Week 40 Sunday
Week 40 Sunday
I Will Not Let Anything Master Me
1 Corinthians 9:24-27; 1 Timothy 6:11-12
The will to live is the urge in everything. Everything lifts up strong hands after perfection. The urge for completion is perhaps the most insistent of all urges. Religion is rooted in this life urge; religion is the life urge turned qualitative. We want to live, not merely fully, but better. The will to live may turn into the mere will to power unless ruled by qualitative factors. The will to mastery may become the will to tyranny unless controlled by the will of God.
Paul suggested this will to mastery in these words: “ ‘All things are lawful for me’? Yes, but I am not going to let anything master me” (1 Cor. 6:12 Moffatt). That phrase, “I am not going to let anything master me,” is one of the greatest phrases declaring a life purpose that has ever been uttered. Paul, the man who was completely mastered by the will of God, said that he would not be mastered by anything. The opposite of that holds as well: If you are not mastered by God, you will be mastered by things, by yourself, by other persons, by circumstances, by the world, or by sorrows and disappointments.
Take the last two things that master us: the world, and sorrows and disappointments. Some are mastered by the world. It is usually a very slow and silent process. We scarcely know what is happening, but we are slowly mastered by a materialistic outlook. The story goes that a robin was offered a worm for a feather. The bird thought this a good bargain; it would save a lot of hunting for worms, and he would not miss a feather. But one dreadful day, the robin awoke to the fact that his feathers were gone, and he could not fly. He had sold his power to fly for worms. He was earthbound. The counterpart of that is happening all around us; the powers of soul, the ability to soar, are bartered for physical things. Soon the person is a dead soul surrounded by many things.
Then others are mastered by some bereavement or disappointment. They retreat into the kennel of life like a whipped dog. Life is too much for them. They are beaten. There they give themselves to inward self-pity. The will to live has become the will to complain of life.
O God, apart from you I am mastered by this, that, or the other. With you I am mastered by nothing—except you. Then I am free. Save me from being mastered by any sorrow or disappointment. Help me rise, like an airplane, against resistances. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 40 Monday
Abundant Living “In Spite Of”
John 15:11; 16:33; Romans 8:35-39
Abundant living is sometimes “on account of,” but perhaps more often, “in spite of.” When circumstances are against us, we must be able to set the sails of our souls and use even adverse winds. The Christian faith does not offer exemption from sorrow and pain and frustration. It offers the power, not merely to bear, but to use these adversities. The secret of using pain and suffering and frustration is, in many ways, life’s greatest secret. When you have learned that, you are unbeatable and unbreakable.
A young doctor said to me:
Your way of life is different from that of the psychoanalyst, who gives the patient a knowledge of self and then hopes to resolve difficulties; it is also different from that of the Meyer school, which would change the environment when disturbing factors are found there. You go beyond: you give a person knowledge of self, try to change the environment where possible and then get the patient to lay hold on the resources of God, so that if the person can’t change the environment, he or she can use the adverse surroundings and make them serve his or her purposes. Yours is a more complete and adequate way of life.
He was right, except that it isn’t my way! I discovered it! It is Christ’s way.
The Christian “can take it,” because he or she can take hold of adversity and use it. A teacher of slum children was drawing up a list of the qualities in Jesus that appealed to the youngsters. When the list was apparently completed, a grimy-handed newsboy put up his hand and said, “They hung him on a cross, and he could take it.” The boy was right, the reason Jesus could take it was not because of a stoic attitude. The reason goes deeper: he could take it because he could use it. He bore the cross for he could use the cross. You cannot bear the cross long; it will break your spirit unless you can take that cross and make it serve higher purposes. The stoic bears the cross; the Christian makes the cross bear fruit.
Any movement that has learned the secret of making the bitterest tree—the cross—bear the sweetest fruit has learned the secret of abundant living.
O Christ, we begin to see your secret. You laid hold of life when life was speaking its cruelest word and turned that very word into God’s most redemptive word. You did not bear the cross—you used it. Give me power to do just that. Then, in you, I am invincible. Amen.
Week 40 Tuesday
Let Your Peace Return to You
Matthew 5:43-48; Romans 12:17-21; 1 John 4:21
In connection with instructions Jesus gave to his disciples, he said, “If the household is deserving, let your peace rest on it; but if the household is undeserving, let your peace return to you” (Matt. 10:13 Moffatt). In other words, if the people will not take your peace, it returns to you—you get the peace you have, plus the peace you gave! You win either way. It is a question of “heads, I win; tails, you lose.” Perhaps you have heard of the stone fence so broad that when it blew over it was as high as it was before! Christians are like that! They thrive on difficulties, for they turn their very difficulties into doors, their Calvaries into Easter mornings.
