3/7/54

Scripture: (Read Luke 15: 11-32; See Romans 3)

The New Testament is a powerful set of books! It bears a message that has power to transform the lives of those who receive it. Luke speaks of Jesus returning "in the power of the spirit." The Book of the Acts of the Apostles, the very title of which suggests strength and movement, is full of reference to the power of God in those lives. It is said that the key to understanding and appreciation of that book, as well as much of the rest of the New Testament, is in the 8th verse of its first chapter: "You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you." [Acts 1: 8].

Paul calls the gospel "the power of God." And he apparently does not mean the "message" of the gospel, but the gospel itself. It is both the proclamation of a dynamic event and the dynamic itself! Just as God used the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, so also He is using, in a properly subordinated way, the preaching of that life, death, and resurrection as a medium of His power. The gospel is, according to Paul, the power of life unto salvation. It is the ground for confidence.

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The approach to Easter’s assurance, through the season of Lent, is interpreted by some as a "sobering up" from the waywardness of much of the living we do. It may have its corrective effect, and probably should chasten us where we need chastening. It is not nearly enough, however, for us men and women to become submissive to the moral law. We may want to be "correct" in social etiquette or in ethical practice, because we do not want to be out of step with others whose esteem we value. Or we hope to dull the barbs of an uneasy conscience before God in the hope of becoming spiritually comfortable again.

But far beyond that, we want the power to live in self-respect and hope of the Father’s "Well done, good and faithful servant." [Matthew 25: 21]. We want more than "correctness" in our lives. We want power, zest of spirit, the feeling of buoyancy that goes with being on the right track toward worthy achievement. We do not receive that power, however, unless we can feel right with God, and in harmony with His good purposes. And the first step toward that harmony is an honest recognition of the incompleteness, the error, the waywardness that lies in our lives. It is sound Christian doctrine that none who ever walked the earth, save Jesus Christ alone, is perfect, or anywhere near the goodness of God. The faithful Jews, long before the time of Jesus, perceived this truth also.

Paul, addressing the Christians of Rome, refers to what has been written earlier, saying: "None is righteous, no not one;

no one understands, no one seeks for God.

All have swerved, one and all have gone wrong,

no one does good, not a single one.

Their throat is an open grave,

they are treacherous with their tongues,

the venom of an asp lies under their lips.

Their mouth is full of cursing and bitterness,

their feet are swift for bloodshed,

their ways bring destruction and calamity.

They know nothing of the way of peace;

there is no reverence for God before their eyes." [Romans 3: 10-18].

"O yes," says Paul, "we know what the law says. But we have a righteousness of God, disclosed by believing in Jesus Christ, which is meant for all who have faith." And it is far beyond conformity to law.

"None is righteous," quotes Paul out of the ancient writings, "No, not one." Whoever gets the feeling that he is "pretty good" has the seeds, already growing, of an insufferable attitude toward fellow men and complacency before God. And whoever reacts from that complacency as seen in a fellow creature, so that he takes pride in the boast that "he is no saint," is likewise on the road to misery. "All have swerved, one and all have gone wrong," says Paul -- and with truthful, penetrating discernment. All of us have a fundamental need for penitence.

We do not need to become morbid about it. There have been times and occasions when the sense of sin has been over-cultivated. Carl Patton remarked that: "The people who do not need [the conviction of sin] take it to heart, while the people who need it and might profit by it throw it away; so that those who already feel worse than they need to feel still worse, while those who ought to feel bad about themselves continue to feel good." We need not get over-righteous about the sin of others, nor morbid about the sin in ourselves. But penitence for our own evil is a spiritual necessity.

A keen observer [Brisen] who has seen remorse go to the extremes which we might recognize in some forms of insanity, and who has thought it over a great deal, remarks that "repentance is not an evil, --- but is exactly what Christian theology has long taught --- the first step in the process of salvation. Emotional disturbances are thus frequently [though not always] manifestations of nature’s power to heal."

The cure, the mental health, the salvation toward which a proper penitence points is the re-establishment of right relationship with that which is supreme in the individual’s system of loyalties. "A breach of trust [and that is what sin is] must be followed by the experience of reconciliation, marked on the one side by acknowledgment of wrongdoing, and on the other by the capacity to understand and the willingness to resume friendly relations."

There is power in penitence, if it is the kind that will do some good. Harry Emerson Fosdick has discussed "the kind of penitence that does some good" with his usual vigor and clarity of insight. Our sins are not just a matter of private concern, to ourselves. Most of the sin which we have done, in act or in attitude, affects others adversely. That is why it is wrong. And we are also involved in the sin of a whole society, from which we cannot extricate ourselves, nor stand aloof.

