God
GOD
How Can I Find God?
Acts 17:23-28
In our quest for God let us look at a few preliminary things. Hold in mind that the purpose of your very being, the very end of your creation is to find and live in God. As the eye is fashioned for light, so you are fashioned for God.
Victorious Living
(Week 4, Sunday)
The Risk God Took
Matthew 25:34-40; 2 Corinthians 5:2
Was it not risky for God to create us with the awful power of choice and with the possibility that we might go astray and break our hearts and God’s? Yes, very risky indeed. God might have made us without the power of choice, or with the power to choose only the good. But this would not be choice, for you must be able to choose in two directions, not one, for choice to be real. . . . There was no other way to create personalities except to give them freedom. Risky? Yes.
But parents take that same risk when they bring a child into the world. That child may go astray and crush their lives and its own. But parents assume that awful risk. Why? Because they are determined that whatever happens they will do their best for the child; they will enter into his or her very life, until the child’s problems become their own, the child’s troubles theirs, the child’s growth and happiness theirs. This will mean a cross! Of course. But parenthood accepts that cross because it cannot to otherwise. So with God. Our creation meant that God would enter into our very lives. Our troubles are God’s troubles, our sins God’s sins, our joy God’s joy. So creation, then, means a cross for God? Inevitably. But God took it. Love could not do otherwise.
Victorious Living
(Week 4, Monday)
God Fading Out
Genesis 27:35-36; 31:53 (Moffatt); 32:24-30
How has God faded out of the mind of this age? Well, the age, like thoughtless children, believed that the “toyland” of material wealth was a sufficient world; then God faded out, smothered by preoccupations. . . .
Our forebears had firsthand experience of God through the evangelical revival of the nineteenth century. The next generation clung to the church for their fathers’ sake, but God was only the “Awe”—the afterglow of a fading faith. The third generation is reaping the result of a fading faith, which is producing decaying morals and a decaying civilization. Our loss of God is working out in moral decay. We are going to pieces morally, for we have gone to pieces religiously. We have lost God and have thus lost the basis of morals. Jacob met God on Jabbok’s banks in his midnight wrestle and emerged a new man. . . .
Unless we, like Jacob, find a moral renewal in finding God, we are done for.
Abundant Living
(Week 1, Tuesday)
Our Freedom Complicates God’s Game
John 4:34; 1 Corinthians 16:13; Galatians 2:21
In this freedom of ours lays 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 that discontent would drive me to God’s feet. “Blessed are the homesick, for they will come home,” says a German proverb.
Abundant Living
(Week 3, Wednesday)
How God Reveals God
Psalm 19:1-6; Hebrews 1:10-12; 2:6-9
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 thing 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.
Abundant Living
(Week 3, Thursday)
Be Silent to God
Isaiah 30:20-21; Jeremiah 1:4-10; Acts 15:28; 16:6-10
Many of us talk fast in the presence of God, afraid that if we keep quiet God will say something unpleasant to us. We must learn to listen, to live in the passive voice. A pastor arose in one of our Ashrams and said, “God is showing me that I must shift the emphasis of my life from talking to taking.” He was learning receptivity.
One translator interprets the command, “Be still, and know that I am God,” this way: “Be silent to God and he will mold you.” Be silent to God and God will make and mold you to become the instrument of divine purposes. An almighty “Will,” will reinforce your weak will, but only when that weak will is aligned to the purposes of that almighty Will. An all-wise Mind will brood over your mind, awakening it, stimulating it, and making it creative. An all-embracing Love will quicken your love into world-sensitivity until “He hath set the world into [your] heart” (Eccl 3:11 KJV).
God has three things in mind in reference to us: purpose, plan, and a person. God has a purpose to make you the best that you can be. God has a plan that embodies that purpose. God has a plan for every life. The next step is for you to be the person for carrying out that purpose and that plan. In the silence you listen for the unfolding of that purpose and that plan. You literally become the plan and purpose of God, an embodied thought of God, the word made flesh.
Abundant Living
(Week 37, Sunday)
The Berry in the Mouth
Isaiah 37:3-7; 41:10, 13; 42:16
“Christians, when he gets to the end of a rope, tie a knot and hang on.” For they know that very extremity is God’s opportunity.
