Matthew 7:28

Chapter 1

Christ's Doctrine As a Preacher. The Preacher Like No Other Man Our Civilisation an Inheritance Some Badly-used Words the Helpful Preacher

Prayer

Almighty God, we come to thee through Jesus Christ, our only Saviour, for he alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and there is none other: he is sent of God to bring us unto the Father, and no man cometh unto Christ except the Father draw him. Herein are wonderful mysteries, which we cannot penetrate, but where we cannot understand we fall down and adore. What are we that we should know aught? We are of yesterday and know nothing: our breath is in our nostrils, and whilst we talk of life behold we are thrown down and are dead men. It well becometh us, therefore, to hold our peace in thy house, and to listen attentively, with the whole hearing of our heart, lest we miss any tone of thy gracious and living voice. Jesus Christ our Saviour loved us: he gave himself for us; his head, his hands, his heart, his feet, his side, bled for us: it was holy blood the blood of atonement.

Thou art always careful of us, as if we were worth much in thy sight. We cannot understand thy care. We could understand thy crushing us because of the provocation of our sins, but why thou shouldst save us and spare us and love us and mightily redeem us with blood, every day in the year, lo, this is a mystery of love which baffles our mind. Deep is thy design, gracious is thy purpose, immeasurable is thine intent, unknown in its beginning and uncomprehended in its issues it is enough for us to know that thou doest all things in wisdom and in love. To-day is the battle, and tomorrow the mystery, and on the third day dost thou perfect the issue. Help us to fight, to wait, to worship, to suffer, to endure with noble courage and unmurmuring patience, knowing that the end will come as a great surprise of hidden love, a revelation of infinite tenderness.

We bless thee for thy word; it is good reading in sandy places, and in wildernesses full of stones and wild beasts: it makes the very wind, when loudest and coldest, music in our hearing. It shows us where the tree is, the branches of which will sweeten the bitter pool: it is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother. Help us to understand it by our modesty, humility, self-renunciation, utter, childlike, unquestioning trust. Thou dost speak wonderful things to the child-heart may ours evermore be such. Save us from our own imaginings, deliver us from the temptations of our own sagacity and learning, and help us in all simpleness, with complete trust and love of heart, and with the openness of soul which receives all heaven's gifts, to wait upon the Lord, yea, to wait patiently for him.

Every heart has its own story of joy, of sorrow, of baffled hope, of dead ambitions, of frustrated purposes and trusts send a gospel to each soul, that none may feel itself left out on the day of benediction and rest. Speak comfortably unto Jerusalem: send thine angel to cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned, yea, let this be the day of jubilee, when silver trumpets shall announce the glad reprieve, the great and universal amnesty and release. Give us a nail in thy sanctuary, give us a standing on the threshold of thy house, bring us quite within the sacred enclosure of the holy temple, and give us rest and peace within its hallowed defences. Amen.

Text: "His doctrine." Mat 7:28

In what is known as the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Christ's preaching was shown to be profoundly doctrinal. There is many a figure here and there the figures being points of gold that glitter in the infinite mass of rock, the rock being the doctrine which is expounded with so marvellous and astounding an authority. Yet there is hardly any hint of the parable of which Jesus Christ was to make such copious use in his after-ministry, until we come, indeed, to the closing sentences, and there, in the image of the two builders and the two foundations, we have a hint of the more vivid and popular method of teaching which was coming. In this sermon Jesus Christ was profoundly and vitally doctrinal. In his opening discourse he was pre-eminently the WORD. Hence the deep thinking, the benedictions that seem to come up from eternity, and the whole doctrine of the individual inspiration of character, until we reach the very holiness and perfection of God. This is, indeed, the very mystery of the Logos, the Word, the ineffable and infinite thought. This is the divine meaning, incarnated in plain human words. In this discourse we are quite out of the region of finite speculation; here are no happy guesses, no striking suggestions which startle the speaker quite as much as they startle the hearer. We have here the deep things of God, spoken with an unction which makes the very hearing of them the most solemn responsibility we ever incurred. To have heard some sermons is to have laid up wrath against the day of wrath, or to have added to the joy of the day of supreme gladness. It were better for us that we had not heard some sermons our life was never the same after the hearing.

