Spurgeon: Sermons on Proverbs (40 page)
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Authors: Charles Spurgeon
And let me now tell you what are the excellencies of so doing. That man who believes in Christ and can say, "Salvation is finished; all is of Christ and all is free; my faith is in Jesus Christ and in him
alone,"--that man is freed from fears; he is not afraid to die, Christ has finished the work for him: he is not afraid to live, he shall not perish, for his soul is in Jesus Christ: and he is not afraid of trial, or of trouble, for he that bought him with his blood shall keep him with his arm. He is free from present fears, and he is free from present cares too. He has no need to toil and labor, to fret and strive, to do this or to do that. He feels no more the whip of the slave-driver on his back; his life is happy and his service light, the yoke he wears he scarce knows to be a yoke, the road is pleasant, and the path is peace--no climbing upwards except as angel hands assist him to climb the road which else no mortal feet could traverse. He is free too from all fatal delusion. He is not a deceived man, he shall never open his eyes to find himself mistaken, he has something which shall last him long as life shall last, which shall be with him when he wakes from his bed of clay to conduct him joyously to realms of light and endless day. This man is such a man that if I compared him with the very angels I should not do amiss. He is on earth but his heart is in heaven; he is here below, but yet he sits together with Christ in heavenly places, he has his troubles but they work his lasting good; he has his trials but they are only the precursors of victory, he has weakness, but he glories in infirmity because the power of Christ doth rest upon him, he is sometimes cast down, but he is not destroyed, he is perplexed, he is not in despair, he does not grovel, but he walks upright; his foot may be in the mire, but his eye is above the stars; his body may be covered with rags, but his soul his robed in light, he may go to a miserable pallet to find an unresting rest, but his soul sleeps in the bosom of his beloved, and he has a perfect peace, "a peace which passeth all understanding, which keeps his heart and mind through Jesus Christ." Christians, I would that you and I could believe God better and get rid of these wicked fears of ours. Gracious Father, I do to-day cast all I have on thee, and all I have not, too, I would cast on thee. My cares, my sorrows, my labors, my joys, my present, my past, my future--take thou and manage all. I will be nothing, be thou all.
Brethren, believers in Jesus, do the same, and you shall find that happy is the man who trusteth in the Lord. As for you who fear not the Lord Jesus--may his Holy Spirit visit you this morning, may he quicken you, for you are dead in sin; may he give you power, for you are strengthless of yourselves. Remember, the way of salvation is simple and plain before you--"Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." Trust my Master's blood, depend upon his finished righteousness and you must, you shall be saved; you cannot, you will not be lost.
The Unrivalled Friend A sermon (No. 899) delivered on Lord's Day morning, November 7th, 1869, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington,
by C. H. Spurgeon.
There is one thing about the usefulness of which all men are agreed, namely, friendship; but most men are soon aware that counterfeits of friendship are common as autumn leaves. Few men enjoy from others the highest and truest form of friendship. The friendships of this world are hollow, they are as unsubstantial as a dream, as soon dissipated as a bubble, as light as thistledown. Those airy compliments, those empty sentences of praise, how glibly they fall from the lip, but how little have they to do with the heart! He must be a fool indeed who believes that there is aught in the complimentary affection but mere flattery or matter of form. The loving cup means not love, and the loud cheering of the toast means not sincere fellowship. With very many friendship sits very loosely: they could almost write as Horace Walpole does in one of his letters. He says he takes every thing very easily, "and if," saith he, "a friend should die, I drive down to the St. James's coffee-house and bring home another," doubtless as cordial and enraptured with the new friend as with the old. Friends in this world are too often like the bees which swarm around the plants while they are covered with flowers and those flowers contain nectar for their honey; but let November send its biting frosts, the flowers are nipped, and their friends the bees forsake them. Swallow friendship lives out with us our summer but finds other loves in winter. It has always been so from of old, even until now; Ahithophel has deserted David and Judas has sold his Lord. The greatest of kings who have been fawned upon by their courtiers while in power, have been treated as if they were but dogs in the time of their extremity; we may, as the poet of the passions-
