Monday: Not-the-Way Tries to Stop the Way
WEEK 27
MONDAY
NOT-THE-WAY TRIES TO STOP THE WAY
Hebrews 10:22-25
We saw yesterday that our positive attitudes must be discriminating. Positive thinking may be good, provided your positive is good. To be positive for the sake of being positive may end in the negative, for reality doesn’t back that positive.
To have faith in faith as some modern emphases advocate may end in collapse, for you may have faith in the wrong thing. And to have faith in faith is to have faith in the wrong thing. Paul, before he was converted, had full faith in what he was doing as the right thing; these Christians were a danger to the national faith and to the nation itself. So he would arrest the heresy in the name of truth. So “[Saul] went to the high priest, seeking letters to the synagogues at Damascus. If he found persons who belonged to the Way, whether men or women, these letters would authorize him to take them as prisoners to Jerusalem” (Acts 9:1-2). Here was positive zeal for the Jewish faith backed by legal authority, yet it ended in Paul’s collapse and blindness. Why? He was positively backing the wrong thing. It was a case of Not-the-Way laying hold of the Way and trying to bind it. And that is futile, for the universe was behind the Way, and only the Jerusalem authorities and a zealous Paul were behind the other way. The universe affirmed the one and denied the other. Their positive turned out negative; it ended in blindness and prostration.
Your faith has to be faith in the Way—in Jesus Christ, who is the Way. There you can safely say yes to everything. There you can be positive to the utmost limit, positive with the stops out. For “in him it is always yes. All of God’s promises have their yes in him” (2 Cor 1:19-20). Note “in him it is always yes.” Out of him it is always no. For Life affirms his affirmations; and since Life does, we may safely do so. In him we can affirm all out.
O Jesus, in you I find the Way. Therefore in that Way I can be affirmative and all-out affirmative. For Reality is behind the Way. I thank you. Amen.
AFPIRMATION FOR THE DAY: My starting point is Jesus; I am affirmative as I move out from him to everything.