Divine Providence and Our Choices | Rev. Malcolm G. Smith

So, children, if you'd like, you can face this direction.

It might be easier to see what I'm showing you and hear the talk.

That song that the choir sang at the beginning, does anyone know what language that was in?

Yeah?

What was it?

Yeah?

Yeah.

Welsh.

The language w of Welsh from the country of Wales.

Now you might not have been able to understand what the words meant, but maybe you could get the feeling of it.

The heart behind it.

It was thinking about Kalonlan, a heart that's pure.

Let me show you something else about a pure heart.

Does anyone know what language this is?

Yeah, touch it.

This is Hebrew.

This is from Psalm 51.

And it says, it reads this direction: Lev tahor barali Elohim Varuach Nachon Kadesh Bakirbi, which means, create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.

It's a prayer, praying for a pure heart, or a clean heart.

And in this world, what I want to talk about is how we have lots of different languages people speak.

You can see in this picture here, all these different people, sorry, I'll turn it a little bit.

You can see lots of different people.

And on earth, they probably had lots of different languages that they spoke.

But these people are now in heaven.

And they can all speak the same language.

This is what the teachings for the new church tell us is in heaven, we'll all speak the same language.

And we don't have to learn it.

We already know it.

And we can communicate.

It says, in one minute in heaven, you can communicate what would take an hour to explain.

So if you think about times when you're trying to figure out how to say the words to have someone understand, and it's not working, don't worry, in heaven, you'll get to say a few words and people will get it.

Isn't that great?

So this vision described here is from the book of Revelation, and this is what John says about it.

After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude, which no one could number of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and for the Lamb, clothed in white robes with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, saying, Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.

So because they love the Lord and love each other, they can speak the same language.

And there's another story about people on earth who at first couldn't understand the same language, but then could get to the point where they could.

So, this is a story from the Bible, from the book of Acts, that about the apostles.

The twelve disciples or apostles the Lord called, and what the Lord made them able to do.

Can you guys see the twelve apostles anywhere in this room?

I'll give you a hint.

There's a big window that might have twelve people on it.

Ah, yes.

Do you see it?

So, yes, this is a story about those people, Peter, James, John, all those disciples and apostles.

And this is what it says.

The apostles were all with one accord in one place, and suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting.

Then divided tongues as a fire appeared, one sat on each of them, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues.

What this means is there were people of all different languages in that place, and the disciples wanted to tell them about the Lord, what the Lord had done, what the Lord had gone through, and these tongues of fire came down as a symbol of the Lord's love and spirit helping them find the right words.

And then people of all these different languages heard them as if they were speaking their own language.

And I want to show you something.

If you look up there, can you see between the Lord at the top and the disciples, can you see tongues of fire?

There's above the heads of the people on the left column and on the right column, there's these bits of fire.

Do you see that all the way up there?

So when you see that, you can think, and there's a dove in the middle, that's the Lord's Spirit.

You can think about the Lord with his love and with his wisdom helping those people communicate in a way that people can understand them, and you can think about the Lord doing that for you.

Because that's the key.

If we come from a pure heart, like the psalm was talking about, and a pure heart like that Welsh song was talking about, then people can understand us better.

So if you want people to understand you, come from love.

Love them.

Love the Lord, love the truth, and that will come through in your words, and the Lord will help you to understand and to be understood.

Amen.

Why, for example, does it matter, like we were talking about in the children's talk, if we approach a particular conversation from love or not?

We can have a sense that our small decisions do matter, but it can be helpful to have some teachings from the Lord's Word to shore that up, to give us confidence that that's true.

Because on some days it can feel like our decisions do not matter at all.

Either because it seems like things are gonna happen the way they're gonna happen, regardless of what we do, and so what's the point?

Or like all there's evil people out there somewhere doing bad things, and they're gonna make everything messed up regardless of what we do.

Those things feel true on certain days, but they're not the full picture.

And so today we're gonna try to see a little bit more of the picture from the Lord's perspective.

And we're gonna focus particularly on times when things don't go or don't seem like they're going in the direction we want them to go.

What then?

What do we do?

