The King with Ten Thousand

Luke xiv. 31

What king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand? — Luke xiv. 31.

IT AM very grateful to be allowed to add one more -*- to the long series of annual sermons to the young which I have preached. It is fifty-four years since the first of them, and each year makes it more probable that this will be the last. How many of the hearers have passed into the Unseen! And the speaker will follow. ‘’ The fathers, where are they? and the prophets, do they live for ever? But My word which I spake unto your fathers through the prophets, took it not hold of your fathers?”

The words which I have read for my text are part of the second of two short parables or long similes, by which Jesus enforces the plain lesson that it is no light thing to be a disciple. It ought to be the result of squarely facing facts, and of prolonged deliberation. He is not going to tempt recruits by highly coloured pictures. They shall know what they are doing, and what they have to expect.

Now I am not going to use the words which I have read as my text, and the other emblem, which means the same thing, viz., the man building his tower, and sitting down first to count the cost, so much for the purpose of interpreting the parables, as for the purpose of gathering from the general drift of them some lessons which I think may be seasonable for us. I will not try to ascertain, for instance, who the king with the twenty thousand is. That is a detail. There has been a great deal of harm done by insisting upon finding out a spiritual or moral meaning for every scrap of the Parables, as if they were so many conundrums. And that false principle has been carried to a patent absurdity in interpreting this parable, with the result that some people say that the “king with twenty thousand” is the devil, and some people say that he is God. When you arrive at a contradiction like that, it is a hint that you are on the wrong road altogether. Let us take two or three plain lessons.

Here is a solemn thought of

I. What every Noble Life has to be — a
Building and a Fight.

The man intending to build a tower, and the other man intending to declare war, are the symbols of the man meaning to live a noble life as the disciple of

Jesus Christ. I do not speak about discipleship at present; that will come presently. But what I wish to lay upon the hearts of my young friends especially is just this, that you will never do anything in this world that you will not be ashamed of, or anything that will bring any blessed and good results to you, unless your deepest notion about life is this — first, a building; second, a conflict.

First, a building. “Building,” you say; “■ building what?” Building yourselves — building character. That is what makes life so solemn — that all of us, whether we know it or not, are doing that; and this is what makes life tragical, that so many of us doing it, do not know what we are doing, and are building at haphazard, so that our lives, instead of being an ordered sequence, a considered structure, a rightly evolved whole, harmonious and steadfast, are much more like a cartload of bricks emptied down on a place where a house is to be, which fall anyhow, and lie in disorder and impotence. The lives of half of us are not buildings, but, to use a well-known phrase, “born ruins.” But if you mean to be anything worth being, if you are going to do anything worth doing, if you desire at all — and I should think there are no young men or women listening to me now that do not know something of the desire — to live as conscience would have you do, fix this in your mind, that there must be an architect’s plan before there is a satisfactory house, and there must be a foundation before a steady topstone can be laid. The process of building must be continuous and slow, as it has been with some of these cathedrals, of which one generation laid the foundation, and a thousand years afterwards the topmost stone was set on the sky-piercing pinnacle.

What is it that jou are building? A shop, a mill, a lecture-hall, a “stately pleasure-house,” a dramshop, a house of debauchery — which? Yon are building yourself; and what have you made of yourself, or what are you going to make of yourself all through life? My texts tell us what we ought to build — a tower, massive and strong. But a tower is not all. On the Acropolis, the citadel of Athens, stood the temple of the patron-goddess. The palladium was shrined in the Parthenon; and the Parthenon was on the citadel-rock. The tower is to be a temple; and unless it is, alas for the life!

Like the silkworms, you are building what you have to live in; and for some of us the building that we are rearing becomes a prison, out of which we cannot get. I read in a daily newspaper no longer ago than yesterday, of an American millionaire who died ‘’ universally respected,” because he was a millionaire; and who said near the end of his life, “I do not want money; what I want is to be making it; what else can I do? “Ah! that man was sent into the world with all but infinite possibilities, and after seventy years of ‘^ successful” work he had dwindled down to this — a machine for making money without the capacity of enjoying it, and having to say: “There is nothing else in God’s universe that I am fit for.” Now that man built a factory, and it turned out to be his prison, and there are a great many of us that are doing the same. So much, then, for the first of the thoughts here.

Jesus does not find the architectural emblem sufiicient to explain the conditions of a noble life, and so He takes the militant one as well. Which, being turned into abstract words, is just this: there is no noble life possible unless you fight for it.

In our dreams we do fine things very easily, because we are working, so to speak, in vacuo. But when the atmosphere is let in, it is not quite so easy to make head against it. Our imaginations suggest to ns grand deeds that we may do, but, when we come down into the region of hard reality, we find resistance that we had not reckoned on. The engineer will make a great mistake if in calculating the speed of his engine he does not allow for friction. We have all to fight if we would build, like Nehemiah’s men, who had a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other. Unless I can say, “I will not,” I shall never, to any good purpose, and strongly, say, ^’ 1 will.”

