Signs of the Times

W. B. J. Martin

The Link

The Reverend W. B. J. Martin, D.D. in The Link, a Protestant magazine for Armed Forces personnel Washington, District of Columbia

What is the Bible about, from cover to cover? Is it not suffused throughout with the conviction that real life is a dialogue with God? ...

The Bible shows us a host of vital, dynamic men who are head-over-heels in conversation with God. They talk to God and they listen to God. Their whole life is one constant response. In everything they do, they are answering back, they are responding to unseen signals, accepting and interpreting messages from beyond, and this is what gives their lives dignity and power.

But why are most men reluctant to listen? Perhaps the best short answer is—fear. They are afraid to be drawn into dialogue with God because they might hear things that would shatter their complacency, challenge their inertia, and set them upon a more exciting road than the one on which they prefer to travel.

When we make a genuine effort to listen to God in prayer, we are forced to make discoveries about ourselves. Of course, if we confine our prayers to telling God what we want, we may evade these deeper discoveries. ...

We cannot read the Word of God in the Psalms or the New Testament without receiving new light on what the Lord requires of us in the way of personal integrity, grateful obedience, and unrestricted service. ...

The prayers we pray, and the lives we lead, after confronting what God is saying to us in the Beatitudes, in Paul's Hymn of Love, or in Philippians 2, will be worthier prayers than those we are wont to pray out of our own selfishly conceived and narrow need.

When we listen to God in prayer, we are bound to receive new illumination upon our relationships with others. Very often we resist this new illumination, because we want to go categorizing people according to our prejudices or to the standards of our social group. ...

When God speaks, he casts a new light on the people we have taken for granted. We see them henceforth for what they are really, children of the same love, under the same mercy and judgment as ourselves.

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April 6, 1963

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