College Union

(The following is an excerpt from E. Stanley Jones devotional classic, Mastery, week 4. It builds on last months devotional which noted that the disciples were asked to “stay in Jerusalem” in their place of failure and confront their biggest challenge)

There is another phase of the charge of Jesus to the disciples not to depart from Jerusalem until they were endued with power. The emphasis was upon the “power.” For it was possible for them not to run away from Jerusalem but to stay as they were – “behind closed doors for fear.” …The point was to get them not merely to stay there but to stay there with power - with power to go out and meet Jerusalem positively and redemptively…It is possible to stay in a situation and compliment yourself that you are not running away, but all the time the staying is behind closed doors for fear…You have not shut the problem out – you have shut it within – you have become the problem – you are full of fears.

The disciples knew that Jesus was risen from the dead – why then were they behind closed doors? Intellectually they knew He was alive, but emotionally they were held by old fears. Only the Holy Spirit could release them from those fears.

The church today is in large measure halfway between Easter and Pentecost and is behind closed doors for fear. The grandest good news that ever broke upon human ears had broken freshly upon them – Jesus was alive, yet that didn’t free them – they were still locked behind closed doors.

One of the greatest fallacies of this age of intellectual progress is the fallacy that knowledge in itself is necessarily freeing. It may free you – it may not. Many intellectually mature people are emotionally immature. That accounts for the fact that many psychologist and psychiatrists are not integrated. They know, but they don’t know freedom. Emotionally they are still bound by old fears and frustrations. That is the basic reason we need some powerful impulse within that will free us from our unreasoning fears and anxieties. That impulse within can be supplied by the Holy Spirit, for he works within – down amid the driving urges.

A religion of rites, ceremonies, and outer observances may be good, but not good enough. For it does not touch within, where fears and inhibitions hold the citadel. Only the Holy Spirit can touch those inner depths and free us three. All the knowledge about freedom and exhortation to freedom could not have got the disciples from behind those enclosed doors and bid them walk in freedom. And God was within the Holy Spirit. For the Spirit is God in action – where it counts, down amid the driving urges where fears lurk.

Jerusalem is now in our hands as possibility for fruitfulness and not in our hearts as fear.

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