Hebrews 6

Hebrews 6:19

SAFELY Hebrews 6:19. A WEEK ago, I spoke to the smaller company who came through the storm, upon the subject of “Drifting”, attempting to point out both the ways and dangers of drifting. It is quite appropriate, therefore, that I should follow that with a sermon from the text read, and the subject “Anchored”, “Safely Anchored”!I call your attention to the fact that the same inspired writer who set before us the danger of “drifting away from the things which we hear”, speaks to us through this text, to show us how we may be “anchored” in the truth.It is a gracious thing that we need not stop with the discussion of the first subject, but may present its complement, for his would be a cruel business who told men that they were adrift, unless he could also follow the statement with another—You may be anchored safely and eternally.Since last Sunday evening, I have talked with some who have frankly confessed that they were adrift. The number who know this to be their spiritual state, but have not confessed it, is legion. There are not a few of those who hear me tonight, who have departed from the teachings of youth, walked away from the Word of God, and have spread their sails before evil winds, and are driving, they know not whither. Such a state is not desirable, and those who are conscious of that condition are not content.The measure of a man’s interest in the anchor is exactly the measure of his consciousness of drifting, his dread of being drowned in the seas of infidelity or the waves of immorality. I want, therefore, to say some things that may be of assistance to many souls.

Because many of you were kept away last Sunday night, I may be pardoned for turning back again to the discussion of that hour, namely,SOME WAYS IN WHICH SOULS ARE SET ADRIFTI said last Sunday evening that there was the way of the current, the way of the tide, the way of the winds; but the thought of drifting has still other illustrations in the natural world.A vessel may be set adrift by loosened floats. Another vessel, when loose, is likely to drift into it.

Great rafts of logs sometimes break the cables and send skiffs and even steamers afloat.In 1884 I was in college at Hanover, Indiana, hard by the Ohio River. The waters rose to such heights that houses were swept in great numbers; property was destroyed to the extent of millions; and every craft in that stream, from the small skiff to the mail-line steamer was in greater or less danger. The great coal barges, freighted with tons on tons of black diamond, loosed from their moorings, and with irresistible momentum swept down the Ohio. Sometimes they crashed into tethered vessels and sank them. Other times they cut their cables and set them afloat.There is something wonderfully like that in human life. Its waters are alive with floaters, men and women who have long since loosed from their early education, who long ago broke the cables that bound them to the faith of the fathers.

Some of these men are in pulpits. More of them, however, are not only out of pulpits, but very far from attendance on the preaching of evangelical pulpits, to say the least.

Those who pose as preachers, while often men of unstained reputation, are none the less dangerous. Possibly they are the more dangerous, because falsehood from a good man has more weight than the lie of an immoral, irresponsible man. Just why a man should feel called upon to preach doubts, we have never been able to comprehend.Some time ago I sat in an auditorium and listened to one harangue his fellows for almost an hour in an effort to destroy faith, and I could but ask—Well what good have you accomplished? Even though you get your desire, are the faithless men and the faithless women of the world the holy men and holy women, the happy men and happy women?Do you build a man up in moral character, or in spiritual might, when you have insinuated into his mind infidelity, and have set him afloat? Such work seems to me a work well pleasing to devils.Years since, off the coast of Halifax, the schooner, Lord Eldon, heavily loaded with a precious cargo, was adrift with sails spread at full mast and filled with a furious storm. It was without a single soul on board.

No captain, no mate, no pilot, no sailor, but driving madly on the bosom of the mighty deep. Does that picture give you pleasure?

How much less pleasure can we possibly get from seeing a human soul with all of its immortal interests and destinies similarly situated. If Owen and Hume and Rousseau and Voltaire and Payne and Ingersoll were alive today, would they look on the subjects of their preaching with satisfaction? Bob Ingersoll! could he get joy out of seeing men accept his infidelity?Years since a man in Kansas read one of the Colonel’s addresses, accepted it as true, and made his way north to Lake Superior, and committed suicide in its waters, just out of Duluth.Is that the sort of gospel that the world needs? It is sad enough for a man to be afloat himself, but the greater sadness arises out of the circumstance that he has power to set others adrift. Fools we are to bring ourselves into touch with those who are drawn from their moorings, and whose business it is to destroy the faith of their fellows.Then, sometimes, a vessel goes adrift through the failure of the flukes—the anchor points. When one of these breaks an anchor cannot hold unless it be turned and the opposite fluke fastens itself in the rock.

