I hope that many who are now present long beyond everything else to be useful to their fellow-creatures. We do not want to go to heaven alone; we are most anxious to lead others to the Saviour. I remember a very remarkable telegram, which was sent from England, by a lady who had sailed from New York with all her children. She landed in England after being shipwrecked, but she had to send to her husband this brief but suggestive telegram, “Saved,-alone.” Ah! that last sad word seemed as if it took almost all the sweetness out of the first one. “Saved alone.” May that never be what we shall have to say as we enter heaven; but may we have the privilege of saying, “Here am I, Father, and the children whom thou hast given me.” May it be my joy to be able to say, “Here am I and all my congregation, saved in the Lord with an everlasting salvation.”

So we begin with the assurance that all of you who know the Lord want to be useful; but, if that is to be the case, preparation is necessary. You say that you are going out to battle, young man, do you? Well, do not be in such a hurry. You have no rifle or sword, you will be in the way of the other soldiers rather than an addition to them. Unless you are, first of all, properly trained, you will certainly make a failure of your soldiering. The man who jumps into the army is not a warrior all at once; there must be drill, there must be a certain course of training, before he can be of any service to the Queen. So is it with Christ’s disciples. He did not send them out to preach directly he called them from their former occupations; but he kept them with himself for a time till they had learned at least some of the lessons they were to impart to others; for how could they teach what they did not know? Can a thing which is not in a man come out of him? And if it has never been put into him, how can it be got out of him? So our Saviour, in the words of our text, encouraged his disciples to proclaim, even upon the housetops, the gospel which he had revealed to them; but he also gave them to understand that, first of all, they had need of preparation before they would be qualified to deliver their message: “What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light: and what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops.”

I want, first, to speak to you, who desire to work for Jesus, concerning his own definition of. an invaluable privilege for all Christians: “What I tell you in darkness,” “what ye hear in the ear.”

From our Lord’s words, I learn that it is the great privilege of Christians to realize, first, that Christ is still alive, and still with his people, still conversing with his chosen ones, still by his Divine Spirit speaking out of his very heart into the hearts of his true disciples. Christ was born an infant, but he is no infant now. Christ died, but he is not dead now. He is risen; he has gone up into his glory; he sits upon the throne of God; but, at the same time, by a very real spiritual presence he is with all his people, as he said to his disciples, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” And there is nothing that can so fit a man for holy service as to have Christ’s eyes looking into his eyes, and reading him through and through, and to have Christ’s pierced hand laid on his heart till the very impress of its wound is there reproduced, filling that heart with a loving grief for others. “Oh!” says one, “I think that I could speak for Christ if that should ever be true to me.” Ah! my friend, you will never speak aright until it is true to you. Not with those mortal eyes will you see him, but your heart shall behold him without any help from those dull optics. Not with your ears shall you hear his voice, but your heart shall attend to his message without the use of those poor impediments of ears. You shall know that he is with you, you shall be sure of it, for his life shall touch your life, his spirit shall flood and overflood your spirit; and then, but not till then, shall you be fit to speak in his name. That is the first part of this invaluable privilege,-we are permitted to realize our Lord’s presence with us personally.

Next, we are enabled to feel Christ’s word as spoken to us: “I tell you.” The message of the gospel is applied by Christ directly and distinctly to our own soul. We do not look for any new revelation, but we do expect the old revelation to be made to our hearts and consciences in all its wondrous power. We expect that the words which Jesus spoke should ring in our souls with such music as they evoked when he first uttered them, and that we should, by the working of his Spirit, feel the force of those words just as they did who heard him with their outward ears; and we shall never fully preach the gospel till then. A man may go to College, he may learn all about the letter of Scripture, but he is no minister of God if he has not sat at Jesu’s feet, and learned of him; and when he has learned of him, and the truth has come home to his heart as his own personal possession given to him by Christ, then shall he speak with more than mortal power, but not till then. Step back into the rear rank, sir, if Christ has never spoken to you thus, and wait there until he has done so. If the Master has given you no message, do not run; what is the use of running if you have nothing to tell? Do you think that you are to make up your own message as you run? Ah! then, you are not Christ’s servant, for his servant waits until he has heard the message from his Master, and then it is both his duty and his privilege to tell it out just as he has heard it: “What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light: and what ye hear in the ear,”-“I myself whispering it into your personal ear, that you may receive it direct from me,-this it is which you are to go and proclaim upon the housetops.”

The text seems to imply that these communications are made to us again and again. There are some of us who are called to spend our whole lives in our Master’s service; and unless we are often alone with him, listening to the message he has for us to deliver, our streams will not continue to run. I thank God that, during the last few weeks, while I have been in the South of France, I have had a blessed period of privately hearing the word afresh from the Master. It has been a constant joy and delight to me to meditate again and again upon the truths which I have preached, to feed upon them in my own soul, and in quiet communion with God to be gathering spiritual stores of nourishment for you, of which, first of all, I had proved the power and preciousness to my own heart. I would earnestly urge all Christian workers to be sure to get some time alone for the prayerful study of the Word. The more of such time that you can get, the better will it be both for yourself and for others. You know that it is impossible for a sower of seed to be always scattering, and never gathering; the seed-basket must be filled again and again, or the sowing must come to an end. You cannot keep on distributing bread and fish to the multitude, as the disciples did, unless, every now and then, you go back to the Master, and say, “My Lord, I need more bread and more fish, for my supply is running short. Give me more, that I may give out more.”

Make such occasions as often as you can. I am glad to see so many of you, my young friends, busy for the Master; but I pray you not to forget that it was Mary, who sat at the Master’s feet, of whom he said that she had chosen that good part which should not be taken away from her. It is well to be like Martha, busy on your Lord’s behalf; but you cannot do without Mary’s quiet meditation. You must have the contemplation as well as the activity, or else you will do mischief, and not really honour the Master. Suppose you see a carpenter, with a little hammer in his hand, go round the workshop, and gently tap a hundred nails on the head; you rightly say that he has not done any good at all. But here is another workman, with a good heavy hammer, and when he does hit a nail, he drives it home, and he does not leave it till he has driven it home, and clinched it, too. There is a way of seeming to be doing a great deal, and yet really doing nothing; and there is also a way of apparently doing but little, but then it is good solid work, thoroughly well done. Nobody can do this solid, permanent work, in a spiritual sense, without often getting alone with the Lord Jesus Christ.

Avail yourselves also, dear friends, of those special opportunities which God makes for you to receive his messages. Sometimes he takes one of his servants, and puts him right away for a while. “Be thou silent,” says he, “and I will talk to thee.” Perhaps the Lord takes away the strength, the bodily vigour of his servant; there is the Christian woman, who longs to be going up and down her district, laid upon a sick bed; or there is the earnest, faithful Sunday-school teacher, no longer able to instruct his class. Yet it is in God’s wisdom that the nets are sometimes drawn out of the water, that there may be an opportunity to mend them, otherwise they would not always take the fish that are ready to be caught. It is true economy to let the cannon rest till it gets cool, or else there may be mischief done to the men who are firing it, instead of to the enemy; and all of us need rest, every now and then, if we are to be fitted for future service. Above all, we need often to go to Christ, to get from his hand a fresh stock of that gospel provision which we are afterwards to dispense to the people in his name. I pray you, who are seeking to serve the Saviour, to take good note of the advice I have been trying to give you.

