Chapter 7 

More Lessons in God Watching

Portrait Number One: The Ultimate Executive 

"The Lord executeth righteousness and judgment for all that are oppressed." - Psalm 103:6

The phrase "ultimate executive" has developed a new meaning for me. In recent years I reluctantly left the pastorate I had served for twenty-one years. I assumed the position of executive in a Christian organization. It called for new skills. It was a brand-new world. I had to learn, in fact, what an executive is.

Essentially I was told, "An executive is one who gets things done." He doesn't necessarily do them himself but he must see that the right things get done at the right time. That involves working with people, not merely working for them.

Soon my bookshelf groaned under a load of new books describing the effective executive. Not only were the dust jackets of these books different; the ideas within them were different as well. I kept looking for the things that all of them said, the common denominator of executive success.

Finally I found the unifying principle: Build on your strengths, not your weaknesses. Discover the strengths of others and build on them.

Does God do that? Exactly. Through all the inconsistencies and weaknesses of human beings, God works out his purpose. "All things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose" (Rom. 8:28). The world is in good hands.

How do you capture that feeling of confidence that makes it possible for you to bless the Lord "who executes righteousness and judgment for all who are oppressed"? What kind of picture can you frame for your personal gallery of blessing?

If you are a managerial person yourself, you might want to frame a picture like those in the business magazines. An expensively dressed executive is sitting at a large uncluttered desk. He is looking at an array of charts and graphs that show an upward graph-line. Things are going well.

Or you may want a picture of a giant orchestra playing all the instruments yet remaining under the control of the maestro's baton. Harmony is coming out of difference.

Whatever kind of picture you use to set your emotional mood, try to capture the feeling you would have if you were that person. Now bless God because he is in control. Through people -even you - he is getting things done. He is the ultimate executive.

Portrait Number Two: The Revealer 

"He made known his ways unto Moses, his acts unto the children of Israel." - Psalm 103:7

Everybody is a lot like Daniel Defoe's character Robinson Crusoe. We arrive on the earth with little knowledge of the world itself or who manages it, just as Robinson Crusoe landed on a strange island. Of course, Crusoe discovered right away that the island must have been inhabited, because he saw footprints in the sand. Following these he found another human being whom he called Friday, named for the day Crusoe met him.

Our discovery of God is like that. We see evidence of him in the world that he has made, we can literally trace his footprints in the sand. We follow his acts and we find him. According to the Hebrew poet, David, Moses learned of God's nature while the Hebrew people themselves merely know of his acts. It must be clear that God discloses himself to us to the degree that we are ready for that disclosure.

I really don't know what kind of picture to suggest for your blessing gallery. It ought to be a picture that suggests some way that God reveals himself. Perhaps it will be different for all of us. It could be a beautiful scene in the world of nature. Elizabeth Barrett Browning suggests,

Earth's crammed with heaven, 
And every common bush afire with God; 
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, 
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

You may want to catch the mood of the time you were desperate to find the answer to some question. Then miraculously God showed you the way to understand. Try to recapture the feeling you had. Remember how all the pieces fell together. It is a wonderful feeling. Thank God for it. Bless him.

Portrait Number Three: Mercy 

"The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy. 
He will not always chide: neither will he keep his anger forever." - Psalm 103:8-9

If you want to understand God, you must think of the most merciful thing you know. God is full of mercy. In contrast to the flinty attitude of "getting what is coming to me," Shakespeare observes in The Merchant of Venice, "The quality of mercy is not strained. It falls as the gentle dew from heaven."

That is beautiful, but it presents a problem. Who has seen the dew fall? How do you visualize it?

Naturally we can look at the grass that sparkles in the morning sunlight, but that does not really give us a feeling of mercy. Maybe the only way to feel the warmth of mercy is to feel deeply the need of it.

Imagine, for example, that you are a prisoner condemned to die in the gas chamber. For months you have lived with this chilling prospect. Then at the moment of your blackest despair in your gray-barred world you are told of a pardon, your pardon. In that instance you understand the feeling of mercy.

It wasn't as though you did not deserve punishment. Imagine you did. But in spite of your unworthiness you were given a second chance. Does this picture help you to understand God?

"He hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him." - Psalm 103:10-11

In order to bless the Lord it is not important that you know why God is merciful; it is important that you let yourself luxuriate in the warmth of that mercy.

