Week 26 Sunday
Week 26 Sunday
Gathering Up Lessons Learned
Acts 5:3-5; 26:14
We are now entering the last week of the first half of the year. We must gather up the lessons learned before we start on the more positive side of the Way in the second half.
The emphasis of this book is that the Way is not merely the way of salvation. It is that, thank God, but more. The Way is the way to do everything. And everything not-the-way is not the way. In the Pan-American Airport building in Panama, the “seeing-eye door” opens as you approach to come in or go out. But when I tried to go out by the door marked “Entrance,” nothing happened. The “seeing eye” did not see me, paid no attention to me. I might have become angry, or I might have prayed to all the gods that be, but that door would not have opened. Only as I retreated and entered the other aisle, did the door “see” me and open. When I obeyed the nature of reality, things began to open. It is so everywhere in everything for everybody. Life is made to work in God’s way and only in God’s way. If you try to work it some other way, it works its own ruin.
When I arrived back from a two-and-a-half-month tour of Latin America, I was anxious to catch up with events, so I went to the bookstall at the station in Miami and asked for Time and Life, and received the reply that there were none, for—so the clerk said—“Time and Life are on strike.” “Yes,” I said to myself as I walked away, ‘Time’ and ‘Life’ are on strike. We wouldn’t use time and we wouldn’t live life in God’s way, so they are both on strike against us.” Time is getting more and more filled with problems, and life is more and more filled with frustrations. Time and life are on strike against us. If we live life as it should be lived, that is, according to the Way, and if we use passing time as it should be used, they will work with us; doors will fling open at the very sight of us, and life will be an open vista; life will be livable, time will tingle with adventure.
Jesus is the Door, not only to salvation; he is the Door to everything. Everything opens when you come in his Way.
O Jesus, I see that you are the Door, and when I humbly come your Way, everything in heaven and on earth is open to me. I live in a wide-open universe. Beauty and love and service and joy and redemption are all open to me. I walk everywhere with doors being flung open to me as though I were royalty. I am—in you. I thank you. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “I am the Gate; whoever enters by me will be saved, he will go in and out and find pasture” (John 10:9 Moffatt).
Week 26 Monday
Heed the Helm or the Rocks?
Acts 12:19-24
We must continue gathering up our thoughts on the Way. When we try to manipulate life and make it work in our way instead of humbly accepting God’s way, then we get into trouble.
An outstanding Canadian layman said, “The idealisms of yesterday have become the necessities of today.” The substitutes won’t work. The psalmist says, “All who swerve from thy will, thou spurnest; their notions end in nothing” (Ps. 119:118 Moffatt). Notions that end in nothings! As the story goes, “The mountains labor and bring forth a mouse!” We have colossal effort and contemptible effect. We get what we want, and then we don’t want it. Journalist Dorothy Thompson, after visiting Germany, says, “The trouble with our war is that we have got our unconditional surrender. We asked the Germans to give themselves over to our will and they have, and it seems we haven’t any will.”* We should have tried to get the Germans and ourselves to make unconditional surrender to God. Then there would have been an open Door. “The one who rules in heaven laughs” (Ps. 2:4 CEB)—laughs a sad laugh at our impossible attempts at playing God.
Jeremiah might have been speaking of today, when he said, “For the authorities were senseless, seeking no guidance from the Eternal; so they had no success, and all their folk are scattered” (Jer. 10:21 Moffatt). When you do not seek guidance from God, you are not merely bad, you are senseless. For the Christian way is just sheer sense—all else is nonsense. “The devil is not only bad, he’s a fool,” says a very discerning friend of mine, “for if you reap what you sow, then look at what he reaps. ‘The sorrows of Satan’ is more than a phrase, it is a fact.” I suppose the devil doesn’t mind being called bad, but he hates being called a fool; he can’t stand being laughed at. And yet life does laugh at our “senseless” ways.
After I had spoken on this subject to an English-speaking audience in Buenos Aires, the pastor asked a woman if she understood what I had said. “Only too well,” she sadly replied. What I said was simply a commentary on the text of her own experience.