There are not a few people who have been brought up in a religious faith that is false in part, and when, upon their own study, they discover that fact, the danger is that they will conclude that all of their teaching was in error; and instead of eschewing the evil and holding fast that which is good, they loose themselves from it all.Goethe attempted, when a boy, to make an offering unto the Lord, but in the slovenliness of youth, he forgot to put the porcelain dish under his burning pastils, and so they spoiled his father’s hand-painted music stand.The lad reasoned that this damaging result was indicative of the fact that God could not be worshiped. That day the flukes of his early faith lost their grip on the stable rock, and he never tried to fasten them to the Rock of Ages, but spread his sails to the hot winds of license and lust and drove madly till the day of his death.

A kindred experience is not uncommon.The child of wrong religious teaching has a good chance to wake up to the errors of that system; to see in it many things that are not in the Scriptures, not even faintly suggested by them, but are utterly opposed to them. When that time comes, it is usual for him to have his faith so shaken as to be set adrift. Instead of turning to the True God, he turns to infidelity. Instead of turning to the Scriptures to see what they say, he turns himself over to Satan and leads an out and out irreligious life. We find that there are many people in these days, in our Protestant churches, the flukes of whose faith are breaking. They have discovered that their fathers have taught them wrongly that their mothers have taught them wrongly touching the formalism that characterizes the high churches.

They discover that their preachers have practically denied the teaching of the Word of God touching the matter of baptism; they discover truth touching the Holy Spirit, the Second Coming of Christ, the restoration of the Jews, the evangelization of the world, the healing of men’s bodies in answer to prayer, and so forth, and so they are coming out of the churches and saying, “We’ll have nothing more to do with them!” Poor reasoning in my judgment. If the church of my blessed Christ has departed from His faith at one point, or at a hundred points, then I have the more serious obligation to stay in it, and show the better way.

Every one is bound by this fact that the Word of God shall be the infallible rule of his faith and practice; and so I turn myself to the study of the Bible and invite my fellows to come with me to that Book. It is better than beating about the world, resting in no bay, anchored nowhere, and by nothing.Martin Luther was rudely awakened to the horrible superstitions of the church of his day, but he did not cease to believe simply because he found he had been believing a lie. With an open Word before him, he turned to the work of knowing the eternal Truth, and while the soul of his German brother Goethe went on the rocks of infidelity and was lost, that of the great Reformer rode triumphantly in the haven of God’s promises, anchored by the Word to the Rock of Ages.Then again, as I suggested on last Sunday evening, crafts are set adrift by winds.So are men! The ministry just now is full of so-called “Liberalism”, another name for the narrowest bigotry in religious opinion. The philosophy is as full of error as an egg is of meat; it is one that seeks to destroy the inspiration and it practically dethrones God by putting degenerate men in His seat of holiness. Ptolemaic astronomers used to suppose that the world was the center of the universe, and they sought by every possible means to make the sun, moon and stars revolve around it.

It was a great shock to their faith when they had to see that the sun was the center, and the earth an insignificant planet. There are those, in our pulpits, who would make man the center of the theological universe, and have God describing ellipses about him, but the philosophy is only a theory.

In fact God does nothing of the sort, nor will He.Truly, as Dr. A. J. Gordon once said, “Liberalism is the religion of human nature. It does not make strong and rigid claims on men. It does not hold them up to strong convictions on such subjects as sin and retribution and the need of regeneration. Consequently, when men get careless and easy-going in their opinions, they drift into what is called ‘Liberalism’ as inevitably as water runs down a hill. You never find men backsliding into orthodoxy.

