“The divine `yes’ has at last sounded in him,

for in him is the `yes’ that affirms all the promises of God”

(2 Corinthians 1:19-20).

Is life saying “yes” to you or is it saying “no”? Do you feel that the world is giving you the green light or continually flashing a red stoplight to impede your progress? What about your friends, business associates, and the mem­bers of your family? Do you count on them to open new doors of opportunity and good fortune for you, or are you always expecting them to do something that will thwart your desires and undercut your well-being and spoil your pleasure? Do you feel deep down inside that the cards of life are stacked against you, or do you feel in your bones that you are a favored child of destiny?

Now, I’m trying to quiz you into giving yourself a spiritual third degree, because, as a shepherd of souls, I have learned it makes a whale of a difference with people whether they believe life is saying yes to them or whether they believe it is saying no. So I’m asking you to search your own soul with this age-old question, “Is the universe friendly?” and honestly admit to yourself whether you have been living with the faith that life is saying no to your deepest hopes and longings or saying yes. For the way you believe about this sets the tone, the temper, the shade of color to your life.

In a certain ministers’ association to which I once belonged, there was one minister who always objected to whatever was proposed. No matter how meritorious the proposal might be, this man would find fault with it. “Aw, don’t pay any attention to him,” said the Methodist minister one day when this fellow had opposed some good, cooperative project. “Don’t mind him; he was born in the objective mood.” So, indeed, it seemed. But after I got to know this fellow better, I learned his repeated “noes” and persistent denials were born of a negative sort of faith; he really believed all the world was against him, saying no to him. His way of meeting such a condition was shouting back his own defiant little no.

You probably are acquainted with some folks who are hypercritical of others. They criticize the other fellow’s way of doing business, his method of bringing up his children, his peculiarities of dress or speech or walk. In nine cases out of ten, such an ugly, critical spirit is born of a negative faith, a faith that the universe is unfriendly.

Supersensitive folks always expecting someone to hurt their feelings or slight them, belligerent bodies going around with chips on their shoulders and always looking for a fight — these folks are fashioned outwardly into what they are by an inward faith that the universe is unfriendly, that life is denying them their rights and privileges, that the unseen powers of the cosmos are saying no to them. So it makes a great deal of difference what you believe life is saying to you.

A host of ardent advocates can be summoned, of course, to support either contention. There is no lack of sincere souls who swear that life says no to human hopes. There was old Koheleth, the writer of our biblical book Ecclesiastes, whose expressed faith was that all man’s struggle and striving are destined to futility — a brief quivering of the flesh, a palpitation of the breast, and then, nothingness. “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity,” said this gloomy preacher. And Thomas Hardy, coming out of a cathedral service, shook his head in sad disapproval, saying,

 

He who breathes “All’s-well” to these,

Breathes no “All’s-well” to me.

Yes, some heroic, sincere souls have lived by this faith that the final, persistent, irrevocable answer to all our hopes, our loves, our dreams is a harsh no.

On the other hand, innumerable blithe spirits have lived in the confident faith that life is saying an “everlasting yea” to the deepest desires and longings of each one’s soul. These spirits have lived in the sure faith that the creating intelligence that conceived the universe, the primal power that is behind and before and pulsing through the cosmos, is keenly interested in each individual’s well-being and working in friendly cooperation for each soul’s supreme success.

Job was like that. When he was set upon by all earth’s furies and knocked to his knees by adversity, yet he cried in unconquerable optimism, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then without my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side” (Job 19:25-27). Job believed there was one who, conspiring through the events and circumstances of his life, through friends and enemies, was intent on championing his best interests. Thomas Carlyle finally worked out to this same positive faith. In his Sartor Resartus he affirms his belief that in the deepest soul of man and in the heart of the universe there is something that says an everlasting `yea’ to man’s hopes and aspirations.

Listen to this rugged Scotsman: “The Universe is not dead and demonical, a charnel-house with spectres; but god-like, and my Father’s!” And this: “What is nature? … Art thou not the `Living Garment of God?”‘

This surely was the faith of Saint Paul, for to the Corinthian Christians he said of Christ, “The divine `yes’ has at last sounded in him, for in him is the `yes’ that affirms all the promises of God.”

Christ then has settled the age-old argument, Paul says. Never more need any one of us be in doubt and ask, “Is the universe friendly to me?” Now we know, for the divine yes has at last sounded in Christ, for in him is the yes that affirms all the promises of God. Because of Christ we can live in the faith that life is saying yes to us, that the universe is on our side, that God has given us the green light.