Now the servant must herein be as the Master, according to the measure and degree of his capacity. His speech must be, above all things, religious. Not religious because of surrounding circumstances, as, for example, the Sabbath, the sanctuary, the pulpit but in itself, its origin, its tone, its meaning, it must be profoundly religious, it must be from above. It must not be literary, clever, piquant, or anything else that is of the quality and limitation of art. It must come with all the sacredness of a divine origin, bringing with it the living air of the upper world, and bearing the thought of the hearer upward to the holy elevation and sympathy which come of the presence of God. The danger is, and the people make that danger greater every day, that preaching be mere literature, made peculiar by a religious accent. The danger is that preaching becomes one of many things all standing upon a level, and if it should become so, the hearer will be to blame quite as much as the speaker. The preacher must be like no other man. Every other speaker you may be able to measure and estimate; you know where he begins and where he ends, and you can weigh out his merit in scales, and announce his stature in inches; but the preacher must be a weird man, without beginning of days, without father or mother, a secret, a mystery, a voice, a flash of light, a revelation, a burning bush, and the great question must always be: Whence hath he this? It is not in the lockers of the rich man, it is not in the treasures of the literary student Whence this wisdom? And the answer must be, God-begotten, Heaven-born, its roots deep in the rock and its pinnacles flashing beyond the stars!

If preaching can be traced back to a school, a teacher, a custom, it is shallow and barren. It must come from eternity, from the invisible God, being at once so simple as to excite the interest and curiosity of little children and so profound as to abash the wise. The first thing, therefore, the preacher has to do is to renounce himself. He must not limit himself to his own little power of invention and expression; he must not dig wells in the sand of his own cleverness, or they who drink thereof will thirst again. He is a messenger: he must deliver God's message. If he do not deliver God's message, blame the hearer. The congregation creates the pulpit. The earnest hearer comes to hear God's word, but how many earnest hearers are there in any assembly? If I had one man here, and he wanted to hear God's word, I dare not speak my own. But I have a thousand men here who want to hear my word and not God's. If a soul were here affrighted by its own sin, asking me, with eye and voice and trembling fame, to reveal the Gospel, I dare not keep back any part of it. But you are not here for that purpose I speak of the multitude, not of the individual here and there whose object it may be, indeed is, to hear what God the Lord will say.

But if a sermon be charged with God's messages, will it be dull and heavy? Look at the Sermon on the Mount for answer. What variety, what penetration, what liveliness, what startling application and appeal! How restful the benedictions, quieting the soul, soothing all fear, encouraging all goodness, and watering the very roots of life from the river of God! Now the great Teacher must be figurative. He has not begun the great parabolical fancy and use yet. Still I see the beginnings of it in that very initial discourse. He cannot be dull. He says, Ye are the light of the world, ye are the salt of the earth, ye are a city set on a hill." Then he tells about the candle and the candlestick, and the bushel, and then he tells about the beam in one man's eye and the mote in another's, and then he winds up with the two hearers, the two foundations, the two houses, and the two destinies. A wonderful sermon, and yet so doctrinal. It is not dry doctrine, but doctrine vitalised, illumined, glittering all over with diamonds of the first water. How solemn the lessons to the lustful, the angry heart, the violent tongue, the anxious spirit; what a review of the past, what an outlook upon the future? Verily this is not a sermon in our sense of the term. You might describe it by great figures, call it the very Ganges of truth, illustration, philosophy, moral teaching, and appeal; call it a sky which seems to have been built to cover our little world, and yet which encloses within itself unnumbered millions of planets.

Was the sermon, then, dull and heavy? It was an infinite beginning. That is the marked peculiarity of Christ's preaching; it never ended. Persons sometimes said, "What, is he done?" What did that curious question arise from? Not from the abruptness of the speaker, but from the infinitude and immeasurableness of his message. Others can round off their discourses: from the pipe of their wit they can mould and sphere the soap-bubbles of their cleverness, and let them float on the air done! But the speaker of infinite secrets and infinite gospels, conclude as he may, can never be done. There may be a comma, a semi-colon, and even a colon, in this high mystic literature, but the period is never wanted, for the conclusion is never accomplished.

