Week 36 Sunday
Week 36 Sunday
Communion and Commission
Luke 24:15, 32; John 20:19-20; Acts 1:4, 8
Prayer seems many-sided, but really there are only two sides: communion and commission. The rest are phases of these two. These are the two heartbeats of the prayer life. And a heart has to keep beating in two directions or death ensues. All communion without commission—death. All commission without communion—death. The two together—life.
First there is communion. As I have looked at the rubber trees, freshly tapped, with the cup nestling up against the wound and taking the sap from the heart of the tree, I have thought of prayer as being just that. We press our empty lives like cups up against the wounds of the Eternal God and take from God life and power and redemption. Every day let me nestle up against God’s wounded side, for I am empty without it. And every day let my cup be emptied in loving help to others.
“And he appointed twelve, to be with him, and to be sent out to preach and have authority to cast out demons” (Mark 3:14-15). In the call of the disciples there were three things: (1) to be with him; (2) sent forth to preach; (3) to have moral authority. The first item is the call to be with him; hold that intact and everything else follows. Anyone who neglects communion will find the last two fading out. Also neglect commission and the first and the last will die. And moral authority depends upon the other two. Dim either the communion or the commission and moral authority is dimmed with them. But the one who keeps these two things intact does have moral authority. Empty closet, empty heart, empty hands: this is the spiritual history of many. Cause and effect: “Jesus would withdraw to deserted places for prayer. . . . Now the power of the Lord was with Jesus to heal” (Luke 5:16-17 CEB).
O Christ, who by example shows us the Source of power, give us the will to tap that power and to channel it to other lives. Amen.
Week 36 Monday
Does God Guide Our Lives?
Psalms 25:9; 31:3; 32:8; 93:24; Isaiah 58:11
Commission follows out of communion. In communion, you feel the hand of God upon your life guiding you to do certain things. We have organized our religious lives around certain services in the church, one on Sunday, one on Wednesday, and so on. If we attend these services, we think we are very good, faithful Christians. But between these services there are great gaps where God functions very feebly or not at all. Guidance fills up these gaps, and makes us every moment responsible to God. God is no longer in the interstices of life but in the very fiber of the whole structure. Guidance, therefore, brings God in from the occasional to the continuous.
Every Christian should live a God-guided life. For if God is, God should be in everything that concerns us—directing, controlling, inspiring. The Christian who doesn’t know this sense of guidance is missing something vital. For, mind you, if you are not guided by God, you are guided by something else. Perhaps yourself. But we all know that to be self-managed is to be self-damaged. And we are not good enough, and we don’t know enough to guide our lives. God must guide them.
Have you and I today
Stood silent as with Christ, apart from joy and fray
Of life, to see by faith His face;
And grow, by brief companionship, more true,
More nerved to lead, to dare, to do
For Him at any cost? Have we today
Found time in thought our hand to lay
In His, and thus compare
His will and ours, and wear
The impress of his wish? Be sure
Such contact will endure
Throughout the day; will help us walk erect
Through storm and flood.*
O God, help me to discern your touch upon my life and to obey it. Amen.
* Lutheran Woman’s Work (June 1915): 222.
Week 36 Tuesday
How Does God Guide Us?
Genesis 50:20; Isaiah 54:17; Romans 8:28; Philippians 1:12
God guides us in many ways, not one, but many. Among these are five outstanding ways: (1) circumstances, (2) enlightened Christian intelligence, (3) the spoken or written words of others, (4) an intimate group, (5) the Inner Voice.
Sometimes God guides by (1) circumstances, or shall we call them providences? Something opens before us, perhaps unexpectedly, just when we are in perplexity. That open door is matched against our perplexity, we walk through it, and find it has been God’s way.
Or God may close something before us, and that closing of the door proves to be God’s preventive guidance. Many times God lets us fail in a secondary thing that we may succeed in a primary thing. For many people are ruined by secondary successes. They get tangled up in them and never get to the really worthwhile things.
