The tower of the rash builder stands a gaunt, staring ruin.
Whosoever throws himself upon great undertakings or high aims,
without a deliberate forecast of the difficulties and sacrifices
they involve, is sure to stop almost before he has begun. Many a man
and woman leaves the starting-point with a rush, as if they were
going to be at the goal presently, and before they have run fifty
yards turn aside and quietly walk out of the course. I wonder how
many of you began, when you were lads or girls, to study some
language, and stuck before you had got through twenty pages of the
grammar, or to learn some art, and have still got the tools lying
unused in a dusty corner. And how many of you who call yourselves
Christians began in the same fashion long ago to run the race? 'Ye
did run well.' What did hinder you? What hindered Atalanta? The
golden apples that were flung down on the path. Oh, the Church is
full of these abortive Christians; ruins from their beginning,
standing gaunt and windowless, the ground-plan a great palace, the
reality a hovel that has not risen a foot for the last ten years. I
wonder if there are any stunted Christians of that sort in this
congregation before me, who began under the influence of some
impulse or emotion, genuine enough, no doubt, but who had taken no
account of how much it would cost to finish the building. And so the
building is not finished, and never will be.
But I should remark here that what I am speaking about as failure is
not incomplete attainment of the aim. For all our lives have to
confess that they incompletely attain their aim; and lofty aims,
imperfectly realised, and still maintained, are the very salt of
life, and beautiful 'as the new moon with a ragged edge, e'en in its
imperfection beautiful.' Paul was an old man and an advanced
Christian when he said, 'Not as though I had already attained,
either were already perfect, but I follow after.' And the highest
completeness to which the Christian builder can reach in this life
is the partial accomplishment of his aim and the persistent
adherence to and aspiration after the unaccomplished aim. It is not
these incomplete but progressive and aspiring lives that are
failures, but it is the lives of men who have abandoned high aims,
and have almost forgotten that they ever cherished them.
And what does our Lord say about such? That everybody laughs at
them. It is not more than they deserve. An out-and-out Christian
will often be disliked, but if he is made a mock of there will be a
_soupçon_ of awe and respect even in the mockery. Half-and-half
Christians get, and richly deserve, the curled lip and sarcasm of a
world that knows when a man is in earnest, and knows when he is an
incarnate sham.
IV. Lastly, I would have you observe the inviting encouragement
hidden in the apparent repelling warning.
If we read my text isolated, it may seem as if the only lesson that
our Lord meant to be drawn from it was a counsel of despair. 'Unless
you feel quite sure that you can finish, you had better not begin.'
Is that what He meant to say? I think not. He did mean to say, 'Do
not begin without opening your eyes to what is involved in the
beginning.' But suppose a man had taken His advice, had listened to
the terms, and had said, 'I cannot keep them, and I am going to
fling all up, and not try any more'--is that what Jesus Christ
wanted to bring him to? Surely not. And that it is not so arises
plainly enough from the observation that this parable and the
succeeding one are both sealed up, as it were, with 'So likewise,
whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he
cannot be My disciple.'
Now, if I may so say, there are two kinds of 'forsaking all that we
have.' One is the forsaking by which we become disciples; and the
other the forsaking by which we continue true disciples. The
conviction that they had not sufficient to finish is the very
conviction that Christ wished to root in the minds of the crowds.
He exhibits the difficulties in order that they may feel they cannot
cope with them. What then? That they may 'forsake' all their own
power to cope with them.
That is the first kind of 'forsaking all that we have.' That makes a
disciple. The recognition of my own utter impotence to do the things
which yet I see must be done, is the underside of trust in Him. And
that trust in Him brings the power that makes it possible for us to
do the things which we cannot of ourselves do, and the consciousness
of the impotence to do which is the first step toward doing them. It
is the self-sufficient man who is sure to be bankrupt before he has
finished his building; but he who has no confidence in himself, and
recognises the fact that he cannot build, will go to Jesus Christ
and say, 'Lord, I am poor and needy. Come Thou Thyself and be my
strength.' Such a forsaking of all that we have in the recognition
of our own poverty and powerlessness brings into the field an Ally
for our reinforcement that has more than the twenty thousand that
are coming against us, and will make us strong.
