The Withheld Completions of Life

“Peter said unto Him, Lord, why cannot I follow Thee now 1” — JOHM xiii. 37.

IT is from passages like this that we have all gathered our impression of St. Peter’s character, an impression probably clearer and more correct than we have with regard to any other of the Lord’s disciples. Here is all his impulsiveness and affection, the unreasonableness and impatience which still excite our admiration and our love because they strike the note of a deeper and diviner reason, of which the prudent people seldom come in sight. They were sitting together at the Last Supper. Jesus had just told his friends that He must leave them. Simon Peter was the first to leap forward with the question, “Lord, whither goest Thou?” Jesus replied, “Whither I go thou canst not follow me now, but thou shalt follow me afterwards.” There was the promise of a future companionship between the disciple and the Master, which was to carry on and complete the companionship of the past, whose preciousness was now coming out as it drew near its close. There opened before the loving man a mysterious but beautiful prospect of some more perfect paths through which he might walk with Jesus, and find the completion of that intercourse of which the well-remembered walks through the streets of Jerusalem and the lanes of Galilee had been only the promise. The keen joy of dying with his Lord seemed all that was needed to finish the joy of living with Him; and when he sees all this deferred, when Christ is, as it seems, gathering up His robes to walk alone into the experience that lies before Him, Peter breaks out in a cry of impatience, “Why cannot I follow Thee now?” The life with Jesus, which is the only life for him, seems to be passing hopelessly away. The promise of a future day when it shall be restored to him does not satisfy him.; indeed it hardly seems to take hold of him at all. He wants it now. It was unreasonable. So it is unreasonable when by the side of your friend’s grave you wish that you could die and enter at once upon the everlasting companionship. So it is unreasonable when, as your friend goes alone into a cloud of sorrow, the sunlight of prosperity in which you are left standing seems hateful to you, and you grudge him his solitary pain. How unreasonable Peter was appeared only a few hours later, when his denial proved his unfitness to go with Jesus into the mystery and pain which He was entering. It is an unreasonable impatience, but it is one that makes us love and honor the unreasonable man, and adds a new pleasure to the study of all Peter’s after-life, as we watch him treading more and more in his Lord’s footsteps, and at last really following his Lord into His glory.

It has seemed to me as if this verse opened a great subject, one which is continually pressing upon us, one that is full of practical bewilderments; a subject that must come home to the thoughts of many of the people in this congregation. That subject is, The Withheld Completions of Life. St. Peter felt dimly that the life of

Jesus was opening into something so large that all which had gone before would be seen to have been only the vestibule and preparation for what was yet to come. He vaguely felt that this death, in whose shadow they were sitting, was the focus into which all the lines along which they had travelled were converging only that they might open into larger and more wonderful fields of experience. And just then, when his expectation was keenest, when his love was most eager, an iron curtain fell across his view. “Whither I go thou canst no4” follow me now,” said Jesus. The completion was withheld. The life of Jesus was broken off, and they who had lived with Him were left standing bewildered and distressed in front of the mystery which hid Him from their sight.

And that is what is always happening; what it is so hard for us to understand and yet what we must understand, or life is all a puzzle. For all our life has its tendencies. It would be intolerable to us if we could not trace tendencies in our life. If everything stood still, or if things only moved round in a circle, it would be a dreary and a dreadful thing to live. But we rejoice in life because it seems to be carrying us somewhere; be cause its darkness seems to be rolling on towards light, and even its pain to be moving onward to a hidden joy. We bear with incompleteness, because of the completion which is prophesied and hoped for. But it is the delay of that completion, the way in which, when we seem to be all ready for it, it does not come; the way in which, Yhen we seem to be just on the brink of it, the iron curtain drops across our path; this is what puzzles and distresses us. The tendency that is not allowed to reach the fulfillment which alone gave it value seems a mockery.

