Friday: Destiny in the Stars?
WEEK 6
FRIDAY
DESTINY IN THE STARS?
Isaiah 8:19-20
I must pause and emphasize the need for mastery over times-and-seasons mentality in religion—times and seasons instead of power to witness effectively to the living, saving Christ.
Three distinct tendencies are pulling many devoted men and women from being effective witnesses to Christ into speculators on the future. One is the astonishing number of people trying to read their destiny in the stars—astrology addicts. I use the word addicts advisedly; for just as alcohol and drugs pull you away from the real world into a false world of fantasy and illusion, so gazing at the stars to find your destiny and your direction takes you out of the real world of guidance through your Christian faith into a false world of guidance through stars. As if lumps of matter floating in space could decide my destiny as a moral being. My destiny is decided by my moral choices. Under the guidance of my Christian faith I make those moral choices. All the stars in their courses cannot alter the slightest the moral choices themselves or the results of those moral choices. Yet five million people in America, I am told, decide their lives on the basis of the supposed effects of the stars. This is always a sign of moral decay; when people haven’t nerve enough to make their own decisions, they weakly turn to the stars for direction, a moral abdication.
Then there are those who try to get in contact with the dead and get moral and spiritual direction from them. One can sympathize with this desire on the part of those who have lost loved ones. But the guidance and information supposedly coming from behind the veil are meager and innocuous. Apparently no worthwhile revelations and certainly no moral renovations or impulses have come from that quarter. This emphasis drains off our attention from getting the power of the Holy Spirit to witness effectively for Christ in the here and now. That is what the departed, if they are in touch with Christ there, would have us do here.
We must master the marginal interest and give ourselves to the central.
O Holy Spirit, check us when we are drawn from the simplicity of devotion to Christ to the devotion to curiosity, for in Christ is Life and Life eternal. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: The big enemy of the central is the clamoring marginal. I belong to the central.