Are you criticized? Then, if the criticisms are true, correct the thing criticized. Make your critics the unpaid “watchmen of your soul” (see Heb. 13:17). All of us are “only Christians in the making,” so make your criticisms make you. If the criticisms are false, then let them make no difference in your attitude toward the critic. Let your thoughts of the critic turn to prayer. Out of the injustice you will wrest a moral victory. You will have no enemies, for you will have no enmity. It is an easy and bloodless way to get rid of your enemies! The only possible way to get rid of an enemy is to turn that enemy into a friend. Even if the person doesn’t acknowledge being a friend and continues to act like an enemy, nevertheless, you have transformed that person into a friend in two ways: you now have only friendly feelings toward him or her, and you can turn criticisms and make them make you. Whether the person wants to be or not, the critic is your friend. You are master.
The only way to overcome your enemies is not to be like them. Don’t let them put their weapons into your hands. If they give enmity, you give love. Keep your own weapons. Two hates never made a love affair. You be master.
Remember the phrase “A soul breathing peace”—be that kind of a person: breathe peace upon everybody. If they don’t take it, then it comes back to you.
Gracious Master, I would walk amid adversity with my head up. But I cannot do this unless I lay my head in the dust at your feet to learn your ways. For your ways are ways of mastery. Nothing daunted you; nothing stopped you. In you, too, I am invincible—humbly, gladly, joyously so. Help me be so overflowing that I may swamp everything—enmity and all. Amen.
Week 40 Wednesday
Pain Is God’s Preventive Grace
Jeremiah 51:58 (Moffatt); Romans 8:16-33; 2 Corinthians 7:8-12
Christianity survived the worst thing that could happen to it—the death of its Founder—and turned that worst thing into the best thing that could happen to the world. It redeemed the world through a catastrophe. A faith that can do that has survival value, and will outlast all the shallow-rooted, surface philosophies of life. Nothing less than that kind of a philosophy of life can stand up to life.
We can see why God allows pain—it is God’s preventive grace. Had there been no pain in the world, we should not have survived as a race. For instance, were there no pain attached to disease, we should probably allow disease to eat on—it doesn’t hurt, so why bother? But pain stabs us broad awake and says, “Look out—there is something wrong here; attend to it.” Pain is God’s red flag run up to warn of underlying lurking danger. We can then thank God for pain.
But this we cannot do unless we can do something with pain other than bearing it stoically. Unless pain is working out to some end, it breaks us by its meaninglessness. That is why the prophet saw that “pagans waste their pains” (Jer. 51:58 Moffatt). Those who live without the God-reference—the pagans—don’t know what to do with pain; they waste it. Their pains end in mere dull, fruitless, meaningless suffering. It gets them nowhere. So much of the world’s suffering is wasted. During 1914–18, we suffered dreadfully, and yet we wasted that world pain. The best that we could do with it was to coin it into the Versailles Treaty; now we are back again, compelled to go through the whole miserable business once more. We may do the same thing with this present world pain unless we can transmute it into a determined purpose to make a new world out of it, so that war may never happen again. Only where we see redemption in pain can we have any release while in it—purposeless pain is paralyzing.
Christ, you master of the central pain, help us to master both the central and the marginal pains. Help me take hold of life when life is hard and impossible, and thus make life not only possible but also full of possibilities. For the struggle is on—I am to master or to be mastered. Help me master through you, O Master. Amen.
Week 40 Thursday
Deflected Grace
Acts 16:6-10; Galatians 4:13; Philippians 1:12-18
If “pagans waste their pains,” then we as Christians must learn to make our pains productive. Yesterday we saw that pain can be used for a purpose: redemptive pain. Paul speaks of “the pain God is allowed to guide” (2 Cor. 7:10 Moffatt); there can be a God-guided pain. Pain can be taken up into the purposes of God and transformed into finer character, greater tenderness, and more general usefulness. It can be made into the pains of childbirth; it can bring forth new life.
Take one of the most difficult pains to bear—the frustration of one’s life plans. This often throws confusion into everything, for everything had been geared into those life plans. How did Jesus meet such a situation? A small incident reveals his secret.
When Jesus healed the demoniac, the people came and saw the man, seated, “clothed, and in his right mind . . . and they were afraid” (Mark 5:15). Afraid of sanity! They begged Jesus “to depart from their neighborhood” (v. 17). His presence had cost them too much. He thought people were worth more than swine. Anyone who thinks that is dangerous! It is disconcerting—and to some, discouraging—to find one’s best endeavors blocked by ignorance and self-centered greed.
