Week 8—Wednesday Acts 5:1-6
Week 8—WEDNESDAY
“ALL THINGS BETRAY THEE, WHO BETRAYETH ME”
We pursue the fact that the Christian way is written within us. Therefore morality is not something we can take or leave and nothing happens. Everything happens. Morality is not built up by mores, by custom—it is not built up, but built in. You don’t break the moral laws; you break yourself upon them. This is a universe where you get results or you get consequences. If you work with the moral universe, you get results—it will back you, sustain you, and you will have cosmic support for your way of life. But if you go against the moral universe, you get consequences—you’ll be up against things, you’ll be frustrated. “All things betray thee, who betrayeth me.” Some people go through life getting results; others get consequences. You are free to choose, but you’re not free to choose the results or the consequences of your choices. They are in hands not your own.
In India I was talking to a politician, trying to get him to give up a relationship with a woman, for he was snarling up his home and another home—and himself. In order to ward off my appeal, he told me of a British general who was challenged by the Oxford Group Movement with its four absolutes: absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, absolute love. This general was not willing to build his life upon these four absolutes, so in order to ward off the appeal said half-humorously and half-seriously that he was going to organize another group movement—the Cambridge Group Movement—and they would have four absolutes, too, but the opposite—absolute dishonesty, absolute impurity, absolute selfishness, and absolute hate. The politician waited for me to laugh, but I looked him straight in the eye and said: “Why don’t you organize a movement on absolute dishonesty, absolute impurity, absolute selfishness, and absolute hate? If you believe in evil, why don’t you make it absolute? Why are you so tentative in sin? Why don’t you sin with the stops out?” He looked at me in surprise and said: “Oh, no, we couldn’t do that. You see, it wouldn’t work.”
O Gracious Father, your Way will work, but no other way will. Then bring us back to our senses and let us take your Way and only your Way. For a mixture of your Way and other ways makes a mess and makes us a mess as well. Help me to be all yours and only yours. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Things will go to pieces around me if they go to pieces within me.