Paul rode from Jerusalem 'breathing out threatenings and slaughters.'
He fell from his warhorse, a persecutor of Christians, and a bitter
enemy of Jesus. A few moments pass. There was one moment in which the
crucial decision was made; and he staggered to his feet, loving all
that he had hated, and abandoning all in which he had trusted. His own
doctrine that 'if any man be in Christ he is a new creature, old things
are passed away and all things are become new,' is but a generalisation
of what befell himself on the Damascus road. It is of no use trying to
say that there had been a warfare going on in this man's mind long
before, of which his complete capitulation was only the final visible
outcome. There is not a trace of anything of the kind in the story. It
is a pure hypothesis pressed into the service of the anti-supernatural
explanation of the fact.
There are plenty of analogies of such sudden and entire revolution. All
reformation of a moral kind is best done quickly. It is a very hopeless
task, as every one knows, to tell a drunkard to break off his habits
gradually. There must be one moment in which he definitely turns
himself round and sets his face in the other direction. Some things are
best done with slow, continuous pressure; other things need to be done
with a wrench if they are to be done at all.
There used to be far too much insistence upon one type of religious
experience, and all men that were to be recognised as Christians were,
by evangelical Nonconformists, required to be able to point to the
moment when, by some sudden change, they passed from darkness to light.
We have drifted away from that very far now, and there is need for
insisting, not upon the necessity, but upon the possibility, of sudden
conversions. However some may try to show that such experiences cannot
be, the experience of every earnest Christian teacher can answer--well!
whether they can be or not, they are. Jesus Christ cured two men
gradually, and all the others instantaneously. No doubt, for young
people who have been born amidst Christian influences, and have grown
up in Christian households, the usual way of becoming Christians is
that slowly and imperceptibly they shall pass into the consciousness of
communion with Jesus Christ. But for people who have grown up
irreligious and, perhaps, profligate and sinful, the most probable way
is a sudden stride out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of
God's dear Son. So I come to you all with this message. No matter what
your past, no matter how much of your life may have ebbed away, no
matter how deeply rooted and obstinate may be your habits of evil, no
matter how often you may have tried to mend yourself and have failed,
it is possible by one swift act of surrender to break the chains and go
free. In every man's life there have been moments into which years have
been crowded, and which have put a wider gulf between his past and his
present self than many slow, languid hours can dig. A great sorrow, a
great joy, a great, newly discerned truth, a great resolve will make
'one day as a thousand years.' Men live through such moments and feel
that the past is swallowed up as by an earthquake. The highest instance
of thus making time elastic and crowding it with meaning is when a man
forms and keeps the swift resolve to yield himself to Christ. It may be
the work of a moment, but it makes a gulf between past and future, like
that which parted the time before and the time after that in which 'God
said, Let there be light: and there was light.' If you have never yet
bowed before the heavenly vision and yielded yourself as conquered by
the love which pardons, to be the glad servant of the Lord Jesus who
takes all His servants into wondrous oneness with Himself, do it now.
You can do it. Delay is disobedience, and may be death. Do it now, and
your whole life will be changed. Peace and joy and power will come to
you, and you, made a new man, will move in a new world of new
relations, duties, energies, loves, gladnesses, helps, and hopes. If
you take heed to prolong the point into a line, and hour by hour to
renew the surrender and the cry, 'Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?'
you will ever have the vision of the Christ enthroned, pardoning,
sympathising, and commanding, which will fill your sky with glory,
point the path of your feet, and satisfy your gaze with His beauty, and
your heart with His all-sufficing and ever-present love.
'ME A CHRISTIAN!'
'Then Agrlppa said unto Paul, Almost thou persuadest me to be a
Christian.'--ACTS xxvi 28.
This Agrippa was son of the other Herod of whom we hear in the Acts as
a persecutor. This one appears from other sources, to have had the
vices but not the force of character of his bad race. He was weak and
indolent, a mere hanger-on of Rome, to which he owed his kingdom, and
to which he stoutly stuck during all the tragedy of the fall of
Jerusalem. In position and in character (largely resulting from the
position) he was uncommonly like those semi-independent rajahs in
India, who are allowed to keep up a kind of shadow of authority on
condition of doing what Calcutta bids them. Of course frivolity and
debauchery become the business of such men. What sort of a man this was
may be sufficiently inferred from the fact that Bernice was his sister.
But he knew a good deal about the Jews, about their opinions, their
religion, and about what had been going on during the last half century
amongst them. Or grounds of policy he professed to accept the Jewish
faith--of which an edifying example is given in the fact that, on one
occasion, Bernice was prevented from accompanying him to Rome because
she was fulfilling a Nazarite vow in the Temple at Jerusalem!
