Luke 5:1

ON HEARING SERMONS

‘The people pressed upon Him to hear the word of God.’

Luke 5:1

This eagerness of the people to hear Christ is full of instruction, and both of encouragement and caution to all in every age who preach and who hear the Word of Grace.

I. Motive.—Some desired to hear Christ from mixed and even unworthy motives; some came from curiosity, impelled by the desire of knowing something new; some came for bread, or for healing, or for some other form of temporal aid; some came to cavil, to catch Him in His words, to betray Him. But some came to hear Christ because their hearts felt the charm of His words and the Divine power of His message. Still does the Divine Word prove its power by drawing the hearts of men unto itself.

II. Method.—To hear it profitably men must listen to it—

(a) With reverence, as to a word higher than that of man.

(b) With attention, as to what is of vital interest and concern.

(c) With candour, as prepared to weigh all that is said, although it may be opposed to their prejudices.

(d) With prayer, that the Spirit may accompany the message to the heart.

(e) With frequency, as remembering that not one lesson, not many lessons, can exhaust the riches of heavenly truth.

III. Purpose.—The purpose for which the Word of God should be heard is essentially spiritual.

(a) To appropriate it in faith. They truly hear who truly believe.

(b) To obey it with cheerfulness and diligence. ‘Blessed are they who hear the word of God, and do it!’

Illustrations

(1) ‘Speaking of the plain of Gennesareth, Josephus says: “One may call this place the ambition of Nature, where it forces those plants that are naturally enemies to one another to agree together; it is a happy contention of the seasons, as if each of them laid claim to this country, for it not only nourishes different sorts of autumnal fruits beyond men’s expectation, but preserves them a great while. It supplies men with the principal fruits, grapes and figs, continually during ten months of the year, and the rest of the fruits as they ripen together throughout the whole year.” ’

(2) ‘It was no brilliant lecturer, no mere fascinating improviser that gathered that eager throng. Imperfectly as He may have been understood to the full extent of His teaching, all felt that He was a teacher of quite another order from any they had ever known. It was nothing less than the Word of God that men crowded to hear from the lips of Christ; and the craving which drew men after Him then was one which has never passed away; it still works mightily in human hearts; now, as of old, through many an avenue of approach, men are pressing upon Him for satisfaction of that self-same craving; and the time is assuredly coming, notwithstanding adverse signs, when the pressure shall be more intense yet—nay, when the words once whispered in hatred and alarm, shall be literally true: “Behold! the world is gone after Him.” ’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

THE MODERN SERMON

The text serves to suggest thoughts af a general kind.

I. It opens up the whole question of religious appeal and Christian preaching.—What is there, we may ask, in common between the eagerness with which men pressed of old upon Christ Himself, and that with which they will flock to listen to the teacher who preaches about Christ? Doubtless the disparity is great, indeed, between the teaching of the Divine Master and that of the worthiest individual who bears His commission. Yet what men seek to gather from the imperfect utterances of His ministers is what they sought from Him—it is the Word of God.

II. Another consideration is that preaching, in the original sense of the word, is a thing now unknown in Christian lands.—To preach in the language of the New Testament means to proclaim Christ as a Saviour to those who never before heard of Him. The modern sermon is a new means of grace. It is one that has grown up in the Church of Christ in answer to the instinctive demands of believers; it is to satisfy the need which every Christian feels of having the chords continually touched which link Divine truth to his common life. For more than a generation the demand for sermons has been steadily growing. The people have truly pressed upon’ the ministers of the Gospel ‘to hear the word of God.’ It is a great mistake to imagine that the clergy have invented this want. It is the people who call for sermons, and their ministers with revived zeal have set themselves to meet the demand; notwithstanding charges of dulness, sameness, and emptiness which have been levelled against preachers, the clergy know full well that the omission of the sermon would be generally regarded as a loss. It should be remembered that preaching must, for the most part, be all that it is sometimes censured for being, commonplace and repetition. The preacher may, and should, exercise his skill in clothing his great message with freshness, and in diversifying the application of truth; to bring out of his treasure ‘things new and old’; to face the intellectual difficulties, the moral perils, the social problems of his time; but for all that, one theme alone must be paramount—he has to preach Christ in all His fullness, and to bring the ‘mind of Christ’ to bear to consecrate the present, and to keep supreme the interests of the soul, to point ever to that unseen world to which it belongs, and for which it is to prepare.

III. But what is it that gives to preaching its attractiveness still in a day when there are so many influences at work which tend to discredit and invalidate it? Is it not because there is that in the individual hearer which must always contribute to the effect of a sermon? Every hearer has a history of his own. Many can testify that the sermons which have helped them have not been those which a mere critic would have pronounced remarkable; indeed, the preacher’s words may have been lost upon the majority of his congregation, and yet some hearts there, whose soil God has prepared, at some critical point in their life’s history, perhaps, have heard words which just met the sorrow or the doubt or the fear which held possession of them. No wonder, if those who have gone through such an experience, believe it possible, even through the weak and faltering utterances of man, to hear the very Word of God.

—Rev. Canon Duckworth.

Illustration

‘The vision must precede the message, and the message declare the vision. The age calls for preachers who are seers, men who with pure hearts see God, who “behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world,” who discern “the signs of the times,” who with anointed eyes see under the surface of things, and with open vision watch the movements of men in the light of the Incarnate Christ. The age calls for preachers who are prophets as well as seers. Men who speak what they know, and testify what they have seen, whose preaching may not be with enticing words of men’s wisdom, but is in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, who will not hesitate to declare the whole counsel of God, and who scorn to apologise for preaching the full Gospel of Christ. The general reinstatement of preaching as a Divine institution suited to modern needs would issue in a widespread readjustment of the Church to the age. The people will always come to hear, if only the clergy have always something worth hearing to say. The Gospel of Christ is still the power of God unto salvation, and still the cry is heard, “What must I do to be saved?” ’

(THIRD OUTLINE)

CONCENTRATIVE CHRISTIANITY

The text tells us that the people ‘pressed’ to listen to the gracious words of Christ. It tells little of their motives.

I. Those of our time, too, can press to hear the Word of God. Of diffusive religion we have abundance; a concentrative Christianity is what we require. And to believe it—to commune with our own hearts and be still—is the finest preparative for external usefulness.

II. There are two ways in which the revelation of the will of God through Christ may be presented to our minds.

(a) We may know it as a mass of doctrines and commands offered to our acceptance as beings possessed of reasonable faculties, and demanding from our understandings a simple assent to these truths.

(b) We may know it in such a sense and degree as that it becomes the prevailing principle of all our actions and the presiding director of our inmost thoughts, the soul of our souls, the fountain of our moral being, the central force of the whole system of life and conduct. To which of these classes does our acquaintance with the Word of God belong?

Illustration

‘Archbishop Davidson in his Visitation Charge has a telling passage on preaching. “If it be,” he says, “that we are enabled by painstaking study and elaborate preparation and care to produce that which will be pointed and pithy, and make itself felt as a direct message from God to the human soul, in ten minutes, then be it so, and thank God. But if it be merely that we think people are pleased and satisfied now with the ten minutes rather than with the little longer time which used to be more customary; if God’s people so like it that therefore we can do with it, and say a few words, as it is called, leaving the big thought of the responsibility of the teacher to God and his fellow-men to be discharged in a lighter way than before, then surely we are missing some of the very largest part of the trust which God has laid upon us in a day when education is wider and our own reading ought to be more deep and thorough. Facilities for obtaining knowledge are taken advantage of by everybody, and people who are preaching should now utter words worth hearing, because the result of elaborate and painstaking care.” ’