O grant us, Gracious Lord, the willingness to keep ourselves in constant training for the punctual performance of your will.  Help us keep the edges of our minds keen and our thinking straight and true.  Help us keep our passions in control.

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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 on the cave walls………..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 the 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.

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Is the soul that which makes men and women capable of reverence, of feeling awe before the presence of beauty and greatness? …Is reverence the characteristic motion of that something that is eternal in human beings? …Or is the characteristic motion of the soul the outgoing of love toward others?  Is this what transforms the temporal into the eternal?  Is this the open sesame to throw wide the dark gates of our earthly prison so that the heavenly light may burst in? …Can it be that this thing that is eternal, way down deep in human beings, is that endowment in human nature that needs both to express and to receive love?

George McDonald defined the essence of temporality as being “always at the mercy of one self-centered passion or another.”  And if this is the nature of temporality, surely the nature of the eternal is just the opposite — to be delivered from self-centered passions by outgoing love.——————————————————————————-

When the Bible speaks of the goodness of God it usually refers to one of two things: providence or grace.  Providence is the goodness of God to all the human family…. his ordering of the natural world to bless all human life, whether people are conscious of God or not. But grace is that goodness of God bestowed upon unworthy, sinful people that involves their consciousness of being made right with God, all the while being conscious of the fact that they have not merited this goodness.

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Saving Faith — Saving faith is a many sided reality with rich rewards for each of us at different levels of faith.  Paul describes these levels in ascending order as conviction of the reality of the unseen world, faith in the promises of the unseen God, and faith as surrender to Jesus Christ.

Some people guide their course through life only by what they can see and hear…materialism is their philosophy, pragmatism their chart and compass. But others insist there is another world, just as real, though unseen, of spiritual and moral values such as justice, truth, love and honesty, and that these are the trustworthy channel markers by which the voyage of life should be charted.

…Faith like this saves a man from empty materialism, from coming down to the end of life and having to see the material things go and realize too late he has put his trust and his heart in fake and perishable commodities.

Faith like this saves a man from fear if he is wedded to the eternal verities and courageously living for them, then he is unafraid of the partial powers of a lost world.

Life will not always give us the accolades of the public’s approval for our espousal of truth, honesty and justice, but it will give us the inner assurance of living in harmony with eternal righteousness and that is more lastingly satisfying than the thundering cheers of a mighty multitude.

…But Christian faith is more than this.  St. Paul speaks of faith as a trust in the promises of God.  It embodies not only a conviction that the unseen world is real, that truth, justice, mercy, purity and honesty are genuine commodities and real and solid as coal and iron…. it not only holds that these qualities are of the very nature of God; but it goes one step further and believes that God is not a nebulous mass of moral statutes, but a person with a father’s face of love whose gracious promises can be relied on with an implicit trust.  Such faith builds its world, its home, its profession on these blessed promises of God……….This trust in the promises of God is truly a saving faith…it bestows poise on our spirits in the midst of storm.

…The ultimate step of faith is surrender to Christ…paradoxically it is only through this surrender that we have hope of achieving victory; through it lies our only hope of realizing our unique selfhood.

Faith as surrender to Jesus Christ saves one from the tragedy of never becoming, never realizing what in the economy of the ages and the providence of God, one was intended to become.  What a catastrophe to come into this world, to have lavished upon oneself all the love of parents, the training of teachers, to have lived and loved, to have striven and fought, to have lived and died, and yet to have missed selfhood’s supreme expression, failing the very purpose of the whole adventure.

Arnold Toynbee, who made himself at home in every period of recorded history, tells us that the Roman soldier had a zest for living unequaled in all lands and at all times until the Christian martyr stepped on the stage of history.  Why did the Roman soldier possess this zest for living, this buoyancy and sense of meaning in his everyday existence, unequaled in all the world? Toynbee says it was because every year on the first day of January each Roman soldier swore a solemn oath to defend the emperor and the empire with his life, and so he lived every moment for a cause for which he was prepared to lay down his life, and this gave unparalleled zest to living.  Only the Christian martyr, whose allegiance to another lord and another kingdom outstripped the Roman soldier’s courage and commitment, was lifted to a superior level of life.

 

Deliverance From Fear — The most distressing of all fears that plague the souls of people are those, which creep into their religious life.  It was this “appeal to fear,” so powerfully used in the Roman Church, which struck terror in the youthful conscience of Martin Luther…He later wrote that no pen could describe his mental torture.  He was struggling to achieve his soul’s salvation by good works, and getting nowhere.  Then the light began to dawn, and one day, as he read the Epistle to the Romans it came full upon him.  ‘The just shall live by faith.’  Through that window the sun poured in.  Salvation was a gift of God’s grace, not to be sought by good works, but received by a trustful and hospitable heart.  Good works were not the operative cause of a transformed life, but its consequence.  This experience was Luther’s ‘Damascus Road’ and the beginning of the Reformation.

