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        Title: Spurgeon's Sermons Volume 35: 1889
   Creator(s): Spurgeon, Charles Haddon (1834-1892)
CCEL Subjects: All; Sermons;
   LC Call no: BV42
  LC Subjects:

               Practical theology

               Worship (Public and Private) Including the church year, Christian
               symbols, liturgy, prayer, hymnology

               Times and Seasons. The church year
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          Shoes of Iron, and Strength Sufficient: A New Year's Promise

   A Sermon

   (No. 2062)

   Intended for Reading on Lord's-day, January 6th, 1889,

   Delivered by

   C. H. SPURGEON,

   At the [1]Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington

   On Thursday Evening, March 29th, 1888.

   "And of Asher he said, Let Asher be blessed with children; let him be
   acceptable to his brethren, and let him dip his foot in oil. Thy shoes
   shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength
   be."'Deuteronomy 33:24-25.

   I once heard an old minister say that he thought the blessing of Asher
   was peculiarly the blessing of ministers; and his eyes twinkled as he
   added, "At any rate, they are usually blessed with children, and it is
   a great blessing for them if they are acceptable to their brethren, and
   if they are so truly anointed that they even dip their foot in oil."
   Well, well, I pray that all of us who preach the gospel may enjoy this
   triplet of blessings in the highest sense. If our quiver is not full of
   children according to the flesh, yet may we have many born unto God
   through our ministry. May we be blessed by being made spiritual fathers
   to very many, who shall be brought by us to receive life, pardon,
   peace, and holiness, through our Lord Jesus. What is the use of our
   life if it be not so? To what end have we preached unless we see souls
   born into the family of grace? My inmost soul longs to see all my
   hearers born anew: this would be my greatest joy, my highest
   blessedness. Ask for me the blessing of Asher'"Let Asher be blessed
   with children"; and may the Lord make my spiritual offspring to be as
   the sands upon the sea-shore.

   It is a great blessing from the Lord when our speech is sweet to the
   ears of saints'when we have something to bring forth which our brethren
   in Christ can accept, and which comes to them with a peculiar
   preciousness and power, so that they can receive it, and feel that it
   is thoroughly acceptable to them. We do not wish to be acceptable to
   the worldly wise, nor to the error-hunters of the day; but we are very
   anxious to be pleasant to the Lord's own children'our brethren in
   Christ. They have a holy taste whereby they discern spiritual meats,
   and we would bring forth for food that which they will account to be
   nourishing and savoury. Every minister prays to be "acceptable to his
   brethren."

   And what could we do without the third blessing, namely that of
   unction? "Let him dip his foot in oil." Oh, for an anointing of the
   Holy Spirit, not only upon the head with which we think, but upon the
   foot with which we move! We would have our daily walk and conversation
   gracious and useful. We wish that, wherever we go, we may leave behind
   us the print of divine grace. I was asking concerning a preacher what
   kind of man he was, and the simple, humble cottager, answered me,
   "Well, sir, he is this kind of man: if he comes to see you, you know
   that he has been." We must not only have oil in the lamps of our public
   ministry, but oil in the vessels of our private study. We need the holy
   oil everywhere, upon every garment, even down to our skirts. I know
   that there are mockers who scoff at the very mention of unction; but I
   pray that to myself and my brethren the promise may be fulfilled, "He
   shall dip his foot in oil." Such a man, anointed with fresh oil, holds
   an unquestioned office, enjoys an unfailing freshness, and exercises an
   effectual influence. Wherever he goes you see his footprints, for his
   foot has been dipped in oil.

   Well, now, if these three blessings be good for ministers, they are
   equally good for all sorts of workers. You in the school, you who visit
   tract districts, you who manage mothers' meetings, and you who in any
   shape or way endeavour to make Christ known, may you have the threefold
   blessing! The Lord give you many spiritual children: may you be blessed
   with them, and never be without additions to their number! The Lord
   make you acceptable to those among whom you labour; and the Lord grant
   you always to go forth in his strength, anointed with his Spirit!

   That is the first part of our text, and I am not going to say any more
   about it, as the second part is that to which I shall call your
   especial attention. May the Holy Spirit make the promise exceeding
   sweet to you, and grant you a full understanding of it.

   "Thy shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy
   strength be."

   There are two things in the text'shoes and strength. We will talk about
   these two, hoping to possess them both.

   I. "THY SHOES SHALL BE IRON AND BRASS." That is a very great promise,
   and I fear that I shall not be able to bring out all its meaning in one
   discourse.

   I find that the passage has several translations; and, though I think
   that which we have now before us is by far the best, yet I cannot help
   mentioning the others, for I think they are instructive. These
   interpretations may serve me as divisions in opening up the meaning. I
   take it as a rule that the Lord's promises are true in every sense
   which they will fairly bear. A generous man will allow the widest
   interpretation of his words, and so will the infinitely gracious God.

   This promise meant that Asher should have treasures under his feetthat
   there should, in fact, be mines of iron and copper within the
   boundaries of the tribe. Metals enrich nations, and help their
   advancement in many ways. Tribes that possess minerals are thereby made
   rich, what ever metals those may be; but such useful metals as iron and
   copper would prove of the utmost service to the people of that time, if
   they knew how to use them. Is there any spiritual promise at all in
   this! Asher is made rich and iron and copper lying beneath his feet.
   Are saints ever made rich with treasures under their feet? Undoubtedly
   they are. The Word of God has mines in it. Even the surface of it is
   rich, and it brings forth food for us; but it is with Scripture as Job
   saith it is with the earth: "As for the earth, out of it cometh bread:
   and under it is turned up as it were fire. The stones of it are the
   place of sapphires: and it hath dust of gold." There are treasures upon
   the surface of the Word which we may pick up very readily: even the
   casual reader will find himself able to understand the simplicities and
   elements of the gospel of God; but the Word of God yields most to the
   digger. He that can study hard, and press into the inner meaning'he is
   the man that shall be enriched with riches current in heavenly places.
   Every Bible student here will know that God has put under his feet
   great treasures of precious teaching, and he will by meditation sink
   shafts into the deep places of revelation. I wish we gave more time to
   our Bibles. We waste too much time upon the pretentious,
   poverty-stricken literature of the age; and some, even Christian
   people, are more taken up with works of fiction than they are with this
   great Book of everlasting fact. We should prosper much more in heavenly
   husbandry if we would "dig deep while sluggards sleep." Remember that
   God has given to us to have treasures under our feet; but do not so
   despise his gifts as to leave the mines of revelation unexplored.

   You will find these treasures, not only in the Word of God, but
   everywhere in the providence of God, if you will consider the ways of
   the Lord, and believe that God is everywhere at work, He that looks for
   a providence will not be long without seeing one. All events are full
   of teaching to the man that has but grace and wit to interpret them.
   "Whoso is wise, and will observe these things, even they shall
   understand the lovingkindness of the Lord." There shall be treasures
   under your feet if your feet keep to the ways of truth. A rich land is
   the country along which believers travel to their rest: its stones are
   iron, and out of its bowels thou mayest dig brass. "Who is wise, and he
   shall understand these things? prudent, and he shall know them? for the
   ways of the Lord are right."

   The Revised Version has it, "Thy bars shall be iron and brass;" and
   certainly the original text bears that meaning. "Thy bars shall be iron
   and brass:" there shall be protection around him. The city gates shall
   be kept fast against the enemy, so as to preserve the citizens. The
   slaughtering foe shall not be able to intrude, because, instead of the
   common wooden bar, which might be sufficient in more peaceful times,
   there shall be given bars of metal, not easily cut in sunder or
   removed. Herein I see a spiritual blessing for us also. What a mercy it
   is, when God strengthens our gates and secures the bars thereof, so
   that, when the enemy comes, he is not able to enter or to molest us!
   Peace from all assaults, safety under all alarms, shutting in from all
   attacks'this is a priceless boon. Happy people who have God for their
   protector! Blessed are they who rest in the sure promises and
   faithfulness of God, for they may laugh their enemies to scorn. O
   brethren, how safe are they whose trust is in the living God and in his
   covenant and promise! Personally I know what this means. I have rested
   as calmly in the centre of the battle as ever I have reposed in the
   deepest calm: with all against me I am as quiet in soul as when
   everyone called himself my friend. It is true'"Thy bars shall be iron
   and brass."

   Still, I like the Old Version best, and the original certainly bears
   it, "Thy shoes shall be iron and brass." The Revised Version puts this
   in the margin He shall have protection for his feet. The chief
   objection that has been raised to this is that it would be a very
   unusual thing for shoes to be made of iron and brass. Such a thing is
   not heard of anywhere else in Scripture, neither is it according to
   Oriental custom. For that reason I judge that the interpretation is the
   more likely to be correct, since the protection which God gives to his
   people is unusual. No other feet shall wear so singular a covering; but
   those who are made strong in the Lord shall be able to wear shoes of
   iron, and the Lord shall give them sandals of brass. As Og, the King of
   Bashan, was of the race of the giants, and "his bedstead was a bedstead
   of iron," so shall the Lord's champions wear shoes of iron. Theirs are
   no common equipments, for they are no common people. God's people are a
   peculiar people, and everything about them is peculiar. Even if the
   poetry of the passage would not bear to run upon all fours, there is no
   reason why it should, since it only relates to shoes. We may be quite
   content to take the notion of iron and brazen shoes with all its
   strangeness, and even let the strangeness be a commendation of it. You
   have peculiar difficulties, you are a peculiar people, you traverse a
   peculiar road, you have a peculiar God to trust in, and you may,
   therefore, find peculiar consolation in a peculiar promise: "Thy shoes
   shall be iron and brass."

   With shoes of iron and of brass,

   O'er burning marl thy feet shall pass,

   Tread dragons down, from fear set free;

   For as thy day thy strength shall be.

   But what does this mean'"thy shoes shall be iron and brass"? Are there
   not several meanings? Does it not mean that our feet, tender and
   unprotected by nature, shall receive protection'protection from God?
   Our feebleness and necessity shall call upon God's grace and skill, and
   he will provide for us, and give to us exactly what we, by reason of
   our feebleness, so much need.

   We want to have shoes of iron and brass, first, to travel with. We are
   pilgrims. We journey along a road which has not been smoothed by a
   steam-roller, but remains rough and rugged as the path to an Alpine
   summit. We push on through a wilderness where there is no way.
   Sometimes we traverse a dreary road, comparable too a burning sand. At
   other times sharp trials afflict us as if they cut our feet with
   flints. Our journey is a maze, a labyrinth: the Lord leads us up and
   down in the wilderness, and sometimes we seem further from Canaan than
   ever. Seldom does our march take us through gardens: often it leads us
   through deserts. We are always travelling, never long in one stay.
   Sometimes the fiery cloudy pillar rests for a little, but it is only
   for a little. "Forward!" is our watchword. We have no abiding city
   here. We pitch our tent by the wells and palms of Elim, but we strike
   it in the morning, when the silver bugle sounds, "Up, and away!" and so
   we march to Marah, or to the place of the fiery serpents. Ever onward;
   ever forward; ever moving! This is our lot. Be it so. Our equipment
   betokens it: we have appropriate shoes for this perpetual journey. We
   are not shod with the skins of beasts, but with metals which will
   endure all wear and tear. Is it not written, "Thy shoes shall be iron
   and brass"? However long the way, these shoes will last to the end.

   Perhaps I address some friend whose way is especially rough. You seem
   to be more tried than anybody else. You reckon yourself to be more
   familiar with sorrow than anyone you know: affliction has marked you
   for its own. I pray you take home this promise to yourself by faith:
   the Lord saith to thee, "Thy shoes shall be iron and brass." This
   special route of yours, which is beset with so many difficulties'your
   God has prepared you for it. You are shod as none but the Lord's chosen
   are shod. If your way is singular, so are your shoes. You shall be able
   to traverse this thorny road'to journey along it with profit to
   yourself, and with glory to God. For your travelling days you are well
   fitted, for your shoes are iron and brass.

   "If the sorrows of thy case

   Seem peculiar still to thee,

   God has promised needful grace,

   'As thy days, thy strength shall be.'"

   Shoes of iron remind us of military array'they are meant to fight with.
   Brethren, we are soldiers as well as pilgrims. These shoes are meant
   for trampling upon enemies. All sorts of deadly things lie in our way,
   and it is by the help of these shoes that the promise is made good.
   "Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder; the young lion and the
   dragon shalt thou trample under feet." Are we not often too much like
   the young man Jether, who was bidden by his father to slay Zebah and
   Zalmunna, but he was afraid. We tremble to put our foot upon the neck
   of the enemy; we fancy that if we should attempt it, we should be
   guilty of presumption. Let us have done with this false humility, for
   thus we dishonour the Lord's promise: "Thy shoes shall be iron and
   brass." Better far to say, "Through thee will we push down our enemies:
   through thy name will we tread them under that rise up against us."
   Thus we may say without fear, for assuredly "The Lord shall bruise
   Satan under our feet shortly."

   "O my soul, thou has trodden down strength," said the holy woman of
   old, when the adversaries of Israel had been routed. Thus can our
   exultant spirits also take up the chant. I also can say, "O my soul,
   thou has trodden down strength." Yes, believer, with thy foot thou has
   crushed thy foe, even as thy Lord, who came on purpose that he might
   break with his foot, even with his bruised heel, the head of our
   serpent adversary. Be not afraid, therefore, in the day of conflict, to
   push onward against the foe. Do not be afraid to seize the victory
   which Christ has already secured for thee. "Thy shoes shall be iron and
   brass" thou shalt trample down thy foe, and march unharmed to victory.

   What a blessing it is when we get self under our feet! We shall have
   good use for iron shoes if we keep him there. What a mercy it is when
   you get a sinful habit under your feet! You will need have shoes of
   brass to keep it there. What a mercy it is when some temptation that
   you have long struggled with at last falls to the ground, and you can
   set your foot upon it! You need to have both of your shoes strengthened
   with iron, and hardened with brass, that you may bruise this spiritual
   enemy, and crush out its life. Feet shod with sound metal of integrity
   and firmness will be none too strong in this evil world, where so many,
   like serpents, are ready to bite at our heels. Only so shod shall we
   win the victory.

   See, the Lord promises that we shall have shoes suitable alike for
   travelling and for trampling upon enemies!

   Next, we have fit shoes for climbing. One interpreter thinks that the
   sole of the shoe was to be studded with iron or copper nails.
   Certainly, those who climb would not like to go with the smooth soles
   which suit us in our parlours and drawing-rooms. There are many
   instances where a rough tip of iron, or a strong nail in the heel of
   the shoe, has checked the slipping mountaineer when gliding over a
   shelving rock, and there he has stayed on the very brink of death. Our
   spiritual life is an upward climb, with constant danger of a fall. It
   is a great mercy to have shoes of iron and brass in our spiritual
   climbings, that should our feet be almost gone, we may find foothold
   before we are utterly cast down. We ought to climb: the higher our
   spiritual life the better. It is written of the believer, "He shall
   dwell on high." We ought not to be satisfied till we reach the highest
   places of knowledge, experience, and practice. High doctrine is
   glorious doctrine, high experience is blessed experience, high holiness
   is heavenly living. Many souls always keep in the plains: the simple
   elements are enough for them; and, thank God, they are enough for
   salvation and for comfort. But if you want the richest delight and the
   highest degree of grace, climb the hills and roam among the mysteries
   of God, the sublimer revelations of his divine will. Especially climb
   into the doctrines of grace: be not afraid of electing love, of special
   redemption, of the covenant, and all that is contained in it. Be not
   afraid to climb high, for if thy feet be dipped in the oil of grace,
   they shall also be so shod that they shall not slip. Trust in God, and
   you shall be as Mount Zion, which can never be removed. Your shoes
   shall be iron and brass, for lofty thought and clear knowledge, if you
   commit your mind to the instruction of the Lord. Receiving nothing
   except as you find it in the Word, but in a childlike spirit receiving
   everything that you find there, you shall stand upon your high places.
   Your feet shall be like hinds' feet, and your place of abode shall be
   above the mists and clouds of earth's wretched atmosphere of doubt.

   Rise, also, to the highest graces and the noblest virtues. As is the
   food we feed on, such should our actions be. Let us love, for God is
   love, and as dear children we must be imitators of him in all
   gentleness, tenderness, and forgiveness. Climb to the heights of
   self-denial, the summits of consecration. Be as near heaven as is
   possible for those who dwell on earth. Have you not the shoes to climb
   with? Wherefore tarry down below?

   I will not press this longer upon you, for I hope that your hearts
   aspire to climb up where your Lord reveals himself in clearer light;
   but, lest you should be at all afraid of the climbing as the aged man
   is afraid of that which is high, I would arouse you to a holy bravery,
   since God has not given you shoes of iron and brass merely to trip over
   the plains. He means you to climb; your equipments prove it. Will you
   be as the children of Ephraim, who, being armed, and carrying bows,
   turned back in the day of battle? Will you be shod with iron, and melt
   like wax under a little heat of opposition?

   Once more. These shoes are for travelling, for trampling, for climbing;
   they are also made of iron and brass for perseverance. You would not
   need such shoes for a little bit of a run'for a trip up the street and
   back again. Since the Lord has shod you in this fashion, it is a
   warning to you that the way is long and weary, and the end is not
   by-and-by. The Lord has furnished you with shoes that will not wear
   out. "Old shoes and clouted" were good enough for Gibeonites, but they
   are not fit for Israelites. The Lord does not mean that you should be
   arrayed as beggars, or become lame through worn-out shoes. The sacred
   canticle, in one of its verses, saith, "How beautiful are thy feet with
   shoes, O prince's daughter!" The princes of the heavenly household
   shall be shod according to their rank and this shall be the case at the
   end of their journey as surely as at the beginning. Whether Israel
   traversed sand or rock, the camp never halted because the people had
   become lame; for the Lord had said "Thy shoes shall be iron and brass."
   It is a good pair of shoes that lasts a man for forty years; yet there
   are some of us who can testify that God's grace has furnished us with
   spiritual shoes of that kind. I can speak of nearly that length of time
   since I knew the Lord, and I bear my unhesitating witness that I have
   found the grace of God all-sufficient, and his promises most sure and
   steadfast.

   If we are allowed to live till we touch the borders of a century, or if
   we even fulfill our hundred years, these shoes would never be too old.
   These are the sort of shoes that Enoch wore; and was it not for more
   than three hundred years that he walked with God? He was always
   walking, but his shoes of iron and brass were never worn out. It
   matters not, dear friend, how severe may be your trials and troubles,
   or how long may be your pilgrimage through this wilderness, God, who
   gives these extraordinary shoes, such as no other has ever fashioned,
   and such as men are not accustomed to wear, has in this provided you
   against the utmost of endurance, the extremity of suffering. "Thy shoes
   shall be iron and brass"'does not this symbol signify the best, the
   strongest, the most lasting, and the most fitting provision for a
   pilgrimage of trial? Thy shoes shall last as long as thou shalt last.
   Thou shalt find them as good as new when thou art about to lie down on
   thy last bed, to be gathered to thy fathers. "Thy shoes shall be iron
   and brass."

   I may be addressing some here that are very low in spirit: they fear
   that they shall not hold on their way, they are ready to halt, yea,
   ready to lie down in despair. I trust the way will hold you on when you
   can hardly hold on your way. May you hear the ring of your iron
   sandals, and be ashamed of cowardice. They should be iron men to whom
   God has given iron shoes. I would encourage you to go forward in the
   way, for you are, by God's grace, made fit for travelling. You are not
   bare-footed, nor badly shod. You ought to go forward bravely, after
   your heavenly Father has put such shoes as these upon your feet. You
   are shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace, and you may trip
   lightly on your way; and again I say, though that way should be a very
   long one, you need not think that your provision for the way will fail
   you. Even to hoar hairs the Lord will be with you. He has made, and he
   will bear; even he will carry you. Your last days shall be better than
   your first days. Yea, you shall go from strength to strength through
   his abounding and faithful love.

   I find great difficulty in speaking tonight, because of some failure of
   my voice; but the divine promise is so sweet that even when poorly
   uttered it has a music all its own. For fear my voice should quite fail
   me, I will hasten on to say a few words upon the second point. We have
   examined the shoes, now let us consider the strength.

   II. "AS THY DAYS,SO SHALL THY STRENGTH BE."

   This provision is meant to meet weakness. The words carry a tacit hint
   to us that we have no strength of our own, but have need of strength
   from above. Our proud hearts need such a hint; for often we poor
   creatures begin to rely upon ourselves. Although we are weak as water,
   we get the notion that our own wit, or our own experience, may now
   suffice us, though once they might not have done so. But our best
   powers will not suffice us now, any more than in our youth. If we begin
   to rest in ourselves it will not be long before we find out our folly.
   The Lord will not let his people depend upon themselves: they may make
   the attempt, but, as sure as they are his people, he will empty them
   from vessel to vessel, and make them know that their fullness dwells in
   Christ, and not in themselves. Remember that, if you have a sense of
   weakness, you have only a sense of the truth. You are as weak as you
   think you are; you certainly do not exaggerate your own helplessness.
   The Saviour has said "Without me, ye can do nothing"; and that is the
   full extent of what you can do. The Lord promises you strength, which
   he would have no need to promise you if you had it naturally apart from
   him. But he promises to give it, and therein he assures you that you
   need it. Come down from your self-esteem: stoop from the notion of your
   own natural ability: divest yourself of the foolish idea that you can
   do anything in and of yourself, and come down to the strong for
   strength, and ask your Lord to fulfill this promise in your experience,
   "As thy days, so shall thy strength be."

   The strength which is here promised is to abide through days. "As thy
   days, so shall thy strength be." Not for today only, but for tomorrow,
   and for every day as every day shall come. The longest and the shortest
   day, the brightest and the darkest day, the wedding and the funeral
   day, shall each have its strength measured out, till there shall be no
   more days. The Lord will portion out to his saints their support even
   as their days follow each other.

   "Days of trial, days of grief,

   In succession thou may'st see;

   This is still thy sweet relief,

   'As thy day, thy strength shall be.'"

   This strength is to be given daily We shall never have two days' grace
   at a time.

   "Day by day the manna fell:

   Oh, to learn this lesson well,

   'Day by day' the promise reads:

   Daily strength for daily needs!"

   If I get strength enough to get through this sermon, I shall be
   satisfied for the present. I do not want strength to get through next
   Sabbath morning's sermon till that Sabbath morning comes. If I can
   weather the present storm, I shall not just now require the strength to
   outlive the storms of all the year 1889. What should I do with this
   reserve force if I had it? Where would you store away your extra grace?
   You would put it in the lumber-room of your pride, where it would breed
   worms, and become an offence. A storage of what you call "grace" would
   turn into self-sufficiency. "As thy days, so shall thy strength be":
   this secures you a day's burden and a day's help, a day's sorrow and a
   day's comfort. After all, what more do we want? If a man has a meal,
   let him give thanks for it: he does not want two meals at once. If a
   man has enough for the day, he certainly is not yet in want for
   tomorrow. He cannot eat tomorrow's food today; or, if he did, it would
   injure his health, and be no comfort to him. Let us narrow our vision
   as to the necessities of daily life, not looking so far ahead as to
   compress into today more evil than naturally belongs to it; for
   "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." Our strength is to be
   given to us daily.

   And then the text seems to say clearly that it will be given to us
   proportionately, "As thy days, so shall thy strength be." A day of
   little service, little strength; a day of little suffering, little
   strength; but in a tremendous day'a day that needs thee to play the
   Samson'thou shalt have Samson's strength. A day of deep waters in which
   thou shalt need to swim, shall be a day in which thou shalt ride the
   billows like a sea- bird. Do you not think that this might almost tempt
   us to wish for days of great trial, in order that we might receive
   great grace? If we are always to go smoothly, and to receive but little
   grace in consequence, we shall never rise to the great things of the
   divine life. We shall be dwarfs, and none shall say, "There were giants
   in those days." We may not wish to be always children, with boyish
   tasks and childish duties; it is right we should grow, and that in
   consequence we should shoulder burdens from which youthful backs are
   exempt. Who would wish to be always a little child? Great grace will be
   sent to us to meet our great necessities. And is not that a most
   desirable thing? I remember that for a long season the Lord was very
   gracious to me in the matter of funds for the extensive works which I
   have been called upon to originate and superintend, and I felt very
   grateful for the ease which I enjoyed; yet it crossed my mind that I
   was learning less of God than in more trying seasons, and I trembled.
   Years gone by there were considerable necessities which did not appear
   to be met at once, and I went with them to God in prayer, and I trusted
   him, and he supplied my needs in such a wonderful way that I seemed to
   have the closest intercourse with him. I could most plainly see his
   hand stretched out to help me. I could see him working for me as
   gloriously as if he wrought miracles. These were glorious days with me!
   I cannot tell you what holy wonder often filled my soul when the Lord
   interposed on behalf of the Orphanage or the College. The record reads
   so charmingly that unbelievers would never accept it as true. Then God
   made me by grace like one who steps from the summit of one mountain to
   another: I stepped across the valleys, leaving the deep places far
   below. So in my easy seasons I thought to myself, "Everything comes in
   regularly and abundantly. I am like a little child walking along a
   smooth lawn. This is but a common, ordinary state of affairs, in which
   even a man of no faith could pursue his way. I do not see so much of
   God, though assuredly I ought to see him as clearly now as ever." I did
   not wish for necessities, but I remembered how the Lord glorified
   himself in them, and therefore I half desired them. The regular
   blessing day by day, almost without need of special prayer, does not
   constrain you to look to God so vividly as when you gaze down into the
   deep, dark abyss of want, and feel, "If he does not help me now, I
   shall soon be in dire distress." This forces forth the living
   prayer."Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and he saved
   them out of their distresses." Our great necessities bring God so very
   near to us, so manifest to our consciousness, that they are an
   unspeakable blessing. So I did not ask to have a time of need; I hope
   that I shall never be so foolish as that; but when I found a time of
   need hurrying up, as I soon did, I felt a special delight in it'I took
   pleasure in my necessities. My heart cried,"Now I shall see my Lord;
   now I shall see him again. Now I shall get a hold of that great arm,
   and hang upon it, and I shall see how the Lord will deliver me in time
   of need." I did thus lay hold upon my Lord again, and I found him still
   God All- sufficient, for which I bless his name. In proportion as he
   sends the trial he sends the help. Be not, therefore, afraid of great
   trial: on the contrary, look for it, and when it comes, say to
   yourselves, "Now for great grace. Now for a special manifestation of
   the faithfulness of God."

   Mark, again, that strength will be given to us in all forms. "As thy
   days, so shall thy strength be." Our days vary, our trials change; our
   service varies, too. Our lives are far from being monotonous: they are
   musical with many notes and tones. Our present state is like chequered
   work: or, say, as a mosaic of many colours. But the strength that God
   gives varies with the occasion. He can bestow physical strength, and
   mental strength, and moral strength, and spiritual strength. He gives
   strength just where the strength is needed, and of that peculiar kind
   which the trial demands. We have no need to fear because we feel weak
   in a certain direction: if we need strength in that special quarter,
   the strength will come there. "But if I am tried," says one, "in a
   certain way, I shall fail." No, you will not. "As your days, so shall
   your strength be." "I am horrified," says one, "at the thought of
   having to pass through the ordeal of a surgical operation." Do not be
   horrified at it; for though at the present moment you may be quite
   unfit for the trial, you will be quite ready for it when it comes. Have
   you never been in great danger and found yourself cool and calm beyond
   anything you could have expected? It has been so with me, and I have
   learned from my experience, not to measure what I shall be, in a trying
   hour, by what I happen to be just now. The Lord will take care to fit
   us for our future, and, as our days, so shall our strength be.

   I find that some persons read this passage thus'when our days grow
   many, and we come to the end, yet our strength shall be equal to what
   it was in the days of our youth. We shall, according to this, find our
   strength continuing as our days continue. It is a cheering meaning,
   certainly. The children of God do find that, spiritually, their
   strength is renewed day by day. The outer man decayeth, that is nature:
   but the inward man is renewed day by day, that is grace. As thy days
   are, so shall thy strength continue to be. "Even the youths shall faint
   and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fail: but they that wait
   upon the Lord shall renew their strength." Though days come one after
   another, so shall strength come with them; there shall be such a
   continuity of perpetual renewal that the heart shall be strong even to
   the end of life, and the old man shall know no inward decay.

   An hour or so ago, I stood by what will certainly be the death-bed of
   one of our best friends, and I was cheered and comforted when I heard
   him so blessedly speaking both of the present with its pain, and of the
   future with its near descent into the vale of death. He said, "I have
   no doubt as to my eternal bliss. I have had no doubt'no, not a shadow
   of doubt'of my interest in Christ through my long illness. In fact, I
   have felt a perfect rest of mind about it all. And," he added, "this is
   nothing more than ought to be, with us who listen to the glorious
   gospel, for we live on good spiritual meat. Sound doctrine should make
   us strong in the Lord. I have not been a hearer of yours for thirty
   years, and heard of covenant love and faithfulness, to die with a
   trembling hope. I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he
   is able to keep that which I have committed unto him." Thus, dear
   friends, shall we also be supported, for the brother of whom I speak is
   a simple-minded man, who makes no pretensions to learning, but is one
   of our own selves. It will be a great privilege to find that when
   death's days come'the days of sickness, and decline, and weakness, yet
   still our strength remains the same. It will be glorious to go from
   strength to strength, and even in the day of utter physical prostration
   to find the spirit leaping for joy, in anticipation of the time when it
   shall be free from the cumbering clay, and shall stretch its wings and
   fly aloft to yonder world of joy. Yes, as our days our strength shall
   be.

   Come, child of God, be peaceful, be happy in the prospect of the
   future. Do more, be joyous, and show your joy. You are out of harm's
   reach, for Christ has you in his hand. You shall never be staggered nor
   overcome, for the Lord is your strength and your song, and he has
   become your salvation. This text is a royal banquet for you. Here are
   fat things full of marrow. Eat abundantly, O beloved. Feel your spirit
   renewed by the Holy Spirit. Be prepared for whatever is yet to come;
   for such a word as this, not from me, but from the Lord himself, may
   gird up your loins for another march towards Canaan; "Thy shoes shall
   be iron and brass, and as thy days, so shall thy strength be."

   I am sorry, very sorry, for those among you who have no portion and lot
   in such a promise as this. Whatever you may have in this world, you are
   very poor in losing such a promise as this. You are shoeless, or if you
   have some wooden sabot, it will soon be worn out. You will never be
   able to travel to heaven in any shoes that mortal men can make for you.
   You need to go to the great Father, who alone can say, "Put a ring on
   his hand, and shoes on his feet." I am sorry for you in your present
   condition, for you have no strength but your own, and that is a poor
   piece of weakness. You are troubled even now: what will you do in the
   swellings of Jordan? The common footmen of daily life have wearied you:
   what will you do when you have to contend with horses? O souls, what
   will you do when you are ushered into the presence of the dread
   mysteries of another world? O sirs, you are without strength; but is
   not that a grand verse, "When we were yet without strength, in due time
   Christ died for the ungodly"? Ungodly as you are, clutch at such a word
   as that. "Without strength" as you are, yet lay hold upon the Lord's
   strength. It is for those who have no strength that Christ came into
   the world. It is for the ungodly that he laid down his life. Come, and
   trust him. Let him become your strength and your righteousness from
   this time forth; and my he manifest himself to you in a special and
   gracious way; and unto his name shall be praise, for ever and ever.
   Amen.

   PORTION OF SCRIPTURE READ BEFORE SERMON'Psalm 37.

   HYMNS FROM "OUR OWN HYMN BOOK"'686, 89 (Part II), 46 (vers. 1.)

   LETTER FROM MR. SPURGEON BELOVED READERS,'To you, one and all, may the
   New Year be fruitful of blessings. I wish you the text of this sermon
   as a benediction, so far as it is applicable to you. Specially may your
   feet be shod with the iron and brass which are promised you, and this
   will be better than the glass slippers of fortune, or the silver
   sandals of wealth. For myself, I beg your kind remembrance when you
   have the ear of "the King." I need restored strength, for I am well,
   but weak; and for another year of service I need that the right hand of
   the Lord may be laid upon me, and that he should say to me, "Be strong:
   fear not." He that has supplied might to our feebleness for so many
   years will not fail us now. Week by week the loaf will be set before
   you in this sermon, and we shall together bless the Lord of the feast.

   With all the good wishes of the season, in sincerity and truth,

   I am, your weekly visitor,

   C. H. SPURGEON.

   Mentone, Jan 1st, 1889.
     __________________________________________________________________

The Filling of Empty Vessels

   INTENDED FOR READING ON LORD'S DAY, JANUARY 13, 1889,

   DELIVERED BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "Even empty vessels; borrow not a few." 2 Kings 4:3.

   IT is needful that we read the whole story--"Now there cried a certain
   woman of the wives of the sons of the Prophets unto Elisha, saying,
   Your servant my husband is dead. And you know that your servant did
   fear the Lord: and the creditor is come to take unto him my two sons to
   be bondmen. And Elisha said unto her, What shall I do for you? Tell me,
   what have you in the house? And she said, Your handmaid has not
   anything in the house, save a pot of oil. Then he said, Go, borrow
   vessels abroad of all your neighbors, even empty vessels; borrow not a
   few. And when you are come in, you shall shut the door upon you and
   upon your sons and shall pour out into all those vessels and you shall
   set aside that which is full.

   "So she went from him and shut the door upon her and upon her sons, who
   brought the vessels to her. And she poured out. And it came to pass,
   when the vessels were full, that she said unto her sons, Bring me yet a
   vessel. And they said unto her, There is not a vessel more. And the oil
   stopped. Then she came and told the man of God. And he said, Go, sell
   the oil and pay your debt and live, you and your children on the rest."

   The best of men may die in poverty--here is the widow of a Prophet left
   in destitution. We must not hastily censure those who leave their
   families unprovided for--circumstances may have rendered it impossible
   for the breadwinner to do more than supply the pressing wants of the
   hour. Yet assuredly it is sad to see the widow of so worthy a man in
   such straits! A widow, and especially the widow of a Prophet of the
   Lord--our concern for her is tender.

   Her husband had been among the persecuted and having been, by
   oppression, deprived of all that he had, it came to pass that when he
   died he left his wife and children in distress--from which I gather
   that holy men may be in the worst of circumstances and yet it will be
   no proof that the Lord has forsaken them. We may not judge a person's
   character by his position in life. Certainly, poverty is no sign of
   Divine Grace, for there are many who bring themselves to it by their
   own wickedness. But on the other hand, wealth is no sign of Divine
   favor--for many there are who will have their portion in this life,
   only, and have no inheritance in the life everlasting.

   As a general rule, piety is more often found among the poor than among
   the rich--and in persecuting times it is almost of absolute necessity
   that a clean conscience should involve poverty. Let this encourage any
   here who are just now very low in circumstances. You are where Prophets
   and saints have been. God can lift you up and would do so if it were
   really for your good. Be more concerned to act like a Christian in your
   present condition than to escape from it. Remember, however poor you
   are, your Master was poorer and that whatever else you have not, you
   still have a share in His love.

   Seek to be rich in faith if you are poor in all besides. You can honor
   God much in your present condition. You can learn much in it, you can
   prove much the Divine faithfulness and you can exercise much sympathy
   towards others. Therefore be not impatient. Since other men both
   greater and better than you have trod this rough road, bow before the
   determination of God's Providence and ask for Divine Grace to be
   patient under your affliction.

   This sorrowing widow, when she found herself in great poverty and
   likely to lose her two sons, went to God in her trouble. She hastened
   to God's Prophet, for that was the way in which broken hearts would
   then speak to God in special trials. And it was a way with which, as a
   Prophet's widow, she was well acquainted. But now we have another
   Mediator, Jesus Christ the Righteous, and every Christian in trouble
   should take his burden to his God in Christ Jesus. We readily enough
   tell our friends and neighbors and it is natural we should, for the
   human mind wants sympathy.

   But faith would teach us that there is no sympathy equal to that of the
   Man Christ Jesus and there is no power to help equal to that of the
   heavenly Father. Let us, therefore, never forget to unload our burden
   at the foot of the Cross.

   We should first tell our troubles to our best Friend. We should go to
   Jesus first, to Jesus with child-like reliance upon His power to help.
   The woman went to the Prophet. Let us go to our greater Prophet, even
   Jesus our Lord, without hesitation or delay.

   God was pleased to ordain by His servant a way of escape for the poor
   woman. The little oil that she had in the house was to be multiplied
   till there should be enough, when sold, to pay her debts with--from
   which I gather that if in our distress we take our trouble to God He
   will deliver us. This woman is not a solitary instance--she is one of a
   great multitude for whom the Lord has worked graciously. It is the rule
   of God's Providence that His children should cry to Him in the day of
   trouble and that He should be gracious to them and deliver them. Rest
   assured that the Lord, who daily provides for the millions of fish in
   the sea and the myriads of birds in the air will not suffer His own
   children to perish for lack of the things of this life.

   He cares for a glowworm on a damp bank and for a fly in a lone wood and
   He will never neglect the children of His own house. "I am poor and
   needy, yet the Lord thinks upon me," said one of old and so may the
   most humble still say. Whether your trouble is about temporal things or
   spiritual things, if you leave that trouble with God--cry to Him in
   prayer, walk in His fear and trust in His name--sooner or later, in
   some way or other, He must make a way of escape for you. Other friends
   may fail you. But the Lord God never can. Other promises may turn out
   to be mere wind but faithful is He that has promised this to you and He
   also will do it. In six troubles He will be with you and in seven there
   shall no evil touch you. You shall dwell in the land and verily you
   shall be fed. No good thing will He withhold from them that walk
   uprightly. How happy might we be if we really and practically believed
   this and acted upon it.

   Yet the Lord allowed His handmaid to be very sorely pressed. She could
   not secure delay nor make any fair terms with the hard creditor. He was
   already in the house and he would be satisfied with nothing less than
   both her sons. She was so reduced that she had nothing in the house but
   a single pot of oil--what could she do? She had hoped for deliverance
   but now the night of utter misery was coming on and she saw no light.

   Beloved, it has been the same with many of the Lord's tried ones and it
   may be the same with you. The Lord does not promise to rescue us in our
   time, nor to save us from waiting. Rather does He see it to be right to
   try our faith and patience for our good and for His own glory.
   Therefore, I say to you whose turn seems to come last--be strong to
   wait and do not dishonor the Lord by unbelief. Waiting in faith is a
   high form of worship which in some respects excels the adoration of the
   shining ones above.

   But the way in which this woman was delivered was one which proved and
   exercised and strengthened her faith. She had to go and borrow empty
   vessels from her neighbors. That was a strange proceeding, empty oil
   jars would seem to be useless lumber in her house. Her neighbors, also,
   might make remarks upon her singular conduct. She had to shut the door,
   that no curious eyes might watch her and she had then, with full
   confidence in God, to take her one pot of oil and go on pouring out
   from it into the empty vessels till they were all filled.

   Unbelief might have said to her, "That is a wild proceeding! How can
   you fill these vessels out of that one little jar? There is but very
   little oil to begin with, and certainly that cannot be enough to fill
   all these borrowed jars. The Prophet has mocked you. He is exposing you
   to the jests and jeers of all your neighbors." But her faith, when
   exercised, was equal to the emergency. She did what she was commanded
   to do--she did it in faith. And the result answered the end.

   God takes care to deliver His servants in ways that exercise their
   faith. He would not have them be little in faith, for faith is the
   wealth of the heavenly life. He desires that the trial of faith should
   be carried on till faith grows strong and comes to full assurance. The
   sycamore fig never ripens into sweetness unless it is bruised and the
   same is true of faith. Expect, O tried Believer, that God will bring
   you through, but do not expect Him to bring you through in the way that
   human reason would suggest, for that would provide no development for
   faith.

   Be not laying tracks for God--

   "He plants His footsteps in the sea, Provide no chariots for the
   Eternal One-- "He rides upon the storm."

   God has a way of His own. He does His wonders as He pleases. Be content
   often to stand still and see the salvation of God. Be ready to obey Him
   and that will be far more in accordance with your position as a finite
   creature than the vain

   attempt to map out a course for your Creator. Keep to the obeying and
   rest assured He will not be behind with the providing.

   These are the general lessons which we learn from the history. Now I
   intend to take the narrative and especially the two or three words I
   have culled out of it and use it for instructive purposes as the Holy
   Spirit shall help me. First, in reference to the Divine Grace that is
   in Christ Jesus. Secondly, in reference to the Mercy Seat. and thirdly,
   in reference to the Holy Spirit.

   I. There is teaching in this narrative, first of all IN REFERENCE TO
   THE GRACE THAT IS IN CHRIST JESUS. Let me show you this. The woman was
   to get together empty vessels--these were to be set in her room. All
   these empty vessels were filled. As long as there were any empty
   vessels left, the oil kept flowing in till they were all filled to the
   brim. When they were all filled she asked for one more but there was
   not another empty one. And then the oil stopped, but not till then. We
   will use this as an emblem of spiritual things and this one verse shall
   interpret our symbol--

   "Dear dying Lamb, Your precious blood

   Shall never lose its power,

   Till all the ransomed Church of God

   Be sa ved to sin no more."

   As long as there is one of God's people unsaved, as long as there is a
   seeking, repenting, sinner, yet unpardoned, there will be found to be
   merit in the Savior still to flow out--till every vessel that needs to
   be filled with mercy shall be filled and that to the very brim.

   Now in this case notice first of all what was required. In this miracle
   all that was required was empty vessels. This is precisely all that
   Jesus Christ requires of us--that we be to Himself and His Divine
   fullness as empty vessels. The Grace is with Him, not with us. Just as
   the oil was in the woman's one pot and not in the empty vessels.
   Suppose that one of her neighbors had said to herself, when the boy
   came to borrow the vessels, "Poor woman, she modestly asks for an empty
   oil jar but I will send her in a full one to help her"?

   The lad joyfully accepts the offer and takes home a jar full of oil.
   When his mother is pouring out the oil, the boy brings the vessel. She
   looks at it and it is full. "My child," says she, "this is of no use to
   me. It is full and we cannot fill again what is full already." It might
   have been a great loss to her, for the oil might have been of poor
   quality and you may be sure that what the Lord made was the best oil
   that ever was known. So, if there is one person in this world who is by
   nature full of merit. If there is a man in the world that does not want
   mercy--that has enough natural goodness to save himself--why Christ
   cannot do anything for him and he cannot be of any use as a receiver of
   Divine Grace. As long as the man is full of himself, there is no room
   for Jesus Christ. It is well said by our hymn--

   "None are excluded hence But those who do themselves exclude."

   Our own supposed fullness shuts us out from receiving Christ's
   fullness. It must be so. You will remember the story of the plowman and
   Mr. Hervey. The plowman asked Mr. Hervey what he thought was the
   greatest hindrance to men's salvation. Mr. Hervey replied, "Sinful
   self." "No," said the plowman, "I think righteous self is a greater
   hindrance to men's salvation than sinful self. They that are sinful
   will come to Christ for pardon but they that think they are righteous
   never will."

   The full oil jar can hold no more. A deserving sinner (if such a person
   could exist) would be of no use to the Savior and the Savior could be
   of no use to him. Another jar is brought and the boy, as he looks into
   it, finds that his mother's oil does not flow into it. She is holding
   the miraculous jar over the vessel, just as she did with the rest but
   the oil does not flow. "What ails this vessel, my child?" says she. And
   they begin to shake it. There is some oil left at the bottom. The
   neighbor thought who sent it, "Well, I won't pour it all out. Poor
   souls, it will be a good thing for them if I leave a little in it."

   The mother says to the boy, "The oil won't run in because there is some
   oil in the jar already. Pour it out, my son, pour out the last drop,
   for I was bid to use empty vessels and this is not empty and nothing
   can be done with it." When that is done, the oil begins to flow freely,
   till the pot is full to the brim. Now, as long as there is anything
   good left in any of you upon which you place your trust, the Divine
   Grace of our Lord Jesus will not run into you. Empty vessels! Remember
   this. Emptiness is eligibility. Want of natural goodness proves your
   need of God's Grace and that need is your capacity to receive.

   Some will say, "Truly, I have no good works in the past. But then, I
   have good resolves for the future. I am going to be what I should be."
   Are these resolutions formed in your own strength? These, also, will
   impede the inflow of the heavenly oil. It is when we are without
   strength that salvation comes to us. Ah, Friend, if you can save
   yourself, Christ will not save you. Again I remind you that you must be
   emptied of self in all forms before Divine Grace can fill you.

   "No," says one, "I don't trust altogether to my good resolutions but I
   am going to pledge myself to this and make a bond to the other and that
   will help me." My Lord Jesus does not want your help. Abstain, resolve,
   repent, advance--do what you will. But do not join these poor things to
   His great salvation. Give up once and for all depending upon what you
   have done, even when you have done all--as an unprofitable servant quit
   all claims of wage and appeal to mercy only. Dismiss the proud notion
   of containing anything in yourself which comes of your fallen nature
   and yet can be acceptable with God. Do you think there is some good
   thing in you, some strength, something that you can do, or be, that
   will help Jesus Christ? I assure you nothing can check the flow of
   Divine Grace like such a notion. Empty buckets are most fit for the
   well of grace--these shall be filled while the full ones stand idle at
   the well's mouth.

   But there is another oil jar that is empty, quite empty. Smell it.
   There is not a trace of oil. It is a long time since it had anything in
   it. You put your finger round the rim but nothing adheres to it. It is
   dry, very dry, it is a long time since there was any oil there. Look!
   As soon as the woman begins to hold the pot over it, the oil runs into
   the empty jar. And it fills to the brim, large as it is. O poor Soul,
   if you feel tonight that you are a lost, ruined, empty, undone
   sinner--that is just what Jesus wants! There is a full Christ for empty
   sinners but none for those who are full of themselves. If you are so
   empty as to have no trace of good about you, Jesus will not therefore,
   leave you unblest.

   If you are saying, "But I don't feel as I should. I don't think as I
   should. I don't weep as I should," this only proves how empty you are.
   And into all this natural emptiness of yours the super abounding Grace
   of the Lord Jesus Christ will flow till it fills you and overflows to
   His praise. Oh, that by an act of faith you would receive what Jesus so
   freely gives to as many as will receive Him! That is all the empty
   sinner has to do--"as many as received Him, to them gave He power to
   become the sons of God." All that the Savior wants of us is our need of
   being saved and our acceptance of His salvation. Come along with you! O
   Lord, I pray You--bring them under the silent but copious flow of the
   holy oil, even now!

   Now observe what followed. In this miracle, as soon as the empty
   vessels were brought, the oil flowed till they were full, of whatever
   size they might be. One neighbor lent a little jar, another a large
   one. But they were all filled. So, when a sinner receives Jesus, he
   shall receive all the Divine Grace he wants till he is full. "You are
   complete in Him." "Of His fullness have all we received and grace for
   grace." O Soul, if you believe in Jesus you shall find in Him grace to
   pardon you, grace to change your nature, grace to keep that nature
   changed, grace to preserve you till you are perfect, grace to help you
   till you are brought home to Glory!

   Christ freely gives everything a sinner wants between the gates of Hell
   and the gates of Paradise. He does not half fill but He makes the soul
   say, "My cup runs over." He is no half Savior--He is a perfect Redeemer
   from the ruin of the Fall. O you empty, needy Sinner, come and take a
   full and all-sufficient Savior and be blessed forever!

   What was the space in which the miracle endured? How long did this oil
   continue to flow? That is a point worth noticing. It flowed as long as
   any empty vessel could be brought. And the command was, "borrow not a
   few." I know tonight how many souls Christ will bless. He will bless as
   many souls as are empty and are placed beneath the flow of His Divine
   Grace. That He fills the hungry with good things is always the rule.
   And the other rule is equally sure--the rich He sends away empty. We
   know how long Christ will continue to save sinners. It is as long as
   any needy sinner comes to Him to be saved. If there were no sinners on
   earth there would be no room for the Savior on earth. If there were no
   guilty ones, there would be no need for His pardoning blood.

   If there were no filthy ones, there would be no need of the Fountain in
   which they might be cleansed. But as long as there exists an empty,
   penniless, poverty-stricken soul that longs and yearns after a precious
   Christ--there is a precious Christ for that poor, longing, needy soul.
   I feel inclined to cry with the woman in the narrative, "Bring me yet
   another vessel." There are many here whom Christ has filled with His
   Grace--glory be to His name for it! But is there not yet another vessel
   before me? Oh, it is sweet preaching to the sinner who is made to feel
   he is a sinner! There is no such successful preaching in the world.

   We might be content to preach till midnight if we knew we preached to
   those who greatly needed a Savior and were longing for Him--for such
   hearts are like the wax that is ready for the seal. When you want
   Jesus, you shall have Jesus.

   And the deeper your needs become, the more ready will you be to accept
   the finished salvation which He freely gives to all who need it. "Bring
   me yet a vessel." Don't tell me, "There is not a vessel more," for I am
   sure there must be many more. Our Lord has not come to the end of the
   vessels yet. There are many more to be filled. We do not live in an age
   when all the elect are gathered in, when all the redeemed are brought
   home. There are plenty of empty vessels still about. I pray that they
   may be brought to the fullness of our Redeemer and be filled to the
   brim.

   I have used a very simple method of preaching the Gospel in thus
   talking. But simple as it is, there are a great many who will not
   understand it. Let me just rehearse it again. You have broken God's Law
   and you are lost. The only way in which you can get forgiveness is
   through the merit of Jesus and that He will freely give you if you
   simply come and confess your sin and take Him to be your All in All.
   Adore His mercy, magnify His love, accept His Grace--yield to the
   working of His Holy Spirit and you are saved. Be you an empty vessel
   beneath the out flowing of a full Christ.

   Do not try to be a full one, nor a half-full one. But be an empty
   vessel and Christ will fill you. He will not miss one of you that is
   empty for His desire is to bless you. He delights in it--He longs for
   it. Be dead and let Him be your life. Be the beggar and let Him be your
   riches. Be sick and let Him be your health. Be lost and let Him be your
   Savior. Be nothing and let Him be your All in All. This, indeed, is
   faith--to sink the creature in the Creator. To sink self in a Savior.
   To be lost in ourselves and to be saved in His righteousness.

   Oh, that I could lead your hearts into the Truth of God that we are
   saved through faith and that not of ourselves, it is the gift of God!
   Come, empty Pitcher, stand beneath the flowing fountain and it will
   surely fill you. Do you understand me? The Lord make you to prove that
   you do so by your practical compliance with my exhortation.

   II. I shall further use the text in another way, IN REFERENCE TO
   ANSWERS TO PRAYER. My conviction is,

   Brethren, that we do not pray enough. I do not, by this remark, measure
   our prayers by time but I mean that we do not ask enough of God. We are
   not straitened in Him but we are often straitened in ourselves. The
   Prophet's advice to the woman was, "Borrow empty vessels"--notice the
   next word--"borrow not a few." It was needful, thus to urge her to
   large things. Covetous men need restraining but in asking of the Lord,
   our hearts need enlarging.

   This godly widow had the blessing now at her disposal to increase or
   diminish. If she borrowed few vessels, she would have but little oil.
   If she borrowed many vessels they should all be filled and she should
   have much oil. She was herself to measure out what she should have. And
   I believe that you and I, in the matter of spiritual blessings from
   God, have more to do with the measurement of our mercies than we think.
   We make our blessings little, because our prayers are little.

   I will take two points--prayers about ourselves and prayers about
   others. Concerning ourselves. Brethren, some have never brought their
   sins and prevalent temptations before God. One man has a hasty temper
   which he says he cannot overcome. He must overcome it if he is to be
   saved from sin. And what he should do is to treat his wretched temper
   like an empty vessel and bring it before the Lord. He needs that his
   temper should be cured. Let him bring it to the Healer, whose cooling
   touch can remove this fever. I say again, his quick temper is an empty
   vessel for him to set before the Giver of all Divine Grace, that He may
   fill it with sweetness and meekness.

   I know one whom I trust is a child of God. But, alas, he has been
   carried away by folly and has dishonored the Christian name! He is now
   in deep despair and thinks he never can be saved. I fear his despair is
   only another form of rebellion against Divine love. If he could have
   faith to bring his peculiar temptation before God as well as every
   other, it would be overcome for him. There is no sin which the Grace of
   God cannot subdue in us. We must not say that such-and-such a sin is
   constitutional and therefore we cannot overcome it. It must be overcome
   and the Grace of God can do it. Bring this empty vessel and set it down
   where Jesus can come into contact with it.

   Perhaps, with some of you, your special trial is not so much a sin as a
   lack of spiritual attainment. You are still only babes in Christ. You
   hear of some that have gained high degrees of Divine Grace, that have
   become matrons in the Church, or champions in Israel. My dear Friends,
   do not suppose that these attainments are beyond your reach. Do you
   want them? Would they not be honorable to God and a blessing to you?
   Well, then, ask for them! Set these empty vessels beneath the dropping
   of the Divine oil and you shall have these gifts granted to you. In the
   matter of Divine Grace, he is poor that will be poor--but he that
   desires to be rich and has faith in God, may be rich.

   "To him that has shall be given and he shall have more abundance." Oh,
   if we do not get from God's fullness great supplies, it is because we
   are not greatly receptive nor greatly expectant. But if, like this
   woman, we get many empty ves-

   sels, we shall have them all filled! Suppose she had brought a number
   of empty vessels into the house but she had not used them and the oil
   had stopped. She would have been a very foolish woman. But are not many
   of us quite as foolish? We have a great many cares, cares about our
   boys and girls, cares about our business, cares about household
   concerns. But we do not bring these cares to God--we feel as if they
   were too little to mention to Him.

   This is so absurd that I will have no more to do with such a sinful
   silence. Let us tell it all to Jesus. Or else the case stands thus--you
   have your empty vessels and you will not bring them to be filled. Why
   will you be so wickedly foolish? When the Lord bids you cast your care
   upon Him, for He cares for you, why not cast it there? Why will you
   carry your sin, your need, your care? These cares are different sets of
   empty vessels for the Grace of God to fill. Oh, why, my Brethren, why
   have we not larger desires and broader expectations, that according to
   our faith it may be done unto us?

   The angel of mercy sometimes flies around the tents of God's people and
   he bears with him a cornucopia full of the precious blessings.
   Oftentimes he stays at a tent, hovering on soft wings, while the
   sleeper rests--he looks around the tent but does not see a single empty
   vessel into which to pour the benediction and he goes on his way. Soon
   he lights on another tent, where, before the dwellers went to sleep,
   they set out in their evening prayer a number of empty vessels. He
   takes his horn of plenteous mercy and he fills one vessel and then
   another.

   And when they wake, they are surprised with the rich Grace which has
   abounded towards them! Some have feeble wishes, small desires, slender
   prayers--hardly any prayers at all--and "they have not, because they
   ask not." Others have large desires, earnest prayers, great faith,
   large expectations and God gives them according to their faith and they
   are enriched. Oh, for many empty vessels to be set forth in this
   Church, both night and day, that God's mercy may abound in the
   congregation!

   The same is true with regard to prayers for others. We ought to treat
   others as if they were empty vessels for us to use, so as to glorify
   God in their salvation. I wish you would take me and treat me as an
   empty vessel and pray that I may be filled with Heaven's own oil. It is
   of no use hoping to get good out of a ministry if you do not pray for
   it. As a rule I believe congregations get out of a minister what they
   put into him. That is to say, if they pray much for him, God will give
   him much blessing for them. Those persons who come up to the house of
   God and take their seats--and expect their souls to be filled when they
   have never prayed that God will help the minister and bless the
   sermon--may not expect to be visited with Divine Grace.

   Pray for all ministers and all workers for Christ--make them like empty
   vessels and ask the Lord to fill them. Christian people should do the
   same with their children and relatives. If our children are not
   converted, is it not, in some cases, the fact that we have not prayed
   for them as we should? We have not brought them before God in
   supplication and if they remain unconverted and worldly, how can we
   wonder? Let us not leave the empty vessels unfilled. Come, Friends,
   think of the unconverted at home. You have still some unsaved
   ones--mention them again and again in prayer by name and cease not to
   pray.

   Christ's Grace ceases not to flow and the efficacy of prayer is not
   stayed. Do not cease to pray till all the family is converted, till
   there is not another vessel left. Let us do the same with our
   neighbors. Are we sufficiently earnest before God with regard to them?
   Might we not expect to see a great change in London if the districts
   wherein we dwell were more often on our hearts in prayer? You have
   heard of the great revival which followed Jonathan Edwards' marvelous
   sermon upon "Sinners in the hand of an angry God." That sermon was
   marvelous in its effects.

   The power of that sermon may be traced to this fact--that a number of
   Christian people had met together some days before and prayed that God
   would send a blessing with the minister who was to preach on that
   occasion. Their prayer put power into Jonathan Edwards' sermon and so
   sinners were converted. If we were to take up villages and hamlets and
   towns and pray for them with earnest, believing faith, God might
   prosper instrumentalities that are now unblessed. And ministers who are
   now sowing seed that never springs up, God might bless with a joyful
   harvest.

   They might not know the reason. But those who prevailed with God would
   be able to solve the riddle. Prayer to the Most High would be a quiet
   setting of the empty vessel under the running oil and without noise it
   would be filled! Let us see what we can do in this matter. Do you
   hesitate? When you have the keys of Heaven at your belt will you not
   use them? When God puts the whole treasury of His Grace into the
   keeping of our faith, shall we let that Grace be unused for want of
   earnestness? When He says to us--"Here is carte-blanche for you--ask
   what you will and it shall be done unto you"--shall we not open our
   mouths widely?

   If the Lord promises that when two agree as touching anything
   concerning His kingdom, He will grant it to us-- why, let us agree at
   once! What? Will you not fill up these checks which God has signed and
   left blank for you? Will you fill them up for pennies, or for trifling
   sums, when the infinite checkbook of God is laid open to you? O saints
   of God, be not straitened in yourselves since God does not straiten
   you! Bring in the empty vessels and bring in not a few.

   III. Once more. I shall use the text in a third way of application IN
   REFERENCE TO THE WORK OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. There was a time in certain
   Churches when, if there were a few converted to God, say thirty or
   forty at a time, the older friends would hold up their hands, not in
   astonishment exactly but in utter unbelief. For they thought some undue
   influence or improper excitement must have been present to bring out
   such a crowd. I recollect having to deal with those who would say, "We
   had one Baptism in ten years under the solid doctrinal teaching of our
   former pastor. We had a sound Divine and we were sound ourselves (and
   sound asleep, too)! But see what a hurry we are now in! There have been
   twenty persons professing to be converted in one month!"

   The good Brethren have added, "We hope you will be very cautious. Don't
   receive them too fast. There is a deal of excitement abroad and we must
   be judicious and watchful, for when the excitement passes away a
   terrible reaction may set in!" One good old lady I know of used to say
   sarcastically that she hoped the Church would take care that the back
   door was easy to open, for she was quite sure that if so many came in
   at the front, there would be a good number who would soon have to be
   turned out at the back. I am half afraid that she hoped it would be so
   to justify her criticisms.

   When there were only two or three in a year, our friends ascribed the
   work to the Holy Spirit--anything little was of the Holy Spirit. But if
   the number of converts rose to thirty or forty and especially if it
   came to three hundred, that was mere excitement. When the minister had
   to ransack the congregation to find a few who could be drawn into the
   Church to make his work look decent--that was the Holy Spirit--but when
   converts came pouring in by hundreds, oh, then everyone was frightened
   lest it should be fleshly excitement!

   Dear Brethren, is not this absurd? Do not these people act on the very
   reverse principle of the Prophet's widow? They say, "Bring very few
   vessels, vessels very few. Suppose some of them should not be filled!
   There is oil enough for one or two--do not bring more--for fear of
   failure in such cases. If we see the oil filling hundreds of vessels,
   then we say it cannot be oil, it must be some vile imitation of it. We
   cannot expect it can all be good oil if so many vessels are filled with
   it." The fact is, there are some who do not believe the Holy Spirit to
   be great--nor even to be good.

   They have an idea that He is not God after all. For if they believed
   Him to be God, surely they would expect Him to do great things in this
   world and they would look to see another Pentecost, in which thousands
   would cry out, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" Instead of thinking
   that the period of revival through which we may have passed was
   anything in its greatness beyond what the Holy Spirit was likely to do,
   I believe, Brethren, it was insignificant compared with what the Holy
   Spirit is able and willing to accomplish! If we should live to see a
   genuine revival of the best kind, we should see greater things than
   these. I hope that when the Holy Spirit comes with power and works with
   His Truth--as He will when we fully believe in Him and obey Him--we
   shall then hear sermons preached which shall be the means of conversion
   of a whole Tabernacle full at once.

   I hope to hear that in every Chapel--in every place of worship in
   London--the Word of God has had free course and has been glorified. I
   hope to hear of places crowded first with one congregation and then
   with another which had been waiting to come in. I hope that thousands
   will be in hot haste to find the Savior. Why not? You are settling down
   to think that this congregation is very great and very wonderful. And
   so indeed it is. Where else will you see these thousands constantly
   assembled? I trust the day will come when hundreds of houses like this
   shall be crowded from floor to ceiling and the cry shall be heard from
   tens of thousands, "Come over and help us and tell us what the blood of
   Christ can do for us."

   God grant this not in England only. We must not fancy that the heathen
   are to be converted at the slow pace they have been. The population of
   heathendom has increased at a far greater rate than the number of
   converts to Christianity. When the increase does come, it will come in
   a different style from this--in a Godlike way. Shall a nation be born
   at once? Perhaps it shall be so. Why not? The Spirit of God is not
   straitened. And when faith comes back to the Church and she brings her
   many empty vessels, then the Spirit of God that is in her shall
   graciously multiply His Divine work and all the empty nations shall be
   filled. England, the United States, France, Prussia, Russia, Italy,
   Spain, India, China, Arabia

   shall all be filled to the brim with the outpouring of God's eternal
   Spirit and myriads shall be saved by the precious blood of Jesus!

   I would encourage my Brother and Sister workers here to look for great
   things and go to work vigorously because they have an omnipotent God
   behind them. Brethren, push forward, undeterred by discouragement. You
   do not know, my dear Sister, what you can do. But make a bold attempt.
   Your tiny spark may set a county on a blaze. My dear young Brother, you
   do not know what you can accomplish. Put it to the test in all
   earnestness and you will be surprised at yourself. The Lord can make
   use of poor nothings to achieve glorious purposes. It is not your
   strength, it is His strength that is to do the work. That strength can
   lay hold of but what shall turn out to be Divine strength.

   Have faith in God. Believe Him to be true and omnipotent and we shall
   see greater things than these. Alas, we fail because we do not believe!
   If the Son of Man comes shall He find faith on the earth? I fear He
   would discover, but here and there, a grain of mustard seed. May He
   grant to many of us that heroic faith which, believing in God, thinks
   nothing of difficulties and does not believe in impossibilities but
   does right and preaches the Truth of God and expects God to bless it
   above what we can ask or even think. May God bless you and may the
   first part of my subject be last in your recollection. If you are empty
   vessels, come to Christ and be filled. May He fill you with His Grace
   tonight for His mercy sake! Amen and Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

Essential Points In Prayer

   INTENDED FOR READING ON LORD'S DAY, JANUARY 20, 1889.

   DELIVERED BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON, ON THURSDAY EVENING,
   FEBRUARY 10, 1887.

   "The Lord appeared to Solomon the second time, as He had appeared unto
   him at Gibeon. And the Lord said unto him, I have heard your prayer and
   your supplication, that you have made before Me: I have hallowed this
   house, which you have built, to put My name there forever. And My eyes
   and My heart shall be there perpetually." 1 Kings 9:2,3.

   BELOVED Friends, it was an exceedingly encouraging thing to Solomon
   that the Lord should appear to him before the beginning of his great
   work of building the temple. See in the third chapter of this First
   Book of the Kings, at the fifth verse, "In Gibeon the Lord appeared to
   Solomon in a dream by night: and God said, Ask what I shall give you."
   Some of us remember how the Lord was with us at the beginning of our
   life-work--when we started as young men and women newly converted, full
   of zeal and earnestness--determined to do something for the Lord. How
   we sought His face! With what simplicity, with what tenderness of
   heart, with what dependence upon Him and diffidence as to ourselves!

   We remember, as HE remembers, the love of our espousals--those early
   days. I cannot forget when the Lord appeared unto me in Gibeon at the
   first. Truly there are things about the lives of Christian men that
   would not have been possible if God had not appeared to them at the
   beginning. If He had not strengthened and tutored them and given them
   wisdom beyond what they possess in themselves. If He had not inspirited
   them. If He had not infused life into them, they had not done what they
   have already done. It is a priceless blessing to begin with God and not
   to lay a stone of the temple of our life-work till the Lord has
   appeared unto us.

   I do not know, however, but that it is an equal, perhaps a superior
   blessing, for the Lord to appear to us after a certain work is done.
   Even as in this case--"The Lord appeared to Solomon the second time, as
   He had appeared unto him at Gibeon." Solomon had now finished the
   temple and he needed another visit from on high. There is great joy in
   completing a work. And yet there is, to some minds, a great letdown,
   when the once engrossing service ceases to keep the mind upon the
   stretch. You run up hill and you have gained the summit--there is no
   more climbing for the present-- and then you almost wish that you had
   to struggle again.

   A work like that of Solomon lasting for seven years must have become a
   delight to him--to see the house growing and to mark all the stages of
   its beauty. And so it is with any special and notable work which we are
   called to do early in life. We get wedded to it, we are glad to see it
   grow under our hand. And when at last that particular portion of our
   service is finished, we feel a kind of loss. We have grown used to the
   pull upon the collar--we have almost leaned upon it and we feel a
   difference when we are at the top of the hill. Personally I never feel
   exhilaration at a success but a certain sinking of heart when the tug
   of war was over.

   We see the same in the story of God's greater servants. We note it
   specially in Elijah when he had performed his mighty work on Carmel and
   slain the prophets of Baal--he felt an exultation in his spirit for a
   while and he ran before the chariot of the king in the joy of his soul.
   But there came a reaction afterwards of a very painful kind. The case
   of Solomon is not parallel. And yet I should think that it might have
   been and probably was so with Solomon that he was in a condition of
   special need when the temple was finished. He may have been in peril of
   pride, if not of depression--in either case it was a remarkable season
   and its need must have been remarkable, also--"and so the Lord appeared
   unto Solomon the second time, as He had appeared unto him in Gibeon."

   Brethren, we need renewed appearances, fresh manifestations, new
   visitations from on High. And I commend to those of you who are getting
   on in life--that while you thank God for the past and look back with
   joy to His visits to you in your early days--you now seek and ask for a
   second visitation of the Most High. Not that I do not think that you
   have visitations from God full often and walk in the light of His
   countenance. But still, though the ocean is often at flood twice every
   day--yet it has its spring tides. The sun shines whether we see it or
   not, right though our winter's fog, and yet it has its summer
   brightness.

   If we walk with God constantly, there are still seasons when He opens
   to us the very secret of His heart and manifests Himself to us not only
   as He does not unto the world but as He does not at all times to His
   own favored ones. All days in a palace are not days of banqueting, and
   all days with God are not so clear and glorious as certain special
   Sabbaths of the soul in which the Lord unveils His glory. Happy are we
   if we have once beheld His face. But happier still if He again comes to
   us in fullness of favor.

   I think that we should be seeking those second appearances--we should
   be crying to God most pleadingly that He would speak to us a second
   time. We do not want a re-conversion, as some assert. I hope that we do
   not. If the Lord has kept us, as we should be, steadfast in His fear,
   we are already possessors of what some call "the higher life." This
   have many of us enjoyed from the very first hour of our spiritual life.
   We do not need to be converted again. But we do wish that again, over
   our heads, the windows of Heaven should be opened--that again, a
   Pentecost should be given, and that we should renew our youth like the
   eagles to run without weariness and walk without fainting. May the Lord
   fulfill to every one of His people tonight His blessing upon Solomon!
   "The Lord appeared to Solomon the second time, as He had appeared unto
   him at Gibeon."

   Now, what the Lord spoke upon in the commencement of His interview with
   Solomon concerned his prayer. And as the Lord answered that prayer, and
   here, in this second appearance, recapitulated the points of it, we may
   be sure that there was much about that prayer which would make it a
   model for us. We shall do well to pray after the manner which
   successful pleaders have followed. In this case we will follow the
   Lord's own description of an accepted prayer. I shall use the text to
   that end briefly in two or three ways.

   I. First, OUR PROPER PLACE IN PRAYER. The Lord said, "I have heard your
   prayer and your supplication, that you have made before Me." There is
   the place to pray--"before Me"--that is to say, before the Lord. Let us
   talk a little about this matter--

   "Whenever we seek HIM He is found, And everyplace is hallowed ground."

   But we should take care that the place is hallowed by our prayer being
   deliberately and reverently presented before God.

   This place is not always found. The Pharisee went up to the temple to
   pray but evidently he did not pray "before God" so that even in the
   most holy courts he did not find the place desired. In his own esteem
   he prayed--but in his going home to his house without
   justification--there was evidence that he either had not prayed at all
   or that he had not prayed before God. It is not because you pass these
   portals and come into these pews that you are before God. No, and if
   you were to seek the shrines which have been most eminently regarded in
   the Church--if you stood by the site of Jerusalem, if you sought out
   that little skull-like hill called "Calvary," and prayed there--or if
   you went to Olivet and bowed your knee in Gethsemane, you might not
   therefore be before God.

   The nearer the Church--sometimes the farther from God. And in the very
   center of it, in the midst of the assembly where prayer is likely to be
   made, you may not be "before God" at all. Praying before God is a more
   spiritual business than is to be performed by turning to the east or to
   the west, or bowing the knee, or entering within walls hallowed for
   ages. Alas, it is easy enough to pray and not to pray before God! And
   it is not so easy--it is indeed a thing not to be done except by the
   power of the Spirit--to "enter into that which is within the veil," and
   to stand before the Mercy Seat, all blood-besprinkled, consciously and
   really in the presence of the Invisible, to fulfill that precept, "You
   people, pour out your hearts before Him." "Before Him" is the place for
   the soul's outpouring, and blessed, are they that know it and find it!

   This blessed place "before God" can be found in public prayer.
   Solomon's prayer before God was offered in the midst of a great
   multitude. The priests stood in their places and the Levites kept their
   due order. The people were gathered together and all the armies of the
   tribes of Israel stood in the streets of the holy city when Solomon
   bowed his knee and

   cried mightily unto his God. It is evident that he was enabled, that
   day, not to pray to please the people--that they might note his
   eloquent language and be gratified with the appropriate performance--he
   was inspired to pray before the Lord.

   Ah, Brethren, those of us who have to conduct your devotions strive
   hard that we may be seen of God in secret when heard of men in public.
   And I am sure that we never pray so rightly or so usefully for you as
   when we only remember you in a very inferior sense but seem to be
   surrounded as with a cloud, enclosed within the secret place of the
   Most High, even when we stand supplicating aloud for you in the public
   assembly of God's people. The same is true of each of you--it is wrong
   for you, in a Prayer Meeting, to pray with a view to an individual of
   importance, or with the remembrance of those present whose respect you
   would like to obtain.

   The Mercy Seat is no place for the exhibition of your abilities. It is
   even more evil to take the opportunity of making personal remarks about
   others. I have heard of oblique hints having been given in prayer. I am
   sorry to say that I have even heard of remarks which have been so
   directly critical and offensive that one knew what the Brother was
   saying and lamented it. Such a proceeding is altogether objectionable
   and irreverent. We do not pray in Prayer Meetings to correct doctrinal
   errors, nor to teach a body of divinity, nor to make remarks upon the
   errors of certain Brethren, nor to impeach them before the Most High.

   These things should be earnest matters of supplication but not of a
   sort of indirect preaching and scolding in prayer. It is conduct worthy
   of the Accuser of the Brethren to turn a prayer into an opportunity of
   finding fault with others. Our prayer must be "before God," or else it
   is not an acceptable prayer. And if eyes and memory, and thought can be
   shut to the presence of everybody else, except in that minor sense in
   which we must remember them in sympathy, then it is in the Presence of
   God that we truly pray. And that, I say, may be done in public, if
   Divine Grace is given. For this we have need to pray, "O Lord, open my
   lips. And my mouth shall show forth Your praise."

   But prayer before God can just as well--perhaps more readily--be
   offered in private, though I am not sure that it is not easily missed,
   even there. You are in your room where you are accustomed to pray. Do
   you not find yourself upon your knees repeating goodly words, while
   your heart is wandering? May you not confess that often the prayer
   which has been a matter of habit, has been said as much before the
   walls of your room, or before the bedpost, as before God? You have not
   realized His Presence--you have not spoken distinctly and directly to
   Him. Although you have observed the Savior's canon and have shut the
   door and nobody else has been there so that you have not prayed in the
   presence of oth-ers--you have mainly prayed in your own presence and
   God has to your inmost soul been far away.

   It is poor work merely to talk piously to yourself. There is not much
   that comes of pouring your heart into your heart, praying your soul
   into your own soul--it is neither an emptying of self, nor a filling
   with God--it does but stir up what had been quite as well left as dregs
   at the bottom. Better far is the course prescribed in that hallowed
   precept, "You people, pour out your heart before Him"--turn them bottom
   upwards, let all run out before God and so let room be left for
   something better and more Divine. Pouring out your soul within yourself
   does not come to much.

   And yet often that is about what our prayer amounts to--a
   recapitulation of wants without a grasp of Divine supplies. A bemoaning
   of weakness without a reception of strength. A consciousness of
   nothingness but not a plunging into all-sufficiency. Brothers and
   Sisters, the main point of supplication is neither to pray in the
   presence of others, nor yet, first of all, in your own presence but to
   present your prayer "before God."

   Now, it is clear that this means that the prayer is to be directed to
   God. "Well," says one, "I know that." I know you do--and yet, my
   Brother, you too often forget it. Like a playful boy you get your bow
   and arrows and shoot them anywhere. The way to pray is to take in hand
   the aforesaid bow and arrows and--you think I am going to say--shoot
   with them with all your might. But I am not in such haste. Wait a
   bit--yes, draw the string and fit the arrow to it but wait, wait! Wait
   till you have your eyes fixed on the target! Wait till you see
   distinctly the center of the mark!

   What is the use of shooting if you have not something to shoot at?
   Wait, then, till you know what you are going to do. You want to strike
   the white, to pierce the center of the target. Be sure, then, that you
   get it well into your eye! Imitate David, who says, "In the morning
   will I direct my prayer unto You and will look up." He has fixed the
   arrow, drawn the bow and taken deliberate aim--now is the time for the
   next act. He lets the arrow fly. How well directed! Look! He has hit
   the center! He caught the mark with his eyes, and therefore, he has
   struck it with his arrow.

   Oh to pray with a distinct object! Indefinite praying is a waste of
   breath. It will never do to begin praying because the time has come for
   it. We must think, "I am about to ask of God what I want--I am to speak
   to the great King of

   kings, from whom all Divine Grace must come--it is to Him that my
   prayer must be directed. What, then, shall I ask at His hands?" Does
   anybody here suppose that the repeating of certain words out of a book,
   or of his own making, has any virtue in it? Some seem, by their
   frequent repetitions of that blessed model of prayer, the Lord's
   Prayer, to think that there is a magical charm in that sacred
   arrangement of words.

   But I tell you solemnly--you might as well repeat that perfect prayer
   backwards as forwards, if your heart is not in it. If your very heart
   is not in it and if your soul is not looking Godward, you profane your
   Lord's Words and are guilty of all the greater sin because of their
   excellence. Make not praying a piece of witchcraft and your
   supplications an imitation of the abracadabra of the wizard! That is
   vain superstition and not acceptable supplication. Pray distinctly with
   all your wits about you to your God. Speak to Him.

   And hence it becomes needful that we should endeavor in prayer to
   realize the Presence of God. It shall be well to put it this way--you
   have prayed well if you have spoken to God as a man speaks to his
   friend. If you are as sure that God is there as that you are there, and
   perhaps somewhat more sure. If you are in Him and He in you and if you
   talk to Him as to one whom you cannot see, but whom you can perceive
   better than by sight, you have prayed well. If you speak to Him as to
   one whom you cannot feel with your hands but can feel with all your
   nature--with something better than fingers and hands--perceiving that
   He is, and knowing that He is hearing you and will reward your diligent
   seeking--that is praying before God.

   That is pleading before a living God, with One who feels and will be
   moved by what you feel, to One who speaks and will hearken to what you
   speak. You are to commune with One who is not like your fellow men, who
   may let you plead and remain like a block, unmoved by your pathetic
   requests. But to a living God, a tender God, sensitive to all the
   sensations of your soul. Oh, to come before the living and acting God!
   Not before a God lame and impotent. Nor before the new God, who is
   impersonal and dead ,but before the true God--God in Christ Jesus!

   If we did but realize who He is to whom we speak--God, very near to us
   in the person of the Only Begotten, who has taken our nature upon
   Himself--what praying ours would be! And that is the right sort of
   praying. Oh, that the God of Truth may be able, in speaking to each of
   us, to speak concerning, "Your prayer and your supplication which you
   have prayed before Me"! Lord, help us to pass through the outer courts
   and to enter into Your inner court and speak with You! Lord, deliver us
   from staying in the words but bring us into the spirit of prayer--bring
   us near Yourself.

   If there are any here that have never prayed, let their prayer at this
   time be to One who is close to them, ready to hear them. Do not ask,
   "What shall I say?" Say to God what you wish to say. What is your
   desire tonight? Would you be saved? Beg Him to save you. Would you be
   forgiven? Ask forgiveness. "The words," you say, "tell me the words."
   No, you need no words. If you have none, look, just look to Him. Let
   your heart think out its desires. There is music without words--and
   there is prayer without words. The soul of prayer is being before God
   and desiring before God--who hears without sounds and understands
   without expressions.

   Open your heart--look to Him. And ask Him to read what you cannot read.
   Beg Him of His great mercy to give you not according to your own sense
   of your requirements but according to the riches of His mercy in Christ
   Jesus. You are praying before God when you have realized His Presence.
   The Lord does not require from you that you should express yourself in
   words. He reads what is there with an omniscient glance--what is
   written on your heart. To know that He does so, and to plead in that
   spirit is prayer before God. May He by His Grace give each of us this
   privilege today.

   II. I will change the run of our thought for a little while to notice,
   with much earnestness, OUR GREAT DESIRE IN PRAYER. It is that which God
   said that He had given to Solomon. "I have heard your prayer and your
   supplication."

   I have often had occasion to remark that the wise men of modern times
   whose principal characteristic is that they think so much of themselves
   and so very little of anybody else, tell us that prayer is an excellent
   exercise, good and comforting and useful. But they say that we are not
   to suppose that it has any effect upon God whatever. We enquire of
   them, "Would you have us go on praying after the information you have
   given?" "Oh, yes," they say, "Oh yes, of course. It is a pious
   exercise, a proper and edifying thing. Go on praying but do not think
   that God hears."

   Brothers and Sisters, it is evident that they think us idiots.
   Evidently they consider praying men to be born fools. If it is certain
   that prayer has no effect upon God, my Brothers and Sisters, I would
   just as soon whistle when I rise in the morning as pray. And I would as
   soon close my eyes at night in dumb silence as run over a set of
   ineffectual words. There

   could be no good in prayer if it should be proved that it never went
   beyond the room in which it was uttered. When it ceases to be accepted
   by the Lord and honored by His response, we shall abandon it.

   If there is neither hearing, nor answering, we shall have reduced
   ourselves to the level of the worshippers of Baal. And we have not come
   to that, yet. We are obliged to you wise men for your compliments. But
   we shall not follow your absurd advice! Your pretty praises of our
   devotion as a pleasing and instructive exercise are quite lost upon us,
   since they involve a covert insult. You may take back your compliments,
   if you please. For our opinion of your wisdom is almost equal to your
   opinion of ours.

   But, Brethren, what we desire in prayer is really to be heard. If I
   pray, I pray not to the winds, nor to the waves--but to God. And if He
   does not hear me, I have lost my breath. The first thing the soul
   desires in prayer is an audience with God. If the Lord does not hear
   us, we have gained nothing. And what an honor it is, if you come to
   think of it, to have audience with God! The frail, feeble, undeserving
   creature is permitted to stand in the august Presence of the God of the
   whole earth and the Lord regards that poor creature as if there were
   nothing else for Him to observe and bends His ear and His heart to
   listen to that creature's cry! It is necessary to a living prayer to
   feel that we are speaking to God and that God is hearing us.

   You notice, that generally in the Psalms David says very little about
   God's answering. But he always speaks about God's hearing and he asks
   that He would hear. That He should deign to hear us is quite
   enough--quite enough from such a God as He is. If I can get my petition
   placed in His hands I am fully satisfied. If I can pour my desires into
   His ears and He has once observed them, all further fear is removed.
   Your heavenly Father knows that you have need of these things and you
   may rest perfectly content. For in coming into His Presence, you have
   done according to His command and therefore His promise holds good to
   you. The first thing wanted, then, is that the Lord should hear us.

   But we want more than that--we want that He should accept. It were a
   painful thing to be permitted to speak to a great friend and then for
   him to stand austere and stern and say, "I have heard what you have to
   say. Go your way." We ask not this of God. We beg Him kindly and
   graciously to accept our poor confessions, petitions, supplications and
   adorations. And if He does but look and smile--if He does but say one
   word into our soul which implies, "I have accepted your prayer"--what a
   joy it is! To have brought an offering which the Lord has
   accepted--this is the sweetness and delight of supplication!

   Still, there is a third thing which we want, which God gave to Solomon
   and that was an answer. He asked the Lord to hallow the house and the
   Lord did hallow the house. And as to you and me in prayer, while there
   are some things which we must always pray for with a great deal of
   diffidence, evermore saying emphatically, "Not as I will but as You
   will"--yet are there certain other gifts which we are encouraged to
   pray for with importunity, being resolved to have them. Those are
   spiritual blessings, Covenant blessings, distinctly promised and
   evidently necessary--these we may ask for without any question, using a
   sacred importunity and refusing to let the angel go unless he blesses
   us.

   On matters promised by God in His Word we may come again and
   again--knocking at the Lord's door until He awakes and gives us the
   loaves that we seek for our hungry and fainting friend. Oh for more
   holy boldness! Oh for more assured confidence! We have need to believe
   that we have the petitions that we ask of Him. We must ask in faith,
   nothing wavering, or we may not expect to receive anything of the Lord.
   Oh, yes, we long to be heard and answered. And we cannot be satisfied
   to pray unless we perceive that prayer is effective in the courts
   above. That is our desire in prayer.

   III. This makes me mention, thirdly, OUR ASSURANCE or ANSWER TO PRAYER.
   Can we have an assurance that God has heard and answered prayer?
   Solomon had it. The Lord said unto him, "I have heard your prayer and
   your supplication, that you have made before Me." Does the Lord ever
   say that to us? I think so. Let us consider how He does so.

   I think that He says it to us very often in our usual faith. I hope
   that I speak for many of you when I say that we constantly pray
   believingly. It is habitual with me to expect God to answer me. I go to
   Him very simply and ask for what I want. And if I did not have that
   which I humbly sought for, I should be greatly surprised. When I do get
   it, I reckon it as a matter of course--for the Lord has promised to
   answer prayer and it is certain that He will keep His promise. I am
   speaking now about the daily mercies and the daily trials and the
   ordinary events of life--in these matters God is sure to answer prayer.
   And our faith, in its ordinary operation, is, to our hearts, the voice
   of God, saying, "I have heard your prayer and your supplication."

   But sometimes you require strong confidence. You have to solicit some
   extraordinary blessing. You get to a place like that to which Jacob
   came when common prayer was not sufficient. When Esau was coming to
   meet him with an armed force, he must have a night's prayer--he must
   gather up all his courage at Jabbok. He must wrestle with the angel and
   win the Divine blessing. At such times, it is a stronger faith than
   usual, brought into exercise, by necessity, which assures the soul of
   the blessing. "According to your faith be it unto you." If we can trust
   God--for that is the thing--we shall have the thing we seek.

   Faith is not saying, "I know that I have it," when you really have it
   not. That would be telling yourself a lie. Here is a man who says,
   "Believe that you are sanctified and you are in a moment sanctified."
   But you are not. You may believe a lie in believing that and be,
   perhaps, less sanctified than you were before you believed it--and ten
   times more proud-- and thus far more under the influence of Satan. To
   believe in God that He will sanctify me and that He is sanctifying me,
   is a very different thing from believing that I am already sanctified.
   I believe that God will supply my needs but I do not believe that I
   have got the Bank of England in my pocket. If I did believe it, I
   should not find it there when I put my hand to feel for it.

   Faith is not believing fanatically but believing the Truths of God.
   There is a wonderful difference between believing what your fancy says
   and believing what God has distinctly promised. Faith and fancy are two
   very different things. God keep us from the falsehood of folly and lead
   us into the Truth of God! I will believe anything, however monstrous it
   may appear, if God says it. I will believe nothing, however desirable,
   merely because my own fancy imagines it--or because your heated brain
   suggests it. Strong faith often brings with it a conviction within the
   soul which nothing can shake. A conviction most sure, and yet most
   reasonable, since it is inspired by the Spirit of God who bears witness
   only to the truth and not to dreams. To the man's inner consciousness
   it is as though he heard the voice of God, saying, "I have heard your
   prayer and your supplication."

   Sometimes this comes in the form of a comfortable persuasion. Have you
   ever known what it is to leave off prayer when you are in the middle of
   it and say, "I am heard--I am heard"? Have you not felt that you needed
   not to cry any longer, for you had gained your suit and must begin to
   praise, rather than continue to pray? When a man goes to a bank with a
   check and he gets the money, he does not stand loafing about the
   counter--he goes off about his business. And oftentimes before God, he
   that is prepared to be a long time in prayer if it should be necessary,
   feels that he must be brief in petition and long in thanksgiving. He
   rises from his knees with the persuasion, "I need not ask any more--I
   am heard."

   And he goes about his business, to do something more needful and
   seasonable than praying. For it is always better to serve God in a
   pressing practical duty than it is to continue to pray when prayer has
   no longer any reasonableness in it, seeing that you are already heard.
   If God has given you the blessing, why ask for it any further? "The
   Lord says to Moses, Why do you cry unto Me? Speak unto the children of
   Israel, that they go forward." And that going forward was a better
   thing than praying, now that praying had had its day. So there comes a
   comfortable assurance at times that it is even so, and you must go on
   your way rejoicing. This inward persuasion is no fanatical imagining,
   nor excitement of the brain-- but a work of the Holy Spirit--which none
   can imitate and only the receiver can understand.

   The Lord also gives to His people a manifest preparation for the
   blessing. He prepares them to receive it. Their expectation is raised
   so that they begin to look out for the blessing and make room for it.
   And when it is so, you may be sure that it is coming. God never brought
   you to a well and put a bucket and rope in your way without intending
   to fill that bucket when you let it down. When the thirsty soil has
   opened all its mouths to drink in the rain of Heaven, that rain always
   comes. When the ears of wheat are ready for the sun to ripen them, the
   heat of harvest is near. When a man of God so looks for the wind of the
   Spirit that he spreads the sails of hope, the breeze is sure to blow.

   Brothers and Sisters, it is want of preparation in you that hinders the
   blessing. "He did not many mighty works there because of their
   unbelief." "You are not straitened in us but you are straitened in your
   own heart." But when the Lord has given you an evident preparation for
   the blessing, the blessing is already on the way, the shadow of it is
   resting upon you. In that preparation the Lord virtually says--"I have
   heard your prayer and your supplication."

   Actual observation also breeds in us a solid confidence that our suit
   is succeeding. Sometimes God gives us an assurance that He has heard
   our prayer when He makes us look back and observe the past. How He has
   answered us! He changes not. He hears us still. O Sirs, I have no
   patience with those who say that God does not hear prayer--for my daily

   experience proves them wrong. I would not lie even under the notion of
   honoring God. But I will speak what I know. Throughout life it has been
   my habit to wait upon God about many things and especially about
   extraordinary necessities which have arisen out of the demands of the
   great institutions committed to me.

   I shall not stay to tell the stories of the Lord's supplies in answer
   to prayer. Some of you know them in a measure. But in very truth the
   Lord has heard my prayers as distinctly as if He had rent the heavens
   and put out His right hand filled with good. Many of you could bear
   similar witness, could you not? The fact that the Lord has heard us in
   the past speaks in our souls and fills us with the assurance that He
   will hear us again. Memory emphasizes the voice of the Lord, which
   says, "I have heard your prayer. I have heard your supplication,
   therefore trust Me with all your heart. Have I not always heard your
   prayer? When did I refuse you?

   "My Beloved One, when did I reject you? Have I not always hearkened to
   you? In the hour of your distress, have I not delivered you? In the
   times of your need, have I not supplied you? I have heard your prayer.
   Go in peace. Weep no more. Let not your soul be troubled. All is well,
   for I am on the Throne of Grace and My face is towards you."

   IV. Now I have come to the end of what I have to say, with this one
   sole exception. Let me speak of OUR SPECIAL APPLICATION OF PRAYER. In
   the case of Solomon, prayer turned in one direction and in that
   direction I want to turn now. You learn what Solomon's prayer was when
   you hear how God fulfilled it. God said to him, "I have hallowed this
   house which you have built and put My name there forever and My eyes
   and My heart shall be there perpetually."

   Last night the members of this Church met in their annual Church
   Meeting* and we had great joy and thankfulness for all the mercy which
   God has made to pass before us. I have just completed thirty-three
   years of ministry here--a third of a century--with unbroken blessing.
   We can say that all these years have passed with no division and no
   strife among us--with nothing but perpetual benedictions from the Lord
   God of our salvation. Blessed be His name!

   Our prayer is again that the Lord Himself would hallow this house which
   we have built. We ask this in no superstitious way. Bricks and mortar
   and iron and stone are nothing to us. The qualities of holiness do not
   adhere to material substances but to hearts and to souls and acts. Yet
   we ask our Lord to hallow this Tabernacle with His Presence still more
   and more. If that were gone, Ichabod would be our bitter cry! The glory
   would indeed have departed. We want our Lord to hallow it by His
   favorable regard that when we worship He will accept our worship and
   hear our prayers and our praises.

   We want Him to hallow it by His working among us in many more
   conversions. It was a joyous time to me when I saw the enquirer come
   who was number ten thousand--that is long ago and we have reached a far
   higher number now-- but all is the work of our gracious God. We shall
   never bring in another true convert unless we have God's Presence! O
   Lord Jesus, we would constrain You saying, "Abide with us." The Lord
   bless His people in this House of Prayer in the breaking of bread, in
   the ordinance of Baptism, in the proclamation of the Gospel and in all
   their gatherings together.

   O Lord, we pray You hallow this house. We pray it from our inmost
   souls. We that have found our services to be hallowed to You in days
   that are past, cannot bear the idea of failure and famine in the
   future. May the Lord say to us tonight, "I have hallowed this house
   which you have built."

   We want that He should hallow it, next, in this way--"to put My name
   there forever." "Forever." As long as there shall be any such house, or
   need of such a house, may His name be here. My venerable predecessor,
   Dr. Rippon, whom I never saw, I have been informed was likely to pray
   for a certain successor of his whom he seemed always to have in his
   mind's thoughts. He frequently prayed for the man whom the Lord would
   send among the people of his care after his own decease. In a letter
   that I have seen, which he wrote to a friend, I cannot but somehow see
   myself.

   As in the glimmer of the firelight he saw the person who would follow
   him and carry on his work. After sixty years of service in this Church,
   as the old man grew older, he used to be praying about this successor
   more and more. I think that I may begin to pray after his example, that
   as long as there shall be the need for a House of God, the name of God
   may be honored in this Tabernacle and may faithful men proclaim His
   salvation in the power of the Holy Spirit. Shall there stand here one
   day a man that denies the Deity of my Lord? God forbid! ["Amen."]

   Shall there be found here one that shall preach modern thought and give
   up the old, old Gospel? God forbid! ["Amen."] Let the house be wrapped
   in flames and every ash be blown away by the winds sooner than any
   shall preach from this pulpit any other Gospel than that you have
   received. ["Amen." "Amen."] I thank you for those loud Amens. May God
   Himself say, Amen. May the name of our Covenant God be set here forever
   and no other name.

   And then, Solomon prayed also and God heard him, that the eyes of the
   Lord might be there. That was Solomon's prayer and God greatly improved
   upon it, for He said that His eyes and His heart should be there
   perpetually. Thus the Lord hears our prayers in a better sense than
   that in which we offer them. We pray that His eyes may be upon us, and
   He adds, "It shall be so and with My eyes, My heart also shall be
   there." Oh, that the eyes of the Lord might be upon this house and upon
   this Church, to watch over it, to keep it from all harm!

   But may His heart also be with us to fill us with His Divine life and
   love and to make us know His inner self! Oh for the love of God to be
   shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit! May we know that God's
   feelings of affection and delight are towards us! This shall be our joy
   unspeakable.

   Now, Brothers and Sisters who happen to be worshipping with us on this
   occasion but are not members with us, I entreat you kindly to pray for
   this house and this Church. I would, in return, pray for your place of
   worship and for the Church to which you belong. You will, however,
   readily forgive us if we think, just now, after our thirty-three years
   of this particular Church and its interests. We must praise the Lord
   for all His mercy towards us. Grace personally received must be
   personally acknowledged. You see, we are at home and we must think of
   our own home. I can truly sing--

   "Here my best friends, my kindred dwell, Here God my Savior reigns."

   "I dwell among my own people," said the Shunammite. And there is no joy
   like it for a Christian minister and a Christian Church member--to feel
   that he dwells among his own people and is happy with them. To be
   driven from Church to Church, as some are, is a wretched business. To
   be like others, changing their views as often as the moon-- happy
   nowhere, miserable everywhere, agreeing with nobody, not even with
   themselves--is a poor business. Persons of that kind, I hope, will not
   join this Church just yet, or, if they do, may the Lord convert them as
   they come in.

   As for us, we love each other and our united prayer is that the eyes
   and the heart of God may be with us and all His people perpetually. The
   Lord bless you, dear Friends, for Christ's sake! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

Our Great Shepherd Finding the Sheep

   INTENDED FOR READING ON LORD'S DAY, JANUARY 27, 1889.

   DELIVERED BY C. H. Spurgeon,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON, ON LORD'S DAY EVENING, MARCH
   25, 1888.

   "Until he finds it. And when he has found it. And when he comes home."
   Luke 15:4,5, 6.

   THE love of Jesus, the Great Shepherd, is very practical and active.
   There is a sheep lost and the Lord regrets it. But His love does not
   spend itself in regrets. He arises and goes forth to seek and to save
   that which was lost. The love of Jesus Christ is love not in word only
   but in deed and in truth. The love of Jesus is prudent. He does not
   wait until the sheep is willing to return, or until it makes some
   attempt to come back. But no sooner is its lost estate known to the
   Shepherd than He starts off, that He may find that which was lost. The
   love of Jesus to the lost sheep is pre-eminent. He leaves the
   ninety-nine in their pasturage. And for a while forgets them, that all
   His heart, His eyes, His strength may be given to the one that has gone
   astray. O sweet love of Christ, so practical, so prudent, so
   pre-eminent! Let us ask for Divine Grace that we may imitate it,
   especially those of us who are called to be shepherds of men.

   Among God's people most of the saints have a charge to watch over.
   However little the flock may be, even if it is restricted to our own
   family, or to the little class that gathers about us on the Sabbath, we
   are all our brother's keeper in some measure. Let us learn the love of
   Christ, that we may be wise in shepherding. Let us not talk about our
   friends and say we love them. But let us show it by earnest, personal,
   speedy endeavors to do them good. Let us not wait until we see some
   goodness in them--until they seek after instruction. But, "Oh, come,
   let us go and find them. In the paths of death they roam."

   And long before they have a thought of coming home, let us be on their
   track, eager to grasp them, if by any means we may save some. Oh, to
   have in our hearts such love of souls that it engrosses us so that we
   forget earthly needs and only remember this yet higher necessity! It is
   a good house, said St. Bernard, in which Martha has to complain of
   Mary--where gracious pursuits put other work in the background. It is a
   choice crime that men should even grow lax about their lower business
   for a while, that they may devote their chief energy to the saving of
   the lost sheep. Let that stand as an introduction. May we see the love
   of Jesus, as Bernard saw it and we shall have had sermon enough.

   In my text there are three periods to which I call your attention--

   I. Christ, the Good Shepherd, first seeks the lost sheep "UNTIL HE
   FINDS IT." Just put a mark under those words. That is our first
   head--"Until He finds it." It is a long reach "Until He finds it."

   I like the expression. The Lord Jesus did not come down to earth to
   make an attempt to find men but He came to do it and He did it. He
   tarried here, seeking the lost sheep till He found it--He never gave
   over till His work was done. At this hour, in His work of grace among
   His chosen, He does not make an attempt at their salvation and suffer
   defeat. But He keeps at soul-seeking work until He find it.

   Look at the seeking shepherd--he is looking for the sheep. Notice his
   anxious countenance "until he finds it." We read that after he found it
   he rejoiced. But there is no rejoicing until he finds it. He is all
   excitement, quick of ear to catch the faintest sound, for it may be the
   bleating of his lost sheep. His eyes are like the eyes of eagles. He
   saw something stir in the fern, yonder, and he will be there in a bound
   or two. He is so eager. No--it was a mistake. It was not the sheep.
   Perhaps it was some frightened fox. He climbs a hill and from the top
   of it he looks all around. I was about to say that he looks with ears
   and eyes together. He puts his whole soul into the organs of
   watchfulness, if perhaps he may discern the sheep.

   Is there a smile on his face? Ah, no! Not "until he finds it." His
   whole soul is in his eyes and ears until he finds it. This is a faint,
   yet true picture of that Great Shepherd who came here to seek His
   flock. So the Evangelists have drawn Him in

   their pen-and-ink sketches of him--always watchful--spending night and
   day in prayers and tears and entreaties-- never more to have a joy
   until He finds the lost one. Then, when He did find a single sheep,
   finding His meat and His drink in it and becoming refreshed from the
   fact that He has so far accomplished His beloved work, the great
   Shepherd is all energy, care and concentration of thought concerning
   His sheep, "until He finds it."

   There is no hesitating with Jesus. The sheep is lost and the news is
   brought to the Shepherd. He girds His loose robe about Him and is on
   the way. He knows within a little while which way that stray sheep will
   go and He is on its track at once, though He knows that He must mark
   that track with His blood. See the blessed Shepherd pressing on? There
   is no pausing nor resting "until He finds it." He has made up His mind
   that no sheep of His shall be lost and He flies over hill and dale
   after the wanderer until He finds it.

   If you look into our Shepherd's face, there is no trace of anger there.
   He does not say, "Oh, that I should be worried with this silly sheep
   thus going astray!" No thought is there but that of anxious love. It is
   all love and nothing else but love before He finds and until He finds
   it. And you may be sure that careful tenderness will be in full action
   after He has found it. He is looking with anxious eyes of love. "As I
   live," says the Lord, "I have no pleasure in the death of him that dies
   but that he should turn unto Me and live." "Until He finds it" there
   will be no thought of anxiety but a fullness of pitying care for the
   lost sheep.

   And, mark, there is no giving up. That sheep has wandered now for many
   hours. The sun has risen and the sun has set. Or, at least it is just
   going down. But as long as the shepherd can see and the sheep is still
   alive, he will pursue it "until he finds it." He has been disappointed
   a great many times. And when he thought that he should have found it,
   he has missed it--but still, he will never give it up. He is impelled
   onward by irresistible love, and he must continue his weary search
   until he finds it. It was precisely so with our Lord Jesus Christ. When
   He came after you and after me, we ran from Him but He pursued us--we
   hid from Him but He discovered us--He had almost grasped us but so long
   as we eluded Him He still pursued with love unwearied until He found
   us.

   Oh, if He had given up after the first ten years--if He had ceased to
   care for some of us after fifty different occasions in which we had
   choked conscience and quenched the Spirit, then we should have been
   lost. But He would not be turned away. If He determines to save, He
   continues to pursue the rambling sheep until He finds it. He cannot, He
   must not, He will not cease from the work of seeking and of finding
   till He finds it. I wish tonight that the time were come with some here
   that it should be said, "The Savior did pursue such-and-such a one
   until He found him--found him in the Tabernacle and ended all his
   wanderings there--found him standing in yonder gallery and ended all
   his wanderings at the 'foot of the Cross.' "

   God grant that it may be so! But whether it is so with you or not, you
   can be sure of this--that the Lord Jesus has in hundreds and thousands
   of cases pursued sinners with unflagging mercy, leaping to them over
   hills of sin and following them till He has found them. We are now His
   forever and ever, for He who has found us will never lose us. Blessed
   be His name!

   Learn this lesson before I pass on. If ever you are seeking the
   conversion of any man, follow him until you find him. Do not be
   discouraged. Put up with a great many rebuffs and rebukes--you will
   have him yet. He is surest to succeed who cannot be put off from his
   aim. From some it will be necessary to receive a great deal that is
   most discouraging. Receive it and say nothing about it--only whisper to
   yourself, "I might well have put the Great Shepherd off from caring for
   me and yet He was not so turned aside. If He persevered with me even to
   the death, I may well persevere as long as I live in seeking and
   finding a soul." I have heard of wives who have pleaded with God for
   their husbands twenty years. And by God's Grace they have seen them
   converted.

   There are instances in this place in which indefatigable love has
   followed up ungodly relatives until they have at last been saved by
   Sovereign Grace. Persevere with loving entreaties! Till you bury your
   unsaved ones, do not consider them dead. And do not bury them
   spiritually till they are dead really. Some are easily baffled. They
   have written the death warrant of their friend by ceasing to pray for
   him and yet that death warrant will never be written in the records of
   Heaven, for their friend will be brought to the Savior's feet.

   "Until He finds it." Now nail your colors to the mast. "Until He finds
   it." Go out, you under-shepherds for Christ. Wear this motto on your
   right hand. "Until I find it." Live or die, or work or suffer, whether
   the time is short or long,

   or the way is smooth or rough, let each one of you be bound to seek a
   soul "until He finds it." You will find it then, even as Christ found
   you. There I leave that first point.

   II. And now we come to the second--"AND WHEN HE HAS FOUND IT." When he
   has found it, what does he do then? Well, first, he takes fast hold.
   "He lays it on his shoulders rejoicing." So when he has found it, the
   first thing is to get a tight grip of it. Look at him--he has got close
   up to the sheep. The poor thing is spent and yet may have strength
   enough to get away, therefore the shepherd takes good care that he
   shall not. He grasps his legs and holds him tight. That is what the
   Lord Jesus does when at last He gets a man broken down under a sense of
   sin, spent and worn out as to further resistance of Divine mercy.

   Our Lord gets such a grip of the rebel that he will never get away. I
   remember when He laid hold of me. He has never lost His grasp even to
   this day. But, oh, it was a grasp! Nothing ever gripped my fickle mind
   like the hand of Christ. When the Divine hand, which fixed the
   foundations of the earth, had fixed itself on me, my wanderings were
   ended once and for all.

   The next thing after the fast hold was the gracious lift. He lifted
   this poor sheep up and put it on his shoulders and there it was with
   all its weight, carried by powerful shoulders. That is what the Savior
   does for poor weary sinners. He carries the weight of their sin, No,
   the weight of themselves. He takes us just as we are, and instead of
   driving us back by His Law, He carries us home by His love. Instead of
   urging us to go home, He becomes the great burden-bearer of His
   redeemed and bears them on His shoulders. And now you have before you
   one of the loveliest of portraits that ever imagination can
   sketch--that great crowned Shepherd of the sheep, King of kings and
   Lord of lords, bearing on His shoulders, as a burden He delights to
   carry--the sheep that had gone astray.

   Oh, I pray God that you may lie on those broad shoulders if you never
   have been so favored. The shoulders of Omnipotence bearing up our
   weakness--the mighty Savior bearing us and all our sins and all our
   cares and our whole being upon the shoulders of His strength--this is a
   sight for angels!

   And as He thus carries the weight, observe that the distance is
   removed. We read in the next verse, "When He comes home," but there is
   nothing said about the road. For somehow our Master has the knack of
   being at home at once. The sinner may weary himself by twenty years of
   sin but in five minutes that may all be gone. It may have taken you
   fifty years to make yourself such a Hell-deserving sinner as you are,
   but it will not take Jesus fifty ticks of the clock to wash you and
   make you whiter than snow and get you back into the great Father's
   house. Truth to tell, the Shepherd's redeeming work is done already--

   "How dreadful was the hour,

   When God our wanderings laid, And did at once His vengeance pour

   Upon our Shepherd's head! How glorious was the Grace,

   When Christ sustained the stroke! His life and blood the Shepherd pays,
   A ransom for the flock."

   By that redeeming process He brought us near to God. There is no weary
   journey back for shepherd or sheep. He grasps the sheep. He puts it on
   His shoulders and they are both back at the fold. But the particular
   point I want you to notice is when the Great Shepherd gets this burden
   on His back. We read, "When He has found it He lays it upon His
   shoulders"--with great anxiety? Look to see whether it is so. Nothing
   of the sort. But is it not, "He lays it on His shoulders with great
   weariness"? No. Look! Look! "He lays it on His shoulders
   rejoicing--rejoicing."

   He does not remember all the weariness that He has had to suffer. He
   does not think of the folly of His sheep in having lost good pasture,
   in having involved itself in so much danger and in costing Him so much
   labor. Not a word is mentioned of it. "He lays it on His shoulders
   rejoicing." He says to Himself, "I am glad to carry this burden--happy
   to carry My lost sheep home." And oh, I love to picture to myself at
   this moment the joy in the heart of the blessed Christ. "For the joy
   that was set before Him He endured the Cross, despising the shame." And
   now, whenever He gets a lost sheep to carry back--He rejoices.

   His heart leaps within Him. All anxiety is gone. Fullness of delight is
   upon Him. "He lays it upon His shoulders rejoicing." I wonder whether
   the sheep could see that the Shepherd rejoiced. I do not suppose that
   it could. But it could feel it. There are two ways, you know, of
   handling a sheep and the sheep very soon knows which expresses pleasure
   on its owner's part. At any rate, I am sure that a dog knows well
   enough what your movements mean. If you speak angrily to a sheep and
   throw it upon your shoulder with indignation, that is one thing. But if
   you have not a word to say, except, "Poor thing, I am glad I have found
   you," and you cast it on your shoulders rejoicing, why, sheep as it is,
   it knows the difference.

   At any rate, I know that Christ has a way of saving us--oh, so gently,
   so lovingly, so gleefully, that He makes us happy in being saved. There
   is a way of turning a penny into stone or into gold according to the
   way in which you give it to a poor man. You can fling it at him as if
   he were a dog and he will be about as grateful to you as a dog, or not
   as much. But there is a way in which you can say, "I am sorry for your
   needs. This is all I can afford now. Take it and do what you can with
   it." Given with a brotherly look, it will be gratefully received and
   made the most of.

   There is much in the manner, as well as in the matter of a gift. The
   mannerism of Christ is grandly gracious--He saves us rejoicing. It is a
   matter of thanksgiving to Him when He gets hold of His lost sheep and
   gets it on His shoulders. It makes me glad to think that it is so. We
   are not saved by a grudging Christ, who seems as if He were weary of us
   and must save us out of hand, to get rid of us. He does not act with us
   as some rude surgeon might do who says, "I will attend to you directly
   but I have plenty else to do and you gratis patients are a trouble."

   Nor does He roughly set the bone. No. Jesus comes and as with a lady's
   dainty hand He molds the dislocated joint. And when He sets it, there
   is bliss even about the method of the setting. We look into His face,
   and we see that He puts His most tender sympathy into each movement.
   You know the different ways which workmen have. Some kind of work a man
   is soon sick of. The principle of division of labor is a very admirable
   one for the production of results upon a large scale. But it is a
   miserable business for the workman to have to do the same thing over
   and over again, all day long, as if he were an robot.

   Get a man at work at a statue--an artist whose whole soul is in his
   chisel, who knows that there is a bright spirit within that block of
   marble and who means to chip off all that hides the lovely image from
   his sight. See how he works! No man does a thing well who does it
   sorrowfully. The best work is done by the happy, joyful workman. And so
   it is with Christ. He does not save souls as of necessity--as though He
   would rather do something else if He might--but His very heart is in
   it, He rejoices to do it, and therefore He does it thoroughly and He
   communicates His joy to us in the doing of it.

   Now, learn a lesson before I go away to the third point. "When he has
   found it." Suppose that any of you should very soon meet with a poor
   troubled sinner, anxious to come to Christ. When you have found him,
   let me recommend you imitate the Master's example--get a tight grip on
   him. Do not let him slip. Get a hold of him. And then, if he is in
   trouble, take all that trouble upon yourself. Try whether you cannot
   get him upon your shoulders. Imitate your Master in that way. Try to
   bear all his burden for him, as Christ bore yours. Conduct him to the
   Christ who is the true burden-bearer.

   And all the while be very happy about it. I do not think we ought to go
   and talk to young converts in a dreadfully solemn tone, as though it
   would be something horrible to find a Savior. They will never come
   again, you may depend upon it. They will give you a wide berth. But
   just go and in a joyful spirit say, "I am so glad to find you caring
   about your soul." The best thing that can happen to a soul-seeker is to
   meet with a troubled conscience. "But," you say, "I have not the time."
   Always have time, even in the middle of the night, to see a poor
   conscience-stricken sinner.

   But perhaps you are very weary, or not well. If I were weary I should
   not be weary any longer when I came across a lost sheep. And if I were
   ill, I would get well on purpose to see after a sin-sick sinner. Talk
   in that way, with sweet and pleasant encouragement, for this is the way
   to help your brother sinner to the Savior. My time has gone but just a
   few words more on this last point.

   III. "WHEN HE COMES HOME." "When he comes home, he calls together his
   friends and neighbors, saying unto them, Rejoice with me. For I have
   found my sheep which was lost." Some hurried observations. First,
   Heaven is a home. "When he comes home." And the next verse says that it
   is Heaven. Heaven is a home. Do you not like to think of it under

   that aspect? It is the home of Jesus. And if it is the home of Jesus
   can any other home be equal to it? "When he comes home."

   Note, next, that lost ones are known in Heaven. I give you that thought
   more from the Greek than from the English hero. "When he comes home, he
   calls together his friends and neighbors, saying unto them, Rejoice
   with me. For I have found my sheep--the lost one." That is how it
   should run. It is as if the friends knew that one had been lost and the
   loss had been deplored--and the shepherd says, "I have found my
   sheep--you know which one--the lost one." Up there they know which are
   Christ's sheep, and which are lost. Heaven is nearer earth than some of
   us dream. How long does it take to get there?--

   "One gentle sigh the spirit breaks--

   We scarce can say, 'He's gone,' Before the ransomed spirit takes Its
   mansion near the Throne."

   And there are more communications between earth and Heaven than some
   folks dream. For here it is clear that when the shepherd came home he
   said to them, "I have found the sheep," the lost one. So they knew all
   about it. It is evident, again, that they all knew there that the
   shepherd had gone after the sheep, for he says, "I have found my sheep
   which was lost." They all knew that he had gone on search, and
   therefore they could all understand his joy when he came back with the
   sheep.

   I believe that they know in Heaven when Christ is seeking after anyone.
   It must be a great satisfaction to some up there who die with an
   unconverted son, or an unconverted child to know, after a little while,
   son or daughter is converted. I am persuaded they know it. They cannot
   help knowing it, because they are Christ's friends and neighbors and,
   according to the parable, He tells them and He says to them, "Rejoice
   with Me." And if He says, "Rejoice with Me," why, of course, He tells
   them why.

   You don't think that Jesus ever invited a spirit before the Throne to
   rejoice with Him, and received for an answer, "I cannot do it, for I
   know no cause for joy." If I had been converted after my mother's
   death, I can fancy that when Jesus said to all of them, "Rejoice with
   Me. For I have found My sheep, the lost one," my mother would say, "My
   Lord, I can rejoice more than any of them, for that was my boy and he
   is saved at last." Your mother in Glory will be twice glorified
   tonight, John, if you give your heart to Christ. And I pray that you
   may. Your father, now before the Throne, will think that Paradise has
   grown more wonderful than ever if he hears it whispered down the golden
   streets that the wanderer has come home.

   Notice, next, very briefly, that Jesus Christ loves other people to
   rejoice with Him, so that, when He finds a sinner, He has so much love
   in His heart that His joy runs over and He cries to others, "Come,
   Friends, come Neighbors, come and help Me to be glad, for I have saved
   another soul." Let us catch the blessed infection. If you have just
   heard of somebody being saved, be glad about it. Though you do not know
   the person, yet be glad about it, because Jesus is glad.

   Notice, next, that repentance is regarded as coming home. This sheep
   was not in Heaven. No, but as soon as it had been brought into the fold
   it is described as repenting. And Jesus and the angels begin to rejoice
   over it. If a man truly repents and Christ saves him, it is clear that
   he never will be lost. A certain old Proverb forbids us to count our
   chickens till they are hatched. And I do not think that angels would do
   so in the case of immortal souls. If they believed that repenting
   sinners might afterwards be lost, they would not ring the marriage
   bells just yet, but they would wait a while to see how things worked
   out.

   If they can yet perish there is not one convert that the angels dare
   rejoice over. For if any child of God might fall away and perish, why
   not everyone of us? If anyone falls from Divine Grace, I fear I shall.
   O my Brothers and Sisters, do you not fear the same for yourself? "No,"
   you say, "I don't think so." Well, then, you are a proud fellow and you
   are the most likely one to desert your Lord. If ever a sheep of
   Christ's shall fall away, I shall. I see more of my own tendencies to
   wander and more of my own temptations to offend than I do of yours. I
   would not have the angels rejoice over a man because he repents, if
   repentance is only a sign of human improvement and not a token of
   heavenly love.

   I would say, "Stop, angels. For this man may go back and perish after
   all, if, according to the modern Gospel, Christ loves today and hates
   tomorrow--and a child of God may yet be a child of the devil." I do not
   believe a word of such doctrine. I believe that where the Lord begins
   the good work of Divine Grace He will carry it on and perfect it. And

   when the Lord has once given to a man to know Him, He will see that he
   is preserved in that knowledge forever. There is a text that clenches
   it--"I give unto My sheep eternal life and they shall never perish,
   neither shall any man pluck them out of My hand."

   Now, if they have eternal life, it cannot come to an end. For eternal
   life is eternal, evidently. And if they have eternal life, the Shepherd
   and His friends may justifiably sing when one single possessor of that
   eternal life is brought to life and salvation. In the penitent man a
   work is done that never can be undone. And he is put where he never can
   be lost. Yes--

   "I to the end shall endure, As sure as the earnest is given; More happy
   but not more secure. Are the glorified spirits in Heaven. Sing away,
   angels! There is something to sing about now! And we will join with you
   in blessing and praising the unchanging God forever and forever. Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

Our Place--at Jesus' Feet

   DELIVERED BY

   C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON, ONLORDS-DAYEVENING, JUNE
   8,1879

   "At His feet." Luke 7:38.

   THE Easterns pay more attention to posture than we do. They are
   demonstrative and express by outward signs much which we do not
   express, or express less energetically. In their courts certain
   positions must be taken up by courtiers. Oriental monarchs are
   approached in positions which indicate the greatness of the king and
   the submissiveness of the petitioner. So, in their worship, the
   Easterns abound in postures significant of the humility which should be
   felt in the Presence of God. The most of us think very little, indeed,
   of outward postures. Perhaps we do not even think enough of them.
   Inasmuch as in devotion we think little of the position of the body,
   let us pay all the more attention to the posture of the soul.

   And if it seems to us to be a matter of indifference whether a man
   prays standing as Abraham did, or sitting as David did, or kneeling as
   Elijah did. Yet let us take care that the posture of the soul is
   carefully observed. One of the best positions in which our heart can be
   found is at Jesus' feet. Here we may fall, or here we may sit and
   follow excellent examples to our exceeding benefit.

   The first thing that is necessary to spiritual life at all is to
   recognize the Presence of Jesus and to come into relationship with Him.
   To look at Him is salvation. As to look at the brazen serpent was
   healing, so to look at Jesus Christ brings life eternal to the soul.
   After we have come to look at Jesus and so there is a connecting link
   between us and Him through which salvation comes to us, we are
   described as being in various positions with regard to our Lord. We are
   on His heart. Just as the priest of old carried the names of the twelve
   tribes, so does Jesus carry all His people on His heart-- and that is
   where we are at this time.

   There are favored times when, like John, we are on His bosom. We feel
   His heart beating with true affection to us. We not only believe His
   love but there is a kind of sense--which I may not call sense either,
   for it belongs not to the grosser forms of sensation--but there is a
   kind of spiritual sensitiveness which causes us to feel that Jesus
   loves us. We seem to say, "God is love, I know, I feel." For in our
   very hearts the love of God is shed abroad by the Holy Spirit. Then are
   we raised to His bosom. And it is a blessed posture to be in--

   "Oh, that we could with holy John Forever lean our heads upon The bosom
   of our Lord!"

   We are described, also, as being in the hands of Christ. All His saints
   are in His hand. He gives unto them eternal life and they shall never
   perish, for He Says, "none shall pluck them out of my hand." See your
   position in the hollow of His hand, while in the Father's hand the hand
   of Christ is embraced and He tells us "none is able to pluck them out
   of my Father's hand."

   Then, too, we are described as being on His shoulders. Does not the
   Good Shepherd, when he finds the strayed sheep, cast it upon His
   shoulders and carry it home? When Aaron stood pleading before the Lord
   he not only carried the names of the tribes upon his breastplate but he
   had them in of gold upon his shoulders. Christ carries us on the heart
   of His love and on the shoulders of His power. Thus are we perfectly
   safe.

   You see, then, where we are. And I do not want you to forget this,
   while I urge upon all the Lord's people that they should seek to be "at
   His feet." You can keep all the other positions and this, too. Though
   that were impossible for the body, it is quite possible for the spirit.
   The highest delight and the fullest assurance are perfectly consistent
   with the lowliest reverence. You may rise even to the Master's lips,
   until you can say with the spouse, "Let Him kiss me with the kisses

   of His mouth, for His love is better than wine." And yet you may still
   be lying at His feet, conscious of your unworthiness and bowed into the
   very dust under a sense of His love.

   We must leave those other positions and consider the one in our text.
   And we have only two remarks to make-- namely, first, that at His feet
   is a becoming posture. And, secondly, at His feet is a helpful posture.

   I. First, AT HIS FEET IS A BECOMING POSTURE. This is proper because of
   the majesty of His Person. As He is Divine, "at His feet" is the
   creature's becoming place. Jesus is "God over all, blessed forever."
   Let us exhibit the lowliest reverence whenever we think of Him. He
   comes very near us and we sing at the communion table--

   "His sacred name a common word On earth He loves to hear; There is no
   majesty in Him Which love may not come near."

   But there is majesty--there is Divine majesty. Jesus is our Brother but
   He is the first-born among many Brethren. He has a human head but on
   that head are many crowns. He wears a nature like our own but that
   Nature is in union with His Godhead and we cannot think of Him without
   bowing with lowly adoration before Him. The sun and the moon and the
   eleven stars make obeisance to this star of Bethlehem. All the sheaves
   bow before this Joseph's sheaf, as it stands upright in the midst.
   Jesus, You are He whom Your Brethren shall praise! All Your mother's
   sons shall bow down before You, for You are exceedingly glorious.
   Behold, every tongue shall confess that You are Lord and every knee
   shall bow before You. Therefore with glad prostration of spirit we bow
   at Your feet even now.

   We may well bow at His feet when we remember the unworthiness of
   ourselves. We are insignificant creatures. That is saying little. We
   are sinful creatures. Even though we have been redeemed by His precious
   blood and shall never come into condemnation if we are, indeed,
   Believers, yet we "were by nature children of wrath, even as others."
   Undeserved mercy has made us what we are. And if, even now, His Grace
   were withdrawn from us, we are fit fuel for the fires of Hell. There is
   nothing in ourselves of which we can glory. And, when we come near to
   Jesus, our place is "at His feet."

   There may be some--no, I think there cannot be among His people any
   that would aspire to any higher position than "at His feet" when they
   think of their sinnership--when they even think of their wanderings
   since they have known His love, of their shortcomings and coldness of
   heart towards Him. But if there are any that can take a higher place, I
   know that I cannot. Oh, if I may but sit forever at His feet! If I may
   only look up and bless Him, that He loved me and gave Himself for me,
   it shall be everlastingly Heaven to my spirit! And do you not say the
   same?

   Oh, utter nothingness, you are something as compared with us. For we
   are less than nothing! The blank of nothingness stood not in God's way
   when He came to create. But in us there was an opposition to the Divine
   will--a something, I say, which was worse than nothing--which resisted
   our Lord's Grace. But He has triumphed, and He has saved us and now it
   is ours, with deep humiliation, to lie "at His feet."

   "At His feet," again, is a place well suited to us, because of His
   well-beloved claims upon us. As many of us as have been renewed by
   Divine Grace we have been rescued from the slavery of Satan. And we
   have come into the sweet service of Christ and now it is our great joy
   to call Him Master and Lord. When we are right-minded we make a full
   submission of everything to Him. We place "at His feet" all our time,
   our talents, our substance. We desire to bring every thought into
   captivity to His dear sway.

   Our ambition is that He would rule us entirely. It is a scepter of
   Divine Grace with which Jesus reigns over His trusting people, but it
   is quite as powerful as the iron scepter. Oh, that He would use it and
   crush our lusts with it and break our sinful desires with it like
   potter's vessels, till we should be wholly given up to Him!--

   "In my spirit rule and conquer,

   There set up Your eternal throne;

   Wean my heart from every creature,

   You to love and You alone."

   This is the Christian's desire. He would lie joyfully submissive at the
   Savior's feet, completely subjected by the conquering Lord.

   Once more--He is All in All and we would lie at His feet to find
   salvation in Him and seek it nowhere else. Perhaps I am speaking to
   those who long after eternal life and are crying after salvation. Come,
   beloved Friend, I do not know you, but my Lord does. Come and lie at
   His feet and cry, "I never will depart until You speak peace to me."
   You are not

   far from finding peace in Christ when you are satisfied that you cannot
   find it anywhere else. When you are weaned from every hope except that
   which is found in Jesus, you will soon have a hope in Him.

   Come, lie prostrate there and say, "If I perish here, I will perish 'at
   His feet.' " None perish there. Beneath the Cross, where the full
   sacrifice was offered, there I cast myself. I will never stir an inch
   beyond this. If the eternal thunderbolts can smite the Cross, they
   shall blast me at the same time, for here I will stay. At Jesus' feet,
   I lie, in despair as to all else but with strong resolve never to go
   away from Him, resolved with Him to live or die. This is what I mean,
   then, by the posture of being at Jesus' feet.

   But now remember, dear Friends, that at Jesus' feet is the position
   which the very brightest of the saints delight to take up. When John
   was in the Isle of Patmos and saw His Master whom he loved, he did not
   essay to place his head upon His bosom. Remember his words--"And when I
   saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead." Now if such a one as John the
   Divine lay there, that is a high enough place for you and for me. "At
   His feet." Oh, let us get there! Down, down, down, high looks! Proud
   thoughts, down with you! Legal hopes, self-confidence, down with you!
   Away, away, with everything that lifts up man. And may Christ, alone,
   be exalted while we lie at His feet. For if we do not bow willingly, we
   shall have to come to it by a humbling experience.

   The Lord has put all things under His feet. Let us put ourselves "at
   His feet." If we will not accept Him now to be our Master and Lord, we
   shall be flung into the winepress of the wrath of God and then shall He
   trample upon us in His wrath and crush us in His sore displeasure. God
   save us from such a doom and may we rejoice to be at His feet.

   II. Now we shall attend to our second observation. We have shown, I
   think, that it is a becoming posture. But now, secondly, IT IS A VERY
   HELPFUL POSTURE.

   Turn to my text and see that it is a very helpful posture for a weeping
   penitent. "Behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she
   knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought an
   alabaster box of ointment and stood at His feet behind Him weeping." It
   helps us to repent. Do not go and stand at Moses' feet. You will never
   repent there. To stand at the foot of Sinai and tremble may have its
   uses. But Gospel repentance does not spring from legal terror. Gracious
   tears are wept at Jesus' feet.

   Oh, if you would have your heart broken till the rock shall gush with
   rivers of repentance, stand at Jesus' feet. Stand there now. If you
   would have a tender heart, think of the Beloved who died for you! Think
   of how those feet were pierced. This woman could not see that, for it
   was not then done. But you can see it and mark where the nail has bored
   each blessed foot.

   "At His feet" is the best place for a penitent, for it helps faith. For
   as you look down at those dear feet and think, "He is God and He became
   a Man to suffer in my place and those dear feet were pierced that my
   heart might be delivered from death," you will find faith spring up in
   your soul at the sight of the great Substitute. Such faith will bring
   with it pardon. Standing at His feet, you will find Him turn His head
   and say to you what He said to the woman, "Your sins, which are many,
   are forgiven you. Your faith has saved you; go in peace."

   Repentance, apart from Christ, will need to be repented of. Repentance
   at Christ's feet is the only repentance worth having. When you weep for
   sin, so that you cannot see Christ through your tears, away with them!
   Unbelieving tears are not such as God delights in. But it is a sweet,
   sweet thing to taste a salt repentance and then to taste the honey of a
   honeyed pardon--to have the soul smarting and then to have it
   rejoicing, too, because it stands at Jesus' feet.

   And let me say to all weeping penitents--Get away to Jesus' feet,
   because it is there your love will flow and there you will begin to
   think of doing something for Him who will blot out your sin. Did not
   this woman unbind the luxuriant tresses of her head to make a towel?
   Did she not, instead of pitcher and basin, use the fountains of her
   eyes, no, the fountains of her heart, with which to bathe His feet? And
   then for ointment she broke the alabaster box and kissed, and kissed,
   and kissed, and kissed again, those dear, dear feet of Him who had
   brought salvation to her.

   O Penitents, I pray you stand not outside in the cold porch with Moses
   but come indoors, where Jesus welcomes you. And stand at His feet and
   He will give you that blessed repentance after a godly sort, which
   shall bring you an answer of peace and shall nourish life in your soul.
   "At His feet," then, is a helpful posture to the weeping penitent.

   Now you have got your Bibles open at Luke's seventh chapter, turn over
   to the eighth chapter and the thirty-fifth verse. You know the story of
   the man that had a legion of devils in him who used to cut himself and
   who lived among the

   tombs. Now we read, "They went out to see what was done. And came to
   Jesus and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting
   at the feet of Jesus."

   At Jesus' feet is the best place for a new convert. What a state of
   mind and body this poor man must have been in who was possessed of
   devils that carried him over hedge and ditch and field and flood--he
   knew not where! Men bound him with chains but like another Samson, he
   snapped them. He tore himself with flints and knives and thorns. Poor
   wretch! He rested not day nor night. And ever with his dolorous cry he
   made nights hideous, so that they that passed by the cemeteries
   startled, feeling that they had come near the gates of Hell.

   A whole legion of devils dwelt within this poor wretch. And when Christ
   cast all the devils out of him, he must have been spent and exhausted,
   just as after a delirium there seems no life left. He wanted rest.
   Where was he to get it? He sat at Jesus' feet. Do you know why he
   rested there? It was because he felt the devils could not press on to
   Jesus' feet. He felt quite sure the devils would never enter into his
   body again while he sat at Jesus' feet. Why, no, the devils had been
   afraid of Jesus and had gone into the swine and rushed into the sea to
   escape from Him.

   While he sat at the feet of that great One who had rescued him from so
   terrible a fate, he seemed to feel, "I am safe here." At Jesus' feet he
   plucked up courage and gathered strength! With his new clothes on (he
   had not worn any for many a day) and his tangled hair combed out again
   and his poor face, that had been covered with filth, all cleansed
   again, I can hardly imagine the pleasurable sensation and the happiness
   that he felt! Except I remember how I have sometimes felt myself, after
   sharp pains and long diseases, when I have come forth to breathe the
   air again, free from pain. Convalescence is very sweet and fairly
   pictures how souls feel when they get Christ at last. "He has saved me
   but, oh, I am weary, I am weary. I will sit at His feet." And as we sit
   at His feet, we feel all weariness pass away.

   "Old things are passed away. Behold, all things are become new." We see
   a new Heaven and a new earth and we are made completely new creatures.
   Where should we sit but at His feet who makes all things new? You that
   have found Christ and now greatly need rest, do not try to find rest
   anywhere but in Him. Come and sit "at His feet." Have no more cries, no
   more fears, no more doubts, no more despairs. Christ has saved you. Sit
   still and remember what He has done and what He is doing. Sit still and
   look up at His dear face and say, "Blessed be the altogether lovely One
   who plucked me out of the jaws of Hell and delivered me from between
   the teeth of the dragon." O dear Friends, there is no rest like resting
   at Jesus' feet!--

   "Here it is I find my Hea ven While upon the Cross I gaze."

   Now, turn with your finger a little farther to the forty-first verse of
   the same chapter and you will find out that "at Jesus' feet" is a very
   helpful posture for a pleading intercessor--for one who is himself
   saved and is pleading for others. "Behold, there came a man named
   Jairus and he was a ruler of the synagogue: and he fell down at Jesus'
   feet and besought Him that He would come into his house: for he had
   only one daughter, about twelve years of age and she lay a dying."

   Many of us know what it is to intercede with God for others. But there
   is no interceding that is so efficacious as that which is done at
   Jesus' feet. When your heart breaks--when you feel that you do not
   deserve the mercy that you are seeking for--when, like Abraham, you
   cry, "I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust
   and ashes," it is then that you prevail. Lie "at His feet." But do not
   lie there as if it were somebody else's feet. Let it be Jesus' feet,
   the feet of your dear Lord, who came to save you. Lie there and say,
   "Lord, save my daughter. Lord, save my wife," or, "Lord, have mercy
   upon my wandering, willful boy and save him, for Your mercy's sake."
   Plead with your whole soul. Plead importunately. But do not plead
   despairingly.

   If you are at Jesus' feet, you are near to the Fountain of help. You
   are near to Him who tenderly loves you, One who would not have had feet
   if He had not loved mankind, for He took His body upon Him out of love
   and His feet are a part of His frame. Oh, to realize the presence of
   Christ when we pray, for if not, we pray out into the open common, or
   across the cruel sea. I like praying right into the Mediator's ear. It
   is grand praying when Jesus is near and you speak to Him as a man
   speaks to his friend. Thus do I pray now--"Lord, have mercy upon my
   congregation. Save the people. Lord, have mercy upon those whom I have
   prayed for many a time, who still are not renewed in heart."

   We always prevail when we pray so. When I know that I have gained
   Christ's ear I look out for the answer as confidently as I expect an
   answer to a letter that I send by post. Some of our prayers do not go
   that way for want of our believing that He is and that He is the
   Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. But when we believe that He
   will hear us, He

   does hear us. So, Jairus, if your daughter is sick, pray for her, but
   do it "at Jesus' feet." You have an ungodly relative and you have
   prayed often but perhaps you have not prayed at Jesus' feet and I urge
   you now to try that hallowed place.

   This fourth time will you turn a little farther, to Luke 10:39. "She
   had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus' feet and heard His
   word." So that "at Jesus' feet" is the fitting place for a willing
   learner. A lowly sense of our own ignorance so that we do not dare to
   sit higher than "at His feet," but a believing confidence in His
   infinite wisdom so that we sit "at His feet" to learn of Him--this is
   suitable. How much better scholars we should be if we tried to learn at
   Jesus' feet! Some even of the Lord's people are a deal too knowing.
   Many a boy at school does not learn anything of an excellent master,
   for he is conceited--he knows nothing and he teaches himself.

   I am afraid we are like that scholar. We know nothing and we teach
   ourselves. We have prejudices--opinions of what the Truths of God ought
   to be. This is evil--but, oh, it is very sweet to feel, "I do not know
   anything. I come and take the Bible and ask it to photograph itself
   upon my heart"! Some minds are like stained glass windows. They shut
   out much of the light and the little light that does struggle through,
   they color after their own manner. It is better to be plain glass so
   that the Lord's light, with all its color and delicacy of shade, may
   come in just as it comes from Heaven, with nothing gathered from
   ourselves. Beloved, I pray the Lord to free us all from prejudice, from
   self-conceit and from opinions which originate with others.

   We must learn at Jesus' feet. Not at the feet of man, when man goes
   away from Christ. At times the Lord may send a man whom He teaches and
   what we gather from him may be God's own voice to us. Still we must
   always be ready to discriminate between what the man says of himself
   and what he says in his Master's name. For there is a grave difference.
   "At Jesus' feet" we must take up our seat. Dear young men that are
   beginning to study theology and that wish to become teachers of others,
   do not give yourselves up to any system and say, "I follow this doctor,
   or that."

   John Wesley is not our master--but Jesus Christ is. John Calvin is not
   our Master, but Jesus Christ. It does not matter how great and good
   these men were--they were worthy of the love of all the Church of God
   but we call them not Rabbi. We may follow the man as far as the man
   follows Christ but not an inch farther. We must sit at Jesus' feet,
   humble, teachable, child-like, confidently believing what Jesus says
   but having no "know" of our own--taking it all from Him.

   But my time fails me and so I must take you to the last instance that I
   will give you in Luke. Look at Luke 17--and the sixteenth verse--the
   chapter which I read to you. We find that the Samaritan who had been
   healed fell down on his face at His feet, giving Him thanks. Well,
   then, that position is most helpful to every grateful worshipper. I
   think I see the angels and the blood-bought ones commencing one of
   their celestial chorales. The eye of my imagination is almost smitten
   with blindness as I gaze upon the scene. They are all brighter than the
   sun and the whole company shines with the light of more than a thousand
   fold midday.

   Hear them as they commence the rapturous strain! Their notes--how
   sweet, how seraphic--as they praise the eternal Father and the glorious
   Lamb of God! We hear the song. How it swells! Hearken to the soft
   touches of the harpers harping with their harps! Do you note how the
   singers and the players of instruments seem caught up in the ecstasy?
   But mark! As the song rises they begin to bow. As it rises higher they
   bow lower and lower and lower. Hark! The enthusiastic fervor of their
   love has made them lift their loudest hallelujah.

   And lo, they cast their crowns at His sacred feet! The whole company is
   still lifting up the song to its utmost glory but soon they fall on
   their faces, prostrate before the Throne. "At His feet" is their
   loftiest position. Let us imitate them, and making the worship more
   ecstatic than before, bow before Him--

   "Lo, at His feet, with awful joy The adoring armies fall! With joy they
   shrink to nothing there, Before the eternal All."

   So let us praise Him for all that He has done for us. And, as we praise
   Him, let us sink lower and lower and lower, till in ourselves we are
   nothing and Christ alone lives in us. Let no thought of self, nor wish
   for self, nor dream of self intrude but let Jesus be All in All. "At
   His feet." There shall our Heaven be found. When our soul is deepest
   bathed in grateful praise we shall fall down on our faces and worship
   the Lamb. The Lord bless you, and keep you at His feet forever. Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

The Spirit and the Wind

   DELIVERED BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON,

   ON THURSDAY EVENING, FEBRUARY 2, 1888.

   "The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it but cannot
   tell from where it comes and where it goes. So is everyone that is born
   of the Spirit."

   John 3:8.

   OUR Savior's words are infinite. Some men use a great deal of language
   to convey a very little meaning. But our Savior compacts boundless
   instruction into short sentences. If all the preachers in Christendom
   were to preach from this one verse for the next twelve months they
   would still leave much of its teaching undeveloped.

   These words remind us of the Holy Spirit. Is it not to be feared that
   we have lost a great deal of power in our lives because we have not
   been sufficiently mindful of the power of the Spirit of God? When our
   Savior compared the Holy Spirit's operations to the movements of the
   winds did He not show us how absolutely needful they are, how
   indispensable they are? Imagine a world without winds! Why, we should
   soon stagnate into death. Without wind what would be the use of the
   great highway of the sea? A thousand mischiefs would follow--infinitely
   more than we could calculate--if henceforth the air had no motion and
   there were no living, breathing winds.

   Without the Spirit of God, the scene were infinitely worse. O ship of
   the Church, how could you speed over the sea of time? The trees of the
   forest would no more clap their hands. Stagnation of progress would
   take place. The dry bones of the valley would lie unquickened and even
   the odors of the rose of Sharon would no more be shed abroad. We must
   have the Spirit of God. Even as the Sun of Righteousness brings healing
   beneath His wings so does the Holy Spirit bring all that is living to
   us all. Let us adore the third Person of the Trinity in Unity and think
   of Him often, with deep reverence in our spirits, so that we never go
   to work, nor to prayer, nor even to the singing of a hymn without
   seeking that He would Himself be the life of the holy engagement.

   With the view of bringing out the Truth about the Spirit of God, I
   shall first mention certain minor lessons contained in the text. Then,
   the lesson of the mystery of the Holy Spirit. And thirdly, the mystery
   of the man that is born of the Spirit. For it is not merely said, "so
   is the work of the Spirit." But "so is everyone that is born of the
   Spirit." The child of a mystery is himself a mystery.

   I. First, there are CERTAIN MINOR LESSONS TO BE TAUGHT HERE. The Spirit
   of God is like the wind. Note well that His operation is unexpected.
   The wind blows where it wishes so that you know not what wind to
   expect. In this land, especially, we can never tell what wind will blow
   tomorrow. A few days ago it was the south-west and it brought a rapid
   thaw. But the next morning it was nearly north and a frost was upon us.
   We may well put vanes upon our public buildings, for without them we
   could never tell from the day of the year or the season of the year,
   from what quarter the wind would come. I feel thankful when I remember
   that, like the wind, the Holy Spirit blows where He wishes for I cannot
   tell where next He may operate.

   Perhaps tomorrow He may save a prince--it would be an unexpected thing.
   Another day He may save some great backslider, who knows? He may
   graciously work upon the more degraded part of the people or He may
   deal with certain of our great merchants and bring them to His feet. He
   that knows the work of the Holy Spirit must have learned to expect the
   unexpected. The last thing expected in Jerusalem was that Saul of
   Tarsus would be converted. But he was converted. And you may now hope
   that the most violent opposer of the Gospel may become a trophy of its
   power. And might not that same wind blow on you who come here simply to
   be a spectator of solemnities--willing to hear what the preacher has to
   say but not at all desirous to be affected by it?

   How often have we seen men and women the least likely, the very first
   to be impressed by this Divine power? O heavenly Wind blow where the
   feeble faith of Your people has scarcely dared to think that You can
   come, and where every influence has operated to shut You out! The
   movement of the Holy Spirit is like the wind, too, because it is
   inexplicable.

   Who can tell me why the wind was north-west on Monday, or why it was
   east on Friday? There are persons who profess to tell us but they use
   great words which mean nothing. As a general rule, science signifies
   bamboozlement, riding upon hypotheses, or mystifying with long words.

   The explanations of modern savants are often more difficult to
   understand than the fact which requires the explanation. Now I cannot
   tell why the Spirit of God works here or there. Why was England favored
   with the Gospel when other nations, who were in advance of Britain in
   civilization, were left without it? Why is it that the islands of the
   sea seem almost always to accept the Gospel, while continents are left
   in darkness? "He gives no account of His matters"--take that for your
   answer. It is all that He will give you.

   The Holy Spirit moves like the wind for suddenness and freeness. None
   of us can raise the wind. We use the expression, but the fact is beyond
   our power. The wind comes without our call or direction. Who shall tell
   whether tomorrow we shall wake up with a thaw or a sharp frost? The
   wind springs up just where it likes and moves just where it pleases.
   And it is so with the Holy Spirit. I grant you that prayer such as that
   of Elijah can chain the winds and stay the clouds, or unseal the
   bottles of Heaven and bring down the rain--but it is because the Lord
   wills it. Still, the Spirit is absolutely free and He moves as the dew
   which tarries not for men, neither waits for the sons of men.

   If He wills to break forth tomorrow across this country with His Divine
   energy He cannot be stopped. If, in answer to the prayers of His
   people, He should be pleased to work in India or in China, as I trust
   He will, we shall soon see how free is the blessed Spirit to bring
   glory to God. God may be glorified thereby. The Spirit is like the
   wind--His movements are not to be accounted for.

   And, next, the Holy Spirit is like the wind because He is absolutely
   sovereign. Preachers scarcely like to tell their congregations nowadays
   that God gives His Grace according to His own good pleasure. I learned,
   when I was a boy, that the chief end of man was to glorify God and
   enjoy Him forever. But I hear now, according to the new theology, that
   the chief end of God is to glorify man and enjoy him forever. Yet this
   is the turning of things upside down. The glory of God is still the
   chief end of the world's existence. And whether men will have it so or
   not, the Lord has settled it. "I will have mercy on whom I will have
   mercy and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion."

   So that, "it is not of him that wills, nor of him that runs but of God
   that shows mercy." No voice is more glad than mine to preach the free
   salvation of God to them that perish. But God has not sunk His
   sovereignty in His bounty. Jehovah still reigns and the wind blows
   where it wishes and not where man wills that it shall blow. Further,
   the Spirit of God is comparable to the wind because of the variety of
   His operations.

   The wind does not blow at all times alike. Soft and mild, it brings us
   summer heat. Rough and rugged, it makes us bind our cloaks about us as
   the sharp breath of winter chills us to the bone. The Spirit of God
   works differently at different times, according to the necessity of the
   case and according to His own will. For He blows as He wishes as well
   as where He wishes. Sometimes I have almost trembled to pray for the
   power of the Holy Spirit. I remember a Brother praying that we might be
   filled with the Spirit of God and I was but very young then but
   ventured to ask him whether he knew what he meant.

   He looked at me with astonishment when I added, "Where He comes He is
   the Spirit of judgment and the Spirit of burning." It is a blessing, no
   doubt, to be filled with the Spirit. But who may abide the day of His
   coming? Like the Lord Jesus, He is as a refiner's fire. We might have
   had the Spirit much more copiously had we been able to bear His
   wondrous work within us. I know He is a Comforter but I know also that
   His fan is in His hand. He is a searcher as well as a healer, a
   destroyer of evil as well as a creator of good.

   Thus you see that His working is not always of one kind. One gracious
   soul has gone out weeping, broken-hearted-- the Spirit of God had
   wounded the heart. Another has gone forth rejoicing in full
   salvation--it was the Spirit of God. One day the Word of God comes like
   a hammer and a fire--at another time it drops like the gentle dew from
   Heaven upon the parched heart. All these are works of the same Spirit.
   Judge not, I pray you, so as to deny this humble hope or that trembling
   trust to be of the Spirit, for the Spirit works all good things.

   Even in the same individual the Spirit of God works very differently at
   different times. One day He makes us leap like young harts upon the
   mountains. And then Napthali is a hind let loose--the Spirit of God is
   on him. At another time the true Prophet is shut up and cannot come
   forth. He is filled with sighs and groans which cannot be uttered and
   the

   Word of the Lord is as a pent-up fire in his bones. But the Spirit of
   God is as much in the silence as in the eloquence-- possibly more
   so--for the flesh may go with the first but it is the Spirit which
   works in the second.

   Let us not judge ourselves to be abandoned by the Spirit of God because
   after autumn eventides, in which we sat under our own vine and fig
   tree, we have had wintry nights of darkness, leafless and fruitless.
   Don't you know that the Spirit of God is that Wind which passes over
   the green field when the flowers are all in bloom and the grass withers
   and the flower fades because the Spirit of the Lord blows upon it?
   Surely the people are grass. The withering work of the Holy Spirit is
   as necessary for our eternal benefit as when the Spirit, at another
   time, opens the buds of those fair flowers which shed their perfume at
   the feet of love.

   Note then, that like the wind, He varies in His modes of manifestation.
   And note, again, the Spirit of God is like the wind because His
   operation is manifest. "The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the
   sound thereof." Yes, we cannot see the wind but we can hear it. So may
   you hear the Spirit of God. When you hear the Scriptures and read the
   Word, the Spirit of God speaks to you. It is well to hear the Spirit
   whisper in the ear of conscience when He presses home the Truths of God
   and makes the mind to feel its power. Sweetest of all is it when the
   newly-opened ear hears the Spirit of God speak to it with its own
   peculiar, "still small voice." Then it is sweetly true. "You hear the
   sound thereof."

   My dear Hearers, do you know anything about this? Has the Spirit of God
   so worked in you that you have recognized the sound? It is a manifest
   work--have you felt it?

   In all respects, the work of the Spirit of God remains mysterious and
   wonderful. Men cannot tell us much about the wind but when the wind
   rises to a tornado and carries everything before it, we see what the
   wind can do. I would to God that we had a cyclone of the Holy Spirit!
   What a sweep it would make of a great many rotten Church buildings
   which now stand upright! Many a magnificent pile would fly before it
   like dust and chaff from the summer's threshing-floor! But the Spirit
   of God, whether He works so gently that He scarcely disturbs the tear
   that hangs in the eye like a dewdrop on a blade of grass, or whether He
   comes with such tremendous force that the most stubborn infidelity is
   swept away before it--in either case it is very marvelous--for He is
   God and He works after the Divine manner.

   I am half inclined to pause here and say, "For the rest of our time let
   us worship in the presence of this mighty God, who does His pleasure
   and works the will of the Most High forevermore."

   II. But I must take you on--in the second place to consider THE GREAT
   LESSON OF THE MYSTERY WHICH IS TAUGHT US BY THE SYMBOL OF THE WIND,
   WHICH IS THE TYPE OF THE SPIRIT OF GOD.

   Now dear Friends, concerning the wind, our Savior says, "You can not
   tell from where it comes and where it goes." Yet we know that it comes
   from the east, or the south and passes on its way and it goes towards
   the west. The text cannot mean that we do not know the direction of the
   wind, or the direction in which the Spirit of God is moving, for we do
   know that. We know that He is a power that makes for righteousness and
   for eternal life. But then, we do not know where any wind begins to
   blow. No one can explain where the north wind commences.

   The heathen had an idea about the wind rushing out of a cave, or of its
   being let loose from a bag. We know that this is but a dream. We cannot
   imagine a place where the wind starts on its journey. And we do not
   know when the Spirit of God begins to work in any person's heart, or
   even in our own. Some persons are troubled because they cannot tell the
   day of their conversion. Let them not be troubled about that question.
   Even those who know that on such-and-such a day they took a decided
   step, and the light burst in upon their spirit, will find, if they look
   back, that a great deal of gracious experience went before their
   decision to prepare their minds for the final step.

   We do not know how early the Divine processes begin within a soul. Our
   very parentage has something to do with it. That we were born of
   such-and-such godly parents is a part of the arrangement of Divine
   Grace. I do not think you can tell, with regard to yourself, when the
   first gracious thought was sown in you when first you lived towards
   God. You can tell when you first perceived that you believed in God.
   But there was an experience before that. You cannot put your finger
   upon such-and-such a place and say, "Here the east wind began," nor can
   you say, "Here the Spirit of God began to work on me."

   Neither can we always tell what was the first process. Does a man pray
   first or believe first? If he prays without faith he will not be heard.
   Which comes first, repentance or faith? A repentance that has no faith
   in it is no repentance. A faith that has no repentance with it is no
   faith. These gracious products are like the spokes of a wheel, they all
   move at the same time. When the wheel of spiritual life moves we cannot
   tell which grace in it moves first. The processes of Divine

   Grace may, in your case, begin with a downcast soul and in the case of
   another person they may begin with a lifting up of holy faith. We
   cannot tell from where it comes.

   Neither can we always tell the exact means of our receiving the Spirit.
   You say it was by this minister's preaching. Be grateful. But before
   that sermon an unknown person did a deal of plowing within your heart.
   How would the one have sown had not the other plowed? Many a man who
   thinks he has never done any good will find out at the Last Great Day
   that he did much more than he fancied and that he accomplished an
   essential part of the work though it remained hidden. "You can not tell
   from where it comes."

   Equally mysterious is the other point as to "where it goes." We know
   which way the Holy Spirit points but you can not tell where He
   goes--that is to say what special fashion His work will take in the
   person who has received it tonight--whether it shall go towards a
   deeper and deeper sense of sin and the life shall be most noticeable
   for its repentance. Or whether it shall rise into a higher and a higher
   view of Christ and the life shall be noticeable for its joyfulness. You
   can not tell where it goes. How far the Grace of God can go in any man
   is impossible for us to say. Let none of us begin to measure by
   ourselves and say, "Nobody can be holier than I am. Nobody can have
   more Divine Grace than I

   have."

   Brothers and Sisters, you yourself can obtain ten times as much Divine
   Grace as you now have. You are but a babe yet. You do not know what the
   stature of a man in Christ may be. The boy converted but a week ago may
   become a Mof-fat or a Livingstone. The girl who is now a trembling
   Believer, you can not tell what a Mary or Hannah, God may make her. You
   can not tell where the Spirit goes. When Martin Luther's father first
   taught Martin about Christ and prayed for him, he could not tell how
   the Spirit of God in him would work and how the whole world would be
   the better for the miner's son. "You can not tell where it goes."

   Oh, if some of you get the Spirit of God just now, I cannot guess what
   it will make of you! There are wonderful possibilities sleeping within
   the breast of every man who receives the Spirit of God. Should the
   Spirit work in you, you would not know yourself in the sanctifying
   experience of a thousand years time. And what are a thousand years?
   Project yourselves beyond the growths of time to that grandest of all
   growths, when "we shall be like He, for we shall see Him as He is."
   Even then you have not reached the end of the Divine way. You can not
   tell where it goes.

   You are yet to outstrip the angels. Jesus your Lord is the First-born
   and you are to be one of the First-born's many Brethren. Measureless
   advancement lies before you. I have opened the window--look through and
   contemplate with the eye of faith what yet may come of the entrance of
   the Grace of God into your heart! You can not tell where the north wind
   stays its course, nor where the east wind falls asleep. Is there such a
   place? You have not seen where it begins, nor can you guess where it
   shall end, yet even when you are in Glory the life which the Spirit
   imparted to you here shall be your life.

   III. The last few minutes must be occupied with THE LESSON CONCERNING
   THE MYSTERY OF THE MAN

   HIMSELF--"So is everyone that is born of the Spirit."

   The Spirit-born man is a mysterious person. Only those who are like he
   is can pretend to know him. Even they do not know him. And what is more
   wonderful--he does not know himself. Perhaps no man is more amazed at
   him than the godly man himself. He has experienced a change but he
   cannot describe it to you. He knows the things in which he is
   changed--the effects of the Spirit--but how it was worked he knows not.

   As no man can tell anything about his first birth, so neither can he
   describe his second birth--it remains a mysterious operation even to
   him who has passed through it. "Oh," said one to me, "Sir, either the
   world's quite altered, or else I am." So, indeed, it is--everything is
   changed. The world itself is altered and in some things it seems
   altered for the worse. We find we are not at home in it, though we used
   to be. We should not know ourselves if we met ourselves. And when,
   unfortunately, we do meet ourselves, we fall to quarrelling with
   ourselves--for we have no greater enemy anywhere than our own selves.

   It is a strange thing that we should have to say so--but the greatest
   paradox that can be is a regenerate man still in a body which remains
   under corruption. The man is a strange mixture of old and new, nature
   and Grace. While he is himself a mystery to himself, his sorrows are a
   mystery to other people and they cannot make out why he is sad. His
   business prospers, his children are about him, he has good health and
   yet he is mourning. And if they hear him say, "O wretched

   man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" They
   reply, "This is a wretched man, though he ought to be the happiest of
   beings!"

   From the best man in the world we hear the deepest sigh that he is not
   better. The man that thanks God who can give him the victory is the man
   who groans in the battle. The world does not understand this. It cannot
   make out how we can fight and yet be at peace. How we can be torn
   asunder, yet never torn away from the Cross. How we can live by dying
   and die every day in order that we may never die at all. The Believer's
   riddle is a very hard one. He is a mystery as to his sorrows and his
   joys--these are secrets with which the world cannot intermeddle. This
   is a mysterious business--a man in poverty, rich. A man in affliction,
   rejoicing. A man alone, yet in the best of company. The unregenerate
   cannot comprehend this singular person.

   The man that lives near to God is a mystery, more or less, at all
   times. He is not all he desires to be, nor all he hopes to be but he is
   far beyond what he ever expected to be. Strange impulses move him at
   times so that he does things which he cannot himself account for. He
   feels that he is bound to do them, and he does them, and has the
   warrant of having done rightly in the result of what he does. I am sure
   that every child of God who walks in the light of His countenance will
   understand what I mean when I say that we are moved in singular ways.
   So moved that we ourselves hardly know how. But so moved that Wisdom is
   justified of all her children.

   Strange is the power of the Holy Spirit over the heart of the
   regenerate. And this is made manifest in the singular changes of which
   they are the subjects. God's own people know what it is to sound the
   deeps and outsoar the heights. Up, up, up, where the callow lightning
   first spread his wings, we mount in ecstasy. And then down we go, down
   into the abysses where sea-monsters have their dens--such strange
   beings are we when under the highest power. The wind sighing through
   the trees, or singing amid the cords of an Aeolian harp is not more
   strange than the experience of a genuine child

   of God.

   I know what it is to run before Ahab's chariot with Elijah and I am
   afraid I know what it is to faint under the juniper and need to be
   awakened that I may partake of food, that I may go forty days in the
   strength thereof. The Christian man does not understand himself but his
   varying experiences go to make up that sickness of self and fondness of
   Christ which is so desirable.

   I will give you two words you cannot explain, just to show the mystery
   of our manhood. "Spirituality"--now then, turn to your dictionaries and
   see whether they define it. You know what it is--you cannot tell me and
   I shall not tell you, because I cannot. There is another
   word--"unction." You know what it is. If you hear a sermon that has
   none of it you know what the absence of it is. But when an unction
   rests upon the Word, can you tell me what it is? I cannot tell you. But
   I pray that I may have that unction myself. Of course, the ungodly make
   jests upon the expression, because it has no meaning to them. Yet the
   children of God delight in it.

   Do not expect the world to understand you. If you were of the world,
   the world would love its own. But inasmuch as Christ has chosen you out
   of the world, do not expect that the world will know you. If it knew
   Him not, who was so much better and clearer than you, how should it
   know you? And you, my dear Hearers, who are not born again, to whom all
   this must seem a foreign language--I pray you to believe that there is
   something which you need to understand and that in order to understand
   it you must be born again.

   May the Spirit of God make you feel, experience, and enjoy this mystery
   by causing you to know the power of that gracious word, "And as Moses
   lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be
   lifted up: that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have
   eternal life"--if you believe in Jesus, if you look to Him, if you
   trust Him--if the Holy Spirit has given you faith, He has begun His
   work in you and He will carry it on and perfect it to the praise of His
   glory forever. May it be so, for Jesus' sake. Amen.

   LETTER FROM MR. SPURGEON

   Dear Friends--"Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," and
   therefore I will not repeat any of the fears which naturally thrive
   around such a shock as I have received. The doctor says, "You may be
   well soon of that knee but do not deceive yourself by trying the brain
   till it has had a fair chance of recovery." I know what he means and I
   feel I must submit to be away from my delightful work till I can begin
   again without absolute folly.

   The good points of the whole matter are very many. The name of the Lord
   is prayed for the splendid way in which, in the sorrowful absence of
   both pastors, all the Church has stuck to its work and the blessing has
   not ceased. I am cheered and comforted by this. And I am sure that the
   Lord has some great design of love to answer by the heaped up coals of
   fire which have burned upon our hearth. He is good. As surely good in
   the dark as in the sunlight. All is well. Though He slay me, yet will I
   trust in Him. Perhaps by the way of bodily weakness may come increased
   spiritual strength. Love unbroken, from your suffering pastor, C. H.
   Spurgeon. Mentone, January 17, 1889.
     __________________________________________________________________

Nathanael--the Man Needed for the Day

   INTENDED FOR READING ON LORD'S DAY, FEBRUARY 3, 1889

   DELIVERED BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON, ON LORD'S DAY EVENING,
   SEPTEMBER 20, 1885.

   "Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no deceit!" John 1:47.

   THIS morning we had a "behold"--a behold about a new convert. "Behold,
   he prays!" It seemed to me most suitable to occupy the evening with
   another "behold"--a behold about another new convert who is just having
   his eyes opened to see the Deity of the Lord Jesus Christ and to become
   His disciple. "Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no deceit!" When
   Jesus says "Behold!" we may be sure that there is something worth
   seeing. A man in whom is no deceit is so rare a person nowadays that we
   ought not to grudge an evening for such a sight. We are always beholden
   to a man who enables us to see an honest man--such a man is one of the
   noblest works of God and will reward our observation. Diogenes looks
   for an honest man with a lantern. But Jesus finds him.

   I shall not go into the full meaning of what "an Israelite indeed," is,
   but I shall dwell, principally, upon the fact that Nathanael was a man
   with no deceit in him. The Lord Jesus Christ made that discovery. And
   who so fit to spy out a man in whom was no deceit--as the Christ in
   whom there is no deceit? Two guileless men were that day together, for
   in our Lord Jesus there is neither guilt nor deceit. In us there is
   guilt but we trust that by Divine Grace deceit has been cast out of us.
   It will be so if the Lord does not impute iniquity to us, according to
   the words of David, "Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputes not
   iniquity and in whose spirit there is no deceit." The Lord is sure to
   put all deceit out of us when He removes all guilt from us.

   Men generally see what they are. And because Christ has no deceit,
   therefore He spies out the man with no deceit in his heart and at once
   commends him and welcomes him and says, "Behold," as if delighted and
   charmed to see him. The Lord Jesus appreciates the sincerity which He
   perceives in Nathanael. I am afraid that a man without deceit is not
   much esteemed by the ordinary run of mankind. He will be wise, however,
   not to trouble himself about that matter. The approbation of Jesus is
   better than the approbation of the whole world. They say of a man
   nowadays who has no deceit, "Well, he is a very simple-minded kind of
   fellow. Exceedingly good, but rather blunt. Quite unsuspicious and
   therefore you may readily take him in."

   Mark you, there is no reason why a man without deceit should be taken
   in. For while we are harmless as doves we can also be wise as serpents
   if we are rightly taught. But in the ordinary way, a man that is not
   crafty and cunning--a man that speaks his mind and practices no policy
   and is not acquainted with tricks and shifts--is thought to be a poor
   creature by the wise and deceitful men of this day. But if Jesus Christ
   takes delight in a guileless man, the guileless man may be perfectly
   satisfied with this high measure of acceptance. God grant to each one
   here present, man and woman, that we all may be found free from deceit!

   I am going to speak upon the text in two ways. First, here is a happy
   sign in a seeker of Christ--a man in whom there is no deceit. And
   secondly, here is a vital point about a Believer in Christ--about the
   man who has passed the stage of seeking and has become a Believer. He
   must have in his spirit no deceit. It is vital to him that it should be
   sincere and straightforward.

   I. Here, first, we clearly see A HAPPY SIGN IN A SEEKER--he is a man in
   whom is no deceit. We were talking, some time ago--a few of us
   ministers of Christ who have been familiar with the souls of men for
   years--and I made a remark that seemed to startle my Brethren. The
   remark was this--although I had spoken with thousands of men and

   women who had been converted and I had seen persons brought to Christ
   of every age and of every character, yet I scarcely remembered the
   conversion of a man who was double-minded, crafty, false, deceitful.

   Of course, God's Grace is sovereign and God chooses whomsoever He wills
   and He does not choose according to human merit. But it is very
   singular that of the ground which is mentioned in the parable, which
   brought forth fruit to the Divine Sower, it is said that it was "honest
   and good ground." By this was not intended any spiritual grace, nor
   even any moral virtue of high degree in the condition of the persons
   who received the Gospel. But there was sincerity about the people so
   described--they were honest, straight, unsophisticated and free from
   subtlety and cunning. It is in the honest heart that sowing Truth takes
   root.

   I have known the drunkard saved. Blessed be God for that! I have seen
   the swearer have his mouth washed so that he has spoken sweet and
   goodly words for the rest of his life. I have known the fornicator and
   adulterer and the harlot delivered from the Stygian ditch of abominable
   lust. I have known men guilty of almost every sin delivered from the
   power of evil. And concerning all these, the living evidence of holy
   conduct has proved their sincerity beyond all question. But I still say
   that my memory does not bring before me a single person habitually
   guilty of the double-shuffle, habitually a liar, habitually a cheat,
   converted to God at all. The insincere, the canting, the hypocritical,
   the habitually deceptive--I know not of converts from these classes.

   There may have been such and I should not wonder if there have been.
   But I do not happen to have met with them. The most of the converted
   people I have seen have been straightforward and true after a way. They
   might curse and swear, they might deny the Gospel, they might
   occasionally lie under strong pressure or from sheer flippancy. They
   might commit all manner of criminalities but as a rule, there they were
   and you could see them to be what they were. They were bad fellows,
   enough, but they did not dissemble--they sinned most grievously but
   they never pretended to be saints. Such were the men that Christ
   converted. Such was Paul, of whom we spoke this morning--intensely
   earnest and honest in all that he did--even when he persecuted the
   saints of God.

   It seems to me that often in the man who is filled with deceit there is
   a want of something for the Grace of God to work upon. When this
   creature repents it is only a skin-deep business--his heart is never
   wounded. When he believes something you do not know that he believes
   it. His faith is no better than another's unbelief. He begins at once
   putting another meaning on what he professes to believe--you cannot
   hold such an eel. If anything comes home to his feelings, he has such a
   very minute conscience left that there is no room for conviction to
   light upon, when it does pay him a visit.

   He has got into such an habitual condition of cheating that he cheats
   himself as well as others. He cannot be true and thorough--it is not in
   him. When the Truth of God shines full upon his face he does not openly
   pull down the blind to shut out the light--he talks about how
   delightful it is and yet manages to shut his eyes to it. He praises the
   Truth of God but he does not love it. He is a lover of the Gospel in
   words but he cunningly spreads abroad sentiments which undermine it. I
   am sick of such men and yet they are not hard to find. We have all
   around us the hollowness which would, if it were possible, deceive even
   the very elect.

   There is scarcely anything under Heaven so damnable as deceit, deceit
   and craft. The ingrained deceiver is capable of everything evil and
   incapable of anything good. Out of that kind of man the devil
   manufactures his chief instruments. Traitors like Judas Iscariot are
   carved out of the ebony of deceit. I say, again, that it is horribly
   difficult for any of these people ever to be converted and it seldom
   happens that they are. They may get into the Church even like Ananias
   and Sapphira, but they have to be carried as corpses outside of
   her--such a dishonor are they to the company of God's people.

   The man of whom we have great hope is one in whose spirit there is no
   deceit. Now I will show you the sort of man he is. He is one who, when
   he is spoken to about Christ, has difficulties but in his difficulties
   he is honest. Nathanael is told by his friend Philip that he has found
   the Messiah. Nathanael enquires, "Where did you find Him?" Why, He
   comes from Nazareth! "Well," says he, "but can there any good thing
   come out of Nazareth?" Now, when a man will plainly state his
   objection, his friend can do his best to meet it and to answer it with
   some such word as, "Come and see."

   Around us are a number of persons who object to our Lord. But the
   objections which they mention are not their real objections. Their
   pretended difficulties are a red-herring--to turn the scent from their
   real reasons for opposition. Many scorn Christ because they do not want
   to give up their sin. They pick up some technical question--some
   difficulty raised by geology or evolution, or something or other and
   they make a fuss over it--while the real impediment is that they are

   living an unclean life and do not want to give up their evil ways. The
   difficulty is that they are making gain in a wrong way and to be
   Christians would not suit their pockets, for they would have to quit a
   bad trade, or conduct their business with less profits.

   There is where the true difficulty lies. But they do not care to
   mention the real impediment, and therefore they pretend that they are
   the victims of some awful mystery or terrible dogma which frightens
   them out of their salvation. We know the bugbears which these deceivers
   set up. They deceive themselves more than they deceive anybody else. He
   is the sincere seeker who does not play at sham difficulties but who
   speaks out at once and tells his friend what the point is that hinders
   him.

   Of the man in whose spirit there is no deceit, we may also say that, as
   a seeker, he is also candid--he is willing to examine. Consequently,
   like Nathanael when Philip said, "Come and see," he does come and see
   for himself and he examines on his own account to see if it is so. Oh,
   if half the people that object to the Gospel would but read the Bible
   for themselves they would not object any longer! Few people nowadays
   care to read solidly good books. But when they do so they are usually
   greatly the better for it. I saw a young Brother last Friday and in
   answer to the question, "How were you converted?" he said, "It was
   through reading Luther."

   I was somewhat surprised and I said, "Luther? What book of Luther?" "I
   read Luther on the Galatians." "You did? I am glad to see the man that
   reads Luther on the Galatians." He was a young man employed in the city
   and I admired him for preferring Luther to the wretched novels of the
   period. "I read it two or three times," he said, "and I saw the
   difference between the Covenant of Works and the Covenant of Grace. I
   saw how man was ruined by his works and how he must be saved by faith
   and I found the Savior while reading that book." I was delighted with
   the young man and I feel persuaded that one day we shall hear of him in
   another capacity.

   Oh, if people would but read the Bible and books about the Bible which
   explain the Gospel with the desire to know what the Gospel is, they
   would find Him of whom Moses and the Prophets did write! Alas, men do
   not find Jesus, for there is deceit in their spirit and they do not
   desire to find Him. They do not want to know and so they remain
   ignorant. They do not want to discover and so do not discover. In the
   Last Great Day, when that curtain shall be drawn back which hides from
   our eyes all souls that are lost--if we are permitted to look into that
   dreadful place--we shall not find there a soul that ever sincerely
   cried to God for mercy through Jesus Christ.

   Nor do I think that we shall find one who searched the Scriptures and
   heard the Gospel with the desire to find Christ. Hell is filled through
   that deceitfulness of the natural heart which will not let them receive
   Jesus and His salvation. They blind their own eyes to the light of God.
   Happy is the pastor to whom enquirers state their difficulties honestly
   and who can persuade them to examine the subject about which they are
   in doubt!

   Now, dear Friends, a man who is really free from deceit in his heart--a
   downright, upright, straightforward man-- is open and ready for the
   work of God's Holy Spirit. For instance, such a man is open to
   conviction. When he reads the Bible or hears a sermon, he says, "I
   desire to know all about it." Tell me the Truth of God, however
   unpleasant it may be. He does not want the preacher to flatter him.
   Some do, you know. They must have very pretty words spoken about the
   dignity of human nature, the universal Fatherhood of God, the almost
   unavoidable character of sin and the hopeful destiny of universal
   manhood or else their proud hearts sneer at the preacher.

   But the man in whose spirit there is no deceit loves best the preacher
   who uses the surgeon's knife without partiality and cuts down to the
   root of the cancer. "No," says he, "I did not come here to be fooled
   and amused. I want to know about that which concerns my soul for life
   and for death and to know the truth of it." Such a man is open to
   conviction. He has laid aside prejudice. He does not dictate to the
   minister of God but he is ready to hear all the Truth and to feel the
   power of the message if it is, indeed, from God. He is ready to confess
   his sin when he finds that he has broken the Law of God. When he
   perceives that the Law deals with thoughts and words and deeds. When he
   sees how wide its range is, so as to take in every action of this
   mortal life, he is ready to bow his head and say, "I am a sinner. God
   be merciful to me a sinner."

   The man who is crafty and double-minded will not do that--indeed, it is
   the last thing he cares to do. He begins excusing himself in some
   fashion or other. He is no worse than other people. He was misled by
   others. He could not help it. Everybody else did it. He only followed
   his natural passions and he could not help his constitutional
   inclinations. It was his fate to do it. He had intended to do better
   but was overcome. These are a few of the forms of the shuffling of
   deceit. If

   the man were an honest man he would say, "Yes, it is so. I broke the
   Law and did wrong. I am not going to dispute the question. I am forced
   to plead guilty. And if you condemn me, O my God, You will do no more
   than is just." That is the kind of man who, before long, will find
   salvation and enter into peace with God.

   This is the man who lies open also to the power of the Holy Spirit in
   reference to conversion. You have proved to him that he is wrong and
   with his whole heart he desires to turn from evil. Show him his mistake
   and he will be eager to redress it. His honest soul will not rest in
   wrong-doing. Look at the Apostle Paul before his conversion. He is a
   desperate Pharisee and a furious persecutor. He tears along like a wild
   horse in his mad career of self-righteousness. But he no sooner
   perceives that Jesus really is the Christ than he is just as intense in
   his attempts to make known the glory of Christ as he was before to
   overthrow His kingdom. He sinned through ignorance and unbelief and not
   from malice.

   If we spoke to honest hearts at all times, we should see plentiful
   conversions. But, alas, "the heart is deceitful above all things and
   desperately wicked: who can know it?" Further than this I believe that
   a sincere heart, a true heart, is a great guard to a man against
   pretended plans of salvation. "Come here," says one, "I will prove to
   you salvation by works." The honest man replies, "That will not suit
   me. For salvation by works would require that my works should have been
   perfect throughout life and mine have not been so. Mine have been
   imperfect--are still imperfect--and will be imperfect till I die. I
   cannot stand on the footing of merit for an hour."

   "Come," says another, "here is salvation by sincerity. Sincere
   obedience is the patent article by which men are saved. Do your best
   and be sincere and the matter is squared." But the man who is upright
   in heart answers, "I do not see that. Neither can I rest therein."
   Indeed he ought not to do so. For such a hope is based on a lie. If a
   man were to take poison sincerely, thinking it to be medicine, it would
   not cure him, but kill him. If a man most sincerely stands in the way
   of an express steam-engine and thinks he can stop it, it will "stop
   him" and his life altogether. The candid, thoughtful mind cannot
   believe that invention of self.

   You see, the man whose heart is quite honest wants something real and
   solid and has no desire to arrive at an easy peace by deceitful means.
   Being truthful himself, he cannot bear a lie. And when somebody offers
   him a comforting falsehood, he replies, "I cannot be comforted except
   by the Truth of God. I will not let my conscience be stayed and eased
   except by that which is legitimate and right. I want to be justly and
   truly saved and not merely tempted to believe that I am saved, when I
   am not."

   I believe that many persons will never be a prey to priest craft, or
   any of the thousand inventions of mankind, because God, in great mercy,
   has made them men in whose spirits there is no deceit. And therefore
   they search after that which is true and have an inward perception of
   what is the Truth of God. They may be mistaken in some things and will
   be, for we are all fallible. But a true heart is very much like the
   mariner's needle which is true to its own pole and therefore helps a
   man in his steering. God grant us all to have an instinct for truth and
   to be led by its aid to Christ, who is the Truth, so that we may truly
   find Him and be saved by His great salvation.

   To be free from deceit also helps us to see our need of the Spirit of
   God. The right-minded man who will examine himself carefully will
   perceive that what is required of him is more than he can ever give,
   unaided and unassisted. He will discover that there is that about a
   Christian's life to which he cannot attain unless he is born again. He
   will feel that there is a something about the child of God which he
   does not possess and cannot imitate and can only gain by a work of the
   Spirit of God in the heart.

   Brethren, a man whose heart has been made to be true--even though as
   yet he may not have found Christ--is one of those men who are pretty
   sure to find Him. He is on the outlook for such a Savior as Christ, and
   therefore he will spy Him out when He passes by. To such men I like to
   tell the story of substitution--how a just God cannot pass by sin
   without a penalty. How that just God, in the Person of His Son, came
   here on earth and took human nature into connection with His own. How
   in that perfect Manhood He took the sins of all who believe in Him and
   bore them in His own body on the tree. That, by bearing what was due to
   the dishonored Law, He might put away sin, so "that God might be just
   and the Justifier of him that believes."

   Why, I have seen true hearts leap at this. They have said, "Yes, that
   is the secret--that is the solution of the dread problem of my
   conscience. I see now how righteousness and peace can kiss each
   other--how an offending sinner can meet his offended God--how they can
   justly stand on terms of mutual amity and love. The sinner washed in
   the atoning blood and God rejoicing in the sinner as He sees him in the
   righteousness of His dear Son." The truthfulness which God puts

   into men's hearts seems, somehow, to open wide the doors of the
   understanding and the entrances of the entire being to the glories of
   the Cross of Christ. And Jesus enters--the Truth and the Life--and
   takes possession of that honest spirit and dwells there to the
   salvation of the sinner, world without end.

   Now, if any man or woman here is resolved to come to Jesus, let them
   carry out the resolve. Come along with you! The true Savior shuts out
   no true man. If you mean to pray tonight, pray. If your heart means the
   prayer, God will hear it. O my Hearer, if you will turn from your sin
   in real earnest, God will help you and enable you to overcome your sin.
   If you will give yourself up to Jesus Christ at once--not in words but
   from your very soul--He will receive you and save you. Let there be no
   trifling, no mocking God. No stopping to talk with a Christian friend
   to chat away your feelings with pious words. But come as you are! Only
   come really and truly and Jesus will meet you and welcome you and say,
   "Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no deceit!" Those who come thus
   are always welcomed by Him. Come and see for yourself!

   II. But now, secondly, I am going to give a picture of A SINCERE MAN
   AFTER HE BECOMES A CHRISTIAN. It is the sine qua non for a Christian
   that he should be thoroughly sincere. Of every man who is really a
   child of God it must be said--or we shall question whether he is a
   child of God at all--"an Israelite indeed, in whom is no deceit!" Just
   let me briefly state how the true Christian's portrait is here painted
   in life--like colors in the words, "in whom is no deceit."

   First, the real Believer in Christ desires to be what he thinks he is.
   That is to say, if he judges himself to be converted he desires to be
   soundly converted. If he judges himself to be a Believer, his desire is
   that he may not be anything else than a true Believer. If upon
   examination he perceives that he is regenerate, his prayer is that
   there may be no mistake about it, but that he may be really born again
   from on high. Some people do not like to be examined on these points
   but the genuine Christian loves to be searched and tested.

   He prays, "Search me, O God." Because searching by his own conscience
   may not be enough. He asks God Himself to search and test him whether
   he is true or not. It would be an awful thing if you or I should form
   the comforting conclusion, "I am all right, for I am in the
   light!"--and it should turn out that we are abiding in death and
   darkness. It would be an awful thing to find out that terrible truth
   just when we are in the valley of death and wading through the dread
   river. Let us find it out at once, if we must find it out at all!
   Startling as the discovery would be to some of us, yet we would rather
   know it now than go an inch further--for every inch we go, we are
   further away from the right road, if we are on the wrong track.

   I heard of one who got into the backwoods and went traveling on all day
   long and at nightfall he discovered that after the most weary plodding
   he had arrived at the exact place from which he started in the morning.
   He had been wandering in a circle and spending his strength for
   nothing. It is a fearful business, when one is starving, to be at the
   same time losing one's way. We pray that it may not be so with us. We
   wish to be what we think ourselves to be. We want to carry out to the
   full any profession that we may have made--we desire to go beyond it
   rather than fall short of it.

   And, next, every true Christian desires to do what he thinks he does.
   You will understand me when I say that when we go upstairs to pray, if
   we are true Christians, we shall want to feel that we really pray. For
   there may be times when we have not prayed at all, though we have been
   on our knees and have repeated very excellent words. When you read the
   Bible you know well that there is no practical good in getting through
   a chapter of the Bible any more than a passage of any other book if the
   heart has not received the teaching of the Holy Spirit.

   John Bradford vowed that he would never leave off a holy exercise until
   he felt that his heart had entered into it. He resolved that if he
   sang, he would sing until he did sing. If he prayed, he would pray
   until he did pray. If he heard the Word, he would hear it until he did
   hear it, so as to profit by it. But O dear Friends, how easy it is to
   fall into the hypocritical cant of talking and not doing, doing and
   half-doing and flattering ourselves that we have done it when, indeed,
   we have only talked of doing it! Let us be straight and sincere. If you
   have given alms, take heed that you have given alms--and not spent your
   money in buying for yourself a name for generosity.

   If you preach the Gospel, mind you have preached it--and have not
   merely played the orator and aimed at being thought a man of admirable
   parts. If you have engaged in public prayer, let it never be merely
   because you were called upon by the leader of the meeting. But let it
   be a prayer in which you breathe out a burning desire to speak with
   God. When you plead on behalf of your Brethren, do not compel them to
   think of you. But lead them to the Mercy Seat. Let us cultivate a
   spirit in which there is no deceit. If you have had a quarter of an
   hour for prayer and you have not prayed,

   rather mark it down as a wasted quarter of an hour than reckon it a
   season of devotion. It will never answer to keep false accounts with
   the Lord.

   If you have been reading the Bible and you really have not read it and
   have got nothing out of it, do not say that you have read it--just say
   I pretended to do so. That is the honest way. Be very straight with
   yourself, for he must be a great knave who is willing to cheat his own
   soul. If you are not very watchful and severe with yourself, you may be
   giving your heart and your life credit for things which are but the
   names of things and not the things themselves.

   The Christian man in whom there is no deceit is true to his
   convictions. This is an age in which convictions are sadly rare and
   where they do exist they are singularly sleepy and torpid. I take it,
   as a Christian man and minister, that I have no right to occupy the
   pulpit of a congregation if I do not believe those doctrines which I
   professed to believe when I became the pastor of the Church. I have no
   right to undermine the basis upon which the Church was formed. As a
   private member of a Church, I have no right to be a member of a Church
   whose doctrines I do not accept. Indeed, I ought not to regard it as a
   possibility that I could remain to profess what I do not agree with. I
   am responsible, as a member of a Church, for all that is taught and all
   that is done by that Church in its capacity as a Church.

   And if I am protesting in my heart, and yet in my proper person
   continue part and parcel of that Church--I am not acting truthfully to
   God. We want, in this century, a class of men who are endowed with a
   double portion of conscience to what is generally exhibited by
   professors. For there are many of them who have got enough conscience
   to make them miserable and disagreeable but not enough to make them
   honestly quit their positions. They have enough conscience to make them
   feel uncomfortable but not enough to force them to act bravely for what
   they believe.

   Who wants to have a conscience that will only be quiet by being
   drugged? Trifling with conscience, though common enough, is one of the
   most deadly sins against a man's self of which he can be guilty. If you
   are following a trade and you know that it is evil, quit it. Quit it at
   once. Quit it before you get comfortable in it. For after a while, by
   continuance in it, you will become saddened with dishonesty and you
   will not be able to see the dishonor of it. I do not doubt that many
   persons in London who get their living by the most infamous vices
   entered into those infamous ways by degrees. They began with some
   little divergence from morality and then turned decidedly into
   wickedness. It was a very little fault at first and it troubled
   them--but they soon grew used to it and said, "Oh, well, everybody does
   it."

   Then they went on a little farther and a little farther till they were
   out of sight of the right road and had lost all desire to return to it.
   Sad is that man's case who has lost all power to hear the foghorn and
   yet is nearing a rock. Blessed is that man who will not listen to the
   common talk about making small nicks in his conscience. For he that
   makes a little rent will find that in the wear and tear of life those
   little rents soon gape wider and wider. Be true to your conscience,
   though it cost you your honor or your life. What if your barn is empty
   and your purse is taken from you? What if your reputation sinks? If you
   are true to God and to yourself you need not fear, for you shall have
   the approbation of Him who said of Nathanael, "Behold an Israelite
   indeed, in whom is no deceit!"

   I do not myself like the doing of things for which I have to make an
   apology. I do not refer to apologies to my fellow men. For what matters
   what people think about us? We need not mind the judgments of erring
   mortals. But I refer to apologizing to myself and to my God. Every man
   who respects himself feels that the first thing he has to do is to
   deserve his own good opinion. And numbers of men and women have not won
   that good opinion yet. If they were to talk to themselves, they would
   say to themselves, "Why, you know you are not acting straight. You know
   you are not doing right. You are mean and cowardly and afraid to do
   right."

   But they will not give themselves an opportunity of talking to
   themselves, lest they should be uneasy. He that never likes to be alone
   probably knows that when he is alone he is in bad company. And this
   fact ought to startle him. Would he be so mightily afraid to commune
   with his own heart in solitude if he did not suspect something to be
   rotten within? Never violate your convictions. If you do, you are not
   one in whom is no deceit.

   Again, a genuine Christian man is simple in his aims. He is aiming at
   God's glory. He is aiming at the good of his fellow men. He is aiming
   to lead a holy life. That is what he says. And if he is, indeed, a
   child of God, he is really aiming at these things and he is not basely
   taking up with godliness for the sake of gain and reputation. Are not
   many looking one way and rowing another? Do you not know Mr.
   Facing-Both-Ways, who looks this way and the other way, too? He runs
   with the hounds when there is anything good to be hunted. But he is off
   with the hare when a little fear surprises him.

   Trimming is a despicable business--a diabolical thing and those who
   follow it are the worst of men. Such men are common as blackberries and
   base as dirt. Oh, be not so! Let your life be laid like a gun that is
   sighted for the center of the target and then let it be fired at once
   that the bullet may go straight to its place, driven on by all the
   powder of your energy. God give us to be like thunderbolts hurled from
   His own hand against all falsehood and sham. Never caring what the
   consequences may be--so far as we ourselves are concerned--let us be
   resolved that if the heavens fall we will follow the Truth of God and
   justice, and righteousness, and leave those whose likings run the other
   way to shift for themselves by trickery and policy.

   The Christian man is clear in his aims, and if he is a true Christian,
   he is also very clear in his modes of pursuing his aims. Some people
   have a sort of spiritual or moral squint. If they want to look over
   there, they turn their eyes up this side of the gallery. They never say
   plainly and exactly what they mean, but use words in a double and
   doubtful sense. I abhor this most in a teacher of religion but it is
   far too common. Some preachers are great men at beating around the
   bush. They never go to work as a truthful man would go to work because,
   they say, "No, I must play my cards." Beware of all that moral
   card-playing. Hate the idea of playing your cards for this and that.

   I do not say that you and I might wish with the Roman that we had a
   window in our breast, that all men might see our thoughts. For he that
   had a window in his breast would sometimes need to pull down the blind.
   But I do say this-- that if we are walking as Christ would have us
   walk, we shall so live that our design and our mode of getting at our
   design will bear the test of the judgment of the Last Great Day. I say
   yet further that he among you who is proposing to do one thing--as his
   fellow man judges but who is really aiming to do another thing, as God
   knows--is not "an Israelite indeed, in whom is no deceit."

   Brethren, in your trade, in your business, in all that you do, be
   straight as a line. Policy may be a guide for the world but it should
   never be the rule of life of Church members. O my Brothers and Sisters,
   be true in all things! Do that which will bear the burning heat of the
   last fire and the fierce light of the last day and then you do that
   which you can sleep upon on your deathbed, can remember in the Day of
   Judgment and remember without fear before your God. Live unto God. Live
   as in the sight of God. Live under the command of God. Court His
   approbation and care for nothing else. Set your helm towards the right
   course, and then fasten it there and turn not aside an inch, God
   helping you, all your days.

   Such a man as this need never be afraid. He may live or die without
   apprehension. He may face any company without a blush. It is a great
   mercy when you do not get into the way of talking one way to one set of
   people and another way to another. I know some professed Christians who
   are so delightfully sweet and earnest that they try to make things
   pleasant all round and therefore never speak out the whole truth in any
   company--unless it happens to be such as will be agreeable. It is, "Oh,
   yes, my dear Sir." And though there is something hard said about an
   absent person they quite agree with

   it.

   When they get with that very person it is again, "Yes, my dear Sir."
   And they join hands with him in tearing up the character of the
   opposite party. This method of talking is very liable to accidents. A
   person who acts this double part must always live a very unquiet life
   because he does not know when No. 1 and No. 2 may meet and put their
   accounts together and find out his treachery to both parties. Brethren,
   let no one among you be guilty of such conduct. Always say anything you
   have against a man straight to his face. When you speak behind his
   back, speak as kindly of him as truth permits. You need not do that
   before his face--for that might seem flattery on your part.

   To his face you may tell him a few things that do not please him, if it
   is just to do so. But when he is absent, be silent on such themes.
   Double-facedness often brings a bitter reward in this life. Do not play
   the double in your conversation, either towards God or man. Be an
   Israelite, indeed, in whom is no deceit. Such a person who has lived
   honestly in the sight of God--trusting alone in the precious blood of
   Jesus and not to his own sincerity--need not fear in time or in
   eternity.

   I remember seeing a good but very timorous woman whose gracious life
   was drawing to a close. I was sitting by her bedside and she seemed to
   be very low and filled with fear as to her future state. But at last
   she was comforted by a word I spoke. Then she said to me very
   tremblingly, "I do not think that God will send me among the wicked who
   did not love Him and did not trust His dear Son, for I never sought
   their company here. I have always loved the people of God and I have
   loved His house and I have loved His Word and I have loved holiness,
   and therefore I think that He will let me go among my own people."

   This was sound reasoning. The true shall go with the true at the last.
   The man whom God has made to be upright and truthful shall not be
   driven down to the place where all liars go. He shall keep his own way
   and go to his own company. Up there in Heaven it is all Truth of
   God--the God of Truth is there and the Christ of Truth is there--and
   men are there who loved the Truth and who, despite all their
   imperfections, came to the light that their deeds might be made
   manifest that they were worked in God. If you are truthful, you will go
   with these truthful people. Oh, may God make you so at once!

   Remember that there is an absolute necessity that a Christian should
   possess thoroughbred sincerity and intense, downright reality. The
   child of God may have spots on his countenance but he must not paint
   his face. It is the hypocrite that paints. There may be a speck here
   and a speck there upon the countenance of the true Believer but he is
   sorry that it should be so and he tries to wash off all such stains.
   But he never uses the color-box. In this he is the reverse of the
   world's religious professors. Oh, the multitude of hypocrites that
   rouge themselves up to their eyes! They are such beauties as Jezebel
   made herself.

   You would suppose that they possessed the beauty of holiness. But see
   them when the paint is off--catch them at home--watch them in their own
   families--trace them into their secret places and there you will say,
   "Can these be the same men?" When one saw a woman of eighty tricked out
   like a girl of eighteen, he shouted, "What old hag is this?" So might
   you say of many a brave professor, "What disgraceful creature is this?"
   That which we thought was the beauty of Divine Grace we find to be the
   worn and shriveled countenance of the old man hidden beneath coats of
   deceptive coloring. Loathe all this and be as free from it as you would
   wish to be free from theft or murder.

   O Sirs, if any of us are lost, let us at least know that we are so. If
   we hope that we are saved, God grant that it may be a true hope and a
   vital experience. I will speak to you, one and all, the Gospel of the
   Grace of God and I have done. To each one the Word of the Lord says,
   "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved"--saved from
   hypocrisy, saved from falsehood, saved from deceit and guilt--for "he
   that believes and is baptized shall be saved. But he that believes not
   shall be damned." May God set His seal upon this admonition, for Jesus'
   sake! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

My Own Personal Holdfast

   INTENDED FOR READING ON LORD'S DAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1889,

   DELIVERED BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "My God will hear me." Micah 7:7.

   OBSERVE that the Prophet has no sort of doubt. He insinuates no "if or
   "an" or "but" or "perhaps," but he says it straight out as a fact of
   which he is infallibly convinced--"My God will hear me." What a blessed
   thing it is that the child of God knows and feels that this is true!
   Wherever he may fail, he will succeed at the Throne! If all other
   friendly ears are closed, his Friend of friends will hear him. Lose
   your confidence in the power of prayer and I know not what remains for
   you. If you are obliged to say, "My God will not hear me"--if that is
   the language of your unbelieving spirit--your Achilles tendon is cut
   and you cannot stand with confidence, much less run with delight.

   With faith in prayer you have Heaven's infinite treasures at your
   disposal. But if you ask waveringly, you find that warning true, "He
   that wavers is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.
   Let not that man think that he shall receive anything of the Lord." You
   must know with absolute certainty that God is and that He is the
   Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him, or you will not be among
   those whom the Father seeks to worship Him. To be "strong in the Lord
   and in the power of His might" you must be strong upon your knees. "My
   God will hear me" is a sentence which you must know by heart.

   It is a very wide question, that of God's hearing the prayers of men,
   and I should need a considerable time to describe particularly whose
   prayers the Lord will hear and what prayers He will hear and how it is
   true that He always hears, whatever His answer may be. But it will be a
   far better thing if, without debate, you can personally say for
   yourself, "Let others say what they will and judge what they please in
   this matter, I am persuaded by the Spirit of all Grace that my God will
   hear me." If, so far as you yourself are concerned, you have this
   assurance, your own feet are upon a rock and you need not trouble about
   the sand and the mire.

   This assurance, "My God will hear me," is better than all the aid of
   mortal men and a greater wealth than the mines of India could afford
   you. I desire to preach, not only from these few words but also from
   their connection. The position of the text in the Sacred Book is highly
   instructive. May the Author of the Book make it so at this time!

   I. I shall try to speak, in the first place, UPON THE RESULTS OF
   CONFIDENCE IN PRAYER IN BELIEVERS. When they can truly say, "My God
   will hear me," the best consequences will come of it. Think of what
   will happen to them.

   To begin with, in the worst of times God is their resort. In reading
   the chapter we saw that the times were desperate. The nation had become
   rotten throughout. "The good man is perished out of the earth: and
   there is none upright among men." Justice was openly sold. Bribes were
   unblushingly taken and even openly demanded. In business all were
   dishonest. "The best of them is as a briar: the most upright is sharper
   than a thorn hedge." In domestic life there was no trusting friend, or
   husband, or wife, or son, or daughter.

   The whole land had become corrupt. And as the Prophet surveyed it with
   tears in his eyes, he could see nothing worth the looking upon, and he
   cried, "Therefore I will look unto the Lord. I will wait for the God of
   my salvation: my God will hear me." His conviction that God would hear
   his prayer was his last comfort and it led him to close his eyes upon
   the spectacle of universal crime and look heavenward and heavenward
   only. When you have faith in prayer you will, in the cloudy and dark
   day, find consolation in looking to God who is the blessed sun from
   whom a brighter day will come.

   Instead of being overcome by doubt you will gather up your faith, which
   otherwise might have been scattered among men, and you will place the
   whole of it upon God, who still remains true and faithful and holy. Men
   who have confidence in prayer have perpetual errands at the Throne, for
   they have abundant trials in the wickedness of men and they look for

   more abundant mercies from the Lord. If they are in straitened
   circumstances they run to their Father in Heaven to ask that their
   daily bread may be given them. And if they enjoy plenty, with equal
   earnestness they pray that their abundance may be sanctified.

   In any case, the Believer has abundant reasons for praying without
   ceasing. If a man had no confidence in prayer, would he thus resort to
   God in the worst of times and in the best of times? Would he seek
   deliverance from evil things and the consecration of good things? I
   think not. We resort to God because He bids us do so. We accept His
   method of granting blessings and prayer because we conceive prayer to
   be a part of the Divine Decree. The same God that ordains to give a
   certain blessing has also ordained that we shall pray for it. We do not
   expect to change the will of God but we believe our prayer to be a part
   of His will. It is not contrary to predestination for us to pray--it is
   itself a part of it.

   As coming events cast their shadows, so does a coming mercy cast upon
   our heart a desire to pray. That I should pray is as much the Divine
   purpose as that the asked-for blessing should come to me. The Word of
   the Lord concerning the Believer is, "He shall call upon Me and I will
   answer Him." God's Providence is thus like a two-leaved gate. Our
   prayer, and God's act, work upon the one hinge of the eternal purpose.

   Now, if a man had no confidence in prayer, he would not look to God in
   dark times. He would be searching everywhere else for some lower light
   which might be available. If the Lord's ear is too high, or He Himself
   is too great, or too remote for our requests to be of any avail, let us
   go to the creature. We must draw from the cistern if we cannot get at
   the fountain. What else remains? If an appeal to the highest and the
   best is absurd, does not common sense direct us to abandon it and trust
   in those who will hear us? I know that Scripture says, "Cursed is he
   that trusts in man and makes flesh his arm." And this makes me feel
   that there must be a power in trusting in God.

   Brethren, we are in an evil case, if, indeed, prayer is a mere form.
   But we need not fall into despair for we are not in such a condition.
   We need not run to saints, or angels, or friends, for verily, there is
   a God that hears prayer. Saints in all ages have turned their eyes to
   the Lord, their God, and I cannot conceive of them as fools. And yet,
   what more foolish than to look to a God who cannot see the glance of
   faith, nor hear the voice of supplication, nor in any way practically
   sympathize with the trust of His worshippers? Beloved, we look to the
   Lord at all times, because He that made the eye, can certainly see--and
   He that made the ear, can assuredly hear--and He that has commanded us
   to pray, will not fail to regard us. I, for one, for this reason,
   solemnly declare, "Therefore will I look unto the Lord."

   Another blessing which we derive from the certainty that God hears our
   prayer is that our eyes are led to look to God with hope. Not only do
   we turn to the Lord because we have no other resort but because we look
   to Him with joyful expectation. The Prophet says, "Therefore will I
   look unto the Lord. I will wait for the God of my salvation." We view
   our God, not as a forlorn hope, but as the sure source of salvation to
   us. Many things are taken from us, but hope remains forever in the box
   which is not that of Pandora but of Jehovah. It is one of the best of
   our blessings that we, "through patience and comfort of the Scriptures
   may have hope." Our God is called "the God of hope." We have hope that
   God will hear because He is Jehovah, the I AM. We know that He is and
   that He is equal to all emergencies, be they what they may. Even in
   death we say, "Now, Lord, what do I wait for? My hope is in You."

   When we cannot see any other grounds for hope, we find good anchor-hold
   in the promise of the Lord, so that we cry, "My soul, wait only upon
   God. For my expectation is from Him." It is He that has so often
   wrought deliverances for His praying people--we look for His mercy as
   men that watch for the morning. It is no small thing to keep hope alive
   in the human bosom--it is the direst of calamities when it dies out.
   From where does the suicide plunge into the dark wave, or the crimson
   gash that lets out a soul? Are not those gates of grim death opened as
   hope flies away? From where is that listlessness, that lethargy, that
   want of energy, that letting things drift to ruin? It is because hope
   has quit the helm and the ship is drawn upon the rocks. Kill hope in a
   man, and you have killed the man's best self. The spirit of a man will
   sustain his infirmity. But "a wounded spirit who can bear?"

   Now, a firm conviction that God will hear prayer is a buoy to a sinking
   hope. He will not give all up who believes that his God will hear him.
   He cannot be driven to desperation while the Mercy Seat continues a
   source of hope and he remains in possession of his reason. You will
   hear him argue with himself, "Why are you cast down, O my Soul? And why
   are you disquieted within me? Hope in God--for I shall yet praise Him,
   who is the health of my countenance and my God." Surely, these are two
   choice blessings--to be enabled to look always to God and to look
   towards Him evermore with hope.

   But we go further. A full conviction of the certainty that God will
   hear our prayers helps us to wait with patience. "I will wait for the
   God of my salvation." He may not answer me today but He will hear me.
   Tomorrow may not bring me the expected deliverance but it will come.
   Though the vision tarry, I will wait for it. For it shall come and
   according to the reckoning of infinite wisdom it really will not tarry.
   Great is the punctuality of the living God. He never is before His time
   but He never is behind.

   He is not only present when we need Him but we find Him, "a very
   present help in trouble." We find it good to wait because we have no
   fear of being disappointed. A full conviction that prayer shall be
   heard makes us sit even with Job on the dunghill and bless the Lord who
   has taken away what before He gave. It makes us strengthen ourselves on
   the bed of languishing and sing with Jacob, "I have waited for Your
   salvation, O Lord." It enables us with David to encourage ourselves in
   the Lord amid the ashes of our Ziklag. It helps us to go with Jeremiah
   into the low dungeon and yet to say, "The Lord is good unto them that
   wait for Him, to the soul that seeks Him."

   It enables us to hope with Jonah, when all hopes seem gone, till we at
   length bear witness, "Out of the belly of Hell cried I and You heard my
   voice." In all difficulties and under all opposition, we shall be able
   to endure with patience the will of the Lord if we remain firm in the
   assurance that prayer is heard of the Lord. I often repeat Ralph
   Erskine's ditty--

   "I'm heard when answered, soon or late, Yes, heard when I no answer
   get; I'm kindly answered when refused, And treated well when harshly
   used." It is so. No good thing will the Lord withhold from them that
   walk uprightly. And therefore, if an answer to prayer is withheld, it
   is because what we sought was not for our real good. A flat denial in
   form may be a full grant in essence since all our prayers are
   comprehended in, "Your will be done." And this is the standing
   corrective for all that we ask amiss. If, then, in prayer we do not
   have our will of God in one way, yet we shall have it in another. For
   we evermore, in the inmost depths of our soul, are praying,
   "Nevertheless, not as I will but as You will."

   The Lord will either give us what we ask, or do some better thing for
   us. Believe in prayer with a tenacity that nothing can remove. Stand to
   it that He does hear you and be not staggered. Hope against hope and
   wait to the uttermost. Do not have a pretended and false faith in it
   but let the solid, solemn, immovable conviction of your inmost soul be,
   "My God will hear me."

   If you now pass on to the verse that follows the text, you will get
   another series of thoughts, showing the result of an assured conviction
   that God hears prayer. Observe that it gives us an answer to our
   enemies. "Rejoice not against me, O my enemy: my God will hear me." The
   foe has seen me fall and he has hastened to set his foot upon me. But I
   do not lie there in despair, surrendering myself to be destroyed by
   him, for "My God will hear me." How bravely can we deride derision and
   pour scorning upon the scorners, even when they are in their glory,
   when we firmly believe that the Lord hears prayer!

   They reckon that we are defeated, that we have no one to plead our
   cause, that we shall never be heard of again and they have very
   ingenious ways of telling us these cruel persuasions of theirs. We
   answer them by declaring boldly that our heavenly Father has heard our
   cries and that, before long, He will make this clear even to our foes.
   "Then my enemy shall see it and shame shall cover her which said unto
   me, 'Where is the Lord your God?' "

   We fight a waiting battle. Fabius saved Rome by waiting and we, also,
   are saved by the hope which waits upon the Lord and bides the time of
   the faithful promise. The saint is no Caesar, who boastfully writes,
   "Veni, vidi, vici." His dispatches are written with the pen of patience
   and here is one of them, "I wait for the Lord, my soul does wait and in
   His Word do I hope." We are of the tribe of Gad, of whom it is written,
   "A troop shall overcome him: but he shall overcome at the last."
   Cheering is that promise--"Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast
   down: for the Lord upholds him with His hand."

   Our adversaries had better not laugh till the affair is over. We have
   yet a weapon in reserve which we have not done with yet. That weapon is
   prayer. We answer their shouts of victory with this one sentence, "My
   God will hear me." The tables will yet be turned, the trampler shall be
   trampled on and captivity itself led captive. We may have to wait long
   before the Lord takes up the quarrel of His Covenant, but He will
   avenge His own elect which cry day and night unto

   Him, though He bear long with them. As for me, my heart is quiet
   beneath the contumely which comes of defending the Lord's Truth, for He
   will justify me before long.

   And if He should not do so speedily, yet He will do it ultimately--yes,
   I am happy to wait even till after death, for I know that my Justifier
   lives and that, though after my skin worms devour this body, yet shall
   my Lord vindicate me and all others who have been faithful to His
   Truth. But where would be our patience under defeat? Where our answer
   to the adversary, if we were not sure that, beyond all doubt, God will
   hear prayer? We have left our case in His hands and now we are unmoved
   by sarcasm and ridicule, for our cause is safe in the keeping of the
   Eternal. Sneer still, you philosophic doubter, "My God will hear me."

   Again, our confidence in a prayer-hearing God sustains us with the
   bright prospect of rising when we are down. What says the Prophet?
   "Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise."
   What if I have slipped? What if, through pressure of pain and sorrow,
   my spirits have sunk within me? What if I am a broken and crushed man?
   Yet I can pray and I do pray and my God will hear me. Therefore I shall
   arise again. Oh, blessed thought! The Christian may fall very low but
   underneath him are the everlasting arms. Since those arms are
   underneath, they will stay the fall and lift us up from it. We shall
   arise.

   How high that rising who can tell? Even though we fall into the grave,
   blessed be God, we can fall no lower. And then comes the rising from
   among the dead, the rising to the Throne. It makes my spirit leap
   within me to think how this conviction that God hears prayer begets in
   us the joyful certainty that we cannot be left in the dust but we must
   arise and shake ourselves and put on our beautiful array. The God that
   has promised to hear us shall bring us again from Ba-shan--yes, He
   shall bring us up again from the depths of the sea. Our downcastings
   are temporary. Our uprisings are eternal. We shall return with singing
   and everlasting joy shall be upon our heads. Faith sets us praying and
   praying sets all Heaven at work to draw us out of the pit and set us on
   high.

   A firm conviction that the Lord hears prayer gives the soul confidence
   that light will come to it. The Prophet says, "When I sit in darkness,
   the Lord shall be a light unto me." This delightful expectation springs
   out of that little word, "My God will hear me." If I am plunged in
   darkness I shall still pray. And as the Lord will hear me, He will give
   me light. Prayer lights candles where there are none. The moaning of
   oppressed Israel, though they were scarcely prayers, yet ended the long
   darkness of their Egyptian bondage. Peter lies in the dark, bound with
   chains. But the Church is praying for him in Mrs. Mark's house and
   suddenly a light shines in the dungeon!

   An angel awakens him with a touch on the side and leads him out into
   the street to his own company. My God--my Light. It cannot be that a
   Christian should be in the dark and not have his God with him. For if
   his God is with him it must be light round about him. Joy and comfort
   must spring up in the most barren misery if we know how to pray--the
   desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose, if the feet of
   supplication touch it. They said that where the Tartar's foot fell the
   grass was withered. But we may say that where the Believer's knee
   touches all is made fruitful. God keep us in this conviction.

   I say again, if this goes, all goes--if there is no more power in
   prayer, religion is either null and void, or a mere piece of
   fanaticism, or a juggle of priest craft. If God's answering prayer is
   but an idle daydream, where are we? Poor lone children crying in the
   dark to a Father who cannot hear us? Poor children apt to be entangled
   in the terrible machinery of events and to be whirled round and crushed
   by it, since no fatherly hand will be stretched out to rescue us? Mungo
   Park, in the desert, was refreshed by the sight of a bit of moss
   because it told him that God was near.

   But all this is an error according to the modern theory that God either
   may not, cannot, or will not interpose in answer to His children's cry.
   The reign of Law is proclaimed but the Law-giver is pushed back beyond
   our reach. We call but He does not hear--none but old-fashioned bigots
   can imagine that He does. Or if perhaps He hears, it is a still greater
   chance that He will not answer--so they say. If prayer seems to be
   answered it is a mere coincidence, a happy accident which pleases the
   pious mind. I am sick of repeating such cruel talk. Brothers and
   Sisters, we know better. We are as sure of the Law that our God hears
   prayer--we are each one personally as sure that "my God will hear me,"
   as we are sure that the law of gravitation binds matter in its place.

   We have a personal Providence, a personal God and a personal God
   listening to our prayers. And we are persuaded, therefore, that all
   things must work together for good and we must come out of the
   darkness--but even in the darkness the Lord shall be a light about us.
   This supports our spirits under the greatest pressure and gives us
   songs in the night.

   All those benefits I have spoken of are the results of holding firmly
   to the doctrine of effectual prayer. And to us most excellent results
   they are.

   II. And from this I pass on, secondly, to notice THE REASON FOR THE
   GREAT CONFIDENCE WHICH BELIEVERS EXHIBIT IN THE MATTER OF PRAYER. They
   speak not without reason when they say, "My God will hear me." Why do
   we believe thus?

   We believe it first and mainly, because of the faithful Promiser. The
   character of the Lord God, who has promised to answer prayer, the
   truthfulness of the Lord Jesus, who has said, "If you shall ask
   anything in My name I will do it," and the wisdom of the Holy Spirit
   who incites the prayer--in a word, the Character of God Himself
   constrains us to rely upon His word without a doubt. It is declared,
   over and over, in the inspired Scriptures of Truth, that "He that seeks
   finds. And to him that knocks it shall be opened."

   We have the command, "Ask and it shall be given you." We are told that,
   "Men ought always to pray and not to faint." We are assured that, "The
   effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much." Yes, not only
   are we told this, but we have it set before us in actual instances,
   such as Elijah, Abraham, Moses, David, Daniel and multitudes of others.
   It is a matter of Covenant with God that He will hear His children's
   prayers. "He shall call upon Me and I will answer him!" Is the Lord
   faithful? Is He true? Only let us get a reply to those two questions
   and the matter is settled.

   Is He the same God as in former ages? Can He, will He, still keep His
   word as before? We have but one form of answer to these queries--He is
   Jehovah and He changes not. I had rather have one little promise in the
   corner of the Bible to support my faith than I would have all the
   philosophies of scientific men to sustain my opinion. The history of
   philosophy is in brief the history of fools. All the sets of
   philosophers that have yet lived have been more successful in
   contradicting those that came before them than in anything else. It is
   well when the children of Ammon and Moab stand up against the
   inhabitants of Mount Seir utterly to slay and destroy them. The enemies
   of God are good at the business of destroying each other.

   Within a few years the evolutionists will be cut in pieces by some new
   dreamers. The reigning philosophers of the present period have in them
   so much of the vitality of madness that they will be a perpetual
   subject of contempt. And I venture to prophesy that before my head
   shall lie in the grave there will hardly be a notable man left who will
   not have washed his hands of the present theory. That which is taught
   today for a certainty by savants will soon have been so disproved as to
   be trod down as the mire in the streets.

   The Lord's Truth lives and reigns but man's inventions are but for an
   hour. I am no prophet, nor the son of a prophet. But as I have lived to
   see marvelous changes in the dogmas of philosophy--I expect to see
   still more. See how they have shifted. They used to tell us that the
   natural depravity of our race was a myth--they scouted the idea that we
   were born in sin and declared with mimic sentiment that every dear babe
   was perfect. Now what do they tell us? Why, that if we do not inherit
   the original sin of Adam, or any other foregoing man, we have upon us
   the hereditary results of the transgressions of the primeval oysters,
   or other creatures, from which we have ascended or descended. We bear
   in our bodies, if not in our souls, the effects of all the tricks of
   the monkeys whose future was entailed upon us by evolution.

   This nonsense is to be received by learned societies with patience and
   accepted by us with reverence, while the simple statements of Holy Writ
   are regarded as mythical or incredible. I only mention this folly for
   the sake of showing that the opponents of the Word of God constantly
   shift their positions, like quicksand at a river's mouth. But they are
   equally dangerous, whatever position they occupy. In the announcement
   of heredity, philosophical thought has deprived itself of all power to
   object to the Biblical doctrine of original sin. This is of no
   consequence to us, who care nothing for their objections.

   But it ought to be some sort of hint to them. According to modern
   thinkers, what is true on Monday may be false on Tuesday. And what is
   certain on Wednesday may be our duty to doubt on a Thursday and so on,
   world without end. Every change of the moon sees a change in the
   teaching of the new theology. A good stout hypothesis in the old times
   served a man for a hobbyhorse for twenty years. But nowadays their
   sorry jades hardly last twenty months. Said I not well that the
   smallest promise of God is worth more than all that ever has been
   taught, or ever shall be taught, by skeptical philosophers and
   speculative theologians?

   Let God be true but every man a liar. Whatever may be the truth in
   science, God is true and on His promise we build our confidence. We
   will distrust the witness of all men and angels but we cannot, we dare
   not, distrust the Lord. I feel

   ashamed to add anything to the first overwhelming reason for faith, for
   that is enough and more than enough. Yet since faith is so often weak,
   we may place beneath it another prop. We believe in the power of prayer
   because of our past experience. Certain of us could not say less than,
   "My God will hear me," for if we did we should be traitors to the
   witness of our lives.

   I shall not turn this into an experience-meeting but, if I did, what
   testimonies we could produce to answered prayer! I will not even quote
   a selection from the many great and special answers which I have
   personally received. But all the saints of God are one in their
   testimony upon this point. I take leave to say that praying people are
   as a rule as honest and truth-speaking a people as those gentlemen who
   deny the virtue of prayer. Well, these men, myself among them, solemnly
   declare that God has heard and answered our prayers. And we do not say
   this in moments of fanaticism when we are worked up into a delirium of
   devotion but we assert it soberly, as a plain matter of fact.

   If we were about to die we should assert this all the more earnestly.
   It is true to us as before God. Upon this statement, that God has heard
   and answered our prayers, we are prepared to speak as positively,
   solemnly and deliberately, as if we thought it right to call God to
   witness by an oath. We are not, therefore, prepared to have our witness
   summarily dismissed as of no value. We claim as men the right to be
   believed. At any rate, we shall hold to facts which we have ourselves
   experienced and to the truth which they prove. And if we are ridiculed
   for so doing, we shall bear it with equanimity. When the philosopher
   said that there was no such thing as matter, he who hurt his head
   against a post was convinced of the contrary.

   And when another great theorist said that there was no such thing as
   mind, he who had been heart-broken with sorrow could not be converted
   to the opinion. It is hard to argue against our experience and
   consciousness. We are case-hardened. The Creole Proverb says, "When the
   mosquito tried to sting the alligator, he wasted his time." And the
   case is much the same when infidels deal with us. It would be needful
   to convince us that facts are not facts, that deliverances from trouble
   were not deliverances, that supplies of necessities were not supplies.

   I am ready to disbelieve my eyes, for they have often deceived me. I am
   ready to discredit my ears, for they have misled me. But I cannot
   disbelieve my personal experience, especially when it does not consist
   of a few scattered incidents but of a chain of facts. The Lord has
   listened to my voice when I have cried to Him and this I know as
   certainly as I know that I have lived upon this earth. Therefore I
   believe that "my God will hear me" in the present and in the future.

   Beloved, we are sure that God will hear us because we have towards God
   a sense of sonship. He is our Father and we know it. Hence we argue
   that if we, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto our children,
   He also will give to us what we need at His hands if we cry to Him.
   Concerning this I need not argue. Granted the fatherhood of God, He
   must hear prayer. Deny that He is your Father and I do not say that He
   will hear you.

   Moreover, we believe in the power of believing prayer, because of the
   prevalence of our Intercessor. Jesus Christ Himself is pleading for us
   in the Presence of God. He has gone into Heaven on purpose that He
   might represent His people at the Throne of Grace and plead their
   cause. And we can never imagine that as our great High Priest, accepted
   of the Father, He pleads in vain. When we ask in His name and set His
   seal to our petitions, we must win our suit. We are bound to be as
   certain of this as of the continued life and boundless merit of our
   Lord. Our prayer is backed and endorsed by His adorable name and this
   makes it quite another thing than if it were the mere request of a
   sinful man. It must be heard. Jesus, when You take up my case, "my God
   will hear me."

   Moreover, we have guidance in prayer, for the Holy Spirit teaches us
   how to pray. God Himself puts acceptable desires into our hearts and
   makes us to know what we should pray for as we ought. And surely such
   prayers cannot go unanswered. We pray to be helped to overcome sin. And
   this desire was implanted in us by the good Spirit--will it not be
   granted? We ask to be made holy and to be enabled to glorify God.
   Surely, God did not implant such desires in us to mock us by giving us
   aspirations which He never intended to fulfill! To make us hunger and
   thirst after blessings which He could not or would not give--would be
   to torment us before our time--and this we cannot impute to God.

   The leading of the Spirit which induces us to pray is no dancing
   will-o'-the-wisp, uprising from the swamp of superstition conducting us
   to fanaticism. But it is a clear and sure light which has never been
   followed by any man without guiding him to peace and safety. Have any
   of you ever suffered injury by prayer? Did you ever rise from your
   knees a worse man for pleading with God? Did you ever go away from a
   company of faithful, pleading men, and feel that you were morally
   lowered by joining in their devotions? I am sure that you never did.

   If anything has helped you to fight against sin and to bear the burdens
   of life, it has been this drawing near to God. Therefore, I urge you,
   by the holy effect of prayer, to believe it to be among the things
   honest and true. Such a holy thing, implanted in you by God Himself
   cannot be a weed which He will pluck up and fling over the garden wall
   in contempt. God has never taught us prayer that it might be an
   imposition upon our credulity and a sport for His supreme intelligence.
   Such a suggestion is plain blasphemy and we mention it with abhorrence.
   That blessed exercise in which I have a hallowing and elevating
   fellowship with the Eternal cannot be a failure. Assuredly--"My God
   will hear me."

   III. I close with a third head. Let us now CONSIDER THE EXERCISE OF
   THIS CONFIDENCE IN PRAYER. I

   have shown you the results of this confidence and some few of the
   reasons for it. Now let us see where the exercise of this confidence
   leads us. What are we doing when we carry this assurance into action?

   Our confidence that the Lord hears prayer is seen in our looking to Him
   first and foremost at all times. For our eternal salvation we look to
   God alone, accepting that Divine system in which, by water and by
   blood, we are saved from sin, through faith. Our confidence does not
   lie in our own resolves, or moral virtue, or spiritual attainments, but
   in Him to whom we cry in prayer, "Hold You me up and I shall be safe."
   We are glad of the aid of friends in smaller concerns. But even there
   our first resort is to our God in Heaven, for we each one feel this to
   be his chief defense--"My God will hear

   me."

   This leads us also to make sure that God is ours. We live by
   appropriating our God to ourselves. We may, without terror, see our
   property lessen and our friends desert us and our dearest relatives
   pass away. But it would be horror, indeed, if we lost our God and could
   no longer say, "My God." Others may choose what they please as the
   object of their heart's chief choice but we will pay no homage of the
   soul to any but Jehovah. "this God is our God forever and ever." As
   another man's God I cannot rest in Him but as, "My God," I am assured
   that He will hear me. Thus, we are driven, by our confidence in prayer
   to grapple Him to our soul with hooks of steel. To say, "My God" is our
   Heaven below.

   This also impels us really to pray. Since God will hear us, we will
   pray to Him and we do. Alas, we have many sins in reference to prayer.
   Our slackness in prayer and our unbelief as to prayer are crimes for
   which we ought to cover our faces with shame. But when we walk with God
   aright, when we keep His Commandments and abide in His love, then He
   gives us life, joy and power in prayer and then we become conscious of
   success at the Throne. That power being bestowed upon us, we come to
   pray as naturally as a child cries. We ought to have set times for
   private prayer. It is most healthful that we should. But I question
   whether our best prayers are not those which are quite irrespective of
   time and season.

   When a man does not pray because it is seven o'clock in the morning but
   because he has a pressing need--when he does not pray because it is
   time to go to bed but because he feels drawn to speak with God, then he
   prays, indeed. When a man has a constant confidence in the prevalence
   of prayer he slips away from a trying business to seek guidance and
   support. The confident pleader, when he walks the street groaning in
   spirit, makes known his desire to the Most High. Perhaps Cheapside has
   been a Bethel to some of you and your shop has been a temple. The most
   living prayer bursts naturally from the swollen heart and does not come
   because of time.

   I have heard of a minister who put in the margin of his manuscript
   sermons, "Cry here." And in another place, "Here lift up your eyes." It
   must be very dreadful preaching when the emotion is made to order. And
   the same is true of praying. The fear is that you should not really
   pray when the clock says, "Now pray." I do not think we can always keep
   the watch of the soul in exact time with the clock on the mantelpiece.
   Therefore I think that the most living prayer is that which comes by
   the movement of the Spirit of God just at that time when it is most of
   all required.

   "Let us pray" is, however, a voice which is never unseasonable. When
   would it be unfit for such an exhortation to be given? When would it
   not be profitable to pray? The Lord is always willing. Therefore let us
   be always praying in one form or another. Let us pray no matter what
   may be the trial, no matter what the joy, no matter what the company.
   Pray without ceasing, because it is always true--"My God will hear me."

   You know how it was said of a holy man as he walked the streets, "There
   goes the man that can have anything of God that he pleases to ask."
   This is the secret of a great life. Fail here and you fail everywhere.
   Prosper on the mount with your uplifted hands and Amalek in the valley
   is of no consequence. But how can we have this power if we have not the
   unquestioning confidence that if we ask anything according to His will
   He hears us? Brethren, to be strong and happy think about these
   words--"My God will hear me," till you can say them with your whole
   soul.

   As for you, poor Souls, who cannot say, "My God," shall I tell you that
   you may not pray? Far from it. If you have a desire to pray, encourage
   that desire. But mind that it is prayer and not a mere form. Let your
   heart go up to Him who says to you, "Seek you the Lord while He may be
   found." Instead of telling you not to pray, I would direct you how to
   pray. You have need, first, to have a God to pray to, for till then you
   cannot say, "My God will hear me."

   God can only be yours in the saving sense by Christ's being yours.
   Jesus says, "No man comes unto the Father but by Me." God becomes our
   God by faith which appropriates Him as He is revealed in His Son Jesus
   Christ. Look to Jesus, for He is the Mercy Seat and so the way to God
   in prayer. The Gospel that we have preached to you is not, "Pray," but,
   "Believe." "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved."

   Then, being saved, you will be able to pray with assurance of
   prevailing. Come to God by the blood of Jesus and so shall a sinner's
   prayer be heard. Prayer is the vital breath of every saved man even as
   faith is the life-blood of his soul. At this moment come to God by
   Jesus Christ. You are a sinner condemned by sin--Christ came into the
   world to save sinners--accept the Savior--trust your soul with Him and
   ask that, for His sake, you may have the free gift of eternal life. You
   are an empty, poor, naked and miserable sinner--take the Lord Jesus, in
   all His fullness and blessedness, to be yours forever and then the
   great God will bow His ear to you, even to you and you, too, shall be
   numbered with those who have power with God.

   Here on this spot I charge you cry, "God be merciful to me a sinner."
   Let that request be silently offered, even though you dare not lift
   your eye to Heaven. Come, Brethren, let us all offer it and then there
   shall come to each of us a justification far sweeter and larger than if
   we should stand aloof from sinners and say, "God, I thank You, that I
   am not as other men." O my Lord, hear this, my prayer, that those who
   hear or read this sermon may be able to say, even as Your unworthy
   servant most boldly says, "My God will hear me." Grant it, I pray You,
   for Jesus' sake. Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

Christ's Connection With Sinners the Source of His Glory

   INTENDED FOR READING ON LORD'S DAY, FEBRUARY 17, 1889

   DELIVERED BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "Therefore wiil I divide Him a portion with the great. And He shall
   divide the spoil with the strong. Because He has poured out His soul
   unto death. And He was numbered with the transgressors. And He bore the
   sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors." Isaiah 53:12.

   WE may regard this verse as a kind of Covenant made between the
   everlasting God, the infinite Jehovah on the one part, and our great
   Representative, Mediator and Redeemer, the Lord Jesus Christ, on the
   other part. The incarnate God is to be bruised and wounded. He is to
   pour out His soul unto death and by a travail of soul He is to bear the
   sin of many. And then His ultimate reward is to be that God will divide
   Him a portion with the great and He Himself shall divide the spoil with
   the strong.

   Note the double recompense and joyfully distinguish between the two
   divisions--that which Jehovah makes for Him and that which He makes
   Himself. Our champion, like another David, is to confront and conquer
   the great enemy of the Lord's people, and then He is to have His
   reward. Unlike David, He is to pour out His soul and die in the
   conflict, and then He is to receive a glorious portion from the Father,
   and He is also Himself to seize upon the spoil of the vanquished foe.

   At this moment, our Lord Jesus is enjoying the reward which His Father
   has allotted Him--"Therefore will I divide Him a portion with the
   great." He is no more despised and rejected. Who dares to dishonor a
   majesty so surpassing? See how the whole host of Heaven adores Him! All
   the pomp of

   glory is displayed around Him. To Him the cherubim and seraphim
   continually cry in their ceaseless worship and undivided adoration. The
   four-and-twenty elders, representing the ancient and the present Church
   cast their crowns at His feet. And the myriads of the redeemed whose
   robes are washed in His blood pour forth their love and life at His
   feet. He has His portion with the great--none are so great as He.

   He is not only King but kingmaker for He has made His most humble
   followers priests and kings unto God and His royalty is multiplied in
   each of them. How much His Father honors Him, it is not for my tongue
   to tell you. And if it were possible for me to tell it in words, yet
   the inner meaning could never be compassed by such narrow hearts as
   ours. He has infinite Glory from the great Father God. He lives
   forever, King of kings and Lord of lords and all hallelujahs come up
   before Him. Imagination cannot reach the height of His immeasurable
   majesty and happiness.

   And why these honors? What has He done to merit these immeasurable
   glories? The answer is that He has done these four things--"He has
   poured out His soul unto death. And He was numbered with the
   transgressors. And he bore the sin of many and made intercession for
   the transgressors." In addition to what His Father gives Him, it is
   worthy of contemplation that our Lord has taken, in His life-conflict,
   great spoils with His own hands. "He shall divide the spoil with the
   strong." He has spoiled sin, death and Hell--each one the vanquisher of
   our race, the spoiler of the entire world.

   He has overcome these three, and in each case has led captivity
   captive. What must be the spoils of such victories? All the processions
   of triumph that ever went up the Sacra Via to the Capitol of Rome we
   may dismiss as empty pageants. All the glories of Assyria, Babylon,
   Persia and Greece are blots of the cruel past which sicken us in
   remembrance. These led liberty captive. But when He ascended on high He
   led captivity captive. Jesus blesses all by His victories and curses
   none. He spoiled no man of his goods--He only brought death on death,
   destruction on the Destroyer and captivity upon captivity.

   In all His spoils men are gainers. And therefore, when the incarnate
   God divides the spoil with the strong, all His people may joyfully
   shout without the reservation of a sigh for the conquered and the
   spoiled. That was a rich triumph

   and the spoils He won are spoils that enrich myriads of Believers today
   and shall enrich them throughout all the ages that are to come.

   And why these spoils? What has He done? These trophies--where were they
   won? What was the conflict? Here is the answer--"Because He has poured
   out His soul unto death. And He was numbered with the transgressors.
   And He bore the sin of many and made intercession for the
   transgressors." It is a strange fact that I am going to declare, but it
   is no less true than strange--according to our text the extraordinary
   glories of Christ, as Savior, have all been earned by His connection
   with human sin. He has gotten His most illustrious splendor, His
   brightest jewels, His most Divine crowns out of coming into contact
   with this poor fallen race.

   What is man? What are all men? Nothings, nobodies. This great globe
   itself--what is it in connection with the vast creation of God? One
   grain of the sweepings of dust behind the door. The small dust of the
   balance bears a larger proportion to the eternal hills than this little
   globe to the great worlds which speak to us across the midnight sky.
   Yet all those glittering worlds that we can see with the telescope bear
   an extremely minute proportion to the illimitable fields of Divine
   creation. We know not that anywhere Christ ever came into contact with
   sin, except upon this little ball. We have no Revelation of any other
   redemption. This obscure star is faith's great marvel!

   How shall we comprehend that here the eternal Deity did take the nature
   of a man and here did suffer in the sinner's place, "the Just for the
   unjust, that He might bring us to God"? All the eyes of all the angels
   turn this way. This mystery is too great for them. They cannot compass
   its full meaning but desire to look into it. We know not that anywhere
   in all the vast creation of God there has ever been seen the likes of
   this matchless, unparalleled deed of Divine Grace--that the Son of God,
   in mighty love, should come down to earth and come into contact with
   human sin that He might put it away.

   No one imagines that our Lord has often suffered. No, He has been
   incarnate once and has been sacrificed but once. "Once in the end of
   the world has He appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself."
   And this for guilty men! I am overwhelmed. I would gladly sit down in
   silence and give way to adoring wonder.

   May the Holy Spirit, Himself, now aid me, for my need is great! I am
   going to speak about these four things very briefly. I have nothing of
   my own to say about them. I only want to put them before you as much as
   I can in their naked simplicity--there is a beauty in them which needs
   no describing, which would be degraded by any adornment of human
   speech. Here are four flints out of which you may strike sparks of
   Divine fire if you are but willing to see their brightness. These four
   things that Jesus did, the four reasons why He is crowned with such
   superlative honor, are connected with you, if you have but faith to
   perceive the connection--so connected that they will save you--will
   even make you partake in the glory which has come of them.

   I. The first source of the Mediator's glory is, that He, out of His
   love to guilty men, has POURED OUT HIS SOUL UNTO DEATH.

   Remember that the penalty of sin is death. "The soul that sins, it
   shall die." "For in the day that you eat thereof you shall surely die."
   As God made us, we should not have died. There is about man, when he is
   in connection with God, no reason for death. But as soon as man touched
   evil he was divided from God and he took into his veins the poison
   which brings death with it and all its train of woes. Jesus Christ, our
   Substitute, when He poured out His soul unto death, was bearing the
   penalty that is due to sin. This is taught in the Bible--in fact, it is
   the chief theme of Holy Scripture. Whenever sin was to be put away, it
   was by the sacrifice of a life.

   All through the Jewish Law it stands conspicuous that, "Without
   shedding of blood is no remission of sin." God has so impressed this
   Truth upon humanity that you can scarcely go into any nation, however
   unenlightened, but there is connected with their religion the idea of
   sacrifice, and therefore the idea of the offering of a life on account
   of a broken Law. Now, the Lord Jesus came into such connection with men
   that He bore the death penalty which guilty men had incurred.

   Remember the expression--"He has poured out His soul unto death." It is
   deliberate. "He has poured out His soul." It is a libation presented
   with thought and care. Not the mere spilling of His blood but the
   resolute, determinate pouring out of His whole life unto its last
   drop--the pouring it out unto death. Now, Christ's resolve to die for
   you and for me was not that of a brave soldier who rushes up to the
   cannon's mouth in a moment of excitement. But He was practically
   pouring out His life from the day when His public ministry commenced,
   if not before. He was always dying, by living, at

   such a rate that His zeal consumed Him--"The zeal of Your house has
   eaten Me up." Deliberately and as it were, drop by drop, He was letting
   His soul fall upon the ground--till at length, upon the tree of
   doom--He emptied it all out and cried, "It is finished," and gave up
   the ghost. "He poured out His soul unto death."

   As it was deliberate, so it was most real and true. I pray you do not
   think of Christ as pouring out His soul as though the outpouring was a
   kind of sentiment of self-abnegation. As though it made Him spend a
   sort of ecstatic life in dreamland and suffer only in thought, intent
   and sympathy. My Lord suffered as you suffer, only more keenly. For He
   had never injured His body or soul by any act of excess so as to take
   off the edge from His sensitiveness. His was the pouring out of a whole
   soul in all the phases of suffering into which perfect souls can pass.
   He felt the horror of sin as we who have sinned could not feel it, and
   the sight of evil afflicted Him much more than it does the purest among
   us. His was real suffering, real poverty, real weariness.

