Jesus
JESUS
The Realism of Jesus—a Rejected Stone
Matthew 7:28, 29; 11:4-6; Mark 1:27; John 6:63
Of all the strange anomalies in history the strangest is this: the Man who was the greatest realist in history has been turned into the greatest idealist. Jesus’ realism was so astonishing, so different that people did not know what to do with it. They had to act on it or reject it. But they couldn’t bring themselves to do either, so they found a way by which they would both—hold Jesus and hold the older order of life—they made him into an ideal. That ideal would be practiced someday, but not now. They thus satisfied their sense of being loyal to the high while practicing the low. Christ was crucified on the cross of being irrelevant now.
So we adopted Christianity as an “idealism,” lifted up high above life, inoperative except here and there in small things. Because we could hold high ideals, we thought we were thereby spiritual. But “all idealism is a concealed materialism,” for it makes a divorce between body and spirit, and refers religion to the spirit, while other ways of life control the material. Hence idealism becomes materialism, for the latter is acted on.
Jesus was astonishingly realistic. So realistic, that we thought it idealism. When he said we must love our neighbor as ourselves, that is not idealism; it is realism, and we are discovering that it is the only realism possible, for nothing else will work. Unless you give an equal and fair chance to everybody, you will have none for yourself. Selfishness is suicide, collective and individual.
When Jesus said we must lose ourselves to find ourselves, this is not idealism, it is realism. It is obeying a fundamental law of life. Nothing else will finally work. The demand that religion be realistic is upon us. The world is perishing for the need of just this. So the realism of Jesus, rejected by the builders, is made the head of the corner.
Victorious Living
(Week 50, Saturday)
A Good Anger
Psalms 95:10; 97:10; Proverbs 8:3; Mark 3:5; Ephesians 4:30
Jesus was an example of controlled anger. When he was about to heal the man with the withered arm, he saw the hard faces of religious men who opposed the act because it was being done on the sabbath. He “looked “around at them with anger, deeply grieved at their unyielding hearts” (Mark 3:5 CEB). Here his anger was not personal pique, a wounded egotism; it was grief at the hardness of men’s hearts that could block the healing of a poor unfortunate man. His anger drove him to oppose these men on behalf of the underprivileged. It was a righteous anger.
Abundant Living
(Week 8, Monday)
Final Steps for Overcoming Resentments
Matthew 11:25-26; Luke 6:37; 17:3-4; Ephesians 4:32
When Jesus announced his program at Nazareth, he read from Isaiah, until he came to the words, “the day of vengeance of our God” (see Isa 61:1-2; Luke 4:18-19). Then he closed the book. You do the same. Leave vengeance to God; use only redemptive good will.
Abundant Living
(Week 9, Saturday)
Can We Manipulate Life?
Psalms 25:12; 32:8; Matthew 5:5
For in Jesus I see the uncovering of the nature of the Divine. And my heart almost skips a beat when the thought forms: I wouldn’t, if I could, have God otherwise than what I see in Christ. If I were to sit down to try to think out the kind of God I would like to see in the universe, for the life of me, I couldn’t think of anything higher than that God should be like Christ.
The Way
(Week 1, Wednesday)
Is the Way Written in Us?
Romans 1:19-20; 2:14-15; Hebrews 10:16
If Jesus is a moralist imposing a moral code on humanity, then of course we can question that code and his authority. But suppose Jesus is the revealer of the nature of reality, then that makes him different. He is not only revealing the nature of God; he is revealing the nature of life. Life then works in his way and only in his way. Then the Christian Way becomes, not a side issue, but the central issue of life—the one issue of life.
The Way
(Week 1, Friday)
Life-Denying and Life-Affirming
Romans 9:33; 1 Corinthians 3:21-22
Jesus revealed God from within the process of life. He ate and drank and lived in homes; he used parables taken from life and nature; he lifted up the laws underlying life; showed God in the regularities, the natural. Not that he stopped with the natural. He showed God in the extranatural, the supernatural. But it was all supernaturally natural. He revealed Life within life. There is a kinship between the natural and the supernatural. Life was of one piece.
The Way
(Week 6, Thursday)
Listening to His Master’s Voice
Romans 8:19-22
Just as the Rosetta stone furnished the clue to the hieroglyphics and made it possible to decipher ancient lore, so Jesus is the Rosetta stone that gives us the clue to the language of creation, to that hidden purpose running through all things. “He is God breaking through” into intelligibility, into redemption. He is God’s “open secret.”
The Way
(Week 7, Tuesday)
Is the Kingdom Our Good?