Of all friendship which is not based on principle, we may say with the prophet, "Thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting." But there is a higher friendship than this by far, and it subsists among Christian men, among men of principle, among men of virtue where profession is not all, but where there is real meaning in the words they use. Damon and Pythias still have their followers among us, Jonathan and David are not without their imitators. All hearts are not traitorous; fidelity still lingers among men: where godliness builds her house true friendship finds a rest. Solomon speaking not of the world's sham friends but of friends indeed, saith, "A friend loveth at all times." Having once given his heart to his chosen companion he clings to him in all weathers, fair or foul; he loves him none the less because he becometh poor, or because his fame suffers an eclipse, but his friendship like a lamp shines the brighter, or is made more manifest because of the darkness that surrounds it. True friendship is not fed from the barn-floor or the winefat; it is not like the rainbow dependent upon the sunshine, it is fixed as a rock and firm as granite, and smiles superior to wind and tempest. If we have friendship at all, brethren and sisters, let this be the form it takes: let us be willing to be brought to the test of the wise man, and being tried, may we not be found wanting. "A friend loveth at all times."
But I am not about to talk of friendship at all as it exists between man and man; I prefer to uplift the text into a still higher sphere. There is a Friend, blessed for ever be his name, who loveth at all times; there is a Brother who in an emphatic sense was born for adversity. That friend is Jesus, the friend of sinners, the friend of man, the brother of our souls, born into this world that he might succor us in our adversities. I shall take the text then and refer it to the Lord Jesus Christ; and unless time should fail us I shall then refer it to ourselves as in connection with the Lord Jesus Christ, showing that we also ought to love him even as he has loved us, always and under all adversities.
I. First then in reference to the Lord Jesus Christ. The first sentence is, "a friend loveth at all times," and this leads us to consider first, the endurance of the love of Jesus Christ.
My dear brethren, when we read "a friend loveth at all times" and refer that to Christ, the sentence, full as it is, falls short of what we mean, for our Lord Jesus is a friend who loved us before there was any time. Before time began the Lord Jesus Christ had entered into covenant that he would redeem a people unto himself, who should show forth his Father's praise. Before time began his prescient eye had foreseen the creatures whom he determined to redeem by blood. These he took to himself by election, these the Father also gave to him by divine donation, and upon these, as he saw them in the glass of futurity, he set his heart. Long before days began to be counted or moons to wax and wane, or suns to rise and set, Jehovah Jesus had set apart a people to himself whom he espoused unto himself, whose names he engraved upon his heart and upon his hands, that they might be taken into union with himself for ever and ever. Meditate on that love which preceded the first rays of the morning, and went forth to you before the mountains were brought forth or ever he had formed the earth and the world. My brethren, you believe the doctrine of eternal love, meditate thereon, and let it be very sweet unto your hearts:-
He loved you when time began, in the elder days before the flood, and in the far-off periods; for those promises which were spoken in love had reference to you as well as to all the believing seed. All the deeds of love which were wrought as a preface to his coming, all had some bearing towards you as one of his people. There never was a point in the antiquity of our world in which this friend did not love you, every era of time has been a time of love. Love, like a silver thread, runs adown the ages. Chiefly did he lay bare his love eighteen hundred years ago, when down with joyful haste he sped to lie in the manger; and hang as a babe at the virgin's breast. He proved his love to you to a degree surpassing thought when as a carpenter's son he condescended for thirty years to live in obscurity, working out a perfect
righteousness for you, and then spent three years of arduous toil to be ended by a death of bitterness unutterable. You had no being then, but he loved you and gave himself for you. For you the bloody sweat that fell amidst the olives of Gethsemane; for you the scourging and the crowning with thorns; for you the nails and spear, the vinegar and lance; for you the cry of agony; the exceeding sorrow "even unto death." He is a friend that loved you in that darkest and most doleful hour when your sins were laid upon him and with their crushing weight pressed him down, as it were, in spirit, to the lowest hell.
