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  SPURGEONS SERMONS VOLUME 12 1866
  by C.H. Spurgeon
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Volume 12 of Spurgeon's collected sermons, containing messages preached during
1866 at the Metropolitan Tabernacle. These sermons showcase Spurgeon's powerful
biblical exposition, vivid illustrations, and passionate gospel proclamation
that drew thousands to hear the 'Prince of Preachers' during his Metropolitan
Tabernacle ministry.

  Chapters: 5

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS
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    0. Spurgeons Sermons Volume 12 1866
    1. Sin Laid on Jesus
    2. The Axe at the Root--A Testimony Against Puseyite Idolatry
    3. Turning Back in the Day of Battle
    4. Order and Argument in Prayer

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  CHAPTER 0: SPURGEONS SERMONS VOLUME 12 1866
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  CHAPTER 1: SIN LAID ON JESUS
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A Sermon (No.694) Delivered on Sunday Morning, June 10th, 1866, by C. H.
SPURGEON, At the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington "All we like sheep have gone
astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him
the iniquity of us all." -- Isaiah 53:6. THE VERSE OPENS with a confession of
sin common to all the persons intended in the verse. The whole of the elect
people of God seem to me to be here represented; they have all fallen, those of
them who have lived to years of responsibility have all actually sinned, and
therefore in common chorus they all say from the first who entered heaven to the
last who shall enter there, "All we like sheep have gone astray." But the
confession while thus hearty and unanimous, is also special and particular: "We
have turned every one to his own way." There is a peculiar sinfulness about
every one of the individuals; all are sinful, but each one with some special
aggravation not found in his fellow. It is the mark of genuine repentance that
while it naturally associates itself with other penitents, it also feels that it
must take up a position of loneliness. "We have turned every one to his own way"
is a confession importing that each man had sinned against light peculiar to
himself, or sinned with an aggravation which he at least could not perceive in
his fellow. This confession being thus general and particular has many other
traits of excellence about it of which we cannot just now speak. It is very
unreserved. You will observe that there is not a single syllable by way of
excuse; there is not a word to detract from the force of the confession. It is
moreover singularly thoughtful, for thoughtless persons do not use a metaphor so
appropriate as the text: "All we like sheep have gone astray." Not like the ox
which "knoweth its owner," nor even like the ass which "remembers its master's
crib nor even like the swine which if it wandereth all day long cometh back to
the trough at night, but "like sheep we have gone astray;" like a creature cared
for but not capable of grateful attachment to the hand that cares for it; like a
creature wise enough to find the gap in the hedge by which to escape, but so
silly as to have no propensity or desire to return to the place from which it
had perversely wandered; like sheep habitually, constantly, wilfully, foolishly,
without power to return, we have gone astray. I wish that all our confessions of
sin showed a like thoughtfulness, for to say that we are "miserable sinners" may
be an increase of our sin unless we have really felt it, to use words of general
confession without our soul entering into them may be but a "repentance that
needeth to be repented of," an insult and mockery to high Heaven vented in that
very place where there ought to have been the greatest possible tenderness and
holy fear. I like the confession of the text because it is a giving up of all
pleas of self-righteousness. It is the declaration of a body of men who are
guilty, consciously guilty; guilty with aggravations, guilty without excuse; and
here they all stand with their weapons of rebellion broken in pieces, saying
unanimously, "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to
his own way." I hear no dolorous wailings attending this confession of sin; for
the next sentence makes it almost a song. "The Lord hath laid on him the
iniquity of us all." It is the most grievous sentence of the three; but it is
the most charming and the most full of comfort. Strange is it that where misery
was concentrated mercy reigned, and where sorrow reached her climax there it is
that a weary soul finds sweetest rest. The Savior bruised is the healing of
bruised hearts. I want now to draw the hearts of all who feel the confession to
the blessed doctrine set forth in the text: the Lord hath laid on Christ the
iniquity of us all. We shall take the text first by way of exposition; then by
way of application; and we shalt conclude with serious and I hope profitable
contemplation. I. First, let us consider the text by way of EXPOSITION. 1. It
may be well to give the marginal translation of the text, "Jehovah hath made to
meet on him the iniquity of us all." The first thought that demands notice is
the meeting of sin. Sin I may compare to the rays of some evil sun. Sin was
scattered throughout this world as abundantly as light, and Christ is made to
suffer the full effect of the baleful rays, which stream from the sun of sin.
God as it were holds up a burning glass, and concentrates all the scattered rays
in a focus upon Christ. That seems to be the thought of the text, "The Lord hath
focused upon him the iniquity of us all." That which was scattered abroad
everywhere is here brought into terrible concentration; upon the devoted head of
our blessed Lord all the sin of his people was made to meet. Before a great
storm when the sky is growing black and the wind is beginning to howl, you have
seen the clouds hurrying from almost every point of the compass as though the
great day of battle were come, and all the dread artillery of God were hurrying
to the field. In the center of the whirlwind and the storm, when the lightnings
threaten to set all heaven on a blaze, and the black clouds fold on fold labor
to conceal the light of day, you have a very graphic metaphor of the meeting of
all sin upon the person of Christ; the sin of the ages past and the sin of the
ages to come, the sins of those of the elect Who were in heathendom, and of
those who were in Jewry; the sin of the young and of the old, sin original and
sin actual, all made to meet, all the black clouds concentrated and brought
together into one great tempest that it might rush in one tremendous tornado
upon the person of the great Redeemer and substitute. As when a thousand
streamlets dash down the mountain side in the day of rain, and all meet in one
deep swollen lake; that lake the Savior's heart, those gushing torrents the sins
of us all who are here described as making a full confession of our sins. Or to
take a metaphor not from nature but from commerce; suppose the debts of a great
number of persons to be all gathered up, the scattered bonds and bills that are
to be honored or dishonored on such and such a day, and all these laid upon one
person who undertakes the responsibility of meeting every one of them without a
single assistant; such was the condition of the Savior; the Lord made to meet on
him the debts of all his people so that he became responsible for all the
obligations of every one of those whom his Father had given him whatsoever their
debts might be. Or if these metaphors do not suffice to set forth the meaning,
take the text in our own version, "The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us
all;" put upon him as a burden is laid upon a man's back all the burdens of all
his people; put upon his head as the high priest of old laid upon the scape-goat
all the sin of the beloved ones that he might bear them in his own person. The
two translations you see are perfectly consistent; all sins are made to meet,
and then having met together and been tied up in one crushing load the whole
burden is laid upon him.2. The second thought is that sin was made to meet upon
the suffering person of the innocent substitute. I have said "the suffering
person" because the connection of the text requires it. "He was wounded for our
transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace
was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed." It is in connection with
this, and as an explanation of all his grief, that it is added, "The Lord hath
laid on him the iniquity of us all." The Lord Jesus Christ would have been
incapable of receiving the sin of all his people as their substitute had he been
himself a sinner: but he was, as to his divine nature, worthy to be hymned as
"Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth;" and, as to his human nature, he was by
miraculous conception free from all original sin, and in the holiness of his
life he was such that he was the spotless Lamb of God, without spot, or wrinkle,
or any such thing, and therefore he was on all accounts capable of standing in
the room, place, and stead of sinful men. The doctrine of the text is, that
Jesus Christ, who was man of the substance of his mother, and who was,
nevertheless, very God of very God, most true and glorious Creator, Preserver,
did stand in such a position as to take upon himself the iniquity of all his
people, remaining still himself innocent; having no personal sin, being
incapable of any, but yet taking the sin of others upon himself -- it has been
the custom of theologians to say -- by imputation; but I question whether the
use of that word, although correct enough as it is understood by us, may not
have lent some color to the misrepresentations of those who oppose the doctrine
of substitution. I will not say that the sins of God's people were imputed to
Christ, though I believe they were; but it seems to me that in a way more
mysterious than that which imputation would express, the sins of God's people
were actually laid upon Jesus Christ; that in the view of God, not only was
Christ treated as if he had been guilty, but the very sin itself was, I know not
how, but according to the text it was somehow laid upon the head of Christ
Jesus: "For he hath made him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be
made the righteousness of God in him." Is it not written, "He shall bear," not
merely the punishment of their sin, nor the imputation of their sin, but "He
shall bear their iniquities"? Our sin is laid on Jesus in even a deeper and
truer sense than is expressed by the term imputation. I do not think I can
express it, nor convey the idea that I have in my own mind, but while Jesus
never was and never could be a sinner, -- God forbid that the blasphemous
thought should ever cross our lips or dwell upon our heart! -- yet the sin of
his people was literally and truly laid upon him. 3. It has been asked, Was it
just that sin should thus be laid upon Christ? Our reply is fourfold. We believe
it was rightly so, first because it was the act of him who must do right, for
"the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." Jehovah, he against whom the
offense was committed, and who has ordained that the sin of the people spoken of
should be laid upon Christ. To impugn this, then, would be to impugn the justice
of Jehovah, and I pray that none of us may have the hardihood to do that. Shall
the potsherd venture to strive with the potter? shall the thing formed contend
with the Creator of all things? Jehovah did it; and we accept it as being right,
caring not what men may think of Jehovah's own deed. Remember, moreover, that
Jesus Christ voluntarily took this sin upon himself. It was not forced upon him,
he was not punished for the sins of others with whom he had no connection and
against his will; but He his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree,
and while bearing it said, "No man taketh my life from me, but I lay it down of
myself." It was according to his own eternal agreement made with the Father on
our behalf; it was according to his own expressed desire, for he had a baptism
to be baptized with, and he was straitened until it was accomplished; and
therefore whatever of injustice might be supposed, it is removed by the fact
that he who was mainly concerned in it was himself voluntarily placed in such a
position. But I would have you remember, beloved, that there was a relationship
between our Lord and his people, which is too often forgotten, but which
rendered it natural that he should bear the sin of his people. Why does the text
speak of our sinning like sheep? I think it is because it would call to our
recollection that Christ is our Shepherd. It is not, my brethren, that Christ
took upon himself the sins of strangers. Remember that there always was a union
of a most mysterious and intimate kind between those who sinned and the Christ
who suffered. What if I say that it is not unjust but according to law that when
a woman gets into debt her husband should bear it? And the church of God sinning
it was but right that her Husband, who had espoused her unto himself, should
become the debtor on her behalf. The Lord Jesus stood in the relationship of a
married husband unto his church, and it was not, therefore, a strange thing that
he should bear her burdens. It was natural for the next of kin to redeem the
inheritance, it was most seemly that Immanuel, the next of kin, should redeem
his lost church by his own blood. Recollect that there was a union closer even
than the marriage bond, for we are members of his body. You shall not punish
this hand of mine without making the sentient nature which dwells in the brain
to suffer therewith; and does it seem strange to you that when the inferior
members of the body have transgressed the Head should be made to suffer? It
seems to me, my brethren, that while substitution is full of grace, it is not
unnatural, but according to the laws of everlasting love. Yet there is a fourth
consideration that may remove the difficulty of sin being laid upon Christ. It
is not only that God laid it there, that Jesus voluntarily took it, and moreover
was in such a union with his church that it was natural that he should take it,
but you must remember that this plan of salvation is precisely similar to the
method of our ruin. How did we fall, my brethren? Not by any one of us actually
ruining himself. I grant you that our own sin is the ground of ultimate
punishment, but the ground of our original fall lay in another. I had no more to
do with my fall than I have to do with my restoration; that is to say, the fall
which made me a sinner was wholly accomplished long before I was born by the
first Adam, and the salvation by which I am delivered was finished long before I
saw the light by the second Adam on my behalf. If we grant the fall, -- and we
must grant the fact, however we may dislike the principle, -- we cannot think it
unjust that God should give us a plan of salvation based upon the same principle
of federal head-ship. Perhaps it is true, as has been conjectured by many, that
because the fallen angels sinned one by one, there was no possibility of their
restoration; but man sinning, not one by one in the first place, but
transgressing under a covenant head, there remained an opportunity for the
restoration of the race by another covenant head-ship. At any rate we, accepting
the principle of the federal head-ship in the fall, joyfully receive it as to
the restoration in Christ Jesus. It seems right, then, on these four grounds,
that the Lord should make the sins of all his people to meet upon Christ.4. I
beg you to observe in the fourth place, that lying upon Christ brought upon him
all the consequences connected with it. God cannot look where there is sin with
any pleasure, and though as far as Jesus is personally concerned, he is the
Father's beloved Son in whom he is well pleased; yet when he saw sin laid upon
his Son, he made that Son cry, "My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me?" It
was not possible that Jesus should enjoy the light of his Father's presence
while he was made sin for us; consequently he went through a horror of great
darkness, the root and source of which was the withdrawing of the conscious
enjoyment of his Father's presence. More than that, not only was light
withdrawn, but positive sorrow was inflicted. God must punish sin, and though
the sin was not Christ's by his actually doing it, yet it was laid upon him, and
therefore he was made a curse for us. What were the pangs, which Christ endured?
I cannot tell you. You have read the story of his crucifixion. Dear friends,
that is only the shell, but the inward kernel who shall describe? It is certain
that Christ not only bore all that humanity could bear, but there was a Deity
within which added extraordinary strength to his humanity, and enabled it to
bear far more than it would otherwise have been able to endure. I doubt not that
in addition to this the Godhead within gave a peculiar sensitiveness to the
holiness of Christ's nature, so that sin must have become even more abhorrent to
him than it would have been to a merely perfect man. His griefs are worthy to be
described according to the Greek Liturgy as "unknown sufferings." The height and
depth, the length and breadth of what Jesus Christ endured nor heart can guess,
nor tongue can tell, nor can imagination frame; God only knows the griefs to
which the Son of God was put when the Lord made to meet upon him the iniquity of
us all. To crown all there came death itself. Death is the punishment for sin,
and whatever it may mean, whatever over and beyond natural death was intended in
the sentence, "In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die," Christ
felt. Death went through and through him, until "he bowed his head, and gave up
the ghost." "He became obedient to death, even to the death of the cross." 5.