You watch your plant growing, and see its wonderful building of the woody fibre, its twining of the strong roots, its busy life-blood hurrying along its veins. The dignity and beauty of the whole process is in the completion which it all expects. Some morning you step into your garden and the deep-red flower is blazing full-blown on the stem, and all is plain. The completion has justified the process. But suppose the plant to have been all the time conscious of the coming flower, to have felt its fire already in the tumultuous sap, and yet to have felt it self held back from blossoming. Not to-day! not to-day! each morning as it tried to crown itself with the glory toward which all its tendencies had struggled. Would it not be a very puzzled and impatient and unhappy little plant, as it stood wondering why its completion was withheld, and what delayed its flower?

Now there are certain conditions which are to all good life just what the flower is to the plant. They furnish it its natural completion. They crown its struggles with a manifest success. There are certain fine results of feeling and contentment which are the true and recognized results of the best ways of living. They crown the hidden resolutions and the prosaic struggles of men with beautiful conclusiveness, as the gorgeous flower finishes all that the buried root and the rugged stalk of the plant have done, and make it a perfect and satisfactory thing. The flower is the plant’s success. These conditions of peace and pleasure are the life’s success in the same way. But when the life, conscious of the character in itself out of which these conditions ought to come, finds that they do not come, finds that it pauses on the brink of its completion and cannot blossom, then comes bewilderment; fe

then come impatient questionings and doubts. This is the state of many lives, I think, especially about religious things. I want to speak with you of this, and see if we can get any light upon it.

But lest I speak too vaguely, let me take special instances. In that way we can understand it best; and here is the first, perhaps the simplest. Suppose we have a man thoroughly, genuinely, unselfishly devoted to the good of fellow-men. It is not so uncommon as we think. It matters not upon what scale the self-devotion may take place. A poor obscure woman in a sick-room giving her days and nights, her health and strength, to some poor invalid; or a great brilliant man out in the world neglecting his personal interests in the desire that some of the lagging causes of God may be helped forward, or that the men of the city may be better clothed and fed and housed. Now such a life, in whatever scale it may be lived, has its legitimate completion. There is one natural and healthy result to which it is all tending, one flower into whose beauty its hard work was made to bloom. The natural flower which should crown that life of self-devotion is men’s gratitude. The joyous, thankful recognition of your fellow-men is the true issue of the life which gives itself for them. Perhaps in ringing cheers that make the world stand still to listen, perhaps only in the weak, silent pressure of the hand, or the last feeble lighting of the eyes, with which he whose sick-bed you have watched thanks you unutterably just as he dies; some way or other, thanks is the completion of ser vice. The two belong together, service and thanks; not in the way of bargain, not by deliberate arrangement, but in the very nature of the things. The man who does no good expects no thanks. The selfish life feels and shows the unnaturalness if men make a mistake and lavish their gratitude upon it. It is as if men tied the glorious flower on to the top of a wooden post that has no germinating power. But to the life that serves, the gratitude that recognizes service belongs as the warmth belongs to the sunlight, or the echo to the sound. And now suppose that the gratitude does not come. Your friend turns his face to the wall and dies, and never looks at you. The people pass you by, and waste their cheers upon some charlatan who has been working for himself. What then? Is there no disappointment of the soul; no sense of a withheld completion; no consciousness of some thing wrong, of something that falls short of the complete and rounded issue which was natural? Indeed there is! “What does it mean?” you ask with wonder, even with impatience.

