Week 50 Sunday
Week 50 Sunday
The Aim of the Christian Discipline
2 Timothy 1:7-8; 2:1-5; 4:2, 5
In the remaining days we have left for our meditations, we must gather up the strands we have been weaving. Perhaps the verse that would sum up what we have been saying is this one: “Whereas the aim of the Christian discipline is the love that springs from a pure heart, from a good conscience, and from a sincere faith” (1 Tim. l:5 Moffatt).
The “Christian discipline”: The Christian way is a discipline and not merely a doctrine. The doctrine gives direction and content to the discipline. Doctrine that does not discipline is dead. Christianity is therefore not merely something that you believe, but something that you believe in enough to act upon. Your deed is your creed, the thing you believe in enough to put into practice. You do not believe in what you do not practice. Theory and practice are one. Your theory is your practice.
The future of the world is in the hands of disciplined people. The undisciplined waste their energies with themselves and their own tangles. But the statement, that the future of the world is in the hands of the disciplined, needs to be corrected by the addition: The future of the world is in the hands of those who are disciplined to the highest. If one is disciplined to less than the highest, then the discipline will exhaust itself; it isn’t backed by the ultimate.
The Christian is disciplined to what? Verse 4 (Moffatt) tells us: “the divine order which belongs to faith.” The divine order is the Divine Order: the kingdom of God. That Divine Order was embodied in the Divine Person: Jesus Christ. We are, therefore, disciplined by a Person who embodies an Order, an embodiment that makes our discipline at once personal and at once social; personal, in that it is related to a Person, and social, in that it is related to a new Order embodied in that Person. Disciplined to the embodied kingdom, the Christian is bound to out-think, to out-live, to out-die, because the kingdom out-experiences every other way of life. We can give ourselves without question to the Christian discipline!
O God, this discipline to which I have given myself is It! Help me now to be disciplined to this Way, with no reservations and with no hesitations. May I fling every doubt and fear and hesitation to the winds. As the ancient Hebrews said: “I accept the yoke of the kingdom.”* I know I shall find that yoke easy, for it is my life! Amen.
* In Judaism, recitation of the Shema (Deut. 6:4-9) is an affirmation that one accepts the yoke of the kingdom and God’s commandments.
Week 50 Monday
The Christian Discipline Produces Spontaneity
Isaiah 42:7; John 4:14; 2 Corinthians 2:1-4
We saw yesterday that the Christian discipline is the highest discipline because it is disciplined to the highest: the Divine Order embodied in the Divine Person. This discipline is complete and totalitarian, reaching in to control and redeem the inmost thought and aspiration, and stretching out to the utmost rim of relationships. Then does it produce the robot, the marionette dancing to the invisible strings of the Divine Master behind the scenes? No! A thousand times, No! The exact opposite is true. For when you fulfill this will, you fulfill yourself. Paul expresses the spontaneity in these words: “Whereas the aim of the Christian discipline is the love that springs” (1 Tim. 1:5 Moffatt); it produces spontaneity—it “springs.”
Here is what the totalitarians are aiming to achieve and cannot. They cannot produce a love that springs. Their methods produce a hate that springs. They have to sit on a lid. God takes off the lid. “Love God, and do what you like.” You are perfectly free, for you are free to do what you ought. Your desires and decisions fit in with the nature of Reality, hence you are living with the grain of the universe, and not against it.
Let this statement soak in with its full implications: “The highest in Christ is the deepest in nature.” If so, then “grace and reality are ours through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17 Moffatt); grace and reality are inseparable. When you are in grace, you are at the heart of reality.
Now let this statement take hold of you: “Wise decisions harmonize with the fundamental truths of human nature.” When you make the wise decision of being disciplined by the Christ kingdom, you harmonize with the fundamental truths written in you by that Christ. “Without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3). The Christian discipline, therefore, produces the most truly spontaneous and natural person in the world: the real Christian. The law ends in a liberty, “love springs.” The Christian is artesian.
God and Lord, I surrender my lesser, uncontrolled loves of self in order to find a disciplined love to you. In that love I shall walk the earth a conqueror—afraid of nothing, because I want nothing but you. You are gathering up my discords into your harmony; my jerky, bumpy ways of life into your rhythm; my inner clashes into your great enveloping peace. I thank you. Amen.
Week 50 Tuesday
“Vanished the Ripe Fruit of Thy Soul’s Desire!”
Psalm 1:3-5; Matthew 13:6; 2 Corinthians 13:8; Jude 12
We saw yesterday that Christianity is the natural, commonsense way to live. The opposite is true: All evil has the doom of decay upon it. There is this penetrating passage: “Vanished the ripe fruit of thy soul’s desire!” (Rev. 18:14 Moffatt). The fruit of the soul’s desire is ripe, and, lo, it vanishes. Just when evil promises most, it lets us down. It will “keep the word of promise to our ear,/And break it to our hope.”* Lust ends in disgust: “vanished the ripe fruit of thy soul’s desire.” Money, after you have toiled and labored for it, ends in becoming a worry and anxiety: “vanished the ripe fruit of thy soul’s desire.”
