Everything which is transferred from the kingdom of self to the kingdom of God has life in it -- eternal life. It has security in eternal security. Everything transferred from the kingdom of God to the kingdom of self has death in it -- eternal death.
Yesterday we saw a pastor dramatically step from life to death, but here is a pastor's wife who, though less dramatically, just as certainly stepped from life to death by stepping out of Christ into herself. She pulled me aside into the pastor's study and said: "Most of my life I've tried to charm people to myself. I've been the center of all I've done. Now everyone has found me out. Everything has tumbled around me. Even my little boy has found me out, and I've lost my influence with him." Her self taken out of Christ and made the center became insecure -- automatically.
This losing of God and self amid religious surroundings is depicted:
Cry aloud, spare not... declare to my people their transgression... Yet they see me daily, and delight to know my ways... they delight to draw near to God. "Why have we fasted, and thou seest it not? Why have we humbled ourselves, and thou takest no knowledge of it?" Behold, in the day of your fast you seek your own pleasure and oppress all your workers. Behold, you fast only to quarrel and fight (Isaiah 58:1-4).
Here a very religious people had inwardly stepped out of God into themselves -- "You seek your own pleasure." Therefore the heavens were brass, and religion turned into a vast futility. The futility turned to fight. Out of sorts with God, they became out of sorts with themselves and others -- "You fast only to quarrel and fight." The center was self and the circumference disorder.
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Eli Stanley Jones was a 20th century Methodist Christian missionary and theologian. He is remembered chiefly for his interreligious lectures to the educated classes in India, thousands of which were held across the Indian subcontinent during the first decades of the 20th century.
Jones was born in Baltimore, Maryland. After attending Asbury University, he became a missionary in the Methodist Episcopal Church. He traveled to India and began working with the lowest castes, including Dalits. He became close friends with many leaders in the Indian Independence movement, and became known for his interfaith work. He said, "“Peace is a by-product of conditions out of which peace naturally comes. If reconciliation is God’s chief business, it is ours—between man and God, between man and himself, and between man and man.” He was nominated for Nobel Peace Prize for his reconciliation work in Asia, Africa, and between Japan and the United States.