The Gifts of God

Then Peter said, Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I unto thee.” — Acts iii. 6.

It was the first miracle which the apostles wrought after Jesus had left them. Peter and John, full of their new power and with the mystery of their new life all stretching out before them, went up into the temple at the hour of prayer. They passed through the crowd that always was gathered there, and at the door, just as he might crouch beside any church-door to-day, there sat a crippled beggar. And perhaps seeing something in the faces of these two men which he did not understand but which made him hopeful, he asked Peter and John for charity. They gave him no money. They had none to give him. Poor men themselves, they were as destitute of the one thing on which his heart was set as he was. Silver and gold they had none. But they had something better. Full of the spirit and the health of Christ they had the power of giving health to him, and Peter took the cripple by the hand and lifted him up, and his feet and ankle bones received strength, and he, leaping up, stood and walked and entered into the temple, walking and leaping and praising God.

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Such is the beautiful story. The goodness of God by these His two disciples was so much richer than the poor beggar dreamed of. Little he thought that morning as he left his house and crawled up to the temple of what was coming to him before the night closed in. To gather a few pennies as on other begging days was all he hoped for; but this, to come back home a straight, strong man, this he had never pictured to himself. It was a good instance of the way in which men live with one another, the hard and rigid way in which we touch each other’s lives. It is only in certain appointed forms, only through certain conventional mediums, that men come near to one another and give each other the help that man ought to give to man. Out of the manifold points in which we ought to come in contact with one another, this or that is arbitrarily selected, and if we cannot meet there we stay apart, and so it is often sad to think how much of the best which we might get from one another we must be continually losing. This poor man expected money. If any one of the crowd had money and would give it he could help him, but he looked for nothing from anybody else. And so we expect help and comfort in working out this human life of ours from certain people and in certain prescribed ways; and if we are in the position to give certain kinds of help we are willing to accept the duty, but all the time it seems as if there must be other doors open through which help and ministry might flow back and forth between us.

For we all know that the best help that has been given to us in life has not come from those who gave us money or anything which money could represent. Prominent as money stands in all our thoughts of charity we owe more to-day to those who h?ve never given us, perhaps who never could have given us a penny, but who have given us something that is far more valuable than money — the Peters and the Johns who in some need have said to us as we looked up to them, “Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I unto thee,” and who then have touched some dead and withered part of our nature and by their strong character given it back its strength.

I want to dwell a little while on this. I want to speak of the invaluable gifts that it is in the power of man to give to man — that is to say, using the word literally, of the gifts which cannot be valued or estimated. Not the gifts of money or influence which make the receiver so much richer, but the more spiritual gifts of life and character, whereby a man may be benefited not merely by the lowest and grossest but by the finest and highest which his fellow-man possesses. I have various reasons for choosing my subject: I would make the rich man feel that he cannot do his whole duty by any brother by gifts of money, however lavish they may be; I would make the poor man feel that his poverty by no means shuts him out from the very noblest privilege of charity; and I would try to make everybody feel that there is a lofty and dignified dependence in which we may always be looking up to other people, not with a mean expectation that they will give us money but with a generous hope that they will bestow upon us their intelligence, their inspirations, their comfort, their religion.

I honor the influence of money. I excuse no man from the duty, I except no man from the privilege, of bounteously and wisely giving it to whom it has been intrusted, but there are higher things to give than money, and any man who really wants to give something may find something to give, though his purse be as empty as the purses of the two apostles.

To what shall we apply, then, what we have been saying, in order to make it clearer and more definite? I apply it in a very few words first to ideas, then to moral inspirations, then to sympathy, and then to religion. A man may be able to give any of these, and yet be very poor in silver and gold.

