Do we ask despairingly how it is that we have not been able to cast it out? Our Lord"s answer comes to us in these emphatic words--"This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer."
In other words, if we really desire that our soul shall be cleansed and strengthened, we must surrender it to Him in prayer and self-denial, in spiritual exercises and communion, that He may cure it of its sin or its weakness, and inspire us with new life.
Prayer and fasting are in this word of His the symbol of all special exercises of the spirit, as it strives to get free from the burden of the flesh and to come nearer to G.o.d; and without such exercises, He presses it on us if we stand in need of such reminders, we cannot hope for any harvest of spiritual strength.
And we can hardly have failed to notice how His own practice corresponds with His warnings and injunctions.
Before He began His ministry we read of His forty days" fast in the wilderness; and at every turn, in the course of it, we read again and again incidentally of His constant withdrawals into privacy with G.o.d.
His short life on earth was a life of spiritual ministry. All the common things of life were to Him so many ill.u.s.trations of some spiritual lesson of the Father"s love and care, or of man"s dependence on Him. In every voice of the world there was the undertone of some spiritual suggestion. So that we might say--Surely His days were one unbroken course of spiritual work and communion, and He could need no special seasons or exercises; but His example teaches us a different lesson.
As if to bring it home to us beyond all possibility of doubt or question, that the most devoted, the most active, and most powerful spiritual characters, will always be those whose communion with G.o.d in private prayer and exercise is most constant and intense, He Himself was continually withdrawing for such communion; and there are no more suggestive pa.s.sages in the Gospels for our guidance than those incidental references which tell us, as if by chance, giving us pa.s.sing glimpses into the unrecorded portions of His life, how on one occasion He retired into a mountain apart to pray, or how on another he spent the whole night apart in prayer, or how he was in a desert place apart in prayer.
These withdrawals of Jesus into the solitude of the desert or the mountain, these hours in which He was alone with the Father, are but another name for those exercises of prayer, fasting, meditation, communion with G.o.d, without which, as He tells His followers in the text I have read to you, it is not possible to eradicate from the soul those influences of sin which destroy its harmony and undermine its strength.
These withdrawals were His times of spiritual refreshment; and by His practice He declares to us His need of them. And if in His case they were necessary, much more are they necessary for you and me, entangled as we are amidst all the varied influences of our common life, and with natures p.r.o.ne to sin.
Hence it is that the Church has set apart this season of Lent to come round to us year by year as a season of special thought and prayer and self-denial. Many other times and seasons come to us laden with the same spiritual influences, and to be used by us as times of reflection, inspiration, purification, and strengthening. This is the purpose which the quiet of these recurring Sundays should be fulfilling in our lives, or our gatherings for Holy Communion.
And once and again there comes to us in the course of life some time or season which is sure to make its impression upon our soul as having brought us in a special sense into the presence of G.o.d, and within the overshadowing influences of His Spirit.
So it may happen to us that some family bereavement, the death of father or mother, of brother or sister, or child of our affections, draws us away from the world into a closer communion with our Father in Heaven, a communion which is never entirely lost again or forgotten. So, too, comes the season of confirmation, as to many of you just now, with all its thoughts, feelings, prayers, and resolutions.
And it is a happy thing for our life when any of these seasons leave an indelible mark upon our memory and our spirit.
But as we think of these words of Jesus, "This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting"--the question for each of us here to-day is, what practical daily meaning we hope to give to this season of Lent which is to begin on Wednesday.
Let us not fancy that we can allow such seasons to come and go, year by year, giving them no thought or attention, without some corresponding loss.
The voice of humanity, and the experience of centuries, the practice of holy men, and the example and the words of Christ Himself, have all testified to the need there is for the spiritual observance of such times, if men are to keep their soul alive in them--and who are we that we should venture to set ourselves against such overpowering testimony?
Let us rather address ourselves seriously to making these weeks a time of some special exercise or discipline such as our life may need.
There is hardly one of us but will confess, if he thinks of the matter at all, that the world is too much with us; that its influence is too strong upon us; that we are too ready to conform to its ways and follow its indulgences. And such a confession is equivalent to an acknowledgment that we need these Lenten seasons. And if with this feeling in our hearts we use the coming weeks with any definite purpose, praying to be rid of some temptation or weakness, or to be endowed with some strength, or to be supported in some good purpose, we are sure to recognise with thankfulness, when the time is over, that it has indeed proved a time of some dislodgment, that some temptation or habit has fallen away from us and left us free, so that some new spirit or purpose has begun to grow in us.
