Week 3 Sunday
Week 3 Sunday
The Kingdom of God Is Among You
Luke 10:27-37
We closed last week on the fact that “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21 KJV). Another translation says, “The kingdom of God is already among you” (CEB). Which is correct? Jesus probably used both, for both are profoundly true. If the kingdom of God is stamped into the constitution of our beings, it is also stamped into our relationships with one another. There is a way to get along with ourselves, and there is a way to get along with other people, and that way is God’s way. The kingdom of God is among you.
If you try to get along with others on some basis other than God’s, you won’t. Your relationships will break down. Try to get along with your family on the basis of domination. Result? There will be seething revolt and your own frustration and unhappiness. In trying to dominate, you break the law written into the constitution of human relationships. No, you do not break the law; you break yourself upon the law.
The central law of human relationships is expounded by Jesus: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31). Now, you needn’t obey that law; you needn’t love your neighbor as you love yourself, but if you don’t, you can’t get along with your neighbors. Your relationships will break down. When you do not love your neighbors, you do not get rid of them; they come back on your hands as a problem and a pain. Loving your neighbor is a forced option, like eating; you do not have to eat, but if you don’t eat, you can’t live. The kingdom of God is among you; it is the way we get along with others when we get along with them well.
Dr. Alfred Adler, who was the originator of the concept of the “inferiority complex,” attributed all human failure to inability to grasp that “it is more blessed to give than to receive.” Why does life break down if you do not love your neighbor as you love yourself? Because you are made that way.
My Lord, I see that you are Lord to your family. You made me so that I cannot get along with myself without getting along with the rest of the family. I see I must live by love or live by loss. Help me this day to live by love. Amen.
Week 3 Monday
The Kingdom Works as Self-frustration
Philippians 3:19; James 3:16-18; 4:1-3
Yesterday we saw that the kingdom of God is among us; it is the way we get along with one another, if we get along at all. Look at the breakdown of human relationships on a world scale. Why have they broken down? For the simple reason that we have tried to get along with other nations on the basis of pure selfishness. That broke the law of the kingdom, which is among us. Hence our relationships with one another broke down. Hence, this war. We cannot violate the law of love any more than we can the law of gravity and not get hurt. The law of gravity will hold up our buildings if we build plumb with it, but it will pull them to the dust if we build them out of plumb.
People ask, “Where is the kingdom of God in this war?” As someone plaintively put it: “I am wondering when God will come into this war and take a hand.” Where is the kingdom of God? It is here in the very frustrations that are taking place; it is working as self-frustration. Since we wouldn’t take the kingdom of God as our collective fulfillment, we must now take it as our collective frustration. We cannot live the way we have been living without having the kind of a world we now have. When we are at war with the kingdom of God, we are bound to be at war with one another.
Suppose the opposite had taken place. Suppose our collective revolt against God had turned out as prosperity, as peace, as progress, as mutual helpfulness. Then we could have asked, “Where is the kingdom of God?” since its opposite had turned out so well. The success of our revolt would indeed smite our faith a fatal blow. But this kind of messed-up world corroborates everything the Christian stands for. Revolt against God and a resulting chaos work out as prophecy and fulfillment, as seed and fruit. We cannot live on a collectively selfish basis without having a collective clash. That collective clash is war.
The Christian has, then, the key to the situation: the kingdom of God is among us. Live collectively according to it and we live; if not, we collectively perish—as now.
O God, I begin to feel a sense of personal and collective guilt. We have been trying to live against the universe and not with it, and now we are up against it. I’m up against it—we all are. I lift pleading hands to you to help me, save me. Amen.
Week 3 Tuesday
Picking Out a Hypothesis
Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Joshua 24:15; Matthew 6:24
We have now come to the end of our discussion of the first of the five steps in the scientific method: “state the problem.” The problem is how to live and to live well in a universe of moral law, written in us and written in the constitution of our relationships. We have not lived well in that moral universe. We have run afoul of it and wear great inner bruises: guilts, fears, inhibitions, frustrations, complexes. If not these, then just that sense of incompleteness, of something missing, of emptiness.
We must now come to the second step: “pick out the hypothesis most likely that will meet that problem.” The picking out of a hypothesis involves choice. “Does the whole thing rest back on my choice? Will God not choose for me and make me take God’s choice? I wish that would happen.” But that would be the most fatal thing God could do. God making choices for us would break down the citadel of personality, the will; and when will is gone, we are gone, things instead of persons. There is nothing good but a good will; there is nothing bad but a bad will.