I. First, then, about the ideas or the knowledge that comes to us in anj’ way. They are beyond all value in mere money terms. It does not need a very high attainment to be able to say “More than all the money that I have made in life is the knowledge that I have gained.” Many a poor student, looking about him, is able with a perfectly honest heart to say, “If I had my life to live over again I would not choose differently. I would give it again to winning knowledge, not to winning wealth, for knowledge is more to me than wealth is.” But while the clear sense of the superior value of knowledge is thus no uncommon thing, the feeling of responsibility about knowledge as something that a man has no right to keep to himself is much less common than it is about money. Many a man has a blind notion of stewardship about his property, but very few have it about their knowledge. We all feel that it is disgraceful for a man to be very rich and give nothing away, but we look complacently enough at the man who makes his culture a mere selfish luxury. One grows tired of seeing cultivated people with all their culture cursed by selfishness. But surely to give a man an idea is better than to give him a dollar, unless he is starving and needs something to eat upon the spot. And if you, among my hearers, who have no money to give away but have been trained to careful study, to serious and thoughful lives, only knew it, you have a power of charity that no millionaire possesses. Not in some special form, not by mounting the preacher’s pulpit or the professor’s chair, but by steadily bearing in mind that what you know and think, you know and think not for yourselves alone but for others, you may become the centre of a little green spot of intelligence in the midst of this arid wilderness which we call society, as a live tree gathers the moisture and keeps off the sun for a little circle of grass that grows bright and rich under its branches. It is better than silver and gold. The dollar is spent and the man again is hungry, but the idea is implanted, the intelligence is stirred, and the man is richer and happier forever.

2, This is one sort of charity which is far above money. But take another. Higher than intelligence or knowledge, as a gift from man to man, is moral inspiration. It is good to give a man a new idea, but surely it is better to give him a high motive. The motives of the noblest actions are lying all about us all the time. Men are too dull and gross to find them. As a man’s nature becomes finer it becomes capable of transmitting pure and loftier impulses, and finding for them an entrance into the lives of other men. Thus it is that into a community that is all discouraged and demoralized there comes some bright, pure, simple-hearted man who believes in honesty and loves principles, and by and by the low tone of the men he lives among is shamed by him, and men catch his moral spirit and try to live like him. Has he not given them something better than money? Or a poor broken man comes to you when your purse is empty, and you are just going out to earn something for yourself, and you succeed in making him feel that it is better to earn than to beg; you succeed in touching the rusty key of his independence, and he goes back with a refreshed manhood, determined to help himself. Tell me, is there any comparison between what you have done for him and what you would have done if you could have filled his pockets with gold, and feasted his hunger off of silver dishes? And so to reawaken the sense of purity in a gross, licentious nature, breathing over the hot and lustful manhood a fresh, cool breeze out of the long-deserted mountains of his youth, to stir the impulse of honor in a crawling sycophant, to make a coward courageous or a scoffer reverent — these are greater gifts than money. These are greater even than the curing of diseases or the strengthening and straightening of cripples such as John and Peter met. And think what poor people they are who may give gifts like these. Poverty itself gives the chance often for that fortitude that inspires other men to bear their trials. It is the broken windows out of which these lights shine. It is the look of a little child that often calls back purity or honor to a degenerate old man. It is not necessary to have anything, often it is not necessary even to do anything. It is only necessary to be good and brave and true and patient and we give our brethren gifts far beyond all value, great generous impulses and strong true principles.

