The New Park Street Pulpit Terrible Convictions and
Gentle Drawings Sermon delivered on Sabbath morning, May
6, 1860, by the Reverend C.
H.
Spurgeon at Exeter Hall Strand.
Psalm 32, verses 3 and 4.
When I kept silence, my bones waxed old
through my roaring all the day long, for
day and night thy hand was heavy upon
me.
My moisture is turned into the dross of
summer.
David here describes a very common experience amongst
convinced sinners.
He was subjected to extreme tears and pangs
of conscience.
These tears were continual.
They scared him at night with visions.
They terrified him all day with dark and
gloomy forebodings.
Day and night thy hand was heavy upon
me.
His pain was so extreme that when he
resorted to prayer he could scarcely utter an
articulate word.
There were groanings that could not be uttered
within his spirit, and hence he calls his
prayer roaring.
A roaring all the day long.
Wherever he was, his spirit seemed to be
always sighing, sending a full torrent of melancholy
groans upwards towards God, a roaring all the
day long.
So far did this groaning proceed that at
last his bodily frame began to show evidences
of it.
He grew old, and that not merely in
the lines of the countenance and the falling
in of the cheeks, but his very bones
seemed as if they partook of the suffering.
He became like an old man before his
time.
We have heard of some who through severe
trouble have had their hair blanched in a
single night.
But here was a man who did not
show merely externally, but even internally, the heavy
pressure of grief on account of sin.
His bones grew old, and the sap of
his life, the animal spirits were all dried
up.
His moisture was turned into the dross of
summer.
So intimate is the connection between the body
and the soul that when the soul suffers
extremely, the body must be called to endure
its part of grief.
Verily, in this case it was but simple
justice.
For David had sinned with his body and
with his soul too.
By fornication he had defiled his members.
He had looked out from his eyes with
lustful desires and had committed iniquity with his
body.
And now the frame which had become the
instrument of unrighteousness becomes a vehicle of punishment,
and his body bears its share of misery.
My moisture is turned into the dross of
summer.
We gather from what David says in this
psalm, and indeed in all these seven penitential
psalms, that his convictions on account of his
sin with Bathsheba and his subsequent murder of
Uriah were of the deepest and most poignant
character, and that the tears he experienced were
indescribable, filling his soul with horror and dismay.
Now this morning I propose to deal with
this case so common among those who are
under conviction of sin.
There are many who, when the Lord is
bringing them to Himself, are alarmed by reason
of the hardness of the stroke with which
He smites them and the sternness of the
sentence which He pronounces against them.
After having dealt very solemnly with that character,
I shall then turn and spend a few
moments in trying to comfort another class of
persons who, strange to say, are without comfort,
because they do not have these tears and
are unhappy because they have never experienced this
unhappiness.
Strange perversity of human nature!
But when God sends the tears, we doubt,
and when He withholds them, we doubt nonetheless.
May God the Spirit bless my discourse doubly
to these two different conditions of men.
First, then, let me address myself with loving
kindness to those who are now the subjects
of God's rebuke and the tears of God's
law.
To you I would speak on this wise.
First, detect the causes of your tear.
In the second place, tell you God's design
in subjecting you thereto, and then point you
to the great remedy.
As for the causes of your tear, there
are many, and perhaps in your case the
cause may be so peculiar that the wit
of man may not be able to discover
it.
Nevertheless, the remedy which I have to propound
at the end will most assuredly be adapted
to your case, for it is a remedy
which reaches all diseases and is a panacea
for all ills.
You tell me you are sore, troubled by
reason of conviction, and that your convictions of
sin are attended by the most terrible and
gloomy thoughts.
I am not at a loss to tell
you why it is.
I shall this morning borrow my divisions from
quaint old Thomas Fuller, whose book happened to
be thrown in my way this week by
Providence, and as I cannot say better things
than he said, I shall borrow much of
his description of the causes of the tears
of conviction.
First, those wounds must be deep, which are
given by so strong a hand as that
of God.
Remember, sinner, it is God that is dealing
with you.
