The Pursuit of God

A fairly accurate description of the human race might be furnished one unacquainted with it by taking the Beatitudes, turning them wrong side out and saying, "Here is your human race."For the exact opposite of the virtues in the Beatitudes are the very qualities which distinguish human life and conduct.

In the world of men we find nothing approaching the virtues of which Jesus spoke in the opening words of the famous Sermon on the Mount.Instead of poverty of spirit we find the rankest kind of pride; instead of mourners we find pleasure seekers; instead of meekness, arrogance; instead of hunger after righteousness we hear men saying, "I am rich and increased with goods and have need of nothing"; instead of mercy we find cruelty; instead of purity of heart, corrupt imaginings; instead of peacemakers we find men quarrelsome and resentful; instead of rejoicing in mistreatment we find them fighting back with every weapon at their command.

Of this kind of moral stuff civilized society is composed.The atmosphere is charged with it; we breathe it with every breath and drink it with our mother's milk.Culture and education refine these things slightly but leave them basically untouched.A whole world of literature has been created to justify this kind of life as the only normal one.And this is the more to be wondered at seeing that these are the evils which make life the bitter struggle it is for all of us.All our heartaches and a great many of our physical ills spring directly out of our sins.Pride, arrogance, resentfulness, evil imaginings, malice, greed: these are the sources of more human pain than all the diseases that ever afflicted mortal flesh.

Into a world like this the sound of Jesus' words comes wonderful and strange, a visitation from above.It is well that He spoke, for no one else could have done it as well; and it is good that we listen.His words are the essence of truth.He is not offering an opinion; Jesus never uttered opinions.He never guessed; He knew, and He knows.His words are not as Solomon's were, the sum of sound wisdom or the results of keen observation.He spoke out of the fulness of His Godhead, and His words are very Truth itself.He is the only one who could say "blessed" with complete authority, for He is the Blessed One come from the world above to confer blessedness upon mankind. And His words were supported by deeds mightier than any performed on this earth by any other man. It is wisdom for us to listen.

As was often so with Jesus, He used this word "meek" in a brief crisp sentence, and not till some time later did He go on to explain it.In the same book of Matthew He tells us more about it and applies it to our lives."Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."Here we have two things standing in contrast to each other, a burden and a rest.The burden is not a local one, peculiar to those first hearers, but one which is borne by the whole human race.It consists not of political oppression or poverty or hard work.It is far deeper than that.It is felt by the rich as well as the poor for it is something from which wealth and idleness can never deliver us.

The burden borne by mankind is a heavy and a crushing thing.The word Jesus used means a load carried or toil borne to the point of exhaustion.Rest is simply release from that burden.It is not something we do, it is what comes to us when we cease to do. His own meekness, that is the rest.

Let us examine our burden. It is altogether an interior one. It attacks the heart and the mind and reaches the body only from within. First, there is the burden of prideThe labor of self-love is a heavy one indeed.Think for yourself whether much of your sorrow has not arisen from someone speaking slightingly of you.As long as you set yourself up as a little god to which you must be loyal there will be those who will delight to offer affront to your idol.How then can you hope to have inward peace?The heart's fierce effort to protect itself from every slight, to shield its touchy honor from the bad opinion of friend and enemy, will never let the mind have rest.Continue this fight through the years and the burden will become intolerable.Yet the sons of earth are carrying this burden continually, challenging every word spoken against them, cringing under every criticism, smarting under each fancied slight, tossing sleepless if another is preferred before them.

Such a burden as this is not necessary to bear.Jesus calls us to His rest, and meekness is His method.The meek man cares not at all who is greater than he, for he has long ago decided that the esteem of the world is not worth the effort.He develops toward himself a kindly sense of humor and learns to say, "Oh, so you have been overlooked?They have placed someone else before you? They have whispered that you are pretty small stuff after all? And now you feel hurt because the world is saying about you the very things you have been saying about yourself? Only yesterday you were telling God that you were nothing, a mere worm of the dust. Where is your consistency? Come on, humble yourself, and cease to care what men think."