   And when He came to His last agony, His bloody sweat was no
   fiction--His exceeding sorrow unto death was no fancy. When the
   scourges fell upon His shoulders it was true pain that He suffered. And
   the nails and the spear and the sponge and the vinegar--these tell of a
   real passion--a death such as probably you and I shall never know.
   Certainly we shall never experience that pouring out of our soul unto
   death which was peculiar to Jesus--in which He went far beyond martyrs
   in their most extreme griefs. There were points of anguish about His
   death which were for Himself, and for Himself, alone. "He has poured
   out His soul unto death," in grief most weighty--so weighty that it can
   never be fully weighed in any scales of mortal sympathy.

   And He did this, remember, voluntarily. If I were to die for any of
   you, what would it amount to, but that I paid the debt of nature a
   little sooner than I must ultimately have paid it? For we must all die,
   sooner or later. But the Christ needed not to die at all so far as He,
   Himself, was personally concerned. There was no cause within Himself
   why He should go to the Cross to lay down His life. He yielded Himself
   up a willing sacrifice for our sins. Herein lies much of the
   preciousness of His propitiation to you and to me. Love, love
   immeasurable, led the immortal Lord to die for man.

   Let us think it over and melt into loving gratitude. A death endured
   out of pure love. A death which was altogether unnecessary on His own
   account and, indeed, a superfluous act, save that it behooved Him to
   suffer that He might fulfill His office of a Savior and bring us near
   to God. This is a matter which should set our hearts on fire with
   fervent gratitude to the Lord who loved us to the death. "He has poured
   out His soul unto death." I will say no more about it, except that you
   see how complete it was.

   Jesus gave poor sinners everything. His every faculty was laid out for
   them. To His last rag He was stripped upon the Cross. No part of His
   body or of His soul was kept back from being made a sacrifice. The last
   drop, as I said before, was poured out till the cup was drained. He
   made no reserve--He kept not back even His innermost soul--"He has
   poured out His soul unto death."

   Consider these two Truths of God together. He is the Lord God Almighty
   before whom the hosts of angels bow with joy. Yet on yonder Cross He
   pours out His soul unto death. And He does it not because of anything
   that is in Him, that renders it needful, but for your sake and for
   mine--for the salvation of all those who put their trust in Him. Put
   your trust in Him, then, without reserve. Pour out your souls in full
   trust--even as He poured out His soul unto death. Come and rest in Him
   and then see the reason why He is crowned with majesty.

   His death for your sins is the reason why He divides the spoils with
   the strong. He has His portion with the great because He "died, the
   Just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God." This, which
   brought Him so much shame, has now brought Him all His glory. Come and
   trust Him! Come and trust Him wholly! Come and trust Him now!

   II. Secondly and somewhat briefly. It appears in the text that our Lord
   did not only bear the penalty due to sinners but HE WAS NUMBERED WITH
   SINNERS. "He was numbered with the transgressors." There is a touch of
   nearness to the sinner about this which there is not in the first
   clause. He bears death for the sinner. But you would not suppose, if
   you had not read it, that He would be written in the sinners' register.
   He was not and could not be a sinner. But it is written, "He was
   numbered with the transgressors." O Sinner, see how close Jesus comes
   to you? Is there a census taken of sinners? Then, in that census, the
   name of Jesus is written down. "He was numbered with the
   transgressors."

   He never was a transgressor--it was impossible that He could be. It
   would be blasphemy to say that the Son of God ever was a transgressor
   against His Father's Laws. In Him was no sin in any sense, or shape, or
   form. His spotless birth, His perfect nature, His holy life, all make
   Him, "separate from sinners." How, then, was He numbered with the
   trans-

   gressors? This makes it the more marvelous because it is so hurtful to
   a man who is pure, to be numbered with the impure. What would any woman
   with a delicate purity of mind think if she were numbered with the
   harlots? What would any honest man among us think if he were numbered
   with thieves?

   But that would be nothing compared with the holy Lord Jesus being
   numbered with the transgressors. And yet to this He submitted for our
   sakes. I said that He could not be a transgressor. But we are not like
   He in this. Anyone of us could be either unjust or dishonest. For,
   alas, sin dwells in us, and the possibilities of its still greater
   development are rich! But Jesus was clean in nature and pure in heart
   and therefore He could never be tainted with evil. And yet the inspired
   Prophet says, "He was numbered with the transgressors." This was a
   humiliation, indeed! This was coming down to where the sinner lay and
   bowing over him to lift him up.

   Our Lord Jesus was numbered with the transgressors, first, by the
   tongue of slander. They called Him a drunken man and a
   wine-bibber--they even called Him Beelzebub. That was sharp enough for
   Him to bear, whom all the angels salute as "Holy, holy, holy!" Accused
   of blasphemy, sedition, and so forth, He had enough to bear from evil
   lips. Nothing was too vile to be cast upon Him by those who said, "Let
   Him be crucified." Reproach never spared the Spotless One but spent its
   utmost venom on Him. Like the Psalmist, He was the song of the
   drunkard. The very thieves who were crucified with Him reviled Him.

   He was numbered with the transgressors in the earthly courts of
   justice. He stood at the bar as a common felon though He was Judge of
   all. Though they could not find witnesses whose testimony agreed, yet
   they condemned Him. Though Pilate had to say, "Why, what evil has He
   done?" yet He was taken out with two malefactors that He might die side
   by side with them. And then, we are told by the Evangelist, the
   Scripture was fulfilled--"He was numbered with the transgressors" (Mark
   15:28).

   To go a little farther, our Lord Jesus Christ on earth was treated, in
   the Providence of God, as transgressors are treated. Transgression
   sometimes brings on men poverty, sickness, reproach and desertion. And
   Jesus Christ had to take His share of all these with sinful men. No
   wind was tempered for this shorn Lamb. No winter's frost was stayed, no
   night dews dried to comfort His secret agonies--

   "Cold mountains and the midnight air Witnessed the fervor of His
   prayer." All things in this world that are so keen and terrible to man,
   because man has become so guilty, were just as keen and terrible to
   Him. The sun shone on Him till His tongue was dried up like a potsherd
   and did cleave to His jaws and He cried, "I thirst."

   The nails that pierced Him tore His tender flesh as they would have
   torn that of the sinful. Fever parched Him till His tongue cleaved to
   His jaws. There was no softening of the laws of nature for this Man
   because He had never offended. But He had to stand as a sinner where we
   sinners stand--to suffer from the common laws of a sin-cursed
   world--though He was not, and could not, be a sinner. "In Him was no
   sin." Yet He was numbered with the transgressors.

   And look, my Brethren. Oh, that I may know how to speak properly on it!
   The Holy God treated Him as if He were one of us--"it pleased the
   Father to bruise Him. He has put Him to grief." God not only turned His
   back on transgressors but He turned His back on His Son, who was
   numbered with them. God never can forsake the perfectly innocent, yet
   He who was perfectly innocent said, "My God, My God, why have You
   forsaken Me?" Sinking and anguish of spirit, even to soul-death, cannot
   come to a man who is numbered with the perfectly righteous. It was
   because Jesus voluntarily put Himself into the sinner's place that He
   had to bear the sinner's doom.

   And He being numbered with the transgressors, the justice which smites
   sin smote Him. The frown that falls on sin fell on Him. The darkness
   which comes over human sin gathered in sevenfold night about His sacred
   brow. In the day of the Lord's anger, "He was numbered with the
   transgressors."

   As this is the reason why He is now exalted, it seems to me that you
   and I ought to feel a mingling of grief and joy at this time to think
   that the Lord Jesus would condescend to put His name down with
   transgressors. You know what a transgressor is, don't you? One who has
   done wrong. One who has broken laws. One who has gone beyond bounds and
   committed evil. Well, Jesus Christ says, "Father, that I might save
   these transgressors, put My name down among them." It was necessary
   that it should be so, that He, standing in our place, might lift us
   into His place, transferring His righteousness to us, as He took our
   sin upon Himself.

   I could weep as I tell you that "He was numbered with the
   transgressors." I cannot preach. This theme baffles me altogether. I
   wish that you would look into it yourselves. Never mind my words. Think
   of my Lord and of these two things--"He has poured out His soul unto
   death. And He was numbered with the transgressors."

   III. That leads me to the third matter by which the Lord Jesus Christ
   has won His victories and earned reward of God. It is this--"HE BORE
   THE SIN OF MANY."

   Now do not think that these words are mine, and therefore find fault
   with them. Deliberately observe that these are the words of the Holy
   Spirit. "He bore the sin"--"He bore the sin of many." They quibble with
   us for saying that He bore the chastisement of sin. We shall say it
   none the less plainly. But we shall go much further and insist upon it
   that, literally, Jesus bore the sin of man. Or else why did He die? Why
   did He die at all? "He was Man," you say, "and, therefore, He died."
   There was no reason why the Christ should die because He was a Man--for
   being born without the taint of sin and having lived a spotless life
   and having never violated the Law of God--there could be no justice in
   Christ's dying at all, if there was not some reason for it apart from
   Himself.

   It is an act of injustice that Jesus should be permitted to die, at
   all, unless there can be found a reason apart from His own personal
   conduct. If death is the consequence of sin, there being no sin in
   Christ, the consequence could not follow without the cause. You tell me
   that by wicked hands He was crucified--it was so, and yet the Scripture
   assures us that this was by the determinate purpose and foreknowledge
   of God. How could this have been, had our Lord had no connection with
   sin? It was not necessary that He should die because He was Man. He
   might have been taken to Heaven in a chariot of fire. Or it might have
   been said of Him, as of Enoch, "He was not, for God took Him." If the
   rough Elijah ascended to Heaven, how much more the gentle, tender,
   perfect, absolutely perfect Christ might have been expected to do so!
   There was no reason, then, in His personal nature, why He should die.

   "He died," said one, "as an example." But, my dear Friends, I do not
   see that. In His life He is an example to us through and through, and
   so He is in His death. If we must die, it is an example to us that we
   should die as bravely, as patiently, as believingly, as He did. But we
   are not bound to die at all unless God requires it at our hands.
   Indeed, we are bound to shun death if it can virtuously be avoided.
   Self-preservation is a Law of nature--and for any man to voluntarily
   give himself up to die without some grand purpose would not be
   justifiable.

   It is only because there is a Law that we must die that we may judge
   ourselves permitted to volunteer to die. The Savior does not set us an
   example in a sphere into which we cannot enter. In that case He goes
   beyond us altogether and treads the winepress alone. He is a Being whom
   we cannot follow in the higher walks in which He is both God and Man.
   In His great voluntary self-surrender unto death, the Son of God stoops
   from a position which we, who are mortal, because of sin, have never
   held.

   "Well," you say, "but Jesus Christ died as an exhibition of Divine
   love." This is true in a certain sense, but from another point of view,
   of all the things I have ever heard, this does seem to me to be the
   most monstrous statement that could be made. That Jesus Christ, dying
   because of our sins, is a wonderful example of Divine love, I know,
   admit and glory in. But that Christ's dying was an instance of Divine
   love, if He did not die because He bore our sins, I entirely deny.
   There is no exhibition of Divine love in the death of Christ if it is
   not for our sins. But an exhibition of a very different sort. The death
   of the perfect Son of God, per se, without its great object, does not
   exhibit love but the reverse.

   What? Does God put to death His only begotten Son, the perfectly pure
   and holy Being? Is this the finale of a life of obedience? Well, then,
   I see no love in God at all. It seems to me to be the reverse of love
   that it should be so. Apart from sin-bearing, the statement that Jesus
   must die the death of the Cross to show us that his Father is full of
   love, is sheer nonsense. But if He died in our place, then the gift of
   Jesus Christ by the Father is undoubtedly a glorious instance of Divine
   love.

   Behold and wonder, that "God so loved the world, that He gave His only
   begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have
   everlasting life." This is love, if you please. But not the mere fact
   that the Son of God should be put to death. That were a thing
   altogether unaccountable, not to be justified, but to be looked upon as
   a horrible mystery never to be explained--that the blessed Son of God
   should die--if we did not receive this full and complete explanation,
   "He bore the sin of many."

   If our Lord's bearing our sin for us is not the Gospel, I have no
   Gospel to preach. Brothers and Sisters, I have fooled you these
   thirty-five years, if this is not the Gospel. I am a lost man, if this
   is not the Gospel. For I have no hope beneath

   Heaven, neither in time nor in eternity, save only in this belief--that
   Jesus, in my place, bore both my punishment and sin. If our Lord did so
   bear our sin we have a firm and joyous confidence. God would not accept
   a Substitute in our place and then punish us. If Jesus suffered in my
   place, I shall not suffer. If another has gone to prison and to death
   for me, I shall not go there. If the axe has fallen on the neck of Him
   that took my place, justice is satisfied, the Law is vindicated, I am
   free, happy, joyful, grateful--and therefore, bound forever to serve
   Him who loved me and gave Himself for me.

   I do not know how you look upon this doctrine, but it seems to me to be
   something worth telling everywhere. I would like to make every wind
   bear it on its wings and every wave waft it on its crest. There is a
   just and righteous way to forgive sin--Jesus bearing the death penalty
   in the sinners' place--that whosoever believes in Him should be
   justified from all things from which the Law could not deliver him.

   Now, these three things--that He poured out His soul unto death and so
   bore the sinner's penalty. That He was numbered with the transgressors
   and so stood side by side with sinners. And next, that He actually bore
   their sin and so came into a wonderful contact with sin which did not
   defile Him, but which enabled Him to put away the sin which defiled
   men--these three things are the reasons of the glory of our Lord Jesus.
   God, for these three things and one more, makes Him to divide the spoil
   with the strong, and divides Him a portion with the great.

   IV. The last thing is this--"HE MADE INTERCESSION FOR THE
   TRANSGRESSORS." You see, all along

   Christ gets His glory by standing side by side with guilty men. A
   curious mine it is to get gold out of. I will not venture to say what
   Augustine, in a burst of enthusiasm, once uttered. When speaking of
   Adam's Fall and then describing all the glory that comes to God out of
   the salvation of the guilty, that holy man could not help using the
   unguarded expression, "Beata culpa!" "Happy fault!" Yet, though I would
   not say so much as that, I do see that out of this dunghill of sin
   Christ has brought this diamond of His Glory by our salvation.

   If there had been no sinners, there could not have been a Savior. If no
   sin, no pouring out of the soul unto death. And if no pouring out of
   the soul unto death, no dividing a portion with the great. If there had
   been no guilt, there had been no act of expiation. In the wondrous act
   of expiation by our great Substitute, the Godhead is more gloriously
   revealed than in all the creations and Providences of the Divine power
   and wisdom--

   "Sin, which strove that love to quell, Woke yet more its wondrous
   blaze; Eden, Bethlehem, Calvary, tell, More than all beside, His
   praise."

   In the person of His dying Son, bleeding for human guilt, the Lord God
   has focused the splendor of His infinity. If you would see God, you
   must look to Calvary. God in Christ Jesus--this is God, indeed. God in
   Christ Jesus--bearing sin and putting it away--here you see what a God
   can do in boundless love! "God forbid that I should glory, save in the
   Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ."

   But this is the finale of it. He makes intercession for the
   transgressors. Who among us will take up the part of the guilty? Who
   will plead for the guilty? I know, in certain cases, the lawyer will
   sell his tongue to the most polluted. But if a man were perfectly pure
   you would not find him saying a word in defense of the guilty, would
   you? So far as the man was guilty he could not be defended. Unless
   there were a fear of too severe a punishment, no one would take his
   part. And even in that case, the offender is viewed as so far deserving
   that he is not guilty enough for so heavy a penalty. For the guilty we
   could not plead so as to deny or extenuate evil.

   A just man would plead for innocent persons who might be falsely
   accused--but our Lord made intercession for transgressors. When He was
   here on earth how tender He was with transgressors! Women that were
   sinners came around Him and He never bade them be gone. She that was
   taken in adultery, oh, how He dealt with her! When Peter was about to
   deny Him, He said, "I have prayed for you, that your faith fail not."
   Those nights out there on the cold mountains were not spent for
   Himself, but for sinners. He bore on His heart the names of guilty men.

   He was always pleading their cause and when He came to die, He said,
   "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." He took their
   part, you see. He would clear them of guilt if He could. I dare say
   that He has often prayed like that for you. When you have been
   despising religion and saying vile things about your Lord, He has said,
   "Ah, poor Soul! It is like the ravings of a man in a fever who does not
   know what he is talking about. He does not know what he is saying.
   Father, forgive him."

   Our blessed Lord pleaded thus when He was here. And now He has gone up
   yonder He is pleading still for the same persons. Though we cannot see
   through that veil which hides the invisible from us, yet the eye of
   faith, I hope, is strong enough to see that He is at the Father's side
   at this moment making intercession for transgressors. I do not picture
   Him up yonder as using entreaties or pleading to an agony. Oh, no! With
   authority He intercedes, for He has finished the work and He claims the
   reward. I do not even picture Him as using words. Those are the poor
   tools with which men plead with men. But the death which our Lord
   endured for the guilty is pleading with the Father.

   The death of Christ is a well-spring of delight to God. The Father
   thinks of what Jesus has suffered in vindication of the Law, even of
   His obedience unto death. And that thought has power with the Judge of
   all the earth. In effect, the wounds of Jesus perpetually bleed. Still
   His cries of the great Sacrifice come up into His Father's ear. The
   Godhead, delighted to bless, is charmed to find the way of blessing men
   always open by the fact that the propitiation has been made, the sin
   has been put away.

   I cannot continue longer, for strength and time fail me. Only it does
   seem to me so delightful to think that Jesus pleads for sinners. If you
   see Him die, He is dying for sinners. If you see Him with His name
   written down in a register, that register is the sinners' census
   book--His name is written there that He may be in a position
   advantageous for sinners. If you see Him pleading now that He is risen,
   He is the advocate for sinners. Did you ever read this text in the
   Bible--"If any man does not sin, we have an Advocate with the Father,
   Jesus Christ the Righteous"? No, you never did! But I will tell you
   what you do read there--"If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the
   Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous." "If any man sin."

   Is there anybody here that never sinned? Then there is no Christ for
   you. He never did anything for you and never will. Are you guilty? Do
   you feel it? Do you confess it? Do you own it? Christ is for you. If a
   doctor were to set up in the town he would never think of sending out a
   circular in such terms as these--"Henry Smith, M.D., invites healthy
   persons to call upon him, for he is proficient in the healing arts."
   There will be no business for "Henry Smith, M.D.," among the healthy
   folks--let him be as learned as he may. And if he is known as an
   eminent physician, he does not need to intimate that sick persons are
   welcome to call upon him. For the very fact that he is a physician
   means that he lives to serve the sick.

   My Lord Jesus Christ, with all His saving power, cannot save those who
   do not need saving. If they have no sin He cannot cleanse them from it.
   Can He? What, then, have some of you to do with the Savior? You are
   very good, respectable people that have never done anything wrong in
   all your lives--what is Jesus to you? Of course, you go your own way
   and take care of your own selves and forget the idea of being beholden
   to Free Grace. Alas, this is folly! How foolish you are to think you
   are such characters! For you are nothing of the sort. If you look
   within, your heart is as foul as a black chimney that has never been
   swept.

   Our hearts are wells of defilement. Oh, that you could see this and
   quit your false righteousness! If you will not, there is nothing in
   Jesus for you. He derives His glory from sinners, not from
   self-conceited folks like you. But, you guilty ones that will admit and
   confess your guilt may cheerfully remember that those four things which
   Jesus did, He did in connection with sinners--and it is because He did
   them in connection with sinners--that He is this day crowned with glory
   and honor and majesty.

   Jesus Christ does not shrink from sinners. What then? O you Sinners, do
   not shrink from Him! If Jesus does not shrink from sinners--(let me say
   it again)--you Sinners, do not shrink from Him. If we were to go today
   to some of those unhappy parts of the world in the north of Europe (it
   makes one's blood curdle to think that there are such places), where
   poor decaying lepers are made to live alone. And if these poor
   creatures came our way, we should wish them every blessing and should
   desire for them every comfort. But while we were expressing our kind
   wishes we should be gradually edging off and leaving a distance between
   ourselves and their horrible pollution.

   That is not the way in which Jesus acts towards sinners--He draws near
   and never sets a hedge between Himself and them. You need not undergo a
   quarantine before you may enter the port of salvation by Christ. Yonder
   is a filthy leprous sinner--as full of filth as an egg is full of
   matter--but Jesus comes right up to him and lays His hand upon him and
   says, "I will. Be you clean." Jesus never keeps at a distance from the
   sinner.

   But suppose this poor leper began to run away from Him. It would be
   natural that he should, but would also be very foolish. No, poor
   Creature, stop your running! Stay at Jesus' feet! Look to Him! Trust
   Him! Touch His garment and be

   healed! O my dear Hearers, in this pulpit I seem to stand a long way
   off from you and talk to you from afar but my heart is with you. I wish
   I knew how to persuade you to come to Jesus. I would use some loving
   logic that I have not yet hit upon. How heartily would I entreat you to
   trust the Son of God, made flesh, bleeding and dying for guilty men! If
   you will trust Him, He will not deceive you, but you shall be saved,
   and saved at once, and forever!

   And, O you that love Him and know Him, will you learn one lesson, and
   then I will send you home? As Jesus does not shrink from sinners, do
   not yourselves shrink from them. You are not so pure and holy as He was
   and yet He came into the world to save sinners. Go, each of you, into
   the world to seek them. Be in earnest after sinners. You get so good,
   some of you, that there is no living with you. You forget the dunghills
   where you grew and fancy yourselves angels, but you are nothing of the
   sort. God has made something of you, and now you are too respectable to
   look after those who are no worse than you once were.

   If a man sins, you do not speak to him lest you should be disgraced by
   his society. What pride! A man is known to be a drunkard and there are
   some, even of you, that are teetotalers who would not talk with such,
   but leave them till they are improved, and then you would speak to
   them. You will do them good if they come to you for it but you will not
   go to them--you cannot bring your souls to handle the wound while it
   bleeds and touch the filthy while they are foul. Some are too fine and
   finicky to look after roughs. But I venture to say to the rough, the
   ragged, the graceless, the godless-- that they are more likely to get a
   blessing than the self-righteous.

   I believe that there is more likelihood of converting a downright
   out-and-out sinner than of reaching the consciences of your very nice,
   neat, hypocritical people. Do not, therefore, shrink from sinners, for
   Jesus did not. And as from them He won His brightest trophies, even so
   may you. Be not ashamed, even if, by talking with sinners, you should
   come to be taken for one of them, for your Lord Himself, "was numbered
   with the transgressors. And He bore the sin of many, and made
   intercession for the transgressors."

   Let it be your vocation, as a man redeemed by blood, to be "the
   sinners' friend," henceforth and forever. God help you to do it! O my
   Beloved, may God send a blessing upon us at this hour. Pray for it.
   Pray for it. Lord, send it, for Jesus' sake! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

Trembling at the Word of the Lord

   INTENDED FOR READING ON LORD'S DAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1889.

   DELIVERED BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON, ON THURSDAY EVENING, MAY
   1,1884.

   "To this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite
   spirit and trembles at My Word." Isaiah 66:2.

   PORTRAIT painting is a great art. Many pretend to it but the masters of
   the art are few. In the Word of God we have a gallery of portraits so
   accurate, so striking, that only the hand of the Lord could have drawn
   them. Most of us have been startled to see our own portrait there. The
   best of all is that at the bottom of each likeness we have the Lord's
   judgment upon the character so that we are able to form an estimate of
   what our true condition is before the Lord. Here you have a man
   drawn--he is poor and of a contrite spirit and trembles at the Word of
   the Lord. Here, also, you have the Lord's estimate of him--"To this man
   will I look."

   I hope to dwell chiefly upon the character described in the closing
   words, "And trembles at My Word." Support the text by the fifth verse,
   "Hear the Word of the Lord, you that tremble at His Word." This
   trembling is, in God's esteem, an admirable trait in their character.
   The glorious Jehovah from His Throne in Heaven speaks of those contrite
   ones who tremble at His Word--and then the Prophet takes up the strain
   and cries, "Hear the Word of the Lord, you that tremble at His Word."
   It is a very great mercy that there are descriptions of saints given in
   the Word of God which go very low and reach the feeblest degrees of
   Divine Grace and the saddest frames of mind.

   We find the children of God sometimes upon very high places--their
   spiritual life is vigorous and their inward joy is abounding. When we
   give you descriptions of saints in that condition, many of the
   Little-Faiths at once cry out, "Alas, I know nothing of this! Would God
   it were so with me! But, indeed, it is not." They are greatly
   discouraged by those very things which should raise their spirits and
   stimulate their desires--for surely if one Believer is able to climb
   the Delectable Mountains, there is all the more hope that another may
   do so.

   Yet, we have to thank God that in His priceless Scripture, He has
   painted for us portraits of the Believer in his low estate. In the
   picture gallery of those saved by faith we find Rahab as well as Sarah
   and erring Samson as well as holy Samuel. In the Family Register of the
   Lord we have the names of Believers who were weak and sad and faulty.
   We have instances in the Sacred Record of undoubtedly gracious men who
   were in very uncomfortable and undesirable conditions. Men are spoken
   of as the Lord's people when their souls are sick, when Divine Grace is
   at a very low ebb and when joy is eclipsed.

   God's people are in Scripture owned as such when it is winter with
   their spirits lie dormant like sap stagnant in the tree. The Lord
   acknowledges spiritual life in His own when there is small evidence of
   it, and when that evidence is confused. The mention in the Scriptures
   of small but sure evidences is cheering to many. I know many of God's
   people that have been greatly comforted by the text, "We know that we
   have passed from death unto life, because we love the Brethren." "Oh,"
   they have said, "we do feel a love to all God's people, whoever they
   may be. And if that is evidence of Divine Grace, we have that
   evidence."

   Apostles could say, "We know and we are quite sure about it, that we
   have passed from death unto life, because we love the Brethren."
   Therefore we also may be encouraged by our sense of love to the saints
   to enjoy the same assured confidence that we also have passed from
   death unto life. You may, some of you, think this an insecure ground of
   consolation. But I can bear witness that it is, like the conies' hole
   among the rocks, a very useful shelter from the enemy.

   That is a very choice evidence, too, where God speaks of those that
   think upon His name--"A book of remembrance was written before Him for
   them that feared the Lord and that thought upon His name." If our
   thoughts dwell lovingly

   upon the name of the Lord, this is a saving sign. And yet how small a
   thing it seems! Thoughts are like straws but they show which way the
   wind blows. Surely the Lord's net of comfort has meshes small enough to
   hold the smallest fish.

   That, again, is very comforting where the Lord says, "Your heart shall
   live that seek Him." Even seekers shall live. Though as yet they are
   rather seekers than possessors, they have the Lord's promise of eternal
   life. Though they are only pursuing and have become faint in the
   pursuit, yet the love which set them pursuing will keep them following
   on. That is a blessed Word, indeed--"Whosoever shall call upon the name
   of the Lord shall be saved." "I do call upon His name," says one, "I
   know I do. I am crying to Him in prayer. I do wish to have His name
   named upon me. I choose Him to be my God and I dedicate myself to Him.
   And if that is calling upon God's name, then, truly, I am a child of
   God."

   This precious passage has been a special stay to my own heart in time
   of great heaviness of spirit. I know I call upon the name of the Lord
   and I shall be saved. How often also have I said to myself, "One thing
   I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see!" To see even a ray of
   light is conclusive evidence that I am no longer blind. The eye that
   can see a solitary ray of light has clearer evidence of being restored,
   if possible, than if it lived in the flood of sunlight. For if it can
   see a single ray, then is sight not only there, but it is there in no
   small degree. The man who can trust Jesus when he is at his lowest in
   his own soul, is by no means a man of little faith, but rather is he a
   man of strong confidence.

   Dear Friends, rejoice that the Lord, in infinite mercy, has deigned to
   utter the words of my text, since they serve as a most comfortable
   evidence to God's people. There is a song the Jubilee singers used to
   sing which begins, "Swing low, sweet chariot." I am sure I do not know
   what the singers mean by the expression. And so I give it a meaning of
   my own and say that I am right glad when a promise swings so low that I
   can get into it. Surely a promise from God is a chariot lined with
   love, drawn upward by winged steeds which bear our hearts aloft. And it
   is a mercy when it swings as low as this text--"To this man will I
   look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit and trembles at
   My Word."

   "Trembles at My Word." This is the description to which I call your
   attention. Here are the elect men upon whom the Lord looks and with
   whom He dwells. They are not the chivalry of earth but the chosen of
   Heaven. They are not dancing but trembling. And yet they have more
   reason to be happy than those have who laugh away their days. Let us
   enquire concerning these chosen ones. First--who are these people that
   tremble at the Lord's Word? Secondly, let us enquire, why do they
   tremble? From where comes their lowly spirit? Their humiliation before
   the Lord? Then, next, we will give a glance at a comparison here used
   and answer the question--what does God compare them to? What does God
   say that He will do for them?

   Let me read you the passage, "Thus says the Lord, The Heaven is My
   throne and the earth is My footstool: where is the house that you build
   unto Me? And where is the place of My rest? For all those things has My
   hand made and all those things have been, says the Lord: but to this
   man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit and
   trembles at My Word." There you see that God prefers the Trembler to
   the Temple and makes to the contrite heart a larger promise than even
   to the consecrated shrine of His glory. May the Holy Spirit bless these
   meditations!

   I. Aid me with your prayers while I try to answer the question--WHO ARE
   THESE PEOPLE THAT TREMBLE

   AT GOD'S WORD? I think I hear your hearts crying, "Oh, that we may be
   numbered among them!" Let me begin to answer the question by telling
   you who they are not. They are not a proud people--they do not cry,
   "Who is the Lord, that I should obey His voice?" They are humbly
   hearing. Hearing the Word of God and inwardly reverencing the heavenly
   monitor. They are no longer careless and reckless, for the voice of the
   Lord has brought them to their bearings. They have bowed their heads
   before Jehovah and they listen with rapt attention to everything that
   He may speak. They are like the child Samuel when he said, "Speak,
   Lord. For Your servant hears." They are teachable and lowly, and by no
   means belong to the school who correct the Infallible and judge the
   unerring.

   They are not a profane people, that is clear--they neither mock sin nor
   God's Word. It is a terrible sign of hardness of heart when a man can
   find no comic book so ready to his hand as Holy Scripture. Surely if
   men must play with words,

   1 know not that they are always to be blamed. But they should find the
   word of man sufficient for their amusement and not take Jehovah's Word
   to be their racket ball. Oh, it is ill with a man's soul, be sure of
   that, when he can treat the Word of the Lord with lightness and regard
   it as no more than the word of Shakespeare or Spenser. Such are not the
   men that tremble at God's Word but very far from it.

   They would not themselves care to be so described. In fact, they would
   scorn the idea of being afraid of the Book they despise. Some there are
   that are downright scoffers. They twist texts of Scripture. They
   pervert them to make mischief of

   them. They will hold up even the blessed Christ of God to ridicule. And
   the Holy Spirit, although to speak ill of Him is a fearful thing, yet
   even He has not been free from their profane utterances. No, the proud
   man and the profane man are as far asunder as the poles from the man
   that trembles at God's Word.

   I must put down the careless in the same list and say of the Lord's
   tremblers they are not indifferent people. We have among us a class who
   cause us great sorrow of heart. They are not likely to jest at God's
   Word, but yet it has no power over them. They do not scoff at it but
   they do not feed on it. They have too much thought and sense to become
   infidels. But yet they overlook the importance of the Truth which they
   accept. God's Book lies in their houses honored but unread. They do not
   much trouble to go and hear about its meaning. Or if through custom
   they become attendants at the House of God, they hear the Gospel but it
   goes in one ear and out the other.

   Like the French king who was brought to London in great state and yet
   was only a prisoner to the Black Prince, so is the Bible bound in
   morocco and adorned with gilt but is kept in bonds. There is no
   practical regard to it, no weighing it, no considering it, no
   meditating upon it, no applying it to the conscience and the daily
   life. Those cannot be said to tremble at God's Word who neglect the
   great salvation. They put far from them a consideration of the Law of
   the Most High and live as if they had license given them to act as they
   please. O Friends, careless souls cannot be numbered with those that
   tremble at God's Word!

   These were not a critical, skeptical people. They trembled at the Word
   and did not sit down on the throne of usurped infallibility and call
   the Scriptures to their bar. There are men abroad nowadays--I grieve to
   say some of them in the ministry--who take the Bible, not that it may
   judge them but that they may judge it. Their judgment weighs in its
   balances the wisdom of God Himself. They talk exceeding proudly and
   their arrogance exalts itself. O Friends, I know not how you feel about
   the prevailing skepticism of the age but I am heart-sick of it! I shun
   the place where I am likely to hear the utterances of men who do not
   tremble at God's Word. I turn away from the multitude of books which
   advocate doubt and error.

   The evil is too painful for me. If I could be content to be an
   Ishmaelite and have my hand against every man, I might seek this
   company, for here I find every faculty of my being called to warfare.
   But as I love peace, it sickens and saddens me to meet with the enemies
   of my soul. If I knew that my mother's name would be defamed in certain
   company, I would keep out of it. If I knew that my father's character
   would be trailed in the mire, I would travel far not to hear a sound so
   offensive. I could wish to be deaf and blind rather than hear or read
   the modern falsehoods which, at this time, so often wound my spirit.

   I feel more and more a tenderness for the Truth of God of the same sort
   as I would feel for the good name of my wife or my mother. I wish the
   modern revilers would have some compassion upon us old Believers to
   whom their talk is such torture. They might keep their doubts for home
   consumption. When a man was going to swear, a wise person bade him wait
   till he was further away from the town so that nobody might hear
   him--it might cause grief to a Christian ear. When a man has anything
   to say against the eternal Truth of God, let him speak it to those who
   love to hear it--to his mates and admirers. But as for us, we are
   determined we will not be tortured by this kind of thing--we cannot
   endure it. And we will not remain among those who bespatter us with it.

   "Oh but surely you are open to conviction?" they say. We are open to no
   conviction that shall be contrary to the Truth of God that has saved us
   from going down to the pit. We are open to no conviction that shall rob
   us of our eternal hope and of our glorying in the Cross of our Lord
   Jesus Christ. We do not deliberate, for we have decided. To be forever
   holding the Truth of God as though it might yet turn out to be a lie
   were to lose all the comfort of it. To be forever prepared to desert
   our Lord and Master to follow some brand new philosopher would be
   perpetual disloyalty. No, we have not come thus far at a guess. We have
   known our Lord and His Truth for these forty years and it is not maybe,
   or maybe not, with us now. We neither speculate nor hesitate. But we
   know whom we have believed and by His Grace we will cleave to Him in
   life and in death.

   Those who tremble at God's Word are not presumptuous people who derive
   fictitious comfort from it. We meet at times with a vainly confident
   man who puts behind his back every warning and threat and only
   appropriates to himself every promise, though the promise is not made
   to him. Such a man steals the children's bread and without question
   dares to put into his felon mouth what God has reserved for His own.
   This thief knows nothing of trembling at God's Word-- he takes much too
   much freedom with what the godly hardly dare to look upon. I will not
   say a word in favor of unbe-

   lief--it is a dreadful sin. But I would say very much in honor of that
   holy caution, that sacred bashfulness, that godly reverence which
   treats holy things with deep humility and careful jealousy.

   Some of God's dearest children are so afraid of presumption that they
   go too far the other way and hardly dare to be as confident as they
   might. Some of the holiest people that I know are afraid to say what
   they might say. For they scarcely dare to call themselves the children
   of God. On the other hand, I have heard others say what I fear they
   never ought to have said for they have boasted that they never had a
   doubt. I heard one minister of great experience, who believes in the
   doctrine of perfection, assert very plainly that he had lived in the
   midst of the Church of God for many years and that he had seen many
   persons who claimed to be perfect but he did not think that anyone
   agreed with them.

   And, on the other hand, he had known intimately certain other persons
   whom he thought to be as nearly perfect as men could be but in every
   case they had been the first to disown all notion of personal
   perfection and mourned their own conscious imperfection. That is my
   observation, also. I distrust the men who publish their own
   perfection--I do not believe one of them but think less of them than I
   care to say. Deformity talks of its beauty, while true beauty mourns
   its deformity. I gaze with loving sympathy upon those known to me whom
   I liken to dew-laden lilies--they are so heavy with the dew of Heaven
   that they bow low till they almost touch the ground. It may need a
   trained eye to see the beauty of lowliness but assuredly for a chaste
   loveliness nothing can exceed it.

   The lily of the valley has a charm about it that is not to be found in
   flowers which lift their glorious colors aloft. Give me such lilies,
   for I believe that among them Jesus lives and that He loves right well
   the men that are of a broken and a contrite spirit, that tremble at His
   Word. There is too much brass and too little gold about the perfection
   of the present day. It has a brazen forehead and has a way of sitting
   by the roadside--a way which in old times belonged not to true purity.
   I had rather tremble at God's Word than testify to my own excellence.
   We have had enough of witnesses to them-selves--let us now have some
   witnesses for God.

   I have largely told you what these tremblers are not. And I must now
   tell you a little of what these people are. They are people who do
   believe that there is a Word of God. There are plenty of persons who
   profess and call themselves Christians and yet do not believe that this
   sacred Book is the very Word of God. Say that it is inspired and they
   answer, "So is the Koran and so are the Vedas." They talk after this
   fashion--"This is the religious book of the ancient Hebrew nation. A
   very respectable book it is, but infallible, certainly not--the very
   Word of God, certainly not."

   Well, then, we distinctly part company with such talkers. We can have
   no sort of fellowship with them in any measure or degree with regard to
   the things of God. They are to us as heathen men and publicans. If we
   are to come under the head of those that tremble at God's Word, we must
   believe that there is a Word of the Lord to tremble at, as we do most
   assuredly believe, let others talk as they may.

   They are a people who are acquainted with God's Word. You cannot
   tremble, in the sense here meant, at a voice you have never heard or at
   a book you have never opened. There is nothing sacred in so much paper,
   ink and binding-- nothing in the fashion of a volume to make you
   tremble--you must hear the Lord speak and know what He says to you.
   When, like the ancient king, you have found the Word of God and read
   its holy laws, then you will tremble. When you are astonished to find
   how much you have broken the Law and how short you have fallen even of
   the full enjoyment of the Gospel--then you tremble. An intelligent
   appreciation of the Word of God can alone make a man tremble at it. And
   the more he understands it, the more cause for trembling will he see in
   it.

   Yes, and the more he enjoys it, the more will he tremble. The highest
   joy which it yields to mortal men is attended with a reverent awe and a
   holy trembling before God. If the Believer went beyond the enjoyment of
   the literal Word and saw the Incarnate Word Himself in all the splendor
   of His Person, he would tremble still more. For what did John say--
   "When I saw Him I fell at His feet as dead." A sight of the Incarnate
   Word would create even a greater trembling than the full understanding
   of the Word as it is written and revealed. Yet such trembling is a sign
   of Divine Grace and by no means to be censured.

   But what does this trembling mean? Believe me, it does not mean a
   slavish fear. They that tremble at God's Word at the first may do so,
   because the Word threatens them with death. But afterwards, as they
   advance and grow in Divine Grace and become familiar with the God of
   Love and enter into the secret of His Covenant, they tremble for a very
   different reason. They tremble because they have a holy reverence of
   God and consequently of that Word in which resides so much of the power
   and majesty of the Most High. These are the men of whom we are going to
   speak at this time--these

   are they that reverence the Word, who would not have a syllable of it
   touched, who regard it as being Divine after its measure and therefore
   sacred as the skirts of Deity.

   What God has spoken bears a portion of His majesty about it and we
   acknowledge that majesty. I say that these choice spirits are a people
   that all their lives long continue to tremble at the Word of the Lord.
   George Fox, the famous founder of the Society of Friends, was called a
   "Quaker" for no other reason than this--that often, when the Spirit of
   God was upon him and he spoke the Word with power, he would quake from
   head to foot beneath the burden of the message. It is an honorable
   title. No man need be ashamed to quake when Moses said, "I exceedingly
   fear and quake."

   In the Presence of God a man may well tremble. Surely he is worse than
   the devil if he does not. For the devils believe and tremble. Demons go
   the length of that. And he that knows God and has any sense of His
   infinite power and inconceivable purity and justice must tremble before
   Him. I believe George Fox not only quaked, himself, but he made others
   quake. And if we tremble at God's Word we shall make others tremble.
   True power, when it rests upon us, will discover our own weakness but
   it will not itself be hindered.

   II. I have described these tremblers so far as my scant knowledge and
   brief time will allow--the time has now come to enquire, WHY DO THEY
   TREMBLE? I have been trenching upon this field of enquiry already. They
   do not tremble because they are going to be lost. Those who are going
   to be lost are pretty generally free from trembling--"there are no
   bands in their death. But their strength is firm." I would, my hardened
   Hearer, that you did tremble. And because you do not tremble for
   yourself I tremble for you. Oh, that you judged yourself, that you
   might not be judged! I would that you condemned yourself, that God
   might acquit you. I would that you were horribly afraid. For then the
   great cause for fear would be over. See how the text blesses all the
   contrite and the trembling. And, when you have seen it, seek to be
   among them.

   God's people tremble, first, because of His exceeding majesty. Note
   what became of Ezekiel, of Daniel, of Habakkuk, of John the beloved,
   when they had visions of God. No man could see God's face and live.
   There must always be some sort of cloud between. Through the veil of
   Christ's manhood we see God and live. But God absolutely is beyond all
   creature understanding--the sight is far too much for us. Even a
   glimpse of His garments is something overwhelming! They that have seen
   God at any time have trembled at Him and at His Word. For the Word of
   the Lord is full of majesty.

   There is a Divine royalty about every sentence of Scripture which the
   true Believer feels and recognizes, and therefore trembles before it.
   They tremble at the searching power of God's Word. Do you ever come
   into this place and sit down in the pew and say, "Lord, grant that Your
   Word may search me and try me, that I may not be deceived"? Certain
   people must always have sweets and comforts. But God's wise children do
   not wish for these in undue measure. Daily bread we ask for, not daily
   sugar. Wise Believers pray that the Word of the Lord may prove to be
   quick and powerful and a dis-cerner of the thoughts and intents of
   their hearts. That it may do with them what the butcher does with the
   animal when he cuts it down the middle and lays the very entrails open
   to inspection--yes, cleaves the mid-bone and lets the very marrow be
   seen.

   That is what God's Word has done for you and me, I am sure. And when it
   has done so, we have trembled. I can personally bear witness to the way
   in which the solemn Word of the Lord makes my whole soul to tremble to
   its center. The Word of the Lord has cut very close, sometimes, with
   many of you and made you cry, "Am I saved or not?" The man that did
   never tremble before the Lord does not know Him. It is very easy to
   take the matter of your soul's salvation for granted and yet to be
   mistaken. It is infinitely better to ask your way twenty times than
   miss your road home. And I do not blame the man, who with holy anxiety
   says, "Is it so, or is it not so? for I want to know and to be sure." O
   Beloved, I am not sorry that you tremble before the refining fire of
   sacred Truth. I should be much distressed if you did not.

   God's searching Word makes man tremble--so does the Word when it is in
   the form of a threat. Believe me, dear Friends, the Word of God about
   the doom of sinners is very dreadful. Hence, there are some that try to
   pare them down and cut the solemn meaning out of them. And then they
   say, "I could not rest comfortably if I believed the orthodox doctrine
   about the ruin of man." Most true, but what right have we to rest
   comfortably? What grounds or reason can there be why we ever should
   have a comfortable thought with regard to the doom of those who refuse
   the Savior? If with that dreadful doom before us which Holy Scripture
   threatens to ungodly men we do grow far too indifferent, to what will
   the Church of God come when it has torn out the doctrine from the Bible
   and given it up?

   Why, sinners will be more hardened and professors more trifling. He who
   seeks comfort at the expense of Truth will be a fool for his pains.
   Blessed in the end will that man be who can endure the Word of the
   Lord, when it is all thunder and flaming fire--and does not rebel
   against it, but bows before it. If it makes you tremble, it was meant
   to make you tremble. One said, after he had heard Massillon, "What an
   eloquent sermon. How gloriously he preached!" Massillon replied, "Then
   he did not understand me. Another sermon has been thrown away." If a
   sermon concerning the future punishment of sin does not make the hearer
   tremble, it is clear that it is not of God. For Hell is not a thing to
   talk about without trembling. My inmost desire is to feel more and more
   the overwhelming power of Jehovah's judgment against sin so that I may
   preach with all the deeper solemnity the danger of the impenitent and
   with tears and trembling may beseech them to be reconciled.

   He that knows the Lord aright also trembles with fear lest he should
   break God's Law. He sees what a perfect Law it is, and how spiritual it
   is--how it overlaps the whole of human life--and the man cries, "It is
   high. I cannot attain unto it. O my God, help me, I pray You." He views
   the Law with reverence. He admires with a sacred fear. He trembles at
   God's Word, not because he dislikes it but because he cannot bear to be
   so far off from compliance with its righteous demands. He sees the Law
   fulfilled in Christ, and there is his peace. But yet the peace is
   mingled with deepest awe.

   "Oh," says one, "if he trembles like that, it shows he does not know
   the love of God." It shows that he does know it. Have you heard of the
   boy whose father was exceedingly fond of him? He was asked by some
   other boys to go and rob an orchard with them but he said, "No, I will
   not go." They replied, "Your father won't scold you, nor beat you. You
   may safely come." To this he answered, "What? Do you think because my
   father loves me, that therefore I will grieve him? No, I love him and I
   love to do what he wishes me to do. Because he loves me I fear to vex
   him." That is like the child of God. The more he knows of God's love,
   the more he trembles at the thought of offending the Most High.

   We, also, tremble lest we should miss the promises when they are spread
   out before us, sparkling like priceless gems. We hear of some who
   "could not enter in because of unbelief." And we are taken with
   trembling lest we should be like they. We tremble lest there should be
   any passage of Scripture or doctrine of Revelation that we are not able
   to believe-- we pray for Divine Grace that we may never stagger at
   anything in the Word. We tremble lest we should misbelieve. And tremble
   more--if you are as I am--lest we should mistake and misinterpret the
   Word.

   I believe Martin Luther would have faced the infernal Fiend, himself,
   without a fear. And yet we have his own confession that his knees often
   knocked together when he stood up to preach. He trembled lest he should
   not be faithful to God's Word. Angels have a holy fear of God and well
   may you and I tremble when engaged in His service. To preach the whole
   Truth is an awful charge. It was as much as even the Son of man could
   do to fully discharge His mission here below. You and I, who are
   ambassadors for God, must not trifle--we must tremble at God's Word.

   III. Now we have got through the description of these trembling ones
   and we have shown why they so exceedingly

   fear and quake. Our third question was to be, WHAT DOES GOD COMPARE
   THEM TO? Hearken, for here is a thing

   to be noted and thought upon.

   The Lord compares the tremblers at His Word to a temple. "Where is the
   house that you build unto Me? And where is the place of My rest? To
   this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit
   and trembles at My Word." They are His temple. And to the Jews the
   temple was something very wonderful. There stood the holy and beautiful
   house, the joy of the whole earth. Lined with strong wood and overlaid
   with pure gold and its hewn stones put together without hammer or axe.
   To the Israelite's mind there never was such a building as this. Yet
   the glorious Jehovah speaks lightly of the temple and says, "Where is
   the house that you build unto Me? And where is the place of My rest? To
   this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit
   and trembles at My Word."

   So then, a man that trembles at God's Word is God's temple. And he is
   emphatically so. He is so beyond the sense in which the house of
   Solomon was thus honored. His heart is full of worship. His trembling
   is, in itself, worship. As the angels veil their faces in the presence
   of the Lord, so do good and true men veil theirs, trembling all the
   while, as they worship Him that lives forever. As the temple, even to
   the posts of the doors, moved at the presence of the God of the whole
   earth, so does every part of our manhood become awe-stricken when He
   that dwells between the cherubim shines forth within our spirit. Well
   may we tremble to whom the Infinite draws near! The ungodly in their
   brutishness may be free from the fear of God, but the man worships with
   fear and trembling to whom Divine Grace has given a holy sensitiveness.

   Note that the Lord does not merely compare us with the temple but He
   prefers us to the temple. And further, He prefers us even to the great
   temple of the universe not made with human hands, which He Himself sets
   so much above the house that Solomon built. The Lord says, "The Heaven
   is My Throne and the earth is My footstool." And yet He seems to say,
   "All this is not My rest, nor the place of My abode. But with this man
   will I dwell, even with him that trembles at My Word." The Lord prefers
   the trembling spirit not only to the golden house below but to the
   heavenly house above!

   The Lord speaks of Heaven as His Throne. And what is the trembler at
   God's Word but God's Throne? God is evidently enthroned within Him.
   Under a sense of the Divine Presence, the stupendous weight of Deity
   has crushed the man and made him tremble in every part of his nature.
   It is the glory of the Revelation which causes the sinking of heart,
   the shrinking of the soul. As for the earth, it is Jehovah's footstool.
   But so is this lowly, trembling man. He is willing to be God's
   footstool, willing to be as the dust beneath God's feet. Who is there
   among you, my Beloved in the Lord, that would not feel highly honored
   if he might be permitted to be as the footstool of the Infinite
   Majesty?

   It is too high a place for us! To lie as a doormat at His temple gate
   for the poorest of His saints to wipe his shoes upon, is an honor
   greater than we deserve--we feel it to be so. At any rate, I speak for
   myself. When God is near me I feel as if it were an honor to be the
   servant of the least of His poor people. "I would rather be a
   doorkeeper in the house of my God, than dwell in the tents of
   wickedness." Yet, look! The Lord makes His Throne and footstool out of
   the heart and conscience of the man that trembles at His Word. It is a
   sublime comparison--you are the temples of God and something more. The
   more you study these verses the more you will be astonished.

   And what does God say He will do? He says, "To this man will I
   look"--look first with approval. The Lord seems to say, "I will not
   look on proud Pharisees. I will not look on the presumptuous. But I
   will look at the lowly trembling penitent. I will fix My eye upon him.
   He shall be countenanced by Me. I will lift up the light of My
   countenance upon him. He is right with Me and I will show Myself
   gracious to him." It is right that the creature should tremble at the
   Creator--right that the sinner should tremble before his Judge. It is
   right that a child should give due honor to his august
   Father--therefore will the Lord look upon such a one with approval.
   Sweetly does Miss Steele pray in her song--

   "Low at Your feet my soul would lie, Here safety dwells and peace
   Divine; Still let me live beneath Your eye, For life, eternal life is
   Yours."

   The text means, next, that He will look upon him with care. You know
   how we use the expression, "I will look to Him"? Thus will God look to
   the man that trembles at His Word. You that can stand alone may look to
   yourselves. But he that trembles shall have God to look to him. When
   you are afraid, cry, "Hold You me up and I shall be safe," and your
   tottering footsteps shall be firmer than a giant's tread. When you grow
   so sell-satisfied that as the young man you can run without weariness,
   you shall both be weary and fall. Oh, trust not in yourselves but
   tremble before the Lord and He will look to you and see that no evil
   shall come near unto you!--

   "With sacred a we pronounce His name, Whom words nor thoughts can
   reach, A contrite heart shall please Him more Than noblest forms of
   speech."

   The look of the Lord shall mean a third thing, namely, delight. We had
   a part of that in the term approbation--it is marvelous that God should
   take delight in the man that trembles at His Word. The Lord has no such
   pleasure in the careless and carnally secure. He that goes tramping
   through his Christian career as if he were somebody and all were safe
   is no favorite of Heaven. The man who takes things easily and
   self-confidently, with a kind of happy-go-lucky feeling that all must
   end well with him--he has no consideration from God. Have you seen the
   fine professor who has despised the tender in heart? Mark that man, for
   the end of that man will be a crash--"great shall be the fall thereof."

   Have you heard the boastful preacher, self-sufficient as to his own
   knowledge and eloquence? Mark that man also-- for his end is confusion.
   But watch that trembling one, whose only hope is in Christ, whose only
   strength is in the Lord--he shall be sustained. Watch the one who never
   pounces upon a privilege as if it were his by right of merit, but
   humbly accepts it as a gift to the unworthy--he is the man that shall
   stand in the evil day. He that goes through life fearing is the man who
   has nothing to fear. "Happy is the man that fears always," says the
   Word of the Lord. He that is

   afraid of falling under trial and cries, "Lead me not into temptation
   but deliver me from evil"--he shall be kept from sin.

   But he who rashly rushes into temptation shall fall by it. He who
   watches by day as well as by night, puts on his armor when there seems
   no war, and carries his sword always drawn--even when there is no enemy
   visible--oh, that is the man who shall cope with the deadly enemy of
   souls! The Holy Spirit is in him and the Lord has regard unto him. He
   shall not fall by the hand of the enemy. Though oftentimes he trembles,
   he shall be safe at last. Glory shall thus be given to God that helped
   him. The self-confident would not have glorified God if he had
   succeeded, for he would have thrown up his cap inside the gates of
   Heaven, and magnified his own name.

   As for this man, he doffs his crown. "Non nobis, Domine," he cries,
   when he enters Heaven. "Not unto us, not unto us," is still his cry.
   Unto Him that loved us and washed us from our sins in His blood. Unto
   Him that kept us from falling and preserved us to His kingdom and
   glory, unto Him shall be all honor. Every man who this day trembles at
   God's Word says "Amen" to this. God bless you, my Beloved. The Lord
   Himself look to you and dwell with you! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

Breakfast With Jesus

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S DAY MORNING, FEBRUARY 24, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "Jesus said unto them, Come and dine. And none of the disciples dared
   ask Him, Who are you? knowing that it was the Lord." John 21:12.

   Or, as we have it in the Revised Version,

   "Jesus said unto them, Come and break your fast. And none of the
   disciples dared enquire of Him, Who are you? knowing that it was the
   Lord."

   THE Lord Jesus is thoughtful of bodily wants. In His earlier days He
   fed multitudes of people, on two grand occasions, with bread and fish.
   And now that He has died and risen from the dead and is in the body of
   His Glory, He still thinks of the hungering bodies of men and calls to
   the fishermen, "Children, have you any meat?" Finding that they have
   nothing, He makes a breakfast for them. "Come and break your fast"
   falls very condescendingly from His lips and it proves to us how He
   cares for the temporal needs of the poor.

   Here is warrant for the servants of God endeavoring to feed the hungry
   crowd. We are not to buy them with so-called charities, for that our
   Lord never did. Loaves and fishes are a very poor spiritual bait and
   catch none of the right sort of fish. The feeding must come because
   they need it and for the love of God and with no ulterior aim. As the
   Savior fed the people, so, according to our ability, we may attempt to
   do without fear that we shall therein be going beyond our legitimate
   province.

   Our Lord and Savior was particularly mindful in this case of the wants
   of His own people. These seven Apostles were supplied by His care. If
   any of you are in needy and trying circumstances, catch this fact and
   be encouraged. He that said to the seven, "Come and break your fast,"
   will not forget you in the time of your need. On your part, now is the
   time for the exercise of faith. And on His part, now is the season for
   the display of His power. If you look to your fellow men perhaps they
   may fail to help you--they are far too apt to give the cold shoulder to
   those who are not well-to-do. But if you look to Him, you shall have
   your prayer answered.

   "In some way or other the Lord will provide." I cannot tell how, any
   more than I can tell you how our Lord provided that fire of coals, or
   how he procured the fish which was broiling on the fire. But there was
   the fire and there was the fish. And so, in the Lord's own way, it
   shall be seen that the Lord will provide. "Trust in the Lord and do
   good; so shall you dwell in the land and verily you shall be fed." He
   that taught you to say, "Give us this day our daily bread" did not
   teach you an empty phrase.

   O you whose need presses so closely as even to make you acquainted with
   hunger, behold how Jesus pities you and look to Him to aid you. For He
   is the same now as He was by the lake of Galilee. Go a step further. As
   Jesus is so careful of the condition of His people that He will have
   their bodies fed, we may be sure that He will have their souls
   nourished. I said to myself, as I considered my return among you, "The
   first thing we will do when I get home shall be to feed the servants of
   God, that they may be in good working order." Our Lord began this third
   manifestation of Himself not with prayer, but with food. Much had to be
   said and done. But they must breakfast first.

   They were to be questioned, rebuked, instructed, commissioned, warned.
   But they must first be fed. The essential thing that morning was a fire
   of coals and broiled fish and bread. For they must be put into good
   condition, and then they would be ready to hear what their Lord should
   say to them. Things that were of prime importance must yet be kept back
   a little while until they could bear them and profit by them. And that
   they could not do while they were cold and hungry. Therefore fire and
   food.

   Now, if it was so with the body, how much more is it so with the soul?
   I want you, therefore, this morning, to ask the Lord to spread a table
   for you in the wilderness. May your song at this time be--

   "The Lord's my Shepherd, I'll not want, He makes me to lie down In
   pastures green. He leads me There by quiet waters."

   Many things call for your earnest attention. But it will be poor haste
   if you rush to work without refreshing the inner man. Pause a while and
   feast with your Lord in order that you may be able to attend to your
   pressing duties.

   If you had a tree to fell, you would count it no loss of time, first,
   to sharpen your axe. When the axe is sharp, then the tree will come
   down all the sooner--sharpen therefore, the axe of your mind. This
   morning have nothing to do but to attend to the feeding of your soul.
   The Lord's first miracle was at a wedding feast. And in the miracle now
   before us He provides a breakfast. His is no starveling Gospel, He
   gives us all things richly to enjoy. Hear His cry, in the ancient Song
   of Songs--"Eat, O Friends; drink, yes, drink abundantly, O beloved."
   Dear child of God believe and doubt not. Should a choice morsel come
   your way, partake of it with a believing confidence.

   I. First, I shall invite you TO SEE THE IMPORTANCE OF A FEAST WITH
   JESUS. Jesus says to you, "Come and break your fast." And His words are
   never without the deepest meaning. See the importance of a meal with
   Jesus. It was peculiarly needful to these men because they were in a
   needy condition. They were wet, cold and hungry. A fire of coals was a
   fine center for them, whereat they could dry their jerseys and warm
   their hands. The fish, fresh from the sea and from the fire, was most
   suitable for their hunger. Before them Jesus spreads the old food with
   which He always fed the people--food pleasant and easy to digest.

   Bread, with a relish of fish, was the constant menu of all our Lord's
   feasts. Jesus does not like to see His servants wet and cold and
   hungry. And so He provides for the removal of these discomforts. Depend
   upon it, what Jesus does not like to see is not good for us. It is not
   well for us to be unhappy. If, therefore, you feel this morning, in
   your inmost souls, uncomfortable and much out of sorts, your Lord does
   not wish you to be so. The thoughts of your own misery will hinder your
   thoughts of Him and prevent your rendering Him good service. My Master
   bids me, this morning, to see to it that all hands are provided with
   good cheer.

   Gladly, therefore, do I invite you to the fire of coals which is
   furnished by His glowing love. Cheerfully do I set before you the holy
   food of sacred Truth furnished by His Word. And I would thus fulfill
   His command to me, "Feed My sheep." It is important, dear Child of God,
   that you should be happy. It is important that you should be in a
   flourishing spiritual condition within. Therefore, come and break your
   fast with Jesus. Many a battle has been lost because the soldiers were
   not in good condition for the fight. Let it not be so with you. You
   need stamina if you are to do hard and long work for Jesus and His
   Truth. And there is no keeping up the stamina without heavenly food. It
   is important, considering the condition of many of you, that you should
   have a meal with Jesus at once.

   Besides, they were weary with a night's fruitless toil. As I told you
   in reading, it was "night" and "nothing" while Jesus was away. Have I
   not before me some servants of God who have not seen any good following
   their exertions of late? They have fished for men but the nets have
   remained empty. It is dreary work, toiling all night and taking
   nothing. I know this, because I know still better the reverse of it.
   Oh, it is a blessed thing to have a successful season by the little
   river of retirement, when one is away from the great sea of the city!

   In my late seclusion it has seemed to me that the fish kept coming up
   to my line and biting at my hook, though I had not on purpose baited
   it! The Lord sent me persons to receive a blessing and they had a quiet
   word and went on their way rejoicing. Alas, it is not always so. You
   may have a widespread net cast into the great sea and no end of fishes
   all around you and yet you may take nothing--that night's work yielded
   nothing but splash and haul, disappointment and fatigue. If you are in
   that condition, you evidently need encouragement. Times of refreshing
   from the presence of the Lord will be your present want. The Savior
   calls to you, "Come and breakfast. Leave the boat and the nets and
   forget the night's vain toil and come and commune with Me." Weary
   Worker, worried and weeping, cease your complaining and come to the
   fire and the food which Jesus provides for you.

   You will remind me that before the breakfast the disciples had taken a
   great number of fish and had counted them. Just so. And that is another
   reason for calling them to feast with Jesus. Catching fish is a fine
   business, but being fed is equally needful. No fisherman can live on
   catching and counting. It is a very deceptive thing for a man to
   sustain his faith

   upon the success of his labors. Our tendency in a revival is to rejoice
   over converts, and count them "a hundred and fifty and three." It is
   not wrong to count your converts if Christ gives them to you--the
   awkward part of it is that you are apt to count in with the fish a
   number of frogs--I mean a sort of convert that Jesus never sent. You
   may, if you please, count every convert and say, "a hundred and fifty
   and three." But do not think that this will nourish your own soul. You
   cannot sustain the life of Divine Grace upon the grace received by
   others.

   Believe me, you must in secret draw from the Divine storehouse your
   personal supplies, or you will be famished. You will find it very
   hungry work if you try to live on catching and counting! You must be
   yourself watered, or your watering of others will dry up your soul. The
   most successful Evangelist, if he attempts to live on his own work,
   will suck up the wind. If a teacher of children, or a conductor of
   young men's classes makes the food of his soul to be his success in the
   service of God, he will feed on ashes. O you that have had grand times
   in preaching or teaching, do not be content with these! Grace for your
   office is one thing--Divine Grace for yourselves is another. It is well
   to catch fish. But even that would be sorry work if you perished with
   hunger yourselves.

   Again, dear Friends, I think it was a very necessary thing that they
   should break their fast, for the Lord Jesus Christ was going to search
   their hearts. "When they had dined"--notice that, not till then--Jesus
   questioned Peter. When they had breakfasted, "Jesus said, Simon, son of
   Jonas, do you love Me?" "When they had breakfasted," not before. He
   would not deal with Peter, or any of them, while they had empty
   stomachs. I beg you to feed well this morning because you will have to
   be overhauled before long, and it will be well to have heart to bear
   it. Truth will be preached to you another day which will blow quite
   through you, like a mighty wind--Truth which will burn as an oven and
   like a refiner's fire. Get yourself in good order for
   Cross-examination.

   Prepare your soul for the hour of trial when the business of the hour
   will be to answer the question, "Simon, son of Jonas, do you love Me?"
   Ah, dear Friends, if heart-searching trials come upon us when we are
   lean and famished, they pull us down dreadfully, for we are out of
   condition. But the same measure of heart-searching administered to us
   when soundly nourished by communion with Christ will do us much good--

   "Though cares like a wild deluge come, And storms of sorrow fall; When
   I have fed with Christ at home, My soul defies them all."

   He that is right with God can bear to be questioned. He that is
   nourished and built up with heavenly food can bear to examine the
   grounds of his faith and to test the foundations of his hope. Such a
   man can face the inquiry--

   "Do I love the Lord or no? Am IHis, or am Inot?"

   So, therefore, because heart-searching times will come before long, I
   entreat you to comfort your souls with a morsel of bread.

   Remember, also, that they were about to receive a commission--they were
   to be told to feed Christ's lambs and sheep. But I think I hear you
   say, "That commission, like the examination, was directed to Peter." I
   know it. But I am also sure that when the Lord said to Peter, "Do you
   love Me?" the question went home to them all. What the Lord said to
   Peter especially, He was talking to them all. Have you ever felt, when
   a word of warning has been addressed to your friend, that it was even
   more applicable to yourself than to him? An indirect admonition is, to
   some extent, more powerful than one personally directed. Nathanael,
   Thomas, James, John and the others were quite as truly addressed by the
   Savior as "Simon, son of Jonas."

   The arrow shot at Simon was not lost upon the sons of Zebedee.
   Certainly they were, all of them, to feed the lambs and pastor the
   sheep. And the commission which was given distinctly to Peter was meant
   for all the Lord's servants. See, then, the necessity for their
   breaking their fast. If they are to feed others, they must be fed
   themselves. "The husbandman that labors must be first partaker of the
   fruits." He that waters others must be himself watered. "They made me
   the keeper of the vineyards. But my own vineyard have I not kept," was
   a very sorrowful lament. And the Lord would not have His people imitate
   it.

   Jesus was going to give them a blessed work to do, and therefore He
   would put them into working order before He allotted it to them. O
   Brothers and Sisters, it may seem a very small thing for you to feed
   your own selves but it is not so. I would have you strong, yourselves,
   that you may labor for others. You cannot be made a blessing to those
   around you

   till you are blest yourselves. Your usefulness largely depends upon
   your personal joy--"The joy of the Lord is your strength."

   Once more, our Lord was going to give to one of them a warning and by
   that one to hint much the same heritage of trials to the others.
   "Another shall gird you and carry you where you would not." Crucifixion
   awaited Peter, and a martyr's death, in some form awaited all those who
   were present except John. This the Master lets them know. But He does
   not mention it till they have dined. Do not reckon upon an easy journey
   between here and Heaven. If you do, you will be mistaken. For "in the
   world you shall have tribulation." If the Lord loves you, He will
   chasten you--it is the Covenant mark. Marvel not when you fall into
   manifold trials. But rather rejoice in this, that you have evidence
   herein that your Father has not forgotten you but is still training you
   for His Heaven.

   But while we give you that warning, we invite you to come and feed on
   heavenly bread and refresh your souls with those spiritual luxuries
   whereby men are made ready for labor and suffering. "Eat that which is
   good and let your soul delight itself in fatness," that you may be
   prepared to do that which is good and delight yourself in sacrifice. It
   is no trifling matter, therefore, when I say to you, in the words of
   the Old Version, "Come and dine," or in the more exact phrase of the
   Revision, "Come and break your fast." Thus much for the importance of
   the matter.

   II. Secondly, I want you to SEE JESUS HIMSELF ACTING AS YOUR HOST. It
   was Jesus who cried to them,

   "Children, have you any meat?" It was He that said, "Bring of the fish
   which you have now caught." It is He that gives the invitation, "Come
   and break your fast." Jesus is Master of the feast. He condescends to
   the feast. Is it not wonderful that the Holy Lord should have communion
   with His faulty followers? Yet He will breakfast with us--with us who
   doubted Him, as Thomas did. With us who denied Him, as Peter did. With
   us who forsook Him and fled, as all the rest

   did.

   He, always sinless, was now without physical necessities. He had risen
   from the dead and He did not need to eat, yet did He still have
   familiar fellowship with sinful man. On one occasion He ate a piece of
   a broiled fish and honeycomb. And I suppose that on this occasion He
   also ate with them. For one does not ask others to come and dine and
   then Himself refrain from eating. He communed with them by that bread
   and by that fish. It was wonderful condescension. But will the Lord
   still come and commune with us? Will He, "without whom was not anything
   made that was made," have fellowship with a sinful mortal like I?

   Take comfort, you who are conscious of sin, from the fact that His last
   close companion here below was a thief! And the first that passed the
   pearly portal with Him and entered into His kingdom was that self-same
   justly executed one. Come along with you, you child of God, conscious
   of your gross unworthiness--come, for He invites you now to feast with
   Him. This shall be your nourishment, not only the food which He
   prepares for you, but His company, too.

   Notice that Jesus, as the Host, prepared the feast. We shall never know
   how that fire of coals was kindled--some speak confidently of it as the
   work of angels. But why introduce angels where they are not needed?
   They can kindle fires, doubtless--but so can the Savior without their
   aid. There was the fire of coals and there was the fish. Where did He
   get the fish? All sorts of idle speculations have been raised about His
   having bought it from a passing boat. There is no need of such
   inventions. Doubtless both fire and fish were the products of creative
   power. We have before us one of those miracles which were commonplace
   to the Savior. He spoke and there was the fire and the fish laid
   thereon and a crisp cake hot from the coals.

   Dear Friends, your soul can never feed except upon what Jesus has
   prepared for you. His flesh is meat indeed. But there is no other meat
   for souls. He has not to kindle a fire for your comfort--it is burning
   now--it has been kindled long ago. There was never a morsel of manna in
   the mouth of any child of God but the Word of the Lord supplied it.
   There was never food yet for a true heart but what it came from Him who
   is our life and the food of our life. "How can this man give us His
   flesh to eat?" said they of old--but that is exactly what He does. All
   that He gives to us of spiritual nourishment is of His own preparing.

   What is equally wonderful to me is this--after the Lord had prepared
   it, He Himself was the waiter at the feast. Read verse thirteen--"Jesus
   then came and took the bread and gave it to them and likewise the
   fish." When there are seven at table, a host might well be justified in
   saying, "Dear friends, you are welcome to all that is before you, help
   yourselves." But we cannot help ourselves--He who prepares the feast
   must also bring the food to us. "Jesus then came and took the bread and
   gave it to them and likewise the fish." Only one serving the food and
   that the Lord Himself!

   O Master, we know there is good spiritual food in Your Word but we are
   not able to appropriate it. Come Yourself and lay home the promise to
   the heart. You know what a way our Lord has of making us to lie down in
   green pastures-- we do not even lie down of ourselves. He places the
   nourishing Word in the heart. Remember that passage in Hosea which in
   the original says, "Behold, I will allure her and bring her into the
   wilderness and speak to her heart." I can speak to your ears but Jesus
   speaks to the heart.

   The Lord Jesus, by the work of the Holy Spirit, has a way of conveying
   the heavenly food into us so that we receive and inwardly digest it.
   And it then enters into the secret part of the soul and is assimilated
   and we are truly built up. I pray that the Holy Spirit may thus work at
   this time. Look at your Host. It is the Lord Himself who lovingly
   condescends to commune with you and in a wonderful way prepares the
   feast and with boundless condescension Himself helps you to it.

   All the while He was doing this He showed Himself. "This is now the
   third time that Jesus showed Himself to His disciples." The chapter
   opens by saying, "And on this wise showed He Himself." When the Lord
   was handing out that bread He was showing Himself and they could see
   Him serving them. And when He brought them the fish to eat, they saw
   Him revealed as the very Christ. They saw more of Him in giving the
   bread and the fish than they would have seen if He had stood still to
   be gazed upon. Jesus feeding us is Jesus revealed. If He had stretched
   out His hand for them to examine the nail-prints, they would not have
   seen Him so well as when that hand gave them food.

   Oh, if the Lord Jesus will come to you individually, as I pray He may,
   and bring you heavenly food this morning, you will see Him--see Him
   with eyes full of tears. Are there not times with you when Divine Truth
   comes home to you in such a sweet, comforting, nourishing way that you
   have said, "It is the Lord. He is Himself the sum and substance of His
   own blessed Gospel. He has Himself brought me into His banqueting house
   and His banner over me is His own love"? A vision of Christ is the most
   filling thing in the world. If we may but see Him in Glory, that shall
   be the Heaven of Heaven.

   If I were the dying thief I would be happy to die with Him side by side
   on the Cross and count it bliss to be with Him there. But what must it
   be to pass through the pearly gate with Him and to be with Him in His
   kingdom, as that same dying thief was? This is your morning's
   portion--do not miss it. "He showed Himself." Is it weeks since you
   have seen your Lord? Oh, then, heave a great sigh and say, "Lord, show
   Yourself to me." Is it days since you have had actual fellowship with
   Jesus? Oh, that your heart might break after Him now! Do not be
   satisfied to let this morning's sitting break up without your having
   seen the Lord--everyone of you who are His true disciples.

   O dear Friends, you that hear about Christ and just let it glide
   by--what are you worth? What sort of Christians are those who do not
   know the vitals of Christianity, the secret enjoyments of rapturous
   love? Outside, in merely external religion, everything is cold and
   dreary and I do not wonder at people getting weary of it and giving it
   up. The glory lies within the veil. We must see Jesus. Our home is
   where God reveals Himself to His people. Little drops of religion are
   poor things. Oh, for Madame Guyon's torrents! Oh, that the sacred
   torrent would bear us away! That mighty river, not the river Kishon,
   but what if I call it Kedron?--the Kedron of His suffering love, which
   is a torrent indeed! Oh, to be borne along by the stream of Free Grace
   and dying love until one is conscious of nearing the unfathomable
   depths of love unsearchable!

   Thus much about our Host. Mine is a poor talk. God grant that, by the
   teaching of the Holy Spirit, you may get far beyond me and see Him whom
   having not seen we love!

   III. Now, SEE THE PROVISION. I have tried to call you to the feast and
   I have also tried to point out our Host. Now, attentively regard the
   provisions. There are two parts. First, there was what He had
   mysteriously prepared--the fish laid upon the coals. And, secondly,
   what He had graciously given. For He said, "Bring of the fish which you
   have now caught." It was the same sort of fish, no doubt. But it came
   in two ways.

   First, let us note the mysteriously prepared provision. Look at the
   fish which is broiling on the coals! Mysterious fish! Mysterious coals!
   Feed now with all your hearts upon the mystery of everlasting love. "I
   have loved you with an everlasting love." Feed on the mystery of the
   Covenant of Grace, when, on your behalf, the blessed Son of God stood
   Sponsor and Surety before the great Father and the Father covenanted
   for His Son's sake to bless His chosen. Oh, the mystery of the eternal
   gift of the elect to Jesus and the gift of Jesus to His elect! Before
   the world began all this was provided for our need. Cannot you feed on
   this?

   Think, next, of the kinship of Christ to you. He came to Bethlehem that
   He might take our nature. He lay an Infant on a woman's breast. He was
   cradled as a Child. He abode here a suffering, wayworn man. Was not
   that a beautiful verse we sang just now, which began--

   "Jesus, our Kinsman and our God, Arrayed in majesty and blood

   You are our life, our souls in You Possess a full felicity"?

   Yes, He is Brother to you--of your nature, of your flesh and of your
   bones--your next of kin, sworn to redeem you and even espoused to you.
   Jesus is Brother to you who are in adversity. Feed on that.

   Here is another fish of the kind found only in the sea of mysterious
   love--I point you to His effectual atonement. He has finished His
   lifework for you and poured forth the price of your redemption--minting
   it from His own heart. He has washed you from your sins in His own
   blood. He has made you kings and priests unto God. He has bought you
   with a price, so that you are not your own. The dying Christ bore your
   penalty--the living Christ has ensured your acceptance and your
   immortality. "Because I live," says He, "you shall live also."

   While He shows Himself to you this morning, He gives you these ancient
   things to feed upon. Come, feast upon the love that had no beginning,
   the love that can know no end, nor change, nor be measured. Remember
   your living and everlasting union with Him. The union between you and
   the Ever-blessed is inseparable. "Who shall separate us?" Come, I pray
   you! Break your fast, you who are most weary and worn and sad! Stay not
   back from the table but eat to the full. My Beloved, eat of these fish
   laid on the coals--these mystic, marvelous things--in the preparation
   of which you have had no hand but which Jesus before time began has
   prepared for you.

   But the feast was also made of what the Lord had graciously given and
   they had drawn out of the deep. The Lord has caused us to obtain many
   precious things by His own Spirit. And these we have made our own,
   taking them in our net and dragging them to shore. Let us feed on
   mercies experienced. Just now to myself these are very many--"a hundred
   and fifty and three." I can scarcely count the favors the Lord has
   given me of late. My net is not broken but I wonder it is not. For the
   draught of benefits is so great--He daily loads me with benefits. I
   desire abundantly to utter the memory of His great goodness. Cannot you
   do the same and in the memory find a feast for love? "A hundred and
   fifty and three"--an odd number but large--a number which, if you have
   been careful in your gratitude, may be very exact for all that--even
   the last three must not be forgotten--

   "Streams of mercy never ceasing Call for songs of loudest praise." "How
   precious, also, are Your thoughts unto me, O God!" The Lord has dealt
   well with His servants, according to His Word. Let us rejoice in His
   name as He has revealed it to us.

   Have you not a net full of answers to prayer? Some here present have
   received such blessings that they may be compared to great fishes. When
   we have many fishes we expect them to be small but ours are all great
   fish. Oh, the great goodness of a great God to great sinners in the
   times of their great need! Let us be satisfied with the Lord's great
   goodness to us when in trouble we have sought His face. "This poor man
   cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles."
   "I sought the Lord, and He heard me." Come, feed upon what you have
   already tasted and handled, both of His Word and work. Rejoice in what
   you have seen Him do in you, and for you. Why, here are great fishes, a
   hundred and fifty and three.

   The provision on the lake shore was more than enough for seven men,
   however hungry they might be. Was it not? They might eat as much as
   they liked without any fear of exhausting the supply. And after the
   meal, they would not have left twelve baskets full alone, as there had
   been at the former feast, but a superabundance for their Brethren, or
   for any wanderers along the shore. Now, dear Friends, try for a minute
   or two to dwell upon the wonders of God's Truth and Grace to you. Think
   of what He did in your conversion. What He has done in the time of
   temptation--how He has supplied your needs. And how He has given you
   enjoyments of His love.

   I was looking back through former volumes of my sermons and I noticed
   how often a sermon occurs without a date upon it. I know what that
   denotes. It means that I was ill and in great pain. Two or three times
   in almost every year I have to hear the Lord preach to me in the
   chamber of sickness and I am unable, therefore, to preach to you. These
   were bitter things at the time. But I bless the Lord for them all and
   for raising me up again and again and renewing my

   strength. He will not leave me now. Cannot you also turn to your
   diaries and remember the loving kindness of the Lord and speak well of
   His name? All this will be to you a fire of coals and fish drawn from
   the deep sea.

   I am almost done. I do not know whether you have been fed. But I hope
   you have. I would again invite you in Wisdom's name, saying, "Come, eat
   of My bread and drink of the wine which I have mingled."

   IV. But, lastly, SEE HOW THE GUESTS BEHAVED THEMSELVES. I hope if you
   are fed well, you will behave in the same way. These guests of our
   Savior's, we find, "dared not ask Him, Who are you? knowing that it was
   the Lord." Come, let us get close up to our Lord.

   When a soul draws near to Jesus, its words are few or none. Notice what
   the disciples said to the Master on this occasion. They only spoke one
   word and that word was "No." John spoke to Peter but not to the Lord.
   All the time before breakfast and all the time they were at breakfast,
   they never said anything to Him but, "No." That one deep "No" betrayed
   the vacuum, the emptiness, the hunger--that was all they had to say.
   You, also, may say as much to your Lord as that--"Lord, I am nothing,
   nobody. I have nothing. I can do nothing without You." Not another word
   is recorded as coming from them.

   That devotion which must always show itself by shouting may be very
   genuine but it is to be feared that it is superficial. Deep waters run
   silently. Great feeling is dumb--there is a frost of the mouth when
   there is a thaw of the soul. Words are often a wall between our spirit
   and the Great Spirit. I think I remember reading of George Fox sitting
   down with a crowd of people round him and for a long time he never said
   a word. They were all watching and waiting. And if it had been myself,
   I should have stood up full soon and have said something, like a fool.

   But he was a wise man and he sat still. It takes a very wise man to
   hold his tongue so long. George Fox kept silent that he might famish
   the people from words. A grand lesson for them and one that might be
   useful to some of you. You must have words! Fine words! Wonderful
   words! A big mouthful of words is fine food for fools. Some preachers
   seem to think that saints can feed on their eloquence but they need
   more substantial meat. Could we not put things prettily if we were to
   try and throw out to you great bouquets of flowers? What would be the
   good of it? You want food. You want Christ. And if you could get Jesus
   Himself, words would be an impertinence--your own words as well as
   mine.

   As there were no words, so there could be no doubtful questions.
   Whenever a man gets away from communion with Christ, he begins to ask a
   host of questions. Persons who have no religion have always a selection
   of religious questions, varying from the stupidity of, "Who was Cain's
   wife?" onward to, "What will man become by evolution?" When a soul has
   drawn near to Jesus and has been fed by Him, it is no more troubled
   with doubts than a man at the equator is bitten by frost.

   "I believe in the Bible," said one. "How can you do that?" sneered
   another. "Because I know the Author," was the fit reply. If you are
   walking in the light with your Lord, questions and doubts are heard no
   more. You adore in deep rest-fulness of soul, "knowing that it is the
   Lord." How did the disciples know this? By reason? Well, the knowledge
   is not unreasonable. But we rise higher--we know Jesus by contact, by
   conversation and by a consciousness--or shall I call it an overpowering
   conviction?--which needs no supporting argument. When we fall at His
   feet in lowliest reverence of joyful love, we believe and are sure. We
   become doubt-proof. As an iron-clad throws off the ball which is hurled
   at it, so a love-clad heart defies all the suggestions of skepticism.

   They ate the bread and fish that morning, I doubt not, in silent
   self-humiliation. Peter looked with tears in his eyes at that fire of
   coals, remembering how he stood and warmed himself when he denied his
   Master. Thomas stood there, wondering that he should have dared to ask
   such proofs of a fact most clear. All of them felt that they could
   shrink into nothing in His Divine Presence, since they had behaved so
   cowardly. Yet were they also silent for joy.

   Did you ever feel the bliss of dying to self? As you near the vanishing
   point of self?--the glory of the Lord dawns on you with immeasurable
   splendor! To grow bigger and bigger and bigger until you fill the halls
   of fame and your name echoes round the world, is the ambition of the
   vain and it is an abomination. But to grow less and less, till the Lord
   God is All in All--that is the joy of saints and it is a sweet smelling
   offering--

   "The more Your glories strike mine eyes,

   The humbler I shall lie--

   Thus, while I sink, my joys shall rise

   Immeasurably high."

   They were silent in wonder as they gazed on the risen One. He was all
   over wonder to them--a world of beauties and of miracles. When He fed
   them, when He gave them the bread, when He gave them the fish--it was a
   melting season. They remembered how He washed their feet. But then He
   was in His state of humiliation. And they marveled yet more that now He
   was risen He would still be among them "as One that serves." They were
   dumb with surprise and gratitude and love.

   I suppose they could not speak because they felt such deep, unutterable
   reverence for His majesty. They felt, with Jacob, "How dreadful is this
   place!" God was manifest in the flesh and they beheld His Glory.
   Therefore Peter speaks of himself as "a witness of the sufferings of
   Christ and also a partaker of the Glory that shall be revealed." What
   could they do but, while they apprehended that Glory, remain quiet and
   inwardly adore? The practice of occasional quiet affords healthy
   nourishment to the soul. A sitting silently at the feet of Jesus is of
   more worth than all the clatter of Martha's dishes.

   Communion with Christ will teach you a reverence which words cannot
   express. There is an exceeding weight of glory which would break the
   backs of all the words of all languages should we essay to load them
   therewith--

   "Come, then, expressive silence, Muse His praise."

   "Praise waits for You, O God, in Sion: and unto You shall the vow be
   performed."

   Brethren, have you fed? Have you had breakfast with Jesus? If so, I am
   well content. But I would remind you that when you come here again, you
   must hear what your Lord has to say by way of question and command.
   For, "when they had dined," solemn business began. It must not be with
   us as with Israel--"The people sat down to eat and to drink and rose up
   to play." But we rise to work and suffer and to go far towards Heaven
   in the strength of the meat we have enjoyed.

   Someone will ask, "Have you not a word for the unconverted this
   morning?" Indeed, I have something better than words. When we set forth
   the provisions of Divine Grace before the godly, we are really inviting
   poor hungry sinners. The sight of food is a fine creator of appetite.
   When the prodigal returned to his father they brought forth the best
   robe and put it on him. And they put a ring on his hand and shoes on
   his feet. But when it came to the eating, what was done? The father did
   not say, "Bring forth the fatted calf and feed my son with it. His
   words were--"Let us eat and be merry."

   Why, I thought he was caring most for his returning child? Yes, but he
   was faint and sick at heart and needed to have his appetite aroused.
   One sure way to induce another to eat, is to eat, yourself. If he
   stands there and his sadness has taken away his appetite, you eat and
   be merry and you will soon find that his mouth will begin to water and
   he will be ready to feed with you. I do hope some people will feel an
   appetite coming to them this morning and will cry, "I long to feed on
   heavenly bread and to have my heart refreshed in the Presence of the
   Lord Jesus."

   O poor Heart, believe in Jesus and He is yours! Children of God, just
   as you can enjoy Christ and show that enjoyment in your lives, you will
   be fascinating others to your Lord and thus by your means I shall not
   have preached in vain to the unconverted.

   O you who would gladly come to Jesus, look at the first chapter of this
   Gospel of John. The word is there, "Come and see." While in this last
   chapter of John it is, "Come and dine." Remember that the first thing
   to do is to "Come and see," or look to Jesus. He says, "Look unto Me
   and be you saved, all the ends of the earth." Look to Jesus, see Him
   dying in your place to put away your guilt. Look with the appropriating
   glance of faith, trusting in Him. And then before long you shall feed
   on him, to your heart's delight. The Lord send his blessing upon this
   word, for His name's sake! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

                              Two Essential Things

   A Sermon

   (No. 2073)

   Delivered on Lord's-day Morning, March 3rd, 1889,

   C. H. SPURGEON,

   At the [2]Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington

   "Testifying both to the Jews, and also to the Greeks, repentance toward
   God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ."'Acts 20:21

   This was the practical drift of Paul's teaching at Ephesus, and
   everywhere else. He kept back nothing which was profitable to them; and
   the main profit he expected them to derive from his teaching the whole
   counsel of God was this, that they should have "repentance toward God,
   and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ." This was the great aim of the
   apostle. I pray that it may be so with all of us who are teachers of
   the Word: may we never be satisfied if we interest, please, or dazzle;
   but may we long for the immediate production, by the Spirit of God, of
   true repentance and faith. Old Mr. Dodd, one of the quaintest of the
   Puritans, was called by some people, "Old Mr. Faith and Repentance,"
   because he was always insisting upon these two things. Philip Henry,
   remarking upon his name, writes somewhat to this effect'"As for Mr.
   Dodd's abundant preaching repentance and faith, I admire him for it;
   for if I die in the pulpit, I desire to die preaching repentance and
   faith; and if I die out of the pulpit, I desire to die practising
   repentance and faith." Some one remarked to Mr. Richard Cecil, that he
   had preached very largely upon faith; but that good clergyman assured
   him that if he could rise from his dying bed, and preach again, he
   would dwell still more upon that subject. No themes can exceed in
   importance repentance and faith, and these need to be brought very
   frequently before the minds of our congregations.

   Paul testified concerning "repentance toward God, and faith toward our
   Lord Jesus Christ"; by which I understand that, as an ambassador for
   Christ, he assured the people that through repentance and faith they
   would receive salvation. He taught in God's name mercy through the
   atoning sacrifice to all who would quit their sin and follow the Lord
   Jesus. With many tears he added his own personal testimony to his
   official statement. He could truly say, "I have repented, and I do
   repent"; and he could add, "but I believe in Jesus Christ as my
   Saviour; I am resting upon the one foundation, trusting alone in the
   Crucified." His official testimony, with its solemnity, and his
   personal testimony, with its pathetic earnestness, made up a very
   weighty witness-bearing on the behalf of these two points'repentance
   toward God, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.

   Beloved friends, we cannot at this time do without either of these any
   more than could the Greeks and Jews. They are essential to salvation.
   Some things may be, but these must be. Certain things are needful to
   the well-being of a Christian, but these things are essential to the
   very being of a Christian. If you have not repentance toward God, and
   faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ, you have no part nor lot in this
   matter. Repentance and faith must go together to complete each other. I
   compare them to a door and its post. Repentance is the door which shuts
   out sin, but faith is the post upon which its hinges are fixed. A door
   without a door-post to hang upon is not a door at all; while a
   door-post without the door hanging to it is of no value whatever. What
   God hath joined together let no man put asunder; and these two he has
   made inseparable'repentance and faith. I desire to preach in such a way
   that you shall see and feel that repentance toward God and faith toward
   the Lord Jesus Christ are the two things which you must have; but even
   then I fail, unless you obtain them. May the Holy Spirit plant both
   these precious things in our hearts; and if they are already planted
   there, may he nourish them and bring them to much greater perfection.

   I. Let me observe, in the first place, that THERE IS A REPENTANCE WHICH
   IS NOT TOWARD GOD. Discriminate this morning. Paul did not merely
   preach repentance, but repentance toward God; and there is a repentance
   which is fatally faulty, because it is not toward God.

   In some there is a repentance of sin which is produced by a sense of
   shame. The evil-doers are found out, and indignant words are spoken
   about them: they are ashamed, and so far they are repentant, because
   they have dishonoured themselves. If they had not been found out, in
   all probability they would have continued comfortably in the sin, and
   even have gone further on in it. They are grieved at having been
   discovered; and they are sorry, very sorry, because they are judged and
   condemned by their fellows. It is not the evil which troubles them, but
   the dragging of it to light. It is said that among Orientals it is not
   considered wrong to lie, but it is considered a very great fault to lie
   so blunderingly as to be caught at it. Many who profess regret for
   having done wrong are not sorry for the sin itself, but they are
   affected by the opinion of their fellow-men, and by the remarks that
   are made concerning their offence, and so they hang their heads. Truly,
   it is something in their favour that they can blush; it is a mercy that
   they have so much sense left as to be afraid of the observation of
   their fellows; for some have lost even this sense of shame. But shame
   is not evangelical repentance; and a man may go to hell with a blush on
   his face as surely as if he had the brazen forehead of a shameless
   woman. Do not mistake a little natural fluttering of the heart and
   blushing of the face, on account of being found out in sin, for true
   repentance.

   Some, again, have a repentance which consists in grief because of the
   painful consequences of sin. The man has been a spendthrift, a gambler,
   a profligate, and his money is gone; and now he repents that he has
   played the fool. Another has been indulging the passions of his corrupt
   nature, and he finds himself suffering for it, and therefore he repents
   of his wickedness. There are many cases that I need not instance here,
   in which sin comes home very quickly to men. Certain sins bear fruit
   speedily: their harvest is reaped soon after the seed is sown. Then a
   man says he is sorry, and he gives up the sin for a time; not because
   he dislikes it, but because he sees that it is ruining him: as sailors
   in a storm cast overboard the cargo of the ship, not because they are
   weary of it, but because the vessel will go to the bottom if they
   retain it. This is regret for consequences, not sorrow for sin. Ah,
   look at the drunkard, how penitent he is in the morning! "Who hath woe?
   who hath redness of the eyes?" But he will get a hair of the dog's tail
   that bit him, he will be at his cups again before long. He repents of
   the headache, and not of the drink. The dog will return to his vomit.
   There is no repentance which only consists of being sorry because one
   is smarting under the consequences of sin. Every murderer regrets his
   crime when he hears the hammers going that knock the scaffold together
   for his hanging. This is not the repentance which the Spirit of God
   works in a soul; it is only such a repentance as a dog may have when he
   has stolen meat, and is whipped for his pains. It is repentance of so
   low a sort that it can never be acceptable in the sight of God.

   Some, again, exhibit a repentance which consists entirely of horror at
   the future punishment of sin. This fear is healthful in many ways, and
   we can by no means dispense with it. I do not wonder that a man who has
   lived a liar, a forger, and a perjurer, should, in the hour of his
   discovery, put an end to his life. If he accepts modern theology, he
   has escaped, by this means, from the hand of justice: the little
   pretence of punishment which deceivers predict for the next world no
   man need be afraid to risk rather than subject himself to a felon's
   fate. According to current teaching, it will be all the same with all
   men in the long run, for there is to be a universal restitution; and
   therefore the suicide does but rationally leap from pursuit and
   punishment into a state where all will be made happy for him by-and-by,
   even if he does not find it altogether heaven at first. He escapes from
   punishment in this life, and whatever inconvenience there may be for
   him in the next life he will soon get over it, for it is said to be so
   trivial that those who keep to Scripture lines, and speak the dread
   truth therein revealed, are barbarians or fools. Many men do, no doubt,
   repent truly through being aroused by fear of death, and judgment, and
   the wrath to come. But if this fear goes no further than a selfish
   desire to escape punishment, no reliance can be placed upon its moral
   effect. If they could be assured that no punishment would follow, such
   persons would continue in sin, and not only be content to live in it,
   but be delighted to have it so. Beloved, true repentance is sorrow for
   the sin itself: it has not only a dread of the death which is the wages
   of sin, but of the sin which earns the wages. If you have no repentance
   for the sin itself, it is in vain that you should stand and tremble
   because of judgment to come. If judgment to come drives you, by its
   terrors, to escape from sin, you will have to bless God that you ever
   heard of those terrors, and that there were men found honest enough to
   speak plainly of them; but, I pray you, do not be satisfied with the
   mere fear of punishment, for it is of little worth. The evil itself you
   must lament, and your daily cry must be, "Wash me thoroughly from mine
   iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin."

   Another kind of repentance may be rather better than any we have spoken
   of, but still it is not repentance toward God. It is a very good
   counterfeit; but it is not the genuine article. I refer to a sense of
   the unworthiness of an ill life. I have known persons, upon a review of
   their past, rise above the grovelling level of absolute carelessness,
   and they have begun to enjoy some apprehension of the beauty of virtue,
   the nobleness of usefulness, and the meanness of a life of selfish
   pleasure. A few of those who have no spiritual life, have,
   nevertheless, keen moral perceptions, and they are repentant when they
   see that they have lost the opportunity of distinguishing themselves by
   noble lives. They regret that their story will never be quoted among
   the examples of good men, who have left "footprints on the sands of
   time." Musing upon their position in reference to society and history,
   they wish that they could blot out the past, and write more worthy
   lines upon the page of life. Now, this is hopeful; but it is not
   sufficient. We are glad when men are under influences which promise
   amendment; but if a man stops at a mere apprehension of the beauty of
   virtue and the deformity of vice, what is there in it? This is not
   repentance toward God; it may not be repentance at all in any practical
   sense. Men have been known to practise the vices they denounced, and
   avoid the virtues they admired; human sentiment has not force enough to
   break the fetters of evil. Repentance toward God is the only thing
   which can effectually cut the cable which holds a man to the fatal
   shores of evil.

   Once more, there is a repentance which is partial. Men sometimes wake
   up to the notice of certain great blots in their lives. They cannot
   forget that black night: they dare not tell what was then done. They
   cannot forget the villainous act which ruined another, nor that base
   lie which blasted a reputation. They recall the hour when the inward
   fires of passion, like those of a volcano, poured the lava of sin adown
   their lives. At the remembrance of one gross iniquity, they feel a
   measure of regret when their better selves are to the front. But
   repentance toward God is repentance of sin as sin, and of rebellion
   against law as rebellion against God. The man who only repents of this
   and that glaring offence, has not repented of sin at all. I remember
   the story of Thomas Olivers, the famous cobbler convert, who was a
   loose-living man till he was renewed by grace through the preaching of
   Mr. Wesley, and became a mighty preacher, and the author of that
   glorious hymn, "The God of Abraham Praise." This man, before
   conversion, was much in the habit of contracting debts, but could not
   be brought to pay them. When he received grace, he was convinced that
   he had no right to remain in debt. He says, "I felt as great sorrow and
   confusion as if I had stolen every sum I owed." Now, he was not
   repentant for this one debt, or that other debt, but for being in debt
   at all, and, therefore, having a little coming to him from the estate
   of a relative, he bought a horse, and rode from town to town, paying
   everybody to whom he was indebted. Before he had finished his
   pilgrimage, he had paid seventy debts, principal and interest, and had
   been compelled to sell his horse, saddle, and bridle, to do it. During
   this eventful journey he rode many miles to pay a single sixpence: it
   was only a sixpence, but the principle was the same, whether the debt
   was sixpence or a hundred pounds. Now, as he that hates debt will try
   to clear himself of every sixpence, so he that repents of sin, repents
   of it in every shape. No sin is spared by the true penitent. He abhors
   all sin. Brethren, we must not imitate Saul, who spared Agag and the
   best of the sheep. He had been told to destroy all, but he must needs
   spare some. Agag must be hewn in pieces, and the least objectionable of
   sin, if such there be, must be at once destroyed. Grace spares no sin.
   "Oh," saith one man, "I can give up every sin except one pleasure. This
   I reserve: is it not a little one?" Nay, nay; in the name of truth and
   sincerity, make no reserve. Repentance is a besom which sweeps the
   house from garret to cellar. Though no man is free from the commission
   of sin, yet every converted man is free from the love of sin. Every
   renewed heart is anxious to be free from even a speck of evil. When
   sin's power is felt within, we do not welcome it, but we cry out
   against it, as Paul did when he said, "O wretched man that I am! who
   shall deliver me from the body of this death?" We cannot bear sin: when
   it is near us, we feel like a wretch chained to a rotting carcass; we
   groan to be free from the hateful thing. Yes, repentance vows that the
   enemy shall be turned out, bag and baggage; and neither Sanballat, nor
   any of his trumpery, shall have a chamber or a closet within the heart
   which has become the temple of God.

   II. I have said enough to show that there is a repentance which is not
   toward God; and now, secondly, let us observe that EVANGELICAL
   REPENTANCE IS REPENTANCE TOWARD GOD. Lay stress on the words, "toward
   God." True repentance looks toward God. When the prodigal son went back
   to his home, he did not say, "I will arise, and go to my brother; for I
   have grieved my brother by leaving him to serve alone." Neither did he
   say, "I will arise and go to the servants, for they were very kind to
   me. The dear old nurse that brought me up is broken-hearted at my
   conduct." "No," he said, "I will arise and go to my Father, and will
   say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and
   am no more worthy to be called thy son." Our Lord's picture of a
   returning sinner is thus drawn in very clear colours, as a return to
   the Father, a repentance toward God. You are bound to make humble
   apology and ample compensation to everybody you have wronged; you are
   bound to make every acknowledgment and confession to all whom you have
   slandered or misrepresented: this is right and just, and must not be
   forgotten. Still, the essence of your repentance must be "toward God";
   for the essence of your wrong is toward God. I will endeavour to show
   you this. A boy is rebellious against his father. The father has told
   him such a thing is to be done, and he determines that he will not do
   it. His father has forbidden him certain things, and he therefore
   defiantly does them. His father is much grieved, talks with him, and
   endeavours to bring him to repentance. Suppose the boy were to reply,
   "Father, I feel sorry for what I have done, because it has vexed my
   brother." Such a speech would be impertinence, and not penitence.
   Suppose he said, "Father, I will also confess that I am sorry for what
   I have done, because it has deprived me of a good deal of pleasure."
   That also would be a selfish and impudent speech, and show great
   contempt for his father's authority. Before he can be forgiven and
   restored to favour, he must confess the wrong done in disobeying his
   father's law. He must lament that he has broken the rule of the
   household; and he must promise to do so no more. There can be no
   restoration of that child to his proper place in the family till he has
   said, "Father, I have sinned." He is stubborn, unhumbled, and
   rebellious till he comes to that point. All the repentance that he
   feels about the matter which does not go toward his father, misses the
   mark: in fact, it may even be an impudent aggravation of his rebellion
   against his father's rule that he is willing to own his wrong toward
   others, but will not confess the wrong he has done to the one chiefly
   concerned.

   O sinner, you must repent before God, or you do not repent at all; for
   here is the essence of repentance. The man repenting sees that he has
   neglected God. What though I have never been a thief nor an adulterer;
   yet God made me, and I am his creature, and if throughout twenty,
   thirty, or forty years I have never served him, I have all that while
   robbed him of what he had a right to expect from me. Did God make you,
   and has he kept the breath in your nostrils, and has he kindly supplied
   your wants till now, and all these years has he had nothing from you?
   Would you have kept a horse or a cow all this time, and have had
   nothing from it? Would you keep a dog if it had never fawned upon you?
   never noticed your call? Yet all these years God has thus preserved you
   in being, and blessed you with great mercies, and you have made no
   response. Hear how the Lord cries, "I have nourished and brought up
   children, and they have rebelled against me!" This is where the sin
   lies.

   Further than that, the true penitent sees that he has misrepresented
   God. When he has suffered a little affliction, he has thought God was
   cruel and unjust. The heathen misrepresent God by worshipping idols: we
   misrepresent God by our murmurings, our complainings, and our thought
   that there is pleasure in sin, and weariness in the divine service.
   Have you not spoken of God as if he were the cause of your misery, when
   you have brought it all upon yourself? You talk about him as if he were
   unjust, when it is you that are unjust and evil.

   The penitent man sees that the greatest offence of all his offences is
   that he has offended God. Many of you think nothing of merely offending
   God: you think much more of offending man. If I call you "sinners" you
   do not repel the charge; but if I called you "criminals" you would rise
   in indignation, and deny the accusation. A criminal, in the usual sense
   of the term, is one who has offended his fellow-man: a sinner is one
   who has wronged his God. You do not mind being called sinners, because
   you think little of grieving God; but to be called criminals, or
   offenders against the laws of man, annoys you; for you think far more
   of man than of God. Yet, in honest judgment, it were better, infinitely
   better, to break every human law, if this could be done without
   breaking the divine law, than to disobey the least of the commands of
   God. Knowest thou not, O man, that thou hast lived in rebellion against
   God? Thou hast done the things he bids thee not to do, and thou hast
   left undone the things which he commands thee to do. This is what thou
   hast to feel and to confess with sorrow; and without this there can be
   no repentance.

   Near the vital heart of repentance, right in its core, is a sense of
   the meanness of our conduct toward God. Especially our ingratitude to
   him, after all his favour and mercy. This it is that troubles the truly
   penitent heart most: that God should love so much, and should have such
   a wretched return. Ingratitude, the worst of ills, makes sin exceeding
   sinful. Sorrow for having so ill requited the Lord is a spiritual
   grace. A tear of such repentance is a diamond of the first water,
   precious in the sight of the Lord.

   True repentance is also toward God in this respect, that it judges
   itself by God. We do not repent because we are not so good as a friend
   whom we admire, but because we are not holy as the Lord. God's perfect
   law is the transcript of his own perfect character, and sin is any want
   of conformity to the law and to the character of God. Judge yourselves
   by your fellow-men, and you may be self-content; but measure yourselves
   by the perfect holiness of the Lord God, and oh, how you must despise
   yourself! There is no deep repentance until our standard is the
   standard of perfect rectitude, till our judgment of self is formed by a
   comparison with the divine character. When we behold the perfection of
   the thrice holy Jehovah, and then look at ourselves, we cry with Job,
   "Mine eyes seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and
   ashes."

   To sum up: evangelical repentance is repentance of sin as sin: not of
   this sin nor of that, but of the whole mass. We repent of the sin of
   our nature as well as of the sin of our practice. We bemoan sin within
   us and without us. We repent of sin itself as being an insult to God.
   Anything short of this is a mere surface repentance, and not a
   repentance which reaches to the bottom of the mischief. Repentance of
   the evil act, and not of the evil heart, is like men pumping water out
   of a leaky vessel, but forgetting to stop the leak. Some would dam up
   the stream, but leave the fountain still flowing; they would remove the
   eruption from the skin, but leave the disease in the flesh. All that is
   done by way of amendment without a bemoaning of sin because of its
   being rebellion against God will fall short of the mark. When you
   repent of sin as against God, you have laid the axe at the root of the
   tree. He that repents of sin as sin against God, is no longer sporting
   with the evil, but has come to stern business with it; now he will be
   led to change his life, and to be a new man: now, also, will he be
   driven to cry to God for mercy, and in consequence he will be drawn to
   trust in Jesus. He will now feel that he cannot help himself, and he
   will look to the strong for strength. I can help myself toward my
   fellow-man, and I can improve myself up to his standard; but I cannot
   help myself toward God, and cannot wash myself clean before his eye;
   therefore I fly to him to purge me with hyssop, and make me whiter than
   snow. O gracious Spirit, turn our eyes Godward, and then fill them with
   penitential tears.

   III. Thirdly, I am going to throw in a bit of my own. I confess that it
   does not rise to the glorious fulness of the text, but I use it as a
   stepping-stone for feeble footsteps. I thus apologize as I say'THOSE
   WHO HAVE EVANGELICAL REPENTANCE ARE PERMITTED TO BELIEVE IN JESUS
   CHRIST. Paul says that he testified of "repentance toward God, and
   faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ"; and, therefore, where there is
   repentance, faith is allowable. O penitent sinner, you may believe in
   the Saviour! While you are labouring under your present sense of guilt,
   while you are loathing and abhorring yourself, while you are burdened
   and heavy laden with fears, while you are crushed with sorrow as you
   lie before the Lord, you may now trust the Lord Jesus Christ. Before
   you have any quiet of conscience, before any relief comes to your
   heart, before hope shines in your spirit; now in your direct distress,
   when you are ready to perish, you may at once exercise faith in him who
   came to seek and to save that which was lost. There is no law against
   faith. No decree of heaven forbids a sinner to believe and live.

   You may pluck up courage to believe when you remember this'first, that
   though you have offended God (and this is the great point that troubles
   you) that God, whom you have offended, has himself provided an
   atonement. The sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ is practically a
   substitution presented by God himself. The Offended dies to set the
   offender free. God himself suffers the penalty of his law, that he may
   justly forgive; and that, though Judge of all, he may yet righteously
   exercise his fatherly love in the putting away of sin. When you are
   looking to God with tears in your eyes, remember it is the same God who
   is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and this offended God,
   "so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever
   believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

   Recollect, also, that this atonement was presented for the guilty: in
   fact, there could be no atonement where there was no guilt. It would be
   superfluous to make expiation where there had been no fault. For man,
   as a sinner, Christ died. "This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all
   acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners." I
   pray you, then, the more deeply you feel your sinnership, the more
   clearly perceive that the sacrifice of Calvary was for you. For sinners
   the cross was lifted high, and for sinners the eternal Son of God
   poured out his soul unto death. Oh that my hearers, who mourn over sin,
   could see this, and rejoice in the divine method of putting sin out of
   the way!

   But, remember, you must, with your repentance, come to God with faith
   in his dear Son. I have said that you may do so; but I apologize for so
   saying, for it is only half the truth. God commands you to believe. The
   same God that says, "Thou shalt not steal," is that God who says,
   "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." This is
   his commandment, that you believe on Jesus Christ, whom he hath sent.
   Faith is not left to your option, you are commanded to accept the
   witness of God. "Believe and live," has all the force of a divine
   statute. "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved."
   Therefore, if thou art already a rebel, do not go on rebelling by
   refusing to believe in the Lord's own testimony.

   Remember that there can be no reconciliation made between you and God
   unless you believe in Jesus Christ, whom he has given as a Saviour, and
   commissioned to that end. Not believing in Jesus is caviling at God's
   way of salvation, quarrelling with his message of love. Will you do
   this? You have done wrong enough by fighting against Jehovah's law, are
   you going to fight against his gospel? Without faith it is impossible
   to please him; will you continue to displease him? Disbelief in Christ
   is on your part casting a new dishonour upon God, and thus it is a
   perseverance in rebellion of the most aggravated form. By refusing his
   unspeakable gift, you do, as it were, put your finger into the very eye
   of God. To refuse the Son is to blaspheme the Father. "He that
   believeth not God hath made him a liar; because he believeth not the
   record that God gave of his Son." Come, poor soul, be encouraged.
   Clearly, if you have repentance toward God, you are allowed to believe
   in Jesus. Upon the drops of your repentance the sun of mercy is
   shining; what a rainbow of hope is thus made!

   Do not hesitate. You would fain be washed, for you mourn your
   defilement; yonder is the cleansing fount! You are pained with the
   malady of sin; there stands the healing Saviour, cast yourself at his
   feet! No embargo is laid upon your believing. God has not even in
   secret said to you, "Seek ye my face in vain." Come, I pray you, and
   fear not.

   We testify to you "repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord
   Jesus Christ." But that faith must be toward the Lord Jesus Christ. You
   must look to Jesus, to the substitute, to the sacrifice, to the
   mediator, to the Son of God. "No man cometh unto the Father," saith
   Jesus, "but by me." No faith in God will save the sinner except it is
   faith in God through our Lord Jesus Christ. To attempt to come to God
   without the appointed Mediator, is again to insult him by refusing his
   method of reconciliation. Do not so, but let your repentance toward God
   be accompanied with faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ; you are
   warranted in thus believing.

   IV. And now I come to my last point. Oh that I might be helped by the
   Holy Ghost! Here I come back to the text, and get on sure ground.
   EVANGELICAL REPENTANCE IS LINKED TO FAITH, AND FAITH IS LINKED TO
   REPENTANCE. We testify not only of repentance toward God, but of faith
   toward our Lord Jesus Christ.

   Repentance and faith are born of the same Spirit of God. I do not know
   which comes first; but I fall back on my well-worn image of a
   wheel'when the cart starts, which spoke of the wheel moves first? I do
   not know. Repentance and faith come together. Perhaps I may say that
   repentance is like Leah, for it is "tender eyed"; and faith is like
   Rachel, fairer to look upon. But you cannot take Rachel to yourself
   unless you will have Leah also; for it is according to the rule of the
   gospel that so it should be. The Old Testament, with its law of
   repentance, must be bound up in one volume with the New Testament of
   the gospel of faith. These two, like Naomi and Ruth, say to each other,
   "Where thou dwellest I will dwell." There are two stars called the
   Gemini, which are always together: faith and repentance are the Twins
   of the spiritual heavens. What if I liken them to the two valves of the
   heart? They must be both in action, or the soul cannot live. They are
   born together, and they must live together.

   Repentance is the result of an unperceived faith. When a man repents of
   sin, he does inwardly believe, in a measure, although he may not think
   so. There is such a thing as latent faith: although it yields the man
   no conscious comfort, it may be doing something even better for him;
   for it may be working in him truthfulness of heart, purity of spirit,
   and abhorrence of evil. No true repentance is quite apart from faith.
   The solid of faith is held in solution in the liquid of repentance. It
   is clear that no man can repent toward God unless he believes in God.
   He could never feel grief at having offended God, if he did not believe
   that God is good. To the dark cloud of repentance there is a silver
   lining of faith; yet, at the first, the awakened soul does not know
   this, and therefore laments that he cannot believe; whereas, his very
   repentance is grounded upon a measure of faith.

   Repentance is also greatly increased as faith grows. I fear that some
   people fancy that they repented when they were first converted, and
   that, therefore, they have done with repentance. But it is not so: the
   higher the faith, the deeper the repentance. The saint most ripe for
   heaven is the most aware of his own shortcomings. As long as we are
   here, and grace is an active exercise, our consciousness of our
   unworthiness will grow upon us. When you have grown too big for
   repentance, depend upon it you have grown too proud for faith. They
   that say they have ceased to repent confess that they have departed
   from Christ. Repentance and faith will grow each one as the other
   grows: the more you know the weight of sin, the more will you lean upon
   Jesus, and the more will you know his power to uphold. When repentance
   measures a cubit, faith will measure a cubit also.

   Repentance also increases faith. Beloved, we never believe in Christ to
   the full till we get a clear view of our need of him; and that is the
   fruit of repentance. When we hate sin more we shall love Christ more,
   and trust him more. The more self sinks, the more Christ rises: like
   the two scales of balance, one must go down that the other may go up:
   self must sink in repentance that Christ may rise by faith.

   Moreover, repentance salts faith and sweetens it, and faith does the
   same to repentance. Faith, if there could be true faith without
   repentance, would be like the flowers without the dew, like the
   sunshine without shade, and like hills without valleys. If faith be the
   cluster, repentance is the juice of the grape. Faith is dry, like the
   fleece on the threshing-floor, receptive and retentive; but when heaven
   visits it with fulness, it drips with repentance. If a man professes
   faith, and has no sense of personal unworthiness, and no grief for sin,
   he becomes a man of the letter, sound in the head, and very apt to
   prove his doctrine orthodox by apostolic blows and knocks. But when you
   add to this the mollifying effects of true repentance, he becomes
   lowly, and humble, and easily to be entreated. When a man repents as
   much as he believes, he is as patient in his own quarrel as he is
   valiant in "the quarrel of the covenant." He holds his own sinnership
   as firmly as he holds the Lord's Saviourship, and he frequents the
   Valley of Humiliation as much as the hills of Assurance.

   If there could be such a thing as a man who was a believer without
   repentance, he would be much too big for his boots, and there would be
   no bearing him. If he were always saying, "Yes, I know I am saved; I
   have a full assurance that I am saved"; and yet had no sense of
   personal sin, how loudly he would crow! But, O dear friends, while we
   mourn our sins, we are not puffed up by the privileges which faith
   receives. An old Puritan says, that when a saint is made beautiful with
   rich graces, as the peacock with many-coloured feathers, let him not be
   vain, but let him recollect the black feet of his inbred sin, and the
   harsh voice of his many shortcomings. Repentance will never allow faith
   to strut, even if it had a mind to do so. Faith cheers repentance, and
   repentance sobers faith. The two go well together. Faith looks to the
   throne, and repentance loves the cross. When faith looks most rightly
   to the Second Advent, repentance forbids its forgetting the First
   Advent. When faith is tempted to climb into presumption, repentance
   calls it back to sit at Jesus' feet. Never try to separate these dear
   companions, which minister more sweetly to one another than I have time
   to tell. That conversion which is all joy and lacks sorrow for sin, is
   very questionable. I will not believe in that faith which has no
   repentance with it, any more than I would believe in that repentance
   which left a man without faith in Jesus. Like the two cherubs which
   stood gazing down upon the mercy-seat, so stand these two inseparable
   graces, and none must dare to remove the one or the other.

   I have almost done; but the thought strikes me, Will these good people
   go home, and remember about repentance and faith? Have I so talked that
   they will think of me rather than of the points in hand? I hope it is
   not so. I do pray you, throw away all that I may have said apart from
   the subject; cast it off as so much chaff, and keep only the wheat.
   Remember, "repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus
   Christ." Let each one ask himself, Have I a repentance which leads to
   faith? Have I a faith which joins hands with repentance? This is the
   way to weave an ark of bulrushes for your infant assurance: twist these
   two together, repentance and faith. Yet trust neither repentance nor
   faith; but repent toward God, and have faith toward the Lord Jesus.
   Mind you do this; for there is a sad aptitude in many hearers to forget
   the essential point, and think of our stories and illustrations rather
   than of the practical duty which we would enforce. A celebrated
   minister, who has long ago gone home, was once taken ill, and his wife
   requested him to go and consult an eminent physician. He went to this
   physician, who welcomed him very heartily. "I am right glad to see you,
   sir," said he; "I have heard you preach, and have been greatly profited
   by you, and therefore I have often wished to have half an hour's chat
   with you. If I can do anything for you, I am sure I will." The minister
   stated his case. The doctor said, "Oh, it is a very simple matter; you
   have only to take such and such a drug, and you will soon be right."
   The patient was about to go, thinking that he must not occupy the
   physician's time; but he pressed him to stay, and they entered into
   pleasant conversation. The minister went home to his wife, and told her
   with joy what a delightful man the doctor had proved to be. He said, "I
   do not know that I ever had a more delightful talk. The good man is
   eloquent, and witty, and gracious." The wife replied, "But what remedy
   did he prescribe?" "Dear!" said the minister, "I quite forget what he
   told me on that point." "What!" she said, "did you go to a physician
   for advice, and have you come away without a remedy?" "It quite slipped
   my mind," he said: "the doctor talked so pleasantly that his
   prescription has quite gone out of my head." Now, if I have talked to
   you so that this will happen, I shall be very sorry. Come, let my last
   word be a repetition of the gospel remedy for sin. Here it is. Trust in
   the precious blood of Christ, and make full confession of your sin,
   heartily forsaking it. You must receive Christ by faith, and you must
   loathe every evil way. Repentance and faith must look to the water and
   the blood from the side of Jesus for cleansing from the power and guilt
   of sin. Pray God that you may, by both these priceless graces, receive
   at once the merit of your Saviour unto eternal salvation. Amen.

   PORTIONS OF SCRIPTURE READ BEFORE SERMON'Acts 20:17-27; Ps. 51.

   HYMNS FROM "OUR OWN HYMN BOOK"'34 (Ver. 1), 579, 51 (Ver. 2).
     __________________________________________________________________

Intimate Knowledge of the Holy Spirit

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S DAY MORNING, MARCH 10, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "The Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it sees
   Him not, neither knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you
   and shall be in you." John 14:17.

   THE part of the text on which we shall meditate is this--"The Spirit of
   Truth, you know Him, for He dwells with you and shall be in you."
   Observe that the Holy Spirit is here called the Spirit of Truth. There
   is much meaning in this expression. He is the Teacher of the Truth of
   God, unalloyed Truth, practical, divinely effective Truth of God. He
   never teaches anything but the Truth of God. If it comes from the
   Spirit of God, we may receive it from Him without any hesitation. It is
   He that takes of the things of Christ and shows them unto us. And these
   things are true and He thus proves Himself to be the Spirit of Truth.

   He is the very Spirit and soul of Truth, the essence, the life and
   power of it. Divine Truth, when merely heard, takes no effect upon the
   mind until the Spirit of God enlivens it, and then it becomes a
   quickening force. He makes the Truth of God itself, in its reality and
   substance, to enter the soul and affect the heart. He is the Teacher of
   Truth and He is Himself the active power that makes Truth to be Truth
   to us in the assurance of our inmost souls. He is the Spirit of Truth
   in this sense, too, that He works truthfulness in His people. In those
   with whom the Holy Spirit works effectually "there is no

   deceit."

   They are open-hearted, honest, sincere and true. They have an intense
   affection for the Truth of God and a zeal for it. They are by His
   truthful influence preserved from deadly error. If it were possible,
   false teachers would deceive even the elect. But where the Spirit of
   God dwells, He detects for us the false from the true and He gives us
   the spirit of a sound mind by which we reject that which is false and
   cleave only to that which is revealed of God. In this sense He is the
   Spirit of Truth. And as He works truthfulness in His people, so the
   work that He does is always true and real work.

   You may get up an animal excitement and your converts will, in due time
   fail--but the Spirit of God works true conversion, sincere repentance
   and saving faith such as no sun of persecution can dry up and wither.
   He works deep conviction of sin and simple faith in the Lord Jesus. And
   these things abide in the heart. The new birth, as He works it, is not
   after the fancied manner of baptismal regeneration but after an
   effective spiritual manner so that a Divine life is imparted and the
   man becomes a child of God. He produces real sanctification--not the
   pretense of perfection but the reality of holiness. Everything the
   Spirit of God does is substance and not shadow. The baseless fabric of
   a vision is the work of man. But the eternal, abiding, everlasting work
   of Divine Grace is wrought by the Spirit of Truth alone.

   As He is the Spirit of Truth, we may be sure that whatever He sets His
   seal upon, is true. He will only bear witness to the Truth of God. He
   will not assist in maintaining error. Mark this word--careful
   observation will show that in proportion as the nominal Church of the
   present day has departed from the truth of God, the Spirit of God has
   departed from her. He can never set His seal to a lie. The testimony of
   His sacred operation in "signs following," is borne only to the Truth
   of God. If I preach to you that which is not the Word of the Lord, it
   will not be followed by the work of the Spirit of Truth. There will be
   no conversions among sinners and there will be no edification for the
   people of God.

   It is by the Truth of God as His instrument that the Spirit of God
   works. And we must be very careful that we do not bring forth any other
   instrument. Let us not talk, as some do, as if Scriptural doctrine were
   of little or no consequence. For where the doctrine is not of God, the
   Spirit of Truth is grieved and He will depart from such a ministry.
   Except we keep close to the Words of the Lord Jesus and the Revelation
   of the inspired Book, the Spirit of Truth will show His displeasure by
   refusing to use our utterances. In vain your music, your architecture,
   your learning and your "bright services" if the Truth of God is given
   up. Farewell to the witness of the Spirit in the hearts of men when men
   are taught the inventions of men in the place of the Revelation of God.

   If the Holy Spirit is bearing witness in your spirit that you are the
   children of God, then you are truly born of God. The presence of the
   Divine Paraclete is the seal of your adoption. If He dwells in you,
   this is the token of your sonship. For He does not dwell in the
   unregenerate. If He helps, strengthens, comforts, guides, illuminates
   and sanctifies you, you have a seal which you need not question--the
   seal of God upon you--that you are His chosen and shall be His in the
   day when He makes up His jewels.

   This brings me to the doctrine upon which I shall enlarge this morning.
   This is the distinction between the men of the world and the disciples
   of Christ. The world knows nothing of the Holy Spirit. But the
   disciples of Christ know Him. For the Lord Jesus says, "He dwells with
   you and shall be in you." There are a great many distinctions in the
   world of a religious kind--one man wears his phylacteries, another is
   girt with camel's hair. One man comes with multiplied ceremonies,
   another with none at all. You cannot judge who are the people of God by
   these external things.

   Forms of Church government and modes of worship may be important in
   their own place--but before the Lord the infallible test is this--do
   you bear the fruit of the Spirit of God in you? Does He indwell you?
   "If any man has not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His." But he
   that has the Spirit dwelling within his soul, he it is that is a true
   born heir of Heaven.

   We have raised a solemn question to begin with, have we not? But, dear
   Friends, I do not desire it to remain a question. I pray that it may be
   no question with anyone of you but that you may know that it is so and
   may go on to enjoy the blessed privilege of being on intimate terms
   with the Holy Spirit--"But you know Him, for He dwells with you and
   shall be in you."

   I. To come close up to my subject, the first head will be BELIEVERS IN
   JESUS CHRIST KNOW THE HOLY SPIRIT. They know Him, to begin with, by
   believing what has been taught them concerning the Comforter by the
   Lord Jesus Christ. When Jesus Christ had taught His people concerning
   the Holy Spirit and they had received His teaching, He said, "You know
   Him. For He dwells with you and shall be in you." If they had refused
   the sayings of Christ, if they had possessed no love, if they had not
   kept His Commandments, if they had arrogantly resolved to find out this
   mystery for themselves by their own thinking, apart from the
   instruction of their Master, they would not have known the Spirit of
   God. We must begin our acquaintance with the Spirit by sitting at the
   feet of Jesus and accepting His testimony as sure.

   But more than this--we know the Holy Spirit by knowing our Lord Jesus
   and by Him knowing the Father. There is such an intimate union between
   the Holy Spirit, the Father, and the Son, that to know the Holy Spirit
   we must know the Son of God, and know the Father. If we know the Lord
   Jesus, we have the Spirit of God. For by no one else could the things
   of Christ be revealed to us. Beginning then, at the very beginning--do
   you know the Lord Jesus Christ? You know something about Him--but do
   you know Him? Is He your friend, your acquaintance? Are you on personal
   terms of fellowship with Him?

   If so, then you see the Father in His face. Jesus says, "He that has
   seen Me has seen the Father." And He tells His people, "From henceforth
   you know Him and have seen Him." You are, therefore, acquainted with
   God the Father through Jesus Christ the Son. And you have seen the
   glory of His Grace beaming in your Savior's face. In this way you have
   become acquainted with the Holy Spirit who is not divided from the
   Father and the Son. As you know the Son you know the Father, and in
   this way you come to know the Holy Spirit. No man comes to the Father
   but by the Son, and he that comes to the Father receives the Spirit.

   We know the Holy Spirit, next, by His operations upon us. We not only
   know about His operations but we have been the subjects of them. All
   those who are true disciples of Christ have felt a divinely
   supernatural power working upon them. First, the Holy Spirit operates
   to our spiritual quickening. There was a time when we were dead in
   trespasses and in sins--holy feeling was unknown to us and the life of
   faith was far from us. At that time we did not desire nor even know
   spiritual things--we were carnally minded and the carnal mind knows not
   the things which are of God.

   The Spirit of God came upon us and we were awakened and made to live.
   Do you remember that? Many of us can distinctly remember when we passed
   from death unto life. With others, the visible life may have been made
   manifest more gradually, but even in them there was a moment when the
   vital force entered the soul and they can now rejoice that they have
   been quickened who were once spiritually dead. You know the Spirit in
   measure when He breathes upon your dead heart and it begins to throb
   with the heavenly life. In connection with that quickening there was
   conviction of sin. In what a powerful light does the Holy Spirit set
   our sin!

   In my discourses to you about sin I try to show you how heinous it is
   and how terrible are its consequences. But when a single beam from the
   Spirit of Truth shines upon sin, it makes it appear "exceeding sinful."
   I remember how Mr. Bun-yan said, when under conviction, "I thought none
   but the devil himself could equal me for inward wickedness and
   pollution of mind." When the Spirit of God revealed him to himself he
   would have willingly changed places with toads and serpents for he
   esteemed the most loathsome objects to be better than himself. This
   revelation of darkness is the effect of light--the light of the Spirit
   of God. And when He convicts us of sin we begin to know Him.

   After having convicted us of sin, He leads us to repentance and to
   faith in Jesus Christ--then we know Him! How many a promise did some of
   you hear but you could not receive it! How many a comforting discourse
   did you listen to and yet it did not comfort you! But when the Spirit
   of God came--in a moment you saw Jesus as the Consolation of Israel,
   the Friend of sinners, the atoning Sacrifice, the Surety of the
   Covenant of Grace--and sweet peace came streaming into your soul! At
   that time you did not only know that the Holy Spirit leads to Jesus
   Christ but you knew that He was leading you. In that respect you knew
   Him by an experimental acquaintance which is the best of knowledge.

   Since that time, beloved Brethren, we have known the Holy Spirit in
   many ways--restraining from evil, stimulating to good, instructing,
   consoling, directing and enlivening. He has been to us the Spirit of
   reviving--we have grown dull and cold and sleepy, till that verse of
   the hymn has been verified--

   "In vain we tune our formal songs, In vain we strive to rise, Hosannas
   languish on our tongues, And our devotion dies."

   But no sooner has the Spirit visited us than we have felt all
   alive--bright, cheerful and intense. Then our whole heart has run in
   the ways of God's commands and we have rejoiced in His name. How true
   is that word, "He restores my soul"! Thus have we known the Holy Spirit
   by His operations within us.

   Oftentimes He has acted as an illuminator. A difficult Scripture or
   mysterious doctrine has been before me--I have looked at the original
   and I have examined what the best Biblical students have written upon
   it. And yet, when I have thus used all the helps within reach, the
   point has remained in the dark. My best aid has ever been to resort to
   the great Author of the sacred Word--even the Holy Spirit Himself. He
   can, by blessing the means which we are using, or by directly leading
   the mind in the right track put an end to all difficulty. He has the
   clue of every maze, the solution of every riddle. And to whom He wills,
   He can reveal the secret of the Lord.

   Dear young Believers, you who wish to understand the Scriptures, seek
   this light from above for this is the true light. Other lights may
   mislead but this is clear and sure. To have the Spirit of God lighting
   up the inner chambers of truth is a great gift. Truth of the deeper
   sort is comparable to a cavern into which we cannot find our way except
   by a guide and a light. When the Spirit of Truth is come He pours
   daylight into the darkness and leads us into all Truth of God. He does
   not merely show the Truth but He leads us into it so that we stand
   within it and rejoice in the hidden treasure which it contains. Then we
   know Him as our sacred Illuminator.

   I especially note that we also know Him as the Comforter. Alas for the
   disturbance of heart which we receive in the world--perhaps even in the
   family! Few things, it may be, are as we could wish and therefore we
   are sorely troubled. But when the Spirit of God comes, peace flows to
   us like a river and Jesus breathes on us and says, "Peace be unto you."
   Do you know that peace? Many saints of God have enjoyed a heavenly calm
   upon their sick beds--when pain should have distracted them. The Spirit
   of God has rested them in Jesus. I have heard of one saint, near his
   end, who asked, "Is this dying? Then I should like to keep on dying
   forever."

   He felt so much comfort--such a flood of joy which the Holy Spirit
   creates--that death itself had not only lost its sting but had even
   become a joy to him! The comforts of the Holy Spirit take bitterness
   out of wormwood and gall and the sting out of the last enemy. May God
   give us His Grace to know the Holy Spirit as our Comforter! Happy
   knowledge! I trust that we have oftentimes known the Holy Spirit as
   guiding us in various ways. I will not speak largely on this for some
   might not understand it. But I know for sure that the Holy Spirit does
   give to His favored people hints as to things to come. I say not that
   any man is inspired to tell the future. But I do say that choice saints
   have received preparations for the future and foreshadowing of their
   coming experiences.

   When Believers come into difficult circumstances they bow the knee and
   cry for guidance, even as David said, "Bring here the ephod." The
   oracle is not dumb, but in some way, not always to be explained, the
   Spirit of God guides our steps

   through life if we are willing to obey His monitions. Is it not
   written, "Your ears shall hear a word behind you saying, This is the
   way, walk you in it"? The Divine communications of the Holy Spirit are
   the precious heritage of true saints. But they are a peculiar voice to
   their own souls and are not to be repeated in words.

   If you know these Divine workings, as I am sure many of you do, then
   through His operations you are made to know the Holy Spirit--that deep
   calm--that peace which only He can give. That exhilaration, that
   superlative joy as of Heaven begun below which only the Lord can work.
   That steadfast courage, that holy patience, that fixedness of heart,
   that gentleness of manner and firmness of purpose which come only from
   above--these all introduce you to the wonderworking Spirit who takes
   pleasure thus to operate upon the minds of the heirs of eternal glory.
   Thus we know the Holy Spirit by His works and gifts and revelations.

   But I do not think we have entered the center of the text even yet.
   "You know Him," says the text--you know not only His work but Himself.
   I may know the great achievements of an artist in marble but I may not
   know the sculptor himself. I may know a man's paintings and therefore I
   may guess somewhat of his character but yet I may not know the man
   himself. "You know Him," says our Lord. And truly we know the Holy
   Spirit as to His personality. If the Holy Spirit were a mere influence,
   we should read, "You know it." Let us always shun the mistake of
   calling the Holy Spirit "it." It cannot do anything. It is a dead
   thing--the Holy Spirit is a living, blessed Person and I hope we can
   say that we know Him as such. Others may doubt His personality. But we
   believe in the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ and behold, in the
   names given to Him, the emotions ascribed to Him and the acts performed
   by Him, abundant proofs of His sacred personality. In our hearts we
   know HIM.

   As we know His personality so we know also His Divinity because the
   Holy Spirit work in us effects which none but God could work. Who can
   give life to the spiritually dead? Who but the Lord and Giver of life?
   Who can instruct and illuminate as the Holy Spirit does? Only because
   He is Divine can He guide us into all Truth and purify us unto perfect
   holiness. There have been things worked in us--in our experience--in
   which we have beheld not only the finger of God but God Himself working
   in our hearts to will and to do of His own good pleasure. Oh, worship
   the Holy Spirit! The greatest crime of sinners is to blaspheme the Holy
   Spirit--and the greatest fault of saints is to neglect the Holy Spirit.
   Let us adore Him, yield to Him, confide in Him--and pray that we may
   know Him to the fullest.

   So it comes to this--that as we know the Holy Spirit's personality and
   Godhead we come to know Him. I mean this--that there is now a personal
   relationship between the Believer and the Holy Spirit, a conscious and
   clear fellowship and communion. The communion of the Holy Spirit is one
   of the three choice blessings of the great Benediction. Do we not enjoy
   it? We speak with Him and He speaks with us. We trust Him and He puts
   us in trust with many a precious Truth of God. We are not strangers
   now. We do not talk of Him as a personage a long way off of whom we
   have heard-- a Divine mystery with which Prophets and Apostles were
   acquainted in remote ages--but we know Him.

   Come, let me look into your faces, my Beloved in the Lord, and let me
   ask you, Is this true or not? If you are obliged to say, "We do not
   know whether there is any Holy Spirit, for we are utter strangers to
   Him," then I pray the Lord to deal graciously with you and manifest His
   Son Jesus Christ to you by the power of that same Holy Spirit of whom
   we speak. The Spirit of Truth is to those of us who trust in the Lord
   Jesus our present help. He is more familiar with us than any other
   Person. For He enters within, where none else find admission. "You know
   Him. For He dwells with you and shall be in you." Thus much upon our
   first head. Now I will take you to another exceedingly important and
   interesting. May the Holy Spirit help me.

   II. The second head is this--BELIEVERS KNOW THE HOLY SPIRIT THROUGH
   HIMSELF. Let us read the text again--"You know Him, for He dwells with
   you and shall be in you." It is not, "You know Him for you have heard
   gracious preaching." Nor, "You know Him for you have read about Him in
   the Scriptures." No--"You know Him, for He dwells with you and shall be
   in you." The moon cannot help us to see the sun nor can man reveal God.
   God can only be seen in His own light. No one can reveal the Holy
   Spirit but the Holy Spirit.

   I thought this morning, coming along--I have to preach about the Holy
   Spirit. But what can I do without the Holy Spirit Himself? I can only
   preach aright concerning Him by His own Presence with me. And if He is
   not there, I shall only darken counsel by words without knowledge. Why
   is it that we know the Holy Spirit only by the Holy Spirit? I answer
   first, on account of the inadequacy of all means. By what methods can
   you make a man know the Holy Spirit? He is not to be discerned by the
   senses, nor perceived by eyes or ears. What if the preacher should be
   as eloquent as an angel--in what

   way would that make you know the Holy Spirit? You would probably
   remember more of the man than of his Subject. Nothing is more to be
   deplored than a hungering after mere oratory.

   It would be infinitely better to speak with a stammer the Truth of God
   than to pour forth a flood of words in which the Truth is drowned.
   Words are nothing but air and wind and they cannot possibly reveal the
   Holy Spirit. No outward ordinances can reach the point any more than
   human speech. We greatly rejoice in the Baptism of Believers and in the
   breaking of bread in which the death of the Lord Jesus is set forth
   before us. But in what symbol could we fully see the Holy Spirit? If He
   were even to descend upon us as a dove we should see only the visible
   shape--we would not necessarily discern the Spirit. The Spirit Himself
   must reveal Himself.

   Beloved, there is no chariot in which God can ride to us--the axles of
   creation itself would break beneath the enormous load of Deity. It is
   not possible for God to reveal Himself fully by His works--He is seen
   only by Himself. Therefore the Son of God, Himself, has come to us as
   "God with us." In Him we see God. The Holy Spirit must Himself come
   into the heart to which He would make Himself known.

   This is even more clear from the inability of our nature to discover
   the Holy Spirit. We are dead by nature and how can we know anything
   until He makes us alive? Our eyes are spiritually blinded--how can we
   see Him until He opens our eyes? We are altogether without strength by
   nature--how can we run after Him until He first comes to us and gives
   us the power to do so? We are unable to perceive the Holy Spirit--the
   carnal man knows not the things which are of God for they are spiritual
   and must be spiritually discerned. We must be endowed with a spirit
   before we can discern the great Spirit. Flesh cannot transform itself
   into spirit. No, it is the Lord Himself who must come and breathe into
   us the Spirit of life and then we perceive Him who is the Spirit of
   Truth.

   The Holy Spirit must reveal Himself to us if we are to know Him--this
   is clear from the nature of the case. How do I know a man but by the
   man himself appearing to me and speaking to me and manifesting himself
   to me? You cannot with accuracy judge of a man by his writings. It is a
   curious circumstance that Mr. Toplady, who wrote very bitterly on
   behalf of the Truth of God, was, in temper, the sweetest of men. On the
   other hand, Mr. Romaine, of Blackfriars, who in their writings seem to
   be the gentlest of beings were by no means free from harshness. You
   must see a man. No, more--you must live with a man in order to know
   him. You must live with the Holy Spirit and He must dwell with you and
   be in you, before you can speak of knowing Him at all.

   The facts of the case prove this. I shall put it to any Believer here
   who can humbly say, "I know Him, for He dwells with me and is in me."
   How do you know the Holy Spirit but by the Holy Spirit? Did you learn
   your religion from me? Then you have it all to unlearn. Did you learn
   it out of a book? You have need to begin again. Did you inherit it from
   your parents or borrow it from your friends? Then you are still
   ignorant of the vital point--God is only known through Himself. The
   Holy Spirit by the holy Spirit. Have you not found it so in your own
   case? Why, you have sat and heard a sermon which was in itself
   cheering, comforting and quickening, for your neighbor said, "What a
   happy time we have enjoyed!" Alas, you thought you had never felt more
   stupid and lifeless. Have you not gone down the Tabernacle steps and
   said to yourself, "I am as hard as stone and as cold as a winter's fog?
   What shall I do?"

   Thus are you without the Spirit of God. But when the Divine Spirit
   comes upon you, such complaints are at an end. Then does the lame man
   leap as an hart and the tongue of the dumb is made to sing. Then are
   you full of living joy in listening to the Gospel--every word you hear
   seems to be on wheels. And towards you the cherubim fly swiftly
   bringing live coals from off the altar.

   III. My third head is BELIEVERS ENJOY A SACRED INTIMACY WITH THE SPIRIT
   OF GOD. I am not going

   to withdraw that word intimacy. It is warranted by the language of our
   Lord. For He says, "You know Him, for He dwells with you and shall be
   in you."

   First, He says, "He dwells with you." Is not that a wonderful sentence?
   The Holy Spirit is God, and therefore the Heaven of heavens cannot
   contain Him--and yet behold the condescending fact--"He dwells with
   you." The Holy Spirit is now upon earth, the vicar and representative
   of the Lord Jesus Christ who said, "I will send you another
   Com-forter"--that is, another Helper and Advocate like Himself.
   Consider how our Lord dwelt with His disciples. After the same fashion,
   the Spirit of Truth dwells with us. Jesus permitted His disciples the
   most intimate communion with Him-self--they ran to Him with their
   troubles, they told Him their difficulties, they confessed their
   doubts.

   He was their Master and Lord, and yet He washed their feet. He ate and
   drank with them and permitted the freest conversation. You never find
   our Lord repelling their approaches or resenting their familiarities.
   He did not draw a ring round Himself and say, "Keep your distance."
   Now, in the same manner, the Spirit of Truth deals with Believers. "He
   dwells with you." You may go to Him at any time, you may ask what you
   will of Him, you may speak to Him as a man speaks with his friend. You
   cannot see Him, but He sees you, which is much better. You cannot hear
   His voice, but He hears yours. No, He hears your thoughts. He is most
   near to those who are in Christ. "He dwells with you."

   Dwelling with us, He is in our assemblies. It is He who fulfils the
   promise of our Lord, "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of
   the world." It is by the Holy Spirit that the Lord Jesus is with us.
   That we might enjoy that sacred Presence, it was expedient for our Lord
   to go away. Beloved, what a mercy it is when the Holy Spirit is in our
   assembly! What a dreary business it is when the Holy Spirit is gone
   from the congregation! The people come and go and perhaps there may be
   fine music, splendid millinery, admirable eloquence, a vast crowd, or a
   wealthy congregation. But what of these things? They are a bag of wind!
   If the Holy Spirit is not in the congregation, it is gathered together
   in vain. Behold, the people spend themselves for very vanity if the
   Lord is not among them. But the Comforter does come into our
   assemblies. For it is written, "He dwells with you."

   He also comes into our homes--"He dwells with you." Where do you dwell,
   O true Believer? Is it in a very poor lodging?--"He dwells with you."
   It may be, dear Friend, you live on board ship and are tossed upon the
   sea--"He dwells with you." Perhaps you go to work in a mine far beneath
   the surface of the earth--"He dwells with you." Many choice saints are
   bed-ridden but the Spirit dwells with them. I commend to all of you who
   love the Lord these gracious words--"He dwells with you." The first
   disciples said to the Lord Jesus, "Master, where do you dwell?" He
   answered, "Come and see." So I bid you note where the Divine Spirit
   chooses to dwell--behold and wonder--He dwells with His people wherever
   they are! He does not leave them alone but He abides with them as a
   shepherd with his flock.

   Well may we know Him for He takes up His abode with us. And He does
   this, not as a latent, inoperative influence but He works in the place
   where He dwells. He makes our members instruments of His working and
   sanctifies the faculties of our nature as vessels of a temple wherein
   He dwells. He perfumes every chamber of the house of manhood and
   consecrates every corner of our being. O Believer, "He dwells with you"
   in all the might of His Godhead and you are made strong in the inner
   man by His strengthening! Fall back upon the Holy Spirit in the moment
   of your weakness.

   Alas, my Brethren, are there any moments when we are not weak? Fall
   back, therefore, upon the Holy Spirit at all times. Even in the prayer
   in which you seek strength, ask that the Spirit may help your
   infirmities. Even for the faith which brings you all Divine Grace ask
   for the Spirit of God to work faith in you. "He dwells with you," for
   you are unable to live without His constant presence and you need not
   attempt the perilous experiment.

   The second sentence runs, "He shall be in you." This is a greater
   marvel. "Know you not that your bodies are the temples of the Holy
   Spirit?" Take care of them, never defile them. Let not the idea of
   drunkenness, gluttony, or lust come near you. For it is written, "If
   any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy." With what
   reverence should we look upon the body now that it has been redeemed by
   the Lord Jesus and is indwelt by the Holy Spirit! The Spirit also
   dwells within your minds. We possess Him and He possesses us. "He shall
   be in you," as a king in his palace, or a soul in its body. I am afraid
   that many professors know nothing about this. I must be talking
   nonsense in the esteem of some of you--if it seems nonsense, let that
   fact condemn you. You cannot be right before God unless the Spirit of
   God is in you, in your mind, your heart, your desires, your fears, your
   hopes, your inmost life.

   The Spirit must permeate your entire being, filling it full with His
   floods, even as the waters cover the channels of the deep. "He shall be
   in you." It is a wonderful fact. The Spirit shall be in you as the
   source of your life and the force of your life. What cannot a man do
   when the Holy Spirit is in him? His weakest endeavor will prosper when
   the Holy Spirit is pouring His life into him. For he shall be like a
   tree planted by the rivers of water that brings forth his fruit in his
   season. His leaf also shall not wither. And whatsoever he does, shall
   prosper. But without the Holy Spirit, what barren and withered trees we
   are! May we never know the awful drought which comes of the absence of
   the Spirit!

   Brethren, when our Lord Jesus Christ came upon the earth and was beheld
   as God in human flesh, that was to us the pledge of the indwelling of
   the Holy Spirit in us--for as God dwelt in the human Person of the Lord
   Jesus Christ--even so does the Spirit abide in our humanity. Our Lord's
   life on earth was the picture of the Spirit's indwelling. As He was
   anointed of the Spirit, even so are we in our measure. "He went about
   doing good." He lived consecrated to God, loving the sons of men. And
   thus will the Spirit of God within us cause us to live--we shall
   imitate the Christ of God through the Spirit of God.

   The death of Christ was the way by which the Spirit was enabled to come
   to sinful men. By His great sacrifice the stone is rolled away which
   once blocked the road--

   "It is through the purchase of His death,

   Who hung upon the tree,

   The Spirit is sent down to breathe

   On such dry bones as we."

   When our Lord rose from the dead, we had the guarantee that even so the
   Spirit of God would quicken our mortal bodies and renew us into newness
   of life. But it was when our Lord ascended up on high, leading
   captivity captive that the Holy Spirit was actually given. When our
   Redeemer returned to His Father's Throne, He scattered the largess of
   Heaven--He gave the Holy Spirit to men of various offices and to His
   whole Church. Then were the days of refreshing by Divine visitation.
   Your ascended Lord gives you this token of His love--the indwelling of
   the Holy Spirit in you--prize it above all things. Do you know it? It
   seems like an impertinence for me to put this question to some of you
   who are gray-headed, and yet there is need. I trust you knew the Holy
   Spirit before I was born. But yet I cannot help pressing the enquiry,
   for you may not know Him even now.

   I have urged the question upon myself and therefore I urge it upon you.
   Does the Spirit of Truth dwell in you? If not, what will you do?

   IV. I come to a conclusion with one more observation. BELIEVERS SHALL
   HAVE A CONTINUANCE AND AN INCREASE FOR THE SPIRIT'S INTIMACY. "He
   dwells with you and shall be in you."

   Mark well the increase. Is it not a blessed step from "with" to "in"?
   "He dwells with you"--that is, a Friend in the same house. "And shall
   be in you," that is, a Spirit within yourself. This is nearer, dearer,
   more mysterious and more effective by far. The bread yonder is "with"
   me. I eat it and now it is "in" me. It could not nourish me until it
   advanced from "with" to "in." What a distinct advance it is for the
   child of God when he rises from the Spirit of God being with him to the
   Spirit of God being in him! When the Spirit of God helped the Apostles
   to work miracles, He was with them. But when they came to feel His
   spiritual work in their own souls and to rejoice in the comfort which
   He brought to them, then He was in them. Even if you could obtain
   miraculous gifts, you ought not to be satisfied to speak with tongues,
   nor to work miracles. But you should press on to know the Spirit with
   yourself--indwelling, communing, quickening you.

   "He shall be in you." Notice that in consequence of this, we know Him.
   If a person dwells with us, we begin to know him. But if he dwells
   within us and has become intertwined with our being, then we know him,
   indeed. "He shall be in you" is a high degree of intimacy. As we have
   noticed the increase, so remark the continuance--"He shall be in you."
   There is no period in which the Holy Spirit will have finished His work
   so as to go away and leave the Believer to himself. Our Savior says of
   the Comforter, that He "shall abide with you forever." Grieve not the
   Spirit of God, I pray you--quench Him not, resist Him not--but
   carefully cherish in your hearts this Divine word, "He shall be in
   you." What comfort is here!

   You dread the days of age and infirmity, but "He shall be in you." You
   tremble before that trial which threatens you, but "He shall be in
   you." You do not know how you will answer the gainsayer--take no
   thought what you shall speak--it shall be given you in the same hour
   what you shall speak, for He shall be in you. And when the last moment
   approaches, when you must breathe out your soul to God--the living
   Spirit who dwells with you, even as the nurse sits at your
   bedside--shall then be in you and by His living power within shall
   transform death into the gate of endless life. "He dwells with you and
   shall be in you." O child of God, your Comforter will not leave you! He
   will continue still to take up His residence within you until you shall
   be taken up to dwell where Jesus is forever and ever.

   This is our great reliance for the future upholding of the Church as a
   whole and of each individual Believer--the Spirit of God dwells with us
   and shall be in us. The Church of God will never be destroyed. The
   gates of Hell shall not prevail against her. For the Holy Spirit dwells
   with us and shall be in us to the end of the world. This is the
   reliance of the child of God personally for his perseverance in Divine
   Grace. He knows that Jesus lives and therefore he shall live. And the
   Holy Spirit is within him, as the life of Christ, which can never die.
   The Believer pushes on despite a thousand obstacles, knowing that God
   gives him the victory through the Lord Jesus Christ--out of whose hand
   none can pluck him.

   I have done. And yet I have done nothing unless the Spirit of God shall
   bless the word spoken. Oh, that some of you who have never known the
   Spirit of God may feel His power coming upon you at this moment! You
   may be sitting in the pew very careless, even now, and yet before you
   leave He may descend and soften your hard heart. The other day the
   ground was hard as iron and the water was turned to ice. But there came
   a breath from the south and soon a thaw set in, the snow vanished and
   the ice was gone--even so the Holy Spirit breathes on us and our inward
   frost disappears at once.

   Come, Holy Spirit. Come even now. Let us implore His Presence and
   power. Pray for a closer, clearer knowledge of Him, O Children of God!
   Pray that sinners may be met with by His Grace. The first token of the
   Spirit's work will be that they will begin to feel their sin and cry
   for mercy--and when that is done, the glad tidings of pardon are for
   them. To them we say, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall
   be saved and your house." The Lord make the word effectual, for Jesus
   Christ's sake. Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

Our Lord's Entrance Within the Veil

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S DAY MORNING, MARCH 17, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "Not with the blood of goats and calves, but with His own blood He
   entered the Most Holy Place once and for all, having obtained eternal
   redemption for us." Hebrews 9:12.

   UNDER the old covenant the Lord was set forth to the people as dwelling
   apart, within the veil. A thick tapestry hung before the Most Holy
   Place and thus concealed the light which symbolized the Presence of
   God. Within the inner sanctuary Jehovah dwelt apart and none entered
   the sacred precincts except one man, and he, but once a year. The great
   teaching was that God is hidden from men--sin has made a division
   between man and God. The way of approach is not yet made manifest. Yet,
   even then, there was a hint given that an entrance would be made
   manifest eventually.

   Remember, the division was not a piece of brickwork, nor even an
   arrangement of cedar overlaid with gold--it was a veil which, once each
   year was solemnly lifted, that the high priest might pass beneath. This
   hinted that sinful men were yet to be permitted to draw near unto the
   Most Holy God, through the Christ of God. That, I say, was implied--if
   men had faith enough to spy it out. Three hundred and sixty-four days
   in the year the teaching was, "No admission"--one day out of the three
   hundred and sixty-five, the teaching was, "A way of access will yet be
   shown."

   Now, beloved Friends, the priests of old, the holy and the Most Holy
   Place were only "patterns of things in the heavens." They were not the
   things, themselves. In them we see instructive types and symbols but
   nothing more. How greatly we may rejoice as we read the eleventh verse
   of the chapter before us! It begins with "But." And, oh, what a blessed
   "but" for you and for me! Up till then religion dealt with externals
   such as meats and drinks and washings and carnal ordinances and priests
   who could only offer the blood of bulls and of goats. But the coming of
   the Messiah changed all this. We pass from shadow to substance--

   "Finished all the types and shadows Of the ceremonial Law."

   Now have Divine Grace and the Truth of God come by Jesus Christ. Read
   on--"Christ came." How the bells ring out joyously--"Christ came." It
   was the music of Bethlehem--"Christ came." It was the song of Anna and
   Simeon-- "Christ came." This will be the joy of the whole earth when
   once earth understands her truest privilege--"Christ came." The good
   things were still come for many a year. But now "Christ came," we have
   them in possession. No son of Aaron stands before us but the Christ,
   the truly Anointed One, commissioned of the Lord to introduce man to
   his offended God. Anointed by the eternal Spirit without measure, the
   Lord Jesus Christ appears in the end of the world to put away sin by
   the sacrifice of Himself and then to destroy the separating veil by
   going in unto the Father.

   If I had to tell you today that a Savior would in due time be born and
   would offer a sacrifice for sin, there would be great joy in the
   news--but we have something far better. For the Anointed One has
   appeared and fulfilled His course. He has been here among the sons of
   men. The Incarnate God--"Immanuel, God with us," the true High Priest
   for men in things pertaining to God. Again, I say, let the bells
   joyously ring out--"Christ came." He is "an High Priest of good things
   to come." Things which were in the olden time "things to come," are
   things present at this hour. For Jesus has brought to light the
   precious things of the Covenant, which kings and Prophets desired to
   see. Yet even now there are good things in the future. "Eye has not
   seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the
   things which God has prepared for them that love Him."

   The Lord Jesus has brought all good things to those who believe in Him,
   that they may rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory. Good
   things to come find their way here by the Mediator. God Himself has
   come among men in the Person of the Lord Jesus who has taken our nature
   into union with His Godhead. Our Immanuel was born at Bethlehem,

   He dwelt at Nazareth, He died on Calvary and He has now gone up on High
   because His work is finished and the reward of it is given.

   The striking point to which I call your attention is this--while our
   Lord was here, He was comparable to the high priest when he stood on
   the outside of the veil. I want you to remember that fact. Outside is
   the place of sinful men. Did the holy Jesus ever stand there? He did.
   His sacrifice was of necessity offered without the veil and as a sign
   thereof--"He suffered without the gate." The fact is evident that our
   Lord suffered by being forsaken of God. The veil hung thick between Him
   and God till His great sacrifice was accepted--in testimony whereof
   hear you not that bitter cry, the bitterest that ever came from human
   lips--"My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?"

   Our High Priest then stood on the outside of the veil. But after He had
   presented His sacrifice, after it had been consumed with fire, He
   passed within the veil and rose to the Throne of the eternal God. He
   entered Heaven as a priest, in all the solemnity of accomplished
   sacrifice. "He entered the Most Holy Place once and for all, having
   obtained eternal redemption." Upon that august entrance I shall try to
   speak this morning. But I am very conscious of my want of power to do
   so. Thought is shallow, speech is stammering in the presence of a theme
   so high, so deep. Come, Holy Spirit, and in Your infinite compassion,
   reveal our great High Priest to all Your waiting ones now!

   I. First, Beloved, I shall call your attention to THE SACRIFICE OF HIS
   ENTERING. "Not with the blood of goats and calves, but with His own
   blood He entered." We have, this morning, taken for our lesson the
   sixteenth chapter of Leviticus--may I ask you all to study it with
   care? There we saw that the high priest, once each year entered the
   Most Holy Place but "not without blood." Our Savior, as God and Man in
   one Person, standing in the sinner's place, could not enter within the
   veil until first He had presented a sacrifice. By blood even He must
   enter. That blood must be His own. Let us think about His sacrifice.

   We note concerning it, first, that the sacrifice presented by our Lord
   was unique. It was "His own blood" that he of-fered--blood from the
   veins of a man. But what a man! Remember how He Himself said
   it--"Sacrifice and offering you would not: but a body have You prepared
   Me." The body of Christ was especially prepared of God for this great
   sacrifice. Though we rightly speak of our Lord as "clothed in a body
   like our own," yet we may not forget that, in some points, His humanity
   was peculiar. He was without spot. In His birth He received no taint of
   original sin. Was it not said to the virgin, "The Holy Spirit shall
   come upon you and the power of the Highest shall overshadow you:
   therefore also that holy Thing which shall be born of you shall be
   called the Son of God"?

   Thus the Person of our Lord was unique among men and it is that pure
   Personality which was presented as an offering to the Lord. He was pure
   and holy, and therefore able to bear the sin of others, since He had
   none of His own. God especially prepared His body for the indwelling of
   the Deity and He stands before us as a Personage, the likes of which
   neither Heaven nor earth contains. God is pure Spirit but this sacred
   Person has a Body--man has no pretensions to Divinity but this glorious
   One counts it not robbery to be equal with God. He is God and Man in
   one Person by a marvelous unity which we believe but can never
   comprehend. And as our Mediator, by the eternal Spirit, He offered
   Himself without spot unto God. This singular sacrifice deserves our
   singular faith.

   The sacrifice of our Lord was, in the highest sense, substitutionary.
   The penalty of sin is death. And Jesus died. All through the old Law
   there is no atonement except by the death of a victim. Indeed, this is
   what God has said from the beginning, even in the Garden. Still is this
   the sentence of the Law--"The soul that sins, it shall die." Sin
   necessitates death. The Lord Jesus Christ did not come to earth to make
   a reconciliation by the holiness of His life, or by the earnestness of
   His teaching but by His death. The text says, "With His own blood he
   entered."

   He must die in the place of guilty men before He could enter Heaven on
   their behalf. Just as the calves and the bullocks in the type were
   slain and their blood poured out before God, so must Jesus be slain in
   the sinner's place. O Beloved, let us cling to the great Truth of God
   of the vicarious sacrifice which is the chief teaching of this sacred
   Book. Take this away and I do not see anything left in the Bible at all
   which can be called good news. The very soul of the doctrine of Christ
   is atonement by His death--

   "He bore, that we might never bear, His Father's righteous ire."

   The victim was killed, but it was also consumed by the holy fire upon
   the altar of God. Our Lord offered up Himself unto God, not only by the
   death which came from the Cross, but by the consuming of soul which
   came from the horror of bearing human sin.

   The tempest of sin's consequences burst upon the innocent head of the
   great Substitute--the thunder cloud emptied its dire contents upon His
   soul. He, voluntarily putting Himself in our place, bore the result of
   that substitution. Out of infinite love Jesus became an offering for
   sin. Not of compulsion but of His own sacred choice He became the
   sin-offering for the sinner, that the sinner might be made the
   righteousness of God in Him. "Who His own self bore our sins in His own
   body on the tree." This we know and in this great truth we steadfastly
   abide. What other hope have we?

   The sacrifice which our Lord presented before He went within the veil
   was personal. Stress should be laid upon the word "own" here. "Not with
   the blood of goats and calves, but with His own blood." The Lord Jesus
   did not bring before God the sufferings of others or the merits of
   others but His own life and death. "He poured out His soul unto death."
   I will repeat the text which I quoted just now, for it is well worth
   repeating a thousand times. "Who His own self bore our sins in His own
   body on the tree." "He loved me and gave Himself for me." Aaron could
   not do this--the blood he brought was not his own. And if he could by
   any strange imagination be supposed to bring his own blood, yet it
   could only have been for himself, since his death was due to God as the
   punishment of his own individual sin.

   Our Lord owed nothing to the justice of God on His own account--He was
   "holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners." And, therefore when
   He took our place it was that He might voluntarily offer up His own
   sacrifice of personal suffering and personal death--yielding up His
   whole being as a sacrifice in our place. When He hangs naked upon the
   tree, I dare not look--but with tears in my eyes, I worship. I
   acknowledge with deepest love how absolutely He gave up everything on
   my behalf, reserving not even a rag of Himself nor an atom of Himself.
   "He saved others, Himself He could not save." It was, in the most
   emphatic sense, a personal sacrifice.

   In that sacrifice none could share and in the after-entrance none could
   have a part at the time. Read Leviticus 16:17--"There shall be no man
   in the tabernacle of meeting when he goes in to make an atonement in
   the Holy Place, until he comes out that he may make an atonement for
   himself, for his household and for all the assembly of Israel." Even in
   sympathy we cannot enter the inner shrine of His sacrifice. In their
   innermost depths they are unapproachable. Jesus treads the winepress
   alone. Gethsemane--who can stand in the garden and view the bloody
   sweat and hear the deep groaning of that mighty heart? Even the favored
   three are overcome with sorrow and fall asleep--

   "Who can penetrate through you, Lonesome, dark Gethsemane?"

   But as for Calvary, where the darkness was denser still--till midday
   turned to midnight, as an emblem of what was going on--into that awful
   blackness we cannot peer. "Your unknown sufferings" still remains one
   of the best descriptive expressions concerning that which can never be
   described. All this, I say, was His own personal grief for sins in
   which He had no personal share--this was His sacrifice of entrance.

   I cannot dwell long on any one point. But, I pray you, treasure these
   Truths of God which are more to be valued than much fine gold. This
   sacrifice of His was of transcendent value. Think who He was that was
   offered! The Son of the Highest offered His own self unto God. There
   was never such another as He, as we have already said, for He was God
   and Man in one Person. And it was this Divine Person that was offered
   up a sacrifice without the veil, that He might enter within it. I
   cannot imagine a limit to the value of the sacrifice of Christ--I hope
   none of you will ever try to do so. When He gave Himself up as a
   sacrifice, there was a greater recompense made to the justice of God
   than if the whole human race had been consumed.

   When God Himself comes here to stand in the sinner's place, the Law
   obtains a fuller vindication than if worlds of guilty ones had borne
   its penalty. When the Law-Giver Himself bears the penalty of the
   breaking of the Law, the Law is made honorable and it is plainly
   demonstrated that God will not spare the guilty but that every
   transgression must receive its penalty. When even the innocent
   Substitute is made to die because sin is laid upon Him, we are sure
   that sin is exceedingly hateful to God. Therefore the sacrifice of our
   Lord was of transcendent value.

   This sacrifice, let men nowadays say what they will, was made in
   reference to human guilt. The passage I read to you in Leviticus
   insists upon this. The blood was sprinkled in the Holy Place, "because
   of the uncleanness of the children of Israel and because of their
   transgressions in all their sins." Our Lord Jesus has put away sin by
   the sacrifice of Himself.

   His death was not merely an example, nor simply a display of Divine
   love. "Behold the Lamb of God, which takes away the sin of the world."
   His death dealt with our uncleanness--it cleans us from all sin. "Once
   at the end of the ages has He appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice
   of Himself." And this had reference to God. The sacrifice of the Day of
   Atonement was not seen by the people and its blood was not sprinkled
   where they could look upon it--it was for the Lord only.

   God, the infinitely loving One, because of the very infinity of His
   love, cannot look upon sin without displeasure, seeing it is man's
   worst enemy. He must punish the sinner when he dares to break the
   perfect Law. The sacrifice is, therefore, needed to show the Lord's
   hatred of evil and His resolve to be just. Jesus did not die to make
   God merciful, as some falsely say that we teach. But because God was
   merciful Jesus died--that there might be a clear passage for Divine
   mercy, without the violation of Divine justice. Jesus did not die to
   make God love sinners for He always did love them. But that His love
   might be exercised in consistency with holiness it was necessary that
   the Law should be vindicated and the threat against sin should not
   become a dead letter.

   You see, then, the entrance offering which our Lord presented outside
   the veil. Come and partake in its cleansing effects.

   II. Let us now notice THE MANNER OF HIS ENTRANCE. We are told in the
   text, "He entered the Most Holy

   Place once." Much emphasis is to be laid upon that word "once."

   It has been done, then, once. Once has He offered up Himself without
   spot unto God. Once has He lifted the veil and passed into the Holy
   Place of fullest fellowship with God on our behalf. It has been done!
   Oh clap your hands for very mirth! Let your harps ring out loudly and
   sweetly with excessive joy. Jesus has entered in. Our Head and
   Representative is with God. It is not a thing to be worked out in the
   future but it has been accomplished. His sacrifice had an immediate
   efficacy. On the spot it availed to open the kingdom of Heaven. From
   the Cross the Forsaken One entered into His kingdom as the Beloved of
   God.

   To prove how complete was the effect of His sacrifice, He went into the
   Heaven of God at once. "It is finished." The proof is that Jesus
   entered in once within the veil. It means, however, that it was only
   once. Once only has Jesus made entrance officially into the heavenly
   places. For, by that one entrance He has made the way open and
   manifest. His offering has been made once, and no more. And so it is
   written, "Not that He should offer Himself often, as the high priest
   enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood of another. He then
   would have had to suffer often since the foundation of the world; but
   now, once at the end of the ages, He has appeared to put away sin by
   the sacrifice of Himself."

   No, there is not a repeated offering of Christ to God, nor a repeated
   taking possession of Heaven on our behalf. "Once and for all" the work
   is done. Jude tells us that "once and for all" the faith was delivered
   to the saints--it is a final act which is so complete that it needs no
   repeating. The entrance of our Lord once and for all into the Holy
   Place has secured the entrance of His people. It was once and it cannot
   be twice, because it was so effectual. And this is set forth by the
   Evangelists--for when our Lord entered the Holy Place, the veil was
   rent. The Holy of Holies was laid open--its enclosure was thrown down.
   What if I say that the inner shrine has expanded itself and taken in
   the Holy Place and now all places are holy where true hearts seek their
   God?

   Had our High Priest merely lifted the veil and passed in, we might have
   supposed that the veil fell back again--but since the veil of the
   temple was rent in two, from the top to the bottom, there can be no
   need for a new entrance. For that which hinders is taken away. No veil
   now hangs between God and His chosen people--we may come boldly to the
   Throne of Grace. Blessed be the name of our Lord who has entered in
   "once"!

   And now, Beloved, He has entered into the Holy Place once in the sense
   that He has entered in the fullest and most complete manner. When the
   High Priest went up to the Mercy Seat, he drew near to the symbol of
   God but not necessarily near to God Himself. But our Lord Jesus Christ,
   as Mediator, came so near to God that no nearness could be greater. He
   always was in His Godhead one with the Father--but as God and Man in
   one Person, He is now forever with God. He says, "I and My Father are
   One." The nearness of the God-man Christ Jesus to His Father is
   something to think upon with reverent pleasure. For, remember--

   "In the Person of His Son We are as near as He."

   Christ has gone into the glory of the Father and He has made a way for
   us to enter into like nearness. The road is open, the access is
   free--God meets us and invites us to meet Him. He waits to speak with
   us, as a man speaks with his friend. I wish I knew how to put this
   before you. But I fail. I pray you to think it over. Let these feeble
   words suffice to suggest to you the manner of His entrance as set forth
   by the word "once."

   III. But now, thirdly, let us consider THE OBJECTS OF HIS ENTRANCE.
   What did our Lord Jesus Christ do by

   His entrance within the veil? What comes of it?

   It means, first, that He made atonement within the veil. He cleansed
   the heavenly places. Read the twenty-third verse of the chapter before
   us--"Therefore it was necessary that the copies of the things in the
   heavens should be purified with these." How it startles us to read such
   words! Was the heavenly place, itself, defiled? No, that cannot be. But
   if you and I had gone there without atonement by blood, Heaven would
   have been defiled. Look at the crowds of once sinful men and women who
   are daily entering there to dwell with God. How could they go there if
   the heavenly places had not been prepared for them?

   Look at the multitude of our prayers and praises that are daily going
   up there! Are they not all, in a measure, impure, and would it not have
   defiled Heaven to accept them? But the Lord has gone there and has
   sprinkled His blood upon the Mercy Seat so that our prayers and
   praises, yes, and ourselves also, may enter without any hindrance. Even
   if the guilty are taken up to dwell with God and our poor prayers are
   accepted of God, neither we nor our prayers carry any defilement into
   the Holy Place because the atoning blood is there beforehand. After
   Heaven has sucked up into itself so much of the sinnerhood of earth, it
   remains as pure as it was when only God and His holy angels dwelt
   therein. While men that were once steeped in sin are permitted to come
   and sit at the right hand of God, God remains as rigorously righteous
   as if no guilty one had been forgiven--the great Sacrifice has secured
   this.

   Then He enters there to appear for us. Read the twenty-fourth
   verse--"For Christ has not entered the Holy Places made with hands,
   which are copies of the true, but into Heaven itself, now to appear in
   the Presence of God for us." He has gone there to put in an appearance
   on our behalf. As in a court of law, when a man appears by his
   attorney, or legal representative, he is in the court, even though he
   may be miles away--so are we, today, in possession of our eternal
   inheritance through Him who has put in an appearance for us. God sees
   His saints in Heaven in the Person of their glorious Representative. In
   Him we are raised up together and made to sit together in the heavenly
   places. Is not this a subject for quiet enjoyment? The Forerunner has
   for us entered upon the purchased possession.

   He is there, next, to perfect us. Look at the tenth chapter and
   fourteenth verse--"For by one offering He has perfected forever those
   who are being sanctified." His one sacrifice has made the comers
   thereunto perfect. And to show their perfectness, they enter into the
   Holy Place. His work is done or else He would not be within the
   veil--His being there is proof that everything is complete and that His
   people are complete in Him. The set-apart ones are accepted, for He in
   whom they stand, is accepted. As when Adam was driven out of the garden
   we were all driven out of the garden--so now that the second Adam is in
   the Paradise of God, we are there, too, in Him.

   He has entered in once, also, that He may abide there. Look at the
   twelfth and thirteenth verses of the tenth chapter--"But this Man,
   after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the
   right hand of God, from that time waiting till His enemies are made His
   footstool." Jesus is with God in Heaven and always must be there till
   the purposes of Divine Grace are accomplished. He holds a permanent
   session at the right hand of the Father in everlasting triumph. Till
   our Representative is expelled from Heaven, we cannot lose it. And that
   can never be! Look up, O Believer, and see where you are and where you
   always must be--accepted in the Beloved, made near by the blood of
   Christ!

   Once more--He is there to admit us to the same nearness. Read the
   twenty-first and twenty-second verses of the tenth chapter--"Having a
   High Priest over the House of God, let us draw near with a true heart."
   Behold, the Lord Jesus meets us when we pray and praise and He presents
   our worship. When we fall asleep and wake up in another state, He will
   come and meet us--at Heaven's wide entrance--and through the rent veil
   admit us into Heaven. What must it be to be with Him on His Throne! To
   behold His Glory and that forever! It will not be long before we reach
   that felicity. Some of us are within hearing of the eternal song.
   Therefore, let us cheer up--and if the way is rough, let us remember
   that it cannot be long. Since He has entered, by whom we are everywhere
   represented, this guarantees our entrance into the Glory of God.
   Therefore has He gone before that He may welcome us Home.

   Turn these thoughts over and surely you have heavenly manna to feed
   upon--food for faith and material for songs. You are gone in before us,
   Lord. And because we love You, we rejoice.

   IV. But now, lastly, let us review THE GLORIES OF THIS ENTRANCE. We
   have seen the sacrifice of our Lord's entrance, the manner of His
   entrance and the objects of His entrance. And now let us muse upon the
   glory of His entrance, which is this--"having obtained eternal
   redemption." The words, "for us," are supplied by the translators and
   therefore we leave them out. Our Lord entered the Most Holy Place
   "having obtained eternal redemption."

   When Aaron went in with the blood of bulls and goats, he had not
   obtained "eternal redemption." He had only obtained a symbolic and
   temporary purification for the people and that was all. Our Lord enters
   in because, first, His work is all done. We do not read, "He entered in
   that He might obtain it," but "having obtained." Some read, "having
   found eternal redemption." He found it in Himself, for He could have
   found it nowhere else. Neither in Heaven, nor earth, nor Hell could
   there be found a redemption for the souls of men. But our Lord found
   the ransom in His own great sacrifice and He entered into Glory with
   this amazing "Eureka" on His tongue--"Deliver him from going down into
   the pit, for I have found a ransom."

   glorious Finder, You could well find it, for it was hidden in Yourself!
   You have obtained eternal redemption. That which He had obtained was
   redemption. There is no getting "redemption" out of the Bible. I bless
   God for this. Many cannot endure the word, but it is there. And it is
   redemption by price, too--"a mercantile transaction," as they profanely
   speak. "You are bought with a price." Redemption is deliverance through
   payment--in this case, ransom through One standing in another's place
   and discharging that other's obligations.

   Brethren, when the Lord Jesus Christ died, He paid our redemption
   price. And when He entered within the veil, He entered as One who not
   only desired to give us redemption but as One who had "obtained eternal
   redemption." He has won for us redemption both by price and by power.
   We do not fully know what the word "redemption" means, for we were born
   free. But if we could go back a few years and mix with the Negro slaves
   of America, they could have told us what redemption meant, if ever, by
   any good fortune one of them was able to buy his freedom. You that have
   groaned under the tyranny of sin, you know what redemption means in its
   spiritual sense, and you prize the ransom by which you have been made
   free.

   Brothers and Sisters, we are today redeemed from our far off condition
   in reference to the Lord God--we do not now stand outside the veil.
   This is a great redemption. We are also delivered from guilt, for "He
   has washed us from our sins in His own blood." This is a great
   redemption. We are rescued from the power of sin that we should not
   live any longer a slave to it. We overcome sin through the blood of the
   Lamb. This also is a great redemption. We are now saved from the curse
   of sin. For He was "made a curse for us, as it is written, Cursed is
   everyone that hangs on a tree." This is, indeed, a great redemption. We
   are redeemed from all the bondage that ensued from sin. We are no
   longer the serfs of Satan, nor the slaves of the world--neither are we
   subject to bondage through fear of death. That last enemy shall be
   destroyed and we know it. The Son has set us free and we are free,
   indeed. He entered into the heavenly places with this for His
   everlasting renown, that He has obtained redemption for His people.

   And now think of the nature of that redemption. For here is a grand
   point. He has obtained "eternal" redemption. If you carefully study the
   verses around the text, you will find the word "eternal" three
   times--there is "eternal redemption," the "eternal Spirit" and an
   "eternal inheritance." Why is redemption said to be eternal? It is a
   long word, that word "eternal"--notwithstanding all the squeezing and
   cutting that men give to it nowadays--they cannot make it into a
   limited period, do what they may. He has obtained eternal redemption--a
   redemption which entered into eternal consideration.

   1 speak of the Lord God with great reverence, when I say that
   redemption was from eternity in His thoughts. What if this world was
   first created myriads of ages ago, as it probably was. Yet in the
   succeeding epochs neither plant nor animal was created without respect
   to the Divine ultimatum which is redemption! Not a fossil lies in the
   rock which has not been molded with a relation to the Lord Christ and
   His eternal redemption. Christ is the image of God and all things bear
   traces of that image. From every act of Deity a finger points to Jesus,
   the atoning sacrifice.

   Redemption is the drift of creation and the hinge of Providence. The
   undertone of all the voices God has created is God in Christ Jesus. In
   Him the transcendent splendor of the Godhead was best beheld. Veiled in
   manhood He bore human guilt that He might abolish it and bring to God a
   blood-washed Church. Things created serve as a platform for

   things redeemed--the temporal creation gives way before eternal
   redemption. In the Everlasting Covenant the Lord had always an eye to
   its seal, which is the blood of its Surety. In the Divine decrees
   everything is shaped and fashioned according to the work of that
   wondrous Person in whom dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.

   The eternal councils of God have ever had an eye to the everlasting
   righteousness and to the everlasting redemption of the everlasting Son
   of the Father. Redemption is no new thought with God--no expedient to
   snatch the world from an unexpected accident--no patching up of a
   broken-down purpose. Redemption is the center of the Divine plan. The
   focus of the manifestation of God, the summit of the mountain of
   Revelation. Herein is love! Herein is God!

   When our Lord entered in, He had by His sacrifice also dealt with
   eternal things and not with matters of merely passing importance. He
   offered Himself by the Eternal Spirit and by that offering He took off
   the mortgage from the eternal inheritance and bade us freely enter upon
   the predestinated possession. Sin, death, Hell--these are not temporary
   things--the atonement deals with these and therefore it is an eternal
   redemption. Let me cheer the heart of anyone here who is burdened with
   sin, with this reflection, that the redemption of Christ deals with the
   whole of past sin. How far back can we trace evil? We may follow it
   back to the first apostate angel.

   But as far as we are concerned, we trace it to father Adam, and thus
   our sin runs back in muddy streams to that primeval fault which has
   brought a taint into our nature. Eternal redemption has removed from us
   whatever of consequences might come on us because of our portion in the
   Fall. The stain of heredity is washed out by our being created anew in
   Christ Jesus. From every soul that has, by faith, part and parcel in
   this redemption, all the olden curse of the race is gone. You have no
   cause to fear the ancient past. Nothing lies buried there which can
   ever rise to accuse you. Who shall lay anything to the charge of him
   for whom Christ has obtained eternal redemption?

   Now, look forward into eternity. Behold the vista which has no end!
   Eternal redemption covers all the peril of this mortal life and every
   danger beyond, if there are such. You know not how much you are to be
   tempted and tried before the end comes. Perhaps you will live to
   extreme old age and you dread the decay of intellect and the increase
   of infirmity. And well you may. Nevertheless, be glad that He has
   obtained eternal redemption for you. You cannot possibly outlive the
   redemption of Christ, neither can any temptation for which He has not
   provided by any possibility assail you.

   Leap to the end. Think of the future of prophecy. Anticipate the blast
   of the seven trumpets, the pouring out of the dread vials! You need not
   fear any of these, seeing your Lord has obtained eternal redemption. We
   are being informed that great events will happen on such a day and
   hour. I believe these predictions as much as I believe in the
   prophecies of the Norwood Gypsy and no more. But if they were all true,
   what occasion is there for fear to a Believer? Our Lord has obtained
   eternal redemption for His people and we shall rest contented even
   though the star Wormwood should fall and the waters should be turned
   into blood and all these things should be dissolved.

   When prophecy is all fulfilled and we pass into the dread future, we
   fear not death since our Lord has obtained eternal redemption. "Eternal
   punishment" is a word of unspeakable terror. But it is met and fully
   covered by "eternal redemption." Be not afraid, O you that put your
   trust in the Lord Jesus as your Sacrifice and Priest! There is nothing
   in the mystery of eternity that need frighten you. Fearlessly you may
   launch into the deep and quit the shores of this present being since
   you bear with you eternal redemption. How shall you be lost for whom an
   eternal ransom has been paid?

   Oh, leap for joy, you Believers in Jesus! For He has obtained eternal
   redemption for you! He would not go within the veil unto His Father
   till He had fully wrought out your redemption. He stayed here till He
   could cry exultingly, "It is finished." And then, but not till then, He
   gave up the ghost and entered into His Father's Presence. Rejoice that
   you have no trifle here, but an eternal redemption. This is no thing of
   today, or tomorrow but of the eternal past and future.

   I have done, but let me ask my beloved Hearers, one by one, Have you
   this eternal redemption? Do you believe in the Lord Jesus? He that
   believes in Him has everlasting life and that is the outcome of eternal
   redemption. Do you believe in the Son of God? Faith in Him is the
   greatest of all works, even as our Lord said, "This is the work of God,
   that you believe on Him whom He has sent." All other works are like the
   chaff on the threshing floor, if we refuse to believe in God's grandest
   deed of love and wisdom.

   God's noblest deed rejected, we reject God Himself. He has manifested
   Himself in the sacrifice of Christ as nowhere else. And if we turn our
   backs upon the Cross, if we refuse to believe in the Incarnate God
   dying for human sin--we show a rebellion of heart against God which
   must destroy us. No sin can equal the sin of refusing God's way of
   mercy. If you come confessing sin and if you accept the great Sin
   Offering as presented for you, you shall be brought near to God. If
   you, too, by faith can dip your finger in this blood and sprinkle it
   upon the Mercy Seat, even as Christ, your High Priest, has sprinkled
   it, then you, too, shall stand within the veil with Jesus.

   Into the holiest of all you may enter! No, you have entered there
   already in Jesus and you are there permanently, because He abides there
   forever. Your Substitute, your Covenant Head, your Representative, is
   in Glory and there you shall be before long. Therefore, if you believe
   in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, with all your heart, comfort yourself
   with these words. Since the veil is rent, hide not yourself from God
   who unveils Himself to you. By-and-by you shall be with Him where He
   is. Rejoice that even now He is with you where you are.

   The Lord bless this congregation and may we all meet within the veil
   around the great Forerunner, whom we love and adore! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

Sounding Out the Word of the Lord

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S DAY MORNING, MARCH 24, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "For from you sounded out the Word of the Lord not only in Macedonia
   and Achaia but also in everyplace your faith to God-ward is spread
   abroad; so that we need not to speak anything." 1 Thessalonians 1:8.

   PAUL went to Thessalonica from Philippi with a sore back but with a
   sound heart. He went resolved to spend and to be spent for his Lord in
   that city. On the first three Sabbaths he spoke to the Jews in the
   synagogue but he soon found that they were obstinately resolved to
   reject Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah. Therefore he directed his
   attention to the heathen of Thessalonica and among them he had
   wonderful success. Large numbers of persons, some of honorable rank,
   turned from their idols to worship the living God and he soon gathered
   about him an enthusiastic people.

   During his stay at Thessalonica he pretty nearly wore himself out--for
   he had determined that he would accept no help from the people who
   appeared to have been in great straits at that time. He toiled night
   and day at his trade of tent-making but even then could not earn
   sufficient income to survive. He might have failed to maintain his
   existence had not the Believers at Philippi sent once, and again, to
   assist him. Thus, being affectionately desirous of winning them to
   Jesus, the Apostle was willing to have given to them not the Gospel of
   God, only, but even his own life. The Lord accepted the cheerful
   sacrifice and gave the Apostle the reward he sought.

   The Thessalonians not only received the Word with joy of the Holy
   Spirit but became zealous in making it known. Their intensity of faith
   helped to spread the Gospel, for their lives were notably affected by
   it. And for their earnestness and godliness they were everywhere talked
   of. Living in a trading town, to which many went and from which many
   came, their singular devotion to the faith of the Lord Jesus became the
   theme of conversation all over Greece. And thus enquiry was promoted
   and the Gospel was sounded out far and wide. In their case, learners
   speedily became teachers. The Lord Jesus had thus not only given them
   drink but He had made them into a well overflowing, to refresh the
   thirst of thousands.

   They had heard the Gospel trumpet and now they had become trumpeters
   themselves! In their lives the echoes of Paul's preaching were
   preserved. This was a very happy circumstance for the tried Apostle and
   greatly cheered his spirit. These Thessalonians must have been
   especially gracious people for Paul to praise them so heartily. "As the
   fining-pot for silver and the furnace for gold; so is a man to his
   praise." Many can bear slander better than they could endure praise.
   Many, when commended, become puffed up. But the Thessalonians were in
   such a happy spiritual condition that Paul could safely speak of them
   as, "examples to all that believe in Macedonia and Achaia."

   That praise was all the more precious because it was not
   indiscriminate--"not laid on with a trowel," as the Proverb puts it.
   The Thessalonians had faulty ones among them. The best Church that ever
   existed has had in it imperfect members. And the very virtues of the
   Thessalonians carried them into certain faults. They were notable for
   their expectation of the coming of the Lord and certain of them became
   fanatical and ceased from work because of the speedy approach of the
   last day. The Apostle was obliged to talk to them about this in his two
   Epistles, and even to lay down the rule very strongly--"If any man will
   not work, neither let him eat." Under whatever pretense men might cease
   from their daily callings they were not to be maintained by their
   Brethren. These good people were too ready to be deceived by idle
   rumors of coming wonders.

   Even the Thessalonian Church had its spots. But, then, there are spots
   on the sun and yet we do not speak of it as a dark body since its light
   so much preponderates. Grave faults in the Thessalonian Church did not
   prevent our honest Apostle from awarding praise where praise was due.
   When a man is sound at heart, praise does not become an intoxicating
   wine, but an invigorating tonic. Feeling a modest fear that he does not
   deserve the warm commendation, the good

   man is anxious to live up to the character imputed to him. This will be
   the case, however, only with those whose spiritual life is vigorous.

   I entreat you, dear Friends, to learn practically from these
   Thessalonians by being led to imitate them. May it be truly said of us
   also, "From you sounded out the Word of the Lord"! It is true even now
   in a measure--may it be far more so! The expression to which I would
   call your attention is this--"From you sounded out the Word of the
   Lord." It reminds us of a trumpet and its far-sounding notes. Having
   heard the Gospel sounding within, they in return sounded it out.

   First, let us carefully look at the trumpeters. What sort of men are
   these who make God's Word to sound out? When we have talked about the
   men we will look at their trumpets and see how it is that they give
   forth so telling a sound. Next, we will speak of the need of such a
   trumpet blast just now. And close by enquiring whether we are not
   called to give forth that trumpet sound.

   I. We begin by looking at THE TRUMPETERS. Who are these by whom the
   Word of the Lord is sounded out? I shall hastily give you a picture of
   these Thessalonians drawn from Paul's letters to them.

   Observe at the outset that they were a people whom the three cardinal
   Graces were conspicuous. Kindly look at the third verse--"Remembering
   without ceasing your work of faith and labor of love and patience of
   hope." The three Divine sisters--Faith, Hope, Love--linked hands in
   their lives. These were with them in their best condition--faith
   working, love laboring, hope enduring. Faith without works is dead.
   Faith performing her work with energy is healthy and alive. Paul saw
   the Thessalonian Believers to be fulfilling the lifework of a true
   faith.

   Nor was faith left to work alone--at her right hand was love,
   sweetening and brightening all. Their love did not consist in words or
   in mere amiability of temper. But it worked with a will. They threw
   their whole hearts into the cause of God--they loved Jesus and
   rapturously waited for His appearing. They loved one another and shared
   the sufferings of their leaders in the time of persecution. They
   exhibited a labor of love--it was not work, only, but in intensity it
   deserved to be called "labor."

   As for hope--that bright-eyed Grace which looks within the veil and
   realizes things not seen as yet--it was peculiarly their endowment.
   This enabled them to bear with patience their suffering for
   Christ--whether it lay in false accusation, or in the spoiling of their
   goods. Of them it could be said, "Now abides faith, hope, charity,
   these three." Brethren, it is of no use for us to attempt to sound out
   the Word of the Lord if we have not the spiritual power which lies in
   those three Divine Graces.

   These are of first importance. Those precious Truths of God which faith
   believes, which love delights in, which hope relies upon--these are the
   Truths of God we shall diligently make known. We believe, and therefore
   speak. We love, and therefore testify. We hope, and therefore make
   known.

   Next I note these Thessalonian Believers were a people whose election
   was clear. Read the fourth verse--"Knowing, brethren beloved, your
   election of God." Paul said the same of them in the second Epistle
   (2:13)--"We are bound to give thanks always to God for you, brethren
   beloved of the Lord, because God has from the beginning chosen you to
   salvation, through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the
   truth." They were not ashamed to believe the doctrine of election as
   some professors are. They rejoiced in having been chosen of God from
   the beginning. They saw the practical nature of election for they
   perceived that they were chosen unto sanctification.

   Their lives were such as to prove that they were the Lord's chosen
   people for they became choice Brethren. They gave evidence of the
   secret choice of God by their holy lives. I hope this is true of us as
   a people--we are old-fashioned enough to rejoice in the electing love
   of God and Free Grace has a sweet sound to our ears. If it is so, we
   ought to bring forth fruits worthy of it. Gratitude for Sovereign Grace
   and eternal love should operate upon us mightily. Let the slaves of Law
   go to their tasks with a lash at their backs--the chosen of God will
   serve Him with delight and do ten times more from love than others from
   hope of wages. None can show forth the praises of God like those who
   taste His especial love and know the unutterable sweetness of it.

   These trumpeters had received the Word of God themselves in much
   assurance and with much power. Note the fifth verse--"For our Gospel
   came not unto you in word, only, but also in power and in the Holy
   Spirit and in much assurance." The Apostle also says, in the thirteenth
   verse of the second chapter, "For this cause, also, we thank God
   without

   ceasing, because, when you received the Word of God which you heard of
   us, you received it not as the word of men but as it is in truth, the
   Word of God, which effectually works also in you that believe."

   Beloved, it is a poor thing to receive the Gospel in word only. You
   then say, "Yes, it is true, I believe it." And there the matter ends.
   It is a far different matter to feel the power of the Word as it comes
   from the Omnipotent Lord so as to have your heart broken by it and then
   healed by it. To receive the Gospel as indisputable, infallible and
   Divine is to receive it, indeed. To receive it not because you think a
   certain way but because it carries conviction with it and bears you
   away by its irresistible force--that is to receive it in its power.

   Beloved, I do not believe a man will spend his life in spreading a
   doctrine which has never mastered his spirit. But when the Truth of God
   takes possession of a man and holds him by force as a strong man armed
   keeps his own house, then will he run up his flag and openly
   acknowledge the Mighty One who reigns within. He who believes, and is
   sure, is the man who will propagate the faith and desire that others
   should accept it. What a difference there is between the man who has
   felt the Omnipotence of Truth and another who merely professes to
   entertain sound opinions!

   If the almighty Word has carried you captive you will hold it fast and
   nothing will persuade you either to surrender it or to stifle it. The
   Thessalonians were a people whose constancy was proven. They received
   the Word "with much affliction." The Apostle says, "For you, Brethren,
   became followers of the Churches of God which in Judea are in Christ
   Jesus: for you also have suffered like things of your own countrymen,
   even as they have of the Jews." The assault by the mob, recorded in
   Acts 17, was, doubtless, only one of their many trials. They remained
   steadfast and enthusiastic under all their tribulations. And therefore
   the Gospel was sounded out by them.

   Cowards hold their tongues--but brave men are not to be put down.
   Having already borne slander, reproach and misrepresentation of every
   kind, we are not abashed but rather are hardened to endurance and
   publish our belief more unreservedly than ever. We have nothing to
   conceal, nothing to fear. Slander can say no more. Therefore we, the
   more boldly sound forth the Word of God. Brethren, unless you can hold
   on in rough weather and bear up under opposition you will do little in
   sounding out the Word of God. Trumpets must be made of hard metal and
   trumpeters must have something of the soldier about them, or little
   will come of it.

   Again--these people really and lovingly served God. Look at the ninth
   verse--"For they themselves show of us what manner of entering in we
   had unto you and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living
   and true God." I have no doubt many of these folks had been great
   devotees of their idols for it is amazing what idolaters will do for
   their deities! At this day the gifts of Hindus to idol shrines put to
   shame the offerings given by Christians to their Lord. Have you not
   heard how they were likely to throw their very lives away beneath the
   wheels of the chariot of their demon god? Shall hideous deities of wood
   and stone command a zeal which is not shown in the service of the
   living God?

   I doubt not that these Thessalonians became as earnest worshippers of
   the living Jehovah as they had once been earnest votaries of their
   idols. They turned from idols but they turned to serve God. They were
   not turned in opinion, only, but in a practical manner. What a pity it
   is that to many Christian professors, religion is opinion, and
   conversion a feeling! Do not many live as if God were a myth and the
   service of God a sham? If God is God, serve Him--service is the right
   of Godhead. Does not the Lord Himself say, "If then I am a father,
   where is My honor? And if I am a master, where is my fear?"

   Oh, that to us the service of the Lord may be a delight--and then it
   will he as natural to us to sound out the Word of the Lord as it is for
   birds to sing! For one thing the Thessalonians were peculiarly
   notable--they were enthusiastic expectants of the second coming of the
   Lord Jesus Christ. Paul says of them in the tenth verse that they
   waited for the Son of God from Heaven. They really expected Christ to
   come and to come speedily. They even carried this expectation beyond
   its proper bounds--they grew impatient of the Lord's apparent delay.
   Some of their number died and they laid it to heart as though in their
   case their hope had failed.

   Paul wrote to them concerning this--"But I would not have you to be
   ignorant, Brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that you sorrow
   not, even as others which have no hope." They were not losers by their
   death. Those who remained alive till the advent would have no
   preference over those who slept. In their case there was no need to
   write "of the times and the seasons," for they well knew that the Lord
   would come as a thief in the night. They came to expect the immediate
   coming of the Lord as to fall into unhealthy excitement about it. And
   it was needful for Paul, to prevent their becoming fanatical, to say,
   "Now we beseech you, Brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ
   and by our gather-

   ing together unto Him, that you be not soon shaken in mind, or be
   troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as
   that the day of Christ is at hand."

   Paul delighted to see them waiting for the coming of Christ. But he
   also prayed, "The Lord direct your hearts into the patient waiting for
   Christ." He wishes rest to the troubled--but this unrest was a virtue
   carried to excess. We are not, many of us, in danger of exaggeration in
   that direction. I fear that we are more likely to forget the Lord's
   coming, or to treat it as an unpractical speculation. If any Truth of
   God should arouse us this should do it--yet even the wise virgins, as
   well as the foolish, are all too apt to slumber and sleep because the
   Bridegroom delays His coming.

   Hear you not the midnight cry? Does not this startle you? "Behold, the
   Bridegroom comes; go out to meet Him." If you hearken to that call you
   will be the men to sound out the Word of the Lord in every place. If
   we, as a Church and people are more and more influenced by the
   expectation of our Lord's appearing, we shall be more eager to spread
   His Gospel. Remember that He may come at once. Those things of which
   Paul spoke as hindering His coming have now come and gone. Eighteen
   centuries and more have passed away since Paul wrote that the Lord
   comes quickly. Stir up yourselves then, to use all diligence. Proclaim
   His Word and according to your ability go forth into all the world and
   preach the Gospel to every creature. You that look for your Lord--you
   are the men who should herald His coming by a clear testimony to His
   name in every place.

   Thus I have given you hints as to what kind of men are likely to sound
   forth the Word of God. Judge, my Brethren, whether you yourselves have
   these qualifications. It is my sincere impression that they are to be
   found in many of you.

   II. Secondly, let us notice THEIR TRUMPETS. "From you sounded out the
   Word of the Lord." Their testimony was distinct, clear, resonant and
   far-sounding. We may find an illustration in the silver trumpets of the
   sanctuary which were sounded to gather the people together. Let your
   trumpets ring out the call to assemble to our Lord Jesus, the true
   Shiloh--unto whom shall the gathering of the people be. We may further
   think of the Jubilee trumpet which early in the morning proclaimed
   clearance of debts, release from bondage and restoration to lost
   heritages. Such are the glad announcements of the Gospel. Let us hasten
   to make them.

   Trumpets are also blown in time of war--many are the allusions to this
   in Scripture. Oh, that the Church of God may boldly sound the war
   trumpet, at this time, against impurity, intemperance, false doctrine
   and loose living! Our Lord has come to send a sword upon earth in these
   matters. Oh that from each one of us the war blast may be sounded
   without fear or hesitation! Gladly would we also earn the name given to
   the Apostles, "They that turn the world upside down." For at present it
   is wrong side up. A trumpet is also used simply for musical purposes
   and the testimony of the Church to her Lord Jesus should be the most
   melodious sound the ears of man have ever heard--

   "How sweet the name of Jesus sounds!"

   Oh, to sound forth the glorious name "with trumpet and sound of
   cornet," that multitudes might be compelled to hear it! Oh, to make all
   earth and Heaven ring with that dear name! Somebody writing upon this
   verse compares the sounding forth to the voices of Church bells. I will
   suppose that you are sojourning among the hills and have almost lost
   reckoning of the days. How clearly are you told that it is the Sabbath
   morning when you hear the sweet voices of the bells from yonder tower
   far away! The call comes through the wood and over the moor and it
   seems to say, "Come here and worship, for the day of rest has come."

   Each Church should find in its living members its best peal of bells.
   Every individual, great and little, should give forth his sound--no one
   should be dumb, Oh that it were always so--that everyone would
   constantly show forth the praises of the Lord! The Lord of Hosts is
   with us. Let us lift up the shout of a King. He is All in All to us.
   Let us make Him known. God grant us to realize that we may give a loud
   fanfare upon the silver trumpets to our coming Prince!

   What was the means by which these excellent people made the Gospel to
   sound out? It was made known by the remarkable conversions which
   happened among them. These men had been idolaters and had fallen into
   many lusts common in those times. Paul's preaching had made a change
   which none could have looked for. They had been brought to worship the
   true God and to look for His Son from Heaven and to walk worthy of
   their high calling. Everybody asked, "Why, what has happened to these
   Thessalonians? These people have broken their idols--they worship the
   one God. They trust in Jesus. They are no longer drunken, dishonest,
   impure, contentious."

   Everybody talked of what had taken place among these converted people.
   Oh, for conversions plentiful, clear, singular and manifest--so the
   Word of God may sound out! Our converts are our best advertisements and
   arguments. Have you not known a whole town startled by the conversion
   of one great sinner? A distinct, clear-cut conversion will often
   astound an en-

   tire parish and compel the crowd to say, "What is this Word of the
   Lord?" Brothers and Sisters, may your own conversions and those of many
   around you proclaim aloud the power of the Word of God and the efficacy
   of faith in the precious blood of Jesus.

   The attention commanded by their conversion was further secured by
   their unmistakable, unquestionable character. They became such godly,
   honest, upright, sober, saintly people that all who observed them took
   note of their excellence. They were Christians, indeed, for they were
   Christians in their deeds. Their whole lives were affected by their
   faith--both at home and abroad. They were so admirable in character
   that they had become examples to those who were already saved. Notice
   in the seventh verse the remarkable expression, "You were examples to
   all that believe." It is not so difficult to become an example to the
   ungodly, for their level is a low one. But it is a high attainment to
   become an example to those who fear God.

   This requires Divine Grace. If even saints may copy from you, you had
   need write a good hand. The Thessalonians had attained to this, and it
   was by this that they were able to give such voice to the Gospel. Holy
   living is a grand pulpit. A godly character has a louder voice in it
   than the most eloquent tongue. Character is our Chrysostom--holiness
   has a golden mouth. The Apostle says that their lives were so complete
   a publication of the Gospel that he did not need to call attention
   thereto. He writes, "We need not to speak anything"--as much as to say,
   "We have only to point to you." Shall I ever feel that I have little
   need to preach in words since my people preach far better by their
   lives? Yes, there are many cases among you concerning which I might
   say--"There, watch that friend's life and see what the Gospel is--there
   is no need for me to tell you."

   Nobody stands on a summer day and points upward, saying, "There is the
   sun." No, the great light sheds its radiance everywhere and nobody
   mistakes him for the moon or a star. Oh, that all of us were of such a
   character that none should mistake us! Till we have more grace in our
   hearts and more holiness in our lives, we shall lack the greatest means
   of making the Gospel known. We must shine by our works if men are to
   see our light. Oh, what a sounding forth of the Word will your holy
   lives be! Without these, all is vain. If the life contradicts the
   voice, it will be as when a trumpet is stopped up and blow as you may,
   no sound is heard.

   I have no doubt that the Thessalonians added to their character many
   earnest efforts for the spread of the Truth of God. They went about
   telling what they had heard, believed and enjoyed. Some of them became
   preachers of the Word at home and others went abroad to publish the
   glad tidings. Jesus would be made known to the poor in the back slums
   of Thessalonica and talked of to the sailors on board the vessels and
   to the merchants on the wharfs. Are you, Beloved, all of you, making
   Jesus known? Are there any of you silent? Have we not among us some who
   should now be working in foreign lands? Have we not in these pews many
   whose voices should be heard in our streets? We shall never be as we
   ought to be till every talent is utilized. We must be all at it, always
   at it, and at it with all our might. We have not come to this yet. May
   the love of Christ constrain us thereto!

   Meanwhile, it was by their faith that their teaching was made so clear
   and forcible. They were intense Believers, so that Paul says, "Your
   faith to God-ward is spread abroad." They did not half-heartedly teach
   what they half-heartedly believed. They accepted the teaching of the
   Apostle as being not the word of man but the Word of God. And so they
   spoke with the accent of conviction. Those who heard them felt that
   they were enfeebled by no doubts but were filled with full assurance of
   the eternal verities. Their goods were spoiled--they were themselves
   brought before magistrates and yet they stood fast in the faith and had
   no secret mistrust. There was no moving them, although the philosophers
   sneered at them and the superstitious persecuted them. They stood like
   rocks amid raging seas. This was a trumpet for the Gospel blasting
   loudly.

   When holy constancy is to the front under reproach and ridicule, the
   Gospel is sounded as with a bugle note and men are compelled to hear
   it. Brothers and Sisters, you possess this confidence. Have it more and
   more! May we have among us remarkable conversions, unquestionable
   character, earnest effort and intense faith. And these will be to us
   all the trumpet that we need. We need not blow our own trumpets nor
   borrow the whistles of politics or amusement. But the Word of the Lord
   will by these sound forth all around us. I cannot keep you long upon
   these points--my aim is not to fill up the time but to fill you with an
   eager desire to sound out the Truth of God.

   III. Oh that the Holy Spirit would put fire into my sermon--that its
   live coals may touch your hearts while I say that THERE IS NEED, AT THE
   PRESENT TIME, FOR A TRUMPET BLAST OF THIS KIND.

   Brethren, the Word of the Lord ought to be sounded out because it is
   the Word of God. If it is the word of man let him spread it as he can.
   We are not concerned to help him. The word of man comes from a dying
   source and it will return to it. But the Word of the Lord endures
   forever--

   "Float, float, you winds, His story! And you, you waters, roll,

   Till, like a sea of glory,

   It spreads from pole to pole."

   The Word of the Lord is so all-important that it should have a free
   course, run and be glorified. When He gives the word, great should be
   the company of them that publish it. If you believe the Gospel to be
   the Divine Word you dare not withhold it. The stones would cry out if
   you were silent.

   With many of us this is a matter of solemn obligation. The Word of God
   has been to us life from the dead, deliverance out of bondage, food for
   our hunger, strength for our weakness, comfort for our sorrow and
   satisfaction for our hearts. Spread it then--

   "Can you, whose souls are lighted With wisdom from on high, Can you, to
   men unenlightened, The lamp of life deny?"

   Seeing that God's Word has come to you with power and has saved you
   from all evil, you must sound it abroad.

   Remember too, that this is salvation to the perishing. Did not one dear
   Brother and deacon on Monday night pray to the Lord with great fervor,
   reiterating these words, "They are perishing, they are perishing, they
   are perishing, Lord, save them!"? You believe that men are diseased
   with sin and that Christ is the only remedy--will you not tell them the
   remedy? You see men dying without hope--will you not tell them where
   there is hope as to the hereafter? You tremblingly feel that for souls
   to die without accepting the Savior is eternal woe--will you not pray
   for them, in Christ's place, to be reconciled to God? O Sirs, by
   everything that is terrible in the doom of those who die in unbelief, I
   charge you, sound out the Word of the Lord! As you will shortly appear
   before the judgment seat of Christ, be clear of the blood of all men.
   The Gospel has power to save today and to save forever--sound it out!

   This is a time in which the Word of the Lord is much abused. Many
   venture to say that it has lost its power and has proved unsuitable to
   the age. They tell us that we need something more advanced than it. O
   you that love it, avenge this insult by manifesting its power in your
   lives and by sounding out the old Gospel with new vigor! By your holy
   characters, and by your incessant labors, force men to see the power of
   the Divine Word. Let its secret power be embodied in your practical
   consecration and proclaimed in your incessant witness-bearing. When I
   wish to speak best, my tongue fails me. I am a poor advocate. But oh, I
   pray you, by the glory of the Ever Blessed--which is tarnished by the
   foul mouths of ungodly men--seek with sevenfold energy to make known
   Christ Crucified and the way of salvation by faith in Him!

   If you have slept until now, "Awake, awake! Put on strength!" for the
   enemy is at the gate. I beseech you, now that Christ's crown and Throne
   are assailed by His adversaries, put on your armor, grasp the sword and
   stand up for the sacred cause.

   At this time many other voices are clamoring to be heard. The air is
   full of din. Men have devised new methods by which to elevate the race
   and loud are the voices that proclaim the man-invented nostrums. "Shall
   we be heard?" cries one, "if we lift up our voices?" Yes, if you take
   the Gospel trumpet you will enforce a hearing. It chanced one evening,
   when there was a large gathering of friends at the Orphanage that our
   boys were sweetly discoursing a hymn tune upon their bells. An American
   organ was being played as an accompaniment and all the gathered company
   were singing at their best, making a rushing flood of music.

   Just then I quietly hinted to our friend, Mr. Manton Smith, to put in a
   few notes from his silver cornet. And when he placed it to his lips and
   threw his soul into it, the lone man was heard above us all. Bells,
   organ, voices--everything seemed to yield before that one clear blast
   of trumpet music! So will it be with the Gospel. Only sound it out as
   God's own Word and let the power of the Holy Spirit go with it, and it
   will drown all music but its own. At any rate, you will have done your
   part and will be no longer responsible, even if men do not hear it, if
   from your very soul you sound out the Word of the Lord.

   Need I say more to show you how needful it is that we now should put a
   tongue into the heavenly doctrine and let it proclaim salvation to all
   lands?

   V. I want, during my last few minutes, to hint to the members of this
   Church and to those many friends far and near who

   have so generously associated with me in holy enterprises that WE ARE
   THE PEOPLE TO GIVE FORTH THIS SOUND.

   It is our duty, first of all, because of our position. Thessalonica was
   a well-chosen center because it was a place of great resort. Ships were
   always coming into that port and going out again. Whatever was done at
   Thessalonica would soon be known in all quarters. We are placed in a
   central position in London. Who does not know the Tabernacle? Here the
   tribes come up and here the multitudes continually assemble. Friends
   from the country flock to this spot. And on any summer Sabbath, per-

   sons from all countries are in these pews and aisles. I state the
   simple truth when I speak of this house as known to some of all
   nations, and therefore what is done here, is done in the heart of
   England and in the center of the world.

   If you, as a Church, can sound forth by your character and exertions
   the Word of God, you are in the most fit place for it. The position
   demands it of you--act not unworthily. Providence has forced us into
   prominence. We have not desired it, but we are known and observed by
   multitudes. If, Beloved, we keep the fire burning here it will be a
   beacon seen afar. If we are consecrated men and women we have a great
   opportunity. If my helpers will see to it that nothing fails in this
   place, we shall encourage many. But we shall dispirit thousands unless
   we carry on the work here with great vigor, the Lord being our helper.

   Nor can I forget our numbers. There may have been Churches of larger
   numbers than ours but I have never heard of them. In this I do not
   glory but I dare not conceal from you the anxiety which it causes me.
   If little is done by such an assembly it will be a great disgrace to us
   all. I am overwhelmed with the thought of more than five thousand souls
   united here in Church fellowship. Large numbers may be our weakness. We
   may become a mere horde of men without discipline, without unity,
   without power. But I trust in the great Lord that it shall not be so.
   If God has caused us to be as large as almost any other ten Churches
   put together, does He not call upon us to exert ourselves with tenfold
   energy to spread abroad the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ?

   I am sorely burdened with this great host--will you allow it to be a
   burden? Will you not make it a joy? Will all these professed Believers
   make up a crowded hospital? Shall not this house rather be a barrack of
   soldiers? Shall not our voice be louder for our Lord than if we were
   but five hundred instead of five thousand? How would I plead with you
   if I knew how! Do not make this community a gigantic failure. God grant
   that, remembering our numbers, we may not be satisfied with a thin and
   feeble voice for Jesus. Our voice should be as the noise of many
   waters. Is it so? Is it as much so as it ought to be? Oh, for the
   Spirit of God among us as a rushing mighty wind!

   Through our agencies we ought to sound out the Word of the Lord very
   loudly. At this moment you have, by the College, sent out more than
   seven hundred preachers of the Word into all countries. Oh, that they
   were all as faithful as some are! Many are the Churches presided over
   by those trained in your school of the Prophets--pray that the Lord may
   be with them. Your orphan children are growing up--oh, that they may be
   a seed to serve the Lord! Your peddlers are going from door to door
   with holy literature. Oh for the power of God with their laborious
   efforts! Your Evangelists are heard by tens of thousands-- implore the
   unction from on high for them.

   The sermons preached in this place are not only printed in our own
   tongue but many of them are translated into other languages and are
   widely read. This is no mean agency for good. All this, and much more
   which I will not speak upon, I mention not to boast, but that we may be
   humbled under our responsibilities and may cry to God for His power.
   All this, if the Holy Spirit is with us, must accomplish great results.
   But without Him--and we shall be without Him unless we are a holy,
   godly, earnest, Christ-loving people--nothing will be accomplished. Our
   agencies will become burdens to us until that which should be the armor
   of our warfare will become the sepulcher of our life. I feel this more
   than anyone else since the very finding and using of funds for so great
   a work would crush me if the Lord were not my helper.

   Beloved, I press home upon you the duty of sounding out the Word of God
   because of your prayers. If there is a people under Heaven that
   constantly meets in large numbers to pray, we are that people. However
   some of you are lax on this point, but I am bound to say that I rejoice
   in your gatherings for prayer. In this you are my joy and crown. God be
   praised for it! But if any cry to God and then do not work for Him,
   what hypocrisy it is! What if we ask Him to save souls and never lift a
   finger to spread the Gospel? Is this truthful? Dare we hang the trumpet
   on the wall and then pray, "Lord, let it be blown"? No. By the honesty
   of your hearts set that trumpet to your lips if you desire its sound to
   go forth. Give it your very life's breath. Lift up your voice with
   strength--lift it up! Be not afraid.

   Once more--you have stood with me in solemn protest against the
   declensions of the age. He who knows all things knows what this has
   cost me. But your love has been a great relief to me in the bitter
   sorrow. We will have no complicity with error--we will not aid the
   Philistines in shearing away the locks of the Gospel's strength. Having
   protested, we must justify our position by our lives. We shall be
   dishonored unless we have the power of God especially resting upon
   us--that may be a small thing--but the Truth of God itself will be
   dishonored. And this we cannot bear.

   If the Gospel is indeed true--and we have no doubt about it--we beseech
   the God of Truth to grant us the sign and seal from Heaven by baring
   His holy arm in our midst. Today, again, I lay the sacrifice upon the
   altar by reasserting the old Gospel against the down-grade of the
   times. The God that answers by fire let Him be God! May the tongues of
   fire descend and rest on you. May you who are with me, whether in
   London or in the utmost parts of the earth, be inflamed with zeal and
   fired

   with love. May the water in the trenches be licked up by the flame and
   the whole sacrifice be consumed with Heaven's own fire till the people,
   once deluded by Baal, shall be forced to cry, "Jehovah, He is the God!
   Jehovah, He is the God!"

   May the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ triumph in the midst of the
   earth and become, as it always has been, the Truth by which the Glory
   of the Lord shall be revealed! The Lord grant it. Labor, all of you to
   secure it.

   I have not preached to sinners. I leave that, for once, to you. I lay
   on you this burden--that you each one make the Word of the Lord to
   sound out "so that we need not to speak anything." God grant it may be
   so, for Jesus' sake! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

The Gospel of the Glory of Christ

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S DAY MORNING, MARCH 31, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "The light of the glorious Gospel of Christ." 2 Corinthians 4:4

   SHINING in the center of the verse, like a pearl in its setting, you
   find these words. Literally and accurately translated, they run
   thus--"The light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ." This is the
   form given to my text in the Revised Version and I shall follow it
   because, word for word, it follows the original.

   Paul was a man of one idea. The Gospel of Christ had saturated his soul
   as the dew saturated Gideon's fleece. He could think of nothing else
   and speak of nothing else but the glory of Christ Crucified. Important
   events in politics transpired in the Apostle's day but I cannot
   remember an allusion to them. Great social problems were to be solved,
   but his one and only solution was the preaching of that great Savior
   who is to cleanse the Augean stables of the world. For Paul there was
   but one thing worth living for and that one thing was worth dying for.
   He did not count even his life dear unto him that he might win Christ
   and be found in Him.

   Therefore his spirits rose or sank according to the prosperity or
   decline of the kingdom of Christ. When he writes an Epistle his mood
   varies according to the spiritual condition of the people to whom he
   writes. If their faith grows exceedingly and if from them sounds forth
   the Word of God, then he is jubilant in his tone. But if they are
   declining in Divine Grace Divine Grace, if there are divisions among
   them, if false doctrine is ravaging them like a wolf in the sheepfold--
   then he is solemn in spirit and he writes with a heavy hand. In this
   case Paul laments the condition of those who could not see what was so
   plain to himself--namely, the Gospel of the glory of Christ.

   He saw most clearly the glory of his Lord and that precious Gospel
   which is built up thereon and he marveled that others could not see it
   also. Considering their case with care he sorrowfully perceived that
   they must first have shut their eyes by willful unbelief. Therefore he
   felt Satan had exercised his evil power and had utterly blinded them.
   The blaze of the Gospel is so bright, that even with their eyes
   averted, some measure of light must have entered their minds--unless
   some especial evil power had operated to hold them in darkness. The
   devil himself, Paul perceived, must have blinded them, but even Satan
   found it a great task to shut out the glorious light. To accomplish it
   he had to amass all his power as "the god of this world."

   It required a great amount of cunning to close the perceptive faculties
   of men against the clear and forcible light of the Truth of the Gospel.
   The light of the glorious Gospel, like that of the morning dawn, would
   have been seen even by dim eyes had not the infernal prince blindfolded
   the thoughts of men and made their minds as dark as his own. The light
   of the Gospel is intense, and by a faithful ministry it is flashed in
   the very faces of men. Therefore, in fear of losing his subjects, the
   Prince of Darkness hastens to blind their eyes. Jesus comes to give
   sight, but Satan comes to destroy it. They each know the value of those
   eyes by which men look and live. The battle rages at the mental Eye
   Gate. The conflict between the two champions is raised upon the
   question--shall men behold the light--or shall they abide in darkness?

   I wonder whether there are any here at this time who have long been
   willing unbelievers and have at last come to be quite unable to
   perceive any glory in the Gospel of our Lord Jesus. When they hear it
   faithfully preached they flippantly criticize the style of the speaker.
   But the matter of which he speaks appears to them to be of small
   consequence. They pass by the Cross itself and the sorrow of the Lord
   is nothing to them. These may be very intelligent men and women in
   other matters and yet have no perception of the spiritual Truth of God.
   They can perceive a thousand beauties in nature but none in Divine
   Grace. They have drunk of the Castilian fountain but have never sipped
   of "the waters of Shiloh that go

   softly."

   They can discuss at large upon the sublime and beautiful. But they see
   neither beauty nor sublimity in Him who is all that is lovely and all
   that is heavenly. I pray that while I am speaking of the light of the
   Gospel of the glory of Christ that

   light may penetrate their minds. May God who commanded the light to
   shine out of darkness speak again the almighty fiat, saying, "Let there
   be light." And there shall be light. May the miracle of the old
   creation be repeated in the new creation to the praise of the glory of
   Divine Grace.

   First, this morning I shall ask you to think upon Paul's words and
   consider his name for the Gospel--it is "the Gospel of the glory of
   Christ." Secondly, let us consider the light which streams from that
   Gospel of the glory of Christ. When we have thought of these two
   things, let us consider what to do with this light, this marvelous
   light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ.

   I. At the outset LET US CONSIDER PAUL'S NAME FOR THE GOSPEL--"the
   Gospel of the glory of Christ."

   It is very evident that the Apostle felt that the Gospel was solely and
   altogether of Christ. The Anointed was, in his view, the one subject of
   the glad tidings from beginning to end. When He was born the angels
   proclaimed good tidings of great joy to the sons of men. And after His
   death His human messengers went forth to all nations with messages of
   love. His death is the birth of our hope--His resurrection is the
   rising of our buried joy. His session at the right hand of God is the
   prophecy of our eternal bliss. Christ is the Author of the Gospel, the
   Subject of the Gospel and the end of the Gospel. His hand is seen in
   every letter of that wonderful Epistle of Divine love called the New
   Testament, or New Covenant.

   He Himself is glad tidings to us in every point and the Gospel is from
   Him in every sense. That is not Gospel which does not relate to Jesus.
   If there is no mark of blood upon it, the roll of tidings may be
   rejected as a forgery. As Christ is the Subject, so is He the Object of
   the Gospel--His Glory is promoted by the Gospel. It is the Gospel of
   His Glory among the sons of men in all ages and it will be so
   throughout eternity. The Gospel, and the sinners saved by it, will
   glorify the Son of God forever.

   To Paul the Gospel was always a glorious Gospel. He never had dim views
   of its excellence. He never spoke of it as though it stood in doubtful
   competition with Judaism, or heathenism, or the philosophies of the
   Stoics and the Epicureans. These things were but dross to him in
   comparison with the "much fine gold" of the Gospel. He spoke of it in
   glowing terms--he felt it to be a great privilege and responsibility to
   be put in trust with it and to be allowed to preach it. It was the joy
   of his heart to live upon it himself and it was his one aim to proclaim
   it to others. "The glorious Gospel of the blessed God" was his one
   absorbing science and he determined to know nothing else.

   O you that are beginning to think lightly of the old Gospel and dream
   that it is becoming powerless--may the Spirit that rested upon the
   Apostle rest upon you till you, also, shall perceive the glory of the
   method of Divine Grace and shall speak of it fervently as "the glorious
   Gospel of Christ"!

   Returning to the literal translation, we remark that the Apostle saw
   that the excellence of the Gospel lay in the glory of Christ. I shall
   try to show you this. The glorious Savior is the Substance of the
   glorious Gospel. In speaking of this theme I can only repeat what you
   know already, and in that repetition I shall not strive after elaborate
   expressions but tell the story simply, after the manner of the Apostle
   who says, "Seeing, then, that we have such hope, we use great plainness
   of speech." The glory of Christ would be insulted by attempts to set it
   forth with finery of words. Let it be seen in its own light.

   The glory of the Gospel, then, lies very much in the glory of our
   Lord's Person. He who is the Savior of men is God--"God over all,
   blessed forever." Is it not written, "When He brings in the first
   begotten into the world, He says, And let all the angels of God worship
   Him"? With the angels of God we worship Jesus Christ as God. Our
   Redeemer is also man--man like ourselves with this exception--that in
   Him there is no taint of natural depravity and no act of sin has ever
   stained His Character. Behold the glory of Him who is God and Man
   mysteriously united in one Person! He is unique--He is the brightness
   of the Father's glory and the Brother born for adversity.

   This is the Gospel--that the Son of God, Himself, gloriously undertook
   the salvation of men and therefore was made flesh and dwelt among us
   and we beheld His Glory. If we had here a vast hospital full of sick
   people it would be the best of news for those languishing there. If I
   could tell them that a great Physician had devoted Himself to their
   heal-ing--the more I extolled the Physician who had come to visit
   them--the more would there be good news for them. If I could say to
   them, "The Physician who is coming to succor you is possessed of
   infallible wisdom and unerring skill and in Him are united loving
   tenderness and infinite power"--how they would smile upon their beds!

   Why, the very news would half restore them! Should it not be much more
   so with desponding and despairing souls when they hear that He who has
   come to save is none other than the glorious Christ of God? The
   mysteriously majestic

   Person of Christ is the mainstay of the Gospel. He who is able to save
   is no angel and no mere man--He is "Emmanuel, God with us." Infinite
   are His resources, boundless is His Grace. O, you guilty ones who lie
   upon beds of remorse, ready to die of grief, here is a Savior such as
   you need. When you think of what you are and despair--think also of
   what He is--and take heart.

   If I made you doubt the Deity of the Savior I should cut away the
   foundation of your only hope. But while you see Him to be God, you
   remember that nothing is too hard for Him. If I caused you to doubt His
   proper Manhood I should also rob you of comfort, since you would not
   recognize in Him the tender sympathy which grows out of kinship.
   Beloved, the Lord Jesus stands before you commissioned by the eternal
   God with the Spirit of the Lord resting upon Him without measure. And
   thus, being in Nature and Person the first and the best, His message of
   salvation is to you most full and sure and His Glory is Gospel to you.

   The glory of Christ lies not only in His Person but in His love.
   Remember this, and see the Gospel which lies in it. From all eternity
   the Son of God has loved His people--even from of old, "His delights
   were with the sons of men." Long before He came on earth He so loved
   the men whom His Father gave Him that He determined to be one with them
   and for their redemption to pay the dreadful price of life for life. He
   saw the whole company of His chosen in the glass of His foreknowledge
   and loved them with an everlasting love. The love which glowed in the
   heart of our Redeemer "in the beginning"--that same love will never
   know an end!

   Here, to us, is His Glory. He loved us so that Heaven could not hold
   Him. He loved us so that He descended to redeem us. And having come
   among us amid our sin and shame, He loves us still. "Having loved His
   own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end." Love, you
   have reached your utmost glory in the heart of the Divine Savior! And
   the glory of this love which is without beginning, boundary, change, or
   close, is the very lifeblood of the Gospel. The love of Jesus is the
   glad tidings of great joy. Our great Physician loves the sick and
   delights to heal them. He comes into the wards among the palsied and
   the plague-stricken with an intense longing to bless them. Jesus is the
   sinner's Friend. How rapturously does my soul sing of Him as "Jesus,
   lover of my soul"! A gracious Gospel lies in the glory of the love of

   Christ!

   This being so, Beloved, we next see the glory of His incarnation. To us
   it was the glory of Christ that He was born at Bethlehem and dwelt at
   Nazareth. It looks like dishonor that He should be the carpenter's son.
   But throughout all ages this shall be the glory of the Mediator--that
   He deigned to be partaker of our flesh and blood. There is glory in His
   poverty and shame--glory in His having nowhere to lay His head. Glory
   in His weariness and hunger. Surpassing glory springs from Gethsemane
   and the bloody sweat, from Calvary and the death of the Cross. All
   Heaven could not yield Him such renown as that which comes from the
   spitting and the scourging, the nailing and the piercing.

   A glory of Divine Grace and tenderness surrounds the incarnate God. And
   this, to those convicted of sin, is the Gospel. When we see God in
   human flesh we expect reconciliation. When we see that He took our
   infirmities and bore our sicknesses we hope for pardon and healing.
   Born of a virgin, our Lord has come among us and has lived on earth a
   life of service and of suffering--there must be hope for us. He came
   not into the world to condemn the world but that the world through Him
   might be saved. I pray you can see the glory of His life of doing good,
   of working miracles of mercy, of tender care for the fallen. Then ask
   yourselves whether there is not in His life among men good news for all
   sad hearts.

   Did God Himself cover His Glory with a veil of our inferior clay? Then
   He means well to men. Humanity thus honored by union with the Godhead
   is not utterly abhorred. In the Word made flesh we see the Glory of
   God, and noting how love predominates, how condescending pity reigns,
   we see in this a Gospel of Divine Grace for all believing men.

   The glory of Christ is further seen in His atoning sacrifice. But you
   stop me and say, "That was His humiliation and His shame." Yes, it is
   true, and therefore it is His Glory. Is not the Christ to every loving
   heart most of all glorious in the death of the Cross? What garment does
   so well become our Beloved as the vesture dipped in His own blood? He
   is altogether lovely. Let Him be arrayed as He may. But when our
   believing hearts behold Him covered with bloody sweat we gaze upon Him
   with adoring amazement and rapturous love. His flowing crimson bedecks
   Him with a robe more glorious than the imperial purple. We fall at His
   feet with sevenfold reverence when we behold the marks of His passion.

   Is He not most of all illustrious as our dying Substitute? Beloved,
   here lies the marrow of the Gospel. Jesus Christ suffered in our place.
   "He His own self bore our sins in His own body on the tree." That glory
   of His Cross which we again declare to be greater glory than any other,
   is Gospel to us. On His Cross He bore the whole weight of Divine
   justice

   in our place. The iron rod of Jehovah which would have broken us into
   pieces like potters' vessels fell on Him. He "became obedient to death,
   even the death of the Cross," and in that act He slew death and
   overcame him that had the power of death, that is, the devil--

   "His Cross a sure foundation laid For glory and renown,

   When through the regions of the dead He passed to reach the crown."

   Beloved, the glory of His sacrificial death by which He blotted out our
   sin and magnified the Law is the Gospel of our salvation.

   We will now travel a little further to His resurrection--wherein His
   Glory is more palpable to us. He could not be held by the bonds of
   death. He was dead--His holy body could die but it could not see
   corruption. Having slept a little while within the chamber of the tomb,
   He arose and came forth to light and liberty--the living Christ
   glorified by His resurrection. Who shall tell the glory of the risen
   Lord?--

   "Rising, He brought our Heaven to light, And took possession of the
   joy." Rising, He sealed our justification. Rising, He rifled the
   sepulcher and released the captives of death. He was "declared to be
   the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead."

   Let us rejoice that He is not dead, but ever lives to make intercession
   for us. This is the Gospel to us--because He lives we shall live also.
   "He is able to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him,
   seeing He ever lives to make intercession for them." Oh the glory of
   our risen Lord! Consider it deeply, meditate upon it earnestly. And as
   you do so, hear the clear sound of glad tidings of great joy. For our
   greatest consolation we do not look to this precept or to that promise
   so much as to Jesus Himself. It is He who has by His rising from the
   dead given us the surest pledge and guarantee of our deliverance from
   the prison of guilt, the dungeon of despair and the sepulcher of death.

   Once more--lift up your eyes a little higher and note the glory of our
   Lord's enthronement and of His second coming. He sits at the right hand
   of God. He that once was hung upon the tree of shame now sits on the
   Throne of universal dominion. Instead of the nail, behold the scepter
   of all worlds in His most blessed hand. All things are put under His
   feet. Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the
   suffering of death, is now crowned with glory and honor and this is the
   Gospel to us. For it is plain that He has conquered all our enemies and
   has all power in Heaven and in earth on our behalf. His acceptance with
   God is the acceptance of all whom He loves. And He loves all who trust
   Him.

   His sitting in glory is a pledge that the whole of the redeemed by
   blood shall sit there in due time. His second coming, for which we
   daily look, is our most Divine hope. Perhaps before we fall asleep the
   Lord shall descend from Heaven with a shout, with the trump of the
   archangel and the voice of God. And then shall the righteous shine
   forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Then will our weary
   days be ended--the strife of tongues, the struggle against sin, the
   stratagems of error--all will be finished and truth and holiness shall
   reign supreme!

   O my Brethren--if I could but break loose from the impediments of mouth
   and tongue and speak my heart without these cumbrous organs--then would
   I make you rejoice in the glory of my Divine Master upon His Throne
   today and in His glorious appearing at the appointed hour. If we could
   see Him as John did in Patmos we might swoon at His feet. But it would
   be with the rapture of hope and not with the chill of despair. Mark
   this--the less you make of Christ, the less Gospel you have to trust
   in. If you get rid of Christ from your creed you have at the same time
   destroyed all its good news.

   The more Gospel we would preach, the more of Christ we must proclaim.
   If you lift up Christ, you lift up the Gospel. If you dream of
   preaching the Gospel without exalting Christ in it you will give the
   people husks instead of true bread. In proportion as the Lord Jesus is
   set up on a glorious high throne He becomes salvation to the sons of
   men. A little Christ means a little Gospel. But the true Gospel is the
   Gospel of the glory of Christ.

   II. Secondly, LET US CONSIDER THE LIGHT OF THIS GOSPEL. Our Apostle
   speaks of "the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ."

   That light is, first of all, unveiled. Whatever light there was in the
   Law--and there was much--it was latent light. The veil on the face of
   Moses was typical of the way in which the ceremonies of the Law were
   hidden from the sight of men. We forget that a great majority of those
   things we read in the Law were never seen by the Israelites as a
   people. Do

   not suppose that any Israelite ever looked within the veil--none but
   the high priest ever entered there. Even the Holy Place outside the
   veil was reserved for the priests. The most of the sacrificial types
   were as much matters of faith to the Israelites as the meaning is a
   matter of faith to us.

   They did not even see the patterns of the heavenly things--they had to
   be told of them. And in the hearing they had to exercise faith as we
   also do. But, my Brethren, our Gospel is not of the veil which hides,
   but of the lamp which shines. We use no reserve among you. I solemnly
   declare before God that I believe nothing which I do not preach among
   you openly and I give no sense to the words which I use but that which
   is natural to them. "For we are not as many, which corrupt the Word of
   God: but as of sincerity but as from God, in the sight of God speak we
   in Christ."

   We have heard of preachers who believe very differently from what they
   openly say. The deed of trust requires some little consonance with
   evangelical doctrine, but they loathe it in their souls and tell their
   Brethren so in private. But as for us, "we have renounced the hidden
   things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the Word
   of God deceitfully." We dare preach everything that we believe and
   preach it as plainly as possible. The more you know us through and
   through, the more glad we shall be. Our Gospel is one which may be
   advertised everywhere--we have nothing to conceal.

   I have heard that William Gadsby of Manchester, traveling on a coach
   one day, asked two heretical Divines to tell him how a sinner is
   justified in the sight of God. "No," said they, "you won't catch us in
   that fashion. Whatever answer we gave you would be repeated all over
   Manchester within a week." "Oh," said he, "then I will tell you. A
   sinner is justified in the sight of God by faith in the blood and
   righteousness of Jesus Christ. Go and tell that all over Manchester and
   all over England as quickly as you like. For I believe nothing that I
   am ashamed of."

   Light rejoices to proclaim itself. The Gospel is a light and lights are
   not meant to be hidden under bushels or beds. If they are buried in
   that way, they will burn their way to resurrection and the bushels and
   the beds will be consumed and make all the greater light. The Gospel of
   the blessed God is intended to be conspicuous as the lighthouse on the
   rock which is seen afar. It is so illuminating that everyone in the
   house may see by it. The Gospel which is not known is of no value--the
   true Gospel is as much intended to be understood as light is meant to
   be seen.

   This light, in the next place, is all its own. You cannot illuminate
   the Gospel--it is itself an illumination. Would I not be an idiot if I
   were to say to my deacon behind me, "Dear Friend, kindly get me a
   candle--I want to show these people the sun. I do not see the sun just
   now but I will lead them into the street and by the help of this candle
   we will search the sky till we find it"? I think I hear you say, "Our
   pastor is out of his mind." Such conduct might well justify the
   suspicion. It is not by human light that we can show the Gospel of God.
   Not by rhetoric and reasoning do men perceive the light of the Gospel.
   There is a self-manifesting and a self-evidencing power in the Gospel.
   It runs on its own feet and needs no crutches.

