We cannot too often insist upon it that religion is a matter of the heart. It is the besetting sin of man to forget that God is a spirit, and that worship rendered to God must be of a spiritual kind. Idolatry is the full carrying out of this mischievous propensity. Instead of adoring the Great Invisible, and giving him the love of the heart, man sets up a block of wood or stone, and, burning incense and performing genuflections before it, he cries, “This is my god.” Where this idolatry does not assume the very grossest form it takes another, which is equally as objectionable in the sight of God.

Man pleads that he cannot worship God with his heart unless his memory be assisted by some outward object, and then he smuggles in his idol, and gratifies his depraved nature with will worship and outward formalism. God requires soul worship, and men give him body worship; he asks for the heart, and they present him with their lips; he demands their thoughts and their minds, and they give him banners, and vestments, and candles. Where man is hunted by very shame from outward superstitions, he betakes himself to anything sooner than yield his heart’s love to his Maker, submit his intellect to the great Creator’s teaching, and render all his faculties to the service of the Most High. No matter how painful may be the mortification, how rigid the penance, how severe the abstinence, no matter how much may be taken from his purse, or from the wine vat, or from the store, he will be content to suffer anything sooner than bow before the Most High with a true confession of sin, and trust in the appointed Saviour with sincere childlike faith. In this age, as much as in past times, the watchmen of our Israel must insist upon the spirituality of worship, for the old paganism lives among us, altered in form but unchanged in spirit. We spake of idolatry as being buried at Athens and consigned to its tomb at Rome, but it lives in the Puseyism of the present hour; men are naturally idolaters, and it is nothing but idolatry which now-a-days in the toyshops of the Tractarians is polluting the simplicity of our worship by thrusting their childish symbols and emblems before the sublime truth that God is to be worshipped in spirit, and only to be approached through the atoning sacrifice of his only-begotten Son.

This morning I trust I shall not be guilty of attracting your attention for a single moment to anything that is external, however gaudy or however simple. It is to the human heart that I ask you now to turn your eyes. It is to your own hearts, my hearers, you that are converted and you that are not; it is to a consideration of your own inner natures, that I entreat you now to turn your serious thoughts. My text is a looking-glass in which every man may see himself; may see, not his face which he can see anywhere, but his heart, his moral nature, his innermost self. Here, sin is man’s heart laid bare, turned inside out, anatomised and depicted by one who cannot lie and cannot be deceived.

We shall come to the text at once, and observe, first, the humiliating doctrine which it teaches; and then we shall occupy the rest of your time by mentioning the kindred doctrines of which it reminds us.

First. Notice the humiliating truth which the Saviour here sets forth. He tells us that out of the heart all sorts of moral evils proceed. He selects, not the milder forms of sin but the grosser shades; adulteries, murders, blasphemies, these are words of no common import, and stand for sins of no common dye. The accusation laid against human nature here is one of the most solemn that could possibly be put into words. The Saviour has not minced matters in any degree, nor chosen smooth forms of speech, but he has just selected the very grossest shapes of human sin, and he has said that all these come out of the human heart. There have been men who have asserted that sins are merely accidents of man’s position; but the Saviour says they come out of his heart. Some have affirmed that they are mistakes of his judgment, that the social system bears so hardly at certain points that men can scarce do otherwise than offend, for their judgment misleads them; the Saviour, however, traces these offences not to the head and its mistaken judgments, but to the heart and its unholy affections. He plainly tells us that the part of human nature which yields such poisonous fruit is not a bough which may be sawn off, a limb which may be cut away, but the very core and substance of the man-his heart. He in effect tells us that lust doth not come out of the eye merely, but from the inmost nature of a depraved being. Murder comes not in the first place from the hasty hand, but from a wild ungovernable heart. He declares that theft is not the mere result of a hasty temptation, but is the outflow of a covetous desire which dwells in the being of which disorganized affections are the real source. All the mischiefs mentioned in our text come out of man’s essential self-that is what I understand the Saviour to mean by the heart. The heart is the true man; it is the very citadel of the City of Mansoul; it is the fountain and reservoir of manhood, and all the rest of man may be compared to the many pipes which run from the fountain through the streets of a city. The Saviour puts his finger on the mainspring of the machine of manhood, and cries, “Here is the evil.” Like a great physician, he lays his hand upon the very core of human nature, and exclaims, “Here is the disease.” The leprosy of sin is not as to its primary seat in the head, nor the hand, nor the foot, but in the very heart; the poison is in the centre, and consequently all the outlying members share in the poison.

By the heart we usually understand the affections, and doubtless the affections of man are the sources of his crimes. It is because man does not love his Maker with all his heart, and soul, and strength, but loves himself, that he therefore breaks his Maker’s laws to please himself. It is because man does not love that which is right, and good, and true, but because he delights in that which is false and evil, that his actions become defiled. It comes to the same thing you see, whether you interpret the word “heart” to mean the central core of the man, or to signify the affections; you come to the same result, that it is the man’s vital self which is wrong, it is manhood’s real essence which is vitiated. Manhood in its most vital essence is corrupt through and through. To use the words of the infinite Jehovah himself, “Every imagination of the heart of man is evil from his youth.” “The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint.” “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.”

Observe with humiliation those foul streams which the Saviour declares flow from the heart of man. He speaks of evil thoughts. Some make little of thoughts of evil, but God doth not so judge, for he judgeth an action not so much by the outward motions of the matter of the body by which the action is performed, as by the inward motion of the inner man by which that motion was instigated and dictated. Evil thoughts have in them the absolute essence of sin quite as surely as evil acts, for when we come to trace an action to its essential evil we have to look to the motive which dictates it, which motive brings us at once into the region of thought. So that evil thoughts, instead of being less evidently sinful than actions, are most clearly the very nest in which the principle and soul of sin is to be found. Men sometimes say, “We shall not be hanged for our thoughts;” but it will be well for them to know that, except they repent of them, they certainly will be damned for their thoughts; and even if those thoughts of theirs never shaped themselves into actions, yet their guilt would remain. If the men were shut up in cells, so that they could not commit that which their nature instigated them to do, yet, as before the Lord, seeing they would have been such sinners outwardly if they could have been, their hearts are judged to be no better than the hearts of those who found opportunity to sin and used it. A vicious horse is none the better tempered because the kicking-straps prevent his dashing the carriage to atoms; and so a man is none the better really because the restraints of custom and Providence may prevent his carrying out that which he would prefer. Poor fallen human nature behind the bars of laws, and in the cage of fear of punishment, is none the less a fearful creature; should its master unlock the door we should soon see what it would be and do.

Evil thoughts flow out of the heart. Such as evil thoughts of God, evil thoughts of man; thoughts about evil, doting imaginations, and foul desires, the rolling of evil under the tongue as a sweet morsel, and such like. Many a man who has not committed an outward act of sensual lust has nevertheless thought it over and relished it, and so perpetrated it in his soul. Many a man who had not the courage to be a thief in very deed, has nevertheless been a thief a thousand times over in his heart; and he who dared not blaspheme God with his lips, has cursed God in his heart ten thousand times. These evil thoughts are signs of what is in the heart. They would not bubble up within us if they were not first there. They could not come into the mind if they were not essential to the soul.

