Selected Writings -- Tozer
Preface
1. Man: The
2. The Call of
Christ
3. What We Think
of Ourselves Is Important
4. The Once-born
and the Twice-born
5. On the Origin
and Nature of Things
6. Why People Find
the Bible Difficult
7. Faith: The
Misunderstood Doctrine
8. True Religion
Is Not Feeling but Willing
9. How to Make
Spiritual Progress
10. The Old Cross
and the New
11. There Is No
Wisdom in Sin
12. Three Degrees
of Religious Knowledge
13. The
Sanctification of the Secular
14. God Must Be
Loved for Himself
15. True Faith Is
Active. Not Passive
16. On Taking Too
Much for Granted
17. The Cure for a
Fretful Spirit
18. Boasting or
Belittling
19. The Communion
of Saints
20. Temperament in
the Christian Life
21. Does God Always
Answer Prayer?
22. Self-deception
and How to Avoid It
23. On Breeding
Spotted Mice
24. The Unknown
Saints
25. Three Faithful
Wounds
26. The Wrath of
God: What Is It?
27. In Praise of
Dogmatism
28. What Men Live
By
29. How to Try the
Spirits
30. Religious
Boredom
31. The Church
Cannot Die
32. The Lordship
of the Man Jesus Is Basic
33. A
Do-It-Yourself Education Better Than None
34. Some Thoughts
on Books and
35. The Decline of
Apocalyptic Expectation
36. Choices Reveal
- and Make - Character
37. The Importance
of Sound Doctrine
38. Some Things
Are Not Negotiable
39. The Saint Must
Walk Alone
Introduction
THE SUPREME
INTEREST in the life of A. W. Tozer was God: He who spoke and brought the world
into being, Who justly rules over men and nations, yet deigns to make man His
dwelling place. He believed that all that really matters is for man to be in
right relationship with God, that his first duty-and privilege-is "to
glorify God and enjoy Him forever." For this reason he delighted to speak
to men of God's majesty and wonder and grace and he ever sought to instruct and
exhort Christians to let this be the purpose of their lives. He grieved that
they should be content with less.
Nothing he
preached or wrote was merely academic or theoretical. What he said about God
came out of many hours spent in His presence and with His Word. What he wrote
about men was what he knew of his own heart and observed in others. With the
Spirit's anointing came discernment; perception and clarity issued out of a
disciplined mind. A broad knowledge averted dullness, and a lively wit brought
freshness.
The chapters in
this book deal with many aspects of one subject: the relationship of God and
man. They are above all practical and all who read them will profit.
Anita M. Bailey
A.W. Tozer
Managing Editor
(1897 -1963)
The
Man: The
DEEP INSIDE EVERY
MAN there is a private sanctum where dwells the mysterious essence of his
being. This far-in reality is that in the man which is what it is of itself
without reference to any other part of the man's complex nature. It is the
man's "I Am," a gift from the I AM who created him.
The I AM which is
God is underived and selfexistent; the "I Am" which is man is derived
from God and dependent every moment upon His creative fiat for its continued
existence. One is the Creator, high over all, ancient of days, dwelling in
light unapproachable. The other is a creature and, though privileged beyond all
others, is still but a creature, a pensioner on God's bounty and a suppliant
before His throne.
The deep-in human
entity of which we speak is called in the Scriptures the spirit of man.
"For what man knoweth the things of man, save the spirit of man which is
in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God"
(I Cor.
The importance of
all this cannot be overestimated as we think and study and pray. It reveals the
essential spirituality of mankind. It denies that man is a creature having a
spirit and declares that he is a spirit having a body. That which makes him a
human being is not his body but his spirit, in which the image of God
originally lay.
One of the most
liberating declarations in the New Testament is this: "The true
worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father
seeketh such to worship him. God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must
worship him in spirit and in truth" (John
From man's
standpoint the most tragic loss suffered in the Fall was the vacating of this
inner sanctum by the Spirit of God. At the far-in hidden center of man's being
is a bush fitted to be the dwelling place of the Triune God. There God planned
to rest and glow with moral and spiritual fire. Man by his sin forfeited this
indescribably wonderful privilege and must now dwell there alone. For so
intimately private is the place that no creature can intrude; no one can enter
but Christ; and He will enter only by the invitation of faith. "Behold, I
stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I
will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me" (Rev. 3:20).
By the mysterious
operation of the Spirit in the new birth, that which is called by Peter
"the divine nature" enters the deep-in core of the believer's heart
and establishes residence there. "If any man have not the Spirit of
Christ, he is none of his," for "the Spirit itself beareth witness
with our spirit, that we are the children of God" (Rom. 8:9, 16). Such a
one is a true Christian, and only such. Baptism, confirmation, the receiving of
the sacraments, church membership-these mean nothing unless the supreme act of
God in regeneration also takes place. Religious externals may have a meaning
for the God-inhabited soul; for any others they are not only useless but may
actually become snares, deceiving them into a false and perilous sense of security.
"Keep thy
heart with all diligence" is more than a wise saying; it is a solemn
charge laid upon us by the One who cares most about us. To it we should give
the most careful heed lest at any time we should let it slip.
The Call of
Christ
TO BE CALLED TO
FOLLOW CHRIST is a high honor; higher indeed than any honor men can bestow upon
each other.
Were all the
nations of the earth to unite in one great federation and call a man to head
that federation, that man would be honored above any other man that ever lived.
Yet the humblest man who heeds the call to follow Christ has an honor far above
such a man; for the nations of the earth can bestow only such honor as they
possess, while the honor of Christ is supreme over all. God has given Him a
name that is above every name.
This being true
and being known to the heavenly intelligences, the methods we use to persuade
men to follow Christ must seem to them extremely illogical if not downright
wrong.
Evangelical
Christians commonly offer Christ to mankind as a nostrum to cure their ills, a
way out of their troubles, a quick and easy means to the achievement of
personal ends. They use the right words, but their emphasis is awry. The
message is so presented as to leave the hearer with the impression that he is
being asked to give up much to gain more. And that is not good, however well
intentioned it may be.
What we do is
precisely what a good salesman does when he presents the excellence of his
product as compared with that of his closest competitor. The customer chooses
the better of the two, as who would not? But the weakness of the whole
salesmanship technique is apparent: the idea of selfish gain is present in the
whole transaction.
Jesus Christ is a
Man come to save men. In Him the divine nature is married to our human nature,
and wherever human nature exists there is the raw material out of which He
makes followers and saints. Our Lord recognizes no classes, high or low, rich
or poor, old or young, man or woman: all are human and all are alike to Him.
His invitation is to all mankind.
In New Testament
times persons from many and varied social levels heard His call and responded:
Peter the fisherman; Levi the publican; Luke the physician; Paul the scholar;
Mary the demon possessed; Lydia the businesswoman; Paulus the statesman. A few
great and many common persons came. They all came and our Lord received them
all in the same way and on the same terms.
From any and every
profession or occupation men and women may come if they will. The simple rule
is that if the occupation is good, continue in it if you so desire; if it is
bad, abandon it at once and seek another. If the call includes detachment from
all common pursuits to give full time to the work of the gospel, then no
profession or occupation, no matter how good or how noble, must keep us from
obeying the call.
The activities in
which men engage may be divided into two categories: the morally bad and the
morally neutral. The activities of the burglar, the gambler, the dictator, the
procurer, the dope addict, the gangster and all who prey upon society are bad;
nothing can make them better. The call of Christ is away from all such. This is
not to be questioned or debated, but accepted without delay and acted upon at
once.
But the majority
of our human activities are not evil in themselves; they are neutral. The
laborer, the statesman, the housewife, the doctor, the teacher, the
engineer-such as these engage in activities that are neither good nor bad.
Their moral qualities are imparted by the one who engages in them. So the call
of Christ is not away from such things, for they may be sanctified by the
prayer and faith of the individual, and thus turned into a positive good.
One thing is
certain: the call of Christ is always a promotion. Were Christ to call a king
from his throne to preach the gospel to some tribe of aborigines, that king
would be elevated above anything he had known before. Any movement toward
Christ is ascent, and any direction away from Him is down.
Yet though we
recognize the honor bestowed upon us, there is no place for pride, for the
follower of Christ must shoulder his cross and a cross is an object of shame
and a symbol of rejection.
Before God and the
angels it is a great honor to follow Christ, but before men it is not so. The Christ
the world pretends now to honor was once rejected and crucified by that same
world. The great saint is honored only after he is dead. Rarely is he known as
a saint while he lives. The plaudits of the world come too late, when he can no
longer hear them; and perhaps it is better that way. Not many are selfless
enough to endure honor without injury to their souls.
In those early
Galilean days Christ's followers heard His call, forsook the old life, attached
themselves to Him, began to obey His teachings and joined themselves to His
band of disciples. This total commitment was their confirmation of faith.
Nothing less would do.
And it is not
different today. He calls us to leave the old life and to begin the new. There
must never be any vacuum, never any place of neutrality where the world cannot
identify us. Peter warming himself at the world's fire and trying to seem
unconcerned is an example of the kind of halfway discipleship too many are
satisfied with. The martyr leaping up in the arena, demanding to be thrown to
the lions along with his suffering brethren, is an example of the only kind of
dedication that God approves.
What We Think of
Ourselves Is Important
THE MAN WHO IS
SERIOUSLY CONVINCED that he deserves to go to hell is not likely to go there,
while the man who believes that he is worthy of heaven will certainly never
enter that blessed place.
I use the word
"seriously" to accent true conviction and to distinguish it from mere
nominal belief.
It is possible to
go through life believing that we believe, while actually having no conviction
more vital than a conventional creed inherited from our ancestors or picked up
from the general religious notions current in our social circle. If this creed
requires that we admit our own depravity we do so and feel proud of our
fidelity to the Christian faith. But from the way we love, praise and pamper
ourselves it is plain enough that we do not consider ourselves worthy of
damnation.
A revealing proof
of this is seen in the squeamish way religious writers use words. An amusing
example is found in a cautious editorial change made in the song "The
Comforter Has Come." One stanza reads:
"O boundless
love divine!
How shall this
tongue of mine,
To wondering
mortals tell
The matchless
grace divine -
That I, a child of
hell,
Should in His
image shine!"
That is how Dr.
Bottome felt it and that is how he wrote it; and the man who has seen the
holiness of God and the pollution of his own heart will sing it as it was
written, for his whole inner life will respond to the experience. Even if he
cannot find chapter and verse to brand hint a child of hell, Ins heart indicts
him and he eagerly accuses himself before God as fit only for perdition. This
is to experience something profounder than theology, more painfully intimate
than creed, and while bitter and harsh it is true to the man's Spirit
illuminated view of himself. In so confessing, the enlightened heart is being
faithful to the terrible fact while it is singing its own condemnation. This I
believe is greatly pleasing to God.
It is, I repeat,
amusing if somewhat distressing to come upon an editorial change in this song,
which was made obviously in the interest of correct theology, but is once
removed from reality and twice removed from true moral feeling. In one hymnal
it is made to read,
"That I a
child of SIN
Should in His
image shine!"
The fastidious
song cobbler who made that alteration simply could not think of himself as ever
having been a "child of hell." A finicky choice of words sometimes
tells us more about a man than the man knows about himself.
This one instance,
if isolated in Christian literature, ought not be too significant, but when
this kind of thing occurs everywhere as thick as dandelions in a meadow it
becomes highly significant indeed. The mincing religious prudery heard in the
average pulpit is all a part of this same thing-- art unwillingness to admit
the depths of our inner depravity. We do not actually assent to God's judgement
of us except as we hold it as a superficial creed. When the pressure is on we
back out. A child of sin? Maybe. A child of hell? No.
Our Lord -told of
two men who appeared before God in prayer, a Pharisee who recited his virtues
and a publican who beat on his breast and pleaded for mercy. The first was rejected,
the other justified.
We manage to live
with that story in some degree of comfort only by keeping it at full arm's
length and never permitting it to catch hold of our conscience. These two men
are long ago dead and their story has become it little religious classic. We
are different, and how can anything so remote apply to us? So we reason on a
level only slightly above our unconscious, and draw what comfort we can from
the vagueness and remoteness of it all.
But why should we
not face up to it? The truth is that this happened not a long while ago, but
yesterday, this morning; not far-away, but here where some of us last knelt to
pray. These two men are not dead, but alive, and are found in the local church,
at the missionary convention and the deeper life conference here, now, today.
Every man lives at
last by his secret philosophy as an airplane flies on its electric beam. It is
the profound conviction that we are wholly unworthy of future blessedness,
that, we are indeed by nature fitted only for destruction, that leads to true
repentance. The man who inwardly believes that lie is too good to perish will
certainly perish unless he experiences a radical change of heart about himself.
The poor quality
of Christian that grows out of our modern evangelistic meeting may be accounted
for by the absence of real repentance accompanying the initial spiritual
experience of the converts. And the absence of repentance is the result of an
inadequate view of sin and sinfulness held by those who present themselves in
the inquiry room.
"No fears, no
grace," said Bunyan. "Though there is not always grace where there is
fear of hell, yet, to be sure, there is no grace where there is no fear of
God." And again, "I care not at all for that profession which begins
not in heaviness of mind .... For the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom,
and they that lack the beginning have neither middle nor end."
The Once-born and
the Twice-born
CLASSIFICATION IS
ONE OF THE MOST DIFFICULT of all tasks. Even in the realm of religion there are
enough lights and shades to make it injudicious to draw too fine a line between
men and men. If the religious world were composed of squares of solid black and
solid white classification would be easy; but unfortunately it is not.
It is a grave
error for us evangelicals to assume that the children of God are all in our
communion and that all who are not associated with us are ipso facto enemies of
the Lord. The Pharisees made that mistake and crucified Christ as a
consequence.
With all this in
mind, and leaning over backwards to be fair and charitable, there is yet one
distinction which we dare make, which indeed we must make if we are to think
the thoughts of God after Him and bring our beliefs into harmony with the Holy
Scriptures. That distinction is the one which exists between two classes of
human beings, the once-born and the twice-born.
That such a
distinction does in fact exist was taught by our Lord with great plainness of
speech, in contexts which preclude the possibility that He was merely speaking
figuratively. "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of
God," He said, and the whole chapter where these words are found confirms
that He was speaking precisely, setting forth meanings as blunt and downright as
it is possible for language to convey.
"Ye must be
born again," said Christ. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh;
and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." This clear line of
demarcation runs through the entire New Testament, quite literally dividing one
human being from another and making a distinction as sharp as that which exists
between different genera of the animal kingdom.
Just who belongs
to one class and who to the other it is not always possible to judge, though
the two kinds of life ordinarily separate from each other. Those who are
twice-born crystallize around the Person of Christ and cluster together in
companies, while the once-born are held together only by the ties of nature,
aided by the ties of race or by common political and social interests.
Our Lord warned
His disciples that they would be persecuted. "In the world ye shall have
tribulation," He said, and "Blessed are they which are persecuted for
righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when
men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil
against you falsely, for my sake."
These are only two
of many passages of the New Testament warning of persecution or recording the
fact of harassment and attack suffered by the followers of the Lord. This same
idea runs through the entire Bible from the once-born Cain who slew the
twice-born Abel to the Book of the Revelation where the end of human history
comes in a burst of blood and fire.
That hostility
exists between the once-born and the twice-born is known to every student of
the Bible; the reason for it was stated by Christ when He said, "If ye
were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the
world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth
you." The rule was laid down by the apostle Paul when he wrote, "But
as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the
Spirit, even so it is now."
Difference of
moral standards between the onceborn and the twice-born, and their opposite
ways of life, may be contributing causes of this hostility; but the real cause
lies deeper. There are two spirits abroad in the earth: the spirit that works
in the children of disobedience and the Spirit of God. These two can never be
reconciled in time or in eternity. The spirit that dwells in the once-born is
forever opposed to the Spirit that inhabits the heart of the twice-born. This
hostility began somewhere in the remote past before the creation of man and
continues to this day. The modern effort to bring peace between these two
spirits is not only futile but contrary to the moral laws of the universe.
To teach that the
spirit of the once-born is at enmity with the Spirit of the twice-born is to
bring down upon one's head every kind of violent abuse. No language is too
bitter to hurl against the conceited bigot who would dare to draw such a line
of distinction between men. Such malignant ideas are at odds with the
brotherhood of man, says the once-born, and are held only by the apostles of
disunity and hate. This mighty rage against the twice-born only serves to
confirm the truth they teach. But this no one seems to notice.
What we need to
restore power to the Christian testimony is not soft talk about brotherhood but
an honest recognition that two human races occupy the earth simultaneously: a
fallen race that sprang from the loins of Adam and a regenerate race that is
born of the Spirit through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.
To accept this
truth requires a tough-mindedness and a spiritual maturity that modern
Christians simply do not possess. To face up to it hardly contributes to that
"peace of mind" after which our religious weaklings bleat so
plaintively.
For myself, I long
ago decided that I would rather know the truth than be happy in ignorance. If I
cannot have both truth and happiness, give me truth. We'll have a long time to
be happy in heaven.
On the Origin and
Nature of Things
THE CELEBRATED
PRAYER of the great German astronomer, Kepler, has been a benediction to many:
"O God, I thank Thee that Thou hast permitted me to think Thy thoughts
after Thee."
This prayer is
theologically sound because it acknowledges the priority of God in the
universe. "In the beginning God" is undoubtedly the most important
sentence in the Bible. It is in God that all things begin, and all thoughts as
well. In the words of Augustine, "But Thou, O Lord, who ever livest, and
in whom nothing dies, since before the world was, and, indeed, before all that
can be called `before,' Thou existest, and art the God and Lord of all
creatures; and with Thee fixedly abide the causes of all unstable things and
the changing sources of all things changeable, and the eternal reasons of all
things reasoning and temporal."
Whatever new thing
anyone discovers is already old, for it is 1-tt the present expression of a
previous thought of God. The idea of the thing precedes the thing itself; and
when things raise thoughts in the thinker's mind these are the ancient thoughts
of God, however imperfectly understood.
When a true
thought enters any man's mind, be he saint or sinner, it must of necessity be
God's thought, for God is the origin of all true thoughts and things. That is
why many real truths are spoken and written by persons other than Christians.
Should an atheist, for instance, state that two times two equals four, he would
be stating a truth and thinking God's thought after Him, even though he might
deny that God exists at all.
In their search
for facts men have confused truths with truth. The words of Christ, "Ye
shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free," have been
wrenched from their context and used to stir people to the pursuit of knowledge
of many kinds with the expectation of being made "free" by knowledge.
Certainly this is not what Christ had in mind when He uttered the words.
Such truths as men
discover in the earth beneath and in the astronomic heavens above are properly
not truths but facts. We call them truths, as I do here, but they are no more
than parts of the jigsaw puzzle of the universe, and when correctly fitted
together they provide at least a hint of what the vaster picture is like. But I
repeat, they are not truth, and more important, they are not the truth. Were
every missing piece discovered and laid in place we would still not have the
truth, for the truth is not a composite of thoughts and things. The truth
should be spelled with a capital T, for it is nothing less than the Son of God,
the Second Person of the blessed Godhead.
The human mind
requires an answer to the question concerning the origin and nature of things.
The world as we find it must be accounted for in some way. Philosophers and
scientists have sought to account for it, the one by speculation, the other by
observation, and in their labors they have come upon many useful and inspiring
facts. But they have not found the final Truth. That comes by revelation and
illumination.
They who believe
the Christian revelation know that the universe is a creation. It is not
eternal, since it had a beginning, and it is not the result of a succession of
happy coincidences whereby an all but infinite number of matching parts
accidentally found each other, fell into place and began to hum. So to believe
would require a degree of credulity few persons possess. "I had rather
believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoram,"
said Bacon, "than that this universal frame is without a mind. And
therefore God never wrought miracles to convince atheism, because His ordinary
works convince it."
Those who have
faith are not thrown back upon speculation for the secret of the universe.
Faith is an organ of knowledge. "Through faith we understand that the
worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not
made of things which do appear." The voice of Eternal Wisdom declares,
"In the beginning God created" and "In the beginning was the
Word .... All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made
that was made."
All things came
out of the Word, which in the New Testament means the thought and will of God
in active expression and is identified with our Lord Jesus Christ. It is the
Son who is the Truth that makes men free.
Not facts, not
scientific knowledge, but eternal Truth delivers men, and that eternal Truth
became flesh to dwell among us. "This is life eternal, that they might
know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent."
Not only the
origin of things is revealed, but the nature of things as well. Because the
origin of all things is spirit, all things are at bottom spiritual also. This
is a moral universe; it is governed by moral laws and will be judged by moral
laws at last. Man above all creatures possesses moral perception and is
answerable to the spiritual laws that pervade and sustain the world. Pure
materialism-that is, the doctrine that matter is the primordial constituent of
the universe is not natural to the human mind. It requires a chronic violation
of our basic instincts to accept it as an explanation of the nature of things.
And Paul tells us in the first two chapters of his Epistle to the Romans how
men get into a state of mind to accept such falsehood.
Why People Find
the Bible Difficult
THAT MANY PERSONS
FIND THE BIBLE HARD to understand will not be denied by those acquainted with
the facts. Testimony to the difficulties encountered in Bible reading is too
full and too widespread to be dismissed lightly.
In human
experience there is usually a complex of causes rather than but one cause for
everything, and so it is with the difficulty we run into with the Bible. To the
question, Why is the Bible hard to understand? no snap answer can be given; the
pert answer is sure to be the wrong one. The problem is multiple instead of
singular, and for this reason the effort to find a single solution to it will
be disappointing.
In spite of this I
venture to give a short answer to the question, and while it is not the whole
answer it is a major one and probably contains within itself most of the
answers to what must be an involved and highly complex question. 1 believe that
we find the Bible difficult because we try to read it as we would read any
other book, and it is not the same as any other book.
The Bible is not
addressed to just anybody. Its message is directed to a chosen few. Whether
these few are chosen by God in a sovereign act of election or are chosen
because they meet certain qualifying conditions I leave to each one to decide
as he may, knowing full well that his decision will be determined by his basic
beliefs about such matters as predestination, free will, the eternal decrees
and other related doctrines. But whatever may have taken place in eternity, it
is obvious what happens in time: Some believe and some do not; some are morally
receptive and some are not; some have spiritual capacity and some have not. It
is to those who do and are and have that the Bible is addressed. Those who do
not and are not and have not will read it in vain.
Right here I
expect some readers to enter strenuous objections, and for reasons not hard to
find. Chrisianity today is man-centered, not God-centered. God is made to wait
patiently, even respectfully, on the whims of men. The image of God currently
popular is that of a distracted Father, struggling in heartbroken desperation
to get people to accept a Saviour of whom they feel no need and in whom they
have very little interest. To persuade these self-sufficient souls to respond
to His generous offers God will do almost anything, even using salesmanship
methods and talking down to them in the chummiest way imaginable. This view of
things is, of course, a kind of religious romanticism which, while it often
uses flattering and sometimes embarassing terms in praise of God, manages
nevertheless to make man the star of the show.