Abundant Living
(Week 41, Monday)
The Center of the Christian Gospel: Reconciliation
Matthew 5:23-24; Romans 5:10-11; 2 Corinthians 13:11; Hebrews 12:14; James 3:13-18
If I were to pick out the one verse that most nearly expresses the Christian gospel, it would be this: “God was reconciling the world to himself through Christ, by not counting people’s sins against them. He has trusted us with this message of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:19 CEB). God was in the positive business of an outgoing love that reconciled humanity to God when humanity did not want to be reconciled. We do what God does; God trusts us with the work of reconciling.
Abundant Living
(Week 48, Friday)
Psalm 119:37, 103, 130
The Christian way is the way that conforms to nature, real nature. Anything else is doomed.
We must have hold of this until it becomes a basic axiom: My will and God’s will are not alien. When I find God’s will, I find my very own. The idea that God’s will always lies along the line of the disagreeable is false. The will of God is always our highest interest. It could not be otherwise and God be God. I am fulfilled when I make God my center. I am frustrated when I make myself the center. I am destined to be a Christian.
The Way
(Week 5, Thursday)
Islam Means Submission
Psalm 4:5-8
If everything that happens is the will of God, then what kind of a God is God? God’s character is gone.
It is true that God, in making us free agents, is indirectly responsible for what we do with that free agency. God assumes that responsibility and discharges it at a cross, at a Cross where everything that falls on humanity as a result of the misuse of free agency falls on God. The world’s sorrow and sin is “forced through the channels of a single heart” (Frederick Myers, “St. Paul,” 1867), he bears it and redeems us through it.
But to tell a stricken mother that the taking of her babe, or the loss of a loved one in an automobile accident, is the will of God is to charge God with murder. The time is here when we should be ashamed to have children die, for we know that some law has been broken: by remote parents through heredity, or by the immediate parents through ignorance or carelessness, or by the wrong organization of society producing impossible living conditions, or through the wrong choices of the child. The death is the result of one or more of these wills, but it is not the will of God. God wills health, not sickness; life, not death.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 2, Tuesday)
From Imposition, to Imitation, to Indwelling
Acts 2:29-33
God the Father is God for us; God the Son is God with us; God the Spirit is God in us. I cannot be satisfied with only for, or with, or in God the Father is the Creator; God the Son is the Redeemer; God the Spirit is the Creator-Redeemer within.
[A good definition of the Trinity:] The Father’s love, the divine intention; the Son’s approach, the divine invasion; the Spirit’s coming, the divine indwelling. God dwelt in a holy temple, then in a holy Person; now God dwells in us who want to be holy. God in the Old Testament is Light; God in Jesus is Life; God in us is Power. Each time God comes closer, until finally God comes to the ultimate place—within. Authority is never authority until it is within. But when the authority is within, and when that authority is the Holy Spirit, then it must be spelled Authority.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 5, Wednesday)
Everything You Say and Do Is Heightened
John 14:20-21, 23
When we live in union with God, then we take on the significance of the One with whom we are united. To be conscious that, when you work, God works; when you think, God thinks; when you go ahead, you are not alone—that is the cure for inferiorities, for hesitation, for weak personality. “In him who strengthens me, I am able for anything (Phil 4:13 Moffatt).”
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 18, Wednesday)
I Am Unable to Stand Myself a Minute Longer
Matthew 6:22-24
For almost all our problems are rooted in an unsurrendered self. Get yourself onto the hands of God, and your problems will be off your hands.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 31, Sunday)
Psychiatry without God, Questionable
Romans 6:20-23
Anything that leaves you centered in yourself or centered in something less than God—whether it is religion, psychiatry, or just plain secularism—is leaving you off-center, for you are not God.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 6, Sunday)
Why Didn’t He Come Himself?
John 10:15, 17-18
When I was speaking in India to a group about God loving the world, that God gave his Son to die for us, a village woman spoke up and said: “What kind of a father was he to send his son; why didn’t he come himself?” It was a good question, and penetrating. Yes, why didn’t God come himself?
“I love Jesus but I hate God, for God wanted to destroy the world, and Jesus wouldn’t let him,” said a little girl. If Jesus is a third person, standing between us and God, she is right. But Jesus is a mediator only in the sense that he mediates God to us. For when we take hold of Christ, we take hold of the very self of God. For, “In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor 5:19). I cannot tell where Jesus ends and God begins in my experience. They melt into one. When I deepen the Christ-consciousness, I deepen God-consciousness. They do not rival or push each other out. They are one.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 18, Wednesday)
The Three Ends of the Atonement
Romans 1:1-6
We cannot go on to the way to grow until we settle the question. To whom do I belong, to myself or to God? You are not primarily called to do, or to be; you are called to belong: “called to belong to Jesus Christ” (Rom 1:6 Moffatt).
