The Exploits of the Faith

“Out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight.”

Hebrews xi. 34.

This is surely one of the most wonderful chapters in the Bible. As literature alone it has all the force, and rhythm, and dignity of an army marching with banners and bands. Or shall we call it the Westminster Abbey of the Scriptures? Its massive and yet exquisite setting provides a hallowed shrine for the heroes and heroines of the faith. You move around the stately pile, and you read the monumental eulogies which record the valiant doings of the soldiers of the Lord. Here are Abel, and Enoch, and Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and Joseph, and Moses, and many others whose names and triumphs are inscribed in this majestic scriptural Abbey of courage and devotion. They are all conspicuous members of a noble army. Their warfare was fought on very varied fields. They are gathered from many centuries. But they had one cause, and they carried one banner, and they sought the honours of one Lord, and they covered themselves with distinction, and together they share the eternal glory. Yes, I think we may call the chapter the Westminster Abbey of the Bible, erected to the immortal glory of the soldiers of the faith.

I have used the words valour, and courage, and glory, and these words call to my mind the armies of Europe, and the marvellous warfare which very recently possessed the whole of our Continent. I recall the features of that warfare; the conviction that lay within it, the courage that marked it, the endurance, the self-forgetfulness, the self-sacrifice. And then I turn my eyes upon the army of the Lord, and I ask whether the soldiers of Jesus are distinguished by the same valour, and the same glorious abandon, and the same ready and joyful sacrifice. What is the quality of the soldiers who have been born and bred in the army of the Lord? Is there anything of sacrificial blood in their intercessions, in their beneficence, and in their service? Here is a book we call the Acts of the Apostles, and this book is blood-red from end to end. There is nothing cheap and bloodless in its happenings. Every event is stamped with sacrifice. Everywhere and in everything men and women are giving their blood.

But is the bookj of the Acts of the Apostles only a remote record of an early day? Is it now only a dim reminiscence of a dead and buried world? Were those early apostolic labourers the only witnesses who have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb? Nay, rather, my teaching shall be this, that new chapters are even now being written in the Acts of the Apostles, and that every year of our modern life adds to the shining record! The apostolic exploits can be matched in modern missions, and the last fifty years are as rich in sacrifice as the first wonderful fifty years which followed the resurrection of our Lord. Take any event you please in the Acts of the Apostles, which is fragrant with grace, and noble in valour, and I will engage to find its glorious and blood-red counterpart in the annals of our own time. And my simple purpose is to look at some of the early missionary soldiers of the Cross, who are revealed to us in the Acts of the Apostles, and then to put into the same ranks with them, to march abreast with them, unabashed and unashamed, some of the warriors of our own day. This is not the presentation of an abstract argument for Christianity; it is the compelling reasonableness of actual life, and it is, therefore, a superlative argument for the sustaining and triumphant energies of divine grace.

Where, then, shall I begin? Let us begin with the first martyr, the apostolic missionary, Stephen, “a man full of faith and of the Holy Ghost.” I want you to fix your eyes upon Stephen in the moments of his martyrdom. He has just been making a mighty confession of Christ as the Saviour of the world, and the hostile Jews were incited to the frenzy of a mad antagonism. “They ran upon him with one accord, and cast him out of the city, and stoned him.” And you know how, in the midst of that brutal death, the superb courage of this soldier emerged and expressed itself in the tenderest self-forgetfulness, and in the gentlest and most chivalrous benediction: “And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge!” What loftier form of courage can you conceive than the courage which dares to be gentle to the brutal, and which ministers kindly to those who are the ministers of death? The courage which attends to the wounds of the bruiser is the very valour of the Lord.

Well, now, can it be matched in our own day? Have we any missionaries on the field who have blood enough to reveal this sacrificial courage? Have you read of the doings of the Kurds in and around the city of Urumia? The record constitutes one of the blackest chapters in all the black records of the appalling war. The brutality of the Kurds has been unspeakable. “One of the cases reported was that of a girl of twelve who was taken to a life of slavery. The mother protested, and tried to save her child, who was ruthlessly torn from her. As the daughter was being dragged away, the mother made so much trouble for her oppressors, and clung to them so tenaciously, that they stabbed her twelve times before she fell, helpless to save her little girl from her awful fate.” “The American missionary stood almost alone for more than a year in this city of Urumia. No consul; no foreign resident; no outside help.” Alone! And now we are ready for a sentence from a letter: “Another great privilege of these days was the opportunity to serve dozens of Kurds who needed medical help!” My God! what strong and tender chivalry! What self -forgetful chivalry, ministering to the wounds of those Kurds that they might win their hearts and woo them into the love and grace and peaceableness of the Lord Jesus Christ. I say, does not this match the gentle valour of the early day?

