Verses 24-42
Chapter 44
Prayer
Almighty God, thou hast given unto every day its own light, and to this day of all the seven dost thou often give the brightest light of all. Sometimes thou dost make us glad by the mere power of the light that shines around us, for it touches our stony hearts into music and upon our eyes it sheds the brightness of a new hope. We come to thee this Sabbath day, with all the memories which make it the day blest of heaven and dear to earth. We have seen the Crucified One; we have seen the grave wherein he was laid; we were early at the place of sepulture, and behold he was not there, for he had risen, as all good men must rise, and all good causes that have been smitten and wounded and slain must come up again and behold we have found him, and in his "All-hail" we have stood still to receive his blessing and to hear his instructions.
We have come to thine house today with expectations not easily fulfilled; we have heard of the wondrous things thou hast promised to them that love thee; we have been told that the riches of Christ are unsearchable, we have been given to understand that thy spirit only can reveal the heavenly things to souls prepared for the disclosure, and satisfy our expectation so as to create in it a new expectancy, a wider and brighter hope. Thus do thou satisfy us by always showing us that there is more to be done and more to be received; this satisfaction is the inspiration of our manhood, it is a benediction upon our growth, it lures us by many a gentle compulsion to still stronger endeavour and still more patient endurance and industry.
We bless thee for the corn we have reaped this week: thou hast granted unto the fields plentifulness of produce, and thou hast given our arm strength, and thou hast sharpened our sickle, and we have cut down the golden grain, and we rejoice in the abundance of the provision. Thou hast done great things for us, whereof we are glad. Thou hast filled us with the plenteousness of thine own grace, thou hast established us in a confidence that cannot be shaken, thou hast preserved unto us our friends the old man by the fireside, the little child in the cradle, the busy man full of distress about his daily bread, the mother and the sister we are all here, and behold our psalm is one of homage and adoration to heaven. We will bless the Lord with all musical instruments, we will call upon the very stones of the temple to join us in our loud Hallelujah, for thy mercy has been tender, thy kindness has been loving, thou hast kept our eyes from tears, our soul from death, our feet from falling.
The Lord anoint us every day from heaven as with a new baptism, rekindle every morning the fire upon the altar of our heart, give us increasing delight in the broadening revelations of thy truth, may we obey every indication from heaven of the will and purpose of our Father. Help us to lose our life that we may find it, and save us from the delusion that if we would save our life we must find it of our own strength. The Lord help us to trust his law, to live upon his grace, to answer his calls, then shall there be in our hearts a great peace, and in our eyes a shining light.
Look upon us as we are bowed down here at thy throne. We have come, not to plead against thy law, but to confess that we have broken it. We have not brought our virtues for thy survey, but our vices for thy pardon. We do not boast of our strength, we are humbled by our weakness, and now with the outstretched love of our hearts we grasp the great cross, the cross of Christ, the one and only cross by which men can be saved.
Thou knowest what we are, what we need, what our single pain is, what is the story we dare not tell to human ears, what are the prayers for which there are no words, our heart-yearnings, our deep desires, our solicitudes that are often expressed in sighing and in tears. All these things thou knowest come to us through Jesus Christ thy Son, our Saviour, not according to the narrowness of our prayers, but according to the infinite fulness of thine own love. Amen.
Christ's Consolation for Workers
Let me call your attention to an instructive fact. All these tender consolations were given beforehand. Jesus Christ did not wait until the disciples returned, bruised and shattered, and then gather them into his heart and heal them, as it were, with his sympathy and blood. Jesus Christ once said, "I will give the multitudes bread, lest they faint by the way." That text gave us a discourse upon the preventive ministry of Christ. He did not wait until the people had actually fainted, and then give them bread: he gave them bread to prevent the fainting. He hath prevented me with his lovingkindness that is to say, he hath run before me to get ready for my weakness and hunger, and ere the blow has been struck the healing has been made ready.
I hold it to be a noteworthy fact that this comfort formed part of the inspiration of the disciples. The comfort was, so to say, part of the capital on which they had to live. If Jesus Christ had been sending forth men to add to the leprosy of the world, to strike thousands more of its inhabitants blind, and to deafen as many as possible, he could not have forewarned his disciples of greater dangers and distresses. "Ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake." How are we to account for this issue? He gave them power against unclean spirits, and he sent the disciples forth to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness, and all manner of disease, and to preach, saying, "The kingdom of heaven is at hand," and then he added, with an abruptness which must receive some profound explanation, "Ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake." Where is the balance between the men and the fate? I repeat, had he sent forth his disciples to break up the world, to diminish its joys, to add to its distresses, he could hardly have painted a more tragical issue. He sent them forth on a beneficent errand, and told them that they should be brought before governors and kings, be cast into prison, be called Beelzebub, and be forsaken and hated of all men for his name's sake. Herein once more is the statesmanship of that wondrous Peasant, and herein do I find his Godhead. Not in the small grammatical clevernesses of the Biblical exegete, but in these disclosures of his shrewdness, of his insight, the penetration that pierced everything, and saw essences and realities, and the vital parts and secrets of all things. Who but himself could have seen that the casting out of devils, the cleansing of lepers, the giving sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, and the preaching of the nearness of a new kingdom could have ended in scourgings and contempt, and hatred and death? But his forecast has been abundantly established by facts.
