Acts 26:18

Chapter 95

Prayer

Almighty God, let light fill our minds, and let love excite and ennoble our emotions. Thy gospel is light. Jesus Christ, thy Son. is the Light of the world. In him, as in thyself, is no darkness at all. The darkness fleeth at his approach. He is the Child of the day, the Glory of the summer, the Lustre that fills all space. Yea, heaven itself shall have no need of the sun, because the glory of the Lamb will be the light thereof. Thou hast, in thy Son, Christ Jesus, turned us from darkness unto light. Our eyes are now open; we see somewhat of the reality of things. Once we were blind; now we see. A Man that is called Jesus anointed our eyes, and we do see. We owe all our knowledge to thy Son; we owe our liberty to the Cross of Christ. The Son has made us free; therefore are we free indeed. This is a glorious liberty; it is our heaven begun below; it is the liberty of large, keen, clear sight. We are not deceived by shape and figures now by bulk and nearness: we see the things that are not seen; we are living in the invisible; we are on the earth, yet in heaven; and we bring the power of an endless life to bear upon the question of the dying hour. This is our inheritance among them that are sanctified; this is our sonship by adoption; herein is the great grace of God abounding over sin, opening up a way into a blissful and pure eternity, and giving us to glory in tribulation also. The night is far spent; the day is at hand glorious day! cloudless day! the reign of light, the sovereignty of pure splendour. This is the realisation of faith; this is the fruition of hope. For all religious uplifting of the soul we bless thee; for all the emotion that cleanses the heart we thank God; for the tears that come into our eyes and take out of them all earthly sights we bless thee as for great gifts. May we, having enjoyed the Christian feeling, go forward to do the Christian work, and thus confirm in action what we have enjoyed in fellowship. Show us what our duty is. Point us to the plough thou dost intend each of us to use. May there be no shrinking from the appointed labour; with a true heart, a responsive love, a soul all trust, may we answer the call of God. Thou dost appoint our habitation, thou dost fix our business, thou dost cut our bread for us, and say, "It is enough," and thus rebuke the voracity that would destroy what it professes to nourish. Thou knowest how many coats apiece we need, and how many staves and swords, and how much of purse and scrip. May we take our whole life role from God, and have no will or wish or thought but to love the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ with perfect love. Great peace have they who love thee; inner and eternal joy, not to be touched by thievish hand, have they who live in Christ, who move and have their being in the Son of God. This is heaven! this is immortality! We have what we ask for; we are where we wish to be. Regard us as having many needs, all of which are nothing in the presence of the fulness of thy river. May we not look to our necessity, but to the fulness of God. Carry away our sins by a way thou hast thyself appointed, full of mystery, full of grace. Bring us every night to the Cross; remind us every day of thy love. When the spirit of duty calls us to sacrifice, may the spirit of grace call us to triumph. Bless all old travellers and all young pilgrims; all lookings back upon battlefields and roads well worn, and all dreamy forecasts of the future, shapeless and unknown. Be the Physician of the sick. Speak to the disappointed man who holds a blighted life in his hand, and tell him that this is not the end, yea, hardly the beginning, and may he take heart again. Be with those whose way lies through the grave-land, who are more in the cemetery than out of it, who are skilled in digging graves, yet get not accustomed to the wearing sorrow. The Lord himself stand by them; breathe messages of peace into their hearts, and speak those great words never invented by the makers of human speech. The Lord have us, every one, like an only child, in his own keeping; the Lord point out the road, fix the rate of travel, make us lodge where he pleases in the palace, or in the open air, or under a sheltering tree a stone a pillow; where thou wilt and as thou wilt, only may our eye be fixed upon the star which leads lo the Infinite Light. Hear us, every one for ourselves, our loved ones; for the present, for the absent; for those whose life is needful to us, and for whose love we vainly pine. Good Lord, thou wilt enlarge thyself, rather than there should be no room for even one of the least of the countless host.

Hear our prayer at the Cross, made powerful by the intercession of the Priest, and whilst we say, Amen, let thine answer be hidden in our hearts. Amen.

Act 26:18

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.

