1/19/66

Strength Enough 1/19/66

Scripture: Isaiah 40: 27-31

“They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;

they shall mount up with wings as eagles,

They shall run and not be weary,

they shall walk and not faint.”

I want today to bring a message of simple faith; I commend to you a sure trust. There is power for your living; there is strength enough for your tasks.

Let us begin with a reference to Harry Golden and his Jewish mother. Harry writes that his father was the kind of man who loved a lot of talk about the Jewish law and its fine points. He liked to gather 5 or 6 men about him in a kind of philosophy discussion which really split hairs to a fine point.

Harry says that his mother was, by comparison, a primitive woman. She could read the prayers out of the book, but that was all she could read. She spent all her time cooking and cleaning and sewing -- looking after her household. She was probably amused at the erudite discussions of her husband and his friends, and (while, of course, she respected the learned utterances of the great men) Harry thinks that she was not unduly impressed. He suspects that she regarded those heavy discussion as nonsense, at least for her.

“What does a person need, but God? And she had God!” Harry writes. “Sometimes I smile at all the goings-on over the radio about God. Whose God are they talking about, anyway? What do they know about God? My mother,” he says, “talked with God all the time, actual conversations.”

She would send one of the boys on an errand. As he was ready to dart out into the dangerous, crowded, swift-traffic street, she would turn her face up and say, “Now see that he’s all right.” She smiled at the boy; but when she looked up she was “dead serious.”

She took for granted a matter-of-fact covenant between herself and God. In the home, the boy was her obligation. But once he got out on the street, she apparently felt like saying to God, “That’s your department, and be sure to see to it.” She covered every expression concerning the future with the clause, “With God’s help.” If a boy ran down the hall, calling back to mother that he was going to the library, she would chase after him with the covering clause, “With God’s help.”

The idea of God’s help covered every phase of the family life, in her experience. If a dish, cooked for dinner, turned out well, did she take the credit for it? Hardly! She said it was an act of God. God helped her to cook and sew and clean.

Harry Golden says that sometimes you wonder about it when one thinks of his mother’s potato latkes (pancakes) and holishkas (small portions of dough folded around chopped beef, boiled, and then dropped into a steaming hot platter of golden chicken soup.) “I will say this,” he observes, “If God did not really help her prepare those dishes (as she claimed) how is it that I haven’t been able to find anything to equal them in all these years? This is the kind of evidence that would even stand up in a court of law!”

Granted that he writes with a whimsical bit of humor, this skillful comment on his mother’s sure trust is most appealing, isn’t it? Apparently she never ran out of the faith that was essential for effective, creative living!

If we live in times that are demanding and difficult (and we do) we need some such trust. Our ledger of living may run into the red because we undertake too much, assume too weighty responsibilities, overextend ourselves. And our generation does demand heavy output from decent folk. We people can not conscientiously live, unburdened by mankind’s agony, and do nothing about it. Our faith has to be equal to the demands of the time. And it can be, if we know its source, and lay hold upon it, and live confidently by it.

Jesus had a way of dealing with his disciples when he saw them overstrained and fatigued. He called them aside to replenish, in solitude, their spent resources. And that hard-driven little group of his first followers would come back from their associations with him filled with wide margins of reserve around their daily need. They found in him deeps wells from which to draw their strength and courage. They learned from him the secret of living at its best.

“Lord, what a change within us one short hour

Spent in Thy presence, will prevail to make!”

This opening to his spirit, this regular worship of His Father and ours, in this place of prayer, is one of the means by which “He restoreth our souls.”

At the vital center of the Christian life is this divine-human encounter, this direct access of the soul to God. From it comes inward reinforcement. With it comes confidence that strength and power are available in personal living and in social tasks.

Jesus had then, and has still, a way of leading his followers to the experiences of those great Old Testament souls like Ezekiel, exiled in Babylon, but crying out, “The Spirit entered into me --- and set me upon my feet;” [Ezekiel 2: 2]; and like the Psalmist, facing evil-doers seemingly intent on devouring his very flesh, yet writing “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” [Psalm 27: 1]; and like Isaiah, confronting national disaster, saying, “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.” [Isaiah 40: 31].

