Week 44 Sunday
Week 44 Sunday
The Christian’s Joy
Exodus 16:20-21; 1 Samuel 2:1; Isaiah 55:12
Now that we have spoken of the cross, we can speak of the Christian’s joy. For the Christian’s joy is won out of the heart of pain. It has a certain quality that distinguishes it from lesser joys. Revelation 15:3 speaks of those who sing “the song of Moses . . . and of the Lamb.” There are really three great songs: the song of nature, the song of Moses, the song of the Lamb.
The song of nature is the song of the triumph of the strong over the weak. I heard a bird singing gaily with a quivering dragonfly in its mouth. It beat it from this side to that and interspersed the ghastly killing with gay singing. That is the song that comes out of lower nature; it is mingled with the pains of others. Hunger and power are satisfied, even though it costs the lives of others.
Many sing that song. Their joy is the joy of personal advantage, no matter what it may cost others. They rejoice that they have gained in the stock market, even though their gain was somebody’s loss. They rejoice in success in business, even though they know that by ruthless competition they have pushed somebody to the wall. It is the joy of knowing that the head of John the Baptist is off, even though they do not like the sight of it on a platter in front of them. They have won. That is enough. It is the song of unlimited rights over the weaker.
There is a slightly higher joy, the song of Moses. It is the song of limited rights, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. We rejoice that we get even with someone. Our sense of rough justice is satisfied. We sing the song of Moses. We go through life getting satisfaction out of strict justice. That too is a superficial and precarious joy.
O Christ, save us from the satisfactions of the lesser joys that leave their sting, and help us to know your joy, because we know your cross. Amen.
Week 44 Monday
The Song of the Lamb
Luke 6:22-23; John 16:20, 22; 2 Corinthians 12:10; 1 Peter 4:13
We saw yesterday the song of nature, of unlimited rights over the weak, and the song of Moses, of limited rights. We must now look at the song of the Lamb: the song of unlimited love, the song of doing good to those who despitefully use you, the song of One who dies for his crucifiers. This is life’s deepest song. Anyone who can sing this song is in the highest stage of spiritual evolution and really has victory.
That widow of a murdered prime minister had it when she gathered her children around the coffin of her husband, and prayed for the forgiveness of his murderer, and gave it from herself and family. It was the song of the Lamb. Our young ashram doctor has it when cruel nature snatches his young wife away, and he carries on helping to save others and rejoices in the opportunity.
I had a canary that would not sing until after it had taken its bath. Then it would sing deliriously. I have a heart like that, and so have you. It will not sing until it is washed from all bitterness, all revenge, all hate. When it is cleansed from these, then it really sings—with all the stops out.
A Brahmin convert suffered because of his stand for Christ, but this is what he writes: “I am always bubbling over with joy to the bursting point. My Lord is always with me to save, to comfort, to guide, and to cheer. May he be with you similarly.” That is the Christian note.
Don’t make light of that joy in the name of modern sophistication, for this joy is the most cleansing, the most energizing, the most service-inspiring, and the most rhythm-producing fact on earth. It is salvation by joy. One drop of that puts more oil into the machinery of life than any other known thing.
O Christ, we thank you for this exquisite joy. When we have tasted it, we know that we have tasted life itself. Help us to share it. Amen.
Week 44 Tuesday
The Power of the Resurrection
Isaiah 25:8; 26:19; Philippians 3:8-10; Colossians 3:1
We spoke of the exquisite joy of the cross—the song of the Lamb. But there is a step further. There is the joy of realizing “the power of his resurrection” (Phil. 3:10).
The resurrection means that the worst has been met and conquered. This puts an ultimate optimism at the heart of things. The resurrection says that no matter how life may seem to go to pieces around you, nevertheless, the last word is with love. And that, on the plane of the physical, in the here and now. Had it been a spiritual resurrection only, it would have meant that the victory is beyond matter, not in the midst of it. But as the battle was embodied, so the victory is embodied. This sweeps the whole horizon, and says that, here and now, we can meet and conquer anything, everything. No wonder Christians in the midst of a decaying order are not pessimists. They have solid grounds for optimism. They have got hold of unconquered and unconquerable Life.