But was Jesus blocked by this ignorance and greed? No; he was not blocked, but diverted. His grace was not dammed, but diverted. It simply turned in another direction. So he embarked—frustrated? Oh, no! The grace was deflected toward other people and situations. He did some of the greatest things of his life as a result of that blocking; that blocking turned to blessing. He healed a paralytic, called Matthew, taught regarding conservatism, healed a woman with a hemorrhage, raised the dead, and so on and on. The frustration turned to fruitfulness. If he couldn’t do this, he could do that. And that had in it a deeper quality of character; it had a victory over bitterness and resentment. So “that” was finer than “this.” He gained not only victory, but victory-plus!
O Christ, I will be undeterred by petty or by decisive blocking of my plans. In neither case will I stop. I will find a way around if I cannot get through. Give me that resilience of spirit that bends, but is never broken. For upon life’s resistances I will rise. Help me be equal to anything—by your power. Amen.
Week 40 Friday
Frustrations Becoming Fruitful
Luke 10:25-37; 15:2-7
Yesterday we saw how Jesus’ life was not dammed, but deflected by opposition and frustration. That very opposition can be a spur.
Glenn Cunningham, the man who became the fastest human in a mile race in 1940, was so badly burned as a lad that the doctors thought he would always be in an invalid’s chair. The boy who was destined to be an invalid turned that destiny into becoming the world’s fastest human. Whistler, the painter, wanted to be a soldier; but he failed at West Point, and turned to the brush as a second choice. Walter Scott wanted to be a poet and gave up because he could not equal Byron. Ashamed of being a novelist, he wrote anonymously, but he gave the world Ivanhoe. A young university man had both his hands blown off in an explosion; since he could no longer use his hands, he decided he would use his head the more, and became a teacher in a great university. Phillips Brooks wanted to be a teacher, failed miserably, and turned reluctantly to being a preacher, becoming one of the world’s greatest.
Someone asked a man about his constitution, and he replied, “That’s gone long ago—I’m now living on the by-laws.” Some people live better on their by-laws than most people on their constitutions. Toyohiko Kagawa does; he lives radiantly and effectively on one lung, and does more with that lung than most people do with two!
Perhaps you find yourself in difficulties and frustrations because of your Christian stand. Then you will have to do as John did: “I . . . found myself in the island called Patmos, for adhering to God’s word”—isolated because of conviction. But the verse continues: “On the Lord’s day I found myself rapt in the Spirit, and I heard a loud voice . . . calling, ‘Write your vision’ ” (Rev. 1:9-11 Moffatt). Isolated from people, John saw heaven opened and received the vision of the coming victory. Isolation became revelation.
Are your life plans broken up? Then you can, by God’s grace, make new and better ones.
Victorious Christ, impart to me your secret. For life turns inevitable again and again. I am powerless to change my surroundings—let me change my soul. And through that changed soul I shall make of unavoidable surroundings the whetstone upon which my soul shall be sharpened for your purposes. With you I cannot be beaten. Amen.
Week 40 Saturday
On Using Illnesses and Impediments
Matthew 10:23; Acts 16:19-34; 2 Corinthians 12:7-10
We ended with the thought yesterday that frustrations can forward us. Paul was thrown aside at Galatia by an illness. Frustrated? Oh, no! “It was because of an illness . . . that I preached the gospel to you” (Gal. 4:13 Moffatt). Thrown aside by an illness, he used that frustration and preached the gospel, through it raised up a Christian Church, and wrote a letter to it—a letter that has enriched the world. That is victory.
When Paul asked God to take away the “thorn . . . in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harrass” (2 Cor. 12:7) him, he received the reply, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (v. 9). He was promised, not deliverance, but power to use the infirmity. He arose and said, “I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses. . . . For when I am weak, then am I strong” (vv. 9-10). If the messenger of Satan was to harass him, he would determine the direction in which the blows would send him. They sent him forward!
War left a man disabled, confined to bed. Beaten? Oh, no! From that bed, he runs a very large business, and his home is the center of wholesome gaiety. He might have made his mother into an attendant for his needs. He refused; he and his mother both live out their lives in individual achievement and beautiful cooperation.
The world’s greatest preacher could say, “I am no speaker, perhaps” (2 Cor. 11:6 Moffatt); but did that lack of oratorical ability stop Paul? It only spurred him on to primary successes. Had he been a good speaker, in all probability he would have depended on that, and a secondary success would have blocked a primary success. Many people are ruined by secondary successes; they become entangled in their techniques and never get to the goal. One of the most spiritually useful men in America rather glories in being his “state’s worst speaker.” He is, but he made that kick send him forward; he functions where his usefulness really matters.
Jesus, you master of every situation—even upon a cross, where you dispensed forgiveness to crucifiers and gave absolution to a dying thief—give me this mastery over circumstances. For I am not beaten until beaten within. With you, I am not beaten there. Abide with me, and then I can abide with anything. Amen.