Our Lord next speaks of murders, by which he means, according to John’s interpretation of it, every form of unjustifiable anger. Those ebullitions of evil temper, in which we wish people were dead, or otherwise injured, and would fain punish them if we could, are in the same class as murders. Murders themselves arise from the evil passions of the human heart. If the fire was not there temptation could not fan it to a flame. Is it not because men love themselves better than their neighbours that they commit murder? It is clear to every one that it must be so. Hence it is the failure of the affections to work accurately, which leads men to the commission of this terrible deed. An evil nature sits by the fire-side, and murders men in thought, and hurls daggers at them in the house in words, because it is evil, self-loving, and vile.

The inventory next mentions acts of unchastity. Men would never fall into evil lusts if it were not that they are dear to their hearts. Because these things are sweet to the heart, therefore men follow them. If the ox drinketh water, it is because the ox thirsteth; and if man goeth after vice, it is because his soul longeth after it. Those who never indulged in these actions may yet have meditated upon them, and in such a case the heart has committed uncleanness before God.

So also the injuring of others by theft is from the heart. Is it not again because we love ourselves better than God, and better than others, that we are tempted to covet and led from covetousness to acts of dishonesty? And when it comes to the bearing of false witness, what is this again but an intense lie of one’s own proper being, and a want of love to our neighbours and our God? When the list closes with blasphemy, what is this but the heart setting itself up higher than God, and then seeking to tread God beneath its feet by the use of opprobrious and wicked epithets concerning him? The heart is at the bottom of it all. There would be no murder, no fornication, there could be no blasphemy, if the heart were pure and right; if God were loved first and foremost, these offences could not occur; but the heart is mischievous, and hence these things.

The Saviour does not stop to prove that these things come out of the heart; he asserts it, and asserts it because it is self-evident. When you see a thing coming forth you are clear it was there first. Last summer I noticed hornets continually flying from a number of decayed logs in my garden; I saw them constantly flying in and out, and I did not think myself at all unreasonable in concluding that there was a hornet’s nest there; I suppose that was the inference which everybody would have drawn. If we see the hornets of sin flying out of a man, we suppose at once that there is sin within him. Look at yonder spring; it is bubbling up with cool and fresh water; do you not conclude that somewhere or other there is a reservoir of this water from which it rises? If you did not conclude so, you would be so unreasonable that you might be the common butt of laughter; and when we know that all sorts of evil thoughts, and murders, and lustful desires do come from men’s hearts, it is not at all a difficult conclusion that they must be in men; and inasmuch as all men, more or less, fall into these displays of sin, we conclude that there is in all men a great storehouse of sin, a secret fountain of sin, a mass of inward evil from which outward evil proceeds.

If this needed any sustaining at all I might offer these few observations, namely, that nobody ever needs any training to commit sin. Albeit there may be schools of virtue, there is certainly no necessity to open a school for vice. Your child will have evil thoughts without your sending him to a diabolical infant school; lads who have never seen the act of theft, children who have been brought up in the midst of honesty, will be found guilty of little thefts early enough in life. Lying and false witness, which is one form of lying, is so common, that perhaps to find a tongue which never did bear false witness would be to find a tongue that never spoke; is this caused by education or by nature? It is so common a thing that even where the ear has heard nothing but the most rigid truth, children learn to lie and men learn to lie and commonly do lie and love to tell an evil tale against their fellow men whether it be true or not, bearing false witness with an avidity which is perfectly shocking. Is this a matter of education, or is it a depraved heart? Some men will wilfully invent a slanderous lie, knowing that they need not take any special care of their offspring, for they may lay it in the street and the first passer-by will take it up and nurse it, and the lie will be carried in triumph round the world; whereas a piece of truth which would have done honour to a good man’s character, will be left to be forgotten till God shall remember it at the day of judgment. You never need educate any man into sin. As soon as ever the young crocodile has left its shell it begins to act just like its parent, and to bite at the stick which broke the shell. The serpent is scarcely born before it rears itself and begins to hiss. The young tiger may be nurtured in your parlour, but it will develop ere long the same thirst for blood at if it were in the forest. So is it with man; he sins as naturally as the young lion seeks for blood, or the young serpent stores up venom. Sin is in his very nature that taints his inmost soul.

What is worse, it is certain that men sin under all conceivable circumstances. You have heard much romance about unsophisticated nature: it used to be a theory that the untutored savage saw God in every cloud and heard him in the wind. But when travellers go to see these model untutored savages, what miserable specimens of humanity they are! The very philosophers who once set them up as being models change their minds, and tell us that they are a connecting link between man and the ape. This is what unsophisticated nature becomes. The tagrags of conventionalism are taken away, the tricks of commerce are removed, and the child of nature is brought up naked, and a very pretty child he is! let those who admire him live with him, and see if the very brutes do not shame him? The character of the uncivilized man is generally such that it were impossible for us to describe it in your hearing, so degraded and so debased is savage man. Is he not better, however, if he be highly educated? I suppose there was no nation of antiquity more highly educated than the Greeks, and yet if history be credited the private characters of her best philosophers, such as Socrates and Solon, were stained with vices revolting to the mind. In modern times there has been ample proof that neither ignorance nor learning are an effectual check to sin. The fool learns sin without his book, and the scholar learns it none the less with all his lore. One of the most educated nations of modern times is the Hindoo, and what is the moral character of the Hindoo? Those who have been among the Hindoos never dare to tell all that they have seen, and missionaries inform us in a whisper that what they have seen in the temples where the Hindoos meet for worship, and where surely the better parts of their nature ought to be seen in the presence of their gods, is so utterly obscene that it is degrading to the mind to know that such a thing exists. “Yes,” say you, “some races are vicious both when trained under a certain civilization and when left uncivilized; but how about Christian civilization?” Why, the so-called Christians are scarcely any better. A man with religion is not any better than a man without it unless that religion changes his heart and makes a new man of him. The heart under a Christian’s coat is as vile as that under a Bushman’s sheepskin unless grace has renewed it. If you shall take a child and tutor him in all the outward observances of our own holy faith, if you shall see that in everything he is brought up after the straitest sect that your judgment shall select, yet unless the Holy Ghost shall come and give him a new heart and a right spirit his heart will find out ways of showing its sin, put it under what restraint you will. Nay, it has been notorious that some who were brought up with Puritanic rigidity have been the most vicious in after life, and those who have not been so have become what is almost as detestable, hypocritical pretenders to a religion to whose real power they are strangers. “Ye must be born again,” is a truth which is as true in the Hottentot’s kraal as it is in the midst of this congregration, and as true in the home of piety as it is in the haunt of vice. The old nature everywhere, wash it, and cleanse it, and bind it, and curb it, and bridle it, is still the old fallen nature, and cannot understand spiritual things. You may take the man and treat him as they did the demoniac of old, you may bind him with chains, you may seek to tame him down, but when the old evil spirit comes up again he snaps the bonds of morality and rushes away to one form of sin or another, either to the outward excess of his carnal passions or else to the equally vicious excess of hypocrisy, formalism and self-conceit.

