24 I Always Do the Things that Please Him
XXIV I ALWAYS DO THE THINGS THAT PLEASE
HIM
There are more kinds of preachers than one. There are exegetical preachers, who keep close to the text, and who labor to draw out the contents of the text, and to press the lessons of the text home upon the hearts of their hearers. They are sometimes called expository preachers, and hearers of a spiritual mind are much delighted with such preaching. John Calvin and Matthew Henry are, perhaps, the best examples we have of exegetical and expository preaching. Then there are doctrinal preachers, who delight in the method and the order of divine things, and who preach more according to the creeds and confessions and catechisms of the Christian Church. And when it is duly subordinated to the exegesis of the Scriptures, such preaching is very edifying and very satisfying to hearers of a masculine mind. Among the Puritans,---the greatest school of preachers the Church of Christ has ever seen---John Owen is perhaps the best example of doctrinal preaching, while Thomas Goodwin is by far the best example of expository preaching; especially on the Epistles of Paul. Then again, there are apologetically preachers, and ethical preachers, and devotional, and evangelistic preachers. And there are experimental preachers, like the Psalmist who said, "Come all ye that fear God, and I will declare what He hath done for my soul." Now our Lord was all these preachers in Himself. Sometimes He was expository and sometimes He was doctrinal and sometimes He was ethical and sometimes lie was apologetical and sometimes He was evangelical. His preaching grew as He grew Himself and as His hearers grew. He studied in His preaching to show Himself approved unto God, a workman that needed not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. Till in one Gospel you will find Him full of one kind of preaching, and in another Gospel full of another kind. From chapter to chapter His tone and His manner and His matter will greatly vary, according to His varying audiences, and according to causes concerning which we are ignorant. But with all that He was emphatically an experimental, and even an autobiographical preacher. "We speak that we do know and testify that we have seen," was the continual seal which He set on all His preaching and on all His teaching. First and last, our divine Lord had come through, and Himself was, all that He preached. And every one who had ears to hear such things felt that and confessed that. Again and again it is testified that our Lord’s preaching was not like any preaching the people had ever heard before. For they had never heard any better preaching before than that of the scribes, at any rate not till John came with his law-work in his hand and with his two-edged sword in every hearer’s heart and conscience.
Preaching in the treasury that day our Lord’s thoughts took an autobiographical and experimental turn. "He that hath sent Me is with Me," He said. "The Father hath not left Me alone; for I do always those things that please Him." And, indeed, He had this same experimental testimony from His Father’s own mouth before He began to preach at all. For, at His baptism which was our Lord’s ordination, so to say, into His preaching office, as He came up out of the Jordan, His Father’s voice saluted Him and sealed Him in these recognizing and reassuring words: "Lo! this is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." The first thirty years of our Lord’s earthly life is summed up for Him, and for us, in these words of His Father, spoken over Him from heaven, "In whom I am well pleased." My brethren, it is surely the most attractive and the most rewarding of all possible studies, to picture to ourselves just how our Lord lived as child, and youth, and man, till He began to be about thirty years of age. He commenced His life of pleasing His Father in heaven by being subject to His father and His mother on earth. And as time went on, and as He grew more and more in wisdom and in stature, His own heart and His own conscience would gradually come to take the place of the parental commands of Joseph and Mary. And then His conscience and His heart would more and more be seconded and supported by the Word of God, which He read in the Psalms and in the Prophets continually. Till, as time still went on, new duties and new obligations would arise before Him, and new trials and new temptations would meet Him, among all of which His Sonship heart and His heavenly mind would instruct and direct Him what to do. And as often as He always did the things that pleased His Father--and that was every day and every hour --the light of His Father’s countenance would more and more be shed abroad in His happy heart. And this would go on till Jesus of Nazareth did not live so much under a servant’s law to God as under a son’s love to God. He did not so much do this and that duty to God and man because that duty was written in the ten commandments of Moses; but, rather, because all the commandments and all their requirements were written and read in His own holy and loving heart. Till a whole lifetime of such a sweet and sure and ever-blessed experience enabled our Lord to say in the temple that day, “I do nothing of myself: but as my Father hath taught Me, I speak these things. And He that sent Me is with Me: the Father hath not left Me alone; for I do always those things that please Him."
