The Secret of Power and Other Sermons

Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, Why could not we cast him oat? And Jesus said onto them, Because of your tabeliet

* A ND when He had called unto Him His twelve disciples, He gave them power against unclean spirits to cast them out” That same power was bestowed, too, on the wider circle of the seventy who returned again with joy, saying, “Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through Thy name.” The ground of it Was laid in the solemn words with which Christ met their wonder at their own strength, and told how He “beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.” Therefore had they triumphed, showing the fruits of their Master’s victory j and therefore had He a right to renew the gift, in the still more comprehensive promise, “I give unto you power — over all the power of the enemy.”

What a commentary on such words this story affords! What has become of their supernatural might? Has it

Preached before the Directors and Friends of tke London Missionary Society*

s ebbed away as suddenly as it flowed? Is their Lords endowment a shadow — His assurances delusion? Has He taken back what He gave? Not so. And yet His servants are ignominiously beaten. One poor devilridden boy brings all their resources to nothing. He stands before them writhing in the gripe of his tormentor, but they cannot set him free. The importunity of the father’s prayers is vain, and the tension of expectancy in his eager face relaxes into the old hopeless languor as he slowly droops to the conviction that they could not cast him out The malicious scorn in the eyes of the Scribes, those hostile critics who “knew that it would be so,” helps to produce the failure which they anticipated. The curious crowd buzz about them — and in the noMst of it all the little knot of baffled disciples, possessors of power which seems to leave them when they need it most, with the unavailing spells dying half spoken on their lips, and their faint hearts longing that their Master would come down from the mount, and cover their weakness with His own great strength.

No wonder that, as soon as Christ and they are alone, they want to know how their mortifying defeat has come about And they get an answer which they little expected, for the last place where men look for the explanation of their failures is within; and they will ascend into the heavens, and descend into the deeps for remote and recondite reasons, before they listen to the voice which says, “The fault is nigh thee — in thy heart” Christ’s reply distinctly implies that the cause of their impotence lay wholly in themselves, not in

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any defect or withdrawal of power, but solely in that In them which grasped the power. They little expected, too, to be told that they had failed because they had not been sure they would succeed. They had thought they believed in their ability to cast out the demon. They had tried with some kind of anticipation that they could. They had been surprised when they found they could not They had wonderingly asked why. And now Christ tells them that all along they had had no real faith in Him and in the reality of His gift. So subtly may unbelief steal into the heart, even while we fancy that we are working in faith. And a further portion of our Lord’s reply points them to the great means by which this conquering faith can be maintained — namely, prayer and fasting. If, then, we put all these things together, we get a series of considerations, very simple and commonplace indeed, but all the better and truer therefore, which I venture to submit to you, as having a very important bearing on all our Christian work, and especially on the missionary work of the Church. The principles which the text suggests touch the perpetual possession of the power which conquers; the condition of its victorious exercise by us, as being our faith; the subtle danger of unsuspected unbelief to which we are exposed; and the great means of preserving our faith pure and strong. I ask your attention to a few considerations on these points in their order.

But first, let me say very briefly, that I would not be understood as, by the selection of such a text, desiring to suggest that we have failed in our work. Thank God I

t we can point to results far, far greater than we have deserved, far greater than we have expected, however they may be beneath oar desires, and still further below what the gospel was meant to accomplish. It may suit observers who have never done anything themselves, and have not particularly clear eyes for appreciating spiritual work, to talk of Christian missions as failures; but it would ill become us to assent to the lie. Failures indeed 1 with half a million of converts, with new forms of Christian life budding in all the wilderness of the peoples, with the consciousness of coming doom creeping about the heart of every system of idolatry I Is the green life in the hedges and in the sweet pastures starred with rathe primroses, and in the hidden copses blue with hyacinths a failure, because the east wind bites shrewdly, and “the tender ash delays to clothe herself with green “? Not no we have net failed. Enough has been done to vindicate the enterprise, more than enough to fill our lips with thanksgiving, enough to entitle us to say to all would-be critics — Do you the same with your enchantments. But, on the other hand, we have to confess that the success has been slow and small, chequered and interrupted, that often we have been foiled, that we have confronted many a demon whom we could not cast out, and that at home and abroad the masses of evil seem to close in around us, and we make but little impression on their serried ranks. We have had success enough to assure us that we possess the treasure, and failures enough to make us feel how weak are the earthen vessels which hold it

And now let us turn to the principles which flow from this text

L We have an unvarying power.

No doubt the explanation of their defeat which most naturally suggested itself to these disciples would be that somehow or other — perhaps because of Christ’s absence — they had lost the gift which they knew they once had. And the same way of accounting for later want of success lingers among Christian people still You will sometimes hear it said: — “God sends forth His Spirit in special fulness at special times, according to His own sovereign will; and till then we can only wait and pray.” Or 14 The miraculous powers which dwelt in the early Church have been withdrawn, and therefore the progress is slow.” The strong imaginative tendency to make an ideal perfect in the past leads us to think of the primitive age of the Church as golden, in opposition to the plain facts of the case. We fancy that because apostles were its teachers, and the Cross within its memory, the infant society was stronger, wiser, better than any age since, and had gifts which we have lost What had it which we do not jpossess? The power of working miracles. What have jwe which it did not possess? A completed Bible, and fee experience of eighteen centuries to teach us to understand it, and to confirm by facts our confidence that Christ’s gospel is for all time and every land What have we in common with it? The same mission to fulfil, the same wants in our brethren to meet, the same gospel, the same spirit, the same immortal Lord All that any age has possessed to fit it for the task of witnessing for Christ we too possess. The Church has in it a power which is ever adequate to the conquest of the world; and that power is constant through all time, whether we consider it as recorded in an unvarying gospel, or as energized by an abiding spirit, or as flowing from and centred in an unchangeable Lord.

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