Week 36 Sunday
Week 36 Sunday
Physical and Mental Relaxation
Psalms 37:1-11; 121
We will use an exercise for relaxation given to us by an Ashram member who spends most of her time in a city school system teaching children and parents to relax.
(1) Stand with arms overhead, palms flat, and push hard against the ceiling, going up on tiptoe as far as you can. Then let arms go to side, limp. Repeat.
(2) Sit in chair. Raise right arm, every muscle tight; the arm is very, very heavy. Let go, limp, to side. Repeat same with left arm.
(3) Raise right leg, knee bent, every muscle tight—make it as heavy as possible. Let go, limp. Repeat. Same with left leg.
(4) As you sit in chair, sit loose, every muscle relaxed. Now you are like a rag doll, no stiff muscles; you’re limp. Your hands are resting in lap with palms up. The palms up represent receptivity—you’re now receiving into every pore of your being.
(5) Your head falls on your chest, your eyes closed, your jaws relaxed and loose, mouth partly open.
(6) Now turn your head over to the left and make a complete circle, as far back as possible; to the right, back on chest, limp. Repeat, making your nose like a piece of chalk inscribing a circle as large as possible.
(7) Follow this guided image: “Now I am seated, in imagination, on a quiet hillside, before me a calm lake and strong silent hills beyond with their cloud-veiled peaks. The trees lift their arms in silent prayer and absorb, absorb the strength of God. The grass also lifts its blades and receives, receives. Everything receives, and so do I. I breathe in God’s peace and breathe out God’s calm: peace-calm; peace-calm; a gentle rhythm. In every portion of my being, I am taking in the life of God—of God—so I am at rest, at rest, in God, in God.
I am relaxed and receptive and released.
My Lord, gently and quietly I breathe your calm and your peace into every portion of my being. My fever is gone in the great quiet of God. I am receptive in every fiber and every tissue. The healing of God goes through me, through me. I am grateful, grateful. Amen.
Week 36 Monday
Meeting Today, Today
Matthew 6:25-34; 1 Peter 5:7
May I pause in this discussion to add a personal word?
Besides living physically relaxed, I live mentally and spiritually relaxed. I am spiritually relaxed because I believe the central hypothesis of my life is right. Life is one long verification of that central hypothesis. This fact gives an inner sense of steadiness.
This attitude toward life was tested in an airplane over St. Louis, when we circled above the clouds for two hours, trying to land. The ceiling was so low that we could not get under. I had time to think. So I wrote down a life conclusion:
I am up in this plane and we have been circling over these clouds for about two hours. If we do not land safely, I would like to leave my last will and testament to my friends and fellow followers of Christ: There is peace, perfect peace. Apart from my unfaithfulness to the highest, there are no regrets about the general course of my life. Life with Christ is the way to live. In this hour there is assurance; there is God underneath all the uncertainties of human existence. So I rest in God. God’s best to you all. Living or dying, I am God’s—God’s alone. Glory! Signed, E. Stanley Jones.
I try to take that central assurance into my work. The thing that is so centrally right will not let me down in the details. I meet these details in confidence. The word Comforter means “brave together.” With God, I can be “brave together.”
I meet today, today. I do not telescope all next week into today. I clip off my engagements one by one as a person clips off coupons. Dr. William Osler, the great surgeon, said, “The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried today, makes the strongest falter. Shut off the future as tightly as the past.”* One greater than Osler said, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” (Matt. 6:34 KJV). I sometimes have to put it, “Sufficient unto the hour is the evil.” I do not take any worries to bed with me. Methodist Episcopal bishop William Quayle tells of lying awake, trying to hold the world together by his worrying. God said, “Now, William, you go to sleep and I’ll sit up.”
My Gracious Lord, how can I worry and fret when you live and care? As your happy child, I play in your house, with no corroding care. Even my hardest work is play. I inwardly dance to my tasks, and amid them feel the gaiety of your love. You have taught me to laugh—I laugh with incredulity that I, even I, have found this treasure. Amen.
* William Osler, A Way of Life (London: Constable & Co., 1913), 29.
Week 36 Tuesday
Are We Circumstance-directed?
Matthew 5:43-48; 1 Corinthians 15:33; Galatians 2:11-12
We come now to the matter of guidance. If life is to be at its best, we must have the sense of instrumentation, of carrying out purposes not our own, of fulfilling a Will that is ultimate. We must “regain the sense of being led,” as one pastor urges. Without that sense of being led, life hangs at loose ends, lacks goal and dynamic to move on to that goal. “Anybody got a car going anywhere?” asked someone in a public meeting. No one laughed! But that announcement was revealing: must go somewhere; the direction didn’t matter. Much of our life is like that; it lacks direction and goal.
