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Week 4 Sunday

Week 4 Sunday

How Can I Find God?

Acts 17:23-28

We have seen that life will work only in one way—God’s way. The statement of Augustine, often corroborated by experience, is often repeated: “You hast made us for Yourself, and we are restless until we rest in you.” Let that fact be burned into our minds. Let it save us from all trifling, all dodging, and bend us to the one business of finding God and God’s way.

In our quest for God, let us look at a few preliminary things. Hold in mind that the purpose of your very being, the very end of your creation is to find and live in God. As the eye is fashioned for light, so you are fashioned for God. But many question this. A Hindu student once asked, “If there is a God, what motive of his is seen in the creation of this universe, where ‘to think is to be full of sorrow’?” At one morning interview time, five students, one after the other, with no collusion, asked the question, in one form or another, “Why was I created?” It is the haunting question in many minds.

I could answer only thus: Of course we cannot see the whole motive of creation, for we are finite. But why does a parent create? Physical lust? Not in the highest reaches of parenthood. Does not a parent create because of the impulse of love, the impulse that would have an object upon which to lavish love and to impart oneself in the development and growth of the child? Is parenthood different in God? Could God, being love, have done otherwise than create objects of that love? And having created us, will God not give the divine self to us? If not, then the whole apparent good is stultified. With that thought in mind, to think is not “to be full of sorrow,” but to be full of hope and expectancy. The creative Lover is at the door.

Lord God, you have come a long way through creation to the very door of my heart. I hear your very footsteps there. I let you in. You are thrice welcome, Lover of my soul. Amen.

Week 4 Monday

The Risk God Took

Matthew 25:34-40; 2 Corinthians 5:2

Yesterday we left off at the place of God’s creative love creating us in order to impart himself to us and to find that love fulfilled in our growth and development in the divine image. We must pursue the thought, for God pursues us.

But we ask, was it not risky for God to create us with the awful power of choice and with the possibility that we might go astray and break our hearts and God’s? Yes, very risky indeed. God might have made us without the power of choice, or with the power to choose only the good. But this would not be choice, for you must be able to choose in two directions, not one, for choice to be real. Besides, if we are able to choose only the good, then it isn’t the good for us. We would be determined, and the very possibility of goodness is in freedom. “There is nothing in the world, or even out of it, that can be called good, except a good will,” says nineteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant. So where there is no will there is no goodness, no badness, in fact, no personality. There was no other way to create personalities except to give them freedom. Risky? Yes.

But parents take that same risk when they bring a child into the world. That child may go astray and crush their lives and its own. But parents assume that awful risk. Why? Because they determine that whatever happens they will do their best for the child; they will enter into his or her very life, until the child’s problems become their own, the child’s troubles theirs, the child’s growth and happiness theirs. This will mean a cross! Of course. But parenthood accepts that cross because it cannot do otherwise. So with God. Our creation meant that God would enter into our very lives. Our troubles are God’s troubles, our sins God’s sins, our joy God’s joy. So creation, then, means a cross for God? Inevitably. But God took it. Love could not do otherwise.

God, we stand astounded at your courage. But you did create us—it may be, to re-create us. That is our hope. We clasp it to our bosoms. Amen.

Week 4 Tuesday

God’s Search for Me

Luke 15:1-10; John 3:16

If what we learned yesterday is true, then we must accept the thought that God is in a persistent, redemptive search for us. It seems too good to be true. My answer is that it is too good not to be true.

Turn to the pages of the New Testament and read the astonishing parables of Luke 15: the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son. Never before did such astonishing truth tremble on human lips. “The author of the universe is hard to find,’’ said Plato. An austere Hindu sage was rebuked in this way, “Why do you trouble God with your austerities so that he cannot sleep?” Mahatma Gandhi once said to me, “In finding God you must have as much patience as a man who sits by the seaside and undertakes to empty the ocean, lifting up one drop of water with a straw.”

But here Jesus flings back the curtains and lets us see the God of the shepherd-heart who seeks and seeks the lost sheep until it is found. And then the woman who sweeps the house for the lost coin. So, says Jesus, God will sweep the universe with the broom of redeeming grace, until each lost soul is found. For as the king’s image is stamped upon the coin so is the Divine image stamped upon the human soul, lost though it may be amid the dust of degradation.

It is true that the father of the prodigal did not go into the far country after the son, but wasn’t his love there with him, and wasn’t that love the line along which the son felt his way back to his father’s house? I once saw blind children running a race with a cord in their hands, which was attached to a ring upon a wire that led them to the goal. So this lad got hold of his father’s outreaching love and it led him back to the father’s bosom. The Hound of Heaven relentlessly pursuing us down the years!

O God, I dare not close my heart to you. You conquer me with your persistence. But how glad, oh how glad, I am to be found! I thank you. Amen.

Week 4 Wednesday

Some Further Considerations in Finding God

1 John 4:16-21

We have got hold of one truth, namely, that God is searching for us. But there is the persistent question in many minds: “Very well, but aren’t there some souls incapable of finding God by their very mental and spiritual makeup? Those more mystically inclined may find God, but some of us cannot. We are not mystics.”

If by “mystically inclined” we mean that some are more emotionally sensitive than others, then we must admit this to be true. But God does not come to us only by the way of the emotions. God comes by the way of the mind and the will as well. God makes a life approach to us, and this includes all three ways. So if you are a person whose active side is more developed than the emotional, you can receive God at the door of the will. The same with the mind; if you lean toward the intellectual, then you have the privilege of accepting God at the door of the mind. By whatever door God comes, the whole person is possessed by God.

