Sermons on National Subjects

What will make a man to do his duty?  Will the hope of heaven?  That depends very much upon what you mean by heaven.  But what people commonly mean by going to heaven, is—not going to hell.  They believe that they must go to either one place or the other.  They would much sooner of course stay on earth for ever, because their treasure is here, and their heart too.  But that cannot be, and as they have no wish to go to hell, they take up with heaven instead, by way of making the best of a bad matter.

I ask you solemnly, my friends, each one of you, which would you sooner do—stay here on earth, or go to heaven?  You need not answer me.  I am afraid many of you would not dare answer me as you really felt, because you would be ashamed of not liking to go to heaven.  But answer God.  Answer yourselves in the sight of God.  When you keep yourselves back from doing a wrong thing, because you know it is wrong, is it for love of heaven, or for mere fear of being punished in hell?  Some of you will answer boldly at once: “For neither one nor the other; when we keep from wrong, it is because we hate and despise what is wrong: when we do right it is because it is right and we ought to do it.  We can’t explain it, but there is something in us which tells us we ought to do right.”  Very good, my friends, I shall have a word to say to you presently; but in the meantime there are some others who have been saying to themselves: “Well, I know we do right because we are afraid of being punished if we do not do it, but what of that? at all events we get the right thing done, and leave the wrong thing undone, and what more do you want?  Why torment us with disagreeable questions as to why we do it?”

Now, my friends, to make the matter simpler, I will take you at your words, for the sake of argument.  Suppose you do avoid sin from the fear of hell, does that make what you do right?  Does that make you right?  Does that make your heart right?  It is a great blessing to a man’s neighbours, certainly, if he is kept from doing wrong any how—by the fear of hell, or fear of jail, or fear of shame, or fear of ghosts if you like, or any other cowardly and foolish motive—a great blessing to a man’s neighbours: but no blessing, that I can see, to the man himself.  He is just the same; his heart is not changed; his heart is no more right in the sight of God, or in the sight of any man of common sense either, than it would be if he did the wrong thing, which he loves and dare not do.  You feel that yourselves about other people.  You will say “That man has a bad heart, for all his respectable outside.  He would be a rogue if he dared, and therefore he is a rogue.”  Just so, I say, my friends, take care lest God should say of you, “He would be a sinner if he dared, and therefore he is a sinner.”

How can the hope of heaven, or the fear of hell, make a man do right?  The right thing, the true thing for a man, is to be loving, and do loving things; and can fear of hell do that, or hope of heaven either?  Can a man make himself affectionate to his children because he fancies he shall be punished if he is not so, and rewarded if he is so?  Will the hope of heaven send men out to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, visit the sick, preach the gospel to the poor?—The Papists say it will.  I say it will not.  I believe that even in those who do these things from hope of heaven and fear of hell, there is some holier, nobler, more spiritual motive, than such everlasting selfishness, such perfect hypocrisy, as to do loving works for others, for the sake of one’s own self-love.

