The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit.
Plowing a Rock.
A sermon published on Thursday, March 1st, 1906,
delivered by C.
H.
Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington, on Lord's
Day evening, September 12th, 1875.
Amos 6, verse 12.
Shall horses run upon the rock?
Will one plow there with oxen?
These two questions are evidently Oriental proverbial expressions.
Proverbs have always been used by the wisest
of men.
Solomon not only spoke and wrote a great
many, but he also made a considerable collection
of those uttered by others.
We find in the writings of such notable
thinkers as Socrates and Pliny and Aristotle an
abundance of short, pithy sentences, many of which
can be used as proverbs.
Proverbs have great force in them because they
are condensed wisdom.
They are generally most convincing.
It is hardly ever possible to answer or
controvert them.
They carry truth home as an arrow has
often been known to carry death to the
person aimed at, for they strike, they stick,
they penetrate, and they wound.
Our Lord Jesus very frequently made use of
proverbs, nor was he singular in so doing.
The prophets of old constantly employed them, and
here in our text we see Amos, who
from his occupation as a herdsman and gatherer
of sycamore fruit was probably more familiar with
their use than some others of the prophets
were, puts together two proverbs which were commonly
used to signify that men do not, as
a rule, continue to labor in vain and
spend their strength for naught.
Wise men do not send their horses to
run upon the rocks, and they do not
send their oxen to plow where all their
toil would be wasted.
Shall horses run upon the rock, will one
plow there with oxen?
The answer implied is certainly not, and it
means that if a thing cannot be done,
or is not worth doing if it can,
it will be well for us not to
attempt to do it.
Our text may have two bearings, first upon
men and secondly upon God.
First with regard to men, they are not
usually so foolish as to try to plow
a rock, yet many are as foolish as
that in moral and spiritual matters.
I want to give you three or four
illustrations of this fact.
The first is that many persons have tried
to find the way of safety and pleasure
in the way of sin.
Many a man has sought to get rich
by injustice.
Possibly he has succeeded to a certain extent,
but as a general rule it is notorious
that ill-gotten riches are generally ill-spent
and bring a curse upon their possessors.
Some have thought that if they indulged their
passions, they would have great enjoyment.
Although their fathers warned them that such a
sin would be like self-destruction and would
make their whole life sad, they have not
believed it would be so.
They have tried to plow this hard rock
of sin and to find lasting pleasure therein.
There are hundreds and thousands of men who
are pursuing the way which is not good,
and they know it is not good, yet
they foolishly continue in it because they conceive
it to be the path of pleasure.
Nor can you beat that false notion out
of their heads, do what you may.
On the contrary, they turn round upon you
and call you a Puritan because you object
to their style of living.
Possibly they revile you as a hypocrite because
you point out the evils of the way
in which they are walking.
Yet if they would but think at all
seriously, they must perceive that the way of
sin cannot lead to happiness.
It is absolutely inconceivable that God, who made
the whole universe, should have arranged that the
terminus of sin should be heaven, or should
have made the path of evil lead to
joy and peace.
The judge of all the earth cannot have
put a premium upon wickedness.
In the long run it must be proved
that sin brings forth sorrow, and the path
of right is the path of peace.
Yet many will not see that it must
be so, and they continue, even to the
bitter end of life, to plow that rock,
breaking the plowshare, wearing out the ox, and
themselves dying a death of miserable disappointment, which
if they had not been errant fools they
would never have had to endure, for they
would never have attempted so hopeless a task
as that of trying to find any real
pleasure in the ways of sin.
As well might you sow the sea with
salt, and expect to reap from it a
harvest of golden sheaves.
As well might you scatter firebrands, and expect
to gather from them the cooling streams that
flow from the mountain spring, as live in
sin, and expect to receive happiness as the
result of doing so.
See, O sons of men, such an act
of madness as the plowing of this rock
must ever be.
Others are attempting another equally absurd task.
They are hoping to find real joy in
pursuits which are laudable in themselves, but which
are entirely of this world.
Did you ever read the book called The
Mirage of Life?
It is a book which is well worth
everyone's reading.
