Part 9

When Christ asked Saul that question He might have added: “I lived on Earth thirty years, and I never did you any hurt or injury; I never even injured your friends. I came into the world to bless you. Why persecutest thou Me?”

When this question was put to Saul He supplemented it by saying: “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” You and I would not have had any compassion upon Saul if we had been in Christ’s place. We would have said the hardship is upon the poor Christians in Damascus. But the Lord saw differently.

In those days, when people did not drive their camels with whips, they had a stick with a sharp piece of steel at the end, called a prick, and with this the animal was goaded. Hence the point of the saying is obvious.

SIMEON.

The Lord was one day at Jerusalem, and a banquet was given him by Simeon.

There was a banquet table in the house, arranged according to the fashion of that day. Instead of chairs for the guests, the guests sat reclining on lounges.

Well, it was just one of these repasts that our Lord sat down to, along with the wealthy Simeon and his many guests. But no sooner had He entered than a certain woman followed Him into the house. She fell down at His feet, and began to wash them with her tears.

It was the custom in those days to wash one’s feet on entering a house. Sandals were worn, and the practice was necessary.

This woman had got into the house by some means, and, once inside, had quietly stolen up to the feet of the Savior. In her hand was a box; but her heart, too, was just as full of ointment as the box she carried. And there was the sweetest perfume as she stole to His feet.

Her tears started to fall down on those sacred feet--hot, scalding tears, that gushed out like water. She said nothing while the tears fell, and then she took down her long black hair and wiped His feet with the hair of her head. And after that she poured out the ointment on His feet.

At once the Pharisees began to talk together. How, all through the New Testament, these Pharisees kept whispering and talking together!

They said, shaking their heads: “This Man receiveth sinners. Were He a prophet, He would know who and what manner of woman this is that touches Him, for she is a sinner.” No prophet, they insisted, would allow that kind of a woman near him, but would push her away from him.

But Jesus read their thoughts, and quickly rebuked them. He said: “Simeon, I have something to say to thee.”

Simeon answered: “Master, say on.”

“Seest thou this woman? I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water to wash my feet; but she has washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head. Thou gavest me no kiss, but this woman, since I came in, hath not ceased to kiss my feet. My head with ointment thou didst not anoint, but this woman hath anointed my feet with ointment.”

Simeon was like many Pharisees nowadays, who say: “Oh, well! We will entertain that minister if we must. We do not want to, for he is a dreadful nuisance; but we will have to put up with him. It is our duty to be patronizing.”

Well, the Master said more to His entertainer, as follows:

“There was a certain creditor which had two debtors. One owed 500 pence and the other 50 pence, and when he had nothing to pay----”

Mark that, sinner; the debtor had nothing to pay. There is no sinner in the world who can pay any thing to cancel his debt to God. The great trouble is that sinners think they can pay--some of them 75 cents on the dollar, some even feel able to pay 99 cents on the dollar, and the one cent that they are short they believe can be made up in some manner. That is not the correct way; it is all wrong; you must throw all the debt on God. Some few, very likely, will only claim to pay 25 cents on the dollar, but they are not humble enough, either; they can not begin to carry out their bargain. Why, sinner, you could not pay one-tenth part of a single mill of the debt you are under to God.

Now, it is said in this parable the debtors could not pay their creditor any thing; they had nothing to give, and their creditor frankly forgave them both.

“Now, Simeon,” the Master asked, “which should love that man the more?”

“I suppose,” was the reply, “he that was forgiven the more.”

“You have rightly judged. This woman loves much because she has been forgiven much.” And Jesus went on to tell Simeon all about her. I suppose He wanted to make it plainer to Simeon, and He turned to the poor woman and said:

“Thy sins are forgiven; go in peace.”

All her sins were forgiven--not simply part of them; not half them, but every sin from the cradle up. Every impurity is blotted out for time and eternity.

Yes, truly, she went out in peace, for she went out in the light of Heaven. With what brightness the light must have come down to her from those eternal hills! With what beauty it must have flashed on her soul!

Yes, she came to the feet of the Master for a blessing, and she received it.

THE GOOD SAMARITAN.

We are told that as Jesus stood with His disciples a man, a lawyer, stood up and tempted Him.

The lawyer asked Jesus this question:

“Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”

He asked what he could do to inherit eternal life--what he could do to buy salvation.

Jesus answered his question by asking another question: “What is written in the law? How readest thou?”

To this the lawyer answered:

“Thou shalt love the Lord God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself.”

“Thou hast answered right. But who is ‘thy neighbor?’”

Then Jesus drew a vivid picture, which has been told for the last eighteen hundred years, and I do not know any thing that brings out more truthfully the wonderful power of the Gospel than this story. It is the story of the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and who fell among thieves.