O Christ, I come to you with my wayward, stupid will. I have been afraid of your will. I have been afraid of Life. And now I come to you with humbled heart, humbled through many a setback and many a blank wall against which I’ve run. I’m hurt, but wiser. So I come to give you my recalcitrant will to have you make it over again. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “Make the Eternal your delight, and he will give you all your heart’s desire” (Ps. 37:4 Moffat).
*Dorothy Thompson, “German Mind Is Kept in Vacuum,” in Harrisburg Telegraph (June 25, 1945), 12.
Week 26 Tuesday
“Many Other Words of the Same Nature”
Psalm 51:1-10
We must pursue this subject of the Way being the way for everything until it shall no longer be an idea, but an axiom.
The prophet Habakkuk utters the truth we are emphasizing in these words, “Has not the Lord of hosts ordained, that ‘the toil of the nations ends in smoke’; and ‘peoples wear themselves out for naught’?” (Hab. 2:13 Moffatt). Is this “ordained” arbitrary, imposed by God’s declaration? Or is it ordained by the nature of reality, written into the nature of things? When nations do not take God’s way, does their toil end in smoke? Inevitably? And do peoples who take paths other than God’s “wear themselves out for naught”?
The saying “He who will not heed the helm must heed the rocks” is not imposed on the facts, but coined out of the facts themselves. For if the hand of Christ is not on the helm, then the hand of catastrophe guides you straight to the rocks—inevitably. That is the text of life, all else is commentary.
If you try to cut out the text, it will come back again stronger than ever. When Jeremiah wrote the judgment of God, Jehoiakim, the king, didn’t like it, so he cut the scroll with a penknife, cut out the parts he didn’t like, and threw them into the fire. “That’s that,” thought the king. He had settled it. Had he? Listen, “So Jeremiah took another scroll, and gave it to Baruch . . . who wrote upon it, to Jeremiah’s dictation, all the words of the book that Jehoiakim . . . had burned, besides many other words of the same nature” (Jer. 36:23, 32 Moffatt). Note: “besides many other words of the same nature.” Do you get rid of God’s laws written into the nature of reality by burning or spurning them? Hardly. They come back, and come back redoubled—“many other words of the same nature.” If you don’t listen to it from the Bible, then psychology, history, experience will speak “many other words of the same nature.”
If we don’t listen, then life judges us. Author Dan Brummitt said in regard to his careless walking at cross streets, “If I’m bumped off, an appropriate inscription on my tomb would be: ‘Died of looking the wrong way.’ ”*
O Christ, inescapable Christ, how can I run from you. If I flee from you, I flee from life. I cannot do that and live. Then help me to flee into your arms, into your ways. For I know that you have the words of eternal life; you are eternal life itself. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “Take hold of the Eternal your God and you will keep hold of life” (2 Chron. 20:20 Moffatt).
*No published source was found for this quotation.
Week 26 Wednesday
Whitewashing Flimsy Walls
Matthew 26:69-75
Jehoiakim dramatically burned the laws of God, and they dramatically came back. But what about the silent decay that very undramatically sets in when we take ways other than the Way?
Jeremiah depicted the dramatic rejection; now he depicts other undramatic results, “Turning his thoughts from the Eternal, he is like some desert scrub that never thrives” (Jer. 17:5 Moffatt). Turn your thoughts from the Eternal, think on other ways, and you become “like some desert scrub that never thrives.” When you don’t think God’s thoughts, you haven’t the key: economists plan for economic ruin; politicians undermine the body politic; philosophers philosophize in the dark; psychologists pick people to pieces, but since they have no great Design, they do not know how to put people together again and so leave them more disrupted than before; moralists without God lead to immorality.
Jeremiah changes the figure and puts it thus, “Your footsteps stumble on the twilight hills, before the gleam you look for turns to dense, dead gloom” (Jer. 13:16 Moffatt). If the Way is “the path of the just” that “shineth more and more unto the perfect day,” then those who go on not-the-way are on a path that fadeth more and more unto the perfect night. People hope for “the gleam,” but it ends in “gloom,” the “dense, dead gloom.”
