Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Church Increase.
A sermon intended for reading on Lord's Day,
September 16th, 1900.
Delivered by C.
H.
Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington on Thursday
evening, August 18th, 1881.
Isaiah 49, verses 20 and 21.
The children which thou shalt have, after thou
hast lost the other, shalt say again in
thine ears, The place is too straight for
me.
Give place to me that I may dwell.
Then shalt thou say in thine heart, Who
hath begotten me these, seeing I have lost
my children, and them desolate, a captive, and
removing to and fro?
And who hath brought up these?
Behold, I was left alone.
These, where had they been?
Men who have no grace in their hearts
despise the Church of God.
Those who have only a little grace have
but slight sympathy with her condition.
Men who have great grace and are conscious
of having received much mercy from God have
great sympathy with the Church of God and
a deep regard for her.
You remember how David in that memorable penitential
psalm, the 51st, after he had poured out
his whole soul in pleading for mercy and
forgiveness for himself, concluded his prayer by saying,
Do good in thy good pleasure unto Zion.
Build thou the walls of Jerusalem.
In like manner, those who have needed mercy,
and have pleaded for mercy, and have received
much mercy, are usually those who are most
anxious that the people of God should be
happy, that the cause of God should prosper,
that the truth of God should speedily overthrow
error, and that the Christ of God should
be exalted and glorified in the earth.
I do not expect to say anything upon
this subject which will interest those who have
no love for the Church of God.
But those who belong to her, and who
are spending their lives to promote her welfare
because she is the bride of Christ, will,
I trust, find something in what I say
which will interest and perhaps encourage them.
I shall come at once to the text
and notice that first, we must expect a
measure of decrease in the Church.
And then secondly, we may expect a great
increase in the Church.
And thirdly, from what this text has to
say upon that subject, and for other reasons
also, we ought to be encouraged to seek
the increase of the Church of God.
First then, dear friends, there is a decrease
going on in the Church of God on
earth.
Zion is represented here as mourning for the
children that she had lost.
The Jewish church in the olden times saw
her sons and daughters slain with the sword
or carried away captive.
Afterwards, she saw the great majority of the
nation refusing Christ and turning away from Him,
and thus the Jewish church was minished and
brought very low.
The same thing has happened in many other
cases, and I am going to apply the
text to ourselves and our own churches.
We must naturally expect to see in each
separate church of Jesus Christ a certain process
and measure of decrease.
For first, some are being drafted from us
to supply the choirs of heaven with fresh
ministry.
That is a happy source of loss which
we would not stop if we could.
Peradventure, in the case of each sheaf that
is gathered into the heavenly garner, there are
some who would feign detain it to the
loss of that particular sheaf and also to
the loss of the great husbandman.
When we speak as we ought concerning those
who are thus taken home, we thank God
that when the shocks of corn are fully
ripe, they are no longer left in the
field to suffer through the falling showers or
the blighting mildew, but they are carried away
to their proper place in the garner of
God.
Therefore, beloved, dare ye not the saints with
dolorous music but sing psalms of praise as
you bear them to the grave.
I like the old Puritan style of funeral
when the body of the believer was borne
to the tomb upon men's shoulders and the
surviving friends sang psalms and hymns as they
marched along.
Their faith taught them that they had no
need to sorrow as those that are without
hope, so they took care always to mingle
the music of a joyful faith with the
tears that they shed over the departure of
those who had fallen asleep in Christ.
So let it always be with us.
As star by star descends below the horizon
of earth, it shines far more brightly in
the skies above.
Should not Jesus have his own?
Is it not still his prayer, Father, I
will that they also whom thou hast given
me be with me where I am, that
they may behold my glory?
Should we wish to detain them from their
Lord's embrace or rob the master of the
satisfaction of receiving home his loved ones?
No, certainly not.
That source of decrease has taken away lately
some of the godliest and most gracious of
ministers.
Some of the officers of the church who
seemed to be its pillars have been removed,
and others less known but equally gracious have
also been missed from our midst.
So must it continue to be.
Therefore let us not rebel against the blessed
necessity.
Who among us would wish to alter the
Lord's arrangement?
No, let this form of decrease still go
on.
Let the church on earth be the nursery
of the church above.
Let it be the school, the place of
education, the training ground, until the children shall
come of age and enter upon their inheritance
fully prepared to enjoy it to the praise
and glory of their Lord.