The notion that
the Bible is addressed to everybody has wrought confusion within and without
the church. The effort to apply the teaching of the Sermon
on the Mount to
the unregenerate nations of the world is one example of this. Courts of law and
the military powers of the earth are urged to follow the teachings of Christ,
an obviously impossible thing for them to do. To quote the words of Christ as
guides for policemen, judges and generals is to misunderstand those words
completely and to reveal a total lack of understanding of the purposes of
divine revelation. The gracious words of Christ are for the sons and daughters
of grace, not for the Gentile nations whose chosen symbols are the lion, the
eagle, the dragon and the bear.
Not only does God
address His words of truth to those who are able to receive them, He actually
conceals their meaning from those who are not. The preacher uses stories to
make truth clear; our Lord often used them to obscure it. The parables of
Christ were the exact opposite of the modern "illustration," which is
meant to give light; the parables were "dark sayings" and Christ
asserted that He sometimes used them so that His disciples could understand and
His enemies could not. (See Matthew 13:10-17.) As the pillar of fire gave light
to
The saving power
of the Word is reserved for those for whom it is intended. The secret of the
Lord is with them that fear Him. The impenitent heart will find the Bible but a
skeleton of facts without flesh or life or breath. Shakespeare may be enjoyed
without penitence; we may understand Plato without believing a word he says;
but penitence and humility along with faith and obedience are necessary to a
right understanding of the Scriptures.
In natural matters
faith follows evidence and is impossible without it, but in the realm of the
spirit faith precedes understanding; it does not follow it. The natural man
must know in order to believe; the spiritual man must believe in order to know.
The faith that saves is not a conclusion drawn from evidence; it is a moral
thing, a thing of the spirit, a supernatural infusion of confidence in Jesus
Christ, a very gift of God.
The faith that
saves reposes in the Person of Christ; it leads at once to a committal of the
total being to Christ, an act impossible to the natural man. To believe rightly
is as much a miracle as was the coming forth of dead Lazarus at the command of
Christ.
The Bible is a
supernatural book and can be understood only by supernatural aid.
Faith: The
Misunderstood Doctrine
IN THE DIVINE
SCHEME OF SALVATION the doctrine of faith is central. God addresses His words
to faith, and where no faith is, no true revelation is possible. "Without
faith it is impossible to please him."
Every benefit
flowing from the atonement of Christ comes to the individual through the
gateway of faith. Forgiveness, cleansing, regeneration, the Holy Spirit, all
answers to prayer, are given to faith and received by faith. There is no other
way. This is common evangelical doctrine and is accepted wherever the cross of
Christ is understood.
Because faith is
so vital to all our hopes, so necessary to the fulfillment of every aspiration
of our hearts, we dare take nothing for granted concerning it. Anything that
carries with it so much of weal or woe, which indeed decides our heaven or our
hell, is too important to neglect. We simply must not allow ourselves to be uninformed
or misinformed. We must know.
For a number of
years my heart has been troubled over the doctrine of faith as it is received
and taught among evangelical Christians everywhere. Great emphasis is laid upon
faith in orthodox circles, and that is good; but still I am troubled.
Specifically, my fear is that the modern conception of faith is not the
Biblical one; that when the teachers of our day use the word they do not mean
what Bible writers meant when they used it.
The causes of my
uneasiness are these:
1. The lack of
spiritual fruit in the lives of so many who claim to have faith.
2. The rarity of a
radical change in the conduct and general outlook of persons professing their
new faith in Christ as their personal Saviour.
3. The failure of
our teachers to define or even describe the thing to which the word faith is
supposed to refer.
4. The
heartbreaking failure of multitudes of seekers, be they ever so earnest, to
make anything out of the doctrine or to receive any satisfying experience
through it.
5. The real danger
that a doctrine that is parroted so widely and received so uncritically by so
many is false as understood by them.
6. I have seen
faith put forward as a substitute for obedience, an escape from reality, a
refuge from the necessity of hard thinking, a hiding place for weak character.
I have known people to miscall by the name of faith high animal spirits,
natural optimism, emotional thrills and nervous tics.
7. Plain horse
sense ought to tell us that anything that makes no change in the man who
professes it makes no difference to God either, and it is an easily observable
fact that for countless numbers of persons the change from no-faith to faith
makes no actual difference in the life.
Perhaps it will
help us to know what faith is if we first notice what it is not. It is not the
'believing' of a statement we know to be true. The human mind is so constructed
that it must of necessity believe when the evidence presented to it is
convincing. It cannot help itself. When the evidence fails to convince, no
faith is possible. No threats, no punishment, can compel the mind to believe
against clear evidence.
Faith based upon
reason is faith of a kind, it is true; but it is not of the character of Bible
faith, for it follows the evidence infallibly and has nothing of a moral or
spiritual nature in it. Neither can the absence of faith based upon reason be
held against anyone, for the evidence, not the individual, decides the verdict.
To send a man to hell whose only crime was to follow evidence straight to its
proper conclusion would be palpable injustice; to justify a sinner on the
grounds that he had made up his mind according to the plain facts would be to
make salvation the result of the workings of a common law of the mind as
applicable to Judas as to Paul. It would take salvation out of the realm of the
volitional and place it in the mental, where, according to the Scriptures, it
surely does not belong.
True faith rests
upon the character of God and asks no further proof than the moral perfections
of the One who cannot lie. It is enough that God said it, and if the statement
should contradict every one of the five senses and all the conclusions of logic
as well, still the believer continues to believe. "Let God be true, but
every man a liar," is the language of true faith. Heaven approves such
faith because it rises above mere proofs and rests in the bosom of God.
In recent years
among certain evangelicals there has arisen a movement designed to prove the
truths of Scriptures by appeal to science. Evidence is sought in the natural
world to support supernatural revelation. Snowflakes, blood, stones, strange
marine creatures, birds and many other natural objects are brought forward as
proof that the Bible is true. This is touted as being a great support to faith,
the idea being that if a Bible doctrine can be proved to be true, faith will
spring up and flourish as a consequence.
What these
brethren do not see is that the very fact that they feel a necessity to seek
proof for the truths of the Scriptures proves something else altogether,
namely, their own basic unbelief. When God speaks unbelief asks, "How
shall I know that this is true?" I AM THAT I AM is the only grounds for
faith. To dig among the rocks or search under the sea for evidence to support
the Scriptures is to insult the One who wrote them. Certainly I do not believe
that this is done intentionally; but I cannot see how we can escape the
conclusion that it is done, nevertheless.
Faith as the Bible
knows it is confidence in God and His Son Jesus Christ; it is the response of
the soul to the divine character as revealed in the Scriptures; and even this
response is impossible apart from the prior inworking of the Holy Spirit. Faith
is a gift of God to a penitent soul and has nothing whatsoever to do with the
senses or the data they afford. Faith is a miracle; it is the ability God gives
to trust His Son, and anything that does not result in action in accord with
the will of God is not faith but something else short of it.
Faith and morals
are two sides of the same coin. Indeed the very essence of faith is moral. Any
professed faith in Christ as personal Saviour that does not bring the life
under plenary obedience to Christ as Lord is inadequate and must betray its
victim at the last.
The man that
believes will obey; failure to obey is convincing proof that there is not true
faith present. To attempt the impossible God must give faith or there will be
none, and He gives faith to the obedient heart only. Where real repentance is,
there is obedience; for repentance is not only sorrow for past failures and
sins, it is a determination to begin now to do the will of God as He reveals it
to us.
True Religion IS
Not Feeling but Willing
ONE OF THE
PUZZLING QUESTIONS likely to turn up sooner or later to vex the seeking
Christian is how he can fulfill the scriptural command to love God with all his
heart and his neighbor as himself.
The earnest
Christian, as he meditates on his sacred obligation to love God and mankind,
may experience a sense of frustration gendered by the knowledge that he just
cannot seem to work up any emotional thrill over his Lord or his brothers. He
wants to, but he cannot. The delightful wells of feeling simply will not flow.
Many honest
persons have become discouraged by the absence of religious emotion and
concluded that they are not really Christian after all. They conclude that they
must have missed the way somewhere back there and their religion is little more
than an empty profession. So for a while they belabor themselves for their
coldness and finally settle into a state of dull discouragement, hardly knowing
what to think. They do believe in God; they do indeed trust Christ as their
Saviour, but the love they hoped to feel consistently eludes them. What is the
trouble?
The problem is not
a light one. A real difficulty is involved, one which may be stated in the form
of a question: How can I love by commandment? Of all the emotions of which the
soul is capable, love is by far the freest, the most unreasoning, the one least
likely to spring up at the call of duty or obligation, and surely the one that
will not come at the command of another. No law has ever been passed that can
compel one moral being to love another, for by the very nature of it love must
be voluntary. No one can be coerced or frightened into loving anyone. Love just
does not come that way. So what are we to do with our Lord's command to love
God and our neighbor?
To find our way
out of the shadows and into the cheerful sunlight we need only to know that
there are two kinds of love: the love of feeling and the love of willing. The
one lies in the emotions, the other in the will. Over the one we may have
little control. It comes and goes, rises and falls, flares up and disappears as
it chooses, and changes from hot to warm to cool and back to warm again very
much as does the weather. Such love was not in the mind of Christ when He told
His people to love God and each other. As well command a butterfly to light on
our shoulder as to attempt to command this whimsical kind of affection to visit
our hearts.
The love the Bible
enjoins is not the love of feeling; it is the love of willing, the willed
tendency of the heart. (For these two happy phrases I am indebted to another, a
master of the inner life whose pen was only a short time ago stilled by death.)
God never intended
that such a being as man should be the plaything of his feelings. The emotional
life is a proper and noble part of the total personality, but it is, by its
very nature, of secondary importance. Religion lies in the will, and so does
righteousness. The only good that God recognizes is a willed good; the only
valid holiness is a willed holiness.
It should be a
cheering thought that before God every man is what he wills to be. The first
requirement in conversion is a rectified will. "If any man will,"
says our Lord, and leaves it there. To meet the requirements of love toward God
the soul need but will to love and the miracle begins to blossom like the
budding of Aaron's rod.
The will is the
automatic pilot that keeps the soul on course. "Flying is easy," said
a friend who flies his own plane. "Just take her up, point her in the
direction you want her to go and set the pilot. After that she'll fly
herself." While we must not press the figure too far, it is yet blessedly
true that the will, not the feelings, determines moral direction.
The root of all
evil in human nature is the corruption of the will. The thoughts and intents of
the heart are wrong and as a consequence the whole life is wrong. Repentance is
primarily a change of moral purpose, a sudden and often violent reversal of the
soul's direction. The prodigal son took his first step upward from the pigsty
when he said, "I will arise and go to my father." As he had once willed
to leave his father's house, now he willed to return. His subsequent action
proved his expressed purpose to be sincere. He did return.
Someone may infer
from the above that we are ruling out the joy of the Lord as a valid part of
the Christian life. While no one who reads these columns regularly would be
likely to draw such an erroneous conclusion, a chance reader might be led
astray; a further word of explanation is therefore indicated:
To love God with
all our heart we must first of all will to do so. We should repent our lack of
love and determine from this moment on to make God the object of our devotion.
We should set our affections on things above and aim our hearts toward Christ
and heavenly things. We should read the Scriptures devotionally every day and prayerfully
obey them, always firmly willing to love God with all our heart and our
neighbor as ourself.
If we do these
things we may be sure that we shall experience a wonderful change in our whole
inward life. We shall soon find to our great delight that our feelings are
becoming less erratic and are beginning to move in the direction of the
"willed tendency of the heart." Our emotions will become disciplined
and directed. We shall begin to taste the "piercing sweetness" of the
love of Christ. Our religious affection will begin to mount evenly on steady
wings instead of flitting about idly without purpose or intelligent direction.
The whole life, like a delicate instrument, will be tuned to sing the praises
of Him who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood.
But first of all
we must will, for the will is master of the heart.
How to Make
Spiritual Progress
THE COMPLACENCY of
CHRISTIANS is the scandal of Christianity.
Time is short, and
eternity is long. The end of all things is at hand. Man has proved himself
morally unfit to manage the world in which he has been placed by the kindness
of the Almighty. He has jockeyed himself to the edge of the crater and cannot
go back, and in terrible fear he is holding his breath against the awful moment
when he will be plunged into the inferno.
In the meantime, a
company of people exist on the earth who claim to have the answer to all life's
major questions. They claim to have found the way back to God, release from
their sins, life everlasting and a sure guarantee of heaven in the world to
come.
These are the
Christians. They declare that Jesus Christ is very God of very God, made flesh
to dwell among us. Thy insist that He is the Way, the Truth and the Life. They
testify that He is to them Wisdom, Righteousness, Sanctification and
Redemption, and they steadfastly assert that He will be to them the
Resurrection and the Life for eternity to come.
These Christians
know, and when pressed will admit, that their finite hearts have explored but a
pitifully small part of the infinite riches that are theirs in Christ Jesus.
They read the lives of the great saints whose fervent desire after God carried
them far up the mountain toward spiritual perfection; and for a brief moment
they may yearn to be like these fiery souls whose light and fragrance still
linger in the world where they once lived and labored. But the longing soon
passes. The world is too much with them and the claims of their earthly lives
are too insistent; so they settle back to live their ordinary lives, and accept
the customary as normal. After a while they manage to achieve some kind of
inner content and that is the last we hear of them.
This contentment
with inadequate and imperfect progress in the life of holiness is, I repeat, a
scandal in the Church of the Firstborn. The whole weight of Scripture is
against such a thing. The Holy Spirit constantly seeks to arouse the
complacent. "Let us go on" is the word of the Spirit. The Apostle
Paul embodies this in his noble testimony as found in his Philippian epistle:
"But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yea
doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge
of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and
do count them but dung, that I may win Christ . . . that I may know him, and
the power of his resurrection . . . but this one thing I do, forgetting those
things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before,
I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ
Jesus."
If we accept this
as the sincere expression of a normal Christian I do not see how we can justify
our own indifference toward spiritual things. But should someone feel a desire
to make definite progress in the life of Christ, what can he do to get on with
it? Here are a few suggestions:
1. Strive to get
beyond mere pensive longing. Set your face like a flint and begin to put your
life in order. Every man is as holy as he really wants to be. But the want must
be all-compelling.
Tie up the loose
ends of your life. Begin to tithe; institute family prayer; pay up your debts
as far as possible and make some kind of frank arrangement with every creditor
you cannot pay immediately; make restitution as far as you can; set aside time
to pray and search the Scriptures; surrender wholly to the will of God. You
will be surprised and delighted with the results.
2. Put away every
un-Christian habit from you. If other Christians practice it without
compunction, God may be calling you to come nearer to Him than these other
Christians care to come. Remember the words, "Others may, you
cannot." Do not condemn or criticize, but seek a better way. God will
honor you.
3. Get Christ
Himself in the focus of your heart and keep Him there continually. Only in
Christ will you find complete fulfillment. In Him you may be united to the
Godhead in conscious, vital awareness. Remember that all of God is accessible
to you through Christ. Cultivate His knowledge above everything else on earth.
4. Throw your
heart open to the Holy Spirit and invite Him to fill you. He will do it. Let no
one interpret the Scriptures for you in such a way as to rule out the Father's
gift of the Spirit. Every man is as full of the Spirit as he wants to be. Make
your heart a vacuum and the Spirit will rush in to fill it.
Nowhere in the
Scriptures nor in Christian biography was anyone ever filled with the Spirit
who did not know that he had been, and nowhere was anyone filled who did not
know when. And no one was ever filled gradually.
5. Be hard on
yourself and easy on others. Carry your own cross but never lay one on the back
of another. Begin to practice the presence of God. Cultivate the fellowship of
the Triune God by prayer, humility, obedience and self-abnegation.
Let any Christian
do these things and he will make rapid spiritual progress. There is every
reason why we should all go forward in our Christian lives and no reason why we
should not. Let us go on.
The Old Cross and
the New
ALL UNANNOUNCED AND
MOSTLY UNDETECTED there has come in modern times a new cross into popular
evangelical circles. It is like the old cross, but different: the likenesses
are superficial; the differences, fundamental.
From this new
cross has sprung a new philosophy of the Christian life, and from that new
philosophy has come a new evangelical technique-a new type of meeting and a new
kind of preaching. This new evangelism employs the same language as the old,
but its content is not the same and its emphasis not as before.
The old cross
would have no truck with the world. For Adam's proud flesh it meant the end of
the journey. It carried into effect the sentence imposed by the law of Sinai.
The new cross is not opposed to the human race; rather, it is a friendly pal
and, if understood aright, it is the source of oceans of good clean fun and
innocent enjoyment. It lets Adam live without interference. His life motivation
is unchanged; he still lives for his own pleasure, only now he takes delight in
singing choruses and watching religious movies instead of singing bawdy songs
and drinking hard liquor. The accent is still on enjoyment, though the fun is
now on a higher plane morally if not intellectually.
The new cross
encourages a new and entirely different evangelistic approach. The evangelist
does not demand abnegation of the old life before a new life can be received.
He preaches not contrasts but similarities. He seeks to key into public
interest by showing that Christianity makes no unpleasant demands; rather, it
offers the same thing the world does, only on a higher level. Whatever the
sin-mad world happens to be clamoring after at the moment is cleverly shown to
be the very thing the gospel offers, only the religious product is better.
The new cross does
not slay the sinner, it redirects him. It gears him into a cleaner anal jollier
way of living and saves his self-respect. To the self-assertive it says,
"Come and assert yourself for Christ." To the egotist it says,
"Come and do your boasting in the Lord." To the thrillseeker it says,
"Come and enjoy the thrill of Christian fellowship." The Christian
message is slanted in the direction of the current vogue in order to make it
acceptable to the public.
The philosophy
back of this kind of thing may be sincere but its sincerity does not save it
from being false. It is false because it is blind. It misses completely the
whole meaning of the cross.
The old cross is a
symbol of death. It stands for the abrupt, violent end of a human being. The
man in Roman times who took up his cross and started down the road had already
said good-by to his friends. He was not coming back. He was going out to have
it ended. The cross made no compromise, modified nothing, spared nothing; it
slew all of the man, completely and for good. It did not try to keep on good
terms with its victim. It struck cruel and hard, and when it had finished its
work, the man was no more.
The race of Adam
is under death sentence. There is no commutation and no escape. God cannot
approve any of the fruits of sin, however innocent they may appear or beautiful
to the eyes of men. God salvages the individual by liquidating him and then
raising him again to newness of life.
That evangelism
which draws friendly parallels between the ways of God and the ways of men is
false to the Bible and cruel to the souls of its hearers. The faith of Christ
does not parallel the world, it intersects it. In coming to Christ we do not
bring our old life up onto a higher plane; we leave it at the cross. The corn
of wheat must fall into the ground and die.
We who preach the
gospel must not think of ourselves as public relations agents sent to establish
good will between Christ and the world. We must not imagine ourselves
commissioned to make Christ acceptable to big business, the press, the world of
sports or modern education. We are not diplomats but prophets, and our message
is not a compromise but an ultimatum.
God offers life,
but not an improved old life. The life He offers is life out of death. It
stands always on the far side of the cross. Whoever would possess it must pass
under the rod. He must repudiate himself and concur in God's just sentence
against him.
What does this
mean to the individual, the condemned man who would find life in Christ Jesus?
How can this theology be translated into life? Simply, he must repent and
believe. He must forsake his sins and then go on to forsake himself. Let him
cover nothing, defend nothing, excuse nothing. Let him not seek to make terms
with God, but let him bow his head before the stroke of God's stern displeasure
and acknowledge himself worthy to die.
Having done this
let him gaze with simple trust upon the risen Saviour, and from Him will come
life and rebirth and cleansing and power. The cross that ended the earthly life
of Jesus now puts an end to the sinner; and the power that raised Christ from
the dead now raises him to a new life along with Christ.
To any who may
object to this or count it merely a narrow and private view of truth, let me
say God has set His hallmark of approval upon this message from Paul's day to
the present. Whether stated in these exact words or not, this has been the
content of all preaching that has brought life and power to the world through
the centuries. The mystics, the reformers, the revivalists have put their
emphasis here, and signs and wonders and mighty operations of the Holy Ghost
gave witness to God's approval.
Dare we, the heirs
of such a legacy of power, tamper with the truth? Dare we with our stubby
pencils erase the lines of the blueprint or alter the pattern shown us in the
Mount? May God forbid. Let us preach the old cross and we will know the old
power.
There Is No Wisdom
in Sin
THE WORLD HAS
DIVIDED MEN into two classes, the stupid good people and the clever wicked
ones.
This false
classification runs through much of the literature of the last centuries from
the classics to the comic strip, from Shakespeare's Polomus, who furnished his
son with a set of good but dull moral platitudes, to Capp's Li'l Abner, who
would never knowingly do a wrong act but who would rather fall on his head than
on his feet because there is more feeling in his feet than in his head.
In the Holy
Scriptures things are quite the opposite. There righteousness is always
associated with wisdom and evil with folly. Whatever other factors may be
present in an act of wrongdoing, folly is one that is never absent. To do a
wrong act a man must for the moment think wrong; he must exercise bad judgment.
If this is true
then the devil is creation's prime fool, for when he gambled on his ability to
unseat the Almighty he was guilty of an act of judgment so bad as to be
imbecilic, He is said to have had a great amount of wisdom, but his wisdom must
have deserted him at the time of his first sin, for surely he grossly
underestimated the power of God and as grossly overestimated his own. The devil
is not now pictured in the Scriptures as wise, only as shrewd. We are warned
not against his wisdom but against his wiles, something very different.
Sin, I repeat, in
addition to anything else it may be, is always an act of wrong judgment. To
commit a sin a man must for the moment believe that things are different from
what they really are; he must confound values; he must see the moral universe
out of focus; he must accept a lie as truth and see truth as a lie; he must
ignore the signs on the highway and drive with his eyes shut; he must act as if
he had no soul and was not accountable for his moral choices.
Sin is never a
thing to be proud of. No act is wise that ignores remote consequences, and sin
always does. Sin sees only today, or at most tomorrow; never the day after
tomorrow, next month or next year. Death and judgment are pushed aside as if
they did not exist and the sinner becomes for the time a practical atheist who
by his act denies not only the existence of God but the concept of life after
death.
History is replete
with examples of men whose intellectual powers were great but whose practical
judgment was almost nil: Einstein, for instance, who was a mathematical genius
but who could not look after his own bank account and who absentmindedly ran
his little motorboat aground with the excuse that he "must have been
thinking about something else." We can smile at this, but there is nothing
humorous about that other class of men who had brilliant minds but whose moral
judgment was sadly awry. To this class belong such men as Lucretius, Voltaire,
Shelley, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman and thousands of others whose names are less
widely known.
