Acts 20:27-29

Chapter 79

Prayer

Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the living God and Saviour of all men, we come to thee with psalm and prayer, with adoration and intercession, and pour out of our hearts all our desire and all our purpose. We will keep back nothing. We will tell thee the tale of our life, and will utter it only within the circle of the Cross, that, there uttering it, grace may abound over sin, and light may drive darkness away, and peace make quiet in eternal restfulness the tumult of our memory and conscience. We will speak of thy lovingkindness, and call it great; of thy tender mercies, and regard them as without number. We will make our hearts familiar with thy love, as shown in the gift of thy Son, and in all the wonders of his life and death and resurrection, before speaking of our sin, for then our hearts will utter themselves in hope, and our spirits shall be saved from the darkness of despair. We will think of the mountain clothed with light, of the throne of the heavenly grace, radiant with welcomes to sinful penitents; we will think of the cross, the light, the blood, the triumph; we will remember that there is a fountain opened in the house of David for sin and uncleanness. Then, when we come to tell thee of our guilt, we shall feel inspired and quieted by all the reality of thy grace. Thou hast loved us with an eternal love. Before the foundation of the world was the Lamb slain for the sins of men. Thou dost take no pleasure in the death of the wicked; thou dost take pleasure in life, in immortality, in the happiness of every creature of thy hand; thou wouldst that we might turn and live. We remember these gracious words and all the tender promises which accompany them; and so calling before our mind all the wonders of thy being, and all the tenderness of thy grace, and all thy readiness to pardon, we come, each crying in his own name and out of his own heart, "God be merciful to me a sinner." Thou dost stop the prayer in its utterance with a great answer; we may not pray out in words our broken-heartedness, for whilst we are yet praying thou dost send answers by the angels, and we who began to pray are constrained to conclude with praise. What joy have they to whose hearts thou dost immediately speak! The chains fall from off their hands; the darkness is no longer a weight upon their eyes; thou dost lead them forth to liberty, and establish their feet in secure places. May we enter into the mystery of this joy. May every one acknowledge that the house of God is the gate of heaven. Thou art drawing us nearer to the end without giving us to feel the violence of the motion. Day by day we approach the brink; night by night our pulses lessen their decreed beatings. We see the place of our final lying down; we feel gathering upon us the first shades of the great night. Yet dost thou lift us above all fear of the end, by Christ Jesus, thy Son, our Saviour. Thou dost show us that the end is the beginning, that the night is the morning, and that whilst we pass from earth, clinging to him who is the resurrection and the life, we are already amongst the number of those upon whom death has no more power. Whilst we live may we live well; by our industry, may we double the hours of the day; by our passionate yearning for all the highest fellowship of souls, may we already enter into heavenly society. For all that comforts we bless thee; for the growing brightness of thy truth, shining upon our souls with added lustre every day, we thank thee. Continue thy wondrous grace and light and peace unto the end, and at the last may we say, though with failing breath, concerning all thy truth and light and comfort, "The half had not been told us." So whilst we grow in grace we shall grow in glory. Amen.

Act 20:27-29

27. For I shrank not from declaring unto you the whole counsel of God.

28. Take heed unto yourselves, and to all the flock, in the which the Holy Ghost hath made you bishops [denotes the official function of these elders. Had the word been translated shepherds, the sequence of thought with the following verb, etc., would have been obvious to the English reader], to feed the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood [Paul's previous thought of his own death in connection with the ministry explains the unparalleled intensity of his language].

