Love's Lamentation
(No. 2782)
A SERMON INTENDED FOR READING ON LORD'S-DAY, JUNE 8, 1902.
DELIVERED BY C. H. SPURGEON,
AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON, ON LORD'S-DAY EVENING, APRIL
28, 1878.
"I have loved you, says the LORD. Yet you say, In what way have You
loved us?" Malachi 1:2.
THE children of Israel had passed through great trouble, but all of it
was brought upon them by their own sin. Yet, in their time of trouble,
God had remembered them in the greatness of His Grace and mercy. They
had been carried into captivity in Babylon and there they had wept when
they remembered Zion. They had been scattered over the face of the
earth, but God had heard their groans and had restored them to their
own land and given them a period of peace and prosperity. But now that
they were cured of idolatry, they fell into self-righteousness,
indifference and worldly minded-ness. The ordinances of God's house
were neglected, or, if they were attended too outwardly, it was in such
a careless, heartless manner that God was insulted by their worship
rather than adored thereby. For these reasons, new sorrows were caused
to fall upon them, for, under the old dispensation, it was God's rule
that His obedient people were a prosperous people–but whenever they
wandered in heart away from Him, then they began to suffer. His message
to them, by Moses, was, "If you will walk contrary unto Me, I will walk
contrary unto you, also, in fury and I, even I, will chastise you seven
times for your sins"–and so they found it. They were, therefore, now
in a very sad condition, but they had no consciousness of the real
cause of it. They were fretting and fuming against God instead of
striking out boldly at their sins–complaining of the severity of the
Divine chastisement rather than confessing the iniquity by which they
had brought the rod upon themselves!
So God sent His servant Malachi, the last of a long train of Prophets,
to seek to bring them to repentance–to try to touch their hearts and
consciences by reminding them of His manifold favor and of their base
ingratitude towards Him who had treated them so graciously and with
such undeserved mercy. This is to be the subject of my discourse. I
want, if I can, to get at men's hearts. I shall not have much to say by
way of instruction–I want, rather, to speak so as to impress and
awaken my hearers, seeking to set your consciences at work so that all
of us–for I hope there will be something to touch us all–may be
compelled to bow before God in true repentance and with genuine
confession of sin.
The text seems to me to contain two things and to suggest a third.
First, here is the lamentation of love–"I have loved you, says the
Lord." Secondly, here is the insensibility of ingratitude–"Yet you
say, In what way have You loved us?" They would not see any signs and
tokens of God's love, for they did not believe in it. And the third
thing on which I am going to speak is the discoveries of Grace, for,
though it is not in the text, the text leads us to think of it and the
5th verse tells us of it–"Your eyes shall see, and you shall say, The
Lord will be magnified from the border of Israel."
I. Our first theme, then, is to be THE LAMENTATION OF LOVE–"I have
loved you, says the Lord."
The lamentation is abrupt and appears to end without completing its own
sense. It is the exclamation of unrequited affection–"I have loved
you, says the Lord." It is a sorrowful lament–as the eyes of God rest
on His rebellious people, He seems to say to them, "You are acting thus
wickedly against Me, yet I have loved you. You offer polluted bread
upon My altar. You bring the blind, the lame and the sick as sacrifices
unto Me and thus you treat Me with derision, yet I have never treated
you so, for I have loved you, says the Lord," as if He were about to
say a great deal more, but suddenly stopped. His grief would not let
Him say more, so the sentence stands in its rugged majesty of pathos,
"I have loved you, says the Lord."
Taking this expression, first, in its lowest sense, namely, the love of
benevolence, it applies to all mankind. The Lord can still say to those
who forget Him and care nothing for Him, "I have loved you." Great
masses of mankind live as if there were no God. If God were really dead
it would, apparently, not make the slightest difference in their
thoughts and feelings. They are, practically, dead to Him and they act
as if He were dead to them. The Lord seems to me to be speaking to some
of you who never appear to have any thought about Him–and He says to
you, "I have treated you lovingly. I have permitted you to live and
kept you in being. You are not suffering pain–the blood leaps in your
veins, you are in robust and vigorous health, yet, alas–you are
spending that strength in sin! Your children have been spared to you.