How do we understand what's going on in those circumstances, and what are we supposed to do in response?

We're gonna start with one image, potential way of looking at how this all works, how divine providence integrates with our decisions.

Then we'll consider another image that's perhaps a little better, and finally we'll use these ideas we've talked about to go through some examples of things not going our way and try to see how they can help us.

So, one way of picturing our life and our role in life is as a person riding a roller coaster.

Here's one way that idea is expressed.

Life is like a roller coaster.

You can either scream every time there's a bump or you can throw your hands up and enjoy the ride.

It may be an overused analogy, but it's kind of fun.

Because sometimes life is like a fun ride.

Other times it's slow and boring and predictable, like one of those kiddie roller coasters that just goes around and the little thing doesn't go up and down much.

Or there are times when it feels like you're clicking upwards towards some terrible, terrifying drop that's about to happen.

And other times you're just flinging around all different directions and you have no idea where it's going to go and when you can get off.

But is this analogy accurate?

A key characteristic of this roller coaster analogy is that we're not in charge of where it goes.

And when people talk about life being like a roller coaster, that's their exact point.

Here's one example of someone making this argument.

Think of life like as a roller coaster.

We ride the coaster, we don't drive it.

Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to try to make the roller coaster go the way you want it to?

Not only would you not be able to steer it, you would miss the experience of just riding it with all its highs and lows.

And there's wisdom in this.

There is a lot that happens in our lives of which we're not in control.

And to pretend to be in control or to try to be in control is just going to be an exercise in anxiety and futility.

And Alcoholics Anonymous and other recovery organizations teach people about this.

They teach people about taking life on life's terms.

The serenity prayer was popularized by AA, and it begins with the line: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

There are things in life we cannot change.

It's wise to accept that.

However, not everything falls in that category.

The serenity prayer goes on.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

In some ways, what we're talking about today is the wisdom to know the difference between what we cannot change and what we can change.

And the problem with the roller coaster analogy is that it kind of has no representation of our ability to change some things.

Maybe we should picture a roller coaster with a lever that helps us switch tracks, and we can like keep on switching tracks, got trunk, and then we get on a better track.

Or we can set that analogy aside and go with an analogy that the Lord provides us with.

There is a beautiful and well-loved passage from Arcana Celestia that talks about people who trust in the Lord.

It's aspirational.

It describes the kind of trust and peace that probably all of us wish we could have.

It talks about the Lord's providence being like a stream.

And I looked at different translations and I went with an old one because it just sounds so good.

With people who trust in the divine, unruffled is their spirit, whether they obtain the objects of their desire or not.

And they do not grieve over the loss of them, being content with their lot.

If they become rich, they do not set their hearts on riches.

If they are raised to honors, they do not regard themselves as more worthy than others.

If they become poor, they are not made sad.

If their circumstances are mean, they are not dejected.

They know that for those who trust in the divine, all things advance toward a happy state to eternity, and that whatever befalls them in time is still conducive thereto.

Be it known that the divine providence is universal, that is, in things most minute, and that they who are in the stream of providence are all the time carried along toward everything that is happy, whatever may be the appearance of the means.

Isn't that beautiful?

Don't you want to be like those people who trust in the Lord and his providence even when things don't go their way?

However, if we're not careful, we can misunderstand this analogy as well.

Misunderstand this idea of the stream of Providence.

We might think it's kind of like a roller coaster.

Like it's gonna go where it's gonna go, regardless of what we do.

Or to use another amusement park analogy, I want you thinking about Providence this summer, uh, we might think of it being like a lazy river.

On a lazy river, you don't have to pay attention to where you're going, and you can be a jerk to the people in the tube next to you or the other tubes around you, you can splash them, um, and you'll still get where you need to go by the end.

But that's not how the stream of providence works.

If we just read the part I quoted to you from that passage, it can sound like everyone's in the stream of providence and they're all going a good direction.

But the full passage is actually making a contrast.

It's explicitly contrasting what life is like for people in the stream of Providence and from people who are not in the stream of Providence.

There are other forces and currents at work that we need to be aware of.

