Saturday: None Excluded Except Those Who Exclude Themselves
WEEK 48
SATURDAY
NONE EXCLUDED EXCEPT THOSE WHO EXCLUDE THEMSELVES
Acts 19:1-6
We saw yesterday that there were none who were excluded except those who excluded themselves. The promise is explicit: “You will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. This promise is for you, your children, and for all who are far away” (Acts 2:38-39).
The blocks are within us, and they can be reduced to two: lack of self-surrender and lack of receptivity. Some may be so tied up emotionally and mentally that they cannot make an intelligent self-surrender. Here counseling and psychotherapy can help clear the blocks to intelligent and emotionally free self-surrender. But that is about all counseling and psychotherapy can do; they cannot give the final cure unless they lead to self-surrender to God. They may help one to sufficient mental and emotional freedom to allow surrender to God. But the end is the surrender and receptivity, not the process of psychotherapy. One is a means; the other is the end.
Apart from these emotionally and mentally tangled people, all men, women, and young people can receive anything God has for them, especially the Holy Spirit, the gift of Godself.
Here are two letters received from two different types of men: one an airman in the Army and the other a leading businessman. The airman: “Have just finished reading for the second time your book How to Be a Transformed Person. You see, I was so mixed up in my mind, soul, and body that I needed a book like yours to explain and more or less lead me to see the light. I’m in. What a wonderful, joyous, indescribable feeling! To think it took so long. Trying to have my cake and eat it too.” The businessman: “Probably no one is ever quite satisfied with his relationship with God. I certainly am not; but at least now it’s real, not something I have heard or read. I see more clearly right and wrong—they are more nearly black and white and not grays. . . . Things have happened in our plant, in the church, in social contacts—things are different.”
One based it on feeling—“what a wonderful feeling!”—and the other on things that had happened through him. Both vital and valid.
O Lord, I thank you that you do not come in the same way to all, but you come in the way we need you. When you come, we know. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Not only am I open to the Highest; I am receiving the Highest, for the Highest is receiving me.