I pointed out in my last sermon the strange identity of our Lord's
words to His humble friends, with those which on another occasion He
used to His bitter enemies. He reminds the disciples of that identity
in the verse from which my text comes: 'As I said to the Jews … so now
I say to you.' But there was one thing that He said to the Jews that He
did not say to them. To the former He said, 'Ye shall seek Me, and
shall not find Me'; and He did not say that—even for the sad hours it
was not quite true—He did not say that to His followers, and He does
not say it to us.
If we seek we shall find. There is no disappointment in the Christian
life. Anything is possible rather than that a man should desire Christ
and not have Him. That has never been the experience of any seeking
soul. And so I urge upon you what has already been suggested, that
inasmuch as, by reason of His infinite longing to give truth and love
and guidance and energy and His whole Self, to all of us, the amount of
our possession of the power and life of Jesus Christ depends on
ourselves. If you take to the fountain a tiny cup, you will only bring
away a tiny cupful. If you take a great vessel you will bring _it_ away
full. As long as the woman in the old story held out her vessels to the
miraculous flow of the oil, the flow continued. When she had no more
vessels to take, the flow stopped. If a man holds a flagon beneath a
spigot with an unsteady hand, half of the precious liquor will be spilt
on the ground. Those who fulfil the conditions, of which I have already
been speaking, may make quite sure that according to their faith will
it be unto them. And if you, dear friend, have not in your experience
the conscious presence of a Christ who is all that you need, there is
no one in heaven or earth or hell to blame for it but only your own
self. 'I have never said to any of the seed of Jacob, Seek ye My face
in vain'; and when the Lord said, 'Ye shall seek Me,' He was implicitly
binding Himself to meet the seeking soul, and give Himself to the
desiring heart.
Remember, too, that this seeking, which is always crowned with finding,
is the only search in which failure is impossible. There is only one
course of life that has no disappointments. We all know how frequently
we are foiled in our quests; we all know how often a prize won is a
bitterer disappointment than a prize unattained. Like a jelly-fish in
the water, as long as it is there its tenuous substance is lovely,
expanded, tinged with delicate violets and blues, and its long
filaments float in lines of beauty. Lay it on the beach, and it is a
shapeless lump, and it poisons and stings. You fish your prize out of
the great ocean, and when you have it, does it disappoint, or does it
fulfil, the raised expectations of the quest? There is One who does not
disappoint. There is one gold mine that comes up to the prospectus.
There is one spring that never runs dry. The more deep our Christian
experience is, the more we shall take the rapturous exclamation of the
Arabian queen to ourselves: 'The half was not told us!'