The meek man is not a human mouse afflicted with a sense of his own inferiority.Rather he may be in his moral life as bold as a lion and as strong as Samson; but he has stopped being fooled about himself.He has accepted God's estimate of his own life.He knows he is as weak and helpless as God has declared him to be, but paradoxically, he knows at the same time that he is in the sight of God of more importance than angels.In himself, nothing; in God, everything.That is his motto.He knows well that the world will never see him as God sees him and he has stopped caring.He rests perfectly content to allow God to place His own values.He will be patient to wait for the day when everything will get its own price tag and real worth will come into its own.Then the righteous shall shine forth in the Kingdom of their Father.He is willing to wait for that day.

In the meantime he will have attained a place of soul rest.As he walks on in meekness he will be happy to let God defend him.The old struggle to defend himself is over. He has found the peace which meekness brings.

Then also he will get deliverance from the burden of pretenseBy this I mean not hypocrisy, but the common human desire to put the best foot forward and hide from the world our real inward poverty.For sin has played many evil tricks upon us, and one has been the infusing into us a false sense of shame.There is hardly a man or woman who dares to be just what he or she is without doctoring up the impression.The fear of being found out gnaws like rodents within their hearts.The man of culture is haunted by the fear that he will some day come upon a man more cultured than himself.The learned man fears to meet a man more learned than he.The rich man sweats under the fear that his clothes or his car or his house will sometime be made to look cheap by comparison with those of another rich man.So-called "society" runs by a motivation not higher than this, and the poorer classes on their level are little better.

Let no one smile this off.These burdens are real, and little by little they kill the victims of this evil and unnatural way of life.And the psychology created by years of this kind of thing makes true meekness seem as unreal as a dream, as aloof as a star.To all the victims of the gnawing disease Jesus says, "Ye must become as little children."For little children do not compare; they receive direct enjoyment from what they have without relating it to something else or someone else. Only as they get older and sin begins to stir within their hearts do jealousy and envy appear. Then they are unable to enjoy what they have if someone else has something larger or better. At that early age does the galling burden come down upon their tender souls, and it never leaves them till Jesus sets them free.

Another source of burden is artificialityI am sure that most people live in secret fear that some day they will be careless and by chance an enemy or friend will be allowed to peep into their poor empty souls.So they are never relaxed.Bright people are tense and alert in fear that they may be trapped into saying something common or stupid.Traveled people are afraid that they may meet some Marco Polo who is able to describe some remote place where they have never been.

This unnatural condition is part of our sad heritage of sin, but in our day it is aggravated by our whole way of life. Advertising is largely based upon this habit of pretense. "Courses" are offered in this or that field of human learning frankly appealing to the victim's desire to shine at a party. Books are sold, clothes and cosmetics are peddled, by playing continually upon this desire to appear what we are not. Artificiality is one curse that will drop away the moment we kneel at Jesus' feet and surrender ourselves to His meekness. Then we will not care what people think of us so long as God is pleased. Then what we are will be everything; what we appear will take its place far down the scale of interest for us.Apart from sin we have nothing of which to be ashamed.Only an evil desire to shine makes us want to appear other than we are.

The heart of the world is breaking under this load of pride and pretense.There is no release from our burden apart from the meekness of Christ.Good keen reasoning may help slightly, but so strong is this vice that if we push it down one place it will come up somewhere else.To men and women everywhere Jesus says, "Come unto me, and I will give you rest."The rest He offers is the rest of meekness, the blessed relief which comes when we accept ourselves for what we are and cease to pretend.It will take some courage at first, but the needed grace will come as we learn that we are sharing this new and easy yoke with the strong Son of God Himself.He calls it "my yoke," and He walks at one end while we walk at the other.

Lord, make me childlike.Deliver me from the urge to compete with another for place or prestige or position.I would be simple and artless as a little child.Deliver me from pose and pretense.Forgive me for thinking of myself.Help me to forget myself and find my true peace in beholding Thee.That Thou mayest answer this prayer I humble myself before Thee.Lay upon me Thy easy yoke of self-forgetfulness that through it I may find rest.Amen.