Of course, the spirit of the unregenerate man is afraid.  We who trust in self alone, on our own strength for our security, in our own wisdom for our guidance, of course we will be afraid, hesitant, uncertain, confused. We had better be afraid if that is the best resource we have to marshal before the array of the hostile and competitive forces of the universe.

But the free gift of God to the man or woman of faith through Jesus Christ is a new spirit that is emancipated from destroying fears.  This spirit is not native to us, or of our achievement.  It is the gift of God as St. Paul and Martin Luther found.  The spirit of a Christian is really God’s spirit, a spirit of power, which means the intensity and drive of life; a spirit of love, or the warm affection of a self-giving life emancipated from the dreadful slavery of self serving; a life of self control, which means a reasonable, disciplined well-ordered life.

O, help us to live upward to thee in our spiritual capabilities rather downward in our physical appetites and desires.

 

The Sharp Tools and the Blunt Tools of Human Relationships — …What is this supreme tool for getting along with other people like and how does it work?  Patience with people and kindness to them in the stress and strain of life is the cutting edge that love holds unwaveringly, and ultimately this tool turns out the best products.  Nothing can match it.

“Love envies not, vaunts not itself, is not puffed up, seeks not its own.”  The self- centered spirit doesn’t accomplish very much in the realm of human relations.  It usually builds up resentments and isolates other people from itself. …

Then again, love is never glad when others go wrong… Jesus was always alert to any good quality in the life of others.  His eye alone saw the greater possibilities in the fishermen of Galilee He chose to be his disciples.  Whenever he saw the beginnings of better things in people He was uplifted in spirit and encouraged them.  Every human heart hungers for such treatment.  Children bloom in the sunshine of the spirit that encourages them and helps them whenever they do well.

…Then love, the more excellent way in human relationships, has a staying, lasting quality which out endures any other tool that can be used.  “Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never fails.”  Love is like an army that is threatened with over-whelming defeat by superior numbers of the enemy, but steadfastly refuses to give ground.

Concludes — “Let us accept the love of God in Christ, for ourselves, and that love as it redeems, reshapes, and recreates us anew will work wonders in every department of our relationships with others.”

 

Christian Forgiveness — Forgiveness has been called, ‘Christ’s most striking innovation in morality’.  If not a virtue unknown in the ancient world, it was at all events not one that was demanded or proclaimed as a duty by any ethical system.

Jesus clearly teaches in parable and prayer that the measure of our willingness to forgive others is the scale by which God forgives us.

 

On Breaking Out of Jail  — The lusts and passions of the flesh can imprison the soul. What can be a more complete confinement than that of a person shut up under the lock and key of a self-destroying habit?  Human beings, created in the image of their maker, were intended to be free, and when they suffer imprisonment, they are most hurt where they are most like their Maker, in their immortal souls.

And it follows that the more sensitive, conscientious and noble a person is, the more likely it is that any type of imprisonment will destroy him. The deeper one’s sense of responsibility and capacity for affection and loyalty, the more cruelly imprisoning and soul destroying many a jail can be.

How does Christ deliver the captive and set the prisoner free?  Primarily by granting spiritual deliverance and granting the soul freedom, which is the very point where, as we have seen, all prison pinches hardest.

Are you and I in a prison of our own construction?  Have we let our lusts, our selfish ambitions, our indulgence in self-destroying habit, imprison our souls?  Do we feel caught in a life situation that is a jailhouse to us?”

 

Our Poverty and God’s Plenty —…. But there is a second condition for making the transition from our human poverty to God’s affluence: it is to stay within the protective moral and ethical walls…

How many disillusioned disciples there are who…. esteeming every new experience of any kind to be an addition to their store, will get drunk simply for the experience, touch unholy things just so they can taste the whole of life – not realizing, poor duped fools, that in life, as in arithmetic, there is a minus sign as surely as there is a plus sign, and that certain experiences do not add to but subtract from, what we had and were before – with each new indulgence in forbidden things leaving us poorer, leaner, emptier, and at last bankrupt. …Oh, the poor, destitute, pitiable people who…becoming completely careless about the moral and ethical walls He has thrown up about them for their protection, soon found their lives chaotic, poverty stricken wastelands.

Some of us can remember the fervent debate that tool place in Memphis thirty years ago over whether to legalize liquor by the drink.  It was argued that it would be good for the economy of West Tennesseans.  Our local news media those days were full of expressions of the follies of not serving liquor by the drink…. it would …put more money in the pockets of everyone.

In my time in the ministry I have seen a lot of liquor by the bottle and by the drink and by the case.  I have put in many man hours with alcoholics and the human wrecks strewn about them, including jobs lost and relationships violated, and families blasted; including the mangled corpses they have produced in traffic catastrophes, including the cold suicides they have left in cluttered bedrooms, including listening to the babblings of burned out brains they have devastated.

What liquor by the drink, or by the bottle or by the barrel has meant for our economic gain, I don’t pretend to know — this I do know, surely, soberly, sadly: that there is nothing in the whole American economy that has a higher production potential for physical and spiritual poverty and misery and despair among God’s children.

