Matthew 4:18-25

Chapter 14

A Cry to Heaven the Divine Call to Service Suffered Nothing for Christ a Picture of Christ's World men Who Play the Scrutineer

Prayer

Almighty God, if thou dost answer us out of thy mercy, who then can tell the measure of thy reply to our prayer and our thanksgiving? Behold, thy love is a sea whose depths have never been searched, and thy mercy is higher than the sky, yea, no man can lay a line upon all the pity and compassion of God. Our life stands in thy goodness, we are surrounded by thy mercy, verily we live and move and have our being in God. Show us that thou art not a God far off, but a God nigh at hand, yea, within us, nearer than our own breath and our own life, without whom, indeed, we could not live. We bless thee for the house of prayer, the place of silence and of song, the house of inspiration, the sanctuary of defence, the place where prayer is wont to be made, and we bless thee for the wide and open way to thy throne through Jesus Christ our only Saviour. We keep that living way, we are all found in it this very moment, so is the moment the sweetest in our life, and there is in it a brightness above the light of the sun, and it is alive with the most sacred and elevating hope.

Thou dost not disappoint the heart of man; when his soul is lifted up towards thee thou dost bathe it with all the light of heaven's morning, and when his cry rises from his heart to thy throne, thou dost turn it into a sweet hymn, and enrich the heart with all the graciousness of thy love. We have come to thine house to-day with no small expectancy, our hearts" are inflamed into a great desire, our tongue is open before thee with speech, demanding in the name of Christ, and not our own, all the promises to be fulfilled; yea, is ours a violence we come to take the kingdom of heaven by force. So hast thou allowed us to do, yea, thou hast charged us to seize the gates of thy kingdom and to open them with the violence of importunate love. We bless thee for these heavenly desires, we thank thee for influences that move the heart upwards from the dust and through the stars, and onward to things divine and everlasting. May those noble desires never die, may our life be a continual petition for enlargement and sanctification. We have been content too long to live in the dust and eat its perishing roots; we would now live in the heavens, and sustain our hearts on God.

We bless thee for all thy Bible of love, wide as the heavens and green as the earth in summer-time, and tender as all the songs of love. We bless thee for that inner revelation of the spirit, that sacred ministry which is beyond all words, and too holy for song. O dwell within us, abide with us, soothe us with all the comforting, stimulate us with all the hopefulness which thou dost bring to bear upon the lives of men who are given to thee wholly, body, soul, and spirit. Turn the discipline of thy rod to the advantage of our souls, save us amid the gathering gloom from the last darkness of despair; when every earthly prop and hope is given up, do thou grant unto us the defences and assurances of thy sanctuary and thy presence.

Thou knowest us altogether; the old and the young, the rich and the poor are here, the head hoary with the snows and frosts of many a winter, and the face bright and unwrinkled and young, and the life full of charming hope. Thou knowest those who are in bitterness and sorrow of soul, thou understandest all our life; we therefore come before thee assured that in Christ Jesus all our wants shall be supplied and our poverty shall become the occasion of our wealth.

The Lord help us to do every good work with earnestness, the Lord work in us a holy dislike and detestation of all evil things, and the Lord grant unto us such answers in the course of his providence to our best desires and holiest vows as shall assure us that the voice of the heart does not fall to the ground.

We would read thy word attentively, we would listen to every tone of thy revelation, as if our soul's best interests depended upon hearing it. Whilst thus we attend thou wilt not withhold the illuminating and confirming spirit, but thou wilt pour out upon us all that we need as zealous and adoring students of thy holy book.

Bless us altogether, those of us who are old friends and old fellow-students of thy word, well known to one another as common suppliants at thy throne, and bless the stranger within our gates, who joins our worship to-day for the first and only time: destroy all feeling of distance and strangeness and exile, and fill his soul with all the light and love of heaven, and thus in the unity of the spirit, with common and undistracted fellowship, may we wait upon God to our soul's profiting.

The Lord speak to the indifferent man and awake him to attention, the Lord rebuke the worldly man whose heart is at this moment far away from thy house though his body is here, and the Lord grant great rich answers of peace and assurance, pardon and love, to those whose best desire is to know the Lord more fully, and to serve him with increasing earnestness and delight. Amen.