Recently, on the train, I heard one soldier say to another: “Do you know how you ended up your celebration? By spraying a lady in the opposite bunk with your vomit!”
“Gosh,” the other muttered in dismay, “and I promised my girl I’d quit it.” That is celebration without cerebration: “vanished the ripe fruit of thy soul’s desire.” Just when you think you have it, it is gone! Nothing but Dead Sea fruit in your hands!
Another passage, “As for the Beast which was and is not” (Rev. 17:11 Moffatt), is the biography of every “Beast” with a capital B, and every “beast” with a small b: “The Beast which was and is not”; not “will be.” Evil has no future; it was and is not. Only good was and is and will be; it has a past, a present, and a future. Evil, by its very nature, is self-destructive. It is an attempt to live against the nature of reality, and it ends only in self-destruction. The New Testament therefore says that sinners “perish”—they do here and now—the life forces break down, disintegrates. All evil people render themselves unfit to survive. They will not obey the law of survival, so they perish.
Romans 7:5 (Moffatt) says: “The sinful cravings . . . made us fruitful to Death.” “Fruitful to Death”: just when the fruit is ripe, it rots. And the “Death” is with a capital D; it is a universal law.
You loving Ruler, you will not let us rest in self-destruction. You are always letting us see that your way is our way, but we don’t see. Hence we suffer. But leave us not alone, tender Lover of our souls. You are saving us by hard refusals. Do not soften those refusals, for they are your preventive grace, holding us back from self-ruin. I thank you. I thank you. Amen.
* William Shakespeare, Macbeth, act 5, sc. 8.
Week 50 Wednesday
Evil Is a Parasite upon the Good
Genesis 18:23-32
We must spend one more day on the self-destructiveness of evil, for many have the idea that goodness is bondage and that evil is freedom. But we know that evil is freedom only to get into trouble with ourselves.
I was urging a politician to give up an illicit affair he was having with a woman, for through it he was breaking up his own home, the home of another, and snarling up his own life. To ward off my appeal, he told of an English general who had been challenged by the Oxford Group with their four absolutes: absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love. But he was not prepared to build his life on them. So, in order to ward off this challenge, the general, half humorously and half seriously, said he was going to organize another group movement—the Cambridge Group Movement—and its principles would be the opposite: absolute dishonesty, absolute impurity, absolute selfishness, and absolute hate. The politician expected me to laugh, but instead I replied: “Why not? Why don’t you go in for evil and make it absolute? Why are you so tentative and hesitant? Why don’t you sin with the stops out?”
“Oh, no,” replied the politician, “we couldn’t make the evil absolute; for if we did, it wouldn’t work.”
“Ah,” I replied, “you have given away the case. All evil has to have enough good thrown around it to float it. It is a parasite upon some good. Pure evil would be self-destructive.”
You cannot build a society on absolute dishonesty, for no one would trust another; absolute impurity, for the society would rot; absolute selfishness, for no one would think of others; absolute hate, for hate is centrifugal. So dishonest people are parasites upon the honesty of honest people, whose honesty holds society together long enough for the dishonest to practice their dishonesty. Impure people are parasites upon the purity of pure people, whose purity keeps society from rotting and makes it sufficiently livable so that the impure can practice impurity in it. Evil could not exist were there no good thrown around it to keep it going.
O God, help me rid myself of the parasites of evil in my life. The good within me holds together my world long enough for the evil to exist. Let me fulfill the statement of Paul: “I prove myself at all points a true minister of God” (2 Cor. 6:4 Moffatt). “At all points”—let there be no decaying points in my life, make all points sound and under your control. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 50 Thursday
The Whole Nature Disciplined by Love
2 Corinthians 5:14, 17; Colossians 3:12-14; 1 Thessalonians 5:23
We turn again to the “aim of the Christian discipline,” which is “love that springs from a pure heart, from a good conscience, and from a sincere faith” (1 Tim. 1:5 Moffatt). Note that it is a love that springs from the total personality: “a pure heart,” the emotional nature; “a good conscience,” the volitional nature; “a sincere faith,” the intellectual nature.
The personality expresses itself in three phases: intellect, feeling, and will. So the Christian discipline produces a love that springs, not from a portion of the being, but from the total being. This echoes the words of Jesus, who said the highest commandment was to “love the Lord your God with all your heart”—the affectional nature, “with all your soul”—the volitional nature, “with all your mind”—the intellectual nature, and “with all your strength”—the physical nature (Luke 10:27). People are to do the highest thing in the world—love—and do it with every portion of their nature.
