The New Park Street Pulpit Christ glorified as
the builder of his church.
Sermon delivered on Sabbath morning, May 2nd, 1858,
by the Reverend C.
H.
Spurgeon at the Music Hall, Royal Surrey Gardens.
Zechariah 6, 13 He shall build the temple
of the Lord, and he shall bear the
glory.
There's music in all things, if men have
ears.
This world is but the echo of the
spheres.
Heaven singeth evermore, before the throne of God,
angels and redeemed saints extol his name.
And this world is singing too, sometimes with
the loud noise of the rolling thunder of
the boiling sea, of the dashing cataract, and
of the lowing cattle, and often with that
still, solemn harmony which floweth from the vast
creation, when in its silence it praises God.
Such is the song which gushes in silence
from the mountain, lifting its head to the
sky, covering its face, sometimes with the wings
of mist, and at other times unveiling its
snow-white brow before its maker, and reflecting
back his sunshine, gratefully thanking him for the
light with which it has been made to
glisten, and for the gladness of which it
is the solitary spectator, as in its grandeur
it looks down upon the laughing valleys.
The tune to which heaven and earth are
set is the same.
In heaven, they sing, the Lord be exalted,
let his name be magnified forever, and the
earth singeth the same.
Great art thou in thy works, O Lord,
and unto thee be glory.
It would seem, therefore, a strange anomaly if
the church, the temple of the living God,
should be void of song, and we bless
God that such an anomaly doth not exist,
for day and night they praise God in
his temple.
And while it is true the ceaseless circles
of the starry heavens are praising him without
cessation, it is also true that the stars
of earth, the churches of the Lord Jesus
Christ, are each of them evermore singing their
hymns of praise to him.
Today in this house thousands of voices shout
his name, and when the sun of today
shall set, it shall rise upon another land
where Christian hearts awakened shall begin to praise,
as we have just concluded.
And when tomorrow we shall enter upon the
business of the week, we will praise him
when we rise, we will praise him when
we retire to rest, and we will solace
ourselves with the sweet thought that when the
link of praise here is covered with darkness,
another golden link is sparkling in the sunshine
in the lands where the sun is rising
when it sets upon us.
And mark how the music of the church
is set to the same tune as that
of heaven and earth.
Great God, thou art to be magnified.
Is not this the unanimous song of all
the redeemed below?
When we sing, is not this the sole
burden of our hosannas and hallelujahs?
Unto him that liveth and sitteth upon the
throne, unto him be glory, world without end.
Now my text is one note of the
song.
May God help me to understand and to
make you to understand it also.
He shall build the temple of the Lord,
and he shall bear the glory.
We all know that the Lord Jesus Christ
is here alluded to, for the context runs,
behold the man whose name is the branch,
which title is ever applied to the Messiah,
Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
He grew up out of his place, and
he shall build the temple of the Lord.
Even he shall build the temple of the
Lord, and he shall bear the glory, and
shall sit and rule upon his throne, and
he shall be a priest upon his throne,
and the council of peace shall be between
them both.
Now we shall notice this morning first of
all the temple, that is the church of
Christ.
We shall notice next its builder, he, that
is Jesus shall build the temple.
Then we shall stop a moment and pause
to admire his glory.
He shall bear the glory.
Then we shall attempt under the good hand
of the Holy Spirit to make some practical
applications of the subject.
The first point is the temple.
The temple is the church of God, and
here let me begin by just observing that
when I use the term church of God,
I use it in a very different sense
from that in which it is sometimes understood.
It is usual with many Church of England
people to use the term church, especially applying
to the bishops, archdeacons, rectors, curates, and so
forth.
These are said to be the church, and
the young man who becomes a pastor of
any congregation is said to enter the church.
Now I believe that such a use of
the term is not scriptural.
I would never for one moment grant to
any man that the ministers of the gospel
constitute the church.
If you speak of the army, the whole
of the soldiers constitute it.
The officers may sometimes be spoken of first
and foremost, but still the private soldier is
as much a part of the army as
the highest officer, and it is so in
the Church of God.
All Christians constitute the church.
Any company of Christian men gathered together in
holy bonds of communion for the purpose of
receiving God's ordinances and preaching what they regard
to be God's truth is a church, and
the whole of these churches gathered into one,
in fact all the true believers in Christ
scattered throughout the world, constitute the one true
universal apostolic church built upon a rock against
which the gates of hell shall not prevail.