If we lose the sense of being led, we become victims of our circumstances. The men of a church were having a supper, and, being unused to managing meals, they gave contradictory orders to the caretaker. He became upset over these contradictory orders and objected, whereupon one man asked, “Well, Henry, if you get upset with us, what do you do when the women are here?” Henry replied, “That’s simple. I just throw my mind into neutral and go where I’m pushed.” A great many people simply throw their minds into neutral and go where circumstances push them. They have no sense of being led.
Or they allow other people’s actions to determine their conduct. They are circumstance-directed instead of Christ-directed. Jesus warned us against allowing the others to determine our conduct: “If people slap you on your right cheek,”—don’t use their weapons; keep your own—“turn the left cheek to them as well” (Matt. 5:39 CEB). The best revenge you can have on enemies is not to be like them.
A bishop said that something I wrote cured him of what he called “a mild species of episcopal swearing.” When he went along the roads at night and dimmed his lights at the approach of another car, if the approaching driver did not respond, he would flash his lights into the other’s face to let the driver know how he felt. “Now,” he said, “I dim my lights no matter what the other person does, and keep them dimmed. It’s safer, and I feel more like a bishop! I don’t let the other person determine my conduct.”
O Christ, how often we’ve let circumstances and persons determine our conduct. Help us be impelled from within, instead of being compelled from without. O Christ, let me submit to your direction lest I become a victim of my surroundings. I want to be a person, and not a thing. Amen.
Week 36 Wednesday
Guidance at Secondhand
Lamentations 5:15-17; Matthew 15:14; Revelation 3:15-18
We saw yesterday that if we are not God-led, we shall probably be mob-led. We shall not act; we shall only react, becoming things, not persons. In trying to find a way out between America and Japan, I said to some high officials: “Don’t you see what’s happening? You are allowing the Japanese to determine your conduct. You say, ‘If they do this, we shall do that.’ You allow them to determine your conduct. That leads straight to war. Why don’t you work out from your own principles to the situation and find a settlement through the application of your own principles?”
We Christians must work out from principles, not from pressures. No matter what the other person does, we should remain Christian. As Shakespeare puts it:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds.*
Without a sense of guidance, life turns dull and insipid. “Some of the most active church leaders, well-known for their executive efficiency, people we have always admired, are shown in the X-ray light of Eternity, to be agitated, half-committed, wistful, self-placating seekers, to whom the poise and serenity of the Everlasting have never come.” They lack the sense of being led. That brings us to what Thomas Kelley described in these words: “The year has been getting on in average mediocrity. There is no special excellence, no special defect in it. It’s just it. And that’s damnable. For the world is popping with novelty, adventure in ideas. And we aren’t getting them here. We are safe and sane.”** Yes, safe and sane and secondhand!
When the Israelites disobeyed God the punishment was this: “I will not go with you. . . . I will send an angel in front of you” (Exod. 33:3 Moffatt). Religion became a secondhand affair through angels, instead of a direct contact with God.
O God, we who are afraid to be led by you become led by things and surroundings. Our religion becomes secondhand and vague, instead of firsthand and vivid. We want to regain the sense of being led by you, the sense that we are in direct contact, and that life has firsthand meaning. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
* William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 116,” Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. William James Rolfe (New York: American Book Co., 1898), 105.
** Thomas R. Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, 53, 111.
Week 36 Thursday
Led of God or Led of Things?
1 Kings 19:12; Isaiah 8:19; 30:2; John 10:4
The growth of astrology in America is a sign of the lack of firsthand contact with God. If we are not led by God, we will try to be led by stars. Turning to stars for guidance is a sign of decay, mentally and spiritually. It is sheer materialism to believe your life is determined by lumps of matter floating in space. It is a sign of failure of nerve; you don’t face the facts of life in the courage and spirit of Christ, but you turn to dodging stars. Astrology laid its paralyzing hand on the mind of Greece and killed it. The Greek mind was a good mind, facing bravely the facts of life, until it lost its nerve and turned to the stars to find destiny written there. The mind of India was a creative mind, producing the amazing Sanskrit literature, until astrology made it sterile and noncreative by turning it toward the stars instead of toward the facts of life.
People will be led by God into sure ways, or led by subterfuges into swamps and miasmas of despair.
