Shelf. RX 5133 .H67 V54 Hort, Fenton John Anthony, 1828-1892 . Village sermons D igitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/villagesermonsOOhort VILLAGE SERMONS VILLAGE SERMONS BY THEJjATE F. J. A. HORT n.D., D.C.L., LL.D. SOMETIME HULSEAN PROFESSOR AND LADY MARGARET's READER IN DIVINITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE London Macmillan and Co., Limited New York : The Macmillan Company 1897 All rights resemed GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO, PREFATORY NOTE. One cannot without some misgiving add to the volumes of sermons already in existence. Yet, simple and unpretentious as these discourses are in form, a deep and wide theology underlies them, which, with the calm and trustful spirit that they reveal, will, it may be hoped, make them a source of strength to many readers. They were all preached to a village congregation in the churches of St. Ippolyts and Great Wymond- ley, in Hertfordshire, of which double parish my father was vicar from 1857 to 1872. Each sermon represents many hours of anxious thought ; for the preacher gave to his simple parishioners, as afterwards to University students, nothing but his best. The first of the series was preached on his first Sunday in his new parish: of the next eleven, several were delivered more than once, some of them in later years vi PREFATORY NOTE at Cambridge with considerable alterations : in such cases the original or ' village ' form has been re- tained. The last twelve sermons form a continuous series, delivered once only, in 1868. 1 have ventured to correct a few obvious slips, since, in spite of frequent careful revision, the manuscript was clearly only meant for the author's own use. ARTHUR FENTON HORT. CONTENTS. [The dates are those of the first time of preaching.] I. PAGE THE ANOINTING OF THE SPIRIT TO PREACH FREE- DOM AND LIGHT. (1S57), I II. ON PSALM LXVII. (i.) Prayer for Mercy and Blessing. (1857), . . 16 III. (ii.) The Light of Gou's Face and the Knowledge OF His Way. (1857), 26 IV. (iii.) The Praise of the People. (1857), . . -37 V. (iv.) Communion with God in Praise for the In- crease of the Earth. (1857), . . . -47 viii CONTENTS VI. HAGE THE SOWER. (Sexagesima, 1862), 57 VII. THE TEMPTATION. (i.) In the Wilderness. (1861), . . . .67 \ VIII. (ii.) On the Temple. (1861), 80 IX. (iii. ) On the Mountain. (1861), 90 X. GODS LOVE SHO WN IN CHRIS T S DEA TH. (Good Friday, 1858) lOI XI. THE LIVELY HOPE PROCEEDING FROM THE RESUR- RECTION. (Easter Day, 1858), 108 XII. ANDREW'S DISCOVERY OF THE CHRIST TO HIMSELF AND PETER. (St. Andrew's Day, 1862), . . . .117 CONTENTS ix XIII. THE BIBLE [rSbS). PAGE (i.) The Old and New Testaments, .... 128 XIV. (ii. ) The Old Testament a History of the Jews, 139 XV. (iii.) The Pentateuch. Genesis, 150 XVI. (iv.) Exodus to Deuteronomy, ..... 161 XVII. (v.) Joshua to David, 174 XVIII. (vi.) The Kings, the Captivhy, and the Return, 185 XIX. (vii.) The Prophets, 197 XX. (viii.) Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, . . . 209 CONTENTS XXI. PAGE (ix.) The Gospels, 221 XXII. (x.) The Acts of the Apostles, 233 XXIII. (xi.) The Epistles, 245 XXIV. (xii.) The Apocalypse, 257 VILLAGE SERMONS I THE ANOINTING OF THE SPIRIT TO PREACH FREEDOM AND LIGHT " The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor ; he hath sent me to heal the broken- hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord." — Luke iv. i8, 19. These words belong to the Old Testament as well as the New. They were spoken first by the prophet Isaiah, and from him our Lord Jesus Christ took them, making them henceforth His own. But they do not come to an end with Him. If the preachers of the Jewish nation might lawfully speak thus, much more the preachers of the Christian Church. In the same spirit, and in the same power, must every one go forth whom God has commanded to declare His name unto men. And therefore, dear brethren, I have not feared to set this text before you on this the first day of my speaking to you from this place. If it is pre- sumptuous and wrong to claim so high a mission, 2 THE ANOINTING OF THE SPIRIT I had better hold my peace now and for ever. To put forth any lower claim, to ask you to listen to any other kind of message, would rob me of all hope, all strength, all freedom of utterance, and would keep you, as far as human acts can do, from knowing the Lord your Saviour. Let us turn for a little while to Isaiah and his prophecy. Looking forward to the captivity which was coming upon the Jews for their manifold sins against God, he looked yet further across all their miseries to the deliverance which should be given to them at last. Their forlorn state as prisoners in a foreign land seemed to pass before his eyes : he saw them downcast, helpless, enslaved, shut up in dark dungeons. All these sights were dreadful to one who loved his people so warmly and could not bear to think of their sufferings ; and yet he knew in his inmost heart that all these things Duist come upon them, so deeply were they sunk in sin : dreadful as God's judgments on their sins might be, their sins themselves were much more dreadful and more hopeless still : it was dreadful that foreign armies should tear them away from their homes and the city where their fathers and grandfathers had lived ; but far more dreadful that they should tear them- selves away from the presence of their gracious and loving God, and prefer their own devices and lusts to His will. But God did not suffer Isaiah to be overwhelmed with that dark vision of sin and the punishment of sin. He taught him that those sharp judgments were sent in mercy to root out the sins which made them needful, and that TO PREACH FREEDOM AND LIGHT at last they would do their appointed work, and the people would repent. In the words which go before the text in Isaiah's prophecy (Ix. 2 1 ), this is the Lord's promise, " Thy people also shall be all righteous : they shall inherit the land for ever, the branch of my planting, the work of my hands, that I may be glorified." From that root of righteousness should spring the fruit of glory and happiness. " A little one," the prophecy goes on, " A little one shall become a thousand, and a small one a strong nation : I the Lord will hasten it in its time." Such was the lesson which Isaiah had to learn and learn over again, before he could truly know in himself, or truly make known to others, the work which God had appointed for him as a preacher to the people around him. It was needful that he should, on the one hand, feel most keenly all the evils dwelling within him and his brethren, and pressing upon him and his brethren, and, on the other hand, that he should know how far God's love and mercy go beyond man's sin and misery. So long as he had any doubt or misgiving about God's character, all his own words could not fail to be perverse or even altogether false. But, now that he had learned that God was indeed Israel's Redeemer, who must and would at last bring them back to Himself, he could boldly go forth in the strength of that faith as God's messenger to them. And this was the message which he delivered : " The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me ; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings THE ANOINTING OF THE SPIRIT unto the meek ; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim Hberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound. To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God ; to comfort all that mourn. To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness ; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified." Words like these could not lose their power when the man who uttered them was dead and gone. Isaiah had not said a word which could lead the Israelites to put their trust in hint, and then to fall away when he departed from among them. His own faith was in the Everlasting King, who was always with His people, and who might suffer generation after generation to pass before He should bring the promised deliverance. Isaiah might die, and many another prophet anointed by the Lord like him, and like him filled with the Spirit of the Lord God ; but the good tidings to the meek, the liberty to the captives, could not die, for they came from the ever-flowing love of the undying God. Every new age could not but receive some fresh gift of the joy and freedom which He was for ever preparing for His people. When therefore Isaiah's words were written in a book, and handed down from father to son, they must have brought comfort and strength to many a weary soul in troubles yet worse than those which afflicted Jerusalem in the reign of TO PREACH FREEDOM AND LIGHT Hezekiah. The seven hundred years which passed before Christ came were full of events that must have given such words much precious meaning to all who had hearts to receive it. And so we cannot doubt it was on that memorable day of which we read in St. Luke. In that village of Nazareth, up in the Galilean hills, it is hard, in spite of what follows, to think that there were none to whom the words were not only familiar, but dear. All this must be borne in mind, if we would understand our Lord's act. The story occurs in St. Luke, im- mediately after the Temptation ; but, if we compare it with the shorter accounts of what is obviously the same event in St. Matthew (xiii. 54-58) and St. Mark (vi. 1-6), we shall see that our Lord must have preached and worked miracles in Capernaum and the neighbourhood of the sea of Galilee before He thus went up to His old home at Nazareth. Still, the visit to Nazareth must have occurred early in His ministry, and we are warranted in taking His language in that synagogue as one of the most marked declarations of the purpose of His whole teaching. Let us read St. Luke's story. " And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up ; and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read. And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, ' The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor ; he hath sent me 6 THE ANOINTING OF THE SPIRIT to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.' And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he began to say unto them, ' This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.' And all bare him witness, and wondered at the gracious words which pro- ceeded out of his mouth. And they said, ' Is not this Joseph's son ?' " It was, it seems, our Lord's custom in these early months after His baptism and temptation to enter the synagogues of different villages on the sabbath day and preach to the congregations with the leave of the ruler of the synagogue, as was often done in Judea at that time. By this means His fame was soon spread abroad through Galilee. At last He went to Nazareth, where he had spent His childhood and early manhood till He was thirty years old, and there too, as usual, He stood up in the synagogue to read and preach. We English Christians, who know that that Nazarene preacher was the son of God Himself, might have supposed that He would draw the whole congregation to His feet to worship Him and follow Him by proclaiming His high glory and Godhead, and working some astonishing miracle to prove His power. A time came at last when multitudes did follow Him with signs of noisy worship, and He rode from Bethany to Jerusalem over a carpet of palm leaves, with shouts of " Hosanna TO PREACH FREEDOM AND LIGHT to the Son of David." But what could the value of such a conversion, of such a worship be, when those same multitudes were as noisily shouting for His murder before a week had passed ? No, that was not His way of proving that He came from God, or of showing what are the features of God's nature which He wishes us to regard most. He chose rather the words of the poor