Matthew 9:27-31

Chapter 39

Prayer

Almighty God, our words are too poor for thy praise: thou knowest what our hearts would give if they could, thou dost accept the purpose as a temple and the intention as a great reality. Thou dost turn our water into wine, and our two mites of poverty thou dost account more than the gold of the rich. Thou shalt calculate for us, we will no longer reckon for ourselves. Do thou fill our hearts with a desire to praise thee, and turn our whole life into a glad and industrious service, so that whilst the days linger, we may be found doing thy will upon earth, with all the purpose with which thou dost inspire our heart. Now and again we are lifted above the dust and cloud, up where no earth-wind blows, even to heaven's gate there we see somewhat of the other light, compared with which the light of our sun is but a dim flame. Keep us there in all elevation of feeling and sacredness of desire appropriate to such nearness to thyself, and then as to our daily activity and service, help us to toil amongst men with Christ's own devotion, piteousness, and infinite charitableness of heart: may the morning find us busy, may the eventide find us seeking only honourable rest, may we be numbered amongst those servants who have the blessedness of being found waiting or working when their Lord comes!

We have brought our weekly hymn to thy house, loud and sweet, cheerful with a great gladness, bright with a heavenly hope. Thou hast done great things for us whereof we are glad: every night thou hast blessed us with the benediction of sleep, every morning thou hast sent the sunbeam to awaken us again to a sense of responsibility and to the engagement of service. All the week long thou hast beset us behind and before and laid thine hand upon us, thou hast sustained our hearts by the infinite comfortableness of thy grace; we are here today a band of men whose hearts God has touched our life would rise to thee like a flame seeking the skies, our whole purpose would be undivided in intensity and in love, and all the while we would be seeking to renew our strength by no trick or cunning of our own, but by diligently waiting for the Lord until it doth please him to appear.

Thou hast given us glad promises, thou hast sounded a trumpet amongst us; yea, a silver trumpet, and every note of it is a note of hopefulness. Thou hast promised that the earth shall be better lighted, that the heavens shall be filled with a greater glory, that all human hearts shall unite in offering praise unto the living one, and that the Cross of Christ, bare, bleak tree, blighted by all the cold and bitterness of winter, shall bloom into a tree, the leaves of which shall be for the healing of the nations, and all nations shall gather themselves under its grateful shade. Pluck thou the prey from the hand of the enemy, reclaim the heritage of the heathen and make it as the garden of heaven. Clothe thy ministers with power, touch their tongues anew with tuneful eloquence and make their hearts burn with all the love of Christ.

We come to thee through the dear Cross of one Jesus of Nazareth, Son of Mary, Son of Man, Son of God, the Man with the great heart, the Christ of Heaven, the Anointed of Eternity, the Lamb that taketh away the sin of the world. O, take it away soon, take it away altogether, shut it up in its appropriate hell, and burn it with unquenchable fire. Reign in us, thou Holy Spirit, rule us continually, give us new thoughts, new emotions, clothe our will as with the garment of obedience, bring us evermore into the attitude of worship and homage before the throne of light.

Comfort those who are bowed down, with the solaces of heaven. Touch the heart that is wounded and give a portion of sweetness to the life that has long been accustomed to the bitter cup. Lighten the burden of the heavy-laden, relight the lamp of those whose hope is dying. Bless our friends who are in the sick chamber, waiting for health, or tarrying till their immortality in heaven begins. Behold our loved ones on the sea, and give them safe outgoing or incoming. Remember all those whom we love on foreign shores, in colonial lands, and in distant countries unite us all by the subtle and inviolable fellowship of Christian love, and may we, when all earthly separations are closed for ever, meet in the brotherhood of heaven! Amen.