Now, secondly, this going to Christ, to hear the Word directly from him, is itself a most blessed preparatory process for all Christian workers. Let me show you how it is so.

First, if you get your message of mercy directly and distinctly from the living Christ, you will have truth in its personality,-living, acting, feeling, for he is “the way, the truth, and the life.” The message will come to you with power because he uttered it, and you will therefore preach him as well as it. We do not want a misty, cloudy Christ-a sort of impalpable phantom, to comfort us; we want a real Christ, God and man, really among us, and really able to save unto the uttermost all them that come unto God by him. So, my dear brother, if you go to him for your message, you will be sure not to forget him. He will be real to you, and your teaching will make him real to other people. Some ministers preach very finely about Christ; but that which saves sinners is preaching Christ himself. He is our salvation, and we shall never put that salvation in tangible, graspable, real form unless we go to him, and get distinctly from himself the message we are to deliver on his behalf.

By doing this, we shall also have truth in all its purity. You know that, when the light of the gospel shines through me, it takes a little tinge of colour from me, just as when it shone through Luther, there was a Lutheran shade about the truth; and when it shone through John Calvin, there was a Calvinistic tinge. Shining through any man, God’s light will be tinged to a certain extent, just as it is when shining through the very best glass that was ever made. You had better get into the sunlight for yourself, so that you may have it in all its purity. I am of the mind of that man who said that the milk was so bad where he lived that he would move into the country, and keep a cow for himself. It is just so with the gospel; there is nothing like going to the Lord Jesus Christ himself as to the well-head of doctrine, and saying to him, “Master, what dost thou teach? What can I learn from thee?” Our unfailing rule is,-What did Jesus say about this or that? How did his Spirit speak by the apostles? It is that living with Christ, from day to day, which will give us the truth of God in all its purity.

And it will also give us truth in its due proportions. We are all of us lopsided in one way or another. I suppose that there is not a pair of eyes in this world that is absolutely a pair. There is scarcely anything about us that is exactly as it ought to be; we are all of us somewhat wrong; and, hence, there is no man who teaches all truth in its exact proportions. One man sees the responsibility of man, and he preaches it; another sees the sovereignty of God, and he preaches that. Cannot we find a brother who preaches both those truths? Yes, no doubt we can; but, then, that brother will probably fail to see some other truth. If we knew all truths in their right proportions, we should be God rather than man, for we should practically possess omniscience. But to avoid giving undue prominence to any one truth, and casting another truth into the shade, the best remedy is to get your teaching direct from Christ himself. You think you see a certain doctrine in the Bible; well, then, take it to him who gave you the Bible, and say, “Blessed Lord Jesus, by thy Spirit, teach this doctrine to me. Let me know, by thy teaching, what this passage of Scripture means, for I am prepared to receive whatever thou dost impart to me.”

If you do this, dear friends, you will get truth in its personality, truth in its purity, truth in its due proportions.

And, let me add, that you will then get truth in its power. When the truth of God has broken your heart, and afterwards bound it up; when Christ has so spoken it to you that you have felt the power of it, then you will speak it as men should speak who are ambassadors for God. George Fox was called a Quaker because, when he preached, he often trembled and quaked. Was that folly on his part? Nay; for he had so felt the power of what he spoke that his very body was full of emotion while he delivered that truth to others. And well may you and I also tremble at the Word of the Lord. But, on the other hand, whenever that Word comes home with sweetness to the heart, you must often have noticed with what sweetness the man tells it out to others. There is nobody who can preach the gospel like the man who has experienced its power. You know that the tale of a tale, the report of a report, is a very poor thing; but when a man gets up, and says, concerning some notable event, “I was there, I saw it all,” then you listen to him. So, if you can say of Christ, “He is indeed precious, for he is precious to me; he can save, for he has saved me; he can comfort, and cheer, and gladden, for he has done all that to me,”-then you speak with power to others, because Christ has spoken with power to you.

And there is something more than that. A man who receives the gospel distinctly from Christ will speak the truth in Christ’s spirit. Did you ever hear a man preach the gospel in a passion? You wonder at my question, yet such a thing has happened; but if you are present on such an occasion, you feel sure that the man did not get his message-or, at any rate, he did not get his manner-from his Master. The other day, I saw a man offer a bit of bread to a poor, lean, half-starved dog; the animal did not seem to care for bread, so he turned away; and, then, directly, the man was so angry with the creature because he would not have the bread that he threw a stone at him. There is a certain kind of preaching that is just like that; the minister seems to say, “You dogs of sinners, there is the gospel for you; will you have it? If you do not, I will throw a stone at you.” Well now, neither dogs nor men admire that sort of treatment; and, certainly, the Lord Jesus Christ never intended us to deliver his message in that kind of fashion. There are some, I believe, who preach the doctrines of grace very much as a dog of mine acts with his rug. When I go home to-night, he will bring it out, and drag it up to my feet, just because he wants me to try and take it away from him, that he may growl over it. So have I seen some people preach the doctrine of election, and other truths like it, as if they wanted some Arminian to try to run away with them, or have a fight over them. Now that is not the way which Christ teaches us to preach; he never bids us proclaim the gospel in such a way that we seem to want to make an Irish fight over it. No, no, no; go direct to Christ for truth, and you will preach it strongly, honestly, openly, positively, but you will always preach it with love.

That is the plan I recommend to you,-the system of getting the gospel fresh from the mouth of Jesus, and then delivering it, as far as we can, in Jesus Christ’s tones and in Jesus Christ’s spirit. I can assure you, my dear friends, that we shall never know how Jesus preached till we hear him speak in our hearts, and then endeavour to imitate the tone of that speech which our inward ears have heard. Oh, to preach Christ in a Christly way,-to tell of mercy in the spirit of mercy, and to preach grace in a truly gracious way!

Here is the time to say that, if you go to Christ for all the truth you preach, and if you proclaim it in his way, then you will preach it with what is called “unction.” Do you know what unction is? I do, but I cannot tell you. I can tell when a man has not any unction, and I can tell when he has; but I do not know exactly how to define and describe it, except by saying that it is a special anointing from the Spirit of God. There is an old Romish tale of a monk who had been the means of converting great numbers of persons; but, on a certain occasion, he was detained in his journey, and could not reach the congregation in time to conduct the service. The devil thought it was a fine opportunity for him to speak to the people, so, putting on the cowl of the monk, he went into the pulpit, and preached; according to the story, he preached about hell,-a subject with which he was well acquainted,-and the hearers listened very attentively. Before he finished his discourse, the holy man appeared, and made the devil disclose himself in his proper form. “Get you gone,” said he to Satan, “but however dared you preach the truth as you were doing when I came in?” “Oh!” replied Satan, “I did not mind preaching the truth, for there was no unction in it, so I knew that it could not do any hurt to my cause.” It was a curious legend, but there was a great truth at the bottom of it,-where there is no unction, it does not matter what we preach, or how we preach it. One of my friends behind me sometimes says to me, after the service, “I believe that God has been blessing the people, for there has been plenty of dew about.” That is what we want, that holy dew, which the Spirit of God so graciously bestows. You may preach to one congregation, but it is all in vain, for there is no dew about; but, at another time, it is sweet preaching and blessed hearing, because there is plenty of dew about; and the way to get that dew is by coming straight out of the Master’s presence, with the Master’s message ringing in your own ear, to tell it out as nearly as possible as he has told it to you.

