Luke 13:35

THE DESOLATE HOUSE

‘Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.’

Luke 13:35

There is no such mournful passage in all history as this. The danger is that we think of old Jerusalem, a city now practically extinct, a city that flourished nineteen hundred years ago. This is Jerusalem, and me are the rejecting inhabitants.

I. Christ rejected.—We every day reject overtures of love, and turn our backs on doors that open to give us hospitality and rest. Every day we insult Deity; every day we put our fingers in our ears and shut out the most charming music; every day we desire the night to come in order that we may do the deed of darkness. That is the mystery of experience that makes all the realities of revelation possible to our faith.

II. Christ’s tenderness. ‘Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.’ Your house is ‘ desolate.’ It was not shouted, it was not uttered in denunciation; there was no accent of threatening in the tone. The pathos of the word is its power. We do amiss to think that Jesus Christ pronounced His woes as if they were resentments or angry threatenings. They were full of tears; they would have been nothing but for their pathos.

III. Choose ye!—Still is the cry, ‘Choose ye this day whom ye will serve.’ But if we reject Christ once and again, and three times and seven times; if we keep Him standing knocking at the door and never reply, we must not wonder if, when after a long time we open the door to see if He is still there, we find He is gone. ‘Your house is left unto you desolate.’ You do not know how much your house owes now to the very knock you never answer. Christ cannot even be outside the door without a blessing being about the house. His very presence is a benediction; His very touch is a security. So long as He is found there outside, wet with dew, all night choking His voice into a moan, your house is not without a comfort. The accidental blessings, the blessings which come through Christ’s presence and ministry, you can never calculate. But when He is gone, when He no longer knocks at your door, then ‘your house is left unto you desolate.’