Week 4 Sunday
Week 4 Sunday
The First Step Upward
Proverbs 15:24; Isaiah 1:18-20; 2 Timothy 2:7
We come now to the third step in the scientific method: experiment with the hypothesis.
You are now ready, I trust, to put your feet upon the ladder and climb out to release and victory. I shall make that ladder very, very plain; for the greatest moment in life has come. The moment of the great choice has come, a decision that will decide all other decisions down the line—a master decision. Psychology speaks of “a major choice,” a choice that doesn’t have to be made over again every day. Lesser choices fit into it, not it into them. The ladder will have seven steps. It will be built around the thought of turn, a central word in Scripture.
(1) Turn over in mind your life, its direction and spirit. As you turn it over, you will be tempted to get on the defensive, for it is a hard thing not to defend your life patterns. But be relentlessly honest; look at yourself objectively and refuse to defend any wrong thing in your life. The first step toward complete mental and spiritual health is complete honesty.
That ugly self of yours, which you perhaps have dressed up in righteous garments, will plead, excuse, and rationalize. It will try to keep the throne amid all marginal changes. But fasten your attention on yourself as the center of your difficulties. You will be tempted to confess marginal sins and leave untouched the central sins. But nothing permanent has happened until the center of your difficulty—a wrong self—is replaced by another Self—God—as the center of reference, the center from which you get your life commands and orders.
A highly cultured and beautiful woman, after viewing her life, said with a sigh, “We have everything, and nothing.” Everything in the way of outer comforts, yet empty of heart.
You remember the blind man sitting by the wayside begging, who, when they told him that Jesus was calling him, flung away his garment and ran to Jesus (see Mark 10:50). You must fling away everything that would hinder you from getting to Christ: your inner dishonesties, and your outer ones too, your resentments, your wrong sex relationships, your self-centered attitudes—yes, your very self—and run to Christ.
O Christ, where else can I run? If I run away from you, I shall run away from life, from release, from the Open Door. Help me, then, to fling away everything—yes, my very self—and come to you. For I cannot live any longer with myself until I find you, my true Self. So I come. Amen.
Week 4 Monday
The Second Step
John 11:28; Ephesians 2:1-8
Yesterday you began to put your feet upon the seven-runged ladder to release and power. I trust you have taken that first step. Turn over in mind your life, its directions and spirit. As you turn over in mind your life, change your mind. Repentance in the New Testament is metanoia, a change of mind. There must be a complete reversal of life values, a complete changing of your mind as to what you really want. A Chinese version of Luke 9:23 translates as, “If any man would come after me, let him fling away himself.” This recalcitrant, ugly, tangled self must be flung away, lost, in order that a new, disentangled, cooperative self may be found
You must now come to the next step: (2) Turn to Christ. You need a Lord and Master. Perhaps you have been like the little dog Bang, who, in search of his master, ran onto a football field. People called to him from every direction, but there was no dominant voice, so he stood confused. You have been listening to many voices, a perfect babel of them, that call to you from all directions: the voice of money, of sex passion, of self-interest, of pride. And you are confused, for there has been no dominant voice.
Now, above the din, you are hearing, “The Master is come, and calleth for thee” (John 11:28 KJV). You hear a voice that grows authoritative. You feel that there is destiny in that voice. You have one thing that is yours: yourself. You can decide what to do with it, who shall master it.
A science student, making his way through the maze of possible choices, went out of my meeting, walked upstairs, and as simply as a child said, “I will say yes to Jesus.” He kept repeating that to himself. It transformed him. Across that simple bridge of yes, he walked out of the slough of despair to abundant living. And that choice has worked through the years.
Perhaps you have been trying to be several selves at once, without all your selves being organized around a single mastering Life within you. There was the plaintive cry of a confused and defeated doctor: “I try to nail down one of these selves, so that the rest of them may organize themselves around it.” Don’t! Turn over all of them to one mastering will, the will of Christ.
O God, I need a Master. Chain me back into freedom; darken me back into light; stab me back into wholeness; quiet me back into singing; and erase me back into fullness. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 4 Tuesday
The Third Step
Romans 6:2, 5-6, 11-14
We come now to the third step: (3) Having come to Christ, turn and look at your life through his eyes and break decisively with everything he cannot approve.
I have purposely waited for this stage before asking for the decisive break with all hindrances, all barriers, all sins. You cannot really see yourself until you see yourself through his eyes. Up to this moment, you may have been comparing yourself with yourself or with others, and in the light of these you have not come out badly. But now, having come to Christ, you see things through his eyes—a very different light. Things that, seen in the half-lights of former standards, were not so bad, now turn out to be intolerable. They must go. Don’t trifle.
