The Intention of the Soul—Exposition of Matthew 6:22
5. The Expositor at Work
The benefit of the Expository Method to the preacher is immense. In the first place it saves him from the search for a subject or text, which is sometimes extremely tiresome and wasteful of his time. There are times when for hours nothing bites. The mind cannot settle. It visits flower after flower without extracting a drop of honey. But there is small danger of this when Exposition is the preacher’s rule.
Probably on Sunday night, when the family has dispersed, he will take his Bible in hand and turn to the paragraph next in order to that from which he has preached during the day. The emotions that have wrought within his soul have not died down. The sea still heaves with mighty billows. If his sermons have failed, he sees where and why, and girds himself with desire to lay emphasis on the neglected truth; or if his sermons have succeeded, he is desirous of carrying forward the impression to further results. He can see his congregation still facing him, or can feel them tugging hard at his heart and brain. The reaction has not set in. The glow of the day still lingers on the mountain peak, and he is standing there, though he realizes already that to-morrow he may be still descending into the valley beneath. This is the hour when, with the light of the Holy Spirit illumining the printed page and his soul, he cons the paragraph next in order, until probably its salient features, its lesson, or its pivotal sentence grips him.
He has his scrap of writing paper at hand and makes a few rough notes. There is yet no coherency or connection between those fragmentary jottings. In jumbling disorder they have tumbled from his hand, and lie there in confusion. A word, an anecdote, a reference to some recent reading; they are there as the hues of a gorgeous sunset, caught by a lover of nature’s most radiant hours, may lie hidden under the jottings of his notebook.
Nothing more need be attempted that night. Let the tired brain have rest as soon as sleep will come, the subconscious soul may be left to elaborate upon its new-found theme. The ferment will begin to grow in its profound depths, as yeast in flour. Only let the preacher keep that paper handy, that he may fix on it the fugitive thoughts, with footstep light as a fairy’s, that may flit across the surface of the soul. They must be instantly snapshotted and fixed. The resolve to recall them will fail. It is almost impossible to recover the first fair form in which a thought visits you, unless it is instantly transfixed by the pen.
As the week begins to wane the preacher will take an hour or two to develop his theme. First he investigates the original Hebrew or Greek. Happy man if he has each within easy call. It is the writer’s great regret that he ever allowed his Hebrew to get rusty; and he cannot be thankful enough to have kept his Greek in good and ready use. Though it is true that the results of expert learning in each language are within reach in some form or other for English readers; yet there is a peculiar freshness of interest in interrogating the very language employed by an Isaiah or a Paul until, like the carcass of Samson’s lion, it yields meat and sweetness. We have no right to put fancy interpretations on the sacred writings. There is plenty of good metal within their content for those who will seek it. It is always better to mine into it than to bring extraneous matter to it or travel from it. Even an allegorical use of Scripture is to be made with caution. We must not convey the notion to our hearers or readers that the Bible, of all books, is to be taken in a non-natural sense, or that it cannot be understood and interpreted by the plain man who goes to it with a pure heart and an intelligent mind. The far-fetched lessons and instruction which some men delight in extorting from the Bible are the despair of wayfaring souls, who walk in the broad thoroughfares of Scripture, unable to make these excursions into realms of fancy or imagination.
Not only does the expositor ascertain the exact meaning of the text, but he considers it in the light of the entire book. One of the greatest expositors of our time tells us that he will read a given book, which he has set himself to expound, some ten or twenty times through, that he may catch the spirit of the author and become steeped in his ruling motive and purpose. Every book in the Bible was written to effect some purpose, and it is only by steadfast attention that the modern mind can be apprehended and possessed by that purpose. Just as the first glimpse at a noble picture or the first hearing of superb music is insufficient to acquaint one with the author’s entire conception or to show the harmony of the details with its main outline, so a piecemeal reading of any book of the Bible will fail to possess the soul with its full harmony and glory. It is not enough to read about the Bible, we must read the Bible itself. It is as necessary to be familiar with the atmosphere of the book you are expounding as for a painter to be acquainted with the profession and interests of a man before he attempts to portray him. The first aim should be to know what the original text exactly meant; the next is to place it in the perspective of the entire book. Who can understand the mind of the Roman Forum, who is not acquainted with Roman history? Each author of the Bible books is a highly developed personality, as much so as Mozart or Beethoven, as Milton or Shakespeare, and needs, therefore, special understanding and handling.