Dear friends, for a moment think of the result of all this. Sin meets on Christ
and Christ is punished for sin, and what then? Why then sin is put away. If the
penalty be endured justice asks no more. The debt discharged -- there is no
debt; the claim made and the claim met -- the claim ceases to be. Though we
could not meet that claim in our proper persons, yet we have met it in one who
is so united and allied to us that we are in him even as Levi was in the loins
of Abraham. Jesus himself also is free. Upon him the gathered tempest has spent
itself, and not a single cloud lingers in the serene sky. Though the waters came
his love has dried them up, his suffering has opened the sluices, and made the
floods for ever spend themselves. Though the bills were brought he has honored
them all, and there is not one outstanding account against a single soul for
whom he died as a substitute.6. We cannot close the exposition of this verse
without just remarking upon the "us" here intended. "The Lord hath laid on him
the iniquity of us all." It is usually conceded by us who hold the doctrine of
particular redemption that there was in the death of Christ very much of
generality and universality. We believe that the atonement of Christ was
infinite in value, and that if Christ had decreed to save every man of woman
born, he need not have suffered another pang; there was sufficient in his
atonement if he had so willed it to have redeemed the entire race. We believe
also that by the death of Christ there is a general and honest invitation given
to every creature under heaven in terms like these: -- "Believe on the Lord
Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." We are not prepared, however, to go an
inch beyond that. We hold that from the very nature of the satisfaction of
Christ it could not have been made for any but for his elect; for Christ either
did pay the debts of all men or he did not; if he did pay the debts of all men
they are paid, and no man can be called to account for them. If Christ was the
surety of every man living, then how in the name of common justice is Christ to
be punished, and man punished too? If it be replied that the man would not
accept the atonement, then I ask again, Was there a satisfaction given, for if
so it was given whether the man accepts it or not, or else satisfaction by
itself is powerless until man puts efficacy in it, which is preposterous to
suppose. If you take away from us the fact that Christ did really satisfy for
those for whom he stood, we cry like Jacob, "If I am bereaved I am bereaved;"
you have taken away all that is worth having, and what have you given us in its
place? You have given us a redemption, which confessedly does not redeem; you
have given us an atonement, which is made equally for the lost in hell and for
the saved in heaven; and what is the intrinsic value of such an atonement? If
you tell us that Christ made a satisfactory atonement for every one of the human
race, we ask you how it was that he made an atonement for those that must have
been in the flames of hell thousands of years before he came into this world? My
brethren, ours has the advantage of universality in its proclamation and in its
bona fide offer, for there is no man living who shall believe in Jesus who shall
not be saved by Christ; but it has a greater advantage than this; namely, that
those who do believe are saved by it, and they know that Christ made such an
atonement for them that for them to be punished for sin would be as much a
violation of justice as it would of mercy. O my soul! thou knowest this day that
all thy sins were made to meet on Christ, and that he bore the punishment for
them all."He bore that we might never bear,His Father's righteous ire."Here is a
rock to stand on, a safe resting-place for those who trust in Jesus. As for you
who trust him not, your blood be upon your own heads! If ye trust him not, ye
have no part nor lot in this matter, ye shall go down to your own punishment to
bear it yourselves; the wrath of God abideth on you; you shall find that the
blood of Jesus has made no atonement for your sins. You have rejected the
invitation that was given, and put far from you the cross of Christ, and upon
your heads the pardoning blood shall never drop, and for you it shall never
plead, but you must perish under the law, seeing you refuse to be saved under
the gospel.II. Let us come briefly to the APPLICATION.Dear hearer, a friend now
puts a question to you. There is a countless company whose sins the Lord Jesus
bore; did he bear yours? Do you wish to have an answer? Are you unable to give
one? Let me read this verse to you and see if you can join in it. I do not mean
join in it saying, "That is true," but feeling that it is true in your own
souls. "All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own
way, and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." If there be in you
this morning a penitential confession which leads you to acknowledge that you
have erred and strayed like a lost sheep, if there be in you a personal sense of
sin which makes you feel that you have turned to your own way, and if now you
can trust in Jesus, then a second question is not wanted; the Lord hath laid on
him your iniquity, and the iniquity of all such as confess their sin and look
alone to Christ. But if you will not trust to Christ, I cannot say to you that
the Lord hath taken the sin from you and laid it upon Christ, for in my soul I
know that living and dying as you now are, that sin of yours will rise up in
judgment against you to condemn you. Dear friend, I will venture to say to you,
are you reconciled to God's way of getting rid of sin? Do you feel any joy in
your heart at the thought of Jesus bearing sin for you and suffering for you? If
you do not, I cannot offer you the consolation, which the text gives to those
who submit to it. But let me ask you, do you mean to bear your sin yourself? Do
you know what that means? Jesus smarted when he bore the sin of his people, but
what a smart shall yours be when you bear your own! "It is a fearful thing to
fall into the hands of the living God." There are some now-a-days who are
mightily angry at the doctrine of everlasting punishment; I, too, might be angry
at it if it were an invention of man; but when it is most certainly threatened
in God's Book, it is vain for me to kick against the pricks; my question should
not be, "How can I dispute against it?" but "How can I escape from it?" Dear
hearer, do not venture into God's presence with your sins upon yourself; even
our God is a consuming fire, and his fury will break forth against you when you
come to stand there. Have you an imagination that your own merits may make
atonement for sin? I pray you think what Christ had to do before he could cast
sin off from himself, what griefs he bore, through what an ocean of wrath he
passed; and do you think that your poor merits, if they be merits, can ever
avail to do what the Savior suffered so much to accomplish? Do you hope to
escape without a punishment? If you do, let me pray you to think the matter
over; for if God smote his own Son, do you think he will permit you to go
scot-free? If the King of Glory, when he only takes others' sins upon him, must
needs die, what think you will become of you, poor worm of the dust? Think you
that God will be unjust in order to save you? Do you suppose that he will be
hail fellow, well met! with you, and revoke his own sentence, because you do not
choose to be saved by a plan which is both just to him and safe to you? Shall
God be unjust to pander to your fancies, or indulge your lusts? Sinner, bow the
knee to this plan of salvation, for be it known to you -- and I speak now,
knowing what I say, and coolly too -- there is, none other plan of salvation
under heaven. There may be other ways of salvation preached, but other
foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, Jesus Christ the Righteous.
If thou shalt struggle after salvation individually, and hope to get to heaven
apart from the head-ship of Christ, thou mayest struggle, but thou shalt be like
the Jews of old, who had a zeal for God but not according to knowledge; if thou
shalt be going about to establish thine own righteousness, but not submitting
thyself to the righteousness of Christ, thou shalt perish. But let me ask thee,
does not this plan commend itself to thee? If I trust Jesus, this is to me the
evidence that he took my sins and suffered in my stead. Oh the joy it gives me!
I speak to you honestly of my own experience now; there is no doctrine that
fires my soul with such delight as that of substitution. The doctrine of
atonement, as it is often preached, is a hazy, misty doing of something by which
the law is honored, or perhaps dishonored, for I scarce know which to call it;
this yields me no joy; but when I know that Christ was literally and positively,
not metaphorically and by way of figure, but literally and positively the
substitute for his own people, and when I know that trusting in him I have the
evidence of being one of his people, why my soul begins to say, Now let me live!
I'm clean, through Jesu's blood I'm clean. Now let me die! for I shall boldly
stand in the day of resurrection, through Jesus my Lord. Why, soul, it seems to
me as if it were enough to make you leap into the arms of Christ, crucified!
covered with blood for you! disinterestedly suffering for his own enemies that
they might live! Oh stay not away! "Come, guilty souls, and flee awayLike doves
to Jesu's wounds;This is the welcome gospel-day,Wherein free grace abounds.God
loved the church, and gave his SonTo drink the cup of wrath;And Jesus says he'll
cast out noneThat come to him by faith."III. Now consecrate a few minutes to
hallowed CONTEMPLATION.You do not want talk, you want thought: I will give you
four things to think of. The first is the astounding mass of sin that must have
been laid on Christ. Now do not jump at it, and say, "Yes, the sins of the
millions of his elect." Do not leap at that, get at it by degrees. Begin with
your own sin. Have you ever felt that? -- your own sin. No, you never felt the
full weight of it; if you did you would have been in hell. It is the weight of
sin that makes hell. Sin bears its own punishment in its own weight. Do you
remember when you felt that the pains of hell get hold upon you, and you found
trouble and sorrow? That hour when you called upon the name of the Lord, saying,
"O Lord, I beseech thee, deliver my soul!" Then you only felt as it were the
little end of your sins, but all your sins, what must they weigh! How old are
you? You know not how old you may be before you enter into rest, but all the
sins of all your years he carried. All the sins against light and knowledge,
sins against law and gospel, week-day sins, Sabbath sins, hand sins, lip sins,
heart sins, sins against the Father, sins against the Son, sins against the Holy
Ghost, sins of all shapes, all laid upon him; can you get the thought now? Now
multiply that. Think of the sins of all the rest of his people; persecutions and
murders at the door of such an one as Saul of Tarsus; adultery at the door of
David -- sins of every shape and size, for God's elect have been among the chief
of sinners; those whom he has chosen have not been the best of men by nature,
but some of them the very worst, and yet sovereign grace delighted to find a
home for itself where seven devils had dwelt before, nay, where a legion of
devils held their carnival. Christ looks abroad among the sons of men, and while
a Pharisee is passed by, Zaccheus the publican is selected -- and the sins of
all these with their full weight laid upon him. The weight of sin would have
crushed all these into hell for ever, and yet Christ bore all that weight; and
what if I venture to say the very eternity and infinity of wrath that was due
for all that mass of sin, the Son of God, marvellously sustained by the infinity
of the Godhead within, bore and sustained the whole. I would like to stop a
minute and let you turn it over, but when you go home perhaps you will spend
half an hour very profitably in thinking that"The enormous load of human
guiltWas on my Savior laid;With woes as with a garment heFor sinners was
array'd."2. The next subject I offer you for contemplation is this, the amazing
love of Jesus, which brought him to do all this. Remember Paul's way of putting
it. "Scarcely for a righteous (or strictly just) man will one die; peradventure
for a good (or benevolent) man one might even dare to die; but God commendeth
his love towards us in that, while we were yet sinners, in due time, Christ died
for the ungodly." When Christ has renewed us by his Spirit, there may be a
temptation to imagine that some excellency in us won the Savior's heart; but, my
brethren, you must understand that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.
Not that infant washed and swaddled, not that fair maiden with the jewel in her
ear, and with the pure golden crown upon her head, not that lovely princess,
presented like a chaste virgin to her husband; no, that was not what Jesus saw
when he died. He saw all that in the glass of his prescience, but the actual
condition of that fair maid was very different when he died for her; she was
cast out, unwashed, unsalted, unswaddled, in her blood, a foul, filthy thing.
Ah! my brethren, there is no filthy thing under heaven so filthy as a filthy
sinner. When there was not a ray of beauty to be discovered in us, when neither
without nor within a single thing could be found to commend us, but we were
morally altogether abhorrent to the Holy nature of Christ, then -- oh wondrous
grace! -- he came from the highest heaven that the mass of our sin might meet on
him. I met with this question the other day, which seemed a novel one to me. The
question was asked thus: "Suppose you had a child that had the leprosy, or some
other foul disease. Suppose this dear child of yours was infected and
contaminated to the most loathsome degree in every part, till the eyes were
blinded and the hands were rotting, and the heart was turning to stone, and the
whole body was covered with wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores. Now,
suppose there were no cure for this child but for your perfectly sane and
healthy soul, suppose it to be such, to be put into that child's body, and for
you to bear that child's diseases instead of that child; would you consent to
it?" I can suppose a mother's love yielding even to that; but the more disgusted
you had been with those putrifying sores, the more terrible would the task
become. Now, that only touches the fringe of the work, which Jesus did for us
when he himself took our sins and bore our sicknesses. Such a wonderful union is
there between Christ and the sinner that I venture to say there are some
expressions in the New Testament and in the Old with regard to Christ's
connection with the sin of man that I would not dare to use except as direct
quotations from Holy Writ; but being there you shall see how wondrously the love
of Jesus Christ induced him to take upon himself our sad condition and plight.
But, oh the love! oh the love! Nay, I will not speak of it; ye must muse upon
it. Silence is sometimes the best eloquence; and it will he best for me to say
to you, oh the depths of the love of Jesus! unsearchable, past finding out! God
over all, blessed for ever, should have laid on him the iniquity of us all! 3.
Wonder of wonders that I need another minute to set you thinking on another
subject, the matchless security which this plan of salvation offers. I do not
see in what point that man is vulnerable who can feel and know that Christ has
borne his sin. I look at the attributes of God, and though to me, as a sinner,
they all seem bristling as with sharp points, thrusting themselves upon me; yet
when I know that Jesus died for me, and did literally take my sin, what fear I
the attributes of God? There is justice, sharp and bright, like a lance; but
justice is my friend. If God be just, he cannot punish me for sin for which
Jesus has offered satisfaction. As long as there is justice in the heart of
Deity, it cannot be that a soul justly claiming Christ as his substitute can
himself be punished. As for mercy, love, truth, honor, everything matchless,
Godlike and divine about Deity, I say of all these, "You are my friends; you are
all guarantees that Mince Jesus died for me I cannot die." How grandly does the
apostle put it! It seems to me as if he never was worked up by the Holy Spirit
to such a pitch of eloquence as when speaking about the death and resurrection
of the Savior, he propounds that splendid question, "Who shall lay anything to
the charge of God's elect?" There, where eternal justice sits upon a flaming
throne, the apostle gazes with eye undimmed into the ineffable splendor, and
though some one seems to say, "The Judge will condemn," he replies, "Who shall
lay anything to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth." Can he
justify and then condemn us? He justifies those for whom Christ died, for we are
justified by his resurrection. How then shall he condemn? And then he lifts up
his voice yet again -- "Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea,
rather that is risen again, who sitteth at the right hand of God, who also
maketh intercession for us." On other grounds a man must feel unsafe, but here
he may know himself sure. Go ye that will, and build upon your sandy
foundations; run up your superstructures till they are as high as Babel's tower,
and tumble about your ears unable to support their own weight; but as for me, my
soul shall rest upon this solid rock of substitution; and clinging to the rock
with confident resolve, I know that I have no cause for fear since Jesus died
for me.4. Lastly, I desire to give you as a subject for contemplation, and I
pray you do not forget it, this question, What then are the claims of Jesus
Christ upon you and upon me? Brethren and sisters, I have sometimes wished to be
eloquent; never when I had a cause to plead in which I was myself involved, but
when I have had to speak for Jesus. But indeed, there is no need of eloquence
here. Your hearts shall be the pleaders, his agonies shall be the plea. Did our
blessed Lord take your sin, my brethren, and suffer all its terrific
consequences for you, so that you are delivered. By his blood and wounds, by his
death, and by the love that made him die, I conjure you treat him as he should
be treated! Love him as he should be loved! Serve him as he should be served!
You will tell me that you have obeyed his precepts. I am glad to hear it. Are
you sure that you have? "If ye love me, keep my commandments." Have you kept the
ordinances as he delivered them? Have you sought to be obedient to him in all
respects? In all your Lord's appointed ways have you scrupulously pursued your
journey? If you can say this I am not content; it does not seem to me that with
such a leader as Christ mere. obedience should be all. Napoleon singularly
enough had power to get the hearts of men twisted and twined about him; when he
was in his wars theme were many of his captains and even of his private soldiers
who not only marched with the quick obedience of a soldier wherever they were
bidden, but who felt an enthusiasm for him. Have you never heard of him who
threw himself in the way of the shot to receive it in his bosom to save the
Emperor? No obedience, no law could have required that of him, but enthusiastic
love moved him to it; and it is such enthusiasm that my Master deserves in the
very highest degree from us. It is out of and beyond all categories of law, it
is far exceeding all that law ventured to ask, and yet not supererogation for
all that, for ye are not under the law but under grace; and ye will do more out
of love than ye would have done out of the compulsion of demand. What shall I do
for my Master? What shall I do for my Lord? How shall I set him forth? My
brethren and sisters, my highest aim before God, next to the conversion of the
unconverted among you, is this, that you who do love Christ may really love him
and act as if you (lid.1 hope you will never become a dead cold church. Oh may
my ministry never help to lull you into such a state as that! If Jesus Christ
does not deserve everything of you he does not deserve anything; you do not know
anything of his claims if you do not feel that"If you could make some
reserve,And duty did not call;You love the Lord with zeal so great That you must
give him all."Christ stands for me, oh may I learn to stand for him, and plead
for him, and live for him, and suffer for him, and pray for him, and preach and
labor for him as he may help me! May I remind you each individually as you all
followed your own way, and individually had some sin to increase that burden,
pay him individual service? Contribute of your substance to the common work of
the church, and do that constantly, and as a matter of delight. Our College,
which is doing so much service greatly needs, and demands the help of all who
love our work, and love the Lord's truth. But in addition to that, do something
for yourself, speak for Christ yourself, have some work in hand on your own
account. Do, I say again, at all times assist the work of the combined body, for
that will be a great work, God being in us as our life and stay, and let no man
withhold of his substance from Christ's cause; but still that is not all, he
does not ask your pocket only but your heart. It is not the pence, it is the
activities of the soul; it is not the shillings and the guineas and so on, but
it is your very inmost soul, the core of your spirit. O Christian, by the blood
of Jesus devote yourself to him again! In the old Roman battles it sometimes
happened that the strife seemed dubious, and a captain inspired by superstitious
patriotism would stand upon his sword and devote himself to destruction for the
good of his country, and then, according to those old legends, the battle always
turned. Now, men and brethren, sisters, every one of you who have tasted that
the Lord is gracious, devote yourselves this day to live, to die, to spend, and
to be spent for King Jesus. You will be no fool, for no man ever had an ambition
more worthy. You will not be devoting yourself to one who does not deserve it.
