Chapter 3

"Lord, bid me come," said Peter. And what was the reply of Jesus? Did He say, "Peter, I am astonished at you. Why do you want to do this foolish and insane and impossible thing? Don't you know that the storm is against you? Don't you know that the law of gravitation is against you? Don't you know that the whole experience of the race is against you? You have been about the sea all your life. When did you ever see anybody walk on the waves? Why do you request, then, to do this absurd and ridiculous and impossible thing?"

But Jesus did not say that. I never read where He told a single trusting heart that his request was impossible. I do read where He said the very opposite. He said, "All things are possible to him that believeth." He makes all things possible. That is what he is for. He ever attacks men at the point of their impossibilities. He calls on the selfish man to love his neighbor as himself. He calls on the paralytics to rise and walk. And never does He have a rebuke for the man who dares to fling himself blindly upon His power.

And instead of rebuking Peter He approved him. He encouraged him. He set His sanction upon his request. He said to him, "Come." I am sure if you or I had been there we would have wanted Him to have said far more. We would have wanted Him to explain to us how He would hold us and enable us to walk. But the invitation, "Come," that one word was enough for Peter.

"Come," said Jesus. What would you have done under those circumstances? What would I? I suppose I know. I would have said, "Lord, I'd like to. I wish I could. I've always wanted to do something magnificent. It has occurred to me again and again as I have read the record of thy dealings with thy saints that the Christian life is not to be a dull and drab and unromantic thing. I have felt a thousand times that the faith of the saints ought to have far more of buoyancy and enthusiasm and daring and romantic adventure in it than it has. So since you have bid me come, Lord, I'd like to come. I'll think it over. Who knows but that I may try it some day?"

But Peter was made out of more heroic stuff. The spirit of adventure had not died within him. His faith is full of the finest romance. "Come," said Jesus and immediately I see Peter drop his oar and begin to climb down out of the boat to go to Jesus.

Some of the commentators are very hard on Peter for his boldness and seeming foolhardiness here. But I am frank to say that I like Peter here very much. I suppose most of the critics would have sat very still in the boat. I shouldn't wonder if they would not have put a restraining hand upon Peter. In fact, it would not surprise me if some of his fellow disciples did not do that very thing. I can imagine that Andrew might have gripped him and said, "Peter, sit where you are. You can hardly stay on top of the water now." And Thomas would have said, "Man, are you mad? Nobody ever walked on the water before." But Peter said, "By the help of Christ I will." And with the "storm light in his face" and the spray in his hair and with faith in Christ in his heart he pushes the boat from under his feet.

There is something great about that. There may be much base alloy in Peter, but there is something fine in him also. He is to be admired if he never takes a step. He is worthy of praise if he sinks into the sea as a piece of lead. At least he has dreamed of doing the supernatural. At least he has dared in the presence of Christ to undertake what others were afraid to undertake. He has ventured to stake his life on the power of Christ to make good His promise. If he fails utterly he is still worthy of respect. It is better to make a thousand failures than to be too cowardly to ever undertake anything.

So he steps out upon a stormy sea. It does look a bit mad, doesn't it? And yet it only looks mad because of our blindness and dullness and stupid unbelief. What did Peter have under him when he was in the ship? Upon what were his fellow disciples trusting to keep them from the bottom of the sea? Just two or three planks, that is all. Upon what was Peter trusting? He was trusting upon the sure word of God. When he let himself down from the side of the boat at Christ's invitation he did not drop into the sea. He dropped into God's arms. He dropped into the arms of Him who holds every sea in the hollow of His hand. He dropped into the arms of Him whose power kindled every sun and flung every world into space. Before Peter can sink he must break God's arm. And mad as seemed his act Peter was never so safe in his life. Pile upon him, if you will, all the mountain systems of all the worlds and he will never sink low enough to wet his sandals if he keeps his feet planted upon the promise of Christ.

Jesus said, "Come." Peter did the same that you and I may do. He responded in the affirmative. He said, "Yes, Lord," and made the venture. And what happened? Let me read it to you. "He walked on the water to go to Jesus." He did what was humanly impossible. He accomplished what was absolutely beyond the reach of any human being except for the power of Christ. He walked. It must have been a thrilling experience. It was a joy to himself. It was a joy to his Master. It was a benediction to his fellows. I can see the terror in their faces give way to wonderment and gladness as they say, "Well, well, well! He is doing it after all."

Yes, Peter walked. Let us not let any subsequent failure blind us to this blessed fact. I know that he did not walk far. I know, too, that that was his own fault. It was not the fault of his Lord. Peter might have walked the whole distance but for one fatal mistake. He might have won a complete triumph but for one tragic loss.

