Spurgeon: Sermons on Proverbs (51 page)
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Authors: Charles Spurgeon
My dear hearers, do think of this matter. O that you might get Christ for your friend; he will never be your friend while you are selfrighteous; he will never be your friend while you live in sin. But do you believe yourselves guilty? Do you desire to leave off sin? Do you want to be saved? Do you desire to be renewed? Then let me tell you, my Master loves you! Poor, weak, and helpless worms, my Master's heart if full of love to you; his eyes at this moment are looking down with pity on you. "O! Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem!" He now bids me tell you that he died for all of you who confess yourselves to be sinners, and feel it. He bids me say to you, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved." He tells me to proclaim salvation full and free; full, needing nothing of yours to help it; free, needing nothing of yours to buy it.
There is nothing I feel that I fail so much in as addressing sinners. O! I wish I could cry my heart out and preach my heart out to you and at you.
Farewell with this one thought--we shall never all of us meet together here again. It is a very solemn thought, but according to the course of nature and the number of deaths, if all of you were willing to come here next Sabbath morning, it is not at all likely that all of you would be alive; one out of this congregation will be sure to have gone the way of all flesh. Farewell, thou that are appointed to death; I know not where thou art--yon strong man, or yon tender maiden with the hectic flush of consumption on her cheek. I know not who is appointed to death; but I do now most solemnly take my farewell of such an one. Farewell, poor soul; and is it farewell for ever? Shall we meet in the land of the hereafter in the home of the blessed; or do I bid you farewell now for ever? I do solemnly bid farewell to you for ever if you live and die without Christ. But I can not bear that dreary thought; and I therefore say, poor sinner! stop and consider-- consider thy ways, and now "turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die?" "Why will ye die?" "Why will ye die?" "Why will ye die?" Ah! ye can not answer that question. May God help you to answer it in a better fashion, by saying, "Here Lord!
A Sermon (No. 2766) intended for reading on Lord's Day, February 16, 1902
delivered by C.H. Spurgeon at New Park Street Chapel, Southwark on a Thursday Evening, during the Winter of 1859.
Laziness is the crying sin of Eastern nations. I believe that the peculiar genius of the Anglo-Saxon character prevents our being, as a nation, guilty of that sin. Perhaps we have many other vices more rife in our midst than that, but in the East almost every man is a lazy man. If you tell a Turk in Constantinople that his street is filthy-- and it certainly is for there the offal lies and is never swept away --he says sitting with his legs crossed and smoking his pipe, "The Lord wills it." If you tell him there is a fire at the bottom of the street he does not agitate himself, but he says "God wills it." If you were to tell him that he was sitting on a heap of gunpowder and that he had better take heed lest a spark should blow him up, probably he would never move or take his pipe out of his mouth, except to say "God wills it." Some of the most extraordinary instances of idleness are told us of those people by travelers in the East to this day. The further you go East, the less activity there is; the further you go West in the world, the more restless does the human mind become, and consequently I suppose, the more active.
Yet, while the fact of the superabundance of idleness in the East is a great explanation of the reason why Solomon speaks so much against it in the Proverbs, and seeing that this Book was meant to be read not only in the East but everywhere else, I should fear that there must be some laziness in the West also, and as this Book was meant to be read in England I should imagine there must be a few sluggards in England; and this happens to be not a matter of imagination with me at all, for I know there are many such. You can brush against them at the corners of our streets. There are to be found many such who are slothful in business, who certainly are not worth their salt, who do not earn a livelihood for themselves even with regard to the things of this life. There are still far too many to whom the familiar lines of Dr. Watts may be applied,-
It sometimes happens too that these idle people are religious people, or profess to be so, though I have no faith in that man's religion who is lazy. He reminds me always of a certain monk who went to a monastery determined to give himself up entirely to contemplation and meditation. When he reached the place he saw all the monks at work tilling the ground, ploughing or trimming the vines round the monastery, so he very solemnly observed as he entered "Labour not for the meat that perisheth." The brethren smiled, and they still continued their labors. He thought it his duty to reprove them a second time by saying, "Martha is cumbered with much serving, but I have chosen the good part which shall not be taken from me." However, it was taken from him, for the bell did not ring for him at the usual time for meals; and our brother, after waiting some few hours in his cell in prayer, beginning to feel certain calls within, came out, and accosting the prior of the monastery enquired, "Do not the brethren eat?" "Do you eat?" said he; "I thought you were a spiritual man for you said to the brethren, Labour not for the meat that perisheth.'" "Oh, yes!" he replied, "I know I said that, but I thought the brethren ate." "Yes," answered the prior, "so they do, but we have a rule in our monastery that none eat but those that work. There is such a rule to be found in Scripture, too," he reminded the monk; "Paul himself hath said it, If any man would not work neither should he eat.'" I think the master of that monastery acted and spoke wisely. A man must work in this life. He was sent to this world that he might be diligent in his calling, in the position in life in which God has been pleased to place him.
