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Week 8 Sunday

Week 8 Sunday

What Is the Basis of Assurance?

Matthew 24:35; Romans 10:17; 1 Thessalonians 1:5; 1 John 2:14

You will ask what is the basis of assurance by which you will know that you are accepted. God assures us from a number of directions, which makes it far stronger than if it were from one direction alone.

First, God assures us through the Word. Nothing could be more explicit than that Christ received sinners. People did not wait until they were good enough to come to him. They came as they were, and they were made good in the very coming. That seems a commonplace to us today, but it scandalized the religious then and it does now. A modern Jewish thinker criticizes Jesus at this point, “Jesus was too familiar with God and too familiar with sinners.”

In the second century, Celsus, debating with Origen, says:

Those who invite people to other solemnities make the following proclamation: “He that hath clean hands and sensible speech may come near, he who is pure from all stain, conscious of no evil in his soul and living a just and honorable life may approach.” But hear what persons these Christians invite: “Anyone who is a sinner,” they say, “or foolish, or simpleminded”—in short, any unfortunate will be accepted by the kingdom of God! And what do they mean by “a sinner”? By sinner is meant an unjust person, a thief, a burglar, a sacrilegious person, a poisoner, a robber of corpses. Why, if you wanted a band of robbers, these are the very people you would invite.*

Origen’s answer was explicit: “Though we call those whom a robber chieftain would call, we call them for a different purpose. We call them to bind up their wounds with our doctrines, to heal the festering wounds of their souls with the wholesome medicine of faith, nor do we say God calls only sinners’’ (ibid.).

We glory in what Celsus conceived to be our shame. The first to enter paradise from the Christian movement was not Peter or James, but a thief on a cross—the forerunner of the crooked made straight.

O Christ, you did receive sinners then, and you will not reject me now. I may have dragged my soul through hell, but you will wash it—you wash it even now. I thank you. Amen.

* Origen, Contra Celsum, book III.59-60.

Week 8 Monday

The Assurance of the Word

1 Peter 1:23-25; 1 John 3:19-24; 5:11-12

We saw yesterday that the Word assures us that we are accepted. There are promises there that could not be more explicit: “Come to me, . . . and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28 CEB). “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins” (1 John 1:9 CEB). Does it seem out of date thus to quote passages from Scripture to heal present need? To some it may seem so. But those of us who have been up against raw human need for years know that people need nothing, absolutely nothing, so much as they need the simple assurance that they are reconciled to God. Unhealed at that place, people wear a mortal hurt. The assurance that the grace of God in Christ banishes estrangement and reconciles us to God is the most precious thing that ever sunk into guilty human hearts.

“Please leave India,” said a Sadhu who listened to a missionary describe how Christ died for us on the cross, “for we have no such story in our books. The heart of India is very tender, and if it hears that story, it will leave our temples to follow this.” We cannot leave India, nor can we leave the world, for this fact of grace is what the world, and India, and you and I need, and need desperately.

Jesus also assures us through the revelation of an act. He says to an adulterous woman, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and . . . don’t sin anymore” (John 8:11 CEB). He says to a hard, money-loving publican, “Today has salvation come to this house” (Luke 19:9); to a man with a sin-complex in his life that caused a physical paralysis, “Your sins are forgiven” (Mark 2:5).

This is the eternal Word speaking through the language of act. It is the Spacious speaking through the specific. Then grasp this thought: The love of God shining through those specific acts will not deal differently with me. He forgave and restored them; he forgives and restores me.

O you, whose very healing was a revealing—you who did make timeless truth speak through the facts of time—you speak to my heart, “Your sins are forgiven thee!” I take it, for your very character is behind those words, and you are changeless. Amen.

Week 8 Tuesday

The Assurance of the Collective Witness

Acts 1:8; 2:32-33; 5:32; Hebrews 12:1

God assures us through the Word. But that Word, speaking specifically and fully through words and deeds in the pages of the New Testament, keeps on speaking. The Acts of the Apostles was not completed. It is still going on.

