Week 51 Sunday
Week 51 Sunday
Our Central Need Met
Matthew 9:8; 28:18; Luke 4:32; Romans 1:4
The first sermon I preached in India was on this text: “You shall call his name Jesus; for he shall save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). I would be happy if it should be my last text to India—and to the world. For in these words, and in the fact that underlies them, our greatest need is met.
Several weeks ago, we said that people need two things: light on the mystery of life, and power for the mastery of life. In Jesus, these two things are met. He gives light on the mystery of life by the way he lived. His life becomes a focal point of life’s problems. In him are raised all my problems and all of them find their solution. He is light. But he is more; he is power to master life, and to save from the crookedness of life. He saves people from their sins.
A university woman of keen mind was telling me of the discovery she had made of Christ as a man: His humanity brought him so near to us, he was no longer in the heavens, but alongside us, struggling with our struggles. She had found an example of life. It left her mentally satisfied, but morally defeated. Then I told her that in Jesus we have two things: One who is like us, meeting life as we meet it, calling on power that you and I can have for our moral battles. Jesus met life, not as God, but as a man. Therefore he is my example. But I find something else in him. He confronts me from the side of God with one offer of redemption. He is thus unlike me, therefore my Redeemer.
Had he been only like me, he could have been only my example; had he been only unlike me, he could have been only my Redeemer. But he was both, and therefore meets my dual need, for I need light, and I need power. “Say that in every sermon, won’t you?” she said, as this truth dawned on her and made her utterly new. She had found Jesus as power.
O Christ, help me not to stop halfway, but to enter into my full inheritance of victory. Amen.
Week 51 Monday
The Modern Mood of Despair: Why?
Deuteronomy 28:65-67; Job 17:13; Luke 23:29-30
H. S. Wood says that if anyone would interpret modern scientific humanism in a sentence these words would suffice: “Put your trust in science and have confidence in yourselves.”* This is the faith that is supposed to be the faith of all educated persons under forty. And the scientific humanists were very sure about it all. So sure they became dogmatic.
This was accepted as a modern gospel, but it has turned out to be a gospel with no music at its heart. It doesn’t sing. The fact is that scientific humanism has grown very weary, its feet are leaden, and its soul is confused and dismayed. It has lost nerve, because it has lost meaning from its universe. Bertrand Russell says that evolution is a long, wearisome story with a poor point: “I think the external world may be an illusion, but if it exists, it consists of events, short, small, and haphazard. Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions.” He likens the “unpleasing universe” to “a bottle of very nasty wine.”**
Scientific humanism, thinking that it needs no Savior except itself, has found itself disillusioned and full of despair. Wood comments, “Scientific humanism is fundamentally bankrupt. It can sustain neither faith in science, nor our hopes for mankind.”
If you would see the necessity of having a Savior, do not look at the down-and-outs in the gutter but at the finest intellectual flowers of our race, at the end of their resources, sad and dismayed. Christ is necessary for humanity, and not merely for humanity as degraded.
Jesus Christ saves people from the sins of despair and gloom because he saves them from themselves. I know nothing of gloom, or dismay, or discouragement, and if you ask why, I point to Christ. That’s all. But that’s enough.
O Christ, you are my antidote for gloom. For in you I find a central gladness. I thank you. Amen.
* Publication details unknown.
** Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1931), 69, 84-85.
Week 51 Tuesday
Made Narrow and Saved from Narrowness
Matthew 7:13-14; 1 Corinthians 3:21-23; 2 Corinthians 5:14
In the course of our study together, we have mentioned many things from which we are saved by the power of Christ. In gathering up the loose ends as we near our goal, we must look at a great fear in the minds of many—the fear of being considered narrow. To be called narrow is to be damned in modern eyes. This holds many back from complete freedom in Christ.