Once more, this preparation for declaring the truth is very valuable, because it enables a man to have truth in its certainty. Concerning the truth of God, questions are continually being raised nowadays; many people ask, with Pilate, “What is truth?” Even preachers put that question. Why do they not hold their tongues until they know? Suppose a servant comes to the door to bring you the answer to a question which you have sent to her mistress. She begins to talk on all sorts of subjects, and you say to her, “Do you not know what the reply is from your mistress to my enquiry?” She says, “Well, to tell you the truth, I have not been to her to know what her reply is, but I am making up an answer myself.” Of course, you say to her, “I do not want to hear your answer; go to your mistress at once, and whatever message she has to send to me, kindly report it to me, for that is all I want to know.” So we say to the minister, “Tell us what your Master has told you; we don’t want to hear anything else.” If he says, “I think-er, I beg your pardon, I am very anxious not to appear dogmatical; but with great diffidence I submit to you,” you reply, “My dear sir, we want you to be dogmatical. If you have been to your Master, and he has given you a message for us, tell it to us; and if you have not been to him, and he has not told you anything to say on his behalf, then clear out of that pulpit, for you have no right to be there. Go and earn an honest living at breaking stones, or something of that sort.” An ambassador who is not commissioned by his sovereign had better be sent home by the first ship that is going that way. He who comes professedly as a messenger from God, and yet declares that, for the life of him, he does not know what God would have him preach, proclaims his own condemnation, and we say to him, “We cannot let our souls run the risk of being lost; so, if you have no message from Christ for us, we will not waste our time by listening to you.” Be sure, dear friends, to have as your minister a man who lives with God, and walks with God; a man who leans his head on the bosom of Jesus, and then comes forward and speaks what his Master has whispered right into his ear. Men are startled when they hear him; they say, “Who is this fellow? Where did he learn such things?” But, with awful earnestness, so that his hearers sometimes think him half-demented, he tells out what he feels that he must tell out because he has received it from his Lord and Master. He says, “That is the truth, whether you take it or leave it. I will preach to you nothing but what God has told me. I cannot and I dare not turn aside from what I believe to be his teaching.” Look at Martin Luther whom God raised up to speak so bravely for him. People said, “This man is so positive, so dogmatic;” but he could not be otherwise, his whole heart and soul were possessed by certain great truths, and he felt that he must proclaim them, whether men put him in prison, or dragged him away to the stake. And such a man, speaking after that fashion, shook the Vatican and the most powerful empires of the earth, and was the means of bringing light to multitudes who otherwise would have remained in darkness. In like manner as the Reformer did, get you to your Lord, my brother; get you to your Saviour, my sister; receive your message from him, and what he speaks privately into your ear, that tell you wherever you have the opportunity, but mind that you do not tell anything else.

Now I must finish with the consequent proclamation: “What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light: and what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops.”

First, it has been told me in the ear, and whispered into my very soul, that there is pardon for the greatest guilt through faith in Jesus Christ,-that his precious blood, shed on Calvary’s cross, is able to cleanse from all sin of every kind, and that as many as believe in him are saved. “Their sins, which were many, are all forgiven.” I heard this said once, and I thought it was true; nay, I heard it many times from those who would not have said what was false. But, on a never-to-be-forgotten day, I myself looked to him who did hang upon the cross. It had been dark days with my spirit until then, and my burden had been exceedingly heavy; I was like a man who would have preferred to die rather than to live, and I might even have laid violent hands upon myself, in the hope of ending my misery, but that the dread of something worse after death did haunt me. I found neither rest nor respite until I heard one say, “Look unto Christ, and you shall be saved. Look, young man, look; for he says, ‘Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth;’ ” and there and then I did look unto him; and that my sins were at that moment forgiven me, I do know as surely as I know that I am standing here, and speaking to you. I might be made to doubt some things about which I feel tolerably certain; but I must absolutely lose my reason before I can ever doubt the fact that I then passed out of despair into something higher than hope, and rose from the very gates of hell into a joy that is with me, even now. Shall I not tell to others what the grace of God has done for me? Shall I not lay hold of every poor sinner’s hand, and say, “Look you to Christ, and you also shall be saved, even as I was”? Shall I not, from the very housetops, shout again and again,-

“There is life for a look at the Crucified One;

There is life at this moment for thee”?

Further, there is another thing that has been whispered in my ear. It is that, by faith in Christ, the ruling power of sin is immediately broken, and that every sin, of every kind, may be overcome by faith in the blood of Jesus Christ. I heard one man laughing at another because he said that he had a clean heart. Ah, me! but that may have been true, for every man who believes in Christ has a clean heart. Are you nominally a Christian, and yet your Christianity does not make you holy? I implore you to throw such worthless Christianity to the dogs, for it is worse than useless to you. If your religion does not make you holy, it will damn you as surely as you are now alive. It is simply a painted pageantry to go to hell in; but it is not the true religion of the Lord Jesus Christ. He that believes in Christ shall be delivered from sin, he shall trample it under his feet; he may have a life-long battle with it, nay, I am sure he will have that, else Christ would never have taught his disciples to pray, “Lead us not into temptation.” When there is no more sin in us, we need not fear temptation; there is no risk of fire to the man who has no tinder in his heart. The Lord can keep his people, and he will preserve them. “He will keep the feet of his saints.” Brother, have you fallen into drunkenness? Faith in Christ can turn that cup bottom upwards for you. Are you a swearer? My Master can rinse your mouth out, so that you shall never speak in that shameful fashion any more, or even be tempted to do so, for I have known swearers cured in a moment, and the temptation to blaspheme has never come back to them. Have you been a thief, or a liar? Have you been a fornicator, or an adulterer? Are you unjust, unholy, and unclean? There is provision for washing sinners such as you are; there is a fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness, and Christ can deliver you from the power as well as from the penalty of sin. Only trust him about it; come and rest your soul upon him. Oh! if there be a harlot here, or a man who has fallen into all sorts of gross sin, Christ can and will deliver you if you will only come and repose your heart’s trust in him.

I cannot tell you all that I have had whispered into my ear, but I must mention one other thing that I know; it is that faith in Christ can save a man from every sort of fear in life and in death. Faith in Christ can make even trouble to be welcome, and affliction to be regarded as a gain. Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ can make poverty to be sweet, and sickness to be borne with patience. The ills of life are turned into blessings when once a man believes in Jesus, and fully trusts in him. I am not now saying what I alone know, but what a great many others here also know. There are hundreds-I might truthfully say thousands-here who can say the same as I can about these matters. Let me prove my assertion. You who have found that faith in Christ sweetens life to you, speak out, and say, “Yes.” Has Christ sweetened life to you who have believed in him? If so, say, “Yes.” [Many voices: “Yes.”] Of course you can say it, and you are not ashamed to say it over and over again; is he the joy of your heart? [Voices: “Yes.”] Has he made your very soul to leap within you when you have kept close to him? [Voices: “Yes.”] I knew that you would answer “Yes” to that question, for it is even so with you; there is a joy, which sometimes comes upon the Christian, and which I cannot attempt to describe, but it bears us right away above all physical pain, and everything that might depress the spirit; and the heart is made strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Oh, he is a precious Christ! Is there one person here who has trusted in Christ, who is willing to give him up? [Voices: “No.”] There is not one, I am sure. You hardly need to answer the question, for there never was one individual, who really knew Christ, who could give him up. They who leave him have only fancied that they knew him; they have never really trusted him.