These things may strengthen this truth surely. Man sins in every place, in every shape; and yet more, he sins after he knows the mischief of sin. As the moth flies into the candle after singeing its wings, so man will fly into sin after he knows the bitterness of it. If he reforms as to one sin he takes up another, till he doth no better for himself than Dr. Watts’s fever patient, of whom he says-

“It is a poor relief we gain,

To shift the place and keep the pain.”

They do so; they give up, perhaps, drunkenness. What then? Why then they become self-righteous. If you can drive a man from outward vice, how far have you improved him if he lives in inward sin? You have benefited him as far as the sight of man is concerned, but not before God. There was a man killed on Holborn Hill this week, and I have heard that there was little or no external appearance of injury upon his body. He had been crushed between an omnibus and a cart, and all the wounds were internal, but he died just as surely as if he had been beaten black and blue, or cut in a thousand gashes. So a man may die of internal sin; it does not appear outwardly for certain reasons, but he will die of it just the same if it be within. Many a man has died from internal bleeding, and yet there has been no wound whatever to be seen by the eye. You, my dear hearer, may go to hell as well dressed in the garnishings of morality as in the rags of immorality. Unless the very centre of your soul and the core of your being be made obedient to the living God he will not accept you, for he looks not only to your outward actions, but to your heart’s secret loyalty or treachery towards himself.

Man sins, moreover,-to close this very fearful impeachment against manhood,-man sins not as the result of mistaken intellect, but as the result of his heart being vile. When a man sins by mistake, does not know it to be sin, when he sins thinking that he is doing right; as soon as he gets to know his error he forsakes the sin with horror, and flies to God with repentance; but this is never done by men naturally: the natural heart of man, if it findeth out sin to be sin, very frequently feels all the more delight in it, just as the apostle Paul says he had not known lust unless the law had said, “Thou shalt not covet.” Our corrupt nature loves forbidden fruit. Some people would not care to work on the Sunday unless they had been commanded to rest; many would never care to go to the Crystal Palace on any day in the week, but they crave to go on the Sunday, simply because it is forbidden. Some fellows are lazy enough on Monday, and make a saint’s day of it, and yet the Sabbath rest they oppose with all their might. It is strange that what God makes common man wants to enclose; what God encloses man wants to make common. As soon as ever a child is told he must not do such a thing, although he had never thought of doing it before, he wants to do it now. That is the nature of us. “When the commandment came,” says the apostle, “sin revived, and I died.” This is not the law’s fault, but ours. Cool water thrown upon unslaked lime produces a burning heat; it is not the fault of the water that the heat is produced, the lime alone is to blame. So the very command of God, “Thou shalt not do this,” or “Thou shalt not do that,” leads man into sin, and so it proves the innate and thorough viciousness of the nature of man. “I do not like it,” says one; “I do not like to hear human nature spoken so evil of.” And do you suppose I like to speak thus of it? It is not more pleasing to me than to you. “Well, but,” says one, “I believe in the dignity of human nature.” Believe in it, my dear man, and try and prove it if you can! Nobody will be more glad than I shall be to see any true dignity in anybody. But wherefore do we thus speak? Why, because our solemn conviction is that we speak the truth. We thus speak because we believe the Word of God teaches it; and, moreover, we know by sorrowful experience that if the charge be not true of others, it is certainly true of us. We have been preserved from known outward sin, but we have to mourn over the terrible evils of our heart; and being willing to endorse the indictment, and personally to plead guilty, we are the more confident in bringing it forward and saying, “This is the case with the whole race of man, without a single exception; they must all stand guilty before God.” Not one heart that by nature is right with God; Jew and Gentile are all under sin: “We are all gone out of the way, we are altogether become unprofitable: there is none that doeth good, no not one.”

We shall now turn aside to notice the truths which are connected with this humbling fact.

First, observe that receiving our Lord’s testimony concerning our hearts, that they have become a den of evil, that out of them cometh evil thoughts, fornication, theft, and so on, we are driven to believe in the doctrine of the fall. If we be in this state, it is inconceivable that God should have made us so. A pure and holy Being must have been the Creator of pure and holy beings. As Job saith, “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one;” we may reverse the question and say, “How could an unclean thing come out of a clean thing?” The Holy God must be the Parent of holy children, and when God made manhood he must have made it perfect, otherwise he did not act according to his own nature. It remains a marvellous riddle how man is what he is till you turn to this Book, and when you read the story of the fall the riddle is all unriddled; then we see how that first parent of ours, who stood for us as our representative, sinned, and by that sin tainted the whole race, so that we, being born of him, are born in his image and in his likeness, and he being a rebel we are born rebels, he being a traitor we are born traitors too. “Behold,” says David, “I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.” There is the root of the matter. It is not by God’s making that we are sinful, it is by Adam’s unmaking of us and ruining of us that we come to be what we are, inheritors of original sin and corruption. If it shall be asked, How is this great mystery still further to be explained and the justice of it proved? we answer, that these are things too deep and too high for us, that we think we can see the justice of it, and we have sometimes admired the mercy of it too; but, nevertheless, we are not accustomed to dispute facts because we cannot understand them, but to believe them if God reveals them; and since it is revealed that by one man’s transgression many were made sinners, we believe it, and raise no further question. We must leave the fact as a fact, feeling that it is a great deep. You ask an explanation of this, and refuse to believe till you understand; we are obliged to refer you to all other things in nature, which at the bottom must be matters of faith rather than of reason. There are ten thousand mysteries in nature which you know are there, but which you cannot understand. You cannot even tell me what electricity is, nor what the attraction of gravitation. There are these forces, for you see their effects, but how the forces first began you know not; and here is a great force which is in mankind, the force of evil, and you see its effects everywhere, but how it came there you could not have told unless God had said it came there through inheritance from your parents as the result of the fall of Adam, and there you must leave it and bow your heads. Only let this be remembered, if you would prefer every one of you to have stood or fallen for yourselves, it is more than probable you would have fallen, and if you had fallen, you would have fallen for ever; for the devils, angels as they once were, stood every one upon his own footing; when, therefore, the angels fell and became devils they could never be saved, they were left for ever to perish; but because we fell in another, and did not fall in the first place in our own persons, it became possible to restore us by the merits of another, and we have been restored in the person of the Lord Jesus, so that whosoever believeth in the Lord Jesus is delivered from the fall of Adam and saved through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ. The way by which we are ruined was such a way that there was a possibility of our being rescued from it, but had we been ruined by our own actual sin at the commencement, it is probable our ruin would have been like that of those evil spirits for whom are reserved chains of fire and the blackness of darkness for ever. This doctrine, then, of the evil character of man necessitates the belief in the fall.

