Week 4 Sunday
Week 4 Sunday
Written in Our Relationships?
Proverbs 4:18-23
We continue our search for the Way amid the ways of people. A state university president was talking to a businessperson who did not attend church, “You don’t give the vote of your life to them; do you want all the churches to burn down?” To which the businessperson replied, “No, by Jerry, it would ruin my business.” This businessperson, uncommitted to religion, saw that unless there is a basis of morality in the community, business is impossible. For the whole structure of life rests on that imponderable thing called character. If the character breaks, the confidence breaks. If the confidence breaks, the community breaks. If the community breaks, the country breaks. Nothing is more false than to say, “Business is business”; for business that regards only itself and does not regard the moral universe sooner or later breaks itself upon that moral universe. The vice president of a bank at the age of seventy-five was about to get a divorce and remarry. The president of the bank was badly upset and said, “This is bad for the business of the bank.” It would lower confidence in the moral integrity of a leading official, and that was bad for business.
A vice president of one of the leading banks in the United States said, “The outstanding necessity of banking is unselfishness.” He was right. You must think in terms of others’ good or else life will not react to you in benefit. “He profits most who serves best,” may not be the highest motive for morality, but Rotarians who use this phrase see that there is a law of service written into life.
The head of a very practical institution, the Imperial Bank of India, said to me, “We have discovered that it doesn’t pay us to break a creditor, for if he goes down, the financial situation goes down with him. So we find it better to nurse him along and help him to his feet. If we save him, we save a situation as well, and that is good for the bank.” My reply, “So the Imperial Bank is also among the prophets, preaching redemption of the hurt and the weak! But that’s the Christian position!” How did they come to that conclusion? Trial and error.
O God, I find the Way written in the common ways of life. You have left your footprints everywhere. We follow them with bated breath, for we know if we find them, we find Life. Help us. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: God’s footprints are in my tissues, in my nerves, in me.
Week 4 Monday
“Nothing That Is Right Is Futile”
Matthew 7:12; James 2:8
We continue our search for the Way amid the ways of people. Ignazio Silone, the Italian novelist, allegedly told this story of what happened to some of his friends who had been ground down by wars, revolutions, and fascism. “One poor devil came to me the other day,” he reports, “his eyes shining as if he had made an important discovery. ‘One should always act toward others,’ he said with sober emphasis, ‘as one would like to have them act toward oneself.’ I hadn’t the heart,” says Silone, “to tell him that his discovery was not exactly new, but expressed an ancient wisdom, for I saw he had seized upon it by dint of sufferings and struggles.” Suffering had taken this poor fellow by the hand and had led him to the Way.
A little girl, reared in a lovely American home, tells what she discovered, “I’m not always good, but when I’m not good, I’m miserable.” The little girl has discovered that there is a world of eternal goodness. When she fitted into it, she was adjusted and happy. When she lived against it, she received the results in herself.
A Des Moines editor captioned an editorial “Nothing that is right is futile.” He saw that the right is backed by the universe and hence cannot be futile. In the end, it will come out on top. Anything that is wrong, however, cannot be anything but futile.
A high-school student came up to me at the close of my address and said, “You mentioned the young man who said he would take the beautiful without any reference to the good. But aren’t the good and the beautiful the same?” This youth saw with rare insight that the bad could never be beautiful. The good is always beautiful, for it is according to the eternal loveliness.
Benjamin Franklin is credited with saying, “A lie is not useful,” and he said a very profound thing, for the universe is not built for the success of a lie. A lie breaks itself upon the nature of reality; therefore, no lie can ultimately succeed. “Lies have short legs,” says a German proverb, but that has been changed now by the Germans into, “Lies have one short leg,” for Goebbels, the propaganda minister, had one short leg! Lies had defeated themselves.
O my gracious Lord, I am finding your Way amid our ways. Daily, hourly, it is being disclosed before my astonished eyes. Help me to walk in your Way as I see it. For I know that when I take other ways, they defeat themselves. Your Way verifies itself. I thank you. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: God is the Eternal Beautiful. Sin is the Eternal Ugliness.
Week 4 Tuesday
All Converge on the Way
Proverbs 10:16, 30; 11:19; 12:7
An expert on family relations said, “You must give up yourself, you must serve others, or you cannot get along with others.” This is interesting. This expert, by the method of observation and trial and error, found that you cannot get along with people unless you cease to be self-centered, unless you serve others. But that is Christian! Listen to an economist, Arthur A. Hood, as he unfolds a discovery, “Mass production—the abundant life in material terms—is here. But we cannot have it or keep it until we learn mass distribution under the principles of the Golden Rule. Distribution involves the application of spiritual meaning to production.”* Hood discovered that mass production that emphasizes “Thou shalt love thyself” cannot succeed unless you have mass distribution that emphasizes “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” No wonder an engineer said, “The great engineering word is awareness of people.” Engineering word! We thought “awareness of people” was the Christian word! Are they one? Yes! Because not only “the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27), but engineering was made for man and not man for engineering. The effect on human personality is the criterion of its worthwhileness. Bernard Shaw could scarcely be accused of Christian bias, but he is said to have summed up a life conclusion in these words, “After reviewing the world of human events for sixty years, I am prepared to say that I see no way out of the world’s misery except the way that Christ would take were he to undertake the work of a modern statesman.”** Shaw saw life being tangled up as people try ways other than the Way. Then there is Pitirim A. Sorokin, professor of sociology at Harvard, who says that the idea of selfish materialism underlying Western civilization is bankrupt and unable to sustain our civilization any further, and that the upset in civilization is over the search for a new idea around which life can revolve. The new idea? He points to the Sermon on the Mount, a cooperative order.