   If men would read their Bibles they would, as a rule, believe their
   Bibles. But they will not read them. If men would hear the Gospel
   attentively, they would, as a general rule, believe the Gospel. But
   they will not give it the attention it deserves. It needs no effort to
   see a bright light. If men would only open their eyes to the light of
   the Gospel they would see it. If they would only think upon the glory
   of the Gospel of Christ, its light would find its way into their souls.
   Where the Gospel shines in all its brilliance, men have to put up their
   shutters to keep out its light. But they do even worse-- they call in
   the devil to gouge out their eyes that they may not be forced to see.

   In itself the Gospel has such a wonderful power of making itself felt,
   that if men did not resist its influence it would reveal Divine things
   to them. I wish I could induce unbelievers here to read the story of
   the crucifixion every morning and to keep on reading it and studying
   it. For I am persuaded that the light which streams from the Cross
   would, by the blessing of God, open their eyes and enter their souls
   savingly. For, mark you--the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ
   is Divine light.

   Paul tells us this when he says, "For God, who commanded the light to
   shine out of darkness, has shined in our hearts, to give the light of
   the knowledge of the Glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." The
   Gospel is either Divine or it is a lie--it has a supernatural power
   about it or else it is an impostor. The true power of the Gospel of
   Christ lies not in its natural reasonableness, in its adaptation to
   human need, in its moral beauty, but in the attendant power of the
   Spirit of God. God is in the Gospel and therefore it is mighty.

   We may preach to you for a thousand years altogether and never a soul
   of you would receive Christ unless the same Spirit that spoke light
   into the primeval dark should say, "Let there be light." Salvation is a
   supernatural process. God Himself must come upon the scene before the
   eyes of a man born blind will see. How this Truth exalts God and lowers
   man! Yes. And the lower we are brought, the better. When we get to feel
   our utter helplessness, then will our extremity prove to be the
   opportunity of the Grace of God. O heavenly light, shine now into the
   soul of all who hear or read this sermon!

   This light is a revealing light. Whenever the light of the glory of
   Christ comes streaming into the heart it reveals the hidden things of
   darkness. When the glory of Christ is seen, then we see our own shame
   and sinfulness. Did it need God Himself to redeem us? Then we must have
   been in dire bondage. Did it need the incarnate God should die? Then
   sin must be exceeding sinful! That is a deep pit which needs that God
   should come from Heaven to lift us out of it. We never see the
   impotence and depravity of human nature as well as in the light of the
   glory of Christ.

   When He is seen as undertaking this tremendous work and as putting His
   almighty shoulder to it, then we clearly perceive what help man needed
   and how great was his fall. What a revelation it is when the light
   shines into the secret chambers of imagery and the idol gods are made
   manifest in all their hideousness! May God send this light to many,
   that their ruin, their doom, their remedy, and their way of obtaining
   it may be plainly perceived.

   The light of the Gospel also enlivens. No other light will give life to
   the dead. You may make the strongest light in the world flash
   frequently upon a corpse but there will be neither breath nor pulse.
   But the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ brings life with it.
   "The life was the light of men." "Awake, you that sleep, and arise from
   the dead and Christ shall give you light." Darkness is death, but the
   light of God is life. Let but this Sun of Righteousness arise and He
   not only brings healing but life. Shine, glorious Lord--let Your glory
   shine forth! And as it pours its brilliance into the minds of men their
   dead hearts shall beat with the life of hope and holiness and they will
   see the Lord!

   This light is photographic--you get that in the neighborhood of the
   text--in the last verse of the third chapter. See the Revised
   Version--"But we all, with unveiled face, reflecting as a mirror, the
   glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to
   glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit." The light of the Gospel of
   the glory of Christ imprints Christ's image upon the character of
   Believers. We see Him, and seeing His love we learn to love. Seeing His
   life we learn to live. Seeing His full atonement, we hate evil--seeing
   His resurrection, we rise to newness of life. By the power of the
   Spirit working from day to day we are quietly transformed from our old
   likeness and conformed to the likeness of Christ till our deformity is
   lost in a blessed comeliness of conformity to Him.

   If we saw Him more clearly and more constantly we should grow into His
   likeness more rapidly. No sanctification is worth having but that which
   comes of communion with the holy Lord through the power of the Holy
   Spirit. You may read the biographies of good men and you may copy them
   in all simplicity. But in the end you may become a caricature of
   perfection and not the very image itself. The perfect character of
   Jesus is yet the most easy to imitate. It is safe to copy Jesus. For in
   Him is no excess or defect. And strange to say, that character which is
   in some aspects inimitable is in others the most imitable of all.

   I have often been depressed in view of the high character of certain
   saints whom I honor because I have felt that I could never be like they
   are under any circumstances. I know one who is full of faith and
   goodness. But he is always solemn and constantly absorbed "in high
   meditations." I never could grow exactly like he is, for there are
   certain mirthful elements in my constitution. And if they were taken
   away I should not be the same man. When I look at my Lord I see much in
   Him that is supernatural but nothing that is unnatural. We see in Him
   humanity in perfection. But the perfection never conceals the humanity.
   He is so holy as to be a perfect model--so human as to be a model
   available for poor creatures such as we are. Beloved, the light of the
   Gospel of the glory of Christ is photographic.

   Yet further--it creates peace and joy. This light brings delight. I
   cannot imagine a man unhappy who clearly perceives the light of the
   glory of Christ. Is Christ glorious? Then it does not much matter what
   becomes of me. Have you ever heard of the dying and wounded soldiers in
   Napoleon's wars who still clung to their emperor with an idolatrous
   love in the hour of death? Lifting himself upon his elbow, the soldier
   of the Old Guard gave one more cheer for the great captain. If the
   dying warrior saw Napoleon riding over the field he would with his last
   gasp cry, "Vive l'Empereur!" and then expire.

   We read of one that when the surgeons were trying to extract a bullet
   from his chest said, "Go a little deeper and you will find the
   Emperor." He had him on his heart. Infinitely more commendable is the
   loyalty of the Believer to the Lord Christ. Though we die in a ditch,
   what does it matter so long as "God also has highly exalted Him and
   given Him a name which is above every name: that at the name of Jesus
   every knee should bow, of things in Heaven and things in earth and
   things under the earth. And that every tongue should confess that Jesus
   Christ is Lord, to the Glory of God the Father"?

   It makes the sick saint well to think of the triumphs of his Lord. Have
   you ever, when you have been sitting here heavy in heart, been borne
   aloft on wings of delight when we have been singing--

   "Bring forth the royal diadem, And crown Him Lord of all"?

   Surely there is a Gospel in the glory of Christ to our sad hearts. That
   Gospel lifts us out of the dumps of doubt and fear into the clear blue
   sky of heavenly fellowship. God grant that we may feel this uplifting
   more and more! Thus have I tried to describe the qualities of this
   light. But you must see it for yourselves.

   III. And now I close by saying, LET US CONSIDER WHAT WE SHALL DO WITH
   THIS LIGHT.

   Do with it? Look towards it. Let us first indulge ourselves with a long
   and steady gaze upon it. No man can look long at the sun for it would
   blind him. But you may look at Jesus, the Sun of Righteousness, as long
   as you please and your eyes will grow stronger the longer you gaze on
   His perfections. I beseech you, Beloved in the Lord, to get alone and
   give yourself to meditate upon the glory of the once-despised Jesus.
   Track Him from the cradle to the Cross, from the Cross to the crown. I
   cannot suggest to you any subject more instructive, more comforting,
   more ennobling than this. Look at this light--or it is a pleasant thing
   to behold--this sun.

   Have you ever heard how the Laplanders climb the hills when the sun is
   at last about to appear after the weary winter months? How they rejoice
   in the first beams of the rising sun! So let us rise to lofty
   meditation and look to our Lord and Master till we perceive His
   mediatorial glory and are blessed thereby. Have you no time? Give up
   your newspaper for a week that you may sanctify the time to the noble
   end of considering the glory of your Lord. If you will, I will warrant
   that you shall get a thousand times more out of such thought than from
   skimming the daily journal. Look unto Jesus and the light within will
   grow like the glory of Heaven.

   If you say that a man cannot always stand looking at the sun, I admit
   it, and change my advice to you. See all things by this light. How
   differently things look in sunlight to what they do by gaslight or
   candlelight! Let us regard all things by their appearance in the light
   of the glory of Christ. Then if you hear a sermon which does not
   glorify Christ it will be a lost discourse to you. Do not endure to see
   your Lord set in a low place. Hear no more of that talk which makes
   little of His blood and of His Substitution. You read a book--a very
   clever book--but instead of honoring Christ it glorifies human nature
   and you have soon had enough of it. Only that which is a good Gospel
   glorifies Christ--in this light you see things truly.

   Many of the wise men of the period ought to be treated as Diogenes
   treated Alexander. The conqueror of the world said to the man in the
   tub, "What can I do for you?" He thought he could do everything for the
   poor philosopher. Diogenes only replied, "Get out of the sunlight."
   These wise people cannot do us a greater favor than to remove their
   learned selves from standing between us and the sunlight of the
   ever-blessed Gospel of the glory of Christ. These Alexanders may go on
   ruling the Christian world, and the infidel world, but they have not
   conquered us. Our faith and joy lie outside the world--in yonder Sun of
   Righteousness whose light is the rejoicing of our eyes!

   Beloved, when asked what we should do with this light, I answer
   again--value it. Esteem the glorious Gospel of Christ more than all
   besides. See at what rate the devil reckons it! He takes the trouble
   himself, to come up from the bottomless pit to blind men's eyes for
   fear they should see it. When he perceives the blaze of the Gospel of
   the Glory of God, he says to himself, "Ah, they will be seeing the
   Truth of God and so they will escape from me. I must go myself and
   blind them." So the "god of this age," as he esteems himself, comes to
   unbelievers and blindfolds them in one way or another. He thrusts the
   hot iron of fatal unbelief upon men's inward eyes and seals them in
   blackest night lest they should see "the light of the Gospel of the
   glory of Christ." Since, then, the devil thinks so much of this light,
   let us spread it with all diligence. If Satan hates it, let us love it.
   If this is the great gun which he dreads--let us wheel it to the front
   and keep up a constant cannonade from it.

   The Gospel is our Mons Meg, the biggest gun in the castle. But it is
   not out of date--it will carry a ball far enough to reach the heart of
   the sinner who is furthest from God. Satan trembles when he hears the
   roar of the Gospel gun. Let it never be silent.

   Let us also hold it out with the greatest confidence. This light must
   win in the long run. If you came to this building in the middle of the
   night somebody might say to you, "How can we get the darkness out of
   this building?" It would be a hopeless task. How could it be done? You
   cannot pump out the darkness. But if you fill the house with light the
   darkness will vanish of itself. Preach Christ and away goes the god of
   this world. Exalt Christ and down goes the devil. Beloved, let us
   persuade men to let this light shine around them. They cannot see it
   because of unbelief. But if it shines around them, it may bring them
   eyes. God the Holy Spirit blessing it, light will beget sight. Induce
   your friends to hear the Gospel and read the Word of God and who can
   tell but they will be saved?

   And, lastly, let all who try to preach and teach keep Christ always in
   the front. The Gospel must have Christ as its center and its
   circumference. In fact, as its All in All. The Gospel is not the Gospel
   without Christ. The Gospel will have no dominant idea in it but Christ.
   It is a noble steed but it will bear no rider but He whose vesture is
   dipped in blood. I have read of the famous horse Bucephalus, that when
   he was brought out with his royal trappings upon him he would not allow
   one even of the highest nobles of the court to mount him. He would
   carry no one but Alexander, the king.

   The Gospel is glorious in its going when it bears Jesus in the saddle.
   But if you preach yourself or human philosophy the Gospel will fling
   you over its head. Let us sing with the blessed virgin, "My soul does
   magnify the Lord and my spirit does rejoice in God my Savior." This is
   a Gospel sonnet--this is a song which our Well-Beloved deserves of us.
   O you preachers and teachers, lift up Christ! He is as the serpent on
   the pole and all who look to Him shall live forever.

   Look to Him all you that are dying of serpent bites--for looking you
   shall LIVE. God bless these words in which I have desired to glorify my
   Lord! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

                              The Believing Thief

   A Sermon

   (No. 2078)

   Delivered on Lord's-day Morning, April 7th, 1889,

   C. H. SPURGEON,

   At [3]the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington

   "And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy
   kingdom. And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt
   thou be with me in paradise."'Luke 23:42-43.

   SOME TIME AGO I preached upon the whole story of the dying thief. I do
   not propose to do the same to-day, but only to look at it from one
   particular point of view. The story of the salvation of the dying thief
   is a standing instance of the power of Christ to save, and of his
   abundant willingness to receive all that come to him, in whatever
   plight they may be. I cannot regard this act of grace as a solitary
   instance, any more than the salvation of Zacchaeus, the restoration of
   Peter, or the call of Saul, the persecutor. Every conversion is, in a
   sense, singular: no two are exactly alike, and yet any one conversion
   is a type of others. The case of the dying thief is much more similar
   to our conversion than it is dissimilar; in point of fact, his case may
   be regarded as typical, rather than as an extraordinary incident. So I
   shall use it at this time. May the Holy Spirit speak through it to the
   encouragement of those who are ready to despair!

   Remember, beloved friends, that our Lord Jesus, at the time he saved
   this malefactor, was at his lowest. His glory had been ebbing out in
   Gethsemane, and before Caiaphas, and Herod, and Pilate; but it had now
   reached the utmost low-water mark. Stripped of his garments, and nailed
   to the cross, our Lord was mocked by a ribald crowd, and was dying in
   agony: then was he "numbered with the transgressors," and made as the
   offscouring of all things. Yet, while in that condition, he achieved
   this marvellous deed of grace. Behold the wonder wrought by the Saviour
   when emptied of all his glory, and hanged up a spectacle of shame upon
   the brink of death! How certain is it it that he can do great wonders
   of mercy now, seeing that he has returned unto his glory, and sitteth
   upon the throne of light! "He is able to save them to the uttermost
   that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession
   for them." If a dying Saviour saved the thief, my argument is, that he
   can do even more now that he liveth and reigneth. All power is given
   unto him in heaven and in earth; can anything at this present time
   surpass the power of his grace?

   It is not only the weakness of our Lord which makes the salvation of
   the penitent thief memorable; it is the fact that the dying malefactor
   saw it before his very eyes. Can you put yourself into his place, and
   suppose yourself to be looking upon one who hangs in agony upon a
   cross? Could you readily believe him to be the Lord of glory, who would
   soon come to his kingdom? That was no mean faith which, at such a
   moment, could believe in Jesus as Lord and King. If the apostle Paul
   were here, and wanted to add a New Testament chapter to the eleventh of
   Hebrews, he might certainly commence his instances of remarkable faith
   with this thief, who believed in a crucified, derided, and dying
   Christ, and cried to him as to one whose kingdom would surely come. The
   thief's faith was the more remarkable because he was himself in great
   pain, and bound to die. It is not easy to exercise confidence when you
   are tortured with deadly anguish. Our own rest of mind has at times
   been greatly hindered by pain of body. When we are the subjects of
   acute suffering it is not easy to exhibit that faith which we fancy we
   possess at other times. This man, suffering as he did, and seeing the
   Saviour in so sad a state, nevertheless believed unto life eternal.
   Herein was such faith as is seldom seen.

   Recollect, also, that he was surrounded by scoffers. It is easy to swim
   with the current, and hard to go against the stream. This man heard the
   priests, in their pride, ridicule the Lord, and the great multitude of
   the common people, with one consent, joined in the scorning; his
   comrade caught the spirit of the hour, and mocked also, and perhaps he
   did the same for a while; but through the grace of God he was changed,
   and believed in the Lord Jesus in the teeth of all the scorn. His faith
   was not affected by his surroundings; but he, dying thief as he was,
   made sure his confidence. Like a jutting rock, standing out in the
   midst of a torrent, he declared the innocence of the Christ whom others
   blasphemed. His faith is worthy of our imitation in its fruits. He had
   no member that was free except his tongue, and he used that member
   wisely to rebuke his brother malefactor, and defend his Lord. His faith
   brought forth a brave testimony and a bold confession. I am not going
   to praise the thief, or his faith, but to extol the glory of that grace
   divine which gave the thief such faith, and then freely saved him by
   its means. I am anxious to show how glorious is the Saviour'that
   Saviour to the uttermost, who, at such a time, could save such a man,
   and give him so great a faith, and so perfectly and speedily prepare
   him for eternal bliss. Behold the power of that divine Spirit who could
   produce such faith on soil so unlikely, and in a climate so
   unpropitious.

   Let us enter at once into the centre of our sermon. First, note the man
   who was our Lord's last companion on earth; secondly, note that this
   same man was our Lord's first companion at the gate of paradise; and
   then, thirdly, let us note the sermon which our Lord preaches to us
   from this act of grace. Oh, for a blessing from the Holy Spirit all the
   sermon through!

   I. Carefully NOTE THAT THE CRUCIFIED THIEF WAS OUR LORD'S LAST
   COMPANION ON EARTH. What sorry company our Lord selected when he was
   here! He did not consort with the religious Pharisees or the
   philosophic Sadducees, but he was known as "the friend of publicans and
   sinners." How I rejoice at this! It gives me assurance that he will not
   refuse to associate with me. When the Lord Jesus made a friend of me,
   he certainly did not make a choice which brought him credit. Do you
   think he gained any honour when he made a friend of you? Has he ever
   gained anything by us? No, my brethren; if Jesus had not stooped very
   low, he would not have come to me; and if he did not seek the most
   unworthy, he might not have come to you. You feel it so, and you are
   thankful that he came "not to call the righteous, but sinners to
   repentance." As the great physician, our Lord was much with the sick:
   he went where there was room for him to exercise his healing art. The
   whole have no need of a physician: they cannot appreciate him, nor
   afford scope for his skill; and therefore he did not frequent their
   abodes. Yes, after all, our Lord did make a good choice when he saved
   you and me; for in us he has found abundant room for his mercy and
   grace. There has been elbow room for his love to work within the awful
   emptiness of our necessities and sins; and therein he has done great
   things for us, whereof we are glad.

   Lest any here should be despairing, and say, "He will never deign to
   look on me," I want you to notice that the last companion of Christ on
   earth was a sinner, and no ordinary sinner. He had broken even the laws
   of man, for he was a robber. One calls him "a brigand"; and I suppose
   it is likely to have been the case. The brigands of those days mixed
   murder with their robberies: he was probably a freebooter in arms
   against the Roman government, making this a pretext for plundering as
   he had opportunity. At last he was arrested, and was condemned by a
   Roman tribunal, which, on the whole, was usually just, and in this case
   was certainly just; for he himself confesses the justice of his
   condemnation. The malefactor who believed upon the cross was a convict,
   who had lain in the condemned cell, and was then undergoing execution
   for his crimes. A convicted felon was the person with whom our Lord
   last consorted upon earth. What a lover of the souls of guilty men is
   he! What a stoop he makes to the very lowest of mankind! To this most
   unworthy of men the Lord of glory, ere he quitted life, spoke with
   matchless grace. He spoke to him such wondrous words as never can be
   excelled if you search the Scriptures through: "To-day shalt thou be
   with me in paradise." I do not suppose that anywhere in this Tabernacle
   there will be found a man who has been convicted before the law, or who
   is even chargeable with a crime against common honesty; but if there
   should be such a person among my hearers, I would invite him to find
   pardon and change of heart through our Lord Jesus Christ. You may come
   to him, whoever you may be; for this man did. Here is a specimen of one
   who had gone to the extreme of guilt, and who acknowledged that he had
   done so; he made no excuse, and sought no cloak for his sin; he was in
   the hands of justice, confronted with the death-doom, and yet he
   believed in Jesus, and breathed a humble prayer to him, and he was
   saved upon the spot. As is the sample, such is the bulk. Jesus saves
   others of like kind. Let me, therefore, put it very plainly here, that
   none may mistake me. None of you are excluded from the infinite mercy
   of Christ, however great your iniquity: if you believe in Jesus, he
   will save you.

   This man was not only a sinner; he was a sinner newly awakened. I do
   not suppose that he had seriously thought of the Lord Jesus before.
   According to the other Evangelists, he appears to have joined with his
   fellow thief in scoffing at Jesus: if he did not actually himself use
   opprobrious words, he was so far consenting thereunto, that the
   Evangelist did him no injustice when he said, "The thieves also, which
   were crucified with him, cast the same in his teeth." Yet, now, on a
   sudden, he wakes up to the conviction that the man who is dying at his
   side is something more than a man. He reads the title over his head,
   and believes it to be true'"This is Jesus the King of the Jews." Thus
   believing, he makes his appeal to the Messiah, whom he had so newly
   found, and commits himself to his hands. My hearer, do you see this
   truth, that the moment a man knows Jesus to be the Christ of God he may
   at once put his trust in him and be saved? A certain preacher, whose
   gospel was very doubtful, said, "Do you, who have been living in sin
   for fifty years, believe that you can in a moment be made clean through
   the blood of Jesus?" I answer, "Yes, we do believe that in one moment,
   through the precious blood of Jesus, the blackest soul can be made
   white. We do believe that in a single instant the sins of sixty or
   seventy years can be absolutely forgiven, and that the old nature,
   which has gone on growing worse and worse, can receive its death-wound
   in a moment of time, while the life eternal may be implanted in the
   soul at once." It was so with this man. He had reached the end of his
   tether, but all of a sudden he woke up to the assured conviction that
   the Messiah was at his side, and, believing, he looked to him and
   lived.

   So now, my brothers, if you have never in your life before been the
   subject of any religious conviction, if you have lived up till now an
   utterly ungodly life, yet if now you will believe that God's dear Son
   has come into the world to save men from sin, and will unfeignedly
   confess your sin and trust in him, you shall be immediately saved. Ay,
   while I speak the word, the deed of grace may be accomplished by that
   glorious One who has gone up into the heaven with omnipotent power to
   save.

   I desire to put this case very plainly: this man, who was the last
   companion of Christ upon earth, was a sinner in misery. His sins had
   found him out: he was now enduring the reward of his deeds. I
   constantly meet with persons in this condition: they have lived a life
   of wantonness, excess, and carelessness, and they begin to feel the
   fire-flakes of the tempest of wrath falling upon their flesh; they
   dwell in an earthly hell, a prelude of eternal woe. Remorse, like an
   asp, has stung them, and set their blood on fire: they cannot rest,
   they are troubled day and night. "Be sure your sin will find you out."
   It has found them out, and arrested them, and they feel the strong grip
   of conviction. This man was in that horrible condition: what is more,
   he was in extremis. He could not live long: the crucifixion was sure to
   be fatal; in a short time his legs would be broken, to end his wretched
   existence. He, poor soul, had but a short time to live'only the space
   between noon and sundown; but it was long enough for the Saviour, who
   is mighty to save. Some are very much afraid that people will put off
   coming to Christ, if we state this. I cannot help what wicked men do
   with truth, but I shall state it all the same. If you are now within an
   hour of death, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be
   saved. If you never reach your homes again, but drop dead on the road,
   if you will now believe in the Lord Jesus, you shall be saved: saved
   now, on the spot. Looking and trusting to Jesus, he will give you a new
   heart and a right spirit, and blot out your sins. This is the glory of
   Christ's grace. How I wish I could extol it in proper language! He was
   last seen on earth before his death in company with a convicted felon,
   to whom he spoke most lovingly. Come, O ye guilty, and he will receive
   you graciously!

   Once more, this man whom Christ saved at last was a man who could do no
   good works. If salvation had been by good works, he could not have been
   saved; for he was fastened hand and foot to the tree of doom. It was
   all over with him as to any act or deed of righteousness. He could say
   a good word or two, but that was all; he could perform no acts; and if
   his salvation had depended on an active life of usefulness, certainly
   he never could have been saved. He was a sinner also, who could not
   exhibit a long-enduring repentance for sin, for he had so short a time
   to live. He could not have experienced bitter convictions, lasting over
   months and years, for his time was measured by moments, and he was on
   the borders of the grave. His end was very near, and yet the Saviour
   could save him, and did save him so perfectly, that the sun went not
   down till he was in paradise with Christ.

   This sinner, whom I have painted to you in colours none too black, was
   one who believed in Jesus, and confessed his faith. He did trust the
   Lord. Jesus was a man, and he called him so; but he knew that he was
   also Lord, and he called him so, and said, "Lord, remember me." He had
   such confidence in Jesus, that, if he would but only think of him, if
   he would only remember him when he came into his kingdom, that would be
   all that he would ask of him. Alas, my dear hearers! the trouble about
   some of you is that you know all about my Lord, and yet you do not
   trust him. Trust is the saving act. Years ago you were on the verge of
   really trusting Jesus, but you are just as far off from it now as you
   were then. This man did not hesitate: he grasped the one hope for
   himself. He did not keep his persuasion of our Lord's Messiahship in
   his mind as a dry, dead belief, but he turned it into trust and prayer,
   "Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom." Oh, that in his
   infinite mercy many of you would trust my Lord this morning! You shall
   be saved, I am sure you shall: if you are not saved when you trust, I
   must myself also renounce all hope. This is all that we have done: we
   looked, and we lived, and we continue to live because we look to the
   living Saviour. Oh, that this morning, feeling your sin, you would look
   to Jesus, trusting him, and confessing that trust! Owning that he is
   Lord to the glory of God the Father, you must and shall be saved.

   In consequence of having this faith which saved him, this poor man
   breathed the humble but fitting prayer, "Lord, remember me." This does
   not seem to ask much; but as he understood it, it meant all that an
   anxious heart could desire. As he thought of the kingdom, he had such
   clear ideas of the glory of the Saviour, that he felt that if the Lord
   would think of him his eternal state would be safe. Joseph, in prison,
   asked the chief butler to remember him when he was restored to power;
   but he forgat him. Our Joseph never forgets a sinner who cried to him
   in the low dungeon; in his kingdom he remembers the moanings and
   groanings of poor sinners who are burdened with a sense of sin. Can you
   not pray this morning, and thus secure a place in the memory of the
   Lord Jesus?

   Thus I have tried to describe the man; and, after having done my best,
   I shall fail of my object unless I make you see that whatever this
   thief was, he is a picture of what you are. Especially if you have been
   a great offender, and if you have been living long without caring for
   eternal things, you are like that malefactor; and yet you, even you,
   may do as that thief did; you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, and
   commit your souls into his hands, and he will save you as surely as he
   saved the condemned brigand. Jesus graciously says, "Him that cometh to
   me I will in no wise cast out." This means that if you come and trust
   him, whoever you may be, he will for no reason, and on no ground, and
   under no circumstances, ever cast you out. Do you catch that thought?
   Do you feel that it belongs to you, and that if you come to him, you
   shall find eternal life? I rejoice if you so far perceive the truth.

   Few persons have so much intercourse with desponding and despairing
   souls as I have. Poor cast down ones write to me continually. I scarce
   know why. I have no special gift of consolation, but I gladly lay
   myself out to comfort the distressed, and they seem to know it. What
   joy I have when I see a despairing one find peace! I have had this joy
   several times during the week just ended. How much I desire that any of
   you who are breaking your hearts because you cannot find forgiveness
   would come to my Lord, and trust him, and enter into rest! Has he not
   said, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will
   give you rest"? Come and try him, and that rest shall be yours.

   II. In the second place, NOTE, THAT THIS MAN WAS OUR LORD'S COMPANION
   AT THE GATE OF PARADISE. I am not going into any speculations as to
   where our Lord went when he quitted the body which hung on the cross.
   It would seem, from some Scriptures, that he descended into the lower
   parts of the earth, that he might fill all things. But he very rapidly
   traversed the regions of the dead. Remember that he died, perhaps an
   hour or two before the thief, and during that time the eternal glory
   flamed through the underworld, and was flashing through the gates of
   paradise just when the pardoned thief was entering the eternal world.
   Who is this that entereth the pearl-gate at the same moment as the King
   of glory? Who is this favoured companion of the Redeemer? Is it some
   honoured martyr? Is it a faithful apostle? Is it a patriarch, like
   Abraham; or a prince, like David? It is none of these. Behold, and be
   amazed at sovereign grace. He that goeth in at the gate of paradise,
   with the King of glory, is a thief, who was saved in the article of
   death. He is saved in no inferior way, and received into bliss in no
   secondary style. Verily, there are last which shall be first!

   Here I would have you notice the condescension of our Lord's choice.
   The comrade of the Lord of glory, for whom the cherub turns aside his
   sword of fire, is no great one, but a newly-converted malefactor. And
   why? I think the Saviour took him with him as a specimen of what he
   meant to do. He seemed to say to all the heavenly powers, "I bring a
   sinner with me; he is a sample of the rest." Have you never heard of
   him who dreamed that he stood without the gate of heaven, and while
   there he heard sweet music from a band of venerable persons who were on
   their way to glory? They entered the celestial portals, and there were
   great rejoicing and shouts. Enquiring "What are these?" he was told
   that they were the goodly fellowship of the prophets. He sighed, and
   said, "Alas! I am not one of those." He waited a while, and another
   band of shining ones drew nigh, who also entered heaven with
   hallelujahs, and when he enquired, "Who are these, and whence came
   they?" the answer was, "These are the glorious company of the
   apostles." Again he sighed, and said, "I cannot enter with them." Then
   came another body of men white-robed, and bearing palms in their hands,
   who marched amid great acclamation into the golden city. These he
   learned were the noble army of martyrs; and again he wept, and said, "I
   cannot enter with these." In the end he heard the voices of much
   people, and saw a greater multitude advancing, among whom he perceived
   Rahab and Mary Magdalene, David and Peter, Manasseh and Saul of Tarsus,
   and he espied especially the thief, who died at the right hand of
   Jesus. These all entered in'a strange company. Then he eagerly
   enquired, "Who are these?" and they answered, "This is the host of
   sinners saved by grace." Then was he exceeding glad, and said, "I can
   go with these." Yet, he thought there would be no shouting at the
   approach of this company, and that they would enter heaven without
   song; instead of which, there seemed to rise a seven-fold hallelujah of
   praise unto the Lord of love; for there is joy in the presence of the
   angels of God over sinners that repent.

   I invite any poor soul here that can neither aspire to serve Christ,
   nor to suffer for him as yet, nevertheless to come in with other
   believing sinners, in the company of Jesus, who now sets before us an
   open door.

   While we are handling this text, note well the blessedness of the place
   to which the Lord called this penitent. Jesus said, "To day shalt thou
   be with me in paradise." Paradise means a garden, a garden filled with
   delights. The garden of Eden is the type of heaven. We know that
   paradise means heaven, for the apostle speaks of such a man caught up
   into paradise, and anon he calls it the third heaven. Our Saviour took
   this dying thief into the paradise of infinite delight, and this is
   where he will take all of us sinners who believe in him. If we are
   trusting him, we shall ultimately be with him in paradise.

   The next word is better still. Note the glory of the society to which
   this sinner is introduced: "To day shalt thou be with me in paradise."
   If the Lord said, "To day shalt thou be with me," we should not need
   him to add another word; for where he is, is heaven to us. He added the
   word "paradise," because else none could have guessed where he was
   going. Think of it, you uncomely soul; you are to dwell with the
   Altogether-lovely One for ever. You poor and needy ones, you are to be
   with him in his glory, in his bliss, in his perfection. Where he is,
   and as he is, you shall be. The Lord looks into those weeping eyes of
   yours this morning, and he says, "Poor sinner, thou shalt one day be
   with me." I think I hear you say, "Lord, that is bliss too great for
   such a sinner as I am"; but he replies'I have loved thee with an
   everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness will I draw thee, till
   thou shalt be with me where I am.

   The stress of the text lies in the speediness of all this. "Verily I
   say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise." "To day."
   Thou shalt not lie in purgatory for ages, nor sleep in limbo for so
   many years; but thou shalt be ready for bliss at once, and at once thou
   shalt enjoy it. The sinner was hard by the gates of hell, but almighty
   mercy lifted him up, and the Lord said, "To day shalt thou be with me
   in paradise." What a change from the cross to the crown, from the
   anguish of Calvary to the glory of the New Jerusalem! In those few
   hours the beggar was lifted from the dunghill and set among princes.
   "To day shalt thou be with me in paradise." Can you measure the change
   from that sinner, loathsome in his iniquity, when the sun was high at
   noon, to that same sinner, clothed in pure white, and accepted in the
   Beloved, in the paradise of God, when the sun went down? O glorious
   Saviour, what marvels thou canst work! How rapidly canst thou work
   them!

   Please notice, also, the majesty of the Lord's grace in this text. The
   Saviour said to him, "Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with
   me in paradise." Our Lord gives his own will as the reason for saving
   this man. "I say." He says it who claims the right thus to speak. It is
   he who will have mercy on whom he will have mercy, and will have
   compassion on whom he will have compassion. He speaks royally, "Verily
   I say unto thee." Are they not imperial words? The Lord is a King in
   whose word there is power. What he says none can gainsay. He that hath
   the keys of hell and of death saith, "I say unto thee, To day shalt
   thou be with me in paradise." Who shall prevent the fulfilment of his
   word?

   Notice the certainty of it. He says, "Verily." Our blessed Lord on the
   cross returned to his old majestic manner, as he painfully turned his
   head, and looked on his convert. He was wont to begin his preaching
   with, "Verily, verily, I say unto you"; and now that he is dying he
   uses his favourite manner, and says, "Verily." Our Lord took no oath;
   his strongest asseveration was, "Verily, verily." To give the penitent
   the plainest assurance, he says, "Verily I say unto thee, To-day shalt
   thou be with me in paradise." In this he had an absolutely indisputable
   assurance that though he must die, yet he would live and find himself
   in paradise with his Lord.

   I have thus shown you that our Lord passed within the pearly gate in
   company with one to whom he had pledged himself. Why should not you and
   I pass through that pearl-gate in due time, clothed in his merit,
   washed in his blood, resting on his power? One of these days angels
   will say of you, and of me, "Who is this that cometh up from the
   wilderness, leaning upon her beloved?" The shining ones will be amazed
   to see some of us coming. If you have lived a life of sin until now,
   and yet shall repent and enter heaven, what an amazement there will be
   in every golden street to think that you have come there! In the early
   Christian church Marcus Caius Victorinus was converted; but he had
   reached so great an age, and had been so gross a sinner, that the
   pastor and church doubted him. He gave, however, clear proof of having
   undergone the divine change, and then there were great acclamations,
   and many shouts of "Victorinus has become a Christian!" Oh, that some
   of you big sinners might be saved! How gladly would we rejoice over
   you! Why not? Would it not glorify God? The salvation of this convicted
   highwayman has made our Lord illustrious for mercy even unto this day;
   would not your case do the same? Would not saints cry, "Hallelujah!
   hallelujah!" if they heard that some of you had been turned from
   darkness to marvellous light? Why should it not be? Believe in Jesus,
   and it is so.

   III. Now I come to my third and most practical point: NOTE THE LORD'S
   SERMON TO US FROM ALL THIS.

   The devil wants to preach this morning a bit. Yes, Satan asks to come
   to the front and preach to you; but he cannot be allowed. Avaunt, thou
   deceiver! Yet I should not wander if he gets at certain of you when the
   sermon is over, and whispers, "You see you can be saved at the very
   last. Put off repentance and faith; you may be forgiven on your
   death-bed." Sirs, you know who it is that would ruin you by this
   suggestion. Abhor his deceitful teaching. Do not be ungrateful because
   God is kind. Do not provoke the Lord because he is patient. Such
   conduct would be unworthy and ungrateful. Do not run an awful risk
   because one escaped the tremendous peril. The Lord will accept all who
   repent; but how do you know that you will repent? It is true that one
   thief was saved'but the other thief was lost. One is saved, and we may
   not despair; the other is lost, and we may not presume. Dear friends, I
   trust you are not made of such diabolical stuff as to fetch from the
   mercy of God an argument for continuing in sin. If you do, I can only
   say of you, your damnation will be just; you will have brought it upon
   yourselves.

   Consider now the teaching of our Lord; see the glory of Christ in
   salvation. He is ready to save at the last moment. He was just passing
   away; his foot was on the doorstep of the Father's house. Up comes this
   poor sinner the last thing at night, at the eleventh hour, and the
   Saviour smiles and declares that he will not enter except with this
   belated wanderer. At the very gate he declares that this seeking soul
   shall enter with him. There was plenty of time for him to have come
   before: you know how apt we are to say, "You have waited to the last
   moment. I am just going off, and I cannot attend to you now." Our Lord
   had his dying pangs upon him, and yet he attends to the perishing
   criminal, and permits him to pass through the heavenly portal in his
   company. Jesus easily saves the sinners for whom he painfully died.
   Jesus loves to rescue sinners from going down into the pit. You will be
   very happy if you are saved, but you will not be one half so happy as
   he will be when he saves you. See how gentle he is!

   "His hand no thunder bears,

   No terror clothes his brow;

   No bolts to drive our guilty souls

   To fiercer flames below."

   He comes to us full of tenderness, with tears in his eyes, mercy in his
   hands, and love in his heart. Believe him to be a great Saviour of
   great sinners. I have heard of one who had received great mercy who
   went about saying, "He is a great forgiver;" and I would have you say
   the same. You shall find your transgressions put away, and your sins
   pardoned once for all, if you now trust him.

   The next doctrine Christ preaches from this wonderful story is faith in
   its permitted attachment. This man believed that Jesus was the Christ.
   The next thing he did was to appropriate that Christ. He said, "Lord,
   remember me." Jesus might have said, "What have I to do with you, and
   what have you to do with me? What has a thief to do with the perfect
   One?" Many of you, good people, try to get as far away as you can from
   the erring and fallen. They might infect your innocence! Society claims
   that we should not be familiar with people who have offended against
   its laws. We must not be seen associating with them, for it might
   discredit us. Infamous bosh! Can anything discredit sinners such as we
   are by nature and by practice? If we know ourselves before God we are
   degraded enough in and of ourselves? Is there anybody, after all, in
   the world, who is worse than we are when we see ourselves in the
   faithful glass of the Word? As soon as ever a man believes that Jesus
   is the Christ, let him hook himself on to him. The moment you believe
   Jesus to be the Saviour, seize upon him as your Saviour. If I remember
   rightly, Augustine called this man, "Latro laudabilis et mirabilis," a
   thief to be praised and wondered at, who dared, as it were, to seize
   the Saviour for his own. In this he is to be imitated. Take the Lord to
   be yours, and you have him. Jesus is the common property of all sinners
   who make bold to take him. Every sinner who has the will to do so may
   take the Lord home with him. He came into the world to save the sinful.
   Take him by force, as robbers take their prey; for the kingdom of
   heaven suffereth the violence of daring faith. Get him, and he will
   never get himself away from you. If you trust him, he must save you.

   Next, notice the doctrine of faith in its immediate power.

   "The moment a sinner believes,

   And trusts in his crucified God,

   His pardon at once he receives,

   Redemption in full through his blood."

   "To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise." He has no sooner believed
   than Christ gives him the seal of his believing in the full assurance
   that he shall be with him for ever in his glory. O dear hearts, if you
   believe this morning, you shall be saved this morning! God grant that
   you, by his rich grace, may be brought into salvation here, on the
   spot, and at once!

   The next thing is, the nearness of eternal things. Think of that a
   minute. Heaven and hell are not places far away. You may be in heaven
   before the clock ticks again, it is so near. Could we but rend that
   veil which parts us from the unseen! It is all there, and all near. "To
   day," said the Lord; within three or four hours at the longest, "shalt
   thou be with me in paradise;" so near is it. A statesman has given us
   the expression of being "within measurable distance." We are all within
   measurable distance of heaven or hell; if there be any difficulty in
   measuring the distance, it lies in its brevity rather than in its
   length.

   "One gentle sigh the fetter breaks,

   We scarce can say, 'He's gone,'

   Before the ransomed spirit takes

   Its mansion near the throne."

   Oh, that we, instead of trifling about such things, because they seem
   so far away, would solemnly realize them, since they are so very near!
   This very day, before the sun goes down, some hearer, now sitting in
   this place, may see, in his own spirit, the realities of heaven or
   hell. It has frequently happened, in this large congregation, that some
   one of our audience has died ere the next Sabbath has come round: it
   may happen this week. Think of that, and let eternal things impress you
   all the more because they lie so near.

   Furthermore, know that if you have believed in Jesus you are prepared
   for heaven. It may be that you will have to live on earth twenty, or
   thirty, or forty years to glorify Christ; and, if so, be thankful for
   the privilege; but if you do not live another hour, your instantaneous
   death would not alter the fact that he that believeth in the Son of God
   is meet for heaven. Surely, if anything beyond faith is needed to make
   us fit to enter paradise, the thief would have been kept a little
   longer here; but no, he is, in the morning, in the state of nature, at
   noon he enters the state of grace, and by sunset he is in the state of
   glory. The question never is whether a death-bed repentance is accepted
   if it be sincere: the question is'Is it sincere? If it be so, if the
   man dies five minutes after his first act of faith, he is as safe as if
   he had served the Lord for fifty years. If your faith is true, if you
   die one moment after you have believed in Christ, you will be admitted
   into paradise, even if you shall have enjoyed no time in which to
   produce good works and other evidences of grace. He that reads the
   heart will read your faith written on its fleshy tablets, and he will
   accept you through Jesus Christ, even though no act of grace has been
   visible to the eye of man.

   I conclude by again saying that this is not an exceptional case. I
   began with that, and I want to finish with it, because so many
   demi-semi-gospellers are so terribly afraid of preaching free grace too
   fully. I read somewhere, and I think it is true, that some ministers
   preach the gospel in the same way as donkeys eat thistles, namely,
   very, very cautiously. On the contrary, I will preach it boldly. I have
   not the slightest alarm about the matter. If any of you misuse
   free-grace teaching, I cannot help it. He that will be damned can as
   well ruin himself by perverting the gospel as by anything else. I
   cannot help what base hearts may invent; but mine it is to set forth
   the gospel in all its fulness of grace, and I will do it. If the thief
   was an exceptional case'and our Lord does not usually act in such a
   way'there would have been a hint given of so important a fact. A hedge
   would have been set about this exception to all rules. Would not the
   Saviour have whispered quietly to the dying man, "You are the only one
   I am going to treat in this way"? Whenever I have to do an exceptional
   favour to a person, I have to say, "Do not mention this, or I shall
   have so many besieging me." If the Saviour had meant this to be a
   solitary case, he would have faintly said to him, "Do not let anybody
   know; but you shall to day be in the kingdom with me." No, our Lord
   spoke openly, and those about him heard what he said. Moreover, the
   inspired penman has recorded it. If it had been an exceptional case, it
   would not have been written in the Word of God. Men will not publish
   their actions in the newspapers if they feel that the record might lead
   others to expect from them what they cannot give. The Saviour had this
   wonder of grace reported in the daily news of the gospel, because he
   means to repeat the marvel every day. The bulk shall be equal to
   sample, and therefore he sets the sample before you all. He is able to
   save to the uttermost, for he saved the dying thief. The case would not
   have been put there to encourage hopes which he cannot fulfil.
   Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning,
   and not for our disappointing. I pray you, therefore, if any of you
   have not yet trusted in my Lord Jesus, come and trust in him now. Trust
   him wholly; trust him only; trust him at once. Then will you sing with
   me'

   "The dying thief rejoiced to see

   That fountain in his day,

   And there have I, though vile as he,

   Washed all my sins away."

   PORTION OF SCRIPTURE READ BEFORE SERMON'Luke 23:27-49.

   HYMNS FROM "OUR OWN HYMN BOOK"'241, 288, 506.

   * No. 1881. "The Dying Thief in a New Light."
     __________________________________________________________________

Man Unknown To Man

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S DAY MORNING, APRIL 14, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "The heart knows his own bitterness. And a stranger does not understand
   with his joy." Proverbs 14:10.

   YOU lift up your eyes and you behold the stars. Surely, it is no idle
   imagination that these heavenly lights are distant worlds. But they are
   entirely separated from the inhabitants of this globe. You may peer at
   them through the telescope as long as you will, but you cannot enter
   into the feelings and pursuits of the dwellers in those worlds. You
   know nothing of the nearest planet, nor even of the world's own
   satellite. Some look up and declare that they see a man in the moon. It
   is the fancy of the ignorant. Others gaze at it till they discover huge
   volcanoes. It is the belief of the astronomer. But do what you will,
   you cannot enter into conversation with the moon-dwellers.

   You cannot sympathize with their politics, nor share their domestic
   experiences. There is a great gulf fixed and we who would pass to them
   cannot--neither can they pass to us who would come from there. In a
   great measure such is our relation to our fellow men. Men are
   microcosms, or little worlds--each man has his distinct sphere, wherein
   he dwells. We are so many worlds and no one world of man exactly
   overlaps another. You cannot completely know your fellow man. All that
   you know concerning your fellows--and there is much which we can
   know--leaves a great deal as unknown to us as the fixed stars.

   There is a bitterness which each man feels alone and a sweetness with
   which none can understand. Every man is, in a measure, self-contained.
   His being is detached from other beings in certain matters. There are
   bonds which unite us to our fellow man, and there is a solidarity about
   the race. But for all that, each man is a distinct atom and item and
   there are portions of his nature in which he does not touch his fellow
   man at all but displays his own individuality and personality. Alone
   are we born, one by one. Alone do we die, one by one. Though we shall
   stand with the great multitude before the Throne of God, yet that
   judgment will be of individuals and the sentence will be passed upon us
   one by one.

   Heaven will be an enjoyment which the Believer himself possesses--or
   Hell a misery which the impenitent himself endures. No one can merge
   himself in another man, nor so blend himself with the mass as to cease
   to be an individual existence. For weal or woe we are each one launched
   on the ocean of life in his own vessel. "Every man shall bear his own
   burden."

   It is not surprising that we must be, in a measure, unknown to others
   since we do not even fully know ourselves. Mysteries exist within our
   own bosoms and abysses which we have never yet explored. Their own
   personal humanity is to many an utterly unknown land. And none know
   themselves so fully as they think. "Man, know yourself," is a precept
   much more profound than it appears. If we do not know ourselves, how
   shall we know our fellows?

   Besides, there are points of individuality in each man which render him
   distinct from every other. No two women-- although they are born of the
   same parents, have been trained in the same home, and have lived
   together in close companionship--will be found to be precisely alike.
   No man could find his exact counterpart among all the millions of the
   race. In some point or points each man is inscrutable by his
   companions. Either from one peculiar element which is in him or from
   the peculiar proportions in which qualities are blended in his
   constitution, each man is a being after his own kind.

   How can we know beings so strangely different from each other? Remember
   also, that men in their highest and deepest conditions, are remarkably
   secretive. The extreme heights and depths lie in darkness. A man may
   openly show himself in his ordinary life and "wear his heart upon his
   sleeve." But when he reaches a especial grief the waters are still
   deep. The keenest griefs cut a narrow but deep channel and as they wear
   into the inmost soul they flow without noise. The grief that babbles is
   a shallow brook. Silent sorrow is profound. Great misery is dumb with
   silence--it opens not its mouth. It is precisely the same in the higher
   ranges of joy. When once we soar into the heavenlies we are alone.

   As I rode along in the South of France, the driver, turning to me,
   exclaimed, "See, there are eagles!" "No," I said, "not eagles, for
   eagles fly alone." Seven or eight large birds together might be hawks,
   or falcons, or kites but not true eagles. A royal eagle soars alone
   into the blue--his mate may bear him company but he has no crew of
   comrades around him. The child of God--the true eagle of the
   skies--when he rises into the more Divine ranges of his spiritual life
   is, and must be, alone. Like their Lord, all saints will have a
   winepress which they must tread alone. And even so, they will have a
   Pisgah to which they will climb unattended. I marvel not that men hide
   those lives which God has hidden in Christ and that their fellows see
   not the part of them which lives upon the invisible.

   What is the practical use of these facts? We learn, I think first, that
   we may not judge our Brethren as though we understood them and were
   competent to give a verdict upon them. Do not sit down, like Job's
   friends, and condemn the innocent. They, seeing Job covered with sores,
   and hearing him speak in bitterness--and knowing that God had taken
   away from him his property and his children--rushed to the conclusion
   that he was a hypocrite, abhorred of God, and that his heart was
   proudly rebellious against Jehovah.

   Never a more cruel judgment than that of men who are but half-informed
   upon the matter and see before them a great man in adversity, a good
   man in dire distress. Had it not been for Job's prayers, they would not
   have escaped the anger of God. And yet they had dared to condemn the
   patient saint. Why do you sit down and write bitter things against your
   fellow man? Be not sure that you can accurately judge any of his
   actions. Seen upon its surface and by itself, his act may appear
   blameworthy. But the motive behind it, if known to you, might soften
   your censure or even win your praise.

   Before the great Searcher of all hearts, things are not what they seem.
   As our law condemns no man before it hears him, so let us not hasten to
   give sentence since we have not yet heard and in all probability never
   shall hear, all the ins and outs of his behavior. Well said our Lord,
   "Judge not, that you be not judged." Especially judge not the sons and
   daughters of sorrow. Allow no ungenerous suspicions of the afflicted,
   the poor and the despondent. Do not hastily say they ought to be more
   brave and exhibit a greater faith. Ask not why are they so nervous and
   so absurdly fearful? No, in this you speak as one of the foolish women
   speaks. I beseech you, remember that you understand not your fellow
   man.

   The next practical lesson is if we desire to show sympathy to our
   Brethren let us not dream that this is an easy task. It is not a simple
   matter to square two unknown quantities--yourself and your friend. It
   would take me long to learn to correspond with the inhabitants of the
   planet Mars--in all probability I should never achieve the task. I
   doubt not that there are many people so peculiar, both in their sorrows
   and in their joys, that I shall no more be able to commune with them in
   real sympathy than with the people of the aforesaid planet. Study the
   art of sympathy. It is easy enough for a captain of a steam vessel to
   lay his ship alongside the wharf. But if I had to do it I would
   probably break down the wall of the dock and wreck the vessel, too.

   It is not easy to lay your soul side by side with another man's soul.
   It is as difficult to do as Elijah did when he laid himself upon the
   dead child, putting his mouth upon the child's mouth and his hands upon
   the child's hands and his feet upon the child's feet and so, by God's
   power, breathing life into the cold form. It is not easy to be
   effectively sympathetic--some cannot manifest tenderness even when they
   have a mind to do so. I once knew a minister who had never suffered
   pain or illness in his life. I was unwell in his house and he most
   kindly tried to sympathize with me. He did it almost as wonderfully as
   an elephant picks up a pin. It was a marvel that he could attempt a
   thing so altogether out of his line.

   Many of the trials which are experienced by Christians are sent as an
   education in the art of sympathy. Be thankful for that which enables
   you to be a minister of consolation to your fellow men. But feel that
   in this matter you are yet a learner and will frequently meet with
   sorrows and with joys into which you cannot enter.

   One other lesson and that is the great one we want all of us to learn.
   We all need sympathy. And as it is impossible that we should ever
   perfectly obtain it from our fellow men, there remains but One who can
   give it to us. There is One who can enter the closet where the skeleton
   is locked up. One who is in touch with our unmentionable grief. He
   weighs and measures that which is too heavy for us to bear. That
   blessed One! Oh, that we may each one have Him for our Friend! Without
   Him we shall lack the great necessity of a happy life! A personal
   Savior is absolutely needful to each of us to meet our individual
   personality. Jesus, alone, can understand with our joy and make it
   still more gladsome. He, alone, can understand our grief and remove its
   wormwood.

   We must each one have Christ for himself. What is another man's Christ
   to me? What is the Christ who dies for all the world to anyone in that
   world until he takes a personal hold on Him? "He loved me and gave
   Himself for me"--that is the point of rest. What joy to touch the nail
   print with your finger and to cry, "My Lord and my God"! This is the
   heart of the matter. The general doctrine of the Gospel has great power
   in it but the sweetness lies in the particular application of it. What
   though the city be full of bread? If there is none upon your table you
   will starve! What though the coffers of the bank should overflow with
   gold? If you have nothing to purchase the necessaries of life, you will
   perish in your poverty!

   We must have not a national religion but a personal religion. Not a
   share in the ecclesiastical privileges of a Church but the
   privilege--each one for himself--of becoming a child of God. We must
   personally open the door to our Lord and He must enter into us and fill
   our entire nature with His Divine indwelling. He must be formed in each
   one of us the hope of glory, or Glory will never be ours. Be not
   deceived into joint-stock godliness--each man must come into individual
   relation with the living God in Christ Jesus.

   Having already handled its general principle, we will now come close to
   our text in its two parts--the heart knows a bitterness peculiar to
   itself. And secondly, the heart also knows a sweetness peculiar to
   itself.

   I. THE HEART KNOWS ITS OWN BITTERNESS. This is true in a natural,
   common and moral sense. I shall, as a rule, confine myself to the more
   spiritual application.

   "The heart knows its own bitterness." Concerning any man this is true.
   The shoe pinches on every foot and that foot only knows where the pinch
   is felt by itself. Every shoulder bears its load and that load is its
   own. Envy no man. He who seems most happy may be more fit for pity than
   for envy. His heart knows its own bitterness. Do not intrude into the
   hidden sorrows of any--it is enough for one heart to know its
   bitterness. Maybe you will increase misery if you meddle with it. Leave
   that alone which you can not relieve. If you can, help, lend your
   attentive ear. But if you can not help, keep your finger from the
   wound.

   Yet in your very quietness feel inwardly a sense of brotherhood. For
   since this man's heart has its own bitterness and you have yours, it
   proves that you and he are of the same fallen family and both citizens
   of that world which brings forth thorns and thistles to all the fallen
   race. You are evidently sprung of the same Adam since in the sweat of
   your face you must eat bread. You cannot bear another man's burden so
   as to take the weight from his shoulder. If a man had to carry a
   hundredweight of material upon his back you could take fifty-six pounds
   of it for him and he would have just so much the less to carry.

   But it is not so with mental and spiritual loads. You may cheer the
   heart of the burden-bearer but his trouble is still the same--there is
   no dividing his grief. When a heart is full of bitterness you may sip
   the wormwood but the cup will still be nauseous to him that drinks it.
   We cannot diminish the pain of another's wound even though we should be
   wounded ourselves. Rest certain that everywhere throughout this world
   every foot has its blister, every shoulder has its sore, every lot has
   its crook--every rose has its thorn.

   Most solemnly this is true concerning the godless man. Of the
   irreligious man--the unbelieving man--it is surely true that, "The
   heart knows its own bitterness." In the verse which precedes the text
   we read, "Fools make a mock at sin." Why do they? It is to hide the
   uneasiness within their bosoms. Why does a man blaspheme? Why does he
   sneer at the Truth of God? Why does he say evil things against the
   Christ of God? Why does he persecute godly people? Simply because these
   good things are a protest against his evil condition. He is disturbed
   by them and is vexed by an uneasy feeling within his heart. The boy
   going through the Churchyard at night whistles to keep his courage up.

   And many of the braggart speeches of infidels are merely an attempt to
   conceal the unrest of heart which they would not like to confess. They
   are not happy--they cannot be happy. Can a creature be happy at war
   with its Creator? Can the breaker of the Law be happy when Justice
   pursues his every step? They are ill at ease and we may truly say of
   each one of them, "The heart knows its own bitterness." Be not afraid
   to approach them with the Gospel--they are more ready to receive it
   than we imagine. When they roar most loudly there is little of the lion
   about them except the skin. Fear them not. They need the Gospel even
   more than other people and their attempt to bully their own consciences
   proves that they are somewhat aware of their want. Approach them
   without fear and press them home with the Word of the Lord. For this is
   true of them, "The heart knows its own bitterness."

   Next--how true this is concerning an awakened man! When conscience at
   last starts up from its dream. When the Holy Spirit begins to convict
   the sinful man of righteousness and of judgment--ah, then, Beloved,
   "the heart knows its own bitterness." I could not have told you, if you
   had bribed me to disclose the secret, the inward grief I felt when day
   and night God's hand was heavy upon me on account of sin. Before I
   found a Savior, the agony of my mind was at times indescribable for I
   felt the pressure of the wrath of God justly incurred by my iniquity.
   That verse which precedes my text, which we read as, "Fools make a mock
   at sin," may be interpreted, "Fools mock at the sin offering." Or even
   "The sin offering is a mock to fools."

   Not only does the fool mock at the sin offering but the sin offering
   becomes a vain thing to the fool. Religion refuses to yield comfort to
   godless men. I have known a sinner when under deep conviction of sin to
   seek the Lord with hunger of spirit and for a while he has been left in
   his hunger. He has turned to Jesus for comfort and for a season he has
   thought that even Jesus repelled him. It is an awful time with the
   heart when it is obliged to confess, "I remembered God and was

   troubled."

   Have you ever looked to the Cross and even there beheld darkness and
   not light? Have you ever heard a voice saying, "You have done despite
   to the precious blood and it avails you no more"? That voice is a LYING
   voice--but all the same--when it pierces the ear of conscience it
   brings on an indescribable agony and then with emphasis, "The heart
   knows its own bitterness." Have any of you to whom I now speak at last
   come to your senses? And do you wish to escape from the wrath of God
   but cannot? Do you feel like a poor worm upon the ground, surrounded by
   a ring of fire which you cannot overleap? I am grieved for you, my
   Brothers and Sisters. And I am thankful that by such despair men are
   brought at last to trust in Jesus.

   They are cut off from sin by a terrible discovery of its evil, cut off
   from self by utter despair and driven to cast themselves on the merit
   of the Savior. Fly to Jesus and you shall be saved. But till you do,
   your heart will be filled with a bitterness beyond expression.

   Our text is certainly true concerning the backslider--"The heart knows
   its own bitterness." The Proverbs appear at first sight to be thrown
   together without connection but it is not so--when you come to close
   reading you will discover that they are threaded pearls and that they
   are in proper position with regard to each other. In the 14th verse we
   read-- "The backslider in heart shall be filled with his own ways: and
   a good man shall be satisfied from himself." So whenever a backslider
   goes away from God and plunges into sin you may not dare to think that
   he is happy. In his case, "The heart knows its own bitterness."

   One of the most bitter experiences is that of one who is awakened to
   see his heinous criminality after having known the Truth of God. One
   who has enjoyed meetings for prayer and has been accustomed to speak
   about his own conversion. One who has labored for the salvation of
   others. Has known rapt fellowship with God but has turned aside to
   filthiness and dishonored the sacred name by which he was called. To
   dive from communion with God into gross sin--ah, it were better for him
   that he had never been born! Even in the present anguish of his heart
   he will often feel himself set up as a target for the arrows of the
   Almighty till they seem to drink his blood.

   When the gracious Lord grants him repentance and he comes back, as I am
   persuaded he will--he will return with weeping and with supplication
   and eat again of the paschal lamb with abundance of bitter herbs. Alas,
   even when he is restored and Divine Grace has cleansed the stain, his
   old wounds will be sadly apt to bleed afresh. As men that break a bone
   in their youth will find strange pains visiting the limb in bad
   weather, so do old men feel the sins of their youth in their bones.
   Some go softly all their days, because of one grievous fall. Many a
   sigh and many a tear will start unawares because of former
   transgressions. Even the restored and pardoned heart knows its own
   bitterness.

   Concerning the tried Believer, this is very true. The afflicted is one
   whose heart knows its own bitterness. Brethren, many of the excellent
   of the earth are constitutionally sorrowful. Certain of our friends are
   always happy, not so much as the result of Divine Grace as the effect
   of nature. Some can bear a very much larger amount of pain than others
   without being depressed in spirit--this is a great gift. Many plants
   flourish best in the sunshine but others love the shade. I have seen a
   fern which grows best in drip and gloom. God has made each one for its
   place.

   Some of the most beautiful flowers in the garden of the Lord grow under
   the shade of the tree of life. Bid all those who are timorous and sad
   to lift up their hearts and rejoice in God--but oh, do not condemn them
   while you encourage them! Cheer them, but do not censure them. The Lord
   knows that there may, in each case, be something about the body,

   something about the mind, or something about the condition which makes
   it far less evil in these persons to be desponding than it might be in
   our cases--"The heart knows its own bitterness."

   Possibly there may be present among us servants of God who are wading
   through rivers of trouble. We do not know. Dear Friends, in the heyday
   of our joy how closely we may be sitting to "a woman of a sorrowful
   spirit," or "a man that has seen affliction." We little know the
   burdens which are bowing our neighbors' backs. Patience gives them
   smiling faces but pain wrings their hearts. Great losses and great
   crosses fall to the lot of great saints. Sickness is often a means of
   Divine Grace--those who have much Grace may be called to endure much
   disease. There is a bitterness which some of you can scarcely
   understand--it is the loss of beloved children--especially the loss of
   an only child.

   Call to mind that word of Holy Scripture--"They shall be in bitterness,
   as one that is in bitterness for his only son." Evidently this is
   singled out as the keenest trial. The widow of Nain was feeling this
   grief and this led our Divine Master to bid the bearers stand still
   while He made the dead young man sit upright on the bier and then
   delivered him to his mother. Bereavement of our loved ones is a heavy
   trial. I must add here that your spiritual children can also make you
   feel a bitterness of the most intense order. This sorrow I know better
   than most men. Ah me--I bow in the dust when I think of those over whom
   I watched carefully and lovingly--who have turned against the cause I
   love as my own life.

   I thought that they would always preach to the glory of our Lord. But
   they have denied the faith or sided with those who pervert the Gospel
   of Christ. There may be sharper troubles but I deeply pity those who
   have to endure them. In proportion as we have loved, we mourn over
   Judas when he lifts up his heel against us--and Demas, who quits us for
   the present evil world. Cutting to the very marrow of the bone is the
   cruel spirit which, in its infatuation with evil, forgets not only the
   ties of gratitude but even of common decency. Truly, days have passed
   over me in which the plowmen made deep their furrows. But I
   forbear--"The heart knows its own bitterness."

   You see, then, that in the whole range of human society each heart
   knows its own bitterness. And I want to say this to you--the
   singularity of sorrow is a dream of the sufferer. You sit alone and
   keep silent and you say in your heart, "I am the man that has seen
   affliction." But a host of others have seen affliction as well as
   yourself. Come down from your elevation of especial woe. Indulge no
   longer the egotism of despair. You are but one pilgrim along the well
   trod Via Dolorosa. The stairway of grief is never without its
   passengers and at their head is He whose name is, "A man of sorrows and
   acquainted with grief."

   Next, let me say, know your sorrow well. "The heart knows its own
   bitterness." It is always well when it does know it. If you can write
   down your grief in black and white and describe it to yourself, the
   half of it will evaporate. A large proportion of our despondency is
   mythical--it is a kind of smoke or mist which will disappear as the
   light falls on it. "Why are you cast down, O my Soul? Why are you
   disquieted in me?" If you are wise you will press home those two
   "whys," till you say to yourself, "There is no reason for being
   disquieted--hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him!"

   Above all, remember that the cure for bitterness of heart is to take it
   to your Lord at once. Remember this word-- "In all their affliction He
   was afflicted." No drop of gall was too bitter for His mouth--He tasted
   death, itself. There is no corner in your heart so dark but Christ has
   been in as dark a room as that. All the thorns that pierce your feet
   once pierced His head. Go to Him with the full vessel of your woe. "You
   people, pour out your hearts before Him: God is a refuge for us." Then
   shall you sing for joy of heart. Enough, perhaps too much, upon that
   part of the text.

   II. I wish I had an hour in which to speak upon the second part of our
   subject. THE HEART KNOWS A SWEETNESS WHICH IS ALL ITS OWN. I will go
   into one or two of the forms of this sweetness.

   You have tasted, many of you, the joy of pardoned sin. Do you remember
   when you were, for the first time, sure that God, for Christ's sake,
   had forgiven you? Could you tell anybody the joy you then felt? If you
   had tried to explain it, you would have been compelled to use your legs
   to dance with, your hands to clap with, your eyes for tears of joy and
   your countenance for beams of delight, as well as your tongue for
   speech! You would have had to speak by signs and gestures, as well as
   by words. In proportion as you were burdened before, you felt the bliss
   of rest. In proportion as the iron had entered into your soul before,
   the joy came leaping into your heart.

   You felt as if you wanted every pore of your skin to become a mouth for
   song to praise the redeeming Christ. Truly a stranger understands not
   with such joy. Only the pardoned know the joy of pardon. I dare say
   when you were first saved others said that you were off your head. In
   the family it was suspected that poor John was not himself at all. He
   was so different from what he used to be. Oh yes, the joy of pardoned
   sin is one with which a stranger cannot understand.

   Some time after your pardon you knew the bliss of vanquished evil. To
   be forgiven was not enough. You longed to be free from the dominion of
   sin. I do not know what your peculiar sin may have been, but after a
   struggle you overcame it and you felt that the very desire for that sin
   was dead--you loathed it now as much as you loved it before. What a joy
   that was to you! It was like the triumph of Israel when they had come
   out of Egypt and Egypt itself had been overthrown at the Red Sea. The
   depths had covered them, there was not one of them left. The mighty
   waters swept away Pharaoh and his captains.

   Do you remember when the habit of drunkenness went down into the sea?
   Do you remember when another vile propensity sank as lead in the mighty
   waters? Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the shore. Then sang Moses
   and the children of Israel, saying, "Sing unto the Lord, for He has
   triumphed gloriously." No Arabian in the wilderness could have entered
   into the joy of Miriam that day. No Edomite in the rock city could have
   joined in the ecstasy of the tribes who had newly come up dry-shod from
   the depths of the sea. Joy over a conquered evil is a joy worth worlds,
   and no stranger can deprive us of it.

   Beloved, since then you have known the joy of perfect reconciliation
   with God. When the prodigal laid his head in his father's bosom and his
   father's kiss was warm on his cheek, he could not have told how happy
   he felt. He was as a child which nestles down in its mother's bosom. Or
   as a lamb which has been lost amidst the brake and has been found by
   the shepherd and carried home. What a joy to be "reconciled to God by
   the death of His Son"! I was once His enemy and now I am His friend. He
   loves me. With an everlasting love He loves me. I will not attempt to
   describe the joy this confidence creates because I should break down in
   the endeavor. The only way for anybody to understand the bliss of
   reconciliation is to be reconciled himself.

   I have told you, I think, the story of the boy at the Mission house to
   whom the missionary gave a piece of white sugar. He had never seen it
   before and when he reached home, he told his father about this sweet
   stuff. His father said, "Is it like so-and-so?" The boy could not
   answer his father's questions and so he ran down the street to the
   teacher, and said, "Teacher, please give me a lump of the white stuff
   for my father. He wants to know how sweet it is and I cannot tell him.
   He must eat it for himself." Reconciliation to God has a sweetness in
   it which he only knows who enjoys it.

   One of the most intense joys I have ever known is the joy of accepted
   service. The best picture I can show you of what that joy must be is
   Abraham. You have thought of Abraham going up to Mount Moriah with his
   son, Isaac, bearing the fire and the knife and the wood. What a heavy
   heart the Patriarch carried up that hill! You have sympathized with
   him. Will you try to realize his feeling when he comes down from the
   mount? Isaac is alive. God has revealed Himself-- Abraham is accepted.
   The man of God has been proved and he has not been found wanting. What
   joy he feels to think that he has not withheld his son, his only son,
   from God! He has fulfilled to the utmost the Divine command, painful as
   it was. There is no self-righteousness about the old man.

   But what an intense satisfaction in feeling God has blessed him now
   with a sevenfold blessing, because when brought to the test, he did not
   withhold his only son! Now, if you have served God and you have felt
   the witness of the Spirit within you--that God has accepted you--your
   joy is such as nobody can dampen or diminish. You will not say much
   about it for other people would say, "He is proud of what he has done."
   But for all that, you know what you know, and are not to be beaten out
   of the rest which comes of that knowledge.

   Another great joy is that of answered prayer. When the Lord has heard
   our petitions and given us the desire of our hearts, what joy fills our
   souls! Perhaps it is a personal prayer, like that of Hannah. She sat in
   the Sanctuary--a woman of a sorrowful spirit and the Lord granted her
   desire--and in due time she came there a glad mother. Samuel was the
   reward of the travail of her prayer as well as the travail of her
   flesh. "For this child I prayed," said she. With what eyes she looked
   at him! There is never such a child as that which comes by the way of
   prayer. She added, "Therefore he shall be the Lord's as long as he
   lives." This is a joy which a stranger cannot touch at all. It must
   also have been a stern joy which filled Elijah when he stood at the
   altar after the priests of Baal and their clatter had all failed.

   When he stood up and said, "Let it be known, O Lord, that I have done
   all these things at Your word." When the live lightning leaped from
   Heaven and the sacrifice went up in sheets of flame, then I do not
   wonder that Elijah girded up his loins and ran, old man as he was,
   before the chariot of Ahab. For God had heard him and he was great that
   day. A wonderful exhilaration lifted him out of himself and he could do
   anything in the joy of his heart because of his answered

   prayer. A stranger to prayer cannot know the joy of its success. He who
   knows what it is to wrestle, will understand what it is to prevail.
   None can praise God like the man who has prevailed in prayer.

   Further, dear Brethren, there is a very extraordinary joy about
   usefulness. This is a joy which, thank God, I do know. But unless you
   know it, I cannot communicate its sweetness to you. It was but a poor
   child, or a humble servant girl, or a working man in his fustian
   jacket. But as he took my hand and looked into my face, he said, "God
   Almighty bless you! You brought me to the Savior." I get registered
   letters containing money for the Lord's work. But the letters which are
   most precious are those which tell of conversions from great sin to the
   Lord Jesus through the printed sermons. These are my golden wages. If I
   say much about this, someone will charge me with blowing my own
   trumpet. But truly this sacred bliss is one which the successful worker
   has all to himself and a stranger understands not.

   You Sunday school teachers and other workers know what I mean. Pray
   that you may have more of it! This makes us eat bread in secret--meat
   which the world knows not of. Blessed be the name of the Lord who gives
   us this choice delight! As a shepherd rejoices when he brings back the
   sheep that was lost, so does the winner of souls rejoice with a joy
   that he cannot communicate to others when he is the means of saving a
   soul from death and covering a multitude of sins.

   There is a joy in the heart with which no stranger understands of
   another kind, namely, peace in the time of trouble. A painful operation
   is needful and the patient hears the sad news without a murmur. I
   remember the picture of "the sleep of Argyle" who is to be executed in
   the morning and he is found fast wrapped in sweet slumber when the
   jailer enters the cell. Remember the martyr who had to be burned early
   in the morning but needed to be shaken to awake him? Fancy being shaken
   in the morning with, "Get up and be burned"! How blessed to leave all
   with the Lord and bear His will with gladsome readiness! To be calm in
   the presence of pain, bereavement, slander, ridicule! This is
   delightful. The Lord breathes into His people His own peace. Many
   saints have their highest joy in their deepest trial--the Son of God is
   most with them in the burning fiery furnace.

   They are not disturbed in prospect of the worst of evils--their heart
   is fixed--trusting in the Lord. God gives them a Divine serenity so
   that they can say, "Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither
   shall fruit be in the vines, the labor of the olive shall fail and the
   fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold
   and there shall be no herd in the stalls--yet I will rejoice in the
   Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation." The worldling cannot
   understand this! The saint is neither careless nor callous. He has both
   sense and sensitiveness. And yet he lives apart from burdensome care
   and throws aside the fret which otherwise would eat into his heart.

   The deeper the waters, the higher our ark mounts towards Heaven. The
   darker the night, the more we prize our lamp. We have learned to sing
   in the dark with the thorn at our breast. This peace is a blessing with
   which no stranger understands--this world cannot give it and the world
   to come will not remove it. Nothing can disturb, much less destroy, the
   peace which Jesus gave us as His last legacy. It passes all
   understanding.

   One other joy I must not overlook--it is the highest of all, and that
   is the joy of communion with God. About this I hardly dare to speak. If
   you have ever read Rutherford's Letters, I will very much judge you by
   how you judge them. If you know nothing at all about communion with God
   you will say, "The man is fanatical, carried away with rhapsodies. He
   almost utters blasphemy at times in his daring language." But if you
   have trod the crests of the mountains of fellowship and have bathed
   your forehead in the eternal sunlight--you will know that he does not
   exaggerate, but that he even falls short of the indescribable bliss of
   fellowship with God!

   Yes, we even now behold the Invisible and enjoy the Infinite. We pass
   the boundary which separates us from Imman-uel's land and enter into
   the ivory palaces wherein our Lord does make us glad. When the gales
   blow from the right quarter, they carry to us odors from the beds of
   spices in the heavenly land and then our abode is, indeed, the hill
   Beulah. Do you know what this means? If you do not, I could not tell
   you for I should seem as one that talks in a dream. Yet, whether you
   know it or not, some of us find Heaven begun below. If you have ever
   tasted fellowship with God, then there is a joy, as you know, with
   which no stranger understands.

   Beloved, if it is so, be much in the enjoyment of these delights! There
   is a secret parlor in the house of manhood into which none can go but
   yourself and your Lord. Be sure that you enter there! Lock yourself in.
   I wish I might do so and never come out again. Why should you always be
   moping down in the cellar? If you have a good house, why do you grope
   in the basement among the coals and the rats? If there is a room in the
   house that has a fine view, make it your sitting room. I remember at
   Newcastle a person said, when letting a house, "You can from the upper
   window see Durham Ca-

   thedral on a Sunday." "Why on a Sunday? Cannot you see it on a Monday?"
   "No, because then the smoke of the furnaces darkens the air."

   There is a room in my heart from which I can see Heaven at choice
   Sabbatical times, when I can get alone with my God and forget the cares
   both of the Church and of the world. A glimpse of Heaven is a rare joy.
   Why should we not have it often? Come out of the cellar! Come upstairs!
   Come to the highest place upon the housetop and look toward the New
   Jerusalem--

   "Why should the children of a king

   Go mourning all their days?" May the Comforter come and cheer us this
   morning with that joy which a stranger cannot know!

   If you have never known these joys, I pray you seek them for
   yourself--each man, each woman. Remember, you must come to God alone,
   by the exercise of personal faith and personal repentance. For neither
   in your sorrow, nor in your joy can another man exactly fit with you.
   Therefore, come alone to the Lord Jesus and come at once. Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

The Power of His Resurrection

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S DAY MORNING, APRIL 21, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection." Philippians
   3:10.

   PAUL, in the verses before the text, had deliberately laid aside his
   own personal righteousness. "But what things were gain to me, those I
   counted loss for Christ, for whom I have suffered the loss of all
   things and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ and be found
   in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is of the Law." It is
   insinuated in these days that a belief in the righteousness of faith
   will lead men to care little for good works--that it will act as a
   sedative to their zeal, and therefore they will exhibit no ardor for
   holiness. The very reverse is seen in the case of the Apostle and in
   the case of all who cast aside the righteousness of the Law--that they
   may be clothed with that righteousness "which is through the faith of
   Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith."

   Paul made a list of his advantages as to confidence in the flesh and
   they were very great. But he turned his back upon them all for Christ's
   sake. Accepting Christ to be everything to him, did he, therefore, sit
   down in self-content and imagine that personal character was nothing?
   By no means! A noble ambition fired his soul--he longed to know
   Christ--the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His
   sufferings. If by any means he might attain unto the resurrection from
   the dead, he became a holy walker and a heavenly runner--because of
   what he saw in Christ Jesus.

   Be sure of this--the less you value your own righteousness--the more
   will you seek after true holiness. The less you think of your own
   beauty, the more ardently will you long to become like the Lord Jesus.
   Those who dream of being saved by their own good works are usually
   those who have no good works worth mentioning. Those who sincerely lay
   aside all hope of salvation by their own merits are fruitful in every
   virtue to the praise of God. Nor is this a strange thing. For the less
   a man thinks of himself, the more he will think of Christ and the more
   will he aim at being like He is. The less esteem he has of his own past
   good works, the more earnest will he be to show his gratitude for being
   saved by Divine Grace through the righteousness of Christ. Faith works
   by love, purifies the soul and sets the heart running after the prize
   of our high calling in Christ Jesus. Therefore it is a purifying and
   active principle, and by no means the inert thing which some suppose it
   to be.

   What, then, was the great object of the Apostle's ardor? It was, "that
   I may know Him and the power of His resurrection." Paul already knew
   the Lord Jesus by faith. He knew so much of Him as to be able to teach
   others. He had looked to Jesus and known the power of His death. But he
   now desired that the vision of his faith might become still better
   known by experience. You may know a man and have an idea that he is
   powerful. But to know him and his power over you, is a stage further.
   You may have read of a man so as to be familiar with his history and
   his character and yet you may have no knowledge of him and of his
   personal influence over yourself.

   Paul desired intimate acquaintance with the Lord Jesus--personal
   communion with the Lord to such a degree that he should feel His power
   at every point and know the effect of all that He had worked out in His
   life, death and resurrection. He knew that Jesus died and he aspired to
   rehearse the history in his own soul's story--he would be dead with Him
   to the world. He knew that Jesus was buried and he would gladly be
   "buried with Him in Baptism unto death." He knew that Jesus rose and
   his longing was to rise with Him in newness of life. Yes, he even
   remembered that his Lord had ascended up on high and he rejoiced to
   say, "He has raised us up together and made us sit together in heavenly
   places in Christ Jesus."

   His great desire was to have reproduced in himself the life of Jesus so
   as to know all about Him by being made like He is. The best Life of
   Christ is not by Canon Farrar, or Dr. Geikie--it is written in the
   experience of the saint by the Holy Spirit.

   I want you to observe, at the very outset, that all Paul desired to
   know was always in connection with our Lord, Himself. He says, "That I
   may know HIM and the power of His resurrection." Jesus first, and then
   the power of His resurrection. Beware of studying doctrine, precept, or
   experiences apart from the Lord Jesus, who is the soul of all. Doctrine
   without Christ will be nothing better than His empty tomb. Doctrine
   with Christ is a glorious high throne-- with the King sitting on it.
   Precepts without Christ are impossible commands. But precepts from the
   lips of Jesus have a quickening effect upon the heart. Without Christ
   you can do nothing. But abiding in Him you bring forth much fruit.

   Always let your preaching and your hearing look towards the personal
   Savior. This makes all the difference in preaching. Ministers may
   preach sound doctrine by itself and be utterly without unction. But
   those who preach it in connection with the Person of the blessed Lord
   have an anointing which nothing else can give. Christ Himself, by the
   Holy Spirit, is the savor of a true ministry.

   This morning we will confine our thoughts to one theme and unite with
   the Apostle in a strong desire to know our Lord in connection with the
   power of His resurrection. The resurrection of the Lord Jesus was, in
   itself, a marvelous display of power. To raise the dead body of our
   Lord from the tomb was as great a work as the creation. The Father, the
   Son, and the Holy Spirit each worked this greatest miracle. I need not
   stay to quote the texts in which the resurrection of our Lord is
   ascribed to the Father--who brought again from the dead that great
   Shepherd of the sheep.

   Nor need I mention Scriptures in which the Lord is said to have been
   quickened by the Holy Spirit. Nor those instances in which that great
   work is ascribed to the Lord Jesus, Himself. But assuredly the Sacred
   Writings represent the Divine Trinity in Unity as gloriously
   co-operating in the raising again from the dead the Person of our Lord
   Jesus Christ. It was, however, a especial instance of our Lord's own
   power. He said, "Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it
   up." He also said, concerning His life, "I have power to lay it down
   and I have power to take it again."

   I do not know whether I can convey my own thought to you. What strikes
   me very forcibly is this--no mere man going to his grave could say, "I
   have power to take my life again." The departure of life leaves the man
   necessarily powerless--he cannot restore himself to life. Behold the
   sacred Body of Jesus embalmed in spices and wrapped about with linen.
   It is laid within the sealed and guarded tomb--how can it come back to
   life? Yet Jesus said, "I have power to take My life again." And He
   proved it. Strange power--that spirit of His which had traveled through
   the under lands and upwards to the eternal Glory--had power to return
   and to re-enter that holy Thing which had been born of the virgin and
   to revivify that flesh which could not see corruption.

   Behold the dead and buried One makes Himself alive again! Herein is a
   marvelous thing. He was master over death, even when death seemed to
   have mastered Him--He entered the grave as a captive but left it as a
   conqueror. He was compassed by the bonds of death but He could not be
   held by them. Even in His burial garments He came to life--from those
   wrappings He unbound Himself--from the sealed tomb He stepped into
   liberty. If, in the extremity of His weakness He had the power to rise
   out of the sepulcher and come forth in newness of life, what can He not
   accomplish now?

   I do not think, however, that Paul is here thinking so much of the
   power displayed in the resurrection as of the power which comes out of
   it--which may most properly be called, "the power of His resurrection."
   This the Apostle desired to apprehend and to know. This is a very wide
   subject and I cannot encompass the whole region. But many things may be
   said under four heads. The power of our Lord's resurrection is an
   evidencing power, a justifying power, a life-giving power and a
   consoling power.

   I. First, the power of our Lord's resurrection is AN EVIDENCING POWER.
   Here I shall liken it to a seal which is set to a document to prove its
   authenticity. Our Lord's resurrection from the dead was a proof that He
   was the Messiah. That He had come upon the Father's business. That He
   was the Son of God, and that the Covenant which Jehovah had made with
   Him was henceforth ratified and established. He was "declared to be the
   Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the
   resurrection from the dead." Thus said Paul at Antioch--"The promise
   which was made unto the fathers, God has fulfilled the same unto us,
   their children, in that He has raised up Jesus again. As it is also
   written in the second Psalm, You are My Son, this day have I begotten
   You."

   Nobody witnessing our Lord's resurrection could doubt His Divine
   Character and that His mission upon earth was from the eternal God.
   Well did Peter and John declare that it was the Prince of Life that God
   had raised from the dead. Our Lord had given this for a sign unto the
   mocking Pharisees--that as Jonah lay in the deep till the third day and
   then

   came forth--even so would He, Himself, lie in the heart of the earth
   till the third day and then arise from the dead. His rising proved that
   He was sent of God and that the power of God was with Him.

   Our Lord had entered into a Covenant with the Father before all worlds,
   wherein He had, on His part, engaged to finish redemption and make
   atonement for sin. That He had done this was affirmed by His rising
   again from the dead-- the resurrection was the attestation of the
   Father to the fulfillment on the part of the Second Adam of His portion
   in the Everlasting Covenant. His blood is the blood of the Everlasting
   Covenant and His resurrection is the seal of it. "Christ was raised
   from the dead by the glory of the Father" as the witness of the Eternal
   God to the glory of the Son.

   So much is the resurrection the proof of our Lord's mission that it
   falls to the ground without it. If our Lord Jesus had not risen from
   the dead, our faith in Him would have lacked the cornerstone of the
   foundation on which it rests. Paul writes most positively--"If Christ
   is not risen, then is our preaching vain and your faith is also vain."
   He declares that the Apostles would have been found false witnesses of
   God, "Because," he says, "we have testified of God that He raised up
   Christ: whom He raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not." "If
   Christ is not raised, your faith is vain; you are yet in your sins."
   The resurrection of Jesus is the keystone of the arch of our holy
   faith. If you take the resurrection away, the whole structure lies in
   ruins.

   The death of Christ, albeit that it is the ground of our confidence for
   the pardon of sin, would not have furnished such a foundation had He
   not risen from the dead. Were He still dead, His death would have been
   like the death of any other person--and would have given us no
   assurance of acceptance. His life, with all the beauty of its holiness,
   would have been simply a perfect example of conduct but it could not
   have become our righteousness if His burial in the tomb of Joseph had
   been the end of all. It was essential for the confirmation of His
   life-teaching and His death-suffering, that He should be raised from
   the dead. If he had not risen but were still among the dead, you might
   as well tell us that we preach to you a cunningly devised fable.

   See, then, the power of His resurrection--it proves without a doubt the
   faith once delivered to the saints. Supported by infallible proofs it
   becomes itself the infallible proof of the authority, power and glory
   of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of

   God.

   I beg you further to notice that this proof had such power about it in
   the minds of the Apostles that they preached with singular boldness.
   These chosen witnesses had seen the Lord after His resurrection--one of
   them had put his finger into the print of the nails and others had
   eaten and drunk with Him. They were sure that they were not deceived.
   They knew that He was dead, for they had been present at His
   burial--they knew that He lived again, for they had heard Him speak and
   had seen Him eat a piece of a broiled fish and honeycomb. The fact was
   as clear to them as it was wonderful. Peter and the rest of them,
   without hesitation, declared, "this Jesus has God raised up, whereof we
   all are witnesses."

   They were sure that they saw the man who died on Calvary alive again
   and they could not but testify what they had heard and seen. The
   enemies of the faith wondered at the boldness with which these
   witnesses spoke. Theirs was the accent of conviction--for they
   testified what they knew of as fact. They had no suspicion lurking in
   the background. They were sure that Jesus had risen from the dead and
   this unquestionable certainty made them confident that He was, indeed,
   the Messiah and the Savior of men. The power of this fact upon those
   who believe it is great. But upon those who saw it as eyewitnesses it
   must have been inconceivably mighty!

   I wonder not that they defied contradiction, persecution and even
   death. How could they disbelieve that of which they were so certain?
   How could they withhold their witness to a fact which was so important
   to the destiny of their fellow men? In the Apostles and the first
   disciples we have a cloud of witnesses to a fact more firmly attested
   than any other recorded in history--and that fact is the witness to the
   truth of our religion. Honest witnesses, in more than sufficient
   number, declare that Jesus Christ who died on Calvary and was buried in
   the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, did rise again from the dead. In the
   mouth of many witnesses the fact is established--and this fact
   established proves other blessed facts.

   If the cloud of witnesses might not seem sufficient in itself, I see
   that cloud tinged with crimson. Reddened as by the setting sun, the
   cloud of witnesses in life becomes a cloud of martyrs in death. The
   disciples were put to cruel deaths asserting still the fact that Jesus
   had risen from the grave. They and their immediate followers, never
   doubting, "counted not their lives dear to them," that they might
   witness to this Truth of God. They suffered the loss of all
   things--were banished and were accounted the offscouring of all
   things--but they could not, and would not, contradict their faith.

   They were nailed to crosses and bound to stakes to be burned. But the
   enthusiasm of their conviction was never shaken. Behold an array of
   martyrs reaching on through the centuries! Behold how they are all sure
   of the Gospel, because sure of their Lord's endless life! Is not this a
   grand evidence of "the power of His resurrection"? The Book of Martyrs
   is a record of that power. The resurrection of Christ casts a sidelight
   upon the Gospel by proving its reality and literalness. There is a
   tendency in this generation to spirit away the Truth and in so doing
   lose both the Truth and its Spirit.

   In these evil days fact is turned into myth and truth into opinion. Our
   Lord's resurrection is a literal fact--when He rose from the dead He
   was no specter, ghost, or apparition. But as He was a real Man who died
   the cruel death of the Cross, so He was a real Man who rose again from
   the dead, bearing in His body the marks of the crucifixion. His
   appearance to His familiar companions was to them no dream of the
   night--no fevered imagination of enthusiastic minds. Jesus Christ took
   pains to make them sure of His real Presence and that He was really
   among them in His proper Person--

   "A Man there was, a real Man,

   Who once on Calvary died,

   That same blest Man arose from death--

   The mark is in His side!"

   There was as much reality about the rising of our Lord as about His
   death and burial. There is no fiction here. This literal fact gives
   reality to all that comes from Him and by Him. Justification is no mere
   easing of the conscience--it is a real arraying of the soul in
   righteousness. Adoption into the family of God is no fancy, but brings
   with it true and proper sonship. The blessings of the Gospel are
   substantial facts and not mere theological opinions. As the
   resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead was a plain visible
   matter of fact--so are the pardon of sin and the salvation of the soul
   matters of actual experience and not the creatures of religious
   imagination.

   Brethren, such is the evidencing power of the resurrection of Christ,
   that when every other argument fails your faith, you may find safe
   anchorage in this assured fact. The currents of doubt may bear you
   towards the rocks of mistrust. But when your anchor finds no other
   hold, it may grip the fact of the resurrection of Christ from the dead.
   This must be true. The witnesses are too many to have been deceived.
   And their patient deaths on account of their belief proved that they
   were not only honest men but good men who valued the Truth of God more
   than life. We know that Jesus rose from the dead--whatever else we are
   forced to question, we have no question on that score.

   We may be tossed about upon the sea in reference to other statements,
   but we step to shore again and find terra firma in this unquestionable,
   firmly-established Truth--"The Lord is risen, indeed." Oh, that any of
   you who are drifting may be brought to a resting place by this fact! If
   you doubt the possibility of your own pardon, this may aid you to
   believe-- for Jesus lives. I read the other day of one who had greatly
   backslidden and grievously dishonored his Lord. But he heard a sermon
   upon the resurrection of Christ from the dead and it was life to him.
   Though he had known and believed that Truth before, yet he had never
   realized it vividly. After service he said to the minister, "Is it so,
   that our Lord Jesus has really risen from the dead and is yet alive?
   Then He can save me."

   By His Grace! A living Christ can say assuredly to you, "Your sins are
   forgiven you." He is able now to breathe into you eternal life. The
   Lord is risen indeed--in this see the evidence of His power to save to
   the uttermost. From this first solid stone of the resurrection you may
   go, step by step, over the streams of doubt till you land on the other
   side fully assured of your salvation in Christ Jesus.

   Thus, you see, there is an evidencing power in the resurrection of our
   Lord Jesus Christ. I pray that you may feel it now. You cannot have too
   much holy confidence. You cannot be too sure. He that died for you is
   alive and is making intercession for sinners. Believe that firmly and
   realize it vividly. Then you will be filled with rest of heart and will
   be bold to testify in the name of your Lord. The timid by nature will
   become lion-like in witnessing when the resurrection has borne to them
   overwhelming evidence of their Redeemer's mission and power.

   II. We will dwell next UPON THE JUSTIFYING POWER OF HIS RESURRECTION.
   Under the first head I

   compared the resurrection to a seal. Under this second head I must
   liken it to a note of acquittal, or a receipt. Our Lord's rising from
   the dead was a discharge in full from the High Court of Justice and
   from all those liabilities which He had undertaken on our behalf.

   Observe, first, that our Lord must have fully paid the penalty due to
   sin. He was discharged because He had satisfied the claim of justice.
   All that the Law could possibly demand was the fulfillment of the
   sentence, "The soul that sins, it shall die." There is no getting away
   from that doom--life must be taken for sin committed. Christ Jesus is
   our Substitute and Sacrifice. He came into the world to vindicate the
   Law and He has achieved it by the offering of Himself. He has been dead
   and buried and He has now risen from the dead because He has endured
   death to the fullest and there remains no more to be done. Brothers and
   Sisters, consider this and let your hearts be filled with joy--the
   penalty which has come upon you through breaches of the Law is paid.

   Yonder is the Receipt. Behold the Person of your risen Lord! He was
   your Hostage till the Law had been honored and Divine authority had
   been vindicated--that being done, an angel was sent from the Throne to
   roll back the stone and set the Hostage free. All who are in Him--and
   all are in Him who believe in Him--are set free by His being set free
   from the prison of the sepulcher--

   "He bore on the tree the ransom for me, And now both the sinner and
   Surety are free" Our Lord has blotted out the record which was against
   us and that in a most righteous way. Through the work of Jesus, God is
   just and the Justifier of him that believes. Jesus died for our sins
   but rose again for our justification. As the rising of the sun removes
   the darkness, so the rising of Christ has removed our sin. The power of
   the resurrection of Christ is seen in the justifying of every Believer.
   For the justification of the Representative is the virtual
   justification of all whom He represents.

   When our Lord rose from the dead it was certified that the
   righteousness, which He came to work out, was finished. For what
   remained to be done? All was accomplished, and therefore He went up
   unto His Father's side. Is He toiling there to finish a
   half-accomplished enterprise? No, "This Man, after He had offered one
   sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God." Our
   righteousness is a finished one, for Jesus quit the place of
   humiliation and arose to His reward. He cried upon the Cross, "It is
   finished!"--and His Word is true. The Father endorsed His claim by
   raising Him from the dead. Put on, therefore, O you faithful, this
   matchless robe of perfect righteousness! It is more than royal--it is
   Divine.

   It is for you that this best robe is provided. Wear it and be glad.
   Remember that in Christ Jesus you are justified from all things. You
   are, in the sight of God, as righteous as if you had kept the Law. For
   your Covenant Head kept it. You are as justified as if you had been
   obedient unto death--for Jesus Christ obeyed the Law on your behalf.
   You are this day justified by Christ who is "the end of the Law for
   righteousness to everyone that believes." Because He is delivered from
   the tomb, we are delivered from judgment and are sent forth as
   justified persons. "Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace
   with God."

   Oh, that a deep peace, profound as the serenity of God, may fall upon
   all our hearts as we see Jesus risen from the dead! His resurrection
   did not only prove our pardon and our justification but it proved our
   full acceptance. "He has made us accepted in the Beloved." Christ is
   never separated from His people, and therefore, wherever He is they are
   in Him. He is the Head. And as the Head, such are the members. I will
   suppose that a dead body lies before us. See, the head comes to life.
   It opens its eyes. It lifts itself. It rises from the ground. It moves
   to the table. I need not tell you that the arms, the feet and the whole
   body must go with the head. It cannot be that there shall be a risen
   head and yet the members of the body shall still be dead!

   When God accepted Christ, my Head, He accepted me. When He glorified my
   Head, He made me a partaker of that glory through my Representative.
   The infinite delight of the Father in His Only-begotten is an infinite
   delight in all the members of His mystical body. I pray that you may
   feel the power of His resurrection in this respect and become flooded
   with delight by the conviction that you are accepted, beloved, and
   delighted in by the Lord God. The resurrection will make your heart
   dance for joy if you fully see the pardon, justification and acceptance
   which it guarantees you. Oh that the Holy Spirit may now take of the
   things of Christ's resurrection and apply them to us with justifying
   power!

   III. Thirdly, let us now notice THE LIFE-GIVING POWER OF THE
   RESURRECTION OF CHRIST.

   This will be seen if we perceive that our Lord has life in Himself. I
   showed you this earlier--in the fact that He raised Himself from the
   dead. He took up the life which He laid down. He only has
   immortality--essential and underived. Remember how He said, "I am the
   resurrection and the life"? Do not say, "I believe in Christ and desire
   life." You have

   it. Christ and life are not two things. He says, "I am the resurrection
   and the life." If you have Jesus Christ, you have the resurrection. Oh,
   that you might now realize what power lies in Him who is the
   Resurrection and the Life! All the power there is in Christ is there
   for His people.

   "It pleased the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell," and "of
   His fullness have all we received." Christ has a life in Himself and He
   makes that life flow into every part of His mystical body according to
   His own word, "Because I live, you shall live also." Triumph,
   therefore, that you possess as a Believer this day, that same life
   which is inherent in the Person of your glorious Covenant Head.

   Moreover, our Lord has power to quicken whom He will. If the Lord Jesus
   Christ will, this morning, speak to the most cold heart in this
   assembly, it will glow with heavenly life. If the salvation of souls
   depended upon the preacher, nobody would be saved. But when the
   preacher's Master comes with him--however feeble his utterance--the
   life flashes forth and the dead are raised. See how the dry bones come
   together! Behold how, at the coming of the Divine Wind they stand upon
   their feet an exceeding great army! Our risen Redeemer is the Lord and
   Giver of life. What joy to Christian workers is found in the
   life-giving power of the resurrection! The warrant of Jesus will run
   through the domain of death and set dead Lazarus free. Where is he this
   morning? Lord, call him!

   This life, whenever it is imparted, is new life. In reading the four
   Evangelists have you ever noticed the difference between Jesus after
   resurrection and before? A French Divine has written a book entitled
   "The Life of Jesus Christ in Glory." When I bought it, I hardly knew
   what the subject might be. But I soon perceived that it was the life of
   Jesus on earth after He was risen from the dead. That was, indeed, a
   glorious life. He feels no more suffering, weakness, weariness,
   reproach, or poverty--He is no more mocked or opposed by men. He is in
   the world but He scarcely seems to touch it and it does not at all
   touch Him.

   He was of another world and only a temporary sojourner on this globe to
   which He evidently did not belong. When we believe in Jesus we receive
   a new life and rise to a higher state. The spiritual life owes nothing
   to the natural life--it is from another source and goes in another
   direction. The old life bears the image of the first and earthy Adam.
   The second life bears the image of the second and heavenly Adam. The
   old life remains, but becomes to us a kind of death--the new life which
   God gives is the true life, which is part of the new creation and links
   us to the heavenly and Divine. To this, I say, the old life is greatly
   opposed. But that evil life, by God's Grace, does not get the upper
   hand.

   Wonderful is the change worked by the new birth! Faculties that were in
   you before are purged and elevated. But at the same time, new spiritual
   faculties are conferred and a new heart and a right spirit are put
   within you. Wonder at this--that the risen Christ is able to give us an
   entirely new life! May you know, in this respect, the power of His
   resurrection! May you know the peace, the repose, the power of your
   risen Lord! May you, like He, be a stranger here, soon expecting to
   depart unto the Father! Before His death our Lord experienced stress
   because His work was unaccomplished--after His death He was at
   ease--because His work was done.

   Brethren, we may enter into His rest, for we are complete in Him! We
   are working for our Lord as He was for His Father during the forty
   days. But yet the righteousness in which we are accepted is finished
   and therefore we find rest in

   Him.

   Once more--the resurrection of Christ is operating at this present time
   with a quickening power on all who hear the Word aright. The sun is, to
   the vegetable world, a great source of growth. In this month of April
   he goes forth with life in his beams and we see the result. The buds
   are bursting, the trees are putting on their summer dress, the flowers
   are smiling and even the seeds which we buried in the earth are
   beginning to feel the vivifying warmth. They see not the lord of day
   but they feel his smile. Over what an enormous territory is the
   returning sun continually operating! How potent are his forces when he
   crosses the line and lengthens the day!

   Such is the risen Christ. In the grave He was like the sun in His
   winter solstice but He crossed the line in His resurrection. He has
   brought us all the hopes of Spring and is bringing us the joys of
   Summer. He is quickening many at this hour and will yet quicken
   myriads. This is the power with which the missionary goes forth to sow.
   This is the power in which the preacher at home continues to scatter
   the seed. The risen Christ is the great Producer of harvests. By the
   power of His resurrection men are raised from their death in sin to
   eternal life.

   I said eternal life, for wherever Jesus gives life, it is everlasting
   life. "Christ being risen from the dead, dies no more. Death has no
   more dominion over Him." And as we have been raised in the likeness of
   His resurrection, so are we raised

   into a life over which death has no more dominion. We shall not die
   again but the water which Jesus gives us shall be in us a well of water
   springing up into everlasting life.

   I wish I could venture further to unveil this secret force and still
   more fully reveal to you the power of our Lord's resurrection. It is
   the power of the Holy Spirit. It is the energy upon which you must
   depend when teaching or preaching. It must all be "according to the
   working of His mighty power, which He worked in Christ when He raised
   Him from the dead." I want you to feel that power today. I would have
   you feel eternal life throbbing in your bosoms, filling you with glory
   and immortality!

   Are you feeling cast down? Are your surroundings like those of a
   morgue? When you return will you seem to go home to endure the
   rottenness and corruption of profanity and lewdness? Your remedy will
   lie in eternal life flooding you with its torrents and bearing you
   above these evil influences. May you not only have life but have it
   more abundantly and so be vigorous enough to throw off the baneful
   influences of this evil world!

   IV. The last point is THE CONSOLING POWER OF THE RESURRECTION OF
   CHRIST.

   This consoling power should be felt as to all departed saints. We are
   often summoned to the house of mourning in this Church. We seldom pass
   a week without one or two deaths of beloved ones. Here is our
   comfort--Jesus says, "Your dead men shall live, together with My dead
   body shall they arise."

   "As the Lord our Savior rose So all His followers must."

   He is the first fruits from among the dead. The cemeteries are crowded,
   precious dust is closely heaped together. But as surely as Jesus rose
   from the tomb of Joseph all those who are in Him shall rise also.
   Though bodies may be consumed in the fire, or ground to powder, or
   sucked up by plants and fed upon by animals. Though they are made to
   pass though ten thousand changeful processes--yet there are no
   difficulties where there is a God. He that gave us bodies when we had
   none can restore those bodies when they are pulverized and scattered to
   the four winds. We sorrow not as those that are without hope. We know
   where the souls of the godly ones are--they are "forever with the
   Lord." We know where their bodies will be when the clarion blast shall
   wake the dead and the sepulcher shall give up its spoils. Sweet is the
   consolation which comes to us from the empty tomb of Jesus. "God has
   both raised up the Lord and will also raise up us by His own power."

   Here, too, is comfort in our inward deaths. In order that we should
   know the resurrection of Christ we must be made conformable unto His
   death. Have we not to die many deaths? Have you ever felt the sentence
   of death in yourself that you might not trust in yourself? Have you not
   seen all your fancied beauty decay and all your strength wither "like
   the leaves of the forest when autumn has blown"? Have not all your
   carnal hopes perished and all your resolves turned to dust? If any of
   you are undergoing that process today, I hope you will go through with
   it till the sword of the Spirit has slain you.

   You must die before you can be raised from the dead. If you are
   undergoing the process of crucifixion with Christ-- which means a
   painful, lingering death within--remember that this is the needful way
   to resurrection. How can you know your Lord's resurrection except by
   knowing His death? You must be buried with Him to rise with Him. Is not
   this sweet consolation for a bitter experience?

   I think there is here great consolation for those of us who mourn
   because the cause of Christ seems to be in an evil case. I may say to
   the enemy, "This is your hour and the power of darkness." Alas, I cry
   with the holy woman, "They have taken away my Lord and I know not where
   they have laid Him." In many a pulpit the precious blood no longer
   speaks. They have taken the heart out of the doctrine of propitiation
   and left us nothing but the name of it. Their false philosophy has
   overlaid the Gospel and crushed out its life, so far as they are
   concerned. They boast that we are powerless--our protest is despised,
   error shows her brazen forehead and seizes the strongholds of truth.

   Yet we despair not--no, we do not even fear. If the cause of Christ
   were dead and buried--and the wise men had fixed the stone and set
   their seal and appointed their guards--regardless, at the appointed
   hour, the Lord's Truth would rise again. I am not uneasy about ultimate
   issues. It is the mischief of the time being that grieves me. But the
   Lord will yet avenge His own elect which cry day and night unto Him.
   Jesus must live if they kill Him. He must rise if they bury Him--
   herein lies our consolation. This Truth affords choice consolation to
   persecuted saints.

   In Paul's day to be a Christian was a costly matter. Imprisonment was
   the lightest of their trials--stripes and tortures of every kind were
   their portion. "Christians to the lions!" was the cry heard in the
   amphitheatre. And nothing pleased the people better unless it was to
   see saints of God smeared with pitch from head to foot and set on fire.
   Did they not call themselves the lights of the world? Such were the
   brutal pleasantries of the Romans. Here was the backbone of saintly
   comfort--they would rise again and share in the glory of their Lord
   forever! Though they might find a living grave between a lion's jaws,
   they would not be destroyed--even the body would live again--for Jesus
   lived again--even the Crucified One in whom they trusted.

   My Brethren, my text is like a honeycomb dripping with honey. It has in
   it comfort for the ages to come. There will be a living issue for these
   dead times. Do you see that train steaming along the iron way? See, it
   plunges into a cavern in yonder hill! You have now lost sight of it.
   Has it perished? As on an angel's wing you fly to the top of the hill
   and you look down on the other side. There it comes steaming forth
   again from the tunnel, bearing its living freight to its destination.
   So, whenever you see the Church of God apparently plunging into a
   cavern of disaster or a grave of defeat, think not that the spirit of
   the age has swallowed it up! Have faith in God! His Truth will be
   uppermost yet--

   "The might with the right, And the right with the might shall be-- And,
   come what there may To stand in the way, That day the world shall see."

   The opposition of men might have proved a dark den in which the cause
   of God should have been hopelessly buried. But in the resurrection of
   our Lord we see a cavern turned into a tunnel and a way pierced through
   death itself. "Who are you, O great mountain?" The Alps are
   pierced--God's way is made clear. He triumphs over all difficulties.
   "The glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it
   together--for the mouth of the Lord has spoken it."

   That is my close. I desire that you should feel resurrection power. We
   have many technical Christians who know the phrases of godliness but
   know not the power of godliness. We have ritualistic Christians who
   treasure the outward but know not the power. We have many moral
   religionists, but they also know not the power. We are pestered with
   conventional, regulation Christians. Oh, yes, no doubt we are
   Christians. But we are not enthusiasts, fanatics, nor even as this
   bigot. Such men have a name to live and are dead. They have a form of
   godliness but deny the power of it.

   I beseech you, my Hearers, be not content with a Truth of God till you
   feel the force of it. Do not praise the spiritual food set before you,
   but eat of it till you know its power to nourish. Do not even talk of
   Jesus till you know His power to save. God grant that you may know the
   powers of the world to come, for Jesus' sake! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

Truth Stranger Than Fiction

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S DAY EVENING, MAY 30, 1886,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "And I will restore to you the years that the locust has eaten." Joel
   2:25.

   LOST years can never be restored literally. Time once past is gone
   forever. Let no man make any mistake about this or trifle with the
   present moment under any notion that the flying hour will ever wing its
   way back to him. As well call back the north wind or fill again the
   emptied rain cloud, or put back into their quiver the arrows of the
   lord of day. As well bid the river which has hastened onward to the sea
   bring back its rolling floods, as imagine that the years that have once
   gone can ever be restored to us. It will strike you at once that the
   locusts did not eat the years--the locusts ate the fruits of the years'
   labor--the harvests of the fields.

   So the meaning of the restoration of the years must be the restoration
   of those fruits and of those harvests which the locusts consumed. You
   cannot have back your time. But there is a strange and wonderful way in
   which God can give back to you the wasted blessings, the unripened
   fruits of years over which you mourned. The fruits of wasted years may
   yet be yours. It is a pity that they should have been eaten by your
   folly and negligence. But if they have been so, be not hopeless
   concerning them. "All things are possible to him that believes." There
   is a power which is beyond all things and can work great marvels.

   Who can make the all-devouring locust restore his prey? No man, by
   wisdom or power, can recover what has been utterly destroyed. God alone
   can do for you what seems impossible. And here is the promise of His
   Grace--"I will restore to you the years that the locust has eaten." By
   giving to His repentant people larger harvests than the land could
   naturally yield, God could give back to them, as it were, all they
   would have had if the locusts had never come. And God can restore your
   life which has up to now been blighted and eaten up with the locust and
   sin, by giving you Divine Grace in the present and in the future. He
   can yet make it complete and blessed and useful to His praise and
   glory. It is a great wonder--but Jehovah is a God of wonders and in the
   kingdom of His Grace miracles are common things.

   We shall go into this subject, which I think will be very interesting
   to those here present who have wasted years to mourn over, since they
   have up to now done nothing for God, nor even for themselves. The
   locust has eaten everything. The prospect of recovering the wreckage of
   a life must be full of interest to them.

   I. I shall first speak upon locust-eaten years. YEARS WHICH THE LOCUST
   HAS EATEN--what sort of years are

   these?

   First and darkest of all, there are the dead years of sin, of
   reprobation, impenitence and unbelief. Those years without God and
   without Christ. Those years without life as to spiritual things! What a
   condition to be in! Oh, how many, many years have some passed in this
   horrible state! We, all of us--those of us with whom God has dealt very
   graciously--always feel sorry that even our most early days should have
   been spent in sin. I was brought to know the Lord when I was fifteen
   years of age and I have often said that I could wish I had known Him
   fifteen years before. Oh, that one could, from the very earliest
   openings of one's eyes have seen the light of the Eternal!

   Oh, that the first pulsing of life had been with Jesus! Oh, that the
   first flowing of the blood had been consecrated with the life of God
   within the soul! But yet I fear there are very many to whom the idea of
   conversion in boyhood and youth seems almost too good to be true. They
   have now reached thirty, forty, fifty years of age, and are still
   unregenerate, unrenewed. I could weep over you! We frequently meet with
   people older, still, whose many years have all been graceless,
   locust-eaten years. Ah me, how sad to be old and unsaved--feeble with
   age and yet without strength unto

   God!

   Now remember. That eating of the locust--that devouring of everything
   by the caterpillars, meant a laborious year, because that year the
   people plowed and sowed and watched their crops, and their labor was
   all in vain. So, he that does

   nothing for God and has no spiritual blessing, still has to work and to
   labor. None toil harder than those who are the slaves of lust,
   pleasure, self and Satan. These people often labor as in the very fire.
   The way of transgressors is hard. They have to toil and slave and tug
   and strive. The yoke of the world is not easy and its burden is not
   light. And nothing comes of it. This is the gall of the bitterness. One
   does not mind working when there is a good reward for it. But to plow
   and sow and then to reap nothing because the locust has eaten it! This
   is misery.

   The wage sweetens the toil. But when the wage is death, the toil is
   horrible. Yet this is the way of unregenerate men--they spend years in
   laborious rebellion and the harvest is not after their desire. They
   toil under the impulse of some strong desire and their desire perishes.
   They work, they slave--but nothing comes of it. It is a year of labor
   but it is labor in vain.

   The locust year was particularly a year of great disappointment. The
   people looked for a harvest. In fact, they seemed to see it spring up
   and then it was devoured before their eyes. Even so, the ungodly
   man--the man who has no faith in Christ--is often charmed with the
   prospect of a happiness which he never reaches. A little more and he
   will be content. He gets a little more. And this increases his thirst
   for yet another draught from the golden cup. Run as we may when the
   heart shoots with its far-reaching bow, still the arrows are beyond us.
   The student must know a little more. The ambitious must climb a little
   higher upon the ladder of honor and then he will be at ease. He learns,
   he reaches the honor--but the ease is still as distant as ever--perhaps
   it is even further off.

   Earth's cups, when they seem most sweet, only hold salt water which
   beget a growing thirst. We swallow the horseleech when we drain the
   chalice at the feasts of this world and an insatiable craving follows.
   The locust-eaten years of sin are years of labor and years of bitter
   disappointment.

   And, alas, they are fruitless years. O Sirs, what have some of you ever
   done in this world? I heard of one who had made a half a million pounds
   of money and he died. A Christian man said, "Now, I call that man's
   life a dead failure. What has he done? He has accumulated what he could
   not enjoy. He has scraped it together and he has made no use of it
   whatever." Such persons remind me of crows who will hoard, I know not
   what--all kinds of treasures and trash. And what do they do but hide
   them in a hole behind the door? They cannot do anything with them. They
   have no sense to use them--whether they steal the abbot's ring or a bit
   of wire, it is all the same to them. And to misers what can be the
   difference between a thousand pounds or a thousand pins, since they use
   neither? Alas, many have the power to get, but have not the faculty to
   use what they have gotten. Their years are eaten with the locust.

   Think again--are there not numbers of men that are just living
   strainers of bread and meat and beer and that is all that you can say
   of them? They go to and fro in the world but if they were tied neck and
   heels together and flung into the Atlantic nobody would miss them,
   except perhaps the poor wife and children who would be more comfortable
   without them than with them. I speak not too severely, for we meet with
   many such persons who are nature's blot--creation's blank. These are
   clouds without rain, wells without water--the wrapping and packing of
   what should have been useful lives. Why have they burdened the earth at
   all?

   Others who are decent, respectable and quiet people--what does their
   whole life come to? It is like some of those sponge plants which appear
   very large when you have them in your hand but you can compress them
   into the tenth part of nothing. Are not many mere blown-up appearances?
   It is a biggish sort of life--especially when the man himself describes
   it. But if it comes to the reality of it, the good that is done is
   nothing. God is not glorified, broken hearts are not healed, holiness
   is not extended--nothing is in the whole performance but the very
   reverse of what should have been. It is a drawback rather than an
   addition to that which is good in the world.

   What an awful thing for a man to have lived to be forty-five and to
   have done nothing! If we will not spare a fruitless tree in the
   orchard, which, year after year has brought forth nothing--if we quite
   understand the justice of the verdict, "Cut it down. Why cumbers it the
   ground?"--surely such a sharp sentence followed up by a swift blow of
   the axe, might go out against many here present! For up to now they
   have been wasters, cumberers, doing nothing worth the doing. The locust
   has eaten up every year that they have plowed and sown. Nothing has
   come of the whole of their lives. Yet, listen to me--if you are led by
   Divine Grace to confess your sin and turn unto the Lord your God and
   "rend your hearts and not your garments"--even to you God can restore
   the years which the locust has eaten! I beseech you, hear this
   marvelous promise. And think of it and do not miss it from want of
   effort.

   Now, very briefly let me mention that there is another sense in which
   the text can be used. There are some whose years have been eaten by the
   locust through great sorrow, depression and disappointment. They
   remember those happy springtide days when they greatly rejoiced in God.
   But for some reason they dropped their confidence and lost their hope.
   Their sky was darkened and the wintry winds of despair howled around
   them. I am grieved for dear friends on whom the chill of long
   depression has fallen with terrible power. I frequently meet with these
   sons and daughters of melancholy and my sorrow is that I am so often
   unable to deal wisely with them.

   It has been my privilege in many cases to be the bearer of comfort but
   in the very act my own soul has often been heavily burdened. Very
   precious children of God may fall into the Slough of Doubt. Diamonds
   may be hidden away in dark mines. Some of God's rarest pearls lie deep
   in the dark waters. Now you that are thus losing year after year and
   sighing--

   "Where is the blessedness I Anew When first I sa w the Lord? Where is
   the soul-refreshing view Of Jesus and His Word?"

   do not lose all heart about it. Prisoners who have been confined till
   it almost seemed that the moss would grow on their eyelids have yet
   been set free. Do not utterly despair, for here stands this gracious
   promise--"I will restore unto you the years which the locust has
   eaten." God can give you back all those years of sorrow and you shall
   yet be the better for them.

   You shall have to thank God for all this sadness of heart. It is a
   strange story that I tell you. Perhaps you will not believe me tonight,
   but you shall live to see it true--God will grind sunlight for you out
   of your black nights--in the oven of affliction Divine Grace will
   prepare the bread of delight. I said this to a friend with whom I have
   often conversed--an earnest Christian woman who for three years had
   defied all attempts to comfort her. We had prayed with her. Her godly,
   gracious husband, a minister of Christ, had laid out his heart to cheer
   her but she had refused to be comforted.

   And yet to my great joy, the other day I received a letter saying, "The
   Lord has opened the gates of my dungeon. My captivity has ended. And
   though I am sick in body, that does not matter, for I am restored in
   spirit." Yes, the Lord can loose the captives and He does it. There are
   dear children of God who have been ten or twenty years the victims of
   despair to whom, nevertheless, this promise has, in the fullness of
   time, been sweetly fulfilled, "I will restore unto you the years which
   the locust has eaten."

   And now, having given you those two versions of the text, let me give
   you another. I speak of those whose years have been wasted by their
   being in a low state of Grace. Many Christians are barely Christians.
   We may not be judges of our Brethren. But if some professors are
   Christians, it is in a very small way. They remind me of the answer
   given by the American boy when he went to Sunday school and the teacher
   asked him, "Is your mother a Christian?" "Yes, Sir," he said, "she is a
   Christian." "Is your father a Christian?" The boy answered, "Well, Sir,
   he may be a Christian but he has not worked at it much lately."

   We know quite a company of that kind--perhaps they fear the Lord but
   they have not worked at it much. Their religion has no practical power
   over them. Salvation is not by works. But when a man is saved, then
   straightway he begins, by God's Grace, to work for the Lord. And
   therefore where nothing is done for Jesus we are apt to fear that
   nothing has been done by Jesus. There are talkers around us whose years
   are eaten up by the locust of idleness, the worm of worldliness, the
   worm of frivolous amusement. They seem to be like Hosea's "silly dove"
   without heart. I do not judge them--but I look at them with pitying
   wonder. How can they be content to be such useless things? How can they
   be satisfied to be so neutral, so double-minded, when all around them
   the stern conflict rages?

   I wish they would give us a little more evidence upon which to judge
   whether they are for us or for our enemies. They attend a place of
   worship. They come to a Prayer Meeting once in twelve months if any
   friend calls in and asks them to do so. They are glad that there is a
   Sunday school connected with the Church--they do not know what it is
   doing. They have never entered it. They love their minister but do not
   contribute to his maintenance. They admire the Doctrines of Grace but
   never attempt to spread them. In fact they spend their time in
   diligently doing nothing and in quietly wearing the cloak of a
   profession which has nothing in it.

   Well, now, dear Friend, this is a wretched kind of thing. If you are a
   Christian, be a Christian. Let your heart be warm towards holy things
   or else let them alone. Cold meats are well enough but cold religion is
   the sickliest diet upon which a man can live. Serve up religion hot,
   Sir, or not at all! If it grows lukewarm, neither God nor man will have
   it. For Jesus, who is both God and Man, has said, "I will spit you out
   of My mouth." He cannot endure it, who is the most patient of all
   beings.

   The years which the locust has eaten in some professors are far too
   many. And I would earnestly exhort any Brother or Sister here who has
   had the locusts at him for a long time--remember the promise stands, if
   you will avail yourself of it, "I will restore unto you the years that
   the locust has eaten." It is high time that you saw to it, for your
   case is a bad one. It is ill to be trading so ill, when a merchandise
   so precious as time is being lost.

   Once more only, lest by these varied instances I should weary you.
   There are some in whom their years have been eaten up by the locusts in
   a worse way than that of mere idleness, namely, by the sin of open
   backsliding. This is one of the plagues of the Church of God. Alas, for
   the many who did run well but have suddenly stopped and run no longer
   in the Divine road! This is our frequent sorrow, even to heartbreak. We
   believe in the perseverance of the saints but many are not saints and
   therefore do not persevere.

   Nominal saints exhibit no final perseverance. Saints who have only the
   name of saints last but for a time and then die away. In too many, the
   life of God rather lingers, than grows--their religion is so very weak
   that they exhibit the signs of disease rather than of health. They
   wander away from their Lord and Master because they do not sufficiently
   feel His attractive power. Oh, that the Lord would be gracious in
   restoring such wanderers! Do I address any who have almost given up
   attendance on the means of Divine Grace? I know you have no comfort in
   such a course. I am sure, if you are a child of God, you cannot be
   happy in the world--you cannot be content while leaving Christ, but are
   in a miserable way.

   Grace has spoiled you for the world and it is of no use your attempting
   to get comfort out of it. Your only hope of happiness lies Godward. You
   must come back. You must come back to the good old way. Do not linger,
   but return at once. Every hour that you linger the locusts are eating
   up every green and fruitful thing within your spirit--why give the
   Destroyer so much space? You are doing no good. You are getting no
   good. Why remain as you are? You are doing mischief. You are grieving
   the Spirit of God--wake up from so deplorable a state. You are not
   winning souls but you are ruining souls by your inconsistency.

   God have mercy upon you! Come, and receive His restoring mercy. He will
   not cast you away but He bids me say to you that if you turn to Him
   according to the teaching of this chapter, He will yet restore to you
   the years that the locust has eaten. It is a great wonder. But you
   shall see it--if you will seek the Lord yet again. So much then about
   locust-eaten years, for I want to get at a happier subject.

   II. What does God say? "I will restore unto you the years that the
   locust has eaten." This is our second head--

   LOCUST-EATEN YEARS RESTORED.

   Notice, this is Divine Work, "I will restore unto you the years that
   the locust has eaten." You cannot get them back. Nobody can give them
   back to you. But the Omnipotent Jehovah says, "I will restore them to
   you." Can you believe that? All things are possible with God. Those
   dead years, those doleful years, those desponding years, those idle
   years, those backsliding years--all the harvests of them, God can give
   them back to you. Look away from yourself and trust in the
   miracle-working God while you hear this word of promise, "I will
   restore unto you the years which the locust has eaten."

   But notice that this restoration follows upon a true and genuine
   repentance. Let me read the Words of the Lord to you and you listen to
   them and obey. "Therefore also now, says the Lord, turn you even to Me
   with all your heart and with fasting and with weeping and with
   mourning: and rend your heart and not your garments and turn unto the
   Lord your God: for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of
   great kindness and repents Him of the evil. Let the priests, the
   ministers of the Lord, weep between the porch and the altar and let
   them say, Spare Your people, O Lord and give not Your heritage to
   reproach, that the heathen should rule over them: wherefore should they
   say among the people, Where is their God? Then will the Lord be jealous
   for His land and pity His people."

   Repent, then. This is the great teaching and operation of the Gospel at
   its commencement upon the heart. "Repent and be baptized everyone of
   you," is its first cry from the wilderness. "Turn you every man from
   his evil ways." "Turn you, turn you, why will you die, O house of
   Israel?" To go on in impenitence is to miss the blessing of my text. To
   go on

   in spiritual deadness--to go on in backsliding--will never bring the
   restoration of lost years. But he that shall genuinely confess his
   sin--shall heartily hate it and shall turn unto God through Jesus
   Christ, trusting in the precious blood of His atonement--shall receive
   the unspeakably precious benediction of the Lord, the Restorer. Such a
   man shall plead this promise with God and have it graciously
   fulfilled--"I will restore unto you the years that the locust has
   eaten." It is a very remarkable promise but you see to whom it is
   given.

   Yet linger a moment over this mystery of love. Picture the spirits of
   evil, year after year, bearing away from the fields of human life all
   their harvests. Where have they borne the precious products? Ask where
   has the fire carried the forests it has devoured? Or where has the
   flood borne away the navies it has swallowed up? To call back these
   harvests would be a task which only madness could attempt. Fly,
   swift-winged angels! But you cannot overtake the spoilers--neither
   could your eyes of fire detect the caverns in which the robbers have
   stored their wealth. The fruits of wasted years are gone, gone past
   hope. Yet, behold, the Lord who called light out of darkness and will
   yet bring forth life from the tomb, declares that these long-lost
   spoils shall be restored!

   And shall it not be done? Is anything too hard for the Lord? Does not
   the very difficulty, yes, impossibility of the enterprise make it the
   more worthy of the Almighty? Here is a marvelous thing and here is,
   therefore, a work fit for Him who does great marvels. To him that
   believes all things are possible and this also is among the "all
   things." Never was a fairy tale more strange, or a dream of Arabian
   nights more romantic. Yet here it stands in sober words and many a time
   in solid fact these words have been true. When we come into the region
   where the Lord works, we come at once into contact with miracles and
   walk in the midst of marvels. Then as we see Grace upon Divine Grace,
   we have to cry, "O world of wonders! I can say no less."

   This promise is only fulfilled by the exceeding Grace of God. And it
   shall be my business for a minute to show you how the Grace of God
   works it out. We take, for instance, a man or a woman who has been
   living for many years in known sin. Those years have all been wasted.
   How can God give us back the fruit of those wasted years? He can. He
   can. See that woman? She is a sinner, a common sinner of the town. She
   has spent her days and her nights in wantonness. She comes into the
   room where the Savior lies reclining at the dinner table and His feet
   are not far from the door. She bears a choice box of ointment. She has,
   besides that, eyes full of tears and she stands behind Him weeping.

   She washes His feet with those tears. She loosens the luxuriant tresses
   of her head, those nets in which she had entangled many a living soul
   and she bows down and wipes those feet which with her tears she washed.
   While she kisses them with her lips, she wipes them with her hair. Now,
   that woman, in that day, had through Grace restored to her the years
   which the locust had eaten. Who shall dare to say that she stands
   second to anybody in the service of her Lord and Master? She loves much
   because she has had much forgiven. And though I say not that the
   greatness of her sin could ever be an advantage, yet I do say that the
   greatness of her love that springs out of the greatness of her Lord's
   forgiveness did put her in the very front rank of those who served and
   loved Him.

   She had been last but mighty Grace placed her among the first and she
   has never lost that leading position. And you, too, my Hearer, though
   you may have been so many years a sinner, can yet be so transformed as
   to overtake the saints. God can give you such a true repentance, such a
   burning love, such an enthusiastic consecration that during the rest of
   your days you shall make up for all those wasted years. The prey shall
   be taken from the mighty--years seized by evil shall be dragged back
   from the devil's den. And all the memory and outcome of them
   transformed by the action of Divine Grace and gratitude shall be laid
   as treasure at your Redeemer's feet. By giving you a deeper love, a
   more tense passion, a fuller consecration on account of the greatness
   of your sin, the Lord can restore to you the years that the locust has
   eaten. Did Paul lose those years in which he was a persecutor and
   injurious? Did not his quickened pace and his deeper self-knowledge
   make all the after years of his life ten times more full of power for
   good?

   I will suppose the locust has eaten many years by your being in great
   sorrow--and I believe that the Lord can easily make up to you that
   grievous loss. The wear and fret of grief are very great but there is a
   remedy. Have I not seen some that have passed through years of deep
   soul distress who have been all their lifetime much the better for it?
   They have been more able to sympathize with poor, tried saints. They
   have had a truer, deeper, richer experience. And, as a rule, they have
   known the Gospel of Christ better and they have had a more tender love
   to Him who brought them up out of the horrible pit and out of the miry
   clay.

   Personally I have been much the gainer by my sad hours and my sick
   days. I reckoned those times lost in which I was unfit for service. But
   I think I was in error--for I perceive that the fields which have lain
   fallow repay the unfertile season sevenfold when the bearing time
   returns. Do not think, dear children of God, if you have been for years
   in despondency that it need turn out to be a total loss to you. It is a
   great evil and mischief. But God can restore to you the years that the
   locust has eaten. Your ills may become wells of comfort for others. The
   Lord can bring so much good out of the evil, so much light out of the
   darkness, so much joy out of the sorrow that you shall one day say, "I
   thank God that I was shut up in Doubting Castle. I thank God I did sink
   in the deep mire where there was no standing for He has restored to me
   the years that the locust has eaten."

   And if, again, the locust has eaten up your years through your being
   cold and indifferent and idle, God can recover you from this sad
   mischief. He will grant you Divine Grace to repent bitterly of this
   great sin. For a great sin it is to lose a moment which should be used
   for Jesus. But yet, if the Lord shall visit you with an intense hatred
   of such idleness and sting you into action and at the same time draw
   you by the cords of love into full consecration, you will, perhaps, by
   redoubled zeal, recover the lost seasons. Oh, that God would make it so
   with those who up to now have sadly loitered in the race! Oh, that our
   smoldering logs would become flaming firebrands! Oh, that our sluggards
   could be aroused into enthusiasts!

   I have known men living orderly and regular lives for many years and
   yet they have done nothing for their Lord. Such sober people move on
   and on and on and on. But they make little progress. Steady, steady,
   steady, steady, jog-- trot--life has no fire in it for them and they
   know no reason for ardor. They never get out of breath with zeal. They
   never exhaust themselves with excitement. They accomplish little from
   want of fire. I have known a great many Christians about whom I have
   never had any fear of their being consumed by their vehemence. They are
   such proper people that even if the Lord Himself were to come they
   would never cry "Hosanna!" in the street. They are never warmed into
   anything like enthusiasm--as soon hope to warm a marble statue.

   These are the folks who, after a while, grow negligent and the locusts
   eat up the years of their regularity and all the gains of their
   sobriety. I am sorry, indeed, to hear of a broken reputation, or a
   profession openly disgraced. But what a mercy it is when, even by this
   terrible means, dead professors are driven to turn to God with full
   purpose of heart! When these, who slept in all the chill propriety of
   spiritual death are aroused to seek the Lord penitently, we see no more
   of their dull commonplace. If restored by a renewal of spiritual
   strength before they have openly declined into sin, the change is
   equally manifest.

   Now they must fly like the wind, though before they could only creep
   like the snail. They must do everything at a great heat with all their
   heart and soul and strength. A month or so of such quickened, intense
   work full often effects more result than years of slow, feeble, formal
   routine. Oh, to live while we live! Once fully charged with the Divine
   Power we can achieve as much in a day as before we performed in a year!
   If you, as a preacher, come back to God and get the Holy Spirit to
   anoint you, one sermon preached in the power of the Holy Spirit will be
   worth ten thousand preached without it.

   If you, as a worker, go to your Sunday school class with a Divine
   Anointing resting upon you, there will be more children brought to
   Christ by a little of your living, loving, teaching than ever would
   have been by whole years of your unspiritual talk. Thus the Lord God
   can, by His endowing us with greater power and firing us with fuller
   zeal restore to us the years that the locust has eaten. The strong
   swimmer will soon recover the space through which he has drifted-- when
   omnipotence is in every stroke the man is soon back to his right place,
   and before long he is ahead of where he would have been.

   Do not invite the locusts to come, I pray you, in the hope of getting
   back that which they devour. No! No! No--a thousand times NO! We do not
   want the locusts at all--we cannot endure sin, or doubt, or trifling.
   We want every year to be fruitful--fruitful with a hundred-fold
   increase. But if the evils have come, let us turn to God with penitence
   and faith and He can yet restore to us the losses they have caused.

   I think I said, also, that in certain cases the locust has eaten up
   much of the fruit of life through backslidings. Many are in this case.
   But if they will return from their backslidings, the Lord can give them
   back whatever they have lost. I have known persons backsliding very
   sorrowfully, very much to the grief of the Church. But God has visited
   them in Divine Grace and brought them back and they have been better
   men afterwards. Yes, I venture to say, even better men

   than before they actually offended. I have not been thankful for their
   open offense. But I have been very thankful for their restoration and
   for the humility and other graces which have been the result of their
   bitter experience.

   They used to be very top-lofty once, but now they carry no flags and
   banners. Such grand fellows they were! But after their wandering, when
   they came back, they were willing to be in the rear rank and to do
   commonplace work. They were once very reserved--you could not get near
   them. But now they value a kind word and return a loving salutation
   very gratefully. They are now more like their Brethren and more willing
   to be on a level with them, and yet their religion is a great deal
   deeper and more sincere. They do not carry so much sail--but they have
   more cargo.

   I have known some that, at first conversion, have not been very clear
   in the Gospel but who have been made evangelical by their discoveries
   of their own need of mercy. They could not spell the word "grace." They
   began with a "G" but they very soon went on with an "F," till it spelt
   very much like "free will" before they had done with it. But after they
   have learned their weaknesses--after they have fallen into serious
   fault and God has restored them--or after they have passed through deep
   depression, they have sung a new song. In the school of repentance they
   have learned to spell. They began to write the word "free," but they
   went on from free, not to "will," but to "grace" and there it stood in
   capitals, "FREE GRACE."

   By coming to know themselves they came also to understand what Divine
   Grace meant and they began to read their title written in the blood of
   Christ, instead of reading it in themselves. And they became clearer in
   their divinity and truer in their faith than ever they were before. I
   do not want you to know the locusts of backsliding but if they have
   ever come and you have been eaten up by them, I pray that God may
   restore to you the years that the locust has eaten. I want you to lay
   hold of this promise and go home and plead with God that it may be
   fulfilled to you so that the rest of your life may be so bright and so
   clear, with the light of the Spirit of God, that as much as possible,
   you may make up for lost time. God grant that your desire may be
   fulfilled!

   III. I have done when I have said just a word or two upon a third
   point. Here are locust-eaten years and here are those locust-eaten
   years restored--and now, WHAT IS TO COME OF IT? If God restores to us
   the years that the locust has eaten, He has done a great deal for us.
   But notice that He is able to do more and will do it, for what does He
   say? He says, in the twenty-sixth verse, "And you shall eat in plenty,
   and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God, that has
   dealt wondrously with you: and My people shall never be ashamed."

   What a promise! You half-starved professors--you that are moping and
   mourning--who rise from the tables of the world unsatisfied--devoured
   with a griping hunger! If you turn to God with full purpose of heart He
   will fill you with heavenly bread and give you as real enjoyment as
   ever He gave to the best of His people. You, too, shall have your mouth
   satisfied with good things and your youth shall be renewed like the
   eagle's. The Lord does nothing by halves--if He receives a prodigal
   back, He does not send him down into the kitchen to be fed with broken
   victuals--He receives him into the best parlor and puts on him the best
   robe and kills for him the fatted calf.

   O you cast-down and troubled ones, you do not know how near you are to
   joy! O sad Hearts, the morning is breaking in the east for you! You are
   heavy tonight. And well you may be! You know your sin and that may well
   make you mourn. But ring the bells of Heaven, the sinner is repenting!
   And if he turns with repentance to God, the richest joy, the choicest
   Covenant blessings that belong only to the chosen family shall be his
   portion at once! Is it not written, "You shall eat in plenty and shall
   be satisfied and shall praise the name of the Lord"?

   What shall come of it? Why this shall come of it--that you who have had
   the most to mourn over shall be among the loudest singers. You shall
   praise the name of the Lord your God that has dealt wondrously with
   you. You will cry, with tears running down your cheeks, "Who is a God
   like unto You, passing by transgression, iniquity and sin?" I was a
   sinner up to the neck in filth. A despairing soul shut up in the
   blackest darkness. But He has washed me and He has brought me out into
   the light and put a new song into my mouth. He is a glorious God--this
   God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! I pray you may have
   intense enjoyment of His marvelous Grace and may pour forth your whole
   souls in His praise.

   Next, you shall have most clear and sweet communion with God. Hear what
   the Prophet further says, "And you shall know that I am in the midst of
   Israel and that I am the Lord your God and none else and My people
   shall never be ashamed." Wonderful! Wonderful that a far-off outcast
   sinner should know his Covenant God and should say, "He is my God," and
   should enter into fellowship with Him and should enjoy all the
   privileges of a friend of God. Wonderful that

   all his fear should be gone and that he should, instead, be full of
   holy confidence and have a right to hold up his head and never be
   ashamed! It shall be so, dear Hearer. True repentance shall bring rest
   to you. Only trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and your fellowship shall
   be with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ henceforth and
   evermore.

   And then, best of all, the anointing shall come upon you. You remember
   how the chapter goes on to say that God would pour out His spirit upon
   all flesh so that even the handmaiden and the servant, the very least
   of the people of God, should be moved by the Spirit of God to speak in
   God's name and should be enabled to realize things which before had
   been deemed mere visions and dreams? I hope that the Lord has some
   here, at this hour, who did not know Him when they came within these
   walls, who, at this time, shall be called by His Grace and before long
   shall begin to tell to others what the Lord has done for them.

   O Lord, find ministers among these miserable sinners! Raise up for
   yourself witnesses from among these careless youths! I think I see the
   angel even now, and hear the voice from off the Throne, crying, "Whom
   shall I send and who will go for Us?" Oh, that one of the seraphims
   might take from off the altar the live coal and touch some unclean lip
   and inflame some cold heart and make the purified man to answer, "Here
   am I, send me." Then shall you be sent to tell abroad the riches of the
   Divine Grace of which you have tasted--the freeness of the love which
   has been manifested to you. May the Lord grant it!

   May the locusts all be blown away by a strong north wind and never
   darken the air again! May these wasted years all be given back to you
   and may you become the Lord's living, loving servants from this time
   forth. Oh for the highest form of spiritual life! Oh for the greatest
   possible usefulness! Oh for grace to fill out our poor shriveled lives
   till they arrive at a heavenly fullness! Oh for the sacred breath of
   God to fill out all the canvas of our capacity! Lord, the sail flaps.
   The boat scarcely moves. We lie becalmed in indolence! Send us a
   breeze, my God! Grant us the wind of Your Spirit to fill out every sail
   that by Your Grace we may fly over the waves. Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

                              A Free Grace Promise

   A Sermon

   (No. 2082)

   Intended for Reading on Lord's-day, May 5th, 1888.

   Delivered by

   C. H. SPURGEON,

   At the [4]Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington,

   On Thursday Evening, October 11th, 1888.

   "And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of
   the Lord shall be delivered."'Joel 2:32.

   VENGEANCE was in full career. The armies of divine justice had been
   called forth for war: "They shall run like mighty men; they shall climb
   the wall like men of war." They had invaded and devastated the land,
   and turned the land from being like the garden of Eden into a desolate
   wilderness. All faces gathered blackness: the people were "much pained"
   The sun itself was dim, the moon was dark, and the stars withdrew
   themselves: the earth quaked, and the heavens trembled. At such a
   dreadful time, when we might least have expected it, between the peals
   of thunder and the flashes of lightning, was heard this gentle word,
   "It shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the
   Lord shall be delivered." Let us carefully read the passage: "And I
   will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and
   pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon
   into blood, before the great and the terrible day of the Lord come. And
   it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the
   Lord shall be delivered." In the worst times that can ever happen,
   there is still salvation for men. When day turns to night, and life
   becomes death, and the staff of life is broken, and the hope of man has
   fled, there still remains in God, in the person of his dear Son,
   deliverance to all those who will call upon the name of the Lord. We do
   not know what is to happen: reading the roll of the future, we prophesy
   dark things; but still this light shall always shine between the rifts
   of the cloud-wrack: "Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall
   be delivered."

   This passage was selected by the apostle at Pentecost to be set in its
   place as a sort of morning star of gospel times. When the Spirit was
   poured out upon the servants and the handmaids, and sons and daughters
   began to prophesy, it was clear that the wondrous time had come, which
   had been foretold so long before. Then Peter, as he preached his
   memorable sermon, told the people, "Whosoever shall call on the name of
   the Lord shall be saved"; thus giving a fuller and yet more evangelical
   meaning to the word "delivered." "Whosoever shall call on the name of
   the Lord shall be delivered" from sin, death and hell'shall, in fact,
   be so delivered as to be, in divine language, "saved"'saved from the
   guilt, the penalty, the power of sin, saved from the wrath to come.
   These gospel times are still the happy days in which "whosoever shall
   call on the name of the Lord shall be saved." In the Year of Grace we
   have reached a day and an hour in which "whosoever shall call on the
   name of the Lord shall be saved." To you at this moment is this
   salvation sent. The dispensation of immediate acceptance proclaimed at
   Pentecost has never ceased: its fulness of blessing has grown rather
   than diminshed. The sacred promise stands in all its certainty,
   fulness, and freeness: it has lost none of all its breadth and length:
   "Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved."

   I have nothing to do to-night but to tell you over again the old, old
   story of infinite mercy come to meet infinite sin'of free grace come to
   lead free will into a better line of things'of God himself appearing to
   undo man's ruin wrought by man, and to lift him up by a great
   deliverance. May the Holy Spirit graciously aid me while I shall talk
   to you very simply, thus:'

   I. First, THERE IS SOMETHING ALWAYS WANTED. That something is
   deliverance, or "salvation." It is always wanted. It is the requisite
   of man, wherever man is found. As long as there are men on the face of
   the earth, there will always be a need of salvation. I could wish that
   some of you had the instructive schooling which I received last
   Tuesday, when I was sitting to see enquirers. I had a very happy time
   in seeing a very large number of persons who had joyfully put their
   trust in Christ; but among them were some who could not trust'poor
   hearts, conscious of sin, though they did not think they were. These
   seemed bound hand and foot, shut up in the prison of despair, and
   darkened in heart. I tell you, I felt dismayed as they baffled me: I
   felt a fool as they refused to be comforted. I could do nothing for
   them so far as argument and persuasion were concerned. I could pray
   with them: I could also set them praying, and they did pray: but they
   were cases in which, unless the arm of God were revealed, I was as
   powerless with them as when a man stands weeping over the body of his
   dead wife, and would restore her to life even at the cost of his own
   life, and yet he could produce neither hearing nor motion. Dear
   friends, while we mingle only with those who are saved, we forget how
   much need there is still of a divine salvation. If we could go through
   London, into its dens and slums, we should think very differently of
   human need from what we do when we simply come from our own quiet
   domestic circle, and step into our pew and hear a sermon. The world is
   still sick and dying. The world is still corrupting and rotting. The
   world is a ship in which the water is rising fast, and the vessel is
   going down into the deep of destruction. God's salvation is wanted as
   much to-day as when the spirit preached it in Noah's day to the spirits
   in prison. God must step in, and bring deliverance, or there remains no
   hope.

   Some want deliverance from present trouble. If you are in this need
   to-night through very sore distress, I invite you to take my text as
   your guide, and believe that "whosoever shall call on the name of the
   Lord shall be delivered." Depend upon it, in any form of distress,
   physical, mental, or whatever it may be, prayer is wonderfully
   available. "Call upon me," says God, "in the day of trouble: I will
   deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me." If you are so down at the
   heel that your foot is on the bare pavement; if you have come to this
   place in bodily sickness, and feel as if you should die on the seat in
   which you sit; if there be no physician to help you, and no friend to
   stretch out a generous hand, call upon God, I beseech you. You have
   come to the end of men; you are now at the beginning of God. See
   whether your Maker will forget you. See whether the great, generous
   heart of God does not still beat tenderly towards the sorrowful and the
   afflicted. If I saw you lying wounded on a battle-field, bleeding to
   death, I would say, "Call upon God." If I knew that you had not a house
   to go to, but must walk these streets all night, I would say,
   "Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be delivered." I
   will take the text in the broadest sense, and bid you, nay, command
   you, to test your good and gracious God in the day of your calamity.

   This is true whenever you come into a position of deep personal
   distress, even though it should not be of a physical kind. When you do
   not know how to act, but are bewildered and at your wits' end, when
   wave of trouble has followed wave of trouble till you are like the
   sailor in the storm who reels to and fro, and staggers like a drunken
   man; if now you cannot help yourself, because your spirit sinks and
   your mind fails, call upon God, call upon God, call upon God! Lost
   child in the wood, with the night fog thickening about you, ready to
   lie down and die, call upon your Father! Call upon God, thou distracted
   one; for "Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be
   delivered." In the last great day when all secrets are known, it will
   seem ridiculous that ever persons took to writing tales and romances;
   for the real stories of what God has done for those who cry to him are
   infinitely more surprising. If men and women could but tell in simple,
   natural language how God has come to their rescue in the hour of
   imminent distress, they would set the harps of heaven a-ringing with
   new melodies, and the hearts of saints on earth a-glowing with new love
   to God for his wonderful kindness to the children of men. Oh that men
   would praise the Lord for his goodness! Oh that we could abundantly
   utter the memory of his great goodness to ourselves in the night of our
   weeping!

   The text holds good concerning deliverance from future troubles. What
   is to happen in the amazing future we do not know. Some try to startle
   and alarm you with prophecies of what will soon happen; concerning whom
   I would warn you to be well upon your guard. Take small heed of what
   they say. Whatever is to happen according to the Word of God'if the sun
   shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood'if God shall show
   great wonders in the heavens, and the earth, blood and fire, and
   pillars of smoke, yet remember that though you will then assuredly want
   deliverance, deliverance will still be near at hand. The text seems put
   in a startling connection in order to advise us that when the worst and
   most terrible convulsions shall occur, "Whosoever shall call on the
   name of the Lord shall be saved." The star Wormwood may fall, but we
   shall be saved if we call upon the name of the Lord. Plagues may be
   poured out, trumpets may sound, and judgments may follow one another as
   quickly as the plagues of Egypt, but "Whosoever shall call on the name
   of the Lord shall be saved." When the need of deliverance shall
   apparently increase, the abundance of salvation shall increase with it.
   Fear not the direst of all wars, the bitterest of all famines, the
   deadliest of all plagues; for still, if we call upon the Lord, he is
   pledged to deliver us. This word of promise meets the most terrible of
   possibilities with a sure salvation.

   Yes, and when you come to die, when to you the sun has turned into
   darkness, and the moon into blood, this text ensures deliverance in the
   last dread hour. Call upon the name of the Lord, and you shall be
   saved. Amid the pains of death, and the gloom of departure, you shall
   enjoy a glorious visitation, which shall turn darkness into light, and
   sorrow into joy. When you wake up amid the realities of the eternal
   future there will be nothing for you to dread in resurrection, or in
   judgment, or in the yawning mouth of hell. If you have called upon the
   name of the Lord, you shall still be delivered. Though the unpardoned
   are thrust down to the depth of woe, and the righteous scarcely are
   saved, yet you who have called upon the name of the Lord must be
   delivered. Stands the promise firm, whatever may be hidden in the great
   roll of the future; God cannot deny himself, he will deliver those who
   call upon his name.

   What is wanted, then, is salvation; and I do think, beloved brethren,
   that you and I who preach the Word, and long to save souls, must very
   often go over this grand old truth about salvation to the guilty,
   deliverance to all who call upon the name of the Lord. Sometimes we
   talk to friends about the higher life, about attaining to very high
   degrees of sanctity; and all this is very proper and very good; but
   still the great fundamental truth is, "Whosoever shall call on the name
   of the Lord shall be saved." We urge our friends to be sound in
   doctrine, and to know what they do know, and to understand the revealed
   will of God; and very proper is this also; but still, first and
   foremost, this is the elementary, all-important truth'"Whosoever shall
   call on the name of the Lord shall be saved." To this old foundation
   truth we come back for comfort. I sometimes rejoice in God, and joy in
   the God of my salvation, and spread my wings and mount up into
   communion with the heavenlies; but still there are other seasons when I
   hide my head in darkness, and then I am very glad of such a broad,
   gracious promise as this, "Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord
   shall be saved." I find that my sweetest, happiest, safest state, is
   just as a poor, guilty, helpless sinner, to call upon the name of the
   Lord, and take mercy at his hands as one who deserves nothing but his
   wrath, while I dare hang the weight of my soul on such a sure promise
   as this, "Whosoever shall can on the name of the Lord shall be saved."
   Get where you may, however high your experience; be what you may,
   however great your usefulness, you will always want to come back to the
   same ground upon which the poorest and weakest of hearts must stand,
   and claim to be saved by almighty grace, through simply calling upon
   the name of the Lord.

   Thus have I said enough upon what is always wanted'this deliverance,
   this salvation.

   II. Now, secondly, let us attentively observe THE WAY IN WHICH THIS
   DELIVERANCE IS TO BE HAD. Help us, blessed Spirit, in this our
   meditation. It is to be had, according to the text, by calling upon the
   name of the Lord.

   Is not the most obvious sense of this language, prayer? Are we not
   brought to the Lord by a prayer which trusts in God'by a prayer which
   asks God to give the deliverance that is needed, and expects to have it
   from the Lord, as a gift of grace ? It amounts to much the same thing
   as that other word, "Believe and live"; for how shall they call on him
   of whom they have not heard? And if they have heard, yet vain is their
   calling if they have not believed as well as heard. But to "call on the
   name of the Lord," is briefly to pray a believing prayer; to cry to God
   for his help, and to leave yourself in his hands. This is very simple,
   is it not? There is no cumbersome machinery here, nothing complex and
   mysterious. No priestly help is wanted, except the help of that great
   High Priest, who intercedes for us within the veil. A poor, broken
   heart pours its distress into the ear of God, and calls upon him to
   fullfil his promise of help in the time of need'that is all. Thank God,
   nothing more is mentioned in our text. The promise is'"Whosoever shall
   call on the name of the Lord shall be saved."

   What a suitable way of salvation it is to those who feel that they can
   do nothing! Ah, dear hearts! if we had to preach to them a very
   difficult and elaborate salvation, they would perish. They have not the
   mind, some of them, to follow our directions if they were at all
   intricate; and they have not enough hope to venture upon anything that
   looks at all difficult. But if it be true that "Whosoever shall call on
   the name of the Lord shall be saved," this method is simple and
   available, and they catch at it. He can pray to God who can do nothing
   else. Thank God, he need not want to do anything else; for if he can
   call for help, he gets deliverance, and, in that deliverance, he gets
   all that he will ever want between this place and heaven. He has called
   upon the name of the Lord, and all that is deficient in him will be
   supplied for time and for eternity. He will be delivered, not only now,
   but throughout all the future of his life, until he sees the face of
   God in glory everlasting.

   The text, however, contains within it a measure of specific
   instruction: the prayer must be to the true God. "Whosoever shall call
   on the name of Jehovah shall be saved." There is something distinctive
   here; for one would call on Baal, another would call on Ashtaroth, and
   a fourth on Moloch; but these would not be saved. The promise is
   special: "Whosoever shall call on the name of Jehovah shall be saved."
   You know that triune name, "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost "'call upon it.
   You know how the name of Jehovah is set forth most conspicuously in the
   person of the Lord Jesus'call upon him. Call upon the true God. Call
   upon no idol, call on no Virgin Mary, no saint, dead or living. Call on
   no image. Call on no impression of your mind! Call upon the living
   God'call upon him who reveals himself in the Bible'call upon him who
   manifests himself in the person of his dear Son; for whosoever shall
   call upon this God shall be saved. You may call upon the idols, but
   these will not hear you: "Ears have they, but they hear not. Eyes have
   they, but they see not." You may not call upon men, for they are all
   sinners like yourselves. Priests cannot help their most zealous
   admirers; but, "Whosoever shall call on the name of Jehovah shall be
   saved." Mind, then, it is not the mere repetition of a prayer as a sort
   of charm, or a piece of religious witchcraft, but you must make a
   direct address to God, an appeal to the Most High to help you in your
   time of need. In presenting true prayer to the true God you shall be
   delivered.

   Moreover, the prayer should be intelligently presented. We read,
   "Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord." Now, by the word "name"
   we understand the person, the character of the Lord. The more, then,
   you know about the Lord, and the better you know his name, the more
   intelligently will you call upon that name. If you know his power, you
   will call upon that power to help you. If you know his mercy, you will
   call upon him in his grace to save you. If you know his wisdom, you
   feel that he knows your difficulties, and can help you through them. If
   you understand his immutability, you will call upon him, as the same
   God who has saved other sinners, to come and save you. It will be well,
   therefore, for you to study the Scriptures much, and to pray the Lord
   to manifest himself to you that you may know him; since, in proportion
   to your acquaintance with him, will you with greater confidence be able
   to call upon his name. But, little as you may know, call on him
   according to the little you do know. Cast yourself upon him, whether
   your trouble to-night be external or internal; but especially if it be
   internal, if it be the trouble of sin, if it be the burden of guilt, if
   it be a load of horror and fear because of wrath to come, call upon the
   name of the Lord, for you shall be delivered. There stands his promise.
   It is not, "He may be delivered," but he "shall be." Note well the
   everlasting "shall" of God'irrevocable, unalterable, unquestionable,
   irresistible. His promise stands eternally the same. Hath he said, and
   shall he not do it? "Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall
   be saved."

   This way of salvation, by calling upon the name of the Lord, glorifies
   God. He asks nothing of you but that you ask everything of him. You are
   the beggar, and he is the benefactor. You are in the trouble, and he is
   the Deliverer. All you have to do is to trust him, and beg of him. This
   is easy enough. This puts the matter into the hands of the Lord, and
   takes it out of your hands. Do you not like the plan? Put it in
   practice immediately! It will prove itself gloriously effectual.

   Dear friends, I speak to some whom I know to be now present, who are
   under severe trial. You dare not look up. You seem to be given up; at
   any rate you have given yourself up; and yet, I pray you, call upon the
   name of the Lord. You cannot perish praying; no one has ever done so.
   If you could perish praying, you would be a new wonder in the universe.
   A praying soul in hell is an utter impossibility. A man calling on God
   and rejected of God!'the supposition is not to be endured. "Whosoever
   shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved." God himself must
   lie, he must quit his nature, forfeit his claim to mercy, destroy his
   character of love, if he were to let a poor sinner call upon his name,
   and yet refuse to hear him. There will come a day, but that is not
   now'there will come a day in the next state when he will say, "I
   called, but ye refused" ; but it is not so now. While there is life
   there is hope. "To-day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your
   heart," but call upon God at once; for this warrant of grace runneth
   through all the regions of mortality, "Whosoever shall call on the name
   of the Lord shall be saved."

   I recollect a time when, if I had heard a sermon on this subject,
   putting it plainly to me, I should have leaped into comfort and light
   in a single moment. Is it not such a time with you? I thought, I must
   do something, I must be something, I must in some way prepare myself
   for the mercy of God. I did not know that a calling upon God, a
   trusting myself in his hand, an invocation of his sacred name, would
   bring me to Christ, the Saviour. But so it stands, and happy, indeed,
   was I when I found it out. Heaven is given away. Salvation may be had
   for the asking. I hope that many a captive heart here will at once leap
   to loose his chains, and cry, "It is even so. If God has said it, it
   must be true. There it is in his own Word. I have called upon him, and
   I must be delivered."

   III. Now I come to notice, in the third place, THE PEOPLE TO WHOM THIS
   PROMISE AND THIS DELIVERANCE WILL BE GIVEN. "Whosoever shall call upon
   the name of the Lord shall be delivered."

   According to the connection, the people had been greatly afflicted'
   afflicted beyond all precedent, afflicted to the very brink of despair;
   but the Lord said, "Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall
   be saved." Go down to the hospital. You may select, if you please, the
   hospital which deals with the effects of vice. In that house of misery
   you may stand at each bed and say, "Whosoever shall call on the name of
   the Lord shall be saved." You may then hasten every door of every cell,
   yes, even at the grating of the condemned cell, if there lie men and
   women there given up to death, and you may with safety say to each one,
   "Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be delivered."

   I know what the Pharisees will say'"If you preach this, men will go on
   in sin." It has always been so, that the great mercy of God has been
   turned by some into a reason for continuing in sin; but God (and this
   is the wonder of it) has never restricted his mercy because of that. It
   must have been a terrible provocation of Almighty grace when men have
   perverted his mercy into an excuse for sin, but the Lord has never even
   taken the edges off from his mercy because men have misused it: he has
   still made it stand out bright and clear: "Whosoever shall call upon
   the name of the Lord shall be saved." Still he cries, "Turn and live."
   "Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts:
   and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and
   to our God, for he will abundantly pardon." Undimmed is that brave sun
   that shineth on the foulest dunghills of vice. Trust Christ, and live.
   Call upon the name of the Lord, and you shall be pardoned; yea, you
   shall be rescued from the bondage of your sin, and be made a new
   creature, a child of God, a member of the family of his grace. The most
   afflicted, and the most afflicted by sin, are met with by this gracious
   promise, "Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved."

   Yes, but there were some, according to Joel, who had the Spirit of God
   poured out upon them. What about them? Were they saved by that ? Oh no!
   Those who had the Spirit of God so that they dreamed dreams and saw
   visions, yet had to come to the palace of mercy by this same gate of
   believing prayer'"Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be
   saved." Ah, poor souls! you say, to yourselves, "if we were deacons of
   churches, if we were pastors, oh, then we should be saved!" You do not
   know anything about it: church officers are no more saved by their
   office than you are by being without office. We owe nothing to our
   official position in this matter of salvation: in fact, we may owe our
   damnation to our official standing unless we look well to our ways. We
   have no preference over you plain folks. I do assure you, I am quite
   happy to take your hand, whoever you may be, and come to Christ on the
   same footing as yourself.

   "Nothing in my hand I bring,

   Simply to thy cross I cling."

   Often, when I have been cheering up a poor sinner, and urging him to
   believe in Christ, I have thought, "Well, if he will not drink this cup
   of comfort, I will even drink it up myself." I assure you, I need it as
   much as those to whom I carry it. I have been as big a sinner as any of
   you, and therefore I take the promise to myself. The divine cordial
   shall not be lost: I will accept it. I came to Jesus as I was, weary,
   and worn, and faint, and sick, and full of sin, and I trusted him on my
   own account, and found peace'peace on the same ground as my text sets
   before all of you. If I drink of this consolation, you may drink it
   too. The miracle of this cup is that fifty may drink, and yet it is
   just as full as ever. There is no restriction in the word "Whosoever."
   You maidens that have the Spirit of God upon you, and you old men that
   dream, it is neither the Spirit of God nor the dreaming that will save
   you; but your calling on the sacred name. It is, "whosoever shall call
   on the name of the Lord shall be saved."

   Also, there were some upon whom the Spirit of God did not fall. They
   did not speak with tongues, nor prophesy the future, nor work miracles;
   but though they did none of these marvels, yet it stood true to
   them'"Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved."
   What though no supernatural gift was bestowed, though they saw no
   vision and could not speak with tongues, they called upon the name of
   the Lord, and they were saved. There is the same way of salvation for
   the little as well as for the great, for the poorest and most obscure
   as well as for those that are strong in faith, and lead the hosts of
   God to the battle.

   But some were terribly afraid. I should think that a good many must
   have been sadly alarmed when there were in the earth blood and fire and
   pillars of smoke, the sun turned into darkness and the moon into blood:
   but, afraid as they were, if they called upon the name of the Lord,
   they were delivered. Now, Mrs. Much-afraid, what do you say to that?
   Mr. Ready-to-halt, did I hear your crutches sounding in the aisle just
   now, or was it an umbrella? Never mind, if you call upon the name of
   the Lord, you shall be saved. You that are so feeble in mind, so weak,
   so wounded that you hardly dare to trust, still it is written for your
   sakes also, "Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be
   saved."

   "Ah!" says another, "but I am worse than that. I have no good feelings.
   I would give all that I have to own a broken heart. I wish I could even
   feel despair, but I am hard as a stone." I have been told that
   sorrowful story many times, and it almost always happens that those who
   most mourn their want of feeling are those who feel most acutely. Their
   hearts are like hell-hardened steel, so they say; but it is not true.
   But if it were true, "Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord
   shall be saved." Do you think that the Lord wants you to give yourself
   a new heart first, and that then he will save you? My dear soul, you
   are saved when you have a new heart, and you do not want him to save
   you then, since you are saved. "Oh, but I must get good feelings!" Must
   you? Where are you going for them? Are you to rake the dunghill of your
   depraved nature to find good feelings there? Come without any good
   feeling. Come just as you are. Come, you that are like a frozen
   iceberg, that have nothing about you whatever, but that which chills
   and repels; come and call upon the name of the Lord, and you shall be
   saved. "Wonders of grace to God belong." It is not a small gospel that
   he has sent us to preach to small sinners, but ours is a great gospel
   for great sinners. "Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall
   be saved."

   "Ah, well!" says one, "I cannot think it is meant for me, for I am
   nobody." Nobody, are you there? I have a great love for nobodies. I am
   worried with somebodies, and the worst somebody in the world is my own
   somebody. How I wish I could always turn my own somebody out, and keep
   company with none but nobodies! Then I should make Jesus everybody.
   Nobody, where are you? You are the very person that I am sent to look
   after. If there is nothing of you, there shall be all the more of
   Christ. If you are not only empty, but cracked and broken; if you are
   done for, destroyed, ruined, utterly crushed and broken, to you is this
   word of salvation sent:'"Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord
   shall be saved."

   I have set the gate wide open. If it were the wrong track, all the
   sheep would go through; but as it is the right road, I may set the gate
   open as long as I will, but yet the sheep will shun it, unless thou,
   Great Shepherd, shall go around the field to-night, and lead them in.
   Take up in thine own arms some sheep that thou hast purchased long ago
   with thy dear heart's blood'take him upon thy gracious shoulders,
   rejoicing as thou doest it, and place him within the field where the
   good pasture grows.

   IV. I want you to dwell for a minute upon THE BLESSING ITSELF.
   "Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be delivered." I
   need not say much about it because I have already expounded it. It is a
   very good rule, when a man makes you a promise, to understand it in the
   narrowest sense. It is fair to him that you should do so. Let him
   interpret it liberally, if he pleases; but he is actually bound to give
   you no more than the bare terms of his promise will imply.

   Now, it is a rule which all God's people may well practise, always to
   understand God's promises in the largest possible sense. If the words
   will bear a bigger construction than at the first sight they naturally
   suggest to you, you may put the larger construction upon them. "He is
   able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or even think."
   God never draws a line in his promise, that he may go barely up to it;
   but it is with the great God as it was with his dear Son, who, though
   he was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, yet spent the
   greater part of his time in Galilee, which was called, "Galilee of the
   Gentiles"; and went to the very verge of Canaan to find out a
   Canaanitish woman, that he might give her a blessing. Thou mayest put
   the biggest and most liberal sense, then, on such a text as this, for
   Peter did so. The New Testament is wont to give a broader sense to Old
   Testament words; and it does so most rightly, for God loves us to treat
   his words with the breadth of faith.

   Come, then, if you are the subject of the judgments of God; if you
   believe that God's hand has visited you on account of sin, call upon
   him, and he will deliver you both from the judgment, and from the guilt
   that brought the judgment'from the sin, and from that which follows the
   sin. He will help you to escape. Try him now, I pray you.

   And if your case should be different: if you are a child of God and you
   are in trouble, and that trouble eats into your spirit, and causes you
   daily wear of spirit and tear of heart'call upon the Lord. He can take
   away from you the fret and the trouble too. "Whosoever shall call on
   the name of the Lord shall be delivered." You may have to bear the
   trouble, but it shall be so transformed as to be rather a blessing than
   an evil, and you shall fall in love with your cross, since the nature
   of it has been changed.

   If sin be the great cause of your present trouble, and that sin has
   brought you into bondage to evil habits, if you have been a drunkard
   and do not know how to learn sobriety, if you have been unchaste and
   have become entangled in vicious connections; call upon God, and he can
   break you away from the sin, and set you free from all its
   entanglements. He can cut you loose to-night with the great sword of
   his grace, and make you a free man. I tell you that, though you should
   be like a poor sheep between the jaws of a lion, ready to be devoured
   immediately by the monster, God can come and pluck you out from between
   the lion's jaws. The prey shall be taken from the mighty, and the
   lawful captive shall be delivered. Only call upon the name of the Lord!
   Call upon the name of the Lord, and you shall be delivered.

   Yes, and I repeat what I said just now. If you have come under the
   power of disease, if you are near to die, if already death has written
   his name legibly upon your body, and you are afraid of death and hell;
   yet call upon the name of the Lord, and you shall be delivered at this
   last moment. Even now, when the pit gapes wide for you, and like Korah,
   Dathan, and Abiram, you are ready to go down alive into it, call upon
   the name of the Lord and you shall be delivered.

   If I were telling you what I had made up, or hammered out of my own
   brain, I could not expect you to believe me; but, as this Book is
   inspired, and as Joel spoke in the name of God, and as the apostles
   spoke in the name of Jehovah, this is the very truth of the God that
   made the heavens and the earth. "Whosoever shall call on the name of
   the Lord shall be delivered."

   V. In conclusion, I must remind you of one mournful thought. Let me
   warn you OF THE SADLY COMMON NEGLECT OF THIS BLESSING. You would think
   that everybody would call upon the name of the Lord; but read the text,
   "For in mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the Lord
   hath said." It shall be there as the Lord hath said. Will they not have
   it then? Notice! "And in the remnant whom the Lord shall call." It
   seems to shrivel me up altogether, that word "remnant." What! Will they
   not come ? Are they madmen? Will they not come? No, only a remnant; and
   even that remnant will not call upon the name of the Lord until first
   God calls them by his grace. This is almost as great a wonder as the
   love which so graciously invites them. Could even devils behave worse?
   If they were invited to call upon God, and be saved, would they refuse?

   Unhappy business! The way is plain, but "few there be that find it."
   After all the preaching, and all the invitation, and the illimitable
   breadth of the promise, yet all that are saved are contained "in the
   remnant whom the Lord shall call." Is not our text a generous
   invitation; the setting open of the door, yea, the lifting of the door
   from off its hinges, that it never might be shut? And yet "broad is the
   gate, and wide is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there
   be that go in thereat." There they come, streams of them, hurrying
   impatiently, rushing down to death and hell'yes, eagerly panting,
   hurrying, dashing against one another to descend to that awful gulf
   from which there is no return! No missionaries are wanted, no ministers
   are needed to plead with men to go to hell. No books of persuasion are
   wanted to urge them to rush onward to eternal ruin. They hurry to be
   lost: they are eager to be destroyed. As when the wild bisons of the
   prairie hasten onward in their madness, until they come to a great
   gulf, and then rush down headlong, a cataract of life leaping to death,
   so is it with the sons of men! They choose their own delusions, and
   covet their own damnations, and that without end. This is all that
   sovereign mercy rescues after all'a remnant, and that remnant only
   because the arm of the Lord is revealed, and a miraculous power exerted
   upon their wills. This is the misery of it, that the guilty are not
   willing to be parted from their sins. They will not seek that which
   alone is their life, their joy, their salvation. They prefer hell to
   heaven, sin to holiness. Never spake the Master a word which
   observation more clearly proves than when he said, "Ye will not come to
   me, that ye might have life." You will attend your chapels, but you
   will not call on the Lord. Jesus cries, "Ye search the scriptures; for
   in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify
   of me; but ye will not come to me, that ye might have life." You will
   do anything rather than come to Jesus. You stop short of calling upon
   him. O my dear hearers, do not let it be so with you! Many of you are
   saved; I beseech you intercede for those who are not saved. Oh, that
   the unconverted among you may be moved to pray. Before you leave this
   place, breathe an earnest prayer to God, saying, "God be merciful to me
   a sinner. Lord, I need to be saved. Save me. I call upon thy name."
   Join with me in prayer at this moment, I entreat you. Join with me
   while I put words into your mouths, and speak them on your
   behalf'"Lord, I am guilty. I deserve thy wrath. Lord I cannot save
   myself. Lord, I would have a new heart and a right spirit, but what can
   I do? Lord, I can do nothing, come and work in me to will and to do of
   thy good pleasure.

   "Thou alone hast power, I know,

   To save a wretch like me;

   To whom, or whither should I go

   If I should turn from thee?"

   But I now do from my very soul call upon thy name. Trembling, yet
   believing, I cast myself wholly upon thee, O Lord. I trust the blood
   and righteousness of thy dear Son; I trust thy mercy, and thy love, and
   thy power, as they are revealed in him. I dare to lay hold upon this
   word of thine, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall
   be saved. Lord, save me to-night, for Jesus' sake. Amen."

   PORTION OF SCRIPTURE READ BEFORE SERMON'JOEL 2:11-32.

   HYMNS FROM "OUR OWN HYMN-BOOK"'282, 544, 275.
     __________________________________________________________________

One Lost Sheep

   DELIVERED ON LORD' S-DAY MORNING, APRIL 28, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "How think you? If a man has an hundred sheep and one of them is gone
   astray, does he not lea ve the ninety and nine and go into the
   mountains and seek that which is gone astray? And if he should find it,
   verily I say unto you, he rejoices more of that sheep, than of the
   ninety and nine which went not astray." Matthew 18:12,13.

   THIS passage occurs in a discourse of our Savior against despising one
   of those little ones that believe in Him. He foretells a dreadful doom
   for those who, in their contempt for the little ones, cause them to
   stumble. And He forbids that contempt by a variety of forcible
   arguments upon which we cannot now dwell. There is a tendency, apparent
   at this present time, to think little of the conversion of individuals
   and to look upon the work of the Holy Spirit upon each separate person
   as much too slow a business for this progressive age.

   We hear grand theories of a theocracy of a kind unknown to Holy
   Scripture--a semi-political dominion of the Lord over masses wherein
   the individuals are unregenerate. We listen to great swelling words
   about the uplifting of nations and the advancement of the race. But
   these lofty ideas do not produce facts, nor have they any moral power.
   Our "cultured" teachers are weary of the humdrum work of bringing
   individual souls into light. They want to do it wholesale, by a far
   more rapid process than that of personal salvation. They are tired of
   the units--their great minds dwell upon "the solidarity of the race."

   I am bold to assert that if ever we despise the method of individual
   conversion we shall get into an unsound order of business altogether
   and find ourselves wrecked upon the rocks of hypocrisy. Even in those
   right glorious times when the Gospel shall have the freest course, when
   it shall run the most quickly and be the most extensively glorified,
   its progress will still be after the former manner of the conviction,
   conversion and sanctification of individuals. Individuals who shall
   each one believe and be baptized according to the Word of the Lord.

   I fear lest in any of you there should be even the least measure of
   despising the one lost sheep because of the large and philosophical
   methods which are now so loudly advocated. I would not have you
   exchange the gold of individual Christianity for the base metal of
   Christian Socialism. If the wanderers are to be brought in, in vast
   numbers, as I pray they may be, yet must it be accomplished by the
   bringing of them in one by one. To attempt national regeneration
   without personal regeneration is to dream of erecting a house without
   separate bricks. In the vain attempt to work in the gross, we may miss
   the practical result which would have followed working in detail. Let
   us settle it in our minds that we cannot do better than obey the
   example of our Lord Jesus given us in the text and go after the one
   sheep which has gone astray.

   Our text warns us that we are not to despise one person, even on
   account of evil character. The first temptation is to despise one
   because he is only one. The next is to despise one because that one is
   so little. The next and perhaps the most dangerous form of the
   temptation, is to despise one because that one has gone astray. The
   individual is not in the right path. He is not obeying the Law, nor
   reflecting credit on the Church but doing much that vexes the spiritual
   and grieves the holy. But we are not, therefore, to despise him. Read
   the eleventh verse--"The Son of man is come to save that which was
   lost."

   In the Greek, the word "lost" is a very strong word--we may read it,
   "that which is destroyed." It does not mean "that which is
   nonexistent," as you can clearly see. But that which is destroyed as to
   usefulness to the shepherd, as to happiness to itself, and as to
   working out the intent for which it was created. It means any that are
   so effectually destroyed by sin that their existence is a greater
   calamity than their nonexistence. But even if they are now dead in

   trespasses and sins, and even offensive in character--must we not
   despise them. The Son of Man did not despise such, since, "He has come
   to seek and to save that which was lost."

   Many a soul that has been so destroyed as to be lost to itself, lost to
   God, lost to his people, lost to anything like hope and holiness, the
   Lord Jesus Christ has saved by His gracious power. He values each one.
   This is the lesson which I would teach this morning to the utmost of my
   power. May the Holy Spirit teach it also.

   In considering the words of our Lord which are now before us, I beg you
   to notice, first, that the Lord Jesus herein shows peculiar interest in
   one lost soul. Secondly, He puts forth special exertion for the rescue
   of this lost one. And thirdly He displays a special rejoicing when the
   lost one is restored. When we have thought of all this, we shall then
   observe, fourthly, that He sets us a very striking example--herein
   teaching us to care for each soul destroyed by sin. I. First, then, in
   the words before us, OUR SAVIOR SHOWS PECULIAR INTEREST IN ONE LOST
   SOUL. Note in the commencement, that for the sake of those lost ones,
   our Lord assumes a special Character. The eleventh verse puts it, "The
   Son of Man is come to save that which was lost." He was not originally
   known as "the Son of Man," but as "the Son of God." Before all worlds,
   He dwelt in the bosom of the Father and "thought it not robbery to be
   equal with God." But in order to redeem men, the Son of the Highest
   became "the Son of Man." He was born of the Virgin and by birth
   inherited the innocent infirmities of our nature and bore the
   sufferings incident to those infirmities. Then did He also take upon
   Himself our sin and its penalty and therefore died upon the Cross.

   He was in all points made like unto His Brethren. He could not be the
   Shepherd of men without becoming like they were and therefore the Word
   condescended to be made flesh. Behold the stupendous miracle of
   incarnation! Nothing can excel this marvel--Immanuel, God with us!
   "Being found in fashion as a Man, He became obedient unto death, even
   the death of the Cross." O lost One, conscious of your loss, take heart
   today when the name of Jesus is named in your hearing. He is God but He
   is Man--and as God and Man He saves His people from their sins.

   Next to this, to show how Jesus values one lost soul, He makes a very
   wonderful descent. "The Son of Man is come." He was always known as
   "The Coming One." But as to the salvation of the lost He has actually
   come. For judgment He is "the Coming One" still. But for salvation we
   rejoice that our Savior has already come. Quitting the assemblies of
   the perfect, He has been here as the Friend of publicans and sinners.
   From being the Lord of angels, He has stooped to be "a Man of Sorrows
   and acquainted with grief." Yes, He has come. And not in vain. Those
   who preached the coming Savior had such a joyous message to deliver
   that their feet were beautiful upon the mountains and their voices were
   as heavenly music.

   But as for us who preach that He has come, and coming He has finished
   the work which He undertook to perform-- surely ours is the choicest of
   messages. Our Lord Jesus has completed the atoning sacrifice and the
   justifying righteousness by which lost men are saved--happy is the
   preacher of such tidings and blessed are your ears that hear them! The
   Good Shepherd has performed all that is necessary for the salvation of
   the flock which His Father has given into his Hands. Beloved, let us
   take heart. Lost as we are, Christ has come to save us. He has come to
   the place of our ruin and woe. His coming and seeking will not be in
   vain. Brothers and Sisters, how greatly ought we to value the souls of
   men when Jesus, for their sake, becomes Man and comes into this sinful
   world among our guilty race that He may work the salvation of the lost!

   Note here that He does this for those that are still straying. I have
   marked, in looking at the Greek text, that it is written, "He seeks
   that which goes astray." The Shepherd seeks while the sheep
   strays--seeks it because it strays and needs seeking. Full many of the
   Lord's redeemed are even now going astray and even now is the Shepherd
   going after them. The Savior seeks those who are even now sinning. That
   He should have a love to those who are repenting I can well understand.
   But that He should care for those who are willfully going astray is far
   more gracious. Jesus seeks those whose backs are towards Him, who are
   going further and further away from the fold. Herein is Divine Grace
   most free, most full, most sovereign.

   Indeed, it is so. Though you harden yourself against the Lord, though
   you refuse to turn at His rebuke, yet if you are His redeemed, His eyes
   of love mark you. In all your willful wanderings He follows you. He
   sees you, He seeks you! Oh that you may yield, by His Grace, and find
   that He saves you! O you that are now in the flock, think of the love
   of Christ to you when you were outside the fold. When you had no wish
   to return. When, seeing Him pursuing you, you only ran faster to escape
   His almighty love! Let us sing together--

   "Determined to save, He watched over my path, When, Satan's blind
   slave, I sported with death."

   Notwithstanding all my rebellion and all my willful transgression, He
   still loved me with His heart and pursued me with His Word. Oh, how we
   ought to love sinners, since Jesus loved us and died for us while we
   were yet sinners! We must care for drunkards while they still pass
   round the cup. Swearers even while we hear them swear. And profligates
   while we mourn to see them polluting our midnight streets. We must not
   wait till we see some better thing in them, but feel an intense
   interest for them as what they are--straying and lost. When the sheep
   is torn with the thorns of the waste places and is sick and worn to
   skin and bones with long wanderings and hunger, we must seek its
   restoration--though we see in it no desire to submit itself to the
   Shepherd's care and rule. Such was our Savior's love to us--such must
   be our love to lost ones.

   The Shepherd takes a peculiar interest in the lost--not only as now
   straying--but as having already gone very far away. Carefully consider
   these words--"If he should find it." That "if tells its own tale.

   The sheep had become so terribly lost that it was not likely to be
   found again--it had wandered into so dense a thicket, or strayed into
   so wild a region that it seemed scarcely within the bounds of hope that
   it would ever be discovered and brought back. We do not often meet with
   an "if" in reference to the work of Christ. But here is one--"If he
   should find it." This does not show weakness in the Shepherd but the
   desperate danger of the sheep. I have often heard it said by those who
   come to confess Christ and to acknowledge His love to them, that they
   are struck with wonder that they, above all others, should be doing any
   such thing. When we sit at the Lord's Table the feast is very
   wonderful. But the greatest wonder is the guest, when I am there. How
   humbly do we each one sing--

   "Why was I made to hear Your voice, And enter where there's room, When
   thousands make a wretched choice, And rather starve than come?" But it
   is so. The Good Shepherd is today seeking many whose salvation seems
   highly improbable if not utterly impossible. Herein is love that He
   should go after those whose finding is by no means a certainty, nor
   even a probability! Very improbable, almost impossible, is the task He
   undertakes! Yet in such He takes a deep interest.

   Moreover, those toward whom our Lord has these thoughts of love have
   often sinned so as to have brought themselves into the deadliest
   danger. "For the Son of Man is come to save that which was lost."
   Saving implies ruin, peril, jeopardy--yes, destruction already in a
   measure present. Are not many now playing with the fire of Hell? What
   is that unquenchable fire, but sin, in its nature and results? Men are
   trifling on the brink of eternal woe--"Their foot shall slide in due
   time." Playing with edged tools is nothing in danger compared with
   sporting with your lusts. And many are doing so.

   Yet, despite their danger, Jesus seeks them. Do you see those sheep
   heedlessly feeding near the den of the wolf? In a little while the
   monster will devour them. They are far away from home and rest and
   safety. They have no desire to return. But they are resolved to roam
   yet further from the fold. The Lord Jesus comes after such desperately
   deluded ones. Until you pass the iron gate the Gospel will invite you
   to return. If you are but one inch this side of Hell, love will pursue
   you and mercy will follow you. Our glorious David, while a lamb still
   lives, is able to rescue it from the jaws of the lion and the paws of
   the bear. Though, like Jonah, a soul may have descended into the deeps
   and may lie out of all human reach, yet a word from Jesus can bring it
   up from the lowest pit. Glory be to the blessed name of the Almighty
   Savior, He is able to save to the uttermost--His power to save the lost
   is such that none are too vile for His salvation!

   If we rightly consider the parable before us, we shall see that He
   takes a special interest in these stray sheep because they are His own.
   This man did not go after wild beasts, nor after other men's sheep. But
   he had a hundred sheep of his own and when he had counted them, he
   missed one. The hireling, whose own the sheep are not, would have said,
   "We have nearly the hundred--we need not be particular about an odd
   one." But these hundred sheep belonged to the Shepherd Himself. They
   were His own by choice, by inheritance, by Divine gift, by glorious
   capture and by costly purchase. He could not accept ninety and nine for
   a hundred. "None of them is lost," says He. "Those that You gave Me, I
   have kept, and none of them is lost but the son of perdition. That the
   Scripture might be fulfilled."

   Jesus could not endure to report a loss upon the flock handed over to
   Him of the Father. Ninety-nine is not a hundred, and the Savior will
   not consider it such. For well He knows that, "it is not the will of
   your Father which is in Heaven, that one of these little ones should
   perish." Dear Friends, since Jesus takes such an interest even in one
   stray soul, you must not think it little that you should be called to
   care for a single soul. Do not think that a little congregation of
   forty or fifty is too few to be worthy of your best efforts. Should
   your class, through various circumstances, get down to a very small
   number, do not, therefore, give it up.

   No, no! Value one soul more than a world's purchase. The full company
   of the redeemed is far from being made up as yet and the Lord has much
   people in this city not yet brought to His feet. Therefore, never dream
   of ceasing your labors. Rest not till the hour shall come--

   "When all the chosen race Shall meet around the Throne; Shall bless the
   conduct of His Grace, And make His glories known."

   II. Secondly, may the Spirit of God help me while I remind you that OUR
   LORD PUT FORTH SPECIAL

   EXERTION TO SAVE ONE SOLITARY INDIVIDUAL.

   Observe in the parable--for it is a parable, though briefly told--that
   we see the Shepherd leaving happier cares. He felt himself at home with
   His attached and faithful flock. They had not gone astray and they
   gathered about Him and He fed them and took pleasure in them. There is
   always a great deal to do with sheep--they have many diseases, many
   weaknesses, many needs. But when you have an attached, affectionate
   flock about you, you feel at home with them. So the Great Shepherd
   describes Himself as leaving the ninety and nine, His choice flock--the
   sheep that had fellowship with Him and He with them.

   Yes, he leaves those in whom He could take pleasure to seek one that
   gave Him pain. I will not dwell upon how He left the Paradise above and
   all the joy of His Father's house and came to this bleak world. But I
   pray you remember that He did so. It was a wonderful descent when He
   came from beyond the stars to dwell on this beclouded globe to redeem
   the sons of men. But, remember, He still continually comes by His
   Spirit. His errands of mercy are perpetual. The Spirit of God moves His
   ministers who are Christ's representatives, to forego the feeding of
   the gathered flock and to seek, in their discourses, the salvation of
   the wandering ones in whose character and behavior there is nothing to
   cheer.

   My Master's heart is full of care for all that love Him. He wears their
   names engraved on the jewels of His breastplate. But yet His heart is
   always going forth afar--after those who have not yet been brought to
   Him. And after those who once were in His fold but have gone aside and
   quit the flock. He leaves the happy and the holy and gives His best
   thoughts to the lost.

   Our Lord goes out to seek these. It is not merely a sending forth of
   thought--it is a marching forth of power. His Divine Grace is going
   forth, I trust, this day beyond the company whom He has called by His
   Grace, to those other sheep who are not yet of His fold, whom also He
   must bring in. He would not have His Church expend all her care on the
   flock which He has led into her green pastures but He would have her go
   after those who are not yet in her blest society.

   According to the text, the Shepherd goes into the mountains--among
   difficulties and dangers. He will do and dare for the saving of the
   lost--no hardships can daunt His mighty love. You know through what
   dark ravines He passed in saving men. You have heard what climbing He
   had after proud souls and what condescension for despairing ones. A
   sheep in the East is more light of foot than our sheep. It will leap
   like a gazelle and climb the mountains like a chamois. And so are
   sinners very swift in transgression and very daring in presumption.
   They leap in their iniquities where the children of God would shudder
   to follow them even in thought. They make nothing of leaps of profanity
   which would curdle the blood of him that has been taught the fear of
   God at the feet of Jesus Christ.

   Yet the Lord Jesus went after these desperadoes. What difficulties He
   conquered, what sufferings He endured, what mountains He leaped
   over--that He might seek and save! O Brethren, the same heart is in Him
   still--He goes forth continually in the preaching of the Word. With
   many a sigh and many a groan on the part of His chosen ministers, He
   goes among the mountains to seek that which has gone astray. I pray
   that He may accept the effort of His unworthy servant this day and
   bring some lost one home by means of this sermon.

   To show His exertion for the lost, our Lord describes Himself as
   seeking with persevering diligence. He looks this way but sees nothing.
   He shades His eyes with His hand and looks steadily! He thought He saw
   His sheep. There is surely

   a living object upon the hillside! He gazes intently. No, it does not
   stir--it is a white rock! Possibly the lost sheep is in yonder gully!
   It is a long way to go but He is so intent on His purpose that He is
   soon there. But the sheep is not to be seen. Where can it be? He
   travels on with swift foot, for He does not know what may become of His
   sheep while He delays. Every now and then He stops--He thinks He hears
   a bleating. Surely it is the voice of His sheep! He is mistaken. His
   love makes His ear the father of sounds which are not sounds at all. He
   has neither seen nor heard it these long hours.

   But He will continue seeking till He finds it. The concentrated
   omniscience of Christ is set upon a soul that goes astray, looking
   after it in all its evil desires and evil emotions--watching the growth
   of anything that looks like repentance--and observing with sorrow the
   hardening of its heart. This is what our Lord is doing for those
   redeemed with His blood, who as yet have not been carried back to the
   fold. He puts forth a gracious exertion of eye and mind as well as of
   foot and hand towards His wandering sheep.

   At the last He saves--completely saves. He has not come to make the
   salvation of His people possible. But to save them. He has not come to
   put them in the way of saving themselves but to save them. He has not
   come to half-save them. But to save them altogether. When my Lord comes
   forth in the majesty of His Sovereign Grace to save a soul, He achieves
   His purpose, despite sin and death and Hell. The wolf may grind his
   teeth but the Shepherd is the wolfs Master. The sheep itself may, for a
   long time, have wandered and at the last may struggle against Him. But
   He grips its feet and throws the creature on His shoulders and bears it
   home. For He is resolved to save it. The sheep is glad to be so borne,
   for with a touch the Shepherd molds its will to His more perfect will.
   His Grace is the triumphant energy by which the lost one is restored.

   The salvation of a single soul is a mass of miracles. I have heard of a
   fire which consumed the shop of a jeweler and a number of costly
   treasures of gold and silver and precious stones were found among the
   ruins, caked into a conglomerate of riches. What a salvage! Such is the
   salvation of a single man--it is a mass of priceless mercies melted
   into one inestimable ingot--dedicated to the praise of the glory of His
   Grace who makes us to be "accepted in the Beloved" and "saved in the
   Lord with an everlasting salvation." When I think of the energy which
   is put forth by the Lord to save a single lost soul I feel stirred in
   my heart and I desire that your hearts should be stirred also--that we
   may put forth all our strength to go and find the Lord's lost ones. Let
   us co-operate with Him in His great labor of seeking that which is
   lost, Oh, that the Holy Spirit may put such a spirit within us and keep
   it there!

   III. I am compelled to pass onward somewhat hurriedly. Notice, in the
   third place, that our Lord FEELS A

   SPECIAL REJOICING AT THE RECOVERY OF A WANDERING SHEEP. Do not make a
   mistake here. Do not

   suppose that our Lord loves the one soul that has wandered more than
   the ninety and nine who have been preserved by His Grace from going
   astray. Oh, no! He thinks ninety-nine times more of ninety-nine than of
   one. For His sheep are each one equally precious to Him. We must not
   suppose that He looks upon any one soul of His redeemed with a
   tenderness ninety-nine times greater than He gives to another.

   But you will see the meaning of the passage by an illustration from
   your own experience. You have a family and you love all your children
   alike. But little Johnny is very ill. He has a fever and is likely to
   die--now you think more of him than of all the rest. He recovers and
   you bring him downstairs in your arms and just then he is the dearest
   child of the whole company. Not that he is really more valued than his
   brothers and sisters, but the fact that he has been so ill and was
   likely to die has brought him more before your mind and caused you more
   anxiety. Therefore you have more joy in him because of his recovery.

   The great deeps of Christ's love are the same to all His flock, but on
   the surface there is sometimes a holy storm of joy when any one of them
   has been newly restored after wandering. Learn the occasion of this
   demonstrative joy. The wandering one has caused great sorrow. We were
   all grieved that our Brother should become a gross backslider--that
   such an earnest Christian as he seemed to be--should disgrace his
   profession. Our Lord is still more grieved than we are. When the erring
   one comes back we feel a new joy in him. In proportion to the sorrow
   felt over the wanderer is the joy manifested when he is restored.
   Moreover, great apprehensions were aroused. We feared that he was not
   the Lord's and that he would go back unto perdition. We trembled for
   him. That black dread is all over now--the sheep is safe--the doubtful
   one is saved and restored to the fold. In proportion to the weight of
   the apprehension is the intensity of the relief.

   The Shepherd had exercised, also, great labor over the lost one. He
   went up among the mountains to find His sheep. But now His labor is
   fully rewarded, for He has found His lost sheep. He remembers no more
   His travel and travail for joy that the sheep is safe. Besides, in this
   newly-restored one, there are marks of salvation which cause joy. He
   has been torn with the briars but he is resting now. See how he lies
   down in the tender grass! He was weary and worn and almost dead with
   his wanderings. But now, how happy he is in the presence of his
   Shepherd! How closely he keeps to his Shepherd's footsteps! All this
   goes to make the shepherd glad!

   The Shepherd rejoices when He brings back the lost sheep because He
   makes that rescue an occasion and opportunity for having a special gala
   day. He wishes all His sheep to learn His delight in them all by seeing
   His delight in one. I know it is so in the Church. I bless the Lord
   when He keeps the feet of His saints--I bless Him every day for
   preserving Grace. But when some grievous wanderer is restored--then we
   bless Him more emphatically. Then we have music and dancing. The elder
   Brother wonders what these overflowing joys can mean--but everybody
   else can see good reason for special mirth when the lost one is found.

   Shepherds and their flocks cannot have holiday every day. But when a
   lost one has been recovered, they feel such mutual delight in each
   other and such a common delight in the saving of the lost that they
   seize upon the occasion for rejoicing. I want you all to recognize
   that. If you love the Church of Christ you are bound to keep a feast
   day when fallen ones are raised up. And that you may hold that
   festival, you are bound to put out all your strength to bring in the
   lost one.

   IV. Now we come to the tug-of-war, that is, to look upon our Divine
   Shepherd as HE SETS US A STRIKING

   EXAMPLE.

   We may view this text as our personal missionary warrant. Today we are
   called upon to think of missions. And as I think it idle to preach
   about missions in a big high-flying style. I have purposed to say
   something commonplace but practical. Brethren, we are all of us to be
   missionaries for Christ and the text presents a warrant for each one to
   work earnestly as a soul-winner.

   What shall we do, then, to imitate our Lord? The answer is--Let us go
   after one soul. I cannot make a selection for you this morning, but I
   entreat all who are workers together with God to go after the ones.
   There is a kind of knack in speaking to individuals--everybody does not
   possess it. But every Believer should labor to acquire it. Seek the
   souls of men one by one. It is far easier work to me to speak to you
   all than it would be to take each one and speak to him personally of
   his soul. And yet such speaking to you one by one might be more
   successful than this sermon to you in the mass. I entreat you--as the
   great Shepherd goes after one, do not think you will demean yourself by
   going after one poor man, or woman, or child. But do it now.

   Listen again--let that one be somebody that is quite out of the way.
   Try and think of one who has grievously gone astray. It may be there is
   one such in your family, or you meet with one such in the course of
   trade. Think carefully of that one soul and reflect upon its sin and
   danger. You would like to pick out a hopeful case, in order that you
   might feel sure of success. Take another course this time--seek the one
   which is going astray and seems hopeless. Follow your Lord's example
   and go after one who is the least likely to be found. Will you try this
   plan? If you do not, you will be quitting the way of your Lord.

   "I have a class and a work," one says. Yes. I want you for a little
   while to leave the ninety and nine. I pray that you may feel called to
   look after some one greatly depraved person, or some utterly neglected
   child. Keep up your ninety-and-nine class, if you possibly can, but at
   all hazards, go after the one. Make an unusual effort--go out of your
   way. Let ordinary service be placed second for the time being. It will
   be a healthy change for you and perhaps, a great relief. Perhaps you
   will come back and do more good with the ninety and nine after you have
   been away a little while with the straying one. You are getting a
   little moldy. And you are just a wee tired of the monotony of your
   work.

   Every Sunday the same girls, or the same boys and the same form of
   lesson. Well, cut the whole concern for a little and go after the one
   sheep that has gone astray. "You are giving us odd advice, Mr.
   Spurgeon." If it is not in my text, then do not follow it. But if it is
   in our dear Master's words, I trust you will carry it out bravely. When
   you go after that ONE, have all your wits about you. Go and seek--and
   that you cannot do unless you are alert. Follow up the straying one.
   Did you say that you would wait till he called at your house? Is that
   your notion of seeking lost sheep? Is that the

   way of sportsmen in the autumn? Do they sit in the drawing room till
   the pheasants fly by the window? That would be poor sport--

   "O come, let us go and find them, In the paths of death they roam."

   Go after them, for so our Shepherd did. He braved the mountain's
   slippery side. I do not suppose the Shepherd had any greater love for
   mountain tracks than you have. But up the rough tracks He climbed, for
   the sheep's sake. Go after sinners into their poverty and wretchedness,
   until you find them.

   Here is one thing to cheer you. If you should win such a soul as that,
   you will have more joy, a great deal more than in saving those for whom
   you regularly labor--more joy over that lost one than over the ninety
   and nine hopeful ones. It will be such a support to your faith, such a
   boost for your joy, such a bright light to your labor to have won such
   a guilty one. I should not wonder but what you will talk about it for
   many a day and it will be a source of strength to you when things are
   not quite as you would desire. Such converts are our crown of
   rejoicing. May I especially recommend that you make a trial of this
   extra sheep-seeking? If you do not succeed you will have done no harm.
   For you will have copied your Lord and Master. But you will succeed,
   for He is with you, and His Spirit works through you.

   I would remind you that even under the old Law, you would be bound to
   do this thing. Turn to the twenty-third chapter of Exodus and read the
   fourth and fifth verses. "If you meet your enemy's ox or his ass going
   astray, you shall surely bring it back to him again. If you see the ass
   of him that hates you lying under his burden and would forbear to help
   him, you shall surely help with him." You are bound to do good even to
   your enemy. Will you not serve your best friend? If your enemy's ox or
   ass needed to be taken back to him, you are bound to do it. How much
   more when the sheep belongs to Him whom you love with all your heart!
   Prove your love to Jesus by laboring to take Him back His strays!

   Turn to the twenty-second of Deuteronomy, first to fourth verses, and
   there you will find another bit of the Law. "You shall not see your
   brother's ox or his sheep go astray and hide yourself from them: you
   shall in any case bring them again unto your brother." Oh, will you not
   bring in the stray sheep of your greater Brother, "the First-born among
   many Brethren"? "And if your brother is not near unto you, or if you
   know him not, then you shall bring it unto your own house and it shall
   be with you until your brother seeks after it and you shall restore it
   to him again."

   If you cannot get a soul to Christ, at any rate get it to yourself. If
   you cannot lead it immediately to conversion, show it some hospitality
   within your own doors by ministering such comfort as you can. Do what
   you can to cheer the poor heart till Christ comes after it. "You shall
   not see your brother's ass or his ox fall down by the way and hide
   yourself from them: you shall surely help him to lift them up again."
   How easy it is to hide ourselves! That is the expression used by
   Moses--"you shall not hide yourself from them." When you know that
   people are very wicked, the usual plan is to wish them well but keep
   out of their way. Prudence makes you hide yourself from them. The whole
   street may swarm with harlots, but then you have gone to bed and the
   door is shut. What has their sin to do with you? There are many drunken
   men about. But you do not drink to excess--what has their drinking to
   do with you? That is what is meant by hiding ourselves from them. How
   easily that can be done!

   Take an illustration which is worth the telling. A vessel, the other
   day, was crossing the Atlantic and it fell in with that disabled
   emigrant ship, The Danmark. Suppose the captain had kept on his course.
   He might have looked another way and resolved not to be detained. He
   might have argued, "I am bound to do the best for my owners. It will
   hinder me greatly if I go pottering about after this vessel. I had
   better go by and not see it. Or make haste to port and send out

   help."

   It could have been done and nobody would have been the wiser, for the
   ship would have gone down soon. The captain of that vessel was a man of
   a nobler breed. He did not hide himself, nor turn the blind eye towards
   the vessel in distress. But what did the captain do? All honor to him,
   he came near and took the ship in tow. This was not all--he found that
   she could not keep afloat and he resolved to take those hundreds of
   emigrants on board his own ship. But he could not carry them and his
   cargo, too. What then?

   The decision was greatly to his honor. Overboard goes the cargo! God's
   blessing rest on the man! Into the sea went the freight, and the
   passengers were taken on board and carried to the nearest port. He
   could have easily hidden himself, could he not? So can you, you
   Christian people, as you call yourselves. Can you go through this world
   and always have a blind eye to the case of lost sinners? Can you come
   in and out of this Tabernacle and never speak to the strangers who

   throng these aisles? Will you let them go to Hell unwarned and
   uninstructed? Can you hide yourselves from them? How dare you call
   yourselves Christians! How will you answer for it at last? Brothers,
   Sisters--let us shake off this inhuman indifference and deny ourselves
   rest, ease, credit--that we may save poor sinking souls. Overboard with
   cargo cheerfully that you may, in the power of the Holy Spirit, save
   souls from death.

   Once more--this text is the great missionary warrant for all the Church
   of God. We are to go, as the Savior did, to seek and to save that which
   was lost. And we are to do this not on account of the numbers of the
   heathen but for one of them. I grant you there is a great power in the
   argument of numbers--so many hundreds of millions in China--so many
   hundreds of millions in India. But if there were only one person left
   unsaved in any part of the world it would be worth while for the entire
   Christian Church to go after that one person! For He who is greater
   than the Church, as the Bridegroom is greater than the bride, quit
   Heaven--yes and quit the sweet society of His own Beloved that He might
   go after the ONE that had gone astray.

   Do not care, therefore, about numbers--save the smallest tribes. Have
   an eye to the hamlets in England. I believe that the scattered cottages
   of our land are in a worse condition than the villages. Care for the
   ones. Your Lord did so, and here is your warrant for doing the like.

   Next, notice that we ought never to be moved by the supposed
   superiority of a race. I have heard it said that it would be far better
   to try and convert the superior races than to consider the more
   degraded. Is it not better to bring in the educated Brahmins than the
   wild hill-tribes? "What a fine sort of people these are, these
   philosophical Hindus! If we could win them they would be worth
   converting!" That is not at all according to the mind of Christ. The
   Shepherd sought a lost sheep and when He had found it, it was no great
   spoil for Him for it was so worn out as to be nothing but a destroyed
   sheep. Yet He went after that one poor animal. Let us feel that the
   degraded Africans, the dwarfs of the woods, the cannibals of New Guinea
   and all such are to be sought quite as much as more advanced races.
   They are men. That is enough.

   Once more--the motive for missionary enterprise must never be the
   excellence of the character of the individuals. The shepherd did not go
   after the sheep because it never went astray nor because it was
   docile--but because it did go astray and was not docile. The sin of men
   is their claim upon the Church of God. The more sin, the more reason
   for Divine Grace. Oh that the Church would feel it to be her duty, if
   not to go to the most degraded first, yet not to leave them to the
   last! Where you seem least likely to succeed, there go at once--for
   there you will find room for faith. And where there is room for faith,
   and faith fills the room, God will send a blessing.

   Dear friends, as you cannot, all of you, go abroad to the
   heathen--though some of you ought to do so--I ask you to do what you
   can do. Contribute to the collection which is for the support of
   mission work. Here is a small opportunity. And if you do not avail
   yourselves of it, you are not likely to do the greater thing to which I
   have invited you. The Lord bless you! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

The Bible Tried and Proved

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S-DAY MORNING, MAY 5, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "The Words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of
   earth, purified seven times." Psalm 12:6.

   IN this Psalm our text stands in contrast with the evil of the age. The
   Psalmist complains that the "godly man ceases. The faithful fail from
   among the children of men." It was a great grief to him and he found no
   consolation except in the Words of the Lord. What if men fail--the Word
   of the Lord abides! What a comfort it is to quit the arena of
   controversy for the green pastures of Revelation! One feels like Noah,
   when shut within the ark--he saw no longer the death and desolation
   which reigned outside. Live in communion with the Word of God and even
   in the absence of Christian friends you will not lack for company.

   Furthermore, the verse stands in fuller contrast still with the words
   of the ungodly when they rebel against God and oppress His people. They
   said, "With our tongue will we prevail. Our lips are our own: who is
   Lord over us?" They boasted, they domineered, they threatened. The
   Psalmist turned away from the voice of the boaster to the Words of the
   Lord. He saw the promise, the precept and the doctrine of pure Truth
   and these consoled him while others spoke every man vanity with his
   neighbor. He had not so many of the Words of the Lord as we have--but
   what he had made his own by meditation, he prized above the finest
   gold.

   In the good company of those who had spoken under Divine direction he
   was able to bear the threats of those who surrounded him. So, dear
   Friends, if at any time your lot is cast where the Truths you love so
   well are despised, get back to the Prophets and Apostles and hear
   through them what God the Lord will speak. The voices of earth are full
   of falsehood but the Word from Heaven is very pure. There is a good
   practical lesson in the position of the text--learn it well. Make the
   Word of God your daily companion and then whatever may grieve you in
   the false doctrine of the hour, you will not be too much cast down. For
   the Words of the Lord will sustain your spirit.

   Looking at the text, does it not strike you as a marvel of
   condescension that Jehovah, the Infinite, should use words? He has
   arranged for us, in His wisdom, this way of communicating with one
   another. But as for Himself, He is pure spirit and boundless--shall He
   contract His glorious thoughts into the narrow channel of sound and ear
   and nerve? Must the eternal mind use human words? The glorious Jehovah
   spoke worlds! The heavens and the earth were the utterances of His
   lips. To Him it seems more in accordance with His Nature to speak
   tempests and thunders than to stoop to the humble vowels and consonants
   of a creature of the dust.

   Will He in very deed communicate with man in man's own way? Yes, He
   stoops to speak to us by words. We bless the Lord for verbal
   inspiration, of which we can say, "I have esteemed the words of Your
   mouth more than my necessary food." I do not know of any other
   inspiration, neither am I able to conceive of any which can be of true
   service to us. We need a plain revelation upon which we can exercise
   faith. If the Lord had spoken to us by a method in which His meaning
   was infallible, but His Words were questionable, we should have been
   rather puzzled than edified. For it is a task, indeed, to separate the
   true sense from the doubtful words. We would always be afraid that the
   Prophet or Apostle had not, after all, given us the Divine sense. It is
   easy to hear and to repeat words. But it is not easy to convey the
   meaning of another into perfectly independent words of your own.

   We believe that holy men of old, though using their own language, were
   led by the Spirit of God to use words which were also the Words of God.
   The Divine Spirit so operated upon the spirit of the inspired writer
   that he wrote the Words of the Lord, and we, therefore, treasure up
   every one of them. To us "every Word of God is pure," and full of soul
   nutriment. "Man does not live by bread, only, but by every word that
   proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord does man live." We can heartily
   declare with the Psalmist, "You are my portion, O Lord: I have said
   that I would keep Your words."

   Our condescending God is so well pleased to speak to us by words that
   He has even deigned to call His only-begotten Son, "The Word." "The
   Word was made flesh and dwelt among us." The Lord uses words not with
   reluctance but with pleasure. And He would have us think highly of
   them, too, as He said to Israel by Moses, "Therefore shall you lay up
   these My Words, in your heart and in your soul."

   We believe that we have the Words of God preserved for us in the
   Scriptures. We are exceedingly grateful that it is so. If we had not
   the Words of the Lord thus recorded we should have felt that we lived
   in an evil time, since neither voice nor oracle is heard today. I say
   we should have fallen upon evil days if the words that God spoke of old
   had not been recorded under His direction. With this Book before us,
   what the Lord spoke two thousand years ago he virtually speaks now--for
   "He will not call back His Words" (Isa. 31:2). His Word abides forever.
   It was spoken, not for one occasion, but for all ages.

   The Word of the Lord is so instinct with everlasting life and eternal
   freshness that it is as vocal and forceful in the heart of the saint
   today as it was to the ear of Abraham when he heard it in Canaan. Or to
   the mind of Moses in the desert. Or to David when he sang it on his
   harp. I thank God that many of us know what it is to hear the Divine
   Word spoken again in our souls! By the Holy Spirit the words of
   Scripture come to us with a present inspiration--not only has the Book
   been inspired, it is inspired. This Book is more than paper and ink, it
   talks with us. Was not that the promise, "When you awake, it shall talk
   with you"?

   We open the Book with this prayer, "Speak, Lord, for Your servant
   hears." And we often close it with this feeling, "Here I am, for You
   did call me." As surely as if the promise had never been uttered before
   but had been spoken out of the excellent glory for the first time, the
   Lord has made Holy Scripture to be His direct word to our heart and
   conscience.

   1 say not this of you all, but I can say it assuredly of many here
   present, may the Holy Spirit at this hour speak to you again!

   In trying to handle my text there will be three points to dwell upon.
   First, the quality of the Words of God--"The Words of the Lord are pure
   words." Secondly, the trials of the Words of God--"As silver tried in a
   furnace of earth, purified seven times." And then, thirdly, the claims
   of these words derived from their purity and the trials which they have
   undergone. Eternal Spirit, help me to speak correctly concerning Your
   own Word and help us to feel aright while we hear!

   I. First, then, beloved Friends, consider THE QUALITY OF THE WORDS OF
   GOD--"The Words of the Lord are pure words."

   From this statement I gather, first, the uniformity of their character.
   No exception is made to any of the Words of God but they are all
   described as "pure words." They are not all of the same character. Some
   are for teaching, others are for comfort and others for rebuke. But
   they are so far of a uniform character that they are all "pure words."
   I conceive it to be an evil habit to make preferences in Holy
   Scripture. We must preserve this volume as a whole. Those sin against
   Scripture who delight in doctrinal texts but omit the consideration of
   practical passages.

   If we preach doctrine, they cry, "How sweet!" They will hear of eternal
   love, Free Grace and the Divine purpose. And I am glad they will. To
   such I say--Eat the fat and drink the sweet, and rejoice that there are
   fat things full of marrow in this Book. But remember that men of God in
   old times took great delight in the Commands of the Lord. They had
   respect unto Jehovah's precepts and they loved His Law. If any turn on
   their heel and refuse to hear of duties and ordinances I fear that they
   do not love God's Word at all. He that does not love it all loves it
   not at all.

   On the other hand, they are equally mistaken who delight in the
   preaching of duties but care not for the Doctrines of Grace. They say,
   "That sermon was worth hearing, for it has to do with daily life." I am
   very glad that they are of this mind. But if at the same time they
   refuse other teaching of the Lord, they are greatly at fault. Jesus
   said, "He that is of God hears God's Words." I fear you are not of God
   if you account a portion of the Lord's Words to be unworthy of your
   consideration.

   Beloved, we prize the whole range of the Words of the Lord. We do not
   set aside the histories any more than the promises--

   "I'll read the histories of Your love, And keep Your Laws in sight,
   While through the Promises I love With ever fresh delight.'"

   Above all, do not drop into the semi-blasphemy of some who think the
   New Testament vastly superior to the Old. I would not err by saying
   that in the Old Testament you have more of the bullion of Truth than in
   the New--for therein I should be falling into the evil which I condemn.
   But this I will say--they are of equal authority--and that they cast
   such light upon each other that we could not spare either of them.
   "What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder." In
   the whole Book, from Genesis to Revelation, the Words of Jehovah are
   found and they are always pure words.

   Neither is it right for any to say, "Thus spoke Christ Himself. But
   such-and-such a teaching is Pauline." No! It is not Pauline. If it is
   recorded here, it is of the Holy Spirit. Whether the Holy Spirit speaks
   by Isaiah, or Jeremiah, or John, or James, or Paul, the authority is
   still the same. Even concerning Jesus Christ our Lord this is true. For
   He says of Himself, "The word which you hear is not Mine but the
   Father's which sent Me." In this matter He puts Himself upon the level
   of others who were as the mouth of God. He says again, "For I have not
   spoken of Myself. But the Father which sent Me, He gave Me a
   commandment, what I should say and what I should speak."

   We accept the words of the Apostles as the Words of the Lord,
   remembering what John said--"We are of God: he that knows God hears us.
   He that is not of God hears us not. Hereby know we the spirit of truth
   and the spirit of error" (1 John 4:6). A solemn judgment is thus
   pronounced upon those who would set the Spirit of Jesus against the
   Spirit which dwelt in the Apostles. The Words of the Lord are not
   affected in their value by the medium through which they came. The
   revealed Truth is all of the same quality even when the portions of it
   are not of the same weight of metal.

   Abiding by the text, we observe next the purity of the Words of the
   Lord--"The Words of the Lord are pure words." In commerce there is
   silver and silver, as you all know--silver with alloy and silver free
   from baser metal. The Word of God is the silver without the dross. It
   is as silver which has been purified seven times in a crucible of earth
   in the furnace till every worthless particle has been removed--it is
   absolutely pure. David said truly, "Your word is Truth." It is Truth in
   the form of goodness, without mixture of evil. The Commandments of the
   Lord are just and right.

   We have occasionally heard opponents carp at certain coarse expressions
   used in our translation of the Old Testament. But the coarseness of
   translators is not to be set to the account of the Holy Spirit, but to
   the fact that the force of the English language has changed and modes
   of expression which were current at one period become too gross for
   another. But I will assert this--I have never yet met with a single
   person to whom the Words of God have of themselves suggested any evil
   thing. I have heard a great many horrible things said, but I have never
   met with a case in which any man has been led into sin by a passage of
   Scripture.

   Perversions are possible and probable--but the Book itself is
   absolutely pure. Details are given of very gross acts of criminality,
   but they leave no injurious impression upon the mind. The saddest story
   of Holy Scripture is a beacon and never a lure. This is the cleanest,
   clearest, purest Book extant among men. No, it is not to be mentioned
   in the same hour with the fabulous records which pass for holy books.
   It comes from God and every Word is pure.

   It is also a book pure in the sense of truth, being without mixture of
   error. I do not hesitate to say that I believe that there is no mistake
   whatever in the original Holy Scriptures from beginning to end. There
   may be, and there are mistakes of translation. For translators are not
   inspired--but even the historical facts are correct. Doubt has been
   cast upon them here and there and at times with great show of
   reason--doubt which it has been impossible to meet for a season. But
   only give space enough and search enough and the stones buried in the
   earth cry out to confirm each letter of Scripture!

   Old manuscripts, coins, and inscriptions are on the side of the Bible
   and against it there are nothing but theories and the fact that many an
   event in history has no other record but that which the Bible affords
   us. The Book has been of late in the furnace of criticism. But much of
   that furnace has grown cold from the fact that the criticism is beneath
   contempt. "The Words of the Lord are pure words"--there is not an error
   of any sort in the whole compass of them. These words come from Him who
   can make no mistake and who can have no wish to deceive His creatures.

   If I did not believe in the infallibility of the Bible, I would rather
   be without it. If I am to judge the Book, it is no judge of me. If I am
   to sift it, like the heap on the threshing floor, and lay this aside
   and only accept that, according to my own judgment, then I have no
   guidance whatever unless I have conceit enough to trust my own heart.
   The new theory denies infallibility to the Words of God but practically
   imputes it to the judgments of men. At least this is all the
   infallibility which they can get at. I protest that I will rather risk
   my soul with a guide inspired from Heaven than with the differing
   leaders who arise from the earth at the call of "modern thought."

   Again, this Book is pure in the sense of reliability--it has in its
   promises no mixture of failure. Mark this--no prediction of Scripture
   has failed. No promise that God has given will turn out to be mere
   verbiage. "Has He said and shall He not do it?" Take the promise as the
   Lord gave it and you will find Him faithful to every jot and tittle of
   it. Some of us are not yet entitled to be called "old and gray-headed,"
   though the iron-gray is pretty conspicuous upon our heads. But up to
   now we have believed the promises of God and tested and tried them. And
   what is our verdict? I bear my solemn testimony that I have not found
   one Word of the Lord fall to the ground.

   The fulfillment of a promise has been delayed sometimes beyond the
   period which my impatience would have desired. But to the right instant
   the promise has been kept--not to the ear only--but in deed and in
   truth. You may lean your whole weight upon any of the Words of God and
   they will bear you up. In your darkest hour you may have no candle but
   a single promise and yet that lone light shall make high noon of your
   midnight. Glory be to His name! The Words of the Lord are without evil,
   without error and without failure.

   Furthermore, on this first head the text not only speaks of the uniform
   character of God's Words and of their purity but of their preciousness.
   David compares them to refined silver and silver is a precious
   metal--in other places he has likened these Words to pure gold. The
   Words of the Lord might have seemed comparable to paper money, such as
   our own Bank notes. But no, they are the metal itself. I remember the
   time when a friend of ours used to go into the western counties, from
   one farm to another, buying cheese and he was in the habit of taking
   quite a weight of coin with him. He had found that the farmers of that
   period did not care for bank notes and would not look at checks. They
   were more ready to sell when they saw that they would be paid in metal,
   down on the nail.

   In the Words of God you have the solid money of Truth--it is not
   fiction but the substance of Truth. God's Words are as bullion. When
   you have them in the grip of faith you have the substance of things
   hoped for. Faith finds in the promise of God the reality of what she
   looks for--the promise of God is as good as the performance itself.
   God's Words--whether of doctrine, of practice, of comfort--are solid
   metal to the man of God who knows how to put them in the purse of
   personal faith. As we use silver in many articles within our houses, so
   do we use God's Word in daily life. It has a thousand uses. As silver
   is the current coin of the merchant, so are the promises of God a
   currency both for Heaven and earth--we deal with God by His promises,
   and so He deals with us.

   As men and women deck themselves with silver by way of ornament, so are
   the Words of the Lord our jewels and our glory. The promises are things
   of beauty which are a joy forever. When we love the Word of God and
   keep it, the beauty of holiness is upon us. This is the true ornament
   of character and life and we receive it as a love-gift from the
   Bridegroom of our souls.

   Beloved, I need not enlarge in your presence upon the preciousness of
   the Word of God. You have, many of you, prized it long and have proved
   its value. I have read of a German Christian woman who was accustomed
   to mark her Bible whenever she met with a passage which was especially
   precious to her. But towards the end of her life she ceased from the
   habit, for she said, "I find it unnecessary. For the whole of the
   Scripture has now become most precious to me." To some of us the
   priceless volume is marked from beginning to end by our experience. It
   is all precious and altogether precious--

   "No treasures so enrich the mind, Nor shall Your Word be sold For loads
   of silver well refined, Nor heaps of choicest gold."

   Furthermore, this text sets before us not only the purity and
   preciousness of the Lord's Words but the permanence of them. They are
   as silver which has passed through the hottest fires. Truly, the Word
   of God has for ages stood the fire-- and fire applied in its fiercest
   heat--"tried in a furnace of earth"--that is to say in that furnace
   which refiners regard as their last resort. If the devil could have
   destroyed the Bible he would have brought up the hottest coals from the
   center of Hell. He has not been able to destroy one single line! Fire,
   according to the text, was applied in a skillful way--silver is placed
   in a crucible of earth, that the fire may get at it thoroughly.

   The refiner is quite sure to employ his heat in the best manner known
   to him so as to melt away the dross--so have men with diabolical skill
   endeavored, by the most clever criticism, to destroy the Words of God.
   Their object is not purification--it is the purity of Scripture which
   annoys them--they aim at consuming the Divine Testimony. Their labor is
   in vain. For the Sacred Book remains still what it always was--the pure
   Words of the Lord.

   But some of our misconceptions of its meaning have happily perished in
   the fires. The Words of the Lord have been tried frequently, yes, they
   have been tried perfectly--"purified seven times." What more remains, I
   cannot guess, but assuredly the processes have already been many and
   severe. It abides unchanged. The comfort of our fathers is our comfort.
   The words which cheered our youth are our support in age. "The grass
   withers, the flower fades: but the Word of our God shall stand
   forever."

   These Words of God are a firm foundation and our eternal hopes are
   wisely built on them. We cannot permit anyone to deprive us of this
   basis of hope. In the olden time men were burned rather than cease to
   read their Bibles. We endure less brutal oppositions but they are far
   more subtle and difficult to resist. Still let us always abide by the
   Everlasting Words, for they will always abide by us.

   Unchanged, unchangeable are the Words of the Ever Blessed. They are as
   silver without dross which will continue from age to age. This we do
   believe and in this we do rejoice. Nor is it a tax upon our faith to
   believe in the permanence of Holy Scripture--for these Words were
   spoken by Him who is Omniscient and knows everything. Therefore there
   can be in them no mistake. They were spoken by Him who is Omnipotent
   and can do everything. And therefore His Words will be carried out.
   Spoken by Him who is Immutable, these Words will never change. The
   Words which God spoke thousands of years ago are true at this hour, for
   they come from Him who is the same yesterday, today and forever.

   He that spoke these Words is Infallible and therefore they are
   Infallible. When did He ever err? Could He err and yet be God? "Has He
   said and shall He not do it? Or has He spoken and shall He not make it
   good?" Rest you sure of this-- "The Words of the Lord are pure words."
   But time hastens me on to the next point.

   II. Secondly and carefully let us consider THE TRIALS OF THE WORDS OF
   GOD. They are said to be as silver,

   which has been tried in a furnace. The Words of God have been tested by
   blasphemy, by ridicule, by persecution, by criticism, and by candid
   observation. I shall not attempt an oratorical flight while describing
   the historical tests of the precious metal of Divine Revelation--but I
   shall mention trials of a commonplace order which have come under my
   own notice and probably under yours also. This may be more homely but
   it will be more edifying. The Lord help us!

   In dealing with the sinner's obstinacy we have tested the Words of the
   Lord. There are men who cannot be convinced or persuaded. They doubt
   everything and with closed teeth they resolve not to believe though a
   man declare it to them. They are encased in the armor of prejudice and
   they cannot be wounded with the sharpest arrows of argument though they
   profess great openness to conviction. What is to be done with the
   numerous people who are related to Mr. Obstinate? You might as well
   argue with an express-train as with Mr. Obstinate--he runs on and will
   not stop though a thousand should stand in his way.

   Will the Words of God convince him? There are some in this place today
   of whom I should have said--if I had known them before their
   conversion--that it was a vain task to preach the Gospel to them. They
   so much loved sin and so utterly despised the things of God. Strangely
   enough, they were among the first to receive the Word of God when they
   came under the sound of it. It came to them in its native majesty, in
   the power of the Holy Spirit. It spoke with a commanding tone to their
   inmost heart. It threw open the doors that had long been shut up and
   rusted on their hinges and Jesus entered to save and reign!

   These who had defiantly brandished their weapons threw them down and
   surrendered unconditionally to almighty Love, willing Believers in the
   Lord Jesus. Brethren, we have only to have faith in God's Word and
   speak it out straight and we shall see proud rebels yielding. No mind
   is so desperately set on mischief or so resolutely opposed to Christ
   that it cannot be made to bow before the power of the Words of God. Oh,
   that we used more the naked sword of the Spirit! I am afraid we keep
   this two-edged sword in a scabbard and somewhat pride ourselves that
   the sheath is so elaborately adorned. What is the use of the sheath?
   The sword must be made bare and we must fight with it without
   attempting to garnish it.

   Tell forth the Words of God. Omit neither the terrors of Sinai nor the
   love notes of Calvary. Proclaim the Word with all fidelity as you know
   it and cry for the power of the Highest and the most obstinate sinner
   out of Hell can be laid low by its means. The Holy Spirit uses the Word
   of God--this is His one battering ram with which He casts down the
   strongholds of sin and self in those human hearts with which He
   effectually deals. The Word of God will bear the tests furnished by the
   hardness of the natural heart and it will, by its operations, prove its
   Divine origin.

   Here begins another trial. When you have a man fairly broken down he
   has but come part of the way. A new difficulty arises. Will the Words
   of the Lord overcome the penitent's despair? The man is full of terror
   on account of sin and Hell has begun to burn within his bosom. You may
   talk to him lovingly but his soul refuses to be comforted. Until you
   bring the Words of the Lord to bear upon him "his soul abhors all
   manner of meat." Tell him of a dying Savior. Dwell on Free Grace and
   full pardon. Speak of the reception of the prodigal son and of the
   Father's changeless love. Attended by the power of the Spirit, and only
   by the Holy Spirit, these Truths will bring light to those who sit in
   darkness.

   The worst forms of depression are cured when Holy Scripture is
   believed. Often have I been baffled when laboring with a soul convicted
   of sin and unable to see Jesus. But I have never had a doubt that in
   the end the Words of the Lord would become a cup of consolation to the
   fainting heart. We may be baffled for a season but with the Words of
   the Lord as our weapons, Giant Despair will not defeat us. O you that
   are in bondage under fear of punishment, you shall come forth to
   liberty yet--your chains shall be broken if you will accept the Words
   of God. My Master's Word is a great opener of prison doors--He has
   broken the gates of brass and cut the bars of iron asunder.

   That is a most wonderful Word, which, like a battle-ax smashes in the
   helmet of presumption and at the same time, like the finger of love,
   touches the tender wound of the bleeding and heals it in an instant!
   The Words of the Lord--for breaking down or lifting up--are equally
   effective. In certain instances, the Words of God are tried by the
   seeker's singularity. How frequently have persons told us that they
   were sure there was nobody like themselves in all the world! They were
   men up in a corner--strange fish, the like of which no sea could yield.
   Now, if these Words are, indeed, of God, they--and nothing else--will
   be able to touch every case.

   The Words of God have been put to that test and we are amazed at their
   universal adaptation. There is a text to meet every remarkable and
   out-of-the-way case. In certain instances we have heard of an odd text,
   concerning which we could not before see why it was written. Yet it has
   evidently a special fitness for a particular person to whom it has come
   with Divine authority. The Bible may be compared to the locksmith's
   bunch of keys. You handle them one by one and say of one--"That is a
   strange key, surely it will fit no lock that ever was made!" But one of
   these days the smith is sent to open a very peculiar lock. None of his
   keys open it. At last he selects that singular specimen. Look! It
   enters, shoots back the bolt and gives access to the treasure!

   The Words of this Book are proved to be the Words of God because they
   have an infinite adaptation to the varied minds which the Lord has
   made. What a gathering of locks we have here this morning! I could not
   describe you all-- Bramah and Chubb and all the rest of them could not
   have devised such a variety--yet I am sure that in this Inspired Volume
   there is a key in every way suited to each lock. Personally, when I
   have been in trouble, I have read the Bible until a text has seemed to
   stand out of the Book and salute me, saying, "I was written especially
   for you." It has looked to me as if the story must have been in the
   mind of the writer when he penned that passage.

   And so it was in the mind of that Divine Author who is at the back of
   all these inspired pages. Thus have the Words of the Lord stood the
   test of adaptation to the singularities of individual men. We
   frequently meet with people of God who have tested the Words of God in
   time of sore trouble. I make here an appeal to the experience of the
   people of God. You have lost a dear child. Was there not a Word of the
   Lord to cheer you? You lost your property--was there a passage in the
   Scriptures to meet the disaster? You have been slandered--was there not
   a Word to console you? You were very sick and depressed. Had not the
   Lord provided a comfort for you in that case?

   I will not multiply questions--the fact is that you never were high but
   the Word of the Lord was up with you. And you never were low but what
   the Scripture was down with you. No child of God was ever in any ditch,
   pit, cave, or abyss--but the Words of God found him out. How often do
   the gracious promises lie in ambush to surprise us with their loving
   kindness! I adore the infinity of God's goodness, as I see it mirrored
   in the glass of Scripture.

   Again--the Word of God is tried and proved as a guide in perplexity.
   Have we not been forced, at times, to come to a pause and say, "I do
   not know what to think about this. What is the proper course?" This
   book is an oracle to the simple-hearted man in mental, moral and
   spiritual perplexity. Oh, that we used it more! Rest assured that you
   never will be in a labyrinth so complicated that this Book, blessed of
   the Spirit, will not help you through. This is the compass for all
   mariners upon the sea of life--by its use you will know where lies the
   pole. Abide by the Words of the Lord and your way will be clear.

   Beloved, the Words of God endure another test. They are our
   preservatives in times of temptation. You can write a book that may
   help a man when he is tempted in a certain direction--will the same
   volume strengthen him when he is attracted in the opposite direction?
   Can you conceive a book which shall be a complete fence encircling a
   man in all directions? Keeping him from the abyss yonder and from the
   gulf on the other side? Yet such is the Bible. The devil himself cannot
   invent a temptation which is not met in these pages. And all the devils
   in Hell together, if they were to hold parliament and to call in the
   aid of all evil men, could not invent a device which is not met by this
   matchless Library of Truth. It reaches the Believer in every condition
   and position and preserves him from all evil. "How can a young man
   cleanse his way? By taking heed according to Your word" (Psa. 119:9).

   Lastly on this point, here is a grand test of the Book--it helps men to
   die. Believe me, it is no child's play to die! You and I will find
   ourselves in that solemn article before we know it and then we shall
   need strong consolation. Nothing upon earth ever gives me so much
   encouragement in the faith as to visit members of this Church when they
   are about to die. It is very sad to see them wasting away or racked
   with pain, but the chief effect produced upon the visitor is gladsome
   rather than gloomy. I have this week seen a sister well known to many
   of you, who has a cancer in her face and may, in all probability, soon
   be with her Lord.

   It is a dread affliction and one knows not what it may yet involve. But
   the gracious patient knows neither murmurs nor fears. No one in this
   place, though in the flush of health, could be more calm, more restful
   than our sister is! She spoke to me with full confidence that living or
   dying she is the Lord's and she had bright anticipations of being
   forever with the Lord. The little she could say with her voice was
   supplemented by a great deal which she expressed with her eyes and with
   her whole demeanor. Here was no excitement, no fanaticism, no action of
   drugs upon the brain--just a sweetly reasonable, quiet, and assured
   hope of eternal joy.

   Brethren, it is not hard to pass out of this world when we are resting
   on that old and sure Gospel which I have preached to you these many
   years. Personally, I can both live and die on the Eternal Truths which
   I have proclaimed to you. And this assurance makes me bold in
   preaching. Not long ago I sat by a Brother who was near his end. I said
   to him, "You have no fear of death?" He replied cheerfully, "I should
   be ashamed of myself if I had. After all that I have learned of the
   glorious Gospel from your lips these many years, it is a joy to depart
   and to be with Christ, which is far better."

   Now, if this Inspired Volume with its wonderful record of the Words of
   God helps us in the trials of life--directs us in our daily paths and
   enables us to weather the last great storm--surely it is precious
   beyond description, "as silver tried in a furnace of earth purified
   seven times."

   III. Now thirdly, what are THE CLAIMS OF THESE WORDS OF THE LORD? The
   claims of these words are many. First, they deserve to be studied.
   Beloved, may I urge upon you the constant searching of Inspired
   Scripture?

   Here is the latest new novel! What shall I do with it? Cast it to the
   ground. Here is another piece of fiction which has been very popular!
   What shall I do with it? Throw it on one side, or thrust it between the
   bars of the grate. This Sacred Volume is the freshest of novels. It
   would be, to some of you, an entirely new book. We have a society for
   providing the Bible for readers but we greatly need readers of the
   Bible. I grieve that even to some who bear the Christian name, Holy
   Scripture is the least read book in their library.

   One said of a preacher, the other day, "How does he keep up the
   congregation? Does he always give the people something new?" "Yes,"
   said the other, "he gives them the Gospel. And in these days that is
   the newest thing out." It is truly so. The old, old Gospel is always
   new. The modern doctrine is only new in name. It is, after all, nothing
   but a hash of stale heresies and moldy speculations. If God has spoken,
   listen! If the Lord has recorded His Words in a Book, search its pages
   with a believing heart. If you do not accept it as God's Inspired Word,
   I cannot invite you to pay any particular attention to it. But if you
   regard it as the Book of God, I charge you, as I shall meet you at the
   Judgment Seat of Christ--study the Bible daily. Treat not the Eternal
   God with disrespect but delight in His Word.

   Do you read it? Then believe it. Oh, for an intense belief of every
   Word that God has spoken! Do not hold it as a dead creed but let it
   hold you as with an almighty hand. Have no controversy with any of the
   Lord's Words. Believe without a doubt. The brother of the famous
   Unitarian, Dr. Priestly, was permitted to preach for his brother in his
   Chapel in Birmingham. But he was charged to take no controversial
   subject. He was obedient to the letter of his instructions but very
   rebellious against their spirit--seeing he took for his text--"Without
   controversy great is the

   mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh." Assuredly there
   is no controversy among spiritual men upon the glorious Truth of the
   incarnation of our Lord Jesus!

   So also, all the Words of the Lord are out of the region of
   debate--they are to us absolute certainties. Until a doctrine becomes
   an absolute certainty to a man, he will never know its sweetness. The
   Truth of God has little influence upon the soul till it is fully
   believed.

   Brothers and Sisters, obey the Book! Do it freely, do it heartily, do
   it constantly. Err not from the Commandment of God. May the Lord make
   you perfect in every good work, to do His will! "Whatsoever He says
   unto you, do it." You that are unconverted, may you obey that Gospel
   Word--"He that believes and is baptized shall be saved." Repentance and
   faith are at once the commands and the gifts of God--neglect them not.

   Furthermore, these Words of God are to be preserved. Give up no line of
   God's Revelation. You may not know the particular importance of the
   text assailed, but it is not for you to assess the proportionate value
   of God's Words--if the Lord has spoken, be prepared to die for what He
   has said. I have often wondered whether, according to the notions of
   some people, there is any truth for which it would be worth while for a
   man to go to the stake. I should say not. For we are not sure of
   anything, according to the modern notion.

