“HOW OFTEN WOULD I …….AND YOU WOULD NOT!”

LUKE 13:34

When our Lord was on this earth, He was all the while trying to show us that there is a higher life everywhere, appealing to us, but being refused.

The parable of the good Samaritan illustrates this.

Lying in the roadway is the robbed and wounded man: A priest comes by, and sees him, but refuses to help.

Then a Levite passes by in similar refusal.

Next, a Samaritan comes by, and sees the half dead victim is a Jew, one of the peoples detested by those who are Samaritan, yet he responds with a compassion that overleaps racial animosities.

The Priest and the Levite, notwithstanding their religious appearance and profession, refused the appeal of the higher, bigger more divine realm which is everywhere around and appealing to us; but the Samaritan responded despite obstacles of racial antipathy.

The priest and the Levite saved themselves much inconvenience, but they also refuse “the kingdom” and missed the greatest joy we can know on this earth.

We see the same thing in the parable of the sheep and the goats: “Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not unto Me.” (Matthew 25:33-46)

The tragic, damning feature is not active committing of evil, but of selfish refusal of the higher, which at last is exposed as refusal of Christ Himself.

There it is: The kingdom of heaven is everywhere around us, beckoning, appealing, in daily incidents, situations, and opportunities.

It is our sense of having refused what might have been which cast such gloomy reproach over us as we look back.

We have allowed the evil to keep us from the good; the good to keep us from the better, and the better to keep us from the best.

We have allowed selfish refusals to keep us from richest self-fulfillment and mystic communion with the “King in His beauty.”

We must drag out those innate attitudes of refusal.

Our psycho-analysts do not speak of sin, but they insist that the worst enemies to peace of mind lurk in the subconscious, and that we must drag them up to conscious exposures if we are to conquer them.

That then is close to Plato’s dictum of “the lie in the soul?”

We should guard against becoming morbidly introspective,but an occasional crisis of dragging these sub-conscious refusals to light is a wholesome necessity.

Drag the skulking Agags of pride, snobbery, fear, prejudice, green envy, the ugliness of grudge to light, and hack them into pieces!

These are the hidden emotions that trick us into refusing the meek, lowly, brave, noble, generous, lovely, Christ like life which we know we ought to live

Thank God, there is blood-bought absolution from all the accumulated culpability of the past; and if we will fling wide the portals of our inner life to the risen Lord Jesus, He will work gracious miracles in our nature, so that the shining ideal may indeed become the daily reality.