Acts 8:9-13

Chapter 21

Prayer

Almighty God, come to our waiting hearts and give us the light and the comfort which are alone in thy gift. We come in the name of Jesus Christ. If we forget it, may our right hand forget its cunning, and our tongue cleave to the roof of our mouth. It is the Name above every name. It is "the Name to sinners dear." Write it upon our heart and continually draw towards it all the passion of our love. Save us for Christ's sake. Draw us away from all bondage into the infinite liberty of thy dear Son. With him thou wilt also freely give us all things. Thou delightest to give. Thou dost live to give. Every good gift and every perfect gift cometh down from heaven. We have nothing that we have not received, and upon everything that is in our lives is written thine own name. Continue to give unto us according to the need of every day. Refresh us with the dew of the morning. Find honey for us in the flowers that open in the noonday sun. At eventide do thou spread our table, and make our bed that we may rest. We would give ourselves to thee, thou God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. When we are wise we are foolish. When we are strong we are weak. When we would seek our life we lose it. Lord, help us to understand these things, and to throw ourselves with completest faith upon the Infinite Arm of thy Providence, and the Infinite heart of thy love. Few and evil, but a handful at the most, are the days of our pilgrimage. May we know to what goal we are moving, and with steadfast eye and continual progress, ever leaning upon the strong for strength, may we move onward to our destiny in thy providence. Thou dost rebuke us with many humiliations. Out of our voice thou dost take the boastful tone. Thou dost smite us for our healing; and that we may be solidly enriched thou dost first make us very poor. When we are weak then truly we are divinely strong. Feed us with the bread of life, which is Jesus Christ the Son of God. We would eat his flesh, we would drink his blood, that we might have life abiding in us. Show us the mystery of eating and drinking the flesh and blood of thy dear Son. Help us to distrust ourselves. Enable us to give the lie to our own senses, and to order them behind when they would attempt to penetrate the mystery of God. Thou art constantly showing us that we know nothing as it really is until our eyes are opened, and we do not hear the wondrous, the subtle, and ineffable music until thou dost anoint and inspire our ears. Sometimes we are ashamed of our wisdom. It is not what it looks. It is but a furbished lie. Our reckoning is one long line of mistakes, and so busy are we in putting the figures together, and looking as if we could handle them, that the humiliation thou dost inflict upon us becomes intolerable. Lord, teach us how to pray. Lord, increase our faith. Lord, take us from the alphabet of the senses into the deep reading of the spirit. Lord, spare not thy light, thy light in Christ, but let it drive every shadow away for ever. Bless the hearts that mourn with a little release from their distress. Dry the tears, lest they blind the eyes that are looking for thee. Put thine arms around all the little children, that in thine arms they may find perpetual security. Number our hairs when they are grey and white, that in old age men may know how to find in Christ the beginning of youth. As for those who are in prosperity, and who have no pain in head, or heart, or limb, on whose whole road the broad sunshine lies day by day men who have pulled down the altar and hidden thy Book away the Lord send a serpent to bite them and a great affliction, not for their destruction, but for their conversion. Amen.

Simon the Sorcerer

Act 8:9-13

LOOK first of all at the condition in which Philip found the city or the region of Samaria. You find there the condition of the whole world represented in one pregnant sentence. Samaria was (1) diseased, (2) possessed, and (3) deluded. These are the conditions in which Christianity has always to fight its great battle. Christianity never finds any town prepared to cooperate with it. All the conquests of Christianity imply a long siege, stubborn hostility, inveterate prejudice, and the victory of right over wrong. We are none of us by nature prepared to give the Christian teacher a candid hearing. We "hate the fellow, for he never prophesies good of us." If he could prophesy good of us he would have nothing to tell our soul that could do it vital and lasting good. The first thing a Christian teacher has to do is to tear us, morally, to pieces! There is nothing in his favour. The literary lecturer pays homage to his audience, but the preacher rebukes it, humbles it, pours upon it holy despite and contempt. The early preachers did not trim, and balance, and smooth things. They spoke thunderstorms, and the very lifting of their hand was a battle half won. It was because they did fundamental work that they made progress so slow, but so sure. The world is no better today than Samaria was when Philip went down. And these three words, whole categories in themselves, include the moral condition of the race. Diseased, there is not a man in this house who is thoroughly and completely well, nor in any house, nor in all the world. If he suppose himself to be so, he is so only for the moment; he was ill yesterday, or will be to-morrow, and presently the oldest oak will be lightning struck and laid flat down on the cold earth. The world is a great lazar-house. The world is dying. You stand up in the mere mockery of strength; it is when we lie down that we assume the proper and final attitude of the body. How ill we are, what aches and pains! What sharp shootings, what burnings in the head, what throbbings in the heart!

