Week 40 Sunday
Week 40 Sunday
Facing Up
John 4:19-24; Acts 19:18-19; 2 Timothy 4:3-4; Titus 3:9
We left the woman face to face with her sins. We must get people to this place, for no matter what this sophisticated age may say, this is our personal problem. How can I get rid of sin? The first step is to expose it. For sin is like a seed; cover it and you cultivate it. But you ask, “How can I get people to uncover their moral need?” First, be free to talk about your own moral needs and your victory over them. Second, don’t be shocked at disclosures. Third, establish confidence, that you are a doctor that knows the way through.
To get people to face up to their moral need, I find it effective to remind the person of my friend who examines his life in the light of the five tests: “Am I truthful? Am I honest? Am I pure? Am I quarrelsome or am I loving? Am I selfish or am I consecrated?” Repeat them over again, very slowly, and ask the person where he or she comes out in examining life thus. Many will tell you where they break down, glad to get out the whole wretched business. Others, to save face, will wriggle and excuse. Or they may try to go off on another subject.
That’s what the woman did. She said: “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain; and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship” (vv. 19-20). Why did she raise this issue at this particular place? Because she found the conversation very uncomfortable, and preferred to draw it off to a more abstract religious question. It is easier to discuss abstract religious questions than it is to face one’s own sin—easier and more deadly. Beware of the attempt to pull you off of the real thing by drawing the red herring of abstract religious questions across the path. Hold to the moral problem. For life and death lie in this issue. But they do not lie in the question of where to worship.
O Christ, your restlessness saves us, for we would go off on tangents from salvation. Save us from ourselves. Amen.
Week 40 Monday
Religious but Rotten
Isaiah 1:11-17; Matthew 23:3-14, 25-28
This Samaritan woman was apparently a religious woman—she was interested in the proper place to worship and in the coming Messiah who would tell them everything. Don’t be put off the track when people talk religion to you, for we may be very religious and very rotten. She was. Or we may be religious in spots and rotten in spots. As Burnett Hillman Streeter, Oxford theologian, put it:
Nothing is more remarkable in human nature than the varying degree to which . . . the moral consciousness is awake. You will find men and women who are perfectly unconscious that their lives are one long expression of “envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness,” who yet feel paroxysms of contrition because they are haunted by impure dreams. You will find others quite easy in their minds about a long course of sexual depravity but burdened with remorse for an unkind word.*
Or this, from seventeenth-century poet Samuel Butler, “[We] compound for sins [we] are inclined to/by damning those [we] have no mind to.” Or in a quotation attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr: “We have two motives: the one we publish and the real one. Good people want to do the selfish thing, but they don’t until they find an unselfish reason for doing it.” We insist then, take nothing and nobody for granted.
Did Jesus answer the abstract religious question about the proper place to worship? Yes, but note how he did it in John 4:24: “God is spirit”—that rendered Jerusalem and this mountain irrelevant. God desires people to “worship in spirit and truth”—that rendered the moral life relevant in worship. Jesus went off of Jerusalem and this mountain, but he was back at the need of worship through truth, through right living. The moral problem was still central. No matter how far you go off the point momentarily, bring the conversation back to the central issue. You must guide the conversation. As you are leading toward liberty, toward release, so you must be in moral control of the situation. At every point Jesus guided the conversation. And in the end he guided the woman to release.
O Christ, we thank you that you point us to the wicket gate that leads to release. Help us to do that same thing with someone today. Amen.
* God and the Struggle for Existence (New York: Association Press, 1919), 177.
Week 40 Tuesday
The Goal
Matthew 10:8; Mark 5:19; John 1:35-37; 20:28, 31; Colossians 1:18
What was the goal of the conversation between Jesus and the woman of Samaria, the end toward which everything was being led? It was in these words: “I who speak to you am he” (John 4:26). The goal of the whole conversation was the revelation of himself. He got her to see herself, that she might then see him—savingly.
