What a great mercy it is for us that David had not a smooth path and an easy life! We should have lost much valuable instruction if he had been able to hold on the even tenor of his way continually; whereas, now, we are great gainers by his trials and sufferings. In reading the Psalms of David, you will often find a verse which just suits your own case. It is hardly possible for you to be placed in any position without discovering that the son of Jesse has been there before you. I cannot, in all respects, liken him to the Lord Jesus Christ, who was in all points tempted like as we are; yet, to a large extent, it was so with David as well as with “great David’s greater Son.” He seems to have been, not merely one man, but “all mankind’s epitome,” and to have known almost all human temptations, and human sins, and human joys, having been led, sometimes by the Spirit, and sometimes, alas, by his own frailty and foolishness, into all sorts of strange places in order that he might become an instructor to us.

You have probably heard this remark a great many times, but did it ever strike you that very much the same may be said concerning your own experience? When you are wondering why you are so strangely tried, and why your experience is often so remarkable, may it not happen that the reason does not lie in yourself so much as in others to whom God means to make you useful? You are being led along a rough road, and being tried and instructed, in order that you may be the means of helping others whom you will find in some of the dark places of the earth. You are being trained as a hardy mountaineer in order that, when the Lord’s sheep are lost on wild craggy places, you may know how to climb up after them, and bring them down to a place of safety. You are being taught how to find your way through the fen-country of despondency and despair in order that, when the pilgrims to the Celestial City lose their way, and get into the marshy places of fear and doubt, you may know how to bring them out again, and set their feet again upon the rock, and establish their goings once more. The bearings of any one man’s life upon the lives of other men can scarcely be fully known to us here. Even when we are able to look upon the completed life, we shall hardly know how much it has been intertwisted with other men’s lives; and, certainly, until the life is completed, no man can know how much his present sufferings have to do with his usefulness to others; nor can he fully understand how he is being prepared here, there, and in a thousand other places, for usefulness in a position of which he little dreams that he will ever be the occupant. Yet he is one day to be placed where all this mysterious training will be of the utmost service to other people. The steel blade, that was put into the fire again, and again, and yet again, to be tempered, did not know that the Cid would use it in the day of battle to cut through the armour of his adversaries; if it had not been prepared for use in this fashion, it would not have been fit to be placed in such a hero’s hand. Believers are being made into vessels meet for the Master’s use, and it is not every vessel that is fit for him to employ in his divine service. David was so prepared, but he could only have become so by means of the remarkable life of trial through which he was called to pass.

Whenever we read the story of David’s life, or note in the Psalms where he went and what he did, we should not merely notice how David acted and suffered, and what he did while undergoing the suffering, but we should try so to study his experience as to be able to do as he did if we are placed in circumstances similar to his. Avoid his sin; let that be a beacon to warn you; but imitate his virtues. Pray the Lord to make you a partaker of the fullest measure of the grace which the psalmist possessed; but never look at his life as you gaze at a statue,-merely to admire it, and to say how beautifully it is wrought;-but look at it as a boy should look at his copy, that he may imitate it; look at it as the soldier looks at the fugleman, that he may march step by step as he sets him the example; and, above all things, ever keep your eye on David’s Lord and Master, lest even David should be the means of misleading you. Let your admiration both of David and of the Lord Jesus Christ be practical; there is far too much of that kind of religion which consists in merely admiring other people, or in seeing what we ourselves ought to be, or in regretting that we are not what we should be; but true godliness is manifested as we bring forth the fruit of the Spirit by being and doing that which we feel we ought to be and to do. To this end, gracious Spirit, be pleased to help us! Let us give to our text that sort of meditation which shall all the while be aiming at a practical result, and while we see how David fled to his God in the time of trial, let us each one also make this resolve, in the strength of the Holy Spirit, “I also will do the same as David did; I will flee unto God to hide me.” In our text we have David’s declaration to the Lord, “I flee unto thee to hide me.” We also ought to do as David did, but no man will do this unless he has the five things of which I am about to speak.

And, first, no man will ever flee unto God to hide him unless he has a sense of danger.

David was in danger from many cruel enemies, and he fled to God to hide him from them. You and I may not be in any such danger as that, physically. We live in a country where, happily, we are protected from such a danger as that;-at least, the most of us do; but there are other dangers to which we are exposed. David fled to God to hide him because he realized the danger in which he was placed, and we shall only flee unto the Lord to hide us when we realize our own personal peril.

We are all well aware that many persons have perished because they have not realized their danger. You know how often this is the case. Men have gone, without any thought of peril, into places where there have been pestilential odours or the seeds of deadly diseases. If they had known what there was there, they would not have gone in that direction, or they would have taken various precautions to guard themselves from infection; but, in ignorance of their peril, they have breathed the fatal air, and have gone home to sicken and to die. Many a gallant ship has struck upon a hidden reef, or upon a sandbank that was not marked on the chart. I have never heard of any vessel being wrecked through its officers keeping too good a look-out; nor do we often read of ships being lost because the captain was too anxious to keep far away from the treacherous sands and the dangerous headlands; but we often hear of wrecks which have occurred through the captain’s ignorance of the danger to which his vessel was exposed. Every now and then, we learn that some obstruction has been encountered upon the railway as the express train has come rushing along. If the driver had but known that the permanent way, as it is called, was out of order, and that there would be a collision if he did not stop the train, he would have done all that he could to avoid such a calamity; but because he did not know that he and his passengers were in danger, he went on as though all had been well, and the most terrible consequences ensued.

Many have perished-I am using the word “perish” in the ordinary sense,-because they have not known that they were in danger; and we know (oh, that it were not so!) that, concerning spiritual things, there are millions of our fellow-countrymen who are in danger of the eternal wrath of God, yet they are not conscious that it is so. They know that they are living in sin, and they have some dim perception that sin is an evil thing in God’s sight, yet they do not fully comprehend what sin is. Many of them do not know, in the full meaning of the word, that they are sinners. See how contented they are with their fancied righteousness, conceiving themselves to be in perfect safety all the while that they are in the utmost peril. They eat and they drink, they are married and they are given in marriage, as though such a state of things would last for ever. Talk to them concerning the last dread conflagration which is to consume the world, and they will laugh you to scorn, and cry, “Peace and safety,” even though sudden destruction is coming upon them. If we could once make men realize that they are in danger, there would be some hope that they would seek to escape from the peril that threatens them; but we cannot make them believe in its reality and certainty. They are unbelieving with regard to such disturbing news. If we cried aloud to them, “Peace, peace,” although we know there is no peace for them as long as they continue as they now are, they would probably believe us, for they lend their credulous ears to any superstition that seems to promise them a false peace; but if we try to warn them of their danger,-danger of the most terrible kind,-they will not, as a rule, be persuaded to listen to such unwelcome tidings; or if they do listen, they do not believe our message, and they will not admit they are in danger.