29. I know that after my departing grievous wolves shall enter in among you, not sparing the flock.

What Paul Leaves Behind

We have just been moved with deepest emotion on hearing Paul say that we shall see his face no more. The question then arises. Since Paul is going, what will be left? When the Apostle goes, will not the whole fabric which he seemed to represent and sustain go along with him? Is Christianity the heroism of one personality? Is it a thing which belongs to the individual, like his incommunicable genius of mind, so that when he dies it will die with him? If Paul's estimation of himself had been that of an idolater or of a superstitious person, he would have reminded the Ephesian elders that in the removal of his personality they had themselves no longer any official standing, or any claim upon public attention. We may learn something about the man's faith that is to say, about his doctrine, his theology, his outward and heavenward look by studying his spirit in relation to the things that were round about him. By an almost infinite subtlety of thought he indicates his apostolic primacy amongst men. He could be lowly-minded, and he could put on his crown and show that no diadem was so radiant as the one which sparkled on his head. He could say that he was not meet to be called an apostle; he could also say that he was not a whit behind the very chiefest of the apostles. On this occasion he shows his greatness, yet his modesty; the almost supreme importance of his personal ministry, and yet the absolute independence of God of any man's service. He does not talk of himself as of a little man, a small factor in a great operation; he speaks of himself as of the highest social and religious consequence in the matter of advocacy and the protection and guidance of Christ's Church. He seems to multiply himself into many when he gives the elders of the Church of Ephesus this charge, as if each of them were to be in his degree an Apostle Paul, and the whole were to constitute in their consolidation the influence and the energy which he embodied in himself. He does not say this in words, for then he would not truly and deeply say it; he subtly and spiritually suggests the idea, and thus throws over the whole occasion the mystery of spiritual colour, and leaves us to feel rather than to see how vast was the place he occupied. When Paul goes what will be left? The Church! and the Church is greater than any member of it; the Word! and the Word is infinitely greater than all the ministers that preach it. The blood that bought the Church! and that blood is beyond all rivalry and co-partnership of influence; it is alone in its meaning, its energy, and its grace. Then everything will be left when Paul goes? Yes, verily so. That is the mystery of Providence, the miracle of Divine and redeeming love. We can take nothing away from Christ's Church. The first-born dies, but the Church is as strong as ever; the most eloquent tongue ceases its gracious utterance, but the music of the Cross loses no tone or note of its subtle mysterious enchantment. It is even good for us that the Apostle should be taken away; it was expedient for us that Christ himself did not remain upon the earth in visible presence. Christianity is not an idolatry of a preacher; Christianity is not a customary attendance upon a particular place of worship; Christianity does not depend upon its great men or its little men; it is a spirit, a truth, a redeeming force, sanctifying reality; it abideth for ever; no part of it is laid in the tomb which holds the head of its noblest apologist; the Church, like its Lord, is the same yesterday, today, and for ever.

Paul's charge is Paul himself: "Take heed therefore unto yourselves." That was what Paul himself was always doing. He was a severe disciplinarian. He could not have spoken those words to other men if he had not himself first proved them. He was always undergoing the discipline of an athlete; Paul was every day under training for a great prize fight and prize race. He had no periods of intermission; he was always on the strain; he kept his body under, he struck himself in the eyes lest, having preached to others, he himself should become "a castaway." Self-heed is the secret of public power. Preparation of yourselves is the preparation of your sermon. Take heed unto yourselves, be severe upon yourselves, and you will be gentle to other people. Regard yourself as a sinner greater than any man that lives, and then you will preach with growing eloquence, because growing in human knowledge and human sympathy. Do not spare yourselves; do not live under your official clothing as if that made you better; if it has any influence upon you at all, it makes you worse. Watch your soul; watch the heart-gate; watch it as much at midnight as at midday. Give yourself no liberty, license, holiday, or periods of rioting, but lay grappling-irons upon your life, hooks of steel upon passion, desire, and every impulse within you. You must have no liberty but the law of Christ. How could a man talk so if he did not know the mystery of self-discipline? He did know it, and, therefore, we venture to repeat the assertion that Paul's charge is Paul himself.

And "take heed" also "to all the flock." That is the balancing consideration. The minister is not a monk shut up in his far-away and all but inaccessible cell; he is a public man, a social man, a man with a great shepherdly heart, that can understand and love a thousand varieties of men. The true minister is the miracle of men. He has not the contemptible gift of loving only one kind or sort of men the man who thinks as he does, who occupies his standpoint and calls it heaven. He loves all burning souls, all ardent, consecrated minds; erratic, heretic, eccentric, ordinary, conventional, stupid intellectually, but morally consecrated, he takes them all within his shepherdly care, and is most a shepherd when he tarries longest for the weakest of the flock; not so much a shepherd when at the head of the flock he sings a ballad to himself, as when he waits to gather up the tired lamb and to give it a lift up the steep place, mayhap lay his great soft hand upon it in tender caress and benediction. We should be greater if we were less, mightier if we were tenderer, wiser if more "foolish" according to worldly and carnal definitions of wisdom. Paul's conception of the ministry was regulated and inspired by Paul's conception of the Church. What was that conception? Was the Church a club, a little gathering of men called together for superficial purposes, or for transient enjoyment? It was a flock; it was purchased; it was purchased with the blood of God. Why, then the Church makes the ministry; it is because the Church is so great that the ministry, properly understood, is so great. The ministry has no existence apart from the Church. The minister be he Paul or Apollos or Cephas is but an upper seat-holder. There is no ministry if there is no Church. We are members one of another; we must have no merely official discrimination and recognition; but One is our Master, and all the saints are the clergy of God.