The Eternal God has invited and encouraged all His children to enter into His incalculable wealth and joy, but some will not and cannot because they will not stay within the protective moral and spiritual walls He has provided.

 

The Discipline of Time — …One of the most disturbing aspects of modern day American life is the loss of Christian conviction about the crucial importance of the discipline of time.

…What is distinctive about our time is that we have come to one of those continental divides in history when the descent is more rapid and precipitate, when the drift to Godlessness is more general, when the world’s accommodation to compromise spreads, not like ink on a blotter, but like a grassfire whipped by a fierce wind, when church members are following the God-despisers to perform all sorts of iniquities.

And the place for the concerned Christian to peg this destructive drift, to break away from the collision course of contemporary culture, is at the point of keeping one day of the week for God and soul, for, as always, this is the fundamental point of beginning in schooling people in the discipline of time.  People must be trained to accept the four fundamental principles of time: first, the origin of time; second, the divisions of time; third, the purpose of time; and last, the end of time.

…The supreme purposes of time are understood and grasped only by those so disciplined in the use of time that they have learned to accept what God has done to us in the midst of time, even our crippling and our suffering, as part of equipping us for His service to others in the world.

…But the ultimate service the Christian discipline of time renders…is girding one up for the ultimate adventure of this life — the end of earthly time.

God has so ordered our lives in time that even he will not furnish his children such sinews of spirit, such armor of soul, without the discipline of mind and body and spirit in the words and emotions and noble deeds of the faith, week by week, Sunday by Sunday.

 

The Wedding Cake — …But what we must all remember is that God has given our children, as well as ourselves, complete freedom.  They can choose the lifestyle of alley cats or Zulus and can repudiate any and everything we have valued.  This is what it means to be human.

The ideal of the Christian family, with its neatly balanced scheme of mutually subjected relationships, is just one of the choices open to the free spirit of man.  And for me, one of the recognizable glories of this Christian family system is its realistic grappling with the paradox of human freedom and servitude.  Built into the pattern of the Christian family, mutual subjection is the recognition that utter freedom is only license whose undisciplined race through this life plunges to destruction.

…This is what our family relationships are all about at their best — just our chance of subjecting ourselves to each other out of reverence for Christ, that each may be stripped of the chains and slaveries of sin and all the walls be battered down that separate us from the service of Christ that is our perfect freedom.

 

On Hanging Pictures — Pictures on the walls of a house tell us lots about the folks who live there.  But have you ever stopped to think that each of us has an interior picture gallery — our imagination?  The imagination is the picture gallery of the soul.  The pictures that hang on the hidden walls of imagination are even more important and influential on personality, and could we but see them, they would be far more revealing than the pictures that hang on the walls of our homes.

Ezekial puts this quite plainly in his Vision of the Cave…What is the meaning of this vision of the prophet?  Just this: The imagination is the picture gallery of the soul.  Could we but dig in as Ezekial did, to the hidden hall of each person’s imagination, and see the pictures that hang there, we would know the secret of that life.  On the walls of the imagination are to be seen the images before which that soul bows down, whether they be vile, slimy, reptilian creatures, as in Ezekial’s vision, or shining ones with angels’ wings whose names are Truth and Love and Beauty.  It’s a sacred place, this chamber of imagery in every person’s soul.  There burn always the fires of faith.

C.S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength tells the story of a group of moral perverts possessing preposterous powers who almost gain control of a nation.  They force out of power in the government most of the people of good will, of humane instincts, of Christian morality.  They invite to earth from outer space all the demonic forces of the universe.  It is a tall story but it is shot through with clever insights into human nature, one of which is this: To dehumanize their recruits to prepare them for positions of power in the new, evil order, the diabolical technocrats use a room filled with obscene, untrue pictures.  The neophytes are taken there to this gallery, shut in there for hours, and left to contemplate in this chamber of imagery the false, the vile, the unnatural.  This is one of the initial steps in their training, an invasion of the imagination with abominable images.  Then the new recruits are ready to be taken over, possessed by the evil spiritual forces.  Lewis presents us with a modern parable of the ancient truth that Ezekial grasped in his vision of the chambers of imagery.  The human imagination is the picture gallery of the soul, even the sanctuary of the soul, personality’s most holy place.  The images enshrined there, could we but see them, would lay bare to us that personality, show us what that soul lives for, believes in and serves.

Alan Bloom, in The Closing of The American Mind, decries the devastating effect that rock music has had on his students, not so much its direct effect on their morals but rather what it does to the possibility of education in the higher reaches of the mind and soul.  He sees rock music poisoning the imaginations of young people at a crucial time, making impossible the “sublimation,” the “making sublime,” of the emotions in a person’s quest for truth and taste and nobler being.

Bloom also deplores the present-day antipathy students have for heroes; for without admirable characters, respected and adored and hung as portraits in the picture gallery of one’s imagination, a strong and ennobling power is banished from the soul.

The power of imagination in structuring character has long been realized.  George Buttrick, in his book, Prayer, says of the imagination, “Every crime is first imagined, every heroism…no man goes wrong suddenly, he falls slowly through a series of unworthy thoughts.”