Vital Ministry

Words fail to express my personal appreciation of this magnificent charge. This is the New Testament. Everything is in the eighteenth verse. No man ever invented that verse: it is a house not made with hands. I pause before it as before an object of infinite sublimity. Should any one ask, "What does Christianity want to do in the world?" point the inquirer to the twenty sixth chapter of the Acts, and the eighteenth verse. That is our answer. We do not attempt to amend it; we accept it just as it stands there. We take no banner out on which we do not write these words in light. Would God we could enter into the spirit of this charge! It is not in the heart of man to invent that verse as an imposition. This is the centre of reason, the centre of health, the seal of God. Sometimes we want a concise expression an easily quotable explanation of what we are and what we want to do. You cannot find any words so full, so bright, so tender, as you find in Acts 26:18 . Write them at the head of every sermon; write them in gold, brightened with diamonds, around every pulpit. This is what our Lord Christ wants to do. Is it worth doing? Would the world be the better for the doing of it? Is it worth my while your while to take up this programme? Let us examine it in detail, and then we shall know the fulness and the value of the Divine reply.

Picture the scene. A strong man is thrown down a man capable of all but inveterate prejudice, invincible in will, cultivated in mind; a man of rare intellectual penetration and great moral sternness. Bidden to stand up, he receives a charge from an invisible speaker. I will not stop at the mystery of the invisibleness until I have mastered the moral purpose of the words that were spoken. We may spend so much time over the invisibleness as to overlook or neglect the beneficence. Let us stand at the point best fitted to our reason and our whole faculty, and then advance into the transcendental and the infinite. What does the invisible speaker want this man to do? To go to the Gentiles, the heathen peoples of the world. What does he want this man to do when he reaches the far-off lands? Everything depends upon this revelation. First, "to open their eyes." My confidence is already turned towards this speaker. He is not the inventor of a superstition. Any religion that proposes to open our eyes is presumptively a true religion. Superstition says, "Keep your eyes closed; put a hood over your reason; do not make any inquiries; take my report of everything, and be contented and satisfied with it." That is superstition. Christianity says to every man, "Stand up, I will open thine eyes; thou shalt see the bigness of the universe, the reality of things, the magnificence of life, the solemnity of destiny. Stand up, I will make a luminous man of you; thou shalt have sight faculty of criticism; thou shalt have a large estate, a glorious appeal to the eye." Christianity, then, does not seek to befool me; Christianity does not want to envelop me in darkness, to shut me up in some prison, priest-guarded, priest-locked, roofed in with superstition, wound round with darkness. Verily not. There are no blind Christians. In proportion as they are blind, they have not received the benefit of Christ. The Christian is a wide-awake man all reason, all life. If any had supposed him to be a dotard, a superstitious fanatic, they have misunderstood the faith, if they have not misinterpreted the man. A rationalist? That is what I am! If any man outside Christ's great revelation propose to be a rationalist, I call him a false man a thief. He has stolen a livery that does not belong to his court; he wears a crest he has purloined. I claim that Christianity is rationalism because it opens the eyes. Marvellous is that expression! Do not suppose you understand it in a moment. It has in it a whole firmament of light and possibility, education, growth, development. This is a daily process in our education namely: seeing things more clearly, with a happier and more satisfactory distinctness, noting their relations, proportions, interdependences, and final issues. Christ has no blind followers. If any man want to follow Christ, he must first have his eyes opened. That was Christ's way in the days of his flesh. He did not say to blind men by the wayside, "Grope your way after me, and we may see about your vision by-and-by." No; he stopped, gave eyes to the blind, and then passed on. Christians are not blind men, but men whose eyes have been divinely opened. Is it worth my while giving up what strength I may have, or faculty, to open men's eyes? Why, there is no mission so sublime! It is almost like creating a man to give him sight. The man blesses you with a grateful, overflowing heart; he says he owes the universe to you, as the instrument of God: for before it was a great night, now it is a sun-lit, glowing day. The greatest gift of man to man is the gift of idea, thought, new vision, the enlargement of the critical, judicial, and appreciative faculty. To open the eyes is to give wealth. The poet cannot give me the acres of my lord, but he can give me the landscape that belongs to the poorest of the children of men.