Jerusalem was called the City of Peace. Jericho and the road leading to it were infested with thieves. Probably it had been taken possession of by the worst of Adam’s sons.

I do not know how far the man got from Jerusalem toward Jericho, but the thieves had come out and fallen upon him, and had taken all his money, stripped him of his clothing and left him wounded. I suppose they left him for dead.

By-and-by, a priest came down the road from Jerusalem. We are told that he came by chance. Perhaps he was going down to dedicate some synagogue or preach a sermon on some important subject, and had the manuscript in his pocket.

As he was going along on the other side, he heard a groan. He turned around, and saw the poor fellow, lying bleeding on the ground, and pitied him. He went up close, took a look at him, and said: “Why, that man is a Jew! He belongs to the seed of Abraham. If I remember aright, I saw him in the synagogue last Sabbath. I pity him; but I have too much business, and I can not attend to him.”

He felt a pity for him, and looked on him, and probably wondered why God allowed such men as were those thieves to come into the world. Then he passed by.

There are many men just like this priest. They stop to discuss and wonder why sin came into the world, and look upon a wounded man, but do not stop to pick up a poor sinner--forgetting the fact that sin is in the world already, and must be rooted out.

Soon another man came along, a Levite, and he also heard the groans of the robbers’ victim. He, too, turned about and looked upon him with pity. He felt compassion for him. He was one of those men that, if we had him here, we would probably make an elder or a deacon. He looked at the suffering man and said: “Poor fellow! He is all covered with blood! He has been badly hurt; he is nearly dead; and they have taken all his money and stripped him naked! Ah, well; I pity him.” He would like to extend help, but he, too, has very pressing business; and so he passes by on the other side. But he has scarcely got out of sight when another one comes along, riding on a beast. He heard the groans of the wounded man, and went over and took a good look at him.

The traveler was a Samaritan. When he looked down he saw the man was a Jew.

Ah, how the Jews looked down upon the Samaritans. There was a great, high partition wall between the Jews and the Samaritans. The Jews would not allow them in the Temple; they would not have any dealings with them; they would not associate with them.

I can see him coming along that road, with his good, benevolent face; and as he passes he hears a groan from the poor fellow. He draws in his beast, and pauses to listen. “And he came to where he was.”

This is the sweetest thing, to my mind, in the whole story.

A good many people would like to help a poor man if he was on the platform--if it cost them no trouble. They want him to come to them. They are afraid to touch the wounded man; he is all over blood, and they will get their hands soiled.

And that was just the way with the priest and the Levite. This poor man, perhaps, had paid half of all his means to help the service in the Temple, and might have been a constant worshiper; but they only felt pity for him.

This good Samaritan “came to where he was,” and after he saw him he had compassion on him. That word “compassion”--how sweet it sounds! The first thing he did on hearing him cry for water--the hot sun had been pouring down upon his head--was to go and get it from a brook. Then he goes and gets a bag, that he had with him--what we might call a carpet-bag or a saddle-bag in the West--and pours in oil on his wounds. Then he says to himself: “The poor fellow is weak.” So he goes and gets a little wine. He has been lying so long in the burning sun that he is nearly dead now--he had been left half dead--and the wine revives him.

The good Samaritan looks him over, and sees all the wounds that need to be bound up. But he has nothing to do this with. I can see him now, tearing the lining out of his coat, and with it binding up his wounds. Then he takes him up and lays him on his bosom until he is revived, and, when the poor fellow gets strength enough, the good Samaritan puts him on his own beast.

If the Jew had not been half dead he would never have allowed the Samaritan to put his hands on him. He would have treated him with scorn. But he is half dead, and he can not prevent the good Samaritan treating him kindly and putting him on his beast.

Did you ever stop to think what a strong picture it would have been if the Samaritan had not been able himself to get the man on the beast--if he had needed to call any assistance?

Perhaps a man would have come along, and he would have asked him to help him with the wounded man.

“What are you?”

“I am a Samaritan.”

“You are a Samaritan, are you? I can not help you--I am a Jew.”

There is a good deal of that spirit today--just as strong as it was then. When we are trying to get a poor man on the right way--when we are tugging at him to get his face toward Zion--we ask some one to help us, but he says: “I am a Roman Catholic.”

“Well,” you say, “I am a Protestant.”

So they give no assistance to one another.

The same spirit of old is present today. The Protestants will have nothing to do with the Catholics; the Jews will have nothing to do with the Gentiles. And there was a time--but, thank God, we are getting over it--when a Methodist would not touch a Baptist nor a Presbyterian a Congregationalist; and if we beheld a Methodist taking a man out of the ditch, a Baptist was sure to ask:

“What are you going to do with him?”

