Acts 27:20-44

Chapter 100

Prayer

Almighty God, thou hast said unto each of us, "What is thy petition? and what is thy request? and it shall be granted unto thee." Lord, teach us what to say in reply. This is the challenge of thy love. Thou dost tempt our powers to ask great things of thee, knowing that giving doth not impoverish thee, nor withholding enrich thee. Thou art able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think. We have no words equal to the treasures of God. Do thou give unto us the faith which is its own answer, its own peace, as it is its own inspiration. Faith is the gift of God; but having given unto us faith, thou hast given unto us all things. If we had faith even as a grain of mustard-seed, we could remove mountains, and turn back seas out of our way, and make the desert blossom as the rose. Lord, increase our faith! When it comes to us we know it by a great uprising of the soul into nobler life, into wider domination and power. We would have more of it: we would live by faith and not by sight. We would thus have the larger life. Lord, increase our faith! Thou dost call us to trust in thee, and to have no fear. Thou alone canst give us the perfect love which casteth out fear and settleth the soul in infinite calm. Every good gift is thine. We have nothing that we do not receive. We live upon thy bounty; we are guests at thy table; we shelter ourselves in thy house. The Lord's mercy be multiplied unto us, and the Lord's comfort encourage and strengthen our souls! We come before thee because with the Lord is abundance of pardon and plenteous forgiveness, that he may be sought unto and feared with all the sacred reverence of love. Pardon our sin. Cleanse us in the holy blood of Christ; yea, wash away all guilt, and give us the sanctification which is the miracle of the Holy Ghost. Sanctify us body, soul, and spirit. Subdue our whole nature to thy government. Create in us the spirit of obedience. Lead us to see that our faith means sacrifice, or it is void of meaning. Regard us all. How many our frailties; how countless our sins; how varied our needs! But thou knowest us every one: our frame, our nature, our opportunities, our temptations, our engagements. Thou dost count us up and understand us wholly, and there is nothing in us that is hidden from the searching of thine eye. Have mercy upon us! Lord, pity us! Lord, come to us through the way of the Cross, mighty to save, with great answers to great questions, with the infinite fulness of God, in reply to the prayers of men. Let the old traveller feel that it is better farther on. Give the young worker to know that to build below the skies is to build without foundation and without power of completion. Show the youngest that there is no safety out of thy movement and beyond thy law. Comfort the discouraged. Give unto the disappointed soul new hope and new opportunities. Let all the past be turned into a school, and, learning its lessons, bowing under its discipline, may we begin tomorrow with a new heart and a new hope, having behind us yesterdays full of experience and full of teaching; and thus may our mistakes become the beginnings of our wisdom, may our failures contribute to our successes, and may all the scorning and the trial, the tempting and the scourging, of time and life bring us nearer to thyself, thou holy Christ of God. Amen.

Act 27:20-44

20. And when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared, and no small tempest lay on us, all hope that we should be saved was then taken away.

21. But after long abstinence Paul stood forth in the midst of them, and said, Sirs, ye should have hearkened unto me, and not have loosed from Crete, and to have gained this harm and loss.

22. And now I exhort you to be of good cheer: for there shall be no loss of any man's life among you, but of the ship.

23. For there stood by me this night the angel of God, whose I am, and whom I serve,

24. Saying, Fear not, Paul; thou must be brought before Cæsar: and, lo, God hath given thee all them that sail with thee.

25. Wherefore, sirs, be of good cheer: for I believe God, that it shall be even as it was told me.

26. Howbeit we must be cast upon a certain island.

27. But when the fourteenth night was come, as we were driven up and down in Adria, about midnight the shipmen deemed that they drew near to some country;

28. And sounded, and found it twenty fathoms: and when they had gone a little further, they sounded again, and found it fifteen fathoms.

29. Then fearing lest they should have fallen upon rocks, they cast four anchors out of the stern, and wished for the day.