The world is not only diseased, it is possessed. Possessed with demons, possessed with unclean spirits, possessed with false ideas. Why make a marvel or a mystery about demoniacal possession, when we are all so possessed? Why push this idea back some twenty centuries or more, as if it were an ancient anecdote? We are all insane! We are all devil-ridden. We had better give the right names to our mental conditions, lest we be attaching the wrong label and mistaking ourselves utterly. Out of Christ, out of the Cross, self-centred, self-poised, self-seeking, we are mad! Of course we are as usual the victims of the vulgarer interpretation of words. We do not account persons mad who are not shut up in confinement. Until we get a clearer conception of that word we shall be reading in the dark, and the Bible will be to us but a rock of stumbling and offence. Diseased, possessed these are the terms we must understand in their spiritual meaning. To these terms we must add a third, for Samaria was not only diseased and possessed, Samaria was also deluded. She was bewitched. The sorcerer had flung his charms upon her mind, and she was led as the sorcerer's will suggested or desired. Understand that somebody has to lead the world. In Republicanism there is a Sovereignty. In a mob there is a captaincy; somebody must lead the world. And the question is who, Christ or Barabbas? There is only one question worth discussing so far as the future is concerned, and that is who is to rule, from whom is the future to receive its law and inspiration and its best rewards? To-day you find men making churches for the future. You might as well make clothes for the future: for ages unborn! There are those who are anxious to know which will be the Church of the future. Personally I am not interested in the inquiry. It may be elaborately answered. The reply may be as magnificent as a cipher would be if it were the size of the firmanent. Personally I do not care. My question is, who is to be the man of the future, the life, the Sovereign, the King of the future? This Man, Christ, or Barabbas? As Christians we have no difficulty about the result. We believe that Jesus of Nazareth, marred more than any man, shall come up out of his weakness and humiliation, and sit upon the throne of glory. We do not sing only, or say, we believe

If this were a sentiment only we might despise it. It is a faith which lifts up the whole life along with it to a noble level, and charges it with the function of a larger beneficence. It is not as if we could depose Christ, and then all be upon a level. There remains the historic certainty that some one man must lead. Who shall that one man be? Simon or Christ? Superstition or faith? Wrong or right?

As we are all diseased and all possessed, so we are all deluded. And who can encounter a delusion? None but God the Holy Ghost. There are no fingers dainty enough to take hold of a delusion and pull it out of the nest of the mind. This kind goeth forth only by the ministry of the Holy Ghost. A delusion belongs to the same class as a prejudice, and prejudice has no shape, no form, no hiding-place, that we can penetrate. It can only be dislodged by that which takes up all room, and yet leaves all space at liberty Light. Wondrous light! Filling all things and burdening none! Occupying all space, yet not encroaching on the little sphere of the meanest insect!

It is marvellous what delusions the mind can acquire, and most truly humbling is it to hear the deluded man's tale about his personal suffering what he sees, what he hears, what he suspects, what he thinks he knows. That man is yourself, is myself, in one phase and aspect of our possible experience. Do not stand back from him as if you had nothing to do with his humanity. When he withers, you also wither. We are "members one of another." From the weak we may learn our weakness; from the strong, the imperial, we may learn how mighty we too may become. Again, therefore, would I say, we are "members one of another."

