From sin’s tremendous curse and blame.”

“Yes, yes,” say you, “well, I thank God for that, but my conscience, my conscience will never let me be in quietness.” Oh! but my Master knows how to talk with thy conscience. He can say to it, “I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, and, as a cloud, thy sins.” He can take his precious blood, which is better than the balm of Gilead, and he can apply it to the wounds of thy conscience; and as soon as conscience feels the power of the blood, all its wounds close up directly, and the heart rejoices, saying, “If Jesus paid my debts, then paid they are; if Jesus died for me, then God will never make me die and Jesus too; for payment he will ne’er demand twice-first at my bleeding Surety’s hands, and then at mine.” When conscience enters into the wounds of Christ, how happy it is! it is like the dove that dwells in the cleft of the rock, and builds its nest there, and sits all day uttering its soft turtle notes for very joy and gladness. O poor heart, Mr. Conscience and thou will shake hands well enough if thou wilt stand at the foot of the cross and do it. Conscience is a dreadful thunderer to a sinner unreconciled; but, to a sinner who has seen the great atonement, and felt the power of the blood, conscience becomes a generous friend.

And let me say, dear friend, if the Lord gives you quietness while the law and conscience will be at peace with you, so will that Book of God be. Some of you, whenever you turn the Bible over, can find nothing but threatenings in it. Each page cries out against you, “I bear a curse for you.” Oh! but if you can only come to Jesus and rest in him, then the page shall glisten with blessings, and glow with benedictions; you shall find that it utters peace to the men of peace, and good tidings of great joy to those who look alone to the Redeemer’s blood. Still I think I see you shake your head and say sorrowfully, “Oh, but I shall never get much quietness at home, for I have ungodly friends, and they tell me I am religion mad.” Ah, my dear friend! if the Lord give thee quietness, thine ungodly friends will give thee very little trouble, for thou wilt have grace to bear with them. If they shall revile thee, thou wilt turn their revilings into joy, thanking God that thou art accounted worthy to be reviled for Jesus’ sake; while in the midst of it thou wilt sometimes take an opportunity of speaking a good word for thy Master, and so be thankful that thou art placed where thou art wanted. We ought to be glad to be cast as a pound of salt amid the corruption which salt destroys; and we should be thankful that we are set as a light in a dark place, where a lamp is most required. In this light the persecuted believer may even look upon his painful position as a desirable one, for the practical usefulness which it puts in his way.

If Jesus Christ be thy companion, thou mayest walk unharmed through Vanity Fair, if thy path should lie through it, and thou needst not care for all the fools that pluck at thy garment. Through a shower of mud it is safe and blessed travelling if Jesus be our companion. I hope you are not one of those who would choose to walk with him in silver slippers, but who would leave him if he came in poverty and shame! If so, you do not know the love of Jesus at all. Through briars and thorns lies the path of love; and yet that thorny road is paradise if Jesus do but tread it with us and permit us to lean upon is arm. The more severe the troubles of life become, the higher shall your comforts rise if Jesus be with you. Tried soul, rest in Jesus! Only cast yourself on him, confide entirely in him, and you shall find that the peace which he gives you none can take from you.