Your house is replete with comfort and you have no little satisfaction
in the things of this life. I gave you all these things–your corn,
your wine and your oil–and I have clothed you and kept you alive.
Shall I still keep on loving you in this fashion, loading you with
benefits, causing you to prosper, giving you all that heart can
wish–and will you, in return, continue to be hard, cold and
indifferent to Me? Must I still be your Benefactor and you remain an
ingrate? Must I, from morning to night, and from night to morning,
visit you with kindness, and shall I never have anything from you but
sullen silence and heartless indifference?"
There are some of you who have been so prospered in the things of this
world and who have been made so happy in your homes, that you ought to
love the Lord who has done such great things for you! And He seems to
say to you, through my lips, "I have loved you. Will you never remember
Me, never thank Me, never give yourself up to Me, never accept Me as
your Father and your Friend?" It is a natural and just lament of love
that it should have done all this and yet should be reciprocated by
forgetfulness.
Certain men, however, go further than simply forgetting God, for they
actively oppose Him. They can never seem to find language foul enough
to apply to the religion of Jesus Christ. Those who are zealous on
behalf of religion are described by them as cants, hypocrites and I
know not what besides. And anything like conscientiousness is ridiculed
by them as Phariseeism. They know better, but that is the way in which
they oppose God. Yet, as He looks upon them in pity, He can say to
them, "I have loved you. You oppose Me, but why do you act so?" When
our Lord Jesus was upon the earth and the Jews took up stones again and
again to stone Him, He said to them, "Many good works have I showed you
from My Father; for which of those works do you stone Me?" He had
healed their sick, satisfied their hunger and bestowed upon them
countless gifts–yet, again and again, they took up stones to stone
Him, so He said to them, "Why do you act thus towards Me?" And God
might speak to many of you in similar style and say, "I have dealt with
you in love and you have scoffed at Me and opposed Me and I have only
met your opposition with a still greater display of love! With a
strange perseverance of unappreciated and unrequited love, I have still
pursued you–then why do you rebel against Me as you do?"
I might speak to some of you in another strain. O Sir, your mother died
rejoicing in hope! Then why do you hate that Christ who was her joy and
delight? Has the Lord Jesus Christ ever made your children become
unkind to you? Has He ever been the means of any wrong being done to
you? You know that it has not been so, but that all His influence among
the sons of men has been for the good of the whole commonwealth and for
the establishment of peace and righteousness the world over! Why, then,
do men oppose Him so fiercely? Some of them seem almost to foam at the
mouth whenever they mention His sacred name. Well may He, then, as He
looks upon the atheist and the Socinian, say to them, as He says to so
many more, "I have treated you with love, yet this is the only return I
receive from you. Shall it always be
so?"
The same expression may be used concerning the many who have long heard
the Gospel and who yet remain unsaved. Now I can speak personally to a
great many of you who are here. God has indeed shown His love to you in
permitting you to meet with us in this House of Prayer. You might have
been born in some far-off country where you would have been taught the
abominations of Paganism, or Romanism, or Mohammedanism. The name of
Jesus might never have been sounded in your ears–yet it has been and,
with many of you, from your very childhood! I will not speak in praise
of my own ministry, but I will say this–I have always preached the
Gospel to the best of my ability. All that I have known of the Word of
God, I have spoken and I have tried to use the best words that I could
get together in proclaiming the Gospel message. And seeing that so many
hundreds and even thousands have found the Lord Jesus Christ here, I am
right in saying that you have been in a highly privileged place. You
have had opportunities given to you which are denied to a great many
people–and God has proved that He has loved you in giving you such
privileges. If you still remain hearers
only, and not doers of the Word, I can fancy my Lord and Master weeping
over you as He wept over Jerusalem, when He said, "How often would I
have gathered your children together, even as a hen gathers her
chickens under her wings, and you would not!"
