These roofs are substantially built, as they need to be, since the whole family habitually walked and slept upon them. They broke up and uncovered a part of the roof. But one would have thought that even then they were as far off from Jesus as ever. It must have required a daring faith in those four men to conceive and carry out the course they took. They let down their neighbour in a bed, which they had slung to ropes, into the room where Jesus was talking with rabbis of all the schools, but they uttered no request. One would like to know the names of these four good men, good neighbours, good friends. The fact that we know not their names suggests to us that Christ cares for men whose names the world has never heard of, and never will hear; for the lowly and inconspicuous, no less than for the famous and the great. (S. Cox, D. D.)
Doing difficult work
Whenyou cannot do a good thing, then is the very time to do it. If it cannot be done in one way, do it in another. If there is no way of doing it on the ground level, get up on to the roof and do it. “Where there is a will, there is a way.” The best work done in the world has been work that could not be done; and there is rarely a time when you ought not to do something that cannot be done-as it seems to you. (H. C. Trumbull.)
The potency of faith in Christian work
I.True faith is always concerned for the welfare of others. These men manifestly worked disinterestedly. So faith always acts; like the sister grace of charity, she “seeketh not her own.”
II. True faith always looks to Christ as the centre of its operations. Not forms or ceremonies, or ministers, or churches, or even the Bible itself, but Christ is the only Saviour of the lost.
III. True faith is fertile in expedients for overcoming difficulties. Have we exhausted all ingenuity in seeking souls?
IV. True faith meets with its appropriate reward. What a reward for their faith! Here is infinitely more than they ever expected (Eph_3:20). Learn-that faith is essentially practical; that religion is promoted by the exertions of believers; that to bring others to Jesus is the noblest achievement of man. (W. W. Smith.)
Faith seen by Christ
Onnone of these qualities did Christ fix as an explanation of the fact. He went deeper. He traced it to the deepest source of power that exists in the mind of man. “When Jesus saw their faith.” For as love is deepest in the Being of God, so faith is the mightiest principle in the soul of man. Let us distinguish their several essences. Love is the essence of the Deity-that which makes it Deity. Faith is the essence of Humanity, which constitutes it what it is. And, as here, it is the warring principle of this world which wins in life’s battle. No wonder that it is written in Scripture-“This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.” No wonder it is said, “All things are possible to him that believeth.” It is that which wrestles with difficulty, removes mountains, tramples upon impossibilities. It is this spirit which in the common affairs of life, known as a “sanguine temperament,” never says “impossible” and never believes in failure, leads the men of the world to their most signal successes, making them believe a thing possible because they hope it; and giving substantial reality to that which before was a shadow and a dream. It was this “substance of things hoped for” that gave America to Columbus, when billows, miles deep, rose between him and the land, and the men he commanded well- nigh rose in rebellion against the obstinacy which believed in “things not yet seen.” It was this that crowned the Mahomedan arms for seven centuries with victory: so long as they believed themselves the champions of the One God with a mission from Him, they were invincible. And it is this which so often obtains for some new system of medicine the honour of a cure, when the real cause of cure is only the patient’s trust in the remedies. (F. W. Robertson, M. A.)