If any such persons are present with us here,-and I fear that there are some,-I mean, those who have no sense of danger, and yet have never trusted in Christ for salvation, let me remind you, dear friends, that your sins must inevitably bring punishment upon you. There is a Judge of all the earth, who must do right; and every transgression of his righteous law must be followed by punishment; else, why should there be a Judge of the earth at all, if he is indifferent to the iniquities of man? Let me also remind you that your sin is holding you in its power, and though, at present, you may not indulge in the grosser forms of vice, you are in great danger of going much further in the paths of sin than you like to think you will. You cannot stop in an evil course just when and where you please. You cannot say to sin, “Thus far shalt thou go, and no further.” The beginnings of evil are like the letting out of water, and when the dyke is once broken, and the pent-up flood is set free, it soon deluges the fields, and, perhaps, sweeps away multitudes of men and their habitations as well. Oh, that men could but realize that, while they are living in sin, they are always in danger of committing more sin, and yet more sin, going on from bad to worse, and from worse to the very worst of all! Many a young man would shudder with horror if he could foresee what he will yet become unless the grace of God shall prevent it. You have often seen that familiar picture of the child, and the kind of man that he will yet become,-either drunken or sober. If that child should be told that, one day, he would be like that red-faced old drunkard, he would not believe that he could ever grow to be as bad as that; neither will most young men, who are now living in sin, believe that they can ever grow to be what they will be if they continue in their present course. Yet that is the danger to which they are continually exposed,-the danger of sin ever producing yet more sin; and, to my mind, it seems to be punishment of a most grievous kind, even if there were no other, that sin should be allowed to breed within itself something yet more black and foul and filthy than it is itself,-till, on the cancer of sin there comes yet another cancer, more foul and loathsome, and yet another, and another, and another; or till the man, who was possessed with one devil, becomes possessed with seven devils even more wicked than the first one was. There is this real danger, this grievous danger, in the case of every unconverted man or woman upon the face of the earth. Therefore, each one of them should cry unto the Lord, “I flee unto thee to hide me.”

No man ever flees to God for shelter until he realizes that he is in danger, yet all men, whether they are the children of God or the children of this world, are in danger of one kind or another. As for the men of this world, the children of disobedience, they are in danger of the punishment which is due on account of their present sin, and that awful growth of sin of which I have been speaking; but are the children of God also in danger? Ask them, and they will tell you that they are pilgrims to the Celestial City, which they will, in due time, reach by God’s grace; but they will also tell you that, all along the road to heaven, there are dangerous places where the traveller might fall to his very grievous hurt;-for instance, the descent into the Valley of Humiliation, with Apollyon waiting there, determined to slay, or at least to wound the pilgrim; or the Valley of the Shadow of Death, a little further on, with its miry bog, and its hobgoblins, and all manner of terrifying sights and sounds;-and then the Enchanted Ground, with its temptation to the pilgrim to sleep, and Vanity Fair, where there are all sorts of ill wares to allure and deceive the pilgrim. Dangers of every sort beset the followers of the Lamb, and they are only safe as they are divinely protected. The moment you become a Christian, you are-

“Safe in the arms of Jesus,”

so far as your ultimate and final perseverance is concerned; but, all the while you are on the road to heaven, you must wear the armour provided for the good soldiers of Jesus Christ, for you are always exposed to danger from the adversary’s arrows and sword. All the while that you are in the earthly pastures, you need the protection of the good Shepherd. Why? Because you are in danger from the roaring lion, who goeth about seeking whom he may destroy; and, unless the great Shepherd’s rod and staff protect you, you will certainly be destroyed.

Let me also remind you that some dangers are not readily perceived, and those are generally the worst of all. We may be able to keep clear of “the arrow that flieth by day;” but who can guard himself against “the pestilence that walketh in darkness”? Possibly we do not fall into open sin; but the dry rot of gradual declension,-the silent sliding away of the heart from Christ,-who but God can guard us against that? Many a man is caught in the invisible nets of Satan, and well-nigh destroyed, even while he dreams that he is safely pursuing the path that leads to heaven. Therefore do I sound the tocsin and ring the alarm bell again and again, to remind you that we are all in danger, though some think they are not; those are the very persons who are in the greatest danger of all because they think they are not in peril. I wish I had the power to arouse all of you to a true sense of your danger with regard to spiritual things, for then you would, like David, flee unto God to hide you. You never will do that until you realize the peril in which you are placed, and recognize that, so long as you are not abiding in Christ, you are in continual peril, and that your only safety lies in fleeing unto God to hide you, even as the psalmist did long ago.

The second great need of a man, in order that he may flee unto God to hide him, is a sense of weakness.

A man who thinks that he can fight his own battles in his own strength will not flee unto God to hide him. But we are all of us as weak as water if we are left to ourselves, and we soon show that we are quite unable to cope with our spiritual foes. The unforgiven sinner proves how weak he is by yielding at once to the tempter. He has a traitor within his own heart, who opens the gates to Satan, and so he is easily overcome; and the believer, though he hath within him the new life which hateth sin, is as weak as other men if he be left without the Spirit of God for a single moment. There is enough of the fire of hell in thee, my brother,-thou who art the most spiritual and most like Christ,-to set all hell alight again if the infernal fires were ever put out. Thou art inclined toward that which is good; but if the grace of God ever left thee, thou wouldst be quite as much inclined toward that which is evil. I will not quite say what Ralph Erskine said concerning himself,-

“On good and evil equal bent,

And both a devil and saint;”-

but I will say that, if a saint could ever be left of God, he would soon become a devil; and he, who was so eager after that which was good, would be just as eager after that which is evil; so again I say that we are all of us as weak as water if left to ourselves.

But some people think that they are very strong. Hear how the boastful man says, “I can drink my glass of beer or wine, but I shall never become a drunkard. I can attend the theatre, and see what a low standard of morals prevails there, but I shall never fall into such an evil thing as fornication or adultery. I shall never become a blasphemer; I am not in the habit of even using coarse language, and it is quite impossible that I should become profane.” He thinks, when he stakes his small sums of money, that he will never become a gambler. “No,” he says, “I am not such a fool as that.” Yet, often, when a man says that, you may write his true name in large capital letters, “A FOOL,” for there is no other fool who is so foolish as the one who thinks he is not such a fool as other men are. When Hazael was told by Elisha what he would afterwards do, he exclaimed, “Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?” Ah, brethren! we are all sadly weak, and those are the weakest of all who think themselves to be strong. Past failures ought to have taught us all how great is our weakness. I wonder if any of you ever tried to soar away into the clouds with the perfectionists who delight to go up in a balloon, and seek to live far above all ordinary mortals. If so, and if you are at all like me,-and I expect your flesh and blood are very similar to mine,-I imagine that you soon discovered your mistake. The very day that you thought your temper was perfect, you found that it was very imperfect; and at the very time that you intended to have no thought or care, and when you had made up your mind that you were not coming down again to the level of this poor grovelling world, you found that you could not rise an inch above the ground, and that you were, so far as spiritual things were concerned, just like a lump of lead. You were made to feel that the best of men are but men at the best; and, in that way, your failure taught you how weak you are. Even if you are the best man or woman in the world, in yourself you are utter weakness, and only Christ himself can make anything of you; saint as you are, you are still a sinner saved by grace, and you are only holy as you are made so by the blessed Spirit who sanctifieth you. If you were left by him for a single moment, your sinnership would come to the front all too prominently, and your saintship would retire to the rear.

