Seeking a Man

“The Lord hath sought him a man after his own heart!*^m I Samuel xiii. 14.

IF we read this text in the light of David’s life we become confused, for God hates sin, always has hated it, and always must hate it, and David is a sinner, yet we are told that it was he who was a man after the heart of God. If you read verses 13 and 14, “And Samuel said to Saul, Thou hast done foolishly, thou hast not kept the commandment of the Lord thy God, which he commanded thee; for now would the Lord have established thy kingdom upon Israel for ever. But now thy kingdom shall not continue, the Lord hath sought him a man after his own heart and the Lord hath commanded him to be captain over his people, because thou hast not kept that which the Lord commanded thee.” You will find that Saul was kingly in his appearance, for he towered head and shoulders above those who were round about him, and he was kingly in his ancestry, but that was not enough, for it has ever been true that kinship with the saved does not insure salvation. It is easy also in this story to learn the lesson that God is not dependent upon any individual. He can set Saul aside and His kingdom still move forward, and He may set you aside and the world’s work will go forward as if you had never been

a part of it; but if you read this text in the light of

David’s whole life, then all is different. There is no confusion, and you can quite understand how God would love him, especially when he comes to the end of his great career.

Jacob is another illustration of the same thing. The other day in New York I saw them removing a scaffolding from a great building which had been in the process of construction for months. With the scaffolding about it the building was not remarkable, but when it had been removed the architectural lines were perfect; and when at the last Jacob stands forth with the scaffolding taken down, we appreciate his greatness, and when David appears before us chastened by his affliction and purified by his trials it seems that it is a worthy conclusion of a great life, and we understand the text.

His story is written in the 29th chapter of i Qironicles. The last years before his death he lived a life of quietness and peace, made provision for the temple, and then called his people about him to bless them, and fell asleep. It was a beautiful ending of a truly great life, and we must always remember that God sees the end from the beginning and deals with us accordingly*

When Peter first stood before Jesus he asked him his name and then said to him, “I will change your name and call you Cephas, which is by interpretation, a stone,** and if we had been present we might have well said,” Master, this man is most unlike a stone. It would be better to name him that which represents the sands of the sea, always shifting; or the clouds of the sky, always changing;’* but when he stands at Pentecost with the waves of unbelief breaking at his feet and is calling men to repentance, he is more like a stone than any figure that could be used. So God has named you and named me, not for what we are, but what we are going to be when His work is completed. “And David was a man after God’s own heart,” because God knew what he would be when his work was finished.

The Bible gives us a perfect picture of a perfect niati;^ It has been said by someone that just as the photographer would make a composite picture by catching the expression of many faces and moulding them together, so the Bible in the story of Adam and Abraham and Moses and Joshua and David and Isaiah and all the other worthies of the Old Testament and the New, gives to us a completed picture of what man is at his best. Christ, however, is the ideal, and with Him set before us the Word of God gives us a picture of God bringing man on by steady progress to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. In the Bible we see man in his past and his present, and have a suggestion as to his future.

THE PAST

Go3 finds him in sin and in his hopeless condition breathes into him eternal hope, and being dead in trespasses and sins He breathes into him the breath of his own life.

Sin is an awful thing. It weakens character.

An American traveller who studied and dwelt with some shiftless people in a poverty-stricken district of one of the Southern States, where the blight of the cruel deprivations and desolation of the Civil War was particularly severe, said that in all that region not only the bams, houses, and fences, but all the people showed a strong inclination to lean up against something, and that all the inhabitants seemed to have “lost their grip.”

The slangy colloquialism, “losing one’s grip,” is very forcible and expressive. The phrase, describing a physical relaxation involved in the inability to take a firm hold, is used very happily to describe mental and moral states denoting decadence, degeneration, and what physicians call an “atonic condition,” or a feebleness that precludes the putting forth of successful effort of any kind.

A great city has thousands of men who have lost their grip and stamina. Every man with his eyes open knows of dozens or hundreds of men who are gradually sliding down toward the inevitable wreck and ruin of character and career, and losing their grip.

