Sermons on Biblical Characters Part 9

Jephthah made his vow and went to battle. He went confidently. He went believing that inasmuch as he had put himself and what he had at G.o.d's disposal, that G.o.d would put Himself at his disposal. And G.o.d did not disappoint him. He won the fight. And now the victorious army is marching home. The soldiers are rejoicing. But there is a strange tenseness and anxiety in the general's face that the soldiers do not understand. n.o.body understands but G.o.d and Jephthah. At last they round the bend in the road and the general comes in sight of his own home. And then suddenly his bronze face goes deadly pale. He reels upon his horse. For out from the door of his home has come a lovely girl with dark hair and sunny face, and she is singing a song of welcome.

Father and daughter come face to face. The girl is perplexed, and the general strains her hard to his heart. He is father and mother to her at once, and she is all he has. And the cup is bitter almost beyond the drinking. And he says, "Alas, my daughter, you have brought me very low." And he tells her his story. And the girl with sweet resignation understands, and the great sacrifice is made.

Jephthah was a hard man, you say. Do not judge him in the light of the twentieth century. Judge him in the light of the day in which he lived. And remember this, that he had the manhood to keep his promise.

Remember that he had the st.u.r.dy courage to pay his vow. "I have opened my mouth unto the Lord, and I cannot go back." Oh, the world is saved by the "cannot" men, by the men who have big impossibilities in their souls. Joseph says as he faces the temptation of his life, "I cannot do it." The apostles ordered to keep silent, say, "We cannot." And Jephthah with breaking heart and tear-wet face, tempted to break his vow, says, "I cannot go back."

Oh, I know what we would probably have done. We would have said to ourselves, "n.o.body knows that I made that vow anyway, n.o.body but G.o.d.

I made it in the secrecy of my own heart. I never breathed a word into any human ear. If I go back on it, it will not matter so much. It is simply a promise that I made to G.o.d." This man had not told his vow.

It was a secret between himself and his Lord. He was not driven to the performance of it by public opinion. He was not urged to it, as flabby Herod, "for the sake of those that sat with him." He was urged to it by his own unstained conscience and his sterling manhood.

Or he might have said, "I made the vow, it's true, but I made it under pressure. A great danger was threatening and a man is not to be held responsible for a vow he makes in the presence of danger." Did you ever get frightened when a storm was on and promise G.o.d things, and then go back on it? Of course you have. We have been false to one another, some of us. How many of us have been false to G.o.d! How far is this old hero ahead of ourselves!

Think of the vows that you have made as members of the church. You have not even fulfilled the vow you made to your groceryman. Some of you have not paid for the clothes that you have on, and never will.

Some of you have made pledges to the church and have forgotten them.

And just because the church won't sue you, you are going to break the promise that you have made, not simply to men, but to G.o.d.

And what have you done with your church vows? You have promised to renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world. Have you kept your vow? You have promised to obediently keep G.o.d's holy will and commandments. Have you been honest with G.o.d in this matter? You have promised to be subject to the rules of the church and to attend upon its services, and some of you have trampled on those rules flagrantly, openly, knowingly. And remember that when you took that vow it was not a pledge that you made to me. You opened your mouth that day unto the Lord.

And you that are here outside the church, may the lord help you to pay your vows unto the Most High. For there is hardly a single one of you but that at some time has opened your mouth unto the Lord. What about that promise you made to G.o.d when you were sick? I do not say you made it into any human ear, but you breathed it in prayer into His ear.

What about the promise you made to G.o.d by the coffin of your baby?

What about the promise of consecration you made by the bedside of your dying mother? May the Lord help us to make this day a pay day. May the Lord give us the courage to say, "I have opened my mouth unto the Lord, and I cannot go back."

X

A CASE OF BLUES--ELIJAH

_1 Kings 19:4_

One day you were reading in the New Testament and you came to that surprising word from James: "Elijah was a man subject to like pa.s.sions as we are." And if you were reading thoughtfully you stared at that sentence in wide-eyed amazement. And then in your heart you said, "It isn't true. Elijah's story doesn't read a bit like mine."

Then you thought of how he came and put his finger in Ahab's face and made that face go white. You thought of how he carried Heaven's key in his pocket for three years and six months. You thought of his lifting the dead boy into life; of his victory on Carmel; of his quiet walk to the little station beyond the Jordan where the Heavenly Limited met him and took him home. And again you felt like saying that James was altogether mistaken.

