Here, as I have said, is the thin thread of water at the source. We
to-day are on the broad bosom of the expanded stream. Here is the
little beginning; the world that we see around us has come from this,
and there is a great deal more to be done yet before all the power that
was transported into Europe, on that Sabbath morning, has wrought its
legitimate effects. That is to say, 'the Kingdom of God cometh not by
observation.' Let me say a word, and only a word, based on this
incident, about the law of small beginnings and the law of slow,
inconspicuous development.
We have here an instance of the law of small, silent beginnings. Let us
go back to the highest example of everything that is good; the life of
Jesus Christ. A cradle at Bethlehem, a carpenter's shop in Nazareth,
thirty years buried in a village, two or three years, at most, going up
and down quietly in a remote nook of the earth, and then He passed away
silently and the world did not know Him. 'He shall not strive nor cry,
nor cause His voice to be heard in the streets.' And as the Christ so
His Church, and so His Gospel, and so all good movements that begin
from Him. Destructive preparations may be noisy; they generally are.
Constructive beginnings are silent and small. If a thing is launched
with a great beating of drums and blowing of trumpets, you may be
pretty sure there is very little in it. Drums are hollow, or they would
not make such a noise. Trumpets only catch and give forth wind. They
say--I know not whether it is true--that the _Wellingtonia gigantea_,
the greatest of forest trees, has a smaller seed than any of its
congeners. It may be so, at any rate it does for an illustration. The
germ-cell is always microscopic. A little beginning is a prophecy of a
great ending.
In like manner there is another large principle suggested here which,
in these days of impatient haste and rushing to and fro, and religious
as well as secular advertising and standing at street corners, we are
very apt to forget, but which we need to remember, and that is that the
rate of growth is swift when the duration of existence is short. A reed
springs up in a night. How long does an oak take before it gets too
high for a sheep to crop at? The moth lives its full life in a day.
There is no creature that has helpless infancy so long as a man. We
have the slow work of mining; the dynamite will be put into the hole
one day, and the spark applied--and then? So 'an inheritance may be
gotten hastily at the beginning, but the end thereof shall not be
blessed.'
Let us apply that to our own personal life and work, and to the growth
of Christianity in the world, and let us not be staggered because
either are so slow. 'The Lord is not slack concerning His promises, as
some men count slackness. One day is with the Lord as a thousand years,
and a thousand years as one day.' How long will that day be of which a
thousand years are but as the morning twilight? Brethren, you have need
of patience. You Christian workers, and I hope I am speaking to a great
many such now; how long does it take before we can say that we are
making any impression at all on the vast masses of evil and sin that
are round about us? God waited, nobody knows how many millenniums and
more than millenniums, before He had the world ready for man. He waited
for more years than we can tell before He had the world ready for the
Incarnation. His march is very slow because it is ever onwards. Let us
be thankful if we forge ahead the least little bit; and let us not be
impatient for swift results which are the fool's paradise, and which
the man who knows that he is working towards God's own end can well
afford to do without.
And now, lastly, let me ask you to notice, still further as drawn from
this incident--
III. The simplicity of the forces to which God entrusts the growth of
His Kingdom.
It is almost ludicrous to think, if it were not pathetic and sublime,
of the disproportion between the end that was aimed at and the way that
was taken to reach it, which the text opens before us. 'We went out to
the riverside, and we spake unto the women which resorted thither.'
That was all. Think of Europe as it was at that time. There was Greece
over the hills, there was Rome ubiquitous and ready to exchange its
contemptuous toleration for active hostility. There was the unknown
barbarism of the vague lands beyond. Think of the established
idolatries which these men had to meet, around which had gathered, by
the superstitious awe of untold ages, everything that was obstinate,
everything that was menacing, everything that was venerable. Think of
the subtleties to which they had to oppose their unlettered message.
Think of the moral corruption that was eating like an ulcer into the
very heart of society. Did ever a Cortez on the beach, with his ships
in flames behind him, and a continent in arms before, cast himself on a
more desperate venture? And they conquered! How? What were the small
stones from the brook that slew Goliath? Have we got them? Here they
are, the message that they spoke, the white heat of earnestness with
which they spoke it, and the divine Helper who backed them up. And we
have this message. Brethren, that old word, 'God was in Christ
reconciling the world to Himself,' is as much needed, as potent, as
truly adapted to the complicated civilisation of this generation, as
surely reaching the deepest wants of the human soul, as it was in the
days when first the message poured, like a red-hot lava flood, from the
utterances of Paul. Like lava it has gone cold to-day, and stiff in
many places, and all the heat is out of it. That is the fault of the
speaker, never of the message. It is as mighty as ever it was, and if
the Christian Church would keep more closely to it, and would realise
more fully that the Cross does not need to be propped up so much as to
be proclaimed, I think we should see that it is so. That sword has not
lost its temper, and modern modes of warfare have not antiquated it. As
David said to the high priests at Nob, when he was told that Goliath's
sword was hid behind the ephod, 'Give me that. There is none like it.'
It was not miracles, it was the Gospel that was preached, which was
'the power of God unto salvation.'
And that message was preached with earnestness. There is one point in
which every successful servant of Jesus Christ who has done work for
Him, winning men to Him, has been like every other successful servant,
and there is only one point. Some of them have been wise men, some of
them have been foolish. Some of them have been clad with many puerile
notions and much rubbish of ceremonial and sacerdotal theories. Some of
them have been high Calvinists, some of them low Arminians; some of
them have been scholars, some of them could hardly read. But they have
all had this one thing: they believed with all their hearts what they
spake. They fulfilled the Horatian principle, 'If you wish me to weep,
your own eyes must overflow'--and if you wish me to believe, you must
speak, not 'with bated breath and whispering humbleness,' but as if you
yourself believed it, and were dead set on getting other people to
believe it, too.
And then the third thing that Paul had we have, and that is the
presence of the Christ. Note what it says in the context about one
convert who was made that morning, Lydia, 'whose heart the Lord
opened.' Now I am not going to deduce Calvinism or any other 'ism' from
these words, but I pray you to note that there is emerging on the
surface here what runs all through this book of Acts, and animates the
whole of it, viz., that Jesus Christ Himself is working, doing all the
work that is done through His servants. Wherever there are men aflame
with that with which every Christian man and woman should be aflame,
the consciousness of the preciousness of their Master, and their own
responsibility for the spreading of His Name, there, depend upon it,
will be the Christ to aid them. The picture with which one of the
Evangelists closes his Gospel will be repeated: 'They went everywhere
preaching the word, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word
with signs following.'
Dear brethren, the vision of the man of Macedonia which drew Paul
across the water from Troas to Philippi speaks to us. 'Come over and
help us,' comes from many voices. And if we, in however humble and
obscure, and as the foolish purblind world calls it, 'small,' way,
yield to the invitation, and try to do what in us lies, then we shall
find that, like Paul by the riverside in that oratory, we are building
better than we know, and planting a little seed, the springing whereof
God will bless. 'Thou sowest not that which shall be, but bare grain
... and God giveth it a body as it hath pleased Him.'