This is one of the psychological laws: whenever there is a conflict between the will and the imagination, the imagination will always win the battle.  Imagination in conflict with will is no match at all.  Imagination always wins the day.

St. Paul knew the power of controlling imagination through the power of a higher and superior affection…for the Christian, through habitual worship, prayer…. Christ becomes the center of reference for our whole scheme of imagination.

 

The Words of Life  — “It’s a life and death matter,” Moses is saying to the people for whom he has laid his life on the line. “It’s a life and death matter that you reverence these words and obey them.”

What are these words that Moses insists are no mere words but are the very essence of life for his people?  Why, the whole moral and religious law delivered by Moses to the people from God himself.  The moral code is there, God’s plan for peoples’ behavior in relationship with each other…

The religious code is there as well, God’s plan for every person’s relationship with God, based on faith and love and obedience: Worship one God with the whole of one’s heart and mind and soul; honor the family relationships as sacred under God; Keep one day of every week for worship and rest and the nurture of one’s soul in the midst of the covenant people of God.

Moses knew that he was dying, but the real leader he knew was God.  God would lead and guide his people through his word.  Therefore they must reverence, learn and obey God’s word, for that word was no mere word — their very lives depended on it.

Surely ours is a day when there is a widespread disdain for the old customs and maxims.  The young are particularly fed up with the preachments of moralistic Christian culture.  The old rules that governed manners and morals, the notions of the obscene and objectionable — haven’t these all been washed away by rapid social change?

No matter how loudly we shout, “Its no harm, pay no attention to it,” in our impatience with old fashioned moral integrity or in our exuberance over freedom from ancient religious scruples, the old words of moral integrity will not go away, and the ancient human values that the old words enshrine will not be trans-valued.  Still they remain, as Moses stated, “They are no empty words, they are your very life.”

Over fifty years ago, in a time when free love and trial marriage were very much in vogue, Harry Emerson Fosdick told his congregation:

“In its long history mankind has tried every conceivable experiment with the sex relationship…And out of this long experimenting of the race there has arisen the great tradition: a man and a woman loving each other so much that they do not care to love anybody else in the same way at all, and so building a permanent home that puts around the children the strong security of an unbroken affection.  That describes the loveliest family life in the world.  That is the great tradition.”

But however strong and powerful in every personality are the twin currants of heredity and environment, the determining factor in the development of every personality is his own personal response.  What each person does with the treasure trove of his own heredity and environment determines human destiny.  That is the point at which life or death is chosen.

Our response of obedience to God’s word spells life or death for us.  There is never any mystery about a person’s persuading himself that God’s word is an empty word, an impotent or irrelevant word, a mere trifle.  That is his necessary rationalization in order to abandon himself to the worship of the god he has chosen to serve in the place of God.

…This parable of the vine declares the moral and ethical nature of Christian love, not its sentimentality. Christian love is something entirely different from just liking someone…even devotedly.  It is willing the good for another as one wills the good for oneself.  Christian love is affirming the fact of another’s son-ship to God.  Christian love is working for another’s welfare as one works for ones own welfare.  This is loving one’s neighbor as oneself.  Such love is more an act of mind and will than of the emotions, and it is not possible unless the teachings of Christ about God and God’s love for all people abide in us.

….Those men who worked most closely with Calvin sensed that a personal awareness of the directing and sustaining presence of the living God was for Calvin an almost uninterrupted state of mind.

 

The Continuing Samaritan Problem — One of the chief reasons that Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan created such a sensation was its almost impossible intimation that there might be a good Samaritan.  For Samaritanism stood for intermarriage with idolatrous people, for adopting pagan ways, for laxity in morals, for becoming in every aspect of body and soul, mongrel, low, and degraded.

There is in modern Christian faith and practice a continuous watering down process going on, an insidious obliteration of the distinctions between right and wrong, a belief that openness is the supreme virtue, and that intolerance is the only unforgivable sin.  The modern Samaritan does any and everything his pagan neighbors do.  The observance of the Christian Sunday as a holy day, set apart, the abstaining from the use of drugs and alcohol, the cultivation and display of certain noble traits of character — these acts were once the bright red badge that marked the Christian.

During the Second World War Alfred Noyes, in The Edge of the Abyss, said:

“The spirit of this evil thing which is assaulting civilization is no isolated phenomenon.  It is active everywhere, in art, in literature, in drama and theater.  For 50 years the pseudo-intellectual has been preparing his way by scoffing at every distinction between right and wrong in private human relationships, in marriage and the home as well as in wider spheres…For a great part of the world the authority of conscience, that God within the breast, has been lost.”

Noyes pointed out then that the pseudo-intellectuals’ practice of scoffing at anything higher than themselves undermined the foundations of civilizations, “picked the mortar from between the bricks,” and prepared the hearts of men and women for that worldwide moral and spiritual collapse.