Go back a little way. James Hannington, the first Bishop of Eastern Equatorial Africa, was murdered by the people whom he sought to redeem. Let me give you the last entry in his journal. “Eighth day in prison, I can hear no news, but I was held up by Psalm 30, which came with great power.” Perhaps you would like to be reminded of the nature of this Psalm. It is a singing Psalm, full of holy triumph, and one of its closing verses is this: “Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness.” The next day the good Bishop was slain by the spear of a treacherous native, and he became numbered with the glorious army of martyrs.

Now mark the magnificent sequence. Bishop

Hannington’s son offered himself for service on

the field on which his father was slain. He went

and laboured among the very men who had

145 sought his father’s blood. His father’s murderer was dead, but with all the ardour of a hound of the Lord he sought the soul of the murderer’s son, and he won him for Christ, and he baptized him into the Christian faith as he made the open confession of the Saviour’s name. I dare to place this modern record side by side with the gentle chivalry of the Apostle Stephen, and the modern record is not dimmed!

Let us turn again to the apostolic record, and let it be to an incident which is very quietly told, with no exclamation mark, and with nothing to suggest that anything unusual has taken place. The Apostle Paul is in Lystra, busy night and day in gracious and beneficent service, telling the story of grace, and restoring a cripple who had never walked from his mother’s womb. And on the very day of this chivalrous ministry a hostile crowd gathered, and “rhey stoned Paul, and drew him out of the city, supposing he had been dead.” What then? The beaten and broken Apostle came to consciousness again. What then? Let me read the Word: “And he returned again to Lystra.” That sentence always makes my heart leap with its exaltation of a quiet but magnificent heroism! Back to the place of the stoning, as though no stoning had taken place! He was black, and blue, and sore, and broken, and weak and burdened with loss of blood. But he returned again to Lystra, to tell them about Jesus, and the story of redeeming grace and love. What is there which happened in the European war which can make that courage look pale and dim?

But can this scriptural record be matched in our own time, or is it one of the brilliant exploits of a dead and bygone day? I turn your thoughts to James Chalmers, the noble pioneer missionary to New Guinea. I cannot stop to tell what perils, and hardships, and awful deprivations this man endured to tell the natives of New Guinea of Jesus and His love. There were long seasons of his tremendous ministry when he could have truly said with the Apostle Paul, “I die daily.” When he had been out for twenty-one years, nine of them spent in the island of New Guinea, he was induced, after much constraint, amounting almost to compulsion, to come home to rest. I met him when he returned, one of the most arresting and splendid personalities I have ever seen. He stood up there in London, on the platform of Exeter Hall, and in the course of a driving speech he used these words: “Recall the iwenty-one years, give me back all its experience, give me its shipwrecks, give me its standings in the face of death, give it me surrounded with savages with spears and clubs, give it me back again with spears flying about me, with the club knocking me to the ground, give it me back, and I will still be your missionary.” Yes, and we gave him back to the field. He returned again to his Lystra, and this gloriously brave and leonine apostle of the Lord laid down his life and won the martyr’s crown. “Give it me back,” he said, “and I will still be your missionary.”

Have we forgotten Father Damien? His life is well within my own life, and his story matches any record in apostolic days. If the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews had been writing his letter to-day he would have given Father Damien a niche in his Westminster Abbey with the other heroes and heroines of the faith. Father Damien sailed out of the beautiful harbour of Honolulu in company with fifty banished lepers, to spend the rest of his days on the leper island. “Now Joseph, my boy, this is your life work,” he said to himself, as he scrambled on shore and saw the other leper inhabitants awaiting him “Half clothed, ragged, and dirty, many of them with faces stained and scarred, sometimes almost shapeless with the ravages of leprosy, with hands and feet maimed and bleeding, mortifying limbs and decaying flesh, there they were gathered together in ghastly groups; and these were the most healthy inhabitants of the island; the more helpless and dying were lying in the settlement two or three miles away.” Father Damien lived a life among them of the uttermost sacrificial labour. He so identified himself with the people that in all his letters his customary address was “we lepers i” He often carried the dead in his own arms to their graves. Ten years passed, and then the great hero saw in himself the symptoms of leprosy. He was still cheerful, and felt the lepers to be nearer and dearer to him than ever. And now comes the sentence that burns in my mind like holy fire, and blazes alongside the words of James Chalmers which I have just read to you. “I would not be cured if the price of my cure was that I must leave the island and give up my work!” What quality do you assign to courage like this? In his Lystra Father Damien took the leprosy, and he would not leave his Lystra even for the priceless bounty of a perfect cure. What is there which puts that valour to shame? It is surely one of the blood-red marks of the Lord Jesus.

