Week 12—Wednesday 1 Corinthians 3:18-20
Week 12—WEDNESDAY
BARREN INTELLECTUALISM
We are studying the supremacy of love in human nature and the supremacy of the Divine Love in changing human nature. A man who was widely experienced in dealing with alcoholism said that he had never seen a case of alcoholism cured by purely psychiatric methods. Unless psychiatry can introduce the patient to the redeeming grace of God-in-Christ, it leaves the patient helped at the edges perhaps, but unredeemed at the Center—the self-preoccupied libido holds the center. That center must be surrendered to something beyond itself—to God, through Christ. Love for Christ expels the lower love—the lower love is converted from eros, self-regarding love, to agape, the other-regarding love. You cannot get rid of one desire except to replace it by a higher desire. Psychiatry with its barren intellectualism, when it offers insight as the remedy, finds itself giving light on life, but powerless to give life to life. It lacks the God-in-Christ reference and the God-in-Christ power to change love, and therefore, life. It is moonlight, not sunlight.
A psychological counselor teaching counseling in a Christian institution said he was going to get a divorce from his wife on the ground that he had grown up and was mature and she had not grown up and was immature. But he was personally disrupted and constantly took tranquilizers. Dependence on tranquilizers was a sign of his maturity! Tranquilizers are the refuge of bankrupt psychiatry and bankrupt medicine when they know no God-in-Christ.
A nurse of thirty-eight years’ experience said: “This country is being turned into imbecility and dullness by tranquilizers, taken because of any national crisis or any personal trouble.” The love of Christ is not a tranquilizer, an opiate; it is a stimulus—“By the stimulus of Christ.” He converts all our desires to higher ends—stimulates them with his own love and power. Then we are so taken up with the love of Christ that the expulsive power of a new affection drives out the lower. And that works to the degree that we make it work. This is emerging as “the sovereign remedy.” There is no other on the field.
“O Love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee.” Where else should I go? You have the words of eternal life. And those words can become flesh in me. I can love with your love when I cannot love with mine. So I turn to you to be filled—filled with love. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “The sovereign remedy”—love—is so simple, so at hand, so available that we marvel that everyone doesn’t use it.