In the next place, this doctrine shows the need of a new nature. There is a young man here who says, “I mean to lead a perfectly pure and holy life. I resolve to serve God.” Now should we dissuade such a man from the attempt? By no means. It has been sometimes said that we speak against morality. Never, never a word against it; but we have spoken against the attempt being made to produce purity from impurity, and have said that such a nature as ours needs renewing before it will be holy. If it shall be said that we speak against navigation because we say that leaky vessels are not fit to put to sea, we are content that fools should so judge us; on the contrary, we hold that we are speaking for the true art of navigation when we say to the man with his water-logged vessel, “You must find another ship if you would navigate a boisterous ocean.” Young man, you wish to be holy and pure, then remember, that if your heart be full of theft, murder, adultery, and so on, it will always be seeking to come forth from you in word and act, and that your utmost endeavours will not be able utterly to restrain the outcoming of that which is there, according to Christ’s word. You had better, then, instead of beginning in your own strength, stop a while and count the cost. What if you could get a new heart and a right spirit? What if that nature of yours could be changed? What if the Divine One who made Adam perfect should make you anew? What if he should drop into you a new spark of life of a higher order than that which now possesses you? Then you would have a nature as inclined to holiness as your present nature tends to sin. Then you would, by force of a new nature, follow after that which is right, as you now naturally follow after that which is evil. “Oh!” say you, “is this possible?” Possible! It is the gospel of our salvation. We tell you that whosoever believeth in the Lord Jesus Christ shall be saved; and the process of salvation consists in part of the implantation of a new nature. By trusting in Jesus you come to love him, and the love of him, by the power of the Divine Spirit, becomes a master passion, a new heart, by which you war with your old passions, trample them under foot, and subdue them. As soon as you clearly see in your soul, by the Holy Ghost, that Jesus loved you, and gave himself for you, your heart sings-

“Now for the love I bear his name,

What was my gain I count my loss;

My former pride I call my shame,

And nail my glory to his cross.”

Then you have a new object for your love; instead of loving self you love God in the person of his Son Jesus Christ, and that new love becomes to you the heart which overcomes the old corruption, and prompts you to walk in holiness and in the fear of God all your days. Oh, young man, go not forth to this warfare till you have considered the charges. As good men as you have sought to fight with sin, and have found its arm too strong for them. Come to the cross and ask the Saviour who fought himself with temptation and overcame it, ask him to cleanse you from your past sins in his precious blood; ask him to let his Divine Spirit, who is the great Regenerator, enter into you, and make you a new creature; and when you are a new creature then there shall be the new longings, the new hopes, the new fears, which shall enable you to follow a new course to the glory of God. If your heart be evil, you must get a new heart or you cannot be holy.

Do you not see how clearly necessary it is that we should be regenerate or made new creatures, because such a heart as ours cannot possibly enter into heaven? If the heart naturally be a great barracks of evil, a sort of Thebes with a hundred gates from which black warriors of sin are continually streaming, how can such an abomination as that ever pass through the pearly gates and be where God is, before the eternal throne? O sirs, these hearts of ours, these depraved affections must be slain; they must be crucified with Christ, they must be conquered, put down, stamped out, or how can we be where Jesus is? Who can do this but the eternal Spirit? He can do it, he can do it now, he can put into you a new heart which will begin fighting with this old heart at once, which will go on fighting with it as long as you live, contending, struggling, wrestling, till at last it will drive the old loves out; your affections will no more be set on self and on evil things, but you will become as pure as God is pure, because God himself has renewed you in the spirit of your mind: then you shall enter heaven, then you shall dwell with angels, then you shall see God because you have been made perfectly like God by the work of the Holy Ghost. Reverence and esteem, dear hearers, that blessed Spirit who can make new creatures of us. Pray to him that the old man may die in us, that it may be crucified daily; that the old nature may be buried in the tomb of the Saviour, and that a new heart and right spirit in us may continually gather strength and force till they shall come to their ultimate perfection, and we shall enter into our rest.

There is another doctrine which receives also very great strength from this truth. If man’s heart be nothing but a source of blackness and sin, admire the grace of God. What should have led the Lord to save such creatures as we have described, if they be indeed such creatures? What but sovereign grace could look on such wretches? Those who give glory to human merit always try to puff up human nature by speaking in its praise, but we who believe human nature to be utterly fallen and debased, we admire the wonderful kindness and matchless goodness of God, that he should ever have set his love upon such unworthy creatures. Paul is in admiration of it when he says, “his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses and sins.” A heart full of evil thoughts, and yet he loved me! A heart full of fornication and adultery, and yet he loved me! A heart full of murder, and yet he loved me! A heart that could bear false witness, a heart that could blaspheme, and yet he loved us. O brethren, if we could see ourselves as God saw us in the fall, we should wonder how the eyes of Infinite Purity could have borne with us, how the heart of Infinite Love could have set itself upon us. You were not loved because of your goodness, you were not chosen because of anything in you that was lovely and amiable, you were loved because he would love you; you were chosen because he would do it for his name’s sake.

“He saw you ruin’d in the fall,

Yet loved you notwithstanding all;

He saved, you from your lost estate,

His loving-kindness, oh how great!”

Why, beloved, it must be grace from top to bottom. Grace must be the Alpha, grace must be the Omega. If this be the true state of the case I do not wonder that so many kick against the doctrine of election and the kindred doctrines of grace when they have such a high opinion of themselves; but if God would make them see their own hearts then they would cry out, “God be merciful to me a sinner!” and then they would understand that if ever a man be saved, it is not by his own doings or his own willings, but by grace alone. It is not of him that willeth nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy, for he will have compassion on whom he will have compassion. The sovereignty of God would become an easy doctrine to believe if we felt the depravity of our own hearts; if we saw ourselves as in the glass of Scripture, and abhorred ourselves in dust and ashes, then instead of having any claims upon God we should say, “Let him do as seemeth him good,” and make our appeal not to his justice but to his unfathomable mercy, crying, “According to the multitude of thy loving-kindnesses and thy tender mercies blot out mine iniquities.”

Yet once again, how this doctrine illustrates the doctrine of the atonement. Brethren, sin defiles us most horribly; its act defiles our character, but its essence has ruined our nature. It appears from Christ’s statement that we are defiled internally as well as outwardly, that sin is not only an eruption as it were upon the skin, but it is in the centre of our nature. Behold, then, the need of the precious blood, and admire its wonderful potency! The blood of God’s own dear Son which streamed on Calvary’s accursed tree cleanses us in our inner man. O matchless blood! O marvellous purification! Come hither, sinner; though thy sins be as scarlet they shall be as wool, and though thine heart itself is even more scarlet than thine actions, he can cleanse thine heart as well as thy life. Christ can cleanse the fountain and the stream too; he can remove the external leprosy, and heal the internal leprosy also; both root and branch he bears away. O souls, admire and wonder; bow down with tears streaming from your eyes, and then look up with gladness to the Son of God made flesh, crucified for sinners, for whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life. Come, ye black-hearted! Come, ye defiled and ruined sons of Adam! Come, ye that are perishing at the gates of hell shut out from hope! Come, ye who like the men of Zebulun and Naphtali sit in darkness and in the valley of the shadow of death. Come and trust Christ, and he will send his Spirit upon you, and give you new hearts and right spirits; from all your iniquities will he cleanse you, he will be the new Creator, for he sitteth on the throne this day, and he saith, “Behold, I make all things new.”