afflicted prophet of Hezekiah, who had lived and died in the latter days of the old Jewish kingdom just before the Captivity. The faith of the prophet was also the faith of the Son of God, the same Holy Spirit rested on both, both had the same mission to point to the Father in heaven as the true deliverer from evil. Christ as little as Isaiah made Himself the end and object of His preaching. " I am come in my Father's name," he says to the Jews, in St. John v. 43, " and ye receive me not : if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive." But the words which Isaiah could pronounce only after many a bitter lesson, with fear and trembling, albeit with true faith, knowing that he could, after all, do but feebly and imperfectly the work which God had sent him to do, these words the Son of God could repeat without swerving as belonging entirely to Himself, in whom the fulness of the Godhead dwelt bodily: in Him, as the Bible has it, they were fulfilled. It seemed in some measure a humble office that He claimed, even though the Spirit of God might go along with it ; and yet He was indeed therein claiming to be the promised Messiah or Christ, for the words Messiah and Christ mean ' anointed ' ; 8 THE ANOINTING OF THE SPIRIT and thus expressly to declare Himself anointed by the Lord in an age which lacked prophets, but was always expecting the coming of the Messiah, was in effect to hint that He was Himself that Messiah. But this teaching about Himself was still more clearly and forcibly a teaching about the Messiah. To men who were looking for a grand conquering Messiah it was good to be taught, not by some new- fangled doctrine, but by the very words of God's old prophets to Israel, that the true anointing of God is to such work as preaching the gospel to the poor. This then is the office which Christ sets forth as His own before all others. Let us try to get at its meaning a little more closely. By ' preaching the gospel ' in the present day is often meant expounding a certain set of doctrines about Christ's death and the benefits which are thereby obtained for us ; and to us now Christ's death must always rightly be the deepest part of the gospel. But it was simply im- possible for the Jews of Nazareth so to understand our Lord's words. He was but beginning by slow degrees to make Himself known, the chief events of His Life, above all. His Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension were still to come. There is really nothing lying on the surface of the phrase that refers to any particular doctrines. It means simply ' to tell good news,' ' to preach good tidings,' and, if you will refer again to the sixty-first chapter of Isaiah, from which the quotation is taken, you will find that He is there said to be anointed " to preach good tidings." " Good tidings to the meek" he goes on, whereas our Lord spoke of preaching good tidings to the poor. TO PREACH FREEDOM AND LIGHT It is worth notice that there is just such a difference in the beginning of the two Gospel accounts of the Sermon on the Mount. According to St. Matthew Jesus said, " Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven": according to St. Luke He said, " Blessed be ye poor, for yours is the king- dom of God." The ' poor in spirit ' of St. Matthew answer to the ' meek ' of Isaiah. Now we must not go away with a notion that one of these meanings is right and the other wrong : rather, by comparing them boldly together, we may find more exactly the full meaning of Scripture. The Hebrew word in Isaiah means both ' poor ' and also ' meek,' but — mark this — it is especially used when it is wished to speak in one word of those who are both poor and meek. By the ' poor ' is not here meant simply those who are in want of money or other property, but all who are in any way depressed or beaten down low in any way, whether by what we commonly call poverty, or cruelty, or tyranny, or any other sore burden. Such are the ' poor,' and the ' poor in spirit ' are they who yet more than this have been led by their distresses to humble themselves under the mighty hand of God, casting all their care upon Him since He careth for them, and will exalt them in due season, if they are not over-anxious to exalt them- selves. This then was Christ's first work, to bring good news to the poor and afflicted, to bring it to them whether they were poor in spirit or not, although it would profit them little if they were not. Good news to the poor was His first message to the men of Nazareth ; Blessing to the poor, above all, to THE ANOINTING OF THE SPIRIT the poor in spirit, the first sentence of the Sermon on the Mount ; Good news to the poor the crowning sign of Himself which He gave to John the Baptist's disciples. We cannot desire three occasions more decisive than these. But what were these good news ? They are partly unfolded in the words that follow : " Deliverance to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, relief to the bruised," — these were some of the good things which were promised to men. They all refer to outward distresses and out- ward benefits. And why should they not ? Surely God, who made man to dwell upon the earth, must care for the earthly troubles of men, must delight to relieve men from their earthly troubles : surely to tell men of this graciousness of their Heavenly Father must be a part of any true good news brought from heaven to earth, a part of the good news, the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God. At all events, we who receive the four Gospels as the record of His acts on earth are bound to that belief Consider for a moment what these Gospels would lose if Christ's feedings of the hungry. His healings of diseases, His raisings from the dead were cut out of it as unworthy of a spiritual religion. No, blessed be God, so long as we hold fast the Book of Life, we cannot be cheated by the cruelty and heartlessness