C. H. SPURGEON,

at the metropolitan tabernacle, newington,

On Thursday Evening, February 2nd, 1882.

“And many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman, which testified, He told me all that ever I did. So when the Samaritans were come unto him, they besought him that he would tarry with them: and he abode there two days. And many more believed because of his own word; and said unto the woman, Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.”-John 4:39-42.

Wherever faith exists, it is the gift of God. It is a plant that never sprang up spontaneously from the soil of corrupt human nature. Whether it be little faith or great faith, it is equally of divine origin; and wherever it is found,-whether in the child of pious parents who was brought up with the utmost care, or in one who has lived all the former part of his life in the vilest sin,-it is equally and alike the fruit of the Spirit and the effect of God’s grace. From this fact I gather great encouragement, because, if it needs divine power to implant faith in the heart that looks more favourable, it needs no more to implant and preserve it in the soul that appears most unprepared to receive it. Casting our eye over the whole map of Palestine, we might have said that probably Samaria was as unlikely a place as any in the entire country in which we might expect to find followers of the Lord Jesus; for, at the very threshold of Christ’s announcing himself there would be found this prejudice, that the Samaritans would not believe in a Jew. They would not even listen to a Jew; for, while the Jews had no dealings with the Samaritans, the Samaritans reciprocated the feeling, and had no dealings with the Jews. Yet it was among the Samaritans, the members of the mongrel faith into which Judaism had deteriorated, that Christ was to find a large number of his followers. My brethren, you will be wise to go first to those places where there seems to be least likelihood of conversions. You will often find that God judges not as man judges. “Man looketh on the outward appearance;” but God, who reads the hearts of men, can see a certain readiness where we reckon that there is the most unreadiness. The Lord knows that the soil, where the seed of the kingdom is sown, may be in the best condition for fruitfulness even when we fancy that it cannot possibly yield us any return for our labour. If faith be the work of God,-a supernatural thing,-as it certainly is; what have you and I to do with judging according to natural appearances? You may go and speak, my brother, feeble as you feel yourself to be, for the seed owes very little indeed to the hand that sows it; and you may go, my brother or my sister, and scatter this precious seed upon what you may regard as waste soil, for the seed owes very little, after all, to the soil. God can make it spring up like a root out of a dry ground, and, as of old he brought water out of the rock, and oil out of the flinty rock, so can he bring a harvest to his glory where everything seems utterly barren. If it be God’s work, let us have no doubts, much less any despondencies, concerning it; but let us continue to put ourselves into his hand, that he may use us anywhere that he pleases, for we know not where he will most glorify his name through our feeble instrumentality.

I am going to talk about faith,-faith as it came to these Samaritans; and we shall notice, first, faith’s annunciation: “Now we believe;” secondly, faith’s nativity,-where it is born; thirdly, faith’s upbringing,-faith’s Nazareth,-for, according to the text, it grows and takes higher ground as it develops: “Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves.” I give these names to my three divisions in order to assist your memories.

First, then, I call your attention to faith’s annunciation. Here we have it, in the 42nd verse: “we believe.”

Genuine faith may, through timidity, be hidden for a little while; or, possibly, the love of carnal ease may lead some to conceal their faith in Christ; but it is of the very nature of faith that it should make its appearance known and felt. As Christ had what our Church of England friends call his Epiphany, when he was manifested unto men, so faith, though it may for a while be swaddled, and laid in a manger, and kept in a stable, must have its outcoming, it must have its manifestation, and men must see it. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathæa managed, for three years or so, to conceal their faith to a great degree. Every now and then, the light would burn a hole through the bushel, for they could not quite hide the fire that was within them; but when Jesus died, then the thoughts of many hearts were revealed, and both these men stood out in the clear light of day as his avowed disciples. They could not help it; the occasion had come when their faith must be manifested, and they must by their actions say, “Now we believe.” Our Lord has always put, side by side with the faith that saves, the duty of confession of that faith. His own words are, “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved.” And Paul, guided by the Holy Spirit, wrote, “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” Christ loves not a tongue-tied faith; he would not have faith dumb, but would ever have her speak to the glorifying of her Lord on whom she depends. So these Samaritans, when they had come to believe in Jesus, must confess their faith, and they did so by saying, “Now we believe.”

Possibly, dear friends, they felt some little difficulty-I suppose that it was but little in their case,-in saying, “Now we believe,” because they had previously undergone a period of doubt. Evidently these people did not receive the woman’s testimony, although others had done so. They listened to it, and were sufficiently moved by it to go out and see the Teacher of whom she spoke; but they were not brought to faith by it. Peradventure, they even battled with her, and raised questions;-I will not say quibbles;-but, at last, to her great joy, they said to her, “ ‘Now we believe;’ we have got out of all the muddle and confusion in which we were; we have left the darkness, and the doubt, and the difficulty; and ‘now we believe.’ ” Are there any of you, dear friends, who have been amusing yourselves for years with the notion that you were infidels? Have you tried to make up in your own minds a sort of belief that you were “agnostics”? I think that is the favourite word for those who are proud of being know-nothings or ignoramuses. Have you tried to bolster up in your mind the idea that you were something very wonderful in the form of a sceptical person,-all the while, I doubt not, believing a great deal more than you liked to admit,-believing and trembling all the time? But have you played that foolish game out, and have you now truly trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ as your own Saviour? If so, then do not be ashamed to say, “Now I believe.” You will have to eat your own words; well, then, eat them. You will have to be very humble when you meet your old friends; well, then, be humble; there will be no harm to you in that. And, peradventure, they will bring against you some of your own arguments. Well, it will serve you right if they do; and, besides, it will give you the pleasure of breaking those arguments in pieces, and perhaps of winning your friends for Christ, for you have seen those fallacies broken in your own case, and you may be the means, in the hand of God, of breaking the bow and cutting the spear in sunder in the case of those who have been your fellow-doubters. Do not be ashamed of confessing your past folly. I think a man who says, “I was wrong,” really in effect says, “I am a little wiser to-day than I was yesterday.” But he who never admits that he has made a mistake, and who claims that he has always been in the right, has evidently never made much growth in knowledge of himself. So, do not be ashamed to say, “Now I believe,” though that confession may have been preceded by many a doubt.

And do not hesitate to say it to the person who has hitherto been baffled by you. I expect the tears were in that poor woman’s eyes when she said to the men, “You remember what sort of person I used to be, and you see the change that has been wrought in me. You know that I always spoke straight out what I believed, and this blessed Man, who read my very soul, is the Christ; I know that he is. Then, why do you not believe what I say about him?” I should not wonder if she pleaded very hard with them, and prayed, and entreated them to believe her testimony; and now, at last, when they did believe, it was due to her that they should cheer her heart by saying, “Now we believe;” and, even though they had to add, “not because of thy saying,” that qualification would not grieve her. “Oh!” she would say, “so long as you do believe, I do not mind how you came into that happy condition. I should have been glad if God had used my saying to bring you to faith; but, inasmuch as he blessed the saying of the great Preacher, the Lord and Master himself, I am the more glad on that account, for he will have all the glory of it, and, so long as you do but believe, you give gladness to my heart.”