You know how much you owe him; nay, you do not know, to the fullest extent, the
depth of your obligation, but you know you owe him all that you have; your
escape from hell and your hope of heaven. Follow me this morning in these verses
-- "Tis done, the great transaction's done;I am my Lord's, and he is mine:He
drew me, and I follow'd on,Charm'd to confess the voice divine.Now rest, my
long-divided heart;Fix'd on this blissful center rest;With ashes who would
grudge to part,When call'd on angel's bread to feast?High heaven, that heard the
solemn vow,That vow renew'd shall daily hear;Till in life's latest hour I
bow,And bless in death a bond so dear."PORTION OF SCRIPTURE READ BEFORE SERMON
-- Isaiah 53.


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  CHAPTER 2: THE AXE AT THE ROOT--A TESTIMONY AGAINST PUSEYITE IDOLATRY
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A Sermon (No.695) Delivered on Sunday Morning, June 17th, 1866, by C. H.
SPURGEON, At the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington "But the hour cometh, and
now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in
truth, for the Father seeketh such to worship him. God is a Spirit: and they
that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." -- John 4:23-24. THE
WOMAN'S CONSCIENCE had been aroused by Christ's declaration of her sin. He was
touching upon matters of the most vital importance, and her depraved heart
naturally shrunk from the lancet, From the truth which was becoming
inconveniently personal she flew to that natural resort of the carnal mind,
namely, to religions discourse upon points of outward observance. Instead of
confessing her sin, and asking how it may be forgiven, she must needs say, "Our
fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place
where men ought to worship." The carnal heart dreads the contact of spiritual
truth, and finds a most convenient way of avoiding it by running to questions of
holy places, holy times, and holy customs. Jesus, to her astonishment, informs
her that the question which she had asked was of only temporary importance.
There had been a time when it was well to know that salvation was of the Jews,
and that the rival temple of the Samaritans was an imposture; but he says in
effect to her, "Woman, believe me that question is of no importance now, for the
hour cometh, yea and now is, when the external is to be abolished and the
ritualistic is to be put away, and a purer, simpler, and more spiritual worship,
is to take its place." The worship which our Lord Jesus Christ established
involved a change. That is implied in the expressions here used. He announced to
her that the hour was just then come when all questions about this or that place
must cease, and be superseded by spiritual worship. Our Lord gave a very brief,
but I think a very instructive description of what this worship was to be. If
you observe carefully the words, you will see that it was a distinguishing kind
of worship, for he mentions true worshippers. There had been but little
distinction before; so long as they all passed through the same outward form
they all seemed to be worshippers; but a distinction was now to be made clear
and manifest. Merely outward worshippers were now false worshippers, and only
those who pressed into spiritual worship were to be regarded as true. The gospel
of Christ is a great discerner and an accurate judge. Christ has the winnowing
fan in his hand; he sits as a refiner; he is compared by the prophet to the
"refiner's fire" and to "fuller's soap;" and hence you see he discerns at once
between worshippers and worshippers. There they stand both alike with bended
heads, perhaps both repeating the same words, but the Savior distinguishes:
"there is," saith he, "a false worshipper, and there is a true worshipper, and
he alone who is spiritual is true." He announces further that under the gospel
God is to be worshipped in the character of a Father; true worshippers shall
worship the Father. This had not been the case before. The Lord had been adored
as the Adonai, and reverenced as Jehovah; but to say "Our Father which art in
heaven" remains the prerogative of the enlightened Christian who, having
believed in Christ, has received power to become a son of God. True Christian
worship addresses God, not merely as Creator and Preserver, or as the great Lord
of the Universe, but as one who is very near of kin to us, our Father, beloved
of our souls. Jesus likewise states that gospel worship is to be of a kind which
does not result from the man himself merely, but comes from God, and is a work
of grace. This is implied in the sentence, "The Father seeketh such to worship
him," as if no true worship would come from any man unless God sought it. True
devotion under the Christian dispensation is not merely human but also divine.
It is the work of the Spirit in the soul returning to its author; or as our hymn
puts it -- "Prayer is the breath of God in man, Returning whence it came." These
are very grave points, and draw a broad line of distinction between the living
worship of the chosen of God and the dead formal worship of the world which
lieth in the wicked one. Furthermore, the Savior goes on to say that they who
worship God are to worship him "in spirit." No longer with the visible sacrifice
of a lamb, but inwardly trusting in him who is the Lamb of God's passover; no
more with sprinkled blood of goats, but heartily relying upon the blood once
shed for many; no longer worshipping God with ephod, breastplate, and mitre, but
with prostrate soul, with uplifted faith, and with the faculties not of the body
but of the inward spirit. We who worship God under the Christian dispensation
are no longer to fancy that bodily exercise in worship profiteth anything, that
genuflexions and contortions are of any value, but that acceptable worship is
wholly mental, inward, and spiritual.But he adds, lest there should seem an
omission in the description, "must worship him in spirit and in truth;" for
though we should profess to worship God only with the spirit and so despise
forms, yet unless the soul shall truly love, and really adore, and sincerely
bow, our worship will be as unacceptable as though it were formal and outward.
See then, brethren, putting the whole three together, the worship under the
Christian dispensation which God ordains, and which he accepts through Christ
Jesus, is a worship distinguished by an inward vitality from the outward worship
of the carnal mind. It is the worship of a child towards a father, feeling
within himself a kinship with the divine; it is a worship wrought in us by God
the Holy Ghost, because the Father has sought us out and taught us how to
worship him. It is a worship which is not outward, but of the inner man, and
occupies not hand, eye, and foot, but heart and soul and spirit: and it is a
worship which is not professional and formal, but real, hearty, earnest, and so
acceptable before God.Let me give a sketch of this worship as it actually
exhibits itself. A man may have been to a place of worship from his youth up,
and he may have fallen into a habit of repeating a sacred form every morning and
every evening, he may even have been a tolerably diligent reader of the Word of
God, and yet though this may have been continued for sixty years and more, he
may never once have worshipped God after the fashion prescribed in the text. But
see him! the Father seeks him, truth comes home to his soul, and in the light of
that truth he feels himself a sinner, and feeling himself so, he cries, "Father,
I have sinned." That is his first true worship. See, brethren, his spirit feels
it, he means what he says. All that he said before was as nothing, but that
first cry "I have sinned" has in it the vitality of worship. He hears the story
of the cross, the full atonement made by God's appointed sacrifice, and he
prays, "Lord, I believe in Jesus, and I trust him;" here is another specimen of
true worship; here is the spirit resting upon God's appointed sacrifice, and
reverencing God's way of salvation by accepting it. Being saved by the precious
blood of Jesus, he cries, "Father, I bless thee that I am saved, I thank thee
that my sins are washed away." This is true worship. Whether a man sings in the
assembly, or sings alone; whether he prays aloud, or prays in silence, if he
feels gratitude to God for pardon received, he offers the true worship. The
whole of the Christian's life, consisting as it must do of dealings with the
invisible God through Jesus Christ by his heart, is a life of worship, and when
at last he comes to die, you perceive that his worship will not cease with
death, because it has always been spiritual, and did not depend upon the body.
So that while the outward man faileth him, the inward spiritual man grows more
strong in devotion than ever it was before; and when at last the spirit leaves
its earthly tenement, and is disembodied, it has still a song for God, and
throughout eternity its spiritual worship can continue; which worship must have
been suspended if it had been connected with the body, and not with the immortal
part of man.If I understand the Savior's words, and I hope I do, not only
theoretically but practically, he means that those of us who are his true
worshippers must worship him with our better and our nobler part, and our soul,
with all the power she has, must pay reverence to the unseen God, Brethren, this
is the kind of worship that men will not render to God; they will render him
anything else but this; and until divinely effectual grace shall work such
worship in man's heart it is obnoxious to him; he will worship God with robes,
and incense, and flowers, and banners, but he will not consent to worship him in
spirit and in truth.I. I shall proceed to my work by giving A BRIEF OUTLINE OF
THE HISTORY OF WORSHIP, in connection with the doctrine that we are now to
worship more manifestly than ever God in spirit and in truth. It appears from
Scripture that worship before the flood was of the very simplest form. The
outward ordinances were very few; the chief of them being the offering of
sacrifice. This was probably instituted by God himself when he clothed Adam and
his wife with skins of beasts; it has been thought that he then indicated to
them the slaughter of beasts for sacrifice. Certain it is that the first worship
of fallen man was by sacrifice. There was connected with this no doubt the
meeting of gracious hearts for prayer, and also the ministration of truth, for
Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied concerning the coming of the Lord;
so that they appear to have had what was tantamount to a ministry, and the sons
of God had appointed times for meeting. But this simple form of worship seems to
have been too high, too spiritual for fallen man at the first; at any rate the
seed of the serpent could not endure it, for Cain at the very first commenced a
schism; instead of bringing a sacrifice by blood he must needs bring a sacrifice
of the fruits of the ground. Perhaps he was a man of taste, and desired to bring
something that should look more decorous than a poor bleeding victim; he would
lay those rich grapes, those ruddy fruits upon the altar; and those fair flowers
that gemmed the bosom of earth, surely he might consecrate those. At any rate he
was the first man who set up taste and self as the guide in religious worship,
and God had no respect unto his sacrifice. The two stood by their altars; Abel
by faith, exercising spiritual worship, offered a more acceptable sacrifice than
Cain; Cain's offering was possibly even more fair to look upon but it was of his
own invention; Abel was accepted, but Cain discarded. The ultimate result of
man's sinfulness in connection with this early type of worship was general
neglect of all religion. The sons of God seem to have maintained their
simplicity for a time, but at last by unholy alliances with the ungodly race
there arose a widespread neglect of all thought of God, so that they were
married and given in marriage, they ate and they drank till the day when the
flood came and swept them all away. Depraved nature thus refused to render
spiritual worship. After the flood we find worship restored in very much the
same form: let us distinguish it as the patriarchal method of worship. The head
of a family was accustomed to offer sacrifice, and no doubt if Job be taken as a
type thereof family prayer and household religion were maintained, But you see
very early the indication that man, although he could not forget God, for the
deluge had struck to the very heart of manhood an awful dread of the Most High,
began to interpose symbols and visible objects between God and himself. The use
of teraphim became very common; so that in the house even of Abraham's ancestors
teraphs were found; and when we come down to the time of Jacob, we find one of
his wives stealing her father's images, thus proving that Laban, one of a once
God-fearing family, had become a worshipper of God through the medium of images.
Thus was it among those who still had some knowledge of God; but the nations
being dispersed, soon lost the pure idea of the invisible One, and worshipped
gods of their own devising. From the plagues of Egypt, which were no doubt
intended to be a blow against all Egypt's gods, we find out that, in addition to
the worship of the calf or bull, the Egyptians paid religious reverence to
flies, the river Nile, the elements, beetles, and all kinds of creatures; and
throughout the world, as a general rule, through the introduction of visible
symbols of the unseen Being, the Lord himself had become forgotten, and
spiritual worship had almost ceased, except in one elect household; and even
there, alas! how fallen had spirituality become! Keeping to the line of grace,
we shall now introduce you to the ceremonial form of worship which God
instituted after the more spiritual method had entirely broken down. He saw that
the children of Israel whom he loved were but a mob of slaves; their spirits had
been broken by bitter bondage; like the poor African race of the present day,
they seemed as a whole incapable of rising at once to mental dignity, and needed
to pass through a generation or two before they could as a nation achieve manly
self-government. So when he brought his people out of Egypt the Lord did not try
them with an altogether spiritual form of worship; because of the hardness of
their hearts among other reasons, though he was still to be worshipped as a
spirit, yet he gave them certain outward signs by which they might be enabled to
understand his character. A great deal has been made of the symbolical worship
of the Jew, as if it were an excuse for the manmade symbolism of the Roman and
Anglican Antichrist. We would remark that nothing ought to be made of it at all
now, since it has been positively declared many times in Scripture that the age
of the shadow has gone, and that the age of the substance now reigns. Whatever
may or may not have been the excellence of the old Jewish economy -- and being
divinely ordained, God forbid we should say a word against it -- yet the apostle
Paul always talks of it as being but a yoke of bondage to which we are no more
to submit ourselves, being but the shadow and not the very image of the good
things which were to come; and he speaks of it as a thing so passed away, that
to go back to it is to go back to the rudiments, and not to go onward in the
full-grown manliness of Christianity. If there were no other passage my text
might show that the ceremonialism of the Jew is no excuse whatever for
ceremonialism now, but that we ought to stand in direct contrast to that,
hearing the Savior declare, that whatever may have been before his time, the
hour had come when the true worshipper must worship the Father in spirit and in
truth.Remember that symbolical worship was suitable merely to the infancy of
God's church, and that now having received the Spirit of God to dwell in us it
would be as unsuitable as would the swaddling bands of babyhood to full-grown
men. Besides, even while it existed it was spoken of as soon to be superseded by
a new and better covenant. It was frequently broken through by divine authority.
