Quiet Talks on Following the Christ Part 9

And at first thought you say, surely there can be no following for any of us in this sore lonely experience of His. And there cannot. He was alone there as on the morrow. None of us can go through what He went through there. For, it was _for us_, and for our sin that He went through it. And yet there _is_ a following, if different in degree and in depth of meaning, yet a very real following. While Gethsemane stands a lone experience for Jesus, yet there will be _a_ Gethsemane for him who follows fully where He asks us to go.

There will be a real suffering of spirit because of the sin of others. We will see the world around us through those pure, seeing eyes of His. We will _feel_ the ravages of sin in those we touch, with something of the feeling of His heart. Close walking with Christ brings pain and it will bring it more, and more acutely. We will see sin as He does, in part. We will feel with our fellow-men toiling in its grip and snare as He did, in part. There will be sore suffering of spirit. This is the Gethsemane experience, and it will not grow less but more.

"'O G.o.d,' I cried, 'why may I not forget?

These halt and hurt in life's hard battle Throng me yet.

Am I their keeper? Only I? To bear This constant burden of their grief and care?

Why must I suffer for the others' sin?

Would G.o.d my eyes had never opened been!'

And the Thorn-crowned and Patient One Replied, '_They thronged Me too. I too have seen_.'

'But, Lord, Thy other children go at will,'

I said, protesting still.

'They go, unheeding. But these sick and sad, These blind and orphan, yea and those that sin Drag at my heart. For them I serve and groan.

Why is it? Let me rest, Lord. I _have_ tried--'

He turned and looked at me: '_But I have died_!'

'But, Lord, this ceaseless travail of my soul!

This stress! This often fruitless toil These souls to win!

They are not mine. I brought not forth this host Of needy creatures, struggling, tempest-tossed-- They are not _mine_.'

He looked at them--the look of One divine; He turned and looked at me. '_But they are mine_!'

'O G.o.d, I said, 'I understand at last.

Forgive! And henceforth I will bond-slave be To thy least, weakest, vilest ones; I would not more be free.'

He smiled and said, '_It is to me_.'"[72]

The word Gethsemane has not been used accurately sometimes. And it is not good that it is so, for it keeps us from appreciating what the real meaning is. In poetry and otherwise it has been used for some great experience of sorrow in which the soul has struggled alone. But there are two things in the Gethsemane experience that give it a meaning quite different from such. The Gethsemane sorrow is on account of the sin of others, _and_ it comes to us through our own consent, of our own action.

We need not go through the Gethsemane experience save as we make the choice that comes to include this. It is only as we _choose_ to follow fully, close up to His bleeding side, where the Lord Jesus is leading, that this experience of pain will come.

Moses knew what this meant. As he came from the presence of G.o.d in the mount the sin of the people seemed so terrible, that the fear that possibly it could not be forgiven unless he made some sacrifice sweeps over him and came out as a great sob.[73] The sight of their sin brought sorest pain to his spirit. Paul tells us there was a continual cutting of a knife at his heart because of his racial kinsfolk, their sin, their stubbornness in sin, the awful blight upon their lives.[74] There was sore, lone, unspeakable pain of spirit because he felt so keenly the sin of others. This is the Gethsemane experience. Have you felt something like this as you have come in touch with the sin, the blighted lives, the wreckage of lives among both poor and rich, lower cla.s.s and better? You will if you follow where He leads.

Calvary.

Then came the morrow. _The experience of Calvary_ came hard on the heels of Gethsemane. The pain of spirit became both pain of body and pain of spirit, intensified clear beyond what the night before had antic.i.p.ated.

How shall I trust myself to speak of that morrow, or you to listen? Yet, let us hold still, and, for a great purpose, look at it again, if only for a moment, that the meaning of it, the flame of it may take fresh hold, and consume us anew.

Gethsemane was followed by a sleepless night, while bitter hate brought its utmost iniquity and persistence to hound this Man to death. Nine, of the next morning, found Him hanging, nailed on the cross, crowned with the cruel mocking thorn crown. From nine till three He hung, while the strange darkness came down over all nature from noon till three, the blackness of midnight shutting out the brightness of noon. The Father's presence was withdrawn. This tells the bitterness of the cross for Jesus as does nothing else.

