THE POWER OF UNBELIEF
‘And He could there do no mighty work, save that He laid His hands upon a few sick folk, and healed them.’
Mark 6:5
What an idea it gives us of the wonder-working power of Jesus—that to ‘lay His hands on a few sick folk, and heal them,’ was not accounted as any very ‘mighty’ thing!
But I shall have to do more with what the Lord did not do, than with what He did. Great and many as are the things which God has done for every one of us, they are but as nothing in comparison with what He might have done, and with what He would have done, if only we had let Him.
I. The place was Nazareth, the most privileged spot of the whole earth; for there, of thirty-three years, Jesus spent nearly thirty. And there it is evident that His heart went forth to do ‘many mighty works.’ Yet in the minds of the men of Nazareth there was an unholy familiarity with holy things—with the name, and the person, and the work, and the truth of Jesus Christ. See the result. They had no faith—the material view destroyed the spiritual. They grovelled in the confidence of an outside knowledge till they became steeped in unbelief. No city ever disbelieved like Nazareth, and so we have the inevitable consequence, the essential retribution, ‘He could there do no mighty work.’
II. The counterpart.—With the whole face of truth—the sublime truth, the truth in Jesus—none upon the whole earth can be more familiar than you. You have looked at it—ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years. Have we come to treat these things as some very ordinary concern of daily occurrence? Has some truth been so long before our eyes that we have lost the sense of its power and majesty, and have no appreciation of its beauty? Are there not thousands and tens of thousands with us who are occupied with the accidental and the external?
III. There are two great truths which we must always lay down as fundamental principles. One is, that the love and beneficence of God are always welling and waiting, like some gushing fountain, to pour themselves out to all His creatures. And the other, that there must be a certain state of mind to contain it—a preparation of the heart to receive the gift—both, indeed, of grace, but the one, the moral condition of the soul, previous and absolutely necessary to the other. Before you can have the gift you must believe the Giver.
Illustrations
(1) ‘You have been engaged in some work to do good to a fellow-creature, and you have laboured long and hard, and you have not succeeded. Why? You have distrusted the issue. You thought you were distrusting yourself, but you were distrusting God. You said, “Who am I? how can I do this?” when you ought to have felt, “It is God’s work, it is for God’s glory; to it He has promised success, and therefore it will be, though I am all ignorance, and all weakness, and all sin.” But because of your want of faith, in you God could “not do the mighty work.” ’
(2) ‘You go to your knees in prayer, and, within the range of the promises, there is no limit to the answers which God has covenanted to that prayer. But you can tell of no success—you bring up your burdens, and you take them back with you again; your soul was cold and powerless when you began, and it is cold and powerless now that you have done. No sense of peace, no acquisition of strength, no light to the soul, has broken through the iron and the brass with which your heaven was sealed. The promises sound by you, but you cannot grasp them; your supplications seem to have found no entrance to God’s mercy seat. And why is it thus? You have not really believed that God was going to do what you sought.’

JESUS MARVELLED
‘And He marvelled because of their unbelief.’
Mark 6:6
It is recorded twice, and only twice, that ‘Jesus marvelled.’ And it is remarkable that both times it was on a matter of ‘faith.’ Once, at its greatness; once, because it was so small.
I. All unbelief is an offence against reason.—The region of faith lies beyond reason; but reason takes us to the border, and shows us it is reasonable to go in. We can demonstrate, by close reasoning, that there is a revelation, and that the revelation is our Bible. And from that moment reason itself demands of us that we believe all that that Bible contains. Then the Bible admits us into the fields of faith. Once in the region of faith, reason stops. We are amongst the unfathomable, the mysterious, the incomprehensible. We have simply to accept. To reason here would be out of place.
II. What is faith?
( a) Faith realises. It makes unseen things realities to the mind; as great realities, and greater, than the objects of our senses; clearer than the things in which we daily move. It turns those unseen things into substances. It is the ‘substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’
( b) Faith appropriates. It makes those things our own. I see Christ on His Cross. He is very real to me. His blood is flowing. And I hear Him say, ‘This blood is shed for you. It is My life given instead of your life, that you may live, and never die. It pays all your debt. Your sins are cancelled.’ And as He says it, He looks on me, and I take it home to my heart of hearts, and I say, ‘Yes, Lord; I know it, I feel it; I am forgiven, my sins are pardoned, and I am free and happy. And I am safe. For Thou hast said it.’ That is faith.
( c) Faith is the mother of love. If I have it, I cannot help but love. I am forgiven. I am loved. And I love again. The ray must reflect itself. And that love makes holiness. It must speak; it must act.