When you lay dead in your sins, He
looked on you, and now He has begun
not only to look, but to smite.
He is now wounding you with the design
of afterwards making you whole.
He is killing you that He may afterwards
make you spiritually alive.
You have now entered the lists with no
other than the Almighty God.
Do you wonder then that when He smites,
His blows fell you to the ground?
Are you astonished that when He wounds, His
wounds are deep and hard to heal?
Besides, remember, it is an angry God that
you have to deal with, one who has
had patience with you in your sins these
thirty, forty, or fifty years, and now He
has come forth Himself to compel you to
throw down the weapons of your rebellion and
to take you captive by His justice, that
He may afterwards set you free by His
grace.
Is it any marvel then that when an
angry God, a God who has restrained His
anger these many years, comes out in battle
against you, you find it hard to resist
Him and that His blows bruise you and
break your bones and make your spirit feel
as if it must verily die, crushed beneath
the mighty hand of a cruel one?
Be not astonished at all your tears.
God on Sinai, when He came to give
the law, was terrible, but God on Sinai,
when He comes to bring the law into
the conscience and to strike it home, must
be more terrible far.
When God did but stretch out His hand
with the two tables of stone, Moses did
exceedingly fear and quake, but when He throws
those tables of stone upon you and makes
you feel the weight of that law which
you have broken, it is but little marvel
that your spirit is bruised and mangled and
dashed into a thousand shivers.
Again, it is no wonder that you are
sore troubled when you remember the place where
God has wounded you.
He has not wounded you in your hand
or in your head or in your foot.
He is striking at your conscience, the eye
of your soul.
He wounds you in your heart, in your
inmost soul.
Every wound that God gives to the convicted
man is a wound in the very heart,
in the very vitals.
He cuts into the core of the liver
and makes His darts cut through the gall
and parches your inward parts with agony.
It is not now a disease that has
laid hold merely on your skin or flesh,
but it is something which makes the life
floods boil with hot anguish.
He has now shot His arrows into your
inmost spirit, thrust His fingers into your eyes
and put out their light.
O ye need not wonder that your pains
are fearful when God thus smites you on
the tenderest part of a conscience which He
has made tender by His grace.
He may well smart that has salt rubbed
into His wounds.
You have been lashed with the ten-thonged
whip of the Lord till your heart is
all bare and bleeding, and now God is
scattering, as it were, the salt and making
all those wounds to tingle and smart.
O ye might wonder if ye did not
feel when God is thus casting bitterness into
the fountain of your life.
Besides these, there is a third cause for
this, your pain, namely that Satan is now
busy upon you.
He sees that God is wounding you, and
he does not wish that those wounds shall
heal.
He therefore thrusts in His fangs and tears
open the flesh and tries if he cannot
pour his poison into that very flesh which
God has been wounding with the sword.
Now, saith he, that God is against him,
I will be against him too.
God is driving him to sadness.
I will drive him further still and urge
him to despair.
God has brought him to the precipice, to
the edge of his self-righteousness, and bidden
him look down and see the yawning gulf.
Now, saith Satan, one push more and over
he will go.
He has come forth therefore with all his
strength, hoping that the hour of your conviction
shall be also the hour of your condemnation.
He will tempt you perhaps, as he did
Job, till you say, My soul chooseth strangling
rather than life.
He will seek to bring you low like
Jeremiah until you are ready to wish you
had never been born rather than that you
should suffer like this.
You can well understand if a man had
been wounded that it were hard work for
the most skillful surgeon to heal him if
some vile wretch should tear away the liniments
and rend open the wounds as fast as
they began to close.
Oh, pray against Satan.
Cry aloud to your God to deliver you
from this fiend for he is the cause
of much of your distress and if you
were rid of him it may be that
your wound would soon heal and you would
find peace.
But remember, the remedy that I shall have
to propound to you is a remedy against
devils.
It is the fiend's confusion as well as
sin's destruction.
Let them come against you as they may.
