Suggested by the loss of the "Princess Alice" September 8th, 1878 by C. H. SPURGEON (1834-1892)
"He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters." Psalms 18:16 .
I do not know how you feel, my brethren, at this time, but as for myself, a heavy cloud seems to hang over me all the day. The overwhelming calamity of last Tuesday, so crushing and so far reaching, of which we must have spoken to each other, I suppose, every hour during the past week, cannot be removed from the thoughts of our minds or from the affections of our hearts. The whole of London may well be likened to that ancient city of which we read "The city Shushan was perplexed." Every man has been asking his fellow, "Have you lost a friend?" and no man wonders when the answer is, "Alas, I have been sorely bereaved." In our own immediate circle we have borne a special share of the grief, for five, at least, of those who are in church membership with us have been removed from our midst, and we can scarcely speak with any of our brethren without discovering that they have lost some connection or friend. Alas, that unhappy vessel has sunk with a more precious freight than ever loaded Spanish galleon, and her wreck has brought a greater loss to our city than if she had carried untold gold. We cannot help thinking of this dire affliction, and, therefore, we had better think of it with some practical purpose. I believe that this sudden grief comes, like every other event, from God, and comes as a voice from God to this our city a voice which, we trust, will be heard and regarded. "The Lord's voice crieth unto the city, and the man of wisdom shall see thy name: hear ye the rod, and who hath appointed it." We are of the mind of that old prophet who said, "Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?" (Amos 3:6 .) Cometh there anything in the form of calamity upon the sons of men without the permission, control, and overruling of the Lord? Assuredly not. "The Lord killeth and maketh alive: he bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth up." I know that many minds are so stunned by this tremendous blow, that they can hardly think of God in connection with it, and half wish to believe that the Omnipresent was not there. The problem staggers their reason, and they are unable to leave it among the mysteries of faith. As yet they have not gained the confidence of Job, who denied that affliction cometh out of the dust, but attributed it to the Lord, saying, "He taketh away: who can hinder him?" Even some who love the Lord, and trust him, are somewhat of the mind of Mary and Martha when they said, "Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died"; while others who should know better would timidly conceal their belief in an overruling providence, lest the ribald world should scoff at them. Let them scoff, I say; for our God is none the less glorious because his ways are far above and out of our sight. It is an atheistical thought which would put God out of any place; if he be not everywhere, he is nowhere; omnipresence is an essential of Godhead. If his hand ruleth not over evil it is not omnipotent, and thus again it lacks another essential attribute of deity. It would be dreadful to suppose him to have a limited dominion: "His kingdom ruleth over all." We are not as those who believe in two co-existent forces, each supreme, one of whom shall create disasters, and the other shall distribute blessings. The prince of evil is, according to our faith, subordinate to the great Lord of all. Thus saith Jehovah, by the mouth of his servant Isaiah, "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and I create evil: I the Lord do all these things." He reigneth in the calm summer's day, and gives us the precious fruits of harvest, but he is equally present and regnant in the hurricane which destroys, or the blight which desolates. His providence speeds the ship to its desired haven, but it is equally his providence which sinks the barque and its mariners to the bottom of the sea. It is his power which looses the bands of Orion and binds the sweet influence of the Pleiades; his are the lightnings as well as the sunbeams, the thunderbolts as well as the raindrops. He is able to make the heaven as iron and the earth as brass, so that our land shall not yield her increase; he can call for a famine and break the whole staff of bread; for famine, pestilence, and war are as rods in his hand. Everywhere is God, and in all things his hand is present: in the things which seem to us to be evil as well as in the events which appear to us to be good, God is at work. He doeth no wrong, for God is not tempted of evil, neither tempteth he any man, but we speak of physical evil, which causeth sorrow, pain, and death among men, and we say that certainly God is there. If not a sparrow falleth to the ground without our Father, we are sure that no great calamity can befall us apart from him. He is not far from us in our deepest sorrow, and however we may trace a calamity to the carelessness or the mistake of men, these are but the second causes, and we see behind all mere detail the permit of the Lord. If it were not so, mourners would be deprived of the greatest reason for submission, and the surest source of consolation. Even where a terrible event is the result of crime God is not excluded. He shares not the guilt, but he overrules the act. Think of the crucifixion of our Lord, and remember that though the sin of it lay heavy upon those who perpetrated it, yet the grand design of it was God's. Read Peter's words in the Acts: "Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain." Who shall deny that God was at Calvary, though sin there reached its culminating point? We freely admit that we do not understand this, and therefore we do not attempt to explain it; but we believe and adore. Happily, we need not attempt to justify the ways of God to man, for he asks no defense at our hands, and deigns not to give any account of his matters: this only is our resolve, "Though he slay me yet will I trust in him." Now, the question which has very naturally suggested itself to many is this, If there be a providence, why does it permit these terrible evils? It is dreadful that human life should be lost on such a scale: God is omnipotent, nobody doubts that; why, then, does he not interfere to save? That shall suggest to us the first point of our discourse this morning, that miraculous interpositions in the affairs of this life are not to be expected, and we may not hope literally to use the words of our text and say," He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters." Still, secondly, we shall note that, according to our text, providential interpositions of another kind are vouchsafed; and thirdly, and best of all, gracious interpositions are given for the salvation of men. What though the Lord doth not nowadays send from above, and take his servants, and draw them by miracle out of the waters of the river, yet doth he uplift us from the depths of trouble, and especially doth he upbear us from the deeps of sin to our eternal salvation, for thus saith the Lord, "I will bring again from Bashan, I will bring my people from the depths of the sea." I. First, then, MIRACULOUS INTERPOSITIONS IN THE CALAMITIES OF THIS LIFE ARE NOT TO BE EXPECTED. I am not standing here as an advocate for God to defend his character because he does not thus interpose, for to objecters his sole answer is, "Nay, but O man, who art thou that repliest against God?" If you will accuse your Maker he will not care to answer you. You who have forged