04/25/48

(Luke 9:51-62)

What spiritual highway are you traveling? Oh, we know all about driving our automobile through the maze of our national highways to arrive at whatever destination we determine upon. We know how to read road maps, watch road signs, and make time on our American highways which are one of the seven wonders of the modern world. But what do we know about traveling spiritual highways?

There is nothing new in speaking of the Christian life as a journey along a spiritual highway. It is an old figure often employed. John Bunyan wrote in Pilgrim’s Progress of how Christian followed the road of life from the City of Destruction through the Slough of Despond, into By-pass Meadow, over the Delectable Mountains, past Doubting Castle, where dwelt the giant Despair, down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death, till, at journey’s end, the Faithful Pilgrim comes up to the last river and sees beyond, even as he steps into the icy stream, the walls and towers of the Celestial City. And Commenius, a Christian of ancient Czechoslovakia, wrote the Labyrinth to tell the story of a man who traveled all the highways of the soul in search of soul satisfaction. And in our time John Baillie writes a popular book on theology and calls it Invitation to Pilgrimage. No, there’s nothing new in speaking of the Christian life as a journey along the highway of the soul. We all are familiar with the figure.

But what some of us have failed to comprehend is that there are several highways of the soul which are open for us as Christians to travel. Too many of us have confined ourselves to just one or two, when the thrill and beauty of other lovely highways are open to us. There are good roads of the spirit and there are better highways ever opening before us. Rufus Jones, in the Luminous Trail, points out that “there are at least four of these highways of the soul charted in the New Testament”.

First of all, among the highways of the soul, there is the Road of Awakening. This is the Damascus Road. Saul of Tarsus suddenly saw on the Damascus Road a blinding light. The might and glory of the spiritual world broke in upon his soul. The whole course of his life was changed. He was suddenly lifted to a new level and given a different direction in life. He became a new person with another name.

A young woman had attended church and Sunday school intermittently for years. When at college, she was expected to go to chapel services. But it all had little meaning for her until a bitter, crushing sorrow came to her mother-in-law, a woman of stalwart Christian faith. When the younger woman saw the older one borne up by a faith that kept her courageous, composed, confident, as her world tumbled in, that young woman’s soul was stirred, awakened to the truth and reality of God. She began to travel her Damascus Road.

There are many openings into this road of spiritual awakening. Men have burst upon it at strange intersections. Peter and Andrew, James and John, were just mending their nets and going a-fishing — exactly what they had done every day of their lives for years — when suddenly there was that strange Galilean carpenter before them saying: “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” And just that suddenly life opened up before them in all its fullness, and the daily routine shown with a new luster of meaning, and they rose up and followed Him.

John Wesley was in the little Aldersgate chapel, one of the few persons attending, of all things, a mid-week service, when he felt his heart strangely warmed.

Yes, this spiritual highway, the Damascus Road of Awakening, may be, and is, entered at many a strange intersection, but all travelers find it the same delightful highway of discovery of spiritually transforming experience, when the whole level of one’s life shifts to a new plane.

I had walked life’s way with an easy tread,

Had followed where joys and pleasures led,

Until one day in a quiet place,

I met the Master face to face.

But there are Christians who seem to expect to travel only this one highway — or rather to stop their journey once they have come upon it. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews found some early Christians going back, again and again, to their original spiritual experience, attempting to relive and recapture the luster of that past awakening, and that was the sum total of their religion. The result was that they not only were not making progress in the Christian life, but were actually slipping farther and farther away.

So, the first highway of the soul, the Road of Awakening, leads quite naturally into a second, the Jerusalem Road of Complete Commitment. And Jesus and His disciples “were on the way, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was going before them; and they that followed were amazed, and they were afraid — because He set His face steadfastly to go to Jerusalem … ‘Behold,’ said Jesus, ‘we go up to Jerusalem … It cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem.’”

The die was cast. His face was set. The decision made. There could then be no turning back or aside into another highway. That road must be traveled to its termination, be the end sweet or bitter. Well might those who followed in the way with Jesus experience both terror and amazement. Now there comes a note of severity in the mild Master’s words — now there is no toleration of a divided allegiance. One man who meets Jesus on the Jerusalem Road as he goes steadfastly up to fulfill his divine destiny says that he, too, will become a disciple, but the Master replies with inhospitable directness: “The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” And yet another would-be disciple promises to come and follow, after he has buried his dead father, only to be shocked by the stern injunction, “Let the dead bury the dead, but go thou and preach the Kingdom of God.”

This is no highway for pleasure driving. The Jerusalem Road leads unerringly to a cross — the cross where self is crucified, finished, done for. But it is the Jerusalem Road of complete commitment to which Jesus would lead every disciple of His. It is to this highway of the soul that these teachers and church officers have come.

And though it is no place for pleasure driving, as such, those who travel this road know that they have been lifted to a higher and better level of life. Phillips Brooks says that if you travel this highway of complete commitment: “If a friend comes to you and says, ‘Do this with me,’ you quietly reply to him: ‘I cannot, I am going up to Jerusalem.’ There is an end of it. You have not to sit on a stone by the side of the road until you have decided whether the thing is wrong and just how wrong it is. Simply the thing is not on your way to Jerusalem, and so you press on and leave it far behind.”

