Week 12 Sunday
Week 12 Sunday
Cleanse Your Past
Luke 19:8-10
We must continue the steps to the Way:
(7) Cleanse your past. Make restitution where it is necessary or possible. I say make it where “necessary or possible” because sometimes it is not possible. There are things beyond your recall. Do not spend time in useless worry over a past you cannot change. God forgives; let that suffice. God wipes it from the “book of remembrance.” So must you. God forgives you; you must forgive yourself. Bury it all at the foot of the cross, and put “No Resurrection” over it. The past is buried. Its effects may carry over into the present, but it itself is buried. Even those continuing effects God can help you counteract and cancel, by starting new redemptive influences. God restores the years that the caterpillar and the locusts have eaten.
Some things it is not necessary to bring up. If more harm than good comes from bringing things up, let them rest, especially if they involve others. Do not develop a back-looking conscience, morbidly mourning over the past instead of bravely facing the present and the future in Christ’s name.
But some things may have to be straightened out before you can go on. A stately New England woman rocked an audience with laughter and at the same time shook their consciences with this story: She and her neighbor hated each other like poison. The point of contention was the neighbor’s ducks, which used to get into her garden and spoil it. One day, she found her opportunity. She put all the ducks into a cement-weighted bag and dumped them into the river. Later she became spiritually changed, and one day in the quiet hour those ducks came up. She would have to confess. Her response was, “Now Lord, this is carrying things too far. I’d be ruined if I confessed that.” One day, when the neighbor was on the lawn, the woman started tremblingly toward her. She managed to blurt out the truth, told the whole story. The neighbor’s jaw dropped. “My heavens, I always wondered what happened to those ducks.” The woman volunteered to pay for the ducks, but the neighbor said she was just as responsible. The whole matter was buried. They are wonderful friends now, and the subject of ducks is never mentioned. Restitution often comes before restoration.
O Christ, give me courage and power to do the right thing though the heavens fall. I know they won’t fall for you require only the possible, and the healing thing. Help me. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded” (Jas. 4:8 Moffatt).
Week 12 Monday
Washing Wounds
Acts 16:30-34
Since this matter of cleansing the past as far as possible is so necessary, we continue it today. You may be afraid of making an apology, of righting a wrong—afraid of what people will think about you. But only small people are afraid to apologize. “I’d die before I would apologize,” said a telephone exchange operator. To which the superintendent of the hospital replied, “Oh, I do that a dozen times a day. It’s the easiest thing I do.” Result of these two attitudes? The telephone operator stayed in her position, and the other woman climbed to the top. The telephone operator got caught in herself; the superintendent was released from herself every time she made an apology.
The president of a state university once told me that he had received a diploma with an accompanying letter saying, “I cheated in the final examination. This thing has burned me for seventeen years. I can’t keep it any longer. I feel relieved already. A great burden has been lifted.” One member of the board of regents wanted to take the name off and hang the letter in the university as a warning to others. “No,” said the president, “that would leave suspicion on other students. I’ll bury it in my safe. No one shall ever know.” He invited the man to come to see him whenever he came to town. The incident has never been mentioned.
Some university girls slipped out at night through a window and were caught. They lied about it. They afterward told the dean that they had lied. He suggested that they go to the dean of women and confess the whole thing. They did. The dean brought it before the university council, and then she moved that the girls be forgiven and the matter dropped. This was passed unanimously.
Evangelist Rodney “Gipsy” Smith preaches on the Philippian jailer washing the wounds of Paul, wounds he had inflicted the night before, as a sign of his penitence and change. If we wash the wounds of the past with our tears and our sincere apologies, they will be sterilized and will quickly heal. Cleanse your past from everything that might fester.
O Christ, you have forgiven that past, and where your forgiveness is, there can be no infection. But show me if there is anything left for me to do in righting that past ere we go on together. For I want no open wounds, anywhere. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “Search me, O God, and know my heart, test me and try my thoughts; see if I am taking a wrong course, and do thou lead me on the lines of life eternal” (Ps. 139:23-24 Moffatt).
Week 12 Tuesday
Christianize Your Relationships
Acts 16:14-15; 1 Timothy 3:12-13
We come now to the next step:
(8) Christianize your relationships. Take the Spirit of the Way into your total life. You have now one more set of relationships to bring into line with the Way: your present relationships. To be a Christian is to be in Christian relations. Of course that must be qualified: Do it as far as it depends on you, for other wills are concerned, and you may not be able to establish Christian relations with them. “If possible, so far as it depends upon you, live peaceably with all” (Rom. 12:18). “So far as it depends on you” is important. But we are to do the Christian thing even though the other person doesn’t respond.
