Acts 17:32-34

Chapter 64

Prayer

Almighty God, thou art our Shepherd in Jesus Christ thy Son, through whose sweet name we now come to thee, as through an open gate on which thou hast written all the welcome of thy love. We love to be thought of as a flock. Thou makest thy flock to lie down at noon; thou leadest thy flock by the still waters and the green pastures; thou carriest the lambs in thy bosom; thou art merciful as well as mighty. We need the shepherdliness of heaven amid all the bleakness and sore travail and labour of earth. It is sweet to think of the descending heavens and of their warmth and comfort and tenderness, and to know that they come down to take us up as into strong arms, which will hold us lovingly in eternal security. We bless thee for this vision in Christ. He said we would see heaven opened and the Son of man descending upon us. Our hearts long to see no other figure; they love the Saviour. They would see Jesus only all beautiful sights in one the glory of God, the Light of heaven, the Jewel of eternity. We bless thee for a Word that touches our life's necessity and pain; a Word that is no burden, but a morning light, a summer hope, a gladness that has no comparison. May that Word enter into our life and make us young again! May that sweet Word sing in us like an angel sent down from God to comfort and cheer the heart! We know thy Word; there is none like it, there is no counterfeit. It comes to us with its own authority of sweetness and power and joy in the Holy Ghost. We have come to hear it, to believe it, yea, to devour it, as hungering men devour bread. May we now know that the festival is spread for our soul's delight, and may thy banner over us be Love! We want to live as thou wouldst have us to live. Thou didst make us, and not we ourselves, and thou wilt account to us as to thyself for our individuality. Thou hast a set purpose in each life; we are all thine, jewels thou wilt number, and not one of us in Christ Jesus thy Son our Saviour can ever be lost. Thou hast made our life into night and day. Thou hast set the one against the other. Thou hast made the day partly ours and the night mostly thine own. Thou dost set us up in the presence of light, and thou dost lay us down to sleep that we may get back our youth and strength and hope and begin another day's work with yesterday's experience. Thou hast also given us the bright day, so full of light, so full of joy, a gleam of heaven, a hint of the world in which there is no darkness at all. Help us to understand this variety of night and day, and to feel that it is a parable full of Gospel meaning to those who have the pure heart. We commend one another and all our interests and relations to thy tender care. Be unto us all in all; bind us together in the bond of eternity. Save us from despair, from sin, from death. Fill our hearts with life that shall say, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" May the life of thy Son be in us abundantly, and more abundantly, like wave upon wave of waters that cannot be measured! Regard the traveller and the stranger, the friendly visitor, and those who would enlarge our prayers by the addition of their own. Regard the dear young ones and save them from the cold wind, the cruel tempter, and the snare cunningly laid; and help the old to believe that onward ness in age is progress towards youth. Be with the dying, and grant unto them the power to wave the banner of triumph and to speak the fearless and hopeful word. Help every good man to be better, every faithful servant to be more industrious, every sufferer to be more patient, and every waiter for the kingdom of heaven to stand still with a deeper and happier contentment. Our sins thou wilt deal with, for we cannot; they will not baffle thee. Thou hast opened a fountain of blood. Where sin aboundeth grace doth much more abound. Thou dost magnify thyself against our enemy, and show thyself to be greater than all that can be against us. We fall into thy hands in this great sweet faith. We are quite strong; no cloud is before our eyes, the earth is a solid rock, and the heaven an eternal security, whilst this faith that is in Christ Jesus reigns and rules in our souls. The Lord's love be our Sabbath blessing and the Lord's light our Sabbath glory. Amen.

Act 17:32-34

32. Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked; but others said, We will here thee concerning this yet again [expression incompatible with the view of some Evangelical commentators, who argue from the name of Jesus not having been spoken that Paul was interrupted before his intended close].

33, 34. Thus Paul went out from among them. But certain men clave unto him, and believed: among whom also was Dionysius the Areopagite [one of the council], and a woman called Damaris. and others with them.

The Point of Departure

WE have heard of Paul's great sermon, and yet that sermon would be called by very hard names if it were preached today. Consider that Paul was never at Athens before, and that Paul never went back to Athens any more; and consider that this is his deliverance to Athenian hearers on a great and historical occasion. Having put these points before your mind, tell me where is what we too narrowly call the Gospel? There is a theory popular with those who have never considered it that in every discourse there ought to be a clear and complete view of the way of personal salvation. The theorist founds his theory upon the probability, or at least the possibility, that some hearer may hear only once and nevermore. That theory found no respect in the Sermon on the Mount, or in the sermon preached by Paul on Mars' Hill. Life must be taken in averages; life must be taken in breadths of time. We can only address ourselves with intelligence and effect to the broader possibilities and probabilities of the case, and not to exceptional circumstances, which are of a kind that would, ii attended to exclusively, upset the whole policy and scheme of civilized life.