Now, brethren and sisters, in our weakness lies our strength. The apostle Paul says, “When I am weak, then am I strong;” and I wish it were possible for me to produce in all of you, whether you are sinners or saints, the sense of positive inability and utter weakness; for, until you feel that, you will never say to the Lord, “I flee unto thee to hide me.” On the contrary, you will stand out boldly in the place of danger, and you will even defy your foes to do their worst against you. You will venture into worldliness; you will go up to the very mouth of the furnace of sin; you will become more daring and more presumptuous, and you will be less on your watch-tower; you will keep on going further and further in the wrong way as long as you imagine that you are strong. But if the Lord will aim his arrows right at the very heart of your strength, and lay all your fancied glory in the mire, and make you to know that you are less than the least of all saints, then it will be better for you. But before you will reach this point, you will have to confess your own nothingness, and say,-

“But, oh! for this no strength have I;

My strength is at thy feet to lie.”

Then you will flee unto the Lord to hide you, and then you will be hidden by him in a safe place, but never till then.

A third thing which we must all have before we are likely to use the language of the text with truth is a prudent foresight: “I flee unto thee to hide me.”

The ungodly man, and, in a measure, the unwise believer also, will perceive the peril in which he is placed, and yet hesitate, linger, delay, deliberate, procrastinate. This is great folly, yet it is just what thousands are doing. I feel sure that some of you, who are here, are not prepared to live;-much lees are you prepared to die. I am glad to see you come to the house of God on a weeknight, for it looks as if you had some desire to find out the way of everlasting life. Yet how many there are among you who are living as if this life were all! You are quite unprepared for that great day to which you all know you are hastening; and you do not like even to hear anything about death and the judgment to come, because you are utterly unfit to face those stern realities. Are you always going to put off thoughts about these all-important matters, and to go on living without the slightest preparation for eternity? You know that you are in danger, and that you are too weak to face that danger all alone, though you have not yet fully perceived how great your weakness is. Oh, that you would be wise enough to begin to look about you for a way of escape! When you are in this sense wise, you will flee unto God to hide you; but until you do get at least a little of this sacred prudence, and some of the wisdom which the Holy Ghost teacheth, you will delay, and delay, and delay, till, on some dread day, the long-gathering clouds will discharge the awful storm of divine judgment upon your devoted head; and, then, you will not be able to flee unto Christ to hide you, for the harvest will be past, and the summer will be ended, but you will be “not saved.”

The Lord, by his grace, has made Christian men and women more full of forethought than the ungodly are, and they have desired to escape from the wrath to come, and they have done so. And let me tell you, sinner, you who have not yet fled to Christ for salvation, that, while it is a blessed thing to be delivered from the wrath to come, it is also a most delightful thing to be delivered from the fear of it even now. I do not think that I could live an hour, without being in the bitterest agony, if I had any sort of doubt about my safety in Christ Jesus, for I have a most vivid sense of my danger and my weakness apart from him, and these, like wings, bear me to the Rock of Ages, where I can hide in absolute security. But I could never rest in peace if I thought that God was angry with me, or if I knew that, if I were to drop down dead, my soul would be in hell. How can any of you remain unconcerned in such a sad condition as that? Surely it must be because you do not realize what your true condition is. If I could lock some of you up in a room, and make you think about your position with regard to God, you would be very uncomfortable; you would almost as soon go to prison as sit down to think about the needs of your immortal spirit. Yet it is wrong for a man to be afraid to look into the books in which he keeps his soul’s accounts; it is worse than foolish to be afraid to test the soundness of the foundation of the house in which he dwells; it is sheer madness to be afraid to look to the state of his soul to see whether it has the marks of death upon it or not. Do not any of you be so foolish, so insane. You insure your lives, you insure your houses, you put On warmer garments as winter approaches, and if you have only some slight ailment, you run to a doctor. Have you no care about your immortal souls? Have you no anxiety concerning death and eternity? Or are you resolved to play the fool before high heaven? I pray you, do not so; but awake to something like prudence; and any one of you who does so will say to God, as David did, “I flee unto thee to hide me.” You never will do this until you exercise such wise forethought as I urge upon you.

Now, fourthly, and briefly, before any one of us will say to the Lord, “I flee unto thee to hide me,” there must be a solid confidence.

What kind of confidence do I mean? A solid confidence that God can hide us. Did you notice the second hymn that we sang? It always seems to me that the writer had a wonderful conception of God in his awfulness and greatness to be feared, and then he says,-

“Yet I may love thee, O my God!”

Think of the great God who made the heavens and the earth, who is everywhere, filling all things, and doing all things according to the good pleasure of his own will, and then say to yourself, “If I flee unto him,-if he will permit me to flee unto him to hide me,-how safe I must be! It is he of whom I have been afraid; but if I can hide in him, how secure I shall be! If I can find a shelter in him, what a perfect shelter that must be!” When God lifts up his sword of justice, in his almighty hand, to smite the sinner, if that sinner can lay hold upon his arm, and cling firmly to it, how can God smite him? And he urges us to take hold of his strength. A heavy blow falls with the greatest force upon those who are some little distance away from the striker. When a man intends to strike a tremendous blow, if his adversary runs up close to him, and clings to his arm, what can he do with him? And fleeing to God to hide us does, as it were, disarm God; therefore I urge you to flee unto God in Christ that he may hide you from his justice, and he can rightly do this because Christ has borne for all believers the punishment that was due to their sin; and, therefore, the God of justice can himself smile when he sees a sinner hidden in the Christ who made a full and complete atonement for his sin. Whither can any of you flee away from the presence of God? If you ride upon the sunbeams, he will track you. If you plunge into the deeps of the sea, he will discover you. If you could climb up among the stars, he could pluck you from your hidingplace, for he is everywhere; but if you flee to God in Christ to hide you, you must be safe for ever. I have read an old story of a rebel, who was hunted by a certain king, but who disguised himself, and entered into the king’s tent, and partook of his hospitality before anyone discovered that he was the very man whose life the king had been seeking; and the king nobly and generously scorned to smite the foe who had fled for shelter to his own tent. O poor guilty soul, this is the message of the gospel,-Flee to God to hide you from God; turn to him as the prodigal returned to his father to obtain forgiveness of the wrong which he had done to his father!

And, ye Christian men and women, this is to be your constant joy, that you always can hide in God, that there is no trouble, difficulty, or danger, from which God will not be a shelter to you; for, as he is a shelter from his own justice, he must be a shelter from everyone else and everything else that would harm you. And you may always hide in God. You will never say to the Lord, “I flee unto thee to hide me,” until you know that you may hide in him. Yes, beloved, you may flee unto God to hide you, for God is never more truly God than when he receiveth poor souls that make him to be their hidingplace. It is said that, on one occasion when certain wise men were sitting together in council, a poor bird, which was pursued by a hawk, flew into the bosom of one of the councillors, and he-the only man in the whole company who would have done such a thing,-plucked the trembling bird out of his bosom, wrung its neck, and threw it away from him, whereupon the other councillors all rose up, and voted for his immediate expulsion from their assembly, for they all felt that any man, who could do such a deed as that, was unworthy to have a place in their ranks; and we may be quite sure that the ever-merciful Jehovah will never take a soul that has flown into his bosom for shelter, and destroy it. Thou dreadest God, poor soul, but thou needest never do so. If thou art in Christ Jesus, God is so fully reconciled to thee that, when thou art pursued by sin, or Satan, or trouble of any kind, the safest place for thee to fly to is his bosom, and there thou art safe for ever, for he will never cast thee out. If you have this confidence in God, you will say to him, as David did, “I flee unto thee to hide me.”