The words of our text will also be applicable to many when they come to
die. When God comes to look back upon the whole of a man's life and to
recall the way in which He has treated that man from the first day of
his history to the last, He will be able to say to many a man who will
die unregenerate, "Yet, I loved you. I put you into the arms of a woman
who taught you to fear My name. I placed you in circumstances that
ought to have led you to thought, to prayer, to repentance and to
faith. I have preserved your life and cared for you until now that you
lie there dying, and you will be lost because of despised mercy and
unrequited love! I called, but you refused! I stretched out My hands,
but you regarded not–and now you are lost and must be driven away from
My Presence forever–not because I treated you roughly, or denied to
you the message of salvation, or shut you out of Heaven, but because
you yourselves spurned My love and set at nothing all My entreaties."
I think I once told you the story of a godly woman who was wonderfully
kind to her very unkind and wicked husband. She was so obedient,
gentle, affectionate and patient that he even boasted about what a good
wife he had. And in company, one night, long past the hour of midnight,
he said that if he took his drunken companions home with him, late as
it was, she would receive them like a lady and prepare a supper for
them–and never show by word or sign that it was hard upon her, or that
they were not welcome. And it came true! When he took them home, she
got together such things as she had and made a decent feast for them.
And one of them addressed her, afterwards, and said that they had come
there as the result of a wager–and they could not understand how she
could have patience with such a man as her husband was, for they
themselves felt ashamed of the way he had acted towards her. When they
pressed her for her answer, she said, with tears "I am afraid that my
husband's only happiness will be in this life. I have prayed for him
and sought in vain to bring him to a better mind, but my fear is that
when this life is over, there will be no more happiness for him, so I
mean to make him as happy as he can be in his present condition."
It seems to me that God sometimes acts upon that plan, for He gives to
some men more than heart can wish–their eyes stand out with fatness
and He multiplies to them all earthly blessings because He is a God who
would make men as happy as they can be. So He will let them have
happiness here, for, in the eternity to come, it will not be possible
for His Justice to deal out anything to them but those sorrows which
are the inevitable consequence of perseverance in sin!
Even in this first part of my theme there seems to me to be much that
ought to touch many hearts. But when I come to the higher sense of the
term, "love," and speak of God's own chosen people to whom He can, with
emphasis, say, "I have loved you," oh, how sad it is that the Lord has
to often say this to them while they are in their unregenerate state!
He has chosen them unto eternal life. He has written their names in the
Lamb's Book of Life. His well-beloved Son has already bought them with
His precious blood, yet look at them–slaves to lust, rioting in sin,
or merely hearers of the Word, but not doers of it, still rejecting the
Savior and continually going from bad to worse. Oh, could someone only
echo in their ears this little message of God, "I have loved you,"
could they–would they–remain as they are, without the love of God
shed abroad in their hearts, or any desire to be drawn towards Him? God
knows all about His eternal love towards them and the choice that He
has made of them. And often must He say, as He beholds their heart of
stone, brow of brass and neck of steel, "Yes, I have loved you, O you
poor foolish creatures. And you shall yet be Mine and shall sing among
the angels, though now you are rioting in sin and reveling in
iniquity!" I think I hear the Lord thus graciously expressing the
inmost feelings of His heart and the very repetition of the message
ought to touch all our hearts.
But, further, think how the Lord must express Himself, in a similar
style, concerning wandering backsliders. There are some whom we have
every reason to regard as His people. In times past they have given
abundant evidence that they were His, but they have grown spiritually
cold, as if a death-chill had struck them in their heart. They have,
apparently, gone back to the world and they are now far off from the
place where they used to be. But the Lord looks upon them in their
wretchedness and sin and He says to them, "I have loved you. You may be
trying to live without prayer, but I have loved you. You may have
ceased to frequent the House of God, but I have loved you. I remember
you, the kindness of your youth, the love of your espousals, when you
went after Me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown. Can a
woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on
the son of her womb? Yes, they may forget, yet will I not forget you.
Turn, O backsliding children, says the Lord, for I am married to you."
"The Lord, the God of
Israel, says that He hates putting away." He has not sued for a divorce
from His unfaithful spouse, as He might well have done. "Only
acknowledge your iniquity," He says, "confess that you have
transgressed against the Lord your God, and you shall be fully and
freely forgiven, for I have loved you."
