“I have compassion on the multitude.”—Mark, viii. 2.
What a pattern to His people, the tender compassion of Jesus! He found the world He came to save a moral Bethesda. The wail of suffering humanity was every where borne to His ear. It was His delight to walk its porches, to pity, relieve, comfort, save! The faintest cry of misery arrested His footsteps—stirred a ripple in this fountain of Infinite Love. Was it a leper,—that dreaded name which entailed a life-long exile from friendly looks and kindly words? There was One, at least, who had tones and deeds of tenderness for the outcast. “Jesus, being moved with compassion, put forth His hand, and touched him.” Was it some blind beggars on the Jericho highway, groping in darkness, pleading for help? “Jesus stood still, and had compassion on them, and touched their eyes!” Was it the speechless pleadings of a widow’s tears at the gate of Nain, when she followed her earthly pride and prop to the grave? “When the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her, and said, Weep not!” Even when He rebukes, the bow of compassion is seen in the cloud, or rather, that cloud, as it passes, dissolves in a rain-shower of mercy. He pronounces Jerusalem “desolate,” but the doom is uttered amid a flood of anguished sorrow!
Reader! do the compassionate words and deeds of a tender Saviour find any feeble echo and transcript in yours? As you traverse in thought the wastes of human wretchedness, does the spectacle give rise, not to the mere emotional feeling which weeps itself away in sentimental tears, but to an earnest desire to do something to mitigate the sufferings of woe-worn humanity? How vast and world-wide the claims on your compassion!—now near, now at a distance—the unmet and unanswered cry of perishing millions abroad—the heathendom which lies unsuccored at your own door—the public charity languishing—the mission staff dwarfed and crippled from lack of needful funds—a suffering district—a starving family—a poor neighbor—a helpless orphan—it may be, some crowded hovel, where misery and vice run riot—or some lonely sick chamber, where the dim lamp has been wasting for dreary nights—or some desolate home which death has entered, where “Joseph is not, and Simeon is not,” and where some sobbing heart, under the tattered garb of poverty, mourns, unsolaced and unpitied, its “loved and lost.” Are there none such within your reach, to whom a trifling pittance would be as an angel of mercy? How it would hallow and enhance all you possess, were you to seek to live as almoner of Jehovah’s bounties! If He has given you of this world’s substance, remember it is bestowed, not to be greedily hoarded or lavishly squandered. Property and wealth are talents to be traded on and laid out for the good of others—sacred trusts, not selfishly to be enjoyed, but generously to be employed.
“The poor are the representatives of Jesus, their wants He considers as His own,” and He will recompense accordingly. The feeblest expression of Christian pity and love, though it be but the widow’s mite, or the cup of cold water, or the kindly look and word when there is neither mite nor cup to give, yet, if done in His name, it is entered in the “book of life” as a “loan to the Lord;” and in that day when “the books are opened,” the loan will be paid back with usury.
“ARM YOURSELVES LIKEWISE WITH THE SAME MIND.”
“Not my will, but Thine be done!”—Luke, xxii. 42.
Where was there ever resignation like this! The life of Jesus was one long martyrdom. From Bethlehem’s manger to Calvary’s cross, there was scarce one break in the clouds; these gathered more darkly and ominously around Him till they burst over His devoted head as He uttered His expiring cry. Yet throughout this pilgrimage of sorrow no murmuring accent escaped His lips. The most suffering of all suffering lives was one of uncomplaining submission.
“Not my will, but Thy will,” was the motto of this wondrous Being! When He came into the world He thus announced His advent, “Lo, I come, I delight to do Thy will, O my God!” When He left it, we listen to the same prayer of blended agony and acquiescence, “O my Father, if it be possible let this cup pass from me! Nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt.”
Reader! is this mind also in you? Ah, what are your trials compared to His! What the ripples in your tide of woe, compared to the waves and billows which swept over him! If He, the spotless Lamb of God, “murmured not,” how can you murmur? His were the sufferings of a bosom never once darkened with the passing shadow of guilt or sin. Your severest sufferings are deserved, yea, infinitely less than deserved! Are you tempted to indulge in hard suspicions, as to God’s faithfulness and love, in appointing some peculiar trial? Ask yourself, Would Jesus have done this? Should I seek to pry into “the deep things of God,” when He, in the spirit of a weaned child, was satisfied with the solution, “Even so, Father, for so it seems good in Thy sight”?
