Saturday: God Will Not Pull Down God’s Standards to Ours
WEEK 45
SATURDAY
GOD WILL NOT PULL DOWN GOD’S STANDARDS TO OURS
Matthew 22:15-18
We have been looking at the mastery of dishonesty and lies. Jesus is relentless. He will not pull down his standards to ours; we must come up to his. He saves us by hard refusals. You cannot find the Holy Spirit without complete honesty, and you cannot keep the Spirit without it. So you are held at the center. The highest goes if there is any lowering of standards. But the Spirit goes only in awareness, calling attention by that lack of awareness of God’s presence to the departure. God is ready with forgiveness and restoration the moment we become honest again.
The head of a state university told me of a graduate who wrote that he would have to return his degree, for he cheated in an examination, and the degree was a badge not of honor but of shame. A trustee suggested that the returned degree be framed and posted as a warning to other students. “No,” said the president, “that degree is in my safe, and no one will ever know about it.” Then the president wrote the graduate, inviting him to come and see him and stay at his home. He came with his wife and was the honored guest of the president for a week. And the degree was never mentioned. That is a beautiful picture of what God does: God forgives, forgets, and restores us to fellowship, the run of God’s house is ours!
However, if there is a basic dishonesty, it will come out in our looks, in our attitudes. Ruskin in The Stones of Venice describes a statue, high up in a church, which to the outward eye was finished with exquisite skill; but if you climbed up and examined it closely, you had a rude shock, for its back, hidden from the spectator’s eye, was left in a rough state. It was the work of a man who cared only for outward appearances. Ten years later that man was banished from the city for forgery.* There was a flaw in his character that ran all through. “Nothing is hidden that won’t be revealed” (Matt 10:26). A student about to be caught cheating in an examination swallowed the paper from which he was copying, turned sick, vomited it up, and was caught. “Nothing is hidden.” The mastery of dishonesty and lies is basic, and the early Christians had it. We too can have it.
O Jesus, give me the unsullied honesty of your character. Wash my lips and my heart from all untruth. Make me as pure from dishonesty as a violet under the open sky. In your name. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: At the center of my faith is a perfectly honest Person; I shall be like him.
*John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 1 (New York: John B. Alden, 1885), chap. 1, §§41–43.