Chapter Twenty

Chapter 20.
Remember your Leader A Sermon Delivered by Rev. Arthur T. Pierson, D.D. At the Metropolitan Tabernacle On Lord's-day Evening, February 14th, 1892.

"Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God, whose faith follow, considering the end their conversation."—Hebrews 13:7.

Along this upper railing you may all read that significant motto: "Remember the word that I said unto you; being yet present with you;" and to amplify the meaning of that motto will be my special object now.

Those who were present at the Memorial Service for the church members, will recall how Dr. Angus made this text the staple of his remarks, venturing to give a new rendering of it, which is rather more literal; "Bear in mind your leaders, since they have spoken unto you the Word of God; observing the end of their life-course, imitate their faith."

Spiritual leaders are of the highest importance to the human race. Few of us are capable of leadership, and so we need to have leaders to follow; and in all ages of the world God has given to men leaders—leaders in education, leaders in politics, leaders in philanthropy, and leaders in great religious movements; and inasmuch as the well-being of souls is of supreme importance, leadership in spiritual things is a supreme want and need of the human family.

It is of great importance that we should recognize such leaders, when God gives them to us. If it be needful that we should have leaders, it is equally so that we should not be misled by false guides, and therefore it is of such high importance that we should be able to determine what are the marks of a true, God-sent teacher. This text, whatever may be its other value, is mainly of importance, because it indicates three tests of a genuine, God-sent leader. In the first place he speaks the word of God, in the second place his faith is fixed on a personal Saviour; and, in the third place, his life conforms to the Word of God and to the faith in Christ, and ends in a glorious immortality. Wherever we find those three indications meeting in any man or woman, we may recognize the heaven-sent leader, and it is at our peril if we do not follow such leadership. There may, apparently, be one of these signs without the other two, or there may even appear to be two of those signs without the other, and third. In such cases doubt is justified: but, when the three are united, there can be no more reasonable question that such a man is one of God's anointed kings. As there are three indications of God's heaven-sent leaders here noted, so there are three corresponding duties that pertain to the common mass of mankind. The first is that we should bear in mind the heaven-sent leader for the sake of his message. The second is that we should watch and observe his heavenly course of life, and especially its glorious end;and the third is that we should copy or imitate his faith in a personal Christ; and I am sure you will agree with me, that no text could be more appropriate to the closing portion of these memorial services, that have extended through a fortnight, than this text. Bear in mind your great departed leader, because he spoke to you faithfully the Word of God; look back over the course of his life, and especially mark its glorious end; and from henceforth become imitators of his personal faith in a personal Saviour.