The notion that
the careless sinner is the smart fellow and the serious-minded Christian,
though well-intentioned, is a stupid dolt altogether out of touch with life
will not stand up under scrutiny. Sin is basically an act of moral folly, and
the greater the folly the greater the fool.
It is time the young
people of this generation learned that there is nothing smart about wrongdoing
and nothing stupid about righteousness. We must stop negotiating with evil. We
Christians must stop apologizing for our moral position and start making our
voices heard, exposing sin for the enemy of the human race which it surely is,
and setting forth righteousness and true holiness as the only worthy pursuits
for moral beings.
The idea that sin
is modern is false. There has not been a new sin invented since the beginning of
recorded history. That new vice breaks out to horrify decent citizens and worry
the police is not really new. Flip open that book written centuries ago and you
will find it described there. The reckless sinner trying to think of some new
way to express his love of iniquity can do no more than imitate others like
himself, now long dead. He is not the bright rebel he fancies himself to be but
a weak and stupid fellow who must follow along in the long parade of death
toward the point of no return.
If the hoary head
is a crown of glory when it is found in the way of righteousness, it is a
fool's cap when it is found in the way of sin. An old sinner is an awesome and
frightening spectacle. One feels about him much as one feels about the
condemned man on his way to the gallows. A sense of numb terror and shock fills
the heart. The knowledge that the condemned man was once a redcheeked boy only
heightens the feeling, and the knowledge that the aged rebel now beyond
reclamation once went up to the house of God on a Sunday morning to the sweet
sound of church bells makes even the trusting Christian humble and a little bit
scared. There but for the grace of God goes he.
I am among those
who believe that our Western civilization is on its way to perishing. It has
many commendable qualities, most of which it has borrowed from the Christian
ethic, but it lacks the element of moral wisdom that would give it permanence.
Future historians will record that we of the twentieth century had intelligence
enough to create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it.
Three Degrees of
Religious Knowledge
IN OUR KNOWLEDGE
OF DIVINE THINGS three degrees may be distinguished: the knowledge furnished by
reason, by faith and by spiritual experience respectively.
These three
degrees of knowledge correspond to the departments of the tabernacle in the
ancient Levitical order: the outer court, the holy place and the holy of
holies.
Far in, beyond the
"second veil," was the holiest of all, having as its lone piece of
furniture the Ark of the Covenant with the cherubim of glory shadowing the
mercy seat. There between the outstretched wings dwelt in awesome splendor the
fire of God's presence, the Shekmah. No light of nature reached that sacred
place, only the pure radiance of Him who is light and in whom there is no
darkness at all. To that solemn Presence no one could approach except the high
priest once each year with blood of atonement.
Farther out, and
separated by a heavy veil, was the holy place, a sacred place indeed but
removed from the Presence and always accessible to the priests of
The court of the
priests was out farther still, a large enclosure in which were the brazen altar
and the lavar. This was open to the sky and received the normal light of
nature.
All was of God and
all was divine, but the quality of the worshipper's knowledge became surer and
more sublime as he moved in from the outer court toward the mercy seat and the
Presence, where at last he was permitted to gaze upon the cherubim of glory and
the deep burning Fire that glowed between their outstretched wings.
All this
illustrates if it does not typify the three degrees of knowledge possible to a
Christian. It is not proper that we should press every detail in an effort to
find in the beautiful Old Testament picture more than is actually there; but
the most cautious expositor could hardly object to our using the earthly and external
to throw into relief the internal and the heavenly.
Nature is a great
teacher and at her feet we may learn much that is good and ennobling. The Bible
itself teaches this: "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the
firmament showeth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto
night showeth knowledge." "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her
ways, and be wise." "Behold the fowls of the air." "For the
invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being
understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and
Godhead." Reason working on data furnished by observation of natural
objects tells us a lot about God and spiritual things. This is too obvious to
require proof. Everyone knows it.
But there is
knowledge beyond and above that furnished by observation; it is knowledge
received by faith. "In religion faith plays the part by experience in the
things of the world." Divine revelation through the inspired Scriptures
offers data which lie altogether outside of and above the power of the mind to
discover. The mind can make its deductions after it has received these data by
faith, but it cannot find them by itself. No technique is known to man by which
he can learn, for instance, that God in the beginning created the heaven and
the earth or that there are three Persons in the Godhead; that God is love or
that Christ died for sinners, or that He now sits at the right hand of the
Majesty in the heavens. If we ever come to know these things it must be by
receiving as true a body of doctrine which we have no way of verifying. This is
the knowledge of faith.
There is yet a
purer knowledge than this; it is knowledge by direct spiritual experience.
About it there is an immediacy that places it beyond doubt. Since it was not
acquired by reason operating on intellectual data, the possibility of error is
eliminated. Through the indwelling Spirit the human spirit is brought into
immediate contact with higher spiritual reality. It looks upon, tastes, feels
and sees the powers of the world to come and has a conscious encounter with God
invisible.
Let it be
understood that such knowledge is experienced rather than acquired. It does not
consist of findings about something; it is the thing itself. It is not a compound
of religious truths. It is an element which cannot be separated into parts. One
who enjoys this kind of knowledge is able to understand the exhortation in the
Book of Job: "Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace." To
such a man God is not a conclusion drawn from evidence nor is He the sum of
what the Bible teaches about Him. He knows God in the last irreducible meaning
of the word know. It may almost be said that God happened to him.
Maybe Christ said
all this more simply in John 14:21: "I . . . will manifest myself to
him." For what have we been laboring here but the sublimely simple New
Testament teaching that the Triune God wills to dwell in the redeemed man's
heart, constantly making His presence known? What on earth or in heaven above
can be a greater beatitude?
The Sanctification
of the Secular
THE NEW TESTAMENT
TEACHES that all things are pure to the pure, and I think we may assume that to
the evil man all things are evil. The thing itself is not good or bad; goodness
or badness belongs to human personality.
Everything depends
upon the state of our interior lives and our heart's relation to God. The man
that walks with God will see and know that for him there is no strict line
separating the sacred from the secular. He will acknowledge that there lies
around him a world of created things that are innocent in themselves; and he
will know, too, that there are a thousand human acts that are neither good nor
bad except as they may be done by good or bad men. The busy world around us is
filled with work, travel, marrying, rearing our young, burying our dead,
buying, selling, sleeping, eating and mixing in common social intercourse with
our fellowmen.
These activities
and all else that goes to fill up our days are usually separated in our minds from
prayer, church attendance and such specific religious acts as are performed by
ministers most of the week and by laymen briefly once or twice weekly.
Because the vast
majority of men engage in the complicated business of living while trusting
wholly in themselves, without reference to God or redemption, we Christians
have come to call these common activities "secular" and to attribute
to them at least a degree of evil, an evil which is not inherent in them and
which they do not necessarily possess.
The Apostle Paul
teaches that every simple act of our lives may be sacramental. "Whether
therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of
God." And again, "Whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the
name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him."
Some of the great
saints, who were great because they took such admonitions seriously and sought
to practice them, managed to achieve the sanctification of the secular, or
perhaps I should say the abolition of the secular. Their attitude toward life's
common things raised those above the common and imparted to them an aura of
divinity. These pure souls broke down the high walls that separated the various
areas of their lives from each other and saw all as one; and that one they
offered to God as a holy oblation acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.
Nicholas Herman
(Brother Lawrence) made his most common act one of devotion: "The time of
business does not with me differ from the time of prayer," he said,
"and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at
the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great
tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament."
Francis of Assisi
accepted the whole creation as his house of worship and called upon everything
great and small to join him in adoration of the Godhead. Mother earth, the
burning sun, the silver moon, the stars of evening, wind, water, flowers,
fruits-all were invited to praise with him their God and King. Hardly a spot
was left that could be called secular. The whole world glowed like Moses' bush
with the light of God, and before it the saint kneeled and removed his shoes.
Thomas Traherne,
the seventeenth century Christian writer, declared that the children of the King
can never enjoy the world aright till every morning they wake up in heaven, see
themselves in the Father's palace, and look upon the skies, the earth and the
air as celestial joys, having such a reverent esteem for all as if they were
among the angels.
All this is not to
ignore the fall of man nor to deny the presence of sin in the world. No
believing man can deny the Fall, as no observing man can deny the reality of
sin; and as far as I know no responsible thinker has ever held that sin could
ever be made other than sinful, whether by prayer or faith or spiritual
ministrations. Neither the inspired writers of Holy Scripture nor those
illuminated souls who have based their teachings upon those Scriptures have
tried to make sin other than exceedingly sinful. It is possible to recognize
the sacredness of all things even while admitting that for the time the mystery
of sin worketh in the children of disobedience and the whole creation groaneth
and travaileth, waiting for the manifestation of the children of God.
Traherne saw the
apparent contradiction and explained it: "To contemn the world and to
enjoy the world are things contrary to each other. How can we contemn the
world, which we are born to enjoy? Truly there are two worlds. One was made by
God, and the other by men. That made by God was great and beautiful. Before the
Fall it was Adam's joy and the temple of his glory. That made by men is a
Such souls as
these achieved the sanctification of the secular. The church today is suffering
from the secularization of the sacred. By accepting the world's values,
thinking its thoughts and adopting its ways we have dimmed the glory that
shines overhead. We have not been able to bring earth to the judgment of heaven
so we have brought heaven to the judgment of the earth. Pity us, Lord, for we
know not what we do!
God Must Be Loved
for Himself
GOD BEING WHO HE
is must always be sought for Himself, never as a means toward something else.
Whoever seeks
other objects and not God is on his own; he may obtain those objects if he is
able, but he will never have God. God is never found accidentally. "Ye
shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your
heart" (Jer. 29:13) .
Whoever seeks God
as a means toward desired ends will not find God. The mighty God, the maker of
heaven and earth, will not be one of many treasures, not even the chief of all
treasures. He will be all in all or He will be nothing. God will not be used.
His mercy and grace are infinite and His patient understanding is beyond
measure, but He will not aid men in their selfish striving after personal gain.
He will not help men to attain ends which, when attained, usurp the place He by
every right should hold in their interest and affection.
Yet popular
Christianity has as one of its most effective talking points the idea that God
exists to help people to get ahead in this world. The God of the poor has
become the God of an affluent society. Christ no longer refuses to be a judge
or a divider between money hungry brothers. He can now be persuaded to assist
the brother that has accepted Him to get the better of the brother who has not.
A crass example of
the modern effort to use God for selfish purposes is the well-known comedian
who, after repeated failures, promised someone he called God that if He would
help him to make good in the entertainment world he would repay Him by giving
generously to the care of sick children. Shortly afterward he hit the big time
in the night clubs and on television. He has kept his word and is raising large
sums of money to build children's hospitals. These contributions to charity, he
feels, are a small price to pay for a success in one of the sleaziest fields of
human endeavor.
One might excuse
the act of this entertainer as something to be expected of a twentieth century
pagan; but that multitudes of evangelicals in North America should actually
believe that God had anything to do with the whole business is not so easily
overlooked. This low and false view of Deity is one major reason for the
immense popularity God enjoys these days among well-fed Westerners.
The teaching of
the Bible is that God is Himself the end for which man was created. "Whom
have I in heaven but thee?" cried the psalmist, "and there is none
upon earth that I desire beside thee" (Psa. 73: 25) . The first and
greatest commandment is to love God with every power of our entire being. Where
love like that exists there can be no place for a second object. If we love God
as much as we should surely we cannot dream of a loved object beyond Him which
He might help us to obtain.
Bernard of
Clairvaux begins his radiant little treatise on the love of God with a question
and an answer. The question, Why should we love God? The answer, Because He is
God. He develops the idea further, but for the enlightened heart little more
need be said. We should love God because He is God. Beyond this the angels
cannot think.
Being who He is,
God is to be loved for His own sake. He is the reason for our loving Him, just
as He is the reason for His loving us and for every other act He has performed,
is performing and will perform world without end. God's primary reason for
everything is His own good pleasure. The search for secondary reasons is
gratuitous and mostly futile. It affords occupation for theologians and adds
pages to books on doctrine, but that it ever turns up any true explanations is
doubtful.
But it is the
nature of God to share. His mighty acts of creation and redemption were done
for His good pleasure, but His pleasure extends to all created things. One has
but to look at a healthy child at play or listen to the song of a bird at
sundown and he will know that God meant His universe to be a joyful one.
Those who have
been spiritually enabled to love God for Himself will find a thousand fountains
springing up from the rainbowcircled throne and bringing countless treasures
which are to be received with reverent thanksgiving as being the overflow of
God's love for His children. Each gift is a bonus of grace which because it was
not sought for itself may be enjoyed without injury to the soul. These include
the simple blessings of life, such as health, a home, a family, congenial
friends, food, shelter, the pure joys of nature or the more artificial
pleasures of music and art.
The effort to find
these treasures by direct search apart from God has been the major activity of
mankind through the centuries; and this has been man's burden and man's woe.
The effort to gain them as the ulterior motive back of accepting Christ may be
something new under the sun; but new or old it is an evil that can only bring
judgment at last.
God wills that we
should love Him for Himself alone with no hidden reasons, trusting Him to be to
us all our natures require. Our Lord said all this much better: "Seek ye
first the
True Faith Is
Active, Not Passive
A CHRISTIAN IS ONE
WHO BELIEVES on Jesus Christ as Lord. With this statement every evangelical
agrees. Indeed there would appear to be nothing else to do, since the New
Testament is crystal clear about the matter.
This first
acknowledgment of Christ as Lord and Saviour is usually followed by baptism and
membership in a Protestant church, the one because it satisfies a craving for
fellowship with others of like mind. A few Christians shy away from organized
religion, but the vast majority, while they recognize the imperfections of the
churches, nevertheless feel that they can serve their Lord better in the church
than out of it.
There is, however,
one serious flaw in all this: it is that manywould I overstate the case if I
said the majority?-of those who confess their faith in Christ and enter into
association with the community of believers have little joy in their hearts, no
peace in their minds, and from all external appearances are no better morally
than the ordinary educated citizen who takes no interest whatever in religion
and, of course, makes no profession of Christianity. Why is this?
I believe it is
the result of an inadequate concept of Christianity and an imperfect
understanding of the revolutionary character of Christian discipleship.
Certainly there is
nothing new in my conclusion. The evangelists are loud in their lamentation
over the bodies of dead church members, as well they might be, and many
thoughtful articles and books appear from time to time dealing with the serious
hiatus between faith and practice among Christians.
Why then add
another feeble voice to the many? Because many who lament the condition do not
seem to know what to do about it, and because I believe that the way is plain,
if hard, and that there is no excuse for going on at this poor dying rate when
we can enjoy abundant life in Christ Jesus. True faith brings a spiritual and
moral transformation and an inward witness that cannot be mistaken. These come
when we stop believing in belief and start believing in the Lord Jesus Christ
indeed.
True faith is not
passive but active. It requires that we meet certain conditions, that we allow
the teachings of Christ to dominate our total lives from the moment we believe.
The man of saving faith must be willing to be different from others. The effort
to enjoy the benefits of redemption while enmeshed in the world is futile. We
must choose one or the other; and faith quickly makes its choice, one from
which there is no retreat.
The change
experienced by a truly converted man is equal to that of a man moving to
another country. The regenerated soul feels no more at home in the world than
Abraham felt when he left
This journey from
One of the first
changes will be a shift of interest from earth to heaven, from men to God, from
time to eternity, from earthly gain to Christ and His eternal kingdom.
Suddenly, or slowly but surely, he will develop a new pattern of life. Old
things will pass away and behold, all things will become new, first inwardly
and then outwardly; for the change within him will soon begin to express itself
by corresponding changes in his manner of living.
The transformation
will show itself in many ways and his former friends will begin to worry about
him. At first they will tease him and then chide him; and if he persists in his
determination to follow Christ they may begin to oppose and persecute. The onceborn
never understand the twice-born, and still after thousands of years Cain hates
Abel and Esau threatens Jacob. It is as true today as it was in Bible times
that the man who hates his sins too much will get into trouble with those who
do not hate sin enough. People resent having their friends turn away from them
and by implication condemn their way of life.
The change will
reveal itself further in what the new Christian reads, in the places he goes
and the friends he cultivates, what he does with his time and how he spends his
money. Indeed faith leaves no area of the new believer's life unaffected.
The genuinely
renewed man will have a new life center. He will experience a new orientation
affecting his whole personality. He will become aware of a different
philosophic outlook. Things he once held to be of value may suddenly lose all
their attraction for him and he may even hate some things he formerly loved.
The man who
recoils from this revolutionary kind of Christianity is retreating before the
cross. But thousands do so retreat, and they try to make things right by
seeking baptism and church membership. No wonder they are so dissatisfied.
On Taking Too Much
for Granted
ONCE MARY AND
JOSEPH, with a number of friends and relatives, were traveling back home from
Their fault was
that they assumed that what they wanted to believe was so in fact. They took
too much for granted. A simple check at the start of the journey would have
saved them a harrowing experience of fear and uncertainty and two days'
unnecessary travel.
Theirs was a
pardonable fault and one that we ourselves are in great danger of committing.
The whole company of evangelicals is traveling home supposing things, some of
which may not be true. We had better check before we go any further. Our
failure to do so could have more serious consequences than those suffered by
Mary and Joseph. It could lead straight to tragedy.
There is danger
that we take Christ for granted. We "suppose" that because we hold
New Testament beliefs we are therefore New Testament Christians; but it does
not follow. The devil is a better theologian than any of us and is a devil still.
We may, for
instance, assume that salvation is possible without repentance. Pardon without
penitence is a delusion which simple honesty requires that we expose for what
it is. To be forgiven, a sin must be forsaken. This accords with the
Scriptures, with common logic and with the experience of the saints of all
ages.
We are also in
danger of assuming the value of religion without righteousness. Through the
various media of public communication we are being pressured into believing
that religion 'is little more than a beautiful thing capable of bringing
courage and peace of mind to a troubled world. Let us resist this effort at
brainwashing. The purpose of Christ's redeeming work was to make it possible
for bad men to become gooddeeply, radically and finally. God translates men out
of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of His love. To believe
that such translated men must still dwell in darkness is a reflection on the
blood of Christ and the wisdom of God.
In spite of all
that James said to the contrary, we are still likely to take for granted that
faith without works does somehow have a mystic value after all. But "faith
worketh by love," said Paul, and where the works of love are absent we can
only conclude that faith is absent also. Faith in faith has displaced faith in
God in too many places.
A whole new
generation of Christians has come up believing that it is possible to
"accept" Christ without forsaking the world. But what saith the Holy
Ghost? "Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of
the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world
is the enemy of God" (James 4:4), and "If any man love the world, the
love of the Father is not in him" (I John 2:15) . This requires no comment,
only obedience.
We may also
erroneously assume that we can experience justification without transformation.
Justification and regeneration are not the same; they may be thought apart in
theology but they can never be experienced apart in fact. When God declares a
man righteous He instantly sets about to make him righteous. Our error today is
that we do not expect a converted man to be a transformed man, and as a result
of this error our churches are full of substandard Christians. A revival is
among other things a return to the belief that real faith invariably produces
holiness of heart and righteousness of life.
Again, we may go
astray by assuming that we can do spiritual work without spiritual power. I
have heard the notion seriously advanced that whereas once to win men to Christ
it was necessary to have a gift from the Holy Spirit, now religious movies make
it possible for anyone to win souls, without such spiritual anointing!
"Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad." Surely such a
notion is madness, but until now I have not heard it challenged among the
evangelicals.
David Brainerd
once compared a man without the power of the Spirit trying to do spiritual work
to a workman without fingers attempting to do manual labor. The figure is
striking but it does not overstate the facts. The Holy Spirit is not a luxury
meant to make deluxe Christians, as an illuminated frontispiece and a leather
binding make a deluxe book. The Spirit is an imperative necessity. Only the
Eternal Spirit can do eternal deeds.
Without exhausting
the list of things wrongly taken for granted I would mention one more: Millions
take for granted that it is possible to live for Christ without first having
died with Christ. This is a serious error and we dare not leave it unchallenged.
The victorious
Christian has known two lives. The first was his life in Adam which was
motivated by the carnal mind and can never please God in any way. It can never
be converted; it can only die (
The second life of
the Christian is his new life in Christ (
For our own soul's
sake, let's not take too much for granted.
The Cure for a
Fretful Spirit
THE HOLY SPIRIT IN
PSALM 37 admonishes us to beware of irritation in our religious lives:
"Fret not
thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against the workers of
iniquity."
The word
"fret" comes to us from the Anglo-Saxon and carries with it such a
variety of meanings as bring a rather pained smile to our faces. Notice how
they expose us and locate us behind our disguises. The primary meaning of the
word is to eat, and from there it has been extended with rare honesty to cover
most of the manifestations of an irritable disposition. "To eat away; to
gnaw; to chafe; to gall; to vex; to worry; to agitate; to wear away"; so
says Webster, and all who have felt the exhausting, corrosive effects of
fretfulness know how accurately the description fits the facts.
Now, the grace of
God in the human heart works to calm the agitation that normally accompanies
life in such a world as ours. The Holy Spirit acts as a lubricant to reduce the
friction to a minimum and to stop the fretting and chafing in their grosser
phases. But for most of us the problem is not as simple as that.
Fretfulness may be
trimmed down to the ground and its roots remain alive deep within the soul,
there growing and extending themselves all unsuspected, sending up their old
poisonous shoots under other names and other appearances.
It was not to the
unregenerate that the words "Fret not" were spoken, but to
God-fearing persons capable of understanding spiritual things. We Christians
need to watch and pray lest we fall into this temptation and spoil our
Christian testimony by an irritable spirit under the stress and strain of life.
It requires great
care and a true knowledge of ourselves to distinguish a spiritual burden from
religious irritation. We cannot close our minds to everything that is happening
around us. We dare not rest at ease in
By nature some
persons fret easily. They have difficulty separating their personal antipathies
from the burden of the Spirit. When they are grieved they can hardly say
whether it is a pure and charitable thing or merely irritation set up by other
Christians having opinions different from their own.
Of one thing we
may be sure, we can never escape the external stimuli that cause vexation. The
world is full of them and though we were to retreat to a cave and live the
remainder of our days alone we still could not lose them. The rough floor of
our cave would chafe us, the weather would irritate us and the very silence
would cause us to fret.
Deliverance from a
fretting spirit may be by blood and fire, by humility, self-abnegation and a
patient carrying of the cross. There will always be "evildoers" and
"workers of iniquity," and for the most part they will appear to
succeed while the forces of righteousness will seem to fail. The wicked will
always have the money and the talent and the publicity and the numbers, while
the righteous will be few and poor and unknown. The prayerless Christian will
surely misread the signs and fret against the circumstances. That is what the
Spirit warns us against.
Let us look out
calmly upon the world; or better yet, let us look down upon it from above where
Christ is seated and we are seated in Him. Though the wicked spread himself
like "a
Boasting or
Belittling
WE ALL know how
painful it is to be forced to listen to a confirmed boaster sound off on his
favorite topic - himself. To be the captive of such a man even for a short time
tries our patience to the utmost and puts a heavy strain upon our Christian
charity.
