Saturday: I Was All Tied Up Inside
WEEK 27
SATURDAY
I WAS ALL TIED UP INSIDE
2 Corinthians 13:1-3
We continue to look at the mighty redemptive affirmation in the Christian impact. It was seen then; it is seen today!
Note this: “I was all tied up inside—fears, resentments, guilt complex, inferiority complex, worries—everything that tied me in a tight knot. God could not get through to me at all. Then came the Ashram. My soul began to emerge, God was getting through to me, and the cleansing process began, and I was a new creature. What a glorious ten years I have had. My teaching is more valuable now, my church work, everything I do now, is done to his honor and glory. I am happy in Jesus.”
A psychoanalyst went to a pastor, for he was personally upset. He said, “These people with whom I deal hang on my belt. They call me up at 3:00 am. They make me God. I can’t stand up under it.” The pastor gave him a copy of Abundant Living.* Seven pages of it changed him. He found God and release. He had charged fifty dollars an hour to patients, would string them out, and then would bring up another problem just as they were about to get well. Now he charged eight dollars an hour and did a lot of free work. He was getting a lot of insights into Jesus and the meaning of the gospel, an entirely made-over man. He and his patients had been existing on analysis; now he was living on synthesis. Life had been put together on a higher level. There was subtraction, leading to addition and multiplication—a plus.
The positive note is summed up in the Acts in the title given to Barnabas. Before he laid everything at the feet of Jesus, his name was Joseph; and Joseph means “one more.” He was one more child in the home, one more disciple. But when he gave everything to God, his name was changed to Barnabas, which means “Son of Encouragement.” He encouraged everybody, was on the offensive of positive, creative love. He embodied the positive and the affirmative and thus the creative.
The Christian movement was a movement of encouragement—en (= within) and courage—courage within.
O blessed Holy Spirit; make me a “son of encouragement.” Help me to encourage every good thing and every good person I meet and help me to encourage the possible good. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I am not “one more.” I am a plus in God. I shall live by what God builds.
*E. Stanley Jones, Abundant Living (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2014).