At our Saugatuck, Michigan, ashram, one woman buried a little box, a symbol of the tyranny of a habit, in the sand at the foot of the cross. Another said she buried her fears and sins in the stars, so far out of her reach that she could not get at them again. Whether you bury them in the sand or in the stars, bury them, and over their graves put the inscription “No resurrection.”
In the same ashram, we were all assigned work to do with our hands; mine was picking up paper. I found that people’s consciences were developed regarding throwing paper around as the days went on. But not far enough! For many would hide the paper under bushes. They had just enough conscience to hide the paper, but not enough to get rid of it! Do not let this matter of getting rid of sin end in a stalemate, a compromise; don’t be content with a conscience that will hide sins but will not get rid of them. Go back into the hidden recesses where you have tucked sins away, to the margins of the subconscious, and bring them all out—all. They will plead, excuse, procrastinate, but be relentless; bring them all out. Not a thing must be left behind.
O God, I have put my hand to this plow, and I do not intend to look back. I am going all out for Christ. This shall be no halfway business. I shall take the whole cross and not ask for a half cross. Help me cut loose. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 4 Wednesday
The Fourth Step
Luke 9:23-24; Romans 12:1; 1 Thessalonians 5:23
We come now to the most important step of all: (4) Turn over to Christ yourself and all you have. This is the crucial point, and if you bungle this you block the process. Between two persons there is no love without an inward self-surrender to each other. If either one withholds the essential self from the other, love is blocked; it will not spring up no matter how hard you try to love around and past that core of an unsurrendered self. So between you and God there can be no love without an inward self-surrender. Not the surrender of this thing or that thing, but the surrender of you, the essential you.
A brilliant woman came to the end of her resources. Her self-centered life had run through its inner assets. She was bankrupt. She saw clearly that the self would have to resign to find itself. But the struggle was great. It always is. One man put it this way: “There were many battles fought on great fields, but there was never a harder one than that between myself and myself in that little room.” I told this woman that the initial battle was the hardest, that it takes twice as much power for an airplane to get off the earth as it does for it to fly. We bowed in prayer. At the close of that prayer, she opened her eyes and said, “But I’m off!” She had broken with the old life. And there was wonderful release. She gave me her whisky bottle and her gold cigarette case, saying, “I have no more use for them.” She gave up her sleeping tablets too. She let go all crutches.
For several days, this woman was supremely happy, and then a cloud. “I am like a child adopted into a new family; everything is beautiful, but one thing is lacking; I cannot see my Father’s face.” And then the reason for it dawned. She had given her whisky bottle and her cigarette case in lieu of herself. She had tried to buy off God with these! When she saw what had happened, she hastened to add herself to the bottle and the case; and then did she see her Father’s face? Yes, with nothing between! And now she is radiantly happy. She lost a tangled, snarled-up self and found a united, released, and happy self.
O God, I see that I cannot buy you off—you relentless Lover. You want the inmost shrine—myself. So I vacate and give it to you. For I have no right to the Throne. I am not God—you are. So I abdicate and give you supreme charge. You command. I obey. It is done! Amen.
Week 4 Thursday
The Fifth Step
Mark 9:23; 11:22, 24
Yesterday you decided that God should have first place. Someone wrote to the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, “It seems to me that to put ourself into the second place is the whole significance of life.” To which Turgenev replied, “It seems to me to discover what one should put in the first place is the whole problem of life.”* You have decided that problem: God, and no one else, shall have the first place in your life.
Now you are ready for the next step: (5) Turn to God in confidence and faith, and believe that God receives you and that you receive God. Having given the one thing you have, you have the right to accept the one thing God has—Godself. Many fail at this place. They are forever giving but fail to receive. Suppose you should do that in a marriage relation—always give and not allow your partner to reciprocate; would not the relationship be blocked? The alternate heartbeats of your relationship with each other and with God are “Give, take”; “Give, take.” If it’s all giving and no taking, the heart will stop beating; it cannot beat in this lopsided fashion. A great surgeon expressed it this way: “Christianity is pure receptivity. As many as received Christ, to them gave he the right to be called the sons of God.” If you are always breathing out and never breathing in, your breathing will stop.
A Roman Catholic girl, a student of sociology, entered this new experience and is alive with God. She puts her resolution this way: “More than ever before, I am going to stop searching and let Christ permeate my life. He alone has the answer to life by giving us life itself—life abundant and real and not loaded with unanswerables.”