There is no doubt that Christ does narrow one. “The love of Christ controls us” (2 Cor. 5:14), says Paul, and this is true. Jesus says that the new patch on the old garment shrinks and tears the old (see Matt. 9:16; Mark 2:21). There is a sense in which the Christian does pull in and tear relationships and situations by a very definite shrinking tendency. Christ does narrow us and keep us from doing many things we otherwise would do. But that is only one phase of the truth. Jesus, at the very time he mentions the shrinking, says the new life within you will be like expanding wine that will constantly need new wineskins (see Matt. 9:16-17; Mark 2:21-22).
Christians are at once the narrowest and the broadest of people. They become people of one Book and one Person. And yet “all things are yours” (1 Cor. 3:21), so they break all bonds and barriers. They are people of one Book, and then of all books; of one Faith, and then of all faiths; of one Person, and then of all persons; of one Interest, and then of all interests; of one Kingdom, and then of all kingdoms.
One compass point is on Christ and then the other sweeps the horizon. To sweep the horizon without having a point on Christ turns out to be theosophy. To hold one point on Christ without sweeping the horizon turns out to be narrow conservatism. To have both a single-pointedness and an all-inclusiveness is to be a Christian. It you belong to Christ, then all things are yours—you are at once the narrowest and the broadest person in the world!
O Christ, I cling to you, and now I am free to walk the earth. I thank you for this bondage—freedom. Amen.
Week 51 Wednesday
Given Experience and Saved from Experience
John 15:3, 16; Romans 8:14-16; 1 John 1:4
As we have talked about experience during our pilgrimage, the objection would probably arise from the side of the Barthians, that experience is an unsure foundation, too subjective, too mystical, bound up too much with the historical process. We must depend, they say, upon the objective Word of God, which speaks to us through the written Word. The first is fluctuating, depending too much on emotional states, the latter is abiding, sure.
There is something in this objection, and we must listen to it. Barth and his colleagues provide a corrective and a needed one. But it is only a corrective and not the full truth. It seems that the full truth lies in both experience and revelation. Luke 24:35 (CEB) puts them together: “Then the two disciples described what had happened along the road [experience], and how Jesus was made known to them as he broke the bread [revelation].”
In that experience, they told of how the living Christ was with them and how their hearts burned within them as he spoke to them by the way. To discount that is to discount an authentic meeting with Christ, which is individual, personal, intimate, life-changing. We therefore make no apology for experience, for Christ is in that experience just as definitely as he is in the objective revelation. To repudiate experience, or to minimize it, is to minimize and thus to repudiate the living Christ of experience.
At the same time, we must not minimize objective revelation. Christ revealed himself in the breaking of the bread. He does speak through the Word. And that revelation is redemptive. Experience needs constantly to be corrected by objective revelation. To take one or the other is to impoverish each. We need both. When we take both, we become people of the burning heart and of the constantly illuminated and directed soul. Then we are safe—and saved!
O living God, live within me day by day in intimate experience, and then may I listen to your voice through your Word in humble obedience. Amen.
Week 51 Thursday
He Saves from Laziness
Proverbs 26:13-16; 1 Corinthians 4:12; Colossians 1:29; 2 Thessalonians 3:10
We need to be saved from laziness, inertia, lack of ambition, and non-creativeness. The soul must be reenergized, enkindled, and made alive and fruitful.
Christ does that very thing. Through conversion, the soul is made more energetic. “By his energy and happiness, we know he has found God,” said some Hindus in regard to a certain Christian. As the soul has now a clean joy—a joy that does not produce countercurrents of disquietude as some joys do—there is a sense of rhythm and harmony and therefore of fruitful energy. The soul is not wasted on the lesser issues of life. It is single-pointed.
When the disciples said to Jesus, “ ‘Rabbi, the Jews were but now seeking to stone you, and are you going there again?’ Jesus answered, ‘Are there not twelve hours in the day?’ ” (John 11:8-9). It is not a question of what others will do or not do—there are twelve hours in the day, and I must complete my task.
What a sense of inward drive is found in these words! The redemptive life within him must give vent to itself in spite of threats or obstacles. The life of Christ within one breaks up inertia. “Jesus disturbs my complacency,” said a sincere Indian youth. He does. “He becomes the Conscience of my conscience,” said another. And because of this there can be no wasting of time in needless rest.
