The paradox of my text needs little explanation, Buy without money and without price.' The contradiction on the surface is but intended to make emphatic this blessed truth, which I pray may reach your memories and hearts, that the only conditions are a sense of need, and a willingness to take--nothing less and nothing more. We must recognise our penury and must abandon self, and put away all ideas of having a finger in our own salvation, and be willing--which, strangely and sadly enough, many of us are not--to be under obligations to God's unhelped and undeserved love for all.
Cheap things are seldom valued. Ask a high price and people think that the commodity is precious. A man goes into a fair, for a wager, and he carries with him a try full of gold watches and offers to sell them for a farthing apiece, and nobody will buy them. It does not, I hope, degrade the subject, if I say Jesus Christ comes into the market-place of the world with His hands full of the gifts which His pierced hands have bought, that He may give them away. He says, Will you take them? And you, and you, and you, pass by on the other side, and go away to another merchant, and buy dearly things that are not worth the having.
My father, my father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldst thou not have done it?' Would you not? Swing at the end of a pole, with hooks in your back; measure all the way from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas, lying down on your face and rising at each length; do a hundred things which heathens and Roman Catholics and unspiritual Protestants think to be the way to get salvation; deny yourselves things that you would like to do; do things that you do not want to do; give money that you would like to keep; avoid habits that are very sweet, go to church or chapel when you have no heart for worship; and so try to balance the account. If the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, thou wouldst have done it. How much rather when he says, Wash, and be clean.' Nothing in my heart I bring.' You do not bring anything. Simply to Thy Cross I cling.' Do you? Do you? Jesus Christ catches up the comes' of my text, and He says, Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink.' Brethren, I lay it on your hearts and consciences to answer Him--never mind about me--to answer Him: Sir, give me this water that I thirst not.'
