Spurgeon: Sermons on Proverbs (8 page)

And lastly, take care that you continue gazing upon Christ until you have faith in him. "Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God." Go on hearing the Word of God till faith come thereby. Do you ask me how faith comes? It is the gift of God, but it usually comes in a certain way. Thinking of Jesus and meditating upon Jesus will breed faith in Jesus. I was struck with what one said the other day of a certain preacher. The hearer was in deep concern of soul, and the minister preached a very pretty sermon indeed, decorated abundantly with word-painting. I scarcely know any brother who can paint so daintily as this good minister can; but this poor soul under a sense of sin said, "There was too much landscape, sir. I did not want landscape; I wanted salvation." Dear friend, never crave word-painting when you attend a sermon; but crave Christ. You must have Christ to be your own by faith or you are a lost man. When I was seeking the Savior I remember hearing a very good doctrinal sermon; but when it was over I longed to tell the minister that there was a poor lad there who wanted to know how he could be saved. How I wished he had given half a minute to that subject! Dr. Manton, who was usually a clear and full preacher of the gospel, when he preached before the Lord Mayor, gave his lordship something a cut above the common citizens and so the poorer folk missed their portion. After he had done preaching his sermon an aged woman cried, "Dr. Manton, I came here this morning under concern of soul, wanting a blessing, and I have not got it for I could not understand you." The preacher meekly replied, "The Lord forgive me! I will not so offend again." He had overlooked the poor, and had thought mainly of my Lord Mayor. Special sermons before Mayors and Queens and assemblies are seldom worth a penny a thousand. The gospel does not lend itself to show performances. I am not here to give you
intellectual treats: my eyes look right on to your salvation. Oh that yours may look that way! Go after Christ, dear friend. Seek after Christ with your whole heart and soul. Feel that the one thing you must have is to be reconciled to God by the death of his Son. Keep on with that cry, "None but Christ: none but Christ." Make this your continual litany-

Then you will soon find him. "Let your eyes look right on and let your eyelids look straight before you," and you shall see the Lord of grace appearing to you through the mist and through the cloud; that self-same Savior who stands in the midst of us even now and cries, "Look unto me and be ye saved all the ends of the earth: for I am God and there is
none else."

A sermon (No. 667) delivered on Sunday morning, December 31, 1865 at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington,
by C. H. Spurgeon.

The wise man saw the young and simple straying into the house of the strange woman. The house seemed so completely different from what he knew it to be that he desired to shed a light upon it, that the young man might not sin in the dark, but might understand the nature of his deeds. The wise man looked abroad and he saw but one lamp suitable to his purpose; it was named "At the last;" so snatching this he held it up in the midst of the strange woman's den of infamy, and everything was changed from what it had been before: the truth had come to light and the deceptive had vanished. The young man dreamed or pleasure, in wanton dalliance he hoped to find delight; but when the lamp of "At the last" began to shine, he saw rottenness in his bones, filthiness in his flesh, pains and griefs and sorrows as the necessary consequence of sin, and wisely guided, wisely taught, the simple-minded started back and listened to the admonitions of the teacher, "Come not nigh the door of her house, for her gates lead down to the chambers of death."

Now if this lamp of "At the last" was found so useful in this one particular case, methinks it must be equally useful everywhere else, and it may help us all to understand the truth of matters if we will look at them in the light which this wonderful lamp yields. I can only compare my text in its matchless power to Ithuriel's spear, with which according to Milton, he touched the toad and straightway Satan appeared in his true colors. If I can apply my text to certain things to-day they will come out in their true light; "At the last," shall be the rod in my hand with which I shall touch tinsel, and it shall disappear and you will see it is not gold, and I will touch varnish and paint and graining, and you shall understand that they are really what they are, and not what they profess to be. The light of "At the last" shall be the light of truth, the light of wisdom to our souls. It seems to me a fitting occasion for holding up this light this morning, when we have come to the end of the year and shall in a few short hours be at the beginning of another. This period, like Janus, hath two faces, looking back on the year that is past and looking forward on the year that is to come, and my four-sided lamp will perhaps gleam afar. I wish that you may have courage enough to look down the vista of the years that you have already lived, and think of everything that you have thought, and spoken, and done, in the light of the beams of this lamp "At the last," and then I hope you will have holy daring enough to let the same light shine forward on the years yet to come, when your hair shall be grey and the grinders shall fail, and they that look out of the windows shall be darkened. We will then, examine the past and the future of life in the light of "At the last." May it teach us wisdom and make us walk as in the fear of God.