Yes, this sermon on the mount is emphatically the WORD the Word made flesh and dwelling among us, the Word showing itself in our mean syllables, illuminating but not consuming them. It took all that time to get the speech of the world ready to receive the gospel, even in the degree in which it was preached in the Sermon on the Mount You cannot tell how much time is required, or would be required, if you yourself had everything to do in order to enable you to accomplish the simplest act in civilisation. O, ingrates are we, and most thoughtless inheritors of inheritances all but infinite! If you had to do everything for yourself in the simplest act of civilisation, it would be seventy years before you could dine. It would be a hundred years and more before you could travel from one capital to another. But to-day we take all these things as a right. We grumble at the roads, of course; poor fool, dost thou know it, that if thou hadst to make a road it would take thee twenty years to get from here to thy mother's house? It took a thousand years to get human speech ready to take in the gospel and utter it in poor broken syllables. For God's difficulty is our language. He cannot tell us what he means because the dewdrop is not big enough to hold the sun. So we have suggestion and hint and flash of light and sudden large glimpse, as we suppose it to be, of things divine. But our human speech is an inn too small for the birth of God into our human imagination and individual grasp of thought.

Jesus Christ had something distinct and definite to say to mankind. He was not one teacher amongst many How often shall I insist that the preacher is not one amongst many, yet the foolish virgins and more foolish men will compare the preacher with the lecturer. The preacher has nothing to say to you; the lecturer lives on his own vitals, spins his own cleverness, and works marvellous jugglery with his own ability, and eloquence, and wit, and fancy and fun. It is beautiful, and instructive, and useful. But the preacher plucks no word from his own tree. What am I a lecturer? A man with so many yards of foolscap on which he writes beautiful sentences and telling stories? Have I fallen to that? The minister is an errand-bearer; he has to tell what he has been told. Do not find fault with him; you want to hear something else; he has nothing else to tell. How I could please you sometimes if I were in tolerably good health, if you would allow me to talk my own nonsense; it would be easy to gratify you then. I would weave coloured clouds around you, and call those coloured clouds sermons. I would salute your ears with witty stories, I would mock you with intellectual taunt, and I would speak severe things to the man in the next pew, and you would be so delighted! But I dare not put in a single word of my own without initialing it. Ah, me! if the manuscript is initialed all over, it is not God's sermon, but mine. Paul once or twice ventured to say something, and he always initialed it, put a large and most legible P under it said, "I speak this of myself." He need not have said so. We knew it to be so at once; the discrepancy was infinite. Still, conscientious man as he was, he put down a very large P against his own suggestions, and it was as well he did so, for they are most impracticable.

When Christ's sermon was done the criticism passed upon it was, "Not as the scribes." That is the criticism with which every sermon should be listened to, not as the speculatists, not as the guessers, not as the lecturers, not as the inquirers, not as the gropers but with authority, with all the momentum of an eternal and infinite impulse. How can a finite creature give such an impulse? He cannot: this is the gift of God, and always goes along with the word of God. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. Search the Scriptures. Preach the preaching that I bid thee, and let the hearers come to hear God's word and they will assuredly receive it.

The Sermon on the Mount is emphatically what is termed a dogmatic discourse, that is to say, it was positive, definite, practical, final. It was not a paper read before a religious debating society, for the purpose of eliciting opinions that is the idea of a modern sermon, and therefore we say when we get away from church, "Aye, aye, it is all very well, you know, for him to be standing up there and having it all his own way." Indeed! If he has it all his own way he is an unfaithful servant. A sermon is not a paper read before a number of equals for the purpose of the reader's saying afterwards, "Now, my fellows, men of equal understanding will you be kind enough to tell me what you think of all this?" If it admits of an appeal of that kind, it is not a sermon, it is a lecture out of the lecturer's own brain. If it is the word of God, pure, simple, unadulterated, absolute, that is to say, if it is quoted from the Book which we, by the very fact of our assembling here, accept as God's Book, then the preacher has it not all his own way; he is an errand-bearer, he is a deliverer of holy messages, and the messages are not to be measured by his personality, but by the degree in which they can be substantiated from the volume which he is set up to open and expound.

