Word and Deed

“For he spake, and it was done.” — PSALM xxxiii. 9.

WHEN David sang these words in his great Psalm, he was calling upon the earth to fear the Lord, and all the inhabitants of the world to stand in awe of Him, because He was its Maker: “For he spake, and it was done; he commanded and it stood fast.”

No truth can ever be opened to man’s knowledge which can supersede the simple dignity of that conception, that God made the world. No motive for lofty life can be presented which can outshine this: that, because God made the world and all that therein is, the world must fear its Maker with that fear which is the beginning of wisdom. The method of men, trying to get at the true explanation of things which they see, is to construct an hypothesis, to see how that hypothesis will meet the facts which they observe, and to modify their hypothesis as the facts compel them. Behind all other hypotheses there must always stand the first hypothesis of a God-Creator. Before any revelation authenticates it, man, standing in the midst of the wondrous world, says to himself: “Where did it come from? What made it?” and the answer springs from his own consciousness: “Why, the only creative power which I know of must have made it — a personal Will! Some He must have spoken the word, and it was done.” With that hypothesis he tests the world, and nowhere does it fail him. Much light he gets upon the character and intentions of this sublime He who made the world; but, above it all, clearer and clearer it grows to the holder of that hypothesis continually that He did make it. And so he is ready by and by, when Revelation opens its mouth and Incarnation comes, to listen and look and understand the nature of the God whose existence has been to him the key of the world.

And so the primal motive of all life must be, as I said, this same Creatorship which is the final know ledge. What is the strongest power to make men good, to take them from their sins, to turn them to new lives? You say, Christ’s Love. Yes, but the Love of Christ, remember always, is but the reassertion of Creatorship. It is the Father claiming His children, claiming them because they are His children; and all that which comes into the Christian’s heart, and sets it struggling, yearning towards God, is only the reawakened childhood. It has been emphasized by danger; it is full of special gratitude for special love; but, after all, it is the soul of the child finding out the Father. It has its root in the creative act by which God made man when “He spake and it was done.”

These thoughts cannot but arise when we speak of God’s act of creation, but it is not on these thoughts that we will dwell now. I want to have 144 WORD AND DEED

you notice with me the singular form of the declaration, and the way in which it puts what we may call the decisiveness of God. “He spake, and it was done,” says David. Here, you see, is a perfect meeting of the Word and the Deed, and those two in their combination make the perfect life.

See what they are. The word is the completed thought. It is the reasonable process of a man who has come at last up to the point of resolution and of declaration. Not yet is there anything to show in outward life. No material has yet been touched. The world seems the same that it has seemed before; but inside the man everything is altered. The thought, the passion, the struggle of motive with motive has been going on, and at last has come to a decision. The word is ready, and is spoken. The conclusion is reached. The resolution is declared. That moment always has a special solemnity and interest when it is recognizable — the moment when the word is perfect, but the deed not yet begun. Such was the moment when Abraham determined on his journey, sleeping his last night in Ur of the Chaldees, with all the Jewish history before him; when Paul was sitting in the house at Damascus, with the determination of his new life made, but not one stroke of work yet done for Christ; when Columbus uttered his strong conviction to the world, waiting only for his ships to find America.

There are moments in all our lives which have this solemnity, as we look back upon them; moments when the word was complete, the resolution made, but the deed not yet begun. Before that moment there had come the perplexity of puzzled thought; after it, came all the bewildering detail of action. But, just there, thought stood clear in its conclusion, and the coming deed glowed bright and certain in its promise; and that was, what such moments of a man’s life always are, heroic and inspiring. It exalted us when we were in it, and we remember it with joy. But yet, on the completed word a deed must follow, or the word loses its beauty and distresses us. If, as we look back, we see our lives all strown with words that never came to deeds, with resolutions that never produced actions, we are as unsatisfactory to ourselves as if we saw our lives full of actions which had no reasonable resolutions out of which they sprang, but were the results of thoughtless whims. These make the two kinds of men who disappoint us always: the men of words, but not of deeds; the men of deeds, but not of words; the men who resolve without acting, and the men who act without resolving; for remember that speech has a deep meaning in the Bible. It is not the mere use of words. It is that whole reasonable process which culminates in the use of words, in the deliberate utterance. This is the high use in which the Lord Himself is called the Word of God.