30. And as the shipmen were about to flee out of the ship, when they had let down the boat into the sea, under colour as though they would have cast anchors out of the foreship,

31. Paul said to the centurion and to the soldiers, Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved.

32. Then the soldiers cut off the ropes of the boat, and let her fall off.

33. And while the day was coming on, Paul besought them all to take meat, saying, This day is the fourteenth day that ye have tarried and continued fasting, having taken nothing.

34. Wherefore I pray you to take some meat: for this is for your health: for there shall not an hair fall from the head of any of you.

35. And when he had thus spoken, he took bread, and gave thanks to God in presence of them all: and when he had broken it, he began to eat.

36. Then were they all of good cheer, and they also took some meat.

37. And we were in all in the ship two hundred threescore and sixteen souls.

38. And when they had eaten enough, they lightened the ship, and cast out the wheat into the sea.

39. And when it was day, they knew not the land: but they discovered a certain creek with a shore, into the which they were minded, if it were possible, to thrust in the ship.

40. And when they had taken up the anchors, they committed themselves unto the sea, and loosed the rudder bands, and hoisted up the mainsail to the wind, and made toward shore.

41. And falling into a place where two seas met, they ran the ship aground; and the forepart stuck fast, and remained unmoveable, but the hinder part was broken with the violence of the waves.

42. And the soldiers' counsel was to kill the prisoners, lest any of them should swim out, and escape.

43. But the centurion, willing to save Paul, kept them from their purpose; and commanded that they which could swim should cast themselves first into the sea, and get to land:

44. And the rest, some on boards, and some on broken pieces of the ship. And so it came to pass, that they escaped all safe to land.

The Supreme Value of Life

"There stood by me this night the angel of God" ( Act 27:23 ). That is just when we need the angel most; and the angel is never kept back when we really need him. An angel at night seems to be a double blessing because of the surrounding darkness. Words of sympathy are always good, but they are the very balm of heaven when the heart is sore, and, so to say, opening its lips with great thirst that it may drink of the water of life. Did the angels ever come in the daytime? We cannot answer that question without consideration, but memory supplies innumerable instances in which the angels have come in the night season. Some of our earliest recollections are of angels wrestling with us, when we could see no light in the nightly sky, nameless angels; angels that could have crushed us, but only bruised us; angels that could have torn us to pieces, but only put out one joint to show their omnipotence. The night has a story all its own. Any vulgar pen can write the story of the day; but the night, with its distances, its mysteries, its half-voices, its almost things, must be a troubled dream in the affrighted imagination. Yet some nights we want to live over again. There was joy in the agony, there was friendship in the ghostliness, there was a music in the going, that we want to hear just once more, if haply we might take hold of something with both hands, until the noise was over. I would not live without this supplementary life, this ensphering and comforting life, these hints of worlds that make the sun a mere speck. I am tired of the little bigness of the sun; I am thankful to hear of flames that blind him, and of sizes that reduce him to insignificance. God thus appeals to the fancy which he stuns, and turns imagination itself into a religious faculty, and makes wonder go for prayer. Yet it takes a courageous man to say, in a materialistic age, that an angel has spoken to him. He will be called mad. But to call a man mad is, when we come to think of it, not to make him mad. What is madness? It is a relative term. There is a madness of insensibility, a madness of indifference, a madness of unpardonable stupidity amongst the appealing and exciting sublimities of things. Why should we call the unseeing beast sober, and the burning, flying poet mad? We must rectify our standards. Tomorrow, or even today, we must take our balances into the sanctuary and have them tested by the Divine weights. But this is a ladder whose foot is upon the earth, though its head be lost in the high light; so we will come down the ladder, round by round; and, mayhap, when we descend it fully, we may find that it rests on logic and lifts itself up into rapture. Let us see if this be not so.