Elijah though not at all of the house of Levi offered sacrifice, and prophet
after prophet as he arose manifested and declared by his actions that God did
not intend to give the Levitical form of worship undivided sway, but that when
he poured his Spirit upon special men they were to break through all ritual
regulations in order to show that they were not meant to be fixed and
permanent.It is not sufficiently remembered that the most of God's people in the
Jewish nation had very little to do with this symbolical worship. When they were
all in the wilderness, and gathered round the one tent called the tabernacle,
they might all see the fiery cloudy pillar; but when they came into the land
which God had given them, what had they most of them to see? Why the temple
itself the most of them would only see once or twice in a year. Scarcely any one
ever saw the ark, the cherubim, or the golden candlestick; they were always
within the veil, and only once in the year did the high priest enter that sacred
place. Even the place where the sacrifices were carried on continually, no one
entered but the priests; so that to at least eleven tribes out of twelve the
ceremonials were mainly invisible. Little was done outside the court of the
priests, but the most of the sacrifices, and of the typology of Judaism, was as
much a hidden thing as the spiritual things of God are to us at the present day;
and thus there was a great exercise of the spiritual faculties, and
comparatively little of outward display. Moreover, it is to be remembered that
there was nothing whatever visible for the Jew to worship. It is not so in the
symbology of that false Church which is trying to raise up and revive the
beggarly elements; there men bow before a cross; a piece of bread inside a box
is reverenced and treated with worship; cast-off clouts and rotten rags, called
relics, are the objects of adoration; but there was nothing like this with the
Jews, they did worship toward the temple, but they did not adore the temple, or
mercy-seat, the altar, or any other emblem. Is it not said expressly, "Ye saw no
similitude"? When God descended upon Sinai, and all the people worshipped there,
they saw nothing which they dared to worship; God was to them still invisible,
and they had to exercise their mental faculties in the worship of the invisible
God. When at one time it was thought that the miraculous powers of the brazen
serpent entitled it to worship, Hezekiah called it Nehushtan, that is, a piece
of brass, and broke it to pieces. So that with all its splendor of imagery,
embroidered vest, and glittering breastplate, to a great extent there was a
powerful element of spirituality even about Aaronic worship; I mean, of course,
only to spiritual men. David himself utterly outstripped the outward, when he
declared, "Sacrifice and offering thou dost not desire;" and when he said again,
"Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it thee." The prophet declares
that God is weary of their sacrifices, and in another place the Lord himself
says that if we could come before him with rivers of oil, or ten thousand of the
fat of fed beasts, he would not accept us with these. To obey is better than
sacrifice, is told us even under the law. So that even there, though not so
distinctly as now, the spirituality of worship was taught and declared. But,
dear friends, what became of this accommodation of worship to the childhood of
the church? You know that very soon after Israel came out of Egypt they said,
"Let us make gods that they may go before us." They could not do without a
visible God. Do not think that when they set up the calf they meant to worship
the calf instead of Jehovah, that would be a slander upon them; they worshipped
Jehovah through the calf -- that was their plea, for they said, "Tomorrow is a
feast unto Jehovah." They thought to represent Jehovah by a bull, "they changed
their glory into the similitude of an ox that eateth grass." Though severely
rebuked, it was the constant sin of Israel to desire to worship God under the
favourite Egyptian emblem of the bull. At last they had so far gone into
idolatry that they were driven far away; and in captivity they were so
chastened, and moreover brought into such contact with the abominations of
idolatry that they were heartily sick of it, and no Jew has been an idolater
ever since. Still, spiritual worship they would not offer, and therefore fell
into rigid ritualism, reverencing the mere letter of the law, and fighting over
trifling refinements of regulation and observance; so that in Christ's day they
made broad their phylacteries and the borders of their garments, but they forgot
the Great Spirit who is to be worshipped in spirit and in truth.Since that day
the Lord has been treated by carnal men in one of three ways; either God is
adored by outward symbols as among Brahminists, Romanists, Puseyites, and other
idolaters; or else he is worshipped through ritualism, as among too many who
claim to be orthodox, who contend for pre-arranged, and unbending forms; written
or unwritten as the case may be: or else men show an utter indifference to God
altogether, and then rush into superstitious reverence for something or other
which is evil, and therefore to be dreaded and spoken of with awe. This is the
history of religious worship, that let spiritual worship assume what form it
may, man always will if he can, get away from it and forget his God and set up
something seen, instead of bowing down before the unseen; hence the necessity of
the second commandment in the Decalogue, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any
graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in
the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow
down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God,
and so on." This is not a command against worshipping another God, that is the
first commandment, but a command against worshipping God under any shape, or
through any medium or under any symbol; for he is a spirit, and must be
worshipped in spirit and in truth and not by symbols. Against this command the
human mind is always dashing itself, and in one shape or another idolatry is the
ruling religion of mankind.Christ comes to tell us that now his worship is to be
wholly spiritual, even the altar which belongs to antediluvian times is gone,
for we have an altar of another kind; even the sacrifice which belonged to the
early period has departed like a shadow, because we have the sacrifice of Christ
in which to trust. As for the institutions which suited the infancy of the
church, they also have disappeared, for now Jesus would have the worship of men
enlightened by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost; he would have us understand
that a perfect revelation demands of us, that in the perfection of our spiritual
powers we should adore the invisible God without the interference of visible
signs. Now he would have us cast away all outward types and signs, except the
two which he has himself ordained, and even these are types of the Savior's
manhood and not of his Godhead at all, to be only valued because of the
spiritual communion which they enable our hearts to hold with Jesus; baptism
being intended for spiritual men, that they may enter into the Savior's death
and burial, and the Lord's supper that the same persons may remember his body
broken and his blood shed for them; the water, the bread, the wine, being mere
emblems, not to be treated with reverence, but put to their proper emblematic
use.II. I shall now, in the second place, try to ACCOUNT FOR THE EXTREME RARITY
OF SPIRITUAL WORSHIP. The reason is, my brethren, because man has fallen. If man
were what he once was, pure and holy, I cannot conceive of his wanting holy
places and crosses, copes, and dalmatics, crosiers, and chasubles. I cannot
conceive of the temptation to bow down before a bull, or a Virgin Mary, or a
wafer. There the noble creature walks in paradise, and if he reclines beneath a
shady tree, he lifts up his eyes and says, "My Father, thou hast made this
grateful shade, here I will adore thee;" or if he walks in the full heat of the
sun, he says, "My God, it is thy light that shineth on me, -- I adore thee." Up
yonder on the mountain's brow, or down by the gleaming river, or the silvery
lake, he needs build no altar, his altar is within himself; be needs make no
temple, his temple is everywhere. The morning is holy, and the evening is holy;
he hath no prescribed hour of prayer, it is devotion all day long; his morning
bath is his baptism; each meal is his Eucharist. Depend upon it, the nearer we
get back to the nakedness of worship, the nearer we get to its truth and purity;
and it is because man has fallen, that as his body wants clothing, so he is
always dressing up his religion. Moreover, it is far more difficult to worship
God in spirit than in form. To patter through a dozen Ave Marias or Paternosters
is so easy, that I can nearly go to sleep over them: to repeat a form of prayer
in the morning and evening is a very small matter, and one can be thinking of
the shop all the while; to go to church or chapel so many times a week is a
cheap duty, and withal one may still be a thief or a hypocrite; but it is hard,
very hard, to bring the heart down to humble penitence, and the soul to holy
meditation. The last thing that most people will do is to think. The noblest
part of our nature is still the least exercised. Humbly to tremble before God,
to confess sin before him, to believe him, to love him -- this is spiritual
worship! Because this is so hard, men say, " No, no, let me crawl on my knees
around a shrine! Let me kneel down before a pyx, let me help to make a cope, or
to manufacture some pretty piece of millinery for the priest to wear. Let me go
every morning to the steeple house and come out in half an hour, and feel I have
done my religion." That is quite easy, but the hard part of religion is the part
of spiritual worship.And yet again, to worship God spiritually men would have to
part with their sins. There is no effect produced upon a man's conscience by his
being sprinkled, or by his taking the sacraments, he can do all that and be as
much a pleasure-lover, or a worshipper of Mammon, as he was before; but, to
worship God spiritually, a man must give up his sins, must overcome his pride
and lust, and his evil concupiscence must be cast out of him. Many persons might
honestly declare, "I do not mind worshipping God if it consists in doing
penance, or going without meat on Fridays; but if I am to give up my sins, love
God, seek Christ, trust to him, I cannot attend to that." Furthermore, man, for
the most part, somehow cannot get the idea of this spiritual worship into his
brain, Oh the many times I have tried to preach spiritual worship here, and yet
I am conscious that when I try at it I do not interest many of you, and some of
you think, "if he would only give us more metaphors, more anecdotes, and so on;"
I say I will do that, for I believe we should speak by parable, but sometimes I
do not know how to clothe these spiritual things without making you look at the
clothing rather than the spirit. It is not your worshipping God by words in
hymns and prayers, or sitting in a certain place, or covering your faces at
certain times that is acceptable to him; true worship lies in your heart paying
reverence to him, your soul obeying him, and your inner nature coming into
conformity to his own nature, by the work of his Spirit in your soul; and
because men can scarcely get the idea of this till the Holy Spirit gives it to
them, this is a reason why it is so rare, so exceedingly rare. There is one
other reason, dear friends, why spiritual worship is unusual, and that is
because man cannot traffic in spiritual religion. The priest is up at arms
directly. " Oh," saith he, "spiritual! spiritual! why they will do without me
one of these days. Spiritual -- why, if you tell these people that every place
is holy, and that there are no holy places; and that one believer is as much a
priest as another, and that prayer is as acceptable at home, as it is in a
particular spot, why," says he, "there is an end of me." Yes, sir, there is an
end of you, and the sooner the better for the world; for of all the curses that
have ever fallen upon the human race the priesthood is the worst. Its claims are
imposture, and its actions are full of deceit, In the age of witches and ghosts
priesthood might be tolerated, but he who now sets himself up as a priest is as
much a common nuisance as a fortune-teller. Nothing has been such a nightmare
upon the intellect of man; nothing has sat like old Sindbad the Sailor upon the
back of humanity, like the pretensions of priesthood. God forbid that
Christianity should even for a moment endorse the lie! Christ has put it all
down. Christ says, "All ye are brethren," and he says of the whole body of his
elect, "Ye are a royal priesthood." Concerning all the saints, Scripture
declares, "Ye are God's clergy," for that is the Greek word in the passage --
"Ye are God's heritage." We know no clergy and no laity; we know nothing
whatever now of priesthood and of the common people, for ye are made priests and
kings unto God to offer spiritual sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God by Jesus
Christ.III. Turning from that point, a third subject is this, WHY IS SUCH
WORSHIP TO BE RENDERED? Why did not God ordain worship by windmills as in
Thibet? Why has he not chosen to be worshipped by particular men in purple and
fine linen, acting gracefully as in Roman and Anglican churches? Why not? He
gives two reasons which ought to suffice. The first is, he himself seeks
spiritual worship. It is his own wish that the worship should be spiritual, And
in the second place, he is himself a spirit, and is to be spiritually
worshipped. Whatever kind of worship the great Ruler desires he ought to
receive, and it is impertinence on my part if I say to him, "No, not that, but
this." It is true I may say, "I am very sincere in all this, very earnest in it.
It suits my taste. There is a beauty about it; it excites certain emotions which
I think to be devotional." What is all that but saying, "Great God, thou hast
chosen such-and-such a way of being worshipped, but I will not render it to
thee?" Is not that in effect saying, "I will not worship thee at all;" for must
not worship, to be worship, be such as the person worshipped himself will
accept? To invent our own forms of worship is to insult God; and every mass that
is ever offered upon the Romish altar is an insult to heaven, and a blasphemy to
God who is a Spirit. Every time any form of worship by procession, celebration,
or ceremonial of man's invention is offered to God, it is offered in defiance of
this word of Christ, and cannot and will not be received; however earnest people
may be they have violated the imperative canon of God's Word; and in fighting
for rubrics they have gone against the eternal rubric that God as a Spirit must
be worshipped in spirit and in truth. The second reason given is, that God is a
Spirit. If God were material, it might be right to worship him with material
substances; if God were like to ourselves, it might be well for us to give a
sacrifice congenial to humanity; but being as he is, pure spirit, he must be
worshipped in spirit. I like the remark made by Trapp in his commentary on this
passage, when he says that perhaps the Savior is even here bringing down God to
our comprehension; "for," saith he, "God is above all notion, all name."
Certainly, this we know, that anything which associates him with the grossness
of materialism is infinitely removed from the truth. Said Augustine, "When I am
not asked what God is, I think I know, but when I try to answer that question, I
find I know nothing." If the Eternal were such an one as thou art, O man, he
might be pleased with thy painted windows. But what a child's toy must coloured
glass be to God! I can sit and gaze upon a cathedral with all its magnificence
of architecture, and think what a wonderful exhibition of human skill; but what
must that be to God, who piles the heavens, who digs the foundation of the deep,
who leads Arcturus with his sons? Why, it must be to him the veriest trifle, a
mere heap of stones. I delight to hear the swell of organs, the harmony of sweet
voices, the Gregorian chant, but what is this artistic sound to him more than
sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal? As a sight, I admire the choristers and
priests, and the whole show of a grand ceremonial; but do you believe that God
is imposed upon by those frocks and gowns of white, and blue, and scarlet, and
fine linen? It seems to me as if such a notion brings down God to the level of a
silly woman who is fond of finery. The infinite God, who spreads out the heavens
and scatters stars with both his hands, whom heaven and earth cannot contain, to
whom space is but a speck, and time is as nothing, do you think that he dwelleth
in temples made with hands, that is to say, of man's building? And is he to be
worshipped with your organs, and your roodscreens, and your gaudy millinery? He
laugheth at them, he treadeth on them as being less than nothing and vanity.
Spiritual worship is what he regardeth, because he is a Spirit. My brethren, if
you could get together a procession of worlds, if you could make the stars walk
along the streets of some great new Jerusalem, dressed in their brightest array;
if instead of the songs of a few boys or men you could catch the sonnets of
eternal ages; if instead of a few men to officiate as priests you could enlist
time, eternity, heaven and earth to be the priesthood, yet all this would be to
him but as a company of grasshoppers, and he would take up the whole as a very
little thing. But let me tell you that even God himself, great as he is, does
not despise the tear that drops from a repentant eye, nor does he neglect the
sigh that comes from a sinner's soul. He thinks more of your repentance than of
your incense, and more of your prayers than of your priesthoods. He views with
pleasure your love and your faith, for these are spiritual things in which he
can take delight; but your architecture, your music and your fine arts, though
they lavish their treasures at his feet, are less than nothing and vanity. Ye
know not what spirit ye are of. If ye think to worship my God with all these
inventions of man, ye dream like fools. I feel glowing within me the old
iconoclastic spirit. Would God we had men now like Knox or Luther, who with holy
indignation would pull in pieces those wicked mockeries of the Most High,
against which our soul feels a hallowed indignation as we think of his
loftiness, and of that poor paltry stuff with which men degrade his name.IV.
WHAT THEN? What is the practical drift of this? Why two things.The first is, my
dear brothers and sisters, I mean you who have learned to worship God in spirit
and in truth, who have got above the beggarly elements of the outward, and can
worship him in spirit and in truth, what then? Why, in the first place, let us
be particularly jealous of anything which looks at all like going back to
ceremonialism. As a matter of taste I have a great liking for noble
architecture. Many an hour have I lingered in the ruins of some splendid abbey
or our own majestic buildings still used for sacred worship. I have a great
delight in a well-painted window. I cannot say that I like most Dissenting
painted windows, because they look to me as if they were a sort of would be if
you could. I cannot say I have any kind of liking for most of our Dissenting
Gothic, for it seems to me such a paltry thing to build a front just like St.
Paul's or Westminster Abbey, and then as if to cheat the Lord to make the back
part shabby. I cannot say I care for that kind of thing. But a really splendid
place of worship I admire, as a matter of taste. I like an organ very well, as a
matter of musical taste. But, my brethren, I feel that these are times when we
must stand out even against allowable things, lest going one step we should go
another. I do pray you therefore if you have any influence anywhere always use
it in favor of simplicity, and if you see at any time in the churches of which
you are the members a tendency to creep on to something a little nearer, a
little towards the way of Rome, cry "Halt!" Let us rather go back to the barns
in which our fathers worshipped, or better still to the hill side, and to the
green sward than go forward to anything like symbolism, which will tempt the
soul away from spiritual worship. We ought ourselves to guard against falling
into formalism by means of simplicity, for we may do it the one way as well as
the other, by laying it down as a rule that a service must begin with prayer or
begin with singing, that the preacher must preach at such a time in the service,
that the service must commence, continue, and conclude in some fixed fashion;
that seems to me to have a tendency to breed another form of ritualism
inconsistent with worshipping God in spirit and in truth. I am afraid I have
hardly grace enough to worship God by two or three hours together in silence as
our Quaker friends do. I do enjoy a quarter of an hour's silence every now and
then; to sit quite still seems to me to be an admirable way of getting into
contact with God. Our service is so much words, words, words, that I am almost
afraid you get to think as much of words as other people do of banners, and
flags, and so on. Now, to sit still, to get might away from words, if so your
heart keeps to God, is better even than preaching and singing. Juan De Yaldes, a
Catholic, but a good Protestant for all that, remarks that the vulgar in seeking
to remember Christ by the crucifix do not exercise their mind but stop at the
crucifix, and therefore that which was intended to be a help becomes a
hindrance; so the learned get their bibles which should help them to think upon
divine things, but being content with having read the letter of Scripture they
often fail to reach the spiritual truth which it containeth, and so after all do
not worship God. Remember that while we should be jealous of anything which
would make it easy to be formal of worship which might be adopted, yet we may
still after all have missed the main thing, the worshipping of God in spirit and
in truth. Let us make it a matter of heart-searching as to whether we ourselves
have been in the habit of worshipping the Father in spirit and in truth. Dear
friends, I am jealous of some of you that you do not do this. If the preacher
happens to be away you do not feel in so good a frame; somebody else takes my
place, and there are certain feeble folk among you who feel as if the sabbath
had lost its enjoyment. But God is here, and you might worship God as much
surely without me as with me; and though the instruction received from one man
may not seem so edifying as that which may come from another, and possibly may
not be so, yet still if your object be the worship of God, which should be the
main object of our gathering, surely you should do that as well under the
ministry of Mr. A. as Mr. B. I am afraid too that many of you are content with
singing through the hymn; now all that singing which is not thought-singing is
of no use; you may have very sweet voices but God does not regard your voice, he
hears your heart, and if your heart does not sing you have not sung at all. When
we stand up to pray it may be that the preacher's words may happen to be
suitable to your case, but it is not prayer so far as you are concerned, though
it may be as far as he is, unless you join in it. Recollect that if you do not
put your hearts into the worship of God, you might for that matter as well be at
home as here; you are better here than at home for other reasons, because you
are in the way where good may come to you; but for worship's sake you might as
well have been in bed as here. You who have no spiritual worship may even clog
the devotions of those who have; an invisible savor of death unto death may be
stealing from you, helping to pollute or to render dead the worship of those who
truly adore God. At any rate, my dear hearers, if you have not with your whole
hearts loved and worshipped God, repent over it, and pray the Holy Ghost to make
you spiritual. Go to Christ's cross, and trust in him; then, and not till then,
will you be capable of adoring the most High God in a style in which he can
accept your worship. God grant that this may be impressed upon the hearts of all
of us, that we may worship God in spirit and in truth.PORTION OF SCRIPTURE READ
BEFORE SERMON -- John 4:1-30.