These two kinds of men, then, there are. The men of words who are not men of deeds think, speculate, dream, grow vague, intangible, and helpless. The men of deeds who are not men of words grow shallow and shortsighted, practical only in the outside ways and little tricks of things. As men grow to be full and complete men, the two come together. The word and the deed correspond. Every reasonable resolution has its action, and every action has its reasonable resolution. The object of all education, whether of the family or the school or the church, ought to be to bring this union to its best completeness.

Now, when David says of God, “He spake, and it was done,” he is declaring that in God the word and deed unite completely. It is impossible for them to be separated. God cannot know a truth, involving a conviction, that shall not flash out some action, as its consequence, to the very ends of the universe. And God cannot do a deed out on the farthest confines of His eternal nature, but that deed has its root down in the very deepest depths of His nature. He never resolves but action follows. He never acts but resolution has gone before. In this truth lies the solidity, the solemnity, the wonderful beauty of the world. God does some thing to you. He opens His hand and fills your cup with plenteousness. Or is it the opposite? He closes His hand, and takes the joy and pride of your life away. Before He did that deed, He spake. It was the utterance of a reasonable resolution. It was no generous nor cruel whim. The strange event, be it all bright with sunshine or black with grief, comes in and sits down in your life crowned with God’s intention. He did it, and He meant to do it.

And so, upon the other hand, no word without its deed. God’s words are words of righteousness. “All sin is bad; all holiness is good.” When once those words have been spoken, evil must come upon wickedness; blessing must come upon goodness. No power in the universe can stop it. He who tries to be wicked, and yet enjoy, casts himself between a word and a deed of God, and must be crushed in their inevitable meeting. He who tries to be holy and yet thinks he must be wretched, is amazed to see how impossible that is. God takes him up and bears him, in spite of himself and his feeble expectations, into happiness. Ah yes; the necessary union, the necessary correspondence of word and deed, in God, is what makes the solidity and the solemnity, the awfulness and beauty, of the universe and of every life.

If we allow ourselves to ask why it is that God’s words always produce deeds, why His resolutions always produce their actions, while ours so often only die away in their own echoes, and have no result to show; the answer, the deepest answer, I am sure, will be in this: that God’s resolutions are real resolutions; or, to put it more simply, that God always thoroughly means everything that He says. It is not simply the greatness of His power, for there are regions where we, too, have power and yet in them our resolutions fail, — but the real difference is here: God’s resolutions mean the things they say, while ours have only half made up their minds.

We dwell, indeed, on what we choose to call the delays of God. There is nothing more impressive to our thoughts. We know that God decrees the sinner’s punishment or the saint’s reward at the very moment of the sin or holiness; nay, in the very sin 148 WORD AND DEED

or holiness itself the punishment or the reward is promised; — but years slip by, the man grows old, and only on the gray hairs, perhaps, comes the retribution of the action which was done in all the flush of youth. We watch and wonder at God’s patience in His treatment of the nations. Jerusalem, Assyria, Rome, — the judgment of death which they have incurred comes creeping on for centuries before it fastens upon them and they die. So everywhere we see God’s patience. But nowhere is there hesitation. However slow it comes, it comes with absolute sureness — the suffering upon the sin, the blessing on the goodness, the ruin on the wicked nation. And we must always remember that those words of our feebleness — “slow” and “quick” — mean nothing in the life of Him who is eternal.

But with us it is not merely delay. It is a lack of power in the word to turn itself into a deed at all. It is hesitation. How many times have you said, “I will give up this bad habit”? It is not that you have seen that it takes a long time to give it up. It is not that you began at once and it has taken you longer than you thought it would. It is that your word was not strong with real intention. You did not really mean what you said. Therefore the deed never came. How often we say: “I will go into the heavenly life. I will not live to myself; I will live to God and God’s children.” We speak and it is not done, because our speech was not strong and determined. Alas for our poor resolutions! Oh, the woeful, woeful lack in our lives of the decisiveness of God! It grows more and more clear to me — the power that belongs to self-consecration and absolute determination. Men do what they mean to do. For the will is a part of God in man, and has some of His absoluteness and certainty.

It seems to me that no thoughtful man watches the state of things to-day, without seeing continual illustrations of a very curious and important truth with regard to this matter of the will and its power of decision. That truth is this: Decision is easy in the lowest and crudest conditions of human life; and it is easy again in the highest conditions of human life; but there are middle conditions in which decision becomes difficult, and men’s minds float about loose and unsettled. Just consider if that be not so. You take a child, and how quickly he decides every thing. Promptly and sharply his word leaps into action. He speaks and acts. There are very few considerations in his mind. Everything is simple to him, so simple that he can hardly conceive how it can seem otherwise to any one. Then take the other end — the full-grown man. He too decides. With many more elements to harmonize, with many more aspects of the subject to adjust than the child had, the mature man feels the necessity of decision, and grasps, as it were, the mass of many thoughts into his hand, and compacts them into a solid resolution. But between the two, what have we? — the irresolute and vague and doubtful years of him who is neither boy nor man, the years in which the directness of childhood has been lost, and the higher directness of manhood not attained, the years when crowding thoughts of many kinds make it seem often impossible to decide on anything, the misty and uncertain years of young manhood and young womanhood.