3. Now this text, which thus belongs to the saint and to the seeking sinner, I think is equally true, on the larger scale, to the Christian Church. I could not omit saying this out of thankfulness to God for the quietness which he has for years been pleased to give to us as a Christian community. During thirteen years and more we have been knit together as one man, while we have lived to see certain sects that were the one and only church-that railed almost with the mouth of a Sanbanat and Tobiah at all other Christians as worldly schimatics, while they themselves were Scriptural, immaculate, the brethren, the perfect ones, we have seen them torn to pieces till there is scarce a remnant of them left, with all the elements within them of internal discord, which will dash them yet more completely into shivers. By the grace of God we who, as a single Church, are almost as numerous as some of their parties, have been kept in holy peace and quietness, working incessantly for the cause of God without dissension and without strife; and though we are not free from ten thousand faults, yet I have often admired the goodness of God, which has enabled us to hold with a hearty grip each other by the hand, and say, “We love each other for Jesus’ sake, and for the truth’s sake, and hope each of us to live in each other’s love till we die, wishing if it were possible to be buried side by side.” I do thank God for this, because I know there is more than enough of evil among us to plant a root of bitterness in our midst. We who bear office in the Church have the same nature as others; and therefore, naturally, every man of us would seek to have the supremacy, and every man, if left to himself, would also indulge an angry temper, and find many reasons for differing from his brother. We have all been offended often, and have as often offended others. We are as imperfect a band of men as might be found, but we are one. We have each had to put up with the other, and to bear and forbear; and it does appear to me a wonder that so many imperfect people should get on so well for so long. I read over the door of our Tabernacle this text-“When the Lord giveth quietness, who then can make trouble?” When some of our members were first taken into the Church, the pastor had a very suspicious character with them. It was said, “Well, if Mr. Spurgeon receives such a man, he has been so great a trouble in our Church, that he will be the beginning of wars at the Tabernacle.” But those very persons who came with that doubtful character, have become the most zealous of our working community, and instead of differing and disagreeing, have felt that there is so much to do that it would be a pity to spend one grain of strength in quarrelling with other children of God. How good it is to use our swords upon the devil and his allies, and not to blunt their edges upon our fellow Christians! Possibly, my brethren, many of you do not sufficiently prize the peace which reigns in our Church. Ah! you would value it if you lost it. Oh, how would you prize it if strife and schism should come in! You would look back upon these happy days we have had together with intense regret, and say, “Lord, knit us together in unity again; send us love to each other once more;” for in a Church, love is the essential element of happiness; and if any of you have violated it, or sinned against it, ask for grace to repent of your mistake, and let us “love one another with a pure heart fervently,” walking in love, “as Christ also hath loved us and gave himself for us.” Let us have that fervent charity which is the perfect bond, abounding in our hearts yet more and more by Jesus Christ.

I shall leave this first point when I have briefly drawn three lessons from it. “When the Lord giveth quietness, who then can make trouble?” The first lesson is, those who have peace, should this morning adore and bless God for it. O God, when we remember what our trouble was before we knew a Saviour; when we recollect what the tempest was when thou didst hide thy face from us, we cannot but be glad, exceeding glad, that now thou speakest kindly and favourably unto us. You who will not thank God for peace, deserve to hear war in your streets again; you who will not thank him at the place of the drawing of water, because the noise of the archers has ceased, you deserve to have your hearts again ploughed up by the hosts of the enemy. Praise him, then, my brethren, from your hearts praise him. Secondly, be hopeful, ye who are seeking peace, whether for others or for yourselves. Do not despair of any soul, however near to death and hell it may be: God can make quietness even in the heart that is ready to die. Lastly, give up all other peace but that which the Lord giveth to every believer. If you have a quietness which God has not created, implore the Lord to break it; if you have a peace which did not come from heaven, it is “peace, peace, where there is no peace,” and the Lord deliver you from it.

Now let us turn to the second point. The all sufficiency of God is seen, secondly, in his sovereign withdrawals.

God does sometimes hide his face from his people, and then, as his saints well know, nothing can enable them to behold him or to be happy. You know God doctrinally, but what are the doctrines of grace to a soul when God hides his face? You may accept and hold fast the orthodox gospel, but is the purest evangelical truth anything but a cloud without rain, unless the Lord himself shall appear? In vain, dear friends, is all our experience to help us to see God if he hides his face, for though we have tried and proved his faithfulness, yet if he do not continue to smile, we grow to be as unbelieving and as doubting as ever we were. At such times all in vain are outward mercies. Though to day we can see God’s hand in the loaf of bread and in the the cup of cold water, yet if God hide his face, though there should be a stalled ox before us, and a feast fit for kings, yet we should not see our Father’s love in them. Christian, you know well that if God takes himself away and hides within his secret places, and speaks no more to you, neither earth nor all the sky can afford you one delight.