Let us, then, for a few moments, reflect upon these signs of a heaven-sent leader, and then apply them to the beloved and departed Pastor. In the first place, a heaven-sent leader speaks the Word of God. God has communicated his messages to men; and I believe, personally, that in a grand sense the prophetic office always has been in the world, and always will be in the world, till the end of time. What is a prophet? A prophet is not necessarily one who predicts future events. Prediction was but one mark of a prophet, and did not mark all prophets, either. A. prophet is one who stands before men, to speak in behalf of God. Most of the Old Testament prophets predicted, because it was pleasing to God that those who spoke in his name should indicate to men the great events of the future, and especially the coming events that had to do with the Messiah; but, as was said before, it is no necessary mark of the prophetic office or person, that he predicts future events. The difference between the Old Testament prophets and New Testament prophets lies mainly in this: Old Testament prophets spoke in behalf of God when, as yet, there were no written Scriptures, or when those written Scriptures were being gradually accumulated to make the complete book. Therefore, it was essential that prophets should be guarded by divine inspiration from any false or even fallible utterances. It was needful that there should be a compact body of revelation known as the Word of God, and they were chosen as the vehicles for creating or producing this Word of God, and therefore the great requisite was infallible inspiration. The character of the man speaking was of no particular consequence, in comparison to the character of his message. And so it pleased God sometimes to speak through men that were not what they ought to be, as in the case of Balaam and as in the case of Saul, because He thus magnified the office and function of the prophet above the person or character of the man. The message of God was the main thing, and if God chose to give that message through lips that were estranged from Him by wicked works, He might follow His own pleasure. But in these New Testament times the Word of God has been given, and given in final completeness. Hence there is no longer a necessity that any should help to produce the written Word of God. We have that in its entirety, its inspiration, its infallibility, and now, what we need prophets for is to interpret the word that God has given and apply it to human hearts. Hence arises a necessity that the character and life of the man who is to interpret the Scriptures shall be in accordance with the Scriptures. I think that we may safely say that, in modern times, God never chooses an unconverted or an unholy man to be the true vehicle of His message to his fellowmen. Character is of prime importance, as we shall see before we get through with this investigation; but what I would just now impress upon your minds is that a prophet is essentially a divine teacher and that, although the gift of predicting future events may no longer be a part of the qualification of a prophet, the prophetic office continues in the Church of God. Every man who preaches, and teaches, and testifies the Gospel of the grace of God, in accordance with the conditions here laid down, backing his gospel message by his personal faith in a personal Christ, and living such a life of godliness as shows that the message has taken root in his own heart—such a man is one of God's prophets, one of God's anointed ones, and it is at the peril of men that they do not receive the testimony of his lips and of his life. That I take to be the solemn sentiment of the text; and the meaning of that august and solemn admonition is, "Bear ye in mind your spiritual leaders, seeing that they have spoken unto you the very message of God. Keep your eye on their lives, and especially mark their glorious end, and become ye imitators of their faith in a personal Christ, who is the same yesterday, today and for ever, and therefore as ready to be your Saviour as he was to be theirs." With regard to the application of the test, whether a prophet speaks the Word of God or not, how shall we know that the message which God's spiritual leader brings to us has the authority of the Most High? Even this is not left without criteria or means of forming a judgment. For instance, we are told in the eighth chapter of the prophecy of Isaiah, one of the great marks that shall always distinguish the utterances of a true spiritual leader. In the twentieth verse of that chapter we read "To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word it is because there is no light in them." That is the first test. Does the preaching or teaching of a spiritual leader correspond with the written Word of God? There is to be found the infallible standard of doctrine and duty. There is the great court of final appeal; beyond this no appeal can be carried, even to the throne of God, because the authority of God is in that book: and therefore he says, "Test every spiritual leader by the law and by the testimony of Holy Scripture, and if he speaks not according to this word, there is no light in him, and therefore he can shed no light on your spiritual darkness and duty." That criterion would unseat from their thrones hundreds of so-called spiritual leaders, who, in this day, to the astonishment of those of us who thoroughly believe this Word of God, seem to consider that their office is rather to cast doubt on the Holy Scripture than to confirm the confidence of men in this blessed Word; men who seem to use the pulpit as the place from which to spread rather their own misgivings and negations than their own convictions and affirmations, and who employ both tongue and pen rather to destroy than to construct faith in other souls. For one, I say, away with all these leaders! They are not God-given men. Again, let it be put on record, that the first test that a man is God's leader and speaks God's message, is that, accepting this Word of God as his guide, as the source from which he derives the authority of his message, the substance of his message and the spirit of his message, he preaches and teaches nothing new—old truths in new lights, it may be, but no new truths, for there are none. That which is new and not old is not true. All spiritual truth is as old as God is, and even the revelation of spiritual truth is as old as the Bible is. Men may talk about "progressive theology," but such a progressive theology only goes backwards, progressing only in the wrong direction. There is no addition to be made to the law and testimony. The only addition possible is in the spiritual interpretation and understanding of the law and testimony by the increase of spiritual insight and life in the teacher and the believer. That is the only true progress; and if people would pay more attention to their capacity for progress in that direction, leaving the Word of God unmutilated, and seeking simply to open their own minds and hearts to its testimony and to the incoming of the Holy Ghost, we should find, instead of a progressive theology, progressive theologians and progressive disciples. A second test that the spiritual leader is delivering God's message is to be found in the fact that he considers his own thoughts and conceptions as insignificant in comparison with those of God. They are mere "chaff." If they include and embrace the Word of God, and are the means of setting forth that Word, they are, like the husk, valuable for the sake of the kernel within; but if it be only their own dreams and visions that these teachers are giving to men, there is nothing but chaff without a kernel, to be borne away by the first wind that blows. And so Jeremiah says concerning the preaching of the Word: "What is the chaff to the wheat?" We have long insisted, and again emphatically repeat, that what the people need on matters of doctrine and duty, is not what "I think" or another man "thinks" (for all have equally a right to "think,") but what God thinks. Man's "opinion" changes; God's opinion never changes; man's "conceptions" of truth differ; God's idea of truth is eternally the same. A third evidence is given to us in the second Epistle to the Corinthians, in the first chapter, and it is especially necessary to emphasize this in our day. Paul says, in the seventeenth verse, "The things that I purpose, do I purpose according to the flesh, that with me there should be yea, yea, and nay, nay? But as God is true, our word toward you was not yea and nay. For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was preached among you by us, even by me and Silvanus and Timotheus, was not yea and nay, but in him was yea." That passage seems by many hard to be understood, but it is very simple. "Yea" is the word of affirmation—"It is so." "Nay" is the word of denial—"It is not so." Paul says, "Our preaching among you was not yea and nay." It did not consist of alternate positive and negative statements, of affirmations here and denials there; but it was one great, emphatic "Yea," that is, the utterance of positive truth backed by positive conviction. There are some professed teachers who, as I said before, seem to feel themselves called upon to tell others what they doubt. Goethe, the sceptic, says, "Give us your convictions; as for doubts, we have quite enough of our own." Men have no need to have their faith destroyed; they rather want to have it built up. They have no need to have doubts implanted in their minds; doubts spring up like weeds. What we want is faith, and, in order to faith, we want men of positive conviction, speaking positive truths. And here is another sign of a God-sent leader. He comes before men with truths and facts that he doubts not, to speak what he knows, and so he speaks with the positiveness and authority of absolute certainty, "We know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved," etc. "We know that we have passed from death unto life." "We know him that is true." "We know that we have eternal life." "We know that we are of God." Who would not rather hear a preacher of the gospel say with confident certainty of conviction, "One thing I know," than to have him tell you ten thousand things that he did not know, or of which he was uncertain? A fourth sign that one is speaking according to the Word of God, is that the true teacher of Christ speaks by the testimony of the Holy Ghost. In the first Epistle to the Corinthians, the second chapter, we read these words: "I brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and much trembling. And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power; that your faith should hot stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God." A true spiritual leader will be known by the fact that, when he speaks to men, his utterance is attended with the demonstration of the Holy Ghost—not simply the demonstration of logic, but the demonstration of the Holy Spirit; that is to say, God will acknowledge and own his appointed leader by accompanying his teaching with his own power. There will be conversions among the unsaved; there will be edification and sanctification among believers; there will be a stirring up in the church of God and in the world when God's anointed king wields God's sceptre, and delivers God's message. It is a sign of spiritual leadership that spiritual power, in some form, attends the utterance of God's message.