the accusation may fashion an answer, if it seem good unto you. Yet there is a difficulty which none can deny, and that difficulty lies in a fact. Why is there any evil at all, seeing that the good God is almighty, and sits upon the throne? This is the old puzzle which none can answer. The negro put it in a very natural form when he asked the missionary, if God be so much stronger than the devil, why does he not kill the devil and make an end of his mischief? Just so: that is the top and bottom of the matter. There is the question, but who can answer it? A fool may raise in an hour more objections than the wisest man could remove in a century. Now, the cleverest theory will not alter facts. What you and I may think is a very small matter compared with what really is, and it is quite certain that there is moral evil in the world, and that there is also a God; that there is physical evil in the world, and yet love is supreme; and that the Almighty permits fire and water to destroy his creatures, and does not interpose to rescue them, and yet he is full of tenderness and pity. There be some of course who will dare to condemn their Maker, and call him by I know not what horrible names. I have even heard such a word as "monster" hissed from between proud lips. Again I say it is not worth our while to answer such objectors, because such persons are not pervious to explanation, nor willing to receive it; and then again, it is a small matter to the Most High what such persons may think of him. He doeth as he pleases and asks no leave from his creatures. But now just for a minute let us consider the question which we trust is modestly proposed. Suppose that every time a great danger threatened we might expect a miraculous interposition from heaven, what then? The supposition is not absurd, for there might be such an interposition: we must admit the possibility since God is almighty. The train is thundering along the iron way, it will dash into another, and many lives will be destroyed, but if the Lord willed it he could put his hand upon the engine and stay it in its full career. The vessel freighted with eight hundred lives is about to sink: but if the Lord willed it he could buoy it up in the hollow of his hand. Yet he does not move; the iron road is strewn with the dead, the river is gorged with corpses. We do not know all the reasons for this non-interference, but yet we think we can see a little, which little we will think upon. For, first, such interpositions would change the whole arrangement of the world: it would not be the same place at all. The Lord has made this world, and he governs it by certain fixed laws. If those laws were variable, and were continually being altered, it would be another form of creation altogether, and man had need to be another creature. His physical, moral, and even spiritual condition would be changed from top to bottom. It was the Lord's arrangement that he should put forth his power in certain ways which we call the laws of nature, and by that arrangement he abides. There is no such independent force as "nature," as some are always dreaming; nor is there any energy in mere laws of nature apart from God's own power. You may write all the laws you like, but there is no power in laws, there must be a power in the king to carry out the laws. All power emanates from God, be it what it may; he is the source and fountain of all the forces which operate throughout creation; but he has been pleased from the beginning to determine that his power shall usually go forth in certain ways, and under fixed laws and regulations. He can suspend those laws when he pleases; he can quench the violence of fire, stop the mouths of lions, and make water to stand upright as a heap; but he has not often done so, and in these days he never does so. I think we can in a measure see why; for if such were the case continually, the whole plan and purpose with which he made the present world would have been abandoned, and another mode of power would have taken its place. Recollect, too, that whatever the plan of God is, it is now being carried out under the shadow of the Fall. There had been, I suppose, neither pain, nor sickness, nor sighing, nor death, had there been no sin. If had been possible for a race to have multiplied from the glades of Eden, and to have gone forth into a wider Paradise as pure and holy as Adam first came from his Maker's hands, I can believe that there would have been no famine, no war, no catastrophe of shipwreck by sea, nor of accident by land; but however multitudinous the human race might have become its records would have been all unstained with agonizing details such as those which blacken the broad-sheets of to-day. But, alas, man has fallen, and to a race in such a condition it would not be consistent that everything should be of sunlight and summer; there must now be heard the roar of the storm and the cry of death, as the fruit of sin. Render calamity impossible and what mark would there be of the divine displeasure for man's revolt? Wherein indeed would sin differ as to its consequences from obedience and holiness? Think for a little, and you will see reason for God's staying his hand from rescue. Furthermore, if interpositions were given to save the lives of godly men alone, as some would have it, then this world would became the place of judgment, which it is not intended to be. It still remains among many persons as a superstition that if there is an accident, and people suffer, there must have been some special sin in the victims of the disaster; and yet our Lord has told us that the men upon whom the tower of Siloam fell were not sinners above others, and the Galileans who were slain by Pilate were not sinners above other Galileans. I pray you dismiss from your minds the idea that a sudden death is necessarily a judgment. Never draw any inference from the destruction of a building, or the wreck of a ship, or an explosion, or aught of that nature, as to the character of the persons who perish, for if you do you will be guilty of cruel injustice. What if some gracious man be spared, ascribe the deliverance to providence, but do not suppose that those who perished were less gracious than he. You shall find that men of bad character sometimes escape where saints are left to die. Because I said the other day that providence had saved a certain godly woman, foolish persons drew the inference that I condemned those who perished. No sentiment could have been further from my mind. I ascribe to providence death as well as life, and draw no inference as to the character of the person. What if a man has found a watery grave in the Princess Alice, do not therefore imagine that God was angry with him, for he may now be in Paradise, and at any rate the same wreck carried down with it many of the Lord's beloved. Now, if God were to interpose and save his own people whenever they were in danger, this world would become the place of judicial separation, which it is not and is not meant to be: judgment is reserved for the world to come. When Christ shall descend from heaven with a shout, and sit upon his great white throne then will he separate the tares from the wheat, but now they are to grow together. Then will he put the goats on the left and the sheep on the right, but for the time present they feed in the same pastures. One event happeneth to them all; as it happeneth to the fool so happeneth it to the wise. This is not the land of judgment, but of longsuffering; not the place wherein God giveth sentence, but waiteth patiently awhile. There is a judgment