I Washed My Face

Ur Lord never asks any of His fol¬
lowers to do anything that He does
not first do the thing Himself, in
order to show them the way to
do it.

All His life long, our Lord was The Man of Sorrows; but His disciples never discovered that from anything He ever said or did. He was The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world; but He did not appear unto men to be that; but only to His Father who saw Him in secret. All His days His face was set to go up to Jerusalem; but His followers never believed that He was going there; no, not even when He took them and told them in the plainest words possible, what was wait¬ ing Him there. In His own words. He so anointed His head and so washed His face, that He completely deceived His most discerning disciples all the time He was with them. He fasted and prayed in secret; but all the time His enemies were not without some ground for saying: Behold, a man gluttonous and a wine-bibber; a friend of publicans and sinners. John the Baptist came neither eating nor drinking; but Jesus Christ came doing both. When the wine went done at the marriage of Cana, He filled the six waterpots up to the brim with the best wine that the governor of the feast had ever tasted. And he drank thereof Himself and so did all His disciples. And then on every highway He would make multitudes of mothers to be happy beyond all words as He took up their children in His arms and blessed them as if they had been His own. In short, He spread sunshine abroad wherever He went; while, all the time. His own heart was broken within Him. All His life long He practised to perfection what He here preaches. All you, who have any real interest in Him and in His ways, you should read, till you have it by heart, how He spent His last night before His Crucifixion. He knew quite well what was coming to Him on the morrow, but He spent that night as if to-morrow was to be His marriage-day. He made the night on which He was to be betrayed the most heart-comforting night to His disciples that they had ever spent, or ever would spend, in this world. All H is talk at table His last night was about their great blessedness. It was all about the place He was to prepare for them. As one of them said afterwards, it was all about their inheritance, incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for them. The whole night was given up to the consolation of His disciples. While, all the time. He Himself was already on the accursed tree; with the crown of thorns on His head, and with the great nails in His hands and in His feet, and with the soldier’s spear in His side, and with His Father’s great forsaking in His heart.

Now, when our Lord says to us that we are always to anoint our head, and to wash our face. He means us to understand that He would have us always to do as He did Himself. That is to say. He would have us to eat and to drink, and to go to all our entertainments and amusements and relaxa¬ tions, with a smile on our countenances, even when there is a sword in our hearts. We are not to let the men around us so much as guess that there is anything the matter with us. We are on no account to expose God’s sanctification-secrets to vulgar eyes. Commonplace men do not know, and they cannot be made to understand, what is involved in the sanctification of a sinful soul. They have not the faintest idea of what it is to have God’s law entering the most sinful human heart. And thus it is that when you must eat and drink with such dull-witted and unimaginative men, you are to anoint your head and to wash your face as if you were as dull-witted and unimaginative as they are. In short, you are here called to a kind of holy hypocrisy everywhere, so to name it. That is to say, you are to use all your skill to cast dust in the eyes of the most lynx-eyed of men, till you make them think that you are anything and everything but what you actually are, in your broken heart and in your hidden life.

And not only in your entertainments and amusements are you to keep God’s secrets with you well

6o hidden in your heart, but almost more in your prayers and in your praises and in the Scriptures you select to read in public. Attend to your Lord’s petitions and pleas that passover night and you will be struck again to see that at the very moment when His enemies were sharpening their weapons and were selecting their cords and were lighting their torches there is not one syllable about Himself in all the seventeenth of John; not one syllable! Now, we must all imitate Him in that silence about Himself. We must not imitate James Guthrie of Stirling. For we are told that when that great Covenanter was in another agony of his sanctification, he was wont to pour out all his own secret sins and sorrows at the family altar, till his church-officer took him to task about that habit of his, and told him that his family worship was becoming simply intolerable. And told him to anoint his head and to wash his face so that he might not appear to his wife and his children and his servants and his guests that he had the two-edged sword so deep in his heart. And when you have had a specially bad day, as James Guthrie had so often, be sure you select a specially cheerful chapter to read to your household that night, and sing a specially joyful psalm. And then bid them all good-night with a beaming countenance. And then after they are all fast asleep, shut your door on yourself and your heavenly Father. And when once your door is securely shut, then let as many clouds come out on your brow, and let as many tears run down your cheeks as you like.

You are free now to pour out your blackest and most broken heart: as black and as broken as you like, and as long as you like. Only your head must be well anointed, and your face well washed, before you make your appearance at the breakfast-table next morning. ‘ My sore ran in the night,’ says David. But that practised penitent took down his psaltery and sang the hundred and third Psalm at family worship next morning. And says Mr. Gladstone about our own sovereign: ‘ Her eyes told tales; but she smiled and put on a cheerful countenance.’

