Week 32 Sunday
Week 32 Sunday
Getting According to Need, Giving According to Ability
Matthew 25:24-30; 2 Thessalonians 3:8-10
Last week, we stressed that God guaranteed that our needs would be met. We must now go back and stress the condition upon which the guarantee is made: “Seek first the kingdom of God.” All God’s promises are conditional, for God must not merely give; God must give in such a way that the person receiving is stimulated, not smothered. God must not merely make a gift; God must make a person.
Abundant living will not come through eternally receiving. One can dry up while eternally receiving. Abundant living depends upon abundant giving. If, therefore, we should stop at the thought “to each according to need,” we would create a parasitic society. Each person would stretch out a hand and get according to need. That would cause degeneration. The other side of the coin is “from each according to ability.” If you do not give to the good of society according to your ability, then you will not get according to your need.
But someone throws up his hands and says, “But that is socialism!” You cannot scare me with a word! The two principles mentioned, namely, “to each according to need,” and “from each according to ability,” are deeply embedded in the New Testament, and were there long before the label of socialism was thought of. The two principles embedded in the New Testament are: “Distribution was made to each as any had need” (Acts 4:35), and “If any one will not work, let him not eat” (2 Thess. 3:10). You might just as easily say that the spirit of cooperation is democracy as to say it is socialism, for Andrew Jackson had the second principle on one of his coins: “No labor, no food.” I prefer to say that this way of life is neither socialism nor democracy, but Christianity, for that is where these twin principles originally came from. Christians should claim that which is their own. Wherever the idea came from, it is sound: If you do not give, you cannot get. Life is receptivity and response—both.
Lord, you have made your children for creative activity. You have created us to be creators. Help us then to be channels of your creative energy. Help us take hold of our tasks and make them the demonstration of your purposes. Help us create through you. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 32 Monday
Seeking First the Kingdom Means Action
Psalm 27:14; Luke 6:38; John 5:30; Hebrews 11:6
It cannot be emphasized too much that abundant living means abundant giving. You are made that way in the very structure of your being. Just as you would smother yourself to death if you only breathed in and refused to breathe out; so, if you are not outgoing, the whole process of incoming will stop, and you will die spiritually, mentally, physically. If a cow is not milked, it will go dry. If you are not giving out to others, you too will go dry in spirit.
God will see to it that “all these things” will not “be added unto you” if you do not “seek first the kingdom.” If you do not give back to society according to ability, you will not get according to need. What would it mean to fulfill the first portion of the command, “Seek first the kingdom of God”? Many would translate it in their thinking as “Acknowledge as first the kingdom of God,” mentally assenting to its primacy. But this goes deeper. I know a man who lives in a constant state of self-reference, but has on his letterhead, “In all things He might have the preeminence.” The motto on the letterhead was mental compensation. No, seeking first the kingdom means more than acknowledgment; it means action.
Seeking first the kingdom means committing the whole of life to the proposition that the kingdom is first, last, and always—and acting upon the committal. The context gives the content of the word seek. Just as people seek food and clothing, you are to seek the kingdom; it must master your thinking, your emotions, your will, you. That means that you discipline life to one-pointedness. In every situation, you ask, “In this situation what does the kingdom demand I should do?” and you do it.
In the Lord’s Prayer, the kingdom and doing the will of God are made identical: “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). Here, the coming of the kingdom is the doing of the will of God. “Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven; but he who does the will of my Father” (Matt. 7:21). The kingdom and carrying out the will of God are one and inseparable.
O God, let me commit my will to your will, not to be borne, but to be done. For you have wrought me for strenuous endeavor; and unless I work, I wither. Put your zeal within me, and let me burn out for you. In the Master’s name. Amen.
Week 32 Tuesday
The Kingdom and the State
Isaiah 26:2; 58:2; Matthew 28:19; 1 Peter 2:9
The kingdom of God is to be held and acted on as first. It is the Absolute, confronting all relativisms with an imperious demand: surrender, submit, obey, lose your life to find it. There is one Absolute and only one: the kingdom of God. All else is relative to something higher than itself from which it gets life and meaning. But this life and meaning come only when the relative surrenders to the Absolute and obeys.
The kingdom of God confronts the relativisms of state, race, class, church, mammon, family, and self with a demand that all, and each, bend the knee, surrender, obey, and find the meaning of their relative life in the Absolute Life. Not one of these can be an end in itself. If it is, it will lose itself.
