Victorious Living. E. Stanley Jones
because you are saving. Amen.
Week 7 Saturday
The Central Thing in Conversion
Matthew 11:29-30; 23:10; John 13:13-14; Romans 14:4
Psychology tells us that there is a master sentiment* around which life is organized. It may fasten itself to one of the instinctive urges: self, sex, or the herd. If the master sentiment is fastened on the self-urge, then life is egotistical and self-centered. Or it may fasten itself upon the sex-urge, and the whole of life becomes sex-centered. Or it may fasten itself upon the herd, and life may be lived out under the dominance of what people will say and do; fear of the herd will be the deciding factor. There may be a mixture of all three, but in the end the master sentiment decides and dominates.
Modern psychology tells us that in curing a patient of inward conflict or complex it is necessary to have a patient transfer sentiment from oneself to someone outside, usually to the psychoanalyst. This is called transference. The patient is thus loosed from problems by the expulsive power of a new affection.
Now, the central thing in conversion is just that—transference. Conversion involves breaking with this sin, that habit, this relationship, that attitude; yet all these things are the negative side. The real thing that happens is the transference of the master sentiment from self to Christ. It is the conversion of the master sentiment. Life is no longer self-centric, sex-centric, or herd-centric, but Christ-centric. He is the master of the master sentiment.
Jesus quietly said to men long ago, “Follow me”—not a set of doctrines, however true; or a rite or ceremony, however helpful; or an organization, however beneficial—but “Follow me.” The disciples did it. The transference was made. A strange new word came to their lips, “Savior,” for he was saving them from their complexes, their gloom, their despair, their sins—yes, from their very selves. Conversion was a fact, made so by the conversion of the master sentiment.
O Christ, you have our master sentiment—and as you have it you have us. We dare not give our love wholly to anyone save the Divine. Take it and us. Amen.
*In psychology, sentiment means more than an emotional response. It is an experience of both sensation and ideas. See Howard Crosby Warren, Elements of Human Psychology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922), 218-19.
Week 8 Sunday
Week 8 Sunday
What Is the Basis of Assurance?
Matthew 24:35; Romans 10:17; 1 Thessalonians 1:5; 1 John 2:14
You will ask what is the basis of assurance by which you will know that you are accepted. God assures us from a number of directions, which makes it far stronger than if it were from one direction alone.
First, God assures us through the Word. Nothing could be more explicit than that Christ received sinners. People did not wait until they were good enough to come to him. They came as they were, and they were made good in the very coming. That seems a commonplace to us today, but it scandalized the religious then and it does now. A modern Jewish thinker criticizes Jesus at this point, “Jesus was too familiar with God and too familiar with sinners.”
In the second century, Celsus, debating with Origen, says:
Those who invite people to other solemnities make the following proclamation: “He that hath clean hands and sensible speech may come near, he who is pure from all stain, conscious of no evil in his soul and living a just and honorable life may approach.” But hear what persons these Christians invite: “Anyone who is a sinner,” they say, “or foolish, or simpleminded”—in short, any unfortunate will be accepted by the kingdom of God! And what do they mean by “a sinner”? By sinner is meant an unjust person, a thief, a burglar, a sacrilegious person, a poisoner, a robber of corpses. Why, if you wanted a band of robbers, these are the very people you would invite.*
Origen’s answer was explicit: “Though we call those whom a robber chieftain would call, we call them for a different purpose. We call them to bind up their wounds with our doctrines, to heal the festering wounds of their souls with the wholesome medicine of faith, nor do we say God calls only sinners’’ (ibid.).
We glory in what Celsus conceived to be our shame. The first to enter paradise from the Christian movement was not Peter or James, but a thief on a cross—the forerunner of the crooked made straight.
O Christ, you did receive sinners then, and you will not reject me now. I may have dragged my soul through hell, but you will wash it—you wash it even now. I thank you. Amen.
* Origen, Contra Celsum, book III.59-60.
Week 8 Monday
The Assurance of the Word
1 Peter 1:23-25; 1 John 3:19-24; 5:11-12
We saw yesterday that the Word assures us that we are accepted. There are promises there that could not be more explicit: “Come to me, . . . and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28 CEB). “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins” (1 John 1:9 CEB). Does it seem out of date thus to quote passages from Scripture to heal present need? To some it may seem so. But those of us who have been up against raw human need for years know that people need nothing, absolutely nothing, so much as they need the simple assurance that they are reconciled to God. Unhealed at that place, people wear a mortal hurt. The assurance that the grace of God in Christ banishes estrangement and reconciles us to God is the most precious thing that ever sunk into guilty human hearts.
“Please leave India,” said a Sadhu who listened to a missionary describe how Christ died for us on the cross, “for we have no such story in our books. The heart of India is very tender, and if it hears that story, it will leave our temples to follow this.” We cannot leave India, nor can we leave the world, for this fact of grace is what the world, and India, and you and I need, and need desperately.
Jesus also assures us through the revelation of an act. He says to an adulterous woman, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and . . . don’t sin anymore” (John 8:11 CEB). He says to a hard, money-loving publican, “Today has salvation come to this house” (Luke 19:9); to a man with a sin-complex in his life that caused a physical paralysis, “Your sins are forgiven” (Mark 2:5).
This is the eternal Word speaking through the language of act. It is the Spacious speaking through the specific. Then grasp this thought: The love of God shining through those specific acts will not deal differently with me. He forgave and restored them; he forgives and restores me.
O you, whose very healing was a revealing—you who did make timeless truth speak through the facts of time—you speak to my heart, “Your sins are forgiven thee!” I take it, for your very character is behind those words, and you are changeless. Amen.
Week 8 Tuesday
The Assurance of the Collective Witness
Acts 1:8; 2:32-33; 5:32; Hebrews 12:1
God assures us through the Word. But that Word, speaking specifically and fully through words and deeds in the pages of the New Testament, keeps on speaking. The Acts of the Apostles was not completed. It is still going on.
The Chinese cook, hearing that it was the twenty-fifth anniversary of my sailing to India, brought in a cake with the words on it, “Through the ages one word.” It was a quotation from a Confucian classic, applied to the fact that through these twenty-five years I had one word: Christ. Through the ages, the timeless Word speaks the language of time. That Word still speaks through the collective Christian witness.
Once, as I knelt seeking restoration to God, someone knelt beside me and quietly said, “God so loved Stanley Jones that he gave his only begotten Son, that if Stanley Jones will believe in him, he shall not perish but have everlasting life” (see John 3:16). Did that Christian have a right thus to assure me? Oh yes. That Christian had once put his own name in that verse, and it had worked. It was the church whispering its collective witness into my ear.
Sometimes the collective witness of assurance is given through the absolution of the duly appointed priest. I will not