We shall, in fact, be conscious, as the weeks go on, that a new life of new tastes and new satisfactions has sprung up, as the first fruits of our prayer. If we doubt the need of such exhortations as these, let us reflect for a moment--Does it not sometimes happen to us that our souls are only too like the soul of that sick child in the Gospel?
Good instincts, and intentions, and tendencies, are clearly felt and recognised, but they are fitful, weak, and intermittent. Another spirit seems to lay hold of us and carry us whither it will.
If in any sense this can be said to be your case, then remember, that just what the Saviour"s healing word was to that child, sick and possessed, as He met it on His way from the Hill of Transfiguration, and breathed over it the spirit of the higher life, reducing the chaos of the soul to harmony, and bringing reason out of madness, and freedom out of demoniac possession, these holy seasons of time-honoured observance may be to your soul, if you use them reverently, and as G.o.d"s appointed means for your growth in the Spirit.
XIV. G.o.d"S CURSE ON SIN.
"Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one according to his ways, saith the Lord G.o.d. Repent and turn yourselves from all your transgressions; so iniquity shall not be your ruin."--EZEKIEL xviii. 30.
These words of Ezekiel may be understood as expressing in the prophet"s language what the Book of Deuteronomy expresses in such denunciations as those which were read to us the other day in the Commination Service.
They correspond also to the warning of St. Paul when he says--"Be not deceived; G.o.d is not mocked; whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. He that soweth to the flesh shall reap corruption; and he that soweth to the spirit shall reap everlasting life." Or again they correspond to that question which is put to us in the Epistle to the Hebrews--"If every transgression and disobedience received a just recompense and reward, how shall we escape?"
Thus we find in the Pentateuch, in Ezekiel, and in the apostolic writings the representatives of three very different stages of religious enlightenment, all teaching us in effect the same lesson, to remember the recompense that sin never fails to bring upon him who commits it. As we listen to the curses of Deuteronomy on one sin and on another, and then read the language of Ezekiel or St. Paul, we are conscious of a difference in the modes of thought and expression. The thought of the apostle is separated from that of the lawgiver or the prophet of the Old Testament by the new revelation and the sacrifice of Jesus; but yet underneath all differences their judgment on every sinful act or habit remains spiritually the same. They all alike bid us, when we think of our sins, to think also of the inevitable punishment which rises behind them like their shadow; and to bear in mind that the root of the whole matter is the one incontrovertible and never-changing fact of human life that as you sow you must expect to reap--he that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption.
Now, inasmuch as your early years are the seed-time of your life, these stern reminders that if you sow any sin in your soul you will some day reap its curse, that G.o.d will judge you every one according to his ways, all this is very appropriate for your consideration. And you are likely to be all the more serious about your present life and its habits, tastes, and purposes if this thought really takes possession of you, that there is in fact a very close a.n.a.logy between the life of the soul and life around us in the outer world, and that every seed we sow in it grows after its own kind.
In the region of animal or vegetable life you see and recognise this law on every side. You trace it sometimes as the law of improvement by culture, sometimes as the law of degeneration.
You cultivate and tend a garden or a field, sowing, planting, eradicating, and the growths of flower or fruit improve in proportion to your care; but leave it to itself and the weeds choke it, and the very fruit degenerates; your rose becomes a dog-rose--it reverts, as men say, to a lower type.
So exactly is it with your own life; so long as it is grafted into a life higher than your own, so long as good purposes are being sown in it and good habits cultivated, and the bad weeded out and the Spirit of G.o.d breathes through it, it is growing nearer to the Divine type; but neglect it, or follow sinful impulse or low taste, and it becomes like the garden of weeds; degeneracy begins at once, it is changing to something worse, it is reverting to a lower type.
This is a way of expressing it which is sufficiently familiar to you. But this is only our modern way of looking at those facts of life which were eloquent to men of earlier times as the curse of G.o.d.
As, then, it is undoubtedly true that--
"Our acts our angels are, for good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk with us still,"
these stern warnings which our Lenten services hold up before us are of the greatest value.
Keeping before us this law that in every region of life it is the tendency of everything to bear fruit after its kind, we shall feel that we can hardly impress it too deeply upon our minds that there is no sin which we commit but will a.s.suredly return upon our own heads. The Israelites in the Old Testament saw the hand of G.o.d thus visiting their sins upon them in many ways. They thought of Him as smiting them for their sins with consumption or with fever, with plague or mildew, or the sword of the oppressor. These are not our expectations. We have learnt that it is not with such visitations that G.o.d punishes us for our sinful indulgence or neglect, but that He does it with a punishment which may be less obvious but is often more ruinous than these.
