2 Kings 4:31

And Gehazi passed on before them, and laid the staff upon the face of the child.

Personal power

Here is a remarkable thing in Bible history--nothing less than that a miracle should miscarry. Here is an attempt to work a miracle, which ends in failure. This is strange and most painful. Who knows what may fail next? Are there any purposed miracles suddenly broken in failure? Does the staff ever come back without having done its work? We are bound to ask these sharp and serious questions. Do not let us hasten perfunctorily oyez the melancholy fact of our failure; let us face it and wisely consider it, and find out whether the blame be in Elisha, or Gehazi, or the staff, or whether God Himself may be working out some mystery of wisdom in occasionally rebuking us in the use of means and instrument. Elisha was not a man likely to make vain experiments. We had, therefore, better know, with all frankness and simplicity, exactly what the case is, for in faithfulness may be the beginning of success. Gehazi came back and said, in effect, “Here is the staff, but it has done no good. There is neither sight, nor hearing, nor sound of returning voice; the child is not awaked.”

1. Who was this Gehazi? An undeveloped hypocrite. There were three or four different men in that Gehazi figure. There are three or four different men in you and in me. Which man is it to whom I speak; who is it that announces the hymn, that offers the prayer, that reads the Scriptures, that proclaims the Word? “Things are not what they seem.” Gehazi was at this moment an undeveloped knave, and what can he do with Elisha’s staff, or with God’s sunlight? The bad man spoils whatever he touches. In the fall of man, everything with which man has to do must also fall. Virtue perished out of Elisha’s staff; it became in the grip of Gehazi but a common stick. There is law in that deterioration; there is a whole philosophy in that mysterious depletion of virtue, and we ought to understand somewhat of its operation. Sin impoverishes everything. The universe is but a gigantic shell gleaming with painted fire to the bad man. To him there are no flowers in the garden; there may be some diversity of colour, but flowers as tabernacles in which God reveals Himself, creations of the supreme power, there are none, there can be none. A man cannot go down in his highest religious nature without going down all round. Whatever his pretence of interest may be in things beautiful and musical, and pure and noble, it is only a skilful hypocrisy. When the fool says in his heart, “There is no God,” he also says in his heart, “There is no beauty, there is no virtue, there is no purity, there is no soul.” God is the inclusive term, and denial in relation to that term is negation in reference to everything that belongs to it--all music and beauty, all virtue and tenderness, all chivalry and self-sacrifice. You cannot be theologically wrong, and yet morally and socially right. We know what it is to have done the evil deed, and then to have seen all the sunshine run away from the universe like a thing affrighted. Thus we may be coming nearer to the reason why the staff failed. The staff is good, the hand that wielded it was bad; there was no true sympathy or connection between the hand and the staff. The staff was only in the hand, it was not in the heart. There was a merely physical grasp, there was no moral hold of the symbol of prophetic presence and power. Gehazi had already stolen from Naaman, and already there had gone out from the court of heaven the decree which blanched him into a leper as white as snow. Now, let us come home. We have an inspired Book as our staff, our symbol, but are we inspired readers? An inspired Book should have an inspired perusal: like should come to like. By inspiration, by the human side, I mean a meek, reverent, contrite and willing heart, a disposition unprejudiced, a holy, sacred burning desire to know God’s will and to do it all. How stands the case now? You read the Bible and get nothing out of it. No, because you read it without corresponding inspiration on your part. No bad man can preach well. He may preach eloquently, learnedly, effectively. He may go very near to being a good preacher in the right sense of that term, but the bad man cannot preach well in God’s sense and definition of the term. What can the bad man preach? Can he preach salvation by the blood of Christ, he who knows not what it is to shed one drop of blood for any human creature? Can he speak nobly who never felt nobly? (J. Parker, D. D.)

The personal element

Personality is the one thing of real value. The other day I stood looking at ten or fifteen pounds of clay. It was valued at one thousand dollars. But this clay bore upon it the impress of personality. It had been touched by man’s intelligence and innermost spirit. It had been designed, and moulded into beauteous form; painted by artistic skill; glazed and baked and perfected by man’s inventive genius, and when it came from his hand, bearing the impress of his art, the beauty of thought, the very life of his personality, it had risen in value from zero to a thousand dollars--from worthless clay to a vase of surpassing value and loveliness. Whenever we purchase an article of any kind, in any store, we buy manhood, and not materials; personality, and not things. What we buy would be worthless without the impress of the human soul. Material things take their value from man. They rise in value as he rises in intelligence and moral power. The only thing of real value in the world is the human soul. (Homiletic Review.)

The child is not awaked.

Are you awake?

