Vessels of Gold and of Earth

2 Tim. ii. 20, 21

“In a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth; and some to honour and some to dishonour. If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the Master’s use, and prepared unto every good work.” — 2 Tim. ii. 20, 21.

HIS is a condensed parable, or expanded
metaphor, designed to illustrate the
wide difference in Christian character
amongst nominal Christians, and to
enforce the obligations upon each to
belong to the nobler class whom Jesus Christ can use
for His service.

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The Apostle has been speaking about certain apostates who had fallen away, and in their fall had dragged down others. Contemplating their collapse, like that of houses built upon sand, he comforts him¬ self with the thought that “the firm foundation of God” (by which he means the aggregate of true Christians) stands. And then in my text, retaining, but slightly modifying, the metaphor of a building, he applies it, not so much to the invisible nucleus of real Christians, as to the visible Church as an organization, in which he finds wide varieties of worth and usefulness. The “great house,” then, is the external institution of the Church; the “vessels” are its members. Some of them are precious, and used for high puiposes, some of them cheap and common. A man can settle to which of the classes he belongs. If ho belong to the one, honour, if he belong to the other, dishonour is his portion.

Now, then, let us look at this parable for a little while.

I — First of all, then, note the two classes.

There is gold and silver plate set out upon the high table, where the lord ol the house sits; 01 ranged in glittering rows upon some buffet or side¬ board. There are pots and pans in the scullery, lit only for base uses. And, says Paul, there is as much difference between different sets of people who are joined in the same Christian community as between these two sets of vessels.

Now, of course, we are not to suppose that the distinction which he here draws is the vulgar, worldly one according to natural gifts and capacities. Men put shining faculties and talents in high places, anc lowly or moderate ones in the background.. That is not the way in which God classifies vessels in His house. The humblest service may be great and wonderful; the poorest and narrowest gifts may be lofty and precious. The difference between the o-olden vessel and the wooden tub or the earthen pot of our parable does not lie in natural endowment, capacity, circumstances, resources, or the like. One man may be brilliant and another stupid.. It makes no difference in the possibilities of his preciousness in the eyes of the lord of the house.

VESSELS OF GOLD AND OF EARTH.

But the difference points to a thing within our own power — viz., the difference in maturity of Christian character, in fervour, and earnestness of Christian devotion. It is this, and only this, and not the vulgar distinctions of temperament or capacity, which lie so f withm our own power, that determines the hierarchy of excellence and the aristocracy of nobility in the Church of Christ. The graces of a Christian character are the “gold and silver.” The “earth” is the tendencies and desires or the selfishness of our own nature. These are the things which, respectively predominating in our lives, determine to which of these two classes we shall belong.

Look at the churches; look at this congregation, or any other agglomeration of people who are brought together for religious purposes. Is not the description of them that there is a little nucleus of unmistakeably devout people, and there is the great, nebulous tail, loosely compacted, of people concerning whom it takes a great deal of charity to suppose that they are Christians at all, and of whom not even charity can deny that they are anything but very im¬ perfect ones? Every great cause, after its inspired infancy, gets weighted and dragged down by the adhesion of people of that sort; and in all our Chustian communities, wherever there is the organized body, there is naturally the accretion to it of a mass of people who either are altogether unaffected by the great central truths and mighty motives of the Gospel, or whose Christian character has been arrested at an early stage, and who spend all their lives immature and infantile. Is not that the condition of all our communities? In a great house are vessels of gold and silver,” but also “vessels of wood and clay” The mass of ice brings down the temperature of the whole. It is so much dead weight that has to be carried by the engine, and it clogs the operations, and lowers the aspirations, and drags down the average of the Christian character ol all our so-called religious communities. The sadness is not so much that there are men in some hind of nominal connection with God’s Church who aie utterly unaffected by God’s truth, since they may be touched and brought near; but the tragic and mysterious thing is that some of you have as much as you have and no more; that, feeling some faint influence on your spirits of the great “powers ol the world to come,” that influence is so obscured and neutralized by self and sin and earth, as that it comes to be practically reduced to a vanishing quantity. The sadness is that some of you, having tasted the sweetness, have so little cared for larger draughts o the honey; that some of you with the river of the water of life by your sides, and having tasted a drop of it, long not for larger gifts. It is not for me to decide whether a man has any hold upon Jesus Christ or no, but it is for me to warn you all, and to take the warning to myself, that the mere outward connection with a Christian community determines nothing as to the worth of the man in the eyes ol God. “In a great house there are vessels ol go d

.. and vessels of clay.”