The Chinese cook, hearing that it was the twenty-fifth anniversary of my sailing to India, brought in a cake with the words on it, “Through the ages one word.” It was a quotation from a Confucian classic, applied to the fact that through these twenty-five years I had one word: Christ. Through the ages, the timeless Word speaks the language of time. That Word still speaks through the collective Christian witness.

Once, as I knelt seeking restoration to God, someone knelt beside me and quietly said, “God so loved Stanley Jones that he gave his only begotten Son, that if Stanley Jones will believe in him, he shall not perish but have everlasting life” (see John 3:16). Did that Christian have a right thus to assure me? Oh yes. That Christian had once put his own name in that verse, and it had worked. It was the church whispering its collective witness into my ear.

Sometimes the collective witness of assurance is given through the absolution of the duly appointed priest. I will not quarrel with those who can get the assurance thus, though I must confess I shrink from the idea of the grace of God being almost mechanically dispensed. Nevertheless, even this may be a phase of that collective witness where men and women and children have arisen from every tribe and tongue, and people, in every walk of life, from the peasant to the professor, from every stage of human development from the ripened sage to the ransomed sinner, and have whispered into the ear of the seeker, “Go on, brother or sister, we give you our collective assurance. We have tried it, and it works.”

O Christ of the emerging new humanity, we thank you that there are millions whose hearts you have touched and lighted and who lay their grateful tribute at your feet and at ours. We joyfully join their ranks. Amen.

Week 8 Wednesday

The Assurance That Comes through New Moral Power

Psalm 32:1-2; Romans 8:1, 9-10; 1 John 3:9-10, 14; 5:4-5

We have heard the assurance of two: the Word and the collective witness. There is another—the fact of new moral power over sin. God shows within you in your heightened moral power.

A man came to me one day and said: “I went out of the meeting last night determined to do just what you asked us to do, namely, to take Christ into our lives. I took him as you asked us to take him—by faith. I felt no change at the time. But the next day when I went out into the old surroundings, amid the old temptations, I found to my astonishment that the old temptations had lost their hold on me. I simply didn’t want them. Then I woke up to the fact that there was a new power in my life. Christ was there.” He was, and that new moral power was a sign of his presence.

Another man did much the same thing—took what I said on faith without any consciousness of change. But he said afterward, “I was a bad-tempered man. If anyone crossed me, I easily flew into a temper. But the next day when someone did me a wrong, instead of anger I felt only pity. I was astonished beyond words at myself. Then I knew I was a new man. Christ must be within me.” He was.

When we begin to show forth the fruit—“love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Gal. 5:22-23)—then we know that we are connected with the root, Christ. The new life is at work within us. I do not mean that these things will be there in maturity, or perhaps even in purity; but I do say that they will be there in the beginnings. Let that fact assure you. The bud is the prophecy of the flower.

O Christ, I thank you that already I feel within me the stirrings of a new life. I make the first unsure steps, but I make them. I begin this walk with you, a walk that will take me down through the years and the centuries, and the ages. I begin it feebly, but I begin it. And as I walk, my legs will grow stronger and the moral power now begun within me shall ripen into perfect strength. I thank you. Amen.

Week 8 Thursday

The Assurance of the Creative Impulse

Psalm 51:1-3; Acts 5:20; 8:4; 13:1-3

There is another source of assurance that the new Life is within us. We will be conscious of the impulse to share something, yes, to share Christ.

Life manifests not merely in a desire for more life for itself but also for more life for others. The two sides of religion are love to God and love to humanity, and the moment we touch God, we will have an impulse to touch people. If, therefore, we are not sure of our love to God, we may be assured of it, if we find our love to people increase.

If nothing else had assured me that the new life was working within the converted Chinese engineer, this fact would have assured me, “And, moreover, I have been talking to my wife, and she is wanting it too.” Now, the wife had been a nominal Christian and he a Confucianist, but the moment the new life came, he wanted to share it apart from the question of labels.

The moment I arose from my knees after surrendering myself to Christ, I wanted to put my arms around the world and share this with everybody. There was an almost irresistible impulse to give this precious fact. I felt that everyone should know it and experience it. I feel that way still.

