The paradox of my text needs little explanation, 'Buy without money and
without price.' The contradiction on the surface is but intended to
make emphatic this blessed truth, which I pray may reach your memories
and hearts, that the only conditions are a sense of need, and a
willingness to take--nothing less and nothing more. We must recognise
our penury and must abandon self, and put away all ideas of having a
finger in our own salvation, and be willing--which, strangely and sadly
enough, many of us are not-to be under obligations to God's unhelped
and undeserved love for all.
Cheap things are seldom valued. Ask a high price and people think that
the commodity is precious. A man goes into a fair, for a wager, and he
carries with him a try full of gold watches and offers to sell them for
a farthing apiece, and nobody will buy them. It does not, I hope,
degrade the subject, if I say Jesus Christ comes into the market-place
of the world with His hands full of the gifts which His pierced hands
have bought, that He may give them away. He says, 'Will you take them?'
And you, and you, and you, pass by on the other side, and go away to
another merchant, and buy dearly things that are not worth the having.
'My father, my father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing,
wouldst thou not have done it?' Would you not? Swing at the end of a
pole, with hooks in your back; measure all the way from Cape Comorin to
the Himalayas, lying down on your face and rising at each length; do a
hundred things which heathens and Roman Catholics and unspiritual
Protestants think to be the way to get salvation; deny yourselves
things that you would like to do; do things that you do not want to do;
give money that you would like to keep; avoid habits that are very
sweet, go to church or chapel when you have no heart for worship; and
so try to balance the account. If the prophet had bid thee do some
great thing, thou wouldst have done it. How much rather when he says,
'Wash, and be clean.' 'Nothing in my heart I bring.' You do _not_ bring
anything. 'Simply to Thy Cross I cling.' Do you? Do you? Jesus Christ
catches up the 'comes' of my text, and He says, 'Come unto Me, all ye
that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' 'If any man
thirst, let him come unto Me and drink.' Brethren, I lay it on your
hearts and consciences to answer Him--never mind about me--to answer
_Him_: 'Sir, give me this water that I thirst not.'