Christ says in my text, 'Let him hear,' as if the possession of the
ear did not necessarily involve that there should be hearing. And so
it is; 'Having ears, they hear not,' is a description verified in a
great many other walks of life than in regard to religious matters.
But it is verified there in the most conspicuous and in the most
tragic fashion. I wonder how many of us there are who, though we
have heard with the hearing of the outward ear, have not heard in
the sense of attending, have scarcely heard in the sense of
apprehending, and have not heard at all in the sense of obeying?
Friend, what is it that keeps you from hearing, if you do not hear?
Let me run over two or three of the things that thus are like wax in
a man's ears, making him deaf to the message of life in Jesus
Christ, in order to bring out how needful it is that these should be
counteracted by an effort of will, and the vigorous concentration of
thought and heart upon that message.
What is it that keeps men from hearing? Being busy with other things
is one hindrance. There is an old story of St. Bernard riding along
by a lake on his way to a Council, and being so occupied with
thoughts and discussions, that after the day's travel he lifted up
his eyes and said, 'Where is the lake?' And so we, many of us, go
along all our days on the banks of the great sea of divine love, and
we are so busy thinking about other things, or doing other things,
that at the end of the journey we do not know that we have been
travelling by the side of the flashing waters all the day long.
Everybody knows how possible it is to be so engrossed with one's
occupations or thoughts as that when the clock strikes in the next
steeple, we hear it and do not hear it. We have read of soldiers
being so completely absorbed in the fury of the fight that a
thunderstorm has rattled over their heads, and no man heard the
roll, and no man saw the flash. Many of us are so swallowed up in
our trade, in our profession, in our special branch of study, in our
occupations and desires, that all the trumpets of Sinai might be
blown into our ears, and we should hear them as though we heard them
not; and what is worse, that the pleading voice of that great Lord
who is ever saying to each of us, 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour,
and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,' passes us by, and
produces no effect, any more than does the idle wind whistling
through an archway. Brethren, you have the need, the sin, the
weakness, the transiency, to which the Gospel appeals. You have the
faculties to which it addresses itself. Jesus Christ is speaking to
every one of us. I beseech you to ask yourselves, 'Do I hear Him?'
If not, is it not because the clatter of the world's business, or
the more refined sounds of some profession or study, have so taken
up your attention that you have none to spare for that which
requires and repays it most?
Then there is another thing that makes attention, and concentration,
and a dead lift of resolution necessary, if you are rightly to hear,
and that is the very fact that, superficially, you have heard all
your days. You do not know the despair that sometimes comes over men in
my position when we face our congregations of people that are familiar
to weariness with everything that we have to say, and because they are
superficially so familiar with it, fancy that there is no need for
them to give heed any more. What can a poor man like me do to get
through that crust of familiarity with the mere surface of Christian
truth and teaching which is round many of you? You come and listen to
me, and say, 'Oh! he has nothing original to say. We have heard it all
before.' Yes, your ears have heard it. Have _you_ heard? 'Jesus Christ
died for me,' you have been told that ever since you were a little
child; and so the thousand-and-first, the million-and-first, repetition
of it has little power over you. If once, just once, that truth could
get through the crust of familiarity, and touch your heart, your bare
heart, with its quick naked point of fire-shod love, I think there
might be a wound made that would mean healing. But some of you will
go away presently, just as you have gone away a thousand times before,
and my words will rebound from you like an india-rubber ball from a
wall, or run off you like water from the sea-bird's plumes, just
because you think you have heard it all before--and you have never
heard it all your days. 'He that hath ears to hear, let him _hear_.'
Then there is another hindrance. A man may put his fingers in his
ears. And some of you, I am afraid, are not ignorant of what it is
to have made distinct and conscious efforts to get rid of the
impressions of religion, and of Christ's voice to us.
And then there are some of us who, out of sheer listlessness, do not
hear. It is not because we are too busy. It is not because we have
any intellectual objection to the message. It is not because we have
made any definite effort to get away from it. It is not even because
we have been so accustomed to hear it, that it is impossible to make
an impression on our listless indifference. Go down into Morecambe
Bay when the tide is making; and, as the water is beginning to
percolate through the sand, try to make an impression with a stick
upon the tremulous jelly. As soon as you take out the point the
impression is lost. And there are many of us like that, who, out of
sheer stolid listlessness, retain no fragment of the truth that is
sounding in our ears. Dear friends, 'If the word spoken by angels
was steadfast, how shall we escape if we'--what? Reject? Deny? Fight
against? Angrily repel? No;--'if we _neglect_ so great salvation?' That
is the question for you negligent people, for you people who think you
know all about it and there an end, for you people who are so busy
with your daily lives that, amidst the hubbub of earth, heaven's silent
voice is inaudible to your ears. Neglect stops the ears and ruins the
man. But you will not hear, though you have ears, unless you make an
effort of will and concentration of attention.