And then, if, knowing our weakness, our misery, our poverty, and
cleaving to Jesus Christ in simple confidence in His divine power
breathed into our weakness, and His abundant riches lavished upon
our poverty, we cast ourselves into the work to which He calls us by
His grace, then we shall find that the sweet and certain assurance
that we have Him for the possession and the treasure of our lives
will make parting with everything else, not painful, but natural and
necessary and a joy, as the expression of our supreme love to Him.
It should not, and would not be difficult to fling away paste gems
and false riches if our hands were filled with the jewels that
Christ bestows. And it will not be difficult to slay the old man
when the new Christ lives in us, by our faith and submission.
So, dear brethren, it all comes to this. We are all builders; what
kind of a work is your life's work going to turn out? Are you
building on the foundation, taking Jesus Christ for the anchor of
your hope, for the basis of your belief, for the crown of your aims,
for your all and in all? Are you building upon Him? If so, then the
building will stand when the storm comes and the 'hail sweeps away
the refuges' that other men have built elsewhere. But are you
building on that foundation the gold of self-denial, the silver of
white purity, the precious stones of variously-coloured and
Christlike virtues? Then your work will indeed be incomplete, but
its very incompleteness will be a prophecy of the time when 'the
headstone shall be brought forth with shoutings'; and you may humbly
trust that the day which 'declares every man's work of what sort it
is' will not destroy yours, but that it will gleam and flash in the
light of the revealing and reflecting fires. See to it that you are
building _for_ eternity, _on_ the foundation, _with_ the fair stones
which Jesus Christ gives to all those who let Him shape their lives. He
is at once, Architect, Material, Foundation; and in Him 'every several
building fitly framed together groweth into a holy temple in the Lord.'
'THAT WHICH WAS LOST'
'An hundred sheep ... ten pieces of silver,... two
sons.'--LUKE XV. 4,8,11.
The immediate occasion of these three inimitable parables, which have
found their way to the heart of the world, needs to be remembered in
order to grasp their import and importance. They are intended to
vindicate Christ's conduct in associating with outcasts and
disreputable persons whom His Pharisaical critics thought a great
deal too foul to be touched by clean hands. They were not meant to
set forth with anything like completeness either what wanderers had
to do to go back to God, or what God had done to bring wanderers back
to Himself. If this had been remembered, many misconceptions,
widespread and mischievous, especially affecting the meaning of the
last of the three parables--that of the Prodigal Son--would have been
avoided. The purpose of the parables accounts for Christ's accepting
the division which His antagonists made of men, into 'righteous,' like
themselves, and 'unclean,' like the publicans and sinners. There was a
far deeper truth to be spoken about the condition of humanity than
that. But for the purposes of His argument Christ passes it by. The
remembrance of the intention of the parables explains their
incompleteness as a statement of what people call 'the way of
salvation.' They were not meant to teach us that, but they were meant
to show us that a human instinct which prizes lost things because they
are lost has something corresponding to it in the divine nature, and
so to vindicate the conduct of Christ.
I venture to isolate these three statements of the subjects of the
parables, because I think that looking at the threefold aspect in
which the one general thought is presented may help us to some
useful considerations.
I. I ask you, then, to look with me, first, at the varying causes of
loss.
The sheep was lost, the _drachma_ was lost, the son was lost.
But in each case the reason for the loss was different. Whilst I
would avoid all fanciful inserting into our Lord's words of more
than they can fairly bear, I would also avoid superficial evacuating
them of any of their depth of significance. So I think it is not
unintentional nor unimportant that in these three metaphors there
are set forth three obviously distinct operative causes for man's
departure from God.
