Isaiah 54:2-3

Enlarge the place of thy tent.

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An enlarged Church

The Jewish nation, after its return from captivity, never attained so remarkable a degree of prosperity and power as fully to answer all the terms of this prophecy. It is true that they became a very numerous people; so that from forty-two thousand, the number of those that went out of Babylon, they had increased to nearly three millions at the time of our Saviour’s death; but they can hardly be said, in respect of territorial limits, to have broken “forth on the right hand and on the left,” nor to have “inherited the Gentiles.” We must therefore look for another interpretation of the prophecy; and we can be in no doubt as to its application to the Church of God. (C. J. Blomfield, D. D.)

Jew and Gentile in one Church

“He shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied,” are words of comfort interposed amidst forebodings of suffering and woe; and the mode of their accomplishment is more clearly pointed out by an image drawn from the habits of pastoral life, familiar to the people of eastern countries, where the nomad chief, as his family, and cattle, and goods increase, finds it necessary to “enlarge the place of” his “tent, and” to “stretch forth the curtains of” his “habitation.” Under this image is represented the gradual increase of the Church, from the moment when, to human eyes, it appeared to have been crushed by the disgrace and death of its Founder, to the time when the “fulness of the Gentiles” shall have “come in,” and God’s ancient people shall be brought back to the same fold with them, and all “the kingdoms of this world” shall “become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of His Christ.” (C. J. Blomfield, D. D.)

Enlargement

According to the prophet the relation of God to His people is a relation that assures enlargement of beneficence on every hand. God and His Church are not locked up together, in some secret place, enjoying spiritual luxuries, whilst all the world is dying of starvation. If we could find such a hint in the Scripture we should burn the book. The Scripture is all for enlargement. The feast cannot be increased; but if it were needful to increase the space within which the guests are to be accommodated God would thrust back the horizon, rather than any man should starve for want of room to sit down in. If any messenger shall return, saying, “Yet there is room,” God would send that messenger out again to compel the hungering and homeless to come that they might enjoy a Father’s gracious bounty. So we find in the opening verses of this chapter--enlargement. (Dr. Parker, D. D.)

William Carey and missions

William Carey’s sermon on this text, preached at Nottingham, marked an epoch in the history of Christianity, for it aroused the Church of Christ to a sense of its responsibility for the conversion of the heathen and the evangelization of the world. The interest awakened by that sermon led to the formation of the Baptist Missionary Society, and to the ushering in of the Evanglistic era, which has already brought a great revenue of glory to Christ, and priceless blessings to every branch of His Church. From this remarkable text Carey deduced and enforced two important practical principles, which were afterwards embodied in the motto of the Baptist Mission--“Attempt great things for God.” “Enlarge,” “stretch forth,” “lengthen,” “strengthen.” “Expect great things from God (Isaiah 54:4). If Carey had done nothing but shape this formula for evangelistic work, he would have achieved much for the cause he loved so dearly. It is easily remembered. Rather, it is not easily forgotten. (J. T.McGaw, D. D.)

The enlargement of the Church

The tent is the simplest and most primitive form of the human habitation. Wherever a pole can be found, with cords or strips of leather, a little bark or cloth or canvas or skin, a tent can be set up--as easily struck as pitched, and almost as easily enlarged; for when the growing necessities of a family demand larger shelter and room, all you have to do is to get a little longer pole, a little thicker cords, a little more bark or skin or canvas, and you can stretch forth the curtains of your habitation to accommodate the needs of the growing family. And so this is made the type of the enlargement of the canopy of the Church over her growing family of children. “Thou shalt burst forth,” as the Hebrew is--the grand old Hebrew--“Thou shalt burst forth on the right and on the left.” A symmetrical growth in this direction and that direction alike; not like a family that has a one-sided development--she is going to gather her children from east and west and north and south, and every clime and every tongue and every people; and because her family is to come from all quarters of the earth, her canopy must stretch to every quarter of the earth to cover her increasing family. (A. T. Pierson, D. D.)

“Lengthen” and “strengthen”

What is the duty of the Church in these days? “Lengthen” and “strengthen.” The word “lengthen” suggests extensity; the word “strengthen” suggests intensity, and there is always danger in extensive movement that is not accompanied by intensive movement. You are lengthening your cords, but if you do not strengthen your stakes what will happen? Your lengthening your cords will be a disaster to you and the tent itself.

