03.06. The Preacher in the Home

LECTURE VI THE PREACHER IN THE HOME "From house to house" In our previous lectures we have been considering the preacher’s calling, the glory of his themes, the studious preparation of his message, and the presentation of the message in the sanctuary amid conditions which have been ordered and fashioned to be allies of the truth. And now we are to consider the preacher’s calling when he leaves the public sanctuary and enters the private home. There is a change of sphere but no change of mission. The line of purpose continues unbroken. He is still a messenger, carrying good news; he is still an ambassador, bearing the decrees of the eternal God. His audience is smaller, his business is the same.

Now the difficulty of delivering a message is in inverse proportion to the size of the audience. The greater the audience the easier the task: with a diminished audience our difficulties are increased. I know that a crowd brings its perils, and they are very subtle, and we are not always doing our strongest work when we are least conscious of the dangers. Crowds may add to our comfort but they do not necessarily add to our Spiritual triumphs. We may" be least effective When we feel our work to be easiest, and we may be in the most deadly grips with things when we have difficulties and reluctance’s on every side. Now, I think that the common experience is this, that the difficulties of the messenger become multiplied as his hearers become few. It is a harder thing to speak about our Lord to a family than to a congregation, and it is harder still to single out one of the family and give the message to him. To face the individual soul with the word of God, to bring to him the mind of the Master, whether in counsel or encouragement, in reproof or comfort, is one of the heaviest commissions given to our charge. Where there are ten men who can face a crowd there is only one who can face the individual. What is the explanation of it?

Well, in the first place, the fear of a man is a much more subtle thing than the fear of men. The fear of a man bringeth a most insidious snare, and too often the fear is created by the mere accidents of circumstance and not by any essential gifts of character. We are intimidated by the office rather than by the officer: by a man’s talents rather than by his disposition: by his wealth rather than by his personality. Nay, our timidity sometimes arises from the splendor of a man’s house rather than from any splendor in the tenant. And from all this kind of fear the preacher is not exempt. The snare is ever about him, and he may measure his growth in grace by the strength with which he meets the snare and overcomes it. It was a noble type of courage which inspired Paul to "fight with beasts at Ephesus ": it was a nobler courage with which he confronted the Apostle Peter, reputed to be "a pillar of the Church," and "withstood him to the face because he stood condemned."

I confess that this part of our commission, the carrying of the message to the individual, was the greatest burden of my early ministry. Of course it is perfectly natural that in our earliest ministry this burden should be the heaviest. There is our lack of experience, there is the timidity of untried powers, there is the deference we pay to years,--all these tend to make us fearful and reserved, and disinclined to speak to individuals of their personal relationship to the Lord. A sermon is easier than a conversation. And yet from the very beginning of our ministry this obligation is laid upon us, and we cannot neglect it without imperiling the health and welfare of immortal souls. And how we shrink from it! I vividly remember the first battle-royal I had with the temptation soon after my ministry began. I heard on excellent authority that one of my people was "giving way to drink." He was a man of some standing in the church, and he was possessed of considerable wealth. I had already preached more than one temperance sermon, but these had been general messages addressed to a congregation. I was now ordered by the Master to carry the message to an individual, and to tactfully withstand him to his face, because he stood condemned! How I wriggled under the commission! How I shrank from it! How I dallied with it! And even when I had fought my way almost to his door, I lingered in the street in further faithless loitering. But at length courage e0nquered fear, I faced my man, tremblingly gave him my message, and by the grace of God he heard the voice of God and was saved from a horrible pit and the miry clay. Gentlemen, it seemed as though I could preach a sermon and never meet a devil: but as soon as I began to take my sermon to the individual the streets were thick with devils, and I had to be like the armed man in "The Pilgrim’s Progress" who, "after he had received and given many wounds to those that attempted to keep him out, cut his way through them all, and pressed forward into the palace." But I will say again, "the fear of man bringeth a share." But there is perhaps a second reason why we shrink from these individual commissions. There is a certain secularity which is often embedded in our characters and which makes us half-ashamed W "talk religion" in private. The "wares" seem out of place. We can "talk" politics, or business, or sport, but religion seems an intrusion which will certainly be resented. Men can scent "the garments of myrrh" afar off, and turn away as they approach. And the secularity in our souls takes sides with this aversion, and we are snared into sinful silence, and our solemn charge is unfulfilled. And thus the spirit of the world makes its home in our souls and defines the limits of our commission. The Lord issues the decree, but worldliness is permitted to appoint its bounds. And I will mention a third reason why the individual ministry is beset by so much reluctance and timidity. There is a certain shyness which makes us shrink from any assumption of moral and spiritual superiority. When we minister in the pulpit, and proclaim the exacting commandments of the Lord, we may regard the proclamation as the utterance of a voice not our own, and we may place ourselves among the struggling, stumbling congregation, which is listening to decrees from the great white throne. We can preach to a crowd and yet number ourselves in its faltering ranks. But when we go to the individual, to minister in the things of the higher life, we go not merely as a voice but as an incarnation. We cannot hide from ourselves that we go not only with the strength of a message but in the assumption of an attainment. And sometimes we shrink from it, lest the assumption should appear presumption, and lest we should seem tainted with Pharisaic pride and profession. That is an exceedingly subtle temptation. It is born amid the delicate reserves and reticence of true humility, but it may be perverted into the faithlessness of unlawful shame. It is one thing to be humble about our spiritual attainments, it is quite another thing to be betrayed into acting as though we had no tokens of heavenly favor, and no riches from the treasury of grace. There is a false modesty which makes us disloyal: there is a true humility which constrains us to make our boast in the Lord. The one may make us silent about ourselves, the other will make us silent about the Lord.