It may be that you have no such overwhelming impulse; it may be very feeble, it may be just the timid peeping of the buds through the yet partly frozen ground of your reserves, and yet it is there. Act on it today.

You may be rebuffed as I was rebuffed, when the next day I spoke to my companion in the law library of what had happened: “What? I’ll knock that out of you in two weeks.” He didn’t; he only knocked it deeper. It is the very life of God within you when you have an impulse to share. Take its assurance.

O Christ, your love is conquering me, for I would conquer others for you. O let this feeble love flame, until I shall rest not, until I have found my brothers and sisters. Amen.

Week 8 Friday

The Most Intimate of All Assurances: The Assurance of the Spirit

Romans 8:16; 2 Corinthians 1:21-22; 1 John 3:24; 5:11-12

You say, these assurances are good, precious beyond words, but shall I not see him face to face? You shall.

I cannot feel that God would give the intimations of presence by giving gifts, but would withhold the divine self. Would you as a father, a mother, do that to your child? Then, “If you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?” (Luke 11:13 CEB). Being love, it would hurt God as much as us to withhold his divine self.

Listen to these words: “It is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” The Spirit; our spirit. They come together. Now there is nothing between.

Hush! God speaks, so gently, so intimately: “Child of mine, you shall never know how far I have come to find you. I came seeking you through a cross. But that is gone now. I have found you. You have thrown down the barriers. That is what I’ve waited for. Now throw away that lingering doubt and fear. It is I. Be not afraid. When that last fear is gone, then we shall talk together. All you have is mine; you have said it. And now all I have is yours; I say it. Draw on me for what you need. My resources are adequate, inexhaustible. Tell me all your troubles, even the little ones, and I will tell you some of mine. It costs to be God. We shall share together. And as we share together you shall grow, and some day, my child, I want you to be like my other Child. I can think of nothing better for you, and so I can wish for nothing less. You know by my coming that all your sins are forgiven. I blot them out of the book of my remembrance forever. I will not remember them, and you must not.”

O God, my Lord, I bow in speechless adoration. I, the once vile, am now fully accepted. Amazing grace! I bow and kiss your feet, but as I do, I feel your love enfolding me to your heart. I thank you. Amen.

Week 8 Saturday

Is This Assurance Based on Feeling?

2 Corinthians 5:4-5; Philippians 1:9-11; Colossians 2:6-7

We now have the fivefold strands of assurance binding themselves about our hearts: the assurance of the Word, the collective witness, the assurance through new moral power, through the creative impulse, and the direct witness of the Holy Spirit to our spirits. Surely, this should give the strongest assurance that can be given to any mortal on any matter whatever. These lines of assurance all converging give not only a spiritual, but an intellectual certainty as well. For the mind, gathering up the facts in experience and the universe around one—facts which seem to approve and work in behalf of the new life—comes to a mental satisfaction from the resultant sense of wholeness.

But is all this dependent on how I feel about the matter? If my feelings change, what then?

It does depend partly on feeling, but only partly. We should not be afraid of emotions, for they are a part of us, an integral part. They give driving force to the soul. But they are liable to fluctuation, according to the state of physical health and many other things. The spiritual life must use them, but it must not be founded on them. It must be centered in the will. You have made what is called in psychology “a permanent choice.” It is one of those choices that does not have to be made over again every day. The lesser choices of life fit into this central permanent choice, not it into them. It organizes life around itself as the Ganges gathers the lesser streams into itself. It remains the permanent abiding fact amid the flow and flux of feeling.

But the decision of the will is not a bare, hard, unfeeling thing. It has its emotional tone, and the more decisive the choice the deeper the emotional tone. But whether the Ganges is made rough by storms or smooth by calm, it flows on its life-way. So with you. Yours is a permanent life­choice. Don’t raise the issue again every time your feelings change.

O Christ, you do not change, no matter how my feelings change. You will abide in my heart whether I feel you there or not. I thank you that, as I make the permanent choice, you take up your permanent abode. Amen.