Matthew 9:14-19

Chapter 37

Prayer

Almighty God, do thou lead us into all the deeper truth, and save us from the narrowness and meanness of the letter. Give unto our hearts that keen vision which sees thee afar off, and knows the way that thou dost take, though it be hidden in much darkness and be not known to the carnal reason. We would be no longer children, tossed to and fro with every wind of doctrine, but would be men in Christ Jesus, having maturity of understanding, largeness of knowledge, trueness and depth of sympathy, and the insight which is a continual revelation. Our aspirations are high and pure, and they are the creation of the Holy Ghost, and the prayer which thou dost inspire thou dost never forget to answer. We would see thee in the sanctuary, we would hear thy goings in all the providences of life, we would behold thy supreme beauty in the Holy Word help us to realise all these desires in the perfectness of their meaning, then shall our life enjoy a wide liberty, and before our spirits there shall shine an enchanting and contentful destiny.

We bless thee for all thy tender care, thy patience, so great as to be beyond our words to express; thy lovingkindness, thy tender mercy how shall we speak of these without taking from them the very bloom which is their charm? Yet must our hearts refer to them in continual delight, for they are the staff and the joy of our life, our great defence, our sure and eternal protection. Thou hast been mindful of us with infinite care; thou hast still continued unto us all that is precious; thou hast given unto us health and reasoning power, and a sense of responsibility; thou hast kindled within us lights which are not of the earth, and hopes which are not born of time. Thou hast not forgotten the wants of the body, as thou hast not neglected the cry of the soul; but we are what we are this day by the grace of God, and to that grace would we now awaken a loud sweet psalm, thanking thee with glowing hearts for all thy wondrous mercies and thy tender kindness.

Thou dost do with us as seemeth good in thy sight. We cannot alway tell what thou doest: seldom can we find out why thou doest it, but it is our delight to find our rest in thy power, wisdom, love, and in all the purposes of thine almightiness. We rest in God, we stand in God, we have every answer to every difficulty in God. Not our will but thine be done, for thy will is good and thy purpose is full of mercy. Undertake for us in all the way of life, we humbly beseech thee. When the wind is high and cold and the road is long and steep and lonely, when all things seem to be in conspiracy against our rest and hope, in the cloudy, dark day, in the starless, cheerless night, on the broad and sunny road, everywhere, on land and sea, in city and wilderness, do thou be at our right hand then shall we be almost in heaven. Save us from ourselves, protect us from every enemy, destroy the power of every delusion, lift us above the influence of every prejudice, open our souls to receive the whole light of heaven, and give unto our hearts the steadiness and the courage which can abide in the day of adversity and speak for God and truth in the time of darkness and trouble.

We give thee united and hearty thanks for all thy tender mercies: as heads of houses, as fathers and mothers and children and servants, we unite in blessing thee for household gifts, for all domestic protection and comfort; as men whose lot is cast in the world, whose every day sees a battle, and whose every night is broken by sleeplessness, we bless thee that amidst it all we have the shining of thy countenance and the assurance of thy presence and benediction.

Hear us when we pray for those who are not able to be with us and to unite in common prayer. For the sick, for the dying, for the wounded and lonely, for the traveller by sea and land, for all for whom we ought to pray, and after whom our love goes out in searching and sacred desire the Lord's blessing be multiplied upon them all, brighter than the summer noonday, tenderer than the dews of the morning.

The Lord help us now to study his word: may we turn over its pages with modest fingers and look into the writings with reverent hearts. May our whole spirit be attuned to the purposes of thy gracious revelation. As for our sin, we know where to bring it; we bring it to the great cross of Christ; we behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world by whom we have received the Atonement. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin: bowing before his cross, trusting to his sacrifice, looking to his ministry, each of us would desire to say with all the urgency of his heart, "God be merciful to me a sinner." Amen.

Mat 9:14-19

The Spiritual Law

Jesus Christ was always pestered by little questions. It is very seldom, if ever, that you hear a great inquiry propounded to him. Why eat with publicans and sinners? Why eat with Unwashed hands? Why heal on the Sabbath-day? Why not fast more? These were the small enquiries by which those who were immediately around him and were observing him critically or in partial sympathy belittled every occasion. A man is known by the questions he asks. Whoever asks any great question concerning the Bible? Be assured that he who asks the great question gets the great answer, and be not surprised if, in reply to our little and superficial enquiries, we receive shallow and disappointing replies. What is our question when we open the sacred book?