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  CHAPTER 3: TURNING BACK IN THE DAY OF BATTLE
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A Sermon (No.696) Delivered by C. H. SPURGEON, At the Metropolitan Tabernacle,
Newington "The children of Ephraim, being armed, and carrying bows, turned back
in the day of battle." -- Psalm 78:9. I DO NOT THINK that it has ever been
clearly ascertained to what particular historical event Asaph here refers, but I
do not find that any of the commentators mention a very obscure passage in the
First Book of Chronicles, which I venture to suggest may give us the
explanation. In the first Book of Chronicles, the seventh chapter and the
twentieth verse, you read: -- "And the sons of Ephraim, Shuthelah, and Bered his
son, and Tabath his son, and Eladah, and Tabath his son, and Zabad his son, and
Shuthelah his son, and Ezer, and Elead, whom the men of Gath that were born in
that land slew, because they came down to take away their cattle. And Ephraim
their father mourned many days, and his brethren came to comfort him." This
event appears to have occurred while the children of Israel were still in Egypt.
It has been supposed by some that these sons of Ephraim made a raid upon the
promised land, and attacked the men of Gath. Believing the land to be theirs by
promise they went to take it before they had divine authority so to do. They
made God's decrees the rule of their life instead of God's revealed will, and so
they soon fell into trouble, -- as those people always do who make that mistake,
-- and their father Ephraim mourned over them many days. But it appears to have
been rather an attack made upon them by some men of Gath. The people seem some
of them to have been of Egyptian origin, and they probably made an attack upon
the cattle of the men of Ephraim. These young men defended their cattle for a
time, but at last -- if this be the event, which this Psalm refers to -- it
would appear they turned their backs and so fell slain. That may or may not be.
Still there are other passages in history, which might serve to illustrate the
text. You are aware that Joshua was of the tribe of Ephraim, and probably on
account of this, the ark of God was first placed at Shiloh. On the occasion when
Hophni and Phineas were slain, the children of Israel, we are told, fled. It
appears to have been the peculiar duty of the men of Ephraim, in whose tribe
Shiloh was, to guard the ark. It may be possible that they were set around the
ark as a body-guard to it, but fled at the approach of the Philistines, or fell
slain together with Hophni and Phineas on that terrible and disastrous day. If
this is the event alluded to you will find the history of it in the fourth
chapter of the First Book of Samuel. Perhaps, however, reference is made to the
whole history of the tribe of Ephraim, that though they were well armed and were
dexterous men in the use of the bow, yet on many occasions they turned their
backs in the day of battle. Whether any of these explanations interpret the
historical reference or not, the subject in itself will furnish us with a theme
for meditation. I. We will first consider for a little while WHAT THESE MEN DID.
They turned their backs. When the time for fighting came they ought to have
shown their fronts. Like bold men they should have kept their face to the foe
and their breast against the adversary, but they dishonorably turned their backs
and fled. This, I am sorry to say, is not an unusual thing amongst professing
Christians. They turn back; they turn back in the day of battle. Some do this at
the first appearance of difficulty. "There is a lion in the way," saith the
slothful man, "I shall be slain in the streets." They hear that there is some
trouble involved in Christian service, or that some persecution may be met with
in the pursuit of truth, and straightway they look before they leap, as the
world hath it, and turn back from the way which they supposed to be that of
safety. Timorous and Mistrust come running down the hill crying, "The lions! the
lions!" and thus may a pilgrim turn back towards the City of Destruction. Others
are somewhat braver. They bear the first brunt. When the skirmishers begin these
are as bold as any; they can return blow for blow, and you bear them boast, as
they buckle on their armor, at such a rate, that you would suppose, if you did
not know that boasters are seldom good at fighting, that they must certainly be
victorious. During the first thrust they stand like martyrs and behave like
heroes, but very soon, when the armor gets a little battered, and the fine plume
on their helmet a little stained, they turn back in the day of battle. Some
professors bear the fight a little longer. They are not to be laughed out of
their religion; they can stand the jeers and jests of their old companions. When
they find that they have got the cut direct in the society which once loved them
so much they can put up with that, and they are very much complimented by
themselves on having done it. "Cowards," say they, "are those who flee; but we
shall never do this." But by and by the skirmishers have done their work, and it
comes to a hand-to-hand fight; the struggle begins to be somewhat more arduous,
and now shall we see what metal they are made of. The enemy gets hold of them,
and "That desperate tug their soul might feelThrough bars of brass and triple
steel."Then they find that they are being hugged in the wrong place; they are
touched in a tender part, and so they also turn back in the day of battle!And,
alas! sad as it is to say it -- firmly as we believe that every child of God is
safe, yet is it true that many who profess to be so, after having fought so long
that you would suppose the next thing would be for them to rest upon their
laurels and receive their crown, just at the very last they fall and turn hack!
We have seen grey-headed apostates as well as juvenile ones. There have been
those who seemed to wear well for a time, but at last one crushing blow came
which they could not bear, and they gave way before it! Oh, brethren, it is only
those who persevere to the end that will be saved, and only those who have a
true faith in Jesus Christ have a sure evidence of their election of God; these
be they who shall be clothed with white raiment, and shall sit down upon his
throne for ever. But, how many who bade fair to do this, after all turn back!I
may be describing -- I hope I am not -- some actual case here. Some of you may
say as you turn the thought over in your minds, -- "My feet had almost gone;My
steps had well nigh slipped."That young man over yonder was so much jeered at
the other day by those with whom he works, that he felt it was very unkind, and
he did think something about renouncing his religion altogether. And my other
brother yonder, who has had so many losses, has lately had such a time as he
never had before, and he thinks nobody else ever had; and he cries, "God has
forsaken me." He cannot just now say, "Though he slay me yet will I trust in
him;" but he thinks, "Surely I had better turn to the world; I had better leave
my religion and give it up, for I am encompassed about with such a terrible
conflict that I shall never win the victory!" Ah! brethren, these are often the
trials that God sends, and it is by these that he separates the chaff from the
wheat, and lets us see who are true soldiers, and who are only the lacqueys who
wear regimentals, but have not the soldier's heart pulsing beneath the scarlet.
God grant us grace to be found at last men that turned not back in the day of
battle.If I take the history of the children of Ephraim, I should say that they
turned their backs and failed to defend the ark. There are some who, when they
are defending the truth, shun controversy. They are of such a timid disposition
-- a loving disposition they call it -- that as soon as ever the war-trumpet
sounds they find it to be their duty to attend to the baggage in the rear. They
are very brave men indeed in that particular quarter of the conflict where it
does not happen to rage; but there in the van, where the corpses are piled on
heaps, and where the battle-axes drip with gore, they never will be found,
because they have not the courage to fight and to conquer for Jesus. As far as
they are concerned the ark of God may be taken by the Philistines, because they
turn their backs.These Ephraimites ought, too, as Joshua had set them the
example, to have conquered Canaan, and to have driven out the Canaanites still
left. Ah! my brethren, there are some of you whose sins still live, because you
have turned your backs upon them, but not in the right sense, for you have
turned your backs against contending with sin. There is that bad temper of yours
-- you have given up trying to curb it now. You say, "Well, you know many of
God's children have bad tempers," whereas you know that this is very wicked
talking. You ought to slay that Agag. You have no business to tolerate a bad
temper. You must never have any peace with that spiteful temper, or that hasty
temper of yours; you must down with it, or else it will down with you, and if
you do not overcome it, it will overcome you. Rest assured that you are guilty,
and that you turn your back if you do not fight with it. So too with that
worldliness of yours and that want of a prayerful spirit. If you say, "Well, I
will be content to be as I am; I will not try after a high state of piety," you
turn your backs, my brethren. You ought to slay all these Canaanites, and you
must in Christ's name do it, and not spare so much as one of them, but say,
"they compass me about, like bees, yea, they compass me about, but in the name
of the Lord will I destroy them."And then, when these people turned their backs,
Canaan was not won. So it is with you. The Lord's kingdom is not yet fully
extended, and just when you ought to be pushing far and wide the conquests of
the cross, and be letting this great city of ours know that the King reigneth
mighty to save, you turn back in the day of battle. There are some Christians
here who are doing nothing. I should not say this, perhaps, if I were preaching
on Sunday, for I thank God that I could not in my own heart say it of my own
members; the most of them are doing, I believe, as much as lieth in them, or if
not, I hope they very soon will be. But I am persuaded that there are many other
Christians who are not doing what they should do, but are shrinking from
practical service. They come in here, perhaps, on a Thursday night, and get a
little bit, and they go elsewhere on other evenings of the week and pick up
sweet morsels and crumbs. They like feeding very well, but they do not like work
so much. There is a certain little company that come here on week-day evenings,
into whose ears I should like to whisper, and ask them what they are doing for
Christ. They are spiritual vagrants who go from one place to another, but have
no settled home where they work for the Master, and they are of very little
credit to anybody. We must all of us have a sphere of labor, and though I am
glad to see all of you, as many as like to come, yet I pray you do have your own
place for your own work, and do not be like the children of Ephraim who "turned
back in the day of battle." II. Having thus observed what these men of Ephraim
did, we come to look at the inopportune time WHEN THEY DID IT.They turned back,
and their doing so would not have mattered much had they done it in a day of
feasting. They could always be spared then, but that was not when they did it.
They always had their faces to the front when there was any feasting to be done.
They turned back; when? On holidays, when the banners waved high and the silver
trumpets sounded? No; they were in the front then! Exeter Hall! May meetings!
How many people are in the front there and then? When there is something sweet
to feed upon they do not think of turning back. But these people turned back on
rather a different occasion; they turned back in the day of battle. They turned
back, it seems then, just when they were to be tried. Ah! how much there is we
do that will not stand trial! How much there is of godliness which is useful for
anything excepting that which it is meant for! It is all in vain for me to say,
if I have bought a water-proof coat, that it is good for everything except
keeping the water out. Why, then it is good for nothing, and so there are some
Christians who have got a religion that is good for every day except the day
when it has to be tested, and then it is good for nothing. An anchor may be very
pretty on shore, and it may be very showy as an ornament when it lies on the
ship's deck or hangs from the side, but what is the good of it if it will not
hold when the wind blows and the vessel needs to be held fast? So, alas! there
is much of religion and of godliness, so called, that is no good when it comes
to the day of trial. The soldier is truly proved to be a soldier when the
war-trumpet sounds and the regiment must go up to the cannon's mouth. Then shall
you know, when the bayonets begin to cross, who has the true soldier's blood in
him; but ah! how many turn back when it really comes to the conflict, for then
the day of trial is too much for them!They turned back at the only time when
they were of any sort of use. A man who has to fight is not of any particular
use to his country, that I know of, except when there is fighting to be done.
Like a man in any other trade, there is a season when he is wanted. Now, if the
Christian soldier never fights, of what good is he at all? That is a very
remarkable passage in one of the prophets, where the Lord compares his people to
a vine, and then he says of them, in words of which I will give the sense, "If
the vine bears fruit it is very valuable, but, if it bears no fruit, then it is
good for nothing at all." An oak without fruit is valuable for its timber, and
even thorns are useful, for you may make a hedge of them. Smaller plants may be
used for some medicinal purposes, but the vine, if it bear no fruit, is
absolutely good for nothing. "Will a man even make a peg of it, whereon to hang
a vessel?" saith the prophet. No, it is of no service whatever. So is it with
the Christian. If he be not thorough and true he is no good at all; you can make
nothing of him whatever; he is, to use Christ's expressive words, "Neither fit
for the land nor even for the dunghill, and men cast him out." Who would enlist
a soldier that knew he would turn back? and who amongst us would like to be in
his regiment? Take off his colors, play "The Rogue's March," and turn him out of
the barracks! And this is what will come to some professors who turn back in the
day of battle! Their regimentals will be torn off, and they will be excluded
from the church of God because they turned back in the day of trial and at the
time when they were needed.They turned their backs, too, like fools, in the day
when victory was to be won. The soldier wants to distinguish himself; he wants
to rise out of the ranks; he wants to be promoted. He hardly expects an
opportunity of doing this in time of peace; but the officer rises when in time
of war he leads a successful charge. And so it is with the Christian soldier. I
make no advance while I am not fighting. I cannot win if I am not warring. My
only opportunity for conquering is when I am fighting. If I run away when there
is a chance of winning the crown, then I am like the ship that does not come out
of harbour when there is a fair wind, or like the man who does not avail himself
of the high tide to get his vessel over the bar at the harbour's mouth. I cannot
win without fighting, and therefore I thank God when the trial comes, and count
it a joy when I fall into manifold temptations, because now I may add to my
faith one virtue after another, till my Christian character is all complete. To
throw away the time of conflict is to throw away the crown. Oh simple heart! Oh
silly heart! to be afraid of suffering for Jesus! You are, in fact, afraid of
reigning with him, for you must do the one if you would do the other. You, young
woman, who are so alarmed at a little laughing, recollect you cannot go to
heaven without being laughed at sometimes in the circle in which you move, or
the family in which you live. He that will live a godly life in Christ Jesus
must suffer persecution. Since, then, this is the way to heaven, why do you turn
from it? Be not like these children of Ephraim who turned back when there was a
crown to be won. They turned back, once more, when turning back involved the
most disastrous defeat. The ark of God was taken. "Ichabod," the enemy cried,
for the glory was departed from Israel, because the children of Ephraim turned
back in the day of battle. And so, dear friends, unless God gives you preserving
grace to stand fast to the end, do you not see that you are turning back to --
what? To perdition. You do not turn back merely to the world. That is what it
looks like, perhaps, to you, but you really turn back to hell. If, after having
once put your hand to the plough, you look back, you are unworthy of the
kingdom; but what are you worthy of? Why, those "reserved seats" in hell! Did
you ever think of that? There are such, and let me quote a passage, which proves
it. We are told in one place of darkness "reserved" for some who were "wandering
stars, for whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever!" When you turn
back you turn back to those reserved places where the darkness is more black and
the pain more terrible. Oh! may God save you from ever turning back in the day
of battle! This, then, is when they did it -- they turned back in the day of
battle.III. But now let us notice, WHO THEY WERE THAT TURNED BACK.They were
"children of Ephraim," and they are described as "being armed and carrying
bows," or bows throwing forth sharp arrows. They were men of a noble parentage.
They were the children of Ephraim. Joshua was of that line, and he was the
greatest of conquerors, who led the people into the promised laud. And you
professors, you profess to be descended from our Joshua, -- Jesus the Conqueror,
and will you turn back? Are you followers of the Savior who gave his back to the
smiters, and his cheeks to them that plucked off the hair, and are you afraid or
ashamed of anything? He gave his face to be spat upon, and will you hide your
faces at the mention of his name, because fools choose to laugh at you?