“Take him to a Methodist church.”

“Well, I’ll have nothing to do with him.”

A great deal of this has gone by, and the time is certainly coming when, if we are trying to get a man out of the ditch, and they see us tugging at him, and we are so faint that we can not get him on the beast, they will help him. And that is what Christ wants.

Well, the Samaritan gets him on his beast, and says to him:

“You are very weak, but my beast is sure-footed; he’ll take you to the inn, and I’ll hold you.”

He held him firmly, and God is able to hold every one He takes out of the pit. I see them going along the road, he holding him on, and he gets him to the inn. He gets him there, and he says to the inn keeper:

“Here is a wounded man; the thieves have been after him; give him the best attention you can; nothing is too good for him.”

I can imagine the good Samaritan as stopping there all night, sitting up with him, and attending to his every need. And the next morning he gets up and says to the landlord:

“I must be off; I leave a little money to pay you for what the man has had, and if that is not enough I will pay what is necessary when I return from my business in Jericho.”

This good Samaritan gave this landlord twopence to pay for what he had got, and promised to come again and repay whatever had been spent to take care of the man, and he had given him, besides, all his sympathy and compassion.

Jesus tells this story in answer to the lawyer who came to tempt Him, and showed that the Samaritan was the neighbor.

Now, this story is brought out here to teach church-goers this thing: It is not creed or doctrine that we need so much as compassion and sympathy.

THE LEPER.

See that poor leper! Do you know what an awful thing leprosy is? A disease so terrible that it separates its victim from all the world, and makes him an outcast, even from his home. Every one is afraid of him. His disease is so contagious that to touch him or even to breathe the air near him is dangerous; and so these poor, afflicted wretches have to go away and live in cave or desert all alone.

They sit by the wayside afar off, calling to the passers-by for charity--who sometimes throw them a piece of money and hurry off, lest they also come into that terrible plight.

Here is a poor man who finds the marks of what he thinks is this terrible disease upon his body. According to the law, he must go to the priest and be examined.

Alas! The priest says it is leprosy--nothing else.

Now the poor man, with broken heart, turns away from the Temple. He goes to his house, to say good-by to his wife and to take his children in his arms once more before he goes away to spend the long years in the wilderness alone, or with other lepers like himself, until death shall come to deliver him from his sufferings.

What a sorry house is that! Surely, this is worse than death itself.

He goes out of his door with no hope of ever entering it again. He walks the street by himself, and if any one comes near he lifts up his voice in that mournful cry:

“Unclean! Unclean!”

Out of the gates of the city he goes, away from all his friends and acquaintances, carrying with him the sorrow of separation and the seeds of death.

One day he sees a crowd passing along the road, but he dares not go near enough to inquire what it is. All at once he happens to think it may be that Prophet of Nazareth whom he had heard of--that same Man that, people said, could open the eyes of blind men, make lame men to walk, and who had even raised the son of the widow from death, over there at Nain. If only He were passing! At any rate, he will take the chances, and cry out after Him; and so he shouts, at the top of his voice:

“Have mercy upon me!”

All the rest of the crowd are afraid of him, but Jesus, who is in the midst, hears some one calling; and, just as He always did when any one wanted any thing of Him, He stopped to find out what it was.

He is not afraid of the leper; and so, while the rest of the crowd stand apart by themselves, He calls the poor fellow up to Him, and asks him what he wants.

The leper, with his heart full of anxious hope, makes answer:

“Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean.”

Jesus says: “I will; be thou clean.”

A strange sense of health and strength comes suddenly over the man. He looks at his hands, and finds the leprosy all gone. He begins to pour out his heart in thanks to Jesus, who sends him away to the priests, saying: “Go, show thyself to the priests, and offer the gift that Moses commanded.”

Now, I seem to see that cleansed leper, hurrying off to show himself to the priest, to be pronounced cured, according to the law; and then hastening to his little home, to see his wife and children once more. He bursts into the house, weeping for joy. He stretches out his arms to his wife and little ones, saying: “I am clean! Jesus did it--Jesus of Nazareth.”

THE PENITENT THIEF.

I am going to take for my text, this morning, “A Man”--the last one that Jesus saved before He returned to Heaven.

The fact that Jesus saved such a man at all ought to give every one of us much hope and comfort. This man was a thief--a highwayman and murderer, perhaps--and yet Christ takes him with Him when He ascends to glory; and if Jesus is not ashamed of such a man, surely no class of sinners need to feel that they are left out.

It is a blessed fact that all kinds of men and women are represented among the converts in the Gospels, and almost all of them were converted suddenly.

Very many people object to sudden conversions, but you may read in the Acts of the Apostles of eight thousand people converted in two days. That seems to me rather quick work. If all the Christians before me this morning would only consecrate themselves to the work of Christ, they might be the means of converting that number before the week is out.