After we have got so far, we naturally turn to commentaries and sermons, that they may throw further light on our subject. The method adopted by Mr. Spurgeon was, I believe, as follows: On Saturday evening at 6 P. M. he would retire from the sitting-room, in which he had been entertaining his guests with his wise and witty talk, announce his text to his secretary, who would open all commentaries and treatises bearing upon it, arranging them around his library on little ledges provided for the purpose. The great preacher would pass from one to another, notebook in hand, jotting down any characteristic or fresh view or side-light, and in this manner availed himself of a great variety of material which, becoming assimilated in his own mind, was reproduced in his own style. This is a great model. We must not appropriate a man’s expression of thought—this is his own—but thoughts, so far as we appropriate them, and allow them to grow in the soil of our own mind, and reproduce themselves after their kind, become ours. We are free to use all truth which has germinated in ourselves and drawn on the resources of our soul. It is in this sense that commentators serve us—they set us thinking.
It is, of course, most unwise for a preacher to trouble his hearers with the successive steps which have led up to the conclusions which he announces. Still less is he justified to set before his congregation a number of varying conclusions, leaving them to select the one that seems nearest the truth. He ought to have settled all this for himself and for them long before. It is his business to weigh up the worth of the various readings, arguments and suggestions with which the books of reference teem, and after he has winnowed away extraneous matter, to present the conclusions to which he has come in a form that his hearers can readily assimilate. We do not need to be informed of the various processes through which the wheat passes, and to be instructed as to the different varieties of wheat before partaking of our morning meal. We pay others, who are experts, to do this for us, placing at our disposal the knowledge gained through study, training and experience.
There are five considerations that must be met in every successful sermon. There should be an appeal to the Reason, to the Conscience, to the Imagination, to the Emotions, and to the Will; and for each of these there is no method so serviceable as systematic exposition.
The Reason. “Come, let us reason together,” is God’s own appeal to the soul. There are many things in religion which we should not have been able to reason out for ourselves, but which we can apprehend and accept when once they are revealed; but there is nothing to contradict our reason. It may be confidently affirmed that God does not require of us to accept anything which is clearly unreasonable. He who gave us the eye of the body has contrived to adapt the light to it, and it to the light. Reason is the eye of the soul, and what light is to the eye, that truth is to the mind. Our Lord is the King of Truth, and His appeal is always to those who are of the truth. “He that is of the truth heareth my voice.”
After the preacher has stated the main thesis of his sermon, there should be a little time spent in showing that it is consistent with reason. It may be above reason, but it is not contrary to reason. Our reason is founded on two great faculties of our nature, the logical and the intuitive. The logical is the faculty of advancing from certain premises to the conclusion; the intuitive, which is largely the storehouse of racial experience, does not argue, but perceives. There is the flash of recognition as of something which needs no train of argument, because it is self-evident. It is most important that by one or other of these two processes the reason should be led to give its assent to the main theme of the discourse. By manifestation of the truth we must obtain the verdict of the inner court or tribunal. The speeches of great orators and preachers generally excel in the lucidity of their presentation of their valid claim to the assent and consent of the reason.
The preacher who bases his sermon on a paragraph rather than a text is, on the whole, more likely to discover the grounds of this appeal to reason. The prophets, for instance, are greatly given to arguments borrowed from nature, as in Isaiah 40, or from the futility and unreasonableness of idol worship, as in Isaiah 44. The Epistles of Paul bristle with arguments addressed to the logical faculty, and those of John with appeals based on the intuitive. The discourse, then, which rests on a careful exegesis of a tract of Scripture resembles those mighty mountains or oaks whose roots and spurs go far afield, mooring them in immovable majesty in the earth.