When Paul came to the Athenians and preached “Jesus and the resurrection,” they said he was proclaiming “foreign gods.” They thought the “resurrection” to be a separate “god,” because of Paul’s emphasis. There is no danger of that happening in this age, for the resurrection has been dimmed, and with it an infinite sadness has come over us.
We shall not deify the resurrection, neither shall we dim it, but we shall declare it as the most amazing and transforming fact of human history. Nothing really matters now, except this one thing: Christ is alive forevermore! Related to him, realizing him, drawing life from him, we are in fellowship with ultimate Life, and nothing again can dismay us or make us afraid. If, in the end, everything will come out all right, then what does it matter what happens to us on the way! He is risen!
O Christ, I thank you for the joy of knowing that nothing need now defeat me, since nothing defeated you. Help me to take hold of that fact and live by it. Amen.
Week 44 Wednesday
The Joy of God’s Presence
Psalms 16:11; 51:11-12; Ephesians 3:16-19; 1 John 4:12-13
Each morning, at the close of morning prayers at our ashram, the leader says, “The Lord is risen!” and the group answers, “He is risen indeed.” In that strength, we go forward into the day knowing the power of his resurrection. But we must not depend on the resurrection, but on the resurrected Christ, and not on a resurrected Christ of the past, but on the actual, living, present Christ through whom and in whom we meet God now.
The deepest joy is the communion of Person with person. Sometimes our earthly vessels can scarcely contain the weight of this exquisite joy. We are almost tempted to ask God to stay the divine hand. But we wouldn’t really have it that way, for this is Life—Life. “I feel so sacred within,” wrote a very modern girl after tasting this new Life. And no wonder! In the center of our being, we commune with Life; our thoughts are washed in God’s thoughts, our wills are strengthened by God’s will, our affections are bathed in God’s.
The German theologian Adolf von Harnack, speaking of the mystics, says, “Some perceive the presence of the Spirit with every sense; they see its brilliant light, they hear its voice, they smell the fragrance of immortality and taste its sweetness.”* One moment of that, and it is worth the world. Life can never more be the same.
To us it is no longer strange that God speaks to Moses out of a burning bush, for have not our hearts become, in living fact, a burning bush out of which God speaks to us in the tenderest and directive tones? For out of this fellowship with the fire comes the call to redeem, to bid my people go. So this communion ends in a commission. And that commission in turn feeds upon the communion.
The wonder is not that we should speak of it, but that we should speak of anything else.
O God, my Lord, I drop into the shrine of my heart and commune with you there, and one minute of that is an eternity. For there we become deathless. Amen.
*The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries (New York: Putnam, 1904), 1:252-53.
Week 44 Thursday
The Joy of Certainty and the Open Road
Romans 8:15-16; Philippians 1:6; 3:12-14; Hebrews 12:1-2
Is there any joy more wonderful than that of being in touch—saving touch—with ultimate Fact? Life becomes immovably centered and fixed. It is not subject to the changes of life around it. A certainty that is open-eyed and still remains certain is certainty indeed. The Christian has just that.
A very intelligent lady wrote: “I had spiritual certainty, but it was without an open road. I was afraid of open roads. So I clung to my spiritual certainty and became blind to everything else. Then I went to a university and took postgraduate work, and there I got the open road, but I lost my certainty. And I groped along the open road for some time. Now I have both certainty and the open road.” She had found life’s most beautiful combination.
Some have certainty and no open road. Their ideas, their minds, and their theological systems are fixed. It is a certainty gained at the expense of sight! Others have the open road, but they have no certainties. They know the quest, but no rest. They journey and journey and never arrive. And they call this emptiness virtue. They want no certainties, they say.
But the heart knows better. It journeys with a new buoyancy when there is certainty within. But this is not a dead certainty, but certainty that sets us on fire to know more. We know that we cannot live on an afterglow of some past experience. As French philosopher Ernest Renan says, we cannot go on “living on the fragrance of an empty vase” (see John 12:3). There must be fresh discovery every day. And there is!