The persons who put this enquiry were honest men. They were not Pharisees, they were the disciples of John, and their question was, "Why do we and the Pharisees fast oft, but thy disciples fast not?" These people represented those persons who have only got so far as the gospel of abstention. Many of us are at that point, the very first and meanest in the Christian life. Our Christianity consists in not doing things. It is a necessary point in our higher culture: no man can work up the line which has upon it the grim rough words, "Thou shalt not." Yet the purpose of Jesus Christ is to lead us away from the negative gospel and virtue of abstention into the glorious gospel of ample and lifelong liberty.

You find persons whose virtue consists in abstention from vice: it is a kind of minus quantity, it is the mere negation of wrong. They will not eat, they will not drink, they will not pursue this pleasure, nor will they follow after that delight, they will not be seen in such and such company that is their lean and most puny virtue. It is necessary, it is part of the education, but a man ought not always to rest there. Virtue is positive, religion is emphatic, the true spirit is one of liberty. The question, therefore, which we should put to ourselves every day is, how far are we yet in the prison of the letter, and what advancement have we made into the kingdom of liberty? True virtue would, of course, consist in being able to go round the whole circle of legitimate pleasures and yet to keep that circle in its proper place. He has grown up into the fulness of Christ who can sit down with publicans and sinners, who can touch pitch and not be denied, who can take up serpents and play with them, and can drink any deadly thing and it shall not hurt him; but who has attained that height? That is the grand liberty that is yet to be realised. They shall take up serpents, and the serpents shall have no power over the hand that grasps them, and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them, the soul shall be so much better than the body, the mind shall have lofty lordship over that which is physical, and the spiritual shall triumph over the material. That is the line along which our education has to proceed. Do not scourge it unduly, do not hasten it with the impetuosity which is not wise. The most of us are yet virtuous simply because we are not so vicious as we might be.

"Why do we and the Pharisees fast oft, but thy disciples fast not?" Religion is enjoyment, religion is associated with wedding bells and wedding feasts, and wine drinking, and high delight, and infinite liberty, and cloudless sunshine. He who binds it down to other ideas forces an eagle into a mean cage and bruises its noble wings with iron weapons. He, of course, would be the grand Christian who made every day holy alike, whose Saturday was so holy that his Sunday could not possibly be holier. But we have not yet attained that spiritual excellence, therefore some of us are obliged to set apart one day in the week and to say concerning it, "This day is sacred to religious purposes: we will call it day of rest, day of prayer, day of hope." When we have completed our Christian education, there will be only one day in the week, and its name will be the Sabbath day, the Lord's day, every moment a jewel, every breath a waft from heaven, every exercise nobler than prayer, even as noble as praise.

Sometimes this high ideal of religion is unduly forced upon us by thoughtless people, as if it were attainable and realisable here and now by every professing Christian. Let me protest against such undue urgency. We are travellers, and therefore we go one step at a time. We are mounting a ladder, and the rule is, one round at once; when we get to the top the ladder may be burned, for we have mounted to the very sanctuary of infinite liberty; but whilst we are climbing let no man cut one round out of the ladder; every round is part of the trying, solemn, but most salutary discipline of life. When we have attained the fulness of Christ's purpose, and are all shut up in the wedding chamber, eating and drinking with him from morning till night at the great festal board, then all our money will be sacred; but just now some of us are obliged to put away into God's basket God's portion: we are so thievish we should steal it if we did not seal it up on the Saturday: our fingers have got the felonious movement, and they would take that money if we did not seal up and stamp it as God's. Do not despise, therefore, the man who is yet in the narrow gospel of abstention and whose virtue consists in not being vicious. He has undertaken a great lesson: the pages are very long and the print is very small, and therefore it is not often that we have to turn over. The great question we have to put to ourselves is whether we have got hold of the right book, whether we are animated by the right spirit in its perusal. If so, we shall come to its finis then as great and perfected scholars, we shall lay hold of the great liberty and shall be enfranchised among those who have no need of candle, or sun, or moon, for the light is from God, and it needs no intermediate atmosphere through which to come to us. That is our resting point: it is afar off, we are on the road, faint yet pursuing in that pursuit find your rest and hope.

