Take the Initiative
Take the Initiative
Add to your faith virtue. 2 Peter 1:5 (“Furnish your faith with resolution.” Moffatt)
This love requires nothing of us but innocent and regular manners and behaviour. It would only have us do all those things for the sake of God which reason bids us practise. The thing required is not to add to the good actions we have already done, but only to do that out of love to God which men of reputation and virtuous lives do from a principle of honour and regard of themselves. We are not only to lop off evil. That we must do if we were guided by no other principle than right reason. But for everything else leave it in the order God has established in the world. Let us do all the same honest and virtuous actions, but let us do them for the sake of Him Who made us and to Whom we owe our all.
Fenelon
Many of us refuse to do it; we are lazy and we frustrate the grace of God.
1. Stop Hesitating
A doubleminded man is unstable in all his ways. (James 1:8)
We have to stop hesitating and take the first step; and the first step is to stop hesitating! “How long halt ye between two opinions?” There are times when we wish that God would kick us right over the line and make us do the thing; but the remarkable thing about God’s patience is that He waits until we stop hesitating. Some of us hesitate so long that we become like spiritual storks; we look elegant only as long as we stand on one leg; when we stand on two we look very ungraceful.
Or we have stood so long on the verge of a promise of God’s that we have grown like monuments on its edge; and if we were asked to go over the edge in the way of giving our testimony or doing something for God, we should feel very awkward. It would be a good thing for us if we could be pushed over, no matter how we sprawled. If God tells us to do something good we hesitate over obeying, we endanger our standing in grace.
“A double minded man,” i.e. a discreet man, diplomatic and wise—“is unstable in all his ways.” The man who does not put God first in his calculations is always double minded. “If I do,” “Supposing,” and “But”—these are all in the vocabulary of the double minded man. If we begin to weigh things, we let in that subtle enemy against God, viz., insinuation. When God speaks we have to be resolute and act immediately in faith on what He says. When Peter walked on the water, he did not wait for someone to take his hand; he stepped straight out, in recognition of Jesus, and walked on the water.
Never revise decisions. If you have made a wrong decision, then face the music and stand up to it; do not whimper and say—“I won’t do that again.” Take the initiative, take the step with your will now; burn your bridges behind you—“I will write that letter”; “I will pay that debt”; make it impossible to go back on the decision. Sentimentality always begins when we refuse to obey, when we refuse to take some stand God has told us to because of an insinuation that has come in from somewhere. If we hesitate, insinuations are sure to come.
2. Start Hearkening
Whosoever . . . heareth My sayings, and doeth them . . . (Luke 6:47†)
Whether we are Christians or not, we must all build; the point is that a Christian builds upon a different basis. If we build to please ourselves, we are building on the sand†; if we build for the love of God, we are building on the rock.† Do we listen to what Jesus has to say? All we build will end in disaster unless it is built on the sayings of Jesus. “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”†† Before we can hear certain things, we must be trained. Our disposition determines what we listen for; and when Jesus alters the disposition, He gives us the power to hear as He hears. (Cf. John 12:29-30.) If, when no one is watching us, we are building ourselves up in the word of God, then, when a crisis comes, we shall stand; but if we are not building on the word of God, when a crisis comes we shall go down, no matter what our wills are like. Have we learned the habit of listening to what God says? Have we added this resolute hearing in our practical life? We may be able to give a testimony as to what God has done for us, but does the life we live evidence that we are not listening now, but living only in the memory of what we once heard? We have to keep our ears trained to detect God’s voice, to be continually renewed in the spirit of our mind.† If when a crisis comes we instinctively turn to God, we know that the habit of hearkening has been formed. At the beginning there is the noisy clamour of our own misgivings; we are so taken up with what we have heard that we cannot hear any more. We have to hearken to that which we have not listened to before, and to do it we must be insulated on the inside.
“He wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned.” Once a week at least read the Sermon on the Mount and see how much you have hearkened to it—“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you”†; we do not listen to it because we do not want to. We have to learn to hearken to Jesus in everything, to get into the habit of finding out what He says. We cannot apply the teachings of Jesus unless we are regenerated, and we cannot apply all His teachings at once. The Holy Spirit will bring back to our remembrance a certain word of our Lord’s and apply it to the particular circumstances we are in, the point is—are we going to obey it? “Whosoever . . . heareth My sayings, and doeth them . . .”† When Jesus Christ brings a word home, never shirk it.
3. Stand Heroically
Having done all, to stand. (Ephesians 6:13)
It is a great deal easier to fight than to stand; but spiritually our conflict is not so much a fight as a standing on guard—“having done all, to stand.” When we are in a frenzy, we attack; when we are strong, we stand to overcome. To-day in Christian work we are suffering from a phase of spiritual dyspepsia that emphasises doing. The great thing to do is to be a believer in Jesus. With Jesus it is never “Do, do,” but “Be, be and I will do through you.” To stand, means to work on the level of the heroic. It would be a terrible thing to lose the sense of the heroic, because the sense of our duty is only realised by our sense of the heroic. Our Lord calls us to a joyful heroic life, and we must never relax:
“Put on the whole armour of God.” If we try to put on the armour without a right relationship to God we shall be like David in Saul’s armour; but when we are right with God we find that the armour fits us exactly, because it is God’s own nature that is the armour. The armour God gives us is not the armour of prayer, but the armour of Himself, the armour of God. “That ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” The devil is a bully, but when we stand in the armour of God, he cannot harm us; if we tackle him in our own strength we are soon done for; but if we stand with the strength and courage of God, he cannot gain one inch of way at all. Some of us run away instead of standing; when there is a fresh onslaught of the wiles of the devil we lose heart instantly; and instead of standing we scuttle and others have to stand until we are sufficiently ashamed to come back again. We have to take the initiative in standing against panic. One strong moral man will form a nucleus around which others will gather; and spiritually, if we put on the armour of God and stand true to Him, a whole army of weak-kneed Christians will be strengthened. Remember, we have to take the initiative where we are, not where we are not.