There are other pictures you can hang in your gallery of blessing. Have you seen a painting of the women inspired by Florence Nightingale? These were women who moved like angels among the suffering men who had been wounded in battle. These women left the perfumed drawing rooms and sought out the hospital wards that were heavy with the odor of death. They were called "angels of mercy." It is a good thing to stand a long time in contemplation of God's mercy. There is nothing we need more. There is no word that can more quickly trigger our gratitude and blessing.

Bless God for his mercy.

Portrait Number Four: Forgetfulness 

"As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us." - Psalm 103:12 

I sit beside my silent fire 
And pray for wisdom yet, 
For wisdom to remember 
And courage to forget. 
                        -Sara Teasdale

My friends laugh at my lostness most of the time. "How do you expect to show people the way to heaven when you can't find your way to the post office?" they ask.

They have a point. But I have managed to get around in this world in spite of my poor sense of direction.

In 1948 1 began a trip around the world. Leaving San Francisco on a slow steamer, Ralph Starr and I made our way to China. Ralph is a born navigator. He can remember every turn in every road. We traveled by ship, plane, truck caravan, and finally by mule back into Tengchung, Yunan, West China. If I were to call him this moment, I feel sure he could describe every pagoda we passed. Not I.

We separated in Tengchung. He remained to help with the work of the hospital and eventually to help missionaries Dr. and Mrs. David Gaulke and Milton and Eleanor Buettner to escape. He was afraid I could not make it on my own. As we separated he gave me simple instructions, "Just keep on going west and you will get home all right."

Twelve months later I did. When I sailed into New York harbor to see if the stone lady was still carrying a torch for me-and for all the other poor, tired, huddled masses-I was still traveling west. When I finally took the Pennsylvania train from New York to Indiana I was still heading west. The east and west never meet.

A few months ago my wife and I were in Alaska. We were told that if we had time we could travel to the Arctic. I am not sure that I really want to do that. I am sure my wife, Berny, would. She has the soul of a gypsy. We did not go.

For a moment let us imagine that we travel north to the North Pole. At the time we cross that point we begin to travel south. Since the world is round, I don't really understand the difference, but it is there anyway. When you go far enough north you start heading south again. You can go east as long as you live and you will never be heading west.

Didn't David say that God has forgiven all our iniquities in the very first part of Psalm 103? Of course. Then why does he come back to talk about our "transgressions." Isn't this just another word for sin?

In a general way, yes. More specifically it isn't. Iniquity means the unconscious bent to miss the target, to pervert a . good thing. Transgression is a more vigorous, willful word. It means to "walk across, to violate, to go where you are not supposed to go and do what you are not supposed to do."

This needs a special kind of forgiveness. From a purely human point of view, it is one thing to overlook errors in situations in which people can't help themselves, but it is quite another matter to forgive people who really know better.

Stand for a moment in the warmth of God's mercy. He forgives our transgressions - the things we know we are doing wrong when we do them. The powerful word atonement echoes across the centuries. Like the base notes in the "song of redemption," atonement reverberates: "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all" (Isa. 53:6). What a blessed thought!

Even more thrilling than this is the fact that God forgets. To that never - never point where east and west meet-that is how far he has removed our transgressions from us.

If "to forgive is divine," what word shall we use for forget? There is none. Our problem is solved, however, when we realize that forget is the flip side of forgive. You cannot have one without the other. If forgiveness is real, forgetting is automatic. That is the nature of God. There are no tombstones in the cemetery where God buries our sins. No one can go and dig them up again-not even God himself. Bless him.

It should not be difficult to find pictures to hang in your gallery of blessing - pictures of the wonder of forgiving and forgetting. Perhaps the simple remembrance of the human tendency to forgive but not forget will help us be grateful to God for his kind of forgiveness.

From the human point of view it is easy to bury the hatchet as long as we leave the handle sticking up out of the ground so we can find it again. How different is God's love.

Can you visualize a chalkboard? On it are written all your transgressions. Then a merciful angel comes with an eraser and wipes away every mark. None is visible. But the angel is not satisfied. With a wet sponge she washes the chalkboard one more time, just to be sure. The marks will never be remembered again. Blessed thought.

If you want to be in the mood of blessing God, simply spend a little time in the gallery of blessing looking at some pictures that have come from your own album of "forgiving and forgetting." You will not see the face of God, but you will see his footprints. Walk in them.