1. How shall we lengthen cords? By sending out our organizations in every direction--a cord here to Europe, another cord to Asia, another to Africa, and another to the islands of the sea. Towards the North Pole and the South Pole; in every direction, from the great centres of Christendom, let your missionary organizations reach! With the enterprise that has dash and push in it let these cords be carried to the ends of the earth, until the network of missions overspreads the whole family of man! And, if we are going to have this lengthened cord you must add your own length to it. As, when we rescue a man from a burning building, and the ladder will not reach those that are in peril, the fireman stands on the top rung of the ladder and adds his own length, over which men and women climb down into safety, so if you are going to have this organization reach over the world in a spirit of hallowed enterprise till the canopy is co-extensive with the family of man, your length has got to be added to the cord. You have read of the self-sacrifice of the Carthaginian maidens when they cut off their raven ringlets that they might be braided into bowstrings for Hannibal’s archers; or of the Tyrian maidens when they sacrificed their golden hair for cordage for the Tyrian navy. The cords of enterprise by which this Gospel is to be carried to the ends of the earth are woven out of the very fibres of human hearts! You cannot make them with money, and you cannot make them with commercial interests, and you cannot make them with public enthusiasm. They are woven on the loom of personal consecration in the secret place with God.

2. We must not only have lengthened cords, but strengthened stakes. If there is one weak stake on the circumference of a tent, and it pulls out or is broken, then it puts a greater stress on the other tent-pegs round it, and one by one they are loosened or pulled out, until the whole tent collapses. What does that mean? It means that any Church on the circumference of Christian effort that does not plant itself firmly to hold up the cord of organization is responsible for the collapse of Christian missions. And it means that any man or woman or child in the Church of God, among God’s professed believing children, that does not become a stake down deep into the ground and holding on, is responsible for any disaster that comes to the whole work of Christ by lack of personal co-operation. (A. T.Pierson, D. D.)

Strengthening the stakes

How are you going to strengthen the stakes?

1. By faith in Almighty God. This is His work.

2. By the power of believing prayer. A beloved Japanese convert and trainer of native teachers said with his dying breath, “Advance on your knees.”

3. By a firm confidence in this Gospel as the Gospel of Christ, and that this Word is the Word of God.

4. We must have sanctified giving.

5. Holy living. Stanley says that he owes to the months he spent with Livingstone the transformation of his character; and yet Livingstone never said a word to him about his soul’s salvation. (A. T. Pierson, D. D.)

The Church’s duty and encouragements

I. THE DUTY OF THE CHURCH.

II. HER ENCOURAGEMENTS. (A. W. Brown, M. A.)

Foreign missions

I. THE MAGNITUDE AND SUPREME IMPORTANCE OF OUR OBJECT. The conversion of the world. We know that the conversion of the world is not our work, but God’s. But we also know that the Lord works with suitable instruments, and that the degree of our success may be influenced by our devotedness, and the skill with which we adapt our efforts to our end. The conversion of the world! Who can realize what that means? I think of one soul living and dying in rebellion against God--of its possibilities for misery and for mischief--how much it may itself endure, how much injury it may inflict, how much grief occasion, throughout God’s holy universe? I think of that soul as converted! of the blessedness it may experience, the beneficent influence it may exert, the joy its conversion will diffuse throughout the ranks of sinless intelligences. Of the sublime satisfaction with which He will regard it, who for its sake endured the Cross and despised the shame, when it becomes a jewel in His crown, a trophy of His saving love and power, fruit of His soul’s travail. Then I extend the thought to the countless myriads of the human race whom that soul represents, and of whom the same thing may be predicated. The thought is to me absolutely overpowering. “Oh, the magnitude--the momentous importance of the object at which we aim! Oh, the miserable smallness of the means we use for such a purpose.

III. THE VASTNESS OR THE FIELD NOW OPEN TO US; With more force than at any previous period of the world’s history we can say if missions, “The field is the world.”

III. THE FACILITIES WE NOW HAVE FOR CARRYING ON OUR WORK. The Lord in His high providence has furnished the Church with most favourable opportunities of conducting her great enterprise in all parts of the earth.