There may be other explanations, besides those which I have named, why many of us are so indisposed to religious dealings with the individual man. But whatever the radical explanation may be, there is the fact: we fear the individual more than we fear the crowd. Multitudes of ministers can fish with a net who are very reluctant to fish with a line. But it is as clearly a part of our commission to go out after "the one" as to minister to "the ninety-and-nine": and therefore we are called upon to master our reluctance and our timidity’s, and with steady loyalty to carry our ministry from the pulpit into the home, and from the great assembly to the individual soul.

Now I want to frankly confess my own conviction that in this attempted ministry to the home there is a pathetic waste of precious time. I have no confidence whatever in the ministry which calculates its afternoon’s work by the number of doorbells it has rung, and the number of streets it has covered, and the number of supposed "calls" that can be registered in the pastoral books. I attach little value to the breathless knocking at a door, the restless, "How do you do?" and the perspiring departure to another door where a similar hasty errand is effected. I attach even less value to a sharp, short series of afternoon gossiping which only skim the surfaces of things, and which never come within sight of those stupendous heights and depths that matter everything to immortal souls. "Wandering about from house to house . . . tattlers also and busybodies, speaking things which they ought not." I say that this kind of ministry, burdensome and tiring as it certainly is, is effeminate work, and it is a tragic waste of a strong man’s time. But here again, a clear and well-defined purpose, large, luminous, sacred, and sanctifying, will be our sure defense against puerility’s and against all sinful trifling with time and strength. Ever and everywhere, in the pulpit and out of it, amid a crowd, with a few, or holding fellowship with the individual, the true minister will guide himself with the self-arresting challenge: "What am I after?" and he will continually refresh his vision and ambition by the contemplation of the apostolic aim:--"To present every man perfect in Christ

Jesus."

There is no need that a minister be pietistic just because he unceasingly cherishes a glorious end. Nay, the pious prig will be absolutely impossible where a man seeks to live in the glory of his "High calling in Christ Jesus." A lofty purpose can minister through lighter moods. It can consecrate church-bells and ring out a merry peal, as well as fire-bells and ring out its loud alarm. It can seek its serious ends through laughter as well as through tears. Its quest of the Holy Grail runs through many a bright and jocund day. It can use the ministries of wit and humor and yet never lose sight of its end. How true all this was of Spurgeon! He could fish in the sunniest seas I His geniality was ever the companion of his piety, and his smile was never far away from his tears. He followed a great purpose, and a big retinue of powers moved in his train. They moved with him in private as well as in public, when he communed with the individual and when he ministered to the crowd. And equally true was all this of Moody. He was a child of light, luminously human in the service of the divine, all the more human because he increasingly sought the glory of God. He moved and won men by his naturalness. He could throw his line through wit and humor, but in the central heart of all his merriment there was a holy place where notching dwelt that was common or unclean. And so, I say, a minister need not be a Stiggins --a melancholy Stiggins because his life is possessed of a lofty and serious end. On the other hand, let his life lose its holy and well-defined purpose, and there is no man who will so surely drivel into effeminacy’s, into idle puerility’s, into empty gossiping, into petty conventions devoid of spiritual significance,--with the added tragedy that he may come to be satisfied with his barren lot.