Oh that Jesus may make some new who are here this morning! I have laid the axe at the root of the tree; and every tree that is here must be hewn down and cast into the fire, unless Christ changes the nature of that tree, and makes it bring forth fruit unto righteousness. I have tried to show that man is utterly ruined in himself; that he has become like the ruins of Babylon, wherein dwell hideous dragons and all manner of loathsome creatures. I will even liken him to the troubled sea, whose waters cast up mire and dirt, wherein Satan dwells as a leviathan, and with him creeping things innumerable, things obscene and horrible. I have tried, as far as I could, to preach the old unfashionable truth, and I expect to be hated for so doing; but now over all there comes the proclamation of mercy, to wit, that God is in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their iniquities; and whosoever believeth in him shall be delivered from the mischief of the fall, and lifted to dwell where God is, in perfect purity and happiness. What a wonder is this choice mercy, that a den of dragons should become a temple of the Holy Ghost! What a wonder that the heart through which blasphemy raved should become a son in which grace reigns! That the profane mouth should become the organ of holy song! Oh what a thousand wonders, that that black heap of human nature, that dunghill of the heart, should yet be made pure as alabaster, glittering in holy light, and bright with heaven, shining like pure gold, like unto transparent glass; and that the Holy Spirit himself should deign to dwell where the devil dwelt! “Know ye not that your bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost?” What wonder! Once they were the temples of lust, of anger, of evil speaking, of blasphemy; and yet they can be, and I trust now are, the temples of the Holy Ghost. Oh marvellous! Marvellous! Let us bless God, and ask that we may realize in ourselves this wondrous miracle, to the praise and glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the Beloved.

Portion of Scripture read before Sermon-Matt. 15:1-20.

UNSTAGGERING FAITH

A Sermon

Delivered on Lord’s-day Morning, February 3rd, 1867, by

C. H. SPURGEON,

at the metropolitan tabernacle, newington.

“And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah’s womb: he staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; and being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform.” Romans 4:19-21.

It was God’s purpose that Abraham should be a surpassingly excellent example of the power of faith. He was to be “the father of the faithful,” the mirror, pattern, and paragon of faith. He was ordained to be the supreme believer of the patriarchal age, the serene and venerable leader of the noble army of believers in Jehovah, the faithful and true God. In order to produce so eminent a character, it was necessary that Abraham’s faith should be exercised in a special and unequalled manner. The power of his faith could not be known except by putting it to the severest tests. To this end, among other trials of his faith, God gave him a promise that in his seed should all the nations of the earth be blessed, and yet for many a year he remained without an heir. The promise, when originally given, startled Abraham, but he did not doubt it. We read that he laughed, laughed with holy joy, at the thought of so great and unexpected a blessing. It startled also his wife Sarah; she did, however, doubt it: and when she laughed it was the laugh of incredulity. The fulfilment of the promise was long delayed. Abraham waited with patience, sojourning as a stranger in a strange land, having respect unto the covenant which the Lord had made with him and with his unborn seed. Not a shadow of doubt crossed the mind of the holy patriarch, he staggered not at the promise through unbelief, and though he came to be a hundred years old, and his wife Sarah was almost equally as advanced in years, he did not listen to the voice of carnal reason, but maintained his confidence in God. Doubtless he had well weighed the natural impossibilities which laid in the way, but he overlooked the whole, and being fully persuaded that if God had promised him a son the son would certainly be born, he entertained a holy confidence, and left the matter of time in the hands of the sovereign ruler. His faith triumphed in all its conflicts. Had it not been that Sarah and Abraham were both at such an advanced age there would have been no credit to them in believing the promise of God, but the more difficult, the more impossible the fulfilment of the promise seemed to be, the more wonderful was Abraham’s faith, that he still held to it that what God had promised he was able to perform. If I may so say, there was in Abraham’s case a double death to stand in the way of the promise, not one difficulty in itself insuperable, but two, two absolute impossibilities; and yet, though one impossibility might have been enough to stagger any man, yet the two together could not cause his faith to waver. He considered not the natural impediments; he allowed them no space in the account, they seemed to be less than nothing in the presence of the truth and power of the Almighty God. The Most High God had given a promise, and that fact over-rode ten thousand adverse arguments. His was that noble confidence of which we sing-

“Faith, mighty faith, the promise sees,

And looks to that alone;

Laughs at impossibilities,

And cries, ‘It shall be done!’ ”

By such unquestioning confidence Abraham brought glory to God. It glorifies God greatly for his servants to trust him; they then become witnesses to his faithfulness, just as his works in creation are witnesses of his power and wisdom. Abraham was a noble instance of the power which the truthfulness of God exerts over the human mind, when under all discouragements he still “believed God.” His heart said of the living God, “He cannot lie; he will perform his promise.” While glorifying God, Abraham reaped a present consolation to himself, and in the end he had the joy of receiving the promise. His early laugh of Joy was remembered and commemorated in his son Isaac, that child of promise, whose name was “laughter.” The patriarch himself became one of the most honoured of men, for it is written, “Him that honoureth me I will honour.”

Brethren, this is the point to which I want to bring you, that if God intends to make you or me, any one of us, or all of us together, to be distinguishing exhibitors of the grace of faith, we must expect to be passed through very much the same trial as Abraham. With regard to the object upon which our faith is exercised, it is most probable that we shall be made to feel our own weakness and even our personal death; we shall be brought very low, even into an utter self-despair; we shall be made to see that the mercy we are seeking of God is a thing impossible with man; it is very probable that difficulties will rise before us till they are enough to overwhelm us, not only one range of mountainous impossibilities, but another will be seen towering up behind the first, till we are pressed beyond measure, and led to an utter despair of the matter as considered in ourselves. At such a crisis, if God the Holy Ghost be working with mighty power in us we shall still believe that the divine promise will be fulfilled; we shall not entertain a doubt concerning the promise; we shall remember that it remains with God to find ways and means and not with ourselves; we shall cast the burden of fulfilling the promise upon him with whom it naturally rests; go on in steady, holy, confident joy, looking for the end of our faith and patiently pleading until we reach it. The Lord will honour and comfort us in so doing, and in the end he will grant us the desire of our hearts, for none that trust in him shall ever be confounded, world without end. Let us this morning firmly lay hold upon this general principle, that God will empty us of self completely before he will accomplish any great thing by us, thus removing from us every pretext for claiming the glory for ourselves; but at such seasons of humiliation it is our privilege to exercise unabated faith, for the fulfilment of the promise is not imperilled, but rather may be looked upon as drawing nigh. May the Holy Spirit guide us while we endeavour to apply the general principle to distinct cases.

First, we shall view it in application to the individual worker for Christ; then, secondly, we shall take it in connection with the church associated for Christian service; thirdly, we shall apply it briefly to the case of a pleader wrestling with God in prayer; and, fourthly, we shall show its bearing upon the case of a seeker, showing that he also will have to feel his own natural death and utter helplessness, and then faith will find all needful grace stored up in the promise-giving God.

To the individual worker we have a message.