So the Apostle was fully warranted in appealing to Agrippa's knowledge,
not only of Judaism, but of the history of Jesus Christ, and in his
further assertion, 'I know that thou believest.' But the home-thrust
was too much for the king. His answer is given in the words of our text.
They are very familiar words, and they have been made the basis of a
great many sermons upon being all but persuaded to accept of Christ as
Saviour. But, edifying as such a use of them is, it can scarcely be
sustained by their actual meaning. Most commentators are agreed that
our Authorised Version does not represent either Agrippa's words or his
tone. He was not speaking in earnest. His words are sarcasm, not a half
melting into conviction, and the Revised Version gives what may, on the
whole, be accepted as being a truer representation of their intention
when it reads, 'With but little persuasion thou wouldst fain make me a
Christian.'
He is half amused and half angry at the Apostle's presumption in
supposing that so easily or so quickly he was going to land his fish.
'It is a more difficult task than you fancy, Paul, to make a Christian
of a man like me.' That is the real meaning of his words, and I think
that, rightly understood, they yield lessons of no less value than
those that have been so often drawn from them as they appear in our
Authorised Version. So I wish to try and gather up and urge upon you
now these lessons:--
I. First, then, I see here an example of the danger of a superficial
familiarity with Christian truth.
As I said, Agrippa knew, in a general way, a good deal not only about
the prophets and the Jewish religion, but of the outstanding facts of
the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Paul's assumption that he
knew would have been very quickly repudiated if it had not been based
upon fact. And the inference from his acceptance without contradiction
of the Apostle's statement is confirmed by his use of the word
'Christian,' which had by no means come into general employment when he
spoke; and in itself indicates that he knew a good deal about the
people who were so named. Mark the contrast, for instance, between him
and the bluff Roman official at his side. To Festus, Paul's talking
about a dead man's having risen, and a risen Jew becoming a light to
all nations, was such utter nonsense that, with characteristic Roman
contempt for men with ideas, he breaks in, with his rough, strident
voice, 'Much learning has made thee mad.' There was not much chance of
that cause producing that effect on Festus. But he was apparently
utterly bewildered at this entirely novel and unintelligible sort of
talk. Agrippa, on the other hand, knows all about the Resurrection; has
heard that there was such a thing, and has a general rough notion of
what Paul believed as a Christian.
And was he any better for it? No; he was a great deal worse. It took
the edge off a good deal of his curiosity. It made him fancy that he
knew beforehand all that the Apostle had to say. It stood in the way of
his apprehending the truths which he thought that he understood.
And although the world knows a great deal more about Jesus Christ and
the Gospel than he did, the very same thing is true about hundreds and
thousands of people who have all their lives long been brought into
contact with Christianity. Superficial knowledge is the worst enemy of
accurate knowledge, for the first condition of knowing a thing is to
know that we do not know it. And so there are a great many of us who,
having picked up since childhood vague and partially inaccurate notions
about Christ and His Gospel and what He has done, are so satisfied on
the strength of these that we know all about it, that we listen to
preaching about it with a very languid attention. The ground in our
minds is preoccupied with our own vague and imperfect apprehensions. I
believe that there is nothing that stands more in the way of hundreds
of people coming into real intelligent contact with Gospel truth than
the half knowledge that they have had of it ever since they were
children. You fancy that you know all that I can tell you. Very
probably you do. But have you ever taken a firm hold of the plain
central facts of Christianity--your own sinfulness and helplessness,
your need of a Saviour, the perfect work of Jesus Christ who died on
the Cross for you, and the power of simple faith therein to join you to
Him, and, if followed by consecration and obedience, to make you
partakers of His nature, and heirs of the inheritance that is above?
These are but the fundamentals, the outlines of Gospel truth. But far
too many of you see them, in such a manner as you see the figures cast
upon a screen when the lantern is not rightly focussed, with a blurred
outline, and the blurred outline keeps you from seeing the sharp-cut
truth as it is in Jesus. In all regions of thought inaccurate knowledge
is the worst foe to further understanding, and eminently is this the
case in religion. Brethren, some of you are in that position.
Then there is another way in which such knowledge as that of which the
king in our text is an example is a hindrance, and that is, that it is
knowledge which has no effect on character. What do hundreds of us do
with our knowledge of Christianity? Our minds seem built in watertight
compartments, and we keep the doors of them shut very close, so that
truths in the understanding have no influence on the will. Many of you
believe the Gospel intellectually, and it does not make a hairsbreadth
of difference to anything that you ever either thought or wished or
did. And because you so believe it, it is utterly impossible that it
should ever be of any use to you. 'Agrippa, believest thou the
prophets? I know that thou believest.' 'Yes, believest the prophets,
and Bernice sitting by thy side there--believest the prophets, and
livest in utter bestial godlessness.' What is the good of a knowledge
of Christianity like that? And is it not such knowledge of Christianity
that blocks the way with some of you for anything more real and more
operative? There is nothing more impotent than a firmly believed and
utterly neglected truth. And that is what the Christianity of some of
you is when it is analysed.
