So I brought him to your disciples, and they could not cure him. - Matthew 17:16
There are a great many teachers in our churches who have had similar experiences. People have been brought to them possessed by evil spirits, and they have failed to cast out the demons. They have tried every device, gentle and extreme. They have prayed and labored, they have talked and wept; but the evil spirits in their scholars have defied all efforts to get rid of them. Teachers of such depraved scholars may learn some lessons here.
It should be somewhat encouraging to us that even Christ's apostles met at least one case that they could not do anything with -- no wonder if ordinary people like us fail now and then! It is failures like these in the apostles that bring them down to our level. When we see them victorious and successful at every point, we are discouraged. But when we find them baffled and defeated, we see that they were human, just like us, and could do nothing by themselves. We get far more real help from St. Paul's experience with his “thorn” (2 Corinthians 12:7-10) than we get from his “third heaven”(2 Corinthians 12:2-4) exaltation. In this last example he is so far beyond us that we cannot follow him; in the first example we are on familiar ground.
It may be instructive also to study the reasons of the apostles' failure. For one, the Master was absent; the disciple cannot do anything without His Lord. This is a lesson we should think on deeply in our own minds. Unless we have Christ with us, all our Christian work will fail miserably. Of ourselves we can never change a heart. Another reason was a lack of faith in the disciples -- unbelief makes any one weak. Though absent, Christ's power would have been theirs if their faith hadn't failed. Still another reason was the difficulty of this case: all cases are not alike difficult, some requiring more faith and spiritual power than others.
No comments:
Post a Comment