3. And then, thirdly, comes sympathy! We know that there are times when any gift which can be measured by money-values becomes totally worthless. There are the times when you are in the deepest perplexity or the profoundest sorrow, when it would be insult and mockery for anybody to come to you and overwhelm you with the most enormous fortune that the country has to show. A man goes on heaping up his fortune, money seems to be his only craving. He works for it all the time he is awake and he dreams of it all the time he is asleep. He lives for it, and by the way in which he lavishes his health in its pursuit it seems as if he would die for it. And then all of a sudden some great sorrow comes to him, and how everything is altered! His child dies, and how the values of things are all confused in an instant! Money — his chest so full that he can bury and bathe his hands in gold — what is it worth? Men who can tell him nothing except how to make more money, what does he care for them? But out of utter obscurity comes someone — a pauper, perhaps, whom he has helped, a servant, it maybe, who has crept unnoted about his house, a friend whom he has looked on with something like contempt, so utterly destitute was he of the power of wealth — and he brings the unutterable, the invaluable power of sympathy. He lets that stricken man know that one heart is bitterly sorry for his suffering, and by the strength of love he casts some light into the dark mystery that lies behind the sorrow. This is the power of sympathy. It includes both the other gifts of which we spoke. He who truly gives sympathy enlightens the intelligence and restrings the enfeebled moral nature of him with whom he sympathizes. But he does something more than this. He makes some personal bestowal of himself, of his own strength, his own life, into the weakness and deadness that he tries to help. It is indeed a wondrous gift for man to give to man.

4. But this is not all. A man gives to another man his ideas, his inspirations and his consolations, but if he is all that a man may be, then there is something more that he can give. If he has God, if he has taken Christ into his nature so that his life is a continual following of the Lord’s, then see what a power of benefaction that man may have. It requires nothing great or exceptional in him. Certainly not great wealth. That has nothing whatever to do with it. Not great ability or knowledge, that has hardly more. Only the power to know God and to tell about him. The little Hebrew maiden is so humble that she may not even go to the great Syrian, captive herself. She tells his wife, and the wife repeats it to her husband, “Would God my Lord were with the prophet “; and Naaman goes to God’s prophet, and comes back with his new health again almost as if the proud man had taken it out of the maiden’s little hand. History delights in the little insignificant people who have turned the world’s tides; and religious history has nothing of which she so delights to tell as the way in which the little have been able to lead the great to Christ. For remember the Christian religion is Christ’s friendship. We cannot come to any truer friend as we cannot find a simpler story to tell of it than that. The Christian who comes then with glowing face and says, “I wish that you would believe my Christ,” has to bear witness to me only of one thing — that he has a human heart, and that that heart has found its satisfaction in the Christ to whom he invites me. His glowing face tells me both of these. All that is new in him bears witness that he has really found the great Renewer. I, wanting to be made new, arise and go and find Christ, and He does His blessed work for me. I cannot take that friend’s faith for my own. When, finally, I stand with Christ and call Him mine, it is like those people of Samaria who said unto the woman, “Now we believe, not because of thy word but we have seen Him ourselves “; but nevertheless do you think these men never thought of the woman as the one who had done for them the greatest thing that one human creature can do for another? She had introduced them to Jesus, and whoever does that for any fellow-man, whoever by a Christian word he speaks or by a Christian life he lives, brings a new soul to see the perfect life and take the perfect grace, has poured out of his full hands a blessing on his brother that leaves utterly out of sight any gift that riches can bestow on poverty. It is terrible f )r a rich man to go through life and never have helped a poor man once out of his plenty, but it is far more terrible for a Christian to die without having brought any other soul to Christ.

See then what great gifts they can give who have no silver and no gold. See what bounty the souls of very poor men may lavish upon one another. Intelligence, inspiration, comfort, religion — these are the things which men are needing everywhere. Ignorant, spiritless, wretched, Christless lives are all about us. To help them, to give them what they want, we do not need to be rich. As much as these needs of theirs outgo their need of wealth, so much does the bounty that supplies these needs surpass the bounty that should simply spread their tables and fill their purses. O poor man, you who want to be charitable and seem to be shut out from the great privilege by your poverty, look up, take courage! Here is what you may do. Here is what you may give. Out of the free presence of God, out of that costless mercy of Christ which is yours always, you may gather these boons with which to satisfy your brother’s wants. What a new life we should have, what a new world we should be if all men really were living to give these precious things to one another

It is not hard to see what it is that gives their superior value to these higher bounties. It is that the giver necessarily goes with them. Of all the worshippers who passed into the temple many a one may have dropt his bit of silver into the cripple’s hand, but the silver was not the man, the man need not go with the silver. But when Peter and John came, and Peter gave him his health, that was not something that could be given like a bit of silver; Peter’s own self, his heart, his soul, had to go out to the poor suppliant. We cannot but believe that he felt something of that mysterious experience which the great Healer uttered once when the poor woman touched His robe and He said, “Virtue is gone out of me.”

