Victorious Living. E. Stanley Jones
or does Christ? The answer to that determines whether I am a Christian or not.
And what is the issue? It is this: If I dominate my life, it will disintegrate—I shall lose it. If Christ dominates my life, I shall find it—it will come back to me integrated, happy, and useful.
Sat Tal, the ashram retreat in India where I am writing, means “Seven Lakes.” The legend says that during a drought a very holy man was dying of thirst by the wayside. A poor village woman, seeing his distress, ran off and at great trouble brought him seven handfuls of water. These seven handfuls became the seven beautiful lakes. On the other side of the ridge is a lake, really a swamp, the place where the dead are burned. This was the seat of a great kingdom, but the rani, the queen, when the drought came, thought only of herself and cried to the gods for water. They gave her so much that she and her palace were drowned and are now beneath the swamp.
The legend teaches what life teaches: If my desires dominate me, I shall be drowned in my own desires. I shall have my way, and then I shall loathe my way. When self is on the throne, its inner subjects are unhappy, discordant. That self may be a very refined self, it may be a very religious self—it may even be an apparently serving self—but if it is on the throne and makes the final decisions, then, as sure as fate, I shall lose my life. My life needs a master, but self is not the master that it needs.
Hush your heart and ask yourself this question: Who has the ultimate say in my life—self or Christ? Am I self-directed or Christ-directed?
O Christ, I know in my heart of hearts that when my hand is on the helm my life drifts toward the rocks. I cannot manage my boat. Take the helm, Lord. Amen.
Week 5 Friday
Is Confession Necessary?
Luke 12:2-9; James 5:13-16
As you face your life in the light of these five questions of character, where do you come out? Repeat them to yourself, slowly one by one, and give an honest answer. Your self will want to excuse, to rationalize, to go off to the irrelevant. Don’t let it. Hold it to the issues.
If you fall down at any or at all of these five places, confess it honestly and straightforwardly. Confess it? Yes. Both modern psychology and the teaching of Jesus agree at this point.
When the conscience, acting in the capacity of an observer, condemns the ego for wrong actions, and the feeling of guilt results, there are three possible modes of conduct open to the conscious mind. The consciousness may do nothing whatever about it, allowing the emotion full play; it may repress the feeling; or it may rid itself of the depressing sensation by means of spiritual catharsis, through confession.*
The first two methods are obviously unsatisfactory, and more, they are disastrous. To find oneself wrong and to do nothing about it is to condemn oneself to live with a self that we cannot respect. That is incipient hell. To repress is worse. The schools of psychology—Freud, Adler, Jung, and MacDougall—unite on this: To drive such a thing as fear and guilt into the subconscious and to shut the door is not to be rid of it. There it festers and sets up an irritation. The life is unhappy, ill at ease, nervous, it scarcely knows why. That is the result of repression.
And all the schools of psychology and all the teachings of Jesus unite on this: That repression must be found, brought up, exposed to the light, and resolved through confession. There is no other way out.
O Christ, we here take a deep breath, for this confession means humiliation to our inmost selves. We would fain hide our wounds. But we dare not. We open them to you—we dare do it to you—now. Amen.
* Clifford E. Barbour, Sin and the New Psychology (New York: Abingdon Press, 1930), 215.
Week 5 Saturday
To Whom Must I Confess?
Psalm 32:6; Luke 18:9-14; Acts 19:18-19 (Weymouth); 1 John 1:9-10
We left off yesterday with the conviction that if we are to get rid of the guilt that has gathered about and within our lives, we must confess it, open it up, expose it. But the question arises—to whom?
Obviously, it must include the one or ones we have wronged. That makes three because when we do wrong, we sin against ourselves, against God, and against society, or, to be more personal, against our brother or sister.
First, we sin against ourselves. We have been false to our highest interest, we have betrayed our ideals, we have sinned against our higher nature. We must then acknowledge it to ourselves. Unless you first acknowledge it to yourself you cannot acknowledge it to God or man. Do you really confess it to yourself? Without equivocation and fully? The last is important, for you will try to compromise with half-confessions and half-repentances.
Second, we must confess it to God. We have not merely broken a law, we have broken a Heart. You must tell God so. The approach to God has now been made easy through Jesus. His awful purity condemned sinners, yet invited them. For they saw that his purity was not forbidding, but forgiving. You dare expose your heart to that Heart. You must, to get relief. But again, it must be wholehearted and without anything held back, for one thing held back spoils it all and cancels the rest.
Third, we must confess it to those whom we have wronged. We do not need to broadcast our sins to everybody. Promiscuous confession to promiscuous gatherings is not healthy. There are some things that God deals with in private. But when we have wronged others or others have wronged us, we must both ask forgiveness and offer it.
O Christ, your knife is going deep. We wince, and yet we consent that the whole thing be taken out by the roots. Leave no lingering roots behind. For we do not want to be better only; we want to be well. Amen.
Week 6 Sunday
Week 6 Sunday
Untangling Our Lives
Matthew 5:9-15, 23-26; Romans 12:18
Yesterday we said we must confess any wrongs to our brother or sister or forgive any wrongs done to us. That cuts deep.
For instance, suppose we have been dishonest. No matter what it does to us or to our positions, we must confess it and restore it. I know a Christian minister who laid down four hundred and fifty rupees on the table—the weight that had lain on his soul for twenty years and caused his barrenness. Hard—but an open door.
Take resentment. Whether you have wronged your brother as shown in Matthew 5:23-24 (in coming to the altar you remember that someone has something against you) or in Matthew 18:15 (someone has sinned against you); in either case you are to go and be reconciled. Whether sinned against or sinning, the Christian is under obligations to take the initiative in settling the dispute.
But you say, “I can’t forgive.” Then may I say it very quietly, but very solemnly: You can never, never be forgiven. “But if you don’t forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your sins” (Matt. 6:15). Do you not remember that in the Lord’s Prayer we pray, “Forgive us of our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”? So if you do not forgive, you ask not to be forgiven. In refusing forgiveness to others you have broken down the bridge over which you yourself must pass, namely, forgiveness.
As I sit in this ashram in India I am reminded of one of our group, a government official, who harbored resentment against a subordinate. A wrong had been done, and the resentment was deep. It was not easy to confess that resentment to a subordinate, not in India where rank counts for much. But it was done. Release was found, and now that life is radiant and spiritually contagious. You can do the same. By God’s grace, you will, won’t you?
O Christ, you who did hang on the cross, tortured in every nerve, yet did pray for your enemies, “Lord, forgive them,” help me this day, now, to forgive those who have wronged me in a lesser way. In your name. Amen.
Week 6 Monday
Still Untangling Our Lives
Matthew 18:23-35
Yesterday we were in the midst of getting rid of resentments. We must go to the last root.
You say, “Well, I’ll