Do not imagine, therefore, when I speak at
any time of the church that I mean
the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London,
and some twenty other dignitaries, and the whole
host of ministers.
No, nor when I speak of the church
do I mean the deacons, the elders, and
pastors of the I mean all them that
love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity and
in truth.
For these make up the one universal church
which hath communion in itself with itself, not
always in the outward sign, but always in
the inward grace.
The church which was elect of God before
the foundation of the world, which was redeemed
by Christ with His own precious blood, which
has been called by His Spirit, which is
preserved by His grace, and which at last
shall be gathered in to make the church
of the firstborn, whose names are written in
heaven.
Well, now, this church is called the temple
of God, and Christ is said to be
its builder.
Why is the church called the temple?
I reply very briefly, because the temple was
the place where God especially dwelt.
It was true that He did not wholly
dwell in the temple made with hands of
man's building, which Solomon piled upon the mount
of Zion, but it is true that in
a special sense the infinite majesty there held
its tabernacle and its dwelling place.
Between the wings of the overshadowing cherubim there
did shine the bright light of the Shekinah,
the type, the manifestation, and the proof of
the special presence of Jehovah, the God of
Israel.
It is true He is everywhere.
In the highest heavens and in the deepest
hell God is found, but especially did He
dwell in His temple, so that when His
people prayed they were bidden to turn their
eye towards the temple as Daniel did when
he opened his window towards Jerusalem and offered
his prayer.
Now such is the church.
If you would find God, He dwelleth on
every hilltop and in every valley.
God is everywhere in creation, but if you
want a special display of Him, if you
would know it is the secret place of
the tabernacle of the Most High, the inner
chamber of divinity.
You must go where you find the church
of true believers, for it is here He
makes His continual residence known in the hearts
of the humble and contrite who tremble at
His word.
Again the temple was the place of the
clearest manifestation.
He who would see God the best of
all must see Him in His temple.
I repeat, He was to be discovered everywhere.
If you stood on Carmel's top and looked
toward the great sea, wherein are all the
ships and the great leviathan He had made
to play therein, there might God be discovered
in His great strength.
If you turned your eye on the same
hill and looked toward the veil of Estrelon,
there was God to be seen in every
blade of grass, in every sheep feeding by
the stream.
God was everywhere to be discovered, but if
you would see Him best, it is not
on Bashan, it is not on Hermon, it
is not on Tabor.
It was on Mount Zion that the Lord
God loved to make a special display of
Himself.
It is so with the church.
God is to be seen in the midst
of her, her helper, her strength, her teacher,
her guide, her deliverer, her sanctifier.
In holy communion, in the breaking of bread
and in the pouring out of wine, in
holy baptism, in the immersion of believers into
the Lord Jesus Christ, in the preaching of
the word, in the constant declaration of the
great salvation of Jesus, in the lifting up
of the cross, in the high exalting of
Him that died upon it, in the preaching
of the covenant, in the declaration of the
grace of God, here is He to be
seen.
Here is His name written in brighter letters
and in clearer lines than elsewhere the wide
world o'er.
Hence His church is said to be His
temple.
O Christian people, you know this, for God
dwelleth in you and walketh with you.
You dwell in Him and He dwells in
you.
The secret of the Lord is with them
that fear Him and He will show them
His covenant.
It is your happy privilege to walk with
God.
He manifests Himself to you as He doth
not unto the world.
He takes you into His inner chamber.
He manifests His love.
The song of Solomon is sung in your
courts and nowhere else.
It is not the song of the wide
world.
It is the sonnet of the inner chamber,
the song of the house of wine, the
music of the banquet.
You understand this, for you have been brought
into near acquaintance with Christ.
You have been made to lean your head
upon His bosom.
You have been taught to look into His
heart and to see eternal thoughts of love
there towards you.
You know well, better than we can tell,
what it is to be the temple of
the living God.
And once more we should fail to describe
the reason why the word temple is used
to picture the church, if we did not
observe that the church is like the temple,
a place of worship.
There was a law passed by God that
no offering should be presented to Him except
upon the one altar in His temple at
Jerusalem.
And that law is extant to this day.
No acceptable service can be offered to Christ
except by His church.
Only those who in Christ can offer songs
and prayers and praises that shall be received
of God.
Whatever ordinances you attend to, who are without
Christ in your hearts, you do belie that
ordinance and prostitute it.
You do not honor God therein.