The sheep did not intend to go anywhere, either to keep with or to
leave the shepherd. It simply knew that grass was sweet, and that
there, ahead of it, was another tuft, and it went after that. So it
nibbled itself away out of the path, out of the shepherd's care, out
of the flock's companionship. It was heedless; and therefore it was
lost.
Now that is a fair statement of facts in regard to thousands of men,
of whom I have no doubt there are some listening to me now. They do
not intend any mischief, they have no purpose of rebellion or
transgression, but they live what we call animal lives. The sheep
knows only where the herbage is abundant and fresh: and it goes
there. An animal has no foresight, and is the happier because it
cannot look before and after. It has only a rudimentary conscience,
if it has that. Its inclinations are restrained by no sense of
obligation. Many men live just so, without restraint upon appetite,
without checking of inclination, without foresight except of the
material good which a certain course of conduct may get. So, all
unwitting, meaning no mischief, they wander further and further from
the right road, and find themselves at last in a waterless desert.
Dear friends, am I speaking to any now who have too much yielded to
inclinations, who have been unwilling to look forward to the end,
and ask themselves what all will come to at the last, and who
scarcely know what it is to take heed unto their ways, except in so
far as worldly prudence may dictate certain courses of conduct for
the purpose of securing certain worldly and perishable ends? I would
plead, especially with the younger portion of my congregation, to
take the touching picture of this first parable as a solemn prophecy
of what certainly befalls every man who sets out upon his path
without careful consideration of whither it leads to at the last;
and who lives for the present, in any of its forms, and who lets
himself be led by inclinations or appetites. The animal does so,
and, as a rule, its instincts are its sufficient guide. But you and
I are blessed or cursed, as the case may be, with higher powers,
which, if we do not use, we shall certainly land in the desert. If a
man who is meant to guide himself by intelligence, reason, will,
foresight, conscience, chooses to go down to the level of the beast,
the faculties that serve the beast will not serve the man. And even
the sheep is lost from the flock if it yields only to these.
But how it speaks of the Lord's tender sympathy for the wanderers
that He should put in the forefront of the parables this explanation
of the condition of men, and should not at first charge it upon them
as sin, but only as heedlessness and folly! There is much that in
itself is wrong and undesirable, the criminality of which is
diminished by the fact that it was heedlessly done, though the
heedlessness itself is a crime.
Now turn to the second parable. The coin was heavy, so it fell; it
was round, so it rolled; it was dead, so it lay. And there are
people who are things rather than persons, so entirely have they
given up their wills, and so absolutely do they let themselves be
determined by circumstances. It was not the _drachma_ that lost
itself, but it was the law of gravitation that lost it, and it had
no power of resistance. This also is an explanation--partial, as I
shall have to show you in a moment, but still real,--of a great deal
of human wandering. There are masses of men who have no more power
to resist the pressure of circumstances and temptations than the
piece of silver had when it dropped from the woman's open palm and
trundled away into some dark corner. That lightens the darkness of
much of the world's sin.
But for you to abnegate the right and power of resisting
circumstances is to abdicate the sovereignty with which God has
crowned you. All men are shaped by externals, but the shape which
the externals impose upon us is settled by ourselves. Here are two
men, for instance, exposed to precisely the same conditions: but one
of them yields, and is ruined; the other resists, and is raised and
strengthened. As Jesus Christ, so all things have a double
operation. They are 'either a savour of life unto life or a savour
of death unto death.' There is the stone. You may build upon it, or
you may stumble over it: you take your choice. Here is the adverse
circumstance. You may rule it, or you may let it rule you.
Circumstances and outward temptations are the fool's masters, and
the wise man's servants. It all depends on the set of the sail and
the firmness of the hand that grasps the tiller, which way the wind
shall carry the ship. The same breeze speeds vessels on directly
opposite courses, and so the same circumstances may drive men in two
contrary directions, sending the one further and further away from,
and drawing the other nearer and nearer to, the haven of their
hearts.
