Thursday: Various Masteries Reviewed
WEEK 52
THURSDAY
VARIOUS MASTERIES REVIEWED
John 16:20-24
We continue to gather up the masteries that are disclosed in the early Christian movement.
They mastered fear. A group of people who, before the coming of the Holy Spirit, were behind closed doors in fear (John 20:19) were now calling upon the very people of whom they had been afraid to repent and receive the gospel. And they did. “The council was caught by surprise by the confidence with which Peter and John spoke. . . . They also recognized that they had been followers of Jesus” (Acts 4:13). His quiet courage had caught on in them. Fears had dropped away with the coming of this amazing adequacy to meet anything that life held. They didn’t fight the fears; they took the adequacy, and the fears dropped off.
They mastered ingrown self-preoccupation. They forgot themselves, for they were seeing Christ. They fulfilled this statement of Paul, “We have different gifts that are consistent with God’s grace that has been given to us. If your gift is prophecy, you should prophesy in proportion to your faith. If your gift is service, devote yourself to serving. If your gift is teaching, devote yourself to teaching. If your gift is encouragement, devote yourself to encouraging. The one giving should do it with no strings attached. The leader should lead with passion. The one showing mercy should be cheerful” (Rom 12:6-8). All of these—prophecy, service, teaching, encouraging, giving, leading, acts of mercy—were outgoing, not one turning in toward itself. Life had mastered life and had turned its flow outward, hence release from self-preoccupation.
They mastered gloom and sadness. Theirs is the most joyous account of the most joyous people that ever existed. They laughed their way through prisons and sang their way through death. They had an incorrigible joy. And joy is the most health-giving emotion that can run through us. Hence they mastered sicknesses that are rooted in sorrow and heaviness of spirit.
Sickness, both functional and structural, went out before the incoming tides of new, abundant living. Inner conflicts gone, the body registered the harmony of the soul. Body and spirit under the control of Wholeness became whole. A new, healthy race came into being.
O Christ, you are Life; and when I have you, I have no gaps of death in me. You have banished death; I live by Life and feel it coursing within me. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I shall open the channels of my being to health by right thinking and emotion.