Followers of Joshua, and vet afraid? Followers of Jesus, and yet blush? God
grant that we may never blush, except when we think that we ever blushed at the
thought of his Son! Oh! thou dear, despised, and persecuted One, I see thee on
thy way amidst the scoffers. One plucks thy beard; another pulls thy hair; a
third casts his accursed spittle into thy face; another beats thee; another
cries, "Let him be crucified." They mock thee with all forms of mockery. Taunt
and jeer they heap upon thee. They fill thy mouth with vinegar, and give thee
gall to drink. They pierce thy hands and thy feet, and yet thou goest on along
thy way of kindness and of mercy! And I -- what have I ever suffered compared
with thee? And these thy people -- what have any of these endured, or what can
they endure, compared with all thy griefs? Thy martyrs follow thee. Up from
their fiery stakes they mount to their thrones. Confessors follow thee; from
dungeons and from racks their testimony sounds. And, shall we, upon whom the
ends of the earth are come, in these softer and gentler times, shall we turn
back, and say we know not the Man? O God, forbid! but do thou keep us faithful
unto thee, that we, the sons of Ephraim, may not turn back in the day of
battle.Then, again, they were armed, and had proper weapons, weapons which they
knew how to use, and good weapons for that period of warfare. And as Christians,
what weapons have we? Here is this "Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of
God." Here is a quiver, filled with innumerable arrows, and God has put into our
hands the bow of prayer, by which we may shoot them, drawing that bow by the arm
of faith against our innumerable foes. What weapons of holy warfare do you want
better than those which this sacred armoury supplies? Read the last chapter of
the Epistle to the Ephesians, and see how the apostle, with a triumphant
glorying, takes you through God's armoury, and bids you look at the various
pieces of armor, and the various weapons that are provided for you. If you lose
the battle, it is not for want of being armed, and if you desert from the ranks,
it is not for the want of bows.But what is more. Another translation seems to
show that these Ephraimites were very skillful in the use of the bow, and yet
they turned back. Oh! may God grant that none of us who have preached to others,
and preached to others with fluency and zeal may ever have our own weapons
turned against us. I may make a confession here now. I have read some of my own
utterances and have trembled as I have read them, and afterwards I have wept
over them, not wanting to alter them, not regretting them, but fearing and
trembling lest I should have my own words used in judgment against me at the
last great day, for there can be no more dreadful thing that for a man to have
known and taught the Word to others, and then to hear the Master say, -- just
listen to it, -- "Thou wicked servant! Out of thine own mouth will I condemn
thee!" O God! Condemn me out of anybody's mouth rather than out of my own. It
will be a dreadful thing to have known how to use the bow, and yet not to win
the victory one's-self; to have been a sort of drill-sergeant to God's people,
showing them how to use the weapons, and then not to have fought the battle
one's-self! This will be a terrible thing! Some of you know how to use this
Bible. You are acquainted with it, you have studied its doctrines, you know the
points of divinity and theology, you are well read up in the teachings of God's
Word; you know how to use the bow. And some of you pray very sweetly at
prayer-meeting. Ah! beloved, what I said about myself may well apply to you.
Some of you are Sunday-school teachers and others tract distributors, and you
all know how to use the bow. I hope I can say to you who sit here that I have,
like Saul, taught you to use the bow. We have sought to teach you young men to
use God's Word both in prayer and in other exercises of your holy faith; but,
beloved, if you turn back, the art, which you have learned, shall rise up in
judgment against you to condemn you! If as professors taught the use of God's
Word you are marched out to fight, but have not courage enough for the conflict,
and turn your backs and slink into inglorious ease or into vain-glorious
self-righteousness, or into false glorious pleasure, oh! how terrible must be
your ruin at the last! May you not be like the children of Ephraim, who, though
skilled in the use of the bow, yet turned back in the day of battle! This, then,
is who they were. IV. And ask ye now -- WHY DID THEY DO IT?Why did they, indeed?
We might well have been at a loss to tell, for they were armed and carried bows.
What then was the reason? The Word of God tells us and gives us three reasons.
You will find them in the verses following the text. "They kept not the covenant
of God and refused to walk in his law, and forgot his works, and his wonders
that he had showed them.""They kept not the covenant." Oh! that great covenant,
"ordered in all things and sure," when you can fall back upon that how it
strengthens you! When you can read in it eternal thoughts of divine love to you,
and can hear Jesus say, "I give unto my sheep eternal life, and they shall never
perish, neither shall any pluck them out of my hand." How it encourages you to
go forward! You cannot be killed, you are invulnerable, you have been dipped in
the covenant stream that makes you invulnerable from head to foot. Why, then,
should you fear to face the foe? If you forget that covenant you will soon turn
back, and so prove that you are not in it; but the remembrance of it gives
strength to God's people to persevere, since they feel that God's purpose is
that they shall persevere, and so win the victory. The covenant, however, not
only secures safety, but it also provides all sorts of blessings. If a Christian
always had his eye on the covenant storehouse he could never desert his God for
the world. Will a man leave a treasury that is full of gold to go to a beggar's
cottage for money? Will a man turn from the flowing stream that comes cool and
fresh from Lebanon's melting snow to go and drink of some filthy stagnant pool?
No, not he, and when a man knows the treasures of grace that are in Christ
Jesus, and remembers that it pleased the Father that in him should all fullness
dwell, and that he hath made him a covenant for the people, will such a man turn
back? Assuredly not, but every promise of the covenant will enable him to face
his foes and prevent his turning back in the day of battle. Perhaps, however,
the covenant which we forget is the covenant we feel we made with Christ in the
day when we said, "My beloved is mine, and I am his," when we give ourselves up
in a full surrender, body, soul, and spirit, to God. Oh! let us never forget
that covenant! Supposing we should lose our character for Christ's sake? Did we
not give Christ our character to begin with? You are of no use in the ministry,
my dear brother, if you are not quite willing to be called a fool, to be called
a thief, or even to be called a devil! You will never be successful if you are
afraid of being pelted. The true minister often finds his pulpit to be a place
but little preferable to a pillory, and he is content to stand there, feeling
that all the abuse and blasphemy which may come upon him are only the means by
which the world recognises and proves its recognition of a God-sent man. Oh! to
rest upon the covenant which is made in grace, and to hold fast the covenant
which Christ has compelled us to make with him, resolved that even should he
take all away, our joy, our comfort, and our ease, we will still stand to it,
and still keep the covenant.Another reason why they turned back was that "they
refused to walk in his law." When we get a proud heart we very soon get beaten,
for with the face of a lion, but the heart of a deer, such an one is afraid of
the world. If I am willing to do what God tells me, as he tells me, when he
tells me, and because he tells me, I shall not turn back in the day of
battle.They also seem to have turned back because they had bad memories. "They
forgat his works, and the wonders that he had showed them." My dear friends, we
the members of this church have seen many of God's wonders, and have rejoiced in
them, and if we were to forget these we should lack one means of comfort in our
own darkness. Some of you have had very wonderful manifestations of the Lord's
kindness, and if you forget all these I should not wonder if you should prove to
be a mere professor and turn your back, for God's true people are like that
Mary, whom all generations call "blessed," they treasure these things in their
hearts. We ought to stir up our remembrances of God's loving-kindness, for if we
do not it will soon he a powerful reason for our turning back in the day of
battle. Oh! have we not fought in days gone by, and shall we now be afraid? Have
we not slain old Giant Grim? Did we not fight with dragons and with lions? Have
we not gone through the Valley of the Shadow of Death? Have we not had a
conflict with Apollyon himself foot to foot, and shall Giant Despair or his wife
Mrs. Diffidence make us afraid? No, in the name of God we will use the good old
sword, the true Jerusalem blade that we wielded aforetime, and we shall yet
again be more than conquerors through him that loved us. Let us, then, not
forget God's works in the days of yore, lest we fail to trust him in the days
that are to come. This was why they turned back.V. And now the last enquiry is
-- WHAT WAS THE RESULT OF THEIR TURNING BACK?One result of their turning back
was, that their father mourned over them. We are told, in the passage I quoted
first, that "Ephraim their father mourned for them many days." What a
lamentation it brings into the Christian church when a professor falls! There is
one heart, which feels it with peculiar poignancy -- the heart of him who
thought he was the spiritual father of the person so falling. There are no
griefs connected with our work like the grief of mourning over fallen
professors, especially if these happen to be ministers, men who are armed and
carry bows, for when they turn back, well accoutred and well skilled in war, it
is heart breaking work indeed! I do not exaggerate, but I know I only speak the
sober truth, when I say that if I could submit to any form of corporeal torture
that I have ever heard of, I would be willing to bear it sooner than submit to
the torture I have sometimes felt over members of this church, or what is worse,
over young men educated in our College, or what is worse still, over ministers
who have been for some time settled over their flocks. If at any time you desire
to be malicious towards the man whom you look upon as your spiritual father; if
you would send an arrow through his very liver and smite him with a dagger in
the core of his heart, you have nothing to do but I to turn back in the day of
battle and you have done it. It were better that you had never been born than
that you should go back to the world. It were better that you should be taken
out of this house a corpse than that you should live to disgrace the profession
which you have espoused, especially those of you who stand in a prominent place.
O God, keep us who witness before the multitude, keep us by thine eternal power,
keep us as the apple of thine eye, hide us beneath the shadow of thy wings, or
else we who are chief and foremost, though armed and carrying bows, shall yet
turn back in the day of battle. Another result, which you perhaps will think
more important far, was that owing to their turning back the enemy remained.
Owing to many Christians not doing what they ought to do in the day of battle,
Romanism is still in this land, and infidelity is rife. If in the days of
Elizabeth and Cranmer men had acted up to the light they then had, we should not
be as we now are, a semi-Popish nation. Had Luther himself been faithful to some
of the light to which he shut his eyes, he might have inaugurated a more perfect
Reformation than that for which we are still devoutly grateful to God and for
which we always cherish his memory. There was a want of thoroughness even in
that day. And at the present moment, if some of our brethren were but faithful
to their own convictions, they would not be bolstering up an alliance of the
State with a depraved Church; they would not dare to perform some ceremonies
which are atrociously bad, and many of us, if we acted according to our inward
monitor, would not do many things which we are now doing. Oh! may God give us
grace to smite the foe! What has sin to do in this world? Christ has bought the
world with his blood, and oh! for grace to clear sin out of Christ's heritage!
The earth is the Lord's, and the kingdoms thereof, the world and they that dwell
therein; and if we were but faithful to God we should not turn back in the day
of battle, and Rome and all our foes would be slain.Then, again, if we did not
turn our backs, the country would be conquered for Christ. I do not like the way
in which some brethren say, that if we were more faithful half London would be
saved. I say that I believe God's purpose is achieved, but still we are bound to
speak of our sins according to their tendencies, and the tendency of our want of
confidence in God, and our not boldly persevering, is to destroy souls. Paul
talked once of destroying with meat him for whom Christ died, that being the
tendency to destroy such souls if they could be destroyed. So humanly speaking,
the darkness of the world at present is owing to the unfaithfulness of the
church, and if the church had been as true to Christ as she was in the first
century, long ere this there would not have been a village without the gospel,
nor a single empire in the world in which the truth had not been proclaimed. It
is our turning back in the day of battle that leaves Canaan unconquered for our
Lord.But, worse than this, the ark itself was actually taken. My dear friends,
those of you who are armed and carry bows, men of learning, men who understand
the Scriptures, 1 do pray you, do not turn back just now, for just now seems to
be a time when the ark of God will be taken. It can never really be so, but
still we must mind that it be not the tendency of our actions. We are in great
danger from what some people will not believe, but what is most certainly a
fact, and that is the marvellous increase of Popery in this land. There are
certain brethren who are always harping upon this one string, till we have grown
sick of the theme, but, without at all endorsing their alarm, I believe there is
quite enough for the most quiet and confident spirit to be alarmed at. The thing
has become monstrous, and there is need to awaken the anxious care and the
earnest efforts of God's church. You need not be long without good evidence of
this. Every nerve is being strained by Rome to win England to itself, and, on
the other hand, while we have less neology, and less of all sorts of scepticism
throughout the whole country, I am afraid that we have more of it than we used
to have inside the church itself. There are many doctrines that are now matters
of question, which I never heard questioned ten years ago. I am not altogether
sorry for this, but rather glad, because there are some doctrines which are not
preached now, but which will be preached more in future in consequence of doubts
being thrown upon them. But it is a very ominous sign of the times, that most of
those truths which we have been accustomed to accept as being the received and
orthodox faith of Christendom are now being questioned, and questioned too by
men who are not to be despised, men who from their evident earnestness, from
their deep knowledge, and from their close attention to the matter, deserve a
hearing in the forum of common sense, even if they do not deserve it from
spiritual men. We must all of us hold fast the truth now. If there is a man who
has got a truth, let him draw his bow and shoot his arrows now, and not turn
back in the day of battle. Now for your arrows! Now for your arrows! The more
our foes shall conspire against Christ, the more do you make war against them.
Give them double for their double; reward them as they reward you. Spare no
arrows against Babylon. "Happy shall he be that taketh thy little ones and
dasheth them against the stones." Happy shall he be who slays the little errors,
who kills the minor falsehoods, who does battle against Popery in every shape
and form, and against, infidelity in all its phases! If we do not come to the
front now, the ark of God, as far as we are concerned, will be taken! And then,
worst of all, we shall hear the Philistines shouting while God's church is
weeping! The Philistines are good hands at shouting. They shout rather loudly
about nothing, but when they get a little they bark loudly enough then. If they
see but one Christian turn back what rejoicing there is! They ring the bells and
make great mirth over the fall of the very least among us, but if those of us
who are armed and carry bows should turn back in the day of battle, oh "Tell it
not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon, lest the daughters of
Philistia rejoice, lest the sons of the uncircumcised triumph!" God grant that
we may never make mirth for hell. If Satan must have merriment may he find it
anywhere rather than in us. Oh! may we stand at last, and, having done all, may
we still stand.To conclude, brethren. If we do not stand fast, you know what
will come of it. Supposing the churches of which we are members do not stand
fast, what will come of you and what of me? What became of Shiloh? What became
of Ephraim? Instead of the ark being any longer in the custody of Ephraim it was
taken away from Shiloh, and God transferred the custody of it to Judah, and it
rested upon Mount Zion under the government of King David. So, mark you,
whenever a church becomes unfaithful, and turns back in the day of battle, God
takes away from it the keeping of his ark and entrusts it to others. "I have
looked upon a neighbor of thine," saith he, "who is better than thou," and so he
takes the sword and gives it to David, and thus perhaps may he do with us. There
are many churches that were once flourishing but now are deserted altogether. So
it may be with us individually, and with the churches at large unless we are
faithful to God.Now, I have said nothing to the unconverted. My drift seemed to
be to speak to professing believers. Some of you say you never went to this war,
and therefore you will not turn back; you never made a profession. Ah! dear
friends, it will be a very poor excuse at the last great day to say, "I never
made a profession." Did you ever hear of a thief being brought up at the Mansion
House before the Lord Mayor who said, when he was accused of being a thief,
"Why, my Lord, I am not a very honest man; I never professed to be; I never
professed that I would not pick people's pockets; I never professed that I would
not steal a watch if I had the chance; I was regularly known as a thief; I never
professed to be anything else, therefore you cannot blame me." If a man should
make such a defense as that, I should think it very likely that the Lord Mayor
would give him an extra six months, and I think it would serve him very well
right. You smile at this, but the very same argument may be applied to you.
"Well," you say, "you know I do not make any profession of religion;" that is to
say, you do not make any pretense of serving and loving the God who made you,
who gave you life, and has kept and preserved you in it; you do not make any
profession of being washed in the precious blood of Christ; you do not make a
profession of being on the road to hell. Well, may God save you from that
excuse, and may he give you grace to look it in the face and say, "Well, I do
not dare even to hope that I am saved; I know I am not." Then, my brother, if
you are not saved, you are lost. I would like to stop while you turn that
thought over, and when you have done so I would say, "The Son of Man is come to
seek and to save that which was lost."May God's eternal mercy seek and save you,
and, if it be his will, may he find you, and lead you to put your trust in Jesus
Christ, and resting upon him, and looking to his cross, you shall not, as the
children of Ephraim did, "turn back in the day of battle."PORTION OF SCRIPTURE
READ BEFORE SERMON -- Psalm 78.


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  CHAPTER 4: ORDER AND ARGUMENT IN PRAYER
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A Sermon (No.700) Delivered on Sunday Morning, July 15th, 1866, by C. H.
SPURGEON, At the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington "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." -- Job 23:3,4 In Job's uttermost
extremity he cried after the Lord. The longing desire of an afflicted child of
God is once more to see his Father's face. His first prayer is not, "Oh that I
might be healed of the disease which now festers in every part of my body!" nor
even, "Oh that I might see my children restored from the jaws of the grave, and
my property once more brought from the hand of the spoiler!" but the first and
uppermost cry is, "Oh that I knew where I might find HIM -- who is my God! that
I might come even to his seat!" God's children run home when the storm comes on.
