Week 39 Sunday
Week 39 Sunday
Interpreters or Interferers?
Isaiah 57:14; Romans 14:13; 1 Corinthians 10:32-33; 2 Thessalonians 3:9
We are to interpret through our lives the meaning of God in terms of today. We are to extend the Incarnation. “I know who you are talking about,” interrupted a Persian villager as the missionary was speaking of Christ, “Dr. ______. He comes to our village.” The doctor had interpreted Christ to them. Once, while he was on an errand of mercy, bandits stripped him of everything, including his clothes. Strange to say, however, they left him with his camera, and he snapped a picture of them. Later, one of these bandits came to his hospital for an operation. They recognized each other. He was in the doctor’s power—and helpless. The doctor used that power to forgive him and heal him, and, while doing so, interpreted the meaning of Christ.
But some of us interfere with that meaning. “But the disciples interfered” (Mark 10:13 Weymouth). They tried to keep the little children away, and in doing so interfered with the Spirit and purpose of Christ. You and I are interpreters of Christ or interferers with Christ. We represent either the cure or the disease.
Jesus interpreted God: “the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (John 1:18 KJV)—literally, “he hath interpreted him.” And what an interpretation! As I listen to his words and watch his acts and see his Spirit, God grows tenderly beautiful before me. And I fall in love with such a God.
John 10:23 says, “Jesus was walking in the temple,” and Luke 19:47 says that Jesus “was teaching daily in the temple.” They were both right; his walking was teaching. His very walk interpreted God. Luke 13:22 says of him that he was “teaching, and journeying toward Jerusalem,” where the cross awaited him. Many of us would have nursed our coming pain. But he had inward leisure to teach the love of God to others—on the way to die! Even through that death, he gave us a deathless interpretation of the Lord. What an interpreter he was!
O Christ, as you interpreted the Lord, help me this day to interpret you. Amen.
Week 39 Monday
Heightening the Message
1 Corinthians 1:17; 4:18-20; 1 Thessalonians 1:4-5
I have used a good many interpreters through the years, and some have heightened my message, and some, alas, have subtracted from it. Once they said to me in China, “This man is such a wonderful interpreter that no matter what you say, he will make a good address out of it.” He did! He would take a commonplace statement and make it live.
But some have used the opportunity for self-display. I once had to stop an interpreter who was doing this so obviously that he was spoiling everything. And when I did so, I felt that I was rebuking myself, for often I have used the opportunity to interpret Christ as an opportunity to display myself. I thus became an interferer instead of an interpreter. Much of modern preaching is interfering with Christ instead of interpreting him, self-display instead of Christ-interpretation.
Sometimes we block the message because we are in it too much, and sometimes because we are in it not at all. We are perfunctory. It doesn’t consume us. We do not burn with it. When asked to become the mayor of a certain French city, a man replied, “I will take the affairs of the city into my hands, but not on my heart and liver.” Thus we take the affairs of the kingdom into our hands, but will not let them reach our hearts and livers. We are dead channels of a living Christ.
“When I came to this ashram I was a flickering torch, now I have become a flaming torch,” said a radiant youth to me. And he had! If Christ doesn’t get into your blood and raise your temperature, I wonder why? Such a Christ, such a message, such a need! We flatten out by our inner deadness what should live and challenge and redeem.
Do we interfere with the message because the self is too much in it, or because we are not truly in it at all? Or do we truly interpret him?
O Christ, forgive me that I have again and again become like static in the radio, breaking up clear reception. Help me to become a heightener of your redemptive message. Amen.
Week 39 Tuesday
Getting the Message Through
John 4:3-42; Acts 28:30-31; Philippians 1:12-14; 2 Timothy 2:9
We must now study how to get the message through to human need, for it is not enough for us to live victoriously; we must help others to do so. Nothing is really ours until we pass it on. Someone has defined a Christian as “one who makes it easy for others to believe in God.” Jesus did that. He did not prove God. He brought God.