Paul began adroitly by beginning where the Athenians themselves were prepared to begin. They wanted a god he said he could declare or reveal the very god they were seeking after. That is sublime preaching! sitting down beside a man and asking him where he, poor groping soul, can begin. Christianity goes about asking men themselves for the starting-point. The religion of benevolence, the religion of love, the religion of the heart of Christ, is willing to give us a chance by saying to us, with tender graciousness, "What is your uppermost question?" or "What is your special and most urgent desire? Tell me all about it, and let us sit down on this green hillock and talk it all ov. Tell me what is in your troubled heart? for I have with me balm and light and true wisdom and grace, sympathy and help. Now, poor heart, begin." That is not a ruthless religion, forcing itself upon reluctant attention, but taking up our poor weaving and completing the web, or disentangling the piece that has been woven, and saying, "Now let us both begin together and see if we cannot do something better." These are the traits of the religion of the Cross which lift it above the necessity of all patronage and all vindication.

Paul addressed at Athens the very congregation which every preacher addresses today. The congregation never changes. If it is "The king is dead Long live the king!" it is also the same with the congregation. There is but one assembly, for there is but one blood among all the nations of the earth. Paul's assembly was divided sharply into Epicureans and Stoics the very men who are here today! Do not let us put off the Epicureans and Stoics on account of their peculiar names, and think of them as Grecian antiquities. Nothing of the kind. We are the Epicureans and Stoics, though mayhap we did not know it. The Epicureans glorified lust ; the Stoics glorified suicide so do we! Any protest you may lodge against the suggestion is an affair of weak words. Centrally, substantially, protoplastically, we do precisely what was done by Epicurean and Stoic. The Epicurean would have what he liked not this dish, but that. He would tarry long at his pleasures; he would pay any price for a new sensation. He awoke in the morning to find a new delight; he lay down in the darkness to dream of a novel pleasure. He lived in his palate, he lived in his taste; and his posterity is with us unto this day. The Stoic was a fatalist His great ambition was to suppress all feeling, to retire within an impervious shell, to regard all the events of life with equal indifference, and to put an end to intolerable agony, concealed and suppressed, by suicide. He took matters into his own hands; and are not we committing suicide every day? An etymological definition of suicide would be a childish answer to that tremendous impeachment. Do not play off against this terrific indictment some little knowledge of the Latin language. Suicide is not one act. Self-murder we perpetrate every day. We say we will "put an end to this"; in higher anger we say "this shall not go any farther"; in madness we declare that a line shall be drawn, and the affair shall be determined, cost what it may. What if we escape the charge of etymological suicide, and yet be convicted of having committed self-slaughter in the deepest sense of that term every day in the revolving year?

Christianity creates a third class. Whatever the third class may be in any congregation, it is the specific creation of Christian teaching. Christianity says, "Do not live in your pleasures." Christianity says, "Do not take cases into your own hands as if you had no Father in heaven. Sacrifice is better than indulgence, and resignation is better than suicide." So, though it is true that humanity, and substantially the congregation, is made up of Epicureans and Stoics, it is true doctrinally and spiritually that there is a third quantity the Christian life, the Christian hope, the Christian victory, for which God's name and Christ's Cross be praised!

If Paul began adroitly, he proceeded, as the subject unrolled itself before his spiritual vision, to touch upon distinctively Christian points. He came to the Man not named. That was a touch of happy and permissible cunning of a rhetorical kind. The anonymous is often more influential in the case of the ignorant than the avowed and duly-testified declaration. Paul refers to his Master as "that Man whom God hath ordained." Paul will touch attention; he will excite wonder; he will compel those people to listen to him. Had he begun by thrusting a Jew's name upon their attention, they would have turned away from him and left him to address the empty air. He kept his bolt to the last. If he did fail, he would fail as only a great general can do. He will get his men well in order; he will watch his opportunity; with that wonderful eye which saw behind and beyond the near and the tangible, he watched the working and beating of every heart, and when the moment came he launched the grand appeal. He failed, but he failed magnificently. There was no blundering in the generalship; there was no flaw in the inspiration; he failed, but he failed as only a great soul can fail. Some failures are better than some victories. Sometimes weakness is strength.