So this brings us to the first passage quoted in your handout.

It talks about that same strong force from the Lord lifting people in a good direction, but it also talks about another force.

From the Lord's own words, we can see that he ascribes goodness to everyone and evil to no one, and therefore that he judges no one to hell, but instead lifts us all toward heaven to the degree that we will follow along.

Jesus said, When I am raised up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.

God did not send his son into the world in order to judge the world, but so that the world would be saved through him.

Those who believe in him are not judged, but those who do not believe in believe have already been judged.

When evil individuals are lifted by the Lord toward heaven, their evil drags them downward, and because they love that evil, they follow it of their own accord.

There is, in fact, a sphere that constantly emanates from the Lord, which lifts all towards heaven.

It fills the entire spiritual world and the entire natural world.

It is like a strong current in the ocean that secretly carries ships along.

All people who believe in the Lord and live by his commandments come into that sphere or current and are lifted up.

Those who do not believe, though, are unwilling to enter it.

They move themselves off to the sides and are there caught in a flow that leads down into hell.

So that's a scary one.

The same Latin word is used for the stream of providence and that flow that leads to hell.

We need to know about that scary undertow.

It would be dishonest and dangerous not to warn people about it.

Imagine if you're going for a paddle on the lake and the guy earning minimum wage who's doing the safety briefing says to you, It's all good, just go with the flow.

And meanwhile, there's a large whirlpool in the middle of the lake that can suck you in.

No, we need proper warning.

We need to know about the currents we're going to be dealing with as we paddle around in our lives.

And maybe this gives us a good picture of our decisions in relation to the Lord's divine providence.

We're in our little boats on a big ocean with big, strong currents, and those strong currents are way stronger than we are.

But we do have our paddles or our oars.

We can certainly make things worse with our rowing, but we can also use our paddles and oars to get ourselves pointed back in the right direction and moving toward the good current.

One of the passages that talks about the current of hell talks about people rowing hard to get out of that current.

This is what it says.

People who have immersed themselves in evil delights cannot approach the delights of the affections of a love of goodness and truth otherwise than as people who with straining arms pull on the oars against the current of a swift river.

That's our job, to pay attention to where we're headed and do our best to strain the oars to paddle back in a good direction.

The word the teachings for the new church uses for our efforts is prudence.

And there's good use of prudence and there's bad use of prudence.

So here's the second passage that's printed in your handout about the good use of our prudence.

It says, if you want to be led by divine providence, use your prudence as a servant and employee who faithfully manages the employer's assets.

Love of self lives in the depths of each one of us from birth.

If we do not recognize it and it does not want to be recognized, then it lives in perfect safety and guards the door to prevent us from opening it so the Lord can evict it.

We open the door by abstaining from evils as sins, apparently on our own, but admitting that it is being done by the Lord.

This is prudence with which the divine providence can cooperate.

All right.

So that's a lot of analogies, a lot of teachings.

Let's get down to more practical things.

How can these ideas help us when things don't go our way?

One of the traps we can easily fall into is thinking that what happens is either all on us or all on God.

If it's all on God, we throw up our hands and give up on even trying to make things better.

If things don't go how we want them to go, we conclude that God's punishing us or doesn't care about us or is unable to help us.

If it's all on us, then we hold on to too much responsibility.

We blame ourselves if things don't work out well.

We take credit for successes that are really not our doing.

And the reality is less simplistic.

It's as complex as trying to understand and navigate ocean currents and weather.

The Lord is involved in all the details.

He has a strong current pulling us in a good direction.

But hell also does play a big role in the things that happen on this earth.

And we do still have some role to play.

When something we care about succeeds or fails, we won't be able to parse exactly why each part went the way that it did.

But we can try to avoid explaining these things in overly simplistic ways.

Another way that people will try to make sense of difficult things that they go through is to ask themselves, is God trying to teach me a lesson?

Or they'll wonder, is God putting a challenge in front of me for me to face head on?

These things might be the case, or they might not.

Maybe we're supposed to face the difficulty we're in head on and learn from it.

Or maybe we're supposed to learn how to paddle around it.

