The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith.
I. Consider the safety which Christ offers. Notice it is a safety, not by the avoidance of deadly things, but by the neutralizing of them through a higher and stronger power. There is no such idle promise as that if a man believes in Christ a wall shall be built around his soul, so that the things out of which souls make sin cannot come to him. The Master knew the world too well for that. His own experience on the hill of His temptation was still fresh in His memory. He knew that life meant exposure, that sin must surely beat at every one of these hearts nay, that the things, out of which sin is made, temptation, moral trial, must enter into every heart; and so He said, not, "I will lead you through secluded ways, where none but sweet and healthy waters flow;" but, "Where I lead you, there will be the streams of poison. Only if you have the vitality, which comes by faith in Me, your life shall be stronger than the poison's death; if you drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt you." One thing we see immediately in such a promise, one condition which belongs to its fulfilment. It is that only in the higher action and mission lay the safety from the lower influence; and, therefore, that the lower influence was to be powerless over the disciples only as they met it incidentally in the direct pursuance of their higher task. Only those temptations which we encounter in the way of duty, in the path of consecration only those has our Lord promised us that we shall conquer. He sends us out to live and work for Him. The chances of sin, which we meet while that Divine design of life, the life and work for Him, is clear before us, shall not hurt us. When we forget that design, our arm withers, our immunity is gone.
II. He "shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover." Safety and helpfulness. He shall be safe, and he shall save others too. These two things go together, not merely in this special promise of the Saviour, but in all life. Safety and helpfulness. So is the whole world bound into a whole, so does the good that comes to any man tend to diffuse itself, and touch the lives of all, that these two things are true. First, that no man can be really safe, really secure that the world shall not harm and poison him, unless there is going out from him a living and life-giving influence to other men. And, second, that no man is really helping other men unless there is true life in his own soul. Both of these seem to me to be great and ever-present truths. "They shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover." If I read these words spiritually; if I make them a promise and a prophecy of that wonderful power which, in all times in all religious, spiritual life has had to extend itself, like fire, from any one point which it has already occupied, to everything within its reach which is inflammable, which is capable of the same burning life; it seems to me that the way in which the promise is fulfilled to us is by the clothing of the believing life with two qualities, which are expressed by these two words Testimony and Transmission. (1) Life-giving lives bear testimony by the very fact of their own abundant life. They show the presence, they assert the possibility of vitality. And very often this is what souls, whose spiritual life is weak and low, need to have done for them. (2) Transmission: the highest statement of the culture of a human nature and of the best attainment that is set before it is, that as it grows better it grows more transparent, and more simple more capable, therefore, of simply and truly transmitting the life and will of God which is behind it. On a life of obedience and faith God shines as the sun shines on a block of crystal, sending its radiance through the willing and transparent mass, and lighting it all into its utmost depths.
Phillips Brooks, Twenty Sermons,p. 333.