Many of you are, or have been, quite as “dead,” in the truest sense of that word, as was the boy who lay still and white in the prophet’s chamber at Shunem, and need to be “awaked” quite as much as he did. No doubt even in the youngest of you there are evil germs which may unfold themselves by and by, until you too die, or fall asleep, to God and goodness. No doubt even you often do wrong, and know that it is wrong while you do it. But, for all that, I do not call you “dead” if God is near and present to you, if you think of Him as your Father, if you are sorry when you do wrong, if you are quickly and easily moved to love, admire, and imitate whatsoever is right and brave and noble. But there are some of you who have lived long enough, and have long enough been “knocked about” in the little world of school, to have grown somewhat dull and “dead.” God is not so real, or He is not so much, to you as He was. You are not so ashamed of doing wrong as you were; it may be even that there are some things which you know your masters or parents would think wrong that you take a foolish pride in hiding from them. Perhaps you are getting greedy, selfish, hard to please; or, like Gehazi, covetous of the good things which others have, but you have not. Yes: I have often seen a most gruesome sight. I have seen a dead boy inside a living boy, and a dead girl inside a living girl! That is to say, I have seen girls and boys who had lost their sensibility to spiritual things, their love of goodness, truth, kindness, and gentleness, and were nevertheless quite content with themselves so long as they could get nice food to eat, nice clothes to wear, and plenty of pocketmoney and amusement. Is it too much to say that such boys and girls are dead? And, then, some of you, if you are not dead, are at least “fast asleep.” Your spiritual faculties and affections rust unused, or they are seldom used. You are dreaming, and pursuing dreams. For what we often call “the real world,” the world outside us, is not truly the real one; but the world within it and behind it, and beyond it. Thousands of men pass into this outward world, and pass out of it every day; and they can only take with them what they have stored up within themselves. So that it is this inner world which is the real world to us, the world in which alone true and enduring treasures are to be found. And if any of you think the outside world--in which you only stay for a few years at most--to be the real one, and are living only or mainly for that, while the inward and spiritual world, in which you are to abide for ever, is unreal and unattractive to you;--what can we say of you except that you are fast asleep, and do not see things as they are, and mistake dreams for realities, and realities for dreams? You have eyes, but they are not open. There are faculties in you capable of apprehending the true realities, but as yet they are not in exercise. Like the Shunammite’s son, who was both asleep and dead, you need to be awaked; you need to be quickened unto life. I should like to creep into your very hearts, and whisper, “Are you awake?” and to go on asking it till you were roused from your dreams, and saw things as they really are; for it is my duty to you, as it is that of your other teachers, to rouse and wake you, if we anyhow can. But, at the very outset, you may turn upon me, and say--“How are we to know whether we are what you call awake? What is it to be awake, and alive, toward God? What do you want us to be and to do?” And I reply: Well, for one thing, I do not want to see you trying to become sanctimonious little saints. I should hate to see you behaving and to hear you talking as some of the “good children” behave and talk of whom you read in certain tracts and books. What I want is that you should set yourselves to become good, useful, and happy men and women, by placing the best and highest aims before you, by acting on right motives, because you know that God loves you, and is bent on making you good. How are you to know whether you are alive and awake, or asleep and dead? In a hundred different ways--such ways as these. If you are at school, and set yourself to learn your lessons well and to get on fast--you may have very different motives for doing your duty in school. You may care only to beat your class-fellows, to stand above them, to get on in your little world and be looked up to; and if that be your aim or motive, it is a selfish one, and you are asleep and dead to the true motives and aims by which you ought to be inspired. But if you are eager to learn because you wish to do your duty, and to fit yourselves for larger duties by and by, because you want to become wiser, better, more useful, or because you want to please your parents and show that you are not unmindful of how much they have done for you, or because you want to please God and to prove that you thankfully remember how much He has done for you and given you, then you are alive and awake: for, now, your motives reach up out of and beyond this present world, which will soon pass away, and you are trying to prepare yourselves for any life, or any world, to which it may please God to call you. And, lastly, some of you are growing up into men and women, and have to go out into the world to earn your daily bread. Are you diligent, thoughtful, eager to advance? Why, so far, well. But you may be diligent, observant, quick to seize every advantage and opportunity, mainly because you hate work and hope to get free from it the more quickly; or because you want to lay by money, to get rich, to make a fortune; or because you are bent on distinction, reputation, applause. And, in that case, you are dead and asleep; you are not alive and awake to the best things, the most satisfying, the most enduring. For this life, for which alone you are living, will soon be over, and the riches which have wings soon use them and fly away. If you should die to-night, our Father would not have sorrowfully to say of you, “The child is not awake,” and feel that He must put you into hard and painful conditions which will rouse and sting you to a sense of all that you have lost and thrown away. And if you should live to be never so old, still all your life will be a useful and happy preparation for the better life to come. (S. Cox, D. D.)

On being awake

A member of Whitefield’s Sunday Afternoon Men’s Meeting stopped Mr. Horne a little while ago and said, “I have a crow to pluck with you.” “Oh, only one?” said Mr. Home. “What is that? You have taken away my Sunday afternoon’s nap!” “How is that?” asked the well-known preacher. “Well, I used to sleep all Sunday afternoon, and now I come to Whitefield’s.” “And how do you like it?” “Oh, I find it far more interesting to be awake!” The story is worth repeating, because there are tens of thousands of people who seriously assume that it is more interesting to be asleep. God has made us for wakefulness, and in all the departments of our life the wakeful man receives the surprises of the Almighty. How much the wakeful man can see in the country lane! There are uncounted numbers of village people who are still asleep, and whose senses have never begun to discern the transient glories of their own surroundings. I have just been staying with a man who makes it part of his ministry of life to open the senses of young villagers whose lives are cast in these entrancing spots. He tells me that they are entering into the unknown world with all the fascination exercised by a fairy tale. Birds and flowers have become the fairies in their once commonplace world, and now that they am awake they find it surpassingly interesting. (Hartley Aspen.)