Two men go up to the temple to
pray, the one a believer, the other an
unbeliever.
He that is an unbeliever may have the
gifts of oratory, the mightiest fluency of speech,
but his prayer is an abomination unto God,
whilst the feeblest utterance of the true believer
is received with smiles by him that sits
upon the throne.
Two persons go to the master's table.
The one loveth the ordinance in its outward
sign and reverenceth it with superstition, but he
knows not Christ.
The other believes in Jesus and knows how
to eat his flesh and drink his blood
as a worthy partaker in that divine ordinance.
God is honored in the one, the ordinance
is dishonored in the other.
Two persons come to holy baptism.
The one loves the master, believes in his
name and trusts him.
He is baptized.
He honors Christ.
Another comes, perhaps an unconscious infant, one who
is incapable of faith or hath no faith.
He dishonors God.
He dishonors the ordinance in venturing to touch
it when he is not one of the
church and therefore hath no right to offer
sacrifice of prayer and praise unto the Lord
our God.
There is only one altar, that is Christ,
and there is only one set of priests,
namely the church of God.
And the men chosen out of the world
to be clothed in white robes to minister
at his altar and whosoever besides pretendeth to
worship God worshipeth him not aright.
His offering is like that of Cain.
God hath no respect to his sacrifice for
without faith it is impossible to please God.
We care not who it is that doth
the act.
Unless he believeth, he cannot win pleasure from
God, nor shall his sacrifice be accepted.
I have thus noted the reasons why the
church is said to be the temple.
As there was only one temple, so there
is only one church.
That one church is his holy place where
God dwells, where God accepts worship, where songs
of praise are daily uttered, and the smoking
incense of prayer continually comes up before his
nostrils with acceptance.
Now we have an interesting subject in the
second part of our text.
He shall build the temple of the Lord.
Christ is the church's only builder.
Now I shall want to make a parallel
between Christ's building the church and Solomon as
the builder of the first temple.
When Solomon built the temple, the first thing
he did was to obtain instructions with regard
to the model upon which he should build
it.
Solomon was exceeding wise, but I do not
think he was his own architect.
The Lord, who had shown the pattern of
the old tabernacle in the wilderness to Moses,
doubtless showed the pattern of the temple to
Solomon, so that the pillars and the roof
and the floor thereof were all ordained of
God, and every one of them settled in
heaven.
Now Christ Jesus in this is no Solomon.
With this exception, that being God over all,
blessed forever, he was his own architect.
Christ has made the plan of his church.
You and I made a great many plans
for the building up of that church.
The Presbyterian makes his plans extremely precise.
He will put an elder in every corner,
and the Presbytery is the great groundwork, the
pillar and the ground of the truth, and
right is he in so doing to an
extent.
The Episcopalian builds his temple too.
He will have a bishop at the doorpost,
and he will have a priest to shut
the gate.
He will have everything built according to the
model that was seen by Cranmer in the
mount, if he ever was there at all.
And those of us who are of severe
discipline and have a simpler style must have
Christ's church always built in the congregational order,
every congregation distinct and separate, and governed by
its own bishop and deacons and elders.
But Mark, Christ does not attend to our
points of church government, for there is one
part of Christ's church that is Episcopalian, and
looks as if a bishop of the Church
of England had ordered it.
Another part is Presbyterian, another Baptist, another Congregational,
and yet all these styles of architecture, somehow
fused into one by the great architect, make
that goodly structure which is called the temple
of Christ, the church of the living God,
the pillar and ground of the truth.
Christ must be his own architect.
He will bring out different points of truth
in different ways.
Why, I believe that different denominations are sent
on purpose to set out different truths.
There are some of our brethren a little
too high.
They bring out better than any other people
the grand old truths of sovereign grace.
And there are some, on the other hand,
a little too low.
They bring out with great clearness the great
and truthful doctrines of man's responsibility, so that
two truths that might have been neglected, either
the one or the other, if only one
form of Christianity existed, are both brought out,
both made resplendent by the different denominations of
God's people, who are alike chosen of God
and precious to him.
God forbid I should say anything that would
bolster up any in their errors.
And nevertheless, God's people, even in error, are
a precious people.
Even when they seem to be as earthen
pitchers, the work of the hands of the
potter, they are still comparable to fine gold.
Rest assured that the Lord has deep designs
to answer, even by the divisions of his
church.