If the state becomes an end in itself, saves its life by centering upon itself as supreme, it will lose its life. When a relative thing becomes an absolute thing, you have idolatry. I love my country and will give everything to it except one thing: my conscience. That belongs to the kingdom of God. And when there is a clash between my country and my conscience, then my conscience must bow to one authority, and only one authority: the kingdom of God.
Our nation acknowledges that position when it gives the right of conscientious objection in wartime. In doing so, it acknowledges that there is an authority beyond the state to which the individual conscience is amenable. The state will not ravage or coerce that conscience; it belongs to God and not to the state. The standing of the conscientious objectors is therefore legal, and their patriotism as such is unquestionable. The danger to the state is not from those who have consciences, but from those who have none. They are the fifth columnists who undermine the morals, and hence the morale, of country.
The state finds its meaning and its life surrendering to and carrying out the purposes of something beyond itself, namely, the kingdom of God.
O God, you have a plan for our nation. Help us as a people to surrender to your plan and work it out. For if we take our way, we shall lose our way. If we take your way, we shall find ours. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 32 Wednesday
The Kingdom and Race
Acts 17:26; Colossians 3:11; Revelation 5:9-10
We must continue our study of the Absolute Order, the kingdom of God, as it makes an absolute demand on all relative orders to submit and to lose themselves in this higher Order so that they may find themselves again. In Nazism, the kingdom of race is supreme and absolute. But not only in Nazism. Many of us have the religion of being white. Where there is a clash between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of being white, we choose and act upon the fact of race. It is our god. We cannot live abundantly unless we offer our race on the altar of God. Then we can paraphrase Paul and say: “He, who though he was in the form of the dominant race, did not count it a thing to be grasped, but made himself of no reputation, taking on the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men. . . . Therefore God has highly exalted him” (see Phil. 2:6-9). How can the white race be supreme? Only in one way: Let white people become the servant of all; then they will become the greatest of all. No race can be great except as it greatly gives itself to the service of others. In the future, those will rule the world who serve the world. That is an inexorable law written into our universe and therefore inescapable. But note: “servant of all.” Some are willing to be the servant of some—their friends, their families, their class, their race—but they pull back from being the servant of all.
Only two came out of the last war [World War I] with enhanced reputations: Christ and the Quakers. Why? Well, the Quakers were the servants of all. A Polish woman saw the Quakers feeding the starving on both sides of the conflict and said to one of them: “You are feeding everybody, aren’t you? Poles, Russians, Germans—everybody, friend and foe? Well, I knew there ought to be people like that in the world, but I didn’t know that there actually were.” No wonder the Quakers were held in such tender affection; the servants of all had become the greatest of all. The future belongs to those who belong to others in loving service.
Gracious Master, you have obeyed this law—you became the servant of all. And now you are enshrined in our hearts forever. Help me lose my racism in your passion for service, and thus I shall find myself again. In your name. Amen.
Week 32 Thursday
The Kingdoms of Class and Money
Romans 1:14; 1 Corinthians 1:10, 26; 1 Timothy 6:8-11
The kingdom of class must bend the knee to the kingdom of God. We think and act in class terms rather than in Christian terms. Before we act, we look around to see what our class approves. We do not act; we only react. We are not a voice; we are an echo. We are not conscious persons; we are class things. We don’t think with our minds; we react with our emotions. This is bondage. No Christian can hope to remain Christian who becomes a prisoner of class. Class consciousness and Christian consciousness are incompatible. For the kingdom of God is a classless society. The Communists are striving for a classless society. In the kingdom of God we have it. Have it? Yes; for any in that kingdom who begin to obey the behests of the class instead of the behests of the kingdom are automatically out. Nor can any enter the kingdom of God unless they surrender the kingdom of class.
When we lose our petty class consciousness, we find a human consciousness and with it a God-consciousness. The class must lose its life to find it again.
The kingdom of money must also bend the knee to the kingdom of God. In our acquisitive society, money is god. You succeed in terms of accumulation. Our wealth is measured by wealth. People are “worth” the amount they accumulate. These values are false and must be surrendered. Following the god of money leads into a road with a dead end. The wealthiest man in a certain city said pathetically: “Now that I’ve made my money, the two things I most want to do in the world I can’t do, namely, smoke and play golf.” A touch of heart trouble and his world—that he had laboriously built up—fell to pieces.