Acts 19:8-9; Colossians 1:13
But, strangely, Jesus did not begin with himself as the center of loyalty. He said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God . . . ; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matt 6:33 KJV). He made the kingdom the center of loyalty.
The Way
(Week 9, Monday)
The Order and the Person
Acts 8:12; 28:23, 31
Jesus began with the kingdom of God. He went out “preaching the gospel of the kingdom” (Matt 4:23 RSV). But before he was through, he began to preach the gospel of himself: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). “Come to me, . . . and I will give you rest” (Matt 11:28). He made “for the sake of the kingdom of God’” (Luke 18:29) and “for my sake” synonymous. He made himself and the kingdom synonymous. The Person and the Order were one.
The Way
(Week 10, Sunday)
Gathering Up Lessons Learned
Acts 5:3-5; 26:14
Jesus is the Door, not only to salvation; he is the Door to everything. Everything opens when you come in his Way.
The Way
(Week 26, Sunday)
Luke 8:9-10 (Moffat); Ephesians 3:2-6
Jesus is the key to the meaning of the universe. Follow the clues he gives and you get the answers every time. But the answers are hidden answers; they are an “open secret.” The secret is a spirit, the spirit of self-surrendered humility. Everything in the kingdom is open to those who surrender to and obey the kingdom. We are in the process of discovering that kingdom hidden in the nature of reality. The kingdom is there, the ground plan of our being.
The Way
(Week 26, Friday)
Grace Did Much More Abound
Romans 5:1-11
Jesus did not come to show us the Way, but to show himself as the Way. “He did not come to preach the gospel, but that there might be a gospel to be preached.”
The Way
(Week 28, Sunday)
The Best Man That Ever Lived Believed
John 10:27-29; 12:24-25
Jesus was so right in everything. There isn’t a thing he uttered that is not valid for today. There isn’t an attitude he took that isn’t the highest attitude now. There isn’t an act of his that is not now a universal norm. He touched life in all its phases, and everywhere he touched it he rang true—more, he rang Truth.
The Way
(Week 43, Wednesday)
The Marks of Those on the Way
Galatians 6:17; 1 Timothy 6:11-16
Any word or person getting into touch with Jesus is heightened, for Jesus turns all our common nouns into proper nouns. The word love gets into contact with him, and you have to spell it Love; it’s different now. Jesus turns the nobodies into the somebodies and the insignificant into the significant.
The Way
(Week 44, Sunday)
A Disrupted Interior and a Lusterless Face
Matthew 11:2-11
Take the actions of Jesus. They were wonderful, but his reactions were even more wonderful. About half of the New Testament is taken up with a description of his actions, and the other half with his reactions. And his reactions reveal him even more than his actions. His reactions were just as redemptive as his actions.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 40, Sunday)
That I May Not Be Shaken
1 Corinthians 15:56-58
“But God raised him up, having loosed the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it” (Acts 2:24). The resurrection of Jesus was not based on the sovereign act of God raising Jesus, an act imposed on reality, it was based on the nature of reality: “because it was not possible for him to be held by it.” It was impossible for a man like Jesus, who held death in his grasp, to be held by death. The nature of things would be reversed if Jesus should be held captive by death. So the resurrection was not based on an extraneous act of God; it came from the intrinsic fact: he had to rise, being what he was.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 45, Monday)
Called to Do the Impossible
Isaiah 6:7
“Now there was a disciple at Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, ‘Ananias.’ And he said, ‘Here I am, Lord’” (Acts 9:10 RSV). He put himself at God’s disposal in a crisis. . . .
One morning at the Sat Tal Ashram, as we sat on the prayer knoll, the Inner Voice said, “If you’ll say one thing in every situation, “Here I am, Lord,” then I’ll take care of the rest. You need worry about nothing.” I replied, “I close the bargain.” Life was simplified. I had only to do one thing: put myself at God’s disposal and God would take care of the rest.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 14, Thursday)
The Word Is Nigh to You
Romans 10: 6-10
A little boy, child of missionaries, was in school in the United State at Christmas time. The principal said to him, “Son, what would you rather have most of all for Christmas?” The boy looked at the picture of his father framed on his desk and remembered acutely the absence of the father in a far-off land, and then quietly said, “I want my father to step out of that frame.” The little boy voiced the cry of humanity: We want God our Father to step out of the frame of the universe, out of this impersonal relationship and meet us personally. Jesus is God stepping out of the frame of the universe: God simplified and God personalized, God become intimate and tender and redemptive.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 2, Saturday)
The Divine Yes
Mark 9:21-23
“The divine ‘yes’ has at last sounded in him, for in him is the ‘yes’ that affirms all the promises of God” (2 Cor 1:19-20 Moffatt). In Jesus, the divine yes has at last sounded. People were not able to say a full-throated and a full-hearted yes to life until they saw it incarnate in Jesus. Up to that time it had to be yes and no. But when we saw the full meaning of life in Jesus, then at this place we can say yes with no inhibitions or hesitations. Here I am not saying yes at random—a yes for the sake of saying yes—which ends in mushy sentimentality; I’m saying yes in Christ, for in him life is good, creative, and open ended.