Matthew 4:18-25 .

18. And Jesus (a considerable time after the temptation), walking by the sea of Galilee (the lake of Gennesareth or Tiberias), saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers.

19. And he saith unto them. Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.

20. And they straightway left their nets, and followed him.

21. And going on from thence, he saw other two brethren, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in a ship with Zebedee their father, mending their nets; and he called them.

22. And they immediately left the ship and their father, and followed him.

23. And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people.

24. And his fame went throughout all Syria (the province of which Palestine was Considered a part), and they brought unto him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils (demons), and those which were lunatic (affected by the moon), and those that had the palsy; and he healed them.

25. And there followed him great multitudes (plural, on account of the places whence they came) of people from Galilee, and from Decapolis (a group of ten cities), and from Jerusalem, and from Judea, and from beyond Jordan.

We are not to understand that this event took place immediately after our Lord's temptation. A very considerable interval passed between the temptation and this work by the sea of Galilee. Still the incident comes with infinite beauty and suggestiveness after that great crisis in the history of our Lord. Shall we be too fanciful if we think of the places in connection with the events the quiet river and the sacred baptism, the solitary wilderness and the fierce assault of hell's chief, the busy sea and the call to service? If a painter seeks a background, and if the novelist feels it needful roughly and with the haste of great skill to thrust in a little scenery and landscape in order to throw up the figures, why should we hesitate to connect certain great events in our Lord's life and certain special events in our own life with the peculiar atmosphere in which they were developed the river and the baptism, the wilderness, silent, solemn, awful, and its temptations, and the sea, never at rest, and its call to labour, heroic sacrifice, noble toil?

We are not to understand that these men never saw Jesus Christ until the day referred to in the text. They knew him perfectly well. Jesus Christ had been preaching and labouring in many places, and these very men sustained the relation of a kind of nominal discipleship to him already. There was in them a wonder, nearly equal to faith, there was in them an expectation which sometimes almost dignified itself into a religion. They knew his person, they knew his voice, they knew somewhat of his claim, and they had seen somewhat of his power. They were already in a sense followers of Christ just as some of you are, in a distant way, gropingly, wonderingly, well inclined towards him, with a mind half set in all the loftiness of the direction which he himself took. They would have been wounded if you had told them they did not care for him, and yet they would have been puzzled if you had asked them why. Why this is just your case; if you could be suddenly and rudely told that you did not care for Christ, you would half resent the impeachment. Yet you are not in the circle wholly and for ever. The time now came when Jesus Christ called these men with a more definite call to service. This was not a call to piety, to religious devotion, in the sense of mere worship. Understand that this was a call to toil, service, work. "I will make you fishers of men." He was not reasoning with the persons referred to, saying, "Give your hearts to God, be good in the truly religious sense of the word, leave your atheism and worship the true and living God"; it was not an appeal of this kind that was addressed to the fishermen, it was a call to service "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men."

There is a time in every life when such a call is addressed to it. Have you heard your call a ghostly hour in which you heard a voice and could not tell whence it came? You said you were moved, stirred, all but inspired, and you knew not what to make of that strange incident in your life. Did it ever occur to you that it was the voice of Christ? Did you ever give a broadly and sublimely religious interpretation to the ghostly ministries which have affected your thinking and toned your ambition? If you have been looking downward for small interpretations that might be written with a fool's finger in the dry dust, let me now ask you to lift up your eyes and see if the meaning be not found in the stars rather than in the cold stones.

