Week 5 Sunday
Week 5 Sunday
Review Your Life and Reverse
Luke 13:3; Acts 2:38; 3:19; Romans 2:4
This matter of taking the initial step is so important that, if you do not really take it, the rest of abundant living will be a sealed book to you. As someone said of another, “He hasn’t the combination.” When you haven’t got the combination, you can’t get at the locked treasures of God.
At the risk of seeming tedious, we will go back again over some of the same ground, this time using a different ladder. For I know that many may have gone through last week’s study of the steps without actually taking them. I would gather in that last hesitant soul before we go on. For what lies ahead is too good to be missed!
You will remember we are working our way through the five steps of the scientific method found on Tuesday of week 2. We have picked out Christ as the most likely hypothesis (the second step), and we are now experimenting with him as the Answer. We will linger on this third step for some time, incorporating the fourth and fifth steps—verifying the answer and sharing results—as we go.
This ladder will be even simpler than the first, using nine Rs upon which to step up and out.
(1) Review. Take an honest look at yourself. Perhaps you will find not so much positive sin as a lack of divine life.
Outwardly splendid as of old—
Inwardly sparkless, void and cold—
Her force and fire all spent and gone—
Like the dead moon, she still shines on.*
Or life may be at cross-purposes with itself, “sweet bells jangled out of tune.”** Or you may feel you are not getting anywhere. A redcap said to me, “No, don’t take that coach, for it ain’t hitched to nothin’ that is goin’ somewhere.” You may feel your life is hitched to something that isn’t getting you anywhere.
Then let us take the second step: (2) Reverse. Repentance is reversal. You have been going in a wrong direction; now you turn on your heel and reverse. Don’t confess other people’s sins; confess your own. If you begin with yourself, then like may beget like; they will confess theirs.
O God, I do begin with myself. I’ve been a coward. I’ve laid things on others and blamed them for my condition. I am to blame for what I am. But I do not stop with useless regret—about-face. I honestly, even bitterly, repent. Forgive me. Amen.
*William Watson, “The Church Today” in New Poems (New York: John Lane Co., 1909), 128.
** William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. K. Deighton (London: Macmillan, 1919), act 3, scene 1; Ophelia soliloquy.
Week 5 Monday
Return to God
Luke 15:11-32
You have taken two of the nine steps on the ladder to release. You now take the third: (3) Return. Repentance is the negative side. It releases you to return—return to God. But you say: “Will God receive such as I am? Shall I not have to make myself better, so that I shall be worthy?” Worthy? No one ever is. Go back to God with these words on your lips: “Just as I am, without one plea.”
A minister was in a train, the only occupant of the coach except a young man who seemed very ill at ease. The young man would sit in one seat and then get up and go to another, take up a book and drop it again. The minister went over to him, sat down beside him, and asked what was the matter. The boy shut up like a clam. But at last the dam broke, and he told his story: “I’ve run away from home, and I’ve been away a long time. I’ve wanted to go back, and I wrote my father asking if he would take me back. But there has been no reply. So I have written my mother and told her that I am not going to wait for a reply, that I am coming home; and that if they will take me back, she must hang a white rag on the crabapple tree down near the railroad tracks, so that I can see it when the train goes by. If I do not see the white rag, I shall understand and go on by. We are getting near, and I am afraid to look—afraid the white rag won’t be there.”
The minister told the lad that he needn’t look, that the minister would look for him. The boy sat with his eyes closed, the hand of the minister on his knee. As they drew near to where the tree was, the hand of the minister closed tight on the boy’s knee, and he said, “My boy, there is a white rag on every limb of that tree!”
Something like that awaits you, you who are returning to God. A welcome so ungrudging, so overflowing that it will break down all your hesitancies, all your fears and doubts. Take one step toward God, and God will take two steps toward you.
“While he was still a long way off, his father saw him. . . . His father ran to him, hugged him, and kissed him” (Luke 15:20-21 CEB).
O God, how dare I close my heart to you? I cannot; I will not. And now I come to you, just as I am. If anything can be made of me, then you have me. I am at your disposal. I’ve come with all I have. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 5 Tuesday
Renounce, Restore, and Receive
Luke 19:8-10; John 1:12-13; Romans 5:1
Now that you have taken the third step, take the next: (4) Renounce. At the heart of this new life there is a no. Psychologically, it is the hardest word to say; yes is much easier. But you will have to say no to some things in order to say yes to the real things. Among the effects of poet James Russell Lowell were found these lines:
Here lies a part of J. R. L.,
The things that kept him from doing well.*
A man promised a pastor that he would not drink again. After the pledge had been taken, the man appeared in late evening and said he must be allowed to drink or he would die. The pastor told him to go home and die, and went on with his work. The next day, the man appeared with a new confidence in his face and said, “I died last night.” He had, but a new man was alive.