The same thing is true about the degrees of culture, independent of age. The savage or the brute, whether he is old or young, decides easily, decides instantly. The beast sees his prey, and springs upon it. The savage sees his enemy, and the javelin flies. On the other hand, the man of highest culture, the finished soldier, the accomplished statesman, the experienced merchant, he again is quick as lightning. He speaks, and it is done. He summons with a quick, imperious call one summary result out of the complication of the business that lies before him. It is the man between the two, the man who has left the simpleness of the brute, and come in sight of many considerations which the savage never dreamed of, but has not yet passed out into the highest culture, who, Hamlet-like, hesitates and fears to act. There are faith and action at the bottom and faith and action at the top of life; between the two lies inability to decide.

It is a sign of where our age stands, of what multitudes of minds in it have left the lowest without having attained the highest culture, that so many men in our age are haunted by indecision. Light at the bottom of the mountain and light at the top; but half-way up clouds and mist! This is the order of the mental conditions of mankind. First comes he who leaps at conclusions without evidence; then he who questions everything; and then he who holds truth which he has proved. The dogmatist, the skeptic, the believer, such is the order of the phases of the growing mind.

There is in the midst of all indecision and all doubt a constant conviction that not these, but decision and belief, are the highest condition for man kind. The highest men have come out of the mists, and are living in action and faith. And what delivers a man from the confusion and helplessness of the middle state is really a moral need. This is most interesting and important. When a man’s intellectual life has become snarled and confused, and with all his thinking he cannot decide what he ought to do, then it is that a moral necessity steps in and furnishes the point about which all this mental disturbance crystallizes into coherency and purpose. A young man has so perplexed himself with many schemes of life that it seems impossible for him to settle upon any one thing and do it. But by and by his duty to his family, the need of making bread to put into his children’s mouths, steps in, and he is compelled to fix his will on something, to strike the balance of his long debate and go to work. A man has tossed back and forth the arguments for two sorts of doctrine, all the while his heart no more holding any faith than the juggler holds the balls which he flings from hand to hand in quick succession. What finally stops his weary and unsatisfactory debating is the absolute necessity, for the regulation of his life, that he should have something to believe. It is the felt power of temptation, the absolute inability to meet sorrow with a debate instead of a faith.

Those are the things that must break up every man’s indecision at last. If you are a young man questioning what you will do with your life, it must be the duty of being something for other men. Certainly it must be duty somewhere that saves you and brings you out a true man, and makes you really live a life. If you are an unbeliever, perplexed with many doubts, I tell you earnestly that the intellect will never clarify itself by its own action. It must be duty, duty demanding the power for its task which nothing but belief can give it; this it must be which throws light into the darkness, and scatters the mist, and makes you a believer. It is the man, “perplexed in mind, but pure in deed,” of whom it is written that “At last he beat his music out.”

I believe with all my heart in this necessity of the moral to the intellectual man. I believe it so strongly that if a man is not trying to do right, if he has not got the idea of duty, I count his judgments, upon even the most purely intellectual questions of religious faith, of very little worth. The selfish man who says that the divine self-sacrifice is incredible; the man who never grapples with temptation and so never feels the need of divine help, and yet who says that the miracles of Christ are impossible; the man who undertakes no tasks so spiritual that they demand eternity for their accomplishment, and yet who denies the everlasting life; the man who never cares for his own soul, and then says, “There is no God” — I find but little power in the skepticism of such men. It is the soul struggling to do right, and yet finding it hard to get hold of truth — that soul which we do see here and there — which is terrible. In God Himself the moral and the intellectual are but one. His goodness and His wisdom perfectly belong together. And it is Duty that settles, with strong but gentle touch, the mingled problems of our life. The mother learns a faith above her child’s cradle that she never knew before; and the man setting out to do some hard work for his land or his friend calls on a God of whom he has been debating with himself whether, indeed, there were a God at all.

