“The eyes of the Lord range through the whole earth, to bring aid and comfort to

those whose hearts are loyal to Him.”

(II Chronicles 16:9)

Once James Barrie, the Scottish playwright, said: “God is watching to see whether you are adventurous.” This is not a very timely remark now for people who are troubled about unemployment, the rising cost of living, and increasing hazards to our security. To hear such words may irk us now: “God is watching you to see whether you are adventurous.”

For a long time in this nation we have been a security obsessed people. In the good old welfare state we have instituted social security, and old age pensions, and hospital insurance, and Medicare, and food stamps, and crop insurance, and price subsidies, and dozens of other schemes to afford security.

Now there is nothing wrong with security, of course. All of us would like to have as large a slice of security as possible. Nevertheless, as wonderful as security is, when we come to count security as the supreme value, and bow down and worship at the shrine of security, and judge all effort in terms of how much security will be secured, then a sad plight has fallen upon us. The glory of life has departed. The worship of security which eliminates risk and venture from living is a first class calamity.

Archbishop William Temple used to say that nothing so took the heart out of him as to be talking with a young person about what profession that one should enter and have the young person ask right off: “What is the prospect for a pension?” What would Archbishop Temple say today about our lusting for double pensions?

Yes, when the supreme passion of the human heart is a thirst for security, when a church, a state, or nation become so preoccupied with ways and means of guaranteeing future security, a deadly spiritual sogginess settles over that life making it unworthy of preservation. And it is that kind of a world to which we have now come. This is the climate in which we must live and do our work.

Barrie says: “God Himself is watching to see whether you have a spirit which spurns security and chooses to be adventurous.” But there seem to be some sound scriptural foundations for Barrie’s contention. Was not this just what Jesus had in mind when He said: “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it, but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s shall save it.” “Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” On one occasion when a fellow said he wanted to be Jesus’ disciple, the Lord pointed out what that would do to his security:
The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the son of man hath no where to lay his head.” “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. But seek ye first the Kingdom of God and its righteousness.” “Come after me,” said Jesus to Galilean fishermen who were eeking out a scant livelihood by hard labor — “Come after me — leave what security you have — follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” The lesson in Jesus’ Parable of the Talents is that God’s ultimate judgment on every life will be: “Did you use the talent or talents I entrusted to you for my Kingdom, or were you cowardly and afraid to risk it?” And the next parable in Matthew’s 25^th chapter about the Last Judgment shows that what God is watching for is to see whether we will be adventurous in showing and dispensing Christ-like love and compassion in our human relationships. Yes, Barrie was right — if Jesus reveals God — God is watching to see whether we are adventurous and the Parable of the Talents teaches that this watching God comes in critical judgment upon our lives.

But why should God be watching to see if we are adventurous? Why does He care? Didn’t we always think that if God were watching us, it would be to see if we were being good or misbehaving?

God is watching to see if we are adventurous first of all, because only thus can we prove our faith in and reliance upon Him. Abraham was called the hero of faith because he believed in the promises of God and went out in adventurous reliance upon God’s word into a strange new land, not knowing wither he went. It was his adventurous spirit which proved the validity of Abraham’s faith.

Rufus Jones said of St. Francis of Assisi: “As other boys run away to sea, Francis ran away to God.” For Francis, in adopting the rules for his personal lifestyle from a literal obedience to Christ’s words in the gospel — rules of poverty, chastity and loving service to others, spoke of becoming a fool for Christ. All people who have taken seriously the example of Jesus’ loving compassion as a mandate for their way of daily living have embarked on an exciting adventure.

God is watching to see whether we will be so adventurous as to accept His call in enough faith and trust and obedience to show the kind of compassion and love that Christ did — even to the point of becoming fools for Christ’s sake, judged from earthly standards of security.

But in the second place, God is watching to see if we will be adventurous because only thus can we grow in character and give expression to what in us is of greatest worth and so prove the quality of our souls. Our spirits, like young birds in the nest, are created to soar aloft, but unless an adventurous disposition overcomes the natural desire for security neither will ever fly.

Along the deserted waterfront of Manhattan’s East River late one summer afternoon, I saw a shiny black Cadillac come to an abrupt stop. The driver, the sole occupant of the car, got out, went to the trunk compartment, unlocked it, and took carefully out of the dark interior a large wicker basket. He walked over to the river’s edge, put down the basket, and sat down beside it. He kept looking at his wristwatch. Finally, presumably at the time he judged right, he opened the basket top and out flew twenty or thirty pigeons. Up, up, they flew, circled once or twice in the still blue evening air, and then, with an obvious assurance of knowing what they were doing and where they were going, they struck off in a northwesterly direction through the chasm of Manhattan skyscraper spires, now shining rose and gold from the last rays of the setting sun.

A merchant seaman who was also standing by and watching the strange demonstration, explained to me: “They are homing pigeons. The man belongs to a club. The club members have placed bets on each bird. They are all waiting round the pigeon roost now at the club to see which bird gets back first. That one is the winner. Then they pay off the bets.”

Human beings, like homing pigeons, have mysterious inner equipment which draws them and points them to the homeland of the soul. Man is, as Rufus Jones used to say, “an amphibian,” created with the capacity for living in two worlds. We have a capacity for seeing the heavenly vision, of living for and toward the unseen world, but we never prove nor enter into that higher citizenship without adventurous pioneering into the hinterland of the soul. God is watching to see whether we will be adventurous and slip the surly bonds of earth and try our spirit’s wings.