Here you can say yes with the stops out. Think, affirm, say, and accept the yes of Jesus, and life itself will become a yes. For you are affirming something that the universe affirms. You are echoing the creative Word of God; the Word that created the worlds, sustains them, and that redeems into affirmation all who affirm life with him. In saying his yes, you align yourself with the creative purposes of God, and all of them work in you and through you.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 20, Tuesday)
The Nobodies Become the Somebodies
Acts 3:14-16
I love Jesus because, for one thing, he shed a shaft of light upon the disinherited peoples of the earth. “You come and walk through the compound of my humble cottage, and it will be purified of all its impurities and inferiorities,” said a sweeper, the lowest of the low, to me after he had become a Christian by baptism. I knew his faith was misplaced; I couldn’t do that. But I knew Jesus could do and did just that. He walks through our minds and spirits and homes, and lo, life is purified of its impurities and inferiorities. . . . The nobodies become the somebodies; the ordinary become the extraordinary; life begins to live. Dead harps feel the sweep of a hand, and sleeping music is awakened.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 15, Saturday)
Jesus, the Perfect but Unfolding Revelation
Matthew 5:17; Romans 10:3-4; Galatians. 6:14
Life convictions that I hold are . . . that the revelation of God to humanity is progressive, appearing in varying degrees among all races, and culminating in the final and perfect revelation in Jesus Christ. God apparently intends to redeem the race of humankind, for wherever the mind of humanity is open and receptive, God has revealed the divine self in varying degrees. God has not left himself without witness in any nation (see Acts 14:16-17). . . .
In Jesus Christ we see what God is like and what people can be like. He is the revelation of both God and people. And he is the final revelation. “Beyond that which is found in Jesus of Nazareth the human race will never progress,” said Coleridge [no published source found]. And the years and the centuries say a resounding “Amen.”
But if Jesus is final, he is also unfolding. New meanings are constantly breaking out from him and will continue to do so. He is on the other side of our century, beckoning us into the new day. Surprises and new, scintillating meanings break out of his person. Such infinity of revelation could come only from the infinite.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 51, Tuesday)
The Christian Way Works
John 3:35-36, 5:22-24
[Another conviction is] that Jesus Christ will have the last word in human events. It sounds like an incredible thing to say, but events all point to one thing, namely, that the man who walked our dusty roads is now on the throne of the universe and will have the last word in human affairs. This sounds absurd. And yet human affairs are working out just that way. Everything that embodies his will survives, and everything that goes against that will perishes. Jesus is the rock upon which we build or upon which we go to pieces. And there are no exceptions. He is the Alpha—the Christ of the beginning—and the Omega—the Christ of the final word.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 51, Saturday)
We Shall Be Like Him
Colossians 1:9-12
I saw a number of ropes going out from big trees in the forests of Japan to the little trees around. It meant that the big trees were pulling the little trees around them, which were inclined to crookedness, into straightness.
Jesus is the big tree, planted in eternity. I am bound to him by cords of love, and he is pulling me into straightness and will do so both now and forever. I’m out for eternal growth.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 52, Saturday)
The Master
Philippians 2:9-11
The Christian way is centered in . . . a Master. Jesus Christ was the most masterful Person this planet has ever seen. He walked into time and quietly divided it into before and after—BC and AD. He walked into the realm of thought and altered all our conceptions about God and life and destiny. He walked into our moral conceptions and codes, and now we are good or bad according to whether we embody his spirit or not. He walked into our sundered relations with God and healed them by his cross. He walked into the chaos of human relationships and projected a kingdom that is destined to gather all our chaos into cosmos, to be the goal and end of human history. He walked into our moral weakness and sin and imparted to the defeated and collapsed a moral and spiritual mastery which made them go out and impart to humanity such a stimulus that a movement was begun, which is destined to change the world. The Master mastered people into masterfulness.
Mastery
(Week 1, Sunday)
I Am Not Religious: I’m His
1 Timothy 3:16
Religion, which is to help you to Christ, often stands between you and Christ; you can’t see the person for the paraphernalia.
