Victorious Living. E. Stanley Jones
Are you saving us through hard refusals? Teach us. We listen. Amen.
Week 2 Friday
The Kingdom and Life
John 1:4; 11:25; 14:6; 17:3; 20:31
We said yesterday that life will not work in any way except God’s way. When we find the kingdom, we find ourselves.
Jesus said the same thing; he made the kingdom and life synonymous, “It’s better for you to enter into life crippled. . . . It’s better for you to enter God’s kingdom with one eye” (Mark 9:43, 47 CEB). Here he used the terms “God’s kingdom” and “life” interchangeably. To him they were one.
But life to Jesus had to be spelled with a capital “L” to express what he meant. True, it is this life and its laws within ourselves and the universe. But it is more. If that had been all, it would have been naturalism. Not that we thereby damn it when we call it naturalism, for nature, human and nonhuman, is God’s handiwork. But while God wrote the elemental laws of the kingdom within us, God did not stop there. The kingdom is “within us,” but it is also “at our doors.” Something from without is prepared to invade us, to change us, to complete us. When that happens, we too shall have to spell life with a capital “L.” For every fiber of our being will know that this is Life. The two charged electrodes of life, natural and supernatural, will meet; and when they touch, the white light of Life will result.
The kingdom, then, is life-plus. It is the grafting of a higher Life upon the stock of the lower. The stock will still be there; its roots are deep in the soil of the natural, but we will bud and bloom and fruit with new possibilities. The kingdom is the Ought-to-be standing over against the Is—challenging it, judging it, changing it, and offering it Life itself. It is at our doors. And we are the ones to decide whether we shall live life with a small “l” or a capital “L.”
O God, our Lord, we talk of the kingdom. But you are the kingdom. You are at our doors. We put our trembling fingers to the latch and let you in. And when you are in, we know that we have let in Life. Amen.
Week 2 Saturday
Are Religious People Unnatural and Strange?
1 Corinthians 1:21-31; 2:15
They sometimes are, and this makes many honest souls hesitant, for they do not want to be strange or impossible. Many people feel that religion tries to give human nature a bent that it won’t take, that is an imposition on life, something that makes us unnatural and out-of-joint.
A medical student expressed this fear to me when he asked, “Is religion natural?” He feared the unnatural. However, Tertullian, the third-century theologian, said that “the soul is naturally Christian.”
My own experience is that Tertullian was right. When I obey Christ, I feel naturalized, at home, universalized, adjusted. When I disobey him, I feel orphaned, estranged, out-of-joint with myself and the universe. I seem to be made for this man and his kingdom.
It is true that when we obey Christ we have to break with society in many things. That makes us seem strange and unnatural. But may it not be that society, at those points, is strange and unnatural? We call a man strange when he is eccentric—“off the center.” Isn’t society, insanely bent on its own destruction through its selfishness and its clashes and its lusts, eccentric and off the center? A great flywheel off its center shakes itself and the building to pieces. On the center it is a thing of construction and production. The center of life is Christ; when we are adjusted to him, life catches its rhythm, its harmony. When life revolves around something else, it is eccentric, and thus self-destructive and society-destructive.
Was Christ strange? To the men of his day he was. We now see that his was the only sanity. He moves through those scenes, poised and masterful, at home in the huts of the poor and in the houses of the rich—the one sane one, to whom we must turn or lose our sanity and ourselves.
O God, our Lord, we have become so used to the insanities of life around us that we look on the sane as the insane. Give us clarity of mind and heart, that we may turn from the insanities of selfishness and greed to the sanities of your way. For we know that life will not work in any way save your way in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 3 Sunday
Week 3 Sunday
Toiling in the Dark
John 6:16-21
We must get clear this whole matter of whether the Christian way will work before we can go on to “victorious living,” for as long as we have the suspicion lurking in our minds that we are about something that cannot be done, that the universe won’t back it, there is a paralysis at the center. If, however, we are sure that the sum total of things is behind our acting, then our wills are steeled to do the hitherto impossible.
It was said of the disciples that they were toiling in the dark, rowing and getting nowhere. The wind and the waves were against them and the whole thing was ending in futility. Then Jesus came. They cried out against him, in fear that he was a ghost. But finally they took him in, and “immediately the boat was at the land to which they were going” (John 6:21). Is that the history of our lives? We strive for goals we cannot reach. The whole thing ends in futility—toiling in rowing and getting nowhere. The sense of meaningless striving is upon us. We are “up against it.” And everything is very dark. Life is too much for us. Then Jesus comes and we are afraid of him; he is ghostly, unnatural, and will demand the unnatural and the impossible. This is our first reaction. But finally we let him in; and, lo—we are at the very place we were striving to reach—we are at the land to which we were going! This is the very way it works.
But there is no doubt that we are afraid of Jesus. It was said that when Herod heard that Jesus came, he “was troubled, and everyone in Jerusalem was troubled with him” (Matt. 2:3 CEB). Troubled at the coming of the Deliverer! They were naturalized in their own lostness. But should the dynamo be afraid of the coming of electricity? The flower at the coming of the sunshine? The heart at the coming of love? Should life be afraid of the coming of Life?
Help me, gentle, redeeming, impinging God, not to keep you at a distance through fear. Help me, then, to take you into my little troubled boat. Amen.
Week 3 Monday
How Do We Get to the Goal of Self-expression?
2 Corinthians 2:14-16; Galatians 2:20; 6:14
We saw yesterday that we toil in futile striving until Jesus comes. Take the natural things within us, which are part of our very makeup; can these instincts be fulfilled, can they reach their goal apart from him?
Take the instinct of self-expression. Noted psychologist Alfred Adler said that the instinct of self is the strongest of the three major instincts: self, sex, and the herd. Hence self-expression is natural and normal and right. We therefore strive to get to the goal of self-expression. We all do. The smallest member of our ashram, a three-year-old, after singing at the top of her voice, will announce triumphantly at the conclusion of the grace, “I sang.” We all laugh. In polite society, we do not laugh at sophisticated attempts at self-promotion—we get irritated. Place a dozen people in one situation, all of whom want to express themselves, and you have the stage set for clash and confusion and jealousy. The result is refined strife. The whole thing ends in futility. We thwart one another. We are toiling in rowing and it is getting dark . . . darker. Then across the troubled waters Jesus comes to us. We cry out in fear against him, for we suspect what he will ask of us. He will ask that we cease all this and lose ourselves. And that is exactly what we do not want to do; we want to express ourselves. It is unnatural, ghostly, impossible. But as we toil further into our futilities, he keeps coming, until at last we let him in. Then we lose ourselves in his will and purposes. We forget about our self-expression. And, lo, we are at the land to which we were going!
We are never so much ourselves as when we are most his. For then, we have found ourselves. We have arrived. We have obeyed the deepest law of the universe: the one who saves his or her life shall lose it, and the one who loses it for the sake of Jesus shall find it. It works.
O