When God created another person, God had to self-limit, to move back, as it were, to give that will room to act. For the essence of personality is freedom. That was a dangerous move—terribly dangerous—for that free will in acting might make a mess of things, might break its own heart, the hearts of those around it, and God’s. True. But God took the risk, just as parents take the risk when they bring a child into the world, for the child might break its own heart and the parents’.
God and humans create, because, well, they each say, “I’ll enter into this and take the consequences. The sins of these created persons shall be mine, their failures mine, but also their joys and developments shall be mine. We’ll work it out together.” Nothing but love could make God and humanity take that risk. Had God not seen a glorious end, God would not have dared to create. It took nerve to do it.
O God, I see I have to choose. I would shrink from that responsibility and lay it over on you. But I can’t. I must stand up and choose. Help me to make the right choice, take the right way. For the future—your future and my future—is in this hour of choice. Help me to choose aright. Amen.
Week 3 Wednesday
Our Freedom Complicates God’s Game
John 4:34; 1 Corinthians 16:13; Galatians 2:21
In this freedom of ours lie God’s problem and possibility. Our freedom is a problem to God. Someone has put it this way: “Here is a chessboard, and all the figures on the board, instead of being made of wood, are flesh and blood with wills of their own. The game for God would be simple if the figures would go where God desires them to go. But suppose, when God makes a move in the game against evil, the figures balk and refuse to move, and instead move on their own to other positions, without reference to the Player-God. That would complicate the game and mess it up badly.” That has happened, and that is God’s problem.
But our freedom is also God’s possibility. Suppose those figures should learn that failure and mix-ups come through moves on their own and refusal to cooperate with the Player, and should thus be chastened into choosing cooperation with the Player. Then, suppose God and humanity should play the game in cooperation, and win! How much finer that would be than to win against evil with only wooden pawns to play with!
You and I can cooperate with God, can align our wills with God’s will, can make God’s wisdom our own, and in the end can make the victory a joint victory. What a possibility for God and us! I would rather be a discontented man than a contented worm, for discontent drives me to God’s feet. “Blessed are the homesick, for they will come home,” says a German proverb.
A little boy of five, after seeing a puppet show, expressed his reaction to a doctor, “I’m glad I’m not one of those pretending persons. They have to do what they are told.” The lad was right. With all the hazards, all the possibilities for breakdown, all the heartaches involved in freedom, we don’t want to be one of those “pretending persons.” We would rather be real persons, standing up and making our choices with all their possibilities of good and ill.
O God, my Lord, I feel I can begin to call you that now, for I want to cooperate with you. I have been making foolish and disastrous moves on my own and getting into a mess with myself and others and spoiling the game. Help me play your game. Amen.
Week 3 Thursday
How God Reveals God
Psalm 19:1-6; Hebrews 1:10-12; 2:6-9
You are a free being and can do the most important thing in the world—choose. Now you want to choose your highest hypothesis. What shall it he? Let us come straight to the issue: Do you know of any better hypothesis than Christ? Let your mind sweep the horizon of possibilities. After eliminating this thing and the other thing, this person and that person, does it not settle upon Christ as your best bet?
The highest thing in our moral universe is moral character. If God can be found anywhere it ought to be here. The highest illustration of moral character ever seen on our planet is Christ. If God can be found anywhere, it ought to be in the highest illustration in our moral universe—the character of Christ. How could God show us the divine character except through perfect moral character?
The character of God matters. For what God is like we must be like; God’s character determines ours. Just what is God like in character? I look up through nature, and I come to the conclusion that God is law. I am grateful for that, but I want something beyond law. I am not a subject asking for a law; I am a child asking for a Parent. Nature cannot tell me of my Parent, not clearly. Nor could the perfect revelation come through prophet or teacher, for the revelation going through them becomes limited, sometimes distorted, because of the human medium. Nor could the revelation come perfectly through a book, for literature cannot rise higher than life; the life that surrounds the literature puts content into the literature. So the book would be pulled to the level of our highest experience. The only complete way of revelation is through a Life, a Character who would show us what God’s character is like. That Character is Christ—the human life of God, that part of God we have been able to see. The Bible, then, is not the revelation of God; it is the inspired record of the revelation. The revelation is seen in the face of Jesus Christ. Is God then Christlike? He is! I can say nothing higher. I can be content with nothing less.