Superstition is not to be laughed at. I would rather laugh at the merely arithmetical man who never had a dream in his life. Were I disposed to mock, I would choose him as the butt of my bitter taunt. Even you who supposedly have the clear head and practical mind, without a single whim or fancy disturbing the equal balance of your intellectual monotony, what Gospel there can be for you it hath not entered into my mind to conceive. Show me a man who has dreams, fancies, visions of the night, and who is following invisible leaders, and out of him there may come a very apostle of the everlasting kingdom of Jesus Christ. He has the making of a man in him. And yet I would not despise the other man, simply because we do occasionally require to eke out the structure with stones that have only a burden to carry and with pillars that are covered by the painter's trick. Christianity has to encounter all the false faiths of the world. There is a strong man already in possession of the citadel, and he will not easily give way. It is not an easy thing for the missionary to persuade the most barbarous of his hearers to throw away the piece of wood or stone, which the barbarian hugs as his god. It is a long way from the physical eye to the spiritual light! The barbarian likes a god that he can finger well. He knows then that he has a god. To be told that God is Unseen and Invisible, "God is a Spirit," "No man hath seen God at any time," "No man can see God and live," is a Gospel that requires time to make its way in the world the world that wants to make the globe a factory and human life a toil! Christianity must continually startle its students by showing them how very little there is in its Book that is literal. You put the water into the firkin and it comes out wine! You peruse the letter, and it turns into a spirit! There is the difficulty to men who live an intellectually jaunty life, who touch things with their fingers, count things up to ten, then add, multiply, and subtract, and divide at pleasure, and who suppose that they have in this way settled the whole case. I can ask the strongest-sighted man in the world to look at a piece of glass and tell me if there is anything upon it, And his necessary answer must be, if he limit his judgment by his sight, that the glass is absolutely vacant. I can hand to him a magnifier, and say, "Look at the glass now, for whatever is upon it that magnifier will increase one hundred fold." He takes the glass, he looks at the object, and he says, "I still adhere to my judgment and declare that this piece of glass is absolutely void, there is literally nothing upon it." I like his emphasis, because presently it will be turned into contrition. I encourage him to be very emphatic, and when he has reached the very limit of his emphasis, and almost taken his stand upon his dignity, I bring the proper microscopic power to bear upon the glass which he declared to be vacant and void, then imagine his look! He sees that within the thousandth part of an inch there is written the sublimest prayer ever offered to God! What was wanting? A medium. What was absent? The necessary help to the eye! Yet there are those amongst us who say, "Seeing is believing." Truly say I, but what is seeing? Where does it begin, where does it end? And what do we know now about sight, or light, or anything as it really is? This being so in the lower realms of thinking and inquiry, I am enabled to move upward to the higher regions, and to believe that "God is a Spirit."

It is very instructive to watch Philip's course in Samaria, because first of all he took no notice of Simon. There are some persons who think we ought to send missionaries to argue down the infidels. Do not let us belong to that extremely foolish class of persons. There is nothing to be argued down. Argument is the weakest of all weapons. If occasion should naturally arise for the answering of some sophistical argument, avail yourselves of it, but do not imagine that Christianity has to go down to Samaria to fight a pitched battle, face to face with Simon Magus. What then did Philip do? Philip preached CHRIST. Simon had been preaching himself. Philip never mentioned himself, all the while he talked only about Christ. Thus Philip did not argue down Simon, he superseded him. The daylight does not argue with the artificial light. The sun does not say, "Let us talk this matter over, thou little, beautiful, artificial jet. Let us be candid with one another, and polite to one another, and let us treat one another as gentlemen talking on equal terms. Let us thus see which of us ought to rule the earth." The sun does nothing but SHINE! What then! Men then sneakingly put the gas out! "Let YOUR light so shine before men that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven." Lift is the unanswerable logic. Holiness is the invincible argument. Charity, love, beneficence, chivalry, self-sacrifice, these form the shining host that will chase all competitors away!