Prospect–“He Will Keep”

Prospect–"He Will Keep"

(No. 1883)

DELIVERED BY

C. H. SPURGEON,

AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

"Now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come
to You. Holy Father, keep through Your own name those whom You have
given Me that they may be one, as We are. While I was with them in the
world, I kept them in Your name: those whom You gave Me I have kept,
and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition; that the Scripture
might be fulfilled." John 17:11,12.

THE PASTOR'S RETURN. THREE SPECIALLY- SELECTED SERMONS TO HIS CHURCH,
CONGREGATION, READERS AND FRIENDS, CONSISTING OF

A RETROSPECT, A PROSPECT [No. 1883] AND AN EXHORTATION [No. 1884.]

WHAT a wonderful intercommunion and fellowship exists between the
Father and the Son in the matter of redemption! It is the Father who
gave the Son–it is the Son who gave Himself. It is the Father who gave
us to the Son–it is the Son who has bought us with a price and has
kept us by His hand. Here, in the text, the Father who gave, receives
back from the Son, the Son praying to Him in these terms, "Holy Father,
keep through Your own name those whom You have given Me." We cannot
doubt the personality of the Father and of the Son, nor their essential
unity. There are not three Gods, but one God. The Father and the Son,
though two in one sense, are one in another. I delight to see the
traces of the Trinity in every act of Grace. From the first
transactions of Covenant love, even to the ingathering of the whole
election of Grace and the introduction of the chosen into Glory, we
hear the sound of that voice which of old said, "Let Us make man." The
three Divine Persons work together in absolute union for the production
of one grand result. "Glory be unto the Father, and to the Son, and to
the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be,
world without end! Amen."

Observe that our text is all about keeping. Three or four times over we
have some tense or other of the word, "keep." "Holy Father, keep those
whom You have given Me." "While I was with them in the world, I kept
them." Greatly do we need keeping. You have been redeemed, but you must
still be kept. You have been regenerated, but you must be kept. You are
pure in heart and hands, but you must be kept. You are quickened with
the Divine life, you have aspirations after the holiest things, your
love to Christ is intense–but you must be kept. You have had a deep
experience and you know the temptations of the enemy–but still, you
must be kept. The sunlight of Heaven rests upon your honored brow. You
are near the gates of Glory, but you must be kept. The same hand that
bought you must keep you–and the same Father who has begotten you,
again, unto a lively hope, must keep you to His eternal Kingdom and
Glory. All Glory be unto Him who is able to keep us from falling! Let
all those unite in the song who are kept by the power of God! Here lies
our topic and we will not wander far from it.

First, we will notice a choice pastorate which was enjoyed by some of
God's people. Secondly, we shall observe that this choice pastorate,
was, after all, but a temporary privilege. And, thirdly, we shall see
that those who enjoyed it were

brought, by-and-by, to the exact place where we must always be and,
therefore, were made the objects of a blessed prayer, "Holy Father,
keep through Your own name those whom You have given Me."

I. First, here is A CHOICE PASTORATE. Our little children sing–

"I think when I read that sweet story of old, When Jesus was here among
men, How He called little children like lambs to his fold. I should
like to have been with them!" And so forth. Might not you and I well
wish that we had been numbered with the 12, or that we had been among
the Marys? It was certainly a choice privilege to be one of the
Apostles who were the intimates of Christ, the bodyguard of Jesus.
These men saw Him in His privacy, understood His dark sayings and read
His heart. That privilege cannot be ours. Let us think of them without
envy and learn something from them.

You notice what the Savior did for the 12 who were round about
Him–"While I was with them in the world, I kept them." This care was
continuous. It looks as if He did this above everything else. He kept
them. He was a guard to His people. He made this the chief employment
of His life. While He went about doing good and reclaiming the
wandering, He never diverted His care from His people. Loving them as
His own, He loved them to the end. In this chapter you have "the ruling
passion strong in death." He has kept them in life and now He says, "I
am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to
You." And the one thought of His heart is, "What is to become of them?
While I was with them, I kept them. What will they do, now, that I am
taken from them? They will have nobody to resolve their doubts, nobody
to abate their discords, no one to answer their adversaries, no one to
cheer them into holy confidence. What will the poor babes do when their
Nurse has gone? What will the half-instructed scholars do when their
Teacher shall be taken up from among them?" He closes His life on earth
by commending them to the keeping of His heavenly Father!