You do not deny the call, but how to carry it out is your difficulty. You have nothing to do with that. Hear this voice and tell me if everything be not in it "Follow me." That may mean a great tax upon my strength. "Follow me." That may mean a rash adventure. "Follow me." I may not be equal to the occasion. But the call does not end with "Follow me." He who spake these words spake other words which address themselves immediately to every misgiving of the modest heart. The other words are, "I will make you" as if he had said, "Rely on me for the power, puzzle not yourselves with vain enquiries as to how this following is to be sustained and completed; he who gives the call gives the power." Herein we are entitled to bind Christ to his own promise. We do not start upon a warfare or a race at our own charges. We have come out at the bidding of God, to do God's work and to do it in God's strength where, then, is your cleverness, your ingenuity, your self-supplying strength? You have none, you need none: your daily bread is in heaven; go for it every morning, live upon God, make yourselves strong with his promises. I know not what I shall do for the next seven years; they will oppress me, they will kill me, they will utterly put an end to me so would I talk if I were dependent upon my own suggestiveness and fertility of invention. But when Christ says, "I will make you "he never leaves unfinished any tower that he begins. He has not left any star unrounded, there is no useless rubbish in his universe. I will then even live in him, and wait for his word, and when I am most dumb because of my self-exhaustion, he will be most eloquent if my eyes be lifted up to him in the prayerfulness of a confident expectation.

So many of you are standing back because you think you have to do everything at your own charges. You are afraid you would fail if you went forward to attempt this or that work in the name of Christ. Let me tell you the secret of your fear you have not read the call right through from beginning to end. You have heard the words "Follow me" the most of us only hear parts of sentences; there are very few men that can quote any sentence right through from end to end. They hear the leading word, they forget all the other words that give it perspective and tone and colour. Men hear according to their moral condition; we often hear only what we want to hear; our attention is not of that round and complete kind that takes in the entire statement and weighs it to the utmost syllable and tone.

How are we to know when a divine call has really been addressed to the heart? There are many calls that may only be voices that we should not listen to how then are we to know when the call does really come down from heaven, ringing with all its music and filled with all its gentle persuasiveness? The text will tell you the answer is here. Know that your call to service is likely to be a divine vocation if it involve sacrifice. You want to know no more. "Leave your ship, leave your father, leave your nets, leave your friends, and follow me." A call that summons men to surrender all things in this way is likely to be a healthy and true call.

I never knew God address any call to any human soul that did not involve loss. Anticipating our natural and eager desire to know whether a call is heavenly or earthly, God has always associated with his calls sacrifice. When Moses was called, he counted it greater honour to follow God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season and to enrich himself with all the riches of Egypt. When Hadad astounded Pharaoh by saying he wanted to go back to Edom, Pharaoh said, "What hast thou lacked?" and the young man said, "Nothing, howbeit in anywise let me go." The Lord had stirred up the heart of Hadad, and Hadad went from Egypt to poor Edom, from rest to battle, from assured and continued prosperity to all the perils and adventures of hazardous war. So through all history having digressed for a moment from the text now under consideration.

This man Simon, called Peter, and Andrew his brother, left their nets and followed Christ. Have we ever left anything for the Saviour? I have left nothing. He has given me more than I ever gave him the whole advantage is on my side. If ever he should say to me, "I was sick and in prison, and ye came unto me," I will contradict him to his face. He will have to prove it. There are those of us, perhaps, who think we have given up a good deal for the gospel; I am not of that number I have given up nothing for the gospel. There have been men who have not counted their lives dear unto them that they might follow and serve Christ, It would be my distress not to follow him. There would be no poorer wretch on all the earth's green surface than I should be were he to dismiss me from his service. I have never been bruised for him. I have had gardens of flowers given to me because I have endeavoured to preach him, and all times of comfortableness and honour: if ever he should say to me, "Blessed one, because I was an hungered and thou didst give me bread," if I have not strength to contradict him, I hope I shall have the honesty to hang my head and deny by silence what I would gladly contradict by speech. Let none of us set up as sacrificing anything for Christ we have never done it.

We observe further, from this incident, that Christ's calls are always to something higher. "I will make you fishers of men." He gives the broadest interpretation to our daily want. Whatever you are, he spiritually uses as a type of the other service to which he calls you. Are you fishers in the ordinary sense of the term? He comes to you and says, "I will make you fishers of men." Are you builders of stone and wood? He says, "I will make you builders of a living temple." Are you servants of masters who pay you? He says, "I will make you servants of the King of kings." If we have not realized the spiritual side of our earthly vocation, we are still in the outer court, and have much to learn. Oh, ye who heal the body, come, and Christ will show you how to heal the soul. Oh, ye tradesmen, and merchants, and money-turners, come, and he will show you how to make fine gold and imperishable wealth. Accept your present secular position as a type and hint of the call which Christ is addressing to the soul.