And always, there can be no really precious gift either to giver or to taker, with which the self of the giver does not go. You remember, I am sure, the story that our poet has written of the young knight who rides out after the holy Grail, and as he goes flings a gold-piece to the beggar who sits beside his gate, and the beggar will not lift it from the dust, because it is only “worthless gold.” But years pass by and when the weary Sir Launfal comes home, old and haggard, there sits the leper still, and then as the knight breaks his single crust and fills his wooden bowl out of the frozen stream and gives the beggar food and drink, the blessing comes to him; the holy Grail, which is Christ’s Passover cup, is found, is the true act of charity, and the leper speaking with the voice of Christ — * ’ the voice that is calmer than silence “— says, “Who gives himself with his gift feeds three, himself, his hungering neighbor and me.” It is sad indeed to think of how much money has been lavished which was only “worthless gold” because the self of the giver was not in it.

I think this lights up much about religion, about the gifts, that is, which God bestows on man. If it is true that man cannot give man his highest gifts unless he gives himself with them, then the same must be true of God. And every conception of religion which thinks of God as standing off and handing men from a distance bounties, however rich they might be, and does not make everything of the giving by God of Himself, His character. His love, with and in His gift, is radically wrong, is not the gospel. It is not that God gives us meat and drink, it is not even that He gives us forgiveness for our sins as a mere forensic and judicial act, it is not even that He gives us heaven as a mere place of delight, — these are not what bind us to Him and make us His. If He could give us any of these without giving us Himself, if He could spread our tables heartlessly, if He could forgive us, as men have sometimes talked, because some one had borne our penalty and forced forgiveness from His justice, if He could open the gates of pearl and not stand Himself with living heart to welcome us, none of these gifts would make us perfectly and permanently His. And if He could give us Himself and not give us some of these things, as sometimes He does give His very heart of hearts to a poor child of His who is struggling and starving, that gift would satisfy the soul in lack of every outward blessing. No, it is true of God as it is of man,

‘• That is no true alms which the hand can hold, He gives nothing but worthless gold Who gives from a sense of duty.”

And such representations as many of our theologies contain of mercies and gifts extorted from God’s reluctance by a hard necessity of justice, however they may be trying to tell one side of the story, cannot and do not picture the glory and the power of the Gospel, God’s free gift of Himself to man.

The Incarnation was the great announcement of this truth. God had been giving men gifts through all the ages. He had dropped His bounties thick through all His people’s history. Men had taken His bounties and thanked Him for them, but through them all they had not reached the certainty of God with them, of God giving Himself to them. And so He came. By every sacrifice, by every identification of Himself with the life that they were living, He gave them Himself. He was not satisfied until He was the gift, the very God given to man. Mysteriously, perfectly He put Himself into their nature.

And when He had come this same desire was always evident. Men often failed to reach it. They wanted gifts. “Give us bread,” they cried, as they followed Him from place to place. “Nay, I am the bread,” He answered, “take and eat me”!

Give me water,” begged the woman of Samaria, “that I need not come to the well to draw.” “The water that I shall give him shall be in Him,” Christ replied. He gave no money anywhere. What we call charity He could not give, silver and gold had He none. But knowledge, such as He gave to Nicodemus, inspiration such as He bestowed on the apostles, comfort such as He brought into the cottage at Bethany, the way to the Father as He opened it wide to the multitudes in the temple, these He was always giving. Himself, His divine self. He lavished on all who would receive Him.

