Sunday: The Unhealed Trying to Heal
WEEK 5
SUNDAY
THE UNHEALED TRYING TO HEAL
Romans 2:19-23
We have been studying the fact that Jesus ordered the disciples not to leave Jerusalem. We have noted the word “ordered.” It was the only time he ever ordered his disciples to do or not to do anything. It showed the importance he attached to facing up to your most difficult problem and solving it. For if you don’t, everything else you do is canceled by your refusal to do this central thing.
For instance, a woman is out to set right the church and the world. She nags everybody she can about it, and then feels a martyr because there is no response. And there is none. For she is a frustrated woman trying to set everybody right. She is full of discord trying to produce concord. And the reason is seen at a glance; everybody senses it. The reason is she has never faced the need for personal self-surrender.
Her conflicting, festering, disrupted self sticks out, for the garment of defensive words has worn thin and is in shreds, and the untouched problem of an unsurrendered self protrudes. But if you try to get near that problem, she decoys you away from the nest of her personal problem by her flutter of wings of concern for the world’s troubles. She wants attention—lots of it—and if you don’t give as much as she demands, she is hurt, a martyr. But it all ends in frustration for everybody, for she is refusing to face her central problem—her Jerusalem. She is bypassing that and continually running into dead-end roads instead of walking the Way. She feels she has a mission, but the mission is used to hide omission. If she would face her need for self-surrender, she would find her life and work clicking; now they are only clacking. And the clacking gets on people’s nerves. And that makes her feel that everybody is hard-hearted and unresponsive. No one comes to her with problems. People run away from her as a problem that refuses to acknowledge it is a problem—everybody else is the problem. So everybody’s hands are tied. The problem is insoluble because unacknowledged.
But these Christians who had listened to the order of Jesus faced the multitudes; and the multitudes sensed they had faced their own central problem—their Jerusalem—and had solved it, so the people turned to them for solutions and got them.
O Lord, we know that unless we have found the Way for ourselves, we cannot point the way. Help us to find it. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I shall begin to change the world by letting God begin in me.