Each separate church will also have a measure
of decrease through the removal of God's servants
from one place to another.
This is a circumstance which is sometimes much
regretted, but I think it should not be
so.
Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge
shall be increased.
Often the removal of a Christian out of
a particular place is in order that he
may be more helpful to another community than
he is in his present position.
I have frequently seen brethren who were just
ordinary members of this church, good, useful people,
but they did not attain to any very
great prominence.
Yet in another place they have been exceedingly
useful.
I go into the country to preach, and
the deacon shakes hands with me, and as
I look at him I say, Ah, I
recollect you.
Well, sir, he replies, I moved away from
London some years ago, and the Lord has
been pleased to put me here so that
I may help this little cause.
It has been strengthened, I hope, by my
coming.
And I find the brother greatly developing by
being transplanted.
He is where the trees do not stand
so thickly together as they do here, and
he grows all the better for the change.
Sometimes under the shadow of some great tree
there is a large number of saplings, and
they grow there pretty well.
But by and by the big tree is
cut down, and it is not altogether a
loss, for then the minor trees that were
beneath it begin to develop and to become
strong forest trees themselves.
So is it sometimes that men are overshadowed
in one position, and their removal is for
their own development.
On the whole it is a gain to
the Church of God for certain churches to
lose some of their members.
Do not therefore always regret this source of
decrease.
For my part, I thank God for the
many whom we lose by immigration.
I am glad that some friends have gone
to America.
What would the United States have been at
this moment if it had not been for
the men of the Mayflower in the olden
times, and the many pilgrim fathers and pilgrim
sons who have since gone across the Atlantic
to be in that part of the earth?
Look still further away to Australia, so largely
peopled by those who are of our race.
What a mercy that it is so.
Would you have those lands given up to
Romanism, or to Mohammedanism, or to paganism?
God forbid, salt ought not to be kept
in a box.
It is meant to be rubbed into the
meat, and Christians are intended to be scattered
all over the carcass of this world, to
salt it all, and act with purifying and
preserving power in every place.
Let not the members of any one church
therefore sit down and sigh and cry because
their fellow members are removed.
There are as good fish in the sea
as ever came out of it, so try
to catch some more.
If your brethren and sisters are gone where
they can be more useful, God speed them
freely and cheerfully let them go.
A heart that should try to keep all
the blood within itself would be no source
of life to the body, nay, it could
not itself live, but the heart that continually
pumps in the blood and then pumps it
out again is the one that is serving
its proper purpose.
That is how churches should do.
Let them not be parsimonious, but rather prodigal
in the cause of God.
Depend upon it that if we decrease in
numbers because our friends depart to other spheres
of service for the Savior, it is not
a thing to weep over.
We must try to get in some new
members to take their places, and may God
prosper their endeavor.
But there is another source of decrease over
which we must greatly grieve, and that is
the backsliding of many professors.
Over this decrease I mourn even more than
over another, grievous as that is, namely, the
sifting process by which the chaff is removed
from the wheat.
For when the saints backslide, they are still
God's people, although their power for good, their
influence, their help to the church of God
is gone until they are brought back, and
that is very lamentable.
Churches lose much if not in number, yet
certainly in strength, in fervor, in power of
prayer by the declining in grace of some
who once did run well but who have
been hindered.
Pray much, dear friends, that God would keep
all who are members with us from growing
cold.
May they have their first love restored if
it is at all declining, and may they
have much more than that, for it is
little to keep just as we were when
we were spiritually made alive.
We ought to grow in grace.
Our first love should be like the kindling
of the fire when perhaps there are shavings
or straw set alight, and it burns apparently
more fiercely than it does afterwards.
Yet later on in the Christian life there
ought to be a steady flame like the
glow of the coals when they are turned
in the great to one solid ruby.
That steady glow of permanent love to the
Lord Jesus Christ is what we should seek
after, but we do not see it in
some of our fellow members.
Then by and by they cease their attendance
at the communion, and they are missing from
various forms of Christian work and service, and
so the church has non-efficient members, and
thus it has to regret a real decrease.
As for that other decrease over which we
mourn, the sifting by which the chaff is
separated from the wheat, how sadly true it
still is, as the beloved apostle wrote, they
went out from us, but they were not
of us.
