Proverbs 19

Don't Hurry

He that hasteth with his feet sinneth. Proverbs 19:2.

“He that hasteth with his feet sinneth.” That is a strange text, is it not? And perhaps you don't see much sense in it. But if you have the Be vised Version of the Bible, and turn up the verse, you will find a little figure 6 before the word “sinneth.” Then if you look at the narrow column in the margin you will see another little 6, and beside it these words “or misseth his way.” So you see our text can be read, “He that hasteth with his feet misseth his way.”

What does that make you think of? It makes me think of a man running in a great hurry along a strange road. He is tearing along at top speed, but he is in such haste to reach the end of his journey that he does not stop to look at the sign-posts by the roadside. He dashes past the post which would tell him to turn to the right, and later he finds he has missed his way. He has a long road to come back, and he is very sorry for his haste, and sorry for himself too, ere he reaches his destination. He hastened too much with his feet and so he missed his way.

Well, today's text says to me, and I want it to say to you, “Don't hurry!” Now, to be honest, most of us are being told every day and all the day the exact opposite. Father, mother, teacher, and grown-up people generally are continually telling us to hurry till we have got rather tired of the word. For a change I am going to say to you this morning, “Don't hurry!” That's good, isn't it? Ah! but there are three special kinds of “don't hurry,” and you must see that your “don't hurry” is one of these.

1. First, then, don't be in such a hurry to reach the end that you miss out the middle. Don't slop through your school work so that you may be done with them and get to play. If you do that you will have missed the way. You will have missed what counts most and what is really worth while, and that is the learning. Getting to the end of school work is no use. You must make them a part of yourself.

As you grow older you will find as a rule that the more valuable a thing is the less you can hurry with it. Look at the world around you. How long has God taken to make it so beautiful? Why, thousands and thousands of years! Look at a rosebud! How slowly it opens, petal by petal! You could open it in thirty seconds with your pen-knife, but you would spoil the rose. No! the hasty way is often the wrong way.

And besides being the wrong way the hasty way is often the long way. That is true even with small things. When you are too hurried you break your shoe-lace. It has got to be mended or another found to replace it.

Or you pull off a button and it disappears under the wardrobe. You have to find it and sew it on again. Or you jerk out your drawer and it empties itself on the floor. You have to put all its contents back where they were. Hurry often means time lost, not time gained.

When you grow up, perhaps you will go to Switzerland, and climb some of its wonderful snow-covered mountains. You will need a guide, of course, to show you the way and to help you, and one of the first rules he will give you is “Don't hurry!” An Alpine guide doesn't hurry. He goes at a steady, even pace never hastening, never slackening and that is how he reaches the highest peaks. If he hurried he would be exhausted in no time and stick half-way. So, boys and girls, take time.

2. In the second place, don ' t be in a made-up hurry. That is a real mean sort of hurry. It is a hurry that attacks some boys and girls very suddenly and violently when they are asked to do a little job for father or mother. All at once these boys and girls (of course there can't be any of them here!) discover that they have a little job of their own that requires to be done immediately if not sooner. So they call back to mother in a rude, important tone, “I can't! I'm too busy! I haven't time just now!”

I'm not going to say more about that kind of hurry. It is so contemptible that we don't want to waste words on it. But, boys and girls, should I say should you be tempted one day to fall into a pretence hurry, just say to yourselves, “No! there's one thing I won ' t be, and that is a skunk”

3. But there's a third kind of hurry and I think it is the hurry we need to guard against most, for it is the hurry we oftenest fall into it is the hurry of speaking words or doing deeds without thinking. We let cruel and foolish words trip off our tongue without thinking how much they mean, and without remembering that we can never call them back again. We may wish later that we had rather bitten out our tongue, but at the moment we never pause to find out whether the story we have heard of a friend is true or not. We repeat it to somebody else, and we help to make a lot of misery.

Or we have had a disappointment and we are cross and irritable, and a little brother or sister comes along. We don't take time to think that they have nothing to do with the matter. We are feeling sore, and so we let fly at our poor little brother or sister till we reduce them to tears. Or if we haven't a little brother or sister we give the furniture or the family cat a bad quarter of an hour.

If we were not in such a hurry, if we paused to think one minute (or say two perhaps that's safer!), it is ourselves we should be saying nasty things about, and not others; it is ourselves we should be shaking, and not our little brother; it is ourselves we should be punishing, not the chairs or poor puss. Never, never be in the kind of hurry that ill-treats one of God's creatures.

This sermon has been nothing but “don'ts.” We all dislike “donts,” so let me give you a few “do's” to end up with. Do be in a hurry to say kind words. Do hasten to repeat all the generous things and the fine things you hear of others. Do hurry to make up quarrels, and forgive injuries. And be in a special hurry to do a kindness or lend a helping hand. These are all noble hurries. They are God's own hurries. And we can never have too much or too many of them.