This is faith’s pedigree. This is faith’s history.
III. Where is the secret of this strange marvel?—‘Mighty works’ are being done around you: many are converted; many are being raised to a new life; and the Mighty One stands at your door and knocks; and if He once came in, O what a change! from unrestfulness to rest! from ‘the wilderness’ to ‘the garden of the Lord.’ But unfaith has locked and barred the door. And there He stands! Perhaps He is going away to someone else! ‘He marvels at your unbelief.’
Illustration
‘We can never be too much on our guard against unbelief. It is the oldest sin in the world. It began in the garden of Eden, when Eve listened to the devil’s promises instead of believing God’s words, ‘Ye shall die.’ It is the most ruinous of all sins in its consequences. It brought death into the world. It kept Israel for forty years out of Canaan. It is the sin which specially fills hell. “He that believeth not shall be damned.” It is the most foolish and inconsistent of all sins. It makes a man refuse the plainest evidence, shut his eyes against the clearest testimony, and yet believe lies. Worst of all, it is the commonest sin in the world. Thousands are guilty of it on every side. In profession they are Christians. They know nothing of Paine and Voltaire. But in practice they are really unbelievers. They do not implicitly believe the Bible, and receive Christ as their Saviour. Let us watch our own hearts carefully in the matter of unbelief. The heart, and not the head, is the seat of its mysterious power. It is neither the want of evidence, nor the difficulties of Christian doctrine, that make men unbelievers. It is want of will to believe.’

THE POWER OF A GOOD LIFE
‘But when Herod heard thereof, he said, It is John, whom I beheaded: he is risen from the dead.’
Mark 6:16
The Baptist had been slain in prison, but a new star was shedding light on all the land. Our Blessed Lord was doing unnumbered works of mercy, and Herod was alarmed. Note—
I. A good life is always the same.—A life of piety issues in like beauty and fragrance in all ages and in all parts of the world. When a man becomes a Christian he has not to do what has never been done before, but simply what his predecessors have done. He has not to strike out an original path, but to be a follower ‘of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises.’
II. A good life never dies.—Persecution may kill the man, but it cannot blot out his memory, or destroy his influence. It is true that even in the ordinary course of things there are those removed by death whose continuance on the earth seems necessary to the progress of the Church. Yet how often do we find that, as from the ashes of the dead spring the heart for higher love and the arm for sublimer service?
III. A good life troubles the bad life.—A wicked man may do much to be at ease in his wickedness; he may drive away or kill the messengers of God; he may flatter himself that henceforth he can go on in his own way, neither fearing God nor regarding man; but at some point in his life a word will go blazing, rushing through his soul, a hand will smite him, a presence will confront him, and he will find that it is all in vain that he has attempted to confound the difference between right and wrong.
IV. A good life triumphs.—It triumphs:—
( a) Historically. Herod’s name is execrated; the Baptist’s extolled.
( b) In its influence. John was killed in the prison, but was alive in the palace.
( c) In its power. Herod’s kingdom passed away; the voice of the Baptist sounds aloud throughout the world to-day.
Illustration
‘ “God buries His workman, but carries on His work.” When the Rev. C. S. Thompson died of his exertions in fighting the famine and cholera among the Bhils of Western India, four other missionaries, out of many who volunteered, were selected to carry on and extend the work. The whole of these, with the Rev. A. Outram and his wife, who worked in another part of the district, were invalided as the result of the painful sights, incessant labours, and unhealthy surroundings. The story is much the same in each case. One after another they were found by their colleagues battling on in spite of illness, and only induced to give up when the strain had reached breaking point. When they succumbed, another set were ready to take their place.’

THE WITNESS OF THE BAPTIST
‘John had said unto Herod, It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother’s wife.’
Mark 6:18
The Baptist sets an example of boldly rebuking vice, and patiently suffering for truth’s sake.
I. His boldness.—He does not spare the king. What excuses he might have made! ‘It would be a bit of bad policy to alienate the king, to lose his favour. While he was friendly, John had an opportunity of getting hold of so many people and handing them on to Jesus.’ Ah, how often we are deceived about this matter of popularity and of influence! We are so loath to lose influence, to stand by principle. We sacrifice the very object of which influence and popularity may be given for the sake of retaining it. For what is influence given? What is the worth of popularity save that it may be used?
II. He rebuked vice.—‘I will speak of Thy testimonies even before kings, and will not be ashamed.’ That was the motto of John the Baptist; that must be the law of the Christian Church, and of Christian men and women in whatever sphere or department of life. ‘Before kings’—even the uncrowned King Demos who utters his mandates in the daily press, or the king or queen of your own circle of society. The Christian religion has a code of morals just as imperious in its demands as the Christian creed. Do not be afraid of being thought bigoted or prudish. Raise the standard. There are many who will rally round it if only some one in the office, in the club, in the drawing-room, will have the courage to plant it.
