The Sufficient Grace of God
Bp. Phillips Brooks. 2 Corinthians 12:8-9 For this thing I sought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me.… I. WHAT A NEED THERE IS FOR ANY TRUE LIFE THAT IT SHOULD HAVE SOME CONCEPTION OF ITSELF WITHIN WHICH ALL ITS SPECIAL ACTIVITIES SHOULD MOVE AND DO THEIR WORK. What the skin is to the human body, holding all the parts of the inner machinery compactly to their work; what the simple constitution is to a highly-elaborated state, enveloping all its functions — such to the manifold actions of a man is some great simple conception of life, surrounding all details, giving them unity, simplicity, effectiveness. The degree in which the life is immediately and consciously aware of its enveloping conception may vary very much indeed. Some would have to stop and re-collect their consciousness before they could give you a clear statement of it. Nevertheless the dignity, beauty, usefulness of human lives seem to depend on it. Here is a man all scintillating with brightness: every act he does, every word he says, is a single, separate point of electricity, shining the more brilliantly just because of its isolation. Here is another man of far less brilliancy; his electricity does not sparkle-at brilliant points, but it lives unseen and powerful through everything he does and is. Now it is to the second man, not to the first, the world must look for good and constant power. II. NOTE THE SPECIAL CONCEPTION OF LIFE WHICH IS IN THE TEXT. That man's life is to have abundant supply for all it needs, and yet all this abundance is not to come by or in itself, because the human life itself is part and parcel of the Divine life. 1. This conception excludes two ideas — the first, that there is no sufficiency for man; the second, that man carries his sufficiency within himself. How these two ideas divide among themselves the hearts of men! The timid, tired, discouraged men say, "Human life a predestined failure: full of wants for which there is no supply, of questions for which there is no answer." The self-confident, self-trustful say, "Man is satisfied in himself. Let him but put forth all his powers and he shall supply all his own needs and answer all his own questions." And then God says, "Nay, both are wrong; you must be satisfied, but you must be satisfied in Me; you must have sufficiency, but My grace must be sufficient for you." 2. Now man cannot rest in the settled conviction of insufficiency. He has a deep and true conviction that he has no power or need for which there is not a correspondent supply somewhere within reach, e.g., his power of adoring love brings him assurance that there is a being worthy of such love. Then, on the other hand, that man shall find humanity sufficient for his powers and needs is made everlastingly impossible by the strange fact to which all the history of man bears witness, that man, though himself finite, demands infinity to deal with and to rest upon. That fact is the perpetual witness that man is the child of God. The child may be reminded of his limitations, and yet he always mounts up to claim the largeness of his father's life for himself. You never can rule lines around the realm of knowledge and say to man, "That is the limit of what you possibly can know." He will rub out your lines, and choose those very things to exercise his knowing faculty upon. What man ever truly loves and sets a limit to the loveliness of that which he is loving? Who that with the best human ambition is seeking after character can fix himself a goal and say, "That is as good as it is possible for me, a man, to be"? There comes no real content until, behind all the patterns which hold themselves up to him, at last he hears the voice far out beyond them all calling to him, "Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect." Then the finite has heard the voice of the infinite to which it belongs, to which it always will respond, and straightway it settles down to its endless journey and goes on content. III. IT IS IN VIEWS LIKE THESE THAT I FIND MY ASSURANCE IN THESE DAYS OF DOUBT ABOUT THE NATURE AND DESTINY OF MAN. If man is God's child, then man cannot permanently be atheistic. This poor man or that may be an atheist, perhaps; this child or that may disown or deny his father; but the world-child, man, to him the sense that he was not made for insufficiency, and the sense that he is not sufficient for himself, will always bring him back from his darkest and remotest wanderings, and set him where he will hear the voice which alone can completely and finally satisfy him, saying, "My grace is sufficient for thee." IV. AND NOW, IF THIS IS WHERE THE SOUL OF MAN MUST REST, LET US SEE WHAT IS THE REST WHICH MAN'S SOUL WILL FIND HERE; what will it be for a man when the secret and power of his life is that he is resting on the sufficiency of the grace of God? 1. This grace of God must be a perpetual element in which our life abides, and not an occasional assistant called in to meet special emergencies. I say to one man, "Who is your sufficiency? On whom do you rely for help?" and his reply is, "God"; and it sounds exactly as if he thought that God was a man in the next house, some one at hand when wanted. I ask another man the same questions, and be answers, "God"; and it sounds as if the sunlight talked about the sun, as if the stream talked of the spring, as if the blood talked of the heart, as if the plant talked of the ground, as if the mountain talked of the gravitation that lived in every particle of it and held it in its everlasting seat; nay, as if the child talked of his father "in whom he lived and moved and had his being." 