But strong and massive virtue is not always of the scarlet order, nor does it always robe itself in quieter khaki. The finest virtue is often dressed in the plainest and most unobtrusive gray. I have been unveiling some very brilliant virtues; now let us look at one of a homelier but equally sacrificial order. Let me turn again to the Acts of the Apostles; “And Paul continued in Corinth a year and six months teaching.” And this is all we know about that year and six months. He was just teaching ignorant people, and there is nothing in the work that calls for particular record. But how tame, and gray, and unadorned! Just teaching people about Jesus who find it difficult to learn! Yes, but what powers of endurance it needed, and what resources against weariness, and what springs against drought, and what inspirations against retreat! We have seen the great Apostle robed in scarlet courage; here he is in the plain gray of a perseverance that will not be bored, in the plain gray of a pertinacity which no glittering snare can entice from its road. I am perfectly sure that in the scriptural Westminster Abbey, and among the heroes and heroines of the faith, there are niches for those who wear the quiet gray of obscure and unapplauded perseverance. It is the illimitable patience of secret and unregistered labour. It is the quiet but prolonged dripping of sacrificial blood.

In 1914 I was in Beirut. One of the main things I wanted to see in that fascinating town was the printing house where the Bibles are printed which are sent out to every part of the Moslem world. I walked about among the machinery. I handled the very type with feeling of reverence. There is a great worker for God in that place, and he was busy on the marginal references of the Moslem Bible. And the Arabic letters are so delicate, and so complicated, and the pointing is so minute and the work is so scrupulous and almost microscopic that we found this hero of God, Dr. Hoskins, was beginning to lose his sight. For twenty-eight years he has been working away at the Moslem Bible. Nothing scarlet about it, not even khaki courage, but the magnificent gray courage which can pass the breaking point and not break, and go gloriously on with its task, having no spectator but God. And so do I put Dr. Hoskins in the rank with Father Damien, and both of them in the brave company of the Apostle Paul.

If you went to Canton you would see a home and school for the blind. You would find two hundred blind boys and girls. Many of the little girls, indeed almost all of them, have been rescued from an unnamable slavery into which they had been sold by their parents. One little sentence in the report reads thus: “None of these girls came from homes.” That brief word is significant of horrors far more terrible than the horrors amid which Father Damien lived and died. There is a noble woman in that home who has been working in this blessed ministry for thirty-four years. Send your imagination working down that long lane. What a glorious tenacity of mighty Christian purpose! What resource of plain, home-spun perseverance! What invincible courage! On, and on, and on, and on; just a plain road without a banner and without a band. Thirty-four years! I take off my hat to this glorious worker on the battlefield of Canton, who for thirty-four years in the army of the

Lord has just been bleeding away in quiet, sacrificial and blessed ministry for these blind and orphaned slave-children for whom our Saviour died.

Yet all these are but typical examples which might be indefinitely multiplied. Take any exploit you please from the Acts of the Apostles. It can be matched in the story of modern missions. The songs which were sung in the hour of tribulation can be matched by the midnight songs of our own time. The courage which was placarded in the presence of fierce persecution in Jerusalem and in Asia Minor can be matched by the courage of persecuted Christians to-day. The Acts of the Apostles is still being written, and dazzling chapters are being added in the shining record of the missionary life of to-day. Christ has heroic men and women at the front, soldiers of the Cross who are exhibiting as cool a nerve, and as noble a courage, and as tenacious a patience, and as gloriously extravagant a sacrifice, as any which you could have found in the battle-trenches and hospitals of Europe. But what about ourselves? Are we in the field or out of it? Are we soldiers, or only spectators? Nay, are we really less than spectators, not sufficiently interested even to turn our eyes upon the glorious war? How much do we care for the salvation of the world? Our sons have given their blood for the defence of the Fatherland, and for the sacred cause of liberty, and for the honour of the plighted word. What are we ready to give for the glory of our Saviour, and for the extension of His Kingdom of righteousness and peace? If all the soldiers in the army of Jesus gave themselves and their money to the service of the Lord, with the same glorious abandon as our men gave themselves to the warfare of the flesh, we should speedily engirdle the globe with the evangel of grace, and we should create heavenly airs in every land in which the devils of hatred and jealousy would be unable to breathe. Shall we do it? In this stricken and appallingly war-swept world the blessed Saviour is calling. He is calling for men and women and munitions and money. Shall we refuse Him? I appeal to every reader, young and old — nay, the Master Himself appeals to us to have a share in His holy and glorious campaign. Let us give ourselves to our Lord in the uttermost consecration. Let us give Him our spirits in ceaseless intercession. Let us give Him our strength in the readiness of exultant service. Let us give Him our money in most joyous and bountiful beneficence. Let us give to the point of blood, and let us know the joys of sacrifice. Let the angels in glory be constrained to whisper to one another; “They bear the marks of the Lord Jesus.”