I trust I address many brethren and sisters who have wholly consecrated themselves to the service of God, and have been for months or years perseveringly toiling in the Redeemer’s cause. Now, it is probable, very probable indeed, that you are more than ever conscious of your own spiritual weakness. “Oh,” say you, “if God intends to bless souls, I cannot see how they can be blessed through me. If sinners are to be converted, I feel myself to be the most unfit and unworthy instrument to be used by God in the whole world. If he shall be pleased to smile upon the endeavours of such an evangelist, or such a pastor, or such a zealous Christian, I shall be very grateful, and not at all surprised; but if he should ever bless me it will be a most astonishing thing, I shall scarcely be able to believe my own eyes.” Such a lowly sense of our own unfitness is common even at the beginning of real Christian labour, and arises from the unexpected and novel difficulties with which we are surrounded. We are then unused to Christian labour, and whether we have to speak in public or to plead with individual sinners we do not feel at home at the work at first, and are oppressed with a sense of weakness. We have not gone this way heretofore, and being quite new at the work, Satan whispers, “You are a poor creature to pretend to serve God. Go back to your retirement, and leave this service to better men.” Dear friends, who are thus tempted, take comfort from the word this morning. It is necessary to any great blessing that you should feel your weakness, and see death written upon all carnal strength; this is a part of your preparation for great usefulness; you must be made to feel early in the work, if you are to have an early blessing, that all the glory must be of God; your fancied excellence must fade away, and you yourself must become in your own esteem as feeble as a little child.

I think, however, that a sense of weakness grows on the Christian worker. To continue in harness year after year is not without its wear and tear; our spirit truly is willing, but the flesh is weak, and faintness in pursuing reveals to us that our own strength is perfect weakness. Personally I feel my own spiritual inability much more strongly than I did when I began to preach the gospel. There was a novelty and an excitement then about the exercise which gave a degree of spurious facility in it; but now it comes almost every day in the week, twice each day, and this constant utterance, the proclamation of the same gospel, finds out the weak joints in our armour. One is not weary of it, thank God, but still there is a languor which creeps over us, and the old novelty and flash which apparently helped us is now gone, and we feel much more vividly than at first that without the energy of the Holy Spirit we can do nothing, absolutely nothing. You experienced Sunday-school teachers, and you parents seeking the conversion of your children are, I doubt not, much more conscious that all your strength must come from above than you once were. You held as a sort of orthodox creed that you were nothing, but now you feel that you are less than nothing. The more earnest your labours for the Lord, the more clear will be your sense of your own nothingness.

There are times when a want of success or a withering of our cherished hopes will help to make us feel most keenly how barren and unfruitful we are until the Lord endows us with his Spirit. Those whom we thought to be converted turn out to be merely the subjects of transient excitement, those who stood long and for years appeared to honour the cross of Christ, turn aside and pierce us through with many sorrows, and then we cry out, “Woe is me! How shall I speak any more in the name of the Lord?” Like Moses, we would have the Lord send by whomsoever he would send, but not by us; or like Elias, we hide ourselves for fear, and say “Let me die, I am no better than my fathers.” I suppose there is no successful worker who is quite free from times of deep depression, times when his fears make him say, “Surely I took up this work myself through presumption, I ran without being called; I have wilfully thrust myself into a position where I am subject to great danger and great toil, without having the strength which is required for the place.” At such moments, it only needs another push from Satan, a little withdrawing of God’s hand, to make us like Jonah go down to Joppa, and see if we can find a ship to take us away to Tarshish, that we may no longer bear the burden of the Lord. My brother, my sister, I am not sorry if you are passing through this fiery ordeal. If your strength is dried up like a potsherd, if your strength is shrivelled like a skin-bottle that has been hanging up in the smoke, if you feel as though your personal power was altogether paralysed, I do not regret it, for know you not that it is in your weakness God will show his own strength, and when there is an end of you there will be a beginning of him. When you are brought to feel, neither have I any strength, nor know I what to do, then will you lift up your eyes to the strong One, from whom cometh all your true help, and then will his mighty arm be made bare.

In laying down the general principle drawn from the text we observed that there existed a double difficulty, and that even this did not abate Abraham’s confidence. It may be that a sense of our own unworthiness is not our only discouragement, but that our sphere of Christian effort is remarkably unpromising. You did not know, my dear friend, when you commenced your evangelistic efforts, how hard the human heart was. You were like young Melancthon; you thought you could easily conquer the human heart, but you now discover that old Adam is too strong for young Melancthon. You had heard of other brethren who preached or taught without success, and you said to yourselves, “There must be something very wrong in them or in their doctrines, I will not fall into their errors; I at least will be wise and discreet; my methods shall be more Christlike, more suitable, more effective; I shall surely win souls;” but now you find that hearts with you are as hard as hearts with other men. In that little Sunday-school class of yours the boys are still obstinate, the girls still frivolous. You had not reckoned upon this. You accepted it as matter of doctrine that they were depraved, but you supposed that under your treatment that depravity would soon disappear. You are disappointed, for the children seem even worse than others. The more you try to influence their hearts the less you succeed, and the more earnest your endeavours to bring them to Jesus the more the sin that dwelleth in them is provoked. It is possible that you are called to labour where the prejudices of the people are against the gospel, where the temptations and habits and ways of thought are all dead against the chance of success. We constantly meet with brethren who say, “I could prosper anywhere else, but I cannot succeed where I now am.” Perhaps they complain, “It is a population of working men,” and this they look upon as a dreadful evil; whereas I believe that no class will better reward the labours of the earnest preacher of the gospel. Or else they say, “They are all rich people, and I cannot get at them;” whereas where there is a will there is a way. Or the neighbourhood is subject to church-influence, or all taken up with other congregations; there is sure to be found difficulty, and Christian work never does succeed to any great extent until the worker perceives the difficulties, and rates them at their proper rate. The fact is, to save a soul is the work of Deity, to turn the human will towards holiness is the work of Omnipotence; and unless you and I have made up our minds to that, we had better go back to retirement and meditation, for we are not ready for labour. You tell me your particular sphere is one in which you can do nothing; I am glad to hear it. Such is mine; such is the true position of every Christian worker; he is called by God to do impossibilities; he is but a worm, and yet he is to thresh the mountains and beat them small. Will he do it? Ay, that he will, if his faith be equal to the work. If God do but enable him to call in divine strength the absence of human strength will be gain to him, and the difficulties and impossibilities will only be as a platform upon which God shall be uplifted, and God’s strength the better displayed. Settle it in your heart, my dear friend, that there is great labour to be accomplished if souls are to be won; and in that class, or that tract distributing, that hamlet, that preaching station, there is a work quite out of your reach, and if you do not enlist the power of a heavenly arm, you will come back and say, “I have laboured in vain, and spent my strength for nought.” It is well for you to know it. Here are you without power, and the work cannot help you, will not help you, it will bring every obstacle to impede you. You without strength and the work more than human, see your position and be prepared for it.

