The Compass and the Cross

Welcome to Vespers, where we take up the last hour of your day.

Tonight: the compass and the cross — why ease is no proof of the right road, and why the people who love us best are the ones willing to call us into hard country.

A reminder: this is a survey of great ideas, not necessarily an endorsement of any one contribution.

There is an instrument most of us carry without knowing we carry it. It sits somewhere between the heart and the conscience, and it works like a compass. When a decision leaves us comfortable, the needle reads true north, and we conclude we are on the right road. When a decision costs us something — sleep, money, friends, reputation — the needle swings, and we conclude we have wandered. Comfort tells us we are right. Discomfort tells us we are wrong. It is a simple instrument, and it is nearly always trusted, and the whole weight of the reading we take up tonight stands against it.

Because tonight's readings gather around a letter — a letter written from a Roman prison by an old man awaiting execution, to a younger man he loved like a son. And the astonishing thing about that letter is its logic. The old man does not say, I love you, therefore stay safe. He says, in effect, I love you, therefore come share this suffering with me. The world has never quite known what to do with that sentence. The great voices of the tradition — the moralists, the philosophers, the Puritans, the poets — circle it all night long. We will let them.

We begin with the letter itself. From the second epistle of Paul to Timothy, in the King James Version:

Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, according to the promise of life which is in Christ Jesus, to Timothy, my dearly beloved son: Grace, mercy, and peace, from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. I thank God, whom I serve from my forefathers with pure conscience, that without ceasing I have remembrance of thee in my prayers night and day; greatly desiring to see thee, being mindful of thy tears, that I may be filled with joy; when I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also.

He goes on:

Wherefore I put thee in remembrance that thou stir up the gift of God, which is in thee by the putting on of my hands. For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me his prisoner: but be thou partaker of the afflictions of the gospel according to the power of God.

Hear the order of it. Affection first — my dearly beloved son, night and day in my prayers, mindful of thy tears. Then the charge — stir up the gift. And then, without any softening, the destination — be thou partaker of the afflictions. The tenderness and the summons arrive in the same breath. Paul is not writing from a study. He is writing from the place his own obedience carried him, and he is asking the man he loves most to walk the same road. If comfort were the compass, this letter would read like cruelty. It reads instead like the deepest thing love has ever said.

The book of Proverbs compresses the whole paradox into a single verse:

Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.

Sit with that a moment. The wound and the kiss have traded uniforms. The hand that hurts you may be the faithful one; the mouth that flatters you may be the enemy's. Any account of love that cannot tell the difference — that reads every wound as hatred and every kiss as kindness — has mistaken the instrument. It is navigating by comfort.

So let us examine the instrument. What do the moralists say of ease — the great collectors of prose wisdom, gathered by subject in the old encyclopedias?

From John Taylor:

All men desire ease. Never covet easy paths.

From L'Estrange:

That which we call ease is only an indolency, or a freedom from pain.

From Bishop Atterbury:

This world is a place not of rest, but of discipline.

From Thomas Fuller:

If thou desirest ease, in the first place take care of the ease of the mind, for that will make other sufferings easy.

And what of comfort itself — the thing the compass measures? The Puritans handled it with gloves, not because comfort is evil, but because it is borrowed. From Samuel Rutherford:

Of all the created comforts, God is the lender; you are the borrower, not the owner.

From Christopher Love:

The comforts we enjoy here below are not like the anchor in the bottom of the sea that holds fast in a storm, but like the flag upon the top of the mast that turns with every wind.

From Thomas Brooks:

If you take the comforts of this life in your hands, and lay them too near your hearts in affection and love to them, they will quickly melt and vanish away from you.

A flag, not an anchor. A loan, not a possession. A thing that melts when held too close. This is why comfort makes a poor compass: a needle that swings with every wind cannot point north. The moralists are not telling us to despise warmth and rest and friendship. They are telling us not to steer by them.

