To enrich the humble poor.
The majority of people do not think of Christ as a great preacher. They look at Him as a man of supreme love, gentleness of spirit, kindness of manner, and as thoroughly good and unselfish in all He did; but they do not think of Him as possessing the qualities which we think necessary to make what we call a great preacher. The wonderful gift of language, the skilful choice of words, the ability to gather His arguments and focus His thought so as to carry His audience to the point of decision, most people, I say, do not thus think of Christ. When the great preachers of history are named, people speak of Brooks, Beecher, Finney, and Edwards in America ; Spurgeon, Chalmers, Whitefield, and Wesley in Britain ; Luther, Savonarola, and Chrysostom of the old world. But did you ever hear any one put Christ in this category ?
1. That Christ was a great preacher is evident from our text, for the requisites, which all concede as necessary, are here set forth as being in His possession.
(1) First, He had the right qualification for His work, namely, the anointing of the Holy Spirit. " The Lord hath anointed me to preach." Christ received this special qualifica- tion at the time of His baptism, with the declaration, " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." It was this anointing for the work that gave Christ His power. The account in Luke closes with the suggestive sentence, " His word was with power," and immediately following the text occurs the
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statement, " And they wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of His mouth,"
The fact that Christ's earthly life became effectual through the ministry of the Holy Spirit within Him, and not alone through the inherent virtue and power He brought with Him from His pre-existent state, has become one of the commonplaces of theology ; and yet how little do we realise its true import, and cultivate that humOity and dependence of soul which would distinguish us if the great truth were ever in view ! In spite of our formal adhesion to this doctrine, it seems still strange to us that one whom we think of as holy and Divine should be indebted at every stage of His earthly life to that inward mystic ministry which is so necessary to us because of our sinfulness. "We speak of the Holy Ghost as a Deliverer from inbred corruption, and are ready to assume, quite unwarrantably, that where there is no corruption in the nature, the stimulating forces and fervours of His benign indwelling are needless. We are accustomed to look upon this ministry, which perpetuates in our souls the saving work of the Lord Jesus, as though it were a special antidote to human depravity only. For the Spirit to abide moment by moment with Jesus Christ, and work in His humanity, seems like painting the lily, gilding fine gold, and bleaching the untrampled snow.
But that is a mistaken view. When the universal Church shall have been built up and consecrated to its high uses, it will be " by the Spirit " that God will dwell in the temple. And the temple of Christ's sacred flesh needed this same indwelling presence. It was imperative that to the Son in His humiliation the Father should give the Spirit, and give Him, too, upon no grudging scale — give Him for His own sake as well as for ours, whom He came to represent and to save. The great Sanctifier blends the essential forces of His personality into this divinest type of goodness, to show that goodness in even the only begotten Son is not self- originated. In the less mature stages of Christ's expanding humanity implicit and docile dependence on this inward leading was the test of His entire acceptability to the Father.
(2) He had also the second requisite of a preacher, whose sermon must always be about Christ. Christ's sermon in Nazareth was about Himself. " The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, He
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has sent me." The personal pronoun runs through all He has to say. The subject of His discourse was, in a word, Himself. Just after the resurrection, when Christ was on the road to Emmaus with two of the disciples, we are told that, " Beginning at Moses and all the prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the thing concerning Himself." Again, He said : " I am the Vine." " I am the Eesurrection and the Life." " I am the Son of God." " I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life."
More than that, Christ's sermon was Himself. He gave His life a ransom, His soul an offering for sin. That day this Scrip- ture was fulfilled. He preached the sermon in Nazareth by anticipation ; for He delighted to do the Father's will, — and it was as good as done already, even to the last agony.
IT I once heard a prayer of a rough ploughman in a village schoolroom ; and this was in his prayer — " Dear Lord, if there be any poor stricken one in this room to-night, come and bind him up, and bind Thyself, Lord, into the binding." ^