And in answer to your wondering question there are two things to be said. The first is this: that such a suspension of the legitimate result, this failure of the flower to complete the plant, does show beyond all doubt a real condition of disorder. The natural result of your self-devotion has not come because the state of things in which you live is unnatural. That must be recognized. There is a reason in your wonder and surprise. Some thing is wrong. If you let your surprise appear, if men can see, as they look into your face, pain and bewilderment at their ingratitude, no doubt they will misunderstand you. They will laugh and jeer. They will cry, “Oh, after all, then, you were not unselfish; you did this thing not for us, but to be seen of men and to be thanked. It is good enough for you not to get it if that was what you wanted.” But it may very well be that they are wrong; you were unselfish; you did not work for thanks. When the thanks do not come it is not your loss, it is the deranged, disordered state of things which the world shows that troubles you. When Jesus wept over ungrateful Jerusalem, did He not feel its ingratitude? But was it not the disturbed world where such ingratitude was possible, and not any mere loss of recognition of Himself, which lay at the bottom of his grief? When )our child is ungrateful to you, is it the neglect of your self, or is it not the deranged family, the broken and demoralized home, that saddens you? It is the violation of a deep, true instinct. I think that this is always on Christ’s soul. The world’s ingratitude to Him showed Him how wrong the world was. In a perfect world every tendency must open to its result. Its Christ must be greeted with hosannas. They who receive His blessings must give Him their praise. The world is broken and disordered, that is the first thing that is meant when you help men and they scorn you, when the world’s benefactors are neglected or despised.

But let us never think that we have reached all the meaning when we have reached that. Because any state of things is unnatural, it does not prove that there can come out of it no blessing. God very often leaves the consequences of a man’s sins untouched, but in the midst of them makes it possible for His servant to live all the better life by the very derangements and distortions by which he is surrounded. So it is here. The service that a man does to his fellow-men does not bring down their gratitude upon him. And what then? There is a blessing which may come to him even out of the withholding of the legitimate completion of his service. It may throw him back upon the nature of the act itself, and compel him to find his satisfaction there. Many a man who, having served his brethren in public or in private, has looked up from his work with a true human longing that his work should be recognized, and heard no sound of gratitude, has then retreated to the self-sacrifice itself and found, in the mere doing of that, an even deeper, even keener joy than he could have gathered from the most spontaneous and hearty thanks. That has been the support, the inner triumph of many a despised reformer and misunderstood friend. Men have found a joy which they could not have had in a world undisturbed, and whose moral order was perfect. The essence of any act is more and finer than its consequences are. It is better to live in the essence of an act than in its con quences or rewards. The consequences of an act are meant to interpret and manifest its essence; but if at any time the withholding of its consequence can drive us home more deep into its essence, is it not a blessing?

I think we cannot doubt that Christ’s life manifested the essential and eternal joy of serving God, the dignity and beauty of helping man, as it could not have done if it had been heralded by the trumpets and followed by the cheers of human gratitude. Because He was “despised and rejected of men,” we are able to see more clearly how truly He was His Father’s “well-beloved Son.” And if, as it may be, you, with no morbidness, no self-conceit, no querulousness, know that you have been helping some man, or some hundred men, from whom you get no gratitude, — the manly thing for you to do in that withholding of the natural completion of your life is just what

Christ did: first own that the world is out of order, and do not look with any certain confidence for a recognition which could be certain only in a world of moral perfectness; and then let its withholding drive you home to the blessedness of the service of other men in and for itself, recognized or unrecognized, thanked or unthanked, and to companionship with God, who understands it all.