One thing more is needed, and that is activity of faith.

There are some of you, who have heard what I have been saying about hiding in God, and as you go home you will say, “Yes, we know that we are in danger, we know that we are weak, we know that we need a secure hidingplace, and we know that God is willing to hide us.” Well, then, if you know that, will you not at once flee unto him to hide you? Beloved, you who have often fled unto him to hide you, will not you again flee unto him? Some of you may have a new form of trouble which has just come upon you, and it is of such a kind that you do not like to tell anybody about it. I pray you, do not keep it to yourself for even another minute, but flee unto God, and tell him all about it. I must confess my own folly in this respect, for I have been foolish enough, partly through weariness of body and brain, to nurse a trouble which I ought to have cast upon the Lord long ago. One does not mind nursing his own children, who may grow up to be a comfort to him, but it is always a pity to nurse trouble, for that often means taking a serpent’s eggs, and putting them into our bosom to hatch there into serpents that will sting ourselves. This is a most foolish course of action; would it not be far wiser for us, as soon as any trouble comes upon us, to flee unto the Lord to hide us from it? Let us be cowardly enough to run away from our trouble. Nay, it will not be cowardice, but true bravery, always to run unto God directly any trouble comes upon us, each one of us crying to him, with David, “I flee unto thee to hide me.” Suppose that twenty troubles should come to us in a day, and that we should flee unto God twenty times with them, I think that we might almost pray to God to send twenty troubles more, so that we might flee unto him forty times a day. Any reason for going to God must be a blessing to us, for going to God is going to bliss; so we may even turn our troubles into blessings by making them drive us unto him.

I want to keep you, dear friends, to the practical point of my subject. Have you been worrying yourself, since you have been here, about a trial that you expect to fall upon you towards the close of this year? You fear that Christmas is not likely to be “a merry Christmas” to you; there are many bills coming in, and not much hope of the money with which to meet them; well, then, flee unto God with that trouble; and whatever is burdening your heart or your mind, flee unto God about it, and leave it all in his hands, and go on your way rejoicing.

Last of all, is there not some poor sinner here, who has never yet believed in Jesus Christ as his or her Saviour? How happy I should be if, even before you leave this place, you would flee unto the Lord to hide you! You do not need even to go into the vestry, to talk to the elders. You may do that, if you like, and they will be glad to see you; but your best plan is to tell the Lord, while you are sitting in that seat, that you are a sinner far off from him, and that you wish that he would save you. Ask him, for Christ’s sake, to have mercy upon you. Trust his dear Son to save you; tell him that you do trust him to save you, and he will do it, for, according to thy faith shall it be unto thee. Flee unto him to hide you. There are his dear wounds, and you are a poor feeble dove, and the cruel hawk is after you. You cannot fight with him, for he would tear you in pieces; you can only escape from him by flying to the wounds of Jesus; do so, then, for your pursuer cannot reach you there.

“Come, guilty souls, and flee away

Like doves to Jesu’s wounds;

This is the welcome gospel-day,

Wherein free grace abounds.”

God bless you all, for his dear Son’s sake! Amen.

Exposition by C. H. Spurgeon

PSALM 143

Psalm 143. A Psalm of David. Verses 1, 2. Hear my prayer, O Lord, give ear to my supplications: in thy faithfulness answer me, and in thy righteousness. And enter not into judgment with thy servant: for in thy sight shall no man living be justified.

That is, of course, apart from the wondrous system of justification by faith in Jesus Christ, whereby believers are made the righteousness of God in him. Apart from that righteousness, no man living can be justified in the sight of God.

3, 4. For the enemy hath persecuted my soul; he hath smitten my life down to the ground; he hath made me to dwell in darkness, as those that have been long dead. Therefore is my spirit overwhelmed within me; my heart within me is desolate.

Are any of you passing through this trying experience? If so, does it not encourage you to find that somebody else has been this way before you? The road is very rough, but there is a man’s footprint there, the footprint of a man whom God greatly loved, even the man after God’s own heart? Ah, dear friends, in those deep sorrows of yours, you are not alone; David has passed this way before you; and, what is better still, David’s Lord has traversed this rough road. In all our afflictions he was afflicted, he was tempted in all points like as we are, so he can most perfectly sympathize with us in all the troubles through which we are called to pass.

5, 6. I remember the days of old; I meditate on all thy works; I muse on the work of thy hands. I stretch forth my hands unto thee: my soul thirsteth after thee, as a thirsty land. Selah.

One of the things which God’s people are in the habit of doing, when they are in deep trouble, is to look back upon their past experience. You may have seen the bargemen on the canal push backwards that they may propel the barge forwards; and, sometimes, we who believe in Jesus Christ have to push backwards,-to look back on our past experience in order to derive fresh courage for the present hour of trial. So the psalmist says, “I remember the days of old; I meditate on all thy works; I muse on the work of thy hands.” Yet in David’s day of distress, when he had meditated upon his experiences in the past, that did not satisfy him. He wanted his God, therefore he cried unto the Lord, “I stretch forth my hands unto thee: my soul thirsteth after thee, as a thirsty land.” When the fields have been long dry, because there has been no rain, you see how the earth opens its mouth in great cracks as if it gaped for the rain it so sorely needs; and David’s soul seemed thus gaping with a strong desire after the living God: “My soul thirsteth after thee, as a thirsty land.”

7, 8. Hear me speedily, O Lord; my spirit faileth: hide not thy face from me, lest I be like unto them that go down into the pit. Cause me to hear thy lovingkindness in the morning; for in thee do I trust: cause me to know the way wherein I should walk; for I lift up my soul unto thee.

This is a beautiful prayer, which any one of you might present to the Lord: “Cause me to know the way wherein I should walk.” You are perplexed as to what you ought to do; you wish to do that which is right, but you are not sure what is right. Yet God can cause you to know the way wherein you should walk; he leadeth the blind by a way that they know not, and in paths which they have not seen. So breathe this prayer to him in the hour of your perplexity,-

“Guide me, O thou great Jehovah,

Pilgrim through this barren land:

I am weak, but thou art mighty;

Hold me with thy powerful hand!”

Or say with David, “Cause me to know the way wherein I should walk, for I lift up my soul unto thee.” He seems to say, “My soul is like a dead weight which cannot lift itself up; but in the strength which thou dost impart to me, I lift it up; I will not let it lie like a dead log before thee: ‘I lift up my soul unto thee.’ ”

9, 10. Deliver me, O Lord, from mine enemies: I flee unto thee to hide me. Teach me to do thy will;

This is another most blessed prayer: “Teach me to do thy will.” Most of us want to have our own will, and to go our own way; but each one who is truly wise prays to the Lord, “Teach me to do thy will.”

10, 11. For thou art my God: thy spirit is good; lead me into the land of uprightness. Quicken me, O Lord, for thy name’s sake: for thy righteousness’ sake bring my soul out of trouble.

What earnest pleading is this, and how powerful it is! Every word is so fitting that, if I had time to explain it, you would note the force and appropriateness of every syllable that the psalmist here uses.

12. And of thy mercy cut off mine enemies, and destroy all them that afflict my soul: for I am thy servant.

Hymns from “Our Own Hymn Book”-57, 821, 195.