Mat 9:27-31

The World Through Which Christ Passed

What a world our Lord Jesus Christ passed through! He was always surrounded by the deaf, the dumb, the blind, the poor, the broken-hearted, the weary, the hungry, and those that had no helper. Herein was the realization, and most vivid and happy fulfilment of prophecy: it was foretold of him that he was to be the Apostle to the meek, the captive, the broken-hearted, and the mourning. Every man creates his awn world. You can find a tolerably comfortable world if you please. Shut yourself up in your own parlour, enjoy your own honey, warm yourself by your own fire, shut out safely all the cries of distress that are ringing in the world, and you will come to the conclusion that life after all is tolerably happy and comfortable. There are men who do this. When they hear complaints, they say they are exaggerated; when their eye reluctantly alights upon the newspapers containing reports of human distress and poverty, they call such reports romances, or they blame the poor for their poverty, the sorrowing for their distress, and the lonely for their helplessness. Every man, let me repeat, creates the world through which he passes. There are some of us near whom no poor man would ever come, if he could help it; he would give us room enough on the broad highway. There are others who are always surrounded by crying, distressful, sad-hearted, grief-stricken folks, so that life is spent in a kind of multitudinous hospital. You can go through life comfortably if you like, or you can acquaint yourself with the world's woe and the world's bitter grief.

What a wonderful world Jesus Christ developed! You would not have known that there were so many sick folks in the town if he had not come. The oldest inhabitant was surprised by the distress, helplessness, and sadness of life hidden in the town in which he had lived full seventy years and more. When Jesus Christ entered into the town, all its distress was in a flutter of expectancy. When the Saviour came into any city, the blind heard his footfall, the deaf saw signs in the air that indicated the presence of the Beneficent One all the sadness of the town moved itself in a new prayer, and tried with feeble trembling hand to relight its little lamp of hope.

How is it when you go into any circle, neighbourhood, or town? All its fashion dresses itself, every looking-glass in the neighbourhood is made to do hard duty; or all the letters or all the music of the town may be moved to expectation but no cripple cares for your coming, no deaf man says, "To-day I shall hear," no blind man gets his sight through your coming. We create, I would say again and again, our own society. The priest goes to the other side when he sees the half-murdered man, the Levite follows his chief; the Samaritan lingers in that unroofed church that he may redeem a life from destruction, and in this way sing his morning psalm and breathe his daily prayer.

You think the world is not a bad place to live in, after all. You say you have found life tolerably comfortable; you think that a great deal too much is made of the shady side of life. Who are you what right have you to speak upon this subject? I could put my ringers in my ears and run through a crowd of people crying with pain, and say at the end of my running, "I heard nothing of it; everything was quiet when I passed through." We do not diminish the world's distress by shutting our window, brightening our fire, and drawing around us all the comforts of our own luxurious abode. The distress is still there, it is crying in the night wind, shuddering in the snow, praying to the black night.

Every preacher creates his own congregation. "Like priest, like people," is a proverb not without its application even in this sense. The congregation and the minister are one in height, in the very shape of their head, in the breadth of their shoulders, in the tone of their mind, in their look, in their fire they are one. There are men we could not hear; they are not our shepherds. There are other men whom we could hear always, because they are our kith and kin from before the foundation of the world. As truly as a man calls around him his own companions, acquaintance and friends, as truly as a minister makes his own congregation in due time, so true is it in the deeper and more tragical sense that every heart makes the world in which it lives. If we were more sympathetic, our doorstep would be crowded with those who need sympathy, but in proportion as we are severe, misanthropic, unsympathetic, unrighteous in judgment, shall we drive away the world's distress from our neighbourhood and sight, and shall come to believe in the long run that the distress we do not see therefore does not exist.

We sicken at the sight of all this sorrow which is narrated in the holy gospels. Nearly every verse has in it something about the dumb possessed with devils, a man sick of the palsy, a little child dead, a poor woman stealing a blessing from the Physician as he goes down to raise the little one from her fatal slumber, a blind man crying and saying, "Thou Son of David, have mercy on me!" a leper with his hand upon his lip, saying, "Lord, if thou wilt thou canst make me clean." O, it is heart-rending! Who would not rather read a stirring novel about something that never did occur? When the multitude became hungry, the disciples said, "Send them away." That is our short and easy cure for human malady send it away. Jesus said, "No, never send anybody away that really needs your help." Instead of sending them away, Jesus said, "Cause them to sit down on the green grass, and bring out of your little store all that you have, and do not let a single person go away until the last crumb is eaten," and the last crumb is never eaten in the house of Christ; so long as he is at the table there is bread enough and to spare; so long as he spends your pound a week, working man, you will find in it no end of shillings; so long as he keeps your house, poor widow woman, there will be coal in the grate, there will be bread in the cupboard, and there will be oil in the cruse. "I have been young," said the Psalmist, "and now am old, yet have I never seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread." We want a change, we are tired of seeing sad and tragical sights. I, for one, am often tired of the vision; I am weary, I long to plunge my eyes into the snows of the Alps, or into the deep greens of the rich valley pastures. It would do the eyes good. Jesus Christ never tired; he went about doing good. He tired every helper; He never exhausted his own sympathy.