IV. And now the last thing that I have to say is:--If we do not
hear, we shall become deaf.
That is what Christ said in the context. The sentence which I have
taken as my text was spoken at the close of the Parable of the
Sower; and when His disciples came and asked Him why He spake in
parables, His answer was in effect that the people to whom He spoke
had not profited by what they had heard, 'hearing, they heard not,'
and therefore He spoke in parables which veiled as well as revealed
the truth. It was not given to them to know the mysteries of the
Kingdom, because they had not given heed to what had been made known
to them. The great law was taking effect which gives to him that has
and takes from him that has not; and that law applied not only to
the form of Christ's teaching, but also to the faculty of receiving
it. That diminished capacity is sometimes represented as men's own
act, and sometimes as the divinely inflicted penalty of not hearing,
but in either case the same fact is in view--namely, the loss of
susceptibility by neglect, the dying out of faculties by disuse.
Just as in the bodily life capacities untrained and unexercised
become faint and disappear; just as the Indian _fakir_, who
holds his arm up above his head for years, never using the muscles,
has the muscles atrophied, and at last cannot bring his arm down to
his side;--so the people who neglect to use the ears that God has
given them by degrees will lose the capacity of hearing at all.
Which, being put into plain English, just comes to this: that if we
do not listen to Jesus Christ when He calls to us in His love, we
shall gradually have the capacity of hearing diminished until--I do
not know if it ever reaches that point here--until its ultimate
extinction.
Dear friends, this word of the love and pity and pardon and
purifying power of God manifest in Jesus Christ for us all, which I
am trying to preach to you now, is not without an effect even on the
men by whom it is most superficially and perfunctorily heard. It
either softens or hardens. As the old mystics used to say, the same
heat that melts wax hardens clay into brick. The same light that
brings blessing to one eye brings pain to another. You have heard,
and hearing you have not heard; and you will cease to be able to
hear at all; and then the thunders may rattle over your heads, and
be inaudible to you; and that Voice which is as loud as the sound of
many waters, and sweet as harpers harping on their harps, and which
says to each of us, 'Come to Me, and I will be thy peace and thy
rest and thy strength,' will no more be audible in your atrophied
ears. Dear friends! I do not know, as I have said, whether that
ultimate tragic result is ever wholly reached in this world. I am
sure that it is not reached with some of you as yet. And I beseech
you to obey that voice which says, 'This is My beloved Son; hear
Him,' and to let there not be only outward hearing, but to let there
be inward acceptance, attention, apprehension, and obedience. And
then we shall be able to say, 'Blessed are our ears, for they hear;
blessed are our eyes, for they see.' 'Many prophets and righteous
men desired to hear the things that ye hear, and heard them not,
take care that, since you are thus advanced in the outward
possession of the perfect word of God, there be also the yielding
to, and reception of it.
'TO HIM THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN'
'Whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall
have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him
shall be taken away even that he hath.'-- MATT. xiii. 12.
There are several instances in the Gospels of our Lord's repetition
of sayings which seem to have been, if we may use the expression,
favourites with Him; as, for instance, 'There are first which shall
be last, and there are last which shall be first'; or, again, 'The
servant is not greater than his master, nor the disciple than his
lord.' My text is one of these. It is here said as part of the
explanation why He chose to speak in parables, in order that the
truth, revealed to the diligent and attentive, might be hidden from
the careless. Again, we find it in two other Gospels, in a somewhat
similar connection, though with a different application, where Jesus
enunciates it as the basis of His warning, 'Take heed how'--or, in
another version, 'what'--'ye hear.' Again He employs it in this
Gospel in the parable of the talents, as explaining the principle on
which the retribution to the slothful servant was meted out. And we
find it yet once more in the parable of the pounds in Luke's Gospel,
which, though entirely different in conception and purpose from that
of the talents, is identical in the portion connected with the
slothful servant.
So there are two very distinct directions in which this saying
looks, as it was used by our Lord--one in reference to the attitude
of men towards the Revelation of God, and one in reference to the
solemn subject of future retribution. I wish, now, mainly to try and
illustrate the great law which is set forth here, and to follow out
the various spheres of its operation, and estimate the force of its
influence. For I think that large and very needful lessons for us
all may be drawn therefrom. The principle of my text shapes all
life. It is a paradox, but it is a deep truth. It sounds harsh and
unjust, but it contains the very essence of righteous retribution.
The paradox is meant to spur attention, curiosity, and inquiry. The
key to it lies here--to use is to have. There is a possession which
is no possession. That I have rights of property in a thing, as
contradistinguished to your rights, does not make it in any deep and
real sense mine. What I use I have; and all else is, as one of the
other evangelists has it, but 'seeming' to have.
So much, then, by way of explanation of our text. Now, let me ask
you to look with me into two or three of the regions where we shall
find illustrations of its working.