If the disciples of John put a little question, Jesus gave a great reply. He was not answering them only, he was answering the spirit of all coming time. Herein you have the reason why sometimes a great answer was given to a small inquiry. The individuals who put the question spoke for themselves alone, expressed their momentary fretfulness or surprise, but Jesus Christ in every little question saw the enquiries that would fall upon his cause and kingdom through all time, and therefore he spread out his answer beyond the immediate occasion that elicited it. Hear this marvellous answer, struck from him in a moment. "Can the children of the bride-chamber mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast. No man putteth a piece of new cloth into an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse. Neither do men put new wine into old bottles, else the bottles break and the wine runneth out and the bottles perish, but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved." Christ's replies were all extemporaneous: never did he retire to consider any question that was put to him: the answer was plucked out of his eternity, it was always ready. If he could have paused for one moment he would have lost the crown of his deity. In the instancy of his replies was the fulness of his light: you had but to touch him with right fingers and you drew from him the healing virtue.

What then is his own notion of our union with him? The figure is beautiful. We are children of the bride-chamber, and he is the bridegroom, and we are gathered around a wedding table, and the air vibrates and dances under the thrill and shock of the wedding bells. "Fasting?" saith he; "it is a stranger to a scene like this, it is an anti-climax, it is an alien that cannot speak the language of this fair land." We are not called to gloom and mourning and falling of the head, nor are we summoned to take the bulrush and sackcloth and ashes. My Father's house is a bride-chamber, the sanctuary is a place where the wedding guests assemble, the temple of the Lord is the place where the life-wine is poured out in rivers for the soul's ample drinking. Child, young one, spirit of delight and hope, you thought the church was a gloomy place: if there is any gloom in it, blame the human fingers that brought it to the place. The high ideal of the church is joy in its keenest accent, pleasure without alloy, the very ecstasy and rapture of gladness. Christianity tell the world that her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace. When Zion is looking round and considering what key-note she shall take, say unto her, "Rejoice, rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion."

Yet the Lord keeps us on the right lines for one swift moment, quicker than the twinkling of an eye. In this passage he directs attention to the highest point of joy, and then he descends to the common average line of life, and says, "But the days will come when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast." Then they will base their ceremonies on reason, then the ceremonial observances of the church shall not be priestly tricks, for they shall come out of the heart's wound, out of the life's bitter grief; they shall not be calendared for punctual observance, according to the movements of the clock, but they shall express an inner, real, secret, profound, unutterable grief. When that black grief seizes thee, thou needest not turn to some man-written diary to know whether it is fast-day or not. Every heart will be its own calendar, every life will keep its own fasts, and no man needs ask the meaning of the dejection which shall then picture itself on the worn face. It shall bear so clearly the autograph of the heart, that no man, wayfaring or foolish, can misread such writing.

There are those who ask questions about fasts and feasts and new moons and special days mechanical scholars, mechanical Christians, technical purists, persons who need to go to ink-written paper to know what they have to do next. Is the bridegroom with you? If you can say "Yes," then eat and drink, yea eat and drink abundantly, and let your soul delight itself in fatness, whatever the calendar may say. Has the bridegroom gone is his chair vacant is his sunlike face no more the centre of the feast and the security of its delight? I need not exhort you to grief and mourning, the heart will know what to do: follow the intuitions of the heart in these matters, and then your ceremonies will not be tricks of the hand, but expressions of the inner life, your fasting and your feasting shall be accounted sacraments in Heaven.

Nor was the answer parabolically beautiful only, it was philosophically broad and true. No man putteth a piece of new cloth into an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse. You are not to be partly one thing and partly another: the left hand is not to be a Jew and the right hand a Christian. That is not Christ's idea of his own purpose and his own kingdom. We are one thing only. There are those that are least in the kingdom of heaven, and there are those that are greatest; but they are all in the kingdom of heaven; and he that is least in the kingdom of heaven, is greater than he that is greatest outside. You cannot be both Jew and Christian, both believer and unbeliever, both infidel and worshipper. You are the one or you are the other, and if you are trying to unite the two, then you will know by experience and loss that men who put new wine into old bottles lose both the bottles and the wine. What are you? Under whose banner do you come? Whose name do you bear? I ask not whether you are giants in the kingdom, but whether you are little children in the house, just breathing, crying, cooing, laughing, wondering, looking with eyes that are all wonder and but little vision. Let your hearts reply, and according to their answer let the exhortation come, for no other exhortation can touch the reality of the case.