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X  The Sacrament of Living

One of the greatest hindrances to internal peace which the Christian encounters is the common habit of dividing our lives into two areas, the sacred and the secular.As these areas are conceived to exist apart from each other and to be morally and spiritually incompatible, and as we are compelled by the necessities of living to be always crossing back and forth from the one to the other, our inner lives tend to break up so that we live a divided instead of a unified life.

Our trouble springs from the fact that we who follow Christ inhabit at once two worlds, the spiritual and the natural.As children of Adam we live our lives on earth subject to the limitations of the flesh and the weaknesses and ills to which human nature is heir. Merely to live among men requires of us years of hard toil and much care and attention to the things of this world. In sharp contrast to this is our life in the Spirit. There we enjoy another and higher kind of life; we are children of God; we possess heavenly status and enjoy intimate fellowship with Christ.

This tends to divide our total life into two departments.We come unconsciously to recognize two sets of actions.The first are performed with a feeling of satisfaction and a firm assurance that they are pleasing to God.These are the sacred acts and they are usually thought to be prayer, Bible reading, hymn singing, church attendance and such other acts as spring directly from faith.They may be known by the fact that they have no direct relation to this world, and would have no meaning whatever except as faith shows us another world, "an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens."

Over against these sacred acts are the secular ones.They include all of the ordinary activities of life which we share with the sons and daughters of Adam: eating, sleeping, working, looking after the needs of the body and performing our dull and prosaic duties here on earth.These we often do reluctantly and with many misgivings, often apologizing to God for what we consider a waste of time and strength.The upshot of this is that we are uneasy most of the time.We go about our common tasks with a feeling of deep frustration, telling ourselves pensively that there's a better day coming when we shall slough off this earthly shell and be bothered no more with the affairs of this world.

This is the old sacred-secular antithesis.Most Christians are caught in its trap.They cannot get a satisfactory adjustment between the claims of the two worlds.They try to walk the tight rope between two kingdoms and they find no peace in either.Their strength is reduced, their outlook confused and their joy taken from them.

I believe this state of affairs to be wholly unnecessary.We have gotten ourselves on the horns of a dilemma, true enough, but the dilemma is not real.It is a creature of misunderstanding.The sacred-secular antithesis has no foundation in the New Testament.Without doubt a more perfect understanding of Christian truth will deliver us from it.

The Lord Jesus Christ Himself is our perfect example, and He knew no divided life.In the Presence of His Father He lived on earth without strain from babyhood to His death on the cross.God accepted the offering of His total life, and made no distinction between act and act."I do always the things that please him," was His brief summary of His own life as it related to the Father.As He moved among men He was poised and restful.What pressure and suffering He endured grew out of His position as the world's sin bearer; they were never the result of moral uncertainty or spiritual maladjustment.

Paul's exhortation to "do all to the glory of God" is more than pious idealism.It is an integral part of the sacred revelation and is to be accepted as the very Word of Truth.It opens before us the possibility of making every act of our lives contribute to the glory of God.Lest we should be too timid to include everything, Paul mentions specifically eating and drinking.This humble privilege we share with the beasts that perish.If these lowly animal acts can be so performed as to honor God, then it becomes difficult to conceive of one that cannot.

That monkish hatred of the body which figures so prominently in the works of certain early devotional writers is wholly without support in the Word of God.Common modesty is found in the Sacred Scriptures, it is true, but never prudery or a false sense of shame.The New Testament accepts as a matter of course that in His incarnation our Lord took upon Him a real human body, and no effort is made to steer around the downright implications of such a fact.He lived in that body here among men and never once performed a non-sacred act.His presence in human flesh sweeps away forever the evil notion that there is about the human body something innately offensive to the Deity.God created our bodies, and we do not offend Him by placing the responsibility where it belongs. He is not ashamed of the work of His own hands.

