Saturday: Mine Has Left Me with Answers
WEEK 38
SATURDAY
MINE HAS LEFT ME WITH ANSWERS
2 Corinthians 1:20-22
We continue the story of the conversion of a leading manufacturer:
Last night I couldn’t sleep very well; and usually if I wake up at night, my mind jumps into a kettle of boiling candy. Last night it didn’t. God kept waking me up and telling me all the things he wanted me to do; and, believe me, it was quite a list. Right at the top was: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God.” I am still not sure enough of myself to say that I really have it for keeps, but I do know I am on the Way and with God’s help I will stay there.
He is on the Way with both feet. And a simple country girl helped him to it. Anybody can do it.
You don’t have to be a saint to be a witness; for you’re not witnessing to yourself or to your attainments—you’re witnessing to Christ. And don’t argue with people; witness. A man who was very argumentative tried to argue with “Mary.” She said nothing. When he was through, he said, “Aren’t you going to answer me?” “No,” said she, “for I was just thinking what a wonderful person God is going to get when he really gets you.” He was disarmed! Another, a liberal put up all his objections and questions; and Mary quietly answered at the close, “Your way has left you with questions; mine has left me with answers.” Give that answer through witnessing!
Someone has said that the Acts of the Apostles is simply an exposition of the one sentence, “Rather, you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (1:8). Two things and two things only with Acts: the coming of the Holy Spirit and the consequent witnessing in the Spirit’s power in larger and larger circles. So there are just two things here: receiving power and witnessing with power. All else is “filling.”
And today, all else is “filling.” All our services, all our prayers, all our spiritual exercises, have one goal in view: to receive power. And the end of receiving power is to witness with power. If it doesn’t, then it is all “faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null.”* It ends in witness, or it is worthless.
O Jesus my Lord, help me to receive power, to receive it with all the pores of my being open. Then help me to give it in witness and to give it all out. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: To receive power, to witness with power, these are the alternate beats of my heart.
* Alfred Lord Tennyson, Maud (1855), pt. 1, §2:6, in Charles W. Eliot, English Poetry III: From Tennyson to Whitman, The Harvard Classics, vol. 42 (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 2909–14).