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Week 10 Sunday

Week 10 Sunday

The Corporate Fellowship

Psalm 133:1; Acts 2:43-47; Hebrews 10:45

‘‘Don’t you think I should belong to some church?” asked a lady who had just entered the new life. Was her instinct for corporate fellowship right? It was.

The spiritual life cannot be lived in isolation. Life is intensely personal; it is also intensely corporate, and you cannot separate them. If you should wipe out the church today, you would have to put something like it in its place tomorrow. For there must be a corporate expression of the spiritual life as well as an individual. Even to separate the social and the personal life in this way is wrong. For the social life is the personal in its larger relationships.

The idea that it is your duty to support the church seems to me to be all wrong. The church is not founded upon a duty imposed on you from without. It is founded on the facts of life. Your very inner nature demands it. American evangelist D. L. Moody, in answer to a man who said he did not need the church, quietly pulled a coal from the hearth and separated it, and together they watched it die. It was a legitimate answer.

I am quite sure that I should not have survived as a young Christian had I not had the corporate life of the church to hold me up. When I rejoiced, they rejoiced with me. When I was weak, they strengthened me, and once when I fell—a rather bad fall—they gathered around me by prayer and love and without blame or censure they lovingly lifted me back to my feet again.

I know the stupidities and the inanities and the irrelevancies and the formalities of the church. Yes, I know them all. But nevertheless, the church is the mother of my spirit, and we love our mothers in spite of weakness and wrinkles. My word, then, to you is that, as you begin this new life you begin it as a member of the church family.

O Christ, who read our deepest need and who gathered us together into a family in which you are the elder brother and God is our Father, we thank you that you invite us to take our place in the family circle. We do. Amen.

Week 10 Monday

Is Christendom Living Victoriously?

Acts 19:1-2, 6, 20; 1 Corinthians 3:1-4

It would seem that we might now go straight from the beginning of the new life to the social order and talk about our relationships to it. But we cannot, not yet.

For to do that would mean that we have passed by the problem of victorious living within the ranks of the Christians themselves, within the ranks of the converted and the semiconverted—and shall I add the unconverted—inside the church. We have all three. Even the most enthusiastic would scarcely claim that the characteristic of the rank and file of the churches is victorious living. Here and there one sees it, but the chief thing that strikes me in looking at Christendom is the lack of it. A strange sadness, which we mistake for solemnity, has come over us. What is its root?

I asked a congregation in India to express this desire for a new life, and many had done so. The pastor was translating my prayer in which I said, “O God, we do not know what these people need, but you know.” He translated, “O God, you know what these people need, and so do we!” He could not let that pass! Many pastors in the quietness of their hearts would have to say, “O God, you know what I need, and so do I!” We need victorious living.

Spiritually we seem to have turned gray. The vivacity, the sparkle, the spontaneity, the joy, the radiancy that should characterize people called Christians seem to have faded out. Moreover, there seems a lack of moral dynamic, a paralysis that makes us limp and helpless in the face of rampant wrong.

We protest, but seem to have little power to change. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, needed so much among Christians today as the discovery of the secret of victorious living. If we can find that, then anything can happen. Without that nothing will happen, except staleness, tastelessness, and bitter disappointment with religion.

O Christ, are you putting your finger on our need? Then help us not to rest until we know this secret, and use it in our living. Amen.

Week 10 Tuesday

The Spirit of Nonexpectancy

Matthew 8:10; 9:2; Mark 4:40; Luke 18:8

Yesterday we said that the chief characteristic of modern Christianity is not victorious living. This would not be so serious if we expected something else; if we were pushing upon the gates of abundant life to have them open. But many have settled down to a spirit of nonexpectancy. They do not expect anything beyond spiritually muddling through. This is serious.