For if they had been of us, they
would no doubt have continued with us, but
they went out that they might be made
manifest that they were not all of us.
There is a separating process always going on
in the professing church, and the most effectual
fan of all is a faithful ministry.
After a while, some of our hearers do
not like what we say.
It is too personal, too cutting, too searching.
They want to listen to that kind of
preaching which will allow them to go on
comfortably in their sins and to keep up
a name to live even while they are
dead.
How constantly our Lord's teaching kept on sifting
His disciples.
After one of His utterances concerning human inability
apart from divine grace, we read, from that
time many of His disciples went back and
walked no more with Him.
As He continually brought out some of the
deeper truths, as His disciples were able to
bear them, there were certain of the mixed
multitude that had joined with His followers who
went off this way and that way.
So is it ever, and so must it
be under the faithful preaching of the Word.
And you must not be astonished or grieved
when it is so.
It is a gain to any church to
lose such members as these, for the mixed
multitude usually falls a lusting as it did
in the olden time.
Half the sin in the wilderness came not
from the children of Israel, but from the
riffraff and rabble that went up out of
Egypt with them, that were mingled among them
to their hurt.
Do not, you dear friends, ever believe that
the true saints of God can finally turn
away from Him and be lost.
There was a notable sermon preached last Sunday
in St. Paul's Cathedral against the perseverance of
the saints.
Did you notice why it was preached, and
the whole tone and tenor of it?
It was this.
If the saints shall finally persevere, why then
do we not need the sacraments?
Ah, that is the great secret.
Calvinism is the death of priestcraft.
Calvinism is the end of sacramentalism, and hence,
sacraments must be cried up, and God's everlasting
love is to be proved to be mutable,
and the covenant to be founded on an
if and an and, and the Christ of
God is, after all, to be just a
toy for priests to play with.
The preacher perhaps unintentionally let the cat out
of the bag.
The sacraments must be cried up, the priests
must be kept up, and everything else must
go.
But we do not believe any such teaching
as that.
We still hold to it that when Christ
gives to his sheep eternal life, they shall
never perish, neither shall any pluck them out
of his hands, and yet there are some
that come in among his sheep that are
only goats or wolves in sheep's clothing, and
after a time, these depart, and the church
thus apparently decreases.
But so it must be to the end,
even as Judas went to his own place,
yet the apostles did not really lose by
his departure, they were rather the gainers thereby,
and as those who are not true converts
go out from her, the church need not
lament except for their sakes, certainly not for
her own.
I've brought this subject forward because I may
be addressing some brethren who see the tide
running out in their churches, and they are
very sad as they watch the ebb.
I have not seen much of that sort
of thing myself, but the least ebb troubles
me, and I go before God in prayer
about it.
I cannot bear really to lose one of
the members of my church or to see
one of them turn aside from the company
of the faithful, yet there is another side
to this picture, and we must not shut
our eyes to it.
So I ask you now to consider with
me the second part of our subject, and
that is there is an increase to be
expected in the church of God.
There are new converts yet to come in,
as says my text, these children which Zion
is to have after she has lost the
others, and brethren, these new converts are needful.
No church can be healthy without the constant
infusion of fresh blood.
Unless there are new converts, you cannot see
the church built up.
They often help to keep the old members
warm and zealous.
How I like at a prayer meeting to
hear a brother pray for the first time,
and I am not greatly grieved even if
he breaks down, for it is the best
kind of praying in the world when a
man breaks down.
Such an incident puts a sense of reality
into the whole meeting.
Our good old friends who could not break
down but must inevitably run on till the
winding was all worked out were not always
the most edifying to us, but those who
from very passion of earnestness cannot find words
in which to express their feelings, and so
come to a pause with a sigh or
a groan or a flood of tears often
do us the most good.
The young converts are also quick in inventing
new ways of usefulness, and they venture to
do things which some consider imprudent.
Oh, how I love that word, imprudent, in
such a connection.
I like imprudent young people.
The more imprudent they are in the cause
of God, in the judgment of stolid, cold
-hearted professors, the more I rejoice in them,
for imprudence which believes in God and dares
to do exploits in His strength is far
preferable to that prudence which has no faith
and is therefore a poor, dead, useless thing.
So you see that the church needs new
converts, and therefore she ought to have every
preparation for their reception.
There should always be an arrangement in every
church to afford welcome to the coming ones.