Boasting is
particularly offensive when it is heard among the children of God, the one
place above all others where it should never be found. Yet it is quite common
among Christians, though disguised somewhat by the use of the stock expression,
"I say this to the glory of God."
Some boasters
appear to feel a bit self-conscious, and apologize meekly for their outbursts
of self-praise. Others have accepted themselves as being all their doting
relatives and friends claim they are, and habitually speak of themselves in
reverent terms, as if their superiority was a matter of common knowledge too
well established to require proof. Such a one was the concert singer who
replied to a glowing compliment after a performance, "Well, what did you
expect?"
God is very
patient with His children and often tolerates in them carnal traits so gross as
to shock their fellow Christians. But that is only for a while. As more light
comes to our hearts, and especially as we go on to new and advanced spiritual
experiences, God begins to impose disciplines upon us to purge us from the same
faults He tolerated before. Then He permits us to say and do things that react
unfavorably against us and expose our vanity for what it is. It may then happen
in the providential will of God that the very gift we have boasted of may be
lost to us or the project we are so proud of will fail. After we have learned
our lesson the Lord may restore what He has taken away, for He is more
concerned with our souls than with our service. But sometimes our boasting
permanently hurts us and excludes us from blessings we might have enjoyed.
Another habit not
quite so odious is belittling ourselves. This might seem to be the exact
opposite of boasting, but actually it is the same old sin traveling under a nom
de plume. It is simply egoism trying to act spiritual. It is impatient Saul
hastily offering an unacceptable sacrifice to the Lord.
Self-derogation is
bad for the reason that self must be there to derogate. Self, whether
swaggering or groveling, can never be anything but hateful to God.
Boasting is an
evidence that we are pleased with self; belittling, that we are disappointed in
it. Either way we reveal that we have a high opinion of ourselves. The
belittler is chagrined that one as obviously superior as he should not have
done better, and he punishes himself by making uncomplimentary remarks about
himself. That he does not really mean what he says may be proved quite easily.
Let someone else say the same things. His eager defense of himself will reveal
how he feels and has secretly felt all the time.
The victorious
Christian neither exalts nor downgrades himself. His interests have shifted
from self to Christ. What he is or is not no longer concerns him. He believes
that he has been crucified with Christ and he is not willing either to praise
or deprecate such a man.
Yet the knowledge
that he has been crucified is only half the victory. "Nevertheless I live;
yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh
I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for
me." Christ is now where the man's ego was formerly. The man is now
Christ-centered instead of self-centered, and he forgets himself in his
delighted preoccupation with Christ.
Candor compels me
to acknowledge that it is a lot easier to write about this than it is to live
it. Self is one of the toughest plants that grows in the garden of life. It is,
in fact, indestructible by any human means. Just when we are sure it is dead it
turns up somewhere as robust as ever to trouble our peace and poison the fruit
of our lives.
Yet there is
deliverance. When our judicial crucifixion becomes actual the victory is near;
and when our faith rises to claim the risen life of Christ as our own the
triumph is complete. The trouble is that we do not receive the benefits of all
this until something radical has happened in our own experience, something
which in its psychological effects approaches actual crucifixion. What Christ
went through we also must go through. Rejection, surrender, loss, a violent
detachment from the world, the pain of social ostracism - all must be felt in
our actual experience.
Where we have
failed is in the practical application of the teaching concerning the crucified
life. Too many have been content to be armchair Christians, satisfied with the
theology of the cross. Plainly Christ never intended that we should rest in a
mere theory of self-denial. His teaching identified His disciples with Himself
so intimately that they would have had to be extremely dull not to have
understood that they were expected to experience very much the same pain and
loss as He Himself did.
The healthy soul
is the victorious soul and victory never comes while self is permitted to
remain unjudged and uncrucified. While we boast or belittle we may be perfectly
sure that the cross has not yet done its work within us. Faith and obedience
will bring the cross into the life and cure both habits.
The Communion of
Saints
"I believe in
the communion of saints."-Apostles' Creed
THESE WORDS WERE
WRITTEN into the creed about the middle of the fifth century.
It would be
difficult if not altogether impossible for us at this late date to know exactly
what was in the minds of the Church Fathers who introduced the words into the
creed, but in the Book of Acts we have a description of the first Christian
communion: "Then they that gladly received his word were baptized: and the
same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls. And they
continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking
of bread, and in prayers."
Here is the
original apostolic fellowship, the pattern after which every true Christian
communion must be modelled.
The word
"fellowship," in spite of its abuses, is still a beautiful and
meaningful word. When rightly understood it means the same as the word
"communion," that is, the act and condition of sharing together in some
common blessing by numbers of persons. The communion of saints, then, means an
intimate and loving sharing together of certain spiritual blessings by persons
who are on an equal footing before the blessing in which they share. This
fellowship must include every member of the
Now, before there
can be communion there must be union. The sharers are one in a sense altogether
above organization, nationality, race or denomination. That oneness is a divine
thing, achieved by the Holy Spirit in the act of regeneration. Whoever is born
of God is one with everyone else who is born of God. Just as gold is always
gold, wherever and in whatever shape it is found, and every detached scrap of
gold belongs to the true family and is composed of the same element, so every
regenerate soul belongs to the universal Christian community and to the
fellowship of the saints.
Every redeemed
soul is born out of the same spiritual life as every other redeemed soul and
partakes of the divine nature in exactly the same manner. Each one is thus made
a member of the Christian community and a sharer in everything which that
community enjoys. This is the true communion of saints. But to know this is not
enough. If we would enter into the power of it we must exercise ourselves in
this truth; we must practice thinking and praying with the thought that we are
members of the Body of Christ and brothers to all the ransomed saints living
and dead who have believed on Christ and acknowledged Him as Lord.
We have said that
the communion of saints is a fellowship, a sharing in certain divinely given
things by divinely called persons. Now, what are those things?
The first and most
important is life-"the life of God in the soul of man," to borrow a
phrase from Henry Scougal. This life is the basis of everything else which is
given and shared. And that life is nothing else than God Himself. It should be
evident that there can be no true Christian sharing unless there is first an
impartation of life. An organization and a name do not make a church. One
hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organization do not
constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team. The
first requisite is life, always.
The apostolic
fellowship is also a fellowship of truth. The inclusiveness of the fellowship
must always be held along with the exclusiveness of it. Truth brings into its
gracious circle all who admit and accept the Bible as the source of all truth
and the Son of God as the Saviour of men. But there dare be no weak compromise
with the facts, no sentimental mouthing of the old phrases: "We are all
headed for the same place .... Each one is seeking in his own way to please the
Father and make heaven his home." The truth makes men free, and the truth
will bind and loose, will open and shut, will include and exclude at its high
will without respect to persons. To reject or deny the truth of the Word is to
exclude ourselves from the apostolic communion.
Now, someone may
ask, "What is the truth of which you speak? Is my fate to depend upon
Baptist truth or Presbyterian truth or Anglican truth, or all of these or none
of these? To know the communion of saints must I believe in Calvinism or
Armimanism? In the Congregational or the Episcopal form of church government?
Must I interpret prophecy in accord with the pre-millenarians or the
post-millenarians? Must I believe in immersion or sprinkling or pouring?"
The answer to all this is easy. The confusion is only apparent, not actual.
The early
Christians, under the fire of persecution, driven from place to place,
sometimes deprived of the opportunity for careful instruction in the faith,
wanted a "rule" which would sum up all that they must believe to
assure their everlasting welfare. Out of this critical need arose the creeds.
Of the many, the Apostles' Creed is the best known and best loved, and has been
reverently repeated by the largest number of believers through the centuries.
And for millions of good men that creed contains the essentials of truth. Not
all truths, to be sure, but the heart of all truth. It served in trying days as
a kind of secret password that instantly united men to each other when passed
from lip to lip by the followers of the Lamb. It is fair to say, then, that the
truth shared by saints in the apostolic fellowship is the same truth which is
outlined for convenience in the Apostles' Creed.
In this day when
the truth of Christianity is under serious fire from so many directions it is
most important that we know what we believe and that we guard it carefully. But
in our effort to interpret and expound the Holy Scriptures in accord with the
ancient faith of all Christians, we should remember that a seeking soul may
find salvation through the blood of Christ while yet knowing little of the
fuller teachings of Christian theology. We must, therefore, admit to our
fellowship every sheep who has heard the voice of the Shepherd and has tried to
follow Him.
The beginner in
Christ who has not yet had time to learn much Christian truth and the
underprivileged believer who has had the misfortune to be brought up in a
church where the Word has been neglected from the pulpit, are very much in the
same situation. Their faith grasps only a small portion of truth, and their
"sharing" is necessarily limited to the small portion they grasp. The
important thing, however, is that the little bit they do enjoy is real truth.
It may be no more than this, that "Christ Jesus came into the world to
save sinners"; but if they walk in the light of that much truth, no more
is required to bring them into the circle of the blessed and to constitute them
true members of the apostolic fellowship.
Then, true
Christian communion consists in the sharing of a Presence. This is not poetry
merely, but a fact taught in bold letters in the New Testament.
God has given us
Himself in the Person of His Son. "Where two or three are gathered
together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." The immanence of
God in His universe makes possible the enjoyment of the "real
Presence" by the saints of God in heaven and on earth simultaneously.
Wherever they may be, He is present to them in the fullness of His Godhead.
I do not believe
that the Bible teaches the possibility of communication between the saints on
earth and those in heaven. But while there cannot be communication, there most
surely can be communion. Death does not tear the individual believer from his
place in the Body of Christ. As in our human bodies each member is nourished by
the same blood which at once gives life and unity to the entire organism, so in
the Body of Christ the quickening Spirit flowing through every part gives life
and unity to the whole. Our Christian brethren who have gone from our sight
retain still their place in the universal fellowship. The Church is one,
whether waking or sleeping, by a unity of life forevermore.
The most important
thing about the doctrine of the communion of saints is its practical effects on
the lives of Christians. We know very little about the saints above, but about
the saints on earth we know, or can know, a great deal. We Protestants do not
believe (since the Bible does not teach) that the saints who have gone into
heaven before us are in any way affected by the prayers or labors of saints who
remain on earth. Our particular care is not for those whom God has already
honored with the vision beatific, but for the hard-pressed and struggling
pilgrims who are still traveling toward the City of
We should pray for
an enlargement of soul to receive into our hearts all of God's people, whatever
their race, color or church affiliation. Then we should practice thinking of
ourselves as members of the blessed family of God and should strive in prayer
to love and appreciate everyone who is born of the Father.
I suggest also
that we try to acquaint ourselves as far as possible with the good and saintly
souls who lived before our times and now belong to the company of the redeemed
in heaven. How sad to limit our sympathies to those of our own day, when God in
His providence has made it possible for us to enjoy the rich treasures of the
minds and hearts of so many holy and gifted saints of other days. To confine
our reading to the works of a few favorite authors of today or last week is to
restrict our horizons and to pinch our souls dangerously.
I have no doubt
that the prayerful reading of some of the great spiritual classics of the
centuries would destroy in us forever that constriction of soul which seems to
he the earmark of modern evangelicalism.
For many of us the
wells of the past wait to be reopened. Augustine, for instance, would bring to
us a sense of the overwhelming majesty of God that would go far to cure the
flippancy of spirit found so widely among modern Christians. Bernard of Cluny
would sing to us of "Jerusalem the Golden" and the peace of an
eternal sabbath day until the miserable pleasures of this world become
intolerable; Richard Rolle would show us how to escape from "the abundance
of riches, the flattering of women and the fairness of
youth," that
we may go on to know God with an intimacy that will become in our hearts
"heat, fragrance and song"; Tersteegen would whisper to us of the
"hidden love of God" and the awful Presence until our hearts would
become "still before Him" and "prostrate inwardly adore
Him"; before our eyes the sweet St. Francis would throw his arms of love
around sun and moon, trees and rain, bird and beast, and thank God for them all
in a pure rapture of spiritual devotion.
But who is able to
complete the roster of the saints? To them we owe a debt of gratitude too great
to comprehend: prophet and apostle, martyr and reformer, scholar and
translator, hymnist and composer, teacher and evangelist, not to mention ten
thousand times ten thousand simplehearted and anonymous souls who kept the
flame of pure religion alive even in those times when the faith of our fathers
was burning but dimly all over the world.
They belong to us,
all of them, and we belong to them. They and we and all redeemed men and women
of whatever age or clime are included in the universal fellowship of Christ,
and together compose "a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar
people," who enjoy a common but blessed communion of saints.
Temperament in the
Christian Life
A CELEBRATED
AMERICAN PREACHER once advanced the novel theory that the various denominations
with their different doctrinal emphases served a useful purpose as gathering
places for persons of similar temperaments. Christians, he suggested, tend to
gravitate toward others of like mental types. Hence the denominations.
Undoubtedly this
is oversimplification carried to the point of error. There are too many persons
of dissimilar temperaments in every denomination to support such a sweeping
classification. Yet I believe that we have here an instance where an error may
serve to point up a truth, the truth being that temperament has a great deal to
do with our religious views and with the emphases we lay on spiritual matters
generally.
It may be a bit
difficult to determine which is cause and which effect, but I have noticed that
historically Calvinism has flourished among peoples of a markedly phlegmatic
disposition. While it is true that Jacob Arminius was a Dutchman, on the whole
the Dutch people appear temperamentally quite suited to Calvinism. On the other
hand, it would be hard to imagine a Calvinistic Spaniard or Italian. Isolated
instances there certainly are, but for the most part the buoyant, volatile,
mandolin-playing Latin does not take naturally to long periods of meditation on
the divine sovereignty and the eternal decrees.
While we all pride
ourselves that we draw our beliefs from the Holy Scriptures, along those border
lines where good men disagree we may unconsciously take sides with our
temperament. Cast of mind may easily determine our views when the Scriptures
are not clear.
People may be
classified roughly into two psychological types, the gay and the somber, and it
is easy to see how each type will be attracted to the doctrinal views that
agree most naturally with its own mental cast. The Calvinist, for instance,
never permits himself to become too happy, while the Arminian tends to equate
gravity of disposition with coldness of heart and tries to cure it with a
revival.
No Calvinist could
have written the radiant hymns of Bernard of Clairvaux or Charles Wesley.
Calvinism never produced a Christian mystic, unless we except John Newton who
was near to being a mystic and did write a few hymns almost as radiant as those
of Bernard.
To square the
records, however, it should be said that if the Calvinist does not rise as
high, he usually stays up longer. He places more emphasis on the Holy
Scriptures which never change, while his opposite number (as the newspapers
say) tends to judge his spiritual condition by the state of his feelings, which
change constantly. This may be the reason that so many Calvinistic churches
remain orthodox for centuries, at least in doctrine, while many churches of the
Arminian persuasion often go liberal in one generation.
I realize that I
am doing a bit of oversimplifying on my own here; still I believe there is more
than a germ of truth in the whole thing. Anyway, I am less concerned with the
effect of temperament on the historic church, which obviously I can do nothing
about, than with its effect upon my own soul and the souls of my readers, whom
I may be able to influence somewhat.
Whether or not my
broader conclusions are sound, there would seem to be no reason to doubt that
we naturally tend to interpret Scripture in the light (or shadow) of our own
temperament and let our peculiar mental cast decide the degree of importance we
attach to various religious doctrines and practices.
The odd thing
about this human quirk is that it prospers most where there is the greatest
amount of religious freedom. The authoritarian churches that tell their
adherents exactly what to believe and where to lay their emphasis produce a
fair degree of uniformity among their members. By stretching everyone on the
bed of Procrustes they manage to lengthen or trim back the individual
temperament to their liking. The free Protestant, who is still permitted a
certain amount of private interpretation, is much more likely to fall into the
trap of temperament. Exposure to this temptation is one price he pays for his
freedom.
The minister above
all others should look deep into his own heart to discover the reason for his
more pronounced views. It is not enough to draw himself up and declare with
dignity that he preaches the Bible find nothing but the Bible. That claim is
made by every man who stands in sincerity to declare the truth; but truth has
many facets and the man of God is in grave danger of revealing only a limited
few to his people, and those the ones he by disposition favors most.
One cannot imagine
Francis of Assisi preaching Edward's sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an
Angry God," nor can we picture Jonathan Edwards preaching to the birds or
calling upon sun and moon and wind and stars to join him in praising the Lord.
Yet both were good men who loved God deeply and trusted Christ completely. Many
other factors besides temperament must not be overlooked.
Are we then to
accept the bias of disposition as something inevitable? Are we to allow our
religious views to be dictated by ancestors long dead whose genes still stir
within us? By no means. The Scriptures, critical self-discipline, honesty of
heart and increased trust in the inward operations of the Holy Spirit will save
us from being too greatly influenced by temperament.
Does God Always
Answer Prayer?
CONTRARY TO
POPULAR OPINION, the cultivation of a psychology of uncritical belief is not an
unqualified good, and if carried too far it may be a positive evil. The whole
world has been booby-trapped by the devil, and the deadliest trap of all is the
religious one. Error never looks so innocent as when it is found in the
sanctuary.
One field where
harmless-looking but deadly traps appear in great profusion is the field of
prayer. There are more sweet notions about prayer than could be contained in a
large book, all of them wrong and all highly injurious to the souls of men.
I think of one
such false notion that is found often in pleasant places consorting smilingly
with other notions of unquestionable orthodoxy. It is that God always answers
prayer.
This error appears
among the saints as a kind of all-purpose philosophic therapy to prevent any
disappointed Christian from suffering too great a shock when it becomes evident
to him that his prayer expectations are not being fulfilled. It is explained
that God always answers prayer, either by saying Yes or by saying No, or by
substituting something else for the desired favor.
Now, it would be
hard to invent a neater trick than this to save face for the petitioner whose
requests have been rejected for non-obedience. Thus when a prayer is not
answered he has but to smile brightly and explain, "God said No." It
is all so very comfortable. His wobbly faith is saved from confusion and his
conscience is permitted to lie undisturbed. But I wonder if it is honest.
To receive an
answer to prayer as the Bible uses the term and as Christians have understood
it historically, two elements must be. present: (1) A clear-cut request made to
God for a specific favor. (2) A clear-cut granting of that favor by God in
answer to the request. There must be no semantic twisting, no changing of
labels, no altering of the map during the journey to help the embarrassed
tourist to find himself.
When we go to God
with a request that He modify the existing situation for us, that is, that He
answer prayer, there are two conditions that we must meet: (1) We must pray in
the will of God and (2) we must be on what old-fashioned Christians often call
"praying ground"; that is, we must be living lives pleasing to God.
It is futile to
beg God to act contrary to His revealed purposes. To pray with confidence the
petitioner must be certain that his request falls within the broad will of God
for His people.
The second
condition is also vitally important. God has not placed Himself under
obligation to honor the requests of worldly, carnal or disobedient Christians.
He hears and answers the prayers only of those who walk in His way.
"Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God.
And whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments, and
do those things that are pleasing in his sight . . . . If ye abide in me, and
my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto
you" (I John 3:21, 22; John 15:7).
God wants us to
pray and He wants to answer our prayers, but He makes our use of prayer as a
privilege to commingle with His use of prayer as a discipline. To receive
answers to prayer we must meet God's terms. If we neglect His commandments our
petitions will not be honored. He will alter situations only at the request of
obedient and humble souls.
The
God-always-answers-prayer sophistry leaves the praying man without discipline.
By the exercise of this bit of smooth casuistry he ignores the necessity to
live soberly, righteously and godly in this present world, and actually takes
God's flat refusal to answer his prayer as the very answer itself. Of course such
a man will not grow in holiness; he will never learn how to wrestle and wait;
he will never know correction; he will not hear the voice of God calling him
forward; he will never arrive at the place where he is morally and spiritually
fit to have his prayers answered. His wrong philosophy has ruined him.
That is why I turn
aside to expose the bit of bad theology upon which his bad philosophy is
founded. The man who accepts it never knows where he stands; he never knows
whether or not he has true faith, for if his request is not granted he avoids
the implication by the simple dodge of declaring that God switched the whole
thing around and gave him something else. He will not allow himself to shoot at
a target, so he cannot tell how good or how bad a marksman he is.
Of certain persons
James says plainly: "Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that
ye may consume it upon your lusts." From that brief sentence we may learn
that God refuses some requests because they who make them are not morally worthy
to receive the answer. But this means nothing to the one who has been seduced
into the belief that God always answers prayer. When such a man asks and
receives not he passes his hand over the hat and comes up with the answer in
some other form. One thing he clings to with great tenacity: God never turns
anyone away, but invariably grants every request.
The truth is that
God always answers the prayer that accords with His will as revealed in the
Scriptures, provided the one who prays is obedient and trustful. Further than
this we dare not go.
Self-deception and
How to Avoid It
OF ALL FORMS OF
DECEPTION, self-deception is the most deadly, and of all deceived persons the
self-deceived are the least likely to discover the fraud.
The reason for
this is simple. When a man is deceived by another he is deceived against his
will. He is contending against an adversary and is temporarily the victim of
the other's guile. Since he expects his foe to take advantage of him he is
watchful and quick to suspect trickery. Under such circumstances it is possible
to be deceived sometimes and for a short while, but because the victim is
resisting he may break out of the trap and escape before too long.
With the
self-deceived it is quite different. He is his own enemy and is working a fraud
upon himself. He wants to believe the lie and is psychologically conditioned to
do so. He does not resist the deceit but collaborates with it against himself.
There is no struggle, because the victim surrenders before the fight begins. He
enjoys being deceived.
It is altogether
possible to practice fraud upon our own souls and go deceived to judgment.
"If a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing," said
Paul, "he deceiveth himself." With this agrees the inspired James:
"If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue,
but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion is vain."
The farther we
push into the sanctuary the greater becomes the danger of self-deception. The
deeply religious man is far more vulnerable than the easygoing fellow who takes
his religion lightly. This latter may be deceived but he is not likely to be
self-deceived.
Under the pressure
of deep spiritual concern, and before his heart has been wholly conquered by
the Spirit of God, a man may be driven to try every dodge to save face and
preserve a semblance of his old independence. This is always dangerous and if
persisted in may prove calamitous.
The fallen heart
is by nature idolatrous. There appears to be no limit to which some of us will
go to save our idol, while at the same time telling ourselves eagerly that we
are trusting in Christ alone. It takes a violent act of renunciation to deliver
us from the hidden idol, and since very few modern Christians understand that
such an act is necessary, and only a small number of those who know are willing
to do, it follows that relatively few professors of the Christian faith these
days have ever experienced the painful act of renunciation that frees the heart
from idolatry.
Prayer is usually
recommended as the panacea for all ills and the key to open every prison door,
and it would indeed be difficult to overstate the advantages and privilege of
Spirit-inspired prayer. But we must not forget that unless we are wise and
watchful prayer itself may become a source of self-deception. There are as many
kinds of prayer as there are problems and some kinds are not acceptable to God.