RETURN! RETURN!

A Sermon

Published on Thursday, April 13th, 1905,

delivered by

C. H. SPURGEON,

at the metropolitan tabernacle, newington,

On Lord’s-day Evening, December 17th, 1876.

“Return, thou backsliding Israel.… Turn, O backsliding children.… Return, ye backsliding children.”-Jeremiah 3:12, 14, 22.

It is, indeed, a horrible thing that a saved soul should ever wander from its Saviour. After having had so much of past sin fully and freely forgiven, and after having been made to rejoice in perfect pardon, can it ever turn away from that dear pierced hand which lifted its heavy burden from its shoulders? Can it ever wander from the fountain in which it was washed whiter than the snow? If so, it will indeed have committed a shameful sin. After so many spiritual benefits have been enjoyed, and the soul has not only been washed, but also robed, and fed, and adopted into the family of God, and been taught many wonderful lessons,-can such a child as that leave such a home and such a Father, and go back to “the beggarly elements” from which it has been delivered? Ah, if it even thinks of doing so, it has, by that very thought, committed treason against the sovereign love of God. No, beloved, with so much sin forgiven, and so much favour bestowed, we ought to feel ourselves bound with cords to the horns of the altar; and with such bright prospects before us, such a heaven prepared by such a Saviour,-with the assurance that we shall for ever be with him where he is, beholding his glory,-and with such exceeding great and precious promises as he has made to him that overcometh, why, brethren, if we think of turning our backs in the day of battle, or of forsaking the King’s highway for Bypath meadow, the very thought must be most grievous to God as well as most shameful on our part. It ought to be intolerable to us even to think of such a thing; but for any believer in the Lord Jesus Christ actually to go astray,-to sin against light and knowledge,-to sin against infinite love and mercy,-to sin against thy wounds, Emmanuel, and against thy crown of thorns,-to offend against thy matchless love,-oh, this is indeed dreadful! Well did the Lord say, concerning Israel’s backsliding, “Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid.”

Brethren and sisters in Christ, let me remind you that there is nothing for us to gain, and everything for us to lose, by forsaking the ways of God, even for a moment. We are not like those who have never known his ways, for we know them to be paths of pleasantness and peace. We are not like those who are still deceived by the world, for we have proved how false she is. Her painted charms once bewitched our hearts, and we were enamoured of her; but we have been undeceived, and now we cry, with Solomon, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” This empty world does but mock and deceive all who seek for true treasure in it; so are we going back to it after all that we have received from Christ, forsaking the real for the imaginary, the substantial for the shadowy? Can it be that we are going to commit these two evils,-to forsake the fountain of living waters, and to hew out for ourselves broken cisterns which can hold no water? If any of us have done so in the past, let us be ashamed of ourselves; and if some of us have done so almost without knowing what we were doing, let us prostrate ourselves in the very dust before the Most High, for this is no common sin. It is a sin that has a high degree of heinousness and aggravation when any of us, who have known the way of righteousness, and who have enjoyed sweet and hallowed fellowship with God, and the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free, go back to wear again the chains of sin’s slavery, and even for a while, or in part, again have a guilty complicity with that vain world which we professed to have forsaken once for all.

Every man, however great his experience may be, is in danger. I have heard that more horses fall at the bottom of the hill than anywhere else, because the drivers fancy they have no need to hold them up when they have reached the bottom of the hill; and I have noticed that some of the saddest falls I have ever witnessed among Christian men have been among elderly Christians,-among those who said of the young people, “Ah, they ought to be very watchful, for they have strong passions, and they may very easily be led astray; but as for us, we have had such a long experience that we have passed out of the range of temptation.” The most dangerous place in the world is that which is supposed to be beyond the reach of temptation. The power of the devil is often most to be feared when he has left you alone for a while, for he has then probably left you to something or someone who will be more dangerous to you than he himself would be. That is to say, when a man says, “I shall never be tempted again,” he has already fallen into one of the devil’s most dangerous snares, for the pride of his heart has deceived him, and made him an easy prey to the great adversary. Satan delights to pluck grey beards, and to prove their owners to be fools. He has great joy in tripping up young men, in the fulness of their strength, to show that he is more than a match for the very strongest of them; he is even more glad to waylay a man in middle life, and to teach him that, even when he thinks he has all his wits about him, he is not so shrewd as the old tempter is; but I think it is his chief delight to waylay those who imagine that their long experience will preserve them from the snares of Satan. Therefore I say that we are all of us-from the little child to the man who is on the very brink of heaven,-from the most timid up to the bravest of us all,-in danger from our great adversary. Recollect the dreadful conflict with Satan which John Knox had just as he was about to enter heaven, and remember Martin Luther’s desperate fight with the arch-fiend even in the midst of the waters of Jordan, and learn from the experience of these mighty men of God that we are all, evermore, from the first to the last, in danger; and, therefore, all of us have need to cry unto the Lord unceasingly,-

“Keep us, Lord, oh keep us ever,

Vain our hope if left by thee;

We are thine; oh leave us never,

Till thy face in heaven we see;

There to praise thee

Through a bright eternity.

“All our strength at once would fail us,

If deserted, Lord, by thee;

Nothing then could aught avail us,

Certain our defeat would be:

Those who hate us

Thenceforth their desire would see.

Now, supposing that I am addressing any persons who have, unhappily, fallen into this sin, what is the message that I am to give to them from my Lord? After this morning’s service, I was talking with a brother in Christ who was in this sad condition. If he is here now, I would very affectionately commend to him the message which the Holy Spirit sends to him, and to all who are like him,-the word which comes over and over again in the three texts upon which I am about to speak to you,-“Return! Return!”

In trying to press that one simple message home to the backsliding heart, I shall, first of all, speak of the surprise which this message ought to awaken: “Return!”

Does God really mean that? After I have wandered so far from him, does he invite me to come back to him? Yes, beloved, he does; and he does so fully realizing all that the word “Return” involves. There is a holy jealousy, in the heart of God, which causes him to feel a righteous anger when any of his children wander away from him; yet this word “Return” proves that he has put aside that jealousy in a marvellously gracious manner. Let me read to you what the Lord says, in the first verse of the chapter from which my texts are taken, for I want to keep you to God’s own Word, which will do you far more good, and give you far more solid comfort, than any word of mine. “They say,”-that is, everybody says it,-“If a man put away his wife, and she go from him, and become another man’s, shall he return unto her again? shall not that land be greatly polluted? but thou hast played the harlot with many lovers; yet return again to me, saith the Lord.” I cannot say much about the illustration which the Lord here uses; it is a thing to be thought of rather than to be talked about: but do you not see that the delicacy, which makes a man feel that he cannot take back his erring spouse, is far more developed in the mind of God; yet, over the head of that delicacy, there rides this omnipotent love, which makes him say, even to you who have wandered the furthest from him, “Return unto me notwithstanding all that has happened.” Are you not surprised at the Lord’s message when it is set before you in such a light as this? Yet, surprising as it is, I pray you to believe it, and promptly to obey it.