There are some of you, dear friends, to whom I have preached in vain for a long while; and God knows that, when I have been laid aside, I have often felt a holy joy in my heart at the thought that the man who has been preaching for me will be blessed by God to some who have never been converted under my ministry. Sometimes, when I have longed to be fishing for souls, but could not even stand, and therefore had to lie at home in pain, it has been my hope that some other fisherman would throw the fly better than I might have done, and that you would take the bait from him, though you have often refused it from me. And when you come forward to join the church, and say to me, as many have done, “Sir, we believe; but it was through Fullerton and Smith’s mission,” or, “it was through the teaching in the Sunday-school,” or, “it was through the agency of someone who spoke to us in the aisle,” I am sure that I have been just as glad and happy as if you had told me that it was by my own personal testimony that you had found the Lord. Glad, indeed, am I to be the instrument of saving souls; but, still, if you are saved, the instrumentality by which that blessed result is reached is, after all, a very small matter. Only, when you do really believe in our Lord Jesus Christ, take care that you tell us, for we have wept over you, and prayed for you; and when you are converted, it seems but a fair and honest recompense that you should say to the individual whom God has honoured to be your spiritual parent, “Now we believe.” By doing so, you will strengthen and encourage him to go on with his work more earnestly than before. Perhaps you will even stave off a heartbreak, and make the Christian sower fill his hand the fuller, and scatter the seed the more deftly, because he knows that he has not laboured in vain, nor spent his strength for nought.

In this annunciation of faith, I want you also to observe that it was very speedy. The Lord Jesus Christ was only in that place for two days, so that those who said, “Now we believe,” must have testified very speedily after they believed. I do not think that it is the duty of people to wait several months before they come forward and confess Christ; it may sometimes be the wisdom of the officers and members of the church to say to some persons, “We should like to see a little of your life, that we may judge by your fruit, before we receive you into fellowship.” It may even be their duty to say that, and to keep them waiting outside the church for a while to test their genuineness; but it is not the duty of the candidate himself. His business is, as speedily as may be convenient after he has believed in Jesus, to confess his faith, and to seek to be baptized, and added to the church. You do not find Paul waiting several months, after he was converted, before he was baptized. You see, in Scripture, no trace of what our old people in the country used to practise, namely, “summering and wintering” converts, to see what they were like, before they permitted them to make any confession of their faith in Jesus. No, no; if you have believed in him, come along with you. The next step is to say so, and to say it as quickly as ever you can, “Now we believe.” If to-night you are brought to faith in Jesus Christ, I would say to you, find out some Christian brother, and tell him at once that you have believed in Jesus. When this precious child of the Spirit of God, namely, faith, is born, let it be known to the King’s house that it has come; they make such blessed tidings known in heaven, for “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.” Though it is but the initial stage of faith, hold not the glad news back from the Church of God, but let it be speedily proclaimed, “Now we believe.” What a joyous moment it is when any can say, “Now we believe!” It is the end of suspense; it is the end of the kingdom of darkness; it is the end of fear; it is the end of despair; it is the dawn of hope; it is the dawn of heaven. Oh, what a world of meaning there is in those three words! What glory is opened up to the poor tearful eye by faith! What sights are visible when we can say, “Now we believe”!

O my dear hearers, can you all say, “Now we believe”? If you can do so truthfully, you can say a greater thing than Cicero or Demosthenes, with all their eloquence, ever uttered. Have you been seekers for months and years? Have you been tempest-tossed and driven up and down upon the sea of doubt? May you now cast your anchor overboard, into the depths of Jehovah’s love; and when you find that it holds, may you cry out, with ecstasy, “Now we believe”!

There, then, is the annunciation of faith.

Now, very briefly, I want you to look, in the second place, on faith’s nativity. How comes faith into men’s hearts at all?

According to the plain teaching of Scripture, “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” But faith is not always created in the human heart by the same form of instrumentality. It is always the fruit of the Spirit of God but it comes in different ways. Some of these Samaritans believed because of the saying of the woman; and I suppose that, in the Christian Church, a very large number derive their faith through the power of God’s Spirit, from the personal witness of others who have been converted. Now look, dear friends, all of you, at this woman, and be encouraged to use your personal testimony for Christ. She was the spiritual mother of many a Samaritan believer, yet she was a woman of bad character. An ill savour was about her name; everybody in Sychar must have looked upon her as a dangerous person, of fickle love, and of foul ways; and yet, after she had found Christ, she did not hesitate to tell her neighbours about him, and God did not refuse to bless her testimony. I believe that there are thousands of persons, whom no man would ordain, but who are ordained of God, for all that; and there are many whom we should say that the Church could not employ, whom the great Head of the Church employs, and employs largely, too. What if you have been converted from great sin? Be careful and watchful that you sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto you; but let not shame, with regard to the past, make you ashamed to confess the Christ of the present, and to own that he has wrought a great work upon you. Here was a poor fallen woman, and yet, after her conversion, she became a missionary of Christ to the city of Sychar. She was quite an unofficial person altogether; she does not appear to have been called a sister of mercy, or to have put on any peculiar garb; but she ran straight away to the people with whom she had lived, and perhaps to the very men with whom she had sinned. She went to tell the story that Christ had come to her, and had given to her that living water, whereof, if a man shall drink, he shall never thirst again. Well, believer, if no man sends thee, go all the same, for God sends thee. Perhaps no man has laid his hands upon thee; but of what use is the laying on of hands? Full often, I fear it is only empty hands laid on empty heads; so, if no man has laid his hands on thee, go without the laying on of hands, in the name of him who has laid his pierced hand upon thee, and said unto thee, “Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.”

If thou sayest, “What shall be my message?” let thy message be thine own personal testimony, what thou hast thyself seen, and heard, and tasted, and handled, and felt of the good Word of God. I do not suppose that this woman arranged her discourse under three heads, or that she had an exordium and a peroration, and all that; but she just went to the men of the city, and said, “Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?” That was her little sermon; and often and often she repeated it, over and over again she spoke out, and bore her personal testimony, and so she brought the men of Sychar to Christ. “Go home,” said Christ to one whom he had healed, “go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee.” It is wonderful how attractive a personal narrative is. If you begin to explain to some people the doctrines of the gospel, your audience will diminish one by one; but tell them your own experience of the power of Christ, and they will listen as listened the wedding guest when “the ancient mariner” laid his hand upon him, and detained him, and told him that strange legend of the sea. You will have attentive hearers when you speak about your own dealings with Christ, the wonders that Christ has wrought in you and for you, and of which you can testify because they are your own experience. That is, in many a case, the nativity of faith. The mother tells her child, the husband tells his wife, the brother tells his sister; oftener still, the sister tells her brother. One man communicates it to his fellow-workmen; a gentleman speaks of it in the drawing-room to those of his own class; and so faith is born in other hearts as the result of the personal testimony of believers.