Portrait Number Five: A God with Dirty Hands

"He knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust. - Psalm 103:14

Each of us is a strange mixture of dust and divinity. No matter how hard we may try to deny either part of us, we cannot. If we try to live as though we were totally physical, totally animal, our divinity cries out.

On the other hand, if we try to emphasize our divinity to the extent that we will not admit we are human, our humanity comes bursting through. You might say we are angels with dirty wings.

It is a good thing to remember that while we have trouble keeping these two sides of our nature balanced, God does not. He understands. Bless him. No matter how high we soar in our spiritual ambitions, God always smiles knowingly. Like Daedalus with the wax wings (Remember the man in the Roman legend? He wanted to fly to the sun.), when we get too high our wings droop and we fall to the earth. We are reminded one more time of our humanity. God never forgets. He remembers that we are dust.

I know a "dusty old story" that illustrates this. It is not a dirty story just dusty.

Five-year-old Jason had been to Sunday school. He was filled with questions. "Mother," he said, "our teacher told us that God made people out of dust. Is this true."

"Yes," she replied. "The Bible says that God made man out of the dust of the earth."

"Our teacher told us that when we die our bodies go back to the dust? Is this true?" the boy asked.

"Yes, that is true, too," the mother replied.

"Well," said the excited Jason, "Come and look under the bed; somebody is either coming or going."

There is a great deal of cleansing in that old story. What a prison we live in when we impose upon ourselves goals that God did not assign us. No wonder people live with the relentless whip of guilt over them. They have forgotten they are human.

If we were to believe all that is written about energy and vitality, we would feel guilty to take a nap.

In a world in which brightly colored books tell us of the "newest path to success and fulfillment," what do we do

when our dreams get dusty? What happens when in our spiritual mountain climbing we find dirt under our fingernails?

In Oklahoma City a very super-energetic, super-striving, super-achieving woman attended my lectures. She absorbed every word I said about blessing. All week long she assured me, "This is my kind of stuff. I love it. This is the way I live. I believe in being positive."

At the close of the last sessions this effervescent young woman confided to me, "I just learned something about myself that I don't like."

"What?" I asked.

"Today I discovered that I am `down on people' who are `down on people,' " she replied.

I laughed. That is a great discovery. One of the perils of spiritual achievement is negativism that invades people who are not positive. She was wise to catch that. I admire her.

"That's great," I said. "Now don't get down on yourself because you have discovered that you are down on people who are down on people. You are human."

How do you hang a picture in your gallery of blessing - a picture that will make you feel God's acceptance of your humanity? I really don't know how to visualize this part of God. Maybe you can flash back to the Christmas drama in your local church. Doesn't everyone love the little kid with her halo on crooked? When the bathrobe-clad youngster standing as the austere Joseph behind the manger waves to the audience and says, "Hi, mom," don't we all enjoy it?

One-hundred-percent divinity is a scratchy garment for us to wear. A little dust on our wings is becoming. We may forget that we are dust. God doesn't. He is not a clinically clean Aunt Matilda. He doesn't rub his hand over our piano to see if it is dusty. He is too busy enjoying the music. Bless him for this.

Portrait Number Six: Sovereignty

"The Lord hath prepared his throne in the heavens; and his kingdom ruleth over all." - Psalm 103:19

To be godly is a good thing. To be god is deadly. It is a wonderful thing to accept Christ as Messiah, but to have a messiah complex is to have the most complex complex possible. It precludes salvation because we are trying to nail ourselves to a cross so that we can provide our self-won atonement.

To change the figure of speech, an Atlas complex (that is trying to carry the world on our shoulders) is bad both for us and the world. We collapse. So does the world.

We need to think about the sovereignty of God. What an overpowering thought, "The Lord ... ruleth over all." Sometimes when the headlines are particularly depressing we feel like the poet John Drinkwater: "Right forever on the scaffold/ Wrong forever on the throne."

Then, of course, we walk into the gallery of blessing and see as Drinkwater continues: "Yet behind the dim unknown/ Standeth God within the shadows/ Keeping watch above His own."

The nearsighted believer survives from tremor to tremor. True believers know that they cannot understand all the ways that God works, but they rest in the knowledge that even the shadows that cross their earthly paths are an evidence of light shining somewhere. That's where God is. God is light.