When money is surrendered as an end and offered to be a means to the ends of the kingdom, it is found again. Only those enjoy it who surrender it. To surrender it means to surrender it to God to be used for kingdom purposes.
O Master of my heart, I offer you all that would divide that heart. Class has silently entered and set up its shrine within me. I overthrow it today. And money would claim my allegiance and my heart. I tear out both altars and make you, O Christ, sole Lord and Liege. Amen.
Week 32 Friday
The Kingdom and the Church
Matthew 16:18; Ephesians 4:11-16; 5:25-27
The kingdom of the church must bend the knee to the kingdom of God. Just as we want our state, our race, our class to be dominant, so we want our church to be dominant. The church can be our religious self writ large, but it is still the self. It can be the group self asserting itself toward supremacy, albeit covered up with religious trappings. If the kingdom of God comes in, we, as a church, would like to bring it in, since the fact that we brought it in would leave us dominant.
That any one denomination is the exclusive or particular channel of God’s grace is as dead as Queen Anne; and she is very dead! God sometimes works through the denomination, sometimes in spite of it, but never exclusively or particularly in any one of them. If that hurts your denominational pride, it may help your Christian humility! The saints are about equally distributed among all denominations. There is no denomination that has a corner on the saints. The degree to which God uses a person is determined, not by the denomination in which that person is located, but by the depth of the person’s surrender to God, regardless of where he or she is. If God seems too broad and too liberal and not sufficiently mindful of denominational distinctions, then quarrel with God, not with me!
No one denomination has the truth. The truth is in Christ, who is “the Truth.” What we hold are truths about the Truth. These “truths” more or less approximate the Truth, but are not the Truth. God is beyond us all and more than us all. We need, then, to pool our truths, so that the sum total of our truths will more nearly approximate the Truth.
The kingdom of the church must surrender itself to the kingdom God. The church is not an end in itself; it is a means to one end: the kingdom of God. If the church is an end in itself, it loses itself. The church, like the individual, must lose itself in the kingdom of God to find itself again.
O God our Lord, forgive us that we have made of your glorious church an idol. We do so no more—we offer it to you to be the instrument of redemption. Help us, that this beautiful instrument shall remain an instrument and not become an end, lest it decay. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 32 Saturday
The Kingdom and the Family and the Self
Matthew 10:37-39; 12:46-50
The kingdom of the family must be surrendered to the kingdom of God if it is to find itself. But the family often becomes an end in itself. Family interests decide the issues. Such a family is bound to deteriorate. A family that lives in a state of self-reference will live in a state of self-frustration. Unless the family is dedicated to something beyond itself—from which it receives goal, inspiration, and guidance—it will deteriorate into a self-centered, self-seeking unit. The probabilities are that, being self-centered, it will be self-disruptive; the units, not held together by lofty purposes, will fall apart. It is interesting to note that while divorces are currently one in six throughout our nation, among church people they are only one in fifty.* That means, if it means anything, that to have something beyond the family, to which the family is devoted and loyal, will make that family hold together. The beyond-itself loyalty will be the cement that holds it together. A family that loses its life will save it.
And now we come to the final unit that must be surrendered: the kingdom of the self. We have stressed this so much that we need only mention it here. Losing the individual in something beyond itself in order to find itself is not a suppressing imposition laid upon life; it is the law of life running from the lowest to the highest. You have to die on one level to live on another. That is the law God has written into the constitution of things. The mineral kingdom surrenders itself to the kingdom above—the vegetable kingdom—and is taken hold of by that kingdom and transformed from dead matter into living forms. The vegetable kingdom surrenders to the animal kingdom, and is lifted into thinking, feeling forms. The animal kingdom surrenders to the human kingdom and becomes assimilated into the higher life of humankind. The human kingdom surrenders to the kingdom of God and shares a higher law of life: Lose your life to find it.
We close this discussion with the words of Robert Browning: “Who keeps one end in view makes all things serve.”**
O God, we have found the Way! Your Way is written in the life from the kingdom of matter to the kingdom of God. It is our Way, our Life. If we miss your way, we miss our way, and we miss our life. Help us this day to accept your way, surrender to it, live according to it and thus Live! In Jesus’ name. Amen.
* These rates were current in 1941. Today, the rate of divorce among both Christians and non-Christians is closer to 50 percent.
** “In a Balcony,” 1855.