Perversion, misuse and abuse of our human powers should give us cause enough to be ashamed.Bodily acts done in sin and contrary to nature can never honor God.Wherever the human will introduces moral evil we have no longer our innocent and harmless powers as God made them; we have instead an abused and twisted thing which can never bring glory to its Creator.

Let us, however, assume that perversion and abuse are not present.Let us think of a Christian believer in whose life the twin wonders of repentance and the new birth have been wrought.He is now living according to the will of God as he understands it from the written Word.Of such a one it may be said that every act of his life is or can be as truly sacred as prayer or baptism or the Lord's Supper.To say this is not to bring all acts down to one dead level; it is rather to lift every act up into a living kingdom and turn the whole life into a sacrament.

If a sacrament is an external expression of an inward grace than we need not hesitate to accept the above thesis.By one act of consecration of our total selves to God we can make every subsequent act express that consecration.We need no more be ashamed of our body—the fleshly servant that carries us through life—than Jesus was of the humble beast upon which He rode into Jerusalem. "The Lord hath need of him" may well apply to our mortal bodies. If Christ dwells in us we may bear about the Lord of glory as the little beast did of old and give occasion to the multitudes to cry, "Hosanna in the highest."

That we see this truth is not enough. If we would escape from the toils of the sacred-secular dilemma the truth must "run in our blood" and condition the complexion of our thoughts. We must practice living to the glory of God, actually and determinedly. By meditation upon this truth, by talking it over with God often in our prayers, by recalling it to our minds frequently as we move about among men, a sense of its wondrous meaning will begin to take hold of us. The old painful duality will go down before a restful unity of life. The knowledge that we are all God's, that He has received all and rejected nothing, will unify our inner lives and make everything sacred to us.

This is not quite all.Long-held habits do not die easily.It will take intelligent thought and a great deal of reverent prayer to escape completely from the sacred-secular psychology.For instance it may be difficult for the average Christian to get hold of the idea that his daily labors can be performed as acts of worship acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.The old antithesis will crop up in the back of his head sometimes to disturb his peace of mind.Nor will that old serpent the devil take all this lying down.He will be there in the cab or at the desk or in the field to remind the Christian that he is giving the better part of his day to the things of this world and allotting to his religious duties only a trifling portion of his time. And unless great care is taken this will create confusion and bring discouragement and heaviness of heart.

We can meet this successfully only by the exercise of an aggressive faith.We must offer all our acts to God and believe that He accepts them.Then hold firmly to that position and keep insisting that every act of every hour of the day and night be included in the transaction.Keep reminding God in our times of private prayer that we mean every act for His glory; then supplement those times by a thousand thought-prayers as we go about the job of living.Let us practice the fine art of making every work a priestly ministration.Let us believe that God is in all our simple deeds and learn to find Him there.

A concomitant of the error which we have been discussing is the sacred-secular antithesis as applied to places.It is little short of astonishing that we can read the New Testament and still believe in the inherent sacredness of places as distinguished from other places.This error is so widespread that one feels all alone when he tries to combat it.It has acted as a kind of dye to color the thinking of religious persons and has colored the eyes as well so that it is all but impossible to detect its fallacy.In the face of every New Testament teaching to the contrary it has been said and sung throughout the centuries and accepted as a part of the Christian message, the which it most surely is not. Only the Quakers, so far as my knowledge goes, have had the perception to see the error and the courage to expose it.

Here are the facts as I see them. For four hundred years Israel had dwelt in Egypt, surrounded by the crassest idolatry. By the hand of Moses they were brought out at last and started toward the land of promise. The very idea of holiness had been lost to them. To correct this, God began at the bottom. He localized Himself in the cloud and fire and later when the tabernacle had been built He dwelt in fiery manifestation in the Holy of Holies. By innumerable distinctions God taught Israel the difference between holy and unholy. There were holy days, holy vessels, holy garments. There were washings, sacrifices, offerings of many kinds. By these means Israel learned that God is holyIt was this that He was teaching them.Not the holiness of things or places, but the holiness of Jehovah was the lesson they must learn.