II. Now, secondly, notice how we have here the example of a proud man
indignantly recoiling from submission,
There is a world of contempt in Agrippa's words, in the very putting
side by side of the two things. 'Me! _Me_,' with a very large capital
M--'Me a Christian?' He thinks of his dignity, poor creature. It was
not such a very tremendous dignity after all. He was a petty kinglet,
permitted by the grace of Rome to live and to pose as if he were the
real thing, and yet he struts and claps his wings and crows on his
little hillock as if it were a mountain. '_Me_ a Christian?' 'The great
Agrippa a _Christian_!' And he uses that word 'Christian' with the
intense contempt which coined it and adhered to it, until the men to
whom it was applied were wise enough to take it and bind it as a crown
of honour upon their head. The wits at Antioch first of all hit upon
the designation. They meant a very exquisite piece of sarcasm by their
nickname. These people were 'Christians,' just as some other people
were Herodians--Christ's men, the men of this impostor who pretended to
be a Messiah. That seemed such an intensely ludicrous thing to the wise
people in Antioch that they coined the name; and no doubt thought they
had done a very clever thing. It is only used in the Bible in tike
notice of its origin; here, with a very evident connotation of
contempt; and once more when Peter in his letter refers to it as being
the indictment on which certain disciples suffered. So when Agrippa
says, 'Me a Christian,' he puts all the bitterness that he can into
that last word. As if he said, 'Do you really think that I--I--am going
to bow myself down to be a follower and adherent of that Christ of
yours? The thing is too ridiculous! With but little persuasion you
would fain make me a Christian. But you will find it a harder task than
you fancy.'
Now, my dear friends, the shape of this unwillingness is changed but
the fact of it remains. There are two or three features of what I take
to be the plain Gospel of Jesus Christ which grate very much against
all self-importance and self-complacency, and operate very largely,
though not always consciously, upon very many amongst us. I just run
them over, very briefly.
The Gospel insists on dealing with everybody in the same fashion, and
on regarding all as standing on the same level. Many of us do not like
that. Translate Agrippa's scorn into words that fit ourselves: 'I am a
well-to-do Manchester man. Am I to stand on the same level as my
office-boy?' Yes! the very same. 'I, a student, perhaps a teacher of
science, or a cultivated man, a scholar, a lawyer, a professional
man--am I to stand on the same level as people that scarcely know how
to read and write?' Yes, exactly. So, like the man in the Old
Testament, 'he turned and went away in a rage.' Many of us would like
that there should be a little private door for us in consideration of
our position or acquirements or respectability, or this, that, or the
other thing. At any rate we are not to be classed in the same category
with the poor and the ignorant and the sinful and the savage all over
the world. But we are so classed. Do not you and the men in Patagonia
breathe the same air? Are not your bodies subject to the same laws?
Have you not to be contented to be fed in the same fashion, and to
sleep and eat and drink in the same way? 'We have all of us one human
heart'; and 'there is no difference, for all have sinned and come short
of the glory of God.' The identities of humanity, in all its examples,
are deeper than the differences in any. We have all the one Saviour and
are to be saved in the same fashion. That is a humbling thing for those
of us who stand upon some little elevation, real or fancied, but it is
only the other side of the great truth that God's love is world-wide,
and that Christ's Gospel is meant for humanity. Naaman, to whom I have
already referred in passing, wanted to be treated as a great man who
happened to be a leper; Elisha insisted on treating him as a leper who
happened to be a great man. And that makes all the difference. I
remember seeing somewhere that a great surgeon had said that the late
Emperor of Germany would have had a far better chance of being cured if
he had gone _incognito_ to the hospital for throat diseases. We all
need the same surgery, and we must be contented to take it in the same
fashion. So, some of us recoil from humbling equality with the lowest
and worst.
Then again, another thing that sometimes makes people shrink back from
the Gospel is that it insists upon every one being saved solely by
dependence on Another. We would like to have a part in our salvation,
and many of us had rather do anything in the way of sacrifice or
suffering or penance than take this position:
'Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to Thy Cross I cling.'
Corrupt forms of Christianity have taken an acute measure of the worst
parts of human nature, when they have taught men that they can eke out
Christ's work by their own, and have some kind of share in their own
salvation. Dear brethren, I have to bring to you another Gospel than
that, and to say, All is done for us, and all will be done in us, and
nothing has to be done by us. Some of you do not like that. Just as a
man drowning is almost sure to try to help himself, and get his limbs
inextricably twisted round his would-be rescuer and drown them both, so
men will not, without a struggle, consent to owe everything to Jesus
Christ, and to let Him draw them out of many waters and set them on the
safe shore. But unless we do so, we have little share in His Gospel.