What happened to Peter? "He saw the wind boisterous." What does this mean? It means that Peter ceased giving his attention and his confidence to Christ. He fixed upon the difficulties. In other words, he lost his faith. He came to believe in his hindrances more than in his help. He believed in Christ a great deal, but he believed more in waves and wind and lightning and thunder. He believed in Jesus, but he believed more in weakness and death. Looking at the wind he stepped right off God's promise and it wasn't a second till he was up to his neck in the raging water.

There was absolutely no failure possible so long as he stood firm upon the promise of Christ. "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden," Jesus is saying to you that are troubled and sin burdened. That means that you can come. That means that He is eager for you to come. And however far you have gone from God and however stiff may be the tempest that blows about you, if you get this promise under your feet all the storms that hell can let loose against a human soul will leave you unshaken. But you must keep a firm stand on the promise.

If you are here with some great yearning in your heart, some special prayer for usefulness or for deliverance from a peculiar temptation, lay hold on God's Word and cling to it and you will never be put to confusion. A saintly old friend of mine told me on one occasion about praying for his child. And he said he got the assurance that his baby was going to recover. She was suffering from membranous croup. That very night he was awakened by the mother and the nurse. And he heard the mother say to the nurse, "Is she dead?" And he turned and went to sleep with never a question and never a doubt. He refused to look at the waves.

Peter got too interested and too absorbed in difficulties. It is so easy to do that. Peter took counsel of his fears. I have done the same and you have done the same a thousand times over. We are not going to be harsh and critical with him. By so doing we would be too hard upon ourselves. But this I say: It is a great calamity. It is a great shame. Oh, that we might get upon the higher ground of the psalmist who said, "Wherefore will we not fear though the earth be removed and though the mountains be cast into the midst of the sea."

But looking at the boisterous wind and taking counsel of our fears,--these are not the only things that work our ruin. We might be persuaded, and often are, to take our eyes off Christ as much by our advantages as by our disadvantages. Had Peter said within himself, "The law of gravitation is not so invariable as I thought," or "I am a much superior man to what I dreamed I was." If Peter had fixed his confidence in self or in circumstances he would have gone down just the same. Anything that turns our eyes away from a steadfast gaze of faith upon Christ spells disaster.

What happened to Peter when he began to look at the boisterous wind? You know. He began to sink. Peter sinking right in the presence of Christ,--that is pathetic. He can help nobody now. He could not have saved his own child if he had been there. Unbelievers seated smugly in the boat said, "Ah! I thought so. I knew something like that would happen." I do not know that Peter would ever have noticed the boisterous wind unless somebody had called his attention to it. I can imagine Thomas might have shouted to Peter and said, "Look out, Peter. There comes a tremendous wave." Anyway, Peter is sinking.

Did you ever have that experience? Do you know what it is to feel that soul sickening sensation that comes to one who is sinking? Do you know what it means to be losing your grip on God, losing your power in prayer, losing your grip of things spiritual? Did you ever sink? Are you sinking to-day? I think I know something of the experience of Peter. I have an idea that you know something of it.

Young man, away from home for the first time, are you sinking? Little by little are you giving up your faith? Little by little are you flinging away the fine ideals that were the strength of your earlier years? Young woman, are you sinking? Business man, cumbered with many cares, living your life in the thick of the fight, are you keeping straight and clean or are you losing your vision? Are you sinking? What was the matter with Lot in Sodom? He led a sinking life. That was it and it cost him every one that was dear to him. It will prove expensive to you. Oh, Christian worker, you will not count as long as you are living a defeated and failing and sinking life.

But even in his failure Peter has a message for us. In his defeat he is his own straightforward, sincere and honest self. When Peter realized that he was sinking he did not try to conceal the matter. He did not say, "I'll fight it out in my own strength." He threw himself at once on the infinite strength of Christ. He prayed. That was a wise thing. That was a big and manly thing. Peter prayed. Have you forgotten the art?

And listen to that prayer. It was white hot with earnestness. "Lord, save me." It is short, too. Notice that. When you do not want anything, when you have no burden, when you are careless and indifferent and listless, you can get down on your knees and pour out whole hogsheads of mere words. When you are spiritually asleep and morally stupid you can utter platitudes in the form of prayer endlessly. But when the sword of genuine conviction has passed through your soul, when you are doing business in great waters, then you fling aside your platitudinous petitions and call out in solemn earnestness for help.

That prayer was a confession. It was a confession of failure, a confession of defeat. It was also a confession of need. Some men would have been too proud to have made it. What a terrible thing is pride, that damning pride that makes us unwilling to confess our sin even to God. "For he that covereth his sin shall not prosper." But "if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."