of nations in this world, but that of individuals, with rare exceptions, is reserved for the final account. Beloved, note once again that if God were to interpose in the case of all calamities it would involve many evils. For, observe, if next year the mass of farmers should refuse to sow the fields, if over whole nations the land should be left to produce only weeds, there would be great scarcity of corn. Suppose that in such cases God should interpose and cause harvests suddenly to grow by miracle, that our teeming millions might escape starvation, what would be the consequence? Why, it would encourage idleness everywhere; men would say, "The Lord is too good to let us starve, and therefore we may allow the plough to rust, and dance away the hours." Would that be well? Suppose again that when a contagious disease comes into a district the Lord miraculously prevented it from being fatal, although the carelessness of men may have left feverlairs in rotting, overcrowded houses enough to pollute the very air. Suppose, I say, that we all neglected sanitary laws, and then knew that a merciful God would not let the poor people die of fever, or of cholera, then the filthiness of our cities would increase till they became huge dunghills, and man who is great enough now at polluting rivers and defiling God's earth in every imaginable way, would go on to turn the whole earth into one monstrous globe of rottenness. But now even pests and plagues and fevers have their good side, they are watchmen to sound an alarm, prophets to give us warning. They arouse man to discover the laws of his being, and thus they benefit the race. Suppose again that whenever there is a likelihood of there being an accident God were to send an angel at once to interpose, and avert the collision or the wreck, what would happen? Why then, of course, every railway and steamboat company might go in for accidents in any quantity, seeing they would be harmless, and might even become attractive. There would be no reason for keeping a watch at the ship's bow, and no necessity for breaks or signals. There would be no longer any need to be careful about human life, but we might each one be as reckless as he pleased, and gratify himself with experiments which could not end fatally. Such a state of things would destroy many of the virtues, and render many vices harmless. I cannot suppose a world regulated upon such a system; I can imagine God divinely interposing and suspending his own laws now and then, as pleaseth him, for some great purpose of instruction; but it appears wise and good for all concerned that, having made man what he is, the Creator should rather leave him to take the consequence of violating the fixed laws of matter than make those laws variable and uncertain. Again, dear friends, divine interpositions of a miraculous sort would not be attended with the advantage to the ungodly which we might suppose, because if there were miracles of mercy on the behalf of God's people to snatch them from a watery grave, or from the devouring element of fire, or from the deadly consequences of a collision, then we might expect to have, and naturally should have, miracles of judgment, too. If you get into the wilderness, and manna falls from heaven, and water leaps from the rock, remember you have also entered a land where the earth opens to swallow up Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, and where the very sand breeds fiery serpents to sting to death the rebels against God. You cannot have the mercy wonder interposing without having the judgment wonder side by side with it: and on the whole it is a more lenient mode of dealing on God's part to let sinners alone, and to let one event happen to all men for a while, because the longsuffering of God leadeth the sinner to repentance, and the sorrow that falleth upon the child of God is blessed to him. If all accidental deaths were punishments it would be a far more terrible state of things than that which is now before us; and therefore the matter is best as it is. If we had wonders of miraculous deliverance often before us they would not impress mankind as we imagine. If God were always suffering the wicked to drown or burn, and always snatching the righteous from the midst of every danger, men would not think much of it after all; they might be slightly impressed at first, but by-and-by they would harden their hearts. In Egypt there was light in the houses of the Israelites when all was dark with the Egyptians, and God smote Egypt heavily while he was blessing Israel; but this fact did not affect Pharaoh, for he only hardened his heart the more. When in the wilderness the Israelites, murmuring against God, saw some of their companions swallowed up and destroyed, it very little affected them; for soon after they began murmuring against Moses, and charged him with destroying the people of God. All things considered, the arrangement is best as it is, and the Lord knows it is so, and, therefore, continues the method of letting physical law take its course, although occasionally it may destroy hundreds of lives. Neither would it be so great a gain to the godly, as some imagine, always to have their lives spared in times of danger. We have to die some day, brothers and sisters, and we have nothing here below which might make us anxious to postpone the hour of our departure. It is as well to die one way as another: at least, there is small choice in the modes of death. If one were asked by what death he should glorify God, he might be long in the choosing, and probably would then choose that which would be most painful. Some are afraid to go to sea lest they should be drowned, and yet there is little reason for the fear. When a captain was asked whether he was not afraid to go to sea he said, "Not at all." "But your father was drowned, captain?" "Yes." "Your grandfather was drowned?" "Yes." "Your brothers have been drowned?" "Yes." "Are you not afraid to go to sea?" "No," said he, "not at all; for I may ask you the same question. Your father is dead?" "Yes." "Where did he die?" "In his bed." "And his father, where did he die?" "In his bed." "And his father?" "In his bed." "And your brothers, where have they died?" "In their beds." "Are you not, then, afraid to go to bed?" Certainly we must die somewhere or other, and we shall not die one single minute before the ordained period. I am a sufficient believer in predestination to feel sure that every bullet has its billet, and that no death can befall the man whom God ordains to live, God hath appointed all things, and his people are safe everywhere, whether they live or die. "Surely there is no enchantment against Jacob, nor divination against Israel;" the powers of darkness cannot harm us though they put forth all their craft and power. The Lord has declared that he who hath made God his refuge shall abide beneath his shadow, and therefore we may go where duty calls us without trembling, and we may die when God bids our spirit return without the slightest fear. We ask no immunity from death. Why should we be absolved from it? It is better to die than to live full often, inasmuch as it is better to be in heaven than to remain in banishment below. So there I leave that matter of the non-interposition of God to think very briefly of interpositions which do occur. II. PROVIDENTIAL INTERPOSITIONS ARE FREQUENT AMONG GOD'S PEOPLE: they can often say, "He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters." Divine interpositions come in the way of deliverance from floods of trouble. Have you not experienced them? How