The old philosophers reached the same conclusion by another road, and they said it with a hardness that can still brace the spine. The Roman philosopher Seneca wrote a little dialogue called Of Providence, asking why hard things happen to good men, and his answer runs directly against the comfort compass. From Seneca, in the Stewart translation:

Do you not see how differently fathers and mothers indulge their children? how the former urge them to begin their tasks betimes, will not suffer them to be idle even on holidays, and exercise them till they perspire, and sometimes till they shed tears — while their mothers want to cuddle them in their laps, and keep them out of the sun, and never wish them to be vexed, or to cry, or to work. God bears a fatherly mind towards good men, and loves them in a manly spirit. Let them, says He, be exercised by labours, sufferings, and losses, that so they may gather true strength.

He goes on:

Those who are surfeited with ease break down not only with labour, but with mere motion and by their own weight. Unbroken prosperity cannot bear a single blow; but he who has waged an unceasing strife with his misfortunes has gained a thicker skin by his sufferings, yields to no disaster, and even though he fall yet fights on his knee.

And again, in the same dialogue:

He does not pet the good man: He tries him, hardens him, and fits him for Himself.

Seneca remembered a saying of his friend Demetrius that he said still rang and thrilled in his ears:

No one seems to me more unhappy than the man whom no misfortune has ever befallen.

Why unhappy? Because, Seneca explains, such a man has never had an opportunity of testing himself. Everything has happened according to his wish — nay, even before he has formed a wish — and so he has never been deemed worthy to conquer ill fortune. Seneca reaches for the arena:

A gladiator deems it a disgrace to be matched with an inferior, and knows that to win without danger is to win without glory. Just so Fortune; she seeks out the bravest to match herself with, passes over some with disdain, and makes for the most unyielding and upright of men, to exert her strength against them. She tried Mucius by fire, Fabricius by poverty, Rutilius by exile, Regulus by torture, Socrates by poison, Cato by death: it is ill fortune alone that discovers these glorious examples.

And he presses the point to its edge:

It does not matter what you bear, but how you bear it.

If comfort were the compass, Seneca says, then the untested man — the man whom no misfortune has ever befallen — would be the most fortunate man alive. Instead he is the poorest: rich in ease and bankrupt in proof.

Epictetus, the philosopher who had been a slave, put the same conviction in the language of the wrestling school. From the Discourses, in the Long translation:

It is circumstances, difficulties, which show what men are. Therefore when a difficulty falls upon you, remember that God, like a trainer of wrestlers, has matched you with a rough young man. For what purpose? you may say. Why, that you may become an Olympic conqueror; but it is not accomplished without sweat. In my opinion no man has had a more profitable difficulty than you have had, if you choose to make use of it as an athlete would deal with a young antagonist.

And elsewhere he asks:

What would Hercules have been if he said: How shall a great lion not appear to me, or a great boar, or savage men? And what do you care for that? If a great boar appear, you will fight a greater fight; if bad men appear, you will relieve the earth of the bad.

So say the philosophers. The road is proved by its hardness, and the man is proved by the road.

There'll be more from Vespers after this brief musical interlude.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE 1]

Welcome back to Vespers. Tonight we are taking up the compass and the cross — the old conviction that ease is no proof of the right road.

Before the break, we heard the Stoics. They carry us a good distance, but notice where they stop. For Seneca, hardship is a training ground and Fortune an anonymous sparring partner; the good man grits his way to glory and the gods watch with interest, as at a spectacle. It is bracing, but it is cold. The Scriptures say something at once gentler and more severe: the hand that appoints the hardship is not Fortune's but a Father's, and the aim is not spectacle but sonship. From the epistle to the Hebrews:

And ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him: for whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not? But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons.

The writer goes on:

Furthermore we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live? For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure; but he for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness. Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby.

Mark what this does to the compass. If chastening is the mark of sonship, then the seasons of discomfort are not evidence of abandonment — they may be evidence of adoption. The psalmist learned to read his own afflictions this way, and left three sentences in the hundred and nineteenth psalm like three entries in a convalescent's diary:

Before I was afflicted I went astray: but now have I kept thy word.