Let us look at Christ hanging on the cross, between two thieves--the Scribes and Pharisees wagging their heads and jeering at Him, His disciples gone away, and only His mother and one or two other women in sight to cheer Him with their presence, among all this concourse of enemies--relentless and mocking enemies.

Hear those spiteful Pharisees calling out to Jesus: “If Thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross, and we will believe on Thee.” And the account says that the two thieves cast the same in His teeth.

So, then, the first thing that we know of our man is that he is a reviler of Christ. You might reasonably think that he ought to be doing something else at such a time as this; but, hanging there in the midst of his tortures, and certain to be dead in a few hours, instead of confessing his sins and preparing to meet the God whose laws he had broken all his life--instead of that, he is abusing God’s only Son. Surely, this man can not sink any lower until he sinks into hell!

The next thing we hear of him, he appears to be under conviction. Nobody is ever converted until he is convicted.

In the twenty-third chapter of Luke we read:

“And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on Him, saying: ‘If Thou be the Christ, save Thyself and us.’ But the other, answering, rebuked him, saying: ‘Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds; but this man hath done nothing amiss.’”

What, do you suppose, it was that made this great change in this man’s feelings in these few hours?

Christ had not preached him a sermon--had given him no exhortation. The darkness had not yet come on; the Earth had not opened its mouth; the business of death was going on as usual; the crowd was still there, mocking and hissing and wagging their heads; and yet this man, who in the morning was railing at Christ, is now confessing his sins.

“We indeed justly.”

No miracle had been wrought before his eyes. The Son of God had not come down from the cross. No angel from Heaven had come to place a glittering crown upon His head, in place of the bloody crown of thorns.

What was it, then?

I will tell you what I think it was. I think it was the Savior’s prayer:

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

I seem to hear this thief talking with himself in this fashion:

“What a strange kind of man this must be! He says He is King of the Jews; and the superscription on His cross says the same thing. But what sort of a throne is this? He says He is the Son of God. Why does not God send down His angels, and destroy all this great gathering of people that are torturing His Son? If He has all power now, as He used to have when He worked those miracles they talk about, why does He not bring out His vengeance, and sweep all these wretches into destruction? I would do it in a minute, if I had the power. Oh, if I could, I would open the Earth, and swallow up these tormentors!

“But this man prays to God to ‘forgive them.’

“Strange! Strange! He must be different from the rest of us. I am sorry that I said one word against Him when they first hung us up here. What a difference there is between Him and me!

“Here we are, hanging on two crosses--side by side; but all the rest of our lives we have been far enough apart. I have been robbing and murdering, but He has been visiting the hungry, healing the sick, and raising the dead. Now these people are railing at us both. What a strange world is this!

“I will not rail at Him any more. Indeed, I begin to believe He must be the Son of God; for, surely, no son of man could forgive his enemies this way.”

That is what did it, my friends.

This poor man had been scourged and beaten and nailed to the cross, and hung up there for the world to gaze upon; and he was not sorry for his sins one single bit--did not feel the least conviction on account of all that misery. But when he heard the Savior praying for His murderers that broke his heart.

I remember to have heard a story, somewhere, of a bad boy that had run away from home. He had given his father no end of trouble. He had refused all the invitations that his father had sent him to come home and be forgiven, and help to comfort his old heart. He had even gone so far as to scoff at his father and mother.

But one day a letter came, telling him his father was dead, and they wanted him to come home and attend the funeral.

At first he determined he would not go, but then he thought it would be a shame not to pay some little show of respect to the memory of so good a man after he was dead; and so, just as a matter of form, he took a train and went to the old home.

He sat through all the funeral services, saw his kind old father buried, and came back with the rest of the friends to the house, with his heart as cold and stony as ever. But when the old man’s will was brought out to be read, the ungrateful son found that his father had remembered him along with all the other members of the family in the will, and had left him an inheritance with the others, who had not gone astray.

This broke his heart.

It was too much for him, that his old father, during all those years in which he had been so wicked and so rebellious, had never ceased to love him.

That is just the way our Father in Heaven does with us. That is just the way Jesus does with people who refuse to give their hearts to Him. He loves them in spite of their sins, and it is the love which, more than any thing else, brings hard-hearted sinners to fall upon their knees.

Now, this thief on the cross confessed his sins. A man may be very sorry for his sins; but, if he does not confess them, he has no promise of being forgiven. The thief says: “We are suffering justly.” I never knew any man to be converted until he confessed.

Cain felt bad enough over his sins, but he did not confess.

Saul was greatly tormented in his mind, but he went to the Witch of Endor rather than to the Lord.