Friday: The Choice Is Always Ours
WEEK 48
FRIDAY
THE CHOICE IS ALWAYS OURS
Acts 10:43-47
We have seen that the old election was based on the attempt to graft Old Testament conceptions onto the New or to change the figure, to put new wine into old wineskins. But the new wine of God’s pure, unlimited love in Christ burst the old wineskin of a partial God who loved people partially. The idea has been quietly discarded.
A new election has taken its place, based not on God’s will but on our incapacity to receive. This is more widespread. People shake their heads sadly and say, “Well, this isn’t for me. I wish it were. But I suppose I’m just not made that way.” This lays a dead hand on all our seeking and expectation and consequent finding.
And it just isn’t true. There are no inherent blocks to the receiving of God’s highest gifts except those we make by our own choices. The choice is always ours. I am persuaded that everybody is constitutionally made for God. The psychology of Victor Frankl of Vienna (1905–1997), says that the God urge is just as definitely a part of human nature as the self urge and sex urge and the herd urge. If you suppress the God urge within you, there will be set up a complex or neuroses exactly in the same way as if you were suppressing the self urge or the sex urge. This naturalizes the urge for God and puts it at the center of all the urges as the supreme urge. If that urge is unfulfilled, then we are unfulfilled. This was said long ago by Augustine in the oft-quoted sentence: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.” Frankl’s psychology would say the same only he would change the “are restless to “have a neurosis,” intensified!
The Acts of the Apostles, antedating both, gives not the mere doctrine of equal possibilities in all people for the finding of God; it goes further and shows the fact of all people receiving equally the Holy Spirit. “They were all filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:4), the one hundred twenty, including the women. These were tested disciples. But the “Holy Spirit fell everyone who heard the word” (10:44). These were untested Gentiles.
O Jesus, through you a new all-ness comes into being; your arms are open to all who come. “Come unto me, all ye” (Matt 11:28 KJV). That puts the latchstrings out, even for me. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I am open to the Highest, for the Highest is open to me.