And another thing stands in the way--namely, that the Gospel insists
upon absolute obedience to Jesus Christ. Agrippa fancied that it was an
utterly preposterous idea that he should lower his flag, and doff his
crown, and become the servant of a Jewish peasant. A great many of us,
though we have a higher idea of our Lord than his, do yet find it quite
as hard to submit our wills to His, and to accept the condition of
absolute obedience, utter resignation to Him, and entire subjection to
His commandment. We say, 'Let my own will have a little bit of play in
a corner.' Some of us find it very hard to believe that we are to bring
all our thinking upon religious and moral subjects to Him, and to
accept His word as conclusive, settling all controversies. 'I, with my
culture; am I to accept what Christ says as the end of strife?' Yes,
absolute submission is the plainest condition of real Christianity. The
very name tells us that. We are Christians, _i.e._ Christ's men; and
unless we are, we have no right to the name. But some of us had rather
be our own masters and enjoy the miseries of independence and
self-will, and so be the slaves of our worse selves, than bow ourselves
utterly before that dear Lord, and so pass into the freedom of a
service love-inspired, and by love accepted, 'Thou wouldst fain
persuade _me_ to be a _Christian_,' is the recoil of a proud heart from
submission. Brethren, let me beseech you that it may not be yours.
III. Again, we have here an example of instinctive shrinking from the
personal application of broad truths.
Agrippa listened, half-amused and a good deal interested, to Paul as
long as he talked generalities and described his own experience. But
when he came to point the generalities and to drive them home to the
hearer's heart it was time to stop him. That question of the Apostle's,
keen and sudden as the flash of a dagger, went straight home, and the
king at once gathered himself together into an attitude of resistance.
Ah, that is what hundreds of people do! You will let me preach as long
as I like--only you will get a little weary sometimes--you will let me
preach generalities _ad libitum_. But when I come to 'And thou?' then I
am 'rude' and 'inquisitorial' and 'personal' and 'trespassing on a
region where I have no business,' and so on and so on. And so you shut
up your heart if not your ears.
And yet, brethren, what is the use of toothless generalities? What am I
here for if I am not here to take these broad, blunt truths and sharpen
them to a point, and try to get them in between the joints of your
armour? Can any man faithfully preach the Gospel who is always flying
over the heads of his hearers with universalities, and never goes
straight to their hearts with 'Thou--thou art the man!' 'Believest
_thou_?'
And so, dear friends, let me press that question upon you. Never mind
about other people. Suppose you and I were alone together and my words
were coming straight _to thee_. Would they not have more power than
they have now? They are so coming. Think away all these other people,
and this place, ay, and me too, and let the word of Christ, which deals
with no crowds but with single souls, come to you in its
individualising force: 'Believest _thou_?' You will have to answer that
question one day. Better to face it now and try to answer it than to
leave it all vague until you get yonder, where 'each one of us shall
give account of _himself_ to God.
IV. Lastly, we have here an example of a soul close to the light, but
passing into the dark.
Agrippa listens to Paul; Bernice listens; Festus listens. And what
comes of it? Only this, 'And when they were gone aside, they talked
between themselves, saying, This man hath done nothing worthy of death
or of bonds.' May I translate into a modern equivalent: And when they
were gone aside, they talked between themselves, saying, 'This man
preached a very impressive sermon,' or, 'This man preached a very
wearisome sermon,' and there an end.
Agrippa and Bernice went their wicked way, and Festus went his, and
none of them knew what a fateful moment they had passed through. Ah,
brethren! there are many such in our lives when we make decisions that
influence our whole future, and no sign shows that the moment is any
way different from millions of its undistinguished fellows. It is
eminently so in regard to our relation to Jesus Christ and His Gospel.
These three had been in the light; they were never so near it again.
Probably they never heard the Gospel preached any more, and they went
away, not knowing what they had done when they silenced Paul and left
him. Now you will probably hear plenty of sermons in future. You may or
you may not. But be sure of this, that if you go away from this one,
unmelted and unbelieving, you have not done a trivial thing. You have
added one more stone to the barrier that you yourself build to shut you
out from holiness and happiness, from hope and heaven. It is not I that
ask you the question, it is not Paul that asks it, Jesus Christ Himself
says to you, as He said to the blind man, 'Dost thou believe on the Son
of God?' or as He said to the weeping sister of Lazarus, 'Believest
thou this?' O dear friends, do not answer like this arrogant bit of a
king, but cry with tears, 'Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief!'