Acts 27:20-24

Chapter 98

Prayer

Almighty God, thou knowest where we are on the sea of life; we cannot tell ourselves. The nights are weeks long; we hear no voices in the roar of the wind; we are verily driven. Then the sunshine comes, and the smooth water, and the lulling, dreamy wind; then we take heart again and sing the song of joy, and look the look of hope, radiant as morning dawn. Then, again, the darkness: black night coming down like an infinite burden upon the world too small to carry it. Thus are we in sore tumult, and our heart is vexed with fear; we are torn asunder, one part of the life from the other, so that we have not the use of our whole strength; we are divided men, and our souls are without their own consent and force. Behold, this is life strange life, short life, yet within it so much space for trouble. But this is not all. Thou hast meanings of grace and love yet to be revealed, and when we know thy purpose in all its fulness we shall forget the earth as we forget the night that is gone. Thou meanest to redeem the earth, to take us to thyself; having bought us with blood and cleansed us in the fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness, and educated us by all the providence of life's eventful day, thou dost mean to set us among the saints who walk in white and whose delight it is to serve thy throne. We will look on to the larger time; we will not consider this little feverish day the whole span of being, but will lay hold of the endless life, and in its sublime power rule the fear and vexation of the present moment. This is the victory of faith; this is the triumph of thy saints; this is the miracle of grace! Lead us in this direction. Bid us look up when the stars are all out and the whole host of heaven is glittering with delight; and as we gaze upon the infinite pomp tell us that it is nothing but a symbol of what it cannot adequately express of power and wisdom and love, all of which is ours in Christ Jesus. Thou art good: full of tenderness and lovingkindness and saving health. Thou dost not delight in the destruction of men, in the overthrow of human purpose, and in the confounding of natural desire; thou dost mean to sanctify us, build us up, complete in us some beneficent purpose, and shape the ruin of our life into a temple of worship, into a palace for a king. We are poor and needy; we cannot bear much prosperity; it drives us beyond the right centre; it unsettles our thought; it prostrates us before our own ability. We say, "This is our doing," and, "Behold the result of our cleverness and the harvest of our genius"; and thus we forget thee, the Giver of every good and perfect gift. Give us what we can bear. If we can bear poverty rather than wealth, we shall be rich in our destitution. The Lord undertake our whole life for us, every whit of it and every day. May we never deceive ourselves into the delusion that we can manage the concerns of one moment, or do without God for one breath. Keep us steady, constant, steadfast, noble, true. May our ruling purpose always be right; then, though we slip in the detail and are found faulty and unworthy here and there, yet the great column of our life shall be perpendicular and strong, pointing straight up to God's light and God's throne. The Lord help us as we need to be helped. Show every man that he has more mercy in his life than he has yet counted. Give us that eye of love which seeks for the goodness of thy providence, and take away from us that evil eye which delights in finding out the crookedness and the gloom of life. Take up all the little children and baptize them with the dew of the morning. Bring forth all the parents to the altar and baptize them with fire. Take out thy whole Church into wilderness or fair garden and baptize thy host with the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Act 27:20-24

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.

The Teachings of Impoverishment

"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." What have we to do with sun and stars? Is not one world sufficient at a time? We are travellers, and it is enough for us to mind the road without caring for the sun; we are mariners, and surely it is enough for us to keep the ship right without troubling our heads about the stars. This is the vain and empty talk of persons who mistakenly call themselves secular and practical. When we come to adapt things and to look at them in all their bearing and their totality we find that really the earth is the very smallest thing we have to do with. Surely we can get along through the water, though it be tossed and vexed, without heeding the far-away stars little glints of yellow light? It so happens that we cannot safely move without them. We have to consult them; we have to inquire where the moon is, or the sun, or the Pole-star; and sometimes one brief glimpse of a planet will tell us exactly where we are on the earth. Why, even cursing sailors have to be, in a sense, religious even men who say they have got enough to do with the ship without troubling their heads about anything else are obliged to confess that the ship is in the leash of the planets, part of the great astronomy belonging to an infinite compactness and grandeur of things. So, from a thousand points and in a thousand unsuspected ways, there comes upon us the sweet Gospel doctrine: "The very hairs of your head are all numbered." They are foolish who think they have only to do with one world. They are ineffably, infinitely foolish who suppose that things are what they seem, and that they can see everything exactly as it is. Again and again, by many a dream, by many an inexplicable touch, God shows us that this earth, so far away from all its kindred sparks, is none other than the house of God and the gate of heaven. I know it is possible to belittle the occasion, to take the earth as a flat and immovable surface, to neglect the stellar lights and let them glitter in ghostly unmeaningness, and to rake and scrape in the mud; but we do not choose to avail ourselves of that narrow possibility. We believe in getting into the rhythm of things, committing ourselves to the great astronomic movement; not in creating little spaces for ourselves, but in inhabiting our Father's house and submitting to his gracious domination.