It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes.

I know, O Lord, that thy judgments are right, and that thou in faithfulness hast afflicted me.

Thou in faithfulness hast afflicted me. Not despite faithfulness. In it.

Arthur Pink took up that very verse in his study of the attributes of God. From Pink:

Trouble and affliction are not only consistent with God's love pledged in the everlasting covenant, but they are parts of the administration of the same. God is not only faithful notwithstanding afflictions, but faithful in sending them. Chastening is not only reconcilable with God's lovingkindness, but it is the effect and expression of it. It would much quieten the minds of God's people if they would remember that His covenant love binds Him to lay on them seasonable correction.

And in his chapter on the love of God, Pink presses the argument to its highest proof:

Christ was beloved of the Father, yet He was not exempted from poverty, disgrace, and persecution. He hungered and thirsted. Thus, it was not incompatible with God's love for Christ when He permitted men to spit upon and smite Him. Then let no Christian call into question God's love when he is brought under painful afflictions and trials. Learn then that spiritual blessings are the principal gifts of Divine love. How blessed to know that when the world hates us, God loves us!

There is the answer to the compass, stated at the summit. If comfort measured love, then the most beloved Son who ever lived would have been the most comfortable man who ever lived. He was not. He had not where to lay His head. The needle fails precisely at the point where love runs deepest.

Spurgeon knew this country well — he walked through long seasons of affliction himself — and his expositions of the Psalms return to it again and again. On the sixth psalm, where David pleads, O Lord, rebuke me not in thine anger, Spurgeon writes:

The Psalmist is very conscious that he deserves to be rebuked, and he feels, moreover, that the rebuke in some form or other must come upon him, if not for condemnation, yet for conviction and sanctification. Corn is cleaned with wind, and the soul with chastenings. It were folly to pray against the golden hand which enriches us by its blows. He does not ask that the rebuke may be totally withheld, for he might thus lose a blessing in disguise.

The golden hand which enriches us by its blows. Only a man who had felt both the blows and the enrichment could write that sentence. And on the twenty-second psalm — the psalm of the forsaken cry — Spurgeon looks at the verse which says God hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and writes:

Never was man so afflicted as our Savior in body and soul from friends and foes, by Heaven and Hell, in life and death. He was the foremost in the ranks of the afflicted, but all those afflictions were sent in love, and not because his Father despised and abhorred him. Jehovah always loved him, and in love laid that load upon him with a view to his ultimate glory. Under all his woes our Lord was honorable in the Father's sight, the matchless jewel of Jehovah's heart.

Foremost in the ranks of the afflicted, and all the while the matchless jewel of the Father's heart. Hold those two clauses together and the comfort compass is broken beyond repair.

Now, if affliction can be faithful, what of the man who arranges his whole life to avoid it? The tradition has a word for the virtue that has never been tested, and Milton said it best. From Milton:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

An untested virtue is not yet a virtue; it is a hope. The moralists gathered around the same fire. From John Newton:

Trials are medicines which our gracious and wise Physician prescribes, because we need them; and He proportions the frequency and the weight of them to what the case requires; let us trust in His skill, and thank Him for His prescription.

From Chatfield:

Trials are the moral ballast that often prevents our capsizing. The burdened vessel may be slow in reaching the destined port; but the vessel without ballast becomes so completely the sport of the winds and waves, that there is danger of her not reaching it at all.

From Luther:

If trial makes us impatient, then the devil laughs and is glad.

From Beza:

It belongs to the Church of God to suffer blows, not to strike them; but at the same time, let it be remembered that the Church is an anvil which has worn out many a hammer.

From Arrowsmith, one of the Westminster divines:

There is as much difference between the sufferings of the saints and those of the ungodly, as between the cords with which an executioner pinions a condemned malefactor, and the bandages wherewith a tender surgeon binds his patients.