The Conscience. We are told in the majestic prologue to the Fourth Gospel that in every man there is a beam of the light which shone in the character and ministry of our Lord and which is divine. That sense of right and wrong, that instant appreciation of rightness and wrongness which is the property of each moral being. When the question arises whether such and such a course is wise or unwise, expedient or inexpedient, conscience is silent, though it listens attentively to the debate; but so soon as the question is introduced whether a matter is right or wrong, conscience puts all other speakers aside and silences every other voice, and utters a verdict against which there can be no dispute. It is final and irrefutable. It cannot be argued with or cajoled. It is a miniature of the Great White Throne reflected in the mirror of the soul.
Conscience is the minister’s main ally. As Blondin, the minstrel, discovered the imprisoned King of England, entrapped on his way home from the Crusades, and incarcerated in an obscure castle in Austria, by playing beneath his prison windows a lay which only they two knew, so the preacher plays under the windows of the soul the external truths of revelation, certain of eliciting a favourable response. Deep down in the human soul there is an ally, an accomplice, a confederate, who joins his forceful voice, which cannot be gagged or silenced, with the voice of truth, so that in the mouth of two witnesses every word is established.
But again the expositor stands a better chance of awakening this response than the topical preacher, because there is necessarily more of Scriptural statement in his sermons. His preaching is the concentrated essence of Scripture. It might be called Bibline. The Spirit of truth finds a larger amount of that sword which He is accustomed to wield, and of those arrows, which have always proved themselves to be sharp in the heart of the King’s enemies.
The Imagination. In every sermon there should be a stained-glass window, through which the light should enter, dyed and saturated with the glow of colour. Some minds are naturally imaginative and poetic. They love the pure white marble better when it is bathed with the rainbow hues of the noble eastern window. The gateway through which truth comes to them is made of pearls saturated in a very phantasmagoria of splendour. They cannot be comforted unless their stones are laid with fair colours, and their foundations with sapphires. Their windows must be of agates and their borders of precious stones. There ought to be a dash of colour in every sermon. The children will listen for it and recognise the happy moment; and people with vagrant fancies will find these winging their way back when the preacher turns off the moorland into the gardens gay with bloom and filled with the hum of bees.
It was to win such that our Lord so often said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like …” For these also the Song of Solomon was placed in the Old Testament and the Apocalypse in the New. For them also there are here and there suggestions and things which eye hath not seen, nor the ear heard.
But the expositor who bends over each word and clause of his paragraph, endeavouring to penetrate to the heart, as a road-mender will go on his knees to break open the granite blocks heaped beside him, is more likely to find materials on which the imagination may feed. The imagination must be called into play to reconstruct the historic past, to reproduce the characters and lives of those who compose the dramas of the Sacred Book, to rebuild before the modern world the stage on which redemption was wrought. The preacher-expositor clothes the persons of the period with which he is dealing in the costumes of their times, and makes them speak and act as they must have done in those far-away days. It is when his picture is complete, and his audience is absorbed in watching the development of the plot that he suddenly drops the style of the narrator and comes to close quarters with the dagger-thrust of “Thou art the man.”
The Emotions. We must not forget these. Some can only be approached through the tears that wet the cheek and the sorrow or joy that moves the heart. You must call up the past, you must touch the chords that respond to the zephyr breath of tender and sacred memories, you must awaken sensibility, you must melt the arctic ice and snow which have gathered over the green pastures of the soul. In each sermon there should be some touch of that nature which makes the whole world kin.
But where can such materials for these appeals be obtained so readily as in the great old stories of Scripture? Is there anything in literature more moving than Judah’s appeal for Benjamin before the Egyptian Prime Minister, his brother, though he did not recognise him? Is there anything more pathetic than the appeals to the backsliding, based on Hosea’s trampled home and his desolate heart? Can words find anywhere more piteous language than the lamentations of Jeremiah? Is any scene more likely to strike rivers of waters from rocks than the story of the crucifixion or of Peter’s denial? With Shakespeare, the preacher may constantly be led to exclaim, as he comes to these and similar paragraphs in the course of his exposition,
“Ye that have tears, prepare to shed them now.”
And who can complain when the minister comes on such scenes, not because of his arbitrary selection, but because they come in the ordinary course of exposition. He can hardly be characterised as “a weeping preacher” who again and again in the course of his ministry arrives at valleys of weeping, where the rains fill the pools.
