Victorious Living. E. Stanley Jones
own image. Help us to arise and follow. Amen.
Week 3 Saturday
How Can We Arrive at the Goal of Inward Unity?
Matthew 6:22; Ephesians 4:1-6; James 4:8
If there is one thing that both modern psychology and the way of Christ agree on, it is this: Apart from inward unity there can be no personal happiness and no effective living.
Jesus said, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation” (Matt. 12:25 KJV). That simple statement has within it all the depths of wisdom that modern psychology has discovered from the facts of the inner life. Divided personality, inward clash, these are the things that bring desolation to human personality.
Many say to a distracted soul, “Pull yourself together.” This is futile advice when there are mutually exclusive things within us. They won’t be pulled together. Experience taught Old Testament lawgivers the futility of trying to plow with an ox and an ass yoked together. It was forbidden (see Deut. 22:10). Experience forbids us from attempting to pull ourselves together when there are conflicting selves.
“Exert your will,” counsels another. But suppose the will, which expresses the personality in action, is itself divided? Again futility.
The psychoanalyst, after getting hold of the distracting place in a disordered life, and after relating it to the rest of life, says that to be held together there must be something upon which to fasten the affections. This will lift you out of yourself and keep you unified. But often nothing is offered except, perhaps, just the counselor, a professional trestle upon which the patient can twine the vines of affection. This is, to say the least, unsatisfactory.
So we toil in rowing, trying to get to the land of inward unity. We are tossed by many a wind and many a wave. And it gets very dark. Then Jesus quietly comes. We more easily let him in this time, for there seems no other alternative. The soul seems instinctively to feel, “The Master has come.” He gathers up the inward distinctions, cleanses away the points of conflict, and unifies life around himself. We have arrived.
O Christ, we need a master, someone to command us. You are that law. For your commandments are our freedom. Help us to accept your way, that we may find our own. Amen.
Week 4 Sunday
Week 4 Sunday
How Can I Find God?
Acts 17:23-28
We have seen that life will work only in one way—God’s way. The statement of Augustine, often corroborated by experience, is often repeated: “You hast made us for Yourself, and we are restless until we rest in you.” Let that fact be burned into our minds. Let it save us from all trifling, all dodging, and bend us to the one business of finding God and God’s way.
In our quest for God, let us look at a few preliminary things. Hold in mind that the purpose of your very being, the very end of your creation is to find and live in God. As the eye is fashioned for light, so you are fashioned for God. But many question this. A Hindu student once asked, “If there is a God, what motive of his is seen in the creation of this universe, where ‘to think is to be full of sorrow’?” At one morning interview time, five students, one after the other, with no collusion, asked the question, in one form or another, “Why was I created?” It is the haunting question in many minds.
I could answer only thus: Of course we cannot see the whole motive of creation, for we are finite. But why does a parent create? Physical lust? Not in the highest reaches of parenthood. Does not a parent create because of the impulse of love, the impulse that would have an object upon which to lavish love and to impart oneself in the development and growth of the child? Is parenthood different in God? Could God, being love, have done otherwise than create objects of that love? And having created us, will God not give the divine self to us? If not, then the whole apparent good is stultified. With that thought in mind, to think is not “to be full of sorrow,” but to be full of hope and expectancy. The creative Lover is at the door.
Lord God, you have come a long way through creation to the very door of my heart. I hear your very footsteps there. I let you in. You are thrice welcome, Lover of my soul. Amen.
Week 4 Monday
The Risk God Took
Matthew 25:34-40; 2 Corinthians 5:2
Yesterday we left off at the place of God’s creative love creating us in order to impart himself to us and to find that love fulfilled in our growth and development in the divine image. We must pursue the thought, for God pursues us.
But we ask, was it not risky for God to create us with the awful power of choice and with the possibility that we might go astray and break our hearts and God’s? Yes, very risky indeed. God might have made us without the power of choice, or with the power to choose only the good. But this would not be choice, for you must be able to choose in two directions, not one, for choice to be real. Besides, if we are able to choose only the good, then it isn’t the good for us. We would be determined, and the very possibility of goodness is in freedom. “There is nothing in the world, or even out of it, that can be called good, except a good will,” says nineteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant. So where there is no will there is no goodness, no badness, in fact, no personality. There was no other way to create personalities except to give them freedom. Risky? Yes.
But parents take that same risk when they bring a child into the world. That child may go astray and crush their lives and its own. But parents assume that awful risk. Why? Because they determine that whatever happens they will do their best for the child; they will enter into his or her very life, until the child’s problems become their own, the child’s troubles theirs, the child’s growth and happiness theirs. This will mean a cross! Of course. But parenthood accepts that cross because it cannot do otherwise. So with God. Our creation meant that God would enter into our very lives. Our troubles are God’s troubles, our sins God’s sins, our joy God’s joy. So creation, then, means a cross for God? Inevitably. But God took it. Love could not do otherwise.
God, we stand astounded at your courage. But you did create us—it may be, to re-create us. That is our hope. We clasp it to our bosoms. Amen.
Week 4 Tuesday
God’s Search for Me
Luke 15:1-10; John 3:16
If what we learned yesterday is true, then we must accept the thought that God is in a persistent, redemptive search for us. It seems too good to be true. My answer is that it is too good not to be true.
Turn to the pages of the New Testament and read the astonishing parables of Luke 15: the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son. Never before did such astonishing truth tremble on human lips. “The author of the universe is hard to find,’’ said Plato. An austere Hindu sage was rebuked in this way, “Why do you trouble God with your austerities so that he cannot sleep?” Mahatma Gandhi once said to me, “In finding God you must have as much patience as a man who sits by the seaside and undertakes to empty the ocean, lifting up one drop of water with a straw.”
But here Jesus flings back the curtains and lets us see the God of the shepherd-heart who seeks and seeks the lost sheep until it is found. And then the woman who sweeps the house for the lost coin. So, says Jesus, God will sweep the universe with the broom of redeeming grace, until each lost soul is found. For as the king’s image is stamped upon the coin so is the Divine image stamped upon the human soul, lost though it may be amid the dust of degradation.
It is true that the father of the prodigal did not go into the far country after the son, but wasn’t his love there with him, and wasn’t that love the line along which the son felt his way back to his father’s house? I once saw blind children running a race with a cord in their hands, which was attached to a ring upon a wire that led them to the goal. So this lad got hold of his father’s outreaching love and it led him back to the father’s bosom. The Hound of Heaven relentlessly pursuing us down the years!
O God, I dare not close my heart to you. You conquer me with your persistence. But how glad, oh how glad, I am to be