Here, then, are God's great marks of a spiritual teacher: he will speak according to the written Word of God; he will not deliver himself of mere human opinions; he will speak the language of personal conviction and positive statement; and he will speak with the demonstration of the Holy Spirit. When you find those four things united, you need have no more doubt that the spiritual teacher is one who is delivering to you the message of God.

Another test is hinted by Jeremiah, in the twenty-third chapter, where he writes about the false prophets, who delude and deceive Israel "by their lies and by their lightness." Notice the collocation of those two words, "lies and lightness," i. e., falsehood and frivolity! In proportion to the soundness of a gospel preacher, his attachment to the Word of God, the depth of his experience, and the consistency of his life, will be the solemnity with which he preaches. On the other hand, when a man cuts loose from the Word of God, and begins to lead an inconsistent life, and loses hold on a personal Saviour, he begins to talk frivolity. For myself, although I have the keenest sense of the humorous and the ridiculous, and doubt not that humour has its part to play in a man's service, and has its lawful place in his utterance, I have always avoided conscientiously all invasions of the solemnity of the house of God by any jesting or trifling. And why? Suppose you go to a physician, believing yourself to have a cancer on the breast that is eating away at your vitals, and. so close to your heart that it imperils your very existence. You go to one who is accustomed to deal with cancer as his specialty. You open your mind to him, and show him the cancerous sore. With a smile and a joke, he says, "Oh, just go home and put on a bread and milk poultice." What would you think? You would come to the conclusion either that the man does not know anything about cancers, or else that you have nothing serious to worry about—would you not? You come to the house of God; the man in the pulpit professes to deal with the realities and verities of eternity, and to speak in the name of God to men; he professes to believe that you are a lost sinner, that perdition is before you, and that there is no hope for you except in the blood of Jesus Christ. And yet he gets up and begins to trifle, to talk lightly and deal in frivolities; and you come to the conclusion either that he does not believe his own message, or else that you are in no danger. I therefore protest that, for the preacher of the gospel, no attitude of mind is proper, except the solemnity of deep earnestness; and that lies are scarcely more delusive than lightness on the part of a gospel preacher. And so God would have his appointed leaders manifest and exhibit the fact that they are his appointed leaders, not only by their clinging to the Word of God, by their assertion of positive conviction in positive statement, by the abundant power of the Spirit of God in their ministry, but also by the solemn and awful earnestness with which they press the truths of God upon the consciences of men.