The end of our work and conversation is just one simple thing: to get people to see Jesus. If we have failed in that, we have failed in our task. Our business is not to be clever but to be Christian, and we can be Christian only as we show people Christ. This must not be an intellectual apprehension of him; it must be a moral apprehension, a taking hold of Christ as the power that shall change and transform life. The person must not merely survey Christ but surrender to him. That is what we mean by seeing Christ. Then the person has “root in himself” (Matt. 13:21 KJV), and that root is Christ.
There is one step further, beyond the goal for the woman. The real end was to get her so full of the vision of Christ that she would go off and give it to somebody else. The woman left her waterpot and ran off to the village and told what had happened. The end of evangelism is to produce an evangelist. We must not be satisfied to get somebody “in”; we must be satisfied only when they are getting someone else “in.” Then we have really started something that knows no end. For we repeat, “You belong either to the cure or to the disease”; if you are not curing, you are causing disease. And as you cure, you will be more deeply cured. Matthew’s resurrection account says, “as they went to tell his disciples, behold, Jesus met them” (28:9 KJV). On the way to tell others, Jesus met them. He always does. On the way to tell others, you will sense a warm, living Presence.
O Christ, help us not to feel that we are changed until we are changing, and help us to begin today. Amen.
Week 40 Wednesday
Social Restraint: Individual Change
Psalm 51:10-13; Acts 3:41-47; 11:22-24
When the disciples arrived at the Samaritan well, they found Jesus in a very exalted state. He did not care to eat. When they urged, he replied, “I have food to eat of which you do not know. . . . My food is to do the will of him who sent me” (John 4:32-34). Why should he be so abstracted and exalted over such a small incident? Small? In that simple changing of an individual, he saw the biggest thing on earth, something that he identified with the will of God. And that will, he said, fed him like food.
If Jesus felt that way about changing the individual, why should it be sneered at as of little consequence, as some socially minded people are now doing? Are we too small to hold two great emphases? Must we swing back from one to the other? Can we not hold both in a living blend? The kingdom of God does mean changing the social order, but it also means just what happened to this woman—a changed individual life.
Some grafted peach trees were planted here in our mountain garden ten years ago, but today they are not over two feet high. The reason is that deer came in from the forest at night and ate off the growing tips as fast as they came out. The trees have life, and it is a good quality of life, but growth has been impossible. Now that we have surrounded the garden with a barbed-wire fence, the trees are growing. A barbed-wire fence (a social restraint) and a good quality of grafted-life (an individual change) are necessary for fruitfulness. But a barbed-wire fence around ungrafted wild peach trees will not bring fruitfulness. Nor will a grafted tree without that fence be fruitful. Individual change without social restraint won’t do. Both are needed.
And Jesus rejoiced that day that he had put the graft of a higher life into a human soul. That was the will of God for him; it must be for us.
O Christ, keep my life up against this central necessity, and give me power to put the graft of your life into other lives. Amen.
Week 40 Thursday
God’s Will: My Meat
Psalms 40:8; 119:16, 45, 105, 162, 165; John 7:6
Nothing exalts the soul, gives it a sheer sense of buoyancy and victory, so much as the fact that we are being used to change the lives of other people. This is a necessary and integral part of victorious living. Without it victorious living will remain an unfulfilled dream. The battle of life is won, not by the defensive, but by the offensive. The will of God is redemptive, and when we feed upon that will, we too shall become redemptive.
Jesus said that to him the will of God was meat; it was something that fed him, sustained him, something that he lived by. Now, to some of us, the will of God is medicine. It is something to be taken now and again to straighten us out. It is bitter, but it is needed to get rid of our ills. This view of the will of God is very common; it is something to be accepted, with a sigh. The will of God is to be borne. When death and calamity visit us, we say, “Your will be done.” It is medicine, and bitter too.
To some, the will of God is more like sweets at the end of a meal; something to round off life and give it taste. But you don’t live by sweets. Nor do such people live by the will of God. For them, the will of God is the occasional. It gives life its flavor but not its food.