It is the heaven-born instinct of a gracious soul to seek shelter from all ills
beneath the wings of Jehovah. "He that hath made his refuge God," might serve as
the title of a true believer. A hypocrite, when he feels that he has been
afflicted by God, resents the infliction, and, like a slave, would run from the
master who has scourged him; but not so the true heir of heaven, he kisses the
hand which smote him, and seeks shelter from the rod in the bosom of that very
God who frowned upon him. You will observe that the desire to commune with God
is intensified by the failure of all other sources of consolation. When Job
first saw his friends at a distance, he may have entertained a hope that their
kindly counsel and compassionate tenderness would blunt the edge of his grief;
but they had not long spoken before he cried out in bitterness, "Miserable
comforters are ye all." They put salt into his wounds, they heaped fuel upon the
flame of his sorrow, they added the gall of their upbraidings to the wormwood of
his griefs. In the sunshine of his smile they once had longed to sun themselves,
and now they dare to cast shadows upon his reputation, most ungenerous and
undeserved. Alas for a man when his wine-cup mocks him with vinegar, and his
pillow pricks him with thorns! The patriarch turned away from his sorry friends
and looked up to the celestial throne, just as a traveller turns from his empty
skin bottle and betakes himself with all speed to the well. He bids farewell to
earthborn hopes, and cries, "Oh that I knew where I might find my God!" My
brethren, nothing teaches us so much the preciousness of the Creator as when we
learn the emptiness of all besides. When you have been pierced through and
through with the sentence, "Cursed is he that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh
his arm," then will you suck unutterable sweetness from the divine assurance,
"Blessed is he that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is." Turning
away with bitter scorn from earth's hives, where you found no honey, but many
sharp stings, you will rejoice in him whose faithful word is sweeter than honey
or the honeycomb. It is further observable that though a good man hastens to God
in his trouble, and runs with all the more speed because of the unkindness of
his fellow men, yet sometimes the gracious soul is left without the comfortable
presence of God. This is the worst of all griefs; the text is one of Job's deep
groans, far deeper than any which came from him on account of the loss of his
children and his property: "Oh that I knew where I might find HIM!" The worst of
all losses is to lose the smile of my God. He now had a foretaste of the
bitterness of his Redeemer's cry, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
God's presence is always with his people in one sense, so far as secretly
sustaining them is concerned, but his manifest presence they do not always
enjoy. Like the spouse in the song, they seek their beloved by night upon their
bed, they seek him but they find him not; and though they wake and roam through
the city they may not discover him, and the question may be sadly asked again
and again, "Saw ye him whom my soul loveth?" You may be beloved of God, and yet
have no consciousness of that love in your soul. You may be as dear to his heart
as Jesus Christ himself, and yet for a small moment he may forsake you, and in a
little wrath he may hide himself from you. But, dear friends, at such times the
desire of the believing soul gathers yet greater intensity from the fact of
God's light being withheld. Instead of saying with proud lip, "Well, if he
leaveth me I must do without him; if I cannot have his comfortable presence I
must fight on as best may be," the soul saith, "No, it is my very life; I must
have my God. I perish, I sink in deep mire where there is no standing, and
nothing but the arm of God can deliver me." The gracious soul addresseth itself
with a double zeal to find out God, and sends up its groans, its entreaties, its
sobs and sighs to heaven more frequently and fervently. "Oh that I knew where I
might find him!" Distance or labour are as nothing; if the soul only knew where
to go she would soon overleap the distance. She makes no stipulation about
mountains or rivers, but vows that if she knew where, she would come even to his
seat. My soul in her hunger would break through stone walls, or scale the
battlements of heaven to reach her God, and though there were seven hells
between me and him, yet would I face the flame if I might reach him, nothing
daunted if I had but the prospect of at last standing in his presence and
feeling the delight of his love. That seems to me to be the state of mind in
which Job pronounced the words before us. But we cannot stop upon this point,
for the object of this morning's discourse beckons us onward. It appears that
Job's end, in desiring the presence of God, was that he might pray to him. He
had prayed, but he wanted to pray as in God's presence. He desired to plead as
before one whom he knew would hear and help him. He longed to state his own case
before the seat of the impartial Judge, before the very face of the all-wise
God; he would appeal from the lower courts, where his friends judged unrighteous
judgment, to the Court of King's Bench -- the High Court of heaven -- there,
saith he, "I would order my cause before him, and fill my mouth with arguments."
In this latter verse Job teaches us how he meant to plead and intercede with
God. He does, as it were, reveal the secrets of his closet, and unveils the art
of prayer. We are here admitted into the guild of suppliants; we are shown the
art and mystery of pleading; we have here taught to us the blessed handicraft
and science of prayer, and if we can be bound apprentice to Job this morning,
for the next hour, and can have a lesson from Job's Master, we may acquire no
little skill in interceding with God. There are two things here set forth as
necessary in prayer -- ordering of our cause, and filling our mouth with
arguments. We shall speak of those two things, and then if we have rightly
learned the lesson, a blessed result will follow. I. First, IT IS NEEDFUL THAT
OUR SUIT BE ORDERED BEFORE GOD.There is a vulgar notion that prayer is a very
easy thing, a kind of common business that may be done anyhow, without care or
effort. Some think that you have only to reach a book down and get through a
certain number of very excellent words, and you have prayed and may put the book
up again; others suppose that to use a book is superstitious, and that you ought
rather to repeat extemporaneous sentences, sentences which come to your mind
with a rush, like a herd of swine or a pack of hounds, and that when you have
uttered them with some little attention to what you have said, you have prayed.
Now neither of these modes of prayer were adopted by ancient saints. They appear
to have thought a great deal more seriously of prayer than many do now-a-days.
It seems to have been a mighty business with them, a long-practised exercise, in
which some of them attained great eminence, and were thereby singularly blest.
They reaped great harvests in the field of prayer, and found the mercy seat to
be a mine of untold treasures.The ancient saints were wont, with Job, to order
their cause before God; that is to say, as a petitioner coming into Court does
not come there without thought to state his case on the spur of the moment, but
enters into the audience chamber with his suit well prepared, having moreover
learned how he ought to behave himself in the presence of the great One to whom
he is appealing. It is well to approach the seat of the King of kings as much as
possible with pre-meditation and preparation, knowing what we are about, where
we are standing, and what it is which we desire to obtain. In times of peril and
distress we may fly to God just as we are, as the dove enters the cleft of the
rock, even though her plumes are ruffled; but in ordinary times we should not
come with an unprepared spirit, even as a child comes not to his father in the
morning till he has washed his face. See yonder priest; he has a sacrifice to
offer, but he does not rush into the court of the priests and hack at the
bullock with the first pole-axe upon which he can lay his hand, but when he
rises he washes his feet at the brazen laver, he puts on his garments, and
adorns himself with his priestly vestments; then he comes to the altar with his
victim properly divided according to the law, and is careful to do according to
the command, even to such a simple matter as the placing of the fat, and the
liver, and the kidneys, and he taketh the blood in a bowl and poureth it in an
appropriate place at the foot of the altar, not throwing it just as may occur to
him, and kindles the fire not with common flame, but with the sacred fire from
off the altar. Now this ritual is all superseded, but the truth which it taught
remains the same; our spiritual sacrifices should be offered with holy
carefulness. God forbid that our prayer should be a mere leaping out of one's
bed and kneeling down, and saying anything that comes first to hand; on the
contrary, may we wait upon the Lord with holy fear and sacred awe. See how David
prayed when God had blessed him -- he went in before the Lord. Understand that;
he did not stand outside at a distance, but he went in before the Lord and he
sat down -- for sitting is not a bad posture for prayer, let who will speak
against it -- and sitting down quietly and calmly before the Lord he then began
to pray, but not until first he had thought over the divine goodness, and so
attained to the spirit of prayer. Then by the assistance of the Holy Ghost did
he open his mouth. Oh that we oftener sought the Lord in this style! Abraham may
serve us as a pattern; he rose up early -- here was his willingness; he went
three days journey -- here was his zeal; he left his servants at the foot of the
hill -- here was his privacy; he carried the wood and the fire with him -- here
was his preparation; and lastly, he built the altar and laid the wood in order,
and then took the knife -- here was the devout carefulness of his worship. David
puts it, "In the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up";
which I have frequently explained to you to mean that he marshalled his thoughts
like men of war, or that he aimed his prayers like arrows. He did not take the
arrow and put it on the bowstring and shoot, and shoot, and shoot anywhere; but
after he had taken out the chosen shaft, and fitted it to the string, he took
deliberate aim. He looked -- looked well -- at the white of the target; kept his
eye fixed on it, directing his prayer, and then drew his bow with all his
strength and let the arrow fly; and then, when the shaft had left his hand, what
does he say? "I will look up." He looked up to see where the arrow went, to see
what effect it had; for he expected an answer to his prayers, and was not as
many who scarcely think of their prayers after they have uttered them. David
knew that he had an engagement before him which required all his mental powers;
he marshalled up his faculties and went about the work in a workmanlike manner,
as one who believed in it and meant to succeed. We should plough carefully and
pray carefully. The better the work the more attention it deserves. To be
anxious in the shop and thoughtless in the closet is little less than blasphemy,
for it is an insinuation that anything will do for God, but the world must have
our best. If any ask what order should be observed in prayer, I am not about to
give you a scheme such as many have drawn out, in which adoration, confession,
petition, intercession, and ascription are arranged in succession. I am not
persuaded that any such order is of divine authority. It is to no mere
mechanical order I have been referring, for our prayers will be equally
acceptable, and possibly equally proper, in any form; for there are specimens of
prayers, in all shapes, in the Old and New Testament. The true spiritual order
of prayer seems to me to consist in something more than mere arrangement. It is
most fitting for us first to feel that we are now doing something that is real;
that we are about to address ourselves to God, whom we cannot see, but who is
really present; whom we can neither touch nor hear, nor by our senses can
apprehend, but who, nevertheless, is as truly with us as though we were speaking
to a friend of flesh and blood like ourselves. Feeling the reality of God's
presence, our mind will be led by divine grace into an humble state; we shall
feel like Abraham, when he said, "I have taken upon myself to speak unto God, I
that am but dust and ashes." Consequently we shall not deliver ourselves of our
prayer as boys repeating their lessons, as a mere matter of rote, much less
shall we speak as if we were rabbis instructing our pupils, or as I have heard
some do, with the coarseness of a highwayman stopping a person on the road and
demanding his purse of him; but we shall be humble yet bold petitioners, humbly
importuning mercy through the Saviour's blood. We shall not have the reserve of
a slave but the loving reverence of a child, yet not an impudent, impertinent
child, but a teachable obedient child, honouring his Father, and therefore
asking earnestly, but with deferential submission to his Father's will. When I
feel that I am in the presence of God, and take my rightful position in that
presence, the next thing I shall want to recognize will be that I have no right
to what I am seeking, and cannot expect to obtain it except as a gift of grace,
and I must recollect that God limits the channel through which he will give me
mercy -- he will give it to me through his dear Son. Let me put myself then
under the patronage of the great Redeemer. Let me feel that now it is no longer
I that speak but Christ that speaketh with me, and that while I plead, I plead
his wounds, his life, his death, his blood, himself. This is truly getting into
order.The next thing is to consider what I am to ask for? It is most proper in
prayer, to aim at great distinctness of supplication. There is much reason to
complain of some public prayers, that those who offer them do not really ask God
for anything. I must acknowledge I fear to having so prayed myself, and
certainly to having heard many prayers of the kind, in which I did not feel that
anything was sought for from God -- a great deal of very excellent doctrinal and
experimental matter uttered, but little real petitioning, and that little in a
nebulous kind of state, chaotic and unformed. But it seems to me that prayer
should be distinct, the asking for something definitely and distinctly because
the mind has realized its distinct need of such a thing, and therefore must
plead for it. It is well not to beat round the bush in prayer, but to come
directly to the point. I like that prayer of Abraham's, "Oh that Ishmael might
live before thee!" There is the name and the person prayed for, and the blessing
desired, all put in a few words, -- "Ishmael might live before thee!" Many
persons would have used a roundabout expression of this kind, "Oh that our
beloved offspring might be regarded with the favour which thou bearest to those
who," etc. Say "Ishmael," if you mean "Ishmael"; put it in plain words before
the Lord. Some people cannot even pray for the minister without using such
circular descriptives that you might think it were the parish beadle, or
somebody whom it did not do to mention too particularly. Why not be distinct,
and say what we mean as well as mean what we say? Ordering our cause would bring
us to greater distinctness of mind. It is not necessary, my dear brethren, in
the closet to ask for every supposable good thing; it is not necessary to
rehearse the catalogue of every want that you may have, have had, can have, or
shall have. Ask for what you now need, and, as a rule, keep to present need; ask
for your daily bread -- what you want now -- ask for that. Ask for it plainly,
as before God, who does not regard your fine expressions, and to whom your
eloquence and oratory will be less than nothing and vanity. Thou art before the
Lord; let thy words be few, but let thy heart be fervent.You have not quite
completed the ordering when you have asked for what you want through Jesus
Christ. There should be a looking round the blessing which you desire, to see
whether it is assuredly a fitting thing to ask; for some prayers would never be
offered if men did but think. A little reflection would show to us that some
things which we desire were better let alone. We may, moreover, have a motive at
the bottom of our desire which is not Christ-like, a selfish motive, which
forgets God's glory and caters only for our own case and comfort. Now although
we may ask for things which are for our profit, yet still we must never let our
profit interfere in any way with the glory of God. There must be mingled with
acceptable prayer the holy salt of submission to the divine will. I like
Luther's saying, "Lord, I will have my will of thee at this time." "What!" say
you, "Like such an expression as that?" I do, because of the next clause, which
was, "I will have my will, for I know that my will is thy will." That is well
spoken, Luther; but without the last words it would have been wicked
presumption. When we are sure that what we ask for is for God's glory, then, if
we have power in prayer, we may say, "I will not let thee go except thou bless
me": we may come to close dealings with God, and like Jacob with the angel we
may even put it to the wrestle and seek to give the angel the fall sooner than
be sent away without the benediction. But we must be quite clear, before we come
to such terms as those, that what we are seeking is really for the Master's
honour. Put these three things together, the deep spirituality which recognises
prayer as being real conversation with the invisible God -- much distinctness
which is the reality of prayer, asking for what we know we want -- and withal
much fervency, believing the thing to be necessary, and therefore resolving to
obtain it if it can be had by prayer, and above all these complete submission,
leaving it still with the Master's will; -- commingle all these, and you have a
clear idea of what it is to order your cause before the Lord.Still prayer itself
is an art which only the Holy Ghost can teach us. He is the giver of all prayer.
Pray for prayer -- pray till you can pray; pray to be helped to pray, and give
not up praying because thou canst not pray, for it is when thou thinkest thou
canst not pray that thou art most praying; and sometimes when thou hast no sort
of comfort in thy supplications, it is then that thy heart all broken and cast
down is really wrestling and truly prevailing with the Most High.II. The second
part of prayer is FILLING THE MOUTH WITH ARGUMENTS -- not filling the mouth with
words nor good phrases, nor pretty expressions, but filling the mouth with
arguments are the knocks of the rapper by which the gate is opened.Why are
arguments to be used at all? is the first enquiry; the reply being, Certainly
not because God is slow to give, not because we can change the divine purpose,
not because God needeth to be informed of any circumstance with regard to
ourselves or of anything in connection with the mercy asked: the arguments to be
used are for our own benefit, not for his. He requires for us to plead with him,
and to bring forth our strong reasons, as Isaiah saith, because this will show
that we feel the value of the mercy. When a man searches for arguments for a
thing it is because he attaches importance to that which he is seeking. Again,
our use of arguments teaches us the ground upon which we obtain the blessing. If
a man should come with the argument of his own merit, he would never succeed;
the successful argument is always founded upon grace, and hence the soul so
pleading is made to understand intensely that it is by grace and by grace alone
that a sinner obtaineth anything of the Lord. Besides, the use of arguments is
intended to stir up our fervency. The man who uses one argument with God will
get more force in using the next, and will use the next with still greater
power, and the next with more force still. The best prayers I have ever heard in
our prayer meetings have been those which have been fullest of argument.