So we are in the process of developing a new and more horrible form of hypocrisy than history has ever known, a hypocrisy that no longer says, “Thank God I am not as that Publican,” but “Thank God I am not as that Pharisee.”  We have produced the astonishing hypocrisy of actually priding ourselves on having watered down our faith and our morality, on having blotted out the difference between right and wrong.

The horror of this modern Samaritanism, this blotting out of the distinctions between good and evil, is that it destroys the soul.

C.S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, has Screwtape say, in a letter of instruction to Wormwood, his nephew on earth, “You will doubtless say these temptations I have suggested are very small sins, and are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness, but do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy.  It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into nothing.”  Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

Yes, the result of Samaritanism is that people give way little by little, corrupting faith and practice until the soul is dead.  Arthur John Gossip notes that C. G. Jung has warned us that “All the evils of primitive man are still crouching, alive and ugly as ever, in the dark recesses of our modern hearts; and it is only Christianity that is holding them in check; and if the true faith be neglected or forgotten, all the barriers it alone keeps in being against them will go down, and the old horrors sweep in a roaring flood across a dumbfounded world.”

 

The Private Preserve of Religion — (Arthur Gordon is quoted): “Freedom is dangerous, it can be a two edged blade.  Look at this country today.  All around us there seems to be a drastic decline in morals: cheating where once there was honesty, promiscuity where once there was decency.  Everywhere there seems to be a growing laxness, an indifference, a softness that terrifies people that think about it.

And what lies behind all this? ….Perhaps we do have a blind and misguided concept of liberty.  Perhaps we are using the freedom of choice gained for us by our forefathers to choose the wrong things…….the freedom we now claim has come to mean freedom from all unpleasantness: from hardship, from discipline, from the stern voice of duty, from the pain of self sacrifice…

We have clamored for total freedom, now we have just about got it, and we are facing a bleak and chilling truth: we have flung off one restraint after another, but in the process we have lost how to restrain ourselves.”

 

Compromise — …We compromise our Christian convictions and character because the balance is so easily tripped in the wrong direction.  To remain strong and steadfast, resolute and constant before all temptations to compromise, we need an amazing amount of help.  In our own strength alone we are doomed.

….And that brings us to this important junction, that we know so well and apply so poorly: The ties of affection and devotion are strengthened by daily association. They are weakened and destroyed by long periods of separation and neglect.

What have the saints of all the ages done to build the battlements of their lives against the destroying forces of this world that would pull them down in cowardly compromise?  This they have done: Whatever experience of God they have had in their lives, they held on to it.  They ringed it round with sanctities.  They returned to it day after day as to a shrine.

….What experience of God have you and I had in our daily lives?  What are we doing to keep that experience real, insistent, in the warfare between heaven and hell that rages daily in our souls?  What are we doing in our daily lives to keep ourselves in Christ’s company, to live and move and have our being so really in his presence that he may have a chance to strengthen the bonds of our devotion that gird our lives to him?  It is here that we win or lose the battle against cowardly compromise.

 

The Chain of Kindness — …..the making of the chain of kindness is not sentimental slush, but tough welding that calls for courageous hearts challenged by the world’s deepest need on some of its most dangerous fronts.

…….And finally, this brief episode from the life of King David, this about the chain of kindness: It awaits our forging, not only for the world’s great need that kindness be shown, but also for ourselves, our own soul salvation.  David, human, frail, erring man that he was, yet always lived with his soul windows open upon the Eternal, ready to receive tidings and inspiration from the other world.  This was the secret of his genius…..So even in his triumph and glory…he felt in his soul that he must do the kindness of God to someone so that his soul might live, so that what in him was most like God might remain alive and in touch with the Eternal.

…….Yes, the chain of kindness must be forged link by link, not only because our world needs to be filled with the goodness of God, but more because we need to have our souls fashioned into the likeness of Christ and that will not come without our showing kindness.  It is the giver’s soul rather than the recipient’s that is most filled with joy, beauty and strength when kindness is done.

…….Nothing is as important as souls…. and souls are not made perfect without showing kindness…..We need to perform these kindnesses not only for the good they do others but so that our souls may not grow cruel, hard, insensitive — so that we may become more like Christ.

 

Life is Hard For the Faint Hearted — ….(commenting on the treatment of the servant who buried his talent in the Parable of the Talents) — Harsh and cruel treatment, you say for the Kingdom of God?  Perhaps so, but Jesus is just enunciating a universal law of life.  These are not just the ethics of the kingdom, mind you; here is the stern law engraved in the granite of the centuries.  Withhold a native endowment, refuse to employ a God-given faculty, and it will wither and die. The failure of this one talent man and his stern condemnation by the Lord of Life is a result, not of his greed or his tight fisted stinginess, but entirely of his fear.  The man was not dishonest, he was not a drunkard, nor was he wasteful.  What was wrong with him?  He was afraid to hazard in use what his Lord had entrusted to him.

John Milton says in Areopagitica, “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and un-breathed, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for….”

Life is hard for the faint hearted …..but courage can be cultivated, and that particular brand of courage exemplified in hazarding one’s talents for God is born of faith.