Do not fast by rule, do not go to church because of mere custom, do not read the Bible according to the measurement which you have laid out. If you are still in the state of pupilage which requires such mechanical help, far be it from me to deny you the advantage of such assistance. Some of you will need to say you will read so much scripture today and to-morrow: if any of you have grown away from that mechanical arrangement, as I trust most of us have done, do not visit with severity of criticism your opinions upon those who have not attained your height of excellence. I cannot bind myself to read so many verses in the day, nor can I bind myself to fast on this day month. I must let the day bring its own religion, I must let the day deliver its own letters, I must let the day bring its own angels. I cannot forecast my religious doings and observances: to-morrow the bridegroom may have gone, and I shall not need you to tell me to fast: my head will sink, and in the chamber of the heart there will be a great vacancy and a fatal gloom. To-morrow he may come back, and this hand will thrust itself out to find the rope that rings the loudest bell. God make us all real, for reality is the glory of piety.

I am surprised that I find so good a stopping place in the seventeenth verse, yet the eighteenth verse opens in a way which constrains me to go on. "While he yet spake these things unto them------" Christ was a speaker that was often interrupted. Some of us meaner talkers cannot bear interruption; to be broken in upon is fatal to our lame speech, because we are not speakers, we are reciters or readers of a lesson, or performers of a trick. If we talked right out of the temple and sanctuary of our life, we could bear to have our speech punctuated by divers kinds of interruptions, and especially by those interruptions which called us to beneficent labour. "While he yet spake these things unto them," whilst there was wonder on the face of those who received the answer, whilst the air was still stirring with the vibrations of his sacred and revealing voice, whilst the question was yet under consideration, "behold there came a certain ruler and worshipped him, saying, My daughter is even now dead, but come and lay thy hand upon her and she shall live." We began with a little question, we come into a tragic prayer. Such, indeed, is the sharp transition of life. Now the great Teacher has to answer the technical enquiry, and now to recall the dead, and now to redeem the world.

The ruler's little child was twelve years old, and she was dead, yet he said, "Come and lay thy hand upon her and she shall live." " Thy hand" are not all hands alike? Is there a science of palmistry are there those who read the man in the hand are not all grips of the same intensity? Why say, "Thy hand" could no other hand be found? We are sometimes shut up to the help of one man, even in our lower life. "O for our own doctor: his very voice would do the patient good. O for our own physician: he knows just what to give when the sufferer is in this crisis of agony. O for our old mother: there was healing, there was comfort in her gentle hand. O for the old father if he had been here he would have found the key to open this gate. O for the old pastor that first showed us the light and brought us to prayer he would know what to say to us just now." We have, therefore, analogy to help us in this matter. In the great crises of life there is often only one hand that can help us. Thy right hand, O Lord, is become glorious in power. The right hand of the Lord doeth valiantly. In thy hand is both honour and might.

The good hand of my God be upon me. Out of whose hand do you take your daily food? Thou openest thine hand and satisfieth the desire of every living thing. Lay thine hand upon us even when we are dead, and we shall live again. Dear hand, wounded hand, mighty hand, hand of the Loving One, lay it upon us, before us, behind us, round about us keep us in thine hand and let our names be written on its palm.

See the life of our Lord the bridegroom making all the children of the bride-chamber happy, intoxicating them with the sacred wine of his own joy, answering a little technical question and hastening to recall the dead to life: for we read, "And Jesus arose and followed him, and so did his disciples." When did he ever refuse the request of a broken heart? When did he ever say "No" to the contrite spirit? When did he ever pierce the up-turned eyes of contrition with sharp darts of rebuke? He arose and followed him like a servant. He made himself of no reputation, he took upon him the form of a slave and became obedient, obedient unto death, obedient unto the death of the cross. Not obedience in any of its reluctant forms or manifestations, but the utter, complete obedience that left nothing undone.

What is there in your house to-day is death there? Ask Jesus to go home with you, and you will have light at eventide. Is there a great grief at home today? Take Jesus with you and he will sanctify the bitter grief. Is the house very empty today, and cold, and lonely, and are you afraid to hear your own footfall within the unsympathetic walls? Take the guest with you he can break the bread, and make a feast of it in the breaking, and he will fill up every vacancy and make you glad, if not with immediate restoration, with a great hope that shall be more precious than any satisfaction that is possible within the bounds of time and space. With Christ in the house we have companionship, sufficiency, rest, thankfulness, hope and there is nothing else in heaven.