Dear friends, as we have to guard against the animal life of
yielding to inclinations and inward impulse, of forgetting the
future, and of taking no heed to our paths, so, unless we wish to
ruin ourselves altogether, we have to fight against the mechanical
life which, with a minimum of volition, lets the world do with us
what it will. And sure I am that there are men and women in this
audience at this time who have let their lives be determined by
forces that have swept them away from God.
In the third parable the foolish boy had no love to his father to
keep him from emigrating. He wanted to be his own master, and to get
away into a place where he thought he could sow his wild oats and no
news of it ever reach the father's house. He wanted to have the
fingering of the money, and to enjoy the sense of possession. And so
he went off on his unblessed road to the harlots and the swine's
trough.
And _that_ is no parable; that is a picture. The other two were
parabolical representations; this is the thing itself. For
carelessness of the bonds that knit a heart to God; hardness of an
unresponsive heart unmelted by benefits; indifference to the
blessedness of living by a Father's side and beneath His eye; the
uprising of a desire of independence and the impatience of control;
the exercise of self will--these are causes of loss that underlie
the others of which I have been speaking, and which make for every
one of us the essential sinfulness of our sin. It is rebellion, and
it is rebellion against a Father's love.
Now, notice, that whilst the other two that we have been speaking
about do partially explain the terrible fact that we go away from
God, their explanation is only partial, and this grimmer truth
underlies them. There are modern theories, as there were ancient
ones, that say: 'Oh! sin is a theological bugbear. There is not any
such thing. It is only indifference, ignorance, error.' And then
there are other theorists that say: 'Sin! There is no sin in
following natural laws and impulses. Circumstances shape men;
heredity shapes them. The notion that their actions are criminal is
a mere figment of an exploded superstition.'
Yes! and down below the ignorance, and inadvertence, and error, and
heredity, and domination of externals, there lies the individual
choice in each case. The man knows--however he sophisticates
himself, or uses other people to provide him with sophistries--that
he need not have done that thing unless he had chosen to do it. You
cannot get beyond or argue away that consciousness. And so I say
that all these immoral teachings, which are very common to-day, omit
from the thing that they profess to analyse the very characteristic
element of it, which is, as our Lord taught us, not the following
inclination like a silly sheep; not the rolling away, in obedience
to natural law, like the drachma; but the rising up of a rebellious
will that desires a separation, and kicks against control, as in the
case of the son.
So, dear friends, whilst I thankfully admit that much of the
darkness of human conduct may be lightened by the representations of
our two first parables, I cannot but feel that we have to leave to
God the determination in each case of how far these have diminished
individual criminality; and that we have to remember for ourselves
that our departure from God is not explicable unless we recognise
the fact that we have chosen rather to be away from Him than to be
with Him; and that we like better to have our goods at our own
disposal, and to live as it pleases ourselves.
II. So note, secondly, the varying proportions of loss and
possession.
A hundred sheep; ten drachmas; two sons. The loss in one case is 1
per cent., a trifle; in the other case 10 per cent., more serious;
in the last case 50 per cent., heartbreaking. Now, I do not suppose
that our Lord intended any special significance to be attached to
these varying numbers. Rather they were simply suggested by the cast
of the parable in which they respectively occurred. A hundred sheep
is a fair average flock; ten pieces of silver are the modest hoard
of a poor woman; two sons are a family large enough to represent the
contrast which is necessary to the parable. But still we may
permissibly look at this varying proportion in order to see whether
it, too, cannot teach us something.
It throws light upon the owner's care and pains in seeking. In one
aspect, these are set forth most strikingly by the parable in which
the thing lost bears the smallest proportion to the thing still
retained. The shepherd might well have said: 'One in a hundred does
not matter much. I have got the ninety and nine.' But he went to
look for it. But, in another aspect, the woman, of course, has a
more serious loss to face, and possibly seeks with more anxiety. And
when you come up to the last case, where half the household is
blotted out, as it were, then we can see the depth of anxiety and
pains and care which must necessarily follow.
