'I will lay down my life for Thy sake.' Peter meant it, every word of
it; and he would have done it too, if only a gibbet or cross could have
been set up then and there in the upper room. But unfortunately the
moments of elevation and high-wrought enthusiasm, and the calls to
martyrdom, do not always coincide. In the upper room, with its sacred
atmosphere, it was easy to feel, and would have been easy to do, nobly.
But it was not so easy, lying drowsily in Gethsemane, in the cold
spring night, waiting for the Master's coming out from beneath the
trembling shadows of the olive trees, or huddled up by the fire at the
lower end of the hall in the grey morning, when vitality is at its
lowest.
So the sincere, noble utterance was but the expression of impulse and
emotion which lifted Peter for a moment, and did him good, but which
likewise, running through him, left him dry, and all the weaker because
of the gush of feeling which had foamed itself away in empty words. For
let us never forget that however high, noble, or divinely inspired
emotion may be, in its nature it is transient and is sure to be
followed by reaction. Like the winter torrents in some parched land,
the more they foam, the more speedily does the bed of them dry up
again, and the more they carry down the very soil in which growth and
fertility would be possible. A rush of feeling is apt to leave behind
hard, insensitive rock. There is a close connection between a
predominantly emotional Christianity and a very imperfect life. Feeling
is apt to be a substitute for action. Is it not a very remarkable thing
that the word 'benevolence,' which means 'kindly feeling,' has come to
take on the meaning rightly belonging to 'beneficence,' which means
'kindly doing'? The emotional man blinds and hoodwinks himself, by
thinking that his quick sensibility and lofty enthusiasm and warmth of
emotion are action or as good as action. 'Be thou warmed and filled,'
he says to his brother, and, in a lazy expansion of heart, forgets that
he has never lifted a finger to help.
God forbid that I should seem to deprecate emotional religion or
religious emotion! that is the last thing that needs to be done in this
generation. If the Churches want one thing more than another, it is
that their Christianity should become far more emotional than it is,
and their impulses stronger, swifter, more spontaneous, more
overmastering, and that they should be urged by these, and not merely
by the reluctant recognition that such and such a piece of sacrifice or
effort is a debt that they are obliged to clear off. Their service will
be glad service, only when it is impulsive service and emotional
service. Dear brethren, a Christian man whose life is not influenced by
the deepest and most fervid emotion of love to the great Love that died
for him, is a monster. 'The Lord's fire is in Jerusalem, and His
furnace in Zion'—is that a description of the fervour of this Church,
or of any Church in Christendom? A furnace? An ice-house! Think of some
deserted cottage, with the roof fallen in, and in the cold
chimney-place a rusty grate with some dead embers in it, and the snow
lying upon the top of it—that is a truer description of a great many of
our churches than 'the Lord's furnace.'
But the lesson to be taken from this incident before us is not the
danger of emotion; it is rather the necessity of emotion, but with two
provisoes, that it shall be emotion based upon a clear recognition of
the great truth that He has laid down His life for me; and that it
shall be emotion harnessed to work, and not wasted in words. The
mightier the plunge of the fall, the more electrical energy you can get
out of it, and set that to work to drive the wheels of life. Do not be
afraid of emotion; you will make little of your Christianity unless you
have it. But be sure that it is under the guidance of a clear
perception of the truth that evokes it, and that it is all used to turn
the wheels of life. 'Better is it that thou shouldest not vow, than
that thou shouldest vow and not pay.' Better is it that emotion should
be reticent and active than that it should be voluble and idle. It is a
good servant, but a bad master. A man that trusts to impulse and
emotion to further his Christian course, is like a ship in that belt of
variable winds that lies near the Equator, where there will be a fine
ten-knot breeze for an hour or two, and then a sickly, stagnating calm.
Push further south, and get into the steady 'trades,' where the wind
blows with equable and persistent force all the year round in the same
direction. Convert impulses and emotions into steadfast principle,
warmed by emotion and borne on by impulse.
II. Again, this rash vow is an illustration of a confidence, also
strangely blended of good and evil.
'I will lay down my life for Thy sake.' As I have said, Peter meant it.
His words are paralleled by other words, in which two of the Lord's
disciples answered His solemn question: 'Are ye able to drink of the
cup that I drink of?' with the unhesitating answer, 'We are able.' A
great teacher has regarded that saying as one of 'the ventures of
faith.' Perhaps it was. Perhaps there was as much self-confidence as
faith in it. Certainly there was more self-confidence than faith in
Peter's answer, and his self-confidence collapsed when the trial came.
The world and the Church hold entirely antagonistic notions about the
value of self-reliance. The world says that it is a condition of power.