Let us now consider briefly the other two great marks of an anointed king of God—the personal faith in a personal Christ, and the holy course of life that ends in a glorious immortality. Do not you see a "progress of doctrine" here?—a development of truth? How can a child of God become God's anointed teacher and preacher to men, if the Word of God has not first taken hold of himself and made a new man of him? How can he preach the Christ of God, who is the centre of the gospel revelation, unless he personally believes in that Christ, and believes on that Christ, and is one with him by faith? Is not the preaching of the gospel experimental? Men do not want a mere intellectual display of learning, even though that learning be the mastery of the contents of the Word of God. You all like to hear a man speak whose heart speaks to your heart, instead of his head speaking to your head? That man preaches the gospel most powerfully on whose soul that gospel has first wrought the very results that he seeks to work in the souls of others. If I am not enamoured of Christ, I cannot make Christ appear as the Sun of righteousness, in whose presence all the stars fade. If he is not to me as precious ointment poured forth, that fills every apartment of my being with its glorious savour, how can I make him appear precious and fragrant to you? If he has not redeemed me from my sin, with what force can I assure you that he will redeem you from yours? If he has not satisfied my soul, how can I assure you that you will find in him the living bread and water that make hunger and thirst impossible? God's anointed king, who shall melt a million wills into the will of God, must be the man who comes with God's message, that has set his soul afire, and has set his own tongue ablaze. He must feel its melting power who would make others feel it. The man who preached in this Tabernacle, was a living sermon on this text. Let us look at this magnificent example of these principles, which was thus, for thirty years, furnished in this very pulpit, and for nearly forty years in his ministry in the city of London. God's word to this congregation to-night is, "Remember your great spiritual leader, who spoke to you the word of God. Mark his life, and its end, and copy his faith."

Charles H. Spurgeon was the most notable example that modern times have furnished of the union of these three elements to which I have adverted. There has been perhaps, no preacher of the age or century who has so rigidly confined his message to the Word of God as did that man. I call this congregation to witness, that they have heard from no other living preacher, messages so saturated with the thought and very dialect of the Holy Scriptures. It has been my privilege to hear most of the greatest preachers of the world, and I say, without depreciating any other man, living or dead, that I never heard such a gospel preacher as Charles H. Spurgeon. Nearly twenty-six years ago I was in this Tabernacle, in the month of August, 1866. I remember just where I sat, and the whole scene is indelibly impressed on my memory. I had then myself been preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ for more than six years, as an ordained minister, but on that morning I was convicted of sin. Such preaching I never had heard; such praying I never had heard; such praising I never had heard; and I went home to be a different man. That morning's experience revolutionized my ministry. It created in me a divine dissatisfaction with everything that I had been or done before, for I saw how mighty the simple gospel might be made, backed by deep heart-conviction and preached with a positiveness of statement; and I said, "If Christ Jesus, and he alone, can be made so gloriously attractive as that, and draw the people in such multitudes, God forbid that I should attempt any other method of making my life serviceable to men, or of drawing the people within the sound of my voice!" And if there is any power in my preaching of the simple gospel I owe it, under God, to what I heard from Charles Haddon Spurgeon in 1866. I challenge you to find any man living who exalts Christ more than he did, whose personal conviction of the truth was more positive, or who lived out, to the end, more consistently, the faith he preached.

Some say that he was so positive in his beliefs, that he had no compassion upon people who doubted. Would that we had many more like him! He would not encourage doubt where doubt concerned the infallible Word of God. He was not the man to countenance the notion that doubt is something meritorious, the sign of a higher order of intellect and culture, a notion which is one of the subtlest snares of the day in which we are living. Doubt is so in the fashion, that the "first families" in the intellectual world have adopted a new escutcheon, or shield, to signalize their intellectual greatness, and on that shield they have had engraved a huge question mark, an interrogation point (?), as though the mark of a great mind and superb culture is to question all things that have been undoubted, and put a doubt upon all the verities of God.