Some remarkable instances known to many people in a great Eastern city and to the people of the neighbouring States ‘rom which the unfortunates came have attracted attention recently as illustrations of the ease and completeness of the fatal descent. Two of the most prosperous lawyers in one of the chief cities of a State bordering on this now confine their operations to the streets of that city. Several years ago they constituted a well-known firm, and were at the height of prosperity and reputation. They were counsel for railroads and other corporations, chief counsel in many important causes, respected, envied, and masterful. One was a technical lawyer of high ability, and seemed destined for the United States Senate, so great was his authority and political power* The other had filled a high office, and by reason of his standing, activity, and industry had opened a career for himself.

The senior member of the firm is now soliciting slight jobs and alms from old acquaintances who formerly met him in legal causes, and the other, with furtive glance and the trembling, eager kind of excitement which accompanies a frame unstrung by defeat and drink, is begging with the utmost importimity from the passers-by. Neither of them was what might be called evil at heart, or of naturally vicious tendencies, but not one had ever formed a character or tried to form one. They were good enough kind of persons, but had no sheet anchor rooted in firm principles of any sort, and when they began to fall they became indifferent, careless, and suffered eventually such an impairment of self-respect that they went down with extreme rapidity to a squalid ruin.

It defiles the life. Never was the delirium of alcoholism more vividly represented than it was a few months ago in the little rural theatre of Nemours, France. It was depicted in all its spasms of hideous torture by M. Chirac, a confirmed inebriate, but known to many playgoers of Paris, because a few years ago he was an actor of some repute. As the hideous depictor of the drunkard at Nemours he won the unstinted applause of everyone in the theatre. In the excitement of it women fainted and men graw pale. As the actor was carried off the stajgje at the end of the fearful scene men and women all over the house rose to their feet and cheered.

A few minutes later a hush fell over the little theatre ivKen tfie iannouncement was made from the stage that M. Chirac had died in the spasms and that the play was at an end. Then for the first time the audience realised that M. Chirac was not acting when he had represented the drunkard. He was actually in the convulsions preceding death from alcoholism.

He was a dramatist. He prostituted his genius and gave himself to that which was brutal on the stage. He came from a noble French family and might have been a truly great man, but he lived in direst poverty and at the last he miserably failed. Associating with the vile he became vile, consorting with the drunkard he himself became drunken, delighting in the impure he was overtaken by impurity. This is sin.

It mars the features. The sinner is an outlaw and bears the marks of destruction on body as well as soul. There is no contact that leaves its mark more distinctly upon the human features than the disfiguring touch of sin. It can mar the fairest countenance, quench the light from the brightest eyes, steal the freshness and bloom from the sweetest cheek, and so change and distort every lineament as to make the whole unrecognisable, even to the mother whose eyes are the last of all to be deceived.

There is no incident that more forcefully illustrates this than that connected with the painting of Leonardo Da Vinci’s great masterpiece, “The Last Supper.’’ Long and in vain had the artist sought for a model for his Christ. “I must find a young man of pure life,” he declared, “before I can get that look on the face I want.*’ At length his attention was called to a young man who sang in the choir of one of the old churches of Rome, Pietro BandinelH by name. He was not only a young man of beautiful countenance, but his life was as beautiful as his face. The moment he looked upon this pure, sweet countenance the artist cried out in joy, “At last I have found the face I wanted.” So Pietro BandinelH sat as the model for his picture of Christ.

Years passed on and still the great painting, “The Last Supper,” was not finished. The eleven faithful apostles had all been sketched on the canvas, and the artist was hunting for a model for his Judas. “I must find a man whose face sin has hardened and distorted,” he said, “a debased man, his features stamped with the ravages only wicked living and a wicked heart can show.” Thus he wandered long in search of his Judas, until one day in the streets of Rome he came upon a wretched creature, a beggar in rags, with a face of such hard, villainous stamp that even the artist was repulsed. But he knew that at last he had found his Judas. So it came about that the beggar with the repulsive countenance sat as the model for Judas. As he was dismissing him Da Vinci said, “I have not yet asked your name, but I will now.” “Pietro BandinelH,” replied the man, looking at him unflinchingly, “I also sat to you as the model for your Christ.”

