Week 31—Thursday 1 Timothy 1:3-6
Week 31—THURSDAY
“YOUR FUTURE IN YOUR HAND”
We must pause another day on accepting anything less than the Word become flesh in support of the Christian gospel and the Christian movement. The girl mentioned yesterday was a soothsayer, a teller of fortunes. We need not argue the truth or falsity of telling fortunes. True or false, it represents the Word become word—your fortune is a verbal statement of what is going to happen to you. It makes no attempt to derive the fortune through you, depending on what you do to decide your own fortune. That sends life on the wrong track and those who take that method of deciding their fortune will decay—decay by the very method. Your fortune is decided by the way you decide and act and in no other way.
A palmist in India said, “I want to read your fortune in your hand.” “Yes,” I replied, “my destiny is in my hand, but not the way you think. My destiny is in the way I grasp the situations I meet around me—it is in the grasp of my hand, not in the lines of my hand.”
Take spiritualism. The spiritualists bring in materialization as a proof of the reality of spiritualism—table rapping, falling plates. Suppose they could be proved to be true, what good would that do? What moral quality is in table rapping and flying plates? This materialization is a false instance of the Word become flesh. The embodiment is not in moral living, the Word become flesh, it is in magical happenings—the word become the wand.
Astrology is in the same category. India is in the aftermath of a recovery from an orgy of fear and panic over the doom predicted by the astrologers because of the universal position of the planets. Nothing happened—nothing except that a people were let down and weakened by trying to read their destiny in their stars instead of in their decisions. The Word that becomes flesh only in lumps of matter floating in space is a false word become flesh—it is pure materialism.
O Lord Jesus, we thank you for the cleansing sanity of the Word becoming flesh. It saves us from all signs and wonders and pseudomaterializations and concentrates our attention and love upon the fact of your Incarnation. That is enough. We thank you. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: My destiny is my decisions and nothing can change that destiny except my choices.