When, then, we leave our pulpit, and on the one sacred quest seek communion with the individual, what earl we do for him? First of all, we can bring to a man the ministry of sympathetic listening. You will find that sometimes this is all that a man requires, a sympathetic audience. It is not that he needs your speech: he needs your ears. "When I kept silence my bones waxed old." Unshared troubles bring on premature age. The trouble we can talk about loses some of its weight. An audience brings to many people a simplification of their grief. A strange light often breaks upon us when we are unfolding our troubles to another. When we begin to explain our difficulties we often explain them away. The problem is unraveled even while it is being described. You will find that this principle operates in the pulpit. While you are attempting to expound the truth to others you will see it yourself in clearer light. Things become luminous while they are being shared. They become transparent in fellowship. Our audience enriches our possessions. Now many people lack the audience and therefore they never come to their own. And we provide them with an audience, and our ministry to the individual is frequently just this provision of fellowship, the offer of an opportunity through which a soul can "speak" its way into light and liberty.

Think how many haunting fears vanish away when we try to put them into words! Their strength is in their vagueness. They are terrible because they are ill-defined. They are often banished by expression. We seek to put them into expression and they are gone! A fear thus shared is very frequently a fear destroyed. How often I have had that experience in my ministry! I have sat and listened to men and women as they have poured out the story of their griefs and fears. Scarcely a word has passed my lips. I seemed to be doing nothing, but it may be that in such ministries more sacred energies are at work than we have conceived. Who knows what mystic powers are operative when two souls are in sympathetic relation, and one is apparently passively listening to the tale of the other’s woes? At any rate I have often been the silent partner in such fellowship, and often when I have come away the afflicted soul has said to me, "I cannot tell you how much you have helped me ": and I could see that by the mysterious workings of God’s grace the yoke had been made easy and the burden light. And so the minister provides the individual with an audience, but not only for the expression of trouble, and difficulty, and fear, but also for the transfiguration and enrichment of his joy. For joy that is never shared is never fully matured. A joy that tells its story is like some imprisoned bird that has found the sunny air of larger spaces. It is strengthened and vitalized, and it discovers new powers of rapture and song. Here again the audience enriches the songster by giving him occasion to sing. There are people who are laden with providential experiences, and they would become all the wealthier if they told their own simple story of grace. "This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles," but he would be all the richer just to tell his minister this chapter in the Lord’s dealings with his soul. We strengthen a man’s faith when we give him opportunity of confession: we enrich his joy when we listen to his song in the Lord. But there is another side to this individual ministry. We are called upon by our God to bring to men not merely the strengthening grace of sympathetic listen-hag, but also the strengthening grace of sympathetic speech. What can we say to a man when we meet him face to face? Our God will inspire the counsel if we will cherish and seek His glory. He will appoint the means if we will revere His ends. If I will follow "the light" upon my path He will "keep my feet." It is in ministries to the individual soul that the promise of our Lord has rich and immediate fulfillment:--" It shah be given you in that same hour what ye shah speak." Our discernment’s shah be made sensitive, our affections shall be kept sympathetic, our judgments shah be enlightened, and our words shall be as keys that fit the locks, and the "iron gate" in men’s souls shall be opened. We need not trouble about the details of our approach to the individual if only our controlling purpose is clean and lofty.

