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Week 9 Sunday

Week 9 Sunday

The Take-off

Matthew 17:20; Acts 9:17-22; Galatians 5:7; Philippians 1:6

The first days of adjustment after one makes a life decision are the most difficult. Infant mortality in the kingdom is as devastating as infant mortality in India. But most infant mortality in India is preventable. So too, if there are casualties in the new life in the early days, they are preventable.

There is no dodging the fact that the first few days and weeks are crucial. An expert in airplanes told me that it takes twice the power for the machine to rise from the water as it does for it to fly. The earth and water seem loath to let it go. It takes twice the power to break with the old life as it does to live the new life after new habits have been formed.

That need not appall you. This morning in my quiet time I came across this verse, “Who will roll away the stone? . . . And looking up, they saw that the stone was rolled back” (Mark 16:3-4). We see the difficulties like huge stones before us, and lo, as we get to them one by one, they are rolled back. Remember the Silent Partner also at work is practiced at rolling back stones.

First of all, let us remember that there are certain laws of the spiritual life, which are as definite as the laws that underlie our physical lives. I do not mean that a set of rules is given into your hands for you to obey. The Christian life is not mechanically and minutely obeying a set of rules. It is a love affair. And lovers don’t sit down and look at the rules to see what is to be done next. Nevertheless, even in a love affair there are underlying laws of friendship which have to be obeyed or else there will be shipwreck. One of the reasons so many casualties take place is because we are haphazard. And if we are haphazard, we shall not be happy.

O Christ of the disciplined will, teach me to live the life according to your way. I come stumblingly, but I come. I am set to obey; teach me. Amen.

Week 9 Monday

Commit Yourself

1 Kings 18:21; Luke 19:1-10; John 9:25

One of the first things to do is to commit yourself. The Christian life is the beginning of a life as different from ordinary life as ordinary humans are different from animals. You are different, and therefore you will act differently. The temptation will be to raise no issues, to upset no life-habits, to take on protective resemblance to your environment and to settle down, hoping that the inward life will somehow or other manifest by itself. It won’t. You must decide it shall.

Professor William James, speaking from the standpoint of sound psychology, says in regard to any decision: “When once the judgment is decided, let a man commit himself irretrievably. Let him put himself in a position where it will lay on him the necessity of doing more, the necessity of doing all. Let him take a public pledge if the case allows.” This is sound psychology and therefore sound Christianity. Note that word irretrievably. Leave no open door behind you. The mind in a fearful moment may be tempted to take that way of escape. You are no longer a person of an escape mentality. A business owner, after making the great decision, called his employees together the next day and told them what had happened to him. All of the employees respect him.

I was recently called out at night by a servant who told me there was a man waiting to see me in the garden. As I approached this figure in the dark I thought I was being “held up,” for he had a handkerchief over his face and his hands in his pockets. But he wanted to find power over habits and to find a new life. I did my best with him, but went away with little hope in my heart for him. He was afraid that I and others might recognize him.

Off with the handkerchief, come out of dark gardens where we hide behind bushes. Stand before the world open and unashamed and decisive. Be ashamed of nothing but Sin. Commit yourself.

O Christ, I offer you my resolves. May I take the first bold steps. And help me to take them today. Amen.

Week 9 Tuesday

Discipline Yourself

Mark 9:49; 1 Corinthians 9:27; 1 Timothy 4:7-8, 16; 2 Timothy 1:7 (Moffatt)

The word discipline and the word disciple have a close kinship. The fact is they are one—no discipline, no disciple. One of the needs of the present day is putting discipline back into life. We have reacted so strongly against the imposed authority and taboos of the Victorian age that we have swung into a license, which we thought was a liberty. We are now finding out that it isn’t. Teachers have said the child must be left to guide itself, which meant, in large measure, that the teacher did not want to take on the discipline involved in the guidance and discipline of youth. Afraid of youth, the teacher rationalized fear. But both teacher and youth need discipline. Otherwise we shall arrive where Swiss philosopher Henri Frederic Amiel arrived. He spent his life dissecting and debunking his own moods, and then cried out in his Journal:

What a strange creature I am! If I were charged with the education of someone, I should seek what is best everywhere and in everything. But for myself I no longer have the taste to reprimand and direct. I merely examine myself and state my preference. Psychology has replaced morality. That is the effect of this flaccid existence that dispenses with adventures and duties, with work and purpose. I no longer know courage save by name, and hope save by hearsay.