You never find men drifting into Calvinism, and you never will until you find water running up hill and iron floating upward in the air.“On the contrary, one has to climb to get into this kind of faith, trampling on pride, and self-esteem, and holding himself rigidly up to that conviction which is hardest to receive, namely—that human nature is naturally depraved and needs regeneration and God is righteously holy and must punish sin.”If one gets tired of believing this, he is only to shut his eyes and slide; by the simple gravitation of depravity, he lands among the liberals as certainly as a stone, loosened from the mountainside, stops in the lowest valley.Any sort of a man can give up his faith and descend to doubt, but it takes .a man or woman of some moral courage to keep up his faith and climb toward holiness and Heaven.Any sort of a man can practice infidelity, but it takes a noble man to lay the foundations of intelligent belief.It is more probable that we will have another Caesar than another Augustine; another Bacon than another Luther; another Watts than another Edwards; another Stead than another Spurgeon.“The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God”.(Psalms 14:1), and of such individuals the number is not small; but of the men who not only worship God but show their fellows how, the number of such can never be great enough.Dr. Cuyler said sagely, “Skepticism never won a victory, never slew a sin, never healed a heartache, never started a ray of sunshine, never saved a soul.” It is foredoomed defeat. Don’t risk your eternity on that spider’s web.THE ONE WAY FOR THE SOUL TO KNOW AGAINST EVERY STORM Read this context,“That by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to tie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us; “Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil”. (Hebrews 6:18-19). The Apostle is speaking of the Son of God. He is the unseen One who has entered through the veil. Unto Him the line of faith reaches, and on Him the anchor of hope takes hold, just as the anchor from the vessel goes down through the veil of the waters and fastens on the invisible, though eternal rocks that rib the sea. It is a strong figure—Christ the immovable Rock.In this world of change, it is good to find something that changes not. You remember how Drummond, in his address on the “Greatest Thing in the World,” illustrates the passing away of all knowledge and science, but the endurance of love. He who loved was eternal and He who gave His life for us is equally stable and everlasting. That is what the soul of man needs. Someone has said, “The soul wants certainty and cannot rest in doubt.” Oscillation between favor and despair, assurance and unbelief will never satisfy. Is everything on a ceaseless flow? Does nothing abide? Is there no truth or doctrine upon which we can place our hand and say it will be here tomorrow? Is it the work of each succeeding age to explode the faith of the preceding?

We cannot believe it. Just as the sailors know that there are rocks at the ocean’s bottom that cannot be broken up, that will hold the vessel if the cables and anchors hold, so we are persuaded that the Rock of Ages is from the everlasting to everlasting, and can anchor any soul, no matter before what storm it is driving, if only by faith it lays hold on Him.Edward Mote, more than one hundred years ago, sang this truth and the believing world is singing it still; and whatever advance may be made by new theologians and boastful scientists, the succeeding generations who can join with him in that familiar verse will be happy men and women:“My hope is built on nothing less Than Jesus’ Blood and righteousness; I dare not trust the sweetest frame, But wholly lean on Jesus’ Name. “When darkness veils His lovely face I rest on His unchanging grace; In every high and stormy gale, My anchor holds within the veil. “On Christ the solid Rock, I stand; All other ground is sinking sand.” But, there is no power in the eternal Rock to save except our hope lays hold on Him. There are many rocks at sea, near to which vessels have gone down because the sailors, either through ignorance or slothfulness, did not cast the anchor where it could lay hold on them. So there are many souls driving past the proffered Christ, either ignorant of the salvation that is in Him, or indifferent to the same. How soon some of them will find need of Him and yet awake to learn that they have driven past the place of salvation, only God knows.Forty-five years ago, I was holding special meetings in Burlington, Kentucky. I preached from the text, “Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2), and pled with the people to appreciate the value of present opportunities.When I had finished, the pastor arose and said, “Mr. Riley has not set this before you any too strongly.

I have seen in the course of my ministry, most forcible, I might say, terrible illustrations of the truth of his words. It is only a while ago that I was pleading with the unsaved in a certain church to cease sinning against God, and accept the salvation offered.

Closing my remarks I added, I know it is the purpose of most of you to do this, but I also know that Satan is getting into your minds the suggestion that there will be a more convenient season, and your danger is in your delay. Perhaps none of you intend to let five years go without accepting the Son of God. I doubt if the devil dare to ask you to let three years go by. Who is there among you that even thinks tonight and would say,—“I would risk my soul for a twelve month for the pleasures of this world.”’“A young lady whispered something to a friend at her side and laughed. At the close of the meeting this friend came and told me that the young lady had said, ‘I confess I am in love with the world and I guess I will risk it a year more at least.’“Nine of the twelve months went by, when one day I was riding to an appointment in the country, I heard behind me a rider in a death run. Turning my face, I saw her brother lashing his foaming horse with every leap until he reined up at my side. ‘Mr.

Fullilove, come to our house and come quickly’. Then he was gone, and I followed as fast as my horse could go, but when I entered the door the broken-hearted sister said, It is too late, Pastor, for Jennie is dead’.” She had taken a fatal risk.It is sad in the extreme to deliberately drive past salvation, to come short of anchoring the soul, when God’s opportunity is offered; to try treacherous sea for twelve months without pilot or compass is cruel to one’s self.

