HEAR HIS VOICE - Alexander Maclaren

‘Today if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts… ‘ — Hebrews 3:7, 8.

Whose voice? The writer of the psalm from which these words are quoted meant God’s. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, in quoting them, means Christ’s. And the unhesitating transfer, without explanation or apology, of a sacred saying of the Old Testament from God to Christ is a plain indication, especially considering that the writer was a Jew addressing Jews, of what he and they believed about Christ’s divinity. His voice was God’s voice, to be listened to with equal deference, and capable of bringing the same result.

‘To-day’; when is to-day? The writer of the psalm meant his own epoch; the writer of the Epistle go the Hebrews means his. And the unhesitating transfer of the words from one period to another rests on the principle that there is a continuous voice of God sounding through all the ages, to which each generation in turn has the privilege of listening, and the responsibility of not turning away. So we are not only permitted, but obliged, to bring down the ‘go-day’ to our Own period, and to believe that God’s voice in Christ is speaking to us individually as truly and directly as if it had never been uttered to any of the men of the past. One more remark by way of introduction. ‘If ye will hear His voice’ conveys the idea of volition. The writer of the epistle had no such intention. He did not mean to say, ‘If ye want to hear God’s voice, open your ears.’ But he uses the ‘if’ as it is often employed in Scripture, not go express doubt, but simply to east a statement into the form of a supposition. The meaning is really substantially equivalent to ‘as often as.’ Instead of ‘will’ we get the meaning much better when we read, with the Revised Version ‘ shall.’ ‘To-day, if ye shall hear His voice, harden not your hearts.’

Now if that be the connection and the meaning of the words before us, there are three things that I want to press upon you from them. First, that Jesus Christ is speaking to you; second, that there is a danger of steeling your hearts against Him; third, that it is wise to listen to-day.

That Jesus Christ is speaking to you.

The readers of this letter, certainly, and its writer, probably, never heard Jesus Christ in His earthly utterances; but as the letter says, in another place, ‘He now speaketh from heaven.’ The writer was sure that to these people, who had never heard a syllable of the Lord’s earthly sayings, that pleading, infinitely sweet and persuasive voice was ever coming. And, as I said, his bold transference of the ancient words to his own generation involves a principle which compels us to transfer them equally unhesitatingly from the generation of apostles and early Christians to our own prosaic and commonplace times. Jesus Christ, dear friends, is speaking to every one of us, direct and straight, as He spoke to the men of those days.

He speaks to us by His recorded earthly utterances. Oh, if people would read the gospels as they ought to be read — with the conviction that there was nothing in Christ’s words, local, temporary, or peculiar to the individuals to whom they were primarily addressed — how different they would be to us all! His own declaration is true about all His utterances, ‘What I say unto you’ — the little group gathered round Me here, — ‘I say unto all’ — those dim and distant multitudes away out to the very ends of the earth, and down through the ages, I speak to them all.

He stands and says to me, and to thee, ‘Come unto Me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ Dear brother, straight to you, as if winged like an arrow from the heavens, comes this call of the Lord, ‘If any man thirst’ — and surely that is general enough to take us all in — ‘let him come unto Me and drink.’ We are putting no violence on the Lord’s words by thus asserting their direct aim at every human heart. For I believe, for my part, that the love and individualising knowledge of Jesus Christ are divine; and that each of us has his own place in that loving heart; and that to each of us He spoke when He spoke unto all. So if you will rightly use the record that you have, you will hear in it Christ speaking to you.

He speaks to us by one another. I do not believe in sacerdotal authority, nor in apostolic succession, nor in any mystical sacredness attaching to any form of the preacher’s office; but I do believe that the humblest and rudest of men who turns to another and says, ‘Brother, Jesus Christ is thy Saviour; wilt thou not let Him save thee?’ is speaking Christ’s words. ‘He that heareth you, heareth Me.’ That is no bestowment of superhuman and magical authority on either apostles or clergy, hut it is the declaration which I am trying to enforce, that every lip that is opened to proclaim the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord derives all its power and all its music, if there be any, from the inspiration of Christ Himself. The body of a violin is but meant to reverberate the sound; it is His hand that is drawn across the strings. All Christian teachers are the sounding-boards and reverberators of the music that He has made. They are but like wind instruments; the breath that is blown through them is the breath of Christ Himself. Alas! that the instrument is so often out of tune, and so poorly reproduces the infinite sweetness of the pleading tones of Him into whose lips grace was poured. But He does speak, and speaks even through such poor instruments as me.