What feeling then is there left which will bind a man to do good, not once in a way, but always and habitually? to do good, not only to himself, but to all around him?  I know but of one, my friends, and that is Love.  There are many sides to love—admiration, reverence, gratitude, pity, affection—they are all different shapes of that one great spirit of love.  Surely all of you have felt its power more or less; how wonderfully it can conquer a man’s whole heart, change his whole conduct.  For love of a woman; for pity to those in distress; for admiration for anyone who is nobler and wiser than himself; for gratitude to one who has done him kindness; for loyalty to one to whom he feels he owes a service—a man will dare to do things, and suffer things, which no self-interest or fear in the world could have brought him to.  Do you not know it yourselves?  Is it not fondness for your wives and children, that will make you slave and stint yourselves of pleasure more than any hope of gain could ever do?  But there is no one human being, my friends, whom we can meet among us now, for whom we can feel all these different sorts of love?  Surely not: and yet there must be One Person somewhere for whom God intends us to feel them all at once; or else He would not have given all these powers to us, and made them all different branches of one great root of love.  There must be One Person somewhere, who can call out the whole love in us—all our gratitude; all our pity; all our admiration; all our loyalty; all our brotherly affection.  And there is One, my friends.  One who has done for us more than ever husband or father, wife or brother, can do to call out our gratitude.  One who has suffered for us more than the saddest wretch upon this earth can suffer, to call out our pity.  One who is nobler, purer, more lovely in character than all others who ever trod this earth, to call out our admiration.  One who is wiser, mightier than all rulers and philosophers, to call out all our reverence.  One who is tenderer, more gentle, more feeling-hearted, than the kindest woman who ever sat by a sick bed, to call out all our love.  Of whom can I be speaking?  Of whom but of Jesus; He who for us stooped out of the heaven of heavens; for us left His eternal glory in the bosom of the Father; for us took upon Him the form of a servant, and was born of a village maiden, and was called the son of a carpenter; for us wandered this earth for thirty years in sorrow and shame; for us gave His back to the scourge, and His face to shameful spitting; for us hung upon the cross and died the death of the felon and the slave.  Oh! my friends, if that story will not call out our love, what will?  If we cannot admire Christ, whom can we admire?  If we cannot be grateful to Christ, to whom can we be grateful?  If we cannot pity Christ, whom can we pity?  If we cannot feel bound in honour to live for Christ, to work for Christ, to delight in talking of Christ, thinking of Christ, to glory in doing Christ’s commandments to the very smallest point, to feel no sacrifice too great, no trouble too petty, if we can please Christ by it and help forward Christ’s kingdom upon earth—if we cannot feel bound in honour to do that for Christ, what honour is there in us?  Again, I say, if we cannot love Christ, whom can we love?  If the remembrance of what He has worked for us will not stir us up to work for Him, what will stir us up?

I say it again, we are bound by every tie, by every feeling that can bind man to man, to devote ourselves to Christ, the Man of all men.  I say this is no dream or fancy, it is an actual fact which thousands and hundreds of thousands on this earth have felt.  Nothing but love to Christ, nothing but loving Him because He first loved us, can constrain and force a man as with a mighty feeling which he cannot resist, to labour day and night for Christ’s sake, and therefore for the sake of God the Father of Christ.  What else do you suppose it was which could have stirred up the apostles—above all, that wise, learned, high-born, prosperous man, St. Paul, to leave house and home, and wander in daily danger of his life?  What does St. Paul say himself?  “The love of Christ constraineth us, because we thus judge, and if one died for all then were all dead, and that He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him who died for them.”  And what else could have kept St. Paul through all that labour and sorrow of his own choosing, of which he speaks in the chapter before?—“We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body; for we which live are alway delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body.”

We may say that St. Paul was an exceedingly benevolent man, and that made him do it; or that he had found out certain new truths and opinions which delighted him very much, and therefore he did it.  But St. Paul gives no such account of himself: and we have no right to take anyone’s account but his own.  He knew his own heart best.  He does not say that he came to preach a scheme of redemption, or opinions about Christ.  He says he came to preach nothing but Christ Himself—Christ crucified—to tell people about the Lord he loved, about the Lord who loved him, certain that when they had heard the plain story of Him, their hearts, if they were simple, and true, and loving, would leap up in answer to his words, and find out, as by instinct, what Christ had done for them, what they were to do for Christ.  Ay, I believe, my friends—indeed I am certain—from my own reading, that in every age and country, just in proportion as men have loved Christ personally as a man would love another man, just in that proportion have they loved their neighbours, worked for their neighbours, sacrificed their time, their pleasure, their money, to do good to all, for the sake of Him who commanded: “If ye love ME, keep my commandments; and my commandment is this, that ye should love one another as I have loved you.”  That is the only sure motive.  All other motives for doing good or being good, will fail in one case or another case, because they do not take possession of a man’s whole heart, but only of some part of his heart.  Love—love to Christ, can alone sweep away a man’s whole heart and soul with it, and renew it, and transfigure it, and make it strong instead of weak, pure instead of foul, gentle instead of fierce, brave instead of being vain and cowardly, and fearing what everyone will say of him.  Only love for Christ, who loved all men unto the death, will make us love all men too: not only one here and there who may agree with us or help us; but those who hate us, those who misunderstand us, those who thwart us, ay, even those who disobey and slight not only us, but Jesus Christ Himself.  That is the hardest lesson of all to learn; but thousands have learnt it; everyone ought to learn it.  In proportion as a man loves Christ, he will learn to love those who do not love Christ.  For Christ loves them whether they know it or not; Christ died for them whether they believe it or not; and we must love them because our Saviour loves them.