The author gives in sets of pictures the
life of the man of pleasure, the life
of the courtier, the life of the philosopher,
the life of the statesman, the life of
the warrior, and so on, with a very
fair selection of facts from the lives of
such men, with the object of showing that
although each one of them was eminent in
his own line of things, and apparently successful
in that line, yet they all failed to
find the precious jewel of solid satisfaction.
Most of them lived in a sort of
perpetual weariness, and when at last they died
and their eyes were opened, they found that
their pretty dreams had all vanished, and that
the reality, when they beheld it, was dreary
indeed.
There have been men, perhaps some of you
have known them, who have had more wealth
than you and I would care to count,
yet they have thought themselves poor, and so
they really were, for they were incapable of
enjoying the riches which they had amassed.
There have been men who have been crowned
with laurel, who have had all sorts of
honors heaped upon them, yet when a friend
has wished them a happy new year, they
have said, then it had need be a
very different year from any that we have
ever yet experienced.
The high places of the world, like the
mountaintops, are glassy with icy dangers, and they
are cold with discontent.
Many try to clamber up to them, and
a few reach the summit, but others perish
in the crevices.
Yet those who reach the summit often envy
those who are in the vale below, and
those in the valley envy those on the
heights.
For beneath yon moon there is no contentment
to be found in earthly things, either in
the peasant's hut or the monarch's palace.
The man whose arm is not long enough
to grasp that which lies in the land
beyond the stars will have to live and
die without attaining to perfect satisfaction.
Man, it is not here below that God
has placed that which you want.
The bread for your souls must come from
heaven.
That which can satisfy your immortal spirit must
be divine, like the Creator who made you.
God alone can satisfy the cravings of your
soul.
Cease then to toil and tug and fret
and fume, and waste your time and strength
in seeking happiness in these bubbles of earth.
Seek ye first the kingdom of God and
His righteousness, and all these things shall be
added unto you, insofar as you need them.
But as far as seeking them first, plough
that rock no longer, for it will yield
you no return for all your toil.
Men of another sort are satisfied that the
things of this world are not sufficient to
render a man perfectly happy, so they have
religious thoughts of a certain form.
They believe that they are very good and
excellent, and they mean to make themselves still
better, and so to get perfect peace by
feeling that they are what they ought to
be and have done what they ought to
have done.
I remember when I ploughed that hard rock
and entertained the hope of getting a very
fine crop off it.
But I woke one morning to discover that
the rock would not yield even the moss
or lichen of comfort to me.
There was nothing on its surface that could
bring me any contentment.
Self-righteousness is a great cheat.
The man who gets most comfort out of
it simply gets that comfort because he is
ignorant.
If he knew himself and knew God's law
and knew the demands of inflexible justice, he
would fling upon the nearest dunghill that self
-righteousness of his, which looks like fair white
linen, but which really is in God's sight
nothing but filthy rags.
O sirs, you cannot find your way to
heaven by your own works, for the only
way to heaven by works is perfectly to
keep the law of God, and you have
broken that law already.
You must present this matchless vase, flawless and
entire, at the gates of glory if you
would be saved by works, but you have
already shattered it in a thousand pieces.
How can you hope to mend it?
That is impossible.
The hope of salvation by a perfect life
is over, and you must each one feel
that your life has been imperfect already.
Some hope that they will get perfect peace
by the way of ceremonies.
Many people tell us that we are living
in a very enlightened age, but I am
inclined to think that Carlyle was uncommonly near
the mark when he said that the United
Kingdom contains about thirty millions of people, mostly
fools.
For it does seem as if people nowadays
were fools to a very large extent.
For instance, a man says that if we
will come and confess our sins to him,
he can forgive us in the name of
God, and that he can, by sprinkling a
few drops of water upon a child and
uttering certain words, transform an air of wrath
into an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven,
and that if we come to what he
calls an altar, he will give us the
very blood and body of Christ to eat
and drink.
When I was young, I thought that anybody
who talked like that ought to be served
like the gypsies who were put in prison
for taking six pences from silly servants and
pretending to tell their fortunes.
