Acts 26:16-18

Chapter 94

Prayer

Almighty God, we have come into thy house to find rest unto our souls. There is no rest outside. The peace of heaven is within the sanctuary of God. Lord, that sanctuary is thy Son Jesus Christ Blessed One, Man, Woman, Child; the wondrous Life, the mysterious Being, Alpha and Omega. We come by that door, for other entrance there is none. It is a wide door; Welcome is written upon it; it opens at a touch. Lord, give us an abundant entrance and a long time in the sacred house. Here we would leave our weariness, and here we would leave our sin. Is there not a River into which a man may plunge himself and there leave all the leprosy of his life? We bless thee for the quiet day with a light above the brightness of the sun, with a hush deeper than the calm of the earth the sweet day, the day of rest and hope and light and youth; thine own day, made by thyself for thine own purpose. May it enter into our souls. May there be Sabbath in the heart, a great holy rest in the secret places of the life. May we enter into this mystery through the resurrection of our Lord, who rose again from the dead. He must visit them for a moment and leave them to return to the living, that the living and dead may both be one in him, the Resurrection and the Life. May our hearts know the meaning of resurrection rising again from a death in trespasses and in sins, and standing up in the immortal strength of renewed and sanctified manhood. May this be our joy an inward pleasure, a gladness that cannot express itself in words, but in raptures and ecstasies and unspeakable utterance of triumph. This joy have all thy saints. It is madness to the cold reason of the world; it is the wildness which earthly prudence cannot comprehend. We would be found in the Spirit on the Lord's Day, saying things we do not understand, declaring things that cannot be proved by words, but that need no proof because of the joyous consent of the willing and thankful heart. Show us the treasures of thy wisdom, grace, and righteousness, and tell our hearts that all thou hast they have yea, unsearchable riches, an incorruptible inheritance. We bless thee for the green spaces of our life. We would, sometimes, they were larger; but they are of thine own making, and thou dost fix their four corners; the bounds of our habitation are fixed and appointed of God. But we love the green places, the verdant meadows, the blossoms that tell of spring, the singing birds that come with the gospel of summer. If thou dost drive us away from these places into rocks and deserts and caves of the earth, it is still well: the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof; thou art preparing us for the greener heaven, the immortal spring, the summer that cannot die. We lay hold upon this hope, feed upon it, hide it in our hearts, recur to it in the dark and cloudy time, and renew our confidence under its warm and tender light. Help us to do our work better than ever, with a more willing heart, with a more industrious hand, with a more hopeful spirit. Sometimes we feel that some parts of our work are not worthy of us; then do we begin to realise our true quality yea, thou hast appointed us this drill and discipline, this weary work, that our patience may be perfected and that our confidence may be seriously tried. Help us to accept all work as from the Living God, and to do it as if eating and drinking the Holy Sacrament. Make our houses all that homes ought to be. May there be a fire in every room, light in every window, welcome on every door, rest on every couch; may the table be of thine own setting, and the appetite made keen by thyself; and thus in confidence sacred, loving, growing may our handful of days upon the earth be spent. Nurse the dear invalid; shake the pillow with thine own gentle hand, for we cannot make it soft enough for the weary head. Speak a word when our voices are choked with tears, and shed a light that can touch the eye-balls of the soul. Go after the prodigal thyself today, and bring him home at eventide. Then will we stir the fire and beat the drum and sound the trumpet and spread the feast, because in our house we have seen the Resurrection. Amen.

Act 26:16-18

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 the 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.

Christian Ministry Defined

This is the kind of ministry which Jesus Christ wishes to establish in the earth. I will stake everything upon it that is dear to Christian faith and hope. No other statement is needed; no explanation is possible. The only competent exposition of these words can be found in their repetition. Say them over and over again in every tone possible to the heart, and you will find the result a complete knowledge of Christ's meaning. I am prepared to maintain that this conception of the Christian ministry proves the deity of Jesus Christ, for the reason that it is such a conception as never entered into the uninspired mind, and, in particular, never could have entered into a mind constituted as was the intellectual nature of Saul of Tarsus. Reading those three verses is like roaming in a vineyard on an autumn afternoon. This is the Lord's planting. Every syllable bursts out with new wine. If men would ask you what the Christian ministry aims at, point them to the twenty-sixth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth verses. That is the answer. Let us note the particulars just as they occur, without inventing an order of our own.