O God, I begin to see that you are coming to me in Christ. He seems to be that personal approach from the Unseen to me. I would not block that approach. I want you, O God, nothing less than you. Are you, O Christ, God coming to me, that I may come to you? Then receive me, for I receive you. Amen.
Week 3 Friday
God Is My Adventure
John 1:1-5, 17-18; Hebrews 1:1-3; 12:1-2
We now see that God could not be revealed except through another self, a self that would be in human surroundings and speak the language we speak, human language. Jesus was God speaking the language of the person in the street, interpreting God in understandable terms. Just as, when you take hold of my words, you get hold of my thought, so, when you take hold of the Word (Jesus), you get hold of the Thought (God). They do not rival or push out each other. The Word is the Thought become available, near at hand, intimate, human.
God is in nature, but the nature of God I find in Christ. And what a nature! If I were to try to think out the kind of God I’d like to see in the universe, I could think of nothing higher than that God should be Christlike. For “Jesus stands erect amid the fallen, clean amid the defiled, living among the dying, the Savior of men.”* Said the blind preacher George Matheson:
Son of Man, whenever I doubt of life, I think of Thee. Nothing is so impossible as that Thou shouldst be dead. I can imagine the hills to dissolve into vapour, the stars to melt in smoke, and the rivers to empty themselves in sheer exhaustion, but I feel no limit in Thee.**
Surely here in Jesus is one spot in my universe that will not let me down, something that is utterly trustworthy. Here, if anywhere, I can commit my life and confess my sins; for this one spot is not only trustworthy, it is sympathetic—it loves, it cares.
Here, then, is the place of my adventure. My adventure shall be God—and the kind of God I see in Christ.
Just as a planet rushing through space is only a comet on its way to destruction until it is caught by some central sun and begins to revolve around that sun as its center and its life, so my life is an aimless comet burning itself out in its own self-will until it finds the pull and attraction of Christ’s love, halts its deadly way, and forever revolves around him, its central Sun and its Life.
O Christ, I am so grateful that you are God near at hand, God bending to my need. I cannot scale the heavens to find you, for I am mired in my own fears and sins. You come to me. And now there is response within me. I come to you! I thank you that I come. Amen.
* Source unknown.
** Searchings in the Silence (London: Cassell and Co., 1894), 20-21.
Week 3 Saturday
Fastening on Dead Branches
Matthew 27:3-5; Acts 5:1-5
You are on the verge of the great decision. But before you make it, I would utter one word of warning. Go clear through; tolerate no halfway measures. The temptation will be to start out to be wholly Christ’s and end up in feeling a little more relieved. As someone put it, “They want to feel a little less elderly, to experience a slight rejuvenation. They do not want to be born again.” Don’t try to make a home out of a halfway house.
On the prayer knoll at Sat Tal in the Himalayas, I watched a vine stretching across space to fasten itself upon a pine tree. That vine seemed to be Aspiration, stretching to fasten itself upon the Higher. One morning I came out and found the vine had arrived! It had securely fastened its reaching tentacles around the tree. I rejoiced with it. But the next morning I was saddened to find catastrophe. A storm during the night had swept across the mountains and had torn the vine from its moorings. There it lay, a pathetic thing, with its face to the earth, still holding in its grasp the broken branch of the tree. The tree had broken and had let it down! But the tree really had not let it down. The vine had fastened upon a dead branch, and that dead branch had broken. Had the vine reached the central trunk, no storm could have torn it away or broken the trunk.
Many start out with high aspiration toward the Tree—God—and then stop at some dead branch of religion and fasten on that. They stop at a good resolution and fasten to that; but no mere good resolution can hold anyone up amid the storms of life. Others fasten upon an institution—a good thing, but not good enough to fasten one’s life upon. Nor will a rite or ceremony do; it will let one down in a crisis. Others fasten upon a favorite minister and pin their faith to him or her. No person is good enough to be the center of one’s faith; people may let one down. Others fasten on ideas about God instead of their acquaintance with God.
Go clear to the central trunk: God. Don’t stop short.
O God, the hesitancy within makes me want to fasten upon some compromise, some halfway measure. Save me from this. I want nothing less than you. I know that anything less than you will ultimately let me down. I come to you. Amen.