And in later years I have been sometimes
surprised that the law has not been put
in motion against these gentlemen, for certainly the
imposture which they seek to foist upon us
is a far more terrible one than that
of the fortune-telling gypsies.
The so-called priest has no power to
forgive sins, or to change the nature of
the child he sprinkles, or to offer the
sacrifice of the mass.
There is nothing more in him than there
is in anybody else, and let him talk
as loudly as he may.
His pretensions are utterly vain and worthless.
If you trust to him, the result to
you will be the same as it has
been to tens of thousands before you.
For you will find that all the ceremonies
which men have invented, yea, and all the
rites that God himself has given, cannot bring
healing to a soul diseased, or hush the
tumult of an awakened conscience, or bring the
soul into a state of conscience reconciliation with
the Most High.
O sirs, you may be sprinkled, and confirmed,
and immersed, and go to the communion table,
and do I know not what beside, yea,
you may travel along seven thousand leagues of
ceremonialism, but you will be just as uneasy
at the end as you were at the
beginning.
That is not the way of peace, neither
will God make it to be so.
It is ploughing a rock, and no harvest
can possibly come of it.
Some are trying the equally impossible task of
being saved by Jesus Christ, when they shall
have prepared themselves for him.
In other words, they talk about being saved
by Christ, but in their heart of hearts,
they do not think that Christ can save
them till they have reached a certain standard
of excellence.
Now we know from the scriptures that Jesus
Christ came into the world to save his
people from their sins, and he will do
it from first to last, or not at
all.
He will be the Alpha and the Omega,
the A and the Z of salvation's alphabet,
or else he will have nothing to do
with it.
Yet thousands of hearers of the gospel are
constantly saying, we will believe in Jesus when
we feel our sins more, when we feel
more repentance, when we have done this and
felt that and experienced the other.
Ah sirs, this plan of bringing Christ in
at the vague end of the work, after
you have accomplished the first part of it
yourselves, is a most foolish mistake, and a
fateful one too.
It is like setting oxen to plough rock.
Let me ask you, are you any better
than you used to be?
You have been trying for a long while
to make yourselves ready for Christ.
Are you any more ready than you were
at the first?
Has it never struck you that hearts lines
are true?
If you tarry till you're better, you will
never come at all.
Thus I have shown you how the text
can be applied with regard to men.
Now secondly, I want to show you how
these proverbs can be applied with regard to
God.
Shall horses run upon the rock?
Will one plough there with oxen?
God does not always continue to do that,
which after a certain period turns out to
be unprofitable.
Dear friends, there are some of you, I
pray God to grant that there may not
be any of you of whom this will
remain true, but it is at present true
that there are some of you to whom
the gospel has come in vain.
Up till now, so far as you are
concerned, the gospel plough has only gone across
a rock.
The truth preached in your hearing has not
gained an entrance into your heart.
Oh, how many come and hear us preach
merely that they may compare us with other
preachers.
They pass certain criticisms upon our mode and
manner and matter.
We do not know and we do not
care what they say, but the point that
really concerns us is that we cannot get
the gospel plough into them.
We cannot make them feel and repent and
believe.
A great master of the art of preaching
once said when his congregation complimented him on
his having delivered a fine discourse, there is
another sermon lost.
He did not want his hearers to praise
his discourse.
He wanted them to feel the power of
the truth which he had preached to them,
and so do we.
But there are some hearers into whom we
do not know how to get the truth.
We may put it first in one way
and then in another way, sometimes pathetically, and
at other times we may make use of
a little humor.
We may denounce or allure, but we are
equally foiled in whatever way we attempt to
reach them.
We cannot get the plough in where we
want it to go, and if ever the
share does seem to make a little impression,
it only produces a slight surface scratch.
Some of you have had a good many
of those scratches.
You have thought, when I get out of
this place, I will go home and pray,
but you have not done so.
Or if you have prayed, your seriousness has
soon vanished, and the impression made upon you
in the service has expended itself in that
prayer.
And what is worst of all, in some
of you, God's dealing with you in the
preaching of the gospel has developed the hardness
of your hearts.
