Spurgeon: Sermons on Proverbs (76 page)
Read Spurgeon: Sermons on Proverbs Online
Authors: Charles Spurgeon
So I ask again--in what sense can we forsake our Lord? Well, there are many senses, but perhaps you will see better what I mean if I describe a general process of forsaking a friend. I hope that you have never had to undergo it; I do not know that I ever had; but still I can imagine that it is something like this. The old gentleman was your father's friend, he also had been your own friend and has done you many a good turn; but at last he has said something which has provoked you to anger, or he has done something which you have misunderstood or misinterpreted; and now you feel very cool towards him when you meet. You pass the time of day and perhaps say very much the same things which you used to say, but they are said in a very different fashion. Now that is how we begin to forsake our God; we may keep up the appearance of friendship with Christ, but it is a very cool affair. We go to a place of worship but there is no enjoyment, no enthusiasm, no earnestness. Then the next thing is that you do not call to see your friend as frequently as you used to do. It has not come to an open rupture between you, so you do look in at certain set times when you are expected, but there are none of those little flying visits and that popping in upon him unawares, just to get a look at his face as you used to do. And on his part he does not come to see you much. And that is how our forsaking of Christ generally continues. We do not go to talk with him as we once did, and when we do go to his house we find that he is not at home. "Can two walk together except they be agreed?" Then by-and-by perhaps there is a sharp word spoken, and your friend feels that you do not want him. You have said something that cuts him to the quick and grieves him. It was not anything so very bad if it had been spoken to a stranger; but to be said to him who was your father's friend, to him whom you always expected to come in and whom you loved to see--to say it to him was very hard and he naturally took umbrage at it. That is how it comes to pass between Christ and professors. There is something done which might not be of so much account in the case of nonprofessors or the openly ungodly; but it is very bad in one who professed to have Christ for his Friend. And do you know what happens by-and-by when your friend is being discarded? At last he does not call at all and you do not go to see him. Perhaps the breach is still further widened and little presents are sent back or treated with contempt. There is that oil painting which your father would have, though he could scarcely afford it, because he loved his friend so much, and which he hung up in so conspicuous a place in his house; well, the other day the string broke and you did not buy a fresh piece of cord to hang it up again; in fact, you put the picture away in the lumber-room and you really do not care what becomes of it. The little tokens of past affection are all put away for there is an open rupture now; and when somebody spoke to you about him lately you said, "Oh, pray don't mention him to me! He is no friend of mine now. I used to be on intimate terms with him once, but I have altered my opinion about him altogether." So do some professors act towards the Lord Jesus Christ. Those little tokens of love which they thought they had from him they send back. They do not remain in fellowship with his Church. They do all that they possibly can to disown him. In the meanwhile the blessed Lord of love is obliged to disown them too; and his Church disowns them; and by-and-by the rupture has become complete. May that never be the portion of any of you!
"No," says one, "it never will be." My dear friend, if you are so confident as that you are the person about whom I am most afraid. I recollect one who used to pray among us but we had to put him out of the church for evil living; and there was one of our members who said that night, "If that man is not a child of God I am not one myself." I said "My dear brother, do not talk like that. I would not pit my soul against the soul of any man, for I do know a little of myself, but I do not know other men as well as I know myself." I am very much afraid that neither of the two men I have mentioned was a child of God; by their speech they seemed to be Christians, but their acts were not like those of God's people. It does not do for us to talk as that man did but to pray to the Lord, "Hold thou me up and I shall be safe." That is the proper prayer for us; or else it may happen even to us as happened to them, and we may forsake our own Friend and our father's Friend.