Paul says of God, "whose I am, and whom I serve." So the revelation was not made to a fanatic, but to a servant, a toiling man, one who had set his hands to the Gospel plough. Thus we are coming down into cold reason. This is not foam, this is not mere glitter of words, this is not the completion of a phrase; it is at once the beginning and the end of an argument. "Whose I am " But all men are God's. Yes, in a sense; but there is another ownership, an inner life, a warm, comforting, all protecting, sacred sonship and fatherhood and mystery of communion. Paul was always God's; the centurion and the sailors were God's where is the specialty of the claim "whose I am, and whom I serve"? We must enter into this spiritual mystery. We are twice God's: we are "born again" yea, truly, as it were, again and again and every day born to some higher life, into some nobler power, into some tenderer love, into some wider ownership of truth and life. It is a mystery; no words fit it; we must live it to know it.

"Whom I serve." Now we come lower down still into the region of what is termed reason and fact. Did Paul serve God? Let his life answer. If he did not serve God, his life since that Damascus journey has no explanation, no meaning. Verily, from our reading, we would be the first to say to the inquiry "Did Paul serve God?" "Yes, night and day; in every thought, in every pulse, in every upheaving and strenuous energy of the soul." Common fairness demands this tribute. We should lie to ourselves if we did not unanimously and affectionately say, "Yea, verily, Paul, mistaken, mayhap, a fanatic perhaps, wild and mad as judged by Festus' rules and customs, but, O man! bent, withered, impoverished, despised, thou hast with both hands served God."

The all-including thought arising out of this consideration is, that God's revelations are made, not to genius, but to character; not to ability, but to disposition; not to the greatest intellects, but to the tenderest and purest hearts. "To this man will I look" God never changes the point of vision; the focus is never altered. "To this man will I look" a broken-hearted, humble, contrite soul. In other words, "the secret of the Lord is with them that fear him." "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God." Paul does not say, "The revelation was made to me because mine is the highest mind represented in this assembly, mine the brightest intellect, mine the loftiest reason, mine the noblest power of thought." "The secret was revealed to me by him whose I am in every fibre of the body, every thought of the soul, every passion of the heart, and whom I serve with all the resources with which he has entrusted me, and with all the fire that burns in my being." We should know more if we loved more; we should be greater theologians if we were better Christians. To the praying soul the revelation comes; when our eyes are shut in prayer, the vision of our soul is opened that we may behold the sublimest realities of truth. If you would grow in knowledge, you must first grow in grace.

Then mark a wonderful characteristic of Paul, in that he pledges God. This is not a salvation that is to be worked out in the dim and unknown future. With a valour shall we say an audacity? singularly characteristic of himself, he pledges, in all its immeasurable infiniteness, the power of God to do this thing. How he will be covered with confusion presently if it be not so! In a few brief hours this boast will be reduced to confusion and dismay. There is a touch of prophetic knowledge in this pledging to God. "If it be not so," said the old man, "then the Lord hath not spoken by my mouth. If that man die an ordinary death, I should be found a liar, in that I have said God has revealed the contrary to me." A great mystery is this, that the child may pledge the Father to work out certain issues and complete them in happy fruition a wondrous miracle; yes, it is even so. As to detail, we know nothing; but as to broad, substantial issue, we know everything. "Say unto the wicked man, Thou shalt surely die." "Say unto the righteous, It shall be well with thee." We know nothing as to time, mode, circumstance, changing phase and incident; but the issue is revealed in light.

What a wondrous picture of life then follows! We seem to have been in precisely those very circumstances. Have we not seen how great providences are affected by human action? "Paul said to the centurion and to the soldiers, Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved." This is a continual wonder to us, that life should go upon such little hinges; that the small wheels should, in their place, be just as important as the large one. "The shipmen were about to flee out of the ship, when they had let down the boat into the sea, under colour as though they would have cast anchors out of the foreship"; and Paul stopped them with this assurance: "Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved." There must be no tempting of God: there must be complete obedience. Sometimes the fight, so to say, between God and man, is brought down to the very narrowest and simplest incident. The battle is not always a grand one, or fought out upon a great field. We sometimes come into such close quarters with God that great issues depend upon shutting the door, looking out of the window, keeping the eyes open, speaking one word. Thus are little things lifted up into importance, and details made part of the worship of life. There is nothing unimportant to Omniscience: the very hairs of your head are all numbered. There is nothing confused or indiscriminate and undiscriminating in the providence of Heaven. There is not a colour on an insect's wing that does not represent some thought of eternity. Do not take the view which would depreciate that which is matter of detail and comparative insignificance, for a great argument is founded upon God's care in these matters. Wherefore, if God so clothed the grass of the field; so cared for the sparrows; so looked after the daintiness of the lily, so that no hand but his own may paint its white purity; how much more ? Then the argument opens until it becomes wide as the firmament and bright as the aggregated light of the universe. Is it not so in our own life, that often we fail at the little point, the comparatively insignificant thing, the incident that may be thrown into the sum total? Are we not lost because our balances are not fine enough and because we do not work down to the minutest line, making obedience not a rough service, but a detailed and complete sacrifice?