"But rise, and stand upon thy feet" Here is the typical manliness of the Christian ministry. A noble challenge this! We do not want crawling men, fawning, crouching, disabled men, but men who can stand up and show their stature and their force. The Christian minister, realising Jesus Christ's conception of the ministry, does not apologise for his existence, does not account for himself as one of the units of mankind, does not beg a corner on which to spend his dying life: he stands upon his feet, a man every whit bold, courageous, well-defined; a figure, a force, a factor not to be ignored. A beautiful incidental instance this of the quality of the ministry. Jesus did not speak to Saul as he lay down in the dust, a smitten and blighted thing, crushed with a new burden of light: he would speak to him, as it were, on equal terms, face to face. He is the Man Christ Jesus. He will not send frightened things about his messages and errands blind, blighted things that cannot tell their tale he will have the man, the whole man, the man at his best. That is the call today: the call for standing men, upright, forceful men; they can always make their own way under the Divine inspiration. But what kind of manliness? Only the manliness which is made possible by Christ. He gives the power to rise. This is not a carnal manliness, a thing of the flesh, an invention of the sense, an attitude, a posture, but an inspiration. That is the vital difference. You cannot stand up alone. Your very standing is an acceptance of the law that rules the universe. You can do nothing of yourself. If a man suppose that when he stands up he is doing something of his own accord, he is therein foolish. At whose bidding do we stand? What right have we to stand? This is a holy attitude, acquiring all its majesty from its humbleness a mystery of posture, formed from within, shaped from the centre. "Stand, therefore, having your loins girt about with truth." The manliness, therefore, is a Divine creation. To stand without permission to stand is impertinence; to stand -in obedience to Divine injunction is humility. Here is power coming out of weakness. God can make men sit down, lie down, roll in the dust of the ground; he can seal their eyelids with light; he can deafen their ears with thunder. It is out of such lying and blindness and deafness that the true strength comes. It we have not first been laid down by the Divine power, we cannot stand in the Divine strength. We must have a momentary fall. The day of weakness must never be forgotten; the soul must say to itself, "Remember that noontide when you were overwhelmed, struck down, thundered upon from an infinite height; and remember that the Power which struck you down bade you stand up; the Voice was the same, the Power was identical, the experience was continuous and coherent." He does not know what it is to see who does not know what it is to be blind. Vision becomes a commonplace to the man who has always seen; but what must it be to have the eyes opened and to see the whole visible creation all at once! It is through this experience that the ministry must come must have its hours of lying flat down light-struck, stunned, dazed, disabled; able only at least to ask questions with the tone of fear and yet with the accent of suppressed or concealed expectation.

These words cannot be without meaning. The very command to "rise, and stand upon thy feet," is a royal command. The old tone is not taken out of the Voice with which we were familiar in the days of his flesh. We know that tone, there is none like it the rainbow tone that has in it every tint and flush of vocal colour; the grand imperative that makes all language quake, "Rise, and stand upon thy feet." He who has stood before Christ may well stand before kings. We get over all our nervousness when We are with the Lord; having risen at his command and looked at him straight in his very eyes eyes of judgment, eyes of love, wells of heaven we cannot be intimidated by face of clay. You would have been fearless of men if you had been more fearful of God. Fear God, and have no other fear.

"For I have appeared unto thee to make thee a minister." Then ministers are not man-made, they are not manufactures, they are not turned out by machinery. "I have appeared unto thee to make thee a minister." This is our strength. Only Christ can make ministers. We have forgotten this we have taken to a kind of minister-making ourselves a species of ecclesiastical pottery. "I have appeared unto thee to make thee a minister." He never makes other than ministers. We do not read, "I have appeared unto thee to make thee an equal, a master, a priest," but "a minister," which, being interpreted, signalises a servant, a slave. "This also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, which is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in working." He chooses whom he will: "Not many wise, not many mighty, not many noble; but things that are foolish, and things that are despised, yea" mathematical mystery "and things which are not" nothings "to bring to nought things that are: that no flesh should glory in his presence." There is no mistaking the ministers which Christ makes. There is a touch no other hand can give. We do not know where it began, or where it ends, or what it is. Who can define the aroma? Who can take off the bloom and put it back again? Who can clutch the light and hide it in his bosom? The seal of Christ is upon every minister of his own making not always the kind of seal we like. Jesus Christ writes his autograph in a thousand ways yea, as the chariots of the Lord are twenty thousand in number, and he may go forth in any one of them at his pleasure, so he hath chosen twenty thousand ministries, but each bears the signature and the touch Divine. I do not speak of ministers in the pulpit only, but all ministers, at home and in the market-place ministers who do not speak their sermons, but live them. We are all ministers, if we have been with the Lord, struck down at his feet, raised by his voice, charged with his Spirit. Never can I lose an opportunity of resenting the mischievous lie that only a certain class of men are the ministers of Christ. We are all God's ministers, Christ's apostles some in one way, some in another a sweet lute, the brazen telling trumpet made to summon things from the horizon. We are all instruments, ministers, agencies, through whom God speaks and illustrates His living and redeeming Word. A most blessed thing indeed that Christ's stamp is upon every agent he sends out! His initials are burned into the character; somewhere there is the indubitable sign in one man in the intellect, in another in the tender heart; here in the eloquence that fills the ear with delight, and there in the pleading, holy intercession that lifts the listening soul into the quietude of heaven. Do not misjudge the Divine call. It is an infinite variety; it is not an invariable monotony.