At long last we shall all discover that the success or failure of our life’s voyage will be reckoned, not by what we made out of the years, but by whether or not we have been with the great captain of our souls and what in love and faith we have risked for him. (This follows a quote by Admiral Stopford who had served under Nelson).

 

Loss of Life — …But as bad as loss of life by death always is, there is something worse.

Have we begun to calculate that more appalling loss of life that is lost, not by death, but in the midst of life?

As Jesus looked out on life, this is what sickened him most, not loss of life by death — He knew how life could triumph over death — but rather Jesus was appalled by the loss of life in the midst of life.  We know that Jesus very seldom spoke of sinners…..he used another term.  He spoke of “the lost.”  What did he mean by “the lost”?  He meant the people who were loosing life in the midst of life, whose precious resources of life, time, energy, emotions, opportunities, were all slipping away from them because they were investing in doomed enterprises.

….Life can be lost through heedless wandering away like a sheep gets lost…by following ones own selfish and animal instincts until suddenly one finds oneself lost….or through calculated self will,…….etc.,…

Innumerable are the ways that life can be lost in the midst of life.  But however it is lost, Jesus says it is always a deplorable waste and a pitiable tragedy, and it wrings the heart of God who is restless and untiring in his search that the lost soul may be found.  And this, of course, is what the Incarnation is all about.

Are we aware of how life may be lost, our own life or life dear to us, through overindulgence?  Years ago, when we used this term overindulgence, it meant letting alcohol get the best of our lives…often causing the loss of job, family, self-respect…..now we have the additional problem of drug abuse, which is causing so many of our choice young people to lose the best that life has to offer them in the midst of life.

But are we aware of how life can be lost through negative emotions……that are such destroyers of the inner person, that so poison our minds and inner spirit that it is not possible for a clear, clean, unselfish, helpful thought to swim in and motivate us?  Are we not aware of how these can disarm us before we fight the real battles of life?

Are we loosing life in the midst of life, minute-by-minute, day by dragging day?  If so, where are the leaks?…….Of course it’s in relationships that we win or lose this thing we call the opportunity of life.  It’s there that we find contentment or run into despair.  This is where life is saved or lost.

Elton Trueblood wrote in The Life We Prize: “What we are experiencing in the Western World is really a depression….a moral depression….What is really tragic is not death for a reason, but the slow petering out of life in self-indulgence.”  Well, that was more than twenty years ago, and the slow petering out of life in an avalanche of cheap, shoddy living has grown in intensity through the years…

Collectively and individually in America today the world’s corrosive stain is destroying the moral grandeur of a once great and spiritually sturdy people…..Are we going to lose the dream of those patriots who founded this nation on those high, enduring principles?  It can be lost you know.

….the big business of religion is to save life from being lost in the midst of life.  How strange it is that some people should get the idea, the very perverted idea, that religion is something designed to fence life in, to restrict life…..How far this is from the mind and message of Christ.  Listen to him: “I am come that they might have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.”  Jesus came to make it possible for every person to enter…..a relationship that would immeasurably enrich and broaden and increase in every dimension that person’s life.

How not to lose life but to save it?  It’s the very simple but very difficult paradox: How to save life?  Why, give it away. “Life is not lost by dying, but minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand, small, uncaring ways.”  But it need not be lost — ever…

 

Christian Character Judgment — …..The second hallmark of Christian character judgment is that it is always made with a view, not to condemnation and destruction, but to redemption and salvation.

…..There is character judgment that is positive as well as negative, encouraging as well as discouraging, and we are all called to exercise and express it.  For failure at this point has far reaching influence, not only on the character of our family and friends, but even on world history.

Arnold Toynbee, after a lifelong study of the history of the world, wrote: “My own view of the world is that human beings do have genuine freedom to make their choices.  Our destiny is not predetermined for us; we determine it for ourselves…..”

The more confused the times the greater the demand for men and women of integrity.  In an age of permissiveness, how precious those characters whose consciences cannot be seduced by any siren song.  God’s standard for character remains the same — Jesus Christ.

We must be concise and consistent, courageous and compassionate, in our character judgements of ourselves and of others…

God cannot contradict his revealed moral character.  The Scriptures are given us, not to foretell events, but that we may know the truth about God and about ourselves, that we might recognize the right and the merciful and love it and do it.  As Thomas Carlyle put it: “Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”

It is not revealed to us by what mysterious, unseen avenues and agents the Almighty operates….  But what is revealed and known to us is that prayer, worship, study of God’s word, trustful waiting on the Lord, relying on him rather than self, and remaining in the fellowship of the saints — these are the channels by which God comes into our lives, transferring our weaknesses into strength and blessing us with personal power, peace and poise.  This is the testimony of all the saints of all the ages.  By the Spirit of the living God they became the few mighty ones who turned the world upside down.

For me the greatest tragedy of our present times is the repudiation of our great traditions.  How many of us will now sincerely pray with John Baillie, “Grant, Oh Father, that I may go about this day’s business with an ever present remembrance of the great traditions wherein I stand and the great cloud of witnesses which at all times surround me, that thereby I may be kept from evil ways and inspired to high endeavor”?