2. Take special instances. (1) Here is our bewilderment about truth. One doubter, when his hard question comes, says with a ready confidence, "I wilt go and ask God," and carries off his problem to the Bible, to the closet, as if he went to consult an oracle, and as if, when he had got, or failed to get, an answer, he would leave the oracle and come back and live on his own resources until another hard question should come up. I do not say that that is wholly bad; but surely there is something better. Another doubter meets his puzzling question with, "God knows the explanation and the answer. I do not know that God will tell me what the answer is. Perhaps He will, perhaps He will not; but He knows."(2) And so it is with regard to activity and efficiency. One man says, "Here is a great work to be done; God will give me the strength to do it"; and so when it is done he is most apt to call it his work. Another man says, "Here is this work to be done; God shall do it, and if He will use me for any part of it, here I am. I shall rejoice as the tool rejoices in the artist's hand." When that work is finished, the workman looks with wonder at his own achievement, and cries, "What hath God wrought!"(3) Again, one sufferer cries, "Lord, make me strong"; another sufferer cries, "Lord, let me rest upon Thy strength." 3. Always there are these two kinds of men. The scene in the valley of Elah is always finding its repetition. David and Goliath are perpetual: proud, self-reliant, self-sufficient strength on the one side; and on the other the slight Judean youth, with nothing but a sling and stone, with his memories of struggles in which he has had no strength but the strength of God, and has conquered, with no boast, nothing but a prayer upon his lips. Goliath may thank his gods for his great muscles; but it is a strength which has been so completely handed over to him that he now thinks of it, boasts of it, uses it as his. David's strength lies back of him in God, and only flows down from God through him as his hand needs it for the twisting of the sling that is to hurl the stone. 4. It is sad to see even Christian men and times fall into the old delusion. The Christian Church seems to have been far too often asking of God that He should put its power and His wisdom into her, and make it hers; far too seldom that He should draw her life so close to His that His wisdom and power, kept still in Himself, should be hers because it is His. V. I FIND IN ALL THE LIFE OF JESUS THE PERFECT ILLUSTRATION AND ELUCIDATION OF ALL I HAVE BEEN SAYING. 1. He never treated His life as if it were a temporary deposit of the Divine life on the earth, cut off and independent of its source; he always treated it as if it lived by its association with the Father's life, on which it rested. Jesus was always full of the child-consciousness; He always kept His life open that the Father's life might flow through it. "Not My will, but Thy will, O My Father"; that was the triumph of the Garden. "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" that was the agony of the Cross. 2. What Jesus wanted for Himself He wants for His disciples. Not self-completeness. When He calls us to be His, He sees no day in which, having trained our characters and developed our strength, He shall send us out as you dismiss in the morning from your door the traveller whom you have kept all night, and fed and strengthened and rescued from fatigue, and filled with self-respect. No such day is to come for ever. And with that in our minds how much that seemed mysterious grows plain to us! If He is moving our life up close to His, henceforth to be a part of His, what wonder is it it, in order that that union may be most complete, He has to break down the walls which would be separations between Him and us. The going down of the walls between our house and our friend's house would be music to us, for it would be making the two houses one. The going down of the walls between our life and our Lord's life, though it consisted of the failure of our dearest theories and the disappointment of our dearest plans, that too would be music to us if through the breach we saw the hope that henceforth our life was to be one with His life, and all His was to be ours too. 3. And how clear, with this truth before us, would appear the duty that we had to do, the help that we had to give to any brother's soul. Not to make him believe our doctrine; but to bring him to our God. Not to answer all his hard questions; but to put him where he could see that the answer to them all is in God. Not to make him my convert, my disciple; but to persuade him to let Christ make him God's child. (Bp. Phillips Brooks.) Parallel Verses KJV: For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. WEB: Concerning this thing, I begged the Lord three times that it might depart from me.