Week 6 Sunday
Week 6 Sunday
Can We Be Too Christian?
Matthew 19:16-22
We must spend another week on the consideration of the naturalness of the Christian way. A prominent member of the church showed in these words that he thought the Christian way is alien to life, that you might have too much of it: “You can have too much of religion. You must live a balanced life and make religion one of the interests of life.” Of course you can have too much of religion that is off center, not centered in Christ; but if the Christian way is the Way, then it is not one of the interests of life, it is Life controlling all life. Yesterday we quoted the passage, “All things have been created by him and for him”; we are made for Christ and his ways. The rest of the passage is significant, “And all coheres in him” (Col. 1: 17 Moffatt). In him all things cohere, or hang together. Out of him all things are incoherent and go to pieces. When the pressures of life press hard or calamities strike, Christians know how to stand up under it better. Jesus said that if you build upon his way, then when the rain descends and the storm beats and the flood arises, your house will stand, for it is built upon a rock. Life will approve it, sustain it. It will cohere, hang together. But if you build upon something else, then when the rain descends, the storm beats, and the flood arises, your house will crash. Life will not sustain it; it will not cohere. In saying this, Jesus was saying what all life corroborates: The judgments of Christ and the judgments of life are the same. If you won’t listen to the judgments of Christ, you will have to listen to the judgments of life. As I write this, at the beginning of a series of lectures in London, Ontario, a full-page advertisement of this series in the local paper this morning—put in by business and professional people—has this sentence in the center of the page, “If you will not live with God, you cannot live with yourself.” These people found that the very pressures of modern life corroborate this fact. Revolt against God, and you revolt against yourself. Life is an incoherent mess until it finds the Way. Its sums won’t add up; all its ways are ways to disillusionment. You have to find the key, or all your life you will stand fumbling with the lock of life, and it won’t open.
O Christ, you are my key. When I find you, I find an open door, a way to live, a way to harmony, a way to everything I want in my inmost depths. I know life when I know you. I know death when I do not have you. Help me, then, to choose you. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Today my life will be a mess or a message. I choose.
Week 6 Monday
The God of Life and the God of Religion
John 1:4; 10:10; 12:50
An outstanding African American professor said in my hearing, “The biggest question with me is the question of making no distinction between the God of life and the God of religion.” Are they one? The Christian’s answer is an unequivocal yes. The revelation of life that you see in Jesus Christ and the revelation of life slowly unfolding in history are the same. They speak the same story, render the same verdict regarding life.
The professor added these significant words, “If we nourish within om hearts fear and hate and self-centeredness, we shall spend our days stumbling in the dark.” Why? For the simple reason that life is not made for fear, for hate, for self-centeredness. Take those ways, and you stumble in the dark. However, if you nourish within your heart faith and love and other-centeredness, you will spend your days joyously walking in the light. For the one way is for nature, and the other is against it. A bishop spoke of the Christian way as costly, “It will cost you something to be a Christian.” A management engineer said, “After hearing the bishop and hearing the message on the naturalness of the Christian way, my inner reaction was: ‘How costly it will be not to be a Christian!’ ” To be a Christian you may have to give up some things, but not to be a Christian you have to give up everything, everything worthwhile. In giving up things for Christ, I gave up nothing but what subtracted from me, and when I got him, I got everything that added to me. This passage in 1 John 5:3 (Moffatt) sums up this thought perfectly, “His commands are not irksome.” Why? For he commands nothing that is not demanded by the necessities of life. If he did not command them, life would. His commands are not irksome, for when you obey them, you turn out happy, harmonious, and adjusted. And when you do not obey his commands, you turn out unhappy, inharmonious, and maladjusted. You may take it or leave it, but that is what life says.
O Christ, I know I had better listen to life. I get hurt when I don’t. But why should I have to listen to life when I have you to listen to? For you are Life. In you I find everything I want and many things I never dreamed I needed or wanted. I thank you. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: When God commands, life commends.
Week 6 Tuesday
More Fun to Be a Christian?
1 John 4:9; 5:11-12
Yesterday we ended by repeating that “His commands are not irksome.” I do not mean to say that it will not cause you pain and mental suffering to break old ways of life, to surrender your will to his ways. It will. To reverse one’s habits causes upset. But it is an upset that sets up! The initial pain is the “pain divine”; it is the pain that leads to the profoundest joy that life knows—the joy of adjustment, of harmony, of Life.
Jesus puts it this way, “My yoke is kindly” (Matt. 11:30 Moffatt). Why is his yoke kindly? Because he asks little of us? On the contrary, he asks our very all. He demands something that no one dare ask another, our all. And yet when we respond and give the all, we do find the yoke kindly. Why? Because it is of our “kind”; it fits us; we are made for it. His yoke is my yearning, my inmost yearning. His discipline is my desire, my inmost desire. His Life is my life.