Here, then, a family-relations expert, an economist, an engineer, a socialist writer, and a sociologist all converge on one thing—the Way!
O Lord and God, we bow in humble wonder that you have shown your Way to us through many diverse ways. In the end, they converge upon your Way—the Way we see in Christ. Help us to follow. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: The Sermon on the Mount of yesterday is the Sermon for the Mart today.
*Arthur A. Hood was editor of the American Lumberman and Building Products Merchandiser in the 1940s. The source for the quotation is unknown.
**No published source was found for this quotation.
Week 4 Wednesday
Is the Christian Way the Natural Way?
Luke 15:17-24
We saw yesterday that we try ways other than God’s ways, and get hurt. “He who sows for his flesh will reap destruction from the flesh” (Gal. 6:8 Moffatt). Destruction? When? Hereafter? No, now! We see ways ending in decay, in death—death to joy, to peace, to personality, to contribution.
The Christian way is the natural way, the way we are made to live. Everything else is unnatural. Sin is not natural. It is the accustomed but not the natural. Were it the natural we would bloom under it. Do we? On the contrary, sin blights. It is sand in the machinery of life; it is not-the-way. We have been taught very often that sin is natural. If so, then goodness is the unnatural and the good are the strange, a little off-center. If that is true, then the Christian way has an impossible handicap; it is trying to live against nature. How can you live against nature and get away with it? No, goodness is the natural, and evil is the unnatural.
If evil were the natural, how could you with justice be punished for living according to nature? That would be most unfair. But you are punished whenever you take sin into your life. The fact is that sin and its punishment are one and the same thing. By its very nature, sin is disruptive; that disruption is the punishment. You don’t have to punish a cancer for being a cancer; cancer is its own punishment. You don’t have to punish the eye for having sand in it; sand in it is punishment. The word evil is the word live spelled backward. It is life attempting to live against itself. And that can’t be done. Evil is not only bad, it is stupid. It is an attempt to live against the nature of reality and get away with it. It is an attempt at the impossible. The result is inevitable—breakdown and frustration.
If sin were natural, then why wouldn’t it contribute to life, produce happiness, symmetry, harmony, effectiveness? It doesn’t. Goodness does contribute to life, does produce happiness, symmetry, harmony, effectiveness. Then which is the natural? Which one fits into nature? The facts answer. Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle says, “Sin is, has been, and ever shall be the parent of misery.”* Why? There is only one answer: It is not-the-way.
O God, I see I am being shut up to you and your Way. I am being hedged in from every side—everything pressing me to your feet. So I come. I am finding that I cannot live any other way. So I come. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: My way is frustration. God’s Way is fruitfulness.
*Thomas Carlyle, The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. 2, ed. Henry Duff Traill (London: Chapman and Hall, 1898), 53.
Week 4 Thursday
Sin Is the Unnatural
Isaiah 26:7, 10, 13-14
We insisted yesterday that sin is unnatural and goodness is natural. But there are objections. One is the teaching of certain passages, “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God” (1 Cor. 2:14 KJV). But Moffatt’s translation puts it, “The unspiritual man rejects these truths of the Spirit of God.” The contrast is not between the natural and the unnatural, but between the spiritual and the unspiritual. The Scriptures teach that God has made humankind in God’s own image, that there is a natural kinship between humanity and God, and that the laws of human being are the laws of God written into flesh.
If this is true, then all departure from those laws written into human nature is unnatural, a departure from nature. The most usual name for iniquity in the New Testament is hamartia—literally, “missing the mark.” There is a mark, a standard, written within us, and all departure from that is sin, “missing the mark.” Sin is the accustomed, but it is not the natural. If sin were the natural, it would feed us; but the result of sin is to bleed us.
There are those who do not accept the biblical account of humans being created in God’s image. They believe people have an animal heritage and therefore fight with natural animal tendencies within. Sin is therefore natural. The reply is that, even if we believe that humans physically have an animal heritage, nevertheless there is a profound difference between human and animal. All people worship in some form. Animals do not. There seems to be in people a kinship with God that makes us yearn for God with unwordable yearnings. Even if we physically have an animal heritage, somewhere along the line of ascent God seems to have breathed into us the breath of spiritual life so that humans became a living soul. That spiritual and moral nature makes a profound difference in people. It profoundly differentiates us from the animal. The difference between human and animal is not physical, but mental and spiritual. When people find God, we find the fulfillment of our mental and spiritual nature.