Astonished, overwhelmed by this startling declaration, Da Vinci would not at first believe it, but the proof was at hand, and he had finally to admit that Pietro BandinelH, he whose fair, sweet face had been the inspiration for his great masterpiece, the face of Christ, had now become so disfigured by the sins of a lifetime that no trace was left of that marvellous beauty which before had been the admiration of men.

If such IS the effect on the body, formed as it is, of the dull clay of the earth, what must not sin do to the real man made in the image and likeness of the God of all beauty?

It will undo all the refining influences of culture and education.

A young man, the son of a former United States Attorney-General, was arrested recently while attempting to break into a jewelry window. He was a human derelict, had been ruined by whisky and morphine, and he made the following statement about himself:

“Whisky and morphine have robbed me of my
honour, my manhood, my home, my family, my
friends, my heritage — all that I hold dear, all that
made life worth living to me.

“I have dishonoured the name I bear, and my only consolation is that my father, one of the proudest men that ever lived, is dead, and cannot know of my infamy and the disgrace I have brought on his name.

“He died in 1899, a year before the fiend of morphine got its grip on me. My mother died shortly after, so they do not know.

“I was born thirty years ago, and from the first my father determined that I should follow the profession of which he was so bright a light — the law. After a good elementary education I was sent to the famous St. John’s in Washington, where I learned modern and ancient languages and was taught the elements of law.

“My father was elected to the United States Senate in 1874, but was debarred because he had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. The matter was carried to the Supreme Court, which ordered that he be admitted to his seat, two years later. He was again elected and was finally Attorney-General of the United States. So I grew up in the highest circles of Washington, and when a youth I was personally acquainted with the greatest men in the country. It was in that gilded circle at Washington that I first learned to drink whisky.”

This is sin, and this is man as Christ finds him. Resolution cannot make up for such a condition of affairs in the past and reformation will not answer for the sins of yesterday. At the best they can but touch the present and possibly the future, but the past needs an atonement, and nothing less than the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ will answer.

THE PRESENT

Finding him in sin the spirit of God begins the work of conviction and then leads on to contrition and from that to confession, and when the sinful man of yesterday yields himself to God, accepting Jesus Christ as a personal Saviour, then marvel of marvels and wonder of wonders, the sins which have been piled mountain high are taken away, the guilt which has blighted with its very touch is removed, the transgressions which have broken and crushed the life of the past are forgiven, and the sinner of yesterday stands free from the law; oh, happy condition! And this is all because of what Jesus Christ has done for us in His atoning sacrifice upon Calvary. “He was made sin for us who knew no sin that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.”

There are some things in this world so dreadful that

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we cannot look upon them, and so horrible that we cannot realise them, and so horrible that we cannot behold them without a shudder, but there is nothing in this world so dreadful to us as sin or the thought of sin to Jesus Christ, and yet He was actually made sin for us that He might become our Substitute. “The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” It is the old illustration of the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement, when the priest, laying his hand upon the head of the goat, confessed the sins of the people, and the goat, led by the hand of a fit person, was taken away into a land where no man was. So Christ has taken our sins from us farther than the East is from the iWest.

I was preaching in the City of Philadelphia some years ago when the Secretary of the Y. M. C. A. called my attention to a man forlorn and dejected seated in the rear of the room. I went back to speak to him. He told me that he had been a professor of mathematics in a German university, that he had been slain by his appetite, and that he had made the wreck complete in this country. “But,” said he, “something you have said gives me hope.” The Association men bathed him with their own hands, clothed him with their own clothes, and be became a member of my church. Every Sunday morning for years in that church I met several hundred men before I went into my pulpit. These men came to talk with me and to have me talk with them about that which would encourage them in Christian living. One morning I told them that our sins were taken from us as far as the East is from the West, and then seeing this old professor before me I said, “Professor, that is a mathematical proposition for you; how far is the distance from East to West? ‘* He reached for his pencil and note book, when suddenly he stopped and burst into tears and facing the crowd of men he said, “Men, you cannot measure it, for if you put your stake here and East be ahead of you and iWest be behind you, you can go around the world and come back to your stake and East will still be ahead of you and West will still be behind you, for the distance,” said he, “is immeasurable, and, thank God,” he cried, “that is where my sins have gone.”