There really doesn't seem to be any way to understand what God is doing. We can simply see what he has done. That fact is tremendously reassuring. As the famous hymn states,

Hast thou not seen 
How thy desires have been 
Granted in what he ordaineth.

If you do not feel like blessing the Lord for what is in front of you, at least you can bless God for what lies behind you. Soon even the present and the future will be the past. In retrospect you will see that God rules over all. Bless him for it now. Why wait?

Again, the best way to get pictures for your gallery of blessing is to paint them yourself. However, I will suggest a couple of classic ones.

How about the picture of the heavenly weaver? The idea is that God is weaving a tapestry of our lives. He takes all the bright, happy things, the somber things, and the in-between things and weaves them on his heavenly loom. Every now and then we look up and try to see what kind of design is emerging. Usually we can't see much beauty.

If we are wise and realize that we are looking at the tapestry from the bottom side, we get a different feeling. Some day we are going to see things from God's side. There will be revealed a fantastic design, a composite of all the good and bad of our life. How do you make this image work for you? How do you let it become the tuning fork that adjusts the tune of your life?

Keep remembering that when your life is parallel to the will of God, when your thoughts run in the same direction as God's, he reinforces your feelings. (Technically this is called faith.) New power flows into your emotions. You feel the energizing power of blessing. In a little while you will recognize the blessing itself. Right now you are simply setting the stage for God to work.

As I write these words I am sitting in the airport in Chicago. A flight was delayed. I had been scheduled to arrive in Indianapolis last night, but something went wrong with the plane. That didn't disturb me. I would much rather have it happen while the plane is on the ground than when it is thirty thousand feet in the air.

Because of the delay I had to spend the night and part of the morning in a hotel somewhere in Chicago. I worked. I worked late last night and early this morning. A little while ago I called the office to tell them of my delay. They cannot see me working here at the hotel desk, but I have been working nevertheless. In a few hours they will see some of the results of my work. Now they cannot.

I am not suggesting that there is anything particularly godlike in using my delays for a constructive purpose, but it does help me to understand that God works to accomplish his purposes even when we don't see it happening at the moment.

I am sure that caterpillars do not have psychiatrists to comfort them in their discouraging hours inside the slender dark cocoon that is their prison. They really do not need encouragement. It is their nature not to give up.

In the event there were some way to tell the caterpillar of its ultimate destiny-to become a shining butterfly-such encouragement might make it difficult to wait. An early exit from the cocoon would be fatal. Relax and let it happen, caterpillar. Relax, believer. We are promised that "the Lord hath prepared his throne in the heavens; and his kingdom ruleth over all."

In your personal gallery of blessings you need to frame the most vivid pictures you can-pictures of the sovereignty of God. In the event you can't dream up an effective picture, let me plant a few seeds in your mind:

1. The chambermaid sees only the messy paint pots and the unfinished canvas; the artist sees the finished picture in his or her mind. Trust the artist, not the maid. 

2. The ditch digger sees only the hole in the ground; the architect dreams of the finished home. Trust the architect. 

3. The baking powder and the eggs have left their comfortable and secure world of box and shell. They have a feeling that they exist in a mixed-up, confused world. The cook's eyes are bright as she thinks of the smiling faces of the people singing "Happy Birthday" to a surprised father. Trust the cook. 

4. Workers in the quarry see only a large chunk of damaged marble. It is in their way. Michelangelo sees the marble and sees within it an angel that needs only to be released by his chisel. Trust Michelangelo. 

Remember that learning to bless the Lord is not to try to understand him. It is not to imagine what God looks like, whether he is black or white, with or without substance. It is enough that you understand how he works. When your mind is rejoicing in God's overarching design, you are as close as it is safe to get. Be glad.

Don't try to absorb all of these lessons on God-watching at once. Maybe you ought to take these ideas and think about them one day at a time. Let your mind catch the mood, the attitude, the feeling. Think of all the ways you have seen these principles operate in the world.

If you stumble upon a rushing stream of new ideas, put your little sailboat into it and let it go as far as it can. Use your imagination. J. B. Phillips contends that "your God is too small." Maybe you need a new picture. Maybe you ought to let the picture grow to its full size before you frame it.

Chapter 8

A Little Story about Fence Posts and Telephone Lines

North Carolinians have an almost frantic loyalty to their state. One of their most devoted sons, Prince Deal, told me, "God must have a special love for North Carolina. Why else would he make the sky "North Carolina Blue"?