III. The Divine law concerning marriage.—The special subject-matter of the Baptist’s witness was a protest on behalf of God’s law concerning marriage. It was in defence of the sanctity of family life and of domestic purity. Does that not come home with a special application to us in these days? There are divers influences working to undermine our high, our true conception of the dignity of family life, of the Divine law concerning marriage. The Divine law concerning marriage is the lifelong union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others on either side. We are concerned with the Divine law. The Church must stand by that. The Church cannot give her benediction, she cannot admit to her high privileges and sacraments those who forsake or transgress the Divine law concerning marriage.
Bishop A. C. A. Hall.
Illustration
‘From Josephus we learn that the Baptist was imprisoned at the castle of Machærus, on the east coast of the Dead Sea. This castle, however, is stated to have belonged to Aretas. But Aretas made war on Herod when the latter put away his first wife (the former’s daughter), and it is supposed that, in the course of the war, it fell into Herod’s hands. If Herod were at this time engaged in a campaign on the frontier, his headquarters might be at Machærus; which would account for the apparent quickness with which the order to behead John was carried out. Such an absence from Galilee would also account for his not hearing of Jesus till after John’s death. Subsequently, Herod’s army was totally routed by Aretas, which was regarded by the Jews as a judgment for the murder of the Baptist.’

WHERE HEROD FAILED
‘For Herod feared John, knowing that he was a just man and an holy, and observed him; and when he heard him, he did many things, and heard him gladly.’
Mark 6:20
There is no greater peril than the peril of playing with spiritual convictions, or than that of amusing ourselves with God’s truth, taking pleasure in hearing it, yet not making it the rule of action, or really doing anything to promote those objects.
I. Where Herod failed.—The story of Herod contains a remarkable instance of this. We can quite imagine with what emotions of alarm the lewd king may have heard the tale of the wild unearthly man, with his proclamation of a heavenly kingdom at hand, to whom the whole nation flocked. The impure Herod saw in John one whom the shadows of eternity appeared visibly to encircle. To hear of him was, as it were, to enter into the cloud, and as he entered, he feared.
II. Yet ‘he did many things.’—What those many things were which Herod amended at the bidding of John we vainly surmise. A few of the grosser corruptions of his foul course were perchance removed, but he could not be turned to a thorough reformation of his own life. The only voice which had ever stirred the better spirit within him was quenched in blood, and the last state became worse than the first.
III. Warnings.—From Herod’s history we learn ( a) how it may happen that a man who has manifested a certain interest in and deference to religion will yet turn against religion when it assails his cherished idol; ( b) how religious instruction, when not honestly followed out, becomes itself a snare.
Bishop Woodford.
Illustration
‘What is it worth—to feel an abstract respect for religion? What is it worth—to like preaching, to be moved by preaching? What is it worth—to prefer to hear a strictly solemn ministry? What is it worth—to delight in pictures of truth? What is it worth—to do “many things” for conscience sake? All that Herod did! It is very evident that Herod was a weak character. Do not think little of weakness of character. It is the cradle of almost all that is wrong. He had strong convictions. He made a partial surrender of himself to God. But Herod never showed the marks of real conversion. His religion was wrong in its foundation. It was a religion of nothing but fear.’

THE REST BY THE WAY
‘And He said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while.’
Mark 6:31
Here we see that Jesus cares for those who work for Him. How may we find true rest, and real and permanent enjoyment in our hours of recreation?
I. Rest must be earned.—Jesus had been busily engaged in preaching in the villages of Galilee, and so had His disciples. Their rest was no mere accentuation of idleness, as so many so-called holidays are in these days of self-indulgence and luxury. In these hurrying, straining days, and in this unresting city, tired bodies and aching heads must have repose. Alas for those who never get it! But be sure of this—that the man who does not work cannot rest. True rest looks back on times of toil and of effort earnest and sustained.
II. Rest should give power for further service.—The withdrawal was only that they might ‘rest a while,’ and so be ready for work again. It is so with every man who works for God, whether it be in strictly religious effort or in the ordinary round of common duty. There are always fresh doors ahead to enter, fresh fields to win; and Christ calls us across the lake on to the mountain-top to rest with Him, but only that we may go back to the western shore, and down to the dusty plain, there to engage in bolder enterprise of effort and of service.