I do not wonder at this word dogmatic falling into a bad reputation. I do not like the word myself. In itself it is an innocent word. Turn it into Greek, turn it into Latin, beat it into English, it is still an honest, a pure word, in itself; but it has been made such bad use of that I do not wonder that people should avoid it. I do not suppose that you would be very fond of using a rope in which somebody has been hung. This word dogmatic is therefore a word which has in some relations a bad or an unwelcome meaning. So is the word casuistry a very innocent word in itself, and expressive of a very proper intellectual process, but it has been so badly used that I have begun to distrust and disown it. So is the word catholic a simple and beautiful word, but it has been tied up in such wrong relations that, like a rope which has hanged somebody, we feel as if it might hang us too if we did not take care of it. So have words been debased, prostituted, defiled, so that I do not wonder at many persons looking askance upon those words and avoiding dogmatic teaching, casuistical reasoning, and catholic divinity.

Looking upon this Sermon on the Mount as a model for preachers through all time, it justifies the preacher in laying down a definite doctrine. The preacher does not invite his hearers to talk over something with a view to a settlement, That of course would be very comfortable if we could meet here and lay our arms upon a table and say, "Now what do you think about it?" Well, it would be chatty, and nice, and sort of friendly, and almost convivial it might become. We do not assemble to make a Bible, but to read one. We are HEARERS: let that word be emphatic. Observe its limit, its meaning; we are hearers, we do not speak, we listen. We say, "Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth." How far from this our congregational discipline! The very first word you would have said this morning, if I had not made this remark, would have been, the moment you got outside, "How did you like him this morning, eh?" How did you like him poor hireling performer, poor miserable clerk of all work how did you like him? What about the substance, the doctrine, the call, the appeal, the tears, the unction, the consequences? Ask how you like the electric light as compared with the poor half-drunken gas flame, but do not ask how you like the infinite, the complete, the divine, the eternal. Hear it listen the Lord is in his holy temple, let all the earth keep silence before him. To be a good hearer is to be a good learner. Hearing is an art of the soul, an accomplishment of the heart, Sir Isaac Newton said the only difference he knew between himself and others was that he seemed to be able to pay more attention than some of them. The power to pay attention is a gift from God. Some of us cannot pay attention. All the while we are making running commentaries in our mind, doing business, entertaining anxieties; we hear the word, we do not hear the music; we hear the syllables, we do not catch the meaning. To hear, a man should pray an hour before he comes into God's house.

Looking at this as a model sermon for all time, the preacher is justified in preaching practically. A mistake is often made about this matter of practical preaching. If a man denounce the iniquities of his day he is thought to be a practical preacher. To a certain extent he is entitled to that designation. If I were to denounce theatres (as usually understood), racecourses, public-houses, gambling tables, I should be thought to be a most practical preacher, and within a given limit a very small one, albeit I should be preaching practically and usefully. That work needs to be done, must be done. If it is not done, a very solemn duty remains undischarged. But he, too, is a practical preacher who encourages men to try to be better and to do better. He also is a practical preacher who says, "Young man, you failed there, but pluck up your spirits; try again; God bless you; try to do better next time." He also is a practical preacher who recognises the sufferings of those who come to God's house to hear his word. Sorrow is as great a fact as sin. There is not a heart here to-day that is not aching, or that will not ache by-and-by, or perhaps that has not already had days and nights of aching. I take you man for man, pew after pew, and the mourners outnumber those who have nothing but gladness. The preacher, therefore, is a practical preacher who recognises that fact, and speaks comfortably, who delivers healing gospels to broken hearts, who deals out bread to the hungry, and who gives the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. I often want to hear such a preacher myself, namely, the man who takes the high and bright view of things, who shows me that my pain is for my good, that my loss is the beginning of my riches, that all discipline and chastening, though for the present anything but joyous, yea, truly grievous, will afterwards yield me results that will make the soul nobler and tenderer.