The Will. But the end of all preaching is to obtain the assent of the will. We are not what we think or feel or imagine, but what we will. The will is the keeper of the citadel. It is our innermost self. Until that yields, nothing is yielded. Until that is surrendered, nothing is really gained. If ministers would recognise this, how much more permanent the results of their ministry would become. The will is like the alpenstock, which the climber drives into the ice-block above him, and to which he presently drags up the rest of his body.
But, again, the expositor is in a better position than all others in his chance of capturing and compelling the will. He has a wider range of truth on which to base his appeals. In that one paragraph there will probably be contained the materials for access to the inner shrine from each of the gates of the soul. Like the New Jerusalem, the soul has twelve gates, some of which are always open, if not all. He hardly can fail who attempts them all, and is more likely to succeed than if he marched up one avenue alone. “Blessed are they who sow beside all waters.”
The Intention of the Soul—Exposition of Matthew 6:22
The eye is the most striking and important feature of the face. Blue as the azure of heaven, brown as hazel, black as jet, it gives expression and beauty to the countenance, fills with tears of pity, sparkles with the radiance of affection, and flashes with the fire of anger. By the eye we are able, therefore, to discern much of the thoughts and intents of the heart. The eye is also urgently needed to enable us to do the work of life. It is by the eye that we are lighted to our toils, discover the path in which we must tread, and look upon the faces of our friends or the beauty of God’s creation. Each time we see a blind person or pass institutions devoted for the recovery of sight, let us lift up our hearts to thank God for this priceless boon.
It is interesting to notice the comparison which our Lord employs. He speaks of the eye as the “light of the body;” in other places the same Greek word is rendered “lamp,” or “candle.” In the fifth chapter of Matthew we discover the same expression: “Neither do men light a lamp and put it under the bushel.” The same word is used in Luke 12: “Let your loins be girded about, and your lamps burning.” It is the word by which John the Baptist is designated in John 5—“He was a burning and a shining light”—in contradistinction to the other term, applied to our Lord alone, “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” The ministry of John was the lamp that lighteth the steps of men until “the Sun of Righteousness arose with healing in his wings.” The eye, our Lord says, is the lamp of the house of the body. It is as though He thought of the eye as hanging in the vestibule of the palace of life, casting its rays outward to the busy thoroughfare, and inward to the recesses of the soul.
It is obvious that there must be something in our inner life which corresponds to the eye, for our Lord adverts to the eye as the emblem and symbol of something within. He is not speaking of the eye of the body only, but of its correlative, the eye of the soul. What is that inner eye? Some have supposed that it is the power of a concentrated affection, for truly love sheds a warm glow over all the furniture of the inner life, as well as upon the great world without. Others have affirmed that the intellect is the eye of the soul, by which we are able to behold the ordered process of the world and to consider the processes of thought within us. A truer conception of our Lord’s meaning, however, will lead to the conclusion that the eye of the body corresponds to the inward intention and purpose of the soul.
If, for a moment, you will examine your inner life, descending to the profound depths that lie beneath the surface of your being, you will discover that there is one deep aim or purpose which is the real intention of your life. Deep down below the play of emotion and intellect, and of engagement in various interests, there is one strong stream or current running perpetually through the dark ravines of your nature. It may be that you are hardly aware of it; your nearest and dearest friends do not realize it. You would be startled if it were stated in so many words, but it is none the less true that there is a unity in each human character which God perceives. In each of us He can read a unity of purpose and a unity of will. This is the intention of the soul and distinguishes each of us from every one beside.
The eye may, of course, be healthy or unhealthy. If healthy, a tiny curtain which hangs at the back of the organism is adjusted to receive the focused rays which come from the external objects. On this tiny curtain is formed an invested image of all things which are visible. If you look into the eye of another, and especially into the eye of a little babe, you will see the whole panorama of the world presented as in a cinematoscope. This curtain is perpetually being readjusted, so that the unblurred image of the outer world may be cast upon it. When we are travelling in a railway train it is probable that in a single hour the focus is altered thousands of times, for at every jolt and oscillation of the vehicle there must be a readjustment of the lens.
