Monday: He Did Many Things
WEEK 34
MONDAY
HE DID MANY THINGS
Mark 6:18-27
One of the tragic illustrations of a man being given to the many things instead of the one is Herod: “For Herod feared John, knowing that he was a just man and an holy, and observed him; and when he heard him, he did many things, and heard him gladly” (Mark 6:20 KJV). Note “he did many things”; he tried to do many things in lieu of doing the one thing he should have done: give up his brother’s wife. The great refusal of Herod to do that one thing was the cause of his downfall; for the unsurrendered thing, Herodias, moved in and took possession of him and caused him to murder the man he respected most—John—to murder him and his own conscience. The many things could not atone for the one thing.
A superintendent of schools gave permission for a speaker to speak in a high school. But after a certain microscopic opposition began from a very marginal splinter group, he changed his mind and canceled the address. Then to cover the cowardly caving in, he took refuge in an irrelevant section of a statute of the state. When asked about it, the superintendent, who was also a deacon, said, “Well, you see I wear two hats—one my Christian faith and the other my school superintendency. Now I’m wearing the latter.” That “two-hat” theory of life left him a moral blur, and his leadership in each sphere was nil. Willa Cather emphasized this when she wrote, “Listen, my friend. No man can give himself heart and soul to one thing while in the back of his mind he cherishes a desire, a secret hope, for something very different.”*
When you step into the Acts, you feel the atmosphere of single-mindedness, of people who have been cleansed of incompatible desires, who know where they are going and are on the Way with both feet! They went places. In a hesitant world they knew no hesitancy; in an uncertain world they had an invincible certainty, knowing that the sum total of Reality was behind them. It is no wonder that they won!
O Spirit Divine, fuse all my life forces into a burning unity in the fires of your passion. Make me glow with a singleness of purpose and the fire of your love. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I am through with contradictory desires and motives; I’m a single-minded person.
*Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock (Canada: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), book 3, §5.