It has made others realize how hard they
are, and truth to tell, it has really
hardened them.
Ploughing does not harden rocks, but preaching does
harden sinners if the gospel does not reach
their hearts.
And of all hard-hearted men, the hardest
are those who have been hardened in the
fire of the gospel.
If you want to find a heart that
is as hard as steel, you must look
for one that has passed to the furnace
of divine love and has been made aware
of the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,
but has rejected the truth that has been
made known to it.
This hardening of heart is not the fault
of the plowshares which have been used, and
with some of you, God has used a
great many.
There is a man here who used to
be plowed by God when he was a
child, and the plowshares employed then were his
mother's tears.
He cannot forget them.
Even now as I bring them to his
memory, he feels as if he must weep
as he did when he was a child.
Ah, my friend, that mother of yours is
in heaven now, but if she could look
down upon her son and tears could be
shed in heaven, what cause would she have
to weep over you?
She prayed for you, and when you were
nestling in her bosom and she took you
to the house of God from your very
early days, you can remember her very look
when she used to speak to you about
Jesus when you were quite a little child,
and perhaps you remember her dying request that
you would follow her to heaven.
But that plowshare, one of God's best, has
never cut into your rocky heart yet, and
you still remain as hard as ever you
were.
Since that time God has tried you with
the plowshare of personal sickness.
You have not always been such a strong
man as you are today.
Time was when you lay very near the
gates of death and you trembled at the
prospect before you.
Do you remember when the fever seized you,
or when you thought the cholera had claimed
you as its victim?
You did tremble then, and you made many
vows which all proved to be lies, and
you made a profession of repentance, but it
was a mere profession.
And though you appeared just for a little
while to be touched, and those who were
around you who had prayed for you hoped
that at last the plowshare had entered into
you, they found that you rose up from
that bed of sickness worse than you were
before.
Since then God has used another sharp plowshare
upon you, the conversion of some of those
who are very near and dear to you.
You were not at all pleased when your
wife came home a converted woman, but you
could not help feeling it.
And when your sister wrote and told you
that she was rejoicing in Christ as her
Saviour, you could not pour ridicule upon the
letter, and as you read it, it brought
tears to your eyes.
You quickly wiped them away, and said that
you were not such a fool as to
trouble about so absurd a matter, and yet
it was not easy for you to forget
the emotion which the news had caused.
Possibly your own dear child, whom you love
very much, has made a profession of faith
in the Lord Jesus Christ, yet you do
not know anything experimentally about such a faith
as that.
This is a very sharp plowshare, and none
can think lightly of it but those who
are unaware of its operation.
To have your relatives and friends converted, and
to be yourself left out of the happy
circle of blessing, to make you think seriously
about this matter, another plowshare has gone across
your rocky heart from the fact that some
of your old companions are dead.
One was buried this week, was he not?
You used to drink and smoke with him,
but there will be no more pipes and
beer on a Sunday night for you two.
You know right well that he died without
the fear of God in his heart, and
you also know that you are living in
the same sad and perilous condition.
It gave you quite a shock when someone
said to you, Old Tom is dead.
You have also seen several of your business
friends die.
There was that clerk who was in the
office with you a little while ago.
He is gone, and you have been called
to occupy his place.
Death has come awfully near you again and
again.
You have been like a soldier on the
field of battle, who saw the ranks on
every side of him moan down, and yet
he still lived on.
God's plow has been at work with you.
He has been trying by these striking providential
dealings to touch your hard heart, but it
has not yielded yet.
Do you think that God means to keep
on plowing you to no effect?
If you do, you are wonderfully mistaken, for
the oxen will not always plow upon this
rock, and when it comes to this pass,
that neither can love melt you nor tears
subdue you, God will say Ephraim is joined
to idols.
Let him alone.
And when God says that, your doom will
be sealed.
May God grant that he may never have
to say that concerning any whom I am
now addressing.
I have not shown you that you have
been like a piece of granite rock, untouched
by all the different plow shares which have
been tried upon you.
There is another thought that you must not
forget, and that is you have wearied the
workers.
I pity the poor oxen that have to
plow a rock.