The deepest sign of life is that we want more life. The surest sign that we are on the road is that we feel it is an open road. There is eternal progress before us. The joy of growth is one of the deepest joys of life. Victorious living means certain, but adventurous living. Experience—exploration sum it up.
O Christ, you have touched us, and our hearts are afire to know more. Feed us upon the “more” and we are satisfied. Amen.
Week 44 Friday
The Spirit’s Law
2 Corinthians 3:17-18; Galatians 5:1; James 1:25; 1 Peter 2:16
We have been looking at certainty and the open road. A passage that sums up this combination of fixedness and freedom is, “For the Spirit’s Law—telling of Life in Christ Jesus—has set me free from the Law that deals only with sin and death” (Rom. 8:2 Weymouth). Here is an amazing combination of apparent opposites: The “Spirit”—how free and untrammeled “Spirit” seems! “Law”—how fixed and unalterable “Law” appears! “Life”—how free and unfixed “Life” seems! “Christ Jesus”—how fixed in the historic facts! But Paul puts them together and says, “The Spirit’s Law is Life in Christ Jesus.”
French theologian Auguste Sabatier wrote of the division of religions into “religion of the Spirit” and “religions of authority.”* One is directed from within, and the other from without; one depends on inner life, the other on outer law. Paul here puts them together. He says the Spirit’s law is life, “life in Christ Jesus.”
Life in Christ Jesus is the fixed norm. We are not now adrift; we know what life is, for we know what God is. We had to have God transformed so God could become available. As Bernard Bell puts it: “Over a wire comes a mighty electric current. I cannot use it. It is too powerful for my motor. It would melt the thing, ruin it. I shunt off the current into a resistance box and transform it into voltage which is usable. My motor is no longer destroyed, but empowered. So Jesus thus transforms God.”**
The awful God becomes the accessible God. We now see what God is like and what we can be like. We have a fixed point in our universe. No one knows the worth and significance of that until they have seen it in contrast with systems where there is no norm, no fixed point. Whole systems adrift! But God has met us in history and that meeting is Christ. “Life in Christ Jesus”—that gives us a starting Point.
O God, we thank you that we have seen you in a Face. And now we can never be satisfied until we are like that. Our hearts glow with gratitude. Amen.
*Auguste Sabatier and Louise Seymour Houghton, Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit (New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1904).
** Beyond Agnosticism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1930), 72.
Week 44 Saturday
The Spirit’s Law: The Unfolding
John 16:7-15; 1 Corinthians 2:9-13
The Spirit unfolds what is infolded in Christ. The Spirit will not guide us contrary to what we find in the life and teaching and spirit of Christ. This is as fixed as a law. But the range of unfolding is infinite.
In John 14:26 we see again the combination: “The Companion, the Holy Spirit, . . . will teach you everything and will remind you of everything I told you” (CEB). The Holy Spirit “will remind you of everything I told you”—this is the turning back to the fixed facts; “will teach you everything”—this is the Spirit’s direct, immediate voice to each age and to each individual. This points to progressive revelation.
And what is the Spirit’s voice for this troubled and distracted age, searching for a way of life and plans for the future? The kingdom of God on earth! The Spirit is unfolding the possibility of a new world on God’s plan. This Plan haunts the councils where all plans are being examined. We are not ready to take the Plan yet, for we are not ready for salvation. We will stumble along until one day we shall fall on our knees and take God’s Plan and then—a new age, a new world, a new brotherhood, new men!
I refuse to take my eyes off that possibility and to listen to the cynics, within and without the Christian church, who tell me it is a dream, and the only reality is force and compulsion. “Force and compulsion”—where they have healed one they have wounded ten! No, I hear the Spirit’s voice amid the clamor of voices, reminding us of the fact that our Master proclaimed the kingdom as the message, and God does not change. The kingdom is still at our doors—our one open road, our one hope. “If you can hear, listen to what the Spirit is saying” (Rev. 2:7 CEB).
O Spirit of the Living God, you are speaking to dulled ears, and your voice calls us anew to the kingdom. Help us to listen or we perish. Amen.