Ezekiel puts it in these dramatic words, “These daubers whitewash any flimsy wall run up to safe-guard the people . . . till down falls the flimsy wall; and then you will be asked, will you not, ‘What about your whitewash?’ ” (Ezek. 13:10-12 Moffatt). We are in the vast process of whitewashing flimsy walls run up to safeguard the people: militarism, selfish nationalism, force, balances of power, spheres of influence, leagues, pacts and treaties between sovereign nations. They are all flimsy walls, beautifully whitewashed. But the “deluge of rain is coming . . . and a stormy blast shall break out, till down falls the flimsy wall” (v. 11). Life will try our flimsy walls. It will render its verdict, and everything not-the-way will collapse. Christ pronounces; life executes.
O Christ, I see more clearly every hour that your Way is my way and I cannot have my way unless I take your Way. So from pure self-interest, I would take your Way. And yet when I take your will, I am loosed from pure self-interest. I love you, I love everybody, I love myself. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “Why break the commands of the Eternal? Why defeat yourselves?” (2 Chron. 24:20 Moffatt).
Week 26 Thursday
For the Everlasting Right
Daniel 4:26; 8:23-25
We have seen that the Way is in the nature of Reality.
Ezekiel puts it thus, “Your doom appears; your sin has blossomed, your pride has budded” (Ezek. 7:10 Moffatt). The doom is not imposed from without as punishment, it is inherent. The doom is in the blossoming of the sin, in the budding of the pride. The psalmist speaks of the silent laws of God, “their speech has never a word, not a sound for the ear, and yet their message spreads the wide world over, their meaning carries to earth’s end” (Ps. 19:1-4 Moffatt). They are written in us, for each of us
. . . ever bears about
A silent court of justice in his breast,
Himself the judge and jury, and himself
The prisoner at the bar, ever condemn’d*
They are written in the heavens:
For the everlasting right
The silent stars are strong.**
“The stars from their courses fought against Sisera” (Judg. 5:20 CEB)—they fight against any who fight against the Way. We read, “God has prepared all that for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9 Moffatt). God has prepared it in the constitution of things. The Way is the warp and woof of the universe. Somebody has said, “The world is vascular—cut it anywhere and it will bleed.” It will bleed with the blood of Christ.
The Oxyrhynchus papyri include a striking saying of Jesus, “The kingdom of heaven is within you, and whosoever shall know himself shall find it.”*** The first part, “The kingdom of heaven is within you,” is taken from the canonical Scriptures; but the second part, “and whosoever shall know himself shall find it,” sounds Greek: Know thyself. And yet in the light of modern discovery, it more and more sounds true. The more you discover the laws of your being, the more you discover the laws of God. They are the same. And the amazing discovery is this: The Author of the laws of the kingdom written in Scripture and the Author of the laws written in us is the same.
O hidden, universal Christ, I cannot turn anywhere without confronting you. For I meet you on every road, the road of the Scriptures and the road of life. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Christ is everywhere and he is in me. What more do I want, except more of him?
*Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Sea Dreams,” The Complete Poetical Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate (Troy, N.Y.: H. B. Nims, 1885), 234.
**Fredereick L. Hosmer, “The Day of God” in The Pilgrim Hymnal, edited by Charles L. Noyes and Charles L Ziegler (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1912), 317.
***Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt, eds., The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Part IV (London: Egypt Exploration Fund, 1904), 6.
Week 26 Friday
The Open Secret
Luke 8:9-10 (Moffatt); Ephesians 3:2-6
We saw yesterday that “the kingdom of heaven is within you, and whosoever shall know himself shall find it.” “But,” queried a thoughtful woman in Latin America, “if the law of Christ is the law of our being, why have we been so long in discovering it?”