Possibly, dear friend, you are in trouble because you say that you feel afraid to die to-night. Well, but perhaps you are not going to die to-night; and, therefore, dying grace has not yet been given to you. But when the time comes for you to die, then very likely you will not feel the slightest fear. My brother said to me, the other day, when he had been seeing one of our members pass away, “Brother, we can say to one another what the two Wesleys said, ‘Our people die well.’ ” So they do; they often die shouting for very joy; and, at any rate, they go home peacefully, quietly welcoming the everlasting future and the glory that Christ has laid up for them. Oh, yes! we know that “to die is gain.” Some of us have been laid very low, and we have thought that we were about to die, and we have had the greatest joy then,-greater than we ever knew before in all our lives; and, therefore, we tell it out to others, and we mean to tell it out as long as we live. Salvation by grace, through faith in Jesus, is no dream, no fiction, let sceptics say what they will. Our experience-and we are as honest as they are, and no more fanatical than they are,-our experience agrees with what our Lord has revealed to us in his Word; and, therefore, when we preach the gospel, or relate what grace has done for us, we use Christ’s very words, and say, “We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen.” God grant that many of you may be able to bear similar testimony, for our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake! Amen.

Exposition by C. H. Spurgeon

MATTHEW 10:1-27

Verses 1-4. And when he had called unto him his twelve disciples, he gave them power against unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease. Now the names of the twelve apostles are these; The first, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother; Philip, and Bartholomew; Thomas, and Matthew the publican; James the son of Alphæus, and Lebbæus, whose surname was Thaddæus; Simon the Canaanite, and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed him.

The lesson to be learnt from these names is, first, that these men are mentioned in couples, and I think that, as a rule, God’s servants work best in pairs. In other senses than the matrimonial one, it is not good that man should be alone. Moses needs Aaron; Peter needs Andrew; James needs John. It is well to be of such a temperament and disposition that you can work harmoniously with another of your Lord’s servants. If you cannot, pray God to alter you.

Notice that expression, in the 3rd verse, “and Bartholomew.” I think there is not a single instance in the New Testament where Bartholomew is mentioned without the word “and” before or after his name,-“and Bartholomew,” or “Bartholomew and” someone else. Perhaps he was not a man who ever began any work by himself, but he was a grand man to join in and help it on when somebody else had started it. So, dear friend, if you are not qualified to be a leader in the Church of Christ, be willing to be Number Two; but do serve the Master, in some capacity or other, with all your might. Be a brother who carries an “and” with him wherever he goes; be like a horse, that has his harness on, and is ready to be hooked into the team. That is the lesson of the two words “and Bartholomew.”

The last lesson from the names is at the end of the 4th verse: “and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed him.” He preached of Christ, he worked miracles in the name of Christ, he was ordained as one of the apostles of Christ, yet he was “the son of perdition.” Oh! let none of us be content merely with our official position, or trust in the good which we hope we have done, or in any gifts with which the Master has entrusted us. Judas Iscariot had all these marks of distinction, yet he betrayed his Lord. God grant that no one among us may turn out to be a Judas Iscariot!

5, 6. These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

The gospel is now to be preached to every creature in all the world; but, in those days, it was to be proclaimed first to the Jews, then to the Samaritans, and afterwards to the Gentiles as a whole. The largeness of our commission to “preach the gospel to every creature” need not prevent our following providential directions to make it known in one place rather than in another. It is well for the servants of Christ always to ask their Master where they are to go. You know how it is recorded, in the Acts of the Apostles, that Paul and Silas “essayed to go into Bithynia; but the Spirit suffered them not.” Ask the Lord, therefore, where thou shalt work, as well as what thy work shall be, for thy Master knows how thou canst best serve him.

7. And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.

That blessed kingdom, which is now set up among men, of which Christ is the King, and I hope many of us are the subjects. That kingdom was then “at hand.”

8. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give.

“Exercise your healing arts most freely. They cost you nothing; let them not cost anything to those who receive the benefit of them.”

9, 10. Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves: for the workman is worthy of his meat.

They were to “quarter on the enemy,” as we say. Wherever they went, they would be furnished with food, and raiment, and shelter, if they faithfully executed the commission with which their Master had entrusted them.

11-13. And into whatsoever city or town ye shall enter, enquire who in it is worthy; and there abide till ye go thence. And when ye come into an house, salute it. And if the house be worthy, let your peace come upon it: but if it be not worthy, let your peace return to you.

How about your houses, dear friends. Are they “worthy” houses, in this New Testament sense? If an apostle came there, could he bring “peace” to it? Or would he have to take the peace away with him to some other house that was more worthy to receive it?

14, 15. And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city.

Despised and rejected privileges make the fiercest fuel for the fires of hell. They who might have heard the gospel, and would not hear it, shall find the hand of God more heavy upon them than it will be even upon the accursed Sodomites. Woe, then, unto such as live in London, yet who will not hear the Word of the Lord, or, when they do hear it, will not accept it!

16, 17. Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves. But beware of men:

“Do not trust yourselves with them.”

17-19. For they will deliver you up to the councils, and they will scourge you in their synagogues; and ye shall be brought before governors and kings for my sake, for a testimony against them and the Gentiles. But when they deliver you up, take no thought how or what ye shall speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak.

“Let it not fret you that you are not orators, that you are not men of culture; speak what God the Holy Spirit shall teach you to say, and leave the result with him.”

20. For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you.

Oh! that is grand,-when a man has so communed with God that the very Spirit of the Father has entered into him. Then shall there be a wondrous power about his speech; men may not understand whence it came, but they will be obliged to feel the force of it.

21. And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death.

Read the martyrologies, and see whether it was not exactly as our Lord foretold that it would be. In martyr times, men often burst all the bonds of natural affection, and betrayed even their own fathers or children to death. Yet the saints quailed not; they were content to let every earthly tie be snapped so that the tie of their heavenly and eternal relationship might be confirmed. So may it be with us also!

22-27. And ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake: but he that endureth to the end shall be saved. But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another: for verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come. The disciple is not above his master, nor the servant above his lord. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the servant as his lord. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call them of his household? Fear them not therefore: for there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known. What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light: and what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops.

God help us so to do, for Christ’s sake! Amen.

Hymns from “Our Own Hymn Book”-785, 766, 658, 538.

JEHOVAH’S CHALLENGE

A Sermon

Intended for Reading on Lord’s-day, May 20th, 1900, delivered by

C. H. SPURGEON,

at the metropolitan tabernacle, newington,

On Lord’s-day Evening, December 31st, 1882.

“Is there any thing too hard for me?”-Jeremiah 32:27.