I!. — Now note, again, the possibility and the method of passing from the lower class to the higher.

“If a man purify himself from these. The these there evidently means, not vices which the Apostle

VESSELS OF GOLD AND OF EARTH.

has been specifying, but the whole class of the commoner and viler vessels of which he has been speaking. The word employed by him is very eloquent of the way by which one can pass from the one class to the other. If we were to translate it literally it would be, “If a man purify himself out from these,” which is a pregnant way of saying, If a man by purifying him¬ self, signs himself out, as it were, of the lower class. Notice, then, that the first and deepest impression that ought to be made upon us by the contemplation of this mingled condition of things, inseparable from the external institution of a Christian community, is of the need for a careful look to ourselves. The Apostle does not say, “Strike these men out of Christian fellowship, and so get rid of them”; but, knowing’ that, after all efforts to keep a church pure, there will be the mingling, he says, “Look to yourselves, and see that you do not belong to that category; and get out of it by the simple way of making yourselves pure.”

Now, then, notice the great truth that the cleanness of a man’s heart and life determines his place in the Christian Church. It is only purity that can make a vessel into gold. The possibility of passing from the one category shows that, as I have already said, the difference intended does not rest upon any natural ground, but it is entirely a matter of volition and effort. A wooden vessel, scoured, continues wooden; a golden cup, tarnished, continues gold. But a Christian who has purged himself from evil has, as it were, changed the very material of which he is made; and, instead of being the rude earthenware of his natural self, has come to be at least plated over with. if not, as by some diviner alchemy, converted into, the precious metal of a life instinct with God. W e can cleanse ourselves up to be gold; we can foul

ourselves down to be clay.

Then note, further, how here we have the distinct declaration that it is a man’s own business to make himself clean. Some of us would have been afraid to declare that side of the truth so broadly and unconditionally as the Apostle here does; but the New Testament method is always broad and generous, and trusts to the common-sense interpretation of the readers, and so puts one side of a complicated truth with almost exclusive energy at one moment, and the complementary side with equal earnestness at another. And that is not one-sidedness or exaggeration, but it is simply dwelling on the relevant thing at the right moment. So here Paul, who strongly taught that no man can cleanse himself except the grace of God dwell in his heart, and union to Jesus Christ through faith make him lord and wielder of Divinely given powers for purifying, here speaks as if all lay in oui own choice, and was to be determined by our own honest effort. It is an altogether different thing to say to a man, “Now you make yourself clean, and to say to him, “Purify yourself by honest use of the Divine power for purifying which you get by simple trust in Jesus Christ.” The one exhortation is to make bricks without straw, hopeless and impracticable; the other is to make and mould the given material into fitting

forms.

You can make yourselves almost anything you like. The possibilities of elevating Christian character to maturity and perfect likeness to Jesus Christ are

VESSELS OF GOLD AND OF EARTIL

indefinite. No man can ever say here on earth, “I have made myself so pure that there is no room for growth.” You can purge yourself thoroughly from all filthiness of flesh and spirit, “perfecting holiness,” if you will do it “in the fear of the Lord.”

Brother! I lay at your doors the responsibility for your Christian character, and for the class of the vessels in the great house to which you belong.

III. — Then, again, note the characteristics of the more precious. These are three, which the Apostle touches upon, and on which I follow him in briefly commenting. The “vessel unto honour” is “sanctified,” “meet for the Master’s use,” “ready for every good work.”

Now with regard to the first of these. The word translated “sanctified” here seems in this connection more properly to mean rather “consecrated.” These two expressions, “sanctified” and “consecrated,” are, in their root meaning, one, but in their use and application they somewhat diverge — the former of

them, “sanctified,” implying rather moral purifying, the latter of them rather devotion to a cause, a person, or a purpose. And here the meaning of “consecrated,” or set apart for use, is obviously the one intended — the figure of the vessel still being in the Apostle’s mind, and his thought being that these more precious vessels specially belong to and are set apart for the Master of the house. Consecration,

