10/24/54
Christian Spirit and World Order
Scripture: Romans 8: 28-39
The world is in a state of considerable disorder. Official pronouncements, resolutions, and the like, refer to “troubled times,” “disturbed days,” “critical years.” The peoples of the earth are in the midst of a long-term revolution, and the way of life for millions is changing, -- for better or worse -- but changing. Much of the world is spiritually ill. It has been “under surgery.” We of the present generation wait in mingled anxiety and hope that the patient will survive and return to health.
What if the pulse and heart-beat of our civilization should falter and stop? Do we have at hand the techniques and medical injections that may revive it again? Do we have the stimulants that can quicken that pulse and make it steady again?
On this World Order Sunday, at the end of United Nations Week, we may well ask: “Does our Christian religion have the kind of injection needed to revive the heart of our civilization?” The answer is “Yes!” This injection has three major ingredients.
1) The first one is a persistent and undiscouraged faith in God --- a faith in His purposes for our world. A distinguished theologian (John Bennett) reminds us that, whatever else may be true of God, He is more than human. He is prior to man. He is the Being to which we owe our existence. The universe depends upon Him, and not He upon the universe. This conviction that this is God’s world is a fundamental conviction of our Christian faith.
“Man is only a tenant in God’s world.” Each of us lives here only by God’s leave. All of us are here by His purpose and all of us could be removed from this scene in an instant of the cosmic will. While here, we use God’s powers; we employ God’s raw materials; we live on God’s time. Man may be able to split the atom, but he cannot create even one atom of sulfur or of uranium or of hydrogen. Man has no power to determine such things as the operation of the law of gravity. He operates within the limits of his five senses and the interpretations he is able to make of what he thus senses.
This is not man’s world; it is God’s world, created by His purpose, and remaining under His command, no matter what His creatures may do. We undoubtedly interfere with His purposes by our stupidity and sin. The greed of whole nations delays the expression of God’s will. But even so, “we live in a world where evil makes the noise, but where righteousness wins the final victories.” Let enough people be motivated by this conviction, and the world’s ragged pulse and disordered heart will beat more regularly again. This is the kind of faith that can purge the soul of weak-kneed cowardice. It can fortify the heart against despair at the world’s terrible tragedy.
This is the kind of faith that activated the witnessing Reformation. It accounts for the remarkable staying power of our spiritual forefathers. They could sing --- and mean it --- “Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also. The body they may kill; God’s truth abideth still; His kingdom is forever.” This kind of vital, fighting, undiscouraged faith generates the creative energy that can help to bring order out of the world chaos. It inoculates against the malady of materialism and atheistic secularism which plagues our time. It inoculates us with resistance to the notion that wars are “inevitable,” and that good will between nations of differing ideologies is impossible. It helps us surmount the barriers of race and class and nationality.
Our faith, that God’s Kingdom is forever, is medication for the soul, resisting these tragic infections, and bringing us to health. God’s will cannot ultimately be defeated. He is our refuge and strength, and a very present help in time of trouble. Our struggles for world order are neither lost nor futile since “the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.” And if God be for us, who can be against us. “Nay in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.” [Romans 8: 37].
2) In the second place, we assert that this injection of faith, this restorative stimulant, is made even more potent when mixed with a second ingredient -- that of full obedience. If we really trust our destiny to the central conviction that God is at the helm of events, then we must declare boldly to the word that, to recover, it must obey the will of God.
This ailing, gasping world is surrounded by physicians and surgeons of statecraft who disagree on diagnosis. One insists that the disunity of Europe has brought on the disease; another says that communism is the trouble; yet another blames the lack of military preparedness. Another vehemently maintains that the economic systems of man are wrong and must be changed. Still another says that the world’s health can be restored and maintained only by the manipulative methods of politics. And all this time the patient’s life ebbs dangerously low.
But the Christian religion has the audacity to say -- and its followers have the audacity to live by the saying -- that our basic troubles are due to something else. Without recognizing this, it is quite futile to treat mere symptoms.
The Bible points out repeatedly, and from diverse angles of experience, that our troubles spring from our perfidy, our lack of obedience, our divided loyalty, our defection from God. Man gets himself into all kinds of trouble when he worships the wrong god -- some idol of his own choosing or creation, when he offers loyalty and obedience to lesser deities.