The wonder is increased when we remember that the sin of going away from God has, in some cases, been so grossly committed as to involve a terrible mass of guilt. If you read the whole of this chapter,-which is more suitable for your own private reading than for the general congregation,-you will see that Israel had wandered from the Lord in the most shameless manner, and yet he said to her, “Return, thou backsliding Israel.” Now, if you are indeed a child of God, although you may have become neglectful of the Sabbath,-though it may have been a long time since you bowed your knee in prayer,-though your Bible has become covered with dust through your neglect,-and though you have so acted that even mere worldlings might have been ashamed to act as you have done; yet, still, almighty mercy, with the tear of pity standing in its eye, says to you, “Return, return, return.” It condemns your sin, and you also must condemn it, for it is an exceedingly loathsome and horrible thing; but you, yourself, that same mercy fain would save, and it says to you still, “Return, return, return.”

To add to the wonder that this message excites, remember the obstinate adherence to evil which some of you have evinced even when you have been suffering for your wrongdoing. Turn to the third verse: “Therefore the showers have been withholden, and there hath been no latter rain; and thou hadst a whore’s forehead, thou refusedst to be ashamed.” God had kept back the rain, and thus had prevented the ripening and ingathering of the harvest. Famine and want had stalked through the land, and smitten multitudes of the guilty people with death. Those who were spared knew why this judgment had come; yet they did not return unto the Lord. They had a forehead of brass, and they would not own their guilt, but obstinately clung to their sin. Brother, sister, have you had this painful experience? Have you been divinely afflicted again and again, and yet have you not repented, and turned unto the Lord? And notwithstanding that the blows of his rod appear to have been lost upon you, and though he has scourged you again and again, apparently to no purpose, still doth his blessed Spirit yearn over you, and the message he sends to you is not one of condemnation or threatening, but simply this, “Return, return, return.” Oh, this is indeed amazing love, that puts up with your ill manners, and will not take “no” for an answer from you, but still sweetly invites you to return unto the Lord from whom you have wandered so far, and against whom you have sinned so grossly!

Notice, also, that these sinful people had refused repeated invitations to return unto the Lord. How tenderly he says, in the fourth verse, “Wilt thou not from this time cry unto me, My father, thou art the guide of my youth?” As if the Lord meant to say to the sinning one, “Have you not had sufficient suffering as the result of your sin? The showers have been withholden, poverty has come upon you, your barns are empty, and there is no corn in the fields to fill them; will you not, at least from this time, begin to call me ‘Father’, and ask me to be your Friend?” Yet the guilty nation put all this pleading aside; but, even then, the Lord still cried, “Return, return, return;” and if, dear friends, you have heard a great many earnest, faithful sermons, and had many loving entreaties from Christian men and women, and yet have put them all aside, it is unutterably grievous that it should have been so, yet still there is only this message for you, even now, “Return, return, return.”

Worse still, these people had even turned the grace of God into licentiousness, and had made mischief out of God’s goodness. Read in the fifth verse, what they said: “Will he reserve his anger for ever? will he keep it to the end? Behold, thou hast spoken and done evil things as thou couldest.” Because God is so merciful, they were the more sinful; and because he does not keep his anger for ever, therefore they dared to provoke it again and again. This is one of the worst ways in which sinners prove how exceedingly sinful they are. A man is very far gone in guilt when he reads grace the wrong way upwards, and infers, from the longsuffering of the Lord, that he may continue in sin. Still, if you have done this, my brother or my sister, the Lord’s message to you is, “Return, return, return.” Give me thy hand, and come thou back, with melting heart and streaming eyes, and seek thy Heavenly Father’s face again, for the great bell still rings out from the hospice of mercy, and its message to thee is this, “Though thou hast lost thy way in the blinding snows of despondency and doubt, mercy is still proclaimed to thee; therefore, ‘Return, return, return.’ ” Canst thou not hear that great bell swinging in the tower of God’s love and compassion? Turn thy head that way, and ask the Lord to lead thee whither that bell’s message summons thee: “Return, return, return.”

Now, in the second place, we will change the run of our thought a little by noting that this voice must awaken many memories in the backslider’s mind.

He has long been going away from God; but even while he has been sitting in this place, he has been obliged to think of former and happier times in his history; and, now, that word “Return” causes him to recollect the time when he first came to the Lord. Ah, my brother, with what a broken heart, and with what terrors and alarms, and with what weeping eyes you looked up to Jesus on the accursed tree! And, as you looked to him, you found, as you thought, and as I hope you really did, peace, and pardon, and everlasting life. Where have you been, my brother, since that memorable day? Where have you been? Wandering from that dear cross, ever going further and further away from that divine love incarnate which hung bleeding there for you. Peter, your Lord’s loving, pitying eye is still fixed upon you, though you have denied him, and have falsely said, “I know not the man.” Still do the glances of his eye say, “Peter, return to me. Return, my poor, foolish, sinful disciple. Thou hast sadly fallen by thine iniquity; but, although thou hast so greatly changed, I have not. My heart still yearns over thee. Return unto me, for I have redeemed thee.”

That word “Return” must also awaken in your memories recollections of the happy days you used to have when you were living near to God. Some of you have had times of great joy and gladness in this very Tabernacle; you used to sing as sweetly and as joyfully as any, especially when we sang the song of songs,-

“Worthy the Lamb, for he was slain.”

Ah! you loved him then, did you not? You were not a hypocrite, were you? You did mean what you sang, and you did feel it, did you not? You have had, since then, often to question yourselves to know whether you really were sincere at that time, or not; yet I hope you can truthfully say, “Lord, thou knowest all things, thou knowest that I did love thee then.” Why, the time was, when the very mention of that dear name used to fire your blood as the sound of martial music stirs the soldier’s spirit in the day of battle. You know how you would have gone over hedge and ditch to hear the gospel preached in those days, and you would cheerfully have put up with the discomforts of standing in the aisle of the overcrowded building; you were not so dainty and thin-skinned then as you are now. How you relished the gospel then! What sweetness, what marrow and fatness it was to your spirit at those communion times when you sat among the people of God, and remembered the dying love of Christ! Many and many a time you have joined with your fellow-members in singing,-

“My willing soul would stay

In such a frame as this,

And sit and sing herself away

To everlasting bliss.”

Yet now, alas! you have to sing, or to sigh,-

“What peaceful hours I then enjoyed,

How sweet their memory still!”

Well, let the recollection of them come up in your mind, for it will do you good. While you hear your Lord saying to you, “Return, return,” it will help you to return if you recall what it is to which you have to return,-those halcyon days, those happy Sabbaths, when your heart seemed to have a whole peal of bells within it, and every one of them gave forth the richest melody to the praise and glory of Jesus Christ, your Lord and Saviour.

Do you not also recollect how you used to talk to others about the Saviour? Ah, my brethren, if I ever wander from my Lord, my sermons will be a sufficient rebuke to me even if no one says a word to reprove me for my backsliding. What are you doing, you who once preached so earnestly to others? What are you doing, you who used to conduct a Bible-class, where you warned the young people against going into the world, yet you have gone there yourself? You used to tell them that, if all others in the world should be ashamed of Christ, you would never be ashamed of him, yet you are. You used to pray very fervently at the prayer-meeting; you visited the sick, and cheered them, and God made you useful to souls that are now in heaven; yet you have begun to doubt whether you will ever get there yourself. O soul, remember from whence thou hast fallen, and repent and do thy first works! If thou art indeed a child of God, let the recollection of thine own sermons, and addresses, and warnings, and prayers rise up before thy spirit, to stir thy conscience, and to make thee feel ashamed of thy backsliding.