Something always happens to people when they try to stifle that homing urge, when they try to live just for this visible, touchable, tasteable world and its securities. I once heard of a person who had suffered from some injury which completely destroyed her sense of equilibrium. She looked perfectly well, but all power of balance was taken away. So this woman was compelled to take to a wheelchair and carry on in life tremendously handicapped.

Something like this loss of equilibrium happens to one mentally, spiritually, and socially when the soul’s homing instinct is stifled, when the courageous adventurous spirit of a person’s devotion to the eternal verities is smothered.

“I go to prove my soul,” wrote Robert Browning, “I see my way as birds their trackless way. I shall arrive. What time, what circuit first I ask not: but unless God sends His hail of blinding fireballs, sleet or stifling snow, in sometime, His good time, I shall arrive: He guides me and the bird. In His good time.” — Paracelsus

And finally, God is watching to see whether we will be adventurous, because only through adventurous spirits can God bring His Kingdom on earth, and the old, evil order give way to the new. Jesus said of John the Baptist and of all courageous, venturesome spirits like his that they “take the Kingdom of God by storm” — they lay hasty hands on the slowly moving divine purpose and by their adventurous spirit hasten the dawning of the better day.

A dramatic incident occurred at the Olympic games in London years ago. “The relay race was on. The French team had started well. But as the baton was being passed to the third runner, he dropped it. The accident, of course, put the team out of the running. The runner who had dropped the baton, fell to the ground, flung his hands to his head in a gesture of despair, and openly wept. His emotional outburst continued as he was led from the arena.

“To take defeat so tearfully might seem a bit unsportsmanlike. But one should remember how many persons were involved in that runner’s failure. There were his fellow Frenchmen watching in the stands whose hopes were dashed. There were the two teammates who had run before him and whose work was ruined by his blunder. And there was the runner who was to have come after, but who never got the chance to run because of the tragedy.

“Such an incident makes us realize how much life is like a relay race. In the race of life no one starts from scratch, each for himself. Others have run the course before us and we start from the point where their lives touch ours. Our parents, teachers, leaders in the church of the older generation come down the track; for a while we run along beside them until they are able to pass the baton of their work and character on to us; then we carry on while they slow down and eventually step out of the race. Ultimately we come around to the day when we transfer our interests and unfulfilled hopes to our children. Thus generation is linked to generation.” (Dr. Ralph Sockman)

And all the while God is watching to see whether we will be adventurous and run with patience the race that is set before us.

In an old cemetery I saw this inscription on the grave marker of a young marine who fell in Okinawa:

“The tenderest are the bravest,

The loving are the daring.”

How true! And if we ever fail our Christ in His purposes, and clutch a cowardly security when the trumpets of God sound reveille, it will be a failure in the final analysis of our love for Him. We have just loved something else a little more — for the “loving are the daring.”

I love to think of them at dawn

Beneath the frail pink sky

Casting their nets in Galilee

And fish-hawks circling by.

 

Casting their nets in Galilee

Just off the hills of brown,

Such happy, simple fisherfolk

Before the Lord walked down.

 

Contented, peaceful fishermen,

Before they ever knew

The peace of God that filled their hearts

Brimful, and broke them, too.

 

Young John, who trimmed the flapping sail,

Homeless, in Patmos, died.

Peter, who hauled the teeming net,

Head down was crucified.

 

The peace of God, it is no peace,

But strife closed in the sod.

Yet brothers, pray but for one thing,

The marvelous peace of God.

            William Alexander Percy — His Peace

            The Hymnbook — No. 421

 

PASTORAL PRAYER

Here we are again, Lord, Thy people, in Thy house, on Thy day. We call ourselves — “Thy people” — but we know there is much about us that is ungodly. We are more interested in our personal affairs than we are in Thy kingdom. We reflect the color of our culture more than the righteous judgments of Thy revealed commandments. We wear more conspicuously the badges of our business and social and political affiliations than the personal cross our Christ has bid us bear.

But, Lord, we know in our better moments that we are Thy people, brought into the wonder of this world by Thy miracle of birth, redeemed from despair and destruction by the life and death of our Savior Jesus Christ, and called and kept in the fellowship of Thy church by Thy Holy Spirit’s persistent wooing of our wayward hearts.

Take us more completely into Thy charge, O God: purify our motives, enlarge our sympathies, rectify our scale of values, clear our vision, and set us to the deeds of faith and charity and righteous reconstruction Thou hast for Thy people to perform in this our day.

Make us more diligent to pray for and to serve with the compassionate spirit of Christ the sick and sorrowing among us, the poor and discouraged we can help. We ask all in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

• Scripture Reference: 2 Chronicles 16:9-0 • Secondary Scripture References: Psalms 116, Matthew 25:14-30 • Subject : Adventurous Spirit, The; The Security Obsessed; Security; Courage; 682 • Special Topic: n/a • Series: n/a • Occasion: n/a • First Preached: 5/24/1954 • Last Preached: 6/13/1993 • Rating: 2 • Book/Author References: Paracelsus, James Barrie; The Hymnbook, Dr. Ralph Sockman; , Robert Browning; , William Alexander Percy