Week 16 Sunday
Week 16 Sunday
The Steps Out of Resentments
Proverbs 14:17; 24:29; 26:4
We now come to the steps we are to take to get rid of resentments. Breathe a prayer. You are not just reading a page; you are ridding yourself of a plague.
(1) Remember that resentments have no part or lot with a Christian. You cannot hold both Christ and resentments. One or the other must go. Do you want to go through life without Christ, chewing on resentments, a bitter, crabby, poisonous person? That’s what you are headed for if you allow resentments to fester within you.
It may be that your resentments are justified: someone has mistreated you; you have been disappointed in a life plan or ambition; you have met with a bitter calamity; there are those who rub you into soreness; you have to live in an uncongenial environment. All of these things may be very real and apparently justify your resentments. But whether justified or unjustified, resentments are disastrous to the inner life; they are poison. The probabilities are that the resentments are not justified, that they are rooted in a touchy, self-centered self, full of self-pity. Those who harbor self-pity haven’t the key, for life will back good will and only good will. Decide that resentments are going to have no part or lot within you.
(2) Remember that no one has ever treated you worse than you have treated God, and yet God forgives and forgets. God isn’t asking you to do something that God is not doing. Here is one of the most wonderful passages in literature, “Treat one another with the same spirit as you experience in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5 Moffatt). God forgives you, graciously and without reservation. You must do the same. If not? Then Jesus tells what happened to the man in the parable who was forgiven a debt of “three million pounds” and then went out and refused to forgive a fellow servant who owed him “twenty pounds.” He was handed “over to the torturers, till he should pay him all the debt. My heavenly Father will do the same to you, unless you each forgive your brother from the heart” (Matt. 18:21-35 Moffatt). The “torturers”? They are within you; resentments mean inner conflict, division, unhappiness, torture.
O Christ, I know how you have treated me: with forgiveness, gracious and undeserved. Help me to treat others with the same spirit. Only as your Spirit takes the place of my old spirit can I do it. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Today I shall treat everybody as Christ treats me.
Week 16 Monday
The Three Levels of Life
Matthew 5:43-48
(3) Remember the three levels of life and decide which one you are going to live on: (a) The level of life where you return evil for good—the demonic level. (b) The level where you return evil for evil—the human, legal level. (c) The level where you return good for evil—the Christian level, the divine level.
You become born of the qualities you give out. If you give evil for good, then you become evil, you become the thing you give out. If you give evil for evil, you become a tit-for-tat person, legalistic, unlovely, and unloved. If you give out good for evil, then you are born of the good, you become good.
But suppose the person is undeserving? That doesn’t matter. As someone says, “If you give out love to an undeserving person, it will be a bright spot to that person on his or her way to hell.” It will be a bright spot to you, too, for there you have risen to the divine level of life. John Beilgalhausen is a converted Jew, a very learned man. The Nazis deliberately starved to death his mother and his father. For some time he fought against resentment and hate. Then he did something better and more decisive: he surrendered it all to God. His resentment and hate were taken away. And when he says these words, they fall upon the soul with an almost divine authority, “A Christian has no enemies.” No enemies? No, for a Christian has no enmity. This is a simple way to get rid of enemies: have no enmity and your enemies are all gone, at least as far as you are concerned.
When someone remonstrated with Lincoln that he had forgiven an enemy, he replied, “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”* The only possible way to get rid of an enemy is to turn that enemy into a friend, and the only possible way to turn an enemy into a friend is to forgive. For two hates never made a love affair.
A man gave a golf ball the name of his enemy and struck it. But he struck it into the rough, for if you hate, you cannot see straight or drive straight. You cannot hurt another without hurting yourself. As they saying goes, “He who spits against the wind spits in his own face.”
O Christ, I see I cannot be an echo of the treatment people give to me. I must echo you and treat people as you treat them. But I cannot do this except by your grace. May your love melt down all my resentments and heal all my hurts. I accept that love now. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I shall overcome evil with good, darkness with light, hate with love.
*As quoted in Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power (London: Profile Books, 2000), 12.
Week 16 Tuesday
Don’t Let the Actions of Others Determine Yours
Matthew 5:38-42
(4) Don’t let the actions and attitudes of others determine your conduct and attitudes. Be Christ-directed instead of circumstance-directed. If you allow the conduct and attitude of other people to determine your conduct and attitude, you will be changing with every person you meet. You will be on the legal level of life—tit-for-tat. You will be below the Christian level, at the law of karma instead of the law of Christ. Remember, Jesus said that if you give up attitudes of grace—of forgiving enemies, of agreeing with your “make friends quickly with your opponents while you are with them on the way” (Matt. 5:25 CEB)—and take legal attitudes, then you surrender yourself to legal processes, and you will have to pay to “the last penny” (v. 26). There is no stopping this side of exhaustion.