The Church says that it is the root of weakness. Self-confidence shuts
a man out from the help of God, and so shuts him out from the source of
power. For if you will think for a moment, you will see that the faith
which the New Testament, in conformity with all wise knowledge of one's
self, preaches as the one secret of power, has for its obverse—its
other side—diffidence and self-distrust. No man trusts God as God ought
to be trusted, who does not distrust himself as himself ought to be
distrusted. To level a mountain is the only way to carry the water
across where it stood. You can, by mechanism and locks, take a canal up
to the top of a hill, but you cannot take a river up to the top, and
the river of God's help flows through the valley and seeks the lowest
levels. Faith and self-despair are the upper and the under sides of the
same thing, like some cunningly-woven cloth, the one side bearing a
different pattern from the other, and yet made of the same yarn, and
the same threads passing from the upper to the under sides. So faith
and self-distrust are but two names for one composite whole.
I was once shown an old Jewish coin which had on the one side the words
'sackcloth and ashes,' and on the other side the words 'a crown of
gold.' The coin meant to contrast what Israel had been with what Israel
then was. The crown had come first; the sackcloth and ashes last. But
we may use it for illustrating this point, on which I am now dwelling.
Wherever, and only where, there are the sackcloth and ashes of
self-despair there will be the crown of gold of an answering faith.
When thus, as Wesley has it, in his great hymn: 'Confident in
self-despair,' we cling to God, then we can say: 'When I am weak then
am I strong,' 'Behold! we have no might, but our eyes are upon Thee.'
If Peter had only said, 'By Thy help I will lay down my life for Thy
sake,' his confidence would have been reasonable and blessed
self-confidence, because it would have been confidence in a self
inspired by divine power.
And so, brethren, whilst utter diffidence is right for us, and is the
condition of all our reception of energy according to our need, the
most absolute confidence—a confidence which, to the eye of the man that
measures only visible things, will seem sheer insanity—is sobriety for
a Christian. The world is perfectly right when it says: 'If you believe
you can do a thing, you have gone a long way towards doing it.' The
expectation of success has often the knack of fulfilling itself. But
the world does not know our secret, and our secret is that our humble
faith brings into the field the reserves with the Captain of our
salvation at their head. Therefore a self-distrusting Christian can
say, and say without exaggeration or presumption, 'I can do all things
in Christ, strengthening me from within.'
The Church's ideals are possibilities, when you bring God into the
account, and they look like insanity when you do not. Take, for
instance, missions. What an absurdity to talk about a handful of
Christian people—for we are only a handful as compared with the whole
world—carrying their Gospel into every corner of the earth, and finding
everywhere a response to it. Yes; it is absurd; but, wise Mr.
Calculator, counter of heads, you have forgotten God in your estimate
of whether it is reasonable or unreasonable. Again, take the Christian
ideal of absolute perfection of character. 'What nonsense to talk as if
any man could ever come to that.' Yes!—as if any _man_ could come to
that, I grant you. But if God is with him, the nonsense is to suppose
that he will not come to it. Here is a row of cyphers as long as your
arm. They mean nothing. Put a 1 at the left-hand end of the row; and
what does it mean then? So the faith that brings Christ into the life,
and into the Church, makes 'nobodies' into mighty men—'laughs at
impossibilities, and cries, It shall be done!'
Still further, here, in this rash vow, we have an underestimate of
difficulties. There was another incident in the life of the Apostle, a
strange replica of this one, into which he pushed himself, just as he
did into the high priest's hall, partly out of curiosity and a wish to
be prominent; partly out of love to his Master. Without a moment's
consideration of the peril into which he was thrusting himself, he sat
in the boat, and said, 'Bid me come to Thee on the water.' He forgot
that He was heavy, and that water was not solid, and that the wind was
high and the lake rough, and when he put his foot over the side and
felt the cold waves creeping up his knees, his courage ebbed out with
his faith, and he began to sink. Then he cried, 'Lord! help me!' If he
had thought for a moment of the reality of the case, he would have sat
still in the boat. If he had thought of what would be in his way in
following Jesus to death, he would have hesitated to vow. But it is so
much easier to resolve heroisms in a quiet corner than to do them when
the strain comes, and it is so much easier to do some one great thing
that has in it enthusiasm and nobility, and conspicuousness of
sacrifice, especially if it can be got over in a moment, like having
one's head cut off with an axe, than it is to 'die daily.' Ah!
brethren, it is the little difficulties that make _the_ difficulty. You
read in the newspapers in the autumn, every now and then, of trains, in
that wonderful country across the water, being stopped by caterpillars.
The Christian train is stopped by an army of caterpillars, far oftener
than it is by some solid and towering barrier. Our Christian lives are
a great deal likelier to come to failure, because we do not take into
account the multiplied small antagonisms than because we are not ready
to face the greater ones. What would you think of a bridge builder, who
built a bridge across some mountain torrent and made no allowance for
freshets and floods when the ice melted? His bridge and his piers would
be gone the first winter. You remember who it was that said that he
went into the Franco-German War 'with a light heart,' and in seven
weeks came Sedan and the dethronement of an Emperor, and the surrender
of an army. 'Blessed is he that feareth always.' There is no more fatal
error than an underestimate of our difficulties.