I have been speaking about decision in general. I want to bring what I have been saying to a point and make it bear directly on the great decision of a man’s life — that decision by which he becomes a Christian. There is one act which goes beyond and includes all other acts. It is the act in which, won by the authority and love of Jesus Christ, a man takes his whole self and gives it up into the mastery of the Lord, making himself thenceforth His disciple. That act of consecration and surrender, how differently it looks to different men; nay, how differently it looks to the same man at two different times! It is the very hardest or the very easiest act in all the world; so hard that it seems truly impossible, or so easy that it is amazing how any man can keep from doing it. The simplest natures often find it very easy. The child learns of its Saviour’s love, and to accept that Saviour, to ask Him to forgive its sins, to make His will its law, seems to the child’s heart the easiest and most natural of all things. The nature of the man in penitence is the child’s nature over again, and so for him, too, the trust in Him who is all-trustworthy seems not difficult. But, when the great act of dedication is not done at once, there come in all manner of complicating questions about Christ and His mercy, and they make irresoluteness, the condition of unresolve in which such hosts of men are standing. Oh, how familiar those questions have grown! how dusty and forlorn they sound, as we bring them out of the thousand experiences in which they have lain and rankled so miserably! “Is Christ ready to receive me, and must I not do something before I come to Him? Is it indeed necessary that I should own my faith in Him? What will happen to me if I do not come? Do I believe enough to come? How is it with this other man? How is it with these heathen?” These are the questions that make men hesitate about the Christian act. They are always lying in wait. If the soul touched by the Saviour does not instantly and spontaneously give itself to Him, then they come flocking in. And when they have once taken possession of a heart, then, you know — so many of you there are who know — what comes, what hesitating, what unrest, what a constant sense that there is something which you ought to do, which yet you will not do, what putting off and putting off, what dissatisfaction everywhere year after year, till at last the time arrives when, through every hesitation, you step right across and do the act, and really give yourself, body and soul, to Christ. There is the only escape. There is the only daylight.

But when it comes, it is not like the first glad turning to the Saviour which might have been before all these sad years of questioning began. It is soberer and calmer. No longer possible for you is the happy taking of Christ’s service as if there were no thought of anything beside; no longer possible for you is the fresh, enthusiastic faith of the young Christian all glowing with the joy of giving his whole life to Jesus; but still there is something very rich, if you will only take it, — the sober, deep, and soulvpossessing joy of a man who has hesitated long, and asked many and many a question, now at last coming in the full strength of manhood, and resting his soul, heavy with its long-accumulated need, all in one great reasonable act, upon a mercy which has convinced him of its mercifulness by the way in which it has waited for him through all his hesitations.

And now, observe that when this decision comes, when the hesitation of the life gathers itself up at last, and with one total consecration gives itself to Christ, it is a moral act that does it. The intellectual elements are already there. “How shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard?” says St. Paul. But this man has heard, year after year, of Christ. All of His work has been abundantly familiar. It has lain so long in the mind that it has caught the dust of floating difficulties that are not really a part of itself. What is needed is not more knowledge; it is something that shall transfer the knowledge into action. It is Decision.

And that, surely, is moral. It grows from moral needs. It acts by moral powers. Indeed, it corresponds exactly to the act which one of those people who were with Jesus in Palestine did when he be came the Lord’s disciple. He had known all about Jesus before. He had heard of Him. He had heard Him. He had discussed His claims. He had looked up the Scriptures, to see how this Teacher corresponded with the old Teachers. He had watched other men who had come to Christ, as interesting phenomena. Could you have a truer picture of the position in which many a man here and now stands concerning the Saviour? But some day there came a great need into that Jew’s household. Into the peace and composure dropped a hot and burning pain. Perhaps sickness smote him who had never known what it was to feel an ache before. Perhaps death came and stood at the door and beckoned; and some one, the dearest in the household, grew pale as if he knew the summons was for him, and began to gather up his reluctant robes, to follow the austere messenger. Perhaps something deeper than either of these things came. Perhaps the man’s soul itself grew troubled. A deep dissatisfaction settled on it. Its selfishness, its worldliness, dismayed it. It cried out at its own uselessness. It was sorry for its sin.

In either case, what followed? How all that had been learned before of the Saviour sprang into clearness, grew compact with force! The need took everything the man had thought before, and crowned it with decision. He who had reasoned and reasoned, talked and talked before, now “spake, and it was done.” Do you not hear the rushing of the centurion’s horses across the hills to Capernaum, to bring Jesus Christ where his servant is lying sick? Do you not see the figure of the poor woman creeping into the banquet-room in her shame and love? Do you not hear the timid knock in the darkness of Nicodemus at the Master’s humble doorway? In every case the relation between the intellectual conviction and the moral act is plain. The thought and reasoning and observation have gathered the material for decision and piled it in the life, and then the spark of a need falls into the tinder and the decision blazes in an instant.

