Acts 26:15-18

Chapter 96

Prayer

Almighty God, thou hast given welcomes unto the children of men, and we now respond to the welcome of thy love and sit down at the feast spread by thine own hands, and we desire to eat and drink abundantly according to the terms of thy bidding. The light is thine the immeasurable glory of the day; the infinite light, chasing all darkness, driving it away like an enemy and in that light we see the symbol of thy love, so great, so glorious, so impartial, so free. Behold, thy love is high as heaven. who can reach it? wider than the earth: who can lay his measuring lines upon it? Thy mercy endureth for ever. These words fill our little life; they overflow the necessity which we thought to be so great, and by their abundance they make our want seem so small. Where sin abounds grace doth much more abound; and where hunger pinches thou dost multiply the bread of heaven. Thou art kind to the unthankful and to the evil. This is the miracle of thine heart. We have seen the miracle of thine hands, and it is great beyond all imagining; but the miracle of thine heart is the eternal wonder, the amazement of angels, the astonishment of men. Thou hast spared our life as if thou didst take pleasure in it. Surely thou understandest us better than we understand ourselves. Even our sin does not cut us off from thy presence, until a long time. Thou dost see through our sin; thou dost say: "The sinner is greater than his sin, and must, if possible even at the cost of blood be saved." We are thy workmanship: the prints of thy finger are upon us: we are not our own. When thou dost fill our minds with these thoughts, we begin to see the meaning of the Cross, to hear the appeal of the sacrificial blood, and to behold the opening of heaven's door to grant admission to wandering, but now penitent and contrite, souls. Show us revelations this day. Come from behind the cloud, and let one beam of thy glory fall upon our life; and though it may blind us, yet shall we stand upon our feet at thy bidding and hear thy holy charge. We do not bring into thy courts clean hands, for we do not bring clean hearts. Create within us a clean heart, O God, and renew within us a right spirit. Let every soul in thy presence feel that he is looking upon his Father's face. May the enemy lose all his power today. May our souls have open access to the throne of God, through the way of the Cross. Fill our minds with light and our hearts with grace, and inspire our will with the spirit of obedience, and let great blessing rest upon us all. Guard the old and the young, the busy and the suffering, the prosperous and the desolate; and send messages from thy house and a portion of meat in due season. Speak comfortably to those who are unknown, neglected, misunderstood. Help the struggling man to wrestle more bravely with all evil, and may he at last throw it, and, in thy strength, destroy it. Bless the stranger within our gates the man who hardly understands our language, but is at one with us in our sentiment and purpose; the friend from distant shores; the loved one come to take our pledge and see how we fare; the child from school every one. Let the blessing of the Lord fall upon each as upon an only child; and let there be rapture because there is forgiveness.

Now we wait the beam from heaven, the Voice from the cloud, the shining of the Eternal Father. Then shall the house be too small for us; then shall the walls stand back upon the gleaming horizon, and the lower roof lift itself to the heavens, and our life shall be one grand liberty. Amen.

Act 26:15-18

15. I am Jesus whom thou persecutest.

16. But rise, and stand upon thy feet: for I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make thee a minister and a witness both of these things which thou hast seen, and of those things in which I will appear unto thee;

17. Delivering thee from the people, and from the Gentiles, unto whom now I send thee,

18. To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me.

Christianity Self-Attested

If you had a writing given to you copied and asserted to be a speech made long ago by your father, what would you do with it if you were desirous to ascertain its authenticity? The first reading of it would settle your mind. Knowing your father his sentiments, his mode of expression, the peculiarity of style which made the speech what it was you would be able to say instantly whether the speech was authentic or fabricated. We ought by this time to know enough of Jesus Christ's manner to be able to say whether any speech purporting to have been delivered by him was actually ever spoken by his lips. His style cannot be counterfeited; it will break down at some point, will any attempt to reproduce that inimitable eloquence. The words may be well chosen, the simulation may be quite a work of genius; but there will be something wanting an accent, a touch, a breathing peculiarly his own. It is intensely interesting to have handed to us what purports to have been a speech made by Jesus Christ after his ascension. Here is a speech reported by a man who never saw Jesus Christ in the flesh, or communed with him, or was received into his fellowship. Had Saul been a daily attendant upon the ministry of Jesus Christ, he might, to some extent, have imitated his style with considerable skill; but even that circumstance was wanting in this case. We shall see what change death has made upon our Master, and resurrection and coronation. Is this the Jesus whom we have known so well? I think it can be shown that we have in this little speech a recapitulation of the four Gospels. On this speech might be founded a powerful argument for the inspiration of the Christian Scriptures. This is the New Testament in miniature; this is a condensed form of the Gospel revelation. If Paul is right here, he may be right in other places. He cannot be allowed to pass off this speech flippantly or incidentally: we will detain him here and cross-examine him, and turn over his witness page by page and examine it line by line, and if he is strong at this point, it will be so much in his favour.

