Week 51 Sunday
Week 51 Sunday
“Your Commission!”
John 15:15-19; Acts 1:1-8; Galatians 1:15-24
We are nearing the end of the journey in our cycle of the year in quest of abundant living. I would pause with my Comrades of the Way to meditate on a verse that has spoken to me like a beating refrain down through many years:
In the presence of God who is the Life of all, and of Christ Jesus who testified to the good confession before Pontius Pilate, I charge you to keep your commission free from stain. (1 Tim. 6:13-14 Moffatt)
Your commission! You have a commission given to no one else. It is unique and different, for you are unique and different. God is opening a fresh book of revelation through your character and life. If you do not respond, if you hold back and frustrate God’s purposes, that book of revelation will never be revealed, and the world will be poorer—and so will you.
Paul wrote a letter to the Laodicean church (see Col. 4:16), but it was lost and never given to the church, as many of his other epistles were. Why was it lost? Perhaps because the Laodicean church was “neither cold nor hot” (Rev. 3:15). This lukewarm church did not have the insight or the loyalty to see the meaning of that letter; and so let it be lost. What might this church not have given to the world had it been spiritually keen and alert! Its name perished with that letter except as a symbol of “the-might-have-been.” It lost its commission!
I have just come from seeing a man who is going blind; and as the shadows close in on him and the outer life fades out, he hasn’t a thing on the inside but emptiness. When I suggested he would have to live “within,” he sighed, and said there was nothing there. He had lost his commission—and himself. He has missed the purpose and the person. Had he taken the purpose, now his inner person would be rich and full and adequate and essentially undisturbed as the outer fades out. Here is the central treasure—your commission—keep that and, if all else goes, you have the one thing that matters.
Gracious Lord, I have a commission from you. I feel that commission in my very bones. I have something at the center of life that makes life purposeful and meaningful. Help me organize life around that one central fact, and not around some triviality. For if I do, then I shall have a ceaseless whirl around a central emptiness. Quicken the sense of being commissioned! In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 51 Monday
“Your Commission Free from Stain”
Romans 8:11; 2 Corinthians 5:9-10; Philippians 1:20-21
We paused to look at the commission; today we must look at the last part of the verse: “keep your commission free from stain.” From stain of what? We shall begin at the periphery and work toward the center.
(1) Keep your commission free from the stain of unnecessary physical ailments. I say “unnecessary,” for many of them can be avoided by proper living and right mental and spiritual attitudes. In a mortal world, the body breaks down sooner or later, so you cannot be an absolutist in regard to the body. You can be in regard to the soul, for the soul is not necessarily subject to decay—the body is. But while you may be sick, you have no right to be sicker than you need to be. Some people pass on the sicknesses of mind and soul to their bodies.
One of the outstanding doctors of a great city said to me: “In my clinic we have decided that 75 percent of the people who come to us would be well if they changed their attitudes. They are throwing functional disturbances into their systems by wrong moral and spiritual attitudes.” A letter from a highly cultured and intelligent lady came this morning. When her husband began to pay attention to another woman, she broke out with eczema. Only when she surrendered the fear and worry to God did the eczema pass away.
Dr. W. C. Alvarez, the stomach specialist at the Mayo Clinic, says that 80 percent of the stomach difficulties that come to them are not organic, but functional. Wrong mental and spiritual attitudes throw functional disturbance into digestion. A lady came to me and said: “You’re right; I lived with my son-in-law for five years, and he developed a stomach ulcer, and I developed arthritis. The tensions were responsible.” A girl was taken to the hospital to be operated on for intestinal difficulty. They found she was worrying over the news of her brother who was about to lose his mind. When she brought this fear up and out, she left the hospital, well. The disturbance was the result of fear and worry.
O God, I know this body of mine is made for faith and confidence and not for worry and anxiety and fear. Then help me to help my body to be at its best for you. May I feed it with confidence and faith as well as with physical food. May I illustrate the words of Paul: “that the life of Jesus may come out in my body” (2 Cor. 4:10 Moffatt). May that be literally true. May that life bathe every brain cell and every tissue and every nerve with calm and faith. Amen.
Week 51 Tuesday
Your Commission Free from Stain of Worry and Fear
Matthew 6:24-34; Philippians 4:4-7; 1 Peter 5:7
Yesterday we insisted that in order to have the best body God is capable of helping us to have, we must feed it with the best mental and spiritual food. Faith is food, and worry and fear are poison.
(2) Keep your commission free from the stain of worry and fear. Worry is not merely weakness; it is wickedness. It is atheism. It says that God has abdicated, and that we have to hold the world together by our worrying. The opposite happens. Worriers wreck their world. They have frailer bodies. The worriers are narrow-chested, say the doctors. Those who have annuities* live on an average five or six years longer than those who do not. They are not killed off by worry.