of man's gospels since we have God's gospel to fall back upon, and we know from that that nothing is too low for His care and love, without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground. Every attempt to raise men out of a condition of depression and suffering is a carry- ing out of God's gospel, and part of the work which TO PREACH FREEDOM AND LIGHT n He is ever accomplishing. It is true that all the evils of poverty are by His appointment, just as all the evils of disease which fall on all mankind alike are by his appointment ; but, just as a great part of Christ's gospel work when on earth was the healing of diseases, so a great part of His work now is the removal of more partial and unequal hardships. But, though the deliverance promised by Christ at Nazareth included deliverance from outward ills, it could not stop there ; all the words that He used point still more strongly to those deeper and more inward ills, which we may overlook, it may be, for days and weeks and months, but which, in sickness or other seasons of quietness, are suddenly seen in our hearts with most unwelcome clearness. Bond- age, blindness, bruises, — is there any one here who has not at some time felt that his very inmost self was subject to one or other of those evils, that he was unable to do what his conscience commanded him to do, unable to see and know what he needed to see and know, crushed and bruised by the attacks of inward enemies and the weight of his own past mis- deeds ? Then here too Christ is the messenger of good tidings. From these strange evils, which seem so slippery, so desperately hard to get at, so deep down beyond the reach or help of our fellowmen, — from these God is able and willing to deliver us, if we will only trust Him wholly. But His blessed purpose is hindered in two ways : first, we do but half believe that these inward evils really are there ; the outward evils we cannot help seeing and feeling with our bodily senses : but it is otherwise with the THE ANOINTING OF THE SPIRIT inward evils ; we can shut our eyes to them for a long while, if we choose, and persuade ourselves they are not there, while all the while they are destroying unawares the divine life within, and making us more and more fit to dwell only with beasts and devils. Secondly, we will not submit to the remedies which God provides for these diseases of our spirits. His medicines are too bitter and nauseous, and we had rather die than take them. And this explains what I said just now, that outward evils are not only relieved by God, but sent by God. As long as we endure distress, we may be sure that some sin is enslaving us, from which by this means He is striving to set us free. Yet it is still good news that He will set us free, if only we will allow Him, however distasteful to our lower nature the way may be. And do not think that He has only told us of that way. No, His words were but a small part of His gospel. His acts are a much mightier part. He has gone Him- self that way before us. He has drained our cup of bitterness to the dregs. The full meaning of the good tidings could not be known till He had died and risen again for us. The atonement for sin made once for all by the blood of His cross is at once the pledge of our deliverance from these deadliest and inmost enemies, and the only means by which it could be effected. I shall often have occasion to speak of that great event, which both is itself the weightiest part of Christ's good tidings to men and sheds much light on the other parts. But to-day I have spoken of the gospel in the way in which our Lord's own words bring it before us, as above all TO PREACH FREEDOM AND LIGHT things a gospel of freedom and ligJit. If we forget the lessons of these earlier chapters, if we describe the gospel in such a way as to make it sQcm that in Christ's own discourses and parables He was preach- ing no gospel at all, then we shall indeed be turning God's truth into a lie, and the very message of His love will become a curse to mankind instead of a blessing. The good tidings which Christ preached Himself, He commanded His Apostles to preach also : we are told that they did so during His lifetime and after His death, and we have in their speeches and letters trustworthy samples of the manner in which they preached the good tidings, applying them with wonderful variety and boldness to the several changes which befel their flocks in different places and times, but always mindful to keep the good tidings truly good, true freedom to captives, true light to blinded eyes. And from them the com- mand has passed on to generation after generation for eighteen centuries ; and the work of Christ's ministers is still the same, to proclaim those same glad tidings, always bearing in mind to whom they are addressed. But may they go further than this ? May they take to themselves the earlier words of my text, " The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He hath anointed me, because He hath sent me"? Yes, brethren, with all my heart I believe they may. Can anything be imagined more hopeless than to strive to speak the words of the Lord, and yet not to have been sent by the Lord, nor filled with the Spirit of the Lord ? But they who, according to the due THE ANOINTING OF THE SPIRIT order of His Church, have been set apart for this very work, and bidden to receive the Holy Ghost in the name of the Blessed Trinity, may surely believe that He will truly be with them. They may grieve Him and be deaf to His truest inspirations yet more than any whose work less specially consists in setting forth the Gospel ; but He will still be there, and woe be to them if they preach in their own name or in their own strength. Weaker words than these of Christ would give but little hope or courage. And yet what a lesson is read to both you and me, dear brethren, by the close of St. Luke's story ! The gospel