Now, sinner, this is strikingly true in your case. If God shall be pleased to withdraw himself from you, you cannot behold him. If he should take the gospel from you, what then? He may do it. He may send you across the seas as an emigrant. He may put you in some country village, where there is no gospel preaching. He may make you live in a situation where you cannot get out to hear a faithful gospel preacher, and then what will you do? Still worse may it be with you. The Lord may let you continue under the ministry, and the ministry may be full of blessing to others, and yet be fruitless to you. If God do but leave you to the corruptions of your own heart, dear friend, it will be quite enough to secure your ruin. Then the tears of mothers, the counsels of friends, and the appeals of pastors, shall all be powerless to touch your heart; the appeals of the Book of God itself shall never move your conscience, you will go headlong to your own destruction if God withdraw his face from you. Remember, my dear hearer, this is possible! There is a point, we know not when, a place we know not where, where God may end your day of sensibility by saying, “I will let that sinner alone.” Then the cloud shall rain no more rain upon your desert soul; no more seed shall be scattered upon the trodden highway of your thankless heart. Shall horses run upon a rock? Shall men plough there with oxen? If you will not repent, God will not always waste the gospel ministry upon you. He shall let that gospel become a “savour of death unto death” to you, till you loathe it yourself, become a Sabbath breaker, or give yourself up to doubt and sin. O sinner, I long that you may feel how absolutely you are in the hand of God. Should the sun go down, all the candles in the world cannot light up the landscape; and if God shall desert the soul, all human power must fail to give it comfort. What a mercy it is that the Lord has not deserted you as yet; that still does his good Spirit strive and dwell with the chief of sinners; still the cry is heard, “To-day, if ye will chief of sinners to dwell; still the cry is heard, “To-day, if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts.” Yet I pray you remember that if you do harden your hearts, the Lord may do with you as he did with his people of old, and swear in his wrath, that you shall not enter into his rest.

I have no doubt, dear friends, that as this is true of the saint and the sinner, it is true of the Church. If God shall hide his face from a Church, who then can behold him? Let me endeavour to set that truth in two or three words before you. If we as a Church prove unfaithful; if we let go our first love; if we do not plead in prayer, and seek the conversion of souls, God may take away his presence from us as he has done from Churches that were his Churches once, but which are not now. The traveller tells you that, as he journeys through Asia Minor, he sees the ruins of those cities which once were the seven golden candlesticks, wherein the light of truth shone brightly. What will they now say of Thyatira? Where will they find Laodicea? These have passed away, and why not this Church? Look at Rome, once the glory of the Christian Church, her ministers many, and her power over the world for good enormous; and now she is the place where Satan’s seat is, and her synagogue is a synagogue of hell. How is this? She fell; she departed from her integrity; she left her first love, and the Lord cast her away. Thus will the Lord deal with us if thus we sin. You know that terrible passage-“Go ye now unto my place which was in Shiloh, where I set my name at the first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my people Israel.” God first of all had the tabernacle pitched at Shiloh, but Shiloh was defiled by the sin of Eli’s sons; that tabernacle was taken away, and Shiloh became a wilderness. So may this flourishing Church become. If justice should thus visit you, you may hold your prayer meetings-probably those will soon cease-but of what avail will your formal prayers be? You may get whom you will to preach, but what of that? I know what you would do, if some of us were fallen asleep, and the faithful ones buried-if the Spirit of God were gone, you would say, “Well, we are still a large and influential congregation; we can afford to get a talented minister, money will do anything;” and you would get the man of talents, and then you would want an organ and a choir, and many other pretty things which we now count it our joy to do without. Then, if such were the case, all these vain attempts at grandeur would be unsuccessful, and the Church would ere long become a scorn and a hissing, or else a mere log upon the water. Then it would be said, “We must change the management,” and there would be this change and that change; but if the Lord were gone, what could you do? By what means could you ever make this Church to revive again, or any other Church? Alas! for the carnal, spasmodic efforts we have seen made in some Churches! Prayer meetings badly attended, no conversions, but still they have said, “Well, it is imperative upon us to keep up a respectable appearance; we must collect the congregation by our singing, by our organ, or some other outward attraction:” and angels might have wept as they saw the folly of men who sought to anything except the Lord, who alone can make a house his temple; who alone can make a ministry to be a ministration of mercy; without whose presence the most solemn congregation is but as the herding of men in the market, and the most melodious songs but as the shoutings of those who make merry at a marriage. Without the Lord, our solemn days, our new moons, and our appointed feasts, are an abomination such as his soul hateth. May this Church ever feel her utter, entire, absolute dependence upon the presence of her God, and may she never cease humbly to implore him to forgive her many sins, but still to command his blessing to abide upon her.