The fact is that Jesus never used the word religion, nor did the early disciples use it. Religion means literally “binding back”—a binding back to God. It is humanity’s attempts to bind ourselves back to God by various expedients. But the Gospel was not a series of expedients to bind us back to God; it was the good news of God’s coming to man in incarnation, in redemption. Jesus didn’t come to set a religion against other religions—a little better, a little bit more moral. He came to set the good news over against human need, whether that need be found in this religion, that religion, or no religion. Religion is our search upward; the gospel is God’s reach downward. There are many religions; there is but one gospel.
Mastery
(Week 5, Wednesday)
The Earliest Creed: Jesus Is Lord
Philippians 2:9-11
How did it happen that this phrase [Jesus is Lord!] arose out of a fiercely monotheistic people whose central confession was: “Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God is one LORD” (Deut 6:4)? The people who had repeated, “The LORD our God is one LORD,” now found themselves repeating, “Jesus is Lord.” Was Jesus doing something that only God could do?
Was his touch upon nature and upon human nature the very touch of God? His impact upon nature and human living was so tremendous that they found their unwilling lips making the most momentous confession that ever fell from human lips anywhere at any time. It was life’s central revelation. And the revelation was this: “This Man, who walked our dusty roads, slept upon our hillsides, was crucified on one of our trees, and was laid in one of our rock tombs, was at the right hand of final authority—was Lord and would have the final say in human affairs.” That confession was breathtaking.
Mastery
(Week 25, Tuesday)
John 17:1-3
Where groups have taken Jesus as teacher and example but not as Lord, there the key to God slips through their fingers. For them, Jesus as teacher and example takes his place among the other moralists and philosophers who point to truth. But they are not the truth. Jesus never pointed to truth; he pointed to himself and said: “I am the Truth.” he never pointed to the Way as a signpost; he simply said: “I am the Way.” He did not philosophize about life; he said: “I am the Life.” And the amazing thing is that when we follow him, it works. He becomes the Way, the Truth, the Life. His ways become the Way. His truths become the Truth. His life becomes the Life. In him we see God. And apart from him, God is vague and uncertain.
Mastery
(Week 25, Thursday)
Turning the World Upside Down
Acts 17: 5-8
[The apostle Paul] not only positively changed people; he did something more—he “turned the world upside down.” In his positive presentation of Jesus, a revolution in thought and act and attitude was taking place. . . .
The revolution was accomplished by seed thoughts. . . . So Paul dropped seed thoughts into ancient structures, and they crumbled.
1. The Jesus that Paul preached reversed the method of revelation. Hitherto it was a verbal revelation—a book, a voice. Now it was a vital revelation—a Life, a Person.
2. Jesus reversed the method of salvation. Hitherto people were doing something for God; while in Jesus, God was doing something for people. Salvation was a gift.
3. Jesus reversed the method of inheriting the earth. Hitherto people tried to inherit it by conquest, by force; and here Jesus was teaching them to inherit it by meekness, by receptivity. The earth belongs to those who know how to inherit the earth by meekly learning its secrets and obeying its laws.
Mastery
(Week 26, Wednesday)
The Majors Reveals
Revelation 21:5-7
We are looking at the ways the world was turned upside down with the impact of the Jesus whom Paul preached.
Jesus reversed the method of greatness. Before Jesus, those who were greatly served were great; and the greater the number of servants, the greater the person. But Jesus reversed that by making those great who greatly served others. That opened greatness to all—not the getters but the givers were great. Jesus himself was an illustration of this. . . .
Jesus reversed the method of being defiled. Before he came, you were defiled by “unclean” foods and by touching “unclean” persons and things. But Jesus said “It’s not what goes into the the mouth that contaminates a person in God’s sight. It’s what comes out” (Matt 15:11 CEB). That which goes to the person is physical, but that which comes out of a person—evil thoughts, evil words, evil acts—comes from the heart and defiles the person. Here he turned purity from the ceremonial to the moral, the greatest moral turn upward that has ever been made in human history and the most effective and decisive.
Mastery
(Week 26, Thursday)
The Mastery of the Secondhand
Romans 8:1-2
If Jesus is to be power, then it must not be by a repeating of his name at secondhand—the Jesus who is real to somebody else—he must be real to you. . . . As “Mary” says: “They preach Jesus, but don’t preach Jesus available.” Jesus is never available if you are preaching a secondhand Jesus.
Mastery
(Week 34, Thursday)
Nobody but Me and Jesus
John 16:31-33
The God revealed in Jesus was personalized. He was not mere vague force; he was a Person with whom you could talk and have him talk to you in unmistakable terms. I can testify; I know Jesus better than I know any other person in the world. And he knows me better than anyone else in the world knows me, and he still loves me.