It is unspeakably painful to one’s Christian friends. It is an immeasurable sorrow to the great Son of God, and the only one who can get any satisfaction out of it is Satan, that deceiver and destroyer of souls.Some of you are close to the Eternal Rock tonight. Will you not anchor now? Will you not heed the injunction of Isaiah, as he cries to us over the ages, Seek ye the Lord while He may be found, call ye upon Him while He is near” (Isaiah 55:6)?Some of you may say, “Well, we have tried to anchor our souls and have not succeeded. If we perish, therefore, will the fault be ours?”My reply is, that no soul that has ever tried its utmost can fail of finding the Rock and of anchoring thereby, provided we conform our attempt to the instruction of Scripture; but I warn you against making your own philosophy the cables of your faith.Don’t try to anchor in your own moral character. That is mud at best, and the anchor will not hold.

You may be free from out-breaking sins, from what the laws class as crimes, but are your thoughts pure? No!

Then you come short! Have you served God as you ought? If not, then you come short. Have you done everything for your friends and family that you could possibly do? Then you come short. Have you yielded your soul unreservedly to the Lord Jesus, who died to save it?

If not, then you come short. And the moment you attempt to stand on your own morality and think to anchor by it, God comes forth and says, “Therefore by the deeds of the Law there shall no flesh be justified in His sight”; and the flukes pull through the mud and you are driving again, or perhaps the cable made of the rags of self-righteousness snaps, and you are lost.Some of you may be saying, “Well, there are many preachers, good men, who tell us that everybody is going to be saved, and I guess I’ll trust them, and anchor in their larger hope.” Well, that is your privilege; but as a preacher of the Gospel, it is my solemn duty to remind you that if you follow men, and forget the Word of God, you have no right to complain of Him when you go down!

And what does God’s Word say? “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned” (Mark 16:16). What does God’s Word say? “For there is none other name under Heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).The ships of the earlier times carried several anchors, and cast out one or more according to the strength of the wind. They had on board a special anchor, larger and stronger than the others, corresponding to our sheet anchor. They called it the “Sacred Anchor,” and they never used it except when all others had failed to hold and their expression concerning casting it out was, “Flying to the last refuge.” It had unusual strength against the most furious storms. I want to beg of you tonight that you do not trust the stone of “good works”, nor yet the cables of “excuses, and human philosophy of salvation,” but “the sacred anchor” instead that lays hold of the eternal Rock Christ Jesus; that is “flying to the last refuge” indeed, and to the only refuge.You recall how it was with Paul on board the vessel, shipping to Rome. When about to put out to sea, the preacher advised them not to do so.

They said, “He is a land-lubber; preachers have no practical sense you know;” and so they loosed and let her go. Fourteen days of darkness, fourteen days of driving before the storm; fourteen days of fear of dreadful death swept over them before they came near to land. Then they sounded and found the sea depth twenty fathoms; a moment later they found it but fifteen, and a greater fear filled their hearts for now the hoarse breakers could be heard, growling as if hungry to crush the little craft. They heaved out an anchor, but it would not hold; a second one, and yet they were going toward the shoals; a third was thrown, but still the storm swept them on. The great sacred anchor was brought and cast. There was a shock to the vessel. They could scarce stand on their feet; the vessel was lifted high in the air, riding the crest of a wave, and then it sank into a trough. The wave had swept under it and men saw that she stood and then the shout of joy went up—She holds!

She holds! We are safe! Safe!Men and women, sound and see how near the rocks you are tonight, great jagged rocks of immorality. Are you going on them, some of you?— threatening dreadful rocks of doubt and infidelity. Are you driving on them? Do you hear already the hoarse sounds that threaten your soul?

Then something must be done, and ought to be done now tonight, lest it be eternally too late.Cast the sacred anchor. Make the cable of your faith and the anchor of your hope the means of tethering you to the Son of God, and you will be safe against every storm.John Foster tells of a vessel which was threatened with imminent destruction against a rough coast, and after having cast two or three anchors, the steersman forsook the helm and ran about crying, “Oh, God, we are all lost, we are all lost; we are all lost.” But some cooler members of the crew heaved out the great anchor, and suddenly she righted about and the men cried to the passengers, “The anchor holds”, and then in a chorus of voices they answered, “We are safe, we are safe,” and if, tonight, you make Christ the Rock of your salvation, you are safe!