Neglect the opportunities of good with which He strews your path in early life, let some sin strike its roots in your heart and take possession of it, and the curse of G.o.d for that neglect or that sin will overtake you, no doubt of it; coming not perhaps as the Israelite on Mount Ebal expected it to come for any sin of his, but coming, you hardly know how, as the change for the worse, the sinking to lower levels of thought, and taste, and aim, and practice, the reversion to lower types, which is the end of neglect, coming as the creeping and insidious growth of the power of sin working ever stronger in us as the natural fruit of indulgence. So the curse of that ancient Jewish law turns out to be a terrible and unchanging truth, written in a law which is never obsolete and grows not old, a law which calls on us for our Amen! as it cries to us equally in the language of Divine revelation and of the latest scientific discovery: "Sow neglect," it says, "and you will reap deterioration; sow sin, and you will reap corruption."
This vision of the ultimate results of evil is a very ugly one, put it in whatever shape you will, and we are naturally somewhat loth to look it in the face. We would rather not think of any sin of ours as entailing such consequences. This conception of Divine justice or retribution embodied in the action of unbending laws and declaring that death is the fruit of sin, and that death must come of it, this is no doubt a conception which inspires awe. We shrink from it; we hardly dare to say Amen! to its dread utterances. We should like, it may be, to shut our eyes to the fact and dwell rather on the thought that our G.o.d is long-suffering and of great kindness and of tender mercy. It is more soothing to think of love than of retribution, or of the arm that shelters or upholds us than of the hand that smites; but the real question should be--"Is it true, this declaration that as we sow we reap, that the wages of sin is death, death of faculty, death of hope?" It is foolish to blink the sterner aspects of life. The fruit of such blinking and turning aside is very often the very thing we do not like to think of--indulgence and its retribution. Divine love and goodness and long-suffering cannot occupy too much of our thoughts and prayers; for it is through these that the heart is touched, and the spirit is fostered in us, and we awake to the new life in Christ.
But if we shrink from contemplating that law of Divine retribution, which works in men"s lives side by side with the law of mercy and love, it is time for us to ask ourselves--"How is it that I thus shrink from the thought of these penalties?"
There is indeed one sense in which we naturally shrink from the thought that the wages of sin is death, even while we acknowledge that it is so.
It is inexpressibly sad to dwell on the infinite ma.s.s of sin which is daily bearing its bitter and deadly fruit in the world, and propagating itself after its kind; to think of the untold number of darkened or misguided souls that have sown to the flesh, and are going in consequence down to failure and death, blighted, corrupted, ruined. From this thought we naturally turn to the thought of G.o.d"s mercy, and pray that He may yet sow the seeds of new hope in the dismal waste of such lives.
But it happens to us, I fear sometimes, that this thought of G.o.d"s curse on sin sends a chill through the heart, and we shrink away from it, because of our own unregenerate life, because of the fascination which sinful impulse or habit exercises over us.
If the warning voice of our Lenten Commination Service has convicted any one of us of this motive for shrinking from its stern sentence, it has come to us as a true messenger of the G.o.d who has no pleasure in the death of him that dieth. We need the voice of these threatenings, because the heart has such a great power of self-deception in it. Men find it so easy to thrust away into the dim background of their thoughts all the dark but sure consequences of present sins, treating them as a debt which will come up no doubt for payment some day, but may be put aside just now.
And one virtue of our stern plain-speaking Lenten services is this, that they will not allow us to forget that fated reckoning day--they put us, whether we like it or not, face to face with the sure consequences of sin; and they compel us to listen to the question--"What is the choice of thy life?"
For you will bear in mind that we read all these decrees of Divine law with our eye fixed on our own life and not on our neighbour. They are meant to help us to judge ourselves, and not some other person; they lead us to penitence and not to criticism, so that our readiness or our unwillingness to meet and to weigh them, and to respond to them with definite prayer and penitence, may be taken as an index of our religious sincerity, and of our readiness to consecrate our lives to the service of our Saviour Christ.
And it is well for us that we should ask ourselves these questions; for if indeed it is true that every transgression and disobedience shall receive its just recompense and reward, how else shall we escape?
XV. THE CONFLICT WITH EVIL.
"And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."--ST.