Ten Essential Life Principles

Recently a competent psychiatrist observed: “These persons who come to me need an inner structure for their lives. They need an inner discipline that they themselves have accepted as having the authority of Reality. Anyone knows,” he continued, “that the Ten Commandments are the best set of rules ever given for an individual to structure his life upon. The problem,” he added, “is that too many people have learned the Ten Commandments and that too few have accepted them as the inner structure of their own living.”

This psychiatrist disclosed not only the weakness of distraught individuals who are coming to him for assistance. He disclosed also the weakness of an entire generation that is crumbling under the complex responsibilities of human relationships.

The genius of these ten life rules is that by them God through Moses replaced hundreds of laws with ten essential Life Principles that can more easily be remembered and accepted in the subconscious as a way of life. They have remained because they are based on reality; this is the way life is structured. The Ten Commandments are not arbitrary commands forced upon us; they are a revelation of Truth to be followed. If history is faltering today, it is not because the Ten Commandments have failed, but because civilization is disregarding its Life Principles.

“Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me.” We respond: “This was not spoken to our generation; Polytheism, after all, is not one of our problems!” But the commandment does indeed speak to us. It warns not only against revering something other than God; it says: “Thou shalt worship nothing less than God.” Too few people have penetrated to an experience of God himself; too many are worshiping something less than God. Until we discover reality, truth, and the ultimate in God, until we give ourselves even falteringly to the Spiritual Reality at the heart of the Universe, until we know and worship God personally and socially, life will fall apart and disintegrate under tensions too great for our own resolution.

“Thou Shalt Not Make Unto Thee Any Graven Image.” Again we respond: “This does not apply to us; nobody makes idols today!” The children of Israel felt the need of a God they could see and touch. Moses had found Reality in the inner voice of the Unseen in his desert experience. This dynamic reality he sought to share with his people. But as soon as his back was turned, they pitched in their golden ear-rings to make a golden calf. We do not bother to fashion an image; we just worship our gold without melting it! A minister recently observed he would shudder to see the outcome if large numbers of church members should suddenly be confronted with a clear choice between giving up God or giving up possessions. As a rule the alternatives are not put so bluntly; without knowing it, many church members have subconsciously already made the choice. Their commitments are not to God but to their possessions. On this basis they make their decisions, this basis is their pivot point of dedication, here they perform their empty rites of adoration. The commandment still stands: “Thou shalt not worship any material thing.”

“Thou Shalt Not Take The Name Of The Lord Thy God In Vain.” Last summer we drove along the Alaskan Highway for nearly 1,500 miles through a fascinating unsettled wilderness. Now and then we stopped at a lodge; often we found both men and women using profanity as a normal vehicle of conversation. This tendency comes to light wherever people are far removed, by distance or disposition, from the Church and from those symbols that keep alive and nurture a vital sense of the Holy. They are unconsciously cutting the connections God seeks to keep open between himself and them. This careless use of symbols that suggest the Infinite, the Eternal, the Everlasting Love and Power at the heart of the Universe actually denies the existence of anything above the human. Thereby people cancel what is sacred in their own experience; they blot out their own subconscious sensitivity to spiritual values; they accept life at an animal level and reject any awareness that raises life to new dimensions. When they come to pray, they have nothing left except carelessly used symbols. “Thou shalt not cancel in thy consciousness a sense of the Holy.”

“Remember The Sabbath Day, To Keep It Holy.” Hundreds of spectators recently attended an automobile race near our city on Sunday afternoon. Because of rain the race was stopped at the halfway mark. Frustrated at not getting to see the whole event, fans started a free-for-all fight. What shall we do with Sunday? What are our values? A day of rest and worship gives us a break in the burdensome routine, a day of pause, a day of quietness, of beginning again. This day is an opportunity for family fellowship, for getting close to the children, for thinking with our growing youth. It is a day to worship, to meditate on the Eternal, to know God inwardly. Why is it that we seem now to be working night and day to dispose of it? If we lose Sunday, we will lose our best opportunity for growth in grace, and lose our best incentive to instruct and deepen each succeeding generation in spiritual awareness. God does not need a Holy Day; we do.

“Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother.” How old-fashioned! Thirty years ago educators, philosophers, and psychologists told us not to restrain our children, but to let them express themselves. In these thirty years we have produced a generation of adults with little inner discipline, small respect for authority, slight appreciation of the truth, and with no solid inner resources for living. Because of our failure to inculcate basic principles of right and wrong individual life is breaking down all around us and human relations are going to pieces. “In sparing the rod, we raised up a beat generation.” Today, psychologists and educators tell us they were mistaken, that children do need and do expect an inner structure of life. We are told that fathers and mothers should learn from their own painful experiences and from the experience of the race; only by passing these discovered truths on to their offspring, and by launching their children at a higher level of life can civilization make progress. Parents are God’s teachers! “Honor thy father and thy mother.”