So Christ Jesus called men to his ministry, and unless a man is called to his ministry he had better not enter it. I hold that no man is a true minister who is not directly called by Christ. This limits the ministry, but it strengthens it indefinitely. You cannot learn to preach, you cannot learn to expound the spiritual word all your vocables may be neatly enunciated, you may learn the art of breathing and the art of delivering the voice, but you have not learned on earth, for it is not taught in the schools of men, how to touch the sin-cursed and sin-burdened soul; that art is taught in heaven: there is but one Master, and he never tires.

What is true of the spiritual ministry is true of all the ministries of life. Whatever you are, you will succeed in it only in proportion as Christ has called you to it. Some of you are in wrong positions altogether, you ought never to have begun where you did begin. By providences, over which you had no control, you were turned into wrong lines, and you know it, and your life is a daily pain and a continual sacrifice. After fifty years of age you cannot shift over to the right lines. Make the best of your position. You are like men who are working against the tide, and it is hard work rowing, but inasmuch as you did not enter upon that arduous undertaking of your own conceit or self-will, inasmuch as others are to blame for it more than you are, I now give you good heart, I now cheer you in the name of the merciful One he knows your distresses and disadvantages, and he will not overlook these when he audits the account of your life.

"And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people. And his fame went throughout all Syria, and they brought unto him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatic, and those that had the palsy," what a world he came into! And he knew it before he entered it. If the world had been less" damned he need not have come. In these verses you have a picture of the real state of humanity as Jesus Christ found it. I want to go where the people are all well. Tell me where the lepers are, where divers diseases and torments dwell, and where those live who are possessed with devils, and those which are lunatic, and those which have the palsy, and I will flee away. What are terrors to me were attractions to the infinite heart.

This is the real condition of the world in every age it is a world full of sickness, and disease, and torment, a world in which men are who are possessed with demons, who are moon-struck, and shivering and trembling with humanly incurable palsy. Do we want men of culture to go into such a world nice, dainty-fingered men who faint at the sight of blood, and shudder if they see a paralytic on the streets? Is that the cruel irony we are going to perpetrate in such a world as this? Let us send down a hundred and fifty nice kid-gloved young men, who never speak above their breath, and who are infinitely gifted in the art of saying nothing in many words. They will return, they will sigh for summer days, and calmer climes, and fairer sights. Alas! "We are adapted to certain classes of people of a more elevated, dignified, and cultured kind." Fie on thee, my soul, if thou art cursed with a conceit like that. The world is a sick world, a dying world, a mad world, and thy little daintinesses, and prettinesses, and machine-turned sentences will never touch it. The world wants blood; no other price will redeem it. Oh, church of the living God, Zion, Jerusalem, called by a thousand tender names, what art thou doing but running away to pick up flowers when thou shouldst be labouring with coat off, with both hands earnestly at the deliverance and the healing of souls.

If you do not buy the world with blood you will never buy it. There be those who object to the expression, The blood of Christ. We have now refined that very much into the Love of Christ, the Example of Christ, the Sweet Influence of Christ. We are now unwilling to say, The blood of Christ. Why? If I read your human history, I find you have never got anything worth having unless you paid blood for it. How were the slaves redeemed and emancipated? What was laid down on the counter? Blood. Have you your Magna Charta, and do you boast of that large paper? What paid you for it? Blood. Show me in all English history a single great treasure you have, and I will show you as the signature of its lawful purchase red blood, heart blood, human blood. Yet, when I come into a church and think of redeemed men, I am told not to mention the word blood, but to substitute for it example, love, sympathy, kindness. No, no. The music is one, the anthem is indivisible, redemption is always by blood, and he who has paid less than blood for any redemption has bought it at the wrong counter and paid for it with counterfeit coin.