The prophets of the Old Testament denounced
To escape
self-deception the praying man must come out clean and honest. He cannot hide
in the cross while concealing in his bosom the golden wedge and the goodly
Babylonish garment. Grace will save a man but it will not save him and his
idol. The blood of Christ will shield the penitent sinner alone, but never the
sinner and his idol. Faith will justify the sinner, but it will never justify
the sinner and his sin.
No amount of
pleading will make evil good or wrong right. A man may engage in a great deal
of humble talk before God and get no response because unknown to himself he is
using prayer to disguise disobedience. He may lie for hours in sackcloth and
ashes with no higher motive than to try to persuade God to come over on his
side so he can have his own way. He may grovel before God in a welter of
self-accusation, refuse to give up his secret sin and be rejected for his pains.
It can happen.
Dr. H. M. Shuman
once said to me in private conversation that he believed the one quality God
required a man to have before He would save him was honesty. With this I
heartily agree. However dishonest the man may have been before, he must put
away his duplicity if he is to be accepted before the Lord. Double dealing is
unutterably offensive to God. The insincere man has no claim on mercy. For such
a man the cross of Christ provides no remedy. Christ can and will save a man
who has been dishonest, but He cannot save him while he is dishonest. Absolute
candor is an indispensable requisite to salvation.
How may we remain
free from self-deception? The answer sounds old-fashioned and dull but here it
is: Mean what you say and never say what you do not mean, either to God or man.
Think candid thoughts and act forthrightly always, whatever the consequence. To
do this will bring the cross into your life and keep you dead to self and to
public opinion. And it may get you into trouble sometimes, too. But a guileless
mind is a great treasure; it is worth any price.
On Breeding
Spotted Mice
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS LATELY CARRIED an interesting if somewhat
depressing story out of
Having been a man of means and position, it had presumably not been
necessary for him to work for a living like the rest of us, so at the time of
his death he had had about seventy adult years in which he was free to do
whatever he wanted to do, to pursue any calling he wished or to work at
anything he felt worthy of his considerable abilities.
And what had he chosen to do? Well, according to the story, he had
"devoted his life to trying to breed the perfect spotted mouse."
Now, I grant every man the right to breed spotted mice if he wants to
and can get the cooperation of the mice, and I freely admit that it is his
business and not mine. Not being a mouse lover (nor a mouse hater for that
matter; I am just neutral about mice), I do not know but that a spotted mouse
might be more useful and make a more affectionate pet than a common mouse
colored mouse. But still I am troubled.
The mouse breeder in question was a lord, and I was born on a farm in
the hill country of
Made in the image of God, equipped with awesome powers of mind and
soul, called to dream immortal dreams and to think the long thoughts of
eternity, he chooses the breeding of a spotted mouse as his reason for
existing. Invited to walk with God on earth and to dwell at last with the
saints and angels in the world above; called to serve his generation by the
will of God, to press with holy vigor toward the mark for the prize of the high
calling of God in Christ Jesus, he dedicates his life to the spotted mousenot
just evenings or holidays, mind you, but his entire life. Surely this is
tragedy worthy of the mind of an Aeschylus or a Shakespeare.
Let us hope that the story is not true or that the news boys got it
mixed up as they sometimes do; but even if the whole thing should prove to be a
hoax, still it points up a stark human tragedy that is being enacted before our
eyes daily, not by makebelieve play actors, but by real men and women who are
the characters they portray. These should be concerned with sin and
righteousness and judgment; they should be getting ready to die and to live
again; but instead they spend their days breeding spotted mice.
If the spiritual view of the world is the correct one, as Christianity
boldly asserts that it is, then for every one of us heaven is more important
than earth and eternity more important than time. If Jesus Christ is who He
claimed to be; if He is what the glorious company of the apostles and the noble
army of martyrs declared that He is; if the faith which the holy church
throughout all the world doth acknowledge is the true faith of God, then no man
has any right to dedicate his life to anything that can burn or rust or rot or
die. No man has any right to give himself completely to anyone but Christ nor
to anything but prayer.
The man who does not know where he is is lost; the man who does not
know why he was born is worse lost; the man who cannot find an object worthy of
his true devotion is lost utterly; and by this description the human race is
lost, and it is a part of our lostness that we do not know how lost we are. So
we use up the few precious years allotted to us breeding spotted mice. Not the
kind that scurry and squeak, maybe; but viewed in the light of eternity, are
not most of our little human activities almost as meaningless?
One of the glories of the Christian gospel is its ability not only to
deliver a man from sin but to orient him, to place him on a peak from which he
can see yesterday and today in their relation to tomorrow. The truth cleanses
his mind so that he can recognize things that matter and see time and space and
kings and cabbages in their true perspective. The Spirit-illuminated Christian
cannot be cheated. He knows the values of things; he will not bid on a rainbow
nor make a down payment on a mirage; he will not, in short, devote his life to
spotted mice.
Back of every wasted life is a bad philosophy, an erroneous conception
of life's worth and purpose. The man who believes that he was born to get all
be can will spend his life trying to get it; and whatever he gets will be but a
cage of spotted mice. The man who believes he was created to enjoy fleshly
pleasures will devote himself to pleasure seeking; and if by a combination of
favorable circumstances he manages to get a lot of fun out of life, his
pleasures will all turn to ashes in his mouth at the last. He will find out too
late that God made him too noble to be satisfied with those tawdry pleasures he
had devoted his life to here under the sun.
The Unknown Saints
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
IN A FINE PASSAGE states his belief that there are many more poets in the world
than we suppose,
". . .men
endowed with highest gifts,
The vision and the
faculty divine,"
but who are
unknown because they lacked or failed to cultivate the gift of versification.
Then he sums up
his belief in a sentence that suggests truth far beyond any that he had in mind
at the time:
"Strongest
minds
Are often those of
whom the noisy world
Hears least."
Most of us in our
soberer moments would admit the soundness of this observation, but the hard
fact is that for the average person it is not the findings of the sober moment
that determine our total working philosophy; rather it is the shallow and
deceptive notions pressed upon us by the "noisy world." Human society
generally (and especially in the
We have but to
become acquainted with, or even listen to, the big names of our times to
discover how wretchedly inferior most of them are. Many appear to have arrived
at their present eminence by pull, brass, nerve, gall and lucky accident. We
turn away from them sick to our stomach and wonder for a discouraged moment if
this is the best the human race can produce. But we gain our self-possession
again by the simple expedient of recalling some of the plain men we know, who
live unheralded and unsung, and who are made of stuff infinitely finer than the
hoarse-voiced braggarts who occupy too many of the highest offices in the land.
If we would see
life steadily and see it whole we must make a stern effort to break away from
the power of that false philosophy that equates greatness with fame. The two
may be and often are oceans and continents apart.
If the church were
a body wholly unaffected by the world we could toss the above problem over to
the secular philosophers and go about our business; but the truth is that the
church also suffers from this evil notion. Christians have fallen into the
habit of accepting the noisiest and most notorious among them as the best and
the greatest. They too have learned to equate popularity with excellence, and
in open defiance of the Sermon on the Mount they have given their approval not
to the meek but to the self-assertive; not to the mourner but to the self-assured;
not to the pure in heart who see God but to the publicity hunter who seeks
headlines.
If we might
paraphrase Wordsworth we could make his lines run,
"Purest
saints
Are often those of
whom the noisy church
Hears least,"
and the words
would be true, deeply, wonderfully true.
After more than
thirty years of observing the religious scene I have been forced to conclude
that saintliness and church leadership are not often synonymous. I have on many
occasions preached to grateful Christians who had gone so much farther than I
had into the sweet mysteries of God that I actually felt unworthy to tie their
shoe laces. Yet they sat meekly listening while one inferior to them stood in
the place of prominence and declared imperfectly truths with which they had
long been familiar by intimate and beautiful experience. They must have known
and felt how much of theory and how little of real heart knowledge there was in
the sermon, but they said nothing and no doubt appreciated what little of good
there was in the message.
Were the church a
pure and Spirit-filled body, wholly led and directed by spiritual
considerations, certainly the purest and the saintliest men and women would be
the ones most appreciated and most honored; but the opposite is true. Godliness
is no longer valued, except for the very old or the very dead. The saintly
souls are forgotten in the whirl of religious activity. The noisy, the
self-assertive, the entertaining are sought after and rewarded in every way,
with gifts, crowds, offerings and publicity. The Christ-like, the
self-forgetting, the other-worldly are jostled aside to make room for the
latest converted playboy who is usually not too well converted and still very
much of a playboy.
The whole
short-sighted philosophy that ignores eternal qualities and majors on
trivialities is a form of unbelief. These Christians who embody such a
philosophy are clamoring after present reward; they are too impatient to wait
the Lord's time. They will not abide the day when Christ shall make known the secret
of every man's heart and reward each one according to his deeds. The true saint
sees farther than this; he cares little for passing values; he looks forward
eagerly to the day when eternal things shall come into their own and godliness
will be found to be all that matters.
Strange as it may
be, the holiest souls who have ever lived have earned the reputation for being
pessimistic. Their smiling indifference to the world's attractions and their
steady resistance to its temptations have been misunderstood by shallow
thinkers and attributed to an unsocial spirit and a lack of love for mankind.
What the world failed to see was that these peculiar men and women were
beholding a city invisible; they were walking day by day in the light of
another and eternal kingdom. They were already tasting the powers of the world
to come and enjoying afar the triumph of Christ and the glories of the new
creation.
No, the unknown
saints are riot pessimists, nor are they misanthropes or joy-killers. They are
by virtue of their godly faith the world's only true optimists. Their creed was
stated simply by Julian of Norwich when she said, "But all shall be well,
and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." Though sin
is in the world, she argued, a frightful visitation to be reckoned with, yet so
perfect is the atonement that the time will come when all evil shall be
eradicated and everything restored again to its pristine beauty in Christ. Then
"all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."
The wise Christian
will be content to wait for that day. In the meantime, he will serve his
generation in the will of God. If he should be overlooked in the religious
popularity contests he will give it but small attention. He knows whom he is
trying to please and he is willing to let the world think what it will of him.
He will not be around much longer anyway, and where he is going men will be
known not by their 'Hooper' rating but by the holiness of their character.
Three Faithful
Wounds
FAITHFUL ARE THE
WOUNDS OF A FRIEND, says the Holy Spirit in Proverbs 27:6. And lest we imagine
that the preacher is the one who does the wounding, I want to read Job 5:17 and
18: "Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not
thou the chastening of the Almighty: for he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he
woundeth, and his hands make whole." You see, the one who does the
wounding here is not the servant, but the Master Himself. So with that in our
minds I want to talk to you about three faithful wounds of a friend.
In order to get
launched into my message let me introduce a little lady who has been dead for
about six hundred years. She once lived and loved and prayed and sang in the
city of
Before she
blossomed out into this radiant, glorious life which made her famous as a great
Christian all over her part of the world, she prayed a prayer and God answered.
It is this prayer with which I am concerned tonight. The essence of her prayer
was this:
"O God,
please give me three wounds; the wound of contrition and the wound of
compassion and the wound of longing after God." Then she added this little
postscript which I think is one of the most beautiful things I have ever read:
"This I ask without condition." She wasn't dickering with God. She
wanted three things and they were all for God's glory: "I ask this without
condition, Father; do what I ask and then send me the bill. Anything that it
costs will be all right with me."
All great
Christians have been wounded souls. It is strange what a wound will do to a
man. Here's a soldier who goes out to the battlefield. He is full of jokes and
strength and self-assurance; then one day a piece of shrapnel tears through him
and he falls, a whimpering, beaten, defeated man. Suddenly his whole world
collapses around him and this man, instead of being the great, strong,
broad-chested fellow that he thought he was, suddenly becomes a whimpering boy
again. And such have ever been known, I am told, to cry for their mothers when
they lie bleeding and suffering on the field of battle. There is nothing like a
wound to take the self-assurance out of us, to reduce us to childhood again and
make us small and helpless in our own sight.
Many of the Old
Testament characters were wounded men, stricken of God and afflicted indeed as
their Lord was after them. Take Jacob, for instance. Twice God afflicted him;
twice he met God and each time it came as a wound, and one time it came
actually as a physical wound and he limped on his thigh for the rest of his
life. And the man Elijah-was he not more than a theologian, more than a
doctrinarian? He was a man who had been stricken; he had been struck with the
sword of God and was no longer simply one of Adam's race standing up in his own
self-assurance; he was a man who had had an encounter with God, who had been
confronted by God and had been defeated and broken down before Him. And when
Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up, you know what it did to him. Or take
the man Ezekiel, how he went down before his God and became a little child
again. And there were many others.
Now the wounded
man is a defeated man, I say; the strong, robust and self-confident Adam-man
ceases to fight back any longer; he lays down his sword and surrenders and the
wound finishes him. Let's talk about these three wounds in their order.
The first is the
wound of contrition. Now I've heard for the last thirty years that repentance
is a change of mind, and I believe it, of course, as far as it goes. But that's
just what's the matter with us. We have reduced repentance to a change of mind.
It is a mental act, indeed, but I point out that repentance is not likely to do
us much good until it ceases to be a change of mind only and becomes a wound
within our spirit. No man has truly repented until his sin has wounded him near
to death, until the wound has broken him and defeated him and taken all the
fight and self-assurance out of him and he sees himself as the one who nailed
his Saviour on the tree.
I don't know about
you, but the only way I can keep right with God is to keep contrite, to keep a
sense of contrition upon my spirit. Now there's a lot of cheap and easy getting
rid of sin and getting your repentance disposed of. But the great Christians,
in and out of the Bible, have been those who were wounded with a sense of
contrition so that they never quite got over the thought and the feeling that
they personally had crucified Jesus. The great Bishop Usher each week used to
go down by the riverbank and there all Saturday afternoon kneel by a log and
bewail his sins before his God. Perhaps that was the secret of his greatness.
Let us beware of
vain and over-hasty repentance, and particularly let us beware of no repentance
at all. We are a sinful race, ladies and gentlemen, a sinful people, and until
the knowledge has hit hard, until it has wounded us, until it has got through
and past the little department of our theology, it has done us no good. A man
can believe in total depravity and never have any sense of it for himself at
all. Lots of us believe in total depravity who have never been wounded with the
knowledge that we've sinned. Repentance is a wound I pray we may all feel.
And then there's
the wound of compassion. Now compassion is an emotional identification, and
Christ had that in full perfection. The man who has this wound of compassion is
a man who suffers along with other people. Jesus Christ our Lord can never
suffer to save us any more. This He did, once for all, when He gave Himself
without spot through the Holy Ghost to the Father on
But He does call
His people to feel along with Him and to feel along with those that rejoice and
those that suffer. He calls His people to be to Him the kind of an earthly body
in which He can weep again and suffer again and love again. For our Lord has
two bodies. One is the body He took to the tree on
Now, my brethren,
I don't know whether I can make it clear or not. I know that things like this
have to be felt rather than understood, but the wounded man is never a seeker
after happiness. There is an ignoble pursuit of irresponsible happiness among
us. Over the last years, as I have observed the human scene and have watched
God's professed people live and die, I have seen that most of us would rather
be happy than to feel the wounds of other people's sorrows. I do not believe
that it is the will of God that we should seek to be happy, but rather that we
should seek to be holy and useful. The holy man will be the useful man and he's
likely to be a happy man too; but if he seeks happiness and forgets holiness
and usefulness, he's a carnal man. I, for one, want no part in carnal religious
joy. There are times when it's sinful to be happy. When Jesus our Lord was
sweating it out there in the garden or hanging on the tree, He could not be
happy. He was the "man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief."
And the great
saints of the past, who conquered and captured parts of the world for Jesus,
when they were in travail were not happy. The woman, said Jesus, who is giving
birth is not happy at the time of her travail, but as soon as the child is
delivered she becomes happy because a man is born into the world. You and I
are, in a sense, to be mothers in
Thirdly, there's
the wound of longing after God. This little woman wanted to long after God with
a longing that became a pain in her heart. She wanted to be lovesick. She
prayed in effect, "O God, that I might want Thee so badly that it becomes
a wound in my heart that I can't get over." Today, accepting Christ
becomes terminal. That is the end. And all evangelism leads toward one
thing-getting increased numbers of people to accept Christ, and there we put a
period. My criticism of most of our Bible conferences is that we spend our time
counting again the treasures that we have in Christ but we never arrive at the
place where any of that which is in Christ gets into us. He has blessed us with
all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ, but you can no more
buy food with the money still in the bank than you can live on the treasures
that are in Christ unless they're also experientially in you.
So many of us say,
"All right, I'll attend another Bible conference," or "I'll take
a course," or "I'll buy a book." My friends, what we need is not
more instruction; we've been instructed to death. Where in the world is there
more fundamental Bible teaching than here in
Note the
paradoxes: To be happily forgiven and yet to be wounded and to remember the
grief; to enjoy the peace of the finished work of Christ and yet suffer to win
others; to find God and yet be always pursuing Him. When Moses saw the glory of
God he begged that he might see more. When God revealed to him that he had
found grace, he wanted more grace. Remember this: the man that has the most of
God is the man who is seeking the most ardently for more of God.
There was a man
who talked about "a restless thirst, a sacred, infinite desire," and
that is what I want for my own heart. Among the plastic saints of our times
Jesus has to do all the dying and all we want is to hear another sermon about
His dying; Jesus does all the sorrowing and we want to be happy. But, my
brethren, if we were what we ought to be, we would seek to know in experience
the meaning of the words, "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and
die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."
I have been
greatly and deeply concerned that you and I do something more than listen, that
we dare to go to God like the Lady Julian and dare to ask Him to give us a
faithful, fatherly wound-maybe three of them, if you please: to wound us with a
sense of our own sinful unworthiness that we'll never quite get over; to wound
us with the sufferings of the world and the sorrows of the church; and then to
wound us with the longing after God, a thirst, a sacred thirst and longing that
will carry us on toward perfection.
The lack of desire
is the ill of all ills;
Many thousands
through it the dark pathway have trod;
The balsam, the
wine of predestinate wills,
Is a jubilant
pining and longing for God.*
Write that
sentence down, "A jubilant pining and longing for God." Almost every
day of my life I am praying that "a jubilant pining and longing for
God" might come back on the evangelical churches. We don't need to have
our doctrine straightened out; we're as orthodox as the Pharisees of old. But
this longing for God that brings spiritual torrents and whirlwinds of seeking
and self-denial-this is almost gone from our midst.
God loves to be
longed for, He loves to be sought,
For He sought us
Himself with such longing and love;
He died for desire
of us, marvelous thought!
And He longs for
us now to be with Him above.* (*Frederick W. Faber)
I believe that God
wants us to long for Him with the longing that will become lovesickness, that
will become a wound to our spirits, to keep us always moving toward Him, always
finding and always seeking, always having and always desiring. So the earth
becomes less and less valuable and heaven gets closer as we move into God and
up into Christ.
Dare we bow our
hearts now and say, "Father, I've been an irresponsible, childish kind of
Christian-more concerned with being happy than with being holy. O God, give me
three wounds. Wound me with a sense of my own sinfulness. Wound me with
compassion for the world, and wound me with love of Thee that will keep me
always pursuing and always exploring and always seeking and always
finding."
If you dare to
pray that prayer sincerely and mean it before God, it could mean a turning
point in your life. It could mean a door of victory opened to you. May God
grant that it be so.
The Wrath of God:
What Is It?
IT IS RARE that
there is anything good in human anger. Almost always it springs out of unholy
states of heart, and frequently it leads to cursing and violence. The man of
evil temper is unpredictable and dangerous and is usually shunned by men of
peace and good will.
There is a strong
tendency among religious teachers these days to disassociate anger from the
divine character and to defend God by explaining away the Scriptures that
relate it to Him. This is understandable, but in the light of the full
revelation of God it is inexcusable.
In the first
place, God needs no defense. Those teachers who are forever trying to make God
over in their own image might better be employed in seeking to make themselves
over in the image of God. In the Scriptures "God spake all these
words," and there is no independent criterion by which we can judge the
revelation God there makes concerning Himself.
The present
refusal of so many to accept the doctrine of the wrath of God is part of a
larger pattern of unbelief that begins with doubt concerning the veracity of
the Christian Scriptures.
Let a man question
the inspiration of the Scriptures and a curious, even monstrous, inversion
takes place: thereafter he judges the Word instead of letting the Word judge
him; he determines what the Word should teach instead of permitting it to
determine what he should believe; he edits, amends, strikes out, adds at his
pleasure; but always he sits above the Word and makes it amenable to him
instead of kneeling before God and becoming amenable to the Word.
The tender-minded
interpreter who seeks to shield God from the implications of His own Word is
engaged in an officious effort that cannot but be completely wasted.
Why such a man still
clings to the tattered relics of religion it is hard to say. The manly thing
would be to walk out on the Christian faith and put it behind him along with
other outgrown toys and discredited beliefs of childhood, but this he rarely
does. He kills the tree but still hovers pensively about the orchard hoping for
fruit that never comes.
Whatever is stated
clearly but once in the Holy Scriptures may be accepted as sufficiently well
established to invite the faith of all believers; and when we discover that the
Spirit speaks of the wrath of God about three hundred times in the Bible we may
as well make up our minds either to accept the doctrine or reject the
Scriptures outright. If we have valid information from some outside source
proving that anger is unworthy of God, then the Bible is not to be trusted when
it attributes anger to God. And if it is wrong three hundred times on one
subject, who can trust it on any other?
The instructed
Christian knows that the wrath of God is a reality, that His anger is as holy
as His love, and that between His love and His wrath there is no
incompatibility. He further knows (as far as fallen creatures can know such
matters) what the wrath of God is and what it is not.
To understand
God's wrath we must view it in the light of His holiness. God is holy and has
made holiness to be the moral condition necessary to the health of His
universe. Sin's temporary presence in the world only accents this. Whatever is
holy is healthy; evil is a moral sickness that must end ultimately in death.
The formation of the language itself suggests this, the English word holy
deriving from the Anglo-Saxon halig, hal meaning well, whole. While it is not
wise to press word origins unduly, there is yet a significance here that should
not be overlooked.
Since God's first
concern for His universe is its moral health, that is, its holiness, whatever
is contrary to this is necessarily under His eternal displeasure. Wherever the
holiness of God confronts unholiness there is conflict. This conflict arises from
the irreconcilable natures of holiness and sin. God's attitude and action in
the conflict are His anger. To preserve His creation God must destroy whatever
would destroy it. When He arises to put down destruction and save the world
from irreparable moral collapse He is said to be angry. Every wrathful judgment
of God in the history of the world has been a holy act of preservation.
The holiness of
God, the wrath of God and the health of the creation are inseparably united.
Not only is it right for God to display anger against sin, but I find it
impossible to understand how He could do otherwise.