People talk about “sudden conversions.” “Do you believe in them?” says one. “You do not believe in them, do you?” says another. My friends, there never was a sudden conversion, and there never was a conversion that was not sudden. Never was there one that had not been made ready beforehand, never one which, having been made ready beforehand, did not come by one strong resolution, one supreme decisive, “I will.” There is a sudden conversion of which men talk which is no conversion. No change of life, no change of heart, nothing but just a mood, the momentary impression of the sensibilities by the sweet sound of a name, or the imperious declamation of a speaker, or the plaintive singing of a hymn. The trouble with that is, not that it is sudden, but that it is not conversion. But the true conversion is always sudden, and never sudden.

Look at the thief upon the cross beside the dying

Jesus. If ever any man seemed to be suddenly con verted, it was he. But who can tell how much, before his crucifixion, in all the wild days of his wickedness, he had known of Him who was to be the sharer of his suffering? Or, if we allow ourselves no such conjecture as that, still we must remember that he saw upon the cross beside him the nature of Jesus Christ in its supremest manifestation. The last veil was drawn aside, and the very heart of the Divine Sufferer was laid bare. And the thief, too, saw with perceptions quickened by his own agony, and by the terrible intensity of his need. No wonder if his suffering eyes saw into the Saviour’s suffering love with most exceptional clearness and quickness. No wonder if he gathered a knowledge of Christ in that hour while they hung together, which less intense perceptions would have taken a long time to gather. It was the experience of years compressed into the agony of an awful hour. And so when at the last, he broke down and gave way, and cried out from his cross, “Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom!” it was as truly the completion of a process as when, through years of study and reflection, some placid soul accumulates those thoughts of Christ and His salvation which some shock of overwhelming need finally crystallizes into the strong resolution to come to Christ. There comes a moment when the resistance gives way before the weight, whether that weight be the force of the cannon ball that comes crashing through the wall, or the pressure of the snow that has gathered flake by flake upon the roof.

Indeed everything in this world is sudden and not sudden. The sunrise that has been creeping up the east for hours, and then leaps in a moment from the eastern hills; the onset of an army which has slowly gathered its strength together out of cottages and cities, and then falls like an eagle on the enemy; the breaking up of a kingdom which has been growing rotten at the heart, and in some still noontide of history drops into ruin; the coming of a boy to manhood; the bursting of a plant to flower; — all things are sudden and not sudden.

And so must be the coming of man to Christ. “Coming to Christ!” — I love those words. I believe there are no words that have meant so much to human ears as those words have meant. To come to Christ is the completest act that any man can do. It is the acceptance of His forgiveness, the reliance upon His help, and the gradual growth into His character. Is not that plain? Is there anything mysterious or unintelligible about it? There is one Being, and only one Being, who can forgive you for your sins, and that is the God whom Christ manifests. There is only one Being who can make you live a new life, and that is the present, ever-living Christ, to whom you can pray, whose soul your soul can touch. There is one Image, growing into which you shall be perfect. It is the Image of Christ. Now, when you ask Him to forgive you, when you ask Him to help you, and, by any culture that He will, to make you like Himself, — that is coming to Christ. When you have done that, you have come to Christ. It begins when you lay hold upon the borders of His help. It is finished only when you have attained His Christliness. When you have made up your mind to do that, you have resolved to come to Christ.

Whether it be sudden or gradual, evidently that makes no difference. That is a question of curiosity. But whether you do it or not, — on that hangs every thing. There are men who have been gathering material for that resolution for years. Now the spark must touch the tinder. Now the resolution must be made. Now, having seen Christ so long, you must give yourself to Christ.

One last barrier, perhaps, stands between you and the Christian Life. It may be fear! If it is, lay hold of Christ’s promises. You cannot fear God if you really know what He is. Does the child fear the mother’s bosom? Does the bird fear its home nest? Or, it may be pride! If it is, rise to a higher pride. Grow indifferent to all that men will say about you if you become a Christian, by hearing, above everything that they say, the songs of the angels, among whom, Christ says, there is joy over every sinner that repenteth. Let to-day be the strong day of your life, the day when you “spake, and it was done “; the day when you gave yourself to the living, loving Christ, and He took you into His Life and Love.