(5) Restore. As you go over your life, you will find things that you will have to right. You may have to ask forgiveness for wrongs done to others, for resentments harbored; you may have to make up a quarrel; you may have to restore money. In one of our missions, a young lady hesitated about dropping in the box a letter asking forgiveness for resentments harbored. But the moment the letter hit the bottom of the box, a tied-up condition within her broke. She was free. In another mission, the hotel management called us up, thanking us for the mission; a woman had come and returned an armful of towels she had taken when she had been a guest at the hotel. Make a clean sweep with no compromises or half-performances.
(6) Receive. Here is the simple act of faith. To receive is an affirmation that God is as honorable as you are. You have given what you have; now you believe God will not do less. God will give what God has. And the best thing God has to give is the divine self. God gives that. Keep repeating to yourself: “I take into my inmost being the forgiving love of God.” Affirm, affirm, affirm.
O God, I do affirm. I have lived on denials too long. Now I live on the positive affirmation that you are love; that I can bank on that love; that your love will not let me down; that I can draw on it for all I need. And now, O God, I am on your hands forever. I am glad to be there. Amen.
* Published source unknown.
Week 5 Wednesday
Relating the New Life
Psalm 1:2; 63:6-7; 119:148; 121:1
Now that you have taken the step of receptivity, you are ready for the last three. (7) Relate. Jesus was not a moralist, relating you to an imposed moral code. He wasn’t saying, “Do this”; “Don’t do that.” His method was to get people into right relationships, and then everything would follow from that. His first words were, “Follow me.” Out of that relationship with him would flow all other relationships.
The most beautiful tribute I ever heard a man pay to his wife was by an African American bishop who said, “Fifty years ago I looked into the limpid depths of her eyes, and I’ve never got over the spell of it.” Everything flowed from that central loyalty.
Now that you have your central relationship with Christ pegged down, make all your other relationships fit into it. And remember that nothing is more central in the Christian way than bringing all your relationships under the guidance of this central relationship.
The central principle of your relationships with people is: “as you wish that men would do to you, do so to them” (Luke 6:31). Give your employees the same treatment you would like if you were an employee. And thus go on down the line with every human relationship. But for the Christian there is something beyond even the Golden Rule: “Treat one another with the same spirit as you experience in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5 Moffatt). In other words, “Treat others as Christ treats you.” That puts a plus, a “beyondness,” in the whole thing. Surrender yourself to that plus, that beyondness.
To do this you will need resources. Get them in the next step. (8) Refill, Replenish. This will be done in the Quiet Hour. A sheep rancher, living all alone on his Idaho ranch, found that his violin was out of tune, and that he couldn’t tune it without some standard note to go by. So he wrote to the radio station in far-off California, asking them to strike that note. They did. They stopped the program, struck the note, the sheep rancher caught it, and the violin was in tune again. Your Quiet Hour will help you hear God’s standard notes. Then you can tune up your flattened notes to God’s. Keep that Hour intact.
O God, I know there is nothing better than what I have found except more of what I have found. Help me to open every pore of my being to the incoming Life that heals, sustains, reinvigorates, empowers. I do so now—come in, you Life of my life, you Being of my being. Amen.
Week 5 Thursday
Released and Releasing
Romans 8:1-2; 2 Corinthians 3:16-18; Galatians 5:1
You come now to the final step of your ladder. (9) Release. This release is in two directions. First, there is release within. All your tied-up conditions—your inhibitions, your fears, your guilts—are now gone. In the scientific method, you are in step four; you have verified the hypothesis on a wide scale. You have now entered abundant living.
But second, there is release in another direction. You are released to serve. You are released from and released to: from fears to folks, from inhibitions to inspirations, from guilt to guidance. The doors now turn outward. From being an introvert, you become an extrovert—not entirely, of course, for in reality you are now an introvert/extrovert, an “ambivert.” You turn inward, no longer to mull around in useless regret over failure, but to get quiet in the Quiet Hour so that communion with God will recoup the soul and make it adequate for the next step: extroversion. This is step five in the scientific method: simply and humbly sharing the results. Communion ends in commission. Life is now outgoing, positive, affirmative, contributive.