What says Jesus Christ? "I have appeared unto thee for this purpose." Here I recall the words which made the first ministers: "Follow me." None was with him; no presence was allowed to turn that singular into a plural. He is as personal as ever, as unaccompanied as before; as grand in solitude, as majestic in completeness.

"I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make " Here I remember the charming word, "I will make you fishers of men." The word is the same: Jesus Christ is still Maker, Creator. That word, O Saul of Tarsus! was well chosen, that word "make." It is a king's word; it is a Divine term. It goes back to origins and sources, to beginnings and springs; there is a marvellous original power in it. The speaker does not propose to modify, adapt, add to, rearrange: "I will make," I will create. So far I can identify the Master in the quotation of the servant.

"To make thee a minister" that is a new word "and a witness" that is an old word. "Ye are," said Jesus Christ, "witnesses of these things."

Proceed still further: "a witness both of these things which thou hast seen." Why, that is the old method; that is exactly the answer which he returned to the inquiring Baptist: "Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see." We speak as eye-witnesses; we are not quoters from authors of an ancient date, we are witnesses of "things which we have seen." This is the power of Gospel speech. It is an incarnation: a man who speaks affirms in his own name and in his own person; he is a witness of things which he himself has seen.

Proceed further: "and of those things in the which I will appear unto thee." That opens a wide field of possible revelation. So it does. That is exactly what Jesus Christ did in the days of his flesh. Said he to his disciples: "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now." Jesus Christ did not put down a full stop, saying, "This is the end." There is no end to the meaning of revelation. There is no end to the literature of the alphabet. The letters are but six-and-twenty in number, and no man attempts to add another letter to the alphabet; but into how many forms, through how many permutations, may these letters be thrown or passed! It is the same with the New Testament: the alphabet is here, the beginning of Christian thought, life, purpose, power; who can tell into what phases this alphabetic symbol may be passed? Observe, nothing is added to the revelation; there is no invention of a merely human kind admitted into this great outlook. However large the book, it is all in the alphabet; however magnificent the unfoldment of the truth by human eloquence, the truth itself is the distinct and direct gift of God alone.

Proceed now to the seventeeth verse: "Delivering them from the people, and from the Gentiles." Surely that is new. What occasion is there to deliver a preacher "from the people, and from the Gentiles"? Here is the Lord's own speech: "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves. But beware of men: for they will deliver you up to the councils, and they will scourge you in their synagogues; and ye shall be brought before governors and kings for my sake, for a testimony against them and the Gentiles.... Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul." Truly this seventeenth verse was spoken in the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew. It is a marvellous thing if this was invented. It is impossible, considering Saul's antecedents and Saul's religious prejudices, that he could have invented a speech so perfect, not only in the letter which might have been a mere trick of eloquence but so spiritual in the penetration and sympathy. So far, I see it every whit as a reproduction of the matter and manner with which long study has made us so familiar.

The eighteenth verse is a summary of all that Jesus began both to do and to say. The miracles and the Gospels are all in this eighteenth verse. For example: "To open their eyes." That is what Jesus Christ was always doing. He could never be at rest in the presence of the blind; instantaneously he felt the near presence of the blind man. When did he ever leave the blind man in darkness? Again and again he said, "According to your faith be it unto you." He opened the eyes of one that was born blind; he opened the eyes of the blind beggar who called to him from the wayside. Jesus Christ will not have any blind followers. This reference, of course, is not to the opening of the physical eyes, but to the opening of the mental vision. Still it is in exquisite harmony with the whole purpose and method of the Saviour: he will give light, more light; in him is no darkness at all, and from us he will drive away every cloud and shadow.

"To turn them from darkness to light." When did he ever turn men from light to darkness? Never. Whenever he visited a town, the inhabitants were startled by an access of intellectual lustre; sometimes they were dazzled, sometimes distressed they were always surprised. Things appeared so much larger to them after he had touched them; old thoughts stood up in new meanings when he breathed them; the law itself became a kind of gospel when he repronounced its awful words. Enlargement is a characteristic of the incoming of Christ.

