'Till He find'--that is a wonderful and a merciful word. It
indicates the infinitude of Christ's patient forgiveness and
perseverance. _We_ tire of searching. 'Can a mother forget' or
abandon her seeking after a lost child? Yes! if it has gone on for
so long as to show that further search is hopeless, she will go home
and nurse her sorrow in her heart. Or, perhaps, like some poor
mothers and wives, it will turn her brain, and one sign of her
madness will be that, long years after grief should have been calm
because hope was dead, she will still be looking for the little one
so long lost. But Jesus Christ stands at the closed door, as a great
modern picture shows, though it has been so long undisturbedly
closed that the hinges are brown with rust, and weeds grow high
against it. He stands there in the night, with the dew on His hair,
unheeded or repelled, like some stranger in a hostile village
seeking for a night's shelter. He will not be put away; but, after
all refusals, still with gracious finger, knocks upon the door, and
speaks into the heart. Some of you have refused Him all your lives,
and perhaps you have grey hairs upon you now. And He is speaking to
you still. He 'suffereth long, is not easily provoked, is not soon
angry; hopeth all things,' even of the obstinate rejecters.
For that is another truth that this word 'till' preaches to us--viz.
the possibility of bringing back those that have gone furthest away
and have been longest away. The world has a great deal to say about
incurable cases of moral obliquity and deformity. Christ knows
nothing about 'incurable cases.' If there is a worst man in the
world--and perhaps there is--there is nothing but his own
disinclination to prevent his being brought back, and made as pure
as an angel.
But do not let us deal with generalities; let us bring the truths to
ourselves. Dear brethren, I know nothing about the most of you. I
should not know you again if I met you five minutes after we part
now. I have never spoken to many of you, and probably never shall,
except in this public way; but I know that _you_ need Christ,
and that Christ wants _you_. And I know that, however far you
have gone, you have not gone so far but that His love feels out
through the remoteness to grasp you, and would fain draw you to
itself.
I dare say you have seen upon some dreary moor, or at the foot of
some 'scaur' on the hillside, the bleached bones of a sheep, lying
white and grim among the purple heather. It strayed, unthinking of
danger, tempted by the sweet herbage; it fell; it vainly bleated; it
died. But what if it had heard the shepherd's call, and had
preferred to lie where it fell, and to die where it lay? We talk
about 'silly sheep.' Are there any of them so foolish as men and
women listening to me now, who will not answer the Shepherd's voice
when they hear it, with, 'Lord, here am I, come and help me out of
this miry clay, and bring me back.' He is saying to each of you,
'Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die?' May He not have to say at last
of any of us, 'Ye would not come to Me, that ye might have life!'