Sometimes my soul has been fairly melted down when I have listened to brethren
who have come before God feeling the mercy to be really needed, and that they
must have it, for they first pleaded with God to give it for this reason, and
then for a second, and then for a third, and then for a fourth and a fifth,
until they have awakened the fervency of the entire assembly. My brethren, there
is no need for prayer at all as far as God is concerned, but what a need there
is for it on our own account! If we were not constrained to pray, I question
whether we could even live as Christians. If God's mercies came to us unasked,
they would not be half so useful as they now are, when they have to be sought
for; for now we get a double blessing, a blessing in the obtaining, and a
blessing in the seeking. The very act of prayer is a blessing. To pray is as it
were to bathe one's-self in a cool purling stream, and so to escape from the
heats of earth's summer sun. To pray is to mount on eagle's wings above the
clouds and get into the clear heaven where God dwelleth. To pray is to enter the
treasure-house of God and to enrich one's-self out of an inexhaustible
storehouse. To pray is to grasp heaven in one's arms, to embrace the Deity
within one's soul, and to feel one's body made a temple of the Holy Ghost. Apart
from the answer prayer is in itself a benediction. To pray, my brethren, is to
cast off your burdens, it is to tear away your rags, it is to shake off your
diseases, it is to be filled with spiritual vigour, it is to reach the highest
point of Christian health. God give us to be much in the holy art of arguing
with God in prayer.The most interesting part of our subject remains; it is a
very rapid summary and catalogue of a few of the arguments which have been used
with great success with God. I cannot give you a full list; that would require a
treatise such as Master John Owen might produce. It is well in prayer to plead
with Jehovah his attributes. Abraham did so when he laid hold upon God's
justice. Sodom was to be pleaded for, and Abraham begins, "Peradventure there be
fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place
for the fifty righteous that are therein? that be far from thee to do after this
manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked: and that the righteous should be
as the wicked, that be far from thee: Shall not the Judge of all the earth do
right?" Here the wrestling begins. It was a powerful argument by which the
patriarch grasped the Lord's left hand, and arrested it just when the
thunderbolt was about to fall. But there came a reply to it. It was intimated to
him that this would not spare the city, and you notice how the good man, when
sorely pressed, retreated by inches; and at last, when he could no longer lay
hold upon justice, grasped God's right hand of mercy, and that gave him a
wondrous hold when he asked that if there were but ten righteous there the city
might be spared. So you and I may take hold at any time upon the justice, the
mercy, the faithfulness, the wisdom, the long-suffering, the tenderness of God,
and we shall find every attribute of the Most High to be, as it were, a great
battering-ram, with which we may open the gates of heaven. Another mighty piece
of ordinance in the battle of prayer is God's promise. When Jacob was on the
other side of the brook Jabbok, and his brother Esau was coming with armed men,
he pleaded with God not to suffer Esau to destroy the mother and the children,
and as a master reason he pleaded, "And thou saidst, surely I will do thee
good." Oh the force of that plea! He was holding God to his word: "Thou saidst."
The attribute is a splendid horn of the altar to lay hold upon; but the promise,
which has in it the attribute and something more, is yet a mightier holdfast.
"Thou saidst." Remember how David put it. After Nathan had spoken the promise,
David said at the close of his prayer, "Do as thou hast said." That is a
legitimate argument with every honest man, and has he said, and shall he not do
it? "Let God be true, and every man a liar." Shall not he be true? Shall he not
keep his word? Shall not every word that cometh out of his lips stand fast and
be fulfilled? Solomon, at the opening of the temple, used this same mighty plea.
He pleads with God to remember the word which he had spoken to his father David,
and to bless that place. When a man gives a promissory note his honour is
engaged. He signs his hand, and he must discharge it when the due time comes, or
else he loses credit. It shall never be said that God dishonours his bills. The
credit of the Most High never was impeached, and never shall be. He is punctual
to the moment; he never is before his time, but he never is behind it. You shall
search this Book through, and you shall compare it with the experience of God's
people, and the two tally from the first to the last; and many a hoary patriarch
has said with Joshua in his old age, "Not one good thing hath failed of all that
the Lord God hath promised: all hath come to pass." My brother, if you have a
divine promise, you need not plead it with an "if" in it; you may plead with a
certainty. If for the mercy which you are now asking, you have God's solemnly
pledged word, there will scarce be any room for the caution about submission to
his will. You know his will: that will is in the promise; plead it. Do not give
him rest until he fulfil it. He meant to fulfil it, or else he would not have
given it. God does not give his words merely to quiet our noise, and to keep us
hopeful for awhile, with the intention of putting us off at last; but when he
speaks, he speaks because he means to act.A third argument to be used is that
employed by Moses, the great name of God. How mightily did he argue with God on
one occasion upon this ground! "What wilt thou do for thy great name? The
Egyptians will say, Because the Lord could not bring them into the land,
therefore he slew them in the wilderness." There are some occasions when the
name of God is very closely tied up with the history of his people. Sometimes in
reliance upon a divine promise, a believer will be led to take a certain course
of action. Now, if the Lord should not be as good as his promise, not only is
the believer deceived, but the wicked world looking on would say, "Aha! aha!
Where is your God?" Take the case of our respected brother, Mr. Muller, of
Bristol. These many years he has declared that God hears prayer, and firm in
that conviction, he has gone on to build house after house for the maintenance
of orphans. Now, I can very well conceive that, if he were driven to a point of
want of means for the maintenance of those thousand or two thousand children, he
might very well use the plea, "What wilt thou do for thy great name?" And you,
in some severe trouble, when you have fairly received the promise, may say,
"Lord, thou hast said, In six troubles I will be with thee, and in seven I will
not forsake thee.' I have told my friends and neighbours that I put my trust in
thee, and if thou do not deliver me now, where is thy name? Arise, O God, and do
this thing, lest thy honour be cast into the dust." Coupled with this, we may
employ the further argument of the hard things said by the revilers. It was well
done of Hezekiah, when he took Rabshakeh's letter and spread it before the Lord.
Will that help him? It is full of blasphemy, will that help him? "Where are the
gods of Arphad and Sepharvaim? Where are the gods of the cities which I have
overthrown? Let not Hezekiah deceive you, saying that Jehovah will deliver you."
Does that have any effect? Oh! yes, it was a blessed thing that Rabshakeh wrote
that letter, for it provoked the Lord to help his people. Sometimes the child of
God can rejoice when he sees his enemies get thoroughly out of temper and take
to reviling. "Now," he says, "they have reviled the Lord himself; not me alone
have they assailed, but the Most High himself. Now it is no longer the poor
insignificant Hezekiah with his little band of soldiers, but it is Jehovah, the
King of angels, who has come to fight against Rabshakeh. Now what wilt thou do,
O boastful soldier of proud Sennacherib? Shalt not thou be utterly destroyed,
since Jehovah himself has come into the fray? All the progress that is made by
Popery, all the wrong things said by speculative atheists and so on, should be
by Christians used as an argument with God, why he should help the gospel. Lord;
see how they reproach the gospel of Jesus! Pluck thy right hand out of thy
bosom! O God, they defy thee! Anti-christ thrusts itself into the place where
thy Son once was honoured, and from the very pulpits where the gospel was once
preached Popery is now declared. Arise, O God, wake up thy zeal, let thy sacred
passions burn! Thine ancient foe again prevails. Behold the harlot of Babylon
once more upon her scarlet-coloured beast rides forth in triumph! Come, Jehovah,
come, Jehovah, and once again show what thy bare arm can do! This is a
legitimate mode of pleading with God, for his great name's sake. So also may we
plead the sorrows of his people. This is frequently done. Jeremiah is the great
master of this art. He says, "Her Nazarites were purer than snow, they were
whiter than milk, they were more ruddy in body than rubies, their polishing was
of sapphire: their visage is blacker than a coal." "The precious sons of Zion,
comparable to fine gold, how are they esteemed as earthen pitchers, the work of
the hands of the potter!" He talks of all their griefs and straitnesses in the
siege. He calls upon the Lord to look upon his suffering Zion; and ere long his
plaintive cries are heard. Nothing so eloquent with the father as his child's
cry; yes, there is one thing more mighty still, and that is a moan, -- when the
child is so sick that it is past crying, and lies moaning with that kind of moan
which indicates extreme suffering and intense weakness. Who can resist that
moan? Ah! and when God's Israel shall be brought very low so that they can
scarcely cry but only their moans are heard, then comes the Lord's time of
deliverance, and he is sure to show that he loveth his people. Dear friends,
whenever you also are brought into the same condition you may plead your
moanings, and when you see a church brought very low you may use her griefs as
an argument why God should return and save the remnant of his people.Brethren,
it is good to plead with God the past. Ah, you experienced people of God, you
know how to do this. Here is David's specimen of it: "Thou hast been my help.
Leave me not, neither forsake me." He pleads God's mercy to him from his youth
up. He speaks of being cast upon his God from his very birth, and then he
pleads, "Now also, when I am old and greyheaded, O God, forsake me not." Moses
also, speaking with God, says, "Thou didst bring this people up out of Egypt."
As if he would say, "Do not leave thy work unfinished; thou hast begun to build,
complete it. Thou hast fought the first battle; Lord, end the campaign! Go on
till thou gettest a complete victory." How often have we cried in our trouble,
"Lord, thou didst deliver me in such and such a sharp trial, when it seemed as
if no help were near; thou hast never forsaken me yet. I have set up my Ebenezer
in thy name. If thou hadst intended to leave me why hast thou showed me such
things? Hast thou brought thy servant to this place to put him to shame?"
Brethren, we have to deal with an unchanging God, who will do in the future what
he has done in the past, because he never turns from his purpose, and cannot be
thwarted in his design; the past thus becomes a very mighty means of winning
blessings from him.We may even use our own unworthiness as an argument with God.
"Out of the eater comes forth meat, and out of the strong comes forth
sweetness." David in one place pleads thus: "Lord, have mercy upon mine
iniquity, for it is great." That is a very singular mode of reasoning; but being
interpreted it means, "Lord, why shouldest thou go about doing little things?
Thou art a great God, and here is a great sinner. Here is a fitness in me for
the display of thy grace. The greatness of my sin makes me a platform for the
greatness of thy mercy. Let the greatness of thy love be seen in me." Moses
seems to have the same on his mind when he asks God to show his great power in
sparing his sinful people. The power with which God restrains himself is great
indeed. O brothers and sisters, there is such a thing as creeping down at the
foot of the throne, crouching low and crying, "O God, break me not -- I am a
bruised reed. Oh! tread not on my little life, it is now but as the smoking
flax. Wilt thou hunt me? Wilt thou come out, as David said, "after a dead dog,
after a flea?" Wilt thou pursue me as a leaf that is blown in the tempest? Wilt
thou watch me, as Job saith, as though I were a vast sea, or a great whale? Nay,
but because I am so little, and because the greatness of thy mercy can be shown
in one so insignificant and yet so vile, therefore, O God, have mercy upon
me."There was once an occasion when the very Godhead of Jehovah made a
triumphant plea for the prophet Elijah. On that august occasion, when he had
bidden his adversaries see whether their god could answer them by fire, you can
little guess the excitement there must have been that day in the prophet's mind.
With what stern sarcasm did he say, "Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is
talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth,
and must be awakened." And as they cut themselves with knives, and leaped upon
the altar, oh the scorn with which that man of God must have looked down upon
their impotent exertions, and their earnest but useless cries! But think of how
his heart must have palpitated, if it had not been for the strength of his
faith, when he repaired the altar of God that was broken down, and laid the wood
in order, and killed the bullock. Hear him cry, "Pour water on it. You shall not
suspect me of concealing fire; pour water on the victim." When they had done so,
he bids them, "Do it a second time"; and they did it a second time; and then he
says, "Do it a third time." And when it was all covered with water, soaked and
saturated through, then he stands up and cries to God, "O God, let it be known
that thou only art God." Here everything was put to the test. Jehovah's own
existence was now put, as it were, at stake, before the eyes of men by this bold
prophet. But how well the prophet was heard! Down came the fire and devoured not
only the sacrifice, but even the wood, and the stones, and even the very water
that was in the trenches, for Jehovah God had answered his servant's prayer. We
sometimes may do the same, and say unto him, "Oh, by thy Deity, by thine
existence, if indeed thou be God, now show thyself for the help of thy people!"
Lastly, the grand Christian argument is the sufferings, the death, the merit,
the intercession of Christ Jesus. Brethren, I am afraid we do not understand
what it is that we have at our command when we are allowed to plead with God for
Christ's sake. I met with this thought the other day: it was somewhat new to me,
but I believe it ought not to have been. When we ask God to hear us, pleading
Christ's name, we usually mean, "O Lord, thy dear Son deserves this of thee; do
this unto me because of what he merits." But if we knew it we might go in the
city, "Sir, call at my office, and use my name, and say that they are to give
you such a thing." I should go in and use your name, and I should obtain my
request as a matter of right and a matter of necessity. This is virtually what
Jesus Christ says to us. "If you need anything of God, all that the Father has
belongs to me; go and use my name." Suppose you should give a man your
cheque-book signed with your own name and left blank, to be filled up as he
chose; that would be very nearly what Jesus has done in these words, "If ye ask
anything in my name, I will give it you." If I had a good name at the bottom of
the cheque, I should be sure that I should get it cashed when I went to the
banker with it; so when you have got Christ's name, to whom the very justice of
God hath become a debtor, and whose merits have claims with the Most High, when
you have Christ's name there is no need to speak with fear and trembling and
bated breath. Oh, waver not and let not faith stagger! When thou pleadest the
name of Christ thou pleadest that which shakes the gates of hell, and which the
hosts of heaven obey, and God himself feels the sacred power of that divine
plea.Brethren, you would do better if you sometimes thought more in your prayers
of Christ's griefs and groans. Bring before the Lord his wounds, tell the Lord
of his cries, make the groans of Jesus cry again from Gethsemane, and his blood
speak again from that frozen Calvary. Speak out and tell the Lord that with such
griefs, and cries, and groans to plead, thou canst not take a denial: such
arguments as these will speed you.III. If the Holy Ghost shall teach us how to
order our cause, and how to fill our mouth with arguments, the result shall be
that WE SHALL HAVE OUR MOUTH FILLED WITH PRAISES. The man who has his mouth full
of arguments in prayer shall soon have his mouth full of benedictions in answer
to prayer. Dear friend, thou hast thy mouth full this morning, has thou? What
of? Full of complaining? Pray the Lord to rinse thy mouth out of that black
stuff, for it will little avail thee, and it will be bitter in thy bowels one of
these days. Oh, have thy mouth full of prayer, full of it, full of arguments so
that there is room for nothing else. Then come with this blessed mouthful, and
you shall soon go away with whatsoever you have asked of God. Only delight thou
thyself in him, and he will give thee the desire of thy heart.It is said -- I
know not how truly -- that the explanation of the text, "Open thy mouth wide and
I will fill it," may be found in a very singular Oriental custom. It is said
that not many years ago -- I remember the circumstance being reported -- the
King of Persia ordered the chief of his nobility, who had done something or
other which greatly gratified him, to open his mouth, and when he had done so he
began to put into his mouth pearls, diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, till he had
filled it as full as it could hold, and then he bade him go his way. This is
said to have been occasionally done in Oriental Courts towards great favourites.
Now certainly whether that be an explanation of the text or not it is an
illustration of it. God says, "Open thy mouth with arguments," and then he will
fill it with mercies priceless, gems unspeakably valuable. Would not a man open
his mouth wide when he had to have it filled in such a style? Surely the most
simple-minded among you would be wise enough for that. Oh! let us then open wide
our mouth when we have to plead with God. Our needs are great, let our askings
be great, and the supply shall be great too. You are not straitened in him; you
are straitened in your own bowels. The Lord give you large mouths in prayer,
great potency, not in the use of language, but in employing arguments.What I
have been speaking to the Christian is applicable in great measure to the
unconverted man. God give thee to see the force of it, and to fly in humble
prayer to the Lord Jesus Christ and to find eternal life in him.PORTION OF
SCRIPTURE READ BEFORE SERMON -- Numbers 14:1-21.


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Source: https://sermonindex.net/books/spurgeons-sermons-volume-12-1866/
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