Missionary Work.
I. If missionary enterprise were nothing more than one of the most remarkable characteristics of our time, it would well deserve a place in the thoughts of those who are brought up to become English citizens. Missionary work is becoming more and more a nationalundertaking, the expression of a deep national conviction. Any man, whether he be a statesman, a clergyman, or a layman, who shuts his eyes to this truth, is so far out of sympathy with the English nation, and suffers from that narrowness and isolation of heart which is sure to come upon those who look with contempt on national instincts. But missionary enterprise is something more than a marked phenomenon characteristic of our times. It is no transient phase, which may for a time interest philosophical minds, and then pass into obscurity, to be pierced only by the researches of future antiquarians. It is in its nature a lasting thing. If it pass away from England, it is not too much to say that the life of England will have departed.
II. "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me." The missionary and the missionary society must be able to say this from the heart. There is great danger of forgetting this. This is an age of elaborate organisation, an age of societies. Beyond all question there is a most real danger that the great English religious societies may cover much that is hollow. The very fact that religious enterprises have become an established part of national enterprise is a reason for making us fear that the Spirit of God may be forgotten in the presence of the Spirit of the world. Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is (1) liberty, (2) perfect integrity. Wherever the wants of Christ's children are to be supplied, wherever there are captives needing deliverance, poor asking for tidings of their Father, broken-hearted to be healed, blind praying for, or at least needing, recovery so sight, there is needed one who may well feel that he if a labourer working at an infinite harvest, a shepherd feeding but too, scantily a countless flock of sheep and of lambs; and there, too is needed the mature counsel, the encouragement, and the warning of one who is but little disposed to be a lord over God's heritage, and is willingly and affectionately accepted as a true Father in God.
H. M. Butler, Harrow Sermons,p. 38.
Christ the Emancipator.
I. All the world has been under one consciousness namely, of limitation of power, either inherent in the individual, or caused by the restrictions of circumstances, or by oppression from without; and to be free has been the aspiration of the world. When the Saviour declared that His mission in this world was to open prison bonds, to set captives at liberty, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord, He announced a doctrine with which the hearts of men were universally in sympathy. That was just what they wanted. Mankind want the restrictions and limitations about them to be destroyed.
II. The very first essay that the Saviour makes toward the enlargement of men's liberty wears the appearance of the opposite. The very first blow which He strikes at tyranny is at the tyranny of sense and sensuousness in the individual. He introduces us to God as a Father; and if we go to the Father through Him, and if He is a living and loving presence to us, we, by being taught to be in sympathy with Jesus Christ, are under the same conduct, and under the same general instructive processes which we see employed in the lower sphere, and in a more limited way in our own households. We are brought to a sense of the beauty, the grace, the sweetness, the power of the superior life in the soul over all the elements and influences of the lower life.
III. But the deliverance from the thrall of appetite and from the infirmities of the flesh is only one single element of emancipation. Christ delivers us from our bondage to secular conditions. The light and the life that we receive by faith tend to make, often do make, might always make, a man superior to his circumstances. That this is true is pre-eminently shown, not so much by those who are most obvious in life, as by the poor, to whom the Saviour said He came to preach this Gospel. It is the peculiarity of the philosophy of antiquity that it came to the few who were enlightened, and left in the dark the great underclass; and it was the peculiarity of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ that it was designed to reach the great underclass. It is in hidden retreats and in secluded places that you see that disposition of Christ which makes men in the midst of all limitations and under adverse circumstances strong, steadfast, doing what the air-plants do, that, having no root in the soil, draw all their nutriment from the great air above them.
IV. The illumination that we derive from the Lord Jesus Christ is one that sets us free from ignorance, and in setting us free from ignorance it shuts the door out of which come the emissaries of mischief. Knowledge dominates ignorance, and all through society the strong tend to control the weak. But it is not merely the want of intellectual knowledge that makes a man weak; it is the want of that knowledge which comes by illumination through the Lord Jesus Christ.
H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. ix., p. 313.
The Preaching of the Gospel.