They plod on and on, and all their
toil is wasted.
The hardest form of labor is that which
produces no result.
I remember being in a military prison where
they punished the men by making them carry
cannon balls from one end of the yard
to another and bring them back again, a
very senseless practice.
The sergeant who accompanied me said, when we
let the men carry the balls from this
end of the yard to make them into
a pyramid at the other end, there was
some kind of amusement in the task.
So the rule was made that the man
must carry the ball from this end of
the yard and bring it back again.
And in his toil seems to be so
altogether fruitless that it becomes a double punishment
to him.
It is certainly a very great trial for
a man to have to work for nothing
and to feel that all he is doing
will result in nothing.
There are some of us who have had
to do with you unconverted folk, and we
have sometimes felt that we have been very
hardly used.
We oxen that have to plow such hard
rocks as you are.
The first part of my text says, shall
horses run upon the rock?
I remember going over a smooth rocky place
in the Alps, which is called Hell Place,
because it is so very slippery.
Well, horses could not be expected to run
over rocks like those, and it is not
surprising that they sometimes trip.
And if the preacher occasionally trips, it is
little wonder when he has such rocks as
those to go over.
George Herbert says that the sins of here
sometimes make the preacher trip, and so it
is.
There is often in the here that which
makes the preacher speak amiss.
I remember pleading one night here with all
my soul, and I said, If some of
you who are listening to me never mean
to accept Christ as your Savior, do not
continue to sit in this place and hear
the gospel, but go away and let somebody
who will accept Him occupy your seat.
I did not think that one of my
heres would take me at my word, but
there was one over whom I am never
ceased to lament, and for whom I still
pray, who says that he will never come
here again, because he is one of those
who will never receive Christ, and though he
would still like to hear me preach, he
will never occupy another person's place.
It was a mistake on my part to
say just what I did, but I do
not think I should have tripped like that
if the rock had not been so hard
and smooth.
It is hard for a horse to have
to run upon such a rock as that,
and it is hard for the oxen to
keep on plowing there.
I have had over twenty years of this
kind of plowing upon some of you, and
I have made nothing of you yet.
Thank God there are not many of your
sort, but there is still a remnant left
of the old Park Streeters who were almost
persuaded then, and they are almost persuaded still,
and I am almost persuaded that I shall
never be able to do them any good.
It seems to me that there is nothing
which I can say that will ever reach
their hearts, or else surely it would have
reached them before now.
I am always glad when I hear that
some other preacher attracts them and that they
are listening to him with interest, for as
long as they get saved, I shall not
mind how it is done.
Still, it is a hard line for us
to have to preach for twenty years to
some of you and to have all that
labour for nothing.
If anybody would teach me how to preach
better, I would gladly go to school again
and learn how to get at some of
your hearts.
If they would teach me how to speak
in such a vulgar style that I should
lose my reputation but be blessed to the
saving of your souls, I would willingly fling
my reputation to the wind.
Or if I could learn the art of
oratory, I would go and sit at the
feet of Cicero or Demosthenes if I could
but get at your superfine hearts that want
such fine words before they will be touched.
But I fear that it is the oxen's
fate to go on ploughing and ploughing and
ploughing and to get weary with the labour
and yet to see no result of it
at all.
One other thing that I want you to
recollect, you who remain unconverted after all this
effort, and that is, if the same labour
which had been lost upon you had been
used elsewhere, there, it might have been profitable.
Christ said concerning Bethsaida and Chorazin a very
wonderful thing which I do not fully understand
but which I absolutely believe.
If the mighty works which were done in
you had been done in Tyre and Sidon,
they would have repented long ago in sackcloth
and ashes.
It is a very extraordinary thing that God
should send the gospel to men who do
not get any good out of it and
not send it to people who would have
got good out of it.
There are people possibly even in London, certainly
in other parts of the earth, who would
have been converted if they had heard the
gospel as much as you have done.
Yet you have heard it and have not
been converted.
That same digging about and dunging that would
have made other trees bring forth much fruit
has been used in vain upon you, for
you have brought forth no fruit and you
have stood there and occupied a plot of
ground which a better tree might have occupied.
