Vital Choices - Pride or Repentance 3/14/43

Scripture: Luke 3: 4-16

Texts: Joshua 24: 15 “choose you this day whom ye will serve”

Lamentations 3: 40 “Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to the Lord.”

The key to change is choice. And man has the key! It is at once a terrible fact, and a hopeful fact, that we hold in our grasp such possibility. But, for weal or woe, we can choose much of the direction which life may take. At the center of man’s personality is his ability to determine whether his God-given possibilities shall amount to anything, or not.

Of course it must be admitted that our personal choices are limited in certain ways. They are limited by heredity. One who is endowed with a strong body may not need to seek success by the same techniques as does one with a weak physique. Some people seem created with the mental aptitudes which produce a good engineer; others with native ability in musical appreciation or other art. Heredity seems one of the factors which helps to set the direction of our lives.

And certainly environment limits the power of choice. There is usually a difference between the youngster who grows up in the streets of a city slum and one who grows up in the open of a midwestern farm; between one who is starved for food and one who is well fed; between one who has had no suitable mental stimulation and one who has had adequate education. The Australian bushman will hardly make the same choices as will the British Christian missionary. The people of much-bombed European cities will not smile with the same ease as those who have not known the terror.

But despite the limitations of heredity and environment, and the effect of many influences, man stands in the presence of options which are very real. In electing one of his options, he can and does determine the course which his development shall take.

If he chooses to set himself up as some sort of superior being, maintaining the desired status with all sorts of ruthlessness toward others, he becomes one sort of person, and changes his world in one sort of way. If he chooses to “live and let live,” he becomes a different sort of person. If he chooses to try to understand, and to try to serve the needs of other folk, he is still another person, doing his part to form another kind of world.

Joshua could see the children of Israel developing easy-going and self-centered habits of living as they enjoyed the fruits of a new land and worshipped all sorts of easily served gods and ideals. They could never, in this world, maintain the strength and integrity that would hold their place if they persisted in that direction. So, before he died, he gave his people a stern reminder that one God had led their lives through the dangers, and the years, that had brought them to a promised land.

Then, with prophetic insight and fervor, he laid before them a choice. “Choose you this day,” he said, “whom ye will serve.” And he pointed out several possibilities. They might worship as their enemies did; or they could worship as did some of their own less enlightened and less fortunate ancestors. But “as for me and my house” - here he indicates his own determined choice - “we will serve the Lord.”

Well, through ages of varying hereditary equipment and changing environment; with bodies strong or misshapen, splendidly adequate or perhaps mediocre; through floods and wars and disastrous setbacks of many sorts, those who, like Joshua, have chosen to serve the Lord have beaten a highway of spiritual progress.

The supreme revelation of God, given through the life of Jesus, illustrates the importance of man’s choices. Jesus assumed that man’s choice could move from the lower and self-centered to the higher and God-centered. He held that men could change, that they should change, and by his encouragement would change. And they did. Jesus depended upon the power of choice. He saw people choosing different ways. He saw some, like Peter, taking a hard upward trail to a victorious life. He saw some, like Judas, choose a lower level and defeat. He saw one sister so anxious to learn that she was oblivious to the usually accepted etiquette of caring for a guest, and another sister so anxious over the mechanics of hospitality that she had forgotten the best part of having a guest! [Luke 10: 38-42]. Jesus knew that the options of life were real, the results definite.

He had no disillusioned or cynical ideas of life. He came to it hopefully, expectantly. “He knew what was in man” and he believed that men could win over their adversities. He knew that a life could be remade, and he pointed out the direction in which it could go. He announced the glad and willing cooperation of God with anyone who would choose the right directions. “Whosoever will, let him come.” “If any man -- open the door, I will come in.” The power of God is available, in large part, by man’s choices. If we choose that good which we have the power to become, there is remarkable, divine assistance available in achieving it.

It is even possible for one who has made wrong choices to choose again that which will bring life out of wreckage. Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son illustrates it vividly. The younger son of a family chose wrongly. In pride and impatience, he wanted greedily that which seemed almost within his grasp. His choice carried him lower and lower. At last, after the buffetings of bitter experience and inner struggle, he chose to come back in penitence to his father and life took a new direction and a renewed quality. [Luke 15: 11-32].

Jesus saw the results of choice illustrated again and again. Mary the Magdalene became Mary the wholesome; Thomas the doubter became Thomas convinced.

Paul catches and repeats the attitude of Jesus. “Be ye not fashioned according to this world” (for his world was a corrupt world) “but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” [Romans 12: 2]. “Ye were once in darkness, but are now light in the Lord.” [Ephesians 5: 8].

It is a basic assumption of the Christian religion that life can be changed, and that God will change it for better, if man will cooperate by his choice. It would be well for us to remind ourselves, in this Lenten season, that our choices are vital. I want to make that a general theme for the sermons from now until Easter.

The preacher last Wednesday evening, the Rev. Edward A. Finn, sounded a chief note of Lent when he talked on repentance. Repentance is a first among our spiritual needs. It is not a pleasing note, but it is a gateway to Christian living. It is the only antidote for the poison of pride, or self-righteousness, which induces spiritual blindness. If we choose the way of self-righteous pride we close our eyes to the knowledge that we sin constantly and repeatedly and stand in constant need of divine mercy. Repentance is the only dosage which can counteract the evil. Because we dislike or fear it, or because of the stubbornness of our own pride we need to understand the meaning of repentance a little better.

Bishop G. Ashton Oldham has pointed out that repentance does not mean sorrow or remorse, though that is frequently present. Repentance means, literally, a change of mind, with a consequent change of action. It is a “right about face” from a wrong track, or a wrong direction, to a right track, in the right direction.

It is one of those true, but unsweetened, doctrines of the Christian faith that we are all sinners in need of repentance - if not guilty of the sins of commission, then of the sins of omission. Most of us are selfish, frequently lazy, often indulgent. We are stubborn, opinionated, jealous, unjustly critical, and what not. Even those who may feel fairly free from such sins know that they have failed in doing all the good they might, the deeds of kindness and mercy and loving forgiveness that come one’s way. Truly we must all confess, in the words of an old and much-used prayer, “We have done the things we ought not to have done and left undone the things we ought to have done.”

As a church, we need to repent. As a nation, we need to repent. As individual persons we need to repent. I need not try here to enumerate those specific sins from which we ought to do a “right about face.” That is the private business of every one of us as church members, as citizens - as individual persons. There is no better time than this season to search ourselves out honestly, fearlessly, relentlessly.

Are we willing to do something about the injustices and political corruption which we despise? Do we really want to see discriminations removed from class or race lines? Do we really wage war for the freedom of all people? Shall we overlook our own sins and grant self-forgiveness, in view of what we think are the worse sins of others? Do we believe in Christ’s gospel enough to spread it with zeal throughout the world? Shall we be stumped and stopped by oppositions or indifference? Are our ideals more important than our comforts? Do we really have faith, with our Lord, that “my meat is to do the will of Him that sent me?”

If you and I will choose the way of repentance and its discipline, we shall not lack a field for meditation nor a field for unbelievable change in action. “The way to power and influence is the way to reform.” Only so can we become fit instruments in God’s hands for furthering His completely right purposes.

Individuals, citizens, churchmen need to face shortcomings honestly and repent. Don’t flinch from it; choose it; for it is the way of salvation.

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Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, March 14, 1943

Union Lenten Service at First Moravian Church, Wisconsin Rapids, (first 7 pages) March 28, 1943

Planning Conference, Racine, April 23, 1946

C.W.M.A. May 14, 1946