Worries and confusions, tyrannies and wars, the whole range of troubles that finally land our world in the operating room, are the result of apostasy -- that is, turning away from God in disobedience and willfulness, ignoring the demands of His righteous will, and following too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.
The Old Testament makes vivid, in many stories, the truth that spiritual health and happiness depends on obedience to the will of God. Take one of the stories of Joshua’s time. It is told in ancient, and very stern, language, and it deals, of course, with an ancient situation. But its lesson is contemporary. According to this story, the Hebrew people, just out of slavery in Egypt, had invaded Canaan, the Land of Promise. They were working desperately to establish themselves. They were greatly outnumbered; they were less skilled than their enemy in the science of war. Therefore the life of each Hebrew depended on the absolute fidelity of every other one. In a minor battle which they had expected to win easily, they suffered disastrous defeat. Humiliated and terrified, they searched, hastily and frantically, for an explanation.
Finally they discovered that one of their fighters, whose name was Achan, had been guilty of looting. This was in deliberate disobedience to God’s orders, for Jehovah had expressly forbidden the Hebrews to loot, says the account. Their leaders, therefore, attributed their loss to Achan’s disobedience and betrayal. So they dragged him, and all members of his household, from the camp, stoned them to death, and burned their bodies in an open field. [Joshua 7: 18-26].
This is a gory and ruthless story. But it pictures the way in which a race, in its infancy, made one basic fact unforgettable: obedience to spiritual laws, loyalty to spiritual values, undeviating faithfulness to God’s will is the prerequisite for national and personal well-being.
The basic problem confronting mankind today is not economic, nor militaristic, nor political -- though these are aggravated. But the basic problem is a religious problem. And our Christian faith confidently asserts that the answer today is the same as the answer in the time of Joshua and Achan; a forsaking of all our idols and lesser deities and a turning to God without reserve or compromise. God must be obeyed if we are to find and retain health in our world.
3) A third necessary ingredient in the injection is an unconditional dedication. Just as an undiscouraged faith leads to genuine obedience, so obedience leads to unreserved dedication that does not weaken under pressure nor withdraw with excuses under hardship.
80-odd years ago a San Francisco newspaper carried this advertisement: “Wanted: young wiry fellows not over 18. Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily. Apply Central Overland Express, Alta Building, Montgomery Street.” Nothing less than that attitude will compound the spiritual adrenaline to revive the world and assure its survival. We must stop playing at religion, and live it personally, audaciously, and - if necessary - hazardously, as a way of living.
Not long ago, I heard a minister, in a small gathering of ministers, raise this question again with himself: “Do I really believe in God? Do I really trust Him?” And each of us present heard the same question echo to his own soul: “Do I really believe and trust and obey God?” Do you?
If we believe in a political party, we support its platform and stand ready to vote for its candidates. If we believe in a bank, we are willing to trust our funds to its care. If we believe in God, we are willing to accept His judgments in the whole range of earthly existence. Then righteousness, not expediency, becomes our aim in matters of economics, social affairs, industrial relations, political positions, race relations, personal habits, international conduct. Believing in God means we are willing to accept His judgments, His righteousness, in the whole range of human activity and aspiration.
A man said that there was an unfortunate division of opinion in his church. And in discussing it with a neighbor he said, “I know which side of the issue is right and just, but one can’t afford to take sides in such matters. Too much is involved for one to stick his neck out.” Indeed! To put it very simply and in just such colloquial language, to believe in God means just that: being willing, if necessary, to stick one’s neck out for what is just and right. To believe in God does not mean alone affirming his Deity, not merely going to church and giving mental assent to a respectable amount of theological doctrine. It means a fixed determination to do God’s will, come what may, win or lose one’s neck, gladly trusting the outcome of our fondest hopes and most strenuous efforts to His keeping. Wanted: unconditionally dedicated persons, willing to risk their necks for God and His righteousness. Apply at your nearest church!
Clyde Yarbrough, who has suggested the form and much of the content of what I have shared with you today, reminds us that the present condition of the world’s health demands extraordinary heroism and absolute dedication. “When the world is at its worst, then Christians must be at their best.”
It was an experienced and prominent business man (of the somewhat hard-headed school, I judge) who remarked not long ago: “Man cannot find the right way without God’s leadership --- The more we all learn about the nature and purpose of God and our relation to Him, the nearer we will come to a proper solution of our problems.”
Well, there just is no other way. Why not take that way?
[See prayer] [end]
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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, October 24, 1954.