It was after those few precious years that Jesus walked the earth in the flesh that Paul, giving himself to, and being possessed by, Christ’s spirit, found his dependable reliance: “Strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man.” [Ephesians 3: 16]. For such people, religion was not simply a creed about God; for them, religion is an intimate relationship with God; not simply theistic theory, but the personal experience of an environing Presence, whence the soul draws courage and strength.

This vital faith of personal experience in the environing Presence of God, whence the soul draws courage and strength, is not a withdrawal into comfort and ease, because such faith takes for granted (1) the tragedy of human life; (2) the sin and stupidity of man: (3) the catastrophe and turmoil of nations. Such faith is not founded on the niceness of the world, but on inward awareness of adequate power to confront the world, despite all the devil in mankind, and the hellishness of circumstance.

Our great need of the Biblical experience of faith is illumined when we watch the actions of those who lack that faith. Some are rebellious, and they shake a fist in the face of an antagonistic universe. There was a certain mother, turning back to empty living after the funeral of her only son, who said to her minister, “It’s all right! It’s all right! He is well out of this accursed world.” She was not triumphant; she was defiant, just daring a hostile cosmos to make her cringe or cry.

Some sit in a seat of judgment and vent their righteous indignation at this wicked world. Mark Twain was usually astute and often refreshingly funny in his observations. Now and then he “got his craw filled” with the orneriness of the world. Once he wrote to a friend of his: “I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning --- well knowing that I shall find in it the usual depravities and baseness and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and causing me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race.” His mood may show forth a righteous and useful conscience, but it does not by itself reveal any constructive power.

There are others who try stoic indifference to the apparent meaninglessness of the universe. They are determined, nonetheless, to get the most possible out of it. One can salute the buoyant spirit of the fellow who can regard life as comedy, or high tragedy or plain farce and still enjoy it. But if these sum up life’s meaning, the profoundest of human experiences still go unaccounted for.

Yet others decide to disregard any superhuman or extra-mortal reliance. They will let theism and atheism fight it out. Without any faith concerning what Reality is, they center attention and effort on what mankind ought to be and to do. One can applaud so brave an attempt; but in the long run, the eternal truth will not dawn; that the “ought” depends on what “is,” both for its ideals and for the power to make possible the fulfillment of its ideals. (To the young man who has said to me that he is going concentrate simply of doing good in the world, I have commented that I hope that he recognizes yet what is the source of his ideas as to what is good!)

Still others are simply bewildered, just not knowing what life amounts to. They may say, “We strut our tiny hour on the stage and leave the universe without ever having discovered what the play is about.” To which the Christian insistently inquires, is this all that life amounts to?

As we look, then, to where vital faith is lacking, we see some who are defiant, some indignant, some just doggedly trying to make the best of senseless existence; some working hard to promote goodness in a world where goodness seems only an accidental intruder; some just frustrated and cynical. These states of mind are quite familiar.

But over against them, consider Paul, one who had tapped resources of power beyond himself. He too had lived in a frustrating era. He was in a Roman prison. He knew a lot about mankind’s desperate predicament. But he wrote this: “I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound; in any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want. I can do all things in him who strengthens me.” [Philippians 4: 12-13]. This is Paul speaking out of his strong and vital Christian faith.

You may say, “That is fine; it is great to have such resourceful character. But that is Paul, not me. How does he get that way? How can I be like that?” And it may be true that we can not just blow on our hands and hoist ourselves into a belief which, to the intellect, seems incredible. Probably we can no more seize upon, or “make” such a faith, than we could pull ourselves up by our own shoelaces. We don’t go and “get” faith, like something we can grab; we receive it when it is given to us by God. The possibility of receiving a strong faith is underlined by 4 or 5 observations which Harry Emerson Fosdick has pointed out.

(1) Man has an inborn capacity to be inspired. In this respect, he is like a ship going into a lock in order to cross some land by way of a river or a canal. The ship enters the lock and pauses. It is lifted to a higher lever, not by any power of its own but by the inpouring of water around it from above. In some such way, our spirits can be raised by an influx from beyond ourselves, until, upon a higher or better level, they move out again.

(2) Man has an inborn capacity for worship. We are made not simply to look down or to look around us, but to look up to distant horizons, and beyond. And healing hours of restoration come when, in receptive reverence and awe, we “love the highest when we see it.”