We must not interfere with Christ's reasons, nor
with his style of architecture.
Every stone that is in the temple Jesus
Christ ordained should be put where it is.
Even those stones that are most contemptible and
unseen were put in their places by him.
There is not one board of cedar, one
piece of burnished pinnacle, that was not foreseen
and prearranged in that eternal covenant of grace,
which was the great plan that Christ, the
almighty architect, did draw for the building of
the temple to his praise.
Christ, then, is the only architect, and he
shall bear the glory, for he designed the
building.
Now, you remember that when Solomon set to
work to build his temple, he found a
mountain ready for his purpose, Mount Moriah.
The top of it was not quite broad
enough.
He had, therefore, to enlarge it so that
there might be room for the beautiful temple,
the joy of the whole earth.
When Jesus Christ came to build his temple,
he found no mountain on which to build
it.
He had no mountain in our nature.
He had to find a mountain in his
own, and that mountain upon which he has
built his church is the mountain of his
own unchangeable affection, his own strong love, his
own omnipotent grace and infallible truthfulness.
It is this that constitutes the mountain upon
which the church is built, and on this
the foundation hath been digged, and the great
stones laid in the trenches with oaths and
promises and blood to make them stand secure,
even though earth should rock and all creation
suffer decay.
Then, after Solomon had his mountain ready and
the foundation built, the next trouble was that
he had no trees near at hand.
There were, however, fine trees growing in Lebanon,
but his servants had not skill enough to
cut them down.
He had, therefore, to send for Hiram, king
of Tyre, with his servants to cut down
the trees upon Lebanon which, after being shaped
according to the model, were to be sent
by rafts or floats to Joppa, the port
nearest to Jerusalem, and there brought a short
distance over land for the building of the
temple.
He had to do the same with the
stones of the quarry, for the different stones
that were needed for the building had to
be hewn out of the quarry by Hiram's
servants, assisted by some of Solomon's people, who
had inferior skill and therefore were set about
the more laborious and rougher parts of the
work.
The same fact you will notice if you
will read the history of the building of
Solomon's temple occurred with regard to the making
of the vessels of the house.
It is said that Hiram did cast them,
and Solomon found the gold, and the molds
were made in the great plain, and Solomon
did cast them there with Hiram for his
chief designer and director.
Ah, but herein Solomon fails to be a
type of Christ.
Christ builds the temple himself.
There stands the cedars of Lebanon that the
Lord hath planted, but they are not ready
for the building.
They are not cut down, nor shaped, nor
made into those planks of cedar whose odoriferous
beauty shall make glad the courts of the
Lord in paradise.
No, Jesus Christ must cut them down with
the axe of conviction.
He must cut them up with the great
saw of his law.
He must plane and polish them with his
holy gospel.
When he hath made them fit to be
pillars in the house of the Lord, then
they shall be carried across the sea to
heaven.
Then shall they be placed in his temple
forever.
No Hiram is needed.
The axe is in his hand, the plane
is in his hand too.
He understandeth well that business, was he not
a carpenter on earth?
And spiritually he shall be the same to
his church forever and ever.
It is even the same with the stones
of the temple.
We are like rough stones in the quarry.
Behold, the whole of the pit whence we
were digged, and the rock whence we were
hewn.
But we were hewn out of that rock
by no hand but Christ's.
He raised up seed unto Abraham out of
the stones of the pit.
It was his own hammer that broke the
rock in pieces, and his own arm of
strength that wielded the hammer when he dashed
us from the that we may be ready
for the temple.
Yet there is nothing that polishes but Christ.
Afflictions cannot sanctify us except as they are
used by Christ as his mallet and his
chisel.
Our joys and our efforts cannot make us
ready for heaven apart from the hand of
Jesus who fashioneth our hearts aright and prepareth
us to be partakers of the inheritance of
the saints in light.
Thus you notice that herein Jesus Christ excels
Solomon, for he provides all the materials.
He hews them himself.
He roughcasts them first, and then afterwards, during
life, polishes them till he makes them ready
to transport them to the hill of God,
whereon his temple is to be built.
I was thinking what a pretty figure was
that floating of the trees of Lebanon after
being hewn into planks and made ready to
be fixed as pillars of the temple.
What a fine emblem of death.
Is it not just so with us?
Here we grow and are at length cut
down and made ready to become pillars of
the temple.