   Would it be worth while dying for a doctrine which may not be true next
   week? Fresh discoveries may show that we have been the victims of an
   antiquated opinion--had we not better wait and see what will turn up?
   It will be a pity to be burned too soon, or to lie in prison for a
   dogma which will, in a few years, be superseded. Brethren, we cannot
   endure this shifty theology! May God send us a race of men who have
   backbones! Men who believe something and would die for what they
   believe. This Book deserves the sacrifice of our all for the
   maintenance of every line of it.

   Believing and defending the Word of God, let us proclaim it. Go out
   this afternoon on this first Sunday of summer and speak in the street
   the Words of this Book. Go to a cottage meeting, or to a workhouse, or
   to a lodging house and declare the Divine Words. "Truth is mighty and
   will prevail," they say--it will not prevail if it is not made known.
   The Bible itself works no wonders until its Truths are published
   abroad. Tell it among the heathen that the Lord reigns from the Tree.
   Tell it among the multitude that the Son of God has come to save the
   lost and that whosoever believes in Him shall have eternal life!

   Make all men know that "God so loved the world, that He gave His only
   begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have
   everlasting life." This thing was not done in a corner--keep it not a
   secret. Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.
   And may God bless you! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

A Dirge for the Down-grade and a Song For Faith

   DELIVERED ON THURSDAY EVENING, APRIL 18, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "Rejoice for joy with her, allyou that mourn for her." Isaiah 66:10.

   A MOURNER is always an interesting person. We pass by joyful people
   without a thought. But when we see the ensigns of woe we pause and
   sympathize even if we dare not enquire. The new widow, the fatherless
   child, the bereaved husband--these have a history in which our common
   humanity is interested. "One touch of nature makes the whole world
   kin." And when that natural touch comes from the hand of sorrow that
   kinship is quick to show itself.

   The highest style of mourner is one whose griefs are neither selfish
   nor groveling. He who bears spiritual sorrow on account of others is of
   a nobler order than the man who laments his personal woes. This man has
   not only bowed his shoulder to the inevitable load of personal trouble
   but he is obeying the command, "Bear you one another's burdens and so
   fulfill the Law of Christ." The most excellent style of mourner is the
   mourner in Zion, the mourner for Zion, the mourner with Zion. If you
   love the Church of God you will share her joys. But when she passes
   through the dark defiles of persecution, or the rushing waters of
   discord, you will mourn with her.

   God has a great regard for mourners in Zion--for in loving the city,
   they love the King. Christ Himself has come "to appoint unto them that
   mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the garment of
   praise for the spirit of heaviness." It is no small work of Divine
   Grace to make a man so one with Christ and with Christ's mystical body
   that he sorrows with the Lord and His spouse. Whenever the ways of God
   languish, and we languish also, it is a mark that Divine Grace is in
   active exercise. Those who have learned this heavenly mourning are
   called to rejoice--"Rejoice for joy with her, all you that mourn for
   her."

   When I take up my parable, I shall, at the first seem as though I had a
   roll written within and without with lamentations. Under the first head
   we shall enquire, "Who are those that mourn with Jerusalem?" Next, I
   would pass the cup of consolation from hand to hand, while we consider,
   "Why may they yet rejoice with her?" Thirdly, I shall press upon each
   one this question, "Why should we personally mourn with Jerusalem?"
   Surely we have each a portion here.

   I. WHO ARE THOSE THAT MOURN WITH JERUSALEM? Those that love the Church
   of God and desire her prosperity. And when they do not see that
   prosperity they are depressed in spirit. At this present time the
   causes for such depression are exceedingly numerous.

   Nothing can make the heart of the people of God more heavy than to
   think that the Gospel glory of the Church is declining. There was a
   time when the Gospel of the Free Grace of God sounded forth from our
   pulpits as from a trumpet. But that time is past. In years gone by you
   could pretty surely reckon upon hearing the Gospel if you went into a
   Nonconformist place of worship. But you cannot reckon in that fashion
   nowadays--for in some places false doctrine is openly taught and in
   others it is covertly advanced. In former times good men differed, as
   they always will, as to the form of their doctrinal system. But with
   regard to fundamental points they were at one--it is not so now.

   The Deity of our Lord and His great atoning sacrifice, His resurrection
   and His judgment of the wicked were never moot points in the Church.
   But they are questioned at this time. The work of the Holy Spirit may
   be honored in words. But what faith can be placed in those to whom He
   is not a Person but a mere influence? God Himself is, by some, made
   into an impersonal being, or the soul of all things--which is much the
   same as nothing. Pantheism is atheism in a mask. The plenary
   inspiration of Holy Scripture as we have understood it from our
   childhood is now assailed in a thousand insidious ways.

   The fall of Adam is treated as a fable. And original sin and imputed
   righteousness are both denounced. As for the Doctrines of Grace--they
   are ridiculed as altogether out of vogue and even the solemn sanctions
   of the Law are scorned as bugbears of the dark ages. For many a year,
   by the grand old Truths of the Gospel, sinners were converted and
   saints

   were edified and the world was made to know that there is a God in
   Israel. But these are too antiquated for the present cultured race of
   superior beings! They are going to regenerate the world by Democratic
   Socialism and set up a kingdom for Christ without the new birth or the
   pardon of sin. Truly the Lord has not taken away the seven thousand
   that have not bowed the knee to Baal but they are, in most cases,
   hidden away--even as Obadiah hid the Prophets in a cave.

   The latter-day Gospel is not the Gospel by which we were saved. To me
   it seems a tangle of ever-changing dreams. It is, by the confession of
   its inventors, the outcome of the period--the monstrous birth of a
   boasted "progress"--the scum from the caldron of conceit. It has not
   been given by the infallible Revelation of God--it does not pretend to
   have been. It is not Divine--it has no inspired Scripture at its back.
   It is, when it touches the Cross, an enemy! When it speaks of Him who
   died thereon, it is a deceitful friend. Many are its sneers at the
   Truth of Substitution--it is irate at the mention of the precious
   blood.

   Many a pulpit, where Christ was once lifted high in all the glory of
   His atoning death, is now profaned by those who laugh at Justification
   by Faith. In fact, men are not now to be saved by faith but by doubt.
   Those who love the Church of God feel heavy at heart because the
   teachers of the people cause them to err. Even from a national point of
   view, men of foresight see cause for grave concern. Cowper sang, in his
   day, words worthy to be remembered now--

   "When nations are to perish in their sins,

   It is in the Church the leprosy begins--

   The priest, whose office is with zeal sincere,

   To watch the fountain, and preserve it clear,

   Carelessly nods and sleeps upon the brink,

   While others poison what the flock must drink.

   His unsuspecting sheep believe it pure,

   And, tainted by the very means of cure,

   Catch from each other a contagious spot,

   The foul forerunner of a general rot.

   Then Truth is hushed, that Heresy may preach,

   And all is trash that Reason cannot reach." The old motto of the city
   of Glasgow was, "Let Glasgow flourish by the preaching of the Word."
   Our country has flourished by the preaching of the Word. And, under
   God, she has been raised to eminence because of her Protestant
   Christianity. And when she departs from this, the reason for
   maintaining her greatness will have ceased. This makes us mourn.

   Another cause of mourning is when we see the holiness of the visible
   Church beclouded. I trust I am not given to finding fault where there
   is not fault. But I cannot open my eyes without seeing things done in
   our Churches which thirty years ago were not so much as dreamed of. In
   the matter of amusements, professors have gone far in the way of
   laxity. What is worse, the Churches have now conceived the idea that it
   is their duty to amuse the people. Dissenters who used to protest
   against going to the theater now cause the theater to come to them.
   Ought not many schoolrooms to be licensed for stage plays? If someone
   were to see to the rigid carrying out of the Law, would they not be
   required to take out a license for theatricals?

   I dare not touch upon what has been done at bazaars and fancy fairs. If
   these had been arranged by decent worldly people, could they have gone
   further? What folly has been left untried? What absurdity has not been
   too great for the consciences of those who profess to be the children
   of God--who are not of the world but called to walk with God in a
   separated life? The world regards the high pretensions of such men as
   hypocrisy. And truly I do not know another name for them. Think of
   those who enjoy communion with God playing the fool in costume! They
   talk of wrestling with the Lord in secret prayer but they juggle with
   the world in unconcealed gambling.

   Can this be right? Have right and wrong shifted places? Surely there is
   a sobriety of behavior which is consistent with a work of Divine Grace
   in the heart and there is a levity which betokens that the spirit of
   evil is supreme. Ah Sirs, there may have been a time when Christians
   were too, precise but it has not been in my day. There may have been
   such a dreadful thing as Puritanical rigidity but I have never seen it.
   We are quite free from that evil now, if it ever existed. We have gone
   from liberty to libertinism. We have passed beyond the dubious into the
   dangerous and none can prophesy where we shall stop. Where is the
   holiness of the Church of God today?

   Ah, were she what she professed to be, she would be "fair as the moon,
   clear as the sun," and then "terrible as an army with banners." But now
   she is dim as smoking flax and rather the object of ridicule than of
   reverence. May not the measure of the influence of a Church be
   estimated by its holiness? If the great host of professing Christians
   were in domestic life and in business life sanctified by the Spirit,
   the Church would become a great power in the world. God's saints may
   well mourn with Jerusalem when they see spirituality and holiness at so
   low an ebb! Others may regard this as a matter of no consequence. But
   we view it as the breaking forth of a leprosy.

   Moreover, we see in the Church that her sacred ardor is cooling. There
   is still fervor in certain Believers and fervor of the best kind, for
   the Divine Spirit has not utterly departed from us. We have around us
   Christian men and women who will do and dare anything for Jesus and
   bear witness for Him in the open street. Thank God for such! They are a
   standing protest against a lukewarm age. And we have still our gracious
   young men who will give their lives to bear the name of Christ among
   the heathen--amid the fevers of the Congo River. We have also an
   abundant seed of the faithful who labor day and night for the
   advancement of the Redeemer's kingdom. Still things are not in Israel
   as we could desire.

   Very seldom are Believers nowadays charged with being fanatical, nor
   even with being too enthusiastic. And this is a sign that we are below
   the right heat. When the world calls us fanatics we are nearing that
   point of ardor which is our Lord's due. If we were indeed fanatical it
   would be an error. But when we are called so, since the world's
   judgment is erroneous, we may conclude that we are only so earnest that
   the cold world is inconvenienced by our warmth. Oh, for the passionate
   love of a Rutherford! Oh, to seek the souls of men with the vehement
   zeal of a Whitefield, with the persevering purpose of a Wesley!

   Oh, to be carried away by the Divine passion of compassion! Oh, to be
   wholly consecrated to Him who is our King, our Lord, our All! His Glory
   should be the one object of our lives. There is cause to grieve over
   many Churches and individuals--that they are neither cold nor hot. Let
   us be personal and practical and see whether we have not cause to
   grieve over ourselves in that respect.

   There is grave cause for mourning in Zion because the services of God's
   house are neglected. In certain large places of worship which once were
   crowded to the door, I hear that there are more pews than people. Where
   the Gospel is gone from the pulpit, listeners soon go from the pews.
   Nothing is more like a sham than the apparent religious provision for
   this great metropolis. For we have Churches and Chapels in such
   abundance that to build more would seem to be altogether needless. And
   yet, when we make enquiry we find the congregations to be, in some
   instances, so ludicrously small that if the building did not exist it
   would be no more missed than a drop in the sea.

   "I do not know where to send my converts with the hope that they will
   hear the Gospel," said a soul-winner to me the other day, concerning a
   certain London district. I cannot conceal from myself the gloomy fact
   that the habit of going to a place of worship is being altogether lost
   in this city. There are streets upon streets where only one or two
   persons are in the habit of attending the House of God. A man becomes
   even notable because he goes on the Sabbath to a place of worship. I
   was amused with one who attended this Tabernacle one Thursday night--he
   became so much interested in the service that he came on several
   Thursdays.

   But when a friend said to him, "Will you not come on Sunday?" he
   replied, "Oh, no. I have not got so far as that. I don't feel that I
   could become a Sunday Chapel goer." We, from our point of view, think
   better of the weekday hearer than of one who only attends on the Lord's
   Day. But his point of view was very different. No one would blame him
   for going where he pleased during the week but to observe the Sabbath
   would be a decided step which he was not prepared to take. That would
   involve losing a name for irreligion among his associates. This straw
   shows which way the wind blows. Alas, time was when it was thought to
   be a duty to observe the Sabbath. But it is now a day for lying late in
   bed, loafing about in shirt-sleeves, or mending rabbit hutches and
   pigeon houses!

   Do not think that I am exaggerating. I am speaking in sober seriousness
   the sad truth which has been reported to me by city missionaries,
   district visitors and working men who live among it. In many of our
   villages and country towns there is a healthy habit of Church-going and
   Chapel-going, though even there it is not so general as it used to be.
   But in London the general habit is the reverse. This is lamentable. How
   has it come about? I fear that it is very much the case because if and
   when the people did go to many places of worship they could not
   understand what they hear. And what is worse, if they did understand
   it, it would not be of much use to them.

   The criticisms of modern thought are of no value to the working man. If
   the old Gospel is brought to the front in all its simplicity and
   preached with fervor, we may hope to see the people back again to hear
   it. But the task of calling them back is not an easy one. Along with
   the prevalence of a questioning theology comes this religious
   indifference. Under the prevailing form of doctrine our city is
   becoming more heathen than Christian. Between the childishness of
   superstitious sacramentalism and the willful wickedness of doubt, the
   masses are sliding into an utter disregard of holy things. Reverence is
   dying out. And as surely as it dies we shall see a fierce attempt at
   anarchy.

   The evil over which I now mourn is not only prevalent among the
   outlying masses but it taints Christians themselves. Look at your
   hall-Sunday professors--content with only one service and weary of
   that! How is it with many Christian people as to meetings for prayer?
   Prayer Meetings are the very soul of Church work and they bring down
   the blessing upon all our spiritual agencies. Yet they are despised by
   our high-fliers. In many Chapels two services in the week have proved
   too great an effort for the constitution of the ministers and too much
   of a tax upon the time of their hearers who are occupied with the far
   superior avocations of card games or lawn tennis!

   They could not come out two nights in a week--who would propose such a
   thing? So a compromise has been invented for the relief of the
   distressed and they have set up a kind of service which is half lecture
   and half Prayer Meeting so as to get the pious business all over at
   once. And a very little affair is that one service. This is not only
   bad in itself but it is a sign of something worse. Men who can pray to
   edification are in some directions becoming rare. One pastor told me
   the other day that out of a considerable congregation he found it hard
   to make up a Prayer Meeting at all because he had so few praying men.
   It is a dreadful impeachment against the Churches, but faithfulness
   compels me to state it-- before things grow worse.

   You can get a crowd to a concert but hardly a dozen to prayer! I know
   what I say. Because of all this, the ways of Zion languish--those ways
   which once were best trod, namely the ways of prayer and praise, are
   hardly considered by the masses. Surely the Lord will visit the
   Churches for this. By His Grace there are grand exceptions, for which
   God be thanked. But still is it so--that the purely devotional service
   is at a discount. To hear a clever man they will come--but not to wait
   upon God. If there had been a magic lantern, or a penny reading, or a
   recitation with comic songs, the pious people would have strained a
   point to be there. But to pray is much too dull work for novel-reading,
   theater-haunting professors.

   These remarks will seem strange to good old-fashioned Believers. But
   when they hear them and know them to be true, I am sure it will cause
   them to take their places as mourners with Zion.

   Another very great and grave cause for mourning to all true Christians
   is the multitude of sinners that remain unsaved. O my dear Hearers, did
   you ever realize what it is for a soul to be unsaved? If, on your way
   home you were to stumble over a corpse, you would stoop down and look
   and ascertain that the person was really dead and then what a turn it
   would give you to find yourself so near the dead! You would not forget
   it for weeks. Yet men are dead in trespasses and sins and we believe
   that it is so--but it does not affect us in any special manner. Lord,
   arouse us! If we had passed a prison yard and had seen a man in chains
   and heard the clanking of his fetters, the iron would have entered into
   our souls and we should have felt sad for the prisoner.

   And yet around us in this congregation there are men and women bound
   fast with the chains of sin and we are not distressed for them. We do
   not realize their bondage. We do not dispute the fact, neither do we
   feel its sadness. Look at the many round about us who are living in
   open evil, going after their lusts, plunging deeper and deeper into
   what must be their destruction. Look at the many that are blind, though
   they have eyes. That hear not, though they have ears. That feel not,
   though they are rational beings! How can we bear it? How can we bear it
   that there should be any among us who do not know God, who love not the
   Lord Jesus Christ, who are yet in their sins?

   If an ungodly man could realize his own condition he would not dare to
   sit still. And if we had compassionate hearts and could clearly see the
   fact that our own children, our own dearest relatives or our nearest
   neighbors were condemned because of sin and drawing every moment nearer
   to a terrible judgment, would we not bestir ourselves--give God no
   rest--but cry day and night to Him until the perishing ones are saved?
   An unsaved soul is a sight that might well transform us into Jeremies
   and cause us to weep perpetual showers of pitying grief until the arm
   of mercy should interpose to work salvation.

   The dark thought for a true heart is that while souls are lost, even
   now the evil does not end here. But they are passing away into that
   hopeless state in the next world which our Lord speaks of as the place
   where the worm dies not and the fire is not quenched. They are going
   from this place, where mercy is proclaimed, to that dread tribunal
   where the voice of judgment cries, "Depart, you cursed." They are
   hastening away to appear before the Great White Throne, unsaved,
   unrenewed, unforgiven! O God, have mercy upon our fellow men, we pray
   You. But, first, give us Divine Grace to have mercy upon them!

   He who can see a soul lost and yet is not distressed, how dwells the
   love of God in him? We ought to be filled with sorrow when men perish
   willfully under the Gospel. When our adversaries tell us that our
   dreadful belief with regard to the hopeless future of a lost soul ought
   to break our hearts, we admit the truth of what they say. We admit it
   to the fullest extent. But we reply that if they conceive that we are
   not as tender as we ought to be, while believing that terrible Truth
   which seems to us to be plainly taught in the Scriptures, to what a
   depth of callousness should we not descend if they could make us doubt
   what we now believe?

   If they could persuade us of their comfortable fictions. If they could
   induce us to accept their "larger hope" should we not cease from that
   slender degree of pity which their charity may confess we now possess?
   Brethren, we are as compassionate as they are--though that is not
   saying much. At least we dare to incur unpopularity and the sarcastic
   censures of the wise and prudent in order that we may give honest
   warning of the terrible woe which men are bringing upon themselves.
   They talk as if we were to blame for the Hell we proclaim! Will they
   give us an equal share of honor for the Heaven we preach? We create
   neither the one nor the other.

   But they might at least cause their imputations to face both ways. My
   Brethren, the terrors of the world to come, to those who willfully
   reject the Savior, ought to affect us far more than they do--none are
   more ready to acknowledge this than we are. Let us lay to heart the
   sins of our age, the ruin of our fellow men. They love not God. They
   trust not His dear Son. They are mad after sin. They are enemies to
   holiness--this is a heavy burden to a godly heart. They are dying in
   their sins and coming under everlasting punishment. And these things
   should make us mourners in Zion. I am not too bold when I say that they
   do cause us great heaviness of heart.

   I do not think that any man who really thinks about the condition of
   the Church and then turns to the condition of the world in reference to
   the Church can walk up and down our streets exhibiting a perpetual
   gaiety of spirit. Other Truths of God operate upon us to make us glad,
   but this drags us down. There must be times when we get alone and pour
   out our hearts like water before the Lord and cry, "O Lord, how long
   before You will put forth Your saving power? How long before Your arm
   shall be made bare and the work of Divine Grace shall be carried on to
   the rescue of the fallen

   millions?"

   II. I have, at least, shown you that we are not without overflowing
   fountains of grief--but now, Beloved, having mourned unto you, it is
   time for me to change my tune. May the Lord cause the fountains of your
   pity to flow. But, at the same time, enable you to follow me while I
   say, in the second place that WE MAY YET REJOICE WITH JERUSALEM. Why
   may we do so amid such reasons for mourning?

   We may rejoice with the chosen of the Lord when we remember, first of
   all, that God has not changed either in nature, or in love to His
   people, or in the purpose of His Grace. Before we were born He was able
   to achieve His purposes of love and He will accomplish the good
   pleasure of His will when we are no more praying and working here
   below. When His Church was faithful, His Divine decree was carried out.
   And if His Church is unfaithful He is still Omnipotent and can,
   therefore, work out His great designs. He has not changed His system of
   working. He intends, still, to bless the world through the Church--He
   means to use His saved ones for the saving of others.

   I believe that He will fight this battle to a happy end upon the same
   lines as up to now and that in the end He shall have great glory
   notwithstanding all the infirmities and imperfections of His servants.
   An unchanging God is our security for ultimate victory. We fall back
   upon this Truth of God. Our Lord knows not the shadow of a change and
   His eternal purpose shall stand. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Let us
   exceedingly rejoice!

   A further reason for joy is this--we may expect the Lord to appear.
   Take notice of the fifth verse of the chapter before us, for there we
   read, "He shall appear to your joy and they shall be ashamed." God will
   not desert His own cause. Allow no such thought to afflict you. We have
   felt the hiding of His power--we shall yet see the unveiling of it. We
   have had to mourn that He allows the enemy to behave himself
   exceedingly proud. But before long He will make them sing to

   another tune. The Lord will awake like a mighty man that has been
   sleeping. And then when He plucks His right hand out of His bosom He
   will make short work of the insects that chirp against His Glory and
   Godhead.

   Jehovah will win the victory, oppose who may. There never has yet been
   a dark night of patience which has not ended in a bright morning of
   faith. They that sat in darkness and in the valley of death have seen a
   great light--it has sprung up when the blackness was most intense. In
   the middle ages the darkness deepened into sevenfold night. But, as in
   a moment, God said, "Let there be light," and Luther and Calvin and
   Zwingli and other stars shone forth in the midnight sky and made the
   gloom to disappear right speedily. Our glorious God can do so at this
   present crisis. Oh, for a word from the Throne! Oh, for a "light be,"
   from the Lord and Giver of light and this darkness which may be felt
   will be felt no more!

   I am not discouraged, though I am greatly saddened. The battle is not
   ours but the Lord's. God knows no difficulty. Omnipotence has servants
   everywhere and power to create as many more agents of its purpose as
   there are sands on the seashore. Sitting by the chimney side tonight, a
   young Luther is preparing, as he looks in the fire, to burn the bells
   of the philosophic hierarchy of today. In the workhouse, among the poor
   children, there is a Moses who shall confront our Pharaoh and deliver
   Israel's tribes. The coming man who shall startle the world with his
   brave witness to the everlasting Gospel is at school. Never have a
   doubt about it--God will appear--

   "Lord, when iniquities abound,

   And blasphemy grows bold,

   When faith is hardly to be found,

   And love is waxing cold,

   Is not Your chariot hastening on?

   Have You not given this sign?

   May we not trust and live upon

   A promise so Divine?"

   When the Lord shall put on strength then shall His Church be aroused. I
   read you in the chapter--"Before she travailed, she brought forth.
   Before her pain came, she was delivered of a man child." The Lord can
   soon bring upon His Church her fruitful birth pangs and make the barren
   woman to keep house. I hope to see, before I die, a revived Church
   holding truthful doctrine, agonizing over lost souls and blessed with
   hosts of converts. Glory be to the name of the Lord where all is as a
   desert, He can make a garden. Aaron's dry rod shall bud and blossom
   again. His fold shall be filled and there shall be a great sound as of
   the bleating of countless sheep. Since God is almighty in the spiritual
   realm as well as in the material world, nothing is too great for us to
   expect.

   He that raised up our Lord Jesus from the dead can arouse a dying
   Church. And He that cut Rahab and wounded the dragon can break the
   power of infidel criticism. Once more He will shake not only earth but
   also Heaven. Therefore let us rest in the Lord and sing with joyful
   confidence since no good thing will He withhold from His Church and no
   evil thing will He long permit to do her damage.

   Oh, that the days of refreshing were come! Then shall the Church have
   many converts, proving her power and increasing her influence.
   Thousands shall turn to Jesus at the expected Pentecost. Then shall she
   nourish them well and feed them with knowledge and understanding. I
   fear that if in certain Churches there were to be many converts they
   would not know what to do with them. But when the Holy Spirit comes
   into her midst, then the Church shall be a nursing mother. We read of
   "the breasts of her consolations" (see verse eleven). How abundantly
   she supplies loving, living nutriment to her newborn children when God
   blesses her! Yes, the Lord being present, the ministry becomes a means
   of spiritual sustenance, comfort and growth to those who are as little
   children in Divine Grace. And, indeed, all the members of the Church
   become assiduous in their care of those who have lately come to Christ.

   I pray that it may be so among us. We have added to us, during the last
   two months, first seventy and then ninety fresh members for which I
   thank God. It is a little Church in itself. But unless you all look
   after them and try to help them on, we shall be embarrassed by such
   large additions to our number. Oh, that this Church may carefully see
   to all the children that the Lord gives her. And if so, we shall indeed
   have the fullest reason for rejoicing with her! Then shall we sing,
   "The Lord has increased the people and multiplied the joy."

   At such times there is an abundant degree of peace and joy in all
   believing hearts. "For thus says the Lord, Behold, I will extend peace
   to her like a river and the glory of the Gentiles like a flowing
   stream." It is a sad, sad thing when a

   Church is not hearty in its love and unanimous in its action. We have
   heard of Churches of which the Apostle Paul would have said, "I have
   heard that there are divisions among you." And when it is so, the power
   to do good is not present. God will appear for His Church and end her
   sore dissensions and set the hearts of His people together. And when it
   is so, then shall there be a great rejoicing and we will take our part
   in it.

   Nor is this all--God will raise up men fitted to do His work. Read the
   twenty-first verse--"I will also take of them for priests and for
   Levites, says the Lord." When the Holy Spirit visits a Church, He is
   sure to bestow special gifts and give special calls. As the Holy Spirit
   said, "Separate Me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have
   called them," so will He say in our Churches, to our great delight.
   When God sent Pastor Harms to Hermansberg, it was a mere pasture land
   and there were few there that knew the Lord. But under his zealous
   preaching the whole village was turned into a missionary society.

   Oh, that we could do anything like it! Farmers and laborers, men and
   women became missionaries for Christ to Africa. And a large proportion
   of the population went abroad either to preach the Gospel or to form
   little colonies to work with the missionary and support him. They sold
   house and land and everything and thus made Hermansberg the starting
   place of a great evangelizing enterprise. My beloved Brethren, I hardly
   dare be so ambitious as to hope that you will ever reach such
   consecration! See how it was among the Moravians--every man becoming a
   member of their Church became himself a teacher of the Word! Every man,
   woman and child among them sought to bring souls to Christ.

   Would God that the power of the Lord would come in that way upon all
   our Churches! And we may expect it, if it is the true Gospel which we
   preach--if it is the Gospel which we love--if it is in the power of the
   Gospel that we live. So must it be. The Lord will yet be taking many
   out of the midst of His people to be priests and Levites. What is to
   become of India, Africa and China, if we go on at the rate at which we
   have been crawling forward for these many years? Good as all mission
   work has been, yet what a drop in the bucket it is compared with what
   remains to be done! Oh, that the Lord would come and quicken His poor
   dead Church with a more Divine life!

   When she is quickened from the crown of her head to the sole of her
   foot, then the nations of the earth shall know that God is in the midst
   of His people, even the infinite Jehovah whose name is salvation. May
   the Lord Jesus take His servants as Samson took the foxes and fasten
   firebrands to them and send them among the standing corn till the whole
   earth is on a blaze with the flame that came down from Heaven! How
   great, then, will be our joy!

   Brethren, the Providence of God is with us. All its terrors, as well as
   all its bounties, work for the advance of the Lord's kingdom. The
   wheels full of eyes all look this way. Brethren, the Promise of God is
   with us. Our Lord Jesus must reign till all His enemies are put beneath
   His feet. Brothers and Sisters, prayer is with us still--the Mercy
   Seat, the Comforter and the Advocate. If we know how to use the mighty
   engine of All-prayer we may yet shake the gates of Hell. Brethren, the
   Holy Spirit is with us still. He came down at Pentecost and He has
   never gone back again--He abides in His Church forever and works
   mightily. We have but to call upon Him to carry on His sacred mission
   and we shall see greater things than these.

   III. But now my time has nearly gone and so I must finish by asking,
   WHY SHOULD WE PERSONALLY BE OF

   THE NUMBER THAT MOURN WITH THE CHURCH AND THAT REJOICE WITH HER?
   Perhaps some of you do not belong to that honorable company. I pray the
   Holy Spirit to make you of that host at once.

   For first, there is our own sin and ruin to mourn over. I spoke just
   now of how we ought to feel for a lost soul. But how ought that lost
   soul to feel for itself? Poor Soul, if we ought to mourn for you, how
   much more should you mourn for yourself! If you should be lost, if I
   have been faithful to you, I shall be a loser. What if you go down to
   Hell--your mother's pleadings being in vain--she will not be robbed of
   her glory because you refuse the Savior! It is your soul, your own
   soul, your only soul that is in jeopardy. If a man is a bankrupt here
   he may start in business again. But if you make a bankruptcy of this
   mortal life no second commencement is possible.

   In a campaign a lost battle is a great evil--yet the next fight may
   retrieve the disaster. But if the battle of life is lost, you will
   never again be able to enter the wishes and do better. I pray you,
   therefore, mourn over your own condition at once. Sitting in that pew,
   a sinner unforgiven, a rebel against God, with enmity in your heart
   against your best Friend-- what a state you are in! The Lord have mercy
   upon you! The Lord make you at once a mourner in the Church of God that
   you may, before long, rejoice in her Savior!

   Next, I may be speaking to someone who has been a backslider and is a
   backslider even now. Are you sighing--

   "Where is the blessedness I knew When first I sa w the Lord"?

   Well may you say so. By your wretched wandering you have disgraced the
   name of Christ and you have dishonored the cause which you professed to
   love. You have made the enemy blaspheme and you cannot wonder that your
   rest is broken. If anybody ought to be a mourner, you should be. You
   should take front rank among those who lament for the Church of Christ
   seeing that you have done her so much damage that you will never be
   able to undo it even by a long life of usefulness.

   Brethren, do you not think that we might all wisely become mourners
   when we think of our own want of zeal and want of care for the souls of
   others? The preacher would smite upon his breast. And he invites you to
   do the same. Who among us spends half the thought that he should spend
   upon the conversion of his fellow men? We all think of them a little. I
   hope the most of you are doing something for Jesus and His cause. Not
   many things are left undone which as a Church we can do. But the things
   that are done--are they always done in a right spirit? Are they always
   baptized in prayer? Are they worked out humbly, earnestly, and in
   entire dependence upon the Spirit of God? I am afraid that our faulty
   service towards other men must place us among the mourners in Zion if
   there were nothing else to do in it. We need not be ashamed to be among
   them, for if we sorrow with the Lord's Church, we shall also, one day,
   rejoice with her.

   May we not add to this our own failures in the matter of holiness? It
   is easy enough to drag the whole Church up as I did just now and
   scourge her as she well deserves. But it is not so easy for each guilty
   person to flagellate himself. Yet this is what is needed. Ask--Have I
   been as holy as I should be? Has my house been ordered aright? Is there
   family prayer observed, not as a matter of form, but in life and power?
   Am I towards my children, towards my husband, towards my wife, towards
   my servants as I ought to be? Are we as upright and generous as we
   should be in our business and in our connection with common daily life?

   O Brothers and Sisters, we may each of us become mourners with the
   Church of God if we examine ourselves with care! Let me add that we
   have all a great concern in this matter and we ought, therefore, to
   join with the Church in all her griefs. If the ministry of our pastors
   is not successful, we shall lose by its want of power. If the Gospel is
   not preached, our souls will not be fed. See to it that you do not
   encourage false doctrine or wink at the modern apostasy. Suppose the
   Gospel is not preached with saving power--then we shall have our
   children unconverted and they will not be our joy and crown. There
   cannot be a deficiency in the pulpit without its bringing mischief to
   our households.

   We are members of one body and if any part of the body suffers every
   other part of the body will have to suffer, too. If worldliness
   abounds, as it does, we shall see our children becoming worldly. We
   shall see them sucked into the vortex of infidelity and frivolity which
   now seems to sweep down and carry into the abyss so many hopeful young
   men and women. None of us will be able to escape from the terrible
   damage which evil is working all around. When false doctrine breaks
   forth like floods, it will surge around all our houses. Let us,
   therefore cry mightily unto God--not for ourselves only, but for the
   one great universal Church and for this great city and for this wicked
   world.

   O Lord our God, arise for Your cause and crown! Take hold on sword and
   buckler and plead Your own case, for Jesus' sake! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

Taking Possession Of Our Inheritance

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S-DAY MORNING, MAY 12, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "Moses My servant is dead. Now therefore arise, go over this Jordan,
   you and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even to
   the children of Israel. Everyplace that the sole of your foot shall
   tread upon, that have I given unto you, as I said unto Moses." Joshua
   1:2,3.

   UNDER the leadership of Moses the children of Israel had been
   journeying towards the land of promise. Owing to their waywardness,
   what might have been done in less than a month occupied many years.
   They wandered up and down in the wilderness, sometimes close on the
   border of their inheritance and other times lost in the great desert.
   Alas, many of God's people are still in this unsatisfactory
   condition--they have come out of Egypt--the depths have swallowed up
   their adversaries and they are on the way to the promised heritage. But
   they have not yet entered into rest. They will, we trust, ultimately
   reach the peace of God which passes all understanding, for they have
   sufficient faith to prove them to be God's people and therefore, the
   Lord will surely bring them in.

   But, assuredly, they make a great deal of marching for very small
   progress. For lack of faith they go about when, with a step, they might
   possess the promised Canaan. Today my earnest prayer and desire is that
   going towards the promised heritage may come to an end with you this
   day and you may enter into heavenly blessings in Christ Jesus by an
   immediate act of faith. I want the Lord's people so to persevere in
   their seeking, by Divine strength, that they may get out of the great
   and terrible wilderness and come to Mount Zion and the heavenly
   Jerusalem and enter into their heritage, according to that word, "We
   which have believed do enter into rest."

   Our friends have come as far as that first verse of our Lord's
   invitation, "Come unto Me, all you that labor and are heavy laden and I
   will give you rest." And they have a measure of that rest which comes
   of pardoned sin and confidence in Jesus. The pity is that they have not
   advanced to His next word of exhortation, "Take My yoke upon you and
   learn of Me: and you shall find rest unto your souls." This is a rest
   discovered and enjoyed through willing service--"You shall find rest
   unto your souls." Many people are saved in one sense but in another
   sense they are seeking salvation.

   Oh that we may come to be saved in every sense--may salvation be ours
   in the broadest, widest, deepest, highest meaning of that blessed word!
   May we not only be saved from but saved to! Saved from sin--that makes
   us safe. Saved to holiness--that makes us happy. May we realize our
   completeness in Christ this day and cease from the wanderings of fear!
   It is time that we took possession of that goodly heritage which the
   Lord has made our own, for in Christ Jesus "we have obtained an
   inheritance" and have the earnest of it in our possession of the Spirit
   of God. Hear the watchword of the morning, you that have tarried long
   enough in the wilderness--"Arise, go over this Jordan"!

   If I read the whole verse it is a command to myself--"Arise, go over
   this Jordan, you and all this people, unto the land which I do give to
   them, even to the children of Israel. Every place that the sole of your
   foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you, as I said unto
   Moses." For our help in this desirable step, first let us take a survey
   of the inheritance. Secondly, let us glance at the title deeds. And
   thirdly, let us make a move towards taking immediate possession. For
   all this may the Holy Spirit make us sufficient!

   I. First LET US TAKE A SURVEY OF THE INHERITANCE. I cannot carry you to
   the top of Pisgah. And if I could, you would probably reckon that you
   ought to die there. Your time has not yet come for that journey to the
   sky-- but I would invite you to view the purchased possession with the
   eye of an enlightened understanding and then to cross over the Jordan
   of indecision to possess the country.

   I would say of this inheritance which God has prepared for His saints
   and has given to them by a Covenant of Salt that it is exceedingly
   broad. We read here in this Book of Joshua, "From the wilderness and
   this Lebanon even unto the great river, the river Euphrates, all the
   land of the Hittites and unto the great sea toward the going down of
   the sun,

   shall be your coast." These people did not conquer all the country but
   were content with the narrow bounds of Canaan. They began their
   enterprise bravely but soon showed a contracted spirit.

   Moses, in the 34th chapter of Numbers, which is well worthy of careful
   reading, gave them a little map or ordnance survey of the inner country
   which they were commanded to conquer and out of which they were to
   drive the inhabitants with the edge of the sword. The various races of
   Canaanites had brought upon themselves the curse of a righteous God.
   Their existence upon the face of God's earth had become a calamity to
   mankind by reason of their horrible vices. They were doomed to utter
   extinction by the justice of God, as other races have been whose story
   profane history records. The Israelites were appointed to be their
   executioners. But they did not accomplish their task--after a little
   while they began to make treaties and marriages with the doomed people
   and their intended victims became thorns in their sides.

   Outside of these Canaanite nations were greater territories which
   stretched right away from the Lebanon ranges down to the border of
   Egypt and as far east as the great river Euphrates, from whose banks
   their fathers came. This large domain was never altogether conquered by
   Israel although David possessed a large portion of it and Solomon still
   more. The people of these wide regions were not so far gone in evil as
   the degraded tribes of Canaan and so they were to be spared, if they
   submitted to the sway of Israel. Even the inner kingdom Israel did not
   wholly subdue--and the wider region it left for centuries untouched.

   Beloved, this is a sadly correct picture of what happens to numbers of
   God's people today. The inheritance that God has given us to enjoy in
   Christ Jesus is exceedingly broad. But we limit ourselves. All that we
   can think or desire is ours in the Covenant of Grace. There are
   immeasurable breadths and lengths, but we confine ourselves to close
   quarters. Truly "there is very much land yet to be possessed"! Some
   Divine Graces you must have, or you are not saved. Some sins must at
   once be driven out of your life at the sword's point or you are not the
   Lord's. As for the choicer Graces--you are foolish, indeed, if you
   think of doing without them! And as for the less violent sins--you err
   greatly if you spare one of them.

   The deep knowledge, the spiritual experience, the high joy, the extreme
   delight, and the heavenly communion which fall to the lot of certain of
   the saints should be enjoyed by us all. There is no reason why one
   should miss them. For if they have but faith enough to grasp all that
   God gives, they have full permission to do so. The Lord may truly say
   to us, "You are not straitened in Me but you are straitened in your own
   heart." We are petty princelings when we might have an imperial
   inheritance.

   Just let me show what I mean. When we at first come to Christ by faith,
   we begin to enter into our inheritance for we obtain the pardon of sin.
   Some Believers are not even sure that they have a present and perfect
   remission--but some of us know that we are, once and for all, "washed
   in the blood of the Lamb." We know, therefore, in God's eyes we are
   whiter than snow. But beyond that lies "acceptance in the Beloved,"
   which possibly we have not dared to claim. Hosts of professors are
   satisfied to be washed but have not yet asked to be clothed with the
   righteousness of Christ. Beloved, we are not only absolved but we are
   positively delightful unto God in Christ Jesus. He accepts our
   offerings, our prayers, our praises, our heart's love. Our name is
   Hephzibah, for the Lord delights in us.

   Pardon of sin is like the little Canaan that must be conquered. But why
   not advance to the wider regions of "accepted in the Beloved"?
   Brethren, let us walk in the light, as God is in the light and have
   fellowship with Him while the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleans us
   from all sin.

   Think of another great blessing, namely, that of sonship. Beloved, we
   could sing heartily that hymn just now--

   "Behold what wondrous grace The Father has bestowed On sinners of a
   mortal race, To call them sons of God!"

   But sonship is not all--"If children, then heirs, heirs of God,
   joint-heirs with Jesus Christ." Adoption you must have-- heirship you
   ought to have. How rich you are since God Himself is yours--"heirs of
   God"! Yes, God Himself is as truly yours as He is
   Christ's--"joint-heirs with Jesus Christ." Why are we naked and poor
   and miserable when we are heirs of a kingdom by reason of our adoption
   of the Lord? Let us take the good the Lord provides us.

   Consider now the matter of regeneration. When we come to Christ by
   faith we are born again and made new creatures in Christ Jesus--this
   must be. But, Brethren, when we are born again we perceive that the new
   birth begets a new life and that new life develops itself in the beauty
   of holiness. Holiness is the fruit of regeneration. Yet some imagine
   that they cannot be holy, at least not to any great extent. They
   believe that they can be saved from certain grosser evils

   but they cannot ascend to those glorious heights of consecration and
   sanctification without which the Believer can never attain to the
   stature of a man in Christ Jesus. My message to you is, Arise, go over
   this Jordan and take possession of the larger inheritance. Take
   possession of it all--seek after holiness--follow on to know the Lord.

   Be not satisfied until you are conformed unto His image, who is "the
   First-born among many Brethren." Aspire to the utmost God can give. You
   have not seen the goodly heights of Lebanon. As yet you are satisfied
   to stop at Jericho, by the river's brink, as if the conquest of one
   city had satisfied you. Gird on your harness and go forth to the
   fight--for the Lord is with you and the land is before you.

   Again, as soon as a man has believed in Jesus he is safe. If you
   believe that Jesus is the Christ you are born of God. And, being born
   of God you come under the Divine wing and the Lord shall preserve you
   from all evil. Many are satisfied that this is true but they do not,
   therefore, enter into peace as they should. That undisturbed serenity
   which springs from a sense of perfect safety in Christ Jesus is a
   glorious domain into which they do not enter. Our soul is made by faith
   to be as calm as the lake upon a summer's evening when the surface is
   unbroken by a ripple. Alas, we give way at times to doubt and fear and
   hardly know whether we are the Lord's people or not. This must not go
   on. We must have faith.

   But we may have, and we ought to have, the full assurance of faith. In
   full assurance lies the spring of perpetual serenity. The Lord can
   create in us habitual calm--in the midst of trouble He can give us joy.
   In the hour of struggle He can give us confidence. Oh rest in the Lord
   and wait patiently for Him--then shall your times be free from
   disturbance and your days as the days of Heaven upon the earth. It may
   be so if you have Divine Grace enough to claim the whole of the wide
   territory which the Lord has allotted you. Oh, for Divine Grace to
   cry--"Gilead is mine and Manasseh is mine! Over Edom will I cast out my
   shoe. Who will bring me into the strong city? Who will lead me into
   Edom?" God will bring us where unaided nature can never enter.

   Once more--when we come to Christ by faith we have communion with God.
   And this is a land that flows with milk and honey. Out of communion
   comes usefulness and there are certain ones who fancy that they can
   never be very useful. The Lord cannot do many mighty works through them
   because of their unbelief. They have to be fed with a spoon like
   invalid children. If they had but faith enough to receive power from on
   high by fuller communion with God they might become as David. There is
   no limit to the possibilities of usefulness in any man or woman when
   perfectly consecrated. Let us not imagine that we are doomed to small
   usefulness. That branch of the vine which up to now has yielded little
   or no fruit may yet be made by the heavenly Vinedresser to bring forth
   much fruit.

   By faith let the Divine sap of Grace be received. Let living Graces
   bring the living Christ into us and then we shall bring forth clusters
   large as those which the spies brought from Eshcol of old. Thus much,
   then, concerning our survey of the goodly heritage of salvation. The
   land of promise is exceedingly broad.

   Next, it is exceedingly desirable. The country into which Israel
   entered was of a very choice kind. Travelers in Palestine tell us that
   it is the world condensed. Within that narrow strip of territory you
   get plains and hills, frosts of winter and heats of summer. You find
   products both of semitropical and temperate zones. Palestine is the
   whole earth in miniature and all the advantages of all lands are
   gathered into it. It was, in Joshua's days, a place of extreme
   fertility-- "A land that flows with milk and honey." Nor was this
   all--while it was fertile on the surface it was rich underneath.

   It was a land "whose stones are iron and out of whose hills you may dig
   brass." The useful metals were near at hand as was every other
   convenience. Besides being fertile and wealthy it was prepared for
   immediate habitation. The tribes had not to build houses--they
   inhabited what others had built. They had not to plant vineyards but to
   eat the fruit of former labors. All things were waiting for the true
   heirs of the land. Beloved, when faith gets her heritage in Christ, she
   is brought into a wealthy place. When sin is driven out and we come to
   live in God's own land, then we find precious treasure. We dig and we
   are enriched. We have all things in Christ--yes, in Him we have all
   that our utmost want can require. As He has gone into Heaven to prepare
   a place for us--so on earth He has already prepared--in the Covenant of
   Grace, everything that is needed for the way home. Why do we not take
   possession of that which He has prepared for us?

   This heritage upon which we are now looking down from the summit of our
   faith is full of variety. In Palestine there were fertile plains and
   rich valleys between rising hills and towering mountains. It was a land
   of brooks and rivers, a land which the Lord God thought upon. It was,
   in those days, the joy of all the earth--it was as the garden of the
   Lord for exceeding excellency. Beloved, if you come to Christ you shall
   never need to go away from Him to find variety of joys. In

   His teaching you shall find Lebanons of sublime doctrine and Sharons of
   pleasant precept. Here are Hermons of experience, Tabors of communion,
   Jabboks of prevailing prayer and Cheriths of Divine Providence.

   The revelation of God is a blessed country, full of all manner of
   delights. They that live in Christ dwell in spiritual realms which for
   light and joy are as Heaven below. Above all things, it is "your land,
   O Immanuel!" That is the dearest name for the Canaan of Divine Grace.
   The saints' inheritance is the choicest form of life and peace and joy.
   We come to live with Christ, in Christ, for Christ, as Christ--we rise
   in Him to fellowship with the Father and with the Church of the
   First-born. One heart sympathizes with all the purposes of God and we
   joy in God Himself. I cannot properly describe all this but I live in
   the enjoyment of it. We live through our Lord and with our Lord. And
   this is life eternal. This is "the life which is life, indeed."

   Compared with it, all other life is death. Divine Grace is Glory in the
   bud--it will be full-blown by-and-by. This privilege is enjoyed none
   the less because of daily affliction, bodily pain, opposition and
   reproach--it may even be enjoyed all the more because of these--if they
   are borne for Jesus' sake. Our light afflictions are like the black
   shadows of a picture which throw up the bright lights and set them out
   more vividly. Christ Jesus becomes more and more precious to us when we
   have a straitness of earthly things. Yet this promised portion may be
   enjoyed if we have abundance of earthly things. God may multiply your
   possessions. And if he gives you more of Himself at the same time, they
   will not harm you.

   As you find all in God when you are poor, you shall find God in all
   when you are rich. Your life consists not in what you possess, nor in
   what you lack. You shall find in Christ a fullness, a soul-filling
   satisfaction. And this shall be a pledge of that something better which
   the Beloved has laid up in store for a still brighter day. What a word
   is that where we read of being "filled with all the fullness of God"! I
   do not think any man can exaggerate the possibilities that lie before
   Believers. If any man shall draw a line and say he can go no further, I
   must take leave to blot out that line--where God has set no bound we
   will not allow a stop, lest we be found guilty of limiting the Holy One
   of Israel--

   "All our capacious powers can wish In Christ does richly meet."

   All that is in Christ is meant for all Believers and therefore all
   Believers may have all that is in Christ who is All in All. We should
   not be content with pennies when He endows us with pounds. No child of
   God could ever yet say, "I have taken all that God can give me and
   still I am wanting more." God All-Sufficient is our heritage and He
   more than fills our deepest need, our highest aspiration. Thus have we
   surveyed our measureless inheritance.

   II. I beg you, in the next place TO GLANCE AT THE TITLE DEEDS OF OUR
   INHERITANCE. We shall not

   require a lawyer to assist us in our examination. But if there should
   be here a legal critic who would like to overhaul our papers, he is
   welcome to do so. I would not mind exhibiting our title before the
   whole bench of judges, for it has no flaw in it and will stand in the
   highest court--yes, even in the last judgment. I have pleaded this
   incomparable title in several courts already and it has been found to
   convey to me a valid gift. Here is the title deed, "The land which I do
   give to them, even to the children of Israel." It is repeated further
   on, "Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have
   I given unto you." This is an abstract of our title.

   First, notice its Covenant character. "I have given it to you." The
   Lord had given it to them from of old when He promised it to their
   father Abraham. When the deep sleep fell upon Abraham and he saw the
   vision of the burning lamp and the smoking furnace, then the Lord gave
   to him the wide domain and He mentions in detail all the tribes which
   then held the inner circle. You will find the full conveyance in the
   15th chapter of Genesis, beginning at the 18th verse--"Unto your seed
   have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river,
   the river Euphrates: the Kenites and the Kenizzites and the Kadmonites
   and the Hittites and the Perizzites and the Rephaims and the Amorites
   and the Canaanites and the Girgashites, and the Jebusites."

   Thus they came into possession by an ancient deed of gift which
   entailed it upon them from generation to generation. I am glad that our
   tenure of the kingdom of Divine Grace is ancient and well established
   and that it is not so much with us, directly, as with One infinitely
   greater, with whom it stands fast forever. Had the Covenant been made
   with me, individually, I should fear that my unworthiness would corrupt
   it. But it is made with One whose name forbids all fear of forfeiture.
   The Covenant of Grace is not made with you or with me individually
   because of our personal righteousness. But it is made with our Covenant
   Head and Representative whose life and death have sealed and ratified
   it.

   As the Lord could never run back from His promise to righteous Abraham,
   "In you and in your seed shall all the nations of the earth be
   blessed," so will He never return from His promise which He gave to us
   in our blessed Covenant Head. He has given us an inheritance by an act
   of Sovereign Grace and not because of any goodness in ourselves. His
   gift will never be recalled since the ground of it never alters. Each
   Believer may say, "He has in Christ Jesus made with me an Everlasting
   Covenant, ordered in all things, and sure: and therefore do I possess
   all spiritual blessings and shall possess them world without end."

   Observe, next, that this deed of gift is notable for its graciousness.
   What does it say? Which I do sell to them? Ah, no, it is no sale but a
   free gift. Does it say, "Which I do offer to them if they will earn
   it"? No, no--it is a present unconditional grant of sovereign love.
   Nothing is freer than a gift--"the gift of God is eternal life." He has
   given us all things for nothing, that we might behold the exceeding
   riches of His Grace. Note well the righteousness of our title-- "Which
   I do give to them." The Lord God has a right to give what He pleases,
   for "the earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof. The world and
   they that dwell therein."

   Of His own has He given unto us. In the great sacrifice of His dear Son
   He has satisfied all claims of justice and He acts justly when He
   blesses largely those for whom Jesus died. When a man has the free hold
   of his land, he has a right to give it away if so it pleases him--the
   Most High God is possessor of all things and when He says to His
   people, "I give you this," who shall dispute His right? The blessings
   of the Covenant of Grace are a royal gift--they come to us by Divine
   right. Who shall question Jehovah's will? He asks peremptorily, "Shall
   I not do as I will with My own?" That which Divine Grace has given us
   is ours by a surer title than anything else can ever be.

   Do not fail to see its sureness. He not only says, "I have given it,"
   and in some other places, "I will give it," but He declares "I do give
   it." God gives Christ and His Grace to us every day. The blessings of
   the Covenant are continually fresh gifts of His hand. By two immutable
   things wherein it is impossible for God to lie, He has given the
   Covenant possessions to us and if it were to be done again He would do
   it without hesitation. "The gifts and calling of God are without
   repentance." "I do give," says He, and thus He stands to His act and
   deed. O children of God, what do you think of your title deeds? You
   stand possessed of your kingdom by the gift of Him who has a right to
   give what He pleases. The kingdom is given to you because it is your
   Father's good pleasure to give it to you. Not only was it his good
   pleasure but it remains so.

   What great simpletons we are if we do not take possession of the brave
   country which is ceded to us! Does God give and do we decline to
   accept? Does God give and do we let the blessing lie untouched? O
   Sheep, you well deserve to starve if you will not feed on the pastures
   into which the Good Shepherd leads you. The highest privileges of the
   Covenant of Grace are not the monopoly of advanced saints--they are the
   common property of all Believers. A habit is growing up of saying,
   "Such-and-such a man is a saint." And then you set him up in a niche
   after the fashion of Rome. Are you not also a saint? You will never
   enter Heaven unless you are. If you are a saint, why not take a saint's
   inheritance?

   "Oh, but certain chosen ones are the Lord's favorites!" What? Has He
   not also chosen you and favored you? If not, it will go hard with you.
   Well then, being yourselves favored and chosen, why do you not take
   hold upon the glorious estate which belongs to the chosen family? No
   part of Scripture is of private interpretation--no bit of the promised
   country may be hedged in as the peculiar portion of a few. It all
   belongs to all the redeemed if they have but faith to make it their
   own. Do not hedge about the words spoken of the Lord and say, "Ah, He
   said that to Jacob." Does not the Lord tell us by His servant Hosea
   that, "He found him in Bethel and there he spoke with us"? (Hosea
   12:4).

   Although choice words were first of all spoken to this man or that, yet
   were they spoken for all believing people throughout all time. In the
   holy heritage all who have Christ have all that Christ brings with Him.
   "If children, then heirs"--not if grown-up children, not if comely
   children, nor if vigorous children but--"if children, then heirs." If
   you are not children, what will become of you? But "if children, then
   heirs." Come, Brethren, bestir yourselves and claim your heirship. Take
   possession of the whole territory of Divine Grace which the Lord has
   dedicated to your use!

   III. Now I have brought you to the third point--LET US MAKE A MOVE
   TOWARDS OUR POSSESSION. There is your land but Jordan rolls between.
   The first thing to do in this matter is to go over this Jordan. What do
   we mean? Out in the wilderness as a seeker, whose faith does not enter
   in, you are like a sheep which wanders from the fold and you find
   little rest. You are apt to be numbered with the Bedouin of the desert
   and not with the people of the Lord.

   Come out from the world and be separate. The land of gracious
   experience is meant for you to dwell in so that you may be recognized
   as the Lord's peculiar people, separated unto the Most High. Are you
   ready to come right out--to be settled in Immanuel's land--to break
   every link with "the world which lies in wickedness"? I have heard a
   great deal of talk about this separation but I have seen these very
   talkers hesitate when the decisive act of separation from false
   doctrine and unholy living has been expected of them. I pray you hear
   the Divine voice which cries, "Come out from among them and be you
   separate, says the Lord and touch not the unclean thing. And I will
   receive you and will be a Father unto you and you shall be My sons and
   daughters, says the Lord Almighty."

   It is required of you in order to your full entrance into the Grace
   state, that you take up a decided stand on the Lord's side. On the
   other side of Jordan is your portion and not in the Wilderness of Sin.
   Did I hear you say to yourself, "Suppose I am beaten?" Well, you cannot
   retreat from the land for there is no bridge over the Jordan. The river
   effectually bars all retreat. Are you willing to make a life decision?
   Will you draw the sword and burn the scabbard? It is death or glory
   with you. May you have Divine Grace to take the one irreversible step
   and be the Lord's--wholly and only--forever! You can never take the
   kingdom of Divine Grace until with deliberate resolve you quit the sand
   of the desert for the soil of Canaan.

   A balloon cannot go up into the sky until the last rope is cut. Oh, for
   that sharp, decisive step, by which, like Abraham, you come out from
   your father's house that you may be a sojourner with God in the land
   which His Grace will show you!

   Having decided for the Lord, you are next to take possession by an act
   of simple faith. The Lord says to you, "Every place that the sole of
   your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you." This is an
   easy way of taking land--to put your foot down upon it. I delight in
   that Word of the Lord to Jacob when he lay asleep, "The land whereon
   you lie, to you will I give it and to your seed." If you can, by faith,
   lie down on a promise and find rest in it, it is yours. Every place in
   the Grace country upon which the sole of your foot shall tread is
   yours. You will remember that the Red Indians agreed to sell to William
   Penn as much land as a man could walk round in a day.

   And I do not wonder that at the end of the day they complained that the
   white brother had made a big walk. I think I should have put my best
   leg foremost, if whatever I could put my foot upon would be mine--would
   not you? Why, then, do you not hurry up in spiritual matters? Do you
   value earthly things more than spiritual? Mark, then, that if you put
   your foot down upon a blessing and say, "This is mine," it is yours.
   What a very simple operation is the claim of faith! You do not have to
   pass through the Universities to learn that--it is grasping with the
   hand or appropriating with the foot. Many of the Lord's poor and
   unlearned ones obtain more from the promises than the more cultured
   ever

   do.

   The learned man lifts his head up, but the simple put their foot down.
   And this last is the way to the inheritance. By criticism you may put
   your foot in it, but by faith you put your foot on it. Strangers find
   fault, children claim. He that can trust his Lord may say, "In the name
   of the living God this blessing is mine." Come, then, Brothers and
   Sisters, if there is a need for more holiness, put your foot on it. If
   you need more happiness, put your foot on it. If more usefulness is
   what you want, put your foot on it. Lay your claim to all that is put
   within your reach in Scripture. This is the victory that overcomes the
   world and conquers Canaan--our faith.

   But the Canaanite was there! Yes, I know. But you see, he had no right
   there--the Lord had outlawed him. The land was Israel's by the Lord's
   gift and they had a right to fight for the possession of their own
   estates. They first put their foot on it and it was theirs. And then
   they said to the aboriginal Canaanites, "Clear out!" The old nations
   had forfeited their lease through breach of covenant and they were,
   therefore, to give up possession to the incoming tenants, whose right
   was indefeasible. God's people are in conflict with sin and they carry
   out this war vigorously when they have first seen their right to the
   blessings of Divine Grace as given them by the living God.

   You may not claim a piece of land unless you are sure that it is really
   yours. You are a thief if you do. But when you are sure that an estate
   is rightfully yours, then you commence your action and strive to win
   it. In spiritual things waive no spiritual right. Say to sin that now
   mars your peace, "Peace is mine, clear out!" Say to sin that stops your
   usefulness, "That usefulness is mine, I claim it--clear out! "Hivite,
   Jebusite, Girgashite--whatever sort of fellow you are--clear out of my
   heart and life for holiness is mine. God, the Sovereign Possessor of
   all things has given us our redeemed nature, to have and to hold for
   His Glory and we mean to have it!

   Each blessing is yours since you put the foot of faith upon it. But the
   actual enjoyment of it will need a struggle. War! War! War! With every
   Canaanite! Break their images and cut down their groves. They must be
   driven out at the sword's point. You have God's help with you in this
   holy battle. Your warfare will be accomplished, for the Lord Himself
   has said, "There shall not any man be able to stand before you all the
   days of your life: as I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will
   not fail you, nor forsake you."

   I long to encourage you, my Friends, to carry on this sacred crusade. I
   would have you grasp all which the hand of Love holds out to you. Need
   I urge you? If there is such need, you are in a sorry way. I do not
   believe that if I should read from this pulpit that my friend John
   Smith had been left five thousand acres of land, I should have to
   follow him home to persuade him to go and look at it. If my Sister
   yonder received a notification that a very nice little estate had been
   left her in the country, I do not believe I would need beg her to look
   after it. She would take an early train tomorrow morning to go and look
   over her farm.

   Brothers and Sisters, here is an inheritance so broad and wide and
   lasting--why do you not hasten to take it? There is holiness, do you
   not want it? There is serenity, do you not desire it? There is joy
   unspeakable and full of glory, do you not wish for it? There is
   usefulness, do you not hunger for it? This is the reason why some are
   so indifferent--they are ignorant--they do not even know that these
   choice blessings are to be had. All that any child of God was, you may
   be. All the joy and bliss and holiness ever enjoyed on earth, you may
   enjoy. The land is before you--go in and possess it. Do not be without
   the knowledge of Christ Jesus your Lord, for in Him is "joy unspeakable
   and full of glory."

   Some of our dear friends hear a doctrine which is Gospel and water. And
   they really do not know what the undiluted Gospel is. The Doctrines of
   Grace are the cream which many cautious preachers skim from the milk of
   the Word lest it should prove too rich for the stomachs of their
   hearers. A solid portion of Calvinistic doctrine is like a joint of
   nourishing meat and the people of this generation are such babes that
   they cannot digest it. "It is too rich for me!" cries one. I know it, I
   know it. But I pray the Lord to make you grow into men who can enjoy
   the fat things full of marrow and the wines on the lees well refined.

   There are glorious Truths of God of which beginners know nothing and
   through not knowing of them they miss much joy. Full many a child of
   God goes fretting and worrying when he ought to be singing and
   rejoicing and would be so if he knew what God has provided for him.
   Many do not possess the land because of unbelief--

   "Alas, it seems too good to be true" "I'm a poor sinner and nothing at
   all." Yes, that is quite true. But are you going to sing that one line
   forever? Is that your style of singing--one line forever? If our
   leader, just now, when we sang the hymn, had kept on with--"Behold,
   what wondrous grace!" "Behold, what wondrous grace!" it would have been
   very sweet--but I should have pulled his coat-tail and said, "Go on
   with the whole verse."

   So, in this case, you say--"I'm a poor sinner and nothing at all." Why
   not go on to sing--

   "But Jesus Christis my All nn All"? You are empty but Jesus fills you.
   You are in prison but Jesus sets you at liberty. Why not rejoice in
   that liberty? The Lord deliver us from unbelief for it is enough to
   shut any man out of the inheritance! And many are indolent, Oh, the
   laziness of some of God's people! I will not enlarge upon this matter,
   probably you know something about it yourselves.

   Lastly, the indecision of a great many is another cause why they do not
   possess the land. There is a hesitancy to go up and seize it. They mean
   to be better Christians before they die. I wonder how many Christians
   here would like to finish their lives today! Would your life, if now
   ended, be a life worth living? Suppose it were now threatened to be cut
   short. Would you not pray with anguish, "Lord, let me live a little
   longer, that I may distribute more of my money to Your cause, may bear
   better testimony to Your Truth and may set my house in order"? Set your
   house in order at once, my Brothers and Sisters. Give away a full
   portion of your substance immediately. Begin to work for Jesus at once.
   Why should you hesitate? You blame the sinner when he delays--surely
   the saint is to be blamed, too, when he also lingers.

   I have done when I have said to any soul here that is seeking the
   Lord--if you today come in and accept the blessings of the Covenant,
   you may have them and welcome. Do not say to yourself, "It will be a
   presumptuous thing for me to believe in Jesus." It will be a kind of
   presumption which has no sin in it. If a rich man, in one of the
   famine-stricken districts of China were to say to his servant, "Provide
   a great feast and set it out in the street." And he were then to put

   up a notice to hungry Chinamen, "Whosoever will may come," I do not
   think that if I were a hungry Chinaman, I should keep away from the
   dinner from fear of presumption. I should go gladly and ask no
   questions--for my stomach's sake-- if for nothing else.

   O poor, doubting Sinner, you had better do the same. Feed freely and
   fear not. When God's cry is, "Come and welcome," come at once and ask
   no questions. Or if a question does arise, let your hunger answer and
   tell you that you must. God gives His Grace freely--freely take it.
   Come, let us sing together that little ditty--

   "I do believe, I will believe,

   That Jesus died for me;

   And on the Cross He shed His blood

   From sin to set me free."

   This will be a blessed morning for you if you can not only sing it, but
   carry it out at once by a simple faith in our living, risen, reigning
   Savior. God bless you, for Christ's sake! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

Grace For Grace

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S-DAY MORNING, MAY 19, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "Now we have received, not the spirit of the world but the spirit which
   is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given to us of
   God." 1 Corinthians 2:12.

   THE course of our fallen race has been a succession of failures.
   Whenever there has been an apparent rise, it has been followed by a
   real fall. Into ever-increasing darkness the human mind seems resolved
   to plunge itself in its struggles after a false light. When men have
   been fools, they have danced in a delirium of sin. When they have been
   sober, they have given themselves up to a phantom wisdom of their own,
   which has revealed their folly more than ever. It is a sad story, the
   story of mankind! Read it in the light of God's Word and it will bring
   tears from your very heart.

   The only hope for man was that God should interpose. And He has
   interposed, as though He began a new creation, or worked a resurrection
   out of the kingdom of death. God has come into human history and here
   the bright lights begin. Where God is at work in Divine Grace,
   abounding sin is conquered, hope begins and good becomes perceptible.
   This better state is always markedly the effect of a break in the
   natural course of things--a supernatural product which would never have
   been seen in this poor world had it been let alone. See yonder
   avalanche rushing down the steep mountainside--such is humanity left to
   itself.

   Lo, God in Christ Jesus throws Himself in the way. He so interposes as
   to be crushed beneath the descending rocks. But, Beloved, He rises from
   the dreadful burial. He stops the avalanche in its terrible path. He
   hurls back the tremendous mass and changes the whole aspect of history.
   In this Divine interposition, of which the Bible gives us the best
   record-- to which, I trust, our experience has added a happy
   appendix--we behold and adore the almighty Grace of God. In the
   interposition of Omnipotent Grace we note that the Lord so works as to
   preserve His own glory. He takes care that no flesh shall glory in His
   Presence.

   He might have used the power of the great but He has not. He might have
   instructed man by man's own wisdom but He has not. He might have
   declared His Gospel with the excellency of human speech but He has not.
   He has taken for His tools not the armor of a king but the song of a
   shepherd. And He has placed His treasure of Truth, not in the golden
   vase of talent, but in the earthen vessels of lowly minds. He has not
   made men speak for Him under the spell of genius but as they have been
   moved by His Holy Spirit. The Lord of Hosts will save men but He will
   not give men a yard of space for boasting. He will grant them a
   salvation which shall humble them in the dust and lead them to know
   that He is God and beside Him there is none else.

   "The Lord of Hosts has purposed it, to stain the pride of all glory and
   to bring into contempt all the honorable of the earth." God's gracious
   interposition reveals His sovereignty, His wisdom, His power, His love,
   His Grace. But it reveals nothing in men which can admit a boastful
   thought.

   The Lord our God has worked in a way parallel with His central
   interposition which is seen at the Cross where Jesus unveiled Jehovah's
   way of revealing power in weakness. It is in such a connection that
   Paul says, "I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus
   Christ and Him crucified." He knew that there was nothing else to know.
   The plan of the Cross is to conquer death by death, to remove sin by
   the endurance of the penalty, to work mightily by suffering terribly
   and to glorify Himself by shame. The gibbet whereon Christ died was the
   abyss of reproach and the climax of suffering. But it was also the
   focus of God's interposing Grace. He there glorified Himself in
   connection, not with honor and power but with shame and death.

   The great self-sacrifice of God is the great victory of Divine Grace.
   Beloved, it is most sweet to think that all the ways of God to men are
   in harmony with this way of the Cross and that the Cross is the pattern
   of the Lord's constant method of accomplishing His designs of Grace
   rather by weakness than by strength, by suffering rather than by the

   splendor of His majesty. Let me also add that this way which God has
   taken, by which He saves men and glorifies Himself, is entirely
   suitable to the condition of those whom He saves. If salvation had been
   by human excellence I could never have been saved. If the plan of
   salvation had required that in which a man might rightly glory, how
   could it have come to sinners without strength or goodness?

   Such a Gospel would have been no Gospel to us, for it would have been
   far out of our reach. God's plans are workable plans, suitable to the
   weakness of our fallen race. In Christ He comes to the wounded man
   where he is and does not ask him, in his fainting condition, to come a
   certain part of the way. Grace does not begin half-way down the
   alphabet, but it is the Alpha of our hope.

   It is my delightful task, though in much weakness, to set forth the
   exceeding freeness of the Grace of God and thus to set before you an
   open door--that you who have never entered may boldly do so. And that
   you who have already entered may sit within and sing to the praise of
   the glory of His Grace wherein He has made you "accepted in the
   Beloved." My text speaks of the gifts of God freely given to us and of
   the way by which we may receive them and come to know their excellence
   and value--in all these three things it shows us that everything is of
   Divine Grace--it is given of Grace, it is received through Grace, it is
   understood by Grace. "Grace reigns," and Grace alone.

   This morning I shall speak, first, of the things which are freely given
   to us by God. Secondly, of the power to receive them, which is also
   given, since it is spoken of as "received." And, thirdly, of the
   knowledge of them, which is also given through the Spirit. When we have
   set forth these three things, we shall have ranged through a wide
   domain of Sovereign Grace.

   I. First, then, THE THINGS OF GOD ARE FREELY GIVEN. All the blessings
   of salvation are a gift. All the inheritance of the Covenant is a gift.
   All that which comes by our Lord Jesus to save and sanctify men is a
   gift. A gift is not a return for purchase money. We are not asked, in
   any sense, to bring a price to God in order to purchase pardon,
   justification, or eternal life. Where the notion of purchase is for an
   instant hinted at, it is only to show more plainly how free is the
   blessing--"Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price."
   God freely gives His Grace, expecting nothing in return but that we do
   as freely receive as He does freely bestow.

   And even that free reception is a part of the gift which He bestows
   upon us. Be not feeling in your purse--money is useless as to
   purchasing salvation. Be not searching in your character, or in your
   resolutions to find some little recommendation--neither the coins of
   the merchant nor of the self-righteous are good here. The Free Grace of
   God would be insulted by being put up for auction, or set forth for
   sale. "The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."

   It is a gift and not a prize. There are heavenly prizes to be run for,
   to be fought for and to be obtained by Divine help. There is a
   recompense of reward to which we are to look and a crown for which we
   are to strive--but the Divine Grace that forgives sin and works faith
   is no prize for exertion but rather a gift for those without strength.
   "It is not of him that wills, nor of him that runs but of God that
   shows mercy." Jehovah will have mercy on whom He will have mercy and He
   will have compassion on whom He will have compassion, according to the
   good pleasure of His own will. Salvation is not granted to men as the
   result of anything they are, or do, or resolve to be--it is the
   undeserved gift of Heaven. If it were of works, it would not be of
   Divine Grace. But it is offaith--that it might be of Divine Grace
   alone.

   The blessings of salvation are freely given us of God, therefore they
   are not a loan, handed to us for a time and to be one day recalled. Our
   heavenly heritage is not held on lease, upon terms of annual
   payment--it is an unencumbered freehold to every man that has by faith
   put his foot upon it. To give a thing and take a thing is for little
   children in their play. And even among them it is the subject of
   ridicule. But the gifts and calling of God are without repentance on
   His part. When He has given it, the deed is done outright and can never
   be reversed. O Believer, if your sin is blotted out, it can never be
   written in again! God has declared that He has forgiven our
   transgressions. And then He adds, "Their sins and their iniquities will
   I remember no more."

   There is no playing fast and loose in connection with the everlasting
   love of God and its glorious acts. If you have God, you have Him by an
   eternal holding of which none can deprive you. "This God is our God
   forever and ever." The better part which Jesus gives to His beloved
   shall not be taken away from us. The things of God are all of them free
   gifts, with no legal condition appended to them which would make their
   tenure one of payment rather than of absolute gift.

   We may not say that the blessings of salvation, such as pardon,
   justification and eternal life are gifts with an "if in the core of
   them, rendering them uncertain. No, the gift of God is not temporary
   life but, "eternal life."

   We will dwell for a minute upon the fact that saving blessings are the
   gifts of God. Some despise the work of salvation and the blessings
   which accompany it. But surely, they know not what they despise. Every
   part of salvation, from its Alpha to its Omega, is to the highest
   degree precious--for it is of God. It is the gift of the heavenly King,
   the gift of the Almighty Sovereign whose hand makes the gift priceless.
   If the Lord Himself has given you this or that blessing, you should
   prize the gift as coming from such a hand! That which your father gave
   you, preserve. For there is a sanctity in the gift of love. That which
   your choice friend has given you, wear it, and for his sake value it as
   the token of friendship. But that which your God has given you, prize
   above all things else--His touch has perfumed it with unutterable
   fragrance.

   Value every part of the work of Divine Grace because it came from God
   and leads to God. God's gifts are always worthy of the Giver. God gives
   not trinkets and counterfeits--His gifts are solid gold and lasting
   treasure. The gifts of Divine Grace have a quality of divinity about
   them--they are all God-like. The Lord gives upon a God-like style. His
   Grace is like the rest of His Nature. How are you blest if you are
   divinely pardoned and divinely justified! "It is God that justifies."
   Who is he that condemns?" Jehovah is your strength and your song. He
   also has become your salvation.

   I like to think of every blessing of Divine Grace that I have received
   as coming from God. Because each mercy then becomes prophetic of more.
   God is unchangeable, and therefore what He has given He will give
   again. "Still there's more to follow," is a popular way of putting a
   great truth. The stream which has begun to flow will never cease
   flowing. The more the Lord gives, the more we may expect. Every
   blessing is not only in itself a mercy but it is a note for more
   mercies. When we get the most of God's mercy that we can hold, we are,
   by its greatness, enlarged to receive still more. Realization begets
   expectation and expectation increases realization. Each mercy, as it
   comes, makes room for another larger than itself, even as the narrow
   end of the wedge opens the way for its wider portion.

   Every mercy bears a thousand mercies in its heart. John Bunyan said
   that God's flowers bloom double--not only do they bloom double but they
   bloom sevenfold. And out of every one of those flowers there comes a
   seed which will yield seventy times seven. Therefore be encouraged. The
   least of the things which are freely given to us by God draws behind it
   an endless chain of more than golden links of love. The seed of
   salvation, glory, and eternal life, is small as a grain of mustard
   seed. But he that has it has received what neither earth nor Heaven can
   fully contain. What a mercy is a single mercy! I cannot talk to you
   about the gifts of God. You must think over the subject. That which
   comes from God's own hand should be much on our mind.

   I am going to dwell for a minute or two upon that word "freely." "The
   things that are freely given to us of God." Hearken, you that have
   never found Divine Grace yet. Sing while you listen, you that have
   found it and are now enjoying it. "Freely given." "Well," you say, "the
   word 'given' is enough to express the meaning, is it not?" Yes, it
   would be enough, if men were willing to understand. But the additional
   word "freely" is meant to make the meaning doubly plain. When we say
   "Grace," there is no need to say Free Grace, is there? Yet there are
   some people who will be conveniently deaf, if they can. We wish to
   speak so that they not only can understand us but cannot misunderstand,
   even if they try. The text is very expressive--"Freely given to us of
   God."

   How is salvation "freely given"? It comes from God without compulsion.
   If a man is stopped on the road with, "Your money or your life," he
   gives his money. But it is not freely given. Now none can force mercy
   from God, blessed be His name--there is no need to think of such a
   thing. God gives freely, that is, even without persuasion. God was
   never persuaded to be gracious. He is ready to pardon and His Grace
   persuades us to accept mercy. Our praying does not turn the heart of
   God to love us but proves that we are turning to love Him. It is
   because He is gracious that He sets us praying. You have not, poor
   Sinner, to convert an unwilling God to be willing to forgive--the
   conversion is in your will, not in His will--"He delights in mercy."

   He persuades Japheth to dwell in the tents of Shem, but Japheth does
   not need to persuade Jehovah to receive him. The fountain of Divine
   Love pours forth its streams of grace at all seasons without pressure.
   There is no need to tread the grapes of mercy to force forth their
   cheering juice. The paths of the Lord drop fatness, distilling
   spontaneously as the dew and the rain.

   Yes, the Grace of God is so free in its gifts that they come without
   suggestion. A man may be generous of heart and yet he may need a hint
   to put it into his mind to relieve the needy. Mention a charity to him
   and inform him that it is in need and his guineas are forthcoming. But
   he needs a prompter. No one has prompted the Grace of God. No one ever
   suggested any deed of bounty to God--out of His own heart the thought
   has come of itself. The gifts of His Grace were in His eternal purpose
   from of old and there of His own good pleasure. He freely instructs us
   how to pray for those gifts which He has of old purposed to bestow. Our
   prayer does not instruct the Lord. It only shows that He has, in a
   measure, instructed us.

   He gives freely in the sense of absolute spontaneity. He also gives
   without grudging. We have known men to say, "Well, I suppose I must
   give something. But these claims come terribly often. My purse is
   always being drawn upon. But I suppose I cannot get out of it without a
   subscription." He gives as if he were parting with his blood. His
   fingers tremble and linger long over the shilling, which has to be
   extracted as forcibly as if it were a tooth. One wonders that the
   Queen's image is left upon it when it has been held with such pressure.

   But the Lord gives out of the greatness of His heart, without so much
   as a trace of unwillingness. Even when the gift was His own Son, He
   freely delivered Him up. There is never a grudge in the Lord's mind
   towards those who draw upon Him the most largely or the most
   frequently. "He upbraids not." Many who give, take the opportunity to
   upbraid, saying, "I do not think you ought to have been in this plight.
   You must have been wasteful and not so industrious as you ought to have
   been or you would not be drawing upon me." And so on, until they have
   taken full compensation for their shilling out of the poor creature who
   feels bound to endure the chastisement.

   God gives liberally and adds no sorrow to those who humbly seek wisdom
   at His hands. Oh, the splendor of the generosity of God! He is ready to
   save--waiting to deliver. It delights Him to bestow His goodness. The
   cost was paid long ago on Calvary's Cross and that is over. Since the
   great Sacrifice has been presented, all the blessings of Divine Grace
   are freely given to us by God with a willingness which shows that His
   heart goes with them.

   Once more--you know that we use the word "freely" in the sense of
   bountifully. We say of such-and-such a person, "His banquet was spread
   with a free hand," or we say, "He helps his poor neighbors very
   freely." That is to say, his gifts are without stint. The benefits
   bestowed by some are like the provisions of a workhouse, weighed out by
   ounces. But Free Grace does not limit itself by calculations, nor does
   it bind the applicant by estimates. As a free-handed housekeeper makes
   liberal provision, so does the Lord provide more than need demands. The
   mere crumbs from the Lord's Table would suffice to feed multitudes. The
   Lord gives not His Spirit by narrow measure--we are not straitened in
   Him. Come along with you, you needy saint or sinner--the more you can
   take in, the better pleased will the Lord be with you. And if, sitting
   at His table, you feel as if you could eat all that is upon it,
   hesitate not to make the trial, for you shall be heartily welcome.

   Your capacity will fail long before the provision. The Lord desires you
   to open your mouth wide and He will fill it--it is easier for Him to
   give than for you to open your mouth. He encourages and requests you to
   bring large petitions with you when you come before His Mercy Seat.
   Come and receive "the things that are freely given to us of God."

   I do not know whether I have made my intent quite so plain as I wanted
   to do. But this I would set before you--God gives His Grace freely in
   the most emphatic sense. His Sovereign Grace is of Himself--"It is not
   of him that wills, nor of him that runs but of God that shows mercy."
   He is not compelled to be gracious by the force of our importunity but
   He often gives to those who have never asked of Him, as it is
   written--"I am found of those who sought Me not." He calls by His
   Divine power those who before were unwilling to come to Him. A good
   example is Saul of Tarsus who received light and Divine Grace when he
   was in the act of persecuting the saints!

   God gives His Grace as freely as the sun, which, as soon as it rises
   from its chambers in the east "sows the earth with orient pearl." See
   how freely it visits the tiny flower which holds up its cup to have it
   filled with sunshine! How it peers into the glade of the forest, where,
   by the brook, the fern loves the shade. Whether the lark flies up to
   meet it or the mole burrows in the earth to escape its light, the sun
   shines all the same. It fills the heavens and floods the earth with the
   brilliance which is its nature to diffuse. The Lord comes by promise to
   those who seek Him. But He comes also in Sovereign Grace to those who
   seek Him not.

   He is coming this morning to some of you who look not for Him. For He
   is like the dew which waits not for man, neither tarries for the sons
   of man. You came from the country and you said that you would go and
   hear Spurgeon this

   morning. But you did not know that the Lord was about to save you. Give
   yourself up to the writ of Divine Grace of which I am the officer this
   morning. Surrender your hearts to almighty love. And when you do so,
   you will perceive many of "the things that are freely given to us of
   God."

   Now, let us talk about what these things are. They are altogether
   immeasurable, these "things that are freely given to us of God." Shall
   I tell you what they are in one word? GOD. God gives us God. God the
   Father gives Himself to the unworthy sons of men. He becomes their
   Father and their Friend. He gives them His wisdom, His power, His love,
   His immutability. He gives Himself to men to be their possession
   forever. In adoption He gives His fatherhood and grants them sonship,
   so that they may cry, "Our Father, which are in Heaven." He gives them
   pardon and acceptance. He grants them answers to their prayers in ten
   thousand ways. He gives them His Providence to guide and lead them. He
   gives them all they need for this life, and then He gives them an
   inheritance with Himself forever in the world to come. He who gave us
   Jesus, with Him also freely gives us all things.

   Beloved, the Son of God also gives Himself. "He loved me and gave
   Himself for me." "He His own Self bore our sins in His own body on the
   tree." Jesus gives His people His blood to wash out their sins, His
   righteousness to cover them with beauty, His intercession to plead
   their cause and His enthronement to secure their victory. He gives His
   loving care to prepare a place for them in the sky. He gives His
   resurrection to bring them up from the grave and His union with them to
   preserve them through the perils of life. We are married to Him and so
   He freely gives His heart's love to us. Even His crown, His Throne and
   His Heaven He freely gives to His chosen. Oh, what a gift of Grace this
   is that is freely given to us of God! "God so loved the world, that He
   gave His only-begotten Son." He is God's unspeakable Gift. Nobody can
   speak it, for nobody can compass it within the range of thought.

   The Holy Spirit also freely gives Himself to us. He is the "free
   Spirit," and never freer than when He gives Himself to enlighten,
   quicken, convert, comfort and sanctify His people. He leads us to
   repentance and to faith. He conducts us to knowledge and holiness. He
   preserves and perfectly conforms us to the image of Christ. Thus see a
   summary of the things which are freely given to us of God, the Father,
   the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

   All things are yours, the free gifts of God. Now if Paul, when he was
   writing as an Apostle, spoke of these things not as what he had won or
   deserved but as FREE GIFTS to him, you and I, poor sinners that we are,
   may well be glad to accept these priceless gifts on the same terms. We
   are happy to think that these gifts are laid at our door--with nothing
   to pay and nothing to do but simply accept them as the "things that are
   freely given to us of God." I have used simple language but my theme is
   sublime. The Lord bless it!

   II. Our second head is--THE POWER TO RECEIVE THESE GIFTS IS ALSO FREELY
   GIVEN. Some of you are saying, "I see very clearly that salvation is
   the gift of God but how can I get it? How can I apprehend these
   blessings and make them my own?" Dear Friend, the text says, "We have
   received the spirit which is of God." The power with which we receive
   these gifts, which God freely gives, is the power of the Holy Spirit.
   And this, also, we do not purchase or deserve but we freely receive it.

   The power to grasp Christ does not lie in our nature--in its own
   strength or goodness. Our state is that of death, and death cannot
   grasp life. God the Holy Spirit must breathe life into us before we can
   rise from the grave of our natural depravity and lay hold upon Christ,
   who is our Life. It is not in unrenewed human nature even to see the
   kingdom of God, much less to enter it. "The natural man receives not
   the things of the Spirit of God." The power to receive the things of
   God lies not in high gifts or attainments. We may not think that a
   Homer, or a Socrates, or a Plato would be able to obtain the things of
   God more readily than common men. Genius is no help towards Divine
   Grace.

   Indeed, great talent and great learning often miss the way where
   lowliness travels with ease. Do not sit down and say, "I am a poor
   stupid and cannot be taught of God." Or, "I am a humble countryman, or
   a poor woman keeping house for others. I cannot know these precious
   things." It is not so. Read the words of Paul in the first chapter of
   this Epistle--"You see your calling, Brethren, how that not many wise
   men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called." The
   power to receive the blessings of God does not lie in talent at all but
   it lies in the Spirit of God.

   You think that if you had a long hand you could reach the Grace of God?
   No--but if you have a withered hand, that Divine Grace can reach you.
   You suppose that if you had a clear eye you could see the Lord?
   Yes--but if you have no eye but a blind one, the Lord can open it and
   give you sight. Grace is not tied to the rare gifts of genius, nor to
   the precious acquirements of experience, nor to the high attainments of
   learning. No young child may say, "I cannot receive the

   things of God, for I am too young." Out of the mouth of babes and
   children He has perfected praise. Persons who have had a long and
   instructive experience are often as far from Divine Grace as if they
   had never suffered anything. Persons who have taken degrees at the
   university may be still as ignorant as Hottentots concerning heavenly
   things.

   The power to receive is still of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit
   does not find good in us but brings it to us. "Well," says one, "but
   surely we must pass through a period of great anguish and distress
   before we can receive the things of God." Very often men do suffer
   greatly from a sense of guilt and the fear of punishment before they
   lay hold on Christ. But they do not lay hold on Christ by this
   experience. The wounded man is not restored by his pains, the famishing
   man is not fed by his hunger. The power to lay hold on Christ is a
   spiritual power, which must be given from above. It lies not concealed
   within, but is implanted by the Lord from without. No process of
   discipline, or education, or evolution can enable a man to lay hold on
   the things of God. He must be born again from above and his heart must
   be opened to receive the Grace of God. A man can receive nothing unless
   it is given him to receive it and that gift is the Holy Spirit.

   The receptive power is not bestowed by human excitement, nor by the
   oratorical power of the preacher to whom the man listens. Possibly some
   have thought, "If I could hear So-and-So preach, I should then be able
   to believe." Put that thought away--you will believe in Jesus Christ
   when the Holy Spirit leads you to see how worthy your Savior is of your
   confidence. You will never believe in Him if you are looking to
   yourself for the power to believe, rather than to the Truth itself and
   to that Spirit who can make the Truth clear to you and work in you to
   will and to do of God's good pleasure.

   Come, then, dear Hearts, you that feel so dull and dead and so void of
   strength that you cannot do anything-- remember right confidently that
   the Holy Spirit can enable you to receive all the gifts of God. May He
   at this time bless the Truth to you and you will feel the soft, sweet
   influence of repentance melting you to tears on account of sin--you
   will feel a something telling you that in Christ there is just what you
   want and you will feel a resolve forming in your heart, "I will have it
   if it may be had." Then you will come to a solemn decision for the
   present hour, "I will have it now. I will even now rest in Jesus, who
   died for the ungodly. Once and for all I will turn my eyes to the Cross
   and look to Him that did hang upon it and trust my soul's weight on
   Him."

   That is how the work is done. You may not know at the time that the
   moving power is the Spirit of God but no one else works us to this
   thing but the Holy Spirit. We do not see the Spirit nor hear His voice,
   nor recognize His Person at the time. But being emptied of self, by the
   Grace of God, and led to accept the things that are freely given to us
   of God, we are spiritually enriched and then we perceive that it was
   all of Divine Grace by the free gift of the Spirit of God.

   One thing I should like to say before leaving this point--remember
   there are two spirits--there is the Spirit of God and the spirit of the
   world. This last is everywhere active and Believers feel it to be their
   foe--it works evil and only evil. Only the Spirit of God can save
   you--the spirit of the world will ruin all who yield to it. I warn you
   against the spirit of this age--the spirit of the world. Do not lay
   yourselves under the influence of the spirit of the world. For even if
   you are truly saved, its pestilential influence will injure you.

   Are you seeking salvation? Keep clear of the spirit of the world as
   much as possible. And you will have no easy task, for its contagion
   will be found in men professing religion but cunningly undermining it.
   And it is prevalent in books which pretend to reverence our Lord while
   they betray Him. The religious world is more dangerous, by far, than
   the sensual world. It wears the sheepskin but it has all the fierceness
   of the wolf. You cannot expect the Spirit of God to bless you if you
   yield to the spirit of the world. Do not meddle with that which is
   doubtful. There are works of fiction nowadays in abundance whose
   tendency is polluting--the world is drenched with them. Avoid them as
   you would a bath of acid.

   If you would find eternal life, go where the Spirit of God
   works--search the Scriptures and hear the Truth of God through which
   the Spirit of God usually operates. And associate with those in whom
   the Spirit of God dwells. Hear that preaching which comes from God--for
   that alone will lead you to Him. You can soon tell what sort the
   preaching is--I do not think you need stay ten minutes before you will
   find out whether it is according to the spirit of the world, or is in
   the power of the Spirit of God. Those two opposite spirits are waging a
   fierce battle at this hour. And I grieve to say it-- many who profess
   godliness are tainted with the spirit of the world. Take heed that you
   follow the right Spirit, for in so doing you will find the things which
   are freely given us of God and with them glory and immortality and
   eternal life.

   Now, I have done what I wanted to do, if I have made you feel how free
   salvation is. I would have you know that not only are the gifts of
   Divine Grace most free, but that the very hand with which we take the
   gift is nerved to do so by

   God's Grace. Undeserved bounty bestows not only the money but the purse
   in which we carry it home. God gives not only the blessing to the heart
   but the heart to receive the blessing. Hallelujah!

   III. My last head is this--THE KNOWLEDGE OF THESE GIFTS IS FREELY
   GIVEN.

   This is so in the lowest and most ordinary sense, since a knowledge of
   the things freely given of God is communicated to our minds by the
   Revelation contained in the inspired Scriptures. These Sacred Writings
   are open to all and all are invited to search them. Read the Word of
   God and you will know to the letter what are the free gifts of God to
   men. But this form of knowledge suffices not--we cannot savingly know
   the things of God by mere reading--neither can they be taught to us by
   a book. The head learns by nature but the heart must learn by Divine
   Grace. The way to know the things of God is for that which is written
   in the Word of God to be also written upon the heart by the same Spirit
   who wrote the book.

   I heard about repentance but I never knew repentance until I repented.
   I heard of faith, but I never knew faith until I believed. I heard of
   pardon but I never knew pardon until I was washed in the blood of the
   Lamb. I read about justification by faith but I was never justified
   till, by faith, I received the Lord Jesus to be my Righteousness.
   Appropriation by faith gives an apprehension by the
   understanding--experimental enjoyment creates true acquaintance.
   Beloved, go to the Holy Spirit and ask Him to enable you to take the
   things which God freely gives and when you possess them, you will
   "know" them.

   If you still desire to know more of the infinite preciousness of the
   gifts of God, it is a wise ambition. And it will be fully and freely
   satisfied by the Holy Spirit. Resort to Him, for He is the great
   Teacher. There is no instructor like He is. His knowledge surpasses all
   others, for He knows the mind of God. No man can communicate to you
   what he does not know and no man knows the mind of God but the Spirit
   of God. The Holy Spirit knows the infinite and the unsearchable. And
   therefore He is able to teach you what you cannot learn elsewhere. The
   mind and meaning of God in every gift of Grace the Spirit can unfold to
   you. There is no being taught effectually except you are taught by the
   Spirit of God. All other teaching is superficial and therefore
   temporary and vain. But the Holy Spirit speaks to the soul and writes
   the lines of Truth on the fleshy tablets of the heart, so that they can
   never be erased. If you would know the things freely given us of God,
   the Holy Spirit must lead you into the inner secret of the sacred
   treasure house.

   By the same Divine aid you must be enabled to feed upon these choice
   things and have a full enjoyment of them. The things of God, as I have
   said before, are best known by a personal enjoyment of them. Who can
   know meat and drink except by living upon them? When you can feed upon
   a Scripture, when you can suck out the marrow of a doctrine, when you
   can extract the juice from a Divine Promise, when you are made fat and
   flourishing by inspired teaching--then has the Lord made you freely to
   know the blessings of His Covenant. Oh, that the Holy Spirit may be to
   you as the seven-branched lamp gladdening your eyes with His light and
   as the loaves of the show bread nourishing your heart! And then may He
   lead you within the veil and make you to see the Mercy Seat and all the
   glory of the Lord your God!

   Oh, to realize that blessing, "All your children shall be taught of the
   Lord"! May we be taught by actual enjoyment and heavenly communion so
   that we may come into holy familiarity with the choice things that are
   freely given to us of God. I do not know that I want to hear any
   lecture on bread. I know all that I want to know about that form of
   food, because I eat it every day. Even so, we need little talk about
   Covenant blessings, because they are the continual portion of our
   souls--our strength in every stage of our heavenward pilgrimage and our
   song in anticipation of the eternal rest.

   My dear Brothers and Sisters, go to this university of Heaven. The
   terms are "nothing to pay," though the education is beyond all other.
   Blessed school, wherein sinners are made saints and saints are made to
   grow into the likeness of Jesus! Everything is as free in this
   university as in the first school of humble faith where the sinner
   learns repentance and ventures to trust His Savior. Eternal life is the
   gift of God in its first breathing. And it is still the gift of God in
   its highest development. When you stand before the Throne of the Most
   High, you will stand there through Divine Grace alone. All along, from
   sin's pit to Heaven's gate, without a break the whole road is paved
   with Divine Grace.

   We do not begin with grace and then go on to trust in works--we do not
   at first receive freely and then afterwards have to live upon a
   hard-earned wage. No! Still, still, still He works in us to will and to
   do and we lovingly work under His Divine guidance as we are
   strengthened by His Divine power. Grace lays the foundation and--

   "Grace all the work shall crown, Through everlasting days;

   It lays in Hea ven the topmost stone, And well deserves the praise."

   What of all this? Listen to me for a very few minutes more. I speak to
   those of you who know the things that are freely given to you by God.
   Learn from these things to be humble. If you know anything--you have
   been taught it. If you possess anything--it has been given to you. You
   are a charity child. The clothes on your back are furnished by the
   Lord's favor. The bread in your mouth is the provision of His love. A
   proud saint is a contradiction in terms. "What have you which you have
   not received?"

   In the next place, be generous. I cannot believe in a stingy saint.
   Here again there is a contradiction in terms. All things are freely
   given you--are you going to hoard them? "Freely you have received,
   freely give." He who turns over the coin in his pocket to make it as
   small as ever he can before he gives it is a poor creature. He gets the
   smallest change on Saturday that he may give it on Sunday. He is a
   saint, is he? Let those believe in his saintship who can. The child of
   God should be free-hearted. He should give himself away because Jesus
   gave Himself for us. You should be of a large heart, for you serve a
   large-hearted Christ who has given you all things freely to enjoy.

   Next, be ready to impart what you know. If the Spirit of God has made
   you to know the things freely given of God, try to tell somebody else.
   Don't act as if you had a patent, or a monopoly and wanted Divine Grace
   to be a secret. You have not the gift of God yourself if you have no
   desire that others should have it. The first instinct of a converted
   man is to try to convert others. If you have no wish to bring others to
   Heaven, you are not going there yourself.

   Try and impart this knowledge in the way in which you received it. You
   received it by the Holy Spirit. Then go and teach it--not in the words
   which man's wisdom teaches--but in the power of the Spirit of God. Last
   night I felt so sickly that I thought I should not be able to preach
   today. But I cheered myself with this reflection--if you cannot give
   wealth of illustration, if you can display no beauty of style, never
   mind--you can tell out the soul-saving Truth of God in plain words and
   God will own it. Holy Spirit, bless my feeble words this morning! You
   can do it and You shall have all the praise.

   Go to your Sunday school class this afternoon, dear Friends, and say,
   "Lord, put words into my mouth and teach me, that I may teach others.
   Enable me to labor, not in the power of my knowledge, eloquence, or
   experience but under the guidance of Your Spirit." Better five words in
   the Spirit than a long oration in your own power.

   Lastly, if the Lord has given us all these things freely, let us praise
   Him. I did not mind hearing our Brother over there cry out "Amen." He
   may do it again, if he likes. Sometimes it is well to let the living
   water of praise to God burst the pipes and flood the streets. What a
   dumb set we are! The Lord has to pull hard at the rope before our bell
   speaks at all. Let us praise Him for what He has done for us and make
   this vow this morning--

   "I will praise Him in life, I willpraise Him in death, And praise Him
   as long as he lends me breath; And say, when the death-claw lies cold
   on my brow, 'If ever I loved you, my Jesus, 'tis now.'" The Lord
   Himself bless you all, according to the riches of His Grace. Amen.

   Portions Of Scripture Read Before Sermon--1 Corinthians 1:18-31; 2
     __________________________________________________________________

The Form of Godliness Without the Power

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S DAY MORNING, JUNE 2, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "Having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof: from such
   turn away." 2 Timothy 3:5.

   PAUL warns us of certain characters which will appear in the last
   times. It is a very terrible list. The like have appeared in other days
   but we are led by his warning to apprehend that they will appear in
   greater numbers in the last days than in any previous age. "Lovers of
   their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient
   to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection,
   trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those
   that are good, traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more
   than lovers of God."

   These will swarm like flies in the decay of the year and will make the
   times exceeding perilous. We are nearing that period at this very time.
   That these people would, some of them, be within the Church is the most
   painful part of it. But they will be so, for they are comprehended in
   this last clause of the black catalog, which we have taken for our
   text-- "Having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof."

   Paul does not paint the future with rose-colored glasses--he is no
   smooth-tongued Prophet of a golden age into which this dull earth may
   be imagined to be glowing. There are sanguine Brothers and Sisters who
   are looking forward to everything growing better and better and better,
   until, at last, this present age ripens into a millennium. They will
   not be able to sustain their hopes, for Scripture gives them no solid
   basis to rest upon. We who believe that there will be no millennial
   reign without the King and who expect no rule of righteousness except
   from the appearing of the righteous Lord, are nearer the mark.

   Apart from the second Advent of our Lord, the world is more likely to
   sink into a pandemonium than to rise into a millennium. A Divine
   interposition seems to me the hope set before us in Scripture and,
   indeed, to be the only hope adequate to the occasion. We look to the
   darkening down of things. The state of mankind, however improved
   politically, may yet grow worse and worse spiritually. Certainly, we
   are assured in verse 13 that "evil men and seducers shall wax worse and
   worse, deceiving and being deceived." There will spring up in the
   Christian Church and round about it, a body of faithless men who
   profess to have faith--ungodly men who will unite with the saints--men
   having the form of godliness but denying the power.

   We may call these hard times, if we will, but we have hardly yet come
   to the border of those truly harder times when it will go hard with the
   Church and she shall need, even more than today, to cry mightily unto
   the Lord to keep her alive. With this cloud upon our spirit, we come to
   the text itself. Let us consider it carefully and may the Holy Spirit
   help us!

   True religion is a spiritual thing but it necessarily embodies itself
   in a form. Man is a spiritual creature but the human spirit needs a
   body in which to enshrine itself. And thus, by this need, we become
   allied to materialism. And if not "half dust, half Deity," as one has
   said, we are certainly both matter and soul. In each of us there is the
   form or body and the soul or power. It is so with religion--it is
   essentially a spiritual thing but it requires a form in which to embody
   and manifest itself.

   Christian people fall into a certain outward method of procedure, a
   peculiar outward mode of uttering their faith, which becomes to true
   godliness what the body is to the soul. The form is useful, the form is
   necessary, the form ought to be vitalized--just as the body is useful
   and is necessary and is vitalized by the soul. If you get both the
   form, as modeled in the Word of God and the power, as bestowed by the
   Spirit of God, you do well and are living Christians. If you get the
   power alone, without the ordained form, you somewhat maim yourself. But
   if you get the form without the power, then, you dwell in spiritual
   death.

   The body without the spirit is dead. And what follows upon death with
   flesh? Why, corruption--corruption so horrible that even love itself
   has to cry, "Bury my dead out of my sight." So that if there is in any
   the body of religion with-

   out the life of religion, it leads to decay and thus to corruption--and
   that has a tendency to decompose the character. The raw material of a
   devil is an angel bereft of holiness. You cannot make a Judas except
   out of an Apostle. The eminently good in outward form, when without
   inward life, decays into the foulest thing under Heaven. You cannot
   wonder that these are called "perilous times," in which such characters
   abound.

   One Judas is an awful weight for this poor globe to bear but a tribe of
   them must be a peril, indeed. Yet, if not of the very worst order,
   those are enough to be dreaded who have the shadow of religion without
   its substance. Of such I have to speak at this time--from such may God
   give you Divine Grace to turn away! May none of us ever be spots in our
   feasts of love, or clouds without water carried about of winds. But
   this we shall be if we have the form of godliness without the power
   thereof.

   With great solemnity of soul I approach this subject, seeking from the
   Lord the aid of His Spirit, who makes the Word to be a discerner of the
   thoughts and intents of the heart. First, I shall speak of the men, and
   secondly, of their folly. And when I am done with that, I shall have
   some words of instruction to give by way of conclusion.

   I. First, let us talk awhile of THE MEN. They had the form of godliness
   but denied the power thereof. Note what they had and then observe what
   they had not. They had a form of godliness. What is a form of
   godliness? It is, first of all, attention to the ordinances of
   religion. These, so far as they are Scriptural, are few and simple.
   There is Baptism, wherein, in figure, the Believer is buried with
   Christ, that he may rise into newness of life. And there is the Lord's
   Supper, wherein, in type and emblem, he feeds upon Christ and sustains
   the life which came to him by fellowship with Christ's death. Those who
   have obeyed the Lord in these two ordinances have exhibited in their
   own persons the form of godliness. That form is every way instructive
   to others and impressive to the man himself.

   Every baptized person and every communicant at the Lord's Table, should
   be godly and gracious. But neither Baptism nor the Lord's Supper will
   secure this. Where there is not the life of God in the soul, neither
   holiness or godliness follow upon the ordinances. And thus we may have
   around us baptized worldlings and men who go from the table of the Lord
   to drink the cup of devils. It is sad that it should be so. Such
   persons are guilty of presumption, falsehood, sacrilege and blasphemy.
   Ah me, we sit beside such every Sabbath!

   The form of godliness involves attendance with the assemblies of God's
   people. Those who have professed Christ are accustomed to come together
   at certain times for worship and, in their assemblies, they join in
   common prayer and common praise. They listen to the testimony of God by
   His servants whom He calls to preach His Word with power. They also
   associate together in Church fellowship for purposes of mutual help and
   discipline. This is a very proper form--full of blessing both to the
   Church and to the world--when it does not die down into mere form. A
   man may go to Heaven alone but he will do better if he travels there
   with Mr. Great-Heart and Father Honest and Christiana and the children.

   Christ's people are called sheep for one reason--they love to go in
   flocks. Dogs do very well separately but sheep do best in company. The
   sheep of Christ love to be together in the same pasture and to follow
   in a flock the footsteps of the Good Shepherd. Those who constantly
   associate in worship, unite in Church fellowship and work together for
   sacred purposes have the form of godliness and a very useful and proper
   form it is. Alas, it is of no value without the power of the Holy
   Spirit.

   Some go further than public worship. They use a great deal of religious
   talk. They freely speak of the things of God in Christian company. They
   can defend the doctrines of Scripture, they can plead for its precepts
   and they can narrate the experience of a Believer. They are fondest of
   talking of what is doing in the Church--the tattle of the streets of
   Jerusalem is very pleasant to them. They flavor their speech with godly
   phrases when they are in company that will relish it. I do not censure
   them--on the contrary, I wish there were more of holy talk among
   professors. I wish we could revive the old habit, "They that feared the
   Lord spoke often one to another."

   Holy conversation causes the heart to glow and gives to us a foretaste
   of the fellowship of the glorified. But there may be a savor of
   religion about a man's conversation and yet it may be a borrowed
   flavor--like hot sauces used to disguise the staleness of ancient meat.
   That religion which comes from the lips outward but does not well up
   from the deep fountains of the heart is not that living water which
   will spring up unto eternal life. Tongue godliness is an abomination if
   the heart is destitute of Divine Grace.

   More than this--some have a form of godliness upheld and published by
   religious activity. It is possible to be intensely active in the
   outside work of the Church and yet to know nothing of spiritual power.
   One may be an excellent

   Sunday school teacher after a fashion and yet have need to be taught
   what it is to be born again. One may be an eloquent preacher, or a
   diligent officer in the Church of God and yet know nothing of the
   mysterious power of the Spirit of Truth upon the heart. It is well to
   be like Martha in service. But one thing is needful--to sit at the
   Master's feet and learn as Mary did.

   When we have done all the work our position requires of us, we may only
   have displayed the form of godliness. Unless we hearken to our Lord and
   from His Presence derive power, we shall be as a sounding brass and a
   tinkling cymbal. Brethren, I speak to myself and to each one of you in
   solemn earnestness. If much speaking, generous giving and constant
   occupation could win Heaven, we might easily make sure of it. But more
   than these are needed. I speak to each one of you. And if I singled out
   anyone more than another to be the pointed object of my address, it
   would be the best among us--the one who is doing most for his Master
   and who, in his inmost soul, is thinking, "That warning does not apply
   to

   me."

   my active and energetic Brother, remember the word, "Let him that
   thinks he stands take heed lest he fall." If any of you dislike this
   searching sermon, your dislike proves how much you need it. He that is
   not willing to search himself should stand self-incriminated by that
   unwillingness to look at his affairs. If you are right, you will not
   object to be weighed in the balances. If you are, indeed, pure gold,
   you may still feel anxiety at the sight of the furnace but you will not
   be driven to anger at the prospect of the fire. Your prayer will always
   be, "Search me, O God and know my heart: try me and know my thoughts:
   and see if there is any wicked way in me and lead me in the way
   everlasting."

   1 need not enlarge further. You all know what a form of godliness is
   and most of us who are here present hold fast that form--may we never
   dishonor it! I trust we are anxious to make that form accurate
   according to Scripture so that our form of godliness may be that into
   which the earliest saints were delivered. Let us be Christians of a
   high type, cast in our Lord's own mold. But do not become sticklers for
   the form and neglect the inner life--that will never do. Shall we fight
   about a man's clothes and allow the man, himself, to die?

   But now, as these people had not the power of godliness, how did they
   come to hold the form of it? This needs several answers. Some come by
   the form of godliness in an hereditary way. Their ancestors were always
   godly people and they almost naturally take up with the profession of
   their fathers. This is common and where it is honest, it is most
   commendable. It is a great mercy when, instead of the fathers, shall be
   the children. And we may hopefully anticipate that our children will
   follow us in the things of God, if by example, instruction and prayer,
   we have sought it before the Lord.

   We are unhappy if we do not see our children walking in the God's
   Truth. Yet the idea of birthright membership is an evil one and is as
   perilous as it is unscriptural. If children are taken into the Church
   simply because of their earthly parentage, surely this is not
   consistent with that description of the sons of God which is found in
   the inspired Scrip-ture--"Which were born, not of blood, nor of the
   will of the flesh, nor of the will of man but of God. " Not generation
   but REGENERATION, makes the Christian. You are not Christians because
   you can trace a line of fleshly descent throughout twenty generations
   of children of God.

   You must, yourselves, be born again. For except a man is born from
   above, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Many, no doubt, lay hold
   naturally on the form of godliness because of family ties--this is poor
   work. Ishmael is a sorry son of Abraham and Esau of Isaac and Absalom
   of David. Grace does not run in the blood. If you have no better
   foundation for your religion than your earthly parentage, you are in a
   wretched case.

   Others have accepted the form of godliness by the force of authority
   and influence. They were, as lads, put apprentice to godly men. As
   girls, they were under the guidance of pious teachers. And as they grew
   up, they came under the influence of persons of superior intelligence
   and character who were on the Lord's side. This accounts for their form
   of godliness. Many persons are the creatures of their
   surroundings--religion or irreligion is with them the result of
   circumstances. Such persons were led to make a profession of faith in
   Christ because others did so and friends encouraged them to do the
   same.

   The deep searching of heart, which they ought to have exhibited, was
   slurred over and they were found among the people of God without having
   to knock for entrance at the wicket gate. I do not wish anyone to
   condemn himself because he was guided to the Savior by godly
   friends--far from it. But, nevertheless, there is danger lest we fail
   to have personal repentance and personal faith and are content to lean
   upon the opinions of others.

   I have seen the form of godliness taken up on account of friendships.
   Many a time courtship and marriage have led to a formal religiousness,
   but a lacking heart. The future husband is induced to make a profession
   of religion for the sake of gaining one who was a sincere Christian and
   would not have broken her Lord's command to be unequally yoked together
   with an unbeliever. Godliness should never be put on in order that we
   may put a wedding ring upon the finger--this is a sad abuse of
   religious profession.

   Other kinds of friendship, also, have led men and women to profess a
   faith they never had and to unite themselves visibly with the Church,
   while in spirit and in truth they were never truly a part of it. I put
   these things to you that there may be a great searching of heart among
   us all and that we may candidly consider how we have come by our form
   of godliness. Certain persons assume the form of godliness from a
   natural religious disposition. Do not suppose that all unconverted
   people are without religion. Much religiousness is found in the heathen
   and there are races which have naturally more of reverence than others.

   The German, with his profound philosophy, is often free, not only from
   superstition but from reverence. The Russian is by race naturally
   religious, not to say superstitious. I am speaking after the manner of
   men--the usual Russian takes off his hat to Holy Places, pictures and
   persons--and he is little inclined to disbelieve or scoff. We perceive
   like differences among our own acquaintances--one man is readily fooled
   by skeptics, while another is ready, with open mouth, to believe every
   word. One is naturally an infidel, another is as naturally credulous.

   I mean, then, that to some the form of godliness commends itself
   because they have a natural leaning that way. They could not be happy
   unless they were attending where God is worshipped, or unless they were
   reckoned among the Believers in Christ. They must play at religion even
   if they do not make it their life business. Let me remind you of the
   questionable value of that which springs out of fallen human nature.
   Assuredly it brings no one into the spiritual kingdom, for "that which
   is born of the flesh is flesh." Only "that which is born of the Spirit
   is spirit." "You must be born again." Beware of everything which
   springs up in the field without the sowing of the husbandman, for it
   will turn out to be a weed. O Sirs, the day will come when God will try
   us as with fire and that which comes of unregenerate nature will not
   stand the test but will be utterly consumed!

   I do not doubt that, in these silken days, many have a form of
   godliness because of the respect it brings them. Time was when to be a
   Christian was to be reviled, if not to be imprisoned and, perhaps,
   burned at the stake. Hypocrites were fewer in those days for a
   profession cost too much. Yet, strange to say, there were some who
   played the Judas even in those times. Today religion walks forth in her
   velvet slippers. And in certain classes and ranks, if men did not make
   some profession of religion, they would be looked upon with suspicion
   and therefore men will take the name of Christian upon them and wear
   religion as a part of full dress.

   The cross is at this day worn as a necklace. The cross as the
   instrument of our Savior's shame and death is forgotten, and instead
   thereof, it is made the badge of honor, a jewel wherewith ungodly men
   may adorn themselves. Is this indicative of the deceitfulness of the
   age? Beware of seeking respect by a hypocritical godliness. Honor
   gained by a heartless profession is, in God's sight, the greatest
   disgrace. The actor may strut in his mimic royalty, but he must take
   off his crown and robes when the play is over. And what will he then
   be?

   From the days of Iscariot until now, some have taken up the form of
   godliness to gain thereby. To make gain of godliness is to imitate the
   son of perdition. This is a perilous road and yet many risk their souls
   for the lucre which they find therein. Apparent zeal for God may really
   be zeal for gold. The Emperor Maximilian showed great zeal against
   idolatry and published a decree that images of gold and silver should
   be melted down. He was extremely zealous about this. The images were
   all to be melted down and the metal forfeited to the emperor.

   It was shrewdly suspected that this great iconoclast was not altogether
   swayed by unselfish motives. When a business brings grist to the mill,
   it is not hard to keep to it. Some love Christ because they carry His
   money bag for Him. Beware of that kind of godliness which makes a man
   hesitate until he sees whether a duty will pay or not and then makes
   him eager because he sees it will answer his purpose.

   Once more--I do not doubt that a form of godliness has come to many
   because it brings them ease of conscience and they are able, like the
   Pharisee, to thank God that they are not as other men are. Have they
   not been to Church? Have they not paid for their pew? They can now go
   about their daily business without those stings of conscience which
   would

   come of neglecting the requirements of religion. These people profess
   to have been converted and they are numbered with Believers. But, alas,
   they are not of them.

   Of all people these are the hardest to reach and the least likely to be
   saved. They hide behind the earthworks of a nominal religion. They are
   out of reach of the shot and shell of Gospel rebukes. They fly among
   the sinners and they have taken up their quarters among the saints. Sad
   is that man's plight who wears the name of life but has never been
   quickened by the Holy Spirit. Thus, I have very feebly tried to show
   what these men had and why they had it.

   Let us now remember what they did not have. They had "the form" of
   godliness. But they were denied "the power." What is that power? God
   Himself is the power of godliness, The Holy Spirit is the life and
   force of it. Godliness is the power which brings a man to God and binds
   him to Him. Godliness is that which creates repentance towards God and
   faith in Him. Godliness is the result of a great change of heart in
   reference to God and His Character. Godliness looks towards God and
   mourns its distance from Him. godliness hastens to draw near and rests
   not till it is at home with God.

   Godliness makes a man like God. Godliness leads a man to love God and
   to serve God. It brings the fear of God before his eyes and the love of
   God into his heart. Godliness leads to consecration, to sanctification,
   to concentration. The godly man seeks first the kingdom of God and His
   righteousness and expects other things to be added to him. Godliness
   makes a man commune with God and gives him a partnership with God in
   His glorious designs. And so it prepares him to dwell with God forever.

   Many who have the form of godliness are strangers to this power and so
   are in religion worldly, in prayer mechanical, in public one thing and
   in private another. True godliness lies in spiritual power and they who
   are without this are dead while they live.

   What is the general history of those who have not this power? Well,
   dear Friends, their course usually runs thus-- they do not begin with
   denying the power but they begin by trying to do without it. They would
   like to become members of the Church and as they fear that they are not
   fit for it, they look about for something which looks like conversion
   and the new birth. They try to persuade themselves that they have been
   changed--they accept emotion as regeneration and a belief of doctrine
   for belief in Christ.

   It is rather hard at first to reckon brass as gold but it grows easier
   as it is persisted in. Patching up a conversion and manufacturing a
   regeneration, they venture forward. At the first they are a good deal
   suspicious of themselves but they industriously kill every question by
   treating it as a needless doubt. Thus, by degrees, they believe a lie.

   The next step is easy--they deceive themselves and come to believe that
   they are surely saved. All is now right for eternity, so they fancy.
   And they fold their arms in calm security. Meeting with godly people,
   they put on a bold front and speak up as bravely as if they were the
   true soldiers of King Jesus. Good people are charmed to meet with fresh
   Brethren and at once take them into their confidence. Thus they deceive
   others and help to strengthen themselves in their false hope.

   They use the choice phrases of earnest Christians. Mixing with them,
   they pick up their particular expressions and pronounce Shibboleth in
   the most approved fashion. At last they take the daring step of denying
   the power. Being without it themselves, they conceive that others are
   without it, also. Judging from their own case, they conclude that it is
   all an affair of words. They get on very well without any supernatural
   power and others, no doubt, do the same--only they add a little cant to
   it to please the very godly folk.

   They practically deny the power in their lives, so that those who see
   them and take them for Christians say, "There really is nothing in it.
   For these people are as we are. They have a touch of paint here and a
   little varnish there but it is all the same wood." Practically, their
   actions assure the world that there is no power in Christianity. It is
   only a name. Very soon, privately, in their hearts they think it is so
   and they invent doctrines to match. Looking about them they see
   inconsistent Christians and faulty Believers and they say to
   themselves, "There is not much in faith, after all. I am as good as any
   of these Believers and perhaps better, though I am sure there is no
   work of the Spirit in me."

   Thus, within their own hearts they believe, what, at first, they dare
   not speak--they count godliness an empty thing. By-and-by, in some
   cases, these people profanely deny the Divine power of our holy faith
   and then they become the greatest enemies of the Cross of Christ. These
   traitors, nourished in the very House of God, are the worst foes of the
   Truth of God and righteousness. They ridicule that which once they
   professed to reverence. They have measured Christ's corn with

   their own bushel. And because they never felt the powers of the world
   to come, they imagine that no one else has done so either.

   Look at the Church of the present day. The advanced school, I mean. In
   its midst we see preachers who have a form of godliness but deny the
   power thereof. They talk of the Lord Jesus but they deny His Godhead,
   which is His power. They speak of the Holy Spirit but deny His
   personality, wherein lies His very existence. They take away the
   substance and power from all the doctrines of Revelation, though they
   pretend still to believe them. They talk of redemption but they deny
   substitution, which is the essence of it.

   They extol the Scriptures but deny their infallibility, wherein lies
   their value. They use the phrases of orthodoxy and believe nothing in
   common with the orthodox. I know not which to loathe the more--their
   teachings or their spirit-- surely they are worthy of each other. They
   burn the kernel and preserve the husk. They kill the truth and then
   pretend to reverence its sepulcher--"they say they are Jews and are not
   but do lie."

   This is horrible, but the evil is widely spread and in the presence of
   it the children of God are framing compromises, selling their Lord and
   becoming partakers with the despisers of His Truth. "Having a form of
   godliness but denying the power thereof." It is the sin of the age--the
   sin which is ruining the Churches of our land.

   II. In the second place, we are to observe THE WICKED FOLLY of this
   hypocritical conduct. Those who rest in the mere show of godliness are
   acting in a shameless manner and I will try to expose it.

   First, they degrade the very name of Christ. Brethren, if there is no
   spiritual power in godliness, it is worth nothing. We want no clouds
   without rain. Of shams and mere pretences we have more than enough.
   Those who have not the power of godliness show us a very damaging
   picture of religion. They make out our Lord's religion to be comparable
   to a show at a country fair, with fine pictures and loud drumming on
   the outside and nothing within worth a moment's consideration. The best
   of the show is on the outside.

   Or if there is anything within, it is a masquerade where all act
   borrowed parts but no one is what he seems to be. Gracious Lord, never
   suffer us so to act as to make the world think that our Redeemer is
   nothing more than the clever manager of a theater, where nothing is
   real but all is pantomime. Brothers and Sisters, if you pray at all,
   pray God to make you real through and through. May you be made of true
   metal! It were better for you that you had never been born than that
   you should make Christ dishonorable among the sons of men by leading
   them to conclude that religion is all a piece of acting.

   The folly of this is illustrated by the fact that there is no value in
   such a dead form. The form of godliness without the power is not worth
   the trouble it takes to put it together and keep it together. Imitation
   jewels are pretty and brilliant. But if you take them to the jeweler he
   will give you nothing for them. There is a religion which is all paste
   gems--a godliness which glitters but is not gold. And in that day when
   you will want to realize something from it, you will be wretchedly
   disappointed.

   A form of godliness joined to an unholy heart is of no value to God. I
   have read that the swan was not allowed to be offered upon the altar of
   God because, although its feathers are as white as snow, yet its skin
   is black. God will not accept that external morality which conceals
   internal impurity. There must be a pure heart as well as a clean life.
   The power of godliness must work within, or else God will not accept
   our offering. There is no value to man or to God in a religion which is
   a dead form.

   Next, there is no use in mere formality. If your religion is without
   spiritual life, what is the use of it? Could you ride home on a dead
   horse? Would you hunt with dead dogs? Would anyone like to go into
   battle with a pasteboard helmet? When the sword fell on it, what use
   would such a helmet be? What an outcry has been raised about bad
   swords! Is false religion any better? In the depth of winter can you
   warm yourself before a painted fire? Could you dine off the picture of
   a feast when you are hungry?

   There must be vitality and substantiality--or else the form is utterly
   worthless. And worse than worthless, for it may flatter you into deadly
   self-conceit. Moreover, there is no comfort in it. The form without the
   power has nothing in it to warm the heart, to raise the spirits, or to
   strengthen the mind against the day of sickness, or in the hour of
   death. O God, if my religion has been a mere form, what shall I do in
   the swelling of Jordan? My fine profession will all disappear and
   nothing will come of it wherewith I may face the last enemy.

   Peter called hypocrites "wells without water." You are thirsty and you
   gladly spy a well. It is well surrounded with a curb and provided with
   a windlass and bucket. You hasten to draw water. What? Does the bucket
   come up empty? You try again. How bitter is your disappointment! A well
   without water is a mockery. It is a mere pit of destruction--a deadly
   delusion. Are some of you possessors of a religion which never yields
   you a drop of comfort? Is it a bondage to you? Do you follow Christ as
   a slave follows his master? Away with such a religion!

   The godliness which is worth having is a joy to a man--it is his
   choice, his treasure, his all. When it does not yield him conscious
   joy, yet he prizes it as the only source from which joy is expected of
   him. He follows after Christ with love, out of his heart's desire after
   Him and not from the force of fashion, or the power of fear.

   To have the form of godliness without the power of it is to lack
   constancy in your religion. You never saw a mirage, perhaps. But those
   who have travel in the East, when they come home, are sure to tell you
   about them. It is a very hot and thirsty day and you are riding on a
   camel. Suddenly there rises before you a beautiful scene. Just a little
   from you are brooks of water, flowing between beds of osiers and banks
   of reeds and rushes. Yonder are palm trees and orange groves. Yes, and
   a city rises on a hill, crowned with minarets and towers.

   You are rejoiced and ask your guide to lead you nearer to the water
   which glistens in the sun. He grimly answers, "Take no notice, it is a
   mirage. There is nothing yonder but the burning sand." You can scarce
   believe him. It seems so real! But lo, it is all gone, like a dream of
   night. And so is the hope which is built upon the form of godliness
   without the power. The white ants will eat up all the substance of a
   box and yet leave it standing till a touch causes the whole fabric to
   fall in dust--beware of a profession of which the substance has been
   eaten away. Believe in nothing which has not the stamp of eternity upon
   it.

   Be careful, poor Child--you may blow your bubble and the sunlight may
   paint it with rainbows. But in an instant it is gone and not a trace of
   it remains. Your transient globe of beauty is for you and your fellow
   children and not for men.

   In reality, this kind of religion is in opposition to Christ. It is
   Jannes and Jambres over again--the magician of hypocrisy is trying to
   work miracles which belong to God only. In appearance he would produce
   the same marvels as the finger of God. But he fails. God grant we may
   never be guilty of resisting the Truth of God by a lying profession.
   False men do serious injury to true godliness. For, like Ehud, they
   come with a pretended message from God and with their dagger sharpened
   at both edges, they strike vital godliness in its very heart. Nobody
   can do so much damage to the Church of God as the man who is within its
   walls but not within its life.

   This nominal godliness, which is devoid of power, is a shameful thing.
   I close with that. It is a shameful thing for this life, for the Lord
   Jesus loathes it. When He passed by the fig tree, which was so early
   with its leaves but so empty of fruit, He saw therein the likeness of
   the vainglorious professor who has no real holiness and He said,
   "Henceforth let no fruit grow on you forever." His Word withered it at
   once--it stood a terrible emblem of the end of a false profession.

   How shameful will such a fruitless, lifeless professor be in eternity,
   when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed! What shame and
   everlasting contempt will await him when his falsehood shall be
   detected and his baseness shall fill all holy minds with horror! O,
   beware of the Hell of the false professor!

   I have done when I have added a few words of instruction. The form of
   godliness is most precious. Let those who feel the power of godliness
   honor it and use it. Do not despise it because others have damaged it.
   Come forth and make an open profession of religion. But see that you
   have the power of it. Cry to God that you may never wear a sleeve which
   is longer than your arm--I mean may never go beyond what is really and
   truly your own. It will be better for you to go to God as a lost soul
   and cry for mercy, than to profess yourself saved when you are not.

   Yet confess Christ without fail or fear. Do not be ashamed of Jesus
   because of the ill manners of His disciples. Regard the ill savor of
   false professors as a part of the cross which you will have to bear for
   your Lord. To be associated with some who are not true seems inevitable
   in this life--however carefully we choose our company.

   My next is a word of discrimination. Those to whom my text has nothing
   to say will be the first to take it home to themselves. When I
   discharge my heart with a faithful sermon, certain trembling souls whom
   I would gladly comfort are sure to think that I mean them. A poor
   woman, in deep distress, comes to me, crying, "Sir, I have no feeling."
   Dear heart, she has ten times too much feeling. Another moans out, "I
   am sure I am a hypocrite." I never met with a hypocrite who thought
   himself one. And I never shall.

   "Oh," said another, "I feel condemned." He that feels himself condemned
   may hope for pardon. If you are afraid of yourselves I am not afraid of
   you. If you tremble at God's Word, you have one of the surest marks of
   God's elect. Those who fear that they are mistaken are seldom mistaken.
   If you search yourselves and allow the Word of God to search you, it is
   well with you. The bankrupt trader fears to have his books examined.
   The sound man even pays an accountant to overhaul his affairs. Use
   discrimination and neither acquit nor condemn yourself without reason.

   If the Spirit of God leads you to weep in secret for sin and to pray in
   secret for Divine Grace. If He leads you to seek after holiness. If He
   leads you to trust alone in Jesus, then you know the power of godliness
   and you have never denied it. You who cry, "Oh, that I felt more of the
   power of the Holy Spirit, for I know that He could comfort and sanctify
   me and make me live the life of Heaven on earth!" You are not aimed at
   either by the text or the sermon. For you have not denied the power.
   No, no, this text does not belong to you but to quite another class of
   people.

   Let me give you a word of admonition. Learn from the text that there is
   something in godliness worth having. The "form" of godliness is not
   all--there is a blessed "power." The Holy Spirit is that power and He
   can work in you to will and to do of God's good pleasure. Come to Jesus
   Christ, dear Souls. Do not come to the minister, nor to the Church, in
   the first place. But come to Jesus. Come and lay yourselves at His feet
   and say, "Lord, I will not be comforted unless You comfort me." Come
   and take everything at first hand from your crucified Lord. Then shall
   you know the power of godliness.

   Beware of second-hand religion, it is never worth the carrying home.
   Get your godliness direct from Heaven by the personal dealing of your
   own soul with your Savior. Profess only what you possess and rest only
   in that which has been given you from above. Your heavenly life, as
   yet, may be very feeble but the grain of mustard seed will grow. You
   may be the least in Israel but that is better than being the greatest
   in Babylon.

   The Lord bless these words and apply them to each one in his own way by
   His Holy Spirit. You can make either a blister of them or a plaster of
   them, as conscience shall direct. God guide you, for Jesus Christ's
   sake. Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

Profitable Mixture

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S DAY MORNING, JUNE 9, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "For unto us was the Gospel preached, as well as unto them: but the
   word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them
   that heard it." Hebrews 4:2.

   THE people that came out of Egypt were an interesting company, if we
   think of what God had done on their behalf and of what he proposed to
   do for them. They had been lifted up from a state of slavery into one
   of freedom and they were on their way to a country where they were to
   be settled, each one upon his own portion of land, therein to become
   priests and kings unto Jehovah. What an unhappy circumstance that the
   high ideal set before them was never realized by any of them save two
   lone men--Joshua and Caleb!

   You hear them singing at the Red Sea, in exultant joy, and they are on
   their way to Canaan, the land that flows with milk and honey--loud are
   their songs and high are their hopes. But mark those lines of
   graves--those innumerable hillocks which were formed wherever the camp
   was pitched in the desert! That is the end of the generation which came
   out of Egypt--"Their carcasses fell in the wilderness." Instead of
   reaching Canaan and settling, every man under his own vine and fig
   tree, they lie in dishonored graves outside of the land of promise. Ah
   me, so lofty a destiny before them and so sad a missing of it.

   Let us not follow in their tracks. We are far too much inclined to do
   so. They were men and we are no better than they by nature. Oh, for
   Divine Grace to walk after a higher rule! Let a holy dread seize upon
   us at this time, such as that which Paul expresses in the following
   words--"Let us therefore fear, lest a promise being left us of entering
   into His rest, any of you should seem to come short of it." Let us not
   find a tomb when we might gain a throne. Let us not go down into the
   pit when before us lies the way to Heaven and multitudes are beckoning
   us there.

   May great Grace be given that we may win where a whole nation failed!
   It will be Divine Grace, indeed, if Gentiles shall excel the seed of
   Abraham. May heavenly power create within our bosoms a holy caution,
   lest by any means we come short of the Grace of God! Let rebellious
   Israel be our beacon. From the graves of their lusting let us hear a
   voice of warning, lest we also tempt the Lord and constrain Him to shut
   us out of His rest.

   First, I shall invite you to consider Israel's hearing of the
   Gospel--"Unto us was the Gospel preached as well as unto them." They
   heard good news from Moses, which was, at any rate, a Gospel. But to me
   it seems that they also heard the Gospel which we hear. Secondly, let
   us notice Israel's failure to profit thereby--"The word preached did
   not profit them." They heard but heard in vain. Thirdly, let us put our
   finger upon the fatal cause of failure, so plainly indicated here by
   the words, "not being mixed with faith in them that heard it." The
   hearing was alone and without the mixture of faith. It answered no
   practical purpose. May the Spirit of God prepare our hearts for this
   meditation and may we so consider the lamentable failure of Israel that
   we may not fall after the same example of unbelief!

   I. First, then, let us think of ISRAEL'S HEARING OF THE GOSPEL. Whether
   you take it as our translators have put it in the Authorized Version,
   "Unto us was the Gospel preached as well as unto them," or accept the
   Revised rendering, "Indeed, we have had good tidings preached unto us,
   even as also they," it comes to much the same meaning. For the message
   of Moses and the reports of the faithful spies were both typical of the
   Gospel which was brought to us by our Lord and His Apostles. Our Gospel
   is more clear than theirs. Yet they had the Gospel also, in all the
   essential truths of it and had they fully believed it, it would have
   been a saving Gospel to them.

   We shall notice, first, that the good news brought to Israel was a
   Gospel of rest for slaves, a promise of deliverance for men who cried
   by reason of sore bondage. This was a fit emblem of that news which
   comes to us in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Listen to the words of Moses
   in the sixth of Exodus--"Wherefore say unto the children of Israel, I
   am the Lord and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the
   Egyptians and I will rid you out of their bondage and I will

   redeem you with a stretched out arm, and with great judgments. And I
   will take you to Me for a people and I will be to you a God. And you
   shall know that I am the Lord your God, which brings you out from under
   the burdens of the Egyptians. And I will bring you in unto the land,
   concerning the which I did swear to give it to Abraham, to Isaac and to
   Jacob. And I will give it you for an heritage. I am the Lord."

   This was exceedingly glad news to the bond slaves in Egypt. These men
   were made to labor to exhaustion. They had to work in making bricks
   and, as you well remember, they were denied the straw so necessary to
   their manufacture. And yet the count of their bricks was not
   diminished. They had no rest from toil by day or night. And if they did
   not supply the full number of bricks, they were cruelly beaten by their
   taskmasters. Truly the tribes of Israel were in a very evil case. They
   groaned by reason of their bitter bondage and that promise was a
   wonderful Gospel to them--"I will bring you out from under the burdens
   of the Egyptians."

   This is the kind of Gospel which is preached to us today. Does not
   Jesus say, "Come unto Me, all you that labor and are heavy laden and I
   will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me and you shall
   find rest unto your souls"? Spiritual rest is even more precious than
   bodily rest. The great promise of the Gospel is rest from the burden of
   guilt, the pressure of fear, the bondage of habit, the slavery of sin,
   the scourging of conscience and the dread of wrath to come. Jesus
   promises rest for the heart, the intellect, the desires, the fears, the
   hopes, the conscience of the man.

   There is perfect rest to be had, rest from all the burdens which the
   cruel Pharaoh of Hell has heaped upon you. It is yours if you will but
   have it. What a happy people we ought to be to have Christ among us as
   Himself the rest of our souls! We ought to leap toward this blessing
   with intensity of spirit and say, "Lord, suffer me to enter at once
   into Your rest! Deliver me from the slavery of sin and I will serve You
   all my days with gladness and delight. Lay what burden of holy service
   You shall please upon me, only ease me of my guilt, and deliver me from
   the wrath which lies hard upon me."

   The Gospel of rest is preached to you, my Hearers, even as it was
   preached to Israel in Egypt. Have you understood it? Have you received
   it in your hearts? Have you so mixed faith with the glad news that you
   have accepted it and made it true in your own proper persons? Can you
   sing--

   "My heart is resting, O my God, I will give thanks and sing. My heart
   is at the secret source Of every precious thing"?

   Note next, that the good tidings to Israel was a Gospel of redemption
   in order to their entering into the promised rest. They were slaves to
   Pharaoh--how could they become dwellers in Canaan? They might
   truthfully say, "We cannot break our bonds." The power of Egypt would
   hold Israel as with an iron hand. But with a high hand and an
   outstretched arm, Jehovah, their God, determined to bring them out. And
   bring them out He did. Connected with that power of arm there was the
   price of sacrifice. For they were redeemed typically by the blood of
   the Passover Lamb. That blood, sprinkled on the lintel and on the two
   side posts, preserved their houses when the destroying angel passed
   through the land of Egypt with his death sword.

   They stood about their family tables and feasted joyfully while there
   was wailing in every house of Egypt--from Pharaoh's palace down to the
   lowly chamber of his maidservant. This day I also preach to you rest
   through the Divine omnipotence of the Holy Spirit and through the
   sprinkling of the precious blood of the Lamb of God. A full atonement
   has been made, a sufficient ransom has been presented--by this are men
   set free.

   Christ Jesus is the Lamb of God which takes away the sin of the world.
   He died in the Believer's place that he might rest lawfully and have no
   fear of being brought under bondage through the demands of justice. By
   the death of our Lord Jesus Christ the Law has been magnified and the
   requirements of Divine Justice have been met. God is, in Christ Jesus,
   reconciling the world unto Himself. Blessed are the lips that tell you
   this good news! I never feel so happy as when I am talking of
   redemption through the blood of the Lamb.

   I gladly proclaim perfect redemption, efficacious redemption--I joy to
   testify that every Believer is justly set free and comes righteously
   from under the curse of God, since "He has made Him to be sin for us,
   who knew no sin. That we might be made the righteousness of God in
   Him." Beloved, the Gospel preached to Israel is the Gospel which is
   preached to us--only we have it more plainly and see it in substance
   rather than in shadow.

   You have heard the word of reconciliation and you know its meaning.
   Have you rested in it? Have you come to Jesus? Have His wounds become
   your resting place? Is His blood your covering? Are you sheltered
   beneath the crimson

   canopy of His finished sacrifice? There is the point. And in this
   respect "unto us was the Gospel preached as well as unto

   them."

   Furthermore, it was a Gospel of separation. When you read the words of
   the Lord to His chosen ones, you are compelled to see that He means
   them to be a people set apart for His own purposes. He no sooner began
   with them than the first summons was to Pharaoh, "Let My people go,
   that they may serve Me." Israel was in Egypt--but Israel was not a part
   of Egypt. No Israelite could become an Egyptian. As a distinct people
   they came into the land of Ham and as a distinct people they went out
   of the land. Too much was Israel defiled by the customs of that heathen
   nation--it was not absorbed in Egypt, nor did it cease to be a peculiar
   race.

   The Lord has of old separated to Himself, in His eternal purposes, a
   people who are His. And His they shall still be, even till that day in
   which He shall make up His jewels. These chosen ones He gave to His
   Son, and Jesus claims the gift when He speaks of, "as many as You have
   given Me." These belong to the Lord Jesus in a special way. These have
   a destiny before them, even in this world, of separation from the rest
   of mankind. For Jesus says, "they are not of the world, even as I am
   not of the world." "Lo, the people shall dwell alone and shall not be
   reckoned among the nations." "You are a peculiar people."

   We are the Lord's portion, the lot of His inheritance. It is by means
   of this separation that we find rest. There is no rest for us in Egypt,
   for it is polluted. Our rest lies where God has prepared it and He
   cries, "Arise you, and depart. For this is not your rest." Here we have
   no abiding city. Here we are "strangers and foreigners, as all our
   fathers were." So even here the Church is distinct from the world and
   cannot be made one with it. The eternal choice has made a difference.
   And by a heavenly calling and a Divine life working in us, we are set
   apart unto the Lord Himself.

   The eternal decree of separation is fulfilled in an actual separation
   in the thoughts and habits and ways and lives of the chosen. We are not
   now what we were, nor what others are. For John says, "You are of God,
   little children, and the whole world lies in the wicked one." This is
   the Gospel of separation which leads on to rest. Until separated there
   is no rest for us. Thus is it written, "Come you out from among them
   and be you separate. And I will be a Father unto you and you shall be
   My sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty."

   Thus you see that ours is a Gospel of rest, a Gospel of sacrifice and a
   Gospel of separation from the rest of mankind. Hear it with more
   earnest heed than Israel gave to it--"For unto us is the Gospel
   preached, as well as unto them." Dear Hearers, do you know what this
   separation means? Have you been called out? Have you quit your former
   haunts and ways? Do you cleave unto the Lord with purpose of heart
   though others turn aside? Do you follow the footsteps of the Crucified?
   Judge yourselves, that you be not judged.

   Still further, the Gospel preached to the Israelites told them of a
   glorious heritage which was provided for them. It was described as, "a
   land that flows with milk and honey"--a land of wheat and barley and
   figs and olive oil, a land which was not irrigated by labor but was
   watered by the rain of Heaven. A land of rivers, a land which the Lord
   thought upon, a land out of whose heart they might dig brass and iron.
   It was the fairest of all countries, an epitome of the whole world. And
   it was to be theirs as a freehold forever!

   Each tribe was to have its portion, each family its lot. This was good
   news to them. And all the more so because within the outward and
   temporal good news there was a spiritual Gospel. Even so are you told
   that there is a heritage, even a heavenly one, to which God brings His
   believing people and of which He gives them an earnest even now, in the
   possession of His Holy Spirit. This heritage is, in a measure, ours
   even in this life. But into the fullness of its delight we shall enter
   when the Lord shall come and receive us unto Himself. Beloved, our
   hearts ought to burn within us when we think of the good things of the
   Covenant, the fat things full of marrow and the wines on the lees
   well-refined.

   On these Sabbath days, especially, we should look to enjoy a foretaste
   of that heavenly feast to which there will be no end. We enter into the
   rest already in a measure--we shall come into the fullness of it very
   soon. The snows upon the heads of many of you prophesy that the year of
   your wilderness life is drawing to a close and the endless years of
   your glory life are hastening on. O my Hearers, you have all heard this
   Gospel of glory--have you all accepted it? Are you anticipating the
   world to come, whereof this Gospel speaks? Have you already entered
   into the life eternal? Is there within you a well of water springing up
   unto everlasting life? If so, you are thrice happy. But whether or not,
   to you has this Gospel been preached, even as unto Israel of old. They
   had also preached to them the Gospel of a Divine calling. For they were
   informed that they were not to enter into this land to be idlers in it,
   but they were to be a nation of priests. In

   that holy land they were to be a holy people. There would they present
   sacrifices to God, while others worshipped Baal and Ashtaroth. There
   would the sacred oracle speak to them, while the rest of the world
   followed lying vanities. There would the glory of the Lord shine out of
   the midst of His temple and Israel would rejoice in the light thereof.

   They were to preserve the lamp of truth until the day should come when
   it would shine on all mankind. Truly, the Israelites who came out of
   Egypt had a splendid heritage before them if they could but have
   believed God and so have grasped it. To them it would have been
   true--"strangers shall stand and feed your flocks and the sons of the
   alien shall be your plowmen and your vinedressers. But you shall be
   named the Priests of the Lord: men shall call you the Ministers of our
   God." Happy people!

   This, even this, is the Gospel that is preached unto you. We are called
   to believe in Jesus. And then, in Him, to become priests and kings unto
   our God and in His holy service to spend our happy days. God grant that
   we may receive this Gospel indeed and of a truth! Count not yourselves
   unworthy of this high honor. Put it not from you, lest the Lord should
   swear in His wrath, "They shall not enter into My rest."

   Once more--they had a Gospel which promised them help to obtain all
   this. It is a poor Gospel which sets Heaven before us but does not help
   us to enter it. To these Israelites, journeying mercies and conquering
   aids were promised. The Lord said to them, "I will send My fear before
   you and will destroy all the people to whom you shall come and I will
   make all your enemies turn their backs unto you. And I will send
   hornets before you, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite and
   the Hittite from before you."

   The like help for the attainment of heavenly blessedness is provided in
   the Gospel which we preach. All helps for the winning of the fadeless
   crown are waiting for them that believe. "The Spirit helps our
   infirmities." The Lord "will subdue our iniquities." "God shall bruise
   Satan under your feet shortly." "Thanks be unto God, who gives us the
   victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." When we are weak then are we
   strong. We can do all things through Christ that strengthens us. This
   Gospel is preached to us. The Lord, All-sufficient, will be the help of
   His people.

   He says, "My grace is sufficient for you." Therefore I may gladly sing,
   "The Lord is my strength and my song, He also has become my salvation."
   We are encouraged to go forward and take possession of the promises,
   for the Lord has said, "Certainly I will be with you." My dear Hearer,
   do you embrace this Gospel? Do you find in it strength for the journey
   of life? See to it that you miss not the blessing.

   Enough of this. You will find it an interesting exercise to observe in
   how many ways the Gospel preached to Israel runs parallel with the
   Gospel preached to us. The true Gospel is no new Gospel--it is that old
   wine which is better than the new with all its fermentation and
   froth--it is the Gospel of the eternal God, which changes not.

   II. But now, secondly, I have the painful business of setting briefly
   before you ISRAEL'S FAILURE TO PROFIT BY

   THE GOSPEL WHICH THEY HEARD. Though they heard it from many, they clung
   to Egypt. One would think they

   would have abhorred the land of the iron furnace and the brick kiln.
   But no. At the beginning they said, "Let us alone, that we may serve
   the Egyptians." The signs and wonders that God worked in the field of
   Zoan were almost as much needed to separate Israel from Egypt as to
   loosen the cruel grasp of Pharaoh.

   The nation had not long been quit of the land before they cried out to
   Moses, "Why have you dealt thus with us, to carry us forth out of
   Egypt? It had been better for us to serve the Egyptians than that we
   should die in the wilderness." Again and again they sighed for the
   leeks and the garlic and the onions of Egypt, whining for the coarse
   food of their bondage and despising the bread from Heaven. They talked
   as if the Lord had done them a great injury by setting them free from
   their taskmasters. Ah me, the Gospel which they heard did not profit
   them. For in their hearts they still tarried in the house of bondage.

   Worse still, they provoked the Lord. By their murmurings, but chiefly
   by their idolatry, they vexed His Holy Spirit. Could you have believed
   it? After all the gods of Egypt had been smitten in detail by the
   plagues of Jehovah, yet the people remembered the idol god, the ox of
   Egypt, and they set up for their own worship what the Lord derisively
   called a "calf." They said, "These be your gods, O Israel." Yes, the
   chosen people of Jehovah ate and drank in honor of the image of a
   bullock which has horns and hoofs and afterwards they rose up to play
   the lascivious games which attended such idolatrous worship. They thus
   made themselves naked to their shame and the anger of the Lord was
   kindled against them. Truly the word preached had not profited them.

   Moreover, they were always mistrustful. They could not endure a little
   thirst without fear that they would die of it. Whatever trial happened
   to them they were frightened and began to complain and were ready to
   rebel. The days of their provoking God were many. Their lusting after
   the flesh greatly grieved the Lord--when He had prepared them the best
   of diet, and "men did eat angels' food," they declared that the soul
   abhorred this light bread. When they had flesh they ate till they were
   sick of it. They were ever full of distrust and carnality. A
   stiff-necked generation.

   They went so far as to despise the promised land--they said, "It is a
   land that eats up the inhabitants thereof." They would gladly go back
   to Egypt rather than advance upon a scene of such great danger. They
   dared to speak as if death in Egypt had been preferable to the
   wilderness, for they would never be able to conquer the land. Ten of
   the spies whom they sent to spy out the land flattered their humor and
   defamed the country. They could not deny that it flowed with milk and
   honey, for the fruits were before them and the clusters of Eshcol were
   convincing evidence of its fertility. But they said it ate up its
   inhabitants, implying that it was a deadly place to dwell in. Thus they
   set at nothing Heaven's highest gift.

   When the time came when they might have advanced against the foe, they
   were afraid to go up. When for this the Lord withdrew from them, then
   they resolved that they would go up and in consequence they were
   smitten by the Canaanites. They feared lest the giants would destroy
   them--they felt like grasshoppers in their sight. They dared not hope
   to win the country--they turned back in the day of battle.

   The end of it was they died in the wilderness. Ah me, the whole
   generation died in the wilderness--these very men that stood by the Red
   Sea and said, "I will sing unto the Lord, for He has triumphed
   gloriously. You shall bring them in and plant them in the mountain of
   Your inheritance." They sang, "Sorrow shall take hold on the
   inhabitants of Palestine. All the inhabitants of Canaan shall melt
   away." But, on the borders of the land they trembled, turned back into
   the wilderness and died. To them the inspiring Gospel of the promised
   rest was altogether unprofitable.

   O my Hearers, fear and tremble lest it be the same with you! Let me go
   over this story once more with a personal application. Do you still
   cling to sin? Do you still love it? Would you be willing to go to
   Heaven but are you unwilling to part with sin? Is the flavor of the
   onion of sinful pleasure still pleasant to your palate? Are you
   provoking the Lord to jealousy? Are you setting up idols? Are you
   loving self and sin and error and the world? Do you distrust the Lord?
   Am I speaking to any Gospel hearers who are still doubters, still
   refusing to believe that Jesus Christ can save? Are any still refusing
   to trust yourselves with Him who died upon the Cross?

   It is sad that it should be so. Do you despise the goodly land? Do you
   say in your heart, "Heaven and heavenly things are too visionary for
   me. I have too much to do to earn my daily bread"? Are you sighing
   after flesh, after worldly wealth and honor and pleasure? Do you loathe
   the manna of holy joy, fellowship, bliss and life in Christ? Is it so?
   And are you fearing today that you never can do what you should do and
   that you can never conquer your evil propensities?

   Do you sit down supinely, judging your passions to be too strong to be
   subdued, your habits too firmly fixed to be changed? Are the giants too
   strong for you to slay them? Have you no trust in God and in His
   boundless grace? If so, O Sirs, I fear your carcasses will fall in the
   wilderness, your dying hour will come and you will have no hope. The
   howling wilderness will be all around you in the hour of your departure
   out of this life and you will pass from it to a state still worse and
   find that you have missed glory and honor and immortality.

   God grant it be not so. Yet I fear it will be so with many of you who
   abide in unbelief. A whole nation missed the rest of God--it will not
   be a wonder if you and I miss it, who are but one or two, unless we
   take earnest heed and are filled with fear--"lest, a promise being left
   us of entering into His rest, any of us should seem to come short of
   it."

   III. So now, thirdly, I am going to put my finger upon THE FATAL CAUSE
   OF THIS DIREFUL CALAMITY.

   Why was it the Gospel that they heard did not profit them?

   Assuredly it was not the fault of the Gospel which they heard. In
   itself it is calculated to profit all who receive it. It promised
   liberty and this should have made them gratefully obedient. It promised
   an inheritance and added to it a high and holy calling, and this should
   have aroused their loftiest aspiration. It promised every help to the
   getting of the promised blessings and what could they have more?

   Concerning the Gospel which I have preached to you, I can truly say
   that if you miss blessedness, it is not because you are straitened in
   the Gospel, or are discouraged by the narrowness of the Lord's Grace--

   "What more can He say,

   Than to you He has said?"

   What larger provision, what greater promise can God give to guilty man
   than this--"He that believes in Him has everlasting life"? Pardon of
   sin, justification of your persons, salvation of your souls and
   everlasting bliss--what more can be set before you? If this does not
   touch you, what will?

   In their case it was not the fault of the preacher. For Moses spoke
   God's Word with great meekness and gentleness. He set before them the
   Truth of God with all fidelity. With all my imperfection, I hope I can
   say, also, that if you die in the wilderness I am clear of your blood.
   For I have warned you to escape and I have bid you seek, first, the
   kingdom of God and His righteousness. Neither was it the fault of a
   lack of confirming signs from God. No default of Divine working
   hindered Israel's faith. God worked with His Gospel in those days very
   mightily.

   The daily manna and the water leaping from the rock, with other signs
   and wonders, went to prove the Word of the Lord. If men do not believe
   the Gospel of Christ, it is not because it does not work wonders still.
   You have seen others converted. You have seen others die in perfect
   peace. You have seen what the Lord can do for His believing people. And
   if you believe not, you will die in your sins. I have heard much of
   "honest doubt." But I honestly believe that much of doubt is the most
   dishonest thing out of perdition. Take heed that you are not hardened
   by the deceitfulness of this sin. It will ruin you if you indulge in
   it. "Believe and live," is the Gospel. "Doubt and die," is the
   alternative.

   Neither was it for lack of the Holy Spirit that these people made the
   Gospel a failure to them. For we read that the Holy Spirit spoke to
   them and they rebelled and vexed the Holy Spirit. It was the Holy
   Spirit who spoke to them and said, "Today, if you will hear His voice,
   harden not your hearts." That same Holy Spirit is with the Gospel
   still. Oftentimes He stirs your hearts and moves you even to tears--He
   makes deep impressions and causes you to long after better things.
   Quench not the Spirit. Grieve not the Spirit of God. If He leaves you,
   you are lost forever. And He may do so. God grant this may not be the
   case!

   Well, then, what was the cause? We put our finger on it at once--"Not
   being mixed with faith in them that heard it." Where there is no faith
   in the Gospel, no good consequence can possibly come of it. If it were
   preached to you by angels--yes, if one arose from the dead and
   proclaimed it to you--if you believed it not, what could be the
   beneficial effect of hearing it?

   Men, why do you hear it, if you do not mean to believe it? If you will
   be damned, why do you throng this place to hear about salvation? If you
   are resolved that you will not have the promise of God, why come and
   listen to His servant, who has nothing else to tell you? Are we set up
   to be as marionettes, or dancing dolls, for you to stare at? God forbid
   that we should ever accept the calling of actors in a play. If we do
   not win your hearts for Christ and so save you, we have labored in vain
   and spent our strength for nothing.

   See the effect of absence of faith and lament it. Where there is no
   faith, men remain slaves to the present. If they did not believe in the
   milk and honey of Canaan, you see why they hankered for the cucumbers
   of Egypt. An onion is nothing comparable to an estate beyond Jordan.
   Yet as they think they cannot get the estate, they pine for the onions.
   When men do not believe in eternal life, they naturally enough cry,
   "Give me bread and cheese. Let me have a fortune here." They keep their
   nose to the grindstone, always thinking about this passing life,
   because they do not heartily believe in Heaven and its glories. They
   are as "dumb driven cattle" that see not into another state--this life
   seems real to them but the next life they suspect to be a dream. As
   long as there is no faith, this world is all and the world to come is
   nothing at all.

   If a man hears and has no faith, he learns nothing. What would be the
   use of your listening to lectures upon science if you disbelieved what
   the professor set forth? You are no pupil, you are a critic. And you
   cannot learn. Many professors have no faith and, consequently, whoever
   may teach them, they will never come to a knowledge of the Truth of
   God. Israel never saw through the almost transparent veil of the types
   because they did not believe. If they had believed, they would have
   discovered under every symbol a world of wondrous meaning, instructing
   them in the things of God. Want of faith means want of eye and want of
   perception.

   The Truth of God's Word did not affect the hearts of Israel, as it does
   not affect any man's heart till he has believed it. If there is a
   goodly heritage and I believe it, then I long for it, then I strive for
   it. But if it is to me as an idle tale, it does not affect me one whit.
   If there is liberty for the captive, I desire it and I cry to God to
   give it to me. But if I do not believe that escape is possible, I shall
   sit down in despair. If I believe the Gospel, it affects my life, it
   changes my character--it takes me down from false hope and it lifts me
   up to a surer confidence.

   Only that which is believed can operate upon our spiritual nature. As
   light is of no use if we cannot see, so is the Gospel of no service if
   we have no eye of faith. The Gospel plays on a man like some mighty
   minstrel upon his harp. It touches every string of our soul. The Master
   sometimes stays His hand to tune each string, that it may yield the
   right note. And this once done, what angel voices sing amid those
   strings! A man's soul touched by the finger of the Gospel resounds the
   music of God! If the Gospel is not believed, those fingers touch mute
   strings and no response is heard.

   A man that has no faith in what he hears does not appropriate it. One
   cries, "There is gold! Let me go and get it." Unbelief restrains him,
   as it whispers, "There is no gold, or it is beyond reach." He does not
   go to get it, for he does not believe. A hungry man passes by where
   there is entertainment for needy travelers. Believing that there is
   food for his hunger, he tarries at the door. But if unbelief mutters,
   "There is a bare table within, you might as soon break your neck as
   break your fast in that place," then the traveler hurries on.

   Unbelief palsies the hand and it appropriates nothing. That which is
   not appropriated can be of no use to you. Look at your food. How is it
   that it builds up your body? Because you take it into the mouth and it
   descends into the stomach and there it is mixed with certain fluids and
   is digested and ultimately is taken up into the system and becomes a
   life-sustaining force. Being properly mixed, it is taken up and
   assimilated. And so it is with the heavenly Truth of God--if it is
   taken into the heart and then mixed with faith, it is digested and
   becomes food to every part of the spiritual nature. Without faith the
   Gospel passes through the soul undigested and rather feeds disease than
   promotes life. O my Hearers, what a dreadful lack is the lack of faith!

   Lastly, these people could not enter in because they had no faith. They
   could go to the border of the land but they must die even there. They
   could send their spies into the country. But they could not see the
   fertile valleys themselves. Without faith they could not enter Canaan.
   Shall it be so with us, that, for want of faith, we shall hear the
   Gospel, know something about its power and yet miss its glories and
   never enter into possession of the life eternal which it reveals? Here
   is the point--"They could not enter in because of unbelief."

   With two practical points I will conclude. One is this--see the great
   value of hearing the Gospel. Do hear it as often as you can. Do not get
   into the sluggish habit of those who are content with one spiritual
   meal for the whole week. Once on the Sabbath is enough for many
   nowadays. Hear as often as you can. On the weeknights come out to hear
   the Word. I may not long be able to preach it, nor you to hear it. Hear
   it often, for one of these days it may be blessed to your soul, if it
   has not been so as yet.

   What a mercy to have your hearing! Dear Friends, who used to hear me
   preach and are now very old, come to me in the vestry with sad faces
   and say, "I cannot hear even you now." When the eyesight also begins to
   fail, as it does in some cases and thus they are deprived of reading as
   well as of hearing, it is a double trial. You will miss the Gospel if
   ever it comes to that with you, as it may in old age. Be sure that you
   hear and read while you can and thus store up God's Word in your mind.

   Also, pray our Lord to raise up more preachers of the Gospel--they are
   few enough. "Pray you the Lord of the harvest that He will send forth
   laborers into His harvest." Pray much for those who preach the Gospel
   faithfully, that they may be kept true to the Bible and honest to
   souls. The Gospel is getting more and more adulterated. One of these
   days you will want a microscope to find a grain of evangelical doctrine
   in a dozen sermons. Indeed, the small proportion of Gospel to a sea of
   words is often like one homeopathic globule in the Atlantic ocean.
   There is so little of it. God grant that we may have the Gospel
   preserved to us and be enabled to hear it!

   But still, the great necessity is faith. Instead of speaking upon that
   subject, let me beg you to try and do a little mixing at once. Don't
   mix philosophy with the Gospel--by the help of God's Spirit mix faith
   with it. Before us is the glorious Word made flesh, in the eternal Son
   of God in our nature! He lives for men. He dies to make atonement for
   sin. Even He cannot save you unless you now mix faith with all those
   truths about Him which the Scriptures teach you.

   Now mix faith with what you know concerning the Savior and say, "Lord,
   I believe that You are the Son of God. I believe that You did live a
   perfect life, which is our righteousness. I believe that You did die a
   painful death, which brings us pardon. I believe that You ever live to
   intercede. I trust my soul in Your hands." That is mixing faith with
   the Gospel and you will in this fashion richly profit by the Gospel.
   You will go your way a saved man.

   There is proclaimed in the Gospel the pardon of sin. The Lord blots out
   the sins of His believing people like a cloud. Mix faith with that
   doctrine and say, "Lord, I believe that You can put away all my sins
   through Jesus Christ. You can

   wash away my crimson stains and scarlet spots and make me whiter than
   snow. Lord, I trust You to do this. I rely upon You for the forgiveness
   of my transgressions!" By this act of faith you will be profited by the
   promise and pardon, for you are pardoned the moment you believe in Him
   who is exalted on high to give repentance and remission of sins.

   Try what you can do with eternal life itself. Say, "Lord, I believe
   that there is a spiritual life which You do breathe into Believers. I
   believe that this grows from Divine Grace to Glory. You give to
   Believers eternal life even here--death cannot kill it and so they live
   on and on and on, throughout eternity, forever blessed in Christ. I
   believe in the new creation. I appropriate it. I trust in Jesus for it.
   This heritage is mine! By faith I take it to myself." God will never
   take away what you can grasp by faith. Accept it and the acceptance
   makes it yours--for the Lord Himself made it yours long ago in His
   eternal purpose and, therefore, He has given you faith as a token that
   He ordained Heaven and perfection to be yours.

   Mix faith with every promise. Henceforth continue to practice the holy
   art of mixing faith with the revelations of Scripture. Compound them as
   the dispensers do. Here is a choice drug but it wants mixing with its
   proper affinity. The promise must be mixed with faith if it is to be
   life-giving to the soul. Mix it, then, with faith and be profited
   immediately and eternally. Be united to the Truth of God and it will
   save you. Let it come into union with you and you will never perish.
   The Lord help you to be joined unto His Truth by faith, for Christ's
   sake! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

A Delicious Experience

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S DAY MORNING, JUNE 16, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "For we which have believed do enter into rest, as He said, As I have
   sworn in My wrath, if they shall enter into My rest." Hebrews 4:3.

   LAST Sabbath we meditated upon the fact that those who came out of
   Egypt did not enter into the rest of God. "They could not enter in
   because of unbelief." Today I shall not seek so much to warn as to
   encourage, while we look at the way by which we can enter into the true
   rest. The faithful minister of God should be like the parent birds,
   who, when their young are old enough for flight, sometimes drive them
   from the nest to make them fly. And, at other times, go before them,
   twittering and stretching out their wings, to tempt their callow
   offspring to try the air.

   Thus, at times, we endeavor to drive you to and at others we try to
   draw you to the flight of faith. Knowing the terrors of the Lord, we
   persuade--knowing the joys of true religion, we entreat. By all means
   we would induce men to quit the nest of their old trust and fly to
   Christ by faith. If God will bless the Word, so that you put your trust
   in Christ, we shall be content. No, more--our cup will run over with
   gratitude for your salvation.

   In the text, we have a declaration of experience, "We which have
   believed do enter into rest," to which is very singularly added, "As he
   said, As I have sworn in my wrath, if they shall enter into my rest."
   The happy declaration is supported by the tremendous oath of judgment,
   which shut out the unbelieving race. There is usually a promise
   embedded in a threat, like gold in quartz--just as there is generally a
   threat as the reverse of the golden coin of promise. When we read, in
   the opening chapters of the Bible, "In the day that you eat thereof you
   shall surely die," it was implied, was it not, that if they did not eat
   they should live?

   Though that promise was not stated in words, it was implied in the
   threat. So here, when we read, "I have sworn in my wrath, if they shall
   enter into My rest," while we are taught that some could not enter in
   because of unbelief, it is implied in it that Believers would enter in.
   Those who have faith in the Divine promise shall enter in. If unbelief
   shuts men out, then faith is the door of entrance to those who have it.
   I beg you to grasp the kernel of promise which lies whole and safe
   within the shell of the threat.

   God swore of those unbelieving Jews that they should not enter in but
   He had declared that some should enter in. Therefore a promise is left
   which will be fulfilled in those who have faith and so are the true
   seed of faithful Abraham. These shall enter in. And certain of them in
   the text declare that they have done so--"We which have believed do
   enter into rest." I venture to say that the threat in this case even
   gives a touch of rose color to the promise, for it runs thus, "If they
   shall enter into My rest." Whereas the declaration only says,
   "rest"--"we which have believed do enter into rest," the word, "My" is
   added. That little word is like a bright gleam amidst the blackness of
   the tempest. Oh, the glory of that which God calls "My rest"!

   There is such a thing as the rest of God and there is such a thing as
   our entering into it. I call your attention to the fact that the two
   typical rests of the Old Testament were rests of God. And yet they were
   rests into which God's people were to enter. The first rest was the
   rest of creation. When God had finished all His work upon this
   habitable globe He rested. But what follows? "He rested on the seventh
   day and hallowed it." To what end? That we might rest also. "Remember
   the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shall you labor and do all
   your work--but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God."

   And therefore, because it is His Sabbath, He would have us share in it.
   "In it you shall not do any work." It was a day sacred to holy rest.
   God will not rest alone. He will have His people in fellowship with
   Him. "There remains a rest to the people of God"--because God has His
   Sabbath. The other rest was the promised land, of which Mount Zion was
   chosen to be the center. We read in Psalm 132, "For the Lord has chosen
   Zion. He has desired it for His habitation. This is

   My rest forever: here will I dwell. For I have desired it." Where the
   Lord rested, there He gave His people rest. For He adds, "I will
   abundantly bless her provision: I will satisfy her poor with bread."

   Thus God and His Church are associated in happy fellowship. Neither the
   day nor the land is used as a type of rest with reference to God alone.
   He will have His people enter into His rest.

   The true rest of God lies higher than times and places. The Lord God
   rests in the Person of Jesus--in Him He is well pleased. The Lord
   speaks of Him as, "My Elect, in whom My soul delights." In the Person
   of His Son, the heart of the Father finds perpetual joy--"This is My
   beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." But we also behold His
   Glory--"The glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace
   and truth." By faith we see that in Him which gives rest to our heart.
   Therefore was Jesus given--"This man shall be the peace." The Lord
   Jesus is our true Noah, in whom we find safety and rest. He was both
   given in birth and given up in death to be the rest of weary souls.

   Beloved, this morning I earnestly pray that you may be able to join in
   the declaration of the Apostle Paul in the words before us. Though
   nearly nineteen hundred years have passed away, it is still true of
   those who believe, that they enter into rest. Some of us are now
   resting where the Lord rests and our rest is daily deepening, so that
   before long it will only need a moment's change and we shall rest with
   God in Glory.

   May the Holy Spirit direct us, while we shall, first, notice the people
   to whom this experience is confined--"They which have believed do enter
   into rest." Secondly, the experience itself--"We do enter into rest."
   And thirdly, the personal assertion of this experience--we declare,
   without hesitation, that having believed we do enter into rest!

   I. Follow me in meditation and may the Spirit of God bless it to our
   souls, while we consider THE PEOPLE TO WHOM THIS EXPERIENCE IS
   CONFINED. They rest and no one else--they rest, because they have
   believed. As surely as unbelief shuts out, so surely does faith shut
   in.

   What is to believe? To believe is, first of all, to accept as true, the
   Revelation of God. To give unfeigned assent and consent to all that God
   has made known in His Word and especially to believe that He was, "in
   Christ Jesus, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their
   trespasses unto them." We cannot take the further step of trust unless,
   first, we give credence to the testimony of God. In reference to the
   work of our Lord Jesus, we must, first, accept the facts concerning Him
   and the witness of God about Him or we cannot go further. What God says
   is true and to us it is true because God says it. We set to our seal
   that God Himself is true. We bow our judgments, our questionings, our
   consciences, our faith, before the Throne of the Lord God of Truth.
   This is an essential groundwork for saving faith.

   The operative point of faith is the next one--we trust ourselves with
   Him who is revealed--thus we carry our belief of Truth of God to its
   practical conclusion. We come--just as we are--to the Savior who bids
   us come. We rely for our salvation and acceptance with God upon the
   Lord Jesus Christ as the Father reveals Him. We see in Him God's
   appointed Messenger of Divine Grace. We perceive Him to be our Covenant
   Head and representative and we rejoice to stand or fall with Him.
   Chiefly do we receive Him as our Substitute and, in consequence, our
   Sacrifice. We believe in Him as bearing our sins in His own body on the
   tree--as made sin for us, though He knew no sin--that we might be made
   the righteousness of God in Him.

   It is of the essence of faith that we trust ourselves with the Lord
   Jesus, because of His finished work on our behalf. We trust Jesus in
   the faithfulness of God to the promises made to us in Christ Jesus. We
   lean upon the sure Word of God and work of Jesus. He has not the faith
   which will bring him to Heaven who does not wholly trust himself with
   God in Christ Jesus. Out of this trust must come action agreeable
   thereunto. He that trusts Christ appropriates to himself the blessings
   contained in Him and henceforth they become his heart's treasure. And
   this changes the whole tone of his life.

   He that trusts in Christ becomes obedient to his Savior's Word--just as
   the sailor who trusts his pilot yields to him the steering of the ship.
   He that has real faith in the unseen is willing to forego the pleasure
   and the profit of that which is seen and temporal, so far as it comes
   in conflict with that kingdom of God. He sees all that he needs in
   Jesus and sets great store by Him. For he believes that, "it pleased
   the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell. And of His fullness
   have all we received and grace for grace." Faith is an eye to see with
   and a hand to grasp with.

   Faith joyfully accepts all that Jesus brings her and for His sake she
   quits all other confidences. To be married to Christ, she forsakes all
   other trusts and delights. This leads the Believer to flee from sin--he
   sees that no good can come thereby but only deadly evil. Moved by
   gratitude, he reckons himself dead to the world, because Jesus
   died--and alive unto God, because the life of Christ has quickened him.
   This leads to a daily rejoicing in Christ. For in proportion as we

   trust the Lord and are governed by that trust, we become happy in the
   Lord. When we can say, "He is all my salvation and all my desire," we
   shall not be afraid even on our death bed. So far as I am trusting, I
   am resting.

   According to the statement of the writer of this Epistle, faith,
   wherever it exists, brings with it rest. Let me sketch three or four
   cases in proof, such as I have seen myself. Yonder is a man who has
   come to a right idea of his guilt before God. He went on merrily enough
   for years, till the Holy Spirit shone into his soul and caused him to
   see the evil of his life. He began to think. Looking back upon his past
   conduct, he became uneasy. He felt that he had lived without God and
   therefore he had lived an unprofitable life towards his best Friend. He
   became greatly disturbed in spirit, not only by day but even by
   night--his dreams were tinctured with fear. He felt that he was all
   wrong and he feared he could never be set right.

   In such a condition rest is out of the question! What is to be done? In
   eager desire he goes from one place of worship to another and he reads
   the Scriptures and godly books. But he finds no rest and he will find
   none until he begins to see Jesus. How often have I seen the
   enlightenment which comes of faith, when a man sees that God is full of
   love towards him, that He is willing to receive him guilty as he is and
   to blot out all his sin for Jesus' sake. When a convicted sinner
   realizes that Christ on the tree bore the penalty of his
   transgressions--then, I say, an enlightenment comes over his soul!

   I have seen the countenance transfigured as the Divine witness has
   shone into the mind. It has been to the man as when the sun arises and
   the shadows flee. When his heart has said, "Christ for me," then has He
   led His captivity captive. An overpowering delight has filled the soul,
   has flashed from the eyes, shone forth in every feature and overflowed
   at the lips. Oh, the joy of knowing by faith that Christ has saved me,
   that in him I am reconciled to God! Nothing else will give us this rest
   but confidence in God in Christ Jesus.

   Observe another case. This person was once a Christian professor,
   leading the way in public service. But he declined gradually and at
   last he fell into grievous open sin. He has been cut off from the
   visible Church. And necessarily so, for he has wandered into sinful
   habits and mixed with evil associates. He is ill at ease. Like an
   unquiet spirit, he is seeking rest and finding none. If there had been
   nothing of Divine Grace in his heart, he might have been satisfied with
   the husks of the world. But he has enough Grace remaining in him to
   make him miserable.

   His foot finds no resting place. He is not willing, as yet, to go back
   to the Church. And yet he cannot be content away from the fold. He is
   as a bird which has wandered from its nest, or a dog which has lost its
   master. It is only as that man beholds again the vision of the
   Crucified Lover of his soul that he will see a hope of rest. He must
   again see his God, clothed in human flesh, bleeding and dying for him.
   In that sight, alone, will he find a window opened in Heaven through
   which a backslider's prayer may enter. It is the eye of Jesus which
   makes Peter repent and the voice of Jesus which makes Peter confess his
   love.

   I invite any who are in a backsliding condition to come with weeping to
   the pardoning Savior. Do not distrust Him because of your sin but trust
   Him because of His merit. Come back, come back to your first Husband.
   For it was better with you then than now! Say, "Return unto your rest,
   O my Soul, for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you." Turn to the
   way of faith, for this is the homeward path.

   I have seen the like result of faith in another case, which is very
   different from the last. A Christian man endowed with large power of
   thought, in an evil hour, quitted his moorings and drifted out into the
   deep. He saw others sailing on the great and wide sea and he thought it
   a brave thing to imitate them. Today he has lost his compass and does
   not believe in his chart. He neither knows what he does believe, nor
   what he should believe--his intellect is like a carousel-- his belief
   twists about like a weathercock. All around him is a haze and all
   beneath him is quicksand. He fears that before long there will remain
   in his mind no capacity to separate fact from fiction. He fears that
   there is no truth. All doctrine has become to him as the baseless
   fabric of a vision. Only one thing he knows--he is not happy and he
   views with regret the restfulness of former days. My distracted
   Brother, your only hope of intellectual rest lies in believing your
   God. Oh, that you would subject your intellect to the Holy Spirit!
   Come, cast away your pride and sit at the feet of Jesus. Become a
   little child, that you may enter the kingdom.

   Have you not had enough of this plague of the period--the thing which
   betrays its character by calling itself "honest doubt"? While you are
   your own guide, you will go astray. But when you will place your hand
   in that Hand which bears the nail print, you shall be safe and happy.
   Then will you sing, "He leads me beside the still waters." There is
   sound intellectual rest to be had by him who will submit himself to the
   infallible teaching of God and will wait from day to day

   upon the Holy Spirit for light upon his path. "We which have believed
   do enter into rest," and the rest is not that of ignorance and
   agnosticism but of clear knowledge, for we know and have believed the
   love which God has towards us.

   Our standing is on the rock of a revelation which has been made over
   again in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. While those who rely on their
   culture are as boats driven upon the rocks, we stand on safe ground and
   are not shaken.

   Let me give you one more picture. Tread softly, for the shadow of death
   is over yonder bed! Weakness will scarce bear the sound of your
   footfall. His pulse is faint and few, the man is dying! Look at how his
   tender wife wipes the death sweat from his brow! Come here, you
   philosophers and cheer his last hours with the joys of evolution! Come,
   you advocates of a new theology and cheer him with your criticisms!
   Poor Heart, he sees no consolation in all that you can set before him.
   He turns himself to the Lord Jesus and cries--"Hold Your Cross before
   my closing eyes. Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies.
   Heavens' morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee--in life, in
   death, O Lord, abide with me."

   If he can but see "the sacred Head once wounded," he will have rest.
   How sweet! How deep! How perfect that rest will be! Men die not when
   they breathe their last with the living Savior near them. In unruffled
   calm the spirit takes its flight from earth and that Word is fulfilled,
   "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth. Yes, says
   the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors." Behold, how they
   bathe their souls in seas of heavenly rest. They have obtained joy and
   gladness--and sorrow and sighing have fled away. In ten thousand
   thousand instances they that have believed have, even in their mortal
   agony, entered into rest. Blessed be the Lord for this!

   Thus have I set before you who these people are. They are not those who
   merely talk of religion but they have true faith in God. They do not
   hesitate and delay but they have once and for all believed and are now
   walking by faith. They are not questioners--they believe God with a
   simple, child-like confidence. These are they that enter into rest and
   nobody else will ever do so. I wish some of you would take this
   decisive step and end this wretched pretense of wisdom, this
   self-conceited trust in "culture"--for it will be your greatest gain in
   life to trust your God and enter into rest.

   II. Our second point is THE EXPERIENCE ITSELF--"We which have believed
   do enter into rest." I shall now speak of what I know of a surety and
   of what many of you know, also. We will propound no theory and indulge
   no imagination but keep to matters of fact.

   Wherein do we rest? Brethren, we rest where God rests--that is in the
   Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. What a wondrous Personality we see in
   Him! As God, He is the infinite delight of the Father. As personified
   Wisdom, our Lord Jesus says, "I was by Him, as one brought up with Him;
   and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him." We cannot
   tell how much the Father loves Him and how perfectly He rests in Him.
   When God looked upon fallen man He could not rest in him, for it
   repented Him that He had made man upon the face of the earth. There was
   one Man, only, upon whom the Father's eye rested with pleasure. And
   even in the foresight of His birth and death He took pleasure in Him.

   When Noah presented the sacrifice which symbolized the atonement, we
   read that the Lord smelled a sweet savor of rest. The Father takes an
   intense delight in the glorious Person of the Lord Jesus. He cannot
   rest in the creation which is made subject to vanity. He cannot rest in
   fallen man but He rests in One that is near akin to Him and at the same
   time near akin to us. Jesus counts it not robbery to be equal with God
   and yet counts it not beneath Him to be made like ourselves. To the
   Father and to us He is the place of our common rest. How happy are we
   to find rest in a Person! This is warm and substantial comfort. You
   cannot rest in the words of a doctrine as you can in the bosom of a
   person.

   Take a poor child that is lost in the street. Talk to it upon cheering
   themes. These ought to comfort it. But the little one goes on crying.
   Sing to it and reason with it. It is all in vain. Run, fetch its
   mother! See how it smiles! It nestles in her bosom and is at rest. A
   person yields to heart comfort. So it is with our Lord Jesus Christ. In
   life, in death--it is a delightful thought that our salvation rests in
   the hands of a living, loving Personality. We depend upon a Divine and
   human Person, an accessible Helper, to whom we may come at all times.
   Oh, yes, "we which have believed do enter into rest" in the Person of
   the Well-beloved!

   Next, we rest in His work. That work I can only roughly outline to you.
   It was a life of perfect obedience, completed by a death of shame and
   agony. The life and the death were all for us--in our place He obeyed
   and suffered. "It pleased the Father to bruise Him. He has put Him to
   grief." And because of that bruising and grief, it is written, "The
   Lord is well pleased for His righteousness' sake. He will magnify the
   Law and make it honorable." Sinners are reconciled to God

   and all offense is removed. Such rest does the Father find in the life
   and death of His well-beloved Son that He raised Him from the dead and
   set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places. God rests in the
   work of Christ. And so do we.

   Beloved, when you get a faith's view of the work of the Redeemer, do
   you not feel that all your fears and forebodings are sweetly laid to
   rest? The full Atonement, the perfect Righteousness, the glorious
   Victory, are not these quiet resting places? The Covenant of Grace and
   all the blessings it contains--are not these a joy forever? Can you not
   say of the Word of the Lord--

   "My faith can on this promise live, Can on this promise die"?

   I scarcely need to mention, as a separate item, the perpetual life of
   Christ. We have not a dead Savior. I heard one speaking about the blood
   of Christ as a dead thing. But indeed that in which we trust has a
   living efficacy. Beloved, the blood of Christ is the blood of a living
   Christ. He died but not as a bullock dies at the altar. For He died to
   live again, which the bullock could not do. We trust in Him who lives
   and was dead and is alive forevermore. Because He lives we shall live,
   also. Lift up your eyes and see your Lord upon the Throne! Behold Him
   risen from the dead and know that He is coming soon, in all His Glory,
   to receive you unto Himself. I ask you if you cannot find perfect rest
   in the thought that He ever lives and is therefore able to save to the
   uttermost?

   Yes, preach Christ to the soul--He is true balm for its wounds. The
   love of Jesus is a pillow for every aching head. Let our Lord be near
   and, like John, we find rest upon His bosom. Do you ask me what is
   comprehended in this rest? I answer--all things. Here we lay every
   burden down. Personally I do at this moment rest in Jesus as to all the
   past. Whatever there has been of sin to grieve over, whatever of
   mistakes, folly, or wrong--all this is no more my load, for it was laid
   on Jesus as my Scapegoat and He carried it away into the wilderness of
   forgetfulness. He has finished transgression and made an end of sin.

   I also rest in Him in reference to the present. Whatever there may be
   of evil currently, or of need pressing, or of danger secret, or of
   slander foul, I leave all with Him in whom my soul reposes, who says to
   me, "Let not your heart be troubled." They say there is a skeleton in
   every closet. I know of none in mine--yes, though I walk through the
   valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil. We are set free from
   present fret and worry by that dear hand which rules all things and
   causes all things to work together for good. Concerning today we enter
   into rest.

   But there is the future. We foolishly try to look through the veil
   which hides the morrow from our view. But it is all in vain. Why should
   we wish to know what God conceals? It is known to our Father in Heaven.
   And that is enough for our faith. We can leave the future where we
   leave the past. He that believes thus enters into rest as to the past,
   the present and the future. We cast all our care on our Lord, for He
   cares for us. The poor commits himself unto God. And when he has so
   done, he is quiet and his soul is even as a weaned child. I see no
   cloud in my sky--Jesus fills it all. How can the children of the
   bride-chamber mourn while the Bridegroom is with them? Let us rest and
   rejoice.

   What are the excellencies of this rest which comes by believing? I
   answer, they are very many. It brings us honor. "Unto you that believe,
   He is an honor." It is a glorious thing to rest where God rests. Many
   people would give their eyes to be invited to stay with the Queen. But,
   oh, to dwell where God dwells, and to rejoice where God rejoices! Every
   Believer has this dignity.

   This rest is also a wonderful source of strength. When the tree strikes
   deep root it gets vigor for fruitage. No man has any great power to
   work successfully while he is worried. The fulcrum must rest, or the
   lever will not work. Fret creates a great leakage in a man and his
   force runs away uselessly. But when care is ended and he enters into
   rest with Christ, then all the force and energy of his being turns to
   holy service for God and man. Rest in Christ Jesus also gives an
   incentive to diligence. For we feel that since we have such sweet rest
   ourselves, we would wish others to have it. We tell the news which
   gladdens us. We cannot hide from the multitudes around us the glad
   tidings which have charmed away our griefs.

   This rest also brightens life. When you enter into rest, life is not a
   dull and dreary round, such as the blind horse finds at the mill. Life
   is not a chain, which we must drag behind us--but wings on which we
   soar into the joyous blue and hold converse with the choristers of
   Heaven. I know not how to express my thankfulness that ever I had a
   being, seeing it is crowned with well-being in Christ Jesus. I could
   not say, "It is something better not to be." No, No, life is a favor
   now that I know my Lord. This rest in Christ is a fair foretaste of
   Heaven. We eat from the tables of celestials. "Men

   did eat angels' food" in the wilderness. And so do we today. We drink
   from the chalices of the glorified. When you rest in Christ you know
   what Heaven's repose must be like and your heart is glad.

   What are the limits of this rest? We may place them where we
   will--"According to your faith, so be it unto you." "We which have
   believed do enter into rest." It is an entrance and no more as yet. But
   when an Israelite had an entrance into Canaan, it was his own fault if
   he did not penetrate the interior and traverse the land from Dan to
   Beersheba. "Ask, and you shall receive." "All things are possible to
   him that believes." If you are not perfectly restful, it is not the
   fault of the rest. If you are not as restful in heart as saints in
   Heaven, you have only yourself to blame.

   You have the same ground for rest as they have and the same Lord by His
   Presence and power to work repose in your spirit--

   "How sweetly rest Your saints above, Which in Your bosom lie! The
   Church below does rest in hope Of that felicity."

   There is not a joy in the Covenant of Grace but what you may have, if
   you have faith enough to lay hold upon it. There is an unlimited range
   of bliss before you--arise and take possession in the name of God. For
   it is all yours.

   But still, for the most part here below all that we can get is an
   entrance--and we are happy if it is administered to us abundantly. We
   cross the threshold of our Father's house and take the first chair in
   the first room we come to--this is a great privilege. But let us go
   further in and press into His Presence-chamber. Anyhow, let us say, "I
   will dwell in the house of the Lord forever."

   III. Under the third head I must draw your attention to THE PERSONAL
   ASSERTION OF THIS EXPERIENCE--"We which have believed do enter into
   rest." I like the plain and positive speech of the Apostle for himself
   and his friends. If the Apostle had belonged to the same school as some
   of our good but weak Brethren, he would have said, "We that have
   believed hope that we may some day know a little of what the rest of
   faith means. We sometimes hope but more often fear. We are afraid to
   believe too certainly, lest it should be presumption. We sometimes
   indulge a faint hope that ultimately we may find rest."

   This is very weak milk-and-water, and no one will ever get much joy out
   of it. Let us attain to something better than this. Paul did not talk
   so. He said, "We which have believed do enter into rest"--and he said
   no more than is true. Some dog barks at me. I know what its bark means.
   My opponent cries, "You are too dogmatic and too positive." To which I
   reply, "I cannot help being dogmatic when I say that I see what I know
   I have seen, and I declare that I feel what I know I am feeling." Would
   you have me doubt my own consciousness? I know whether I am at rest or
   not.

   I do not invite any of you to say that faith gives you peace unless it
   does so. It must be a matter of fact. We want no empty profession. I
   remember hearing of a pious minister who was asked to speak one day
   upon the subject of joy in God. He stood up and said, "I am sorry that
   I have been requested to speak upon this topic. For the fact is, I am
   not walking in the light but I am crying, 'Restore unto me the joy of
   Your salvation.' I have grieved my heavenly Father and I am in the
   dark." He sat down and sobbed. And so did all his Brethren.

   This honest confession did far more good than if he had patched up a
   tale and told of some stale experience years before. If you have not
   entered into rest, do not say that you have. Fictitious experience is
   dangerous to the forger of it. Experience borrowed from other people is
   like the borrowed axe, sure to fall into the ditch and make its user
   cry, "Alas,"

   "Well," cries one, "we do not rest, we are hard at work for our Lord."
   And so am I. But this is rest to me, now that I am at peace with God.
   The labor of love for Christ is only another word for rest. He says,
   "Take My yoke upon you: and you shall find rest unto your souls." Carry
   Christ's burden and your shoulders shall have rest. We do not mean
   sleep or idleness when we speak of rest--that is not rest but rust. Our
   rest is found in the service of God.

   "Oh," says one, "I have such a world of trouble!" Do you think you are
   the only one? Some time ago I met with a certain younger brother who
   has been made to suffer through taking the right side in the Down-Grade
   controversy. He wrote to me of his sore trials. I sympathized with him.
   But I reminded him that he was not alone in them. When Monte-zuma was
   being roasted alive by the Spaniards, one of his nobles, who was being
   tortured with him, cried out in his agonies. The king bade him be
   quiet, adding, "Do you think that I am on a bed of roses?" No, my
   Friend, you are by no means alone.

   Tribulation is no strange thing to the favorites of Heaven. Is it,
   therefore, impossible to rest? By no means. Does not our Lord say, "In
   the world you shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer. I have
   overcome the world." The holy children enjoy their greatest peace in
   the seven-times heated furnace. Our greatest joys swim on the crests of
   the huge billows of trouble. Through much tribulation we come to the
   kingdom and even in the midst of that tribulation, we glory, since we
   enter into rest.

   "Oh," says one, "I find a conflict going on within me." Do you? So do
   I. Who does not feel a struggle while pressing forward towards
   perfection? Can there be rest where there is conflict? I answer,
   Assuredly. He that is at rest in his heart is the man to fight. While
   he cries, "O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body
   of this death?" he is able at once to add, "I thank God through Jesus
   Christ our Lord." "We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed."
   Our confidence in Christ is not shaken, though all confidence in
   ourselves is gone. The more we see of our wretchedness and vileness by
   nature, the more we rest in Jesus.

   "Oh," cries one, "sometimes my rest is broken." So it may be and yet
   you may have it still. Put the pieces together again and have them well
   riveted. Every now and then a child of God may fail as to the strength
   of his faith and then he loses rest for a while. But as the Object of
   his faith does not fail--since Jesus Christ is the same yesterday,
   today and for-ever--his rest soon comes back. Take down your harp. Your
   peace is like a river and it flows with fresh waters. We have peace and
   we must bear witness to it. For it is with many of us a matter of fact
   that by believing we enter into rest.

   This declaration, that we have rest, should always be made with a holy
   purpose. We must not go about boasting of our peace. That is what
   little children do who know no better--they say, "Look at my new
   shoes." There are many silly children nowadays who cry, "Look, how
   perfect I am!" Dear Child, it will be better for you to be seen and not
   heard. When you bear witness to your own enjoyment of the rest of
   faith, let it be your purpose, first, to glorify God who has given you
   this rest. And next, that you may convince others that such a rest is
   possible. How can we hope to convince others that there is the rest of
   faith, unless we enjoy it ourselves?

   Not long ago, one of our ministers was preaching upon salvation and the
   work of the Spirit in the heart, when one of the congregation rose and
   asked him respectfully, "Sir, do you know all this by the report of
   others, or has this taken place in your own experience?" The preacher
   was by no means put about by the question but rather rejoiced in it.
   For he could honestly reply, "I have trusted Christ. I am saved and I
   know and feel the peace which results therefrom." If he could not have
   made that solemn statement, he would have had no influence over the
   person who had put the question.

   If we show by our daily lives that we rest in Christ, we shall be more
   likely to draw troubled ones to Jesus. The man who was born blind, when
   his eyes were opened, did not hesitate to say, "One thing I know:
   whereas I was blind, now I see." This was a powerful argument to prove
   the power and Godhead of Him who had opened his eyes.

   Brethren, if you can say as much as this--"By believing I have entered
   into rest," be thankful. For this privilege is a gift of love. It is a
   wonderful instance of Sovereign Grace that such unworthy ones as we are
   should enter into God's rest. But if you cannot say it, do not despair.
   Make it a point of question with yourself, "Why cannot I thus speak?
   Why have I not entered into rest? Is it because I have not believed?"
   Perhaps some fault of character may prevent your enjoying perfect rest.
   See where that flaw is. Are you living in any sin? If so, the sun may
   have risen, but if there is a bandage over your eyes, you will still be
   in the dark. Get rid of that which blinds the eye.

   Or, are you trusting yourself as well as trusting in Christ? Are you
   relying on your experience? Then I do not wonder if you miss the rest
   of faith. Get rid of all that spoils the simplicity of your faith. Come
   to the Lord anew this morning. Possibly you are sickly in body and this
   may cause you discomfort for which you cannot otherwise account. Never
   mind, you may come just as you are, with all your sickness, weakness,
   or family trouble, and you may now rest in the Lord. Tell your grief to
   Jesus and He will breathe on you and say, "Peace be unto you."

   We ought to be at rest--we err when we are not. A child of God should
   not leave his bedroom in the morning without being on good terms with
   his God. We should not dare to go into the world and feel, "I am out of
   harmony with my Lord. All is not right between God and my soul." A
   husband, if perhaps he has had a difference with his wife, will not
   feel happy in going to business while that little cloud remains. In
   domestic life we are wise if we square all such matters before we
   separate. Let us part with a kiss.

   This method of unbroken fellowship should be carefully maintained
   towards God. Be at perfect rest with Him. "Acquaint yourself with Him
   and be at peace, for thereby good shall come unto you." Set all
   straight today so that you can

   say, "We which have believed do enter into rest." And when that is
   done, if anything should again happen to break the golden chain, renew
   it by faith. For by faith alone we stand. Destroy, by the power of
   God's Spirit, everything which weakens faith. For this will disturb
   your rest in God.

   Oh, that all the way between here and Heaven we may journey on with
   restful hearts, led beside the still waters! I have seen, in an old
   book, a portrait of Mr. Sibbs, the famous Puritan, and it says at the
   bottom of the likeness, "Heaven was in him before he was in Heaven."
   Now, that must be so with us--for nobody gets into Heaven who does not
   get Heaven into himself first. Oh, to get Heaven into us this morning
   and keep it there forever!

   "Alas," cries one, "I wish I had the rest you speak of but I cannot
   find it, though I study much and work hard." Hearken to a parable--A
   little bird of the air found itself in a Church. It was anxious to find
   its way into the open air and so it flew aloft among the great timbers
   of the roof, where it was half buried and almost blinded, by the dust
   which lay thick upon the beams. There were no seeds, nor fruits, nor
   waters in that dry and thirsty height. It then made a dash at a window,
   glorious with many colors. But it found no way of escape. It tried
   again and again and at last dropped stunned upon the pavement of the
   aisle.

   When it recovered itself a little, it did not again fly aloft. But
   seeing the door open upon the level of the floor, it joyfully flew
   through it into the open country. You are that bird. Your pride makes
   you deal with high things up there in the roof. You are blinding
   yourself among the lofty mysteries--there is no escape for you there,
   nor rest, nor even life. You seek a way through the glory of your own
   painted righteousness. But this will be death to you, if you persevere.

   Drop down upon the floor of honest confession and lowly penitence. Come
   to the ground by self-humiliation. When you get lower ideas of yourself
   you will see before you the open door--Christ Jesus. As soon as you see
   Him, use the wings of a simple faith and you are at liberty and no more
   a captive doomed to die. May God bring you down, that He may exalt you
   in due time, for Christ's sake! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

"Jesus Wept"

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S-DAY MORNING, JUNE 23, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLES NEWINGTON.

   "Jesus wept." John 11:35.

   A GREAT storm was stirring the mind of Jesus. We find, on looking at
   the original, that He was indignant and troubled. We have a very
   literal translation in the margin of the Revised Version. And instead
   of reading, "He groaned in the spirit and was troubled," we find it,
   "He was moved with indignation in the spirit and troubled Himself."
   What was this indignation? We cannot think that it was caused by the
   unbelief of His friends, or even by the pretended sympathy of those
   malicious Jews who hastened to accuse Him to the Pharisees.

   But we look further and deeper for the reason of this heat. He now
   stood face to face with the last enemy, death. He saw what sin had done
   in destroying life and even in corrupting the fair handiwork of God in
   the human body. He marked, also, the share which Satan had in all this
   and His indignation was aroused. Yes, His whole nature was stirred.
   Some read it, "He roused Himself," instead of reading, as we have it in
   our version, "He was troubled." Certainly, there would seem to be an
   active sense in the expression--it was not so much that He was
   troubled, as that "He troubled Himself."

   The waters of His soul were clear as crystal, and therefore when
   troubled, they were not muddied. Yet they were all stirred. It could be
   seen that His holy Nature was in a ferment and an inarticulate
   expression of distress fell from Him. Between indignation at the powers
   of evil, grief for the family who had been bereaved by death, sorrow
   over those who stood by in unbelief and a distressing realization of
   the effects of sin, the Lord's heart was evidently in a great storm.

   Instead of the thunder of threat and the lightning of a curse, all that
   was perceptible of the inward tempest was a shower of tears. For "Jesus
   wept." A hurricane rushed through His spirit. All the forces of His
   soul were disturbed. He shuddered at the sight which was about to be
   set before Him. He was thrilled from head to foot with emotion. Yet the
   result of the storm was not a word of terror, nor a glance of judgment
   but simply a blessed shower of tears--"Jesus wept." If all our
   righteous indignation displayed itself in tears of pity, we should have
   fulfilled the text, "Be you angry and sin not."

   "Jesus wept." I have often felt vexed with the man, whoever he was, who
   chopped up the New Testament into verses. He seems to have let the
   hatchet drop indiscriminately here and there. But I forgive him a great
   deal of blundering for his wisdom in letting these two words make a
   verse by themselves--"Jesus wept." This is a diamond of the first water
   and it cannot have another gem set with it, for it is unique. Shortest
   of verses in words but where is there a longer one in sense? Add a word
   to the verse and it would be out of place. No, let it stand in solitary
   sublimity and simplicity. You may even put a note of exclamation after
   it and let it stand in capitals, "JESUS WEPT!"

   There is infinitely more in these two words than any sermonizer, or
   student of the Word, will ever be able to bring out of them, even
   though he should apply the microscope of the most attentive
   consideration. "Jesus wept." Instructive fact--simple but amazing--full
   of consolation--worthy of our earnest heed. Come, Holy Spirit and help
   us to discover for ourselves the wealth of meaning contained in these
   two words!

   We read of other men that they wept. Abraham, when he buried Sarah,
   wept. Jacob had power with the angel, for he wept and prevailed. Of
   David we are continually reading that he wept. His friend Jonathan and
   he once wept together and were not unmanned but were the more truly men
   for weeping. Of Hezekiah we read that he wept sorely and of Josiah that
   he poured forth tears over the sins of Judah. Jeremiah was a weeping
   Prophet. And I might continue the list, but if I did, it would not be
   at all remarkable that the sons of a fallen father should weep. With
   all the sin and sorrow that surrounds our manhood, it is no marvel that
   it should be said of any man, "He wept."

   The earth brings forth thorns and thistles and the heart brings forth
   sorrow and sighing. Is there a man or woman here who has not wept? Have
   we not all, sometimes, felt a sweet relief in tears? Looking round upon
   this great assembly, I could point to you, one by one, and say, "He
   wept and he wept. And she wept and she wept." And none would wonder
   that such has been the case. The marvel is that the sinless Son of God
   should, in the days of His flesh, know the meaning of strong crying and
   tears. The fact worthy to be noticed and recorded is that "Jesus wept."
   On that subject we shall meditate this morning. And may the Lord make
   our thoughts profitable!

   First, I would remind you that "Jesus wept," Because He was truly man.
   Secondly, "Jesus wept," for He was not ashamed of His human weakness,
   but allowed Himself to reveal the fact that He was, in this point also,
   made like unto His Brethren. Thirdly, "Jesus wept," and therein He is
   our Instructor. Fourthly, He is our Comforter. And lastly, He is our
   Example. We can only give a little space to each of these five things.

   I. First, "Jesus wept," for HE IS TRULY MAN. Many facts prove the
   completeness of our Lord's taking up of our nature. Not in phantasm,
   nor in fiction was Jesus a man. But in reality and truth He became one
   of us. He was born of a woman, wrapped in swaddling bands, fed from the
   breast. He grew as a child, was obedient to His parents and increased
   in stature and in wisdom. In manhood He worked, He walked, He wearied.
   He ate as we do--we find it mentioned that He fasted and that He
   hungered.

   After His resurrection He ate a piece of a broiled fish and of a
   honeycomb, to show that His body was real. His human nature was
   sustained, as ours is, by supplying it with food. Though on one
   occasion, sustained by Divine power, He fasted forty days and forty
   nights--yet as man He ordinarily needed food. He drank also and gave
   thanks both for food and drink. We find Him sleeping with His head upon
   a pillow and resting upon the curb of the well of Sychar. He suffered
   all the innocent infirmities of our nature. He was hungry and was
   disappointed when, early in the morning, He came to a fig tree seeking
   fruit but found none.

   He was weary--"Jesus, being wearied with His journey, sat thus on the
   well." That He thirsted we know, for He said to the Samaritan woman,
   "Give Me to drink." And on the Cross He cried in burning fever, "I
   thirst!" In all things He was made like His Brethren. "Himself took our
   infirmities and bore our sicknesses." His humanity was our humanity to
   the full, although without sin. Sin is not essential to humanity--it is
   a disease of nature. It is not a feature found in humanity, as though
   it came from the Creator's hand. The Man of men, in whom all true
   humanity is found in perfection, is Christ Jesus.

   The fact that Jesus wept is a clear proof of this. He wept, for He had
   human friendships. Friendship is natural to man. Scarcely is He a man
   who never had a friend to love. Men in going through the world make
   many acquaintances but out of these they have a few special objects of
   esteem whom they call friends. If they think to have many friends, they
   are, probably, misusing the name. All wise and good men have about them
   choice spirits with whom their communion is more free and in whom their
   trust is more confident than in all others.

   Jesus delighted to find retirement in the quiet home at Bethany. And we
   read that, "Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus." Alas, my
   Brethren, every friendship opens a fresh door for grief. For friends
   are no more immortal than ourselves. "Jesus wept" at the grave of His
   friend just as you and I have done and must do again. Behold your Lord,
   like David, weeping for His Jonathan, and see how human He is in His
   friendships.

   "Jesus wept," for He was truly human in His sympathies. He did not
   merely walk about among us and look like a man but at a thousand points
   He came into contact with us. Jesus was always in touch with sorrow.
   Happy are they that are in touch with Him! Our Lord saw Mary and Martha
   weeping and the Jews that were with her weeping and He caught the
   contagion of their grief--"Jesus wept." His sympathies were with
   sorrowing ones and for this reason, among others, He was Himself, "a
   Man of Sorrows, and acquainted with grief."

   He loved first His Father in Heaven, whose glory was His main object.
   But He loved intensely His chosen and His sympathy with them knew no
   bounds. "In all their afflictions He was afflicted." Jesus was far more
   tender towards humanity than any other man has ever been. He was the
   great Philanthropist. Alas, man is often the most cruel foe of man.
   None more unkind to man than men. Not the elements in their fury, nor
   wild beasts in their rage, nor diseases in their terror, have made such
   havoc among men as men drunk with the war spirit.

   When has there been such cruel hate on the part of the most savage
   monster towards man as has aged in the hearts of blood-thirsty
   warriors? To this hate our Lord was a perfect stranger. There was no
   flint in His heart. He was love and

   only love. And through His love He descended into the depths of grief
   with the beloved ones whose lot was sorrowful. And He carried out to
   the full that sacred precept, "Weep with them that weep." Jesus was no
   unsuffering seraph, no cherub incapable of grief, but He was bone of
   our bone, and flesh of our flesh. And therefore "Jesus wept."

   He was a man, dear Friends, for He was stirred with human emotion.
   Every emotion that ever thrilled through your bosom, so far as it is
   not sinful, has had its like in the bosom of the Lord Jesus Christ. He
   could be angry--we read in one place that, "He looked round about on
   them with anger." He could be pitiful. When was He not so? He could be
   moved with compassion for a fainting crowd, or with scorn of a crafty
   ruler. Did He not speak with great indignation of the scribes and
   Pharisees? Yet, was He not tender as a nurse with a child, when
   cheering the penitent?

   He would not break the bruised reed, nor quench the smoking flax. Yet
   He uttered faithful warnings and made terrible exposures of hypocrisy.
   Our Savior, at the moment described in our text, felt indignation,
   pity, love, desire and other emotions. He who is all heart of
   tenderness, was stirred from head to foot. He was troubled and He
   troubled himself. As when water is shaken in a vial, so was His whole
   nature shaken with a mighty emotion, as He stood at the grave of
   Lazarus, confronting death and him that has the power of it.

   Our Lord proved Himself a man when it was said that "Jesus wept." Note,
   too, that His pure body and His sinless soul were originally
   constituted as ours are. When His body was formed according to that
   Scripture, "A body have You prepared Me," that holy thing had in it the
   full apparatus of grief--the tear gland was in His eyes. Where there is
   no sin, one would say there should be no sorrow. But in the formation
   of that blessed body, all the arrangements for the expression of grief
   were as fully prepared as in the case of any one of us. His eyes were
   made to be fountains of tears, even as are ours. He had about His soul,
   also, all the capacity for mental grief.

   As I said before, so I say again, it would seem that there should be no
   tears where there are no transgressions. And yet the Savior's heart was
   made to hold sorrow, even as an amphora was made for wine. Yes, more,
   His heart was made capacious enough to be a reservoir wherein should be
   gathered up great floods of grief. See how the sorrow bursts forth in a
   mighty flood! Mark the record of that flood in these amazing words,
   "Jesus wept."

   Beloved, have a clear faith in the humanity of Him whom you rightly
   worship as your Lord and your God. Holding His Divinity without doubt,
   hold His manhood without mistake. Realize the actual manhood of Jesus
   in all lights. Three times we read He wept. Doubtless He sorrowed full
   often when He was not seen. But thrice He was known to weep. The
   instance in our text was the weeping of a Friend over the grave of a
   friend. A little further on, after a day of triumph, our Lord beheld
   the city and wept over it--that was the weeping of a Prophet concerning
   judgments which He foresaw.

   It is not recorded by any Evangelist, but Paul tells us, in the Epistle
   to Hebrews, that with strong crying and tears, He made appeal to Him
   that was able to save Him from death and was heard in that He feared.
   This third record sets forth the weeping of our Substitute, a
   sacrificial weeping, a pouring out of Himself as an oblation before
   God. Treasure up in your mind these three memories, the weeping of the
   Friend in sympathy with bereavement, the weeping of the Judge lamenting
   the sentence which He must deliver and the weeping of the Surety as He
   smarts for us, bearing griefs which were not His own, for sins in which
   He had no share. Thus thrice was it true that "Jesus wept."

   II. Now, let us change the line of our thought a little, while we say,
   "Jesus wept," that is, HE WAS NOT ASHAMED OF HIS HUMAN WEAKNESS. He
   could have repressed His tears--many men do so habitually. I do not
   doubt that there may be great sorrow, very great sorrow, where there is
   no open expression of it. In fact, most of you must have felt times
   when grief has struck you such a stunning blow that you could not weep,
   you could not recover yourself sufficiently to shed tears--the heart
   was all on fire with anguish and the eyes refused the cooling drops.

   The Savior could doubtless, if so He had wished, have hidden His grief.
   But He did not choose to do so, for He was never unnatural. As "the
   holy Child Jesus," He was free from pride and wore His heart where men
   could see it.

   For, first, remember His talk when He spoke to His disciples. He never
   concealed His poverty. There is an idea abroad that respectability is
   maintained by the pretense of riches, whereby real need is hidden. It
   is thought disreputable to seem to be poor, even when you are so. There
   may be something in the affectation but our Lord did not countenance
   such a course. For He said, "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have
   nests. But the Son of Man has not where to lay His head." Though He was
   rich, yet for our sakes He became poor and He was never ashamed to let
   it be known that He was poor.

   So, too, He was "despised and rejected of men," and He did not pretend
   to be unaware of it. He did not try to make out that He was exceedingly
   popular and that nobody had a word to say against Him. But He owned
   that they had called the Master of the house Beelzebub. He knew what
   they had called Him and He was not ashamed of being made the butt of
   ridicule and the target of reproach. When they ascribed His miracles to
   the power of Satan He met the charges with an overwhelming reply. But
   He was not ashamed that slander had befallen Him as well as poverty.

   As for His sufferings and death, how frequently do we find Him talking
   to His disciples about it, till Peter would have stopped Him if he
   could! Our Lord spoke of His being betrayed into the hand of sinners
   and despitefully entreated and spat upon. He spoke openly of His being
   "lifted up." He even dwelt upon the minute items of His coming
   passion-- He had no wish to deny the fate which He knew awaited Him.
   Why not die and say nothing about it, if so it must be? Not so the
   Savior. He has become a man and He is not ashamed at that which
   necessarily follows as a part of His humiliation. Being found in
   fashion as a man He becomes obedient to all that is required of His
   manhood and before all observers He takes His place in the ranks.
   "Jesus wept."

   Jesus wept on this occasion, although it might have been misunderstood
   and misrepresented. Do you not think that the Jews who stood there
   would sneeringly say, "See, He weeps! The miracle worker weeps! He
   calls Himself the Son of God and yet He stands weeping there like any
   ordinary man!" Here was opportunity for scorn at His manifest weakness
   and even for blasphemy at the evident token of it. But our Lord did not
   act upon policy. He allowed His true feelings to be seen. He did not,
   like the stoic, claim respect for His manhood by holding Himself within
   Himself and refusing to let men see that He was of like feelings with
   them. No, "Jesus wept."

   Tears may not be thought manly but they are natural to man and Jesus
   will not be unnatural. The enemies may say what they please, and even
   blaspheme both Him and His God. But He will not act a part in the hope
   of silencing them. He acts the truth, only, and weeps as His kind heart
   suggests. He thinks more of Mary and of Martha and the comfort His
   sympathy may yield them, than of the sneering language of unbelievers,
   which may forge an excuse for itself out of the loving weakness of His
   humanity.

   "Jesus wept," and thereby He revealed His love to Lazarus, so that
   others saw it and cried, "Behold how He loved him!" This is one proof
   that our Lord does not hesitate to declare His love to His people. When
   He sojourned upon earth He was not ashamed to find friends among
   ordinary mortals. Our glorious Lord, now that He is enthroned, "is not
   ashamed to call us Brethren." He is not ashamed to be written down in
   the same heavenly register as His poor people. His cheeks were bedewed
   with tears such as those which drop from our eyes, and by those tears
   all knew what manner of love He had towards His chosen.

   Blessed be His name! Many a great man might be willing to befriend a
   poor man with money but not with tearful love. But here the blessed
   Master, in the midst of the assembled multitude, owns dead and rotting
   Lazarus as His friend and seals the covenant of His love with tears.
   "Jesus wept"--He was not ashamed to own the affliction which sin caused
   to His holy soul--nor the gash which the sight of death made in His
   heart. He could not bear to see the grave and its corruption. May we
   never think of the sin and misery of our race without sorrow!

   I confess I can never go through this huge city without feeling
   unhappy. I never pass from end to end of London without feeling a black
   and dark cloud, hanging like a pall over my spirit. How my heart breaks
   for you, O sinful city of London! Is it not so with you, my Brethren?
   Think of its slums, its sins, its poverty, its ungodliness, its
   drunkenness, its vice! These may well go through a man's heart like
   sharp swords. How Jesus would have wept in London! He could not stand
   in the front of a lone grave, about to look upon a single corpse,
   without weeping.

   He saw in that one death the representation of what sin has done on so
   enormous a scale, that it is impossible to compute the devastation. And
   therefore He wept. What have you not done, O Sin! You have slain all
   these, O Death! What a field of blood has Satan made this earth! The
   Savior could not stand unmoved in the presence of the Destroyer, nor
   approach the gate of death's palace without deep emotion. Of this He
   was by no means ashamed. And therefore He did not hold back His
   tears--"Jesus wept."

   Brethren, holy emotion is not a weakness to be ashamed of. If at any
   time, in the midst of the world's wickedness and gaiety, you weep, do
   not hide those tears! Let the thoughtless see that there is one, at
   least, who fears God and trembles when the Holy One is provoked.

   "Jesus wept," though He was about to work a wonderful miracle. The
   glory of His Godhead did not make Him ashamed of His manhood. Singular
   thing, too, that He should weep just before the joy of raising the dead
   to life. He is God, for He is about to call Lazarus out of the grave.
   But He is man just as much as ever and therefore He weeps.

   Our Lord was as much man when He raised the dead as when He worked in
   the carpenter's shop at Nazareth. He was not ashamed to own His real
   manhood while He proved Himself the Resurrection and the Life. This day
   in the glory of Heaven He wears His scars, to show that, though God, He
   is not ashamed to be recognized as man. He makes this one of His
   glorious names--"I am He that lives and was dead. And, behold, I am
   alive forevermore." Therein He describes His connection with our
   manhood in life and in death. Beloved, "Jesus wept," to show that He
   did not disdain the feebleness of that nature which He had taken up,
   that He might redeem it unto God.

   Remember that our Lord Jesus exercised three years of ministry and each
   year was signalized by a resurrection. He began by raising the little
   daughter of Jairus, upon whose unmarred countenance death had scarcely
   set his seal. Then He went on to raise the young man at the gates of
   Nain, who was being carried out to his burial, dead but not yet
   corrupt. And now He consummates His Glory by raising this Lazarus, who
   had been dead four days already. Yet, when He came to this crowning
   marvel and thus displayed the perfection of His Godhead, He did not
   disdain to stand before all and weep. Jesus is the Resurrection and the
   Life, yet "Jesus wept."

   III. Thirdly, OUR LORD JESUS IS OUR INSTRUCTOR IN WEEPING. This is the
   most practical part of our discourse. Be sure that you receive it by
   the teaching of the Holy Spirit.

   Observe why Jesus wept and learn a lesson from it. He wept because this
   was His method ofprayer on this occasion. A great miracle was to be
   worked and great power was needed from on high--as man, the Lord Jesus
   cries to God with intense earnestness and finds the most fit embodiment
   for His prayer in weeping. No prayer will ever prevail with God more
   surely than a liquid petition, which, being distilled from the heart,
   trickles from the eye and waters the cheek. Then is God won when He
   hears the voice of your weeping.

   The angel at Peniel will slip from your dry hands. But moisten them
   with tears and you will hold him fast. Before the Lord Jesus puts forth
   the power which raises Lazarus from the grave, He appeals to God with
   strong crying and tears. The Father appears for His weeping Son. And
   you, dear Friends, if you want to win in prayer, must weep in prayer.
   Let your soul arouse itself to eager desire and trouble itself to
   anguish, and then you will prevail. "Jesus wept" to teach us how to
   baptize our prayers unto God in a wave of heart grief.

   "Jesus wept" again, because before He would arouse the dead He would be
   Himself aroused. A word of His could have worked the wonder--yes, His
   mere volition would have been enough. But for our instruction He did
   not make it so. There was a kind of evil which went not out but with
   prayer and fasting and here was a kind of death which would not yield
   unless the Savior groaned and wept. Without great exertion of the life
   of Jesus, the death in Lazarus could not be subdued. Therefore the Lord
   aroused Himself and stirred up all His strength, troubling all His
   being for the struggle on which He entered.

   Learn, therefore, my Brothers and Sisters, that if you think to do any
   great good in saving sinners, you must not be half-asleep yourself--you
   must be troubled even to tears. Perhaps the most difficult thing in
   winning souls is to get ourselves into a fit state. The dead may bury
   the dead but they cannot raise the dead. Until a man's whole soul is
   moved, he will not move his fellow. He might, possibly, succeed with
   those who are willing to be impressed. But the careless will be unmoved
   by any man who is unmoved himself. Tears storm a passage for warnings.
   If Christ's whole Self must be stirred before Lazarus is raised, we
   must be thrilled before we can win a soul.

   The fingers of decay are unwinding the goodly fabric which once was
   worn by the soul of Lazarus and no voice can effectually command them
   to pause but one which sounds forth from a bursting heart. That
   "stinking," of which Martha spoke, can only be turned into the sweet
   odors of grateful life by the salt tears of infinite love. It is still
   more so in our case. We must feel, if others are to feel. Come, my dear
   Sister, you that are going to the Sunday school class this afternoon,
   because you must go--you must not go in that spirit. You, my Brothers,
   who are going to preach or talk to your classes and have as yet only
   one eye open. This will never do.

   Your Lord was all alive and all sensitive and you must be the same. How
   can you expect to see His power exercised on others if you do not feel
   His emotion in yourselves? You must be quickened into tenderness as He
   was, or you will not receive His life-giving power. When I am weak,
   then am I strong. "Jesus wept" when He raised dead Lazarus.

   Jesus wept in full knowledge of several things which might have
   prevented His weeping. You have sometimes thought to yourself when
   weeping at the grave of a dear child, or wife, or husband, that you
   have been wrong in so doing. But this may not be the case. Our Savior
   wept, though He knew that Lazarus was safe enough. I do not know what
   had happened to the soul of Lazarus--where Scripture is silent it is
   not mine to speak. But, wherever He was, He was perfectly safe. And yet
   "Jesus wept."

   Moreover, Jesus knew that He was going to raise Lazarus to life--his
   resurrection was close at hand. And yet "Jesus wept." Sometimes we are
   told that if we really believed that our friends would rise again and
   that they are safe and happy even now, we would not weep. Why not?
   Jesus did. There cannot be any error in following where Jesus leads the
   way. Jesus knew, moreover, that the death of Lazarus was for the Glory
   of God--He had said, "This sickness is not unto death but for the Glory
   of God." And yet He wept! Have we not thought, "Surely it must be
   wicked to weep when you know that the bereavement will glorify God"?

   Not so, or else Jesus would not have wept under similar circumstances.
   Learn instruction--tears which else we might have regarded as
   contraband have now free admission into the realm of holiness, since
   "Jesus wept." Sister, you may weep, for Jesus wept. He wept, with full
   knowledge of the happiness of Lazarus, with full expectation of his
   resurrection and with the firm assurance that God was glorified even by
   his death--we may not, therefore, condemn what Christ allows.

   "Jesus wept," but He did not sin. There was not even a particle of evil
   in any one of the Redeemer's tears. Salt there may have been but not
   fault. Beloved, we can weep without sin. I do not suppose we have ever
   done so, but it is possible. It is not a sin to weep for those whom God
   has taken away from us, nor for those who are suffering. I will tell
   you why there was no sin in Christ's weeping--it was because He wept in
   His Father's presence. When He spoke in His sorrow, the first word was,
   "Father"--He said, "Father, I thank You." If you can weep in such a way
   that all the while you feel God to be your Father and can thank Him and
   know that you are in His Presence, your weeping is not blameworthy but
   healthful.

   Let such floods flow on, for Jesus wept and said, "Father, I thank
   You." Brethren, we sin when we either laugh or weep behind God's back.
   Absence from God is the element of sin. When you cannot smile nor weep
   except by forgetting God and His Law, then are you offending. But if
   you can get up to your great Father's bosom and bury your head there,
   you may sob away without shame. For that which He permits is evidently
   no offense.

   "Jesus wept," but He never murmured. "Jesus wept," but He never found
   fault with God's dispensations. "Jesus wept" sweetly in submission, not
   bitterly in rebellion. I think this is good instruction here--may the
   Holy Spirit teach it to us! May the Lord write it on every weeper's
   heart. You, Hannah, a woman of a sorrowful spirit--did Eli accuse you?
   Come to Eli's Master, the great High Priest. For He will not blame you
   but He will tell you that you may weep, for He also wept.

   IV. I must be brief upon my fourth point. "Jesus wept"--IN THIS HE IS
   OUR COMFORTER.

   Let me speak to those who are of heavy heart. "Jesus wept"--herein is
   our honor. You weep, my Friend, in good company. For Jesus wept. Let no
   man censure you lest they not only blame you but Jesus also. "Jesus
   wept"--herein is our sonship vindicated. You say, "Can I be the child
   of God and yet go weeping?" Was not Jesus the well-beloved Son? And yet
   He wept. Ah, the question lies another way--"What son is he whom the
   father chastens not?" What child did God ever have that did not weep?
   He had one Son without sin. But He never had a son without sorrow. He
   had a Son that never deserved a stroke of the rod and yet against that
   Son the sword was awakened.

   Mourner, you are one of "The Worshipful Company of Weepers," of whom
   Jesus is the Worthy Master. He is at the head of the Clan of
   Mourners--you may well wear the plaid with the black and red crosses
   upon it, for your Chieftain wore the same. See now the real sympathy of
   Christ with His people, for herein is comfort. His sympathy lies not
   alone in words, not even wholly in deeds--it is more tender than these
   can be. Only His heart could express His tender sympathy and then it
   was by tears--tears which were brought up like gold from the heart,
   minted in the eyes and then put in circulation as current coin of the
   merchant, each one bearing the King's image and superscription.

   Jesus is our fellow-sufferer. And this should be our greatest solace.
   Oh, if we had a High Priest that knew not what it is to suffer as we
   do, it would be a most unhappy thing for us! If we fled to Him for
   refuge and found that He had known no grief and consequently could not
   understand us, it would be killing to a broken heart. I saw a young
   bird yesterday fly

   where he thought he saw ready entrance. But, alas for him! There was an
   invisible barrier. He dashed against the glass and stunned himself and
   I was sad when I saw him lie dead outside my window.

   If in my grief I fled to Jesus and there was about Him a secret
   inability to sympathize, an incapacity to admit me to His heart--pure
   as crystal though that barrier might be--I should dash myself against
   it and die in despair. A Jesus who never wept could never wipe away my
   tears. That were a grief I could not bear, if He could not have
   fellowship with me and could not understand my woe.

   Beloved, think how bravely our Lord endured--herein is confidence.
   Tears did not drown the Savior's hope in God. He lived. He triumphed,
   notwithstanding all His sorrow. And because He lives, we shall live
   also. He says, "Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world." Though
   our Hero had to weep in the fight, yet He was not beaten. He came, He
   wept, He conquered. You and I must not be afraid to imitate Jesus--we
   share the tears of His eyes and we shall share the diamonds of His
   crown. Wear the crown of thorns here and you shall wear the crown of
   glory hereafter.

   Let this comfort you, too, that, though He wept, He weeps no
   more--herein is Heaven begun below. "Death has no more dominion over
   Him" in any sense or degree. He has done with weeping. So shall it be
   with us before long. How I love that promise--"Neither shall there be
   any more pain"! Heaven is without a temple, for it is all devotion. And
   so is it without a hospital, for it is all health and love. "The
   inhabitant shall no more say, I am sick." "Oh, for the no more
   weeping!" It will come to us before long, for it has come to Jesus.

   "The Lord God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes." We shall soon
   have no cause for sorrow and no possibility of grief. For as He is,
   such shall we be. And as He is perfectly blessed, we shall be beatified
   in Him. "Jesus wept." But His weeping is all over. "Jesus wept." But
   His sorrow is now a thing of the past and so shall ours be before long.

   V. Fifthly and lastly, "Jesus wept"--IN THIS HE IS OUR EXAMPLE. We
   should weep, for Jesus wept. Jesus wept for others. I know not that He
   ever wept for Himself. His were sympathetic tears. He embodied that
   command, "Weep with them that weep." He has a narrow soul who can hold
   it all within the compass of his ribs. A true soul, a Christly soul,
   lives in other men's souls and bodies as well as in its own. A
   perfectly Christly soul finds all the world too narrow for its abode,
   for it lives and loves. It lives by loving and loves because it lives.

   Think of other weepers and have pity upon the children of grief. Today
   I want to touch your heart strings, and move you to pity the pains and
   the agonies of the many now lying within the wards of our hospitals and
   the even greater miseries of those who pine for want of medicine and
   care because they cannot get into the hospitals but have to wear
   themselves out in hopeless disease. How must those suffer who have bad
   nursing and little food and in the winter are pinched with cold! You
   and I may never suffer as they do but at least let us grieve on their
   account and stand ready to succor them to the best of our ability.

   In another matter our Lord is our example--learn from Him that our
   indignation against evil will best show itself in compassion for
   sinners. Ah, my dear Friend! I heard you declaiming tremendously
   against drunkenness. I am glad to hear you--you cannot say anything too
   hard or too heavy about that degrading vice. But, I pray you, wind up
   your denunciation with weeping over the poor drunkard. I heard you
   speak, my other Friend, on behalf of the League of Purity and you smote
   the monsters of lasciviousness with all your force. I wish more
   strength to your arm! But when you have done, sit down and weep that
   such filthiness should defile men and women, who are your fellow
   creatures.

   Appeal to Parliament, if you wish, for the putting down of vice. But
   Parliament itself first needs correcting and purifying. A flood of
   tears before the thrice Holy God will do far more than the largest
   rolls of petition to our senators. "Jesus wept." And His tears were
   mighty weapons against sin and death. You feel indignant at the lazy,
   idle, loafing vagabonds whose very illness is produced by their own
   vice--I cannot condemn your virtuous wrath. But if you would in all
   things imitate Jesus, please note that it is not written that Jesus
   thundered, but that "Jesus wept."

   Let indignation have pity mixed with it. I like not lightning without
   rain, nor indignation without tears. I know what you will say about the
   lack of thrift among the poor, about the absence of sobriety, the want
   of industry and so forth. Admit all this sorrowfully--chide it
   tenderly. And then weep. You will do more good to the offenders and
   more good to yourself and more good to the best of causes, if pity
   moistens all. You may, if you will, beat the terrible drum and sound
   the war trumpet. But the noise will rather deafen than soften. The
   voice of your weeping will be heard deep down in the soul and work more
   wonders than thunders of denunciation.

   Lastly, when you have wept, imitate your Savior--do something! If the
   chapter before us had finished with "Jesus wept," it would have been a
   poor one. Suppose, after they had come to the grave, we had read,
   "Jesus wept and went about His daily business." I should have felt
   small comfort in the passage. If nothing had come of it but tears, it
   would have been a great failing off from the usual ways of our blessed
   Lord. Tears? What are they alone? Salt water. A cup of them would be of
   little worth to anybody.

   But, Beloved, "Jesus wept," and then He commanded, "Roll away the
   stone." He cried, "Lazarus, come forth!" When Lazarus struggled out of
   the tomb, Jesus said, "Loose him and let him go." Some of you are full
   of pity for the sick. But I hope we shall not end in mere sentiment. Do
   not let us say, "We were moved to sympathize with the sick but we gave
   an awfully bad collection!" I should be ashamed to think of this
   morning's meditation if it ended so.

   No, no! If you cannot raise the dead, give something towards rolling
   away the stone which shuts the poor out of the hospital. If you cannot
   restore them to health, at least do something towards removing their
   maladies. Loose them from this crowded city and send them into the
   country to a Convalescent Home. Brethren, we can thus practically prove
   the truth of our sympathy. Therefore, pass the boxes round!

   Portions Of Scripture Read Before Sermon--John 11:17-46; Hebrews
   2:6-18.
     __________________________________________________________________

God's Own Gospel Call

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S DAY MORNING, JUNE 30, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "Incline your ear and come unto Me: hear and your soul shall live. And
   I will make an Everlasting Covenant with you, even the sure mercies of
   David." Isaiah 55:3.

   THIS very memorable chapter may be called God's own Gospel sermon. In
   reading it we forget Isaiah and only remember Jehovah. He speaks not
   here by the Prophet but in the first Person. God Himself says, "Incline
   your ear and come unto Me." Now, we value every single word of Holy
   Writ, but especially those words which come directly from the mouth of
   God Himself--not so much spoken for Him as by Him. Take heed that you
   turn not away from Him that speaks from Heaven. These are not my words
   but the Words of the living God--it is not I that invite your attention
   to myself. It is your Maker, your God, saying to you, "Incline your ear
   and come unto Me: hear and your soul shall live. And I will make an
   Everlasting Covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David."

   From the very beginning, this chapter is a loving pleading with
   sinners--it is a lifting of stumbling blocks and a clearing away of
   objections. Perhaps someone laments thus--"Who am I, that I should come
   to God? I am a poor, penniless sinner." The Lord forestalls the lament,
   by saying, "He that has no money. Come you, buy and eat. Yes, come, buy
   wine and milk without money and without price." If you have no merit,
   if you have no claims, still come. Free Grace sounds its golden harp
   and mercy sings to it these words--"Without money and without price."

   If you stand back because you look upon your past life with sorrow and
   you say, "Alas, my God, I have wasted much time in another service," He
   tells you that He knows your past folly and He calls you to cease from
   it, saying, "Wherefore do you spend money for that which is not bread?
   And your labor for that which satisfies not?" He bids you now receive
   the substantial gifts of His Grace. For these will satisfy the soul.

   If anyone cries, "My needs are exceedingly great. I want the largest
   and richest mercies, or else I am lost." The Lord God admits that
   necessity but meets it with a full supply, saying, "Hearken diligently
   unto Me and eat you that which is good and let your soul delight itself
   in fatness." He knows that nothing but great mercy will serve your
   turn. But great mercy is ready for you. He has not brought you anything
   lean or mean but "fat things full of marrow," a fullness of delight.

   If there are any who feel timorous in the Presence of such astounding
   Grace and are ready to cry, "Lord, we cannot think that You would give
   so great a salvation to us, for we deserve destruction and wrath," see
   how He meets that doubt by the fourth verse. The highest proof of God's
   love to men is this, "God so loved the world, that He gave His only
   begotten Son." He points to His dear Son and says, "Behold, I have
   given Him! In the manger, behold, I have given Him. On the Cross, in
   the sepulcher, in His resurrection, in His enthronement, behold, I have
   given Him!" What further proof of Divine love do you require? What
   surer proof can you imagine? Come without distrust and believe that
   since God spared not His own Son, but freely delivered Him up for us
   all, He will also, with Him, freely give us all things.

   Furthermore, lest anyone should say, "I am a poor Gentile but the Old
   Testament was written for the chosen people, the Jews." The Father
   speaks to His dear Son, and cries, "Behold, You shall call a nation
   that You know not and nations that knew not You shall run unto You
   because of the Lord Your God and for the Holy One of Israel. For He has
   glorified You." To whatever race or nation you may belong, Christ calls
   you to run to Him and the likes of you shall run to Him. May that
   promise be fulfilled this very day in all the unconverted who hear
   these words!

   Beloved, I have no need to preach this morning. I have only to follow
   the line of God's own Word. I do so with much confidence in the power
   of that Word. Gladly will I simply enlarge on what the Lord says and
   give you none of my own suggestions. My word? Ah, it is weakness
   itself! But the Lord's Word is potent as when it said, "Let there be
   light," and

   light flamed forth and scattered primeval night. It is as potent as
   when He made this dead, dull earth to teem with grass and afterwards
   with cattle and placed man over all. Speak, Lord, Your fiat. Where Your
   Word is, there is power.

   Still, there may be some who say, "We feel ourselves to be with no
   strength and incapable." The gracious Lord meets you there by laying
   upon you no heavy yoke--the precepts which He puts before you are
   simple and easy. He has given you ears and He bids you use them,
   saying, "Incline your ear and come unto Me. Hear and your soul shall
   live."

   At this time we will look to the saving precepts laid down in the text.
   And then we will consider the saving promises which go with the
   precepts--"Your soul shall live. And I will make an Everlasting
   Covenant with you." Lastly, as God shall help us, we will hearken to
   saving pleadings, such as abound in the rest of the chapter. Oh, to
   speak only in the power of the Holy Spirit! Oh, for
   salvation--salvation for ALL my Hearers!

   I. Here are TWO SAVING PRECEPTS, which are pressed upon you at this
   time. For the Holy Spirit says in all His commands, "Today if you will
   hear His voice, harden not your hearts." These precepts are of simple
   character. The first is, "Incline your ear." This is placed in another
   form, "Hearken diligently unto Me. Hear and your soul shall live." You
   have ears to hear with, therefore hear. Some of you would hear fast
   enough if the faintest jingle of a guinea should invite you to gain it.
   Oh that you would now hear the voice of God!

   What does it mean--this "Incline your ear"? It means, consider and
   think upon eternal things. It is the fault and folly of worldlings that
   they reckon eternal things to be second-rate and unworthy of their
   immediate thought. Even from the Cross our Lord complains, "Is it
   nothing to you, all you that pass by? Behold and see if there is any
   sorrow like unto My sorrow, which is done unto Me, wherewith the Lord
   has afflicted Me in the day of His fierce anger." The greatest event
   that ever happened in time or in eternity was the death of Jesus to
   save men from eternal woe. And yet this prodigy of love is disregarded.

   The soul-winner has to think of all sorts of ways by which to draw
   men's attention to that which is their chief blessing. They are taken
   up with their farm and their merchandise--any petty piece of news in
   the daily paper will win their thought and excite their talk. But this
   event which most nearly concerns them is forgotten. For passing
   pleasure they have ears enough. But when we speak of Heaven and Hell
   they will not hear--charm we ever so wisely. May the God of all Grace
   this morning arrest the careless one and constrain him to incline his
   ear!

   O thoughtless man, be like the wedding guest who was spell-bound by the
   ancient mariner and kept from the joyous company while he heard the
   strange story of the sea. We have something of greater weight to tell
   than any romance of the salt sea. Do not deny yourself the benefit of
   hearing the Truth of God. Rob not your soul of salvation. Your God
   invites you to give earnest heed to your soul, your immortal soul, and
   the place where it will spend eternity--and the way in which alone that
   eternity can become one of blessedness. Since you are not dogs nor
   horses, think! And give most thought to that which is of most
   importance, namely, your eternal state. I should have hope for you if
   you would think.

