Spurgeon: Sermons on Proverbs (18 page)

This simile needs to be supplemented by another: many true saints are unable to do much. See then the gardeners going down to the pond and dipping in their wateringpots to carry the refreshing liquid to the flowers. A child comes into the garden and wishes to help; and yonder is a little wateringpot for him. Now, see that little waterpot, though it does not carry so much, yet carries the same water; and it does not make any difference to the half-dozen flowers which get that water whether it came out of the big pot or the little pot, so long as it is the same water and they get it. You who are like children in God's Church, you who do not know much, yet try and tell to others what you do know, and if it be the same gospel truth and it be blest by the same Spirit it will not matter to the souls who get blessed by you whether they were blessed by a man of one or ten talents. What difference will it make to me whether I was converted to God by means of a poor woman who was never made a blessing to anybody else, or by one who had brought his thousands to the Savior's feet? Go, my dear brethren, and exercise the holy art of watering. You say "How?" Why, a word may do it, a look may do it, an action may do it; only zealously desire to offer sympathy, to afford instruction, to give needed help, to impart what you may be favored with to others, and you shall be watering yourselves.

The main point is that in so watering others we shall be watered ourselves. I am sure we shall, for God promises it and he always keeps his promise. If I want to get water I must give water. Though that seems a strange way of self-serving, I pray you try it. Was not that a very singular thing that when the poor woman of Sarepta had nearly exhausted all her meal, the prophet asked for a cake for himself? She had been very saving of it; I dare say she had eaten only a mouthful or two every day. She and her poor boy were looking very thin. They had come to the last handful. She thought, "I will make one cake for my son and myself and then we will die." She is outside picking up sticks that she may bake this cake. God intends to bless her. How does he do it? There comes his prophet, the hairy man, and the first word he says to her is, "Fetch me, I pray thee, a little water in a vessel that I may drink." She is quite ready to serve any one, and away she hastens for the water, when Elijah cries aloud, "Bring me, I pray thee, a morsel of bread in thine hand." What, out of that little handful--only enough for one? "Yes," he says, "make me thereof a little cake first, and after make for thee and thy son." "After that!" she might have said, "what will be left after that? When there is only a handful of meal and a little oil in a cruse, not enough for one, am I to give that to you and afterwards see to myself and child?" Faith enabled her to obey, and from that very moment neither she nor her son ever knew what want was. She gave from her little, and her little multiplied. The case of the woman of Zarephath is but one of thousands establishing the rule of God's mode of action with his Church, a rule which shall not be broken till the end shall come.

Let me show you how you will get watered yourself. In the first place, if you try to do good to others it will do you good by waking up your powers. Thousands of men do not know what they are made of. You have no idea what a fine fellow you are, young man, till you begin to shake yourself a little and go forth to fight the Lord's battles. We do not know what sinews we have till we climb the mountains; we do not know what strength there may be in our backs and arms till we have to carry a ponderous load, and then we find it out. You have latent talents, dormant faculties which would work wonders if you could call them forth. Some people are not awake more than skin deep; all underneath the skin is sound asleep. They are like the great candle which I showed you one night with a small wick, which was only melted a little in the middle while all the outside was still cold hard tallow, and did not contribute to the light. You have not become warmed through yet, your whole souls have not been wound up to the right pitch for serving God, you have only a little earnestness, a little zeal; but if you ventured upon holy enterprises you would bestir yourself so thoroughly that you would scarcely know yourself again. That would be a blessing indeed.

But next you would often find that in trying to water others, you gained instruction. Go talk to some poor saint to comfort her, and she will tell you what will comfort you. Oh, what gracious lessons some of us have learned at sick beds! We went to teach the Scriptures, we came away blushing that we knew so little of them. We went to talk experimental truth, and we found we were only up to the ankles while here were God's poor saints breast-deep in the river of divine love. We learn by teaching, and our pupils often teach us.

You will also get comfort in your work. Rest assured that working for others is very happy exercise. Like the two men in the snow; one chafed the other's limbs to keep him from dying, and in so doing he kept his own blood in circulation, and his own life was preserved. Comfort God's people and the comfort will return into your own soul.
Watering others will make you humble. You will find better people in the world than yourself. You will be astonished to find how much grace there is where you thought there was none, and how much knowledge some have gained while you as yet have made little progress with far greater opportunities.