Oh, what blessed peace and serenity, what joyous singleness of heart, is the reward of those who travel the Jerusalem Road of complete commitment.

The third highway of the soul is the Jericho Road of service. “A certain Samaritan hurrying to Jerusalem on this Jericho Road, his mind bent on business (for no Samaritan ever went to Jerusalem for pleasure) saw a poor traveler lying wounded on the road, robbed, stripped, half dead. It was too bad to lose time caring for the wounded man. Others had seen him and hurried by, murmuring no doubt that this was a sad sociological problem for which a committee ought to be formed. But this hated foreigner took up the problem, gave himself as well as his money to it, relieved the situation, saved the life, and established a principle of action.” (Rufus Jones — The Luminous Trail)

Today, officers and teachers in this church and church school have, by sacred vows and promises in solemn services of ordination and installation, come along the road of complete commitment and now there lies before them, stretching away into the future, the Jericho Road of service. It is now for you to pass on from your past experience of spiritual awakening, on from this sacred moment of dedication and complete commitment, to devoted Christian service.

The great tragedy of modern Christianity is its unfinished spiritual trips. People get bogged down. An ordained clergyman, who has preached for some thirty years, recently left his pastorate to become a worker in the automobile industry. He testifies that he finds little, if any, transfer or carry over of religious experience and conviction from the churches into the field of labor and industry. Folks balk at the Jericho Road.

They like to tell in New Haven, Connecticut, of an incident that occurred a hundred years ago. Suddenly there appeared, one day in the New Haven Harbor, a slave ship without captain or crew, driven to shore by storms, with its cargo of blacks aboard. No one in Hew Haven could understand the native’s strange gibberish. What was to be done with or for its human cargo? Someone suggested that perhaps old Professor Reed at Yale University could act as interpreter — he knew almost every language. But someone else remarked that the old Professor was a recluse, as everyone knew, and would most likely be of no help in solving this practical problem. Anyway, Professor Reed was summoned. “He came down to the ship to look the captives over. Their jabber was as strange to him as to anyone else. But their plight fired his soul. Patiently he labored, day after day, until he found one black girl among the slaves who seemed to have a bit more wits than the rest. He traced lines in the sand, counting: ‘one, two, three, four,’ until he got it through her head that he wanted her to count in her language. He went over and over the sound she made until she nodded her head in approval. Then he got on a train and went to New York. He sought out the poor sections of the east side, and went up and down before the saloons and low dives counting in a loud voice. Day after day the strange figure would appear, indefatigably at it in the queer tongue, ‘one, two, three, four.’ At last one day a black man came out of one of the joints and stopped still in amazement. ‘Where did you learn to speak in that dialect?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know any more of it than those four numbers,’ answered Dr. Reed. ‘That is the tongue in which I was born,’ replied the stranger. Dr. Reed took him to the depot and bought him a ticket to New Haven where, to make a long story short, he acted as the interpreter for the wanderers. Their story was learned, their case was heard, their destiny determined, all because a man took what he knew out into the street and worked with it there until he had accomplished some service for men.” (Dr. Julian Price Love — An American Odyssey)

This is the opportunity that confronts you teachers and officers of this church: to take what religious experience you have, what Biblical knowledge you’ve gained, what powers of mind and heart and soul God has given you and, traveling the Jericho Road of Christian service, bring all to bear upon the wrecks and tragedies and smash ups that are always occurring along life’s highway.

And finally there is the Emmaus Road of fellowship with the risen and eternal Christ. On the evening of the first Easter day, two disciples were traveling from Jerusalem to the little village of Emmaus. As they walked and talked of their lost leader, crucified the Friday before, a third, unknown traveler fell in with them and talked with them, expounding the scriptures showing how it behooved the Christ to suffer and die. As the three sat down together for the evening meal the disciples recognized the stranger by the way he broke and blessed the bread as their risen and living Lord.

“It is one thing to know about Christ historically, to read about Him in the gospels, or to recite creedal statements about His divinity, and quite another thing to walk with Him in vital communion and to be conformed in spirit with Him in love and fellowship. ‘Was not our heart burning as we walked and talked with Him?’ was the experience of the first travelers on this Emmaus Road of fellowship. That inward warmth of spirit has lasted across the centuries and it is still a sign that you have found the true highway of the Spirit. All other roads ought to lead into this road and it ought to be our Number One Highway of Life.” (Rufus Jones — The Luminous Trail)

Church officers, teachers, and workers won’t be able to stand the strain of labor and discouragements unless they travel this Emmaus Road of fellowship daily with the Living Christ. He supplies that grace and strength we need.

To every man there openeth

A way, and ways, and a way,

And the High Soul climbs the High way

And the Low Soul gropes the Low,

And in between on the misty flats,

The rest drift to and fro.

But to every man there openeth

A High way and a Low,

And every man decideth

The way his soul shall go.

      John Oxenham

O Soul of mine, where travelleth thou?