He says, again, “My burden [is] light.” It is not that he puts no burdens on us; he puts tremendous burdens on us. For if you follow him, you will find the world and its burdens laid on your heart, these in addition to your own. But those who gladly accept his burden find it is light; the heart sings under it. His burden is a burden only as wings are a burden to a bird, fins are a burden to a fish, and love is a burden to the heart.
Some young people in Boise, Idaho, were discussing why they were Christians, and one boy spoke up and said, “I’m a Christian because it is a heap more fun to be a Christian than it is going to the devil.” A heap more fun! Why? Well, one satisfies a life and the other satisfies an impulse, an impulse that throws confusion and disgust into the rest of life. A part determines the whole instead of the whole determining the part. One ends in a mess; the other ends in fun. The Christian way is literally goodness turned to gaiety. Christians sing, and sing from the depths. We don’t sing to make ourselves happy; we sing because we are profoundly happy. For our happiness is not dependent on happenings; it is founded on life.
O Christ, my every thought dances and sings when it thinks of you. For you have set Joy within my heart. I knew some joys before I found you. But in you I know Joy, and in that Joy all lesser joys are contained and come to fulfillment. Am I grateful? Read my unspoken gratitude! Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: The Christian way is life set to music; the unchristian way is life set to misery.
Week 6 Wednesday
The Light Turned to Darkness
Romans 6:21-23; I John 2:16-17
We continue our study of the Way as the natural way. Jesus calls himself “the master of the House” (Luke 13:25 Moffatt). He is literally just that, “the master of the House.” When he masters it, the house of Mansoul* is orderly and harmonious and livable. But when something else becomes master of the house, then you can’t live in the house of Mansoul. Isaiah speaks of those who take hold of a clansman, crying, “Your house has a robe of office; come, be our chieftain, then, master this chaos” (Isa. 3:6 Moffatt). The people revolted from God, and the result was chaos, and they turned to almost anyone to try to “master this chaos.” No one can “master this chaos” in the house of Mansoul except the Master, the real “master of the House.”
Jesus says, “If your Eye is generous” (Matt. 6:22 Moffatt)—if your eye, your way of looking at life, is generous, is Christian—then your whole body is full of light. The generous eye generates, “gives birth” to happiness, light, life. You are fulfilled, and you are creative. But “if your Eye is selfish,” then everything you touch becomes darkness: money, sex, all relationships. The very self disintegrates and becomes darkness. This is not-the-way. When the very light turns to darkness, what a darkness it is! When your very goods become bads, how bad it is! The whole of your body becomes darkened. You cannot take a wrong attitude in one part of your being without that darkness spreading to the whole of your body, affecting your whole personality. When all your foods become poisons, all your success is failure, all your light is darkness, all your sums come out wrong. What a tangled-up thing life becomes! That is not-the-way, and it is anti-natural. Life won’t respond to it. Chesterton says, “Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural.”**
Jesus says, “I know that his orders mean eternal life” (John 12:50 Moffatt). For God’s orders mean order—within, without, everywhere! Refusal of God’s orders means disorder—within, without, everywhere! For God orders only what life must have—if life lives.
O living Christ, you are living, and you are life giving. I would know you, for I would know life. And now I’m beginning to know life as I am beginning to know you. Life steals into every portion of my being with healing and with health. I am alive, alive to my depths. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I submit my natural to the Supernatural that it may become more natural.
*Mansoul is a reference to The Holy War, a 1682 novel by John Bunyan, written as an allegory on the fight for man’s soul.
**Gilbert K. Chesterton, Heretics (New York: John Lane Co., 1905), 99.
Week 6 Thursday
Life-denying and Life-affirming
Romans 9:33; 1 Corinthians 3:21-22
The two types of religion, the unnatural and the natural, are embodied in John the Baptist and in Jesus.
John tried to show God in the unnatural, lived without a home in the desert, “neither ate nor drank,” lived upon wild locusts and honey, beat upon the soul of a nation from without—an imposed morality. “You must not do this; you must do that”—a whipping up of the will. He imposed rites upon men.
Jesus revealed God from within the process of life. He ate and drank and lived in homes; he used parables taken from life and nature; he lifted up the laws underlying life; showed God in the regularities, the natural. Not that he stopped with the natural. He showed God in the extranatural, the supernatural. But it was all supernaturally natural. He revealed Life within life. There is a kinship between the natural and the supernatural. Life was of one piece.
Jesus said that “he who is least in the kingdom of God is greater” than John (Matt. 11:11), for John was approaching life from the outside, and Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21 KJV): in your nerves, your tissues, your blood, your very makeup. John presented religion as anti-natural asceticism; Jesus presented it as a supernatural naturalism. John’s religion was against life, and Jesus’ was for life. The faith that John presented was world-denying and life-denying. Jesus was world-affirming and life-affirming. One was a no! The other was a yes! John preached a baptism of repentance, a turning from. Jesus offered a baptism of the Spirit, a turning toward—positive, receptive. John’s movement died. Jesus’ movement lives on. For you cannot live against life. The answer to life is not a reduction of life but an inner fullness of life that can master outer life.
