October 29, 2019 – 1 Corinthians 2:8

None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
—1 Corinthians 2:8

If Judas in [his] blundering way meant well, thinking that he knew better than his Master and—because he could not wait for him and his unhurried ways—sought to force his hand, God pity us!27 For are we not all apt to do just that? Is the church ever quite free from a half-bewildered, half-fretful impatience that can’t trust to the steady drip, drip of the weekly services soaking into people’s souls; that is irritated by the seeming lack of results of his appointed methods; that must have the kingdom break in with a rush and a loud noise and all people taking note of it; that keeps seeking for a swift, immediate revival not at God’s time but now, in ours? Devising desperate expedients, trying to whistle up the winds of God! And they won’t come. And these futilities we thought so wise and good and clever end in nothing except robbing people of their hopes and so delaying what was in God’s mind to give us, what was coming and might have been here by now, had we not rushed in with our silly nothings, our machine-made revivals, our grotesque improvings on Christ.
It is not this way that real revivals rise, but, says Christ, like the winds. We hear the sound of them but cannot tell from where they come or where they go. A miner coming home from work is greeted in a courteous fashion by a friendly stranger, and somehow there on the road there rises up in his heart a passion of affection for other people that makes him give his life for them and sweeps them by the thousands into the kingdom!
God works in his own time, in his own ways. And if we try to dictate, to demand it must be now and in this fashion, only confusion comes of that. If we would cease our cunning engineering, our hot organizing, our continual talking and conferring, of which nothing ever seems to come but more conferring, if we would sit quiet and reverent in God’s presence and worship him and wait and give his voice a chance of reaching people—instead of ours—how much more we might see! For does our fussiness and cleverness do anything except this? Like Judas, we get in Christ’s way and hinder him, we who had meant to help were so sure we could help and had found the very way to do it! It was impatience with his methods, it was thinking he knew better than his Master, it was running on ahead of him, that, think some, was the sin of Judas, and that brought Christ to his cross. And who of us is not guilty of that?
—Arthur John Gossip