"When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked: and others said, We will hear thee again of this matter." But they never did! That is precisely what we are doing today. Were I to give an account of any Christian congregation, I should give it in the very words of the thirty-second verse. Congregations now listen as long as their fancy is pleased, and no longer. If a preacher can dominate by intellectual lordship, or moral supremacy, the public crowd, he will hold his position. The public do not listen to him longer than fancy is titillated or some selfish desire is gratified. The poor deluded preacher sometimes imagines that the public I am not now speaking of the inner circle of friendship and love, but the promiscuous public care something for him personally. They would leave him to-morrow if his throat failed! Some of them would not mind taking up their hats in the middle of his feeble discourse and going out to seek some other man to kill! Why will preachers delude themselves by such folly? Do not preach on that ground, young aspiring brother, but preach for Christ's sake and in Christ's name, and find your compensation, not in pecuniary wages, but in your Lord's "Well done!"

The Athenians left the discourse at the point of moral pressure. So long as Paul played the part of a Jewish Socrates they were willing to hear him. They said, with Athenian contemptuous-ness, "This seed-pecker seems to have picked up some new and strange god I wonder what it is." But the moment Paul flamed into moral earnestness, left the intellectual plane and came down to struggle with the heart and question it with hard interrogation, then the Athenians mocked, or with partial civility nodded to him a promise that they might come again to-morrow. Is it not exactly at that point that the congregations leave the preacher now? After the beautiful anecdotes; after the exquisite language, so pearly, so translucent, so charming; after the strong smell of scrap-book, then comes the moral appeal, and the people say they will not be lectured! They will devour any amount of rhetoric, and they will listen to any number of anecdotes, but the moment the preacher becomes the messenger of God with immediate charges from heaven the people go out not physically, that would be vulgar; not uproariously, that would be discourteous and indecent; but sympathetically, attentively the soul seals up its hearing and will listen no more. That is the cause of failure on the part of Christ's Gospel today. We do not want to hear its essence. It was the same with Jesus Christ himself. We are told that "the common people heard him gladly," but that was not so. Many a minister's heart has been made sore by the misquotation of that passage. The common people do nothing of the kind. The common people then were like the common people now, and like the common people of every age. The passage has been used to show that if we would speak as Christ spoke, in parables and and in images, and in sweet, beautiful sentences, "the common people" would understand words of one syllable. The common people do not care for words of one syllable or ten syllables. Do not suppose that the common people of any great city are lying outside the Church this day, fretting and sighing for some man who will come and talk in words of one syllable. It is preposterous! The common people heard him gladly so long as He had anything to give away, and on one occasion he said, "Let us be frank now. You have come, not because of the words, but because of the loaves and fishes. Do not imagine that you are taking me in. I will still go on doing you good, but do not suppose that I give you credit for a good motive." How terrible he was! What rebuke was that! How they might have withered up! For a man to tell you to your face the exact motive which moves you, and for you to know that he has found you out! The common people! the moment he began to be spiritual they turned away in crowds. The moment he began to say, "You must eat my flesh and drink my blood," they said, "This is a hard saying; who can hear it?" They had come to eat and drink, but not to eat and drink his flesh and his blood. He had lured them, as Paul afterwards lured the Athenians, on from point to point. He healed their sick, gave bread to their hungry, and was kind to them in what they would term a practical manner. But all the time he was leading them up to its application, and when he said, "You must eat my flesh and drink my blood. If a man eat not my flesh and drink not my blood, he hath no life in him," the common people, whom you thought to be worshippers of the god-monosyllable, turned right round to seek some other giver of loaves and fishes. Do not torment the preacher's heart by telling him that if he would speak words of one syllable, his church would be too small to contain the great crowds that would thrust down the most substantial walls.

The Athenians mocked and procrastinated. It is easy to mock. We mock the preacher's manner, and think that that excuses us from attending to the preacher's doctrine. We say, We will come again to-morrow. So we may, but Paul may not be there! I dare not say that the Epicureans and Stoics did not return to Areopagus, but if they did, they would wait in vain for the man they had called "babbler" or "seed-pecker." "So Paul departed from among them." If they had beaten him, he would have been there to-morrow. If they had been angry with him, he would have invited their attention a second time, or he would have returned some distant day. He never was afraid to go back to a city where he had been beaten or stoned or imprisoned; but to be mocked, to be treated with indifference that kills the heart! To pour out one's blood for the people, and then for their very next remark to be one about the weather that kills a man, though he be mailed with great strength and have a lion's heart within him. To suffer, to live, to die for your hearers, and then simply to be mocked that is DEATH!