IV. THE MISERABLE CONDITION AND URGENT CLAIMS OF THE HEATHEN.

V. THE DIVINE INTEREST IN THIS GREAT ENTERPRISE.

VI. THE OBLIGATIONS UNDER WHICH WE ARE LAID BECAUSE OF THE FAVOURS WE HAVE RECEIVED. Forgiven rebels as we are, our forgiveness having been procured for us by the sufferings and death of our Lord, and granted to us as the gift of His grace; redeemed by His blood as we are from the destruction which was pending over us; admitted as we are to all the privileges of loyal and obedient subjects, free access into the Divine presence, not only permission, but encouragement to make known to God the desire of our hearts, with the assurance that He hears us always; born as we are of the Spirit into the Divine family, made children and heirs of God, entitled to call God Father; delivered as we are from the fear of hell, and animated by the hope of a glorious immortality; indebted as we are to the influence of the Gospel even for those temporal blessings which are so conducive to our comfort and enjoyment during the present life, and in respect of which we can truly say, “The lines have fallen to us in pleasant places, and we have a goodly heritage;” honoured by God in being called as we are to share in His great work of winning the world to Himself, by which He shows how completely He has forgiven us, and what confidence He places in us; assured, too, that “they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever”--is not ours confessedly a position of unspeakable privilege? What are we doing? Compare our actions with our object and our obligations. (W. Landels, D. D.)

Arguments for missions

1. Christ owns the whole world.

2. The Gospel of Christ is adapted to all men.

3. Our Lord’s commission to the apostles contemplates a universal kingdom. (J. T. McGaw, D. D.)

Modern missions

1. This great utterance fell from the lips of a man who had newly seen God, and caught thereby an original conception of His redemptive work for the world through captive and desolate Israel. No one can miss the meaning of this joyous outburst. It is an evangel. Sursum corda, he cries. Do not give way to repining though you are lonely and heartsore as a childless woman.

Say not “my tent is destroyed and all my tent-pins are plucked up: my children are gone away and there is none to spread out my tent any more, or to set up my tent-curtains” (Jeremiah 10:20). Get up and make your tent-.pins strong: lengthen your cords and fasten your plugs. Be not content with a little space. Roominess and magnificence befit your prospects. Your expulsion will be your expansion, your desolation your increase, your captivity your exaltation. The area covered by your race shall be larger than of yore. The prophet could speak that word of hope and endeavour because he had received his new vision of God. Insight was the warrant for utterance. He knew the meaning of the Exile through his purer conception of the character and purposes of Jehovah. He saw the supreme and universal sovereignty of God; the universal brotherhood of man; the essential spirituality of the Hebrew religion, that it could and would exist without a temple and without a priest, without an altar and without a land, without anything save the soul and God; that it was to cease to be a local religion and become universal, and instead of remaining a national luxury would become an aggressive missionary and world-caving agency. He looked along the highways of the future, and saw the approach of the delivering God, and cried, “Behold your God! Man has a fatal and pathetic facility both for losing himself and his best treasures. Apostolic Christianity went everywhere preaching the Word. It was essentially aggressive. It placed itself by the side of the ancient religions of Greece and Rome, always absorbent of their good, but finally replacing them by its richer ideas and stronger spiritual impulses. The fires of the Christ-given passion to save all men burnt on, although alas l with diminishing intensity, for more than two centuries. The Reformation itself had little or no missionary passion, and the desponding leader said, with unfathomable sadness--a fore-gleam of the agony and pity that stirred the Churches at a later date: “Asia and Africa have no Gospel; another hundred years and all will be over. God’s Word will disappear for want of any to preach it. Surely not, O prophet of God! The Word of the Lord endureth for ever. When the night is darkest, then up leap the stars. The living God is always at work. An astronomer gazed so long on the sun that he could see nothing else. The image was burned into him. For years before May 81, 1792, the vision of God as the God of Missions had arrested, held, moulded, and swayed the soul of Carey. Isaiah repeats Micah, Luther repeats the psalmist, Carey repeats the prophet, and so the Word of the Lord has flee course and is multiplied.

2. It is a revealing fact that, though Carey gained his messagefrom the words of prophecy, he expressed it in the simple and characteristic language of the closing years of the eighteenth century--the century of the expansion of England and of the great evangelical revival. “Expect great things,” said he that he that he voiced the thought of his generation; expect them from God”--in that he expressed the knowledge and insight of men taught by the Spirit.

3. George Sand reminds us: “It is the heart that governs the world; it is feeling that performs the real miracles of history.” Carey’s persistent determination that the Church should evangelize the world was fed by what Vinet calls “the passion for souls.” His perception of evil was acute. His sense of sin strong. His reliance on Christ unhesitatingly entire. He scarcely seems to have had a thought apart from Christ and His salvation. And yet at the root of all, and over all, and through all was a self-consuming love of men, of all men, and of “heathen” men most of all; and therefore forgetting himself this one thing he did, he founded modern missions by the gift of himself, out and out, in serving and suffering so that he might save men. Ah! it is here we fail. “We do not love men for their own sake or for God’s sake. We need to change our style; it is cramped and fettered. (J. Clifford, D. D.)