But to Jesus, the will of God was neither medicine nor sweets, it was meat, the thing that sustained him. This implies that we are made for the will of God as the body is made for food. It fits our moral and spiritual makeup. Everything else is poison; this is food. I live as I live by the will of God; I wither and die as I live by some other will, particularly my own.
Help me, O Christ, to feed upon the will of God as my very meat. May that will within me turn to moral strength and spiritual victory. May it be life to me. Amen.
Week 40 Friday
My Will: My Poison
Matthew 19:21; Romans 8:5-8 (Weymouth); 14:15
Yesterday we said that we are made for the will of God as the body is made for food, that the will of God feeds us while everything else outside that will poison us.
H. G. Wells has fed upon as fine a thing as his utopias, and yet it has left him dissatisfied, unfed. He confesses: “I cannot adjust myself to secure any fruitful peace. Here I am at sixty-five still seeking for peace.”*
Wells was brilliant, modern, and far-seeing, but agnostic, and therefore feeding on some will other than that of God. And still hungry!
If Wells could not find sustenance in his utopias, how about some of us who try to live by the will of the flesh? Paul says, “Thoughts shaped by the lower nature mean death; thoughts shaped by the spiritual mean life and peace” (Rom. 8:6 Weymouth). Life “shaped by the lower nature” is poison to us. Everyone who has tried it knows it to be true. We are not made to live by our lower natures, but by our higher, as that higher is led by the will of God. In South America there are leaves of a tree which, if eaten, take away all appetite; one no longer cares for food, but it is a drug and not a food. Anything that apparently satisfies you, outside the will of God, is a drug.
But the will of God is food, real food. When we are feeding on that, we are adequate for anything, afraid of nothing. We feel that at the center of our being we have resources, sustenance, reinforcement, Life not our own—and we live by that very Life. Victorious living is the natural, normal outcome of that Fact. We are immovably fixed in God, and immeasurably fed by God.
There is nothing that sustains a person like the knowledge that the universe backs one’s will when one acts. Is it any wonder that we share that same sense of exalted joy Jesus had on the occasion of his encounter with the Samaritan woman?
O Lord, I come to you to put my life alongside of yours, to be guided and fed by you this day. Amen.
* As in Charles R. Swindoll, The Darkness and the Dawn (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001), 282.
Week 40 Saturday
“Him unto Him”
Mark 9:17-27; Acts 3:6; 8:35; 9:34; Colossians 1:4-20
We cannot close this phase of victorious living in which we impart our lives to others without summing up the whole in the words “him unto him.” This phrase sums up the very meaning of our gospel. The whole verse reads, “They brought him unto him” (Mark 9:20 KJV). The first “him” was a youth in need, and the second “him” was Christ; the “unto” connected the two. At one end is the “him” of human need, at the other end the “him” that can meet that need. Never was this “him” of human need more needy than at the present time. Torn from old moorings, adrift, distracted, and desperately wanting something is this modern “him.” Going—but we don’t know where! Feeling—but after what we don’t know! Thinking—but with no great certainties! This modern “him” is in the deepest need.
The “him” that can meet that need stands ready, available, adequate. But he cannot reach that human need without a human connection. That connection is the “unto,” and the “unto” is the Christian. God touches the “him” of human need on one side and the “him,” the Savior, on the other, and brings them together. To do so God has to be in living touch with both. But some are in touch with the human side and out of touch with Christ: the humanists. Others are in touch with Christ and out of touch with humanity: isolated religionists.
But some are in touch with both: the real Christians. The king of England was making a speech over the radio to the whole empire when the connection broke. An attendant grabbed the two broken ends of the wire and held them together throughout the speech, and the message got across. The attendant was the vital connecting link between king and people. You and I are to be in such close touch with Christ and human need that we mediate his very life to that need. What a place to occupy!
O Christ, we know that if we fail, the message will not get across. Help us not to fail you, and them, today. Amen.