But, strangely enough, the same thing happens to our bodies. Our bodies are fulfilled when they do the will of God.
My Lord, I see that you have wrought, even into the texture of my physical life, your will and purpose. How can I escape you? You are intimate in these laws and purposes. Help me to align my life. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Nature works with me when I work with God, against me when I am against God.
Week 4 Friday
How Does Evil Arise?
Matthew 15:19; James 4:1
Note this passage, “Cleanse ourselves from everything that contaminates either flesh or spirit” (2 Cor. 7:1 Moffatt). If sin were natural, why should it contaminate? It should consummate. The fact that it contaminates shows that it is extraneous, does not belong to human nature, is alien.
If this is true, how does evil arise? If it is not inherent within us by nature, then how does it come into being? The clue can be found in these words, “Sin resulted in death for me by making use of this good thing” (Rom. 7:13 Moffatt). Evil always uses a good thing; it is the perversion of the good.
James gives us the clearest picture of this, “Let no one who is tried by temptation say, ‘My temptation comes from God’; God is incapable of being tempted by evil and he tempts no one. Everyone is tempted as he is beguiled and allured by his own desire; then Desire conceives and breeds Sin, while Sin matures and gives birth to Death” (Jas. 1:13-15 Moffatt).
Here, then, are the steps: Simple, natural, normal “desire” is “beguiled,” “allured,” turned from its natural way into unnatural ways, breaks the laws written in its own being. Then it becomes Desire with a capital “D,” and becomes dominant. Instead of desire submitting to and obeying the will of God, it becomes God; it is spelled Desire. It rules us, dictates to us. That breeds Sin. Desire has turned into Sin, also spelled with a capital; it is God. Then “Sin matures and gives birth to Death.”
Here, then, are the steps: (1) desire becomes Desire; (2) Desire becomes Sin; (3) Sin becomes Death. Simple desire is God-given and natural and right. But desire can slip out from under the control of God and become Desire. It controls us. It is master; we obey. The result of that is Sin and consequent Death, not physical death only, but Death to the whole person. If Sin is natural, why should it breed Death? If to live according to one’s nature breeds Death, then we are strangely constructed. Besides, if sin is natural, why should we be punished for living according to our nature? Where is the justice?
O God, how could that which destroys me be native to me? I know in the inmost depths of my being that when I sin this is not the Way. I violate every law of my being, and I know it. Help me. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Outside of God there is nothing but death.
Week 4 Saturday
Is Evil Always Disruptive?
Jeremiah 2:11-13
We saw yesterday that evil was a turning of the natural into the unnatural; it was a living against life. Self-love, the natural, can become selfishness, the unnatural. Self-respect, the natural, may be allured into pride, the unnatural. Love, the natural, can be beguiled into lust, the unnatural. Sex desire, the natural, can be allured away from its God-intended creative function, can become an end in itself and thus become Death to every portion of the being.
These simple, natural functions, dedicated to God and controlled by God, bring Life, Life to the whole person. But if they become God, become ends in themselves, then there is one result: Death—death to development, to happiness, to the whole person.
Peter speaks of “the passions of the flesh that wage war upon the soul” (1 Pet. 2:11 Moffatt). But if they are natural and right, why should they war against the soul? The Christian use of sex does not war against the soul; it sets up the soul. Only the unnatural use of sex wars against the soul. The natural use, that is, the Christian use, contributes to the soul’s well-being. Evil is good prostituted.
First Peter 3:12 (Moffatt) says, “The face of the Lord is set against wrongdoers.” We feel that to be true. But is the face of the universe also set against evil? When you do evil, do you feel naturalized, at home, related to the sum total of reality, the universe with you? On the contrary, you feel out of sorts, orphaned, estranged, furtive, underground, at cross-purposes with yourself and with life in general. Why? Because that is not the Way! Not only “the face of the Lord” but also the face of the universe, the face of life, is set against evil. Note, is “set.” It doesn’t change with the fashions of the day; it is “set,” for the universe has laws written in its very nature and hence unchangeable.
“For wherever jealousy and rivalry exist, there disorder reigns and every evil” (Jas. 3:16 Moffatt). If jealousy and rivalry were natural, why should they bring “disorder” and “every evil”? Why not order and every good? For the simple reason that jealousy and rivalry break the law of love, and that means “disorder” and “every evil.” The nature of reality decrees that. It is not-the-way.
O God, my Lord, open my eyes that I may see, may see you at work all about me working through your laws. And deeper, help me to see your approach to me in your Son. And help me to follow. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: The face of the Lord and the face of the universe are both set against evil.