Amiel grasped for liberty and found disintegration.

I do not mean that you will have a discipline imposed on you, willy-nilly. You will accept a discipline of your own choosing, under the guidance of God. It will thus be both yours and God’s. In our ashram we accept a discipline that we arrive at after corporate prayer and consultation. It is not handed to us. We accept it from within. Sit down in thought and prayer, asking for guidance as you take on yourself a spiritual discipline. As you accept a discipline, then are you a disciple.

O Christ, help me this day to find your yoke and take it upon me. For your discipline is my desire. Amen.

Week 9 Wednesday

Establish the Prayer Habit

Psalm 5:3; Luke 11:1-13; Acts 3:1; Ephesians 6:18; Colossians 4:2

Yesterday we suggested that you take on yourself a spiritual discipline, not merely for the sake of the discipline, but because these disciplines gather up the scattered rays and focus them upon the business of finer living.

The first discipline must be to establish the prayer habit. In college I decided how much time I could give to prayer, and I fixed there a prayer habit that has been with me all these years. If for some reason I do not keep it—which is very rare—I feel that a chord has dropped out of my symphony. Fix the habit, even if you have to get up earlier to do it. The other morning I got up earlier than usual and saw the Big Dipper and took a drink of the beauty of the silent heavens. If I had slept, I should have missed it. Get up earlier and drink. God’s dippers are full.

A great Christian in England was very sleepy-headed as a youth, and no matter how much he resolved, he slept past his prayer time. He decided on desperate measures—as penalty he would throw a guinea into the river every time he missed his prayer time. He did this for several mornings and sadly paid the penalty, a heavy one for a poor student. But at last the mind responded, the prayer habit was fixed, and he became one of the outstanding spiritual men of his generation.

Don’t fool yourself into saying that you don’t need the particular time and place, that you will find God all the time and everywhere. If you are to find God all the time, you must find God some time; and if you are to find God everywhere, you will have to find God somewhere. That sometime and somewhere will be the special prayer time and the special prayer place. Fix them. And, as you do, you put your feet upon the road that leads to victory. For spiritual prayer and spiritual fare sound alike and are alike; they are one.

O Christ of the silent midnight hour, teach me to fix the habit of prayer, that I may find the habit of victory. Help me to begin this day in unhurried talk with you. Amen.

Week 9 Thursday

Assimilate the Living Word

Psalm 119:11; Isaiah 55:2; Matthew 4:4; Luke 4:16; John 6:27

Into the prayer hour, take your Testament and a pen. Had I not written down what came to me through the years in the quiet hour, I should have done myself a wrong. For those notes now seem to have been written by someone else. They seem so fresh and new.

A British government official told how he came out to India with no basis for life. His mother gave him a New Testament, which he put in his trunk, at the bottom. But one day out in camp, sick and discouraged, he remembered the Book, fished it out of his trunk, and the first word his eye fell on was the word redeemed. That one word was the pivot around which life swung from moral defeat and discouragement to victory and a new life. And no wonder, for what a word!

You will find such words in the Book, and they will meet your need just when you need them. For here life speaks out of life. God has gone into these words, so God comes out of them and meets you there. Sometimes in the rhapsodies of my early Christian life I would find myself pressing my lips to some verse that seemed so living and saving. I do so still. And why not? For through that verse I kiss my Lord’s cheek. Does God’s face not shine through those words? And I thus tell God I am so grateful that I cannot use the language of words.