then, is indispensable if we are to be of any use to Jesus or precious in His sight. We have to yield ourselves, to say, I am thine, 0 Lord, in will, in affection, in purpose, in honest use of capacities and opportunities, and resources, and all things. To give ourselves to God is the secret of all growth and ol all service. Such, consecration is the issue ol a thankful recognition of what He has done for me. The icy barriers of self-regard are thawed away, and the whole nature turned into flowing, sweet water by the warmth of the great Sun of Righteousness. The incense that is kindled is fragrant, and goes up to Heaven in spires of wreathed smoke. The heait that is inflamed by the recognition and reception of the warmth of the Divine love is the heart that, consecrated, exhales in devotion and aspires to God. And such consecration can be carried out, in reference to all the minute and common things of life. Zechariah, in his great prophecy of the coming days, beheld all the pots and vessels of Jerusalem as “holy to the Lord,” like the sacrificial vessels of the Temple. And so upon every common deed and every secular avocation, and upon ourselves as engaged in and pursuing these, there may still be written” Holiness to the Lord.” The material for consecration is

common life.

Then, again, another characteristic set forth here is “meet for the Master’s use,” or, as it might perhaps be rendered even more accurately, simply, useful to the Master.” What kind of vessel can Christ make use of? The sort that so many of you are of? Can any good be done with you? Aie some of you professing Christians fit to be used for any¬ thing in Christ’s service except the poorest outward business of the house of God, doing some kind of purely secular work which happens to be tacked on to spiritual work? That is the best that many of you are fit for. Why? Because you are neither

VESSELS OF GOLD AND OF EARTH.

pure nor consecrated. You cannot make man-of-war’s masts out of crooked sticks. And no man is meet for the Master’s use except on condition of devotion and purity.

Is it not a wonderful thing to think that any of us can be of use to Jesus Christ? He wants men, because without them He cannot carry out His great purposes. “Go ye into the village over against you, and at the place where two ways meet ye shall find an ass tied.... Say, the

Lord hath need of him.” The Lord of Heaven required that poor animal that He might sit upon it, and enter Jerusalem in triumph. He stoops to need us, and in His condescension He will use us.

There can be no honour greater than that of being meet for the’ Master’s use; and, if I might so say, of being the cup which is lifted to the Master’s Almighty and tender lips, when He says, Give Me to drink.

The last characteristic is that of readiness for all sorts of service. The figure of the cup is abandoned here. There should be many-sided alacrity. W e shall be alert, and on the outlook for opportunities to do Christ’s will, in proportion as we purify ourselves. As the eyes of a handmaiden turn to her mistress, so should ours be ever looking for the guidance of our Master’s eye. The calls to “good works” often come suddenly, and if we are not living with our loins girt, the opportunity may pass before we have pulled ourselves together.

That preparedness will be many-sided if we have purified ourselves. We are all in danger of limitation in our conceptions of Christian duty, and of repeating one note instead of the full chord. The true servant is a servant of all work. The most precious vessel is to be used for many purposes.

IV. — Lastly, note the honour to the vessel.

I suppose that when the Apostle speaks of vessels of honour” he is not thinking of anything beyond the fact that they are vessels for use. The true honour is service. Reputation and other consequences of service are desirable, but nothing is greater, more ennobling and blessed, than the service itself. I am among you as he that serveth.” That is the great example of the dignity of service. But, apart from that consideration, can any of us have higher honour than to be of use to Jesus Christ? The Kings servants are made nobles by their seilice, as was the case of old in England.

But we need not exclude all reference to the future. The vessels of gold and silver are not only honoured by use, but shall be honoured because they have been used. Their value may not have been suspected by some who profited by their service. Many a vessel of pure virgin gold has been found m the huts of ignorant savages, employed for the basest ends, and its value all unknown. And so many a humble Christian man and woman, whom the world, m its purblindness, classes amongst the lower orders, and passes by as unintelligent, and uninfluential, and un¬ important, and undeserving of its regard or praise, shall be found, in the day of reversal of the hasty judgments and worldly estimates, to be of pure gold, fit for the high table and the Master s lips. And many a vessel that was thought to be very precious will be found to be very worthless in that day when “the fire shall declare it.

VESSELS OF GOLD AND OF EARTH.

Brother! Remember, use is honour; service is exaltation. Service comes from purifying, and purify¬ ing comes from our own efforts — efforts built upon faith and upon the honest use of the God-given powers for cleansing our evil.

If we seek to purge ourselves, and in any humble measure become here “meet for the Master’s use,” we may hope that, like the Temple vessels from Babylon, we shall, in due time, be carried across the desert and into the city; and there, cleansed and burnished, shall be employed for higher service and nobler functions in the courts of the Lord’s house, the great mansion in the heavens.