“Thou Shalt Not Kill.” Despite this specific life principle, we face the threat of atomic annihilation. No one seems wise enough to know the solution. By continued disobedience of life principles, humanity maneuvers itself every few years into a position where killing seems to be the least of the evils, as the way out of a dilemma. Our greatest failure has been the failure to relate life principles to God’s creative will. We have considered these principles to be accepted or rejected at our convenience. Not until the creature truly comprehends his definite responsibility to the Creator, will humanity overthrow this course of expediency toward self-destruction. We must realize clearly that obedience to life principles is obedience to God, and conversely that disobedience severs relationships with the very source of life and being. To understand and to accept the fact that there is an Authority in the Universe to whom we are responsible will once again restore individual experience and human relations to creative progress. “Thou shalt not kill” still stands; it is one of God’s assignments whose meaning we have not yet learned.

“Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery.” Today countless books of fiction expound adultery as their theme. They reveal the personal breakdown, the frustration, the shame, the misery of lost and bewildered children and whatever else stems from disobedience to a basic life principle. In reality God has so structured life and so ordered human passions that love finds its best fulfillment where the home has spiritual foundations, where husband and wife have made a covenant not only with each other, but also with God. Such an abiding union finds continuity in self-giving, in comradeship and in deep devotion, through joy and sorrow, in times of hardship or prosperity. Love strengthened with spiritual disciplines produces increased happiness and satisfaction, quite a different alternative to the tragedies portrayed in modern fiction. Someone has suggested that “sin is trying to get more out of life than there is in it!” Fulfillment issues from following life principles; short cuts lead only to mirage and disappointment. “You can do what is wrong; but you can’t make it work.”

“Thou Shalt Not Steal.” A leading journal indicates that many businesses in our country condone dishonest practices within their structure. Recent investigations tend to confirm this statement. “Thou shalt not steal” is another of those basic life principles whose denial destroys personal self-respect and undermines the integrity of the economic structure. Honesty is first learned by conscientiously handling one’s own small responsibilities until it becomes a way of life. Similarly, it is through continued trivial violations that dishonesty becomes the shaky foundation of individual living. This fact holds true for worker and employer alike. Taking advantage of the other person, even within legal bounds, leaves a wake of resentment, of bitterness and of a desire to get even, a spirit which breaks down good will and solid economy. Individuals and groups cannot continue to defy mathematics and expect to get the right answers. In these complex and intricate business dealings of modern society, the Christian is one who has imposed upon himself a sharp conscience at this point of honesty. With keen awareness of fundamental justice, he sees to it that his own personal and corporate dealings are fair. Thereby he experiences in himself a sense of integrity and contributes to the group a basis for mutual confidence.

“Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness.” Our universe was structured by Truth. By deceit therefore one is playing false with Reality; one is running against the grain of the universe. When advertising aims first at sales, and then at truth; when national treaties have some temporary advantage, rather than permanent covenant in view; when individuals say what brings personal gain, rather than what is true and factual—then the inner core of life and of human affairs is but a rope of sand. “He that sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not” is a good motto of tenacious integrity. In scientific laboratories we cannot play fast and loose with facts; neither can we play fast and loose with facts in a world where all the powers of science can be unleashed either for death or life, depending on how much trust can once more permeate human relations on both the individual and the international levels. Humanity cannot continue to do business unless sincerity and trustworthiness are accepted again as life principles.

Dewey’s Mother Goose

Jack and Jill

Went up the hill

Discouraged and disgusted:

Jack was cool

To public school

And Jill was maladjusted.

Old Mother Hubbard

Went to the cupboard

To fetch a pre-primer

For Hughie:

But Hughie said, “Nay,

I’m learning through play—

For I’m a disciple of Dewey.”

Little Jack Horner

Sat in a Corner

Reading a grade One book:

He toiled at page one

And when he got done He said,

“Oh, Oh, Oh!

Look, Look, Look!”

Vic, in Saturday Night

“Thou Shalt Not Covet.” In the last of the Ten Commandments, God penetrates human consciousness at the point of responsible motivation. Covetousness, envy, greed, and selfishness are what motivate most of life’s individual and corporate breakdown. When we want but are unwilling to work for what does not belong to us, when we hate a person or people because they possess something we do not have, when we want to get but not give to society, then personality fulfillment is blocked and human progress becomes impossible. Jesus stressed Love as the Basic Life Principle—love that shares rather than grabs; that works rather than devours; that serves rather than is served. Such a Life moves into ever higher dimensions of satisfying, creative relationships. Because covetousness poisons the whole creative structure of life, “Thou shalt not covet.”

“I Am Not Come To Destroy The Law, But To Fulfill It.” Here Jesus witnesses to the continuous need for recognized Life Principles. “Humanity cannot survive if it continues to do as it pleases.” Life principles, however, are not inherited; they are taught. Each individual must accept them as his personal Way of Life in relation to Reality and as the only structure wherein life works and finds fulfillment.

Yet while one can recognize and accept Life Principles one can also have a nervous breakdown by trying alone to fulfill perfectly what is impossible. When Christ declared, “I came to fulfill,” he revealed the vital continuous relationship that functions between the Redeemer and the redeemed, while we dare not lose sight of what God has already done for us at Calvary, neither dare we forget that God constantly works in his children. He empowers them progressively to fulfill in their lives what Christ is actually fulfilling in their inner experience. God is ever on our side, seeking to lift us to his side!

Superintendent, Asheville District

Methodist Church

North Carolina

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