Now, in all this, my brethren, as in so much else, the Apostle Paul is a sort of half-way house between our Lord and ourselves. For, in all this matter of always doing the things that please God, Paul stands as far below his Master as he stands above us. I can picture Paul, now sitting alone at his tent-making, and now walking alone on his apostolic journeys, and always meditating on his Master, and on how his Master always and in everything did the things that pleased God. Whereas he, Paul, apostle and all, always did the things that displeased God. I can hear Paul as he sighed the deepest sigh that was ever heaved from a human heart. I can hear him as he pondered and applied to himself these, to him, so awful words of his Master: "I do always those things that please Him." "Oh! wretched man that I am!" broke out that holiest of men. "For I know that the law of God is spiritual; but I am carnal--sold under sin! For that which I do I allow not; for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that I do!" Paul never can please himself, no not in the best things he ever does; and how then can he please God? He cannot, neither in thought, nor in word, nor in deed. Paul’s very righteousness are as filthy rags in his own eyes. "I do count them all but dung "--they are his own passionate words--"that I may win Christ and be found in Him." And, even when he is found in Christ; even when Christ is living in Paul; such was the strength and such was the malice of his remaining carnality -- to use his own self-condemning word--that he could satisfy his conscience and his heart in nothing he ever did. And this went on with Paul till he became the most experimental, and the most doctrinal, and the most evangelical preacher that ever opened a mouth. All Paul’s experiences, both of the law of God and of the grace of God, worked together to enable him and to compel him to pen the Epistle to the Romans. That glorious Epistle, of which Luther says: "The Romans is such a treasury of spiritual riches, and, as it were, such an overflowing cornucopia, that if you read it a thousand times over there is always something to be found new in it, so that the last time of reading it will be the most profitable." My brethren, when we have read the Romans a thousand times over, and have read ourselves a thousand times into its doctrinal and spiritual and experimental and evangelical depths, we will, with its profoundly experienced author, be for ever shut up to the "faith" that is there preached with such unparalleled experience and power. That "faith" which in the judgment of God is ten thousand times better to us, and to Him, than all the good works we can ever do. For, to him who worketh not--that is to say, to him who cannot work--do all he can: to him who is as wretched as Paul was, because he could not do the works of God’s holy law: to him who worketh not his faith in God’s mercy and in the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ is counted to him who has it, for the righteousness he has not and never can have. Do we then make void the law of God through faith? God forbid! Yea, we establish the law. For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God did, by sending His own Son to our help, that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled, first in Him and then through Him in us who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit. Or, as we have it put catechetically and dialectically in the fourth Gospel, Labor not for the meat that perisheth; but for that meat which endureth to everlasting life. Then said they unto Him, What shall we do, that we might work the works of God? Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom God hath sent.
Believe, my brethren; Believe and pray. Oh, pray far more than you have ever done, if you would please God. For, a thousand scriptures assure us that nothing we can do pleases God so much as prayer; believing, persevering, intercessory prayer. Among many things for which we are indebted to Luke’s perfect understanding of all things from the very first, I have often thanked that Evangelist for finding out this, and for putting it into his Gospel. "Now, when all the people were baptized, it came to pass that Jesus also being baptized, and praying, the heaven was opened. And the Holy Ghost descended in bodily shape like a dove upon Him, and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art My beloved Son; in Thee I am well pleased." It was not our Lord’s being baptized that opened heaven, it was His praying all the time of His baptism that drew down the Holy Ghost, and, with the Holy Ghost, His Father’s voice. It was in answer to His Son’s baptism prayer, and it was in acknowledgment of His Son’s thirty years of unceasing prayer, and of the life of holy obedience that followed such prayer, that the Father so spake to His Son at the Jordan that day. My brethren, if you would please God, and work out your own salvation, and the salvation of other men--pray. Pray for yourselves without ceasing. Pray for your children without ceasing. Pray by name for the sick, and especially for the dying, without ceasing. Pray for the bereaved as often as you read and hear of another sudden and sore bereavement. Pray for good men. Pray for bad men that they may be made good. And God will hear you, and will reward you, both inwardly and outwardly, as He rewarded His Son at the Jordan that day. God has so staked everything on prayer, that nothing pleases Him like prayer. Some of His reasons for that we see. But many of His reasons for being so pleased with our prayers we are not fully able in this life to see. But of nothing are we more sure than of this, that all His people, from His Son downward, who have greatly pleased Him, have been men of prayer. It is wonderful! It is almost past belief, that the best rewarded of all our works, should just be to ask, and to seek, and to knock. To kneel down and to lift up our hands, and to lift up our hearts. It is most wonderful, is it not, that simple prayer should have held such a supreme place in the life of God’s Son Jesus Christ; and should be ordained to hold such a supreme place in our lives, and should be the surest means of making us well-pleasing to God? And yet, with all that, who lives a life of prayer? Not one in ten. Not one in a hundred. And then a life well-pleasing to God, has its ever-accumulating reward in answered prayer. According to these closing Scriptures. "Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God. And whatsoever we ask, we receive of Him, because we keep His commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in His sight. And this is His commandment, that we should believe on the name of His Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as He gave in commandment. And he that keepeth His commandments dwelleth in Him, and He in him. And hereby we know that He abideth in us, by the Spirit which He hath given us." Amen.