I have watched what the awful power of fatalism can do when it falls upon a civilization. Have I not seen these lovely people of the East paralyzed at the center by a strange fatalism that makes them turn over their hands in helpless resignation? Across the world that danger is at our doors. It has slowly crept into many a heart, and we are resigned to moral and spiritual defeat—we take it for granted, in fact. Doctor Elwood Worcester of Boston, who has labored for years in clinics for people troubled in body and soul, can say these astonishing words: “Most Christians do not expect their religion to do them any great or immediate good.” When one tells them that this condition of moral and spiritual defeat need not last for a single hour, that we can find victory and adequacy and buoyancy in living, they look at you as one who announces strange doctrine. For they have become naturalized in defeat.

John Macmurray quotes Mathias Alexander, who tells the story of a little girl who was permanently lopsided and who was brought to him for treatment. After working with her for some time, he managed to get her to stand quite straight. Then he asked her to walk across to her mother. She walked perfectly straight for the first time in her life and then, bursting into tears, threw herself into her mother’s arms, crying, “Oh, Mummy, I’m all crooked.”* We too think of being spiritually straight and upstanding and adequate as something strange and unnatural.

O Christ, speak to our dead desires and bid them rise. We know we cannot live unless, first of all, we desire to live. We do desire to live—to live fully and adequately. Your pressure awakens us. Our eyes open. Amen.

* Reason and Emotion (Amherst, N.Y.: 1999), 86.

Week 10 Wednesday

Is Forgiveness the Best We Can Expect?

Romans 6:1-7

Many Christians do not expect anything beyond repeated forgiveness for constantly repeated sins. They do not expect victory over sins. Thus in Christianity the most beautiful thing, namely the forgiving grace of God, is turned into the most baneful, for it actually turns out to be something that encourages evil. What a cross that must be on the heart of God! And what a travesty it is on our Christian faith!

This expectancy of constant forgiveness for constantly repeated sin is weakening to character, and is one reason for so much weak character within the Christian church. Under this idea, life turns flabby.

The Hindus believe that they will have to suffer for their sins—the law of karma will exact the last jot of retribution. There is no forgiveness. Samuel Evans Stokes Jr., a famous American missionary who turned Hindu, told me that one reason he did so was that he wanted his “children to be brought up under karma, rather than under redemption.” I could see his point if redemption meant constant forgiveness for constantly repeated sins. And if I had to choose between a cheap, easy forgiveness on the one hand, and the law of karma on the other hand, I should choose the law of karma.

But I do not have to make that choice, for a cheap, easy forgiveness does not represent the gospel. The gospel does offer forgiveness for sins, but along with it, and as a part of it, the gospel offers power over the sins forgiven. Forgiveness and power are the indissolvable parts of the grace of God. We cannot take one without the other. If we should try to take the forgiveness without the power, it would mean that moral weakness would remain; and if we should try to take the power without the forgiveness, it would mean that moral guilt would remain. God does not give one without the other. We must take both or neither.

O Christ, we thank you for redemption. This redemption that comes out of the cross we have twisted and have made into a further cross for you. Forgive us and give us power to do so no more. Power—power, we need. Amen.

Week 10 Thursday

What Does the Gospel Offer?

Mark 5:15; Romans 7:24-25; 8:1-2; 1 John 1:7-10

There are two dangers at this point. One is to make the standard too low, and the other is to make it too high. In either case it paralyzes us. One demands no change, and the other demands such a change that we simply feel helpless before it and give up the struggle. We must avoid this double danger.

It is interesting that both modern psychology and the gospel unite in being pessimistic about humanity. They both say that we are less perfect than we might be, and that there are great possibilities for idealistic progress, which we universally reject. Freud says, “Psychoanalysis here confirms what the pious were wont to say—that we are miserable sinners.”*

While both psychology and the gospel are pessimistic about humanity, both are amazingly optimistic as well. They unite in saying that this divided state must not continue, humanity and human ideals must come together if human happiness is to result. Sin is no necessary part of our makeup. It is an intrusion. It is no more necessary to give spice to life than sand in the eye is necessary for sight.

