2] Holy Obedience
---1] Meister Eckhart wrote:
"There are plenty to follow our Lord half-way, but not the other half. They will give up possessions, friends and honors, but it touches them too closely to disown themselves."
It is just this astonishing life which is willing to follow Him the other half, sincerely to disown itself, this life which intends complete obedience, without any reservations, that I would propose to you in all humility, in all boldness, in all seriousness. I mean this literally, utterly, completely, and I mean it for you and for me—commit your lives in unreserved obedience to Him.
---2]
We have plenty of Quakers to follow God the first half of the way. Many of us have become as mildly and as conventionally religious as were the church folk of three centuries ago, against whose mildness and mediocrity and passionlessness George Fox and his followers flung themselves with all the passion of a glorious and a new discovery and with all the energy of dedicated lives. In some, says William James, religion exists as a dull habit, in others as an acute fever. Religion as a dull habit is not that for which Christ lived and died.
--3]
Some men come into holy obedience through the gateway of profound mystical experience.
It is an overwhelming experience to fall into the hands of the living God, to be invaded to the depths of one's being by His presence, to be, without warning, wholly uprooted from all earth-born securities and assurances, and to be blown by a tempest of unbelievable power which leaves one's old proud self utterly, utterly defenseless, until one cries, "All Thy waves and thy billows are gone over me" . Then is the soul swept into a Loving Center of ineffable sweetness, where calm and unspeakable peace and ravishing joy steal over one. And one knows now why Pascal wrote, in the center of his greatest moment, the single word, "Fire."
--4]
Do not mistake me. Our interest just now is in the life of complete obedience to God, not in amazing revelations of His glory graciously granted only to some. Yet the amazing experiences of the mystics leave a permanent residue, a God-subdued, a God-possessed will. States of consciousness are fluctuating. The vision fades. But holy and listening and alert obedience remains, as the core and kernel of a God-intoxicated life, as the abiding pattern of sober, workaday living. And some are led into the state of complete obedience by this well-nigh passive route,
wherein God alone seems to be the actor and we seem to be wholly acted upon. And our wills are melted and dissolved and made pliant, being firmly fixed in Him, and He wills in us.
But in contrast to this passive route to complete obedience most people must follow what Jean-Nicholas Grou calls the active way, wherein we must struggle and, like Jacob of old, wrestle with the angel until the morning dawns, the active way wherein the will must be subjected bit by bit, piecemeal and progressively, to the divine Will.
But the first step to the obedience of the second half is the flaming vision of the wonder of such a life, a vision which comes occasionally to us all, through biographies of the saints, through the journals of Fox and early Friends, through a life lived before our eyes, through a haunting verse of the Psalms—"Whom have I in heaven but Thee?
And there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee"
- —through meditation upon the amazing life and death of Jesus,
- through a flash of illumination or, in Fox's language,
a great opening.
But whatever the earthly history of this moment of charm, this vision of an absolutely holy life is, I am convinced, the invading, urging, inviting, persuading work of the Eternal One.
--5]
the second step to holy obedience is this:
Begin where you are. Obey now. Use what little obedience you are capable of, even if it be like a grain of mustard seed.
Begin where you are. Live this present moment, this present hour as you now sit in your seats, in utter, utter submission and openness toward Him.
Listen outwardly to these words, but within, behind the scenes,
in the deeper levels of your lives where you are all alone with God the Loving Eternal One,
keep up a silent prayer, "Open thou my life. Guide my thoughts where I dare not let them go. But Thou darest. Thy will be done." Walk on the streets and chat with your friends. But every moment behind the scenes be in prayer, offering yourselves in continuous obedience.
---6]
- No average goodness will do, no measuring of our lives by our fellows,
- but only a relentless, inexorable divine standard.
- No relatives suffice;
- only absolutes satisfy the soul committed to holy obedience.
- Absolute honesty, absolute gentleness, absolute self-control, unwearied patience and thoughtfulness in the midst of the raveling friction of home and office and school and shop.
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- I have in mind something deeper than the simplification of our external programs,
- our absurdly crowded calendars of appointments through which so many pantingly and frantically gasp.
- These do become simplified in holy obedience,
- and the poise and peace we have been missing can really be found.
- But there is a deeper, an internal simplification of the whole of one's personality,
- stilled, tranquil, in childlike trust listening ever to Eternity's whisper, walking with a smile into the dark.
- This amazing simplification comes
- when we "center down,"
- when life is lived with singleness of eye, from a holy Center where the breath and stillness of Eternity are heavy upon us and we are wholly yielded to Him.
- Some of you know this holy, recreating Center of eternal peace and joy and live in it day and night.
- Some of you may see it over the margin and wistfully long to slip into that amazing Center where the soul is at home with God. Be very faithful to that wistful longing.
---7]
Hasten unto Him who calls you in the silences of your heart.
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