Expositions of Holy Scripture | Page 9

also give.
There is only one Giver who is only a Giver, and that is God. All other givers are also
receivers. Paul desired to see his Roman brethren that he might be encouraged; and when
he did see them, as he marched along the Appian Way, a shipwrecked prisoner, the Acts
of the Apostles tells us, 'He thanked God and took courage.' The sight of them
strengthened him and prepared him for what lay before him.
Paul's was a richly complicated nature--firm as a rock in its will, tremulously sensitive in
its sympathies; like some strongly-rooted tree with its stable stem and a green cloud of
fluttering foliage that moves in the lightest air. So his spirit rose and fell according to the
reception that he met from his brethren, and the manifestation of their faith quickened
and strengthened his.
And he is but one instance of a universal law. All teachers, the more genuine they are, the
more sympathetic they are, are the more sensitive of their environment. The very
oratorical temperament places a man at the mercy of surroundings. All earnest work has
ever travelling with it as its shadow seasons of deep depression; and the Christian teacher
does not escape these. I am not going to speak about myself, but this is unquestionably
true, that every Elijah, after the mightiest effort of prophecy, is apt to cover his head in

his mantle and to say, 'Take me away; I am not better than my fathers.' And when a man
for thirty years, amidst all the changes incident to a great city congregation in that time,
has to stand up Sunday after Sunday before the same people, and mark how some of them
are stolidly indifferent, and note how others are dropping away from their faithfulness,
and see empty places where loving forms used to sit--no wonder that the mood comes
ever and anon, 'Then, said I, surely I have laboured in vain and spent my strength for
nought.' The hearer reacts on the speaker quite as much as the speaker does on the hearer.
If you have ice in the pews, that brings down the temperature up here. It is hard to be
fervid amidst people that are all but dead. It is difficult to keep a fire alight when it is
kindled on the top of an iceberg. And the unbelief and low-toned religion of a
congregation are always pulling down the faith and the fervour of their minister, if he be
better and holier, as they expect him to be, than they are.
'He did not many works because of their unbelief.' Christ knew the hampering and the
restrictions of His power which came from being surrounded by a chill, unsympathetic
environment. My strength and my weakness are largely due to you. And if you want your
minister to preach better, and in all ways to do his work more joyfully and faithfully, the
means lie largely in your own hands. Icy indifference, ill-natured interpretations, carping
criticisms, swift forgetfulness of one's words, all these things kill the fervour of the
pulpit.
On the other hand, the true encouragement to give a man when he is trying to do God's
will, to preach Christ's Gospel, is not to pat him on the back and say, 'What a remarkable
sermon that was of yours! what a genius! what an orator!' not to go about praising it, but
to come and say, 'Thy words have led me to Christ, and from thee I have taken the gift of
gifts.'
Dear brethren, the encouragement of the minister is in the conversion and the growth of
the hearers. And I pray that in this new lease of united fellowship which we have taken
out, be it longer or shorter--and advancing years tell me that at the longest it must be
comparatively short--I may come to you ever more and more with the lofty and humbling
consciousness that I have a message which Christ has given to me, and that you may
come more and more receptive--not of my words, God forbid--but of Christ's truth; and
that so we may be helpers one of another, and encourage each other in the warfare and
work to which we all are called and consecrated.
[Footnote 1: Preached after long absence on account of illness.]

DEBTORS TO ALL MEN
'I am a debtor both to the Greeks and to the Barbarians, both to the wise and to the
unwise.'--ROMANS i. 14.
No doubt Paul is here referring to the special obligation laid upon him by his divine call
to be the Apostle to the Gentiles. He was entrusted with the Gospel as a steward, and was
therefore bound to carry it to all sorts and conditions of men. But the principle underlying
the