"MARRED: SO HE MADE IT AGAIN"
An Old And Beautiful Sermon
by F.B. Meyer
Said he: " I think it has to do with my treatment of my brother. He served me cruelly over my father's will, and I said I would never forgive him. I am sorry I said it, but he has been going from bad to worse, has lost his wife and child, and is now on a bed of death, and I cannot go to him because I said I never would."
I said: " My friend, it is better to break a bad vow than keep it. Go."
He went, and the smile of God met him just there. Sixteen years ago I was a minister in a Midland town in England, not at all happy, doing my work for the pay I got, but holding a good position amongst my fellows. Hudson Taylor and two young students came into my life. I watched them. They had something I had not. Those young men stood there in all their strength and joy. I said to Charles Studd:
" What is the difference between you and me? You seem so happy, and I somehow am in the trough of the wave."
He replied: "There is nothing that I have got which you may not have, Mr. Meyer."
But I asked: "How am I to get it?"
" Well," he said, "have you given yourself right up to God?"
I winced. I knew that if it came to that, there was a point where I had been fighting my deepest convictions for months. I had lived away from it, but when I came to the Lord's table and handed out the bread and wine, then it met me; or when I came to a convention or meeting of holy people, something stopped me as I remembered this. It was the one point where my will was entrenched. I thought I would do something with Christ that night which would settle it one way or the other, and I met Christ. You will forgive a man who owes everything to one night in his life if to help other men he opens his heart for a moment. I knelt in my room and gave Christ the ring of my will with the keys on it, but kept one little key back, the key of a closet in my heart, in one back story in my heart. He said to me, "Are they all here?" And I said: "All but one." "What is that?" said He.
"It is the key of a little cupboard," said I, "in which I have got something which Thou needest not interfere with, but it is mine."
Then, as He put the keys back into my hand, and seemed to be gliding away to the door, He said:
"My child, if you cannot trust Me with all, you do not trust Me at all."
I cried: " Stop," and He seemed to come back; and holding the little key in my hand, in thought I said:
"I cannot give it, but if Thou wilt take it Thou shalt have it."
He took it, and within a month from that time He had cleared out that little cupboard of things which had been there for months. I knew He would.
May I add one word more? Three years ago I met the thing I gave up that night, and as I met it I could not imagine myself being such a fool as nearly to have sold my birthright for that mess of pottage.
I looked up into the face of Christ and said: "Now I am thine." It seemed as if that was the beginning of a new ministry. The Lord got me on His wheel again, and He made me again, and He has been making me again ever since. I learned that night to say "yes," and I have tried to say "yes" ever since.
Now, my friend, you say to me: "It is quite true, sir; my life is marred. But I am getting to be an old man. Do you think there is any hope for me?" My text says: "He made it again."
Adelaide Procter says, at the end of one of her verses, that we always may be what we might have been. In a sense that is not true. You and I never can recall the past, and yet,--and yet Jesus has a wonderful knack of making men again.
There was Jacob, the supplanter, for instance. He met him again at the ford of Jabbok, and he was made into Israel, a prince of God. There was Peter, and He made him again so that on the day of Pentecost he became the means of the Holy Ghost's advent to the world. And He made again John Mark who went back before a touch of sea sickness to his mother, but Paul said of him after: "Bring him, for he is profitable." He will make you again.
Canon Wilberforce told me that he had his likeness painted by the great artist Herkomer, who told him the following story, Herkomer was born in the Black Forest, his father a simple wood chopper. When the artist rose to name and fame in London, and built his studio at Bushey, his first thought was to have the old man come and spend the rest of his years with him. He came, and was very fond of moulding clay. All day he made things out of clay, but as the years passed he thought his hand would lose its cunning. He often went upstairs at night to his room with the sad heart of an old man who thinks his best days are gone by. Herkomer's quick eye of love detected this, and when his father was safe asleep his gifted son would come down stairs and take in hand the pieces of clay which his old father had left, with the evidences of defect and failure; and with his own wonderful touch he would make them as fair as they could be made by human hand. When the old man came down in the morning, and took up the work he had left all spoiled the night before, and held it up before the light, he would say, rubbing his hands:
"I can do it as well as ever I did."
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