(3) Man has an inborn capacity for spiritual fellowship. Our souls are homes where we can welcome guests, unseen but real, in whose fellowship we find peace and power.

(4) Man has an inborn capacity to experience transforming invasions of power that make life all over. Babies are born but once. Souls can be repeatedly reborn. A young man in real moral disaster went to a well-known pastor with his problems. He said to the minister, “I do not believe in God, but if you do, for God’s sake pray for me, for I need it.” In his consultation, he found himself aided at length to work through to a victory which his unaided strength could not have won. When he was sure of that, he exclaimed: “If ever you find a person who does not believe in God, send him to me. I know now.”

(5) Man has an inborn capacity to be a channel of spiritual dynamic from beyond himself. The great souls have done their work feeling that it was being done not so much by them as through them. They were not cisterns of power. They were more like artesian wells that keep on flowing, unexhausted, and replenished from hidden depths after the drought has dried up the cisterns and reservoirs for mile around.

This, then, is the source of strength for our difficult times; just as our bodies draw physical strength from the physical world around us, so there is a spiritual environment, with which we can live in vital contact, and from which we can draw replenishing power. Whoever understands this has entered into the profoundest experience of the Christian life. Paul described it when he said: “The spirit of God dwells in you.” [Romans 8: 9]. Jesus referred to it when he spoke of going into the closet or quiet place, shutting the door and praying to the Father who sees in secret. [Matthew 6: 6]. Call it what we will, the reality of this enriching experience has behind it the confident testimony of the race’s greatest souls, and of numberless humble people who have lived in its power.

In our search for faith, we try, age after age, to define it. We read, or read of, the current theologies, and try to build our own. And that is well. It is good for the mind to wrestle over theological ideas. But theological systems wax and wane. Whatever is the popularly accepted one now will be laid aside after its newness has worn off in favor of another. They will probably continue to do so as man continues to discover that he does not have it all reasoned out.

The wise Christian is humble about his theology. Our theories concerning the realm of the spirit are partial, incomplete. But all is not dubiousness and uncertainty. So long as we hold that God is what is eternally true, and that that verity is the Father of our spirits, even when our understanding of it varies or grows, we are beside the stream of power. Like a tree planted beside it, we can thrust our roots into it and draw life from it. Our souls have an unseen Friend, an invisible companion; as Jesus said, “I am not alone, but I and my Father.” [John 8: 16].

Ours is a generation that tries men’s souls. It puts many a person into a Gethsemane where, like our Lord, one cries out, “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” [Luke 22: 42]. Let that presence be so vividly real that each of us can still say with him: “Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done” [Luke 22: 42] and rise strong enough to carry whatever be the cross that is thrust upon us or to perform the mission which God assigns us to do.

Perhaps we start with second-hand religion. We hear about its verities; we are taught; we ask about what others have known and experienced. But let each one move on into first-hand religion, born simply of vital experience with Christ, until we can say, “Here am I; send me,” knowing that every person is commissioned with his vocation to live it in dedication to God’s good purposes.

I can’t lay hold on a given quantity of faith and serve it up to you like a generous portion of bread or meat. You can’t do that for your friend. But you can be found standing with your friend in the right place, at the right time, to receive God’s blessing of renewal and encouragement and strength, if you will assemble regularly, expectantly, with other seekers in the house of worship.

His speaking to your need may be through the beauty of a lovely window; His message may come out of some thought in a sermon; He may speak a direct word to you out of the reading and hearing of His holy word; He may fill you with renewal from the strains of splendid music; He may call you name in love out of the silence of meditation; He may open His holy presence to you in the sacraments; He may excite you to finer service as you leave His sanctuary.

Come, then, faithfully seeking His presence. “Seek the Lord while He may be found. Call upon Him while He is near.” Let Him meet you in His way, for that is how we find and renew a faith for the tough and demanding days of our life.

Let us pray: O Lord God, we have come here in the name of Christ. Let us go out of here blessed by, and made strong in, His spirit.

Amen.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, January 19, 1966.

Also at Wood County Infirmary, February 2, 1966.

Also at Waioli Hui’ia Church, May 12, 1974.