a) The home. Where there are points of friction, talk over things objectively. Try to see the matter from the standpoint of the other person. Project yourself in imagination into the very self of the other person and see things from his or her position. That will take sympathetic imagination. Don’t confess the other person’s sins; confess your own. That will beget confession in the other person. Even if it doesn’t, you have done something to yourself; your peace has returned to you. I have just received a letter containing this sentence, “I think he feels that in admitting that he is wrong he shows weakness.” A strong person doesn’t hesitate to confess wrong; a weak person does, lest the weakness be exposed. But the refusal makes the person weaker. Then go beyond talking over points of friction, come together each day in a corporate spiritual quest, a prayer time together. In that prayer time you will be melted into a common purpose and a common mind. In God you will become one.
b) Your daily occupation. That daily occupation can be the extension of your spiritual life, your spiritual life become incarnate in material things. The head of a great foundry told me that the defects of character in the individual worker sooner or later become revealed in the castings. If the character goes wrong, the casting goes wrong. The opposite of that can be true. Your Christian character can be registered in the work you are doing. God and we make people and things in our own image.
O Christ, I am beginning to extend your life and purposes into my contacts, which are the extensions of me. Help me to create no longer in my image but in your image. That will not be impossible if you are in me—wholly. Come in, then—wholly. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I cannot keep my contact with Christ unless I Christianize my contacts with others.
Week 12 Wednesday
Concerning Class and Race Relations
Acts 10:34-35; 17:26; Colossians 3:10-11
We continue the Christianizing of our relationships:
c) Your class and race relationships. Perhaps class feeling and race feeling, not Christ, have been determining your conduct. Two young people, a boy and a girl, came in to interview me about race relations. You could look at their faces and see which one was on the Way. The boy’s face was bright and assured; the girl’s face was clouded and confused. The boy was working from Christ out to race relationships; the girl was working from the attitudes and opinions of society around her. One ended in tangles, the other in triumph.
d) Your international relations. Perhaps you are becoming embittered and corroded by the acids of prevailing hatreds. Surrender your international attitudes to God, and let God cleanse them. There you will be immune to prevailing hatreds.
e) Your relationships with the person next to you. Become a witness to the new life. Nothing is yours that is not shared. On the jacket of the little book God Calling are these words, “When supply seems to have failed, you must know that it has not done so. But you must look around to see what you can give away. Give away something.”* The simplest and most effective thing you can give away is just the thing you have received. Share it.
f) Your relationships with money. Bishop Edwin Holt Hughes preached a sermon on “God Is Owner”; we are debtors, we own nothing. A wealthy man invited him home to lunch, and they drove to a hilltop overlooking hundreds of beautiful acres. The man waved his hand toward the horizon and said, “Bishop, if this doesn’t belong to me, to whom does it belong?” The bishop quietly replied, “Ask me that question a hundred years from now.” There was no answer. A girl said to me, “My mother taught me that we can take nothing out of this world except our characters.” Nothing except our characters, and what we deposit, in other characters through personal activity, influence, and dedicated money invested in others.
g) Your relationships with the church. If you are not in the church, get in. If you are marginally in, get into the center.
O Christ, I see that no relationship can remain outside your sway. Here, take them all. I reserve nothing. For everything is made for your ownership—for the Way. I thank you that my hands and my heart cling to nothing—nothing but you. And, having you, I have all. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I hold nothing—nothing except in relationship to the kingdom of God.
*A. J. Russell and “Two Listeners,” God Calling (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1945).
Week 12 Thursday
“Cultivate the Quiet Time”
Psalms 25:12; 27:4; 119:147
We now come to the last two steps in putting our feet firmly upon the Way:
(9) Cultivate the Quiet Time—preferably in the morning. We have talked about Christianizing your relationships; we come now to the central relationship, your relationship with God. When that relationship is intact, then every other relationship is toned up. If that relationship gets loose, then every other relationship goes loose with it. For the Christian, there is one responsibility and only one responsibility: to keep in union with God. When that union with God is intact, everything flows from it. I know of no one thing that creates union with God more surely and constantly than the regular practice of the Quiet Time. If I have a Quiet Time, I have a quiet heart; the Quiet Tune goes, the quiet heart goes with it. I can take it or leave it, but that is one of life’s inexorables.
Close your eyes, drop into the silence of the heart, and then listen to God tell you how much time you can spend in the Quiet Time. Take the figure that fixes itself in your mind with a sense of approval, and start it. Pray by the clock. If it starts being mechanical, it will soon become medicinal; it will heal you at the heart.
(10) Create outlets and activities. The Way is an outgoing way. The first law of life is intake, and the second law of life is outflow. (This is also the stage of contribution, mentioned in week 10.) If you try to continue the intake without a corresponding outflow, it will all end in an impasse. The inflow will cease.