strikingly has God delivered some of us! What remarkable preservations of life have we enjoyed; not miraculous, certainly, but full of wonder for all that. We have as much reason to praise God for our deliverances as if the laws of nature had been suspended, for we have been quite as completely preserved. What helps we have had in the hour of sorrow, when one after another our beloved have been taken from us, or when they have gone to the very edge of the grave, and yet have been spared to us. How often have we been helped in business troubles and saved from impending failure or serious loss! In times of slander, when our character has been belied, how graciously has God brought to light our innocence! I say again, not by miracle, but yet very marvellously has our God delivered us. In answer to prayer God worketh in his own way for the good of his people without stopping one single wheel of providence: without violating one single law of nature, God is able to work the same end as we sometimes wish he would work by a miracle. He will not quench the violence of the flame, but yet a precious life shall be snatched from a burning house. He will not prevent the water from drowning, and yet in how many cases in answer to prayer have vessels been saved and the lives of men preserved by unexpected incidents! He will not stop the ordinary run of business, nor alter the way in which the world goes on, and yet he knows how to help the poor, and to bless the struggling tradesman, and to bring up the righteous from deep distress. A miracle is a rough procedure after all, if I may dare say so, compared with the Lord's present methods. The grandest achievement of all is for the Lord God to work miraculous results without miracles, to produce by common means, in answer to the cry of his servants, that which appears to be impossible without a suspension of natural laws. See how the Lord allows all the forces of nature to drive on in their ordinary course, and yet the outcome of it all is that his servant is delivered and his prayers answered. God doth this by very varied ways. We have known some who have been brought out of deep waters by having health suddenly restored to them, or by having the health of those upon whom their maintenance depended renewed. This is God's mercy, and let him be praised for it. Sometimes circumstances have greatly changed; a man has been going down hill for years as to his business, but something quite unexpected has happened, and he has just as gradually risen to a position of comfort. My friends, believe in the unexpected. I was about to utter a paradox, and say expect the unexpectable. Believe that God will do for you something which you know nothing about. The Lord always has a plan in reserve. You think he has reached his last, and you will be left to perish; but it is not so. At the right moment he will bring forth some new and surprising stroke of wisdom, which he did but postpone to the particular moment, so that when he performs it, and draws his servant out of deep waters, the praise and the glory will the more fully redound to his name. We have known the Lord save his servants in the hour of trouble by touching the hearts of their enemies; those that were most unkind and cruel have suddenly become the most generous and thoughtful. At other times enemies have died or have been put to confusion, like the wicked Haman when he plotted the destruction of the Jews. The Lord has hanged up Haman that his chosen might be delivered. Mordecai has gone from the king's gate to the king's house, and Haman has ascended from the king's table to the king's gallows. I cannot instance all the ways in which the Lord makes clear the pathway of his people, but this I know that often in our lives some of us have had to pause and sing, "He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters." Some will not see the hand of God, but I warrant you, brethren, those who have been delivered out of the deep waters will see it. Their experience teaches them that God is yet among us. Others may talk about "laws of nature," as if God were gone to sleep and had left the world wound up like a watch to go without him; but those who have been in sore affliction and tribulation, and have been brought out therefrom, will for ever bless and extol him who is a very present help in trouble. Yes, my brethren, the way by which we have come hitherto is as full of God as this city is full of men. There are deserts which the foot of man hath never trodden, but there is no wilderness where the foot of God hath not been. What say you, my beloved friends, you are not fanatics, neither has the enthusiasm of devotion carried you out of your minds; but are you not conscious of distinct providential deliverances? "Conscious of them," say you, "indeed, if we did not speak of them with joy and thankfulness, the very stones of the street would cry out against us for our wicked silence. Many and many a time hath he sent from above, and rescued us. We are, like Moses, drawn out of the waters, and like him we would be servants of the Lord." III. Now, thirdly, INTERPOSITIONS IN MATTERS OF GRACE ARE THE CHIEF OF ALL. As best I can I should like to conclude with a few words upon this subject. God does not, even to save the souls of his chosen, violate any of his laws. "The soul that sinneth, it shall die." "Every transgression shall have its just punishment and reward." Yet the Lord would save his people. How should he make these two things agree, how should he be just and yet the justifier of the ungodly? It is in the person of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ that we see how one law has been made to counteract and yet to honor another, to remove its direful consequence and yet to make it honorable. You recollect that the law of the Medes and Persians could not be altered; and there was a law made by Ahasuerus that on a certain day the people of all countries might gather themselves together and kill the Jews. Haman had promulgated this royal edict far and wide, and the king could not alter it. Mark the wise method by which the cruel law was met; they made another law, which was that the Jews might defend themselves, might slay those who tried to kill them, and take all their property for a spoil. This met the case, though no edict was revoked. Now, God does not and never will alter his law that sin must be punished; but forth comes another law that, inasmuch as the first sin was committed by a representative man, a representative man should be permitted to come in and bear the penalty which was consequent thereon. This has been done; no law has been broken, and yet God's mercy has had free course. Now let us think a minute or two upon this great salvation and how it is described in the text. "He sent from above." Oh, blessed Lord, the whole race of man was sinking in the old vessel of the covenant of works which had been cut in pieces by the first sin; they were all going down en masse to destruction. Then thou didst send from above. But who was he that was sent? Not the brightest of the cherubim nor the chief of the angelic band, but HE came, the messenger of the covenant, whom we delight in, the Son of God, the only begotten of the Most High, the brightness of his Father's glory. He was the Messiah, the sent one, and he descended from above that he might work out our redemption. Brethren, let your hearts leap for joy as you behold the messenger of the covenant of grace, even Jesus Christ, the adorable and ever blessed Son of the Highest. Now, note the next word, "He took me." When we had lost