Jesus speaks of “the open secrets of the Realm of heaven” (Matt. 13:11 Moffatt). The kingdom of God is a secret. It is hidden within the nature of reality, but it is an “open secret,” open to those who pay the price and search for it. All God’s great things are “open secrets.” Electricity was hidden in the universe before the foundation of the world, but not until Franklin was it discovered. The possibility of being heard around the world was there from the beginning, but Marconi brought it to light. All the laws of God are gradually being discovered.
Jesus is the key to the meaning of the universe. Follow the clues he gives and you get the answers every time. But the answers are hidden answers; they are an “open secret.” The secret is a spirit, the spirit of self-surrendered humility. Everything in the kingdom is open to those who surrender to and obey the kingdom. We are in the process of discovering that kingdom hidden in the nature of reality. The kingdom is there, the ground plan of our being.
H. G. Wells says that the psychologist can stand alongside the preacher and say that unless you get free from all preoccupation with self-interest there is a disintegration of personality. “Self-interest never took a man or a community to any other end than damnation.”* That is the essence of the Christian position. We can now say with assurance that there isn’t a law of your body that contradicts the Christian faith. Those laws are the Christian faith written in flesh and blood and tissue.
When we surrender unchristian attitudes, life works better, works well. “I had nervous headache and nervous indigestion and no relief. Sunday night I was untied while you were speaking. I surrendered it all to God. Been free of it ever since—it’s gone,” said a woman. When she took Christian attitudes, health set in. Someday the psychologist is going to say, “Be Christian and be well.”
O God, your kingdom is written in us as the Way. We know it, and we rejoice in it. How wonderful that at last we have found the Great Design, the Pattern for life, the Way to live, so intimate, so a part of us, so inescapable. And we would not escape it. How can we and live? Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Today I shall find some new footprint of the king in my being and in my relationships—an exciting adventure.
*The quotation is from H. G. Wells, New Worlds for Old (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 105. No published source was found for the statement preceding the quotation.
Week 26 Saturday
In Which We Ask Ourselves Questions
2 Corinthians 13:5; Galatians 3:1-4
We have put our finger on sixteen roads with dead ends. Today ends our six-month quest, so today we will run over in searching thought to see whether we are on the Way—fully. Are we ready for an all-out following of the Way?
(1) Have I surrendered that last lurking fear to Christ? Am I now living by faith and confidence instead of by fear? (2) Have I given over to God my resentments? Am I all out for the way of love for everybody? (3) Have I left behind me all negativism and retreatism? Do I belong to the “forward march,” not to the “backward step”? (4) Have I given over to God all my inferiority complexes? Am I able for anything I should do? (5) Have I given over to God myself, so that I am no longer a self-centered person? (6) Am I going to try to correct others by trying to correct myself? Shall I let that be my criticism of others? (7) Have I surrendered this touchy, oversensitive self to God, released from all oversensitivity? Am I going to cease to look for slights and look for opportunities to be of service? (8) Have I offered to God my inward divisions, with no civil war anywhere? (9) Have I broken the habit of indecision? Am I able now to decide things because there is only one self to decide things? (10) Is my sex life wholly under God’s control? Will God’s guidance, instead of my impulses, decide the use of my sex life? (11) Have I surrendered completely and fully all use of narcotics? Am I through with these crutches? (12) Have I given over to God all my material wealth to be used as God directs? (13) Am I through with boredom, never saying again that I am bored, since in Christ I am eternally alive and interested? (14) If I can’t be perfect, am I willing to be imperfect, and gladly willing, since I can do all things for the love of God? (15) Have I given over all jealous feelings, and do I henceforth rejoice in everybody’s success? (16) And finally, have I been weaned from all idols, so that now I have gone beyond them to Christ and through Christ to God?
Your feet are on the Way! Say a quiet hallelujah or throw your hat in the air!
O Christ, why shouldn’t I rejoice with joy unspeakable for I’ve found the greatest thing that life can hold—the Way to live! Can anything be greater than that? So I rejoice, with all the stops out! And now, Lord, you have all my ransomed powers. Use them, for they are made to be yours. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “The full joy of thy presence” (Ps. 16:11 Moffatt). Yes, in Christ I have a joy without alloy.