Now what reasons can we possibly have for forsaking Christ? We ought to do nothing for which we cannot give good reasons. I have known persons very properly forsake their former friends because they have themselves become new creatures in Christ Jesus, and they have rightly and wisely given up the acquaintances with whom they used to sin. They cannot go now to the house where everything is contrary to their feelings. But it is not so with Christ. Some so called friends drag a man down, lower him, injure him, impose upon him, and at last he is obliged to let them go; but we cannot say that of Christ. His friendship has drawn us up, helped us, sanctified us, elevated us; we owe everything to that friendship. We cannot have a reason therefore for forsaking this Friend. I have known some to outgrow an acquaintance or friend. They really have not been able to continue to have common views and sympathies, for while their friend has remained in the mire they have risen into quite different men by reason of education and other influences; but we can never outgrow Christ. That is not possible; and the more we grow in a right sense, the more we shall become like him. A man who has been the friend of our father and of ourselves is the very man to have still as a friend, because he probably understands all about the family difficulties and the family troubles, and he also understands us. Why, he nursed us when we were children and therefore he knows most about us. I remember that when lying sore sick, I had a letter from a kind old gentleman who said that he had that day celebrated his eightieth birthday, and the choicest friend he had at his dinner table was the old family doctor. He said, "He has attended to me so long that he thoroughly knows my constitution, he is nearly as old as myself; but the first time I was ill I had him, and he has attended me now for forty years. Once" he said, "when I had a severe attack of gout, I was tempted to try some very famous man who very nearly killed me; and until I got back to my old friend I never was really well again." So he wrote to advise me to get some really good physician, and let him know my constitution, and to stick to him and never go off to any of the patent medicines or the quacks of the day. Oh, but there is a great deal of truth in that in a spiritual sense! With the utmost reverence we may say that the Lord Jesus Christ has been our family Physician. Did he not attend my father in all his sicknesses, and my grandfather too? And he knows the ins and outs of my constitution;--he knows my ways good and bad, and all my sorrows; and therefore I do not go to anyone else for relief; and I advise you also to keep to Jesus Christ, do not forsake him. If you ever are tempted to go aside even for a little while, I pray that you may have grace enough to come back quickly, and to commit yourself again to him, and never go astray again. There is the blessing of having one who is wise, one who is tried, one whose sympathy has been tested, one who has become, as it were, one of your family, one who has taken your whole household to his heart and made it part and parcel of himself. Such a Friend to your own soul and to your father's soul forsake not.
Do not forsake him, dear friends, because I almost tremble to say it--you will want him some day. Even if you would never need him in the future, you ought not to forsake him. I do not quite like that verse of the hymn at the end of our hymn-book-
No, I may not; when all my guilt is gone I shall not be ashamed of Jesus. When I am in heaven and need no more the pardon of sin, I certainly shall not be ashamed of him who brought me there; no, but I shall glory in him more than ever. Your friendship to Christ, and mine, ought not to depend upon what we are going to get out of him. We must love him now for what he is, for all that he has already done, and for his own blessed person and personal beauties which every day should hold fast our love and bind us in chains of affection to him.
But suppose you do think of forsaking Christ, where are you going to get another friend to take his place? You must have a friend of some sort; who is going to sit in Christ's chair? Whose portrait is to be hung up in the old familiar place when the old Friend is discarded? To whom are you going to tell your griefs, and from whom will you expect to receive help in time of need? Who will be with you in sickness? Who will be with you in the hour of death? Ah! there is no other who can ever fill the vacuum which the absence of Christ would make. Therefore, never forsake him.
Let this be your resolve by his grace, instead of forsaking him you will cling to him more closely than ever; you will own him when it brings you dishonor to do so; you will trust him when he wounds you, for "faithful are the wounds of a friend;" you will serve him when it is costly to do it, when it involves self-denial; resolved that by the help of his ever-blessed Spirit without whom you can do nothing, you will never in any sort of company conceal the fact that you are a Christian. Never under any possible circumstances wish to be otherwise than a servant of such a Master, a friend of such a Lord. Come now dear young friends who are getting cool towards Christ, and elder friends to whom religion is becoming monotonous, come to your Lord once more and ask him to bind you with cords, even with cords to the horns of the altar. You have had time to count the cost of all Egypt's treasure; forego it and forswear it once for all. But the riches of Christ you can never count; so come and take him again to be your All-in-all.
Nail your colors to the mast. Bear in your body the marks of the Lord Jesus. Ay, let everyone of us who has been baptized into Christ feel that our whole body bears the water-mark, for we have been "buried with him by baptism into death." It was not for the putting off of the
filthiness of the flesh, but as a declaration that we were dead to the
world and quickened into newness of life in Christ Jesus our Savior. So let it be with you too, dear friends, as you follow your Lord through
the water; cling to him, cleave to him: "Thine own friend and thy
father's friend, forsake not." May God add his blessing for our Lord
Jesus Christ's sake! Amen.