 

Your Portrait of God — How important it is for each one of us that our personal portrait of God be a reasonable likeness of the eternal God. God remains eternally the same, but oh, the subtle, the pervasive influence of our souls portrait of God on our lives! Our character, our conduct, our very dispositions are subtly changed and wrought out by those personal portraits of God.

To perfect our personal portraits of God we must become close students of the Christ of the Gospels………But we must be more than students…….we must become disciples of  the living Christ of today.  Knowledge is perfected only through action.  It’s only by doing God’s will as revealed in Christ that we really know Him.  Unless we step forth in true discipleship, we can never know in our own souls the God he came to reveal.  It’s putting to the test of experiment and experience the moral and ethical truths revealed by God’s word, comprehended by the mind, accepted by the will, and done by the individual, that we really know him as he is.

The Eternal God — who can know him? …….But it has pleased God to give us some glimpses of his glory.  And there is that secret artist in the soul of each one of us who is always at work on his portrait of the Almighty.  Those portraits, true or false, crude or masterfully done, have a profound influence on our character, our conduct, our disposition, even our eternal destiny.

So, whoever we are — each in his own way should always be searching for new truth and new knowledge of Him whose glory we would paint on the canvas of our souls.

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From the Pulpit of Paul Tudor Jones

On Giving Life Away
But how not to lose life but to save it? What word has the Christian faith for us here? What does it tell us to do? Oh, it’s the very simple but very difficult paradox: How to save life? Why, give it away ?. It’s all in the way we live it, you see, day by day. We need not be losing life to age or disease or negative emotions or pressures of the time, in all our small uncaring ways. No, if with a will and a sense of dedication, we give life, offer it up entirely with a holy passion and purpose to God through Christ, life is never lost, not even in death.

— Loss of Life
John 10:10
April 8, 1974

On the Fulfillment of Faith
Faith as surrender to Jesus Christ saves you from the tragedy of never becoming, never realizing what in the economy of the ages and the providence of God you were intended to become. What a catastrophe to come into this world, to have lavished upon oneself all the love of parents, the training of teachers; to have lived and loved, “felt dawn, seen sunsets glow,” to have striven and fought, lived and died, and yet to have missed selfhood’s supreme expression! This is to have failed the very purpose of the whole adventure.

— Saving Faith
1 John 5:4
January 27, 1974

On the Call of God
All Christians are called: that is, all of us have been summoned from what we are to what we should become. Calls of many kinds come to everyone, ? but the call of God is unique, decisive, prophetic. It is the call of the Creator, calling his creature. It is the call to everyone that is not so much audible and without as it is compulsive and from within, calling us to rise up and live in the heights of our souls; to be about the work and witness for which we were made.
— The Safe Keeping of Jesus Christ Jude 1

On the Fullness of Salvation
The New Testament very clearly states that to be saved means two very positive things. First, to be saved is to enter now into a living relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ. This is a salvation that begins now, not when death severs our connection with this earth and we go into eternal orbit; not later and somewhere else, but here and now. But there is a second and too often neglected aspect of the New Testament teaching on salvation, just this: Salvation by God in Christ involves the one saved in the saving plans and purposes of God for the whole world. The saved Christian can never be an isolationist salvationist. To be saved from all life’s deadly destroyers — sin and death and self and anxiety and fear and meaninglessness — is now and ever more shall be the deepest longing of every human heart. This is the salvation in its fullest and most satisfying form which can be yours and mine — now — as the free gift of God through Jesus Christ, but only if we surrender ourselves to him.
— What Does It Mean to Be
Saved?
Acts 16:31

On the Church
Through all its history, the church has had three historic functions. First, there is the church’s prophetic function. For the proclamation of God’s word in every age the church has two indispensable tools — unique in this world — the Bible which is the word of God, and the Holy Spirit which is always present with the church when she is faithful to her Lord. The performance of this prophetic function of the church is not just for the pulpit but also for the pew. Society cannot possibly do without this function of the church, for through it comes the diagnosis of the sins of self and society, that repentance may take place and the healing help of God come. Insofar as the church is faithful in performing her prophetic function today, awareness dawns of the inequities of evils in high places, of human suffering that could be alleviated, of poverty that can be obliterated. And through the Church’s prophetic proclamation there comes the call to the people of God to do courageously today what they could never do before in human history toward feeding the starving, paying decent wages, and preventing the births of unwanted and doomed children wherever there are not waiting loving families to give competent care. The second historic function of the church is regenerative in nature. The church is not in the business of saving civilization, or culture, or nations, or capitalism. The church is in the business of saving souls. Souls will outlast all civilizations. But no civilization, nation, system, or culture can get along without transformed men and women, who have been changed from living for self, or wealth, or fame or even family, to living for God. The church is that social organism in which it has pleased God through the foolishness of preaching and the presence of the Holy Spirit to cleanse, renew, and transform human beings into the children of God. But just talking about this ancient regenerative function of the church, and singing anthems and dramatizing it in ancient liturgies are not the same thing as performing this function. The third historic function of the church of Jesus Christ is communal in nature. It furnishes a fellowship, a household of faith for men and women and little children to nurture and mature them in the Christian life.
— A Remodeled Church
Revelation 3:6
Spring, 1969