The end product of the impact of Jesus on the lives of the disciples was this, “The Spirit enabled them to express themselves” (Acts 2:4 Moffatt). The end was self-expression through Spirit-possession. They were most themselves when most God’s. They were free from inhibitions, fears, guilts. Now they could be natural, supernaturally natural.
O Christ, I see you so poised, so natural, so altogether alive and spontaneous. I would be that way too. So I surrender my unnatural sin, my tied-up unnatural self, into your hands to be loosed and alive and gay and natural. I would be free—free to be myself in you. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: In you I am myself; outside of you I am beside myself.
Week 6 Friday
Reaching Our Full Life
John 3:16; Galatians 2:20
Three words put into small compass what we have been saying these two weeks about the naturalness of the Christian way, “realized in him” (1 John 2:8 Moffatt). This phrase “realized in him” can be written after every truth found anywhere in any philosophy; in him the idea has become the fact. But there is something more than ideas realized in him. We are realized in him; we come to our own, become ourselves, are truly natural. It is a simple, literal fact that the more I belong to him, the more I belong to myself. The more I am bound to him, the freer I am.
Your code of morals can then be summed up in a sentence, “Love Christ, and do as you like.” For then you will do what is right and what is good for you. And more, you will do what you really like.
Jesus said to the woman at the well, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks from the water that I will give will never be thirsty again” (John 4:13-14 CEB). “Never be thirsty again”? Why? Because of the ever-present source of satisfaction at the heart of life when Christ is there. Your thirsts are satisfied in Christ, for he is the natural satisfaction of natural desires.
First John 4:9 (Moffatt) includes this penetrating sentence, “By him we might live.” By him we live: live fully, abundantly, to our very fingertips. Out of him we perish in every portion of our being.
This passage sums up the matter, “It is in him that you reach your full life” (Col. 2:10 Moffatt). Just as Jesus came not to destroy the law and the prophets but to fulfill them, so he comes not to destroy the laws and the prophecies written in us but to fulfill them. Everything surrendered to him comes to its fulfillment—comes to its full life. Everything out of him is runted and stunted.
In John 17:3 (Moffatt) we read, “This is life eternal, that they know you, the only real God, and him whom you have sent.” To know God as revealed in Christ, in the sense of participating in, is life eternal. It is also life natural.
O gracious Christ, I begin to see in you my life, my all. You are the life of my nerves, my flesh, my blood, my brain cells—my inmost being. In you I tingle with life; I overflow with it; I am submerged in it. And am I grateful? You will have to read the gratitude I cannot speak. Thank you. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: As the flower in reaching toward the sun reaches its own full life, so in reaching toward Christ I reach my own fullest life.
Week 6 Saturday
The Christian Way Is Sense
James 3:13-18
We come to the end of the week of our study of the naturalness of the Christian way. The real Christian is the most universalized person on earth, the most natural. A great many people think they have to be less Christian to be more universal. That is a mistake. The more Christian you are, the more universal you are. You are at home in everything, everywhere except in one thing, evil. For in evil, life turns unnatural, lives against itself.
A doctor flung himself in a chair in front of me and eagerly asked, “Is religion natural?” His acceptance or rejection of it depended upon the answer. I could answer, “If you mean by religion, Christ—for he is my definition of religion—then the answer is an unqualified yes.” Moreover it can be added, everything that doesn’t fit into his spirit is unnatural.
Charles Edward Pugh sums up the Christian way in these words, “It is horse sense. It is sanity. And anyone who acts differently is a damned fool, and I am not swearing when I say it.”* Everyone who has experienced Christ knows that Pugh was reverent when he said it. For outside of Christ we do damn ourselves to futility, to an impossible way of life. And we know that we are fools to try it.
I know exactly what happens when I do the Christian thing: I am universalized, at home in the universe; the sum total of reality is behind me; I walk the earth a conqueror; I am afraid of nothing; everything within me says, “This is the natural way to live.”
When I go against the Christian way, however, I know exactly what happens: I am out of gear; something has slipped a cog; I feel orphaned, estranged, not at home with myself or people or God; my life sags and loses its music; everything within me says, “This is the unnatural way to live.”
Some high-school girls interviewed me for their paper and asked, “Is there anything you want that you haven’t got?” I could reply, “I don’t know of a thing that I want that I haven’t got. All I want is more of what I have got.” I had found the way, the natural way.
O living Christ, when my feet come to your Way, I am filled with a sense of surety, a sense of being at home, a sense of being rhythmical and harmonious and natural. All my complexities have been reduced to simplicities, all my clashes to concord. I thank you. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: The Way is sense; all else is nonsense.
*Source unknown.