5/6/51
Whose Life Are You Living?
Scripture: Luke 9: 18-26
Text: Luke 9: 23; "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily, and follow me."
That eminent contemporary philosopher, William Earnest Hocking, has written these words: "Of all animals, it is man for whom heredity counts for least, and conscious building forces for most. Consider that his infancy is longest, his instincts least fixed, his brain most unfinished at birth, his power of habit-making and habit-changing most marked, his susceptibility to social impressions keenest -- and it becomes clear that in every way nature, as a prescriptive power, has provided in him for her own displacement. ......... Other creatures nature could largely finish; the human creature must finish himself."
Sooner or later, usually sooner, man finds that he has his own life on his hands. His life is buffeted by circumstances and harassed by heredity. His most serious problem is matching his life with his limited resources while he faces, daily, life’s unfinished business. On the inside, frustration, inhibitions and unhappiness may be at work. On the outside, wars, economic circumstances, catastrophes which respect no man, the cruel inequities of his society, and the liabilities which reside in inherited prosperity complicate his lot. Man, the creature least prepared by nature, finds complicated demands forced upon him as upon no other being in the creation.
I suppose the words "responsible" and "responsibility" are somewhat recently developed in the English language. They seem not to be found in the King James version of the Bible. Yet Jesus spent much time persuading people to accept responsibility for their lives.
When Jesus himself made a decision that led toward a cross for him, Peter protested against it. Jesus responded: "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me." [Mark 8: 34]. There was that time when a well-to-do young ruler came to Jesus and explained that he was observing all the Hebrew law perfectly. Jesus pressed him beyond that: "One thing thou lackest; go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come and follow me." [Matthew 19: 21].
On one occasion the disciples found Jesus when he was praying alone. He asked them, "Who do people say that I am?" Then, perhaps with some anxiety, he said, "Whom do you say that I am?" After Peter answered confidently that Jesus is the Christ of God, the Master explained that "the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected ---- and slain." [Luke 9: 18-22]. He had an exceedingly sober responsibility for his life. Then, as if to drive it home to his disciples, he faced them with their responsibility for their lives. "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me." [Luke 9: 23].
It is perfectly clear from the New Testament that Jesus believed every person is responsible for his own life and what he makes of it. You and I are not to regard ourselves as living solely at the beck and call of the forces which could use our lives. But we are responsible for the way we live and for what we may make of our lives.
There are many devices which man uses to evade responsibility. One is pretense. Behind our conventional attitudes are our genuine feelings, and a man‘s actions are frequently a contradiction of his unspoken thoughts.
When a man seeks to be dominated by one central and worthy motive for living, he discovers how complex life is. All of us tend to live at least two roles in life. Seldom is the life which we live with our fellows the life of our solitariness. Life pushes and pulls us in many directions.
"Within my earthly temple there’s a crowd:
There’s one of us that’s humble, one that’s proud;
There’s one that’s broken-hearted for his sins,
And one that, unrepentant, sits and grins;
There’s one that loves his brother as himself,
And one that thinks of naught but power and pelf.
From much disturbing conflict I’d be free
If I could once determine which is me!"
[Edwin Sandford Martin, "Friend," in "Cousin Anthony and I," Scribner’s, 1895]
How difficult is the battle to make dominant in one’s mind the purpose to "love his brother as himself," that one may overcome the desire to "think of naught but power and pelf!" Everyone knows something of this tug-of-war that goes on inside. Many of us seek to escape responsibility for the choice by putting on a mask of pretending to be what we are not; sometimes pretending to be better than we are; insisting that we are noble in the bearing of life’s burdens, when we know we are not.
There is another device frequently used to evade responsibility for living our lives as we ought. And we all know something of it. If we do not like to accept what life seems to have dealt us, or the cards we ourselves have dealt out in the game, we shift the blame. That is not difficult to do. But it is often ridiculously apparent. The art is not confined to Adam in the garden of Eden who said to God, "The woman thou gavest me, she ....." And probably she could blame the serpent; and so on. It is easy to implicate others in our failures.
Breakdown in marriage usually involves the notion that it is the other’s fault. A child’s failure on the playground may be attributed to the desire of somebody else "to be the boss." Once in a while one who does not get along well in the social group hides behind the notion that other people just don’t appreciate his true gifts. Once in a while we even blame God for our discontents, as in this bit of verse from the coal mines:
God, we don’t like to complain -
We know that the mine is no lark -
But - there’s the pools from the rain;
But - there’s the cold and the dark.
God, you don’t know what it is -
You, in your well lighted sky,
Watching the meteors whizz;
Warm, with the sun always by.
God, if you had but the moon
Stuck in your cap for a lamp,
Even you’d tire of it soon,
Down in the dark and the damp.