The remedy I shall have to propound can
heal the wounds of Satan and the tearings
of his fangs as well as those sorrows
of soul which God has brought upon you.
You may discover a yet further reason why
you are so sore wounded when you consider
the terrible nature of that weapon with which
God has wounded you.
He had not made a little gash with
some slender instrument.
But if I understand your case aright, he
has brought against you the sword of the
Spirit which is the word of God.
Its word condemned you.
Its threatening strike you like barbed arrows.
You turn to the law as it is
here revealed and it is altogether on a
smoke against you.
You turn to the promises and even they
wound you because you feel you have no
right to them.
You look at the most precious passages but
they do not assuage your grief.
But the rather they increase it because you
cannot realize them and lay hold upon them
for yourself.
Now this is God using his word against
you and you know what a weapon that
is.
The sword of the Spirit which is quick
and powerful piercing to the dividing asunder of
soul and spirit is a discerner of the
thoughts and intents of the heart.
They are cut deep that are wounded by
the word of God.
If it were my words which had brought
you into this fear, you might soon get
rid of it.
But these are God's words.
Were it a father's curse, it might be
hard to give you comfort.
But it is God's curse that has gone
out against you.
The curse of the God who made you.
He himself has told you that the sinner
shall not stand in his sight and that
he hateth the workers of iniquity.
He has himself brought home to your conscience
some of those awful passages.
God is angry with the wicked every day.
He will by no means clear the guilty.
Our God is a consuming fire.
The wicked shall be turned into hell and
all the nations that forget God with such
weapons as these.
With red-hot shot fired against you, with
all the power of the spirit, it remains
no longer a wonder that your soul should
be sharply racked and your very bones should
wax old through your roaring all the day
long.
Furthermore, there is another cause for this deep
disease of conviction, namely the foolishness of the
patient.
Physicians will tell you that they can heal
one man vastly more quickly than another even
though the disease be precisely the same and
the same remedies be used.
For there are some men who help the
physician by the quietude of their spirit, by
the ease and resignation of their minds.
Their heart is right and this gives health
to the navel and morrow to the bones.
But other men are fretful, disturbed, vexed, anxious,
questioning this and questioning that and then the
remedies themselves cease to have their proper effect.
It is even so with you.
You are a foolish patient.
You will not do that which would cure
you, but you do that which aggravates your
woe.
You know that if you would cast yourselves
upon Christ Jesus, you would have peace of
conscience at once, but instead of that you
are meddling with doctrines too high for you,
trying to pry into mysteries which the angels
have not known, and so you turn your
dizzy brain and thus help to make your
heart yet more singularly sad.
You know that you are trying still to
work out a righteousness of your own and
this is making your wounds stinking and corrupt.
You know too that you are looking more
to your faith than you are to the
object of your faith.
You are looking more to what you feel
than to what Christ felt.
You spend more time in looking at your
convictions than you do at Christ's vicarious sacrifice
upon the cross.
You are a foolish patient.
You are doing that which aggravates your complaint.
Oh, that you were but wiser!
And these tears and these pangs might the
sooner be over.
You would not tarry so long in the
prison if you would but use the means
of escape.
Instead of seeking to dash your head against
its strong walls, walls that will not move
with all your ravings, but which will only
break and bruise and wound you the more,
you seek to file your fetters and you
rivet them.
You seek to unbind them yourself and you
thrust them the deeper into your flesh.
You grasp the hammer and here is the
fetter about your wrist.
You think to snap it, but you send
the iron through the flesh and make it
bleed.
You make yourself worse by all your attempts
to make yourself better so that much of
your sorrowful conviction is due to your own
absurdity, your own ignorance and folly.
And once more I must give you another
reason.
There is no wonder that you are under
great and terrible pain when under conviction, for
it is a disease in which nothing can
ever help you but that one remedy.
All the joys of nature will never give
you relief.
I have heard of some vain man who
once wore the gown of a clergyman who
was visited by a poor creature under distress
of mind in the days of Whitefield.
He said to the penitent, You have been
among the Methodists?