Surely, Brothers and Sisters, this teaches us that this care is always
needed. Sheep never outgrow the necessity for their being kept by the
Shepherd. If the 11 always required keeping, I am sure that you and I
do. We are not better than Thomas, or Peter, or John. We have among us
many a Thomas who will not believe without a superfluity of evidence.
We have many a Peter, rash and impetuous, and many a John who would
call fire from Heaven upon the adversaries of the cause! We are full of
flaws and failures, are we not? We shall crumble to the dust if the
Lord does not keep us! Is there one man among us that can live unless
the Eternal Life shall continue to flow into him? I am sure there is
not!

We are all so greatly dependent upon the continual keeping of our Lord,
that I look with joy to a care always personal. I read with pleasure
that the Lord, Himself, all the while that He was here, kept those whom
the Father gave Him–those 11 priceless gems were always in His
custody. I bless His name that they enjoyed a ministry so tenderly
personal–"While I was with them in the world, I kept them in Your
name." He lays stress upon His personal care–"I kept them." The Good
Shepherd kept the sheep, not by proxy, but by His own hands. There is
no nourishment for the child like that which comes from its own
mother's breast–and a child of God only thrives as he lives upon
Christ, Himself. Those of us who are under-shepherds exercise a very
poverty-stricken ministry compared with that of our Lord, but we should
at least give the best we have. We should be willing, night and day
with tears, to the utmost of our strength and even beyond it, to help
the feeble and cheer the faint, if by any means we may preserve the
flock of God committed to our imperfect charge. Do you not wish that
you had Christ for your Pastor? You may well wish it! But it cannot be,
for He has ascended. Truly, it was a choice privilege to the 11 that
Christ could say of them, "while I was with them in the world, I kept
them in Your name."

What must have been the effect of the personality of Christ upon those
eleven? There are some men whose influence upon others has, for lack of
a better word, been called, "magical." History tells us of warriors who
have been courageous and skillful in the marshalling of battalions–and
these have inspired their soldiers with boundless loyalty, grappling
them to themselves with hooks of steel. Certain heroes have been
absolutely supreme over their fellow men–a willing homage has been
rendered to them. The influence of the Christ upon those who actually
lived with Him must have been superlative. Think of it! There were but
11 of them, but He so molded them that the little handful of seed
brought forth a harvest, the fruit of which did shake like Lebanon!
They were nothing but peasants when they came under His hand, but when
they left it, they were the fathers of a new age! They were the
Patriarchs of 12 tribes of a new Israel! The Apostles, after they had
been with Jesus, were men of a superior mold. Though they had little
human learning, they were the best educated men on the earth! Each man
of them was more than a prince, in having touched the skirts of Deity,
in bearing

upon his face the brightness of the eternal Godhead, in speaking with a
word which, like the Word of God Himself, was utterly irresistible!
They were men anointed above their fellows, men to the fullness of
manhood, men beyond the utmost height to which the schools could have
trained them. What a privilege to have had Jesus, Himself, for one's
own private Tutor!

Our Lord's care was most successful. Of the 11, not one was lost. I
should not have marveled at all, apart from what we know of our Lord's
gracious power, if the whole 11 had gone back. They were very fickle,
at first, and extremely ignorant. And, at the same time, they were
strongly tempted. Influences which made some go back and walk no more
with Jesus would, naturally, have had the same power over them if Jesus
had not kept them. Yet of those whom the Father gave Him, not one of
them was lost! His marvelous pastorate was so successful that He could
say, "Of those whom You have given Me I have lost none." Thomas, John,
Peter, James–they are all kept. The training of the Master has
qualified each one for his lofty office. Oh, that you and I may be
helped by Divine Grace to keep with us all the souls God has given us,
that we may, at last, say of all our Hearers, "Here am I and the
children that You have given me!" Our Lord's was a wonderful pastorate,
was it not?

But, nevertheless, it was attended with an awful sorrow, for He says,
"None of them is lost, but the son of perdition, that the Scripture
might be fulfilled." Our Savior never meant us to understand that Judas
was one of those whom the Father gave Him. He never made a mistake
about that. Very early he said, "I have chosen you 12 and one of you is
a devil." He had spoken distinctly about the character and doom of
Judas. Some have asked, "How could Jesus have all knowledge and yet
permit a man like Judas to be one of the twelve?" Brethren, He did it
advisedly, with wisdom aforethought, for He knew that often, in the
ages to come, people would say, "Can this Christianity be true which
has such false-hearted traitors in its midst, which has such sellers of
the Master even among its leaders?" He allowed that objection to come
up at the very first and suffered a covetous traitor to be one of the
twelve.