all hold on God then did this blessed messenger take hold on us. He accepted us as the Father's gift to him, and accepted a charge as the great Shepherd of the sheep, that he would keep and preserve those whom his Father gave him, though they were ready to perish. Then what a hold he took on us. He took not up angels, but he took up the seed of Abraham, by becoming a man. Babe in Bethlehem, laborer at Nazareth, suffering man at Gethsemane, thou hast taken indeed a hold on us, such as thou wouldst not relax in life or death! "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us," and so being sent from above he took hold upon us. Then what a wondrous drawing took place after that grip had once been given, He drew us out of many waters, entering into them himself, plunging into the rivers of grief and infirmity, and then into the waters of the curse, being "made a curse for us": descending deep, as it were, into the very depths of hell to bring up the Lord's jewels, that they might be delivered from the pit. Oh, the matchless uplifting which he gave to us when he drew us out of many waters by his own suffering life and agonizing death. Fix your eyes, brethren, upon the work of Jesus. See the human race all sinking. Behold how hopeless and helpless it is; and see him descending, walking the waters, snatching with his own right hand sinking men and women from the billows of destruction, and landing them on the Rock of Ages, putting a new song into their mouths. As you feel that you are partakers of this deliverance, let each one of you say, "He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters." This was the great deed itself, but, just a minute, I ask you to remember the application of it to your own experience. Do you recollect when you felt everything sinking from beneath you? My own self-wreck will help me to describe your experience. I had sailed on gallantly in the good vessel of my own works, hearing music, and full of delight, never dreaming of danger; but suddenly the law of God came along, moving unswervingly in its terrible course, and it cut into the vessel of my works, as though it had been vanity itself. Down it began to sink, and I with it. I looked around for something I could lay hold upon, but nothing availed. The priest was there and offered me his inventions, but I knew him of old, and knew that he would sink as well as I. What, then, could he do for me? Ceremonials were there, but I knew that they prove bubbles to a man who trusts in them. Hopes of salvation by self-mortification were there, and the like, but they clearly could not bear the weight of such a sinner as I was. I sank, I sank, nor had I will or wish to be saved, nor did I struggle for life; yet Jesus came, whose will of grace precedes our will, whose purpose of love outruns our desire for salvation. "He took me": well do I recollect his grasp. He took me and made me more conscious of my danger than I had been before. He took me, by his Holy Spirit, and I knew that he had taken me, for I began to feel his grip tightening upon me. He drew me gradually to look at him, to trust him, and to leave myself and all my hopes entirely in his hand, then he drew me right out of the many waters and made my heart to sing for joy. Do you not recollect the time with yourself? As you look with wonder upon some friend who has been rescued from the great calamity of this week, I want you to feel that you may look with equal wonder upon yourself, for you have experienced a greater rescue. You have been delivered from sinking into the pit that hath no bottom, a sinking down in sin and into the lower depths of corruption. He came from heaven, he took you, he drew you out of many waters, therefore praise and bless his name! You were too anxious to hope, and yet he taught you to hope in his mercy. You were too despairing to struggle, but he made you exercise holy violence to enter the kingdom. You were too weary and despondent to trust, but he led you to faith. His divine Spirit wrought all your works in you, and here you are sitting in this house of prayer this morning to say, "He hath delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling." Now, I should not wonder if since then you have been pretty nearly shipwrecked as to your spiritual hopes, and have a second and a third time been rescued. You have begun to grow somewhat cold, and you have wandered from the Lord, and you have, therefore, dreaded the total destruction of all true religion within your spirit. Then you have cried out in fear "I have been a hypocrite, or a mere formalist, and shall perish after all." But when you were ready to give all up under the temptation of the powers of darkness the Lord has again restored you. Has he not sent from above and taken you out of the deep yet again? Yes, blessed be his name, he has sought you and led you back to his ways. If I address a backslider who feels as if he were sinking deeper and deeper, I would pray for him that he may yet know how Christ can save a sinking Peter and bring a runaway Jonah to the shore again. Last of all, we shall soon come into the many waters of death: sooner, perhaps, than we think. To some the stream of death is very shallow. We have known certain of the saints go over dry-shod, singing all the way. They can hardly have been conscious of death, nor have known when they were last on earth and when they were first in heaven. But there are others who have to cross Jordan at a time when it overfloweth its banks, and, like Christian in the "Pilgrim's Progress," they are up to their necks in the stream, and need words of comfort. You remember how one said, "Fear not, brother, I feel the bottom, and it is good." There is a rocky bottom all the way across. No slippery sand nor sucking mud, but sound rock from shore to shore, and however deep it is, it is never so deep as to drown a believer's hope, nor destroy his soul. Yet I can imagine the best of saints to be flooded with many troubles in their last hours physical weakness, depression of spirit, temptations of Satan, family difficulties, all increase the swellings of Jordan. Do you know what will happen? He will send from above, he will take you, and he will draw you out of many waters, and you shall rise to glory. What a heaven of heavens above others will you feel when you go right up from the depths to the heights! To leap right away from de profundis to in excelsis, from the death-sweat and the expiring faintness to the ecstasy and the ineffable glory, how transcendent the bliss! What an exchange it will be, brethren, for those who have grown old and decrepit, or for those who could scarcely say even a word to testify their dying faith, to find themselves on a sudden rid of every ache and pain, and all their withering flesh, and to be disembodied in perfect liberty, charmed with the beatific vision of their Lord, from whom they are never to part again. Why, methinks, we might almost choose the death-road of the two. Some are very fond of expecting that their Lord will surely come in time to prevent their dying. Ah, well, you may be very thankful if it happens, but I do not think it is the way I shall go, nor can I say that I envy you the prospect in which you delight. In heaven you will come to us who die, and ask us What was it to fall asleep in Jesus? What was the feeling of putting off the body? What was the joy of being made like our Covenant Head in death? I do not say that you will regret that you did not descend into the tomb, but of this I am sure, none of us who shall sleep will think that you had any preference over us.
