Weariness means to wear away the nervous sensibilities. Paul felt this. It is not lassitude which comes from indifference, but the exhaustion felt by the earnest and faithful soul. Let us thank God for restorative power. In nature how blessed this is! So with grace!
I. Weariness comes with temporary disappointment and defeat. God has promised to perfect that which concerneth us, but the way of perfection is just the way which wearies us. We are disappointed at the slow progress. And we are human. Think of Rebekah!--“I am weary of my life because of the daughters of Heth.” The motherly anxiety was at work. As we get older we feel “limitations” of power. Disappointment is a cloud, and we wait till the heavens are clear and the all-revealing light comes again! But we are defeated too! But first defeat has made many a true general, has quickened many an inventor, like Watt, Stephenson, and Brunel. Weariness comes to student, explorer, missionary, and philanthropist saddened with ingratitude. But this is not the weariness of sin, that not only exhausts, but destroys.
II. Weariness comes with self-discovery. The volcano tells what is in the earth. The lightning reveals the latent electricity in the air. Passions and lusts reveal terrible possibilities in good men. David said, “I am weary with my groaning,” and again, “I am weary of my crying.” Conflict with sin in all its forms is weary work.
1. The roots are so hidden. Like some garden weeds have roots that never seem uprooted, long white threads that interlace the earth and strangle other plants.
2. The battle is so varied. Like Stanley’s passage of the Falls, enemies on both banks and on the island, mid-stream.
3. The avengements are so real. There is no escaping the voice! Thou art the man. And the soul cannot pretend not to hear. But think of this same Paul. “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” The answer is--Christ. More than conquerors!
III. Weariness comes with unbelief. The Greeks had an underlying sadness in their outwardly beautiful life. It is faith which gives life and zest. Thomas Carlyle says, “All epochs, wherein unbelief, under whatever form soever, maintains its sorry victory, should they ever for a moment glitter with a sham splendour, vanish from the eyes of posterity; because no one chooses to burden himself with study of the unfruitful.” Men must be weary who have lost faith.
1. Round of same duties without a goal.
2. Growth a mockery merging into weakness.
3. Health into pain. Vision into dimness. Thought into blank!
IV. Weariness comes from solitude. The regiment is thinning in which you started. You have seen many arms of the soldiers “dip below the downs” into the valley. You are beginning in a human sense to feel solitary. The Master was weary in solitude: “What, could ye not watch with Me one hour?” So was Paul: “At Athens alone.” But the Christian is never alone. “I will not leave you comfortless. I will come to you.” (W. M. Statham.)
Beside … the care of all the Churches.--
Anxiety of the Churches
The word “care” is “anxiety”--the same word by which Christ (Luk_8:4-15) designates one of the three influences by which the good seed is “stifled.” St. Paul speaks here of it in the list of sufferings for Christ’s sake. That anxiety which our Lord reproved (Mat_6:25, etc.; Luk_10:41) has a namesake among the graces. St. Paul, who says (Php_4:6), “Be anxious about nothing,” mentions this without apology as his daily experience. Just in proportion to the meanness of the one is the dignity of the other. The anxieties which choke the Word are commonly as selfish as they are earthly; those of which Paul was here capable are elevating, and, so far from choking the Word, grow out of it. Notice, respecting this care of all the Churches--
I. Its unselfishness. These people were nothing to him. They were neither kinsfolk, neighbours, nor countrymen. They were converts, but his idea of his responsibility towards them was not to do his duty and then leave it. He was solicitous, even to pain, about their continuous welfare.
II. Its strictness.
1. As regards his government of the Churches, with what eagerness both of authority and argument does he throw himself into questions even of dress! (1Co_11:3-16; cf. 1Ti_2:13-14). In our ritual controversies we are certain that he would have laid down, as it is now thought tyranny to do, the law of obedience (1Co_14:36).
2. His anxiety, as his Epistles show, was a doctrinal anxiety. He was fighting for Christ, and therefore was peremptory in his enforcement of doctrine.
III. Individual (2Co_11:29). True he made the world his province, but he took a personal interest in his converts. See how he deals with the incestuous person. He never suffered the supposed interests of Churches to eclipse the value of souls. I knew an archbishop who failed not, whatever his distance or occupation, to write at certain intervals to a common northern townsman whom he had reclaimed from intemperance for his establishment in grace. (Dean Vaughan.)
Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is offended, and I burn not?--
Sympathy and indignation
I. There are two faults which alternate in human character--weakness and harshness.
1. We sometimes find a person who is extremely amiable, one invaluable in hours of distress, to whom we fly in sorrow. And yet in this character, so attractive at first sight, there may be a fatal defect. There may be a want of strength--a sympathy not only with the erring, which is right, but with the error, which is wrong.
2. On the other hand, we sometimes see a person of the greatest elevation and purity of character; we hear his judgment upon right and wrong; we fancy our own moral tone to be braced by his principles and example. And yet here too there may be something fatally wanting. He may be harsh, and have the effect of driving in upon itself, but not of correcting, that which is sinful in another. We feel, perhaps, that it would be impossible for us to confess a fault to such a person; therefore in his company we are tempted to deceive him if not ourselves, and that which is evil sinks the deeper in for being thus driven from the surface.