When the eye is in an unhealthy condition the image is doubled or blurred. There are two ways in which it may become evil. To use a common expression, there may be the obliquity, called a squint, such as disfigured the noble face of Edward Irving. Mrs. Oliphant tells us that, as a babe, he was laid in a wooden cradle, through a whole in which he was able to watch the light with one eye, whilst the other retained its usual straightforward direction. His eyes, therefore, were not parallel, and it was impossible to focus them upon a given object. The soul’s intention may be diverted from a single purpose in a double direction. We may pray with the object of gaining an answer from God, and at the same time of receiving credit from man. We may try to amass the treasures of this world, and at the same time to be rich toward God. We may endeavour to serve two masters—God and mammon. This is the counterpart in the spiritual life of a squint in the eye. Another source of ill-health with the eye is when the little vesicles which supply blood for the tiny curtain become overcharged, so that it is impossible for the delicate nerves to adjust the lens, and the vision becomes blurred and indistinct. Yet another source of the evil eye is when a film forms over the surface of the pupil, so that the light cannot enter.
In contradistinction to all these evils, how good it is to have a clear eye, with its distinct vision; and how much more good it is when the purpose and intention of the soul is so undivided that the whole of life is illumined by the glow of a clear and beautiful radiance! All through this chapter our Lord is arguing against this double vision. He says: “Do not profess to belong to the kingdom of heaven while your hearts are buried in the earth; do not have two masters; do not be divided by anxious care; seek first the kingdom of God.” All through this chapter He is, in fact, bidding us to make our constant prayer the cry of the psalmist, “Unite my heart to fear thy name.” Our Lord sets His whole force against any duplication of character so inimitably described by John Bunyan in “Mr. Facing-both-ways,” who, with one eye on heaven and another on earth, sincerely professed one thing and sincerely did another, and, from the inveteracy of his unreality, was unable to see the contradiction of his life. “He tried to cheat both God and the devil, and in reality he only cheated himself and his neighbours.”
There are three kinds of men. First, those who have no intention; second, those who have a double intention; third, those whose intention is pure and simple.
1. Some have no intention. They live day by day without purpose; the eye of the mind is fixed definitely and intently upon nothing. They take each day as it comes, getting from it anything it may bring, doing the duty it demands; but their existence is from hand to mouth, at haphazard, with no aim, no ambition, no godly purpose. They cannot say, with the apostle, that they are leaving the things which are behind, and pressing forward to the things which are before, or that one thing they are ever engaged in doing. It is quite true that in many cases there may be no great cause to be championed, no subjects to be explored, no object in making money, because already there is an ample competence. Some may read these words who are daughters in a wealthy home, or young men the heirs of a considerable fortune, or people in humble life who have no urgent need to look beyond the day or week with its ordinary routine; but even these should have a supreme purpose—to bring down the New Jerusalem out of heaven, to establish the Kingdom of God amongst men, to hasten the coming of the day of Christ, or to be themselves purer and holier. To become may always be the supreme purpose and intention of the soul; to be a little more like Christ; to know and love Him better; to be able to shed more of His sweetness and strength upon others. There is no life so contained within the high walls of circumstances, but it may reach up toward the profound light of the azure sky that arches above.
Do not be content to drift through life; do not be satisfied to be a piece of flotsam, swept to and fro by the ebb and flow of the stream; do not be a creature of circumstance, because it is certain that if you are not living with a divine purpose for God and eternity you are certainly living for yourself, for your ease, for mere indolent enjoyment, or to get through the years with as little fret and friction as possible. This, at the heart of it, and in such a world as this so abject and needy, is undiluted selfishness. To have no purpose is to have the worst purpose; to have no ambition is to be living for self; to have no intention is to be drifting through the wide gate, in company with the many that go in thereat, to their own destruction.
2. Some have a double intention. They have heard the call of Christ and have received the seed of the Kingdom; but so soon as it reached their hearts two strong competitors endeavoured to share with it the nutriment of the soul. On the one hand, there were the cares of the world—these largely have place in the poor and struggling; on the other hand, was the deceitfulness of riches—these principally are found among the opulent and well-to-do. For a brief interval there was a struggle as to which of these should be master, but the strife soon ended in the victory of the sturdy thorn; those ruthless brigands seized for themselves all the sustenance that the soil of the heart could supply, and grew ranker and taller until the tiny grain withered and failed to bring forth fruit to perfection.