However, I do not intend to treat now of this phase of the subject. I am about to direct your attention to spiritual things. I am no legalist; I know that the works of the law can save no man, for "by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified." I know that the work of salvation is by grace alone, and that all our good works are not our own, but are wrought in us by divine grace; yet at the same time I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that, although Scripture continually denies that salvation is by works, it always speaks of the work of grace in the heart of man, and of the experience of the believer as being a hard worker. For do we not continually hear the Christian described as a pilgrim, as one who is on a long and a weary journey? He is described not as a gentleman who is carried on other men's backs, or who is borne along in a vehicle, but as a pilgrim who has to toil along the road; and he is told not to be weary and faint in his mind; he is warned that the road will be very rough and very long, and that he will have to run with endurance the race that is set before him. The very use of such a figure as that does not look as if religion were a lazy thing. Then again, we find religion described as a battle. The Christian is continually exhorted to take unto himself the whole armor of God and to fight the good fight of faith. He is told to resist even unto blood striving against sin. That does not look as if it were a very easy thing to be a Christian-- as if Christianity were a kind of thing to be kept in a band--box. It looks as if there were something to be done, some foe to fight, some great task to be accomplished. When I also find another figure used, which is perhaps yet more forcible because it combines the idea of pressing forward with that of fighting--when I find the figure of agonizing used--"Agonize to enter in at the strait gate"--press, push, labor, strive, toil--I cannot imagine that to be a Christian is to be an idler or a sluggard. No my brethren, though salvation is not by our works, yet as sure as ever the Lord puts divine life into us, we shall begin to labor for the meat that endureth to eternal life, we shall strive to enter in at the strait gate and we shall run perseveringly the race that is set before us, and we shall endure hardness as good soldiers of Jesus Christ.
Now it is just this point in religion that many men do not like. They prefer an easy religion--flowery meadows, flowing streams, and sunny glades--all those things they like; but they do not like the climbing of mountains or the swimming of rivers or going through fires or fighting, struggling, and wrestling. They go along the pilgrim's way till they come to some slough and then they are offended. When it was all clean walking they did not mind; but when they tumble into the bog and begin to bemire themselves, they straightway creep out on that side of the slough that is nearest to their own house, and like Mr. Pliable in "The Pilgrim's Progress," of whom you have often heard--they go back to their house in the City of Destruction. They went in the right road for a little while, but they found that religion was not so easy a thing as they expected and therefore they turned back.
Now, it is of these people I am going to talk. "The sluggard will not plough by reason of the cold; therefore shall he beg in harvest and have nothing." When I have spoken about him, I shall talk a little to those of you who are ploughing in God's field, exhorting you not to make excuses, not to be dilatory in your Master's service, but to plough all the harder the colder it is because the day is coming when a joyful harvest shall reward all your pains.
Ploughing is hard work and the sluggard does not like it. If he does go up and down the field once or twice he makes a short turn of it, and leaves a wide headland; and moreover he leans on the handle of his plough, and therefore the plough does not go in very deep-- not so deep as it would if he were to do as the active ploughman does, hold the handles up in order that the ploughshare may go deeply into the soil. But he goes nodding along, half-dragged by his horses, and glad to do nothing. He would be very pleased indeed if his feet would go without being moved, and if the clods would but move one another, and lift his feet up for him, so that he might not have the trouble of carrying himself after his plough. But the lazy man knows that he will be laughed at if he says ploughing is hard work, so he does not like to say that. "I must get a better excuse," he thinks, so he says, "It is so cold; it is so cold! I would not mind going out to plough but I am frozen almost to death; I shall have chilblains; I have not clothes enough to keep me warm; it is so cold to my fingers. Oh, how the snow comes down! The ponds are all frozen; the ground is so hard; the ploughshare will get broken; it is so cold!" Lazy fellow! Why don't you say that ploughing is hard work? That is the English of it. But no, he must have a more genteel excuse that he may not be so likely to be laughed at. Suppose it were not cold, do you know what he would say? "Oh, it is so hot! I cannot plough; the perspiration runs down my cheeks. You wouldn't have me ploughing in this hot weather, would you?" Supposing it were neither hot nor cold, why, then he would say I believe that it rained; and if it didn't rain, he would say the ground was too dry, for a bad excuse, he holds, is better than none; and therefore he will keep on making excuses to the end of the chapter; anything will he do rather than go and do the work he does not like--that is, ploughing.
Now I have made you smile. I wish I could make you cry, because there will be more to cry about than to smile at in this matter, when I come to show you that this is spiritually the case with many. There are men and women who would like to go to heaven without having any trouble. They want to enjoy the harvest, but they do not like the labor of ploughing. They have not the common honesty to say, "I do not like religion." But what do you suppose they say? Why, they make another excuse. Sometimes it is this, "Well, I am as anxious as anybody to be a Christian; but you know, these are such hard times." Hard times! The times always were hard to such people as you are. "But in these times," say they, "there is no warmth in Christians; they are all so coldhearted. Why, I go up to the chapel, and nobody speaks to me. There is not one-half the religion that there used to be; and what there is is not half so good as it once was. The article is
depreciated. Now if I lived over in Ireland, then I would plough; if I lived over where there is the Revival, then I would be a saint; or if I had lived in the apostle Paul's days and heard such a preacher as that, or if I could have talked to those early Christians, I would not object to be a Christian. But these are such coldhearted times--such lots of hypocrites, and so few Christians--I don't think I shall trouble about religion at all."
Ah! that is a pretty excuse, for you know that what you are saying is false. In the first place, you know that there is life in Christ's Church even now, and that there are still (if you would but look) a few good, loving, warm-hearted Christian men to be found. You know that there are still faithful preachers left. The faithful have not failed from among men; and although hypocrites are plentiful, still there are many sincere souls. And what if there were not? What business is that of yours? Are you content to be lost because the Church is not what it ought to be? Just look at the matter in that light. Because there are a great many hypocrites you have made up your mind to go to hell. Is that the English of it? Because there are such multitudes going there, you think you will go too and keep them company. Is that what you mean? "No!" say you, "not that." That is it Mr. Sluggard, though you don't like to say so. It is a bad excuse you have made. It won't hold water, and you know it won't. You know very well that, when your conscience speaks, it tells you that this excuse is a bad one. It is one that will not satisfy you when you are lying on your dying bed; and above all it is one that will vanish in the day of judgment, just as the mists vanish before the rising sun. What business can it be of yours what the Church is or what the Church is not? If you will not think about the things of God in these times, neither would you in the best of times; and if the present agency is not blessed to you, neither would you be converted though one rose from the dead.
