Sunday entries are taken from the classic devotional series In Christ by E. Stanley Jones.
CONSIDER THIS
We saw yesterday that the Christian way is the way—the way to do everything—to think, to act, to feel, to be in every single situation. This is for God and man and for man in his individual and social attitudes, acts, and relationships. There are just two things in life—the way and not-the-way. If God should act against the way, He wouldn’t be God; He would be something less and something other. And if man acts against the way, he is something less than man and something other.
Are these the statements of an overenthusiastic Christian propagandist, or simply an interpretation of what life itself says? Is life rendering a verdict, and is that verdict a Christian verdict? For more than half a century I have lived amid world currents of thought and life in East and West, and the deepest conviction of my life is that the Christian way is proving itself to be the way. I watch with breathless interest the unfolding of a drama on the stage of the world, and that drama has one theme: by putting the Christian way under the test of life to see which way life approves, the Christian way is turning out to be the way. No more important statement has come from psychiatry than the statement of M. Boss, head of the International Analytical Association and professor of psychotherapy in the University of Zurich, when I asked him, “You seem to have put your Christian faith and your psychiatry together: how did you do it?” He replied, “When I began my work as a psychiatrist I had difficulty, for I began as a Freudian, but the demands of human nature drove me back to the Christian position.” What human nature demanded for its fulfillment, the Christian faith offered. Suppose the basic demands of human nature and the Christian faith were at cross purposes. Then we would be in trouble—deep trouble, life trouble.
THE PRAYER
O Father God, by trial and error we are coming out to the way to live, and that way is turning out to be the way—the way revealed in Thy Son. We are not in trouble—we are in triumph. We sing with quiet hallelujahs. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY
If I take any way except the way, it will turn out to be a dead end.
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One Response
When you feel like saying, “There’s no way,” that’s a great time to look for God’s way.