The Savior sometimes seemed to speak of Judas as if he were one of His,
but then He was speaking popularly and according to the method of
common conversation. He permits the Evangelist to call him, "one of the
twelve," as if He would let us feel that men may go very far on the way
to Heaven and have everything except the essential matter–and yet may
perish. When Judas cast out devils and in Christ's name did many
wonderful works, it would have been impossible for any but the
Omniscient God to have seen any difference between him and any other of
the twelve. In some respects Judas excelled others of the Apostles! He
probably had not half the faults of Peter, nor half the doubts of
Thomas. There were fine qualities within him, but they were all
leavened by that supreme covetousness which mastered him and made him
the son of perdition. He seemed very near to being all that he should
be, yet the Master described him in this prayer, not as one that would
be lost, but as one that was already lost. "None of them is lost but
the son of perdition."

He calls him "the son of perdition" and you may be sure that He did not
give him that name without great sorrow. The Watcher over the sons of
men could not lose even Judas without deep regrets. He sighs, "He that
eats bread with Me has lifted up his heel against Me." Among the bitter
herbs of His Passover, none was more like to wormwood and gall than
that word, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, one of you shall betray
Me." As there is inexpressible sweetness in the doctrine of the Final
Perseverance of the Saints, so there is an unutterable horror in other
doctrines which guard it, such as that which our Lord lays down in the
words, "if the salt has lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted?
It is therefore good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden
under foot of men." Final Perseverance is a rose of Heaven's own
garden, but it is set with thorns–and those thorns are such cases as
those of Judas and of others that drew back unto perdition.

See, then, in this choice pastorate of our Master, the great need there
is of keeping. Let us pray for Him to keep us to the end.

II. Secondly, and very briefly, let us speak of A TEMPORARY PRIVILEGE.
The eleven were not to have Christ with them always. He was to ascend
unto His Throne and then they were to fall back on another mode of
living, common to all saints.

Now, why was Christ with them at all? It was because they were very
weak. They needed fostering and nurturing. Look, Brothers and Sisters,
you had great joys in your early days. You then enjoyed raptures and
transports. It may be you have not had them lately, for you have
traveled to Heaven at a steadier pace. My mother dandled me upon her
knee when I was a babe, but she never thought of nursing me when I
became a man. Certain spiritual joys are the privilege and

the necessity of our religious babyhood, but we outgrow them. The Lord
took the eleven when they were in their infancy and He was with them in
the world and kept them. Why, then, did He go away? Why, for this
reason, that they might grow to spiritual manhood! If He had always
remained with them, working miracles and teaching them by His personal
Presence, they would always have been mere children. It was expedient
for them that He should go, for then the Holy Spirit came upon them and
they rose into the full vigor of manhood! While Jesus was with them,
they were little children, but in His absence they became men in
Christ, quitting themselves valorously through faith in His name. Many
joys of sense are allowed to trembling saints which are taken from them
when they become strong in the Lord.

You also, dear Friends, have enjoyed a profitable pastorate and you are
now about to lose it. You have not been under Christ's personal
teaching, that could not be–but you have been under the teaching of
some man whom God has very greatly blessed in the ministry of His Word.
Alas, you are now going far from the much-loved means of Grace! I pray
God that you may now grow stronger. Now that the plant is put out into
the cold, may it have strength and vigor enough to bear the frost! I
see my gardener hardening off young plants and it may be the Lord is
about to do the same with you. A boat in the builder's yard has been
gradually fashioned to perfection and beautified with abundant care.
But it must be launched! It must be washed by the rough sea. It must
know the wear and tear of storms. Israel must not always fatten in
Goshen–the tribes must be led into the wilderness and must be
conducted over stony places–for thus the Lord brings His chosen to
their promised rest.

Please note that, choice as the privilege was of having Jesus, Himself,
to be their Pastor, apart from the Grace of God this special gift had
no power in it. The Lord Jesus Christ might preach, but He could not
touch the heart of the son of perdition! He looked on Peter and Peter
went out and wept bitterly, but the Lord might have looked till Dooms
Day at Judas and there would have been no tears of penitence in Judas's
eyes. Alas, Judas heard every sermon that Christ preached, saw all the
mighty deeds that He did–even saw the bloody sweat upon His face in
the Garden of Geth-semane–and kissed that face with traitorous lips!
No ministry of itself can turn a heart of stone into flesh. "You must
be born from above." Though the Son of God, Himself, is the Preacher,
yet when the congregation goes out, 11 in whom there is the Grace of
God are blessed–but the son of perdition remains just what he
was–hardened even to the end.