   O Souls, why will you trifle where everything is of such infinite
   weight? Why need I plead for that which is so much for your own good?
   But when you read, "Incline your ear," it means, think about Divine
   matters as God sets them before you. In these days those who judge
   themselves to be wise disdain to be taught by the Revelation of God but
   they elect to follow the conjectures of their own minds. They will not
   follow the Bible but their own brains, such as they are. They endeavor
   to make for themselves a chart of a sea they have never sailed over.
   The way of happiness they picture as they would wish it to be.

   Surely the voice of Wisdom advises us to incline our ear to One who
   knows more than we do. God has spoken--we are to learn from His Words
   rather than from our own thoughts. Science is well enough but
   omniscience is better. God has spoken, we need not conjecture--God has
   revealed it. Would you be wise? This book is inspired by Him--bend your
   powers towards this infallible record. Am I asking too much? Does the
   Lord require an unreasonable thing? If He speaks, shall we not listen?
   Especially when He speaks only for our good.

   Furthermore, remark that this attention to eternal things, this
   hearkening to what God, the Lord, will speak, must be hearty, honest,
   continual, earnest and believing. "Incline your ear," as men do when
   they reach forward to catch every syllable, fearful lest they shall
   miss the meaning. "Hearken diligently." Not as a man does who hears and
   forgets. Hearken as they did who were pent up and besieged and longed
   for deliverance. How the Scotch woman rejoiced when she heard, or
   thought she heard, the sound of the Highlanders' bagpipes in the
   distance! Ah me, the bare hope of rescue from ferocious foes made them
   very quick of hearing.

   Beloved, give the Gospel your best hearing. Hearken diligently--be
   attentive and intent. When your mind has been attentive during the
   discourse, let it be retentive afterwards. Try to catch God's meaning
   in His Word and see what Christ would show to you. I say again, I am
   asking here, in God's name, of you nothing more than is due to Him. I
   would come round these galleries and down these aisles and put it to
   every unconverted person--Is it not reasonable that you should consider
   your ways and hearken to your God? I pray you, my Friends, do not deny
   yourselves this favor--give attention, now, to your souls' best
   concerns.

   The second precept grows out of the first--"Incline your ear and come
   unto Me." This is to be the outcome of your inclining your ear. Come
   unto God. "How can I come to God?" says one. Come to Him at least by
   thinking much of Him. At present God is not in all your thoughts. Some
   of you are busy just now with sightseeing but you seek not a sight of
   God--should it be so? Others of you are busy in making money. You go
   out to business early and come home late and all those hours you are as
   little mindful of Heaven as if there were no God at all. We have not
   much doctrinal atheism abroad but we are drenched with practical
   atheism. The nations forget God.

   The Lord bids you turn your face Godward and seek after Him. Consider
   eternity and how you will spend it, and what it must be for you if you
   pass into it without God. When you have come to Him in thought, then
   come by your desires. The son in the far-off country began to return to
   his father's house, where there was bread enough and to spare, before
   he had put a foot on the ground to go there. His heart was on the road
   before his feet. If you feel as if you could not come to God any other
   way, come by desire, at least--desire to be reconciled to God--longing
   to become His child, hungering to taste of His love. This is a true
   coming.

   Come to God by confession of sin. You have lived up to now without Him.
   Confess that neglect. You have thought that repentance and faith might
   safely be put off to a more convenient season and thus you have given
   your God a contemptuous putting-off. Confess the wrong you have done in
   this. You have violated the Law, for you have not loved the Lord, "with
   all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and with all
   your mind." Beside this, you have broken every Commandment. Thus have
   you insulted your Maker. Yet come to Him with filial sorrow and say,
   "Father, I have sinned."

   Come to God in humble, believing prayer. Ask Him to save you and
   believe that He that asks receives. What? Will you not do that? He that
   will not ask when the blessing is to be had for the asking, how can I
   excuse him, how can I pity him, if he shall perish of want? Come to the
   Lord by prayer and let it not be said, "You have not, because you ask
   not." Oh, how I pray that you may come with your prayers while I am
   pleading with you by my preaching! Come and lay your burdens down at
   the feet of the great Burden Bearer! Come with all your sins and leave
   the load at the Cross. Quit your evil ways and your wicked thoughts and
   turn to the Lord, who will abundantly pardon.

   These are the two precepts--HEAR and COME. They are neither exacting
   nor unreasonable. How earnestly would I urge them upon you! I feel
   ashamed of myself that I do not preach with greater emotion. But let
   not my fault be the ruin of any of you. Be even more in earnest than I
   am, since it is your own soul that is in jeopardy. Gladly would I save
   you if I could. I am eager to win you for my Lord. Be persuaded to
   hearken diligently to your God and Savior even now.

   I. To encourage you in this, I come to my second head, which deals with
   SAVING PROMISES. Here are two promises corresponding to the two
   precepts.

   You are bid, in the first precept, to hearken and incline your ear an
   the promise given is this--"Your soul shall live." What? Live through
   hearing? Yes, live as the result of hearing. For "faith comes by
   hearing, and hearing by the Word of God." If any man would give himself
   diligently to the study of the Revelation of God, to the searching of
   the Word of God, and to the hearing of loving, earnest, truthful,
   spiritual preaching--he would not fail to find life for his soul. If
   with heart's resolve to find Christ in the Word a man hears it
   diligently, he has this promise, "Hear and your soul shall live."

   Some sit down and say, "I cannot believe." Of course you cannot believe
   until you know what you have to believe. But while you are hearing what
   it is, the inspired Word acts upon you with a self-evidencing power and
   your conscience and mind and heart are affected thereby. The Holy
   Spirit quickens through the Word and fulfils the promise, "Hear and
   your soul shall live."

   There is such a power about the Word of God, that when it comes into
   contact with the heart which is seeking eternal life, it breathes
   eternal life into it. I will try to sketch the manner of its operation.
   The man is an earnest hearer and he

   says to himself, "How I wish I could meet with the salvation of God!"
   While listening he feels a tenderness stealing over him. Perhaps a tear
   trickles down his cheek. He gets absorbed in the Truth of God to which
   he listens and becomes serious, anxious and impressible. The Word of
   God is like a fire which melts. Attended by the Holy Spirit, the
   influence of the Word upon the soul acts for the removing of the stony
   heart and the creation of a heart of flesh.

   Be much in the hearing of God's Word and in thinking upon it and a
   better feeling will steal over you. There will follow upon this feeling
   a measure of hope in the Lord. At first it will be as a mere spark. You
   will whisper to yourself, "I think, after all, I may be forgiven and
   accepted." This little hope will be like the first drop of a shower.
   This trembling hope will be the egg of a great joy, or the mustard seed
   of the tree of holy confidence. Hope that comes by hearing the Word
   attentively is a living and growing thing and will increase to a
   blessed rest.

   By-and-by hope will rouse the soul to pleading. You, who first of all
   heard the Word carelessly--and then heard it attentively, feelingly and
   hopefully--will commence to pray that it may be fulfilled to you. I
   think I hear you crying, "O God, bless your Word to me. I am come to a
   turning point, Lord lead me in the right way. Oh, that You would
   quicken me to run therein!" This prayer will continue to rise within
   the heart and will never cease till it is heard and the soul is made to
   live unto God. Having come thus far, the heart will soon possess a
   measure of trustfulness in the Lord Jesus, who is the Revelation of the
   Grace of God. Before you know it, you will find yourself trusting in
   the great Sacrifice for sin.

   I do not know the manner in which faith is created by the Spirit in the
   human mind. In many it comes very gradually. Who can tell when the
   first light of the morning broke over this city? They that were wearily
   watching by the sick saw a gray light glide over the sky. But the sun
   was not yet risen. Then the light became clearer and yet more clear.
   But if there were clouds in the east, even the watchers could not tell
   exactly when the sun was above the horizon and the day had really
   dawned. The light came by degrees but it came in truth.

   my Hearers, I want you, while hearing the Word, to be praying--

   "While I see You wounded, bleeding, Dying on the accursed tree, Gladly
   I'd feel my heart believing That you suffered thus for me."

   Thus, by the light of the Word, the man becomes a Believer before he
   knows it. Is it not so in other matters? We feel that a thing is true
   and we believe it without effort.

   With that little faith will come gleams of joy. Or if the faith is
   stronger, a full day will burst in upon the soul, lighting up the whole
   nature with heavenly brightness, Oh, that the Lord would give you joy
   and peace through believing at this very moment! I pray it may be so! I
   am glad that you are hearing the Word. "Hear and your soul shall live."

   1 remember when I sought the Lord, I said to myself, "If the Lord is to
   be found by hearing, I will always be hearing." Three times on the
   Sabbath you might have found me, as a lad, in some place of worship or
   other. And I never lost a word. I gave earnest heed to all that was
   spoken. As Gideon's fleece drank in the dew, so did I receive the Word.
   The Divine life came to me at last, though not at the first. So will it
   be with you, for there is the promise--the promise of God, that cannot
   lie--"Hear and your soul shall live." May you understand that first
   promise by having it fulfilled within yourself!

   Now consider the second promise, which is something very wonderful--"I
   will make an Everlasting Covenant with you." This joins on to the
   second precept--"Come unto Me." The soul cries, "Lord, if I were to
   come, would You receive me?" "Receive you?" says the Lord, "I would
   enter into a covenant with you." If you come to God, simple as that
   coming seems, it shall involve infinite results. For the Lord will do
   for you exceedingly abundantly above what you ask or even think. Listen
   to this promise, you that are willing to hear God's Word, and pray the
   Lord to fulfill it to you at once.

   First, observe how He promises condescending intercourse--"I will make
   a covenant with you." It is in the Hebrew, "I will cut a covenant."
   Covenants were made by cutting a victim in two and they who made a
   covenant passed between the two halves of the sacrifice to make the
   covenant sure. The Lord in effect says, "Poor, wretched Sinner, you
   that have not a penny to buy water with. If you will come to Me, I will
   enter into a sacred agreement and covenant with you!" "Covenant with
   me?" says one, "What? God and I become contracting parties?" Yes. He
   will make a covenant with you. O my Heart, how can you stay away? This
   means life! This means sure mercies! This means eternal blessedness! "I
   will

   make a covenant with you," with you, an obscure nobody, who can only
   look on yourself as a heap of dirt and filth. "I will make an
   Everlasting Covenant with you."

   God is ready to enter into a binding contract with you. He will bind
   you to Himself and Himself to you. "I will make a covenant with you."
   If once you come to Him, He will put His fear in your heart so that you
   shall not depart from Him. He will cast about you the bands of His love
   and will betroth you unto Himself in a marriage union which shall never
   be dissolved. Do you enquire into the tenor of that contract? Well, I
   cannot tell you all about it this morning, for time would fail me. But
   it runs somewhat in this fashion--"I will be their God and they shall
   be My people. Their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more
   forever.

   "A new heart also will I give you and a right spirit will I put within
   you. I will take the stony heart out of your flesh and give you a heart
   of flesh. The mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed. But My
   kindness shall not depart from you, neither shall the covenant of My
   peace be removed, says the Lord, that has mercy on you."

   This is a covenant of mercy. Yes, of "mercies" in the plural, as the
   text has it. God will enter into a contract with you to supply you with
   all manner of mercies between here and Heaven and to land you safely at
   His right hand. Oh, what a promise this! God will thus enter into an
   unending alliance with you. "I will make an Everlasting Covenant with
   you." I do remember how this attracted me to Christ. When I saw that
   His Grace was everlasting, I longed to enjoy it. If I once got to the
   Lord Jesus, He would never let me go away from Him. This created in me
   a vehement desire after Him--

   "Once in Christ, in Christ forever; Nothing from His love can sever."
   The eternity of the mercy is an essential ingredient in the
   preciousness of it. I should not care to preach to you a trumpery,
   temporary Gospel, which would only yield hope for a short season. But I
   delight to proclaim my Lord's Everlasting Covenant. Come, poor Sinner,
   come to Jesus and you shall have life eternal. We do not offer you a
   ticket halfway from here to Heaven. But a ticket all the way through,
   with no return to it. If you get into this covenant train, it is
   running all the way and will never break down. Yield yourself to the
   Lord, to be His forever and He will make with you an Everlasting
   Covenant.

   "Oh," you say, "but suppose I go to God and trust Him and yet these
   things should fail?" They cannot fail, for He calls them "the sure
   mercies of David." If you believe in Jesus, you are now forgiven. As
   sure as God is God, if you come to Him through Christ Jesus you are
   saved, not for time only, but for eternity. The covenant is ordered in
   all things and sure. God has said, "I will never leave you, nor forsake
   you." Oh, the mercy of God in this!

   You see we liken what He gives to the sinner to what He did to David.
   The aged David lies dying. His strength is gone, he is a worn-out man,
   he will soon be in eternity. It is interesting to watch him. Tears are
   in his eyes as he thinks of Absalom and the rest of his wayward family
   and he exclaims, "Although my house is not so with God. Yet"--blessed
   "yet"--"yet He has made with me an Everlasting Covenant, ordered in all
   things and sure." That is the kind of covenant which God will make with
   you. I am not talking of the man in the moon but of you who are around
   me, you guilty ones, who incline your ear to Him.

   The Lord says to you, "I will make an Everlasting Covenant with you,
   even the sure mercies of David." When you come to die, I hope you may
   not have the faults of David to confess. But I trust you may have his
   covenant to fall back upon. I am thankful that David was not a perfect
   man by a long way, because I can now take comfort from his confidence.
   He was full of infirmities and sins and yet he could rejoice in the
   Covenant of Grace. And I, also, with all my faults, may venture to do
   the same. I, too, can say, "Yet He has made with me an Everlasting
   Covenant." What a mass of Gospel comfort lies in these words! Would God
   that all of you would so come to God that He would make with you an
   Everlasting Covenant!

   The covenant is all in Christ Jesus, Immanuel, God with us. With Him
   this covenant is made. Great David's greater Son is given to us to be
   our leader. The covenant is with Him. He stood for us in that dread day
   when the Judge of all the earth executed justice upon our Surety. The
   storm was made to burst upon His head. The sword of justice found its
   sheath in His heart. And now He stands the Covenant Head of all
   Believers. And God has made with us in Christ, "an Everlasting
   Covenant, even the sure mercies of David." Thus have I put before you
   the precept and the promise.

   III. Our third work is to urge the Lord's own SAVING PLEAS. These are
   not to be mine but the Lord's. I keep to the chapter.

   The first plea for which I would beg a hearing is--God Himself speaks
   to you. It is He that says, "Incline your ear and come unto Me." Can
   you realize for a moment the Presence of God? Oh that He would make
   Himself apparent to you! I do not ask for thunder or lightning to make
   you feel the terror of His majesty. But may you know of a surety that
   the Lord is here! Suppose you were to hear a strange, mysterious voice
   from yonder dome, saying, "Incline your ear and come unto Me. Hear and
   your soul shall live."

   I am afraid the sole result would be that you would be startled rather
   than savingly impressed. But, indeed, it is the Lord God Almighty that
   says, "Incline your ear and come unto Me." I beseech you, refuse not
   Him that speaks from Heaven. By the long-suffering that has kept you in
   being until now. By the love that has borne with your ill manners and
   provocations, I beseech you, now, lend a willing ear to the Lord of
   Mercy.

   You would hear your mother. Ah, how you wish that she were on earth to
   plead with you, though you despised her admonitions when she was yet
   alive! Soul, will you not hear your God, your Benefactor? Turn, I pray
   you, at His entreaty. Accept His tender invitation! Come now, without
   delay. Say, at once--

   "Lord, you have won, at length I yield;

   My heart, by mighty grace compelled,

   Surrenders all to You.

   Against Your terrors long I strove,

   But who can stand against Your love?

   Love conquers even me."

   Furthermore, the Lord pleads with you by the fact that your day of
   mercy is not ended. Read the sixth verse--"Seek you the Lord while He
   may be found, call you upon Him while He is near." God may be found.
   What a blessed fact! Have you been a drunkard? Yet God may be found.
   Were you last night in evil company? Yet you are not yet shut up in
   Hell and the Lord of Love may yet be found. Are you very old and have
   you long despised your Savior? He has not yet closed the gate
   ofmercy--He may be found. Seek Him at once, while the search can be
   successful.

   "Call you upon Him while He is near." God is still within call. He is
   not far from any of you. Even though you speak not, He will hear the
   pulsing of your heart. O Men and Women, call upon your God while His
   ear is inclined toward you. Death is on his way and may overtake you
   before this day concludes. Between the gathering of one congregation
   and another, someone among you will fall by death's javelin. Seek Him,
   my Hearers, while seeking time holds out. Before the death sweat stands
   upon your brow and your soul hovers upon the edge of a dark eternity,
   seek after the Lord with all your might. While He is near to you, call
   upon Him--while He may be found, seek Him. Does not the voice of wisdom
   plead with you to do this?

   The Lord very graciously mentions yet another fact which should lead
   you to come to Him, namely, that He is ready and willing to forgive the
   whole of your past offenses. "Let the wicked forsake his way and the
   unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord and He
   will have mercy upon him. And to our God, for He will abundantly
   pardon." I do not know what you think of those last words, "abundantly
   pardon." But to me they are so sweet that I would set the whole
   orchestra of the Handel Festival to the singing of them.

   "Abundantly pardon! Abundantly pardon!" You have abundant sin--fatally
   abundant! But here is abundant pardon. You mourn your abundant hardness
   of heart! Yes, but abundant pardon will dissolve the stone. How
   abundant that pardon is the Lord does not tell. But certainly it is
   superabundant. "Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound." Note
   the word--Divine Grace not only abounded but it did "much more abound."
   What a God is this who calls us to Himself! Come, you blackened
   sinner--Jesus is both willing and able to make you clean!

   Come, you chief of sinners. For He is the chief of all Benefactors and
   He can so bless you that your foulest stains shall be removed and every
   virtue and grace shall adorn your character. Such a gracious assurance
   should lead us to come to Him, should it not? What more sweet sounding
   bell can ring us unto God's table than these silver notes--"abundantly
   pardon"?

   Then comes in the great persuasive of the magnanimity of God. Hear the
   words--"For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My
   ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so
   are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts."
   No man here knows what great things God designs for him. You poor
   Sinners who will incline your ears and come to your God--little do you
   know what great blessings and honors the Lord has decreed for you--nor
   what is His mind concerning you!

   Shall I tell you a secret? Before you were born and before this round
   world was made, the Lord thought ofyou. Your name was in His book, your
   person was on His heart. The Lord loved you and chose you unto Himself
   from of old. Do you hear that? You are His elect--He ordained you to
   eternal life and that life He freely gives. Shall I tell you more of
   that secret? He gave you to His Son, to be His portion, His reward, His
   Bride. And that Divine Son undertook to redeem you, to save you and to
   bring you safely to His eternal glory.

   At this moment God ordains for you His service here below and His
   Presence in the world to come. If you indeed hearken to His voice, He
   will make you His child. And, as a child, you shall be an heir of God,
   a joint-heir with Jesus Christ. You think yourself to be the meanest of
   the mean and least deserving of men and so you may be. But the infinite
   Grace of God will put you among the royal seed. For He takes the beggar
   from the dunghill and sets him among princes, even the princes of His
   people. Hear his gracious word--"Since you were precious in My sight,
   you have been honorable and I have loved you."

   "Honorable? Why, I have lost my character!" Be it so, He is able to
   ennoble the fallen and it is He that says, "Since you were precious in
   My sight you have been honorable." The Lord determines to do nothing
   less for you than to set you on His Throne, in the image of Christ,
   without spot or wrinkle, or any such thing. Is it not true that His
   thoughts are high and His ways heavenly?--

   "You shall see My glory soon,

   When the work of Divine Grace is done.

   Partner of my throne shall be.

   Say, poor Sinner, do you love Me?" Your answer must be, "O Lord, I must
   come to You. For You do draw me with such soft but mighty bonds." Oh,
   the glory of Divine Grace! Oh that you would come and learn how deep
   the mines of Jehovah's love, how high the blessings of His favor!

   Did I hear one cry, "I feel so dull and stupid. I cannot come as I
   could wish"? Very well, come back to that first precept--"Hear and your
   soul shall live." "I have long been a hearer," says one. Have you been
   an earnest, attentive hearer? Have you heard the Word of God as sure
   and infallible Truth? Then be a more believing hearer. Expect the Word
   to bless you. Hear how the Lord pleads the power of His Gospel--"My
   Word shall not return unto Me void but it shall accomplish that which I
   please and it shall prosper in that thing whereunto I sent it."

   Hearken to God's voice, and let it enter your heart. Then it will
   quicken and save you as surely as the snow and the rain water the
   earth. Snow does not melt at once but it turns to water before long and
   is then doubly effectual in watering the soil. The devil tempts you to
   give up hearing the Gospel. Do not hearken to him. Hear with double
   diligence. For if he does want you to hearken, it is because he is
   afraid of losing you. Hearken diligently and believe steadfastly and
   before long you shall be as much saturated with the power of Divine
   Grace as the earth is moistened with the snow and the rain, which fall
   from Heaven but return not there. Remember, it is God's Word and in
   that fact lies your hope of getting life by it.

   Lastly, the Lord persuades men to come to Him by telling them of the
   joy they will obtain in coming. I know that I am addressing seeking
   souls who feel miserable and even despairing. "Alas," cries one, "I
   shall soon go out of the reach of hope." "No," says the Lord, "you
   shall go out with joy." "Alas," you sigh, "I shall be led forth to
   execution." "No," says the Lord, "you shall be led forth with peace."
   These are not my words. These are the very words of the living God.
   Hearken to them--"you shall go out with joy and be led forth with
   peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into
   singing and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands."

   It is a long time since you clapped your hands. But you shall do it
   with rapture and all the trees shall join with you in your exultation.
   Up to now the world has seemed to be as dull as you are. But it shall
   brighten up. You walked, the other day, in the fields but you found
   little repose among the lambs and sheep, for you felt more like a wolf.
   The very birds on the bough seemed to taunt you with being silent and
   ungrateful towards God. At times the flowing river, with all its
   sparkle of joy, half tempted you to plunge into its depths and find a
   watery grave.

   Earth is but the vestibule of Hell to an unquiet conscience. But if you
   hearken to your God, He can make it the porch of Heaven. Listen to this
   promise. Believe it and you shall find it true. You shall enter upon a
   new life and the world shall be a new world to you.

   "Ah," says one, "God will never make much of me. Even if I had a little
   joy and gladness, I should never be really an honor to Him." He calls
   you to Him by the effectual nature of His work. True, you are a thorny
   bit of ground, covered with briers and thorns and thistles. If you were
   left to barrenness it would be your righteous due. But His thoughts are
   not your thoughts, neither are His ways your ways. This is what He is
   going to do with you--"Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree
   and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree: and it shall be
   to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut
   off."

   That thorny temper of yours shall become gentle and generous. That
   briery malice shall give place to forgiveness and compassion. Blasphemy
   shall yield to devotion, vice to holiness, falsehood to truth and pride
   to lowliness. That sin of drunkenness--which has been such a thicket of
   thorns to you and your wife and family--shall give place to sobriety,
   industry, thrift, godliness, love to God and joy in the Holy Spirit. If
   you hear and live and come to God so as to be in covenant with Him, the
   day will come when you will not know yourself, so great will be the
   change.

   Mercy, in Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," laughed when she saw what the
   Lord was going to do for her. And if some of you could see what the
   Lord is about to make of you, you would laugh, too. You would not laugh
   like Sarah, who could not believe what was told her. But like Abraham,
   who felt the joy of the coming blessing by the realizations of faith.
   Beloved, at this moment I rejoice that I, an unworthy sinner, shall
   dwell with the Lord God in glory--

   "I shall behold His face, I shall His love adore; And sing the wonders
   of His Grace Forevermore."

   Yes, I shall do it, by His Grace. And so shall all of you who now
   believe the promise of our faithful God. May His sweet Spirit gently
   lead you to Himself! And if it is so, "it shall be to the Lord for a
   name." He will get a great reputation out of His great Grace. Even as a
   doctor wins a name by curing grievous diseases, they will tell it in
   Heaven that you are saved and throughout eternity angels and
   principalities in the heavenly places shall see in you a monument of
   Divine Grace, a trophy of all-conquering love.

   So may it be. And to the name of Jehovah, whose mercy endures forever,
   shall be glory and honor, world without end. Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

The Curse and the Curse for Us

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S DAY MORNING, MAY 26, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "For as many as are of the works of the Law are under the curse; for
   itis written, Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things
   which are written in the book of the law, to do them. But that no one
   is justified by the Law in the sight of God is evident, for the just
   shall live by faith. Yet the law is not of faith, but, the man who does
   them shall live by them. Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the
   law, having become a curse for us for itis written, Cursed is everyone
   who hangs on a tree, that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the
   Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the
   Spirit through faith." Galatians 3:10-14.

   THE Apostle tells us, in the eighth verse, that the Gospel was preached
   to Abraham. Very briefly, very tersely but very fully was the Gospel
   proclaimed to him in those words, "In you shall all families of the
   earth be blessed." The true Gospel is no new thing, it is as old as the
   hills. It was heard in Eden, before man was driven from the garden and
   it has since been repeated in sundry ways and in many places, even to
   this day. Oh, that its very antiquity would lead men to venerate it and
   then to listen to its voice! It is "Gospel," or good news--the best of
   news for fallen men. Oh, that they would receive it with gladness!

   The Gospel blessing which was thus preached to Abraham and to his seed,
   came to him by faith. He was justified by his faith, as it is written,
   "Abraham believed God and it was counted unto him for righteousness."
   The blessing, which is the soul of Abraham's Gospel, must come to us in
   the same way as it did to him, namely, by faith. And if we expect to
   find it in any other way, we shall be grievously mistaken. There were
   some in Paul's day who were "of the works of the Law," and expected to
   obtain the blessing through their own doings. But they could not find
   it. We have many around us who are practically looking for Gospel
   blessings upon legal principles.

   The object of our sermon is to show them their certainty of failure.
   And, at the same time, to make clear that way of faith by which the
   curse is rolled away and the blessing comes to the chosen seed.

   To begin with--our first head is this--Blessedness comes not to those
   who are of the works of the Law. And the second head will be,
   Blessedness comes to those who are of faith. We shall need no other
   divisions but we shall greatly need the gracious aid of the Holy Spirit
   that by His Grace these may be plainly and powerfully set forth before
   our minds. I want so to speak that you shall go with me, not in hearing
   only, but in feeling and in believing, practically taking home and
   feeling the power of the Truth of God.

   When a minister is studying a sermon, his best preparation comes
   through his feeling, himself, the power of his subject. He rehearses
   his discourse before the little audience of his own heart and
   conscience. And in observing the effect produced, he arrives at some
   idea of how the Word will operate upon others. He that has run the
   gauntlet of a Truth of God and felt all the heavy blows which it levels
   at his own conscience is likely to deliver that Truth to others with
   tender sympathy and full assurance. Such a preparation, I think, I have
   had--and I pray that you may be benefited by it.

   I. Let us learn, at the outset, that BLESSEDNESS COMES NOT TO THOSE WHO
   ARE OF THE WORKS OF

   THE LAW.

   First, observe the fact, as the Apostle states it very positively--"As
   many as are of the works of the Law are under the curse." You cannot be
   under the curse and yet be partakers of the blessing. A man cannot be
   in darkness and in light at the same moment--he cannot be under the
   curse of the Law and under the blessing of the Gospel, too. All who are
   of the works of the Law are under the curse and consequently none of
   them are blessed with faithful Abraham.

   Note well the persons spoken of--"As many as are of the works of the
   Law"--that is, all of you who hope, by the works of the Law, to commend
   yourselves to God. We are all "of the works of the Law" by nature,
   because it is our bounden duty, as creatures, to keep the Law of our
   Creator. He is our Benefactor, our King, our Lord and God, and He has
   claims upon us which we ought not to disown. He has set forth those
   claims in the Law of the Ten Commandments and these are binding upon
   all of us, without exception. Because we have disobeyed that Law and
   denied to God His just claims, our violation of the Law has brought us
   under its penalty, which is described as "the curse."

   No man has always kept all the Law and consequently every man that is
   of the works of the Law has come under the curse and must remain under
   it unless ransomed in the one appointed fashion. If you read those Ten
   Commandments through, as you should do very carefully, you will have to
   pause at each one and say, with solemn truthfulness, "I have broken
   this." Especially will this be the case if you remember the truth that
   the Law is spiritual and deals with thoughts, desires, imaginations,
   motives--yes, with your nature itself.

   Surely you will have to cry, "Guilty! Guilty!" Every way and "guilty"
   every day. This being the case, you are under the curse. You may have
   been moral and outwardly commendable. But the heart and intent are what
   the Lord looks at. And because you have not loved the Lord your God
   with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with
   all your strength--and have not loved your neighbor as yourself--you
   have come short of the demands of His righteous Law and you are under
   the curse.

   I beseech you to remember that this is a matter which concerns you now.
   "As many as are of the works of the Law are under the curse." Not only
   shall you be so in the day when, "Depart, you cursed," will be the
   final and hopeless doom of the wicked. But today you are under the
   curse if you are of the works of the Law. If the unsaved could really
   understand and believe this, they would hardly keep their seats. If you
   are not by Christ redeemed from the curse of the Law. If you have not,
   by faith, appropriated His great sacrifice, you are under the present
   curse of God.

   Even the Gospel does not bless you, for, "He that believes not is
   condemned already, because he has not believed on the Son of God." O my
   Hearer, I could weep to think that you are under the curse. A deathbed
   is a dreadful place to an unpardoned sinner. But I am not speaking of a
   deathbed--I am now talking of the seat where you sit in health and
   strength. If you are of the works of the Law, that seat now holds a man
   under the curse. I am not talking now of thieves and murderers and such
   like. I am speaking of as many as are of the works of the Law and
   especially of those who believe that they are keeping the Law and are
   looking for salvation by their obedience.

   Those who think that they are not to be numbered with the guilty and
   need not to be saved by Divine Grace--these are of the works of the Law
   by their own choice--and they are under the curse. If you come before
   God in your own self-righteousness, you are, by that very act and deed,
   proven to be under the curse. The brand of Cain is not on your brow but
   the curse is working in your heart. As this city of London seemed last
   night and this morning to lie under a cloud charged with tempest, so
   does the man who looks to the Law for life abide under a cloud of wrath
   which may burst upon him at any moment. Oh, that the gloom and
   oppression of spirit which comes of that cloud of threat would pain you
   greatly and drive you to Christ for shelter!

   That you may no longer abide in false security, I pray that you, for a
   few moments, weigh those words, "under the curse." I do not feel as if
   I could expand them or expound them. But I must simply repeat
   them--"UNDER THE CURSE!" The Lord make those words to pierce your
   souls! This is not my language, remember. It is not even the word of
   the Apostle Paul as a man. For he speaks by inspiration when he says,
   "As many as are of the works of the Law are under the curse." How shall
   I pronounce these words with sufficient solemnity? When the sermon is
   printed, in what type shall the printer set up these words, "UNDER THE
   CURSE"?

   "The curse causeless shall not come," but this is a curse with a cause
   of overwhelming conclusiveness. It is a curse that was pronounced of
   old by the authority of the Lord and confirmed by the Amens of
   assembled Israel. It is, in fact, the essence of all those curses which
   of old were declared on Mount Ebal, the rolling thunder of threatened
   wrath. "As many as are of the works of the Law are under the curse,"
   even as the Shorter Catechism puts it, "They have lost communion with
   God, are under His wrath and curse and so are made liable to all the
   miseries in this life, to death itself, and to the pains of Hell
   forever."

   Dare you sleep tonight under the curse? Will you wake tomorrow and go
   forth to your business under the curse? Can you sport and laugh and
   frolic under the curse? God grant we may be sufficiently sensible to be
   filled with anguish at the sound of these dreadful words--"under the
   curse"!

   The Apostle goes on to give a Scriptural confirmation of this fact. He
   says, "For it is written." He is writing a part of the New Testament
   under inspiration of the Holy Spirit. But he turns back to the Old and
   gives authority to his writing by showing that it always was the mind
   of the Spirit, "for it is written." If anything is written by the pen
   of inspiration, it is true, and we accept it as infallible. I hope you
   are not among those who trifle with the inspiration of any part of Holy
   Writ. For if so, this text has no power with you. "It is written" is a
   thing of omnipotent authority with many of us.

   "It is written, Cursed is everyone that continues not in all things
   which are written in the book of the Law to do them." This is the
   summary of the whole passage in the twenty-seventh chapter of
   Deuteronomy and also of the eleventh verse of the seventh chapter of
   that book.

   Attend to each word of the passage quoted. There is no exemption of
   persons. "Cursed is everyone that continues not in all things that are
   written in the book of the Law." Every offender comes under the curse.
   Is it the king, the priest, the nobleman?--he is under the curse. Or is
   it the poorest of the land--the slave, the beggar, the fallen
   woman?--sin brings them under the curse. Prince or pariah, it is all
   the same--if the Law is not perfectly continued in, the curse follows.
   The sentence is sweeping. There are no exceptions to its killing force.
   You may have kept the Law in many points but if you have broken it in
   one, you are under its curse.

   If you want to send a message by the telegraphic wire, it may be
   perfectly sound for one hundred miles but if it is only broken in one
   inch, no, if it is simply cut across, you cannot send the message by
   it. No blessing can come to a man by the Law unless the Law has been
   perfectly kept. But one single infraction of the Law involves the
   curse. The possibility of blessing on the footing ofjustice is gone
   when sin enters in. Thus, every man of every rank and grade and
   external character, since he has not continued in all things which are
   written in the book of the Law to do them, has come under the curse.

   Observe that there is no limit of time. It says, "continues not." What
   if a man should have kept the Law, in his own judgment, for many years?
   His service is not over. Men join our army for a certain number of
   years and then they are discharged. But a man is under the Law so long
   as he lives--he cannot escape from under its yoke by the mere lapse of
   time. And so, if we had accomplished obedience for twenty years, yet
   still, if in the next year we broke the Law, we should come under its
   curse. A thief is not excused because he was up to now honest, nor a
   murderer because at some prior time he had not shed blood.

   He that "continues not" comes under the lash. My conscience clearly
   sees the utter impossibility of my ever obtaining justification by the
   works of the Law. If, up till now, I had never sinned, which, alas, is
   very, very far from being the case, yet I should still stand in
   jeopardy every hour. For, being tempted, I should yet fall and perish
   if my footing were that of the Law. Even the just could not live by
   legal principles. Their only hope is to live by faith. As for us
   defiled and polluted sinners, we are, from the beginning, out of the
   running, if the race is by works--no lapse of time will enable us to
   start. And if we did start, no time would arrive when we could say, "It
   is finished."

   A Methuselah would be under the Law in his nine hundredth year. Still
   might the curse fall on him, even though, up till then, he had stood
   firm. Thus says the Lord, "When the righteous turns away from his
   righteousness and commits iniquity, he shall even die thereby." On that
   footing none of us could hope to remain free from the curse. But the
   case is worse--for if we are of the works of Law--we are already under
   the curse.

   Observe that there is no indulgence as to certain sins. "Cursed is
   everyone that continues not in all things." What a range these words
   have! Yet they do not so much concern ceremonial things as the moral
   conduct of daily life. If you will turn to Deuteronomy 27, from which
   Paul is quoting, you will find that the works which are mentioned in
   detail as bringing the curse, are not works of worship, oblation, and
   ritual--but of morality or immorality--works which concern the moral
   law. We must continue in the keeping of the Ten Commandments and abide
   in the spirit of them in "all things." Or, if not, it is utterly
   impossible that the Law can ever save us--all it can do is to put us
   under its curse.

   Once more, here is no narrowing of the demand. It is put, "Cursed is
   everyone that continues not in all things that are written in the book
   of the Law to do them." If a man does nothing wrong, yet if he fails to
   do that which is right, he is guilty. Omission is as truly a defect as
   commission. He misses the mark who shoots beyond it or falls short of
   it. If you

   make a single omission of duty on the footing of Law you are a lost
   man. If you have omitted, at any time, to love the Lord your God with
   the whole force and intensity of your nature, if you have omitted in
   any degree to love your neighbor as yourself, you have committed a
   breach of the Law.

   Not to obey is to disobey. Who can plead innocence, if this is so? How
   cutting is the sentence, "Cursed is everyone that continues not in all
   things which are written in the book of the Law to do them"! It is an
   awful passage! It seems to me to shut up the gate of hope by
   works--yes, to nail it up tight. I bless God it does fasten this door
   effectually. For if there seemed to be half a chance of getting through
   it, we should find men still struggling for entrance.

   Salvation by self is man's darling hope--salvation by doings, feelings,
   or something or other of their own, is the favorite delusion of
   sinners. We may bless God that He has rolled a great stone at the mouth
   of the grave of legal hope. He has dashed in pieces as with a rod of
   iron the earthen vessel which held the treasures of our conceit. "By
   the works of the Law shall no flesh be justified."

   To complete this, the Apostle gives us a piece of what I must call side
   evidence. He has stated the fact and confirmed it by Scripture. He now
   gives side evidence from other Scriptures. Some might say, "There have
   been just men--men have been justified in the sight of God." Yes, says
   Paul, turning to one passage out of very many which he might have
   quoted from Holy Scripture, the Lord says by His servant Habakkuk, "The
   just shall live by faith." The only just men that ever have existed
   since the Fall have been justified by faith. And that their faith was
   of the essence of their justification is clear, since they lived by
   faith.

   It is not said that the just shall rejoice by faith but they shall
   "live by faith." Their very existence as just men hung upon their
   faith. They had no life before God except as they believed and lived.
   The Apostle argues that since the just men of the Old Covenant were
   justified by faith, it is clear we cannot be justified by the Law. For
   the Law is not of faith, since the Law says nothing of believing but
   speaks only of doing. The Law speaks nothing of Divine Grace, nothing
   of mercy, but only of justice and merit.

   If anything that may be called mercy is due to men, it is clearly not
   mercy but justice. For all that is due is of justice. The Law speaks
   not of believing, it speaks only of doing--"The man that does those
   things shall live in them." The one teaching of the Law is--"Obey and
   live. Disobey and die." Inasmuch as those who did live unto God lived
   by their faith, it is clear it was not by the works of the Law. Thus
   the Apostle argues, negatively and positively, showing how men were not
   justified and showing how they were justified. And thus he makes it
   plain as a pikestaff that by the works of the Law shall no flesh be
   justified in the sight of God.

   My dear Hearers, let us deal faithfully and personally with the solemn
   Truth of God now before us. I pray that everyone may examine himself to
   see whether he is of the works of the Law. Are we legal in our
   feelings? Are we relying upon self and its doings? Does anyone among us
   feel that there is not in London a more deserving person than himself?
   Because he is attends Church or Chapel regularly, does he think himself
   accepted of the Lord? Because of confirmation, or Baptism, or
   attendance of the sacrament, does he hope to be saved? Because of his
   decent and respectable life, does he reckon himself just?

   If such is the hope of anyone of you, you are confessedly, "of the
   works of the Law," and it is not my word but the Word of the Lord, that
   you are under the curse. Think of this, you who are so very good, so
   free from fault! There is nothing else for you but the curse. You are
   not in the same way as those men who are mentioned in the Scriptures as
   justified. For they lived by faith and you hope to live by works. As
   you are not in the same way, neither will you come to the same end. It
   is a thought which vexes you and possibly even makes you angry--that
   you should be under the curse. But it will be well for you to know the
   truth, however black it looks. Nothing remains but a fearful judgment.
   For where there is even now a curse, what else can there be but fiery
   indignation at the last?

   We will stay no longer upon this most searching Truth of God. Alas, I
   cannot bring it home to the conscience! It needs a miracle of Divine
   Grace to get this Truth into the heart of man and to make him feel the
   full terror of it. It is so repugnant to our proud human nature that we
   incline to any error which will obscure it. Come, Holy Spirit, with
   Your Divine light and flash this Truth of God upon the sinner's eyes in
   such a way that he must see it!

   II. Secondly, THIS BLESSEDNESS COMES TO THOSE WHO ARE OF FAITH, even to
   those who look for salvation to the Lord Jesus, in whom God declares
   Himself to be just and the Justifier of him that believes.

   On this point I shall run on much the same lines as under the first
   division of the subject. Here we have a blessed fact--"Christ has
   redeemed us from the curse of the Law." If the former tog, that we are
   under the curse, should make us sit uneasily, this blessed doctrine
   should make us dance for joy! The ransom is paid. We are free! "Christ
   has redeemed us." That is, so many as believe in Him. He has "redeemed
   us from the curse of the Law." "He has bought us out from under the
   curse." Our deliverance from the curse is by a process similar to that
   by which slaves are set free, namely, by their being bought with a
   price.

   We are not merely delivered from the curse by a moral change in us but
   by a redemptive work for us. Christ was slain and has redeemed us to
   God by His blood. A ransomed captive is by the ransom justly freed and
   has a right to his freedom which none may question. You that believe in
   Jesus are freed from the curse of the Law and justly freed from it. The
   Law cannot curse you, though you have broken it and in your own persons
   incurred its penalty. Since you are in Christ Jesus, the Law has not a
   word to say against you. The reason we will show you directly, but the
   fact is so, and therein you should rejoice. "He that believes in Him is
   not condemned."

   So far from being condemned, the Believer is, "accepted in the
   Beloved," and this is our happy privilege at this hour. Let us rejoice
   in God and rest in peace, being justified by faith.

   But then the Apostle goes on to show the manner of it. The fact is
   clear--oh, for a grip of it! The manner of our deliverance is
   this--"Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the Law, being made a
   curse for us." I do not understand language at all, unless this means
   substitution. Christ was made a curse for us. That is to say, in our
   place He bore our sins and the curse which came of it. The curse of the
   Law, which otherwise must have fallen upon us, fell upon the Anointed
   of the Lord, who stood Sponsor for us.

   Jesus was accursed of men. Oh, how they hated and loathed Him! How
   clamorously the Jews cried, "Away with Him! Crucify Him, crucify Him!"
   The curse of men might have been of small account, though it cost our
   Lord many a sorrow. But His Father hid His face from Him! Do you hear
   that bitterest of all bitter cries, "My God, My God, why have You
   forsaken Me?" Here is the wormwood and the gall, the quintessence of
   woe. He was All-blessed, yet He was made a curse. In Him was no sin,
   yet, "He made Him to be sin for us." He was always in Himself the
   Beloved of the Father. But when He stood in the sinner's place, a voice
   was heard, "Awake, O sword, against My shepherd and against the man
   that is my Fellow, says the Lord."

   "The Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all," and then, "it
   pleased the Lord to bruise Him. He has put Him to grief." I do not like
   to use a word of my own, in trying to open up this mystery--I will not
   even try to explain it but will bid you look down into the depths of it
   for yourselves. He was "made a curse for us"--he was not such by
   nature. It needed a special arrangement to put Him in that condition.
   Not only did the curse pass over Him in its results but the word says,
   "He was made a curse." It is wonderfully expressive. And yet more
   wonderfully it veils the inexpressible.

   "He was made a curse." O You Divine Son of God! You ever-blessed One,
   you perfect One! You altogether lovely One, how can such words apply to
   You? Yet they do apply, for the Holy Spirit speaks of You in this wise.
   Here is our hope and here our joy, even in this abyss of woe--"He was
   made a curse for us." The penal consequences of sin were so visited
   upon the great Substitute that He vindicated the Law of God in the
   highest conceivable manner. Remember those words--"Who His own self
   bore our sins in His own body on the tree."

   These are the echo of that Prophetic sentence--"The Lord has laid on
   Him the iniquity of us all." "He bore the sin of many." "Behold the
   Lamb of God, which takes away the sin of the world." He bore our sins
   that He might bear them away by the fact of bearing them Himself. This
   is the central doctrine of the Gospel. And although today it is
   slighted, here I stand, by God's Grace, to declare it in plain terms
   while my tongue can move. I know no other hope for lost men but
   this--that the justice of God has been vindicated by the death of the
   Lord Jesus Christ and it is by faith in Him that men are delivered from
   the curse of the Law, because He was made a curse for them.

   The Apostle, speaking in this second part, as it were, in the same way
   as in the former portion, goes on to confirm this by Scripture. He says
   again, "For it is written." Beloved, that is the nail on which
   everything must hang--"It is written," "It is written." Never let us
   get away from, "It is written." May we hold fast to God's Word, if we
   give up everything else! "It is written, Cursed is everyone that hangs
   on a tree." Read the twenty-third verse of the twenty-first chapter of
   Deuteronomy. The instructed in Jewish manners and customs tell us that
   the usual way of putting to death by

   the Jews was by stoning and a person who committed murder was stoned to
   death usually and he was afterwards hanged upon a tree.

   He was hanged up that men might see that he was taken from the earth
   and that the curse of God was upon him for his crime. The Law was that
   he should not remain on the tree after sundown and this Law saved the
   Jews from that barbarity which once defaced our own country--leaving
   the body of the hanged in chains year after year. God's Law stipulated
   a man who had committed murder was to hung up till the sun went down.
   And then he was buried and, if I remember rightly, they usually buried
   the tree and the nails and the garments of the criminal, that the
   memory of him might be put away and the land should not be polluted.

   This being the case, it was remarkable that our Lord should die by a
   death which was evidently intended in the Divine decree to exhibit Him
   as made a curse. The felon's hanging, the mode of death for slaves, was
   adopted by the Roman governor, who knew nothing whatever of the Divine
   purpose but yet carried it out. By the mode of His death our Lord was
   exhibited as "made a curse for us."

   Oh, look you to the Crucified! While the darkness gathers around us on
   this murky morning, let it remind you of the gloom which gathered
   around your Savior. Remember the hour when the concentrated essence of
   darkness and of eternal night gathered about His blessed Person while
   He hung exposed to death upon the tree. Darkness was the most fit
   surrounding for the agony which racked His soul. Our Lord endured
   within Him a darkness greater than that without Him.

   The darkness seemed to say that His griefs could not be seen or
   understood of men. He suffered within the sacred chamber of an
   impenetrable midday midnight. None could see the heights and depths of
   what was meant by His being "made a curse"--

   "There my God bore all my guilt

   This through Divine Grace can be believed. But the horrors which He
   felt Are too vast to be conceived."

   Notice, furthermore, the consequence of all this--"That the blessing of
   Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ." Our Lord
   Jesus Christ was made a curse for us that He might deliver us from the
   curse of the Law, and that in consequence we might be blessed. The
   flood of blessing was ready to flow along its channel but the riverbed
   was blocked by a huge rock. The stream was dammed up by our iniquity.
   What was to be done? The hindrance could only be moved by that great
   Lord, whose hands were pierced and whose feet were nailed to the Cross.
   He, by His great self-sacrificing act of love, lifted the rock from its
   place, cast it away and enabled the stream of blessing to flow freely
   down to us.

   This day there is no curse for the Believer. But every blessing awaits
   him. All who are in Christ, the great seed of Abraham, are blessed with
   faithful Abraham. The Covenant may be summed up in this one
   word--Blessing, blessing, blessing--blessing for the Believer and
   blessing through him. What was the blessing of Abraham? It was, first,
   justification. It was "accounted to him for righteousness." God counts
   them righteous who believe in Jesus. He not only absolves you from sin
   but He justifies you, accounts you as having kept the Law. Oh, rejoice
   in this and be glad!

   The next blessing to Abraham was the promise. God had given him a great
   promise of a spiritual inheritance. To us the Holy Spirit is the
   earnest of that future inheritance--and Christ has so worked for us,
   "that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith."
   Wherever the Spirit of God dwells, the covenant is fulfilled--you have
   in the Spirit the foretaste of the promised rest, you have the initial
   stages of the promised perfection--you have the dawn of the promised
   glory. The Spirit is the earnest of the inheritance till the redemption
   of the purchased possession, to the praise of His Glory.

   Beloved, see what has come to you, then, through the substitutionary
   work of Christ! Justification is yours as truly as it was Abraham's,
   and you are as assuredly justified as Abraham was. The promise also
   comes to you even as it did to Abraham. For you are Abraham's seed in
   Christ and you are blessed with faithful Abraham. You may rejoice,
   therefore, with joy unspeakable and full of glory. All this, you
   observe, is by faith--"That we might receive the promise of the Spirit
   through faith."

   O dear Hearers, I am very sorry for some of you--for you have no faith
   and therefore no Grace. Why should not my sorrow be turned into joy?
   May God the Holy Spirit lead you to believe in Christ Jesus today! My
   wonder is that any believe, from one point of view. And then my next
   wonder is that anybody should not believe. Is it not marvelous that God

   should give His own dear Son, God, like Himself? And that God should
   thus come among men and put on human flesh and blood--and that in His
   wonderfully complex Person He should bear the consequences of our sin?

   It is a miracle that God should, by suffering, magnify His own Law and
   that the Supreme Judge should Himself bear the curse, instead of the
   culprit, and thus vindicate the principles of eternal rectitude. Even
   Hell itself could not more fully prove the displeasure of God against
   evil, nor make the moral government of the universe more honorable. The
   doctrine of Substitution must be true. It could not have been invented
   by human wit. Prima facie it bears the mark of the Truth of God upon
   it.

   It is the most wonderful story that ever was told--God Himself
   condescends to suffer in the place of His enemies. He bears the sin of
   those who are rebels against His Divine authority--and without injury
   to His justice or taint upon His righteousness--He pardons sin and
   receives the sinner into favor. Herein is love, indeed! Here is justice
   truly vindicated and great love glorified. Love both devised the plan
   and carried it out and this day love makes it effectual in all who
   believe in Jesus.

   my Hearers, I cannot be content to preach this glorious Truth of God to
   you. I hunger and thirst that you may receive it! Oh, that you would
   now look to Jesus and live! Behold Him on the Cross! Behold your God,
   whom you have offended, clothed in your nature and dying in your place,
   that you may live! The serpent of brass is on the pole--the serpent has
   bitten the people, they are ready to die. And lo, on the pole another
   serpent is uplifted. The curse destroys you. The Lord uplifts Him who
   was made a curse.

   Those who looked to the brazen serpent found life and healing in that
   look. And even so, there is life from sin by looking to Him who was
   made sin for us. Though the serpent's poison was deadly, its bites were
   cured by a look at the brazen serpent. And even so, my Lord becomes a
   man and, as a man, bears our sin in His own body on the tree, that He
   might from that tree cry to guilty men, "Look unto Me and be you saved,
   all the ends of the earth; for I am God and there is none else."

   Oh, that you would look to Jesus by faith! I began by lamenting that we
   are under the curse. But if you will trust in my Lord, I shall conclude
   by bidding you rejoice that, "Christ has redeemed us from the curse of
   the Law."

   1 have done when I just say these two or three practical words--Humbly
   let us own the great evil of sin. What a horrible thing sin must be,
   that it should compel God to curse His creatures! God is Love but even
   love curses sin. God is full of pity and compassion. But this very God
   must curse those who hope to be saved by His Law and yet break that
   Law. Child of God, do you ever trifle with sin? Cease from that fatal
   folly. For God does not trifle with it--He curses it.

   Man, see what a polluting thing your sin must be, since there is no
   removing it except by the blood of the only begotten Son of God! If you
   have ever had faint views of your own guilt, cease from them at once.
   Only by the interposition of God Himself could you be saved from guilt.
   How great that guilt! Lie low before your Lord. Confess your sin with a
   broken heart. Wonder that your heart is not more broken than it is and
   that you have not a greater horror of its tremendous, its infinite,
   evil.

   Next, let me say to you, heartily accept the way of salvation by faith
   in Christ. I cannot make out why men quarrel with justification by
   faith as they now do. There is an old proverb which says, "It is a pity
   for any man to quarrel with his bread and butter." But to quarrel with
   the means of your livelihood is nothing in folly compared with laughing
   at God's way of salvation. Why do you refuse a method so simple, so
   just to God, so safe to man? Why do men desire to find fault with it? I
   am very old-fashioned, so they say. But does their new fashion offer
   men anything better than the old way?

   1 am not too old to learn. But I am not so young as willingly to go
   further and fare worse. I cannot see what there is in the new theology
   which even pretends to be better than the old. I suppose that eminent
   Divine is eminently superior to me who is so orthodox as to say that
   our Lord Jesus Christ by His death did something or other, he does not
   know what, which in some way or other, he does not quite know how, is
   connected with the reconciliation of man to God. This is rather a
   cloudy Gospel. I do not think that such a dim statement would cheer a
   mouse, much less a broken-hearted, dying sinner.

   I do not see that his plan, or want of plan, has any glory over that
   which I declare to you. But he is orthodox--very many of his Brethren
   go far further and altogether deny the expiatory sacrifice. I cannot
   pretend to have fellowship with such--they take from me my hope. I was
   a broken-hearted sinner, crushed under guilt, crying out in despair and
   expect-

   ing soon to be in Hell. And it was only when I learned that the Lord
   Jesus suffered in my place that I found peace of conscience.

   Substitution is still the rock on which I build and I know of no other
   on which a man can wisely base his hope for eternity. Comfort in the
   Cross I have never lost, and I am not going to cast away my confidence
   in it to please the philosophers of the season. The old farmer would
   not change his horse, "For," he said, "I have not seen a nag that will
   carry me better than my own." The doctrine of the Cross has carried me
   so far without a stumble and I hope to enter Heaven by its means. I am
   glad to sing with the children--

   "He knew how wicked we had been,

   And knew that God must punish sin--

   So, out of pity, Jesus said

   He'd bear the punishment instead." Glorious atonement! Accept it, poor
   Soul! Do not let the devil set you laughing at your only hope. This is
   the available way of salvation for you, you lost one! You
   self-condemned one--this is a way which will suit you! If you are so
   very good and so very wise, I know that this gracious method will not
   attract you. You will kick at it. This does not make me think any the
   less of it. For I remember that our Lord is set to be a stone of
   stumbling and a rock of offense to those who stumble at His Word, being
   disobedient. If you will not have Him, do not deceive yourselves--we
   never thought you would.

   You do but prove that the Father has hid these things from the wise and
   prudent and has revealed them unto babes. You come not to Him because
   you are not of His sheep, as He said unto you. If you were brought low
   and felt your need of Him, then should we hope that Jesus reckoned you
   among His redeemed. If you would hear His voice and follow Him, then
   should we know that you belonged to the Good Shepherd who laid down His
   life for the sheep. But as you disregard Him, you will be driven away
   with the goats.

   Further, let us now gratefully extol our Redeemer. Join all of you to
   magnify the Lord your Savior. We do not praise Him half as much as we
   ought. I might even ask, Do we say anything about Him? Six days in the
   week we talk about all sorts of things and say little or nothing about
   Him and yet He has redeemed us. The fact of His being made a curse for
   us ought to fill our mouths with thanksgiving and our tongues with
   singing all the day long. Blessed be the Redeemer's name! "He loved me
   and gave Himself for me." Extol Him now and evermore--if you have not
   done so before, begin at once. Get your music ready. "O sing unto the
   Lord a new song."

   Then go and tell other people about your Lord's redemption. The theme
   will win attention if properly set forth. Let no one within fifty miles
   of you be without a knowledge of this great redemption by Christ's
   being made a curse for us. Men try to hide this Truth of God--therefore
   let us cause it to shine out everywhere. Vindicate the name of your
   great Lord by telling everybody that He has redeemed us from the curse
   of the Law, being made a curse for us.

   If I could set you all preaching this blessed doctrine, I should
   rejoice, indeed. Rest in it and rejoice in it, and then repeat it till
   others also know and believe it. Even now the day begins to brighten
   up, the murky darkness is abating--I hope our hearts will rejoice in
   harmony with the day. The Lord send us out into a world delivered from
   darkness. May we make it brighter by setting before it this great Truth
   of God! To our glorious Substitute be glory forever and ever! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

Foundation Work

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S DAY MORNING, JULY 7, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "And the king commanded and they brought great stones, costly stones
   and hewed atones, to lay the foundation of the house." 1 Kings 5:17.

   "THE king commanded"--that is the beginning of all. Holy zeal waits for
   the king's orders. But as soon as the command was given there was
   neither pause nor hesitation--"the king commanded and they brought."
   Oh, that it were always so in the Church of God. That the King's
   command were at once followed by His people's obedience! That obedience
   was true to every detail--"The king commanded and they brought great
   stones, costly stones, and hewed stones." They did not omit one
   particular, or deviate in the least degree. The advice of the Blessed
   Virgin to the servants at the marriage feast is our advice to all
   workers--"Whatsoever He says unto you, do it."

   Work done without the Lord's command may be nothing more than mere
   will-worship, unacceptable with the Lord. Where the word of a king is,
   there is power. And you may expect that power to go forth with you when
   you go forth under the guidance and authority of the Divine command.
   Solomon began to build the temple at the foundation. You smile and
   wonder how he could have begun anywhere else. Ah, dear Friends! I wish
   common sense ruled people in religion as well as in building temples.
   For many Brethren begin their building at the top.

   To baptize an unbeliever on the ground of a faith which does not yet
   exist is laying the topstone before the foundation. To gather into
   Church fellowship those who are not gathered to Christ is attempting to
   pile on the roof before there are any walls. For any of you to make a
   profession of religion without being born again is building the third
   story before there is any basement. How much we have in this world of
   hanging up houses in the air!--I mean making professions without having
   anything upon which to base them. Begin with the foundation.

   The foundation, in this case, had to be carried to a great height,
   because the area upon which the temple stood was high above the valley.
   As there was not space enough on the mount, it was necessary to build
   up from the depth of the valley scores of feet in perpendicular height,
   to form a foundation upon which there would be sufficient space for the
   temple and its surroundings. Portions of the massive masonry which
   formed the foundation of the enlarged area remain, to be wondered at by
   all who gaze upon them. Solomon paid special care to the foundation.

   Very much of foundation work is out of sight and the temptation is to
   pay but small attention to its finish. It was not so with Solomon.
   Although it was very much out of sight, the king took care that the
   underground portion of the temple should be worthy of the rest of the
   edifice--it was to be made of "great stones, costly stones and hewed
   stones." Builders in these days would think it absurd to spend time and
   labor in the hewing of stones which would never be seen. Foundations
   may call for something firm and solid but certainly for nothing costly
   and hewn with care. Out of sight, out of mind. And therefore none will
   spend time and trouble upon it.

   Not so the wise king engaged in the service of God. He paid great
   attention to underground work. And "great stones, costly stones and
   hewed stones," were brought at his command to form the foundation of
   the temple. He designed to make it all of a piece--it was to be as
   truly "magnificent" in its foundation as in its roof. There was to be
   no poverty of material, no skimping of any portion of the work. It was
   for God and it was to be built by the king of Israel. And it would
   neither honor God nor the king to have a bad foundation.

   I want, dear Friends, to urge that all our work for God should be done
   thoroughly and especially that part of it which lies lowest and is
   least observed of men. I shall first say this is God's method--He
   builds all His works with good foundations. Secondly, this should be
   our method in all work for God. And, thirdly, this is a wise method.
   Briefly upon each, as the Holy Spirit shall help me.

   I. First, THIS IS GOD'S METHOD. Wherever you turn your eyes upon the
   work of God, it is perfect. It will bear the keenest inspection. You
   may look at it from a distance with a telescope, or you may search it
   with a microscope. But you shall find no imperfection. The Lord's work
   is perfect, not merely on the surface but to its center. If you cut
   deep, or if you pull it to pieces, dividing atom from atom, you shall
   see the wisdom of God in the minutest particle.

   Observe the work of creation. God took care that even in the material
   universe there should be a grand foundation for His noble edifice. We
   have the story of the fitting up of the world, during the seven days,
   for the habitation of man. But we have not the history of the creation
   of the earth before that time. To prepare for the seven days' rapid
   furnishing of the earth for man, millions of years may have elapsed.
   The foundation was laid with great care. No limit can be set to the
   period preceding the making of man, if you only follow the Word of God
   in Genesis.

   "In the beginning"--that was a long, long while ago--"God created the
   Heaven and the earth." And during that process of creation it went
   through a great many stages. For God was determined that the house in
   which man should dwell should be thoroughly furnished for him. I cannot
   conduct you to the foundations of the earth. But I do ask you to go
   down with me into the cellar. Consider that vast deposit of salt for
   our comfort and health. And the mines of iron and other metals which
   lay the cornerstones of trade and commerce. Look at the store of coal
   laid up in the deep places for us.

   God would not send his child here in winter time and put no coal in the
   cellar for him. But He took long ages to provide the world with that
   fuel which is necessary for a thousand useful purposes. Those metals
   which are the best treasures of the soil are usually placed lowest by
   God. "In His hand are the deep places of the earth: the strength of the
   hills is His, also." If ever science shall be able to investigate below
   the crust of the globe into its fiery caldron, they will discover fresh
   wonders of God's power and wisdom.

   What benefit may be bestowed upon us even by the secret fires which
   burn and rage within the world's innermost heart, or what may be the
   blessing derived by us from these underlying fountains of water
   gathered in the deeps, we cannot estimate. Suffice it to say that God's
   creation is not only full of glory in its loftiest pinnacles but also
   in its utmost depths. God is the Master Builder and He lays the
   foundation well.

   The same is true of God's work called Providence. No event happens but
   He has planned it and ordained that a multitude of other events should
   precede or follow it. The doings of Providence are threaded together,
   like pearls upon a string. There is a relation of this to that and of
   that to another. God does not allow events to blow about like scattered
   leaves in autumn--neither are they the inventions of a trying
   moment--when He is driven to fresh expedients that His end may not be
   frustrated. Events dovetail the one into the other. Every fact is
   fitted and adapted to take its place in the design of the great
   Architect.

   Certain great principles underlie all history. One who had but little
   spiritual knowledge, yet confessed that "there is a power abroad which
   makes for righteousness"--he could not help seeing that. And he might
   have seen more had he opened his eyes. There is, in the affairs of man,
   many a touch of God's own hand. History looks like tangled yarn. But
   when you and I shall see it disentangled, we shall wonder at the
   infinite wisdom, kindness and goodness of God. Behold, in all things
   everything is of Him and by Him and through Him, to the praise of His
   Glory. In God's government of the universe He makes sure of His
   foundation.

   But we come into clearer light when we look at the Lord's greatest work
   of redemption. You and I are not saved haphazardly. It is not as though
   God had saved us on the spur of the moment, as an afterthought which
   was not in His first intent. No, redemption plays an essential part in
   the purposes of the Lord. I delight to look back upon the Lord's
   redeeming thoughts before all time and say of them, "These are ancient
   things." Long before the stars flew like sparks from the anvil of
   omnipotence, God had contrived the way for the redemption of His own.
   In the covenant council chamber, the Divine Persons of the sacred Unity
   arranged the procedure of all-glorious Grace.

   And today all things are worked according to the purpose of His eternal
   will. The foundation of redemption was securely laid in the Covenant of
   Grace, of which the Lord Jesus is the foundation. Infinite love,
   infallible wisdom, immutable faithfulness--all these combined to lay a
   foundation which can never be moved.

   Go a little further, dear Friends, and come to the day in which the
   Lord provided an atonement for us and thus laid an immovable
   foundation. It has been suggested that He might have saved us, if He
   willed, without a sacrifice, letting Law and Justice stand on one side.
   This is after the manner of the men of the day--the jerry-building of
   the hour scorns so mean a thing as a foundation. But God does not build
   in this vile fashion. God will have no flaw in the salvation of His

   people. And that there never might arise a question as to the justice
   of the Divine act by which their iniquity is passed over, He has
   exacted a penalty at the hand of their Surety.

   Now the Lord justly forgives their transgression. Justice, vindicated
   by a glorious sacrifice, brings for a foundation "great stones, costly
   stones and hewed stones." All the angels of God might search all Heaven
   in vain to find a fit foundation stone for the Temple of Grace. But
   when the Only-Begotten of the Father offered Himself without spot unto
   God, it was seen that He was in all respects fit to be the foundation
   of man's redemption. He is a chief Cornerstone, elect, precious, able
   to bear all that can be laid upon Him.

   What a wonder it was that God would yield Him up to die, to be the
   basis of our hope! Talk of the great stones and costly stones of
   Solomon's Temple--they are not worthy to be mentioned in the same day
   as this Chief Cornerstone, on which all the hopes of His elect are
   laid. For they behold in Him the sacrifice for sin, the destroyer of
   evil and the reconciler of the lost. Glory be to God! In resting upon
   Jesus we do not build on the sand but on a rock. He is the foundation
   of God, which stands sure. The whole temple of the Church is sustained
   by Him.

   When you are rejoicing in your sonship, your union to Christ, your high
   privileges, your eternal glory--do not forget the less visible but
   equally essential foundation blessings of eternal personal election,
   the Everlasting Covenant, the unchanging purpose and the infallible
   oath of God. Sing evermore of the love which from eternity was fixed
   upon you and of the purpose settled and established concerning you. For
   these lie at the foundation of all the favors you enjoy. Solomon's
   foundations astonish beholders on earth. But those of God will fill
   angels with amazement throughout eternity.

   Once more--while illustrating the truth that God's method is to lay a
   good foundation, I must beg you to think of the application of
   redemption to the heart of everyone of the redeemed in personal
   salvation. Beloved, when God saved us, it was no superficial work--the
   building of His Grace in our souls is no wooden shanty but a building
   which has foundations. Look back at the early dealings of God with you
   before you knew Him--He says, "I girded you, though you have not known
   Me." Your experiences in your ungodly state were made to lay a
   foundation for the higher work of Divine Grace in your hearts.

   This was more fully seen in the operations of Grace when God began to
   deal with you effectually. When He worked in you conviction of sin,
   what an out-digging there was! With some of us, the throwing out of the
   foundation lasted for years. And for myself, I began to think there
   never would be a trace of anything built up in my heart. What a trench
   was dug in my soul! Out went my supposed merits! What a heap of
   rubbish! Out went my knowledge, my good resolves and my
   self-sufficiency! By-and-by, out went all my strength. When this
   out-digging was completed, the ditch was so deep that, when I went down
   into it, it seemed like my grave.

   Such a grief it was for me to know my own sinfulness, that it did not
   seem possible that this could help my building up in comfort and
   salvation. Yet so it is, that if the Lord means to build high, He
   always digs deep. And if He means to give great Grace, He gives deep
   consciousness of need of it. Our convictions of sin, though painful and
   humbling, are a necessary part of edification in righteousness. Since
   then we have been the subjects of a great deal of secret, unseen,
   underground work. The Lord has spent upon us a world of care. My
   Brothers and Sisters, you would not like to unveil those great
   searching of heart of which you have been the subject.

   You have been honored in public. And, if so, you have had many a
   whipping behind the door lest you should glory in your flesh. Whenever
   God has filled your boat with fish and you have been more than
   ordinarily successful, that boat has begun to sink. Great mercies are
   great humblers of sincere souls. You have gone down in proportion as
   God has gone up with you. All those chastening, humbling and searching
   of heart have been a private laying of foundations for higher things.
   Yes, and the Lord has done much more than this in His own unseen but
   effectual way. He has given instruction and revelation and sanctified
   fellowship and these have been your own and not another's.

   No one has seen what the Lord has worked in you. But if it had not been
   for this, you could not have been built up in holiness and usefulness.
   Thank God He works the greater wonders of His love in the dark, out of
   sight. Yet, as the foundation is the most important part of the
   building, so the secret, humbling processes of Divine Grace have a
   value second to none. Yes, my Brethren, for the building up of a temple
   for His indwelling, the Lord "brings great stones, costly stones and
   hewed stones to lay the foundation of the house."

   II. I want now to see that THIS MUST BE OUR METHOD, TOO. We must build
   after this fashion and make sure of our foundations.

   First, let it be so in the building up of our own life. Every man and
   woman here, but especially those who are young, have a life to build
   up. It is a great thing to begin by believing good solid doctrine. Some
   people have believed twenty different gospels in as many years--how
   many more they will believe before they get to their journey's end it
   would be difficult to predict. I thank God I never knew but one Gospel.
   And I have been so perfectly satisfied with it that I do not want to
   know any other. Constant change of creed is sure loss. If a tree has to
   be taken up two or three times a year, you will not need to build a
   very large loft in which to store the apples.

   When people are always shifting their doctrinal principles, they are
   not likely to bring forth much fruit to the Glory of God. It is good to
   begin with a firm hold upon those great fundamental doctrines which the
   Lord has taught in His Word. Draw into their places in your belief and
   in your experience, those "great stones, costly stones and hewed
   stones" of sure revelation which lay the doctrinal foundation of the
   Temple of Faith.

   It is a great blessing to have a deep, solid, inward experience.
   Beloved, never think that you have taken hold of a Truth of God till it
   has taken hold of you. We do a great deal of flimsy work in religion,
   to our cost and injury. If much of our supposed experience were laid on
   the wall of our confidence, the first real stone that pressed on it
   would crumble it to sand. We want things solid, vital, real--"great
   stones, costly stones and hewed stones, to lay the foundation of the
   house."

   Beloved, how much is done in private by every Christian who is really
   sanctified, in the matter of the mastering of sin? It is not fit, in
   cases of inward conflict, to open the door or the window and bid
   everybody come and see. If you have the wild beast of sin to tackle,
   shut the door and have it out alone. God helping you, you will never
   attain to a holy life unless there are secret conflicts with sin. There
   must also be hidden times of communion with God. That Grace which is
   artesian, is Grace, indeed. When you have tapped the deep that lies
   under, up leaps the stream with an irresistible force, fresh from the
   very heart of truth.

   I pray God to deliver us from the present superficialities of religion.
   Xavier is said to have made innumerable converts in India by going
   about with a little pot of water and a brush and sprinkling them as he
   went along. If men do not in that way make converts now, I am afraid
   the work is not much deeper or more effectual. Unless men have new
   hearts and right spirits, it is all in vain that they make new
   professions. We need to be baptized into the Grace of God till every
   part of our old nature is buried with Christ and the whole of our new
   nature is dyed in the color of almighty love. God grant it may be so!
   Be thorough. Be real, be intense. In your building up of character,
   look well to the foundation.

   So it must be, next, in the building up of a Church, that a Church of
   God needs be founded on the everlasting Truth of God. There are numbers
   of hasty builders with wood, hay and stubble. But these neither attend
   to the foundation nor to material laid thereon. Splendid stuff for
   rapid construction is good, well-trussed hay! Bring a truss at a time.
   What a pile of building we will show in a day! You wanted a house and
   we have built you one in an instant. The wall is three feet thick and
   wonderfully warm. We have built a house in a day.

   In this way new sects and parties have been invented and called
   Churches of Christ. Is this worth while? "Thus says the Lord, shall it
   prosper?" For my part, although I would be zealous in the service of my
   Lord, I had rather, by the Grace of God, "lay great stones, costly
   stones and hewed stones" upon the solid, rocky old doctrines of the
   Gospel, than gather the greatest crowd, without faith and life. The
   stones of the temple were so squared and polished that you could not
   get a knife in between them when they were placed side by side. The
   stones thus adjusted were like a solid, united mass. So let us build.
   "Slow work," you say. Yes, but it will be equally slow in coming down
   and that is the thing we must care about--we build for eternity.

   To maintain solid truth you need solid people. Vital godliness is
   therefore to be aimed at. Twenty thousand people, all merely professing
   faith but having no energetic life, may not have Divine Grace enough
   among them to make twenty solid Believers. Poor, sickly Believers turn
   the Church into an hospital, rather than a camp. Weak Believers are
   poor stuff for building a Church with. Alas, much has been done of late
   to promote the production of dwarfish Christians. The endeavor has been
   to increase breadth at the expense of depth. What would you think of
   those who should break the dams of our reservoirs to let the water
   spread over the country?

   The accident which did this in America has spread ruin throughout a
   great district. I fear that nothing but mischief can come of the
   present liberal regime which talks of universal fatherhood and
   virtually breaks down the separating wall which is meant to guard the
   Church of God. If, in order to spread our sea, we make it very shallow
   and it spreads a noxious atmosphere and death over the plain, it will
   be a sorry exchange for life eternal. Oh, to have a Church built up
   with the deep godliness of men who know the Lord in their very hearts
   and will seek to follow the Lamb wherever He goes!

   I look with great delight, although with much sorrow, upon our
   Society's Church building in the Congo. When we think of the many men
   who have died there, it has indeed been true already that "great
   stones, costly stones and hewed stones" have been laid for a
   foundation. If God will enable His Church to make such sacrifices, He
   means to build a fair palace for His Glory. When the great demands of a
   work call for unusual consecration and unknown donors drop large sums
   into the treasury of the Church, then there is hope of a grand building
   up. When Christian men, for the Truth of God's sake can part with
   friends, lose popularity and involve themselves in loss, then are
   "great stones, costly stones and hewed stones" being built into the
   foundation of the temple of the Lord.

   This morning a large number of friends are present who have been
   attending the Sunday school Convention. I welcome them heartily and I
   wish to turn my subject towards them, by saying--Dear Friends, in the
   building up of character in others, we must mind that we do the
   foundation work well. Sunday school teachers are those who do the
   foundation work--for they begin first with young hearts, while they are
   tender and susceptible. It is a most important thing that we have our
   children and young people well instructed in the Divine Truth of God
   and soundly converted.

   If we tone down the Gospel which we teach, under the notion of making
   it more suitable to children, we shall greatly err--we may make it more
   childish but we shall not make it more fit for children--nor a more
   effective instrument for their salvation. The same Gospel which is
   preached in this great Tabernacle to this crowd is preached downstairs
   in our Sunday school, to the young. And if I thought it were not so, I
   should despair of seeing any conversions. The lads and lasses want just
   the same Truths of God as the adults, only it should be stated in
   simpler language, with more of parable and illustration.

   Fundamental Truths of God are as much connected with the salvation of a
   child as with the salvation of a full-grown man. Christ receives
   adults, but He also suffers little children to come to Him. Let us
   always take good heed that our Sunday school teaching is as solidly
   truthful as our instruction of the Church.

   But be it never forgotten that the major part of teaching will lie in
   example! And, therefore, the life of the teacher must be of the very
   best. It is wonderful how children copy the conduct of a beloved
   teacher--for good or for evil--the force of example over the imitative
   faculty of youth is very great. When their hearts are tender they are
   molded for God and good things as much by what they see in our
   character as by what they hear from our lips. Most of you have seen in
   the British Museum the Egyptian brick which bears the mark of a dog's
   foot upon it. When it was as yet soft mud, a dog, who was wandering
   through the brickfield, set his signature upon it and there it
   stands--Dog of Nile--his mark.

   Any casual word or foolish act may make a mark on a child's character
   as indelible as the dog's signature. This may be done when we are not
   intending it. How much more when with our heart's intent we write upon
   a loving mind! An unhallowed remark, or an ill-advised act, may start a
   soul upon the line of destruction. As the Japanese copyist was very
   careful to imitate the crack in the plate, and the flaw in the design,
   so shall we find young people peculiarly apt to follow our faults and
   infirmities. Oh, for holy teachers and preachers! Let us be such that
   we may dare to bid our disciples mark us and have us for examples.

   How surely are the impressions of our early days retained when later
   learning is forgotten! How easily may you who work upon the precious
   material of a young mind leave on it an undying record! I remember a
   man of God, who has now gone to his reward, who was the means of
   producing, under God, a library of useful lives. I do not mean books in
   paper but books in boots. Many young men were decided for the Lord by
   his means and became preachers, teachers, deacons and other workers.
   And no one would wonder that it was so, if he knew the man who trained
   them. He was ready for every good word and work.

   But he gave special attention to his Bible class, in which he set forth
   the Gospel with clearness and zeal. Whenever any of his young men left
   the country town in which he lived, he would be sure to have a parting
   interview. There was a wide-spreading oak down in the fields. And there
   he was likely to keep an early morning appointment with John, or

   Thomas, or William--and that appointment very much consisted of earnest
   pleadings with the Lord, that in going up to the great city the young
   man might be kept from sin and made useful. Under that tree several
   decided for the Savior.

   It was an impressive act and left its influence. For many men came,
   after many years, to see the spot made sacred by their teacher's
   prayers. We ought to be ingenious in our methods and spare no pains to
   influence young people for their good. "Great stones, costly stones and
   hewed stones" may be fitly used in such building as this. If the Lord,
   by our means, prepares but one soul for eternal bliss, we shall not
   have lived in vain.

   But, beloved Friends, one of the most important things about dealing
   with children is that we teach them what we have well prepared. Their
   mental food must be carefully cooked. If ever a teacher goes to the
   class without preparing the lesson, the teaching is sure to be very
   poor work. Nobody sees you when you are preparing your lesson--nobody
   commends you for your diligent research. It is the public address which
   is noted. But the secret study is that to which the commendation really
   belongs. If this private preparation is neglected, it is a very serious
   omission.

   Indeed, bad work in places which are not looked at is a wretched order
   of things. Some time ago it fell to me, as executor, to arrange for the
   sale of the goods and effects in a house most elegantly furnished.
   Certain fine pictures were to go to Christy and Manson's. The drawing
   room was expensively adorned and the wall decorations were elaborate
   with a pattern in which gold stars were somewhat plentiful. When the
   paintings were taken down, I was not a little surprised to see that
   behind them the wall was bare of ornament, so that at no time could
   those pictures have been shifted without showing how the decoration had
   been stinted.

   The owner was rich. Yet his tradesman must had practiced such pinching
   economy of a little gilding. I am afraid if we were to take down the
   pictures in some Sunday school teachers and Christian ministers, there
   would be seen ugly patches of neglect. It should not be so, Brethren,
   in the work of the Lord. It must not be so! Our power under God will
   lie very much in the heartiness of our private work.

   Years ago, when I was suffering from gouty rheumatism, a gentleman
   sought an interview--he was confident that he could cure me almost
   immediately. He was a marvelously positive quack and before long he had
   informed me that he had in his exclusive possession a most astounding
   medicine. I do not know whether a smell of it would not have cured all
   the ills of humanity. No, he could not even hint what the medicine was.
   And I did not press the point, for I could not expect to be favored
   with the golden secret. But I was indulged with some insight into the
   preparation of the miraculous drug.

   The professor said, "These pills are infallible in their effect,
   because they are so powerful. Their power does not lie in the mere
   ingredients, which are extremely simple, but their efficacy is the
   result of the careful preparation of the material by myself." Being a
   very healthy man and full of vigor, the professor professed to work up
   these pills in such a way that he transferred to them the electric or
   biological energies of his own personality! And thus he infused health
   into the sick. I have never taken the aforesaid pills. But I have used
   their author's assertion as a lesson.

   I believe that if preachers and teachers work into their lessons the
   life of their souls and the whole power of their minds, their teaching
   will be far more effectual for good than if they merely repeat good
   things and put no heart into them. See to it that your heart and soul
   is worked into your teaching. Next time we are studying the Scripture
   lessons, let us think to ourselves, "This is foundation work. No one
   will know how I have worked at it. But the Lord, whom I serve, will
   take note of all that I do, and He will be pleased with conscientious
   foundation work."

   Brothers and Sisters, we must put "good stones, costly stones and hewed
   stones" into the unseen part of our edifice, that, as a whole, our work
   may be meet for the thrice-holy Lord.

   III. My time fails me. But under my third head I must carefully, though
   briefly, set forth the reasons why this should be done. IT IS A WISE
   METHOD.

   First, because it is suitable for God. You build your temple for God
   and not for men--you should, therefore, make that part of the building
   good which will be seen by Him. And as He sees it all, it must be all
   of the best. The Lord sees the foundation just as much as He does the
   topstone--all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him with whom we
   have to do. Even heathens recognized this. A Grecian sculptor had to
   prepare an image of a god for one of the temples. He was working away
   with all his might at the back of the head and at the hinder garments
   of the figure.

   One said to him, "Your work is needless, for that part of the figure is
   to be built into the wall." "But," said the sculptor, "the gods can see
   in the wall. This is for the gods, and not for men." Let us catch the
   spirit of the heathen artist and do work for God in a manner fit for
   the Omniscient. It is meet that the foundation which is invisible
   should be per-

   fect, if we expect the Invisible God to accept it. For otherwise, if we
   spend our strength on what is seen by men, it will be pretty evident
   that we, after all, are working for the praise of man, and not for the
   Glory of God.

   Next, look well to the foundation that is out of sight, for your own
   sake. No builder can afford to be negligent over the unseen part of a
   building. For it would involve a serious injury to his character. The
   very act of skimping is mean and degrading and lowers a man's tone. I
   do not care who he is, if he habitually trifles over that which is not
   seen, the habit will defile his sincerity in other respects and lead
   him to practical hypocrisy in religious concerns. The bare idea that we
   need not do our best if we are not seen, is debasing to the soul.

   Today many aim at doing things cheaply, getting through work as fast as
   possible and making a great show for the money. Let us avoid this
   popular form of lying! Let us do every part of our work as becomes men
   who are elect of God, redeemed by precious blood and called into
   fellowship with Christ by the Holy Spirit. What if a sham might pass
   acceptable with other men, yet it must not be adopted by those who are
   of the Heaven-born race and have a quickened conscience within their
   bosom.

   "Why," says one, "nobody would respect you any the less if you did such
   work slightingly, for everybody else would do so." Listen--I should
   respect myself less if I skimped my work, and I set a great value upon
   my own respect of myself. What if another esteems me? I am still
   wretched if I know that he is mistaken and I have not the approbation
   of my own conscience. A conscience void of offense, both towards God
   and towards men, is of more worth than the applause of nations.

   Further, lay the foundation well and look to that part which is out of
   sight, because in this way you will secure the superstructure. There
   was a bit of a flaw in the foundation but nobody saw it--the builder
   covered it up very quickly and ran up the whole concern as quickly as
   possible. The walls were built and built well. It seemed clear that the
   fault down below was of no consequence whatever. And as it had a little
   cheapened the underground construction, was it not so much the better?
   How long was this the case? Well, the next year nothing happened--a
   longer time passed away and then an ugly crack came down the wall.

   Had there been an earthquake? No, there was no earthquake. Perhaps a
   cyclone had beaten upon the work? No, there was no cyclone--the weather
   was the same as usual. What was the cause of that gaping space which
   marred the beauty of the building and threatened to bring it down? It
   was that blunder long ago--that underground neglect produced the
   terrible mischief above--which t o correct would involve a great
   expense and perhaps render it necessary to take the whole building
   down. That which was out of sight did not always remain out of mind. It
   only needed time to produce a dangerous settlement.

   If certain men of our acquaintance had been soundly converted at the
   first, backsliding and apostasy would not have followed, to our shame
   and grief. If certain preachers had done their work in the Church of
   God better in years now past, those sad departures from the Truth of
   God, which now vex the saints, would not have occurred. If today you do
   not teach your children the Gospel fully and clearly, the evil may not
   be seen in your present classes, nor possibly even in this
   generation--but children's children will bear the impression of the
   slight work done at this hour. Years may be needed for the development
   of the full result of a false doctrine.

   Besides, dear Fiends, to lay a good foundation, on Solomon's part, was
   the way to save himself from future fears. Buildings which have to hold
   a crowd endure seasons of test and trial. Years ago, I was preaching in
   a building which was exceedingly crowded and, to my apprehension, there
   was a continuous tremor. I grew so anxious that I said to a friend, who
   understood such matters, "Go downstairs and see whether this building
   is really safe. For it seems hardly able to bear the weight of this
   crowd." When he returned he looked anxious but gave me no answer.

   The service ended quietly and then he said, "I am so glad that
   everything has gone off safely. I do not think you should ever preach
   here again. For it is a very frail affair. But I thought that if I
   frightened you there would be more risk in a panic than in letting the
   service go on." Solomon had built with "great stones, costly stones and
   hewed stones." And therefore, when the vast multitudes came together
   around the temple, it never occurred to him to fear that the great
   weight of people might cause a subsidence of the foundation. Oh, no! He
   stood there and prayed to God with collected mind, altogether
   undisturbed by any apprehension of possible disaster.

   He that builds well for eternity will escape a thousand fears. Doubts
   and fears are often born of a knowledge that something has been left
   undone, or has been done poorly in the process of building upon Christ.
   Beloved Members of this

   Church, you that are often subject to doubts and fears, do you not
   think that these might be cured by a more real faith and truer dealings
   with God? Are you lax as to your private study of the Word, or
   negligent in your secret prayers? If so, I do not wonder that you have
   doubts.

   Here is a suggestion as to the way of curing and preventing them. Make
   your religion solid work--have no more of it in appearance than you
   have in reality. Get down to the rock every time. Do nothing with
   careless superficiality. If you pray, plead with your whole heart. If
   you hear the Word, put your very soul into it. Let your Motto be, "Sure
   work for eternity!" Specially look well to the underground and unseen
   parts of Godliness and so shall your comfort be constant and joyful.

   Beloved, lastly, do look well to the foundation and to the secret parts
   of your dealings with God, because there is a fire coming which will
   try all things. "Every man's work shall be made manifest: for the day
   shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire. And the fire
   shall try every man's work of what sort it is." No matter where we
   build, or how we build, the fire will come upon all the works of man.
   The wood, hay and stubble builders cry, "Do not bring any fire here!
   The proposal is horrible!" But in vain do they protest, for God has
   determined that the fire shall be.

   Now, even should you build the upper and visible part of your life with
   stone, it will not avail if the under portion is of hay. The fire will
   bring it all down. What a blaze! What a blaze! Stand far off and see
   the smoke go up like that of Sodom and Gomorrah. What is left? Only a
   handful of black ashes! Is this the whole remaining result of an entire
   life? Is this the substance of a life of notoriety and publicity and
   honor? How terrible! Yet if the foundation part of your life is of
   consumable material, that must be the bitter end. God be thanked, the
   man that builds on the rock, Christ Jesus, and builds on Him gold,
   silver and precious stones, has no cause to fear the last
   conflagration.

   Today he weeps, because he has built so little. "O Lord," says he, "I
   wish I could have done a thousand times as much for You!" But after the
   fire has gone through it, and what is built remains, how thankful he
   will be! See how it shines amid the fire! The flames give it a glow and
   burnish never seen before. The rust and the tarnish are gone and the
   whole fabric shines like the pure gold which it really is. Its precious
   stones are even more brilliant than before, and in nothing has the
   structure suffered loss. The Lord be praised!

   A life well-grounded in Christ Jesus, made sound throughout by the
   power of the Spirit, will bear to be inspected of God and even to be
   inspected by the envious eyes of men, who would gladly find fault with
   it. And at last it will bear the trial of the Judgment Day and will be
   found to the praise and Glory of God forever and ever. Therefore, see
   to it that you lay the foundation of all your religion with "great
   stones, costly stones and hewed stones," that so it may last forever.

   To those of you who are not converted, let this be the final word of my
   sermon--build on God's foundation, build on Christ--the Sacrifice
   appointed of the Lord for the putting away of sin. And see to it that
   with sincere repentance, childlike faith and Gospel holiness you build
   thereon "great stones, costly stones and hewed stones," which shall lie
   firmly on the One Foundation and never be removed, world without end.
   Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

The Lamb In Glory

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S DAY MORNING, JULY 14, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "And I beheld and, lo, in the midst of the Throne and of the four
   living creatures and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had
   been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven
   Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth. And He came and took the
   book out of the right hand of Him that sat upon the Throne." Revelation
   5:6, 7.

   THE Apostle John had long known the Lord Jesus as the Lamb. That was
   his first view of Him, when the Baptist, pointing to Jesus, said,
   "Behold the Lamb of God, which takes away the sin of the world." He had
   been very familiar with this blessed Personage, having often laid his
   head upon His bosom, feeling that this tender goodness of the Savior
   proved Him to be in nature gentle as a lamb. He had beheld Him when He
   was brought "as a lamb to the slaughter," so that the idea was
   indelibly fixed upon his mind that Jesus, the Christ, was the Lamb of
   God.

   John knew that He was the appointed Sacrifice, set forth in the morning
   and evening lamb and in the Paschal Lamb, by whose blood Israel was
   redeemed from death. In his last days the beloved disciple was to see
   this same Christ, under the same figure of a lamb, as the great
   revealer of secrets, the expounder of the mind of God, the taker of the
   sealed book and the looser of the seals which bound up the mysterious
   purposes of God towards the children of men. I pray that we may have on
   this earth a clear and constant sight of the sin-bearing Lamb and then,
   in yonder world of glory, we shall behold Him in the midst of the
   Throne and the living creatures and the elders.

   The appearance of this Lamb at the particular moment described by John
   was exceedingly suitable. Our Lord usually appears when all other hope
   disappears. Concerning the winepress of wrath, it is He who says, "I
   have trod the winepress alone and of the people there was none with
   Me." In the instance before us, the strong angel had proclaimed with a
   loud voice, "Who is worthy to open the book and to loose the seals
   thereof?" And there was no response from Heaven, or earth, or Hell. No
   man was able to open the book, neither to look therein.

   The Divine decrees must remain forever sealed in mystery unless the
   once slain Mediator shall take them from the hand of God and open them
   to the sons of men. When no one could do this, John wept much. At that
   grave moment the Lamb appeared. Old Master Trapp says, "Christ is good
   at a dead lift," and it is so. When there is utter failure everywhere
   else, then in Him is our help found. If there could have been found
   another bearer of sin, would the Father have given His Only-Begotten to
   die? Had any other been able to unfold the secret designs of God, would
   he not have appeared at the angel's challenge?

   But He that came to take away the sin of the world now appears to take
   away the seals which bind up the eternal purposes. O Lamb of God, You
   are able to do what none beside may venture to attempt! You come forth
   when no one else is to be found. Remember, next time you are in
   trouble, that when no man can comfort and no man can save, you may
   expect the Lord, the ever sympathetic Lamb of God, to appear on your
   behalf.

   Before the Lamb appeared, while as yet no one was found worthy to look
   upon that book which was held in the hand of Him that sits on the
   throne, John wept much. By weeping eyes the Lamb of God is best seen.
   Certain ministers of this age, who make so little of the doctrine of
   substitutionary sacrifice, would have been of another mind if they had
   known more contrition of heart and exercise of soul. Eyes washed by
   repentance are best able to see those blessed Truths of God which shine
   forth from our incarnate God, the bearer of our sins. Free Grace and
   dying love are most appreciated by the mourners in Zion.

   If tears are good for the eyes, the Lord send us to be weepers and lead
   us round by Bochim to Bethel. I have heard the old proverb, "There is
   no going to Heaven but by the Weeping Cross." And there seems no way of
   even seeing Heaven and the Heavenly One, except by eyes that have wept.
   Weeping makes the eyes quick to see if there is any hope. And while

   it dims them to all false confidences, it makes them sensitive to the
   faintest beam of Divine light. "They looked unto Him and were
   lightened, and their faces were not ashamed." Those who have laid
   eternal matters to heart so much as to weep over their own need and
   that of their fellow men, shall be the first to see in the Lamb of God
   the answer to their desires.

   Yet observe, that even in this case human instrumentality was
   permitted, for it is written, "One of the elders said unto me, Weep
   not." John the Apostle was greater than an elder. Among them that are
   born of women, in the Church of God we put none before John, who leaned
   his head upon his Master's bosom. And yet a mere elder of the Church
   reproves and instructs the beloved Apostle! He cheers him with the news
   that the Lion of the tribe of Judah had prevailed to open the book and
   to loose the seven seals.

   The greatest man in the Church may be under obligations to the least--a
   preacher may be taught by a convert--an elder may be instructed by a
   child. Oh that we might be always willing to learn--to learn from
   anyone, however low! Assuredly, we shall be teachable if we have the
   tenderness of heart which shows itself in weeping. This will make our
   souls like waxen tablets, whereon the finger of Divine Truth may
   readily inscribe its teaching. God grant us this preparation of heart!

   May we come in a teachable spirit to the texts and may the Lord open
   our eyes to see and learn with John! It is no small favor that we have
   the record of the vision. Does not the Lord intend us to be partakers
   in it? The vision is that of a Lamb, a Lamb that is to open the book of
   God's secret purposes and loose the seals thereof. The teaching of the
   passage is that the Lord Jesus, in His sacrificial Character, is the
   most prominent Object in the heavenly world. So far from substitution
   being done with and laid aside as a temporary expedient, it remains the
   object of universal wonder and adoration.

   He that became a Lamb that He might take away the sin of the world, is
   not ashamed of His humiliation but still manifests it to adoring
   myriads and is, for that very reason, the very Object of their
   enthusiastic worship. They worship the Lamb even as they worship Him
   that sits upon the Throne. And they say, "Worthy is the Lamb," because
   He was slain and redeemed His people by His blood. His atoning
   sacrifice is the great reason for their deepest reverence and their
   highest adoration. Some dare to say that the life of Jesus should alone
   be preached and that no prominence should be given to His death. We are
   not of their religion. I am not ashamed of preaching Christ Jesus in
   His death, as the sacrifice for sin.

   On the contrary, I can boldly say, "God forbid that I should glory,
   save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ." We do not so believe the
   doctrine of Atonement as to leave it in the dark as a second-rate
   article of faith. But we hold it to be the first and foremost teaching
   of inspiration, the greatest well of the Believer's comfort, the
   highest hill of God's glory. As our Lord's sacrificial Character is in
   Heaven most prominent, so would we make it most conspicuous among men.
   Jesus is to be declared as the Sin Bearer, and then men will believe
   and live. May God the Holy Spirit help us in our attempt this morning!

   I. Jesus in Heaven appears in His sacrificial Character. And I would
   have you note that THIS CHARACTER IS ENHANCED BY OTHER CONSPICUOUS
   POINTS. Its glory is not diminished but enhanced, by all the rest of
   our Lord's Character--the attributes, achievements and offices of our
   Lord all concentrate their glory in His sacrificial Character and all
   unite in making it a theme for loving wonder.

   We read that he is the Lion of the tribe of Judah, by which is
   signified the dignity of His office as King and the majesty of His
   Person, as Lord. The lion is at home in fight and "the Lord is a man of
   war--the Lord is His name." Like a lion, He is courageous. Though He is
   like a lamb for tenderness, yet not in timidity. He is terrible as a
   lion--"who shall rouse Him up?" If any come into conflict with Him, let
   them beware--for as He is courageous, so is He full of force and
   altogether irresistible in might.

   He has the lion's heart and the lion's strength. And He comes forth
   conquering and to conquer. This it is that makes it the more wonderful
   that He should become a lamb--

   "A lowly man before His foes, A weary man and full of woes."

   It is wonderful that He should yield Himself up to the indignities of
   the Cross, to be mocked with a crown of thorns by the soldiers and to
   be spit upon by subjects. O wonder, wonder, wonder, that the Lion of
   Judah, the offshoot of David's royal house, should become as a lamb led
   forth to the slaughter!

   Further, it is clear that He is a champion--"The Lion of the tribe of
   Judah has prevailed." What was asked for was worthiness, not only in
   the sense of holiness but in the sense of valor. One is reminded of a
   legend of the Crusades. A goodly castle and estate awaited the coming
   of the lawful heir--he, and he only could sound the horn which hung at
   the castle gate. But he who could make it yield a blast would be one
   who had slain a heap of heathens in the fight and had come home
   victorious from many a bloody fray.

   So here--no man on earth or in Heaven had valor and renown enough to be
   worthy to take the mystic roll out of the hand of the Eternal. Our
   Champion was worthy. What battles He had fought! What feats of prowess
   He had performed! He had overthrown sin. He had met face to face the
   Prince of Darkness and had overcome him in the wilderness. Yes, He had
   conquered death, had bearded that lion in his den. He had entered the
   dungeon of the sepulcher and had torn its bars away. Thus He was
   worthy, in the sense of valor, on returning from the far country to be
   owned as the Father's glorious Son, Heaven's hero--and so to take the
   book and loose the seals.

   The brilliance of His victories does not diminish our delight in Him as
   the Lamb. Far otherwise, for He won these triumphs as a Lamb, by
   gentleness and suffering and sacrifice. He won His battles by a
   meekness and patience never before known. The more of a conqueror He
   is, the more astounding is it that He should win by humiliation and
   death. O Beloved, never tolerate low thoughts of Christ! Think of Him
   more and more, as did the blessed Virgin, when she sang, "My soul does
   magnify the Lord." Make your thoughts of Him great. Magnify your God
   and Savior, and then add to your reverent thoughts the reflection that
   still He looks like a lamb that has been slain. His prowess and his
   lion-like qualities do but set forth more vividly the tender, lowly,
   condescending relationship in which He stands to us as the Lamb of our
   redemption.

   In this wonderful vision we see Jesus as the familiar of God. He it was
   who, without hesitation, advanced to the Throne and took the book out
   of the right hand of Him that sat upon it. He was at home there--He
   counted it not robbery to be equal with God. He is "very God of very
   God," to be extolled with equal honor with that which is given unto the
   Lord God Almighty. He advances to the Throne, He takes the book, He
   communes with Jehovah, He accepts the Divine challenge of love and
   unseals the mysterious purposes of His glorious Father.

   To Him there is no danger in a close approach to the infinite glory,
   for that glory is His own. Now, it is He who thus stood on familiar
   terms with God, who also stood in our place and bore for us the penalty
   of sin. He who is greater than the greatest and higher than the
   highest, became lower than the lowest, that He might save to the
   uttermost them that come to God by Him. He who is Lord of All, stooped
   under all the load and burden of sin. Fall down on your faces and
   worship the Lamb. For though He became obedient unto death, He is God
   over all, blessed forever, the Beloved of the Father.

   We observe, in addition to all this, that He is the Prophet of God. He
   it was that had the seven eyes to see all things and discern all
   mysteries. He it is that opened the seven seals and thus unfolded the
   parts of the Book one after another-- not merely that they might be
   read but might be actually fulfilled. And yet He had been our
   Substitute. Jesus explains everything--the Lamb is the open sesame of
   every secret. Nothing was ever a secret to Him. He foresaw His own
   sufferings. They came not upon Him as a surprise--

   "This was compassion like a God,

   That when the Savior knew

   The price of pardon was His blood,

   His pity never withdrew."

   Since then He has not been ignorant of our unworthiness, or of the
   treachery of our hearts. He knows all about us. He knows what we cost
   Him and He knows how ill we have repaid Him. With all that knowledge of
   God and of man, He is not ashamed to call us Brothers and Sisters. Nor
   does He reject that truth, so simple, yet so full of hope to us, that
   He is our sacrifice and our Substitute. "He who unveils the eternal
   will of the Highest, is the Lamb of God which takes away the sin of the
   world."

   Our Lord always was, and is now acknowledged, to be Lord and God. All
   the Church does worship Him. All the myriads of angels cry aloud in
   praises unto Him. And to Him every creature bows, of things in Heaven
   and things on earth and things that are under the earth. When you call
   Him King of kings and Lord of lords, lofty as these titles are, they
   fall far below His Glory and majesty. If we all stood up with all the
   millions of the human race and with one voice

   lifted up a shout of praise to Him, loud as the noise of many waters
   and as great thunders, yet would our highest honors scarcely reach the
   lowest step of His all-glorious Throne.

   Yet, in the glory of His Deity, He disdains not to appear as the Lamb
   that has been slain. This still is His chosen Character. I have heard
   of a great warrior, that on the anniversary of his most renowned
   victory, he would always put on the coat in which he fought the fight,
   adorned, as it was, with marks of shot. I understand his choice. Our
   Lord today and every day, wears still the human flesh in which He
   overthrew our enemies and He appears as one that has but newly
   died--since by death He overcame Satan. Always and forever, He is the
   Lamb. Even as God's Prophet and Revealer, He remains the Lamb.

   When you shall see Him at last, you shall say, as John did, "I beheld
   and, lo, in the midst of the Throne and of the four living creatures,
   and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been slain."
   Write, then, the passion of your Lord upon the tablets of your hearts
   and let none erase the treasured memory. Think of Him mainly and
   chiefly as the Sacrifice for sin. Set the atonement in the midst of
   your minds and let it tinge and color all your thoughts and beliefs.
   Jesus, bleeding and dying in your place, must be to you as the sun in
   your sky.

   II. In the second place, let us note that, IN THIS CHARACTER, JESUS IS
   THE CENTER OF ALL. "In the midst of the Throne and of the four living
   creatures and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been
   slain."

   The Lamb is the center of the wonderful circle which makes up the
   fellowship of Heaven. From Him, as a standpoint, all things are seen in
   their places. Looking up at the planets from this earth, which is one
   of them, it is difficult to comprehend their motions--progressive,
   retrograde, or standing still. But the angel in the sun sees all the
   planets marching in due course and circling about the center of their
   system. Standing where you please upon this earth and within human
   range of opinion, you cannot see all things aright, nor understand them
   till you come to Jesus--and then you see all things from the center.

   The man who knows the incarnate God, slain for human sins, stands in
   the center of the Truth of God. Now he sees God in His place, man in
   his place, angels in their place, lost souls in their place and the
   saved ones in their place. Know Him whom to know is life eternal and
   you are in the position of vantage from which you may rightly judge of
   all things. The proper bearings and relationships of this to that and
   that to the next and so on, can only be ascertained by a firm and full
   belief in Jesus Christ as the atoning Sacrifice--

   "Till God in human flesh I see,

   My thoughts no comfort find.

   The Holy, Just and sacred Three,

   Are terrors to my mind.

   But if Immanuel's face appears,

   My hope, my joy begins--

   His name forbids my slavish fears,

   His Grace removes my sins."

   In Christ you are in the right position to understand the past, the
   present, and the future. The deep mysteries of eternity and even the
   secret of the Lord are all with you when once you are with Jesus. Think
   of this and make the Lamb your central thought--the soul of your soul,
   the heart of your heart's best life.

   The Lamb's being in the midst, signifies also, that in Him they all
   meet in one. I would speak cautiously but I venture to say that Christ
   is the summing up of all existence. Do you seek the Godhead? There it
   is. Do you seek manhood? There it is. Do you wish the spiritual? There
   it is in His human soul. Do you desire the material? There it is in His
   human body. Our Lord has, as it were, gathered up the ends of all
   things and has bound them into one. You cannot conceive what God is.
   But Christ is God. If you dive down with materialism which by many is
   regarded as the drag and millstone of the soul, yet in Jesus you find
   materialism, refined and elevated and brought into union with the
   Divine nature.

   In Jesus all lines meet and from Him they radiate to all the points of
   being. Would you meet God? Go to Christ. Would you be in fellowship
   with all Believers? Go to Christ. Would you feel tenderness towards all
   that God has made? Go to Christ. For, "of Him and through Him and to
   Him are all things." What a Lord is ours! What a glorious being is the
   Lamb. For it is only as the Lamb that this is true of Him! View Him
   only as God and there is no such meeting with man. View Him as being
   only man and then He is far from the center--but behold Him as God and
   Man and the Lamb of God--and then you see in Him the place of rest for
   all things.

   Being in the center, to Him they all look. Can you think for a moment
   how the Lord God looks upon His Only-Begotten? When Jehovah looks on
   Jesus, it is with an altogether indescribable delight. He says, "This
   is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." When He thinks of the
   passion through which He passed and the death which He accomplished at
   Jerusalem, all the infinite heart of God flows high and strong towards
   His Best-Beloved. He has rest in His Son as He has nowhere else. His
   delight is in Jesus. Indeed, He has so much delight in Him that for His
   sake He takes delight in His people.

   As the Father's eyes are always on Jesus, so are the eyes of the living
   creatures and the four-and-twenty elders which represent the Church in
   its Divine life and the Church in its human life. All who have been
   washed in His blood perpetually contemplate His beauties. What is there
   in Heaven which can compare with the adorable Person of Him by whom
   they were redeemed from among men? All angels look that way, also,
   waiting His august commands. Are they not all ministering spirits, whom
   He sends forth to minister to His people?

   All the forces of nature are waiting at the call of Jesus. All the
   powers of Providence look to Him for direction. He is the focus of all
   attention, the center of all observation throughout the plains of
   Heaven. This, remember, is as "the Lamb." Not as King or Prophet
   chiefly, but pre-eminently as "the Lamb," is Jesus the center of all
   reverence and love and thought, in the glory-land above.

   Once more--let me say of the Lamb in the center, that all seem to rally
   round Him as a guard around a king. It is for the Lamb that the Father
   acts--He glorifies His Son. The Holy Spirit also glorifies Christ. All
   the Divine purposes run that way. The chief work of God is to make
   Jesus the First-born among many Brethren. This is the model to which
   the Creator works in fashioning the vessels of Divine Grace--He has
   made Jesus Alpha and Omega--the beginning and the end. All things
   ordained of the Father work towards Christ as their center.

   And so stand all the redeemed and all the angels waiting about the
   Lord, as swelling His Glory and manifesting His praise. If anything
   could enter the minds of heavenly beings that would contribute to lift
   Jesus higher, it would be their Heaven to speed throughout space to
   carry it out. He dwells as a King in His central pavilion and this is
   the joy of the host--that the King is in the midst of them.

   Beloved, is it so? Is Jesus the center of the whole heavenly family?
   Shall He not be the center of our Church life? Will we not think most
   of Him--more of Him than of Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas--or any party
   leaders that would divide us? Christ is the Center. Not this form of
   doctrine nor that mode of ordinance--but the Lamb, alone. Shall we not
   always delight in Him, and watch to see how we can magnify His glorious
   name? Shall He not be also the center of our ministry? What shall we
   preach about but Christ! Take that subject away from me and I am
   finished. These many years I have preached nothing else but that dear
   name and if that is to be dishonored, all my spiritual wealth is
   gone--I have no bread for the hungry, nor water for the faint.

   After all these years my speech has become like the harp of Anacreon,
   which would resound love alone. He wished to sing of Atreus and of
   Cadmon but his harp resounded love alone. It is so with my
   ministry--with Christ and Christ alone am I at home. Progressive
   theology? No string of my soul will vibrate to its touch. New divinity?
   Evolution? Modern thought? My harp is silent to these strange fingers.
   But to Christ, and Christ alone, it answers with all the music of which
   it is capable. Beloved, is it so with you? In teaching your children.
   In your life at home, in your dealing with the world-- is Jesus the
   center of your aim and labor?

   Does His love fill your heart? In the old days of Napoleon, a soldier
   was wounded by a bullet and the doctor probed deep to find it. The man
   cried out, "Doctor, mind what you are at! A little deeper and you will
   touch the Emperor." The Emperor was on that soldier's heart. Truly, if
   they search deep into our life they will find Christ. Queen Mary said
   that when she died they would find the name of Calais cut upon her
   heart. For she grieved over the loss of the last British possession in
   France.

   We have not lost our Calais but hold still our treasure. For Christ is
   ours. We have no other name engraved on our heart but that of Jesus.
   Truly can we say--

   "Happy if with my last breath I may but gasp His name; Preach Him to
   all and cry in death,

   Behold, behold the Lamb!'"

   III. Thirdly, our Lord is seen in Heaven as the Lamb slain and IN THIS
   CHARACTER HE EXHIBITS PECULIAR MARKS. None of those marks derogate from
   His Glory as the sacrifice for sin. But they tend to instruct us
   therein.

   Note well the words--"Stood a Lamb as it had been slain." "Stood." Here
   is the posture of life. "As it had been slain." Here is the memorial of
   death. Our view of Jesus should be twofold. We should see His death and
   His life--we shall never receive a whole Christ in any other way. If
   you only see Him on the Cross, you behold the power of His death. But
   He is not now upon the Cross. He is risen, He forever lives to make
   intercession for us and we need to know the power of His life. We see
   Him as a lamb--"as it had been slain." But we worship Him as one that
   "lives forever and ever."

   Carry these two things with you as one--a slain Christ, a living
   Christ. I notice that feeling and teaching in the Church oscillates
   between these two, whereas it should always comprehend them both. The
   Romish Church continually gives us a baby Christ, carried by His
   mother. Or a dead Christ, on the Cross. Go where we may, these images
   are thrust upon us. Apart from the sin of image worship, the thing set
   forth is not the whole of our Lord.

   On the other hand, we have a school around us who endeavor to put the
   Cross out of sight and they give us only a living Christ, such as He
   is. To them Jesus is only an example and teacher. As a true and proper
   expiatory Substitute they will not have him. BUT WE WILL. We adore the
   Crucified One upon the Throne of God. We believe in Him as bleeding and
   pleading--we see Him slain and behold Him reign. Both of these are our
   joy--neither one more than the other but each in its own place. Thus,
   as you look at the Lamb, you begin to sing, "You are He that lives and
   were dead and are alive forever more." The mark of our Savior is life
   through death and death slain by death.

   Note, next, another singular combination in the Lamb. He is called, "a
   little lamb." For the diminutive is used in the Greek. But yet how
   great He is! In Jesus, as a Lamb, we see great tenderness and exceeding
   familiarity with His people. He is not the object of dread. There is
   about Him nothing like, "Stand off, for I am too holy to be
   approached." A lamb is the most approachable of beings. Yet there is
   about the little Lamb an exceeding majesty. The elders no sooner saw
   Him than they fell down before Him. They adored Him and cried with a
   loud voice, "Worthy is the Lamb."

   Every creature worshipped Him, saying, "Blessing, and honor, and glory,
   and power be unto the Lamb." He is so great that the Heaven of heavens
   cannot contain Him. Yet He becomes so little that He dwells in humble
   hearts. He is so glorious that the seraphim veiled their faces in His
   Presence--yet He is so condescending as to become bone of our bone and
   flesh of our flesh! What a wonderful combination of mercy and majesty,
   grace and glory! Never divide what God has joined together--do not
   speak of our Lord Jesus Christ as some do--with an irreverent, unctuous
   familiarity.

   But, at the same time, do not think of Him as of some great Lord for
   whom we must feel a slavish dread. Jesus is your next-of-kin, a Brother
   born for adversity and yet He is your God and Lord. Let love and awe
   keep the watches of your soul!

   Further, let us look at the peculiar marks of Him and we see that He
   has seven horns and seven eyes. His power is equal to His vigilance.
   And these are equal to all the emergencies brought about by the opening
   of the seven seals of the Book of Providence. When plagues break forth,
   who is to defend us? Behold the seven horns. If the unexpected occurs,
   who is to forewarn us? Behold the seven eyes.

   Every now and then some foolish person or other brings out a pamphlet
   stuffed with horrors which are going to happen in a year or two. The
   whole of it is about as valuable as the Norwood Gypsy's Book of Fate,
   which you can buy for two-pence. But still, if it were all true that
   these prophecy-mongers tell us, we are not afraid. For the Lamb has
   seven horns and will meet every difficulty by His own power, having
   already foreseen it by His own wisdom. The Lamb is the answer to the
   enigma of Providence. Providence is a riddle but Jesus explains it all.

   During the first centuries, the Church of God was given up to
   martyrdom--every possible torment and torture was exercised upon the
   followers of Christ--what could be God's meaning in all this? What but
   the glory of the Lamb? And now, today, the Lord seems to leave His
   Church to wander into all kinds of errors--false doctrines are, in some
   quarters, fearfully paramount. What does this mean? I do not know. But
   the Lamb knows, for He sees with seven eyes. As a Lamb--as our Savior,
   God and Man--He understands all and has the clues of all labyrinths in
   His hands. He has power to meet every difficulty and wisdom to see
   through every embarrassment. We should cast out fear and give ourselves
   wholly up to worship.

   The Lamb also works to perfection in nature and in Providence. For with
   Him are "the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth." This
   refers not merely to the saving power of the Spirit which is sent forth
   unto the elect, but to those powers and forces which operate upon all
   the earth. The power of gravitation, the energy of life, the mystic
   force of electricity and the like, are all forms of the power of God. A
   Law of nature is nothing but our observation of the usual way in which
   God operates in the world. A Law in itself has no power--Law is but the
   usual course of God's action.

   All the Godhead's omnipotence dwells in the Lamb--He is the Lord God
   Almighty. We cannot put the atonement into a secondary place. For our
   atoning Sacrifice has all the seven Spirits of God. He is able to save
   to the uttermost them that come unto God by Him. Let us come to God by
   Him. He has power to cope with the future, whatever it may be. Let us
   secure our souls against all dangers, committing ourselves to His
   keeping.

   How I wish I had power to set the Lord before you this morning
   evidently Glorified. But I fail utterly. My talk is like holding a
   candle to the sun. I am grateful that my Lord does not snuff me
   out--perhaps my candle may show some prisoner to the door and when he
   has once passed it, he will behold the Sun in its strength. Glory be to
   Him who is so great, so glorious, and yet still the Lamb slain for
   sinners--whose wounds in effect continually bleed our life--whose
   finished work is the perpetual source of all our safety and our joy.

   IV. I close with my fourth point, which is this--Jesus appears
   eternally as a Lamb and IN THIS CHARACTER HE IS UNIVERSALLY ADORED.

   Before He opened one of the seals this worship commenced. When He had
   taken the book, the four living creatures and the four-and-twenty
   elders fell down before the Lamb and sung a new song, saying, "You are
   worthy to take the book." While yet the book is closed, we worship Him.
   We trust Him where we cannot trace Him. Before He begins His work as
   the revealing Mediator, the Church adores Him for His work as a
   Sacrifice. Jesus our Lord is worshipped not so much for what benefits
   He will confer as for Himself.

   As the Lamb slain He is the object of heavenly reverence. Many will
   reverence Him, I do not doubt, when He comes in His second Advent, in
   the glory of the Father. Every knee will bow before Him, even of
   apostates and infidels, when they shall see Him take to Himself His
   great power and reign. But that is not the worship which He accepts,
   nor that which proves the offerer to be saved. You must worship Him as
   a Sacrifice and adore Him in His lowly character, as the "despised and
   rejected of men." You must reverence Him while others ridicule Him,
   trust His blood while others turn from it with disdain and so be with
   Him in His humiliation. Accept Him as your Substitute, trust in Him as
   having made atonement for you. For in Heaven they still worship Him as
   the Lamb.

   That adoration begins with the Church of God. The Church of God, in all
   its phases, adores the Lamb. If you view the Church of God as a Divine
   creation, the embodiment of the Spirit of God, then the living
   creatures fall down before the Lamb. No God-begotten life is too high
   to refuse obeisance to the Lamb of God. Look at the Church on its human
   side and you see the four-and-twenty elders falling down and
   worshipping, having every one harps and vials. Well may the whole
   company of redeemed men worship the Mediator, since in Him our manhood
   is greatly exalted!

   Was ever our nature so exalted as it is now that Christ is made Head
   over all things to His Church? Now are we nearest to God, for between
   man and God no creature intervenes. Immanuel--God-With-Us--has joined
   us in one. Man is next to the Deity, with Jesus only in between, not to
   divide, but to unite. The Lord in Christ Jesus has made us to have
   dominion over all the works of His hands. He has put all things under
   our feet--all sheep and oxen--yes, the fowl of the air and fish of the
   sea and whatsoever passes through the paths of the sea. O Lord our God,
   how excellent is Your name in all the earth!

   The Lord is adored by the Church in all forms of worship. They worship
   Him in prayer. For the vials full of sweet odors are the prayers of
   saints. They worship Him with a new song and with the postures of
   lowliest reverence. But, beloved, the Lamb is not only worshipped by
   the Church--He is worshipped by angels. What a wonderful gathering
   together of certain legions of the Lord's hosts we have before us in
   this chapter! "Ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of
   thousands." Their company cannot be imagined in human arithmetic. With
   perfect unanimity they unite in the hallowed worship, shouting
   together, "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain."

   No, it is not merely the Church and angels, but all creation, east,
   west, north, south, highest, lowest--all adore Him. All life, all
   space, all time, immensity, eternity--all these become one mouth for
   song and all the song is, "Worthy is the Lamb."

   Now, then, dear Friends, if this is so, shall we ever allow anybody in
   our presence to lower the dignity of Christ, our Sacrifice? ["No."] A
   friend says, emphatically, No. And we must say, No. As with a voice of
   thunder, we say--No--to all attempts to lower the supreme glories of
   the Lamb. We cannot have it--our loyalty to Him will not permit it.
   Besides, no man will willingly lose his all. Take the Lamb away and you
   take all away. "Who steals my purse, steals trash"--who steals my
   Christ, steals myself and more than myself--my hopes that are to be my
   future joys.

   Life is gone when His death is rejected, His blood despised. Our souls
   burn with indignation when this vital Truth of God is assailed--

   "Stand up, stand up for Jesus,

   You soldiers of the Cross! Lift high His royal banner, It must not
   suffer loss!"

   Wherever you are, to whatever Church you belong, do not associate with
   those who decry the atonement. Enter not into confederacy with those
   who, even by a breath, would disparage His precious blood. Do not bear
   that which assails the Lamb--grow indignant at the foul lie! The wrath
   of the Lamb may with safety be copied by yourself in this case--you
   will be angry and sin not. Once more, if this is so, if the glorious
   sacrifice of our Lord Jesus is so much thought of in Heaven, cannot you
   trust it here below? O you that are burdened with sin, here is your
   Deliverance--come to the sin-bearing Lamb. You that are perplexed with
   doubts, here is your Guide--the Lamb can open the sealed books for you.
   You that have lost your comfort, come back to the Lamb, who is slain
   for you and put your trust in Him anew. You that are hungering for
   heavenly food, come to the Lamb, for He shall feed you.

   The Lamb, the Lamb, the bleeding Lamb--be this the sign upon the
   standard of the Church of God. Set that ensign to the front and march
   boldly on to victory and then, O Lamb of God, that takes away the sin
   of the world, grant us Your peace! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

"The Marriage of the Lamb"

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S-DAY MORNING, JULY 21, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "Let us be glad and rejoice and give honor to Him: for the marriage of
   the Lamb is come and His wife has made herself ready. And to her was
   granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for
   the fine linen is the righteousness of saints." Revelation 19:7,8.

   LAST LORD'S Day we saw clearly from God's Word that our Lord is
   worshipped in Heaven under the Character of a Lamb. Now, by a Lamb was
   meant sacrifice, sacrifice for the putting away of sin--according to
   the text, "Behold the Lamb of God, which takes away the sin of the
   world." It is against the great doctrine of atonement and
   substitutionary death that the attacks of the present unbelieving age
   are constantly being made. And therefore I set before you the Truth of
   God that substitution and sacrifice were not a temporary expedient but
   that they continue all through the whole history of salvation and
   remain in the very highest place, even in Heaven itself and will
   continue evermore.

   Do not forget that whenever we read of Christ as a Lamb, it is to
   remind us of His sufferings and death in our place, for the putting
   away of our sin. Under that Character we looked to Him, some of us,
   years ago and found peace at the first. We are still looking to Him
   under that same Character. And when we attain to Heaven, we shall not
   have to change our thought of Him but we shall still see Him as a Lamb
   that has been slain. In our lowest place, when we came out of the Egypt
   of our bondage, He was the Lamb of God's Passover. And in our highest
   place, in the heavenly temple, we shall still regard Him as "the Lamb
   slain from the foundation of the world."

   This morning my principal aim shall be to show you that the blessed and
   glorious union, which is to be celebrated between the Church and her
   Lord, will be the marriage "of the Lamb." The ever blessed and eternal
   union of hearts with Christ will be in reference to His sacrifice,
   especially and emphatically. The perfected union of the entire Church
   of God with her Divine Husband is here described by the beloved
   Apostle, who laid his head upon his Master's bosom and knew most about
   Him and who was under the immediate inspiration of the Holy Spirit, in
   these words--"The marriage of the Lamb is come and His wife has made
   herself ready."

   Whatever else we think of at this time, my discourse will aim at this
   as the white of the target--namely, that Jesus Christ as the Lamb, the
   Sacrifice, is not only the beginning but the end. Not only the
   foundation but the topstone of the whole sacred edifice of the Temple
   of Grace. The consummation of the whole work of redemption is the
   marriage of the Church to Christ. And, according to "the true sayings
   of God," this is "the marriage of the Lamb."

   I will set forth this marriage as best I am able. It is divinely veiled
   as well as revealed in this Revelation. God forbid we should intrude
   where the Holy Spirit shuts us out. But still, what we do know of it,
   let us now think upon--and may the sacred Spirit make it profitable to
   us!

   I. First, I invite your attention to THE ANTECEDENTS OF THIS MARRIAGE.
   What will happen before the public marriage is celebrated? One great
   event will be the destruction of the harlot Church. I have just read,
   in your hearing, the previous chapter, which declares the overwhelming
   destruction which will fall upon that evil system. Any Church which
   puts in the place of justification by faith in Christ another method of
   salvation, is a harlot Church. The doctrine of justification by faith
   in Christ is the article of a standing or a falling Church.

   Where the blood is precious, there is life. Where atonement by the
   sacrifice is preached and loved, there will the Spirit of God bear
   effectual testimony. But where human priests are put in the place of
   Jesus, where pardons can be purchased, where there is an unbloody
   sacrifice instead of the great propitiation, and sacraments are exalted
   as the means of regeneration--there the Church is no longer a chaste
   virgin unto Christ--she has turned aside from her purity.

   The Antichristian system is to be utterly extirpated and burnt with
   fire. For you will perceive, in the fourteenth verse of the seventeenth
   chapter, that those who were associated with this false Church, "shall
   make war with the Lamb and the

   Lamb shall overcome them--for He is Lord of lords and King of kings."
   And there has been no more wicked nor more determined war with the Lamb
   than that which has been waged by superstition supported by unbelief.
   The harlot Church and the beast of infidelity are in real league
   against the simple faith of Christ.

   If you point men, no matter where--if you point them away from Christ,
   you point them to Antichrist. If you teach them what you may, no matter
   how philosophical it may seem--if in any way it takes them off from
   building upon the one foundation of Christ's glorious and finished
   work, you have laid an Antichristian foundation and all that is built
   thereon will be destroyed. Everything which sets up itself in
   opposition to the sacrifice of Christ is to be hurled down and made to
   sink like a millstone in the flood. I would God the hour were come! Oh,
   that the Lord's own right arm were bare and that we heard the cry,
   "Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen."

   It is ours to expect the speedy coming of our Lord. Yet, if He tarries,
   it may be many a day before "her plagues come in one day." But, wait as
   we may, so it shall be. The day must come when the true Church shall be
   honored and the harlot Church shall be abhorred. The Bride of Christ is
   a sort of Cinderella now, sitting among the ashes. She is like her
   Lord, "despised and rejected of men." The watchmen smite her and take
   away her veil from her. For they know her not, even as they knew not
   her Lord. But when He shall appear, then shall she appear, also--and in
   His glorious manifestation, she also shall shine forth as the sun in
   the kingdom of the Father.

   Furthermore, in the immediate connection, we note that before the
   marriage of the Lamb, there was a peculiar voice. Read the fifth
   verse--"And a voice came." Where from? "A voice came out of the
   Throne." Whose voice was that? It was not the voice of the Eternal God.
   For it said, "Praise our God, all you His servants." Whose voice, then,
   could it be? No one but God could be upon the Throne save the Lamb, who
   is God. Surely, it was He who said, "Praise our God." The Mediator, God
   and Man in one Person, was on the Throne as a Lamb and He announced the
   day of His own marriage.

   Who should do it but He? "A voice came out of the Throne, saying,
   Praise our God, all you His servants and you that fear Him, both small
   and great." He speaks the word which calls on all the servants of God
   to praise Him, because His complete victory had come. Longing to see of
   the travail of His soul, earnest to gather in all His elect, He speaks.
   For the fullness of time has come--when His joy shall be full and He
   shall rejoice over the whole company of His redeemed as forever one
   with Himself.

   The voice from the Throne is a very remarkable one. It shows how near
   akin the exalted Christ is to His people. He says to all the redeemed,
   "Praise our God, all you His servants." It reminds me of His memorable
   words, "I ascend unto My Father and your Father. And to My God and your
   God." He was not then ashamed to associate His people with Him in the
   high possession of His Father and His God. And up there upon the
   Throne, He says, "Praise our God." I do not know how this language
   strikes you. But to me it forcibly sets forth His love, His
   condescension, His fraternization, His union with His people.

   Since I know not how to set it out to you, I must leave you to think
   over it. He who has gone triumphantly up to the Throne, the Savior
   whose conflicts are all over, who has gained the everlasting reward of
   sitting with the Father upon His Throne, still joins with us in praise
   and says, "Praise our God, all you His servants." He is not even
   ashamed to have fellowship with the least of His people. For He adds,
   "And you that fear Him, both small and great." Truly "the man is near
   of kin to us, He is our next kinsman"--

   "In ties of blood, with sinners one, Our Jesus has to Glory gone."

   In that Glory He still owns His dear relationship and in the midst of
   the Church He sings praise unto God (Heb. 2:11, 12).

   Next, notice the response to this voice. For this also precedes the
   marriage. No sooner did that one august voice summon them to praise,
   than immediately, "I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude."
   He heard the mingled sound as of an innumerable host all joining in the
   song. For the redeemed of the Lord are not a few. No man can count
   them. "Out of every kindred and tongue and people and nation," they
   respond in that day to the voice of the Lamb, saying, "Alleluia: for
   the Lord God omnipotent reigns."

   So loud was the sound of all those commingled voices, that it sounded
   like "many waters." Like cataracts in their roar, or like oceans in
   their fullness. It was as though all the billows of the Atlantic, the
   Pacific and the Northern and Southern oceans lifted up their voices and
   deep answered unto deep. Nor was the figure too strong. For John heaps
   upon

   it another comparison and says, "As the voice of mighty thunderings."
   We have lately heard the thunder above the deafening din of our streets
   and we have trembled at the dread artillery of Heaven. Such was the
   sound of the mingled voices of the redeemed when they all united to
   give honor to God, because the marriage of the Lamb had come.

   Who can imagine the acclamations of that glorious day? We now preach
   the Gospel, as it were, in a corner and few there are that will applaud
   the King of kings. Still, the Christ wends His way through the world as
   an unknown or forgotten man. And His Church, following behind Him,
   seems as a forlorn and forsaken woman--few there are that care for her.
   But in that day when her Lord is seen as the King of kings and she is
   openly acknowledged as His spouse, what welcomes will be heard, what
   bursts of adoring praise unto the Lord God omnipotent!

   Observe that this tremendous volume of sound will be full of rejoicing
   and of devout homage. "Let us be glad and rejoice and give honor to
   Him." Double joy will be there and its expression will be homage to the
   Lord God. The joy of joys will be the delight of Christ in His
   perfectly gathered Church. There is joy in Heaven in the presence of
   the angels of God over one sinner that repents. But when all these
   repenting sinners are gathered into one perfected body and married to
   the Lamb, what will be the infinite gladness?

   Heaven is always Heaven and unspeakably full of blessedness--but even
   Heaven has its holidays, even bliss has its overflowing. And on that
   day when the springtide of the infinite ocean of joy shall have come,
   what a measureless flood of delight shall overflow the souls of all
   glorified spirits as they perceive that the consummation of love's
   great design is come--"The marriage of the Lamb is come and His wife
   has made herself ready"! We do not know yet, Beloved, of what happiness
   we are capable. We have sometimes wished that we could--

   "Sit and sing ourselves away To everlasting bliss."

   But then we were only feeling the spray of the ocean of blessedness.
   What must it be to bathe in it? Here we drink from cups of consolation.
   But what draughts we shall have when we lie down at the wellhead and
   drink in our joy immediately from God! If you and I enter glory soon
   without our bodies, we shall not even then know to the utmost degree
   what will be the bliss of our perfected manhood--when the body shall be
   raised incorruptible from among the dead and joined to the sinless
   soul. Nor would this give us more than a bare idea of the infinite
   blessedness of myriads of such perfected manhood united in a perfected
   Church--from which no one single member shall be missing, nor one
   member maimed, or sick, or stained.

   Praise the Lord Jesus as you sing--

   "You the whole body shall present Before Your Father's face. Nor shall
   a wrinkle, or a spot, The beauteous form deface."

   Oh, what joy! I feel as if I could not preach to you--I want to get
   away to think it over and chew the cud of meditation for myself. You
   must just sit where you are and muse. Here we have the essence of
   heavenly music in a few plain words. "The marriage of the Lamb is
   come." Oh, may I be there! May I be a part of the perfected body of the
   Church of God! Oh, that I might be but part of the soles of her feet,
   or the least hair of her head! If I may but see the King in His beauty,
   in the fullness of His joy--when He shall take by the right hand her
   for whom He shed His precious blood and shall know the joy which was
   set before Him, for which He endured the Cross, despising the shame--I
   shall be blest indeed!

   Thus, I have given you a hint of what will precede the marriage of the
   Lamb, in all of which you may observe that Jesus wears His Character of
   the Lamb. The harlot Church has fought against the Lamb and the Lamb
   has overcome her forces. He it is that, on the Throne, speaks to His
   people as His Brethren. It is to Him that the response is given. For
   the joy and the delight all spring from the fact that the marriage is
   that of the Lamb whom the Father glorifies and who glo-rifles the
   Father. The voice said, "Let us rejoice and give honor to Him." Was not
   that His prayer of old, "Father, glorify Your Son, that Your Son also
   may glorify You"? To glorify the Father, Jesus died as a sacrifice. And
   to glorify Jesus, the Father gives Him His Church, which is redeemed by
   the blood of the Lamb.

   II. Now may I be helped by the Spirit of God, while I lead you on to
   THE MARRIAGE ITSELF. "The marriage of the Lamb is come." Often as you
   hear about this marriage of the Lamb, I greatly question whether any
   here have any precise idea what it means. Dean Alford says, "This
   figure of a marriage between the Lord and His people is too frequent
   and familiar to need explanation."

   With all deference to the excellent Divine, that was a very sufficient
   reason why he should have carefully explained it, since that which is
   often noted in Holy Scripture must be of first importance and should be
   well understood. I do not wonder that many are shy of such a theme, for
   it is a difficult one. Alas, how little do I, personally, know of such
   a matter!

   The marriage of the Lamb is the result of the eternal gift of the
   Father. Our Lord says, "Yours they were and you gave them to Me." His
   prayer was, "Father, I will that they also, whom You have given Me, be
   with Me where I am. That they may behold My glory, which You have given
   Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world." The Father
   made a choice, and the chosen He gave to His Son to be His portion. For
   them He entered into a Covenant of Redemption, whereby He was pledged
   in due time to take upon Himself their nature, pay the penalty of their
   offenses and set them free to be His own.

   Beloved, that which was arranged in the councils of eternity and
   settled there between the high contracting Parties, is brought to its
   ultimate end in that day when the Lamb takes unto Himself in
   everlasting union the whole of those whom His Father gave Him from of
   old.

   Next--this is the completion of the betrothal, which took place with
   each of them in time. I shall not attempt elaborate distinctions. But
   as far as you and I were concerned, the Lord Jesus betrothed each one
   of us unto Himself in righteousness when first we believed on Him. Then
   He took us to be His and gave Himself to be ours, so that we could
   sing-- "My beloved is mine and I am His." This was the essence of the
   marriage. Paul, in the Epistle to the Ephesians, represents our Lord as
   already married to the Church.

   This may be illustrated by the Oriental custom, by which, when the
   bride is betrothed, all the sanctities of marriage are involved in
   those espousals. But yet there may be a considerable interval before
   the bride is taken to her husband's house. She dwells with her former
   household and has not yet forgotten her kindred and her father's house,
   though still she is espoused in truth and righteousness. Afterwards,
   she is brought home on an appointed day, the day which we should call
   the actual marriage. But yet the betrothal is, to Orientals, of the
   very essence of the marriage.

   Well, then, you and I are betrothed to our Lord today and He is joined
   to us by inseparable bonds. He does not wish to part with us, nor could
   we part from Him. He is the delight of our souls and He rejoices over
   us with singing. Rejoice that He has chosen you and called you and
   through the betrothal look forward to the marriage. Feel even now, that
   though in the world, you are not of it--your destiny does not lie here
   among these frivolous sons of men. Our home is from now on High--

   "My heart is with Him on His Throne, And ill can bear delay. Each
   moment listening for the voice, 'Rise up and come away.'"

   The marriage day indicates the perfecting of the Body of the Church. I
   have already told you that the Church will then be completed and it is
   not so now. Adam lay asleep and the Lord took out of his side a rib and
   fashioned thereof a helpmeet for him. Adam saw her not when she was in
   the forming but he opened his eyes and before him was the perfect form
   of his helpmeet. Beloved, the true Church is now in the forming and is
   therefore not visible. There are many Churches. But as to the one
   Church of Christ, we see it neither here nor there.

   We speak of the visible Church. But the term is not correct. The thing
   which we see is a mixture of Believers and mere pretenders to faith.
   The Church which is affianced unto the heavenly Bridegroom is not
   visible as yet. For she is in the process of formation. The Lord will
   not allow such simpletons as we are to see His half-finished work. But
   the day will come when He shall have completed His new creation and
   then will He bring her forth whom He has made for the second Adam to be
   His delight to all eternity.

   The Church is not perfected as yet. We read of that part of it which is
   in Heaven, that, "They without us should not be made perfect." Unless
   you and I get there, if we are true Believers, there cannot be a
   perfect Church in Glory. The music of the heavenly harmonies as yet
   lacks certain voices. Some of its needful notes are too bass for those
   already and others are too high for them. It will not be complete till
   the singers come who are ordained to give the choir its fullest range.

   At the Crystal Palace you have seen the singers come trooping in. The
   conductor is all anxiety if they seem to linger. Still, some are away.
   The time is nearly up and you see seats up there on the right and a
   vacant block down there on the left. Even so with the heavenly
   choir--they are streaming in--the orchestra is filling up but yet there
   is room and yet

   there is demand for other voices to complete the heavenly harmony.
   Beloved, in the day of the marriage of the Lamb, the chosen shall all
   be there--the great and the small--even all the Believers who are
   wrestling hard this day with sins and doubts and fears. Every living
   member of the living Church shall be there to be married to the Lamb.

   By this marriage is meant more than I have told you. There is the
   home-bringing. You are not to live here forever in these tents of
   Kedar, among a people of a strange tongue. But the blessed Bridegroom
   comes to take you to the happy country, where you shall no longer say,
   "My soul is among lions." All the faithful shall soon be away to Your
   land, O Emmanuel! We shall dwell in the land that flows with milk and
   honey, the land of the unclouded and unsetting sun, the home of the
   blessed of the Lord. Happy, indeed, will be the home-bringing of the
   perfect Church!

   The marriage is the coronal-avowal. The Church is the Bride of the
   great King and He will set the crown upon her head and make her to be
   known as His true spouse forever. Oh, what a day that will be, when
   every member of Christ shall be crowned in Him, and with Him, and every
   member of the mystical body shall be glorified in the glory of the
   Bridegroom! Oh, may I be there in that day! Brethren, we must be with
   our Lord in the fight if we would be with Him in the victory. We must
   be with Him in wearing the crown of thorns, if we are to be with Him in
   wearing the crown of glory. We must be faithful, by His Grace, even
   unto death, if we are to share the glory of His endless life.

   I cannot tell you all it means but certainly this marriage signifies
   that all who have believed in Him shall then enter into a bliss which
   shall never end--a bliss which no fear approaches, or doubt beclouds.
   They shall be forever with the Lord, forever glorified with Him. Expect
   not lips of clay fitly to speak on such a theme. Tongues of fire are
   needed and words that fall like fire-flakes on the soul.

   A day will come, the day of days, time's crown and glory--when all
   conflict, risk and judgment is ended forever-- the saints, arrayed in
   the righteousness of Christ shall be eternally one with Him in a
   living, loving, lasting union, partaking together of the same glory,
   the glory of the Most High. What must it be to be there! My dear
   Hearers, will you be there? Make your calling and election sure. If you
   are not trusting in the Lamb on earth, you will not reign with the Lamb
   in His Glory. He that does not love the Lamb, as the atoning sacrifice,
   shall never be the bride of the Lamb.

   How can you hope to be glorified with Him if you neglect Him in the day
   of His scorning? O Lamb of God, my Sacrifice, I must be one with You,
   for this is my very life! I could not live apart from You. If, my
   Hearer, you can thus speak, there is good hope that you shall be a
   participator in the marriage of the Lamb.

   III. But we pass on now to dwell emphatically upon the fact that THE
   CHARACTER UNDER WHICH THE

   BRIDEGROOM APPEARS IS THAT OF THE LAMB. "The marriage of the Lamb is
   come."

   It must be so, because first of all, our Savior was the Lamb in the
   Everlasting Covenant, when this whole matter was planned, arranged, and
   settled by the foresight and decree of eternity. He is "the Lamb slain
   from the foundation of the world," and the Covenant was with Him, as
   One who was to be the Surety, the Substitute, the Sacrifice for guilty
   men. So and not otherwise, was it of old.

   It was next as the Lamb that He loved us and proved His love. Beloved,
   He did not give us words of love merely when He came from Heaven to
   earth, and dwelt among us "a lowly man before His foes." But He
   proceeded to deeds of truest affection. The supreme proof of His love
   was that He was led as a lamb to the slaughter. When He poured out His
   blood as a sacrifice, it might have been said, "Behold, how He loved
   them!" If you would prove the love of Jesus, you would not mention the
   transfiguration but the crucifixion. Gethsemane and Golgotha would rise
   to your lips. Here to demonstration, beyond all possibility of doubt by
   any true heart, the Well-Beloved proved His love to us.

   See how it runs--"He loved me and gave Himself for me," as if that
   giving of Himself for me was the clear proof that He loved me. Read
   again--"Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for it." The proof of
   His love to the Church was the giving up of Himself for it. "Being
   found in fashion as a man He humbled Himself and became obedient to
   death, even the death of the Cross." "Herein is love, not that we loved
   God but that He loved us." So, you see, as a Lamb He proved His love,
   and as a Lamb He celebrated His marriage with us.

   Go a step further. Love in marriage must be on both sides and it is as
   the Lamb that we first came to love Him. I had no love to Christ--how
   could I have--till I saw His wounds and blood? "We love Him, because He
   first loved us." His perfect life was a condemnation to me, much as I
   was compelled to admire it. But the love that drew me to Him was shown
   in His substitutionary Character, when He bore my sins in His own body
   on the tree. Is it not so with you, Beloved?

   I have heard a great deal about conversions through admiration of the
   Character of Christ but I have never met with one--all I have ever met
   with have been conversions through a sense of need of salvation and a
   consciousness of guilt-- which could never be satisfied except by His
   agony and death, through which sin is justly pardoned and evil is
   subdued. This is the great heart-winning doctrine. Christ loves us as
   the Lamb and we love Him as the Lamb.

   Further, marriage is the most perfect union. Surely, it is as the Lamb
   that Jesus is most closely joined to His people. Our Lord came very
   close to us when He took our nature, for thus He became bone of our
   bone and flesh of our flesh. He came very near to us when, for this
   cause, He left His Father and became one flesh with His Church. He
   could not be sinful as she was. But He did take her sins upon Himself
   and bear them all away, as it is written, "The Lord has laid on Him the
   iniquity of us all." When "He was numbered with the transgressors," and
   when the sword of vengeance smote Him in our place, then He came nearer
   to us than ever He could do in the perfection of His Incarnation.

   I cannot conceive of closer union than that of Christ and souls
   redeemed by blood. As I look at Him in death, I feel forced to cry,
   "Surely a husband by blood are You to me, O Jesus! You are joined to me
   by something closer than the one fact that You are of my nature. For
   that nature of Yours has borne my sin and suffered the penalty of wrath
   on my behalf. Now are You one with me in all things, by a union like
   that which links You with the Father." A wonderful union is thus
   effected by our Lord's wearing the Character of the Lamb.

   Once more--we never feel so one with Jesus as when we see Him as the
   Lamb. I shall again appeal to your experience. When have you had the
   sweetest fellowship with Christ in all your lives? I answer on my own
   account--it has been when I have sung--

   "Oh, how sweet to view the flowing

   Of His soul-redeeming blood,

   With Divine assurance knowing

   He has made my peace with God!" If I had my choice today, while abiding
   in this present state, to see my Lord in His Glory, or on His Cross, I
   should choose the latter. Of course, I would prefer to see His Glory
   and be away with Him. But, while dwelling here, surrounded with sin and
   sorrow, a sight of His griefs has the most effect upon me.

   "O sacred head once wounded," I long to behold You! I never feel so
   close to my Lord as when I survey His wondrous Cross and see Him
   pouring out His blood for me. I have been melted down when we have sung
   together those sweet lines--

   "See from His head, His hands, His feet, Sorrow and love flow mingled
   down! Did ever such love and sorrow meet? Or thorns compose so rich a
   crown?" I have almost felt myself in His arms, and like John I have
   leaned on His bosom when I have beheld His passion. I do not wonder,
   therefore, that since He comes closest to us as the Lamb and since we
   come closest to Him when we behold Him in that Character, He is pleased
   to call His highest eternal union with His Church, "the marriage of the
   Lamb."

   And O, Beloved, when you come to think of it, to be married to Him, to
   be one with Him, to have no thought, no object, no desire, no glory but
   that which dwells in Him that lives and was dead--will not this be
   Heaven, indeed, where the Lamb is the light thereof? Forever to
   contemplate and adore Him who offered up Himself without spot unto God,
   as our sacrifice and propitiation! This shall be an endless feast of
   grateful love. We shall never weary of this subject.

   If you see the Lord coming from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah,
   from the winepress wherein He has trampled on His foes--you are
   overawed and overcome by the terror of that dread display of justice.
   But when you see Him clad in a vesture dipped in no blood but His own,
   you will sing aloud evermore, "You were slain and have redeemed us to
   God by Your blood. To You be glory forever and ever." I could go on
   singing, "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain" throughout all eternity.
   The theme has an inexhaustible interest about it--there is everything
   in it--justice, mercy, power, patience, love, condescension, grace and
   glory.

   All over glorious is my Lord when I behold Him as a Lamb. And this
   shall make Heaven seven times Heaven to me to think that even then I
   shall be joined to Him in everlasting bonds as the Lamb. [Here a voice
   from the gallery cried, "Praise the Lord!"] Yes, my Friend, we will
   praise the Lord. "Praise you the Lord" is the command which was heard

   coming out of the throne--"Praise our God, all you His servants and you
   that fear Him, both small and great: for the marriage of the Lamb is
   come and His wife has made herself ready."

   IV. Now we come to the last point, THE PREPAREDNESS OF THE BRIDE--"His
   wife has made herself ready."

   Up till now the Church has always been spoken of as His bride, now she
   is "His wife"--that is a deeper, dearer, more matured word than
   "bride"--"His wife has made herself ready." The Church has now come to
   the fullness of her joy and has taken possession of her status and
   power as "His wife." What does it mean--

   "Has made herself ready"?

   It signifies, first, that she willingly and of her own accord comes to
   her Lord, to be His and to be with Him forever. This she does with all
   her heart--"she has made herself ready."

   She does not enter into this engagement with reluctance. Some unwisely
   speak of the Grace of God, as though it were a physical force, which
   sets a constraint upon the will of the quickened man. Beloved, I never
   preach to you in that fashion. Free Will is an unknown thing, except it
   is worked in us by Divine Grace. Grace is the great liberating force.
   The will is a slave to evil, till Divine Grace comes and makes it free
   to choose that which is good. No action of the soul is more free than
   that by which it quits sin and closes with Christ.

   Then the man comes to himself. The heart is free from compulsion, when
   its love goes forth towards the Lord Jesus. I ask you that love Him, do
   you feel that you are going against your will in so doing? Far from
   it--you wish to love Him more. In the ultimate union of all the chosen
   with Christ, will you want any forcing to take your part in the
   marriage of the Lamb? Did not the words I used just now state your
   longings--"My heart is with Him on His Throne"? Are you not panting to
   behold His face?

   Compulsion to a hungry man to eat would seem more likely than
   compulsion to be joined unto Christ. His wife has gladly made herself
   ready--Free Grace has made her freely choose Him. Does it not mean that
   she has put away from herself all evil, and all connection with the
   corruptions of the harlot Church have been destroyed? She has struggled
   against error, she has fought against infidelity and both have been put
   down by her holy watchfulness and earnest testimony. And so she is
   ready for her Lord.

   Does it not also mean that in the great day of the consummation the
   Church will be one? Alas, for the divisions among us! You do not know
   what denomination my Friend belonged to who prayed just now. Well, I
   shall not tell you. You could not judge from his prayer. "The saints in
   prayer appear as one." Denomination? A plague upon denomina-tionalism!
   There should be but one denomination--we should be denominated by the
   name of Christ, as the wife is named by her husband's name. As long as
   the Church of Christ has to say, "My right arm is Episcopalian and my
   left arm is Wesleyan and my right foot is Baptist and my left foot is
   Presbyterian or Congregational," she is not ready for the marriage.

   She will be ready when she has washed out these stains, when all her
   members have "one Lord, one faith, one Baptism." Unity is a main part
   of the readiness here spoken of. I beg you to notice what the
   preparation was. It is described in the eighth verse--"To her was
   granted." I will go no further. Whatever preparation it was that she
   made, in whatever apparel she was arrayed, it was granted to her.
   Observe that the harlot Church wore fine linen, also, but then she had
   with it purple and silk and scarlet and precious stones and pearls. I
   do not know from where the harlot obtained her apparel but I know where
   the true Church found her wedding dress, for it is written, "to her was
   granted."

   This was a gift of Sovereign Grace, the free gift of her own
   Beloved--"To her was granted." She had a grant from the Throne, a royal
   grant, an indisputable right. We also go to Heaven by royal grant. We
   have nothing of our own to carry us there by right, nothing of boasted
   merit. But to us also is granted acceptance in the Beloved. Oh, it is a
   glorious thing to hold your own by letters patent, under the Great Seal
   of Heaven! When we shall be united to Jesus, the ever blessed Lamb, in
   endless wedlock, all our fitness to be there will be ours by free
   grant.

   Look at the apparel of the wife, "To her was granted that she should be
   arrayed in fine linen, clean and white." How simple her raiment! Only
   fine linen, clean and white! The more simple our worship, the better.
   The true Church of Christ is content with white linen and no more. She
   asked not for those fine things we read about in connection with the
   harlot. She envied not the unchaste one her harpers and musicians and
   pipers and trumpeters--she was content with her simple harp and joyful
   song. She did not need all manner of vessels of ivory and precious
   wood, brass and iron, and marble. She

   did not seek for cinnamon and odors and ointments, nor anything else of
   that finery with which people nowadays try to adorn their worship.

   The simpler the better. When in worship you cannot hear the voices of
   the people beyond the noise which might be made by the twitter of
   half-a-dozen sparrows, because a flood of noise from a huge organ is
   drowning all the praise--I think we have lost our way. The simpler the
   worship the better, whether in prayer or praise, or anything else. The
   harlot Church bedecks herself with her architecture and her millinery
   and her perfumery and her oratory and her music. But those who would
   follow the Lamb wherever He goes will keep their worship, their
   practice, and their doctrine, pure and simple, avoiding all the
   blandishments of carnal policy and human wisdom--content with the Truth
   of God as it is in Jesus. What more beautiful than pure white linen?

   In the Greek, our text runs thus--"Fine linen, clean and white, for
   fine linen is the righteousnesses of the saints." Our Revised Version
   has, in this case, not given us a translation but an explanation and
   that explanation is a contraction of the sense. The revisers word it,
   "Fine linen is the righteous acts of saints." That word "acts" is of
   their own insertion. The word "righteousnesses" has a fuller
   meaning--it is exceedingly broad and they have narrowed it and
   misapplied it. We shall have a complete array of righteousnesses in
   Christ's righteousness, active and passive--a garment for the head and
   a garment for the feet and for the loins.

   What righteousnesses we have! Righteousness imparted by the power of
   the Spirit. Righteousness imputed by the decree of God. Every form of
   righteousness will go to make up the Believer's outfit--but remember,
   all of it is granted and none of it is of our own purchasing. We shall
   not have Christ's righteousness to cover up our sin, as some
   blasphemously say--for we shall have no sin to cover. We shall not want
   Christ's righteousness to make an evil heart seem pure--we shall be as
   perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect. Washed in the blood of the
   Lamb, we shall have no spot upon us or within us. We shall have a
   complete righteousness. And thus arrayed, we shall be covered with the
   beauty of holiness. This garment is most befitting, for it is, "The
   righteousness of saints." Saints ought to have righteousness. They are
   themselves made holy and therefore they ought to be adorned in visible
   holiness. And so they shall be.

   Best of all, we shall be arrayed in that day with that which pleases
   the Bridegroom. Do I not remember how He said, "I counsel you to buy of
   Me white raiment"? Yes, she has remembered His bidding. She has nothing
   else but that "fine linen" which is the "The righteousness of saints."
   And this He delights in. She comes to the Lamb bearing about her the
   result of His own passion and of His own Spirit. And she is well
   pleasing in His eyes. The Lord sees in her of the travail of His soul
   and He is satisfied.

   I have done when I have again put this question--Do you trust the Lamb?
   I warn you, if you have a religion which has no blood of Christ in it,
   it is not worth a thought--you had better be rid of it, it will be of
   no use to you. I warn you, also, that unless you love the Lamb you
   cannot be married to the Lamb. For He will never be married to those
   who have no love to Him. You must take Jesus as a Sacrifice, or not at
   all. It is useless to say, "I will follow Christ's example." You will
   not do anything of the sort. It is idle to say, "He shall be my
   Teacher." He will not own you for a disciple unless you will own Him as
   a Sacrifice.

   You must take Him as the Lamb, or have done with Him. If you despise
   the blood of Christ, you despise the whole Person of Christ. Christ is
   nothing to you if He is not your atonement. As many of you as hope to
   be saved by the works of the Law, or by anything else apart from His
   blood and righteousness, you have un-Christianized yourselves. You have
   no part in Jesus here and you shall have no part in Him hereafter, when
   He shall take to Himself His own redeemed Church, to be His spouse
   forever and ever. God bless you, for Christ's sake. Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

                          The Mediator'The Interpreter

   A Sermon

   (No. 2097)

   Delivered on Lord's-day Morning, July 28th, 1889, by

   C. H. SPURGEON,

   At [5]the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington

   And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the
   noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw
   it, they removed, and stood afar off. And they said unto Moses, Speak
   thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we
   die. And Moses said unto the people, Fear not: for God is come to prove
   you, and that His fear may be before your faces, that ye sin
   not."'Exodus 20:18-20.

   THE GIVING of the law was glorious with pomp of power. The blaze of
   splendor was intended to impress the people with it sense of the
   authority of the law, by letting them see the greatness of the
   Lawgiver. It was meet that with great solemnity the law of the Most
   High should be proclaimed, that Israel might have a holy reverence for
   its commands. This terrible grandeur may also have been intended to
   suggest to the people the condemning force of the law. Not with sweet
   sound of harp, nor with the song of angels, was the law given; but with
   an awful voice from amid a terrible burning. Not in itself is the law
   condemnatory; for if there could have been life by any law, it would
   have been by this law: but by reason of man's sinfulness, the law
   worketh wrath; and to indicate this, it was made public with
   accompaniments of fear and death: the battalions of Omnipotence
   marshaled upon the scene; the dread artillery of God, with awful
   salvos, adding emphasis to every syllable. The tremendous scene at
   Sinai was also in some respects a prophecy, if not a rehearsal, of the
   Day of Judgment. If the giving of the law, while it was yet unbroken,
   was attended with such a display of awe-inspiring power, what will that
   day be when the Lord shall, with flaming fire, take vengeance on those
   who have willfully broken His law?

   To us, that day at Horeb is a type of the action of the law in our
   nature: thus doth the law deal with our consciences and hearts. If you
   have ever felt the law spoken home to you by the Spirit of God, you
   have heard great thunderings within. You have been forced to cry with
   Habakkuk, "When I heard, my belly trembled; my lips quivered at the
   voice: rottenness entered into my bones." And God intended it to be so,
   that you might look to the flames which Moses saw, and abandon forever
   all hope of acceptance by the works of the law.

   The glorious majesty which surrounded the institution of the law is
   not, however, our subject at this time. I shall handle the text in
   another manner. The Lord God, in this instance, came as near to man as
   was possible; yea, He came nearer than man could bear. Until a Mediator
   was found, the approach of God brought to man nothing but terror.
   Although under no great apprehension of guilt at the time'for they had
   only then heard the law for the first time'yet the people removed, and
   stood afar off, and cried out, "If we hear the voice of the Lord our
   God any more, then we shall die." God was near them in special
   condescension; for Moses said, "Did ever people hear the voice of God
   speaking out of the midst of the fire, as thou hast heard, and live?"
   Yet this memorable manifestation caused them alarm. Does it ever happen
   now that the Lord comes to His people in a way which dismays them? I
   think so. It is not really so, that God will fight against His people;
   but, to our apprehension, so it seems at certain times. Of these
   tempestuous manifestations of the Lord to our hearts I am going to
   speak at this time; and may the heavenly Comforter use it to the
   spiritual profit of his tried family!

   Our first head is this: the Lord has ways of communing with His people
   which fill them with fear; but, secondly, this endears the Mediator to
   them; and thirdly, this Mediator teaches them to interpret wisely the
   Lord's darker dealings with them. When we have thought upon these
   things, we shall close by saying to you that this sacred art of
   interpretation should be practiced by us now.

   1. First, let me remind you that THE LORD HAS WAYS OF COMMUNING WITH
   HIS PEOPLE WHICH FILL THEM WITH FEAR. You must not think that the Lord
   always appears to His people in robes of light: sometimes He enrobes
   Himself in clouds and darkness. His paths drop fatness, and yet He
   often hath His way in the whirlwind. True, He manifests Himself to us
   as He doth not unto the world; but in the brightest of those
   manifestations He may make us fear as we enter into the cloud. It is
   not every revelation of God which inspires the saints with joy; for in
   many cases it is far otherwise, even as with Daniel, who said, "I saw
   this great vision, and there remained no strength in me: for my
   comeliness was turned in me into corruption, and I retained no
   strength." This experience may not have occurred to some of you; it is,
   however, known to many of the people of God, who have had long dealings
   with Him. If any of you do not understand this matter, lay the sermon
   by till you do.

   Sometimes the near approach of the Lord fills His people with
   apprehension and alarm; and this sure to be the case when His coming
   includes a close application of the law to their hearts. We used to
   talk of "law-work" in days which are not past, and are by moderns
   looked upon with contempt; and, my brethren, our talk was not without
   good reason, for there is such a work, and it ministers greatly to our
   good. Certain servants of God, who had experienced this law-work to a
   very deep degree, fell into the error of regarding a marked measure of
   it as absolutely necessary to every child of God. We will avoid that
   evil, for it was a grievous cause of uncharitableness; but we will not
   conceal the fact that many souls, in coming to God, and in God's coming
   to them, have been made to feel a hewing and burning work from the law
   of God. The law has rent them in pieces, because they themselves have
   rent in pieces. The law has wrought in them a sense of bondage, burden,
   and despair. Even after we have fled for refuge to the hope set before
   us in the gospel, after we have a full assurance that our iniquities
   are put away, the Lord sometimes works in us a further work of the law,
   in which He makes us to see its exactness, its spirituality,
   strictness, and infinite compass. It is no little thing to see how the
   law judges the thoughts, desires, and imaginations of the heart. As the
   plummet of the holy law is held up, we see how out of the perpendicular
   we are, and we are therefore distressed. Brethren, when I have
   carefully considered, and inwardly perceived, the holiness of God's
   law, I have felt as though the sharp edge of a saber had been drawn
   across my heart, and I have shivered and trembled. Though the law did
   not actually cut or wound, yet its very presence, in all the keenness
   of its two edges, has made me shudder. So pure, so just, so
   uncompromising is the law of God, that when it is really understood, it
   makes us quail, and brings us to our knees. The law searches to the
   dividing asunder of joints and marrow, and it is a discerner of the
   thoughts and intents of the heart. Its excessive light strikes us, like
   Saul of Tarsus, to the earth, and makes us cry for mercy, When you
   begin to judge yourself, and estimate your actions by its infallible
   rule, you cease from boasting, and are filled with self-abhorrence. I
   believe it to be one of the best means to growth in humility, to be
   well instructed in the law, in the force and power of it. No man knows
   the brightness of the gospel till he understands the blackness of those
   clouds which surround the law of the Lord. Much of the shallowness of
   current religion is the result of a failure to apprehend the demands of
   divine justice, and a want of clear perception of the heinousness of
   disobedience. Let but God set up the throne of His law in your heart,
   and make you feel the power of that law in any one item of your daily
   conduct, much more in the whole circle of your life, and you will feel
   as the Israelites did when they could not abide the presence of the
   Most High.

   The Lord also may most truly and profitably come to a man, and in His
   coming may unveil to him the depravity of his nature. If any man could
   see his own heart as it is by nature, he would be driven mad: the sight
   of our disease is not to be borne unless we also see the remedy. When
   the Lord permits the fountains of the great deep of our depravity to be
   broken up, then are the tops of the hills of our self-sufficiency
   drowned in fear. When we see what we are capable of being, apart from
   divine grace, our spirit sinks. When believers are allowed to see how
   much there is still about them that is akin to hell, when sin becomes
   exceeding sinful, and we feel that the taint of it has defiled our
   whole nature, then it is that we are horrified and appalled. What an
   abyss of evil is within our bosoms! Probably some of you know very
   little about it. I pray that you may never discover it by its painful
   results; but I desire that you may believe it, so as to take a firmer
   grip upon the doctrines of grace, and exercise greater watchfulness
   over your hearts. Sin which dwelleth in us is no enemy that we can
   safely despise. Even in one single member of our fallen nature, namely,
   the tongue, there dwells a world iniquity: "It defileth the whole body,
   and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of
   hell." What poor creatures we are! The best of men are men at the best;
   and, apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, and the power of divine
   grace, hell itself does not contain greater monsters of iniquity than
   you and I might become. Within the magazine of our hearts there is
   powder enough to destroy us in an instant, if omnipotent grace did not
   prevent. When this is distinctly perceived, we are troubled before the
   presence of the thrice holy God. Standing before the Lord, we cry with
   the prophet, "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean
   lips." This is a true manifestation of God; but it is by no means a
   cause of comfort to us.

   The Lord may also come to us, and lead us, by His light, to a discovery
   of actual sin in our life. We may sit here, and think ourselves very
   good; but if so, we are in the dark. If a beam of divine light is now
   entering our mind, our apprehension of our own character will be
   changed, The sins of a single day, if fully known in all their
   bearings, would drive us to despair, apart from the infinite grace of
   God. Apart from the divine plan of justifying the ungodly in Christ
   Jesus, any one hour would shut us up in hell. Beloved, think a minute
   of your omissions during the past week, how much you might have done,
   and ought to have done, which you have not done. It is on the side of
   omission that some of us are most vulnerable. Honestly looking down
   upon our lives, we may be able to say that we do not know of any overt
   offense against God, and for this we bless the divine grace; but when
   we come to think of what we have left undone, we feel like a traveler
   who, when crossing a glacier, suddenly sees an unfathomable crevasse
   opening just before him, and widening fast as he looks down into its
   blue depths of frozen death. Oh the sadness of that confession, "We
   have left undone the things which we ought to have done!" There is as
   much of lamentation in it as in the cry which precedes it'"We have done
   those things which we ought not to have done." When we think of all our
   omissions, how can we stand before the Lord?

   Think again of your failure in what you have done. Brethren, you have
   prayed this week. I only refer to this week; for seven days are more
   than enough for my purpose. You have prayed: you have kept your regular
   times for devotion. But how have your prayed? With fervency? With
   careful consideration? With concentrated mind? Brethren, have you
   prayed with faith? With importunity? Surely, each of these questions
   must cut into you like a whip of wire. If you are as I am, you cannot
   answer to this examination without wincing. Why, even in the one matter
   of prayer, the sins of our holy things may shrivel us up before the
   burning eye of the Lord, who searcheth the heart. Your Bible also: you
   have read your Bible, of course you have; but with what attention? with
   what intention? with what devout belief? with what resolve to feel its
   force, and obey its commands? Have we not sinned against this Book
   enough to cast us into the lowest hell in the space of four-and-twenty
   hours?

   When the Lord begins to take a man to pieces by coming near to him,
   another matter will often trouble him, and that is his falseness, even
   were, in a measure, he is sincere. You prayed in public, and expressed
   most proper emotions and desires; but were they really your own
   emotions and desires, or did you steal the expressions of another man?
   You preached about the things of God; did your testimony come from your
   heart? Do you act in accordance therewith? You, my Christian friend,
   expressed yourself strongly, but, in your heart of hearts, can you
   justify the expression? Do we not often go further with our lips than
   we go with our hearts? Is not this, to some degree, hypocrisy? Must it
   not be very displeasing to God that we should use words towards Him
   which we have not weighed, and which are not fully true, as we use
   them? O brethren, if the Lord sets out secret sins in the light of His
   countenance, we too, like Israel, shall start and shrink from the
   presence of the Lord.

   If we add to these apprehensions of our own unworthiness a sense of the
   divine glory, then we cower down and hide ourselves in the dust. When a
   peal of thunder rends the heavens, and is followed up by a crash, as if
   the house would fall about your ears, while flames of fire blind you
   with their excessive brilliance, you feel that the Lord is terrible out
   of His holy places. God's nearness has inspired you with an awe which
   has been shaded with dread. The one attribute of power suffices to make
   the strongest believer feel that Jehovah is to be feared above all
   gods. But, my brethren, if properly apprehended, God's omniscience
   inspires an equal awe, while His goodness, His love, and His holiness
   are even more overwhelming when fully realized. One might possibly
   stand with unblanched cheek in the presence of divine power; but when
   the Lord reveals His holiness, a man might far sooner gaze into the sun
   than look into the face of God. Even His love is as the fire of a
   furnace to our unloveliness. At the sight of our God we say with Job,
   "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye
   seethe thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes."
   The nearness of God to sinful man is a killing thing, and those who
   have known it will confess that it is so.

   What, my brethren, if, in addition to this, there should come to you a
   succession of alarming providences? These Israelites not only knew that
   God was near, but they heard the thunder, they saw the lightning, they
   looked into the thick darkness, they marked the mountain altogether on
   a smoke, and by all this they were horror stricken. Has it come to pass
   that the lord has laid many blows upon His servant? Has He taken away
   the desire of thine eye with a stroke? What if there be one, two, three
   little graves in yonder cemetery? What if love and friend have forsaken
   thee? What if thy business fail thee, and if thy health fail thee also?
   What if thy spirits sink? Oh, then, indeed I marvel not that thou art
   scared with forebodings of still worse calamities, and art ready to
   give up the ghost! Now art thou afraid because of the nearness of the
   great God, who is trying thee.

   If to this be added an apprehension of speedy death, as in the case of
   the Israelites, who cried, "This great Fire will consume us"; then,
   indeed, it is difficult to remain calm and hopeful. It will be no
   trifle to stand before the face of the Eternal. Since heaven and earth
   shall flee from thy face, and rocks shall melt, and stars shall fall,
   and the moon shall be turned black as sackcloth of hair, who shall
   stand before Thee, thou great and glorious One!

   Thus have I spoken to you upon the fact that our God does sometimes
   commune with His people in a way that fills them with overwhelming
   dread; let us advance to our net theme.

   II. Secondly, ALL THIS ENDEARS TO US THE MEDIATOR. The Israelites
   turned at once to Moses. They had already murmured against him: they
   afterwards said, "As for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of
   the land of Egypt, we know not what is become of him"; once they took
   up stones to stone him; but now they are of another mind. Terrified by
   the presence of God, they cry to Moses, "Go thou near, and hear all
   that the Lord our God shall say: and speak thou unto us all that the
   Lord Our God shall speak unto thee." The Mediator is everything to them
   now. They had found out by experience the necessity for an interposer;
   and they had not made a mistake either, for God Himself said they had
   well spoken what they had said. There is in God's esteem an urgent need
   for a Mediator. When we sang just now'

   "Till God in human flesh I see,

   My thoughts no comfort find;

   The holy, just, and sacred Three

   Are terrors to my mind,"

   we did not give utterance to morbid or ungrounded fear. It is so in
   truth; and the next verse is accurate also:

   "But if Immanuel's face appear,

   My hope, my joy begins;

   His name forbids my slavish fear,

   His grace removes my sins."

   It is a matter of fact that we need a Mediator; and these people were
   driven to see it. Brethren, be sensible of your sin, and you will no
   more attempt to approach an absolute Deity than you would walk into a
   volcano's mouth. You will feel that you need a sacrifice, a
   propitiation, a Saviour, a Mediator. Perceive the infinite difference
   between your nothingness and the divine infinity, and you will feel
   that there is no drawing nigh to the Eternal but by Jesus Christ. How
   can we, of ourselves, draw nigh unto God? It is wisdom to say unto the
   Well-beloved, "We pray thee, stand between the Lord and us." When your
   trembling is upon you, when your heart faints with awe, then you
   perceive how much you need an Advocate. Bless God that He has appointed
   one to be High Priest for you, who can safely go into the thick
   darkness, and stand in the presence of the Thrice Holy Majesty, and
   represent you without fail.

   Moses was well fitted to be the type of the true Mediator of the gospel
   covenant. He was himself in great favor with God, so that the Lord
   hearkened to his voice. Behold his dauntless courage in the presence of
   God, and, at the same time, his intense tenderness towards the people.
   Mark his faithfulness Godward as a servant over all his Master's house,
   and then note his self-sacrifice for Israel, so that he once said,
   "Blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written." He
   offered himself to be a sacrifice for them. But, O beloved, consider
   Jesus Christ our Mediator. Where is the like of Him? He is man, like
   ourselves; in all respects a sufferer, poor, needy, knowing even the
   pangs of death; and therefore He can lay His hand upon us with a warm,
   brotherly love. But then He is "God over all, blessed forever," equal
   with the Most High, the Well-beloved of the Father; and thus He can
   give His hand to the eternal God, and so link our humanity with God. I
   feel most safe in trusting all my concerns with that dear Advocate,
   that Interpreter, one of a thousand. O Jesus, who can rival thee?

   "God, and yet man, thou art,

   True God, true man, art thou;

   Of man, and of man's earth a part,

   One with us thou art now."

   Into the thick darkness our Mediator went. Forth from it He came. He
   interprets to us the language of the Eternal, and He takes our
   petitions up to heaven, and translates them into the tongue of the Holy
   One, so that God hears us and accepts us in the Well-beloved.

   I know that some of you imagine that you would believe the gospel if
   God were to speak to you out of the skies. Do not wish for it. The
   terror of His voice would overwhelm you, but it would not convert you.
   The Israelites were happy with a Mediator, and so will you be. If you
   hear not Jesus, neither would you hear though God should thunder. A
   Mediator is provided. Could you, with all your wit, suggest a better
   Mediator than Christ? I entreat you, accept the gospel in Christ, and
   come to God through Him. As there is no other way, so assuredly there
   could be no better way. If you had all wisdom and all power in your
   hands with which to make a way of acceptance with God, could you devise
   one more pleasant, more simple, more perfect, more adequate, more
   exactly what you need? Come, then, dear heart, come at once to God in
   Christ; and remember, Jesus says, "Him that cometh to me I will in no
   wise cast out"; "No man cometh unto the Father, but by me."

   III. Now I come to my third point, upon which I would lay stress: THE
   MEDIATOR TEACHES US TO INTERPRET WISELY THE LORD'S DEALINGS. Moses
   became an interpreter of the Lord's terrible appearance to the
   trembling people, and he put a cheering construction upon it. You, to
   whom God has been speaking in a way of terror, and I know there are
   such here, for I have had to comfort them; you have a Mediator to
   explain to you the ways of the Lord. Be ready to learn the lesson which
   He teaches you: it is this'"Fear not: for God is come to prove you, and
   that his fear may be before your faces, that ye sin not." These rough
   dealings of God with your conscience, with your body, with your family,
   and with your estate, are not for your destruction, but for your
   instruction: not for your killing, but for your healing. As He came in
   tempest and thunder to teach the children of Israel, so has He come to
   you. If God is teaching you, He cannot mean to destroy you: the law
   does not provide a schoolmaster for a convict who is to be hanged
   tomorrow. The discipline in God's house, however severe it may be, is a
   sure proof of love. We educate sons, and not enemies. The Lord is
   teaching you what you are, and what He is. If He had meant to destroy
   you, He would not have showed you such things as these, If a criminal
   must needs die, we do not put him through a rehearsal of the pains of
   death. No, no, there would be no use in such a course-it would be sheer
   cruelty, and depend upon it, the Lord will not show you His own
   greatness merely to make you miserable, nor reveal to you your own ruin
   merely to drive you to despair. He does not afflict willingly. Infinite
   love dictates the apparent severity with which He afflicts your
   conscience. You are being judged here, that you may not be judged
   hereafter with the ungodly; you are now made to abhor yourself, that
   the Lord may not abhor you in the day of the judgment of the wicked.

   The Mediator here explains to trembling Israel that God had come to
   test them. We all need testing, do we not? Would you like to cross a
   railway bridge if it was reported to you that it had never been tested
   by a train? When the first Exhibition was built, I remember how they
   marched troops along the galleries to test them. Do you not desire to
   have your hope for eternity tested? The Lord draws near to us in ways
   which inspire our fears because He would test us. What is the result of
   the test? Do you not feel your own weakness? Does not this drive you to
   the strong for strength? You feel your own sinfulness; and you fly to
   the Lord Jesus for righteousness. Testing has a practically good effect
   in slaying self-confidence, and driving you to put your confidence
   where God would have it rest.

   When God came to these people in cloud and storm, it was to impress
   them, to put depth into their thought and feeling. We are filled with
   fear at times on purpose that our religion may not be a flimsy,
   superficial thing. Our tendency is to slur spiritual work. We easily
   get to be trifling and careless. Levity in religion is an
   easily-besetting sin with many; but when we are made to see the plague
   of our heart, and the awful majesty of God, that fear of the Lord which
   endureth forever soon drives out the triflers from the temple. Fear
   plows deep, and then faith sows, and love reaps; but godly fear must
   lead the way. Godly fear makes prayer to be fervent prayer; it makes
   the hearing of the word to be quite another thing from listening to the
   chatter of the world's vanity. Holy awe of God makes preaching to me to
   be the burden of the Lord. It may be light work to your men of genius
   and learning; but to me it is life and death work. Often have I thought
   that I would rather take a whipping with a cat-o'-nine-tails than
   preach again. How can I answer for it at the last great day unless I am
   faithful? "Who is sufficient for these things?" When I have felt the
   dread responsibility of souls which may be lost or saved by the word
   they hear, the fact that God is so near has made my flesh creep, and
   made me wish that I had never ventured on so bold a life-work. How
   shall I give in an honorable account of my commission at last? Beloved,
   God, by such apprehensions as these, is deepening in us the work of His
   grace, making us more alive to our position, and better fitting us for
   it. It is all in love that He allows our awe of Him to darken into
   dread, our sense of weakness to deepen into faintness of heart.

   Above all, it is explained to us that the dealings of the Lord are
   meant to keep us from sin. What does David say? "Before I was
   afflicted, I went astray: but now have I kept thy word." Does not
   Hezekiah tell us that by these things men live, and in all these things
   is the life of our spirit? We are so worldly, that we need our nest to
   be stirred to keep us on the wing. Six days we are taken up with
   business, mixing with those who despise heavenly things; and we should
   come to think lightly of them too, were it not that God comes to us in
   His dread majesty and makes us think, consider, and fear. This holy
   trembling drives off the shams which else would grow over us like mold
   on decaying matter. Our inward tempests clear the air, and keep us from
   stagnation and the pestilence which breeds in it. God's love will not
   suffer us to settle down in mere pretenses, and so glide into gross
   sins: He empties us from vessel to vessel, and thus discovers our evil
   sediment, and cleanses us from it. Many people, when they hear a
   sermon, say, "How did you enjoy it?" If you always enjoy sermons, the
   minister is not a good steward. He is not acting wisely who deals out
   nothing but sweets. God's people need that the word should at times be
   medicine to them, and we do not enjoy medicine. The word is as fire,
   and the iron does not like the fire; yet it is needful to its melting.
   It is as a hammer, and the rock does not love the hammer; yet it is
   needful to its breaking. Experiences which are painful may be therefore
   all the more profitable. That which makes us hate sin is a thing to be
   valued. I pray you, after this manner read the dispensations of God
   with you. When He chides He loves; when He chastens He shows fatherly
   affection; and when He scourges He receives into peculiar familiarity.
   Do not therefore run away from a chastening God. If fear drives thee
   away, let faith draw thee near. He means thy highest good. Never doubt
   it. Steadfastly believe that His heart loves even if His face frowns.

   IV. I close by asking you to PRACTICE THIS ART OF SACRED
   INTERPRETATION. Whensoever thy Lord speaketh with thee in thunder and
   writeth bitter things against thee, by faith read between the lines,
   and after the example of Moses, the mediator, put a comfortable
   construction upon rough words.

   Faith sees many reasons for refusing to read as fear would suggest:
   here is one of them. When the Lord spoke to these people with the voice
   of trumpet and thunder, He did not speak in anger after all, but in
   love; for His first words set the key-note. Here they are: "I am the
   Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of
   the house of Bondage." What gracious words! What happy memories they
   arouse! What loving-kindnesses they record! It is true that your Lord
   has taken your wife or your child away, or has made you sick, or has
   tried your soul by the hidings of His face; but it is not an enemy who
   has done this. It is your God who has done it, even the same God that
   delivered you from the power of sin, and made you free in Christ Jesus.
   The Lord of love has chastened you, and chastened you in love. Learn
   Job's philosophy, and say from your heart, "The Lord gave, and the Lord
   hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." Think of His former
   loving-kindness. Consider what He has done for you through the Lord
   Jesus and His death on your behalf. He brought you out of the bondage
   of your natural depravity, and He set you free from the Pharaoh of your
   evil passions. He has washed you from your sins, and brought you
   through the Red Sea of your fears by His own right hand. Can you not
   believe that He means well to you? What if He does speak roughly; may
   He not do so without being distrusted? He is the same God: He changeth
   not, and therefore you are not consumed: can you not rely on His
   faithful love? Will you take good from His hand, and will you not also
   take evil? He who humbles us is our covenant God, bound to us by His
   promise and His oath. He gave His Son to redeem us, He cannot now do us
   a displeasure: let Him do as seemeth Him good. We give Him carte
   blanche to do what He wills, for His love is beyond dispute. He died
   that I might live, and now it is impossible for Him to mean anything
   other than good towards me. I sometimes think that if I never had a
   gleam of love from His face again, I would live on that one text: "God
   so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever
   believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
   Salvation from sin and death and hell should make us interpret every
   trying revelation, and every afflicting providence, and every painful
   experience, by the key of His ancient love; and so interpreted, every
   sorrowful line is sweetened.

   Notice next, dear friends, in your process of interpretation, that God
   cannot mean to destroy us, since this would be contrary to His word. He
   hath said, "He that believeth in him hath everlasting life." Can
   "everlasting life" be destroyed or die? How, then, could it be
   "everlasting life?" Can God declare it everlasting, and yet end it?
   Yes, He has given us everlasting life in His dear Son; and, what is
   more, He has laid up that life in Christ; for "your life is hid with
   Christ in God." Can He destroy the life which He has hid in His own
   immortal Son? Does not Jesus say, "Because I live ye shall live also?"
   What are you afraid of, then? God cannot destroy you. He has said, "I
   will never leave thee, nor forsake thee." What if He speaks severely to
   thee, it is that He may deliver thee from sinning. Wilt thou not bless
   Him? He will not curse thee, for He hath blessed thee in His Son, and
   "there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ
   Jesus." Bow thyself, and take from thy Father's hand whatever He
   appoints.

   Remember, that you are not, after all, in the same condition as Israel
   at the foot of Horeb. Though I have drawn a sort of parallel this
   morning, yet there remains a wonderful difference. "Ye are not come
   unto the mount that burned with fire, nor unto blackness, and darkness,
   and tempest." Ye are not come to a terrible voice which mortal ears
   could not endure. "But ye are come unto mount Zion, and unto the city
   of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable
   company of angels. And to Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant, and
   to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of
   Abel." You are come to the land of pardon, peace, and promise: you are
   in the home of life, love and liberty. You have come to the Lord of
   adoption, acceptance and glory. Wherefore, do not, I pray you, construe
   the acts and dealings of God with your soul after the mean and slavish
   manner which unbelief suggests to you, but believe your God in the
   teeth of all you hear, or see, or feel. The Lord hath come to prove
   thee, to put His fear before thy face, and to keep thee from sin;
   wherefore look for sweet fruit from the bitter tree of thy present
   grief, and flee not from thy God.

   Again, dear friend, here is our great comfort: we have a Mediator. When
   God dealeth with thee by the law, or by His rod, or by His searching
   Spirit, thou art apt to say, "How can I endure His hand?" Hide behind
   the Mediator. Let Jesus be thy shield, even as He is the Lord's
   Anointed. Beseech the Lord God not to look on thee as thou art in
   thyself, but to see thee in Christ Jesus. Say

   Him, and then the sinner see,

   Look through Jesus's wounds on me.

   Take care that thou lookest through Jesus' wounds on God; and if thou
   dost, thou wilt see in Him infinite love and boundless kindness. The
   glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ is unutterable love. "Like as
   a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him",
   and when they fear Him most, His pity goes out to them in streams of
   tenderness. If thy God use the knife on thee, it is to cut out a deadly
   cancer. If thy God break thee, and grind thee, it is to get away thy
   bran, and make thee as the fine flour of the meat-offering. He may seem
   to slay thee, but by this He makes thee live. Though He slay thee,
   still trust thou in Him. Never believe anything which would militate
   against the truth of His love, or the wisdom or the tenderness of it.
   Cling to Him when He frowns. The closer thou canst cling the less thou
   wilt feel the blows of His hand when He chastens. A faith which
   believes when it smarts will soon have done with the rod. If thou wilt
   have nothing but good to say of God, He will take thee out of the fire,
   for it is evident that thou dost not need more of it. A full and firm
   belief in God when He seems to be against us, is a grand mark of
   sanctification. To be able to spell out "love" when it is written in
   cruciform characters, shows a high state of spiritual education.

   And now, beloved, if you can take the Lord in this way, henceforth and
   forever believing in His love, and never staggering through unbelief,
   thou wilt glorify thy God and get good to thyself in every way. If thou
   believest, then thou wilt be strong; for faith is the backbone of the
   spiritual man. If thou believest, thou wilt love, and love is the very
   heart of the spiritual man. Believing and loving, thou wilt endure with
   patience, and thy patience shall be a crown to thee. Believing, loving,
   and enduring, thou shalt become equipped for every holy service, and in
   that service thou shalt acquire more and more of likeness to thy Lord,
   till when thou hast endured to the full, thou shalt be in all points a
   brother of Him who is the Firstborn. Like Him, thou shalt be able to go
   into the thick darkness, and have that communion with God which only
   they can know who have felt the consuming fire passing through them
   again and again, and burning up that corruption of the flesh which
   makes God to be a terror to men. Like our Mediator, may we be made to
   plead with God for men, and with men for God. May we go up into the
   mount and see God and eat and drink; and then come down with faces
   shining with the heavenly light. God give us thus to have a Mediator,
   to interpret our God through a Mediator, and then to grow like our
   Mediator by the work of his own Spirit.

   I have said a great deal that must be very terrible to ungodly men,
   since it even tries the holiest. O my hearers, if you are unconverted,
   I do not suppose that the terrors of the Lord, even though they make
   you fear, will work any lasting good in you; for I remember that those
   very people who trembled at Sinai were found, in a very few weeks,
   madly dancing before a golden calf, and saying, "These be thy gods, O
   Israel, that brought thee up out of Egypt." Fear alone will work no
   saving or sanctifying effect on the heart. It plows, but it does not
   sow. In the child of God, mixed with faith, fear becomes a holy tonic,
   a salutary medicine; but, as for you who have cause for fear, there is
   something else for you. Flee to the Mediator, trust in Christ Jesus,
   who stands between man and God, look unto Him at once, and looking you
   shall live. To our adorable Mediator be glory forever and ever. Amen,
   and Amen.

   PORTIONS OF SCRIPTURE READ BEFORE SERMON'Exodus 20:18-21; Deuteronomy
   5.

   HYMNS FROM "OUR OWN HYMN BOOK"'92 (Part 1), 433, 281.
     __________________________________________________________________

Where Go You?

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S DAY MORNING, AUGUST 4, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "But He knows the way that I take: when He has tried me, I shall come
   forth as gold." Job 23:10

   On several Sabbath mornings of late I have earnestly handled spiritual
   subjects which I trust may have been for the edification of the people
   of God. But it will not do to continue in that line. I am a fisher of
   men as well as a shepherd of the flock. I must attend to both offices.
   Here are souls perishing, sinners that need to be saved by Christ, and
   therefore I must leave the flock and go after the wanderers. I must lay
   down the crook and take up the net.

   By a simple sermon, full of earnest expostulation, I would reason with
   the careless. At this moment I have not so much to expound doctrine as
   to arouse hearts. Oh, for the power of the Holy Spirit, without which I
   must utterly fail in my design! We have this morning been praying for
   the conversion of many--we expect our prayers to be heard. The question
   is not, Will there be any converted under this sermon? But, Who will it
   be? I trust many who have come here with no higher motive than to see
   the great congregation and to hear the preacher, may, nevertheless, be
   met with in God's infinite mercy and placed in the way of eternal life.
   May this be the spiritual birthday of many--a day to be remembered by
   them throughout eternity!

   Job could not understand the way of God with him. He was greatly
   perplexed. He could not find the Lord, with whom at some prior time he
   constantly abode. He cries, "Behold, I go forward but He is not there.
   And backward, but I cannot perceive Him: on the left hand, where He
   does work but I cannot behold Him: He hides Himself on the right hand,
   that I cannot see Him." But if Job knew not the way of the Lord, the
   Lord knew Job's way.

   It is a great comfort that when we cannot see the Lord, He sees us, and
   perceives the way that we take. It is not so important that we should
   understand what the Lord is doing as that the Lord should understand
   what we are doing and that we should be impressed by the great fact
   that He does understand it. Our case may be quite beyond our own
   comprehension, but it is all plain to Him who sees the end from the
   beginning and understands the secrets of all hearts.

   Because God knew his way, Job turned from the unjust judgments of his
   unfeeling friends and appealed to the Lord God Himself. He pleaded in
   the supreme court, where his case was known and he refused the verdicts
   of erring men. He that does right seeks the light. And as Job saw that
   the light was with God, he hastened to that light, that his deeds might
   be made manifest. Like a bird of the day, which begins to signal the
   return of the morning, he could sing when he stood in the light of God.
   He was glad that the Lord knew his way, his motive and his desires. For
   from that truth he inferred that he would be helped in his trials and
   brought safely through them--"When He has tried me, I shall come forth
   as gold."

   These words afford rich consolation to the saints. And if I were to use
   them for that purpose, I should expect the Lord's people greatly to
   rejoice in the Lord, whose observant eyes and gracious thoughts are
   always upon them. Our whole condition lies open to Him with whom we
   have to do. Though never understood by men, we are understood by our

   God--

   "It is no surprising thing That we should be unknown-- The Jewish world
   knew not their King, God's everlasting Son."

   As the Son of God was known to the Father, though unknown to all the
   world, so are we hidden from the knowledge of men but well known of the
   Most High. "The Lord knows them that are His." "You have known my soul
   in adversities."

   I quit the design of comforting the people of God for the more
   presently pressing work of arousing the unconverted. Their way is evil
   and the end thereof is destruction. Oh, that I could arouse them to a
   sense of their condition! To that end I shall ask four questions of
   every man and woman within reach of my voice. God knows the way that
   you take. I will ask you first--Do you know your own way? Secondly--Is
   it a comfort to you that God knows your way? Thirdly--Are you tried in
   the way? And, if so, fourthly--Have you confidence in God as to the
   result of that trial? Can you say with Job, "When He has tried me, I
   shall come forth as gold"?

   I. My Hearer, I ask you, first--Do You have a way? There is a way which
   you have taken, chosen, selected for your-self--there is a way which
   you follow in desire, word and act. So far as your life is left to your
   own management, there is a way which you voluntarily take and willingly
   follow. Do you know what that way is? It is not everyone who does know
   as much as that. It is a very simple question to put to you. But yet it
   is a very needful one to a great many. For many walk on as in a dream.

   Do you know where you are going? "Of course," says one, "everybody
   knows where he is going." Do you know where you are going and do you
   carefully consider your end? You are steaming across the deep sea of
   time into the main ocean of eternity--to what port are you steering?
   Where go you, O Man? The birds in the Heaven know their time and place
   when they fly away in due season. But do you know where you are
   speeding? Do you keep watch, looking ahead for the shore? What shore
   are you expecting to see? For what purpose are you living? What is the
   end and drift of your daily action?

   I fear that many in this vast congregation are not prepared to give a
   deliberate answer which will be pleasant to utter and to think upon. Is
   not this suspicious? If I were to go out tomorrow by sea, I should not
   walk on board a steamboat and then enquire, "Where are you going?" The
   captain would think me a crazy fellow if I embarked before I knew where
   the vessel was going. I first make up my mind where I will go, and then
   select a vessel which is likely to carry me there in comfort. You must
   know where you are going.

   The main thing with the captain of a steamer will be the getting his
   vessel safely into the port for which it is bound. This design
   overrules everything else. To get into port is the thought of every
   watch, every glance at the chart, every observation of the stars. The
   captain's heart is set upon the other side. His hope is safely to
   arrive at the desired haven and he knows which is the haven of his
   choice. He would not expect to get there if he did not set his mind on
   it. How is it with you, dear Friend? You are speeding towards Heaven or
   Hell--which of these is your port?

   I know of no ultimate abode of souls except the brightness of the
   Father's glory, or the darkness of Jehovah's wrath--which of these will
   be your end? Which way are you intentionally going? What is it you are
   aiming at? Are you living for God? Or are you so living that the result
   must be eternal banishment from His Presence?

   Surely, to press this inquiry upon you needs no eloquence of speech.
   The question is vital to your happiness and self-interest should induce
   you to weigh it. I shall not use a single metaphor or illustration. For
   I am not here to please, but to arouse. I charge every man and woman in
   this house now to consider this question--Where are you going? What
   will be the end of the life you are now leading? Do not cast away the
   inquiry. It is not impertinent. It is not unnecessary. In the name of
   the Lord, I beseech you, answer me.

   If you answer that question, allow me to put another--Do you know how
   you are going? In what strength are you pursuing your journey? If you
   feel able to say, "I am seeking that which is right and good," I then
   press the inquiry, In what strength are you pursuing it? Are you
   depending upon your own power, or have you received strength from on
   High? Do you rely on your own resolves and determinations, or have you
   received help from the Spirit of God? Remember, there are days in every
   life-voyage in which the storm-fiend puts all human power to a nonplus.
   Even in the fairest weather we are all too apt to run on rocks or
   quicksand.

   But the voyage of life is seldom altogether a pleasant one and we must
   be prepared for tempests. Our own unaided strength will not endure the
   waves and the winds of the ocean of life. And if you are trusting to
   yourself, disaster will befall you. The Lord brings men to the desired
   haven. But left to themselves, they are no match for the thousand
   dangers of their mysterious voyage. Is God with you? Has the Lord Jesus
   become your strength and your song? Do you sail beneath the blood-red
   flag of the Cross? If you are trusting in the Lord alone,
   disappointment, failure and shipwreck are impossible.

   But if you are hastening on without God for your Guide and Protector,
   then will your weakness and folly be made clear before long to your
   inevitable ruin. You may put on all steam and forge ahead in the teeth
   of the wind. But all in vain--you will never reach the fair havens. Are
   there any here who decline to answer my question? Will you not tell us
   where you are going? When a great vessel is crossing the sea and
   another comes within sight, they propose the question, "Where are you
   bound?" If the other vessel took no notice, gave no answer whatever, it
   would look suspicious.

   A craft that will not say where it is going! We don't like the looks of
   it. If one of Her Majesty's vessels were about and it challenged a sail
   and received no reply to the question, "To what port are you bound?" I
   think they would fire a shot across her bow and make her heave to, till
   she did answer. Might not the silent craft prove to be a pirate? When a
   man confesses that he does not know where he is going, or what his
   business may be, the policeman concludes that he is probably going
   where he ought not to go and has business on hand which is not what it
   should be. If you are afraid to consider your future, your fear is a
   bad omen.

   The tradesman who is afraid to look into his accounts will before long
   have them looked into for him by an officer from the Bankruptcy Court.
   He that dares not see his own face in the glass must be an ugly fellow.
   And you that dare not behold your own characters, have bad characters.
   Not know where you are going? Ah me, do you wish to find yourselves in
   Hell all of a sudden? Would you, like the rich man, lift up your eyes
   in hopeless misery? I am suspicious of you who cannot tell where you
   are going. And I wish you would be suspicious of yourselves. You who do
   not like self-examination are the persons who need it most. You who
   shun awkward questions are the very people who need to face them.

   I usually speak out--pretty plainly--and those of you who are used to
   me are not displeased. But sometimes strange hearers are offended and
   say that they will not come to be spoken to in such a fashion. Ah, my
   Friend! Your ill humor shows that you are in an ill condition and do
   not care to be corrected. If you were honestly desirous to be set
   right, you would like straight talk and honest rebukes. Do you prefer
   to go to a doctor who is known to say, "There is not much the matter--a
   little change and a dose of medicine, will soon put you all right"? Do
   you pay your guineas to be flattered?

   No.

   The man who is wise wants to know the truth, however alarming that
   truth may be. The man who is honest and hopeful, desires a thorough
   examination and invites the preacher to deal truthfully with him, even
   if the result should cause distress of mind. If you decline to see
   where you are going, it is because you are going down into the pit. If
   you decline to answer the question, What is your way? I fear your way
   is one that you cannot defend, whose end will cause you endless lament.

   Is anyone here compelled to say, "I have chosen the evil road"?
   Remember, the Lord knows the way that you take. I am anxious that you
   should, yourself, know the truth about your condition and prospects. I
   dread much your going on in ignorance. I wish every man here who is
   serving Satan to be aware that he is doing it. "If Jehovah is God,
   follow Him: but if Baal, then follow him"--be hearty one way or the
   other. If you have chosen the service of sin, own it like a man, to
   yourself, at least. Choose your way of life in broad daylight. If you
   propose to die without hope in Christ, say as much.

   If you resolve to let the future happen as it may, and to run all
   risks, then put down in black and white your daring resolution. If you
   believe that you shall die like a dog and see no hereafter, do not at
   all conceal from yourself your doggish degradation but be true to your
   own choice. If you choose the way of evil pleasures, do it
   deliberately, and after weighing all that can be said on the other
   side.

   But there is this comfort to me, if it does not comfort you--that if
   you have chosen the wrong way, that choice need not stand. The Grace of
   God can come in and lead you at once to reverse your course. Oh, that
   you may now say, "I had not thought of it but I certainly am going in
   the wrong direction and, God helping me, I will not go an inch
   further!" Through our Lord Jesus Christ the past can be forgiven. And
   by the power of the Holy Spirit the present and the future can be
   changed. The Grace of God can lead you to turn away from that which you
   have eagerly followed, and cause you to seek after that which you have
   disregarded.

   Oh, that today your cry might be, "For holiness and Heaven!" You have
   not been up to now on the Lord's side but now enlist in the army of the
   Lord Jesus. I would gladly stay your vessel in her evil voyage. I am
   firing a shot across your bow. I solemnly warn you to consider your
   ways. Think, what will the end of these things be? Break off your sins
   by righteousness. For it is time to seek the Lord. "Turn you, turn you;
   why will you die, O house of Israel?" This is the voice of God's own
   Word to you--hear it and be admonished and, God helping you, turn at
   once.

   But, my Friend, are you drifting? Do you say, "I am not distinctly
   sailing for Heaven, neither am I resolutely steering in the other
   direction. I do not quite know what to say of myself"? Are you
   drifting, then? Are you like a vessel which is left to the mercy of the
   winds and the waves? Ignoble condition! Perilous case! What? Are you no
   more than a log on the water? I should not like to be a passenger in a
   vessel which had no course marked out on the chart, no pilot at the
   wheel, no man at watch. Surely, you must be derelict, if not
   water-logged. And you will come to a total wreck before long.

   Yours is a dark prospect. Some time ago, I read in a paper of a
   gentleman being brought up before the magistrate. What was the charge
   against him? "Nothing very serious," you will say. He was found
   wandering in the fields. He was asked where he was going and he said he
   was not going anywhere. He was asked where he came from and he said he
   did not know. They asked him where his home was and he said he had
   none. They brought him up for wandering as-- what?--a dangerous
   lunatic. The man who has no aim or object in life but just wanders
   about anywhere or nowhere, acts like a dangerous lunatic and assuredly
   he is not morally sane.

   What? Am I aiming at nothing? Have I all this machinery of life, making
   up a vessel more wonderful than the finest steamboat and am I going
   nowhere? My heartthrobs are the pulsing of a Divinely arranged
   machinery--do they beat for nothing? Do I get up every morning and go
   about this world and work hard and all for nothing which will last? As
   a being created of God for noble purposes, am I spending my existence
   in a purposeless manner? How foolish! Why, surely, I have need, like
   the prodigal, to come to myself. And if I do come to myself, I shall
   ask myself, Can it be right that I should thus be wasting the precious
   gifts of time and life and power? If I were nothing, it were congruous
   that I should aim at nothing. But, being a man, I ought to have a high
   purpose and to pursue it heartily.

   Do not say that you are drifting. It is a terrible answer, implying
   grievous danger and casting a suspicion upon your sanity. If you have
   reason, use it in a reasonable way and do not play the fool.

   But can you say, "Yes, I am bound for the right port"? It may be that
   your accents are trembling with a holy fear. But none the less I am
   glad to hear you say as much. I rejoice if you say, "Christ commands
   me. I am trusting to His guidance. He is my way, my life, my end." Dear
   Friend, I congratulate you. We will sail together, as God shall help
   us, under the convoy of our Lord Jesus, who is the Lord High Admiral of
   the sea of life. We will keep with His squadron till we cast anchor in
   the glassy sea.

   But now that you know your way and are assured that you are on the
   right tack, put on all steam. Exert your strength in the work to which
   your life is consecrated. Waste not a single moment. Let no energy lie
   dormant, arouse every faculty. If you are serving the Lord, serve Him
   with all your might. Is it not written, "You shall love the Lord your
   God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind
   and with all your strength"? Those words sound to me like great strokes
   of the soul's paddle wheels! They urge us to press forward in the holy
   voyage.

   Brothers and Sisters, we must run, for our life is to be a race. It
   must be hard running, too. "Let us lay aside every weight and the sin
   which does so easily beset us and let us run with patience the race
   that is set before us." If we really are on the right way, let us press
   forward with all our powers. And may God help us that we may win the
   prize! Answer this first question and know of a surety whose you are,
   and where you are, and where you are going.

   II. Secondly, IS IT A COMFORT TO YOU THAT GOD KNOWS YOUR WAY? Solemnly,
   I believe that one of the best tests of human character is our relation
   to the great Truth of God's omniscience. If it startles you that God
   sees you, then you ought to be startled. If it delights you that God
   sees you, you may reasonably conclude that there is within your heart
   that which is right and true, which God will approve of. You are among
   those who know the truth, for you come to the light and cry, "Search
   me, O God."

   Allow me to apply the test to you now, by asking what you think of the
   Truth of God that the Lord knows you altogether. Remember, if your
   heart condemns you, God is greater than your heart and knows all
   things. But if your heart condemns you not, then have you confidence
   towards God. Dear Friend, it is quite certain that God does know the
   way that you take. The Hebrew may be read, "He knows the way that is in
   me," from which I gather that the Lord not only knows our outward
   actions but our inward feelings. He knows our likes and dislikes, our
   desires and our designs, our imaginations and tendencies. He knows not
   only what we do but what we would do if we could.

   He knows which way we should go if the restraints of society and the
   fear of consequences were removed. And that, perhaps, is a more
   important proof of character than the actions of which we are guilty.
   God knows what you think of,

   what you wish for, what you are pleased with--He knows not only the
   surface of your character but the secret heart and core of it. The Lord
   knows you altogether. Think of that. Does it give you any joy, this
   morning, to think that the Lord thus reads all the secrets of your
   bosom? Whether you rejoice therein or not, so it is and ever will be.

   The Lord knows you approvingly if you follow that which is right. He
   knows them that put their trust in Him. That is to say, He approves of
   them. If there is in you even a faint desire towards God, He knows it
   and looks with pleasure upon it. If you practice private prayer, if you
   do good by stealth, if you conquer evil passions, if you honor Him by
   patience, if you present gifts to Him which nobody ever hears of--He
   knows it all and He smiles upon it. Does this give you pleasure,
   greater pleasure than if men praised you for it? Then it is well with
   you. But if you put the praise of men before the approval of God, you
   are in an evil way. If you can say this morning, "I am glad that He
   knows what I do, for His approval is Heaven to me," then conclude that
   there is a work of Grace in your heart and that you are a follower of
   Jesus.

   God knows your way, however falsely you may be represented by others.
   Those three men who had looked so askance upon Job, accused him of
   hypocrisy and of having practiced some secret evil. But Job could
   answer, "The Lord knows the way that I take." Are you the victim of
   slander? The Lord knows the truth. Though you have been sadly
   misunderstood, if not willfully misrepresented by ungenerous persons,
   yet God knows all about you. And His knowledge is of more importance
   than the opinions of dying men. If you are not afraid to put your
   character and profession before the eyes of the Lord, you have small
   reason for disquietude, though all men should cast out your name as
   evil.

   The Lord knows the way that you take, though you could not yourself
   describe that way. Some gracious people are slow of speech and they
   have great difficulty in saying anything about their soul affairs.
   Coming to see the elders of the Church is quite an ordeal. I am half
   afraid that they even feel it a trial to see me, poor creature that I
   am. They are timid in speech, though they would be bold in act. They
   could die for Jesus but they find it hard to speak for Him. Their heart
   is all right. But when they begin to talk, their tongue fails them.
   They are unable to describe their conversion, though they feel it. They
   love repentance but can barely describe their own repenting.

   They have believed in the Lord Jesus but it would puzzle them to tell
   what faith is. Trembling One, fall back on this--"He knows the way that
   I take." If I cannot express my faith, yet He accepts it--if I cannot
   describe His work in my soul, yet He discerns the work of His own
   hands. Another great mercy is that God knows the way we take when we
   hardly know it ourselves. There are times with the true children of God
   when they cannot see their way, nor even take their bearings. It is not
   every saint that knows his longitude and latitude. No, it is not every
   saint that is sure that he is a saint. We have to ask, "Is my
   repentance real? Is my faith true? Have I really passed from death to
   life? Am I the Lord's

   own?"

   I do not wish you to be in such a state--it is a pity that such a
   question should be possible. But I know full well that many sincere
   saints are often put to the question and not altogether without reason.
   Herein is comfort--the Lord knows His children and He knows the truth
   of their graces, the preciousness of their faith, the heavenliness of
   their life. For He is the Former, the Author of them all. He knows His
   own work and cannot be deceived. Therefore, dear Friends, let us feel
   confident in God's knowledge of us, since He is greater than our hearts
   and His verdict is more sure than that of conscience itself.

   Once more, remember that at this very moment God knows your ways. He
   knows not only the way you have taken and the way you will take, but
   the way you are now choosing for yourself. He knows how you are acting
   towards the sermon you are hearing. It may be you conclude that the
   preacher is very tiresome. Be it so--but still the subject is one which
   ought to be pressed upon your consideration. Therefore, bear with me.
   But if you reply, "No, it is not that. But I do not want to be probed
   and pressed in this way." Well, the Lord knows that you are taking the
   way of resisting His Spirit and hardening your neck against rebuke. Do
   you like that fact?

   I think I hear one say, "I really wish to be right and I am afraid I am
   not right. Oh, that I could be made so!" God knows that
   feeling--breathe it into His ear in prayer. If you can say, "I am
   willing to be tested. I know to what port I am going. I am no pirate. I
   am bound for the New Jerusalem," then I rejoice. Well, well, the Lord
   knows. He dearly sees your present thoughts, your present wishes, your
   present resolves. He knows your heart. Is that a comfort to you? If it
   is, well. But if it saddens you that God should know your present
   condition, then be afraid, for there is something about you to be
   afraid of.

   He that sews fig leaves together, as Adam did, that he may hide himself
   from God, must know that he is naked. If he were clothed in the
   righteousness of the Lord Jesus, he would seek no concealment but would
   be willing both to examine himself and to be examined of the Lord. Thus
   have I handled these two questions--Do you know your way? Is it a
   comfort to you that God knows your way?

   III. Thirdly, DO YOU MEET WITH TRIALS IN THE WAY? I anticipate your
   answer. Out of the many here present, not one has been quite free from
   sorrow. I think I hear one saying, "Sir, I have had more trouble since
   I have been a Christian than I ever had before." I met with such a case
   the other day--a man said to me, "I never went to a place of worship
   for many years and I always seemed to prosper. At last I began to think
   of Divine things and I attended the House of God. But since then I have
   had nothing but trouble." He did not murmur against God but he did
   think it very strange. Friend, listen to me. These troubles are no
   token that you are in the wrong way. Job was in the right way and the
   Lord knew it. And yet He allowed Job to be very fiercely tried.

   Consider that there are trials in all ways. Even the road to
   destruction, broad as it is, has not a path in it which avoids trial.
   Some sinners go over hedge and ditch to Hell. If a man resolves to be a
   worldling, he will not find that the paths of sin are paths of peace.
   The wicked may well be ill at ease--for God walks contrary to them
   because they walk contrary to Him. No man, be he on the throne, or on
   the woolsack, or up in a mill, or down in a coal pit, can live without
   affliction.

   In a cottage near a wood there are troubles as well as in the palace by
   the sea. We are born to trouble--if you look for a world without thorns
   and thistles, you will not find it here. Then, remember, the very
   brightest of the saints have been afflicted. We have in the Bible,
   records of the lives of Believers. Can you remember the life of a
   single Believer who lived and died without sorrow? I cannot. Begin with
   father Abraham--the Lord did try Abraham. Go on to Moses, a king in
   Israel. Were not his trials many and heavy? Remember David and all his
   afflictions.

   Come down to New Testament times. The Apostles were so tried that one
   of them said, "If in this life only we have hope, we are of all men
   most miserable." Through much tribulation they reached their rest. If
   the saints of God confessed that theirs was a troublous way, you need
   not suppose that you are out of the road because your way is full of
   difficulty. Is there any ocean upon which a ship can sail in which it
   shall be quite sure that no storms will arise? Where there is sea there
   may be storms. So where there is life there will be changes,
   temptations, difficulties and sorrows.

   Trials are no evidence of being without God--many trials come from God.
   Job says, "When He has tried me." He sees God in his afflictions. The
   devil actually worked the trouble. But the Lord not only permitted it
   but He had a design in it. Without the Divine concurrence, none of his
   afflictions could have happened. It was God that tried Job, and it is
   God that tries us. No trouble comes to us without Divine permission.
   All the dogs of affliction are muzzled until God sets them free. No,
   against none of the seed of Israel can a dog move its tongue unless God
   permits.

   Troubles do not spring out of the ground like weeds that grow anywhere
   but they grow as plants set in the garden. God appoints the weight and
   number of all our adversities. If He declares their number ten, they
   cannot be eleven. If He wills that we bear a certain weight, no one can
   add half an ounce more. Since every trial comes from God, afflictions
   are no evidence that you are out of God's way.

   Besides, according to the text, these trials are tests--"When He has
   tried me." The trials that came to Job were made to be proofs that the
   Patriarch was real and sincere. Did not the enemy say--"Have not You
   made an hedge about him and about his house and about all that he has
   on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands and his substance
   is increased in the land. But put forth Your hand now and touch all
   that he has and he will curse You to Your face." The devil will have it
   that as dogs follow men for bones, so do we follow God for what we can
   get out of Him.

   The Lord lets the devil see that our love is not bought by temporal
   goods. That we are not mercenary followers but loving children of the
   Lord, so that under dire suffering we exclaim, "Though He slay me, yet
   will I trust in Him." By the endurance of grief, our sincerity is made
   manifest--and it is proven that we are not mere pretenders but true
   heirs of

   God.

   Once more upon this point--if you have met with troubles, remember they
   will come to an end. The holy man in our text says, "When He has tried
   me." As much as to say, He will not always be doing it. There will come
   a time when He will have done trying me. Beloved, put a stout heart to
   a steep hill and you will climb it before long. Put the ship in good

   trim for a storm, and though the winds may howl for a while, they will
   at length sob themselves asleep. There is a sea of glass for us after
   the sea of storms. Only have patience and the end will come.

   Many a man of God has lived through a hundred troubles when he thought
   one would kill him. And so will it be with you. You young beginners,
   you that are bound for the kingdom but have only lately started for it,
   be not amazed if you meet with conflicts. If you very soon meet with
   difficulties, be not surprised. Let your trials be evidence to you that
   you are in the right, rather than that you are in the wrong way--"for
   what son is he whom the Father chastens not?" He that will go to Hell
   will find many to help him there. But he that will go to Heaven may
   have to cut his way through a host of adversaries.

   Pluck up your courage. The rod is one of the tokens of the child of
   God. If you were not God's child you might be left unchastened. But
   inasmuch as you are dear to Him, He will whip you when you disobey. If
   you were only a bit of common clay, God would not put you into the
   furnace. But as you are gold and He knows it, you must be refined. And
   to be refined it is needful that the fire should exercise its power
   upon you. Because you are bound for Heaven you will meet with storms on
   your voyage to glory.

   IV. Fourthly, HAVE YOU CONFIDENCE IN GOD AS TO THESE STORMS? Can you
   say, in the language of the text, "When He has tried me, I shall come
   forth as gold"? If you are really trusting in Jesus, if He is
   everything to you, you may say this confidently. For you will find it
   true to the letter. If you have really given yourself up to be saved by
   Divine Grace, do not hesitate to believe that you will be found safe at
   the last. I do not like people to come and trust Christ with a
   temporary faith as though He could keep them for a day or two but could
   not preserve them all their lives. Trust Christ for everlasting
   salvation--mark the word "everlasting."

   I thank God, that when I believed in His Son, Jesus Christ, I laid hold
   upon final perseverance--I believed that where He had begun a good work
   He would carry it on and perfect it in the day of Christ. I believed in
   the Lord Jesus, not for a year or two but for all the days of my life
   and to eternity. I want your faith to have a hand of that kind, so that
   you grasp the Lord as your Savior to the uttermost. I cannot tell what
   troubles may come, nor what temptations may arise. But I know in whose
   hands I am and I am persuaded that He is able to preserve me, so that
   when He has tried me, I shall come forth as gold. I go into the fire
   but I shall not be burned up in it--"I shall come forth."

   Like the three holy children, though the furnace was heated seven times
   hotter, yet the Son of Man will be with me in the furnace and, "I shall
   come forth," with not even the smell of fire upon me. Yes, "I shall
   come forth," and none can hinder me. It is good to begin with this holy
   confidence and to let that confidence increase as you get nearer to the
   recompense of the reward. Has He not promised that we shall never
   perish? Shall we not, therefore, come forth as gold?

   This confidence is grounded on the Lord's knowledge of us. "He knows
   the way that I take"--therefore--"when He has tried me, I shall come
   forth as gold." If something happened to us which the Lord had not
   foreseen and provided for, we might be in great peril. But He knows our
   ways even to the end and is prepared for its rough places. If some
   amazing calamity could come upon us which the Lord had not reckoned
   upon, we might well be afraid of being wrecked. But our Lord's
   foreseeing eyes have swept the horizon and prepared us for all
   weathers. He knows where storms do lurk and cyclones hide away. And He
   is at home in managing tempests and tornadoes.

   If His far-seeing eyes have spied out for us a long sickness and a
   gradual and painful death, then He has prepared the means to bear us
   through. If He has looked into the mysterious unknown of the
   apocalyptic revelation and seen unimaginable horrors and heart-melting
   terrors, yet He has forestalled the necessity which He knows is coming
   on. It is enough for us that our Father knows what things we have need
   of and, "when He has tried us, we shall come forth as gold."

   This confidence must be sustained by sincerity. If a man is not sure
   that he is sincere, he cannot have confidence in God. If you are a bit
   of gold and know it, the fire and you are friends. You will come forth
   out of it. For no fire will burn up gold. But if you suspect that you
   are some imitation metal, some mixture which glitters, but is not gold,
   you will then hate fire and have no good word for it. You will proudly
   murmur at the Divine dispensations, Why should I be put into the fire?
   Why should I be tried? You will kick against God's Providence if you
   are a hypocrite. But if you are really sincere, you will submit to the
   Divine hand and will not lie down in despair.

   The motto of pure gold is, "I shall come forth." Make it your hopeful
   confidence in the day of trouble. I want you to have this sense of
   sincerity which makes you know that you are what you profess to be,
   that you may also have the convic-

   tion that you will come forth out of every possible trial. I shall be
   tempted, but "I shall come forth." I shall be denounced by slander, but
   "I shall come forth." Be of good cheer--if you go into the fire gold,
   you will come forth gold!

   Once more, he says, "I shall come forth as gold." But how does that
   come forth? It comes forth proved. It has been assayed and is now
   warranted pure. So shall you be. After the trial you will be able to
   say, "Now I know that I fear God. Now I know that God is with me,
   sustaining me. Now I see that He has helped me and I am sure that I am
   His."

   How does gold come forth? It comes forth purified. A lump of ore may
   not be so big as when it went into the fire but it is quite as
   precious. There is quite as much gold in it now as there was at first.
   What has gone? Nothing but that which is best gone. The dross has gone.
   But all the gold is there. O Child of God, you may decrease in bulk but
   not in bullion! You may lose importance but not innocence. You may not
   talk so big, but there shall be really more to talk of. And what a gain
   it is to lose dross! What gain to lose pride! What gain to lose
   self-sufficiency! What gain to lose all those propensities to boastings
   that are so abundantly there! You may thank God for your trials, for
   you will come forth as purified gold.

   Once more, how does gold come forth from the furnace? It comes forth
   ready for use. Now the goldsmith may take it and make what he pleases
   of it. It has been through the fire and the dross has been taken away
   from it and it is fit for his use. So, Beloved, if you are on the way
   to Heaven and you meet with difficulties, they will bring you
   preparation for higher service--you will be a better and more useful
   person. You will be a woman whom God can more fully use to comfort
   others of a sorrowful spirit.

   Spiritual afflictions are heavenly promotions. You are going a rank
   higher--God is putting another stripe upon your arm. You were only a
   corporal, but now He is making a sergeant of you. Be not discouraged.
   You that have set out for Heaven this morning, do not go back because
   you get a rainy day when you start. Do not be like Pliable. When he got
   to the Slough of Despond, and tumbled in, all he did was to struggle to
   get out on the side nearest home. He said, "If I may only once get out
   of this bog, you may have that grand city for yourself."

   Come, be like Christian, who, though he did sink, always kept his face
   in the right way and always turned his back to the City of Destruction.
   "No," he said, "if I sink in deep mire where there is no standing, I
   will go down with my eyes towards the hills from where comes my help."
   "I am bound for Canaan and if all the Canaanites stand in the way in
   one block, I will die with my face towards Jerusalem--I still will hold
   on, God helping me, even unto the end."

   May the Lord so bless you, for He knows the way you take. And when He
   has tried you, He will bring you forth as gold. Amen.

   PORTION OF SCRIPTURE READ BEFORE SERMON--Psalm 139.
     __________________________________________________________________

Concerning the Consolations Of God

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S-DAY MORNING, AUGUST 11, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "Are the consolations of God too small for you? Is there any secret
   thing with you?" Job 15:11.

   THESE are the words of Eliphaz, one of those three friends of Job who
   blundered dreadfully over his case. Their words are not to be despised.
   For they were men in the front rank of knowledge and experience.
   Eliphaz says, "With us are both the gray-headed and very aged men, much
   elder than your father." Their errors were not the superficial mistakes
   of fools but the profound reasoning of men of light and leading. Their
   utterances are, at least, equal to anything our own learned men may
   have to say on the same problem.

   However wrong Eliphaz may have been in reference to Job--and in
   reference to him his remarks were grossly unjust--yet many of them are
   correct in themselves and may usefully be applied to our own hearts.
   Inasmuch as Eliphaz, in this verse, teaches no doctrine but only asks
   two searching questions, he cannot mislead us. In fact, he may do us
   good service. May God the Holy Spirit enable us to consider these
   questions that we may be profited by them!

   The text is in the form of a question, and its sense I shall endeavor
   to bring out by other questions, each of which will have a practical
   relation to ourselves. The passage in the original has proved hard to
   translate. But I think that in four questions I can set forth the
   essence of the meanings which has been found.

   If we are, indeed, Believers in the Gospel and are living near to God,
   our consolation should be exceedingly great. Passing through a troubled
   world we have need of consolations. But these are abundantly provided
   by our God and their influence upon us should be exceedingly great. We
   ought not to be unhappy. For we have joy urged upon us by the precept,
   "Rejoice in the Lord always." And that precept is in substance often
   repeated. It is both the duty and the privilege of Christians to be of
   good cheer. If we are not glad, even amid our trials, there is a reason
   for it, and we shall do well, at this time, to use the text as a candle
   by which to search out that reason. "Are the consolations of God too
   small for you? Is there any secret thing with you?"

   I. Our first question follows the interpretation given by most
   authorities--"Do YOU REGARD THE CONSOLATIONS OF GOD AS SMALL?" Do you
   judge that the comforts of faith are insignificant? "Are the
   consolations of God too small for you?"

   I would ask you, first, Do you think religion makes men unhappy? Have
   you poisoned your mind with that invention of the Enemy? Have you made
   yourself believe that godliness consists in morbid self-condemnation,
   despondency, apprehension and dread? If so, permit me to warn you that
   there are many popular errors and that, in this case, "common fame is a
   common liar." Do you find in the preacher and the members of his Church
   any confirmation of this silly assertion? We can personally assure you
   that the joys of religion are by no means meager in our case. We
   beseech you not to let a groundless prejudice blind your eyes to the
   Truth of God. I will hope that, like the Bereans, you are of a noble
   spirit and will examine that which is told you.

   Is not your verdict different from that of those who have tried
   godliness for themselves? Do you not know that many, for the joy they
   have found in the love of Christ, have renounced all sinful pleasures
   and utterly despised them? They were once fascinated with the world but
   they tasted higher joys and shook off the spell. He that drinks of the
   river of the Water of Life will count the streams of sin to be foul and
   brackish and will no more drink thereof. Many a Believer, for the joy
   that is set before him, has, in the service of God, encountered much
   ridicule, endured severe losses and borne great hardships. And he has
   done so with delight.

   Have you not also seen, in many afflicted Christians, a peace which you
   yourself do not know? Have you not observed their patience under
   adversity? They have been poor but perfectly content. They have been
   sick and yet cheerful--racked with pain and yet joyous. Under the
   apprehension of surgical operations, have you not seen them happily
   resigned? Have

   you ever seen one of them die? How often have we heard them singing in
   their death throes, which have been to them, death joys! Is it not a
   fact which cannot be disputed, that faith in our Lord Jesus has
   uplifted the sorrowful and has rendered others supremely happy?

   This joy has sprung entirely from their hope in Christ, their communion
   with God, their delight in the Truth of God revealed in Holy Scripture.
   Have we not among us in Christian fellowship many notable proofs that--

   "It is religion which can give Sweetest pleasure while we live"?
   Therefore, my questioning Friend, it behooves you to look into this
   matter, and not to remain under the impression that the consolations of
   God are small. Those whose experience asserts that the joys of religion
   are great are not foolish or disreputable persons--give due weight to
   their witness and believe that the consolations of God are precious
   beyond expression. Amid many pains and afflictions, I can personally
   assure you that it is a blessed thing to trust in the Lord.

   Will you follow me as I ask you, Upon consideration, will you not amend
   your judgment? What are these consolations of God? The more you know of
   them, the more ground will you see for believing that they must be
   great. They are the "consolations of God." If God Himself deigns to
   comfort men, will He not greatly cheer them? Knowing human sorrow and
   stepping from the height of His Glory to comfort it, is it conceivable
   that He will labor in vain? Do you think that the All-Sufficient cannot
   provide consolation equal to the affliction?

   The consolations we speak of are applied by the Spirit of God. And to
   prove how earnestly He performs His work, He has taken the name of
   "Comforter." Will the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, do you think, come to
   any human heart with insufficient consolations? Will He trifle with our
   griefs? Can it be that He does not know how to give sunlight when our
   day is dark with sorrow? Think not so. Moreover, the Lord Jesus Christ,
   the Eternal Son of God, is the substance of those consolations. He is
   called, "The Consolation of Israel." Can a man have Christ to be his
   portion and yet be poor? Can a man have Jesus for his joy and yet be
   weighed down with sadness? Might he not well ask, "Why are you cast
   down, O my Soul?" I cannot for a moment dream of a joyless Christ.

   See again, my Friend, these consolations of God deal with the source of
   sorrow. From where came the curse but from the sin of man? Jesus has
   come to save His people from their sins. Those thorns and thistles
   which now rend our flesh are not the natural fruits of the earth as God
   created it. Sin sowed all these. The consolations of God deal with sin.
   As for the guilt which we have incurred, and the inevitable punishment,
   both are removed by pardon full and free. Jesus bore the guilt of sin
   and put it all away by His death upon the Cross. And, in consequence,
   sin can be blotted out.

   Is not this the grandest of all consolations--the consolation of God?
   When we lay hold on Jesus and receive forgiveness, affliction may
   remain, but sin is gone forever. And therefore the affliction, itself,
   loses its bitterness. Sin reigning in the heart is the death of peace.
   But the dethronement of the usurper is provided for, and therefore,
   another Divine consolation. Until we get the mastery over evil, we must
   be uncomfortable. But the consolations of God assure us of a new heart
   and a right spirit--and of a power supreme and Divine--which enters the
   nature of the Believer and subdues, destroys and at last annihilates
   the propensity to sin.

   Is not this a rich and rare consolation? Comfort which left us under
   the power of evil would be dangerous comfort. But comfort which takes
   away both the guilt and the power of sin is glorious, indeed. Dream not
   that it can be small! Remember, too, that the consolations of God
   reveal to us a reason for the sorrow when it is allowed to remain.
   There is a need that we are in heaviness. "We know that all things work
   together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called
   according to His purpose."

   If suffering is a fire, the consolations of God assure us that it is a
   refining fire, which only consumes our dross. Do you not think that the
   comfortable fruits of righteousness, which are brought forth in those
   Believers who are exercised by trial, are the source of great comfort
   to the afflicted of the Lord?--

   "Since all that I meet shall work for my good, The bitter is sweet, the
   medicine is food."

   Another reflection sweetly cheers the heart of the tried one during his
   tribulation, namely, that he has a Comrade in it. We are not passing
   through the waters alone. We have a Fellow-Sufferer, of whom we read,
   "In all their affliction He was afflicted." Our Lord drank, long ago,
   of that cup we sip. He knows the sting of treachery, the stab of
   calumny, the spit of scorn. For He was "in all points tempted like as
   we are." Many of us have found this to be an eminent comfort. Do you
   not think it must be so? Has not many a man, at the sound of another's
   voice, been cheered in the darkness of the

   night when pursuing a dangerous way? Has not the presence of a stronger
   and wiser one acting as guide been quite enough to remove all dread?

   If the Son of God is with us, surely there is an end of every sort of
   fear. Does He not use this as His own note of cheer, saying, "Fear you
   not, for I am with you"? Besides, "the consolations of God" lie also in
   the direction of compensations. You hear the rod--yes, but this is the
   small drawback to heavenly sonship--if drawback, indeed, it is. You
   have become a son of God and, "what son is there whom his Father
   chastens not?" You are an heir of God, joint heir with Jesus Christ.
   And in accepting heirship will you not cheerfully take the Cross, too,
   seeing it is part of the entail?

   It is true that you have special sorrow. But then you have the royal
   nature to which that sacred sorrow is a witness. God has given to you a
   nature that wars against evil--therefore these tears! Would you be of
   the seed of the serpent and have your meat as plentiful as dust? Would
   you not far rather be of the seed of the woman and have your heel
   bruised? What is the bruising of the heel compared with the eternal
   dominion to which that seed is predestined? Compensations abound in
   every case of trouble.

   You have lost your child but you believe in the resurrection. You will
   die yourself, it may be. But you shall rise again from the dust. You
   have lost your property. But you are an heir of all things in Christ
   Jesus. You have been persecuted. But in this you rejoice as a partaker
   of the sufferings of Christ. The compensations of the Covenant of Grace
   are so overflowing that we call our troubles "light afflictions, which
   are but for a moment," and they work out for us a far more exceeding
   and eternal weight of glory.

   Besides, there is another consolation, with which I finish--not because
   I have completed my list but because time does not permit me to
   enlarge--there is the consolation that you are on your journey Home and
   that every moment you are coming closer to the eternal rest. When we
   once reach Heaven, we shall forget the trials of the way. An hour with
   our God will make up for a life of pain. You languish on that bed. But
   if you languish into immortality, you will no more remember your
   anguish. When your head wears the crown and your hand waves the palm,
   you will count it all joy that you were thought worthy to be persecuted
   for Christ's sake.

   Sirs, we have the best of it! Whatever trouble may come to us as
   Christians, so much more of joy comes with it, that we have the best of
   the bargain! We give up drops of poisonous delight but we dive into
   rivers of ineffable joy. The Christian's joy far excels the best that
   earth can afford. Grace is the dawn of Glory. Faith brings Heaven down
   to us, while love bears us up to Heaven. Celestial fruits are gathered
   upon earthly ground by those who look up for the manna. Let us begin
   the song which with sweeter voices we shall continue, world without
   end--"Unto Him that loved us and saved us in His own blood, be glory
   forever!"

   Still I fear there are some to whom it appears as if the joys of
   religion and the consolations of God were small. Let them correct their
   mistake. For the Truth of God is far otherwise.

   II. But now a second question comes up, which will come home to many
   Christian people. HAVE THESE CONSOLATIONS BEEN SMALL IN THEIR EFFECT
   UPON YOU? Have these consolations, though great in themselves, been

   small in their influence upon you?

   1 will begin my examination by putting to one disciple this
   question--Have you ever very much rejoiced in God? Have you always
   possessed a little, and but a very little, joy? Are you one of those
   who is only up to the ankles in the river of Divine Grace? Why is this?
   Dear Friend, you are believing upon a slender scale. You are living on
   a low plane. Why is it so? You hope you are saved but it is by the skin
   of your teeth. You hope you are a child of God but you are not very
   sure about it. And, consequently, you get very little joy out of it.
   This is mischievous. From where does it come? Is it ignorance?

   Do you not know enough of the great doctrines of the Gospel and of the
   vast privileges of the redeemed? It may be so. We have heard of persons
   in Australia who walked habitually over nuggets of gold. We have heard
   of a bridge being built with what seemed common stones but it contained
   masses of golden ore. Men did not know their wealth. Is it not a pity
   that you should be poor in comfort and yet have all this gold of
   consolation at your feet? You have, lying within the leaves of your
   Bible, checks for millions and yet you have scarcely a penny to spend.
   What a pity!

   Is it listlessness? Have you ever felt desirous to know the best of the
   Christian life? Have you ever had the sacred ambition to gain all the
   blessings which are provided in the Covenant of Grace? It is amazing
   how indifferent some people can be--they can fret when within reach of
   unutterable joy! I have heard of a person who walked some seven hundred

   miles to see Niagara Falls. When he was within seven miles, he thought
   he heard the roar of the cataract and he called to a man working in the
   fields and said, "Is that the roar of Niagara?" The man answered, "I
   don't know but I guess it may

   be. What if it is?"

   With surprise, the good man said, "Do you live here?" "Born and bred
   here," the man answered. "And yet you don't know whether that
   thundering noise is from the waterfall?" "No, Stranger," said he, "I
   don't care what it is. I have never seen those falls. I look after my
   farm." No doubt there are many within hail of Heaven's choicest joys
   who have never cared to know them. They hope they are saved but they
   don't care for great joy. They use their spade and their hoe and dig
   their potatoes. But Niagara is nothing to them. Many look well to this
   life but do not arouse themselves to gain present spiritual joy.

   Oh, how sad--that you should be so much a Christian that we should not
   wish to question that you are converted-- and yet you are half-asleep
   and self-content! You labor under the notion that those good people who
   rejoice in the Lord are enthusiasts, or else you say to yourself, "It
   would be presumption on my part to aspire to have the same joy." What
   nonsense! Go in for everything that God can give you. If you are His
   child, nothing in His house is denied you. He says to you, "Son, you
   are ever with Me and all that I have is yours." Do not you, like the
   elder brother, complain that you have served Him all these years and
   yet He never gave you enough to make you merry with your friends?

   But it may be, dear Friend, that you once did joy and rejoice. Well,
   then, is it of late that you have lost these splendid consolations and
   come down to feel them small with you? I suggest to you that you
   observe what alteration you have made of late. Is it that you have more
   business and have grown more worldly? You cannot get out to Prayer
   Meetings now, nor to week night services. "No," you say, "I cannot. And
   if you knew what I have to do, you would not blame me." Just so, a
   little while ago you had not so much to do. But you chose to load
   yourself with an extra burden, knowing that you would not be able to
   get so much spiritual food as before.

   Somewhere in that line you will find the reason why your joy has
   declined. If anybody said to me, "The days are darker now than they
   used to be," I should remember that the sun is still the same. Perhaps
   my Friend has not lately cleaned his windows. Or he has not drawn up
   his blinds. And that is why he thinks there is less light. It is very
   possible to be much more in the dark than you need to be. The gloom may
   be in the eyes rather than in the heavens. May I suggest a little
   looking at home, that you may see why your former blessedness is gone?

   Do you reply to me that you do use the means of Grace--but the outward
   means fail to bring you the consolation they once did? To what means do
   you refer? Are you as much in prayer as ever? And is prayer less
   refreshing than it used to be? Do you read the Scriptures as you
   formerly did, with the same regularity, attention and devotion? Do you
   no longer draw the waters of comfort from these wells of salvation? Do
   you really go on hearing the Word as you once did, with the same hunger
   for it, and love of it, and yet do you find it unsatisfactory to you? I
   must again remind you that these things have not altered in themselves.
   For the ministry is the same to other saints, the Scriptures must be
   the same, and the Mercy Seat is not removed.

   The fault is not in these, but in yourself. Surely, dear Friend, some
   evil things within you have curdled the milk of blessing and stopped
   the flow of joy. Search yourselves, I pray, if the consolations of God
   are small with you. He has not forgotten to be gracious, neither has He
   ceased to hear prayer and to speak to His servants through His Sacred
   Word. You shut the door from within. He bars it not from without. I may
   come near to your experience if I ask--Do you revive occasionally, and
   then relapse? I think I hear you say, "Oh, yes, I sometimes can clap my
   hands--I feel delighted while hearing the Gospel. I could shout
   Hallelujah, I do so rejoice. I am for a time up in the stirrups."

   But you come down again just as readily. Why is this? Surely, you are
   in a very changeful frame and live by feeling rather than by principle.
   Are not the grounds of comfort always the same? If a promise is true
   this morning, it will be true this afternoon. And if it is a real
   source of comfort to you this afternoon, it ought to be a comfort to
   you on Monday, and all the other days of the week. If the feast does
   not alter, and yet it does not satisfy you as it once did, you must be
   ill--some fever or other disease is upon you. Haste away to the Great
   Physician of souls and say to Him, "Lord, search me and try me and see
   what evil thing there is in me and make me right, that I may again be
   satisfied with heavenly food." It is childish to be so changeful. Grow
   in Divine Grace and be rooted in faith.

