Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3305
“Jesus said unto them, Have you understood all these things?” Matthew 13:51.
THIS is a question which might often be asked of us when we have been reading the Scriptures, when we have been attending upon the public means of Grace, or when we have been partaking of the Lord’s Supper—“Have you understood all these things?” It were well for someone to run up to us, as Philip did to the eunuch, who on his return from Jerusalem was reading in his chariot, and say to us as Philip did to him, “Do you understand what you are reading?” Or the question might be put to us, “Do you understand what you hear? Do you understand even what you say?” I fear there are hundreds of religionists in this country who never think of understanding that which they attend to under the name of religion. They pass through the habitual forms, listening to and it may be, joining in the liturgy, till at length the service is finished, the day is over and the thing is done! The language of devotion has thus slipped through the lips without having leaped from the heart. Among ourselves, I fear there may be many who are content with listening to the sound of gracious words, who never pierce through the shell of the words into the kernel of the meaning—satisfied with the external, which is nothing—they miss the internal, which is everything!
“Do you understand these things?” then, is a question which may be asked and should be asked often of every worshipper, for it is only so far as we enter into religious worship, understanding what we are doing, and casting our hearts into it, that it can be at all acceptable to God. The Lord’s Prayer is quite as good said backwards as forwards if you do not say it from the heart. There is quite as much likelihood of a benediction in a number of words thrown out pell-mell, without any kind of connection, as there would be in the best-arranged sermon, if there is not an attentive ear and an understanding heart. Words that touch not the understanding glide over us as oil over a slab of marble, without effect. Men may perish with the Gospel in their houses! They often do perish with the Gospel ringing in their ears, for until they understand its importance, it cannot became a soul-saving word to them!
Nor can it become a sanctifying word to any except as far as they receive it into the understanding. If we were to hear the Gospel in Latin, after a fashion never so orthodox, one might be no more edified by it than by listening to so much blasphemy, because it is not the thing heard, but the thing understood and received into the heart which blesses the soul. Do let me exhort all of you who are in the habit of going up to the House of God, never to be content unless you feel that you have got a hold upon the Truth of God that is being taught. O you Christian people, I beseech you not to be satisfied with merely the terms of theology without getting into the pith and marrow of them! To realize in your own soul, by experience, the meaning of a Doctrine is the only way of knowing it! Those men never forget a Truth who have had it burned into them as with a hot iron, by feeling the bitterness of their soul for need of it and the preciousness of that Truth to their soul when they receive it. He who does not receive the Truth of God in the very power and force of it has but a name to live while he is dead.
I think these observations are warranted from the fact that though our Lord preached the mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven in the plainest parables to the listening crowd, the very plainness of His speech, in using familiar metaphors to make spiritual Truths common, became, through the hardness of their hearts, embarrassing to them—they stumbled at the mere outward figure, but never learned the inward meaning! It was to His own chosen twelve, His favored and elect ones, He expanded the riddles when He took them aside and then afterwards enquired of them lest they should have missed the meaning of His exposition, “Have you understood all these things?” The outward testimony of the Gospel may be addressed to the multitude, but the understanding of it is conveyed with transparent clearness to His own people.
To hear it is a privilege, but such a privilege as may end without the salvation of your soul and with the aggravation of your doom! But to understand it is the privilege which leads to eternal life—and happy are they who thus find the way to God’s right hand.
I. Let us first consider this searching question—“Have you understood all these things?”—as spoken to those who can humbly, but yet confidently, say, “YES, WE HAVE UNDERSTOOD THESE THINGS.”
I believe there are many of us here who, although we would not like to boast of what we know and could but confess our ignorance before God, yet dare not be so false to our own experience as to deny that we do know the things which make for our eternal peace. We can say with the man whose eyes were opened, “One thing I know, whereas I was blind, now I see.” We understand at least as much as this—that we are sinners, lost and ruined in ourselves, and that in Jesus all our help is found. We understand that we were cast away in the first Adam, and that our rescue is found in the Second Adam, to whom we look and to whom we are now united by a union that can never be broken. We understand this, also, that upon His Advent into this world, upon His holy life, His blessed death, His Resurrection, His Ascension and the power which He now possesses at the right hand of the Father—upon Him in all these respects we rest, and rest entirely! If we have not learned enough to understand all mysteries and open up all prophesies, yet we do know that Christ is precious to our soul, that He is the appointed Savior, that He is our Savior and that we are saved through Him. Yes, blessed be His name, we can say that we have understood, in our measure, all these things—not as we shall understand them, not as we shall know them, by-and-by, when clouds and darkness shall all have disappeared and we shall be in the clear light of the Throne of God—but we have understood these things sufficiently to be led to cast ourselves on Jesus and to be affected in our daily life and conversation by the Truths which Jesus Christ has taught us!