Jesus Christ knew that there are men who will never allow good to be done, if they can help it, by any method but their own. There are men who would rather see you damned than see you saved by irregular means. They would rather have you lost in what they would term an orthodox manner, than see you saved by a method which to them would seem to be heterodox or heretical. They would like their own little prophecies confirmed; they do not want their conceptions, low as a ceiling, heightened into a sky; they do not want their little conceptions of fellowship, narrow as the walls of a man-built house, widened out until they touch God's horizon.
This was the principle which Jesus Christ proceeded on in delivering his charge. He told his disciples they would everywhere meet the diabolical spirit of sectarianism; they were irregular, they were nomadic, they were persons who had not upon them the usual seal, they did not bear upon their arms the accustomed badge, and though they might have good in their heads, good in their hearts, good in every tone of their speech, they would be hated of all men. Let us beware of the sectarian spirit; it blinds us to the excellences that are beyond our little boundaries; let us say with Paul, "Some preach Christ in one way, some preach him in another; whether in pretence or in truth, Christ is preached. Therein," said the grand old prisoner, "do I rejoice; yea, and will rejoice." Is the Pauline spirit dead?
As we have read this chapter you must have been struck with the number of times the word therefore recurs. If would seem as if nearly every other verse was a statement of some logical sequence. There is a deep logical sequence in the fact, that as the warning was given beforehand, so the consolation was laid up in store. Jesus Christ set forth the whole case; he told his disciples what to expect alike from man and from God. And this is precisely what he tells every one of his followers today. Jesus Christ regarding him now as nothing more than the greatest of statesmen said to himself, "These poor little children (for they were little better) must be delivered from the peril of surprise. Things must not happen suddenly to immature minds. I must go before them, and give them the outline of the whole course. They must not come back when they have accomplished their journey, expressing any surprise at the greatness of the difficulty. When they do come back it must be with the surprise of joy." To that surprise he sets no period. It is his plan that no man shall ever come back to Christ and say, "Thou didst not tell me half the peril, and thy description of the burning, cutting pain was understated." No; he said, "Ye shall be brought up in the synagogues and scourged there, and the scourge shall cut your flesh and find the bone, and ye shall be brought before governors and kings for my name's sake, and ye shall be hated of all men." This was not a Man who tempted a few disciples by vivid pictures highly coloured, and glowing promises. He told them they were going into a black tunnel, and at every step an enemy would endeavour to seize him, but he also said, "In the midst of that dark and terrible valley God's revelations will flame upon you, and many an angel will surprise you into sudden and ecstatic joy." We know the future perfectly well. All its great broad lines are drawn in a manner which cannot be misunderstood trouble and joy, tears and delights, the grave and the bright heaven are all before us not in detail, indeed, for no man knows the hour of his death; it is enough for me that I know I must die; the day and the hour hath no man known they are hidden in heaven. Jesus Christ gives his disciples the infinite consolation of knowing that when they suffer the Master suffers along with them. "The disciple is not above his master, nor the servant above his Lord. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his Master and the servant as his Lord. If they have called the Master of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call them of his household?" No blow falls upon you that does not also fall upon your Lord and Master. Your tears flow through his eyes. We have not an High Priest that cannot be touched with a feeling of our infirmities: he knows what the force of temptation is, for be has felt its entire strain upon his own beating heart. It is something for the private soldier to know that he is fighting side by side with his General; there is something in such companionship that amounts almost to an inspiration. I suffer less when I suffer in certain society. The very pain that would distress me if I were in society that I hold in contempt lifts me up into a new strength when I endure it in association with men whose names are the inspiration of history and the hope of the world. What more could he have said than that "Whoever undervalues you undervalues me: the insult is not meant for you; it is meant for your Master. When they spit upon your face they mean to spit upon mine. They could despise you from a social point of view; from the point of view of rabbinical learning and culture they could hold you in ineffable contempt; but it is through you that they see me: when they scourge you it is upon my flesh that the thong falls?" If the men heard these words right they must have been ennobled for the occasion. In proportion to their love for their Master would be their joy in thinking that they should suffer anything in his name, and afterwards men went out of the presence of the council rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for his name. That was the heroic age of the Church, when men lived in God, and represented the very sun of the divine image.
When we suffer alone we get no advantage out of the suffering we must offend CHRIST; when we think we are suffering alone we go contrary to his whole teaching, for he says, "Whoso receiveth him I send receiveth me: whoso believeth on me, believeth not on me but on him that sent me, As my Father hath sent me even so I send you. He that despiseth, despiseth not man, but God." This is the root out of which all consolation comes. We do not suffer alone; we have a fellow-sufferer. Whenever you are laughed at because of your Christianity, if it be real, simple, true, noble, honest, and healthy, the laugh is at the cross. Whenever you suffer, which few men now do, for your faith's sake, it is not you that suffer the Son of God is crucified afresh and put to an open shame. Let us take care lest we mistake this matter of suffering in Christ's stead. Sometimes we suffer for our errors and not for our truth, for our impertinence and not for our fidelity, for our selfishness and not for the divine breadth of our character-building. If, therefore, we suffer on our own account, I wonder not that the pain should be sharp and intolerable; but in so far as our character and spirit and action are right, and we suffer, it is not we that suffer only; it is the Son of God whose face is smitten and whose heart is bruised.