But why do we know, and how has it been proved in Christ, that life resounds with an everlasting yea for you and me? Here’s why and how: Do you remember that thrilling news story of the woman who for five years scrubbed floors and saved and toiled and sacrificed until she had $5,000 that she used to accomplish the release of her son, who had been imprisoned on false charges? Her love and sacrifice and fidelity got him out and redeemed his life from disgrace and destruction.

Does that mother’s son have any doubts now, if he ever had them, about the reality of a mother’s love? Does he have any doubts about the reality of a mother’s everlasting faith in her own son, even though he’s a condemned outcast? Does that man have any doubts about the everlasting yea that rises in his mother’s heart in response to his soul’s deep desire for freedom and salvation from prison?

And how do we know that deep in the heart of the cosmos there is a booming yea to our deepest hopes and longings? Because while we were yet sinners, not falsely accused sinners, but convicted sinners, the fair son of God, Jesus Christ, who was and is the very image and essence of Eternal God, descended from his celestial glory into the suffering and tragedy and toil of our world and laid down his life freely for our sakes that we might be delivered from the prison house of sin and redeemed from our lost estate. How can any man or woman for whom Christ died ever doubt the reality of the Heavenly Father’s love and care? In Christ the everlasting yea has at last sounded with unmistakable clarity, for in him are all the promises of God affirmed to us. Now we know that God’s universe is saying yes to our deepest hopes and longings. We can live by that positive faith.

The trouble with so many of us is that we have not ourselves given an affirmative answer to Christ. We haven’t said yes to the Divine Yes. So the universe, our world, seems always to be denying our hopes and dreams.

We are like the people in Plato’s myth of the cave who lived subterranean lives, whose ideas of reality were derived entirely from the distorted shadows they saw moving grotesquely upon the cave walls. In the Stygian darkness where they continuously dwelt, these cave dwellers saw nothing directly. For now and then, whenever a man or a dog or a horse in the upper, outside world would pass before the mouth of their cave, high above their heads, they would see reflected on the opposite wall the creature’s misshapen shadow and conclude that men and dogs and horses were just like those shadows. When brought up to the earth’s surface and out in the bright light of the sun and shown real men and dogs and horses, these cave dwellers realized how far wrong they had been in their ideas of reality.

How many of us have lived in the thick, spiritual darkness of this world and accepted as real the distorted shadows of this world’s false values? How often have we given our soul’s assent, not to truth, but to a poor, misshapen shadow of truth? It has been too painful for us to come up into the realm of eternal reality and look at all things in the bright light of Christ’s life. We have had false, misshapen ideas of what our real wants and needs and hopes are. That’s why the universe seemed to say no to us. We have not been willing to say yes in our own souls to the Divine Yes, so it has seemed to us that life has been saying no to our ambitions and aspirations.

We need to realize, as Carlyle says in Sator Resartus, that for man there is something “Higher than Love of Happiness: he can do without Happiness, and instead thereof find Blessedness…. Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him.”

In Tolstoy’s familiar story “Where Love Is, There God Is Also,” Martin, the shoemaker, is miserable every day, thinking always of the great weight of sorrow he must bear. First he loses his dear wife. Then the little son whom he has idolized grows sick and swiftly passes away. Martin becomes incon­solable. He murmurs against God. His life is so empty he prays for death and reproaches God for taking the life of his only son instead of himself, an old man. Then one day, an ancient holy man comes to see Martin. The shoemaker begins to complain to his guest of his great sorrow, saying that all he wishes for is death.

“You should not speak like that,” said the old man. “God saw fit that your son should die and that you should live. Therefore it must be better so. If you despair it is because you have wished to live too much for your own pleasure.”

“For what then should I live?” asked Martin.

“For God alone,” replied the holy man. “It is He who gave you life, and therefore it is He for whom you should live. When you live for Him you will cease to grieve, and your trials will become easy to bear.” “But how can I live for God?” asked the shoemaker.

“Christ has shown us the way,” said the old man. “Can you read?” he asked. “If so, buy a Testament and study it. You will learn there how to live for God.”

So Martin began to read, and the more he read, the more clearly did he discover and understand what God required of him and in what way he could live for God, so that his heart grew ever lighter and lighter.

The Divine Yes has at last sounded in Christ. But we must give the assent of our souls to the Everlasting Yea of God in Christ before the Divine Yes can sound for us, affirming all the promises of God to us in our own hearts.