Then came the great day when Christ appeared. Immediately He began to say, "Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time—but I say unto you." The Old Testament schooling was over. When Christ died on the cross the veil of the temple was rent from top to bottom. The Holy of Holies was opened to everyone who would enter in faith.Christ's words were remembered, "The hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father....But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship Him.God is Spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth."

Shortly after, Paul took up the cry of liberty and declared all meats clean, every day holy, all places sacred and every act acceptable to God.The sacredness of times and places, a half-light necessary to the education of the race, passed away before the full sun of spiritual worship.

The essential spirituality of worship remained the possession of the Church until it was slowly lost with the passing of the years. Then the natural legality of the fallen hearts of men began to introduce the old distinctions. The Church came to observe again days and seasons and times. Certain places were chosen and marked out as holy in a special sense. Differences were observed between one and another day or place or person, "The sacraments" were first two, then three, then four until with the triumph of Romanism they were fixed at seven.

In all charity, and with no desire to reflect unkindly upon any Christian, however misled, I would point out that the Roman Catholic church represents today the sacred-secular heresy carried to its logical conclusion. Its deadliest effect is the complete cleavage it introduces between religion and life. Its teachers attempt to avoid this snare by many footnotes and multitudinous explanations, but the mind's instinct for logic is too strong. In practical living the cleavage is a fact.

From this bondage reformers and puritans and mystics have labored to free us.Today the trend in conservative circles is back toward that bondage again.It is said that a horse after it has been led out of a burning building will sometimes by a strange obstinacy break loose from its rescuer and dash back into the building again to perish in the flame.By some such stubborn tendency toward error Fundamentalism in our day is moving back toward spiritual slavery.The observation of days and times is becoming more and more prominent among us."Lent" and "holy week" and "good" Friday are words heard more and more frequently upon the lips of gospel Christians.We do not know when we are well off.

In order that I may be understood and not be misunderstood I would throw into relief the practical implications of the teaching for which I have been arguing, i.e., the sacramental quality of every day living.Over against its positive meanings I should like to point out a few things it does not mean.

It does not mean, for instance, that everything we do is of equal importance with everything else we do or may do. One act of a good man's life may differ widely from another in importance. Paul's sewing of tents was not equal to his writing of an Epistle to the Romans, but both were accepted of God and both were true acts of worship. Certainly it is more important to lead a soul to Christ than to plant a garden, but the planting of the garden can be as holy an act as the winning of a soul.

Again, it does not mean that every man is as useful as every other man.Gifts differ in the body of Christ.A Billy Bray is not to be compared with a Luther or a Wesley for sheer usefulness to the Church and to the world; but the service of the less gifted brother is as pure as that of the more gifted, and God accepts both with equal pleasure.

The "layman" need never think of his humbler task as being inferior to that of his minister. Let every man abide in the calling wherein he is called and his work will be as sacred as the work of the ministry. It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it. The motive is everything. Let a man sanctify the Lord God in his heart and he can thereafter do no common act. All he does is good and acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For such a man, living itself will be sacramental and the whole world a sanctuary. His entire life will be a priestly ministration. As he performs his never so simple task he will hear the voice of the seraphim saying, "Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory."

Lord, I would trust Thee completely; I would be altogether Thine; I would exalt Thee above all.I desire that I may feel no sense of possessing anything outside of Thee.I want constantly to be aware of Thy overshadowing Presence and to hear Thy speaking Voice.I long to live in restful sincerity of heart.I want to live so fully in the Spirit that all my thought may be as sweet incense ascending to Thee and every act of my life may be an act of worship.Therefore I pray in the words of Thy great servant of old, "I beseech Thee so for to cleanse the intent of mine heart with the unspeakable gift of Thy grace, that I may perfectly love Thee and worthily praise Thee."And all this I confidently believe Thou wilt grant me through the merits of Jesus Christ Thy Son.Amen.