“Even so, Father!” Afflicted one! “tossed with tempest, and not comforted,” take that word on which thy Lord pillowed His suffering head, and make it, as He did, the secret of thy resignation.
The sick child will take the bitterest draught from a father’s hand. “This cup which Thou, O God, givest me to drink, shall I not drink it?” Be it mine to lie passive in the arms of Thy chastening love, exulting in the assurance that all Thy appointments, though sovereign, are never arbitrary, but that there is a gracious “need be” in them all. “My Father!” my Covenant God! the God who spared not Jesus! It may well hush every repining word.
Drinking deep of his sweet spirit of submission, you will be able thus to meet, yea, even to welcome, your sorest cross, saying, “Yes, Lord, all is well, just because it is Thy blessed will. Take me, use me, chasten me, as seemeth good in Thy sight. My will is resolved into Thine. This trial is dark; I can not see the ‘why and the wherefore’ of it—but ‘not my will, but Thy will!’ The gourd is withered; I can not see the reason of so speedy a dissolution of the loved earthly shelter; sense and sight ask in vain why these leaves of earthly refreshment have been doomed so soon to droop in sadness and sorrow. But it is enough. ‘The Lord prepared the worm;’ ‘not my will, but Thy will!’”
Oh, how does the stricken soul honor God by thus being dumb in the midst of dark and perplexing dealings, recognizing in these, part of the needed discipline and training for a sorrowless, sinless, deathless world; regarding every trial as a link in the chain which draws it to heaven, where the whitest robes will be found to be those here baptized with suffering, and bathed in tears!
“ARM YOURSELVES LIKEWISE WITH THE SAME MIND.”
“Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”—Luke, ii. 49.
“My meat and my drink are to do the will of Him that sent me, and to finish His work.” That one object brought Jesus from heaven—that one object he pursued with unflinching, undeviating constancy, until He could say, “It is finished.”
However short man comes of his “chief end,” “Glory to God in the highest” was the motive, the rule, and exponent of every act of that wondrous life. With us, the magnet of the soul, even when truest, is ever subject to partial oscillations and depressions, trembling at times away from its great attraction-point. His never knew one tremulous wavering from its all-glorious center. With Him there were no ebbs and flows, no fits and starts. He could say, in the words of that prophetic psalm which speaks so preëminently of Himself, “I have set the Lord always before me!”
Reader! do you feel that in some feeble measure this lofty life-motto of the sinless Son of God is written on your home and heart, regulating your actions, chastening your joys, quickening your hopes, giving energy and direction to your whole being, subordinating all the affections of your nature to their high destiny? With pure and unalloyed motives, with a single eye, and a single aim, can you say, somewhat in the spirit of His brightest follower, “This one thing I do”? Are you ready to regard all you have—rank, name, talents, riches, influence, distinctions—valuable, only so far as they contribute to promote the glory of Him who is “first and last, and all in all”? Seek to feel that your heavenly Father’s is not only a business; but the business of life. “Whose I am, and whom I serve,”—let this be the superscription written on your thoughts and deeds, your employments and enjoyments, your sleeping and waking. Be not, as the fixed stars, cold and distant; but be ever bathing in the sunshine of conscious nearness to Him who is the sun and center of all happiness and joy.
Each has some appointed work to perform, some little niche in the spiritual temple to occupy. Yours may be no splendid services, no flaming or brilliant actions to blaze and dazzle in the eye of man. It may be the quiet, unobtrusive inner work, the secret prayer, the mortified sin, the forgiven injury, the trifling act of self-sacrifice for God’s glory and the good of others, of which no eye but the Eye which seeth in secret is cognizant. It matters not how small. Remember, with Him, motive dignifies action. It is not what we do, but how we do it. He can be glorified in little things as well as great things, and by nothing more than the daily walk, the daily life.
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