FED OF GOD
‘And He commanded them to make all sit down by companies.’
The subject of which I wish to speak to you is the need which comes to men of simply being fed by God, of ceasing from self-assertion, and simply being receptive to the influences which come to them from Divinity.
I. Life’s perpetual energy.—There is a danger for many men, if not for all, in the perpetual output of energy which so much of our life involves. Life is made up of tasks and problems. It is one process of education; the calling out of powers by their use. It is the tendency of all the practical necessities of life, the constant outward movement of activity. ‘All is going out, nothing is coming in.’ Is not that the dismay which settles down upon many an experience as it attains to middle life?
II. The blessedness of a pause.—This applies also to our sacred and religious occupations. Nothing so tends to keep God out of our lives as work for God done in a wrong and superficial spirit. The disciples as well as the stragglers from Capernaum, must have needed Christ’s call to sit down and be fed. The more earnestly you are at work for Jesus, the more you need times when what you are doing for Him passes totally out of your mind, and the only thing worth thinking of seems to be what He is doing for you.
III. Is it not possible to rest in working, so that in the very act which exhausts, I shall get my renewal and supply? Here is a man who is engaged in a wholly secular employment. At the same time he is a Christian man who loves Christ; but all the day he is busy at the office or the shop. He knows how his life is always out-going. What can he do? Once in a while he turns aside and leaves the business. He makes his Sunday genuinely sacred. He consecrates his hour of prayer. What happens then? The blessing surely comes. God feeds the docile and expectant life, and it returns to work purer, greater. Why are you selling your goods? If you can say, ‘Because it is my duty, in order that I may maintain my family, and serve my generation, and honour God by usefulness,’ then the act opens itself and becomes a Church—a gate of heaven. In every act, consciously and devoutly done for God’s sake, God gives Himself to the soul and feeds it in the act.
—Bishop Phillips Brooks.
Illustration
‘There are races, and there have been times to which this need of rest and receptivity has been the most familiar truth. Open the record of the fourth century, and it is full of the pictures of hermits sitting on rough mountain sides, listening for the voice of God. Let your boat drop quietly down the Ganges to-day, and along its banks the silent figures sit like carved brown statues, day after day, with eyes open and fixed on vacancy, clearing themselves of all thought or desire, that being emptied of self they may see God. The East believes only too readily what the West finds it so very hard to accept, that no life is complete which does not sometimes sit trustfully waiting to be fed by God.’