To love with every portion of one’s nature is important; otherwise, one develops lopsided. The “strength” refers to the physical, but it could also refer to the rest of the personality. We are to love God with the strength of the mind, the strength of the emotion, the strength of the will. If you love God with the strength of the mind and weakness of the emotion, that lopsided love produces the intellectualist in religion, lacking emotional drive and appeal. To love God with the strength of the emotion and weakness of the mind makes the sentimentalist in religion. To love God with the strength of the will and weakness of the emotion makes the hard person of action, lacking in lovableness. The only really strong Christian is the one who lets love get hold of the total nature. That person loves with the strength of the mind, the strength of the emotion, the strength of the will, and the strength of the body, so that the whole being is caught up by a burning passion of love. Like the rays that are gathered into our focus by a burning glass, so these people kindle love and devotion in others. They are contagious. The disciplined make disciples.
My consecration shall be the burning glass that gathers everything into one focus of love. Then and then alone can I kindle others. I would kindle others. For I know that the discipline of myself is to get me beyond myself, so that I can be freed to lift and inspire others. Then let me find release from all contradictions, all cross-purposes, and let me burn—burn for you. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 50 Friday
The Mind Is the Key
1 Corinthians 2:16; Philippians 2:3, 5; 4:7
We said that the whole person is to be disciplined: intellect, feeling, will, and body. Which is the key? Paul says, “Have your mind renewed, and so be transformed in nature, able to make out what the will of God is” (Rom. 12:2 Moffatt). The key apparently is the mind. For the verse says, “Have your mind renewed, and so be transformed in nature.” Many would say that the nature transforms the mind; and there is a good deal of truth in that, for we often think with our emotions, the mind hunting for reasons to justify attitudes. Nevertheless, the mind is the master transformer. “As [a man] thinketh . . . so is he” (Prov. 23:7 KJV).
The American Medical Association reports that football players raised their endurance 200 percent in three weeks by taking sugary tablets they believed contained gelatin, but didn’t; the tablets had nothing the doctors thought could raise endurance. Other football players were given sugary tablets that did contain the gelatin chemical, amino acetic acid, which is reported to increase endurance. They too improved 200 percent, but they did not outdo the sugar-tablet players. “As [a man] thinketh . . . so is he.”
If you think you are beaten, you are. The mind renews the nature, and also resigns the nature to defeat. But, with the Christian, all this is not a lifting of oneself by the bootstraps. For the next portion of the verse says, “able to make out what the will of God is.” Here the mind is linked with the will of God. It is not a mind seeking to play mental tricks on itself, for that soon breaks down. You can kid yourself so far and no further. Only when you are linked to reality can you go all the way. The Christian mind links itself with the will of God, and hence taps resources—real resources for real living. The mind thus stands between the will of God and nature, and is the key to linking nature with the will of God. The mind throws the switch one way or the other—links you to infinite resources, or entangles you in your own futile self. “As [a man] thinketh . . . so is he.”
O God, take all defeatism, all fear, all turning in on myself, from my mind. And give me a mind that takes life by the hand and leads it to affirmation, to achievement, to victory, to the infinite resources of God. Give me a mind that minds its chief business—to find out the will of God, for the will of God is the homeland of the mind. Bring me home. Amen.
Week 50 Saturday
Disciplined beyond Timidity
Joshua 1:5-9; Acts 4:13, 29; 5:41-42
Before we end this week’s study of the Christian discipline, we must look at another passage on discipline written to the same person, Timothy: “Hence I would remind you to rekindle the divine gift . . . for God has not given us a timid spirit but a spirit of power and love and discipline” (2 Tim. 1:6-7 Moffatt). The first passage (1 Tim. 1:5) begins with discipline, and this one ends with discipline. The Christian way begins and ends in discipline; discipline produces a disciplined life. The discipline may be so hidden in habit and outlook as to be almost unnoticeable, just as one can look straight through revolving blades on a plane, which are spinning so fast and so rhythmically as to be unseen. The end of the Christian discipline is to hide it away into habit, into the subconscious, so that the disciplined person appears to be and is spontaneous. A musician’s creative spontaneity is coordinated discipline that has become second nature.
Paul puts his finger on the thing that dims the spiritual life more than any other: timidity. If I had one gift to give myself and others, I would unhesitatingly give courage. For more people grow dim and need rekindling of the divine gift through lack of courage than through any other thing. First of all, the courage to take from God what God offers. That is the supreme courage: to pay the price and take the gift. That takes courage, for it shifts the whole basis of life from self-sufficiency to God-sufficiency.
Then the next step: the courage to face up to the world with this appropriated gift of God and to believe that this and this alone will meet every need, and to say so, even when people are pathetically trying unworkable ways.
When I was traveling in China in 1937, amid sections that were being bombed, this verse came to me again and again: “Whatever happens, be self-possessed, flinch from no suffering, do your work as an evangelist, and discharge all your duties as a minister” (2 Tim. 4:5 Moffatt). Here in America, facing reconstruction, I have to repeat it again and again.
O God, my Lord, give me the even courage of Jesus, who went quietly on, unruffled and unafraid, even though the end of the road meant disaster. I do not have to succeed. I have only to be true to the highest I know. Success and failure are in your hands. I must be true at any price, whether I succeed or fail. Give me the courage to fail, if necessary, doing the highest I know. Amen.