I pray that my blessed Master may Himself speak to any poor backslider
who is here, for, surely, His gentle, gracious accents ought to melt
even a heart of stone! If you were ever really His, however far you may
have wandered from Him, do not hesitate to come back to Him, for He
still says to you, "I have loved you." Yes, dear Friends, whenever any
of the Lord's people get into a sad, lean, low condition–when they
begin to grow cold and to doubt whether they can be the children of God
at all–it is well for them to hear the great Father say to them, again
and again, "I have loved you. I have loved you. I have loved you. I,
who made the heavens and the earth, have loved you. I have loved you
from before the foundation of the world. I have not merely pitied you
as a man might pity a starving dog, but I have loved you with all My
heart. I have loved many others beside you, but, still, I have as much
love for you as if there were nobody else for Me to love in all the
world." Surely God will cause this simple but most comforting Truth to
come home to the hearts of His people and then they will cry, "We will
arise and go to our Father, and confess our wanderings and our sins,
that we may once more be at peace with Him."
Are you, dear Friend, very sorrowful just now? Have you lost the Light
of God's Countenance? Are you sighing and crying for the peace you once
enjoyed? Well, then, just do what I have been bidding the sinner do!
Come to Christ all over again and, at the same time, make diligent
enquiry to find out whether there is any wrong thing in your character
that is bringing you into this state of misery. How long is it since
you have thoroughly swept out the secret chambers of your heart? If you
leave a room unswept for a little while, you know how the cobwebs and
the dust gather and settle all over it. Look even at the snow after it
has been lying for a day or two in such a foggy, smoky, grimy city as
this–it is positively black! Well, if the snow gets black in this
smoke, do you not think that your soul will also get foul and dirty?
This world is a bad place to live in. To maintain a high condition of
purity, you will need a deal of Divine Grace, or you certainly will not
do it. Ah, me, how little there is around us that can help us toward
God–and how much there is to draw us away from Him! Now, because of
all this impurity by which you are surrounded, your soul needs to be
constantly swept out. You had need cry to the Holy Spirit to light the
candle and frequently sweep out the room, for unless there is a
constant cleansing, there will be continual filth and the heart will
never be fit for Christ to come into it and to abide in it. So much,
then, concerning the lamentation of love.
II. Now, in the second place, I have to speak upon THE INSENSIBILITY OF
INGRATITUDE.
That is a very cruel answer in our text–can you detect the heartless
ingratitude in it? I am afraid I do not know how to pronounce the words
aright so as to bring out all the evil that is in them. First, you hear
God saying, in very plaintive tones, "I have loved you." And then,
instead of that declaration touching the hearts of those who had
wandered from Him, and causing them to ask for mercy at His hands, you
get this wicked question, "In what way have You loved us?" That is all
the reply they give! It is short and sharp, full of unbelief, pride,
and rebellion–"In what way have You loved us?" Does anybody really ask
that question of God nowadays? Oh, yes! I have heard it many times.
That question is sometimes asked by men who are loaded with temporal
mercies. There is nothing that God has denied to them. When they were
younger, if anybody had told them that they would be worth as much as
they now actually possess, they would have said that it was beyond
their utmost expectations. Yet now that they have all that their heart
can desire and their eyes stand out with fatness, they put to God this
shameful question, "In what way have You loved us?" They say that they
cannot see any sign of the goodness of God in their prosperity–they
trace all their riches and their increase to their own wit, wisdom,
industry and perseverance–they leave God out of the matter altogether!
And so, although His mercies stare them in the face and they wear the
tokens of those mercies on their backs, and carry them within their
physical frame, yet they continue to say to Him, "In what way have You
loved us?"