   Does the cause of your greater grief lie in a trial to which you do not
   fully submit? I think I hear you admit that you faint under your load.
   "If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small." But He
   gives more Grace. Get it. Are

   you impatient? Do you kick against the pricks? Do you feel that you can
   endure no longer? Since you are impatient, do you wonder that you are
   unhappy? Since you walk contrary to God, do you wonder that He walks
   contrary to you? Do not find fault with His consolations?--Find fault
   with your own rebellious heart. When a child rebels against his father,
   it is not likely that his father's love will be a source ofmuch comfort
   to him.

   Dear Friend, the Lord help you to get rid of impatience and you will be
   rid of anguish. Take the cup and drink it and say, "Not as I will, but
   as You will." And an angel will appear unto you strengthening you. As
   it was with your Lord in a similar case, so shall it be with you. Are
   you alarmed at what may yet come? Do you dread the future? Well, if you
   will import trouble from the future, blame not the consolations of God.
   For He has told you that, "the morrow shall take thought for the things
   of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." He has never
   taught you to pray, "Give me tomorrow my daily bread"--He has limited
   you and pegged you down to this," Give us this day our daily bread."
   Will you not be content to live by the day? Walking with Him who is the
   God of Eternity, you may leave days and years to Him. And let one day
   at a time be enough for you.

   It may be that while you are thus without the enjoyment of Divine
   consolation, Satan is tempting you to look to other things for comfort.
   I pray you, touch not the wine cup, if this is placed before you as a
   means of consolation. A dark hour is often the crisis in the history of
   a man of God--if he can weather this storm he will have fair sailing.

   Satan will now be very busy to get you to act hastily, or wickedly. It
   will be whispered to you, "Put your pen to that accommodation bill.
   Borrow, though you cannot pay. It may be wrong, but you can put it
   right afterwards." I pray you, do not dream of any means of help which
   you cannot lay before God. How often have men in offices of trust been
   tempted to embezzle money for just a little while, and then to put it
   back again! I beseech you, shake this viper off your hand into the
   fire, for it is a viper. Better suffer anything than do wrong. Keep in
   the furnace till God bids you come out of it.

   Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, when they found themselves walking
   safely in the midst of the flames and saw Nebuchadnezzar standing at
   the mouth of the furnace, did not leap out to assail the tyrant. Not
   they--they stayed till they came out with honor. Brothers and Sisters,
   seek not consolation in policy, in trickery, in falsehood. Do not even
   seek it in haste. Many a man who has run before the cloud has had to
   slink back again. Many a man who has taken a knife to carve for
   himself, has cut his fingers.

   Do not be tempted to think that you can find better comforts than God
   can give you. Look not to man--let your expectation be in God alone. If
   you have despised the consolations of God by setting them below your
   own efforts, you cannot expect that they should be sweet to your taste.
   Amend this and you will be happy. Your lack of comfort lies not in the
   consolations, themselves, but in your own heart. Pray God the Holy
   Spirit to revive the work of Divine Grace in your soul and that being
   done, either the trouble will grow lighter, or your back will be
   stronger to bear the burden.

   III. Our third question is this--Since the consolations of God appear
   so small to you, HAVE YOU ANYTHING BETTER TO PUT IN THEIR PLACE?

   Perhaps this is what Eliphaz meant when he said, "Is there any secret
   thing with you?" He seemed to say to Job, "We cannot tell you anything.
   You will not hear us. Have you some wonderful discovery of your own?
   Have you some secret cordial, some mystic support, some unknown joy?
   Have you discovered a balm of greater efficacy than ours, a cure-all
   for your sorrow?" Let me ask you a similar question. If God's Gospel
   fails you, what will you do?

   Have you found out a new religion with brighter hopes? I do not think
   you have, for the prognostications of modern thought are dreary enough!
   Moreover, I have been informed by those who know most about it, that
   the theology of the future has not yet crystallized itself sufficiently
   to be defined. As far as I can see, it will take a century or two
   before its lovers have licked it into shape. For they have not yet
   settled what its shape is to be. While the grass is growing, the steed
   is starving. The new bread is baking--the arsenic is well mixed within
   it. But the oven is not very hot and the dough is not turned into a
   loaf yet.

   I should advise you to keep to that bread of which your fathers ate,
   the bread which came down from Heaven. Personally I am not willing to
   make any change, even if the new bread were ready on the table. For new
   bread is not very digestible and the arsenic of doubt is not according
   to my desire. I shall keep to the old manna till I cross the Jordan and
   eat the old corn of the land of Canaan. Are you hopeful of finding
   comfort in new speculations? Is that the "secret thing"? Then you feed
   upon the wind.

   Are you hoping to find comfort in the world? Will you be happy if you
   manage to get that position? If you pass that examination? If you save
   so much money? I beseech you, do not play the fool--there is no
   consolation in all this. Did you ever read a little book called, "The
   Mirage of Life," published by the Tract Society? It ought to convince
   anybody that there is no satisfaction to be found in the greatest
   worldly success. For it shows us millionaires, statesmen, and princes--
   all dissatisfied. But I need not refer to any book--observe for
   yourselves. The richest men have often been the most miserable, and
   those who have succeeded best in rising to places of honor have been
   worn out in the pursuit, and disgusted with the prize.

   Wealth brings care, honor earns envy, position entails toil, and rank
   has its annoyances. One of our richest men once said, "I suppose you
   fancy I am happy because I am rich. Why, a dozen times in a year and
   more often, some fellow threatens to shoot me if I do not send him what
   he wants. Do you suppose that this makes me a happy man?" Believe me,
   the world is as barren of joy as the Sahara. Vain is the hope of
   finding a spring of consolation in anything beneath the moon. Seek the
   kingdom of God and His righteousness.

   Or, do you conclude that you are strong-minded enough to bear all the
   difficulties and trials of life without consolation? Well, Friend, I
   will not discuss the point. I have found that persons who think
   themselves strong in mind are generally strong in the head. Yet I would
   remind you that the strongest are not too strong for life's battle.
   There never was a wise man yet who thought he was wise. This world has
   enough of woe in it to test all the wisdom you are likely to possess.
   For my own part, I feel very diffident and would be glad of all the
   consolations Heaven can give me. I suspect that you are as I am and
   will not be able to play the man without help from God.

   Do you say that what can't be cured must be endured and you will stay
   as you are? This is a poor resolve for a man to come to. If there is
   better to be had, why not seek it? Do you mean to abide in the sad
   state into which you have fallen? Are you content to be discontented?
   Have you had a child of your own? Have you seen it go wrong and get
   itself into trouble and then resolve not to confess it but to make
   itself appear a martyr and fret? You wished to put it right and cheer
   it into obedience. But it would not get out of the sulks. What did you
   do with it? I suppose, in the long run, you had to leave it to have its
   sulk out and you thought to yourself, "Silly child! How miserable you
   make yourself and all for nothing. You might be as happy as your
   brothers and sisters. But if you must sulk, you must."

   Some Believers are of this sort. Because they had a serious loss, they
   must rob themselves of communion with God. Because they have endured
   terrible bereavement, they bereave themselves of their Lord. Because
   they are not well, they fret themselves into worse health. Some are
   only satisfied when they are in the depths of misery. I know some whose
   wretchedness is chronic--like polar bears they are only at home in the
   ice. You smile and well you may. But then you should also weep--if this
   is your case.

   You should cry, "O Lord, put me right with Yourself! I cannot be
   content to be always repining and lamenting! If there are consolations
   to be had in You, let me have them now. I know there is no consolation
   anywhere else. To whom should I go? You alone have the words of eternal
   life! There is no secret thing with me, my God, upon which I can rely.
   I must have Your consolation, or I shall have no comfort!"

   IV. Here comes the most practical question of all and with this I
   close. If it is so, that you have up to now found heavenly consolations
   to have small effect with you and yet have nothing better to put in
   their place, IS THERE NOT A CAUSE FOR YOUR FAILURE? Will you not
   endeavor to find it out?

   Dear Friends, you that seek to be right, you that desire to be full
   Christians and yet cannot rejoice in God, at least not often, nor
   greatly--is there not some sin indulged? A child of God may go on with
   a sin unwittingly and that for years. And all the while that sin may be
   causing a dreadful leakage in his joy. You cannot be wrong in life and
   thought and word, without a measure of joy oozing away. Take a good
   look at yourself and examine your life by the light of Scripture--and
   if you find that you have been doing something wrong unawares, or for
   which you have made an unworthy excuse--away with the evil! Away with
   it at once! When this Achan is stoned and the accursed thing is put
   away, you will be surprised to find what joy, what comfort, will
   immediately flow into your soul.

   Next, may there not have been some duty neglected? We are not saved by
   good works. But if any Christian omits a good work, he will find it
   injurious to his peace. Many Christian people never get into the clear
   light of full assurance because they do not obey their conscience upon
   every point. I pray you, never quarrel with conscience, for it will
   have the best of it with you--if you have a conscience. If you go
   contrary to conscience, there will be trouble inside the little

   kingdom of your soul, as sure as you are alive. "Oh but I have always
   been intending to do it." That makes it the greater sin that you have
   not done it, for evidently you knew your Lord's will.

   Have you considered that any willful omission of duty is not one sin,
   but many? It is your duty to do it now. It is a sin that you have not
   done it already. It will be your duty to do it tomorrow. It will be
   another sin if you omit it tomorrow. How often the omission creates a
   new sin, I cannot tell--but as surely as you rob God of obedience, sin
   will rob you of comfort. If you neglect obedience to the precept, you
   cannot have the comfort of the promise. Get that matter seen to at
   once. Omitted duty is like a little stone in the sole of your shoe. It
   is small, and some say it is a non-essential matter--but it is just
   because it is so small that it can do so much mischief.

   If I had a great pebble in my boot, I should be sure to get it out. But
   a tiny stone may remain and blister me and lame me. Get out the little
   stones, or they will hinder your traveling to Heaven. Again, may there
   not be some idol in your heart? That is a very searching suggestion. If
   the consolations of God are small with you, may you not have set up
   something in the place of God--a lover, a wife, a husband, a child, a
   friend--learning, honor, wealth? I need not mention the many forms
   taken by our idols. It is very easy to set up an image of jealousy.

   A thing in itself harmless and even lovely, may grievously provoke the
   Lord through our heart going after it. Brother, Sister, is it so? Do
   you love anything as you love God? I suggest that you should at once
   cry--

   "The dearest idol I have known, Whatever that idol is, Help me to tear
   it from its throne, And worship only You."

   If you do not remove the idol from its throne, if God loves you, He
   will make your Dagon fall and be broken. If you want to lose that which
   is the object of your comfort and delight, love it too much. This is a
   sort of unwillful murder which good people can perform upon their
   children and their friends. Idolize and destroy. Love the creature more
   than the Creator, and it may be necessary that they should be taken
   from you altogether.

   But, Beloved, if you do not enjoy the consolations of God, do you not
   think it is because you do not think enough of God? I am ashamed of
   myself that I do not live more with my God. How little time do we spend
   with Him! We think about His work rather than Himself. Even in the
   Scriptures we look more to the Words than to God speaking by the Words.
   We criticize a phrase when we should be drinking in the spirit of the
   Revelation and so be getting near to God. If we are cold, is it not
   because we do not sit in the sun? If we are faint, is it not because we
   do not feed on Him whose flesh is meat, indeed? How would a fish fare
   if it left the water?

   How can we prosper if we leave our God, who is the element of our life?
   Say with David, in the Psalm we sang just now--

   "Like as the hart for water brooks In thirst does pant and bray; So
   pants my longing soul, O God, That come to You I may." And then you
   will not long be disquieted, for you will go on to sing--

   "For yet I kno w I shall Him praise, Who graciously to me, The health
   is of my countenance, Yes, my own God is He."

   If any of you have not the joy of the Lord which you once possessed, is
   it not possible that when you did have it, you grew proud? "Jeshurun
   waxed fat and kicked." He will have to be starved a bit to bring him to
   his senses. Ah, I have known a child of God so happy in the Lord, so
   useful, and so blessed in every way, that he began to think he was
   something out of the ordinary. He grew very sublime. As to the poor
   Brethren around him, he could hardly put up with them--they were more
   dead than alive. They were weaklings, foolish men, mere babes and so
   on.

   He saw a poor tried Believer looking out of one of the windows of
   Doubting Castle and instead of helping him out, he bullied him so much
   for being there at all, that the poor prisoner was more shut up than
   ever. Look at him! He is a fine fellow! He never had sad doubts. He
   never felt anxious fears. Not he! You remind me, my dear Brother, of
   the fat cattle mentioned in Ezekiel, of whom the Prophet says that they
   thrust with side and with shoulder and pushed all the

   diseased with their horns till they had scattered them. "Therefore,
   thus says the Lord God unto them, Behold, I, even I, will judge between
   the fat cattle and between the lean cattle."

   The Lord will not have you condemn the weak and sneer at the feeble.
   You may yet be such yourselves. His consolations will be small with you
   if His people are small with you. If you do not care for the little
   ones who believe in Him, neither will He be quick to comfort you. Be
   humble. Take the lowest place. If you will lie low before the Lord, He
   will lift you up. But if you lift up yourself, God will throw you down.

   I will close by saying that one of the worst causes of disquietude is
   unbelief. Have you begun to distrust? Do you really doubt your God?
   Then I do not wonder that the consolations of God are small with you.
   Here is the rule of the kingdom--"According to your faith, so be it
   unto you." If you doubt God, you will get but little from Him. He that
   wavers may not expect to receive anything of the Lord. Strong faith may
   have what it wills--but when your doubts master your faith, prayer
   cannot prevail. Few are the dainties from the King's table which come
   to the dish of mistrust.

   What do you doubt? Do you question the Word of God? Has the Lord said
   more than the truth will warrant? Do you think so? Will you dare to
   throw such a handful of mud upon the veracity of God? His Truth is one
   of His crown jewels--would you take it away? Do you distrust His power?
   Do you think He cannot comfort you? Do you imagine that He cannot make
   you ride upon the high places of the earth? Do you think that He cannot
   put a new song into your mouth and make you rejoice in His name from
   morning to night? Why should you doubt His power to make you joyful in
   His House?

   Do you doubt the Lord's wisdom? Do you think the Holy Spirit cannot
   meet your needs and provide comfort suitable for your distress? Surely
   you cannot have fallen into this base suspicion! Or, do you doubt the
   Lord's Presence? Do you think that He is too far off to know you and
   help you? He is present everywhere and He knows the way that you take.
   Come and trust the Lord. Come, Beloved, whether you are a saint or
   sinner, come to the Lord Jesus and fall down at Jehovah's feet and say,
   "Lord, my hope is in You. I have no comfort elsewhere. But I know Your
   comforts are not small. Comfort me, I pray You, in Christ Jesus."

   If you would have that prayer answered, listen to these Words of the
   Lord Jesus--"Look unto Me and be you saved, all the ends of the earth:
   for I am God, and there is none else." Though the tears are in your
   eyes, yet turn them to Christ Crucified. Put your trust simply,
   immediately, wholly, and alone in Him who died for you, and you shall
   go your way filled with consolation.

   God grant that it may be so, for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

Faith Essential to Pleasing God

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S-DAY MORNING, AUGUST 18, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "But without faith it is impossible to please Him: for he that comes to
   God must believe that He is and that He is a Rewarder of them that
   diligently seek Him." Hebrews 11:6.

   MEN have lived who have pleased God--Enoch was one of them but he was
   not the only one. In all ages certain persons have been well-pleasing
   to God, and their walk in life has been such as was His delight. It
   should be the aim of everyone of us to please God. The thing is
   possible, notwithstanding all our imperfections and infirmities--let us
   aim at it in the power of the Holy Spirit. What has been worked in one
   man may be worked in another. We, too, may be well-pleasing unto God.
   Therefore let us seek after it with hopefulness. If we so live as to
   please the Lord, we shall only be acting as we ought to act. For we
   ought to please Him who made us and sustains us in being. He is our God
   and Lord--and obedience to Him is the highest Law of our being.

   Moreover, the glorious Jehovah is so perfectly good, so supremely holy,
   that the conduct which pleases Him must be of the best and noblest
   sort, and therefore we should seek after it. Should we not aspire to
   that character upon which God Himself can smile?

   The approbation of our fellow men is pleasant in its way. But they are
   always imperfect and often mistaken. And so we may be well-pleasing to
   them and yet may be far removed from righteousness. It may be a
   calamity to be commended in error, for it may prevent our becoming
   really commendable. But God makes no mistake. The Infinitely Holy knows
   no imperfection. And if it is possible for us to be pleasing to Him, it
   should be our one object to reach that condition.

   As Enoch, in a darker age, was pleasing to Him, why should not we, upon
   whom the Gospel day has dawned? God grant us to find Divine Grace in
   His sight! If we please God, we shall have realized the object of our
   being. It is written concerning all things, "For His pleasure they are
   and were created." And we miss the end of creation if we are not
   pleasing to the Lord. To fulfill God's end in our creation is to obtain
   the highest joy.

   If we are pleasing to God, although we shall not escape trial--for even
   the highest qualities must be tested--yet we shall find great peace and
   special happiness. He is not an unhappy man who is pleasing to God--God
   has blessed him, yes, and he shall be blessed. By pleasing God we shall
   become the means of good to others--our example will rebuke and
   stimulate. Our peace will convince and invite.

   Being himself well-pleasing to God, the godly man will teach
   transgressors God's way and sinners shall be converted unto Him. I
   therefore, without the slightest hesitancy, set it before you as a
   thing to be desired by us all, that we should win this testimony--that
   we are pleasing unto God.

   Here the Apostle comes in with needed instruction. He asserts that
   faith is absolutely needful, if we would please God. Then, to help us
   still further, he mentions two essential points of faith--"He that
   comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a Rewarder of them
   that diligently seek Him." When I have spoken on these two points, I
   shall close, as God shall help me, by showing that He then teaches us
   many valuable lessons.

   I. First, then, THE APOSTLE ASSERTS THAT FAITH IS ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL
   TO THE PLEASING OF God. Take, as a keyword, the strong word
   "impossible." "Without faith it is impossible to please God." He does
   not say it is difficult, or so needful that without it success is
   barely possible. He declares it to be "impossible." When the Holy
   Spirit says that a thing is impossible, it is so in a very absolute
   sense. Let us not attempt the impossible. To attempt a difficulty may
   be laudable, but to rush upon an impossibility is madness. We must not,
   therefore, hope to please God by any invention of our own, however
   clever, nor by any labor of our own, however ardent--since infallible
   Inspiration declares that, "without faith it is impossible to please
   God."

   We are bound to believe this statement, because we have it in the
   Sacred Volume, stated upon Divine authority. But, for your help, I
   would invite you to think of some few matters which may show you how
   impossible it is to please God without faith in Him.

   For, first, without faith there is no capacity for communion with God
   at all. The things of God are spiritual and invisible--without faith we
   cannot recognize such things but must be dead to them. Faith is the eye
   which sees. But without that eye we are blind and can have no
   fellowship with God in those Sacred Truths which only faith can
   perceive. Faith is the hand of the soul, and without it, we have no
   grasp of eternal things.

   If I were to mention all the images by which faith is set forth, each
   one would help you to see that you must have faith in order to know God
   and enter into converse with Him. It is only by faith that we can
   recognize God, approach Him, speak to Him, hear Him, feel His Presence
   and be delighted with His perfections. He that has not faith is toward
   God as one dead. And Jehovah is not the God of the dead, but of the
   living. The communion of the living God goes not forth toward death and
   corruption. His fellowship is with those who have spiritual life, a
   life akin to His own. Where there is no faith, there has been no
   quickening of the Holy Spirit, for faith is of the very essence of
   spiritual life. And so the man who has no faith can no more commune
   with the living God and give Him pleasure, than can a stick or a stone,
   a horse or an ox, hold converse with the human mind.

   Again, without faith the man himself is not pleasing to God. We read,
   "Without faith it is impossible to please God." But the Revision has it
   better--"Without faith it is impossible to be well-pleasing unto God."
   The way of acceptance described in Scripture is, first, the man is
   accepted--and then what that man does is accepted. It is written--"And
   he shall purify the sons of Levi, that they may offer unto the Lord an
   offering in righteousness."

   First God is pleased with the person, and then with the gift, or the
   work. The unaccepted person offers of necessity an unacceptable
   sacrifice. If a man is your enemy, you will not value a present which
   he sends you. If you know that he has no confidence in you, but counts
   you a liar, his praises are lost upon you. They are empty, deceptive,
   things which cannot possibly please you.

   O my Hearers, in your natural state you are so sinful that God cannot
   look upon you with complacency! Concerning our race it is written--"It
   repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth and it grieved Him
   at His heart." Concerning many, God has said, "My soul loathed them and
   their soul also abhorred Me." Is this true of us? "You must be born
   again," or you cannot be pleasing to the Lord. You must believe in
   Jesus. For only to as many as receive Him does He give power to become
   the sons of God. When we believe in the Lord Jesus, the Lord God
   accepts us for His Beloved's sake and in Him we are made kings and
   priests and permitted to bring an offering which pleases God. As the
   man is, such is his work.

   The stream is of the nature of the spring from which it flows. He who
   is a rebel, outlawed and proclaimed, cannot gratify his prince by any
   fashion of service. He must first submit himself to the law. All the
   actions of rebels are acts done in rebellion. We must first be
   reconciled to God, or it is a mockery to bring an offering to His
   altar. Reconciliation can only be effected through the death of the
   Lord Jesus and if we have no faith in that way of reconciliation we
   cannot please God. Faith in Christ makes a total change in our position
   towards God--we who were enemies are reconciled. And from this comes
   towards God a distinct change in the nature of all our
   actions--imperfect though they are, they spring from a loyal heart--and
   they are pleasing to God.

   Remember, that in human associations, want of confidence would prevent
   a man's being well-pleasing to another. If a man has no confidence in
   you, you can have no pleasure in him. If you had a child and he had no
   trust in his father, no belief in his father's kindness, no reliance on
   his father's word--it would be most painful and it would be quite
   impossible that you should take any pleasure in such a child. If you
   had a servant in your house who always suspected your every action and
   believed in nothing that you said or did but put a wrong construction
   upon everything, it would make the house very miserable and you would
   be well rid of such an employee. How can I take pleasure in a man who
   associates with me and pretends to serve me, but all the while thinks
   me a sheer impostor and gives me no credit for truthfulness? Such a
   person would be an eyesore to me.

   It is clear that want of confidence would destroy any pleasure which
   one man might have in another. When the creature dares to doubt his
   Creator, how can the Creator be pleased? When the Word which worked
   creation is not enough

   for a man to rest upon, he may pretend what he will of righteousness
   and obedience, but the whole affair is rotten at the core--and God can
   take no pleasure in it.

   Note again--unbelief takes away the common ground upon which God and
   man can meet. Two persons who are pleasant to one another must have
   certain common views and objects. God's great object is the
   glorification of His Son. And how can we be pleasing to Him if we
   dishonor that Son? The Father delights in Jesus--the very thought of
   Him is a pleasure to God. He said, as if to Himself only, "This is My
   beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." This He said, afterwards, to
   others, that they might regard it, "This is My beloved Son. Hear Him."

   He delights in what His Son has done--He smells a sweet savor of rest
   in His glorious sacrifice. If you and I believe in God's plan of
   salvation through Jesus Christ, we have a common ground of sympathy
   with God. But if not, we are not in harmony. How can two walk together
   except they are agreed? If we have thoughts of Jesus such as the Father
   has, we can live together and work together. But if we are opposed to
   Him on a point which is as the apple of His eye, we cannot be
   well-pleasing to Him. If Jesus is despised, rejected, distrusted, or
   even neglected, it is not possible for us to be pleasing to

   God.

   According to the well-worn fable, two persons who are totally different
   in their pursuits cannot well live together-- the fuller and the
   charcoal-burner were obliged to part. For whatever the fuller had made
   white, the collier blackened with his finger. If differing pursuits
   divide, much more will differing feelings upon a vital point. It is
   Jesus whom Jehovah delights to honor. And if you will not even trust
   Jesus with your soul's salvation, you grieve the heart of God and He
   can have no pleasure in you. Unbelief deprives the soul of the Divinely
   appointed meeting place at the Mercy Seat, which is the Person of the
   Lord Jesus, where God and man unite in one Mediator and the Lord shines
   forth on the suppliant.

   Assuredly, again, want of faith destroys all prospect of love. Although
   we may not perhaps see it, there lies at the bottom of all love a
   belief in the object loved, as to its loveliness, its merit, or its
   capacity to make us happy. If I do not believe in a person, I cannot
   love him. If I cannot trust God, I cannot love Him. If I do not believe
   that He loves me, I shall feel but slight emotions of love to Him. If I
   refuse to see anything in the greatest display of His love--if I do not
   value the gift of His dear Son--I cannot love Him.

   We love Him because He first loved us. But if we will not believe in
   His love, the motive power is gone. If we reject the Word which says,
   "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that
   whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life,"
   then we have put from out of the heart the grand incentive to love. But
   love on our part is essential to our pleasing God--how can He be
   pleased with an unloving heart? Is not the Lord's chief demand of men
   that we love Him with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our
   mind, and with all our strength? Without faith love is impossible, and
   God's pleasure in us must be impossible.

   Again, dear Friends, want of faith will create positive variance on
   many points. Note a few. If I trust God and believe in Him, I shall
   submit myself to His will. Even when it becomes very painful to me, I
   shall say, "It is the Lord: let Him do what seems Him good." But if I
   do not believe that He is God and that He is aiming at my good, then I
   shall resent His chastisements and shall kick against His will. What He
   wills me to suffer, I shall not be willing to suffer. I shall rebel and
   murmur, and proudly accuse my Maker of injustice, or want of love. I
   shall be in a rebellious state towards Him and then He cannot have
   pleasure in me. "The Lord takes pleasure in them that fear Him, in
   those that hope in His mercy." But He will walk contrary to us, if we
   walk contrary to Him by refusing to bow ourselves before His hand.

   Without faith, moreover, I get to be at variance with God in another
   way--for inasmuch as I desire to be saved, I shall seek salvation in my
   own way--and go about to establish a righteousness of my own. Whatever
   it may be, whether it is by ceremonies, or by good works, or by
   feelings, or what not, I shall, in some way or other, set up a way of
   salvation other than that which God has appointed through Christ Jesus.
   God's love to Christ is supreme and He will not endure that a rival
   should be set up in opposition to Him.

   Another way of salvation is Antichrist and this provokes the Lord to
   jealousy. If you are laboring to be saved in one way, while God
   declares that through His Son is the only way of salvation, you are
   acting in distinct opposition to the Lord in a matter which does not
   admit of any compromise. Rejecters of Christ are enemies to God. If you
   pretend that you are God's servants, you are convicted of falsehood if
   you refuse to honor His Son by trusting in Him. If you believe in
   Christ, whom He has sent, you work the work of God. But no way else.
   Self-righteousness is an insult to Christ and a distinct revolt from
   God. He who has no faith, seeks salvation by a way that is derogatory
   to the Lord Jesus--and it is impossible for him to please God.

   We must be at variance with God if we are without faith. It is a solemn
   truth that, "He that believes not, God has made him a liar. Because he
   believes not the record that God gave of His Son." This is the crime of
   the Unbeliever--so is it stated by the Holy Spirit speaking by the
   beloved John. Could you take any pleasure in a man who made you out to
   be a liar? Perhaps with great patience you could bear with him, but you
   could not be pleased with him--that would be out of the question. Does
   a man daily, by the mode of his life and by the evident drift of his
   actions, proclaim you to be a liar? How can he talk of giving you
   pleasure? Nothing he could do would please you while he calls you a
   liar.

   He that makes God to be a liar, makes him to be no God. To the best of
   his ability he undeifies the Deity. He uncrowns the Lord of All and
   even stabs at the heart of the Eternal. To talk of being well-pleasing
   to God in such a case is absurd.

   Let me conclude this point by asking, by what means can we hope to
   please God, apart from faith in Him? By keeping all His commandments?
   Alas, you have not done so. You have already broken those commands. And
   what is more, you still break them and are in a chronic state of
   disobedience. If you do not believe in Him, you are not obedient to
   Him. For true obedience commands the understanding as well as every
   other power and faculty. We are bound to obey with the mind by
   believing, as well as with the hand by acting. The spiritual part of
   our being is in revolt against God until we believe. And, while the
   very life and glory of our being is in revolt, how can we please God?

   But what will you bring to the Lord to please Him? Do you propose to
   bribe Him with your money? Surely you are not so foolish! Is the Lord
   to be bought with a row of almshouses, or a Chapel, or a Cathedral? To
   most of you, it would be impossible to try the plan for lack of means.
   But if you were wealthy enough to lavish gold out of the bag, would
   this please Him? The silver and the gold are His and the cattle on a
   thousand hills. If He were hungry, He would not tell you. What can you
   give to Him to whom all things belong?

   Truly, you can assist in an ornate worship, or build a gorgeous Church,
   or embroider the furniture of an altar, or emblazon the windows of a
   Church. But are you so weak as to believe that such trifles as these
   can cause any delight to the mind of the Infinite? Solomon built Him a
   house, but "the Most High dwells not in temples made with hands." To
   what shall I liken the most glorious erections of human genius but to
   the anthills of the tropics, which are wonderful as the fabrication of
   ants, even as our cathedrals are marvelous as the handicraft of men?

   But what are anthills or cathedrals when measured with the Infinite?
   What are all our works to the Lord? He who with a single arch has
   spanned the world, cares little for our carved capitals and groined
   arches. The prettinesses of architecture are as much beneath the glory
   of Jehovah as the dolls and boxes of bricks of our children would be
   beneath the dignity of a Solomon. God is not a man that He should take
   delight in these things. "Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of
   rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my
   first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my
   soul?"

   It is not this that He asks of you, but to walk humbly with Him, never
   daring arrogantly to doubt His Truth and mistrust His faithfulness. Go
   not about by a thousand inventions to aim at what you will never
   compass, but believe your God and be established. So much upon that
   painful point. Remember the impossibility of pleasing the Lord without
   faith--and do not dash your ship upon this iron-bound coast.

   II. Now, secondly, THE APOSTLE MENTIONS TWO ESSENTIAL POINTS OF FAITH.

   He begins by saying, "He that comes to God must believe that He is."
   Note the keyword "must"--it is an immovable, insatiable necessity.
   Before we can walk with God, it is clear that we must come to God.
   Naturally, we are at a distance from Him and we must end that distance
   by coming to Him, or else we cannot walk with Him, nor be pleasing to
   Him. That we may come to Him, we must first believe that there is a God
   to come to. More--we must not only believe that there is a God--for
   only a fool doubts that--"The fool has said in his heart, There is no
   God"--but we must believe that Jehovah is God and God, alone.

   This was Enoch's faith--he believed that Jehovah was the living and
   true God. You are to believe, and must believe, in order to be pleasing
   with God, that He is God, that He is the only God, and that there can
   be none other than He. You must also accept Jehovah as He reveals
   Himself. You are not to have a God of your own making, nor a God
   reasoned out,

   but a God such as He has been pleased to reveal Himself to you. Believe
   that Jehovah is, whoever else may be or may not

   be.

   But the devils believe, and tremble, and yet they are not pleasing to
   God, for more is wanted. Believe that God is, in reference to yourself.
   That He has to do with your life and your ways. Many believe that there
   is a hazy, imaginary power which they call God. But they never think of
   Him as a Person, nor do they suspect that He thinks of them, or that
   His existence is of any consequence to them one way or another. Believe
   that God is as truly as you are. And let Him be real to you. Let the
   consideration of Him enter into everything that concerns you.

   Believe that He is approachable by yourself and is to be pleased or
   displeased by you. Believe in Him as you believe in your wife or your
   child whom you try to please. Believe in God beyond everything, that
   "He is," in a sense more sure than that in which anyone else exists.
   Believe that He is to be approached, to be realized, to be, in fact,
   the great practical factor of your life. Hold this as the primary Truth
   of God, that God is most influential upon you. And then believe that it
   is your business to come to Him.

   But there is only one way of coming to Him and you must have faith to
   use that way. He that died and lives forever says, "I am the Way. No
   man comes unto the Father but by Me." He that comes to God must believe
   in God as He is revealed and must come to God as God reveals the way of
   approach. And this is an exertion of faith. Faith as to this point is
   essential. You cannot come to Him in whom you do not believe. Are not
   many hearers of the Word really as far from God as infidels? Let me ask
   you, how many atheists are now in this house?

   Perhaps not a single one of you would accept the title and yet, if you
   live from Monday morning to Saturday night in the same way as you would
   live if there were no God, you are practical atheists. And as actions
   speak more loudly than words, you are more atheists than those
   doctrinal Unbelievers who disavow God with their mouths and, after all,
   are secretly afraid of Him. A life without God is as bad as a creed
   without God. You cannot come to God unless you believe in Him as the
   All in All, the Lord God beside whom there is none else.

   Yet all this would be nothing without the second point of belief. We
   must believe that, "He is the Rewarder of them that diligently seek
   Him." How do we seek Him, then? Well, we seek Him, first, when we begin
   by prayer, by trusting Jesus and by calling upon the sacred name, to
   seek salvation. "Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall
   be saved." That is a grand promise and it teaches how we come to
   God--namely, by calling upon His name. Afterwards we seek God by aiming
   at His glory, by making Him the great Object for which we live.

   One man seeks money, another seeks reputation, another seeks pleasure.
   But he that is pleasing to God seeks God as his Object and End. "Seek
   you first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. And all these
   things shall be added unto you." The man with whom God is pleased, is
   pleased with God. He sets the Lord always before him and seeks to live
   for Him. This he would not do unless he believed that God would reward
   him in so doing. Take this as a certainty--we must believe that "God is
   the Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him," or we shall not seek
   Him.

   We are sure that, somehow or other, it will be to our highest benefit
   to honor the Lord and trust Him. Albeit we deserve nothing at His hands
   but wrath, yet we perceive from the Gospel that if we seek Him through
   His Son, we shall be so well-pleasing to Him as to get a reward from
   His hands. This must be of Divine Grace--Free, Sovereign Grace! And
   what a reward it is! Free pardon, graciously bestowed. A change of
   heart, graciously worked. Perseverance, graciously maintained. Comfort,
   graciously poured in, and privilege, graciously awarded. The reward of
   godliness, even in this world, is immeasurable--and in the world to
   come it is infinite. We may have respect unto the recompense of the
   reward. Indeed, we should have respect to it, and therefore boldly seek
   God and seek nothing else.

   The Lord is "a Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him." That is not
   quite an exact translation--the Greek word means not only seek Him but,
   "seek Him out." That is, seek Him till they find Him and seek Him above
   all others. It is a very strong word. We hardly know how to transfer
   its meaning into English, for though it does not say "diligently," it
   implies it. We must seek, and seek out. That is, seek till we really
   find. Those who with their hearts follow after God, shall not be losers
   if they believe that He will reward them. You have to believe God so as
   to seek His Glory.

   Even when you do not obtain any present reward for it, you are to say,
   "I shall have a reward ultimately, even if I am for a while a loser
   through His service. If I lose money, respect, friendship, or even life
   from following God, yet He will be a Rewarder and I shall be repaid ten
   thousand-fold, not of debt but according to His Divine Grace." He,
   then, that would please God, must first believe that He is. And then,
   dedicating himself to God, must be firmly assured that this is the
   right, the wise, the prudent thing to do. Be certain that to serve God
   is in itself gain--it is wealth to be holy. It is happiness to be
   pleasing to God. To us it is life to live to God--to know Him, to adore
   Him, to commune with Him, to become like He is.

   It is glory to us to make Him glorious among the sons of men. For us to
   live is Christ. This, we are persuaded, is the best pursuit for us. In
   fact, it is the only one which can satisfy our hearts. God is our
   shield and our exceedingly great reward. And in the teeth of everything
   that happens, we hold to this--that to serve God is gain. If God helps
   us to trust Him, and therefore to live unto Him and seek to be
   well-pleasing in His sight, we shall succeed in pleasing Him. We cannot
   conceive that the heavenly Father sees, without pleasure, a man
   struggling against sin, battling against evil, enduring sorrow
   contentedly through a simple faith, and laboring daily to draw nearer
   and nearer to Him.

   God is not displeased with those who, by faith, live to please Him and
   are content to take their reward from His hand. He must be pleased with
   the work of His own Grace. The desire to come to God, the way to come
   to God, the power to come to God, the actual coming to God--these are
   all gifts of Sovereign Grace. Coming to God, however feebly we
   come--and seeking Him, however much else we miss, must be well-pleasing
   in His sight. For it is the result of His own purpose and Grace which
   He gave us in Christ Jesus before the world began. But all this hangs
   upon faith. Without faith there is no coming to God who is and no
   seeking of God who is a Rewarder. And therefore without faith it is
   impossible to please God.

   III. WE WILL NOW GATHER A FEW LESSONS FROM WHAT THE APOSTLE HAS TAUGHT
   US. Help us, O

   gracious Spirit!

   First, then, the Apostle teaches us here, by implication, that God is
   pleased with those that have faith. The negative is often the most
   plain way of suggesting the positive. If we are so carefully warned
   that without faith it is impossible to please God, we infer that with
   faith it is possible to please God. If you believe that He is and that
   He is a Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. If you are willing
   to believe all that He teaches you because He teaches it, and are
   really a believer in Himself and in all that He is pleased to reveal,
   then are you pleasing to Him.

   He that believes in God believes in all the Words that God speaks and
   he surrenders himself to all that God does. And such a man must be
   pleasing to God. We believe in one God and in one Mediator between God
   and man, the man Christ Jesus. We trust in the Lord as He thus draws
   near to us--thus are we in the way of pleasing God. By faith we,
   ourselves, have become pleasing to God, and our actions performed with
   a view to His honor are pleasing to Him. What a joy is this! It is
   bliss to think that I, who, in my unregenerate state, grieved the Holy
   Spirit and vexed Him day by day, am now the object of pleasure to Him.

   I, whose actions were contrary to the Law of God and the bent of whose
   mind was against the Gospel of Christ, I, even I, who was once
   obnoxious to Divine anger, an heir of wrath, even as others, have now,
   through faith, become to God an object of His complacency! This is very
   wonderful. If the Holy Spirit leads you to feel the full sweetness of
   this Truth of God, you will rejoice with joy unspeakable. I feel like
   singing rather than preaching.

   Oh, guilty One, will you not now believe your God? This is the way to
   come back to Him. When the prodigal said, "In my father's house there
   is bread enough and to spare," he believed in his father's power to
   supply all his needs. When he thought in his heart that his father
   would receive him, he said, "I will arise and go to my father and will
   say unto him, Father, I have sinned."

   You must have so much belief in God as to believe Him to have the heart
   of a father towards you, or you will never come back to Him. But when
   you begin to trust your God, your face is already towards the heavenly
   home, and before long your head will be on your Father's bosom. If
   faith can make the vilest and guiltiest pleasing to God, will they not
   believe in Him? What a transformation this would work in them! Oh, that
   this morning all of us may stand out in the clear sunlight of Jehovah's
   good pleasure and know ourselves to be well-pleasing to Him through
   Jesus Christ!

   Learn, next, that those who have faith make it the great object of
   their life to please God. Am I speaking the truth? Will each one ask
   whether it is true about himself? Do I, as a Believer, live to please
   God? We need personal heart-searching on this point. The believer in
   the invisible God delights to act as in His sight and in secret to
   serve Him. I take a choice pleasure in rendering to my God a service
   unknown to others, not done for the sake of my fellows but distinctly
   that I may do something for my Lord. It is sweet to give or do simply
   to please Him, without respect to the public eye.

   Even such actions as must come under the gaze of others are not to be
   done with the view of winning their approbation, but only to please
   God. The doing of such actions is a singular fountain of strength to a
   man's mind. It is ennobling to feel that you have only one Master and
   that you live to please Him, even God. To please men is poor work. To
   live to follow everybody's whim is slavery. If you let one man pull you
   by the ear in his direction, another will tug at you from another
   direction and you will have very long ears before long. Happy is he
   who, pleasing God, feels that he has risen above seeking to please men.
   It is grand to say, "This is what God would have me do and I will do it
   in happy fellowship with others, or alone by myself, as the case may
   be. But do it I must."

   This gives a man backbone, and at the same time removes the selfishness
   which is greedy of popular applause. It is a grand thing to be no
   longer looking down for cheer but to be distinctly looking up for it.
   The man who truly believes in God makes small account of men. Put them
   together, they are vanity. Heap them up in their thousands, they are
   altogether lighter than vanity. Nations upon nations, what are they but
   as grasshoppers? The lands in which they live, what are they before
   God? "He takes up the isles as a very little thing." To please God,
   even a little, is infinitely greater than to have the acclamations of
   all our race throughout the centuries.

   The true Believer feels that God is, and that there is none beside
   Him--none that need to be thought of in comparison with Him. The
   theology of the present aims at the deification of man but the truth of
   all time magnifies God. We shall stand by the old paths, wherein we
   hear a voice which bids us worship Jehovah, our God, and serve Him,
   alone. He shall be All in All. Only as we see men loved of Him can we
   live for men. We seek their good in God, and for His glory-- and regard
   them as capable of being made mirrors to reflect the glory of the Lord.

   Note, next, the Apostle teaches us here, that they that have faith in
   God are always coming to God. For he speaks of the Believer as, "He
   that comes to God." If you once learn to believe God and to please Him,
   you are coming to Him every day. You not only come to Him and go away
   from Him, as in acts of prayer and praise, but you are always coming.
   Your life is a march towards Him. The way of the Believer is toward
   God--by his faith he comes ever nearer and yet nearer to the eternal
   Throne. What is his reward? Why, He that sits on the Throne will say,
   "Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you
   from the foundation of the world."

   Come! Come on! You have been coming, keep on coming forever. There is a
   gentle, constant, perpetual progress of the Believer's heart and mind
   nearer and closer to God. I could not wonder at Enoch being translated
   after walking with God hundreds of years. For it is such a small step
   from close communion with God on earth to perfect communion with God in
   Heaven. A thin partition divides us which a sigh will remove. The
   breaking of a blood-vessel, the snapping of a cord, the staying of the
   breath, and he that had God with him shall be with God.

   Sometimes the Believer could not tell whether he was in the body or out
   of the body but had to leave that question with God. He will soon be
   able to answer the question for himself--and know that he is absent
   from the body and present with the Lord. O Beloved, please God, please
   God! And as you please Him by your simple confidence and child-like
   trust, you are coming nearer to Him.

   The next lesson is one I have already spoken of--God will see that
   those who practice faith in Him shall have a reward. I say, God will
   see to it, for the text says, "He is a Rewarder of them that diligently
   seek Him." The Lord will not leave the reward of faith to the choicest
   angel--He Himself will adjudge the recompense. Here we may get but
   scant reward from those whom we benefit--indeed, they usually return us
   base ingratitude. Joseph was a faithful servant to Po-tiphar. But
   Potiphar put him in prison on a groundless charge. Joseph helped the
   butler and interpreted his dream, yet he remembered not Joseph, but
   forgot him.

   You may not reckon upon due returns from your fellow men, or you will
   be disappointed. Like David, you may guard Nabal's sheep and when the
   sheep-shearing comes you may hope to be remembered and he will insult
   you with a churlish answer. Expect little from men, but much from
   God--for by nature and by office, He is a Rewarder. No work done for
   Him will go unrewarded. In His service the wages are sure. Rise into
   the Abrahamic life which stays itself upon the Lord's word, "Fear not,
   Abraham: I am your shield and your exceedingly great reward."

   It is reward enough to have such a God to be our God. What if He gives
   us neither vineyards nor olive gardens, neither sheep nor oxen? He
   Himself is ours, and this is a greater reward than if He gave us all
   the world! God Himself is enough for the Believer. If his faith is
   true, and deep, and intelligent, he cries, "Whom have I in Heaven but
   You? And there is none upon earth that I desire beside You."

   The last lesson we gather from it is this--those who have no faith are
   in a fearful case. I speak not of the heathen but of Unbelievers who
   reject the Gospel. "Without faith it is impossible to please God." Some
   of you are always fashioning fresh nets of doubt for your own
   entanglement. You invent snares for your own feet and are greedy to lay
   more and more of them. You are mariners who seek the rocks, soldiers
   who court the point of the bayonet. It is an unprofitable business.
   Practically, morally, mentally, spiritually--doubting is an evil trade.

   You are like a smith, wearing out his arm in making chains with which
   to bind himself. Doubt is sterile, a desert without water. Doubt
   discovers difficulties which it never solves. It creates hesitancy,
   despondency, despair. Its progress is the decay of comfort, the death
   of peace. "Believe!" is the word which speaks life into a man--doubt
   nails down his coffin. If you can believe, O guilty One, that Jesus
   Christ bore the guilt of sin upon the Cross and by His death has made
   atonement to the insulted government of God. If you can so believe in
   Him as to cast yourself, just as you are, at His dear feet, you shall
   be pleasing to God.

   I entreat you to look up and see the pierced hands and feet and side of
   the dear Redeemer and read eternal mercy there! Read full forgiveness
   there, and then go your way in peace, for you are well-pleasing to God.
   The sinner who believes God's testimony concerning His Son has begun to
   please Him and is himself well-pleasing to the Lord. Oh that you would
   now trust Him who justifies the ungodly and passes by the iniquities of
   sinful men! He will receive you graciously and love you freely.

   Oh, come to Him, for He is a Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.
   God help you to do so at once. But without faith you cannot please Him.
   Do what you may, feel what you like--you will labor as in the very fire
   and nothing will come of it but eternal despair. The Lord help you to
   believe and live. Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

Life and Pardon

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S-DAY MORNING, AUGUST 25, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh,
   has He quickened together with Him, having forgiven you all
   trespasses." Colossians 2:13.

   THE teaching of this verse is much the same as that in preceding
   verses--but the Apostle does not hesitate to dwell again and again upon
   the important matters of quickening and forgiveness. These lie in the
   foundation. Ministers of Christ cannot too often go over the essential
   points--their hearers cannot too often hear vital Truths of God. Our
   frail memories and dull understandings require line upon line, precept
   upon precept, in reference to fundamental Truths-- our apprehension of
   them is far too feeble, and can never be too vivid.

   To find instances of the work of God in quickening souls and in
   pardoning sins, Paul does not look far afield. In the text he says,
   "And you," and, according to the Revised Version, he repeats the word
   further on, and the passage runs thus, "You, being dead through your
   trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, you, I say, did He
   quicken together with Him." He points personally to the saints at
   Colossi. We are not about to consider a prophecy to be fulfilled in the
   millennium, neither are we speaking of matters which concern the
   unknown dwellers in the moon.

   No. The theme belongs to you. To you, I say, if indeed you are the
   people of God. You are specimens of the Divine Work--you has He
   quickened, you has He pardoned. It is profitable for us to be engaged
   upon matters which concern us. I shall speak to you of those things
   which I have tasted and handled of the good Word of Life, and it is my
   firm belief that, to the most of you, these matters are familiar in
   your mouths as household words. If not, I grieve over you. Let none of
   us be content unless the works of the Holy Spirit are manifest in us.
   What good is it to me if another man receive life and pardon, if I am
   cast to death and lie under condemnation?

   Press forward, my Beloved, to a personal enjoyment of these chief
   blessings of the Covenant of Grace--life in Jesus, forgiveness through
   His blood. Let every part of the sermon have a finger pointed at
   yourselves. Hear it speak to you, even to you.

   In the text we have the conjunction of two things--quickening and
   forgiveness. We will consider these things in connection with each
   other. Their order it may be difficult to lay down--in the text they
   are described as if they were the same thing. Which comes first, the
   impartation of the new life, or the blotting out of sin? Is not pardon
   first? Does God pardon a dead man? How can He give life, which is the
   proof of pardon, to the man who is not forgiven? On the other hand, if
   a man has not spiritual life sufficient to make him feel his guilt, how
   can he cry for pardon? And if it is unsought, how shall it be received?

   A man may be spiritually alive so as to be groaning under the pollution
   and the burden of sin, and yet he may not have received, by faith, the
   remission of sins. In the order of our experience, the reception of
   life comes before the enjoyment of pardon. We are made to live
   spiritually and so we are made to repent, to confess, to believe, and
   to receive forgiveness. First, the life which sighs under sin, and then
   the life which sings concerning pardon. Misery is first felt--and then
   mercy is received.

   Following the line of experience, we shall notice, concerning the
   favored ones of God, first, what they were--"You, being dead in your
   sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh." Secondly, we shall note
   what has been done in them-- "Has He quickened together with Him." And
   then, thirdly, what He has done for them--"Having forgiven you all
   trespasses." May the Holy Spirit lead us into these Truths of God and
   give us the life of God, and the rest of faith!

   I. First, then, consider WHAT THEY WERE. Beloved, they were all by
   nature children of wrath, even as others. There is no distinction in
   the condition of natural men before the Law. We all fell in Adam. We
   are all gone out of the

   way and have all become unprofitable. Any difference which now exists
   has been made by Divine Grace. But by nature we are all in the same
   condemnation and all tainted by the same depravity.

   Where were we when the Lord first looked on us? Answer--We were dead
   according to the sentence of the Law. The Lord had said, "In the day
   that you eat thereof you shall surely die." And Adam did die the moment
   that he ate of the forbidden fruit--and his posterity died in him. What
   is natural death? It is the separation of the body from the soul, which
   is its life. What is spiritual death? It is the separation of the soul
   from God, who is its life. It had been the very life of Adam to be
   united to God. And when he lost his union of heart with God, his spirit
   underwent a dreadful death.

   This death is upon each one of us by nature. Above this comes in the
   dreadful fact, that, "He that believes not is condemned already." The
   position of every Unbeliever is that of one who is dead by Law. As far
   as the liberties and privileges and enjoyments of heavenly things are
   concerned, he is written among the dead. His name is registered among
   the condemned. Yet, Beloved, while we are under the sentence of death,
   the Lord comes to us in almighty Grace and quickens us into newness of
   life, forgiving us all trespasses!

   Are you trembling because of your condemned condition under the Law? Do
   you recognize the tremendous Truth of God that death is the sure and
   righteous result of sin? Then to you, even to you, the life-giving,
   pardoning Word is sent in the preaching of the everlasting Gospel. Oh
   that you may believe and so escape from condemnation!

   These favored people were dead through the action of their sin. Sin
   stupefies and kills. Where it reigns, the man is utterly insensible to
   spiritual truth, feeling, and action. He is dead to everything that is
   holy in the sight of God. He may have keen moral perceptions, but he
   has no spiritual feelings. Men differ widely as to their moral
   qualities. All men are not alike bad, especially when measured in
   reference to their fellow men. Some may even be excellent and
   praiseworthy, viewed from that standpoint. But to spiritual things all
   men are alike dead.

   Look at the multitude of our hearers--to what purpose do we preach to
   them? You may declare the wrath of God against the godless but what do
   they care? You may speak of Jesus' love to the lost--how little it
   affects them! Sin is not horrible, and salvation is not precious to
   them. They may not controvert your teaching. But they have no sensible
   apprehension of the Truth of God--it does not come home to them as a
   matter of any consequence. Let eternal things drift as they may, they
   are perfectly content so long as they can answer those three
   questions--"What shall we eat? What shall we drink? And how shall we be
   clothed?"

   No higher question troubles their earth-bound minds. They may entertain
   some liking towards theological study and Bible teaching, as a matter
   of education. But they do not view the Truths of God revealed in
   Scripture as matters of overwhelming importance. They trifle. They
   delay. They set on one side the things which make for their peace.
   Their religion has no influence upon their thoughts and actions--they
   are dead. Sin has slain them. I see them mingled with this great
   congregation like corpses sitting upright among the living. I look out
   upon the masses of this vast city and upon the innumerable hosts of
   populous countries and I see a measureless cemetery, a dread domain of
   death. A region without

   life.

   One point must be noticed here, which makes this spiritual death the
   more terrible--they are dead but yet responsible. If men were literally
   dead, then they were incapable of sin. But the kind of death of which
   we speak involves a responsibility none the less, but all the greater.
   If I say of a man that he is such a liar that he cannot speak the
   truth, do you therefore think him blameless? No. But you judge him to
   be all the more worthy of condemnation because he has lost the very
   sense which discerns between a truth and a lie.

   If we say of a certain man, as we have had to do, "He is a rogue
   ingrained. He is so tricky that he cannot deal honestly but must always
   be cheating"--do you, therefore, excuse his fraud and pity him? Far
   from it. His inability is not physical, but moral inability, and is the
   consequence of his own persistence in evil. The Law is as much binding
   upon the morally incapable as upon the most sanctified in nature. If,
   through a man's own perversity, he wills to reject good and love evil,
   the blame is with himself. He is said to be dead in sin--not in the
   sense that he is irresponsible--but in the sense that he is so evil
   that he will not keep the Law of God.

   If a man were brought tomorrow before the Lord Mayor and he were
   accused of theft, suppose he should say, "My Lord, I ought to be set
   free, for I am such a rascal that I cannot see an article in a shop but
   what my fingers itch to lay hold upon it!" Would not the judge give
   such a worthless person all the more punishment? O Sinners, dead in
   sin, you are

   not so dead as thereby to be free from the guilt of breaking God's
   Commandments and rejecting Christ. Rather you heap upon yourselves
   mountains of guilt every day that you abide in this condition.

   The ungodly are so dead as to be careless as to their state. Indeed,
   all gracious things are despised of them. Sometimes they attend
   religious services. But they get angry if the preacher presses them too
   hard. I have known them vow that they will never hear the man again
   because he is so personal. Pray, Sirs, what is a preacher to be, but
   personal? If he shoots, is he to have no target and take no aim? What
   is our very office and business but to deal personally with you about
   your sins?

   In ungodly men there is an utter recklessness as to their condition
   before God. They know that they may die. They know that if they die
   they will be lost. But they try to forget these facts. The ostrich is
   said to bury its head in the sand so as not to see the hunter, and then
   to fancy that it is safe. Thus do men fancy that, by forgetting the
   danger, they escape it. Some of you have lived in carelessness until
   gray hairs are on your head. Will you still risk your souls? Alas, you
   look more anxiously after a battered sixpence, which you miss from your
   pocket, than after your immortal soul! If you miss a ring from your
   finger while sitting here, you are more concerned about it than about
   your eternal destiny.

   How foolish! How dead are you to all just judgment and prudence! It is
   your soul, your own soul, your only soul, your never-dying soul, to
   which we beg you to pay attention--and yet you can hardly have patience
   with us. If a prisoner in the condemned cell had no sort of care
   whether he should be set free or hanged, but could even joke about the
   scaffold and the executioner, you would feel that only by an extreme
   act of mercy could such a person be pardoned. No, if he cares nothing
   for the penalty, let him bear it--so man would say--and there would be
   justice in it. Yet God spoke not so in reference to some of us. For
   while we were in a condition of callousness the Grace of God came to us
   and by quickening us, gave us to be anxious and led us to pray.

   The text adds that we were dead in the uncircumcision of our flesh. I
   need not dwell upon the external figure here employed. Its meaning is
   clear enough. The uncircumcision of our flesh means that we were not in
   covenant with God-- it shows, also, the abiding of our filthiness upon
   us--the willingness of our souls to be aliens from the commonwealth of
   Israel, without God in the world. This is where we were in the
   uncircumcision of our flesh. And yet the Grace of God found us out. Oh,
   I could paint the man! He is anxious about this world, but what does he
   care for the world to come? He is a master of his own trade and he
   prospers in it.

   But for his God and His service, he spares not an hour's consideration.
   He cries, "The Covenant of Grace, what is that?" And he turns on his
   heel, like Pilate, when he had said, "What is truth?" As to having any
   sense of the constant Presence of God, and his deep indebtedness to
   God, and of the sweetness of being pardoned, and the bliss of enjoying
   the love of God, and walking with God--he has no notion, or, at best,
   he cries, "Oh, yes, that is all very fine for those who have nothing
   else to do. Let them find delight in it if they can!"

   To him God is nothing. Heaven is nothing. Hell less than nothing. He
   passes by Calvary, itself, where God in human flesh is bleeding out
   redemption and it is nothing to him. The wail from the Cross he never
   hears, though it asks him this question--"Is it nothing to you, all you
   that pass by? Behold and see if there is any sorrow like unto My
   sorrow!" What cares he for the wounds of his soul's best Lover? He has
   no concern about any purchase made by the Redeemer, or of any death
   especially on his behalf, or any resurrection with Christ which he may
   hope to enjoy. The man is dead to faith and glory and immortality. The
   low and the groveling charm him, but the pure and the noble find him
   dead to their claims.

   Yet to such, even to such, does Sovereign Grace approach. Unbought,
   unsought--it comes according to that word of Scripture, "I am found of
   them that sought Me not."

   Again, spiritually, the ungodly are dead and utterly incapable of
   obtaining life for themselves. Could any of you, with the utmost
   diligence, create life, even the lowest form of it? To a man who is
   dead, could you impart life? You might galvanize his limbs into a kind
   of motion. But real life, the pulsing of the heart, the heaving of the
   lungs--could you create it? You know you cannot! Much less can the dead
   man himself create life within himself. The man without Christ is
   utterly unable to quicken himself. We are "without strength," unable to
   do anything as of ourselves and while we are in this condition, Divine
   Grace comes to us.

   Alas, there remains one more point! Man may be described as dead and
   becoming corrupt. After a while the dead body shows symptoms of
   decay--this is vice in its beginning. Leave the corpse where it is, and
   it will become putrid, polluting the air and disgusting every sense of
   the living. "Bury my dead out of my sight," is the cry of the most
   affectionate

   mother or wife. And so it is with many ungodly men. Some of them are
   restrained from the grosser vices, just as Egyptian bodies were, by
   spices, preserved from rottenness. By example, by instruction, by fear,
   by surroundings--many are kept from the more putrid sins, and therefore
   are not so obnoxious to society.

   Towards God they are dead as ever. But towards man they are no more
   objectionable than the mummies in yonder cases in the British Museum.
   But this embalming of the dead with spices of morality has not been
   carried out with hosts of those around us. They rot above ground--their
   blasphemies pollute the air, their lewdness infects our streets, their
   revelry makes nights hideous. The tendency of dead flesh is towards the
   corruption which shows itself in loathsome actions. The mercy is, that
   where even this has taken place, where the foul worm of vice has begun
   its awful work in drunkenness, in blasphemy, in dishonesty, or in
   uncleanness of life--even there the quickening Spirit can come!

   As life came to Lazarus, who had been dead four days, so can spiritual
   life come to those who have fallen into the noi-someness of open
   transgression. Leaving this painful matter, let us be filled with deep
   humility. For such were we in days not long since--but let us also be
   filled with hope for others. For He who quickened us can do the same
   for them.

   II. And now, secondly, WHAT HAS BEEN DONE IN US? What has God worked?

   We have been quickened. To tell you, exactly, how quickening is worked
   in us, is quite beyond my power. The Holy Spirit comes to a man when he
   is dead in sin and He breathes into him a new and mysterious life. We
   do not know how we receive our natural life--how the soul comes into
   the body we know not. Do you suppose that spiritual life in its
   beginning will be less mysterious? Did not our Lord say, "The wind
   blows where it wishes and you hear the sound thereof but can not tell
   from where it comes and where it goes: so is everyone that is born of
   the Spirit"? You know not the way of the Spirit, nor how He breathes
   eternal life.

   We know, however, that as soon as life comes, our first feeling is one
   of pain and uneasiness. In the case of persons who have been nearly
   drowned, when they begin to revive they experience very unpleasant
   sensations. Certainly the parallel holds good in spiritual things. Now,
   the man sees sin to be an exceedingly great evil. He is startled by the
   discovery of its foulness. He was told all about it and yet he knew
   nothing to purpose. But now sin becomes a load, a pain, a horror. As
   dead, he felt no weight. But as quickened, he groans beneath a load.
   Now he begins to cry, "O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me?"

   Now the angels see him on his knees in private. Behold, he prays! "God
   be merciful to me, a sinner," is his hourly sigh. Now, also, he begins
   to struggle against his evil habits--he addicts himself to Bible
   reading, to praying, and to hearing the Word of God. He is for awhile
   desperately earnest. Alas, he goes back to his old sins! Yet he cannot
   rest-- again he seeks the Lord. With some men a large part of their
   early spiritual life has been taken up with agonizing strivings and
   painful endeavors to free themselves from the chains of sin. They have
   had to learn their weaknesses by their failures. But the Grace of God
   has not failed. Some, even for years after their conviction by the
   Spirit of God, have had no comfortable sense of pardon but very much
   conflict with sin--still, the life of God has never been utterly
   quenched within them.

   Their struggles have proved that the heavenly germ was alive and was
   painfully resisting the forces of evil. Men themselves act as if they
   tried to put out the light which Divine Grace has kindled. But they
   cannot effect their purpose. When once they have been disturbed in
   their nest, the Lord has not allowed them to settle down in it again.
   Their once sweet sin has become bitter as wormwood to them. We have
   known men under conviction go further into sin to drown their
   convictions--just as a whale, when harpooned, will dive into the
   depths. But they come up again and again are wounded--they cannot
   escape.

   In the biography of a man of God, who in his early days was a terrible
   drunkard, we find that, in struggling against intoxication, he was
   frequently beaten. And there appears in his diary a long blank of which
   he says, "Four years and a half elapsed and no account rendered! What
   can have been the cause of this chasm? Sin! Yes, sin of the blackest
   dye, of the deepest ingratitude to the Father of mercies!" The wanderer
   was restless and unhappy in sin. The life within was, like Jonah,
   thrown into the depths of the sea. But it hated its condition and
   struggled to rise out of it. God will not leave the life He has given,
   even under the worst conditions.

   But quickening leads to far more than this. By-and-by the new life
   exercises its holy senses and is more clearly seen to be life. The man
   begins to see that his only hope is in Christ and he tries humbly to
   hide himself beneath the merit of the Lord Jesus. He does not dare to
   say, "I am saved," but he deeply feels that if ever he is saved, it
   must be through the blood

   and righteousness of the Lord Jesus. Now, also, he begins to pray,
   pleading the precious blood. Now he hopes and his hope looks only
   through the windows of his Lord's wounds. He looks for mercy only
   through the atoning sacrifice.

   By-and-by he comes to trust that this mercy has really come to him and
   that Jesus had him on His heart when He suffered on the tree. By a
   desperate effort he throws himself on Christ and determines to lie at
   His feet and, if he must perish, to perish looking unto Jesus. This is
   a glorious resolve. See him after a while, as he rises up into peace
   and joy and consecration! His life now being joined to that of his
   Lord, he rejoices that he is never to be separated from Him. I think I
   hear him say, "I see it all now. The Lord Jesus bore my sin and carried
   it away. I died because He died. I live because He lives. The Lord
   accepts me, because He accepts His Son and thus I am 'accepted in the
   Beloved.' "

   From now on the quickened man tries to live for Christ, out of
   gratitude. This is the nature of the life he has received. He strives
   to grow up into Christ, and to become like his Lord in all things. From
   now on he and his Lord are linked together in an everlasting union and
   the cause of Jesus is the one thing for which he lives and for which he
   would be content to die. Blessed be God, I am not talking any new
   things to you--you know what I mean! For these forty years have I felt
   these things and many of you have felt them longer, still. At first the
   struggling light within you revealed to you nothing but your
   darkness--but now you see Jesus and see yourselves alive in Him with a
   life eternal and heavenly. Blessed be the Lord who has raised Jesus
   from the dead and has quickened us in Him and with Him!

   III. Now we come to the third point, upon which I pray for a renewed
   unction from the Holy One. Let us consider, in the last place, WHAT HAS
   BEEN DONE FOR US--"Having forgiven you all trespasses."

   Believing in Christ Jesus, I am absolved. I am clear, I am clear before
   the Lord. "There is, therefore, now no condemnation to them which are
   in Christ Jesus." This is the most joyful theme that I can bring before
   you. And I want you to notice, first, that pardon is a Divine act.
   "Having forgiven all trespasses." Who does that? Why, He that quickened
   you! is exclusively the Lord's own--and the same God who gives us
   spiritual life also grants us pardon from His Throne.

   He sovereignly dispenses pardons. We need not go to any human priest to
   seek absolution, for we may go at once to God, who alone has sovereign
   right to execute the death sentence or to pardon the offender. He alone
   can grant it with sure effect. If any man should say, "absolvo te," (I
   absolve you), I would take it for what it was worth and its worth would
   not be much. But if HE says it, who is the Law-giver and the supreme
   King. If HE says it, against whom I have offended, then am I happy,
   indeed. Glory be to His name, who is a God ready to pardon! What bliss
   I have received in receiving forgiveness from God!

   Oh, my Hearer, if you have done wrong to your fellow man, ask his
   forgiveness, as you are bound to do. And if you get it, be thankful and
   feel as if a weight were removed from your conscience. But, after all,
   what is this, compared with being forgiven all trespasses by God,
   Himself? This can calm the ruffled sea of the soul--yes, still its
   fiercest tempest. This can make you sleep at nights, instead of tossing
   to and fro upon a pillow, which conscience turns to stone beneath your
   aching head. This gives the gleaming eye, the beaming face, the
   bounding heart. This brings Heaven down to earth and lifts us near to
   Heaven. The Lord has blotted out our sins, and thus He has removed the
   most bitter fountain of our sorrows. Pardon from God is a charter of
   liberty, a testament of felicity. God's pardon is a gift most free.

   Look at the text and note that this pardon comes to persons who are
   dead in sin. They were utterly unworthy, and did not even seek mercy.
   The Lord who comes to men when they are dead in sin, comes to quicken
   them and to pardon them. Not because they are ready but because HE is
   ready. Hearken, O Man! If in your bosom there is at this moment a great
   stone instead of a heart of flesh--if you are paralyzed as to all good
   things. If there is only enough life in you to make you feel your
   terrible incapacity for holiness and fellowship with God, yet God can
   pardon you--even as you are and where you are. We were in that
   condition, my Brethren, when the Lord came to us in love. "When we were
   yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly."

   We saw that Jesus died, we believed in Him as able to save, by His
   Grace, and we received the forgiveness of sins. Forgiveness is free.
   The Lord looks for no good thing in the sinner. But He gives him every
   good thing. O my Hearer, if the Lord looked for good in you, He could
   not find it. He looks for nothing you can do, or nothing you can feel,
   or nothing you can resolve to do or feel. But He shows mercy because He
   delights in mercy. He passes by iniquity, transgression and sin,
   because it is His nature to be gracious. The cause of Divine pardon is
   in God, Himself, and in His dear Son. It is not in you, O Sinner!

   Being dead in the uncircumcision of your flesh, what can you do? He
   quickens you and He pardons you. Yes, He is All in All to you. Wonders
   of Divine Grace! When I get upon this subject I do not need to give you
   illustrations, nor to use choice phrases. The glorious fact stands
   forth in its own native beauty--infinite pardon from an infinite
   God--given because of His own mercifulness and the merit of His beloved
   Son--and not because of anything whatsoever in the man whom He pardons.
   "But the man repents," says one. Yes, I know. But God gives him
   repentance. "But he confesses sin." Yes, I know it. For the Lord leads
   him to acknowledge his trespasses. All and everything which looks like
   a condition of pardon, is also given by the Free and Sovereign Grace of
   God--and given freely--without money and without price.

   I want you to notice how universal is this pardon in reference to all
   sin--"Having forgiven you all trespasses." Consult your memory and
   think of all your trespasses, if you dare. That one black night! Has it
   left a crimson spot, indelible, never to be concealed? In many
   instances one special sin breeds more distress than a thousand others.
   That crime has left a deeper scar than any other. In vain you cry,
   "Out, hideous spot!" Should you wash that hand, it would stain ten
   thousand Atlantics, and it would remain a scarlet spot, never to be
   erased forever. No process known to men can wash out the stain.

   But God's infinite mercy can put away that hideous, unmentionable
   crime, and it shall be as though it had never been. Possibly, however,
   you do not so much remember any one transgression as the whole heap of
   them. Certainly, a multiplicity of minor sins heaped together, tower
   upward like a great Alp, although no one offense may seem so notable as
   to demand mention. We have sinned every day and every hour and almost
   every moment of every hour--how numberless our transgressions! Our sins
   of omission are beyond all computation. But all these, too many for you
   to remember, too many for me to number, are forgiven to the man in
   Christ--"Having forgiven you all trespasses"--ALL, not one excepted.
   You have sins not yet known nor confessed--but they are forgiven. For
   the blood cleans from all sin.

   I should like to help your memory by reminding you of your sins before
   conversion. Blessed is he whose sin is covered. One does not wish to
   uncover it. "Lord, remember not the sins of my youth, nor my
   transgressions." The child of God, who has long been rejoicing in
   faith, has need still to pray that. For our sins may vex our bones long
   after they have been removed from our consciences--the consequences of
   a sin may fret us after the sin, itself, is forgiven.

   Then think of your sins after conviction. You were struck down on a
   certain day with a great sense of sin and you hurried home and cried
   upon your knees, "O God, forgive me!" Then you vowed you would never do
   the like again. But you did. The dog returned to his vomit. You began
   to attend a place of worship. You were very diligent in religious
   duties. But all of a sudden you went back to your old companions and
   your old ways. If your sin was drink, you thought you had mastered it
   and could be very moderate. But a fierce thirst came upon you, which
   you could not resist--and you were soon as drunken as ever. Remember
   this with shame.

   Or it may have been a more deliberate backsliding. And deliberation
   greatly adds to the sin of sins. Without being particularly tempted,
   you began to hanker after your old pleasures and almost to despise
   yourself for having denied yourself their indulgence. I know a man who
   was present at a Prayer Meeting and was so worked upon that he prayed.
   But afterwards he said that he would never go into such a place again,
   for fear he should again be overcome. Think of being afraid to be led
   aright--ashamed to go to Heaven!

   Ah, Friends, we have been bullocks unaccustomed to the yoke, dogs that
   have slipped their collars, horses that have kicked over the traces.
   Sins after conviction, as doing despite to Divine Love, are very
   grievous trespasses. Like the moth, you had your wings singed in the
   candle and yet you flew back to the flame--if you had perished in it,
   who could have pitied you? Yet, after such folly, the Lord had mercy on
   you--"Having forgiven you ALL trespasses."

   A still worse set of sins must be remembered--sins after
   conversion--sins after you have found peace with God, after you have
   enjoyed high fellowship with Jesus. O Brothers and Sisters, these are
   cruel wounds for our Lord! These are evils which should melt us to
   tears, even to hear of them. What? Pardoned, and then sin again!
   Beloved of the Lord, and still rebelling! You sang so sweetly--

   "Your will be done; Your will be done" and then went home and murmured!
   You talked to others about evil temper, and yet grew angry. You are old
   and experienced, and yet no boy could have been more imprudent! O God,
   we bless You for the morning and evening lamb. For Your people need the
   sacrifice perpetually! We need a morning sacrifice, lest the night has
   gathered anything of evil. And we require an evening sacrifice for the
   sins of the day.

   Dwell for awhile upon the large blessing of the text. Whatever your
   sins may have been, if you are a Believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, God
   has quickened you together with Him and has forgiven you all
   trespasses. He pardons most effectually. Ask God about your sins and He
   says, "Their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more!" If God
   Himself does not remember them, they are most effectually removed. Ask
   Holy Scripture where they are and Hezekiah tells you, "You have cast
   all my sins behind Your back." Where is that? God sees everything, and
   everywhere, and therefore everywhere is before His face. If, therefore,
   He casts our sins behind His back, He throws our sins into "the
   nowhere"--they cease to exist.

   "In those days, says the Lord, the iniquity of Israel shall be sought
   for and there shall be none. And the sins of Judah, and they shall not
   be found." Surely this is enough to set all the bells of your heart
   ringing! Remember, also, dear Friends, that this pardon is most
   perfect. He does not commute the punishment but He pardons the crime.
   He does not pardon, and then confine for life, nor pardon today and
   punish tomorrow--this were not worthy of a God. The pardon is given and
   never revoked--the deed of Divine Grace is done and it can never be
   undone. God will not remember the sin which He has blotted out, nor
   condemn the offender whom He has absolved.

   O Believer, the Lord so fully absolves you, that all your sins, which
   might have shut you out of Heaven, shall not hinder your way there! All
   that sin of yours, which might have filled you with despair, shall not
   even fill you with dismay. The Lord shall wipe the tears from your
   eyes, as He has washed the sins from your person. Even the very stain
   of sin shall be removed. Remember what He says of scarlet and crimson
   sins. Does He say, "I will wash them so that nothing shall remain
   beyond a pale red"? Does He say, "I will wash them till nothing shall
   remain but a slight rosy tint"? No! He says, "They shall be as wool: I
   will make them white as snow." The Almighty Lord will do His work of
   remission in an absolutely perfect style, and not a shadow of a spot
   shall remain.

   Here is a point that I must dwell upon for a moment, namely, that this
   pardon shall be seen to be perfectly consistent with Justice. If I were
   pardoned and felt that God had weakened the foundations of His moral
   government by winking at evil, I should feel insecure in my pardoned
   state--and should have no rest. If the Justice of God were in the least
   infringed by my forgiveness, I should feel like a felon towards the
   universe and a robber of God. But I bless God that He pardons sin in
   strict connection with Justice.

   Behold the costly system by which this was effected. He Himself came
   here in the Person of His dear Son. He Himself became man, and dwelt
   among us. He Himself took the load of His people's sin. He bore the sin
   of many and was made a curse for us. He put away both sin and the curse
   by His wondrous sacrifice. The marvel of Heaven and earth, of time and
   eternity, is the atoning death of Jesus Christ. This is the mystery
   that brings more glory to God than all creation and all Providence. How
   could it be that He should be slain for sinners, the Just for the
   unjust, to bring us to God?

   To finish transgression and make an end of sin was a labor worthy of
   His Godhead--and Christ has perfectly achieved it by His sufferings and
   death. You had no fiction before you when, just now, you sang
   concerning Him--

   "Jesus was punished in my place, Without the gate my Surety bled To
   expiate my stain-- On earth the Godhead deigned to dwell, And made of
   infinite a vail The sufferings of the man."

   Now are we justly forgiven. And the Throne of God is established. By
   His death as our Substitute, our Lord Jesus has set forth the righteous
   severity of God as well as His boundless mercy.

   To us Justice and Mercy seemed opposed, but in Jesus we see them
   blended. We bless the Lord for His atoning sacrifice. We feel an
   infinite satisfaction in the fact that none can dispute the validity of
   a pardon which comes to us signed by the hand of the eternal King--and
   countersigned by the pierced hand of Him who bore our sins in His own
   body on the tree--and gave for those sins a complete vindication of the
   Law which we had broken.

   Note well the last consideration upon this point of the forgiveness of
   all trespasses. It ought to make you feel unutterably happy. From now
   on your pardon is bound up with the glory of Christ. If your pardon
   does not save you, then Christ is no Savior. If, resting in Him, your
   sins are not forgiven, then He undertook a fruitless errand when He
   came to save His people from their sins. Every drop of Christ's blood
   demands the eternal salvation of every soul that is washed in

   it. The Godhead and Manhood of Christ and all the glory of His
   Mediatorship, stand up and claim for every Believer that he shall be
   delivered from sin. What? Did He bear sin and shall we bear it, too?

   No--if the Lord has found in Him a ransom, His redeemed are free. Since
   to save me, who was once dead in sin, and in the uncircumcision of my
   flesh--and now has become the glory of Christ, I am sure I shall be
   saved, for He will not tarnish His own name. O Believer, to bring you
   home without spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing, has become the
   ambition of your Savior and He will not fail, or be discouraged. He
   will neither lose His lifework, nor His death throes. God forbid! And
   yet this must be, unless you, who are quickened together with Him,
   shall be found at the last without fault before the Throne of God.

   Now, let us just think of this--we are forgiven. I do not mean all of
   you. For if you are out of Christ, you have no part in this grand
   absolution. May the Lord have mercy upon you, quicken you today and
   bring you to Christ! But as many as are trusting in Christ and so are
   living in union with Him, you are forgiven. A person who has been
   condemned by the Law and then has received a free pardon, walks out of
   the prison and goes where he pleases. There is a policeman. Does he
   fear him? No, he has a free pardon, and the policeman cannot touch him.
   But there are a great many persons who know him and know him to be
   guilty. That does not matter. He has a free pardon and nobody can touch
   him. He cannot be tried again, however guilty he may have been. The
   free pardon has wiped the past right out.

   Now, today, Child of God, you begin anew--you are clean--for He has
   washed you and has done the work right well. We have washed our robes
   and made them white in the blood of the Lamb, therefore shall we be
   before the Throne of God and praise Him. What could we do less than
   praise Him day and night? When shall we ever stop? When we are in His
   temple, free from all danger of future sin and trial, we will forever
   praise Him who has forgiven us all trespasses. I charge you, let us
   meet in Heaven, all of us.

   Some have dropped in here this morning from all parts of the country
   and from America. And we may never meet again on earth. Let us meet
   around the Throne in Heaven and sing, "unto Him that loved us and
   washed us from our sins in His own blood." God grant that we may. Who
   wants to be left out? Is there one person here who would like to be
   shut out in that day? I pray you, enter in at once--

   "Come guilty souls and flee a way Like doves to Jesus' wounds; This is
   the welcome Gospel-day, Wherein Free Grace abounds."
     __________________________________________________________________

                             Pricked in Their Heart

   A Sermon

   (No. 2102)

   Delivered on Lord's-day Morning, September 1st, 1889, by

   C. H. SPURGEON,

   At [6]the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington

   "Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath
   made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ. Now
   when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto
   Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we
   do?"'Acts 2:36-37.

   THIS WAS THE FIRST public preaching of the gospel after our Lord was
   taken up into glory. It was thus a very memorable sermon, a kind of
   first-fruits of the great harvest of gospel testimony. It is very
   encouraging to those who are engaged in preaching that the first sermon
   should have been so successful. Three thousand made up a grand take of
   fish at that first cast of the net. We are serving a great and growing
   cause in the way chosen of God, and we hope in the future to see still
   larger results produced by that same undying and unchanging power which
   helped Peter to preach such a heart-piercing sermon.

   Peter's discourse was not distinguished by any special rhetorical
   display: he used not the words of man's wisdom or eloquence. It was not
   an oration, but it was a heart-moving argument, entreaty, and
   exhortation. He gave his hearers a simple, well-reasoned, Scriptural
   discourse, sustained by the facts of experience; and every passage of
   it pointed to the Lord Jesus. It was in these respects a model of what
   a sermon ought to be as to its contents. His plea was personally
   addressed to the people who stood before him, and it had a practical
   and pressing relation to them and to their conduct. It was aimed, not
   at the head, but at the heart. Every word of it was directed to the
   conscience and the affections, It was plain, practical, personal, and
   persuasive; and in this it was a model of what a sermon ought to be as
   to its aim and style. Yet Peter could not have spoken otherwise under
   the impression of the divine Spirit: his speech was as the oracles of
   God, a true product of a divine inspiration. Under the circumstances,
   any other kind of address would have been sadly out of place. A flashy,
   dazzling oration would have been a piece of horrible irreverence to the
   Holy Ghost; and Peter would have been guilty of the blood of souls if
   he had attempted it. In sober earnestness he kept to the plain facts of
   the case, setting them in the light of God's Word; and then with all
   his might he pressed home the truth upon those for whose salvation he
   was labouring. May it ever be the preacher's one desire to win men to
   repentance towards God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ! May no
   minister wish to be admired, but may he long that his Lord and Master
   may be sought after! May none bewilder their people with the clouds of
   theoretic philosophy, but refresh them with the rain of revealed truth?
   Oh, that we could so preach that our hearers should be at once pricked
   in their hearts, and so be led at once to believe in our Lord Jesus,
   and immediately to come forward and confess their faith in his name!

   We must not forget, however, to trace the special success of the sermon
   on the day of Pentecost to the outpouring of the Holy Ghost, in which
   Peter had shared. This it is which is the making of the preacher.
   Immersed into the Holy Spirit, the preacher will think rightly, and
   speak wisely; his word will be with power to those who hear. We must
   not forget, also, that there had been a long season of earnest, united,
   believing prayer on the part of the whole church. Peter was not alone:
   he was the voice of a praying company, and the believers had been with
   one accord in one place crying for a blessing; and thus not only was
   the Spirit resting upon the preacher, but on all who were with him.
   What a difference this makes to a preacher of the gospel, when all his
   comrades are as much anointed of the Spirit as himself! His power is
   enhanced a hundredfold. We shall seldom see the very greatest wonders
   wrought when the preacher stands by himself; but when Peter is
   described as standing up "with the eleven," then is there a twelve-man
   ministry concentrated in one; and when the inner circle is further
   sustained by a company of men end women who have entered into the same
   truth, and are of one heart and one soul, then is the power increased
   beyond measure. A lonely ministry may sometimes effect great things, as
   Jonah did in Nineveh; but if we look for the greatest and most
   desirable result of all, it must come from one who is not alone, but is
   the mouthpiece of many. Peter had the one hundred and twenty registered
   brethren for a loving body-guard, and this tended to make him strong
   for his Lord. How greatly I value the loving co-operation of the
   friends around me! I have no word, to express my gratitude to God for
   the army of true men and women who surround me with their love, and
   support me with their faith. I pray you, never cease to sustain me by
   your prayers, your sympathy, and your co-operation, until some other
   preacher shall take my place when increasing years shall warn me to
   stand aside.

   Yet much responsibility must rest with the preacher himself; and there
   was much about Peter's own self that is well worthy of imitation. The
   sermon was born of the occasion, and it used the event of the hour as
   God intended it to be used. It was earnest without a trace of passion,
   and prudent without a suspicion of fear. The preacher himself was
   self-collected, calm, courteous, and gentle. He aired no theories, but
   went on firm ground, stepping from fact to fact, from Scripture to
   Scripture, from plain truth to plain truth. He was patient at the
   beginning, argumentative all along, and conclusive at the end. He
   fought his way through the doubts and prejudices of his hearers; and
   when he came to the end, he stated the inevitable conclusion with
   clearness and certainty. All along he spake very boldly, without
   mincing the truth'Ye with wicked hands have crucified and slain him
   whom God has highly exalted. He boldly accused them of the murder of
   the Lord of glory, doing his duty in the sight of God, and for the good
   of their souls, with great firmness and fearlessness. Yet there is
   great tenderness in his discourse. Impulsive and hot-headed Peter, who,
   a little while before, had drawn his sword to fight for his Lord, does
   not, in this instance, use a harsh word; but speaks with great
   gentleness and meekness of spirit, using words and terms all through
   the address which indicate a desire to conciliate, and then to
   convince. Though he was as faithful us an Elijah, yet he used terms so
   courteous and kindly that, if men took offence, it would not be because
   of any offensiveness of tone on the speaker's part. Peter was gentle in
   his manner, but forceful in his matter. This art he had learned from
   his Lord; and we shall never have master-preachers among us till we see
   men who have been with Jesus, and have learned of him. Oh, that we
   could become partakers of our Lord's Spirit, and echoes of his tone!
   Then may we hope to attain to Pentecostal results, when we have
   preachers like Peter, surrounded by a band of earnest witnesses, and
   all baptized with the Holy Ghost and with fire.

   When we follow the run of Peter's argument, we do not wonder that his
   hearers were pricked in their hearts. We ascribe that deep compunction
   to the Spirit of God; and yet it was a very reasonable thing that it
   should be so. When it was clearly shown to them that they had really
   crucified the Messiah, the great hope of their nation, it was not
   wonderful that they should be smitten with horror. Looking as they were
   for Israel's King, and finding that he had been among them, and they
   had despitefully used him, and crucified him, they might well be
   smitten at the heart. Though for the result of our ministry we depend
   wholly upon the Spirit of God, yet we must adapt our discourse to the
   end we aim at; or, say rather, we must leave ourselves in the Spirit's
   hand as to the sermon itself as well as in reference to the result of
   the sermon. The Holy Ghost uses means which are adapted to the end
   designed. Because, beloved, I do desire beyond all things that many in
   this congregation may be pricked in the heart, I have taken this
   concluding part of Peter's discourse to be the text of my sermon this
   morning. Yet my trust is not in the Word itself, but in the quickening
   Spirit who works by it. May the Spirit of God use the rapier of his
   Word to pierce the hearts of my hearers!

   First, note that Peter speaks to his hearers upon their evil conduct to
   the Lord Jesus; and, secondly, he declares to them the exaltation that
   God has bestowed upon him. When we have dwelt on these two things, we
   will notice, in the third place, the result of knowing this grand
   fact"Let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made
   that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ."

   I. First, then, Peter dwelt tenderly, but very plainly, upon THEIR EVIL
   CONDUCT TOWARDS THE LORD JESUS. "He came unto his own, and his own
   received him not." As a nation, Israel had rejected him whom God had
   sent. The inhabitants of Jerusalem had gone further, and had consented
   unto his death; nay, had even clamoured for it, crying, "Crucify him,
   crucify him." Solemnly had the Jews exclaimed, "His blood be on us, and
   on our children." None of them had protested against the murder of the
   innocent One; but many of them had been eager to make an end of him.
   This Peter, in plain words, charged upon them, and they could not deny
   it; nor did they pretend to do so. It is well when a sense of guilt
   compels a man to stand silent under the rebuke of God. We then have
   hope of him that he will seek for pardon.

   Men and brethren, we are not in Jerusalem, and the death of our Lord
   happened more than eighteen hundred years ago; therefore we need not
   dwell upon the sin of those long since dead. It will be more profitable
   for us practically to consider how far we have been guilty of similar
   sins against the Lord Jesus Christ. Let us look at home. Let each one
   consider his own case. I may be addressing some to-day who have
   blasphemed the name of the Lord Jesus. I do not suppose that you have
   been guilty of the vulgar language of blasphemy, which is coarse and
   revolting, as well as profane; but there are politer methods of
   committing the self-same crime. Some, with their elaborate criticisms
   of Christianity, wound it far more seriously than atheists with their
   profanities. In these days, wiseacres, with their philosophy, derogate
   from the glory of our Lord's nature, and, with their novel doctrines,
   undermine his gospel. Denying the atonement, or teaching it as
   something other than a substitutionary sacrifice, they try to make away
   with that which is the very heart and soul of the Redeemer's work. Men
   nowadays drink in opinions which lessen the guilt of sin, and, of
   course, lower the value of the atoning blood. The cross is still a
   stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence. Men do not now accept the
   words of the Bible as authoritative, nor the teaching of the apostles
   as final; they set themselves up to be teachers of the great Teacher,
   reformers of the divine gospel. They do not accept the teaching of the
   Lord Jesus one half so much as they criticize it. If any here present
   have been thus guilty, may the Holy Spirit convince them of their sin!
   Since the Lord God hath made this atoning Jesus both Lord and Christ,
   and set him on his right hand, any teaching which does despite to him,
   however learned, however advanced, however cultured it may seem to be,
   is a grievous sin against the Lord God himself. By such conduct we are,
   as far as in us lies, again putting the Lord Jesus to death; we are
   attempting to make away with that which is the very life and glory of
   Christ. O my hearer, if you have denied his Deity, rejected his atoning
   blood, ridiculed his imputed righteousness, or scoffed at salvation by
   faith in him, may you be pricked in the heart as you see that God hath
   made that same Jesus to be Lord of all!

   Much more common, however, is another sin against our Lord
   Jesus'namely, neglecting him, ignoring his claims, and postponing the
   day of faith in him. I trust that none here are willing to die
   unconverted, or would even dare to think of passing away without being
   washed in the precious blood; yet, my hearers, you have lived to
   manhood; to ripe years; perhaps even to old age, without yielding your
   hearts to the Lord Jesus, and accepting him as your Saviour. To say the
   least of it, this is a very sad piece of neglect. To ignore a man
   altogether is, in a certain sense, as far as you are concerned, to kill
   that man.

   If you put him out of your reckoning, if you treat him as if he were
   nothing, if your estimate of life is made as if he were a cipher, you
   have put your Lord out of existence in reference to yourself. You treat
   him with empty compliment by observing his day, and hearing his Word;
   but you have no real regard for him. Is not this a cruel fault? From
   morning till night your Lord is not in all your thoughts; he never
   affects your dealings with your fellow-men; you never endeavour to
   catch his spirit of love, and considerateness, and meekness; and thus,
   as a Leader and Exemplar, he is dead to you. You have never confessed
   your sin before him, nor sought for pardon at his hands, nor have you
   looked to see whether he hath borne your sins in his own body on the
   tree. O soul, this is base neglect'ungrateful contempt! God thinks so
   much of his Son that he cannot set him too high; he has placed him at
   his own right hand, and yet you will not spare him a thought! The great
   God thinks heaven and earth too little for him, and magnifies him
   exceedingly above all, as King of kings, and Lord of lords; and yet you
   treat him as if he were of no account, and might be safely made to wait
   your time and leisure. Is this right? Will you treat your Saviour thus?
   May this prick you in the heart, and may you cease from this base
   ingratitude!

   There are others who have done more than this, for they have rejected
   Christ. I now allude to those of you who have not been able to resist
   the appeals made to you by the Lord's ministers. You have felt a good
   deal'felt more than you would like to confess. You have been so
   inclined to seek the Saviour that you have almost done so; sin has
   flashed in your face like the flames of Tophet, and in alarm you have
   resolved to seek salvation; you have gone home to bend the knee in
   prayer, you have read the Scriptures to learn the way of eternal life;
   but, alas! an evil companion crossed your path, and the question came,
   "Shall it be this man or Christ?" You chose the man: I had almost said,
   you chose Barabbas, and rejected Jesus. A sinful pleasure came before
   you when you had begun to be serious, and the question arose, "Shall I
   give up this pleasure, or shall I renounce all hope of Christ?" You
   snatched at the pleasure, and you let your Saviour go. Do you not
   remember when you did violence to your conscience? There was an effort
   about it, as you stifled conviction. You had to put forth a decided act
   of the will to quench the Spirit of God, and to escape from the
   strivings of your awakened conscience. I know not to whom this may
   apply; but I am certain, as certain as Peter was when he spoke to the
   crucifiers of Christ, that I am speaking to some who have been
   rejecters of the Lord Jesus Christ, not once nor twice. Some of you
   have distinctly rejected him almost every Sabbath-day; but especially
   when the Word of the Lord has been with extraordinary power, and you
   have felt it shake you, as a lion shakes his prey. Thank God, you are
   not past feeling yet! I pray you, do not presume upon the continuance
   of your tenderness. You will not always feel as you have felt: the day
   may come when even the thunders of God may not be heard by your
   deafened ear, and the love of Christ will not affect the heart which
   you have made callous by wilful obstinacy. Woe to the man when his
   heart is turned to stone! When flesh turns to stone, it is a conversion
   unto eternal death; just as the turning of stone to flesh is conversion
   to eternal life. God have mercy upon you, and prick you in the heart
   this morning, while you yet have tenderness enough to feel that you
   have rejected him whom you ought to embrace with all your heart!

   I must come a little closer to certain of you, who have forsaken the
   Lord Jesus Christ. There are a few unhappy persons here this morning,
   over whom I greatly grieve, because of their wanderings; and yet I am
   glad that they have not quite forsaken the courts of the Lord's house.
   These once professed to be disciples of Christ; but they have gone
   back, and walk no more with him. They were once numbered with us, and
   went in and out of our solemn assemblies for prayer and breaking of
   bread; but now we know them not. They were not backward to confess
   themselves Christians, But now they deny their Lord. In former days
   they were zealous, and apparently devout; they were quick in the
   service of God, and sound in their creed. But there came a day'I need
   not describe the circumstances, for they differ in different cases'when
   two roads were before them, and they must go either to the right or to
   the left; and they took the road by which they turned their back upon
   Christ, and upon the vitality of godliness. They went off into sin, and
   apostatized from the faith. We fear "they went out from us, but they
   were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have
   continued with us." They have gone aside unto crooked ways, and we fear
   that the Lord will lead them forth with the workers of iniquity. O my
   backsliding hearer, I hope you are not a Judas; my trust is that you
   may be a Peter! You have denied your Master, but I hope you will yet
   weep bitterly, and be restored to your Lord's service. For your good I
   must bring home your wanderings to you; may the Lord prick you in the
   heart about them! Why have you left your Lord? Wherein has he wearied
   you? There may be present persons from the country, or friends from
   America, who were once glad to be numbered with the children of God,
   but now they care nothing for God, or his people. Alas! they take part
   with the adversaries of Christ, and the despisers of his precious
   blood! Friend, you are here this morning that I may bring your sin to
   remembrance, and ask you why you have done this thing! Were you a
   hypocrite? If not, why have you turned aside ? God has exalted to his
   throne the Saviour, on whom you have turned your back; have you not
   acted madly in what you have done? The Most High God is on the side of
   Jesus, and you are avowedly on the other side; is this right, or wise?
   It is painful to me to speak of these things. I hope it is far more
   painful for you to hear of them. I want you to feel as David did, when
   his heart smote him. What have you been doing? Has the Lord Jesus
   deserved this at your hands? Turn, I pray you, from your evil way, and
   turn unto the Lord with full purpose of heart.

   II. After Peter had dwelt upon the sin of his hearers in treating the
   Lord so ill, he declared to them THE EXALTATION BESTOWED ON HIM BY GOD.
   The great God loved, and honoured, and exalted that same Jesus whom
   they had crucified. O my hearers, whatever you may think of the Lord
   Jesus, God thinks everything of him! To you he may be dead and buried,
   but God hath raised him from the dead. To God he is the ever-living,
   the ever well-beloved Christ. You cannot destroy the Lord Jesus, or his
   cause. If you could do all that the most malicious heart could suggest,
   you could not really defeat him. Men wreaked their vengeance on him:
   once they put him to a felon's death, they laid him in the grave, and
   sealed the stone; but he rose again, for God was on his side. My
   hearer, whatever you do, you cannot shake the truth of the gospel, nor
   rob the Lord Jesus of a single beam of his glory. He lives and reigns,
   and he will live and reign, whatever becomes of you. You may refuse his
   salvation but he is still a Saviour, and a great one. His gospel
   chariot rolls on, and every stone which is placed to hinder it is
   crushed into the earth, and compelled to make a road for him. If you
   resist the Lord, you do it at your peril; but you do it in vain. You
   might as well hope to reverse the laws of nature, quench the sun, and
   snatch the moon from her orbit, as hope to overthrow the cause and
   kingdom of the Lord Jesus; for God is on his side, and his throne is
   established for ever. God hath raised his Son from the dead, and taken
   him up to sit at his right hand, and there he will remain while his
   enemies shall be made his footstool. By this you may see what evil you
   have done through rejecting Christ, and may know who he is whom you
   have neglected refused, and forsaken.

   Let me remind you that, when we read of our Lord as being at the right
   hand of God, we perceive that he enjoys infinite felicity. At the right
   hand of God there are pleasures for evermore; and David said, as the
   representative of our Lord, "Thou hast made known to me the ways of
   life; thou shalt make me full of joy with thy countenance." He who was
   the Man of sorrows now overflows with gladness. All his work and
   warfare done, he rests in boundless blessedness. His priestly work
   being finished, he sits down. No more does be feel the cross and nails,
   no more does he endure the mockery of cruel eyes and ribald lips. He is
   full of joy, that joy which be bids his people share when he says,
   "Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord." His portion is measureless,
   infinite, inconceivable delight. Can it be that you are opposed to him,
   and neglect him, while God lavishes upon him more than all the bliss of
   heaven, and makes him to be the fountain of unspeakable delight to all
   his redeemed ones? Grieve that you should grieve him whom God thus
   loads with blessedness.

   Moreover, remember that at the right hand of God our Lord sits in
   infinite majesty. Jesus, whom you think little of, Jesus, from whom you
   turn aside, is to-day adored of angels, obeyed by seraphs, worshipped
   by just men made perfect. He is the highest in the highest heavens. Do
   you not hear the blast of heaven's trumpets, which proclaims him head
   over principalities and powers? Do you not hear the song which ascribes
   to him honour, and glory, and power, and dominion, and might? My faith
   anticipates the happy day when I shall stand a courtier in his
   unrivalled. courts, and behold him, the Lamb upon the throne, reigning
   high over all, with every knee in heaven and in earth gladly bowing
   before him. Can it be that you have neglected him whom God hath
   exalted? Can it be that you have refused him, that you have done
   despite to him, that you have, as far as you could, put him to death
   whom Jehovah has made Lord of all?

   Nor is this all: for the place at the right hand of God, to which he is
   now exalted, is the place of power. There sits the Mediator, the Son of
   God, the man Christ Jesus, while his enemies are being subdued under
   him. Do not believe it, O proudest of doubters, that thou canst take
   away from Christ any measure of his power! He overrules all mortal
   things; he directs the movements of the stars; he rules the armies of
   heaven. He restrains the rage of his adversaries, and what he suffers
   to be let loose he turns to his glory. All power is given to him in
   heaven and earth; he reigns in the three realms of nature, providence,
   and grace. His kingdom ruleth over all, and of his dominion there shall
   be no end. O sirs, what do our hearts suggest but that we bow at his
   feet? that we worship him with loving reverence? that we yield to that
   supreme power which is used for purposes of love? Yet it is this
   Christ, this mighty Christ, who is set at nought by some of you, so
   that you run the risk of perishing because you have no heart for him
   and his great salvation.

   Learn, next, that he is at the right hand of the Majesty in the
   heavens, seated as our Judge. If we refuse him as a Saviour, we shall
   not be able to escape from him as Judge in the last great day. All the
   acts of men are being recorded, and in that day, when the great white
   throne shall be set in the heavens, all things shall be made manifest,
   and we must stand unveiled in his presence. You have often heard and
   sung of him whose face was more marred than that of any man, when he
   was here as a sacrifice for guilty men. If you refuse him, you will
   have to stand before his bar to answer for it. The most awful sight for
   the impenitent in the day of judgment will be the face of the Lord
   Jesus Christ. I do not find that they cry, "Hide us from the tempest,"
   nor "Hide us from the angel-guards," nor "Hide us from their swords of
   fire," but, "Hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne,
   and from the wrath of the Lamb." Love, when once it turns to wrath, is
   terrible beyond compare. As oil when set on fire blazes with great
   force, so the meek and loving Jesus, when finally rejected, will
   exhibit a wrath more terrible than death.

   "Ye sinners, seek his grace,

   Whose wrath ye cannot bear;

   Fly to the shelter of his cross,

   And find salvation there."

   Perhaps through ignorance you have rebelled; repent, and take another
   course. You supposed that when you kicked against a sermon, you had
   only put down the minister's words; but in reality you resisted the
   Saviour's love. You thought that when you turned away from Christ and
   his people, it was only leaving a church, and having your name crossed
   out of a book. Ah, sirs! take heed, for I fear you have left the Lamb
   of God, and renounced your part in his Book of Life! At the last it may
   turn out to have been an awful thing to have been put forth from the
   Church of Christ on earth; for when we, as a church, do our Lord's
   bidding, that which we bind on earth is bound in heaven. In refusing
   the Lord's Word, you refuse him who speaks from heaven: you refuse not
   only his words, but himself, and he shall be your Judge'your Judge most
   just, most holy. Oh, how will you bear it? How will you bear to stand
   at the bar of the despised Saviour?

   Peter also showed his hearers that the Lord was greatly exalted in
   heaven as the Head over all things to his church, for he had that day
   shed abroad the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit comes, he comes from
   Christ, and as the witness of his power. He proceedeth from the Father
   and the Son, and he bears witness with both. Christ's power was
   marvellously proved when, after he had been but a little while in
   heaven, he was able to bestow such gifts upon men, and specially to
   send the tongues of fire, and the rushing mighty wind, which betoken
   the energy of the Holy Ghost. He is such a Lord that he can save or
   destroy. The Christ that died upon the cross hath all things committed
   into his hands. He can this morning send forth salvation to the ends of
   the earth, so that multitudes shall believe and live; for him hath God
   exalted with his right hand to be a Prince and a Saviour, to give
   repentance and forgiveness of sins. Or, he can turn the key the other
   way, and shut the door against this untoward generation; for he
   openeth, and no man shutteth; and he shutteth, and no man openeth. In
   any case, be ye sure of this, ye Gentiles, even as Peter would have the
   house of Israel be sure of it, that "God hath made that same Jesus,
   whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ."

   I notice that, at this time, few writers or preachers use the
   expression, "Our Lord Jesus Christ." We have lives of Christ, and lives
   of Jesus; but, brethren, he is THE LORD. Jesus is both Lord and Christ:
   we need to acknowledge his Deity, his dominion, and his divine
   anointing. He is "God over all, blessed for ever," and we can never
   praise him too much. A great and grievous error of the times is a want
   of reverence for our Lord and his sacrifice. To sit in judgment on his
   sacred teaching, is to spit in his face; to deny his miracles, is to
   strip him of his own clothes; to make him out to be a mere teacher of
   ethics, is to mock him with a purple robe; and to deny his atonement,
   in philosophical phraseology, is to crown him with thorns, and crucify
   him afresh, and put him to an open shame. Be not guilty of this, my
   hearers, for God hath made this same Jesus "both Lord and Christ"; let
   us worship him as Lord, and trust him as Christ.

   III. Now I come to my closing point, which is, THE RESULT OF KNOWING
   THIS ASSUREDLY. May I here pause to ask'do you know this assuredly? I
   hope all of you believe that God hath made Jesus Christ, the Mediator,
   in his complex person, as God-and-man, to be " both Lord and Christ."
   He was Lord, as God, always; but as God-and-man, he is now Lord and
   Christ. Manhood and Godhead are in him united in one wondrous Parson,
   and this Person is "both Lord and Christ." You believe it. But do you
   so believe it that it is a fact of the utmost importance to you? Will
   you assuredly believe it, that the man of Nazareth, who died on
   Calvary, is to-day both Lord and Christ? If you do now believe this,
   what are your feelings as you review your past misconduct towards him?
   Does not your past neglect prick you in the heart? If you do not so
   believe, it is of little use for me to describe what the result of such
   belief would be, for that result will not take place in you; but if you
   have so believed, and Jesus is to you Lord and Christ, you will look on
   him whom you have pierced, and mourn for him. As you recollect your
   negligence of him, your rejection of him, your backsliding from him,
   and all your ungrateful acts which show contempt of him, your heart
   will be ready to break, and you will be seized with a great sorrow, and
   a hearty repentance. The Lord work it in you, for his Son's sake!

   Observe, that as the result of Peter's sermon, his hearers felt a
   mortal sting. "They were pricked in their heart." The truth had pierced
   their souls. When a man rinds out that he has done a fearful wrong to
   one who loved him, he grows sick at heart, and views his own conduct
   with abhorrence. We all remember the story of Llewellyn and his
   faithful dog. The prince came back from the hunt, and missed his infant
   child, but saw marks of blood everywhere. Suspecting his dog Gelert of
   having killed the child he drove his vengeful sword into the faithful
   hound, which had been bravely defending his child against a huge wolf,
   which lay there, all torn and dead, "tremendous still in death." Yes,
   he had slain the faithful creature which had preserved his child. Poor
   Gelert's dying yell pierced the prince to the heart; and well it might.
   If such emotions fitly arise when we discover that we have, in error,
   been ungenerous and cruel to a dog, how ought we to feel towards the
   Lord Jesus, who laid down his life that we, who were his enemies, might
   live?

   I recall an awfully tragic story of an evil couple, who kept an inn of
   base repute. A young man called one night to lodge. They noticed that
   he had gold in his purse, and they murdered him in the night. It was
   their own son, who had come back to gladden their old age, and wished
   to see whether his parents would remember him. Oh, the bitterness of
   their lamentation when they found that through the lust of gold they
   had murdered their own son!

   Take out of such amazing grief its better portion, and then add to it a
   spiritual conviction of the sin of evil'entreating the Son of God, the
   perfect One, the Lover of our souls, and you come near the meaning of
   being "pricked in the heart." Oh, to think that we should despise him
   who loved us, and gave himself for us, and should rebel against him
   that bought us with his own blood while we were his enemies! I would to
   God everyone here, that has not come to Christ, would feel a sting in
   his conscience now; and would mourn that he has done this exceeding
   evil thing against the ever-blessed Son of God, who became man, and
   died for love of guilty men.

   When we read "they were pricked in their heart," we may see in it the
   meaning, that they felt a movement of love to hima relenting of heart,
   a stirring of emotion towards him. They said to themselves, "Have we
   treated him thus? What can we do to show our horror of our own
   conduct?" They were not merely convinced of their fault so as to be
   grieved, but their desires and affections went out towards the offended
   One, and they cried, "What shall we do? In what way can we acknowledge
   our wrong? Is there any way of undoing this ill towards him whom we now
   love?" To this point I would have you all come. I would have you know
   the meaning of Newton's hymn:'

   "I saw One hanging on a tree,

   in agonies and blood,

   Who fix'd his languid eyes on me,

   As near his cross I stood.

   Sure never till my latest breath

   Can I forget that look;

   It seem'd to charge me with his death,

   Though not a word he spoke.

   My conscience felt and own'd the guilt,

   And plunged me in despair;

   I saw my sins his blood had spilt,

   And help'd to nail him there.

   Alas! I knew not what I did;

   But now my tears are vain;

   Where shall my trembling soul be hid?

   For I the Lord have slain."

   Let us tearfully enquire how we can end our opposition, and prove
   ourselves to be his friends and humble servants.

   As a consequence of Peter's sermon, preached in the power of the Holy
   Spirit, these people exhibited obedient faith. They were roused to
   action, and they said, "Men and brethren, what shall we do?" They
   believed that the same Jesus whom they had crucified was now Lord of
   all, and they hastened to be obedient unto him. When Peter said,
   "Repent!" they did indeed repent. If repentance be grief, they grieved
   at their hearts. If repentance be a change of mind and life, they were
   indeed altered men. Then Peter said, "Be baptized every one of you in
   the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins." Take the open and
   decisive step: stand forth as believers in Jesus, and confess him by
   that outward and visible sign which he has ordained. Be buried with him
   in whom your sin is buried. You slew him in error; be buried with him
   in truth. They did it gladly, they repented of the sin; they were
   baptized into the sacred name. And then Peter could tell them'"You have
   remission of sins: the wrong you have done to your Lord is cancelled:
   the Lord hath put away your sin for ever. Remission of sins comes to
   you through Jesus, whom you slew, whom the Father has raised up. You
   shall not be summoned before the bar of God to account even for the
   hideous crime of murdering the Lord, for by his death you are forgiven.
   In proof of forgiveness you shall now be made partakers of the great
   gift which marks his ascending power. The Holy Spirit shall come upon
   you, even upon you his murderers, and you shall go forth, and be
   witnesses for him."

   O my hearers, to what a place have I brought you now! If indeed the
   Holy Spirit has helped you to follow me in my discourse, see where we
   have climbed! However black your crime, however vile your character, if
   you have seen the wrong that you have done, if you have repented of
   having done it because you see that you have sinned against your loving
   Lord, and if you will now come to him repenting and believing, and will
   confess him as he bids you confess him in baptism; then you have full
   remission, and you shall be partakers of the gifts and graces of his
   Holy Spirit, and henceforth you shall be chosen witnesses for the
   Christ whom God hath raised from the dead. Beloved, you need no choice
   speech from me: pure gold needs no gilding, and as I have told you the
   most wonderful of all facts in heaven or in earth, I let it remain in
   all its simple grandeur.

   May God write out this old, old story on your hearts! Oh, that he would
   issue a new edition of his gospel of love, printed on your hearts!
   Every man's conversion is a freshly-printed copy of the poem of
   salvation. May the Lord issue you hot from the press this morning, a
   living epistle to be known and read of all men; and specially to be
   read by your children at home, and your neighbours in the same street!
   The Lord grant that hearts may be pricked by this sermon, for his
   name's sake! Amen.

   PORTION OF SCRIPTURE READ BEFORE SERMON'Acts 2:14-42.

   HYMNS FROM "OUR OWN HYMN BOOK"'909, 279, 429.
     __________________________________________________________________

The Hunger and Thirst Which Are Blessed

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S-DAY MORNING, SEPTEMBER 8, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for
   they shall be filled." Matthew 5:6.

   BECAUSE man had perfect righteousness before the Fall, he enjoyed
   perfect blessedness. If you and I shall, by Divine Grace, attain to
   blessedness hereafter, it will be because God has restored us to
   righteousness. As it was in the first Paradise, so must it be in the
   second--righteousness is essential to the blessedness of man. We cannot
   be truly happy and live in sin. Holiness is the natural element of
   blessedness. And it can no more live out of that element than a fish
   could live in the fire.

   The happiness of man must come through his righteousness--his being
   right with God, with man, with himself-- indeed, his being right all
   round. Since, then, the first blessedness of our unfallen state is gone
   and the blessedness of perfection hereafter is not yet come, how can we
   be blessed in the interval which lies between? The answer is, "Blessed
   are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness." Though they
   have not yet attained the righteousness they desire, yet even the
   longingfor it makes them a blessed people.

   The massive blessedness of the past, and the priceless blessedness of
   the eternal future, are joined together by a band of present
   blessedness. The band is not so massive as those two things which it
   unites. But it is of the same metal, has been fashioned by the same
   hand and is as indestructible as the treasures which it binds together.

   Of this hunger and thirst I am going to speak this morning. I feel so
   unfit for the effort that I must correct myself and say that I hunger
   and thirst to preach to you but, that is all the power I have. Oh, that
   I, too, may be filled for your sakes! May the Spirit of the Lord
   fulfill my intense desire to minister to you from this beatitude of our
   Lord Jesus, "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after
   righteousness: for they shall be filled."

   First, then, in our text we have mention of singular appetites--"hunger
   and thirst"--not for bread and water but, "after righteousness."
   Secondly, we have a remarkable declaration about these hungering
   people--Jesus says that they are "blessed," or happy. And beyond a
   doubt His judgment is true. Thirdly, in our text is mentioned a special
   satisfaction meeting their necessity and in its foresight making them
   blessed--our Savior says, "they shall be filled."

   I. To begin, then, we shall speak of SINGULAR APPETITES. In this case,
   one insatiable desire takes different forms. They hunger and they
   thirst--the two most urgent needs of the body are used to set forth the
   cravings of the soul for righteousness. Hunger and thirst are different
   but they are both the language of keen desire. He that has ever felt
   either of these two knows how sharp are the pangs they bring. And if
   the two are combined in one craving, they make up a restless, terrible,
   unconquerable passion.

   Who shall resist a man hungering and thirsting? His whole being fights
   to satisfy his awful needs. Blessed are they that have a longing for
   righteousness, which no one word can fully describe and no one craving
   can set forth. Hunger must be joined with thirst, to set forth the
   strength and eagerness of the desire after righteousness.

   This desire is like hunger and thirst in constancy. Not that it is
   always equally raging, for the hungry man is not always equally in
   pain. But, still, he can never quite forget the gnawing within, the
   burning at the heart. Blessed is the man who is always desiring
   righteousness with an insatiable longing that nothing can turn aside.
   Hunger and thirst are irrepressible. Until you feed the man, his wants
   will continue to devour him. You may give a hungry man the best music
   that was ever drawn from strings, or breathed from pipes--but his
   cravings are not soothed--you do but mock him.

   You may set before him the fairest prospect. But unless in that
   prospect there stands conspicuous a loaf of bread and a cup of water,
   he has no heart for flood or field, mountain or forest. They are
   blessed, says Christ, who, with regard to righteousness, are always
   seeking it and cannot be satisfied until they find it. The desire
   toward righteousness, which a

   man must have in order to be blessed, is not a faint one, in which he
   feebly says, "I wish I could be righteous." Neither is it a passing
   outburst of good desires. But it is a longing which, like hunger and
   thirst, abides with a man and masters him.

   He carries it to his work, carries it to his house, carries it to his
   bed, carries it wherever he, himself, goes, for it rules him with its
   imperative demands. As the horse-leech cries, "Give, give," so does the
   heart cry after purity, integrity and holiness when once it has learned
   to hunger and thirst after righteousness.

   These appetites are concentrated upon one object--the man hungers and
   thirsts after righteousness and nothing else. Theological works mostly
   say either that this is imputed righteousness, or implanted
   righteousness. No doubt these things are meant, but I do not care to
   insert an adjective where there is none--the text does not say either
   "imputed" or "implanted"--why need we mend it? It is righteousnesswhich
   the man pants after--righteousness in all its meanings.

   First, he feels that he is not right with God and the discovery causes
   him great distress. The Spirit of God shows him that he is all wrong
   with God, for he has broken the Laws which he ought to have kept and he
   has not paid the homage and love which were justly due. The same Spirit
   makes him long to get right with God. And, his conscience being
   aroused, he cannot rest till this is done. This, of course, includes
   the pardon of his offenses and the giving to him of a righteousness
   which will make him acceptable to God--he eagerly cries to God for this
   gift.

   One of the bitterest pangs of his soul's hunger is the dread that this
   need can never be met. How can man be just with God? It is the peculiar
   glory of the Gospel that it reveals the righteousness of God--the
   method by which sinners can be put right with God. And this comes with
   peculiar sweetness to one who is striving and praying, hungering and
   thirsting, after righteousness. When he hears of righteousness by faith
   in the Lord Jesus Christ, he leaps at it and lays hold upon it, for it
   exactly meets his needs.

   The hunger now takes another form. The pardoned and justified man now
   desires to be right in his conduct and language and thought--he pines
   to be righteous in his whole life. He would be marked by integrity,
   kindness, mercifulness, love and everything else which goes to make up
   a right condition of things towards his fellow creatures. He ardently
   desires to be correct in his feelings and conduct towards God--he
   craves rightly to know, obey, pray, praise and love his God. He cannot
   rest till he stands towards God and man as he ought to stand.

   His longing is not only to be treated as righteous by God, which comes
   through the atoning blood and righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ,
   but that he may be actually righteous before the heart-searching God.
   Nor will this suffice him--not only must his conduct be right, but he
   pants to be himself right. He finds within himself irregular desires
   and he would have these utterly destroyed. He finds tendencies towards
   unrighteousness. And although he resists these, and overcomes them, yet
   the tendencies themselves are abhorrent to him.

   He finds longings after pleasures that are forbidden. And though he
   rejects those pleasures with loathing, his trouble is that he should
   have any inclination towards them at all. He wants to be so renewed
   that sin shall have no power over him. He has learned that a lustful
   look is adultery, that a covetous desire is theft, and that wrongful
   anger is murder. And therefore he craves not only to be free from the
   look and the desire and the passion, but even from the tendencyin that
   direction. He longs to have the fountain of his being cleansed. He
   hungers to, "put on the new man, which after God is created in
   righteousness and true holiness."

   He thirsts to be "renewed in knowledge, after the image of Him that
   created him." He cannot be content till he is himself like Jesus, who
   is the image of the invisible God, the mirror of righteousness and
   peace. But, mark you, if the man should even attain to this, his hunger
   and thirst would only take another direction. The godly man hungers and
   thirsts to see righteousness in others. At times, when he sees the
   conduct of those around him, he cries, "My soul is among lions. And I
   lie even among them that are set on fire." The more holy he becomes,
   the more sin vexes his righteous soul and he cries, "Woe is me, that I
   sojourn in Meshech, that I dwell in the tents of Kedar!"

   He often wishes that he had "wings like a dove," that he might "fly
   away and be at rest." Like Cowper, he cries--

   "Oh, for a lodge in some vast wilderness, Some boundless contiguity of
   shade, Where rumor of oppression and deceit, Of unsuccessful or
   successful war, Might never reach me more!"

   He hungers for godly company--he thirsts to see the unholy made holy.
   And therefore he cries in his daily prayer, "Your kingdom come. Your
   will be done in earth, as it is in Heaven." With hunger and thirst he
   cries, "Lord, end the reign of sin! Lord, cast down idols! Lord, chase
   error from the earth! Lord, turn men from lust and avarice and cruelty
   and drunkenness." He would live for righteousness and die for
   righteousness. The zeal of it consumes him.

   Brothers and Sisters, I hope you have been able to follow, by your own
   knowledge, the various movements of this absorbing passion for
   righteousness, which I have thus feebly sketched for you. Note well
   that these concentrated appetites are very discriminating. The man does
   not long for twenty things but only for one thing and for that one
   thing by itself. The hunger and the thirst are "after righteousness."
   The man does not hunger for wealth--he would rather be poor and be
   righteous, than be rich through evil.

   He does not hunger after health--though he would wish to have that
   great blessing, yet he would rather be sick and have righteousness,
   than enjoy good health and be unrighteous. He does not even set before
   himself, as his great object, the rewardsof righteousness. These are
   very desirable--the respect of one's fellows, peace of mind and
   communion with God, are by no means little things. But he does not make
   these the chief objects of his desire, for he knows that they will be
   added to him if in the first place he seeks after righteousness itself.

   If there were no Heaven, the godly man would wish to be righteous. If
   there were no Hell, he would dread unrighteousness. His hunger and
   thirst are after honesty, purity, rectitude and holiness--he hungers
   and he thirsts to be what God would have him to be. Always distinguish
   between seeking Heaven and seeking God, between shunning Hell and
   shunning sin. For any hypocrite will desire Heaven and dread Hell. But
   only the sincere hunger after righteousness.

   The thief would shun the prison but he would like to be once more at
   his theft. The murderer would escape the gallows but he would readily
   enough have his hand on his dagger again. The desire to be happy, the
   wish to be at ease in conscience--these are poor things. The true and
   noble hunger of the soul is the desire to be right for righteousness'
   sake. Oh, to be holy, whether that should mean joy or sorrow! Oh, to be
   pure in heart, whether that would bring me honor or contempt!
   This--this is the blessed thirst.

   Now, where there is this hunger and thirst, these will work in their
   own way. Hunger and thirst are not the bed-makers of the house of
   manhood. No, they ring the alarm bells and even shake the foundations
   of the house. The starving man cannot bear himself. Ultimately, his
   terrible needs may reduce him to a passive condition by the way of
   faintness and insensibility. But while sense remains in the man, hunger
   and thirst are fierce forces, which nerve him to the most intense
   endeavors.

   When a prisoner was set at the prison gate to plead for the poor
   debtors, in the old time, he did plead. Himself reduced to a skeleton,
   he rattled the box in the ears of persons passing by and cried most
   piteously that they would give something to the poor debtors who were
   starving inside. How a hungry man looks at you! His very look is a
   piercing prayer. A man that hungers and thirsts after righteousness,
   pleads with God with his whole soul. There is no sham prayer about him.

   The man that is hungry and thirsty after righteousness is the wrestling
   man. This makes him also the active man. For hunger will break through
   stone walls. He will do anything for food. The worst of it is, that he
   often attempts foolish things--he tries to stay his hunger with that
   which is not bread, and spends his labor upon that which satisfies not.
   Still, this only proves how energetic are these appetites and how they
   call out every power of manhood when they are set upon righteousness.

   Beloved, these are by no means common. Multitudes of people in the
   world never hunger and thirst after righteousness. Some of you would
   like to be saved. But you can do very well if you are not. A man that
   is hungry and thirsty will never say, "I should like a meal but I can
   do very well without it." And you do not hunger and thirst, if you can
   rest without the blessing you profess to value. If you hunger and
   thirst after righteousness, you want it at once--these cravings will
   not bear delay--they clamor for immediate supplies. The hungry man's
   tense is the present.

   Oh, how many there are who, by their delay and by their carelessness,
   prove that they never hunger and thirst after righteousness! I see also
   others who are righteous already. They are as good as they want to be.
   Hear the man talk--"I do not make any profession of religion but I am a
   great deal better than many that do." Oh, yes, I know you, Sir. And the
   Virgin Mary knew you, for she said in her song, "He has filled the
   hungry with good things. And the rich he has sent

   empty away." You will one day be emptied but you will never be filled.
   Why should you be? You are so blown up with wind that there is no room
   for the heavenly substance within your heart.

   Many refuse the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Bread of Heaven. No man
   can be said to be hungry if he refuses wholesome food. When your child
   sits down at the table and says that he does not want any dinner, he is
   evidently not hungry. They that put Christ away and will not have His
   atonement and His sanctification, are not hungry after righteousness.
   Many criticize the little things of the Gospel, the insignificant
   matters about the minister's voice and tone and appearance.

   When a man sits down to dinner and begins to notice that one of the
   dishes is chipped and one of the roses in the center has an insect on
   it and the saltshaker is not in the right position to half an inch, and
   the parsley is not nicely arranged around the cold meat, that fellow is
   not hungry. Try a poor dockyard laborer, or, better still, his wife and
   children, and they will eat meat without mustard, and bread without
   butter. The hungry man will eat fat as well as lean, I guarantee you.
   Preaching would not so often be submitted to silly remarks if men were
   really hungry after the Truth of God.

   "Give me a knife and a chance," says the man who is hungry. "Give me
   the Gospel," says the anxious enquirer, "and I care nothing for the
   eloquence." Beloved, I wish you may so hunger and thirst after
   righteousness, that trifles may be trifles to you and the essential
   Truth of God be your only care.

   But alas, there are some that we are sure do not hunger and thirst
   after righteousness, for they do not care even to hearabout it. When
   your boy stays out in the road at dinnertime, you may be sure that he
   is not very hungry. The dinner bell is a very prevailing reasoner when
   it finds its arguments within the listener. As soon as there is
   notification that food is to be had, the hungry man hastens to the
   table. I would to God we had more spiritually hungry people to preach
   to. He would be a blessed preacher who preached to them, for he would
   be preaching to a blessed people. "Blessed are they which do hunger and
   thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled."

   II. I have very feebly given you the description of the character and
   now I come to notice the REMARKABLE DECLARATION of our Lord. He says,
   "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness."

   This is a paradox. It does not seem possible that people should be
   hungry and thirsty and yet blessed. Hunger and thirst bring pain. I
   know you, my Friend, you are here this morning and you are saying
   within yourself, "Oh, that I could be right! I am a great sinner; oh,
   that I were forgiven! Oh, that I could become righteous before God!"
   Another is saying, "I trust I am forgiven and saved. But I feel a
   dreadful fear lest I should fall into sin. O wretched man that I am, to
   have sinful tendencies! Oh, that I could be perfect and altogether
   delivered from this embodied death which surrounds me in the form of a
   sinful nature!"

   Or, perhaps, another friend sitting here is crying, "God has been very
   gracious to me. But my children, my husband, my brother--they are
   living in sin and these are my daily burdens. I have come here with a
   very heavy heart because they know not the Lord."

   Hearken, dear Friend, and be encouraged. Whatever form your hunger
   after righteousness may take, you are a blessed person. Albeit that you
   endure that pain about yourself and others, you are blessed. Hunger and
   thirst often cause a sinking feeling and that sinking feeling sometimes
   turns to a deadly faintness. It may be I am speaking to one who has
   reached that stage. To him I say, "You are blessed." I hear you
   sighing, "Oh, that I could be what I want to be! O wretched man that I
   am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

   "These inward corruptions, these evil imaginations, they will kill me,
   I cannot bear them. God has taught me to love what is good and now to
   will is present with me but how to perform that which is good, I find
   not. Even my prayers are interrupted by wandering thoughts and my tears
   of repentance have sin mixed with them." Beloved, I understand that
   faintness and sinking, that groaning and pining. But, nevertheless, you
   areblessed, for the text says it, and it is a very remarkable saying,
   "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness."

   Why are they blessed? Well, first, because Jesus says they are. And if
   He says it, we do not need any further proof. If, looking round on the
   crowd, our Lord passes by those who are self-satisfied, and if His eyes
   light on the men that sigh, and cry, and hunger and thirst after
   righteousness and if, with smiling face, He says, "These are the
   blessed ones," then depend upon it--they are so. For I know that those
   whom He declares to be blessed must be blessed, indeed. I would rather
   be one whom Christ counted blessed, than one who was so esteemed by all
   the world--for the Lord Jesus knows better than men do.

   The man hungering after righteousness ought to consider himself a happy
   man, because he has been made to know the right value of things.
   Before, he set a high value upon worthless pleasure, and he reckoned
   the dross of the praise of men to be as pure gold. But now he values
   righteousness and is not as the child who prizes glass beads more than
   pearls. He has already obtained some measure of righteousness, for his
   judgment reckons rightly. He ought to be thankful for being so far
   enlightened.

   Once he put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter--darkness for light
   and light for darkness. But now the Lord has brought him to know what
   is good and what it is that the Lord does require of him--in gaining
   this right judgment he is a blessed man and on the way to still greater
   blessedness!

   Observe, further, that not only does he estimate things correctly, but
   he has a heart towards that which is good and desirable. Once he only
   cared for earthly comforts. Now he hungers and thirsts after
   righteousness. "Give me a bit of meat in the pot," cries the worldling,
   "and I will leave your precious righteousness to those who want it."
   But this man prizes the spiritual above the natural--righteousness is
   happiness to him. His one cry is, "Give me righteousness."

   His whole heart is set on it and this is no mean privilege. He that is
   filled with the desire of that which God approves, is himself approved.
   To such a man is given a magnanimity which is of more than royal
   nature, and for it, he should be grateful to God. He is blessed
   because, in the presence of this hunger, many meaner hungers die out.
   One master passion, like Aaron's rod, swallows up all the rest. He
   hungers and thirsts after righteousness. And, therefore, he has done
   with the craving of lust, the greed of avarice, the passion of hate,
   the pining of ambition.

   We have known sickly men to be overtaken by a disease which has driven
   out their old complaints--a fresh fire has put out the former ones. So
   men, under the influence of a craving for righteousness, have found
   hunger for land, and hunger for gold, and thirst for pride and lust, by
   God's Divine Grace, come to an end. The new affections have expelled
   the old. Even as the Israelites drove the Canaanites into the
   mountains, or slew them, God alone can give this hungering and
   thirsting after righteousness. And it is one of its grand qualities
   that it drives out the groveling and sinful lusting which otherwise
   would consume our hearts.

   These men are blessed by being delivered from many foolish delusions.
   The delusion is most common that man can get everything that he needs
   in religion out of himself. Most men are deluded in this way--they
   think they have a springing well of power within from which they can
   cleanse and revive and satisfy themselves. Try a hungry man, or a
   thirsty man with this doctrine, "My dear fellow, you need not be
   hungry--you can satisfy yourself from yourself." What is his answer? "I
   have tied a hunger belt around myself to keep down the hunger. But even
   that I did not find within myself. I am hungry and must have food from
   outside, or I shall die."

   He cannot eat his own heart, nor feed upon his own liver--it is not
   possible for him to satisfy his hunger from himself. The common
   spiritual delusion of men is of like kind. They imagine that they can,
   by an effort of their own, satisfy conscience, make themselves pure,
   and produce righteousness of character. Still do they dream of bringing
   a clean thing out of an unclean. Let spiritual hunger and thirst come
   upon them and they escape from this snare. The man cries, "Self-trust
   is a refuge of lies, I must be helped from Above. I must be saved by
   Divine Grace, or I shall remain unrighteous to the end." Spiritual
   hunger and thirst are wonderful teachers of the Doctrines of Grace and
   very speedy dispellers of the illusions of pride.

   Once again--these men are blessed because they are already worked upon
   by the Holy Spirit. Hunger and thirst after righteousness are always
   the production of the Holy Spirit. It is not natural for man to love
   the good and the holy. He loves that which is wrong and evil. He loves
   the trespass or the omission, but strict rectitude before God he does
   not seek after. When a man is hungry to be true, hungry to be sober,
   hungry to be pure, hungry to be holy--his hunger is a gift from Heaven
   and a pledge of the Heaven from which it came.

   Once more--this man is blessed, for in his hunger and thirst he is in
   accord with the Lord Jesus Christ. When our Lord was here, He hungered
   after righteousness, longing to do and suffer His Father's will. His
   disciples, on one occasion, went away to the city to buy meat. And He,
   being left alone, thirsted to bless the poor sinful woman of Samaria,
   who came to the well to draw water. To her He said, "Give me to drink,"
   not only to commence the conversation but because He thirsted to make
   that woman righteous.

   He thirsted to convince her of her sin and lead her to saving faith.
   And when He had done so, His desire was gratified. When His disciples
   came back, though He had not touched a morsel of bread, or a drop of
   water, He said, "I have meat to eat that you know not of. My meat is to
   do the will of Him that sent me and to finish His work."

   Our Lord, on the Cross, said, "I thirst," and that thirst of His lips
   and of His mouth was but the index of the deeper thirst of His heart
   and soul that righteousness might reign by His death. He died that the
   righteousness of God might be vindicated. He lives that the
   righteousness of God may be proclaimed. He pleads that the
   righteousness of God may be brought home to sinners. He reigns that
   this righteousness may chase out of this world the iniquity which now
   destroys it. When you hunger and thirst after righteousness in any of
   the shapes I have described, you are in a measure partakers with Christ
   and have fellowship with Him in His heart' s desire. As He is blessed,
   so are you, for "blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after
   righteousness."

   I think I must have astonished some who have been mourning and crying,
   "Oh, that the Lord would give me to live upon His righteousness and I
   would thank Him forever and ever!" Why, you are one of the blessed!
   "Alas," cries one, "I am pining to be delivered from sin--I do not mean
   from the punishment of it, Sir, but from the taint of it. I want to be
   perfectly pure and holy." Do you? My dear Friend, you are numbered
   among the blessed at this very moment.

   A great professor at your side in the pew is saying, "Blessed be God, I
   am perfect already" Well, I am not sure about that party' s
   blessedness. That fine bird is not mentioned in my text. But I am sure
   about yonder soul that hungers and thirsts after righteousness, for the
   Word is clear and plain--"Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst
   after righteousness."

   III. And now I close with the best of all, SPECIAL SATISFACTION.
   "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for
   they shall be filled."

   This is a singular statement. They are to be blessed while they hunger
   and thirst. If they become filled, will they still be blessed? Yes, and
   what is more, they will still hunger and thirst. You say that is
   strange. Yes, it is. But everything is wonderful in the kingdom of God.
   Paradoxes, in spiritual things, are as plentiful as blackberries. In
   fact, if you cannot believe a paradox, you cannot believe in Christ
   Himself, for he is God and Man in one Person--and that is a paradoxical
   mystery. How can one Person be infinite and yet finite? How can He be
   immortal and yet die?

   Ours is a Gospel wherein lies many an orthodox paradox. He that is
   filled by Christ hungers more than he did before, only the hunger is of
   another kind and has no bitterness in it. He that hungers most is the
   man who is full in the highest sense--

   "I thirst but not as once I did, The vain delights of earth to share.
   Your wounds, Immnanuel, all forbid That I should seek my pleasures
   there."

   Lord, when I get what You give me of Your Divine Grace, then I feel a
   new craving, which seeks after higher things! My soul enlarges by what
   it feeds upon and then it cries, "Give me still more." When a man
   leaves off crying for more, he may doubt whether he has ever received
   anything at all. Divine Grace fills and then enlarges. Increase of
   Grace is increase of capacity for Grace. Cry still, "Lord, increase my
   faith, my love, my hope, my every Grace! Enlarge my soul, that I may
   take in more and more of You!"

   Now I am going to show you how it is that we can be filled, even now,
   although still hungry and thirsty. For first, although we hunger and
   thirst after righteousness, we are more than filled with the
   righteousness of God. I do believe my God to be perfectly righteous,
   not only in His Nature and Essence, in His Law and judgment, but also
   in all His decrees, acts, words, and teachings. I sit down and
   anxiously peer into the dreadful truth of the eternal perdition of the
   wicked. But my heart is full of rest when I remember that God is
   righteous--the Judge of all the earth must do right.

   I cannot untie the knots of difficulty over which some men stand
   perplexed, but I know that God is righteous, and there I leave my
   bewilderments. God will see to it that the right thing is done in every
   case and forevermore. Moreover, as I see how iniquity abounds in the
   world, I am right glad that there is no iniquity in the Lord, my God.
   As I see error in the Church, I rest in the fact that no error finds
   countenance with Him. Wrongdoing seems to be everywhere--certain men
   would rend away every man's property from him and the opposite order
   would grind down the poor in their wages.

   But this is our anchor--there is a power which makes for righteousness,
   and that power is God. I am filled with joy as I see righteousness
   enthroned in God. Do you not know this gladness?

   Next, we are also filled with the righteousness of Christ. What if I am
   sinful, what if I have no righteousness that I dare bring before God.
   Yet--

   "Jesus, Your blood and righteousness My beauty are, my glorious dress."
   True, I have to cry with the leper, "Unclean, unclean." And yet, as a
   Believer in the Lord Jesus, I am justified in Him, accepted in Him--and
   in Him complete. God looks on me, not as Iam, but as Christ is. He sees
   me through the perfect obedience of the Well-Beloved and I stand before
   Him without condemnation., No, with full acceptance and favor. The more
   you think of the righteousness of Christ, the more it will fill you
   with grateful satisfaction--for His righteousness is far greater than
   your unrighteousness.

   Yet you will be crying all the same, "O Lord, perfect me in Your image,
   and give me righteousness!" A fullness of Divine content, even to
   running over, will be yours, while you sing, "There is therefore now no
   condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus." "Therefore being
   justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus
   Christ." You will be satisfied, first, with the righteous character of
   God, and next, with the plan of Divine righteousness revealed in Christ
   Jesus.

   Look at the sin of this world and groan over it. What a wicked world it
   is! Read of wars and oppressions, falsehoods and superstitions. Or, if
   you prefer, see with your own eyes the slums of East London, or the
   iniquity of our great folks in West London. And then you will hunger
   and thirst. But even concerning all this, you will be filled as you
   think of the atonement of Christ and remember that it is more sweet to
   God than all the sin of man is nauseous. The sweet savor of His
   sacrifice has removed from the thrice-holy God the reek of this
   dunghill world and He no longer says that it repents Him that He has
   made man upon the earth. Because of Christ's righteousness, the Lord
   God bears with guilty man and still waits, that He may be gracious to
   the earth and make it anew in Christ Jesus.

   Again, they that hunger and thirst after righteousness are filled with
   the righteousness which the Holy Spirit works in them. I do not say
   that they are satisfied to remain as they are, but they are very
   grateful for what they are. I am a sinner but yet I do not love sin--is
   not this delightful? Though I have to fight daily against corruption,
   yet I have received an inner life which will fight and must fight and
   will not be conquered. If I have not yet vanquished sin, it is
   something to be struggling against it. Even now, by faith we claim the
   victory. "Thanks be to God, which gives us the victory through our Lord
   Jesus Christ." Have you ever felt as if you were full to the brim, when
   you knew that you were, "begotten again unto a lively hope by the
   resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead"?

   Have you not been filled with delight to know that you were no longer
   what you used to be, but that you were now made a partaker of the
   Divine nature and elevated into the spiritual sphere, wherein you have
   fellowship with just men made perfect? Never despise what the Holy
   Spirit has done for you. Never undervalue Divine Grace already
   received. But, on the contrary, feel a Divine delight, a filling-up of
   your heart, with what the Lord has already done. Within your soul,
   perfection lies in embryo--all that you are yet to be is there in the
   seed. Heaven slumbers in repentance, like an oak within an acorn. Glory
   be to God for a new heart--glory be to God for life from the dead!

   Here we are filled with thankfulness. And yet we go on hungering and
   thirsting that the blessing which God has given may be more fully
   enjoyed in our experience and displayed in our life.

   Brethren, I can tell you when again we get filled with righteousness
   and that is when we see righteousness increasing among our fellow men.
   The sight of one poor child converted has filled my heart for a week
   with joy unspeakable. I have talked frequently--I did last week--with
   poor people who have been great sinners and the Lord has made them
   great saints, and I have been as filled with happiness as a man could
   be. A dozen conversions have set all the bells of my heart ringing
   marriage-peals and kept them at it by the month together.

   It is true that I might have remembered with sadness the multitudes of
   sinners who are still perishing, and this would have made me go on
   hungering and thirsting as I do. But still, a score or two of
   conversions have seemed so rich a blessing that I have been filled with
   joy even to overflowing. Then have I felt like good old Simeon, when he
   said, "Lord, now let Your servant depart in peace: for mine eyes have
   seen Your salvation." Do you not know what this means? Perhaps not, if
   you are a big man and must do everything on a big scale.

   But for a poor soul like I am, it has been Heaven enough to save a
   single soul from death. I reckon it a great reward to save a little
   child. It is bliss to me to bring a humble working man to the Lord's
   feet and see him learning the way of righteousness. Oh, try it,
   Beloved! Try and see if hunger after the souls of men will not be
   followed by a fullness of delight, which will again lead on to further
   hunger to bring back lost sheep to Christ's fold. You will never say,
   "I have had many conversions, and therefore I am satisfied to have no
   more." No, the more you succeed, the more you will hunger and thirst
   that Christ' s kingdom may come in the hearts of the sons of Adam.

   By-and-by we shall quit this mortal body and we shall find ourselves in
   the disembodied state, "forever with the Lord." We shall have no ears
   and eyes, but our spirit will discern and understand without these dull
   organs. Set free from this material substance, we shall know no sin.
   Soon will sound the resurrection trumpet and the spirit will enter the
   refined and spiritualized body and perfected manhood will be ours. Then
   the man will have his eyes but they will never cast a lustful glance.
   He will have his ears, but they will never long for unclean talk. He
   will have his lips but they will never

   lie.

   He will have a heart that will always beat truly and obediently--there
   will be nothing amiss within his perfect manhood. Oh, what a Heaven
   that will be to us! I protest that I want no other Heaven than to be
   with Christ and to be like He is. Harps for music, and crowns for honor
   are little as compared with the "kingdom of God and His righteousness."
   Then shall we be filled with righteous society. You will not have to
   watch your tongue, for fear somebody should make you an offender for a
   word.

   You will not be plagued with idle chit-chat and silly gossip when you
   get to Heaven. You will hear no lying there, you will hear nothing that
   derogates from the infinite majesty of the Most High. Everybody will be
   perfect. Oh, will you not delight yourself in the abundance of
   righteousness? And then your Lord will descend from Heaven with a shout
   and the dead in Christ shall rise and He shall reign with them upon the
   earth, King of kings and Lord of lords.

   Then will come a thousand years of perfect peace and rest, and joy and
   glory. And you will be there. What a swimming in a sea of righteousness
   will be yours! You will then be like Christ in all things and all your
   surroundings will agree with His. Heaven and earth shall link hands in
   righteousness. Eternity will follow with its unbroken blessedness.
   There shall be no impurity in the kingdom of the blessed God. No devil
   to tempt, no flesh to corrupt, no want to worry, nothing to disturb.
   But you will be--

   "Far from a world of grief and sin, With God eternally shut in." Oh,
   this will be to be filled with righteousness!

   My Hearers, you will never be filled unless you hunger first. You must
   hunger and thirst here, that you may be filled hereafter. If you are
   hungering and thirsting, what should you do? Look to Jesus, for He
   alone can satisfy you. Believe on our Lord Jesus Christ. Believe on Him
   now, for He is made of God unto us righteousness. And if you want
   righteousness you will find it in the Lord Jesus Christ, the
   Only-Begotten Son of God.

   I am sure those dear Friends who called out so loudly just now, will
   join with me in crying out from the heart, "AMEN! AMEN!" May everybody
   here begin to hunger and thirst after righteousness at once. Let us all
   say, "AMEN."
     __________________________________________________________________

The Inner Side of Conversion

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S-DAY MORNING, SEPTEMBER 15, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself thus: You have chastised
   me and I was chastised, as a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke: turn You
   me and I shall be turned. For You are the Lord my God. Surely after
   that I was turned, I repented; and after that I was instructed, I smote
   upon my thigh: I was ashamed, yes, even confounded, because I did bear
   the reproach of my youth. Is Ephraim My dear son? Is he a pleasant
   child? For since I spoke against him, I do earnestly remember him
   still: therefore My heart is troubled for him. I will surely have mercy
   upon him, says the Lord." Jeremiah 31:18-20.

   THERE are turning points in most lives. We go on in a straight line for
   a certain distance but suddenly we come to a place where we must make a
   choice of roads. All the rest of our journey may depend upon what we do
   at those particular points. Character often hinges on a day's resolve.
   Every now and then we meet with a man who has seemed hopeful enough
   till he has taken a wrong turn. And ever since then we have heard it
   said of him that "he has gone bad." That is a common and expressive
   phrase for going in the wrong direction openly and boldly. The man was
   not right before, but now he is wrong in conduct--heart and life rush
   together down a steep place into the sea of ruin.

   On the other hand, the world may not often notice it, but the lovers of
   the souls of men observe, with great gladness, that men and women are
   suddenly pulled up and caused to turn in the right direction. I meet
   with many who were once gay and frivolous, who are now, "much tumbled
   up and down in their thoughts," as Master Bunyan would have said. And I
   mark their regret, their hope, their trust, their brave resolve, their
   deliverance by the help of God, and their firm choice of that right
   road which they, from now on, follow earnestly. Their way is now
   upward, ever upward--a toilsome and rugged way it may be--but a safe
   and a right way, which leads them to, "glory and honor and
   immortality."

   There are many turning points and places of deliberation in the
   pilgrimage of life. To some, those turning points come very early in
   youth--while they are yet boys and girls they are visited in conscience
   and impressed in spirit. And blessed are they if they then and there
   seek the Lord. For they shall find Him, to the joy of their whole
   lives. To young men and maidens there are stations on the line of life
   where they are called upon to decide as to their future road. Again and
   again the warning voice is heard, "Change here for holiness and eternal
   life."

   The lad is to be bound apprentice, or he is to take his first
   situation, or for some other reason he is, for the first time, to leave
   his father's roof--let him look upon this occasion as one of the most
   important seasons of his life. The night before he goes away will be,
   to that youth, if he is wisely led, a time for especially committing
   himself to God. When, for the first time, facing public life, the youth
   may well hear a voice saying to him, "Choose this day whom you will
   serve." The whole of his future may depend upon how he begins in the
   house of business--the first step may influence every other.

   When men and women are about to be married, how much of life then
   trembles in the balances! Upon the choice of a partner in life the
   fashion of that life may depend. Whether self or Christ--the world or
   God--shall be the master motive of the household, may be decided by the
   finger which wears the plain gold ring. Too often is marriage entered
   on frivolously. And yet, if one could see all the bearings of it, for
   good or for evil, one would judge the fullest consideration and the
   most prayerful thought to be nothing more than the demand of common
   sense on such a subject.

   Changes in business, removals of residence, promotion to higher
   positions, or serious losses--all make new starting points. Birthdays,
   new years, graves wet with tears, or strange events in personal history
   have all become turning points in life's ways. Fierce temptations have
   also brought the lives of men to pauses and then to onrushes, which
   have contin-

   ued to give force to all the rest of their existence. To yield at a
   certain moment has meant slavery for life. To overcome has meant
   eternal triumph.

   Joseph's career was determined by that grave moment in which he fled
   from the allurement of sin and left his garment in the tempter's hands.
   By that flight he prepared his way to become the savior of Egypt and
   the benefactor of his father's house. Take heed, my Brother, when you
   are tempted. For the next minute may be the pivot of your life. An
   interesting book has been written upon "Turning Points in Life," and it
   is capable of indefinite extension. According to a man's station and
   disposition, those turning points take place at different periods. But
   whenever they are before us, they call for special prayer and trust in
   God.

   There is, however, one turning point, and one only, which will secure
   salvation and eternal life. And that is what we call conversion, which
   is the first apparent result of regeneration, or the new birth. The man
   being renewed, the current of his life is turned--he is converted. Of
   this turning point I desire to speak this morning, so far as pain and
   weakness will permit.

   The text tells us a great deal about this turning--it is wonderful how
   clearly it describes it. The Bible must have been written by our
   Creator, for nobody but the Lord who created men could know so much
   about them. This volume reveals the secrets of all hearts. It unveils
   our private thoughts. "The Law of the Lord is perfect, converting the
   soul." And that conversion which it works, it describes as none else
   can. Every touch is true to nature and marks the hand of One who is
   within us as well as round about us. As you listen, may the Holy Spirit
   teach many of you what salvation means--may He turn you--and you will
   be turned.

   In our text we have man at the turning points as God observes him. "I
   have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself." Then we have man just
   after the turning point, when he says, "Surely after that I was turned,
   I repented; and after that I was instructed, I smote upon my thigh."
   And then, thirdly, we have God viewing man at that turning point,
   crying with holy joy, "Is Ephraim My dear son? Is he a pleasant child?
   I will surely have mercy upon him, says the Lord."

   I pray that I may be enabled, in plain and simple language, to describe
   that inner and vital experience with which many of you are well
   acquainted but which may, to others, still seem a strange thing.

   I. First, here is MAN AT THE TURNING POINT AS GOD OBSERVES HIM. Is not
   that a wonderful Word of the Lord--"I have surely heard Ephraim
   bemoaning himself? Of a certainty the Lord hears all the sorrowful
   voices of men. It may be that nobody else has heard you--you would be
   very sorry that they should. But the Lord says, "I have surely heard
   Ephraim bemoaning himself." You did not speak, you could not put your
   feelings into words--your utterance was a moan, a piteous noise, such
   as an animal might give forth--a moaning like that of a cow in pain.

   The word here used, if you pronounce it deliberately, conveys its own
   meaning by its sound. The Lord hears "surely"--that is to say, He hears
   the sense and meaning of our wordless moans--He puts into language that
   which no words of ours could express. The Lord understands us better
   than we understand ourselves. Concerning the man here described, we
   note that he is in a state of great sorrow about himself. He is not
   bemoaning the dead but he is bemoaning himself. His moans are not about
   his lost money or estate--he may be poor, but this is not his present
   grief.

   His moans are not about his bodily pains--he may be sickly but his
   distress is in his spirit rather than in his flesh. His moans are not
   now about the bitterness of his lot, the weariness of his daily toil,
   or the oppression of the proud. No, he bemoans himself, himself only.
   This is sorrow, indeed. The grief is within. All the water outside the
   ship is of small account. It is when the leak admits the water to the
   hold that there is danger. "Let not your heart be troubled"--it matters
   something if your country or your house is troubled. But to you, the
   trying matter is if your heart is troubled.

   We read that David's heart smote him--that is an ugly blow, against
   which there is no shield. "The spirit of a man will sustain his
   infirmity. But a wounded spirit, who can bear?" This is what the Lord
   tenderly notes about the sinner at the turning point, that he bemoans
   himself. His first and deepest grief is that he himself is in an evil
   case. He moans his own sad plight. Ah me, nothing is such a bitter
   fountain to myself as myself! My Soul, you are in some respects my sole
   misery! You are my very self. And if you are wrong, all is wrong. My
   Soul, how is it with you? What am I? Where am I? And where am I going?
   Lost! Lost! What have you lost? Alas, I have lost myself! Thus the
   Lord, "heard Ephraim bemoaning himself."

   This bemoaning was addressed to his God. This is a very hopeful point
   about it--he cried to Jehovah, "You have chastised me and I was
   chastised." His deep trouble is poured out unto his God. It is a
   blessed thing when a man in his

   distress turns to his God and not from him. It is well when the
   troubled heart cries, "Oh, that I knew where I might find Him! That I
   might come even to His seat! I would order my cause before Him and fill
   my mouth with arguments."

   Is it so with any of you here present? Have you given up running to
   your neighbor? Is yours a grief with which no neighbor could
   understand? Does it afford you some relief to look God-ward? Does even
   your despair turn its almost stone-blind eyes in the direction of the
   sun? When you cry and moan, are those cries and moans unto God? Do you
   sit alone and keep silent to all else? And do you speak to God in
   secret? Then let me assure you that there is hope. I am glad, dear
   Friend, because I perceive that whatever bitterness may be in your
   heart, there will come a sweet ending to it.

   If the vessel's head is toward the Lord, no storm will ever sink it.
   You have come to a blessed turning point in your life when you are
   driven to address your sore complaints unto the Lord God. It is no work
   of mere nature when the heart talks with God. Look at the multitudes of
   prayers which unconverted men daily repeat. What dead formalities they
   are! They do not speak to God! They repeat a certain set of fine words
   to the air, or to the skies. But God is not there. A mouthful of words
   every morning and night, uttered without thought of the living God--to
   what end are these?

   True prayer sees God present and speaks to Him as to a living,
   listening Person. Hear how Ephraim spreads his case before God! Come,
   Heart, be of good cheer, some great good is coming to you, now that you
   are coming to God! If you are speaking to the Lord, though it is only
   in sighs and moans, He hears you, and He will answer you, and speak
   comfortably unto you.

   Notice how Ephraim in the text has spied out his God as having long ago
   dealt with him. He tells the Lord that He has chastised him--"You have
   chastised me and I was chastised." The man had not before observed the
   hand of God in his suffering--but he does now. He lost his wife--he did
   not see God in this stroke chastening him. His children were taken from
   him--he did not see the hand of God even in that affliction. I see the
   suffering man before me--he has been brought low by sickness. But he
   has not considered who it is that has weakened his strength in the way
   and shortened his days.

   His spirits sink, his mind is wretched. He has not yet felt that it is
   the hand of the Lord which is heavy upon him. It is a mark that the
   careless heart has come to a change, when the man who had not God in
   all his thoughts now sees Him in his life and cries, "You have
   chastised me." I have hope of that man who sees God's hand, even though
   he sees only a rod in it.

   In this case, "You have chastised me and I was chastised," would seem
   to mean that it was a very sore punishment-- he was indeed,
   chastised--there was no mistaking the smart. Our heavenly Father does
   not play with the rod. When He deals the blow, He means that it shall
   be felt. "You have chastised me and I was chastised--I felt it and I
   bemoan myself because of it." I may be speaking to some here who are
   smarting, even now, under the afflicting hand of God. Let them
   acknowledge that hand--turn to Him that smites them and kiss the hand
   which inflicts the blow--so shall the rod of the Lord be turned away
   from them, and they shall know that in very faithfulness He has
   afflicted them.

   But the mourner in our text means more than this by his moans--he owns
   that the chastening had not set him right. "You have chastised me, and
   I was chastised." And that was all. He had smarted but he had not
   submitted. He had not obeyed but had still further rebelled. He was "as
   a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke." He was like the unbroken calf,
   which cannot bear the yoke and will not work in the furrow--which,
   being goaded--kicks back at the driver and thus hurts itself all the
   more with the goad.

   Human nature is restive under the yoke of the Law. Its shoulder will
   not endure the pressure of the command. When sin brings sorrow as its
   wage, the proud spirit of man is angered and he resents that which God
   justly lays on him. In the time of his affliction many a man sins more
   and more. Now it may happen that I am speaking to a person here whose
   portrait is photographed in this verse. God has chastised you, but all
   that has come of it is that you have been chastised-- you have not
   yielded, you have not repented, you have not made confession of sin.
   You have not asked for mercy through the Lord Jesus Christ.

   This is a very sad and dangerous state of things. Every chastisement
   which ends in chastisement--and produces no salutary fruit--not only
   involves solemn responsibility but it casts a sevenfold blackness over
   future guilt. He that goes astray over the thorn-hedge of affliction is
   not likely to return. May God save us from unsanctified chastisements,
   for they are full often the outriders of destruction! "He, that being
   often reproved hardens his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that
   without remedy."

   Ephraim feels this and fears the result of having been thus obstinate
   towards God. Was there not grave reason for fear? If the fire will not
   separate the dross from the lump of ore, what is to be done with it,
   but to cast it away as reprobate? What is the Lord to say to those whom
   He has chastised in vain but this--"Ephraim is joined unto his idols:
   let him alone"? If the rampant young bullock will not bear the yoke,
   bring forth the axe. That which will not bend shall break--that which
   cannot be mended must be thrown away.

   Yet there is something better than this. The mourner in our text
   despairs of all but God. He cannot turn himself and chastisement will
   not turn him. He has no hope left but for God Himself to interpose.
   "Turn You me and I shall be turned." Lord, You did send a fever--it has
   burnt me but it has not melted me! Let Your love do what Your furnace
   could not! Lord Jesus, come Yourself and melt this iron heart! Lord,
   You have sent death and he has frightened me, but he has not changed
   me!

   Come Yourself and do by Your life what the fear of death could not!
   Lord, I have been subjected to pains and plagues that might have broken
   the pride of a Pharaoh, but I have been exceedingly obstinate and have
   wickedly stood out against You. Come Yourself, with Your own almighty
   Grace and conquer even me! Turn You me and I shall be turned. But I
   despair of any other power ever working conversion in me.

   Surely, it does not need that I speak with any powerful language to my
   dear hearers this morning when I beseech you to make your personal
   appeal to the Lord Himself. If you have not yet yielded to the love of
   God in Christ Jesus our Lord, and if outward means have up to now
   failed--if even the sadness of your life has not been the means of
   bringing thought into your heart and repentance into your soul, then
   cry to the Lord God and entreat Him by His Holy Spirit to deal with
   you. You are driven into a corner--nothing can save you now but the
   Lord God Himself. Cry to Him, for you have no other hope.

   Pray, "Turn You me, O Lord, for You only can turn me. O Lord, place
   Your hand upon the helm of my ship and turn it as You will! Come into
   my vessel, O Lord Jesus, for my ship is driven with winds and tossed
   with waves! Come You and take supreme command, and be both Captain and
   Pilot to me! Turn You me and I shall be turned."

   Holy Scripture plainly teaches us that although man is a free agent,
   yet the Lord can control his will without destroying it. He can turn
   the will and heart by forces which act in perfect harmony with the laws
   of the human mind. He can make us as freely turn as if there were no
   constraint. And yet the glory of every holy movement and turn shall be
   due unto the Lord, alone. My Hearer, you may rightly and wisely pray at
   this hour--"Lord, if Your judgments fail, let Your Grace prevail. If
   afflictions are too feeble, set Your Omnipotent Grace to work. Turn me
   and I shall be turned."

   To all this confession, poor bemoaning Ephraim adds another word,
   whereby he submits to the supreme sway of Jehovah his God--"For You are
   the Lord, my God." Happy is that heart which, in its despair, throws
   itself at the feet of its covenant God, crying, "You are the Lord, my
   God"! He does as good as say--Man cannot help me. I cannot help myself.
   Even Your chastenings have not availed to turn me. Lord, I appeal to
   You, Yourself! You are Jehovah--You can do all things. You are my God,
   for You have made me. And therefore you can make me new. I pray You,
   therefore, exercise Your own power and renew Your poor broken and
   deified creature. Fashion me according to Your mind, that I may answer
   to Your purposes."

   Beloved Friends, I do not feel that I can preach, but I wish my heart
   could get at your hearts. I cannot do this--but may the mystic finger
   of the Holy Spirit now touch the hearts of any who are awakened and
   aroused but not decided. And may they be led to take the blessed step
   of casting themselves upon God as He is revealed in Christ Jesus,
   humbly saying, "You are the Lord, my God"!

   Thus I have dimly described the man at the turning point. And it only
   remains to note that all this was done and felt, not in pretense, but
   indeed, and of a truth. The Lord says, "I have surely heard Ephraim."
   What was said was truly said, so that God surely heard it. That
   experience which is not real and not really worked in the soul will
   prove to be nothing better than the painted pageantry of a dead soul--a
   disguise to go to Hell in. Pretend to no feeling which is not real.
   Profess no emotion which is not deeply and truly felt. In all things be
   sincere, and most of all be accurate when describing your inner
   condition before the heart-searching Jehovah.

   II. Secondly, let us hear MAN AFTER THE TURNING POINT. Here you have
   the description in the nineteenth verse. It begins with "Surely." Is it
   not very remarkable that each of these verses should be stamped with
   the hallmark,

   and each one bear the word, "surely"? The Lord said He had "surely
   heard Ephraim bemoaning himself." And here Ephraim says, "Surely after
   that I was turned, I repented."

   See, before us, prayer mixed with faith soon answered. Not many moments
   after Ephraim had said, "You are the Lord, my God," he felt that he was
   turned. He treats it as a matter of fact and speaks of "after that I
   was turned." There is a sacred moment in the life of the chosen of God
   in which he is turned. I do not think that every man can tell when that
   turning took place. But it did take place in the case of every saved
   one.

   Looking back, he has to look for the fruit of the turning. And that may
   be very perceptible, though the secret mystic work may in itself be
   hidden. In quickening the soul from its death in sin, there must be a
   moment in which the sinner is dead and another in which he lives. The
   actual transition from death to life must be instantaneous, though the
   signs of it may be gradual. "A point of time, a moment's space," works
   the inner transformation. Quick as a lightning flash is the
   implantation of the Divine life. The dead man lives at once--the
   condemned is in an instant pardoned.

   A man must be either condemned or forgiven, and this is a great change.
   The Divine life itself must either be there or not be there. And so
   there must be a true line over which the man passes, once and for all,
   when he proceeds from darkness into light, from death into life. "I was
   turned," says he. Many others of us can say, "I was turned." My Friend,
   do you remember when you were turned? Do you know your spiritual
   birthday and the spot of ground where Jesus unveiled His face to you?
   Some of us do, although others do not.

   The main point is to be turned. To know the place and time is a
   secondary matter. Yet I say some of us know when we were turned. And
   here is one reason why we remember it, for repentance came with
   turning. "After that I was turned, I repented." The man, when awakened,
   cried, "Break! Break! Break, O heart!" But it would not break. He said
   to himself, "I long to feel," but he could not feel--his heart seemed
   to be as an adamant stone. If he did, for a moment, experience a
   melting emotion, it passed away and his goodness was as the morning
   cloud, or as the early dew.

   But now, after he was turned, repentance came easily. No effort was
   required. The heart of stone had turned to flesh and the rock smitten
   by the Divine rod gushed with floods of penitential grief. "I
   repented," says he, meaning, I changed my mind about a thousand
   things--I loved what I had hated, I hated what I had loved. I loathed
   what had been called my pleasure. I longed for what I had despised as
   being dull and dreary. "I repented"--I felt deep sorrow for sin and I
   quit it to follow after obedience and holiness.

   Repentance is a sweet and sure evidence of a Divine conversion. He that
   is truly turned, turns his face to the wall to weep and pray. You can
   not make yourself repent. But when God has changed your heart, you will
   repent as naturally as the brook flows down the valley when once its
   bands of ice are thawed. "After that I was turned, I repented."

   Deep sorrow followed upon farther instruction. The Holy Spirit does not
   leave the convert but gives him further instruction. And out of that
   comes a sorer regret, a more complete self-abasement. "I smote upon my
   thigh," says Ephraim, even as the publican smote upon his breast. Do
   you not hear him cry, "Ah me, what have I done? What have I done?" His
   conviction was deeper, after he was instructed, than it had been
   before. God takes us into His school and He begins to show us the evil
   of sin--the great iniquity of rebelling against a God so good, so
   kind--against a Law so just, so righteous.

   And then we begin to abhor ourselves. Especially does the Holy Spirit
   instruct us as to the Person, and work, and love, and Divine Grace of
   our Lord Jesus Christ. And this makes us loathe ourselves still more.
   We begin to see that there is salvation in none other, but only in the
   Lord--and that His salvation by Christ Jesus is to be had for
   nothing--a free gift of Sovereign Grace. And that it is given at once
   to all who seek the Lord, believing in Christ Jesus, however great
   their guilt may be. Nothing makes a man smite upon his breast with a
   deep sorrow for sin like knowing the Grace of God as it is revealed in
   the suffering and death of the incarnate God.

   As a man knows more of himself, more of Christ, more of God, and more
   of the hereafter, he becomes indignant with himself and deals heavy
   blows at himself. "After that I was instructed, I smote upon my thigh."
   Want of knowledge tends to make men hardened, unfeeling,
   self-complacent, and proud. But when they are instructed by the Divine
   Spirit, then they are ready to inflict wounds upon themselves as worthy
   of buffetings and blows. "God be merciful to me a sinner" is a fit
   prayer for the instructed--and the lowliest posture well becomes such a
   one.

   To this deep sorrow there followed shame. Ephraim says, "I was ashamed,
   yes, even confounded." This man knew everything before. Now he knows
   nothing, but is confounded. Once he could dispute and dispute and
   dispute. But now

   he stands silent before his Judge. He formerly felt himself quite able
   to defend his own cause, but now he stands ashamed. Before he was
   turned, he might have raised objections to the Gospel--yes, raised them
   by the mile. And if you had answered a legion of them, he would have
   summoned another legion to his help.

   But now he proposes no defense, the blush mantles his cheek and he
   pleads guilty. It is very difficult to bring the sinner where he has
   nothing to say. But in this case the man is muddled, confused, ashamed,
   silenced--and has neither excuse nor extenuation to offer. He stands
   like a convicted felon, who, when he is asked by the judge if he has
   anything to say in stay of sentence, lays his hand on his mouth, and,
   blushing scarlet, confesses by his silence that he deserves to die.
   This is the man with whom Mercy can work her will.

   "Well," says one, "you are not painting a very pretty picture." No, I
   am not. But I am painting a truthful one. When God the Holy Spirit
   brings a man to the great turning point, He empties him, strips him and
   lays him low. One of the very first feelings of the new-born life is
   amazement, dismay, self-abhorrence, self-despair. Truth requires that
   such as we are by nature should be ashamed. It is no mock modesty. We
   ought to be ashamed, for we have acted shamefully. The Holy Spirit
   makes a man see this.

   What the man could once boast of, he could not now mention without
   disgust. He could formerly come forth, wearing a brazen forehead, but
   now he seeks holes and corners where he may hide his guilty face. He
   hangs his head and judges himself worse than the worst. He even wishes
   that he had never been born, or that he had been made a dog or a toad,
   rather than have been a man. God often brings men down to this
   condition in order that they may be on ground whereon He can meet them
   in the way of Divine Grace.

   Lastly on this point, memory now comes in and revives the reproach of
   youth. Memory is a very terrible torture to a guilty heart. "Son,
   remember!" is one of the voices heard in Hell. "I was ashamed, yes,
   even confounded, because I did bear the reproach of my youth." The
   formerly forgetful man now recollects what he used to be in years gone
   by. How convenient it is to forget. But how damnable! Forgotten sin
   steels the heart and blinds the conscience--and so destroys the soul.

   Ephraim had forgotten his green and foolish years when he was in the
   first fury of his sinful madness. Do you say to me, "I was sowing my
   wild oats then"? I answer, "You were sowing and soon will come the time
   for reaping." Go down, now, to the field and see what has come of your
   random life! Wild oats are seldom barren. I have known them grow up
   into a harvest of unquenchable flames! God has not forgotten your
   youthful provocation.

   Ah, when memory is awake, it piles huge piles of firewood upon the
   fires of remorse and the flame rises to the heavens. It is a great
   reproach to a man to have been a rebel in his youth--it shows how
   ingrained a traitor he is. I can only compare the sinner with a
   quickened memory to one who is traveling across the plains of Russia
   dreaming in his carriage and all of a sudden he is aroused by the sharp
   bark of a wolf behind him. And this is followed up by a thousand cruel
   voices of brutes, hungry and gaunt and grim, all eager for his blood.

   Listen to the patter of those eager feet! The howls of those hungry
   demons! From where did they come? You thought that your sins were dead
   long ago and quite forgotten. See, they have left their tombs! They are
   on your track. Like wolves, your old sins are pursuing you. They rest
   not day nor night. They prepare their teeth to tear you apart. Where
   will you flee? How can you escape the consequences of the past? They
   are upon you, these monsters--their hot breath is in your face--who can
   now save you?

   Only a miracle can rescue you from the reproach of your youth--will
   that miracle be worked? May we dare to look for it? We have something
   better than a mere hope to set before you. Jesus meets these packs of
   wolfish sins. He interposes between us and them. He drives them back!
   He scatters them! There is not one of them left! For our sakes He has
   borne reproach. He gave His back to the smiters and his cheeks to them
   that plucked off the hair--He hid not His face from shame and spitting.
   And by this substitution of Himself, He has set His people free. But
   till this is seen and known by faith, the man is in a hopeless
   state--neither is any in a more horrible condition. He is ashamed,
   confounded and crushed with reproach. All this is working a true and
   deep work in his soul. Better things are coming.

   III. Now we will turn and HEAR GOD AT THIS TURNING POINT. Picture the
   poor guilty creature, confounded, covered with reproach, unable to
   defend himself in the least degree. And then the God whom he has so
   greatly offended comes in and cries, "Is Ephraim My dear son? Is he a
   pleasant child?" Does this look like a question? The answer has been
   already given in the ninth verse of this same chapter--"I am a Father
   to Israel and Ephraim is My first-born."

   The gracious Lord sees Ephraim sore with chastisement, spent with
   weeping, pale with shame, and moaning with agony. And then his sonship
   is acknowledged. He bends over the crushed one and cries, "This is My
   son. This is My dear child." How gracious on God's part to acknowledge
   the guilty rebel as a son! What did the father do in the parable, when
   he saw his son a great way off? He knew him to be his son and he had
   compassion and ran and fell upon his neck and kissed him.

   God is eager to receive returning prodigals. The Lord as good as says,
   "He is My dear son. He is a pleasant child"! The sinner that despairs
   of self-salvation is "my dear son"! The sinner who bemoans himself for
   his transgressions is "a pleasant child"! How can it be? The heart of
   the Father in Heaven has great depths in it, unfathomable by our poor
   limited natures. We are told, sometimes, that there is joy in the
   hearts of angels over sinners that repent. I do not doubt the fact. But
   that is not the truth which the Bible tries to tell us. Holy Scripture
   says--"There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one
   sinner that repents."

   In whose Presence do the angels dwell? Why, in the Presence of God! The
   joy described in the parable of the finding of the lost sheep is the
   joy of God Himself over a repenting sinner! When a sinner is smiting
   upon his thigh, the Lord God is smiling on him. When he is ashamed and
   confounded, God is ready to own him as His dear Son. Oh, the heights
   and depths of sin-forgiving, sin-forgetting Grace! See, Beloved, here
   is love acknowledging the object of its choice--love confessing its
   near relationship to one most unworthy and most sorrowful.

   Then behold the same love well-pleased. The Lord does not merely say,
   "Ephraim is My son; yes, he is My child." But He calls him, "My dear
   son, a pleasant child." A pleasant child! Why, he has been full of
   rebellion from his birth! Yes. But he confesses it and mourns it. And
   he is a pleasant child when so much holy sorrow is seen in him. He is
   polluted with sin--his sins have ruined his beauty and diseased his
   soul! Yes, but he cried, "Turn me," and he has been turned--and now, by
   God's Grace, he is a pleasant child.

   What a marvel that the thrice holy Lord should ever take pleasure in a
   sinner! Yet a sinner on his knees is a delight to the heart of the
   All-Merciful. A sinner with his eye on the Cross, believing in the Lord
   Jesus, is very dear to the Father. I do believe that the great Lord
   would rather turn His eyes away from angels than fail to look upon a
   weeping pleader, crying, "God be merciful to me." "To this man will I
   look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembles
   at My word." O you kings and princes, with all your pomp and glory--you
   may knock at the door of Heaven and wait for notice!

   O you peers of the realm, you may go your ways and seek great things of
   God, but He will no more regard you than the servants at your doors!
   But if there is a poor, foul castaway--weeping and bemoaning
   himself--let him know that the Lord waits to be gracious unto him. When
   a son, a pleasant child, is before the Father, in sorrow and reproach,
   the Father's heart and eyes are both with him to bless him. He is a
   dear son, he is a pleasant child. He takes him to His bosom, not
   because of his goodness, but because of his relationship.

   Let me imagine a scene, such as our London homes have often seen. One
   of you has a little girl and she has behaved very badly during the day.
   Mother has threatened her with punishment for her continued
   ill-conduct. The child, in her bad temper, has run away. The evening
   comes on and where is Jane? Her brothers and sisters do not know. It is
   getting late. Where can she be? Has anybody seen her? No, she is not
   hidden away at home--every room has been searched.

   In alarm, someone is sent to the police station. Have you seen a little
   girl? No, they have not seen a little girl. It gets to be ten o'clock
   at night and the matter is very serious. Eleven strikes, like a knell.
   "Why don't you go to bed, dear Mother?" "Go to bed! Why, I am her
   mother!" and she breaks out with, "My child! My dear child!" Surely a
   little while ago she might have been called a good-for-nothing little
   chit--one might have been glad to miss the worrying little troubler.
   But now Mother cries, "My child! My dear child!"

   The clock strikes twelve. The small hours grow into great ages of
   grief. Father is troubled--he has been up and down the streets and
   searched everywhere. You meet him and you say, "Well, she was, after
   all, a very commonplace child and most obnoxious in disposition." "Ah,
   you do not know her. Oh, she was such a pretty girl! She had her
   peculiarities. But it makes me angry to hear a word against the dear
   child." Mother felt that she never knew before how much she loved that
   child!

   What is that? What? Is the wanderer found? What joy beams from every
   face! Could you have imagined that one naughty child could have made
   such a stir and caused such delight? Sinner, this is just what happens
   about you! Thus

   does the great God think of His wanderers and rejoice when He sees them
   returning home. When you cry, "Father!" He answers with, "Is he not My
   dear son? Is he not a pleasant child?" Love takes delight in repenting
   sinners.

   Notice, in this case, love in earnest. The Lord says, "Since I spoke
   against him, I do earnestly remember him still." Think of that, "/ do
   earnestly remember him still"! God in earnest--that is a great
   conception! God in earnest over one moaning sinner! God earnest in
   thoughts of love, even when He bids the preacher tell the offender of
   the wrath to come. He says, Go and thunder at him and let loose the
   lightning of the Law upon him--and yet I earnestly remember him with
   thoughts of love! Tell him he will be driven into everlasting fire if
   he repents not. And yet, in thus threatening him, I do earnestly
   remember him still.

   Go, Providence, and frustrate his designs! Go, Death, and take away his
   child! Yet in all this, there are earnest thoughts of love towards him.
   "Since I spoke against him," says God, "I do earnestly remember him
   still." These are charming words to me. They thrill my soul. I fear to
   handle them lest I brush off their bloom. God is never more in earnest
   to save a soul than when He is dealing roughly with it.

   How I wish I could put my thoughts into your hearts at once--instead of
   having to dilute them by my own words-- and then see their strength
   watered down as they pass through your ears and your understanding and
   at last filter in drops into your hearts! May the Lord put His own
   thoughts into your souls by His holy Spirit, that you may know, in some
   measure, what His earnest remembrance means!

   Notice, next, love in sympathy. Ephraim is bemoaning himself and what
   is the Lord doing? He says, "My heart is troubled for him." God's heart
   is wounded when our hearts are broken! The tenderness of God is at
   work--His very life is stirred when a soul is crying to Him, "Turn me
   and I shall be turned"--Jehovah is in sympathy with Ephraim! When the
   rebel is moved with repentance, the forgiving Lord is moved with pity!
   God Himself repents of the evil with which He chastised the sinner when
   the sinner repents of the evil with which he grieved his God. Those are
   words which will bear much thinking on--"My heart is troubled for him."

   Then comes love in action--"I will surely have mercy upon him, says the
   Lord." I am so glad to think that the "surely" is found again in this
   place. "Surely" God heard Ephraim bemoaning. "Surely" he said that he
   was turned, and now God says, "Surely I will have mercy upon him." The
   Lord God puts His hand and seal to it. Sinner, He assuredly forgives
   you. As surely as you have been ashamed, so surely does He put away
   your reproach. Come to Him by Christ and He forgives you now. The bill
   of your debts is receipted--the handwriting which was against you is
   blotted out. The weight of your iniquity was laid on Christ Jesus of
   old and He Himself carried it away and hurled it into the abyss, so
   that it shall never be mentioned against you any more.

   "I will surely have mercy upon him, says the Lord." What great mercy,
   what full mercy, what eternal mercy, is this! Yield, then, your
   stubborn hearts to this immeasurable love. Be captives in the embrace
   of compassion. Can you resist the charms of goodness? When God comes
   forth with nothing in His heart but love and kindness, mercy and
   pardon, flee no longer from Him! Turn at His reproof.

   And may this day, even this very moment, be the day of salvation, the
   beginning of days to you! Then will we bid them ring the bells of
   Heaven, for there is joy today. May the Lord Himself have joy of you!
   May He, concerning you, rest in His love and rejoice over you with
   singing! O Lord, grant me the joy of leading many to Yourself by this
   sermon, through your Son, Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy
   Spirit! Amen. Amen. Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

Preparation for the Coming of the Lord

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S-DAY MORNING, SEPTEMBER 22, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "And now, little children, abide in Him. That, when He shall appear, we
   may have confidence and not be ashamed before Him at His coming." 1
   John 2:28.

   OUR first anxious desire is that our hearers would come to Christ. We
   lay ourselves out to lift Him up, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the
   wilderness and to bid men look to Him and live. There is no salvation
   except by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. He said, "Look unto Me and be
   you saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God and there is none
   else."

   When men have looked to Jesus, our next anxiety is that they may be in
   Christ, the City of Refuge. We long to speak of them as "men in Christ
   Jesus." My beloved Hearers, you must be in living, loving, lasting
   union with the Son of God, or else you are not in a state of salvation.
   That which begins with coming to Christ, as the engrafted branch is
   bound to the vine, continues in your growing into Him and receiving of
   His life. You must be in Christ as the stone is in the building, as the
   member is in the body.

   When we have good hope that our hearers have come to Christ and are "in
   Christ," a further anxiety springs up in our hearts that they may
   "abide" in Christ. Our longing is that, despite temptations to go away
   from Him, they may always remain at His feet. That, notwithstanding the
   evil of their nature, they may never betray their Master but may
   faithfully hold to Him. We would have them mindful of that precept--"As
   you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk you in Him." Oh, that
   they may be rooted in Him, and built up in Him--and may always be in
   union with Him! Then shall we present them to our Lord in the day of
   His appearing with exceedingly great joy.

   To this third anxiety of the minister of Christ I would give my mind
   this morning. John says, "Little children, abide in Him." How sweetly
   those words must have flowed from the lips and the pen of such a
   venerable saint! Methinks he is, in this, the echo of the Lord Jesus.
   For in the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, the Lord Jesus
   said, "Abide in Me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of
   itself, except it abide in the vine, no more can you, except you abide
   in Me. If you abide in Me and My Words abide in you, you shall ask what
   you will and it shall be done unto you."

   That word, "abide," was a very favorite one with the Lord Jesus and it
   became equally dear to that disciple whom Jesus loved. In our
   Authorized Version, the translators have interpreted it sometimes,
   "remain," and sometimes, "continue." But it is not very wise of them to
   have so changed the rendering. It is one of the virtues of the Revised
   Version that it generally translates the same Greek word by the same
   English word. This may not be absolutely requisite, for a little
   variety may be tolerated. But it is eminently instructive, since it
   allows us to see in our own mother tongue where the Holy Spirit used
   the same word. And if the translation is correct in one case, we may
   naturally conclude it will not be incorrect in another. "Abide," is one
   of John's special words.

   May the Lord help us to consider these blessed words! Better still, may
   He write them on our hearts and may we fulfill their teaching! First,
   notice to what he urges them--"abide in Him." Secondly, under what
   character he addresses them--"little children." And thirdly, by what
   motive he exhorts them--"that, when He shall appear, we may have
   confidence and not be ashamed before Him at His coming."

   I. First, then, OBSERVE TO WHAT HE URGES THEM--"Abide in Him." By this
   he meant one thing. But that thing is so comprehensive that we may
   better understand it by viewing it from many sides.

   He meant fidelity to the Truth taught by our Lord. We are sure he meant
   this, because, a little previously, in the twenty-fourth verse, he had
   said, "If that which you have heard from the beginning shall remain in
   you, you also shall continue in the Son and in the Father." Beloved,
   you have believed in the Lord Jesus Christ unto the salvation of your
   souls. You have trusted in Him as the Son of God, the appointed
   Mediator and the effectual Sacrifice for your sin.

   Your hope has come from a belief in Christ as God has borne witness to
   Him. Abide in the Truth which you received from the beginning--for in
   your earliest days it worked salvation in you. The foundation of your
   faith is not a changeable doctrine--you rest on a sure word of
   testimony. Truth is, in its very nature, fixed and unalterable. You
   know more about it than you did. But the thing itself is still the same
   and must be the same. Take care that you abide in it. You will find it
   difficult to do so, for there is an element of changeableness about
   yourself--this you must overcome by Divine Grace.

   You will find many elements of seduction in the outside world. There
   are men whose business it is to shake the faith of others, and thereby
   gain a reputation for cleverness and depth of thought. Some seem to
   think it an ambition worthy of a Christian to be always questioning,
   or, as the Apostle puts it, to be "ever learning and never able to come
   to the knowledge of the Truth." To throw doubt into minds which, by a
   gracious certainty, have been made blessed, is their chosen lifework.
   Therefore, you will be often led to try your foundation, and at times
   you will tremble as you cling to it.

   Hearken, then, to this Word from the mouth of the Holy Spirit--"Abide
   in Him." Stay where you were as to the Truth which you believe. That
   which has justified you, will sanctify you. That which has, in a
   measure, sanctified you, will yet perfect you. Make no change as to the
   eternal verities upon which you ground your hope. As a stone, you are
   built on the foundation--abide there. As a branch, you have been
   grafted into the stem--abide there. As a member, you are in the
   body--abide there. It is all over with you if you do not. Abide in that
   holy mold of doctrine into which you were at first delivered.

   Let no man deceive you with vain words, though there are many abroad in
   these days who "would deceive, if it were possible, the very elect."
   Abide in Jesus, by letting His Words abide in you. Believe what you
   have found to be the means of your quickening. Believe it with a
   greater intensity and a greater practicality. "Cast not away your
   confidence, which has great recompense of reward."

   Next, John means "abide in Him" as to the uniformity of your trust.
   When you first enjoyed a hope, you rested upon Christ alone. I think I
   heard the first infant prattle of your faith when it said--

   "I'm a poor sinner and nothing at all, But Jesus Christ is my All in
   All." At first you had no experience upon which you could rely, you had
   no inward Divine Graces upon which you could depend--you rested wholly
   upon Christ and His finished work. You rested in no degree upon the
   works of the Law, nor upon your own feelings, nor upon your own
   knowledge, nor upon your own resolves. Christ was all.

   Do you not remember how you used to tell others that the Gospel precept
   was, "Only believe"? You cried to them, "Trust in Jesus! Get out of
   yourselves! Find all your wants provided for in Him." Now, Beloved, you
   have experience-- thank God for it. Now you have the Graces of the
   Spirit--thank God for them. Now you know the things of God by the
   teaching of the Holy Spirit--be grateful for that knowledge. But do not
   now fly in the face of your Savior by putting your experience, or your
   Graces, or your knowledge, where He, and He alone, must be.

   Depend today as simply as you depended then. If you have some idea that
   you are hastening towards perfection, take care that you do not indulge
   a vain conceit of yourself. But even if it is true, still do not mix
   your perfection with His perfection, nor your advance in Divine Grace
   with the foundation which He has laid for you in His blood and
   righteousness. "Abide in Him." He is that good ship into which you have
   entered that He may bear you safely to the desired haven. Abide in the
   vessel--neither venture to walk on the water, like Peter--nor think to
   swim by your own strength. "Abide in Him," and you shall weather every
   storm.

   Only as you keep to your first simple confidence in the perfect work of
   the Lord Jesus can you have peace and salvation. As it is written, "You
   will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on You. Because he
   trusts in You."

   Moreover, abide in the Lord Jesus Christ in making Him the constant
   object of your life. As you live by Christ, so live for Christ. Ever
   since you trusted in Christ as dying for you, you have felt that if He
   died for you, then you died in Him--that from now on your life might be
   consecrated to Him. You are not your own but you are Christ's and
   Christ's only. The first object of your being is to honor and serve Him
   who loved you and gave Himself for you. You have not followed after
   wealth, or honor, or self-pleasing, but you have followed Jesus--take
   heed that you "abide in Him" by continuing to serve Him.

   "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any
   man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that
   is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the
   pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world
   passes away and the lust thereof: but he that does the will of God
   abides forever."

   You may wisely continue where you are, for you have chosen the right
   pursuit and you have entered upon the right road. That crown which
   glitters in your eyes at the end of the race is worthy of all your
   running. You could not have a nobler motive than the constraining love
   of Christ. To live for Christ is the highest style of living--continue
   in it more and more. If the Lord changes your circumstances, still live
   for Christ. If you go up, take Christ up with you--if you go down,
   Christ will go down with you. If you are in health, live for Christ
   earnestly. If you are bound to a sick bed, live for Christ patiently.
   Go about your business and sing for Jesus. Or if He bids you stay at
   home and cough away your life, then cough for Jesus. But let everything
   be for Him. For you, "Excelsior" means higher consecration, more
   heavenly living.

   Surely, we should also understand by, "Abide in Him," that we are to
   persevere in our obedience to our Lord. The next verse is, "If you know
   that He is righteous, you know that everyone that does righteousness is
   born of Him." What your Lord bids you, continue to do. Call no man
   Master, but in all things, submit your thoughts, your words, and your
   acts to the rule of the Lord Jesus. Obey Him by whose obedience you are
   justified. Be precise and prompt in your execution of His commands. If
   others reckon you morbidly conscientious, heed not their opinion but,
   "Abide in Him."

   The rule of the Master is always binding on all His disciples and they
   depart from Him in heart when they err from His rule. Reverence for the
   precept is as much included in our homage of Christ as credence of the
   doctrine. If you have been upright in your dealings, be upright. Be
   accurate to the penny in every payment. If you have been loving and
   generous, continue to be loving and generous. For your Lord's Law is
   love. If you have closely imitated the Lord Jesus, go on to copy Him
   still more minutely. Seek no new model--pray the Holy Spirit to work
   you to the same thing. To you, as a soldier, your Captain's word is
   Law--

   "Yours not to reason why, Yours but to dare and die."

   "Abide in Him." I know you might be rich by doing that un-Christly
   act--scorn to win wealth in such a way. I know you may involve yourself
   in persecution if you follow your Lord closely--accept such persecution
   gladly and rejoice in it, for His name's sake. I know that a great many
   would say that for charity's sake you had better make compromises and
   keep in union with evil doctrine and worldly practice. But you know
   better. Be it yours to follow the Lamb wherever He goes. For this is
   what His beloved Apostle means when he says, "Abide in Him."

   But I have not completed the full description yet. I fear I am not able
   to do so, by reason of my shallow knowledge and forgetfulness. Continue
   in spiritual union with your Lord. All the life you have is life
   derived from Him--seek no other. You are not a Christian except as
   Jesus is the Christ of God to you. You are not alive unto God, except
   as you are one with the risen Lord. You are not saved, except as He is
   your Savior. Nor righteous, except as He is your Righteousness. You
   have not a single pulse of heavenly desire, nor a breath of Divine life
   in you but what was first given you from Him and is daily given to you
   by Him.

   Abide in this vital union. Do not try to lead an independent life.
   "Abide in Him," in complete dependence from day to day upon the life
   which is treasured up in Him on your behalf. Let your life "abide in
   Him" in the sense of being directed by Him. The head directs all the
   members. The order which lifts my hand, or spreads my palm, or closes
   my fist, or lowers my arm, comes from the brain, which is the
   headquarters of the soul. Abide in your Lord by implicitly
   acknowledging His headship. Let every regulation of your life come from
   Him who is the Head, and let it be obeyed as naturally as the desires
   of the mind coming from the brain are obeyed by every part of the body.

   There is no war between the hand and the foot, for they abide in the
   head and so are ruled without force and guided without violence. If the
   leg were to set up an independent authority over itself, instead of
   obeying the head, what a strange walking we should see! Have you ever
   met with afflicted people in whom the nerves have lost vigor and the
   muscles seem to jerk at random and throw out a leg or an arm without
   reason? Such movements are painful to see and we know that such a man
   is diseased. Do not desire to be without Law to Christ. Let that mind
   be in you which was also in Christ Jesus--in that respect, "abide in
   Him."

   "Abide in Him" as the element of your life. Let Him encompass you as
   the air surrounds you on all sides. As a fish, whether it is the
   tiniest sprat or the largest whale, abides in the sea--so do you abide
   in Christ. The fish does not seek the sky or the shore, it could not
   live out of the element of water. And even so, I beseech you, do not
   seek to live in the world and in its sins. As a Christian, you cannot
   live there--Christ is your life. There is room enough for you in the
   Lord Jesus Christ, for He is the infinite God. Go not out of Him for
   anything. Seek not pleasure outside of Christ, nor treasure outside of
   Christ. For such pleasure or treasure would be ruinous. Have neither
   want, nor will, nor wish, beyond your Lord. Let Him draw a line around
   you and abide within that circle.

   "Abide in Him" in the sense of being at home in Him. What a world of
   meaning I intend by those words, "being at home in Christ"! And yet
   this is the sense of the words, "Abide in Him." I was speaking
   yesterday to a friend who had bought a pleasant house, with a large
   garden. And he said to me, "I now feel as if I have a home. I have
   lived in London for years and I have changed from one house to another
   with as little regret as a man feels in changing an omnibus. But I have
   always longed for the home feeling which hung about my father's house
   in the country.

   "Why, there we loved the cozy rooms and the look-outs from the little
   windows and the corner cupboards in the kitchen. As for the garden and
   the field, they yielded us constant delight, for there was that bush in
   the garden where the robin had built and the tree with the blackbird's
   nest. We knew where the pike lay in the pool and where the tortoise had
   buried itself for the winter and where the first primroses would be
   found in the spring. There is a vast difference between a house and a
   home."

   That is what John means with regard to Christ--we are not merely to
   call on Him but to abide in Him. Do not go to Jesus one day, and to the
   world another day--do not be a lodger with Him, but abide in Him. My
   friend spoke of changing from one omnibus to another, and I fear that
   some change from Christ to the world when the day changes from Sunday
   to Monday. But it should not be so. Say with Moses, "Lord, You have
   been our dwelling place in all generations." Your Cross is the tree of
   the family of love--within the thorn-hedge of Your suffering love our
   whole estate is shut in. Your name is posted on our home. We are not to
   You as tenants with a lease but we have a freehold in You. We can truly
   say and sing--

   "Here would I make a settled rest

   While others go and come-- No more a stranger or a guest, But like a
   child at home."

   Lord Jesus, I am at home nowhere but in You. In You I abide. Wherever
   else I lodge, I have in due time to shift my quarters. Whatever else I
   have, I lose it, or leave it. But You are the same and You change not.
   What a comfort to have our Lord Himself to be our chosen dwelling place
   in time and in eternity!

   Now I think I have come nearer to the full sense of my text! "Abide in
   Him," means hold fast to Him, live in Him, let all your noblest powers
   be drawn forth in connection with Him. As a man at home is all there,
   feel at ease in fellowship with Him. Say, "Return unto your rest, O my
   Soul, for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you."

   Why does the Apostle urge us to abide in Christ? Is there any
   likelihood of our going away? Yes. For in this very chapter he mentions
   apostates, who from disciples had degenerated into antichrists. He says
   of them, "They went out from us but they were not of us. For if they
   had been of us they would, no doubt, have continued with us." "Abide in
   Him," then, and do not turn aside unto crooked ways, as many professors
   have done. The Savior once said to His Apostles, "Will you, also, go
   away?" And they answered Him with that other question, "Lord, to whom
   shall we go?"

   I hope your heart is so conscious that He has the words of eternal life
   that you could not dream of going elsewhere. "But surely it is implied
   in these warnings that SAINTS leave their Lord and perish?" I answer,
   "No." Carefully observe the provision which is made against that
   fatality--a provision to enable us to carry out the precept of the
   text.

   Will you open your Testaments and just look at the verse which
   immediately precedes my text. What do you see? "You shall abide in Him.
   And now, little children, abide in Him." There is a promise made to
   those who are in Christ that they shall "abide in Him." But that
   promise does not render the precept unnecessary. For the Lord deals
   with us as with reasonable beings, not as with sticks and stones. And
   He secures the fulfillment of His own promise that we shall abide in
   Him, by impressing upon our hearts His sacred precept, whereby He bids
   us "abide in Him."

   The force He uses to effect His purpose is instruction, heart-winning
   and persuading. We abide in Him, not by a physical Law, as a mass of
   iron abides on the earth. But by a mental and spiritual Law, by which
   the greatness of Divine

   love and goodness holds us fast to the Lord Jesus. You have the
   guarantee that you shall abide in Christ in the Covenant engagement, "I
   will put My fear in their hearts, that they shall not depart from Me."
   What a blessed promise that is!

   You are to take care that you abide in Christ as much as if all
   depended upon yourself. And yet you can look to the promise of the
   Covenant and see that the real reason for your abiding in Christ lies
   in the operation of His unchanging love and Divine Grace. Moreover,
   Brethren, if you are in Christ Jesus, you have the Holy Spirit given
   you to enable you to abide in Him. Read the twenty-seventh verse--"But
   the anointing which you have received of Him abides in you and you need
   not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teaches you of
   all things and is truth and is no lie, and even as it has taught you,
   you shall abide in Him."

   The Holy Spirit brings the Truth of God home to your heart with savor
   and unction, endearing it to your inmost soul. The Truth of God has so
   saturated you through the anointing, that you cannot give it up. Has
   not your Lord said, "The water that I shall give him shall be in him a
   well of water springing up unto everlasting life"? Thus, you see that
   what is commanded in one Scripture is promised and provided for in
   another. To His people, God's commands are en-ablings. As He bids you
   abide in Him, so by that very bidding He causes you to abide in Him to
   His praise and glory.

   II. Secondly, notice UNDER WHAT CHARACTER JOHN ADDRESSES THESE
   BELIEVERS. He says, "And

   now, little children." This indicates the Apostle's love to them. John
   lived to a great age. The tradition is that they used to carry him into
   the assembly, and when he could do nothing else, he would lift his
   hand, and simply say, "Little children, love one another." Here, to
   show his tender concern for those to whom he wrote, he called them,
   "little children." He could not wish them a greater blessing out of the
   depth of his heart's affection, than that they should faithfully abide
   in Christ.

   Next, by this he suggests their near and dear relation to their Father
   in Heaven. You are the children of God. But as yet you are little ones,
   therefore do not leave your Father's house, nor run away from your
   elder Brother's love. Because you are little children, you are not of
   traveling years, therefore stay at home and abide in your Lord. Does he
   not hint at their feebleness? Even if you were grown and strong, you
   would not be wise to gather all together and wander away into the far
   country. But as you are so young, so dependent, so feeble, it is
   essential that you abide in Him. Shall a babe forsake its mother? What
   can you do apart from God? Is He not your life, your All?

   Does not the Apostle also gently hint at their fickleness? You are very
   changeable, like little babes. You are apt to be hot and cold in half
   an hour. You are this and that and fifty other things, in the course of
   one revolving moon. But, little children as you are, be faithful to one
   point--abide in your Savior. Change not towards your Redeemer. Stretch
   out your hands and clasp Him and cry--

   "My Jesus, I love You, I know You are mine, For You all the follies of
   sin I resign."

   Surrender yourself to Him by an Everlasting Covenant never to be
   cancelled. Be His forever and ever.

   Did not this remind them of their daily dependence upon the Lord's
   care, as little children depend on their parents? Why, Beloved, the
   Lord has to nurse you. He feeds you with the unadulterated milk of the
   Word. He comforts you as a mother does her child. He carries you in His
   bosom, He bears you all your days. Your new life is as yet weak and
   struggling--do not carry it into the cold atmosphere of distance from
   Jesus. Little children, since you derive all from Jesus, abide in Him.
   To go elsewhere will be to wander into a howling wilderness.

   The world is empty--only Christ has fullness. Away from Jesus you will
   be as a child deserted by its mother, left to pine and starve and die.
   Or as a little lamb on the hillside without a shepherd, tracked by the
   wolf, whose teeth will soon extract your heart's blood. Abide, O Child,
   with your mother! Abide, O Lamb, with your shepherd! We may all come
   under John's description at this time. The beloved John speaks unto us
   as unto little children, for we are none of us much more. We are not
   such wonderfully knowing people as certain of our neighbors--we are not
   such learned scientists and acute critics as they are--neither have we
   their marvelous moral consciousness, which is superior to inspiration
   itself.

   Therefore we are bound by our very feebleness to venture less than they
   do. Let the men of the world choose what paths they will--we feel bound
   to abide in Christ because we know no other place of safety. They may
   push off into the sea of speculation. Our smaller boats must hug the
   shore of certainty. To us, however, it is no small comfort that the
   Lord has revealed to babes the things which are hidden from the wise
   and prudent. Those who become as little children enter into the kingdom
   of Heaven.

   Cling to the Lord Jesus in your feebleness, in your fickleness, in your
   nothingness. And abidingly take Him to be everything to you. "The
   conies are but a feeble sort, yet they make their houses in the rocks."
   Be you like they are. Abide in the rifts of the Rock of Ages and let
   nothing tempt you to quit your stronghold. You are no lion, able to
   fight your foes and deliver yourself by main strength. You are only a
   little cony and you will be wise to hide rather than fight. "Little
   children, abide in Him."

   III. I now come to my last point, which is most important, for it finds
   steam to drive the engine. Thirdly, we shall consider BY WHAT MOTIVE
   JOHN EXHORTS US TO THIS PLEASANT AND NECESSARY DUTY OF ABIDING IN
   CHRIST.

   Kindly look at the text, for there is in it a little word to be
   noticed. The Apostle exhorts us by a motive in which he takes his
   share. Let me read it--"Now, little children, abide in Him. That, when
   He shall appear, you may have confidence." No, no. Look at that little
   word--it runs thus, "that WE may have confidence." The beloved John
   needed to have confidence at the appearing of the Lord and confidence
   fetched from the same source as that to which he directed his little
   children. They must abide in Christ, that they might have
   confidence--and the dearest of the Apostles must practice the same
   abiding. How wisely and yet how sweetly he puts himself upon our level
   in this matter!

   Notice, further, that the motive is one drawn from Jesus. John does not
   drive Believers with the lash of the Law--he draws them with the cords
   of love. I never like to see God's children whipped with rods gathered
   from the thorny sides of Sinai. We have not come to Mount Sinai but to
   Mount Zion. When a man tries to pommel me to my duty by the Law, I kick
   at the goad like a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke. And rightly so,
   "For you are not under the Law but under grace." The motive which sways
   a free-born heir of Heaven is fetched from Divine Grace and not from
   Law. It is from Jesus, not from Moses. Christ is our example and our
   motive, blessed be His name!

   The motive is drawn from our Lord's expected advent. Notice how John
   puts it. He uses two words for the same thing--"When He shall appear,"
   and, "at His coming." The second advent may be viewed in two lights.
   First, as the appearing of One who is here already but is hidden. And
   next, as the coming of One who is absent. In the first sense, we know
   that our Lord Jesus Christ abides in His Church--according to His
   words, "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." Yet,
   though spiritually present, He is unseen. Our Lord will, all of a
   sudden, be "manifested," as the Revised Version has it. The spiritual
   and secret Presence of Christ will become a visible and manifest
   Presence in the day of His appearing.

   The Apostle also uses the term, "at His coming," or, "His Presence."
   This is the same thing from another point of view. In a certain evident
   sense our Lord is absent--"He is not here, for He is risen." He has
   gone His way unto the Father. In that respect He will come a second
   time, "without a sin-offering, unto salvation." He who has gone from us
   will so come in like manner as He was seen to go up into Heaven. There
   is, then, a difference of aspect between the second advent when it is
   described as, "His appearing," and "His coming." John pleads the
   glorious manifestation of our Lord under both of these views as a
   reason for abiding in Him.

   As to our Lord's "appearing," he would have us abide in Christ, that we
   may have confidence when He appears. Confidence at His appearing is the
   high reward of constant abiding in Christ. The Apostle keeps most
   prominent "the appearing" as an argument. A thousand things are to
   happen at our Lord's appearing. But John does not mention one of them.
   He does not hold it up as a thing to be desired that we may have
   confidence amid the wreck of matter and the crash of worlds, when the
   stars shall fall like autumn leaves, when the sun shall be turned into
   darkness and the moon into blood.

   He does not mention that the graves shall be opened and the dead shall
   rise, or when the heavens, being on fire, shall be dissolved, and the
   elements shall melt with fervent heat--the earth also, and the works
   that are therein--shall be burned up. Those will be direful times, days
   of terror and dismay. But it is not of these that he speaks
   particularly. For he regards all these events as swallowed up in the
   one great fact of the glorious appearing of our Lord and Savior Jesus

   Christ!

   His desire is that we may have confidence if He appears all of a
   sudden. What does he mean by having confidence when He shall appear?
   Why, this--that if you abide in Him when you do not see Him, you will
   be very bold should He suddenly reveal Himself. Before He appears, you
   have dwelt in Him and He has dwelt in you. What fear could His
   appearing cause you? Faith has so realized Him, that if suddenly He
   were to appear to the senses, it would be no surprise to you.

   And, assuredly, it would cause you joy, rather than dismay. You would
   feel that you at last enjoyed what you had long expected, and saw
   somewhat more closely a Friend with whom you had long been familiar. I
   trust, Beloved, that some of us live in such a style that if, all of a
   sudden, our Lord were to appear, it would cause no alarm to us. We have
   believed Him to be present, though unseen, and it will not affect our
   conduct when He steps from behind the curtain and stands in the open
   light. O Lord Jesus, if You were now to stand in our midst, we should
   remember that we had Your presence before, and lived in it, and now we
   should only be the more assured of that which we before knew by faith.

   We shall behold our Lord with confidence, freedom, assurance and
   delight--feeling perfectly at home with Him. The Believer who abides in
   his Lord would be but little startled by His sudden appearing. He is
   serving his Lord now, and he would go on serving Him. He loves Him now,
   and he would go on loving Him. And because he would have a clearer view
   of Him, he would feel a more intense consecration to Him.

   The word translated "confidence" means freedom of speech. If our Divine
   Lord were to appear in a moment, we should not lose our tongue through
   fear, but should welcome Him with glad acclaim. To desert our Lord
   would rob us of that ease of mind which is betokened by free speech.
   But to cleave to Him will secure us confidence. We now speak to Him in
   secret, and He speaks again to us. We shall not cease to speak in tones
   of reverent love when He appears. I have preached concerning my Lord,
   while He is not seen, those Truths of God which I shall not blush to
   admit before His face.

   If my Lord and Master were, at this instant, to appear in His Glory in
   this Tabernacle, I would dare, with confidence, to hand Him the volumes
   of my sermons, in proof that I have not departed from His Truth, but
   have heartily continued in Him. I ought to improve in many things but I
   could not improve upon the Gospel which I have preached among you. I am
   prepared to live by it, to die by it, or to meet my Lord upon it if He
   should, this day, appear.

   O my Hearers, if you are in Christ, see to it that you so abide in Him
   that, should He suddenly appear, you would behold Him with confidence.
   If we abide in Him, if he were to unveil His majestic face, we might be
   overcome with rapture. But our confidence in Him would grow stronger,
   our freedom with Him would be even more enlarged and our joy in Him
   would be made perfect. Has He not prayed for us that we may be with
   Him, and behold His Glory? And can we be afraid of the answer to His
   loving prayer? If you abide in Christ, the manifestation of Christ will
   be your manifestation and that will be a matter of delight--not of
   fear.

   Beloved, if you do not abide in Him, you will have no confidence. If I
   were to compromise the Truth of God and then my Lord were to appear,
   could I meet Him with confidence? If, to preserve my reputation, or be
   thought liberal-minded, I played fast and loose with the Gospel, how
   could I see my Lord's face with confidence? If any of you have failed
   to serve your Master. If you have preferred gain to godliness, and
   pleasure to holiness--if He were suddenly to shine forth in His
   Glory--what confidence could you have in meeting Him?

   A good man was asked, one day, "If the Lord were now to appear, how
   would you feel?" He replied. "My Brother, I should not be afraid. But I
   think I should be ashamed." He meant that he was not afraid of
   condemnation but he blushed to think how little he had served his Lord.
   In this case it was genuine humility. I pray you, get not only beyond
   being afraid, but may the Lord make you so to abide in Him that you
   would not even be ashamed at His appearing!

   The other point is that you should "not be ashamed before Him at His
   coming." That means that having regarded Him as being absent, you have
   not so lived that, if He should suddenly be present in Person, you
   would be ashamed of your past life. What must it be to be driven with
   shame away from His Presence into everlasting contempt? The text may
   have such a meaning. What have you been doing while He has been absent?

   This is a question for a servant to answer at his employer's arrival.
   You are left in his house to take care of it while he is in the far-off
   country. And if you have been beating his servants and eating and
   drinking with the drunken, you will be greatly ashamed when he returns.
   His coming will be in itself a judgment. "Who may abide the day of His
   coming? And who shall stand when He appears?" Blessed is that man who,
   with all his faults, has been so sanctified by Divine Grace that he
   will not be ashamed at his Lord's coming.

   Who is that man? It is the man who has learned to abide in Christ. What
   is the way to prepare for Christ's coming? By the study of the
   prophecies? Yes, if you are sufficiently instructed to be able to
   understand them. "To be prepared for the Lord's coming," some
   enthusiasts might ask, "had I not better spend a month in retirement
   and get out of this wicked world?" You may, if you like. And especially
   you will do so if you are lazy. But the one Scriptural prescription for
   preparing for His coming is this: "Abide in Him."

   If you abide in the faith of Him, holding His Truth, following His
   example, and making Him your dwelling place, your Lord may come at any
   hour and you will welcome Him. The cloud, the Great White Throne, the
   blast of trumpets, the angelic attendants of the last assize, the
   trembling of creation, and the rolling up of the universe as a worn-out
   vesture will have no alarms for you. For you will not be ashamed at His
   coming.

   The date of that coming is concealed. When He shall come, no man can
   tell. Watch for Him and be always ready, that you may not be ashamed at
   His advent. Should a Christian man go into worldly assemblies and
   amusements? Would he not be ashamed should his Lord come and find him
   among the enemies of the Cross? I dare not go where I should be ashamed
   to be found should my Lord come all of a sudden. Should a Christian man
   ever be in a passion? Suppose his Lord should then and there come?
   Would he not be ashamed at His corning?

   One here says of an offender, "I will never forgive her. She shall
   never darken my doors again." Would you not be ashamed if the Lord
   Jesus came and found you unforgiving? Oh, that we may abide in Him and
   never be in such a state that His coming would be unwelcome to us!
   Beloved, so live from day to day in duty and in devotion that your
   Lord's coming would be timely. Go about your daily business and abide
   in Him, and then His coming will be a glorious delight to you.

   I called to see one of our friends and she was whitening the front
   steps of the house. She apologized very much and said that she felt
   ashamed of being caught in such a position. But I assured her that I
   should like my Lord to come and find me, just as I found her, doing my
   daily work with all my heart. We are never in better trim for seeing
   our Master than when we are faithfully doing His work. There is no need
   for a pious smartening up--he that abides in Christ always wears
   garments of glory and beauty. He may go in with his Lord into the
   wedding whenever the midnight cry is heard. Abide in Him and then none
   can make you ashamed. Who shall lay anything to your charge?

   He will come--behold, He is coming even now. Hear you not the sounding
   of His chariot wheels? He may arrive before yon sun goes down. "In such
   an hour as you think not, the Son of man comes." When the world is
   eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, He will bring
   destruction upon the ungodly. Be you so engaged, day by day, that you
   will not be taken at unawares. What will it be to be caught up together
   with the saints in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air! What will
   it be to see Him come in the glory of the Father and all His holy
   angels with Him! What will it be to see Him reign upon the earth, with
   His ancients gloriously!

   Can you imagine the millennial splendor, the age of gold, the halcyon
   days of peace? As for the judgment of the world, know you not that the
   saints shall judge angels? They shall appear as assessors with Christ
   and the Lord shall bruise Satan under their feet. Glory awaits us and
   nothing but glory, if we abide in Christ. Therefore, keep your garments
   unspotted, your loins girt, your lamps trimmed, and your lights
   burning--and you, yourselves, as men and women that look for your
   Lord--when He comes, you may have confidence and not shame.

   May the Holy Spirit, without whom this cannot be, be freely given to us
   this day, that we may abide in the Lord! And you who have never trusted
   in Christ for salvation, may you come to Him and then "abide in Him"
   from this good hour! To His name be glory! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

"In the Garden With Him"

   DELIVERED ON THURSDAY EVENING, AUGUST 8, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "One of the servants of the high priest, being his kinsman whose ear
   Peter cut off, said, Did not I see you in the garden with Him?" John
   18:26

   PETER was on dangerous ground. When his Master was being buffeted, he
   was trying to make himself comfortable. We read of the high priest's
   servants, that they warmed themselves and Peter stood with them and
   warmed himself. He stood with them and they were rough servants of ill
   masters. He was in bad company and he was a man who could not afford to
   be in bad company--for he was so impulsive and so easily provoked to
   rash actions.

   The Holy Spirit, having notified us once that Peter was on unsafe
   ground, in the words, "Peter stood with them and warmed himself,"
   especially observes that he remained there, which was worse still. Any
   man may inadvertently stumble upon a boggy piece of ground. But if he
   is a wise man, he will make every effort to pass it and be on sound
   soil again. He does ill to linger upon a quagmire, for thus he toys
   with danger and courts destruction.

   The Holy Spirit has recorded it further on, in the twenty-fifth verse,
   a second time, "Simon Peter stood and warmed himself." Take heed of
   abiding in the place of danger. You may be called in Providence to go
   through the Campagna when it reeks with malaria, but you are not called
   to live there. If you have to cross a sea, cross it. But do not try to
   cast anchor in mid-ocean and thus keep your ship continually amid the
   billows. Where there is peril there should be a prudent haste. Quick!
   Pilgrim, be quick and tarry not in the place of danger!

   The enchanted ground may lie on the road to the Celestial City, and
   therefore it may be your duty to traverse it with anxious speed. But if
   you sit down in it--if you take your rest in any of the arbors there
   provided by the evil Prince, you may sleep yourself into no end of
   misery. Linger no longer in the wilderness than you are forced to
   do--hurry through the enemy's country, and rest not till you are in
   Immanuel's land.

   Voluntary continuance on evil ground leads to repeated temptations.
   First the maid, then several men, and last of all this kinsman of the
   man whom he had wounded, began to try Peter in the high priest's hall.
   They put to him questions which led him to deny that he ever was a
   disciple of the Prophet of Galilee. The longer you stop in an evil
   place, the more numerous will your temptations become. Temptations are
   like flies--they come one or two at the first but by-and-by they buzz
   about you in swarms. When the deadly arrows from Satan's bow fly in
   such showers, it ill becomes you to be at ease. While you tarry on
   dangerous ground, your weakness increases.

   Peter, who might at first have acknowledged his Master, did not do it,
   but denied Him. Having once denied Him, it was almost inevitable that
   he should do the same again. And so, again and again, he said, "I know
   not the Man." And as the weakness increases and the sin gains force,
   the fault deepens in blackness. Thrice he denied his Master and in the
   end he added oaths and curses, as if it would be a sure proof that he
   had never been with Christ if he could swear.

   One distinguishing mark of a Christian, in those days, was that he
   swore not at all, by any oath of any sort, upon any subject, good, bad,
   or indifferent. Thus Peter, seeing that he could profanely swear, was
   giving good evidence, as the listeners thought, that he could never
   have been with Jesus of Nazareth.

   And so, dear Friends, you see the reason why, when you come near the
   place of temptation, you should hasten by it as quickly as possible.
   Linger not where the plague rages--stay not where temptation abounds.
   While Peter was getting increased velocity into sin, he was losing all
   his strength to get out of sin. Why, at the very first, when he had
   denied his Lord to the maid, he ought to have crept away into a secret
   place and wept, or more bravely still, he should have rushed right
   through the crowd up to his dear Master yonder, and have said, "Forgive
   Your servant for his treachery and cowardice." But no, he perseveres in
   the falsehood he has spoken. He adds lie to lie and sinks deeper in the
   mire. Left to himself, his course is downward and there is no hope for
   the deserter.

   The lesson of this is--again I say it--hasten out of the place of
   temptation. Flee from it as speedily as possible. There are some who
   are in positions of life which they ought to give up--positions which
   are sinful and cannot be held by persons who are honest, truthful and
   chaste. It is of no use to try to fight the battle of the Cross where
   some people are--they are harnessed to the chariot of the devil and
   they must come out of it, or be driven to destruction. If they are
   engaged in a trade which, in the very essence of it, is bad, let them
   get away from it.

   If they are in associations which are distinctly sinful, they must
   break loose from those associations and not pretend to be Christians.
   Talking the other evening with a young girl who has, I trust, escaped
   from the grosser sin into which she might soon have fallen, I said to
   her--"There are three things you can do and those three things I will
   set before you by an illustration. When you get outside the Tabernacle,
   there will be a tram car. Now, go up to the car and put one foot on the
   car and keep the other foot on the ground, and if you do not come down
   with a smash I am very much mistaken. Yet many people try to keep in
   with the world and keep in with Christ and they will never do it--but
   will make a terrible fall of it before long.

   "Now, the second thing that you can do is keep standing in the road in
   the mud and not get into the car at all. You can stop there and let the
   tram car go by--that is all fair and straight. If you want to live in
   the world and be of the world, well, live in the world and be of the
   world, and take what pleasure it can give you and reap the fruit of it
   at last. But there is a third thing you can do, namely, get right off
   the road into the car and let the car take you right away where it is
   going."

   Now, it is this third thing that I commend to each of you. Get right
   into Christ and let the Lord Jesus, by the power of His Holy Spirit,
   carry you away from the unclean place where you now stand, bearing you
   in safety along the tramlines of holiness till He brings you to the
   terminus of Glory at His own right hand. May the Lord deliver you from
   halting between two opinions, or choosing the wrong opinion. And may He
   now grant you Divine Grace to leap into the Gospel chariot and leave
   all sinful company and doubtful ways behind so that you may acknowledge
   the Lord Jesus and be His true disciple!

   So much concerning Peter and the mischief that he fell into. This
   brings me to consider one of the questions which led Peter into his
   denial of his Master. It is this question, "Did not I see you in the
   garden with Him?" Let us try to handle that a little. And may the Lord
   cause it to do us as much good as once to Peter it did harm!

   I. And the first thing I say about it is this--MANY OF US HAVE HAD
   SPECIAL ASSOCIATION WITH OUR LORD. If any were to ask us, "Did not I
   see you in the garden with Him?" we should right gladly answer, "Yes,
   you have probably seen me. For I have often been there." We are by no
   means ashamed to admit that we have been much in the company of the
   despised Redeemer. Let us think how we have been, many of us,
   associated with our Lord Jesus Christ-- it will do us good to consider
   our close connection with our Well-Beloved Lord.

   The large proportion of the friends present tonight have been
   associated with him in Church fellowship. Our names are on the Church
   Roll as belonging to Jesus. We, voluntarily and cheerfully, first gave
   ourselves to the Lord and afterwards to His people, according to His
   Word. Some of us have had our names enrolled among baptized Believers
   for many years, and we are right glad to have them there. May they
   never be erased by any shameful act of ours.

   But there may they stand until that day when the Church Rolls of earth
   shall all be swallowed up in the muster roll of the redeemed above! It
   is no small thing, to my mind, to have my name in the family register
   of God--

   "Recorded in some humble place Beneath my Lord the Lamb."

   Yes, so far as the Church is concerned, we have been "in the garden
   with Him." For the Church is the garden wherein He walks and takes
   delight.

   In consequence of this, we have been associated with our Lord in
   fellowship of worship. When His name has been praised, we have praised
   it. When solemn prayer has been offered in His name, we have said,
   "Amen." How many times have those of us who are in the period of middle
   life been gathered in His name in the great congregation! We have
   thousands of times expressed by word of mouth and, I trust, with our
   inmost hearts, our solemn union with our Divine Lord. This we have
   testified at the footstool of Grace, when we have been adoring the Most
   High in private, at the family altar,

   and in the more public assemblies of Believers. Several thousands of
   times we have been "in the garden with Him" in the early morning and in
   the cool of the day and on happy Sabbaths without number.

   Many of us have gone further than this. We have been baptized into His
   death and thus we have solemnly declared that we are dead with Him and
   have also risen with Him. Even more solemn still, if anything can be
   more solemn, we have eaten and drunk at His Table and the viands have
   been nothing less than His flesh and blood, representatively set forth
   in broken bread and the fruit of the vine. What sweet communion we have
   had with our blessed Lord at His Table! I am sure I could not tell you,
   and I think you could not tell me, how very near our Well-Beloved has
   been to us.

   As I heard a newly-converted one say the other day, in simple accents,
   "There has been a mysterious mix-up. He has come into me to build me up
   and I have been as joined to Him as if I had eaten His flesh and had
   drunk His blood." This is a very, very solemn business. If it has been
   true, it is solemnly delightful. If it has been false, it is solemnly
   ruinous. I know of nothing that can minister more to our condemnation
   than to have falsely avowed such a union with Christ as that which is
   set forth in the Holy Supper. I pray that we may not be found mere
   pretenders.

   In a hundred acts of Church life we have been in the garden with
   Him--in fact, we have professed to be part and parcel of His mystical
   body. We have received others into our fellowship and we have sent them
   forth to other Churches in the name of Jesus. We have prayed with them
   as they have gone forth, as missionaries to the ends of the earth, to
   proclaim that same adorable name. We have been one with our Lord in
   acts of worship and fellowship and service. We count it our privilege,
   honor, and delight that it has been so.

   But then, dear Friends, we have, some of us, been associated with Him
   in a yet higher sense still--I mean in distinct open testimony. We have
   preached His name--we have borne witness to the truth of His Word. We
   have pleaded with others. As though God did beseech them by us, we have
   prayed them, in Christ's place, to be reconciled to God. We have
   proclaimed, in Christ's name, mercy to the chief of sinners. And we
   have felt His power working with us, so that what we bound on earth was
   bound in Heaven, and what we loosed on earth was loosed in Heaven.

   So much have we been identified with the Lord Jesus, that when, in the
   preaching of the Word, we declared the remission of sins to those who
   sought the Savior, they did seek Him and their sins were remitted. The
   Lord made us to be girt with His own solemn power and to stand in the
   place of His risen Self. What an association with Christ has this been!
   Others of you, Beloved, have been associated with Him in teaching the
   children. And you have come very near Him, for He said, "Suffer the
   little children to come unto Me and forbid them not."

   You have brought the young to Him and He has smiled upon you while you
   have been bringing them. Oh, yes, you have been associated with Christ
   in visiting the sick, and those in prison, in instructing the ignorant,
   in bringing in the wandering, in cheering the faint. You have taken
   upon yourself, by His Grace, this holy ministry, each one according to
   his ability. And thus, in the most practical ways, you have been "in
   the garden with Him."

   Yes, and to go further still, you have not only been associated with
   Him in service but also in suffering for His name's sake. You had a
   battle to fight in your youth, against ungodly relatives and
   associates. And you fought it well for Christ's sake. Some of you godly
   women have had to bear a living martyrdom, ever since you have been
   married, through the ungodliness and unkindness of your husbands.
   Certain of you have been despised, ridiculed, and rejected with Christ,
   and for Christ. Oh, it is a glorious thing!

   Some of us know what it is to have our name cast out as evil and to
   have come down, in some men's esteem, from the brightest heights to the
   darkest depths, solely and only because we will follow the Lamb
   wherever He goes and will shake ourselves clear of the infidelity of
   the present age, which is defiling the visible Church with its filthy
   leprosy. It is very sweet to be accounted a fool for Jesus! It is most
   joyful when one can go into his chamber and sing--

   "If on my face, for Your dear name, Shame and reproaches be, All hail
   reproach and welcome shame, For You'll remember me!"

   This is no small fellowship. And in this we have, many of us, possessed
   our full share. Yes, we can say that we have been in the garden with
   Him.

   Once more--not only have we been with Him in Church fellowship, in
   service, and in some small measure of suffering, but we have been with
   Him in secret. O Beloved, we dare not tell that which we have enjoyed
   behind the veil with our All-Glorious Lord. But we have been with Him,
   sometimes, in His joy, till whether in the body or out of the body,

   we could not tell--God alone has known! It would not have taken us any
   trouble to slip into Heaven, we were so near the door and the door was
   so open. There would scarcely have needed to be a death, for we were
   already in the beginnings of the heavenly life. Our joy has been full
   when we have been in the garden with Him.

   We have also had a measure of fellowship with Him in His anguish, when
   we have groaned out our very soul to see the apostasy of His Church. To
   see how those that should preach His Gospel do not preach it, but
   preach the very reverse of it. We have felt as if it were better for us
   to die than to live when we have seen this exceedingly great evil. When
   the sins and iniquities of Christians have come under our eyes, and the
   name of Christ has been blasphemed, and the precious Gospel has been
   despised because of the inconsistencies of professors, and the silly
   amusements of Church members, we have been afflicted with our Lord.

   We have been with Christ almost in a bloody sweat concerning His base
   betrayal by His disciples. You know what I am talking of, some of you.
   The Lord does bring some of His people very near to Him, till they are
   in the garden with Him, in an agony of soul for sinful men. There have
   you been made to know what you cannot tell and to behold in your soul
   what no eye can ever see--and to hear in the heart that which shall
   never greet the ear of mortal man. Beloved, in these senses, you would
   be bound to confess your association with the Lord Jesus, and to say,
   "Yes, I have been in the garden with Him."

   II. Now I go a step further in the text. The question is, "Did not I
   see you in the garden with Him?" which leads me

   to observe that MANY OF US HAVE BEEN SEEN OF MEN IN OUR ASSOCIATION
   WITH OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST.

   We did not want to be observed--we were far from courting observation.
   There are some of the Lord's people who would like to go to Heaven
   without being seen with the Lord Jesus in the streets by daylight. They
   desire to be saved and yet never be seen with their Savior. I do not
   think that the sin of this age, with most Christians, is obtrusiveness.
   Far more likely it is unholy fear. Some think it modesty. But I
   question whether this is its real name. I will not call it cowardice,
   but I will take their own expression and call it backwardness. They say
   they are of a "retiring" disposition, which I interpret in a way very
   little to their credit.

   I have heard of a soldier who was of a very "retiring" disposition when
   the battle was on and he retired with great diligence as soon as the
   first shots were fired. I think I heard that he was hung up as a
   deserter and a coward. No good comes of a retiring disposition of that
   kind. We have that sort of "retiring person" with us nowadays but such
   people will have to answer for it when the Lord denies those who denied
   Him.

   But, without desiring to be known, dear Friends, you that have been
   with Christ have been found out. And, first, you have been seen in the
   garden with your Lord by those associated in family life with you. It
   was not long before they discovered that you were a Christian. A man
   who carries in his hand a lot of roses will soon be known to bear it by
   the perfume which is scattered abroad. He that has Divine Grace in his
   heart needs not to advertise it. It will advertise itself.

   Mother finds out that there is something very different in John from
   what there used to be. Sister Jane finds out that Mary seems quite
   altered from what she used to be. Father discovers that Mother is so
   different from what she was a little while ago. Like water in a leaking
   vessel, religion oozes out. Love to Jesus is sure to be found out.
   Believe me, Christian Brothers and Sisters, your friends know that you
   follow Jesus. They have known it long and they will yet say to you,
   "Did not I see you in the garden with Him?"

   You were observed at private prayer. You were noticed reading the
   Scriptures. At first you blushed to find it commended, or to find it
   blamed. You do not do so now, for you are aware that everybody knows
   it. If you have not been found out, I should think you have no Divine
   Grace to spare, for even a little true religion is spied out in these
   days.

   And you, dear Friends, have been found out by certain curious people
   that are always prying about. We do not admire them, but we can never
   get rid of them--certain persons from whom no secret can ever be hid.
   They seem to know things by instinct, and they tell them by
   compulsion--whispering them with the preface that nobody must repeat
   what they say--though they, themselves, take license to communicate the
   secret to everybody they meet. These tattlers soon find out that a man
   is a Christian and they speedily spread the intelligence, not always
   with pleasure--in some instances with malicious sarcasm.

   They ferret out the fact of your change and when they see you, they
   sneeringly ask, "Did not I see you in the garden with Him?" We have
   been found out, especially by those whom our holy faith opposes. Here
   was one that had come to

   take the Savior as a prisoner and he was the man to pitch upon Peter.
   "Did not I see you in the garden with Him?" Just so. And when you come
   out and bear witness against an error, or when your life bears hard
   upon evil conduct, you will assuredly be found out. Those who are on
   the other side will know you.

   I hope that they will have good reason for knowing you. I hope that
   they will oppose you very much, and thus effectually drive you out of
   their fellowship. There are two seeds in the world--the seed of the
   woman and the seed of the serpent. And if the seed of the serpent never
   hisses at you, you may be afraid that you do not belong to the seed of
   the woman. God has put an enmity between the serpent and the
   woman--between the serpent's seed and the woman's seed-- and so it must
   be till the end of time.

   Take any opposition that you get from worldlings as a token for good--a
   sign that you are of a different race from those who despise you--a
   testimonial to your character from those whose homage to goodness
   embodies itself in persecution. "Oh, yes, yes," these people will say,
   "Did not I see you at the meeting house? Did not I hear of your being
   with that canting crew? Are not you one of those vile hypocrites?" And
   so on. That is the way in which they compliment us. Do you know all the
   pretty things they say of your leaders? We are not spared by foul
   tongues.

   Oh, you that are common soldiers in the ranks, you may very well bear
   your portion of abuse. For if I heard you fretting, I should remind you
   that your leaders have had worse things to bear. Do you think that I
   lie on a bed of roses? Am I never opposed and slandered? I have my
   full, fair share of the world's abuse. But I am ready for twice as
   much, if necessary. We are willing to be so publicly in the garden with
   our Master, that His enemies may quote it against us, if they wish, and
   sneeringly ask, "Did not I see you in the garden with Him?"

   Especially will this be known to those who are affected by our
   procedure. The gentleman whose ear had been cut off knew Peter. So did
   his kinsman, who, to his alarm, saw a sword come so very close to his
   kinsman's skull. He recognized Peter at once. And no wonder. It was
   only by the flash of one of those torches that he caught a glimpse of
   the disciple with the sword. But, as Peter cut off that man's cousin's
   ear, the impression made was particularly vivid.

   So, if you begin to talk about Christ to people, if you ask them
   whether they are saved, some of them will thank you for your holy
   anxiety. But others, who choose to feel annoyed, will judge that you
   wantonly tread upon their feet, and they will feel that you have
   assaulted them. Deal faithfully with their souls and they will
   photograph your portrait on the sensitive plate of a very angry nature.
   They do not want to see you any more. They "fight shy" of you, and so
   on. For they judge you to be very rude and personal.

   I hope that you will always have a little company of friends who will
   remember you by reason of their smarting ears. I do not invite you to
   cut their ears off--quite the reverse--rather heal their ears with a
   touch of Christ's golden ointment. But at the same time, make their
   ears tingle with your warnings and entreaties. Tell them about Christ
   Crucified. And then, the next time they see you, they will say, "That
   is the man that spoke to me about my sin and my Savior." Be recognized
   because of the earnestness of your concern for the salvation of others.

   There are some of us--and a very considerable number of friends here
   tonight--who are known to have been in the garden with Christ by a vast
   number of persons. If some of you were to fall into grave sin and
   desired to hide yourselves, where would you go? Especially
   myself--where could I go? I could not go into any doubtful or
   questionable place, with the hope of being unknown, for someone would
   point me out in a moment. I wonder where I could get to without being
   perceived. I say I wonder, but I do not want to discover. Where could a
   well-known preacher go without being recognized?

   I sat with a good Brother minister one day in the midst of a pine
   plantation, on the top of a hill, which is quite a ways from the usual
   haunts of men. We were talking together about the things of God and I
   was saying, if we deserted our Master where could we flee, so as not to
   be known? I said, "If we sat long enough even in this lone spot, I dare
   say some person would come along who would know us." Almost immediately
   I saw the head of a man moving among the pine trees and watched him
   coming up the hill. I said, "I should not wonder if a friend of ours is
   coming now."

   It was a Brother who sits in the right-hand gallery, come to search for
   a secluded spot for a picnic. Yes, he had found us out. We could not
   get anywhere without being known. You and I had better keep our
   regimentals on and go through with the war and never be ashamed--for we
   cannot go away incognito. The day is past in which we can be hidden. If
   you are a Christian and have declared yourself out-and-out for Christ,
   never think of going back. For you cannot, without having the finger of
   shame pointed at you. In the district where you live you have become
   enthusiastic for the conversion

   of souls, you have lifted high the banner of Truth. You have declared
   that for Christ and Him crucified you desire to live and die.

   Well, then, my dear Brothers and Sisters, you are bound to go forward
   even to the end. Else many a man and maid will point their fingers at
   you and say, "Did not we see you in the garden with Him?"--and how will
   you answer, if, afterwards, you are seen serving self and this present
   evil world?

   III. That leads me to the third point, to which we have climbed up
   insensibly, namely, this--WE ARE NOW THE SUBJECTS OF EXPECTATION.

   As we have been in the garden with Jesus and we have been seen there,
   we are now the subjects of very high expectations. That is to say,
   people expect a great deal from those who are known to be associated
   with Jesus. They are very unreasonable, sometimes, and expect far more
   than they are warranted in looking for--and consequently much more than
   they will ever get. I have known some to expect young Christians, who
   have just come to Christ, to be perfect--to know everything, to be able
   to preach a sermon, pray in public, give a five pound note and listen
   patiently to all the nonsense everybody chooses to talk.

   Well, they may expect what they like, but they will not get
   unreasonable things. Should we expect from another what we cannot
   render ourselves? In these days they expect a man to do everything and
   then to attempt more. When you have toiled from morning to night and
   laid yourself out in your Master's service--time, talents, substance,
   everything-- somebody will snarl because you cannot do what he

   demands of you. The mercy is that we are not the servants of man--we
   are the servants of God. And if we please our Master, that is quite
   enough for us.

   One Master is enough for the best of servants. If we are popular in
   Heaven, we may wisely be indifferent to the judgments of men.
   Unreasonable expectations we are not bound to meet. But there are
   expectations which are just and righteous. Men are quite right in
   expecting that, if you have been with Jesus, your character should be
   affected by association with Him.

   For, first, you make a very high profession. You say, "I am Christ's."
   Well, then, they come to look at you and see what Christ's men are. If
   you are in an ugly temper, they will say, "Surely, this is not the work
   of God." If you are awfully stingy and never give anything away, they
   will conclude that it is not desirable to be a Christian. If you are
   sarcastic and find fault with everybody and everything, they will say,
   "That is not a very beautiful spirit." They are right, are they not?
   Can you blame them for thus judging?

   Do you know how to turn a dirty penny in your business? That is no
   credit to the name of Christian. If you promise to send work home on
   Saturday night and your customers do not get it till a fortnight after,
   they will set small store by your Christianity. No one will think well
   of your religion if you do not tell the truth. When your word is
   passed, be sure that you keep it, or you will discredit your Lord and
   Master. I am not going into all the ways in which a man can so act in
   common life, as to lead people to exclaim, "That is not what we should
   have expected of a man that talks of following Jesus."