Everything should be in readiness for the reception
of the newborn converts.
They should scarcely have to ask for admission,
and certainly as soon as they come, they
should see that it is the church's joy
to welcome them.
Hence we should always be on the lookout
for them.
We ought to look for new converts every
Sunday.
I do not think any sermon ought to
be preached without each one of you Christian
people saying, I wonder whether God has blessed
the message to this stranger who has been
sitting next to me.
I will put a gentle question to him
and see if I can find out.
I have known some hearers to be annoyed
at such a question being put to them
by an earnest brother.
Do not be annoyed, dear friend, if you
can help it, because you are very likely
to be treated in that way again.
It is our custom to do it here,
so you will have to put up with
it.
The only way to get over the annoyance
is to give your heart to Christ and
to settle the matter once for all.
Then the next time you come here, you
will not be asked the question because they
will know you are, for they will recognize
your happy face.
Or if anyone else should ask you the
question, you will give such a glad answer
to it that you too will rejoice together.
We expect people to be converted when they
come here.
So much is the case that I know
a friend who came to take a sitting.
I will not point it out, but I
know just where he is now occupying it.
And he said that he must see me
before he took the sitting.
He said, I understand that if I take
a sitting here, you will expect me to
be converted.
I said, oh yes, I do expect that.
Well, he replied, I cannot guarantee that.
No, my good man, I answered.
I know you cannot, but you use the
word expect in a different sense from what
I do.
I hope you will be converted through coming
here.
That is what I mean.
Oh, he said, I hope so too.
And that is just what did happen.
When people come to the house of God
and they expect to be saved and we
expect it too, it is tolerably certain that
they will be converted before long.
We may rejoice and bless God if you
live in an atmosphere of holy expectancy, where
the great door stands wide open for the
prodigal son to come back, where all in
the house are on the watch for his
return, where they keep on sending letters to
him to ask him to come home.
Is there not a good hope that such
a wanderer will indeed return and that the
great father will be made glad?
Churches need converts and they should be on
the lookout for them and all who love
the Lord should labor earnestly on their behalf.
All of us who believe in Jesus should
seek, as God helps us according to our
individual talent, to bring others to the dear
Savior's feet.
If we do this, we shall often be
made to recollect that all true conversion comes
from God alone.
There is no possibility of converting anybody by
persuasion, by logic, by rhetoric or anything of
the sort.
It is the work of God and the
work of God alone.
Though he uses instrumentality in almost every case,
yet he will not use that instrumentality which
thinks itself sufficient for the work.
He will make us know that we are
nothing, and then he will make everything of
us.
He does not mind how much he makes
of his servants when all that he does
for them brings them the more glory to
his own name, and they do not even
with their little finger touch the honor of
it or wish to do so.
When we come to that point and we
are all pleading and laboring for an increase
to the church, it will come.
And when it comes, it is probable that
we shall be astonished at the number of
those that come.
The children which thou shalt have after thou
hast lost the other shall say again in
thine ears, The place is too straight for
me.
Give place to me that I may dwell.
Or, to quote another text, the church shall
say, Who are these that fly as a
cloud and as the doves to their windows?
I wish I could put it into the
heads of some Christian people that when there
are large additions to a church, the new
members are not necessarily at all inferior to
those who come in by slow degrees and
in small numbers.
My own solemn impression is that it is
more probably a work of God in conversion
when there are many than when there are
but few.
For look, when there are few converts, the
tendency of human nature is to encourage as
many as possible to come forward, and in
the process to bring some who, if more
caution had been used, the more true judgment
exercise might have been bidden to stand back
for a while.
The tendency of the minister and of everybody
else is to try to bring in some
when but few are being converted.
And the probability is that they will not
all of them prove to be true Christians.
But then when there are a great many
candidates moving forward, I can vouch for it
that we become even more earnest than usual
not to receive any but those who are,
so far as we can judge, truly converted.
Every elder is doubly watchful at such a
time, and everybody tries, if possible, to prevent
an enthusiasm which might deceive people into the
notion of their being Christians when they are
not.
We feel that we can afford, as it
were, to use many sieves and strainers, many
tests by which to try whether they really
are the children of God or not, whether
they are resolved and determined that they will
follow Christ at all hazards.
I say not this as though I would
depreciate the work of God in the conversion
of ones and twos and threes.