"To turn them from darkness to light." That is upon the same line of thinking? Precisely: that is the Divine logic. Not to open their eyes to see the darkness as sevenfold greater than they dreamed it to be, but "to turn them from darkness to light." What superstitious religion ever proposed to increase the day? One wonders that men, hearing this to be Christ's purpose, do not stand up and say, "King of kings! Lord of lords!" They will follow any demagogue who will delude and befool them, and turn their back upon the man who wants to lead them out of darkness into light. This is the proof of the Divinity of the Christian religion. It is the religion of light; it cries, "Light! more light! cleanse the whole firmament of clouds and let all the light of God shine without interception." What a turning is this from darkness to light! The phrase may go for less than its value because of its very simplicity. The white diamond does not attract the untrained attention so much as some muddily-coloured stone quite valueless: the diamond is neglected because of the very quality which gives it value. Is there a religion in this world that even proposes to turn men from darkness to light? I accept that religion at once on that very profession. Who can measure the distance from darkness to light? This is one of the immeasurable distances finding its counterpart in the expression, "as far as the east is from the west." These are terms that transcend arithmetic. The writers would have borrowed arithmetical numbers to express their ideas but that arithmetical numbers have no relation to such stupendous distances. Darkness imprisons, darkness brings fear, darkness enfeebles, darkness contracts the mind. Jesus never said, "Take away the light; or if you light a candle, put it under a bushel." Contrariwise, he said, "I am the Light of the world," and "ye, my disciples, are the light of the world.... Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven." Because Christianity fights the darkness, loves the light, calls for midday, I accept it as the fullest and strongest philosophy of life yet made known to me.

There is another turning namely: "from the power of Satan unto God." Christianity is the upward movement of the world. "Nearer God!" is the watch-cry; "Away from the enemy; further from the destroyer; upward, out of his reach" that is the sublime charge, that the Divine inspiration. We know what is meant by "the power of Satan" the power that victimises us, that dupes us, that gives us promises which end ever in disappointments; the power that unmans us, takes away our crown, breaks upon our self-control, mocks our prayers, and points us to the grave as the sad end. We know that power. It never gave us any education, it never took us to school; it never offered us any new book written by genius and inspired by purity. It always said, "Avoid school, keep out of the library; turn your back upon the Church, never mind the preacher; feed yourself: drink where you can, eat what you can get hold of; obey me, and I will give you the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them" a figure as large as the lie.

So far this is in some sense negative: "To open their eyes, turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God." Now we come to what may be termed a blessing more positive: "that they may receive forgiveness of sins." No man ever invented that! Man has invented forgetfulness of sins; man has brewed certain drinks which he will give to himself in order to dull the recollection of his iniquities. But this is dew from heaven; no fingers ever moulded these translucent drops of celestial purity. Christianity makes the greatest of all offers. It will not lull me, it will not administer opiate or narcotic to me: it will fight the battle right out; it will adapt means to ends; it will bring the eternal to bear upon the temporary, the Divine upon the human, the sacrificial blood upon the human sin; and the end shall be "forgiveness." Sweet word! infinite in its depth of meaning, infinite in its height of promise. An incredible word! That is its difficulty with me: I know my sin so well that I know it cannot be forgiven I am speaking now within the bounds and observation and consciousness of a personal and social kind. You can throw flowers upon it; you can employ men to come with instruments of iron and throw clay and sand and rocks upon it; you can bring all the great seas of the globe and pour their infinite floods upon it; but you cannot forgive it. Christianity says to me, in this mood of dejection and despair, "You can be forgiven, and I have come to tell you how." I am touched by the sublimity of the offer. If it were possible, I would accept it; but to accept it would be to contradict all my own consciousness and all my own observation, and all the efforts of every empiric who has come to practise his nostrums upon me. Christianity replies: "I am well aware of that; this will be no compromise; my action is building upon original foundations: the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin." My reply to that speech is a great flood of tears; I say, "Would God that were true, thou sweet angel!" and I look suspiciously at the radiant mother-preacher. Can it be? What is it that cleanses from all sin? "The blood of Jesus Christ." I want that to be true! O angel, radiant one making the snow ashamed of its imperfect whiteness by the lustre of thy purity I would thou couldst make me feel the Gospel thou hast made me hear!

Is it worth our while trying to open men's eyes, to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins? In this faith I would serve and count all other programmes mean as lies. Then will come the "inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me" new character, new brotherhood, new riches. This is what Christianity wants to do. Fly abroad, thou mighty gospel! When this work is done, earth will be heaven.