A society lady of sixty complained of her lack of ambition, staleness, inertia, and laziness. Christ came into her life, and immediately her soul was made more energetic, so much so that she wrote a book—her first book—which went into a number of editions and met the spiritual need of many. Christ gave her “a second wind” in the race of life. There is a sense of abounding energy when we are in fellowship with this renewing, life-giving Christ.
O Christ, I pray you that today I may be saved from all lethargy, all dodging of responsibility; may I be really alive and alive in worthwhile things. Amen.
Week 51 Friday
He Will Save His People
Romans 8:2; Galatians 1:3-4; Colossians 1:13, 28; 2:10
I can never again be a pessimist. I know there are enough hard, brutal facts to warrant pessimism if you take your eyes off Christ. But with my eyes on him, my pessimism is cured. Here is adequacy; here is power. Of course that power can be released only if we link up with it by a complete abandon to his will. But given that, anything can happen. “He will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:23). That covers every need.
I have social hope amid the hopelessness around me. For as we discover the larger meaning of sin—the central social sin of organizing life on the unchristian principle of selfish competition when cooperation is open to us; the disloyalty to Christ involved in allowing the means of production to fall into the hands of the few for private personal gain instead of being in the hands of society for the good of all—and we are slowly discovering this, with many a setback, then we shall turn to Christ for a larger salvation. Then there will be a larger release of larger power in larger realms. Wishful thinking? So be it! I would rather wishfully think toward faith than toward collapse.
“He is able to save to the uttermost” (Heb. 7:25 ASV). That “uttermost,” we have only begun to explore. In that word I see provision for every one of my personal sins and for every one of the social sins of this and succeeding ages. We have seen Christ in the cramping, imprisoning framework of a capitalistic order based on competition; and we have wondered why his power is limited. It is bound to be. But put him in the framework of a cooperative order, and there his full power can be loosed. He will then save us to the uttermost, because we will allow him to the uttermost. That salvation will not be “in our sins,” but “from our sins.” There is a profound difference.
Christ of the Almighty Arm, work today in my life in saving me from my sins, and in helping me to save society from our sins. Amen.
Week 51 Saturday
“Your Hour”; “My Time”
John 16:33; Colossians 1:13-20; Hebrews 13:8
Christian sociologist Maurice Reckitt says, “Hence we find conspicuous in the economic sphere that discouragement which is now the characteristic of a civilization dominated by an exhausted humanism.” An exhausted humanism! We have put humanity on the throne, and now our hearts refuse to worship it. We don’t like the object of our worship. Humanity has had its day and has turned it to darkness. Jesus said, “This is your hour, and the power of darkness” (Luke 22:53)—you have had “your hour,’’ and the best you could do with it was to turn it into midnight. These words can be used of this day of humanism. Humanism has exhausted itself and us.
But Jesus used another phrase to the people of his day: “My time” (Matt. 26:18; John 7:6). “Your hour”; “my time.” “Your hour”—and you reveal darkness! “My time”—and I reveal light through your very darkness; I reveal love through your hate, I heal through your wounds; I sacrifice myself through your selfishness; I am universalized through your very narrowness. I create a universal community through your national rejection; through the death you inflict, I bring life to you and to all people. “My time”—I am master even when most passive. I conquer even when most conquered. I save even when I cannot save myself.
Then and now, Jesus is the unexhausted Christ. His “time” will yet come. The “hour” of exhausted humanity is drawing to a close; the “time” of the inexhaustible God-Man will dawn. It is here at our doors. Some have taken him and know his power, but exhausted humanity as such must turn to him for a vital renewal, or perish.
The “hour” of deified, defeated humanity is brief. The “time” of the undefeated God-Man is eternal. We belong to that eternal, and we will not be dismayed at this “hour.” This “hour” belongs to humanity; the next is God’s!
So we rejoice in a victory that is, and that is to come. We taste, but this is only a foretaste. His touch is our victory; his “time” is our full victory.
O Christ, we thank you that we belong to the inexhaustible—help us to draw heavily upon it today. Amen.