Just yesterday a man talked to me about his stomach ulcer. “You’ve been worrying, haven’t you?” I said to him. He replied, “How did you know? All my life I’ve worried.” A judge had to diet carefully while at work trying cases; but let him get out on the lake in a sailboat for several days, and he could digest anything—even pork and beans! The worry upset his digestion. Worry, therefore, is sin—sin against God and ourselves. A mother told me that she became so anxious about her son going to the front that the news of the possibility sent her to bed for three days, “sick with worry.”
Fears are usually homegrown. Babies will handle snakes without fear, if there are no signs of fear on the faces of those around. To impose fears on children is crime. Don’t impose them on yourself or others. Live by cheer rather than by fear. Very few worries live long unless you give them careful nursing. Dr. George Matthew Adams tells about a man who set aside an hour called “The Worry Hour.” Right after dinner, he went to his library and settled down to worry in earnest. But he couldn’t do it on schedule! The idea was absurd. One man had a “Worry Tree” in his front yard, where he hung his worries before he came into the house. For the Christian, that “Worry Tree” is the cross. Hang your worries there.
O Christ, I hang all my worries on your cross. Compared to that cross, what have I ever borne? And even if I should bear such a cross, I know that out of it shall come to me what came to you—a resurrection! Nothing can make me afraid. I have a key in my hand—the Key of Life—your cross. With that I can unlock anything. I thank you. Amen.
* Secure income in older years.
Week 51 Wednesday
Free from Hate and Resentments
Leviticus 19:16-18; Titus 3:3-8; 1 John 2:9-11; 3:15; 4:20
(3) Keep your commission free from the stain of hate and resentments. Through this war, hates are poisoning the air, and us, if we allow them. A cow ran amok with anger and fear. They finally got her tamed down and milked her. A child fed on that milk died. Anger had turned the milk into poison. We are now feeding our people mental and spiritual and physical poison in the hate attitudes we are engendering.
When a newborn baby failed to gain in weight, Luther Emmett Holt, a famous baby specialist, invariably left this prescription: “This baby is to be loved every three hours.” Dr. Holt found that babies are made for love and not for hate or indifference, and when they do not have love, they do not thrive. A Swedish girl was jilted on the street, the ring requested back from her there. She went to bed for six years, an invalid. The resentment made her an invalid. At the end of the six years, through a friend, she was induced to surrender the whole matter to God. She arose from her invalidism and is today radiant and useful. A refined and cultured woman gave me her left hand, saying, “I haven’t been at war with others, but with myself; hence this arthritis.”
Then how can we get rid of hate and resentments? Frances Ridley Havergal, who wrote so many beautiful hymns,* was so bad-tempered that she used to lie on the floor and beat her head in her tantrums. How did she gain calm and poise and goodwill? By doing what we all have to do: bring the hate and resentments up and out; talk to the person concerned and ask forgiveness; and then simply and humbly offer these hates and resentments to Christ, asking him to bury them miles deep at the cross. And he will! You give the consent to have them taken out, and Christ will give the power. They will dissolve in his love.
The Christian faith shows itself completely sound when it insists on no harbored resentments. Psychology is saying the same.
Anything, God, but hate—I have known it in my day, and the best it does is scar your soul and eat your heart away. We must know more than hate as the years go reeling on, for the stars survive and the spring survives—only humanity denies the dawn. God—if one prayer be mine, before the cloud-wrapped end, I am sick of hate and the waste it makes. Let me be my brother’s friend. Amen.
* One of the best known of Havergal’s hymns is “Take My Life and Let It Be.”
Week 51 Thursday
Free from Harsh Attitudes
Luke 23:33-34; Ephesians 4:29-32; Philemon 10-19; 1 Peter 3:8-11
(4) Keep your commission free from the stain of harsh attitudes. We must be free not only from hate but also from harshness. We try to make people good by harsh attitudes. It doesn’t succeed. “Can Satan cast out Satan?” (Mark 3:23). Can you, by acting like the devil, cast the devil out of people? Two hates never made a love affair, and two harshnesses never made amicable relations. “You cannot have your brother and eat him.”
Paul says, “Treat one another with the same spirit as you experience in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5 Moffatt). How does Christ treat us? By all the “consideration of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:1 Moffatt). Could there be anything more lovely than just that phrase, “the consideration of Christ”? There was a spirit about him. He and others did and said the same things, and yet there was a difference. There was an aroma of graciousness about what he did and said that made the deed and the word something different. The deed and the word had a soul. And what a soul!
Paul ends one of his epistles this way: “This is how I write. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all” (2 Thess. 3:17-18 CEB). When we write, do we say, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you”? Or does our writing often leave a sting? Maude Royden says, “When in doubt about guidance, do the most loving thing.”*
Even a dog can tell the spirit in which you do a thing. Throw him a bone, and he’ll walk off with it without a wag of his tail. But call him to you, pat him on the head, and then give him a bone, and his tail will wag its gratitude and appreciation.