Yet the godly worker has that which sustains him, for he has a promise from God. Abraham had received a promise. “In thee and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” Grasping this with unrelaxing hold, he knew the difficulties and weighed them; but having done so, he put them away as not worth considering. God had said it, and that was enough for him. To him the promise of God was as good as the fulfilment. Just as in trade you often consider some men’s bills to be as good as cash, so in this case God’s promise was as good to Abraham as the fulfilment itself. Now, brother, if you and I are to be successful in our work for God, we must get hold of a promise too. I think I hear you say, “If I heard a heavenly voice saying to me, ‘Go and labour, and I will give thee success,’ I should doubt no more. If I could have a special revelation, just as Abraham had to him, personally, that would alter the case; but I have not received such a special promise, and am therefore full of fear.” Now, observe, God gives his promises in many ways. Sometimes he gives them to individuals, at other times to classes of character; and which is the better of the two? I think you should prefer the second. Suppose God had given to you personally a promise, your unbelief would say, “Ah! it is all fancy; it was not the Lord, it was only a dream.” But now God has been pleased to give the revelation, in your case, to character. Shall I quote it? Here it is: “He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.” Now is not that yourself? Your name is not there, but your character is, for you have gone forth, you have wept, and you have carried forth precious seed. The Lord declares that such an one shall doubtless come again rejoicing. Now, although your name is not in the book absolutely it is there virtually, and the promise is just as sure to you. If any man of honour were to issue a promise that all persons appearing at his door at such an hour should receive relief, if he did not give relief to all who appeared, he would be quite as guilty of breach of promise as though he had picked out all the persons by name and given them the promise. The promise is not affected by the absence of the name if the character be there described. I will give you another promise: “My word shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.” Have you delivered God’s word, my dear friend? there is the question. If you have, then God declares it shall not return unto him void; it shall prosper in the thing whereto he sent it; and that promise is quite as good as though your particular initials had been affixed to it, or it had been spoken to you by the voice of an angel in the visions of the night. A promise, however, given is equally binding upon a man of honour, and a promise from God, no matter how delivered, is sure of fulfilment; all you have to do is to lay hold upon it. I have gone forth weeping, and I have sown precious seed, therefore God says I shall come again rejoicing, bringing my sheaves with me. I cannot create the sheaves, and the sheaves as yet do not appear in the field, but I shall have them, for what God has promised he is able also to perform. The thing is to get a promise distinctly and clearly before your mind’s eye, and then to defy all discouragements. Oh, my brethren, may you be so weak that you may be as dead, and yet at the same time may you be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might, because your faith has made the omnipotence of God to be at your command.

Abraham having his full conviction that God would fulfil his own promise, was happy about it, cheerful, rejoicing, comforted, feeling as content to wait as he would have been to receive the blessing at once. He was always full of sacred joy, and thus always glorified God; for those who saw the holy patriarch’s serenity of mind naturally enquired who was his God, and when they heard of the Most High they glorified the God of Abraham. In due season the promise came, and the patriarchal tent was glad with a gladness which never left it. Abraham spake well of his God, and his God dealt well with him. I want you, Christian workers, to seek as before God to tread in the steps of Abraham. While fully aware that you are powerless in yourselves, rest upon the promise of God; go to your work counting no risks, making no calculations, but believing that where God’s promise is concerned, the bare suspicion of failure is not to be endured. Perhaps next to Abraham there was not, in the olden times, a man of more childlike faith than Samson. One weeps over his many infirmities, but one admires the marvellous simplicity of his dependence upon God. When a thousand foes are in array against him he never calculates; he is all alone, unarmed and bound with cords; he snaps his bonds, and seizing the jawbone of an ass, he flies at the hosts of the armed men as if he had a thousand helpers, and they but an equal match for him, and heaps upon heaps he dashes them down till he cries, “With the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jawbone of an ass have I slain a thousand men.” He was a man who, if God had said, “Shoulder the world like Atlas,” would have carried it as readily as he did the gates of Gaza. He had no thought but of God’s power, and he was reckless of danger when he felt that God was with him. See him in that memorable death-deed, see him taking hold of the pillars, after he had been left of God, blind, and shut up in prison all those dreary months; he has even now enough confidence in God to believe that he will help him at the last! Depend upon it, brethren, it is great faith that can believe in God after times of desertion. But see! He puts his hands upon those ponderous pillars; he prays, and then he tugs and strains; down, down they come, and Israel’s God is avenged upon Israel’s foe. That is the kind of spirit I should like to get into my own soul; a spirit conscious that it can do nothing alone, conscious that the work is beyond human possibility, but equally clear that it can do everything, that through God there is nothing beyond the range of its capacity.

Dear friends, members of this church, I want your earnest attention while I try to show the bearing of this upon this church and every church in a similar condition.

We have set our hearts upon a thorough revival of religion in our midst. Some of my brethren, associated with me in the deaconship and eldership, have made this a matter of constant prayer to God, that we may see this year greater things than we have ever seen, and there are many in the membership of the same mind, who have besieged the throne of the heavenly grace with constant applications. It will be, as a preparation for the work which God will work among us, a very blessed thing for us as a church to feel bow utterly powerless we are in this matter. God has blessed us these thirteen years; we have enjoyed continued prosperity; we have scarcely known what to do with the blessing God has given us. Truly in our case he has fulfilled the promise, “I will pour out my blessing upon you so that you shall not have room to receive it.” But I fear that our temptation is to lean upon an arm of flesh, to suppose there is some power in the ministry, or in our organization, or in the zeal which has characterized us. Brethren, let us divest ourselves of all that pride, that detestable, abominable, soul-weakening vice, which is as evil and as hurtful to us as it is abominable to God. We can no more save a soul than make a world, and as to causing a genuine revival by our own efforts, we might as well talk of whirling the stars from their spheres. Poor helpless worms we are in this matter. If God help us we can pray, but without his aid our prayer will be mockery. If God help us we can preach, but apart from him our preaching is but a weary tale told without power, or energy. You must each of you ask the Lord to take you down into the depths of your own nothingness, and reveal to you your utter unworthiness to be used in his work. Try to get a deeply humiliating sense of your own weakness. As a church we want to be kept low before the Lord. Why what are we as a church? There are some sad sinners among us, who are such clever hypocrites that we cannot find them out, and there are others who walk so ill that we fear they are tares among the wheat. The best of us are far from being as good as we should be. We have all grave accusations to bring against ourselves. If the Lord Jesus were to write on the ground here and say, “He that is without fault among you, let him throw the first stone at lukewarm Christians,” I do not know who is the oldest and whether he would try to go out first, but I should follow very closely at his heels. We are all verily guilty before the Lord; we have not done as we ought, nor as we might: we are unworthy that he should use us, and if he should write “Ichabod” in letters of fire over this Tabernacle, and leave this house to be desolate as Shiloh was of old, he might well do it and none could blame him. Let us all confess this.