Mastery
(Week 50, Monday)
Jesus Is God Incarnate
Philipians 2:5-11
Everything hinged on Jesus as incarnate, not Jesus as inspiration, not Jesus as moral teacher, not Jesus as philosopher. But Jesus as incarnate God, that was the issue! And that might well be the issue, for if Jesus is incarnate God, then everything pales into insignificance beside the importance of the fact.
Christian Maturity
(Week 1, Saturday)
God-Salvation or Self-Salvation?
Ephesians 2:7-8
The starting point of the Christian faith is Jesus. As I said in another book: You cannot say God until you have first said Jesus, for Jesus puts content into God. You cannot say Christ until you have first said Jesus, for Jesus puts content into Christ. You cannot say the Holy Spirit until you have first said Jesus, for Jesus puts content into the Holy Spirit. You cannot say the kingdom of God until you first say Jesus, for Jesus puts content into the kingdom of God.
Christian Maturity
(Week 1, Thursday)
Getting Our Starting Point Straight
Revelation 1:17-18
You will be tempted in your quest for maturity to do what the Gnostics did, bypass Jesus and turn to something that seems more intellectual, more modern, more in keeping with the times, more intellectually fashionable. And you will end where the Gnostics ended, in oblivion. Gnosticism has died; Jesus lives on. All the intellectual descendants of Gnosticism will also end in futility and oblivion. Everything not centered in Jesus is off center.
Christian Maturity
(Week 3, Sunday)
Introduction
If you are in Christ, you are in life; if you are out of Christ you are out of life. If that proposition be true, then it cuts down through all veneer, all the make-believe in life.
In Christ
(p. ix)
Attached to Exhaustible Emphases
When your faith and loyalty and love are fastened on Jesus Christ centrally and fundamentally, they are fastened upon the inexhaustible. He never grows stale, trite, or empty of growing meaning. In him you find an eternal unfoldment. The more you see the more you see there is to be seen. In him there is a surprise around every corner. The Holy Spirit unfolds the unfolding revelation, taking care of the things of Christ and showing them to us. It keeps one running to keep up with unfolding truth. The absolute in him is always beckoning to our relativisms. We are under the law of an eternal change—a change “into his likeness from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor 3:18).
In Christ
(Week 22, Monday)
In Christ Distinctions Obliterated
The next passage is rich beyond words: “There [in Christ] is neither Jew nor Greek [race distinction], there is neither slave nor free [social and economic distinction], there is neither male nor female [gender distinction], for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). Another pair of distinctions are added in Colossians 3:11: “Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all.” “Circumcised and uncircumcised” [outer religious distinction], “barbarian or Scythian” [cultural distinction]: in Christ there “cannot be” race, social and economic, gender, outer religious signs or cultural distinction. . . . All things that divide us are gone. A new society has arisen, where a person is a person—a person for whom Christ died.
In Christ
(Week 29, Tuesday)
The one thing that brings assurance that we are in [Christ] is that we “walk in the same way in which he walked” (1 John 2:6). To walk as he walked is to live as he lived. Can we live as he lived? In the same circumstances? No. On the same principles? Yes. We can apply his principles to our circumstances.
1. He met life as a man, calling on no power for his own moral battle, [which is] not at your disposal or mine. He expected God to give him power to meet whatever came and to use it for higher purposes. He expected no favored treatment and got none. We can apply that principle: Meet life as it comes and make something out of it.
2. He kept up his disciplines of reading the word of God and praying. “As his custom was . . . he stood up to read” (Luke 4:16). “He went out to the mountain to pray” (Luke 6:12), “as was his custom” (Luke 22:39). We can apply that principle: Have a disciplined life of reading the Word and praying
3. He gave out what he found. “And again, as his custom was, he taught them” (Mark 10:1). We can apply this principle: Share with others what you have found from God.
4. He gave out love and only love to everybody, to enemies as well as friends. We can apply that principle: Love everybody, even enemies.
5. He made a full surrender to God: “not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42). We can apply that principle: A full surrender of the will.
6. “He set his face [steadfastly] to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). Applied: Face everything, even the hardest, with God.
In Christ
(Week 47, Sunday)
Why “the Word”
John 1:1-3
Why was Jesus here called “the Word” (in John 1:1)? Well, one’s words are the expression of the hidden thought. . . . Only as the hidden thought is put into a word is the thought communicated.