"Where should the dying members rest, But with their dying Head?"
If the Master went that way, descending into the sepulcher, and so up by the hill of resurrection to the golden gate, we will not even envy Enoch and Elias, though they were permitted to take the reserved route, and enter the city by the postern gate. It shall be all well with us if we are resting in Jesus, for at the last he will send from above and take us, and draw us out of many waters. To his name be praises. Amen.
IN our reading we had a very wonderful description of God's delivering mercy towards his servant David. He was very peculiarly tried in the court of Saul; he deserved so well of the king that it was doubly hard for him to be treated so ill. He had been the deliverer of his country when he slew Goliath, yet he was hunted as if he had been the grossest of malefactors. He had to fly for his life, like a partridge upon the mountains, and all the while, no doubt, Saul and his partisans accused him of all manner of evil. There was scarcely any bad thing which they did not attribute to David; but he was upright before God, and he dared to challenge the investigation of the Most High, for he was sincere and true to the core. He proved by his conduct that he was so; for when Saul was in his hands, on two memorable occasions when he might readily have taken his life, he disdained to do so. He would not put forth his hand against the Lord's anointed, and in great grace, in his own good time, God was pleased to deliver his servant. If men blow out the candle of a Christian's reputation, God will light it again; if he does not do so in this life, remember that at the resurrection there will be a resurrection of reputations as well as of bodies: "Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father." It is, after all, of very small account what is said by men whose breath is in their nostrils. "They say. What do they say? Let them say." Let them say till they have done saying; it little matters what they say; yet, to a sensitive spirit, like that of David, the tongue is a very sharp instrument, it cutteth like a razor, and pierceth even to the bones. He felt, therefore, the slander of many, and was sometimes greatly troubled by it. However, God was pleased to work a very marvelous deliverance for him. It seemed as if the Lord would sooner shake the earth to atoms, and crush the arches of heaven, than fail to deliver his servant. He will do so still, depend upon it. "He shall never suffer the righteous to be moved."
David attributes his providential deliverance to the mercy of God by which he had been kept clear in his conduct: "I kept myself from mine iniquity." Whatever you do, if you do right, God will see you through; but, whoever you may be, if you turn aside to crooked ways, you will soon fall into a bog. If you try to carve for yourself, you will probably cut your own fingers. He who thinks that he can do better by suppressing truth, or by speaking falsehood, or by acting contrary to the dictates of his conscience, will find that he has made a great mistake. Do thou so trust in God as to hold to thine integrity. "Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee." Ponder the path of thy feet, and God will bring thee through as surely as he is alive, which is saying much more than if I said as surely as thou art alive; for, as the Lord liveth, before whom we stand, he will not forsake the righteous, nor cast off them that serve him faithfully.
This is the passage we have to consider, "I kept myself from mine iniquity." Here is, first, a personal danger: "mine iniquity." And, secondly, here is a special guard: "I kept myself." And then, thirdly, here is a happy result. David could say, as he looked back upon his life, "I kept myself from mine iniquity." There was no boasting in this declaration; but as his enemies accused him falsely, like an honest man he defended himself, for he was able truthfully to say, "I kept myself from mine iniquity."
I. Well now, here is, first, A PERSONAL DANGER: "mine iniquity."
This is a dreadful possession to have in the house; a man had better have a cage of cobras than have an iniquity, yet we have each of us to deal at home with some special form of sin. It is said that there is a skeleton in every house. I do not know whether that is true; but I do know that there is something very much allied to a skeleton, that is, the body of this death with which we all have to deal; and it takes a special shape in each good man. There is some particular sin which he may call "mine iniquity." Not only is there the general iniquity which affects the whole race, but each man has his own particular form of it: "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way." There is a general sin, but there is a particularity in it, too; each man has his own way of sinning, so that he can speak of "mine iniquity."
Let us think of the particular form of iniquity with which some of us have to do. It takes its speciality, perhaps, from our natural constitution. He who judges all men alike does them an injustice. There are some who have but little tendency to a particular form of evil, but they have a very great inclination towards some other sin. Some are sanguine; they are expecting great things, and they fall into the sin of expecting to drink sweet waters from the cisterns of this world. There are some of quite another temperament, who are inclined to despondency, perhaps to suspicion; they may fall into mistrust, or various forms of unbelief, and even into despair, which will be very grievous to the God who is ever gracious. There are some men who, from their very parentage, are inclined to drunkenness or to unchastity. There are others, favoured by God with a godly ancestry who, if they were left to themselves, would not probably fall into either of these forms of sin, yet they might be proud of their own integrity, and proud of their own uprightness; and is not pride as great a sin as those more open transgressions? Depend on it, my dear friend, thou hast some tendency peculiar to thyself, and there is a special point where thou liest open to the attacks of temptation. Happy will that man be who so knows himself that he sets a double watch against that postern gate through which the adversary is apt to creep in the dark. Peculiar constitutions may lead to special forms of sin, and it behooves the godly man to keep himself from his own iniquity.
Our tendency is to decry the particular form of sin that we find in others. We hold up our hands as if we were quite shocked. Better look in the looking-glass than look out at the window. Looking out of the window, thou seest one for whom thou art not responsible; but looking in the glass, thou seest one of whom thou must give account to God, and thou wilt do well to ask God to keep that one. Thou wilt, likely enough, within a day's march, not see a much worse man than he is, if thou dost know him well. I remember Mr. Berridge's quaint joke. He had, hanging round his room, the portraits of many ministers; and he would say to his friend, "Here is Whitefield, here is Wesley, here is So-and- so;" and then, leading his visitor to a looking-glass, he would say, "Here is the devil." Yes, he is somewhere about there where thou art looking. If thou lookest long enough, thou mayest detect some of his handiwork at any rate, for there is something of his work about us all. Sin, therefore, may be something peculiar to constitution.