I know I have, said he.
Then don't go among those fellows.
They have made you mad.
But what am I to do to get
rid of the distress of mind I now
feel?
Attend the theatre, said he.
Go off to balls.
Take to gaming and the like.
In that way you will soon dissipate your
woe.
But as he that poureth vinegar upon nighter,
so is he that singeth songs to a
sad heart.
It is taking away a man's garment to
make him warm.
It is heaping snow upon his head to
dissolve the frostbite, sending him back to draught
and dung that he may stay his hunger
therewith, thrusting him into the kennel that he
may get rid of the stench that offends
his nostrils.
Nay, but if these be the true woundings
of God, sinful pleasures will make you worse
instead of better.
And even the usual comforts of life will
lose all power to console you.
The words of the tenderest wife, the most
loving husband, the mercies of providence, the blessings
of home, all these will be of no
avail to you to cure this disease.
There is one remedy for it.
But none of these will so much as
touch it.
Quaint old Fuller uses language to this effect.
When Adam had sinned, he became suddenly plunged
in misery.
The birds sang as sweetly, the flowers bloomed
as brightly, and the air was as balmy,
and Eden quite as blissful.
But Adam was in misery.
He had unparadised paradise.
God had not said a word against him,
and yet he went and hid himself under
the trees of the garden to find a
shelter there.
There was nothing in the whole garden that
could give Adam a moment's delight because he
was under a sense of sin.
And so will it be with you.
If you could be put in paradise, you
would not be the happier.
Now that God has convinced you of sin,
there is only one cure for you.
And that one cure you must have.
For you may ramble the world round and
you will never find another.
You may try your best with all the
pleasures and mercies of this life, but you
would be in torment even though you could
be taken to heaven unless this one remedy
should appease your aching heart.
I have thus, I think, given you sufficient
reasons for the great poignancy of your grief.
But now, secondly, what are God's designs in
this plunging you deeply in the mire?
He does not deal so with all his
people.
Some he brings in a very gentle way
to himself.
Why, then, does he deal thus hardly with
you?
The answers to this question are these.
There are some questions best unanswered.
There are some dealings of God about which
we have no right to ask a question.
If he draws you to heaven, though it
were through hell itself, you ought to be
content.
So long as you are but saved, however
fearful the process, you ought not to murmur.
But I may give you some reasons after
all.
In the first place, it is because you
were such a stony-hearted sinner, so dead,
so careless, that nothing else ever would have
awakened you but this trumpet.
It would have been of no use to
bring out the gospel with its dulcet notes.
It would have been of little service for
David to play on his harp before you.
You needed to be aroused, and therefore it
is that God has hurled his thunderbolts at
you one after another and has been pleased
to make heaven and earth shake before you
that you might be made to tremble.
You were so desperately set on mischief, so
stolid, so indifferent, that if saved, God must
save you in such a way or else
not at all.
And then again, the Lord knows that there
is that in your heart which would take
you back to your old sins, and so
he is making them bitter to you.
He is burning you that you may be
like the burnt child that dreads the fire.
He is letting you see the disease in
its full climax, that you may from henceforth
avoid the company in which that disease was
found.
He has taught you the full evil of
your heart, the full obnoxiousness of sin, in
order that from this day forth you may
become a more careful walker and may the
more zealously hate every false way.
Besides, it may possibly happen that he designs
this out of love to your soul to
make you the more happy afterwards.
He is filling your mouth with wormwood and
breaking your teeth with gravel stone that you
may have a richer appreciation of the luscious
flavor of the wine of pardon when he
pours it into your heart.
It is making you feed on ashes, the
serpent's meat, that when you come to eat
children's meat, the bread of heaven, your joy
may be multiplied sevenfold.
I am one of those poor souls who
for five years led a life of misery
and was almost driven to distraction.
But I can heartily say that one day
of pardoned sin was a sufficient recompense for
the whole five years of conviction.
I have to bless God for every tear
that ever scared me by night and for
every foreboding that alarmed me by day.