"All hope that we should be saved was then taken away." This is what God has to do with every one of us before he can get a hearing. If you leave a man a walking-stick, he will believe he can do something with it; if you leave him with one blade of grass, you make an atheist of him. He must be stripped without crumb or speck or atom, without light or strength or hope; he must have nothing in him but the last breath before God can get a hearing from his own image and likeness; so stubborn is the human will, so self-reliant is human vanity, so mad is unregulated reason. Trace your best thoughts back to their origin, find out the day when you gave yourself away to Christ at the holy altar, and you will find it was upon a day when all other hope was dead. I looked for one to save, and there was none; for some to pity, and there was no eye to shed a tender tear; then his own eye pitied, his own arm brought salvation. This is a mysterious thing, incredible if it were a suggestion, only credible because it is an appalling and indisputable fact. Any devil can lure us away from the sacred altar; it seems as if we wanted to go. Is that not the experience of every heart? It takes all heaven's chains of gold to bind us to the altar; it takes but the beckoning finger of some mocking imp to bid us leave it in glad haste. We have to be argued into religion, watched whilst we are in the very church lest we should escape by crevice unknown to every sense but the acuteness of the desire that longs to leave the sacred fane. We require to have all kinds of considerations brought to bear upon us to make us pray, talk to our Father, speak upward into the light; but on the smallest provocation we turn fool again and hug the earth, forgetting that we are but embracing a grave. It is good of God to take away all we have; it is kind of condescending Heaven to conceal all the stars and leave us to sit down at the black table of darkness to eat what we can of the roaring wind. These providences have meaning. Poverty is not an accident which any clever economist can arrange or remove: poverty is part of the mystery of the human economy, as is blindness, as is sin. They are not reformers, they are self-seeking empirics, who take down their little instruments with a view to sweeping poverty off the face of the earth. Poverty is God's agent. Civilisation without poverty would be poor civilisation. There is a mystery in these things not to be laughed at, easily mitigated, quickly dispelled. Poverty may be the true wealth. Do then we find the ship in a state of hopelessness, given up to the gloom, eleven nights crowding their black darkness into one horrible density, and on that ship poor, undergirded thing, held and strung up in every possible way there lies the dead, white-faced angel Hope? It is a corpse the ship carries: the dead thing is Hope. Some hearts are now carrying that dead angel: all hope gone; the doctor said last night, regarding the sufferer, "There is no hope." The letter that came yesterday morning reporting the condition of affairs at a distance said, "There is no hope." Yea, the last daring little prayer was so short of faith that it fell dead back from the clouds and said to the heart that misconceived it, "There is no hope." We now want a Gospel voice sweet, clear, ringing voice from some blue cloud; we shall hear it, or this house has ceased to be the house of God.

The whole situation is now given up to religious direction. That is how the world-ship will be some day, the earth vessel. Ail the captains and mates and other officers the statesmen, economists, philosophers will stand back and let the praying men speak. We are waiting for that day. Then the necromancer will strike his tent to go home and mope in sullenness; then they who plied the ear with sounds that had no sense in them will cease their empty noise; then all the little tricksters who said they would set the world right by programmes and investments will skulk out of any door or window that may be available; and then we shall hear God's Gospel and wonder we never listened to it before, so unapproachable in majesty, so ineffable in tenderness, so infinite in hospitality, Christ's day is coming. Before its full dawn many men will have proposals to make and new ventures with which to dupe the generation. Paul is now the master of the ship. You cannot keep back the true primacies of life. For a time you snub them, undervalue them, pour contempt upon them; but their hour comes, and they assert themselves in the name and grace of heaven. Paul began as a prisoner; he ended as the captain. He went upon the ship quite humbly; now he stands up, as it were, four-square, and all the men are at his feet. There is a prophecy in these things, a sublime forecast, a subtle and most sacred omen. How will he speak in the darkness? "Sirs, ye should have hearkened unto me, and not have loosed from Crete, and to have gained this harm and loss." It is difficult for the noblest man to keep back all rebuke. Paul is rather smaller there than we have been accustomed to see him. He would have been a greater man if he had not said those words; but who can be. more than man? Just a little reproach, just a gentle reminder of your folly, just one little touch to bring to your recollection how you played the fool about a fortnight ago. It would have been better if he had not said this from some points of view; and yet who are we that we should rebuke the great soul we who deal in reproaches, who never allow the four-and-twenty hours to complete themselves without stinging somebody by an unkind reference to the past? We had better drop such criticism and get into broader and more welcome pasture.

Paul, therefore, said, "Be of good cheer." Now he is himself. That is the voice we wanted to hear. We did not care for the rebuke the thing was past and gone; a mistake was made and never could be unmade we want to hear Gospel words; we hear them in this exhortation, "Be of good cheer.". That is the pastor's heart, the great shepherdly love, the glorious leading voice. That voice is amongst us today in Christ's Gospel. We might spend long hours in rebuking ourselves for having loosed from Crete. There are some men who never can let you alone without reminding you what you might have done a month since. We wonder that such persons are permitted to live, for there is no room on this little earth for wisdom so illimitable. How stinging their tongue! How unkind every remark! "If you had listened to me last week, you would not have been in this position today." What a marvellous thing that so wise a man can be spared from heaven! "If you had done what I advised you to do seven years since " What amazing rivalry with Omniscience! Is there no man who can tell me what to do now? Is there no great kingly soul, O Father! O Shepherd! that will say, "But be of good cheer"? There is. This is Gospel day; this is Christian sunlight; this is our Father's house. Let us admit that we got wrong in loosing from Crete; as a matter of fact, we did loose from Crete, and the question is now: What is to be done? and whilst we are asking that question a Gospel-voice answers us, "Be of good cheer. This is the way; walk ye in it." Oh for the spirit of obedience to spring, in instantaneous reply, saying, "Thy will be done"!

So far this speech of Paul's is a remarkable instance of human sagacity. Will Paul limit his address to lines that are purely sentimental? He never did so before; he will not do so now. "For," said he that is the word of the logician, the solid and continuous reasoner, the man who builds his life-house upon rocks "For" now we shall have the reason "there stood by me this night the angel of God, whose I am, and whom I serve." He will preach, he must preach, he cannot help preaching. He will bring good into that ship; he is not going to play the amateur sailor, he is going to be faithful to this religious call and election. How the men listened! men who had never heard a sermon in their lives; men who did not know the meaning of the word "God," as Paul then pronounced it. What an eager audience! That is what we want now: an audience all ear; not men lazing in the house if haply they may catch some sound that pleases them, but intent, stretched forward, drawing out of the speaker an eloquence not his own, because born of inspiration Divine.