2022.04.15 Following The Second Half

Following the Second Half

Tonight I’ll be quoting broad passages from a sermon Thomas Kelly delivered in 1939, titled “Holy Obedience”.

Fourteenth Century Christian “do-gooder” 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.”

Kelly adds:

Only now and then comes a man or a woman who, like [St.] Francis of Assisi, is willing to be utterly obedient, to go the other half, to follow God’s faintest whisper. But when such a commitment comes in a human life, God breaks through, miracles are wrought, world-renewing divine forces are released, history changes. There is nothing more important now than to have the human race endowed with just such committed lives.

If there was nothing so important in 1939, how much more important is this today? We are desperate for God to break through, bring miracles, renew the world, release his divine forces and change the trajectory of our history! Amen?!?!

Kelly continues:

Now is the time to say, ‘Thou are the man.’ To this extraordinary life I call you – or HE calls you through me – not as a lovely ideal, a charming pattern to aim at hopefully, but as a serious, concrete program of life, to be lived here and now, in industrial America … by you and by me. This is something wholly different from mild, conventional religion which, with respectable skirts held back by dainty fingers, anxiously tries to fish the world out of the mudhole of its own selfishness. Our churches, our meeting houses are full of such respectable and amiable people. We have plenty…to follow God the first half of the way. 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 [Jesus] Christ lived and died.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned”: I have followed Jesus halfway many times in my life…and even in recent days I recognize some cold corners that still remain in my heart. Most of the time, I seek to follow a little more than halfway and take the occasion to congratulate myself on being further along than most. My version of the ‘dull habit’ may be different than someone else’s, but even my dull habit is not that for which Jesus Christ lived and died.

Back to Kelly:

There is a degree of holy and complete obedience … that is breathtaking. Difference of degree passes over into utter difference of kind, when one tries to follow Him the second half!

Jesus said, “… you must be born again” (John 3:3). Paul wrote, “If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature ...” (2 Corinthians 5:17). This following the second half is much more ingrained in Christianity than we likely realize, and it’s certainly more ingrained in Christianity than our lives would demonstrate.

Kelly continues with the story of George Fox. Fox was a British preacher in the 1600s who helped organize the fledgling Quaker movement in England and North America:

Fox as a youth was religious enough to meet all earthly standards and was even proposed as a student for the ministry. But the insatiable God-hunger in him drove him from such mediocrity into a passionate quest for the real whole-wheat Bread of Life. … Thinking him crazy, [his family] took him to a doctor to have his blood let – the equivalent of being taken to a psychiatrist in these days.

The life that intends to be wholly obedient, wholly submissive, wholly listening, is astonishing in its completeness. Its joys are ravishing, its peace profound, its humility the deepest, its power world-shaking, its love enveloping, its simplicity that of a trusting child. It is the life and power in which the prophets and apostles lived. It is the life and power of Jesus of Nazareth, who knew that "[When your eye is sincere, your whole body is full of light also.-LEB]" (Luke 11: 34). … It is a life and power that can break forth in this tottering Western culture and return the Church to its rightful life as a fellowship of creative, heaven-led souls.

Do we need such a life and power in today’s Western culture?

Let’s continue and see what Kelly calls the “Gateway Into Holy Obedience”:

In considering one gateway into this life of holy obedience, let us dare to venture together into the inner sanctuary of the soul, where God meets man in awful immediacy.

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 … without warning …

There stand the saints of the ages, their hearts open to view, and lo, their hearts are our heart and their hearts are the heart of the Eternal One. The Holy One is over all and in all, exquisitely loving, infinitely patient, tenderly smiling. Marks of glory are upon all things…where can one look and not see Him? Field and stream and teeming streets are full of Him. Yet as Moses knew, no man can look on God and live–live as his old self. … One knows ever after that the Eternal Lover of the world, the Hound of Heaven, is utterly, utterly real, and that life must [hereafter] be forever determined by that Real. … We are reduced, as it were, to nothing … for He is all.

Kelly argues that this following is not something we passively seek out. Rather, we actively and passionately seek to follow the second half:

Not reluctantly but with [fervor] one longs to follow Him the second half. 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. … The vision fades. But holy and listening and alert obedience remains …

In contrast to [the] passive route … people must follow what Jean-Nicholas Grou calls the active way. We must struggle and like Jacob of old, wrestle with the angel until morning dawns. The active way wherein the will must be subjected bit by bit, piecemeal and progressively, to the divine will.

In other words, this following the second half is not a passive approach to faith, and it is not a one-time decision. Seeking the second half requires a constant surrender of ourselves one-piece-at-a-time.

What do we have to do to prepare for such a surrender? Nothing:

Once having the vision [of a wholly surrendered life], the second step to holy obedience is this: Begin where you are. Obey now! Use what little obedience you are capable of. … Begin where you are. Live this present moment, this present hour as you now sit in your seats, in 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 my life. Guide my thoughts where I dare not let them go. But You dare. Thy will be done.”

Every moment behind the scenes be in prayer, offering yourselves in continuous obedience. It is well to use a single sentence, repeated over and over and over again: “Make your will mine. Make your will mine.” Or [“I surrender all to You. I surrender all to You.” Or “Help me see your vision. Help me see your vision.”] This hidden prayer life can pass, in time, beyond words and phrases … Words may cease and one stands and walks and sits and lies in wordless attitudes of adoration and submission.

The third step in holy obedience … is this: If [When?] you slip and stumble and forget God for an hour, and assert your old proud self, and rely upon your own clever wisdom, don’t spend too much time in anguished regrets and self-accusations but begin again, just where you are.

Don’t let your blunders waste even more time by beating yourself up or lamenting the depth of your failings. Learn from your stumbles…get back up and start walking. Begin again, just where you are.

Finally, Kelly gives a warning:

Don’t grit your teeth and clench your fists and say, “I will! I will!” Relax. Submit yourself to God. Learn to live in the passive voice – a hard saying for Americans – and let life be willed through you.

You see…”I will!” is not obedience. It’s work. And true obedience isn’t such hard work. I said earlier that we are desperate for God to bring miracles, renew the world, release his divine forces and change the trajectory of our history. Obedience is relaxing into submission to the God who wants so urgently to do exactly that.

If we as individuals, as a Church, and as a society seem to be spinning our wheels or driving in reverse, perhaps it’s because we’ve only been following halfway…or maybe a little more than halfway. Let’s join together tonight to Begin where we are! Let’s start following the second half and see if God doesn’t bring about a renewal…first in us, then in the Church, then in our community, and ultimately throughout the world. “Surely we can’t change the world from this little spot on the map.” Changing the world ... begins with you and with me changing.

In a minute, I’m going to invite you to write the sins that keep you from following the second half on a piece of paper and nail it to the cross. In the context of Good Friday, there’s something powerful about hearing the sound of a hammer hitting the nail. It’s shocking and comforting at the same time.

I do this every Good Friday because it’s a powerful act of the will. Thomas Kelly reminded us that following Jesus the whole way is not an act of the will, though. Tonight, let’s make this an act of submission … an act of obedience.

After tonight’s service, I’ll remove all of the paper, and your sins will be burned. No one will see them but you and the Lord.

What does God want you to leave behind tonight? Don’t worry about the work it may take for you to leave it behind. Submit to God’s working through you and commit to following the second half of the way.

[explain process]