The Lord’s call to you to return to him will probably also awaken other memories. It will help you to remember how it was you first went astray. You went on swimmingly at first, did you not? But where did you begin to go astray? Nine times out of ten, declension from God begins in the neglect of private prayer. Possibly, it was so in your case; and it may be that everything seemed to go about as well with you when you did not pray as when you did; indeed, everything went far too smoothly with you; it would have been much better for you if your way had been hedged up with thorns and briers. Then you know that you began to get lax in your mode of life; you would not admit that you were doing anything that was sinful, and you were very angry with those who told you that you were in danger. You said that you did not believe in such Puritanical preciseness as they advocated; you were a man who could think and decide for himself. And you did so, did you not, and have you not thought yourself and brought yourself into a sad plight? And you were going to sail a little closer to the wind than others could do, because you felt that you had a stronger will than they had, and could turn your vessel whenever you pleased. There were certain amusements that might be harmful to young people, but not to you, for you felt that you had greater strength of mind than they had. That is how you began to wander from God. The declension came on by degrees. You did not jump down all at once, but you went down just as surely step by step. As to your first little slip, as you called it, you said there was nothing wrong in it; and nothing wrong in the second slip, and not much wrong in the third slip by itself; but putting them all together, with all the subsequent slips, where have they landed you? Yet, notwithstanding all this, I want you to hear the Master still saying to you, “Return, return, return.” Remember how far you have to go back, for you have to traverse again all that road along which you came with your face turned the wrong way.

Now we will pass on to notice, in the third place, the reasons which are urged in the context why we should return.

Look at the twelfth verse. I think I will not explain these reasons, but just read them to you. “Return, thou backsliding Israel, saith the Lord; and I will not cause mine anger to fall upon you: for I am merciful, saith the Lord, and I will not keep anger for ever.” Can you hear that verse without tears coming into your eyes? There is forgiveness, mercy, pardon, still in your Lord’s heart; will not that blessed fact lead you to come back to him?

Now read the fourteenth verse, for it contains a second reason why you should return unto the Lord. “Turn, O backsliding children, saith the Lord; for I am married unto you.” Can you believe that? If you can, you cannot continue to be a backslider. After all that you have done against him, the Lord still owns the marriage bond that exists between your poor polluted souls and his own holy and gracious self, and he says to you, “Turn, O backsliding children, for I am married unto you.” Who can hold back when the Lord uses such an expression as that,-“married unto you,”-you black, foul wanderer,-“I am married unto you”? In the East, a man could very easily divorce his wife; he just gave her a letter, and sent her away; but the Lord, the God of Israel, saith that he hateth putting away; that is to say, he hates divorce, and he never will have a divorce from the soul that has once been married to him. Come back to him, then. If he is so faithful despite your sin, let your heart yearn towards him. Return to your first Husband, for it was better with you then than now.

Now read the twenty-second verse: “Return, ye backsliding children, and I will heal your backslidings.” Is not that another blessed reason why you should return unto the Lord? He promises that he will remove all the evil that sin has done to you; and that, into whatsoever sin you may have fallen through your wanderings, he will rescue you from it. He will treat your backsliding as a disease, and heal it. I need scarcely stay to tell you what is the remedy that he will apply to you, for you all know that it is by the stripes of Jesus that we are healed. So, come again to that cross to which you came at first, and there you shall again find that his dear pierced hand shall be laid upon your wounds, taking the venom out of them, and so perfectly restoring you that your flesh shall come again unto you like unto the flesh of a little child; and then you will be able gratefully to sing, “He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake;”-“Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name.”

I am speaking briefly upon each point, but I trust that each one of them will abide in your memories without a multitude of words to press the truth home to your hearts; and I want you, in the fourth place, to notice some gracious directions which are given to assist you to return unto the Lord.

Read the thirteenth verse if you wish to learn the way by which you are to return, and give heed to every syllable of it: “Only acknowledge thine iniquity, that thou hast transgressed against the Lord thy God, and hast scattered thy ways to the strangers under every green tree, and ye have not obeyed my voice, saith the Lord.” That is the first thing you have to do; make a full confession of your wrongdoing. Go at once to God, and make it; do not delay another minute. You have sinned against the Lord; go to him, and own from your very heart that you have done so.

Then turn to the twentieth and twenty-first verses: “Surely as a wife treacherously departeth from her husband, so have ye dealt treacherously with me, O house of Israel, saith the Lord. A voice was heard upon the high places, weeping and supplications of the children of Israel: for they have perverted their way, and they have forgotten the Lord their God.” So, let the acknowledgment of your wrongdoing be attended with deep contrition of heart. Be grieved that you have grieved your God; ask the Holy Spirit to melt your spirit, so that you may mourn before the Most High, and lament that you have wandered so far from him.

Once again, the way to come back to God is plainly set before you at the end of the twenty-second verse: “Return, ye backsliding children, and I will heal your backslidings. Behold, we come unto thee; for thou art the Lord our God.” Take the Lord to be your God over again; go back, and begin again where you began before with the Father, and with the Son, and with the Holy Spirit; may the Sacred Trinity graciously enable you to do so!

And, further, come back to the Lord by confessing the result of your sin, the mischief that it has brought upon you, even as these ancient backsliders did when they sorrowfully said, “For shame hath devoured the labour of our fathers from our youth; their flocks and their herds, their sons and their daughters. We lie down in our shame, and our confusion covereth us: for we have sinned against the Lord our God, we and our fathers, from our youth even unto this day, and have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God.” So, dear friends, you see that the way to get back to God is to confess the wrong that you have done by wandering away from him, to lament that wrong, and again to take the Lord to be your God by an act of simple faith, and to begin once more even as you began your spiritual life. It is possible that you are anxious to know whether you ever were a child of God or not. Well, that is a knot which you cannot untie, so you had better cut it. Do you ask, “How can I cut it?” You can do so in this way; say to yourself, “If I am not a saint, I am a sinner, and Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, so I will trust him to save me.” I have begun again, in this fashion, a great many times; often, when doubts and fears have arisen within my spirit, and my evidences have grown dim, I have found that the best thing I could do was to pray the publican’s prayer, and cry, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” I am only asking you, poor wandering soul, to do that which it is the delight of God’s people to be doing every day. Come, repenting and humbled, and take the Lord Jesus Christ again to be your All-in-all, your living, loving Saviour.

Now, lastly, I want to encourage you to return unto the Lord by very briefly mentioning some of the mercies which God promises, in order to keep you from any future wandering.

Our blessed Master knows that many of his children wander because they are not well fed. There were many supposed converts, during the recent revival, of whom we have not heard anything, simply because there was nobody to look after them; in many cases, when the evangelists, whom God so greatly blessed, had gone to other places, their converts were left to starve spiritually. Listen to the fifteenth verse of this chapter, those of you who have been thus starved, whose backsliding was, in the first instance, the result of your not hearing good gospel teaching: “I will give you pastors according to mine heart, which shall feed you with knowledge and understanding.” Plead that promise with the God who gave it, and you will find that he will fulfil it in your experience.

