The Religious Uses of Hardship

The Reticious Uses oF Harpsuip. ‘*« And they were to prove Israel by them.” — Jupars ili. 4.

Iy the previous chapter the Lord says, “TI also will not henceforth drive out any from before them of the nations that Joshua left when he died: that through them I may prove Israel.” The Lord did not drive out the nations hastily; He kept the heathen to be the schoolmasters of Israel; He kept the heathen to be the tormentors of His people — thorns and goads by which their temper and their general quality might be tested. The enemies did not. know what they were doing. The enemy took a short view of the whole situation. He was but a warrior; he was but contending for his own freehold; he was but a patriot, according to his own conception of patriotism; he insisted upon keeping his own foot upon his own ground; so, whether men were good, bad, or indifferent, he would have none of them in his land. That is the Pagan view of life. The Divine view is that the Pagan is kept in order to teach the man who ought to be no Pagan, but a real, simple-hearted, honest believer in God. The

Pagan was a rod in the hands of the living God. Israel took a fretful view of the circumstance; Israel repined and moaned, and was chafed in spirit. He did not know all the case. What man amongst us knows what the Lord is doing with him and for him? The spring is hidden in the clouds which darken the heavens; presently it will come down upon us in the form of rain, then we shall begin to see why the clouds were darkening the sky. Do you know what your enemies live for? They live to keep you right. Do you know why the thorns grow? That you may be pricked, to teach you good manners, excellent behaviour, careful, circumspect conduct. All things are for your sakes. Why are the rocks in the ground so that the plough cannot make a straight furrow? For your education. Why can I not have everything my own way? Because it would be bad for me if I could. Why so many opponents, enemies, antagonists, rivals? Simply that I may be educated to the highest point of refinement, and be presented at the last a perfect man in Christ Jesus, the old Adam dead, the new man fashioned in the figure, and beautiful with the loveliness of the second Adam. That is all. Why did not the Lord drive out all these nations? Why the ‘five lords of the Philistines, and all the Canaanites, and the Sidonians, and the Hivites that dwell in mount Lebanon?” Why all the Pagan host? Simply, I repeat, to keep Israel right. We must not have too much heaven upon the earth. We need all the rocks and all the thorns, and all the east winds that ever blew. We think not; we think we could live better in the south-west wind, and do better without the stony places in the field; we think all men should be our friends. But what right have we to think, beyond a given point, so near, so small? When we have exercised our right of thinking up to the prescribed point, we shall say, We stop here; we thought it would have been otherwise, but God’s good will be done. You are not to fight for fighting’s sake; you are not to fight that you may win; you are to fight that you may be educated; contention should mean elevation, refinement, self-restraint, godliness. All controversy is from below that does not help a man when the storm has gone to praise God more profoundly and sing more lovingly.

What the Lord did in the case of Israel He is doing in our case every day. Look what hardships are yours. Nothing goes right five days in the week. You put things down expecting to find them where you left them, and when you return, they have all disappeared, and not a soul knows where they have been taken to. It is for your sake. You were going to make too much of them; you were going to write down that lead was iron, and iron was silver, and silver was gold; you were reckoning along the wrong line altogether, so God came and took away all that you had left, and your fortune became emptiness. You can take one of two views of such instances. You can say, This is mishap, this is accident, this is chance; it has so fallen out; I cannot account for it. Or you can say, Behind all this difficulty and loss and hardship there is a meaning. The Lord reigneth. The sparrows He watches; the hairs upon the head He counts; the steps of the good man He orders; therefore behind all this prostration of purpose and adaptation there must be some good reason. What is it? Where you cannot explain, you can pray; where you cannot illuminate the mystery, you can sit still or stand still and quietly wait. You can search your heart as with the candle of the Lord. In that heart you will find all the reason if you really want to find it. There is the case of the prodigal. Why should my son, say you, be the plague of my life? He is breaking my heart, breaking his mother’s heart, turning our bread into bitterness. What is the meaning of this? Surely Iam not to blame! You are more, perhaps, than you think. That son may be in some respects keeping you right, educating you, teaching you how to pray. You have been very rough with other people’s sons; you could see them condemned and never shed a tear. The only way in which God can get at you is through that boy of yours. When you prayed aforetime, your prayers were so stiff and hard. Not a tear in all the supplication — nothing but Pharisaic pomp and artificiality; but since your own heart has been grieved with a deeper grief, you have been taught how to pray. Now men love to hear you speak of heaven: the tone is so rich, so kind, so hopeful. You can take one of two views even of the prodigal. You can stand up and say, I have done no wrong; I cannot be held responsible for this evil conduct; I have taken the right course; I have done my duty. If ever you hear a man talk too much about having done his duty, he cannot see the kingdom of God. You done your duty! Why, you are claiming to be almost a god. Or you can say, I must have been wrong, perhaps, without knowing it altogether, perhaps in a larger degree than I have ever suspected; let me recall my life, and settle accounts with my own conscience. God may be thus training both of us. God will not take a prodigal and make educative use of him, and then throw him away. I cannot think that God can so use the meanest of His creatures. To use him as an opponent that will bring you to prayer may itself be the beginning of a noble issue in his own case. I have seen a thousand prodigals come home; I have never known a Pharisee saved. Far be it from me to say that no