There's a great discussion of this in an article from 40 years ago in New Church Life by the Reverend Dandridge Pendleton, and I want to read it to you.

First, he acknowledges that we are taught that the Lord brings good out of temptations, but then he says this it should be well noted that in none of these teachings, as it's said, nor implied, that a man is to simply endure whatever external circumstances may come upon him during his lifetime, nor that these are the circumstances under which he is necessarily to remain in seeking that spiritual development which the Lord would have him achieve.

Too often, the conviction that every external circumstance provides an opportunity for our spiritual development is held in such a way as to mean that whatever the nature or scope of that circumstance, we are to stand and fight regardless, and that if we feel compelled to remove ourselves from the burden, we are somehow not measuring up to our capabilities.

We should bear in mind that while every natural event or circumstance can and should serve our inner development, this inner development does not necessarily come only by surmounting the circumstance.

If we are to develop a balanced spiritual perspective, it is just as important that we come to realize our limitations as it is for us to develop our strengths.

It is true that every such circumstance does provide an opportunity to learn, but what we are intended to learn may just as well be to say, I can't, as I can.

Isn't that good?

Maybe the whole point of this difficult thing you're going through is to say, I can't do this.

I gotta try something else.

We shouldn't assume that every difficult thing we go through is a challenge that we're supposed to conquer.

We want explanations of the things that happen.

We want to know why.

We want to know, is it a good thing, is it a bad thing, why did it happen?

And it makes sense that we want this, and we need to try to hold the explanations that come to our minds gently.

We don't really know.

And this applies for when things go well, too.

We draw lots of conclusions from our successes, and they're just as likely to be inaccurate.

The teachings for the New Church say that honors and riches may be blessings, and they may also be curses.

Here's what one passage says.

They are blessings in the case of people who do not place their heart in them, and they are curses in the case of people who do place their heart in them.

To place one's heart in them is to love oneself in them, and not to place one's heart in them is to love the uses, and not oneself in them.

And advancements and riches lead some people astray and not others.

And there are even passages that say that some good people are not given high position or material success because that would lead them astray.

So, if we do or do not have lots of success, position, power, influence, money, stuff, we can conclude that we don't know.

We don't know why.

Um, and that's good to accept that we don't know why we were successful or we failed.

But we can conclude that maybe all those things are not the point.

What the Lord cares about is us using the agency that we do have to shun evils and try to keep his commandments.

Paddle away from hell with all your strength and trust that the stream of providence will pull you in a good direction.

And we can get a feel for the truth of this when we think about the difference it makes when one person shuns evils.

Think of a man who gets filled with rage easily and lashes out at the people around him.

Maybe his dad was the same way when he was growing up.

Imagine that man realizes that he's breaking the Lord's commandment against murder and he's hurting the people around him.

And he works to change his behavior and repent because the Lord says so.

And with the Lord's help, he does the hard work.

Because it's hard to learn new ways of communicating, it's hard to figure out why he's getting so angry and what he can do with that anger instead.

But we can so easily see that this work that he's doing matters.

Think of the difference it would make to his wife, to his kids, to his co-workers.

Think of how it would change the feeling in their home, in his workplace.

Think of the example it would set for his kids, and then that they could pass on to their kids and their kids.

Over the course of his lifetime is far more important than how much money he has in his bank at the end of his life, or what things happened in his life that he would call a success or a failure.

And if that's true of that guy, it's probably true of you too.

So, yes, our little day-to-day decisions do matter in the small scale and the big scale, in the short term and the long term.

Thanks to the Lord, we have the proper safety briefing about the waters that we're navigating with the hellish undertow and the stream of providence.

We have the use of our little prudence paddle, and we can paddle our way towards the Lord.

And now to end, I want to return to the Serenity Prayer, which you may or may not know is a little longer than just those first few lines that people know.

And the rest is a good encapsulation of how we can try to live, taking responsibility for our decisions and also trusting in divine providence.

It says, living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardships as the pathway to peace, taking as Jesus did, the sinful world as it is, not as I would have it, trusting that he will make all things right if I surrender to his will, that I may be reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with him forever.

Amen.