II. Turn now, and see a character which, by God’s grace, combined both these virtues and avoided both these faults.
1. By nature it was a strong character. Those whom he regarded as in error St. Paul once persecuted to the death. But, as soon as the love of Christ touched his heart, without losing one particle of strength, he learned to add to it tenderness. Knowing how much he had been forgiven, he knew how to forgive.
2. Now therefore his language is, “Who is weak, and I am not weak?” Who is inexperienced or unstable in the life of God, living powerless in a perilous world, and I do not share his fears and sympathise with him to the full from the depth of my own experience? On the other hand, “Who is offended, and I burn not? “ I am weak with the weak, but I am not weak towards their tempter. Read the passage in the first Epistle, in which he consigns to a terrible punishment the guilty person, and then read the passage in the second Epistle, in which, after a due interval of exclusion, he bids them to receive back and comfort the penitent offender.
III. The lesson for ourselves.
1. Amongst you some are weak, vigorous in body, it may be, quick in mind, and yet weak. Some of you feel it, and accuse yourselves of it: “I am so weak, so unstable, so irresolute, so soon shaken from my purpose.” Now, then, St. Paul tells us here how we ought to deal with such weakness. He became weak along with it. This was the right way, he meant, to deal with weakness, to descend, as it were, to its level, and, in the very act of doing so, to help to raise it to his own. Do I recommend laxity of treatment? Far from it. Sympathy is not indulgence, for sympathy can rebuke severely, and severely punish. But there are two ways of doing everything; it is one thing to rebuke with sorrow, and another to rebuke or punish in coldness or in apathy.
2. “Who is offended, and I burn not?” It is the tendency of long carelessness, whether in an individual or in a community, to blunt the edge of the sense of sin. It is said of advancing age that its tendency is to make men more indulgent and less sanguine. Certainly we do find a great want in ourselves too often of righteous indignation. A strange companion, some of you may be saying, to that spirit of sympathy which has just been spoken of! St. Paul, however, did not think so. Now indignation is a dangerous quality to foster towards one of ourselves. But nevertheless it has its uses in the Christian scheme, and the loss of it causes a terrible injury to the health of a community, if not of an individual man. No tongue ever uttered words of such consuming indignation as those which Christ addressed to the Scribes and Pharisees. Would to God there were more who could be angry and sin not in the sight and hearing of some kinds of evil! It is the loss of this feeling which fills the courts of justice with records of unmanly aggressions upon the confiding and the feeble. (Dean Vaughan.)
Sympathy
Many-sidedness, which is an invariable characteristic of all really great men, was indisputably a feature in St. Paul. No doubt it has risks and disadvantages. There is the chance of shallowness. It is often, and with supreme unfairness, identified with insincerity. Capriciousness, too, is imputed to these large and sensitive natures, because we cannot always find them in the same mood. Perhaps that one feature of nature which has done more than any other to conciliate the affection of the Church is sympathy. Sympathy is feeling with others, and it is quite a distinct thing from feeling for them. The latter is more of a quick and evanescent sentiment, good as far as it goes, but not often going far. Sympathy is a habit, or temper of mind, which means prayer and effort and sacrifice. Let us first select certain types of circumstance which sympathy springs to meet.
1. First, let us not forget our apostle’s precept, “Rejoice with them that do rejoice,” and not be so ignorant as to suppose that men do not value sympathy with happiness, though they may need it more in sorrow. All conditions of life, as well as all classes of men, claim and appreciate sympathy. Our Lord’s presence at the marriage feast at Cana, as well as at the feast at Bethany after the raising of His friend Lazarus, is an instance in point. Disappointment and wounded self-love may occasionally have something to do with our lack of sympathy in a friend’s happiness, but thoughtlessness and a certain lazy selfishness have more.
2. There are difficulties in religion, where honest and even reverent souls demand sympathy and do not always get it. Nothing so tends to discourage, or harden, or anger men into actual unbelief as a cold, harsh, dogmatic treatment of their difficulties. Sympathy here, indeed, must be prudent and frank.
3. It is hardly necessary to add how needful and blessed in hours of personal sorrow is the felt sympathy of a friend. People who don’t know are apt, by way of excusing themselves for negligence, to allege that sympathy at such times has no real value. Little they know about it. Here, again, we must premise that true sympathy has nothing morbid or softening about it. It braces, while it sighs; it points to Christ, instead of leaning on man. If it means tact and skill, it also means courage and power. In conclusion, let us say other things about sympathy. No doubt there are some people in whom it is a born instinct; so to speak, it is neither hard for them nor easy. It is a matter of course, for it is a part of themselves. Yet, even in them, it needs educating and disciplining by experience. Then let us be careful how, with the best meaning possible, we express sympathy with troubles and losses of which we have no sort of personal knowledge, thereby, it may be, making our kindly intended consolations clumsy, ludricrous, or even painful. Let us leave it to those who do know what they are doing, and so avoid the danger of making a second wound in our attempt to heal the first. Once more, no quality of the soul, when it is genuine and ripe and wise, is so gratefully accepted, so tenderly cherished, so lavishly repaid, as this grace of sympathy, and it does not need money, talent, cleverness--only the presence of love. The love of God and the love of man react upon each other. (Bp. Thorold.)