It was out of a breaking heart that the cry was wrung, "My G.o.d, My G.o.d, why didst _Thou_ forsake Me?" When you can penetrate that darkness you may be able to tell how really Jesus took our place, and suffered as sin for us,--not before. Then with a great shout of victory He gave up His life.

His great heart broke. He died. He died literally of a broken heart. The walls of that muscle were burst asunder by the terrific strain on His spirit.

_He died for us_. He who so easily held off the murderous mob with their stones, now holds Himself to that cross,--_for us_. This is the Calvary experience. It can be felt, but never explained fully; words fail. It can be yielded to until our hearts are melted to sobs, but never fully told in its tenderness and strength to others. It can bring us down on knees and face at His feet as His love-slaves for ever,--so is its story best told to others. That breaking heart breaks ours. That pierced side pierces through all our stubborn resistance. That face haunts us. Its scars tell of sin, ours. Its patient eyes tell of love, His. Was there ever such sin?

Was there ever such love? Was there ever such a meeting of sin and purity, of love and hate, of G.o.d's best and Satan's worst?

Surely there can be no following _here_! And, strange to say, the answer is both a "no," with a double underscoring of emphasis, and a "yes," that will come to have a like emphatic underlining. _No_, there can be no following. Here, He is the Lone Man who went before. And He remains the Lone Man in what He did, and in the extent of His suffering. There is only one Calvary. There was only the One whose death could settle the sin score for us men. It is only by His death for our sin that there is any way out of our sore plight of sin, and sin's own result. There the Lord Jesus did something that had to be done, for the Father's sake; there He broke the slavery of our sin; there He broke our hearts by His love. There He stands utterly alone in what He did. Calvary has no duplicate, nor ever can have.

That is the emphatic "no" side of the answer. There can be no following on that road.

And yet,--and yet, there can be. There is a "yes" side to the true, full answer. There will be a Calvary experience for every one who really follows. His was _the_ Calvary experience, ours is _a_ Calvary experience.

It does not mean what His meant for the world. But it enters into the marrow of our very being, and means everything to us. It means that as I really follow there will come to me experiences of sacrifice that will take the very life of my life--_if_ I do not pull back, but persist on following the beckoning hand. And it means too, that there will be in a secondary, a minor sense, a redemptive value in my suffering. That suffering will be a real thing in completing the work of some man's redemption.

Listen to Paul. He has been writing to the Corinthian Christians in much detail, of the suffering he has been going through of both body and spirit, and then he adds, "_so then death working in me worketh life in you_."[75] The same thought underlies that wonderful bit of tender, tactful pleading in the eleventh and twelfth chapters of the same letter.

The same thing is put in a rather startling way in the epistle to the Colossians,[76] "I ... fill up on my part, in my flesh, _that which is lacking_ of the afflictions of Christ for His body's sake, which is the Church."

This fits in with the thought in that word "began" in the beginning of the book of Acts.[77] In a very real sense our Lord depends upon our faithful following to supplement among men the great thing which only He could do.

Paul knew _a_ Calvary experience, and Peter and John, and so has, and will, every one who follows the pierced hand that beckons. Ask Horace Tracey Pitkin at Paotingfu if he understands this. And the China soil wet with his blood gives answer, and so do the lives of those who were won to Christ through such suffering throughout China. Ask David Livingstone away in the inner heart of Africa, and those whom no man can number in every nation, who have known this sort of thing by a bitter, sweet experience, some by violence, some by the yet more difficult daily giving out of the life in hidden away corners.

The Underground Road.

And hard following this came _the Burial in Joseph's Tomb_. "Christ died for our sins and ... He was buried."[78] "Joseph took the body, ... and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock, and he rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb."[79] "The chief priests and the Pharisees ... went, and made the sepulchre sure, sealing the stone, the guard (of Roman soldiers) being with them."[80]

Out of that sealed tomb comes with the emphasis of action, the emphasis of death, this word, "except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth by itself alone."[81] The only pathway of life is the underground road. For our Lord, Joseph's tomb made the death clear beyond doubt. The tomb was the climax of the death. He was dead and buried. For him who follows it means this, _a burial clear out of sight in the soil of the need of men's lives_. He who simply gets in behind and faithfully follows will find himself actually being buried in the needs of men. And only where there is such a burial can there come resurrection power into the life.