The same rope, a different hand, an opposite purpose. And from Madame Guyon, who wrote from an actual prison:

He who fears to suffer, suffers from fear.

That last one is worth carrying in a pocket. The man who steers by comfort does not thereby escape suffering; he only exchanges the clean wound of obedience for the endless ache of avoidance.

Three more voices from the old collections, on what suffering makes of those who receive it well. From Chrysostom:

Our greatest sufferings are often our richest blessings.

From Madame Swetchine:

Those who have suffered much are like those who know many languages; they have learned to understand and be understood by all.

And Swetchine again, on the difference between God's severity and the world's:

God chastens, purifies, perfects: there are certain schools which can only mutilate, cut off, and destroy; God's mode of procedure seems to displease them; they like exclusion better than selection.

Selection, not exclusion. The knife in the Father's hand is a pruning knife.

There'll be more from Vespers after this brief musical interlude.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE 2]

Welcome back to Vespers, where tonight the subject is the compass and the cross.

We have heard the moralists on ease, the philosophers on hardship, and the Scriptures on the chastening of sons. What remains is the road itself — and no one ever drew the map of this country better than John Bunyan, who wrote his dream in a jail cell. In The Pilgrim's Progress, Christian comes to a place where the road itself preaches the whole of tonight's argument. From Bunyan:

I beheld that they all went on till they came to the foot of the Hill Difficulty, at the bottom of which was a spring. There were also in the same place two other ways besides that which came straight from the gate; one turned to the left hand, and the other to the right, at the bottom of the hill; but the narrow way lay right up the hill, and the name of the going up the side of the hill is called Difficulty. Christian now went to the spring, and drank thereof, to refresh himself, and then began to go up the hill, saying: The hill, though high, I covet to ascend, the difficulty will not me offend; for I perceive the way to life lies here. Come, pluck up heart, let's neither faint nor fear; better, though difficult, the right way to go, than wrong, though easy, where the end is woe.

He goes on:

The other two also came to the foot of the hill; but when they saw that the hill was steep and high, and that there were two other ways to go, they were resolved to go in those ways. Now the name of one of these ways was Danger, and the name of the other Destruction. So the one took the way which is called Danger, which led him into a great wood, and the other took directly up the way to Destruction, which led him into a wide field, full of dark mountains, where he stumbled and fell, and rose no more.

Mark the geography. The easy ways at the foot of that hill are named Danger and Destruction, and the hard way is the way to life. Bunyan has simply drawn the comfort compass as a map, and on the map you can see what the needle conceals: ease and safety are not the same country, and never were. Higher up the hill, Christian meets two men running the wrong way, whose names are Timorous and Mistrust, and they warn him of lions in the path. From Bunyan:

Then said Christian, You make me afraid; but whither shall I fly to be safe? If I go back to mine own country, that is prepared for fire and brimstone, and I shall certainly perish there. If I can get to the Celestial City, I am sure to be in safety there. I must venture. To go back is nothing but death; to go forward is fear of death, and life-everlasting beyond it. I will yet go forward.

I must venture. That is the sentence the compass can never produce. It is produced only by a man who has fixed his eye on something better than his own ease, and reckoned the two roads honestly: back is certain death dressed as safety; forward is the fear of death with life everlasting beyond it.

Which brings us back to the prison, and to the old man and his letter. For Paul does not merely call Timothy up the hill; he tells him what manner of man the climb requires. From the second chapter:

Thou therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier.

Endure hardness, as a good soldier. Not seek hardness — Paul is no lover of pain for its own sake, as we shall see in a moment — but endure it, the way a soldier endures the field: as the ordinary cost of the calling, under the eye of the One who enlisted him. And then, in the last chapter of the letter, the last charge of Paul's life:

I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom; preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry.

And then Paul turns from Timothy's future to his own, and the register changes. Listen to a man take the measure of his life from the scaffold:

For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing.