Peter was different. That was his salvation. He blurted out the whole pitiful story and threw himself on the mercy of Jesus. And what happened? That which always happens when men thus pray. "Immediately Jesus stretched forth His hand and caught him." And Peter, who had walked and had sunk, rose and walked again. And so may you and so may every single sinking and floundering and failing soul here. All you need to do is pray as Peter prayed and to believe as Peter believed.

And now, my brethren, do you not agree that we need more of the faith that made Peter undertake his mad enterprise? Isn't the tragedy of the Church to-day just this, that the average Christian is not walking by faith, but by sight? That is the reason we have so little of that high spirit of daring that marked the early Church. That is the reason that life for many of us is so dull and prosaic. What we need is faith. For faith is not a tame and spineless thing that dares nothing. Real faith dares something, something big and brawny, beyond the human. Hence it brings into life the thrill of finest romance.

"Come," said Jesus, and Peter gave an instant obedience. May you and I be as wise. For our Lord is inviting us just as He invited Peter. Are you thirsty? He says, "Come to me and drink." Are you hungry? He says, "Come and dine." Are you tired and burdened? He says, "Come and I will give you rest." Are you eager to be of service? He says, "Come,--and out of your inner life shall flow rivers of living water." Brethren, all our needs are met in Him. He is our sufficiency. He is summoning us even now to venture upon Him. "Will you make the venture?

"Out of my shameful failure and loss, Jesus, I come, Jesus, I come; Into the glorious gain of Thy cross, Jesus, I come to Thee; Out of the depths of ruin untold, Into the peace of Thy sheltering fold, Ever hereafter Thy face to behold, Jesus, I come to Thee."

IV

LOVE'S LONGING--PAUL

_Philippians 3:10_

"That I may know . . . the fellowship of His sufferings." Weymouth gives this translation: "I long to share His sufferings." Paul is here leading us into the very innermost sanctuary of his heart. He is revealing to us the supreme passion of his life. He is letting us know what is his one great ambition. "I long," he says. And knowing what a mighty man he was we lean eagerly forward that we may hear the word that comes from his lips. For we are keen to know what is the dearest desire of this brave heart.

And as we listen this is the perplexing word that comes to us: "I long to share in His sufferings." How startlingly strange that longing is. We are half ready to wonder if we have heard aright. And when we realize that we have, we instinctively think of the words of the Roman governor, Festus: "Paul, thou art beside thyself. Much learning doth make thee mad." We wonder if Festus was not right after all. Isn't Paul a bit insane?

"I long to share in His suffering." It sounds like madness to many of us because it is so foreign to our own deepest desires. Had Paul said, "I long for a place of honor; I long that my presence should elicit the applause of the world and call forth the crowns of the world"; had he said this, we could easily have understood him. Had he expressed a longing for a place in the hall of fame, had he said, "My one desire is that the world shall keep sacred my memory," he would have been easily understood by us. We would have said "This is very natural and very human." But that is not what he says. This is his strange language: "I long to share in Christ's sufferings."

Had Paul said that he longed to escape pain and anguish and sorrow we might also have understood him. Had he said, "I long to escape the penalty of sin even though I live in sin," many of us could have appreciated this desire. For there are always those who, while they do not yearn especially for deliverance from sin, do yearn to be saved from its penalty. They do not desire to be saved from the sowing of tares, but they want to be saved from the reaping of the harvest. They do not pray for deliverance from the broad road, but they desire that this broad road terminate at the gate of Heaven instead of at the gate of destruction. Had this man said that he desired to escape hell everybody could have sympathized with him. But that is not his desire.

What he said was entirely different. "I long," he says, "to share in the sufferings of Christ; I long to weep as He wept; I long to sympathize as He sympathized; I long to travel life by His road; I long to pass through His Gethsemane and to climb His Calvary and to share in my finite way in His Cross." It is an amazing desire. What is its secret?

Why could Paul truly say such a word as this? In the first place, he could not say it because it was natural for him. There had been a time when he had given utterance to such a statement it would have been grossly false. When Paul rode out from Jerusalem on his way to Damascus, for instance, he longed for anything else more than he longed to share in the sufferings of Christ. It required a marvelous change. It required an absolute transformation to bring Paul to the place where he was able to give utterance to this high and heroic sentiment. He was not possessed of such a longing by nature.

Nor did Paul long to share in the sufferings of Christ because he looked upon these sufferings as trivial. Few men have ever understood the sufferings of Christ as did Paul. He had an appreciation of their intensity and of their bitterness far beyond most other men. He understood as few have ever understood the physical agonies of the Cross. Paul was a great physical sufferer himself.