In Korea they do not baptize a new convert until that person has brought another to Christ. Then they know the convert is Christian, for he or she is Christianizing.
Let us study how Jesus got his message through to an exceedingly difficult case, the Samaritan woman (John 4:1-42). Not that Jesus ever looked on a person as a “case”; if he had, he would never have won that person. You have to love people to influence them. There were no “cases” with him, there were persons. Let us study his method, for he was not only our example of how to live, but our example in helping other people to live. We shall take his delicate dealings with the woman step by step and learn as we go.
First, the account says, “He had to pass through Samaria” (v. 4). It was an inevitable thing, so he “evangelized the inevitable.” He found his opportunity to get his message across in the everyday inevitabilities of life. There are certain things in your life and mine that are inevitable. We have to go to office, to school, to workshop, to home duties; or we may be compelled by circumstance to sit on a park bench, unemployed. Evangelize that inevitable thing; find your opportunity in the ordinary contacts of the day. Then that day will no longer be ordinary, for the contacts are redemptive. You are turning the commonplace into the consequential. The little things of life become the big things, big with destiny. Life-contacts become life-changing. Nothing, absolutely nothing bigger under heaven than just that.
O Christ, help us to gather up these contacts so drab and commonplace and make them live with meaning and destiny as you did do. Amen.
Week 39 Wednesday
The First Approach
John 4:7; Acts 8:29-35; 17:22-23
The first step in opening the conversation is the most difficult. Many hesitate to take it for fear of being snubbed. But I cannot remember where through the years I have had a real snub in approaching people about Christ. Even if they should snub you, what of it? Be so spiritually cheerful that you don’t know when you are snubbed!
There were a great many reasons that Jesus should not have spoken to this Samaritan woman. He was tired and hungry; to talk to a woman in public was to risk his reputation; she was a woman of loose character. “Sychar” means “drunken,” probably taken from the character of the inhabitants. Nothing could be done with such a lot; it was noon, and at noon in hot countries everyone rests. These were the reasons against his speaking to her.
There was one reason in favor; she needed it! That one reason outweighed all the others. You will find many reasons that you should not share what you have found. I never speak to a person without having to fight past those reasons. But the one reason always persists: People need it, need it as they need absolutely nothing else. Let that be the determining factor.
Jesus began at the place of her dominant interest—water. He began at water and then went from water to living water, and then to fountains of living water in the heart. Try to find the dominant interest in people and lead them along the line of that dominant interest. Is a youth’s interest in athletics? Talk about a strong body, and the necessity of purity if that body is to be strong, and the dynamic in Christ to keep one pure. Are parents wrapped up in their children? Then the suggestion is simple: They want to give the children the best, but they cannot do it unless they have it themselves.
O Christ, help me this day to find someone’s dominant interest and to lead that person through that interest to you. For all real roads run to you. Amen.
Week 39 Thursday
Barriers and the Way around Them
Matthew 4:19; 22:15-22, 35-40; John 4:9-10
The Samaritan woman threw up a barrier: “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (John 4:9). The first tendency of the human heart is to close up at the approach of an intruder. It is the instinct of self-preservation. We do not easily let people into our lives. So many workers stop right here, and say it is of no use. The casualties among personal workers are very great at this point. They stop before they begin—discouraged. For there are today many counterparts of the Jewish-Samaritan barrier.
But if the first instinct is to close, the second is to reveal. We all want to share our inmost self, provided we can find one in whom to have confidence. If confidence is given, it should be kept—absolutely. Or else there will be no further confidences. So do not be abashed at the first barrier, wait for the working of that deeper instinct of self-revelation.
How did Jesus get rid of the issue between Jew and Samaritan? He might have been drawn off into that controversy and never have got beyond it. Instead, he got rid of the lesser issue by raising a higher one; he talked about “living water,” and, as he did so, she forgot about the issue she had raised. That is the principle: When people raise lesser issues, get rid of them by fastening their attention on higher issues. Don’t get tangled up in irrelevancies; drive on the main business in hand.