I have known others who have practically said the same thing by the way
in which they have slighted Gospel privileges–a man of this stamp, who
has been a Hearer of the Gospel for, perhaps, 20 or 30 years, yet
says–"I do not see any proofs of any particular favor that God has
shown to me." O Sir, if you had been cast into Hell, you would have
learned to prize the privilege of listening to the Gospel when you had
lost it forever! If you had been, for even a little while, in a lunatic
asylum, you might, when you come out, begin rightly to value the
blessing of restored reason with which you are able to understand at
least something of that Gospel which you have so long neglected and
despised! It is
strange that there should be people living on praying ground and on
pleading terms with God, with Heaven to be had for the asking, who yet
say to the Lord, "In what way have You loved us?" Ah, Sirs, some of you
see what kings and Prophets desired to see, but died without the sight,
yet you say to God, "In what way have You loved us?" How happy ought to
be your ears that hear the Gospel's joyful sound, yet, as you hear it
not in your hearts, you cry to the Lord, "In what way have You loved
us?"
Yes, and I have heard this question put very bitterly by some who have
murmured at their temporal trials. "How has God been gracious to us?"
they ask. "Look at me," says one, "I am very poor. I work as hard as
any slave, yet I get but little return for all my toil, and my lot is a
truly pitiable one. In what respects has God loved me?" "Look," says
another, "at this broken leg." Or perhaps the lament is, "I was born
deformed." Or, "I lost an eye early in life! Don't talk to me about God
loving me." Yet there are many, now in Heaven, who might never have
gone there if it had not been for their poverty, their infirmity and
their pain. Often, when God is hedging up a man's way with thorns to
stop him from going to destruction, he thinks that the Lord is unkind
to him, whereas the thorns in the way are the surest tokens of Divine
Love to him! Yes, Sir, you were once able to drink greedily from the
muddy stream of worldly pleasure and you kept at it as long as you
could. I do not know where you might have been by this time had not God
struck you down, taken away your power of enjoyment and deprived you of
the means by which you indulged yourself in sin! What better service
could He have rendered to you? The silly, self-willed child will not
thank his father for the rod, but when he becomes a man, if that rod
has been really useful to him, he will respect and love the wise and
kind father who did not spare him for all his crying! And you, dear
Friend, who are in trouble and sorrow, say that God is dealing harshly
with you–yet those trials are all sent in love. That sharp affliction
of yours is the surgeon's knife that is cutting away the proud flesh
and deadly cancers which, otherwise, would destroy you! God is working
for your good in all that He is doing–it is His love that is doing it
all.
I am sorry to say that I have known some who appeared to be the Lord's
people, who have said to Him, "In what way have You loved us?" because
they have become very doubting. They have not looked at eternal
things–they have kept looking at their outward inconveniences and
sorrows. The poor man has said, "With this leaky roof to my cottage,
can God really love me?" And the poor woman has said, "With this
rheumatism in my aching bones and my poor little children half clad and
ill fed, can God really love me?" And even the heirs of Heaven have
sometimes asked of God, "In what way have You loved us?" But when they
have come back to their right mind and have rightly understood the ways
of the Lord, they have blessed Him for their troubles as much as for
their joys–and they have seen how all things work together for good to
them that love God!
It shows how wrong is the state of our heart if we can live in the
midst of God's continued mercies and yet cannot realize that He loves
us. If any of you cannot see any tokens of the benevolence and goodness
of God to you, surely you must be blind! And if, dear child of God, you
fail to perceive what the Lord has done for you, anoint your eyes with
eye-salve that you may see, for He has done everything for you! He has
given you this world and worlds to come. Yes, and He has given Himself
to you, to be your Father. He has given you His Son, to be your Savior.
He has given you His Spirit, to be your constant Comforter. What more
can He do for you than He has done, you who have fled for refuge to lay
hold of the hope set before you in the Gospel? Therefore, never let
this thought flit across your soul and never let this question pass the
door of your lips, "In what way have You loved us?"
Thus have I spoken upon the insensibility of ingratitude as well as the
lamentation of love.
III. Now, lastly, I have to speak, for just a few minutes, upon THE
DISCOVERIES OF GRACE. I am hoping and praying that these last words
which I am about to utter, may come true in the experience of a great
many in this place, as well as of others who will read the discourse
when it is printed.