But, dear friends, there are some persons who do not seem as if they ever would be converted by that means. Personal testimony evidently fails with them, as it did with some of these Samaritans. What then remains? Why, it will suffice if personal testimony leads the way, and excites attention to the subject. Then, if the man be wise, he asks for time and thought; and our Lord Jesus is always ready to attend to those who are anxious about spiritual matters, but are not quick to believe. Two days did he remain in Sychar, and those unbelievers who were candid sat at his feet, and heard him through the two days. Now, what did Jesus preach during those two days? Turn to your New Testaments, and find the sermon. Even though you look very carefully, you will not discover it, for it is not there; and it is a very curious thing that, when the woman preached, we have notes of her sermon; but when Christ preached, we are not told what he said. Very remarkable is it that, frequently, we have those discourses of Christ which did not convert anybody, and we have not those discourses which did convert people. Why is that? I suppose that the Holy Spirit gives us the discourses which were rejected in order to let us see that there was no fault in the sermon, but that the fault was in the people; but as for those that were received, he simply tells us the result, and does not state the particular form of the discourse. I would infinitely rather preach sermons that win souls, and are then forgotten, than go on preaching and having my discourses printed from week to week, and hear of no result therefrom. Happily, I have not to choose either alternative; but these people, who were not persuaded to believe by the witness of the woman, were converted through hearing Christ himself.

“Well,” says one, “but we cannot personally come to Christ now.” No, I know that you cannot; but you can do what is very much like it. I recommend every man who finds faith to be a difficult thing, to carefully read through the four Gospels, asking the Holy Spirit to enable him to believe what is there recorded and revealed. I usually find that the greatest doubters are the people who do not read the Bible. Holy Scripture has within itself a mighty convincing power; and when men lie a-soak in it, it soon penetrates into their very souls. A man says, “I cannot believe;” and yet he does not read or hear about the very thing that is to be believed. He keeps out of the way of it, and yet says, “I cannot believe it.” If there is something in the newspaper to-day, about which you felt compelled to say, “Other people seem to believe it; but, somehow, I am unable to do so; I should be very glad to believe it, but I cannot;” what would you do? You would read the statement again; you would refer to any other account that would be likely to confirm it; you would candidly examine the whole affair to see whether it was true or not. Yet how few-how very, very few-have thus come to Holy Scripture itself, and virtually listened to Jesus himself, and then have gone away and still said, “We do not believe.” Unless they are really given up to hardness of heart, the result, in every case, seems to be that, when they search the Scriptures, and seek to know what Christ did and said, they are soon subdued by his sweet power, and are found sitting at his feet, believing in his name. If anybody has not done this, and yet remains an unbeliever, I charge his unbelief upon himself as his own fault and sin. If I will not examine the evidence, I am to blame if I do not believe the truth.

Do you ask, “What evidence shall I examine?” I say again, examine the documents themselves; let Christ speak for himself. “Had I not better read a ‘Life of Christ’?” Listen: there is no “Life of Christ” extant but the one written by the four evangelists. All the attempts that have been made at lives of Christ, whatever value they may have, are not biographies of Christ. They are somebody’s idea of what he may have been. We need no other “Life of Christ” than the fourfold one given to us in the Gospels. Those inspired evangelists have told us all we ought to wish to know; and if you read those Books,-not men’s books which have been written upon those Books,-I believe that, through the blessing of God the Holy Spirit, you will yet be able to say, with these Samaritans, “Now we believe.” God grant that it may be so! It is in this way that faith is often born. Holy Scripture is the Bethlehem of faith. There is this blessed child brought forth; and happy are they who take it, and nurse it, that it may grow.

It is possible that there were some of the Samaritans who believed, and who, when they said to the woman, “Now we believe, not because of thy saying, for we have heard him ourselves,” meant that they did, at first, believe because of the woman’s saying, but, after a while, they outgrew that first stage of faith, and they came to believe in Jesus still more strongly because they had heard him themselves.

This was a higher form of faith. The beginnings of faith are as a spider’s web. It would be difficult to say how little a thing faith may be at first. I doubt not that many believe the Bible because they were always taught by their parents that it is the Word of God; although they have never thoroughly examined that question for themselves. Some have believed the truth, at first, because their minister preached it. Well, I would not discourage even that form of faith, for it may be like a very tiny thread which may be fastened to a string, and the string may be tied to a rope, and the rope be attached to a cable; and, at last, the shipwrecked mariner may thus be saved from drowning. Anything that links men to Christ may, nevertheless, be overruled of God to their salvation. When that woman said, concerning our Lord, “If I may but touch his clothes, I shall be made whole,” I fear that there was some superstition in the notion; but, nevertheless, Christ overlooked that, and, seeing the real faith that lay hidden underneath, took care that it should live. Do not discourage anything that tends towards faith in Christ; but it is a grand thing when men grow, by God’s grace, till they can say, “Now I do not believe simply because of what my dear mother taught me; I do not believe merely because of what my minister preached; I do not believe because of any human being at all; but I believe because I have heard Christ for myself, I have had personal dealings with him; and, now, ‘I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.’ ”

The faith that sprang from Christ’s own testimony would also be much more vivid faith. The other day, there was a meeting held to protest against the barbarities inflicted on our Jewish brethren. All the speakers spoke very strongly; but if any one of you had seen what has been done, and had come fresh from the deeds of blood, I warrant that you would have spoken very intensely indeed. Your indignation would have flamed fiercely if you had seen the homes of the people burned down, and men murdered and women ravished, for the sight of the cruelties and abominations would have affected you far more than merely hearing about them. So, when faith gets to deal with Christ for herself,-when she sees sin forgiven,-when she feels the weight taken from her troubles,-when she realizes the great possessions of joy which Christ has given to her,-to her herself,-then she becomes much more vivid and truly living than the faith that rests simply upon the testimony of others.

And, beloved, as our faith becomes more vivid, so also it becomes more independent. We need more independent Christian people in the present day. I hope that we are growing a race of them here; and I pray that we may grow far more of them. I have seen young people, and, for the matter of that, old people, too, behave excellently, and seem to be admirable Christians whilst they have lived here in the midst of other warm-hearted believers; but they have gone down into the country to live, and it has been very grievous to see how cold-hearted they have become,-how some of them have even at last forsaken the assemblies of God’s house; and, if they have not utterly turned aside, yet they have been very different from their former selves. Beloved, if you have seen Christ yourself, and are truly one with him, you will live with him when all Christian association is withdrawn. Look at many of the houses in our London streets. If a giant were to pull one of them out of the middle of the row, they would all come tumbling down, they only stand because they lean on one another. But Christians should be detached houses;-no, semidetached,-for they must be attached to Christ;-but they ought to stand alone, apart from men, because of their living faith in him.

This kind of faith has grown beyond that which was at first exercised, and it has become broader. If you will kindly look at the chapter, you will notice that all the woman could tell the men was this, “Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?” But these men had learned more than that, for they had listened to Jesus himself. They wondered, at first, that he, being a Jew, should care for them; but, by-and-by, it darted into their mind that he had not come to be the Saviour of Jews alone; so they said, “We have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.” Oh, that was grand, broad faith,-when they saw that this Christ was not the Jews’ Christ alone, but the Christ of the Samaritans,-the Christ of the Gentiles, too,-the Saviour of sinners all over the world! May your faith and mine, dear friends, grow broad! May we believe for others! May we hope for others! May we expect to see God’s salvation extending even unto the ends of the earth; and, moved by this faith, may we be stirred up to go out and find the lost sheep, that we may bring them to the great Shepherd, that he may fold them in safety by his tender care! Let us be so much with Christ that we may catch his spirit, and that our faith may grow exceedingly, and our love to all the saints be increased.