But beyond the consideration that the ascending proportion suggests
increasing pains and anxiety, there is another lesson, which seems
to me even more precious, and it is this, that it matters very
little to the loser how much he keeps, or what the worth of the lost
thing is. There is something in human nature which makes anything
that is lost precious by reason of its loss. Nobody can tell how
large a space a tree fills until it is felled. If you lose one tiny
stone out of a ring, or a bracelet, it makes a gap, and causes
annoyance altogether disproportionate to the lustre that it had when
it was there. A man loses a small portion of his fortune in some
unlucky speculation, and the loss annoys him a great deal more than
the possession solaced him, and he thinks more about the hundreds
that have vanished than about the thousands that remain. Men are
made so. It is a human instinct, that apart altogether from the
consideration of its intrinsic worth, and the proportion it bears to
that which is still possessed, the lost thing draws, and the loser
will take any pains to find it.
So Christ says, When a woman will light a candle and sweep the house
and search diligently till she finds her lost sixpence (for the
drachma was worth little more), and will bring in all her neighbours
to rejoice with her, that is like God; and the human instinct which
prizes lost things, not because of their value, but because they are
lost, has something corresponding to it in the heart of the Majesty
of the heavens. It is Christ's vindication, of course, as I need not
remind you, of His own conduct. He says in effect, to these
Pharisees, 'You are finding fault with Me for doing what we all do.
I am only acting in accordance with a natural human instinct; and
when I thus act God Himself is acting in and through Me.'
If I had time, I think I could show that this principle, brought out
in my texts, really sweeps away one of the difficulties which modern
science has to suggest against Evangelical Christianity. We hear it
said, 'How can you suppose that a speck of a world like this, amidst
all these flaming orbs that stud the infinite depths of the heavens,
is of so much importance in God's sight that His Son came down to
die for it?' The magnitude of the world, as compared with others,
has nothing to do with the question. God's action is determined by
its moral condition. If it be true that here is sin, which rends men
away from Him, and that so they are lost, then it is supremely
natural that all the miracles of the Christian revelation should
follow. The _rationale_ of the Incarnation lies in this, 'A
certain man had a hundred sheep.... One of them went astray ... and
He went into the wilderness and found it.'
III. Now I meant to have said a word about the varying glimpses that
we have here, into God's claims upon us, and His heart.
Ownership is the word that describes His relation to us in the first
two parables; love is the word that describes it in the third. But
the ownership melts into love, because God does not reckon that He
possesses men by natural right of creation or the like, unless they
yield their hearts to Him, and give themselves, by their own joyful
self-surrender, into His hands. But I must not be tempted to speak
upon that matter; only, before I close, let me point you to that
most blessed and heart-melting thought, that God accounts Himself to
have lost something when a man goes away from Him.
That word 'the lost' has another, and in some senses a more
tragical, significance in Scripture. The lost are lost to themselves
and to blessedness. The word implies destruction; but it also
carries with it this, that God prizes us, is glad to have us, and, I
was going to say, feels an incompleteness in His possessions when
men depart from Him.
Oh, brethren, surely such a thought as that should melt us; and if,
as is certainly the case, we have strayed away from Him into green
pastures, which have ended in a wilderness, without a blade of
grass; or if we have rolled away from Him in passive submission to
circumstances; or if we have risen up in rebellion against Him, and
claimed our separate right of possession and use of the goods that
fall to us, if we would only think that He considers that He has
lost us, and prizes us because we are lost to Him, and wants to get
us back again, surely, surely it would draw us to Himself. Think of
the greatness of the love into which the ownership is merged, as
measured by the infinite price which He has paid to bring us back,
and let us all say, 'I will arise and go to my Father.'