Let this be a warning to such as are not profited under the Word when
faithfully preached. Beware lest you perish under the Gospel and so
perish with a vengeance! If, however, a choice ministry is about to be
removed from any of you, let this thought minister a measure of comfort
to you, that, after all, the essential thing is not to be taken from
you, for even in the absence of the best outward ministry, the Spirit
of God can bless you! But without that Spirit of God, even the ministry
of Christ, Himself, in the days of His flesh, could not have been
effectual to you!

III. So now I come, in the last place, to show you where the Master
left His disciples, where we all are, where we may well be content to
be! We are all the objects of A BLESSED PRAYER. "Holy Father, keep
through Your own name those whom You have given Me that they may be
one, as We are." Beneath this Divine petition we all find shelter!

Notice how He begins–"Father." Oh, yes, it is the Father who keeps us!
Children of God, who can be a better keeper for you than your Father?
To whom can you cry with such certainty of being heard as to your
Father in Heaven? Whose heart will so soon be moved? Whose ears will be
so quick to hear? Whose feet will be so swift to save as your Father's?
The Lord Jesus was tender to us when He selected that title of the
great God and did not say, "Jehovah," or "Elo-him, keep Your people,"
but, "Father, keep them."

And then He puts it, "Holy Father," but why that? Why, just because the
keeping means, keep us holy, and who can make us holy but the Holy God
and who can keep us holy but He who is, Himself, holy? Who will have
such an intense interest in our growing holiness as One whose name is
the Holy Father? Beloved, I love well this title–it commends itself to
my faith and breeds assurance in my soul! If the blessed hand of Jesus
has put me into the bosom of the Holy Father that I may be kept, why,
the keeping is sure and certain! The Holy One will never suffer us to
be polluted or defiled!

Carefully note that the prayer is still–"Keep them: keep them." What
keeping do you and I require? I was thinking of the various forms of
keeping that we, as a Church, might seek. We need keeping from discord.
"Holy Father, keep them that they may be one." It is a very wonderful
thing when a dozen people agree for a dozen weeks. We are such an odd
lot of people–I did not mean you in particular, but I mean all members
of Christian Churches–that it is really no wonder when we disagree.
The wonder is that we have been so long and so heartily united! I
praise and bless God for our years of spiritual harmony. Knowing that
despite our imperfections, our tendencies to self-exaltation, the
easiness of

misunderstanding one another, the readiness with which we provoke and
are provoked without cause, it is very amazing to me that we should
have had no strifes or divisions. "Holy Father, keep us." Let us pray
that prayer very often! We do not know how soon we may be all sixes and
sevens. Let us pray God that we may not fall foul of one another
through the entrance of some serpents of discord into our happy
paradise.

But, Brothers and Sisters, to be kept in unity is not enough–we need
keeping from error. The world swarms with false doctrines like Egypt
with frogs in the day of her plague! You cannot put your head outside
the door without having a flight of heresies buzzing around you. As
some cities on the Continent have been full of cholera, so has this
city been full of "modern thought" and I will not attempt to decide
which is the worse of the two! But it is a great mercy to be kept from
the silly love of novelties and to be helped to adhere to the old
faith, to cling to the old Cross. Happy is he who is determined to know
nothing save Jesus Christ and Him crucified! "Holy Father, keep us." We
have seen some go to the east and some to the west, some to the moon
and some to the stars, some to perfection and some to licentiousness.
Keep us, Holy Father! Keep us staunch in Your Truth even to the end!

But it would not be enough for us to be kept united and firm in the
Truth of God–we need, also, to be kept from sin. Saints must be kept,
or they will soon be sinners. How have I seen the brightest men
tarnished with the foulest lusts! How have I mourned as I have known
those who preached holiness with wondrous power to practice unholiness
in their private lives! You and I are so ready to be upset by a sudden
squall of temptation, especially such as carries much sail and little
ballast, that we have need to pray each one, for himself, and then for
all his Brothers and Sisters, "Holy Father, keep us: keep us from all
evil."