To fortify yourself more fully you reread his story. Then you came to this pa.s.sage and you read it with a gasp: "And he came and sat down under a juniper tree," etc. And down by the print of your foot you saw the big footprint of the old prophet and you said, "After all, we are very much alike. After all, he got in the dumps, fretted and broke his heart with the blues, even as I."

Now, what was the matter with Elijah? He was not a natural and deliberate pessimist. There are some folks that are, you know. There are some people who study to be pessimistic. They are the "self-appointed inspectors of warts and carbuncles, the self-elected supervisors of sewers and street gutters." They pride themselves on being guides to the Slough of Despond and on holding a pa.s.s key to the cave of Giant Despair.

One such woman, being asked how she felt, said, "I feel good to-day.

But I always feel the worst when I feel the best because I know how bad I am going to feel when I get to feeling bad again." Two buckets went to a well one day. One sobbed and said, "Oh, me! it breaks my heart to think that however full we go away from the well, we always come back empty." And its companion laughed outright and said, "Why, I was congratulating myself on the fact that however empty we come to the well, we always go away full."

One morning when the world was br.i.m.m.i.n.g with spring, two little girls ran out into a garden where the dewdrops and the sunlight and G.o.d had wrought the miracle of a hundred full-blown roses. They looked at the lovely scene and one went back and said tearfully, "Oh, mother, the roses are blooming, but there is a thorn for every rose." The other looked and went back singing and said, "Mother, the roses are blooming and there is a rose for every thorn."

No, this man was not a deliberate pessimist. Had he been his name and memory would have rotted long ago, for the men that bless us are the hopeful men, the forward-looking men. I read of a man who was put in jail during the Boer War simply because he was always prophesying disaster. He was a discourager. He refused to see anything hopeful.

And a man of that kind ought to be in jail because he is as harmful as a man with the small-pox. "He who steals my purse steals trash, but he who filcheth from me" my sunny outlook, my expectation of the dawn of a to-morrow, "takes that which not enriches him, but makes me poor indeed."

What was the matter with Elijah? Well, in the first place, he was tired. He was utterly spent. He had just pa.s.sed through a very trying and exacting ordeal. We can well imagine that the days just preceding the test upon Carmel were toilsome days and the nights were sleepless nights. Then came the great day of contest and victory. There was, of course, no rest that day. And, in the exhilaration of victory, you know how he ran before the chariot of Ahab from Carmel to Jezreel, a distance of seventeen miles.

Arrived there, he got a message from Jezebel threatening his life. He had expected, of course, that the men who had shouted "The Lord He is G.o.d" would stand by him. But they did not. He had expected that even Jezebel would be afraid to lift her voice in defense of the old defeated heathenism of the past. But here again he was much mistaken.

In fact, instead of tamely acknowledging defeat she sends him this word: "So let the G.o.ds do to me, and more also, if I make not thy life as the life of one of them by to-morrow about this time."

Jezebel's threat totally upset the prophet's sense of victory. He came to feel that he had not won after all. For the first time he gave way to fear. Cowardice rushed upon him and drove him, without rest, down the road that led into the wilderness. The terminus of this road was, quite naturally, the juniper tree.

So one source of his discouragement, one secret of his being in the blues, was that he was utterly tired. It is hard indeed for a man to be hopeful when his nerves are on edge. It is hard for him to keep out of the blues when he is completely exhausted. As a tired body yields at such times far more readily to physical disease, so does it yield more readily to the exquisite torture of discouragement and depression.

A second reason for his collapse was a lost sense of the divine fellows.h.i.+p. Up to this time Elijah's every step had been ordered of the Lord. He had a sense of the Divine Presence that was continuous.

But Jezebel's threat had made him believe that he must look out for himself. So he took his case into his own hands. And that is the road that must always lead to the juniper tree.

Such a collapse is next to impossible as long as we keep on intimate terms with G.o.d. Yonder is man named Paul on a s.h.i.+p that is going to pieces. The sea "curls its lips and lies in wait with lifted teeth as if to bite." The sailors' faces are ghastly with hunger and panic.

But while despair grips every other heart and while death laughs with hollow laughter amidst the popping timbers of this wrecking s.h.i.+p, this man steadies himself and shouts, "Be of good cheer." What is the secret of his cheer? "There stood by me this night the angel of G.o.d whose I am." He was saved by an intimate and personal sense of the Divine Presence. Elijah had lost this sense of the Divine. Hence the deep, dark night of utter discouragement was upon him.