As we come into the regions of more truly spiritual experience this truth of the withheld completions of life becomes more striking, and often much more puzzling. As we come to that history which goes on within a man’s own heart, and where the action of other men does not intrude, it seems more strange that each cause cannot produce its full effect, and each growth blossom to its appointed flower. But even here I think that if we keep in mind the two considerations which I have been speaking of we shall find in them, if not the sufficient explanations, at least the supporting consolations of the withheld completions of our life. Look, for instance, at the connection of duty and happiness. Happiness is the natural flower of duty. The good man ought to be a thoroughly bright and joyous man. This is no theoretical conviction. It is the first quick instinct of the human heart. We do not know, I think, how deep in us lies this assurance that goodness and happiness belong together, how impossible it would be to take it out of us without de ranging all our life. Just think, if there were no such assurance, what a dreadful thing happiness would be in the world. If to be happy meant nothing, or meant badness, if it had no connection with being good, how a laugh in the street would be dreadful to us, and the look of a bright, gay, happy face would strike upon our conscience like a cloud that sweeps across the sun. But no! From the innocence of childhood uttering itself in the child’s sunny joy, on through the whole of life, there runs one constant conviction that goodness and happiness be long together. That conviction meets a thousand contradictions, but it is too strong for them all. It runs like a mountain stream along a course all blocked with rocks of difficulty; but none of them can permanently hinder it or turn it back. It slips under or around them all, this deep and live conviction that the tendency of goodness is to happiness. In this conviction lies the poetry of .human life. This conviction has planted the Edens which all races have discerned behind them, and painted the Heavens which they have all seen before them. It is bound up with all belief in God. To cease to believe it would be to bow down at the footstool of a devil or a chance, and which of these would be the most terrible master who can say? With this conviction strong in us we come to some man’s life, — a life which we are sure is good; to call it wicked is to confuse all our idea of wickedness and goodness. And that life is all gloomy. Duty is done day after day, but done in utter dreariness; there is no smile upon the face, no ring of laughter in the voice; a good man, a just and pure man, a man who hates sin and whom you would not dare to think of tempting, and yet a sad man, not a glad man; a man to whom life is a burden, not an exhilaration and a joy. Such men there are; good without gladness, shocking and perplexing our deep certainty that to be good and to be glad belong together. To them we want to bring the two considerations which I dwelt on when 1 was speaking of self-sacrifice and gratitude.

To recognize that it is unnatural, and so to struggle against it, not to yield to it, and yet, while it must last, to get what blessing we can out of it, by letting it drive us down deeper for our joy and comfort, into the very act and fact of doing righteousness, that is all that wo can do, and that is enough to do when the golden link is broken and doing righteousness does not blossom into being happy. “I am trying to do right,” a man says, “and yet the world is all dark to me; what can you say to me? Will you tell me still that there is a natural connection between doing right and being happy?” Surely I will, I answer. I will insist on your remembering it. I will warn you never to forget it, nor to get to counting gloominess the natural air and atmosphere of duty. I will beg you never to think it right, that when you are trying to be good you should still be unhappy. You must struggle against it. And yet, you must let the very fact that the connection can be broken prove to you that while the union of duty and joy is natural it is not essential and unbreakable. The plant’ ought to come to flower, but if the plant fails of its flower it is still a plant. The duty should open into joy, but it may fail of joy and still be duty. If the joy is not there, still hold the duty, and be sure that you have the real thing while you are holding that. Be all the more dutiful, though it be in the dark. Do righteousness and forget happiness, and so it is most likely that happiness will come. This is all that one can say, and this is enough to say. It will help the man neither despondently to submit to nor frantically to rebel against the unnatural postponement of the happiness which belongs to his struggle to do right. It will help him to be hopeful without impatience, and patient without despair.