The words of the text are descriptive of the offices of Christ. We shall place them before you in the strongest light if we employ the method of contrast; that is, if we examine other systems, such as the law and natural religion, showing what these can do towards healing the broken-hearted and delivering the captive.
I. The ceremonial law was but a system of rites which had no natural efficacy, or of observances which were themselves destitute of virtue. If there were truth in the ceremonial law, it was, as we know, truth derived exclusively from Christ. Moses cannot be said to have come to preach deliverance to the captives, nor the setting at liberty them that are bruised. Our text will not hold good of the legal dispensation. But let us ask whether it is in any way verified by natural religion.
II. There are many men who think that there is a sort of natural efficacy in repentance, so that sorrow for sin must ensure its pardon. But is it thus in human affairs? Does pardon follow at all necessarily upon repentance? When laws have been broken, whoever dreams of the criminal being forgiven just because he is contrite? Living, as we confessedly do, in our moral capacity, under a retributive government, we can surely have no right to suppose that what would be utterly ineffectual, had we broken the laws of man, must be necessarily efficacious when set against the infraction of the laws of God.
III. Consider how the disclosures in the Gospel provide for the deliverance of the captive and the recovering of sight to the blind. Bound by the prison-house of our selfish dispositions, bruised by our fall from original righteousness, we have but to believe in Christ, and close with Him as our Saviour, and lo! the fetters fall from us, and we spring into the glorious liberty of the children of God. The Gospel admits to liberty, but that liberty God's service, which alone is freedom; it gives spiritual eyesight, but fixes the eyes on "whatsoever things are pure and lovely and of good report."
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 1,483.
The Christ as a Preacher.
I. Consider the substance of Christ's preaching. Without doubt we have in the text the keynote to His entire teaching. The peculiar feature of this quotation from Isaiah, which Christ makes His own, is its doubleness. "The poor" but men are poor in condition and in spirit. "The captives" but men may be in bondage under masters or circumstances, and also under their own sin. "The blind" but men may be blind of eye, and also in spiritual vision. "The bruised" but men are bruised in the struggles of this rough world, and also by the havoc of their own evil passions. Which did Christ mean? Both, but chiefly the moral, for He always struck through the external forms of evil to the moral root from which it springs, and of whose condition it is the general exponent. Christ sets Himself as the Deliverer from each, the origin and the result, the sin and the root, and the misery which is its fruitage.
II. The philosophy of this preaching. It was a revelation of God. Those words in the Nazareth synagogue were but the idlest breath, except as they brought the delivering God before men. But when God is seen and known the whole nature of man leaps into joyful and harmonious activity. Under this revelation of Him our troubles shrink, our broken hearts are healed, our darkened minds are illuminated, our sins pass away in tears of shame and repentance, and our whole being springs up to meet Him who made us, and made us for Himself; the secret of existence is revealed, the end of destiny is achieved.
III. The remaining point is the power of this preaching. No one truth, unless it happens to be an all-embracing truth, and no number of truths, however clearly seen, have any inspiring or redeeming power until they are grounded in an eternal person. Mozley, in one of his sermons, asks, "Have we not, in our moral nature, a great deal to do with fragments?" Yes, and it is the weakness of human nature, when it under-takes to teach moral truth, that it has only fragments to deal with. It is because Christ did not see truth in a fragmentary way, and because there was in Himself nothing fragmentary, that He teaches with power. There is no capability in man of resisting perfect truth; when it is seen it conquers. The main thing, therefore, is to see; but men love darkness, and even when they begin to see it is in a half-blind way.
T. T. Munger, The Freedom of Faith,p. 151.
References: Luke 4:18. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. III., p. 164; Spurgeon, Morning by Morning,p. 330; Expositor,3rd series, vol. iii. p. 147; H. P. Liddon, Church of England Pulpit,vol. v., p. 293; Homilist,new series, vol. i., p. 136. Luke 4:18; Luke 4:19. J. P. Chown. Christian World Pulpit,vol. x., p. 49; Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times,"vol. ix., p. 196; Christian World Pulpit,vol. xi., p. 212.