I like North Carolina myself. It seems to have the kind of soil in which my ideas sprout easily. I enjoyed giving my lectures on blessing to the people in Drexel, North Carolina.

One evening I sat with a group in the home of Lewis Sigmon. Lewis's wife, Thera, was patiently explaining to anyone who would listen how excited she was to discover the Parallel Principle.

"We learned that if you get a wire to be parallel to those overhead wires that carry electricity, even though the wire is not connected to anything, it will pick up an electrical current. I never knew that before."

Lewis, the husband and patient listener, spoke. "That is right.

0f course, I was glad to hear him confirm my illustration, since he is an electrical contractor and understands those things.

He continued. "I haven't thought about it for a long time, but I remember my years as a soldier. We were in Italy, Since I was in the Signal Corps I had to string the wire for the field telephones so that we could stay in touch with the soldiers at the front. Naturally we didn't have time to put up large poles, so we strung the wire on top of the fence posts.

"All at once the phone started ringing. When we picked it up to listen we discovered that no one was calling. It was eerie.

"Then we looked up. We hadn't noticed it before, but the fence posts we used were directly under power lines. They were parallel. They became electrified even though they were not connected."

That fence post story ought to help you understand the principle: Prayer is not our overcoming the reluctance of God. It is merely our aligning with the willingness of God.

When we use the words the will of God, we sometimes make it sound as though God is going to do something for us whether we want it or not. Can you imagine God saying, "I am going to make you well no matter how much you want to be sick"? Hardly.

What can we do? Since it is the nature of God to bless, let your mind flow with this powerful current. If your thoughts are negative they are at cross purposes with him.

In the Book of Job, we find an interesting phrase: "Agree with God and be at peace; therefore good shall come to thee" (22:21). These words are ancient ones. I didn't invent the idea of paralleling the will of God; I'm simply writing about it.

Your mind has tremendous power. Why not make it work for you?

If you have trouble getting your mind to stay in one place long enough to do any good, I have good news for you. In a few moments I am going to give you my guaranteed formula for getting your mind on a leash so that you can lead it where you want it to go.

For now, let's do a little drawing on the tablecloth. Draw some telephone poles and some power lines. Please do not simply look at my illustration. Do your own. It shouldn't be hard to improve on mine.

Now comes the exciting part. While you try to visualize the power of God, which is just another name for the nature of God, change your drawing. Hang the twelve portraits from your personal blessing gallery in the two previous chapters on the overhead wires. It will look a little strange, but do it anyway.

You have moved your gallery of blessing pictures out of your confined mental room and have hung them in space, like pictures suspended on the power lines you have drawn. Good. You have made the first and most important step. Pictures are static; they make things stand still. They freeze the action. But this is unnatural. Life is never standing still. Neither is God.

Such is the reason for the second of the Ten Commandments: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image." How does that relate to making images such as pictures?

Obviously it has a great deal to do with this. Neither God nor life itself is static. But in order to think about them, we have to get them to stand still long enough to look at them.

Actually all these pictures are reminders of the pulsating presence of God with all his attributes.

It is a little like the pictures of your child or your grandchild that you carry in your wallet. The beautiful picture is impressive, but it is no substitute for the real thing, the laughing bundle of love.

God is bigger than any frame we can put him into.

When we admit this, we are ready for the magic, or should I say miracle. Something is going to happen.

As soon as we get our mind thinking in the direction that God works, something tremendous is going to happen. The power of all these "ways God works" descend on us. Their power starts to work on us. Then it starts to work in us. All we have to do is get lined up-to get in parallel. As we have said, to those who believe, no explanation is necessary; to those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.

Personally, I am glad that it works because I have been able to use these ideas in unbelievable ways. I have fantastic stories to tell. Whether or not you can believe these stories is not important. Trust the ideas. Soon you will have your own fantastic stories to tell.

Warning: If you attempt to use this power selfishly, it will destroy you. That sounds ominous, but it is nonetheless truthful.

Just as electricity that comes from a major overhead source to a secondary wire must be grounded or drained off into the earth or it will kill people, so God's blessings must be applied to worthwhile purposes. That becomes phase three of the blessing life: how to bless other people, situations, and things. It is important. It is necessary, but it can wait. It will have to. It is a result, not a resolution.

Let us talk about blessing ourselves.