Quiet Talks on John's GospelGordon, S. D. (Samuel Dickey)
Religion
Quiet Talks on John's Gospel
Gordon, S. D. (Samuel Dickey)
Bible. John -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.
I recall a little old bent-over woman of seventy-odd years up in
northern Sweden, a Laplander. She had come a long three days' journey on
her snow-shoes to the meetings. Night after night as I talked through
interpretation her deep-set black eyes glowed and glowed. But when one
night an hour or more was spent in voluntary prayer she needed no
interpreter. And as I listened I needed none. I _felt_ that she _knew_
that _Jesus spoke Lappish_. The two were face to-face in closest touch
of spirit.
And so it is everywhere. The flaxen-haired Holland maid kneeling by her
single cot _knows_ that Jesus talks Dutch, and her homely hearthfire
Dutch, too, at that. And the earnest Polish peasant in his Carpathian
cabin bowed before the symbol his eyes have known from infancy is
talking into an ear that knows both Polish accent and Polish heart. So
with the German of the Saxon highlands, and of the simpler speech of the
Teutonic lowlands. So with the olive-skinned Latin and the darker-hued
African kneeling on opposite sides, north and south, of the great
Central-earth Sea. Wherever knowledge of Jesus has been carried, He is
_recognized_ and claimed _as their own_ regardless of national or social
lines.
I knew a minister of our Southland, but whose public service took him to
all parts of our country. He had been reared in the South and knew the
coloured people by heart, and loved them. And when he returned to his
Southern home town he would frequently preach for the coloured people.
He was preaching to them one Sabbath with the simplicity and fervour for
which he was noted.
At the close among others, one big black man grasped his hand hard as he
thanked him for the preaching. And then with his great child-eyes big
and aglow, he said, "Youse got a white skin, but youse got a black
heart." And you know what he meant,--you have a black man's heart, you
have a heart like mine. Your heart makes my heart burn.
Now _Jesus had a Hack heart_. He had a white heart. He had a yellow, a
brown heart. He had a Jew heart, a Roman, a Greek, a Samaritan heart.
Aye, He had a _world_ heart, He had _a human heart_. And He _has_.
There's a _Man_ on the throne yonder, bone of our bone, heart of our
heart, pain of our pain.
There's more of God since Jesus went back. Human experience has been
taken up into the heart of God. Jesus belonged to us. And now belongs to
us more than ever, and we to Him. The human heart has felt His
tremendous wooing. It has recognized its Kinsman wherever He has been
able to get to them, and it has gladly yielded to the plea of His love.
Jerusalem might carpenter a cross for Him, but the world would weave its
heartfelt devotion into a crown of love for Him, bestudded with the dewy
tears of its gratitude, sparkling like diamonds in the light of His
face.
IV
Closer Wooing
_An Evening with Opening Hearts: the Story of a Supper and a Walk
in the Moonlight and the Shadows_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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