The first thing, then, to get hold of is this: the gospel offers freedom and release from every single sin. There is no compromise at that point, for compromise would be deadly! It sweeps the horizon and says, “Sin will have no power over you, because you aren’t under Law but under grace” (Rom. 6:14 CEB). “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:2 CEB). We have repeated these words until they are, to many of us, threadbare. But to some of us they are not threadbare words; they are the astonishing offer of God to give us release from the tyranny of evil.

O Christ, we thank you for what this opens up to us. It is the open door—the one open door out of our inner divisions, our inner strifes and confusions to harmony—to just what we want. We thank you. Amen.

* Clifford Barbour, Sin and the New Psychology (New York: Abingdon Press, 1930), 136.

Week 10 Friday

What the Victorious Life Is Not

Luke 22:28; 1 Corinthians 10:13; Hebrews 2:17-18; James 1:2-4

In order that we may see what the victorious life is, we must first see what it is not.

It is not freedom from temptation. Sin results from using a good thing in a wrong way. As dirt is misplaced matter, so sin is misplaced good. Sex is natural and right—adultery is sin. Self-respect pushed too far becomes pride, hence sin. Self-love is normal; pushed beyond limits it becomes selfishness. The herd instinct is right, but when against our ideals, we make the herd the final arbiter, it is sin.

James says, “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God. . . .Every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own [desires], and enticed.” Note the phrase “drawn away”—the natural is drawn away, pushed too far into the sinful.

Now, the natural is always with us. Every moment it will be pressing upon the boundaries we set up for it. Every moment, therefore, we shall be tempted. But temptation is not sin. It is only when we yield that it becomes sin. “You cannot help the birds flying over your head, but you can help them building nests in your hair.” You cannot help the suggestion of evil coming, but you can help holding it, harboring it, and allowing it to rest in your mind until it hatches its brood. Dismissed at once it leaves no stain. Thoughts of evil become evil thoughts only when we invite them in, offer them a chair, and entertain them.

Moreover, temptation is the place where a tension is set up between the lower and the higher. When we throw our will on the right side of that tension, we actually become stronger. Temptation, therefore, can be the ladder to the higher life. We sublimate the moral tension into a moral triumph.

Constant temptation may be consistent with victorious living.

O Christ of the wilderness struggle, we thank you that you are in our struggles, lifting, saving, and turning the tide of the battle. You will go with me today as I turn temptation into character. I thank you. Amen.

Week 10 Saturday

What the Victorious Life Is Not (continued)

Galatians 2:11; 6:1; Philippians 3:12-15

Yesterday we saw that victorious living does not mean freedom from temptation.

Nor does it mean freedom from mistakes. We are personalities in the making, limited and grappling with things too high for us. Obviously, we, at our very best, will make many mistakes. But these mistakes need not be sins. Our actions are the result of our intentions and our intelligence. Our intentions may be very good, but because the intelligence is limited the action may turn out to be a mistake—a mistake, but not necessarily a sin. For sin comes out of a wrong intention. Therefore, the action carries a sense of incompleteness and frustration, but not of guilt. Victorious living does not mean perfect living in the sense of living without flaw. It does mean adequate living, and that can be consistent with many mistakes.

Nor does it mean maturity. It does mean a cleansing away of things that keep from growth, but it is not full growth. In addition to many mistakes in our lives, there will be many immaturities. Purity is not maturity. This gospel of ours is called the Way. Our feet are on that Way, but only on that Way; we have not arrived at the goal.

Nor does it mean that we may not occasionally lapse into a wrong act, which may be called a sin. At that point we may have lost a skirmish, but it doesn’t mean we may not still win the battle. We may even lose a battle and still win the war. One of the differences between a sheep and a swine is that when a sheep falls into a mud hole, it bleats to get out, while the swine loves it and wallows in it.

In saying that an occasional lapse is consistent with victorious living I am possibly opening the door to provide for such lapses. This is dangerous and weakening. There must be no such provision in the mind. There must be an absoluteness about the whole thing. Nevertheless, victorious living can be consistent with occasional failure.

O Christ, we thank you that you know our frame. And yet we know that you cannot remake that frame after your likeness. We put ourselves under its processes. Gladly we do so. Amen.