But take another case, that comes still more distinctly within the limits of Christian experience. There are promises in the Bible, many of them, which declare that dedication to God shall bring communion with God. “Draw near to me and I will draw near to you,” says God. And even without the special promise, that whole revelation of God which the Bible gives us involves such a. necessity. It cannot be that a God all love surrounds us with His life, presses upon us, waits for us on every side, and yet the meanest soul can really turn to Him and throw itself open before Him, and not receive Him into its life. And yet sometimes the man does give himself to God, and the promise seems to fail. The heart draws near to God in conscious dedication, and it seems as if no answering communion came. The soul is laid upon the altar, and no hand of fire is seen reached out from heaven to take it up in love. Day follows day, year follows year, it may be, and the man given to God trembles when he hears other men talk of the joy of divine communion, because no such ever comes to him. Once more, to such a soul, to any such soul which is here to-day, there are the same two messages to bring. Never, no matter how long such exclusion from the presence of God may seem to last, though it go on year after year and you are growing old in your seeming orphanhood; never accept it, never make up your mind to it that it is right; never cease to expect that the doors will fly open and you will be admitted to all the joy of your Father’s felt love and of unhindered communion with Him. Never lose out of your soul’s sight the seat which is set for you in the very sanctuary of divine love. And what beside? Seek even more deeply the satisfaction which is in your consecration itself; and that you may find it, consecrate yourself more and more completely. Oh, it may well be that there are some of you who are listening intently at this moment, thinking perhaps that now, after a thousand disappointments in a thousand sermons, you may hear the word you need, which shall explain this terrible separation from your Father, which, while you give yourselves with all your souls to Him, still keeps you shut out from His communion. I cannot tell you all you want to know. Nobody can. But there are two great anxieties which I do feel for such a soul as yours. One is, lest you should give up hoping for and expecting that privilege of communion which, however long it be de-Hayed, because you are a child of God is certainly yours in possibility, and must certainly be yours some day in possession. The other is, lest, since the consecration has not brought you the communion, you should think that the consecration is unreal, and so lose the power to be blessed by it, and the impulse to increase it. Christ has led you with Him thus far up to the line where you have given yourself to Him. Before you, open the fields where you see the privilege of having His fulness given to you. But something seems to come across and shut you out from them. No wonder that you lift up a cry almost of bitterness: “Why cannot I follow thee now? Why this delay of the divinest life? Why so much duty with so little strength? Why only the journey and the hunger and the thirst, without the brook of refreshment by the way?” No man can wholly answer these questions, but multitudes of saints, if they could speak, would tell you how in their hindered lives God kept them true to such experience as they had attained; and so it was that, by and by, either before or after the great enlightenment of death, the hindrance melted away, and they who had been crying for years, “Lord, why cannot we follow Thee now?” passed forth into the multitude of those who “follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth.”

There is one other of the withheld completions of life of which I should like to speak, and only one. Among Christ’s promises there is none that is dearer to one class of minds, minds of a very pure and noble character, than that which He spoke one day when He was in discussion with the Jews in the Temple. “If any man wills to do my will,” He said, “he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself.” I have been struck by seeing how favorite a text that has become in our day. Many minds have rested upon it. Many earnest seekers after truth, bewildered by the difficulties of doctrine, almost ready to give up in despair, have welcomed this declaration of the Lord, and gone out with new hope, that by the dedication of their wills, by trying to become obedient to Christ, they should come to understand the Christ who was so dark to them. Many and many a soul has found that that was indeed the message that it needed. Turning away from vain disputes of words, leaving theological subtleties alone, just trying to turn what it knew of Christ into a life, it has found — what He promised — that it has become assured of His divinity, sure that His doctrine was of God. Such souls have not found that the thousand curious questions of theology were answered, and all the mystery rolled away out of the sky of truth. Christ did not promise that. But they have found what He did promise: that coming near to Him in obedience, they have been made sure of the true divinity that was in Him and in the teachings that He gave. Such testimony comes abundantly from all the ages, and from many souls to-day. It is not strange. It is like all Christ’s teachings, — one utterance of an essential universal truth. Everywhere the flower of obedience is intelligence. Obey a man with cordial loyalty and you will understand him. Obey Jesus with cordial loyalty and you will understand Jesus. Not by studying Him, but by doing His will, shall you learn how divine He is. Obedience completes itself in under standing.