No, no.
I bless God for them, but I want
to make it clear that when great numbers
of converts come, it is wrong of people,
for that reason, to think that it is
not the work of God.
I should, on the contrary, conclude that it
is the work of God when many are
saved at one time.
If Peter, when he preached on the day
of Pentecost, had been the means of the
conversion of half a dozen of his heirs,
it would have been a thing for which
to praise God, and no one ought to
have suspected the genuineness of the half dozen.
But as Peter's ministry was blessed of God
to three thousand, there was not any the
more reason to say that there was one
too many.
Recollect also, dear friends, that they were all
baptized before night, and the whole of the
three thousand were received into the church that
same day.
Many critics might have said, Oh, dear, there
is far too much excitement.
Are you afraid of excitement, brother?
You have excitement in political affairs, you have
excitement in business matters, you have excitement in
your family.
What excitement there was in your house when
but one little stranger came there!
And shall there be no excitement in the
church of God when souls are born there?
Why, surely we may be permitted to share
in a divine excitement, for there is an
excitement in heaven.
Our Lord Jesus has told us that there
is joy in the presence of the angels
of God over one sinner that repenteth.
There was considerable excitement when the prodigal son
came home.
It was so great that they killed the
fatted calf and had a festival of joy,
and there was holy merriment in the house.
It was the scene of intense excitement.
And I think within reasonable bounds, within such
bounds as true reason would dictate from the
great events that are happening, for the conversion
of a soul is the grandest event in
human history next to the redemption, there must
be a blessed excitement among the people of
God.
Dear friends, expect great numbers of sinners to
be converted by the proclamation of the gospel.
I remember praying when I went to preach
in the great shed at Bedford, belonging to
Mr. Howard, the plowmaker, that God would be
pleased to bring at least some few souls
to himself by that service.
Dear old Mr. Howard, a Wesleyan friend who
has since gone home to heaven, kept on
saying, Amen, Amen, Amen, while I was praying.
But he did not say Amen to that
particular petition.
When I went home to the house, he
said to me, I joined with you in
all your prayer, except when you asked that
God would at least convert a few people.
Why, my dear friend, said he, did you
not pray that God would convert every soul
there?
I said, I will tonight, Mr. Howard.
I am rebuked by what you have said.
We do not ask enough of God.
Open your mouth wide and he will fill
it.
Oh, that we would open our mouths wide
in large request to God that he would
bring in the converts by hundreds of thousands
to the glory of his holy name.
The next thing that was a subject for
astonishment to Zion was how those converts came
to be born at all.
She inquired in the language of the text,
Who hath begotten me these?
The reason was that she did not feel
as if she had any power to bring
forth all these.
Why, said she, I have been in a
sad state.
I have lost my children and am desolate,
a captive, and removing to and fro.
How did it ever happen that all these
should be my children?
Ah, brethren, sometimes we ask the same question.
Yesterday I had a joy day.
All the bells of my heart did ring.
While many of you had been away at
the seaside, I thought there was a little
difference in the numbers coming to here.
And when I sat to see inquirers, there
did not seem to be quite so many
as usual coming forward, and I was troubled
about it.
But I came yesterday and I had so
many sheaves that the cart was loaded with
them.
And my helpers came to me every now
and then and said, What a joyful day.
I do not know whether all the friends
whom I saw yesterday are here, but they
delighted my soul with the stories they told
me of what the grace of God had
done for them.
I bless God and take courage as I
see another great slice cut out of devildom
and transferred to the kingdom of Christ.
Quite a number of people who had never
known the Lord or anything about Him, outsiders
altogether, had dropped in here and heard the
word and found Christ.
And they kept on coming hour after hour
till I was weary with the blessed task
of speaking to them one by one about
their souls.
And as I went home, I kept saying
to myself, How has all this come about?
Because I have often felt so dull and
heavy when I have been preaching.
Who hath begotten me these?
And dear friends, if God blesses you in
your Sunday school classes, you also will say,
However has this come about?
What could I have said that could have
brought my scholars to Christ?
If the Lord shall bless you much, my
dear brother, in your preaching, you will more
and more marvel that ever He should use
such a poor tool as you are.
I do not mean that you are a
worse tool than I am, for I feel
that I am still a poor instrument than
you are.
But I often wonder that God uses me
as He does, and I think you will
also marvel that He uses you.
