Friday: A Kingdom That Cannot Be Shaken
WEEK 52
FRIDAY
A KINGDOM THAT CANNOT BE SHAKEN
Matthew 7:24-29
There isn’t space left to sum up the masteries available for us. So I can do no more than point to the mastery that gives validity and basis to all the other masteries, namely, the mastery of the total life by the totalitarianism of the kingdom of God. Seek first the kingdom of God; and all these things—all the other and lesser masteries—will be added unto you. The kingdom of God gathers up all the loose ends of life and weaves them into total meaning. It is the Cosmic Loom upon which all the little things and big are woven into fabric, into meaning.
If that is true, then how can we find the kingdom in which are included all the lesser kingdoms of mastery? I want to drop into your thinking a verse that has been the most steadying verse I have ever had given me. It was given me in my quiet time in a hotel in Moscow in 1934. Russia had hit me hard. I needed reassurance. It came in this verse, which arose out of the Scripture and spoke to my condition: “Let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken” (Heb 12:28 RSV).
“A kingdom that cannot be shaken”—that has run through my heart and mind like a steadying refrain for years. I’ve seen people building up kingdoms that I knew were shakable: the kingdom of money, the kingdom of position and pride, the kingdom of honor and glory, the kingdom of pleasure, the kingdom of learning, the kingdom of physical love. I knew in my heart of hearts they were shakable, for I’d seen them shake and fall before my very eyes. When I was trying, before World War II, to get the Dutch minister to agree to let Japan have New Guinea for her surplus population, with the understanding that America would agree to give compensation, his angry reply was, “No part of the Dutch empire is for sale.” Alas, where is it now?
Gone, it was shakable. And where are the lesser empires, personal and collective, people have built up? They were shakable by disease, by death, or by sheer inner unhappiness. It is everything to have one unshakable kingdom!
O God, amid shakable kingdoms I stand with my feet in the one unshakable kingdom. What security, what meaning, what ultimacy—what Life this is! I thank you. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Amid a shakable world I shall walk and live and have my being in an unshakable kingdom.