IV. This is my last point: consider WHAT WE OUGHT TO DO.
If there is such a Physician as this, and we have broken hearts, it goes
without saying that, first of all, we ought to resort to him. When people
are told that they have an incurable disease, a malady that will soon
bring them to their grave, they are much distressed; but if, somewhere or
other, they hear that the disease may be cured after all, they say,
“Where? Where?” Well, perhaps it is thousands of miles away; but they
are willing to go if they can. Or the medicine may be very unpleasant or
very expensive; but if they find that they can be cured, they say, “I will
have it.” If anyone came to their door, and said, “Here it is, it will heal
you; and you can have it for nothing, and as much as you ever want of
it;” there would be no difficulty in getting rid of any quantity of the
medicine, so long as we found people sick. Now, if you have a broken
heart to-night, you will be glad to have Christ. I had a broken heart once,
and I went to him and he healed it in a moment, and made me sing for
joy! Young men and women, I was about fifteen or sixteen when he
healed me. I wish that you would go to him now, while you are yet
young. The age of his patients does not matter. Are you younger than
fifteen? Boys and girls may have broken hearts; and old men and old
women may have broken hearts; but they may come to Jesus and be
healed. Let them come to him to-night, and seek to be healed.
When you are about to go to Christ, possibly you ask, “How shall I go to
him?” Go by prayer. One said to me, the other day, “I wish that you
would write me a prayer, sir.” I said, “No, I cannot do that, go and tell
the Lord what you want.” He replied, “Sometimes I feel such a great
want that I do not know what it is I do want, and I try to pray, but I
cannot. I wish that somebody would tell me what to say.” “Why!” I said,
“the Lord has told you what to say. This is what he has said: ‘Take with
you words, and turn to the Lord: say unto him, Take away all iniquity,
and receive us graciously.’ ” Go to Christ in prayer with such words as
those, or any others that you can get. If you cannot get any words, tears
are just as good, and rather better; and groans and sighs and secret
desires will be acceptable with God.
But add faith to them. Trust the Physician. You know that no ointment
will heal you if you do not put it on the wound. Oftentimes when there is
a wound, you want something with which to strap the ointment on. Faith
straps on the heavenly heal-all. Go to the Lord with your broken heart,
and believe that he can heal you. Believe that he alone can heal you;
trust him to do it. Fall at his feet, and say, “If I perish, I will perish
here. I believe that the Son of God can save me, and I will be saved by
him; but I will never look anywhere else for salvation. ‘Lord, I believe;
help thou mine unbelief!’” If you have come as far as that, you are very
near the light; the great Physician will heal your broken heart before very
long. Trust him to do it now.
When you have trusted in him, and your heart is healed, and you are
happy, tell others about him. I do not like my Lord to have any tongue-
tied children. I do not mean that I would want you all to preach. When a
whole church takes to preaching, it is as if the whole body were a mouth,
and that would be a vacuum. I want you to tell others, in some way or
other, what the Lord has done for you; and be earnest in endeavouring to
bring others to the great Physician. You all recollect, therefore I need not
tell you again, the story that we had about the doctor at one of our
hospitals, a year or two ago. He healed a dog’s broken leg, and the
grateful animal brought other dogs to have their broken legs healed. That
was a good dog; some of you are not half as good as that dog. You
believe that Christ is blessing you, yet you never try to bring others to
him to be saved. That must not be the case any longer. We must excel
that dog in our love for our species; and it must be our intense desire
that, if Christ has healed us, he should heal our wife, our child, our
friend, our neighbour; and we should never rest till others are brought to
him.
Then, when others are brought to Christ, or even if they will not be
brought to him, be sure to praise him. If your broken heart has been
healed, and you are saved, and your sins forgiven, praise him. We do not
sing half enough. I do not mean in our congregations; but when we are
at home. We pray every day. Do we sing every day? I think that we
should. Matthew Henry used to say, about family prayer, “They that pray
do well; they that read and pray do better; they that read and pray and
sing do best of all.” I think that Matthew Henry was right. “Well, I have
no voice,” says one. Have you not? Then you never grumble at your wife;
your never find fault with your food; you are not one of those who make
the household unhappy by your evil speeches. “Oh, I do not mean that!”
No, I thought you did not mean that. Well, praise the Lord with the same
voice that you have used for complaining. “But I could not lend a tune,”
says one. Nobody said you were to do so. You can at least sing as I do.
My singing is of a very peculiar character. I find that I cannot confine
myself to one tune; in the course of a verse I use half-a-dozen tunes; but
the Lord, to whom I sing, never finds any fault with me. He never
blames me, because I do not keep this tune or that. I cannot help it. My
voice runs away with me, and my heart too; but I keep on humming
something or other by way of praising God’s name. I would like you to
do the same. I used to know an old Methodist; and the first thing in the
morning, when he got up, he began singing a bit of a Methodist hymn;
and if I met the old man during the day, he was always singing. I have
seen him in his little workshop, with his lapstone on his knee, and he
was always singing, and beating with his hammer. When I said to him
once, “Why do you always sing, dear brother?” he replied, “Because I
always have something to sing about.” That is a good reason for singing.
If our broken hearts have been healed, we have something to sing about
in time and throughout eternity. Let us begin to do so to the praise of the
glory of his grace, who “healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their
wounds.” God bless all the broken hearts that are in this congregation to-
night, for Jesus’ sake! Amen.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