Today I read an account of an important meeting in which it was stated that I had offered a resolution but “it was defeated.” I found myself inwardly glorying in that defeat, for while I am often wrong, this time I know I was right. I can wait for the years to speak against the hours. One does not need to get excited or exasperated when one knows that reality is behind one. “He who believes will not be in haste” (Isa. 28:16)—will not be in haste to avenge, to pay back, to retaliate. That person can be contented with temporary defeat, provided he is linked with long-range victory. “It makes me content, for Christ’s sake, with weakness, insults, trouble, persecution, and calamity” (2 Cor. 12:10 Moffatt). “Content,” not with the weakness, insults, and the rest in themselves, but “for Christ’s sake.” That phrase “for Christ’s sake” transforms you from becoming everybody’s doormat into everybody’s temple of refuge. You have an inner core of dignity, of assurance, of glorying, for you know that in the end the right will emerge. You can trust the processes of God where you cannot trust the persons of humanity.
Remember the word of early Quaker James Naylor, “To outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature opposite to itself.”* “To outlive” and “to weary out”—that is it! When you surrender to love, you “outlive” and “weary out” everything. For love lives and gives, and gives and lives. Hate dies.
O Christ, you will outlive and weary out all that is contrary to your love. For love is eternal; hate is of a passing hour. I surrender myself to love, to love even where I do not like. For you can make me love the unlovely, and perhaps in the process, they too shall become lovely. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I will not descend to the level of the person who has wronged me by trying to pay back.
*John Gough, A History of the People Called Quakers, vol. 1 (Dublin: R. Jackson, 1789), 247.
Week 16 Wednesday
Liking People and Loving People
Matthew 18:21-22, 35
(5) Remember to “shake off the dust” (Matt. 10:14). Jesus told his followers that when people would not receive them they were to “shake off the dust.” This is usually interpreted as meaning that we are to give the people a final warning in the dust-shaking process. Would it not be nearer to his spirit to say that it means that we are not to let the attitudes of people cling to us; their very dust must not become a part of us? Very often we leave a situation, get partial victory over it, but some dust—of resentment, of inward hurt, of lingering mental debate—still clings to us and spoils the complete victory. “I will forgive him, but . . . ,” and because of that “but” the dust clings. “I will forgive, but I won’t forget”; the dust is still there. “I will forgive, but I won’t have anything to do with him”; the dust is evident. The dust must go completely. There must be full and free forgiveness with no strings attached. You must forgive others as God forgives you.
(6) This does not mean that you have to like people and what they do. Christians are people who love people whom they do not like. Impossible? Oh no, for they love them for what they might be when they cannot love them for what they are. They see in every person another person, the person who might become. That very love and faith helps to create that person.
(7) Go beyond praying for people who do you wrong; bless them in Christ’s name. A woman told how she got rid of her resentments: Every time she thought of the person who had done her wrong, she then and there said inwardly, “I bless you, in Christ’s name.” This goes beyond praying for enemies, for when you pray you ask God to bless them; you bless them. That makes the act yours and makes it firsthand. You are not touching people through God. God is touching people through you.
If you cannot attain to this, then take an intermediate step. Meet the object of your dislike with a prayer. Every time the name of the person you dislike is mentioned, breathe a prayer for that person. You beat down rising resentments by a barrage of prayer. Make this a life habit, so that it does not become an issue each time.
O Christ of the unalterable good will, help me to have that same unalterable good will, no matter what others may do. Help me to have the fixed purpose to love, to answer all opposition with patience, all insult with instant prayer, all nagging with patient good humor. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “Goodness shall have justice done to it—the future is with men of upright mind” (Ps. 94:15 Moffatt).
Week 16 Thursday
Smiling a Smile Out of the Baby
Romans 12:17-21
(8) Remember that the sum total of reality is behind you when you love; you are behind you when you hate. Love is positive; hate is negative. Love heals; hate wounds. Love lasts; hate stings itself to death.
I watched some pigeons feeding. One pigeon was very pugnacious and was constantly fighting the rest. But I noted it was a losing game, for when he was fighting, he wasn’t feeding. The rest stepped out of his way and kept on feeding, while he wasted time and temper and nourishment in fighting others. Do not fight; feed!
“You are to conquer as does a stream when it readies a rock; it goes around it, and when strong enough overflows it.”* In a home, or in any life situation, when yon meet opposition, flow around it. Quietly set up your own inner satisfactions when yon cannot get them from your surroundings. Live within when you can’t live without. Then one day you’ll be strong enough to overflow the obstacle, to inundate it with love. You will then do as one saint said, “If you had anything against me, I’d hug it out of you.” And those who know him know that this is no exaggeration; he would do just that, or the moral equivalent of that! I cannot refrain from another quotation from this radiant soul, “The only thing the devil can’t get into is the love of Christ, for if he did get into it, he wouldn’t be the devil.” The devil can get into our virtues and, by a twist, can turn them into vices. He can make righteous indignation into unchristian resentment. He can turn self-respect into pride, can make humility into mush, can corrupt everything except one thing: the love of Christ. Here is one thing the devil cannot get into and remain the same. Here, then, you take your stand. You will give out love and only love, no matter what the other person gives out to you.
A friend tells how he “smiled a smile out of the baby.” That’s it! We must smile a smile out of the unsmiling, love a love out of the unlovely, create a new birth in the spiritually unborn. We must answer death, not with death, but with life. Then we ourselves live!