Across the stream of death we are ferried
by a loving hand and brought to the
port of Jerusalem where we are safely landed
to go no more out forever but to
abide as eternal pillars in the temple of
our Lord.
Now you know the Tyrians floated these rafts,
but no stranger, no foreigner shall float across
the stream of death.
It is remarkable that Jesus Christ always uses
expressions with regard to his people which impute
their death to him alone.
You will recollect the expression in the revelation
Thrust in thy sickle and reap, for the
time is come for thee to reap, for
the harvest of the earth is ripe.
But when he begins to reap, not the
vintage which represents the wicked that were to
be crushed, but the harvest which represents the
godly, then it is said, He that sat
upon the throne thrust in the sickle.
He did not leave it to his angels,
he did it himself.
It is so with the bringing of those
planks and the moving of those stones.
I say, no king of Tyre and Sidon
shall do it.
Jesus Christ, who is the death of death
and hell's destruction, he himself shall pilot us
across the stream and land us safe on
Canaan's side.
He shall build the temple of the Lord.
Well, after these things were brought, Solomon had
to employ many thousand workmen to put them
in their proper places.
You know that in Solomon's temple there was
no sound of hammer heard, for the stones
were made ready in the quarries and brought
all shaped and marked so that the masons
might know the exact spot in which they
were to be placed, so that no sound
of iron was needed.
All the planks and their right places and
all the catches with which they were to
be linked together were prepared so that there
might not even be the driving of a
nail.
Everything was ready beforehand.
It is the same with us.
When we get to heaven, there will be
no sanctifying us there, no squaring us with
affliction, no hammering us with the rod, no
making us.
We must be made meet here, and blessed
be his name.
All that Christ will do beforehand.
When we get there, we shall not need
angels to put this member of the church
in one place and that member in another.
Christ, who brought the stones from the quarry
and made them ready, shall himself place the
people in their inheritance in paradise, for he
has himself said, I go to prepare a
place for you, and if I go away,
I will come again, and I will receive
you unto myself.
Christ shall be his own Asher.
He shall receive his people himself.
He shall stand at the gates of heaven
himself to take his own people and to
put them in their allocated heritage in the
land of the blessed.
I have no doubt you have read many
times the story of Solomon's temple, and you
have noticed that he overlaid all the temple
with gold.
He provided much of the substance, but his
father David brought him a good store.
Now Jesus will overlay all of us with
gold when he builds us in heaven.
Do not imagine we shall be in heaven
what we are today.
No, beloved, if the cedar should see itself
after it had been made into a pillar,
it would not know itself.
If you could see yourselves as you shall
be made, you would say, It does not
yet appear how great we must be made.
Nor were these pillars of cedars to be
left naked and unadorned.
Though they had been fair and lovely then,
they were overlaid with sheets of gold.
So shall we be.
It is sown in dishonor.
It is raised in glory.
It is sown a natural body.
It is raised a spiritual body, plated with
pure gold, no longer what it was, but
precious, lustrous and glorified.
And in the temple we understand there was
a great brazen sea in which the priest
did wash themselves, and there were other brazen
seas in which they washed the lambs and
bullocks when they were offered.
In heaven there is a great lava in
which all our souls have been washed, for
they have washed their robes and made them
white in the blood of the lamb.
Now Christ himself prepares this sacred sea.
He filled it with blood from his own
veins.
As for our prayers and praises, the great
lava in which they are washed was also
made and filled by Christ, so that they
with us are clean.
And we offer acceptable sacrifices to God through
Jesus Christ our Lord.
And I say again, before I leave this
head, there is no part of the great
temple of the church which was not made
by Christ.
There is a great deal in the church
on earth that Christ had nothing to do
with, but there is nothing in his true
church and nothing especially in his glorified church
which was not put there by him.
Therefore we may well come to the conclusion
on the last head here.
He shall bear all the glory, for he
was the only builder of it.
Now what a sweet thing it is to
try and glorify Christ.
I am happy this morning to have a
subject that will magnify my master.
But is it not a sad thing that
when we would magnify Christ most, our poor
failing lips refused to speak?
Oh, if you would know my master's glory,
you must see it for yourselves.
For like the queen of Sheba, the half
can never be told you.
Even by those who know him most and
love him best, half his glory never can
be told.
Pause a while and let me endeavor to
address to you a few loving words.
Your master, O ye saints of the Lord,
has prepared you and will build you into
his temple.
Speak and say he shall have all the
glory.