You will also win many prayers. Those who work for others get prayed for, and that is a swift way of growing rich in grace. Let me have your prayers and I can do anything! Let me be without my people's prayers, and I can do nothing. You Sunday-school teachers, if you are blessed to the conversion of the children, you will get your children's prayers. You that conduct the larger classes, in the conversion of your young people you will be sure to have a wealth of love come back into your own bosoms, swimming upon the stream of supplication. You will thus be a blessing to yourselves.

In watering others you will get honor to yourselves, and that will help to water you by stimulating your future exertions. The Romans appointed censors in their State, not only to censure men for gross immoralities, but to require every man to give an account of what he was doing for the good of the Republic. We have deacons and elders --would it not be an additional blessing to have censors in the Church to go round and ask the members, all of them, what they are doing for the good of the Christian Church? A Greek historian desired very intensely to say a word about the people of the city where he was born. He felt he could not write his history without saying something of his own native place, and accordingly he wrote this-- "While Athens was building temples and Sparta was waging war, my countrymen were doing nothing." I am afraid there are too many Christians of whom, if the book were written as to what they are doing in the Church, it would have to be said they have been doing nothing all their lives. You would be delivered from that reproach if you began to water others.

Let me cease from this subject by saying while you are watering others, you will be manifesting and showing your love to Christ, and that will make you more like him, and so you will be watered while you are seeking to benefit your neighbors. To serve Jesus! what need I say of that? Look into that face bedewed with bloody sweat for you, and can you not sweat for him? Look to those hands pierced for you, and shall your hands hang idly down and not be used for him? Look at those feet fastened to the wood with nails for you! Can I ask of you any pilgrimage too long to repay the toil which those feet endured for your sake? My brethren and sisters, remember what Christ Jesus has done for you, from whence he came, the riches which he left, to what he came, the poverty and shame which he endured, and how he went down into the depths that he might take us up to the heights. If you will think of these, you will have the best motive methinks for beginning to look after his lambs and fighting with those lions which seek to devour his flock; and in that moving motive will be the main means by which you shall be conformed to his image, and shall become like him, self-sacrificing, doing your Father's business.

I wish I could speak more powerfully this morning but the matter ought to speak for itself with Christians. If we love Jesus we shall not want any pleading with to water his plants. If you really love him it will not be a question of whether you shall do something, the only question will be "What can I do?" and you will say in your pew this morning, "What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits toward me?" He has spared your lives, he has given you health and strength, provided you with spirituals and temporals, he has made your heart leap for joy at the sound of his name, he has plucked you out of the horrible pit and out of the miry clay, he has taken you out of the black bondage of the prince of darkness and made you his sons and daughters; he has put the ring of his eternal love upon your finger, your feet are shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace -

There is a crown for your head and a palm branch for your hand and pavements of gold for your feet, and felicities for ever for your entire soul; and even your body is to be raised again from the dust and fashioned like unto Christ's glorious body. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for you." Now what will you do for him? Will you not win the promise that your soul shall be watered by seeking to water the souls of others?

