Acts 20:35 I have showed you all things, how that so laboring you ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus… 1. We might easily imagine occasions on which these words may have dropped from Christ's lips. They may have checked the entreaties of His disciples that He would for once think more of Himself and less of others. They may have answered some kind and friendly remonstrance when He turned aside from an untasted meal to attend to the sorrows and sicknesses which ever thronged the doors within which He rested. They may have explained on any occasion the secret of His perpetual self-sacrifice. 2. Were they not indeed the key to His whole life? Was not this the secret of His humiliation? And when He had thus humbled Himself, did not the same principle originate every act and prompt every motion? 3. How bright a light does this one expression throw upon the whole character of Jesus, Suppose that He had been personally known to later generations but by this one brief sentence? Should we not all have framed to ourselves instinctively some conception of that character which thus expressed itself, of that life which this principle must have moulded? What an intuition must He have possessed, who thus spake, into the real secret of greatness, the true dignity of man, and the essential characteristic of God! More blessed to give than to receive? More blessed, asks the selfish old man, to have an empty coffer than a full one? More blessed, asks the young man of pleasure, to admit another than myself to the desired scene of gaiety? More blessed, asks the man of business, the statesman, or, the student, to stand aside and let others pass me than to reap the fruit of my own skill or perseverance? Nay, let me hear that, however painful, the loss must be submitted to; that it is a condition of the kingdom, and I can understand you: but say not that there is any blessedness in such a life of mortification. Such is ever the true feeling of a fallen and unrenewed nature: there was an inspiration in the words before us; and till He who spake also inspires, we shall hear them still as exaggerated or unmeaning words. And yet if "more blessed" means in other words, more Divine, more Godlike, is not the saying at once proved true? God, who possesses all things, cannot receive: God, who upholds all things, is ever giving. To receive is to be a creature: to give is to be so far a "partaker of the Divine nature." We will illustrate the saying in two particulars. I. TAKE THE COMMONEST AND MOST OBVIOUS OF ALL APPLICATIONS — MONEY. 1. It has many uses; purchases many pleasures; has many powers. With limitations, it can even buy knowledge, rank, subservience. If it cannot buy love, it can buy some substitutes. The rich man is better off than the poor man. Not happier, necessarily, nor better: but better off; speaking of this life only. Now can we possibly say of money, these being its advantages, that "it is more blessed to give than to receive"? Few men seem to find it so. What an eagerness is there to get money! What a pleasure in finding it multiply! What a desire to die rich! At last it becomes a passion, a business, an appetite, a disease. It is too late, perhaps, then to gain an audience for this Divine saying. 2. But let us try it betimes. Is there nothing in human nature which responds to it? I can fancy a man of average virtue saying, My chief pleasure in money is in paying it away. I rejoice to feel that I owe no man anything; to think that that man, who has served me, is the better for me. Yes, I enjoy paying away at least as much as receiving. This is a poor and faint image of the glorious principle of the text: but it is well to show that Christianity is not all transcendental, but that it seizes upon something which is in all of us till we are utterly hardened, and raises it into a region where approval at least and admiration may follow it. 3. But I do not believe that hearts will ever be changed into the love of giving, save by the entrance of the Spirit of Christ. When the world is seen as it is, and heaven as it is; when we perceive that we "are not our own, but bought with a price"; when once the example of Christ, who left heaven for us, and the faith of Christ, who opened heaven to us, are felt by us as real motives; then we shall be "changed into the same image from glory to glory"; we shall value the wealth of this world chiefly for its power of relieving distress and spreading the gospel; we shall find that the Saviour's saying is verified. II. I PASS FROM THE BASEST TO THE HIGHEST OF POSSESSIONS; FROM MONEY TO LOVE. 1. There are those amongst us whose nature is athirst for love. Life is a wilderness to them without it. If there were but one person who loved them they feel that they should be happy. And it comes not. Or they have love, but it is not the love which they desire. 2. We cannot but think that our Saviour has a word for these, and that the text speaks to them, and says, Little as you may think it, it is more blessed, in this respect, to give than to receive. Christ came unto His own, and His own received Him not. It is more blessed, because it is more Christlike, to love than to be loved. To love, and therefore to do good; to love, and therefore to be willing to "spend and be spent, though the more abundantly I love, the less I be loved." This is what Christ did: and the disciple is not greater than his Lord. 3. One thing you can say even now, if you be His; that you would not exchange the lot of the unloved for the lot of the unloving. You would not part with the power to love; even for the sake of being free from its disappointments, free from its aching voids or its rough repulses. 4. Purify and refine your affection, more and more, by every argument and every motive of the gospel; wash out of it all, earthly stains, burn out of it all human corruptions: and then cherish it, give it, yea, lavish it. Give as your Saviour gave, without a bargain, and without an expectation, and without a repining, and without one backward look, and in the end you shall be able to echo His words. (Dean Vaughan.) Parallel Verses KJV: I have shewed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive. |
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