God's wrath is His
utter intolerance of whatever degrades and destroys. He hates iniquity as a
mother hates the diphtheria or polio that would destroy the life of her child.
God's wrath is the
antisepsis by which moral putrefaction is checked and the health of the
creation maintained. When God warns of His impending wrath and exhorts men to
repent and avoid it He puts it in a language they can understand: He tells them
to "flee from the wrath to come." He says in effect, "Your life
is evil, and because it is evil you are an enemy to the moral health of My
creation. I must extirpate whatever would destroy the world I love. Turn from
evil before I rise up in wrath against you. I love you, but I hate the sin you
love. Separate yourself from your evil ways before I send judgment upon
you."
"O Lord,- . .
in wrath remember mercy" (Hab. 3:2).
In Praise of
Dogmatism
IT IS VITAL TO ANY
UNDERSTANDING of ourselves and our fellowmen that we believe what is written in
the Scriptures about human society, that it is fallen, alienated from God and
in rebellion against His laws.
In these days of
togetherness when all men would brothers be for a' that, even the true
Christian is hard put to it to believe what God has spoken about men and their
relation to each other and to God; for what He has spoken is never
complimentary to men.
There is plenty of
good news in the Bible, but there is never any flattery or back scratching. Seen
one way, the Bible is a book of doom. It condemns all men as sinners and
declares that the soul that sinneth shall die. Always it pronounces sentence
against society before it offers mercy; and if we will not own the validity of
the sentence we cannot admit the need for mercy.
The coming of
Jesus Christ to the world has been so sentimentalized that it means now
something utterly alien to the Biblical teaching concerning it. Soft human pity
has been substituted for God's mercy in the minds of millions, a pity that has
long ago degenerated into self-pity. The blame for man's condition has been
shifted to God, and Christ's dying for the world has been twisted into an act
of penance on God's part. In the drama of redemption man is viewed as Miss
Cinderella who has long been oppressed and mistreated, but now through the
heroic deeds of earth's noblest Son is about to don her radiant apparel and
step forth a queen.
This is humanism
romantically tinted with Christianity, a humanism that takes sides with rebels
and excuses those who by word, thought and deed would glorify fallen men and if
possible overthrow the glorious high Throne in the heavens.
According to this
philosophy men are never really to blame for anything, the exception being the
man who insists that men are indeed to blame for something. In this dim world
of pious sentiment all religions are equal and any man who insists that
salvation is by Jesus Christ alone is a bigot and a boor.
So we pool our
religious light, which if the truth is told is little more than darkness
visible; we discuss religion on television and in the press as a kind of game,
much as we discuss art and philosophy, accepting as one of the ground rules of
the game that there is no final test of truth and that the best religion is a
composite of the best in all religions. So we have truth by majority vote and
thus saith the Lord by common consent.
One characteristic
of this sort of thing is its timidity. That religion may be very precious to
some persons is admitted, but never important enough to cause division or risk
hurting anyone's feelings. In all our discussions there must never be any trace
of intolerance; but we obviously forget that the most fervent devotees of
tolerance are invariably intolerant of everyone who speaks about God with
certainty. And there must be no bigotry, which is the name given to spiritual
assurance by those who do not enjoy it.
The desire to
please may be commendable enough under certain circumstances, but when pleasing
men means displeasing God it is an unqualified evil and should have no place in
the Christian's heart. To be right with God has often meant to be in trouble
with men. This is such a common truth that one hesitates to mention it, yet it
appears to have been overlooked by the majority of Christians today.
There is a notion
abroad that to win a man we must agree with him. Actually the exact opposite is
true. G. K. Chesterton remarked that each generation has had to be converted by
the man who contradicted it most. The man who is going in a wrong direction
will never be set right by the affable religionist who falls into step beside
him and goes the same way. Someone must place himself across the path and
insist that the straying man turn around and go in the right direction.
There is of course
a sense in which we are all in this terrible human mess together, and for this
reason there are certain areas of normal activity where we can all agree. The
Christian will not disagree merely to be different, but wherever the moral
standards and religious views of society differ from the teachings of Christ he
will disagree flatly. He will not admit the validity of human opinion when the
Word of God is clear. Some things are not debatable; there is no other side to
them. There is only God's side.
When men believe
God they speak boldly. When they doubt they confer. Much current religious talk
is but uncertainty rationalizing itself; and this they call "engaging in
the contemporary dialogue." It is impossible to imagine Moses or Elijah so
occupied.
All great
Christian leaders have been dogmatic. To such men two plus two made four.
Anyone who insisted upon denying it or suspending judgment upon it was
summarily dismissed as frivolous. They were only interested in a meeting of
minds if the minds agreed to meet on holy ground. We could use some gentle
dogmatists these days.
What Men Live By
HUMAN LIFE HAS ITS
CENTRAL CORE where lie the things men live by. These things are constant. They
change not from age to age, but are the same among all races throughout the
world always.
Life also has its
marginal zones where lie the things that are relatively unimportant. These
change from generation to generation and vary from people to people.
It is at the
central core that men are one, and it is on the marginal zones that they differ
from each other. Yet the marginal things divide the peoples of the world
radically and seriously. Most of the enmities of the earth have arisen from
differences that did not matter basically; but because the people could not
distinguish things men live by from things they live with these enmities arose
between them, and often led to persecutions, murders and bloody wars.
Were men
everywhere to ignore the things that matter little or not at all and give
serious attention to the few really important things, most of the walls that
divide men would be thrown down at once and a world of endless sufferings
ended.
What does matter
after all? What are the great facts that are good all the time everywhere among
all men? What are the axiomatic truths upon which all human life may rest with
confidence? Fortunately they are not many. Here are the chief ones:
1. Only God is
great. Men have sought to place greatness elsewhere, in things, in events, in
men; but the human soul is too great to attribute greatness to itself, and
certainly too great to believe that things or events can possess true
greatness.
The greatness that
men seem to have is as the greatness of moonlight, which is but the glory of
the sun reflected. Man's glory is borrowed. He shines in the light that never
was on land or sea. He reflects God's greatness but has none of his own.
"Before Thy
ever-blazing throne We ask no luster of our own."*
2. Only God is
wise. Man's wisdom has ever been the badge of his superiority and the cause of
his most arrogant pride; yet it fails him constantly. He cannot by his wisdom
find the answer to the old questions concerning himself: Whence? What? Why?
Whither? By it he cannot secure the blessings he wants most: to escape pain, to
stay young and to stay alive.
Yet man boasts of
his wisdom, God waits, the ages pass, and time and space and matter and motion
and life and death join to tell us that only God is wise.
3. Apart from God
nothing matters. We think that health matters, that freedom matters, or
knowledge or art or civilization. And but for one insistent word they would
matter indeed. That word is eternity.
Grant that men
possess perpetual being and the preciousness of every earthly treasure is gone
instantly. God is to our eternal being what our heart is to our body. The
lungs, the liver, the kidneys have value as they relate to the heart. Let the
heart stop and the rest of the organs promptly collapse. Apart from God, what
is money, fame, education, civilization? Exactly nothing at all, for men must
leave all these things behind them and one by one go to eternity. Let God hide
His face and nothing thereafter is worth the effort.
4. Only what we do
in God will remain to us at last.
Man is made in the
image of his Creator and has an urge toward creative activity. When he left the
Garden his creative urge did not leave him. He must build, always build; his
materials may be brick, paint, musical notes, scientific data, systems of
thought; but always he must build, from the boy that builds a toy to the man
that builds an empire.
Yet time is
against him, for it wears out everything it touches. Its grinding action makes
dust of civilizations and cities and men. A lifetime of toil dies with the
toiler. But God puts immortality in all our loving efforts for Him and shares
His eternity with all who love and trust Him.
5. Human sin is
real. Suspicion, hate, envy, power, lust and greed keep the world in a state of
continual ferment, while bespectacled men stand unblinking and assure classes
of eager students that the whole idea of sin is outmoded and sin itself
non-existent.
In spite of all
our smooth talk sin continues to ride the race of man. Until its heavy weight
is lifted from the soul nothing else has any right to our attention, for sin
shuts us out from the presence of the God whose favor alone gives life any
satisfactory reason for being.
6. With God there
is forgiveness. "The Lord God, merciful and gracious . . . keeping mercy
for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin." So says the
Old Testament. *"The Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins,"
says the New.
God's mercy heads
up in the Man Christ Jesus who is God and man by the mystery of the
Incarnation. He can and does forgive sin because the sin was committed against
Him in the first place. The soul in Christ has found the One that matters. His
heaviest problem is solved; his basic philosophy is sound; his eyes are open
and he knows the true from the false.
7. Only what God
protects is safe. All else perishes with the using or the hoarding. Paul knew
this secret. He said, "He is able to keep that which I have committed unto
him against that day."***
Blessed Treasure.
Blessed Keeper. Blessed Day.
* Ex. 34:6 * *
Matt. 9: 6 *** 2 Tim. 1:12
How to Try the
Spirits
THESE ARE THE
TIMES that try men's souls. The Spirit has spoken expressly that in the latter
times some should depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and
doctrines of demons; speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared
with a hot iron. Those days are upon us and we cannot escape them; we must
triumph in the midst of them, for such is the will of God concerning us.
Strange as it may
seem, the danger today is greater for the fervent Christian than for the
lukewarm and the self-satisfied. The seeker after God's best things is eager to
hear anyone who offers a way by which he can obtain them. He longs for some new
experience, some elevated view of truth, some operation of the Spirit that will
raise him above the dead level of religious mediocrity he sees all around him,
and for this reason he is ready to give a sympathetic ear to the new and the
wonderful in religion, particularly if it is presented by someone with an
attractive personality and a reputation for superior godliness.
Now our Lord
Jesus. that great Shepherd of the sheep, has not left His flock to the mercy of
the wolves. He has given us the Scriptures, the Holy Spirit and natural powers
of observation, and He expects us to avail ourselves of their help constantly.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," said Paul (I Thess.
5:21) . "Beloved, believe not every spirit," wrote John, "but
try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone
out into the world" (I John 4:1) . "Beware of false prophets,"
our Lord warned, "which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they
are ravening wolves" (Matt. 7:15). Then He added the word by which they
may be tested, "Ye shall know them by their fruits."
From this it is
plain not only that there shall be false spirits abroad, endangering our
Christian lives, but that they may be identified and known for what they are.
And of course once we become aware of their identity and learn their tricks
their power to harm us is gone. "Surely in vain the net is spread in the
sight of any bird" (Prov. 1:17)
It is my intention
to set forth here a method by which we may test the spirits and prove all
things religious and moral that come to us or are brought or offered to us by
anyone. And while dealing with these matters we should keep in mind that not
all religious vagaries are the work of Satan. The human mind is capable of
plenty of mischief without any help from the devil. Some persons have a
positive genius for getting confused, and will mistake illusion for reality in
broad daylight with the Bible open before them. Peter had such in mind when he
wrote, "Our beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom given unto
him hath written unto you; as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of
these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that
are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto
their own destruction" (II Pet. 3:15, 16).
It is unlikely
that the confirmed apostles of confusion will read what is written here or that
they would profit much if they did; but there are many sensible Christians who
have been led astray but are humble enough to admit their mistakes and are now
ready to return unto the Shepherd and Bishop of their souls. These may be
rescued from false paths. More important still, there are undoubtedly large
numbers of persons who have not left the true way but who want a rule by which
they can test everything and by which they may prove the quality of Christian
teaching and experience as they come in contact with them day after day
throughout their busy lives. For such as these I make available here a little
secret by which I have tested my own spiritual experiences and religious
impulses for many years.
Briefly stated the
test is this: This new doctrine, this new religious habit, this new view of
truth, this new spiritual experience how has it affected my attitude toward and
my relation to God, Christ, the Holy Scriptures, self, other Christians, the
world and sin. By this sevenfold test we may prove everything religious and
know beyond a doubt whether it is of God or not. By the fruit of the tree we
know the kind of tree it is. So we have but to ask about any doctrine or
experience, What is this doing to me? and we know immediately whether it is
from above or from below.
1) One vital test
of all religious experience is how it affects our relation to God, our concept
of God and our attitude toward Him. God being who He is must always be the
supreme arbiter of all things religious. The universe came into existence as a
medium through which the Creator might show forth His perfections to all moral
and intellectual beings: "I am the Lord: that is my name: and my glory
will I not give to another" (Isa. 42: 8) . "Thou art worthy, O Lord,
to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and
for thy pleasure they are and were created" (Rev. 4:11).
The health and
balance of the universe require that in all things God should be magnified.
"Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; and his greatness is
unsearchable." God acts only for His glory and whatever comes from Him
must be to His own high honor. Any doctrine, any experience that serves to
magnify Him is likely to be inspired by Him. Conversely, anything that veils His
glory or makes Him appear less wonderful is sure to be of the flesh or the
devil.
The heart of man
is like a musical instrument and may be played upon by the Holy Spirit, by an
evil spirit or by the spirit of man himself. Religious emotions are very much
the same, no matter who the player may be. Many enjoyable feelings may be
aroused within the soul by low or even idolatrous worship. The nun who kneels
"breathless with adoration" before an image of the Virgin is having a
genuine religious experience. She feels love, awe and reverence, all enjoyable
emotions, as certainly as if she were adoring God. The mystical experiences of
Hindus and Sufis cannot be brushed aside as mere pretense. Neither dare we
dismiss the high religious flights of spiritists and other occultists as
imagination. These may have and sometimes do have genuine encounters with
something or someone beyond themselves. In the same manner Christians are
sometimes led into emotional experiences that are beyond their power to
comprehend. I have met such and they have inquired eagerly whether or not their
experience was of God.
The big test is,
What has this done to my relationship to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ? If this new view of truth-this new encounter with spiritual things-has
made me love God more, if it has magnified Him in my eyes, if it has purified
my concept of His being and caused Him to appear more wonderful than before,
then I may conclude that I have not wandered astray into the pleasant but
dangerous and forbidden paths of error.
2. The next test
is: How has this new experience affected my attitude toward the Lord Jesus
Christ? Whatever place present-day religion may give to Christ, God gives Him
top place in earth and in heaven. "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well
pleased," spoke the voice of God from heaven concerning our Lord Jesus.
Peter, full of the Holy Spirit, declared: "God hath made that same Jesus,
whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ" (Acts 2:36). Jesus said of
Himself, "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the
Father, but by me." Again Peter said of Him, "Neither is there
salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among
men, whereby we must be saved" (Acts 4:12) . The whole book of Hebrews is
devoted to the idea that Christ is above all others. He is shown to be above
Aaron and Moses, and even the angels are called to fall down and worship Him.
Paul says that He is the image of the invisible God, that in Him dwells the
fullness of the Godhead bodily and that in all things He must have the
preeminence. But time would fail me to tell of the glory accorded Him by
prophets, patriarchs, apostles, saints, elders, psalmists, kings and seraphim.
He is made unto us wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.
He is our hope, our life, our all and all, now and forevermore.
All this being
true, it is clear that He must stand at the center of all true doctrine, all
acceptable practice and all genuine Christian experience. Anything that makes
Him less than God has declared Him to be is delusion pure and simple and must
be rejected, no matter how delightful or how satisfying it may for the time
seem to be.
Christless
Christianity sounds contradictory but it exists as a real phenomenon in our
day. Much that is being done in Christ's name is false to Christ in that it is
conceived by the flesh, incorporates fleshly methods, and seeks fleshly ends.
Christ is mentioned from time to time in the same way and for the same reason
that a self-seeking politician mentions
Again, there are
psychic experiences that thrill the seeker and lead him to believe that he has
indeed met the Lord and been carried to the third heaven; but the true nature
of the phenomenon is discovered later when the face of Christ begins to fade
from the victim's consciousness and he comes to depend more and more upon
emotional jags as a proof of his spirituality.
If on the other
hand the new experience tends to make Christ indispensable, if it takes our
interest off our feeling and places it in Christ, we are on the right track.
Whatever makes Christ dear to us is pretty sure to be from God.
3. Another
revealing test of the soundness of religious experience is, How does it affect
my attitude toward the Holy Scriptures? Did this new experience, this new view
of truth, spring out of the Word of God itself or was it the result of some
stimulus that lay outside the Bible? Tender-hearted Christians often become
victims of strong psychological pressure applied intentionally or innocently by
someone's personal testimony, or by a colorful story told by a fervent preacher
who may speak with prophetic finality but who has not checked his story with
the facts nor tested the soundness of his conclusions by the Word of God.
Whatever
originates outside the Scriptures should for that very reason be suspect until
it can be shown to be in accord with them. If it should be found to be contrary
to the Word of revealed truth no true Christian will accept it as being from
God. However high the emotional content, no experience can be proved to be
genuine unless we can find chapter and verse authority for it in the
Scriptures. "To the word and to the testimony" must always be the
last and final proof.
Whatever is new or
singular should also be viewed with a lot of caution until it can furnish
scriptural proof of its validity. Over the last half-century quite a number of
unscriptural notions have gained acceptance among Christians by claiming that
they were among the truths that were to be revealed in the last days. To be
sure, say the advocates of this latter-daylight theory, Augustine did not know,
Luther did not, John Knox, Wesley, Finney and Spurgeon did not understand this;
but greater light has now shined upon God's people and we of these last days
have the advantage of fuller revelation. We should not question the new doctrine
nor draw back from this advanced experience. The Lord is getting His Bride
ready for the marriage supper of the Lamb. We should all yield to this new
movement of the Spirit. So they tell us.
The truth is that
the Bible does not teach that there will be new light and advanced spiritual
experiences in the latter days; it teaches the exact opposite. Nothing in
Daniel or the New Testament epistles can be tortured into advocating the idea
that we of the end of the Christian era shall enjoy light that was not known at
its beginning. Beware of any man who claims to be wiser than the apostles or
holier than the martyrs of the
Granted, however,
that the Scriptures may not always be clear and that there are differences of
interpretation among equally sincere men, this test will furnish all the proof
needed of anything religious, viz., What does it do to my love for and
appreciation of the Scriptures?
While true power
lies not in the letter of the text but in the Spirit that inspired it, we
should never underestimate the value of the letter. The text of truth has the
same relation to truth as the honeycomb has to honey. One serves as a receptacle
for the other. But there the analogy ends. The honey can be removed from the
comb, but the Spirit of truth cannot and does not operate apart from the letter
of the Holy Scriptures.
For this reason a
growing acquaintance with the Holy Spirit will always mean an increasing love
for the Bible. The Scriptures are in print what Christ is in person. The
inspired Word is like a faithful portrait of Christ. But again the figure
breaks down. Christ is in the Bible as no one can be in a mere portrait, for the
Bible is a book of holy ideas and the eternal Word of the Father can and does
dwell in the thought He has Himself inspired. Thoughts are things, and the
thoughts of the Holy Scriptures form a lofty temple for the dwelling place of
God.
From this it follows
naturally that a true lover of God will be also a lover of His Word. Anything
that comes to us from the God of the Word will deepen our love for the Word of
God. This follows logically, but we have confirmation by a witness vastly more
trustworthy than logic, viz., the concerted testimony of a great army of
witnesses living and dead. These declare with one voice that their love for the
Scriptures intensified as their faith mounted and their obedience became
consistent and joyous.
If the new
doctrine, the influence of that new teacher, the new emotional experience fills
my heart with an avid hunger to meditate in the Scriptures day and night. I
have every reason to believe that God has spoken to my soul and that my
experience is genuine. Conversely, if my love for the Scriptures has cooled
even a little, if my eagerness to eat and drink of the inspired Word has abated
by as much as one degree, I should humbly admit that I have missed God's signal
somewhere and frankly backtrack until I find the true way once more.
4. Again, we can
prove the quality of religious experience by its effect on the self-life.
The Holy Spirit
and the fallen human self are diametrically opposed to each other. "The
flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these
are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye
would" (Gal. 5:17). "They that are after the flesh do mind the things
of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit . . .
. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the
law of God, neither indeed can be" (Rom. 8: 5, 7).
Before the Spirit
of God can work creatively in our hearts He must condemn and slay the
"flesh" within us; that is, He must have our full consent to displace
our natural self with the Person of Christ. This displacement is carefully
explained in Romans 6, 7,and 8. When the seeking Christian has gone through the
crucifying experience described in chapters 6 and 7 he enters into the broad,
free regions of chapter 8. There self is dethroned and Christ is enthroned
forever.
In the light of
this it is not hard to see why the Christian's attitude toward self is such an
excellent test of the validity of his religious experiences. Most of the great
masters of the deeper life, such as Fenelon. Molinos, John of the Cross, Madame
Guyon and a host, of others, have warned against pseudoreligious experiences
that provide much carnal enjoyment but feel the flesh and puff up the heart
with self-love.
A good rule is
this: If this experience has served to humble me and make me little and vile in
my own eyes it is of God; but if it has given me a feeling of self-satisfaction
it is false and should be dismissed as emanating from self or the devil.
Nothing that comes from God will minister to my pride or self-congratulation.
If I am tempted to be complacent and to feel superior because I have had a
remarkable vision or an advanced spiritual experience, I should go at once to
my knees and repent of the whole thing. I have fallen a victim to the enemy.
5. Our relation to
and our attitude toward our fellow Christians is another accurate test of
religious experience.
Sometimes an
earnest Christian will, after some remarkable spiritual encounter, withdraw
himself from his fellow believers and develop a spirit of faultfinding. He may
be honestly convinced that his experience is superior, that he is now in an
advanced state of grace, and that the hoi polloi in the church where he attends
are but a mixed multitude and he alone a true son of
The Lady Julian
tells us in her quaint English how true Christian grace affects our attitude
toward others: "For of all things the beholding and loving of the Maker
maketh the soul to seem less in his own sight, and most filleth him with
reverent dread and true meekness; with plenty of charity to his fellow
Christians." Any religious experience that fails to deepen our love for
our fellow Christians may safely be written off as spurious.
The Apostle John
makes love for our fellow Christians to be a test of true faith. "My
little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in
truth. And hereby we know that we are of the truth, and shall assure our hearts
before him" (I John 3:18, 19). Again he says, "Beloved, let us love
one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and
knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love" (I John
4:7, 8).
As we grow in
grace we grow in love toward all God's people. "Every one that loveth him
that begot loveth him also that is begotten of him" (I John 5:1) . This
means simply that if we love God we will love His children. All true Christian
experience will deepen our love for other Christians.
Therefore we
conclude that whatever tends to separate us in person or in heart from our
fellow Christians is not of God, but is of the flesh or of the devil. And
conversely, whatever causes us to love the children of God is likely to be of
God. "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love
one to another" (John 13:35).
6. Another certain
test of the source of religious experience is this: Note how it affects our
relation to and our attitude toward the world.
By "the
world" I do not mean, of course, the beautiful order of nature which God
has created for the enjoyment of mankind. Neither do I mean the world of lost
men in the sense used by our Lord when He said, "God so loved the world,
that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not
perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to
condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved" (John
3:16, 17). Certainly any true touch of God in the soul will deepen our
appreciation of the beauties of nature and intensify our love for the lost. I refer
here to something else altogether.