"And from the power of Satan unto God." When did he ever reverse that process? He came to bruise the head of the serpent; he came to destroy him who had the power of death. He was the continual enemy of the devil: his first battle was with the devil in the wilderness, and his last battle was with the devil on the Cross. He would turn men to God, give them new ideas concerning the origin of things. He would ennoble all thought, enlarge all life, glorify all destiny by associating the whole with the name and sovereignty of the Living God.

Go further, "that they may receive forgiveness of sins." That is his very word: "Son, daughter, thy sins, which are many, are all forgiven thee"; "Forgive us our trespasses"; "Father, forgive them." That is not the kind of word which a bad man would be likely to invent; bad men have not such holy dreams. "Forgiveness of sins" is a phrase which never occurred in the nightmare of wickedness and imposition. Some fruits can only grow in certain climates; they cannot grow otherwhere; they seem to say, "We belong to this land, and to this land alone; men have attempted to rear us in other places, but we could not live there: it was not our native clime." It is the same with some doctrines. You cannot develop the doctrine of forgiveness of sins in a heart that is sinful through and through so sinful as to invent a religion that is itself a lie. We seem to hear the Saviour himself at this point. Who ever said "forgive" in his tone? Surely this is none other than the speech of the Son of God!

But how was this forgiveness to be accomplished? and how was it to be followed? By "inheritance among them which are sanctified." The whole process is set down to the action of "faith." Have we ever heard that word before? Did we ever hear it really until Jesus Christ spoke it? Does the word "faith" ever occur in the Old Testament in the sense of a religious and spiritual exercise with a view to spiritual results and blessing? Jesus Christ is the maker of this word in its Gospel uses; faith is a fruit only to be plucked in the Gospel garden; that word is his. Surely we know it. Said he, "According to your faith be it unto you"; "If ye have faith as a grain of mustard-seed"; "How is it that ye have no faith?" "O ye of little faith!" "Believe ye that I am able to do this?" Why, the word "faith" is the key-word of Christ's ministry and doctrine. It is the last of the senses, it is the sixth sense all the others gathered up into one power and glorified.

So far the speech is self-proving. I find in it no syllable or tone that is not in vital accord with everything we have read in the Gospels ever spoken or done by the Son of God. This is a field of evidence to which I would invite every student of the Scriptures. Read the Book carefully through with a view to see how far its parts are confirmed by one another, and how far even apparent discrepancies admit of a kind of reconciliation which adds infinite force to the substantial argument for the unity of the Scriptures. Perhaps a more vivid instance of confirmation could hardly be produced than the one which is now before us. Paul is supposed to be in a fanatical state of mind: he is struck down to the ground, blinded, disabled; he is supposedly the victim of an hallucination of the most complete kind; yet when he himself reports what happened to him, no slip or flaw can be found in his evidence which throws the slightest doubt upon the identity of the doctrine of Jesus Christ, as revealed in the accepted Gospels. Thus, every examination of Scripture, part with part, wholly, gives us a more sure word of prophecy. More than that, everything is here which is needed. Let invention do something; make room for fertile genius; now come and amend, enlarge, complete this statement. Take this as a programme for the revolution, regeneration, and perfecting of the world, and add to it one line that is not involved in its unfathomable wisdom. It cannot be done. Not a single line was changed, comparing the commission given to the original apostles and the commission now entrusted to Saul. Jesus Christ is in this, as in other respects', the same yesterday, to day, and for ever. The Gospel never changes. No new terms have been invented; no original doctrine has been conceived since the ascension of the Prince of Life; the foundation is the same tried, precious, elect Corner-stone. No new instrument was proposed the instrument is still "faith that is in me." "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." "Whosoever believeth shall not perish, but have everlasting life." Education has advanced, civilisation has proceeded, the fellowship of nations has increased in intimacy and in trustfulness; but faith remains the same, and is being proved, alike by civilisation and by religion, to be the only thing that can touch the highest life and unite the grandest interests of man. Faith is a word with grace. Faith is itself a mustard-seed term small at the first, yea, almost insignificant but as the ages multiply in number and increase their energy and their influence, the word "faith" grows along with them, calls them to higher effort, to nobler endeavour, to larger sacrifice. It is a word which vindicates itself as the necessities of men develop and the powers of men rise towards the completeness of perfection.

I am glad to have had this speech submitted to me. It is the speech of Jesus Christ; it is full of the spirit of Jesus Christ; it recapitulates with burning condensation all that Christ ever said. Give me those three verses, and you give me the whole New Testament.