And, brethren, the Incarnation is the Gospel still. We grow disappointed sometimes, perhaps, when we ask for God’s gifts and they do not come. We ask for health, and God withholds it. We ask for wealth, and we go struggling on in poverty. We beg for pleasant homes, and the family life is broken up and scattered. We want long life, and death stands blankly in our way. We send up our prayer for peace, and anxieties come thickening around us. Let us remember always that these are God’s gifts, but they are not God. Himself — His company. His love. His spirit — these are what we may be sure of. This is what He never will refuse. If any of the others stand in the way of this, He will brush them all ruthlessly aside that He may give Himself completely to the soul which, below and above all other needs, needs Him.

That Incarnation, my dear friends, must be our hope and blessing. But it must also be our pattern. O let us riot think that we cannot share the self-sacrifice of God. What was it? It was the giving up of self-centred, isolated joy in order to bestow

Himself on man. The Son was in the bosom of the Father. The perfect life was his. Each infinite power in all its infinite delight knew no deficiency. All knowledge, all happiness, all love was there. What can we say but this, that He was God, and then He came to be a servant? He “was anointed to preach the Gospel to the poor, He was sent to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.” Can we know anything of that? Can we do anything like that? Filled with his love and spirit, can we in any far-off way repeat that in ourselves? Wherever any man leaves his own self-contained life to go forth into the life of others, wherever any saint leaves his closet to go and tell the story of the Saviour, instead of merely pondering its sweetness by himself, wherever any scholar lets his self-culture go that he may lift a corner of the cloud of ignorance off of some benighted soul, wherever the missionary makes himself homeless that he may gather some of the Father’s children into the eternal home, — there is the soul and spirit of the Incarnation. “As my Father hath sent me, so send I you,” He said. We, too, may enter into the lot of other men as He entered into ours. He was not satisfied just to be God, he must give God. And whenever we are not satisfied merely to be wise or happy or holy, but must give wisdom and happiness and holiness, there is the soul and spirit of the Incarnation. It would have been so easy for God to open His hands and shower his bounty on the world, so that every field should overrun with harvest and every mouth be fed with bread; and it is so easy for us to open our money-bags and give our money, but to come Himself and to be to men wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, nothing but that would satisfy Him. To go ourselves, to be one with the sufferer that we may help his suffering, one with the darkened that we may lighten his darkness, this is the only Christliness, the only complete living of the life of Christ.

We might follow it farther, we might say that as the true Godhood of the Saviour with all its holiness and joy was not lost by His entrance into humanity, so the self-culture and the happiness out of which you seem to depart in order to enter into the ignorance and misery of other men, is not in truth surrendered. Your own soul gathers a ripeness which it could not have had abiding alone, and the joy that you seemed to surrender is multiplied tenfold when you begin to seek not yourself but other men. “He that loseth his life finds it.” He that gives up himself for the service of his brethren finds himself in the service of his brethren. Some of you know this by experience, — oh that all of you would really try it! For however it may puzzle us sometimes to apply it to the lower, the promise is always true about the higher things, “Give, and it shall be given unto you.”

I have tried to open the door of charity to some to whom it has seemed to be shut tight. I am sure that there are many who as they go in and out at the beautiful gate of the temple of a happy life are deeply oppressed at the sight of the many who lie crippled and miserable outside. They would like, they long to help them, but what can they do? Silver and gold they have none. I have tried to show that there are other things to give. Your intelligence, your principles, your comfort, your religion — in one word, yourself. The ways will open before you if you really want them. The first and deepest of all ways is to have a self, a strong, good, positive character. To be our best not merely for ourselves but for each other, that is a noble impulse; that, if it were fully carried out, would be the world’s salvation. No man can really be strong and good without helping the world —

“Not to scatter bread and gold.
Goods and raiment bought and sold,
But to hold fast his simple sense
And speak the speech of innocence,
And with hand and body and blood
To make his bosom counsel good:
For he that feeds men serveth few,
He serves all who dares be true.”

Let us be very thankful that no man is condemned to go uselessly through life, or to come before God at last without some souls that he has helped towards their Father.