Let us now hear the blind men. We have considered the leper's brief prayer, "Lord, if thou wilt thou canst make me clean." The blind men are quite as terse and as direct in their supplications. They cried and said, "Thou Son of David, have mercy on us!" How the right prayer rises from the heart when it is in its own proper mood, Let the heart grapple with the great problems of life and destiny. Snub your impertinent intellect when it undertakes to deal with the universe; let the heart have full swing. "With the heart man believeth unto righteousness." With the intellect he may believe unto temporary conviction; but with the heart he believes unto righteousness, completeness of sympathy, and reality and joyousness of religious obedience.

Wonderful is this way of putting the case on the part of the blind men. They said, "Have mercy on us!" The heart never said, "Be just to us;" the heart has no weights, and scales, and standards, and tapes of measurement. No broken-hearted sufferer ever came to Christ and said, "Be just to me." That is a most remarkable circumstance in the development of human necessity and in the utterance of human want. The blind men might have said, "We have heard that you have cured a leper; now be impartial in your administration of the affairs of the universe; deal with an equal hand; if you have cured one man, you ought to cure another: we will charge you with partiality if you do not cure us as you have cured the leper, and raised the ruler's dead child, and healed the woman who touched the hem of your garment. Be just to us." The cry is still for mercy. We must come to Christ not with claims but with prayers.

This reference to mercy is a religious reference. It goes back to the roots and causes of things. Blindness is a symptom the disease is in the heart. Lameness, deafness, paralysis these are accidents, attendant phenomena, mere symptoms of something within, and you may as well repair your roof in order to heal your sick child as you may attend to some outward symptom to heal the life. There is but one cure; the blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, cleanseth from all sin. You must be born again. The work is inward, vital, complete. Do not fret your energy and waste your time by attempting to deal with symptoms, but get to the root and cause of the fatal malady. Blindness is the symptom, sin is the disease; there is only one disease, and its bad name is sin. When sin is destroyed, health will be re-established and sadness will vanish like the last night, taking with it all its blackness, and dampness, and misery.

Those men were not as blind as they looked. They were blind in the body, but their eyes within were bright as lamps, keen, piercing, far-seeing; they had the vision of faith. There is no other vision that will last a man's lifetime; that vision sees in the dark, sees through mountains, pierces the screen of night it is the true vision. Those blind men had seen Christ a long time with the vision of their hearts. There is an unconscious preparation for great events; those great events seem to come to us suddenly, but in reality they are the culmination of long and subtle processes. One ought to have overheard them talking about the new man, the great Healer, the King of men. How they discussed together their manner of approach, what they would say to him, how they would bring the case under his notice, how they corrected one another as to their views and estimates of the yet unknown Healer, how Jesus Christ came suddenly for he always comes suddenly, though he has been ten thousand ages on the way; when we hear the crush of his chariot wheel, it will startle us like thunder at midnight. They went forward, and probably did not say one word of all they had prepared. The heart must be extemporaneous in its utterances, the heart cannot have its little piece of paper or string of parchment; a thousand preparations will be made for Christ, and yet when he does come the heart will answer him spontaneously, and there is a spontaneity that is better than the most elaborate preparation.

Now let us hear Christ himself upon the subject: "Then touched he their eyes, saying, According to your faith be it unto you." We find the vessel, he finds its heavenly contents. If we have no vessel, we cannot catch the rain; if we have no goblet of faith, we cannot catch the wine of grace. We must be cooperative in this matter; there is a human side as well as a side divine in all this great mystery of human healing and human growth. Jesus Christ, as we have often had occasion to point out, gave people the impression that they had cured themselves. I have never seen Jesus Christ put the crown upon genius, beauty, power, but I have been present on a thousand coronations, when he encircled the brows of modesty with the choicest garlands of heaven.