But any man may also know that "mine iniquity" may be engendered by education. How impressible we are in childhood! We bear the print of our mother's fingers when we are fifty years of age, and it is not gone from us even when we are old and grey-headed. Things that were done at our father's home are likely to be done in our own home. Things that we saw, things that we heard, when we were very young, may abide with us, and help to shape our whole life. May God help us so to look back upon our early training as to discover the defects of it, and, not laying the sin upon others, which would be a wicked perversion of the truth, yet let us recollect that, as we lived in a sinful generation, we have acquired some taint therefrom, and we have need to watch against the sins which were taught us when we were young, especially any of you who have been rescued by grace out of homes of drunkenness and debauchery! I bless the Lord that there are many here who have been brought by sovereign grace out of very dens of iniquity. There are some here who are, so far as they are aware, the only ones of all their household who know the Lord; and when they go home to-night, it will be a great pain to them, as they cross the threshold, to think how very different the atmosphere will be from that in the house of God where they have worshipped. Well, my dear brother or sister, we sympathize with you in your trial, and pray the Lord that you may carefully watch and that you may be kept from your iniquity.
No doubt there are certain forms of iniquity which grow out of our particular condition. The young man has his iniquity; it is not the iniquity of the aged. The young man is tempted to sinful pleasure, the old man to covetousness. Each period of life has its own special snare. Pray, I beseech you, young people, middle-aged people, old people, pray the Lord that you may be kept from the peculiar iniquity of that part of the life-passage through which you are going. He who quits the shores of England for Australia may ask the guardian care of God while yet the white cliffs of Albion have scarcely melted from his view. Let him ask God's blessing as he passes through the middle passage of the Suez Canal; but let him not forget to pray when the captain tells him that, within a few days, he will come in sight of the southern shore. No, all along we need keeping.
It is so with our condition of life as to our outward circumstances. The rich man has his temptations. Few know how great they are, or they would not be so eager after riches. It is as hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven as for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. It is a natural impossibility, for so many difficulties surround the possession of riches; but with God all things are possible. Yet the poor man will not find that he has a much larger hole to go through. His straitened circumstances will not materially help him. Agur did well to pray, "Give me neither poverty nor riches." There are peculiar trials in each condition; and even the middle way between the two is not without its own special temptations; so that, whether thou hast much or little, pray God that thou mayest keep thyself from thine iniquity.
There are iniquities which come through prosperity. I have never yet prayed to God to preserve me in going up in a balloon, for I have never had any idea of entering one; but whenever you prosper very greatly, and especially when you prosper very fast, you are very like a man going up in a balloon. If people knew the danger, they would send in prayers to the Monday night prayer-meeting, asking that the Lord would have mercy upon the man who is greatly prospering, for there are very peculiar trials surrounding that condition. Oh, that men might be kept from that cleaving to the world and letting the Saviour go, which so often follows upon great success in life!
But equally must he pray who is in adversity. Oh, the ills of adversity! The worst ill of all is the tendency to doubt God, and to put forth your hand unto iniquity in order to remove the heavy load. Pray the Lord, thou who art losing everything, that he will keep thee from thine iniquity. Thou needest not pray, like Pharaoh, "Take away the frogs;" but pray like David, "Take away mine iniquity." That is the prayer of the true child of God.
I may be speaking to some who have great talents. Well, you have need to pray, "Lord, keep me from mine iniquity," for great talent is a very dangerous thing for a man to possess, a charge which needs great grace. And, if thou hast but one talent, thine iniquity may be to wrap it in a napkin, and hide it in the earth. There is a temptation in the one talent as well as in the five. Therefore, pray the Lord to keep thee from that iniquity which is often the accompaniment of the particular condition in which thou art found.
Brothers, there are some of you who have need to pray this prayer in reference to your calling. I do not think that any calling is free from temptation, but there are some positions in which the temptation is very terrible. I need not go into those which surround many of you in trade, when everybody seems to "cut the thing fine," as they say, and to cut the truth much finer than anything else, and say a great deal that is not true, under the notion that somehow or other it will help his business. If there be customs in your trade which all others follow, and which you know to be wrong, do not adopt them; but say, "Lord, keep me from mine iniquity." You need not begin to say, "Those grocers, those milk-dealers, those publicans, all have their iniquities." Think about your own; quite enough iniquities may crowd into your shop without your thinking about the shops of other people. Pray the Lord that you may be kept from your iniquity.
And, O beloved, what iniquities there are which surround us all in daily life! Into what company can you go without being tempted? In this city, at the present time, the position of a Christian is very much like that of Lot in Sodom. I speak what I do know; I do not exaggerate the conditions which surround the lives of some Christian working-men and Christian working-women who are not able to let their children go into our streets by reason of the filthiness of the language that they would hear. Even round about this house of prayer is a very cauldron of iniquity, so that many say, "We cannot live there, and we do not know where to live to keep our children out of the temptations which now surround them." I say not that one age is worse than another, but I do say that the peculiar trials of to-day should make Christians walk very near to God; and, instead of loosening and relaxing the lines of our religious profession, let us tighten them as much as ever we can, and seek to be thoroughly Nonconformist, not conforming to the world, to be out and out Dissenters, dissenting from the ways of this ungodly generation.