No note of complaint. No hint that he was cheated. The man who followed Christ instead of comfort does not audit his losses at the end; he inventories a fight fought, a course finished, a faith kept, and a crown laid up. Seneca's gladiator won glory before spectators. Paul's crown is given by a righteous Judge who loved him — and, he is careful to add, it waits for all them also that love his appearing. The reward at the top of the Hill Difficulty is not reserved for apostles.

But do not let the trumpet in those verses deceive you into thinking Paul was made of marble. A few lines later, the same letter descends into the most human paragraph he ever wrote:

Do thy diligence to come shortly unto me: for Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world, and is departed unto Thessalonica; Crescens to Galatia, Titus unto Dalmatia. Only Luke is with me. Take Mark, and bring him with thee: for he is profitable to me for the ministry. The cloke that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee, and the books, but especially the parchments.

There it all is. Demas, who steered by comfort — he loved this present world, and the needle led him to Thessalonica. The empty room — only Luke is with me. And then the cloak. The apostle who has just spoken of crowns is cold, and he would like his coat before winter, and his books. This is not a man who despises comfort. He wants the fire and the friend and the familiar parchments as much as any of us. He has simply refused to let the wanting steer. Comfort is a good gift and a bad god; a mercy to receive, a disaster to follow.

And when the room emptied and the court abandoned him, what held? Paul tells Timothy that too:

At my first answer no man stood with me, but all men forsook me: I pray God that it may not be laid to their charge. Notwithstanding the Lord stood with me, and strengthened me. And the Lord shall deliver me from every evil work, and will preserve me unto his heavenly kingdom: to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

And earlier in the letter, the sentence that carries the whole:

For the which cause I also suffer these things: nevertheless I am not ashamed: for I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.

I know whom I have believed. Not what — whom. The compass Paul steers by is not a principle but a Person, and he learned the heading from the Person Himself. For the Lord Jesus set the terms of following him in words that leave the comfort compass nothing to work with. From the gospel according to Luke:

And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it. For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away?

Take up his cross daily. The instrument of discomfort is not an obstacle on the road; it is issued equipment. And note the arithmetic of the last verse: the whole world on one side of the scale, the self on the other — and the world is found light. That is the reckoning behind every voice we have heard tonight: behind Seneca's gladiator, behind Bunyan's hill, behind the psalmist's diary of affliction, behind an old man in a Roman cell asking for his cloak and calling his son up the narrow way. Love that steers by comfort will keep everyone it loves at the bottom of the hill, in the pleasant country whose roads are named Danger and Destruction. Love that steers by Christ will say the harder and kinder thing: come up. I have been up this hill. The lions are chained. The arbour is halfway, the crown is at the top, and you were never meant to die of ease at the bottom.

One last word from Spurgeon before the poem, because it gathers the whole evening into a few lines. Commenting on the psalm which says the Lord trieth the righteous, he writes:

He does not hate them, but only tries them. They are precious to him, and therefore he refines them with afflictions. None of the Lord's children may hope to escape from trial, nor, indeed, in our right minds, would any of us desire to do so, for trial is the channel of many blessings.

Nor would any of us desire to do so. That is the compass finally recalibrated — not a grim resignation to hardship, but a sober refusal to pray ourselves out of the very channel the blessings come through. And it was at just this point in his exposition that Spurgeon reached for a hymn, as we now do.

We close with William Cowper — a man acquainted with darkness if any poet ever was, and who still could write these stanzas, which Spurgeon loved to quote:

'Tis my happiness below not to live without the cross; but the Savior's power to know, sanctifying every loss.

Trials make the promise sweet; trials give new life to prayer; trials bring me to his feet, lay me low, and keep me there.

Did I meet no trials here, no chastisement by the way; might I not, with reason, fear I should prove a cast-away?

Bastards may escape the rod, sunk in earthly vain delight; but the true-born child of God must not — would not, if he might.

Good night.