Paul uses language full of intellectual suggestion and full of spiritual pathos. "The Church of God which he hath purchased with his own blood." We have often had occasion to say that the word "blood," in its highest spiritual connections, has been woefully misunderstood. It is the custom of men first to debase a word by vulgar usage, and then to deprecate its truest and highest references. What grander word is there than "blood"? Until we touched it, contaminated it, it stood next to "love." There are those who want to get rid of the word now, because of what they are pleased to consider its ignoble meanings and references. I charge them with first giving the term such references, and I would rescue the sacred word and apply it to its original uses. "The blood is the life"; the life is the blood. God purchased the Church with his own life. It is life for life. Take that view of the Church, and you instantly enter into the sanctuary of a great mystery; yet whilst you are wondering as those wonder who stand under a lofty roof, and in the midst of marvellous poetic pillars, tender suggestions insinuate themselves into the heart, surprising lights break upon the eyes, and the whole house becomes sacred with presences felt though unseen. "We are not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin. Unto him that loved us and hath washed us in his own blood, unto him be all the heavens of light." This attempt to reduce the value of the word "blood," and all that belongs to it, is part of a wicked purpose to lessen the sinfulness of sin, the abominableness of iniquity. It is the trick of the devil; but "surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird." When you understand sin you will understand blood. When you see the hell which sin deserves you will see the Cross which God built.

Why should a man care anything about the world he is going to leave? That depends upon the quality of the man. There are those who want peace in their time, who want to leave all unsettled and thorny questions to be determined by those who come after them. The Apostle Paul was anxious for the fortunes of the Church at Ephesus, though he would himself see that Church no more. Christianity is not a new way of sneaking out of responsibility; Christianity is not a cunning method of leaving posterity to take care of itself. Christian love claims all time, all ages, all lands. It is the peculiar glory, because the characteristic tenderness, of Christianity, that it has no limits to its affection, no boundaries to the propositions of its holy philosophy. Even the Apostle Peter, ardent and, often mistakenly supposed, careless, said he would make such arrangements as would enable the Christians to whom he wrote to have holy things in their remembrance after his decease. The Apostle Paul great economist, great statesman, supreme prince of the legions of Christ could not leave Ephesus saying, "I am glad I shall suffer no more there"; but he cared for Ephesus as much as if he were going to spend the remainder of his days in the endeavour to convert its citizens. Paul knew that after his departing "grievous wolves" should enter into the Church, "not sparing the flock." There he gives you the subtle indication we spoke of concerning his own place in the Church, and his own protective power. The "wolves" could not come in so long as Paul was there. Our great souls do something for us; we must not reduce them to the humiliation of nonentity. They have their value; we ourselves feel the stronger because of their presence. We do not cultivate faith by proxy, or live in other men's religion, yet we all feel the stronger when the strong man is there. Persons who are timid in a house by themselves are quite courageous when joined by others, and when the appointments are complete you would suppose that they had never felt a moment's fear of any possible assault. They are then at their best; they have full control of themselves, and the full use of all their powers; the nervous strain is taken away, and in a state of equanimity they can go about their duties with satisfaction and success. It is so in the Church; yet God takes away from us our mighty men that he may train us as much by their absence as he did by their presence. Who would not long and desire, almost to the urgency of prayer, to have a whole year with John Bunyan, to know him, to have him in the house, to hear his very voice, to "pluck the good man's gown and share his smile"? or the greater Milton, or the fiery Baxter, or the profound Howe and Owen? Yet God is training us by their withdrawal, and God's greatest men are always the men who are still to come. The ages do not live backward; God did not show the fulness of his power, and then call the ages to behold its contraction. The way of God is "first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear," the whitening east, the purpling dawn, the growing day, the noontide splendour. We must look for greater things, thankfully and graciously recognize them when they come, and who knows but that today we may see sights which kings and prophets desired long, but died and never saw? If our prayer be great, God's reply will be greater still.