With Jesus as a perfect sacrifice, and our definite acceptance of Him we are born again, or as St. John puts it, “Born from above.” Christ comes in to dwell with us,’.his life is our life, and thus dwelling within us character is formed, f

The men who lose their grip are the ones who have no moral stamina. It often happens that men of the weaker sort suffer a great impairment of character from disease, or misfortune, or advancing age; but the man with the character does not easily lose his grip from these causes, and the man with Christ cannot fail.

If a man have character he may defy the fates and adverse strokes of fortune. “Not education,” says Spencer, “but character, is man’s greatest need and man’s greatest safeguard.” Let the character be wounded and the vitality is taken out of a man; his resistance is gone; his system is fatally attacked; his vigour impaired. Character is the great tonic and non-conductor to misfortunes, and it is a man’s inalienable as set. Take it away and loosen its functions and the man easily loses his grip and sinks into a hopeless condition beyond the power of rescue. Character, too, is not dependent upon fortune or chance. All this may be true, but the only character that counts is that which comes from association with Christ and the yielding to his personal touch of influence. Because of His abiding, the will is strengthened, the heart purified, the life made beautiful and the soul saved.

THE FUTURE

For the unsaved without Christ let us remember that personal effort is really useless. Said a man of fortune the other day:

“When I die I shall leave my children a fortune, but when I think it over day after day I can only be ashamed of it all. I suppose I was no worse than the others; I know some were worse than I. I could always say, * It’s good business ‘; but I forgot that there was such a thing as a square deal. If I could get the better of an associate or a customer, or an employee, I did. Anything that I could do to attain my own success was good business; and I did it.

“I have given to charity, headed subscription lists, but it doesn’t satisfy me. I know what I have done wasn’t manly. Last night I sat with other so-called successful men. I studied them. When they can’t help thinking, they think just as I do.

“The modern success is rank failure. It has made this country rich; it has made it great; it has made its people selfish and unprincipled. I would give all I possess to-night if I could say, * I have given everyone a square deal. I have done no man wrong.”

For the unsaved money is of no value. Men are seeking it and make great personal eflfort to secure it; but on January 27, 1907, among those who were supposed to have perished when the Steamer Valencia went to pieces was J. B. Graham, a passenger, and with him went a bag containing $1500 in gold. Survivors of the wreck say that Graham frantically offered the money to anyone who would place him on shore. But the others paid little heed to his pleadings, and his gold lay on the broken deck, kicked under foot, no one bothering even to pick it up. / “It was one time when gold would not buy what was wanted,” said one of the survivors, as he related the story on the steamship Topeka. “Fm coming into a safe harbour without a cent. Why, even this shirt I have on belongs to another man, and I have not even a hat. But that bag of gold or this ship loaded with bullion would not tempt me into such a place again.*’ For the saved, effort will count because of association with Christ and because of his indwelling. Two men died in our country not long ago, the first was a success from one point of view, the material. He amassed a fortune of more than fifteen millions of dollars and kept most of it to the end. He flourished like the proverbial green bay tree and died in possession of his ill-got gains, for every dollar had a blood mark or a slime mark on it. Yet he was one of the most colossal failures American life has produced. “He failed as a husband, and his wife left him; he failed as a citizen, and went to jail; he failed as a business man, and was blackballed by the leading clubs of the world.” Realising all this he made what amends he could by leaving his fortune to charity and the people whom He had robbed. Compare his life with that of S. H. Hadley, who made shipwreck of his hopes in his early manhood, almost broke the hearts of those who loved him because of his sins, and then began to walk with Christ, and of all the men I have ever known, his life was the most beautiful. Every effort put forth counted for Christ, and a countless host in the United States and in the world rise up to-day to call him blessed.