Suppose you should be converted–become a child of God, and be
saved–the first thing you will discover will be that God has loved
you. What a change that will make in all your feelings towards Him! You
will never again say to the Lord, "In what way have You loved me?" But,
if you feel as I did when I first found out the love of God to me, you
will begin tracing your whole history, from your cradle up to the
moment of your conversion–and you will say, "I can see the Lord's
loving hand there, and there, and there, and there, and there." You
will look upon your trials, your losses, your crosses, your removals
from one village or town to another and you will say, "Ah, it was love
that watched over me all the while! It was love that was arranging all
that happened for my good." And you will be amazed at the difference
that feeling will make in your life! Before you knew the Lord, you
could not realize His love, but, as soon as ever you really know Him,
you will say, "All His dealings with me have been proofs of His love."
You will put up your hands in wonder and say, "How could I have been
such a mad fool as to go on sinning against God in spite of such
wondrous love? It really seems to me as if the more I sinned, the more
He loved me–and the worse I was to Him, the better He was to me. Over
against my black sins He set the whiteness and brightness of His Grace
and He seemed as if He conquered me, not by the sheer force of His
might, but by the superior power of His boundless love."
Further, if you shall be converted, it will not be long before you will
find out that in addition to God being loving and kind to you in His
Providence, He so loved you that He gave His only-begotten Son to die
for you. The general Truth of God that Christ died for sinners is
unspeakably precious–but the sweetest Truth in all the world is for
any of us to be able to say, "He died for me." O my dear Hearer, if you
were ever to find out that Christ thought of you in His last moments
upon the Cross–that He distinctly and personally poured out His life
for you and that your name–I mean your very own name–is engraved upon
the palms of His hands and that you, in your own person, are
continually before Him, surely that would be a heart-breaker for you!
All the Law and the terrors in the world might only harden you in your
rebellion, but one glance of the dear languid eyes of Him who hung upon
the Cross–one gracious look of His–will make your spirit flow like
the streams of water that ran out of the Rock in the wilderness! May
the Lord, in His mercy, enable each one of you to say, "He loved me and
gave Himself for me," for then you will soon be at His feet as weeping,
yet rejoicing penitents!
Again, if you are really converted, so that you come to know the love
of God, and the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, another thing which
you will soon find out will be God's election of you from eternity. How
well I recollect when first that ray of light struck into my soul, as I
seemed to hear Him say to me personally, "I have loved you with an
everlasting love, therefore with loving kindness have I drawn you."
That great Truth was revealed to me in this way. I said to myself,
"Here am I converted, pardoned, saved. There are my school-fellows, the
boys and young men with whom I used to be associated–they are not
saved. Who has made the difference between us?" I dared not say that I
had, and so put the crown of salvation on my own head. I saw, in a
single moment, that God must have made the distinction if I was, in any
degree whatever, different from my fellow creatures. Then I said to
myself, "If God has made this difference in me and done more for me
than He has done for others, there must always have been in His heart
thoughts of love towards my soul, since He never changes. What He does
today is the result of the purpose which was in His heart from before
the foundation of the world." So there rolled into my heart, like a
stream of honey, the assurance that He had loved me, with complacency,
long before the earth was formed, or the day-star knew its place, or
planets ran their round! Then I said to myself, "O you fool of fools,
that you should ever have treated your God as you have done! Are you,
indeed, one of His elect and chosen people and yet have you lived all
these years without hardly a thought of Him who has loved you from
eternity?" I blamed myself, as I still do, that I was so slow to
recognize His eternal choice of me. And if the Lord shall be pleased to
say to you, in the words of my text, "I have loved you"–when you once
really know His love to you, His redemption of you and His election of
you, personally, you will no more say, "In what way have You loved me?"
But you will bow, in speechless but grateful reverence, at His dear
feet, worshipping and adoring the greatness of His Infinite Love!
I do not know how you feel, Brothers and Sisters, who know the Lord,
but I feel that if I could live a thousand lives, I would like to live
them all for Christ–and I would even then feel that they were all too
little a return for His great love to me. And if any of us could have
Grace and strength enough given to us to die a thousand deaths for
Christ, He well deserves them for having loved us as He has done.