It has made me happier ever since, for
now if there be a trouble weighing upon
my soul, I thank God it is not
such a trouble as that which bowed me
to the very earth and made me creep
like a very beast upon the ground by
reason of heavy distress and affliction.
I know I never can again suffer what
I have suffered.
I never can accept I be sent to
hell no more of agony than I have
known.
And now that ease, that joy and peace
in believing that no condemnation which belongs to
me as a child of God is made
doubly sweet and inexpressibly precious by the recollection
of my past days of sorrow and grief.
Blessed be thou, O God, forever, who by
those black days, like a dreary winter, hath
made these summer days all the fairer and
the sweeter.
The shore is never so welcome as when
you mount it with the foot of a
shipwrecked mariner just escaped from the sea.
Food never so sweet as when you sit
at the table after days of hunger.
Water never so refreshing as when you arrive
at the end of a parched desert and
have known what it is to thirst.
And yet one other reason let me give
you, and I need not keep you longer
on this point.
Possibly God is bringing you thus, my dear
friends, because He means to make great use
of you.
We are all God's weapons against the enemy.
All His saints are used as instruments in
the holy war, but there are some whom
God uses in the thickest part of the
battle.
They are His swords whom He wields in
His hand and strikes innumerable blows with them.
These He anneals again and again and again.
He is annealing you.
He is making you meet to be a
mighty one in His Israel by and by.
Oh, how sweetly you will be able to
talk to others like yourself when you once
get comfort, and oh, how much you will
love Him when He once puts away your
sin, will you not?
Oh, I think I see you the first
day after your sins are forgiven.
Why, you will be wanting to preach.
I should not wonder if you will be
going out into the streets or hurrying to
your old companions and saying to them, My
sins are washed away.
Why, there will be nothing too hard for
you.
The Lord gets His best soldiers out of
the highlands of affliction.
These are highlanders that carry everything before them.
They know the rivers of sin.
They know the glens of grief.
And now their sins are all washed away.
They know the heights of self-consecration and
of pure devotion.
They can do all things through Christ who
strengthens them, the Christ who has forgiven them.
Do you not think I have just driven
the nail home here?
Do you not feel in your spirit that
if Jesus would forgive you, you would do
everything for Him?
Oh, I know if I should give out
that hymn then loudest of the crowd I'll
sing while heaven's resounding mansions ring with shouts
of sovereign grace, you would say, Ah, that
I will!
If ever He forgives such a wretch as
I am and takes such a poor worm
as me to His bosom, nothing shall be
too hard for me.
I will give Him all in this life
and I will give an eternity of praise
in the life to come.
But now I am impatient to come to
the word of comfort which I have for
you upon the great remedy.
Sinner!
Distressed on account of sin and bowed with
terror down, there is a way of salvation
for thee, a way open and accessible, accessible
now.
Thou mayst now have all thy griefs assuaged
and all thy sorrows may flee away.
Hear thou then the remedy and hear it
as from the lip of God and take
care that thou availest thyself of it now.
For the longer thou tarriest, the harder will
it be to avail thyself of it.
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou
shalt be saved.
Dost understand me?
Trust Christ and you are saved.
Trust Him now and all your sins are
gone.
There is not one left.
Past, present and to come, all gone.
Am I to feel nothing?
No, not as a preparation for Christ.
Trust Jesus and thou art saved.
Are there no good works required of me?
None, none.
Good works shall follow afterwards.
The remedy is a simple one, not a
compound mixture of thy things and Christ's.
It is just this, the blood of Jesus
Christ.
There is Jesus on the cross.
His hands are bleeding.
His heart is bursting.
His limbs are tortured.
The powers of His soul are full of
agony.
Those sufferings were offered to God in the
place of our sufferings.
And whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish,
but have everlasting life.
Believe on Him now.
But I may not, says one.
Thou mayest, nay, not only thou mayest, but
thou art condemned if thou dost not believe
in Him now.
I cannot, saith one.
Canst not believe thy Lord?
Is He a liar?