Thus utterly wearied and his old intimacy with the Lord gone, the worst naturally followed. All his hopes seemed to fall about him. There came to him a heart-breaking sense of personal failure. He sobbed out the complaint: "I am no better than my fathers. They allowed Israel to drift into idolatry. I have not been able to bring it back. I have accomplished nothing. I toiled long and hard, dreaming that at the end I would clasp the warm, radiant hand of success and victory, but in reality I only clasp the skeleton hand of failure."

Have you ever had a feeling that you were of no account and never would be; that in spite of all that G.o.d had done for you, you were a failure?

There are few things more fraught with heartache and bitterness and discouragement than that. That is something that makes you want to sob and give over the fight utterly. And there are a lot of folks that allow themselves to come to that dismal conviction. They work, and n.o.body seems to appreciate it. They toil, and n.o.body compliments them.

Then they decide that they do not amount to anything, and they feel like giving over the fight.

I read the other day a fascinating essay from Frank Boreham. In this essay the author spoke of a certain discouraged friend of his. He declared it his purpose to help this friend by sending him a present.

And the strange present that he was going to send him was an onion.

Yes, he was going to wrap this onion in lovely tissue paper and put it in a beautiful candy box and tie it with pink ribbon and post it to his friend at once.

Now, why send him an onion? Well, for the simple reason that though an onion is one of the most valuable of all vegetables, though it is the finest of relishes, though it has added piquancy to a thousand feasts, yet n.o.body praises the onion. Of course you know the author is right here. You may have read some great poetry in your time, poems on daffodils, violets, roses, daisies. Even you have known a great poet who could write about a louse and a field mouse, but where do you find a poem about an onion? What orator waxes eloquent in its praise? What bride ever carries a bouquet of onions as a bridal bouquet?

This is true, of course, but why is it true? Not because the onion is useless. The real reason is because it is so strong. It is harder to grow sentimental over great strong things,--though tears have been shed over onions, as our essayist has pointed out. There are some we praise, you know, because we think that they need it to keep them going. They are weak. There are others we do not praise because they are so strong, or because, being strong, we expect strong things of them. The football hero receives an ovation when he makes a touchdown, but no greater than the baby receives when it takes its first step.

There was more noise in the former case, but only because there was a larger crowd of spectators. So it is not wise to conclude that because n.o.body is praising you, you are of no account in the world.

Not only did Elijah for the moment lose faith in himself, but he lost faith in others as well. He thought there was not a good man in all Israel. And if you want a short cut to wretchedness, get to a place where you do not believe in anybody. Some people seem to cultivate this disposition as if it were an a.s.set. It is not an a.s.set. It is the worst possible liability. If you want to make a h.e.l.l for yourself in the here and now, cultivate the habit of seeing a selfish motive back of every seemingly unselfish act. School yourself to believe that all men and all women have their price. Say not in haste, but deliberately, that "All men are liars."

That is the leading characteristic of the devil. "Hast thou considered my servant, Job," the Lord asked, "that there is none like him?"

"Yes," replied the devil, "I have considered him. I know him through and through. I know him better than you do. He is deceiving you. He is putting it over on you. You think he loves you for yourself,--I know that he loves you simply, because you are feeding him bonbons.

Let me touch him and he will curse you to your face." That is the devil's habit. That is what makes him such a success as a devil.

If you do not believe in people no wonder you are miserable. If you do not believe that a fluctuating Simon can be changed into a rock; if you do not believe that a Magdalene can, through the grace of G.o.d, become a herald of the resurrection; if you do not believe that this world of men is a salvable world; then it is not to be wondered at that you are blue. If you do not believe in the honesty and goodness and purity of at least a few, I do not see how you can be in any other place than a veritable perdition.

There are bad men, vicious men, G.o.dless men, but they are not all so.

Do not believe that they are.

"There are loyal hearts, there are spirits brave; There are souls that are good and true, Then give the world the best you have And the best will come back to you.

"Give love, and love to your heart will flow And strength for your utmost need.

Give faith and a score of hearts will show Their faith in your worldly deed.

"Give truth and truth will be paid in kind, And honor will honor meet; And a smile that is sweet is sure to find A smile that is just as sweet.

"For life is the mirror of king and slave; It's just what we are and do.

Then give the world the best you have And the best will come back to you."