God's Lessons Slowly Learned
John Brown, M. A. . Luke 2:50-51 And they understood not the saying which he spoke to them.… All these eighteen years were years of preparation. Thirty years of obscurity, and only two, or at the most three, of active work. "What extraordinary want of proportion! what failure of moral perspective!" we should have said. But God's lessons are only to be slowly learned. Mark this point. See, then, how Christ used the discipline of this preparation. See Him when He cams forth from the thirty years of silence and toil. See Him as He moved among men — calm, unruffled, unresting indeed, but unhurried. Did He not know the depth of human need? "Lord, to whom shall we go but to Thee for words to express man's utter emptiness? Who has gauged sin like Thee? Who sees sin as the man does who views it in Thy light?" Did Christ, then, not feel how short the time is? Well, He knew that "the night cometh, when no man can work." Yet, knowing man's need and life's shortness, He moves among men like a wise physician in a sick-room, the only one not flurried, not distracted, because the only one who adequately knows at once the greatness of the crisis, and the right remedies to use. Whence, then, hath this Man this wisdom and these marvellous gifts? How knoweth this Man letters, having never learned? Surely the answer on the human side is this: Because He has used rightly the opportunities of preparation, the times of waiting All that we mean by the discipline of life. Remember, then, that God's lessons are only to be slowly learned. "First the blade; then the ear; after that" — not before — "the full corn in the ear." "What is the use of all this drudgery, all this taking pains, all this monotonous attention to little wearisome details of duty? I want to strike out boldly for the shore. I am tired of buffeting with these tiresome little waves": — it is the child's voice that speaks thus, not the full-grown man's. Experience teaches that painful, laborious learning must go before successful activity. Day by day you go on drudging, slipping, failing, hoping, blundering: at last the moment comes when you find out that you have mastered your lesson, and you sweep along the icy path with confidence and power. So in all things. God's lessons are to be mastered only by the man. First you receive some spiritual truth — say, e.g., the fact of personal sinfulness — as an outside thing altogether; then by degrees it becomes more real and living; you begin to see that it has a meaning for you as a thing to be striven after; until, at last, you hardly know how, it becomes a part of your very self, nothing in the world for you more real than this, your sinful soul in God's presence. Fully to attain such knowledge you must do as Jesus did — go apart by yourself along the divinely-chosen road of difficult duty — content to fill a little space, if God be glorified — ready to learn, ready to obey, because, above all, more ready to pray. All this can only be deliberately, consciously chosen, as an act of the whole man, when you have mastered the spiritual alphabet, the sinful soul drawn and drawing toward the Divine Saviour. It is blessed, though it is very hard, and we learn but slowly, to be taught by Him. So, so only, we find rest to our souls. No higher wish can be framed, no better prayer offered than this: that all may be able to learn those lessons of daily life which Christ Himself had practised before He taught. (John Brown, M. A. .) Parallel Verses KJV: And they understood not the saying which he spake unto them. WEB: They didn't understand the saying which he spoke to them.