III. Rest in His presence.—The Master takes the disciples with Him. His word is ‘Come’—not ‘Go’—‘apart and rest a while’ with God in work, in times of pressing anxiety, of course when trouble comes and death looms near; but in pleasure, away and to make merry with our friends. Is that so? Can we say of our pleasures, ‘In Thy presence is the fulness of joy, and at Thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore’? Let us have done, once and for all, with the thought that in our hours of pleasure at least we may forget God and get away to make merry with our friends. Let us have done with the thought that His presence will dull any pure enjoyment or sadden any honest joy. Jesus Christ is willing to be with us ‘all the days’—the holidays as well as work-days.
—Bishop T. W. Drury.
Illustrations
(1) ‘ “The Lord rested.… Thou shalt rest.” We know that attempts have been made to ignore this principle because of its positive form, but they have always failed. At the French Revolution one item of reform was to alter the law of the Sabbath, but it came to naught. A still stranger instance of a very different kind is found in the Life of John Wesley, who, with all his goodness, was not always practical in the things of common life. We read that Wesley founded a boys’ school at Kingswood, near to Bristol, and himself drew up the rules of the school. Among them was the strange rule that the boys should have no holidays, no recreation, no games. It was to be all work and no play, and that produced not only dull boys, but it produced very naughty boys; and Wesley was sent for, and, in words which have become memorable in quite a different connection, said: “We must mend this, or we must end it,” and so it was amended by games being restored. Rest is necessary, because we are men; and, moreover, as men created in the image of God, we must rest as God rested.’
(2) ‘ “How shall I spend my holiday?” Do you really ask that question? Here is a certain test of true recreation. Do our amusements refresh us for future work? Can we look forward in them with real satisfaction to that work, and feel that they are fitting us for renewed labour, or do they tend merely to dissipate our powers? Do they send us back “like giants refreshed,” with minds eager and keen to spend and be spent in the work to which God has called us; or do we creep back unwillingly to work, like the schoolboy of bygone days, because our pleasures have left us limp and fagged, the worse and not the better for our so-called recreation? That is a test which all of us can apply to ourselves, only let us do it fearlessly and honestly.’

FED OF GOD
‘And He commanded them to make all sit down by companies.’
Mark 6:39
The subject of which I wish to speak to you is the need which comes to men of simply being fed by God, of ceasing from self-assertion, and simply being receptive to the influences which come to them from Divinity.
I. Life’s perpetual energy.—There is a danger for many men, if not for all, in the perpetual output of energy which so much of our life involves. Life is made up of tasks and problems. It is one process of education; the calling out of powers by their use. It is the tendency of all the practical necessities of life, the constant outward movement of activity. ‘All is going out, nothing is coming in.’ Is not that the dismay which settles down upon many an experience as it attains to middle life?
II. The blessedness of a pause.—This applies also to our sacred and religious occupations. Nothing so tends to keep God out of our lives as work for God done in a wrong and superficial spirit. The disciples as well as the stragglers from Capernaum, must have needed Christ’s call to sit down and be fed. The more earnestly you are at work for Jesus, the more you need times when what you are doing for Him passes totally out of your mind, and the only thing worth thinking of seems to be what He is doing for you.
III. Is it not possible to rest in working, so that in the very act which exhausts, I shall get my renewal and supply? Here is a man who is engaged in a wholly secular employment. At the same time he is a Christian man who loves Christ; but all the day he is busy at the office or the shop. He knows how his life is always out-going. What can he do? Once in a while he turns aside and leaves the business. He makes his Sunday genuinely sacred. He consecrates his hour of prayer. What happens then? The blessing surely comes. God feeds the docile and expectant life, and it returns to work purer, greater. Why are you selling your goods? If you can say, ‘Because it is my duty, in order that I may maintain my family, and serve my generation, and honour God by usefulness,’ then the act opens itself and becomes a Church—a gate of heaven. In every act, consciously and devoutly done for God’s sake, God gives Himself to the soul and feeds it in the act.
—Bishop Phillips Brooks.
Illustration
‘There are races, and there have been times to which this need of rest and receptivity has been the most familiar truth. Open the record of the fourth century, and it is full of the pictures of hermits sitting on rough mountain sides, listening for the voice of God. Let your boat drop quietly down the Ganges to-day, and along its banks the silent figures sit like carved brown statues, day after day, with eyes open and fixed on vacancy, clearing themselves of all thought or desire, that being emptied of self they may see God. The East believes only too readily what the West finds it so very hard to accept, that no life is complete which does not sometimes sit trustfully waiting to be fed by God.’

MYSTERIOUS PASSAGES OF LIFE
‘And He saw them toiling in rowing; for the wind was contrary unto them.’