“Not loaded with unanswerables”—stop mulling around on the inside of yourself, chewing on unanswerables. Go out in positive faith and accept the gift of God. God offers God’s full self. Take it. For in that self of God you find all you need: forgiveness, power, fellowship, motive, and energy to contribute to others—Life!
Take that step—now!
O God, my Lord, this step is taken. You have me. That sums up everything, for I now see the other truth: I have you. I have lost myself and have found you. Can I ever cease to be eternally grateful? Let my life spell out its gratitude day by day. Amen.
* Published source unknown.
Week 4 Friday
The Sixth Step
James 1:27; 2:1-4, 14-18
You have taken the greatest of all steps. You wonder what will happen. Perhaps you will have your doubts and fears. A young man told the editor Daniel Poling, “I’m ruined. Stanley Jones ruined me in that meeting last night. All my plans I’ve had to surrender to God.”
“Thank God,” the Reverend Poling replied; “now God can do something with you. He can remake your ‘ruined’ life.” That is the point: God shakes your life to the dust to rebuild it, but only with your cooperation. You and God now work it out together.
Take the sixth step: (6) Turn and look at all your human relationships and go into them with Christ. Work out all of these relationships with your relationship with Christ as the basic fact. This basic relationship must not be fitted into them; they must be fitted into it.
You have six major relationships. (1) The church—get into it. With all its faults, it is the greatest serving institution in the world, filling the earth with schools, hospitals, orphanages, and so on. The church has many critics, but it has no rivals in the work of human redemption. Get into it and become a part of this world fellowship. (2) The home—take Christ into your home. Set up grace at meals and family prayers. Begin confessing your own sins and not those of your partner. (3) Your business—make your business an outer expression of your chief business—serving God. You have no reason to be in any business that cannot express your chief business—serving God. Change your business, or change to some other. (4) Class and race—you now enter a new society, the society of the kingdom of God. This is a classless society, and it is race- and color-blind. Recast all relationships that cannot be fitted into that. (5) International relationships—you now have no more enemies because you have no more enmity. You are for everybody, so-called enemies and all. (6) The ones next to you, in school, in shop, in office—your neighbors. Witness to them of what has happened to you. Win them.
O God, I begin to see the greatness of my adventure. Nothing lies outside the domain of the kingdom—not as far as I am concerned. You demand a total obedience in the total life. And I give it—gladly. Amen.
Week 4 Saturday
The Seventh Step
Mark 1:35-36; Acts 10:9; Ephesians 6:18; 1 Thessalonians 5:17
You come now to the last of the seven steps: (7) Turn to God each morning; set up the Quiet Hour. Perhaps you are appalled at the ramifications of your new life. How will you be able to transform all these relationships? You must get resources, and you can get them from the Quiet Hour. Many feel that they can live in a state of prayer, without stated times for prayer. This is a mistake.
Jesus felt the need of three simple habits: (a) He stood up to read, “as his custom was” (Luke 4:16); (b) He went out into the mountain to pray, “as was his custom” (Luke 22:39); (c) He taught them again, “as he was wont” (Mark 10:1 KJV). These three simple habits: reading and meditating upon the Word of God; exposing oneself to God at the prayer hour; and teaching others—passing on what we have found—are as basic in the spiritual life as two plus two equals four are in mathematics. If Jesus couldn’t get along without them, how do we hope to do so?
In the pure, strong hour of the morning, when the soul of the day is at its best, lean upon the windowsill of the Lord and look into his face, and get orders for the day. Then go out into the world with a sense of a hand upon your shoulder and not a chip.*
Start the day right, and you will end it right.
Someone asked me how I maintained my spiritual life; what was the secret. I replied that it was by doing two things. First, I keep up my prayer hours. I established the habit in college. Certain hours do not belong to the day; they’re out. They belong to the getting of resources for the day. If I let down those hours, the day lets down with them. I’m better or worse as I pray more or less. Someone described a certain place as “a home in the country where those who have lost spiritual tone and margin through the wear and tear of work may come for rest and reinvigoration.” The prayer hour is that “home,” where those who have lost spiritual tone and margin can regain them. I repeat, my days sag if the prayer hour sags. The second secret is, I am always up against a task I cannot do; deliberately so. This throws me back on the resources of God. Life then becomes what one youth, listening to the Quaker Rufus Jones, resolved his life would be: “I am just going to make my life a miracle.” He did.
O God, I need your silences just as I need physical food. I dedicate myself to them. May I resolve to cut my physical food each time I cut my spiritual intake. Thus soul and body will go up and down together. For I am resolved to see this through and to pay the price to do it. Amen.
* Source unknown.