A truth may be sincerely believed by us, and yet it may do us good to have it put in the form of a question. As I read the chapter, I called your attention to Jeremiah’s confident declaration to God, “There is nothing too hard for thee.” Yet in our text, which is only a few verses further on in the chapter, the Lord says to this same prophet, “Is there any thing too hard for me?” I think the explanation of this mystery is that we do not always thoroughly believe even all that we do truly believe. We may believe it so as to have no doubt upon it, but not so believe it as to be prepared to put it into practice. Jeremiah might say to the Lord, “There is nothing too hard for thee,” and he might be confident of the truth of his words; yet there might be, in the background, so much of mistrust, possibly imperceptible to himself, that it might be necessary for God to put the matter to him in the form of a question, and to say, even to believing Jeremiah, “Is there any thing too hard for me?” Ah! we little know what unbelievers we really are. The most of us are scarcely aware of what an awful amount of scepticism still lies lurking within our breasts, only waiting for the opportunity to show itself.

Besides, dear friends, you must always remember that it is one thing to believe a general doctrine, but it is quite another thing to make a particular and personal application of it. Jeremiah believes that God can drive away the Chaldeans, and leave the land free for the use of its owners; but can he believe that the little plot of ground at Anathoth, for which he has just paid seventeen shekels of silver, will ever be worth the money it has cost him? I expect the devil began to inject doubts into his mind concerning that transaction by saying to him, “Can you trust God about that purchase of land?” So the Lord does not at once accept Jeremiah’s declaration when the prophet says, “There is nothing too hard for thee;” but he puts to him a direct question relating to that very point, “Is there any thing too hard for me?” Some of you think you could believe concerning the conversion of a nation; but do you never have doubts concerning the conversion of a perverse child? You believe in the peacefulness that is to reign during the millennium; but have you never had a doubt about the peace of your own domestic circle? You could trust God, you say, in a storm at sea; but can you trust him about that bad debt on your books? You could depend upon him, you say, in death and throughout eternity; but can you depend upon him about that trifling matter which just now is bothering you, and giving you so much vexation? Is there anything, great or small, that is too hard for God? That is the question I am going to try to answer. I throw down the challenge, in the name of the glorious God who said to Jeremiah, “Is there any thing too hard for me?” Now is your opportunity to bring up your hard things, your difficult things, your apparently impossible things, and to see how they are affected by this challenge of the Most High: “Is there any thing too hard for me?”

In calling attention to this challenge of Jehovah, I ask you to remember, first, that the hardest conceivable things have already been done by God. Next, I will mention some of the hard things which remain to be done; and, lastly, since nothing is too hard for the Lord, I will try to answer the short and simple question, “What then?”

First, then, I want you to remember that the hardest conceivable things have already been done by God.

Let us begin at the beginning, with God’s work of creation, as Jeremiah does in this very chapter; and we shall then say, with him, that Jehovah “made the heaven and the earth.” There was a time when there was nothing that had been created, and God dwelt alone. There was no raw material out of which to construct the universe; yet, when it pleased him to do so, everything was formed and fashioned by God out of nothing. What, then, can he not do after having done that? I ask you also to think what God afterwards did. At first, when he made the world, he left it for ages in an unfinished state, for “in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void;” but, long afterwards, when he came to put it in order, and make it fit for man’s abode, and then to create man to have dominion over all the earth, who was with him to help him? “With whom took he counsel, and who instructed him?” With his own hand, he piled up the mountains, and digged the foundations of the great deep. His unaided power achieved it all. Everything was in darkness even after he had made it; but he spake, and said, “Light, be;” “and there was light.” Everything was in confusion and chaos, the earth and the waters were mingled together; but again he spake, and divided the land from the sea, and the clouds uprose to paint the sky, the rivers sought their bed, and old Ocean was girt about with his belt of sand. God did it all; but, even then, the world was dead, no life was anywhere to be seen. But again God spake; and, straightway, the earth was green with grass, and herbs, and trees; the waters teemed with fish; all kinds of birds began to fly in the open firmament of heaven; and multitudes of beasts ranged the plain. Then, last of all, God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Now, whenever we doubt the power of God to do anything, let us read again the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, and then say, with Jeremiah, “Ah, Lord God! behold, thou hast made the heaven and the earth by thy great power and stretched out arm, and there is nothing too hard for thee!” There is nothing which the Lord did not make, and he made it all unaided, and did it all alone, by his own unguided wisdom and skill. Therefore, one of the hardest things that ever could be done, was done by God when he accomplished his great work of creation.

Now let us think of his work under a different aspect; that is, his work of destruction; and let any who doubt the power of God tremble as they hear or read how he has displayed it. Again and again has the Lord shown how easily he can rid himself of his adversaries, and shake them off, as Paul shook off the viper into the fire. Go far back in the history of the world, and note how all mankind had become corrupt; they who ought to have been holy, and separate from sinners, had mixed themselves with the ungodly; and on a certain day, when God’s patience had at last reached its limit, he spake, and down came torrents of rain, descending with tremendous power, and, at the same time, the sluices of the great deep were unlocked, and up leaped the fountains that till then had been sealed; and, very soon, over the whole earth there was one great sheet of water, for God had determined that he would destroy all flesh from off the face of the earth, save a “few, that is, eight souls,” whom he had housed within the ark. Terrible as the work of destruction must have been, it was done as God determined; and, after that, let none ever think that God cannot overcome his enemies. Let no one ever imagine that a warfare can be successfully waged against him. When he bares his arm for battle, his foes shall all flee before him like chaff before the wind, or they shall fall before him like the wheat falls before the reaper. He can create and he can destroy; in looking back upon what he has already done, we can see that he has accomplished inconceivably great and difficult things both in making and in unmaking. “Ah!” say you, perhaps, “these are sublime things, on an enormous scale.” Yes; but God is great on any scale, and almighty wherever you perceive the signs and tokens of his working.

Think, next, of his work for the defence and deliverance of his chosen people. Read the Book of Exodus; you cannot too often read the wondrous story of how, when the children of Israel were few in Egypt, God nevertheless preserved them; and how, when they multiplied, and the cruel Pharaoh arose, and tried first to curb and then to crush them, God remembered his people, and determined to bring them out of the land of bondage. Moses and Aaron said to Pharaoh, “Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Let my people: go.” How that proud monarch bridled up when he heard those words! “Who is the Lord,” said he, “that I should obey his voice to let Israel go?” He soon knew who Jehovah was, for plague followed plague, till everything that Egypt had was smitten; and, last of all, God “smote all the firstborn in Egypt; the chief of their strength in the tabernacles of Ham.” Then the oppressors opened wide their gates, and Egypt was glad when Israel departed. With a high hand, and an outstretched arm, the Lord brought forth his people; and when they came to the Red Sea, and the Egyptians pursued them, and the tyrant thought that he should surely destroy them, for the wilderness had shut them in, then the Lord divided the sea, and led his people through the depths in safety, “but the sea overwhelmed their enemies;” and on the farther shore, Miriam and the women joined in the jubilant refrain to the triumphant song of Moses and the Israelitish host, “Sing ye to the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea.”

Brethren, after this mighty act of Jehovah, you need never imagine that he cannot deliver his people. You need not suppose that a little church, or a little island, or a little nation, shall be domineered over by the proud ones of the earth. If God shall but repeat that ancient command, “Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm,” it will be a case of “Hands off” for the oppressors, however mighty they may be, and they will have to learn that they must not touch the elect of the Most High to do them harm.