When the church has grown feeble, when she
has seemed to have no hope that God
should bless her, and when He comes and
visits her, and a multitude of converts is
suddenly brought forth, she may well say, Who
hath begotten me these, seeing I have lost
my children and I am desolate, a captive,
and removing to and fro?
Take comfort then, beloved, from the fact that
whatever the decreases in the church may be,
we may also expect increase.
But in their number, the converts will surprise
us, and in their being converted at all,
we shall greatly marvel.
But what Zion wondered at next was how
they had been nurtured.
For she says, Who hath brought up these?
They were not merely born, but they had
been brought up.
And we also meet with persons who come
forward to tell us that they are converted
to Christ, and they are by no means
fools.
Nay, but when we begin to question them
concerning the things of God, they answer us
sensibly and intelligibly.
They do not need us to lead them
like little children and to put the words
into their mouth, for they know what to
say.
Yet some of them have only been converted
about a month, and they have not been
used to hearing the gospel.
But since they have heard it, they seem
to have sucked it in like Gideon's fleece
drank in the dew.
Many doctors of divinity make a dreadful muddle
of their theology, but these dear converts are
as clear as possible upon what they believe.
They have it all at their fingers' ends,
and they can tell what covenant means, and
what substitution means, and what regeneration means.
We say, Who has brought up these?
It seems so wonderful to us.
Has it not often been so to you
also, dear friends?
Yet all the while we have been forgetting
the teaching of the Holy Spirit, and we
have said, Why, my poor teaching could not
have taught them all this.
No, nor has it taught them all this.
There is a higher teacher than the best
of ministers.
There is a better teacher than the most
earnest and the most advanced of Christians, and
he still fulfills that gracious promise, All thy
children shall be taught of the Lord.
A further cause of wonder was the sudden
appearance of this great increase.
Zion inquires, These, where had they been?
Ah, that is just what I thought and
said last night, and that is why I
took this text, for it kept coming to
my mind.
These, where had they been?
Some of them had been seen here ever
so long, but others of them had never
been seen at all, except one or two
Thursday nights.
Lately I noticed them, perhaps at one or
two prayer meetings, and I began to think
that there was something good coming to pass
with them, or else they would not have
come.
So I kept saying to myself as I
went home, These, where had they been?
A month ago I could not have found
them.
These, where had they been?
They have sprung up and come forward all
of a sudden through the blessed working of
the Spirit of God.
These, where had they been?
Shall I tell you where they had been?
Some of them had been in godly families,
where with fathers and mothers praying for them,
no wonder that they came to close with
Christ.
Some of them had been in the Sunday
school, in classes where brethren and sisters love
their children and never rest till they bring
them to decision for Christ.
It is not so very marvellous that they
should by and by come forward.
These, where had they been?
Well, they had been under the influence of
Christian wives, Christian children, sometimes Christian brothers and
sisters.
And so at last the gracious influence took
effect upon them.
By the power of God's Spirit and out
they came.
Thank God that there are great numbers still
under those sacred influences, for they also are
sure to come in due time and say,
we are on the Lord's side.
And then there were some others.
Where had they been?
Well, they had long been listening to the
gospel, regularly sitting in their pews.
And we had heard of them as people
who had been attracted by our ministry for
twenty years, but who did not know the
Lord.
What a blessing it was for them that
even after the hardening influence of listening so
long to the gospel had operated upon them,
for it had such an influence in some
cases, yet at last God Himself touched the
rock and the water streamed forth.
There are some such persons now coming forward
to join us in church fellowship.
Let us pray for all the rest of
our fellow worshippers who are unconverted, that they
also may come after them.
But there were others whom I saw yesterday
about whom I might well ask.
These, where had they been?
On the Lord's day, at home in their
shirt sleeves, on weeknights at the theatre or
the music hall, finding enjoyment in the lowest
form of amusement.
Where had they been?
Never troubling church or chapel, some of them
scarcely ever entering such an edifice at all,
but God in His providence brought them for
once to hear the word.
And as one said to me, I laid
hold of something, and something laid hold of
me, and I shall never part with it,
for it will never part with me.
This is how it happened with many utterly
irreligious people, those who had no fear or
thought of God.
And there were some were still who had
gone into sin and transgression and crime, but
they had been induced by some kind friend
to come and listen to the gospel.