There are just two things that I want to say to you, and with them I
will finish my discourse.
First, some of you are still living in sin. Perhaps you hardly know why
you came to the Tabernacle tonight. Possibly it was only out of
curiosity. I am no thought-reader or mind-reader, but I can imagine
that some of you have been in the habit of pooh-poohing all
religion–ridiculing it–and you have done so for a long while. Now,
suppose that one of these days you should preach the very faith which
now you despise, just as the Apostle Paul did? Do not utter more words
than you can help in reply to this suggestion of mine, for you will
have to eat them, however many there are of them! Do not go any further
in the wrong road than you can help, because you will have to come all
that way back. I dare to tell you, in my Master's name, that some of
you who hate Him, will love Him before long–though now you oppose Him
all
you can, by-and-by you will be among the first to vindicate His cause!
My Lord knows all about you and as He has bought you with His precious
blood, do you think He will not claim you as His own? He has written
your name in His Book of Life, so the devil, himself, and all his
legions cannot take from you the everlasting life to which His
predestinating Grace has ordained you! You shall yet bow down before
Him. The day draws near when you who now talk in a hectoring fashion,
will be found lying at His feet as suppliants! Then, when He has drawn
you to Himself, and has favored you with much of His love–when one of
these Sabbath nights you shall be found sitting at His Table and the
spikenard shall give forth a sweet smell, and your very soul shall seem
to be carried away to Heaven because of the Presence of your Beloved, I
wonder what you will think of yourself then?
Suppose He were then to whisper in your ear–I know He will not do
so–but suppose He were to remind you of all your ill behavior towards
Him–He will not do so, because He gives liberally and upbraids
not–but suppose your own memory should be your accuser and should say
to you, "Remember that you were a bond slave in the land of Egypt.
Recollect those black sins that came out of your heart, those foul
words that issued from your lips"–do you not think that as you look up
into the face of Jesus, your Lord and Master, you will say, "Ah, my
gracious Savior, I have thought of a fresh reason for loving You. I
knew it before, but it has come home to me more vividly now, than
ever–should not they love most who have had most forgiven? That is my
case, my Lord. Therefore, bind me to Yourself and let me never again
wander away from You, but let me love You even to the end."
And lastly, dear Friends, I wonder what we shall think of ourselves
when we get away from communion with the saints on earth and sit up
yonder with our Savior in Heaven? There is one who was once a
drunk–what a strange thing it will be for him to find himself in
Heaven! Here he was stuttering and stammering and could not speak
plainly because of his drunkenness, but he has been washed and cleansed
in the blood of Jesus–and there he is, singing more sweetly, even,
than the angels! Would you believe it? That very man up there–that
bright spirit robed in white, who sings the loudest of them all, used
to curse and swear and ill-treat his wife because she went to the House
of God–yet there he is, purified and glorified! See what Sovereign
Grace can do? But what must he think of himself when he gets up there?
I was trying to imagine what must be the emotion of such a man as Paul,
who had been a persecutor and injurious, when he looks into the face of
his dear Lord and Master, and casts his crown before Him, and yet all
the while thinks, "But I persecuted Him!"
I wonder whether that man is there who pierced His side and those
soldiers who nailed Him to the tree? Certainly, he is there who railed
at Him on the Cross and then repented and was forgiven! And he is there
who said, "I know not the Man." When they are singing, "Worthy is the
Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and
strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing," I think that, sometimes,
Peter pauses a while–and those around wonder why Peter has left off
singing, but he cannot help it. Emotions of unutterable gratitude are
coming over him as he remembers that he has been forgiven through the
wondrous Grace of Christ who loved him even when He was being denied by
him with oaths and curses!
I wish that I could communicate to you the emotions of my own spirit as
I think of the greatness of man's sin and set it side by side with the
greatness of God's Grace–as I think of unspeakable love and of
unutterably vile sin which that love puts away. Come, dear Friends, and
let us all join together to bless and magnify the wondrous love which
God has revealed to us in His Word–and may we all meet in Heaven, to
the praise of the glory of His Grace, for His dear Son's sake! Amen.