The outlets and activities do not need to be great and significant. They may be small and insignificant. But the fact that they represent an outgoing attitude and a sharing purpose makes them significant. For the law of sharing—which is the law of love, which in turn is the law of life—is in operation.
We now sum up the steps: Consider your ways, change your directions, connect with Christ, consent to surrender, cease from struggling, concentrate on acceptance, cleanse your past, Christianize your relationships, cultivate the Quiet Time, and create outlets and activities. Your feet are now on the Way!
O Christ, how can I thank you enough that I am taking these ten steps to freedom. For I feel in my bones that this Way is the way to freedom. For my bonds are breaking, my heart is being released. I know that I am in the process of redemption. I am on the Way. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: The alternate beats of my heart this day shall be cultivate and contribute.
Week 12 Friday
“The Steps to the Divine Relationship”
James 4:6-10
We are reluctant to go on in our pilgrimage with anyone left behind; so we turn back in these last two days of these weeks of quest to gather up the not-yet-arrived souls. Perhaps as we have talked about the Way it has seemed to lack the warmth of a personal fellowship.
So I must give you a shorter and simpler ladder around the idea of getting into saving touch with a Person. How do we set up a warm human friendship? What are the stages through which we pass?
These stages are five: (1) The stage of drawing near: the indecisive, uncertain stage where we alternately want to and do not want to give ourselves to the other person. It is the stage of exploration.
(2) The stage of decision: The mind ceases to alternate; it is made up.
(3) The actual surrender of the self to the other person: There is nothing weighed out or measured, nothing that the eye can see, but inwardly you say, “That person has my heart—has me.”
(4) The taking of the gift of the other’s self: the stage of appropriation, of acceptance. There is a merging of the selves; inward union takes place.
(5) The stage of growth: a blending of will with will, mind with mind, being with being, down through the years.
*****
These are the stages through which we pass in setting up a beautiful human relationship. We go through the same stages in setting up a saving relationship with Christ:
(1) The stage of drawing near: the tentative, explorative, uncertain stage. You have been in that stage with all its wistful hungry longings, a stage when you alternately rebel against God and long for God. You wish you could dismiss the divine Lover, and yet you cannot. You are tom between worlds.
Then you come to the second stage: (2) You make up your mind. The decision is made. Your will is thrown on the side of Christ. Of one woman who was indecisive about the Christian way, someone remarked, “She is always hovering; she never alights.” Now you have ceased hovering. You have alighted. For better or for worse, for life or for death, you have decided.
O Christ, I am grateful that at last, at long last, my indecisive will has come to rest, and has come to rest in you. How can I be grateful enough that it has not come to rest elsewhere, for then that rest would turn to restlessness. In you I know I can be forever at rest. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “You have saved my life from death, mine eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling” (Ps. 116:8 Moffatt).
Week 12 Saturday
Further Steps
1 John 5:13-15
We come to the third rung in our ladder: (3) Surrender to Christ. That sounds simple, after it is done! But before, it seems vague and unreal. You are now so near that all you will have to do is to say yes, and the relationship is set up. Christ has already said his yes. All his barriers are down.
A student sat on a log bridge over a mountain stream and made her life decision. As she sat there, she took twigs of wood and one by one threw them into the stream and watched them float away. She named those twigs, “There goes my pride.” “There goes my fear.” “And there goes my self.” That self was the last thing she threw in, and the decisive thing. When she threw in that last twig, she rose radiant. “I have been laughing ever since, ever since I got myself off my hands.” You too will be glad and relieved to get yourself off your hands and into safer hands, the hands of Christ.
That surrender is important, for there can be no love between persons unless there is mutual self-surrender. If either one withholds the self, then love simply will not spring up. It cannot spring up, for love by its very nature is mutual self-surrender. In the inmost depths of your being whisper to God, “You have me and all I have—forever.”
You now come to the next step: (4) Acceptance of the self of the other person: Christ. Your very surrender of yourself will give you an inner boldness and confidence that you, having surrendered yourself, have a right to take the very Self of Christ into yourself.
Someone has said, “We don’t make friends; we recognize them.” You don’t make Christ a Friend, a Savior; you recognize him as such. He has always been and is your Savior and Friend; now you are recognizing him as such. That is receptive faith.
The last step is: (5) A continuous, mutual adjustment of being to being, of purpose to purpose. This is the stage of continuous growth, and this will go on forever.
But one thing is settled, and settled forever: You belong to Christ; Christ belongs to you. You are forever each other’s. The eternal pact has been made.
O Christ, how can I ever be grateful enough that I have come to this hour, this hour of the permanent choice. I am relieved that my self is off my hands and on your hands. For in your hands I am safe and adjusted and usable. I am now where I have always longed to be—at Home.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “This is a day we owe to the Eternal; let us be glad and rejoice in it” (Ps. 118:24 Moffatt).