O Christ, I come to you to help me to be no longer tangled in what other people do. Help me to be emancipated by starting from you and by doing what you would have me do, for then I am free—free to return good for evil, love for hate. I thank you that I am now beginning from you and your Way. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “In God I trust without a fear: what can man do to me?” (Ps. 56:11 Moffatt).
*Attributed to Lao-Tse (4th or 5th century BC), Chinese sage and reputed author of the Tao Te Ching.
Week 16 Friday
Don’t Fight Resentments; Surrender Them
Matthew 5:21-24
Resentments can slip in under the cover of something else. I have just read where Paul had, what he calls, moments and attitudes “not inspired by the Lord” (2 Cor. 11:17 Moffatt). He allowed the attitudes of his detractors to determine his conduct, “If anyone has no love for the Lord, God’s curse be on him!” (1 Cor. 16:21 Moffatt). “Whoever preaches a gospel that contradicts the gospel I preach to you, God’s curse be on him!” (Gal. 1:8 Moffatt). And then he adds in verse 10 (Moffatt), “Now is that ‘appealing to the interests of men’ or of God? Trying to ‘satisfy men’?” Someone had said, “He’s soft,” and Paul lashed out with these curses upon people to prove he was no “softy.” He allowed other people to determine his conduct. Here, he was “not inspired,” and not inspiring. We seldom quote those words.
Perhaps you feel disappointed with life and what it has brought to you. Self-pity sets in. Perhaps you have been denied, for one reason or another, a life partner. It is no use to fight against that fact. Surrender it to God and let God help you make something out of it. Here are the triumphant words of one who did just that, “I am one of the old maids you have helped to see the way to take life and love it!”
That leads to another step:
(9) Don’t fight your resentments—surrender them. When you fight them, they grow. When you surrender them, they go. A doctor says, “There was a time when I held a strong resentment against an individual for nearly a year. But almost the moment my letter of apology dropped into the mailbox, the resentment vanished. It has never returned. Some of us are willing to do everything except surrender the resentment. Walter B. Pitkin* tells of nettles along the walk on the grounds of a California old person’s home, nettles that scratched so many legs and brought on so many cases of nettle rash that the gardener finally dug up the plants. Whereupon a committee visited the superintendent and demanded that the nettles be restored. “They gave us something to talk about,” said the spokeswoman; “now we just sit around for hours saying nothing.” Back went the nettles. Some people would miss the possibility of a grouch. They are so negative that they fear they would be lost in turning positive.
O Christ, in whom no resentments lodged, help me to be the kind of person in whom no resentments can lodge. Inoculate me with your love so I will not be susceptible to resentments. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I belong to the Way of Love. I cannot step down to any lower way.
*Walter B. Pitkin (1878–1953), well-known lecturer, professor, and author of self-help books.
Week 16 Saturday
God Forgives You; You Forgive Others
Philippians 2:1-5
We come now to the last steps in getting rid of resentment:
(10) In surrendering the resentments to God, you may have to expose them to others. Dr. Loring Swain, who has been very successful in helping arthritics to health and release, tells this story, “Together, the patient and I try to expose resentments, fears, conflicts, or actual hatreds. . . . For example, without any physical reason we could find, a woman in the hospital began vomiting every morning after breakfast. It was discovered she was full of self-pity and resentment against others in her ward who had visitors, and she had none. She was blind to her jealousy, which was back of the emotional upset causing her illness. Repentance freed her, and apology restored friendly relations with her neighbors. These two acts cured her resentments and her vomiting.”*
So surrender your resentments to God and expose them to someone, possibly the one against whom you hold them. The exposing does what oxygen does when impure blood is exposed to it; it purifies it.
(11) Then be so inwardly outgoing and happy that resentments can have no part or lot in you. As Luther said, “My soul is too glad and too great to be the enemy of any man.”** Someone else has put it, “He is below himself who is not above injuries.” The temptation will be to descend from the Christian level of returning good for evil to the lower level of returning evil for evil. Here you leave Christ and return to the pagan level of Cyrus, of whom it was said, “No one ever did more good to his friends and more harm to his enemies.”***
When Tokichi Ishii, awaiting his death sentence in a Japanese prison, stumbled accidentally upon the passage in the New Testament, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do,” he said that, in a flash, he saw the whole meaning of Christianity. That verse, he said, “pierced my heart like a five-inch nail,” and he was forever changed.†
Since God forgives you, you can forgive others. But if you shut off others from your forgiveness, then you shut off yourself from God’s forgiveness. The wonder of God’s forgiveness to us should send us out joyously to forgive others.
O Christ, can I ever get over the wonder of your forgiveness to me—to me? Help me to pass this on in just as gracious a way as you passed it on to me. You forgave me, not grudgingly, but graciously. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I am so rich in forgiveness that I can afford to dispense it prodigally to others.
*Published account unknown.
**George Washington Sandt, editor, The Lutheran (Board of Publication of the United Lutheran Church in America, 1939), 12.
***Harry Emerson Fosdick, quoting Ecce Homo in The Manhood of the Master (New York: Abingdon Press, 1913), 25.
†Tokichi Ishii, A Gentleman in Prison (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1922), 79.