Here is the hidden God, like the hidden thought, and we cannot know what God is like unless God communicates through a word. If one says, “I can know God in my heart intuitively and immediately, without the mediation of a word,” then the answer is, “But your ‘heart’ then becomes the medium of communication, and knowing the heart as one does—with its sin and crosscurrents and cross-conceptions—we know it is a very unsafe medium for the revelation of God.” God must be revealed.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 1, Sunday)
The Word Is the Child of the Thought
John 1:4-5
Jesus is God available. Jesus is not a third person standing between you and God. When you take hold of Jesus, you take hold of God. Jesus is a mediator only in the sense that he mediates God to you. When you know Jesus, you know God. Just as the thought and the word are one, so Jesus could say, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 1, Monday)
The Silence of Eternity Has Been Broken
1 Corinthians 2:9-10
If you are to see God face to face you must see God in the face of Jesus Christ. For Jesus is God approachable, God available, God simplified, and God lovable. The Word has become flesh.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 1, Saturday)
A Person to Be Followed
John 21:18-19
A great many people think Jesus was a moralist imposing a moral code upon humanity; a code for which humanity is badly made. It is an impossible code, which humanity, being what it is, cannot fulfill. But Jesus was not a moralist in that sense at all. He was a revealer of the nature of reality. First, of God; he said if you want to know what God is like look at me. “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). We see the Father in the face of the Son. . . .
Second, Jesus was a revealer of the laws that underlie the universe. He seldom used the imperative, almost never the subjunctive, almost entirely the indicative. “This is,” he said, “and you must come to terms with it, or get hurt.” When Jesus finished the Sermon on the Mount “the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes” (Matt 7:28-29). The scribes quoted authorities, secondhand teaching; Jesus spoke with authority, firsthand teaching. The term “with authority” could be translated “according to the nature of things.” Jesus revealed the nature of things. He was a revealer of the nature of reality.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 3, Thursday)
Jesus Was the Message
1 Corinthians 2:1-5
You see God in the face of Jesus Christ, the Son, or you do not see God. You may see your imagination of God, but you do not see God. That is what Jesus meant when he said: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me” (John 14:6).
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 4, Saturday)
“I Am the Way, and the Truth”: Right Order?
John 14:5-7
It is no mere chance that the order, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), is as it is; the Way first. Jesus had to be the Way before he was the Truth and the Life. If “the truth” had been put first, that would mean that we would have been sent on a quest for verbal truth; Christianity would have become a philosophical system or a theological system.
No, Jesus is the Way before he is the Truth. For truth has to be put under life to see if it is truth.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 5, Wednesday)
Sermon on the Mount Unrealistic?
John 7:14-17
The Sermon on the Mount is beyond most of us, but it is not thereby idealism. What we are trying to live is an inverted realism—a realism that is a bad idealism, which won’t work—it lands us in a mess. Nothing sustains it except our own unrealistic wills. The universe doesn’t sustain it, hence to live some way other than the Sermon on the Mount turns out badly, turns out to be the kind of mess we are now in, individually and collectively.
But the Sermon on the Mount is realism. First of all, it is a portrait of Jesus himself. He put into words the principles and attitudes he was acting upon. This Sermon is not preaching but revelation, a revelation of the inner life and character of Jesus. It is the Word become flesh in relationships. Jesus is here not imposing an impossible code on human nature, a code for which humanity is badly made. He is lifting up principles underlying the universe. When he finished speaking, “the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes” (Matt 7:29). The phrase as “one who had authority” could be translated “according to the nature of things.” He lifted up out of reality the principles that were according to “the nature of things.” The people who heard Jesus felt the “authority” of what he was saying. It hit them with an inner thud. Impossible idealism doesn’t do that. It arouses you emotionally, but it doesn’t come with authority.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 21, Sunday)
No Difference . . . If Jesus Never Lived
1 Corinthians 15:13-19
We are looking at those who bypass the Incarnation as the antichrist. Why does the non-Christian prefer that we preach principles and not the Person? It is simple; the Person demands decision and commitment: Follow me. The principles demand study and weighing, but no life commitment. Principles demand no more than mental assent; but Jesus, the Person, demands us as persons—the total person—not mental assent, but life decision and dedication. The difference is profound. Another Hindu said to me, “We are all interested in the universal Christ.” And when I asked him, “Not in the incarnate Jesus?” he replied, “No, we are only interested in the universal Christ.” The reason was obvious: Into the universal Christ—the Christ not rooted in history—they could put any content, even a Hindu content. But you cannot put any content you want into Jesus, the Incarnate, for he has put his own content, the content of his life and teaching lived out in history. He is in history, though now universal, and demands that we follow him in history and in our own day-by-day lives.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 32, Monday)
The Concrete Christ
Luke 11:27-28
[Jesus] is the Concrete Christ.