For the saved, influence is always powerful. In April, 1907, an American of the name of Kenrick, and his wife, accompanied by two guides, ascended Point D’Ormy. The climb is a dangerous one at this time of the year owing to avalanches.

As they began to descend they suddenly slipped downward at an alarming speed. They had started an avalanche. The guides, to whom the Kenricks were attached by a rope, shouted to them to keep their feet and not to sit down. Their movement increased until they were going at express speed. Mr. Kenrick says:

“I thought every moment that we would be dashed to pieces, as I knew of the huge precipices on the flank’ of the mountain. I was in front, then came a guide, then my wife, and then the other guide. Suddenly I was brought up with a jerk which shook the breath out of me. We had stopped on a ledge, three yards from the brink of a fathomless depth into which the avalanche rolled with a roar. I turned and saw my wife lying senseless. A guide was rubbing her face witH snow. We owe our lives to Guide Dupraz, who had dexterously clasped a projection of rock and clung to it, thereby bringing us up with a tremendous jerk on the rope, which, fortunately, did not break. When the avalanche had passed, and my wife had recovered, we clambered to safety. Old Dupraz did not seem to be moved by the adventure, but he was pleased when my wife kissed him gratefully.” But if this story can be true, what can be said of the Christian who, taking his stand for the right, holds his household by his influence, holds his business associates, holds a host of his friends. What if you should reject Christ as He stands waiting to receive you? It would be heartless. Dr. Torrey has told the following story: In the State of North Carolina was a poor farmer, who scratched and scraped to educate a bright son. That son overtopped everyone else at the district school, and the farmer said to his wife one day, “Our son is a good scholar, and, while we are poor, our son is bright and ought to have the advantage of a university education.” And he made the effort, and sent him to the State University. Every little while the boy wrote telling his father and mother how well he was getting on, and as they got these letters they were very proud of their son, and it made their hearts glad. One day, when a letter came, the father said to his wife, “These letters are all right, but I would like to see our boy. But his wife said, “It is impossible. He can’t come home and you can’t go there. You can’t afford it.” The father said, “I have a plan; I am going to drive up to the university.” He made up his mind to do it. It was a long drive. He went to bed early and got up by daylight and hitched up the old team and started for the university, travelling many a weary mile. But the old man’s heart was lights and the journey didn’t seem long, for at the end of the journey would be his boy, who would be so glad to see him. “Won’t he be surprised when I come; and won’t he be glad to see me?” the old man thought.

As he approached the university and the team started up a hill, there coming down on the sidewalk were three young men, and as he looked at them he said to himself, “Why, one of them is my boy, and won’t he be surprised and glad when he sees me?” He stopped his team and rushed up to his boy, who had two of his gay companions at his side, and the son was surprised, but he wasn’t glad, but was ashamed of his old father in his plain farmer clothes before his two gay college companions. He straightened up and said, “There must be some mistake, sir. I am not your son. You are not my father. I don’t know you. There must be some mistake.” But he might as well have driven a dagger into the old man’s heart. What do you think of a man like that? I am told, I am not sure that this part of the story is true, although we may well believe it, that the father went home with a broken heart and died.

But what if you should accept, then you would be saved and possibly your household too.

(When we were in Minneapolis a business man be-’ came highly indignant at the progress of the meetings, and positively refused to attend. His entire household felt the force of his opposition in the uncomfortable atmosphere which he created in his home, but at last he came to hear one of the evangelists and must have been impressed. No one spoke to him and no one thought of his accepting Christ and joining the Church.^

When the following Christmas came and the presents had been given out, he called his household about him and said, “And now if you will come to my room I want to give you your special presents,” and when the door was closed he said to his children, “I want to give you the present of a Christian father, for on this, Christmas day I have yielded myself to Christ.” Taking his wife in his arms he said, “And I will give you the present of a Christian husband, and if you will bow with me I will commend you all to God and we will erect a family altar.”

If you will accept Christ such an experience as this might be yours, and not only you be blessed, but all your household and all your circle of friends.