   They have a right to expect a good deal from our sacred profession.
   What is our religion? Is it a semi-moral religion, like Mohammedanism?
   No, it is a holy religion, that would make you perfect if, by the Grace
   of God, you followed it to its ultimate issue. For it sets before you
   this as the object of ambition--"Be you perfect, even as your Father
   which is in Heaven is perfect." Such a faith as ours ought to bring
   forth the noblest form of character. And when it does not, I do not
   wonder that the world is disappointed, and in its indignation speaks
   sharp things of us and of our faith. They have a right to expect a
   great deal from the disciples of such a Lord. Such a Leader! What ought
   not the followers to be? Such a Savior! What should the saved ones be?
   What manner of persons ought we to be who serve the holy, harmless,
   undefiled

   One?

   Beloved, they may well expect great things on account of our comrades,
   with whom we are proud to be numbered. Consider who they were that went
   before us--those holy men and women who counted not their lives dear
   unto them. How faithfully they lived and served the Lord Jesus! Many of
   them went in a chariot of fire to Heaven, burnt quickly to death for
   Christ's sake. We are bound by our associations, bound by our Master,
   bound by the Truth of God we believe. We are bound by the profession we
   have made, to live, not as other men, but as men who are of noble
   lineage. Men lifted

   up by a second birth, twice born, the elect of God--redeemed from among
   men--that we may be a kind of first fruits of His creatures.

   IV. So, you see, we are brought where the world expects a good deal of
   us and when the world does not get it (that is the fourth point)--IF WE
   DISAPPOINT SUCH EXPECTATIONS--THE QUESTION MAY BE VERY PROPERLY PUT TO
   US, "Did not I see you in the garden with Him?"

   It is a salutary thing for a man to know that his inconsistency is
   observed. Then he begins to see himself as others see him. It is very
   painful, very disagreeable. But, at the same time, very likely to bless
   the man. A man is apt to get a little angry about it. But it is a good
   thing for him to know how his conduct strikes other people. I have read
   of an old lady who gazed into a looking glass and remarked that they
   did not make good mirrors nowadays, for those which she used to look
   into, fifty years ago, showed her quite differently from what she now
   was. She said the looking glasses were very inferior in these times.

   When the world observes that your character is inconsistent, it may be
   that it is a truthful looking glass, although it does not exhibit your
   beauties but shows up your wrinkles and blotches. Do not quarrel with
   the looking glass but quarrel with your own self. Depend upon it, you
   are disfigured with spots which you need to get rid of. When convicted
   by your conscience of an inconsistency, even though the conviction
   comes to you through an unkind, ungenerous remark of a wicked man, yet
   still take the lesson home and go to God for Divine Grace and
   forgiveness and begin again. A very plain-spoken enemy may do us ten
   times more service than an indulgent friend.

   Such a question as this should effectually recall us to holiness--to
   deep repentance of the past and to strong resolves for the future. I
   will imagine that a certain Christian man has come to town for a
   holiday and during the season of his holiday in London, he is asked by
   a friend to go to a questionable place of amusement. I will imagine
   that he yields to the invitation and goes--though I am sorry even to
   imagine such a thing. Well, he has gone where he should not have gone.

   And I should like some venerable minister, some saint of God, to meet
   him in the street as he comes out, and say to him, "Did not I see you
   in the garden with Him?" What a rebuke! How it would cut him to the
   heart! I have heard that even professing Christians, when they go over
   to Paris, will go where they ought not to go. And they have pleaded, as
   an excuse, that they wanted to see the manners and customs of the
   Continent. To put it in plain English, they want to join in with the
   manners and customs of Satan.

   You have no more right to go into wrong places in Paris than in London.
   I should quite as soon be seen in a theater or a music hall in London
   as in Paris. Indeed, I am told that our home production is by far the
   safer of the two. You have no right to go anywhere where you are
   ashamed to be seen by Christian people, or by the whole world. We are
   surrounded by a cloud of witnesses in Heaven and in Hell and we should
   mind how we act. Take that to yourself, if you have crept into the
   devil's dominions on the sly. Someone will catch you there and say,
   "Did not I see you in the garden with

   Him?"

   And if you are ever tempted to conceal your religion, then I hope that
   this question will come whistling in your ears, "Did not I see you in
   the garden with Him?" I have sometimes been obliged to a wicked world
   for what it has done to inconsistent professors of religion. I remember
   a young man, in my early pastorate, going to a certain place of
   doubtful fame and in the midst of a dance, somebody cried out, "That is
   one of Spurgeon's people. Fling him out of the window." And out he
   went.

   I felt grateful for that act of discipline from the Adversary. I wish
   that they would fling out of windows all among the people of God who
   dare join with the world and its evil pleasures. Those who were
   gathered in that assembly felt that they did not want the company of a
   downright hypocrite, and so they put him out of their synagogue. If you
   should ever be found in "gay company," or even in respectable company
   where evangelical doctrine is at a discount, I hope you will have
   things made uncomfortable for you. If you hold your tongue and are
   quiet and try to be one of the clan, where Jesus is dishonored, I hope
   this question will fall into your ear like a drop of burning lava, "Did
   not I see you in the garden with Him?" Stand up for your Master in all
   companies and in all places, or else renounce His service.

   Now, I am going to use this question very briefly in several ways. The
   question may be put to a person by a friend who is very anxious to see
   him decided against the evil tendencies of the times. The only way of
   dealing with evil, according to the Scripture, is, "Come you out from
   among them: be you separate." When expediency pleads, "Do not come out.
   Make friends with error and be liberal," then may the Reprover ask,
   "Did not I see you in the garden with Him?" Your

   hope is fixed on Him that died without the gate--will you not take up
   your cross and go without the camp bearing His reproach? "Did not I see
   you in the garden with Him?"

   The question may apply again, when a friend is hard at work for Christ,
   and under difficulty, requires your help. Laying his whole life upon
   the altar, he is hard put to it for want of money, or for want of
   personal assistance in teaching or preaching, and he appeals to you--he
   says, "You have something to spare, help me, for the Lord's sake, for
   whom I am striving with all my heart and soul! I am in a difficulty,
   come to my help." When you turn away and coldly say, "No, I cannot
   afford money or time," he might well ask, "Did not I see you in the
   garden with Him? Have you not had fellowship with the Lord. And will
   you not have fellowship with His servant in His work?" It is a good and
   profitable question.

   I should like, at this time, to speak to some here whom I have never
   spoken to in my life before and introduce myself and beg for their
   sympathy and aid, saying to them, "Did not I see you in the garden with
   Him? Did not I notice you at the Prayer Meeting? I think I saw your
   face light up at a certain part of the sermon, as if you enjoyed it.
   Did I not see you in the garden with Him?"

   A kind of freemasonry exists between Christians. If we meet with any
   that have been with Christ, it is, "Hail, fellow! Well met! You are my
   Brother, whatever your opinions may happen to be upon minor points."
   Oh, you that have been in the garden with my Lord and followed Him in
   the time of His shame, you are a Brother of mine, for I saw you in the
   garden with Him and I rejoice to own the everlasting kinship! Give me a
   place in your sympathy. Mention me in your prayers.

   We will put the question also in one other way--we will use it as an
   enquiry full of cheer to a faithful heart under depression. Yonder
   tempted Believer cries, "I am half afraid that I really cannot be a
   living child of God. I am very dull and drooping and distressed." My
   dear Brother, years ago we used to have fellowship with you in joy and
   peace, in hope and song. Not so very long ago you came out of the House
   of Prayer, saying, "It is none other than the House of God and the very
   gate of Heaven!"

   You are down in the valley now. But, like Jeshurun, you were likely to
   ride upon the high places of the earth. Pluck up courage. You may now
   be in the desert with your Lord but you have been in the garden with
   Him and you will be again. Those bright days will come back. For dark
   nights last not forever.

   You have become sleepy and dull and, perhaps, Laodicean and
   lukewarm--but the Lord will revive you. Remember the old times, the
   days of Heaven upon the earth, the Hermonites and the hill Mizar. Hope
   on, hope ever. He who has been with you, will be with you yet again.
   "Did not I see you in the garden with Him?"

   I should like to be welcomed with that question as I enter the skies at
   the last. I should not object to have that spoken to me by some bright
   spirit as I pass through the pearl gate--"Did not I see you in the
   garden with Him?" "Yes, bright seraph, you may have seen me. And now
   you see that He casts not off His poor Friend in the day of His Glory."
   The angel of the Lord saw you when you repented, he spied you out in
   that little room where you wept alone because of sin. Upstairs in the
   solitary chamber, where you told the Lord how father and mother were
   opposed to you and yet you meant to follow the Lamb in all the ways of
   service and obedience, you were "seen of angels."

   Beloved, the brave adherence of the least of our Lord's disciples is
   seen, known, and remembered in heavenly places. In the Last Great Day
   you that have been with Christ here and trusted Him amid the clouds and
   the darkness and the derision--you shall see Him and reign with
   Him--and He shall acknowledge you as His, since you were in the garden
   with Him in the day of His humiliation. God bless you! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

                             The Withered Fig Tree

   A Sermon

   (No. 2107)

   Delivered on Lord's-day Morning, September 29th, 1889, by

   C. H. SPURGEON,

   At the [7]Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington

   "And he left them, and went out of the city into Bethany; and he lodged
   there. Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered.
   And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing
   thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee
   henceforward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away. And
   when the disciples saw it, they marvelled, saying, How soon is the fig
   tree withered away!"'Matthew 21:17-20.

   THIS is a miracle and a parable. We have books upon the miracles, we
   have an equal number of volumes upon the parables: into which of these
   volumes shall we place this story? I would answer, put it in both. It
   is a singular miracle, and it is a striking parable. It is an acted
   parable, in which our Lord gives us an object-lesson. He gets truth
   before men's eyes, in this instance, that the lesson may make a deeper
   impression upon the mind and heart. I would lay great stress upon the
   remark that this is a parable; for, if you do not look upon it in that
   light, you may misunderstand it. We are not of those who come to the
   Word of God with the cool impertinence of the critic, thinking
   ourselves wiser than the Book, and therefore able to judge it. We
   believe that the Holy Spirit is greater than man's spirit, and that our
   Lord and Master was a better judge of what is right and good than any
   of us can be. Our place is at his feet: we are not cavillers, but
   followers. Whatever Jesus does and says, we regard with deepest
   reverence; our chief desire is to learn as much as we can from it. We
   see great mysteries in his simplest actions, and profound teaching
   about his plainest words. When he speaks or acts, we are like Moses at
   the bush, and feel that we stand on holy ground.

   Flippant persons have spoken of the story before us in a very foolish
   manner. They have represented it as though our Lord, being hungered,
   thought only of his necessity, and, expecting to be refreshed by a few
   green figs went up to the tree in error. Finding no fruit upon the
   tree, it being a season when he had no right to expect that there would
   be any, he was vexed, and uttered a malediction against a tree, as
   though it had been a responsible agent. This view of the case results
   from the folly of the observer: it is not the truth. Our Lord desired
   to teach his disciples concerning the doom of Jerusalem. The reception
   given him in Jerusalem was full of promise, but it would come to
   nothing. Their loud hosannas would change to, "Crucify Him!"

   When Jerusalem was to be destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar a former time, the
   prophets had not only spoken, but they had used instructive signs. If
   you turn to the Book of Ezekiel, you will there see the record of many
   signs and symbols which set forth the coming woe. These tokens excited
   curiosity, secured consideration, and brought home the prophetic
   warnings to the homes and hearts of the common people. Again, the
   judgments of God were at the gates of the guilty city. Words'the words
   of Jesus'had been wasted; and even tears'tears of the Saviour'had been
   spilt in vain; it was time that the sign should be given'the sign of
   condemnation. Ezekiel had said, "All the trees of the field shall know
   that I the Lord have brought down the high tree, and have dried up the
   green tree"; and herein was suggested the very image which was employed
   by our Lord. He saw a fig tree, by a freak of nature, covered with
   leaves at a time when, in the ordinary course of things, it should not
   have been so. Our Lord saw that this was a fine object lesson for him,
   and therefore he took his disciples to see if there were figs as well
   as leaves. When he found none, he bade the fig tree remain for ever
   fruitless, and immediately it began to wither. Our Lord would have used
   the fig tree to excellent purpose had he ordered it to be used a fuel
   to warm cold hands, but he did better when he used it to warm cold
   hearts. No wrong was done to any man; it was a tree on the waste, and
   utterly worthless. No pain was inflicted; no anger was felt. In the
   object-lesson, the Lord simply said to the fig tree, "Let no fruit grow
   on thee henceforward for ever"; and it withered away. In this our Lord
   taught a great lesson to all ages at a small expense. The withering of
   a tree has been the quickening of many a soul; and if it had not been
   so, it was no loss to any that a tree should wither when it had proved
   itself barren. A great teacher may do far more than destroy a tree, if
   he can thereby give demonstrations of truth, and scatter seeds of
   virtue. It is the veriest idleness of criticism to find fault with our
   Lord Jesus for a piece of fine poetic instruction, for which, had it
   been spoken by any other teacher, the most lavish praise would have
   been awarded by these very critics.

   The blighted fig tree was a singularly apt simile of the Jewish state.
   The nation had promised great things to God. When all the other nations
   were like trees without leaves, making no profession of allegiance to
   the true God, the Jewish nation was covered with the leafage of
   abundant religious profession. Scribes, pharisees, priests and elders
   of the people were all sticklers for the letter of the law, and boaster
   of being worshippers of the one God, and strict observers of all his
   laws. Their constant cry was, "The temple of the Lord, The temple of
   the Lord, The temple of the Lord, are these." "We have Abraham to our
   Father" was frequently on their lips. They were a fig tree in full
   leaf. But there was no fruit upon them; for the people were neither
   holy, nor just, nor true, nor faithful towards God, nor loving to their
   neighbor. The Jewish church was a mass of glittering profession,
   unsupported by spiritual life. Our Lord had looked into the temple, and
   had found the house of prayer to be a den of thieves. He condemned the
   Jewish church to remain a lifeless, fruitless thing; and it was so. The
   synagogue remained open; but its teaching became a dead form. Israel
   had no influence upon the age. The Jewish race became, for centuries, a
   withered tree: it had nothing but profession when Christ came, and that
   profession proved powerless to save even the holy city. Christ did not
   destroy the religious organization of the Jews: he left them as they
   were; but they withered away from the root, till the Roman came, and
   with the axes of his legions cleared away the fruitless trunk.

   What a lesson is this to nations! Nations may make a profession, a loud
   profession, of religion, and yet may fail to exhibit that righteousness
   which exalteth a nation. Nations may be adorned with all the leafage of
   civilization, and art, and progress, and religion; but if there be no
   inner life of godliness, and no fruit unto righteousness, they will
   stand for a while, and then wither away.

   What a lesson this is to churches! There have been churches which have
   stood prominent in numbers and in influence; but faith, and love, and
   holiness have not been maintained, and the Holy Ghost has left them to
   the vain show of a fruitless profession; and there stand those
   churches, with the trunk of organization, and widely-extended branches,
   but they are dead, and every year they become more and more decayed.
   Brethren, such churches we have even among Nonconformists at this hour.
   May it never be so with this church! We may have numbers of people
   coming to hear the Word, and a considerable body of men and women
   professing to be converted; but unless vital godliness is in their
   midst, what are congregations and churches? We might have a valued
   ministry, but what would this be without the Spirit of God? We might
   have large subscriptions, and many outward efforts; but what of these
   without the spirit of prayer, the spirit of faith, the spirit of grace
   and consecration? I dread lest we should ever come to be like a tree,
   precocious with a superlative profession, but yet worthless in the
   sight of the Lord, because the secret life of piety, and vital union to
   Christ, are gone. Better that the axe clear away every vestige of the
   tree than that it stand out against the sky an open lie, a mockery, a
   delusion.

   This is the lesson of the text; but I do not want you to consider it
   only in the gross, in its relation to nations and churches; but my
   heart's desire is that we may learn the lesson in detail, and take it
   home each one to his own heart. May the Lord himself speak to each one
   of us this morning personally! In preparing the sermon, I have had
   great searchings of heart, and I pray that the hearing of it may
   produce the same results. May we tremble, lest, having a profession of
   godliness, we should wear it conspicuously, and yet should lack the
   fruitbearing which alone can warrant such a profession. The name of
   saintship, if it be not justified by sanctity, is an offence to honest
   men, and much more to a holy God. A pronounced and forward avowal of
   Christianity without a Christian life at the back of it is a lie,
   abhorrent to God and man, an offence against truth, a dishonour to
   religion, and the forerunner of a withering curse.

   May the Holy Spirit help me to preach very solemnly and powerfully at
   this time!

   Our first observation is this'There are in the world cases of forward,
   but fruitless, profession; our second observation will be this'These
   will be inspected by King Jesus; and our third remark will be'The
   result of that inspection will be very terrible. Help us, O Holy
   Spirit!

   I. First, then, THERE ARE IN THE WORLD CASES OF FORWARD, BUT FRUITLESS,
   PROFESSION.

   The cases to which we refer are not so very rare. They far excel their
   fellow-men. Their promise is very loud, and their exterior very
   impressive. They look like fruitful trees; you expect many baskets of
   the best figs from them. They impress us by their talk, they overpower
   us by their manners. We envy them, and lash ourselves. This last might
   not harm us; but to envy hypocrites can never be otherwise than
   injurious in the long run; for, when their hypocrisy is discovered, we
   are apt to despise religion as well as the pretenders to it. Do you not
   know persons who are in appearance everything and in reality nothing? O
   dark thought! may we not ourselves be such persons? See the man, he is
   strong in faith, even to presumption; he is joyous in hope, even to
   levity; he is loving in spirit, even to utter indifference about truth!
   How very glib he is in talk! How deep he is in theological speculation!
   Yet he has never entered the kingdom by the new birth. He has never
   been taught of God. The gospel has come to him in word only. He is a
   stranger to the work of the Holy Ghost. Are there not such persons? Are
   there not persons who are defenders of orthodoxy and yet are heterodox
   in their own conduct? Do we not know men and women whose lives deny
   what their lips profess? We are sure it is so. All vineyards have had
   in them fig trees covered with leaves, which have been conspicuous from
   the foliage of their profession, and yet have brought forth no fruit
   unto the Lord.

   Such persons seem to defy the seasons. It was not the time of figs, yet
   was this fig tree covered with those leaves which usually betokened
   ripe figs. I suppose you all know what I have often seen for myself'the
   fig tree puts forth its fruit before its leaves. Early in the year you
   see green knobs put forth at the end and points of the branches, and
   these, as they swell, turn out to be green figs. The leaves come
   forward afterwards, and by the time the tree is fully covered with
   leaves, the figs are ready for eating. When a fig tree is in full leaf,
   you expect to find figs upon it; and if you do not, it will bear no
   figs for that season. This tree put forth leaves abundantly before its
   season, and therein excelled all other fig trees. Yes, but it was a
   freak of nature, and not a healthy result of true growth. Such freaks
   of nature occur in forests and in vineyards; and their like may be met
   with in the moral and spiritual world. Certain men and women seem far
   in advance of those round about them, and astonish us by their special
   virtues. They are better than the best; more excellent than the most
   excellent'at least in appearance. They are so zealous that they are not
   chilled by the surrounding world: their great souls create a summer for
   themselves. The backwardness of saints, and the wickedness of sinners,
   do not hinder them; they are too vigorous to be affected by their
   surroundings. They are very superior persons, covered with virtues, as
   this fig tree with leaves.

   Observe, that they overleap the ordinary rule of growth. As I have told
   you, the rule is, first the fig, and afterwards the fig leaves; but we
   have seen persons who make a profession before they have produced the
   slightest fruit to justify it. I like to see our young friends, when
   they believe in Christ, proving their faith by holiness at home, by
   godliness abroad, and then coming forward and confessing their faith in
   the Lord Jesus Christ. That looks to be the sober and normal way of
   proceeding, for a man first to be, and then to profess to be; first to
   be lighted, and then to shine; first to repent and believe, and then to
   confess his repentance and his faith in the Scriptural way, by baptism
   into Christ. But these people think it unnecessary to attend to the
   trifle of heart-work'they dare to omit the most vital part of the
   matter. They attend a revival meeting, and they declare themselves
   saved, though they have not been renewed in heart, and possess neither
   repentance nor faith. They come forward to avow a mere emotion. They
   have nothing better than a resolve; but they flourish it as if it were
   the deed itself. Quick as thought, the convert sets up to be a teacher.
   Without test or trial of his brand-new virtues, he holds himself forth
   as an example to others. Now, I do not object to the rapidity of the
   conversion; on the contrary, I admire it, if it be true; but I cannot
   judge till I see the fruit and evidence in the life. If the change of
   conduct is distinct and true, I care not how quickly the work is done;
   but we must see the change. There is a heat which leads to
   fermentation, and a fermentation which breeds sourness and corruption.
   O dear friends, never think you may skip the fruit and come at once to
   the leaf. Be not like a builder who should say, "It is all nonsense to
   spend labor and material on works underground. Foundations are never
   seen; I can run up a house in no time; four walls and a roof will not
   take long." Yes; but how long will such a house last? Is it worthwhile
   building a house without foundations? If you omit the foundation, why
   not omit the house altogether? Is there not a tendency, especially in
   these days, when men are either skeptical or fanatical, to cultivate a
   mushroom godliness, which comes up in a night and perishes in a night?
   Will it not be ruinous if conviction of sin is slighted, repentance
   slurred, faith imitated, the new birth counterfeited, and godliness
   feigned? Beloved, this will never do. We must have figs before leaves,
   acts before declarations, faith before baptism, union to Christ before
   union with the church. You cannot leap over the processes of nature,
   neither may you omit the processes of grace, lest haply your foliage
   without fruit become a curse without cure.

   These people usually catch the eye of others. According to Mark, our
   Lord saw this tree "afar off." The other trees were not in leaf, and
   consequently, when he began to go up the hill toward Jerusalem, he saw
   this one tree quite a long way before he reached it. A fig tree dressed
   in its vesture of lovely green would be a striking object, and would be
   observable at a distance. It stood, also, near the track from Bethany
   to the city gate. It stood where every wayfarer would observe it, and
   probably speak with wonder of its singular leafage for the season.
   Persons whose religion is false are frequently prominent, because they
   have not grace enough to be modest and retiring. They seek the highest
   room, aspire to office, and push themselves into leadership. They do
   not walk in secret with God, they have little concern about private
   godliness, and so they are all the more eager to be seen of men. this
   is both their weakness and their peril. Though least of all able to
   bear the wear and tear of publicity, they are covetous for it, and are,
   therefore, all the more watched. This is the evil of the whole matter;
   for it makes their spiritual failure to be known by so many, and their
   sin brings all the greater dishonor upon the name of the Lord, whom
   they profess to serve. Better far to be fruitless in a corner of a wood
   than on the public way which leads to the temple.

   Such people not only catch the eye, but they often attract the company
   of good men. Who blames us for drawing near to a tree which is in leaf
   long before its fellows? Is it not right to cultivate the acquaintance
   of the eminently good? Our Saviour and his disciples went up to the
   leafy fig tree: not merely did it win their eye, but it drew them to
   itself. Have we not been fascinated by the charming conduct of one who
   seemed to be a brother in the Lord, more devout than usual, fearing God
   above many? Like Jehu, he has said, "Come, see my zeal for the Lord;"
   and we have been glad enough to ride in the chariot with him: he seemed
   so godly, so generous, so humble, so useful, that we looked up to him,
   and wished that we were more worthy to be associated with him. Young
   converts and seekers are naturally apt to do this; and hence it is a
   sad calamity when their confidence turns out to have been misplaced.

   Whenever we see any standing out prominently, and making a bold
   profession, what should be our thoughts about them? I answer, do not
   judge them; do not fall into habitual mistrust. Your Lord did not stand
   at a distance and say, "That tree is worthless." No, he went up to it,
   with his disciples, and carefully inspected it. These prominent persons
   may be wonders of divine grace: let us hope and pray that they may be.
   Let the Lord and his love be magnified in them! God has his fig trees
   that bear figs in winter; God has his saints who are filled with good
   works when the love of others has waxed cold. The Lord raises some up
   to be as standards for the truth, rallying points in the battle. The
   Lord can make young men mature, and new converts useful. It has been
   said, by way of proverbial expression, that "some men are born with
   beards." The Lord can give great grace, so as to make spiritual growth
   rapid and yet solid. He does this so often that we have no right to
   doubt but what the prominent brother before us is one of these growths
   of grace. Unless we are forced to see with bitter regret that there are
   no marks of grace, no evidences of faith, let us hope for the best, and
   be glad at the sight of God's grace. If we are inclined to be
   suspicious, let us turn the point of that sword towards our own bosoms.
   Self-suspicion will be healthy; suspicion of others may be cruel. We
   are not judges; and even if we are, we had better keep to our own
   court, and sit on our own judgment-seat, dispensing the law within the
   little kingdom of our own selves.

   Where those who are prominent turn out to be all they profess to be,
   they are a great blessing. It would have been well if that morning
   there had been figs upon that fig tree. It would have been a great
   refreshment to the Saviour if he had been fed by the green fruit. When
   the Lord makes the first in position to be first in holiness, it is a
   blessing to the church, to the family, and to the neighborhood; indeed,
   it may prove to ba a blessing to the whole world. We ought, therefore,
   to pray the Lord to water with his own hand those trees which he has
   planted; or, in other words, to uphold by his grace those men of his
   right hand whom he has made strong for himself.

   But when we take the text and lay it home to our own hearts, we need
   not be so gentle with it as in the cases of others. We have, many of
   us, for long years been like this fig-tree, as to prominence and
   profession. And in this matter, so far, there is nothing of which to be
   ashamed. Yet it is evidently to ourselves that the parable speaks; for
   we have stood in open avowal and distinct service by the wayside, and
   we have been seen "afar off." Certain of us have made a very bold
   profession, and we are not ashamed to repeat that profession before men
   and angels. Hence the enquiry: Are we truthful in it? What if we should
   turn out to be contending for a faith in which we have no share? What
   if in us there should be none of the life of love, and consequently our
   profession should be "as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal"? What if
   there should be talk, and no work; doctrine, and no practice? What if
   we are without holiness? Then we shall never see the Lord. Whatever
   terrible aspect this parable-miracle may have, it bears upon many of
   us. I, the preacher, feel how much it bears upon me. In that spirit
   have I thought it over, anxiously trusting that every deacon and every
   elder of this church, and every member and every worker among you, may
   have great searchings of heart. May every minister of Christ who may
   have dropped in here this morning, say to himself, "Yes, I have been
   like that fig tree in prominence and in profession; God grant that I be
   not like it in being devoid of fruit!"

   II. It is time that we remembered the solemn truth of our second head:
   THESE WILL BE INSPECTED BY KING JESUS.

   He will draw nigh to them, and when he comes up to them he will look
   for fruit. The first Adam came to the fig tree for leaves, but the
   Second Adam looks for figs. He searches our character through and
   through, to see whether there is any real faith, any true love, any
   living hope, any joy which is the fruit of the Spirit, any patience,
   any self-denial, any fervour in prayer, any walking with God, any
   indwelling of the Holy Spirit; and if he does not see these things, he
   is not satisfied with chapel-going, church-going, prayer meetings,
   communions, sermons, Bible readings; for all these may be no more than
   leafage. If our Lord does not see the fruit of the Spirit upon us, he
   is not satisfied with us, and his inspection will lead to severe
   measures. Notice that what Jesus looks for is not your words, not your
   resolves, not your avowals, but your sincerity, your inward faith, your
   being indeed wrought upon by the Spirit of God to bring forth fruits
   meet for his kingdom.

   Our Lord has a right to expect fruit when he looks for it. When he went
   up to that fig tree he had a right to expect fruit; because the fruit,
   according to nature, comes before the leaf. If, then, the leaf has
   come, there should be fruit. True, it was not the time of figs; but
   then, if it was not the time of figs, it certainly was not the season
   for leaves, for the figs are first. This tree, by putting forth leaves,
   which are the signs and tokens of ripe figs, virtually advertised
   itself as bearing fruit. So, however bad the times may be, some of us
   profess that we will not follow the times, but will follow the one
   immutable truth. As Christians, we confess that we are redeemed from
   among men, and have been delivered from this perverse generation.
   Christ may not expect fruit of men who acknowledge the world and its
   changing ages as their supreme guide; but he may well look for it from
   the believer in his own Word. He looks for fruit from the preacher,
   from the Sunday-school teacher, from the church- officer, from the
   sister who conducts a Bible class, from that brother who has a band of
   young men around him, to whom he is a guide in the gospel. He does
   expect it of all who submit to his gospel rule. As Christ had a right
   to expect fruit of a leaf- bearing fig tree, so he has a right to
   expect great things from those who avow themselves his trustful
   followers. Ah me! how this fact should move the preacher with
   trembling! Should it not affect full many of you in the same manner?

   Fruit is what the Lord earnestly desires. The Saviour, when he came
   under the fig tree, did not desire leaves; for we read that he
   hungered, and human hunger cannot be removed by leaves of a fig tree.
   He desired to eat a fig or two; and he longs to have fruit from us
   also. He hungers for our holiness: he longs that his joy may be in us,
   that our joy may be full. He comes up to each of you who are members of
   his church, and especially to each of you who are leaders of his
   people, and he looks to see in you the things in which his soul is well
   pleased. He would see in us love to himself, love to our fellow-men,
   strong faith in revelation, earnest contention for the once delivered
   faith, importunate pleading in prayer, and careful living in every part
   of our course. He expects from us actions such as are according to the
   law of God and the mind of the Spirit of God; and if he does not see
   these, he does not receive his due. What did he die for but to make his
   people holy? What did he give himself for but that he might sanctify
   unto himself a people zealous of good works? What is the reward of the
   bloody sweat and the five wounds and the death agony, but that by all
   these we should be bought with a price? We rob him of his reward if we
   do not glorify him, and therefore the Spirit of God is grieved at our
   conduct if we do not show forth his praises by our godly and zealous
   lives.

   And mark here, that when Christ comes to a soul he surveys it with keen
   discernment. He is not mocked. It is not possible to deceive him. I
   have thought that to be a fig which turned out to be only a leaf was a
   mistake; but our Lord makes no such mistake. Neither will he overlook
   the little figs, just breaking forth. He knows the fruit of the Spirit
   in whatever stage it may be. He never mistakes fluent expression for
   hearty possession, nor real grace for mere emotion. Beloved, you are in
   good hands as to the trial of your condition when the Lord Jesus comes
   to deal with you. Your fellow-men are quick in their judgments, and
   they may be either censorious, or partial; but the King gives forth a
   righteous sentence. He knows just where we are, and what we are; and he
   judges not after the appearance, but according to truth. Oh, that our
   prayer might this morning rise to heaven: "Jesus, Master, come and cast
   thy searching eyes upon me, and judge whether I am living unto thee or
   not! Give me to see myself as thou seest me, that I may have my errors
   corrected, and my graces nourished. Lord, make me to be indeed what I
   profess to be; and if I am not so already, convince me of my false
   state, and begin a true work in my soul. If I am thine, and am right in
   thy sight, grant ma a kind, assuring word to sink my fears again, and I
   will gladly rejoice in thee as the God of my salvation."

   III. I come, thirdly, by the help of the Spirit of God, to consider the
   truth, that THE RESULT OF THE COMING OF CHRIST TO THE FORWARD, BUT
   FRUITLESS, PROFESSOR WILL BE VERY TERRIBLE.

   The searcher finds nothing but leaves where fruit might have been
   expected. Nothing but leaves means nothing but lies. Is that a harsh
   expression? If I profess faith, and have no faith, is not that a lie?
   If I profess repentance, and have not repented, is not that a lie? If I
   unite with the people of the living God, and yet have no fear of God in
   my heart, is not that a lie? If I come to the communion-table, and
   partake of the bread and wine, and yet never discern the Lord's body,
   is not that a lie? If I profess to defend the doctrines of grace, and
   yet am not assured of the truth of them, is not that a lie? If I have
   never felt my depravity; if I have never been effectually called, never
   known my election of God, never rested in the redeeming blood, and have
   never been renewed by the Spirit, is not my defense of the doctrines of
   grace a lie? If there is nothing but leaves, there is nothing but lies,
   and the Saviour sees that it is so. All the verdure of green leaf to
   him without fruit is but so much deceit. Profession without grace is
   the funeral pageantry of a dead soul. Religion without holiness is the
   light which comes from rotten wood'the phosphorescence of decay: I
   speak dread words, but how can I speak less dreadfully than I do? If
   you and I have but a name to live, and are dead, what a state we are
   in! Ours is something worse than corruption: it is the corruption of
   corruption. To profess religion and live in sin, is to sprinkle
   rose-water upon a dunghill, and leave it a dunghill still. To give a
   spirit an angel's name when it bears the devil's character, is almost
   to sin against the Holy Ghost. If we remain unconverted, of what use
   can it be to have our name written among the godly?

   Our Lord discovered that there was no fruit, and that was a dreadful
   thing; but, next, he condemned the tree. Was it not right that he
   should condemn it? Did he curse it? It was already a curse. It was
   calculated to tantalize the hungry, and take them out of their way to
   deceive them. God will not have the poor and needy made a jest of. An
   empty profession is a practical curse; and should it not receive the
   censure of the Lord of truth? The tree was of no use where it was: it
   ministered to no man's refreshment. So, the barren professor occupies a
   position in which he ought to be a blessing, but, in truth, an evil
   influence streams forth from him. If he has not the grace of God in
   him, he is utterly useless, and in all probability he is a curse: he is
   an Achan in the camp, grieving the Lord, and causing him to refuse
   success to his people.

   Our Lord did, however, use the fig tree for a good purpose when he
   caused it to wither away; for it became, henceforth, a beacon and a
   warning to all others who put forth vain pretenses. So, when the
   ungodly man, who has exhibited a flourishing profession, is allowed to
   fade away in his ways, some moral effect is produced upon others: they
   are compelled to see the peril of an unsound profession; and if they
   are wise, they will no longer be guilty of it. Would God it might be so
   in every case whenever a notable religionist withers away!

   After that, when the Saviour had condemned it, he pronounced sentence
   upon it; and what was the sentence? It was simply, "As you were." It
   was nothing more than a confirmation of its state. This tree has borne
   no fruit, it shall never bear fruit. If a man chooses to be without the
   grace of God, and yet to make a profession of having it, it is only
   just that the great Judge should say, "Continue without grace." When
   the great Judge at last shall speak to those who depart from God, he
   will simply say to them, "Depart!" Throughout life they always were
   departing, and after death their character is stamped with perpetuity.
   If you choose to be graceless, to be graceless shall be your doom. "He
   that is filthy, let him be filthy still." May the Lord Jesus never have
   to sentence any of you in this way; but may he turn us, that we may be
   turned, and work in us eternal life to his praise and glory!

   Then there came a change over the tree. It began at once to wither. I
   do not know whether the disciples saw a quiver run through it at once;
   but on the next morning when they passed that way, according to Mark,
   it had dried up from the roots. Not only did the leaves hang down, like
   streamers when there is no wind; not only did the bark seem to have
   lost every token of vitality; but the whole fabric was blighted
   fatally. Have you ever seen a fig tree with its strange, weird
   branches? It is a very extraordinary sight when bare of leaves. In this
   case I see its skeleton arms! It is twice dead, dead from the very
   roots. Thus have I seen the fair professor undergo a blight. He has
   looked like a thing that has felt the breath of a furnace, and has had
   its moisture dried up. The man is no longer himself: his glory and his
   beauty are hopelessly gone. No axe was lifted; no fire was kindled; a
   word did it, and the tree withered from the root. So, without
   thunderbolt or pestilence, the once brave professor is stricken as with
   the judgment of Cain. It is an awful fate. Better far to have the
   vine-dresser come to you with the axe in his hand, and strike you with
   the head of it, and say to you, "Tree, thou must bear fruit, or be hewn
   down." Such a warning would be terrible, but it would be infinitely
   better than to be left in one's place untouched, quietly to wither to
   destruction.

   Now I have delivered my heavy burden, laying it far more upon myself
   than upon any one of you; for I stand more prominent than you; I have
   made a louder profession than most of you; and if I have not his grace
   in me, then I shall stand before the multitude that have seen me in my
   greenness, and shall wither away to the very roots, a terrible example
   of what God doth with those who bear no fruit to his glory.

   But now I desire to conclude with tenderer words. Let no man say, "This
   is very hard." Brother, it is not hard, is it, that if we profess a
   thing we should be expected to be true to it? Besides, I pray you not
   to think that anything my Lord can do is hard. He is all gentleness and
   tenderness. The only thing he ever did destroy was this fig tree. He
   destroyed no men, as Elias did when he brought fire from heaven upon
   them; nor as Elisha did when the bears came out of the wood. It is only
   a barren tree that he causes to wither away. He is all love and
   tenderness: he does not want to wither you, nor will he, if you be but
   true. The very least he may expect is that you be true to what you
   profess. Are you rebellious because he asks you not to play the
   hypocrite? If you begin to kick against his admonition, it will look as
   if you were yourself untrue at heart. Instead of that, come and bow
   humbly at his feet, and say, "Lord, if anything in this solemn truth
   bears upon me, I beseech thee so to apply it to my conscience that I
   may feel its power, and flee to thee for salvation." Many men are
   converted in this way'these hard but honest things drive them from
   false refuges, and bring them to be true to Christ and to their own
   souls.

   "But," saith one, "I know what I will do; I will never make any
   profession; I will bear no leaves." My friend, that also is a sullen,
   rebellious spirit. Instead of talking so, you should say, Lord, I do
   not ask thee to take away my leaves, but let me have fruit. The fruit
   is not likely to ripen well without leaves; leaves are essential to the
   health of the tree, and the health of the tree is essential to the
   ripening of the fruit. Open confession of faith is good, and must not
   be refused. Lord, I would not drop a leaf.

   "I'm not ashamed to own my Lord,

   Or to defend his cause;

   Maintain the honour of his word,

   The glory of his cross."

   Lord, I do not want to be set away in a corner; I am satisfied to stand
   where men may see my good works, and glorify my Father who is in
   heaven. I do not ask to be observed; but I am not ashamed to be
   observed; only, Lord, make me fit for observation. If a commander said
   to a soldier, "Stand firm, but mind you have your cartridges ready, so
   that you may not lift an empty gun;" suppose that soldier answered, "I
   cannot be so particular. I would rather run to the rear." Would that be
   a fit reply? Coward! because your captain warns you that you must not
   be a sham, you would therefore, run off altogether! Surely, you are of
   an evil sort. You are not truly one of the Lord's, if you cannot bear
   his rebuke. Let not these solemn truths drive us away, but let them
   draw us on to say, "Lord, I pray thee, help me to make my calling and
   election sure. I beseech thee, help me to bring forth the expected
   fruit. Thy grace can do it."

   I would suggest to everyone here to cry to the Lord to make us
   conscious of our natural barrenness. Gracious ones, may the Lord make
   us mourn our comparative barrenness, even if we do bear some fruit. To
   feel quite satisfied with yourself is perilous: to feel that you are
   holy, and indeed that you are perfect, is to be on the brink of the pit
   of pride. If you hold your head so high, I am afraid you will strike it
   against the top of the doorway. If you walk on stilts, I fear you will
   fall. It is a safer thing to feel, "Lord, I do serve thee, and I am no
   deceiver. I do love thee; thou hast wrought the works of the Spirit in
   me. But alas! I am not what I want to be, I am not what I ought to be.
   I aspire to holiness: help me to attain it. Lord, I would lie in the
   very dust before thee to think that after being digged about and
   dunged, as I have been, I should bear such little fruit. I feel myself
   less than nothing. My cry is, 'God be merciful to me.' If I had done
   all, I should still have been an unprofitable servant; but having done
   so little, Lord, where shall I hide my guilty head?"

   Lastly, when you have made this confession, and the good Lord has heard
   you, there is one emblem in Scripture I should like you to copy.
   Suppose this morning you feel so dry and dead and barren, that you
   cannot serve God as you would, nor even pray for more grace, as you
   wish to do. Then you are something like these twelve rods. They are
   very dead and dry, for they have been held in the hands of twelve
   chiefs, who have used them as their official staves. These twelve rods
   are to be laid before the Lord. This one is Aaron's rod; but it is
   quite as dead and dry as any of the rest. The whole twelve are laid in
   the place where the Lord dwelleth. We see them next morning. Eleven are
   dry rods still; but see this rod of Aaron! What has happened? It was
   dry as death. See, it has budded! This is wonderful! But look, it has
   blossomed! There are almond flowers upon it. You know they are rosy
   pink and white. This is marvelous! But look again, it has brought forth
   almonds! Here, you have them! See these green fruits, which look like
   peaches. Take off the flesh, and here is an almond whose shell you may
   break and find the kernel. The heavenly power has come upon the dry
   stick, and it has budded and blossomed, and even brought forth almonds.
   Fruit-bearing is the proof of life and favour. Lord, take these poor
   sticks this morning, and make them bud. Lord, here we are, in a bundle,
   perform that ancient miracle in a thousand of us. Make us bud and
   blossom, and bear fruit! Come with divine power, and turn this
   congregation from a fagot into a grove. Oh, that our blessed Lord may
   get a fig from some dry stick this morning! at least, such a fig as
   this, "God be merciful to me a sinner;" there is sweetness in that fig
   as this, "Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief." Here is another,
   "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him"'that is a whole basketful
   of the first ripe figs, and the Lord rejoices in their sweetness. Come
   Holy Spirit, produce fruit in us this day, through faith in Jesus
   Christ our Lord! Amen, and Amen.

   PORTIONS OF SCRIPTURE READ BEFORE SERMON'Matthew 21:12-32.

   HYMNS FROM "OUR OWN HYMN BOOK"'100 (Ver. 1), 652, 645.
     __________________________________________________________________

                            Perseverance in Holiness

   A Sermon

   (No. 2108)

   Delivered on Lord's-day Morning, October 6th, 1889, by

   C. H. SPURGEON,

   At the [8]Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington

   "And I will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not
   turn away from them, to do them good; but I will put my fear in their
   hearts, that they shall not depart from me"'Jeremiah 32:40.

   LAST Sabbath morning we were called to deep searching of heart. It was
   a very painful discourse to the preacher, and it was not less so to
   many of his hearers. Some of us will never forget that fig tree,
   covered with untimely leaves, which yielded no fruit, and was condemned
   to stand a beacon to the unfruitful of all ages. I felt that I was in
   the surgery, using the knife: I felt great tenderness, and the
   operation was grievous to my soul. When the winnowing fan was used to
   chase away the chaff, some of the wheat felt that it was none too
   heavy: the wind stirred it in its place, so as to make it fear that it
   would be carried into the fire. To-day, I trust we shall see that,
   despite all sifting, not one true grain shall be lost.

   May the King himself come near and feast his saints to-day! May the
   Comforter who convinced of sin now come to cheer us with the promise!
   We noticed concerning the fig tree, that it was confirmed in its
   barrenness: it had borne no fruit, though it made large professions of
   doing so, and it was made to abide as it was. Let us consider another
   form of confirmation: not the curse of continuance in the rooted habit
   of evil; but the blessing of perseverance in a settled way of grace.
   May the Lord show us how he establishes his saints in righteousness,
   and makes the works which he has begun in them to abide, and remain,
   and even to go onward towards perfection, so that they shall not be
   ashamed in the day of his appearing!

   We will go to our text at once. In the world there are men and women
   towards whom God stands in covenant relationship. Mixed up with these
   myriads of God-forgetting, or even God-defying people, there are a
   number of covenanted ones, who think of God, know God, trust God, and
   are even in league with God. God has made with them a covenant. It is a
   wonder of mercy that Jehovah should enter into covenant with men; but
   he has done so. God has pledged himself to his people, and they have,
   in return, through his grace, pledged themselves to God. These are
   heaven's Covenanters, in bonds of amity, alliance, and even union with
   the Lord their God. This covenant shall stand when the mountains shall
   depart and the hills shall be removed: it is not a thing of passing
   time; but, like its Author, it is everlasting. Happy people who are
   joined unto the Lord by an eternal bond!

   These covenanted ones may be known by certain marks and evidences. It
   is most important that we should know that we ourselves belong to them.
   They are a people, according to the text, to whom God is doing good.
   Friend, do you perceive that he is doing good to you? Has the Lord
   dealt graciously with you? Has he appeared to you, and said, "I have
   loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have
   I drawn thee"? Do all things work together for good for you? I mean,
   for your spiritual good? your lasting good? Have you received the
   greatest good by the renewal of the Holy Spirit? Has he given Christ to
   you? Has he made you hate evil and cleave to that which is good? If
   these good gifts have been bestowed on you, he has done you good; for
   these gifts are the outcome of the covenant, and are sure guarantees
   that it stands fast between God and your soul.

   These people are known by having the fear of God in their hearts. Judge
   ye, whether it be so in your own case. This is the covenant promise'"I
   will put my fear in their hearts." Do you fear the Lord? Do you
   reverence Jehovah, our God? Do you desire to please the Lord? Do you
   please him? Do you desire to be like him? Are you like him in some
   humble degree? Do you feel ashamed when you see how sadly you come
   short; and does this make you hunger and thirst after righteousness? Is
   the gracious presence of God your heaven below? Is it all the heaven
   you desire above? If so, this fear of God in your heart is the seal of
   the covenant to you. Towards you God has thoughts of love which shall
   never change.

   This leads us to a close consideration of our text. We notice in it,
   first, the everlasting covenant: "I will make an everlasting covenant
   with them." Secondly, we reverently perceive the unchanging God of the
   covenant: "I will not turn away from them, to do them good." Thirdly,
   we see with joy the persevering people in that covenant: "I will put my
   fear in their hearts, that they shall not depart from me." I am sure I
   shall not find language suitable to such a theme as this; but I am
   cheered with the reflection that, however poor and simple my words may
   be, the matter of which I speak is in itself enough for the delight of
   all true believers. When you have an abundance of solid food wherewith
   to make a meal, you need not fret, even though you miss the tasteful
   adornments of the table. Hungry men are not eager for a display of
   plate or of damask; nor even for a show of flowers bedecking the table.
   They are best satisfied with solid food. In my subject there is meat
   fit for kings: however badly I may carve it, you who have appetites
   will not fail to feed thereon. May the Holy Spirit make it so!

   I. First, here is THE EVERLASTING COVENANT: "I will make an everlasting
   covenant with them."

   In the previous chapter, in the thirty-first verse, this covenant is
   called "a new covenant"; and it is new in contrast with the former one
   which the Lord made with Israel when he brought them out of Egypt. It
   is new as to the principle upon which it is based. The Lord had said
   unto his people, that if they would keep his laws and walk in his
   statutes, he would bless them. He set before them a long line of
   blessings, rich and full: all these would be their portion if they
   would hearken to the Lord and obey his law. Truly Jehovah was a husband
   to them, tenderly supplying all their need, and upholding them in all
   their journeying. He fed them with angels' food; he sheltered them by
   day from the heat, and at night he lit up their canvas city with a
   pillar of fire. He himself walked in the midst of them, and revealed
   himself to them as he had done to no other nation: they were a people
   near unto him, a nation beloved of the Lord. But under the exceedingly
   favourable circumstances in which they lived in the wilderness, where
   they had no temporal cares, and no neighbours to mislead them, they did
   not keep the statutes of their God; nay, they did not even remain
   faithful to him as their God; for they worshipped a molten image, and
   likened the Lord of Glory to an ox that eateth grass. They bowed down
   before the image of a bullock that hath horns and hoofs; and they
   cried, "These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the
   land of Egypt." Thus they brake the covenant in the most wanton and
   wicked manner. Such a covenant was easily violated by a rebellious
   people; therefore the Lord, in his immeasurable grace, resolves to make
   with them a covenant of a new kind, which cannot thus be broken. The
   Lord was faithful to the old covenant: the breaking was on the part of
   the people, as we read in Jeremiah 31:32: "Which my covenant they
   brake, although I was an husband unto them." After long patience, he
   visited them for their iniquities, and their carcases fell in the
   wilderness, for they could not enter into his rest. In after-ages he
   gave them into the hands of their enemies, who were a scourge to them;
   he made them to be carried away captive; and at last he suffered the
   Roman to burn their holy city, and scatter the people throughout all
   lands. They would not keep the covenant of God, and therefore their
   treachery was visited upon them. But in these days the Lord hath, in
   Christ Jesus, made with the true seed of Abraham, even with all
   believers, a new covenant; not after the tenor of the old, nor liable
   to be broken as it was. Brethren, take care to distinguish between the
   old and the new covenants; for they must never be mingled. Many never
   catch the true idea of the covenant of grace; they do not understand a
   compact of pure promise. They talk about grace, but they regard it as
   dependent upon merit. They speak about God's mercy, and then combine
   with it conditions which make it rather justice than grace. Distinguish
   between things which differ. If salvation be of grace, it is not of
   works, otherwise grace is no more grace; and if it be of works, it is
   not of grace, otherwise work is no more work. The new covenant is all
   of grace, from its first letter to its closing word; and we shall have
   to show you this as we go on.

   It is an "everlasting" covenant, however: that is the point upon which
   the text insists. The other covenant was of very short duration; but
   this is an "everlasting covenant." Despite modern thought, I hope I
   shall be allowed to believe that the word "everlasting" means lasting
   for ever. While there is any meaning in language, we shall be satisfied
   that "an everlasting covenant" means a covenant that will never come to
   an end. Why is it so?

   The first reason why it is an everlasting covenant is, that it was made
   with us in Christ Jesus. The covenant of works was made with the race
   in the first Adam; but the first Adam was faulty, and failed full soon;
   he could not bear the stress of his responsibility, and so that
   covenant was broken. But the surety of the new covenant is our Lord
   Jesus Christ; and he is not faulty, but perfect. The Lord Jesus is the
   federal head of his chosen, and he stands for them: they are regarded
   as members of his body, and he is their head, their mouthpiece, their
   representative. The Lord Jesus, as the second Adam, entered into
   covenant with God on the behalf of his people; and because he cannot
   fail'for in him there is no infirmity or sin'therefore the covenant of
   which he is the surety must stand. He abideth for ever in his
   Melchizedek priesthood, and in the power of an endless life. He is,
   both in his nature and in his work, eternally qualified to stand before
   the living God. He stands in absolute perfectness under every strain,
   and, therefore, the covenant stands in him. When it is written, "I have
   given him for a covenant to the people," we see that the covenant
   cannot fail, because he cannot fail who is the sum and substance of it.
   Because the Lord Jesus represents all his believing people in the
   covenant, therefore the covenant is everlasting.

   Next, the covenant cannot fail because the human side of it has been
   fulfilled. The human side might be regarded as the weak side of it; but
   when Jesus became the representative of man that side was sure. He has
   at this hour fulfilled to the letter every stipulation upon that side
   of which he was the surety. He has magnified the law, and made it
   honourable by his own obedience to it. He has met the demands of moral
   government, and made amends to holiness for man's offences. The law is
   more glorified by his atoning death than it was dishonoured by man's
   sin. This Man hath offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, and that is
   so effectual for the fulfillment of the covenant that he sits down at
   the right hand of God. Since, then, that side of the covenant has been
   fulfilled which appertains to man, there remaineth only God's side of
   it to be fulfilled, which consists of promises'unconditional promises,
   full of grace and truth, such as these:'"Then will I sprinkle clean
   water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and
   from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give
   you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the
   stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.
   And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my
   statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them." Will not God be
   true to his engagements? Yes, verily. When he makes a covenant, and on
   man's part the compact has been fulfilled, depend upon it, on the
   Lord's side no word will fall to the ground. Even to the jots and
   tittles, all shall be carried out.

   Furthermore, the covenant must be everlasting, for it is founded upon
   the free grace of God. The first covenant was conditioned upon the
   obedience of men. If they kept the law, God would bless them; but they
   failed through disobedience, and inherited the curse. The divine
   sovereignty determined to deal with men, not according to merit, but
   according to mercy; not according to the personal character of men, but
   according to the personal character of God; not according to what men
   might do, but according to what the Lord Jesus would perform. Sovereign
   grace declares that he will have mercy upon whom he will have mercy,
   and will have compassion on whom he will have compassion. This basis of
   sovereignty cannot be shaken. The covenant which saves men according to
   God's will and good pleasure, is founded upon a rock; for God's free
   grace is always the same, and God's sovereignty is linked to
   immutability, even as it is written, "I am the Lord, I change not;
   therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed." The slightest touch of
   merit puts perishable material into the covenant; but if it be of pure
   grace, then the covenant is everlasting.

   Again, in the covenant, everything that can be supposed to be a
   condition is provided. It is necessary that a man, to be forgiven,
   should repent; but then the Lord Jesus is exalted on high to give
   repentance and remission of sins. It is necessary that a man, in order
   to be saved, should have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; but faith is
   of the operation of God, and the Holy Ghost worketh in us this fruit of
   the Spirit. It is needful, before we enter heaven, that we should be
   holy; but the Lord sanctifies us through the Word, and worketh in us to
   will and to do of his own good pleasure. All that is required is also
   supplied. If there be, anywhere in the Word of God, any act or grace
   mentioned as though it were a condition of salvation, it is in another
   Scripture described as a covenant gift which will be bestowed upon the
   heirs of salvation by Christ Jesus. So that the condition, which might
   seem to put the covenant in danger, is so surely provided for, that
   thence ariseth no flaw or fracture.

   Moreover, the covenant must be everlasting, because it cannot be
   superseded by anything more glorious. In the order of God's working he
   always advances from the good to the better. The old law was put away
   because he found fault with it, and therefore the new covenant must
   last till a fault can be found with it; which will never be. This is
   the glory which excelleth: no brightness can exceed the glory of God in
   the face of Jesus Christ. There can be nothing more gracious, nothing
   more righteous, nothing more just to God or more safe to man, than the
   plan of salvation set forth in the covenant of grace. The moon gives
   way to the sun, and the sun gives way to a lustre which shall exceed
   the light of seven days; but what is to supersede the light of free
   grace and dying love, the glory of the love which gave the
   Only-begotten that we might live through him! The covenant of grace
   made with us in Christ Jesus is the masterpiece of divine wisdom and
   love, and it is established on such sure principles that it must last
   for ever.

   Beloved, rest in the covenant of grace as affording you eternal
   security and boundless comfort. It may well be everlasting, since it
   was divine in its conception. Surely the counsel of the Lord shall
   stand. Who else could have thought of a covenant, "ordered in all
   things and sure," to be made with guilty man? It was also divine in its
   carrying out, and therefore it shall endure. Who could have provided a
   Saviour like the Only-begotten of the Father? Who could have given him
   for a covenant but the Father? The covenant is divine in its
   maintenance. Note well the word of the Lord: "I will make an
   everlasting covenant with them." He does not say, "They shall make a
   covenant with me"; but "I will make a covenant with them." That God is
   the maker of the covenant, is a reason for its certainty and
   everlastingness. The faithful God has given guarantees which fix it
   fast, even his promise and his oath; those two immutable things, in
   which it is impossible for God to lie. Through these we have strong
   consolation, who have fled for refuge to Christ Jesus. Thus much upon
   the first head; and very little it is, compared with the grandeur of
   the subject.

   II. Secondly, we have now devoutly to think upon THE UNCHANGING GOD OF
   THE COVENANT: "I will not turn away from them, to do them good."

   Please notice the terms here: the Lord does not merely say, "I will not
   turn away from them," but, "I will not turn away from them, to do them
   good." He will not cease to work good for his chosen. The Lord is
   always doing his people good; and here he promises that he will never
   leave off blessing them. Not only will he always love them, but he will
   always prove his love by active kindness and blessing. He is pledged to
   continue the gifts and work of his goodness. In effect he says, "I will
   not cease blessing them; I will continually, everlastingly be doing
   them good." Now, why is this, that God is thus unchanging in his doings
   towards his covenanted ones?

   He will not turn away from doing them good, first, because he has said
   so. That is enough. Jehovah speaks, and in his voice lies the end of
   all controversy. He says, "I will not turn away from them, to do them
   good"; and we are sure that he will not forfeit his word. I do not need
   to bring forth more reasons: this suffices, the Lord hath said it. Hath
   he said, and will he not do it?

   Still, let us remember that there is no valid reason why he should turn
   away from them to do them good. You remind me of their unworthiness.
   Yes, but observe that when he began to do them good they were as
   unworthy as they could possibly be. He began to do them good when they
   were "dead in trespasses and sins." He began to do them good when they
   were enemies, rebels, and under condemnation. When first the sinner
   feels the movement of divine love upon his heart, he is in no
   commendable state. In some cases the man is a drunkard, a swearer, a
   liar, or a profane person. In certain cases the man has been a
   persecutor like Manasseh or Saul. If God left off blessing us because
   he could see no good in us, why did he begin to do us good when we were
   without desire towards him? We were a mass of misery, a pit of wants,
   and a dunghill of sins when he began to do us good. Whatever we may be
   now, we are not otherwise than we were when first he revealed his love
   towards us. The same motive which led him to begin leads him to
   continue; and that motive is nothing but his grace.

   Moreover, there can be no reason in the faultiness of the believer why
   the Lord should cease to do him good, seeing that he foresaw all the
   evil that would be in us. No wandering child of God surprises his
   heavenly Father. He foreknew every sin we should commit: he proposed to
   do us good notwithstanding all this foreknown iniquity. If, then, he
   entered into a covenant with us, and began to bless us with all our sin
   before his mind, nothing new can spring up which can alter the covenant
   once made with all these drawbacks known and taken into account. There
   is no scarlet sin which has been omitted, for the Lord has said, "Come
   now, and let us reason together: though your sins be as scarlet." He
   entered into a covenant that he would not turn away from us, to do us
   good; and no circumstance has arisen, or can arise, which was unknown
   to him when he thus pledged his word of grace.

   Moreover, I would have you remember that we are by God at this day
   viewed in the same light as ever. He saw us at the first as under sin,
   fallen and depraved, and yet he promised to do us good.

   "He saw me ruined in the fall,

   Yet loved me notwithstanding all."

   And if to-day I am sinful, if to-day I have to groan by reason of my
   evil nature, yet I am but where I was when he chose me, and called me,
   and redeemed me by the blood of his Son. "When we were yet without
   strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly." We were undeserving
   objects upon whom he bestowed his mercy, out of no motive but that
   which he drew from his own nature; and if we are undeserving still, his
   grace is still the same. If it be so, that he still deals with us in
   the way of grace, it is evident that he still views us as undeserving;
   and why should he not do good towards us now as he did at the first?
   Assuredly, the fountain being the same, the stream will continue to
   flow.

   Moreover, remember that he sees us now in Christ. Behold, he has put
   his people into the hands of his dear Son. He has even put us into
   Christ's body; "for we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of
   his bones." He sees us in Christ to have died, in him to have been
   buried, and in him to have risen again. As the Lord Jesus Christ is
   well-pleasing to the Father, so in him are we well-pleasing to the
   Father also; for our being in him identifies us with him. If, then, our
   acceptance with God stands on the footing of Christ's acceptance with
   God, it standeth firmly, and is an unchanging argument with the Lord
   God for doing us good. If we stood before God in our own individual
   righteousness, our ruin would be sure and speedy; but in Jesus our life
   is hid beyond peril. Firmly believe that until the Lord rejects Christ
   he cannot reject his people; until he repudiates the atonement and the
   resurrection, he cannot cast away any of those with whom he has entered
   into covenant in the Lord Jesus Christ.

   The Lord will not turn away from his people, from doing them good,
   because he has shown them so much kindness already; and all that he has
   done would be lost if he did not go through with it. When he gave his
   Son, he gave us a sure pledge that he meant to finish his work of love.
   They say of a man that does not finish his work, "This man began to
   build, and was not able to finish"; but that shall never be said of the
   Lord Jehovah. The Lord God has laid out his whole Deity to save his
   people, and given his whole self in the person of the Well-beloved for
   our redemption; and can you believe that he will fail in it? Surely,
   the idea is blasphemous. Some of us have known too much love already to
   believe that it will ever cease to flow towards us. We have been so
   favoured that we dare not fear that his favour toward us will cease. So
   heavenly, so divine is the sense of the love of God, when it is
   revealed to the soul, that we cannot believe that it has been given to
   mock us. We have been carried away with such torrents of love, that we
   will never believe that they can be dried up. The Lord has communed
   with us so closely, that the secret of the Lord is with us, and he will
   for ever recognize that mystic token by which our union has been
   sealed. Like Paul, each one of us may say, "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." The cost to which our Lord has
   gone assures us that he will complete his designs of grace.

   Beloved, we feel sure that he will not cease to bless us, because we
   have proved that even when he has hidden his face he has not turned
   away from doing us good. The Lord has withdrawn the light of his
   countenance, but never the love of his heart. When the Lord has turned
   away his face from his people, it has been to do them good, by making
   them sick of self and eager for his love. How often he has brought us
   back from wandering by making us feel the evil of the sin which grieves
   his Spirit! When we have cried, "Oh, that I knew where I might find
   him!" we have been greatly blessed by the anguish of our search. Bear
   me witness, ye tried people of God; the Lord's chastenings have always
   been for your good. When the Lord has bruised you till the wound has
   been blue, your heart has been bettered. When the Lord has taken away
   your comforts, he has done you good by driving you closer to the
   highest good. The Lord has enriched you by your losses, and made you
   healthy by your sicknesses. If, then, the Lord our God, when he is seen
   in darkest colours, has not turned away from doing us good, we are
   persuaded that he will never cease daily to load us with benefits.

   Moreover, I close with this argument, that he has involved his honour
   in the salvation of his people. If the Lord's chosen and redeemed are
   cast away, where is the glory of his redemption? Will not the enemy say
   of the Lord, "He had not the power to carry out his covenant, nor the
   constancy to continue blessing them"? Shall that ever be said of God?
   Will he thus lose the glory of his omnipotence and immutability? I
   cannot believe that any purpose of the Lord can fail; neither can I
   conceive that he can withdraw his declarations of love to those with
   whom he is in covenant. The God whom we adore and reverence, the God of
   Abraham, the God and Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,
   fainteth not, neither is weary. "He is in one mind, and who can turn
   him?" "He will ever be mindful of his covenant." Of our Lord Jesus we
   truly sing'

   "His honour is engaged to save

   The meanest of his sheep;

   All that his heavenly Father gave,

   His hands securely keep."

   Whether my arguments seem good to you or not, is of small consequence;
   for the text is the inspired Word of God, and it cannot be
   misunderstood or questioned. Thus saith the Lord, "I will not turn away
   from them, to do them good."

   III. The third part of our subject leads us to see THE PERSEVERING
   PEOPLE IN THE COVENANT: "I will put my fear in their hearts, that they
   shall not depart from me."

   Let me read very distinctly these words: "They shall not depart from
   me." If there were only that text in the Bible, it would suffice to
   prove the final perseverance of the saints: "They SHALL NOT depart from
   me." The salvation of those who are in covenant with God is herein
   provided for by an absolute promise of the omnipotent God, which must
   be carried out. It is plain, clear, unconditional, positive: "They
   shall not depart from me."

   It is not carried out by altering the effect of apostasy. If they did
   depart from God, it would be fatal. Suppose a child of God should
   utterly depart from the Lord, and wholly lose the life of God: what
   then? Would he nevertheless be saved? I answer, His salvation lies in
   the fact that he will never utterly lose the life of God. Why are we to
   ask what would happen in a case which can never occur? But if we must
   suppose it, we are not slow to say that if the believer were wholly
   separated from Christ, he must, without doubt, perish everlastingly. If
   a man abide not in Christ, he is cast forth as a branch and is
   withered. The Scripture is very positive about it: if grace were gone,
   safety would be gone. "Salt is good: but if the salt have lost his
   savour, wherewith shall it be seasoned?" "If these shall fall away, it
   is impossible to renew them again unto repentance." If the work of
   grace could wholly and totally fail in any man, the case would be
   beyond all remedy, since the best means has, on that supposition, been
   tried and has failed. If the Holy Ghost has indeed regenerated a soul,
   and yet that regeneration does not saved it from total apostasy, what
   can be done? There is such a thing as being "born again"; but there is
   no such thing as being born again and again. Regeneration is once for
   all: it cannot be repeated. Scripture has no word or hint that it could
   be. If men have been washed in the blood of Jesus, and renewed by the
   Holy Ghost, and this sacred process has failed, there remains no more.
   When old things have passed away and all things have become new, can it
   be imagined that these will grow old again? No man may therefore say,
   "Though I go back to my old sin, and cease to pray, or repent, or
   believe, or have any life of God in me, yet I shall be saved because I
   was once a believer." Nay, nay, profane talker; the text saith not,
   "They shall be saved though they depart from me"; but "They shall not
   depart from me"'which is a very different matter. Woe unto them that
   depart from the living God! for they must perish, and with them no
   covenant of peace has been made.

   Neither does this perseverance of the saints come in by the removal of
   temptation. It is not said, "I will put them where they shall not be
   tempted; I will give them such a sufficient livelihood that they shall
   not be tried by poverty, and at the same time they shall never be so
   rich as to know the temptations of wealth." No, the Lord does not take
   his people out of the world; but he allows them to fight the battle of
   life in the same field as others. He does not remove us from the
   conflict, but "he giveth us the victory." We are tempted as was our
   Lord; but we have a way of escape provided. Our heart is prone to
   wander, and we are not kept from the scene of possible wandering. But
   what is said is this'"They shall not depart from me." What a blessed
   assurance! They may be tempted; but they shall not be overcome. Though
   they sin in measure, yet shall they not so sin as to depart from God.
   They shall still hold on to him, and live in Christ by the indwelling
   of the Holy Spirit.

   How, then, are they preserved? Well, not as some falsely talk, as
   though we preached, "that the man who is converted may live as he
   likes." We have never said so; we have never even thought so. The man
   who is converted cannot live as he likes; or, rather, he is so changed
   by the Holy Spirit, that if he could live as he likes, he would never
   sin, but live an absolutely perfect life. Oh, how deeply do we long to
   be kept clear of every sin! We preach not that men may depart from God
   and yet live; but that they shall not depart from him.

   This is effected by putting a divine principle within their hearts. The
   Lord saith, "I will put my fear in their hearts." It would never be
   found there if he did not put it there. It will never spring up
   naturally in any heart. "I will put my fear in their hearts"; that is,
   regeneration and conversion. He makes us tremble before his law. He
   makes us feel the smart and bitterness of sin. He causes us to remember
   the God we once forgot, and to obey the Lord whom once we defied. "I
   will put my fear in their hearts" is the first great act of conversion,
   and it is continued throughout life by the perpetual working of the
   Spirit upon the heart. The work which commences at conversion is duly
   carried on in the converted ones; for the Lord still puts his fear into
   their hearts. How the Spirit of God works we cannot tell: he has ways
   of acting directly upon our minds which are all his own, and cannot be
   understood by us. But without violating the freedom of our nature,
   leaving us men as we were before, he knows how to make us continue in
   the fear of God. This is God's great holdfast upon his people, "I will
   put my fear in their hearts."

   What is this fear of God? It is, first, a holy awe and reverence of the
   great God. Taught of God, we come to see his infinite greatness, and
   the fact that he is everywhere present with us; and then, filled with a
   devout sense of his Godhead, we dare not sin. Since God is near, we
   cannot offend. The words, "my fear," also intend filial fear. God is
   our Father, and we feel the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, "Abba,
   Father." This child-like love kindles in us a fear to grieve him whom
   we love, and therefore we have no desire to depart from him. There
   moves also in our hearts a deep sense of grateful obligation. God is so
   good to me, how can I sin? He loves me so, how can I vex him? He
   favours me so greatly from day to day that I cannot do that which is
   contrary to his will. Did you ever receive a choice and special mercy?
   It has often fallen to my lot; and when the tears have been in my eyes
   at the sight of so great a favour, I have felt that if a temptation
   came to me, it would come at a time when I had neither heart, nor eye,
   nor ear for it. Gratitude bars the door against sin. Great love
   received overthrows great temptation to wander. Our cry is, "The Lord
   bathes me in his love, he indulges me with the nearest and dearest
   fellowship with himself, and how can I do this great wickedness, and
   sin against God?" Loved of him so specially, and united to him by an
   everlasting covenant, how can we fly in the face of love so wonderful?
   Surely, we can find no pleasure in offending so gracious a God; but it
   is our joy to do his commandments, hearkening unto the voice of his
   word.

   See, beloved, this perseverance of the saints, is perseverance in
   holiness: "They shall not depart from me." If the grace of God has
   really changed you, you are radically and lastingly changed. If you
   have come to Christ, he has not placed in you a mere cup of the water
   of life, but he has said it: "The water that I shall give him shall be
   in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." The work
   that is done in regeneration is not a temporary work, by which a man
   is, for a time, reformed; but it is an everlasting work, by which the
   man is born for heaven. There is a life implanted at the new birth,
   which cannot die, for it is a living and incorruptible seed, which
   liveth and abideth for ever. Grace will go on working in a man until it
   leads him to glory.

   If any differ from what I have said, I cannot help it; but I would beg
   them not to differ from the text; for the Scripture cannot be broken.
   Read it: "I will put my fear in their hearts, that they shall not
   depart from me." There it stands, "They shall not depart from me." But
   if you ask, By what instrumentality does God maintain this fear in the
   hearts of his people? I answer, it is the work of the Spirit of God:
   but the Holy Spirit usually works by means. The fear of God is kept
   alive in our hearts by the hearing of the Word; for faith cometh by
   hearing, and holy fear cometh through faith. Be diligent, then, in
   hearing the Word. That fear is kept alive in our hearts by reading the
   Scriptures; for as we feed on the Word, it breathes within us that fear
   of God which is the beginning of wisdom. This fear of God is maintained
   in us by the belief of revealed truth, and meditation thereon. Study
   the doctrines of grace, and be instructed in the analogy of the faith.
   Know the gospel well and thoroughly, and this will bring fuel to the
   fire of the fear of God in your hearts. Be much in private prayer; for
   that stirs up the fire, and makes it burn more brilliantly. In fine,
   seek to live near to God, to abide in him; for as you abide in him, and
   his words abide in you, you shall bring forth much fruit, and so shall
   you be his disciples.

   I find this precious doctrine of the perseverance of the saints to be a
   very fruitful one. One Thursday night, not long ago, I preached this
   doctrine with all my might, and many were comforted by it; but, better
   still, many were set thinking, and were led to turn their faces
   Christ-ward. Some preach a doctrine which has a very wide door, but it
   is all door, and when you get in, there is nothing to be had; you are
   no safer than you were outside. Sheep are not in a hurry to enter where
   there is no pasture. Some have thought my doctrine narrow, though I am
   sure it is not; but if a door should seem strait, yet, if there is
   something worth the having when you get in, many will seek admission.
   There are such wonderful blessings provided in the covenant of grace
   that those who are wise are anxious to obtain them. "Oh!" says one, "if
   salvation is an everlasting thing, if this regeneration means a change
   of nature such as can never be undone, let me have it. If salvation is
   a mere plated article which will wear out, I do not want it; but if it
   is pure silver all through, let me have it." Does the gift of grace
   make us partakers of the divine nature, and cause us to escape the
   corruption which is in the world through lust? then let us have it. I
   pray that some here may desire salvation, because it secures a life of
   holiness. The sweetmeat which tempted me to Christ was this'I believed
   that salvation was an insurance of character. In what better way can a
   young man cleanse his life than by putting himself into the holy hands
   of the Lord Jesus, to be kept from falling? I said'If I give myself to
   Christ, he will save me from my sins. Therefore, I came to him, and he
   keeps me. Oh, how musical these words, "They shall not depart from me!"

   To use an old figure: be sure that you take a ticket all the way
   through. Many people have only believed in God to save them for a time;
   so long as they are faithful, or so long as they are earnest. Beloved,
   believe in God to keep you faithful and earnest all your life: take a
   ticket all the way through. Get a salvation which covers all risks.
   There is no other ticket issued from the authorized office but a
   through-ticket. Other tickets are forgeries. He that cannot keep you
   for ever cannot keep you a day. If the power of regeneration will not
   last through life, it may not last an hour. Faith in the everlasting
   covenant stirs my heart's blood, fills me with grateful joy, inspires
   me with confidence, fires me with enthusiasm. I can never give up my
   belief in what the Lord hath said, "And I will make an everlasting
   covenant with them, that I will not turn away from them, to do them
   good; but I will put my fear in their hearts, that they shall not
   depart from me." God bless you, for Christ's sake! Amen.

   PORTIONS OF SCRIPTURE READ BEFORE SERMON'Hebrews 8; 10:12-39.

   HYMNS FROM "OUR OWN HYMN BOOK"'27, 229, 228.
     __________________________________________________________________

The Eye and the Light

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S-DAY MORNING, OCTOBER 13, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "No man, when he has lighted a candle, puts it in a secret place,
   neither under a bushel, but on a candlestick, that they which come in
   may see the light. The light of the body is the eye: therefore when
   your eye is single, your whole body also is full of light. But when
   your eye is evil, your body also is full of darkness. Take heed
   therefore that the light which is in you is not darkness. If your whole
   body therefore is full of light, havingno part dark, the whole shall be
   full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle does give you
   light." Luke 11:33-36

   IN this parable, our Lord Jesus Christ is the Light. Some saw His
   brightness, and were even dazzled by it, as was that woman who cried,
   "Blessed is the womb that bore You and the paps which You have sucked."
   The malicious saw not His light but even dared to impute His miracles
   to the Prince of Darkness. Others professed to see so little light in
   Him that they demanded a sign from Heaven. Our Lord's constant answer
   was to go shining on.

   He was meant to be observed, even as a lamp is intended to be seen. A
   lamp is not lighted to be placed in a cellar, nor to be hidden under a
   bushel--the lamp is lighted on purpose, that all who come into the
   house may see the light. Even so, our Lord Jesus Christ could not be
   hid. In the narrow circle of the Holy Land, He shone so clearly that
   Gentiles came to the brightness of His rising. Yet, to make Him seen to
   the ends of the earth, He must be set on the lamp stand.

   He was lifted up by crucifixion. And soon after He was raised by
   resurrection--He was lifted up from earth to Heaven at His ascension
   and in another sense He was set on high by the descent of the Holy
   Spirit and the widespread ministry of His servants. Our Lord was thus
   taken from under the bushel of the obscurity which attached to His
   humble origin, brought away from the dark cellar of the despised Jewish
   nation, and set out in the open, where Greek and Roman, Barbarian and
   Scythian, might rejoice in His light. It is our duty to keep His name
   and His Truth ever before the world, waiting for the time when every
   eye shall see Him on the throne of His Glory.

   Our Lord would have all men behold the light of His Gospel. For the
   text says, "that they which come in may see the light." Whosoever comes
   into the Church, or even into the world, should be met with this lamp.
   For this Gospel is to be preached to every creature under Heaven. The
   mighty deeds of His salvation were not done in a corner--they are for
   world-wide observation. He that has eyes to see let him see. If you do
   not see Jesus, it is not because He has hidden Himself in darkness but
   because your eyes are blinded.

   The light which streams from the face of Jesus is meant for human
   eyes--the tempered brightness of the Mediator's Glory suits those eyes,
   which are bid to look to Him and live. Light is not for the rich, the
   wise, the strong--but for men as men. The doctrines of our Lord Jesus
   Christ are not meant to be the monopoly of a few learned doctors. They
   are the common inheritance of those who labor and are heavy laden. As
   the morning breaks for all weary, watching eyes, so shines the light of
   the glorious Gospel for all who sit in darkness and long for the light
   of God.

   Beloved, the great thing to be desired is that the light which is so
   freely given forth by the Lord Jesus may become light within our souls.
   There He stands, as the lamp placed upon the lamp stand, conspicuous to
   all. But we need that the light outside in the room may become light
   inside, within the soul. Nothing more truly needs light than our inner
   man. We are, by nature, as a lantern with the candle blown out. Whether
   we will believe it or not, by nature we are in thick Egyptian night.
   Well says the Apostle, "You were sometimes darkness."

   Much is said about the light of conscience but in many this is but a
   glimmering taper whose beams are "not light but darkness visible." The
   light of nature is dimmed by so many surroundings, and has so little
   oil to sustain it, that it leads no man to eternal life, unless there
   is added to it light from Above--the light of Divine Grace, the clear
   shining of the Holy Spirit.

   Light is absolutely essential to spiritual life. Ignorance is not the
   mother of devotion but of superstition. Knowledge, Divine Grace, the
   Truths of God, are the nurses of true faith. The light of God is
   needful to the life of God. We must know Christ, we must be illuminated
   by His Holy Spirit, we must have fellowship with the Father's Truth--or
   else we are dead--as well as dark. Light within we must have, or the
   light outside will not benefit us.

   Upon that subject we will speak at this time. May God grant us the
   light of His Spirit, for it would be idle for us to try to explain the
   action of light while ourselves in darkness. Shine within, O Holy
   Spirit, that we speak not of theory but of actual experience!

   First, we will consider how the light enters--"The light of the body is
   the eye: therefore when your eye is single, your whole body also is
   full of light." Secondly, we shall note how this light may be
   perverted--"When your eye is evil, your body also is full of darkness.
   Take heed therefore that the light which is in you is not darkness." In
   conclusion, we shall observe how the light acts within--"If your whole
   body therefore is full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall
   be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle does give you
   light."

   I. First, then, consider HOW THE LIGHT ENTERS THE SOUL. Into the body
   the light enters through the eye. A

   man without an eye might as well be without the sun, so far as light is
   concerned. The eye is as needed as the lamp, if a man is to see. The
   most brilliant light that ever has been invented, or ever can be
   discovered, will be of no use to the person who has no eye.

   Therefore it is true, "The light of the body is the eye." It is most
   important to attend to that which is the eye of the inner man. For in
   vain does Christ Himself shine if His light cannot enter our souls. The
   condition of the eye of the mind is of the utmost importance--our light
   or our darkness will depend upon it. The eye of the soul may be viewed
   as the understanding, the conscience, the motive, or the heart. It
   would not be possible to confine it to any one of these names. I
   venture to call it, "the intent of the mind."

   Or, if you will, "the aim of the heart," the honesty of the
   understanding. When God has given a man a true intent to see the light
   of the Gospel, He has in that honest intent furnished him with an eye
   for the heavenly light. If the Holy Spirit makes us truly willing to
   know the Truth of God, He has cleared the mental eye. The worst of it
   is that men have no will to see the light of God--their foolish heart
   is darkened, and therefore they do not understand, but altogether
   misrepresent the doctrine of the Lord Jesus.

   The battle of Divine Grace is with man's unwillingness to see those
   Truths of God against which he is naturally at enmity. If a man wills
   to see the honest Truth and submits himself to the enlightenment of the
   Holy Spirit, he will not be left in darkness. When a man does not want
   to see, he cannot see--when he is determined not to learn, when Truth
   is unpalatable to him, when he designedly twists it from its meaning,
   then his eye is diseased and the light is hindered from its due effect.

   Many things darken the eye of the soul. One of the most common is
   prejudice. The man conceives that he already has light. His father, his
   grandfather, his great-grandfather and previous generations--were
   brought up in a certain religion--and therefore it must be right.
   Whether the lamp gives light or not, is not the question--it is the
   family lamp-- and he will have no other. He will not enquire--he is
   quite sure and wants no evidence.

   When the light of God comes to him, he at once repels it. He cannot be
   disturbed, and therefore he will not hear, nor read, nor consider the
   matter--he is satisfied to let things be as they are. The very
   supposition that he may be wrong he regards as an insult--maliciously
   invented by an uncharitable mind. What is to be done with one so
   blinded? Are there not many such?

   Sloth, too, is a great blinder of the eye--it draws down the eyelid and
   shuts out the light by the spirit of slumber. The man does not care
   what the Gospel is, or is not. Like Pilate, he asks, "What is truth?"
   but he never waits for an answer. It is too much trouble to some people
   to think, to search the Scriptures, and to pray. They have no heart for
   a process so troublesome. "No," says the worldling, "I have other fish
   to fry. I go my way to my farm and to my merchandise. Let graceless
   bigots fight about creeds and the like. It matters not one jot what a
   man believes." Thus do many abide in the blackest darkness, because it
   is too much trouble to open the shutters and draw up the blinds. Ah me,
   how dark are they who prefer an indolent ease to the light of God!

   The light is often shut out by gross error. I cannot go over the list
   of the favorite errors of the present hour. For that list has grown too
   long for one day's reading. Speciously taught in selected phrases,
   cunningly supported by a dreamy

   science and adorned with certain great names, errors come to us
   nowadays as respectable forms of thought. Falsehoods of which we heard
   when we were children--but only heard of them as loathsome
   heresies--long ago decayed and thrown into the limbo of worthless and
   mischievous imaginations--are now refashioned, freshened up with
   touches of bright color and brought out as advanced ideas.

   When any of these are permitted to occupy the mind, as they so commonly
   do nowadays, the old Gospel is no longer seen, because the eye is
   inflamed by the incoming of a foreign and irritating substance. Can it
   be that what was true a hundred years ago, is not true now? Can it be
   that the Gospel, which saved souls in the days of the Apostles, cannot
   save souls now? Is it so, that some men are wiser than God and are
   qualified to sit in judgment upon Prophets and Apostles? Surely,
   judicial blindness has

   happened to this generation--the chaff of their own folly has darkened
   their eyes and Christ is hid from them.

   One thing darkens the eye more than any other, and that is the love of
   sin. Nine times out of ten, allowed sin is the cataract which darkens
   the mental eye. Men cannot see the Truth of God because they love
   falsehood. The Gospel is not seen because it is too pure for their
   loose lives and lewd thoughts. Christ's holy example is too severe for
   the worldly. His Spirit is too pure for lovers of carnal pleasure. When
   people reject the doctrines of the Gospel, they also tolerate laxity of
   morals and give predominance to the customs of the world. How can men
   see, when sin has pricked the very eyeballs of the mind!

   "How can you believe," said Christ, "which receive honor one of
   another?" The love of worldly honor prevented the Pharisees from
   believing in the lowly Messiah. When sin, like a handful of mud, seals
   up the eye, you need not wonder that the man becomes an agnostic, a
   doubter, a caviler. To have a clear eye one must have a clean heart.
   The pure in heart shall see God. And therefore the pure in heart see
   God's Truth, so as to appreciate it and delight in it. Oh, that the
   Spirit of God may wash the filth out of our eyes, that we may walk in
   the light, as God is in the light.

   Pride, too, is a great darkener of the soul's eye. When a man admires
   himself he never adores God. He that is taken up with the conceit of
   his own righteousness will never see the righteousness of Christ. If
   you believe yourself to be pure, you will never prize the blood which
   cleanses from all sin. If you believe yourself to be already perfect,
   you will not prize the Holy Spirit, the Sanctifier. No man cries for
   Divine Grace till he perceives his own need of it--if, therefore, we
   are puffed up with the notion that we

   are rich and increased in goods, we shall never see the riches of Grace
   which are treasured up in Christ Jesus. The light of God dwells not
   with human self-sufficiency. A man's own shadow is very often the means
   of keeping him in the dark.

   Self-seeking, in every form, is a sad cause of obscuring the light of
   the soul. Self-seeking, in the grosser form of avarice, makes men grope
   in the daytime. The glitter of gold is injurious to the eye. How could
   Judas see the beauty of Christ when he saw such value in the thirty
   pieces of silver? How can a man set store by a future Heaven when a
   present fortune is Heaven enough for him? Mammon repays its worshippers
   with blind eyes.

   Self does the same when it appears as ambition, desire of honor, and
   respect, or a wish to have a finger in one's own salvation. The proud
   desire to share the glory of our salvation with Free Grace prevents the
   entrance of the light of God. Self, in the form of magnifying the
   nobility of human nature, extolling the grandeur of our common humanity
   and all that, is a very blinding thing. How can a man that has his eye
   upon self have any sight for Jesus? Of all antichrists, self is the
   hardest to overcome.

   It is written, "He must increase but I must decrease." But if proud
   self will not endure a decrease, how can I see Christ increasing? There
   is no room for Him in my heart. Appreciation of self leads to
   depreciation of the Lord Jesus.

   Multitudes are kept in darkness through fear of men. They dare not see.
   They feel bound to think as the fashion goes--and there is a fashion of
   opinions as well as of coats and bonnets. If you resolve to hold fast
   the faith once delivered to the saints, you will be regarded as
   antiquated and you will be as much pointed out for your faith, as you
   would be for your dress if you should walk down the street in the
   costume of the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

   To many it would be great sin to be singular. They never think for
   themselves. In fact, they are mentally shiftless. They ask their way of
   a certain person supposed to be a deeper student than themselves--of
   him they enquire what they ought to believe, disbelieve, praise, or
   blame. I remember well a man who never knew whether he liked a sermon
   till he had asked a certain knowing old gentleman whether it was a good
   one or not--he had no home-grown judgment--he

   imported his ideas. His brains, for safe keeping, were placed in
   another person's head--this is a very convenient thing and saves a good
   deal of headache.

   But it has its drawbacks. Some persons put all their thinking out and
   have it done for them by the dozen--but he that would have God's light
   knows that it comes not to the coward who fears the frown of a mortal
   and makes man his god. God could have given to the crowd a common
   judgment and have left us to be guided by a central authority, if He
   had thought it right to do so. But having given to each individual an
   understanding, He expects us to use it and to an honest personal use of
   understanding He gives the light.

   The eye of the sparrow or of the ant may be very small, yet it sees the
   great light, if it is a single and clear eye. Pray, then, for Divine
   Grace, that you may search out for yourselves the Truth of God, free
   from the fear of man which brings a snare. Let us never enquire, "Have
   any of the rulers believed?" Whether the rulers have or have not
   believed, let us follow the Lamb wherever He goes and rejoice in that
   pure light which flows from Him.

   God save you, dear Friends, from having your eye injured by any of the
   mischiefs I have mentioned. There are legions more of these blinding
   things--may Divine Grace guard you from them! God give you a "single
   eye," by which is meant an eye which does not look at two things at a
   time--a mind which is free from sinister motives and from anything
   which would cause you to choose falsehood rather than the Truth of God
   and wrong rather than right.

   God grant that we may have a desire to be right, a resolute design to
   know the Truth of God as it is in Jesus, and to feel and act in sincere
   conformity to it! Oh, to be sincere, simple-hearted, child-like and
   true! We want neither great genius nor sparkling wit--we need an
   unsophisticated mind--for so the light gets entrance into the soul
   through the Spirit

   of God.

   II. Secondly, let us consider HOW THE LIGHT MAY BE PERVERTED. Some men
   might have light enough but

   their eye is in such an evil condition that the light is turned into
   darkness. I suppose that in the natural world light could not actually
   become darkness. But in the spiritual kingdom it is certainly so--"When
   your eye is evil, your body also is full of darkness. Take heed
   therefore that the light which is in you be not darkness." Hearken, my
   Brothers and Sisters and take heed.

   A man has heard the Gospel of Free Grace and dying love--he has heard a
   message full of love concerning the forgiveness of sin and pardon
   bought with blood and freely given to him that believes. The doctrine
   of justification by faith has been clearly explained to him. He
   believes firmly in these great evangelical Truths and calls them
   glorious and precious. But he draws an inference from this teaching
   which is ruinous to his soul. He considers that, after all, sin is of
   small consequence and he may indulge in it freely, for God is merciful
   and Divine Grace is infinite.

   At some time or other he will repent and believe in Jesus and then he
   will be set right, however grossly he may have offended. God is
   gracious, and therefore, he may be sinful--God freely forgives--and
   therefore he may recklessly offend. This is to turn light into
   darkness. Such turning of the Grace of God into lasciviousness is
   infamous. Words cannot set forth the hideous ingratitude of such
   depraved arguments. We may justly say of a man who thus turns light
   into darkness, "his damnation is just."

   Yet no doubt there are many such who silently, in their own hearts,
   draw from the goodness of God a license to sin. Ah, my Hearer! If your
   eye is in this condition, the more freely we preach to you the Gospel
   of the Grace of God, the more surely will you go from sin to sin. This
   is terrible. O false Hearts! What shall I do with you? You make me wish
   to be dumb, lest I minister to your condemnation.

   In the lowest Hell you are digging for yourselves a deeper Hell--you
   use the promises of mercy as the instruments of your own destruction.
   What? Can you hang yourselves nowhere but on the Cross? Can you drown
   yourselves nowhere but in the waters of Siloah? What has come to you,
   that you are so infatuated as to find your death in the Gospel which is
   ordained for life?

   Let me set before you another form of this evil. A man perceives the
   great value of the means of Divine Grace, but he goes further and
   misuses them. Having been brought up religiously, he has a deep respect
   for the ministers of God's House, for the services of the sanctuary,
   and especially for the two ordinances which Christ has established in
   His Church--Baptism and the Supper of the Lord. He reverences the
   Sabbath, and the inspired Word, and the Church and all its sacred
   ministries. But it may be that he proceeds from a due regard of these
   things to a superstitious trust in them, making of them what God has
   never made of them--thus his light becomes darkness.

   He regards attendance upon public worship as a substitute for inward
   religion. He looks upon membership with a Church as a certificate of
   salvation. He may be so foolish as to speak of Baptism as an ordinance
   whereby he was made a member of Christ and a child of God. And of the
   Supper of the Lord as a saving ordinance, or even as a sacrifice for
   the quick and dead. When instructive symbols are perverted into
   instruments of priest-craft, the light is turned into darkness. By
   multitudes, in these days, aids to faith are degraded into the
   machinery of superstition.

   The Church, which is our mother and nurse, is made into an antichrist
   and men look to her for salvation instead of looking wholly and alone
   to the Lord Jesus Christ. Outward modes of worship and instruction may
   be very beneficial, but if they are allowed to usurp the confidence of
   the soul, they may gender disease and death. When a man's religion
   becomes his destruction, how sure is that destruction!

   I have known many go another way--they have said, "I care very little
   about the shape or form of religion. A sincere spirit is everything.
   The letter kills, the spirit gives life." Such a man professes to
   clutch at the soul of things but I have seen him grow indifferent in
   creed and licentious in life. He believes everything to have some
   measure of truth in it-- every evil practice to have some good point
   about it. This is a poisonous atmosphere for any man to breathe. Hear
   him talk, if you would see how the worse can be made to seem the
   better. Nothing to him is fixed truth, nor even settled right.

   He is like the chameleon, which takes its color from the changing light
   about it. This he calls "liberty." But assuredly it is not the liberty
   wherewith Christ makes men free. Say, rather, it is the light of
   charity turned into the darkness of indifference. How great is this
   darkness! How many are deceived by it! After all, there is light and
   there is darkness-- and they are not the same thing. There is Truth,
   taught of God and there is a lie, which is the devil's own. And these
   will never sit at the same table. There is a blessing for the preacher
   of the Truth of God. But if any man preaches another Gospel, for him
   there is an anathema which none can reverse.

   I have also seen this light turned to darkness in the case of the
   student who has gathered great erudition and enrolled himself among the
   learned. He begins to criticize. Do not condemn him for that--he judges
   very properly at first--he criticizes things that ought to be
   criticized. But he stops not there. Once having his critical faculty
   aroused, he is like a boy with a new knife. He must cut something or
   other. Nothing comes in his way more often than the Scriptures. And he
   must have a cut at them. He whittles at Genesis. He makes a gash in
   Deuteronomy. He halves Isaiah.

   He takes slices out of the Gospels and cuts the Epistles into slivers.
   You see, he has so sharp a knife that he must use it. By-and-by, from a
   critic he advances to an irreverent fault-finder--and from that to an
   utter unbeliever--hard in the mouth and stiff in the neck. His light
   has blinded him. He has taken his own

   eye to pieces that he might study its anatomy, and from now on the
   light will be of no more use to him than to the dead.

   We have seen the light turned to darkness in a further sense. Hear and
   understand. There is a blessed light called the full assurance of
   faith--the more we have of it the better. Blessed is that man who never
   doubts his God, who hangs with holy confidence upon the eternal
   promises and the immutable Covenant and is never staggered through
   unbelief. He walks in the light of God and enjoys Divine fellowship.

   But I have seen something very like to this holy confidence which has
   been before the Lord a very different matter. Assurance has been
   counterfeited by presumption. The man has taken for granted that he is
   a child of God when he is not--and he has appropriated privileges which
   are none of his. He has supposed himself to be in the Covenant when he
   has neither part nor lot. And without repentance, without the new
   birth--and without saving faith--he has dared to boast of those sacred
   securities which belong only to the heirs of Grace, sanctified in
   Christ Jesus. Dreadful is the case of the man who has presumed to hope
   for Heaven while living an ungodly life--boasting of freedom from all
   fear, when, indeed--he was destitute of all hope.

   I have also seen the light turned to darkness in quite another manner.
   Sweet and soft is the light of holy fear--it is as the twilight of the
   evening. It is a light that comes from God--when a man is afraid to
   sin--when he fears lest he should grieve the Spirit of God. He trembles
   lest in anything he should err from the teaching of his heavenly
   Father. But then this light may be corrupted into slavish dread,
   despondency and despair.

   Introspection, or looking within, may degenerate into a morbid
   habit--under its influence, the soul may refuse to look to Christ--and
   may enshroud itself in the gloom of remorse. The Truth of God may be
   distorted till it takes a most alarming shape and the soul, in sullen
   despair, refuses to be comforted, refuses to believe in the Son of God.

   Do you wonder that our Lord seemed to hold up His hands in astonishment
   as He said, "If the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that
   darkness!" If that which should lead misleads, how misled you will be!
   If your better part turns out to be evil, how evil must you be! See to
   it then, dear Friends, as before the living God, that you have a clear
   eye and that the light of Christ comes streaming into your soul in all
   its glorious purity and power.

   III. I close by coming to the third and most important point--How THE
   LIGHT ACTS WHEN IT COMES

   WITHIN. If the eye is right, single and clear, there is no laborious
   work for that eye to do to obtain the light. When the sun is shining,
   if you wish for light, you simply open your eyes and you have light at
   once. You have not to rub the eye, or work it into some singular
   position--let the outward light come to the eye and at once it enters
   it and conveys an image to the mind.

   When the eye is sound, it takes pleasure in the light and with delight
   conveys the image of things external to the mind within. If the Lord,
   in His great Grace, has made your eye single, so that you desire only
   to know the Truth of God and to be yourself true--then without toil you
   will perceive Truth and the image thereof will readily appear before
   your mind. The light is willing enough to enter when the window of the
   soul allows its admission. When that light comes in, you will know it.

   No man passes from his natural darkness into heavenly light without
   being aware that a great change has taken place. Beloved, I will try to
   show you how the holy light acts when it enters our nature. When it
   first comes in, it reveals much that was before unperceived. If a room
   has been long shut up and kept in darkness, the light has a startling
   effect. You may have hurried through that room with a candle but you
   never stayed to look, and therefore did not notice the state of things.

   The room did not strike you as being very unpleasant, though it smelt a
   little stale and musty. But now that you have put back the shutters and
   drawn up the blind, the light has made the mold and dust very manifest.
   That black festoon of spiders' webs--those insects which hurry out of
   the light. That all-encrusting dust--these had been overlooked. The
   room cannot be suffered to remain in such a state. What a change is
   demanded! All hands are summoned to clean out the den and turn it into
   a healthy chamber fit to be inhabited.

   The light of Heaven reveals a thousand sins and causes their removal.
   The first effect of the light of God in the soul is painfully
   unpleasant--it makes you loathe yourself and almost wish that you had
   never been born. Things grow worse and worse to our consciousness as
   the light shines more and more. Beloved, we wish it to be so. We would
   have no part kept in the dark. We would have every idol discovered and
   broken, every secret chamber of imagery exposed to the sun and then
   destroyed.

   Is it not so? Do you wish to keep the light from any part of your
   nature? Do you not far rather desire that the light should search you
   through and through and lay bare all the deceitfulness of your heart
   and all the falseness of your depraved mind?

   As that light continues to enter, it gradually illuminates each faculty
   of the mind. The will by nature prefers the darkness--the man claims
   the right to act as he pleases and to give no reasons for his
   waywardness. When the light of God enters the soul, the Lord Jesus
   becomes altogether lovely, and then the sacred light falls on the proud
   will and the man sees that it is evil and perverse and he cries, "O
   Lord Jesus, not my will but Yours, be done." This same light falls on
   the outward life which is ruled by the will, and the conduct and
   conversation become bright with the light of love. The judgment feels
   the inner illumination and decides according to the Law of truth and
   righteousness. With the judgment, the delight is lit up, also, and the
   heart rejoices in the Law of the Lord.

   The light is poured in upon the conscience and now that poor,
   half-blinded thing issues edicts and gives forth verdicts which are
   according to the oracles of God. What a difference between a natural
   conscience and a conscience instructed by God and enlightened by His
   Word! There remains much more to be done in this direction than many of
   us suspect. We may be living unconsciously in evils for which our
   consciences have never once accused us. Godly men, in old times,
   persecuted those who differed from them and thought it a duty to do
   so--they even called toleration a crime.

   The best of men owned Negro slaves and were not conscious of wrong.
   When Mr. Whitefield left certain Negroes to the Orphan House, he did
   not dream that he was violating the rights of man--in fact, he was very
   careful for their present and future welfare. Conscience does not
   tolerate slavery now. Do you not think that a great enlightenment has
   taken place upon the slave question? Is not similar light needed as to
   war, as to wage-paying and wage-earning and a thousand

   other things? It is a happy thing that we have received a light which
   will shine brighter and brighter unto the perfect day.

   There is nothing hid within us which this light will not manifest. And
   so, as one by one, we see our imperfections, we shall cry for Divine
   Grace to remove them--and thus we shall grow in holiness through the
   Grace of God. This same light, falling on the memory, awakens penitence
   for our faults and gratitude for God's goodness. Shining on our
   thoughts, it makes them sparkle with the beauty of holiness. Shining
   upon our emotions, it makes them flash and glow with love to God and
   heavenly things. A soul is a fine object when thus lit up!

   The holy light falls on our motives and unveils the secret heart of all
   our actions. You do right, but this light shows you why you do right.
   You are a friend to man but why? You are a Christian professor but are
   you sincere? The light makes short work with that which did not flow
   from a pure motive. This light falls also on the spirit in which a deed
   was done. And here much is seen which some had rather not see.

   Did you ever have the light of God brought to bear upon your
   imagination? Imagination is the playroom of the soul. Here many a man
   considers that he is without Law. "Surely," he says, "thought is free."
   The man gloats over sins which he would fear to commit--he finds a
   pleasure in thinking over lusts which his circumstances compel him to
   avoid. In the dark chambers of imagination, the heart commits
   adulteries, murders, thefts and all manner of infamies.

   When the light falls here, the man shudders as he learns that as he
   thinks in his heart, so he is. He trembles as he perceives that the
   fond imagination of sin is sin. Then is the floor of imagination purged
   and the foul dust and chaff are driven into the fire. Fancy then gleams
   in the light of God and imagination. Washed in the brazen layer, she
   sings songs on her stringed instruments unto the God of her salvation,
   who has brought her out of darkness into His marvelous

   light.

   Brethren, we need the light to shine in upon our tempers. We know some
   Christian people who will not let you mention their tempers--they have
   taken out a license to be as surly as they like--on the ground of, "it
   is their constitution." "No," they say, "I cannot help being
   passionate. My mother was a very quick-tempered woman and I am
   naturally in that way. There's no help for it." Let the light in upon
   that unseemly thing. If what you say is true, write it down in black
   and white that you are an incorrigible vixen--and must be so all your
   life.

   What? Do you not like it? If it is true, let the light in upon it. Let
   it be known to your own self and to others that you are a mad dog and
   that there is no curing you. Are you angry with me for suggesting it? I
   am only taking you at your word. Do not say, "I cannot help having a
   bad temper." Friend, you must help it. Pray God to help you to overcome
   it at once! For either you must kill it, or it will kill you.

   You cannot carry a bad temper into Heaven. They will have none of your
   passions in the Father's House above. Let in the light of Christ's love
   on it, and the vile thing will be made to die. It is a night bird. It
   cannot bear the light of Divine Grace and love. Live near to Jesus and
   His compassion will destroy your evil passion. Try it.

   Your desires, your hopes, your fears, your aspirations, should all be
   set in the light--and what a joy it will be when they all glitter in
   it! "No part dark"--what a wonderful condition! Some professors appear
   to have a little light in the upper rooms. They have notions in their
   heads and ideas on their tongues! Alas, the first floor is dark, very
   dark. From their common conversation the light of God is absent. Enter
   at the door and you cannot see your way into the passage, or up the
   stairs. The light is up a loft but not in the dwelling rooms.

   Oh, for light in the region of the heart! Oh, for light upon the
   household talk and the business conversation! From attic to cellar may
   the whole houses of our humanity be lighted up! This is the true work
   of Divine Grace, when the whole man is brought into the light and no
   part is left to pine in the darkness. Then are we the children of
   light, when we abide in the light and have no fellowship with darkness.
   Then is the distinction seen between Israel and Egypt. For while all
   Egypt sat in a darkness which might be felt, in the land of Goshen
   there was light.

   Where this light comes it gives certainty--we cease to doubt and we
   know whom we have believed. With this comes direction--we see our way
   and how to walk in it. We pursue a plain path and are no more in a
   maze. "This is the way, walk you in it," is sounded in our ears as the
   light reveals to us the narrow way which leads to eternal life.

   This light, when it dwells in the heart, brings good cheer with it.
   Darkness is doleful, light brings delight. Did you ever travel by a
   train which passed through a tunnel but was destitute of a single lamp?
   Somebody has struck a match and lighted a candle and all eyes have
   turned towards him. In a small way he was a benefactor--all eyes are
   glad of light. Oh,

   what a sweet thing is the light of the Holy Spirit to one that has been
   long in the darkness of ignorance, sorrow and despair!

   A poor boy who was put down in the coal mine to close a door after the
   coal wagons had passed by, was forced to sit there all alone, hour
   after hour, in the dark. He was a gracious child. And when one said to
   him, "Are you not weary with sitting so long in the dark?" he said,
   "Yes, I do get tired. But sometimes the men give me a bit of candle and
   when I get a light I sing." So do we. When we get a light we sing.
   Glory be to God, He is our light and our salvation, and therefore we
   sing. O Child of God, when your eye is single and the light of God
   fills every part of your being, then you sing, and sing again, and feel
   that you can never have done with singing on earth, till you begin
   singing in Heaven!

   The text has perplexed many a learned reader. And therefore you will
   not wonder that I confess that it has puzzled me many times. See what
   it says--"If your whole body therefore be full of light, having no part
   dark, the whole shall be full of light." Is not this saying the same
   thing? The Holy Spirit would not use a tautology, nor utter a trite,
   self-evident thing. Yet we must not go beyond what the text says. It
   seems to me that our Lord wished us to feel that He could say nothing
   better in praise of a soul in which there was no part dark than what He
   had said, namely, "The whole shall be full of light."

   Some have thought that He meant that being lighted within we shall be
   full of light to others. That is a great Truth of God. But our Lord
   does not say so here. For He compares our inward light to a candle
   which shines on ourselves--"as when the bright shining of a candle does
   give you light." He refers to our own personal comfort. When a room is
   thoroughly well-lighted in every corner, it has a joyous splendor. One
   looks about and feels content and satisfied. So, when the whole nature
   is filled with the light of God, we have sweetness and light to the
   full and Heaven seems begun below.

   It is inexpressibly delightsome, luxuriously blessed, to dwell in the
   full light of God when there is no concealment and no love of evil.
   When once the sun thus shines full on me, I would cry with Joshua,
   "Sun, stand still"!

   This inner light will make us shine before others. It is the only
   shining we should seek. A clean lantern with a lighted candle in it
   makes no noise and yet it wins attention--the darker the night, the
   more it is valued. There never was a time in which true inner light was
   more needed than now--may the Lord impart it to each one of us--and
   then we shall shine as lights in the world! The Lord God bring this
   light to you and fill you with it. And unto His name shall be the
   glory!

   You have not to work for the light, you have only to receive it. Then
   shall your profiting be known unto all men when it is true profiting to
   your own character. God bless you, for Christ's sake! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

           The Mustard Seed: A Sermon for the Sabbath-School Teacher

   A Sermon

   (No. 2110)

   Delivered on Lord's-day Morning, October 20th, 1889, by

   C. H. SPURGEON,

   At [9]the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington

   "Then said he, Unto what is the kingdom of God like? and whereunto
   shall I resemble it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man
   took, and cast into his garden; and it grew, and waxed a great tree;
   and the fowls of the air lodged in the branches of it."'Luke 13:18-19.

   I SHALL not attempt fully to explain this great little parable. A full
   exposition may be left for another occasion. The parable may be
   understood to relate to our Lord Himself, who is the living seed. You
   know also how His church is the tree that springs from Him, and how
   greatly it grows and spreads its branches until it covers the earth.
   From the one man Christ Jesus, despised and rejected of men, slain and
   buried, and so hidden away from among men'from Him, I say, there arises
   a multitude which no one can number. These spread themselves, like some
   tree which grows by the rivers of waters, and they yielded both
   gracious shelter and spiritual food. I called it a great little
   parable, and so it is: it has a world of teaching within the smallest
   compass. The parable is itself like a grain of mustard seed, but its
   meanings are as a great tree.

   At this time of the year, Sabbath-school teachers come together
   especially to pray for a blessing on their work, and pastors are
   invited to say a word to cheer them in their self-denying service. This
   request I would cheerfully fulfill, and therefore my discourse will not
   be a full explanation of the parable, but an adaptation of it to the
   cheering of those who are engaged in the admirable work of teaching the
   young the fear of the Lord. Never service more important; to overlook
   it would be a grave fault. We rejoice to encourage our friends in their
   labor of love.

   In this parable light is thrown upon the work of those who teach the
   Gospel. First, notice a very simple work: "a grain of mustard seed,
   which a man took, and cast into his garden." Secondly, observe what
   came of it: "it grew, and waxed a great tree; and the fowls of the air
   lodged in the branches of it."

   First, NOTICE A VERY SIMPLE WORK. The work of teaching the gospel is as
   the casting of a grain of mustard seed into a garden.

   Note, first, what the nameless man did. "It is like a grain of mustard
   seed, which a man took." He took it; that is to say, picked it out from
   the bulk. It was only one grain, and a grain of a very insignificant
   seed; but he did not let it lie on the shelf; he took it in his hand to
   put it to its proper use. A grain of mustard seed is too small a thing
   for public exhibition; the man who takes it in his hand is almost the
   only one who spies it out. It was only a grain of mustard seed, but the
   man set it before his own mind as a distinct object to be dealt with.
   He was not sowing mustard over broad acres, but he was sowing "a grain
   of mustard seed" in his garden. It is well for the teacher to know what
   he is going to teach, to have that truth distinctly in his mind's eye,
   as the man had the grain of mustard seed between his fingers. Depend
   upon it, unless a truth is clearly seen and distinctly recognized by
   the teacher, little will come of it to the taught. It may be a very
   simple truth, but if a someone takes it, understands it, grasps it, and
   loves it, he will do something with it. Beloved, first and foremost let
   us ourselves take the Gospel, let us believe it, let us appreciate it,
   let us prize it beyond all things; for truth lives as it is loved, and
   no hand is so fit for its sowing as the hand which grasps it well.

   Further, in this little parable we notice that this man had a garden:
   "Like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and cast into his
   garden." Some Christian people have no garden'no personal sphere of
   service. They belong to the whole clan of Christians, and they pine to
   see the entire band go out to cultivate the whole world, but they do
   not come to personal particulars. It is delightful to be warmed up by
   missionary addresses, and to feel a zeal for the salvation of all the
   nations; but, after all, the net result of a general theoretic
   earnestness for all the world does not amount to much. As we should
   have no horticulture if people had no gardens, so we shall have no
   missionary work done unless each person has a mission. It is the duty
   of every believer in Christ, like the first man, Adam, to have a garden
   to dress and to till. Children are in the Sunday-schools by millions:
   thank God for that! But have you a class of your own? All the church at
   work for Christ! Glorious theory! Are you up and doing for your Lord?
   It will be a grand time when every believer has his allotment, and is
   sowing it with the seed of truth. The wilderness and the solitary place
   will blossom as the rose when each Christian cultivates his own plot of
   roses. Where should this unnamed man sow his mustard seed but in his
   own garden? It was near him, and dear to him, and to it he went. Teach
   your own children, speak to your neighbors, seek the conversion of
   those whom God has especially entrusted to you.

   Having a garden, and having this seed, the man sowed it, and simple as
   this is, it is the hinge of the instruction. You have a number of seeds
   in a pill-box. There they are: look at them! Take that box down this
   day a year from now, and the seeds will be just the same. Lay them by
   in that dry box for seven years, and nothing will happen. Truth is not
   to be kept to ourselves; it is to be published and advocated. There is
   an old proverb, "Truth is mighty, and will prevail." The proverb is
   true in a sense, but it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. If you
   put truth away and leave it without a voice, it won't prevail; it will
   not even contend. When have great truths prevailed? Why, when brave men
   have persisted in declaring them. Daring spirits have taken up a cause
   which has been at the first unpopular, and they have spoken about it so
   earnestly and so often that at length the cause has commanded
   attention; they have pressed on and on until the cause has triumphed
   altogether. Truth has been mighty, and has prevailed, but yet not
   without the people who gave it life and tongue. Not even the Gospel
   itself, if it is not taught, will prevail. If revealed truth is laid on
   one side and kept in silence, it will not grow. Mark how through the
   dark ages the Gospel lay asleep in old books in the libraries of
   monasteries until Luther and his fellow reformers fetched it out and
   sowed it in the minds of men.

   This man simply cast it into his garden. He did not wrap it around with
   gold leaf, or otherwise adorn it, but he put it into the ground. The
   naked seed came into contact with the naked soil. O teachers, do not
   try to make the Gospel look fine; do not overlay it with your fine
   words or elaborate explanations. The Gospel seed is to be put into the
   young heart just as it is. Get the truth concerning the Lord Jesus into
   the children's minds. Make them know, not what you can say about the
   truth, but what the truth itself says. It is wicked to take the Gospel
   and make a peg of it to hang our old clothes upon. The Gos el is not a
   boat to be freighted with human thoughts, fine speculations, scraps of
   poetry, and pretty tales. No, no. The Gospel is the thought of God; in
   and of itself it is the message which the soul needs. It is the Gospel
   itself which will grow. Take a truth, especially that great doctrine,
   that humanity is lost and that Christ is the only Saviour, and see to
   it that you place it in the mind. Teach plainly the great truth that
   whosoever believes in Him has everlasting life, and that the Lord Jesus
   bare our sins in His own body on the tree and suffered for us, the just
   for the unjust'I say take these truths and set them forth to the mind,
   and see what will come of it. Sow the very truth; not your reflections
   on the truth, not your embellishments of the truth, but the truth
   itself. This is to be brought into contact with the mind, for the truth
   is the seed, and the human mind is the soil for it to grow in.

   These remarks of mine are very plain and trite; and yet everything
   depends upon the simple operation described. Nearly everything has been
   tried in preaching of late, except the plain and clear statement of the
   glad tidings and of the atoning sacrifice. People have talked about
   what the church can do, and what the Gospel can do; we have been
   informed as to the proofs of the Gospel, or the doubts about it, and so
   forth; but when will they give us the Gospel itself? Friends, we must
   come to the point and teach the Gospel, for this is the living and
   incorruptible seed which abides forever. It is an easy thing to deliver
   an address upon mustard seed, to give the children a taste of the
   pungency of mustard, to tell them how mustard seed would grow, what
   kind of a tree it would produce, and how the birds would sing among its
   branches. But this is not sowing mustard seed. It is all very fine to
   talk about the influence of the Gospel, the ethics of Christianity, the
   elevating power of the love of Christ, and so on; but what we want is
   the Gospel itself, which exercises that influence. Sow the seed: tell
   the children the doctrine of the Cross, the fact that with the stripes
   of Jesus we are healed, and that by faith in Him we are justified. What
   is wanted is not talk about the Gospel, but the Gospel itself. We must
   continually bring the living Word of the living God into contact with
   the hearts of men. Oh, for the aid of the Holy Spirit in this! He will
   help us, for He delights to glorify Jesus.

   That which is described in the parable was an insignificant business:
   the man took the tiny seed and put it into his garden. It is a very
   commonplace affair to sit down with a dozen children around you and
   open your Bible and tell them the well-worn tale of how Jesus Christ
   came into the world to save sinners. No Pharisee is likely to stand and
   blow a trumpet when he is going to teach children; he is more likely to
   point to the children in the temple and sneeringly say, "Hearest thou
   what these say?" It is a lowly business altogether, but yet, to the
   mustard seed, and to the man with a garden, the sowing is the
   all-important matter. The mustard seed will never grow unless put into
   the soil; the owner of the garden will never have a crop of mustard
   unless he sows the seed. Dear Sunday-school teacher, do not become
   weary of your humble work, for none can measure its importance. Tell
   the boys and girls of the Son of God, who lived and loved and died that
   the ungodly might be saved. Urge them to immediate faith in the mighty
   Saviour that they may be saved at once. Tell of the new birth, and how
   the souls of human beings are renewed by the Holy Spirit, without whose
   divine working none can enter the kingdom of heaven. Cast in mustard
   seed, and nothing else but mustard seed, if you want to grow mustard.
   Teach the Gospel of grace, and nothing but the Gospel of grace, if you
   would see grace growing in the hearts of your young people.

   Secondly, let us consider what it was that the man sowed. We have seen
   that he sowed; what did he sow? It was one single seed, and that seed a
   very small one; so very, very small that the Jews were accustomed to
   say, "As small as mustard seed." Hence the Saviour speaks of it as the
   smallest among seeds, which it may not have been absolutely, but which
   it was according to common parlance; our Lord was not teaching botany,
   but speaking a popular parable. Yes, the Gospel seems a very simple
   thing: Believe and live! Look to Jesus lying in the sinner's stead!
   Look to Jesus crucified, even as Israel looked to the brazen serpent
   lifted up upon a pole. It is simplicity itself; in fact, the Gospel is
   so plain a matter that our superior people are weary of it and look out
   for something more difficult of comprehension. People nowadays are like
   the person who liked to hear the Scriptures "properly confounded"; or
   like the other who said, "You should hear our minister dispense with
   the truth." Sowing seed is work too ordinary for the moderns; they
   demand new methods. But, beloved, we must not run after vain
   inventions; our one business is to sow the Word of God in the minds of
   children. It is yours and mine to teach everybody the simple truth that
   Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, and that whosoever
   believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. We know
   nothing else among adults or among children. This one seed, apparently
   so little, so insignificant, we continue to sow. They sneeringly say,
   "What can be the moral result of preaching such a Gospel? Surely it
   would be better to discourse upon morals, social economics, and the
   sciences?" Ah, friends! if you can do any good in those ways, we will
   not hinder you, but our belief is that a hundred times more can be done
   with the Gospel, for it is the power of God to salvation to everyone
   that believes. The Gospel is not the enemy of any good thing; say,
   rather, it is the force by which good things are to be carried out.
   Whatsoever things are pure and honest and of good repute are all
   nurtured by that spirit which is begotten by the simple Gospel of
   Christ. Yet conversions do not come by essays upon morals but by the
   teaching of salvation by Christ. The cleansing and raising of our race
   will not be effected by politics or science, but by the Word of the
   Lord, which lives and abides forever. To bring the greatest blessings
   upon our rising youth we must labor to implant in their minds faith in
   the Lord Jesus. Oh, for divine power in this work!

   But the seed, though very small, was a living thing. There is a great
   difference between a mustard seed and a piece of wax of the same size.
   Life slumbers in that seed. What life is we cannot tell. Even if you
   take a microscope you cannot spy it out. It is a mystery, but it is
   essential to a seed. The Gospel has a something in it not readily
   discoverable by the philosophical inquirer, if, indeed, he can perceive
   it at all. Take a maxim of Socrates or of Plato, and inquire whether a
   nation or a tribe has ever been transformed by it from barbarism to
   culture. A maxim of a philosopher may have measurably influenced a
   person in some right direction, but who has ever heard of a someone's
   whole character being transformed by any observation of Confucius or
   Socrates? I confess I never have. Human teachings are barren. But
   within the Gospel, with all its triteness and simplicity, there is a
   divine life and that life makes all the difference. The human can never
   rival the divine, for it lacks the life-fire. It is better to preach
   five words of God's Word than five million words of human wisdom. Human
   words may seem to be the wiser and the more attractive, but there is no
   heavenly life in them. Within God's Word, however simple it may be,
   there dwells an omnipotence like that of God from whose lips it came.

   Truth to tell, a seed is a very comprehensive thing. Within the mustard
   seed what is to be found? Why, there is all in it that ever comes out
   of it. It must be so. Every branch and every leaf and every flower and
   every seed that is to be is, in its essence, all within the seed. It
   needs to be developed, but it is all there. And so, within the simple
   Gospel, how much lies concentrated? Look at it! Within that truth lie
   regeneration, repentance, faith, holiness, zeal, consecration,
   perfection. Heaven hides itself away within the Gospel. Like a young
   bird in its nest, glory dwells in grace. We may not at first see all
   its results, nor, indeed, shall we see them at all until we sow the
   seed and it grows; yet it is all there. Do you believe it, young
   teacher? Have you realized what you have in your hold when you grasp
   the Gospel of the grace of God? It is the most wonderful thing beneath
   the skies. Do you believe in the Gospel which you have to teach? Do you
   discern that within its apparently narrow lines the Eternal, the
   Infinite, the Perfect, and the Divine are all enclosed? As in the babe
   of Bethlehem there was the Eternal God, so within the simple teaching
   of "Believe and live" there are all the elements of eternal blessedness
   for people, and boundless glory for God. It is a very comprehensive
   thing, that little seed, that Gospel of God.

   And for this reason it is so wonderful: it is a divine creation. Summon
   your chemists, bring them together with all their vessels and their
   fires. Select a jury of the greatest chemists now alive, analytical or
   otherwise, as you will. Learned sirs, will you kindly make us a mustard
   seed? You may take a mustard seed, and pound it and analyze it, and you
   may thus ascertain all its ingredients. So far so good. Is not your
   work well begun? Now make a single mustard seed. We will give you a
   week. It is a very small affair. You have all the elements of mustard
   in yonder mortar. Make us one living grain; we do not ask for a ton
   weight. One grain of mustard seed will suffice us. Great chemists, have
   you not made so small a thing? A month has gone by. Only one grain of
   mustard seed we asked of you, and where is it? Have you not made one in
   a month? What are you at? Shall we allow you seven years? Yes, with all
   the laboratories in the kingdom at your service and all known
   substances for your material and all the world's coal beds for your
   fuel, get to your work. The air is black with your smoke and the
   streams run foul with your waste products; but where is the mustard
   seed? This baffles the wise; they cannot make a living seed. No; and
   nobody can make a Gospel, or even a new Gospel text. The thinkers of
   the age could not even concoct another life of Christ to match with the
   four Gospels which we have already. I go further: they could not create
   a new incident which would be congruous with the facts we already know.
   Plenty of novel writers nowadays can beat out imaginary histories upon
   their anvils: let them write a fifth Gospel'say the Gospel according to
   Peter, or Andrew. Let us have it! They will not even commence the task.
   Who will write a new psalm, or even a new promise? Clever chemists
   prove their wisdom by saying at once, "No, we cannot make a mustard
   seed"; and wise thinkers will equally confess that they cannot make
   another Gospel. My learned brethren are trying very hard to make a new
   Gospel for this nineteenth century, but you teachers had better go on
   with the old one. The advanced men cannot put life into their theory.
   This living Word is the finger of God. That simple grain of mustard
   seed must be made by God, or not at all; He must put life into the
   Gospel, or it will not have power in the heart. The Gospel of
   Sunday-school teachers, that Gospel of "Believe and live," however
   people may despise it, has Godgiven life in it. You cannot make another
   which can supplant it, for you cannot put life into your invention. Go
   on and use the one living truth with your children, for nothing else
   has God's life in it.

   I want you to see what a little affair the sowing seemed, as we answer
   the question, What was it to him? It was a very natural act; he sowed a
   seed. It is a most natural thing that we should teach others what we
   believe ourselves. I cannot make out how some professors can call
   themselves Christians and yet never communicate the faith to others.
   That the young people of our churches should gather other young people
   around them and tell them of Jesus, whom you love, is as natural as for
   a gardener to put seeds into his prepared ground.

   To sow a mustard seed is a very inexpensive act. Only one grain of
   mustard: nobody can find me a coin small enough to express its value. I
   do not know how much mustard seed the man had; certainly it is not a
   rare thing, but he only took one grain of it and cast it into his
   garden. He emptied no exchequer by that expenditure; this is one of the
   excellencies of Sabbath-school work, that it neither exhausts the
   church of people nor of money. However much of it is done, it does not
   lessen the resources of our Zion; it is done freely, quietly, without
   excitement, without sacrifice of life, and yet what a fountain of
   blessing it is!

   Still, it was an act of faith. It is always an act of faith to sow
   seed, because you have, for the time, to give it up and receive nothing
   in return. The farmer takes his choice seed corn and throws it into the
   soil of his field. He might have made many a loaf of bread with it, but
   he casts it away. Only his faith saves him from being judged a maniac:
   he expects it to return to him fiftyfold. If you had never seen a
   harvest, you would think that someone burying good wheat under the
   clods had gone mad; if you had never seen conversions, it might seem an
   absurd thing to be constantly teaching to boys and girls the story of
   the Man who was nailed to the tree. We preach and teach as a work of
   faith, and remember, it is only as an act of faith that it will answer
   its purpose. The rule of the harvest is, "According to thy faith, be it
   unto thee." Believe, dear teacher, believe in the Gospel. Believe in
   what you are doing when you tell it. Believe that great results from
   slender causes spring. Go on sowing your mustard seed of salvation by
   faith, expecting and believing that fruit will come thereof.

   It was an act which brought the sower no honor. The Saviour has
   chronicled the fact that the man took a grain of mustard seed and sowed
   it, but thousands of people had gone on sowing mustard seed for half a
   lifetime without a word. Nobody has ever spoken in your honor, my
   friend, though you have taught the truth. Dear teacher, go on sowing,
   though nobody should observe your diligence or praise your
   faithfulness. Sow the seed of precious truth in the garden of the
   child's mind, for much more will come of it than you have dared to
   hope.

   It seems to me that our Lord selected the mustard seed in this parable,
   not because its results are the greatest possible from a seed'for an
   oak or a cedar are much greater growths than a mustard tree'but He
   selected it because it is the greatest result as compared with the size
   of the seed. Follow out the analogy. Come to yonder school, and see!
   That earnest young man is teaching a boy, one of those wild creatures
   of the street; they swarm in every quarter. A dozen young Turks are
   before him, or say young Arabs of the street; he is teaching them the
   Gospel. Small affair, is it not? Yes, very; but what may come of it?
   Think of how joyfully much may grow out of this little! What is that
   young man teaching? Only one elementary truth. Do not sneer; it is
   truth, but it is the mere alphabet of it. He touches upon nothing deep
   in theology; he only says, "Christ Jesus came into the world to save
   sinners. Dear boy, believe in the Lord Jesus and live." That is all he
   says. Can any good thing come out of Nazareth? The teacher himself is
   teaching the one truth in a very poor way; at least, he thinks so. Ask
   him, when he has done, what he thinks of his own teaching, and he
   replies, "I do not feel fit to teach." Yes, that young man's teaching
   is sighed over, and in his own judgment it is poor and weak, but there
   is life in the truth he imparts and eternal results will follow'results
   of which I have now to speak in the second part of my sermon. May the
   good Spirit help me so to speak as to encourage my beloved friends, who
   have given themselves up to the Christlike work of teaching the little
   ones!

   Secondly, let us enquire, WHAT CAME OF IT?

   First, "it grew." That was what the sower hoped would come of it: he
   placed the seed in the ground hoping that it would grow. It is not
   reasonable to suppose that he would have sown it if he had not hoped
   that it would spring up. Dear teacher, do you always sow in hope, do
   you trust that the Word will live and grow? If you do not, I do not
   think your success is very probable. Expect the truth to take root and
   expand and grow up. Teach divine truth with earnestness and expect that
   the life within it will unveil its wonders.

   But though the sewer expected growth, he could not himself have made it
   grow. After he had placed the seed in the ground he could water it, he
   could pray God to make the sun shine on it, but he could not directly
   produce growth. Only He that made the seed could cause it to grow.
   Growth is a continuance of that almighty act by which life is at first
   given. The putting of life into the seed is God's work, and the
   bringing forth of the life from the seed is God's work too. This is a
   matter within your hope, but far beyond your power.

   A very wonderful thing it is that the seed should grow. If we did not
   see it every day, we should be more astonished at the growth of seed
   than at all the wonders of magicians. A growing seed is God's abiding
   miracle. You see a piece of ground near London covered with a market
   garden, and after a few months you go by the place and you see streets
   and a public square and a church and a great population. You say to
   yourself, "It is remarkable that all these houses should have sprung up
   in a few months." Yet that is not at all so wonderful as for a plowed
   field to become covered four feet high with corn, and all without the
   use of wagons to bring the material, or tools to work it up into a
   harvest. Without noise of hammer, or the ringing of trowels; without
   handiwork of man, the whole has been done. Wonder at the growth of
   grace. See how it increases, deepens, strengthens! Growth in grace is a
   marvel of divine love. That a person should repent through the Gospel,
   that he should believe in Jesus, that he should be totally changed,
   that he should have a hope of heaven, that he should receive power to
   become a child of God'these are all marvelous things; yet they are
   going on under our eyes and we fail to admire them as we should. The
   growth of holiness in such fallen creatures as we are is the admiration
   of angels, the delight of all intelligent beings.

   To the sower this growth was very pleasing. How pleasant it is to see
   the seed of grace grow in children! Do you not remember when you first
   sowed mustard-and-cress as a child, how the very next morning you went
   and turned the ground up to see how much it had grown? How pleased you
   were when you saw the little yellow shoot, and afterward a green leaf
   or two! So is it with the true teacher: he or she is anxious to see
   growth and makes eager inquiry for it. What was expected is taking
   place and it is most delightful to that teacher, whatever it may be to
   others. An unsympathetic person cries, "Oh, I do not think anything of
   that child's emotions. It is merely a passing impression: he will soon
   forget it." The teacher does not think so. The cold critic says, "I
   don't think much of a child's weeping. Children's tears lie very near
   the surface." But the teacher is full of hope that in these tears is a
   real sorrow for sin, and an earnest seeking after the Lord. The
   questioner says, "It is nothing for a child to say that he gives his
   heart to Jesus. Youngsters soon think that they believe. They are so
   easily led." People talk thus because they do not love children and
   live with the desire to save them. If you sympathize with children, you
   are pleased with every hopeful token and are on the watch for every
   mark of divine life within them. If you are a florist, you will see
   more of the progress of your plants than if you are no gardener and
   have no interest in such things. Think, then, of what my text says: "It
   grew." Oh, for a prayer just now from all of you this morning, "Lord,
   make the Gospel grow wherever it falls! Whether the preacher scatters
   it, or the teacher sows it; whether it falls among the aged people, or
   the young; Lord, make the Gospel grow!" Pray hard for it, friends! You
   cannot make it grow, but you can prevail with God to bless it to His
   honor and praise.

   Next, having started growing, it became a tree. Luke says, "It waxed a
   great tree." It was great in itself, but the greatness was seen mainly
   in comparison with the size of the seed. The growth was great. Here is
   the wonder, not that it became a tree, but that being a mustard seed,
   it should become "a great tree." Do you see the point of the parable? I
   have already brought it before you. Listen! It was only a word
   spoken'"Dear boy, look to Jesus." Only such a word, and a soul was
   saved, its sin was forgiven, its whole being was changed, a new heir of
   heaven was born. Do you see the growth? A word produces salvation! A
   grain of mustard seed becomes a great tree! A little teaching brings
   eternal life. That is not all: the teacher, with many prayers and
   tears, took her girl home, and pleaded with her for Christ, and the
   girl was led to yield her heart to the dominion of Christ Jesus'a holy,
   heavenly life came out of that pleading. See! she becomes a thoughtful
   girl, a loving wife, a gracious mother, a matron in Israel, such a one
   as Dorcas among the poor, or Hannah with her Samuel. What a great
   result from a little cause! The teacher's words were tearfully spoken;
   they could not have been printed, for they were far too broken and
   childlike; but they were, in God's hands, the means of fashioning a
   life most sweet, most chaste, most beautiful.

   A boy was about as wild as any roamer of our streets; a teacher knelt
   by his side with his arm about the lad's neck. He pleaded with God for
   the boy, and with the boy for God. That boy was converted, and as a
   youth in business he was an example to the workroom; as a father he was
   a guide to his household; as a man of God he was a light to all around;
   as a preacher of righteousness he adorned the doctrine of God his
   Saviour in all things. There is much more which I might easily picture,
   but you can work it out as well as I can. All that is to be desired may
   spring out of the simple talk of a humble Christian with a youth. A
   mustard seed becomes a great tree; a few words of holy admonition may
   produce a noble life.

   But is that all? Beloved, our teaching may preserve souls from the deep
   darkness of the abode of the lost. A soul left to itself might hurry
   down from folly to vice, from vice to obduracy, from obduracy to fixed
   resolve to perish; but by the means of loving teaching all this is
   changed. Rescued from the power of sin, like a lamb snatched from
   between the jaws of the lion, the youth is now no longer the victim of
   vice, but seeks holy and heavenly things. Hell has lost its prey, and
   see up yonder, heaven's wide gate has received a precious soul.
   "Sweeping through the gates of the New Jerusalem" many have come who
   were led there from the Sunday-school. They who once were foul are now
   white-robed, washed in the blood of the Lamb. Hark to their songs of
   praise! You may keep on listening, for those songs will never come to
   an end. All this was brought about through a brief address of a
   trembling brother who stood up one Sunday afternoon to close the school
   and talk a little about the Cross of Jesus. Or all this came of a
   gentle sister who could never have spoken in public, yet was enabled to
   warn a young girl who was growing giddy and seemed likely to go sadly
   astray. Wonderful that a soul's taking the road to heaven or to hell
   should be made, in the purpose of God, to hinge upon the humble
   endeavors of a weak but faithful teacher! You see how the mustard seed
   grew until it waxed a great tree.

   This great tree became a shelter: "the fowls of the air lodged in the
   branches of it." Mustard in the East does grow very large indeed. The
   commonest kind of it may be found eight or ten feet high, but there is
   a kind which will grow almost like a forest tree, and there probably
   were some of these latter trees in the sheltered region wherein our
   Lord was speaking. A mustard which grew here and there in Palestine was
   of sur prising dimensions. When the tree grew, the birds came to it.
   Here we have unexpected influences. Think of it. That man took a
   mustard seed which you could hardly see if I held it up. When he took
   the mustard seed, when he put it into his garden, had he any thought of
   bringing birds to that spot? Not he. You do not know all you are doing
   when you are teaching a child the way of salvation by Jesus Christ.
   When you are trying to bring a soul to Christ, your action has ten
   thousand hooks to it, and these may seize on innumerable things. Holy
   teaching is the opening of a well, and no one knows all the effect
   which the waters will produce on that spot. There seems no link between
   sowing a grain of mustard seed and birds of the air, but the winged
   wanderers soon made a happy connection. There may seem no connection
   between teaching that boy and the reclaiming of cannibals in New
   Guinea, but I can see a very possible connection. Tribes in Central
   Africa may have their destiny shaped by your instruction of a tiny
   child. When John Pounds bribed an urchin with a hot potato to come and
   learn to read the Bible, I am sure John Pounds had no idea of all the
   Ragged schools in London, but there is a clear line of cause and effect
   in the whole matter. A hot potato might be the coat of arms of the
   Ragged school Union. When Nasmyth went about from house to house
   visiting in the slums of London, I do not suppose that he saw in his
   act the founding of the London City Mission and all the Country Town
   Missions. No one can tell the end of his beginnings, the growth of his
   sowings. Go on doing good in little ways and you shall one day wonder
   at the great results. Do the next thing that lies before you. Do it
   well. Do it unto the Lord. Leave results with His unbounded liberality
   of love, but hope to reap at least a hundredfold.

   How many fowls came and roosted under that one mustard tree I do not
   know. How many birds in a day, how many birds in the year, came and
   found a resting place, and picked the seeds they loved so well, I
   cannot tell. When one person is converted, how many may receive a
   blessing out of him none can tell. Now is the day for romances: our
   literature is drenched with tales religious or irreligious. What
   stories might be written concerning benefits bestowed, directly and
   indirectly, by a single godly man or woman! When you have written a
   thrilling story upon the subject, I can assure you I can match it with
   something better still. One single individual can scatter benedictions
   across a continent, and belt the world with blessing.

   But what is that I hear? I see this mustard tree'it is a very wonderful
   tree; but I not only see, I hear! Music! music! The birds! the birds!
   It is early morning, the sun is scarcely up'what torrents of song! Is
   that the way to produce music? Shall I sow mustard seed, and reap
   songs? I thought we must buy an organ or purchase a violin, or by some
   wind or stringed instrument come at music, but here is a new plan
   altogether. Nebuchadnezzar had his flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery,
   dulcimer, and all kinds of music, but all that mingled sound could not
   rival the melody of birds. I shall sow mustard seed now, and get music
   in God's own way. Friends, when you teach your children the Gospel of
   the Lord Jesus, you are sowing the music of heaven. Every time you tell
   the tidings of pardon bought with blood, you are filling the choirs of
   glory with sweet voices which, to the Eternal Name, shall day and night
   trill out songs of devout gratitude. Go on, then, if this is to be the
   result. If even heaven's high harmonies depend upon the simple teaching
   of a Ragged school, let us never cease from our hallowed service.

   Having said so much, I now close with these three practical
   observations. Are we not highly honored to be entrusted with such a
   marvelous thing as the Gospel? If it is a seed comprehending so much
   within it which will come to so much if it be properly used, blessed
   and happy are we to have such good news to proclaim! I thought this
   morning, when I awoke into the damp and rain, and felt my bones
   complaining, I shall be glad when four more Sundays shall have gone,
   and I shall be free to take a little rest in a sunnier clime. Jaded in
   mind, and weary in spirit, I braced myself with this reflection'what
   blessed work I have to do! What a glorious Gospel have I to preach! I
   ought to be a very happy man to have such glad tidings to bear to my
   fellows. I said to myself, "So I am." Well now, beloved teacher, next
   Sunday, when you leave your bed, and say, "I have had a hard week's
   work, and I could half wish that I had not to go to my class," answer
   yourself thus: "But I am a happy person to have to talk to children
   about Christ Jesus. If I had to teach them arithmetic or carpentering,
   I might get tired of it, but to talk about Jesus, whom I love, why, it
   is a joy forever.

   Let us be encouraged to sow the good seed in evil times. If we do not
   see the Gospel prospering elsewhere, let us not despair; if there were
   no more mustard seed in the world, and I had only one grain of it, I
   should be all the more anxious to sow it. You can produce any quantity
   if only one seed will grow. So now today there is not very much Gospel
   about, the church has given it up, a great many preachers preach
   everything but the living truth. This is sad, but it is a strong reason
   why you and I should teach more Gospel than ever. I have often thought
   to myself'Other men may teach socialism, deliver lectures, or collect a
   band of fiddlers that they may gather a congregation, but I will preach
   the Gospel. I will preach more Gospel than ever if I can; I will stick
   more to the one cardinal point. The others can attend to the odds and
   ends, but I will keep to Christ crucified. To those of vast ability who
   are looking to the events of the day I would say, "Allow one poor fool
   to keep to preaching the Gospel." Beloved teachers, be fools for
   Christ, and keep to the Gospel. Don't you be afraid. It has life in it,
   and it will grow; only you bring it out, and let it grow. I am
   sometimes afraid that we may prepare our sermons and addresses too
   much, so as to make ourselves shine. If so, we are like the man who
   tried to grow potatoes'he never grew any, and he wondered much, "for,"
   said he, "I very carefully boiled them for hours." So, it is very
   possible to extract all the life out of the Gospel, and put so much of
   yourself into it that Christ will not bless it.

   And, lastly, we are bound to do it. If so much will come out of so
   little, we are bound to go in for it. Nowadays people want ten percent
   for their money. Hosts of fools are readily caught by any scheme or
   speculation or limited liability company that promises to give them
   immense dividends! I would like to make you wise by inviting you to an
   investment which is sure. Sow a mustard seed, and grow a tree. Talk of
   Christ, and save a soul; that soul saved will be a blessing for ages,
   and a joy to God throughout eternity. Was there ever such an investment
   as this? Let us go on with it. If on our simple word eternity is hung,
   let us speak with all our heart. Life, death, and hell, and worlds
   unknown, hang on the lips of the earnest teacher of the Gospel of
   Jesus. Let us never cease speaking while we have breath in our body.
   The Lord bless you! Amen, and Amen.

   PORTION OF SCRIPTURE READ BEFORE SERMON'Matthew 13:1-23.

   HYMNS FROM "OUR OWN HYMN BOOK"'916, 643, 30.
     __________________________________________________________________

Filling With the Spirit and Drunkenness With Wine

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S DAY EVENING, MAY 26, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess. But be filled with the
   Spirit." Ephesians 5:18.

   WHILE I was reading to you just now, in the fourth and fifth chapters
   of Paul's letter to the Ephesian Believers, I could not help feeling
   that you could little understand the elevation and the purity of the
   precepts of the Apostle, as they must have appeared to the inhabitants
   of such a wicked city as Ephesus. When first read, these precepts must
   have seemed like an unearthly light.

   We have now a public sentiment which condemns drunkenness, lying, and
   many other vices which were scarcely considered worthy of censure by
   that degraded people. Christianity had not affected public sentiment at
   the time--that sentiment was distinctly immoral. The sin of fornication
   was scarcely judged to be sinful. Theft was most common, as, indeed, it
   is in the East to this day. Lying was universal and only blamed if
   committed so clumsily as to be found out.

   I may say of drunkenness, that, although it was not regarded as a
   commendable thing, yet it was looked upon as a failing of great minds,
   not to be too much condemned. Alexander the Great, as you know, died
   through drink. He offered a prize on one occasion to those who could
   drink the most and in that famous drinking-bout, large numbers of his
   chieftains and nobility died in the attempt to rival others. Even of
   such a man as Socrates it is said (though I know not with what truth)
   that he was famous for the quantity that he could drink.

   The stories of the feasts of that age I would be ashamed to repeat. And
   you certainly would not have the patience to hear them. Drunkenness,
   and gluttony, and such like were the common faults both of the great
   and of the small. For while some had no opportunity for gluttony--for
   they did not get enough to eat--they only failed to be gluttons for
   that reason and not from principle. The Apostle sets before his new
   converts, not a modified system of right and wrong, but the purest
   virtues and the most heavenly graces.

   As the ages have rolled on, we have seen the wisdom of holding up from
   the first an elevated standard, both of doctrine and practice. We must
   not bring the standard down to the men but the men up to the standard.
   We may not, with the design of making converts more rapidly, alter the
   pure Word with which our Lord has entrusted us.

   Brethren, I am not going to speak to you tonight about the sin of
   drunkenness. Many of you feel an intense aversion to that degrading
   vice. If there are any here who require a homily upon drunkenness, they
   have only to let conscience speak and it will tell them how base a sin
   it is. If they do not know the shamefulness of their wicked habit,
   there are plenty round about them who will let them know in indignant
   language. Perhaps of all the sins that are rife in our country today,
   drunkenness brings the most present misery upon mankind.

   A very large proportion of the want from which people suffer is due to
   wasteful excess in drink. You know it is so, if you are intelligent
   observers. Other sins may seem to go deeper into the soul, and are more
   subject to punishment by our laws. But for creating widespread
   suffering, suffering brought upon the innocent, upon the wife, and upon
   the child-- this vice raises its head above all others. This throngs
   our workhouses, fills our jails, and crowds our lunatic asylums--
   yes--and fattens our cemeteries with carcasses of men and women who die
   before their time.

   This is the Moloch of the nineteenth century. I am not going to preach
   about that one particular vice tonight, as though I would saw off a big
   limb from the tree of evil. It is my custom to lay the axe at the root
   of the tree, aiming my blows at the very nature which bears this evil
   branch. Still, this is a very far spreading limb. And, as I have seen
   the woodmen lopping the tree before they cut it down, there will be no
   waste of time if I aim a blow or two at this huge branch of the tree of
   evil, this bough of drunkenness.

   It is far too common to this day. But, thank God, through the efforts
   of temperance friends and, I hope, through the power of the Spirit of
   God upon many, it is not as it used to be. And it is regarded now in a
   very different light from that in which it was viewed even by Christian
   people years ago.

   The Apostle has been pleased, in this passage, guided by the Holy
   Spirit, to put in apposition and, in some respects, in opposition, a
   prohibition and a command--"Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess.
   But be filled with the Spirit." He had a reason for putting these two
   things together. There is a very, very, very wide and deep abyss
   between being drunk with wine and being filled with the Spirit.
   Drunkenness is down, down, down to the depths of the brute, and far
   lower still--fullness with the Spirit is up, up, up, to the very
   heights of God.

   How did it happen that in the same verse, without a break, Paul should
   put the two together--the prohibition and the command? There was a
   reason and a very good reason, for this conjunction of things so far
   apart in character. I think that I see two reasons. The first is
   because there is a parallel between them--a degree of similarity amid
   their infinite difference. Secondly, he so placed them because there is
   a contrast between them of a very striking kind. The contrast is as
   instructive as the parallel. "Be not drunk with wine." But hasten to
   the very opposite extreme and, "Be filled with the

   Spirit."

   I. First, LET ME DRAW THE PARALLEL. Why do men become drunk with wine,
   or other alcoholic liquors? There are several reasons. I shall not
   mention them all, for they are innumerable and many of them too
   ridiculous to be mentioned in a sermon.

   One motive is to find in wine an exhilaration. It is a feast day. Let
   us have wine, that we may warm our hearts and laugh and sing and make
   merry. It is a marriage day. It is a birthday. It is a royal holiday.
   It is something out of the common--bring forth the wine cup! So say the
   sons of men. When the man has drunk what he ought to think enough,
   feeling already a little elevated, he must drink yet more, with the
   same view. He would rise higher and higher and higher and be filled
   with glee and jollity and make uproarious laughter and be lord of
   misrule for the day.

   Strong drink is taken to exhilarate. And for a while it has that
   effect. How some men are carried away when intoxicated! How lifted up
   they are! What a great man the least becomes! What a Divine the man who
   never looked into his Bible! What a philosopher the boor that does not
   know his letters! What a lord of creation the loon who has not two
   shirts! What a hero, every way, the coward who is afraid of his shadow!
   He is exhilarated when he has taken wine.

   I grant you, that it is natural that we should all wish to be somewhat
   exhilarated. We like to have stirring times in which we do not lie
   still and stagnant--we would have our whole nature stirred with
   pleasure. We like to have our high-days and holidays, even as others.
   "Now," says the Apostle, "that you may enjoy the most exquisite
   exhilaration, be filled with the Spirit." When the Spirit of God comes
   into a man, with extraordinary power, so as to fill his soul, He brings
   to his soul a joy, a delight, an elevation of mind, a delightful and
   healthful excitement which lifts him up above the dull dead level of
   ordinary life and causes him to rejoice with joy unspeakable and full
   of glory.

   This is safe delight and therefore I commend it to you. It is safe
   delight, because it is holy delight--holy because it is the Holy Spirit
   that works it in you--and He makes you to delight in everything that is
   pleasing to the Holy God. Seek no longer the excitement which comes
   from the flowing bowl. Here is something more safe, more suitable, more
   sacred, more ennobling--"Be filled with the Spirit."

   I know there are some Christians who never have much joy. You remember
   one, an old acquaintance of yours, the elder brother. His experience
   was expressed to his father in grumbling tones--"Lo, these many years
   do I serve you, neither transgressed I at any time your commandment:
   and yet you never gave me a kid, that I might make merry with my
   friends." Far too many Christians are of that order. Hear what they
   say--"I have always been regular in my attendance on the means of
   Divine Grace, have read my Bible, have acted consistently with my
   profession. Yet I know nothing of

   delight in God."

   Now, my dear Friend, take this advice, "Be filled with the Spirit." You
   have, as yet, received only a few drops from the Divine shower of His
   sacred influences. Ask for the rivers, the floods, the torrents of His
   sacred power. Let the heavenly floods come in and fill you up to the
   brim--then will you have a joy which shall rival the bliss of those who
   are before the Throne of God.

   Furthermore, I have known people take wine with the idea of being
   strengthened by it. There are such individuals still alive in the light
   of this advanced century. Many of the best physicians tell us that
   there is no strength whatever in strong drink. At any rate, whatever
   strength there is in the drink, it does not give any strength to the
   man. I am not going into physical or metaphysical discussions tonight.
   There is no doubt that many indulge in wine to an extreme, with the
   object of getting strength from it. I believe their action to be
   founded on a very grave mistake.

   But to you Christian people, instruction comes in here, "Be not drunk
   with wine," with the view of gaining strength from it--"but be filled
   with the Spirit," for the Spirit of God can give you strength to the
   highest degree. He can gird you with spiritual strength--the strength
   of faith. And there is no strength like it--for all things are possible
   to him that believes. He can give you the strength that wrestles in
   prayer, that lays hold upon the angel of the Covenant and will not let
   him go, except he grant a blessing.

   The Spirit of God gives the strength to suffer and the strength to
   labor. The strength to receive and the strength to give out again. The
   strength to hope, the strength to love, the strength to conquer
   temptation, the strength to perform holy action. When you are filled
   with the Spirit, how strong you are! There is no influence about us for
   good when the Holy Spirit has departed. But when a man gets the Spirit
   of God to fill him to the full, His presence has a mystic power about
   it. Though such a man tarries but for a short time in a place, he
   leaves a savor behind him that will not be forgotten.

   Dear Brothers and Sisters, whether you are preachers, or teachers, or
   parents, or persons engaged in the service of God in your ordinary
   labor--if you want strength with which to bring glory to the Most
   High--be filled with the Spirit. Oh, that we had in our midst many that
   were strong because of this!

   In the next place, wine has been taken by a great many and taken to
   excess, to embolden them. And it does embolden them to a very high
   degree. A man under the influence of liquor will do what he would never
   think of doing at any other time--he will be rash, foolhardy, and
   daring to the last degree. We have heard of foreign nations whose
   troops have been so afraid of the fight that they have dosed them with
   strong drink to induce them to march into the battle.

   We used to hear the expression, "Dutch courage," which meant the
   boldness which came of ardent spirits--though I do not suppose the
   Dutch had more of it than the English. No doubt many a man under the
   influence of drink has risked his life and performed what looked like
   feats of valor, when, indeed, he was simply beyond himself and out of
   his right mind, or he would not have been so foolhardy. Wine does
   embolden many men in a wrong way.

   Beloved Friends, we are not to make ourselves ridiculous with
   fanaticism--but bold with the Spirit of Truth. "Be not drunk with wine,
   wherein is riot," in order to be emboldened to do anything. But be
   filled with the Spirit of the living God, wherein is quietness, and
   comes a courage which is to be admired and not derided. Oh, how brave a
   man is when he is filled with the Spirit of God!

   Then, knowing a thing to be right, he resolves to do it, and he never
   counts the cost. He has counted that cost long ago and reckoned that
   the light suffering that would come by doing right was no longer worthy
   to be compared with the glory of being found a faithful servant of God.
   When a man has little of the Spirit of God he begins calculating the
   pence. "Will it pay? The thing is right enough," he says, "but then, I
   cannot afford it. I know that what I am doing is wrong. But, still, I
   could not give it up. It would involve too much sacrifice."

   That man has little, if any, of the Spirit of God. For the Spirit
   destroys selfishness and all that love of gain which eats as does a
   canker. A man in whom the Spirit of God dwells abundantly says, "I
   shall never think, from this day forth, what may be to me the
   consequences of any course of action which the Lord, my God, commands
   me to follow. If it is right in the sight of God, I will do it. If God
   approves it, so shall it be. But if it is wrong, not a world made of
   gold, if it could all be mine, should tempt me to parley for a moment."

   Be filled with the Spirit. It will make you bold in the cause of the
   Lord Jesus. How bold the martyrs were! How bravely humble women were
   likely to speak up for Christ! How slaves, peasants, persons of no
   education, faced the Roman governors--yes, stood before the Roman
   Emperor, himself, and were not in the least afraid! When they cried,
   "To the lions with them!" they flinched not from so cruel an end. They
   were a brave people, those early Christians, for they were filled with
   the Spirit.

   And our men and women in England, in the days of Mary--how bold they
   were when filled with the Spirit! The Holy Spirit is the creator of
   heroes. If the Spirit of God is gone, we are a cowardly set. But if the
   Spirit of God shall come

   down upon us, as I hope He may, then every man and woman here, however
   timid by nature, will be able to bear witness for Christ, according as
   Christ shall call him to that work. O my Beloved, for whom I long and
   pray that you may be an army for the Lord, "Be filled with the Spirit."

   Wine has been also taken in large quantities for the destruction of
   pain, for the drowning of misery, for support in the agony of a cruel
   death. Solomon says, "Give strong drink unto him that is ready to
   perish and wine unto those that are of heavy hearts. Let him drink and
   forget his poverty and remember his misery no more." It was an old
   custom, that when a man was doomed and about to die, they gave him some
   narcotic cup that he might be somewhat stupefied and suffer less.

   There was some mercy in this, though truly, "the tender mercies of the
   wicked are cruel." No doubt many persons have most foolishly taken to
   drink in order to forget their grief and assuage their sorrow. We must
   earnestly condemn such wicked conduct, but still, so it is. And the
   Apostle puts it, "Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess. But be
   filled with the Spirit." For that will remove depression and sustain
   under anguish in a most wonderful way. Indeed, in a holy and perfect
   way.

   If you want to forget your misery, remember to apply for a sweet
   visitation of the Comforter. If there has lately happened some great
   calamity to you and you are saying, "How shall I bear it?" the answer
   is, "Be filled with the Spirit of God." Here shall you drink oblivion
   of the heavy trial. Or, better still, you shall forget the sharpness of
   the trial, in your knowledge that it works patience, and patience
   experience, and experience hope, which makes us not ashamed. O beloved
   Friend, do not kick at the trial, be willing to bear it. Get more of
   the indwelling of the sacred Comforter. "Be filled with the Spirit."

   Perhaps this may be a direction to some dear Friend here who has lately
   been called to tread a more trying path than usual. "How shall I bear
   it, Sir? How shall I bear it? I never was so tried before." Seek
   earnestly for more of the Spirit of God than you ever had before. He
   will give you in proportion to your necessity. He is fully equal to
   every emergency. His consolations can balance your tribulations. Wait
   upon Him for the comfort of the Spirit. The day may come when you will
   glory in your infirmities and afflictions, because God used them to
   make room for more of His Spirit to dwell in you.

   I am certain that if you have to go home tonight to lie for the next
   twenty years upon a sick bed--and certain of God's saints have not been
   off the sick bed for all that time. Or if all your property is gone and
   you are called to endure poverty during the rest of your pilgrimage. Or
   if you shall hear of the death of the dearest one you have--if the Holy
   Spirit is but given in a larger measure to you--you will have more
   happiness and more content and be a better man by reason of all this
   affliction that has come upon you.

   God grant that you may find it to be true that you may forget your
   poverty and misery and discover no gall in your most bitter cup! May
   you drink deep draughts of the joy of the Lord till you are filled with
   the Spirit of God! Touch not the wine cup, lest in this you dishonor
   the Holy Spirit, who by His own power is able to cheer your heavy
   heart.

   Again, I think a fifth reason why some have been drinking is to arouse
   themselves. They feel flat, they say. Ah, ah! If I were lecturing
   tonight, I could give you some of those abundant excuses for drinking
   which tipplers so readily invent. You can always find reasons, such as
   they are, when you want to pursue a career of self-indulgence. You may
   find them of every color--black, white, red, blue and gray, at every
   time, every day. The most unreasonable reasons will come cropping up if
   you want to do what your flesh desires.

   But there are some who feel, "I want a pick-me-up. I am rather down,
   seedy, dull. I want something that will brace me, so that I may be up
   to the mark." By the time the man has had enough of his stimulant he is
   worse than before. Many have most effectually knocked themselves down
   in their desire to set themselves up. But, Christian man, if ever you
   feel dull, "be filled with the Spirit." "If ever I feel dull!" cries
   one, "Why, I often do, even at this time I have come into the House of
   Prayer, and do not feel as if I could worship."

   Well, then, go where life and strength are to be had. One of our
   Brethren observed to me the other day (I do not think he meant to
   flatter me), "I often go into the Tabernacle feeling that I cannot
   worship as I should. But," said he, "you always seem to be lively and
   all right." I thought--Ah, dear Brother! You do not know much about me,
   or you would not praise me. For I often feel the reverse of lively--but
   I cannot bear to have it so, lest others should be injured by it.

   There is not a more dull or stupid head than mine in this place. But I
   have a remedy and I fly to it--I wish you would all do so. I go to
   Him--you know His glorious name--He is the Resurrection and the Life. I
   look to Him for quickening and it comes. May that be an example to some
   of you whenever you feel dull! Do not say, "I cannot pray today. I
   cannot sing today." No--go to the Lord to help you to present
   acceptable worship.

   It would be a great relief to me if I could be excused from preaching
   to you when I do not feel like preaching. Yet, it would not be a
   blessing to me, for it would encourage me in dullness and that would be
   a curse. If you do not pray except when you feel like praying, you will
   not pray much, nor pray when you most need it. My Brothers and Sisters,
   when you do not feel like praying, you ought to pray all the more and
   go to the Lord to help you to pray.

   When one does not feel like doing the Lord's work, he must say, "Out
   with you, Mr. Sluggard! You must get to your work. Stir yourself up."
   And here is the hallowed power which will effectually help you--"Be
   filled with the Spirit." Oh, that the Spirit of God would make us feel
   what poor creatures we are, and what a great Savior we have! If He
   would make us feel the love of God shed abroad in our hearts, we would
   burn with love to the souls of men! If He would make us rejoice in
   pardon bought with blood, see our justification and realize it--if we
   could feel the Spirit of God melting us to tenderness or bracing us to
   holy bravery--then it would be that we are refreshed and stimulated
   after the best manner.

   We, then, would have found the true arousing--and there would be no
   reaction after it, no falling back into a deeper depression. I wish
   that those who feel dull tonight may be so filled with the Spirit that
   they will not be content to go to sleep till they have spoken to a poor
   sinner about salvation and eternal life.

   Once more, many men, no doubt, become drunkards from love of what is
   called good fellowship. "Look," said a wife to her husband, "how can
   you drink at the rate you do? Why, a hog would not do so." The wretched
   man replied, "No, I do not suppose that it would. It would be more
   sensible than I am, no doubt. But," he said, "if there was another hog
   at the other side of the trough that said, 'I drink to your health,'
   this hog would be obliged to do the same. And if there were
   half-a-dozen of them together and they kept on toasting one another, I
   expect the hog would get as drunk as I am."

   Sad are the effects of evil fellowship. The fellowship in which people
   indulge, and which they think it necessary to stimulate themselves by
   drink, has led many into drunkenness. Now see the beauty of this
   expression, "Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess. But be filled
   with the Spirit." When the Spirit of God comes upon Christian men, what
   fellowship they have with one another, what delight they take in holy
   conversation, what joy there is in meeting together for solemn worship!

   I do not wonder that it is added immediately after, "Speaking to
   yourselves in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making
   melody in your heart to the Lord; giving thanks always for all things
   unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ." See the
   effect of being filled with the Spirit? It brings a fellowship of holy
   music, sacred gratitude and heavenly thanksgiving. It makes us feel
   concerning the House of Prayer--

   "I have been there and still would go,

   It is like a little Heaven below." It makes us sing with rapture--

   "Hail, you days of solemn meeting!

   Hail, you days of praise and prayer!

   Far from earthly scenes retreating,

   In your blessings we would share.

   Sacred seasons,

   In your blessings we would share."

   The Lord grant us Divine Grace to seek our fellowship where He finds
   it, with holy men and holy women. That among them in joyous fellowship
   we may rejoice and praise His name.

   II. I cannot stay longer on this parallel, I have already been too
   long--now, LET ME POINT OUT THE CONTRAST. I do not think that Paul was
   running the parallel only, for it would dishonor the work of the Holy
   Spirit to think that His operations could be in all things likened to
   the influence of alcohol. No, the Divine inspiration far excels
   anything that earthly excitements can produce.

   "Be not drunk with wine, wherein is riot. But be filled with the
   Spirit." The contrast is at the very beginning. For it is written, "Be
   filled with the Spirit." Wine does not fill. No man is satisfied with
   all that he drinks. He is still thirsty. His thirst is often increased
   by that which was supposed to quench it. The Spirit of God has a
   satisfying, satiating, never

   nauseating influence upon the heart. It fills it to the very brim,
   until the man delights himself in God and cries, "My cup runs over."

   Then the saint becomes like the tribe of which we read, "O Naphtali,
   satisfied with favor and full with the blessing of the Lord." Wine
   ministers to lust and lust is a burning sense of want. But the Spirit
   of the Lord brings fullness with it and a perfect rest of heart.

   "Wine creates riot," says the Apostle. And that is the second point of
   contrast. When men are drunken, what a noise they will make! They are
   ready for any disturbance. But the Holy Spirit, when you are full of
   Him, makes you quiet with a deep, unutterable peace. I do not say that
   you will not sing and rejoice, but there will be a deep calm within
   your spirit. I wish that some Christian people were filled with the
   Spirit, if there were no other effect produced upon them but that of
   peace, self-possession, restfulness and freedom from passion.

   Our friends, the members of the Society of Friends, who speak much of
   the Spirit of God, whatever virtues they may not have, certainly have
   this one--that they are, usually, a very quiet, unexcitable, peaceable
   people. We want more Christians of this sort. We can put up with all
   the uproar of the Salvation Army, if it comes in very deed from warm
   hearts and genuine zeal. I will not find any fault with them for a
   little noise, though the less of it the better. If your genius goes
   that way, sing unto the Lord and blow your trumpet.

   But at the same time, the solid people in the Church are those who
   possess their souls, who go about their business, suffer and labor with
   an inward peace which is not disturbed. They have a holy calm which is
   not ruffled. Do not create riot, but abide in holy peace by being
   filled with the Spirit. May the Lord keep you in perfect peace with
   your minds stayed on Him.

   The next point of contrast is that wine causes contention. When men are
   drunken with it, how ready they are to quarrel! They make a harmless
   word to be an insult. Many a man, when full of wine, will bear nothing
   at all--he is ready to fight anybody and everybody--he cannot have his
   fill of fighting. But when you are filled with the Spirit, what is the
   result? Why, peaceful submission. Listen to this--"Submitting
   yourselves one to another in the fear of God. Wives, submit yourselves
   unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord."

   Human nature likes rule. But the Spirit of God works submissiveness of
   mind. Instead of wanting to be first, the truly spiritual man will be
   satisfied to be last, if he can thus glorify God. That man who must be
   always king of the castle is not filled with the Spirit of God. But he
   that is willing to be a doormat, on which the saints may wipe their
   feet, is great in the kingdom of Heaven. Be filled with the Spirit and
   you will soon submit to inconvenience, misapprehension, and even
   exaction for the sake of doing good to those who are out of the way and
   in the hope of edifying the people of God. Wine causes riot. The Spirit
   causes peace. Drunkenness causes contention. The Spirit of God causes
   submission.

   Furthermore, drunkenness makes men foolish. But the Spirit of God makes
   them wise. I am keeping to the connection of my text. Read the
   fifteenth verse, "See, then, that you walk circumspectly, not as fools
   but as wise." The drunken man cannot walk at all, because he has not
   made up his mind as to which way he will go. He attempts to go two ways
   and ends up staggering till he falls. The man filled with the Spirit
   has a very definite idea of which way he is going. He knows the right
   way and he deliberately chooses it. He perceives the strait and narrow
   way and he steadfastly follows it--for God has made him wise. Folly
   clings to the wine cup. But wisdom comes with the Holy Spirit.

   Drunkenness wastes time. But the Spirit of God, when we are filled with
   Him, makes us save it. Read the sixteenth verse--"Redeeming the time,
   because the days are evil. Therefore be you not unwise but
   understanding what the will of the Lord is. And be not drunk with wine,
   wherein is riot." How much of time is wasted over the unholy cup! But
   the child of God, when the Spirit of God enters into him, makes a
   conscience of his odd moments and leisure minutes. As goldsmiths sweep
   up the very dust of their shops, that no filings of the precious metal
   may be lost, so does the Christian man, when filled with the Spirit,
   use his brief intervals. It is wonderful what may be done in odd
   minutes. Little spaces of time may be made to yield a great harvest of
   usefulness and a rich revenue of glory to God. May we be filled with
   the Spirit in that respect!

   In the next place, drunkenness makes men forget their relationships,
   but the Holy Spirit makes us remember them. The rest of the chapter
   goes on to mention our domestic conditions as wives, husbands,
   children, fathers, servants, masters. The drunken man is bad in every
   relation and the drunken woman is, if possible, worse. The drunken man
   ought

   never to be a husband, but he sometimes wears that name, and then he
   has a power to inflict misery which he is sure to use to the utmost.
   The drunken man will often do towards his wife what I will not trust my
   lips to speak of--it would be a libel on the brutes of the stall, or
   the beasts of the jungle, to liken him to them.

   A drunken father! Is he worth calling "father"? And it is even worse,
   if worse can be, when it is a drunken wife or a drunken mother. A
   special infamy hovers around womanhood soaked in liquor--relationships,
   in such instances, are quite forgotten under the influence of the
   accursed drink. Selfishness eats up the very heart of those who
   otherwise might have been the objects of reverence and love. The
   contrast to this is the fact that when filled with the Spirit, the
   husband is the most tender of husbands, the wife the best of wives.

   No master is so just as the man that is mastered by the Spirit of God!
   No servant so diligent as he that serves the Lord. By the Holy Spirit,
   our relationships become ennobled. And what was but a commonplace
   position wears a glory of holiness about it. We are transfigured by the
   Spirit of God, and we transfigure everything we touch. Dear Friends,
   you see that the contrast is a very vivid one. Look into it very
   narrowly, and it will repay the inspection.

   Lastly, excess of drink leaves a man weak and exposed to peril. But to
   be filled with the Spirit!--listen to what comes of it according to the
   tenth verse of the next chapter--"Finally, my Brethren, be strong in
   the Lord and in the power of His might. Put on the whole armor of God,
   that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we
   wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against
   powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against
   spiritual wickedness in high places.

   "Therefore take unto you the whole armor of God, that you may be able
   to withstand in the evil day and having done all, to stand. Stand
   therefore, having your loins girt about with truth." When filled with
   the Spirit the man is no longer naked, like the drunkard. He no longer
   lies upon the ground in danger as one overcome with wine. He is no
   longer open to the attack of adversaries, as one who sleeps through
   strong drink. God has made him strong and armed him--and now he goes
   forth to fight in the service of his Master. I think that you will see
   the contrast. It is as evident as the parallel.

   I shall keep you no longer except to say this. My beloved Christian
   Friends, our heart's desire is that the members of this Church and,
   indeed, all the members of Christ's mystical body, should be filled
   with the Spirit. Oh, that you may come absolutely under the sway of the
   Holy Spirit and may abide under His most powerful inspirations! Do you
   ask how this is to be? First, reverently regard Him. Worship Him. Speak
   not of the Holy Spirit as "it." Talk not of the Third Person of the
   adorable Trinity as an influence. He is very God of very God. God has
   guarded the sanctity of the Holy Spirit by causing a certain sin to be
   especially condemned and unpardonable--the sin against the Holy Spirit.
   Honor Him much, then--worship Him and adore Him and look to Him for
   help.

   Next, do not grieve Him. If there is anything that would grieve the
   Holy Spirit, let it grieve you, so that you may keep clear of it. Put
   away every thought, idea, principle and act that is not agreeable to
   His mind. Neither live in sin, nor trifle with evil, nor fall into
   error, nor neglect the reading of the Word of God, nor fail to obey the
   commands of the Lord. Do not grieve the Comforter but welcome Him as
   your best Friend. Open your heart to His influences. Watch each day to
   hear His monitions. Pray every morning, "Holy Spirit, speak with me,
   bedew me, enlighten me, set me on fire, dwell in me." And during the
   day lament to yourself if you do not feel the Spirit of God moving in
   you and ask why it is. "Has He left me? Is He grieved with me?" Say--

   "Return, O holy Dove! return,

   Sweet Messenger of rest!

   I hate the sins that made You mourn,

   And drove You from my breast." As you welcome Him when He comes, so be
   fit for Him to come to you and dwell in you. Be clean, for He is pure.
   Do not expect the Holy Spirit to dwell in a foul chamber. You cannot
   make that chamber like Solomon's temple, wherein the cedar wood was
   overlaid with pure gold. But you can take care that it is well
   cleansed. Only the pure in heart shall see God. Oh, for a clean life, a
   clean tongue, a clean hand, a clean ear, a clean eye, a clean heart!
   God give you these and then you shall be ready for the Spirit of God to
   dwell in you.

   And when He does come, learn this thing. If you would have Him fill
   you, obey Him. If you believe that an impulse is from the Spirit of
   God, follow it out. Never trifle with conscience--especially you that
   are beginning life. Mind you set the tune for the whole of your life by
   the tenderness of your consciences at the first. When I was a lad I
   learned a certain

   Truth of God, which my friends and relatives did not know--but I had to
   follow my conscience. It looked very egotistical and wayward for a lad
   to set up his opinion against older people. But I could not help it.

   I saw Believer's Baptism in the Bible and therefore the highest Law
   compelled me to be obedient to that ordinance. I looked over the matter
   again and again, to see if it was not so--and I became more and more
   assured as to the mind of the Lord. Therefore I was not disobedient. It
   is true that it was suggested to me that if I did follow out my views,
   I should have to cut out quite another career for myself from the one
   anticipated. But I could not help that. I must do the Lord's will,
   whatever might be the consequences.

   From that day to this I have never had cause to regret my youthful
   decision. The trial was severe at the time, but it was beneficial to my
   whole character. It taught me to follow the Truth of God wherever it
   might lead me and to expect the Spirit of God to abide with me in so
   doing Since then I have often come to a place where interest has gone
   one way and principle has gone another. But it has not cost me
   half-a-minute's thought which way should be my way. I must follow what
   I believe to be right and true, and preach what I believe to be God's
   Word. And I will, by God's Grace, do so, whether men hear or whether
   they ignore.

   Young Men, young Women, mind you begin straight. Do not begin with
   truckling and making compromises. If you take your hats off to the
   devil today, you will have to take your shoes off to him soon. And
   by-and-by you will become utterly his slaves. Be strong for the Truth
   of God. Quit yourselves like men. Stand fast for God and holiness. You
   will be filled with the Spirit if you are obedient to Him.

   If you are filled with the Spirit of God and wish to retain His
   gracious Presence, speak about Him. Note this, "Be not drunk with wine,
   wherein is riot. But be filled with the Spirit; speaking." That is a
   curious word to follow so soon. The Holy Spirit is not a dumb Spirit.
   He sets us speaking. "Speaking to yourselves." It is a poor audience.
   But still it is a choice audience if you speak to your Brethren.
   "Speaking to yourselves in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs,
   singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord."

   Beloved, when the Spirit of God fills you, you will not only speak, but
   sing. Let the holy power have free course--do not quench the Spirit. If
   you feel like singing all the while, sing all the while and let others
   know that there is a joy in the possession of the Spirit of God which
   the world does not understand but which you are feeling and to which
   you wish to bear witness.

   Oh, that the Spirit of God would come upon this entire Church and fill
   you all to overflowing! May the members of other Churches that are here
   tonight take home fire with them and set their Churches on flame! The
   Lord bless you, for Jesus Christ's sake! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

Peace--How Gained, How Broken

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S-DAY MORNING, OCTOBER 27, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "I will hear what God the Lord will speak: for He will speak peace unto
   His people and to His saints: but let them not turn again to folly."
   Psalm 85:8.

   "I WILL hear what God the Lord will speak." There were voices and
   voices. There were voices of the past concerning God's wondrous mercy
   to His people--"You have been favorable unto Your land; You have
   brought back the captivity of Jacob." But mingled with these were the
   sad voices of the present. He heard the wailing and the pleading of
   those who said, "Will You be angry with us forever? Will You draw out
   Your anger to all generations?" From this mingling of singing and
   sighing, the Psalmist turned away and cried, "I will hear what God the
   Lord will speak. I will get me into the secret place of the tabernacles
   of the Most High. I will hear that voice from between the cherubim
   which speaks peace to the soul."

   Beloved, herein is wisdom. Resort to the sanctuary of God. When you
   cannot find harmony in the voices of the street, or the voices of the
   Church, turn to the melody of that one voice which "will speak peace
   unto His people."

   Again, the Psalmist had been praying. At the Mercy Seat he had spread
   out this petition, "Will You not revive us again: that Your people may
   rejoice in You? Show us Your mercy, O Lord and grant us Your
   salvation." When he had spoken, he desired an answer. He watched and
   waited till the Lord God should give him a reply. A friend, kindly
   wishing to spare me, puts at the end of his letter, "No answer
   expected." This is too often a footnote to men's prayers.

   David did not pray in that fashion--he expected an answer from the
   mouth of the Lord. He said within himself, "I have spoken--but now I
   will speak no more but hear what God the Lord will speak." Always
   follow up prayer with holy expectancy. Prayers which expect no answer
   are guilty of taking the name of God in vain. They are a misuse of the
   holy ordinance of supplication. And they are a question put upon the
   Divine existence, inasmuch as they reduce the Godhead to an idol, like
   to those images of the heathen which have ears but they hear not,
   neither do they speak.

   Prayers without faith are an insult to the attributes of God and
   dishonor to His sacred name. If you pray aright, in the name of Jesus,
   expect the Lord to hear you, even as you would hear your child, if he
   asked bread of you.

   In addition to this, it should be the daily resolve of every Christian
   man--"I will hear what God the Lord will speak." Not only when I am
   dazed and confused with other voices. Nor only when I have expressed my
   heart in prayer-- but at all times and seasons--I will hear what God
   the Lord shall speak. There are many doctrines and controversies. But
   "I will hear what God the Lord will speak." His voice, by His Prophets
   and Apostles, shall be the umpire of every dispute with me. I will also
   turn to the Word of God for the rule of my daily life, as well as for
   the instruction of my mind in doctrine. I will have regard to the
   precepts as well as to the promises. "Your Word is a lamp unto my feet
   and a light unto my path."

   When I would know my duty, "I will hear what God the Lord will speak."
   And, hearing His Word of command, I will need neither whip nor spur,
   but will make haste in the way of His commands. I will listen to His
   Word, whatever I may do with the precepts of men. Has He spoken? Did
   the primeval darkness hear it? Shall not the light which He has given
   me be attentive to it? Even the dead shall hear that voice and they
   that hear shall live. Shall not I, who have been quickened by His
   Spirit, joyfully say, "I will never forget Your precepts: for with them
   You have quickened me"?

   Our Savior speaks of some who enter into life halt and maimed and
   having one eye. But He does not speak of anybody entering into life
   without ears. We must hear the voice of God, for it is written, "Hear
   and your soul shall live." Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the
   Word of God. By Ear Gate the Prince Emmanuel enters the town of
   Mansoul. Men are saved, not by what they touch, or see, or taste, or
   smell--but by what they hear. Oh, that we would all hear the voice of
   Christ with solemn attention!

   Our Lord says, "He that has ears to hear, let him hear." Be this our
   resolve--"I will hear what God the Lord will speak." Like young Samuel,
   let each one say, "Speak, Lord. For Your servant hears."

   There is one special reason given by the Psalmist why the people of God
   should be most willing and eager to hear what God the Lord shall speak,
   and that is because, "He will speak peace unto His people and to His
   saints." You, Beloved, will hear nothing from the Lord but that which
   will calm your fears and cheer your hearts. The Lord speaks no thunders
   against you. His tones are tenderness, His Words are mercy, His Spirit
   is love, His message is peace. I will hear what God the Lord will
   speak--for He will speak peace and nothing else but peace, unto His own
   people. That is the subject for us to consider this morning. The Lord
   Jehovah gives peace to His holy ones.

   First, what we know the Lord will speak. And, secondly, what we fear
   may hinder our enjoying the blessing which He speaks to us--"Let them
   not turn again to folly"--a notable word of warning, to which we shall
   do well to give heed.

   I. First, let us consider WHAT WE KNOW THE LORD WILL SPEAK. "I will
   hear what God the Lord will speak. For He will speak peace."

   The first point is, He speaks peace to a certain company--"to His
   people, and to His saints." Let us, then, ask ourselves, Has the Lord
   ever spoken peace to us, or will He do so? He will certainly do so if
   we have an ear to hear His voice. For God will not speak sweet words to
   those who turn to Him a deaf ear. He that will not hear the Gospel of
   peace, shall never know the peace of the Gospel. If you will not hear
   the Holy Spirit when He warns you of your sins, neither shall you hear
   Him revealing peace through pardon.

   If you will not hear the Lord when He proposes to you reconciliation
   through the sacrifice of His dear Son. If you will not hear Him when He
   bids you repent and believe and be washed in the blood of the Lamb,
   then He will never speak peace to your soul. There is no peace out of
   Christ, who is our Peace. There is one Ambassador and one Mediator and
   only one. There is one atonement by blood and only one.

   There is one Covenant of peace and there can never be another.
   Reconciliation comes to men by Jesus Christ and by no other gate. If
   you will not hear the Lord when He speaks concerning His dear Son, who
   is the Propitiation for sins, He will never speak peace to your heart.
   Oh, for the ear which is opened to hear the Lord, for this is the sure
   mark of Divine Grace! Does not Jesus say, "My sheep hear My voice"?

   Those to whom the Lord speaks peace are His people and they acknowledge
   Him to be their God. Many men have no God. They would not like to be
   called atheists but it practically comes to that. God is not in their
   thoughts, their plans, their actions, their business, their life. But
   there is peace to that man to whom God is the greatest fact of his
   existence. Happy is he who has God first and last and midst in all that
   he does. Look him through and through and you will perceive that as the
   color tinges the stained glass, so does faith in God color all his
   life.

   God is with him in his loneliness and among the multitude--God is above
   him to govern him, beneath him to uphold him--within him to quicken
   him. The man has a God to worship, a God to trust, a God to delight in.
   If God is everything to you, you are among His people and He will speak
   peace unto you. That peace is, however, always connected with holiness,
   for it is added, "and to His saints." His people and His saints are the
   same persons. Those who have a God know Him to be a holy God, and
   therefore they strive to be holy themselves. He that has no saintship
   about him will have no peace about him.

   If you live a blundering, careless, godless life, you will have much
   tossing to and fro and many questionings of heart. "There is no peace,"
   says my God, "unto the wicked." But to His people, His saintly ones,
   His sanctified ones, the people who follow after righteousness--to
   these the Lord Himself will secure peace by His own word of mouth.

   Do I hear anyone saying, "Alas, I could not venture to be classed with
   saints"? Listen one minute--these people, though they are now God's
   people, and though they are now made saintly by His Grace--were once
   given over to folly. How do I know this? Because the text says, "Let
   them not turn again to folly"--which shows that once they did follow
   after folly. Once they followed sin with all their hearts. They knew
   not God, neither served Him. But they have been turned away from folly,
   sin and shame--a change, a conversion has taken place in them, by the
   Grace of God.

   Therefore, dear Hearer, let not your past foolishness dismay you, if
   you would now come to God. Fool as you may have been, the Lord is
   turning you from folly. And if He brings you to be numbered among His
   people and His holy ones, He will speak peace to you. I think I hear
   one say, "I have turned away from folly but I feel that there is in my
   heart a

   tendency to return to it!" I know it. I, too, have felt the old Adam
   pulling at my sleeve, to draw me back to the old way, if possible.

   So it was with these people, or else the Lord would not have needed to
   say, "Let them not turn again to folly." They were His people, they
   were His saints, too--and He spoke peace to them. But the old nature
   lurked within, and made the heart in danger of turning again to folly.
   If you find the old leaven working within you, fermenting unto evil and
   making you feel sick at heart to think that you should be so base, then
   bow low at your Savior's feet and cry to Him in the language of the
   publican, "God be merciful to me a sinner."

   Yet remember, even if it is so with you, nevertheless you may be
   numbered with the Lord's people, of whom He has said that He will speak
   peace unto them. But if you have no horror of sin. If you have no
   conflict with evil. If you have no longing for righteousness and no ear
   for the voice of the Lord, then God will not speak peace to you. But
   one of these days He will speak thunderbolts and accent His words with
   flames of fire--and this shall be the tenor of His speech-- "Depart,
   you cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his
   angels." May you never hear that voice of wrath. But may peace be
   spoken into your soul.

   But now, dear Friends, I notice here that the peace which is to be
   desired is peace which God speaks--and all other peace is evil. The
   question is sometimes put--"We see bad men enjoy peace and we see good
   men who have but little peace." That is one of the mysteries of life.
   But it is not a very difficult one as to its first part. Why do bad men
   enjoy a kind of peace? I answer--sometimes their peace arises from
   sheer carelessness. They will not think, reflect, or consider. They do
   not intend to look about them, or before them. For "they count it one
   of the wisest things to drive dull care away."

   They go through the world like blind men. They are on the verge of a
   precipice and they do not know their danger, or wish to know it. They
   will go over the edge of the cliff and be broken to pieces. But they
   have hardened their necks and if you warn them, they will hate you for
   it. These are your men that fill high the bowl and chase the flying
   hours with glowing feet. They live right merrily. Like the men of the
   old world, they marry and are given in marriage, they drink and are
   drunken--till the flood comes and there is no escape.

   Many are quiet in conscience because of worldliness. They are too much
   occupied to give fair attention to the affairs of their souls. They are
   taken up with business. They are at it from morning to night--shutters
   up and shutters down. They can find time for nothing but counting their
   money, or shifting their stock. Adam was lost in the garden of Eden.
   But these men are lost in their shops, lost in their warehouses, lost
   in their ships, lost in their farms, lost in the market. They give no
   thought to the world to come, because this world engrosses them. From
   this kind of peace may we be delivered!

   Some have a brawny conscience--I mean a conscience hard, callous,
   rough--you cannot make it feel. A healthy conscience is tender as a raw
   wound, which fears a touch. But some men's consciences are covered with
   a thick skin and are devoid of feeling. Certain sinners have a
   conscience seared as with a hot iron and this brings with it that
   horrible peace which is the preface of eternal damnation.

   Around us are persons who have a peace which Satan preserves. "When a
   strong man armed keeps his house, his goods are in peace." When Satan
   is in full possession of a man, then no disturbing thoughts come in,
   and the sinful heart is well content. "They are not in trouble as other
   men; neither are they plagued like other men." They may even die at
   peace, for the Psalmist complains, "there are no bands in their death:
   but their strength is firm." Satan has filled them with "a strong
   delusion to believe a lie," and so in peace they perish. They go
   willingly to destruction, like sheep to the slaughter.

   And some have a peace of sullenness--an awful peace of despair, in
   which the man steels himself against that which he calls his fate. A
   man says, "I know I am to be lost. I have sinned myself beyond all hope
   of mercy. And why should I trouble myself further?" Like a condemned
   criminal, who hears the hammers fitting up the scaffold and gives
   himself up to silent despair, he feels, "I am doomed--it is all over
   with me." O my Friend, it is not so! This is a lie of Satan's own
   invention. While you live, there is hope! While you are yet in the land
   where Christ is preached, you may come to Him and live.

   But deadness, sullenness, and obstinacy are your worst enemies. Waters
   of enmity to God often run silently because they are so deep. The man
   has a settled enmity against God and this makes him set his teeth and
   defy the Almighty in

   grim determination to perish. God save you from this! May you be driven
   out of every peace except that peace which comes from God! To that I
   now come.

   God alone can speak true peace to the soul. When once a soul begins to
   feel its sinfulness and to tremble at the wrath to come, none but God
   can speak peace to it. Ministers cannot. I have often failed, when I
   have desired to bring comfort to troubled hearts. Books cannot do it,
   not even the most wise and gracious of them. The Bible itself cannot do
   it, apart from the Spirit of God. The ordinances of God's House,
   whether they are Baptism, or the Lord's Supper, or prayer, or
   preaching--none of these can bring peace to a heart apart from the
   still small voice of the Lord.

   I pray that none of you may rest in anything short of a Divine
   assurance of salvation. See how the waves are tossing themselves on
   high! Hark to the howling of the wind! Rise, Peter, and bid the waves
   be quiet! Awake, John, and pour oil upon the waves! Ah, Sirs, the
   Apostles will themselves sink, unless a greater than they shall
   interpose. Only He who lay asleep near the tiller could say, "Peace, be
   still!" May He say that to everyone here who is troubled about his
   sins! The voice of the blood of Jesus speaks--"The peace of God, which
   passes all understanding." We read that on the storm-tossed lake,
   "there was a great calm." How great is the quiet of a soul which has
   seen and felt the power of the atoning sacrifice!

   I have told you that only God can speak this peace. Let me remind you
   that He can give you that peace by speaking it. One word from the Lord
   is the quietus of all trouble. No deed is needed, only a word. Peace
   has not now to be made-- the making of peace was finished more than
   eighteen hundred years ago on yonder Cross. The Lord Jesus, who is our
   peace, went up to the tree bearing our iniquities, and thus removed the
   dread cause of the great warfare between God and man. There He ended
   the quarrel of the Covenant. Hearken to these words, "The chastisement
   of our peace was upon Him." He made peace by the blood of His Cross.
   Through His death, being justified by faith, we have peace with God.
   "It is finished."

   Righteousness and peace have kissed each other. Now is the way paved
   for man to come back to God by reconciliation through sacrifice. There
   is no more blood to be shed, nor sacrifice to be offered--peace is
   finally made and it only remains for the Lord God to speak it to the
   conscience and heart by the Holy Spirit. Yet think not that for God to
   speak is a little thing. His voice is omnipotence in motion. He spoke
   the universe out of nothing--He spoke light out of darkness. Where the
   word of our King is, there is power.

   He speaks and it is done. If He speaks peace, who can cause trouble? In
   Jesus Christ there is Divine peace for the guilty soul. "Come unto Me,"
   says He, "all you that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you
   rest." From a tempest of distress to perfect peace--a word from the God
   of Peace can lift us in an instant.

   Sooner or later the Lord will speak peace to His own. How blessed are
   the shalls and wills of the Lord God!--"He will speak peace unto His
   people." Doubt it not. He WILL. He WILL. Some of you have lost your
   peace for a while. Yet, if you are Believers, "He will speak peace unto
   His people." You have come to Christ and are trusting Him but you do
   not enjoy such peace as you desire. "He will speak peace unto His
   people." There may be a time of battling and of struggling, the noise
   of war may disturb the camp for months--but in the end-- "He will speak
   peace unto His people."

   I have seen some of the Lord's true people terribly harassed year after
   year. One for a very long time was in the dark--wrecked on a barbarous
   coast and neither sun nor moon appearing. I do not excuse him for some
   of his despondency. There was a fault, undoubtedly, and there may also
   have been weakness of the brain. But he was a true child of God and at
   length he came out into the light and wrote a book which has cheered
   many. If peace comes not before, yet, "Mark the perfect man and behold
   the upright: for the end of that man is peace."

   The Lord will not put His child to bed in the dark--He will light his
   candle before he sleeps the sleep of death. Sickness of body and
   weakness of mind, or some other cause, may be a terrible kill-joy. But
   in the end, "The Lord will speak peace unto His people." He cannot
   finally leave a soul that trusts in Him. No Believer shall die of
   despair. You may sink very low--but underneath are the everlasting arms
   and these will bring you up again. Many women of a sorrowful spirit
   have a hard time of it, but yet the Lord has set a day in which He will
   give beauty for ashes. O captive Daughter, your chains last not
   forever! Hold on to your hope--the night is very dark but the morning
   will surely come--for as God is Light, so shall His children be.

   Beloved, when the Lord does speak peace to His people, what a peace it
   is! It is sound and safe. You may have as much of it as you will and
   suffer no harm. The peace of God is never presumptuous. It is a holy
   peace. And the more you

   have of it, the more you will strive to be like your Lord and Master,
   Jesus Christ. It is a peace which rules the heart and mind and not
   merely the face and the tongue. It is a peace that will rise superior
   to circumstances. You may be very poor, but you shall find an inward
   wealth of contentment. You may be lonely, but communion with God will
   bring you company. You may be very sick in body, but peace of soul
   enables a man to bear pain without complaining.

   There may even be a measure of depression of spirit about you and yet
   an inward peace will enable you to reason with yourself and say, "Why
   are you cast down, O my Soul? And why are you disquieted in me?" If God
   gives you peace, the devil cannot take it away. If God breathes peace
   into your soul, the roughest winds of earth or Hell cannot blow that
   peace from you. They that have enjoyed this peace will tell you that it
   is the dawn of Heaven. They that walk in the light of God's
   countenance, at this moment, are as the courtiers of a king, and for
   them there is a Paradise restored. Perfect peace brings a joy of which
   no tongue can fully tell.

   There is no war above--Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all reconciled
   to us. There is no war within--conscience is cleansed and the heart
   relieved. There is no fear even of the arch-enemy below. He may grind
   his teeth at us, but he cannot destroy us. Even the world of nature is
   at peace with us. "For you shall be in league with the stones of the
   field: and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with you." "All
   things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are
   the called according to His purpose." A deep peace, a high peace, a
   broad peace, an endless peace is ours.

   "Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect? It is God that
   justifies. Who is he that condemns? It is Christ that died, yes,
   rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who
   also makes intercession for us." "Therefore being justified by faith,
   we have," in the most emphatic and unlimited sense, "peace with God
   through our Lord Jesus Christ." Beloved Friends, do not be satisfied
   without the constant possession of unbroken peace. You may have it. You
   ought to have it. It will make you greater than princes and richer than
   misers. This peace will shoe your feet for ways of obedience or
   suffering. "May the peace of God keep your hearts and minds through
   Christ Jesus!"

   II. Now we must come down from our elevation, to talk about a more
   humbling theme, WHAT WE FEAR MAY MAR THIS BLESSING OF PEACE. "He will
   speak peace unto His people and to His saints: but let them not turn
   again

   to folly."

   The grounds of a Believer's peace are always the same, but a Believer's
   enjoyment of that peace varies very greatly. I always have a right to
   the Divine inheritance but I do not always enjoy the fruits of that
   inheritance. Peace may be broken with the Christian, through great
   trouble, if his faith is not very strong. It need not be so. For some
   of those who have had the greatest fight of affliction have had the
   sweetest peace in Christ Jesus.

   Peace may be broken through some forms of disease which prey upon the
   mind as well as the body. And when the mind grows weak and depressed
   from what are physical causes rather than spiritual ones, the infirmity
   of the flesh is apt to crush spiritual peace. Yet it is not always so.
   For sometimes, when heart and flesh have failed, God has yet been the
   strength of our heart, as He is our portion forever.

   Inward conflict, too, may disturb our enjoyment of peace. When a man is
   struggling hard against a sin, when some old habit has to be hung up
   before the Lord, when corruption grows exceedingly strong and
   vigorous--as at seasons it may do--the Believer may not enjoy peace as
   he would wish. And yet I have known warring times when the fight within
   has not diminished my peace. "How so?" you may ask. I have found peace
   in the very fact that I was fighting! I have seen clearly that if I
   were not a child of God, I should not struggle against sin.

   The very fact that I contend against sin, as against my deadliest foe,
   proves that I am not under the dominion of sin. And that fact brings to
   my soul a measure of peace. Satan, too--oh, it is hard to have peace
   under his attacks! He has a way of beating his drum of Hell at a rate
   which will let no Believer rest. He can inject the most profane
   thoughts. He can flutter us and worry us, by making us think that we
   are the authors of the thoughts which he fathers upon us--which are his
   and not ours. It is a very glorious thing, then, to be able to say,
   "Rejoice not over me, O mine enemy; though I fall, yet shall I rise
   again."

   When the Lord hides His face, as He may do as the result of grave
   offense that we have given Him, ah, then we cannot have peace. Peace
   runs out to a very low ebb when we are under withdrawals. And then we
   cry, "Oh, that I knew where I might find Him, that I might come even to
   His feet!" We can never rest till we again behold the smiles of His
   face and take our place among His children.

   But, after all, the chief reason why a Christian loses his peace is
   because he "turns again to folly." What kind of folly? Folly is sin and
   error and everything contrary to Divine wisdom. I will briefly show you
   a few of the different shapes of this folly.

   There is the folly of hasty judgment. Have you ever judged without
   knowing and considering all the surroundings of the case? Have you not
   come to a wrong conclusion, when you have ventured to judge the
   dealings of God with you? You have said, "This cannot be wise, this
   cannot be right--at any rate, this cannot be a fruit of love." But you
   have found out afterwards that you were quite mistaken, that your
   severest trial was sent in very faithfulness. Your rash judgment was
   most evidently folly. And if you turn again to such folly in your next
   season of sorrow, you will certainly lose your peace.

   What? Will you measure the infinite wisdom of God by the rule of your
   short-sighted policy? Are eternal purposes to be judged of according to
   the ticking of the clock? There can be no peace when we assume the
   throne of judgment and dare accuse our Sovereign of unkindness or
   mistakes--

   "Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, But trust Him for His Grace."

   Consider things in the long run when you would estimate the ways of
   God. Behold, He dwells in eternity and His measures are only to be seen
   in the light of the endless future. Oh, that we could either judge the
   Lord's ways upon eternal principles, or leave off judging altogether!
   My Soul, be as a little child before the Lord and you will find peace!

   Another kind of folly is of like order--it is repining and quarrelling
   with the Most High. Some are never pleased with God--how can He be
   pleased with them? There can be no use in contending with our Maker.
   For what are we as compared with Him? Let the grass contend with the
   scythe, or the tow fight with the flame. But let not man contend with
   God. Besides, who are you? "Who are you, O man, that replies against
   God?" It is true you may be, like Job, terribly smitten and brought
   very low, and you cannot understand the why and the wherefore of it.
   But I pray you bow your head in sweet submission, for your heavenly
   Father must be doing the best possible thing for you.

   Kick not against the pricks. When the ox, newly yoked to the plow,
   kicks against the goad, what is the result? It drives the goad into its
   own flank. It would not have been so hurt had it not defied the driver.
   "It is hard for you to kick against the pricks." No man, by quarrelling
   with God, can gain any advantage, for the right is on God's side and
   eternal principles establish His government. When the boat wars with
   the rock, we know which will suffer. Yield, O my Brothers and Sisters,
   yield to the Lord of Love! Your hope can only climb on bended
   knee--your peace can only return with bowed head. For to proud
   rebellion there is no peace, since it is folly of the grossest kind.

   Another kind of folly to which men often turn is that of doubt and
   distrust. What peace you have had has come by faith. And when faith
   departs, peace goes, also. To doubt the Lord is folly. Even the least
   degree of it is folly of the worst order. When you said, "God is true
   and I will trust Him," then your peace was like a river. Hope in Christ
   and in nothing else but Christ. When your expectation is in the Lord
   alone, then will your peace be like a river.

   Some lose their peace by turning again to the folly of intellectual
   speculation. Some of our friends, who once walked in the light, as God
   is in the light, and were as happy as all the birds of the air, have
   now lost their joy. And all because they have read a pernicious book,
   which started for them a whole host of difficulties of which they never
   dreamed before. Would you like me to answer those difficulties? Suppose
   I took the trouble to do so and succeeded, what would happen?

   You would read another book tomorrow, and come to me with another set
   of doubts. And if we were to slay all these, you would simply invite
   another band of invaders to land on the shores of your mind. Therefore
   I decline to begin the endless task. At Mentone, the trouble of some of
   our friends is to catch the mosquitoes, which worry them. But there is
   little or no use in it. For if you catch a dozen of these little pests,
   twenty-four will come to the funeral.

   It is just the same with these intellectual difficulties. You may, by
   overcoming some of them, make room for more of a worse kind. No fact,
   however certain, is beyond a critic's questioning. I have done with the
   whole band of quibblers. People say, "Have you seen the new book? It is
   terribly unsettling." It will not unsettle me--first, because I know
   what I know. And secondly, because I do not care one atom what the
   unbeliever has to say. I care, indeed, so little, that I am not curious
   even to know what his craze may happen to be. "I know whom I have
   believed."

   I am going no further than that which the Holy Spirit has taught me
   through the infallible Word of God. What is more, I am not going to
   waste my time by reading what every doubter may please to write. I have
   had enough of these

   poisonous drugs, and will have no more. Does anyone say, "We ought to
   read everything"? No! No! If I go out to dinner and there should happen
   to come to table a steak that is far gone, I let it alone. When the
   knife goes into it, the perfume betrays it and I do not pass my plate
   up for a portion.

   Others may carve slices from the carrion of unbelief. But having long
   eaten sweet Gospel food, I cannot bring my soul to feed on that which
   is unholy and only fit for dogs. That which denies Scripture and
   dishonors the blood of the Lord Jesus is more fit for burning than
   reading. If you have once been staggered by modern thought, do not turn
   again to that folly. Be not like silly people, who seem to fall down in
   the mud for the sake of being brushed. Why desire to be befogged and
   bewildered for the sake of getting set in the right way after long
   straying?

   Stick to the Scriptures. When you have read so much of your Bibles that
   there is nothing more in them, then you may devote your time and study
   to some other book. But for the present keep to the Book whose author
   is the All-Wise Jehovah. Between the covers of this Book you shall find
   all wisdom--and I pray you turn not again to the folly which opposes
   the infallible and censures the perfect. God grant us Divine Grace to
   maintain our peace by never turning again to the folly of human wisdom!

   But the worst form of folly is sin. Scripture continually calls sinners
   fools, and so they are. What a touching pleading there is about this
   use of language! "God will speak peace unto His people. But let them
   not turn again to folly." As much as to say, "to turn aside will not
   only grieve Me, but it will harm you. Sin is not only fault, but folly.
   It will be to your own injury as well as to My displeasure."

   Dear child of God, are you out in the storm just now? Have you no rest?
   Let me whisper in your ear. Is there not a cause? Somebody on board
   your vessel has brought this storm upon you. Where is he? He is not
   among the regular sailors that work the ship. He is neither captain nor
   mate. But he is a stranger. Down under the hatches is a man named
   Jonah--is he the cause of the tempest? "No," you say, "he is a good
   fellow, for he paid his fare."

   This makes me feel all the more suspicious. He is the cause of the
   mischief. You will never get peace until the Jonah of sin is overboard.
   Cast him into the sea and it will be calm. Many a child of God harbors
   a traitor and hardly knows that he is doing so. And the Lord is at war
   with him because of the harbored rebel. When Joab pursued Sheba, the
   son of Bichri, he came to the city of Abel, where Sheba had taken
   shelter. A wise woman came to him out of the city and pleaded for the
   people. Joab explained to her that he warred not with the city but with
   the rebel. And he added, "Deliver him only, and I will depart from the
   city."

   Then they cut off the head of Sheba and cast it out to Joab and he blew
   a trumpet and they retired from the city, every man to his tent. God is
   besieging you with trials and distresses, turning His batteries against
   your walls. And there is no chance of any peace until the traitorous
   sin shall be given up to vengeance. I do not know what particular sin
   it may be, but the head of it must be thrown over the wall--and then
   the warriors of the Lord will go their way. Bring forth the Achan, and
   the accursed thing, and let all Israel stone him with stones. Search
   and see! Arrest the hidden foe!

   "Are the consolations of God too small for you? Is there any secret
   thing with you?" God help us to institute a solemn search this morning
   and may we discover the intruder and destroy him!

   Beloved, I pray that no one of us may go back to folly. If we have ever
   tasted the peace of God and communion with God, can we leave it for
   earthly joys? Can we quit the banquets of infinite love for the coarse
   pleasures of sin? God forbid! Remember all the sorrow which sin has
   cost you already. Take not this viper a second time to your bosom. We
   were drowned in tears and sunken in distress when we found ourselves
   guilty of sin. Further and further from it may we fly. But never,
   never, may we turn back!

   Remember what it cost your Lord to make you free from the consequences
   of former folly--never return to it. He had to die to save us from our
   folly--shall we count His death as nothing? Think what tugs the Spirit
   of God has had with us to bring us so far on our journey towards
   Heaven--are we now willing to turn our backs on God and holiness?
   Consider also what lies just beyond. Look a little way before you.
   Think of the street of gold, the river which never dries, the trees
   which bear eternal fruit, the harps of ceaseless melody.

   Beloved, we cannot turn again to folly! O God, do not permit us to do
   so! Grant us Your peace, that by it we may be kept, both in heart and
   mind, loyal to You! Peace spoken to the soul by the Holy Spirit is the
   sure preventive of turning again to folly. Be sure that, if it passes
   all understanding, it also conquers all folly.

   With minds at perfect peace with God, we set our face like a flint, and
   press on towards the haven where peace will never end. Glory be to God,
   who will bring us safely there! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

By The Fountain

   DELIVERED ON LORD'S-DAY MORNING, NOVEMBER 3, 1889,

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well; whose
   branches run over the wall." Genesis 49:22.

   "And of Joseph he said, Blessed of the Lord be his land, for the
   precious things of Heaven, for the dew and for the deep that couches
   beneath" Deuteronomy 32:13.

   DEAR friends, we long to have many converts. We count that Church happy
   to which God adds daily of such as are being saved. But we are very
   much concerned about the quality of our converts. We do not wish to
   make up a Church with a number of shallow professors, whose religion
   lies upon the surface, and is of a doubtful character. We are very
   anxious that we should have those in our fellowship who are thoroughly
   converted, richly experienced and fully instructed in the deep things
   of God.

   We would have as our associates people who are established by principle
   rather than moved by passion. We would earnestly pray to have a company
   of Believers added to the Church who shall be like Joseph in
   character--fruitful trees growing by the well, whose branches ran over
   the wall. Jacob describes Joseph as a fruitful offshoot and he explains
   his fruitfulness by his position--he is fruitful "by a well." When a
   vine grows near a well which is always full, and when it is able to
   send its roots down to drink of the unfailing spring, it may very well
   be fruitful and send forth many branches.

   The point is, to get by the well. Or, to use our second text, to tap
   "the deep that couches beneath." If we can reach the secret fountains
   and say to God, with the Psalmist, "All my fresh springs are in You,"
   then shall we find nourishment for our branches and our fruit and leaf
   will never fail. "Dwell deep" is a prophetic word of much value to
   Christians. To live upon land-drainage and casual rains may suffice for
   ordinary plants. But the trees of the Lord which bring forth much fruit
   need to penetrate below the topsoil and reach the secret fountains of
   Divine Grace.

   Upon that subject I am going to talk this morning. Our desire is that
   we may each one of us abide in Christ Jesus and be in constant
   fellowship with the Father through the Holy Spirit, so that we may, in
   very truth, be rooted by the well and may drink from "the deep that
   lies under." We would be grounded and settled by living and lasting
   union and communion with the Eternal God. We would know the secret of
   the hidden life and be filled with its fundamental principles, its
   constraining influences, its spiritual powers. We would drink in such
   supplies, by secret contact with God, that our outward life would bear
   ample testimony to our private communion with Heaven.

   May the Holy Spirit graciously aid us in our meditations while we first
   notice that this figure describes Joseph's character--he was all that
   Jacob styled him. Secondly, that this in itself was a great blessing,
   for it was used as such by Moses in after years. And thirdly, that it
   brings with it many other choice favors.

   I. First, THIS DESCRIBES JOSEPH'S CHARACTER. He flourished near to God.
   He was an offshoot of the old tree and he was rooted deep by a well
   which always watered him. From his childhood until he died, the main
   point in Joseph's character was that he was in clear and constant
   fellowship with God--and therefore God blessed him greatly. He lived to
   God and was God's servant. He lived with God and was God's child. He
   looked up to Heaven for daily teaching and comfort. And God was with
   him so as not only to bless him but to bless others for his sake--as,
   for instance, the house of Potiphar, first--and afterwards Pharaoh, and
   all the land of Egypt, and all the famishing nations.

   In this respect his branches ran over the wall in scattering blessings
   far and wide--and all this was the result of living in constant
   communion with God. My dear Hearer, you profess to be a Christian, but
   have you really had dealings with God? I know you have been baptized
   and you come to the communion table. But have you pressed beyond the
   signs

   to the Lord Himself? Is there a root in your religion, and has that
   root struck deep into spiritual Truth? And have you received the life
   and power which come from the spiritual Fountain? Can you say with
   David, "My soul, wait you only upon God. For my expectation is from
   Him"?

   The first blessing in the Book of Psalms is that the godly man should
   be, "like a tree planted by the rivers of water that brings forth his
   fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither. And whatever he
   does shall prosper." The great matter is being rooted by the Well--the
   drawing of supplies from the eternal storehouse of Christ Jesus the
   Lord--in whom it pleased the Father that all fullness should dwell.

   How can we fail to be fruitful if we draw our life and all its vigor
   from the Lord Jesus?

   Because Joseph lived near to God, he received and retained gracious
   principles. There is a great difference between religious principle and
   religious passion. Many persons are religious by starts and
   fits--according to their company, their feelings, or their whims.
   According to the influences under which they come, certain people
   become good, bad, or indifferent. But when a man lives in the Presence
   of the Lord, he has fixed principles which rule his heart and guide his
   life. He fears God, not because others fear Him, but because God is "to
   be had in reverence of all them that are about

   Him."

   He believes the revealed Truths of God, not because others believe
   them, but because he is sure that the Lord has spoken them, and
   therefore he knows them to be true. If anybody denies the faith, he
   stands up to it, for it is precious to his heart. His moral conduct and
   his spiritual life are upright, true, sincere and reverent--not because
   of the prejudices of education, or the force of example--but because
   the Lord has placed within him a new heart and a right spirit. He does
   not resort to another man's religious cistern. For there is within him
   "a well of water springing up into everlasting

   life."

   He discerns between the Truth of God and error. For he has learned the
   Gospel for himself by the teaching of the Holy Spirit. He follows after
   holiness because he walks with the God of Holiness and the Law of the
   Lord is written upon the tablets of his heart. The Gospel of the Lord
   Jesus he receives by the witness of the Spirit. It is true to him,
   whether others receive it or reject it--he could part with anything and
   everything sooner than quit his hold upon the everlasting Truth of God.
   This it is to be a tree by a well, to have a religion based upon
   principles, to live by vital contact with the Lord.

   Many nowadays belong to this denomination or to that by pure accident
   of birth or position. They have never weighed their opinions in the
   balances of Scripture. Indeed, many have no idea what their principles
   are. We have Protestants nowadays who never protest against anything
   and Nonconformists who conform to everything which is in fashion. All
   this is bad. Ignorance in reference to Divine Truth is a very fruitful
   evil. We need an instructed people, if we are to have a fruitful
   people. Unless we get hold

   upon the Truth of God by the right hand of clear apprehension and hold
   it as our heart's treasure, we shall neither know the joy of it in days
   of calm, nor be held by it in nights of storm.

   From where came martyrs in times of persecution, but from those who
   were in living union with God? From where shall come bold confessors in
   these apostatizing days, if not from among persons of like character?
   Unless we get men and women into the Church who, like Joseph, take root
   in the deep Truth of God's Word, we shall never see the Church in full
   health and glory.

   Joseph showed his character throughout the whole of his life. As a
   child, his father loved him, as our translators say, "because he was
   the son of his old age." It would be better to understand the words as
   meaning, because he was a son of old age. He was old and wise in his
   ways. He was a youth of great thoughtfulness and his thoughts were much
   with God. You may judge your waking thoughts by those which come to you
   in your dreams.

   Joseph had dreams at night from God, because in the day he thought of
   God. No doubt they were supernatural and prophetic dreams. But I now
   speak after the manner of men--a dream is often the reflection of the
   wakeful thought. Joseph, as a youth, dwelt very near to God, and
   therefore he was forced to enter his protest against the evil conduct
   of his brothers. "Joseph brought unto his father their evil report."
   Soon he became a marked young man--his brothers felt he was not one of
   themselves and they hated him--called him a dreamer--and took the first
   occasion to get rid of him.

   Jacob's household was in a very sad condition--even the grossest vice
   was found among his sons. And young Joseph was a speckled bird among
   them. By their malice he was sold for a slave into Egypt. But no sooner
   is he there, than we

   read, "And the Lord was with Joseph." Potiphar bought him but the Lord
   made all that he did to prosper. It is difficult for a slave to become
   the steward of a great man. But Joseph did so. His master took no
   account of anything--he left it all absolutely in Joseph's hands and
   God blessed the house for Joseph's sake.

   And then there came in his way that great temptation. And you remember
   his gracious answer, "How can I do this great wickedness and sin
   against God?" God was evidently with him, keeping him in the way of
   innocence--he could not grieve his God, for his God was his delight. By
   false accusation he was cast into prison. But we read that "the Lord
   was with Joseph and showed him mercy and gave him favor in the sight of
   the keeper of the prison." Soon he became the un-der-jailer and was
   helpful to the prisoners. His branches were always running over the
   wall in the form of usefulness to others.

   The prison was brightened by his presence. And as soon as he was
   prepared for the position, a straight path was opened for him from the
   prison to the court of Pharaoh. In the hour of his elevation he did not
   forget God. When about to interpret the royal dreams, he said, "God
   shall give Pharaoh an answer of peace." He is a young man greatly
   gifted, and he may miss preferment if he mentions his religion--but
   this does not daunt him--again and again he says, "God has showed
   Pharaoh what He is about to do." On the throne his God is still with
   him and guides him in all things and he exclaims, "God has caused me to
   be fruitful in the land of my affliction."

   When he sees his aged father, their talk is concerning the Lord God.
   When he comes to die, he says to his Brethren, "I die but God will be
   with you." He gave commandment concerning his bones, that he should not
   be buried in Egypt, for he was no Egyptian, though he had been lord of
   the land. He would be carried away to the land of promise in the day
   when Israel should quit the stranger's land. Always the Lord his God is
   the star of Joseph. This is his character--he is in the fear of God all
   day long.

   He was a fruitful bough by a well and that well was his God. This
   abiding near to God made Joseph independent of externals. His resources
   were within, and therefore he was not to be injured by things without.
   His springs were deep, and therefore not affected by circumstances.

   He was not dependent upon family surroundings. At home, the society of
   his father would nourish his early piety but he was just as gracious in
   the house of Potiphar. The degrading idolatries of Egypt did not make
   him unfaithful to the unseen God. Some of you young people not only owe
   your religious impressions to your parents, but I fear that if you were
   removed from them you would have no religion of your own. Are my fears
   correct? It is an anxious time when a lad leaves his home to be
   apprenticed, or to take his first place. If he has nothing but borrowed
   religion, he will soon yield to ill company. But if he lives in God,
   for himself, he will stand.

   If he has lived upon his parents as a mistletoe lives on the oak, it
   will be bad for him. But if he has root in himself and has lived upon
   God, all will be well. Hereditary religion is hopeful when it is also
   personal religion, but not else. If you are not living in God on your
   own account, your religion may as well fail you at once. For it will
   ultimately do so.

   Many professing Christians are, I fear, very much dependent upon
   revival excitement and the currents of godly society, which are often
   sufficiently strong to bear with them those who have no living
   principle. If religion seems to prosper, if many press into the
   congregation, if large numbers throng the inquiry room, these people
   are very happy and very earnest. But after the summer-tide is over,
   where are they? This is the great burden which every earnest Evangelist
   has to bear--so many seem born for God in the heat of a revival who,
   nevertheless, die away when the warmth of zeal is gone.

   Oh, that you, my Brethren, may be planted by a well, so that you may
   never be dried up by drought! Bless God for revivals and never speak
   against them. But do not live upon them, nor cause your spiritual
   health to depend upon them. Those who grow upon hotbeds will not be far
   from dung. There are evil tendencies connected with fanaticism which
   are to be dreaded. Get down to the well and let your roots drink up the
   fresh nourishment, which is essential to the sap of your life and to
   the fruit of your usefulness. Touching the cool spring, you will know
   where you are when others are so carried away as not to know what they
   hear or do.

   Say to yourselves, each one of you, "I want Christ in my own heart. I
   want the love of God shed abroad in my own soul. I want not only to
   talk about heavenly things, but to know and experience them. I desire
   to be possessed by the Spirit of Truth and to know His power." Be not
   content to live by the casual shower, or by the artificial watering-pot
   of special means, or by the mechanical irrigation of routine. But send
   down the roots of your being into the deep things of God till you tap
   the great deep of Divine all-sufficiency.

   Beloved Friend, I pray you will seek after a spiritual life which is
   never dependent on outward ordinances. It is a great comfort to be able
   to hear the Word faithfully preached. And if you hear it, but do not
   hear it, you miss a great blessing and incur grievous loss. But suppose
   you are placed where there is no preaching of the Word? Then it will be
   a happy circumstance if your godliness can survive such a deprivation.

   If you were away on some cattle ranch in South America, far from all
   religious worship--it would be a grand thing to be able to go to your
   Bible and to your knees and draw near to God alone--and so grow strong
   enough to send your branches over the wall, by blessing others and
   beginning to teach or preach for Christ. This is the true way in which
   vigorous life shows itself. I know that the Lord's Supper is a sacred
   ordinance and I would have you come to the Lord's Table as often as you
   can, for He has said, "This do in remembrance of Me."

   But if it shall come to pass that you are where no Christian person is
   near with whom you could break bread--may you have Divine Grace to feed
   on Jesus Himself! When the tokens of His flesh and blood are denied
   you, may you be driven to Jesus Himself! Spiritual life loves the
   outward ordinances, but if it is deprived of them, it survives their
   absence. For in very deed, heavenly life draws its food from Heaven.
   Get to God. Oh, get to God through Jesus Christ! An hour's communion
   with Him means renewed life. Surely, the cluster of Eshcol must have
   grown near waters which were ever running. If you would glorify God,
   live upon God.

   I believe--and I am very sorry to have to say it--that a great many
   nominal Christians live very much upon the minister. I have seen it to
   be so beyond all question. I have noticed a Church flourish and
   increase while a certain good man has lived and preached. But when that
   servant of God has departed, then they have grown cold and have been
   thinned out and sadly scattered. The weaker sort were drawn and held
   together by the good man's preaching. And as they cannot hear him, they
   will hear no one else, and their seats are empty. May this calamity
   never happen to this congregation. And yet I fear it would be so with
   many.

   In the days of the Judges, the people seemed wonderfully good while the
   judge lived. But as soon as he was gone they wandered after idols. O my
   beloved People, may you become so indoctrinated with the Truth of God
   that you will never leave it! Be it your resolve that you will never
   hear anything but the Gospel. Love Christ so well that you will never
   follow any pretended shepherd who would lead you away from Him. Keep to
   Christ and Him crucified and live on the Doctrines of Grace when your
   present leader lies asleep in his grave. Keep to the great Lord of
   love, whoever the preacher may be. Let it be seen that you have struck
   your roots too deep, and are fed by supplies too permanent, for you to
   be dependent upon any man--however much esteemed that man may be.

   Above all, it is a great blessing to be so rooted and watered that you
   can live graciously and uprightly, despite personal interest. There was
   a time when it seemed the loss of everything for Joseph to keep close
   to God. A young man can get on well with elder brothers if he will
   please them by dropping into their habits. But if he opposes them, he
   will have a sorry time of it. "Joseph, if you want to be happy with
   Reuben and Simeon and Levi, you must hold your tongue when you see them
   making free in their morals, or you will bring a hornets' nest about
   your head."

   If you would be happy at home, you must remember the old proverb, that
   when you are at Rome you must do as Rome does. This is the wisdom of
   this world. But Joseph scorns it. No, he cannot help it. He must abide
   with God and with holiness. What is the result? The Ishmaelites carry
   him away for a slave. Poor encouragement this for holy youth! In the
   house of Potiphar, compliance with his mistress seemed an easy way to
   honor and pleasure. But he could not yield to her base suggestion. He
   had rather bear the consequences of her hate. She falsely charges him.
   He comes under his master's anger, loses his place and is put in
   prison. But he cannot help it, he must obey his God.

   Are you of this true kind? Many will gladly walk with Christ when He
   wears silver sandals and a golden girdle. But if He walks barefoot
   through the mire, they seek other company. Oh, for that godliness which
   will strengthen you to quit your situation, to lose your wealth, to
   sacrifice your credit, and to part with your friends sooner than grieve
   your Lord! Oh, that you may never be unstable as water. For, if so, you
   will not excel! Your bow will only abide in strength if, like Joseph,
   the arms of your hands are made strong by the mighty God of Jacob.

   You must draw your soul's nourishment from secret fountains and wait
   upon the Lord where no eye sees you, or you will soon prove barren and
   unfruitful. To follow your Savior wherever He goes, you must daily
   derive your life from Him. I cannot close this first head without
   saying that while Joseph thus was placed in a position of very high
   independence of all outward things, he was very conscious of his entire
   dependence upon God. Take the well away and where was

   the fruitful bough? Remove "the deep that lies under," and then the
   resources even of so great a character as that of the Prime Minister of
   Egypt would have been dried up.

   We can stand alone with God. But we fall without Him--we can bear the
   brunt of the battle without a friend or an armor-bearer--but if the
   Lord does not cover our head we are undone. Like Samson, we can slay
   the Philistines--

   "Butif the Lord is once withdrawn,

   And we attempt the work alone,

   When new temptations spring and rise,

   We find how great our weakness is." Dear young Friends, I exhort you to
   think for yourselves, and judge for yourselves, and act for yourselves
   with a holy independence of others. Yet never forget where your
   strength lies and never rely upon yourselves.

   Never resolve to do anything apart from the Lord. Never say, "I am
   sufficient," but always, in conscious insufficiency, fall back upon
   that Divine Grace which never fails. Self is a mocker, pride is raging
   and whoever is deceived thereby is not wise. All your usefulness and
   all your faithfulness will come to an end unless you fix your entire
   dependence upon Jehovah, the Beginning and the End of all that is good.
   Keep by the deep Well of boundless love. Draw from the Fountain of
   all-sufficiency and may the Lord bless you from now on and forever!

   II. This brings me now to notice, under my second head, that THIS IS OF
   ITSELF A GREAT BLESSING. Moses, in my second text, mentions "the deep
   that couches beneath," as having its own form of blessing. This was for
   Joseph's race a blessing. It is a high favor to know the deep things of
   God, and to enjoy the far-down securities, enjoyments, and privileges
   of the children of Heaven.

   In deep union to God are to be found the very truth and life of
   godliness. As for outward religion, what is it? You may practice all
   the ordinances without fault, and yet you will be godless unless your
   spirit has had converse with the Lord. A good man in Scripture is said
   to be a godly man. He is a man of God--God's man--he lives for God, he
   lives with God, he lives on God. If you do not believe in God, love
   God, glorify God--all the outward forms on earth, all the rites that
   God has given--cannot make up a religion for you that is worth a single
   penny.

   You may be orthodox in creed, as I hope you will be. But unless you
   really grasp and apprehend the things of orthodoxy and so come to the
   God of Truth and the Holy Spirit of Truth, you have a set of words and
   nothing more. A man may possess the catalogue of a library and yet be
   without a book. And so may you know a list of doctrines and yet be a
   stranger to the Truth of God. You may have in your hand a map of a fine
   estate and a list of all the treasures in the mansion--yet you may not
   have a place where to set your foot. A knowledge of the technicalities
   of theology is of small use unless you enjoy the Truths of God to which
   they refer. You must know the Lord and abide in Christ.

   Do not say, "I have joined the Church, Sir, and attend the Prayer
   Meetings, and take my share among the workers." Yes, I know. But true
   religion is more than this. It is repentance towards God. It is faith
   in the Lord Jesus Christ. It is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
   "Dear Sir," cries one, "I accept what you say. And dispute none of your
   teaching." That may be. But this does not content me. If you receive my
   teaching as the Truth of God, I am sorry. I desire you to receive it as
   the Word of God. Go to the Bible for yourself. Seek to be taught by the
   Spirit of God. Ask to have the Truth of God written upon your heart by
   the Holy Spirit. You have not received the Truth of God rightly unless
   it comes to you with power as the Word of the living God.

   When a man like Joseph can be compared to a fruitful tree by a well
   because he is rooted in fellowship with God, he has the blessedness of
   drawing his supplies from secret but real, sources. His life is hid and
   the support of his life is hidden, too. The world knows him not. But
   the secret of the Lord is with him. There is the tree, and there is the
   fruit--these can be seen by all. But none can see the roots which are
   the cause of the clusters, nor the deep that lies under, from which
   those roots derive their supply. God's hidden Ones are a wonder unto
   many. Oh, to dwell with Him who is invisible and so to become ourselves
   partakers of an unseen life!

   The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not
   seen are eternal. Oh, to have eternal life and to be heirs of an
   eternal heritage! It is a great thing to cultivate the inner life, for
   it is the true life. But unless a man dwells with God in secret, he
   forgets the inward life--he is so taken up with washing the outside of
   the cup and the platter, that his inward part remains very wickedness.
   This will never do, for the Lord looks at the heart. We must see to the
   inward. And we shall fail to do so unless we abide near to God.

   The supplies of such a man are inexhaustible. The well is not drawn
   dry, and the deep that lies under is never emptied. Plants dependent
   upon irrigation may pine in the drought of summer. But a tree that
   strikes its roots into the well does not see when heat comes but its
   leaf is green. It can never exhaust the great fountains. It may drink
   on and on and yet never diminish its supplies. "God all-sufficient" is
   a glorious name. Infinite mercy is a storehouse for a starving world.
   The Lord's own word is, "My grace is sufficient for you."

   The man who dwells near to God has supplies which can never be cut off.
   We have heard of cities which have been surrounded by armies and were
   never captured by assault but were compelled to surrender because the
   besiegers cut off the water supply--broke down the aqueducts--and so
   subdued them by thirst. Jerusalem was never thus captured, for there
   were deep wells within the city itself which never ceased to flow. Ah,
   my Brethren, he that has a well of living water within him is beyond
   the enemy's power!

   We can go to God when we are not allowed to go to the service. The
   priest took away the boy's Bible. "Yes," said the child, "but you
   cannot take away those twelve chapters of John which I have learned."
   The malice of man may deny us a place of worship, but it cannot prevent
   our worshipping the Lord, wherever we may be. Every means of Divine
   Grace may be denied the Believer, but the Grace of the means will still
   come to him. God grant that neither sickness, nor traveling, nor
   watching at the bedside may keep us away from the assembly of His
   people. But if ever it should so happen, may we then so dwell in God
   that the upper springs may flow freely and feed the very roots of our
   spirit!

   Supplies gained by nearness to God Himself are constant. Grace is not
   intermittent. It is not a land spring, but a well. Joseph had Divine
   Grace as an old man, even as he had it as a youth. A religion that ebbs
   and flows is a poor thing. We should desire the constancy of the sun
   and not the changing of the moon. We may have Grace day by day, every
   day and all day. If yours is a spring from off the deep that lies
   under, it will be so. I do not say that your root can always take in
   the same measure of water from the well of life. But I do say that it
   will always be there for you to take. And I think, also, that to a
   large extent, you will be able to partake of it with constancy.

   Your root will be always in the well and so you may always drink to the
   full. It is wonderful how trees will grow if planted close by abundant
   water. I hope to see, before long, a palm which was planted in my
   presence some years ago. It was one of a number of palms which make a
   long line in a friend's garden. They were all of one size when I saw
   them brought from the nursery, and the next year they all seemed pretty
   much upon an equality. But very soon this particular palm outstripped
   its fellows, and now it towers high above all the rest, till you might
   suppose it to be many years older.

   My very good friend, the owner of the garden, said to me, "You know why
   this palm has so far outgrown the rest? It has sent its roots down
   below, into that large reservoir and so its life is powerful." The
   Arabs say that the palm tree loves to have its roots in the water and
   its head in the fire--it would have a flowing river below and the
   burning sun above. Ah, Beloved, may we also grow as the palm tree! And
   if we get our roots down into the Divine fountains and can sun
   ourselves in the love of the Lord, we shall grow rapidly and surely.

   The supplies of the Believer who dwells deep are pure, as well as full.
   Grace through the means is apt to be diluted. But when we receive it
   from God alone, it is Grace, indeed. The best of pipes are apt to mar
   the water's taste. All common watercourses mix earth with the water.
   But "the deep that lies under" is out of reach of defilement. If you
   can draw from the pure well of the undefiled Gospel, you will do well.
   Among the Alps how often have I wished to drink! And the guide has
   forbidden me and told me to wait a little. And then we have come to a
   leaping fount, most cool and delicious--far better than the streams
   which, as they ran along, had gathered earth, and decay and evil life.

   Did you ever know a stream in England that ran for half a mile without
   someone turning it into a sewer? And so it would seem at this time, as
   if God's own Truth could not be found in the teachings of the
   pulpit--pure and undefiled as given forth in Scripture by His Spirit.
   Do we not fear, lest with all our care, we should tincture the
   infallible Revelation with our thoughts? O Believer, go at once to your
   God for teaching! Again I remind you of David's words--"My soul, wait
   you only upon God. For my expectation is from Him."

   Draw your supplies at first hand. Do as he did who had been made ill
   with impure milk--he kept a cow of his own. Instead of expositors, read
   the Bible for yourself. In Bible light the Bible is best seen. If the
   human water pot fails, it will not matter if you are "a fruitful bough
   by a well."

   III. Lastly, I would remind you that THIS BRINGS WITH IT OTHER
   BLESSINGS. If you are by the well, sending your roots into its waters,
   you will obtain fruitfulness. A fruitful tree is one which is well
   sustained at the root. Dear

   Friends, it is by no means wisdom to cry, "I will work hard and try to
   bear fruit." Fruit is not produced by work. No vine toils to produce
   grapes. It buds and blossoms and bears fruit in the order of its
   nature.

   We have a great deal of fruitless working nowadays. Religion is pumped
   up. Devotion is too often mechanical. Godliness is supplanted by
   artificial excitement. And love to God by perpetual fussiness. Zeal for
   God is counterfeited by "much ado about nothing." If the inner, secret
   life, is in good order, precious fruit is brought forth both by sun and
   moon. The gardener never says, "It is time for me to go and work a
   hundredweight of grapes out of my vine." Oh dear, no! Beginning early
   in the year he spies a shoot, and by-and-by there is a tiny flower. And
   then leaves appear and so on, in regular order--and only at last can he
   hope to gather the rich cluster from the vine.

   There is no noise in the production of the vintage. You never heard a
   vine groaning, nor saw it sweating, nor noticed it straining a single
   shoot. If vines get their roots down into good soil, they bring forth
   fruit, as it were, naturally. May the Lord make us bring forth holiness
   through the force of the new nature! May He put into us immortal
   principles and may He sustain them by His own Personal power! And then,
   naturally and joyfully, in its season, we shall bring forth fruit to
   His praise and glory, by His Grace.

   The next blessing that came with this was unselfishness. Joseph was a
   bough whose "branches ran over the wall." He extended his influence
   beyond his own family. We shall bear but little fruit if our branches
   are kept within the narrow space of self and relatives. Cultivate
   godliness for the sole sake of yourself and you will never be very
   godly. But abound in it for God's sake, and for love of those whom
   Jesus has redeemed, and you will be godly, indeed. Live to love. For to
   love is to live when the love is set upon God. You should go over the
   wall to your ungodly neighbor, to the infidel without Christ, to the
   heathen and the castaway. You should extend your usefulness where none
   expected it to grow. Then you will be a blessing to many who were far
   off from you and your God.

   I heard of one whose last petition was that God would bury his
   influence with him. An awful prayer! It was good only so far that it
   evidenced a recognition of his life's mistake and some sort of
   repentance for it. But he was asking for that which could not be
   granted. For not even God Himself ever kills a man's influence. The
   world's poet truly says, "The evil that men do lives after them." Most
   surely the evil lives, even if the good expires. Yet, when we are dead
   and buried, if we have lived unto God and lived upon God, our branches
   will run over the wall of the cemetery and our voices will be heard
   from amid the silence of the sepulcher. Is it not written, "He being
   dead yet speaks"?

   A third blessing that comes with this is fixedness. A fruitful tree by
   a well, sending its roots down to the water, is well-rooted and cannot
   be torn from its place. It would not be fruitful if it were not stable.
   If a tree has no living root, you may pull it up, if you please. But if
   it is living and growing and drawing up its nutriment from the depth,
   its roots will furnish it with mighty anchorage. Can you stir a man who
   has once received into his heart the doctrine of the atoning sacrifice?
   Not if he has found in it a refuge for despair.

   The logician may prove that the death of Christ did not mean
   Substitution and Propitiation. A fig for his logic-- "we have received
   the Atonement," and know better. The Doctrines of Grace which I have
   preached to you, have a hold upon the heart and intellect, like that of
   certain colors when the wool is dyed ingrain. But when these doctrines
   have not been sufficiently preached, people are easily carried away
   with every wind of doctrine. Brethren, the old evangelical doctrine of
   Luther and Calvin had about it power to create enthusiasm. See how the
   Huguenots mustered to a sermon when it was death to hear a reformed
   preacher!

   Geneva sent forth men who could gather crowds in regions crimsoned with
   the blood of their Brethren. Why did the multitudes come together?
   Would any man jeopardize his life to hear a "modern-thought" sermon? My
   Brethren, there is something in the old Gospel worth hearing--there is
   an Election of Grace most precious, a Redemption which really redeemed
   and a work of Divine Grace within which assures Final Perseverance and
   eternal Glory. The wish-wash of today's preaching would have gained the
   preacher in "the desert" no congregation. But when untold treasures are
   displayed, saints will come to hear of them.

   That Truth of God, which is a matter of life and death to you, will
   take hold of your heart and soul and you will never part with it. I
   long to see a race of real men who will know the Truth and believe it
   in real fashion--men who have received a kingdom which cannot be
   moved--palaces of God whose foundations are in the rock.

   Another privilege of personal nearness to God--such men enjoy safety.
   Hear how Jacob puts it--"The archers have sorely grieved him and shot
   at him and hated him." If you live near to God you will be the target
   of the ungodly, and the

   hatred of the world will cause you grief of heart. It cannot be
   avoided, for the seed of the serpent will nibble at the heel of the
   seed of the woman. Even to this day is Joseph sold into Egypt and
   separated from his Brethren--

   "No slacker grows the fight,

   No feebler is the foe."

   Keep close to God and His Word and you will be counted a Nazarene among
   your Brethren. But this shall not harm you. For it is added, "His bow
   abode in strength and the arms of his hands were made strong by the
   hands of the mighty God of Jacob." Deriving his strength from God,
   Joseph lived above the rage of men. He who keeps His people neither
   slumbers nor sleeps. Only live upon God--let your expectations be from
   God only--and you cannot be overcome of adversaries.