Oh! my friends, why do so few love Christ?  Why do so few live as those who are not their own, but bought with the price of His precious blood and bound to devote themselves, body and soul, to His cause?  Why do so many struggle against their sins, while yet they cannot break off those sins, but go struggling and sinning on, hating their sins and yet unable to break through their sins, like birds beating themselves to death against the wires of their cage?  Why?  Because they do not know Christ.  And how can they know Him, unless they read their Bibles with simple, childlike hearts, determined to let the Bible tell its own story: believing that those who walked with Christ on earth, must know best what He was like?  Why?  Because they will not ask Christ to come and show Himself to them, and make them see Him, and love Him, and admire Him, whether they will or not.  Oh! remember, if Christ be the Son of God, the Lord of heaven and earth, we cannot go to Him, poor, weak, ignorant creatures as we are.  We cannot ascend up into heaven to bring Christ down.  He must come down out of His own great love and condescension, and dwell in our hearts as He has promised to do, if we do but love Him.  He must come down and show Himself to us.  Oh! read your Bibles—read the story of Christ, and if that does not stir up in you some love for Him, you must have hearts of stone, not flesh and blood.  And then go to Him; pray to Him, whether you believe in Him altogether or not, upon the mere chance of His being able to hear you and help you.  You would not throw away a chance on earth; will you throw away such a chance in heaven as having the Son of God to help you?  Oh, cry to Him; say out of the depths of your heart: “Thou most blessed and glorious Being who ever walked this earth, who hast gone blameless through all sorrow and temptation that man can feel; if Thou dost love anyone, if Thou canst hear anyone, hear me!  If thou canst not help me, no one can.  I have a hundred puzzling questions which I cannot answer for myself, a hundred temptations which I cannot conquer for myself, a hundred bad habits which I cannot shake off of myself; and they tell me that Thou canst teach me, Thou canst guide me, Thou canst strengthen me, Thou canst take out of my heart this shame and gnawing of an evil conscience.  If Thou be the Son of God, make me clean!  If it be true that Thou lovest all men, show Thy love to me!  If it be true that Thou canst teach all men, teach me!  If it be true that Thou canst help all men, help my unbelief, for if Thou dost not, there is no help for me in heaven or earth!”  You, who are sinful, distracted, puzzled, broken-hearted, cry to Christ in that way, if you have no better way, and see if He does not hear you.  He is not one to break the bruised reed, or quench the smoking flax.  He will hear you, for He has heard all who have ever called on Him.  Cry to Him from the bottom of your hearts.  Tell Him that you do not love Him, and that yet you long to love Him.  And see if you do not find it true that those who come to Christ, He will in no wise cast out.  He may not seem to answer you the first time, or the tenth time, or for years; for Christ has His own deep, loving, wise ways of teaching each man, and for each man a different way.  But try to learn all you can of Him.  Try to know Him.  Pray to know, and understand Him, and love Him.  And sooner or later you will find His words come true, “If a man love me, I and my Father will come to him, and take up our abode with him.”  And then you will feel arise in you a hungering and a thirsting after righteousness, a spirit of love, and a desire of doing good, which will carry you up and on, above all that man can say or do against you—above all the laziness, and wilfulness, and selfishness, and cowardice which dwells in the heart of everyone.  You will be able to trample it all under foot for the sake of being good and doing good, in the strength of that one glorious thought, “Christ lived and died for me, and, so help me God, I will live and die for Christ.”

XXIV.

DAVID’S VICTORY

Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of armies, the God of Israel, whom thou hast defied.—1 Samuel xvii. 45.