So there they were to tell of free
grace and dying love, and to testify what
infinite mercy had done for them.
These, where had they been?
Well, I cannot tell you where they had
all been.
Some had been at death's dark door, buried
in sorrow and in sin, in poverty and
in vice.
Others, though, they were not apparently so bad
as these, were notwithstanding quite as much lost,
for they were in the dark wood of
self-righteousness, boasting that they were not as
other men, and that they were as good
as they ought to be, and so deceiving
themselves.
Now it is just as such a marvel
of mercy for God to save a self
-righteous man as it is for him to
save a drunkard or a harlot.
And it takes as much of the almighty
grace of God to tear a man away
from his own righteousness as to pull him
away from his own sin.
Oh, the wonders of redeeming love!
That out of every place he can fetch
its thousands upon thousands to make the church
glad and to cry in sweet surprise, these,
where had they been?
I have no time to dwell on the
third point, further than just to say that
all things should encourage this church.
And the same rule applies to every church
that God blesses, to seek larger increase.
For first, dear brethren, there is the same
power to convert ten thousand as there is
to convert one.
The Lord who brought you in can bring
thousands in.
And if he adds to our church some
hundreds now and then, why should he not
be constantly doing it?
His arm is not shortened.
He is still ready to bless us.
Besides, we ought to be encouraged by the
fact that converts come in answer to prayer.
Notice that these additions to our church have
come just when we have been praying more
than ever.
Every Thursday night before the service, there is
a prayer meeting at six o'clock in
which a few friends gather specially to pray
that their pastor may be helped to preach.
And tonight, I suppose, there were three or
four hundred gathered together with that object.
And it is real praying, let me tell
you, short, deep, earnest cries to God for
a blessing.
And the preacher cannot help preaching when he
is prayed for like that.
And as that prayer meeting has increased in
intensity and power, a blessing has already begun
to come.
Some of us are conscious of it.
We cannot help seeing it.
Is it possible for me not to believe
in prayer?
Can I deny that there is such a
thing as the electric fluid when I see
a tower shivered by the lightning flash?
If I were fool enough, I could deny
that.
But I never could be such a fool
as to deny the power of prayer, which
I see every day exhibited in all sorts
of things, in all sorts of ways.
Very largely, in proportion as we pray, God
blesses the word.
It has been so for years, and they
who have been among us and know can
bear witness that this is an unexaggerated statement
of fact.
Well then, if that be so, let us
pray.
If prayer can be the means of bringing
souls to Christ, let there be no stint
in that matter.
And further, since the from all sorts of
places, let us carry the gospel into all
sorts of places.
There is not any part of London, however
bad it may be, where God may not
have an elect soul in it.
Go after him then, down in the deepest
kennel, in the worst court, in the filthiest
houses, following the vilest occupation.
There may be some whom God, in mercy,
means to bless through you.
So go after them, and go after them
at once.
You can never tell where God's chosen ones
are.
These, where had they been, is the question
concerning those who have come to him.
And where they were, there are others like
them.
How many sheep are straying, lost from the
Saviour's fold?
Upon the lonely mountain they shiver with the
cold.
Within the tangled thickets where poison vines do
creep, and over rocky ledges wander the poor
lost sheep.
Oh, come, let us go and find them.
In the paths of death they roam.
At the close of the day it will
be sweet to say, I have brought some
lost one home.
What a little thing God often blesses!
To save a soul, a word from a
sister, a little note from a Christian woman,
half a word in these isles.
A man who was never before spoken to
about his soul, has not been pleaded with
for five minutes before he comes under conviction
of sin, and soon he finds the Saviour.
The very smallest thing has been made the
means of bringing souls to Christ.
Will you not, dear friends, make use of
those little things?
Will you not use everything?
Will you not be willing to spend and
be spent for Christ in this blessed work
of soul-saving?
In the morning sow thy seed, and in
the evening withhold not thine hand, for thou
knowest not whither shall prosper, either this or
that, or whether they both shall be alike
good.
Go on, dear brethren and sisters, to cry
mightily to God, and to labour earnestly for
Him, till we shall, in glad surprise, bless
and magnify His grace, that multitudes are brought
to Him, and that His name is made
to be yet more renowned.
Let us constantly have your prayers at home
as well as here, and the Lord be
with you all.
Amen.