The Lord give his blessing, for Jesus’ sake! Amen.

Exposition by C. H. Spurgeon

JOHN 4:1-42

Verses 1-6. When therefore the Lord knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John, (though Jesus himself baptized not, but his disciples,) he left Judæa, and departed again into Galilee. And he must needs go through Samaria. Then cometh he to a city of Samaria, which is called Sychar, near to the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Now Jacob’s well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied with his journey, sat thus on the well: and it was about the sixth hour.

Do not be surprised, dear brethren, if you sometimes grow weary in the Lord’s work. I trust that, even then, you will not be weary of it, but that you will believe that your blessed Master can still use even his tired servants, and bless their labours. The Lord Jesus Christ wrought great marvels even when he sat wearily on the brink of Jacob’s well; and you, perhaps, are at this moment as fatigued and worn as you well can be; yet, will you not awaken all the energies of your soul if you should see an opportunity of doing good, even if it should be to some poor fallen woman, as in the case here mentioned? It is a blessed thing never to be too tired to pray, and never to be too tired to speak to an anxious enquirer.

7. There cometh a woman of Samaria to draw water:

Providence was at work so that, when Christ reached the well, this woman was on her way thither. It was very late in the day for anyone to go to draw water; but, probably, the other women, who went to the well early in the morning, were not willing to associate with her, so she had to go by herself. Late as she was, however, she was all in good time, for she reached the spot just when Christ was waiting to bless her.

7, 8. Jesus saith unto her, Give me to drink. (For his disciples were gone away unto the city to buy meat.)

Or else they might have drawn water from the well to refresh him.

9, 10. Then saith the woman of Samaria unto him, How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, which am a woman of Samaria? for the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans. Jesus answered and said unto her, If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.

See the deadly mischief of ignorance concerning spiritual things. If she had known, she would have asked, and Christ would have given; but the first link was missing; and, hence, the rest of the chain was not drawn on. Sometimes, all that people need is a little wise instruction, and they will then trust the Saviour; God grant that we may ever be ready to give it! Alas! there are some who need much more than that; but Christ could truly say to this Samaritan woman, “If thou hadst known, thou wouldst have asked, and I would have given.” O dear hearers, do not perish through ignorance! You have your Bibles; then, search them. You have a gospel ministry among you; take care that you give diligent heed to what you hear from the servants of the Lord.

11. The woman saith unto him, Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep: from whence then hast thou that living water?

Christ told the woman that he could give her living water, but it puzzled her to know how he could get at it. The well where they had met was deep, and he had nothing to draw the water out of it; how, then, could he go deeper still to get the living water of which he had spoken? She could not understand his simile, and to this day it is the same with many of our hearers. The simplest language of God’s ministers goes right over the heads of the people; they take our words literally, when they ought to see that they are spiritual, and, on the other hand, I have known them spirit them away when they ought to be accepted literally. Such is the perversity of man’s mind that, often, he will not understand the truth.

12-14. Art thou greater than our father Jacob, which gave us the well, and drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle? Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.

These words set forth the wonderful nature of divine grace. They certainly greatly err who suppose that we can ever receive it, and yet, after all, be left to perish without it. Nay; but when it is once imparted to us, it continues to spring up within us, like a well that never runs dry. It is the living and incorruptible seed, “which liveth and abideth for ever.” It is of the very nature and essence of the grace of God that it is indestructible, it cannot be taken away from the heart in which it has been implanted by the Holy Spirit.

15. The woman saith unto him, Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw.

This was an ignorant prayer on the part of the woman; but it is one which I would commend to every enlightened soul: “Sir, give me this water.” Do you want a form of prayer? Here is one for you: “Sir,”-Lord,-“give me this water.” The Lord is ready to hear that petition, and to give this precious living water even now.

16, 17. Jesus saith unto her, Go, call thy husband, and come hither. The woman answered and said, I have no husband.

The Lord Jesus knew all about her character, and here he touched the weakest point in it. His plainest teaching had so far missed the mark, for he had not reached her conscience; but he was about to do so.

17, 18. Jesus said unto her, Thou hast well said, I have no husband: for thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: in that saidst thou truly.

You can imagine her astonishment-her blank amazement as the secret story of her life was thus repeated to her.

19. The woman saith unto him, Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet.

It would have been a sign of better things if she had said, “Lord, I perceive that I am a sinner;” but that confession had to be made a little farther on. How apt people are rather to think about the preacher than about themselves! If half the criticisms which are passed upon ministers of Christ were bestowed upon the hearers themselves, how much sooner they might receive the blessing they need! The woman then asked our Lord a question about religion which was strangely out of place from such a woman as she was. Yet, often, those who have least morality will have the most ceremonialism and concern about the externals of worship.

20. Our fathers worshipped in this mountain;-

This Mount Gerizim;-

20. And ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.

This she thought was a very important matter.

21. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father.

“There shall be an abolition of all specially-holy shrines, for all places shall be alike holy. There shall be a putting an end to all your traditions, and your forms of worship, for God shall be worshipped after another fashion than that which is merely formal and superficial.

22-26. Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him. God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. The woman saith unto him, I know that Messias cometh, which is called Christ: when he is come, he will tell us all things. Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he.

That majestic word of Christ carried conviction with it; the woman believed it there and then.

27, 28. And upon this came his disciples, and marvelled that he talked with the woman: yet no man said, What seekest thou? or, Why talkest thou with her? The woman then left her waterpot,-

She was too glad, too happy, to recollect so poor a thing as a waterpot. It was much to her before, but very little now. As one who finds a precious pearl forgets some trifle that he carried in his hand, so she “left her waterpot,”-

28, 29. And went her way into the city, and saith to the men, Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?

Her notion was, that when Christ came, he would tell all things. Here was a man who revealed her innermost secrets;-was not he the Christ?

30-32. Then they went out of the city, and came unto him. In the mean while his disciples prayed him, saying, Master, eat. But he said unto them, I have meat to eat that ye know not of.

O beloved, there is a wonderful fascination about the blessed work of soul-seeking! When one is really anxious to bring a sinner to the Saviour, eating and drinking are often forgotten. As the hunter of the chamois, in the heat of the chase, leaps from crag to crag, and is oblivious of danger, and forgets all about the time for his meals, so he that hunts after a precious soul, to win it for Christ, forgets everything else. He is altogether absorbed in this holy pursuit; the Master was more absorbed in it than any of us are ever likely to be.

33-35. Therefore said the disciples one to another, Hath any man brought him ought to eat? Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work. Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.

That was probably an old Oriental proverb, used by lazy men who never thought it time to get to work; but Jesus said, “Do not use the idler’s language any longer; now, at once, there is work for you to do.”

36-42. And he that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal: that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together. And herein is that saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth. I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour; other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours. And many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman, which testified, He told me all that ever I did. So when the Samaritans were come unto him, they besought him that he would tarry with them: and he abode there two days. And many more believed because of his own word; and said unto the woman, Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.

