01.03. Failure

THE QUESTION OF FAILURE ’Why could not we cast him out?’

Mat 17:19 & Mark 9:28 The same page in the Gospel presents to us the glory for which man was created, and the humiliation in which he lives. We see Jesus transfigured at the top of the mountain, and at the bottom his disciples face to face with a possessed child they cannot heal, and taunted by the scribes whom they cannot answer. When Jesus descended, neither the scribes nor the disciples were forward to speak to him. The scribes became suddenly conscious of their inhumanity, for in their hostility to the followers of Jesus they had been indifferent to the sufferings of the child; the disciples were mortified by their failure; both were abashed in that gracious and mighty presence. The poor man, who alone suffered in his boy’s suffering, explained the situation to Jesus. It was not flattering to those who had used His name. ’I spoke to Thy disciples that they should cast him out, and they were not able.’ They were not able: there might be valid explanations, but there was the inevitable fact. Mark dwells on the struggle in the father’s soul, on the paroxysm in the illness — epilepsy apparently — of the child, and on the wonderful words of Jesus about the power of faith. It was only after all was over, and the crowd had dispersed, that the baffled disciples came to Jesus in the house, and asked, ’Why could not we cast him out ? ’ This is a question which, whether we ask it or not, we have often to answer. The Church’s failures are conspicuous enough, and there are plenty of indifferent or hostile spectators to demand the explanation of them. Why cannot you cast the evil spirits out of society, or even out of the members of your own body? Why are there men and women all about you, victims of evil passions and of evil principles, literally possessed by pride, by lust, by ill-nature, by drunkenness, by inveterate falseness? Why cannot you deliver them from the degradation and misery of vices like these? Such questions are asked, but to such questioners they are never answered. The disciples, fencing with the scribes, did not yet know the answer, and even if they had known they might have found it impossible to tell. Nothing they could ever have told would have gone to the root of the matter. And it is always so. In any document which is of the nature of an apology made by the Church to the world — in any explanation of failure for the benefit of the non-Christian — the essential things are of necessity left out. There are explanations of a sort, pleas in extenuation more than enough, but not the truth. The truth comes out, not when the disciples are questioned by outsiders, but when they put this question to the Lord — Why could not we cast him out? The Lord’s answer is its own evidence, and every man who has been conscious of failure in spiritual work will confess its truth.

’He saith unto them, Because of your little faith.’ Jesus had spoken strongly to the father of the child about faith — ’all things are possible to him that believeth’; He had reproached the whole company as faithless and perverse; and now He explains by lack of faith the failure of the disciples. What is the faith on which He puts such stress? In a word, it is that exercise and effort of the human soul which lays hold of God, and brings Him into the field. It is that power in the soul which makes God present. To have no faith means to have no sense that God is here, no conviction that He is with us as a Redeemer from evil. To have little faith, like the disciples in this story, means to have only a feeble conviction that He is with us — a conviction that seems good enough as long as it is untried, but that vanishes or is reduced to impotence the moment we are confronted with the mighty forces of evil. With no faith, or with little faith — with no hold on God, or with a hold so slight that we faint and let go in face of the enemy — what can we do? We can do nothing. The power of evil in the world is a tremendous power: there is nothing to match it but the power of God. To overcome it is to work the mightiest of miracles, and it is God alone who does wondrous things. To go out to war with it without faith is to go out to certain failure, for it is to go out alone, without God. That is why men preach so often, and no one is blessed; and teach so assiduously, and no heart is won, even for ten minutes, by the love of God. We have left home to do it as if it were a simple thing; we stand before our congregation or our class as if it were a matter of course, and as a matter of course nothing is done. Why? Why, but because we are alone — because God is not here, present to our faith, to do what only He can do. In the time of James VI there was a famous preacher in Edinburgh, Mr. Robert Bruce. ’No man,’ says one of his contemporaries, ’in his time spake with such evidence and power of the Spirit. No man had so many seals of conversion; yea, many of his hearers thought that no man, since the apostles, spake with such power.’ Do we not discover the secret of that power — a secret illustrating our Lord’s answer to His disciples here — in the story told of his preaching at Larbert? He was in the vestry before the service, and some one was sent to call him. But the messenger brought back word that he did not know when the minister would come out.’ He believed there was somebody with him, for he heard him many times say with the greatest seriousness, "that he would not, he could not go, unless He came with him, and that he would not go alone," — adding, that he never heard the other answer him a word. When he came out, he was singularly assisted.’ That example explains to us, better than any words, the real cause of our failures. It is because we go alone to do the work of God. Why should we be able, without Him, to speak to the heart, to touch its secret springs, to call forth repentance, faith, love, self-surrender? Why should anything we say or do, apart from Him, have power to cast out evil spirits from men? We should be afraid to command them, even in the name of Jesus, except in the assurance that God is with us.

Only faith like this can enable us to overcome the fatalistic temper which is so apt at the present time to infect both those who suffer from evil and those who would help them. ’ I am what I am,’ a man says, ’and so I must be; there is a necessity in it against which it is vain to strive.’ Even Christian men fall into this tone. They speak sometimes as if the evil we see were inevitable, and the enslavement of human souls by the devil a part of the order of the world against which it is useless, and indeed senseless, to protest. Such a recognition of natural law is equivalent to the denial of God. Faith means, in the last resort, the assurance that God can work miracles — that He is greater than all the powers of evil, and can overcome them even when they are entrenched in nature — that there is no connection formed in nature which He cannot break ; nay, that He is here in the omnipotence of grace, to do the very things which to nature are impossible. We need to believe in the spiritual nature and destiny of those we try to help: we need to believe that God is able, in spite of all that has been, to carry that destiny to a divine issue. ’ Of all the sins that can be committed,’ says the great preacher already referred to, ’I esteem this the greatest, when a man in his heart will match the gravity of his iniquity with the infinite weight of the mercy of God.’ If there is a greater sin still, is it not that of resigning in apathy, as if thus it must be, the victory over God’s sovereign mercy and holiness to the evil spirit which has subdued a human soul? If we want to see the victory where it ought to be, we must believe that there is One who is stronger than the strong man armed, and who can bind him and spoil his goods. The Gospel of Mark enables us to see a little further into our Lord’s meaning. There He is represented as saying, ’This kind Cometh not out but by prayer (and fasting).’ Faith has to be kept alive and vigorous if it is to work wonders, and here we see the conditions under which it lives. It was neglect of prayer, we should judge from this answer, which explained the dwindling of the disciples’ faith.