And, then, there will be this, in some cases. While you are the most approachable and affable and companionable and entertaining of men, all the same there will sometimes be a terrible loneliness and desolation in your own heart. The wise man says in one place that the heart alone knows its own loneliness. The thing was never better expressed; but I question if Solomon, with all his experience, and with all his wisdom, knew the half of the full solemnity of what he was saying. Lonely in heart, as all God’s true saints have been, in all the dispensations, there is an inwardness and a secrecy and a loneliness and a desolateness in the saints of a New Testament experience, that have all drawn down the Holy Ghost Himself to be their only adequate Comforter. For,

‘ Not even the tenderest heart, and next our own, Knows half the reasons why we smile or sigh.

Thou knowest our loneliness,

No stranger Thou to all our solitude.’

But to come back for a moment more to our holy hypocrisy — so to call it. And I have called it by that name because I cannot find a better name for what I have received to say to you this evening. Well, then, who and what is a hypocrite.? A hypocrite, as you know, is a double-minded man. He is a man who smiles on you, and says sweet things to you, when all the time he would stab you to the heart, if he only could. He fawns on you and flatters you, when all the time it is simply poison to his peace of mind to hear any one appreciate you and praise you. He cheats you into thinking that he loves you; while, on occasion, he hates you like hell. And the fouler his heart is toward you, the more he anoints his head and washes his face when he has again to meet you, and to speak with you. Now, you are to be something like that. Your heart is very far from being right toward a certain man, and you cannot get your heart set right toward that man, all you can do. You are oftener on your knees and on your face about the state of your heart toward that man than he, or any one else, would for one moment believe. And, unavailing as your repentance and your prayers have hitherto been about your heart toward that man, you must go on till your death or his, praying for a clean heart toward him. And, till your prayer is answered, or till he is at your funeral, or you are at his, you must anoint your head every time you meet him, and wash your face.

But, in closing, there are some singular exceptions — some singular and notable exceptions — to this universal rule of secrecy and silence in the life of sanctification. We see the strict rule and injunction of the text divinely suspended, and, indeed, wholly abrogated, in the chosen and conspicuous cases of such still unsanctified saints as David and Asaph and Heman and Isaiah and Hosea, in the Old Testament Church. And, again, in the conspicuous cases of such still unsanctified saints in our Scottish Church as Fraser of Brea, and Brodie of Brodie, and Haly burton of St. Andrews, and Rutherford of Anwoth, and Boston of Ettrick, and many more. And that otherwise universal rule of inward sorrows and outward smiles has been suspended and abrogated, in their cases, for the best of reasons. For this reason: that a secret language and a secret literature might be produced for the enlightenment and for the consolation of all those people of God who are under some such sanctification as those great saints were under. When one of God’s deeply exercised saints — deeply exercised with their own sinful hearts, that is — when any such saint reads certain of David’s psalms, and certain of Paul’s chapters, and certain of Rutherford’s letters, and Fraser, and Brodie, and Halyburton, they are able now to see that they are not alone, but that other men have been in the same awful experience. When Christian was in the valley of the shadow of death, and heard another man wrestling and praying in the same darkness, he took heart, and pressed forward till he overtook his brother pilgrim, and they then went on together. So lias it been with some of your¬ selves as you read David and Paul and Rutherford and Halyburton and Boston. Now, had all those sorrowful saints always anointed their heads and washed their faces, how desolate you would have been in the aloneness of your pilgrimage! If those great preachers and great writers had always seemed to you to be always full of all manner of light and peace and joy and holiness, you would have despaired and would have thought yourself a reprobate. But their n/mnointed heads and their wnwashed faces have been revealed to you in order that you may have hope that He who guided them to tell you how they were afflicted, and then were delivered, will so deliver you, after He has sufficiently afflicted you. Those priceless books of experimental religion that you hide under your pillow all night, while all manner of romances and love stories lie open on your table all day, those classics of the soul could only have been composed by God’s greatly exercised and greatly gifted saints. And they were all composed for your comfort and consolation and encouragement. All you who read Paid, you see how often he writes with the ink of gladness in his pen, and that sometimes discourages you, because you cannot attain to that gladness, nor even come near it. But for your comfort and encouragement the Holy Ghost sometimes makes the Apostle change his ink. Instead of joy and singing Paul sometimes dips his apostolic pen into a bottle of tears and blood. Never did saint of God anoint his head and wash his face like Paul. But, all the same, on an occasion, he wrote the seventh of the Romans.