The Lord bring us all to trust in him, for his dear name’s sake! Amen.

Hymns from “Our Own Hymn Book”-766, 547, 549.

SECOND-HAND

A Sermon

Intended for Reading on Lord’s-day, May 28th, 1899,

delivered by

C. H. SPURGEON,

at the metropolitan tabernacle, newington,

On Lord’s-day Evening, February 12th, 1882.

“Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee of me?”-John 18:34.

I explained, this morning,* why our Saviour put that question to Pilate. The Roman governor had asked him. “Art thou the King of the Jews?” And Jesus as good as said to him, “Have you, of your own knowledge, seen anything in me that looks like setting up to be a king in opposition to Cæsar? You intend, by asking me that question, to enquire whether I have led a rebellion against your government, or the imperial authority which you represent. Now, has there been anything which you have observed which would have led you to make this enquiry, or do you only ask it because of what the Jews have been saying in their enmity against me?” You will see, dear friends, that our Lord asked this question in order that he might get from Pilate’s own lips the acknowledgment that he had not seen any sign of sedition or rebellion in him, and that it might be proved that the charge had been brought to Pilate by those outside, and had not come from the Roman governor himself.

We will, now, forget Pilate for a while, for I want to use this question in two ways with reference to ourselves. First, I shall utilize it as a warning against second-hand cavils at Christ and his gospel. Some people have a large stock of them, and we might say to each one of these cavillers, “Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee?” Then, in the second place, I shall use the text as a warning against all second-hand religion, pressing this question home upon each one who speaks up for Christ, “Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee?”

We will begin with the opponents of the Lord Jesus, and consider our text, first, as a warning against second-hand cavils at Christ and his gospel.

There are a great many people in the world who really do not know why they oppose religion; and if you ask them the reason, they repeat some old bit of scandal, some stale slander upon Jesus and his cross, and they give that as their answer. I firmly believe that there are thousands, who are ranked among the opposers of the gospel, who have not anything to say against Christ of their own knowledge; but others have told them something or other, and they go on repeating and reiterating the old exploded obsolete objections that have been demolished thousands of times, and I suppose they and others of their kind will keep on doing the same thing right to the end of time.

As soon as ever Jesus Christ’s gospel was launched upon the world’s sea, it had to encounter opposing winds, and storms, and tempests. Like a scarred veteran, the gospel has had battle after battle to fight. In our Lord’s own day, it was opposed most vigorously. His apostles found that, wherever they went, their feet were dogged by those who railed at Jesus and his Word; and when the apostles had all fallen asleep, the early churches found that they had need of an order of men who became the apologists for the gospel, and who bravely stood up to defend it against the attacks of divers heathen philosophers, and sceptics, and heretics who arose wherever the truth was preached. Everywhere, there was opposition to the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, and his servants girded up their loins to do battle for him and for his truth.

That great campaign has continued even down to this day, and there is this very remarkable fact about it, that, at the present moment, most of the objections that are brought against the gospel are those that were answered and silenced some hundreds of years ago; and, even when they appeared, all those centuries back, they were then only reproductions of some older objections which had been answered, and, as the defenders of the faith thought, had been trampled out, like sparks of fire trodden under foot. But, somehow, an ill wind has begun to blow again, and the fire, which some hoped was finally extinguished, has burned up once more. Originality in scepticism has almost ceased to be; we scarcely ever hear anything fresh in the way of heresy nowadays. We are troubled with the very errors which our forefathers answered a hundred years ago; yet the adversaries of the truth go on cleaning and sharpening again their blunted shafts, that they may once more shoot them at the great shield of faith, which is impervious to their puny assaults, for it can quench even the most fiery darts of the devil himself. The modern arrows of scepticism will be broken against that glorious shield, yet they will probably be gathered up by another generation that will follow the present one, and the heretics and objectors in the future will do just as their fathers did before them. I want, at this time, to put to any caviller whom I may be addressing, the question of our Lord to Pilate, “Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee?”

And, first, I ask you to observe that there are many unreasonable prejudices. Some persons have great prejudices against the Bible. I will not repeat what they say; but I should like to ask every person who thinks ill of this blessed Book, “Have you read the Bible through, and read it thoroughly? Have you studied it? Are your objections your own? Come, now; did you make them yourself?” It is almost always found that objections are like the axe the young prophet was using, they are borrowed; and often, they are objections against a Book which has not been read at all, and which has not been allowed to exercise its own influence upon the heart and the judgment of the person who is prejudiced against it to his own hurt. Other people have told men such-and-such things, so they shut the Book, and refuse to look into it for themselves.

There are other people who are prejudiced against public worship. You see, I am starting at the very beginning, those matters with regard to religion which are elementary. Of course, we are told that we shut ourselves up on a Sunday in these dreary buildings of ours, and here we sit, in a horrible state of misery, listening to the most awful twaddle that ever was taught, our singing being nothing better than droning, and the whole of our worship being something very terrible! If I were to read to you the descriptions of an English Sabbath which I have sometimes seen in newspapers, they might make you almost weep tears of blood to think that we poor souls should suffer so much as we do; only you know that we are altogether unconscious of any such suffering. We really have been under the notion that we very much enjoyed ourselves while worshipping the Lord in his house. Many of us have the idea that the Sabbath is the happiest day in all the week to us, and that, when we hear the gospel preached, it is sweeter than music to us, and makes our hearts leap within us for very joy. Of course, we are very much obliged to our friends for telling us how dull and how unhappy we are, and for wishing us to be in a better condition. We can only say that, not being enabled to perceive any of these sorrows, we would advise them to retain their pity, and exercise it upon themselves, for they certainly need it far more than we do. To any of you who make remarks of the kind I have indicated, I say,-Do your difficulties concerning public worship really arise out of your attending the house of God,-out of your hearing the gospel preached,-out of your joining in the songs and praises of God’s people? Oh, no! it is those people who never come to our services who believe the Sabbath to be dull, the house of God to be dreary, and the preaching of the gospel to be a monotonous sound from which every sensible man would escape. I put the question of my text to every person who is prejudiced against the Bible, and prejudiced against our public worship in God’s house, “Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee?”

Sometimes, the prejudice concerns the preacher. I will not say that it is so about myself, though I have had in my time more than my fair share of it. “Hear him?” says one; “I would not go across the road to listen to such a fellow.” Many have said that, and the preacher, whoever he may be, is condemned without a hearing. If the objector were asked to give a reason for his prejudice, he might answer by quoting the old lines,-

“I do not like you, Dr. Fell;

The reason why, I cannot tell;

But this I know, and know full well,-

I do not like you, Dr. Fell.”

I should like to say to everybody who is prejudiced against any servant of Christ, “Sayest thou this of thyself?” Those absurd stories about the preacher,-did you really hear them yourself, or did somebody tell you them? Would you like to be judged by the mere idle tittle-tattle of the street or of the newspapers? And if you would not, then be an honest, reasonable man, and at least give the servant of God a hearing before you condemn him or his message; and, take my word for it, the most-abused preacher is very likely to be the very man whom God will bless the most. Not the one who is most praised, but the one who is most censured by the world, is probably the man who has been most faithful to his Master and to the gospel committed to his charge. At any rate, be honest enough to reply to the question which our Lord put to Pilate, “Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee?”

