Acts 16:14-15

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART

‘Whose heart the Lord opened.’

Acts 16:14

These words have not been selected with a view to dwell upon the incident with which they stand connected, full though it be of tender interest and manifold instruction, We take the words as setting forth the indispensable importance of the heart being engaged in religion, of true spiritual sympathy if there is to be any reality in the religion, either as it regards ourselves or in relation to others.

I. Sympathy with truth.—And, first of all, there is our sympathy with truth, or rather, with Him Who is the Truth. He declared in the most solemn hour of His life that He came into the world to bear witness of the truth, and said that whoever was of the truth would hear His voice. The faith that saves is one, the vitality of which consists in trust in and love towards a personal Saviour. Religious reality is, in fact, to have our hearts in some sense and degree like those of the two disciples at Emmaus, burning within us as He—Christ, the subject of the revelation—interprets to us in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself. Here, then, is the inner essence of all true religion.

II. Sympathy with goodness.—‘He that receiveth a righteous man,’ says our Lord, ‘in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward.’ He admires, in other words, the beauty of holiness, and is not without some hope, trembling though it be, not without some desire, however faint, that it may be seen. These, and such as these, are they whom Jesus called to Him, and continually addressed in the days of His flesh—the weary and heavy laden, they who felt a constant sense of discomfort as they saw something above and beyond them they could not attain, but were dissatisfied to remain where and as they were.

III. Sympathy with others.—We think of our Blessed Lord, of the depth of the force, of the reality of His sympathy. Touched with the feeling of our infirmities, tempted on all points like as we are, made perfect through sufferings, He traversed all the rounds of earthly experience. Sympathy was His, deep as the human heart, broad as human necessity, filling into every thought and feeling, and aspiration and condition, and experience possible or conceivable to us human beings; sympathy, which is the same to-day that it was yesterday, that should be for ever; for it is the sympathy not merely of man but of God, and therefore it cannot be weary or exhausted, not till seven times, but till seventy times seven; full as the fountains of heaven, He ever lives to love, to chasten, to soothe, to bless. Shall not the same mind be in us which was also in Christ Jesus?

(a) Some known to you have fallen deeply.

(b) A few may be sadly tried with doubts on religious questions.

(c) Then there is the poverty and misery which abound around us in our great centres of population, the appalling contrasts of modern civilisation—shall not our hearts, brethren, be open to feel it? It is true that we are familiar with it.

—Dean Forrest.

Illustration

‘Alas that there are so many who profess and call themselves Christians who take their very familiarity with suffering as a reason why they should not pause to examine into the appalling fact! The slave-owners of the Southern States of America at one time regarded slavery, with all its attendant atrocities, with all the misery connected with that pitiless traffic in human beings, as almost a kind of Divine institution, or, at any rate, they calmly accepted it as the necessary result, the unavoidable details of a predetermined kind of natural arrangement. But with what changed feelings, as I am given to understand, is slavery thought of now by the population of these States! It is seen in its true colours, and the descendants of the old slave-owners would no doubt feel it almost to be an insult if they were asked to defend what their forefathers regarded as something like sacrilege to attack.’