Growing Spiritually
(Week 3, Monday)
God Digs around Us
Hebrews 12:7-11
If, in our barrenness of soul, we feel proddings of conscience and unhappiness and upsetness of spirit, then that means God is digging around us. God’s diggings are not just to give a “dig” as punishment, but they are constructive diggings to make us fruitful.
Just as physical pain is nature putting up a red flag and saying, “There is something wrong here; attend to it,” so spiritual pain is that same red flag going up. It is God saying, “There is danger of death here. Attend to it.” God’s prods are all redemptive, never just punitive.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 4, Thursday)
God’s Laws Are God’s Preventive Grace
2 Chronicles 6:12-14
Disease is not the will of God; and God never sends disease. This must be clarified a bit. Indirectly God does. For God has made a universe of moral and material law. These laws are God’s preventive grace saying, “Keep off. Danger.” If we break these laws, we don’t just break the laws; we break ourselves upon the laws. We get hurt—physically, spiritually, morally. We get the consequences in ourselves.
If we work with the moral universe, we get results; the moral universe will back us, sustain us, and further us. We will get results. But if we go against the moral universe, we will be up against it, frustrated and hurt. We will get consequences. Some people go through life getting results; others get consequences. But we get one or the other. And those results or consequences are passed on to others, for we are all bound up in a bundle of life together for good or ill. We have the power to hurt or to help one another, and that through succeeding generations. Just as individuals enjoys assets they are not entitled to as individuals, so they are called on to suffer liabilities that they do not individually merit.”
So God, having made the laws, is remotely responsible for our suffering if we break those laws through the misuse of freedom. God is responsible for making us free and hence is responsible, remotely, if we misuse our freedom and suffer. God accepts that responsibility and discharges it at a cross. There God takes on everything that would and does fall on us and suffers with us and for us. There, the world’s sin and sorrow “were forced through the channels of a single heart” (Frederick Myers, “St. Paul,” 1867). There God provided an open door of release from all that hurts and hinders us in any realm of life.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 33, Monday)
Why Not Go Direct to God?
John 14:6-9
But someone asks: Why Jesus? Why not go to God direct? Why a mediator at all? The answer is that no one goes to God direct. God has to be mediated to us. If you try to go to God direct, you go through the category of your conceptions of God. Those conceptions of God mediate God to you. But they are not God; they are your conceptions about God. . . .
Apart from Jesus we know little about God. Jesus is God disclosing the divine self to us in understandable terms, human terms. Jesus is not our view of God but God’s view of Godself. God is the divine self-disclosure. Jesus is not therefore a third person, standing between us and God. He is God come to you; and when you take hold of Jesus, you take hold of the very self of God. So Jesus is a mediator only in the sense that he mediates God to you.
Mastery
(Week 5, Saturday)
At the Sight of This . . . I Am Down
1 Corinthians 1:20-24
So the eternal quest is not our search for God but God’s search for us. God’s quest and ours meet at the foot of the cross, where God finds us and we find God. The eternal quest ends, ends in finding and being found.
Mastery
(Week 6, Tuesday)
God and Life Will Our Maturity
Ephesians 4:14-16
And what kind of parent would God be if God did not disturb us toward maturity? No earthly parent could be content to have a child who refused to grow up. The parent’s joy is in development, in growth, in going on toward maturity. God cannot be otherwise and still be God, our Parent. So the disturbances we feel in our immaturities are not signs of God’s anger, but a manifestation of God’s love. God loves us too much to let us settle down in halfwayness.
Christian Maturity
(Week 1, Monday)
Matthew 1:21-23
The very first step in maturity, is to be reconciled with God, our Parent. As long as the feeling of inner estrangement from God is eating at the center of our being, we will never be mature.
And at this place there are just two types of religion: the one type tries to meet God in reconciliation and realization at the top rung of a long ladder; the other meets God at the lowest rung. In the one we go to God, climbing up by our good deeds, by our prayers, by mortifying of ourselves, by gaining merit, by obedience to rites and ceremonies, and by faithfulness to law and duty; we can earn our maturity and our realization of God. Every way, except the Christian way, belongs to that category. It is humanity’s search up for God.
