Acts 8:35

PREACHING JESUS

‘Then Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus.’

Acts 8:35

At the close of this chapter the picture of the Crucifixion unrolls itself again: it is a miniature of the larger one painted with holy oil in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. In the conversion and baptism of this negro we see what wonderful ways God has of bringing men to Himself. Philip ‘began’ with the story of the Cross, and herein Philip is a pattern to all preachers.

I. The Cross teaches the evil of sin.—Imagine a boy who lives in disobedience to the wishes of his father. He runs away from home. In course of time the father dies, and he finds a letter from which it is clear that the conduct of his son has broken his heart. That boy learns for the first time how base and cruel and ungrateful he has been. The story of the Cross is such a letter. My sin has broken my Saviour’s heart.

II. The Cross is the heart of the Gospel.—‘O sweet exchange!’ wrote some one in the second century, meaning that Christ had borne his sin, and that he had received Christ’s righteousness. It is a far cry from the second to the twentieth century. Yet the human heart has the same needs, and those needs are met by the story of the Cross in the twentieth as surely as they were in the second century.

III. The Cross reveals the glory of self-sacrifice.—Sir James Young Simpson was the discoverer of chloroform, and in the year 1847 he sat down with his friends Drs. Keith and Duncan, and tested on himself and them the action of the drug, and he threw himself, and they consented to his throwing them, into a state of unconsciousness which might have been death—who can help admiring self-sacrifice?

IV. The Cross is a test of character.—It is a revelation. It shows the dark features of the money-loving Judas. We see the hypocrisy of Caiaphas, the Machiavelli of his age. Pilate vacillates: he will take no sides: he would have saved Christ, but he preferred, as he thought, to save himself; he puts his own interest first. Pilate’s wife, in strange contrast, will do something, and if needs be suffer much for her Saviour, so great was her reverence and her love. The Jews did not know Him to be the Lord of glory, but they knew him to be a righteous Man, and they did not act up to the light they had. The ‘thoughts out of many hearts’ are revealed (Luke 2:35).

—Rev. F. Harper.

Illustration

‘I remember the time,’ said Bishop Walsham How, ‘when I used to resent the complaint that a sermon had said nothing about Christ. I have lived to see that I was wrong. The hearts of your people do long to hear about Him. They never feel quite satisfied if they do not. Be it narrowness, or superstition, or what you will, the simple Christian craves the very Name of Jesus. I should like, if I dare, to think this a sign of growing more like a child again; but anyhow, I confess that I should myself go home dissatisfied with a sermon which had in it no mention of our dear Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.’