   They that trust in princes will find them fickle. They that rely upon
   the multitude will find them lighter than vanity. But they that trust
   in the Lord shall not be ashamed, nor confounded, world without end.
   Therefore, strike deep and draw your life from the well. Besides that,
   Joseph received enrichment. Notice how Moses puts it--he mentions quite
   a treasury of jewels. The best pearls come out of deep seas. He
   mentions the precious things of Heaven, the precious fruit brought
   forth by the sun, the precious things put forth by the moon, the chief
   things of the ancient mountains, the precious things of the earth--and
   the fullness thereof--and the goodwill of him that dwelt in the bush.

   All these blessings came upon the top of the head of him who was a
   fruitful bough by a well. Many of you religious people know nothing
   about precious things. Many professors live on the mere skins and husks
   of Divine Truth. They have never tasted the sweet kernels. A little
   religion is a mournful thing--they that drink deep get down to the
   sweetness. Many people have religion enough to make them wretched. If
   they had seven times as much, they would be joyful. The restraints and
   duties and formalities of religion have in them none of the fat things
   full of marrow, nor of the wines on the lees well refined.

   The best wines in God's House are in the cellar. Those who never go
   downstairs have no idea of the secret sweetness. A deep experience is a
   precious experience. The Lord fills certain of His people with pain and
   grief, that they may know His choicer consolations. We are too apt to
   let our roots run along just under the surface and so we get no firm
   footage. But trouble comes and then we grow downward, rooted in
   humility. Then we pierce the treasures of darkness and know the deep
   things of God. If you want a rich Christian, find a man who lives with
   God in secret and goes deep into Divine

   Truth.

   A shallow Believer is a poor and weak Believer. But the strong
   Christian is the man who lives on God and will not be put off with
   anything short of fellowship with Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This
   benediction, with which we close our public service, should be the
   perpetual benediction of every day. Dear Friends, I might add a
   thousand things but I will not. I will only say this--do, I pray you,
   dive into the depths. You that are beginning with holy things, begin
   deep and take sure root. See how soon buildings fall if they have
   insufficient foundations! Find your foundation in the Rock.

   You that have long known the Lord, endeavor to know more and more of
   Him. Send out more roots into yet deeper and richer ground. Get more
   nearly to the very heart of God. In an evil time like this, take firm
   hold. You cannot overcome the drift of an ill current unless you let
   down your anchor. Yes, and at such a time you may be unusually careful
   and let down four anchors from the stern, as well as the one in the
   proper place. We need to be anchored stem and stern in these days. We
   need to be held to Christ by hooks of steel. Heart, and head, and hand,
   and every other power had need take hold on the everlasting Truths of
   God.

   For such are the winds that blow today, that we shall be carried about
   by them like thistle upon the hills, if we have nothing but our own
   strength to rely upon. God grant us to get closer to Him than ever and
   to stay there. And may He grant us yet further to use all our
   opportunities for usefulness, and all our life for fruitfulness to His
   glory! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

The Burden of the Word of the Lord

   DELIVERED

   BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "The burden of the Word of the Lord." Malachi 1:1.

   THE Prophets of old were no triflers. They did not run about as idle
   tellers of tales, but they carried a burden. Those who at this time
   speak in the name of the Lord, if they are, indeed, sent of God, dare
   not sport with their ministry or play with their message. They have a
   burden to bear--"The burden of the Word of the Lord.'' And this burden
   puts it out of their power to indulge in levity of life. I am often
   astounded at the way in which some who profess to be the servants of
   God make light of their work--they jest about their sermons as if they
   were so many comedies or farces.

   I read of one who said, ''I got on very well for a year or two in my
   pulpit, for my great-uncle had left me a large store of manuscripts,
   which I read to my congregation.'' The Lord have mercy on his guilty
   soul! Did the Lord send him a sacred call to bring to light his uncle's
   moldy manuscripts? Something less than a Divine call might have
   achieved that purpose.

   Another is able to get on well with his preaching because he pays so
   much a quarter to a bookseller and is regularly supplied with
   manuscript sermons. They cost more or less according to the space
   within which they will not be sold to another clerical cripple. I have
   seen the things and have felt sick at the sorry spectacle. What must
   God think of such Prophets as these? In the old times, those whom God
   sent did not borrow their messages. They had their message directly

   from God Himself, and that message was weighty-----so weighty that they
   called it, ''the burden of the Lord.''

   He that does not find his ministry a burden now will find it a burden
   hereafter, which will sink him lower than the lowest Hell. A ministry
   that never burdens the heart and the conscience in this life will be
   like a millstone about a man's neck in the world to come.

   The servants of God mean business. They do not play at preaching but
   they plead with men. They do not talk for talk's sake. But they
   persuade for Jesus' sake. They are not sent into the world to tickle
   men's ears, nor to make a display of elocution, nor to quote
   poetry--theirs is an errand of life or death to immortal souls. They
   have something to say which so presses upon them that they must say it.
   ''Woe is unto me if I preach not the Gospel!'' They burn with an inward
   fire and the flame must have vent. The Word of the Lord is as fire in
   their bones, consuming them. The Truth of God presses them into its
   service and they cannot escape from it. If, indeed, they are the
   servants of God, they must speak the

   things which they have seen and heard. The servants of God have no
   feathers in their caps-----they have burdens on their

   hearts.

   Furthermore, the true servants of God have something to carry,
   something worth carrying. There is solid Truth, precious Truth in their
   message. It is not froth and foam, phrases and verbiage, stories and
   pretty things, poetry and oratory, and all that. But there is weight in
   it of matters which concern Heaven and Hell, time and eternity. If ever
   there were men in this world who ought to speak in earnest, they are
   the men. Those who speak for God must not speak lightly. If there is
   nothing in what a man has to say, then God never commissioned him, for
   God is no trifler.

   If there is no importance in their message----yes, if their message is
   not of the first and last importance-----why do they

   profess to speak in the name of God? It is constructive blasphemy to
   father God with our nonsense. The true servant of God has no light
   weight to bear. He has eternal realities heaped upon him. He does not
   run merrily as one that has a feather-weight to carry--he treads firmly
   and often, slowly--as he moves beneath ''the burden of the Word of the
   Lord.'' Yet, do not let me be misunderstood at the beginning. God's
   true servants, who are burdened with His Word, right willingly and
   cheerfully carry that burden. We would not be without it for all the
   world. Sometimes, do you know, we

   get tempted, when things do not go right, to run away from it-----but
   we view it as a temptation not to be tolerated for an

   hour. When some of you do not behave yourselves and matters in our
   Church get a little out of order, I say to myself, ''I wish I could
   give this up and turn to an employment less responsible and less
   wearing to the heart.''

   But then I think of Jonah and what happened to him when he ran away to
   Tarshish-----and I remember that whales are

   scarcer now than they were then-----and I do not feel inclined to run
   that risk. I stick to my business and keep to the message of my God.
   For one might not be brought to land quite so safely as the runaway
   Prophet was. Indeed, I could not cease to preach the glad tidings
   unless I ceased to breathe. God's servants would do nothing else but
   bear this burden, even if they were allowed to make a change. I had
   sooner be a preacher of the Gospel than a possessor of the Indies.
   Remember how William Carey, speaking of one of his sons, says, ''Poor
   Felix is shriveled from a missionary to an ambassador.'' He was a
   missionary once, and he was employed by the government as an
   ambassador. His father thought it no promotion and said, ''Felix has
   shriveled into an ambassador.'' It would be a descent, indeed, from
   bearing the burden of the Lord, if one were to be transformed into a
   member of Parliament, or a prime minister, or a king. We bear a burden
   but we should be sorry, indeed, not to bear it.

   The burden which the true preacher of God bears is for God, and on
   Christ's behalf, and for the good of men. He has a natural instinct
   which makes him care for the souls of others and his anxiety is that
   none should perish but that all should find salvation through Jesus
   Christ. Like the Christ who longed to save, so does the true Malachi,
   or messenger of

   God, go forth with this as his happy, joyful, cheerfully-borne
   burden-----that men may turn unto God and live. Yet, it is a

   burden, for all that. And of that I am going to speak to you. Much
   practical Truth of God will come before us while we speak of ''the
   burden of the Word of the Lord.'' Pray that the Holy Spirit may bless
   the meditation to our hearts.

   I. And why is the Word of the Lord a burden to him that speaks it?
   Well, first, it is a burden BECAUSE IT IS THE WORD OF THE LORD. If what
   we preach is only of man, we may preach as we like and there is no
   burden about it. But if this Book is inspired--if Jehovah is the only
   God, if Jesus Christ is God incarnate, if there is no salvation except
   through His precious blood--then there is a great solemnity about that
   which a minister of Christ is called upon to preach. It therefore
   becomes a weighty matter with him. Modern thought is a trifle light, as
   air, but ancient Truths of God are more weighty than gold.

   And, first, the Word of the Lord becomes a burden in the reception of
   it. I do not think that any man can ever preach the Gospel aright until
   he has had it borne into his own soul with overwhelming energy. You
   cannot preach conviction of sin unless you have suffered it. You cannot
   preach repentance unless you have practiced it. You cannot preach faith

   unless you have exercised it. You may talk about these things-----but
   there will be no power in the talk unless what is said

   has been experimentally proven in your own soul.

   It is easy to tell when a man speaks what he has made his own, or when
   he deals in secondhand experience. ''Son of

   man, eat this roll''----you must eat it before you can hand it out to
   others. True preaching is artesian-----it wells up from

   the great depths of the soul. If Christ has not made a well within us,
   there will be no outflow from us. We are not proper agents for
   conveying the Truth of God to others, if Divine Grace has not conveyed
   it to us. When we get God's Word in our studies, we feel it to be a
   load which bows us to the ground. We are, at times, obliged to get up
   and walk to and fro beneath the terror of the threats of God's Word.
   And often are we forced to bow our knee before the glory of some
   wonderful word of the Lord which beams with excessive Divine Grace.

   We say to ourselves, ''These are wonderful Truths-----how they press
   upon our hearts!'' They create great storms

   within us. They seem to tear us to pieces. The strong wind of the
   mighty Spirit blows through the messenger of God and he, himself, is
   swayed to and fro in it as the trees of the forest in the tempest.
   Therefore, even in the reception of the message of God, it is a burden.

   The Word of God is a burden in the delivery of it. Do you think it an
   easy thing to stand before the people and deliver a message which you
   believe you have received from God? If you so imagine, I wish you would
   try it. He that finds it easy work to preach will find it hard work to
   give an account of his preaching at the Last Great Day. One has
   carefully to look around and think while he is preaching, ''I must mind
   that I do not put this Truth of God in such a way as to exaggerate it
   into a falsehood. I must not so encourage the weak that I dwarf the
   strong. Nor so commend the strong as to

   grieve the weak. I must not so preach the Grace of God as to give
   latitude to sin----- I must not so denounce sin as to drive

   men to despair.''

   Our path is often narrow as a razor's edge, and we keep on crying in
   our spirit, while we are speaking, ''Lord, direct me! Lord, help me to
   deal wisely for You with all these souls!'' The anxieties which we feel
   in connection with our pulpit work are enough to make us old before our
   time. I have heard of one who thought he would give up his ministry
   because

   he had so small a Chapel into which he could not get more than two
   hundred people. But a good old man said to him, ''You will find it
   quite hard enough to give a good account of two hundred at the Last
   Great Day.''

   It is an idle ambition to desire a large congregation, unless that
   desire is altogether for God's glory. For we only increase our
   responsibilities when we increase the area of our influence. Still,
   some are responsible for not having a large congregation. If their
   dullness keeps people from hearing, they do not, thereby, escape from
   responsibility. To speak aright God's Word beneath the Divine influence
   is, in the speaking, as well as in the getting of the message, the
   burden of the Lord.

   When we have preached, the Gospel becomes a burden. ''Well, now, it is
   all done,'' says one. Is it? Is it all done? You, dear Teacher, when
   you have taught your class today, have you done with your children? You
   have thought of them upon the Sabbath-----will there be no care for
   them all the week? If your soul is towards your children, or your
   congregation, as it ought to be, you will bear them always on your
   heart. They will never be far away from you. The mother is

   gone from home. She is out today, seeing her sister-----surely she is
   not caring about her babe, is she? Is SHE NOT? Why,

   wherever she is, the tender mother, if she does not bear her child
   outside her bosom, bears it inside her heart. Her babe is always on her
   mind.

   ''Can a woman forget her sucking child?'' Can a soul-winner forget his
   charge? If God sends any of us to do good to our fellow men and to
   speak in His name, the souls of men will be a perpetual burden to us
   and we shall constantly cry for their salvation and perpetually, with
   entreaties and tears, go to God for them and ask Him to bless the
   message we have delivered.

   Oh, that we may have, in all pulpits, ministers who bear the burden of
   the Lord in the study, in the pulpit, and when the discourse is
   finished! Once truly a minister, you are always a minister. Your burden
   clings to you. May you, my Brothers and Sisters, partakers in the holy
   service of our Lord Jesus Christ, each of you, in your measure, bear
   the burden of the Word of the Lord, and that continually.

   II. I pass to a second point. It is not only a burden because it is so
   solemnly the Word of the Lord, and therefore weighty and overwhelming,
   but next, BECAUSE OF WHAT IT IS. What is it that the true servant of
   God has to bear and to preach?

   Well, first, it is the rebuke of sin. I have heard of hirelings who
   preach, but never think of rebuking sin. It is with them like as in the
   story of the old Negro preacher, a very popular preacher, indeed, among
   his black Brothers. His master said, ''I am afraid some of your people
   steal chickens, for I am always losing mine. I wish you would, next
   Sunday, give them a word about it.'' ''Master,'' said the preacher,
   ''it would throw such a damp over the congregation if I were to say
   anything about stealing chickens.'' So the black preacher avoided that
   subject.

   It seems to me that stealing chickens was the very thing that he ought
   to have preached about, if that was the sin his Brethren were guilty
   of. If a man bears the burden of the Word of the Lord, he speaks most
   to his people upon the evil of which they are most guilty. Somebody
   once said to me, ''Sir, you were very personal.'' I answered, ''Sir, I
   try to be. Do not think that I am going to apologize for it. If I knew
   anything that would come home to your heart and conscience concerning
   sin, I would be sure to say that--just that very thing.'' ''And what if
   I should be offended?'' ''Well, I should be very sorry that you refused
   reproof and should feel all the more sure that it was my duty to be
   very faithful with you. If after much love and prayer you refused the
   word, I could do no more. But I certainly should not speak with bated
   breath to please you. And you would despise me if I did.''

   I remember one in Oliver Cromwell's day who complained to a preacher.
   He said, ''The squire of the parish is very much offended by some
   remarks you made last Sabbath day about profane swearing.'' ''Well,''
   said the Puritan preacher, ''is the squire in the habit of swearing?''
   It was admitted that he was and that he therefore thought himself
   pointed out by the minister. The Puritan replied to the complaining
   tenant, ''If your lord offends my Lord, I shall not fail to rebuke him
   for it. And if he is offended, let him be offended." So must every true
   preacher be not concerned of man's esteem--and speak faithfully-----and
   this is a burden to one of a tender spirit.

   If there is any topic upon which we must of necessity dwell, it must be
   upon that sin which is most grieving to the Lord. For we must by no
   means leave an erring Brother unwarned. This is not a work to be
   coveted. It is neither pleasant

   to the hearer, nor pleasant to the speaker. And yet to rebuke sin and
   to rebuke it sharply, is part of the work of him whom God sends. And
   this makes the Word of the Lord his burden.

   And, next, the Word of the Lord gives a rebuff to human pride. The
   doctrines of the Gospel seem shaped on purpose, among other objects, to
   bring into contempt all human glory. Here is a man who is morally of a
   fine and noble nature,

   but we tell him that he is born in sin and shaped in iniquity-----this
   is a stern duty. Here is a man of a grand righteous

   character in his own opinion and we tell him that his righteousness is
   filthy rags-----he will not smile on us for this. Here is

   a man that can go to Heaven by his own efforts, so he thinks, and we
   tell him that he can do nothing of the sort--that he

   is dead in trespasses and sins-----this will bring us no honor from
   him.

   He hopes that by strong resolves he may change his own nature and make
   himself all that God would have him. But we tell him that his
   resolutions are so much empty wind and will end in nothing-----this is
   likely to earn us his hate. Behold, the axe is laid at the root of the
   tree. Every man, woman, and child stands a convicted criminal, and if
   saved must owe his salvation entirely to the gratuitous mercy of God.
   Condemned and ruined, if he ever escapes from his ruin it must be
   through the work of the Spirit of God in him and not by his own works.
   Thus, you see, human nature does not like our message. How it writhes
   in wrath, how it grinds its teeth against the doctrine which humbles
   man, crucifies his pride and nails his glory to the gallows! Therefore,
   such preaching becomes the burden of the Lord.

   And then the true preacher has to come into contact with the vanity of
   human intellect. We ask of man, ''Can you, by searching, find God?''
   You say, ''I know.'' What do you know, poor blind Worm? You say, ''I am
   a judge and I can discern.''

   What can you discern, you that are in the dark and alienated from God
   by your wicked works? The things of God are hidden from the wise and
   prudent but revealed unto babes. And the wise and prudent are indignant
   at this act revealed of Divine Sovereignty. ''Well,'' says one, ''I
   quarrel with the Bible.'' Do you? The only real argument against the
   Bible is an unholy life. When a man argues against the Word of God,
   follow him home and see if you cannot discover the reason of his enmity
   to the Word of the Lord. It lies in some form of sin.

   He whom God sends, cares nothing at all about human wisdom, so as to
   dote upon it and flatter it. For he knows that, ''the world by wisdom
   knew not God.'' And that human wisdom is only another name for human
   folly. All the savants and the philosophers are simply those who make
   themselves to be wise but are not so. To face false science with ''the
   foolishness of preaching,'' and to set up the Cross in the teeth of
   learned self-sufficiency is a burden from the Lord.

   The most heavy burden of the Word of the Lord, however, is that which
   concerns the future. If you are sent of God and if you preach what God
   has revealed in His Word, then you say, ''He that believes not shall be
   damned,'' and you do

   not hesitate to say that the wrath of God abides on the rejecters of
   the Savior. You do not hesitate to say-----

   "There is a dreadful Hell And everlasting pains, Where sinners must
   with devils dwell In darkness, fire and chains."

   All the romance of the age runs against this. Everybody says, ''Be
   quiet about the wrath to come, or you will have everybody down upon
   you.'' Be down upon me, then! I will not soften God's Word to please
   anybody. And the Word of the Lord is very clear on this matter. If you
   receive not the Lord Jesus Christ, you will die in your sins. If you
   believe not

   in Him, you must perish from His Presence. There is a day coming when
   you will die-----after this comes another day when

   you must appear before the Judgment Seat of Christ and all your actions
   shall be published and you shall be judged for the things done in the
   body, whether they are good, or whether they are evil.

   And then you shall receive the sentence of, ''Come, you blessed,'' or,
   ''Depart, you cursed.'' Do you think we like to

   preach this? Do you think that it is any pleasure to the servant of God
   to deliver these heavy tidings? Oh, no-----very often

   we speak in the bitterness of our spirit. But we speak because we dare
   not refrain. It is infinitely better that men should be told the truth
   than that they should be flattered by a lie into eternal ruin. He ought
   to have the commendation of all men, not who makes things pleasant, but
   who speaks things truly. Somebody is preaching of how to get people out
   of Hell. I preach about how to keep them away from Hell.

   Don't go there. Keep clear of the fire which never can be quenched.
   Escape for your lives--look not behind you! Stay not in the plain but
   hasten to Christ, the Mountain of Salvation, and put your trust in Him.
   This is it which is the burden of the Word of the Lord. We have grief
   of heart because of the dreadful future which men prepare for
   themselves, namely,

   ''everlasting punishment.'' We are heavy at heart for the many who will
   not turn to God but persist in destroying their own souls forever. Oh,
   why will they die? The prospect of their future is a present misery to
   us.

   III. Now, dear Friends, I have, in the third place, to say that it is a
   burden not only because it is the Word of the Lord and because of what
   it is, but BECAUSE OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF OUR BRINGING IT TO YOU.

   Suppose that we do not preach the Gospel and warn the wicked man, so
   that he turns not from his iniquity, what

   then? Hear this voice-----''He shall perish but his blood will I
   require at your hand.'' What will my Lord say to me if I am

   unfaithful to you? ''Where is the blood of those people who gathered at
   Newington? Where is the blood of that crowd which came together to hear
   you speak and you did not preach the Gospel to them?'' Oh, it were
   better for me that I had never been born than that I should not preach
   the Gospel! ''Woe is unto me if I preach not the Gospel'' of Christ,
   for men perish where there is not the Word of God!

   I remember Mr. Knill's portrait which was once in The Evangelical
   Magazine, that it had written at the bottom of it,

   ''Brethren, the heathen are perishing-----will you let them perish?''
   So is it with men that hear not the glad tidings. They

   die in sin. Worse still, men are perishing in this country--in the
   blaze of the Light they sit in darkness. Oh, that we might go and find
   them and tell them of the Gospel! For, if we carry it not to them,
   ''How shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how
   shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach except
   they are sent?''

   What makes it more of a burden to me, is that men may die even if they
   do hear the word of salvation-----men may go from

   these pews quickly into perdition. Those eyes that look on me tonight,
   oh, how intently and earnestly!

   Sirs, if you do not look to Christ, you will be lost, however well you
   may have attended to me. Now, you listen to each word I utter. But I
   pray you listen to the Word of God, the heavenly Father, who bids you
   repent and believe in His dear Son. For ''except you repent, you shall
   all likewise perish.'' So said the Savior. And this, I say, makes the
   burden of the message, lest some of you should not receive it.

   1 cannot bear that one of you should die unforgiven. I look along these
   pews and I remember some of you a good many years ago. You were then in
   a hopeful state but you still have not received Christ. Most faithful
   hearers you have been, but you have not been doers of the word. Do not
   think that I charge you too severely. Have you repented and believed?

   If not, woe is me that I should bear to you a message which will be a
   savor of death unto death unto you because you refuse it! For how shall
   we escape if we neglect so great salvation? When it has been freely
   proclaimed to us year after year, what will become of us if we reject
   it? Do not still refuse to come to Jesus! Do not make me a messenger of
   death to you. I implore you, receive the message of mercy and be saved.

   And, then, it becomes a great burden to me to preach the Gospel when I
   think of what those lose who will not have

   it. That Heaven above-----what tongue can describe it? What painter can
   ever picture it----the Heaven above-----where all is

   love and joy and peace and everlasting blessedness? What if you should
   be shut out? What if against YOU, the door should be closed! There is
   no opening that door again, remember. Even though you stand and cry,
   ''Lord, Lord!'' yet will He not open it to you. May no one of us miss
   eternal felicity! May no one among us fall into eternal misery! But
   here lies the burden of the Lord-----in the consequences of our
   ministry.

   I remember walking out to preach near unto forty years ago, just when I
   began my witnessing for the Lord Jesus. As I trudged along with a
   somewhat older Brother, who was going to preach at another village
   station, our talk was about our work and he said to me, ''Does it not
   strike you as a very solemn thing that we two local preachers are going
   to do the Lord's work and much may depend even upon the very hymns we
   give out and the way in which we read them?'' I

   thought of that and I prayed----and often do pray-----that I may have
   the right hymn and the right chapter, as well as the

   right sermon.

   Well do I remember a great sinner coming into Exeter Hall and I read
   the hymn beginning, ''Jesus lover of my soul,'' and that first line
   pierced him in the heart. He said to himself, ''Does Jesus love my
   soul?'' He wept because he had not loved the Savior in return. And he
   was brought to the Savior's feet just by that one line of a hymn. It
   does make it the burden of the Lord when you see life, death and Hell
   and worlds to come, hanging, as it were, upon the breath of a mortal
   man, by whom God speaks to the souls of his fellows. This is serious
   burden-bearing. At least, I find it more and more so the longer I am
   engaged in it.

   IV. But I pass on to notice one thing more now. It is often the burden
   of the Lord, because of THE WAY IN WHICH

   MEN TREAT THE WORD OF GOD.

   Upon this I will be very brief. Some trifle with it. I was reading last
   night an account of how people are said to behave who go to Church. It
   was written by a canon. I dare say he knows. Certainly, some people who
   go to Nonconformist places are as bad. A servant was asked by her
   mistress about the sermon. She said it was a very good sermon. ''Where
   was the text, Martha?'' ''Somewhere in the Bible, ma'am.'' ''What was
   it about?''

   She did not remember a word of it. One question after another is put to
   her. She tells her mistress that it was a very nice sermon but she
   really does not know what it was all about. And the writer goes on to
   say that a large proportion of our people go off at a tangent while we
   are talking and their minds are thinking about something else. I hope
   that it is not quite true of you tonight. A man once went to hear Mr.
   Whitefield. He was a shipbuilder and he said, ''Oh, that man! I never
   heard such a preacher as that before. When I have been to other places,
   I have built a ship from stem to stern-- laid the keel and put the mast
   in and finished it all up, while the parson has been preaching. But
   this time I was not able to lay a timber. He took me right away.''

   This preoccupation of human minds makes it such a burden when we are in
   earnest to reach the heart and win the soul. Our people are sitting
   here in body but they are far away in spirit. Yonder sits a good woman
   who is meditating as to how she shall leave her home, tomorrow, long
   enough to get to the shop to buy those clothes for the children. A
   gentleman here tonight wonders where he has left that diamond ring
   which he took off when he washed his hands. Do not let

   that bother you any more. Sell the stone and give the money
   away-----then it will never trouble you again.

   All sorts of cares come buzzing around your brains, when I am wanting
   them to be quite clear to consider holy subjects. Little pettifogging
   cares intrude and the preacher may speak his very soul out but it all
   goes for nothing. This makes our work the burden of the Lord.

   Then there is another. It is the number of those who do hear, with
   considerable attention, but they forget all that they hear. The sermon
   is all done with when they have done hearing it. The last drop of dew
   is dried up when they get home. Nothing remains of that which cost the
   preacher so much thought and prayer. And is it not a hard thing to go
   on ''pegging away and pegging away,'' and have done nothing? The
   preoccupied mind is a slate and we write on it. And then a sponge goes
   over it all and we have to write each word all over again.

   Few would choose to roll the stone of Sisyphus, which always fell
   backward as fast as he laboriously heaved it up the hillside. We are
   willing to do even this for our Lord. But we are compelled to admit
   that it is burdensome toil. Poor, poor work with some of you. Ah, it is
   the burden of the Lord to deal with your souls!

   Alas, there are some others that hear to ridicule. They pick out some
   mannerism, or mistake, or something odd about the speaker's language,
   and they carry this home and report it as raw material for fun. The
   preacher is in anguish to save a soul, and they are thinking about how
   he pronounces a word. Here is a man endeavoring to pluck sinners from
   the eternal burnings, and these very sinners are all the while thinking
   about how he moves his legs, or how he lifts his

   hand, or how he pronounces a certain syllable. Oh, it is sickening
   work-----soul-sickening work! It is the ''burden of the

   Word of the Lord,'' when our life or death message is received in that
   way.

   But when it is received rightly, then are we in the seventh Heaven! Oh,
   well do I remember one night preaching three sermons, one after the
   other. And I think that I could have preached thirty, if time had held
   out. It was in a Welsh village, where I had gone into the Chapel and
   simply meant to expound the Scripture, while another Brother preached.
   He preached in Welsh and when it was done, the question was put whether
   Mr. Spurgeon would not preach. I had not come prepared but I did preach
   and there was a melting time. And then we sang a hymn. I think we sang
   one verse seven or

   eight times over-----the people were all on fire.

   The sound seemed to make the shingles dance on the top of the Chapel.
   When I had done, we asked those who were impressed to stop. They all
   stopped and so I had to preach again. And a second time they all
   stopped and I had to preach again. It got on to past eleven o'clock
   before they went away. Eighty-one came forward and joined the Churches
   afterwards.

   It was but a few months before the terrible accident at Risca, [see
   Sermon #349, Volume 7] and many of those converted that night perished
   in the pit. God had sent His Spirit on that glorious night to save
   them, that they might be ready when He should call them Home.

   It was grand work to preach, for they sucked in the word as babes take
   in milk. They took it into their hearts-----it

   saved their souls. Would we had many such opportunities! And then the
   Word of the Lord would be no burden-----but like

   the wings of a bird, would make us mount on high and joy would fill
   every heart!

   V. And now I must not detain you. But I want to say, in the fifth
   place, the Word of the Lord is the greatest burden to the true
   teacher's heart, because he remembers that HE WILL HAVE TO GIVE AN
   ACCOUNT.

   They are all down, those fifty-two Sabbaths. And those weeknight
   opportunities-----they are all down in the heavenly

   record and the writing will be forthcoming when required. There will
   come a time when it will be said, ''Preacher, give an account of your
   stewardship.'' And at the same time a voice will be heard, ''Hearers,
   give an account of your stewardship, too.'' What a mercy it will be, if
   you and I together shall give our accounts with joy and not with grief!
   A mournful account will be unprofitable for you. What sort of sermons
   shall I wish I had preached when I come to die? What sort of sermons
   will you wish that you had heard when you lie on your last beds?

   You will not wish that you had heard mere flimsy talk and clever
   speeches. Oh, no! You will say, as a dying man, ''I bless God for
   weighty words, earnestly spoken, that were a blessing to my soul.'' I
   will say no more upon that, although it is the pressing point of the
   whole matter. Brethren, pray for the preacher. Brethren, pray for
   yourselves.

   I have only these two or three practical words to say. We have to bear
   the burden of the Lord. But there was one, the Head of our
   confraternity, the great Lord of All true Gospel preachers, who bore a
   far heavier burden. ''He His own Self bore our sins in His own body on
   the tree.'' Preacher, Teacher, do you ever get weary? Look to Him as He
   bows beneath His Cross! Take up your burden cheerfully and follow after
   Jesus.

   If this work is a burden, we also rejoice in One who can help us. There
   is One who can make the burden light, or strengthen the shoulder to
   bear the heavy yoke. Dear People, pray for us that this great Helper
   may enable us to bear the burden of His Word to your souls. Do not pray
   that it may not be a burden. Pray that it may be a burden that crushes
   your pastor to the very dust. God forbid that he should ever preach
   without its being a load to him! But pray that he may then be sustained
   under it. And for every true preacher of the Gospel pray the same
   prayer. If the Lord is with us we shall not faint but go from strength
   to strength.

   Since it is a burden in itself, I ask you not to make it any heavier.
   Do not make it intolerable. Some add to it greatly and wantonly. Who
   are these? Well, I will tell you. Inconsistent professors. When people
   point to such-and-such a member of the Church and say, ''That is your
   Christian!''--this makes our burden doubly oppressive. What a spoil it
   is to our testimony for Christ when outsiders can point to one and
   another and say, ''That is how those Christians act!''

   Do not plunge us in this sorrow. I do not know why I should be blamed
   for all the offenses of everybody that comes to hear me. Can I keep you
   all right? Are you like chessmen, that I can move at pleasure to any
   square on the board? I cannot be responsible for any one person-----how
   can I be the guardian of all? Yet the preacher of God's Truth is held
   responsible by many for matters over which he has no power. And this
   injustice makes his burden heavy.

   And, next, do not make our burden heavier by your silence. There was a
   man of God who had been a very distinguished preacher, and when he lay
   dying he was much troubled in his mind. He had been greatly admired and
   much followed.

   He was a fine preacher of the classical sort and one said to him,
   ''Well, my dear Sir, you must look back upon your ministry with great
   comfort.'' ''Oh, dear!'' said he, ''I cannot. I cannot. If I knew that
   even one soul had been led to Christ and eternal life by my preaching I
   should feel far happier. But I have never heard of one.''

   What a sad, sad thing for a dying preacher! He died and was buried and
   there was a goodly company of people at the grave, for he was highly
   respected and deservedly so. One who heard him make that statement was
   standing at the grave and he noticed a gentleman in mourning, looking
   into the tomb and sobbing with deep emotion. He said to him, ''Did you
   know this gentleman who has been buried?'' He replied, ''I never spoke
   to him in my life.'' ''Then what is it that so affects you?'' He said,
   ''Sir, I owe my eternal salvation to him.''

   He had never told the minister this cheering news and the good man's
   deathbed was rendered dark by the silence of a soul that he had
   blessed. This was not right. A great many more may have found the Lord
   by his means but he did not know of them and was therefore in sore
   trouble. Do tell us when God blesses our word to you. Give all the
   glory to God, but give us the comfort of it. The Holy Spirit does the
   work, but if we are the means in his hands, do let us know it, and we
   will promise not to be proud. It is due to every preacher of Christ
   that if he has been blessed to the conversion of a soul

   he should be allowed to see the fruit of his labors. And when he does
   not see it, it adds very sadly to ''the burden of the Word of the
   Lord.''

   Do you not think that you add to my burden, too, if you do not aid me
   in the Lord's work? What a lot of idle Christians we have-----Christian
   people who might sing, like mendicants in the street-----

   "Andgot no work to do, And got no work to do!"

   What a shameful chorus, when the world is dying for lack of true
   workers! There is a Sunday school-----do you know it?

   ''Oh, yes, we know there is one of those excellent institutions''
   connected with our place of worship. Did you ever visit it? Have you
   ever helped in it? There is an Evangelists' Society and young men go
   out to preach. ''Oh, dear!'' you say, ''I never thought of that.'' Why
   do you not go out to preach yourself? Some of you could, if you would.

   What are you doing? There are districts where there are tracts to be
   distributed. Do you know anything about house-to-house visitation? I
   speak to some who do nothing whatever, unless it is a little grumbling.
   I wonder whether we shall ever have a day such as the bees celebrate in
   its due season. You may, perhaps, have seen them dismissing the
   unproductive bees. It is a remarkable sight. They say to themselves,
   ''Here are a lot of drones, eating our honey but never making any. Let
   us turn them out.'' There is a dreadful buzz, is there not? But out
   they go.

   I do not propose either to turn you out, or to make a buzz. But if ever
   those who do work for Christ should burn with a holy indignation
   against do-nothings, some of you will find the place too hot for you! I
   am sorrowfully afraid that it will thin my congregation and lessen the
   number of Church members. I have but little to complain of among my
   people.

   But still, as there is a lazy corner in every village, there is the
   same in this community. You increase the burden of those who do work,
   if you are not working with them.

   But the greatest increase of the burden comes from those who do not
   receive the Gospel at all. May there not be one such here tonight, but
   may everyone now look to Jesus and live! I shall close by asking you to
   sing the Gospel. Oh, that

   you may have it in your hearts! The final closing word is
   this-----''There is life in a look at the Crucified One. There is life

   at this moment for you. Then look, Sinner----look unto Him and be
   saved-----look unto Him who was nailed to the tree.''

   Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

The Drought of Nature, the Rain of Grace and the Lesson Therefrom

   INTENDED FOR READING ON LORD'S-DAY, NOVEMBER 24, 1889,

   DELIVERED BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON, ON LORD'S DAY MORNING, NOV.
   10, 1889.

   "And their nobles have sent their little ones to the waters: they came
   to the pits and found no water. They returned with their vessels empty.
   They were ashamed and confounded and covered their heads. Because the
   ground is parched, for there was no rain in the earth, the plowmen were
   ashamed, they co vered their heads. Are there any among the vanities of
   the Gentiles that can cause rain? Or can the hea vens give showers? Are
   not you He, O Lord our God? Therefore we will wait upon You: for You
   have made all these things." Jeremiah 14:3, 4,22.

   IT is my heart's desire and earnest prayer that many in this house may
   this morning say with the Prophet, "O Lord our God, we will wait upon
   You." I shall not be satisfied to have delivered a discourse, nor for
   you to have heard it, and even approved of it, unless there shall come
   from it this delightful fruit, that those far off from God shall be
   drawn near to Him. And that they shall say, in very deed and of a
   truth, "Therefore we will wait upon You." In God alone can men live
   happily. And if they would be recovered from their fallen state, it is
   to the Lord their God that they must turn, Oh, that they would wait
   upon Him!

   In the last verse we have the word "therefore," which shows that the
   speakers had come to this conclusion by an argument. In truth, they had
   been forced to their resolution by a very painful and personal
   argument, which God had set before them in the order of His Providence.
   By their thirst and by their failure to find water anywhere, the Lord
   had driven them to say, "Therefore we will wait upon You."

   I trust it will not be needful to urge us to conversion by sufferings
   as terrible. "Be you not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no
   understanding." Come willingly, since the argument for coming is clear
   and cogent. I should like you to go this morning mentally through the
   process by which the Israelites passed practically when they came to
   the gracious conclusion, "Therefore we will wait upon You." Let us
   begin at once with the argument, praying God to send it home to every
   heart by His good Spirit, that we may reach the desired conclusion.

   I. First, consider that MAN IS A VERY DEPENDENT CREATURE. He is, in
   some respects, the most dependent creature that God has made. For the
   range of his wants is very wide, and at a thousand points he is
   dependent upon something outside of himself. All creation exists by the
   will of the Lord. And if His will should cease to send forth conserving
   power to maintain the created things in existence, they would all cease
   to be. This great world--the sun, the moon, the stars--would all
   dissolve. And, as a

   moment's foam dissolves into the wave that bears it, they would be lost
   forever.

   At the Lord's will the universe would be gone, as yonder bubble which
   your child was blowing but a moment ago, and now has vanished, and left
   no trace behind. God alone is by his own power--all else is dependent
   upon Him--

   "Life, death and Hell and worlds unknown,

   Hang on His firm decree--

   He sits on no precarious throne,

   Nor borrows leave to be."

   Man as a living creature, is peculiarly dependent upon God as to
   temporals. We see in the text that when the dews no longer fell and the
   rains were withheld, then the unhappy inhabitants of Palestine suffered
   from drought and that drought brought with it failure of the harvest,
   famine, disease and death.

   To quote our common saying, the people died like flies. They fell
   everywhere by thousands, fainting, famished, doomed. On what a feeble
   thread hangs human life! Water, though it is itself unstable, is needed
   to the establishment of human life and without it man expires. Many an
   animal can bear thirst better than man. Other creatures carry their own
   garments with them. But we must be indebted to a plant, or to a sheep,
   for the covering of our nakedness. Many other creatures are endowed
   with sufficient physical force to win their food in fight. But we must
   produce our own food from the soil.

   Behold, how we come into the world, helpless and without
   strength--utterly dependent upon others. And when our strength is
   developed and our manhood is perfected, we only enter upon another
   phase of dependence upon our surroundings for our food--and therefore,
   for our life, we are dependent upon drops of rain. We cannot produce
   food from the earth without the dew and the rain. However cleverly you
   have prepared your soil, however carefully you have selected your seed,
   all will fail without the rain of Heaven.

   Even though your corn should spring up, yet will it refuse to come to
   the ear if the heavens are dry. Nor can you of yourself produce a
   single shower, or even a drop of dew. If God withholds the rain, what
   can the farmer do? Call together the Parliament! Collect a synod of
   scientists! Convoke a conclave of princes--what can they do? In vain
   their acts, theories and commands. When the skies are brass, the earth
   is iron. When God is angry, then the clouds scatter no blessings over
   our field and earth yields not her increase to the husbandman.

   Yes, and life itself would vanish as the food of life ceased. It would
   be an instructive calculation if it could be accurately worked out--to
   estimate how much bread--food, there is at any time laid up upon the
   surface of the earth. If all harvests were to fail from this date. If
   there were no harvests in Australia during our winter, no harvests
   early in the year in India and the warm regions, if there were no
   harvests in America and in Europe, I have been informed that, by the
   time of our own harvest months, there would be upon the face of the
   earth no more food than would last us for six weeks.

   How dependent we are for each year's crop! Should there be universal
   failure, starvation would be closely within sight. God does, indeed,
   give us bread as we need it. Even as, in the wilderness, He gave the
   manna. We are every hour dependent upon His generous care. The bottles
   of Heaven contain the juices of human life--if these were utterly
   stopped, none of us could endure the burning drought and the consequent
   famine.

   See, then, the absolute dependence upon God, not only of the Eastern
   nations but of all peoples of our race. Whatever may be our trade or
   profession, we are all fed by the fruit of the field. And whatever may
   be said about laws of nature, the God of nature is not bound and
   limited by methods of procedure. He can operate exactly as He pleases
   and fill our barns full, or stop the supplies of grain by the simple
   method of giving or withholding rain. Our breath is in our nostrils--He
   takes away that breath and we die. Apart from His preserving, the whole
   race of man would be turned to dust and cease from the land of the
   living.

   In spiritual things this dependence is most evident. Brethren, if God
   shall bless us with His saving health and with the visitation of His
   Spirit, we shall be as a field that God has blessed and our lives shall
   be glad with a harvest to His praise. But apart from God, what can we
   do? In this realm of spiritual things we are absolutely and wholly
   dependent upon God. And without His aid, we are as a salt land, which
   is destitute of verdure. Salvation is of the Lord. Vain is all trust
   which builds not on Him.

   The priceless blessings of pardon and Divine Grace--how can we procure
   them apart from God in Christ Jesus? How can sin be removed, except by
   the Lord, who passes by iniquity? Who is he that can absolve but He
   against whom the transgression was committed? The washing from all
   stain--from where can it come but from those dear hands that were
   pierced for us? When He shall wash us and our robes in His most
   precious blood, only then shall we be clean--and then all the glory
   shall be to Him as the Lamb slain.

   Justification and acceptance--are not these of God? What can you and I
   do to justify ourselves, or to make ourselves acceptable with God?
   These are the gifts of the Covenant of Grace and only God can give
   them. But if He gives them not, we can never obtain them. These
   gifts--it is His royal prerogative to bestow according to the counsel
   of His own will.

   So is it with the life and the power of the Spirit of God, by which we
   are able to receive and enjoy the blessings of the Covenant. The Holy
   Spirit, like the wind, blows where He wishes and the order of His
   working is with the Lord, alone. The new life whereby we receive the
   Lord Jesus--how can it come to us but from the living God Himself? Can
   a dead soul

   quicken itself? Can a man steeped in sin liberate and purify himself?
   "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?" "You
   must be born again."

   But can a man cause himself to be born again? Is it imaginable that the
   new birth is caused by the person born? The change worked is
   mysterious, radical, abiding--who can work it upon himself? Who can
   bring a clean thing out of an unclean? No one. The new life must come
   from God! "Except a man is born from above, he cannot see the kingdom
   of God." The new heart and the right spirit--from where do they come?
   Can the carnal mind, which is enmity against God, beget within itself
   love of God and desire for fellowship with Him?

   They cannot be self-created. They are the work of the same hands which
   made the heavens and the earth. The love of holiness and the pursuit of
   it, and perseverance in that pursuit--do these come any way but from
   Him who has worked all our works in us? Every beginning of good, yes,
   every desire after it, is worked in us by God, or else it is never in
   us at all. We are absolutely dependent upon God, not only for all
   spiritual gifts but for the power to become partakers of them.

   And, Brethren, all the Divine Graces that are pleasing to the Lord, do
   they not come to us from God our Savior? Is there a grain of faith in
   the world that God did not create? Is there a spark of holy love in any
   human bosom that God did not kindle? Is there any true hope in any
   heart which the God of Hope did not implant? Is there anything anywhere
   that is holy, or lovely, or of good repute, which has not first come
   from God Himself and so entered into the heart of man? Sinner, you are
   absolutely dependent upon God for your possession of Divine Grace and
   the obtaining of salvation.

   You lie like the dry bones in the valley, which were very many and very
   dry. What can you do? By what power can dry bones live? The Lord's
   Prophet, as an act of faith in God, bids you live. But God's Prophet
   knows that you will not live by your own strength, nor by the power of
   his persuasion. No, his appeal is to a power beyond himself and you. He
   cries, "Come from the four winds, O Breath and breathe upon these
   slain, that they may live." He looks to the Holy Spirit to create life
   in you and apart from that Spirit he has no hope for you.

   Putting this case very broadly--and I cannot put it too broadly--I am
   not afraid of exaggerating, or going too far in it--I know that for the
   clouds, and the rain, and the harvest, men are absolutely dependent
   upon the God of Providence. And I know, also, that for the gift of the
   Holy Spirit and for the power which saves souls, we are altogether
   dependent upon the great God who creates all good things.

   Here is the pity of it--against God, upon whom we are so dependent, we
   have sinned and continue to sin. We are dependent upon Him and yet
   rebellious against Him. Shall the man who accepts from me his daily
   bread lift up his heel against me? Shall he who could not live without
   me, yet live to speak evil of me? Shall he abuse my goodness into a
   means of doing me damage? That were an atrocious thing, which could
   only spring from a black, ungrateful heart. Yet every sinner who goes
   on in sin is acting thus ungratefully.

   Existing only by God's infinite charity, he who continues to do evil is
   ungrateful in the highest degree to the Lord of Love. This being the
   case, the dependence of guilty man upon the graciousness of Divine
   Sovereignty and the sovereignty of Divine Grace is still further
   enhanced. Because man has broken God's command and continues to rebel
   against Him, he lies all the more absolutely at the disposal of a
   righteous God. The traitor has now no rights. He has forfeited them. He
   has no claims. He has outlawed himself. O ungodly man, you can make no
   appeal to God's justice. For if you do, He must award you eternal
   destruction.

   You cannot claim anything now of Him as due to you, for your only due
   is to be driven into everlasting punishment. You are condemned before
   Him in whose hands are the issues of life and death. You are as much in
   the hand of God as the prisoner condemned to die is in the hand of the
   royal power--indeed, you are far more absolutely so. If pardoned, it
   must be by the exercise of the sovereign prerogative which is vested in
   Jehovah, the Lord of All, who does as seems good in His sight. Provided
   it can be done justly, sovereignty may step in and rescue the guilty
   from his doom. But this is a matter which depends upon the will of the
   Lord alone. If you are executed, the condemnation is so well deserved,
   that not a word can be said against the severity which shall carry out
   the sentence.

   If God had left this sinful world to perish in its sin, none could have
   blamed Him. It is but right that those should die who have provoked
   their God and incurred the penalty which He threatened against sin. If
   the Lord, in the greatness of His love, chooses to save this man or
   that, He does no injury to any but magnifies His mercy in those whom He
   redeems from deserved death. If the Lord enlightens an island and
   leaves a continent in the dark, who shall accuse Him? If He

   takes one of a city and two of a family and brings them to Himself,
   while the rest are suffered to have their own way and willfully
   continue in rebellion, who shall charge God with partiality, or say
   unto Him, What are You doing?

   He can reply to all who object to His way of mercy, "May I not do as I
   will with Mine own?" He lays on no man more than is right and what He
   chooses to forgive of His own bounty cannot be challenged. Whether you
   like the doctrine or not, it is true that, as sinners, you are
   absolutely dependent upon the sovereign mercy of God. I wish you could
   see and feel this great Truth of God. For it would tend to humble you
   and prepare you to seek His favor. I pray the Holy Spirit to impress it
   upon everyone here who has not yet come to God in Christ Jesus. Thus
   much upon the first Truth of God.

   II. Our second remark is this--MEN MAY BE REDUCED TO DIRE DISTRESS.
   Men, being dependent upon God, may be reduced to dire distress if they
   disobey Him and incur His just displeasure.

   Kindly follow me in the earlier verses of my text. Here we have great
   temporal distress--the people had no water! The highest ranks of
   society were made to feel the terrible pinch. The whole of the city was
   tormented with thirst and the leading men instituted diligent searches
   to find water. They sent to the great reservoirs which Solomon had
   constructed in his time--the upper and the lower pools. But they found
   no water. They searched again and again but the waters had utterly
   failed and they were driven to despair. They covered their heads as men
   who gave themselves up to die without hope.

   Terrible was the drought which Jehovah sent upon His land because of
   the sin of His people--it was as if the day of Elijah had returned,
   wherein there was neither dew nor rain for three years and six months.

   My dear Hearers, there is a spiritual distress of which this drought is
   a figure. Behold, as in a parable, the state into which we have seen
   many brought when God has begun to deal with them--to such there comes
   drought of life and famine of hope. My Hearer, do you know what is
   meant by God's dealing with a man? Do you remember that passage in
   Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," where one pilgrim says to the other,
   "Let us fall into good discourse. Where shall we begin?" The other
   answers, "Where God began with us." Do you know what that means? Has
   God begun with you? If so, you will follow me with understanding when I
   say God makes the aroused and convicted man conscious of the greatest
   conceivable want, even of a drought in his own soul.

   These people were conscious that they wanted water. The case was worse
   than that--they were tormented with thirst. So does God come to men and
   make them feel that they need the living water of His Divine Grace and
   He sets them thirsting for it. They did not know their need before but
   went on merrily enough, content with the pleasures of time and sense.
   But now, being quickened, they feel an intolerable hunger and thirst
   after higher and better things. They are tormented by an insatiable
   desire, which cannot and will not be set aside.

   Have we not seen these thirsty ones? Have we not pitied them? Have we
   not pointed them to the one and only Source of supply? Have we not in
   secret rejoiced over them as we have foreseen to what their anguish
   tended?

   To proceed a little in detail with the words of my text--when the Lord
   causes sinners to feel the spiritual drought, pride is humbled. "Their
   nobles have sent their little ones to the waters." Generally, the
   nobility concern themselves little enough about water. But in great
   drought King Ahab and his chancellor, Obadiah, went forth themselves to
   find water. In this case the nobles sent their servants--no, even their
   sons and daughters--to discover some source of supply. So God knows how
   to teach a man so that his lofty thoughts are humbled and his pride is
   brought down to the dust.

   My Lord, you will feel yourself a nobody should the Spirit deal with
   you in conviction. Not long ago, your excellency looked down from the
   highest seat in the synagogue, but now you sit down in the dust and
   count everyone your superior. The philosopher grows into a little child
   and gladly accepts the cup which at some prior time he sneered at. We
   heard you singing to your own honor and glory the other day. But now
   you have no song to sing--you cover your lips and mutter, "Unclean,
   unclean, unclean!" When the Lord lays His hand on a man, He makes his
   beauty to consume away like the moth. From head to foot the man is
   moved--his soul within him melts and all his glory is rolled in the
   mire. Our noblest thoughts become lowly seekers after the water of life
   in the day of our distress.

   But observe that when humbled and made thirsty, these people went to
   secondary causes--they came to the pits, or reservoirs. Reservoirs in
   the East are sometimes great caverns in the natural rock and at other
   times they are excavated by labor, or built up by skill and then
   streams are turned into them and they hold a great storage of water.
   Some of the children of the nobles thought they knew of caverns which
   others had not seen, hidden cisterns under ground, which had been
   forgotten. And they went forth to find them. They hurried to the place
   where they hoped for the priceless water.

   But we read not that they cried unto God, or sought mercy of Jehovah,
   who could right speedily have given them rain. They resorted to the
   secondary causes--they turned not to the hand which smote them. Thus
   souls, when they are awakened, go to fifty things before they come to
   God. It is sad that, in superstition, or in skepticism, they look for
   living streams. They try reformation of manners--I have nothing to say
   against it. But apart from God, reformation always ends in
   disappointment. They seek consolation from an orthodox creed, for which
   I might have much to say. But if a belief in a creed is trusted in, it
   is as if a man sought to quench his thirst with a bottle but did not
   care to see whether it held water or not.

   A creed is a pitcher in which the water is held but it is not the water
   itself. Some try forms and ceremonies in abundance and to these they
   add self-denials and penances--they suffer anything sooner than come to
   God for His Divine Grace. Grace is a port to which no man steers until
   it is seen to be the only one into which he can enter. O my Heart, my
   Heart, how is it that you can be so loath to go to your Father and your
   God? O you that are wandering at this time from one creature-trust to
   another, I pray you cease your roaming and come home to God, who alone
   can help you.

   There is no hope for you but in God and the way to God is by His Son,
   Christ Jesus. Why do you gad about so much? Straightforward to God is
   the surest, safest way--why do you not take it? God is our haven and
   our Heaven--why are we so reluctant to seek Him? O man, why will you
   turn to saints, to angels, and even to devils, rather than to the Lord
   your God? But I know you, your heart is set on idolatry and this is the
   essence of idolatry--that you seek the creature rather than to the
   Creator.

   If you read on, you will find that when they went to these secondary
   supplies, they were disappointed--"They came to the pits and found no
   water." They found mud, black, filthy mud. But no water. Once they saw
   the sparkling liquid in the cool cave. But it was all spent. When
   waters were to be found everywhere else, the cisterns were full. But
   when all else was dry, they were dried also. They stooped down, they
   searched in the darkness. They tried, at least, to get a cupful of the
   precious liquid. But it is written, "They found no water."

   Disappointed, "they returned with their vessels empty." The women with
   their water pots upon their heads presented a sad sight as they entered
   the city gate and one after another all sighed, "Empty! Empty!" They
   thirsted to drink. But not a drop was found to cool their tongues. It
   is an awful thing to come home from a sermon with the vessels empty. To
   rise from the communion table, having found no living water and return
   with vessels empty. To close the Bible and sigh, "I find no comfort
   here, I must return with my vessel empty." When the ordinances and the
   Word yield us no Divine Grace, things have come to an awful pass with
   us. Do you know what this disappointment means?

   Now, upon this disappointment, there followed great confusion of
   mind--they became distracted--"they were ashamed and confounded." On
   the back of that confusion came despair; "they covered their heads."
   The Orientals cover their heads when in the deepest grief, as David
   did, when he went over the brook Kedron. It means, "I cannot face it.
   Do not look on me in my sorrow, nor expect me to look on you. I cover
   my head, for it is all over with me." Thus have I met with many who,
   after going to many confidences, have been disappointed in all and seem
   ready to lie down in despair and put forth no more effort.

   They fear that God will never bless them and they will never enter into
   eternal life. And so they sign their own death warrants. Shall I
   confess that I have been better pleased to see them in this condition
   than to hear their jovial songs at other times? It is by the gate of
   self-despair that men arrive at the Divine hope! I would to God that
   many a Mr. Vain-Confidence sitting here might be struck down to the
   ground and be compelled to end his proud boastings, by going at once to
   Jesus only! Oh, that they might come to that holy and safe conclusion,
   of which I keep on thinking all the while I am preaching to you--the
   Scriptural and logical conclusion mentioned in my text--"Therefore we
   will wait upon

   You."

   At last, when these people came to despair, it is very remarkable how
   everything about them seemed to be in unison with their misery. Listen
   to the third verse--"They covered their heads." Did you hear the last
   words of the fourth verse? They were the very same--"They covered their
   heads." Surely the second is the echo of the first. It is even so--
   earth has sympathy with man. Nature without reflects our inward
   feelings. When God makes us happy we, "go forth with joy and are led
   forth with peace: the mountains and the hills break forth before us
   into singing and all the trees of the field clap their hands."

   But when we are in despair, then all nature echoes our misery. "The
   ground is dismayed," so it runs in the Hebrew. The very earth is
   frightened for want of rain and opens its mouth, gasping for fear. "The
   ground is dismayed, for there was no rain in the earth, the plowmen
   were ashamed, they covered their heads." Have you ever been in such a
   state of mind that you knew your need of the water of life but were not
   able to find it anywhere? If so, you have been unutterably miserable,
   and all creation has put on mourning to keep you company. Earth is
   responsive to man, whom the Creator made to be her lord. Nature rings
   her marriage peal to sound forth man's happiness, or tolls her knells
   to mourn the funerals of his joys.

   If you have drawn down the blinds of your heart and your soul sits in
   the dark, then the heavens are darkened, too. Or if not, the very
   brightness of nature seems another form of blackness to you--and her
   joys mock your griefs and cast salt into your wounds. When men are cast
   down and their face is covered, then nature covers her face, too, and
   all the universe is sad. Alas, for the day when the hand of the Lord is
   sore on the soul! Then our moisture is turned into the drought of
   summer.

   III. I have brought you so far in the argument. Now I must rush on to
   the conclusion. Man is a very dependent creature. He may be reduced to
   dire distress. And thirdly, MAN'S ONLY SURE RESORT IS HIS GOD. "God is
   a refuge for

   us."

   If I address myself to any here who are in such trouble as I have
   described, let me press upon them this thought--the only place of
   refuge for you is in God as He reveals Himself in Christ Jesus. Hasten
   to Him! Lay hold upon His strength! Hide under the wings of His care!
   For, first, there is no help anywhere else. Read verse 22--"Are there
   any among the vanities of the Gentiles that can cause rain?" He says
   not "the gods of the Gentiles"--those who were "gods" in better days
   are seen to be, in truth, nothing but vanities in the time of need.

   To make rain is a Divine prerogative. Therefore the priests of the
   idols pretend to it for their false deities. The Rainmaker is found in
   every idolatrous country, but I think scarcely anybody believes in him,
   now. What antics and tricks the Rain-makers go through to produce rain
   but it does not come, neither can their gods create a cloud! And where
   can any of you go to get Divine Grace if you refuse to look to God
   alone? There is a Rain-maker over there at the Ritualistic Church, who
   can produce a shower on the child's heart, by which it becomes "a
   member of Christ, a child of God and an inheritor of the kingdom of
   Heaven."

   But I trust you are not so foolish as to believe in him. And therefore
   you will not make a fruitless journey towards priest-craft. Where will
   you go? Come not to any of us poor gospelers, for in us you will find
   nothing--we are only fingers to point you to the Lord Jesus, in whom
   all fullness dwells. The long-descended priest of the Church of Rome,
   who can, for a shilling, grant you absolution--will you look to him?
   No, you have still some wit remaining and feel that to be absolved of
   man will not ease your conscience. Priests of Baal are of small account
   when a total drought and a terrible dearth are in the land.

   In the days of Elijah they cried aloud and cut themselves with knives
   and said, "O Baal, hear us! O Baal, hear us!" But only the God that
   answered by fire could answer by water. And Baal could do neither the
   one nor the other. Therefore we will leave Baal alone and all the
   prophets of the grove, with their candles and their crucifixes and
   their incense and their robes. I know where you are likely to go and
   that is to your own frames and feelings, to your own resolves and
   doings. Alas for your folly! Oh, yes, you want to get peace, and so you
   take the pledge, and you vow that you will become a decent, sober body
   and all that. What are these confidences but vanities of the heathen?
   The very best of duties that you and I can perform, if we put our trust
   in them, are only false confidences, refuges of lies and they can yield
   us no help.

   No, look--according to the text there is no help for us even in the
   usual means of Divine Grace if we forget the Lord. Read that second
   question--"Can the heavens give showers?" Showers come from the heavens
   but the heavens cannot yield showers apart from God. The eastern sky,
   without rain, is blue, bright, beautiful. But after months of pitiless
   drought, when no tear of pity has stood in the eye of the heavens, the
   blue color becomes the ensign of melancholy. And if this continues
   month after month it becomes the color of despair.

   Until the Lord opens the windows of Heaven to pour out the blessing,
   neither sun, nor moon, nor stars can help the need of man. If God does
   not help you, O tried and anxious Soul, the sacraments are all in vain,
   though they are ordained of Heaven. And preaching and reading, liturgy
   and song, are all in vain to bring the refreshing dew of Divine Grace.
   Job truly says, "If God will not withdraw His anger, the proud helpers
   do stoop under Him." If God Himself save you not, O

   Man, all that can be done by men or angels throughout the ages can
   never help you one single jot. You are lost, lost, lost, if a stronger
   arm than man's is not stretched out to help you!

   But with God is all power. There is the mercy--"Are not You He, O Lord
   our God? For You have made all these things." See in how short a time
   He covers the heavens with clouds and pours forth an abundance of rain
   till He makes the wilderness a pool and the dry land springs of water.
   He can. He can! He can reach the extremity of human weakness and woe.
   What can He NOT do? Nothing is too hard for the Lord. And you, poor
   Sinner, dried up like the sand of the desert--God can, within an hour,
   yes--in a moment, make your heart to be flooded with His Grace.

   He is the Creator, making all things out of nothing. And He can create
   in you at once the tender heart, the loving spirit, the believing mind,
   the sanctified nature. Though you have no Divine Grace this morning,
   no, not a drop of it-- He can open streams in the desert. You can not
   find within yourself, wherever you look, any trace of love, or holy
   feelings or anything that is good. Yet He can give you all, can give
   you all for nothing, can give it to you now! If you believe that He can
   and will trust Him, as He displays His love in the Lord Jesus, He will
   save you.

   He can give you the power to believe it and lead you now to cast
   yourself on Him. He can, but it hangs upon His will. Does He not say,
   "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and I will have compassion
   on whom I will have compassion"? A God without a will is no God at all.
   And if He has no will in the matter of salvation, then is He dethroned
   from His choicest empire and man is set up above the God of Divine
   Grace Himself. This cannot be.

   Well, then, what follows from this? If God has all this power, our
   wisdom is to wait upon Him, since He alone can help. We draw this
   inference--"Therefore we will wait upon You." O my beloved Hearer, if
   you have never been converted, I pray the Holy Spirit to bring you to
   decision, that you may at once seek the Lord. O tried and anxious soul,
   the sacraments are all in vain, though they are ordained of Heaven. And
   preaching and reading, liturgy and song, are all in vain to bring the
   refreshing dew of Divine Grace. Every road is closed but the way of
   Sovereign Grace.

   You have no merit, you have no strength. You never can have any merit,
   you never can have any strength of your own. God must save you, or you
   are lost to all eternity. But He can save you to glorify His own Grace
   and make His own mercy to be known and to reveal His great power in
   turning hearts of stone into hearts of flesh. He can save you. Submit
   yourself to Him, then, and come to Him and say, with the "therefore" of
   my text, "Therefore we will wait upon You."

   Do I hear somebody say, "How I would like to pray"? Yes, that is the
   way to come to God. Come to Him by prayer in the name of Jesus. Do you
   want a prayer? This chapter is full of petitions and there is one which
   I would point out to you. Here is a short one for you (verse 7), "O
   Lord, though our iniquities testify against us, do You it." "Do You
   it." "Lord, I cannot create Grace in my own heart, any more than I can
   make rain to fall from the sky. But do You it." "Lord, I cannot come to
   You, come You to me; do You it." Is not that a wonderful prayer? There
   is more in it than you think--the more you consider it, the bigger you
   will see it to be. Three monosyllables--"Do you it!"

   And then observe the argument--four words all of one syllable, "for
   Your name's sake." Not for my sake but for Christ's sake, who is the
   manifestation of Your name. For Your own glory's sake, for Your glory
   is Your name. Lord, make men see what a sinner You can save by saving
   me! Lord, glorify Your mercy by forgiving me. For oh, if You will save
   such a poor, unworthy wretch as I am, even Heaven itself will ring with
   Your praises. And even in Hell they will say, "See what God can do! He
   saved one who was ripe for the eternal fire and He has placed the rebel
   among His children." "Do You it for Your name's sake." Heartily do I
   commend this prayer to every soul here that is seeking the Lord. May
   the Spirit write it on your hearts! I cannot give you a better. "Do You
   it for Your name's sake."

   Well then, next, if you are really going to wait upon the Lord, you
   must do it through a Mediator. These guilty people of Jerusalem had
   Jeremiah to pray for them. Jeremiah, with the weeping eye fitly
   typifies a greater than Jeremiah. Remember the Man of Sorrows, the
   Acquaintance of Grief? Jeremiah's Master must be your Intercessor. Beg
   Him to be your Mediator. You cannot go in unto an absolute God. You
   need a Mediator. A Mediator is provided--He has presented an acceptable
   sacrifice--He will plead the causes of your soul. Trust in His blood
   instead of your tears. Let His death wash your life. Leave your case in
   the great Mediator's hands. For if you believe in Him, He will
   undertake for you. And He never fails. He will go into the Court of
   King's Bench for you and be your Advocate and win your suit. Come,
   trust yourself with Jesus. For He will save.

   Let me advise you to make a full confession of sin. Read verse 20 "We
   acknowledge, O Lord, our wickedness: for we have sinned against You."
   Make a clean breast of it, admit the past, lay bare the present. Think
   not to cloak sin. To con-

   ceal sin is to ruin yourself. To confess it is to find mercy. Place
   yourself among the guilty, for there mercy can fitly reach you. When
   you have done this, cast yourself down before your God, saying,
   "Therefore I will wait upon You." Come through Christ, believing in the
   power of His precious blood and you may draw near to God. Though you
   are loaded with enough sins to sink a world of sinners down to Hell,
   yet if you will believe in the mercy of God through Christ Jesus and
   cast yourself down at His feet and lie there, He will never say
   "Depart."

   Jesus has said, "He that comes unto Me I will in no wise cast out." If
   you perish, it is because you do not come. Not because you come and He
   rejects you. O dear Souls, I do not know some of you, others I do know.
   But whether known to me or not, I look at you now with loving eyes and
   say, Come to my Lord. Does your heart say, "I will arise and go unto my
   Father"? Then am I glad. You have tried the citizens of this country
   and they have sent you into the fields to feed swine. And husks are all
   that you have to feed upon. You have spent your money and wasted your
   substance in riotous living. You can find no pleasure now--go where you
   may.

   Vanity of vanities. All is vanity! Quit the vanities and seek the
   verities. Turn unto your God. Turn instantly! Hark back! Hark back! You
   have gone too far already in the evil way. A precipice is before you!
   One more step, yes, one more step and you are over and your eternal
   ruin is complete. Hark back as quickly as you can to the great God from
   whom you have departed! Come now, even now, for He invites you--"Come
   now, and let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are as
   scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like
   crimson, they shall be as wool."

   While he speaks in this manner, I hope you will answer to the call and
   bow at His feet at once. "Today if you will hear His voice, harden not
   your hearts." May the Holy Spirit lay hold on you, that you may lay
   hold on Jesus! God grant it, for Christ's sake! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

The Unchanging God Cheering Jacob in His Change of Dwelling Place

   INTENDED FOR READING ON LORD'S-DAY, DECEMBER 1, 1889,

   DELIVERED BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

   "And Israel took his journey with all that he had and came to
   Beersheba, and offered sacrifices unto the God of his father Isaac. And
   God spoke unto Israel in the visions of the night and said, Jacob,
   Jacob. And he said, Here am I. And He said, I am God, the God of your
   father: fear not to go down into Egypt. For I will there make of you a
   great nation: I will go down with you into Egypt. And I will also
   surely bring you up again: and Joseph shall put his hand upon your
   eyes." Genesis 46:1-4.

   NOTICE in this passage the two names which are mentioned. "Israel took
   his journey and God spoke unto Israel in the visions of the night and
   said, Jacob, Jacob." "Jacob" was the name of his weakness--"Israel" was
   the title of his strength. "Jacob" was the name of his
   birth-nature--"Israel" was the name of his new and spiritual nature.

   When Israel set out to go down into Egypt and see his son Joseph, he
   started in great vigor and strength for an old man--faith made him full
   of force. Therefore we read, "Israel took his journey." I see the old
   man revived and stirred up to a high degree of hopeful energy. He
   traveled some few miles on the first day and reached the well of
   Beersheba. It was the border town, where stood the well of the
   oak--after passing Beersheba he would be out of the land of promise and
   on his way to Egypt.

   And at the remembrance of this fact, the old trembling came over him
   and he became Jacob, as at some prior time. When he was to take the
   decisive step to leave Canaan and make his journey into Egypt, then he
   suddenly felt himself a Jacob and began to halt upon his thigh. And the
   Lord in the visions of the night addressed him by the name which was
   most suitable to his condition, saying to him, "Jacob, Jacob." He did
   not call him "Israel." He came to him in his infirmity and trial and
   suited His speech to his condition. The Lord met the weakness of His
   servant's faith, and sent him consolations fitted rather for Jacob than
   for Israel.

   Dear Friends, I am afraid that the lives of many of the Lord's chosen
   people alternate between "Israel" and "Jacob." Sometimes we are "strong
   in the Lord and in the power of His might," and at another time we cry,
   "Who is sufficient for these things?" Like princes we prevail with God
   and are true Israels. But perhaps before the sun has gone down we limp
   with Jacob and though the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak. We are
   Jacob before we are Israel. And we are Jacob when we are Israel.

   But blessed be God, we are Israels with God when we cease to be Jacobs
   among men. The Lord has chosen Jacob and redeemed Jacob and preserved
   Jacob. But His great aim is to make the Israel in him the dominant
   character. He shall be far more a prince with God than a supplanter
   among men.

   Turning to the text, we have a lesson to learn from it. We find that
   Jacob, on his way down to Egypt, came to Beer-sheba, the border place,
   and this marked a distinct stage in his journey. He came to Beersheba,
   the place of many memories, where God had spoken to his father Abraham
   by the well. This was the place, I suppose, where Abraham was when the
   Lord said to him, "Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you
   love, and offer him for a burnt offering." It was, therefore, a
   memorable spot in the history of his family, and it was just then a
   turning point in his own career. And therefore it called for special
   waiting upon the Lord.

   He was to break new ground and enter upon a way which he had not trod
   up to now. And so we read that he offered sacrifices to the God of his
   father Isaac. Herein is wisdom. In commencing a new era, let there be
   new devotion. It is well

   to begin everything with God, who is the Beginner of all things. When
   young people begin housekeeping they should consecrate an altar as soon
   as ever they have set up a tent. When you begin business, this thought
   should be upon you-- "Except the Lord build the house, they labor in
   vain that build it."

   Therefore, wait upon Him for guidance and help. In starting upon every
   journey, whether long or short, and entering upon every day, however
   commonplace the day may be, it is always well to begin it with God.
   Remember the old and gracious Proverb, that "prayer and provender
   hinder no man's journey." The offering of sacrifices unto God did not
   hinder Jacob's journey--on the contrary, it was the making of him as a
   traveler. For now he began his journey outside of Canaan under the
   special convoy of the Lord, his God. Now the angels of God took up
   their places around the wayfarers and day and night they led the van
   and brought up the rear of the patriarchal caravan.

   I suppose that Jacob, on this occasion, offered sacrifice for three
   reasons, at least. One was to purge his household of any sin that might
   lie upon it. He had a very strange family, this man Jacob. It was badly
   begun at the outset, of four mothers--and jealousies were sure to
   abound. Taking them all round, his many sons were a very sad lot to be
   the sons of such a man. His own account of them on his deathbed is most
   painful. Much sin, even of the blackest dye, had defiled that chosen
   family.

   The stories of Reuben, Levi, Simeon, Judah, and others, are very dark.
   The aged head of the clan seems to say, with broken-hearted penitence,
   "Before we go down into this Egypt, let us offer sacrifice whereby our
   grievous sins may be put away, lest we provoke the Lord on the road."
   It reminds us of father Job, when, after his children had fulfilled
   their days of feasting, he called them together and offered sacrifice,
   lest they might have sinned in their hearts and cursed God foolishly.

   How often have we cause to suspect some secret backsliding, some
   careless omission, some transgression unperceived! It is well to go
   again to the cleansing fountain for fresh washing, to fly anew to the
   great sacrifice of Christ and renew our acquaintance with its cleansing
   power. O Lord, purify our households at this hour! Let our families and
   our Churches know anew the expiation for sin by which the conscience is
   purged from dead works, to serve the living and true God.

   Do you not think that Jacob also offered this sacrifice for another
   reason? Did he not present it by way of thanksgiving? He is going down
   into Egypt--but it is to see Joseph--what a joy this meant! Joseph is
   yet alive. He is going to look him in the face. Benjamin, of whom the
   old man had said, "Joseph is not, and Simeon is not, and you will take
   Benjamin away"--Benjamin had come back safe and sound--this was no mean
   favor. Whereas he had said, "All these things are against me," now he
   perceives that all these things are for him.

   And so he offers sacrifice unto the Lord. Let us magnify the Lord
   whenever we are led to see the extraordinary light of His goodness in
   those places which looked unusually dark. When the cloud we so much
   dreaded has turned out to be big with mercies and has scattered showers
   of blessings upon our heads, let us bless the Lord and bring our
   sacrifices of joy and praise unto His name.

   Surely, these two alone would be right good reasons for offering
   sacrifice. But Jacob had this other--that he might enquire of the Lord
   as to His way. At the altar he hoped to receive the oracle. Poor old
   Jacob appears to have been in a great dilemma--he seems to have greatly
   questioned whether it was right for him to go down into Egypt. And, as
   I shall have to show you, it was a matter that was open to grave
   question and could not have been safely decided unless the Lord had
   spoken.

   It was the custom with men, when they offered sacrifice, to use the
   occasion of the sacrifice as an opportunity for consulting the oracles
   of God and learning His Divine will. People went up to the temple of
   the Lord to enquire His mind-- they went to ask direction from God's
   mouth, through His servants--who spoke in His name. I wish sometimes
   that God's people would be more careful to ask their way of God. I fear
   that they too often err by blundering on and taking no heed to their
   way.

   When I get into a part of the country where I do not know the road, I
   ask my way of almost everybody I see, because I think that there will
   not be half the time spent in asking the way that will be wasted in
   going wrong. The Lord loves to see His children anxious to be right.
   For that anxiety is a great point in their right guidance. If He does
   not speak to us in a dream, nor by the Urim and Thummim, nor by the
   voice of a Prophet, yet He secretly guides our minds.

   We are made careful--we are helped to weigh the matter in the balances
   of the sanctuary and then our cool, calm judgment makes its decisions
   and we choose the way which is most for God's glory. It is a safe and a
   pleasant thing to enquire in His temple. For God the Holy Spirit still
   directs the paths of His people and leads them in the way everlasting.

   So let us learn from Jacob, especially at the beginning of any fresh
   enterprise, to draw near unto God with special devotion. We cannot too
   often remember that great Sacrifice by which we live--neither can we
   too often present ourselves as living sacrifices unto the Lord.

   But now, plunging into the center of the text, I notice, first, that
   Jacob had a fear. His fear was natural. But, secondly, his fear needed
   to be removed, for God said to him, "Fear not to go down into Egypt."
   And, thirdly, his fear was removed most sweetly. And with confidence,
   the venerable man went on his way.

   I. First, then, JACOB'S FEAR WAS NATURAL. It was natural because he was
   an aged man--an aged man leaving the land of his birth. Old men do not
   like changes and they especially fear changes of country and custom. A
   young man runs all over the world and cares little where he goes, for
   he has plenty of youth's quicksilver in him. He cries, "Sitting hens
   get no barley"--and so he pecks up a grain here and a grain there, from
   Liverpool to New York, and from New York to San Francisco, and from
   there to New Zealand, the Cape, and home again.

   The young man makes himself at home anywhere. But the old man loves the
   old house at home and the fireside where his children have been likely
   to gather. Old trees strike their roots deep and it is not easy to
   transplant them. It is neither pleasant nor safe to uproot an ancient
   elm--let it stay where it is. Solomon says concerning the old man, that
   he is "afraid of that which is high and fears shall be in the way." And
   it is very natural, indeed, that the man should feel a great
   disturbance in his mind at the sight of high enterprises and untrod
   ways.

   Was not Jacob one hundred and thirty years old, or thereabouts, at the
   time when he went down into Egypt? He had lived, in the pastures of
   Canaan with his flocks and herds, the life of a Bedouin shepherd, and
   his whole soul clung to the country. For "Jacob was a plain man
   dwelling in tents." The oaks and the plains of Mamre, the hills of
   Carmel and the valleys of Succoth were dear to him and he started at
   the idea of emigrating to a land of canals and watercourses, and he
   dreaded life among educated Egyptians and pompous officers of Pharaoh.
   It was no slight change from Canaan to Egypt. Do you wonder that he was
   afraid?

   His fear also, no doubt, arose, next, from the fact that he was going
   into an idolatrous country of which he knew very little, except that it
   was a place which teemed with the memorials of false deities. A land of
   religion so degraded that cats and crocodiles were worshipped and even
   vegetables which grew in the gardens. An Egyptian must have been a
   living riddle to an unsophisticated shepherd from such a country as
   Palestine. Egypt had a reputation for learning and philosophy and
   divination. And these, to an aged countryman, would seem mysterious and
   uncanny features in his venture.

   He loved not the change. The Canaanites were bad enough. But he had
   grown accustomed to them and they had a healthy fear of him--these
   Egyptians, what might they not do? He was encouraged, because Joseph
   was there and was lord over all Egypt--even that was a very romantic
   affair and the whole business was surrounded with mystery.

   Finally, the associations of Egypt were trying. It had cost the good
   old man many bitter pangs to send his sons down into that country to
   buy corn. Egypt had an ugly name for him. It was like sending them to
   Botany Bay, or Norfolk Island. Somehow, it was not a country that he
   had any liking for, and so Jacob's heart was in his mouth. And he
   trembled to think that in his old age he should be going away from
   where he had lived and especially to be going, not to the ancient
   country from where his family had originally come forth, but to Egypt,
   a place which was of ill savor to his fathers, a country whose
   associations were rather trying than hopeful.

   Abraham went down into Egypt and he met with trouble there and brought
   away from it one named Hagar, who was a great trial in his household.
   In fact, it was the mischievous event in his life. And Isaac had
   thought of going there but the Lord appeared unto him and said, "Go not
   down into Egypt." So a country where his grandfather fared ill and
   where his father was warned not to go, must have seemed, to the anxious
   Patriarch, to be a place to be avoided rather than sought.

   He shook his head many times and though he had said so bravely, "Joseph
   is yet alive. I will go and see him before I die," the journey wore the
   aspect of great risk and tremendous difficulty--with a question hanging
   over it like a black cloud--"After all, would it be a right step?"
   Taking all things into consideration, he was filled with a very
   natural, and I think I may add, a very proper fear. Would not you have
   trembled had you been in his position?

   Moreover, he had some intimation, probably, that this was to be a land
   of pre-eminent trial for his race. For had not God said to Abraham that
   his seed should be strangers in a strange land and that they should be
   afflicted for four hundred years? The old man, with prescient eye,
   began to suspect that this was to be the land which caused Abraham the
   horror of great darkness, which was set forth before him as the fiery
   furnace and the smoking lamp. And so he was afraid to go down into
   Egypt.

   And even though Joseph was there, and Joseph was lord over all the
   land, I should not wonder if the old man was nervous and said, "Joseph
   may not always be lord over the land--he may fall from his position. As
   far as I can find out, they put him in prison once. Why should they not
   put him in prison again? I fear we shall run a great risk." When we
   once get into the vein of distrust and foreboding, we can always find
   fresh relays of doubt and fear--at least, I can. How quick we are at
   inventing objects of fear! We see in the clouds what was never there
   but only in our own eyes. We see things which may be--things that never
   will be. We are fretted at possibilities and ready to faint at
   adventures. Those dreadful things may be. And what if they were to be?
   What then and what then?

   Then I have no doubt he felt that the change would involve himself and
   his family in new temptations. They had behaved badly enough among the
   simple pastoral people--what would they do in the midst of the vices of
   Egypt? I must confess that I often feel great diffidence in
   recommending people to make changes in life--especially in quitting the
   country to go to the great city. Change has its perils. You begin to
   know your temptations by now and you are somewhat prepared to withstand
   them. But you know not what may happen to you in another sphere, with
   other surroundings, and other influences.

   All things considered, I would rather carry my old burden. For it
   begins to fit my back and my back has grown somewhat used to it. But
   what about a new burden? It might be more heavy and it might try me in
   fresh places and cause fresh wounds. For myself, I am not anxious to
   make any changes, for I have read the words of Solomon the wise--"As a
   bird that wanders from her nest, so is a man that wanders from his
   place."

   When God commands a man to follow an untried path, he may go rightly
   and wisely, even as the young swallows fly in their appointed time,
   though they have never traversed the continents before. But he who
   wanders out of sheer wantonness may find that he has gone from bad to
   worse and may come to wish himself back again to that which he
   despised.

   If Jacob trembled at making so great a change, it was not without
   reason. All the habits of the family would be rudely shaken, and a new
   mode of life would be forced upon them. He could not have guessed that
   there would be a Goshen for the shepherds, and he must have dreaded
   leaving a quiet pastoral life for the refinements of Egyptian society
   and the blandishments of Egyptian idolatry.

   I need say no more on that point--Jacob was always anxious, and in his
   old age, more so than ever. The sketch I have given may be the picture
   of some friend now present. And if it is so, I will hope that in my
   discourse he may hear cheering voices from the Lord God to allay his
   fears. May the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, make it so!

   II. But, in the second place, God was not of a mind that His servant
   should be the slave of dread--HIS FEAR WAS TO BE REMOVED. Therefore,
   the Lord appeared to Jacob in the night visions, not to tell him of new
   empires, not to reveal to him the destinies of princes but simply to
   say to him, "Fear not."

   It appears to God to be an important matter to chase away fear, even
   though it is troubling only one person and that person an aged man. The
   Lord broke the eternal silence, to drive away the anxieties of a single
   individual. He said to him, "Jacob, Jacob." And then he added, "Fear
   not to go down into Egypt." Are you very fearful and timorous at this
   time, dear Brother? It is not the Lord's will that you should remain
   so--He would deliver you from this bondage.

   The Lord would drive away your fears because, in the first place, fear
   makes you unhappy. It is an unhappy thing for a father when he comes
   home from business and finds his child in distress of mind. He likes to
   see him run cheerfully to meet him and smile and sing a welcome. Our
   heavenly Father would have His people rejoice in Him. Do you want any
   proof of it? Does He not command you, "Rejoice in the Lord always: and
   again I say, Rejoice"? The Lord puts it thus, "Delight yourself also in
   the Lord. And He shall give you the desires of your heart." The Spirit
   made the Prophet exclaim, "Happy are you, O Israel." God takes it ill
   if His people find no joy in Him. He is our portion and it is sad if we
   are not delighted with such an inheritance.

   But, next, the Lord would not have His people vexed with fear, because
   it is sadly weakening in its effects. Jacob had a difficult task
   enough, to go down into Egypt and bear witness for the true God in that
   region, and he needed more,

   rather than less, strength. In the midst of Canaan, his path had been a
   very difficult one, to stand fast for God in the midst of that wicked
   and perverse generation. He had sadly failed even in that lesser task,
   for his family had grossly transgressed and fallen into the ways of the
   world around them.

   In Egypt his work would be more severe. For he would have the wisdom of
   the Egyptians to battle with, a wisdom proudly conservative of errors
   which had become hoary with antiquity. He must not go down to such a
   battlefield with his hands hanging down and his knees feeble. Before we
   begin a new enterprise, fear may be seasonable--we ought to be cautious
   as to whether our way is right in the sight of God. And therefore Jacob
   had that fear. But when we once begin and intend going through with an
   enterprise, we must say farewell to fear, for fear will be fatal to
   success.

   Go straight ahead. Believe in God and carry the work through. To fear
   in the day of battle will be mischievous to the last degree. Then shall
   it be as when a standard bearer faints. When the standard of our
   confidence falls in the dust, who shall gird himself for the battle?
   Therefore the Lord, that His servant Jacob might be fit for what was
   before him, bade him be of good courage and said to him, "Fear not."

   I am sure that the Lord wished His servant Jacob to cease from every
   kind of fear, because otherwise it would look as if he were quarrelling
   with the Divine will. He is to go down into Egypt by Divine command.
   But if he is afraid to go, it would appear that he judged that the Lord
   had put him upon an ill business. When God judged it right for him to
   go, he must rest assured that it was right. Hesitate, my dear Friend,
   while you are not sure that it is God's will. But when once you are
   certain that it is according to the Lord's mind, it will be
   unfaithfulness to God to have any kind of fear.

   Steam straight ahead, for that way lies your haven. Go on in a direct
   line, like an arrow shot from a mighty bow, which seeks nothing but the
   target. Say with one of old, "Shall such a man as I flee?" If God is
   with you, who can be against you? Flight, when God supports, would be
   not only disastrous, but treacherous. It is not to be dreamed of for a
   moment. You have no armor for your back--face the foe--yes, face him,
   though he were ten thousand strong. You are able to overcome the armies
   of the aliens. God being with you, the day is yours.

   If you treat the Lord as you should, you will become incapable of fear.
   You will, like young Nelson, ask, "What is fear?" You cannot see any.
   "The Lord is my strength; of whom shall I be afraid?" The Lord of Hosts
   is with us, therefore we will not fear. Perhaps I might as well apply
   the subject now and say--Are you beginning to preach, my dear Friend,
   in a new place and are you afraid? Do new faces startle you? Set
   yourself to get rid of this fear of man. The Lord forbids it.

   Are you going across the sea directly and are you afraid of the journey
   and the foreign land? Hasten to the Lord and ask Him to drive all this
   fear far from you. Are you undertaking some new service in the Church
   and are you trembling at the responsibility? Cry to the Lord at once to
   strengthen your weak hands and confirm your feeble knees. For, at this
   moment, though the Lord does not appear to you in vision, yet He speaks
   to you out of this grand old Book and by the mouth of His servant,
   saying unto you, "Fear not to go down into Egypt." Surely, a "fear not"
   from the mouth of the Lord will make you bold as a lion!

   III. And now I shall need to show you how HIS FEAR WAS REMOVED MOST
   SWEETLY. Who can cheer the

   heart so effectually as the Lord our God? Fears must depart when the
   Lord forbids them.

   First, the Lord removed his fears by showing that He knew him by his
   name. He said "Jacob, Jacob." "Oh," says one, "if the Lord were to
   speak to me by my name I should not be afraid any longer." I am not
   sure of that, for you might be even more fearful than you now are. But
   do you think that God does not know your name? Do you dream that if you
   have sought His face and cried to Him for mercy He does not know your
   name? Why Beloved, He knows all things. He knows your secret thoughts.
   He knows the way that you have taken and the way that you are about to
   take.

   He knows you infinitely better than you know yourself. Rest in the fact
   that your heavenly Father knows what you have need of. O poor troubled
   One, you that are cast down on account of sin, remember that the Lord
   knew this Patriarch by his weak and sinful name of Jacob, as well as by
   his bright and princely name of Israel. He knew him by his worse name
   as well as by his better. God knows you by your old name, for He knows
   your old nature. And He knows your new name and your new nature. He
   calls you tonight and tells you--"I know you. I know you. I know all
   about you. Your name is engraved on the palms of My hands.

   "Dream not that I have forgotten you. If you can not spell out your own
   case, I can read it. If you do not know your own griefs so as to
   interpret them to another, I understand all your sorrows, your burdens
   and your failures. I know your

   despondencies and your despairs. I know you, Jacob." Therefore, since
   the Lord knows us altogether, let us trust Him and He will make even
   our weaknesses to magnify the power of His Grace.

   Next, the Lord told him that he was on communion terms with God. The
   Lord said to him, "Jacob, Jacob," and he answered, "Here am I." God had
   to call out to Adam, "Adam, where are you?" But Jacob could say, "Here
   am I." Oh, it is a blessed thing to be on such terms with God that you
   can truly say, "Here am I, my Lord--I have nothing to hide. I stand
   forth before Your presence and have no desire to conceal myself from
   Your eyes, neither have I anything to reserve from Your notice. Tell me
   what I am to do. For I am willing and eager to do it. Take me and make
   what You will of me. For I am Yours and rejoice to be so. Break me up
   and melt me and pour me out into Your mold, if You see fit. For 'Here
   am I.' "

   He that has given up selfhood and is willing that God should do
   whatever He wills with him, is on communing terms with God. The barrier
   is removed and the Lord God Almighty can dwell with us and even give us
   the desires of our heart. But then it follows--if you are on such happy
   terms with God, be not afraid. Now that you may speak with God and He
   will deign to speak with you, why should you be the prey of
   apprehensions? Why should Jacob be afraid of Pharaoh if he is no longer
   afraid of Jehovah? If you are at peace with God, who is he that shall
   harm you? The stones of the field shall be in league with you and the
   beasts of the field shall be at peace with you.

   Hushed is the thunder and pointless is the shaft of the lightning, when
   once a man is right with God. Even if the laws of nature should crush
   his mortal frame, they would but release his joyful spirit and admit
   him the sooner to the joys of Heaven above. Therefore you have nothing
   to be afraid of, O you who walk with God! If the Lord is your Friend,
   who is he that can harm you? All is well. The stars in their courses
   fight for you and the angels of God watch over you. To the friends of
   God all nature is friendly. Heaven and earth, and sea and land, all
   welcome the man on whom their Creator smiles.

   Next, the Lord removed His servant's fear by declaring Himself to be
   the God of the Covenant. "I am God," He said, "the God of your father."
   He manifests Himself as the same God as ever--as much the God of Jacob,
   the son, as of Isaac, the father. The Lord will be to us what He has
   been to His people at some prior time. He has pledged Himself to us as
   to our fathers. He has promised to us, even to us, the blessing,
   saying, "Surely, blessing I will bless you."

   My dear Friends and Brethren, can you say, "This God is our God forever
   and ever"? Is Jehovah the God of this generation as of the former? Some
   of you do not desire to have Jehovah for your God. Then you cannot have
   the blessing that comes from His being your God. But you that can say,
   "My God, my Father, You shall be my Guide," you have no cause to fear.
   If God is your God, the chief thing is secured and all the rest will be
   right. When we have God, we have all things. To be in order with the
   Most High is to be right with all the forces of the universe, both in
   nature and in Providence.

   If the Lord is yours, all things are yours. As He is the God of
   eternity, "things present and things to come are yours" in Him. Oh, how
   sweet to fly to our Covenant God when the tempest is lowering! Where my
   father found a most secure abode, there I also dwell.

   Next, the Lord said to him, "Fear not to go down into Egypt. For I will
   there make of you a great nation." The promise of a great blessing is
   the dismissal of all fear. Jacob's house cannot be destroyed if God is
   going to multiply them into a great nation. If the apparent evil will
   work together for our good, why do we dread it? Beloved Sufferer, do
   not be afraid of the cancer which is preying upon you. It is a terrible
   disease. But if the Lord is going to make your long illness a saving
   blessing to your family, you may resign yourself to the lingering pain
   and no longer shrink from it with horror.

   Do not be afraid of that bereavement in the family. It will be a
   grievous loss to all concerned, but the righteous are taken away from
   evil to come, and out of their graves springs a blessing, even as the
   grass grows on the hillock in the Churchyard. Many a keen affliction
   brings with it God's sevenfold favor, though we cannot see it. As the
   Lord said to Jacob, "Fear not to go into Egypt. For I will there make
   of you a great nation," so He says to us, "Fear not affliction. For so
   shall you receive the greater benediction."

   Brethren, fear not the night but watch for its stars. Fear not the fall
   of the leaf but look for the ripe fruits. You shall see more of God's
   goodness as you see more of man's evil. We read of the Apostles, that
   they "feared as they entered into the cloud." Yet in that cloud they
   saw their Lord transfigured. Therefore be not afraid, lest you be found
   trembling at that which should cause you joy.

   Then the Lord added that which is the richest comfort of all--"I will
   go down with you into Egypt." What cause of fear can remain when we
   have the promise of the Lord's Presence with us? The child is not
   afraid to go to bed in the dark, if his mother will go with him into
   the chamber. The child does not want a candle if his mother will be at
   his side. Her eyes are bright lights to him. If God is with us, we are
   not in the dark--His Presence causes even the night to be light about
   us. If we can have our Lord's Presence, we have no choice of country or
   company.

   Egypt, with Jehovah, is as Canaan. Even Hades and the land of
   death-shades have nothing to make us fear evil, if the Comforter
   sustains us. "For You are with me," is the joyful song of the pilgrim
   when he passes through the valley of the shadow of death. Therefore,
   let us dismiss our fears. We will go down into loneliness, poverty,
   sickness, sorrow, and the grave, if the Lord will be with us.

   The Lord goes on to say, "And I will also surely bring you up
   again"--which meant that Jacob should not lose his inheritance in
   Canaan, nor be forever in banishment in a strange land. Jacob's heart
   dwelt in the Canaan which the Lord had bestowed on him and had entailed
   upon his seed by a covenant of salt. But Jacob's going down into Egypt
   was not to alter that deed of gift. Jacob would not have accepted
   Egypt, with all its treasures, in exchange for the land that God had
   promised to himself and to his seed. But no such change was
   proposed--the chosen seed would leave Egypt in due course and come back
   to its old quarters and so the Lord said, "I will surely bring you up
   again."

   Go down as we may, the Lord will bring us up again. Dear Friend, you
   may lose husband, or wife, or father, or child, or property, or health,
   or even life. But you shall rise out of every loss and you shall never
   lose your share in the sure mercies of David. "Who shall separate us
   from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord?" Esau might
   sell the heritage for a mess of pottage but Jesus would not sell His
   portion for all Egypt's glories. Nor shall He be called on to make the
   exchange. Blessed be God, we shall never be driven down so low that we
   cannot rise again, for the Lord says of every member of the chosen
   family, "I will surely bring you up again!"

   One more fear Jacob had, perhaps, experienced. He had some fear of
   dying. But that was all removed when the Lord said, "And Joseph shall
   put his hand upon your eyes." "Oh," the good old father thought,
   "Joseph is to close my eyes. Then death has lost its sting." Did you
   ever think of dying in that light? Let me read it to you with a word
   changed and another name inserted--"And Jesus shall put His hand upon
   your eyes." We may never die--the Lord may personally appear and then
   we shall not all sleep. But if He does not come and we are called upon
   to die, Jesus will put His fingers on our eyes and we shall sleep in
   peace.

   Death is a Covenant blessing to a child of God. For "so He gives His
   beloved sleep." That last sleep comes from the finger of that hand
   which was nailed to the cross for us. And Jesus, your Joseph whom you
   love, whose bloody coat you have seen with tears--He is yet alive and
   He is King over all that land where you go, for the keys of death swing
   at His girdle. He is the Prince of all realms and He it is that shall
   put His hand upon your eyes and seal them for the moment in darkness,
   to open them for you, when you shall say, "I am satisfied, for behold I
   awake in Your likeness."

   By this time, every fear ought to be removed from us, even as it was
   from Jacob. We may now set up our banners and go forward. Put away the
   sackbut and sound the silver trumpet. Let the vanguard advance and
   follow the leader through the wilderness, or through the sea. If
   Jehovah leads the way, let no man's heart tremble. Let the weakest
   among us be strong--for thus says the Lord, "Fear not to go down into
   Egypt." Rejoice and be glad. All is well--

   "What cheering words are these!

   Their sweetness who can tell?

   In time and to eternal days,

   It is with the righteous well.

   It is well when joys arise,

   It is well when sorrows flow,

   It is well when darkness veils the skies,

   And strong temptations blow.

   It is well when on the mount

   We feast on dying love;

   And 'tis as well, in God's account,

   When we the furnace prove."

   The pillar of fire by night and the pillar of cloud by day, we see at
   all times. Thus Jehovah leads the way in every march through the
   desert. With glad footstep, follow Him. Behold, He says to you, "Fear
   not to go down into Egypt. For I will go down with you and I will
   surely bring you up again." Surely, this passage is very applicable to
   all who are removing from one place to another. "Fear not to go down
   into Egypt. I will go down with you into Egypt." Take your journey in
   peace.

   This also may be used by those who are in perplexity as to what they
   should do. Wait upon God for direction and when you get your marching
   orders, go straight ahead, cheered by this gracious assurance, "I will
   go down with you into Egypt." Any of you that are entering upon a new
   business, upon new trials, new labors, new spheres--accept with joy the
   promise that the Presence of God will be with you. God leading, we fear
   nothing.

   Lastly, to you that are about to die, here is living consolation. There
   may be some here who will never see another earthly Sabbath, for God
   has some better thing in store for them, namely, to see the heavenly
   Sabbath sooner than they think. Fear not to go down into the Egypt of
   the grave, for the Lord will go down with you into the sepulcher. Jesus
   has been there--fear not to go where He went. Whenever I am called in
   to see any of our dying Church members, I find them, without exception,
   calm and willing to depart. When I come out of the dying chamber I
   invariably feel that my faith has been greatly strengthened.

   The way in which they meet the approach of the great enemy, calmly and
   triumphantly, makes me rest joyfully confident in the Gospel which I
   preach. Our dear Friends sing and even shout joyously in death. One
   Brother, who passed away not long ago, even made me laugh by the joyous
   things he told me in his own quaint way. I could not help laughing for
   joy when he talked about Heaven as if he had been there. There is a
   dear Brother, not many doors from this spot, who will probably soon
   pass away. But he speaks about his departure as calmly as if he were
   only going to the seaside for a holiday. Our Lord's love has changed
   the very aspect of death's face.

   My dear Brother and co-pastor said to me one day, "O Brother, our
   people die well, do they not?" That they do. They give us proof of the
   Truth of God which we preach by the way in which it sustains them in
   their last hours. Without the slightest fear, or perturbation of mind,
   they march onward to the Jordan singing with the stream in view. I know
   no happier people in my acquaintance than a certain suffering few, who
   are within measurable distance of the Celestial City. And so it ought
   to be.

   But what is to become of you who have no faith? What is to become of
   you who have no God to go to? O Soul, if you have no God, you are,
   indeed, miserable. God bring you at once to Himself, through Jesus
   Christ His Son! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

The Father's Love to His Dying Son

   INTENDED FOR READING ON LORD'S-DAY, DECEMBER 8, 1889,

   DELIVERED BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON, ON LORD'S-DAY MORNING,
   NOVEMBER 17, 1889.

   "Therefore does My Father love Me, because I lay down My life, that I
   might take it again." John 10:17

   OUR Lord Jesus here speaks of Himself in His complex personality as God
   and Man, the Mediator between God and men. As such, He comes to us
   first at Bethlehem, "wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a
   manger." We behold Him a babe, a child, a man, a worker, a sufferer, a
   witness for the Truth of God and a victim condemned to die upon the
   tree. We behold Him dead in the grave and risen again as the Interposer
   between God and man.

   In that capacity we shall think of Him during this discourse. It is the
   voice of the Man Christ Jesus, the eternal Son of God, which says,
   "Therefore does My Father love Me, because I lay down My life, that I
   might take it again." The Father feels boundless love to Him who, for
   us men, and for our redemption, came down from Heaven and took upon
   Himself our nature, and being found in fashion as a man, became
   obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross. "Therefore God also
   has highly exalted Him," or, to use His own words, "Therefore does My
   Father love Me."

   At this time we shall not keep strictly to the text but shall introduce
   other truths related to it. The run of our discourse will be somewhat
   as follows--First, consider the Father's love to Jesus because of His
   death and resurrection. Secondly, consider the Father's complacency in
   us on that account. Then, thirdly, consider our love to Jesus on this
   account. And, fourthly, consider our consequent fellowship with the
   Father.

   I. First, CONSIDER THE FATHER'S LOVE TO CHRIST JESUS BECAUSE OF HIS
   DEATH AND RESURRECTION. This love was exceedingly sweet to Jesus.
   Persecuted by men and sometimes depressed in His own spirit, He
   comforts Himself with this, "Therefore does My Father love Me, because
   I lay down My life, that I might take it again." To be well-pleasing to
   the Father was everything with our Lord Jesus Christ. In heaviest toll,
   in dark slander, in deepest perplexity, if His Father only said, "This
   is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased," Jesus was refreshed with
   meat which others knew not of.

   Beloved, let us be like our Lord Jesus in this--let the love of the
   Father to us be our comfort, our joy, our strength, our hope, our
   Heaven. What more can men or angels have than the love of God? Let that
   love be shed abroad in my heart by the Holy Spirit and even the
   celestial city cannot afford me a more pure and substantial delight. O
   my God, Your love is precious beyond all estimate! "Whom have I in
   Heaven but You? And there is none upon earth that I desire beside

   You."

   But to come back to our Lord. The Father took the greatest delight in
   His Son as laying down His life, first, because of the delight of Jesus
   in His Father's plans. Exceedingly high are the thoughts of God in
   reference to His dealings with the sinful sons of men. Jehovah could,
   with a word, make creatures that should be perpetually innocent of sin.
   He could also make creatures which He foreknew would choose evil ways
   and depart into rebellion. But a simple act of creation would not
   produce the character of elect man. A weapon may be struck from the
   anvil at a blow. But a Damascus blade needs special annealing to
   produce the temper needed in a champion's sword.

   The chosen were to be a race who had eaten the fruit of the tree of the
   knowledge of good and evil and so knew good and evil by actual
   practice--especially knew the result of evil in their own persons--for
   they would even die spiritually. But they would be restored from death,
   and Hell, and sin, and would be made haters of transgression, lovers of
   righteousness. Though left to their own free agency, yet when the work
   of Divine Grace was complete in them, they would be of a character to
   which sin would be impossible, since they would so deeply abhor it.

   These persons would be raised to the peerage of the Divine kingdom and
   bear the name and dignity of sons of God, being in very deed Brothers
   in blood to Him who is One with God. They were to be Brothers of the
   Son of God by birth, and yet never to be the subjects of pride. It will
   be infinitely safe for the Lord to entrust us with all the privileges,
   royalties, and liberties of His own household. For this end it was
   necessary that the chosen from among men should undergo a marvelous
   process, much more complex and intricate than that which follows the
   fiat of power--we must in Jesus die-- and be made alive again in Him.

   Beloved, it was necessary, in order to the completion of the plan of
   Divine Grace, that God Himself, in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ,
   should take manhood into eternal union with Godhead. The Son agreed to
   do this and was born of the Virgin. But when He took manhood into union
   with Himself, He took all that belonged to manhood. Now, sin having
   attached itself to manhood, the Christ, in becoming Man, took our sin
   upon Himself, as it is written, "The Lord has laid on Him the iniquity
   of us all."

   He could not be actually guilty--God forbid the thought! But He became
   legally amenable to the penalty due for our transgression. He was
   willing even to make this stoop of condescension. When the Divine Plan
   was proposed to Him, this was His answer--"Lo, I come: in the volume of
   the book it is written of Me, I delight to do Your will, O My God!" Do
   you wonder that the Father loved Him, when He saw in Him such
   sympathetic union with Himself?

   It was the Son's highest pleasure to become subservient to the Sacred
   Plan of glorious Grace, in which, for ages to come, Jehovah would show
   forth the glory of His nature, the splendor of His eternal purpose. All
   the plan was acceptable to Jesus. And He was eager to carry it out at
   His own expense. Though He knew that the work involved His death upon
   the shameful tree, yet He felt so one with the Father that He cried, "I
   delight to do Your will. Yes, Your Law is within My heart."

   When He actually appeared as a child, He went up to the temple and
   amazed His human parents with the words, "Know you not that I must be
   about My Father's business?" Such a Son as this, so intent upon His
   Father's plan--is it any wonder that we read, "Therefore does My Father
   love Me"?

   But His Father also loved Him for the constancy and perseverance with
   which He pursued His lifework, making it His meat and His drink to do
   the will of Him that sent Him. He underwent many rehearsals of His
   passion before it actually came. When He said, "Except a corn of wheat
   falls into the ground and dies, it abides alone: but if it dies, it
   brings forth much fruit"--He was passing through a Baptism of
   soul-trouble. The shadow of His death fell on Him often, before He
   actually carried the Cross.

   But His face was steadfastly set to go to Jerusalem. The plaudits of
   the people never made Him turn aside and aspire to be a king. Their
   denunciations never made Him tremble and seek shelter in obscurity. His
   was a spirit constant to its high intent. To the last He was firm as a
   rock. The manhood in Him shuddered at death--it would not have been
   true manhood if it had not. But, overcoming His natural horror, He took
   the cup and drank it to its dregs, with, "Not as I will, but as You
   will."

   He did say, "If it is possible, let this cup pass from Me." And He
   there warranted us in saying that there was no other way of
   accomplishing the Divine purpose, except by His death. Redemption could
   not be accomplished except by the Substitute bearing the penalty and
   dying, the Just for the unjust, to bring us to God. The Lord Jesus,
   from the beginning, knew what it all meant--He often told His disciples
   what would surely happen to Him.

   He did not go to a suffering of which He was not aware. He was not, as
   one said, like a man who went in among machinery to set it right and
   was caught in a great wheel which was too strong for Him and so was
   dragged to death. My Brethren, our Lord knew all about the strength of
   that great wheel--He foretasted all the woe which the accomplishment of
   His Father's purpose would cost Him. But He went forward, resolvedly
   laying down His life, that He might take it again. Therefore His Father
   loved Him, as well He might. Victim by intent! Redeemer by resolve! Be
   You glorified forever!

   Let me put to you a little picture. No doubt our Queen has a strong
   affection for her sons. She loves them as her children. But if it
   should so befall that one of the princes was found upon the seacoast in
   the hour of storm, endeavoring to save men from a wreck. And if the
   prince, when others stood back, bravely ventured his life to rescue the
   perishing, would not his royal mother love him for his humanity? If he
   threw himself into the surf in his eagerness to

   save. If, foreseeing the consequences, he persevered in giving his own
   life that he might bring poor perishing men to shore--would not his
   mother feel that she loved him anew for his heroism? I think so.

   Would not any of us love with renewed affection a dear son who had
   displayed a sacred self-denial for the good of men? Now turn your
   thought, reverently, to the great Father of spirits, who loves His Son
   as His Son but yet loves Him especially, because, out of pure,
   unselfish love, He laid down His life without debate. Marvel not that
   He said, "Therefore does My Father love Me."

   The chief source of this peculiar love was His actual death as the
   perfecting of His obedience. He had become a servant and He served to
   the end. In all His life no single disobedience ever occurred--the
   great Father's will was the rule absolute. Now comes in the last clause
   of the obedience--He must lay down His life, for so has God appointed.
   And even unto this last He fails not but willingly yields up the ghost.
   Jesus went to the garden and the bloody sweat. He went to the high
   priest's hall and the false accusing--to Pilate's hall and the
   scourging. He went to Herod and the setting at nothing.

   He endured the Cross with its nails, its scorn, its darkness, its
   fever, its death-agony--He went to it all as a lamb goes willingly to
   the slaughter. On the way to death He was careful to obey--He would not
   die until every Scripture had been accomplished. His last words, "I
   thirst," were spoken that the Scriptures might be fulfilled. He
   carefully observed the Father's will in all things--in the detail as
   well as in the gross. And to prove that He obeyed even to the end, He
   said, "It is finished"--and He bowed His head and gave up the ghost.
   The Father is infinitely delighted with the perfect obedience of the
   Son. He is a holy God, and He sees in Jesus, holiness perfected by
   patience. Therefore He calls Him, "My Elect, in whom My soul delights."

   Remember, also, that the death of our Lord Jesus was not only the
   perfection of obedience but the vindication of God's righteous Law.
   Some would have a god without law, that he might be love alone. This
   might suit anarchists and the like. Let them, like the heathen, have a
   god of their own making. Is it not well spoken by the Psalmist, "They
   that make them are like unto them"? A lawless man fashions for himself
   a lawless god. But he who knows that society cannot exist unless there
   is law and unless law is sanctioned with reward and punishment,
   delights to see that this is, also, the mind of God.

   God has the deepest concern for order and Law. There was no anger in
   God against men, as men. For while they abode in purity, He communed
   with them. But the thrice-holy God must hate evil in every form and He
   must abhor it even in His most favored creatures. If the Lord should
   forgive sinners without demanding a penalty, He would weaken the
   foundations of moral government. In his magisterial capacity the Judge
   of all the earth perceived that He could by no means spare the guilty.
   It would not have been an act of mercy to the race of men if God had
   winked at human sin in any case. It would have been in conflict with
   the fundamental Law of the universe.

   Every rank of angels and intelligent beings in all worlds would have
   been affected--affected mischievously--had it been proved that Jehovah
   had in any case set aside His own perfect Law and allowed the breach of
   it to go unpunished. It is not a case of private offense against an
   individual--it is rebellion against the highest authority. Sin must be
   punished, therefore. And Jesus came to do honor to the broken Law. He
   was innocent. But He voluntarily submitted Himself as the
   Representative for men, to suffer so that God could righteously
   forgive.

   The Law must be magnified and made honorable, and when the Lawmaker,
   Himself, died under the penalty of the Law, then a sufficient
   vindication was given to the vital principle of moral government. The
   Law became more illustrious in righteousness by the death of the Lord
   Jesus Christ than if every guilty son of Adam had been cast into Hell
   because of his transgressions. Christ's sufferings were unto the Law of
   God a full justification for the free pardon of guilty men-- and as the
   Father looks at the Son and sees Him lay down His life that He might
   take it again, He is well content in justice to forgive, and in
   righteousness to justify, the sinner. Truly said the Lord Jesus,
   "Therefore does My Father love

   Me."

   Beloved, my heart delights in the thought that He who is a consuming
   fire against all sin, yet, when He looks on Christ, sees such a
   vindication given to His Law, that He can justly sheathe His sword and
   smile on those whom once He was bound to smite.

   Once more, I think we may say that the Father loves the Son in His
   death and resurrection, because He herein manifested His supreme love
   to men. We may say of our Lord Jesus, "Yes, He loved the people. All
   His saints are in His

   hands." The love of Jesus to His chosen is no new thing--no idea that
   sprang up yesterday, to perish tomorrow. Long ages ago, when the
   mountains were not brought forth and the ancient hills had not lifted
   their heads, the saints had a dwelling place in the heart of God. He
   saw us in the glass of His foreknowledge and loved us according to the
   predestination of His will.

   From of old the Father loved us so as to give us His Son and the Son
   loved us so as to give His life a ransom for us. And because of this
   love to one chosen object there was a fresh display of love to each
   other. I said, in the opening of my discourse, that the Father always
   loved the Son as God, but in our text we have a love of Him as Man and
   God in one wondrous Personality, in which are blended the two natures
   of holy God and perfect Man. The Mediator loved us so that He died for
   us, a sacrifice unto God, presented by infinite love in our place. And
   He says, "Therefore does My Father love Me, because I lay down My
   life."

   Only this word more--the resurrection is mentioned as ensuring the
   result, and as therefore being another opportunity for love to break
   forth. Jesus says, "I lay down My life, that I might take it again." If
   that prince, of whom I spoke just now, had leaped from the side of a
   vessel to save a drowning man, it would have been a grand action. But
   if he sank never to rise again, his memory would have been enshrined in
   the grief of the Queen's heart. But he would not have been able to say,
   "Therefore does my mother love me." Jesus sinks into the dark wave but
   He rises again. I see Him make the great plunge into the abyss. But He
   cries, "You will not leave My soul in Hell; neither will You suffer
   Your Holy One to see corruption."

   He lifts His head above the black billows. He strikes out for the
   shore. He lands in safety with those whom He has rescued. How the Lord
   must delight in the risen Jesus and in all that follows upon His
   victory over the grave! Now is death defeated by the death of the
   Well-Beloved. Now is a new life ensured for dead sinners. Now is the
   clearance of all the once condemned published both to Hell and Heaven.
   Say, who is He that has passed the iron gate, descended into the abodes
   of death and then returned triumphant to the upper air? Who is this,
   you angel-watchers, at the gates of Glory? Who is this kingly
   Conqueror? "Lift up your heads, O you gates. And be you lift up, you
   everlasting doors. And the King of Glory shall come in."

   The Lord of Hosts, the Lord mighty in battle, has laid down His life
   and taken it again. He has done it as readily and effectually as once
   He laid down His garments and shortly girt them about Him again, after
   He had washed the feet of His disciples. Having redeemed and cleansed
   us by His blood, He puts on again the human body, which for a while, He
   had cast aside. Jesus is glorified in all whom He has saved by His
   death and rising.

   But His greatest glory is that the Father loves Him. Sweet are the
   songs of the saved on earth and blessed are the anthems of the redeemed
   in Heaven. But to Jesus, the best reward which is possible lies in this
   word--"Therefore does My Father love Me." Before me, in this Divine
   love, I see a great deep, which I may not attempt to explore--I have
   but brushed the surface as with a swallow's wing.

   II. Secondly, CONSIDER THE FATHER'S COMPLACENCY IN US ON ACCOUNT OF HIS
   DELIGHT IN HIS

   SON. Beloved, the Father loves His Son so much that His love overflows
   its banks and covers all of us whom the Lord Jesus has taken to be His
   own. The Father's love is like a great beacon kindled in honor of the
   Well-Beloved but shedding its radiance far and wide to enlighten those
   who sit in darkness and in the valley of the shadow of death. Let us
   contemplate this fact so fraught with blessing to all Believers.

   First, as our Lord Jesus is a Man, the Father places His work to man's
   account. The Lord had made man in His own image. He had created him a
   remarkable being of united matter and spirit. But man made a revolt
   from Him, so that, "it repented the Lord that He had made man on the
   earth." When the Lord looks upon our race at this moment, He cannot
   take satisfaction in creatures who have made themselves so vile. Our
   nature is prone to evil, and it cannot but be abhorrent unto the
   thrice-holy Jehovah.

   Yet is man not blotted out from the list of beings, for there is one
   Man, true Man, born of a woman, made under the Law--a partaker of flesh
   and blood, who is in Himself so well-pleasing to the Lord--that He
   makes up for all the displeasure felt towards the rest of our race.
   This Man was so obedient, so self-sacrificing, so pure, so devout, so
   gentle, so everything that is admirable, that when the Father considers
   Him, the virtues of that one Man's life and death endear to Him the
   race. For His sake He forgets the sins of men and is well-pleased to
   accept all who are united to Him.

   "By the obedience of One shall many be made righteous." The savor of
   this one Man's sacrifice has sweetened all the offerings of His
   fellows. It was a Man who, for the sake of the Divine Glory, sweat, as
   it were, great drops of blood and died upon the Cross. And therefore is
   the Lord well-pleased, even with guilty men for whom Jesus stood as the
   second Adam, and for whom He has won acceptance before the Throne.

   Next, remember that the Lord Jesus has so glorified the Father, that
   His great achievements are made to redound to our benefit. All the
   works of God's hands praise Him. All the deeds of His Providence extol
   him. But redemption brings Him His highest honors. In the Person of the
   Redeemer, Jehovah is best made known--

   "God, in the Person of His Son, Has all His mightiest works outdone."

   When the Father hears dishonor put upon the Divine name by blasphemers,
   or false teachers. When He sees the drunkenness and lust, the pride and
   cruelty of men, He is grieved at His heart--but on the other hand, all
   the dishonor is covered and put away by the glory of the Character and
   work of the Man, Christ Jesus.

   I cannot utter my own thoughts on this point--much less can I think
   adequately upon such a theme. It is as if the millions of the redeemed
   were so many evil lamps all pouring forth darkness, and filling the
   universe with blackness. And then, on the other side, this one blessed
   lamp of God stood alone, pouring forth light. And the sacred light was
   so powerful that it banished all the darkness of the myriad
   night-makers and created eternal and unclouded day.

   I will change the example and say that all of us were as the Dead Sea,
   full of foul waters, reeking with deadly odors-- and the life of Jesus,
   poured out for us--has turned that lake of death into a pure and
   sparkling sea of life. The purity of Jesus suffices to purify all the
   multitudes of the human race who put their trust in Him. God loves His
   Son because He gets a glory from Him which cancels the dishonor worked
   by all the sins of men.

   Note, again, that as God has great complacency in His Son, it runs over
   to us, because we are one with Jesus. I say not this of you all. For
   some of you have nothing to do with Christ at this time. But of as many
   as believe in Jesus, I may say, "We are members of His body, of His
   flesh and of His bones." The Father's love to His Son extends to all
   the members of His Son's mystical body. What? Though we should be only
   comparable to the soles of our Lord's feet, and are still in the mire,
   yet, if we are in the body, we share with the Head in all its glories.

   You know the old proverb, "Love me, love my dog." And certainly the
   Lord Jesus Christ might well say, "Love Me, love the least of My
   people." The Father, like David, loves every lame Mephibosheth of the
   household, for the sake of His Jonathan. Brethren, as many of us as are
   joined unto the Lord by a living faith--we are one with Jesus--we are
   by eternal union one. When He died, we died. When He rose, we rose. We
   were condemned and justified in Him. And now that the Father loves Him,
   we also are beloved in Him. What a blessed thing it is that the Father
   loves One who has such an intimate relation to us as to be our
   Representative and Head!

   Meditate upon this overflow of the Father's love to the elect whom He
   has given to His Son. He so loved the Chief Beloved, that, for His
   sake, we are accepted. We are perfected and at last will be glorified.
   This is true of myriads of men--myriads! You speak of great
   congregations--but all that ever assemble here are a mere handful. Look
   at the countless congregation redeemed by our Lord's death--"a
   multitude, which no man can number, of all nations and kindreds and
   people and tongues."

   Remember the multitudes who have died in infancy, redeemed by precious
   blood from all the consequences of the Fall. Consider the multitudes of
   converts in the latter days, when the glory of the Lord shall be
   revealed. "For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so
   by the obedience of One, shall many be made righteous." How many, human
   arithmetic fails to tell.

   Now, call to mind the number and the variety of sins which have been
   committed by the redeemed company. All those sins are washed away by
   the blood of Christ. The love of God in Christ Jesus sees no iniquity
   in Jacob, for the atonement has put away all manner of offenses. The
   love of the Father to Jesus has made us comely in His comeliness,
   despite the multitude of deformities which were found in us. O sea of
   love, in which so vast a host of sins was swallowed up! How greatly
   does the Father love the Son when, for His dear sake, He covers all the
   myriad causes of displeasure, and makes us precious in His sight!

   Then remember that while Jesus has redeemed so many and cleansed them
   from so many sins, He has done more. For by the Father's love to Him
   they are made partakers of very many most costly blessings. Could you
   calculate the wealth

   of benefits wherewith the Lord daily loads His redeemed? Covenant
   mercies, who shall weigh them? Yet they all come through the Father's
   love of Jesus.

   Above all, reflect that we have eternal life through our Lord's death.
   God so loves Jesus that, because of His temporary death, He has given
   endless life to all the redeemed. Jesus died once, and therefore we
   live forever. Because the Father's love to Him can never die and He
   ever lives, we shall live also. His passing sorrow brings us eternal
   glory. Because of Christ's death, millions and millions of years from
   now, we shall still be the children of God and shall be with Jesus
   where He is, beholding the glory which the Father has given Him. Admire
   the measureless merit of the Lord Jesus!

   Meditate with reverence upon the overflowing torrents of the Father's
   love to His Son! Because of His death He is unspeakably beloved and we
   are beloved in him. Here it were well to pause. No tongue can ever
   express this matchless story. We are "accepted in the Beloved." How
   greatly beloved must He have been to cover such base things as we are
   with Divine acceptance! Think it over! Think it over! In Heaven you
   will need no fuller or loftier subject of meditation than the love of
   the Father to the Only-Begotten, enwrapping in its folds the whole
   family of love. "Therefore does My Father love Me."

   Oh, how He must love Jesus, since for His sake He loves multitudes of
   sinners and loves them all the way from the door of Hell to the gate of
   Heaven! By the bliss eternal, by the rivers of pleasure that are at
   God's right hand, by the glory without bounds, we may form some idea of
   the love of the Father to Him who laid down His life that He might take
   it again.

   III. In the third place, CONSIDER OUR LOVE TO THE LORD JESUS ON THIS
   ACCOUNT. Beloved, His death is the great fact for which we love our
   Lord Jesus. The individual love of each Believer wells up when he can
   say, "He loved me and gave Himself for me." This, also, is the crowning
   evidence of God's love to Believers in general, for "God so loved the
   world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believes in
   Him should not perish."

   His laying down His life is the central display of His love and the
   chief cause of our affection. We love Him for the holiness of His
   Character, for the tenderness of His heart, for the excellence of His
   teaching. And, indeed, we love Him for everything about His blessed
   Person and work. But, if the secret must be told, our hearts were
   chiefly won when our Beloved put on the crimson vesture and stood
   before us decked with wounds and pale in death. Then did we sing of
   Him-- "White and ruddy is my Beloved."

   Oh, the beauties of our King when He stands beneath the purple canopy
   of sacrifice! Then is our heart won and held in joyful captivity when
   we can say, "You were slain and have redeemed us to God by Your blood."
   That text often thrills my heart wherein we read, "Who His own Self
   bore our sins in His own body on the tree." Calvary reveals the great
   fountain of our love. The Cross is the pole whereon is uplifted the
   banner of love, both His and ours. We love Him because He first loved
   us and Golgotha is the window through which His love looks.

   The connection of our text enhances our Lord's love. It stands
   connected with the Good Shepherd. It is He that lays down His life. He
   gives it for the sheep. Will a man die for sheep? Yes, that may be. But
   could the Son of God die for such base creatures as we are? We were, of
   ourselves, by no means so great a treasure to Christ as a sheep is to a
   man. And yet He thought far more of us than shepherds do of their
   flocks. We were, by nature, only as so many foxes, or serpents, or
   creeping things. But yet the Lord Christ, having set His love upon us,
   would not rest till He had laid down His life for us. Alas, we were as
   ungrateful as we were unworthy.

   We even opposed the efforts of our Savior. We acted more like goats
   than sheep, for we butted with our horns against our Shepherd. We were
   stray sheep and did not return at His call--we did not follow Him but
   we went farther and farther away. We were lame as to returning. But
   "when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the
   ungodly." We are sheep, too, that still go astray very grievously. Woe
   is me, that this should be true of me! After having been brought back
   on His shoulders, after having been pastured by His care, yet still I
   go astray! We are sheep that were lost.

   We are sheep that would lose themselves again, if we could--sheep that
   make a very poor return to Him that shepherds us. "Is this your
   kindness to your Friend?" is a question which might often awake sad
   memories in our hearts. Beloved, let us love our Lord more! Surely, we
   cannot help it, as we perceive our own vileness and the greatness of
   His love whereby He laid down His life for us.

   And remember that the Lord laid down His life of His own free will and
   under no constraint whatever. If you or I were to die for other people,
   we should be only doing a little sooner what we shall be obliged to do
   one day--for death is the debt of nature which, sooner or later, all
   must pay. If a man yields his life for another, he only anticipates by
   a short season the time when he must lose it. But Jesus needed not to
   die at all, so far as He, Himself, was concerned. "Messiah was cut off,
   but not for Himself."

   What love is this! He wills to die. He says of His life, "No man takes
   it from Me but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down and
   I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of My
   Father." Herein is love indeed, free love, deliberate and resolute. I
   see the bullocks going to the altar of the temple--poor, dumb, driven
   cattle, they know not that they are to be a sacrifice--they cannot
   throw into their deaths the merit of devout intent.

   Behold our Lord going to the slaughter as a sheep in regard to
   patience, but not like a sheep for knowledge and purpose--He knew what
   that slaughter meant and why He must endure it. "Lama Sabacthani!" was
   in its meaning known to Him before He uttered the cry. He foresaw the
   death on the Cross--He was made a curse for us, knowing what the curse
   meant and calmly resolving to bear it. For this deliberation of love He
   has our inexpressible gratitude and love. Do we not each one love Him?
   We should love Him, for Jesus laid down His life for each one of His
   people.

   This love in general is a delightful theme. But how tender and touching
   it becomes when each one sees his own participation in it and cries,
   "He loved me and gave Himself for me"! Love delights in personal
   pronouns, "My Beloved is mine and I am His." Love is most of all
   excited and called forth by a personal sense of gracious gifts
   received. It is a heart-moving song when we can sing, "Unto me, who am
   less than the least of all saints, is this Grace given." Remember, that
   to save one single soul, our Lord

   would have had to die and yet to save all men in the world He could
   have done no more.

   And if there had been as many worlds of sinners as there are grains of
   sand upon the seashore, His one death would have been a sufficient
   vindication of the Law on account of them all. We can imagine no limit
   to the value of Christ's atoning sacrifice. Its object could not have
   been attained by anything less than the laying down of His life. He
   died for His flock and for each one of His sheep in particular--so that
   we may each one say today, "He loved me and gave Himself for me." And
   each one knows that for himself, with special intent, the Lord Jesus
   bore the agony and bloody sweat, the Cross and passion. Therefore we
   must, each one of us, love Him to our heart's utmost capacity.

   Indulge yourself with a sight of His love as it hangs bleeding on the
   tree. It may be, poor Soul, this morning you are bowed down with
   trouble because of sin and yet you are a child of God--see, then, how
   Jesus loves! Do what you did at first, when, in your soul's dark hour,
   you did look to Jesus. Look to His Cross. Look wholly to the slain
   Jesus. "His blood has made peace--

   And brought us release, And now the old bondage Forever must cease. Who
   trust in His might He leads into light-- Nor can any enemy Break on His
   right."

   Blessed, forever blessed, be Your dear name, O Jesus! There is none
   like it in Heaven, nor in the Heaven of heavens. How shall we praise
   Him? Our tears of gratitude come to our rescue. If we cannot speak His
   praises, we will weep them.

   IV. I shall conclude by saying, CONSIDER WHAT A FELLOWSHIP IS OPENED UP
   BETWEEN THE SAVED

   ONES AND THE FATHER. The Father loves the Son and we love Him, also,
   after our measure. Brethren, we are agreed with the great God with whom
   once we were at enmity. Since we have seen our Lord lay down His life
   for us, we love Him. How can we do otherwise? For the same reason the
   Father loves Him--the very strongest love is confirmed when a common
   object of affection becomes a rivet between the two parties. Two hearts
   may be one in married love, but their union is intensified when a
   baby's cry is heard in the house. Seldom are they parted by divorce who
   have blended their love in watching over a company of little children.

   Beloved, when the Father looks on Jesus, He sees One who is altogether
   lovely to Him, and when we look on Jesus in our poor, half-blind
   manner, we also are charmed by His beauties. No enmity can remain
   between a soul and God when love to Jesus becomes the master passion of
   life. By His Cross, our Lord has slain the enmity. His death has cast a
   bond

   around the divided ones and has reconciled us to God. The
   thrice-glorious Jehovah agrees with the blood-washed Sinner in
   glorifying His Son.

   In the blood of Jesus we are made clean, and therefore we love Him--the
   Father sees Jesus pouring out His heart's blood to make us clean and He
   loves Him on that account--thus the two who were apart are agreed in
   one. From now on we desire to honor Christ and we are grieved if He is
   not magnified. Whenever you hear a sermon which praises the Lord Jesus,
   does not your heart dance like David before the ark? But if your Lord
   is dishonored, do you not feel indignant? Could you not bear anything
   sooner than hear your Lord defamed?

   In the congregation, when His atonement has been decried, have you not
   found yourself on the move? And if you did not move, but kept your
   seat, did you not bite your lip? You love Him and you cannot permit Him
   to be thrust into second place. If it were in your power, you would set
   Him upon a glorious high throne and make every knee bow before Him.
   That is what the Father is doing and will yet do--thus the Father and
   you are one towards Jesus.

   You have also an intense desire to become like your Lord, have you not?
   Ever since He bought you with His blood and you knew it, you have
   longed to be conformed to His image. This, also, is the Father's
   design, for He desires His Well-Beloved to be the "first-born among
   many Brethren." He loves our Lord Jesus so much that He has
   predestinated us to be conformed to His image. There cannot be another
   Divine Son, but the Father would have many human sons who shall be like
   the first-born.

   If you have ever stood in the middle of a hall of mirrors, you have
   seen yourself repeated on all sides. Even so shall Heaven be full of
   lovely reflections of Him who is altogether lovely. For every
   blood-washed one shall wear the likeness of the Lord from Heaven. The
   Father can never have too much of His dear Son. He would have Him live
   in ten thousand times ten thousand beloved ones--and as this, also,
   would be your highest joy, you have in this desire a wonderful bond of
   union between you and the Father.

   I think I hear you say, "Now I perceive that the Father Himself, loved
   men, for He gave the Son He loved so well to die for them and loved Him
   for dying on their behalf." This is an instructive discovery. When
   Abraham called Isaac to go up to Mount Moriah to be offered up as a
   sacrifice, Isaac could have resisted his father's will. But he did not.
   They went both of them together to the place of the offering. Abraham
   loved Isaac when he bound him--yes, he loved him all the more for
   consenting to be bound. Not only did Abraham, the father, offer his
   son, but Isaac, the son, voluntarily surrendered himself. And his
   father deeply loved him for that self-surrender.

   Jesus, the greater Isaac, did actually give up His life in our place,
   to achieve His Father's purpose, vindicate His Father's Law, and save
   the people whom His Father had given Him. Therefore does the Father
   love Him and we love Him--and we love the Father who freely delivered
   Him up for us all. Thus

   love completes its circle and God and man are made one by Christ's
   work, even as they are one in His Person.

   If anyone here has, by believing contemplation, found his way through
   the process described in my sermon, he is no longer an enemy to God,
   nor even a stranger to the Most High. For the death of Jesus has drawn
   him near. If you have followed me in this track, not merely with an
   attentive ear but with a willing heart, you are reconciled to God by
   the death of His Son. You love Jesus because He died and God loves Him
   for the same reason. You two have linked hands over the great
   Sacrifice.

   What a joy is this! I feel as if I could find no better conclusion than
   the glowing verse of William Williams--

   "To You, my God, my Savior, Praise be forever new. Let people come to
   praise You In numbers like the dew. Oh, that in every meadow The grass
   were harps of gold, To sing to Him for coming To ransom hosts untold!"
     __________________________________________________________________

The Planter of the Ear Must Hear

   INTENDED FOR READING ON LORD'S-DAY, DECEMBER 15, 1889.

   DELIVERED BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON, ON THURSDAY EVENING, OCTOBER
   31, 1889.

   "He that planted the ear, shall He not hear? He that formed the eye,
   shall He not see?" Psalm 94:9

   THE character of a man hinges upon his relation to God. You may know
   what manner of man he is and what are his communications, if you find
   out how he stands towards God. With many, God is a mere name--a word to
   be pronounced more or less reverently. But nothing more. He is not a
   force operating upon their daily lives. His Glory is no motive of
   action, no object of desire, no joy of their heart. "God is not in all
   their thoughts." And in consequence their lives are not conformed to
   His holy Law. Blessed be the Most High, there are a few to whom God is
   everything--the First and Last, the Center and Circumference of their
   being.

   To them the Lord is the great trust and treasure of their spirit. He is
   the rock of their confidence, the well-spring of their delight. Such
   men as they that delight in God, will seek after holiness and aim at
   perfection. God has shined upon them and their faces will be bright.
   God dwells within them, and as from a kindled lamp, light will stream
   forth.

   Among the ungodly there are many whose lives prove that they know
   nothing about God. Indeed, their ignorance of God is their support in
   their present behavior. They comfort themselves with the notion, "The
   Lord shall not see, neither shall the God of Jacob regard it." To them
   God is out of the world as to observation or practical interference.
   They do not care whether He sees them or not. Their belief is that if
   He does see, He cares nothing what men may think or do. He is too far
   off to be concerned about human affairs. He will neither grow angry
   with the sin of the wicked, nor take pleasure in the holiness of the
   godly.

   Of this practical atheism I am going to speak at this time, pleading
   against that frame of mind by the argument of the text. "He that
   planted the ear, shall He not hear? He that formed the eye, shall He
   not see?" May the Holy Spirit help me in my endeavor and may all my
   hearers believe in the living, hearing, seeing Jehovah!

   I. Our first observation will be THE NOTION THAT GOD CANNOT HEAR OR SEE
   IS PERNICIOUS. In judging it, we will follow the line of the Psalm
   which now lies open before us.

   We perceive that men who talked in this godless fashion were proud.
   Therefore the prayer, "Lift up Yourself, You Judge of the earth: render
   a reward to the proud." The man who thinks that God is not in the
   world, or is not at all concerned in its affairs, thinks that he is,
   himself, about the greatest person in existence. There may be some
   other poor creatures about, but he is, in many respects, the most
   deserving of esteem. He who thinks little of God, thinks much of
   himself. "Who is the Lord," he says, "that I should obey His voice?"

   Who talks like this but Pharaoh, the king, the potent one, accustomed
   to having his own will in everything? Those speak exceeding proud who
   have no knowledge of the Most High. Measuring themselves by others like
   themselves, they are not wise. The worm exalts itself above its meaner
   fellow worms and dreams not of the great Eternal One who fills all
   things. Pride is very apt to grow great when knowledge is small, and
   reverence is absent. Proud language usually goes with profane talk and
   blasphemous ideas. For it comes of the same kindred. "How long shall
   they utter and speak hard things? And all the workers of iniquity boast
   themselves?"

   If there is no God, or no God to care about, then straightway men
   delight in uttering things which make the blood of the godly curdle.
   They render no praise to God, since they seek all glory for themselves.
   Because of their own conceit, they question His wisdom, cavil at His
   Word, doubt His justice, impugn the sentences of His bar and speak evil
   of Him even as they wish. Give a man of proud heart a fluent tongue and
   opportunity enough to speak of God, and then take

   away from him the idea that God hears him--and there is no telling to
   what lengths of profanity he will hasten. His tongue is set on fire by
   Hell and it burns with an inconceivable fury.

   If you have ever been forced to hear or read the expressions of
   renowned infidels, you can form some idea of how completely Satan works
   his will with godless men. Take God away and the brakes are taken off,
   and the train dashes down hill at terrific speed. "Their tongue walks
   through the earth," says David. No bounds can be set to the evil
   perambulations of an atheistic tongue. Not even Heaven itself is free
   from the assaults of its pride--"They set their mouth against the
   heavens." They slander God, Himself, because they imagine that He does
   not hear.

   Nor is this the end of the mischief. When the fear of God is taken away
   from men, they frequently proceed to persecute His servants. The
   Prophet complains, "They break in pieces Your people, O Lord, and
   afflict Your heritage." As they hate God, so they manifest their hate
   against His people. If they cannot get at the leader, if they cannot
   smite the shepherd, they will at least worry the flock. Read the long
   and cruel story of human malice against the Church of God-- it mingles
   with the record of every nation--it is an awful history, written in
   tears and gore.

   The sacramental host of God's elect has left behind it in its marches a
   trail of blood and ashes, filling up, in the persons of the persecuted,
   that which was behind of the sufferings of the Lord. For all that grief
   was meant for Him if His enemies could but have poured it on His head.
   At times it has seemed as if God had given up His people and caused the
   rod of the wicked to rest upon His heritage. No wonder that it was so
   with them. For thus it pleased Him to deal with his Only-Begotten Son.
   He delivered Him up to the world to do with Him as it wished. The
   Father did not interpose, though they spat in His face, though they
   scourged Him, though they blindfolded Him and buffeted Him and made
   nothing of

   Him.

   Yes, though they nailed Him to the accursed tree and stood to gloat
   their cruel eyes upon His agonies, the great God did not interfere to
   save the Beloved of His soul. A greater force than almighty power held
   omnipotence itself in check, that it should not lift its finger to
   rescue the Lord's Anointed. If He was to save others, He could not be
   saved Himself. Though He cried, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken
   Me?" yet Jehovah left His own Son to die in the hands of the ungodly.
   You know the reason why. But, apart from that, it was a strange
   procedure.

   The Lord may deal thus with His own Church and His own cause, till His
   people cry, "How has the Lord covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud
   in His anger!" The Truth of God may appear to be wounded, slain, dead
   and even buried. But yet, as Jesus rose again, so shall His true Church
   and cause rise again, though they are laid in the grave and the stone
   is sealed, and the watch is set. Truth, though entombed, must rise
   again. For her Lord arose and God is with His cause as He was with His
   Son.

   Beloved, when men think that there is no God and speak evil of the Most
   High, we need not wonder that they take liberty to persecute the chosen
   of God. There is no telling to what lengths of cruelty men will go when
   unhindered by a sense of God's Presence. The Psalm says, "They slay the
   widow and the stranger, and murder the fatherless." Take God away and
   what a place this world would be! Without religion our earth would soon
   become a huge Aceldama, a field of blood. Ah, dear Friends, men little
   know what they owe to the presence of God's people even in a city like
   this. There is no reason but religion, why London should not become
   like Paris during the Reign of Terror.

   If it were not that God has respect to the faithful that dwell in the
   midst of the city, He might give it over to the ungodly. And no greater
   plague could come upon it. When men say, "Does God see? Does God know?"
   then they seek every man his own. And, if they can, they turn like
   tigers upon each other--society is torn to pieces and the weak are
   devoured. If the Lord had not left us a remnant who fear His name, we
   had been as Sodom and had been made like unto Gomorrah. There is no
   telling how far the Evil One may be let loose to excite men to evil.
   But, in any case, the chosen means of the devil will be the spread of
   atheistic principles among the masses. A world without God is a world
   without fear, without Law, without order, without hope.

   Note well, that if we were persuaded that God did not hear and did not
   see, there would be an end of worship, would there not? Could you
   worship a deaf God? I must confess that such a being would not be God
   to me. If He could not hear and hear all things, I should see at once a
   limit to His nature. And a being of limited nature is not God, since
   God is and must be, of necessity, infinite, to be God at all. Though it
   is hard to conceive what infinity must be, we must predicate it of the
   Godhead. And, if it is gone, the Godhead is gone with it--and there is
   an end of belief in God.

   The idea of a deaf God is absurd. Does not Jehovah see me? If not, then
   He does not see all things--He is blind to something. Could you worship
   a blind God? If you could, you are on a par with those to whom you talk
   of sending missionaries. For their gods "have eyes but they see
   not--they have ears, but they hear not." And they that make them as
   like unto they are. He is an idolater and not a worshipper of the
   living and true God, who worships a being of whom he entertains the
   notion that he cannot hear or see. There is clearly an end of worship
   when there is an end of belief in a hearing and observing God.

   Nor is this all--it seems to me that there is, to a large extent, an
   end of the moral sense--if there is no God to punish sin, then every
   man will do as seems right in his own eyes. And why should he not? By
   what consideration will he be hindered? If there is no reward for
   righteousness, and righteousness involves self-denial, why should he
   deny himself? If there is to be no punishment for sin and sin is
   pleasurable, why should he not seize the pleasure?

   Take away all thought that God sees and hears, and you have removed the
   underlying basis upon which morality itself is to be built up. A
   godless world is a lawless world. Anarchy comes in when the fear of God
   goes out. And all the mischiefs that you can imagine, and much more,
   rush in like a flood. Without God, or even with a god that does not see
   and does not hear, where is the hope of the despairing? Tonight she
   will go home with a broken heart, for, alas, her last friend is dead.
   She will cover her face and sit astonished in her sorrow. And now what
   can she do?

   Poor woman, with no helper upon earth, where will she look? If she can
   bow by the side of that poor bed and cast her care on God, that loves
   and cares for her, she will rise out of the deep of her distress. But
   if there is none in Heaven to note her misery, the help of the
   helpless, the hope of the hopeless, is taken away. What now remains?
   And he that is full of disease, and near to die--upon whom the
   physician has looked down as he lies in the hospital and has shaken his
   head. He knows that his doom is sealed, and that he will never quit
   that bed except to exchange it for the grave--if he has no God, how
   will he turn his face to the wall in the gall of bitterness, and moan
   in anguish never to be relieved?

   But if God sees and hears, the widow is not without a helper and the
   dying man, in all his agony, is not without a hope. O cruel Unbelief,
   put not out our one sun, take not from the mourner his one consolation.
   Let me lose myself, but not my God, who is more than life to me. Yes,
   if you can, you may blot the glory out of Heaven and silence every
   angel's harp, and quench in endless night the sevenfold luster of the
   celestial light. But leave me my God and I shall have all Heaven back
   again in Him and somewhat more.

   Oh, yes, a God that hears and sees--we must have Him--or else we are
   orphaned indeed! If God does not see and hear, we are shipwrecked upon
   the rock of blank atheism. I do not care a bit what men believe in,
   whether it is pantheism, or agnosticism, or theism. If they have no
   personal God that hears and sees, they have, in fact, no God at all.
   "There is a power that makes for righteousness," said one. But if that
   power is insensible and never communicates with man and never notices
   him, there is nothing in the forced admission of any use to him who
   makes it or hears it. It is big talk, such as men call "bosh," and
   nothing more.

   Though it is veiled in the language of philosophy, the scientific
   jargon which makes God into insensible force is covert atheism. I must
   have a God that hears and sees, and comes into the arena of my daily
   life and helps me because He loves me, or else I have no God. My God
   dwells with me and works for me, or else I have no God. Fine words,
   pretty phrases and magnificent definitions, are so many bags of wind
   and go for nothing--there cannot be a deaf God, nor a blind God, nor an
   insensible God. If any of you so believe, go to Bedlam and find there
   your fit associates. As for us, we know that the God of Abraham, of
   Isaac, and of Jacob is the living God and His memorial is that He hears
   prayer. So much for the first point.

   II. But, secondly, THE NOTION THAT GOD CANNOT SEE AND HEAR IS AN ABSURD
   NOTION. According

   to our text, it is proved to be unreasonable. "He that planted the ear,
   shall He not hear?" Think of that argument--here is a creature which
   has ears and can hear--the God who created that being--can He not hear?
   Has He given to His creature more than He has Himself? Has He made a
   creature which excels Himself in essential faculties? Has He bestowed a
   sense which He Himself never had? How can it be? The God that makes a
   man with ears to hear, must possess hearing Himself.

   The very idea of hearing seems to me to necessitate that He who
   conceived the idea was Himself able to hear. He could not have borrowed
   the idea, for there was no other being but Himself in the
   beginning--from where die He get the thought but from His own being?
   That the mind of man should be reached by the gate of the ear, by an
   impression upon

   an auditory nerve, is a wonderful conception. If you do not think so,
   because you are so used to it, I would like you to tell me whether you
   could invent a sixth sense. You have hearing, smelling, taste, feeling,
   seeing. Will you invent another? You have not the power to invent
   another sense. And the idea of any sense which now exists must have
   been equally a feat of boundless wisdom, impossible to a being who
   could not hear and see.

   He that invented the idea, also planned the way by which hearing would
   become possible. What an intellect was that which forged the link
   between matter and mind, so that the movements of particles of air and
   the impression made by these upon the drum of the ear should turn into
   impressions upon mind and heart! God must have every power in
   perfection, or He could not have contrived and constructed such an
   admirable instrument as the ear.

   I should not think the time ill-spent if I were able to give you a
   lecture upon the human ear. We know far less about it than we do
   concerning the eye. And my own knowledge of it is so scant that I can
   only glance at the subject. That outer portion which we commonly call
   the ear is only the vestibule of curious, intricate, winding passages
   which communicate with chambers of bone and vaults of ivory. Curtains
   are stretched along these passages--membranes which tremble as the head
   of a drum, or vibrate like a tambourine.

   Between two of these parchment curtains a chain of very small bones is
   extended. Have you ever heard of the stirrup bone? Rows of fine
   threads, or nerves, convey the motion, or the sound, into the brain,
   and there the soul sits waiting for the news. It is all wonderful. Nor
   must I forget to remind you that the ear is "planted." The important
   part--the real ear--is so deeply seated in the head, as to be beyond a
   mere external inspection. The lobe of the ear is like a leaf above
   ground but the hearing organ is "planted" in the skull. It is placed
   very near the brain and operates on both sides of it, so as to keep the
   whole mind in communication with sounds from every quarter. The ear is
   set deep, and its chambers-- some filled with air and some filled with
   liquid--are thus protected from much harm, which might otherwise come
   to them from the outer world.

   An ear doctor who explained to you the mechanism of the ear should make
   you feel that an undevout member of his profession is mad. The infinite
   wisdom of God is seen in this gate of sense. And it is there in far
   greater measure than we can perceive. And can you believe that this
   marvelous instrument for hearing was made by a deaf God, or a dead God,
   or an impersonal power? Or that it came into existence through "a
   fortuitous concourse of atoms"? I know not the precise terms in which
   they now attempt to describe creation without a Creator, design without
   a designer. But I can say that those who believe in ears created by an
   unhearing force or being, have more faith than I can muster.

   No, I venture to say that their faith has overleaped itself, has
   climbed to the top of the ladder and gone down on the other side--so
   that, instead of being great faith, it has rotted into gross credulity.
   To fly from the difficulties of faith to the impossibilities of
   unbelief, is a singular infatuation. I prefer to believe in a personal,
   intelligent First Cause.

   But even if you had an ear made--and I suppose that it would be no very
   great difficulty to fashion, in wax or some other substance, an exact
   resemblance to an ear--could you produce hearing then? God alone gives
   the life which hears. That particular point in which motion is
   translated into audible sound--where is that? That thing which hears--I
   mean not the vibrating parchment, nor the telephonic nerves--but that
   living something which is informed by the nerves and reads their
   message--where and what is that something?

   The surgeon searches with his knife but he declares that he cannot find
   it. No, he cannot find it--it has fled before his instrument of search.
   But this much is sure--once gone, he cannot restore it. He could not
   make it in the first place, nor renew it when once departed. Not the
   whole troop of surgeons and physicians of all the hospitals could
   suffice to create a soul. There is a spiritual something--the true
   man--and this it is which God makes. Do you know yourself? Could you
   put your finger on yourself? Oh, no. That mystic being, that strange,
   half God-like existence, the soul, is not within the range of our
   senses. He that made the soul, has He no soul? Can He not hear? O Sirs,
   the argument is plain enough. It needs no elaboration. It carries
   conviction at first sight.

   To imagine that the Creator of life does not see and hear is absurd.
   And yet the devil tempts gracious people, the best of people, at times
   to think that the Lord does not observe them in their trials. "Oh,"
   they say, "God is too great, surely, to hear me, a poor sinful woman,
   or a frail, ignorant man. His greatness must prevent His hearing me."
   Yet, surely, you would not think the Lord deaf because you are
   unworthy. You would not attribute to Him a greatness which would really
   involve littleness. If you make Him so great that He is deaf, or so
   grand that He is blind, you have dishonored Him.

   "No," you say, "but, surely, God does not see and hear everything. Look
   at my great sorrow--why does He allow it to grow and deepen? What keen
   miseries are caused by my thoughts! As George Herbert puts it, 'My
   thoughts are all a case of knives.' " Just so. And yet the Lord knows
   and permits it all in love to your soul. He does not forget you. But,
   "like as a father pities his children," so does He pity you. Do not be
   led astray by the idea that you are passed over and forgotten by your
   God. "He knows the number of the stars, He calls them all by their
   names." And he knows you, also, especially and individually.

   Last summer I noticed a small flower in the center of a beech-wood in
   the New Forest. Surrounded by the princely trees of the woods, it
   smiled from the sod, a modest beauty. I thought to myself, "When do you
   see the sun? Does his light and glory ever cheer you?" I tarried in
   that forest and watched the sunbeams smiling through the interlacing
   branches of the trees. And while I lingered I marked how, finally, the
   sun found out a way to pour his golden glory directly into the center
   of that flower, which glowed and smiled as Heaven thus communed with
   its littleness.

   Rest assured that God, who is our Sun, thinks of the least of us. We
   are not neglected weeds of the moorland. The Lord sees us. We do not
   waste our sweetness on the desert air. For God is there. Those valleys
   among the mountains, virgin of the foot of man, are trod by the great
   Husbandman. Those are His Holy Places, His private gardens, His secret
   haunts. And the flowers which bloom in them are as plants of a royal
   garden, which make glad the heart of the King. So too, you hidden ones,
   your God does not forget you. No, though you may be tempted to think
   that He does not hear and see everything--for men are so vile and error
   is so rampant--He puts up with their provocations. Yes, he considers
   all.

   I have been inclined to cry out myself, as the Psalmist did, "Why
   withdraw You Your hand, even Your right hand? Pluck it out of Your
   bosom." That the Lord lets evil doctrine have so long a day is a great
   disquietude to a lover of the Truth of God. Ah, but the Lord hears
   every blasphemy, and marks it--and the day will come, as surely as He
   lives-- when He will lift His right hand to smite down the edifices of
   error, and they shall be before Him as a bowing wall and a tottering
   fence. "The way of the wicked He turns upside down." "Trust in the Lord
   forever."

   In the cloudy and dark day look for the Light. He does see--He does
   hear--He must work for truth and righteousness. Shall He that made the
   ear not hear? Shall He that formed the eye not see? Be not guilty of so
   absurd a thought as to fancy that these evil days are not watched over
   by the Lord.

   III. But now, thirdly and briefly, THAT GOD HEARS HIS OWN MUST BE
   ESPECIALLY CERTAIN, from the

   very argument of the text. "Why?" you say. Why, because they have new
   and spiritual ears and they have God-given spiritual eyes. And He that
   planted the spiritual ear, shall He not hear? And He that formed the
   spiritual eye, shall He not see? It has come to pass, my Brethren, that
   now when God speaks by His Spirit we hear Him, blessed be His name!
   Time was when His threats spoke to us as with noise of thunder. But we
   would not hear them.

   Now we are humbled in the dust by His anger. He has given us ears which
   are joined to hearts of flesh. When He speaks by way of invitation, and
   says, "Seek you My face," we answer, "Your face, Lord, will I seek." Do
   you imagine that if God has given us the Divine Grace to hear His
   voice, He will not hear us when we lift up our voices to Him? Rather
   let us each one say, "I will hear what God the Lord will speak. For He
   will speak peace unto His people and to His saints."

   Did He give you a new ear only that you might hear Him chide you? Did
   He intend never to regard your answer to His rebukes? Does He convince
   you of sin without intending to grant you a Savior? Does He bring you
   to hear the Law and to confess sin and ask for pardon? And can He not,
   will He not, hear you? Has He made you to hear of judgment to torment
   you before your time? Will He shut His ears to your humble prayers? I
   will not believe it. He that gave you those spiritual ears meant to say
   something worth your hearing and He meant to hear you when you cried to
   Him. He has spoken, and some of us are tonight full of ecstasy at what
   we have heard Him say. Has he not said, "Call upon Me in the day of
   trouble: I will deliver you and you shall glorify Me"?

   If you hear Him speak, He will hear you speak. Oh, that you would sit
   at His feet and ask Him to speak. And then you may be sure that He has
   inclined His ear unto you! He has created in the minds of some of you a
   sense of need and will He not pity you? Perhaps you have not reached
   any farther than to know your wants and dangers. But He gave you this
   knowledge. You are hungry and thirsty. You had not these spiritual
   appetites once. He gave them to you. Why? You were not hungry for
   mercy. You were not thirsty for righteousness till his Spirit came and
   gave you life and with that life the soul-hunger.

   Will He not satisfy the hunger He creates? Will He not fulfill the
   desire He has implanted? I never heard of such cruelty as for a man to
   gather together five hundred poor people from the street who had
   learned to draw tight their hunger-belts and bear privation, and all of
   a sudden to excite a ravenous hunger in them, and then turn them adrift
   and say, "Go your ways. I have made you feel your necessities most
   terribly. But I have nothing else for you. I have shown you your true
   condition. I have made you know what destitution you feel. Be off with
   you!"

   God will not treat you thus. It is not like He. He that planted holy
   longings and hungry pining and spiritual appetites, must intend to
   supply them. He that has made you hear the voice of your need, will
   hear it Himself. He is far quicker of hearing than you can be, and your
   wants appeal to His heart before your heart is awake to them. "He that
   planted the ear, shall He not hear?" He that gives spiritual life will
   live Himself to sustain that life.

   In addition to this, He makes us long after holiness. Will He not work
   it in us? I might say of myself and many dear Brothers and Sisters
   here, that we habitually desire to be holy and to be wholly free from
   sin. We cannot endure evil. A preacher once declared that when Paul
   cried, "O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of
   this death?" he was not a Christian. That shows how very little that
   preacher knew about the matter. No man but a true Believer would have
   such anguish on account of sin.

   Just in proportion as he became a Christian of the highest order, would
   he cry out in an agony when he found evil thoughts and tendencies
   within his nature. It is when we begin to loathe sin, and any leaning
   towards sin--and when we grow wretched because of a single evil
   thought--that we have grown in Divine Grace and are far advanced and
   are reaching towards that other verse, "Thanks be to God, which gives
   us the victory." A true Believer must hate sin with an intense hatred.
   And when the Lord has given him the desire to do so, he may be sure
   that the same Lord will give deliverance from the power of evil.

   He who makes you hate sin will answer to that detestation, and deliver
   you from that which you so greatly loathe. Does He make you pine after
   holiness and will He deny you holiness? Do you hear His voice of
   command and will He not hear your prayer for help to obey? Does your
   child pine to be good and can you help him to be good and will you not
   do so? To the ear which God has enabled to hear His call, the Lord will
   lend His own ear to hear prayer. Surely, the very holiness of God that
   puts into us a desire to be holy is a guarantee to us that He will help
   us to be holy.

   He that makes us long for purity will work it in us. It may be He will
   put us in the furnace. But by some means He will purify us as silver is
   refined. He that planted the desire after holiness is Himself holy and
   will work holiness in His people.

   Do you not sometimes sit down and indulge a daydream of what you had
   wished to be? Do you not wake up and put down your feet and say, "This
   is what I resolve to be, God helping me. I will endeavor to live nearer
   to my Lord and to be more like my Lord Jesus." Then you feel a fire
   burning upon the altar of your heart. You feel that you must put forth
   all your energies in the Divine life and press forward after the
   highest degrees of Divine Grace. Be encouraged by this condition of
   desire, for your Lord will not deny it to you. "He that planted the
   ear, shall He not hear?" He that planted in your heart the desire after
   this high ideal will hear you as you cry to Him for aid in the sacred
   enterprise. The Creator answers to that which He has created--"He will
   fulfill the desire of them that fear Him."

   Do you pray, Brothers and Sisters? I know you do. But do you really
   believe that God hears you? I cannot help thinking that a great mass of
   prayers are poured into a vacuum. I cannot shake off the thought that
   Brethren seem often to be praying into eternal emptiness, pleading with
   an infinite nothing. They say the proper words, but they mean little or
   nothing by them. Does God hear prayer? Do you answer, "Yes"? Then let
   us pray as if we truly believed that He did. When we have done praying,
   let us expect Him to answer us.

   When we go into the bank with our checks, we hand them in, take up the
   money and are gone. Do we deal thus at the Bank of Faith? Do we plead
   the promise? If so, the Lord counts out the money. But do we take it
   up? I fear we leave it on the counter. The Lord might say, "Is that man
   gone? Gone without what he came for? He pleaded My promise, and has he
   gone away content without My reply?"

   Is it your habit to go to the Throne of Mercy and ask for the mere sake
   of asking? Do you grind at a mill for the mere pleasure of grinding?
   Surely he that asks receives. And if he does not, he should enquire the
   reason why. A little time before prayer, to prepare the petition, would
   much help towards reality in prayer. A little time after prayer, to
   consider when and how the blessing is to be used when the Lord sends
   it, would be a further aid to faith.

   Sometimes the angels come to our letter-boxes and cannot put in the
   answers because the boxes are fastened down by unbelief. We are not
   prepared to receive what God is prepared to give. Let us pray,
   believing that as surely as God has given us an ear, He has an ear
   Himself, and will hear our pleadings. "He that planted the ear, shall
   He not hear?"

   Brothers and Sisters, we are at this time greatly concerned about the
   Master's kingdom. Some of us have no other trouble comparable to our
   anxiety about the cause of God and His Truth. We mourn as we see the
   evil leaven leavening the whole lump. Do you not think that the great
   Head of the Church is as much concerned about it as we are? It is His
   own kingdom. It is, therefore, more upon His mind than it can be upon
   ours. It is God's own Truth which is denied--it is His own Son that is
   dishonored.

   The glorious doctrine of the atonement--when we hear it scoffed at--we
   burn with indignation and our heart breaks with grief. Does not the
   Lord's heart also burn with indignation when the precious blood is
   trampled on? Is He indifferent to all this apostasy and heresy? Depend
   upon it, He is not. For "He that planted the ear, shall He not hear?"
   And He that has sworn to glorify His Son, will He forever stand still
   when that Son is dishonored, even in His own

   Church?

   IV. I have done when I say just this one thing more--A BELIEF THAT GOD
   HEARS AND SEES HAS A VERY

   BENEFICIAL TENDENCY UPON THOSE WHO FIRMLY HOLD IT. It works good in a
   thousand ways. Time would fail me to recount a tithe of them. It may
   suffice to take a thought or two, and turn the matter over in our
   minds. If we feel that God sees and hears, what an incentive it is to
   do right and to be valiant for His Truth! Soldiers will play the man in
   the presence of their prince. If our Lord looks on, what will we not do
   and dare?

   The same sense of His Presence will act as a check to any and every
   deed of sin. We cannot indulge the thought of evil when the Lord
   Himself hears that thought. Does the Lord look on and shall I sin in
   His Divine Presence? Shall I grieve Jesus when the Beloved of my soul
   is Himself close to me and watches, with regretful eye, each sinful
   movement? The solemn conviction that God hears is a check to evil and a
   stimulus for good.

   It acts grandly as a preservative against the desire of applause and
   the fear of man. He who knows assuredly that God hears him will speak
   the truth though all the world should listen, or though no one but God
   should hear him. It was a beautiful word which was spoken by a soldier
   to an open-air preacher not long ago. A friend who was preaching in the
   street had gathered a considerable audience. But as a troop of soldiers
   went by, with colors and martial music, the people were dispersed and
   the preacher was

   left almost alone. A soldier, who for some reason was marching outside
   the ranks, called to him, "Go on, Sir--God loves to hear you praising
   His Son Jesus."

   True, most true. God delights in the glories of Christ. What a grand
   audience you have if the Lord hearkens and hears you praising His Son!
   Do the despisers grind their teeth when they hear Jesus preached? Never
   mind. Let them wear out their hearts in wrath. They cannot rob Jesus of
   a beam of brightness. Keep on praising your Lord and Savior. For if men
   who have ears to hear will not hear, yet be sure your heavenly Father
   will not fail to listen.

   We do not want applause from men, since God hears us. If the Queen were
   present and a soldier performed a deed of valor and a person were to
   say to him, "You did well and you may be proud that Corporal Brown and
   Sergeant Smith saw you and approved of what you did." "Oh," he would
   say, "I care nothing for corporals and other petty officers. Her
   Majesty herself looked at me and said, 'Well done.' She will, with her
   own hands put the Victoria Cross upon me in due time. That is the
   reward I seek."

   If God sees me, it is a small matter who may, or who may not see, and
   approve. We need to grow thus healthily independent of human
   judgment--for he who fawns for smiles, or trembles at frowns, will
   never lead a noble life for long. The assurance that God sees and
   hears, is a wonderful care-killer. Why should I be anxious? My heavenly
   Father knows that I have need of these things. What if I am in trouble?
   This, my Father knows. Brethren, if the Lord knows our soul is in
   adversity, and if his eye is ever upon us, are we not safe? Know that
   you serve One whose eyes are upon the righteous and whose ears are open
   to their cry and you will live above care.

   And, oh, how this will tend to promote your fellowship with God! When
   your heart sings, "He leads me. He hears me. He knows the way that I
   take," then are you filled with a sense of fellowship with the Eternal
   God. How we love Him who hears us always! Since He is always seeing us,
   we learn to see Him. "You God see me," is a word which brightens up

   our sad hearts till we also see God. We pass through the trouble, and
   toil, and temptation, and turmoil of this mortal life with serene
   spirit, since it is written, "Jehovah-Shammah, the Lord is there."

   Suffering is no mean thing, if we suffer in full submission to the will
   of Him that hears and sees us. If He is but with us, all question is
   ended. We cheerfully say, "It is the Lord--let Him do what seems Him
   good." As long as his father was captain of the ship, his little son
   never knew a fear. For he was sure his father could steer the vessel
   safely to the haven.

   Be of good cheer--our Father who sees and hears us, is in the midst of
   His people--and not so much as one of them shall perish. If the Lord
   were away, or asleep, or deaf, we might be in a trembling mood. But
   while His ears and eyes are open to us, we cannot tolerate mistrust. By
   a little altering of the quaint poet's lines, we may say--

   "Though winds and waves assault my keel,

   He does preserve it. He does steer,

   Even when the boat seems most to reel.

   Storms are the triumph of His art,

   He cannot hide His eyes, much less His heart." Go, speak with the wise
   Planter of the ear. For He will surely hear!
     __________________________________________________________________

Magdalene at the Sepulcher--an Instructive Scene

   INTENDED FOR READING ON LORD'S-DAY, DECEMBER 22, 1889.

   DELIVERED BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON, ON THURSDAY EVENING, OCTOBER
   24, 1889.

   "Then the disciples went away again unto their own homes. But Mary
   stood without at the sepulcher weeping: and as she wept, she stooped do
   wn and looked into the sepulcher and saw two angels in white sitting,
   the one at the head and the other at the feet, where the Body of Jesus
   had lain. And they said unto her, Woman, why do you weep? She said unto
   them, Because they have taken away my Lord and I know not where they
   have laid Him. And when she had thus said, she turned herself back and
   saw Jesus standing and knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus said unto her,
   Woman, why do you weep? Whom do you seek? She, supposing Him to be the
   gardener, said unto Him, Sir, if you have borne Him, therefore, tell me
   where you have laid Him and I will take Him away. Jesus said unto her,
   Mary. She turned herself and said unto Him, Rabboni; which is to say,
   Master." John 20:10-16

   I WANTED to speak tonight to Believers who have lost the joyful
   Presence of their Lord and who are saying, "Oh, that I knew where I
   might find Him!" But when I thought of that matter, I said to myself,
   Many will be in the congregation who have never yet found Him.
   Therefore they will not have known His sweetness by experience, and yet
   they may be longing to find Him. Is it possible to benefit two classes
   at once?

   "Well, well," I said to myself, "I can speak to the saint, for she who
   figures in the text was Mary. But I can also, at the same time, talk to
   the sinner. For she was Magdalene, and that name has somehow become
   connected with penitent sinners." I pray, at the beginning, that if
   there is one here who has long been a Mary, and has followed Christ
   lovingly-- and if there is another here who is more like what is
   commonly but erroneously known as a Magdalene, both the Mary and the
   Magdalene may find direction and consolation in my discourse.

   I shall have no other preface but these remarks. For we have before us
   a long text to be handled in a short time and I would not perform my
   task slightingly. We will advance by a series of observations.

   I. Our first observation shall be this--A SOUL SEEKING JESUS HAS WAYS
   OF ITS OWN.

   Read carefully the tenth verse--"Then the disciples went away again
   unto their own homes. But Mary," Mary had her own way of proceeding.
   Mary was seeking Christ more intensely and affectionately than even the
   choicest of the Apostles. They were more able to wait for events than
   her eagerness would allow her to do. John was able to go home, because
   he had seen and believed. Peter went home all the more readily because
   a cloud darkened his sky.

   Mary was of another order from either of these--she loved and longed to
   see Him whom she loved. Whether He was dead or alive, she would find
   Him. When you are seeking the Lord, it brings out your individuality.
   Every truly anxious soul must seek the Lord in his own way. Each case
   is peculiar--each seeker feels himself to be one by himself. There are
   not two Mary Magdalenes. And Mary differs from John and Peter.

   One part of her way was this--that she would stay at the sepulcher
   after others had gone to their own homes. So have I seen the lover of
   the Lord lingering at the Mercy Seat when the prayers of others were
   ended, and remaining in the use of the means of Divine Grace when
   others had enjoyed a full portion of them. The meeting is very early in
   the morning but Mary must be there. And if the meeting was at a
   distance, she trudges over the miles. One saint is noted for Bible
   reading and nothing will attract her from it. Another abounds in
   private prayer and is mighty on her knees. Another

   feels bound to go where Christ Jesus is earnestly talked about, and
   therefore he spends many an hour with the Lord's people.

   Perhaps Peter and John had other necessary business to attend to and
   their duty called them away from the tomb. But Mary stood there still,
   hoping to hear something about her Lord and, at least, to know where
   they had laid His Body. It is a blessed thing when the heart becomes so
   resolved to find Christ that it cannot be happy without Him. When it
   cannot even live without Him. When you are resolved to wait at the
   posts of Wisdom's doors until the Incarnate Wisdom appears to you, you
   will not have to wait long.

   Mary had ways of her own beside, for she stood there "weeping." I do
   not read that, upon this occasion, either Peter or John shed a single
   tear. They may have done so, but the Holy Spirit has not recorded the
   fact. Yet He has recorded it of this earnest seeker that she, "stood
   without at the sepulcher weeping." She wept as if her heart would
   break. Where was her Lord? What had they done with that Sacred Body?
   She had seen it wrapped in spices and fine linen and laid in the tomb
   of Joseph--where was it now?

   The tomb was evidently quite empty of all but the burial
   garments--where was the Body? What new indignities had the cruel ones
   put upon it? That dear mangled Body--to what malicious treatment was it
   now exposed? She stood, in deep emotion, sorrowing as love, alone, can
   sorrow when its beloved object is in peril. It is a great thing, dear
   Soul, when you cannot find Christ, to weep your eyes out till you can.
   When you cannot live without Him for very heartbreak, when all the joy
   of life is gone, when existence becomes only another name for grieving
   after an absent love--and that love the Lord Jesus.

   Then you are not far off from the happy hour of finding Him. Tears may
   be as the dew of the morning, the sure prophets of the rising sun. At
   any rate, many search for Jesus with tears in their eyes. Mary did
   something more, which was according to her own mode of action--"she
   stooped down and looked into the sepulcher." They that would find
   Christ must stoop to look for Him. They must not merely wait for Him
   but look for Him on their knees.

   I have known some people pretend to wait for the Lord and they have
   kept up the pretense to their soul's ruin! They never looked to Him by
   faith. I have known some weep much but they would not open their eyes
   to look to Jesus and be saved. True seekers look for Jesus in the
   Scriptures. They search for Him in the hearing of the Word. They cry
   after Him in their private room. This is well. If you would be saved,
   seek Jesus and He will find you. Cry evermore, "Oh, that I knew where I
   might find Him! I would come even to His seat."

   No heart has ever earnestly looked after Jesus but what before long He
   has been seen. If there is this waiting, this weeping, this stooping,
   this looking--there will be an appearing in mercy and a recognition in
   joy. Mary, who looks for Jesus, shall see Him.

   Note this peculiarity--she looked in the wrong place. She looked into
   the sepulcher for the living and risen Jesus. Earnest, true-hearted,
   zealous, was Mary. But she labored under a mistake. Well might the
   angels say, "Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here
   but is risen." Thus have I known true penitents seek the Lord where He
   cannot be found. They have expected to undergo a sort of inward
   purgatory, and they have sought for Jesus in their own feelings. He is
   not there. They have imagined that they must be carried away with
   despair before they might lay hold upon the Savior. Yet the Lord is not
   in the wind of feeling, nor in the fire of despair--His Presence is
   known by His still small voice.

   They have not looked with a simple, childlike trust to Jesus. But they
   have gone about to this, and that, and to other thing--and all in vain.
   They have sought for Jesus among forms, and ceremonies, but in vain.
   Possibly they have gone to human priests, or sages--these are as dead
   as the tombs. Priest-craft and philosophy are no places for the living
   Christ to be found.

   Yet I am glad that Mary looked into the tomb. For, though she looked in
   the wrong place, it was a good thing to be looking for Jesus after any
   fashion. Better blunder in seeking Christ than be so wise as to go away
   from Him. I mean, better to be a sincere, but foolish, seeker after
   Jesus, and fall into a hundred errors of doctrine, than to be highly
   cultured and all the while to be looking to self, or to the world and
   forgetting the Lord Jesus. Poor Seekers! You are in trouble. I see it
   by your tears. There is hope for you, for you have eyes and are looking
   out for something better than you can find in yourselves, or in your
   fellow men.

   I am sure of you, for you will not run away to your home. You stay near
   the place where Jesus was last seen. You are not rolling stones but you
   abide in earnest hearing, in Apostolic doctrine, and in prayers. Your
   constancy and your eagerness are cheering signs that Divine Grace is
   beginning its work in your hearts. Comfort is on the way to you, I can
   see the light of it reflected in those tears which glisten in your
   eyes. God grant that we may not be disappointed in you, for His name's
   sake!

   II. But now, going a little further on, I would observe, secondly, that
   A SOUL SEEKING JESUS MAKES SMALL

   ACCOUNT OF ANYTHING ELSE.

   Mary, when she looked down, saw the angels sitting, the one at the
   head, and the other at the feet, where the Body of Jesus had lain. At
   any other time, if Mary Magdalene had seen two angels, she would have
   been astounded, so as to lose her balance, through reverent fear. A
   vision of angels to a holy woman--there is something overpowering in
   it. A vision of angels, even to the ungodly soldiers that watched the
   grave of Christ, had made them faint and become as dead men.

   But if you read the passage attentively, you will see that Mary talked
   to these angels as if they had been good men whom she had met before.
   She was not abashed by them. When they say to her, "Woman, why do you
   weep?" she answers them, very plainly, "Because they have taken away my
   Lord and I know not where they have laid Him." She is not frightened at
   spirits and angels. Neither is a soul that is in earnest after Christ
   to be put away from its search by any sort of diversion.

   The true enquirer would ask of angels, or of the most eminent saints,
   concerning the Lord Jesus. It will be only too glad to ask of anybody,
   or to answer a question from anybody, if it may thus hope to find
   Jesus. Did you ever note the all-subduing power of a great desire? When
   God makes the heart tender and sets it longing after Jesus, it forgets
   its own feebleness and ceases to be alarmed by that which once
   distressed it. A longing soul would break through angels and through
   devils, through Heaven and through earth to reach Jesus. We must have
   Him. We must behold the Well-Beloved. Our soul is all on fire for Him,
   it cannot be restrained, it will burn its way to Him as the flame makes
   its way across the prairie. We want Jesus and we will not be content
   with anything short of Him.

   Notice, too, as proof of what I have said, that when a soul is seeking
   Christ, nothing but Christ's own Word will satisfy it. This holy woman
   was not content with what the angels said. Though they said to her,
   "Woman, why do you weep?" those shining ones do not appear to have
   comforted her at all. She went on weeping. She told them why she wept
   but she did not, therefore, cease her tears. And, believe me, if the
   angels of Heaven cannot content a heart which is seeking after Jesus,
   you may depend upon it that the angels of the Churches cannot do so.

   We may preach as best we can, but the words of man will never satisfy
   the cravings of the heart. The seeker needs Jesus--Jesus only--Jesus
   certainly. You read the best of books and heard the most faithful of
   testimonies when you were seeking, and yet you came away and cried,
   "Alas, I have not found Him. I have not found Him. And I cannot be
   content till I do so!" Beloved, never sit down short of Christ. For
   short of Christ is short of salvation. Whatever you hear, never be
   content with hearing--long to find Him of whom you hear.

   However sweetly the story is told, the mere hearing of the Truth of God
   must never be enough for you. You want for your salvation a personal
   Christ, to be heard by your own heart and received by your own faith.
   And I entreat you, never rest until this is your happy possession. Find
   HIM--Him whom your soul loves--Him in whom alone your soul may trust.
   Let not voices from Heaven, if you could hear them, much less the
   voices of godly men and women on earth, ever content you, apart from
   the Lord Jesus Christ, who is All in All.

   Furthermore, a soul seeking Jesus is glad to confess Him. It was
   awe-inspiring to behold angels arrayed in white. It was a rare gift for
   the Magdalene to gaze upon, those shining ones sitting in solemn state
   at the head and the foot of the spot where Jesus had once laid! But it
   did not so overpower Mary as to prevent her open acknowledgment of her
   Lord. When she spoke to Peter and John, in the second verse, she said,
   "They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulcher." But when she
   addressed the angels, she said, "They have taken away my Lord and I
   know not where they have laid Him."

   It might not be necessary to say, "my Lord" to the two Apostles, who
   knew exactly what she was. But she had not seen those angels before,
   and she would not let them go without their knowing that Jesus was her
   Lord, her very own. And so she puts it, "They have taken away my Lord."
   I like that amazingly. Are you a seeking saint? Whether you see Him or
   do not see Him, He is still yours. And you must hold to it that He is
   still your own. "My Beloved is mine and I am

   His." And if I do not just now behold the smile of His face, yet He is
   my Lord. I have given myself up to Him. And, if He does not own me as
   His servant, I will still claim Him as my Master.

   Come what may, if I walk in darkness, I will cleave to Him the more
   closely, for I will not wander from Him. Where should I go? If all
   Heaven does not shine upon me, I shall still look up that way. I have
   fallen into a fog and can scarcely see my way beyond my hand--but yet I
   am my Lord's for all that, and I am not ashamed to declare it. "Though
   He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." His I am and Him I serve. My ear
   has been bored to the doorpost, and I am His happy bondman forever.
   Come death, come life, come darkness of soul, or joy of spirit.
   Whatever happens, I am my Lord's. Such holy constancy will be rewarded.

   In the true seeker, the one cry of the soul is Christ, none but Christ,
   Christ alone. Mary looks beyond all others. Angels may come and angels
   may go--but she neither seeks nor fears them. She blushes not to
   confess her Lord before the white-robed spirits. But she seeks Him and
   must find Him. O Child of God, keep to the one object of your search! O
   Sinner, when once you feel your need of Jesus, bend all your desires
   towards Him and seek Him alone! If all your search is after Jesus, you
   shall find Him. Let not a Heaven of angels suffice to take you off from
   searching for your Lord and His salvation.

   Child of God, when you have lost the light of your Lord's face, feel
   that you must have it back again, or die in the dark. And when you thus
   feel, He will return to you. He never set a soul longing for Himself,
   and Himself only, without gratifying the longing which He has created.
   Hunger and thirst after the Lord Jesus are blessed attributes. For He
   who created them will satisfy them. Oh, that the Lord would cause us to
   faint and pine after Himself more and more, and then visit us with that
   which is our soul's only fullness, namely, His precious, priceless
   Self!

   III. Thus have we handled the second point sufficiently. Let us now
   make a third observation--A SOUL SEEKING JESUS MAY HAVE HIM VERY NEAR,
   AND NOT KNOW IT.

   Read, "When she had thus said, she turned herself back and saw JESUS
   standing and knew not that it was Jesus." He was behind her while she
   stood looking into the sepulcher. And though she did not perceive it,
   His Presence operated upon her. She had been speaking to the angels and
   answering their question. And suddenly she was conscious that someone
   was standing just behind her. How came she thus to feel? Some think
   that, as Mark describes, the angels, as standing up. The Lord had, at
   that moment, come behind Mary and the holy angels, perceiving their
   Lord, rose up to do Him honor.

   They had been sitting in contemplation at the place of His sepulcher
   but as soon as they caught sight of their Lord, they stood up, as if to
   do His bidding. From their movements Mary concluded that someone was
   passing behind her. It may have been so. For assuredly the angelic
   guards would have paid Him instant reverence. But, on the other hand,
   rising is scarcely so much a method of saluting a superior in the East
   as it is in the West. Let us suggest something else.

   You have been sitting at your table, writing, and a friend has come
   behind you with noiseless tread but yet all of a sudden you have been
   aware of a presence. Before you had heard or seen, you were
   impressed--what if I say overshadowed? Was it not so with Mary
   Magdalene and the Savior? I am not superstitious if I assert that
   something very similar happens to me when Jesus is near. Many a
   Believer will tell you that he has, at times, when he has been in
   prayer, or hearing the Word, or meditating, felt as if he could be sure
   that the Lord stood near him.

   There could, of course, be no palpable impression upon the flesh. For
   now, after the flesh, we know Him no more. But yet His Presence has
   impressed our souls. There are influences of mind on mind which are
   beyond the recognition of science. The great spirit of our Lord has
   means of making itself spiritually known to our spirits--means which
   flesh and blood know nothing of--and which lips could not describe. I
   have discerned the special Presence of my Lord with me by a
   consciousness as sure as that by which I know that I live. Jesus has
   been as real to me, at my side in this pulpit, as though I had beheld
   Him with my eyes.

   1 appeal to the experience of many of you. Have you not been moved by a
   mysterious influence which has overawed, inspired, and impressed you
   beyond description? A Divine, majestic, delightful and hallowing
   Presence has been near you. And you have turned to look at a something
   which was so distinct that you would not have been surprised had it
   been visible to you. Mary did not discover at first that it was the
   Lord, but she felt His powerful influence, and then, "she turned
   herself back and saw Jesus."

   The next thing to be noted was that she saw Jesus standing. The word is
   better rendered "beholds," as in the Revised Version. It does not
   merely mean that she saw Him. But His Presence fixed her gaze. She
   steadily observed Him. She could not take her eyes off Him. She beheld
   Him intently. For she seemed to say, "I must have seen that face
   before. Can it be He? It is wonderfully similar. But the thought cannot
   be entertained."

   She stood, and beheld Jesus with steadfast gaze. Thus would we hold our
   meditations fixed upon His Person. This may be so. And yet we may not
   know that the Lord is with us, though we are conscious of more than
   human company. In the case of a seeking sinner, Jesus has really come
   to him and has been comforting him and yet he did not know that it was
   Jesus. He dreamed that He was far away. His soul felt so tender, so
   melted, so ready to yield, so near to God, that he was sure some holy
   power was ruling him. But he knew not that it was Jesus.

   Occasionally, you and I have known such secret touches of heart and
   conscience, with such bright hope and burning love, that we have
   wondered at ourselves, and yet we have not dared to believe that it was
   the Lord Himself who was thus at work upon us. And yet it was even so.
   We were looking for Jesus by His own light. Our hearts burned, and yet
   we did not perceive from where came the fire. Jesus may be very near,
   and yet we may fear that He has gone from us in anger.

   What was it, do you think, that prevented her seeing and knowing her
   Lord? Shall we say that her unbelief and sorrow dimmed her eyes? Was it
   that, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, her eyes were held?
   Very possibly. Was it her tears that blinded her to the Divine vision?
   Not so likely. For tears full often cleanse the spiritual vision.
   Weeping for an absent Christ has often made us quit a sin which at some
   prior time had prevented fellowship with Jesus. What was it, then? I
   think it was that the sight was

   not what she expected. She was longing to see Jesus. But, perhaps she
   only hoped to see Him wrapped in grave clothes.

   And so, you notice, that the Evangelist puts it, "She saw Jesus
   standing and knew not that it was Jesus." If she had seen Him lying
   down, with the image of death upon His face, she would have known Him.
   But to see Jesus standing was far more than she could have hoped for.
   She had seen His lifeless Body taken down by Joseph and Nicodemus, and
   she had helped to wrap Him in spices and fine linen. But to see Him
   standing, alive, was more than she could have dreamed of. The rapture
   was too great for her to expect or believe. And we marvel not that it
   is written "she knew not that it was Jesus."

   Beloved, our conceptions of our Lord are so poor and low, that if He
   were to come to us in even a moderate degree of His Glory, we should
   fail to apprehend that it was really He. John knew Him, he had laid his
   head on His bosom, but he says, "When I saw Him, I fell at his feet as
   dead." So overpoweringly beyond all that John could have expected, was
   the vision of the Lord in His Glory. It is true the Lord Jesus did not
   manifest Himself in that manner to Mary. But still, the particular
   posture of standing was beyond what she looked for, and therefore He
   was not perceived.

   It may be that the Lord Jesus is truly appearing to some sinner here.
   But as the appearance is not what he expects, he is unable to hope that
   it is his Savior. You are told simply to trust Him. And this is hardly
   what you looked for--you thought that you would suffer an experience of
   amazing sorrow. You looked for an affair which could be put into a
   biography. Tell me, did you not? But you will not have anything of the
   sort. You hear a voice which cries, "Only trust Him, only trust Him."
   Obey that voice and enter into immediate rest.

   You thought that you would be driven to the verge of madness, and then
   be relieved with a joy which would make you dance. But instead, you are
   led quietly to trust. So long as you are truly saved, what does it
   matter? The Lord Jesus is present wherever there is humble faith in
   Him, for that plant never grows except where He sets His pierced foot.
   Believe and then know that it is Jesus.

   And you, dear Brothers and Sisters, who have lost the Presence of
   Christ a while, perhaps you expect Him to come tonight and carry you
   away in a sacred transport. Instead of which, it may be He will calm
   you and fill you with repose, or He may even rebuke you and send you
   out to work and suffer for Him. May you have the discernment, however
   your Lord may come, to know that it is the Lord! Though He comes not in
   the way in which you looked for Him, yet be not so blind as to mistake
   Him for another. But if you should even think that your risen Lord is
   the gardener, you might not be so very wrong. If, under that
   misapprehension, you should ask Him to dress the garden of your heart
   and pluck up your weeds and water your plants, it would be well with
   you.

   Still, He may be near you and yet you may not know Him. Take comfort
   from this fact. And though you mourn your own dullness of apprehension,
   do not utterly condemn yourself. Under her misapprehension, Mary did
   not catch the tone

   of our Lord's voice when He asked her why she wept. Our Lord quoted the
   question of the angels, as if to show that He would gladly support the
   word which His servants had spoken. Happy messenger, whose words can be
   repeated by his Master! But yet Mary's ear was heavy and she perceived
   not her Lord.

   Ah me, we also may be in such a state that we do not discern the
   blessed Lover of our souls, though He speaks in the language of
   consolation! We would have ventured to predict that never would Mary
   Magdalene have forgotten that dear voice. But she did so. And what
   wonder if we do the same?

   In a word, she was so far from discovering her Lord that she took Him
   to be her foe rather than her Friend. She imagined that the gardener
   had borne the Body away. Was he so unwilling to have a corpse within
   the region of his gardening that he had put it in a corner, that no one
   might perceive it? She humbles herself to him and offers to carry away
   the form to which she feared he had such an objection. "Tell me where
   you have laid Him and I will take Him away." He to whom she spoke had
   not taken away her treasure--He had brought it to her--yes, He was
   Himself that Treasure!

   Beloved, you and I also have reckoned our best Friend to be our
   enemy--so foolish are we and so soon mistaken. In the darkness of our
   souls we judge unrighteously and complain of our Lord whom alone we
   ought to praise. He knows our ignorance and He forgives.

   IV. Upon my fourth observation I will be very brief--A SOUL SEEKING
   JESUS WILL DO ANYTHING TO FIND HIM.

   Mary Magdalene was still seeking. And when she saw one standing before
   her, whom she thought to be the gardener, what did she do? Why, she
   enquired of that gardener where she might find Him whom she loved. She
   was willing to learn from anyone. If you are in earnest to find the
   Lord Jesus, you will not be particular about where you go, or of whom
   you learn. No matter whether the preacher is a doctor of divinity or a
   converted coal heaver, so long as he preaches Christ, you will be glad
   to learn from him.

   She supposed Him to be the gardener. But yet she said to Him, "Sir, if
   you have borne Him, therefore, tell me where you have laid Him." Many
   have been happy to learn of Jesus from fishermen and cobblers. Does my
   Friend object to my hearing an illiterate man? Ah, Sir, when I am
   seeking eternal salvation, I care little about the philosopher--I want
   the experimental Christian. For him I feel a deep respect. And, even if
   I know him to be only a gardener, I speak to him reverently as, "Sir."

   When a man is not truly seeking the Lord, he wants short sermons and
   these of a high literary order, or else adorned with attractive
   rhetoric. But when he is, with his whole heart, seeking for the Savior,
   he is not so concerned about polite phrases and ecclesiastical
   correctness. He looks eagerly for a practical direction how he may come
   to Jesus. And he will take that from any man or woman, be their station
   what it may. Let him be a chimneysweep, if he will lead me to Jesus, I
   will follow.

   So it was with this holy woman. She desired to find the Lord and she
   was altogether absorbed in that one pursuit. She speaks as if everybody
   was equally intent upon the one theme. For instead of mentioning the
   name Jesus, she says, "If you have borne Him, therefore." Why, Mary,
   what are you talking about? "About Him," she says. But who is this of
   whom you speak? Ah, Friends, to her there was but one "Him" in all the
   world, just then! Oh, to be thus absorbed!

   Such was the desire of Magdalene to find the Lord Jesus, that she
   feared no ghastly sight. Let her know where the Body is laid and she
   will be there. That Body, which had bled so much from its five wounds,
   must have been a heartbreaking sight to a tender-hearted woman. But she
   is not dismayed. Let the Body be how it may, it is the flesh and blood
   of her dear Lord and she must pay it homage. Wounds or no wounds, she
   would behold it. A wounded Christ is altogether lovely in the eyes of
   His redeemed.

   His blood, flowing for me, clothes Him with a royal crimson robe in my
   eyes. I fear nothing, so long as I may but come to Him. Dear Hearts, if
   you long for salvation, you will not find fault with those who preach
   the doctrine of the Cross, the wounds, the blood! You will not kick at
   the doctrine of a crucified Savior, your Substitute condemned at the
   bar of justice. You want Jesus who died. You must behold Him for
   yourself by faith and no ridicule of the vain, or sneer of the proud,
   or cavil of the doubting, can make Him uncomely in your eyes.

   Notice that she dreads no heavy burden. She says, "I will take Him
   away." Why, Mary, you could not bear away so great a load! You would
   fall beneath the weight of a man's corpse! You are not strong enough
   for the sad task! Ah, but she thought that she could bear the blessed
   burden and she meant to try! She would have accomplished it. Faith
   laughs at

   impossibility and cries, "it shall be done." But love actually performs
   the deed. A heart that is burning with love has about it a seven-fold
   energy, whose capacity it would be hard to calculate.

   It would seem a grim and terrible task for a woman, at early morning,
   to be carrying from its grave the corpse of one who had been hanged
   upon a tree. But she offers herself for the deed and is even eager for
   it. To a soul that would gladly find Christ, nothing is too hot or too
   heavy, nothing is too cold or too sickening. We would do anything,
   refuse nothing, and suffer everything, if we might but clasp Him in our
   arms, our Jesus and our All.

   Yet was she wedded to her old mistake--she continued to seek the living
   among the dead, for she looked again into the sepulcher. Thus have I
   seen seeking souls cling to their original mistake and follow up those
   erroneous but natural hopes which are surely doomed to disappointment.
   How do I know that Mary began to look again into that sepulcher?
   Observe that, in the sixteenth verse we read, "She turned herself and
   said unto Him, Rabboni!"

   That is the second time she turned herself. The first time she turned
   and looked at Jesus, whom she supposed to be the gardener. Now, if she
   had to turn again to see Him, she must, in the meanwhile, have faced in
   the old direction, and must, therefore, have been peering again into
   the empty tomb. That is the difficulty which we have with poor seekers
   when they are in their fits. We persuade them from looking to
   themselves and their feelings, but they are soon back again at that
   unprofitable work. We tell them, "He is not here, for He is risen. Look
   not to your own dead self, with its feelings and resolves, for Jesus is
   not there."

   For a while they listen to us and try to look to the Lord. But they do
   not know Him, and so their eyes insensibly return to the old place,
   looking again into the sepulcher of self, to find a living hope in the
   things of death. Still, even this mistaken persistency shows how
   anxious they are, and how desperately they are set upon finding
   salvation. Though they make serious mistakes, and even repeat them, yet
   they cannot give up. For nothing short of Christ will content them.

   V. And that brings us to our fifth point--A SEEKING SOUL MAY FIND JESUS
   THROUGH ONE WORD.

   We might be wise to clip our sermons down and make them much shorter.
   Long discourses have often missed the mark. Our Lord's one word gave
   Mary all she sought. He said to her, "Mary." And at once she knew Him
   and cried, "Rabboni." Only one word! Jesus can preach a perfect sermon
   in one word! O dear Friends, when you cannot say much to an anxious
   enquirer, say a single word. Who knows what that one word may do? When
   you cannot repeat a sermon, quote a verse. "A verse may hit him whom a
   sermon flies." Do not think that strength lies in length--it is often
   the reverse.

   Though Mary came to herself by one word, that one word was from Jesus
   Himself. He and the angels together had not comforted her with a
   sentence, but one word from His heart went to her heart. That one word
   of love from His lips, "Mary," brought that other word of reverence
   from her lips, "Rabboni."

   Dear Friends, beseech the Lord to speak in His own all-powerful way at
   this time. In the meeting for prayer, you prayed for me that I might
   speak and I hope the Lord heard you. But now go yet further and cry,
   "Speak, Lord! Speak Yourself! The angel of the Church has spoken and
   You have sealed his message, but now, we entreat You, go further and
   You speak one word Yourself, by Your own Spirit!"

   That one word was the Magdalene's own name. It was as though He had
   said, "I have called you by your name--you are Mine." Words, when they
   are spoken with a general bearing, may prove feeble. When the angel
   said, "Woman," and Jesus himself said, "Woman," that name belonged to a
   large class of individuals. And Mary did not take it to herself. But
   when our Lord said, "Mary," there was but one Mary present, and
   therefore it came home to her without fail.

   This is what is needed--an assured, personal application of the Word.
   This our Lord grants when the message comes right home to you, as if
   you were the only one present--the preacher looks at you, speaks to
   you, and gives such personal details that you are sure that not the
   preacher, but the preacher's God is speaking to you. Then it is that
   you find the Lord and know of a surety that it is He.

   That word from the Master's lips, that word--your own name--that word
   shall wake the echoes of your heart by arousing happy memories and
   recalling hours of sweet delight. When a soul knows that Jesus knows
   its name, it soon begins to know Jesus for itself. Who but He could
   have said, "Mary" with that emphatic accent, with that peculiar
   intonation? Who but He could have brought all her life to remembrance,
   not so much by the word itself, as by the meaning which He threw into
   it, and the vivid flash of His eyes which went with it?

   One glance of His eyes darted the light of God into her spirit. "Mary!"
   was the Open Sesame of her heart and mind. Oh, now she has Him! Lord,
   speak in this fashion to some seeker who is here looking for You! Lord,
   speak to John and Peter, to Jane and Sarah! Let the message come to
   many hearers from Your own lips, to Your own glory!

   VI. The last head is this--A SEEKING SOUL WILL RESPOND WITH REVERENCE
   TO THE WORD OF JESUS.

   Mary said at once, "Rabboni." This is a Hebrew word, signifying
   "Master," or, as Parkhurst says, having a Chaldee particle within it,
   which makes it to mean "My Master," or, as I have heard some say,
   "Great Master." At any rate, she meant that He was her Lord and
   Teacher. He knew her heart, He understood her inmost soul, and
   therefore she acknowledged Him as her Lord. He had called her by her
   name and she recognized that all-controlling voice. He was her Master,
   since He could so divinely know and move her heart.

   Even thus may we each one say, "My God, my Savior, convinced by Your
   knowledge of me and overpowered by Your condescension towards me, I
   feel that You have the sole right to my love, my trust, my obedience!
   You are within and about me, nearer to me than hands and feet, nearer
   to me than even the blood that flows from my heart. And therefore I
   joyfully submit my whole being to You, to be ruled and instructed by
   You as my sole Lord and Rabbi!"

   In addition to this, she feels that she knows Him. He is no stranger to
   her. Had He been a stranger, He might have said, "Mary," many times.
   But because He was the Good Shepherd that knows His sheep and calls
   them by name, therefore Mary, as one of His sheep, responded to His
   call. Mary knew Him--do you know the Master? Beloved, do you know the
   Lord Jesus? To know Him is life eternal! Have you this life? Not to
   know Him is an ignorance dark as death.

   I do not say, do you know about Him? But do you know HIM? Has the Lord
   ever spoken to you? Has he spoken one almighty syllable which has
   thrilled your very soul? If so, you will at once take Him to be your
   Teacher and yield your intellect to His instruction. From now on you
   will only want to know what He chooses to reveal. But what He reveals
   will satisfy your reason at once.

   From now on opposing philosophies will go to the wind and you will
   learn of Him. From now on your own thoughts and speculations will seem
   as the chaff of the threshing floor, compared with the words which He
   teaches, which are full of weight and Divine authority, even of light
   and power eternal. Tonight, from my very heart, I call Jesus,
   "Rab-boni." I will have no Rabbi but Christ--no Master but my Lord
   Jesus. By all His knowledge of me and all His revelation of Himself to
   me, I take Him to be to me my Teacher and Lord.

   "Rabboni" means also "Master" by way of authority. Mary confessed
   herself the follower of Jesus. Where He led the way, she was resolved
   to follow, even as our hymn puts it--

   "I am Yours and Yours alone, This I gladly, fully own; And, in all my
   works and ways, Only now would seek Your praise." From that time, even
   if it had not been so with her before, Mary Magdalene was one of those
   of whom it could be said, "They follow the Lamb wherever He goes."

   Happy man and happy woman, who will keep close to every footstep of the
   Lord. If you are seeking Him at this hour, pray that, at this moment,
   He may speak the revealing word, so that you may from now on feel that
   a change has come over you, the likes of which you have never known.
   May you experience a sacred twist which shall affect your whole
   character! May Jesus touch your heart so that your whole body, soul and
   spirit shall never forget that touch in time or in eternity! Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

The Security Of Believers--Or, Sheep Who Shall Never Perish

   INTENDED FOR READING ON LORD'S-DAY, DECEMBER 29, 1889,

   DELIVERED BY C. H. SPURGEON,

   AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON, ON THURSDAY EVENING,
   SEPTEMBER 5, 1889.

   "My sheep hear My voice and I know them and they follow Me: and I give
   unto them eternal life. And they shall never perish, neither shall any
   man pluck them out of My hand. My Father, which gave them Me is greater
   than all. And no man is able to pluck them out of My Father's hand. I
   and my Father are one." John 10:27-30

   OUR Savior did not hesitate to preach the deeper doctrines of the
   Gospel to the most miscellaneous assembly. When He began to preach
   where He was brought up, they all gathered with admiration about Him,
   until He preached the doctrine of election. And then, straightway, they
   were so angry that they would have destroyed Him. They could not bear
   to hear of the widows of Israel passed by and the woman of Sarepta
   chosen--nor of a heathen leper healed, while the many lepers of their
   own race were left to die.

   Election seems to heat the blood and fire the wrath of many. Not that
   they care to be chosen of God themselves. But, like the dog in the
   manger, they would keep other people out of the privilege. Not even to
   prevent these displays of bad temper did our Lord keep back the
   discriminating Truths of the Word. Here, when addressing the Jews, he
   did not hesitate to speak, even to a rude rabble, concerning that
   glorious doctrine.

   He says, "You believe not, because you are not of My sheep, as I said
   unto you." He does not lower the standard of the doctrine. But He holds
   His ground and carries the war into the enemy's camp. The notion that
   certain truths are not fit to be preached to a general assembly but are
   to be kept for the special gathering of the saints, is, I believe,
   horribly mischievous. Christ has not commanded us to keep a part of our
   teaching reserved from the common folk and set aside for the priests
   alone.

   He is for openly proclaiming all the Truths of God. "What I tell you in
   darkness, that speak you in light: and what you hear in the ear, that
   preach you upon the housetops." There is no Truth of God that we need
   be ashamed of and there is no Truth of God that will do any harm. We
   grant you that every truth can be twisted--but even this would be a
   less evil than the concealment of it. Whatever the doctrine may be,
   ungodly men can pervert it according to their own lusts-- and if we
   have to stop preaching a doctrine because of the possibility of
   perverting it, we shall never preach anything at all, for every truth
   may be perverted and made to be the mother of infinite mischief.

   Our Savior did not teach His disciples to keep certain things for the
   instructed few who were able to receive them. But He bade us publish
   all the great Truths of God, since they are necessary for conviction,
   for conversion, for edification, for sanctification, and for the
   perfecting of the people of God. Even to His brutish opponents He
   exhibited but little reserve. He flashed in the faces of His
   adversaries this grand but humbling Truth, "You believe not, because
   you are not of My sheep." Your unbelief is just an evidence that you
   were not chosen, that you have not been called by the Spirit of God and
   that you are still in your sins.

   The Jews had said to him, "If you are the Christ, tell us plainly."
   They professed that they wanted to know more certainly concerning Him.
   This was a vain pretense, for He had told them all they needed to know
   and they had not believed Him. Therefore He answered them to a large
   degree by making them know more about themselves. Sometimes the point
   in which a man is deficient is not as to the Gospel, but as to his own
   need of it. He may know all of Christ that is needful for his salvation
   but he may not know enough about himself and his own lost condition.

   And therefore he is not in the way in which Christ becomes precious to
   him, because he is ignorant of his deep and terrible need. So the
   Savior began to talk to them, not so much about Himself as about His
   people and what they were to be. "My sheep hear My voice and I know
   them and they follow Me."

   I pray God, the Holy Spirit, to bless the Word to many, that they may
   learn more about the work of Christ in their hearts and more about
   their need of it--and thus may be led to seek Jesus and find Him
   tonight as their Savior and their Shepherd.

   There are two things in my text which will suffice for our meditation.
   First, here is a description given of the Lord's people. "My sheep hear
   My voice, and I know them and they follow Me." And then, secondly,
   there is a privilege secured to them, namely, their everlasting,
   unquestionable safety. "I give unto them eternal life. And they shall
   never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of My hand. My
   Father, which gave them Me, is greater than all. And no man is able to
   pluck them out of My Father's hand. I and My Father are One."

   I. First, and all that I can say will be but little, considering the
   largeness of the subject, let us notice THE DESCRIPTION HERE GIVEN OF
   THE PEOPLE OF GOD.

   They are first described by a specialty of possession--"My sheep." All
   men are not sheep, for some are foxes, or ravenous wolves, and others
   are compared to dogs and lions. All persons who might be called sheep
   are not Christ's sheep. All do not belong to His flock. All are not
   gathered into His fold. There is a special of possession. There may be
   many sheep, but the Savior speaks of, "My sheep," those whom He chose
   of old, those who were given Him of the Father, those who have been
   bought with His blood, redeemed from among men, and in due time have
   been ransomed by His power-- for He has bought them back from the hand
   of the enemy and therefore claims them to be His own. "The Lord's
   portion is His people."

   Other lords have their portion and Christ takes His portion. His people
   are the lot of His inheritance. He speaks of "My sheep" as a peculiar
   heritage, whom, as a Shepherd, He claims for His own. Of these He is
   the sole Owner. He is not merely their Keeper but their Possessor. We
   read of the hireling shepherd, "whose own the sheep are not." But in
   the case of our Good Shepherd, "He puts forth His own sheep."

   There is a special character about them. They are "My sheep." They are
   dependent, timid, trembling, obedient, teachable. They are made sheep
   by His own Spirit. They have received a nature which is not that of the
   doggish world, nor that of the swinish multitude, nor that of the
   wolfish persecutor. But they are men indwelt of the Spirit of God, who
   are, therefore, clean, gentle, loving, gracious. He calls them "My
   sheep," for they have a special relation to Himself-- they are like
   Jesus. Being His sheep, He has become their Guardian as well as their
   Proprietor and they look up to Him as such. They are sheep to Him and
   He is a shepherd to them.

   We may judge ourselves tonight by considering whether towards Christ we
   are His sheep. Do we acknowledge ourselves as belonging to Him, spirit,
   soul, and body? Do we regard ourselves as being, in relation to Him, no
   wiser, no stronger, than sheep to a shepherd? I know some who are
   certainly no sheep of Christ's flock, for they will be led by nobody in
   Heaven, or on earth. They must have their own sweet way. They are
   critics of the Bible, not disciples of it. They might be very good dogs
   but they are very strange sheep. They would make very respectable
   wolves, for they are great in destructive criticism. But they certainly
   are not sheep.

   And their temper and spirit are such that they would disdain the
   character, if they understood it. "What? To go where I am led? To lie
   down where I am bid to lie down? Not to choose my own way? To see
   nothing and know nothing--to have my eyes in His head and my wisdom in
   His mind? To be shepherded by another mind than my own? Is it so? Am I
   to be nothing but a sheep to the Lord Jesus?" Yes, it is even so. And
   therefore the modern wise man is indignant and proudly repudiates the
   character of a sheep.

   As for us, we accept all that the name implies. O Brethren, we can play
   the man before other people, but when we come before our Lord, as the
   sheep is a mere animal in comparison with its shepherd, we feel
   ourselves to be less than that. How often have we cried with David, "So
   foolish was I and ignorant: I was as a beast before You"! O my Lord, in
   Your presence I sink as low as low can be and You become very high,
   yes, All in All to me--the Shepherd of my weak, vacillating, trembling
   spirit! There are special characteristics, then, about these people in
   the description. I have only time to hint at some of them.

   A chief mark of Christ's people is attention. "My sheep hear." They can
   hear, because they have had spiritual ears given them. Once the
   Shepherd might have spoken all day long and they would not have heard
   Him. But it is not so now. Even from the Cross our Lord's plaintive
   cries were all unheard by them. But now He has given them spiritual
   capacity and perception and they can hear and they do hear what His
   dying love would make them know and understand. Their Lord has spoken
   to them. They have heard His voice and have known it to be His. They
   still hear it and they distinguish between His voice and other voices.
   "A stranger will they not follow: for they know not the voice of
   strangers."

   They now so hear that voice as to hear it in a true way. And joyfully
   to own it by obeying it. Do you not say, sometimes, to a child that is
   disobedient, "Did you not hear me speak, Child?" So Christ may say to
   many who hear with the outward ear but who will not yield obedience,
   that they have not heard Him. For indeed they have not hearkened with
   the inner ear. Their ear does not reach down to their heart. And thus,
   for spiritual purposes, it is no ear at all. It is an awful thing when
   the ear is a closed-up passage, shut against the voice of the Savior.

   You can tell the sheep of Christ by their being marked in the ear. "My
   sheep hear My voice." They may not hear a good deal that other people
   hear. They may even be glad to be deaf to it. There are many calls
   exceedingly musical to carnal ears, which have no charms for them. They
   try to be deaf to some voices from which they could gather nothing but
   temptation. But they hear Christ's voice. They are all there when He
   speaks--their soul sits at the door to hear His softest whisper. They
   try to hear--they charge themselves to take heed that they lose no
   sound from Heaven. They do hear. But they long to hear yet more
   completely and to be more obedient to that voice which rings through
   the chambers of their soul.

   Oh, what a hearing we have sometimes given to Christ! I have heard Him
   with my body, my soul, my spirit--at least, I have thought so. But
   whether in the body, or out of the body, I could not tell. If in the
   body, every pore has been an ear for my Lord's sweet voice. As though
   my blood were tingling from the crown of my head to the sole of my
   foot, so has my spirit been wholly and entirely affected by the
   charming tones of the voice of the Well-Beloved, Oh, that He would
   speak tonight! Can you not hear Him? Beloved, is He not now calling us?
   Do you not rejoice to hear Him?--

   "No music's like His charming voice, Nor half so sweet can be."

   So, you see, a noteworthy mark of the elect ones lies in their
   attention to Jesus, their Shepherd. He calls in vain to others. But His
   sheep hear His voice.

   Another mark of the Lord's people is intimacy. "My sheep hear My voice,
   and I know them." "I know them." Yes, the Lord discerns them. He
   singles them out, for "the Lord knows them that are His." Sometimes we
   do not know them. But He says, "I know them." In cloudy times they do
   not know themselves. But He says, "I know them." When a child of God
   does not know whether he is a child of God or not, his Father knows His
   own children and the Great Shepherd knows His own sheep.

   His is a discernment which never fails. The hypocrite cannot get into
   the true fold of Christ. He may get into the visible fold. But not into
   the real spiritual fold of Christ. For Christ does not know Him and
   bids Him depart. This is the very seal upon the foundation--"The Lord
   knows them that are His." His eyes discern between the righteous and
   the wicked, between him that fears God and him that fears Him not--His
   is a knowledge of quick and certain discernment.

   But this might make us tremble if we did not know that the expression,
   "I know them," means a knowledge of approbation. "I know them," says
   the Shepherd. "I take a delight in them. I know their secret sighs and
   mourning. I hear their private prayers. I know their praises in the
   silence of their hearts. I know their consecration and their
   aspirations after perfect service. I know their longings and their
   love. I know how they delight in Me.

   "I know how they trust My promises. I know how they look to My atoning
   blood. I know how in their inmost souls they rejoice in My name. I know
   them and approve their secret thoughts." O sweet words, understood in
   that sense! And this is one part of the character of the Lord's
   people--that He did foreknow them in His Sovereign Grace--and now He
   personally knows them by taking a delight in them.

   This Divine complacency leads to a very intense observation of them.
   "He knows the way that I take." "The Lord knows the way of the
   righteous." He has an eye upon them and marks their paths. His ears are
   open to their cry and He hears their petitions. Though there is all the
   world for His omniscience to consider, yet He looks upon each one of
   His sheep as much as if there were only that one person in the
   universe. Oh, to think of this! "I know them," sounds like mu-

   sic in this sense. He that knows the stars and knows the infinite
   multitude of living creatures in the universe, has a special and
   peculiar knowledge of His own chosen.

   "I know them," says He. And He intends, by that, an intense
   observation. Now, Beloved, just try a little here, to see whether you
   come into this number--"I know them." Does the Lord know you as His
   own? Has He had personal communion with you and you with Him? Or will
   He have to say to you at the last, "I never knew you"? Why, some of you
   have made Him know you! You have gone to Him in such trials and in such
   troubles and you have cried to Him in such bitterness and anguish,
   that, if He asks your name, you can say--

   "Once a sinner near despair

   Sought Your Mercy Seat by prayer;

   Mercy heard and set him free;

   Lord, that mercy came to me!" When You did help me in great need, when
   You did pass by my great sin, then did You know me, O my Lord! "Do You
   ask me who I am? Ah, my Lord! You know my name." Just as some men know
   right well the importunate beggar who is often at their door, so does
   the Lord, for certain, know some of you, for you go every day begging
   at His gate, and you receive constant alms at His hand. Besides that,
   you go every day thanking Him for the mercies you receive. He knows
   your name--the name of one who is drowned in debt to His infinite
   bounty. He can never forget your groans and cries.

   And day by day your praises are a memorial to Him. By His love and pity
   and compassion, He is sure to remember you. Sooner can a woman forget
   her sucking child than your God forget you. Well, here are things well
   worth the not-ing--attention and intimacy. Are these yours?

   But here is one more--actual obedience. How does He put it? "I know
   them and they follow Me." All the Lord's sheep are marked in the foot,
   as well as in the ear. The foot and ear marks must be in every sheep of
   the Lord's flock. "They follow Me." That is to say, they openly avow
   Him as their Shepherd. Other shepherds come and other sheep go after
   them. But these sheep know the Lord Jesus and they follow Him. He,
   alone, is their Leader. They are not ashamed to admit it. They take up
   their cross and follow the Cross-bearer and they bear His name.

   More than that, they practically carry out their open avowal and they
   follow Him in daily life, copying His example. They not only say, "He
   is my Leader," but they follow Him. Christ's sheep try to follow in the
   track that the Shepherd marks for them. Christ's people are never so
   happy as when they can put down their feet where Christ put His feet
   down. The very marks that He has left by His bleeding footsteps we
   would desire to follow all day and every day. Beloved, look carefully
   to this! Do what Jesus did, according to your measure and power. This
   is what the people of God try to do. If you do not endeavor to be like
   Christ, you are not His sheep. For of His sheep it is true, "I know
   them and they follow

   Me."

   And this is personally operative upon them. I could not tell you
   exactly in English words, but the Greek word gives here a kind of
   personality to the whole company. "My sheep hear My voice," that is,
   the whole of the flock of God. "I know them," that is, again, the whole
   flock of them, altogether. But, "they follow Me," is in the plural
   number. It is as though it said, "They, each one, follow Me." We, who
   are the Lord's chosen, hear as a mass and the Lord knows the whole
   Church, for, as a whole, it is redeemed by Christ.

   But we individually follow--each one for himself, through Divine Grace.
   We each one follow Him. "They follow Me." I like that singular personal
   pronoun. It is not written, "They follow My Commandments," though they
   do. It is not said, "They follow the route that I have mapped for
   them," though they do that, too. But, "they follow Me," distinctly. In
   their individual personality they follow their Lord in His individual
   personality. They have recognized Him above His words, above His ways
   and even above His salvation. "They follow Me," says He.

   This is a grand mark of a Christian--not merely a life of morality, a
   life of integrity, a life of holiness--but a life of all these in
   connection with Christ. They follow Him, not holiness, nor morality,
   nor integrity, apart from Christ--they follow their Lord. A good life
   is good in any man. We cannot speak evil of virtue, even when we find
   it in the ordinary moralist. But this is not the complete mark of
   Christ's sheep. The virtues of Christ's sheep are in connection with
   Himself. The Christian is holy and all that, but that is because he
   follows his perfect Master and keeps close to Him. This is one of the
   peculiar and unfailing marks of the child of God.

   I have run through, very briefly, the descriptions, and I now leave you
   to meditate upon it when you are alone. This descriptions of the sheep
   of Christ are worthy of reading, marking and inwardly digesting.

   II. But my main object tonight is to show you THE GREAT PRIVILEGE HERE
   CONFERRED ON THE PEOPLE OF GOD. Christ has secured to them the
   priceless gift of eternal security in Him. No sheep of Christ shall
   ever be lost. None that He has purchased with His blood and made to be
   His own, shall ever wander away so as to perish at last. This is the
   doctrine of the verses now before us. At any rate, if I wanted to
   express that doctrine, I could not find words in which I could set it
   forth more definitely, or more completely, than is done by the words
   before me.

   The security of the people of God lies, first of all, in the character
   of the life which they have received. Listen to this--"And I give unto
   them ETERNAL LIFE." All the spiritual life which all the sheep in the
   flock now possess has been given to them by their Shepherd. Never was
   there another flock of which this could be said. No shepherd but this
   one can give life to his sheep. But He gave them all the true life that
   they have.

   No, stop--He not only gave them life but He sustains that life by a
   constant gift. Observe, it is not written, "I gave unto them eternal
   life," but "I give unto them eternal life." They are always living by
   virtue of the life which He is always giving. They are constantly
   receiving life from Him, according to that assurance, "Because I live,
   you shall live also." What He always gives they must always receive and
   therefore it cannot cease.

   Notice the nature of that life. "I give unto My sheep eternal life."
   Now, you all know what "eternal" means--or say, rather, none of you can
   form an idea of eternity which can grasp all its length of endurance.
   Only this--you know it has no end and cannot, therefore, close. If
   anybody said that he had eternal life and lost it, he would be flatly
   contradicting himself. It could not be eternal, or else he must still
   have it. If it is eternal, it is eternal and there is no end to it. And
   that is an end of further argument about it.

   If the life that Christ gives us, when we are born again, can die, it
   is not "eternal" life, or else words have ceased to have any meaning at
   all. In its nature, as being the work of the Holy Spirit, and an
   emanation from God, the life bestowed in regeneration is an undying
   one. Has not the Holy Spirit described us as "being born again, not of
   corruptible seed but of incorruptible, by the Word of God, which lives
   and abides forever"? The life of God imparted by the Holy Spirit must
   live forever. As the gift is continuous, is always being given, and as
   it is in itself eternal life, it must always exist.

   But, principally, I dwell upon the glorious character of the Giver. "I
   give unto My sheep eternal life." The life that Christ gives is not
   that poor, paltry life which lasts the professor for about three weeks
   and then dwindles down and dies out. Or, say, three months and then the
   revival is over and the convert is spun out and done for and has to
   begin again. Such is the religious life which is excited by men. But it
   is not so with the life which comes from God.

   I said that the false convert begins again, though how he begins again,
   I know not, because I read in Scripture of people being born again. But
   I have never read of their being born again, and again, and again, and
   again. I am told that some of our religionists have had their people
   converted and born again more times than they can count. And I heard
   that a woman had been born again twelve times down at a certain
   meeting. But he who stated the fact said shrewdly that he feared it was
   not done well the last time.

   No, I do not think it will ever be done well in that way. He that is
   born again, according to Scripture, has received ETERNAL LIFE. And this
   is the only life worth receiving. I would not preach my very soul away
   in order to proclaim such a two penny, trumpery, temporary salvation as
   that. But to preach the Lord Jesus as giving eternal life is worth
   living for and dying for. I tell you, Sirs, it is this that brought me
   to Christ. While I was yet young and thinking over matters, I saw young
   lads that were brought up with me, excellent in character, who left
   their homes to be apprenticed and after a while the temptations of the
   world overcame them, and they went astray and had no religion at all.

   But when I read that Christ gave His sheep eternal life, I looked at it
   as a kind of moral life insurance for my soul and I came to Christ and
   trusted Him to keep me to the end. I shall suffer a grievous
   disappointment if I ever find out that the life of God in me is not
   eternal and that the new birth does not assure final perseverance.

   I did not go up to the booking office and take a ticket for a quarter
   of the distance to Heaven. But I took my ticket all the way through. I
   trust, no, I know, that according to my faith, so will it be unto me. I
   am very glad to have my through ticket with me and I believe that
   unless the train of Almighty Grace smashes up--which it never will--I
   shall

   get through to the Celestial terminus as surely as ever Divine power
   can draw me there--for so it is written--"I give unto My sheep eternal
   life."

   Now, depend upon it, it is what you hold out to people that has much to
   do with how they behave themselves afterwards. Tell them that if they
   believe in Christ, they are going to get, not eternal life--but life
   for a little while--life for as long as they take good care of it, and
   I fear it will prove to be so. It may do them good to get the poor
   little change you offer them--but as surely as they are converted to a
   temporary life, they will die out before long.

   You told them that they would. You did not propose any more to them.
   But when you propose to them this--"Here is everlasting life to be had
   by believing in Christ. It is not temporary but eternal life"--why,
   then they grip it as such. They believe in Christ for that and
   according to their faith it is unto them. And the Lord and Giver of
   life is glorified in giving to them this great and splendid gift, the
   gift of all gifts. "I give unto My sheep eternal life."

   I do not know in what other way to preach from this text than the one
   in which I am preaching from it. Somebody says, "Oh, that is
   Calvinism!" I do not care what it is. It is Scriptural. I have this
   inspired Book before me, and I cannot see any meaning in the words
   before me, if they do not mean that those who have received life from
   the Lord Jesus have an endless inheritance. I cannot make them mean
   anything else. "I give unto My sheep eternal life," must mean that
   Believers are eternally secure.

   "It is dangerous doctrine," cries one. I have not found it dangerous
   and I have tried it these many years. I conceive that it would be far
   more dangerous to tell people that they could be truly converted and
   yet the work of Divine Grace would end in six months and then they
   could come back again and begin again and do so as many times as they
   liked. The Word of God tells them that if they shall fall away, it is
   impossible to renew them again unto repentance. Men may fall and be
   restored. But if they fall away utterly, there remains no other work
   which can be done for them. If this everlasting life could die, the
   Holy Spirit would have done His best and nothing more would remain to
   be done.

   If it were so that this salt which is good should lose its savor, where
   could it be salted? See what a gulf opens before you. And do not look
   for a work which will not endure every possible strain. Oh, that you
   may get this eternal life!

   So we take a step farther. The children of God are safe, again, not
   only because of the life they receive but because of the inner dangers
   which are averted. Take the next sentence--"And they shall never
   perish." They have a tendency to spiritual sickness, but their Shepherd
   will doctor them so that they shall never perish. They are sheep and
   have a tendency to wander. But their Shepherd shall keep them so that
   they shall never perish. Time tries them and they grow old and the
   novelty of religion wears off. But they shall never perish. Think what
   you will of them, "they shall never perish," for so the promise stands.

   The first statement, "I give unto them eternal life," is as broad as
   can be, but this is broader still--"they shall never perish." The rule
   has absolutely no exception. The whole of them shall be preserved. Let
   them live to be as old as Methuselah, they shall never perish, whatever
   temptation may assail them. They may be tried and troubled and broken
   down, so that they may be hardly able to live. But they shall never
   perish. "Never" is a long day. But it is not longer than Divine Grace
   will last. Blessed be God, this grand promise stands fast--"They shall
   never perish."

   Now we must go a step farther. We have no time to urge these arguments
   at any great length. They are safe, next, by outer injuries being
   prevented. "Neither shall any man pluck them out of My hand." Many will
   pluck at them but none shall pluck them away. The devil will give many
   a horrible pluck and pull, to get them away. But out of the great
   Shepherd's hand he shall never take them. Their old companions and the
   memories of their old sins will come and pluck at them very hard and
   very cunningly. But the Savior says, "None shall pluck them out of My
   hand."

   So, first, here is their security--they are in His hands. That is, in
   His possession and He grasps them, as a man holds a thing in his hand
   and says, "It is mine." Neither shall any take them away from being
   under His protection. Never shall they be plucked away from Christ.
   When He says this, He pledges His honor to preserve them, for if it
   could be that one were plucked out of His hand, then would the devils
   in Hell rejoice and say, "He could not keep them. He said that He
   would, but He could not. We have managed to pluck this one, or that
   one, out of the pierced hand of their Redeemer." But such a horrible
   exultation shall never be heard throughout the ages of eternity.

   "They shall never perish, neither shall any pluck them out of My hand."
   Someone wickedly said, "They may get out of His hand themselves." But
   how can this be true, when the first sentence is, "They shall never
   perish"? Treat Scripture honestly and candidly and you will admit that
   the promise, "they shall never perish," shuts out the idea of perishing
   by

   going out of the Lord's hand by their own act and deed. "They shall
   never perish, neither shall any pluck them out of My hand." Who is to
   loosen the clasp of that hand which was pierced with the nail for me?
   My Lord Jesus bought me too dearly ever to let me go. He loves me so
   well that His whole omnipotence will work with that hand, and unless
   there is something greater than Godhead, I cannot be plucked away from
   that dear, fast-holding grip.

   Now, to make quite sure about it and to pile on the comfort, the Savior
   goes on to add the care and power of God Himself. Our Lord says, "My
   Father, which gave them Me." The saints of God are safe, because the
   Father gave them to His Son. He did not give Him a transitory
   inheritance. He did not bestow on Him a something which He might, after
   all, lose. Will the Lord Christ lose what His Father gave Him? You know
   how people say, "Oh, I hope that, if a burglar takes anything from my
   house, he will not take that cup, which is an heirloom. My father gave
   it to me."

   If a man had to defend his property, he would be sure to take care of
   that which was a very special gift, given in his honor, as a memorial
   of a great work. So is it with our Lord Jesus--He values that which His
   Father gave Him. I delight in the thought. I picture my blessed Lord
   looking at each one of His believing people and saying, "My Father gave
   you to Me." That poor woman, that struggling young man, that decrepit
   old lady, that man who is half-starved, but who loves his Lord--Jesus
   says of each one, "My Father gave this soul to Me." He cannot lose what
   His Father gave Him.

   He would die again sooner than He would lose them. His death has made
   their salvation safe beyond all jeopardy. He laid down His life for His
   sheep. The lion came and leaped into the fold. But the Shepherd met the
   lion--yes, He received him on His naked breast and held him there. It
   was a terrible tug. The Shepherd sweat great drops of blood as He held
   the monster. But He rent him and He hurled him to the earth and said,
   "It is finished." And it was finished. He has so saved all His flock
   until now that we are sure that He will never lose one of those whom
   His Father committed to His trust. "My Father gave them Me."

   Then He goes on to say that His people are kept by the Father's power.
   For He says, "My Father, which gave them Me, is greater than all. And
   no man is able to pluck them out of My Father's hand." Beloved,
   although God gave us to Christ, He did not cease to care for us
   Himself! Our sweet text last Sunday night I must bring to your memory.
   I could not fully preach from it, but the text was enough without a
   sermon--"All Mine are Yours and Yours are Mine. And I am glorified in
   them."

   We tried to show you how we were none the less the Father's because we
   were the Son's and none the less the Son's because we belonged to the
   Father. So here Jesus in effect says. "My Father gave you to Me. Yet He
   takes care of you none the less, but all the more. Because He is
   determined that what He gave to Me shall be Mine, the Lord will put
   forth His wisdom and power to preserve you."

   Let me, by a symbol, illustrate the latter words of the text. There lie
   the children of God in the hand of Christ. Do you see that fast closed
   hand? They are safe enough there. Jesus says, "No man shall be able to
   pluck them out of My hand." But see the Father? He puts His hand over
   the hand of Jesus! There, now--you are inside two hands, "And no man is
   able to pluck them out of My Father's hand."

   Oh, the serene security of those who hear the voice of Christ and whom
   He calls His sheep! A double-handed force keeps them safe against all
   ill. Pluck away, Satan! You will never pluck them away from the hand of
   Jesus and the hand of His Father! "Who shall separate us from the love
   of Christ?" It is impossible to be done.

   And then the Savior finishes all by saying that, while He has spoken of
   the Father and Himself as two and two as they are as Persons--yet in
   their Divine Essence they are but One. He says, "I and My Father are
   One." And especially One in love to His people. "The Father Himself
   loves you," even as He loves His Son. And, while you read the love of
   Christ in His death, you must read the Father's love quite as much in
   that great sacrifice. It is true of our Lord Jesus that--"He loved the
   Church and gave Himself for it." But it is equally true of the
   Father--"God so loved the world, that He gave

   His Only-Begotten Son."

   They are one in an infinite love to all those who, called according to
   the Divine purpose, are following Christ and hearing His voice. I fall
   back with great joy upon this blessed conviction--that He will not
   suffer those to perish who have received eternal life at His hands. Of
   course, if you have only taken temporary life--if you only believe in
   that--you will get no more than you believe. Your gift will be measured
   by your faith. But if you say, "I gave myself up to Christ

   that He might be Alpha and Omega to me. And I wholly trust myself to
   Him without reserve, throughout all my life, to save me," He will do
   it.

   "I am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed
   unto Him against that day." "He which has begun a good work in you will
   perform it until the day of Jesus Christ." "The path of the just is as
   the shining light, that shines more and more unto the perfect day."

   You are safe in Christ's hands. Know it, and feel the joy of it. "Oh,"
   says one, "but if I thought so, I should run into sin!" I am sorry for
   you--things act very strangely upon you. Nothing binds me to my Lord
   like a strong belief in His changeless love. "Oh but it would be far
   safer to tell your hearers that they may be overcome by sin and
   perish!" I will not tell them what I do not believe. I will not
   dishonor my Lord by a falsehood. Shall I come home to your house and
   tell your children that, if they do wrong, you will cut their heads
   off? Or that, if they disobey you, they will cease to be your children?

   If I were to propound that doctrine, your children would grow angry at
   such a slander upon their father. They would say, "No, we know better
   than that!" Far rather would I say to them, "My dear children, your
   father loves you. He will love you without end, therefore do not grieve
   him." Under such doctrine true children will say, "We love our
   ever-loving Father. We will not disobey Him. We will endeavor to walk
   in His ways."--

   "It is love that makes our willing feet In swift obedience move." Our
   loving Lord will not cast away those to whom He is bound by marriage
   bonds.

   "Well, but suppose we sin." He will chasten us and restore us. "If I
   believed that doctrine, I should live as I like," says one. Then you
   are not one of His sheep, for His sheep love holiness and will not love
   iniquity. The change worked by the new birth is such that a man will
   not return to his old ways of sin and folly. This is the doctrine. And
   how can you make it to be an indulgence to sin? True saints never turn
   the Grace of God into licentiousness but the very mention of eternal
   love leads them to careful obedience.

   One more thing I must say. Some ministers preach a Gospel with a very
   wide door to it, but there is nothing to be had when you get within. I
   am sometimes told that I make my door a little too narrow. It is not
   true, for I preach the Gospel to every creature under Heaven, with all
   my might. But if the door is narrow, there is something worth having
   when you enter by it. Even if the way is narrow, if you once get in,
   you have got in and you have found eternal life and you shall never
   perish, neither shall any pluck you out of Christ's hands.

   Sinner, come and have an eternal blessing! It is worth having. Come and
   have it! If you believe, you shall assuredly be saved. "He that
   believes and is baptized shall be saved"--saved from sin so as never to
   go back and live in it again! So saved as to be made holy! Saved as to
   be preserved in holiness. Holiness shall be the set of the main current
   of your life, until, made perfectly holy, you shall dwell with God
   above.

   Into His hands let us commit our spirits tonight and we may rest
   assured that they shall be safe eternally. Amen.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                    Indexes
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Scripture References

   Genesis

   [10]46:1-4   [11]49:22

   Exodus

   [12]20:18-20

   Leviticus

   [13]16:17

   Deuteronomy

   [14]5   [15]27   [16]32:13   [17]33:24-25

   Joshua

   [18]1:2   [19]1:3

   1 Kings

   [20]5:17   [21]9:2   [22]9:3

   2 Kings

   [23]4:3

   Job

   [24]15:11   [25]23:10

   Psalms

   [26]12:6   [27]51   [28]85:8   [29]94:9   [30]119:9   [31]132

   Proverbs

   [32]14:10

   Isaiah

   [33]31:2   [34]53:12   [35]55:3   [36]66:2   [37]66:10

   Jeremiah

   [38]14:3   [39]14:4   [40]14:22   [41]31:18-20   [42]31:32   [43]32:40

   Hosea

   [44]12:4

   Joel

   [45]2:25   [46]2:32

   Micah

   [47]7:7

   Malachi

   [48]1:1

   Matthew

   [49]5:6   [50]18:12   [51]18:13   [52]21:17-20

   Mark

   [53]15:28

   Luke

   [54]7:38   [55]10:39   [56]11:33-36   [57]13:18-19   [58]15:4
   [59]15:5   [60]15:6   [61]17   [62]23:42-43

   John

   [63]1:47   [64]3:8   [65]10:17   [66]10:27-30   [67]11:35   [68]14:17
   [69]18:26   [70]20:10-16   [71]21:12

   Acts

   [72]2:36-37   [73]17   [74]20:21

   1 Corinthians

   [75]2:12

   2 Corinthians

   [76]4:4

   Galatians

   [77]3:10-14

   Ephesians

   [78]5:18

   Philippians

   [79]3:10

   Colossians

   [80]2:13

   1 Thessalonians

   [81]1:8

   2 Timothy

   [82]3:5

   Hebrews

   [83]2:6-18   [84]2:11   [85]2:12   [86]4:2   [87]4:3   [88]9:12
   [89]11:6

   1 John

   [90]2:28   [91]4:6

   Revelation

   [92]5:6   [93]5:7   [94]19:7   [95]19:8
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Scripture Commentary

   Genesis

   [96]46:1-4   [97]49:22

   Exodus

   [98]20:18-20

   Deuteronomy

   [99]33:24-25

   Joshua

   [100]1:2-3

   1 Kings

   [101]5:17   [102]9:2-3

   2 Kings

   [103]4:3

   Job

   [104]15:11   [105]23:10

   Psalms

   [106]12:6   [107]85:8   [108]94:9

   Proverbs

   [109]14:10

   Isaiah

   [110]53:12   [111]55:3   [112]66:2   [113]66:10

   Jeremiah

   [114]14:3-4   [115]14:22   [116]31:18-20   [117]32:40

   Joel

   [118]2:25   [119]2:32

   Micah

   [120]7:7

   Malachi

   [121]1:1

   Matthew

   [122]5:6   [123]18:12-13

   Luke

   [124]7:38   [125]11:33-36   [126]13:18-19   [127]15:4-6   [128]23:42-43

   John

   [129]1:47   [130]10:17   [131]10:27-30   [132]11:35   [133]14:17
   [134]18:26   [135]20:10-16   [136]21:12

   Acts

   [137]2:36-37   [138]20:21

   1 Corinthians

   [139]2:12

   2 Corinthians

   [140]4:4

   Galatians

   [141]3:10-14

   Ephesians

   [142]5:18

   Philippians

   [143]3:10

   Colossians

   [144]2:13

   1 Thessalonians

   [145]1:8

   2 Timothy

   [146]3:5

   Hebrews

   [147]4:2   [148]4:3   [149]9:12   [150]11:6

   1 John

   [151]2:28

   Revelation

   [152]5:6-7   [153]19:7-8
     __________________________________________________________________

            This document is from the Christian Classics Ethereal
               Library at Calvin College, http://www.ccel.org,
                   generated on demand from ThML source.

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