There must be conflict with myself, for I carry my own most formidable foe about with me, in my own heart, and conflict with the world in which, beautiful as it is, and to you who are just beginning life, “apparelled in celestial light, the glory and the freshness of a dream,” there yet are a great many more temptations to evil than aids to good.

Now, dear friends, I know that you young people have, as the prerogative and wealth of youth, which makes up for much that it does not possess, that inestimable power of sanguine anticipation. I do not seek to weaken or darken that in the least degree. God knows you will need it all before you come to the end.

If Nature put not forth her power
About the opening of the flower,
Who is there that could live an hour

But I do desire that, along with your eager anticipations and sanguine thoughts, you should carry this plain truth with you — that building and fighting are essential to all nobleness. That is my first point.

Now, let us take a second lesson, that in these two parables we have

II. A Call for Deliberate Choice.

In both of them the man, before he embraces the purpose which has come into his mind, and determines to act upon it, is represented as “sitting down” leisurely and quietly to think the thing through.

and only after that does he pass a hand across his brow, to sinoothe the wrinkles, and say “I will.” Now that is what I beg you to do. I know very well that the attitude of deliberate choice is not congenial to youth. Instincts and impulses are strong then; experience is limited then, and it is more natural for you to act from strong instincts and impulses than it is to withdraw into yourself, and cautiously and protractedly to consider your course. But for all that, I do desire to bring my dear young friends, to whom I am more especially speaking now, face to face with the necessity of their making deliberately their choice as to the path they will pursue. One of the sad things of life is that at the age when such a choice would have the widest field and the most powerful influence, we practise it least, and that we old people get to be cautious and deliberate, and think over things twice before we determine upon them once, after the main choices of our lives have been made and are irrevocable.

So we see all around us lives that just drift, and people formulate their own laziness into a principle, and say, “Oh! circumstances determine a man’s actions and character.” Do they? Yes; to a very large extent they do. But there are two ways of taking a circumstance. You may yield to it, or you may resist it. In both cases it will help to shape your characters, but its effect upon you will be diametrically opposite, according as you set your teeth and resist, or collapse and let it impel yon. The question is, “Are you going to be a hammer or an anvil? ‘’ as Goethe said long ago. A north wind is blowing; one captain elects to run before it, and another braces up his yards, and gets a firm grip on the wheel, and then the north wind carries him all but north. And so with circumstances — they do shape you, but you can shape them, and determine what shape they shall put upon you. For instance, I remember a family (not in Manchester) in which the father was a drunkard, and there were two sons, one of them turned drunkard in due course, and the other turned an enthusiastic teetotaler. It was the same circumstances that made one a drunkard and the other a total abstainer. Let us have no more foolish talk — the only effect of which is to weaken men’s sense of control over themselves, and responsibility for exercising it — about the power of circumstances upon men. It is the deliberate choice that we make that determines our whole character. Here you young people stand, with opportunities of choice, that many a man of my age would give all that he possesses if he had over again. May God help you to choose aright! Do not let it be your poor excuse for a certain course of conduct, “I drifted into it without thinking. I did not realise what I was doing. It was ’ the thing ’ in my set.

I should have been thought so odd ii’ I had not.” “So did not I,” said Nehemiah long ago, “because of the fear of the Lord.” “Choose ye this day whom ye will serve.” At any rate let your course of conduct be the result of your deliberate choice, and take this as an infallible truth, that no man or woman will make anything of life unless they let their wills determine their actions, and their reason and conscience decide their will. That is my second point.

My third is this; here is

III. The Summons to a Right Estimate op Our Resources.

The man that is going to build a tower, if he is not a fool, sits down first and considers whether he has sufficient to finish it. I daresay we all have seen some gaunt ruin that never was completed, and which some noble family, in a foolish representative, had begun upon a scale that meant bankruptcy and the common people, all round the neighbourhood, call it “So-and-so’s folly.” I dare say we can all understand how little chance ‘’ the king with ten thousand” had against the king with his twenty thousand. Perhaps Jesus Christ was speaking with a reference, that was understood at the moment, to some contemporaneous disturbance among the restless neighbouring tribes, where some little kinglet was ever perking himself up against the mighty Ciesar and his legions. If we set ourselves to fight by ourselves with our ten thousand men, or to build with our small resources of marble and stones and cash, then we shall be like the men in the two parables. Let me put two or three plain questions.

Do you think that yon, by yourself, can realise your ideals? “Your young men shall see visions,” said the prophet. And 1 believe that that power is, in a sense, granted to most young men — the power of creating grand and pure and lofty imaginations as to what they are going to make their lives. You look at us old people who have fumbled along, and got through somehow, and do not feel that we have much to be proud of, and you think, “Ah! how much better I could have done it if I had been in their place.” Yes, and we were all like you once; and the most cynical amongst us, who has got to the point of smiling at his early fantastic imaginations as he thinks them, now that he has been hardened by half a century of commerce with the world, used to say as you do, and he tried to work out his ideals with his own ten fingers, and so he ended, and that is how you will end. Can you realise your ideals? No.