Let us note first that the glory which
he shall have will be a weighty glory.
Dr. Gill says the expression implies that the
glory will be a weighty one, for it
said he shall bear the glory.
They shall hang, says another expression, upon him
all the glory of his father's house.
In another place we are told that there
is an exceeding weight of glory which is
prepared for the righteous.
How great then the weight of glory which
shall be given to Christ.
Oh, think not that Christ is to be
glorified in such humble measure as he is
on earth.
The songs of heaven are nobler strains than
ours.
The hearts of the redeemed pay him loftier
homage than we can offer.
Try not to judge of the magnificence of
Christ by the pomp of kings or by
the reverence paid to mighty men on earth.
His glory far surpasses all the glory of
this time in space.
The honor which shall be bestowed upon him
is as the brightness of the sun.
The honors of earth are but the twinklings
of a fading star.
Before him, at this very day, principalities and
powers do bow themselves.
Ten thousand times ten thousand seraphim wait at
his footstool.
The chariots of the Lord are twenty thousand,
even thousands of angels, and all these wait
his back in his command.
And as for his redeemed, how do they
magnify him?
Never staying, never changing, never wearying, they raise
their shout higher and higher and higher, and
yet louder and louder still the strain is
lifted up, and evermore it is the same
to him that liveth and was dead and
is alive forevermore, and to him be glory
world without end.
And note again that this glory is undivided
glory.
In the church of Christ in heaven, no
one is glorified but Christ.
He who is honored on earth has someone
to share the honor with, some inferior helper
who labored with him in the work, but
Christ has none.
He is glorified, and it is all his
own glory.
Oh, when you get to heaven, ye children
of God, will ye praise any but your
master?
Calvinists, today you love John Calvin.
Will you praise him there?
Lutheran, today thou dost love the memory of
that stern reformer.
Wilt thou sing the song of Luther in
heaven?
Follower of Wesley, thou hast a reverence for
that evangelist.
Wilt thou in Wesley?
None, none, none, giving up all names and
all honors of men, the strain shall rise
in undivided and unjarring unison, and to him
that loved us, that washed us from our
sins in his blood, unto him be glory
forever and ever.
But again, he shall have all the glory,
all that can be conceived, all that can
be desired, all that can be imagined shall
come to him.
Today you praise him, but not as you
can wish.
In heaven you shall praise him to the
summit of your desire.
Today you see him magnified, but you see
not all things put under him.
In heaven all things shall acknowledge his dominion.
There every knee shall bow before him and
every tongue confess that he is Lord.
He shall have all the glory.
But to conclude on this point, this glory
is continual glory.
It says he shall bear all the glory.
When shall this dominion become effete?
When shall this promise be so fulfilled that
it is put away as a worn-out
garment?
Never, while life and thought and being last,
or immortality endures.
We shall never leave off praising Christ.
We think we can almost guess how we
shall feel when we get to heaven with
regard to our master.
Methinks if I should ever be privileged to
behold his blessed face with joy, I shall
want nothing but to be allowed to approach
his throne and cast what little honor I
may have before his feet, and then be
there and evermore adore the matchless splendor of
his love, the marvels of his might.
Suppose someone entering were to say to the
redeemed, Suspend your songs for a moment.
You have been praising Christ, lo, these six
thousand years.
Many of you have without cessation praised him
now these many centuries.
Stop your song a moment.
Pause and give your songs to someone else
for an instant.
How can you conceive the scorn with which
the myriad eyes of the redeemed would smite
the tempter?
Stop from praising him?
No, never.
Time may stop, for it shall be no
more.
The world may stop, for its revolutions must
cease.
The universe may stop its cycles and the
movings of its world, but for us to
stop our songs, never, never, and it shall
be said, Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, the Lord God
omnipotent reigneth.
He shall have all the glory, and he
shall have it forever.
His name shall endure forever.
His name shall continue as long as the
sun.
Men shall be blessed in him, and all
generations shall call him blessed.
Therefore shall they praise him forever and ever.
Now, in conclusion, let us just make a
practical application of our text.
Brothers and sisters, are we today built upon
Christ?
Can we say that we hope that we
are a part of his temple, that his
handiwork has been exhibited upon us, and that
we are built together with Christ?
If so, listen to one word of exhortation.
Let us evermore honor him.
Oh, me thinks every beam of cedar, and
every slab of gold, and every stone of
the temple felt honored when it was raised
up to be part of the fabric for
Jehovah's praise.