A woman who had gone through the ways of the world and had come out at zero put her experience this way in a letter: “I’ve been full of questions and doubts and wonderings; then all of a sudden everything falls into its place like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. And when this happens, I want to tell someone. I want to say, ‘Why, there is no question about the reality of this. It’s there; it is; it’s a fact.’ ” This letter has the authentic notes in it: “Full of questions, doubts, wonderings . . . everything falls into its place like a jigsaw puzzle . . . I want to tell someone.”
Release is the last stage, rightly so. The doors of the unreleased person all turn inward; the doors of the released person turn outward. Goodness now is good for something. And nothing, nothing is more absolutely sound, psychologically, than just that. Relief comes through release.
You are a released person, released to follow the unfolding will of God.
O God, my Lord, how can I express the gratitude my happy soul would tell? “O for a thousand tongues to sing my great Redeemer’s praise.” Now help me tell my gratitude not merely in ecstatic praise but in quiet ways of human helpfulness. Help me to help the next person I meet, and so on through this day. Amen.
Week 5 Friday
The Four Stages of Life
Galatians 5:22-23; 1 Peter 1:22-23; 2:1-2
The spiritual life passes through the same four stages as the physical life: (1) gestation, (2) birth, (3) growth, (4) flowering.
Gestation is the spiritual period when this new life is forming within one. A brilliant doctor, after a period of awful struggle and darkness, described this first stage thus: “There is a little plant of faith growing in my heart. But I am almost afraid to look at it, lest it wither.”
After this period of incubation, when we alternate between doubt and faith, between hating God and surrendering to God, between plunging deeper into sin and surrendering it entirely, there comes the birth. That spiritual new birth may be sudden, or it may be gradual. It may be as gradual as the opening of a flower to the sun, or it may be as sudden as a lightning flash. But even in the gradual birth there is a moment when the decision is made, as when the hand of the clock gradually turning round the dial, comes to a moment when it strikes twelve. Sometimes the new beginning is sudden and overwhelming, as in John Masefield’s “Everlasting Mercy”:
I did not think, I did not strive,
The deep peace burned my me alive;
The bolted door had broken in,
I knew that I had done with sin.
I knew that Christ had given me birth
To brother all the souls on earth. . . .
O glory of the lighted mind,
How dead I’d been, how dumb, how blind.
The station brook, to my new eyes,
Was babbling out of Paradise,
The waters rushing from the rain
Were singing Christ has risen again.
I thought all earthly creatures knelt
From rapture of the joy I felt.*
O God, these words echo what I feel. And yet I do not depend upon my fleeting feelings. I depend upon the certain faith that you are and that I am, and that we have come together to be knit together in a common purpose and a common life. This is the rock beneath my feet. Amen.
* The Poems of John Masefield (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 80-81.
Week 5 Saturday
Swallowing Sunshine
Romans 8:15-17; 1 Corinthians 6:9-11; 1 Peter 1:8-9
We ended yesterday with the wonder, the miracle, of the new birth. A friend of mine in the southern U.S. called an old man on the station platform to the train window and asked, “Is there anybody in this town enjoying religion?” To which the old man replied, “Them’s that’s got it, is.” He could have said nothing more profound. He expressed in homely language what an able woman said in these words: “In the first place, the terrible clouds of questioning and of doubting have dispersed. I find I am no longer torturing myself about the ‘rightness’ and ‘wrongness’ of things. Victory is mine and I find that praying has taken on a new vitality. I scarcely know just what has taken place, but I do know that something within me has been released, something that had heen throttled.”
A college girl put the same truth in her own language: “I felt that I had swallowed sunshine.” Quite a contrast to some people who look as though they had swallowed a storm cloud!
Another woman, who had gone through the maze of psychiatric analysis and had been left rather picked to pieces without synthesis, experienced this change and described it this way: “I feel all clean within. All the old hymns about cleansing I had laid aside as outworn superstition have come back. I find myself singing them again.”
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes used this term to describe an inspired work: “it seemed to me . . . to have a feeling of intimacy with the inside of the cosmos.”* You do. You are no longer orphaned, estranged, alone. You have a feeling of belonging not only to “the inside of the cosmos” but also to people. The biggest grouch of a certain city called up a friend and said, “Everybody is changed . . . after that meeting in the high school with Stanley Jones last night. Everybody is different this morning. Of course, it may be that only I am different, but everybody seems different.” His world was different, for he was different.
O God, I have come into a new world, for a new world has come into me. Help me live so that people will seem different to me and I seem different to them. For I am different. And I am so grateful. Thank you, Lord. Amen.
* In a letter to Sir Frederick Pollock about John Dewey’s book Experience and Nature. Quoted in James R. Hackney Jr., Under Cover of Science (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 187n111.