We have been reading to-day the story of David’s victory over the Philistine giant, Goliath.  Now I think the whole history of David may teach us more about the meaning of the Old Testament, and how it applies to us, than the history of any other single character.  David was the great hero of the Jews; the greatest, in spite of great sins and follies, that has ever been among them; in every point the king after God’s own heart.  Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself did not disdain to be called especially the Son of David.  David was the author, too, of those wonderful psalms which are now in the mouths and the hearts of Christian people all over the world; and will last, as I believe, till the world’s end, giving out fresh depths of meaning and spiritual experience.

But to understand David’s history, we must go back a little through the lessons which have been read in church the last few Sundays.  We find in the eighth and in the twelfth chapters of this same book of Samuel, that the Jews asked Samuel for a king—for a king like the nations round them.  Samuel consulted God, and by God’s command chose Saul to be their king; at the same time warning them that in asking for a king they had committed a great and fearful sin, for “the Lord their God was their king.”  And the Lord said unto Samuel, that in asking for a king they had rejected God from reigning over them.  Now what was this sin which the Jews committed? for the mere having a king cannot be wrong in itself; else God would not have anointed Saul and David kings, and blessed David and Solomon; much less would He have allowed the greater number of Christian nations to remain governed by kings unto this day, if a king had been a wrong thing in itself.  I think if we look carefully at the words of the story we shall see what this great sin of the Jews was.  In the first place, they asked Samuel to give them a king—not God.  This was a sin, I think; but it was only the fruit of a deeper sin—a wrong way of looking at the whole question of kings and government.  And that deeper sin was this: they were a free people, and they wanted to become slaves.  God had made them a free people; He had brought them up out of the land of Egypt, out of slavery to Pharaoh.  He had given them a free constitution.  He had given them laws to secure safety, and liberty, and equal justice to rich and poor, for themselves, their property, their children; to defend them from oppression, and over-taxation, and all the miseries of misgovernment.  And now they were going to trample under foot God’s inestimable gift of liberty.  They wanted a king like the nations round them, they said.  They did not see that it was just their glory not to be like the nations round them in that.  We who live in a free country do not see the vast and inestimable difference between the Jews and the other nations.  The Jews were then, perhaps, so far as I can make out, the only free people on the face of the earth.  The nations round them were like the nations in the East, now governed by tyrants, without law or parliament, at the mercy of the will, the fancy, the lust, the ambition, and the cruelty of their despotic kings.  In fact, they were as the Eastern people now are—slaves governed by tyrants.  Samuel warned the Jews that it would be just the same with them; that neither their property, their families, nor their liberty would be safe under the despots for whom they wished.  And yet, in spite of that warning, they would have a king.  And why?  Because they did not like the trouble of being free.  They did not like the responsibility and the labour of taking care of themselves, and asking counsel of God as to how they were to govern themselves.  So they were ready to sell themselves to a tyrant, that he might fight for them, and judge for them, and take care of them, while they just ate and drank, and made money, and lived like slaves, careless of what happened to them or their country, provided they could get food, and clothes, and money enough.  And as long as they got that, if you will remark, they were utterly careless as to what sort of king they had.  They said not one word to Samuel about how much power their king was to have.  They made not the slightest inquiry as to whether Saul was wise or foolish, good or bad.  They did not ask God’s counsel, or trouble themselves about God; so they proved themselves unworthy of being free.  They turned, like a dog to his vomit, and the sow to her wallowing in the mire, cowardly back again into slavery; and God gave them what they asked for.  He gave them the sort of king they wanted; and bitterly they found out their mistake during several hundred years of continually increasing slavery and misery.