Mark 6:48
He saw them ‘toiling’—the word in the original is very strong, wrought, tested, tortured—yet, nevertheless, continuing the task which seemed so hopeless, and persevering in the unequal combat, which all the while was producing the distress.
This Jesus saw then, and what does He see now?
I. The voyage of life.—We are all bound together in one holy fellowship, and our first duty is to advance and propel ourselves and each other—all the Church—to the appointed goal. And on that voyage, in which we are all bound, every one of us has his own appointed work to do—and that work is to each man a thing definite, and real, and hard.
II. Difficulties.—Who that has gone but a little on this course does not know how difficult grows the way, and how many are the things that rise up against him! And with all this there come the aggravations of a mind harassed and perplexed with the obscurities in which it finds itself involved; there is the painful questioning, ‘Is this the path?’ And then there comes that bitter sense of loneliness—no voice of love, human or Divine; early feelings lost, or going away with the lost Comforter; the breaking of all we used to lean upon; the miserable desolation; no prayers answered, no sorrow healed, no good done, no hearty responses—but all, above, below, around, on every side, all drear and silent! These are true passages of life.
III. God sends a word of comfort.—Jesus sees you. He sees every stroke of that hand, every heaving of that breast, every panting of that heart, every rolling wave, every disturbing gust, every hostile breath. Darkness and distance shut out Him from you, but they never shut out you from Him. That is the point; that is the whole trial; that is the exercise of faith. I cannot see my Saviour, but my Saviour does see me; and He sees me trying to please Him, and to reach the place where He has told me that I shall see Him.
Illustration
‘If, like St. Peter, we fix our eyes on Jesus, we too may walk triumphant over the swelling waves of disbelief, and unterrified amid the rising winds of doubt; but if we turn away our eyes from Him—if, and as we are so much tempted to do, we look rather at the power and fury of those destructive elements than at Him Who can help and save—then we too shall inevitably sink. Oh, if we feel, often and often, that the water-floods threaten to drown us, and the deep to swallow up the tossed vessel of our Church and Faith, may it again and again be granted us to hear amid the storm, and the darkness, and the voices prophesying war, those two sweetest of the Saviour’s utterances—“Fear not. Only believe.” “It is I. Be not afraid.” ’

HEALED BY A TOUCH
‘As many as touched Him were made whole.’
Mark 6:56
I. The healed.—Those here noticed were evidently affected with a variety of diseases of body and mind. But whatever was the variety and inveteracy of their diseases, we are assured that they were made whole. As the material frame of those who were brought to touch even the hem of the Redeemer’s garment was restored to a state of the most perfect soundness, so the moral nature of those who experience spiritual renovation is healed and fitted for immortal life.
II. The source of healing.—The cure, whether it was the restoration of sight, or of hearing, or active power, or the casting out of devils, was effected simply by the silent but resistless virtue which passed from the Redeemer when His person or even the hem of His garment was touched. In this we have a most expressive and beautiful emblem or representation of the great fountain of moral healing essential for the diseased and sin-stricken nature of man. Spiritual soundness and strength, moral freedom and blessedness, are to be derived simply and exclusively from Him Who is become the great Physician of souls, the sole Fountain of internal purity and health.
III. The medium through which the healing influence was transmitted.—The cures which were effected on the sons and daughters of affliction gathered around the Redeemer were secured in the employment of such means as He sanctioned and approved. It was not the idle gaze of apathy and vulgar astonishment, but the struggle to come near Him—it was the touch of His person, or the hem of His robe, prompted and sustained by the conviction that He was mighty to save, that met with the benediction, ‘Go in peace, thy faith hath made thee whole.’
Illustration
‘ “It was after a walk through the village of Ehden, beneath the mountain of the cedars,” wrote Dean Stanley, describing his visit to the East in company with King Edward VII when Prince of Wales, “that we found the stairs and corridors of the castle of the Maronite chief, Sheyk Joseph, lined with a crowd of eager applicants—‘sick people taken with divers diseases,’ who hearing that there was a medical man in the party, had thronged round him, ‘beseeching him that he would heal them.’ I mention this incident because it illustrates so forcibly these scenes in the Gospel history, from which I have almost of necessity borrowed the language best fitted to express the eagerness, the hope, the anxiety of the multitude who had been attracted by the fame of his beneficent influence. It was an affecting scene; our kind doctor was distressed to find how many cases there were which, with proper medical appliances, might have been cured, and, on retiring to the ship, by the Prince of Wales’ desire, a store of medicines was sent back, with Arabic labels directing how and for what purpose they should be used.” ’