I remember a friend in Philadelphia, a young man who resigned an influential position to go out as a missionary in India. And another friend not at all in sympathy remarked sneeringly in my hearing, "He's gone to bury himself in India." He spoke more aptly than he knew. The years since have told what a blessed burial that was. For scores of lives in Southern India have known the resurrection power of the Lord Jesus through his service.

Do you remember when the Greeks came to Philip with their great plea, "Sir, we would see Jesus"?[82] Whether really from Greece, or Greek-speaking people from elsewhere, or simply non-Jewish people, they represented the outer, non-Jewish world coming to Jesus. The Jew door was slammed violently in His face, but here was the great outer-world door opening. And He had come to a world! But instantly, across the vision so attractive to His eyes, there came another vision, never absent from His spirit those last weeks, the vision black and forbidding, of _a cross_.

And He knew that only through this vision of a cross could the vision of a world coming be realized. And out of the sore stress of spirit, that for a few brief moments shook Him, came the quietly spoken, tense words, "Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone."

The road to Greece is not over the sea here to the west, not the overland caravan route up north through Asia Minor; it is the road down through Joseph's tomb. That was true for Him. It was by that road that He so marvellously reached the Greeks and all the world. And this is true for us. It is only by this road that we can reach out to the crowds with the reach-in that touches heart and life.

These are the four experiences of suffering and sacrifice. This is the dip-down in the "Follow Me" road where it runs through a darkly shadowed valley. These are the dark and red shuttle-threads being woven into the web, by repeated sharp blows of the batten-beam. These are the minor chords that, coming up through the strains of music, give a peculiar sweetness to it.

What Is Sacrifice?

Now you will note that the chief thing in all this is _sacrifice_. The chief thing in all of our Lord's life, clear from Bethlehem to Calvary and the tomb, was sacrifice. It runs ever throughout; it finds its tremendous climax in the cross. And the word to put in here in quietest tone--the quietest is tensest, and goes in deepest--the word is this: _Following means sacrifice_. It means sacrifice as really for the follower as for the Lone Man ahead.

That word "sacrifice" has practically been dropped out of the dictionary of the Christian Church of the western world. It has not been wholly lost.

There is much real sacrifice, no doubt, under the surface. But, in the main, it is one of the lost words in our generation of the Church. We are rich, and increased in goods, and have need of nothing that we cannot provide by the lavish use of money; so we think. And the loss of that word explains the loss from our working dictionaries of another word, _power_.

For the two words always go together.

But please note what sacrifice means. For we may get confused in the use of words, and like the Hebrews in Isaiah's day call things by the wrong names.[83] Sacrifice does not merely mean suffering, though there may be much suffering included in it. But there may be suffering where there is no sacrifice. It does not mean privation, though there may be real painful privation in it. But again there may be much privation and pain without any element of sacrifice entering in.

The heart of sacrifice is that it is voluntary, and that it really costs you something. It is something that would not come to you unless you decide to let it come. It is wholly within your power to keep it away, and it brings with it real pain or cost of some kind. Sacrifice means doing something, or doing without something, that so help may come to another, even though it costs you some real personal suffering of spirit, or of body, or both, or lack of what you should have and would enjoy.

And please note that sacrifice is _not_ the key-note of the "Follow Me"

life. We are not to seek for sacrifice. Perhaps that is quite a needless remark. We are not likely to seek for it. No one loves a cross any more than did Peter, when he had the hardiness to rebuke his Master.[84] And yet we remember those earnest souls in earlier times, who shut themselves up behind monastic walls, and inflicted pain upon themselves by privation and by bodily self-infliction. And we cannot help admiring their earnestness and saintliness, even while we see how morbid was their conception of life, and how completely they got the true order reversed.

And there can be found some here and there, among us to-day, with the same idea.