And sometimes the word seems so personal, almost as if your own name were called through it. When my Chinese friend, Doctor Lo, homesick and discouraged in America, turned to his New Testament for light and comfort, the first verse his eye fell on was “Lo, I am with you always” (Matt. 28:20). It is often just as personal as that!

The Danish children shake hands with their parents at the close of each meal and say, “Thank you for our food.” At the close of your prayer hour you will do the same to your Heavenly Father.

O Christ, in your Word we find the Bread of your life and we feed upon it. We thank you for this food. Amen.

Week 9 Friday

The Habit of Sharing

2 Kings 5:3; Matthew 10:8; Mark 5:18-20; 10:3; 1 John 1:3

We have talked about the discipline of prayer and the assimilating of the Word of God. The natural and necessary outcome of those disciplines is the third: the discipline of sharing. The first two have reference to the inflow, and this third has reference to the overflow. There can be no overflow without an inflow, and the inflow will stop, stop dead if there is no overflow.

I call this the discipline of sharing. We should discipline ourselves as definitely to share by deed and word what we have found as to pray and read the Word. Many do not do this. They are earnest and regular in their quiet time, but have never disciplined themselves to share. If a happening or a conversation, bumping against them, jolts it out of them, well and good. But sharing seems to depend on accident instead of on choice; it seems to be in the whim instead of the will. Rather it should be the natural flowering of communion with God. A doctor found a little dog by the roadside with a broken leg, took it to his house, and attended to it until it was well. It began to run around the house, and then it disappeared. The doctor felt let down. But the next day there was a scratching at the door. The little dog was back again, and had another little dog with him, and the other little dog was lame! The impulse in that little dog’s heart was natural and right. Has not Christ healed you? And if so, is not the natural normal thing for you to do to find somebody else who needs that healing too?

Someone has defined a Christian as one who says by word and life, “I commend my Savior to you.” No better definition. Will you define your Christian life in those terms? If so, put the discipline of sharing deep down in your life purposes.

O Christ, your healing is upon our hearts. Help us to bear your healing help within our hands. Help us this day that we may find some stricken human spirit we can lead to you. Amen.

Week 9 Saturday

The New Life and Recreation

Mark 4:31; 1 Corinthians 9:24-27; 10:31; 2 Timothy 2:15

You must now relate your new life to your recreations. Or rather, you must relate your recreations to the new life. For recreation must not be the center and the new life fitted into it. If you try that, the new life will die. You must now go over your recreations and see whether they contribute to or dim the new life. They should stay only as they minister to your total fitness.

Some recreations do not re-create; they exhaust one. They leave one morally and spiritually flabby and unfit. They should therefore go or be so controlled that they really do re-create. I find after seeing some films that I have been inspired and lifted. But often a film leaves one with the sense of having been inwardly ravished. The delicacies of life seem to have been invaded, the finest flowers of the spirit trampled upon. You come out drooping. You should never expose yourself to such a film, not if you value the higher values. It is like turning pigs into your parlor.

The same can be said of many books. To read books that leave you with a sense of exhausted nerves and emotions is to handicap the spiritual life within you. The idea that you must read everything that comes to hand in order to understand life is a false notion. Does the doctor have to take in typhoid germs in order to understand typhoid? Does one have to wallow in a mud hole in order to understand the meaning of faith? To wallow in it is to understand it all the less. Only cleanliness can understand the meaning of filth.

Spending long and exhausting hours over bridge tables, with emotions aroused that have no constructive outlet, leaves you spiritually weaker. Ask yourself, therefore, whether your “bridge” is a bridge that leads to spiritual anemia or toward finer and more victorious living.

Go over your whole life and ask whether your recreations truly re-create.

O Christ of the fit body and soul, make me fit in every portion of my being and may my recreations contribute to that end. Amen.