Will you not examine yourself? You think that you are whole-hearted, whereas you may be double-hearted; or, to use the apt simile of the prophet, baked on one side and not on the other; or, to use the simile of the great dreamer, looking one way and rowing another. You seem to be very earnest in Christian work, but are you quite sure that your apparent devotion does not arise from a masterfulness of disposition that likes to be independent and rule? May it not be due to a fussy activity, which must be engaged in many directions that the soul may escape from itself; or to a natural pity and sympathy for men, which would incite you to a similar deed, even though you had never heard of Christ? Of course, you say to yourself that your motive is pure and single, and that you only desire to glorify God; but in His sight it may be that you are really actuated by the natural propensities of your nature, by your desire to be first, or by your appetite for notoriety or money. The heart is so deceitful that it becomes us to examine ourselves with all carefulness, lest at the end of life we shall find that, whilst we appeared to be doing God’s work, we were really doing our own; and that, whilst our friends gave us credit for great religious devotion, we were really borne along by a vain, proud and unworthy purpose, which robbed our noblest service of all value in the sight of eternity. As the apostle says, the one supreme intention of every child of God should be to please Him. How few of us can say, with the apostle: “Whose I am and whom I serve!” “It is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man’s judgment; he that judgeth me is the Lord.”
3. Let us see to it that we have a pure and simple intention. Our aim should be to set our whole soul upon one thing only—to do the will of God, so that the whole of our religious life may be spent before the Father, who seeth in secret; that our alms, our prayers, our fastings, should be for His eye, and His alone; and that the whole of our life should emanate from hidden fountains where God’s Spirit broods, like those fountains of the Nile concealed in the heart of the great mountains, the secret of which for so long defied the research of the explorer. The lamp of a holy life is the pure intention of the soul which seeks to gain nothing for itself, which has no desire to please men or to receive their commendation, which does not shirk adversity or court the sunshine, but which sets before it as its all-sufficient goal that God may be well pleased and that at the close of life’s brief pilgrimage it may be said of each of us, as it was said of Enoch, “He had this testimony, that he pleased God.”
How blessed such a life is! The light of the soul’s pure intention illuminates God, duty, human love, the glory of creation, and the significance of history, literature and art. I remember once in my life, at a most important crisis, when for weeks I was torn between two strong, conflicting claims, that at last I was compelled to put aside all engagements and to go alone into the midst of nature, where I carefully examined my heart to its very depths. I found that the cause of the difficulty to ascertain God’s will arose because I allowed so many personal considerations to conflict with the inner voice; and when I definitely put these aside, and stilled and quieted my life so that I became conscious of being impelled by one purpose only—to know and to do God’s will—then the lamp of a pure intention sheds its glow upon the path which I became assured was the chosen path for me. And since I dared from that moment to follow, all other things have been added. It was when Solomon asked that he might have a wise and understanding heart, that he might know God’s purpose, that God gave him honour, wealth and length of days. Again and again these words of Christ ring out as amongst the deepest that He ever spoke: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”
If the lamp of the pure intention of the soul is not kept pure and clean, “how great is the darkness!” Our Lord alludes, of course, to the fact that when darkness settles upon the forest, the beasts steal forth, the glades resound to the roar of the lion, the cry of the jackal, the laugh of the hyena. Multitudes of beasts that have lain quiet in their lairs whilst the sun was shining, creep forth; and our Lord says that when a man’s heart is set on doing God’s will the lower and baser passions of his nature—like so many beasts of prey—remain in their hiding places; but as soon as the blur comes, and the soul ceases to live for the one intense purpose of pleasing God, then darkness steals upon the house of life, and all manner of evil and unclean things, that otherwise would be shamed into silence and secrecy, begin to reveal themselves. “How great is that darkness!” If any are conscious that there is a darkness upon life, upon truth, upon the Word of God; if they are perplexed and plagued by the intrusion of evil things which fill them with misgiving—let me urge them to ask God to “cleanse the thoughts of their hearts by the inspiration of his Holy Spirit, that they may perfectly love him and worthily magnify his holy name.”