Can you meet the demands of conscience by yourselves? I have abjured the attempt to interpret the meaning of, or to attach any special meaning to, ‘’the king with twenty thousand.”

But one might say that there comes to every man some solemn thought of a great duty towering: high above him, ever urging him, imperative, and none the less imperative because it is inaccessible. You cannot fulfil the law written on your own hearts if you try to do so by yourselves. And when the demands of conscience are not complied with, then the demands of conscience turn into consciousness of sin. Can you deal with that? Have you any anodyne that will send your consciences to sleep? Have you any gag that will stifle their voices? When that solemn thought arises in your hearts “I have done wrong I” have you anything that you can say to it? No! ‘^ the King with twenty thousand ‘’ cannot be faced with the sparse ranks of your ten thousand.

Can you resist the tempations that storm in upon you? I have said that the world is more full of inducements to evil, by reason of our own weakness, than it is of aids to good. I have said that we carry our own worst foes within us. And can you stand against these? Have you stood against them? You know you have not, and you cannot.

Can you meet the army of sorrows that will come against you? I trust you may have bright and happy lives, but there are griefs that may come, and there are griefs that must come; and your ten thousand will not be able to front them. It is but a ragged umbrella that we can put up of our own furnishing, against the pelting of the pitiless storm. It is but a poor shelter that we can rear to break the force of the wind that storms against us all. Can you meet the twenty thousand sorrows with your ten thousand of stoicism or patient endurance? No.

Can you meet “the King of Terrors,” as they call death? No. It may not come to you yet. I hope it will not. My notion of Christianity is not a thing that will help a man to die, but a thing to help a man to live. So I do not dwell on that; but if I had second sight I have no doubt that, like the seers who were supposed to have that gift, I could pick out in this congregation more than one or two who have their winding-sheets high upon their breasts. The doctrine of averages makes that certain. Can you face that with your ten thousand? No.

Can you meet your Judge? “Rejoice! 0 young man, in the days of thy youth,... but know that for all these things God will bring thee to judgment.” For every act of mine, whatever its issues upon others, has an issue upon myself. Like one of the old-fashioned muskets, my deed may not hit the mark, but the gun is sure to kick and bruise my shoulder, and so the anticipations of a judgment to come rise from the judgment that is going on now. “Can thy heart endure and thy hands be strong in the day when I shall deal with thee?” No.

He sitteth down and considereth whether, with ten thousand, he is able to meet “him that cometh against him with twenty thousand, or else” — that leads me to my last word,

IV. The Plain Conclusion.

These enemies are sure to come storming upon us, and it is certain that in our own strength we cannot master them. So the ‘’ or else “comes in, and Jesus Christ tells us what He means by it, when He goes on to say that to be His disciple a man must forsake all that he hath. I have been trying to say that you cannot, with your limited powers (and you have no recruiting field from which you can gather in any more), front the certainties of life, of death, of eternity. Therefore you should recognise that you cannot, and drop all notion that you can, and all reliance on yourself. That forsaking of self is the underside of faith. It includes both entire abjuring of reliance upon myself, and the absolute fixing of all my trust on Jesus Christ. That brings fresh reinforcements into the field. The Captain of our salvation Himself comes when faith calls Him. One poor, weak man or woman, with Jesus Christ at their back, is always in the majority. If you have Jesus Christ with you, then, if I may recur for a moment to what I have been saying, you will be able to fulfil your ideals, you will be able to meet the demands of law and duty, you will be able to deal with the sense of sin; yon will be able to bear, and so to conquer, sorrows; you will be able to stand fast against temptations; you will be ready to meet the last enemy, who will become a friend, and be turned into the angel-porter that opens the gates of heaven, and yon will be able to stand before the Judge, and say, “Thon didst die for me. I have trusted Thee. Let me not be pnt to confusion.”

If we will build on Christ the foundation, then, whatever winds may blow against the house, whatever waters may rise and sap its walls, it will stand, for it is founded upon a rock. If we are building in our own strength on any other foundation, our lives, however admirable men may sometimes think them, will lack a solid basis, and lack the shining heavenward-pointing apex, and will tumble into hideous ruin. If we fling ourselves into life’s fight alone, we shall be beaten. If we cry to Jesus Christ in the battle He will come, like the Divine Warrior that the legends of many nations tell of, who appeared on his white horse when the fight was going against his people, and plucked victory out of defeat. Trust yourselves to His blood to take away your sin, and to His life to give you strength that will teach your hands to war and your fingers to fight; and you ‘’ will be more than conquerors through Him that loved you.”