"A minister and a witness" of what? Christ must not only find the minister, he must find the sermon. He never finds the one without the other; so he makes the minister and he makes the text. "A minister and a witness both of these things which thou hast seen." Not "those things which thou hast imagined;" not "those things which thou hast invented"; but, emphatically, "these things which thou hast seen" so that a man denying thy ministry must first deny thy character. That is the strong argument. We have seen it in other instances; we see it again in this. To deny a sermon is to deny the man; to question the argument wherein it is factual is to question the character. Wondrous ministry! the soul continually upon oath, the voice forbidden to utter anything for the sake of uttering it, and charged to tell what the soul has already heard. We do not want an inventive ministry, an imaginative ministry, but a listening ministry and a truth-telling ministry, a pulpit that will only say over again, with exactitude and punctiliousness of recollection, what itself has heard. The man who preaches or teaches pledges his character, not his genius. No man could have imagined such a call, and especially no man like the Apostle Paul. He was so strong in mind, naturally so sagacious, so penetrating; he was gifted with that lightning mind which instantly burns its way through all difficulties. You must, in estimating the value of this call for evidential purposes, keep steadily before your mind the kind of man that Paul was in other directions. You have now to deal with a strong-minded man, with a resolute will, with a highly-trained intelligence; and a man so qualified and characterised tells us that he was called, not to stand upon a velvet knoll in an earthly paradise, to speak amid circumstances which are themselves luxuries, but called upon to lay down his life in attestation of the truth of the statement which he made. This never entered the human mind. Many a man might dream that he was called upon to marry the king's daughter, to ride in the king's chariot, to divide the king's throne, to sun himself in the king's favour dreams of that kind are not wanting in human history but that a man should dream that he was called to make statements every one of which would be contradicted, every one of which would be turned into a penalty which would be inflicted upon himself, is the difficulty with which we have to grapple. If we were dealing with a superstitious mind, we might, to some extent, account even for that dream; but you must take the Apostle Paul as you have found him in this history, day by day a man whose acquaintance ought to make us proud, the shaking of whose hand should form an epoch in our history; a man whose every look was a revelation, whose every tone was a gospel he says, long after the event, that he was light-struck, thrown down, raised up by the Jesus who smote him, charged directly with a certain ministry, and that that ministry involved daily pain, cold, hunger, nakedness, desertion, certain cruel death. This never entered the human imagination.

But Jesus says, not only "of those things which thou hast seen," but "of those things in the which I will appear unto thee." There is a growing revelation; there is an expanding firmament. Christianity has a future as well as a past. The vision will return, the vision will enlarge, the vision will illuminate itself with higher and intenser glories. Expect the vision; wait for the additional revelation. It will not be anything new in the sense of unknown and unrelated, but new in the sense of development, progress from the thing already in the soul. Sometimes we say of a sermon, "How large a sermon from so small a text!" No text is small; you make a mistake in the statement, but the mistake relates to the text. Who would say, looking upon Bashan shaded by a thousand oaks, "How great a forest from so small an acorn!"? No acorn is small; in every acorn there is enough to clothe all the mountains of the earth with umbrageous oaks forests out of which navies might be cut and palaces might be built. There is nothing new in the oak; everything was in the acorn. If the acorn could speak, it might say, "This is what you called a little thing; this is my proper self; I was wrapped up and condensed when you saw me, but this is what I meant all this strength, pomp, colour; all this was in me when you took me in your hand and rubbed my polished shell." It is so when Jesus comes to us the same Jesus, the same grace, the same Spirit, but growing in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

How beautifully the seventeenth verse is put in! a verse of some two lines standing between two long verses: "Delivering thee from the people, and from the Gentiles." "Delivering" that is a suggestive word. Shall I be bound? Shall I be a prisoner? Shall I be in the clutch of evil men? Yes, that is the meaning of it; thou shalt be delivered from them. Every minister has his stormy career if he be a faithful minister. Sometimes a minister will tell you as if he were preaching his own funeral sermon that he never had a difference with any human creature. What an awful life to have lived! What a terrible epitaph! Hear the light saying, "I never had a battle with darkness!" He could not tell so huge a lie. The life of light is a battle; it lives by fighting; it says to darkness, "Thou art my enemy stand back!" The true minister cannot have a peaceful and luxurious life. I do not know who wants him; I know many who would be glad to get rid of him. Who wants the minister in his proper capacity? Not the makers of ill-gotten gain; they cannot bear the sight of the fellow. He has a gold test, and that they cannot tolerate. Says he, "This sovereign you wrung out of hands that could ill spare it." "O my God!" says the man who is being tested, "if all my tens of thousands of sovereigns have to be tested in that way! I cannot bear it!" "This is the exorbitant rent you forced out of the poor creatures who had to starve themselves to pay it." "Cease!" "This was taken in the dark." "Go!" Ay, who would be a minister? who dare to be a minister? There are thousands of preachers; there are few ministers. Who wants a minister of Christ? I don't know. Not profane men, not worldly men, not self-idolaters, not men who have curtained themselves with secrecy and do not want to be disturbed; not men whose books have never been audited by pure sunlight. Who wants the minister in his distinctive and inspired capacity? Many want him as a companion, a man as well-read as themselves, exchanging the pleasant word with a religious accent; who wants him as a judge, a critic, a divider, a representative of the throne of God? Let any minister try that course, and he will soon see that it is impossible to be popular.