Before every well-done work the vision comes. We dream before we accomplish. What is all our boyhood, that comes before our life, and thinks and pictures to itself what that life shall be, that fancies and resolves and is impatient what is it but just the vision before the work, the dream of Europe coming to many a young life, as it sleeps at Troas, on the margin of the sea? The visions before the work; it is their strength that conquers the difficulties and lifts men up out of the failures, and redeems the tawdriness or squalidness of the labour that succeeds. The aspect of the man of Macedonia reveals the real state of the case with reference to the essential need of the human soul for the gospel.
I. The first need is a God to love and worship. If you are not to lose that highest reach of love and fear where, uniting, they make worship, must you not have God? Woe to the man who loses the faculty for worship, the faculty of honouring and fearing not merely something better than himself, but something which is the absolute best, the perfect good his God! The life is gone out of his life when this is gone. There is a cloud upon his thought, a palsy on his action, a chill upon his love. Because you must worship, therefore you must have God.
II. But more than this. Every man needs not merely a God to worship, but also taking the fact which meets us everywhere of an estrangement by sin between mankind and God every man needs some power to turn him and bring him back, some reconciler, some saviour for his soul. There is an orphanage, a home-sickness of the heart which has gone up into the ear of God, and called the Saviour, the Reconciler, to meet it by His wondrous life and death.
III. Man needs spiritual guidance. The power of the Holy Spirit! an everlasting spiritual pressure among men! what but that is the thing we want? The power of the Holy Ghost, by which every man who is in doubt may know what is right, every man whose soul is sick may be made spiritually whole, every weak man may be made a strong man this is God's one sufficient answer to the endless appeal of man's spiritual life.
Phillips Brooks, The Candle of the Lord,p. 91.
A Cry for Help.
I. Each one must have been struck with the beauty and the tenderness and the depth which there is in that word help. "Help us." It implies that there is, which I suppose there is in every living creature under heaven, a feeling consciously or unconsciously which looks out for help. Every one has his aspirations; in every one there is a standard higher than he can reach, a sense of something beyond him, which he sees and admires and wishes to be and cannot. It is the immortality of the man it is the relic of the lost image it is the cry of the void of a heart which once was filled. Weakness, miserable weakness, is the child of sin, and there are times when the hardest and the proudest feel it. You may assume it, every one who has not God sometimes has the thought, though it does not clothe itself in words "Help us."
II. We hold that if a heathen man lives up to the light of his natural conscience, by that light of conscience he will be judged, and if he have obeyed it, he will not be condemned. But then the objection meets us, If this be so, is it not better to let the heathen alone? For if a man who follows the light of reason will not perish, and if to refuse Christ be the condemnation, and the responsibility therefore of knowing Christ so tremendous, surely they are safer as they are! If we, with all the assistance which we derive from education, from the piety of those about us, from the Bible, from the means of grace, find it so very difficult to do what is right, and to act out the dictates of our better mind, what must the difficulty be to a heathen, who has none of these, but all the counteracting influences of evil about him! Is not the gospel practically essential to the heathen, to enable him to fulfil the condition, on which alone he can escape eternal punishment? What the heathen want is help. There is a power abroad in the world to which nothing is really an antagonistic force but Christ only. Let us then obey the more than mortal voice by which the little good that is in everything everywhere in itself pleads silently, in Christ cries loudly, "Come over and help us."
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,2nd series, p. 51.
References: Acts 16:9. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. iv., No. 189; Three Hundred Outlines on the New Testament,p. 115; J. Oswald Dykes, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xv., p. 296; Preacher's Monthly,vol. vi., p. 124.Acts 16:9-40. New Outlines on the New Testament,p. 89. Acts 16:13; Acts 16:14. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. ix. No. 544.Acts 16:14. J. Burton, Christian Life and Truth,p. 44; J. C. Postans, Christian World Pulpit,vol. iv., p. 404; Preacher's Monthly,vol. vi., p. 85.