He speaks to you deep down in that solemn voice that sometimes wakes within, and rebukes and restrains and directs. If it be true, and true it is, that the eternal Word of God is the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world, it is tenfold more true — if I may so say — that consciences like ours, which have been saturated with the more or less, direct influences of Christian morality all our days, are to be taken as His voice.

And so, I beseech you, discern Christ’s words, and not the mere historical record of what a dead Man once said in the past — of which criticism may make more or less havoc — but Christ’s living words, springing fresh from His lips, and meant for you, in the words of the gospels. Hear His utterances, and not men’s poor faltering transcription and translation of them, in the words which my fellows and I may chance to speak to you. And hear His voice in that august monitor which you carry within, to warn and to impel, a spur to all lingering good, and a check upon all rampant evil.

Notice the danger of steeling the heart against Him.

One would have thought that the last thing possible was that there should be a pleading God and a refusing man; that there should be a God manifest in Jesus Christ, beseeching us to accept the loftiest gifts, and that men should turn away from the beseeching. Old legends tell us how mystic music put motion into sticks and stones, and made the trees of the wood clap their hands. But men’s hearts mysteriously and tragically remain stolidly deaf against that voice. It, always has been so. Of old, Wisdom cried in the high places of the city; and even her queenly majesty, and gentle persuasions, and infinitely desirable gifts, gained her no hearing, and her last word was, ‘I have called and ye have refused.’ The Incarnate Wisdom came upon earth, not to cry nor lift up His voice in the streets, but to appeal with gentleness and searching power to men, and He had to turn away from His temple and say, ‘Thou knewest not the time of Thy visitation.’ All that have had the best and highest things to say to the world have had the same experience. ‘If a man prophesy of wine and strong drink,’ speaking words that excite and offer to gratify sense and appetite, ‘he shall be the prophet of this people,’ and the God-messenger has to stand and say, ‘All day long have I stretched out my hands to a disobedient and a gainsaying people.’ A result so uniform must have deep-lying causes.

I do not intend to enter upon these now. I wish to say a word or two rather about the ‘how’ than about the ‘why’ of this strange fact, and to warn you, dear friends, against the courses by which so many of us, and you and I in our time, no doubt, have often stopped our ears against Christ’s voice. Simple occupation with all sorts of other things will effectually do it, Great is the power of preoccupation, magical is the power of indifference. A man can resolve not to attend to almost anything, however imperative and urgent may be its appeals to him. They used to beat drums and blow trumpets in the market-places of the towns when John Wesley and the early Methodists went into them in order to prevent the preacher’s voice from being heard. And you and I know but too well — do we not? — what it is to busy ourselves with such a clamant crowd of occupations that Christ’s voice gets smothered and stifled. Go into a factory and you can see that two men are talking to one another, because their lips are moving, hut you cannot hear a word they say for the whir of the spindles and the clatter of the looms. And there are a great many of us that silence Jesus Christ in that fashion. We see His mouth move, and we make the more noise at our business, and so manage to harden our hearts. Do not, as soon as you go out of these doors, let the rattle of the world come in to deafen the ears of your conscience to the pleadings of your Saviour.

You can harden your hearts very effectually by neglecting to do what you know you ought to do. You can kill a plant if you persistently pick off the buds, and prevent it from flowering. You can kill your consciences in the same fashion. There is nothing which makes a man so receptive of further communications from his Lord as obedience to what He has already heard, and he who says, ‘Thy servant heareth,’ will never have to say in vain, ‘Speak, Lord!’ The converse is true. There is nothing that so hinders a man from knowing what Christ would have him do as to know that He would have him do something which He will not do. You can take the bell off the rock if you like. That will contribute to your sleeping on the voyage, and you will be troubled by no intrusive ringings until the bow is amongst the white breakers and the keel grinding on the black rocks. You can harden your hearts thus by neglecting your convictions.

You can do it by wilfully fighting them down. And I am sure that there are men and women here who know what it is to do that. Take a lump of raw cotton, and put it under sufficient pressure, and you can make it as compact as a bullet. So you can take your hearts, and by dint of determined resistance, and bringing all manner of pressure to bear upon them, you can squeeze and squeeze and squeeze till you squeeze all generous impulses and lofty thoughts and wishes to be better, and convictions of duty, clean out of them, and leave them no bigger than a walnut, and as hard as a cannon-ball. You can do it; do not risk it, It is possible by plunging yourselves into a deliberate course of exciting and intoxicating evil to shake off impressions so as to laugh at them. ‘Take a hair of the dog that bit you’ is the devil’s prescription. I dare say there are people who know what it is, in order to get rid of themselves, or rather I should say of Christ speaking in themselves, to plunge more desperately into some absorbing course of evil. That is the Nemesis of all wrongdoing, that as it continues the delight of it diminishes and the necessity for it increases, to bury remembrances, to drown reflections, to get rid of self. And so as chemists can liquify oxygen you can freeze down your hearts if you will into a solid mass, impervious to anything but the retributive blow that will shatter it. Beware! ‘Since ye hear His voice, harden not your hearts.’