Nothing but blackness above,
And nothing that moves but the cars -
God, if you wish for our love,
Fling us a handful of stars!"
["Challenge," Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1914]
I once knew a church board member --- long ago and far away --- who was frequently disgruntled. And the moment his temper began to flare one could tell it by his use of the word "you." He would say, "Well, you people seem to think --" or "What are you going to do about this?" or "You people decided on such-and-such a move and now see what has happened." He usually forgot all about the "we" attitude which makes any board, committee or team function. If there was any blame to be assessed -- and he could detect blame like a bird dog can detect a quail in a down wind -- he instantly abandoned the notion that "we" were the Board, and resorted to the accusatory "you."
And this tendency to blame the other fellow besets us from office boy to president; from kindergarten to college. So common is the practice of shifting blame that, after some years on a particular campus, a college president once remarked: "I can never be certain whether B.A. stands for Bachelor of Arts of Builder of Alibis."
Another device to which we resort in refusing responsibility for living our own lives is self-pity. If Beethoven had spent himself in self pity over deafness, the world would not have had his music. If Louis Pasteur had excused himself for some paralysis, the world would be far less advanced. The world would be immeasurably poorer if Mozart had excused himself for poverty, Milton for his blindness, Paul for his thorn in the flesh (whatever it was), or Jesus Christ for his birth in a barn. The redemptive spirit flowing from Calvary is ours because the Nazarene did not hide behind self-pity, but went ahead trusting in God.
The little child’s satisfaction in planning his own funeral with the imaginary thought, "When I’m dead they’ll be sorry they punished me" is continued in some adults musings. I once knew a fellow who was just sure that his own worth was unappreciated in business. He had a good notion to go off to the Harvard School of Business Administration and graduate there. "Then they’ll have to pay good money for my services," said he. Incidentally, he never did go to Harvard while I knew him; couldn’t get the jobs he thought he ought to have; couldn’t even keep the affection of his own wife.
We have ourselves on our own hands. We may revolt against the chains of our hereditary makeup; complain about the walls of our environment, blame every thing and every one else for the limitations of our powers. But there is always another element on which the whole of life turns --- our own personal response. What heredity and environment do to us is one thing. But what we make of what they do to us is the determinative matter.
Fatalism is that doctrine that reduces us to mechanical robots, destroying our freedom. But more serious, how many men and women have so magnified their infirmities and reverses that they refuse to develop life’s remaining gifts. How many men and women have justified unworthy conduct or failure by insisting that Adam’s fall is the fountainhead of all evil, over which they have no control. An alibi, persistently held, is the last stronghold of those who insist on blaming fate for their lot.
But if this be a moral universe, with an antithetical difference between right and wrong, then the free are the responsible! When we have said all we can say about the cruel forces of unthinking heredity and uncaring circumstance, we are still responsible for what we make of what has happened to us!
Now and then the shock of some adversity or catastrophe will cause us to cry, "Why does this happen to me?" And often the question has no point or answer. But we do not well to continue our bleating. Rather let us remember that we have our lives to live and let us see what we can do with what has befallen us and with all that is left to us. And the same sense of responsibility must sober and ennoble our living efforts when some great good comes our way.
But how? Granted that man must assume responsibility for his life, how can we achieve acceptance and integrate our powers to go on from where life seems to leave us?
Jesus was clear that, to take himself in hand, man must have a dominant purpose around which to resolve his conflicts, dissolve his tensions and assemble his resources. This dominant purpose Jesus declared the requisite of discipleship: "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me."
Yet one has not necessarily accepted responsibility for life when he finds some central obsession or purpose. Some of the ruthless financial tycoons of the last century had a dominant purpose. Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Adolph Hitler had ruling passions. The tremendous drives of every prominent leader have had some dominant purpose.
Jesus stated clearly that the purpose must be that of daily cross-bearing under the world’s burden, guided by his spirit, and trusting in his redemptive way.
A Boston University theologian writes, "Everybody wants something. The practical man is the man who knows how to get what he wants. The philosopher is the man who knows what he ought to want. The ideal man is the man who knows how to get what he ought to want.
Jesus’ way means finding a dominant purpose with moral discrimination, kept in line with the will of God.
The free are the responsible. Freedom brings with it alternative choices. To use our possessions for our own exclusive comfort, or as a trust from God; to use our physical strengths for sheltering ourselves from life’s stormy blasts or for carrying some of the load of one maimed on life’s journey; to use our capacity for love for selfish gratification or for the enlarging of personality in the whole family circle -- these and like choices face all of us.
We are confronted with the obligation, while shaping our outer world, deliberately to shape ourselves. Whose life are you living? Yours! "But seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness; ----- these (other) things shall be added unto you." [Matthew 6: 33].
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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, May 6, 1951