You have cumbered the ground.
Do you think that God will always allow
you to do that?
Have you, you who live in the country
and have a large orchard, have you a
tree that has borne no fruit for many
years?
I am sure that if so, you mean
to have it cut down before long, and
God means to have some of you cut
down, and that ere long it may be.
I tremble even as I speak to you
thus, for I may be a prophet foretelling
the destruction of your soul.
May God in His infinite mercy grant that
you may repent ere His acts of judgment
falls upon you.
Any man in his senses, when he finds
that the rock will not break, gives up
ploughing it.
The ancient proverb says, Will one plough there
with oxen?
And God, though infinitely merciful, is equally wise.
And if, after the use of means which
are blessed elsewhere, any heart still remains hard,
he may fairly say, I have done with
it.
I give it up to its natural rockiness,
and so let it continue forever.
That is the end of the matter, and
a terrible end it is, and I do
not know anything more that I can say
about it.
I have preached the gospel thousands of times,
and I have nothing to preach but the
gospel.
But these people will not have that, so
what more can I say to them?
A man came to me the other day
and asked me to pray for him.
He was one to whom I had many
times explained the gospel.
And after I had again done so, he
said to me, Will you pray for me,
sir?
I said, No, I will not.
He asked, Why not?
And I replied, Do you want me to
ask God to save you apart from the
gospel?
I have told you the gospel again and
again.
Will you accept it?
If you will not, I shall not ask
God to save you.
How can I do so?
I cannot expect him to save you if
you will not have the gospel.
If you will have it, that will save
you.
If you will not have it, you will
be lost, and it is of no use
for me to pray for you.
There I had to leave the matter so
far as that man was concerned.
But let me say this much to God's
people.
You see that we cannot do anything with
this rock.
The oxen are quite tired out with their
useless labor.
So let us pray to God to turn
that rock into good soil.
It needs a miracle to be wrought, and
only God can work it.
Let us unite our prayers and cry to
God, O Lord, thou didst change our rocky
hearts into good soil where the good seed
could enter and germinate and grow.
Change these rocks we beseech thee.
Here is the reason for our prayer meetings
and for our private intercession.
We can do nothing with these rocky hearts,
so let us turn to God who can
do everything.
Then may I add that if you will
pray God to change these rocky hearts, I
will go on preaching to them.
The weary ox will go on plowing again,
hard as it has found the work for
these twenty years and more.
If you will pray, I will preach.
If you pray God to make the rock
friable and break it up, I will plow
it again.
And I should not wonder if the plow
shall get into some of them at last,
so that there may yet be a golden
harvest to God's honor and glory.
Let me put the plow in one minute
more.
The greatest rock-breaking plow that I know
of is the one that broke me up.
If that will not do it, I do
not know of any other that will.
When Christ died upon the cross, among other
wonderful things that happened, we read that the
rocks rent and the graves were opened.
Ah, it was a dying Christ that rent
the rocks.
Sinner, listen once more to the old, old
story of Jesus and his love.
Thou hast offended and grieved thy God, and
thy God is just, and must punish thee
for thy wrongdoing.
But in order that he may not punish
thee, he has taken upon himself thy nature,
and come into this world to suffer in
the sinner's stead, and born what was due
to human sin in his own body on
the tree.
Out of pure love to those who were
his enemies, out of love to those hearts
that are so hard that they will not
love him, out of love to those who
have perhaps for fifty years rejected and despised
him, for the sake of love alone he
died upon that tree, the just for the
unjust, that he might bring us to God.
And now, if thou wilt trust him, thou
shalt at once have the pardon of all
thy sins.
If thou wilt trust him, thou shalt be
to the great Father's bosom pressed, once for
all a child confessed.
Thou shalt be cleansed in a moment, and
accepted and saved forever, if thou dost trust
the incarnate, dying, risen, glorified Redeemer.
God grant that this ploughshare of the cross
may touch thee.
Law and tares I know full well do
not affect some men, but almighty love will
not that affect them?
God grant that it may, and unto him
shall be glory forever and ever.
Amen.