Jesus, the mystic, was amazingly concrete and practical. Into an atmosphere filled with speculation and wordy disputation, where people were drunk with the wine of their own wordiness, he brought the refreshing sense of practical reality. Jesus taught, but he did not speculate. He never used such words as perhaps, maybe, I think so. Even his words had a concrete feeling about them. They fell upon the soul with the authority of certainty. They were self-verifying.
He did not discourse on the sacredness of motherhood; he suckled as a babe at his mother’s breast, and that scene has forever consecrated motherhood.
He did not argue that life was a growth and character was an attainment. He “increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man” (Luke 2:52).
He did not speculate on why temptation should be in the world; he met it, and after forty days’ struggle in the wilderness he conquered, and “returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee” (Luke 4:14).
He did not discourse on the dignity of labor; he worked at a carpenter’s bench, and this makes the toil of the hands honorable.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 51, Sunday)
He Did Not Discuss Immortality; He Raised the Dead
Luke 10:29-37
As Jesus came among us, he did not try to prove the existence of God; he brought God. He lived in God, and people looking upon his face could not find it within themselves to doubt God.
Jesus did not argue, as Socrates, the immortality of the soul; he raised the dead.
Jesus did not speculate on how God was a Trinity; he said, “If it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matt 12:28). Here the Trinity—“I,” “Spirit of God,” “God”—was not something to be speculated about, but was a working force for redemption, the casting out of demons and the bringing in of the kingdom.
Jesus did not teach in a didactic way about the worth of children; he put his hands upon them and, setting one in their midst, tersely said, “To such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 19:14), and he raised them from the dead.
He did not argue that God answers prayer; he prayed, sometimes all night and in the morning “the power of the Lord was with him to heal” (Luke 5:17).
He did not paint in glowing colors the beauties of friendship and the need for human sympathy; he wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus.
He did not discuss the question of the worth of personality as we do today; he loved and saved persons.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 51, Monday)
The Divine Illustration
Mark 1:16-20
Jesus did not discourse on the equal worth of personality; he went to the poor and outcast and ate with them.
He did not argue the worth of womanhood and the necessity of giving women equal rights; he treated them with infinite respect, gave to them his most sublime teaching, as to the woman at the well, and when he rose from the dead he appeared first to a woman.
He did not teach in the schoolroom manner the necessity of humility; he girded himself with a towel and washed his disciples’ feet.
He did not prove how pain and sorrow in the universe could be compatible with the love of God; he took on himself at the cross everything that spoke against the love of God, and through that pain and tragedy and sin showed the very love of God.
He did not discourse on how the weakest human material can be transformed and made to contribute to the welfare of the world; he called to him a set of weak people, as the Galilean fishermen, transformed them, and sent them out to begin the mightiest movement for uplift and redemption the world has ever seen.
He wrote no books, only once are we told that he wrote and that was in the sand; but he wrote upon the hearts and consciences of people about him and it has become the world’s most precious writing.
He did not point to a utopia, far off and unrealizable; he announced that the kingdom of heaven is within us and is “at hand” and can be realized here and now.
We do not find Jesus arguing that the spiritual life should conquer matter; he walked on the water.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 51, Tuesday)
Mark 6:35-42
[Jesus] did not discourse on the beauty of love; he loved.
He greatly felt the pressing necessity of the physical needs of the people around him, but he did not merely speak on their behalf; he fed the five thousand people with five loaves and two fishes.
He did not speak only on behalf of the Gentiles; he went across the lake and fed the four thousand, made up largely of Gentiles, and ate with them as a kind of corporate Communion. . . .
He did not argue the possibility of sinlessness; he presented himself and said, “Which of you convicts me of sin?” (John 8:46).
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 51, Wednesday)
Jesus Christ Means to Me, First of All, Redemption
1 Corinthians 1:30-31
The first thing Christ means to me is redemption. I met him first at an altar of prayer. I came there with nothing to offer except my moral and spiritual bankruptcy. To my astonishment he took me, forgave me, reconciled me to God, to myself, to others, to nature, to life, and sent my happy soul singing its way down the years.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 52, Monday)
Resources and Guidance
2 Corinthians 1:20, 22
The second thing Jesus means to me is resources. I ran for about a year after my conversion under cloudless skies, and then I ran into stormy weather. But the storms were within—deep within—from the fact of an unredeemed subconscious. My conscious mind was converted in conversion, but apparently my subconscious was not. So a crisis ensued. In that crisis I surrendered all I knew—the conscious, and all I didn’t know—the subconscious. And then something happened. When I arose from my knees, a quiet but profound joy possessed me. I knew the Holy Spirit had moved into the subconscious and had cleansed it, coordinated it with the conscious. So now conscious and subconscious were under one control, the control of the Holy Spirit. . . .