There is a remark sometimes made, and I fear it is a very common one, “Oh, I would not be a Christian, I would not be religious, for it makes men so dreadfully miserable!” Now, friend, sayest thou this of thyself, or did somebody else tell it thee? Come, now, you say that religion is such a miserable thing; have you tried it for yourself? Have you experienced the misery that comes out of prayer,-out of faith,-out of repentance,-out of love to God,-out of being pardoned,-out of having a good hope of heaven? Have you ever proved what that dreadful misery is? I think, if you had ever really tested these things for yourself, your verdict would, be the very reverse, and you would join with us in singing the lines that express what many of us most firmly believe about this matter,-

“’Tis religion that can give

Sweetest pleasures while we live;

’Tis religion must supply

Solid comfort when we die.”

Yet you go on repeating that slander upon religion though you cannot prove it to be true, and might easily learn its falseness. Do let me appeal to you. Had you a godly mother? “Yes,” you say, “and it was her life that prevents my being altogether an unbeliever.” I thought so; but, if I remember her aright, she was a quiet good soul who, in her home, tried to make everybody happy; and though she had not much pleasure in her son, for he was wayward and wilful, yet there was no unkindness on her lip, the law of love always ruled the house. She was a weak and feeble creature, who derived but slender gratification from any of the outward enjoyments of life; but she had a deep, secret spring of peace and joy which kept her calm, and quiet, and happy; and now that she has gone to be with God, she has left a gleam of sunlight still behind in her sweet memory. You did not get from your mother, nor from other godly friends, your belief that religion makes men miserable; and I venture to say that, so far as you have had any actual personal observation of it, you have been inclined to come to quite the opposite verdict, and to confess that, though you do not know how it is, yet, somehow or other, godliness does give, to the people who possess it, peace of mind, and happiness of heart, and usefulness of life.

There is another slander that is spread abroad very widely, and that is, that the doctrine of the grace of God-the doctrine which we try to preach from this pulpit,-has no sanctifying effect,-that, on the contrary, it is likely to lead people into sin,-that if we preach, “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life,” and do not preach up good works as the way of salvation, it is clear that such teaching will lead people into sin. Clear, is it? It is not so to me; but, my friend, will you answer this question, “Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee?” Is it not a matter of history that there never have been stricter-living men than the Puritans? What is the great quarrel against John Calvin himself but that, when he ruled in Geneva, he was too stern and too exacting in his requirements? It is an odd thing,-is it not?-that these doctrines of grace should, on the one hand, make men too strict as a matter of fact, and yet that the wiseacres who object to them should say that these doctrines are likely to lead into sin those who accept them? It is not found to be so by those who believe them. Let me again appeal to any candid objector. My dear sir, did you ever prove what it is to believe in the great love of God to you,-that, for the sake of his dear Son, out of pure, unmerited grace, he has chosen you, and saved you, and appointed you to eternal life? Did you ever believe that, and then feel, as a natural consequence, that you would go and live in sin? I know that you never did, but that it was quite the reverse. “Here,” said some boys to a companion, “we are going to rob an orchard; come along with us, Jack.” “No,” said he, “my father would not approve of such a thing.” “But your father is very fond of you, and never beats you as our fathers do.” “Yes,” said the boy, “my father loves me very much, and I love him very much, and that is the reason why I am not going to rob the orchard, and so to grieve him.” Now, you believe in the beating of the boys by the rod of the law, do you not? And we, on the other hand, feel that, because God loves us, and will in his infinite mercy continue to love us, therefore we must keep out of sin as much as we possibly can. We cannot do that horrible thing which would grieve his blessed Spirit. So I ask you, as truthful men, not to repeat that old slander concerning the doctrines of grace leading to sin, until you have really had some reason to assert it because of what you yourselves have witnessed in the lives of Christian people. Do not say it again until you can truly say it from your own experience or observation; do not repeat it simply because others tell it to you.

Yes, and there are some who say that there is no power in prayer,-that we may pray, if we like, but that we cannot change the purposes of God,-that the laws of nature are fixed and immutable, and, therefore, to pray is a piece of absurdity. “Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee?” I will speak personally to you. Did you ever try to pray? Did you ever put this matter to the test,-whether God will hear prayer or no? I do not think you can have put it to a fair test, and I would like you to see whether God will or will not hear even your prayer if you cry to him. If any say to me, “God does not hear prayer,” I have scarcely the patience to give them an answer. I live from day to day crying to God for this or that favour which I receive as certainly and as constantly as ever my sons had their meals when they sat at my table. I knew how to give good gifts to my children, and I know that my Heavenly Father gives good gifts to me. My evidence, of course, is only that of one man, and it may not suffice to convince others, though many of you here could add your testimony to mine; but I should like all objectors just to give prayer a fair trial before they are quite so sure about the inefficacy of it. Let them-see whether real prayer, offered in the name of Jesus, will not be heard even in their case. Certain I am that there is not anywhere on the face of the globe a praying man who does not bear this testimony,-that God hears him. And if any say, “We do not pray, and do not believe that God hears prayer,” what evidence have you to bring? You are out of court altogether, for you know nothing about the matter; but the man who does pray, and then says, “God hears me,” is the man to be a witness, and the one who has a right to be heard. I have told you, more than once, what the Irishman said when there were five witnesses to prove that he had committed murder. He said to the judge, “You must not condemn me on their evidence; there are only five people here who saw me do it, but I can bring fifty people who did not see me do it;” but that was no evidence at all; and, in like manner, there are many who say, “You bring a certain number of people, who pray, to prove that God hears them; but we can bring ten times as many, who do not pray, and who do not get heard.” What has that to do with the matter? Where is the evidence? You say it not of yourself but merely repeat, second-hand, what has been said by others, so often, and so foolishly, that it sickens one to hear it.

It is beginning to be questioned, in many quarters, nowadays, whether there is any real effect produced by prayer, except that of exciting certain pious emotions in the breasts of those who pray. This is a very pretty statement! We ought to be extremely obliged to those superior persons who allow that even so much may be done! I wonder they do not assert that prayer is ridiculous, or hypocritical, or immoral. Their moderation puts us under obligations. And yet I do not know: when I look again at their admission, I thank them for nothing, for they as good as call us fools. Do they think that we perform a useless exercise merely for the sake of exciting pious emotions? We must be grievous idiots if we can receive benefit from a senseless function. We are not willing to whistle to the wind for the sake of the exercise. We should not be content to go on praying to a God who could be proved to be both deaf and dumb. We have still some little common sense left, despite what our judicious friends consider to be our fanaticism. We are sure that we obtain answers to prayer. Of this fact I am certain, and I solemnly declare that I have received of the Lord that which I have asked at his hands. I am not alone in such testimony, for I am associated with multitudes of men and women who bear witness to the same fact, and declare that they sought the Lord, and he heard them. Take care, brethren and sisters, to record all instances of answered prayer, so as to leave this unbelieving generation without excuse. Accumulate the facts, and demonstrate the grand truth. Multiply the testimonies, till even the philosophers are obliged to admit both the phenomena and the deduction rightly drawn from them.