Let an apostle say
it for us: "All that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust
of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.
And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of
God abideth for ever" (I John 2:16, 17) .
This is the world
by which we may test the spirits. It is the world of carnal enjoyments, of
godless pleasures, of the pursuit of earthly riches and reputation and sinful
happiness. It carries on without Christ, following the counsel of the ungodly
and being animated by the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that works
in the children of disobedience (Eph. 2: 2) . Its religion is a form of
godliness, without power, which has a name to live but is dead. It is, in
short, unregenerate human society romping on its way to hell, the exact
opposite of the true
Any real work of
God in our heart will tend to unfit us for the world's fellowship. "Love
not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the
world, the love of the Father is not in him" (I John 2:15). "Be ye
not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath
righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with
darkness?" (II Cor. 6:140. It may be stated unequivocally that any spirit
that permits compromise with the world is a false spirit. Any religious movement
that imitates the world in any of its manifestations is false to the cross of
Christ and on the side of the devil and this regardless of how much purring its
leaders may do about "accepting Christ" or "letting God run your
business."
7. The last test
of the genuineness of Christian experience is what it does to our attitude
toward sin.
The operations of
grace within the heart of a believing man will turn that heart away from sin
and toward holiness. "For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath
appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts,
we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world; looking
for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our
Saviour Jesus Christ" (Tit. 2:11-13) .
I do not see how
it could be plainer. The same grace that saves teaches that saved man inwardly,
and its teaching is both negative and positive. Negatively it teaches us to
deny ungodliness and worldly lusts. Positively it teaches us to live soberly,
righteously and godly right in this present world.
The man of honest
heart will find no difficulty here. He has but to check his own bent to
discover whether he is concerned about sin in his life more or less since the
supposed work of grace was done. Anything that weakens his hatred of sin may be
identified immediately as false to the Scriptures, to the Saviour and to his
own soul. Whatever makes holiness more attractive and sin more intolerable may
be accepted as genuine. "For thou art not a God that hath pleasure in
wickedness: neither shall evil dwell with thee. The foolish shall not stand in
thy sight: thou hatest all workers of iniquity" (Psa. 5: 4, 5).
Jesus warned,
"There shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great
signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they should deceive the
very elect." These words describe our day too well to be coincidental. In
the hope that the "elect" may profit by them I have set forth these
tests. The result is in the hand of God.
Religious Boredom
THAT THERE IS
SOMETHING gravely wrong with evangelical Christianity today is not likely to be
denied by any serious minded person acquainted with the facts. Just what is
wrong is not so easy to determine.
In examining the
situation myself I find nature and reason in conflict within me, for I tend by
temperament to want to settle everything with a sweep of the pen. But reason
advises caution; nothing is that simple, and we must be careful to distinguish
cause from effect. As every doctor knows there is a wide difference between the
disease and the symptoms; and every Christian knows that there is a big
difference between cause and effect in the sphere of religion.
At the root of our
spiritual trouble lie a number of causes and these causes have effects, but
which is cause and which effect is not always known. I suspect that many things
currently under attack by our evangelists and pastors (and editors, for that
matter) are not the causes of our troubles but the effects of causes that lie
deeper. We treat the symptoms and wonder why the patient does not get well. Or,
to change the figure, we lay down a heavy fire against nothing more substantial
than the cloud of dust raised by marching enemy troops long gone by.
One mark of the low
state of affairs among us is religious boredom. Whether this is a thing in
itself or merely a symptom of the thing, I do not know for sure, though I
suspect that it is the latter. And that it is found to some degree almost
everywhere among Christians is too evident to be denied.
Boredom is, of
course, a state of mind resulting from trying to maintain an interest in
something that holds no trace of interest for us (the boss's jokes, say, or
that lecture on the care and nurture of dahlias to which we went because we
could not resist the enthusiastic urging of a friend). No one is bored by what
he can in good conscience walk away from. Boredom comes when a man must try to
hear with relish what for want of relish he hardly hears at all.
By this definition
there is certainly much boredom in religion these days. The businessman on a
Sunday morning whose mind is on golf can scarcely disguise his lack of interest
in the sermon he is compelled to hear. The housewife who is unacquainted with
the learned theological or philosophical jargon of the speaker; the young
couple who feel a tingle of love for each other but who neither love nor know
the One about whom the choir is singing-these cannot escape the low-grade
mental pain we call boredom while they struggle to keep their attention focused
upon the service. All these are too courteous to admit to others that they are
bored and possibly too timid to admit it even to themselves, but I believe that
a bit of candid confession would do us all good.
When Moses tarried
in the mount,
Those Christians
who belong to the evangelical wing of the church (which I firmly believe is the
only one that even approximates New Testament Christianity) have over the last
half-century shown an increasing impatience with things invisible and eternal
and have demanded and got a host of things visible and temporal to satisfy
their fleshly appetites. Without Biblical authority, or any other right under
the sun, carnal religious leaders have introduced a host of attractions that
serve no purpose except to provide entertainment for the retarded saints.
It is now common
practice in most evangelical churches to offer the people, especially the young
people, a maximum of entertainment and a minimum of serious instruction. It is
scarcely possible in most places to get anyone to attend a meeting where the
only attraction is God. One can only conclude that God's professed children are
bored with Him, for they must be wooed to meeting with a stick of striped candy
in the form of religious movies, games and refreshments.
This has
influenced the whole pattern of church life, and even brought into being a new
type of church architecture, designed to house the golden calf.
So we have the
strange anomaly of orthodoxy in creed and heterodoxy in practice. The
striped-candy technique has been so fully integrated into our present religious
thinking that it is simply taken for granted. Its victims never dream that it
is not a part of the teachings of Christ and His apostles.
Any objection to
the carryings on of our present golden-calf Christianity is met with the
triumphant reply, "But we are winning them!" And winning them to what?
To true discipleship? To cross-carrying? To self-denial? To separation from the
world? To crucifixion of the flesh? To holy living? To nobility of character?
To a despising of the world's treasures? To hard self-discipline? To love for
God? To total committal to Christ? Of course the answer to all these questions
is no.
We are paying a
frightful price for our religious boredom. And that at the moment of the
world's mortal peril.
The Church Cannot
Die
THERE IS A NOTION
ABROAD that Christianity is on its last legs, or possibly already dead and just
too weak to lie down.
This is
confidently believed in Communist countries, and while spokesmen for the West
are too polite to say so, one can hardly escape the feeling that they too
believe the demise of the church to be a certain if embarrassing fact, the
chief proof of her death being her failure to provide leadership for the world
just when it needs it most.
Let me employ a
pair of mixed and battered but still useful clichés and say that those who have
come to bury the faith of our fathers have reckoned without the host. Just as
Jesus Christ was once buried away with the full expectation that He had been
gotten rid of, so His church has been laid to rest times without number; and as
He disconcerted His enemies by rising from the dead so the church has
confounded hers by springing again to vigorous life after all the obsequies had
been performed over her coffin and the crocodile tears had been shed at her
grave.
The language of
devotion has helped to create the impression that the church is supposed to be
a band of warriors driving the enemy before them in plain sight and with plenty
of color and drama to give a pleasing flourish to the whole thing. In our hymns
and pulpit oratory we have commonly pictured the church as marching along to
the sound of martial music and the plaudits of the multitude.
Of course this is
but a poetic figure. The individual Christian may be likened to a soldier, but
the picture of the church on earth as a conquering army is not realistic. Her
true situation is more accurately portrayed as a flock of sheep in the midst of
wolves, or as a company of despised pilgrims plodding toward home, or as a
peculiar nation protected by the Passover blood waiting for the sound of the
trumpet, or as a bride looking for the coming of her bridegroom.
The world is
constantly lashing the church because she has no solution for the problems of
society, and the religious leaders who do not know the score wince under the
lash. Every once in a while some churchman in an acute attack of conscience
does penance in public for Christianity's failure to furnish bold leadership
for the world in this time of crisis. "We have sinned," cries the
frustrated prophet. "The world looked to us for help and we have failed it."
Well, I am all for
repentance if it is genuine, and I think the church has failed, not by
neglecting to provide leadership but by living too much like the world. That,
however, is not what the muddled churchman means when he bares his soul in
public. Rather, he erroneously assumes that the
In the first place
the church has received no such commission from her Lord, and in the second
place the world has never shown much disposition to listen to the church when
she speaks in her true prophetic voice. The attitude of the world toward the
true child of God is precisely the same as that of the citizens of Vanity Fair
toward Christian and his companion. "Therefore they took them and beat
them, and besmeared them with dirt, and put them into the cage, that they might
be made a spectacle to all men." Christian's duty was not to "provide
leadership" for Vanity Fair but to keep clean from its pollution and get
out of it as fast as possible. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.
Christianity is
going the way her Founder and His apostles said it would go. Its development
and direction were predicted almost two thousand years ago, and this itself is
a miracle. Had Christ been less than God and His apostles less than inspired
they could not have foretold with such precision the state of the church so far
removed from them in time and circumstance. No mortal man could have foreseen
the coming of the great religiopolitical system that is
We are in real
need of a reformation that will lead to revival among the churches, but the
church is not dead, neither is it dying. The church cannot die.
A local church can
die. This happens when all the old saints in a given place fall asleep and no
young saints arise to take their place. Sometimes under these circumstances the
congregation ceases to be a church, or there is no congregation left and the
doors of the chapel are nailed shut. But such a condition, however deplorable,
should not discourage us. The true church is the repository of the life of God
among men, and if in one place the frail vessels fail, that life will break out
somewhere else. Of this we may be sure.
The Lordship of
the Man Jesus Is Basic
WE ARE UNDER
CONSTANT TEMPTATION these days to substitute another Christ for the Christ of
the New Testament. The whole drift of modern religion is toward such a
substitution.
To avoid this we
must hold steadfastly to the concept of Christ as set forth so clearly and
plainly in the Scriptures of truth. Though an angel from heaven should preach
anything less than the Christ of the apostles let him be forthrightly and
fearlessly rejected.
The mighty,
revolutionary message of the
Less than three
hundred years after Pentecost the hard-pressed defenders of the faith drew up a
manifesto condensing those teachings of the New Testament having to do with the
nature of Christ. This manifesto declares that Christ is "God of the
substance of His Father, begotten before all ages: Man of the substance of His
mother, born in the world: perfect God and perfect Man, of a reasonable soul
and human flesh subsisting: Equal to His Father, as touching His Godhead: less
than the Father, as touching His manhood. Who, although He be God and man, yet
He is not two, but one Christ. One, not by conversion of the Godhead into
flesh, but by the taking of the manhood into God. One altogether, not by the
confusion of substance, but by the unity of Person. For as the reasonable soul
and flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ."
Even among those
who acknowledge the deity of Christ there is often a failure to recognize His
manhood. We are quick to assert that when He walked the earth He was God with
men, but we overlook a truth equally as important, that where He sits now on
His mediatorial throne He is Man with God.
The teaching of
the New Testament is that now, at this very moment, there is a man in heaven
appearing in the presence of God for us. He is as certainly a man as was Adam
or Moses or Paul. He is a man glorified, but His glorification did not
dehumanize Him. Today He is a real man, of the race of mankind, bearing our
lineaments and dimensions, a visible and audible man whom any other man would
recognize instantly as one of us.
But more than
this, He is heir of all things, Lord of all worlds, head of the church and the
first-born of the new creation. He is the way to God, the life of the believer,
the hope of
This is not all
that can be said about Him, for were all said that might be said I suppose the
world itself could not contain the books that should be written. But this in
brief is the Christ we preach to sinners as their only escape from the wrath to
come. With Him rest the noblest hopes and dreams of men. All the longings for
immortality that rise and swell in the human breast will be fulfilled in Him or
they will never know fulfillment. There is no other way (John 14:6).
Salvation comes
not by "accepting the finished work" or "deciding for
Christ." It comes by believing on the Lord Jesus Christ, the whole,
living, victorious Lord who, as God and man, fought our fight and won it,
accepted our debt as His own and paid it, took our sins and died under them and
rose again to set us free. This is the true Christ, and nothing less will do.
But something less
is among us, nevertheless, and we do well to identify it so that we may
repudiate it. That something is a poetic fiction, a product of the romantic
imagination and maudlin religious fancy. It is a Jesus, gentle, dreamy, shy,
sweet, almost effeminate, and marvelously adaptable to whatever society He may
find Himself in. He is cooed over by women disappointed in love, patronized by
pro tem celebrities and recommended by psychiatrists as a model of a
well-integrated personality. He is used as a means to almost any carnal end,
but He is never acknowledged as Lord. These quasi Christians follow a quasi
Christ. They want His help but not His interference. They will flatter Him but
never obey Him.
The argument of
the apostles is that the Man Jesus has been made higher than angels, higher
than Moses and Aaron, higher than any creature in earth or heaven. And this
exalted position He attained as a man. As God He already stood infinitely above
all other beings. No argument was needed to prove the transcendence of the
Godhead. The apostles were not declaring the preeminence of God, which would
have been superfluous, but of a man, which was necessary.
Those first
Christians believed that Jesus of Nazareth, a man they knew, had been raised to
a position of Lordship over the universe. He was still their friend, still one
of them, but had left them for a while to appear in the presence of God on
their behalf. And the proof of this was the presence of the Holy Spirit among
them.
One cause of our
moral weakness today is an inadequate Christology. We think of Christ as God
but fail to conceive of Him as a man glorified. To recapture the power of the
A Do-It-Yourself
Education Better Than None
THIS IS WRITTEN
FOR THOSE CHRISTIANS who may have missed a formal education. Let no one
despair. A do-it-yourself education is better than none. It can be acquired by
the proper use of our mental powers.
Our intellectual
activities in the order of their importance may be graded this way: first,
cogitation; second, observation; third, reading.
I wish I could
include conversation in this short list. One would naturally suppose that
verbal intercourse with congenial friends should be one of the most profitable
of all mental activities; and it may have been so once but no more. It is now
quite possible to talk for hours with civilized men and women and gain
absolutely nothing from it. Conversation today is almost wholly sterile. Should
the talk start on a fairly high level, it is sure within a few minutes to
degenerate into cheap gossip, shoptalk, banter, weak humor, stale jokes, puns
and secondhand quips. So we shall omit conversation from our list of useful
intellectual activities, at least until there has been a radical reformation in
the art of social discourse.
We shall not
consider prayer here either, but for quite another and happier reason. Prayer
is the loftiest activity possible to man, and it is of course partly mental,
but it is nevertheless usually classified as a spiritual rather than an
intellectual exercise; so it will be omitted.
I believe that
pure thinking will do more to educate a man than any other activity he can
engage in. To afford sympathetic entertainment to abstract ideas, to let one
idea beget another, and that another, till the mind teems with them; to compare
one idea with others, to weigh, to consider, evaluate, approve, reject,
correct, refine; to join thought with thought like an architect till a noble
edifice has been created within the mind; to travel back in imagination to the
beginning of the creation and then to leap swiftly forward to the end of time;
to bound upward through illimitable space and downward into the nucleus of an
atom; and all this without so much as moving from our chair or opening the
eyes-this is to soar above all the lower creation and to come near to the
angels of God.
Of all earth's
creatures only man can think in this way. And while thinking is the mightiest
act a man can perform, perhaps for the very reason that it is the mightiest, it
is the one act he likes the least and avoids most.
Aside from a few
professionals, who cannot number more than one-tenth of one percent of the
population, people simply do not think at all except in the most elementary
way. Their thinking is done for them by the professionals.
After cogitation
comes observation (in order of importance, not in order of time). Observation
is, of course, simply a method of obtaining information. Without information
the most powerful mind can produce nothing worthwhile. Philosophers have not
agreed about whether the mind receives all of its ideas through the five senses
or comes into the world with a few "innate ideas," i.e., ideas
already present. But we need not settle this argument to conclude that
information is indispensable to sound thought. Knowledge is the raw material
out of which that finest of all machines, the mind, creates its amazing world.
The effort to
think well with an empty head is sure to be largely wasted. There is nothing
like a good hard fact to correct our carefully constructed theories. God has
given us our five senses, and these are most highly sensitive instruments for
the gathering of knowledge. So efficient are these instruments that it is quite
impossible for a normal person to live even a brief time without learning
something. For this reason a child five years old may properly be said to be
educated in that he has by observation gathered a few facts and arranged them
into some sort of orderly pattern within his mind. A doctor of philosophy has
done nothing different; he has only gone a little further.
While it is
impossible to live even a short time without learning something, unfortunately
it is possible to live a long time and not learn very much. Observation is a
powerful tool, but its usefulness depends upon how well we use it. One of the
tragedies of life is that the powers of observation atrophy when not used. Just
when this begins with the average person I have no sure way of knowing, but I
would hazard a guess that it is at about the age of twenty-five. By that time
most people have formed their habits, accepted the conventions, lost their
sense of wonder and settled down to live by their glands and their appetites.
For millions there is not much to observe after that but the weather and the
baseball score.
Lastly reading. To
think without a proper amount of good reading is to limit our thinking to our
own tiny plot of ground. The crop cannot be large. To observe only and neglect
reading is to deny ourselves the immense value of other people's observations;
and since the better books are written by trained observers the loss is sure to
be enormous. Extensive reading without the discipline of practical observation
will lead to bookishness and artificiality.
Some Thoughts on
Books and
ONE BIG PROBLEM IN
MANY PARTS of the world today is to learn how to read, and in others it is to
find something to read after one has learned. In our favored West we are
overwhelmed with printed matter, so the problem here becomes one of selection.
We must decide what not to read.
Nearly a century
ago Emerson pointed out that if it were possible for a man to begin to read the
day he was born and to go on reading without interruption for seventy years, at
the end of that time he would have read only enough books to fill a tiny niche
in the British Library. Life is so short and the books available to us are so
many that no man can possibly be acquainted with more than a fraction of one
percent of the books published.
It hardly need be
said that most of us are not selective enough in our reading. I have often
wondered how many square yards of newsprint passes in front of the eyes of the
average civilized man in the course of a year. Surely it must run into several
acres; and I am afraid our average reader does not realize a very large crop on
his acreage. The best advice I have heard on this topic was given by a
Methodist minister. He said, "Always read your newspaper standing
up." Henry David Thoreau also had a low view of the daily press. Just
before leaving the city for his now celebrated sojourn on the banks of
In our serious
reading we are likely to be too greatly influenced by the notion that the chief
value of a book is to inform; and if we were talking of textbooks of course
that would be true, but when we speak or write of books we have not textbooks
in mind.
The best book is
not one that informs merely, but one that stirs the reader up to inform
himself. The best writer is one that goes with us through the world of ideas
like a friendly guide who walks beside us through the forest pointing out to us
a hundred natural wonders we had not noticed before. So we learn from him to
see for ourselves and soon we have no need for our guide. If he has done his
work well we can go on alone and miss little as we go.
That writer does
the most for us who brings to our attention thoughts that lay close to our
minds waiting to be acknowledged as our own. Such a man acts as a midwife to
assist at the birth of ideas that had been gestating long within our souls, but
which without his help might not have been born at all.
There are few
emotions so satisfying as the joy that comes from the act of recognition when
we see and identify our own thoughts. We have all had teachers who sought to
educate us by feeding alien ideas into our minds, ideas for which we felt no
spiritual or intellectual kinship. These we dutifully tried to integrate into
our total spiritual philosophy but always without success.
In a very real
sense no man can teach another; he can only aid him to teach himself. Facts can
be transferred from one mind to another as a copy is made from the master tape
on a sound recorder. History, science, even theology, may be taught in this
way, but it results in a highly artificial kind of learning and seldom has any
good effect upon the deep life of the student. What the learner contributes to
the learning process is fully as important as anything contributed by the
teacher. If nothing is contributed by the learner the results are useless; at
best there will be but the artificial creation of another teacher who can
repeat the dreary work on someone else, ad infinitum.
Perception of
ideas rather than the storing of them should be the aim of education. The mind
should be an eye to see with rather than a bin to store facts in. The man who
has been taught by the Holy Spirit will be a seer rather than a scholar. The
difference is that the scholar sees and the seer sees through; and that is a
mighty difference indeed.
The human
intellect even in its fallen state is an awesome work of God, but it lies in
darkness until it has been illuminated by the Holy Spirit. Our Lord has little
good to say of the unilluminated mind, but He revels in the mind that has been
renewed and enlightened by grace. He always makes the place of His feet
glorious; there is scarcely anything on earth more beautiful than a
Spirit-filled mind, certainly nothing more wonderful than an alert and eager
mind made incandescent by the presence of the indwelling Christ.
Since what we read
in a real sense enters the soul, it is vitally important that we read the best
and nothing but the best. I cannot but feel that Christians were better off
before there was so much reading matter to choose from. Today we must practice
sharp discipline in our reading habits. Every Christian should master the
Bible, or at least spend hours and days and years trying. And always he should
read his Bible, as George Muller said, "with meditation."
After the Bible
the next most valuable book for the Christian is a good hymnal. Let any young
Christian spend a year prayerfully meditating on the hymns of
The Decline of
Apocalyptic Expectation
A SHORT GENERATION
AGO, or about the time of the first World War, there was a feeling among gospel
Christians that the end of the age was near, and many were breathless with
anticipation of a new world order about to emerge.
This new order was
to be preceded by a silent return of Christ to earth, not to remain, but to
raise the righteous dead to immortality and to glorify the living saints in the
twinkling of an eye. These He would catch away to the marriage supper of the
Lamb, while the earth meanwhile plunged into its baptism of fire and blood in
the Great Tribulation. This would be relatively brief, ending dramatically with
the battle of Armageddon and the triumphant return of Christ with His Bride to
reign a thousand years.
Thus the hopes and
dreams of Christians were directed toward an event to be followed by a new
order in which they would have a leading part. This expectation for many was so
real that it quite literally determined their world outlook and way of life.
One well-known and highly respected Christian leader, when handed a sum of
money to pay off the mortgage on the church building, refused to use it for
that purpose. Instead he used it to help send missionaries to the heathen to
hasten the Lord's return. This is probably an extreme example, but it does
reveal the acute apocalyptic expectation that prevailed among Christians around
the time of World War I and immediately following.
Before we condemn
this as extravagant we should back off a bit and try to see the whole thing in
perspective. We may be wiser now (though that is open to serious question), but
those Christians had something very wonderful which we today lack. They had a
unifying hope; we have none. Their activities were concentrated; ours are
scattered, overlapping and often self-defeating. They fully expected to win; we
are not even sure we know what "win" means. Our Christian hope has
been subjected to so much examination, analysis and revision that we are
embarrassed to admit that we have such a hope at all.
And those
expectant believers were not wholly wrong. They were only wrong about the time.