Pharisee has been broken down and received into the kingdom of God. I trust thousands have. I am only speaking within the limits of my own personal observation. By Pharisee I do not refer to office — I refer to character, and by character in this case I mean self-righteousness, self-idolatry, self-sufficiency. The self-sufficient man never can be saved. ‘To whom then will God look, and upon whom will He show mercy? To the broken in heart and the contrite, and to those who surrender themselves to Him, saying, “God be merciful to me a sinner!” The dew will fall upon him, and the anointing oil, and the enlightening sun of the glory, and all heaven will open for him. If we would be saved, it must be along such lines. We must accept providence as having meaning. To believe in providence, and to trust to chance, is the direst atheism. Your providence must not be in your creed, — it must be in your soul; you must live upon it as upon daily bread.

God must be left to determine what tests are best for each man. What would be tests in one case might be no tests in another. The distribution of tests, therefore, must be left to the Most High and the All Good. Some men must be tried through business. Business is now fast becoming a game, and not a game of skill. You are opposed on every hand. Business has now become a bloodless war. We fight with swords other than swords of steel. Every business man is exposed to the peril of becoming a warrior, and having his own brother as his antagonist. Some men cannot succeed in business. Whilst they are servants, they do fairly well; the moment they become masters, they make fools of themselves. They have not intellectual captaincy; they have no commercial capacity; they see a point, not a line; they are intense, not extensive, and therefore they have their little ups and downs which they call their fortunes and their misfortunes; but they never grip life and hold it, and master it, and defy it. Is this a mere matter of chance? God tries men in various ways. Some men would be damned if they could double their business. They do not think so; they would not believe the audacious preacher who would teach such a doctrine; but that is the fact. They can only be saved by being kept under given restraints. God knows exactly every shilling I can be trusted with: if with twenty, I have not twenty-one. I think I could do so much with the extra shilling, and God will not give it to me, and He will tell me in heaven why it was that my income was a pound and not a guinea. IT live now in God; the pound will go further than the guinea if I accept it in the right way; the Lord knows that I cannot be trusted beyond a given tether. Let my heart leap up and say, “Father, fix the tether, and give me all the ground that is good for me, and may I make every inch of it praying ground.”

Other men can only be tried and tested through the body. You must have that rheum, that sharp pain, that disabling agony. It is through the body that God finds the highway to your soul. He found the soul of the other man along the line of business. ‘You have never had any trouble in that direction. You could lose, and not know it; you could gain, and be none the richer. Through your body, therefore, God must find that recreant soul of yours. Take this view of your pain, your sleeplessness, your aching head, your general disability. Who knows but that God has left these hordes of the Philistines, and the Canaanites, and the Sidonians, and the Hivites — left them in your blood to make a man of you? You know how harsh you used to be. When your own apprentice fell ill, you treated him with suspicion and disbelief, and told him to get up and do his work if he would receive his rations. How now? Will you get up? Bestir yourself! The pain lies along the whole length of the sciatic nerve. Get up! You will be gentler now, kindlier; you will find your way to your purse when you see some fellowcripple in greater pecuniary need than you are.

Some men are tried by rivalry. Their rivals will not die. You have said, Surely in another five ’ years that man will be dead and gone, whereas in another five years he is younger than ever. How -is this? You can take two views of it — one the atheistic, the other the theistic or providential. That man may be keeping you up to the mark. The cobwebs would be covering your business windows if he were not up earlier than you are, brightening his panes of glass. You owe that man a great deal; you would have taken things very easily if he had not been there; you have called him a kind of enemy — in reality he has been much of a friend.

Others are tried by long waiting. Patience is almost murdered in the soul. The letter of release will come to-morrow, and to-morrow comes, but no letter. The heart that is hard towards you will be softened by its sunset, and then you will be relieved and blessed. Sunset comes, but no softening of the heart. It is now seven years you have been waiting for that particular event; you have almost calculated the hour of its consummation. ‘Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.” You have almost given up. Blessed be God that “almost” stands between you and despair. Hold to it; you may yet be educated, refined, brought to loyalty, to obedience, and to

prayer.