But he knew what we sometimes forget, that infinitely the deepest pain of Jesus was not physical. Had there been nothing involved in His crucifixion but physical agony then we are forced to acknowledge that many of His followers have endured the same kind of pain with a fortitude to which He was a stranger. His agony was from another source. He suffered because He was made "to be sin for us, who knew no sin." He suffered in that "he was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities." It was this fact that wrung from Him that bitterest of all cries, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

Nor did Paul possess this desire because he longed for pain in itself. Paul was not a calloused soul. Few men have ever been more sensitive to pain. He had no more fondness for being shipwrecked than you and I have. He had no more pleasure in being stoned, in being publicly whipped, in being thrown into dark dungeons and stenchful prison cells than you and I have. He no more delighted in being ridiculed and ostracized than you and I would delight in these things. Paul took no more pleasure in hunger and cold, in peril and nakedness, in agony and tears than you and I would take in them.

Yet we find him longing to share in the sufferings of Christ. Why did he long for this strange privilege? There are two reasons. He longed to share in Christ's sufferings, first, because he genuinely and passionately loved Christ. If you have ever at any time truly loved anybody you will be able to understand this longing of Saint Paul. It is the nature of love to always seek either to spare or to share the pain of the loved one.

One of the sweetest stories in our American literature, I think, is that of "The Wife" told by Washington Irving. You remember it. It has been re-enacted a thousand times over. A man of wealth has lost his fortune. He is heart-broken over it, not on his own account but on account of his wife. She has been tenderly nurtured. He is sure that poverty will break her heart. But he has to tell her. The lovely home in the city must be given up. They must move to a cottage in the country. He enters upon the hard ordeal. It is his Gethsemane. But to his utter amazement he finds his wife more joyous, more genuinely happy in the midst of this trying experience than he has ever known her to be before. What is the secret? She is in love with her husband and loving him, it is her keenest joy to be able to share his sorrow with him.

The wife of the southern poet, Sidney Lanier, was just such a one as Irving's heroine. You will recall what a long hard fight Lanier had with sickness and poverty and what a tower of strength through it all was the gentle and tender woman who loved him.

"In the heart of the Hills of Life, I know Two springs that with unbroken flow Forever pour their lucent streams Into my soul's far Lake of Dreams.

Not larger than two eyes, they lie, Beneath the many-changing sky And mirror all of life and time, --Serene and dainty pantomime.

Shot through with lights of stars and dawns, And shadowed sweet by ferns and fawns, --Thus heaven and earth together vie Their shining depth to sanctify.

Always when the large Form of Love Is hid by storms that rage above, I gaze in my two springs and see Love in his very verity.

* * * *

O Love, O Wife, thine eyes are they, --My springs from out whose shining gray Issue the sweet celestial streams That feed my life's bright Lake of Dreams.

Oval and large and passion-pure And gray and wise and honor-sure; Soft as a dying violet-breath Yet calmly unafraid of death.

* * * *

Dear eyes, dear eyes and rare complete-- Being heavenly-sweet and earthly-sweet, --I marvel that God made you mine, For when He frowns, 'tis then ye shine!"

Now, what was there in the seeming frown of God to make the eyes of love shine? It was just this: they were alight with the joy that comes when love is privileged to share the pain of the beloved.

I heard a grizzled old soldier who was an officer in the Civil War tell of a raw recruit who came into his regiment. This recruit was awkward and uncouth and unattractive. He seemed to be little more than an incarnate blunder. He would stumble and fall down over his own musket. Naturally he was the butt of many jokes. He was the laughing stock of all his comrades. But this officer said that he tried to befriend him. But if the uncouth fellow appreciated his efforts to help him he never said so. He seemed as awkward in expressing himself as he was in all other respects.

"One night," said this officer, "we were sleeping without tents and it was bitter cold. I shivered under my blanket till I went to sleep. When I waked in the morning, however, I was warm. Then I noticed, to my astonishment, that I was sleeping under two blankets instead of one. I looked about me for an explanation. A little way off was this gawky, green, uncouth soldier striding back and forth with the snow pelting him in the face. He was waving his thin arms as he walked to keep from freezing to death. That soldier died a few days later. He died from the exposure of that night. But a smile was on his face as I sat beside him." Now, why did the soldier smile? You know. He was rejoicing that he was able to spare and to share the suffering of his friend.

"I long to share in His sufferings." That is the language of love. To one who does not know love it will forever be a mystery. But to the lover it is easily comprehensible. Any real mother can understand it. Down in Tennessee a few years ago a mother was out riding with her little boy. The horse took fright and ran away. The buggy was wrecked. The mother escaped without injury. But the little lad was so crippled that he was never able to sit up again.