We must regain the sense of being led by God. About two years ago, when ready to sail back to India, I announced that the Inner Voice had insisted that I stay in America, saying, “I want you here.” This announcement aroused widespread comment, some of it unfavorable, as if it were a strange and superstitious thing to be led of God, directly and at firsthand. This reaction was most revealing. It showed how much of American Christianity was at least one step removed from firsthand reality. There seemed to be knowledge of, but not acquaintance with, God.
If there is a God, the Lord must have some plan, some purpose for every life. When God made each of us, God apparently broke the pattern, for we are all different. Each life has peculiar significance. If we find that plan of God and work within it, we cannot fail. Outside of that plan we cannot succeed.
To be the instrument of the purposes of God is the highest thing in life.
Gracious Lord, you have paid attention to the minute, fashioning the lowliest cell with handiwork; have you no plan for me and my life? Help me find that plan, pay the price of working it out, and make it the adventure of my life. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 36 Friday
A Sense of Mission and Submission
Isaiah 6:1-9; John 20:21; Acts 8:29
Whenever I stand up to preach, I ask the audience to bow their heads in prayer; and I invariably remind God of my verse, a verse given to me years ago at the very beginning of my ministry: “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you” (John 15:16 KJV).
Repeating this verse gives me the sense of being sent, of having the backing of the Eternal, and of speaking in a Name not my own. But it does another thing: It lays on me the sense of obligation to surrender to and be obedient to the working out of this plan. It gives life a sense of mission and submission.
That sense of mission gives dignity and meaning to life. An ambassador of a country weighs his or her words, for they are representative words, spoken in the name of the government. We, too, must feel that same representative capacity, that we are speaking and thinking and acting in a name not our own. The significance of a life is determined by the significance of what it is identified with and what it represents.
But that sense of mission also brings a sense of submission. Instead of making you proud and cocky, it has the opposite effect. You are awed and humbled. You feel you must walk sofly before God. You are on the adventure of humility.
Guidance strikes at the citadel of personality and demands the surrender of self-sufficiency. God is taken into the center of the life choices. Guidance involves surrender. It is the shifting of life from self-will to God’s will. That will, not your own, becomes supreme. God’s will becomes your constant frame of reference.
Instead of guidance being a spiritual luxury for rare souls, it is a minimum necessity for every Christian soul: “All who are led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons and daughters” (Rom. 8:14 CEB). No leadership, no sonship or daughtership. Guidance is of the very essence of Christianity.
O God, I begin to see that if I live, I must live in you or not at all. For you are my life and my way of life. When I find your plan, I find my person. For I am made in the very structure of my being for your ways. Your will is my peace! My will is my war. I am eager for your mind. Amen.
Week 36 Saturday
Listen, Learn, Obey
Deuteronomy 31:12; Jeremiah 42:6; Matthew 11:29; Acts 5:20
Since God has a plan for every life, then we must become skilled in the art of knowing and working out that plan. We have suggested that when we come to prayer, we should have three attitudes: “Listen, learn, obey.” Some of us listen but won’t learn, and some of us learn but won’t obey. The Christian is one who listens, who learns, and who obeys. If we do not approach God in all three attitudes, then there will soon be nothing to listen to, or to learn, or to obey. The Voice will grow silent. To the degree that we do all three will there be Someone speaking.
If we do not have guidance, then it is probably withheld for one of two reasons: We are untrained, or we are unwilling. Guidance doesn’t just happen. It is a result of placing oneself in the way of being guided. A radio doesn’t just happen to pick up messages; it is tuned in by deliberate intention, and then it receives. Receptivity is necessary to perceptivity; you perceive only as you receive. To this psychology agrees when it explains life as “instrumentation.” When the king complained to Joan of Arc that he never heard the voice of God, she replied, “You must listen, and then you will hear.”
But many of us don’t want to listen to God, for we are afraid that if God reveals the divine will to us it will be along the line of the disagreeable. The fact that we have changed “Your will be done” into “Your will be borne”—something hard and disagreeable to be borne—shows that we look on the will of God as something that mortals must accept with a sigh, like the death of a loved one.
That view of the will of God as something distasteful must be completely reversed, or we shall get nowhere with guidance. Jesus reverses that view when he says, “My meat is to do the will of him that sent me” (John 4:34 KJV). My meat—my food. The will of God is food, food to every tissue, every brain cell, to everything that is good for us. My will is my poison when it conflicts with God’s will. To real living, the will of God is reinforcement, not restriction.
Forgive me, O God, that I hesitate to throw down every barrier to your guidance. Why should my eye be afraid of light? My stomach, pinched with hunger, afraid of food? No more should I be afraid of your will. I will not be. Every faculty sensitive and open to your suggestions, O my God! Amen.