A Sermon (No. 2643) Intended for Reading on Lord's Day, October 8th 1899,
delivered by C. H. Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington on Thursday Evening, June 22nd, 1882.
In Solomon's day every man sat under his own vine and fig tree, and there was peace throughout the whole country. Then, God's law about dividing out the land among the people so that every man had his own plot was rightly observed, and each one had a fig tree of his own to which he gave his personal attention; and in due time, having waited upon the fig tree and kept it, he ate the fruit thereof. Solomon says in another place, "In all labor there is profit;" and it is well when men feel that it is so, for then they will be inclined to labor. A man would not long keep a fruitless fig tree. If he was quite sure that no fruit would be the result of his toil he would leave the tree to itself, or else he would say "Cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?"
There were some men in Solomon's day who for divers reasons became servants to others--as there still are and always must be --and they looked for some return from their service; and the wise man here tells them that just as "whoso keepeth the fig tree shall eat the fruit thereof, so he that waiteth on his master shall be honored." It is a commonplace truth that those who are faithful servants ought to be honored; I wish in these times this matter was more often thought of, and that men did honor those who are faithful to them. There are some people who permit others to minister to their comfort, but it never occurs to them to provide for the comfort of their servants. They will allow a man to spend most of his life in increasing their business, and yet when he is getting old, he is discharged and left to perish by starvation so far as they are concerned. I notice this kind of thing frequently with very much regret, and I am not always able to make exceptions on behalf of Christian masters. Far from it sometimes; they seem only to recollect their business and to forget that they are Christians, and they act as cruelly as did that Amalekite in David'a day, who left his servant to die because he was sick. I pray that the time may come when there shall be so good an understanding between all men that Solomon's words shall be true: "he that waiteth on his master shall be honored." I am sorry that they are not always true in that sense now, but I am going to leave that literal meaning of the words and apply the text to those who wait upon the Lord Jesus, having made him to be their Master; for most certainly as surely as he who keeps the fig tree shall eat the fruit thereof, even much more certainly shall those who wait upon our great Master in heaven find a sweet return from their service, for they shall be honored by him. Very simple will my talk be, and you beloved, who are his servants, do not want anything else I am sure.
He said to his disciples after he had washed their feet, "Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am." Is it so with you, dear friends? Let conscience answer the question. Is Jesus Christ really Master and Lord to each one of us? It is a wonderful way in which he does master us if we are indeed his servants. I can never forget how in my own case it came to pass that I, who had been bought with his precious blood and therefore belonged to him, had yet lived forgetful of his claims. He passed by and looked on me, and that very look made me go out to weep bitterly. But he did more; he laid his hand on me--it was a pierced hand--and from that day I had a twist in my understanding and my judgment; those who knew me saw that something extraordinary had happened to me which had altogether changed me. From that time I thought very little of men, and very much of One whom until then I had despised; many of my former pursuits ceased to have the slightest charm for me and I had for my one pursuit the desire to do everything to his honor and glory. From that twist I have never been able to escape and I have never wanted to do so; from that mystic influence which he cast over me I have never come forth; and what is more I trust I never shall. I know that I am describing many of you as well as myself. Oh! did he not master you from head to foot! If you are really converted it was not the conversion of the feelings only, or the intellect only; it was the subjugation of everything within you to that sweet power of his. You were quite broken down; you had no strength to stand up against him any longer; and the joy of it was that you had not any wish to do so. When he was about to fix the chains of his love upon you, you held out your hands saying, "Here Lord, bind my wrists;" you put forth your feet crying, "Place the fetters here also." You asked him to cast a chain around your heart; you made a covenant with him and agreed to be bound all over, for that part of you which was unbound you reckoned to be enslaved, and only that which he did bind you considered to be free. When he had so mastered us we longed to lie forever at his feet and weep ourselves away; or, we wished to sit forever at his feet and listen to his wondrous words and learn his blessed teaching; yet we also wanted to run about the world on his errands; it mattered not to us where he might send us, we would not make any choice of our sphere of service if he would but employ us; that would be all we would ask. We wanted then to have a dozen lives and to spend them all for him. Ay, we remember singing-