There is a deep lesson for us, my friends, in all this.  And that is, that God’s gifts are not fit for us, unless we are more or less fit for them.  That to him that makes use of what he has, more shall be given; but from him who does not, will be taken away even what he has.  And so even the inestimable gift of freedom is no use unless men have free hearts in them.  God sets a man free from his sins by faith in Jesus Christ; but unless that man uses His grace, unless he desires to be free inwardly as well as outwardly—to be free not only from the punishment of his sins, but from the sins themselves; unless he is willing to accept God’s offer of freedom, and go boldly to the throne of grace, and there plead his cause with his heavenly Father face to face, without looking to any priest, or saint, or other third person to plead for him; if, in short, a man has not a free spirit in him, the grace of God will become of no effect in him, and he will receive the spirit of bondage (of slavery, that is), again to fear.  Perhaps he will fall back more or less into popery and half-popish superstitions; perhaps, as we see daily round us, he will fall back again into antinomianism, into the slavery of those very sins from which God once delivered him.  And just the same is it with a nation.  When God has given a nation freedom, then, unless there be a free heart in the people and true independence, which is dependence on God and not on man; unless there be a spirit of justice, mercy, truth, trust of God in them, their freedom will be of no effect; they will only fall back into slavery, to be oppressed by fresh tyrants.

So it was with the great Spanish colonies in South America a few years ago.  God gave them freedom from the tyranny of Spain; but what advantage was it to them?  Because there was no righteousness in them; because they were a cowardly, profligate, false, and cruel people, therefore they only became the slaves of their own lusts; they turned God’s great grace of freedom into licentiousness, and have been ever since doing nothing but cutting each other’s throats; every man’s hand against his own brother; the slaves of tyrants far more cruel than those from whom they had escaped.

Look at the French people, too.  Three times in the last sixty years has God delivered them from evil rulers, and given them a chance of freedom; and three times have they fallen back into fresh slavery.  And why?  Because they will not be righteous; because they will be proud, boastful, lustful, godless, cruel, making a lie and loving it.  God help them!  We are not here to judge them, but to take warning ourselves.  Now there is no use in boasting of our English freedom, unless we have free and righteous hearts in us; for it is not constitutions, and parliaments, and charters which make a nation free; they are only the shell, the outside of freedom.  True freedom is of the heart and spirit, and comes down from above, from the Spirit of God; for where the Spirit of God is, there is liberty, and there only.  Oh, every one of you! high and low, rich and poor, pray and struggle to get your own hearts free; free from the sins which beset us Englishmen in these days; free from pride, prejudice, and envy; free from selfishness and covetousness; free from unchastity and drunkenness; free from the conceit that England is safe, while all the rest of the world is shaking.  Be sure that the spirit of freedom, like every other good and perfect gift, is from above, and comes down from God, the Father of lights; and that to keep that spirit with us, we must keep ourselves worthy of it, and not expect to remain free if we indulge ourselves in mean and slavish sins.

So the Jews got the king they wanted—a king to look at and be proud of.  Saul was, we read, a head taller than all the rest of the people, and very handsome to look at.  And he was brave enough, too, in mere fighting, when he was awakened and stirred up to act now and then; but there was no wisdom in him; no real trust in God in him.  He took God for an idol, like the heathens’ false gods, which had to be pleased and kept in good humour by the smell of burnt sacrifices; and not for a living, righteous Person, who had to be obeyed.  We read of Saul’s misconduct in these respects, in the thirteenth and fifteenth chapters of the First Book of Samuel.  That was only the beginning of his wickedness.  The worst points in his character, as I shall show in my next sermon, came out afterwards.  But still, his disobedience was enough to make God cast him off, and leave him to go his own way to ruin.

But God was not going to cast off His people whom He loved.  He deals not with mankind after their sins, neither rewards them according to their iniquities; and so he chose out for them a king after His own heart—a true king of God’s making, not a mere sham one of man’s making.  You may think it strange why God should have given them a second king; why, as soon as Saul died, He did not let them return back to their old freedom.  But that is not God’s way.  He brings good out of evil in His great mercy.  But it is always by strange winding paths.  His ways are not as our ways.  First, God gives man what is perfectly proper for him at that time; sets man in his right place; and then when man falls from that, God brings him, not back to the place from which he fell, but on forward into something far higher and better than what he fell from.  He put Adam into Paradise.  Adam fell from it, and God made use of the fall to bring him into a state far better than Paradise—into the kingdom of God—into everlasting life—into the likeness of Christ, the new Adam, who is a quickening, life-giving spirit, while the old Adam was, at best, only a living soul.