Prayer, in the most general sense, is that exercise of the soul in which we come into God’s presence and assure ourselves again of what He is in Himself, and of what He is to us. It is in this way the great proof of faith, and the great nourisher of faith; and it makes faith conscious of itself. There is no example of prayer, in the Bible or out of it, to compare with Jesus. He saw the evil that was in the world as no other saw it, felt it as no other felt it, was conscious as no other of the enormous strength with which it had rooted itself in the constitution of man and of society, yet He did not despair; His ceaseless passionate prayers kept Him always in contact with the omnipotent love of the Father. As He advanced to the most difficult works, He could say: ’ I know that Thou hearest Me always.’ He never failed.

Much work fails because it is not only prayerless, but in a manner an evasion of prayer. We bustle away with studying and preaching, with visiting and teaching, and after all it is ineffective and may even have been aimless: why? Because we have never had our work in God’s presence to get guidance, inspiration, and force from Him. Prayer, to say nothing else of it, gives a new directness and strength to our purpose; it compels us to leave out of our methods all that is irrelevant, all that is of ourselves or looks to our own ends, all that is evasive: it compels us to go straight to the object in the strength of God. To think that we can do the work of God without prayer is to think that we can do it without God, and there can be no hypocrisy or presumption beyond that. Failure itself should have taught us to ’ speak oftener of men to God, than of God to men.’ Certainly it is only as prayer keeps our hearts right with Him, and enables us to address ourselves to our work, knowing that He is with us, that we can hope to see that work, which is His rather than ours, prosper in our hands. The Revised Version leaves out the words ’ and fasting ’ in Mark 9:29. The scholars who agree with the revisers in this omission suppose the words to have been added — at a very early date — by some ascetically inclined copyist. I once heard a distinguished interpreter of the gospels say that he always felt ’and fasting’ was unlike Christ, and that it was quite a relief to him to discover that there was good authority for omitting the words. But in spite of this, the question of evidence is not perfectly simple, and whether Jesus used the words on this occasion or not, they convey a truth to which He often gave expression on other occasions, and which seems to me entirely in place here. When we pray, in connection with any work we are about to undertake for God, we offer ourselves for His service: we put our whole nature and faculties at His disposal. We must be as fit as possible, to use the language of the gymnasium, for the work He has to do. But fitness implies self- discipline; self- discipline implies abstinence, of various kinds; and the most general name for abstinence is fasting. Take the simplest case of all, the case of food. One need not speak of gluttony: nothing is more unholy than a glutton. But short of that, the man who has just dined heartily, and feels a little heavy with meat and drink, knows that many things, meanwhile, are impossible for him. He is too conscious of the flesh to be of much use spiritually: no evil spirits are likely to be dispossessed by him. Now there is a principle here which has a wide application, and it is this: that those who are going to fight God’s battle in the world, to encounter evil and vanquish it, to succour the degraded and fallen, must vigilantly guard against any compromising relations with the enemy, and even with things otherwise innocent, which the enemy has been able to pervert to his use. This is not an anti - evangelical doctrine. The fasting it commends is not a ritual abstinence twice a week, to be praised of men, but a voluntary abstinence, prescribed to the soul by itself, from all that it feels, though lawful otherwise, would impair its fitness for the service of God. If history can be summoned to prove anything, it is to prove that fasting in this sense is a sifie qua non of successful work for God. The greatest of all preachers of liberty — St. Paul — never once enunciates the principle of liberty in its full compass without instantly subjoining to it this principle of restraint. ’All things are lawful for me, but — all things are not expedient’ , ’All things are lawful for me, but — all things do not build up.’ ’All things are lawful for me, but — I will not be brought under the power of any.’ The principle of fasting is defended by every one of these ’ buts ’: and experience shows that it is the men who have been superior to the attractions which life at the common level has for the average sensual man who alone have been able to do the world spiritual service. No doubt the explanation of much of our failure lies here. We are not separate enough from the evils from which we wish to save others. There is not enough of Puritanism in our moral ideal or in our character. We have not learned what Christ meant when he said: ’First bind the strong many and then spoil his house.’

Little faith, little prayer, little self - discipline: these are the things which spell failure in spiritual work. They are not the reasons we often hear. You are powerless, outsiders tell us, because your creed is too complicated, or because its forms of thought and expression are antiquated. You are powerless, because your preachers have little intelligence, and little eloquence; you are powerless, because you give too little (or too much) attention to aesthetics in your worship; you are powerless, according to the most recent diagnosis, because you are ignorant of social science, and do not care for the condition of the people. Perhaps if we wanted to excuse our failures, we might mention some of these things ourselves; but if we want to understand them we had better hearken to Jesus. The evil spirits are not cast out, from want of faith, want of prayer, and want of self-denial, directed on our work as Christians. There is only one way to strength and success — re-union to God, and separation once more from the world.