Take the appalling spectacle of war. The building up of irritations, conflicting ambitions, suspicions, hatreds to the point where whole populations embark on systematically killing enough of the opponents to bring them to submission. It is a little like the tempers that bring two individuals to the point where they start "slugging it out." The encounter proves who has the strongest combination of craft and strength. But it proves little or nothing about who is right. There still remains, after the slugging has stopped, the working out of what is right. And this is sometimes harder to do after the bruising, than it might have been before.

People of sensitive conscience were so penitent about the first World War’s destruction of life and livelihood that they felt, like L. P. Jacks of England, as though in the presence of some colossal stupidity. But, as a group - a society - we then threw away the peace. We spurned our duties; we retreated to a narrow and selfish nationalism. We were first to repudiate the League of Nations, so that there was only the haziest chance that others could really believe in it. A generation, young men who were not responsible for the world’s tragedy, were forced to do the slugging and the dying in a new holocaust. And we have the awful feeling that the thing could be repeated and vastly intensified at any time but for the consecrated effort of responsible, and responsibly supported, statesman, and the grace of God. There is a feeling of corporate shame over the whole situation among many decent people today.

One might suppose a preacher would be pleased at this prevalent sense of corporate and personal shame. We ministers believe, what so many of the laymen and women know, that the only hope of salvation -- the emergence of right in the lives of people -- begins in sincere sorrow for the wrongs that have cut off that right. But true penitence, that has power in it, is more than just shame. It is possible for one to wallow in his shame until his strength is sapped, his hope deflated, his powers deflated and enfeebled, his life good for little or nothing.

Imagine yourself that Lost Son, that Prodigal scamp Jesus described, returning to his father from a far country. He had known headstrong willfulness. He had known what he thought was fun and he was going to have a lot of it! But the time came when his inheritance money was gone, he had no resourcefulness of spirit. For lack of any other means of physical existence he became the most despised of men - a swine herd. And he was ashamed of himself!

He could have kicked himself into insanity or suicide. He could have told himself that he would never be able to face his family again. He could have built up a pitiable imitation of righteousness by reasoning that his friends of affluent days were really a rotten lot to leave him so entirely in the lurch now that he didn’t have another nickel to spend on them. His soul could have died on that diet!

But that is what he did not do. He reflected that even the most menial servant of his father’s household was better off than he. And he resolved on a healthy, positive, constructive course. Instead of wallowing in a mass of self-disgust, he waked up as he had not wakened before. He said, "I will arise and go." And he started back to his father whom he had so grievously wronged by his life.

He asked nothing of his father but enough forgiveness and tolerance to give him a slave’s place around home. The other side of the picture is that his father had enough god-likeness to forgive completely -- as does indeed the Heavenly Father forgive completely those who turn to Him in penitence.

The older brother was (unfortunately for the older brother!) more than a bit on the proud and self-righteous side. He complained that though he had never transgressed a single commandment of his father, he had no feasts prepared for him. No fuss had even been made over him. There is a temperament that lays such self-righteous on "justice" as to be fully as much in need of penitence as the transgressor against justice. Well, he went off and sulked. And all his father could do for him was to yearn over him with the assurance that all he had, had also been the older son’s. [Luke 15: 11-32].

There are not two kinds of people - the impenitent, proud and conceited, and the crushed or penitent, says Fosdick. In this dimension there are three kinds: (1) the proud, self-satisfied, impenitent; (2) the crushed and morally enfeebled, and (3) the truly penitent from both extremes of evil who hate themselves for their failure but who use that conscience as the prod to stand up and say positively, "I will arise and go." There is a penitence that does some good!

There is an appalling amount of sin in social and public life of which we are ashamed. We of the democracies have come to the end of the line in some matters. Retribution awaits us for our treatment of minorities, our neglect of so many. In Japan, people there have been shocked that American soldiers can read so little and others are rejected because they can not read or write. All Japanese kids are required to learn to read and write their language, they say! Yet, are we ashamed enough to really make literacy possible to all the people of our land - even the remotest hill-billy? Shall we arise and do something about the fact that some people can not register at many hotels, solely because of texture of skin, shape of facial features or ancestry revealed in name? We have not long to decide.

But whatever we do as a people depends basically upon what we are as persons. We must be measurably forgiven, right-seeking souls if we are to be right-influenced citizens.

Do you suppose that prodigal young man, scarred by his wasted opportunity and his riotous living, but nonetheless penitent and forgiven, was not an altogether different fellow? I suspect that all the rest of his days he had an understanding of boys and their dreams, with young men and their problems. He must have had a fine sense of human dignity, and moral rectitude; of integrity of character, of personal humility. For he learned to capitalize on his failures by the power of genuine penitence, penitence which led him to "arise and go."

We are all, to a degree in our personal lives, like that fellow -- prodigal and a son or daughter. And loathing our swine-tending we do well to confess as he did, "I am really a son," underneath all this moral failure, "that is what I really am! ‘I will arise and go to my father.’"

And that Father is One whose promise still stands not to cast out any one who pleads His forgiveness in sincerity.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, March 7, 1954.