Jesus showed an amazing confidence in the woman: “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him . . .” (v. 10). If you see the good, you will want it! That was an amazing assumption to make in regard to such a woman. Everybody else had probably suggested the opposite. To influence people you must believe in people in spite of what you see them to be.
O Christ, you great believer in humanity, you who believes in me when I cannot believe in myself, help me this day to believe in people, that they may believe in you. Amen.
Week 39 Friday
Further Barriers and the Way around Them
Matthew 15:1-11; Luke 22:32; John 4:11-14
Jesus had an amazing confidence in the woman: she would want the good when she saw it. This leads to the third principle: to influence people you must believe in them, sometimes in spite of. The people who influence you for good are not the people who tell you how bad you are, but who tell you how good you may become. Nag people and they sag; believe in people and they bloom.
But the woman was not yet through with barriers. She said, “Are you greater than our father Jacob?” (v. 12). She was ready for a comparison. Now, Jesus might have said, “Woman, your father Jacob was a scheming liar who stole his brother’s birthright.” And it would have been perfectly true! She would have gone away angry and hurt. You and I must strive, not to win arguments, but to win people. To win the argument you need only to be clever, but to win the person you need to be Christian.
But Jesus did get rid of Jacob. He slides out of the picture so gently that we scarcely notice that he is gone. How did he get rid of him? Again, by raising a higher issue. He replied in this most wonderful passage, “Whoever drinks any of the water that I shall give him will never, never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become a fountain within him of water springing up for the Life of the Ages” (v. 13 Weymouth). As the woman’s thought became fastened on that fountain of water in the heart, she forgot Jacob and the controversy. The higher issue pushed out the lower.
This verse, one of the most beautiful in Scripture, was given to a sinful woman. He did not hesitate to give his best to the “worst.” Personality was sacred. Your best is none too good for the worst. Then lavish it, as he did. And the worst will become the best, as she did.
O Christ, your best is offered at the shrine of my worst. Help me to exchange my worst for your best. And help me to help others to do the same. Amen.
Week 39 Saturday
The Most Delicate Moment
Matthew 14:4; Luke 5:8; John 4:16-19; 8:7
When Jesus spoke about “the well of water springing up into eternal life,” the woman said she wanted it, partly so that she might not have to come all the way to the well to draw. Her motives were mixed; she wanted spiritual satisfaction and to be saved trouble.
People have not only mixed minds but also mixed motives. Many of us would have dismissed the woman right there. Why bother with her with such mixed motives? But Jesus was infinite patience; he would purify the motives as well. A youth told me he went to Communion as a semi-joke. But having taken that Communion, he felt that he must stand by it, and did. He became a wonderful Christian. Christ took the hand held out in semi-jest and forever gripped it.
In order to purify the motive, Jesus must purify the woman, so he must get to her moral problem. Take it as an axiom: “There is a moral problem in every life.” Get to that problem, or you will miss the point on which everything else hinges. For if we are not saved from sin, we are saved from nothing.
How did he get to her sin? He might have said, “Woman, you are living a bad, adulterous life.” But had he done so, she would have recoiled at the shock. Besides, it would not have been effective, for it is not enough to point out other people’s sins, they must be led to point them out themselves. Then, and then only, are they on the road to getting rid of them. So he led the woman to acknowledge her sin by making a delicate request, “Go, call your husband, and come here” (v. 16). At the word husband, her eyes dropped, a guilty flush went across the soul. “I have no husband” (v. 17), she said, simply, and the words meant more than they seem. The guilt was exposed. She was inwardly crumpled before her newly aroused self, and him.
O Christ, when we get people to that awful hour of sin exposure, give us the sure word to offer, that we may point to a sin exit through you. Amen.