Imagine a man coming into such a world as is described in the twenty-third and twenty-fourth verses to do anything for it merely by way of example. It is by tragedy that we live. Your home life owes all its beauty and dignity to the tragedy which is at the heart of it. If we are ever to impress this age we must do it by something more than dainty words and accurately regulated ecclesiastical mechanism. When we go nearer the city we must weep over it, and when we go into the city we must die for it. Other programmes you may write, but the angels will tear them and scatter them as waste paper upon the mocking winds.

Wondrous is one little word in this twenty-fourth verse. "He healed them," as easily as the light fills the firmament, without struggle or noise or huge effort. Mark the infinite ease of the expression, "He healed them." Set that expression beside "He created them, he set them in their places, he rolled the stars along he healed them." It is part of the same music, omnipotence never fluttered on account of weakness, and never despaired because of miscalculation. What is thy complaint, O heart of man? He will heal thee. Do not go in the detail of complaints, there is but one disease and its short name is sin. All diseases are but details of that awful fact. The blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, cleanseth from all sin. There is a fountain opened in the house of David for sin. The details are innumerable, the central and vital disease is one.

Jesus Christ's ministry was thus twofold. It was not a literary ministry, it was a philanthropic ministry in the noblest interpretation of that term, a man-loving ministry, a ministry that loved the body and that loved the soul. What are we doing for the body? I know there are great dangers in doing for the body, lest people should become hypocrites. I would rather make a few hypocrites than miss the chance of doing good to one really deserving soul. But who am I that I should set up as scrutineer into real deserts? What are my deserts? None. Shall we pass up to the judgment bar in the official character of scrutineers and say to the great King-Judge, "Lord, I played the part of scrutineer, I examined the credentials of other people, I plucked the mask from the hypocrite's face, I stood nigh to see that no undeserving ones got a crumb from the loaf of chanty: what am I to have as a scrutineer?" There are too many scrutineers. I was the other night accosted, walking with my wife, by a poor creature, who said, "I am very faint, sir." It well became me to play the scrutineer and to say, "All due to her evil behaviour." How dare I say so? Her evil behaviour? If she was faint it was my business to help her to overcome that faintness. I would rather be taken in, deceived, in response to such a petition, than go home and sit down over a smoking supper and applaud myself as a sagacious scrutineer.

I like, as you dc perhaps best of all, to help the little children. We say, at all events they cannot be much to blame. And a friend, known to us all, saw two little children the other day, cold cold looking into a confectioner's window, the heaven of youth, the paradise of the undisciplined mind. Poor ragged little creatures! And the friend said, "Would you like one of these things?" "Yes," and two of them were bought, and the one child was too far gone to feel much interest in it, the other's face glowed with unspeakable delight. How much better it would have been to have played the scrutineer, to have gone into the detail of the case, and to have shown that three generations ago this disease began its cankering work in the family. May God save me from such scrutineering, and may I play the fool a thousand times a day, in giving to the deserving or the undeserving, rather than be so sagacious. I should have nothing this day if the benefits of heaven were given to merit. He is kind to the unthankful and the evil, he sendeth his rain on the just and on the unjust. Thy dinner will choke thee to-day if thou dost not eat it with a mouth first opened in gratitude.

This practical ministry of our Saviour has yet to be repeated on a very great scale. We shall be taken in many times; I myself have been more taken in than any living man I ever heard of, and still they are trying to take me in, and I am always going to learn better and never do. Yesterday a letter reached me from a friend who had been much benefited by my ministry, and he asked me to find for him what he calls some large-hearted Christian who will say to him, "Here, are forty or fifty pounds for you to commence business with." That is the kind of man who never takes me in, and I never take him in. I am not speaking of persons of that sort; but you know in the Galilee you go through, and the Decapolis and the Jerusalem and the Judea and the Jordan known to you, there are thousands to whom you can minister, and that is part of the Christian vocation as truly as preaching the gospel in any merely literary sense. These are all ministries of Christ teaching the ignorant, clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, teaching the intellect, stirring the ambition to nobler daring, and in all ways fulfilling, completing, glorifying our call from heaven. And then, at the last, "Well done, good and faithful servant." May we all hear that sweet word we shall need no other heaven.