The Christian way is quite different. We do not climb to and meet God at the top rung; God comes down the ladder to us and meets us on the lowest rung; God receives us as sinners. “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matt 9:13). That is new and that is revolutionary.
Christian Maturity
(Week 4, Thursday)
God Is Light on Four Things
Romans 1:19-20
When you see God in the face of Jesus, then “God is light,” light on everything. When you lose God, you lose everything, and when you find God, you find everything.
God is light on these four things: (l) creation, (2) character, (3) conversion, (4) consummation. God is light on creation. God is light on the purpose of creation. Since God is love, it is the nature of love to create. For love wants beings with whom it can share love. Parents create because they want children upon whom they can lavish their love and from whom they can receive love in return. God, the Heavenly Parent, is love, and therefore wants children upon whom to lavish love and receive love in return.
God is light on character. In Jesus we see the character of God. God couldn’t do an un-Christlike thing and still be God. So Jesus is the key to the character of God and people. In Christ we see what God is like and what we can be like. He sets the pattern of character for God and people. You can transfer to God every single quality of character in Jesus without lowering your idea of God. Lower your idea of God? You heighten it! For if God isn’t like Jesus, God isn’t good. You ask me my definition of goodness. I do not add virtue to virtue; I point to Jesus. He is goodness. If God isn’t like Jesus I’m not interested in God. If he is, then he can have my heart without qualification or reservation. Having seen the character of God in Jesus, I now know here I must head in.
God is light on conversion. If God is light on character, when I look at my character and see God’s character in Jesus, then I know my character has to be changed. But how? In Jesus I see the door, the only door, through conversion. He said, “Except ye be converted . . . ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 18:3 KJV). There are just two classes of people: the converted and the unconverted, a division that really divides and the only division that really divides. And through Jesus, God provides all the resources for conversion, a total conversion of the total person.
Christian Maturity
(Week 7, Wednesday)
God Is Light on Consummation
Revelation 22:1-4
We come now to the next thing upon which God is light, upon the consummation. The world process is not moving with aimless feet. There is a goal for all created things and that goal has been revealed. It is nothing less than the coming of the kingdom of God on earth. The earth and everything in it have a destiny and that destiny is to be the scene of the kingdom of God. That gives meaning and dignity to everything and makes every act in every human being significant; it is for or against the New Order.
Without the light that God sheds upon the consummation, life is a dull, drab thing moving with leaden feet toward extinction. With it, we see the meaning of the statement of Paul: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom 8:19-21).
Christian Maturity
(Week 7, Thursday)
Inseparably One with God?
Psalm 8:4-6
[What about] those who find all the answers within themselves, asserting their own inseparable oneness with God. . . . The character of God is lost in this viewpoint, for if we are inseparably one with God, then what we do, God does. You cannot say you are metaphysically one and not morally one. You are one, in everything! But any of us who know ourselves—and others—know that when we act, we act and not God. For the outcome of that acting is the sum total of our moral mess. If all this mess we are in is the result of God’s acting, then what kind of God is that? God’s character and face are blackened. We have tried to make ourselves God, and we have lost God in the process if God is just ourselves writ large. But in the end, our moral nature revolts against such a projection of ourselves. We simply cannot worship the God we project. That God is too much like us.
Christian Maturity
(Week 13, Thursday)
As long as we are in Christ Jesus God is glorified. You do not have to step out of Jesus and concentrate on God to glorify God. Stay in Jesus Christ and you glorify God; Jesus is God glorified because Jesus is God self-giving.
In Christ
(Week 33, Friday)
In Him All Things Were Created
Jesus is “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15); he takes the place of idols for us. Idols misrepresent God; Jesus represents God. Jesus is the express image of God’s person; God is a Christlike God.
In Christ
(Week 38, Saturday)
Jesus Puts a Face on God
John 1:15-18
The psalmist asks: “He who planted the ear, does he not hear? / He who formed the eye, does he not see?” (Ps 94:9). And we may add: “He that made the human personality, shall he not be personal?” He can’t be less than personal, for personality is the highest category of being we know. And when I say, “God is personal,” I don’t mean God is corporeal, an enlarged Person seated in the heavens. In personality, there are at least four things: intelligence, feeling, will, self-consciousness. So when we say that God is personal, we believe God thinks, feels, wills, has self-consciousness. God may be more than that but cannot be less.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 2, Saturday)