1.B 02. Sympathy with Men

Sympathy with Men. In speaking of bringing to bear upon men a living force for their exaltation in the spiritual life, I want to call your attention to the very natural substitutes that men take for this. I know men of great learning I could mention their names, and you would recognize them as men of great ability in their pastoral lives men of the greatest breadth of thought, and really and interiorly men of profound emotion; but their ministry has never been very fruitful; that is, they have never moved either the multitudes, or, very largely, the individuals, of the community where they have been. I have thought I saw the reason of it in this: that their sympathy ran almost exclusively toward God. They were on God’s side altogether. They were always vindicating God.

They were upholding the divine government. And they produced, if I may say so, the feeling that they were God’s attorneys, that they were special pleaders on that side. I would not say that a man should not be in sympathy with God, but it must be remembered that God himself is in sympathy with sinful and erring men, that he broke down all the brilliance and glory of the heavenly estate that he might mingle himself among them; and no preacher is the true agent of God, or really takes sides with God, who does not sympathize with men, but who simply holds up the majesty and sternness and power and glory of the divine government.

I have seen men who all the while produced the impression, GOD GOD GOD; there was nothing in them that breathed of gentleness, sweetness, or sympathy the very things that characterized Christ, and which were in him the interpretation of the real interior Godhead; those things were absent from their ministry; and, if you will not misunderstand it, I would say that they failed because they had too exclusive a sympathy with God.

Then I have seen another class of men who were so constructed and educated that they had an intense sympathy with ideas, with organized thought religious system, or philosophy; who studied profoundly, who constructed ably, who had much that was instructive in their work. But after all, while everybody felt the strength of their sermons, almost nobody was moved or changed by them. And I have seen ministers with not one quarter of this equipment really lift and inspire a congregation, producing an effect which, with a proper following up, might have been permanently crystallized into life and. disposition.

There should be in you a strong sympathy with the intellectual elements of the ministry; but it should never overlie, and certainly should not absorb or impede, the more legitimate sympathy you are to have with men themselves. Reflect for one moment what must have been the state of mind of the man who wrote such a thing as this, “ For I think that God hath set forth us the apostles last, as it were appointed to death; for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men. We are fools for Christ’s sake, but ye are wise in Christ.”

Paul was intensely proud, sensitive as a thermo meter is to heat; and you will see that under all the sweetness, the efflorescence of the Christian life, there is still the principle of egotism, “ For I think that God hath set forth us the apostles last, as it wore appointed to death; for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men. We are fools for Christ’s sake, but ye are wise in Christ; we are weak, but ye are strong; ye are honour able, but we are despised. Even unto this present hour we both hunger and thirst, and are naked, and are buffeted, and have no certain dwelling-place; and labour, working with our own hands; being reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we suffer it; being defamed, we entreat; we are made as the filth of the world, and are the off scouring of all things unto this day.”

You will recollect other passages in which he said that to the Jew he became a Jew, that he might win Jews; and to those without law as without law, that he might bring them all to God. There never was such a manifestation of the willowiness of a man of absolute steel in disposition. He was one of stern personal identity; and yet, by the love of Christ and by the sympathy he had with men, he said or would have said, had he spoken in modern English “ I know how to tit myself to every sinuosity and rugosity of every single disposition with which I have to deal; you cannot find me a man so deep or so high, so blunt or so sharp, but I would take the shape of that man’s disposition, in order to come into sympathy with him, if by so doing I could lift him to a higher and a nobler plane of life.” When I see men standing in the royalty of ordination, who have been made golden candlesticks of grace, who feel what is called “ the dignity of their profession/ and move up and down in life, neatly receiving the praise and deference of everybody round about them, and requesting men who pass to look upon God’s ordained ministers, I think by contrast of Paul, with that diffusiveness that he gave himself, that universal adaptation of himself, who mothered everybody, wherever he went. There is not a thing so menial in the kitchen, there is not a thing so distasteful in the nursery, there is not a thing so offensive to every sense, that the mother does not say, over her sick child, “ Now let me do it; should the child die, it would be a grief to think that any body did these things but me.” The mother makes haste to do those most offensive things for her darling child because she loves it. And so the true man has that vital sympathy with men, that there is nothing that he would not become or do, if by so doing he could get hold of them and make better men of them, that, as Paul says, he may present them faultless before God.