The center of the whole relationship will be love, whether the emphasis be on emotional love, intellectual love, or volitional love. Are you sufficiently mystical to love? Everybody is! A man who was very intellectually inclined said he couldn’t find God because he wasn’t a mystic. But he loved his wife very tenderly. He was mystical enough to love his wife, but not mystical enough to love God! He was wrong and soon found his mistake. Everyone has a capacity to love God. Everyone who is willing to pay the price of finding can find God. Remember this: No one is constitutionally incapable of finding God. If we do not find God, the cause is not in our constitution, but in our consent.

O God, you who fashioned us, fashioned us for your own entrance. Our doors may be lowly, but your cross has bent you so low you can get into the very lowest of doors. Come, you gentle Wooer, come. Amen.

Week 4 Thursday

Who Can Find God?

Luke 11:9-13

We must look at two other things before we can come to grips with finding God. Many feel that since Jesus called his disciples away from their ordinary occupations, we must now leave ordinary so-called secular life to find God. This is a mistake. Jesus did ask twelve disciples to leave their occupations and follow him, but did he not in the very act of calling them approve their occupation by filling their boats with fish? And did not one hundred and twenty disciples wait in the upper room for the Holy Spirit, perhaps only twelve of whom had left their occupations?

“Shall I be a student, or shall I be a religious man?” asked a Hindu youth of me one day. I could reply only that I saw no conflict; if he found God, he should be a better student. Before Christ came into my life, I was at the bottom of my classes; afterward I felt that the bottom of the class was no place for a Christian, and left it. I found myself studying my lessons on bended knees, praying my way through.

Any legitimate occupation can be lifted into a sacrament. There are those, especially in India, who feel that one has to be mature, even old, to find God. But the Christian way is different. At question time one day, I asked, “Where is God?” A little fellow of five excitedly whispered to his mother: “Why, I can answer that. He is in my heart.” He was right! I received this note, written in block letters: “It works. Wonderfully and well. Thank you for this. Signed, Jivan Ratman, aged 12 years.”

It does work, even for the child, and may I say, especially for the child, for to find the kingdom we must catch the childlike attitude of open frankness and willingness to follow.

O Christ, you hallow every worthy occupation and open the gates of life to the little child. In your Father’s house is the sound of the hammer and the laughter of little children as well as the quiet oratory for prayer. We thank you. Amen.

Week 4 Friday

Facing the Issues

Luke 11:33-36

The barriers to finding God are not on God’s side, but on ours. Since God is seeking us, then the problem is not in our finding God, but in letting God find us. We must put ourselves in the way of being found by God. Some of us are not there. There are definite barriers on our side.

Some barriers are intellectual. People have honest doubts, and I have spent many years in meeting those doubts, perhaps too many years, for I now see that the problem is usually deeper. Not always, but usually.

For instance, a young man came puzzled about the Trinity. I replied that the emphasis in Christianity was not upon the Trinity but upon the Incarnation. The doctrine of the Trinity was rather overheard than heard in the New Testament, but still I could see why the Trinity is reasonable. The lowest life is the simplest life; the amoeba is a single cell, but as we come up in the scale of existence complexity emerges, so that when we come to man we find a highly complex being made up of body, mind, and spirit—humanity is a trinity. The movement of life, then, seems to be from the simple to the complex. When we get to the highest of life of all—God—we should expect, not simplicity, but complexity. The Trinity is thus a natural culmination. But the movement of life upward is toward unity amid complexity. Humanity is a trinity but also a unity. So in God, there is a richer unity in the richer Trinity.

I waited to see if my answer had any effect. It had none. By a swift insight, I saw the young man’s problem was not intellectual, but moral. I put my hand on his, and quietly asked if he was pure. His eyes dropped. He was not. His trouble was not honest doubt, but dishonest sin.

O God, hold us steady at this point. Help us to be absolutely honest, and it may be that, as the barriers go down, your presence shall strangely warm our hearts. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Week 4 Saturday

We Apply the Tests

Matthew 5:8; 2 Corinthians 13:5-8; 1 Thessalonians 5:21-22; 1 John 3:3

We saw yesterday that moral wrongness makes intellectual blindness. It is easier to live yourself into right thinking than to think yourself into right living. In a moral world, the deepest organ of knowledge is moral response. Without that we are blind, however much we may think. So we must look at the moral barriers. They are not the only barriers, but we cannot get on unless we take them down.

I have a friend whose moral and spiritual influence is potent and penetrating. I discovered the secret of it in his relentlessness toward himself. Once a week he goes aside and examines his life in the light of five pointed questions. In the quietness before God, in an air of absolute realism in which there is no equivocation, he examines his life:

1. Am I truthful? Are there any conditions under which I will or do tell a lie? Can I be depended on to tell the truth, no matter the cost? Yes or no?

2. Am I honest? Can I be absolutely trusted in money matters? In my work? With other people’s reputations? Yes or no?

3. Am I pure? In my relationships with women? In my habits? In my thought life? Yes or no?

4. Am I easily offended, or am I loving? Do I lose my temper? Am I quick to sense slights? Or am I taking the attitude of love, which refuses to be offended? Yes or no?

5. Am I selfish, or am I consecrated? What am I living for: myself, my own position, money, place, power? Or are my powers at the disposal of human need? At the disposal of the kingdom? Again I ask, what am I living for: myself or others?

As we are about to go on, let us put ourselves before ourselves and look at ourselves. The bravest moments of our lives are the moments when we look at ourselves objectively—without wincing, without explaining away.

O Christ, it was said that you know what is in every person. We do not even know what is in ourselves, for we have never looked at ourselves with honest eyes. Help us do it this day in your name. Amen.