There is one other gross slander to which I would reply, and that is, a saying that goes round among troubled consciences-that Christ will not receive sinners,-that the very guilty cannot be saved,-that Christ can forgive and deliver up to a certain point; but if you get beyond that, he is no longer willing to pardon. Dear hearer, has that foolish and wicked notion entered thy head? Then, I ask thee, “Sayest thou this thing of thyself?” Didst thou ever prove it to be true? Hast thou ever sought his face? Hast thou cried to him for mercy? “Yes,” you say, “I have.” And then, further, have you thrown yourself at his feet, trusting him to save you, and have you been refused? I know you have not; there was never a sinner yet, who fell down before him, and determined to lie there and perish if he did not speak a word of mercy, to whom the Lord has not, sooner or later, spoken the grace-word which has sent that poor sinner on his way rejoicing. I would at least like you to go and see whether Christ will receive you or not, before you say that he will not do so. Say not that the door of his mercy is shut, but go in while it is still open. If he casts you out, then he will have broken his word, for he has said, “Him that cometh to me, I will in no wise cast out.” Do not give him the lie, and say that he will cast you out till you have yourself proved that it is so; and that, I know, will never be the case. I am afraid that there is another being who has been whispering that vile insinuation into your ear, and he is your archenemy, who is seeking your destruction, and therefore he has come, and told you this falsehood against the infinitely-loving and gracious Saviour. Believe him not; but come even now, and put your trust in Jesus, and you shall find that he will give to you eternal life.

I have thus examined the question of my text with reference to the opponents of the gospel, and I shall now leave that part of the subject, praying the Holy Spirit to bless it to all whom it may concern.

Now, in the second place, I am going to speak briefly, but with much earnestness, to the many here present who are friends of the gospel, but who have only a second-hand religion, if they have any at all. I want to have a word with you, dear friends, about this matter. You and I have been talking a great deal about Christ. Now, have we been simply quoting what others have said? Have we been making extracts from other people’s experience; or is what we have said something that we can say of ourselves, and not what others have told us?

For, brethren, first, a second-hand testimony for Christ is a powerless thing. Take a man-as I am afraid is often done,-with no grace in his heart, and send him to Oxford or Cambridge, with the view of making him a parson; teach him the sciences, and languages, and mathematics, and give him a degree. His friends want to get a living for him, and the bishop’s chaplain proceeds to examine him. The first question ought to be, Is this young man a Christian? Is he truly converted? Does he know the Lord? Does he understand in his own soul the things he is going to preach to others? For, if he does not, what good can he do in the Christian ministry? Perhaps he is sent to a school of theology, to learn the various systems of doctrine. He must read the judicious Hooker, he must study Jeremy Taylor, he must take lessons in elocution and rhetoric. Then, possibly, his friends buy him some lithographed sermons that he may read, and they get him some books, that he may make extracts from them to put into the sermons he preaches. Suppose that man is all the while unconverted, suppose that he does not know anything about the working of the grace of God in his own soul, what is the good of him as a teacher of others? No good at all; at any rate, at the best, he may be only as good as one of those newly-invented phonographs which can repeat what is spoken into them. This man can read out what he has selected from other books; but that is all. We will suppose that he is a very decent sort of fellow,-an amiable gentleman, well-instructed, well-behaved, and so on; but all that he has to say is what other people have told him.

But now put into that man’s pulpit, only for one Lord’s-day, a preacher who has known what it is to feel the burden of sin, and to have it removed by faith in Jesus. Let him begin to speak to the people, in downright earnest, about the pangs and sorrows of true repentance; let him tell them about their need of the new birth, and about his experience of obtaining that great blessing; and how, by sovereign grace, he was brought out of the darkness into the light, and even from death to life. Let that man be moved to speak of the peace of pardon through the precious blood, and of the joys of heaven laid up for all believers, and then the people will wake up, I will warrant you. This is something very different from the preaching to which they have been accustomed, and they will soon feel the power of it.

Yet the Lord sometimes uses even a preacher who does not himself understand the truth he proclaims. I know a man, who went and heard a certain minister preach, or rather, read a sermon, and it was such a good one that the hearer’s conscience was smitten by it. The discourse was about the new birth; and, the next morning, the man went off to the clergyman, and said, “Sir, I want you to explain this matter further to me, for I am dreadfully distressed by what you preached last night.” What, think you, did this preacher say? He said, “Well, Jonathan, I am sure I never meant to cause anybody any uneasiness; what was it that gave you such trouble?” “Why,” replied he, “it was that part of the sermon where you said that we must be born again.” So the preacher said, “Well, here is the discourse. You see, by the dates upon it, that I have used it thirteen times before, so I could not have made it with any special view to your case. I am very sorry, indeed, that it caused you any discomfort, and I will never preach it again if it brings people into trouble in this style.” That was all the help the poor man could get from the parson, so he went out, and found a true servant of God, who knew the truth himself, and was not a second-hand retailer of it, and, through conversation with him, and prayer, and the reading of the Scriptures, he was brought into peace and liberty. I need hardly tell you that he does not go to hear that second-hand preacher now; he listens to a far humbler minister, who, nevertheless, preaches what he has tasted and handled of the good Word of life. Now, if any of you are going to be Sunday-school teachers, or street-preachers, do not begin to talk about what somebody else has told you. Go and say what you yourself know, of a heart first broken by the power of the Holy Spirit, and then bound up by the application of the atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. Tell out your message, in a living way from the heart to the heart, or else your hearers will feel that there is no power about it, however nicely you put the truth, and however sweetly you describe it. There is all the difference between personal testimony to the truth and a parrot-like repetition of it, that there is between the living and the dead. Let us only bear witness to what we do really know, and then no one will need to ask us what our Lord asked Pilate, “Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee?”

Now, further, the same thing is true with regard to professors. We have many friends who come, at different times, to join the church, and their stories greatly vary. Some who come to see me cannot say much, and they think that I shall be very dissatisfied with them because they make a great muddle of their narrative, and there is not much that comes out after all. But the people with whom I am least satisfied are those who reel off their yarn by the yard; they have it all ready to repeat, and everything is arranged as prettily as possible. Yes; and as I listen to it, I know that someone has told them what to say, and they have learned it all for me to hear. But I like far better the testimony that I have to pick out in little bits, but which I know comes fresh from the heart of the trembling convert. Sometimes, it costs the poor soul a tear or a real good cry, and I have to go round about in all manner of ways to get hold of the story at all; but that shows that it is true, and that the man never borrowed it. I like to hear the experience of a believer, when he comes straight out of the world and out of the ways of sin, to confess his faith in Christ. He does not know anything about the terms that Christian people use. He has not learned our phrases; and it is a great delight to hear it all fresh and new. Yet it is always the same story in all the essential parts of it. However strangely he may narrate it, it tallies with that of others in the main points. Take the experience of a Christian man who has been brought up in the sanctuary from his childhood, and extract the pith and marrow of it. Now take the experience of a man who has been a horse-racer, a drunkard, a swearer, but who has been truly converted, and extract the pith of that. Talk to a peer of the realm who has become an heir of the kingdom of heaven, and take the pith of his experience. Now get a chimney-sweep who has been brought to the Lord, and get the pith of his experience; put them all side by side, and you will not know one from the other. There are always the same essential marks,-death, birth, life, food,-Christ in the death, the life, the birth, the food,-repentance, faith, joy, the work of the Spirit of God. But it is very sweet to hear the story told in the many different ways in which the converts tell it. The true child of grace is ever the same in heart, although the outward appearance may continually vary.