preached by Christ Himself to the men of His own village was of no avail. " All they in the synagogue, when they heard" Him speak of God's mercies to heathens, " were filled with wrath, and rose up and thrust him out of the city, and led him unto the brow of the hill whereon their city was built, that they might cast him down headlong." " He came to his own," says St. John, " and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become sons of God." Yes ! that name of Christ He bestows on all. We too are all His own. Let us all, brethren, strive together to help one another to receive the only begotten Son of God. The same Holy Ghost is given to us all, the same Christ is ever interceding for us all. We may do much to help or hinder the work each of the other. But, blessed be God, no human hindrance can at last mar His work, except by His will, which He is carrying on in every heart and in our whole community, with or without human TO PREACH FREEDOM AND LIGHT aid. When we are fully persuaded that our weak- nesses can be no clog to His strength, and that His purposes are altogether gracious, we shall indeed feel more keenly the dreadfulness of not suffering those purposes to prevail within ourselves, but we shall have a better hope for our neighbours and our country. To keep such a persuasion always strong is no easy task : and it may well be, brethren, that you will hear from me at times faithless words, untrue to God and the gospel of His grace. In such a case, all that I have been endeavouring to say to-day will bear witness against me before you and before God. That God's mind towards man is from first to last love altogether without any reserve, and that His various dealings with man, whether of mercy or of judgment, are but the wise and orderly workings of His love, this is the gospel which we have received from Christ and His Church. And how can we forget the awful curse which St. Paul pronounced upon himself and his brother apostles, if we or an angel from heaven should preach any other ? II PRAYER FOR MERCY AND BLESSING "God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and show us the light of his countenance." — Psalm Ixvii. I. This psalm we read now and then in the evening service. To-day it comes before us in the ordinary course of the evening psalms. Thus sometimes it is joined with the two gospel hymns of the New Testament which stand first for the evening service in our prayer book after the first and second lessons respectively : sometimes it takes its place among the ancient national songs of the Jewish people. Both these ways of using it are worth our notice, as they show us various ways of studying its words, and so of gathering more and more of its meaning. At what- ever time in the history of the Jews, and by whatever psalmist it may have been written, it is probably intended as a lengthening out and filling up of the form of blessing which God committed to Moses in the wilderness, as we read in Numbers vi. 22: " And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto Aaron and unto his sons, saying. On this PRAYER FOR MERCY AND BLESSING wise ye shall bless the children of Israel, saying unto them, ' The Lord bless thee, and keep thee : the Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee : the Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.' And they shall put my name upon the children of Israel ; and I will bless them." The first germ, therefore, of the psalm comes down to us from a very early time indeed ; and yet there is perhaps none which, if we listen to it attentively, rings out with so fresh a sound, as if it were written expressly for ourselves in this very day. It is easy to repeat it hastily as a general prayer for blessing, and so to think that it has nothing par- ticular to tell us, nothing which we have not heard all our lives, nothing which we do not know so well as to be sick of what we feel to be the unchanging sameness. Alas ! it is not our knowledge of this psalm, or of all the psalms, that is in fault first of all. It is our way of thinking that we have got to the bottom of anything, because we know so well the words in which it is spoken of, and have a certain loose notion of what they mean or are said to mean. This is the prevailing disease of all our minds : not one of us is free from it. It spoils and injures us in every possible way : it makes all our life dull and insipid, and, what is far worse, it makes all our life unkindly and unfruitful. The desire of novelty and change, of escaping now and then from the same thoughts and sights is not in itself wrong. God Himself has planted it in us. It is we ourselves who give the right desire a wrong twist, and turn it into an instrument of our own discomfort and injury, B l8 PRAYER FOR MERCY AND BLESSING by neglecting the way in which God would have us gratify it. Our weariness of our old thoughts and sights comes from our fancying that we have known and seen already all that is to be seen and known in them. And so we either resign ourselves to hopeless emptiness and thoughtlessness, or else rush off to some other field which promises us a store of new things, but of which we soon weary in like manner, because we are so ready to imagine that it contains no more food for our minds. Oh, if we would only believe that we really know but a very little of the things which our minds and our senses are daily handling, that in all the years of a long life we can but take a little sip from the depths of wonder and glory which are always close to every one of us. When we once have begun to learn something of that belief, we can take up old things once more with a new interest, and find out by degrees that everything which our eyes behold, or our minds think about, or our hearts feel, is in truth so rich in matter for our thoughts that we need never complain of dulness. Or if, after all, we feel that the dulness is there