Next, there is not only difficulty in ourselves but difficulty in the work. We want to see all these people converted to God, and truly some of our hearers are hopeless enough, for I have been preaching to them for ten or twelve years and they are not a whit the better but the worse for it, for they have grown gospel-hardened. My voice used to startle you once, and the honest truth made you feel, but it is not so now. You are as used to my voice as the miller to the click of his mill; you are made ready for the uttermost wrath of God, for there is no place that can prepare a man for hell so readily as the place of rejected invitations and neglected admonitions. Yet, dear hearers, we desire to see you converted, and by the grace of God we hope to see it. But what can we do? The preacher can do nothing, for he has done his best to bring you to Christ and has failed, and all that any of our most earnest friends can suggest will fail also. The work is impossible with us, but do we therefore give up the attempt? No, for is it not written “I said not unto the seed of Jacob, Seek ye my face in vain?” We cannot seek God’s face in vain, and if this church continues to pray as it has done, an answer of peace must be given us. We do not know how the promise is to be fulfilled, but we believe it will be fulfilled, and we leave it with our God. There is another promise, “He shall see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied.” Christ must see of his soul’s travail must see of it in this place too. We expect to see men converted in this place, and to hear multitudes of sinners crying, “What must I do to be saved?” We have God’s promise for it; we cannot do it, but he can. What shall we do? Why, just in joyous confidence continue steadfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord. Go again to our knees in prayer, feeling that the result is no hap-hazard. Jesus pleads his wounds, and cannot be denied. The Lord cannot draw back from his word. He must do according to his people’s desires when he himself writes those desires upon their hearts, and when they have grown into earnest strivings, and wrestlings, and mounted into believing expectations, they must be fulfilled. If we can only get a dozen men and women among you really humbled before God to feel your own emptiness, and yet to believe the promise, I expect to see within the next few months a blessing of such an extent as we have never received before. God send this, and his be the glory.

For a minute-if there had been time I should have liked to apply this principle to every pleading soul that is wrestling with God in prayer, but as I have not the time I will dismiss it in these words. Dear friends, if your heart has been set upon any special object in prayer, if you have an express promise for it (and mark, that is indispensable), you must not be staggered if the object of your desire be farther off now than when you first began to pray. If even after months of supplication the thing should seem more difficult now of attainment than ever it was, wait at the mercy seat in the full persuasion that although God may take his time, and that time may not be your time, yet he must and will redeem his promise when the fulness of time has come. If you have prayed for the salvation of your child, or husband, or friend, and that person has grown worse instead of better, do not cease praying. If that dear little one has become more obstinate, and that husband more profane even, still God must be held to his word; and if you have the faith to challenge his attributes of faithfulness and power, assuredly he never did and never will let your prayers fall fruitless to the ground; and I repeat the word, that you may be sure to bear that away with you, let not the fact that the answer seems farther off than ever be any discouragement to you. Remember that to trust God in the light is nothing, but to trust him in the dark-that is faith. To rest upon God when everything witnesses with God is nothing, but to believe God when everything gives him the lie-that is faith. To believe that all shall go well when outward providences blow softly is any fool’s play, but to believe that it must and shall be well when storms and tempests are round about you, and you are blown farther and farther from the harbour of your desire-this is a work of grace. By this shall you know whether you are a child of God or not, by seeing whether you can exercise faith in the power of prayer when all things forbid you to hope.

I desire to spend the last five minutes in addressing the seeker. Surely amongst this throng there must be some of you who long to be saved. If so, it is likely that since you have begun to seek salvation instead of being more happy you are far more miserable. You imagined at one time that you could believe in Jesus whenever you liked, that you could become a Christian at your own will at any moment; and now you wake up to find that the will is present with you, but how to perform that which you would you find not. You desire to break the chains of sin, but those sins were far easier to bind than to loose. You want to come to Jesus with a broken heart, but your heart refuses to break. You long to trust Jesus, but your unbelief is so mighty that you cannot see his cross-you cannot look with the look which makes a sinner live. Will you think me cruel if I say I am glad to find you in this poverty-stricken state, for I believe that in your case you must know your own powerlessness, you must be brought to feel that as far as salvation is concerned you are dead, utterly dead. Every sinner must learn that he is by nature dead in trespasses and sins, and that the work of salvation is a work impossible to him-it is high above out of his reach. I want you to know that more and more, and if it should drive you to a thorough self-despair, none will be more thankful than I shall be, for despair is the nearest way to faith in our philosophy. Self-despair throws a man upon his God; he feels that he can do nothing, and he turns to one who can do all things.

Now, friend, if thou art as I have said convinced of thy nothingness, the next thing is, canst thou find a promise? There is one I pray the Lord to give thee this morning: “Whosoever calleth upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” Have you called upon the name of the Lord? that is to say, have you cried to him, “God be merciful to me a sinner”? Well, if you have not, I pray you do it now. If you so call you must be saved. True, you cannot save yourself; I am glad you know that; but what you cannot do, in that you are weak through the flesh, God will do, for there is his promise, “Whosoever cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” Now, do you come? If so, you cannot be cast out. “Whosoever believeth on him is not condemned.” Dost thou believe on the Lord Jesus? Dost thou take him now to be thy Saviour? If thou dost, thy personal want of power shall be no hindrance. Thou hast no power whatsoever, but there is none needed in thee. When Christ raised the dead he did not rake among the ashes to find a lingering spark of vitality, but he said, “Live!” And if thou art as dead as Lazarus of whom Martha said, “Lord, by this time he stinketh,” the voice of mercy can yet make thee live. Canst thou believe this? If thou canst believe in Jesus thou shalt be saved. If thou canst believe that Jehovah Jesus, the Son of God, can save thee, and if thou canst rest upon his merits, though in thee there be no grain of merit, though in thee there be no vestige of power or spiritual strength, this shall not stand in thy way; and though thy sins be as damnable as those of Satan, and thy iniquity of heart as deep as hell itself, yet if thou canst trust in Jesus to save thee, difficulty vanishes before the merit of his blood. I know you say, “If I felt happy I could trust Christ, if I felt tender, if I felt holy.” Nay, friend, thou wouldst not be trusting Christ, thou wouldst trust thy feelings, and thy tenderness would be thy confidence, but now thou hast no feeling of tenderness or holiness that can recommend thee to God. Come then as thou art, wretched, undone, self-condemned, and self-abhorred; come and cast thyself upon the mercy of God as he reveals himself in the bleeding body of his dear Son, and if thou canst do this thou wilt glorify God. “Oh,” sayest thou, “how could such a poor soul as I am ever bring glory to God?” Sinner, I say it is in your power, if God enables you, to bring more glory to God in a certain sense than the living saint can, for the living saint only believes that God can keep him alive, but for you under a pressing sense of guilt still to believe that Jesus can give you perfect liberty and save you-oh! this glorifies him! There is not an angel before the throne who can believe such great things of God as you can. An angel has no sin; he cannot, therefore, believe that Jesus can put away his sin, but thou canst. “If thou believest in Jesus, though thy sins be as scarlet they shall be as wool, though they be red like crimson they shall be whiter than snow.” If thou doest God the honour to believe that he can do what he has said; if thou restest in Jesus, thou shalt have the comfort, he shall have the glory, and thy soul shall have the salvation. Emptied of self you have no life, no strength, no goodness, in fact you have nothing to recommend you, but come as you are and the Lord will bless you and give you the desire of your heart, and unto him be the glory. Amen.

Portion of Scripture read before Sermon-James 1.