The time is gone, but I want just to say these two or three words-namely, that, depend upon it, this is true of a nation as well as of any one Church and of any one man.

At this particular time, though there is perhaps more Christian effort made in England than has been made for many years, there is also probably as little of the divine blessing resting upon that effort as ever was known. It is a melancholy fact that, with all the wonderful increase of accommodation which has been made in London for the worship of God, there is absolutely a greater deficiency now, owing to the increase of the population, a greater deficiency in the means of grace now than there ever was. It is also a notorious fact that of the new Churches which have been erected, you might go into many of them and not find enough to make a respectable gathering in a vestry, so that, even though tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of pounds have been contributed for mere bricks and mortar, in connection with the Episcopalian Establishment, these have merely been a spurious addition to the spiritual supply, but not a real one. It is easy to raise money, but it is not easy to find men; and, while it is easy to get an architect to build a Church, none but God himself can find a minister who will reach the dense masses of our heathendom around us, and compel them to come in and worship. The want of men is the great crying want of the age, and that want is sent to us because we do not pray to God enough to send us men; we do not pray for men, when God does send them, that they may be helped as they should, and consequently much of the Church’s effort is thrown away. Beloved, I want to see something done in this London, and how is it to be done? There are thousands of Christians, tens of thousands of Christians in London, and yet the cause does not spread, or very slowly! What is the cause? Jonah shook Nineveh from end to end, and yet a hundred thousand followers of Jesus cannot do it. Paul, marching along the Appian way at Rome, marked an era in Rome’s history; and yet there are many ministers of Christ who thread our streets, and yet what are we all put together for real power? We do not seem to amount in this great city, all of us, to anything more than a mere chip in the porridge; we scarcely affect the population at all. Oh! it is strange, it is passing strange; for it is the gospel which we preach, we know it is the gospel, and some of us do try to preach it with all our might. But if God withhold his face, what can be done? Yet, brethren, this can be done-we will cry to the Lord until he reveals his face again. We will give him no rest till he establish and make his Church a praise in the earth. O Christian men and women, if you could realise the situation! A city of three millions, not wholly given to idolatry, but still very much given to sin, and we ourselves so weak in the midst of it! if we could but realise this position, and then take hold upon the arm omnipotent, and by an overcoming faith, such as only God could give to any one of us, believe it possible for the Lord Jesus to save this city, and then go forward boldly expecting him to do it, we might see more than we have ever seen. And now, what if I prophesy that we shall see it! what if I say, that if God will but stir up his people everywhere for prayer, he will do a work in our day that shall make both the ears of him that heareth it to tingle, not with horror, but with joy! He will yet let the world know that there is a God in Israel. Verily, that which hindereth is our want of faith, for if the Son of man should descend among us, would he find faith on the earth? O unbelieving Church, O thankless generation, ye are not straitened in God, ye are straitened in your own bowels; and if ye could but believe him, and so prove him by your faith, he would yet open the windows of heaven and pour you out a blessing, such that ye should not have room enough to receive it.

This, then, is the matter, and we leave it with you. We are utterly dependent upon God-absolutely must we rest on him. But this is as it should be, for it were better to trust in the Lord than to have confidence in man: better to trust in the Lord than to have confidence in princes. Through the blood of Jesus let us rest in divine love, and give the Lord no rest till he make bare his arm in the midst of this land.

May the Lord give His blessing to our words, for Jesus’ sake.

Portion of Scripture read before Sermon-Job 34.