What, then, shall be our sovereign purpose in moving among men in common affairs? It will surely be to relate the common to the divine, and to bring the vision of the sanctuary into the street and the market and the home. We are to go among men helping them to see the halo on the commonplace, to discern the sacred fire in the familiar bush. In the sanctuary men are frequently conscious of the stirrings of a heavenly air, but they lose its inspirations in the streets. In the sanctuary they often catch the gleam of the ideal, and they often feel the Sacred Presence of the Lord in the ways of public prayer and praise, but the gleam fades away when they touch their daily work, and the Sacred Presence is lost in the crowded roads of business. It must be our ministry to help them to recover their lost inheritance, and to retain the sense of heavenly fellowship while they earn their daily bread. We do a mighty work when we keep a man’s sense of God alive amid all the hardening benumbments of the world. Sometimes a word will do it: sometimes even the word is not required. Ian Maclaren said that when Henry Drummond entered a room it seemed as though the temperature was changed. Everything looked and felt different, the medium of intercourse was brightened and clarified. Men’s spiritual senses get jaded, they lose their fine perceptions, the setting of life becomes common and profane, and it may be our gracious ministry, by the vigor of our fellowship, altogether apart from actual speech, to "refresh" them, and to restore to them the lost sanctities. It may be we Shall find some business-man living as though life were only a dreary and monotonous plain, and we may leave him "refreshed," having recovered the vision of "the hills of God." But it will also be our mission to recover the divine light, not only as it rests upon common labor, but as it rests upon the ordinary sorrows which so often appear somber and hostile. That is a very beautiful ministry, one of the most gracious privileges committed to our hands. We are to go where the cloud is low, and black, and frowning, and we are to reveal its silver lining. We are to find "springs in the desert." We are to find flowers of divine mercy, forget-me-nots of heavenly grace, growing in the heaviest and ruttiest roads. We are to go into homes where sorrow reigns, and it is to be our tender ministry to show that Jesus reigns. We are to find "the Church in the wilderness." You will esteem this a very precious privilege, and you will esteem it more and more as the years pass by. You will lie down to sweet sleep on the days when you have lightened the path of the sorrowful, when you have shown the divine gleam resting upon the clod, and when the timid, riven heart has been quieted in the assurance that God is near.

I once called upon a cobbler whose home was in a little seaside town in the North of England. He worked alone in an exceedingly tiny room. I asked him if he did not sometimes feel oppressed by the imprisonment of his little chamber. "Oh, no," he replied, "if any feelings of that sort begin I just open this door!" And he opened a door leading into another room, and it gave him a glorious view of the sea! The little room was glorified in its vast relations. To the cobbler’s bench there came the suggestion of the infinite. And really, gentlemen, I think this expresses my conception of our ministry as we encounter men and women in their daily lot. We are to open that door and let in the inspiration of the Infinite! We are to go about skillfully relating everything to God:--the lowliest toil, the most unwelcome duty, the task that bristles with difficulty, the grey disappointment, the black sorrow,--we are to open the door, and let in upon them the light of the infinite purpose and the warm inspirations of eternal love. It may be that sometimes the opening of that door may startle and frighten a man rather than soothe and comfort him. It may be that he is deliberately keeping it closed, and in sinful comfort he is living unmindful of God. Well, then, we must not shirk our duty. We must gently but firmly open the door even though the light should strike like lightning, and the man is filled with present resentment. The resentment will pass, it will most probably change into gratitude, and in the recovered vision of God the man will recover himself and all the riches and powers of his lost estate. For thus saith the Lord, "Son of Man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel: therefore hear the word at my mouth, and give them warning from me. When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die: and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life: the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity: but his blood will I require at thine hand. Yet if thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity: but thou hast delivered thy soul."

Now let no one think that this ministry to the individual is on our part an unmixed expenditure, attended by no corresponding returns. The personal recompense in such labor is abundant. In the first place we discover how strangely many are the varieties of human experience. The kaleidoscope of circumstances takes shapes and fashions of which we ourselves have never dreamed. And we shall find that the changed assortment of circumstances varies the conditions of warfare, and that, while the general campaign of life for all of us may be one and the same, the individual battles are never alike. Every life has its own peculiar field, and we shall discover conditions of warfare which we have never shared. And then, in the second place, through this variety and multiplicity of human needs we shall more gloriously apprehend the fulness and glory of our resources in grace. We are very tempted to interpret our own individuality as the common type, and to express our message through the medium of our own peculiar circumstances. It is a minister’s life that we see, and a minister’s perils, and a minister’s conflicts, and these are too often the settings of our sermons, and other men feel that they are living in another and alien world, and our counsels and warnings seem irrelevant. The ministry to the individual discovers the individuality of others, life breaks up into lives, each of its own fashion, and as we bring the common grace to the manifold needs our conception of grace is immeasurably glorified, "the same Lord over all being rich unto all that call upon Him."