I am sure God prevented me from becoming fond of game-hunting in India. As a young missionary, I found my district filled with black buck. What more natural than to take a gun along while visiting these villages for evangelistic purposes? I did. I shot eighteen times at them and never hit one! Bad marksman? No, as a youth I was the best marksman in our crowd. But I had the feeling that God was making me miss. So I took the gun home and sold it, concluding that God had not called me to be a hunter, but an evangelist. My conclusion was right. I might have been crippled by a secondary success.
Many a woman, finding she has beauty, soon finds she has nothing else. The secondary success of beauty makes her neglect the primary facts of intelligence and soul and usefulness. God’s preventive grace has saved most of us at that point! So be it! Now for the open doors of intelligence, soul, and usefulness! God shuts lesser doors to open bigger ones.
O God, sometimes you save us by hard refusals and sometimes by opening doors. Help us to see you in both, and to obey without murmuring before hard refusals or without hesitation before open doors. Amen.
Week 36 Wednesday
Guidance through Enlightened Intelligence
Acts 6:2-5; 1 Timothy 1:7; 2 Timothy 2:7; Hebrews 8:10
God guides through (2) enlightened Christian intelligence. The development of Christian discernment is a necessary part of Christian development. Hebrews 5:14 says, “But solid food is for adults—that is, for those who through constant practice have their spiritual faculties carefully trained to distinguish good from evil” (Weymouth).
God wants us to love God with the whole of our being, including our minds: “You shall love the Lord your God with . . . all your mind” (Matt. 22:37). Any scheme of guidance that neglects the mind by underemphasis is, to that degree, not Christian. For the whole person is to be perfected.
God’s problem is how to guide us but not override us. For in the guidance, God must not merely make us do a certain thing; God must make us free, upstanding, discerning. I question any scheme of guidance that insists only or largely on the blank-sheet method; God is to write on it, as it were, what God wants us to do. Now I believe that God does guide us by the Inner Voice, but to make that the only method and to depend on that to dictate the minute details of our lives would be to weaken us.
Suppose a father or mother should undertake to dictate the minute things in the child’s life, asking only for implicit obedience, leaving little room for intelligent weighing of moral issues and free decision. Would that be guiding or overriding? Wouldn’t the child’s personality remain undeveloped? Moreover, if we ask for dictated guidance in every little thing, we shall be tempted to manufacture it if we don’t get it. This makes for unreality. No, we must not take one method alone and practically exclude others. God will guide our mental processes, if we are inwardly honest.
O Christ, we need the impact of your mind upon our minds, for without it our minds are confused and perplexed. And help us to obey our highest light. Amen.
Week 36 Thursday
God’s Guidance through Others
1 Samuel 3:9; Acts 9:11-17; Philemon 5-17
Sometimes God guides us through (3) the written or spoken word of others. Some passage in a book becomes luminous and speaks directly to our need. It is the very voice of God to us. Some word in a sermon seems to have in it more than the word of the speaker; it is God speaking. Or it may be a quiet word with a friend that opens the door to the solution of a problem or relief from a grief.
Everyone should have such a friend, a confidant, “a sharing partner,” the groups call them; someone to whom you can open your heart to the depths, so that person really knows you for all you are; someone to whom you can “exteriorate your rottenness,” if necessary, or with whom you can share your deepest perplexity. In his essay “Of Friendship,” Sir Francis Bacon writes, “This communicating of a man’s self to his friend works two contrary effects; for it redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in half.”* Shakespeare puts it this way: “Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.”**
What is a friend for except to share our problems and our sins as well as our joys and our goodness? The friend, freed from your inner emotions, may see the thing in just that detached way so necessary to give needed light. But even your friend’s word must be tested by the other tests of guidance. Don’t depend on it too implicitly. A student once asked me if I thought she should marry either of two men. I told her I didn’t think she should. “Thank you,” she said, “that settles it. I told God last night that I would take your voice for his voice.” I was right in my advice to her, for both men were rotters, but she was wrong in taking my word too implicitly and blindly. Take the word of the friend, but make your own decision in the quietness before God.