There is a great law here, which the Church would do well to ponder. It is the law which expresses the solemn and gracious fact that our faith is the measure of our progress in divine things. If the healing had not been wrought in the case of these blind men, the fault would have been with the men themselves. This is the true reading of our Saviour's word, namely, "According to your faith, be it unto you." If your faith is equal to the occasion, you shall have what you need; if your faith fall below the occasion, you will be as blind as ever. You may touch the right Christ, but if you touch him with a cold hand, you will receive nothing in return. Not only must we go to the right altar, we must go in the right spirit. The true spirit is shown in the conduct of the woman "If I may but touch his garment I shall be whole." How is it that the Church is not succeeding today? Because the Church has intelligence, but not faith. How is it that the Church is empty today, and Christ forsaken? Because his Church has taken to argument, analysis, metaphysical disquisition, controversial statement, high and dry systematic divinity, and has lost faith. Why is this the devil's carnival, why is this the saturnalia of the pit? Because we, as a Church, are clever, but not inspired. We have taken to reckoning religion, and laying a line upon it, and dividing it into fragments and sections; we have taken to a species of religious architecture, giving elevations, and side views, and sections, and detailed drawings, as if the Church were a trick in masonry instead of a glowing and living faith.

The Church will always go down in proportion as its faith declines. For God's sake do not be clever have faith in God. Lord, increase our faith! If ye had faith as a grain of mustard-seed, ye would say to this mountain, "Depart," and the mountain would, so to say, take to its feet and move off. We now have theories of inspiration, theories of the atonement, theories of justification by faith. Do you mean to tell me that Christ's great work for the human family requires a volume of five hundred pages to make it clear? Then is the salvation of the world impossible. The atonement is a flash of the mind, a passion of the heart, one transient glimpse of an infinite tragedy, one touch of hot heart-blood. It is not a five-hundred-page octavo in which theology perpetrates its miserable legerdemain, and creates night for the satisfaction of throwing up rockets in its face. Lord, increase our faith! take us away from the so-called fact-world, with its misnamed realities, and lead us into the invisible temple, the hidden sanctuary, the house in the clouds, and show us there thy grace; then send us down all the mountain steep to find the lunatic and heal him, the blind and give him sight, the deaf and give him hearing. The Church will one day take its cleverness up to some Moriah, draw its glittering knife and slay the enemy, and then the Church will put on her beautiful garments, and neither be ashamed of the mystery of faith nor of the obedience of love.

"And Jesus straitly charged them, saying, See that no man know it." Mark the wisdom of this arrangement. Whatever is done to a mere individual, or to an individual merely as such, is not worth talking about. You have had your eyes opened; that is of no consequence to the universe; do not speak about that. Do not talk with a provincial accent; speak the universal language. If your heart has been blest, tell us; if your skin has been cleansed or your ears have been unstopped, keep the little news to yourself. Jesus Christ was not a mere miracle-monger, Jesus Christ was not a creator of little anecdotes, Jesus Christ was himself the gospel. Jesus Christ never said about the beatitudes, "See that ye tell no man." When he said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven," he did not add, "See that ye tell no man." "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted see that ye tell no man. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God see that ye tell no man." Keep your individual romances to yourself; they are not worth talking about; if you have a gospel, go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.

Understand the difference between a miracle and a gospel, and you will understand how it was that Jesus Christ never cared about his miracles being talked about; but when he came to his gospel, the earth was too small a stage and time too mean a theatre in which to declare the infinite love and bid the universe hear. The gospel is the common speech of the race. Mere eye-opening or unstopping of the ear is a case that may occur here and there; the symptom is personal and the circumstances are narrow, but the healing of the heart is a matter in which the whole race is interested. The whole head is sick and the whole heart is faint. If you can find a man who can cleanse us and make us pure and happy, tell us his name. Talk of individual cases to individual sufferers, but speak the universal language to the universal heart.