and cannot be denied, we may be sure that the fault lies not in the things themselves, scarcely even in any mere ignorance or weakness of ours, but rather in the coldness and hardness of our hearts ; in short, in evils within us which need the help of no human learning or other kind of human power, but only the influence of God's Holy Spirit, and our own efforts that the Holy Spirit's work within us may not come to nothing. I have been a long time in coming to the 67th PRAYER FOR MERCY AND BLESSING 19 Psalm ; but it will not have been lost time, if it makes you more disposed to believe that it is not an easy matter to get really to the bottom of a psalm, and that, though we may know the words by heart, and a trifle of their meaning also, there may be abundance of meaning remaining for us yet to dis- cover. I do not mean that what I have been saying applies only to what we are accustomed to call religious subjects : it applies to all possible kinds of subjects. Only to-day I want you to apply it especially to this psalm, and the vague meaning which, I said, we are so much accustomed to put upon it, that is, as being a general prayer for bless- ing. Surely, supposing the meaning of the psalm to be truly conveyed by these words, are we so very sure that we know quite well what they mean ? Is prayer such a very easy and obvious thing, and is it so very hard to fall into a wrong manner of praying, that we can afford to do without any help that God gives us as to the true meaning and purpose of prayer? It is at least strange that the Bible should say so much about the manner of praying, and above all that Christ should have taught His disciples what we call the Lord's prayer, using these remarkable words, "After this manner pray ye," if every one could certainly find out for himself how to pray aright. And again, that other word 'blessing' we must not hastily suppose that we fully understand ; for, when we shall know fully what true blessing is, and when we can with all our hearts pray God to bless us according to the fulness of that knowledge, we shall have little more to learn in the Christian PRAYER FOR MERCY AND BLESSING life. Perhaps from this psahn, or even a verse of it, we may learn to know better than we have known before, what a prayer for blessings should be. The psalm from first to last is one strain of faith and trust in God, rising in the middle into a burst' of proud exultation in Him. But it begins more humbly and quietly, and, as it were, feels its way up to a higher and louder pitch. Its first prayer is a prayer for mercy. There are no tormenting doubts and fears lest God should not really be merciful in Himself, or show mercy to him who utters the prayer. But there is a feeling of needing mercy, a feeling that, when God shows us kindness and favour, it is more than we should have a right to expect if our deserts were to be strictly weighed, that there is much in us which does not invite and call for kind- ness and favour, but rather repels it ; that God knows all this evil which defiles us, and yet passes it over, and thinks only of His own lovingkindness and that we are still His children. A prayer there- fore which begins with asking for God's mercy is a prayer which begins with confession. It casts aside all notion of rights on our part. It throws us on our knees before the throne of the Heavenly King, and bids Him look upon us not according to our nature, but according to His ; not as men deserve to be looked upon, who have sinned and rebelled against their rightful Lord, but as it becomes a God of love and grace to look. It asks him to listen with that look and in that mind to all the petitions that follow, and to grant them freely for His own great Name's sake. PRAYER FOR MERCY AND BLESSING " God be merciful to us and bless us." What is the blessing here prayed for ? Does it mean, ' God send us good things'? I cannot think so. A prayer for good things may be a quite right and lawful one, and yet the whole teaching of the Bible tends to show that, if our minds are filled chiefly with that thought, we cannot pray in the manner in which Christ taught His disciples. Nor does that meaning of the word suit well its place in the verse, consider- ing the force of the words which go before and of those which follow. It is true we often call things blessings, only because they are pleasant or useful to us. But this arises either from a careless way of using words vaguely without considering what we mean by them, or, worse still, from a fondness for cant and a mere pretence of godliness. Whenever we speak of blessings thoughtfully and deliberately, we mean to point to them not merely as they con- cern us, but as they concern God and us together; we mean that they are marks of God's favour and approval to its. When we receive a present from any friend or relation whom we love and whom we know to love us, we value it not only for its own sake and the use of which it may be to us, but still more for the sake of the giver, as a keepsake and mark of his love. Just so is it in our dealings with God and His gifts to us. When we speak of them as blessings, we mean to say that we value them chiefly as keep- sakes, as it were, from Him, as tokens that He does really love us and has pleasure in bestowing gifts upon us. A prayer for blessing is therefore not so much a prayer for gifts as a prayer for that favour 22 PRAYER FOR MERCY AND BLESSING and friendliness in God's mind towards us, which we value most in His gifts to us or in any other gifts. This is a part of the meaning of the word ' bless,' but it is not the whole. If you look at some of the passages in the earlier books of the Bible where the word occurs, you will see that it is generally used respecting words pronounced by God, rather than actual gifts sent by Him. Thus, in Gen. i. 21, 22, we read, "And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind : and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, ' Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.'" You will see the force of this meaning better by remembering the opposite word ' curse.' When we speak of a curse, we think more of the actual uttering of the words of the curse, and of the fierce and destroying mind of which they are the utterance, than of any actual evil results produced. We should shun one whom we believed to be under a curse, even though he should be as prosperous as any of his neighbours. Just so it is with a blessing. When we give a friend joy, as we call it, we believe and know that, if he cares for us, our words themselves are a real joy to him ; they bring us more closely into each other's presence, so that we can more entirely rejoice together ; and the pith and sub- stance of our friend's delight consists in this, that something of our warmth and friendliness towards him seems to go out of us to him in the very words. PRAYER FOR MERCY AND BLESSING 23 It is the same when God blesses us. We cannot hear Him speaking to us with our outward ears, as we can hear our human friends speaking to us. But yet He does speak to us and give us joy in all the gifts which He sends us. They too, like the words of a friend, seem to come out of Him and to be a part of Him, and to bring us near to the tenderness and love which He feels for us, and which He wishes us to see and rejoice. And thus the heartiest greeting that we can give to a friend is " God bless you ! " We do not merely wish that God will shower upon him all good things, though this may be included in the wish ; but we pray that God's own heart may be open to him in love and favour. We bless him ourselves, tell him of our love, but more than this we pray that God will greet him as we are greeting him, nay, a thousand times more ; that all that which we now feel for him may be felt for him by God, only with all the infinite strength and depth of God's nature. We bless him all we can, but we feel that our heart is too feeble for our wishes, and we pray God to make up our short- comings and bless him as only God can bless. The psalmist has therefore gone a step beyond his first prayer. He prays that God will not only overlook our sinful state but greet us as His friends, and send forth words and acts which may express His welcome and approval. In the next clause he goes still further. " God be merciful unto us, and bless us ; and show us the light of his countenance," or, as the Bible translation expresses it, " cause his face to shine upon us." PRAYER FOR MERCY AND BLESSING This prayer springs from a strong faith indeed. The psalmist knows most securely what look will be on God's face when He turns it towards us. He has no fears that God may, like man, be fitful and moody. He knows that it will not be turned in anger, that the tenderness of His love cannot pass away from His face, even when He is punishing sinners with the sharpest judgments. Even in the severest wrath, that face will still fill him with such a joy and gladness as no other vision can. When Adam and Eve had sinned, and then heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, they hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. Not so the psalmist. He seeks the face of the Lord God, although he knew himself to be a sinner, although he had begun by craving mercy as a sinner, whereas Adam and Eve strove only to justify themselves. And this, dear brethren, is, after all, the truest test whether we are in the right way or not. When we have committed sin, our con- science accuses us ; we feel and know that we are guilty in God's sight. The devil tells us to flee away from our offended Lord, to hide ourselves if possible from His dreadful presence. We are only too well disposed to listen to the tempter's voice. We dread nothing so much as to meet God's eyes and see His lips opening to speak to us. But if we will listen to His Spirit whispering within our hearts, we shall thrust from us the cruel and deceitful advice. We shall go forward eagerly to meet our God and say, " God be merciful to us, and bless us ; and make his PRAYER FOR MERCY AND BLESSING 25 face to shine upon us." There may be stern re- proofs in store for us, and sharp stripes after them ; but, if we are not wilfully blind, we shall see and know that the light of that countenance is the light of love, and that only that searching, all-conquering light can set us free from the bondage of our sins. That He may deliver us from sin. He will smite us still ; but not the less does He greet us and bless us as His own, for He has forgiven us long ago, even before our sins were committed. But it is not the mere turning of God's face once towards us that we want. We have need to gaze at it for ever and ever, that we may know it well. And to us, brethren, is it given to gaze upon it as no Jewish psalmist ever could. In the hymn of Simeon which goes in our prayer-book along with this 67th Psalm, uttered by him when he took the infant Jesus in his arms, he blessed God and said, " Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word : for mine eyes have seen thy salvation " (thy saving health). " He that hath seen me," said Christ Himself, when He had grown to full manhood, "hath seen the Father." All the love that He showed to sinful man in taking human flesh and dying on the cross was in very deed the love of the Father. Every time that a chapter of the Gospels is read in church, a vision is set before every Christian man such as prophets desired in vain to see. God grant us strength to pray with willing hearts the prayer of David, " Lord, lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us." Ill THE LIGHT OF GOD'S FACE AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF HIS WAY " God be merciful unto us, and bless us ; and show us the light of his countenance. That thy way may be known upon earth, thy