What a wonderful confirmation is given to a truth which seemed to astound us in our last study! We then dwelt upon the thought that the world is saved because of its good men. "God hath given thee all them that sail with thee." We were not quite sure of this. All the historical allusions seemed to be good and sound; but how the world should be kept sailing on through the great sea of space because of its ten righteous men we hardly understood. But singularly here is the very same truth stated within lines with which we are perfectly familiar. At a certain point in the voyage "the soldiers' counsel was to kill the prisoners, lest any of them should swim out and escape. But the centurion, willing to save Paul, kept the soldiers from their purpose." So the prisoners were twice saved on Paul's account. The centurion did the very thing that God did, without knowing it. We are ruled by strange emotions; passions, thoughts, impulses suddenly seize us, and we do things for the sake of others which we would not have done but for the presence of these personalities; and thus and thus, on scales small and in ways unintended, we repeat the mystery of God, and show ruined, shattered, lost, as we are that at first we were made in the image and likeness of the Creator. So the world is governed today. We are doing things to others for the sake of some peculiar personalities or special lives; and so we could find our theology in our daily life, and proofs of Christian revelation in many an out-of-the-way field. Why this value set upon life? The men engaged in this stormy voyage did exactly what we are doing, did exactly what all the world has always been doing: they showed the supreme value of life. Why do not men give up life? Why do not the abject poor throw themselves into the river and there lose for ever their consciousness of misery and want? What is it that keeps some men alive? No home, no friend, no fortune, no joy, no light, no music, no fire in the grate, no summer tor them, and yet they hug the life that is reduced to a burning agony. Surely there is some mystery in this circumstance, and surely some religious explanation of it. When the men had partaken of food on Paul's exhortation "they lightened the ship, and cast out the wheat into the sea." When it comes to a contest between life and wheat, the wheat must go; and in the end we read "the rest, some on boards, and some on broken pieces of the ship" no property, nothing saved; everything lost but life. What is the meaning of this? I would force the question upon myself. Why not lighten the ship by throwing out the men? Do not treat the question as trivial: behind it there is a solemn mystery. Learn from it the dignity of life; the sublime, the Divine origin of life; the marvellous compass and possible destinies of life. And whilst these great problems are at once agitating and comforting the mind that studies them, you may see some explanation of the incoming of the Son of man into the world. He came not to destroy men's lives, but to save them. I seem to understand that when I study the value which has been put upon life by men under all circumstances. Why struggle with the deep? Why this wrestling with the winds? Why not give in? Why not jump into the storm, and let it devour us? Why this eternal fight? Why these prayers that break through the agony and seem to say, "Life is very dear; life is unspeakably precious; everything for life. Better live in misery than die"? What is the meaning of it all but that we did not come up out of the dust, but that our spirit is from the Living God? It is the witness of God in the soul; it is life itself in a grand endeavour to explain its own mystery; and there is no explanation but the Gospel one. That covers the whole ground and brings to harmonious conclusions all the inner controversies of the soul, and all the vexations incident upon our discipline. God made us: God speaks in us. In the very least, poorest, meanest little child in London today God speaks through the agony of a life the child cannot part with and which the earth cannot satisfy. Thank God for these natural mysteries! They help us so much when we come to ponder the profounder secrets which relate to God and to eternity.