I. Death is at the last. In some sense it is the last of this mortal life; it is the last of our period of trial here below; it is the last of the day of grace; it is the last of the day of mortal sin. The tree falleth when we die, and it sprouteth not again; the house is washed from the foundations and it is built no more if it hath been founded on sin. Death is the end of this present life. And how certain is it to all of us! This year we have had many tokens of its certainty. One might almost compose an almanac for the year 1865, and put down the name of some one of note at least to every month, and I should scarcely exaggerate if I said to every week, in the year. All ranks and classes have been made to feel the arrow of the insatiable archer. From royalty down to poverty the grave has been glutted with its prey. Not late in the year there fell one, whose benevolence mingled with sagacity had blessed our land, and who being dead is still remembered by the needy because he cheapened their bread, and broke down the laws which while they might have fattened the rich, certainly impoverished the poor. His sagacity could not spare him, and though he is embalmed in the hearts of thousands, yet to the dust he has returned. Swiftly after him there fell one who ruled a mighty people in the flush of victory, when what threatened to be a disruption and a separation had ended in triumph to one side, and the nation seemed as if it were about to start on a fresh course of prosperity. By the assassin's hand he fell. Whatever question there might have been about him in his life, all men conspired to honor him in his death. The ruler of a nation who could subdue a gallant and a mighty foe could not subdue that old foeman who conquers whom he wills. Abraham Lincoln died as well as Cobden. And there was he who had saved many precious lives by warning mariners of the approaching storm, and thus many a ship had remained in harbor and been delivered from the merciless jaws of the deep, but he could not forecast or escape himself the last dread storm; he too must go down into that fathomless deep which swalloweth all mankind. Then when the year was ripe and the flowers were all in bloom --fit season for his going--there was taken away the man who has garnished our nation with objects of beauty and of joy, a man who loved the flowers and sleeps beneath them now. Like flowers he withered as all of us must do--Sir Joseph Paxton died. Then in the month of September, when the year began to wane, three men at least who had walked with their staff to heaven and read the spheres, astronomers who predicted eclipses and told of comets, men of fame and name--three fell at once. They might tell the eclipse, but they themselves must be eclipsed; and the comet they might foretell the track of, but they themselves are gone from us as those meteoric stars are gone. Then you will remember well, when the year had waned, grown old, it is but a day or two ago that all were startled by the death of that young-old man who had ruled our nation so long and on the whole so well. We shall not forget that he was taken away from us who was in some respects a king throughout our land. Wisdom, cheerfulness, youthful strength such as he possessed could not avert the time of death. And then as if the muster roll were not completed, as if death could not be satisfied till the year had yielded up yet another grave, we heard that the oldest of monarchs had been taken away; and though his goodness and his wisdom had guided well the little nation over which he ruled, and given him an influence far more extensive than his own sphere, yet death spared him not, and Leopold must die. It has been a year of dying rather than of living, and you may look upon yourselves and wonder that you are here. Some greener than we are have been cut down. You that are ripe, are you ready? It is marvellous that although so ripe you should have been spared so long.

Now in the light of all these deaths, I want you to look upon mortal sins. They sculpture angels upon gravestones sometimes; then let each angel from the gravestone speak to us this morning, and we will listen to his words, for wise and solemn they will surely be, and worthy of our notice, as if he had risen from the dead.

Let me take you upstairs to your own dying chamber, for there perhaps the lamp will burn best for you. Look at actions which you have thought to be great, and upon which you have prided yourself-- how will they look at the last? You made money; you made money fast; you did the thing very cleverly; you praised yourself for it, just as others have praised themselves for conquering nations or forcing their way to fame, or lifting themselves into eminence. Now you are dying, and what do you think of all that? Is it so great as it seemed to be? Oh, how you leaped up to it, how you strained yourself to reach it, and you have got it, and you are dying. What do you think of it now? The greatest of human actions will appear to be insignificant when we come to die, and especially those upon which men most pride themselves --these will yield them the bitterest humiliation. We shall then say what madmen we must have been to have wasted so much time and energy upon such paltry things. When we shall discover that they were not real, that they were but mere bubbles, mere pretences, we shall then look upon ourselves as demented to have spent the whole of our life and of our energy upon them.

Let us look at our selfish actions in that light. A man says, "I know how to make money," "and I know how to keep it too," says he--and he prides himself that he is not such a fool as to be generous, nor such a simpleton as to give either to God or to the poor. Now, there he lies. Ah! do you know how to keep it now? Can you take it with you? Can you bear so much as a single farthing of it across the river of death? You are come to the water's side--how much of it will you carry through? Ah fool! how much wiser hadst thou been if thou hadst laid up thy treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt! Thou calledst such men fools when thou wast living. What dost thou think of them now that thou art dying? Who is the fool, he that sent his goods beforehand, or he that stored them up here to leave them everlastingly? Everything that is selfish will look beggarly when we come to die; but everything which in the sight of God we have done for Christ's sake that has been generous, and self-denying, and noble, will even amidst the vaults of death sparkle with celestial splendor. Some of you during this week have been giving to the cause of God right generously, for which I thank you--I think I may also do it in my Master's name --and when I have thought of it I have said to myself, "Surely, when they come to die they shall none of them regret that they have served the cause of God. Ah, if they have even given to the pinching of themselves, it shall be no source of sorrow when they come to the dying bed that they did it unto one of the least of God's little ones." Look at your actions in the light of death, and the selfish ones shall soon pass. I would also, dear friends, that some of you would look at your selfrighteousness in the light of death. You have been very good people, very upright, honest, moral, amiable, generous, and so on, and you are resting on what you are. Do you think this will bear your weight when you come to die? When you are in good health, any form of religion may satisfy, but a dying soul wants more than sand to rest on. You will want the Rock of Ages. Then let me assure you that in the light of the grave, all confidence except confidence in the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ is a clear delusion. Fly from it, I beseech thee. Wherefore wilt thou repose beneath a Jonah's gourd that will die before the worm? Seek thou a better shelter; cling thou to the Rock of Ages; find thou the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. The same, I may say, of all confidence in the efficacy of ceremonies and sacraments. When we are in good health it seems a sufficiently satisfactory thing to have been baptized, and to have taken the sacrament, and to go to church, and read prayers and all that, and one can get some little water out of those wells while one is strong and joyous; but when you come to be sick and to die let me tell you, sacraments will be nothing to you. Baptism and the Lord's Supper will alike deceive you if you rest on them; when you come to die you will find them to be supports too frail to bear the weight of an immortal soul's eternal interests. It will be in vain when you lie dying, if God gives you a quickened conscience, to say, " I went to church or to meeting so many times a day." You will find it a poor plaister to your soul's wounds to be able to say, "I made a profession of godliness." Oh your shams will all be rent away from you by the rough hand of the skeleton: Death; you will want a real Savior, vital godliness, true regeneration, not baptismal regeneration; you will want Christ not sacraments; and nothing short of this will do "at the last."