Thus we are brought back to consider the religious uses of hardship. Some of us have had so much difficulty. We have not one crumb of bread we have not fought for. Everything in the house we have taken at the spear-point. Some men seem to carry the hardships of ten lives. Will the severe hand never be taken off the bending neck? Will the yoke never be eased? Is it to be one continual goad and chafe down to the very end? How much of the blame is ours? Why do we not surrender, give in, and say, Galilean, thou hast conquered; God of the worlds, Thou art mightier than I am; take my heart; it is broken, but Thou canst live in the crumbling fragments. All that is wanted on our part is our obedience to the infinite, the everlasting, the supreme, final Necessity. We prefer to substitute the grand evangelical terms, and say, The will of God, the redeeming sovereignty of Christ, the presence and rule, the inspiration and sustenance of God the Holy Ghost. Yet take which set of terms you please; begin your higher education where you like; only do begin it. I would rather you worship a stone in the streets, than that you never worship at all, Reverence is elevating, veneration is the bloom of character, It is customary for men who laugh too easily — and therefore their laughter costs them nothing and is worth nothing — to regard with comic feeling the idea of some poor savage falling down before a tree or star, or some little flower in the ground. They laugh the more when the poor savage worships some rude beast of the forest, and they laugh the more loudly when they are told that in some countries heathen men sell their gods for gold. That is what we are doing in all the thoroughfares of London every day in the week. The form is not so; but what of the spirit, what of the intent, what of the purpose of the heart? The man who is silent when he ought to speak for justice has sold what god he had. The man who will not encounter inconvenience and undergo sacrifice that he may proclaim the Christ to whom he nominally trusts, has sold that Christ, and is a baser Iscariot than Judas. It is easy to laugh at the heathen, to smile at the idea of their parting with their gods) We have sold God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost nearly every day of our conscious and responsible life. When we lied — do you remember? When we told half the truth — you know the time. When we oppressed the weak — you can never forget the look of that man as he went down under your cruel pressure; you will see his eyes on your dying day. It was then that we sold the Trinity we sang to on the Sabbath preceding.

Our hardships may become our blessings if we accept them in a religious spirit. I have to thank

God for every hardship I have undergone. They were terrible at the time; they have been in some degree sanctified; sometimes I can now pray; in some moments I can wrestle with God, and throw Him by His kind consent. Sometimes, indeed, I have wrestled with Him at daybreak, and although ‘He has left His mark upon me, He has left His blessing in me, giving me larger name and larger power. I would undertake to say that if any man has accepted his hardships in the right spirit, he is the better for them — not always will the word “better” be defined in the same way, but in some way — in taking certain elements out of his disposition, in putting certain other elements into his disposition, by rebuking his ambitions, by chastening his presumption, by leading him to see that things are larger than he supposed them to be, and especially by making him quiet where once he was riotous in declamation. Never remark on any other man’s hardships so as to increase them. If you cannot relieve a man’s burdens, do not add to them. Do not remind him of things that will only depress his spirit. If you see a poor cripple on the road, do not laugh at his infirmity; it is enough for him to bear it without having added to it your neglect, contumely, and insult. If a man is poor, do not shake your purse in his eyes, unless you mean to share it with him, and even then the shaking may be done without. “The heart knoweth its own bitterness.” You have your difficulties in business, at home, in the body, in commercial or scholastic rivalry and emulation; you have your difficulties of temper, and you know that many a time when you think you are going to smite and overthrow, you do but bruise your poor knuckles on the unyielding rock. All men have their hardships; all men have their difficulties. Let us accept them in the right spirit; let us make as few difficulties as we can between one another, and when God uses us providentially for conflict and antagonism, let us believe that in the end the explanation will come like a rising light. Life is a plan, life is a school, life is a preparation. We are made by our enemies. Many of us could say, I should have failed through indolence if I had not been pricked and goaded by some rival — by some rival whom I hated at the time. One day that rival and I will shake hands and say it was all right, though we knew it not.

Thus would I accept life. Jesus Christ would not have redeemed it with blood if it had been a thing superficial. The Christ would have been the gigantic mistake of eternity if life were a mere game of chance. If I would know what my life is and what

it is worth, I will not consult some intellectual N calculator to tell me the price in figures, I will look at the Christ of Christ and see in that Christ what every man is worth. If I get the right view, I will say I am not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, which could buy kings and thrones, crowns and palaces, but with the precious, the priceless blood of Christ. In that word “blood” find no coarseness — find life, agony, all.