O Christ, who yearned for a human friend in the hour of Gethsemane’s darkness, but found one not, help me to find such a friend, for I shall need one. Amen.
* The Essays of Francis Bacon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 85.
** Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3.
Week 36 Friday
Guidance through a Group
Acts 13:1-3; 15:25-28
Many group movements with varying emphases have sprung up throughout the world: the Oxford Groups, the Cambridge Groups, the Burma Gospel Team Groups, Kagawa’s Fellowship of the Friends of Jesus Group, the Christian Ashram Group Movement in India, and various other types. I cannot help feeling that God’s Spirit has been raising up these groups to meet particular needs. Not that I think that any one of them has the complete truth, but each does seem to have some particular phase of truth that is partly neglected by others. The difficulty comes when each becomes exclusive and self-righteous. Then the lilies that fester smell worse than common ordinary weeds.
But God is speaking to and guiding this generation through (4) intimate groups. God spoke to the first generation through groups. The fact is that Jesus formed a group movement when he and his disciples fellowshipped and worked together. It was out of that fellowship that the New Testament came. The play of mind upon mind, of attitude upon attitude, of method upon method, of life upon life brought forth a body of common ideas and attitudes. These became the New Testament. Individual writers wrote them down, but the Christian groups produced them in their interactions with the Spirit of God and with one another.
When the disciples said, “For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28), they could have said it in reference not merely to that particular decision but to the whole body of truth and attitude that was growing up. That group had become not merely a collection of people, but an organism of the Holy Spirit. God was expressing the divine mind and redemptive purposes through that group.
Today God guides the individual through the closely knit fellowships of groups. Each individual needs the correction and sustenance of some such group. For the group checks up and tends to keep the individual guidance from going astray. So God often guides through a group.
O Christ, I pray you to touch me through my fellow Christians and help me to discern your voice when you speak through their voices. Amen.
Week 36 Saturday
Guidance through the Inner Voice
Matthew 13:11; Luke 10:21; 12:12; John 16:13-15; Acts 16:7-8
By the (5) Inner Voice, I do not mean the voice of conscience, for the Inner Voice gives guidance, not merely where a matter of right and wrong is involved as in conscience, but where one is taking life directions, deciding perplexities, and where one is bidden to take up tasks and assume responsibilities. The Inner Voice is not contradictory to an enlightened conscience, but is in addition to it and beyond it. It is the Spirit of God speaking to one directly and authentically.
When we turn to the early records of the Christian movement, the New Testament, we find that guidance was moving directly from the external to the internal. The Gospels open with guidance through dreams and visions and the voices of angels, as in the cases of Zechariah and Joseph. With Jesus, it was different; he got his guidance through the insight that comes through prayer and the direct voice of the Spirit within.
In the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, we find the disciples fumbling badly—casting lots as to which one would become a disciple in place of Judas, and giving God the choice between only two at that! How often we narrow God’s choices! God didn’t want either of them; God wanted Paul! But the disciples did not repeat this initial mistake of depending on outer signs. The guidance became more and more inward. This was in line with higher evolution, as Scottish biologist James Y. Simpson says, “The higher organisms gradually substitute internal for external stimuli.”*
The whole movement seems to be inward. But no! Not entirely, but the tendency was distinctly there. And this was in the direction of a deeper Christianizing, for the gospel is producing people who are not compelled by external signs, but impelled by an internal Spirit—the Holy Spirit and our spirits working harmoniously and therefore effectively.
O Christ, who so lived in the Lord that the gentlest whisper was like thunder to you, help us to have that same responsiveness—this day and all days. Amen.
* In Bertha Conde, Spiritual Adventuring (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), 21.