Spare not, lengthen thy cords and strongthen thy stakes

Happy influence of foreign missions on the Church

The whole passage refers to the conversion of the heathen; and furnishes the important suggestion, that there is no system of means so well calculated to give expansion and stability to the Church of Christ as foreign missionary operation. There are several reasons which are supposed by many to favour the opinion, that Christian exertion is less productive among pagan nations than at home.

1. There are preliminary barriers which oppose the efforts of the missionary, and which do not exist in Christian lands. The most important are strange languages, and strong prejudices. There is also the systematic and stubborn opposition which the Gospel meets from the established forms of civil government and pagan superstition. Further, there is the risk and waste of life which foreign missionary labour involves. This, however, is but one view of the subject. There are arguments which favour the opposite opinion--that the direct results of Gospel efforts are greater in pagan than in Christian lands. Among the reasons for such an opinion, is that one which induces almost all ministers of the sanctuary to exchange the sphere of their labour at home; and which would, if they were consistent with their principles, send great numbers of them abroad. The souls to be saved are much more numerous--much more needy. Another reason is, the means of usefulness are both more various and extensively operative. A further reason is the activity of native converts.

2. We believe that foreign missions are the best means of lengthening the cords and strengthening the stakes of the Church, because they establish and promote an action and reaction between themselves and the Churches, which is most powerful and advantageous to both parties. This may be demonstrated by several facts.

I. MISSIONARY LABOUR INCREASES THE PIETY AND ENERGY OF THE CHURCHES. The missionary spirit includes among its essential endowments, faith, prayer, self-denial, deadness to the world, charity, beneficence, heavenly-mindedness, a willingness to submit to sufferings and hazards, and a supreme regard for the glory of God.

1. There is the stimulus of example, than which nothing is more influential. Hold up to the Churches those with whom they are under equal obligations, but who have far exceeded them in the “work of faith, and labour of love, and you bring a motive to bear upon them which piety cannot resist.

2. It operates through sympathy. Our work, our aim, our strongest desires, our highest honour, our dearest interests, our eternal recompense are the same.

3. There is the duty and blessedness of necessary co-operation.

4. It diverts the mind from those unimportant points of doctrinal difference, and metaphysical distinction and abstruse speculation, which squander the time and pervert the talents, and ruin the souls of thousands.

5. It operates, too, through the influence of its own greatness. It expands the mind, liberalizes the soul, elevates the aim; arouses faculties and feelings which nothing else could have addressed; and produces effects and results which no other object could command.

II. MISSIONARY OPERATIONS NOT ONLY INCREASE THE PIETY AND ENERGY OF THE CHURCHES, BUT GREATLY ASSIST IN SUPPLYING THEIR DOMESTIC

DESTITUTION. Many a converted youth has had his attention directed to the ministry through the reading of missionary journals. When we speak of the vigour which missionary exertions throw into our domestic institutions, we refer to a very natural operation. That man who has courage to attempt a great enterprise, despises the difficulties of a small one. The energy produced by the one, overlooks all the appalling trifles of the other.

III. THE CHURCH, THROUGH MISSIONARY EFFORTS, PLACES HERSELF IN THE BEST, AND, INDEED, IN THE ONLY POSITION FOR RECEIVING THE MOST ABUNDANT SPIRITUAL BLESSINGS.

1. These efforts have a direct tendency to remove the most serious obstructions to piety and efficiency. Where the work of evangelizing the world is carried on with energy, it indicates and produces self-denial and liberality. We need not stop to show that nothing is more repugnant to eminent holiness, or usefulness, than a selfish parsimonious spirit. It is abhorrent in the eyes of a holy God (Isaiah 57:17).

2. They secure to us those promises which are connected with enlarged exertions (Proverbs 11:25; Isaiah 58:10).

IV. IT MUST ENCOURAGE AND ENABLE THE CHURCH STILL MORE TO EXTEND HER LIMITS, AND THUS TO RETURN TO THE HEATHEN WORLD THE FULL INFLUENCE OF HER IMPROVED CONDITION. Application This subject teaches, that lengthening the cords of the Church is strengthening her stakes. (D. Abeel.)