Dr. C. F. Deems says, "believe your beliefs, and doubt your doubts." Never make the mistake of believing your doubts and doubting your beliefs, for that temptation is in the very atmosphere of this sceptical age. Men and women are prone to doubt the things that have always been believed, and to believe the things that at least have been always doubted, and so to transfer their confidence to the wrong side of the scale. I bless God for the man that stood in this pulpit. He knew whom he believed, and knew the truth, for all his testimony was the result of experience and experiment. There must be an awful condemnation in store for those who, in this place, have heard this greatest of gospel preachers, and have not yet believed. I would to God that I had the tongue of the archangel to plead with and persuade you. Suppose that God should say to you, in eternity, only this one word: "Remember, remember, REMEMBER"! What if, hereafter, your mind is compelled to turn back to the sermons that you have heard delivered with such transcendent power from this platform, by that departed saint, and you must "remember" how he never preached a sermon in which he did not plead with sinners. When he was a lad he wandered through the place in which he lived seeking to find some comfort for his awakened soul, and could not, until at last he heard a plain sermon, whose message was: "Look unto me and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth." Then, the same day, he heard another sermon about being "accepted in the beloved," and he came home and told his father that he learned the way of salvation in the morning, but that he found the secret of pardon, peace and conscious acceptance in the evening. What a day that was for him! "And now" he said, "I will never preach a gospel sermon in which a sinner may not find the way to Jesus Christ? I do not think that there has been another man in the century who could say that. For myself, while I have tried to be a gospel preacher, I am sure I have preached many sermons in the course of my life, in which a sinner would have found it very difficult to discover the message of grace, or the way of salvation. Yet I bless God that, when I came to preach in this pulpit, I resolved, God helping me, that I would never henceforth preach a sermon in which I did not, in some form or other, uphold the crucified Christ. Well may less faithful preachers envy that blessed man, who could thus look back over forty-two years of his preaching of the gospel, and could never recall a sermon through which a sinner could not have found Christ! I pray God that you, who have sat under such a ministry, may not be lost, else you will be dreadfully lost. I pray you do not persist in going down to perdition, for every sermon that you have heard from Charles H. Spurgeon will be an additional weight on you to sink you down to the lowest depths. Remember him. He has been taken from you, but remember him. Remember his message. Follow his faith. Mark the consistency and beauty of his life, and even at this late day be turned to the Saviour that he served, and follow him.

I will read to you, as I close, a passage from one of Mr. Spurgeon's sermons, which he preached at Park Street Chapel, Southwark, in 1858. It was on the subject of "Death a Sleep"; and in the course of it he used these words—let us think of him as saying them to us to-night:—"And now, beloved, we shall soon all of us die. I shall have a gravestone in a few years planted over my grave in memory of me. Some of you I hope may say, 'There lies our minister, who once gathered us together in the house of God, led us to the mercy seat and joined us in our song. There lies one who was often despised and rejected of men, but whom God did nevertheless bless to the salvation of our souls, and whose testimony he sealed in our hearts and consciences by the operation of the Holy Ghost.' Perhaps some of you will visit my tomb and bring a few flowers to scatter upon it in glad and grateful remembrance of the happy hours that we spent together in the house of God."

It almost seems to me that, absent, he is still present and pleading with souls here to come to Christ. If there be any such thing in heaven as a knowledge of what is going on, on earth, Charles Haddon Spurgeon is assuredly looking down on this great congregation to-night. If there is such a thing as prayer in heaven, he is praying now for souls in this assembly. We know nothing about the communication between this world and the other; but communication will be opened by-and-by, and with each one of you in turn. While the Lord tarries, let us hope that Charles Haddon Spurgeon's reward will go on accumulating even now in multiplied conversions. But, best of all, we would have the jewels in the Saviour's crown made complete, and Christ see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied.

Here stood, for all these years, one of God's anointed kings. He preached the gospel with royal authority and spiritual power; he preached it with positive conviction; with personal faith in a personal Saviour, for I never knew a man whose heart bounded toward a personal Christ with intenser love than his. He preached it by the demonstration of the Holy Ghost. Multitudes were converted and saved and rejoice in God today; and I say to you now, solemnly, that if any of you have ever been doubtful that this is the Word of God, ever been doubtful that there is such a person as the Holy Ghost, ever been doubtful that there is such a thing as a transforming power in the Christian life, that departed Pastor ought to be the sufficient evidence of Christianity to you all; for there is no possibility of accounting for that one man if there is not a God; if this Bible is not his Word; if Christ is not a real Saviour; and if the Holy Ghost does not give the new heart and transform the life into the image of God. In the face of all infidels of all ages, and of the abounding infidelity of the present age, I boldly affirm that that one man, who has recently gone from us into the eternal glory, is the standing refutation of infidelity. He can be accounted for in no way, except by God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. The only philosophy sufficient to explain him is that this Bible contains, and is, the very Word of God, and that the message faithfully proclaimed, embedded and embodied in the heart and expanded in the life, is the essential divine message of reconciliation and salvation.

I can say no more. May God the Holy Spirit seal to your mind and heart the message of life and salvation that Mr. Spurgeon preached in this pulpit; and make it impossible for you to do otherwise than "remember the word THAT HE SPAKE UNTO YOU,—BEING YET PRESENT WITH you:"! Amen