Lastly, notice the wisdom of listening to-day.

Now, as I have said, the ‘to-day’ of my text was the epoch of the generation which the writer was addressing; and in one very blessed sense ‘to-day’ for each of us is the whole period of our earthly lives, during which sounding on for ever will be the pleading of Jesus Christ’s voice. And so men say, ‘It is never too late to mend.’ Yes, perfectly true; but is not the other side as true: It is never too soon to mend? Whilst the ‘to-day’ of my text, thank God, lasts as long as the day of life, there is a very real sense in which the more ordinary meaning of it is applicable to this matter. I do not need to remind you how in all regions of life there is nothing more deleterious to character nor more fatal to success than the habit of putting off doing plain duty. In your business you are trained to promptitude. The man that does not let grass grow under his feet in ordinary matters will be half way on his journey whilst another man is thinking of getting his boots on. And promptitude is no less important — in some aspects it is even more so-in regard to listening to the voice of Jesus Christ, and obeying His commandments. So I want to plead with you, dear friends, to that effect.

‘That thou doest do quickly,’ if it be a right thing. ‘That thou doest drop quickly,’ if it be a wrong thing. But let there be no hesitation in regard of the one course or the other. As Elijah said, ‘How long halt ye between two opinions?’ or in the very picturesque word of the original, ‘How long do you hobble along upon both knees,’ resting now upon one and then upon the other. ‘If the Lord be God,’ then plain common sense says ‘follow Him’; ‘if Baal, then follow Him.’

And this is the more needful, because impressions or convictions stirred by the voice of Christ are apt to be very evanescent. They are delicate; they require prompt fixing, or they fade off the sensitive plate. They are like the images of a dream — very clear at the moment we wake, ten minutes afterwards irrecoverable. Do not trifle with what may be a fleeting inclination to eternal duty.

And they are very hard to reproduce. I am sure I am speaking to some who were once on the verge of taking Christ for their Saviour, and then something within said, ‘Yet a little more sleep and a little more slumber,’ and the disposition has never come back again. Felix sent for Paul many a time after the first time, and talked with him, but he never’ trembled’ any more, but talked comfortably with his prisoner about the possibility of screwing a ransom out of him. I say nothing about other reasons for prompt action, such as that every moment makes it harder for a man to turn to Jesus Christ as his Saviour. The dreadful power Of habit weaves chains about him, thin at first as a spider’s web, solid at last as an iron fetter. Associations that entangle, connections that impede grow with terrible rapidity. And if it is hard for you to turn to your Lord now, it will never be easier, and will certainly be harder.

And, dear friends, ‘to-day’ — how long is it going to last? Of course I know that all the deepest reasons for your being a Christian remain unaffected if you were going to live in the world for ever. And, of course, I know that the gospel of Jesus Christ is as good to live by as it is to die by. But, notwithstanding, common sense says that if our time here is so uncertain as we know it to be, there is no time to put off. You and I have to die, whether we find a convenient season for it or not. And perhaps we have to die before we find Felix’s ‘convenient season’ to send for Paul or Paul’s Master. So in the narrowest sense of the word, ‘To-day… harden not your hearts.’

But I dare say some of you, and especially some of you young people, may be kept from accepting Jesus Christ as your Saviour, and serving Him, by a vague disinclination and dread to make so great a change. I beseech you, do not give a feather’s weight to such considerations. If a change is right, the sooner it is made the better. The shrinking all passes when it is made, just as a bather recovers himself when once his head has been plunged beneath the water.

And some of you may be kept back because you know that there are sins that you will have to unveil if you become Christians. Well, do not let that keep you back either. Confession is healing and good and sweet to the soul, if it is needful for repentance. Sins that men have a right to know hurt as long as they are hid, and cease to hurt when they are acknowledged, like the fox beneath the Spartan boy’s robe, that gnawed when it was covered up, and stopped biting when it was revealed.

So, dear friends, you hear Christ speaking to you in His Word, in His servants, in the depths of your hearts. He speaks to you of a dying Saviour, of His infinite love, of His perfect sacrifice, of a complete salvation, a cleansed heart, a blessed life, a calm death, an open heaven for each if we will take them. See that ye refuse not Him that speaketh.’