And if that cedar, that marble, could have
been vocal in that day when the flame
descended from heaven, the token of Jehovah's presence,
the stone, and the cedar, and the gold,
and the silver, and the brass, all would
have burst out into song and would have
said, We praise thee, O God, for thou
hast made the gold more than gold, and
the cedar more than cedar, inasmuch as thou
hast consecrated us to be the temple of
thine indwelling.
And now will you not do the same?
Oh, my brothers and sisters, God has highly
honored you to be stones in the temple
of Christ.
When you think of what you were and
what you might have been, how you might
have been stones in the black dungeons of
vengeance forever, dark, dank stones where the mobs,
and the greed, and the slimy thing forever
might have lived, disgraced, abandoned, cast away in
blackness of darkness forever.
When you think of this, and then remember
that you are stones in Jehovah's temple, living
stones, oh, ye must say that ye will
praise him, for man is more than man,
now that God dwelleth in him.
Daughters of Jerusalem, rejoice.
You are more than women now.
Sons of Israel, rejoice, for your manhood is
exalted.
He hath made you temples of the Holy
Ghost, God dwelling in you, and you in
him.
Go out from this place and sing his
praise.
Go forth to honor him, and while the
dumb world wants you to be its mouth,
go and speak for the mountain, for the
hill, for the lake, for the river, for
the oak, and for the insects.
Speak for all things, for you are to
be like the temple, the seat of the
worship of all worlds.
You are to be like the priests and
offerers of the sacrifices of all creatures.
Let me address myself last of all to
others of you.
Alas, my hearers, I have many here who
have no portion in Israel, neither any lot
in Jacob.
How many of you there are who are
not stones in the spiritual temple, never to
be used in the building up of God's
Jerusalem?
Let me ask you one thing.
It may seem a slight thing today to
be left out of the muster roll of
Christ's church.
Will it seem a slight thing to be
left out when Christ shall call for his
people?
When you are all assembled around his great
white throne at last, and the books shall
be opened, oh, how dread the suspense while
name after name is read.
How dreadful your suspense when it comes to
the last name and yours has been left
out.
That verse of our hymn has often impressed
me very solemnly.
I love to meet among them now before
thy gracious feet to bow, though vilest of
them all.
But can I bear the piercing thought, what
if my name should be left out when
thou for them shalt call?
Sinner, conceive it.
The list is read, and thy name unmentioned.
Laugh at religion now.
Scoff at Christ now.
Now that the angels are gathering for the
judgment, now that the trumpet sounds exceedingly loud
and long, now that the heavens are red
with fire, that the great furnace of hell
o'er leaked its boundary and is about
to encircle thee in its flame, now despise
religion.
Ah no, I see thee.
Now thy stiff knees are bending.
Now thy bold forehead for the first time
is covered with a hot sweat of trembling.
Now thine eyes that once were full of
scorn are full of tears.
Thou dost look on him whom thou despise,
and thou art weeping for thy sin.
O sinner, it will be too late then.
There is no cutting of the stone after
it gets to Jerusalem.
Where thou fallest, there thou liest.
Where judgment finds thee, there eternity shall leave
thee.
Time shall be no more when judgment comes,
and when time is no more, change is
impossible.
In eternity there can be no change, no
deliverance, no signing of acquittal.
Once lost, lost forever.
Once damned, damned to all eternity.
Wilt thou choose this and despise Christ?
Or wilt thou have Christ and have heaven?
I charge you by him that shall judge
the quick and the dead, whose I am
and whom I serve, who is the searcher
of all hearts.
Choose ye this day whom ye will serve.
If sin be best, serve sin and reap
its wages.
If you can make your bed in hell,
if you can endure eternal burnings, be honest
with yourself and look at the wages while
you do the work.
But if you would have heaven, if you
would be amongst the many who shall be
glorified with Christ, believe on the Lord Jesus
Christ.
Believe now today.
If ye will hear his voice, harden not
your heart as in the provocation.
Kiss the Son, lest he be angry and
he perish from the way, when his wrath
is kindled but a little.
Men, brethren and fathers, believe and live.
Cast yourself at Jesus' feet.
Put your trust in him.
Renounce thy works and ways with grief and
fly to this most sure relief, giving up
all you are to come to him, to
be saved by him now and saved eternally.
O Lord, bless my weak but earnest appeal
for Christ's sake.
Amen.