On Racial Justice
Our current problem of a racial minority living in the midst of a more advantaged, prosperous, powerful majority is ultimately a religious problem and the time has already come, yea, passed, for the servants of God to bring the thoughts, the labors, the love, the reconciling forces of the body of Christ to work upon that problem. For let us be well assured of this, whether we concern ourselves or not – – God is concerned — is even now clanging his call in people’s consciences. “Let my people go,” and lifting up his powerful right arm of judgment to break the arm of
the oppressor in the very historic events of our day. Let this fact be frankly faced by us all, that any social order, or any social problem, left untouched by religious principles and the clarion call of God, will soon become a realm in which people find faith in God difficult, if not impossible. The world wants to know, not “what do you believe about God?” but rather, “what have you experienced in your life of Him? What evidence can you give of His reality?”
In our present most pressing problem, it comes ultimately to this: it is just a matter of the heart. The voice of God comes booming in upon your conscience and mine: “Let my people go, that they may serve me.” Two courses are open to each of us: either we harden our hearts, refuse the call of God, tighten the bands of oppression, vent the ideas and emotions that create an atmosphere in which cruel violence thrives; or we soften our proud hearts to Eternal God’s warm love for all his children and in glad obedience keep His just and humanitarian laws, in deeds of brotherhood and acts of reconciling, redeeming love.

— Let My People Go
Exodus 8:20
September 4, 1955

On the Purpose of Ministry
Now, as I look back on my life trying to be a pastor to God’s people in his Church, I think I’ve come nearer to fulfilling my vocation when I’ve tried to raise the God question in the changing kaleidoscope of church ministries, community crises, family and personal situations: To ask the prophet’s questions: “What does the Lord require of thee, O man, but to do justly, to have mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” People’s reactions have been quite varied: Sometimes they have turned in disgust at the intrusion of the God question, like the British illustrator at the Oban sunrise; sometimes they have been roused up in hot hostility at the suggestions of judgment and reform the God question raised; sometimes they have found the God question opening a way of salvation both costly and rewarding.

 

— Raising the God Question
Micah 6:8
A sermon by Dr. Jones upon his retirement from Idlewild
Presbyterian Church
February 23, 1975

On Trust in God
Never cease to look for and expect the Eternal God to meet you and redeem you and glorify every moment, even every crisis and every relationship with friend or foe of everyday. Cultivate the attitude of Job: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him”; of St. Paul: “We know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purposes’; of Jesus, on his cross: “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.” This is not to take the leap of faith back into obscurantism denying the discoveries of science, damning progress, and burying our heads in ancient shibboleths. Rather it is to leap expectantly into the future where the Ancient of Days rushes forward to accomplish fresh wonders beyond the powers of the human mind to conceive for God’s well-loved children, believing that God is calling us to fresh escalation of the human spirit — away from the down-beat in pursuit of pleasure to the up-beat of universal concern for all under the friendly skies of an Omnipotent Father.

— Blank Skies?
Psalm 19:1
July 9, 1967

 

Pastoral Prayer  7/28/97

Almighty and most merciful God, now has come the time for our prayer, and dutifully we bow our heads to experience that spiritual miracle people call ‘prayer’.  Grant, O Lord, that we may now come to thee in such a way that we may truly pray, lest we be as those who go on an errand and forget what they have come for, or as those who stand before beauty and will not open their eyes, or as those who seek diligently for wisdom and truth and a way out of their difficulties, but when they hear it, will have none of it, because it agrees not with their former habits and opinions.

Our Father, we confess that we are thy perverse and foolish children.  We know so little, yet we are proud and pretentious and stubborn.  But in thy mercy thou hast called us unto thyself, and we have at least come this far today.  Now reveal thy glory to every heart.  In the heat of our passions, and the confusion of our purposes, and the indecision of our inconstant wills, may we be given the grace to pause this moment in thy presence, be still and know that thou art God, our God, and the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  Breathe upon us Lord.  Purify us of our evil thoughts and unworthy ambitions.  Pour the clear, pure light of thy truth into our tempestuous hearts.  Bind us with humble brotherly love to every last lost sinner for whom Christ died that thou hast given us to serve and enjoy and companion.

 

Father, we bring now to thee in prayer the things and the people and the causes we don’t know what else to do with, but to pray over.  We have tried this and that, unsuccessfully.  So we bring to thee now; the concerns that are heavy on our hearts but too far away for us really to do anything about; the people we love but with whom we find it well nigh impossible to communicate; the confused or failing causes to which we have given our allegiance; the slender store of our hopes and fears and doubts — all these, O Father of Spirits, we bring to thee, praying that thy will be done and thy Kingdom may come in and through and by these things and people and causes for Jesus sake.

Amen.