They saw Christ's triumph as being nearer than it was, and for that reason their
timing was off; but their hope itself was valid. Many of us have had the
experience of misjudging the distance of a mountain toward which we were
traveling. The huge bulk that loomed against the sky seemed very near, and it
was hard to persuade ourselves that it was not receding as we approached. So
the City of
But the mountain
is there; the traveler need only press on to reach it. And the Christian's hope
is there too; his judgment is not always too sharp, but he is not mistaken in
the long view; he will see the glory in God's own time.
We evangelicals
have become sophisticated, blasé. We have lost what someone called the
"millennial component" from our Christian faith. To escape what we
believe to be the slough of a mistaken hope we have detoured far out into the
wilderness of complete hopelessness.
Christians now
chatter learnedly about things simple believers have always taken for granted.
They are on the defensive, trying to prove things that a previous generation
never doubted. We have allowed unbelievers to get us in a corner and have given
them the advantage by permitting them to choose the time and place of
encounter. We smart under the attack of the quasi-Christian unbeliever, and the
nervous, self-conscious defense we make is called "the religious dialogue."
Under the scornful
attack of the religious critic real Christians who ought to know better are now
"rethinking" their faith. Scarcely anything has escaped the analysts.
With a Freudian microscope they examine everything: foreign missions, the Book
of Genesis. the inspiration of the Scriptures, morals, all tried and proven
methods, polygamy, liquor, sex, prayer-all have come in for inquisition by
those who engage in the contemporary dialogue. Adoration has given way to
celebration in the holy place, if indeed any holy place remains to this
generation of confused Christians. The causes of the decline of apocalyptic
expectation are many, not the least being the affluent society in which we
live. If the rich man with difficulty enters the
On the North
American continent Christianity has become the religion of the prosperous
middle and upper classes almost entirely, the very rich or the very poor rarely
become practicing Christians. The touching picture of the poorly dressed,
hungry saint, clutching his Bible under his arm and with the light of God
shining in his face hobbling painfully toward the church, is chiefly imaginary.
One of the biggest problems of even the most ardent Christian these days is to
find a parking place for the shiny chariot that transports him effortlessly to
the house of God where he hopes to prepare his soul for the world to come.
In the
But affluence is
only one cause of the decline of the apocalyptic hope. There are other and more
important ones.
The whole problem
is a big one, a theological one, a moral one. An inadequate view of Christ may
be the chief trouble. Christ has been explained, humanized, demoted. Many
professed Christians no longer expect Him to usher in a new order; they are not
at all sure that He is able to do so; or if He does, it will be with the help
of art, education, science and technology; that is, with the help of man. This
revised expectation amounts to disillusionment for many. And of course no one
can become too radiantly happy over a King of kings who has been stripped of
His crown or a Lord of lords who has lost His sovereignty.
Another cause of
the decline of expectation is hope deferred which, according to the proverb,
"maketh the heart sick." The modern civilized man is impatient; he
takes the short-range view of things. He is surrounded by gadgets that get
things done in a hurry. He was brought up on quick oats; he likes his instant
coffee; he wears drip-dry shirts and takes one-minute Polaroid snapshots of his
children. His wife shops for her spring hat before the leaves are down in the
fall. His new car, if he buys it after June 1, is already an old model when he
brings it home. He is almost always in a hurry and can't bear to wait for
anything.
This breathless
way of living naturally makes for a mentality impatient of delay, and when this
man enters the
Another cause is
eschatological confusion. The vitalizing hope of the emergence of a new world
wherein dwelleth righteousness became an early casualty in the war of
conflicting prophetic interpretations. Teachers of prophecy, who knew more than
the prophets they claimed to teach, debated the fine points of Scripture ad
infinitum while a discouraged and disillusioned Christian public shook their
heads and wondered. A leader of one evangelical group told me that his denomination
had recently been, in his words, "split down the middle" over a
certain small point of prophetic teaching, one incidentally which had never
been heard of among the children of God until about one hundred years ago.
Certain popular
views of prophecy have been discredited by events within the lifetime of some
of us; a new generation of Christians cannot be blamed if their Messianic
expectations are somewhat confused. When the teachers are divided, what can the
pupils do?
It should be noted
that there is a vast difference between the doctrine of Christ's coming and the
hope of His coming. The first we may hold without feeling a trace of the
second. Indeed there are multitudes of Christians today who hold the doctrine
of the second coming. What I have talked about here is that overwhelming sense
of anticipation that lifts the life onto a new plane and fills the heart with
rapturous optimism. This is what we today lack.
Frankly, I do not
know whether or not it is possible to recapture the spirit of anticipation that
animated the
Possibly nothing
short of a world catastrophe that will destroy every false trust and turn our
eyes once more upon the Man Christ Jesus will bring back the glorious hope to a
generation that has lost it.
Choices Reveal -
and Make - Character
INTO NINE WORDS,
having altogether but eleven syllables, Luke packs a world of universal truth:
"Being let go, they went to their own company" (Acts 4:23).
Every normal man
has a "company," however small, where he feels at home and to which
he will return when he is tired of being alone. The important thing about a man
is not where he goes when he is compelled to go, but where he goes when he is
free to go where he will. The apostles went to jail, and that is not too
revealing because they went there against their will; but when they got out of
jail and could go where they would they immediately went to the praying
company. From this we learn a great deal about them. The choices of life, not
the compulsions, reveal character.
A man is absent
from church Sunday morning. Where is he? If he is in a hospital having his
appendix removed his absence tells us nothing about him except that he is ill;
but if he is out on the golf course, that tells us a lot. To go to the hospital
is compulsory; to go to the golf course, voluntary. The man is free to choose
and he chooses to play instead of to pray. His choice reveals what kind of man
he is. Choices always do.
The difference
between a slave society and a free one lies in the number of free acts possible
in each as compared with acts of compulsion. No society is wholly slave, as
none is wholly free, but in a free society the voluntary choices are at a
maximum and the acts of compulsion relatively few. In the slave society the
proportions are exactly reversed.
The true character
of a people is revealed in the uses it makes of its freedoms. The slave peoples
do what they are told because they are not free to do what they will. It is the
free nation that reveals its character by its voluntary choices. The man who
"bowed by the weight of centuries . . . leans upon his hoe and gazes on
the ground" when the long day's work is over is glad to get home to supper
and to bed; he has little time for anything else. But in those fortunate lands
where modern machinery and labor unions have given men many free hours out of
every day and at least two free days out of every week, they have time to do
almost anything they will. They are free to destroy themselves by their
choices, and many of them are doing just that.
There is always
danger that a free nation may imperil its freedom by a series of small choices
destructive of that freedom. The liberty the fathers won in blood the sons may
toss away in prodigality and debilitating pleasures. Any nation which for an
extended period puts pleasure before liberty is likely to lose the liberty it
misused.
In the realm of
religion right choices are critically important. If we Protestant Christians
would retain our freedom we dare not abuse it, and it is always to abuse
freedom when we choose the easy way rather than the harder but better way. The
casual indifference with which millions of Protestants view their God-blessed
religious liberty is ominous. Being let go they go on weekends to the lakes and
mountains and beaches to play shuffleboard, fish and sun bathe. They go where
their heart is and come back to the praying company only when the bad weather
drives them in. Let this continue long enough and evangelical Protestantism
will be ripe for a take-over by
The Christian
gospel is a message of freedom through grace and we must stand fast in the
liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. But what shall we do with our
freedom? The Apostle Paul grieved that some of the believers of his day took
advantage of their freedom and indulged the flesh in the name of Christian
liberty. They threw off discipline, scorned obedience and made gods of their
own bellies. It is not difficult to decide which company such as these belonged
to. They revealed it by the company they kept.
Our choices reveal
what kind of persons we are, but there is another side to the coin. We may by
our choices also determine what kind of persons we will become. We humans are
not only in a state of being, we are in a state of becoming; we are on a slow
spiral moving gradually up or down. Here we move not singly but in companies,
and we are drawn to these companies by the attraction of similarity.
I think it might
be well for us to check our spiritual condition occasionally by the simple test
of compatibility. When we are free to go, where do we go? In what company do we
feel most at home? Where do our thoughts turn when they are free to turn where
they will? When the pressure of work or business or school has temporarily
lifted and we are able to think of what we will instead of what we must, what
do we think of then?
The answer to
these questions may tell us more about ourselves than we can comfortably
accept. But we had better face up to things. We haven't too much time at the
most.
The Importance of
Sound Doctrine
IT WOULD BE
IMPOSSIBLE to overemphasize the importance of sound doctrine in the life of a
Christian. Right thinking about all spiritual matters is imperative if we would
have right living. As men do not gather grapes of thorns nor figs of thistles,
sound character does not grow out of unsound teaching.
The word doctrine
means simply religious beliefs held and taught. It is the sacred task of all
Christians, first as believers and then as teachers of religious beliefs, to be
certain that these beliefs correspond exactly to truth. A precise agreement
between belief and fact constitutes soundness in doctrine. We cannot afford to
have less.
The apostles not
only taught truth but contended for its purity against any who would corrupt
it. The Pauline epistles resist every effort of false teachers to introduce
doctrinal vagaries. John's epistles are sharp with condemnation of those
teachers who harassed the young church by denying the incarnation and throwing
doubts upon the doctrine of the Trinity; and Jude in his brief but powerful
epistle rises to heights of burning eloquence as he pours scorn upon evil
teachers who would mislead the saints.
Each generation of
Christians must look to its beliefs. While truth itself is unchanging, the
minds of men are porous vessels out of which truth can leak and into which
error may seep to dilute the truth they contain. The human heart is heretical
by nature and runs to error as naturally as a garden to weeds. All a man, a
church or a denomination needs to guarantee deterioration of doctrine is to
take everything for granted and do nothing. The unattended garden will soon be
overrun with weeds; the heart that fails to cultivate truth and root out error
will shortly be a theological wilderness; the church or denomination that grows
careless on the highway of truth will before long find itself astray, bogged
down in some mud flat from which there is no escape.
In every field of
human thought and activity accuracy is considered a virtue. To err ever so
slightly is to invite serious loss, if not death itself. Only in religious
thought is faithfulness to truth looked upon as a fault. When men deal with
things earthly and temporal they demand truth; when they come to the
consideration of things heavenly and eternal they hedge and hesitate as if
truth either could not be discovered or didn't matter anyway.
Montaigne said
that a liar is one who is brave toward God and a coward toward men; for a liar
faces God and shrinks from men. Is this not simply a proof of unbelief? Is it
not to say that the liar believes in men but is not convinced of the existence
of God, and is willing to risk the displeasure of a God who may not exist
rather than that of man who obviously does?
I think also that
deep, basic unbelief is back of human carelessness in religion. The scientist,
the physician, the navigator deals with matters he knows are real; and because
these things are real the world demands that both teacher and practitioner be
skilled in the knowledge of them. The teacher of spiritual things only is
required to be unsure in his beliefs, ambiguous in his remarks and tolerant of
every religious opinion expressed by anyone, even by the man least qualified to
hold an opinion.
Haziness of
doctrine has always been the mark of the liberal. When the Holy Scriptures are
rejected as the final authority on religious belief something must be found to
take their place. Historically that something has been either reason or
sentiment: if sentiment, it has been humanism. Sometimes there has been an
admixture of the two, as may be seen in liberal churches today. These will not
quite give up the Bible, neither will they quite believe it; the result is an
unclear body of beliefs more like a fog than a mountain, where anything may be
true but nothing may be trusted as being certainly true.
We have gotten
accustomed to the blurred puffs of gray fog that pass for doctrine in modernistic
churches and expect nothing better, but it is a cause for real alarm that the
fog has begun of late to creep into many evangelical churches. From some
previously unimpeachable sources are now coming vague statements consisting of
a milky admixture of Scripture, science and human sentiment that is true to
none of its ingredients because each one works to cancel the others out.
Certain of our
evangelical brethren appear to be laboring under the impression that they are
advanced thinkers because they are rethinking evolution and reevaluating
various Bible doctrines or even divine inspiration itself; but so far are they
from being advanced thinkers that they are merely timid followers of
modernism-fifty years behind the parade.
Little by little
evangelical Christians these days are being brainwashed. One evidence is that
increasing numbers of them are becoming ashamed to be found unequivocally on
the side of truth. They say they believe but their beliefs have been so diluted
as to be impossible of clear definition.
Moral power has
always accompanied definitive beliefs. Great saints have always been dogmatic.
We need right now a return to a gentle dogmatism that smiles while it stands
stubborn and firm on the Word of God that liveth and abideth forever.
Some Things Are
Not Negotiable
WILL ROGERS ONCE
OPINED that a sure way to prevent war would be to abolish peace conferences.
Of course Will, as
usual, had his tongue in his cheek; he meant only to poke fun at the weak habit
of substituting talk for action. Still there is more than a little
uncomfortable truth in his remark.
This above all
others is the age of much talk. Hardly a day passes that the newspapers do not
carry one or another of the headlines "Talks to Begin" or "Talks
to Continue" or "Talks to Resume." The notion back of this
endless official chatter is that all differences between men result from their
failure to understand each other; if each can discover exactly what the other
thinks they will find to their delight that they are really in full agreement
after all. Then they have only to smile, shake hands, go home and live happily
ever after.
At the bottom of
all this is the glutenous, one-world, all-men-are-brothers philosophy that has
taken such hold on the minds of many of our educators and politicians. (The
hardheaded realists of the Communist camp know better; maybe that is why they
are makingsuch alarming advances throughout the world while the
all-men-are-brothers devotees are running around in confusion, trying to keep
smiling if it kills them.)
Tolerance,
charity, understanding, good will, patience and other such words and ideas are
lifted from the Bible, misunderstood and applied indiscriminately to every
situation. The kidnaper will not steal your baby if you only try to understand
him; the burglar caught sneaking into your house with a gun is not really bad;
he is just hungry for fellowship and togetherness; the gang killer taking his
victim for a oneway ride can be dissuaded from committing murder if someone
will only have faith in his basic goodness and have a talk with him. And this
is supposed to be the teaching of Jesus, which it most certainly is not.
The big thing now
is to "keep in touch." Never let the dialogue die and never accept
any decision as final; everything can be negotiated. Where there is life there
is talk and where there is talk there is hope. "As long as they are
talking they are not shooting at each other," say the advocates of the
long palaver, and in so saying they forget
This yen to confer
has hit the church also, which is not strange since almost everything the
church is doing these days has been suggested to her by the world. I observe
with pained amusement how many water boys of the pulpit in their effort to be
prophets are standing up straight and tall and speaking out boldly in favor of
ideas that have been previously fed into their minds by the psychiatrists, the
sociologists, the novelists, the scientists and the secular educators. The
ability to appraise correctly the direction public opinion is moving is a gift
not to be despised; by means of it we preachers can talk loudly and still stay
out of trouble.
A new Decalogue
has been adopted by the neo-Christians of our day, the first word of which
reads "Thou shalt not disagree"; and a new set of Beatitudes too,
which begins "Blessed are they that tolerate everything, for they shall
not be made accountable for anything." It is now the accepted thing to
talk over religious differences in public with the understanding that no one
will try to convert another or point out errors in his belief. The purpose of
these talks is not to confront truth, but to discover how the followers of
other religions think and thus benefit from their views as we hope they will
from ours.
It is a truism
that people agree to disagree only about matters they consider unimportant. No
man is tolerant when it concerns his life or the life of his child, and no one
will agree to negotiate over any religious matter he considers vital to his
eternal welfare. Imagine Moses agreeing to take part in a panel discussion with
The desire to be
liked even if not respected is a great weakness in any man's character, and in
that of a minister of Jesus Christ it is a weakness wholly inexcusable. The
popular image of the man of God as a smiling, congenial, asexual religious
mascot whose handshake is always soft and whose head is always bobbing in the
perpetual Yes of universal acquiescence is not the image found in the
Scriptures of truth.
The blessing of
God is promised to the peacemaker, but the religious negotiator had better
watch his step. The ability to settle quarrels between members of God's
household is a heavenly gift and one that should be assiduously cultivated. The
discerning soul who can reconcile separated friends by prayer and appeal to the
Scriptures is worth his weight in diamonds.
That is one thing,
but the effort to achieve unity at the expense of truth and righteousness is
another. To seek to be friends with those who will not be the friends of Christ
is to be a traitor to our Lord. Darkness and light can never be brought
together by talk. Some things are not negotiable.
The Saint Must
Walk Alone
MOST OF THE
WORLD'S GREAT SOULS have been lonely. Loneliness seems to be one price the
saint must pay for his saintliness.
In the morning of
the world (or should we say, in that strange darkness that came soon after the
dawn of man's creation) that pious soul, Enoch, walked with God and was not,
for God took him; and while it is not stated in so many words, a fair inference
is that Enoch walked a path quite apart from his contemporaries.
Another lonely man
was Noah who, of all the antediluvians, found grace in the sight of God; and
every shred of evidence points to the aloneness of his life even while
surrounded by his people.
Again, Abraham had
Sarah and
Moses also was a
man apart. While yet attached to the court of Pharaoh he took long walks alone,
and during one of these walks while far removed from the crowds he saw an
Egyptian and a Hebrew fighting and came to the rescue of his countryman. After
the resultant break with
The prophets of
pre-Christian times differed widely from each other, but one mark they bore in
common was their enforced loneliness. They loved their people and gloried in
the religion of the fathers, but their loyalty to the God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob, and their zeal for the welfare of the nation of
Most revealing of
all is the sight of that One of whom Moses and all the prophets did write
treading His lonely way to the cross, His deep loneliness unrelieved by the
presence of the multitudes.
'Tis midnight, and
on Olive's brow
The star is dimmed
that lately shone;
'Tis midnight; in
the garden now,
The suffering
Saviour prays alone.
'Tis midnight, and
from all removed
The Saviour
wrestles lone with fears,
E'en the disciple
whom He loved
Heeds not his
Master's grief and tears.
-WILLIAM B. TAPPAN
He died alone in
the darkness hidden from the sight of mortal man and no one saw Him when He
arose triumphant and walked out of the tomb, though many saw Him afterward and
bore witness to what they saw.
There are some
things too sacred for any eye but God's to look upon. The curiosity, the
clamor, the well-meant but blundering effort to help can only hinder the
waiting soul and make unlikely if not impossible the communication of the
secret message of God to the worshiping heart.
Sometimes we react
by a kind of religious reflex and repeat dutifully the proper words and phrases
even though they fail to express our real feelings and lack the authenticity of
personal experience. Right now is such a time. A certain conventional loyalty
may lead some who hear this unfamiliar truth expressed for the first time to
say brightly, "Oh, I am never lonely. Christ said, `I will never leave you
nor forsake you,' and, `Lo, I am with you alway.' How can I be lonely when
Jesus is with me?"
Now I do not want
to reflect on the sincerity of any Christian soul, but this stock testimony is
too neat to be real. It is obviously what the speaker thinks should be true
rather than what he has proved to be true by the test of experience. This
cheerful denial of loneliness proves only that the speaker has never walked
with God without the support and encouragement afforded him by society. The
sense of companionship which he mistakenly attributes to the presence of Christ
may and probably does arise from the presence of friendly people. Always
remember: you cannot carry a cross in company. Though a man were surrounded by
a vast crowd, his cross is his alone and his carrying of it marks him as a man
apart. Society has turned against him; otherwise he would have no cross. No one
is a friend to the man with a cross. "They all forsook him, and
fled."
The pain of
loneliness arises from the constitution of our nature. God made us for each
other. The desire for human companionship is completely natural and right. The
loneliness of the Christian results from his walk with God in an ungodly world,
a walk that must often take him away from the fellowship of good Christians as
well as from that of the unregenerate world. His Godgiven instincts cry out for
companionship with others of his kind, others who can understand his longings,
his aspirations, his absorption in the love of Christ; and because within his
circle of friends there are so few who share his inner experiences he is forced
to walk alone. The unsatisfied longings of the prophets for human understanding
caused them to cry out in their complaint, and even our Lord Himself suffered
in the same way.
The man who has
passed on into the divine Presence in actual inner experience will not find
many who understand him. A certain amount of social fellowship will of course
be his as he mingles with religious persons in the regular activities of the
church, but true spiritual fellowship will be hard to find. But he should not
expect things to be otherwise. After all, he is a stranger and a pilgrim, and
the journey he takes is not on his feet but in his heart. He walks with God in the
garden of his own souland who but God can walk there with him? He is of another
spirit from the multitudes that tread the courts of the Lord's house. He has
seen that of which they have only heard, and he walks among them somewhat as
Zacharias walked after his return from the altar when the people whispered,
"He has seen a vision."
The truly
spiritual man is indeed something of an oddity. He lives not for himself but to
promote the interests of Another. He seeks to persuade people to give all to
his Lord and asks no portion or share for himself. He delights not to be
honored but to see his Saviour glorified in the eyes of men. His joy is to see
his Lord promoted and himself neglected. He finds few who care to talk about
that which is the supreme object of his interest, so he is often silent and
preoccupied in the midst of noisy religious shoptalk. For this he earns the
reputation of being dull and overserious, so he is avoided and the gulf between
him and society widens. He searches for friends upon whose garments he can
detect the smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces, and
finding few or none he, like Mary of old, keeps these things in his heart.
It is this very
loneliness that throws him back upon God. "When my father and my mother
forsake me, then the Lord will take me up." His inability to find human
companionship drives him to seek in God what he can find nowhere else. He
learns in inner solitude what he could not have learned in the crowd that
Christ is All in All, that He is made unto us wisdom, righteousness,
sanctification and redemption, that in Him we have and possess life's summum
bonum.
Two things remain
to be said. One, that the lonely man of whom we speak is not a haughty man, nor
is he the holier-than-thou, austere saint so bitterly satirized in popular
literature. He is likely to feel that he is the least of all men and is sure to
blame himself for his very loneliness. He wants to share his feelings with
others and to open his heart to some like-minded soul who will understand him,
but the spiritual climate around him does not encourage it, so he remains
silent and tells his griefs to God alone.
The second thing
is that the lonely saint is not the withdrawn man who hardens himself against
human suffering and spends his days contemplating the heavens. Just the
opposite is true. His loneliness makes him sympathetic to the approach of the
broken-hearted and the fallen and the sin-bruised. Because he is detached from
the world he is all the more able to help it. Meister Eckhart taught his
followers that if they should find themselves in prayer as it were caught up to
the third heavens and happen to remember that a poor widow needed food, they
should break off the prayer instantly and go care for the widow. "God will
not suffer you to lose anything by it," he told them. "You can take
up again in prayer where you left off and the Lord will make it up to
you." This is typical of the great mystics and masters of the interior
life from Paul to the present day.
The weakness of so
many modern Christians is that they feel too much at home in the world. In
their effort to achieve restful "adjustment" to unregenerate society
they have lost their pilgrim character and become an essential part of the very
moral order against which they are sent to protest. The world recognizes them
and accepts them for what they are. And this is the saddest thing that can be
said about them. They are not lonely, but neither are they saints.