If you want another instance of God’s wonderful working, I remind you that harder things than we need to have done for us by God have been done by him in the work of his providence. Think how he led his people through the wilderness, and fed them for forty years, though all that time they never stirred a plough in the furrow, or gathered fruit from fig tree or from olive. A pathless desert was the highway of the millions who were his people. Heaven dropped with daily manna for them, and the smitten rock yielded a perennial stream to quench their thirst. When they craved flesh to eat, the Lord sent them feathered fowl innumerable. Their garments waxed not old upon them, neither did their feet swell for forty years in that great and terrible wilderness. When you think of all this, my poor brother, you may well say, “If God could do that great work, surely he can provide for my little family.” Of course, he can; the God who could, for forty years, feed three millions of people, who marched or halted with nothing but bare sand beneath them, can much more feed thee, O thou of little faith!

All these are great things that God hath done; but I am going to take you into much greater depths than we have traversed yet, for all this is as nothing compared with what God has done in his great work of redemption. Creation is shorn of its glory; the terrors of God at the deluge may almost be forgotten; the deliverance of Israel at the Red Sea may take quite a secondary place; and the leading of the people through the wilderness may be put quite in the background when I begin to tell the story of our redemption. This is the hardest thing, the most wonderful thing, God has ever done. His Son came down to live among men; he took on him a human form, and was born of the Virgin Mary, sheltered in a stable, cradled in a manger. This is such a miracle that all the other miracles I ever heard of seem commonplace affairs compared with this wonder of wonders,-that God should take upon himself the nature of man, and then,-more marvellous still,-take upon himself the sin of his people, and bear the awful load of their transgression, and all the burden of their punishment, and endure it even to the last pang, drinking up the cup of infinite justice to its dregs. Never was God so Godlike as when Jesus died upon the cross. Never was omnipotence so potent as when he died that men might live, crushing the old dragon as he bled, leading captivity captive while he was himself bound to the accursed tree, casting death into an eternal grave when he himself was laid in the sepulchre. I cannot adequately tell you the story of all these marvels; the very angels in heaven have been set a-wondering ever since that day, and they have been continually telling to one another, over and over again, the story of the God that loved and died, and by his love, and death, and living again, defeated Satan, conquered death, and led captivity captive for all his people. I feel more inclined to burst out with “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” than to say even a single syllable more concerning this greatest of all God’s works.

Certainly, in what I have said, I have fully proved that the hardest conceivable things have already been done by God; and therefore, he may well ring out the challenge of our text, “Is there any thing too hard for me?”

Now, secondly, I am going to mention some of the hard things which remain to be done.

The hardest things have been done by God; what remains to be done? Look within you, look around you, find out all the difficult things that you need to have done for you, and then see how easy it is for the Lord to meet your every need. Some of the hard things relate to temporal matters. “It would be a great thing for God to deliver me out of all my troubles,” says one; “for I am sorely afflicted and tried.” But, really, my dear friend, after all that God has done, will you, can you, dare you think to yourself that he cannot deliver you? Are you his child? Do you love him? Do you trust him? Then, surely, you will not say that he will leave you,-that he will forsake you,-or that he cannot help you! I am certain that you would be ashamed to lead anybody to think that God could not deliver you; yet you have, perhaps, allowed the thought to creep into your own mind. Then drive it out at once; do not let it remain there a moment longer. God can help you, and in very simple ways, too.

I have known him deliver his people in very extraordinary and unexpected ways. There was a poor man, not long ago, who had no bread for his family, and they were almost starving. One of his children said to him, “Father, God sent bread to Elijah by ravens.” “Ah, yes!” he replied; “but God does not use birds in that way now.” He was a cobbler; and a short time after he spoke those words, there flew into his workshop a bird, which he saw was a rare one, so he caught it, and put it in a cage. A little later, a servant came in, and said to him, “Have you seen such-and-such a bird?” “Yes,” he answered, “it flew into my shop, so I caught it, and put it into a cage.” “It belongs to my mistress,” said the maid. “Well, then, take it,” he replied, and away she went. Perhaps you think that there was not anything very remarkable in that incident; but when the girl took the bird to her mistress, the lady sent her back to thank the cobbler for his care of her pet, and to give him half a sovereign; so, if the bird did not actually bring the bread and meat in its mouth, it was made the medium of feeding the hungry family although the father had doubted whether such a thing could happen. God has blessed ways of delivering his people if they will but trust him. I do not doubt, if this were the time for such testimony to be given, that every Christian here could tell some story of the way in which God has delivered in time past. “Oh, yes!” says one, “I could, I know.” What, you? Yet you are the very one who doubts God’s power to deliver you. Cover your face for shame, and cry, “Lord, have mercy upon me, forgive my unbelief, and help thy poor child to trust thy fatherly care, and to know that thou wilt provide for me.”

But, next, some of the hard things relate to spiritual matters. I fancy that I hear someone say, “I have a trouble which causes me more anxiety than the things you have just mentioned. I know that God can provide for me in temporal matters, but I have a very hard fight of it spiritually. I am tempted, first in one way, and then in another, till I sometimes fear that I shall not be able to hold out. Satan appears to know just where I am weakest, he shoots at the joints of my harness, and all his fiery darts seem to make an impression upon me, and sorely wound me. I shall one day fall by the hand of the enemy.” David said something very much like that; yet he did not perish by the hand of his enemy, King Saul; but he died in his bed, rejoicing in his God. And very likely it will be the same with you; at any rate, if you are trusting in Christ, you shall not be overcome, for greater is he that is for you than all that can be against you.

Do you believe that you, a child of God, cannot be so helped by him that you shall be able to overcome any kind of sin? Surely you cannot believe anything so dishonouring to your Heavenly Father? If you do, I do not; I cannot tell how God’s mind comes into contact with man’s mind, but I know that it does,-that his Spirit comes into most intimate connection with our spirit, and so influences our spirit that the sin, which once seemed to fascinate and charm us, loses all its attractions and delights; and the doubts and fears, which for a while depress us, have by-and-by no depressing power whatever. You remember how Eliphaz said to Job, “At destruction and famine thou shalt laugh;” and God often helps his servants to laugh at those very things which before seemed great burdens to them. There is nothing in your spiritual case that is too hard for the Lord; so bring it before him in faith and prayer this very hour.

I fancy that I can hear someone else saying, “But I am not God’s child; oh, how I wish that I could be! Alas! I am a great sinner.” What has been your sin, my friend? I do not want you to tell me; I only ask you what it was that you may tell it to yourself, and then answer the Lord’s question, “Is there any thing too hard for me?” If Christ had not died, it would have been useless to ask you that question; but since Jesus died, “the Just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God,” and since it is written, “The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin,” can there be any thing conceivable that is too hard for the Lord? There is no sin, which thou hast committed, which the blood of Christ cannot wash out if thou believest in him. Though thou wert even red with murder, and black with blasphemy, and covered from head to foot with the filthiness of lust, yet, on thy believing in Jesus, thou wilt be made, there and then, as white as snow. Free pardon for every kind of sin is proclaimed to every soul that will believe in Jesus Christ. “All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men,” if they will only trust in Christ. So, in this sense, there is nothing too hard for the Lord, there is no sinner too guilty for the Lord to forgive when he trusts the Saviour’s sacrifice on Calvary.