Now, for this ministry to the individual mere book knowledge is of little or no service. Our knowledge must be personal, experimental, practical, and immediate. We need an experimental knowledge of God. There must be something solid and satisfying. We must know something, something about which we can be dogmatic, and about which we can speak in words and tones of assurance. "I know": "I have felt": "I have seen": "I know whom I have believed and am persuaded ": --This must be the firm and confirming assurance which fills our confession of the grace and love of God. And to an expert-mental knowledge of God must be added an experimental knowledge of the King’s highway. If Greatheart is to guide the pilgrims from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City he must know the road, and he must be keen to recognize the inviting and perilous by-paths which are only flower-decked ways to destruction. And for all this we need an intelligent and experimental knowledge of the mysterious workings of our own heart, of our own inclinations and repulsion’s, and how in our own souls the enemy has conquered or been overthrown. And yet, with all this we shall meet with problems in our individual ministry for which we have no solution. We shah be asked questions to which we have no personal reply. There will be locks for which we have no keys. How then? There is nothing more pernicious for a minister and for his people than for him to assume knowledge and certainties which he does not possess. We discourage our people when we speak lightly and airily about heights that we have never climbed, and when we move with an air of familiarity in regions where we have no light. The best help you can offer some men is to tell them that you share their doubt and fear, and that the door at which they are knocking has never been opened to you. Let them feel your kinship in uncertainty where uncertainty reigns, and make no pretence of cloudless noon where there are only the doubtful rays of uncertain dawn. We are harmful in our ministry when we profess experiences which to ourselves and to others are only in the region of alluring dreams. When you are certain speak in faith, "nothing wavering": when you are uncertain, when the light is still dubious, speak like a man who is watching for the morning: "For we know in part, and we prophesy in part ": and concerning the things we know not it is a minister’s wisdom and piety to confess his ignorance, and to calmly and hopefully await the further unveiling. In all that I have said to you in this lecture I have assumed that in your intercourse with men you will act as "the friend of the Bridegroom." You are about His most sacred business, seeking to win the soul to the Lord, and to minister to the holy relationships of Bridegroom and bride. That is our business, and we must, therefore, be regularly watchful lest any mood or disposition of ours should give a false impression of the Bridegroom and scare away the prospective bride. It is needful that we be jealously careful lest the impression we give in the pulpit should be effaced when we get into the home. "Jesting, which is not convenient,’’ is never friendly to the Bridegroom. Spiritual moods are very sensitive, as sensitive and delicate as the awakenings of early love. Can you think of anything more exquisite than the love of a young girl, a love newly born in her soul, which she hides almost from herself, and in the most intense shyness shrinks from giving it expression? I know of only one thing more exquisite still,--the earliest mood of the soul when it is first "falling in Love" with the Lord. Yes, "the soul’s awakening" is more exquisite still. And this love for the Bridegroom can be checked and bruised by the Bridegroom’s friend; he can change its vision into fancies, and he can pervert its dawning passion into a transient dream. But, on the other hand, he may, by Christian grace and courtesy, and by "the strength which God supplies," confirm the "heart’s desire" of a would-be-lover until the soul, wooed by his message, and encouraged by his life, has become the consort of Him who is "the chief among ten thousand and the altogether lovely."

I close this lecture with personal witness as to the spiritual good which has come my way through ministering to sick and troubled people, and to those who were beaten and crippled by the way. All the way along it has quickened and deepened my communion with God. Soon after I entered the ministry I was called upon to visit the senior elder of my church, who had been taken sick unto death. He had been a noble and stately figure among us, a certain old-world grace and courtesy reflecting the strength and dignity of his soul. He had been a great friend of the Master, and he had done his Master’s work in a great way. I saw him two or three days before he died, when it was known that the end might come at any time, and I found he was enjoying Dickens’ "Pickwick Papers "! I must have made some remark about it, and he replied very simply that he had always been fond of Pickwick, and that he would not be ashamed, when the Master came, to be found deep in the enjoyment of such innocent humor. I do not know what helpful ministry I brought to him, but I know that he gave to me a broadly human conception of matured piety, which all along the way has enriched my conception of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. In a very recent day of my ministry I went to see a man who had cancer in the throat. Time after time I had communion with him and never did a word of complaint escape his lips. The disease got fiercer hold upon him, his voice sank to a whisper, and at last all power of speech ceased. The first time I saw him after he had become dumb, he took a slip of paper and wrote these words upon it, "Bless the Lord, 0 my soul, and forget not all His benefits!" Again I say I know not what help I brought to him, but I know he gave to me the actual vision of higher range of human possibility, of severe and splendid triumph wrought in the power of divine grace.

These two incidents are taken from the early days and the latter days of the last twenty years, and they are typical of a countless succession of ministerial experiences which have poured wealth into my own treasury, enriching my possession of faith and hope and love. And this, too, will be the happy record of your own labors. While you give you will receive. While you comfort you will be comforted. While you counsel you will be enlightened. While you lift another’s burden your own burden will be made light. For here, too, does the word of the Lord prevail: "He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for My sake shall find it."