But, dear friends, whenever you begin to make a profession of religion, take care that you never profess more than you really possess. Go just as far as you can go yourself, by the grace of God, and do not repeat what others tell you. To borrow another man’s experience is dishonest. If it is not mine, how dare I say that it is? It is also very apt to be self-deceptive, for a man may repeat another person’s experience until he really thinks he did pass through it himself, just as a man may repeat a lie until it almost ceases to be a lie because he himself gets to believe what at first he knew was not true. That borrowing of the experience of others is usually unavailing with those who have had much to do with men, for we who do know the Lord, and are familiar with his people, very readily trip up those who only repeat what they have learned. Freemasons recognize one another by various grips and signs. A man may, perhaps, find out one of the grips, but he does not learn them all, and at last he gets caught, and people say to him, “You are pretending to be what you really are not.” Take, again, a man’s handwriting; someone may imitate my writing for a long while, but, at last, he does not copy some peculiar dash, or stroke, or mark, which is characteristic of my style, and those who know say, “That is not Mr. Spurgeon’s writing; it is a forgery.” So there is a something-a sort of freemasonry-about Christianity. People may learn some of our grips, and signs, and passwords; but, by-and-by, they make a blunder, and we say, “Ah! you are an impostor.” They may try to write after the fashion of a child of God, and they may make the pot-hooks, and hangers, and straight strokes; but, as they get on further, there is a something or other that comes out in the long run, which proves that they are only copyists after all. Therefore, I say to you, dear friends,-Do not attempt to repeat what others have told you about experimental godliness, but let your testimony only consist of what you can truly say out of your own heart and soul.

Let this be the case also with regard to every man, whether he makes a profession of religion or not. May God grant that all that we think we know, we may really know in our own souls, and not have because we have borrowed it from others! In religion, proxies and sponsors are altogether out of place. I pray you never to be guilty of that horrible blasphemy-for I think that it is nothing less than that,-of standing up before God, and promising that a child shall keep his commandments, and walk in the same all the days of its life. Remember that, in religion, there are certain things that must be personal. For instance, every man must be himself born; another person cannot be born for you. In like manner, “Ye must be born again,”-personally, for yourself. There is no possibility of another person experiencing that new birth for you. If a man lives, he must eat for himself. You cannot take my meals for me; it is I myself who must eat them. And we must eat the flesh and drink the blood of Christ by faith, each one for himself or herself; nobody can do it for another. In daily life, each man must be clothed for himself. You may wear silk and satin, you may be dressed in the best broad-cloth; but you cannot be clothed on my behalf, I must be myself dressed, or else go naked. So must each man put on the robe of Christ’s righteousness, or be naked to his shame before God. Every man must repent of his own sin,-make confession of his own sin,-believe in the Lord Jesus Christ for himself,-love God for himself,-obey the Lord for himself; and there is no possibility of any other person, by any means, doing this for you. There must be personal godliness, or else there is no godliness at all. So, whenever you feel inclined to say for yourself, “I believe that I am a Christian; I believe this and I believe that;” let this question come home to you, “Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee?”

And, lastly, brethren and sisters in Christ, let me utter a word specially for your ears. Never get, in your prayers, or in your talk, an inch beyond your actual experience. Our calling is a very high one; and one of the most serious difficulties in the way of ever attaining its greatest height is the impression that we have reached it when we have not. My own impression is, that some brethren might have been well-nigh perfect if they had not thought that they were so already, but they missed the blessing through that very thought. Many a man might have become wise, but he imagined that he had learned wisdom, so he never really was wise. You know that, if you see a man who thinks that he is wise, you say to yourself, “How very foolish he is!” And you speak truly, too. The doorstep of wisdom is a consciousness of ignorance, and the gateway of perfection is a deep sense of imperfection. Paul was never so nearly perfect as when he cried, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” But if he had sat down, and said, “I have attained, and am already perfect,” then would he have been in a fair way of missing the blessing of God. No, dear brothers or sisters, say no more than you can justify. There are many who do that in business; mind that you do not so act in spiritual matters. Look at that shop-window: what a wonderful display! Now go inside the shop; why, there is nothing there! No, for the man has all his goods in the window. You would at once say to yourself, if he wanted to deal with you, “I shall not trust him very deeply.” Ah! and do we not know some who, spiritually, have all their goods in the window? It is a grand thing to have a great stock in reserve. Never mind if it is in the cellar, where you cannot yourself see it; it is none the worse for being out of sight.

The great thing for all Christians is to have a good background, something behind that is real; so that, if you pray, or if you speak to another, you will be prepared to back it up. I remember trying to be a blessing to a very shrewd boy in a Sunday-school class when first I knew the Lord. I told him the gospel: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved.” Then he asked me a straight question, “Teacher, have you believed?” I replied, “Yes, I hope so.” He said, “Don’t you know, teacher? You ought to.” “Yes,” I answered, “yes, I do know; I have believed in Jesus.” “Well, teacher,” he enquired next, “have you been baptized?” I replied, “Yes, I have.” “Then,” said he, “teacher, you are saved.” I said, “I hope so.” “But,” he insisted, “you are.” Just so, and I found that I must say so, too, and that I must not use even Christ’s words unless I meant to back them up by my own consistent character; otherwise I was throwing suspicion on my Master’s veracity. May the Lord bring us up to this point of Christian honesty,-that, when we cannot truthfully say a thing from our own experience, we will be honest enough to resolve, “I shall not say it till I can truly say it.” When you think of a verse of a hymn, and it is a little in advance of your own position, wait till you come up to that point. There are numbers of hymns that I laid by, in that fashion, years ago. I wished that I could sing them, yet they seemed to stick in my throat, and I could not. But my throat has been cleared a good deal lately, and I have been obliged at last to feel that I must have those very hymns, for they have become true to my soul, and have made my experience a very happy one. Do not be in too much of a hurry in spiritual things any more than in temporal affairs. If you cannot eat meat, stick to your milk. Milk is for babes, so keep to milk till you outgrow it. You will choke with that tough bit of meat; you had better leave it for somebody else. Do not find fault with it; it is good for strong men, they do not want to be always drinking milk. Do not deny the strong man his meat, but let him have as much as he likes of it; as for yourself, if you are a babe in grace, keep to your milk diet. “As newborn babes, desire the unadulterated milk of the Word, that ye may grow thereby: if so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious.” But, in all your testimony, do not go beyond what is actually true to yourself, and often let my text lay its hand upon your shoulder, and repeat this searching enquiry, “Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee?”

May God grant a rich blessing to you all, dear friends, for our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake! Amen.

Hymns from “Our Own Hymn Book”-103 (Version II.), 553, 645.