Some relief workers were being thanked in Moscow by the Russian government. The Quakers came last, and the toastmaster said, “Others may have fed more than these, but the Quakers wrapped every bottle of milk in a wrapper of goodwill.” The wrappers made the gifts of the Quakers different, and people never forgot, for the flavor lingered on after the food had gone.
Go out and do something today that nobody but a Christian would do, and be sure to do it in a Christian way.
O Christ, your consideration breaks me down. It gets me to my depths. Then help me give consideration to everybody. Don’t permit me to let the other person’s conduct and attitude determine mine. Let me be unfailingly gentle and kind, no matter what I realize in return. For I know what I shall get in return. My “peace will return to me” [see Matt. 10:13]. If they won’t take it, I shall have it. I thank you. Amen.
* Published source unknown. An activist for social and religious subjects, A. Maude Royden was the first woman to become a doctor of divinity, in 1931.
Week 51 Friday
Free from Stain of Prejudice
1 Timothy 6:6-8; Hebrews 13:5-6; James 2:1-4
Yesterday we were considering harsh attitudes. The most beautiful benediction, and the one most widely used in Christendom, was used by Paul to bless people who were finding fault with him, saying, “in person he is weak and his speech is worth nothing” (2 Cor. 10:10 CEB). What a temptation to pay them back in kind! Instead he says, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Cor. 13:14). No wonder that benediction lives on in the hearts of millions, for Paul was being Christian in response to unchristian attitudes. The spirit in which you do a thing determines the very nature of that thing. Watch that spirit; do the gracious thing graciously.
(5) Keep your commission free from the stain of prejudices. How we impoverish ourselves by our prejudices! As a child, I was prejudiced against beets—I didn’t like their color. If I hadn’t pushed past the barriers of my prejudice, I would have inflicted on myself a lifelong impoverishment. Color prejudice also cuts us off from mental and spiritual enrichment through people of another color.
God is the great artist, who has made many colors. We are not artistic; so some of us insist on one color: white. We make a religion out of being white. It is a false religion, and cruel. Someone had a tulip bed in which there were all colors but one. So he invented a black tulip that set off all the other colors. Prejudice against black would have impoverished that bed of tulips. Race prejudice impoverishes us.
(6) Keep your commission free from the stain of self-pity and complaint. We speak of sicknesses as “complaints”—sicknesses often come out of complaints. Feel sorry for yourself, and you will soon have a self that is worth feeling sorry for. Paul says: “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therein to be content.” The word is therein, and not therewith, as often quoted. Paul was often not content with the state, but in spite of the state. He had contentment in spite of—anywhere, under any conditions. For it was dependent on inner states of mind.
Gracious God, help me live in a state that triumphs over all surroundings and all conditions. Then no self-pity will ever invade and corrupt my inmost soul. For how can I pity myself when you are within me? With that fact secure, I can survive anything. I thank you. Amen.
Week 51 Saturday
Free from Stain of Emptiness
John 4:13-14; 7:37-39; Ephesians 3:14-19; 5:18
(7) Keep your commission free from the stain of emptiness. This is the most frequent stain on the Christian soul—just emptiness. We are not bad; we are just not good enough. We lack the vital contagion and “the enough and to spare.” In Texas, where rain is desperately needed at times, someone asked a ranger about some clouds in the sky. He looked at them, shook his head, and replied, “They’re just empties drifting by.” Just empties drifting by! How many of us are the moral and spiritual equivalent of just that! When people need the refreshing rain of abundant living so desperately, we are just empties drifting by. A minister said with a sigh: “When you use the word adequacy, it makes me shudder, for it is a word that I don’t know—I’m not adequate.”
In our verse, 1 Timothy 6:14 (Moffatt), Paul says that you are to keep your commission free from stain in the light of two facts: First, “In the presence of God who is the Life of all” (v. 13)—in the presence of God’s abundant fullness, keep your commission free from the stain of what? Apparently, from emptiness. With all these resources of God, why be empty when you can attach yourself to these resources? Life isn’t attainment; it is obtainment. Out of that obtainment you find attainment. But try attainment without obtainment, and all you produce is fussy doing.
A friend gave a lovely home to his sisters, and all was in readiness for occupancy—the ranges were in, ready for cooking—but it was discovered that the main in the street had not been tapped. The whole apparatus was useless without attaching it to the power. Life comes through attachment to power. A minister arose in our Ashram and quoted these lines:
Read yourself full;
Think yourself straight;
Pray yourself hot;
Let yourself go!
Good, but the “letting yourself go” is first as well as last. You surrender to Power, then Power surrenders itself to you.
O God, save me from the central wrong of being empty in a world of human need. For many look to me for help—may they not look in vain. Like the man at midnight, I stand asking for bread for the man who has come to me in his journey (see Luke 11:5-6). Give me bread. I cannot return empty, to the empty. Amen.