Beloved, having thus redeemed you, he loved you when time began with you. As soon as you were born the eye of his tenderness was fixed upon you. "When Ephraim was a child, then I loved him." It was
lovingkindness which arranged your parents' native place and time of birth. You came not into this world, as it were, by chance, or as the young ostrich bereft of a parent's care--the Lord was your guardian; the Lord Jesus Christ looked upon you in your cradle and bade his angels keep ward around you. He would not let you die unconverted, though fierce diseases waited around you to hurry you to hell. And when you grew up to manhood and ripened the follies of youth into the crimes of mature years, yet still he loved you. O let your heart be humbled as you remember that if you ever fell into blasphemy, he loved you as you cursed him; that if you indulged in Sabbath-breaking, he loved you when you despised his day; that your neglected Bible could not wean his heart from you, that your neglected prayer closet could not make him cease his affection. Alas! to what an excess of riot did some of his people run! but he loved them notwithstanding all. He was a friend that loved under the most provoking circumstances.
When justice would have said, "Let the rebel go O Jesus; be not bound any longer by cords of love to such a wretch," our ever-faithful Redeemer would not cast us away but threw another band of grace around us and loved us still. Consider well "his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses and sins."
I feel as if this were rather matter for you to think over in private, than for me thus hastily to introduce to you in public. May the Holy Spirit however now bedew your hearts with grateful drops of celestial love as I remind you of the love at all times of this best of friends. You recollect when you were constrained to seek him, when your heart began to be weary of its sin, and to be alarmed at the doom that would surely follow unpardoned transgression; it was his love that sowed the first seeds of desire and anxiety in your heart. You had never desired him if he had not first desired you. There was never a good thought towards Christ in any human breast, unless Christ first put it there. He drew you and then you began to run after him; but had he left you alone your running would have been from him, and never towards him. It was a bitter time when we were seeking the Savior, a time of anguish and sore travail. We recollect the tears and prayers that we poured out day and night, asking for mercy; but Jesus our friend was loving to us then, taking delight in those penitential tears, putting them into his bottle, telling the angels that we were praying, and making them string their harps afresh to sweet notes of praise over sinners that repented. He knew us, knew us in the gloom, in the thick darkness in which we sought after God, if haply we might find him. He was near the prodigal's side when in all his rags and filth he was saying, "I will arise, and go to my Father," and it was Jesus through whom we were introduced to the Father's bosom, and received the parental kiss, and were made to sit down where there are music and dancing, because the dead are alive, and the lost is found.
My brethren, since that happy day this friend has loved us at all times. I wish I could say that since that sacred hour when we first came to his feet and saw ourselves saved through him, we had always walked worthily of the privileges we have received; but it has been very much the reverse. There have been times in which we have honored him, his grace has abounded, and our holiness has been manifest; but alas! there have been other seasons in which we have backslidden, our hearts have grown cold, and we were on the road to become like Nabal when his heart was turned to a stone within him. We have been half persuaded like Orpah to go back to the land of idols, and not like Ruth to cleave unto the Lord our God. Our heart has played the harlot from the love of Christ, desiring the leeks and garlick and onions of Egypt rather than the treasures of the land of promise. But at such times when our piety has been at a low ebb, he has loved us still; there has not been the slightest diminution in the affection of Christ even when our piety has been diminished; he does not set his clock by our watch, or stint his love to the narrow measure of ours. I fear we have often gone further than merely getting poor in grace within; there have been times when God's people have even actually fallen into overt sin; ay, and have descended to sin grievously too, and to dishonor the name of Christ; but herein is mercy, even those actual and accursed sins of ours have not rent away the promise from us, nor turned away the heart of Christ for his beloved. Sinned though we have to our abounding sorrow, I was about to say, for if there could be sorrow in heaven we might eternally regret that we have sinned against such love and mercy, yet for all that our Lord and Savior would not cast us off, nor will he abjure us come what may.