“Yes,” says another friend; “I can understand that I can have forgiveness; but this is a greater difficulty to me, I have been so long a transgressor of God’s law that I do not think I ever could conquer my sin.” No, I know that you could not, and I want you to be fully persuaded that you could not; and then, when you are perfectly convinced upon that point, let me ask you this question, “Is even this thing-this power of overcoming sin-too hard for the Lord? Your successful resistance is out of the question; you cannot accomplish anything in this great conflict, for you are nobody and nothing; but is the struggle too hard for the Lord?” It often happens that a man says, “Well, I know that I have been a great drunkard; drinking has been my besetting sin, but I can leave it off when I like, and become a sober man at once.” So he does, and he signs the pledge, and wears his blue ribbon; but, by-and-by, the colour of that ribbon ought to be ruby rather than blue, for the man has given way to strong drink again. The reason of his fall is that he cured himself, and so the disease came back again. But the drunkard who says, “I am afraid to trust myself, for this intemperance has got such a hold on me that I never can get out of its clutches by my own power; O God, deliver me! I trust thee to save me, I look to Jesus Christ to save me,”-he is the man who shall be helped, and he shall be more than a conqueror through the might of God. Let me assure you, my dear friend, that there is no form of sin from which you cannot be delivered by the grace of God. After many years of vice,-prolonged, continued, inveterate, horrible vice,-men have not only been reformed and reclaimed, but they have been renewed, sanctified, and made pure and holy.

I wonder how you would have felt, if you had been visiting in certain of the South Sea Islands, and you had been sitting at the Lord’s table with some good old deacon, and then, after you had been eating and drinking with him at the communion, and had heard him pray and preach, somebody had whispered in your ear, “That man used to be a cannibal. He has murdered many.” “Oh!” you would say, “and has the grace of God changed such a lion as that into a lamb?” It would have struck you as a very remarkable illustration of the power of divine grace; yet there are, even in this Tabernacle to-night, cases that are quite as striking as that; if you could know all about them, you would agree with me that it is so. God’s grace can do marvellous things; it can change lions into lambs, ravens into doves, and sinners into saints; in fact, the proof of Christianity is the moral change which it is continually working in the minds and lives of men and women. Above all other miracles stands this one,-the miracle by which the dishonest are made just, the impure are made clean, and the disobedient are brought to the obedience of faith.

Truly, there is no case that is too hard for the Lord. I suppose a good many of you never heard that “Satan” came into this place, one Sabbath, and was converted.* “No,” you say, “surely that has never happened.” Yes, it has; I can vouch for the truth of the story. There was a sailor, who lived at Wivenhoe, in Essex, a man who was such a vile blasphemer, and who lived altogether such a disgraceful life, that the people called him “Old Satan.” When the ship in which “Satan” sailed came to London, a godly seaman, who was on the same vessel, persuaded the man to come to hear me. He was the more willing to do so because I once lived at Colchester, which is not far from Wivenhoe. As he heard the Word, the Lord touched “Old Satan’s” heart, and there was never before such a stir in Wivenhoe as when he went home, a converted man, to tell other sinners the power of the grace of God. If there is anybody here who might be called a very devil, let him come, and trust Christ, and he shall be saved straightway. Come along with you, poor slave of Satan. Leave your old master this very minute; do not give him even a moment’s notice, but speed away to the great Father’s house, and he will receive you, for he is expecting you; nay, more, it is he who is drawing you by his gracious Spirit, and it is his Son who has said, “All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” God grant that many, who have been hard sinners, may come to Christ, and find in him eternal life!

Once more, Jehovah’s challenge, “Is there any thing too hard for me?” contains a lesson for you who are trying to serve the Lord. I want you also to catch the meaning and the message of my text;-there is nothing too hard for God, so he can save the children in your Sunday-school class, he can bless the people of the district where you visit, he can help you to talk to that dying person whom you went to see yesterday. There is nothing too hard for the Lord, so he can bless you, city missionary, to that dark slum which gives you so much anxiety; he can bless you, dear friend, at that street corner where you scarcely get through a dozen sentences before you are interrupted. This question of Jehovah, “Is there any thing too hard for me?” seems to be like a rallying cry from God to urge all his followers to press on, like heroes, without a doubt about the victory. “Courage, my comrades,” said Mohammed to his troops, one day, when the battle was going against them; “I can hear the angels coming to our rescue.” There were no angels flying to help him, but they are ever coming to aid us, when we need them, for “are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?” If we are truly trusting in the living God, he will surely send the heavenly principalities and powers to help us, so that, in our weakness, his strength shall be glorified, and sinners shall be saved.

I can believe in the conversion of the Jews when I hear Jehovah’s challenge, “Is there any thing too hard for me?” I can believe in the spread of his gospel over the whole world when I hear him ask, “Is there any thing too hard for me?” I can believe in my Master setting up a kingdom that shall have no bounds, and no end, when I hear his royal enquiry, “Is there any thing too hard for me?” Very often, when we get among men and women, we seem to be surrounded by a lot of children playing with toys, for they bother, and hinder, and hamper us, and only increase our own helplessness; but when we get clear of them, and just look to God alone, then we seem to have elbow-room for our work. A thoroughly consecrated man can do something, by God’s grace, when he has got rid of the intolerable nuisance of having too many human helpers, who are often only hindrances, and who has not any other helper but his God. Oh, it is a blessed thing to be flung back upon the bare arm of omnipotence,-to be gloriously compelled to rest on God, and on God alone! May many of us know, by happy, personal experience, how blessed it is!

I have done, dear friends, when I have, in the last place, very briefly answered a short and simple question. Since nothing is too hard for the Lord, what then?

I want that we, as a people, should be true to the very core to our blessed God; and, to that end, as there is nothing that is too hard for him, do let us trust him, all of us, whatever our trials or our difficulties may be. Let us have no sham faith, no pretended confidence, but real trust in a real God.

Then, next, I want that we should act as if we trusted God. Do not let us waver, “for he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.”

And, then, believing in God, let us always do what is right. Let us believe that, to do the right, is ever right;-that policy, that “hedging” a little, and doing what we call a slight wrong, can never be justified in the sight of God.

Finally, let us live a life of love, a life of forgiveness and kindness, trusting that God will cause love to overcome human hate, and kindness to conquer all misrepresentation. Live in all respects so as to glorify God.

Beloved in the Lord, who are one with us in Christ Jesus, do be out-and-out believers; and let your faith be as evident as the colour on a healthy cheek, that all men may see that the very life-blood of your spiritual being is your faith in God and in his Christ. What made brave Oliver Cromwell, in the days gone by, so terrible an enemy to all who loved not liberty and right? It was his faith; and he had gathered about him a band of men who also believed; and so, when the Ironsides marched to the fight, you might as well have hoped to stay the stars in their courses as to keep those men back from victory. And, to-day, what England needs is men of faith, whose watchword is, “The Lord of hosts!” and whose confidence it is that “with God all things are possible,” and also that “all things are possible to him that believeth.” May all of us be such believers, for our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake! Amen.

Exposition by C. H. Spurgeon

JEREMIAH 32:1-27

Verses 1-5. The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord in the tenth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, which was the eighteenth year of Nebuchadrezzar. For then the king of Babylon’s army besieged Jerusalem: and Jeremiah the prophet was shut up in the court of the prison, which was in the king of Judah’s house. For Zedekiah king of Judah had shut him up, saying, Wherefore dost thou prophesy, and say, Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will give this city into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall take it; and Zedekiah king of Judah shall not escape out of the hand of the Chaldeans, but shall surely be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon, and shall speak with him mouth to mouth, and his eyes shall behold his eyes; and he shall lead Zedekiah to Babylon, and there shall he be until I visit him, saith the Lord: though ye fight with the Chaldeans, ye shall not prosper.