And now are there any of us from whom that completion seems to have been withheld? Are there any of us who, trying hard to do the Lord’s will wherever He has made it known to them, looking for it continually, are yet distressed to know that their Lord’s nature has not be come all clear to them? They must be sure, first, that they are right; sure that Christ has not done for them what He promised, though He may not have done what they chose to expect. They must be sure that they have not really come to an essential faith that the doctrine of Jesus is divine. To many souls that faith has come, while, bewildered still by various forms of expression, they can not even recognize their own belief. They must be sure again that their will to serve Christ has been indeed true; not simply the trying of an experiment from which they still reserved the liberty to withdraw, but the unreserved and total dedication of themselves to Him. And what then? Sure of all this, still the darkness and the doubts remain. Then they must come, it seems to me, to the two principles which I have enforced this morning. Then they must say to themselves: “This is unnatural: it ought not to be. My service, my true will-dedication ought to bring me out into the light; at least I will remember that. I will not be content with darkness. I will not let despair of positive belief settle down on me with its chilling power. I will not rest until my service of Christ completes itself in the knowledge of Christ; and yet all the time while I am waiting I will find joy in the service of Him, however dimly I may apprehend Him. I will find deeper and deeper satisfaction in doing His will, though it be in the midst of many doubts, though I be sorely puzzled when men ask me to give my account of Him. It may be that just because obedience is not able at once to complete itself in knowledge, the pure joy and deep culture which are in obedience itself may come to me more really and more richly.” That is no barren lesson, my dear friends, to comeV to any man. You would not find it a barren lesson if it could come to you to-day. If to your life, struggling in obedience to Christ, but not able to clear itself into light about Christ, there could come, as from the Christ you long for, a com mand to you to struggle on still in hope because you, must reach the light some day; and yet a command, while the light is withheld, to find satisfaction and growth in the ever-deepening struggle, would not that be the com mand you need? Oh that in His name I could utter this message to any souls who are thus trying to do His will, and yet seeming not to know His doctrine! Oh that I could bid them with His voice to persevere because there is light ahead, and yet to be thankful even now for the culture of the darkness! “Whither I go thou canst not follow me now, but thou shalt follow me afterwards.” “Watch, therefore!”

I hope, then, that I have made clear this story of the withheld completions of our human life. The plant grows on toward its appointed flower, but before the blossom comes some hand is laid upon it, and the day of its blossoming is delayed. I have dwelt on a few illustrations, but the truth is everywhere. The emotional and affectional conditions are the natural flower of the wills and dedications of our life. But we resolve, we dedicate our selves, and, though the prophecy and hope immediately begin to assert themselves all through us, the joy, the peace, the calmness of assurance, does not come. We are like southern plants, taken up to a northern climate and planted in a northern soil. They grow there, but they are always failing of their flowers. The poor exiled shrub dreams by a native longing of a splendid blossom which it has never seen, but is dimly conscious that it ought some how to produce. It feels the flower which it has not strength to make in the half chilled but still genuine juices of its southern nature. That is the way in which the ideal life, the life of full completions, haunts us all. Nothing can really haunt us except what we have the beginning of, the native capacity for, however hindered, in ourselves. The highest angel does not tempt us because he is of another race from us; but God is our continual incitement because we are His children. So the ideal life is in our blood, and never will be still. We feel the thing we ought to be beating beneath the thing we are. Every time we see a man who has attained our human idea a little more fully than we have, it wakens our languid blood and fills us with new longings. When we see Christ, it is as if a new live plant out of the southern soil were brought suddenly in among its poor stunted, transplanted brethren, and, blossoming in their sight;, interpreted to each of them the restlessness and discontent which was in each of their poor hearts. When, led by Christ, we see God, it is as if the stunted, flowerless plants grew tall enough to stand up and look across all the miles that lie between, and see the glory of the per feet plant as it blooms in unhindered luxuriance in its southern home. And when we die and go to God, it is as if at last the poor shrub were plucked up out of its exile and taken back and set where it belonged, in the rich soil, under the warm sun, where the patience which it had learned in its long waiting should make all the deeper and richer the flower into which its experience was set free to find its utterance.

Patience and struggle. An earnest Wse of what we have now, and, all the time, an earnest discontent until we come to what we ought to be. Are not these what we need, — what in their rich union we could not get, except in just such a life as this with its delayed completions? Jesus does not blame Peter when he impetuously begs that he may follow Him now. He bids him wait and he shall follow Him some day. But we can see that the value of his waiting lies in the certainty that he shall follow, and the value of his following, when it comes, will lie in the fact that he has waited. So, if we take all Christ’s culture, we are sure that our life on earth may get already the inspiration of the heaven for which we are training, and our life in heaven may keep forever the blessing of the earth in which we were trained.