The third thing [Jesus] means to me is guidance. My life had become, not a self- or circumstance-guided life, but a God-guided life. In all the great crises, and in the smaller crises—and more, in the daily round—I have felt a hand not my own on the helm. Not automatically, I can still insist on my way, can take the helm myself, and pay the penalty. But God never leaves me and takes over again, with my penitent consent, when I’m about to go on the rocks. And I’ve found it profoundly true, in the words of a group, “Where God guides, God provides.”
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 52, Tuesday)
Adequacy: The Power to Make Everything Contribute
Philippians 1:12-14
The fourth thing that Jesus Christ means to me is adequacy, the power to use everything that comes. I do not ask for special treatment, to be God’s spoiled child (though sometimes I wonder if I’m not) but to be able to take what comes—good, bad, and indifferent—and make something out of it. . . . But I was a long time learning that secret. After a period of fumbling it came as a revelation through the Scriptures; when you are delivered up before courts and magistrates “this will be a time for you to bear testimony” (Luke 21:13). The injustice that brought you before courts can be used for a testimony. The injustice becomes opportunity. In Jesus everything is opportunity. So I do not ask for special treatment, or for exemptions, I ask for adequacy to use what happens and make something out of it. Everything—literally everything—furthers those who follow Christ.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 52, Wednesday)
Jesus Christ Means Education
John 6:33-37
The fifth thing Jesus means to me is education. I’ve always felt uneducated. I have nothing but a college degree, and from a small college at that. I have some honorary degrees but I’ve felt uneducated when in company with the really educated. When MAs and PhDs get their degrees by dissertations on “The Theology of E. Stanley Jones,” my reaction is, “Have I a theology?” What theology I have is a byproduct of evangelism among the intellectuals of India and other parts of the world. An author of twenty-three books? It all seems a mistake, for I never intended to be an author. I simply write when I see a need and the urge is upon me. Then somehow I must be educated. The secret is in Jesus. He is the Awakener, Awakener of the total person, including the mind. Since I’ve never felt educated, I’ve made life and people educate me, a lifelong process. My mind has become a magnet, so I pull from every person, every situation, some information, and some truth to further me. And as I am compelled, or impelled to give, so I am compelled to get in order to give.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 52, Thursday)
My Code Is a Character
John 7:37-39
The sixth thing Jesus means to me is health. I don’t make that first, but as a byproduct of all I’ve said before, health emerges. In a health crisis a few years ago, Jesus said to me: “In me you are well and whole.” It was important, for it meant that if I stepped out of him into resentments, fear, self-preoccupation, and guilt, I was not well, and I was not whole. I can only be “well” as long as I am “whole,” and I am “whole” only as long as I remain in Jesus.
The seventh thing Jesus means to me is that my code is a character, that character is Jesus Christ himself. You can outgrow a code, but you never outgrow a character if that character is a divine character. The more you see the more there is to be seen. He is an unfolding revelation, forever with you and forever beyond you. There is a surprise around every corner, life is popping with novelty, never a dull moment.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 52, Friday)
In Jesus I Have Everything
John 1:29-34
The eighth thing Jesus Christ means to me is the kingdom of God, God’s total answer to our total need. Without this fact of the kingdom our faith would be a personal allegiance to a person; it would lack total meaning, individual and corporate. But with Jesus and the kingdom one—he is the kingdom—then “all authority” is in him both “in heaven and on earth.” I belong to the sum total of reality and the sum total of reality belongs to me.
Ninth, Jesus Christ means eternal life to me. I don’t need to wait until the hereafter; I have it now in him. I am sure of heaven, for I’m sure of Jesus. To be in him is to be in heaven wherever you are. So whether I live or die, so-called, is a matter of comparative indifference.
Tenth, Jesus Christ means to me a divine-human fellowship in the church. . . . The church has been the mother of my spirit; at her altars I found Christ. When I found Christ, I found the church. But I do not belong to the church, though I’m a member of it; I belong to Christ; the church belongs to me, a gift of grace. It’s the most precious fellowship the world holds.
Eleventh, Jesus Christ means to me self-surrender. Not a self-surrender once and for all—it is that—but a continuous, moment-by-moment surrender of my self and my problems as they arise. I say to him, “I am yours and this problem is yours; tell me what to do about it.” One morning as I got out of bed, I said to myself, “Stanley, how are you?” And I found myself replying, “Well, I am his.” That settled everything. So when I have Jesus Christ—the Word become flesh—I have everything. For he has me, has me with the consent of all my being as “I commend my Savior to you” (Charles Wesley, “Thy Faithfulness, Lord, Each Moment We Find,” 1741).
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 52, Saturday)