We as a Church, dear friends, have enjoyed singular prosperity. While many Churches have been depressed and decreased in numbers, we have increased. While other Churches have had the hectic flush of a spurious revival, we have had one perpetual revival lasting for nearly twelve years. I do not know that we have increased at a more or a less rapid rate; we could not increase more quickly for we have not officers enough, or time enough to see the converts as it is; we have never, I think, increased less, for the work seems to have ever the same prosperity about it. I praise God that I can say of my ministry in this place and elsewhere, that to this day it hath the dew of its youth upon it, and there are as many rejoicing to find Christ through the agencies employed in this Church to-day as in the first day when we came among you in the freshness and vigor of our youth. We have had no schism; we have had no division; we have not been vexed with heresy. We have been blessed with something like persecution, but this has only bound us the faster to one another till we are like a three-fold cord which cannot be broken, and like iron bars made red hot in the furnace and hammered together, we are not soon to be sundered from one another. Now, dear friends, up to this time the policy which we have pursued has been this: if members of other Churches want to know, we hereby tell them, we have endeavored to water others. Your minister has journeyed all over the three kingdoms preaching the Word, and you have not grumbled at his absence. We have undertaken many enterprises for Christ; we hope to undertake a great many more. We have never husbanded our strength; we have undertaken enterprises that were enough to exhaust us, to which we became accustomed in due season, and then we have gone on to something more. We have never sought to hinder the uprising of other Churches from our midst or in our neighborhood. It is with cheerfulness that we dismiss our twelves, our twenties, our fifties, to form other Churches. We encourage our members to leave us to found other Churches; nay, we seek to persuade them to do it. We ask them to scatter throughout the land to become the goodly seed which God shall bless. I believe that so long as we do this we shall prosper. I have marked other Churches that have adopted the other way, and they have not succeeded. This is what I have heard from some ministers: "I do not encourage village stations, or if I do, I do not encourage their
becoming distinct Churches and breaking bread together. I do not encourage too many young men going out to preach, for to have a knot of people who can preach a little may very soon cause dissatisfaction with my own preaching." I have marked those who have followed this course, and I have seen that the effect of trying to keep all the blood in the heart is to bring on congestion, and very soon the whole body has been out of health. My brethren, if you can do more good elsewhere than you can do here, for God's sake, go, and happy shalt I be that you have gone. If you can serve my Master in the little rooms in the
neighborhood, if by forming yourselves into smaller Churches you can increase the honor of my Master's name, I shall love you none the less for going, but I shall delight to think that you have Christ's spirit in you, and can do and dare for his name's sake. At the present moment we rejoice to know that many a Sunday School in this neighborhood is indebted to the members of this Church for teachers. It is right. We do not want you at home, and are therefore glad to see you at work elsewhere. No matter, so long as Christ is preached, whether you throw your strength into that Church or into this Church. Here, as being members with us, we have the first claim upon you; but when we do not need you by reason of our abundance of men, go and give your strength to any other part of Christ's Church that may desire you.

While I speak thus much in your praise my brethren and sisters, let me say we must keep this up. If we say, "We have the College to support, and we do as much as other Churches for various societies, and we can be content to sit still," this Church will begin to go rotten at the core the moment we are not working for God with might and main. Sometimes I get a pull at my coat-tail by very kind, judicious friends, who think I shall ask you to do too much. My brethren are welcome to pull my coat-tail, but it will come off before I shall stand back for a moment. As long as I live I must serve my Master with my whole soul, and when you think I go too fast, you can stand back if you dare, for mark, you will be responsible to God if you do; you may start back if you will and if you dare, but I must go on, must go, MUST go on, or else you and I that are worthy of the day in which you live will follow me, step by step, in any good project, and though I should seem too rash, you will redeem me from the charge of rashness by the enthusiasm and the earnestness with which you carry out my plans. Here is this great city! Was there ever such spiritual destitution? A million of people who could not go to a place of worship, if they had the heart to go there! And here we have the priestcraft of the Church of England increasing the spiritual destitution by building fresh Churches--not providing for it, but increasing it I say, for I reckon that wherever Puseyism is preached there is an increase of spiritual destitution; wherever broad Churchism comes, there is an increase of spiritual destitution, and it is little better where they go who preach the gospel in the pulpit, and read Popery at the font, the grave, and the bedside. In this last case public morality is shocked by the perjury of those who swear to a Prayer Book in which they do not believe. Much as I respect and even love believers in the Anglican Establishment, I can only feel that their presence in so corrupt a body is the reason why it exists; and I therefore think them to be doing mischief by buttressing a falling and ruinous cause. True Protestants, we must take upon ourselves to work for London, as if there were no other agencies at work except those of the Free Churches; for the Hagar Church, the Church which has a mortal for its head, the harlot Church which lives in alliance with the State, has too many sins of her own to repent of to be of much use in this hour of peril. The good she can do is so insignificant that it is not worth while to compute it, because the monstrous evil which she fosters and perpetrates is a more than sufficient set-off against it. We must work and toil and labor to scatter in every lane, amid alley and court of London, the pure gospel of the blessed God; and let men know that Sacramentarianism is a lie, and that there is no salvation but in the uplifted cross of Christ, and no salvation through ceremonies but only through a simple faith in him who loved us and gave himself for us. If ye, among others, are come to the kingdom for such a time as this, it shall be well with you; but if not, ye shall be put away as things abhorred, and this place shall be a hissing and a bye-word in generations yet to come, and it shall be said of you, there lived a people who were led by a man, who, with all his faults, was in earnest and was honest, and they would not follow him, but proved unworthy of him, and they have passed away, and their names are writ in water. They had opportunities which they did not use; work was allotted them which they were not worthy to take up, God said to them in answer to their request to be excused, "Ye shall be excused;" and they went back-