Canst thou not believe His power to save
the Son of God in agony and yet
no power to save?
I cannot think He shed His blood for
me, saith such a one.
Thou art commanded to trust Him.
Thou shalt read thy title clear in Him
afterwards.
Thy business now is simply with Him, not
with thine interest in Him.
That shall be known afterwards.
Trust Him now, and thou art saved.
Faith is not believing that Christ died for
me.
If Christ died for every man, then every
Arminian, saved or unsaved, hath the true faith,
for he believes Christ died for every man.
We, as Calvinists, do not believe this.
But we believe faith consists in trusting Christ.
And whosoever trusts Christ shall know as the
effect of that trust that Jesus died for
him and he is saved.
Trust Jesus now, just as thou art.
Fall flat on thy face before Him.
Away with that last dirty rag of thine,
that last good work.
Away with that last filthiness, that last good
thought.
Thy good thought and thy good works are
rags and filthiness.
Come just as thou art, naked, lost, ruined,
helpless, poor.
If thou art so bad that I cannot
describe thee, and thou canst not describe thyself,
yet come, mercies free.
Mercies free.
I am never afraid of preaching grace too
free or a Christ too willing to save.
You do want a mediator to come to
God with, but you want none to come
to Christ with.
You do need some preparation if you are
going to the Father.
You want none if you are coming to
the Son.
Come as you are.
And God himself must be untrue.
His throne must have foundations apart from righteousness.
Christ must be false and this Bible a
lie before one soul that trusts Jesus can
never perish.
There is the remedy.
By the power of the Holy Spirit, avail
thyself of it.
Now God help thee, and thou art fully
saved.
I shall now want your patient attention for
another five or ten minutes while I take
upon myself what was a double duty, because
I was afraid without the last part of
the sermon, the first part might do hurt.
In the last part of the sermon, I
have to deal with some who have never
felt these tears at all and who, strange
to say it, wish they had felt them.
I suppose I may have conversed now with
somewhere verging upon two thousand souls who have
been brought to know the Lord under my
instrumentality.
And I have very often noticed that a
considerable proportion of these and of the best
members of our church, too, were brought to
know the Lord not by legal tears, but
by gentler means.
Sitting one day last week, I saw some
twenty-three.
And I should think that there might be
as many as twelve out of the twenty
-three whose convictions of sin were not distinctly
marked with the tears of the law.
An excellent young woman comes before me.
What was the first thought that set you
really seeking the Saviour?
Sir, it was Christ's lovely character that first
made me long to be His disciple.
I saw how kind, how good, how disinterested,
how self-sacrificing He was, and that made
me feel how different I was to what
He was.
I thought, Oh, I am not like Jesus.
And that sent me up to my chamber
and I began to pray.
I often have cases like this.
I preach a terrible sermon upon the law
and I find sinners get comfort under it.
I preach another sermon upon election and I
find poor sinners get awakened under it.
God blesses the word in the very opposite
manner to which I thought it would be
blessed.
And He brings very, very many to know
their state by nature, by things which we
should have thought would rather have comforted than
alarmed them.
The first religious impression I ever had, said
another, that set me seeking the Saviour was
this.
A young companion of mine fell into sin
and I knew that I was likely to
do the same if I was not kept
by someone stronger than myself.
I therefore sought the Lord, not on account
of past sin at first, but because I
was afraid of some great future sin.
God visited me and I then felt conviction
of sin and was brought to Christ.
Singularly enough, too, I have met with at
least a score of persons who found Christ
and then mourned their sins more afterwards than
they did before.
Their convictions have been more terrible after they
have known their interest in Christ than they
were at first.
They have seen the evil after they have
escaped from it.
They have been plucked out of the miry
clay and their feet set on a rock
and then afterwards they have seen more fully
the depth of that horrible pit out of
which they have been snatched so that it
is not true that all who are saved
suffer these convictions and terrors.
There are a considerable number who are drawn
by the cords of love and the bands
of a man.
There are some who, like Lydia, have their
hearts opened not by the crowbar of conviction,
but by the picklock of divine grace.