saving health among all nations." — Psalm Ixvii. I, 2. Last Sunday I tried to explain something of the meaning of the first verse of this psalm, and at the same time to give greater clearness to the vague language in which we are apt to speak both of this and of other psalms. To-day I wish to dwell rather more fully on the last clause of the first verse, and then go on to consider the second verse, and the manner in which it is founded on the first verse. The psalmist begins with a prayer for mercy, thereby confessing himself to be one who needed mercy, and asking God to overlook his offences and listen to him not according to his deserts but according to God's own lovingkindness. He then prays that the merciful God would bless him and his people, that is, would greet them as His own, and send forth gifts and messages as tokens to show how dear they still THE LIGHT OF GOD'S FACE 27 were to Him, and to fill their hearts with joy at the sense of His favour. Next he prays that God would make His face to shine upon them, since the sight of His face and the knowledge of His near and immedi- ate presence was the best blessing that He could bestow upon them. He prays this in the full con- fidence and knowledge that God's face could not but be gracious to them and that, however great their sin might be, it was a good and not an evil thing for them to meet His face. This third petition is a good test whether we are in the right way, whether we hate sin as we ought to do and not merely dislike and dread its unpleasant effects, whether we have genuine trust in God and are willing to bring our sins to Him, that He may rpot them out in whatever way may seem best to Him. The two former petitions might in a manner be offered up by men who were not really praying, who had never known in their hearts their own emptiness and God's fulness. We may cry for mercy in such a way as a fallen soldier on a battlefield cries for mercy from a furious enemy who is cutting him down with his sword ; though such would not be the psalmist's prayer to God for mercy. We may ask for blessings, meaning only that we desire to have wealth, happiness, or any other kind of good thing, and therefore begging them from Him whom we suppose to be able to give them as He pleases ; though this would be still more unlike the psalmist's prayer that God would bless him. But it is much harder to put a cold and godless sense upon a prayer for the light of God's countenance. The man who 28 THE LIGHT OF GOD'S FACE only beseeches one whom he supposes to be his fierce enemy not to kill him, or who only begs good things from a powerful storekeeper of good things, cannot care a jot whether God's face shines upon him or not. If God will only let him alone in peace and send him no pains or troubles, if God will only send him what he desires, that is all he wants, and he has no wish to have anything more to do with God. All this sounds very shocking, when uttered thus in a plain and naked way. And yet, dear brethren, who is there among us who dare pronounce himself guiltless of this sin ? a sin I call it, for assuredly a heart which thinks thus of God has already sunk into a very deadly kind of sin and is ripe to commit any other kind of sin, when a strong enough tempta- tion shall assail it. Surely we must often have felt this inward gracelessness and unbelief haunting our prayers. How often have our prayers been dulled and darkened by some tinge of the hateful thought that the only use of God, I say it in all reverence, is to give us what we wish for, whether that be forgive- ness of sins or an abundance of outward enjoyments! Does not the experience of every week, and most of all of every Sunday, show us what urgent need we have to ask of Christ our Saviour that which His disciples asked of Him ? " Lord, teach us how to pray." Again and again must we ask for His teaching. For though we have in our hands so many true prayers of old Jewish psalmists, and above all that prayer which He Himself taught His disciples when they asked Him, we soon find that it is only too easy to put our own hard meaning into the AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF HIS WAY 29 divine words. Those words may be of the greatest possible use to us if we endeavour to learn from them humbly and patiently how God would have us to pray. But still we have the power of speaking falsehood in true words, and unbelief in faithful words ; and as our lives and our honest thoughts are, so will also the spirit of our prayers be, whatever the words of prayer may be on our lips. Those petitions which seem likel}- to bring us what we wish we can use in our own cold sense, and the rest we can repeat without any sense at all, wishing to pass quickly over them and get back to others which we fancy may be more practically useful. And, when our thoughts of what is useful are thus dwarfed and fettered by a want of faith and love, what can seem more useless than the vision of the light of God's countenance ? Yet, after all, it is not a forced or unnatural state of mind that we must put on if we would feel and know the force of the psalmist's prayer. We need not have recourse to Sunday doings to teach us what it means. We need only think of the mornings and evenings of the common workdays of the week, and. ask whether the words do not recall something that we have felt then about men if not about God. Do we all care so little about our parents and children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, that the mere light of their countenance never brings us any joy? Surely there is nothing which so fills us with gladness, so inspires us with strength and patience to endure the burdens and sufferings of life, if we are not utterly hardened, as the sight of human faces that we love. And, if it THE LIGHT OF GOD'S FACE is otherwise with us with respect to God, the reason is because we love Him for His own sal