Jesus Christ goes even further than this, for he connects the whole mission of the Church expressly with the Father. It is God himself that suffers, and it is God that identifies himself with the whole purpose and issue of the Christian economy. When the disciples were speaking in their own defence, Jesus Christ told them, "It is not ye that speak, but the spirit of your Father which speaketh in you." "A sparrow," said Christ, "cannot fall to the ground without your Father." So the universe is one: no man can touch the truth without touching the whole kingdom of heaven; no man can injure a single truth without injuring the whole quantity called truth, for the truth is not a question of single filaments and threads, particles and details: the truth is one, indissoluble, and to touch it to the injury of any part of it is to touch it to the pain of its very heart.
The universe is one: some of us worship in one place and some in another; but to God there is no space that can be mapped out in separate localities. He filleth all in all. If you are not against him you are on his side. Therein have I sometimes endeavoured to teach men that though they be not nominally in Christ they may be under the inspiration of his Spirit. Men know not what they do even when they put the Son of God to shame. There is a forgiveness that may follow their blasphemy; there is in heaven a consideration for human ignorance, though that ignorance culminate in the tragedy of Gethsemane and Golgotha. Truth, let me say again and again, is one as the universe is one. There is nothing despicable or contemptible; the fall of the sparrow is watched, and the very hairs of your head are all numbered. God putteth our tears in his bottle, and he writes our names in his book of life. Sacred universe, sensitive universe; if I lift a hand I send a shudder to the stars.
So my whole thought and wish and purpose and prayer what are these but so many vibrations that tell upon lines that do not come within my purview, and that stir influences which I can neither understand nor control? So Jesus Christ identifies himself with his disciples, and identifies himself and his disciples with the Father that is in heaven. It is one Church, one life, one temple, and to touch it at any point is to cause an influence to be felt throughout the whole living faculty. These are not tiny solaces, these are not little plasters for little wounds: these great solaces are redemptions; they enter the very secret place of the life; they do not evaporate in the sun they feed the very soul.
Another consolation you find in the words, "He that endureth to the end shall be saved." There is where so many of us may fail: we endure a little while; the seed springs up speedily, and because there is no deepness of earth soon withers away. This is not a question of enduring for a little time; it is a question of enduring to the end. The end who can tell when that shall come? Life is full of endings life is full of beginnings. Knowing how distressed we are by monotony God has taken care in the economy of the universe that there shall be little or none of it. So he has broken up our life into day and night, the beginning of the week and the end of the same, the day of birth, the day of marriage, the day of peculiar joy so many beginnings are there to tempt us into new views and lure us into deeper resolutions and give us fresh chances in life, and yet all these beginnings and endings culminate in one supreme finality no man can tell when it may be: my end may be this day. It is well we do not know when the final point comes into the literature of life.
"He that endureth to the end." Paul did. He said, "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course." Weary not in well doing, for in due season ye shall reap if ye faint not. Jesus Christ himself said, "I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do." And again he said, "It is finished." Take care lest you come almost to land, take care lest you be almost saved. The old Puritan divine, the Shakespeare of the pulpit of his day, wound up one of his grandest appeals to his people by saying, "To be almost saved, is to be altogether damned." Take care lest you be almost in possession, and yet fail of clasping within your glad hand that after which you have been aspiring. Let us endeavour to the last hour. To fail within sight of the prize, to perish within sight of land, to be able to hear the welcomes that ring from the shore, and yet not to land there Oh, that is painful beyond realisation.
I shall never forget how, recently, we approached the city of our desire. The day before the rain had been continuous, and the mists afterwards very thick, and there was a sudden fear in the minds of men. Then came out the evening sun, and touched up all the sullen clouds into a very apocalypse of glory and beauty. I never saw such a sign in all the heavens, that are full of pictures to the eye that searches for them. We moved on through the water, and the day of landing came, and when persons saw their friends in the near distance, there was much signal giving and signal exchanging. One young boy came to me with his eyes alight and, to explain his joy, he said, "I see my father." I heard a lady say, "I see my brown-eyes." I heard another say, "I see my sister." Was it possible to fail just then to fail within a few minutes of the landing-place to be lost before hands were grasped in the reunion of grateful affection?
Take care: we are going towards the end, but we may not accomplish it; God give us strength to fulfil every mile of the road, and to fight the last battle, and to pluck the sting from the last enemy. It is the end that determines everything. The goodliest ship may go down in sight of port. Oh, may we many of whose ships are not good, much tried, storm-beaten, creaking because of weakness may we all be brought in, and so at last
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