Sweetly drawn, almost silently enchanted by the loveliness
of Jesus, they say, Draw me and I
will run after thee.
And now you ask me the question, Why
has God brought me to Himself in this
gentle manner?
Again I say, there are some questions better
unanswered than answered.
God knows best the reason why He does
not give you these terrors.
Leave that question with Him.
But I may tell you an anecdote.
There was a man who had never felt
these terrors and he thought within himself, I
never can believe I am a Christian unless
I do.
So he prayed to God that he might
feel them.
And he did feel them.
And what do you think is his testimony?
He says, Never.
Never do that.
For the result was a fearful in the
extreme.
If he had but known what he was
asking for, he would not have asked for
anything so foolish.
I knew a Christian man once who prayed
for trouble.
He was afraid he was not a Christian
because he had no trouble.
But when the trouble came, he soon discovered
how foolish he was to be asking for
a thing which God in mercy had kept
back from him.
Oh, be not foolish enough to sigh for
misery.
Thank God that you go to heaven along
the walls of salvation.
Bless the Master that He does not call
you in the cloudy and dark day but
brings you gently to Himself.
And be content, I pray you, to be
called by the music of the voice of
love.
May it not happen that Jesus Christ has
thus brought you for another reason.
He knew that you were very weak and
your mind was very frail.
And if you had felt these tears, you
might have gone mad.
And you might have been in a lunatic
asylum now instead if you had passed through
them.
It is true His grace could have kept
you, but God always tempers the wind to
the shorn lamb.
And He will not treat the weak ones
as He does the strong ones.
And I think again it may be that
if God had given you these feelings, you
would have grown self-righteous.
You would have trusted in them, so He
has not given you them.
You have not got them to build on.
And thank God for that, for now you
must build on Christ.
You say, if I had felt these things,
I think I should have been saved.
Yes, then you would have trusted in your
feelings.
The Lord knew that, and therefore He has
not given you them.
He has given you nothing at all.
Therefore, you must now rest on Christ and
nowhere else but there.
Oh, do so now.
And it may be again that He has
kept you there because He means to make
you needful, useful to some who, like yourself,
have come gradually to Him.
For you can say to them when you
find them in distress, Why, Jesus Christ brought
me gently, and therefore be of good cheer.
He is bringing you too.
I always like to see in my church
some of all sorts.
Now, there is a brother I could point
out this morning who is never known in
his life, and I think never will know,
about the plague of his own heart to
such an extent as some of us have
learned.
He has never gone through fire and through
water, but, on the contrary, is a loving
-hearted spirit, a man who spends and is
spent in his Master's service.
He knows more of the heights of communion
than some of us.
For my part, though I do not want
to change places with anybody, I think I
could trust my Master if I had His
experience, as well as I can trust Him
with my own.
For what has experience to do with it,
after all?
We do not rest on experiences and frames
and doings.
Our hopes are fixed on nothing less than
Jesus' blood and righteousness.
Now, to you, then, in conclusion, I preach
the same remedy.
Poor soul, thou longest to be troubled.
Eh, but I would rather have thee long
to get relief.
Jesus Christ hangs on the cross, and if
thou wilt trust Him, thou shalt be saved.
Just as thou art, as I said to
my other friend just now, just as thou
art, take Christ as He is.
Now, never think about getting ready for Christ.
He does not want anything of yours.
You need not trim and dress yourselves to
come to Christ.
Even your frames and feelings are not the
wedding garment.
Come naked.
But, sir, I am so careless.
Come careless, then.
But I am so hard-hearted.
Come hard-hearted, then.
But I am so thoughtless.
Come thoughtless, then, and trust Christ now.
If you trust Him, you will not trust
a deceiver.
You will not have put your soul into
the hand of one who will let it
fall and perish.
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou
shalt be saved, whether convicted by terror or
by love.
For he that believeth and is baptized shall
be saved.
He that believeth not, feel what he may,
and be in terror though he may, shall
be damned.