So you see that Jeremiah was shut up in prison at the time here mentioned. Zedekiah, the king of Judah, had treated him very harshly, because of his faithful utterance of the Word of the Lord. He was a true servant of Jehovah, yet he suffered much at the king’s hand. One very remarkable event, which happened at that time, is here recorded.

6-8. And Jeremiah said, The word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Behold, Hanameel the son of Shallum thine uncle shall come unto thee, saying, Buy thee my field that is in Anathoth: for the right of redemption is thine to buy it. So Hanameel mine uncle’s son came to me in the court of the prison according to the word of the Lord, and said unto me, Buy my field, I pray thee, that is in Anathoth, which is in the country of Benjamin: for the right of inheritance is thine, and the redemption is thine; buy it for thyself. Then I knew that this was the word of the Lord.

The Lord had told him beforehand that it would be so; and, therefore, in due time, his cousin came to him with the offer of this plot of land in the country of Benjamin.

9, 10. And I bought the field of Hanameel my uncle’s son, that was in Anathoth, and weighed him the money, even seventeen shekels of silver. And I subscribed the evidence, and sealed it, and took witnesses, and weighed him the money in the balances.

This was, in every respect, a very extraordinary transaction. Remember that the Chaldeans were already besieging Jerusalem, and they were all over the land, carrying fire and sword into every part of it. Jerusalem was straitly shut up, so that none of the inhabitants could get out of the city; yet here is Jeremiah, himself a prisoner, buying land which was virtually worth nothing whatever; but he believed so firmly that the Chaldeans would yet permit the Jews to live unmolested in that land that he paid down the purchase money for the field, and saw to the legal execution of the deed of transfer, just as you or I might have done if we were purchasing a plot of land in our own country. This is a notable instance of the triumph of faith over unfavourable surroundings, and also of the prophet’s obedience to the Word of the Lord.

11, 12. So I took the evidence of the purchase, both that which was sealed according to the law and custom, and that which was open: and I gave the evidence of the purchase unto Baruch the son of Neriah, the son of Maaseiah, in the sight of Hanameel mine uncle’s son, and in the presence of the witnesses that subscribed the book of the purchase, before all the Jews that sat in the court of the prison.

Jeremiah did all this openly. What they may have thought to be an absurd action, he did not do in private; but in the presence of them all. True faith in God does not go in for hole-and-corner transactions. Faith can do its business in the light of the sun. Faith believes God under all circumstances, and believes that the truest common sense is to obey his Word. Therefore she is not ashamed of what she does; neither shall she ever have cause to be ashamed or confounded, world without end. There is a living God; and if we do what he bids us, good must come of it. No harm shall happen to the man who confidently rests in the Most High.

13-17. And I charged Baruch before them, saying, Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; Take these evidences, this evidence of the purchase, both which is sealed, and this evidence which is open; and put them in an earthen vessel, that they may continue many days. For thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; Houses and fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land. Now when I had delivered the evidence of the purchase unto Baruch the son of Neriah, I prayed unto the Lord, saying, Ah Lord God!

Faith cannot live without prayer. When she has performed her most heroic deeds, she turns to God and humbly asks for renewed strength; for oh! my brethren, the best of men are but men at the best; and those who have the most faith never have any to spare.

Jeremiah says, “I prayed unto the Lord, saying, Ah Lord God!” It looked, at first sight, as if the prophet was going to utter some mournful complaint, or to express some doubt or misgiving concerning the purchase of the land; but it was not so. Having allowed that exclamation to escape from him, his faith came to the rescue, and he continued:-

17. Behold, thou hast made the heaven and the earth by thy great power and stretched out arm, and there is nothing too hard for thee:

Is not that a grand sentence? “There is nothing too hard for thee.” He that could make the heaven and the earth can do anything. Read, in the Book of Genesis, the story of the creation, and see how “He spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast;” and then judge as to what can ever be a difficulty to the Almighty. Surely you must say to him, as Jeremiah did, “There is nothing too hard for thee.”

18. Thou shewest lovingkindness unto thousands, and recompensest the iniquity of the fathers into the bosom of their children after them; the Great, the Mighty God, the Lord of hosts, is his name,-

See how these godly men, in their times of trouble, delighted in the great names and glorious attributes of God. There are, nowadays, many namby-pamby, fashionable religionists, wrapped in luxury, who have only a little god; they never seem to know “the Great, the Mighty God;” but Jeremiah, with the smell of the prison still clinging to him, talks grandly: “the Great, the Mighty God, the Lord of hosts, is his name,”-

19-21. Great in counsel, and mighty in work: for thine eyes are open upon all the ways of the sons of men: to give every one according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings: which hast set signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, even unto this day, and in Israel, and among other men; and hast made thee a name, as at this day; and hast brought forth thy people Israel out of the land of Egypt with signs, and with wonders, and with a strong hand, and with a stretched out arm, and with great terror;

Those ancient Jews, in the time of their trouble, always looked gratefully back to the wonders wrought by Jehovah in Egypt. That great deed of God, when he smote the might of Pharaoh, was always present to the Hebrew mind; and the people, in every season of tribulation, refreshed themselves with the remembrance of it. Well, then, dear friends, as they sang the song of Moses, shall not we sing the song of the Lamb? Will not we go back in thought to the glorious triumphs of our Redeemer, and recount again and again, for the encouragement of our faith, what Christ did for us upon the tree, even as the Jews thought often, for the strengthening of their confidence, of their wondrous deliverance from Egypt by the high hand and the stretched out arm of Jehovah?

22-24. And hast given them this land, which thou didst swear to their fathers to give them, a land flowing with milk and honey; and they came in, and possessed it; but they obeyed not thy voice, neither walked in thy law; they have done nothing of all that thou commandedst them to do: therefore thou hast caused all this evil to come upon them; behold the mounts,-

The margin renders it, “the engines of shot,” which we see, by the next chapter, were powerful enough to throw down the houses in Jerusalem.

24, 25. They are come unto the city to take it; and the city is given into the hand of the Chaldeans, that fight against it, because of the sword, and of the famine, and of the pestilence; and what thou hast spoken is come to pass; and, behold, thou seest it. And thou hast said unto me, O Lord God, Buy thee the field for money, and take witnesses; for the city is given into the hands of the Chaldeans.

I suppose that, although Jeremiah, with unquestioning faith, had done as God had commanded him, yet afterwards, when he was alone in his prison cell, he began to think the whole matter over; and though he may not have had any actual doubts, yet he probaby had some anxieties as to the issue of the whole affair. He could not quite understand it, so he wisely put it before the Lord. Some of you, who have truly trusted God, may yet be just now perplexed with anxiety of one kind or another. Well, then, tell it all out before the Lord; go at once into his presence, and spread the case before him, as Jeremiah did.

26, 27. Then came the word of the Lord unto Jeremiah, saying, Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh: is there any thing too hard for me?

That question we will try to answer presently.

Hymns from “Our Own Hymn Book”-34, 686, 1042; and from “Flowers and Fruits”-54.