Week 1—Friday Matthew 13:16-17
Matthew 13:16-17
THE QUEST FOR THE PERFECT REVELATION
We continue our quest for the Perfect Revelation. If God should give us a book from heaven as the revelation of God, we would read into those words our highest experience of those words. But now the new possibility has come. I can see those words through a Divine Illustration of the meaning of those words. I see the word “purity,” and I no longer read into it my highest experience of purity, which is partial and incomplete, but I see it in the light of a Purity which shared my temptations, minus my falls. I see Purity—the Real Thing. I no longer see the word “God” in the light of my imagination of God, but in the light of this authentic uncovering of the nature of God in understandable terms—human terms. I look up through Jesus, the Son, and I now know what God is like. God is a Christ-like God, and if so, then God is a good God and trustable. I could think of nothing higher; I could be content with nothing less.
If God isn’t like Jesus, I am not interested in God. For the highest I know in the realm of character is to be Christlike. I said that in India, and a Hindu wrote to me: “You took my breath away. This is Bhakti [devotion] par excellence. You said you wouldn’t be interested in God if He were not like your Guru [Master].” But my Guru is no human Guru—he is God’s authentic self-revelation. When the disciples said, “Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us,” Jesus quietly said: “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:8-9, KJV), and it was one of the greatest moments in human history. In the Congo when those in charge were about to pull up the idol from the idol-pit, the people fell back, terror-stricken. They cried: “If we look on the face of ‘our father,’ we will die.” But here, as we look on the face of “Our Father” in the person of Jesus, then we do not die, but live! We see God not terrible but tender, not forbidding but forgiving. We see in Jesus God as he is—really is!
O Son of God, we thank you for showing us the Father. We would never have known what God was like had we not looked on your face. Seeing God in your face, we rest not satisfied but stirred—stirred to be like what we see in you. Read our gratitude. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Perhaps I cannot be authoritative, but I can be authentic.