Nor would that be enough, for there is such a thing as being kept
perfectly moral, outwardly proper and decorous and yet our hearts may
gradually subside into spiritual death. Have you never seen it? It was
not putridity–it was not even ghastliness. The corpse was
washed–washed with rosewater–and there were touches of paint on the
cheeks and lips that almost veiled the work of death. Fitly draped and
with a smile upon its countenance, it looked a welcome to you, yet it
was a corpse! Could you have thought it? O Church of God, beware of
accepting the semblance of life! In the battles between the Spaniards
and the Moors, when the Cid, Rodrigo Diaz, had fallen in the fight, the
Spaniards set his body upright upon his milk-white steed and went forth
to battle with his corpse at their head! How often had his presence
made victory secure to his comrades! Until the Moors discovered that
the mighty arm was palsied by death, they fled before the sword of the
great Cid! But when once they knew that the uplifted falchion was held
in a dead hand, they recovered spirit.

And so you can make a dead church sit upright in the saddle, wearing
all its harness of war, and you can make it bear aloft the great sword
of the Lord and, for a time, its death may be unsuspected. But once let
the world find out the dreadful secret and its hour of defeat has come!
A dead church, like a dead lion, is sport for children! A church devoid
of spiritual life is the laughing stock of devils. God keep us that we
never fall into the condition of spiritual decay! Pray from the bottom
of your hearts, my Brothers and Sisters, in unison with the sweet
prayer of our living, loving Lord, "Holy Father, keep through Your own
name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one, as We are."

Observe, further, that our Lord Jesus Christ asks that we may be kept
through God's own name. It requires the very name of God to keep a
Christian!

By the word, "name," is sometimes meant the whole Character of God, the
whole royal power and prerogative of God. Frequently, power is meant by
the word, "name." There is no keeping one of us, much less the whole
ship's company, except the sacred name of God shall exert all its power
to keep off our foe. The Savior concludes with this plea, "Holy Father,
keep through Your own name those whom You have given Me." I do not know
whether it will strike you, but it strikes me as very touching. He
seems to say, "Father, You did give these to Me. They are very precious
to Me. They are My jewels. Now I am going away and, therefore, I must
leave them. O My Father, keep for Me the sweet tokens of Your own love
to Me! These are Your forget-me-nots and I have valued them, therefore
I ask you, while I go up to yonder bloody tree and die and, when
afterwards I come to You and enjoy My eternal rest, take care of these
whom You have given Me."

It is like a husband who has obtained his bride, but now finds that he
must go away from her. He gives her back to her father who originally
gave her to him and says, "Take care of her for my sake. As you love
me, take care of her." We are talking about you, you believers in
Christ! Listen, therefore, with diligence. "The Father Himself loves
you." The

Father gave you to Jesus because He loved Jesus. He wanted Jesus to
have that which would give Him most delight and so He gave you to Him!
And now that Jesus cannot be with you by His bodily Presence, He gives
you over to the great Father, from whose loving hands He first received
you, and He says, "Holy Father, keep them." Do you think the Father
will answer the Son's request? I am sure that He will. I feel safe in
those Almighty hands in which Jesus has placed me–

"I know that safe with God remains,

Protected by His power,

All that to Jesus appertains,

Till the decisive hour."

Remember that double-handed safety of which Jesus speaks in John 10:28,
29–"They shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of
My hand. My Father, which gave them to Me, is greater than all; and no
man is able to pluck them out of My Father's hand."

Do you belong to Christ, dear Hearer? You are not alone in being owned
by that royal Proprietor–many of us are the sheep of His flock and the
children of His love. We are going to gather around our Lord's table.
Will you go away, or will you come with us and say, "We belong to Him
and we would share His banquet of love?" If you must go away this once,
hasten to put yourself right, that you may obey your Lord in the
future. End this forgetfulness of your dying Lord, I pray you! Give
yourself to Jesus and that shall be the best evidence that the Father
gave you to Jesus, for never did a heart give itself to Jesus except as
the result of the eternal purpose of God and the work of the Spirit
within. Beloved Hearer, yield yourself to the Well-Beloved, whose love
shall henceforth be your joy, your safeguard, your perfection, your
bliss! Yield yourself, now, without an hour's delay!

Let the Lord's people now come and keep the feast with joy and
gladness, singing praises unto the name of the Great Keeper of Israel
who does neither slumber nor sleep!