The next thing that you need, in order to keep you from further wandering from God, is that you should seek to become more spiritual in your worship. Some poor souls, who are, we trust, truly converted, never seem to get beyond mere external, formal worship; they do not get into the heart of it. Let all such persons note what the Lord says in the sixteenth verse: “And it shall come to pass, when ye be multiplied and increased in the land, in those days, saith the Lord, they shall say no more, The ark of the covenant of the Lord: neither shall it come to mind: neither shall they remember it; neither shall they visit it; neither shall that be done any more.” That is to say, mere formal worship shall come to an end: “At that time they shall call Jerusalem the throne of the Lord; and all the nations shall be gathered unto it, to the name of the Lord, to Jerusalem: neither shall they walk any more after the imagination of their evil heart.” To be enabled to render true, spiritual worship unto the Lord, and to learn the inner meaning of his Word, will cause you to be established in the faith, so that you will not be likely to be carried about with every wind of doctrine, and be caused to backslide.

Bear with me just a minute while I give you another sweet promise which will help to keep you from again wandering from the Lord. You shall have the Spirit of adoption in your heart, as the Lord says, in the nineteenth verse: “But I said, How shall I put thee among the children, and give thee a pleasant land, a goodly heritage of the hosts of nations? and I said, Thou shalt call me, My father; and shalt not turn away from me.” O beloved, get a firm grip of that precious promise, for it assures to you that final perseverance which is the heritage of the saints. “Thou shalt call me, My father; and shalt not turn away from me.” As the Lord promises that great blessing, there need be no fear of your backsliding to destruction, whatever your temptations may be in the days and years that are yet to come.

Last of all, if you wish to be kept from wandering away from the Lord, come back to the simplicity of your first dependence upon him. Read the twenty-third verse, “Truly in vain is salvation hoped for from the hills, and from the multitude of mountains: truly in the Lord our God is the salvation of Israel.” So that, what you need is to get back again to the place where you first began to worship God in spirit and in truth, to know yourself to be his child, and to be clean cut off from every trust except in the Lord himself. You must see that salvation is all of grace from first to last, that it is the work of the Holy Spirit, and that it is freely given to you, an undeserving, ill-deserving, hell-deserving sinner. When you get back to that blessed position, you will learn more of the love of God which will hold you with a grip that nothing can loose, and from which you shall never escape from this time forth and for ever. Therefore, poor backslider, come hither, and breathe the prayer to thy Heavenly Father, not merely to receive thee, but also to keep thee, so that henceforth thou shalt never again go astray from him who keepeth the feet of his saints. “And now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.”

Exposition by C. H. Spurgeon

JEREMIAH 2:20-37

Verses 20-26. For of old time I have broken thy yoke, and burst thy bands; and thou saidst, I will not transgress; when upon every high hill and under every green tree thou wanderest, playing the harlot. Yet I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed: how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me? For though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much sope, yet thine iniquity is marked before me, saith the Lord God. How canst thou say, I am not polluted, I have not gone after Baalim? see thy way in the valley, know what thou hast done: thou art a swift dromedary traversing her ways; a wild ass used to the wilderness, that snuffeth up the wind at her pleasure; in her occasion who can turn her away? all they that seek her will not weary themselves; in her month they shall find her. Withhold thy foot from being unshod, and thy throat from thirst: but thou saidst, There is no hope: no; for I have loved strangers, and after them will I go. As the thief is ashamed when he is found,-

And there are many people whose repentance is of no more value than the shame of a thief, when he is found out. Oh, for something better and deeper than this!

26, 27. So is the house of Israel ashamed; they, their kings, their princes, and their priests, and their prophets, saying to a stock, Thou art my father; and to a stone, Thou hast brought me forth: for they have turned their back unto me, and not their face: but in the time of their trouble they will say, Arise, and save us.

Some men never pray except in stormy weather. Their religion is wholly dependent upon their condition and circumstances. If all is going well with them, they bend not their knees before the Lord; but when they are in sore distress, and especially if they think they are likely soon to die, then they cry unto God, “Arise, and save us;” with no more true faith than these idolaters had when they cried to their powerless idols.

28-30, But where are thy gods that thou hast made thee? let them arise, if they can save thee in the time of thy trouble: for according to the number of thy cities are thy gods, O Judah. Wherefore will ye plead with me? ye all have transgressed against me, saith the Lord. In vain have I smitten your children; they received no correction: your own sword hath devoured your prophets, like a destroying lion.

So far from accepting God’s rebukes in the right spirit, and forsaking their idol gods, they even turned upon the Lord’s messengers, and put his prophets to death.

31. O generation, see ye the word of the Lord.

“If you will not hear it, see it.”

31. Have I been a wilderness unto Israel? a land of darkness? wherefore say my people, We are lords; we will come no more unto thee?

“Do you not see,” says the Lord to these rebellious people, “how much I have done for you? Have you forgotten the numberless mercies I have lavished upon you? I have kept from you nothing that was really good for you. When you worshipped me in sincerity and in truth, you prospered exceedingly; but when you turned away from me, you made a sad mistake. See, then, the sermons which providence itself preaches to you if ye will not hear what my prophets say to you in my name.”

32. Can a maid forget her ornaments, or a bride her attire? yet my people have forgotten me days without number.

The very beauty of a believer-his glorious dress-is his God. Then can we ever forget him; or all the precious things of the covenant of grace which he so freely bestows upon us? Can we-can we-have fallen so low as to forget the God to whom we owe so much? Alas, he can still say, “My people have forgotten me days without number.”

33, 34. Why trimmest thou thy way to seek love? therefore hast thou also taught the wicked ones thy ways. Also in thy skirts is found the blood of the souls of the poor innocents: I have not found it by secret search, but upon all these.

God’s ancient people had so completely turned away from him, and wandered so far from him, that they had practised all manner of evil in order to prove their love for other gods. They even went among the heathen, and taught them to sin yet worse than they had sinned before. This was most shameful backsliding, a horrible evil in the sight of God.

35. Yet thou sayest, Because I am innocent, surely his anger shall turn from me.

The most guilty people are often the most self-righteous. The sinful nation, which ought to have pleaded guilty, here says, “Because I am innocent, surely his anger shall turn from me.”

35. Behold, I will plead with thee, because thou sayest, I have not sinned.

That is the great cause of quarrel between God and men. Many a man still says, “I have not sinned,” although God’s law condemns him, and the very office of the Saviour proves that the guilty one needed to be saved by One who was almighty. Self-righteousness is a thing which God utterly abhors.

36. Why gaddest thou about so much to change thy way? thou also shalt be ashamed of Egypt, as thou wast ashamed of Assyria.

First they trusted to Assyria to save them; and when that broken reed failed them, then they trusted to Egypt; and in a similar fashion, we go from one false hope to another,-from one carnal confidence to another, gadding about to change our way; yet, all the while, refusing to turn unto the Lord.

37. Yea, thou shalt go forth from him, and thine hands upon thine head:

Thou shalt go forth as a captive, with thine hands bound above thy head; or, like one in great pain or sorrow, thou shalt hold thine hands to thy head.

37. For the Lord hath rejected thy confidences, and thou shalt not prosper in them.

May God, in his mercy, save all of us from false confidences, both now and throughout our whole lives!

Hymns from “Our Own Hymn Book”-427, 522, 521; and from “Sacred Songs and Solos”-39.