Still, to help you to find out your iniquity, I will make one or two more remarks. It is likely to be that iniquity which thou hast oftenest fallen into in thy previous life. What has been thy sternest struggle? Against quickness of temper? Then, that is thine iniquity. Doubt and mistrust? That is thine iniquity. Has it been covetousness? Has it been slowness to forgive any who have offended you? Has it been gossiping and mixing untruth with your talk? That is your iniquity. Whatever it is which hitherto has stained thy life, that is probably the thing which will stain it again unless thou dost watch, and call in the power of the Holy Spirit for thy protection. That sin which you find yourself readily committing, which you drift into without any effort, ay, which you drift into when you are making a great many efforts not to do it, that is your iniquity. That which you have returned to after having smarted for it, that which you have vowed you would never be guilty of again, and which yet has in a moment, like the bursting forth of some hidden spring of water, carried thee away with a rush, that is thine iniquity. Oh, how canst thou keep thyself from it unless God shall keep thee? Cry unto the Most High to enable thee to keep thyself from thine iniquity. That is thine iniquity which has overtaken thee even after thou hast prayed against it, and laboured against it, that thou hast concluded that surely thou wilt never do it again, and yet thou hast done it.
Let me tell you one thing more; that which you do not like to hear condemned, that which you do not like the preacher to mention, that which makes you to wriggle in your seat, and feel, "I wish he would not say that, he is coming too closely home," that is your iniquity. And if thou canst not bear that thy wife should speak to thee about it, or that thy brother or thy sister should give thee a friendly word of advice concerning it, that which thou art most loath to hear, probably has to do with thine iniquity. We may often judge ourselves by this test. It is that which thou art most loath to hear that thou hast most need to hear; instead of being angry with him who points it out to thee thou shouldst be willing to pay him for doing it. When you go to your doctor, and ask him to examine you, if he says, "There is something a little amiss with the heart, or with the lungs," do you knock him down? Do you get into a passion with him for telling you the truth? No, you give him his guinea, and thank him even for imparting evil news. And should we not thank those who rebuke us, and tell us of our faults? When God sendeth thee not a faithful friend, I pray him to send thee an honest enemy, who will deal straightly with thee, and let thee know where thy weakness is, that thou mayest then cry to God, "Lord, keep me from mine iniquity."
II. Now, secondly, in our text there is A SPECIAL GUARD: "I kept myself from mine iniquity."
Someone may perhaps say, "I have a special temptation, but I am going to set a guard against it." Let me ask you first who you are; are you a child of God? Have you passed from death unto life? If you say, "No," I am not referring to you in this part of my subject. You must be born again, you must go by faith to Jesus Christ, and ask for cleansing in his precious blood, and renewal by the Holy Spirit; but I am now talking to the child of God, the man who has spiritual life. I speak to you, my dear brother, because you can, by God's grace, keep yourself from your iniquity. How are you to do it?
Well, first, you must find out what it is. You must get a clear idea of your own iniquity. Ask the Lord to search you, and try you, and know your ways. When you have found out what that iniquity is, then endeavour to get a due sense of its foulness and guilt in the sight of God. Ask the Lord to make thee hate most that sin to which thou art most inclined. Remember that thou art a child of God; it ill becomes thee to be friendly with any of the King's enemies. Remember that Christ has bought thee; thou belongest to him, thou shouldst not be the slave of any sin, thou must not be such if the life of God be in thee. The life of God in the soul hates sin; thou canst not take pleasure in any sin if thou art indeed a regenerate man or woman. Therefore, I say to thee, seek to get a sight of the heinousness of thy particular sin and the danger which attends it, that, as thou hast an extraordinary horror of it, thou mayest set that over against thy tendency to it.
Then, be resolved in the power of the Holy Spirit that this particular sin shall be overcome. There is nothing like hanging it up by the neck, that very sin, I mean. Do not fire at sin indiscriminately; but, if thou hast one sin that is more to thee than another, drag it out from the crowd, and say, "Thou must die if no other does.I will hang thee up in the face of the sun." Strive against thine anger; strive against thy covetousness; strive against thine envy; strive against thine evil temper, thy malice, if that be thy fault; for there are some who are very slow to forgive. Strive against it till thou gettest thy foot upon its neck. "I cannot do it," says one. Why, the Lord has said that he will bruise Satan under our feet shortly! Surely, if you are to have the devil under your foot, you can get all sin under your feet by God's help; and you must do it. It is a part of that work that must be wrought in us to bring every thought into captivity to divine grace. You are not able to subdue the least sin apart from Christ; but, by the help of the Holy Spirit, there is nothing that can master thee. I tell thee that, if thou let any sin master thee, thou wilt be lost. If any sin should remain unconquered, thou art ruined; for this is the way of salvation, the absolute conquest of every sin through the grace of the Holy Spirit. It must be so with thee ere thou canst enter heaven, and thou art able to overcome it in the power of Jesus Christ. If thou hast an iniquity that more than another haunts thee, then keep away from all that tempts thee to it. Is there a house where thy company is much liked, but where thou art never able to come away without having fallen into sin? Keep away from that house. It is often one of the most essential things in young converts that they should quit the company in which they once sported. You may go into some company to do good; but mind that you are strong enough to resist the evil, for it does not always do for those who have but little strength to attempt to pull others out of the fire; they may be themselves pulled into it. No, come ye out from among them, be ye separate; touch not the unclean thing. You have no business to be in that place where it becomes almost necessary that you should sin; that necessity should warn you not to go there.
The true path of safety is to pray and believe against all sin. We conquer sin by faith in Christ. This is the axe that will cut down the upas tree, and there is no other that will do so. Believe thou in Jesus Christ the Saviour, who died for thee; and then believe in him as living again, and willing to help thee in every conflict against sin. Go thou, having Christ crucified with thee, and ask him to crucify thy sin, and nail it up to his cross. So thou shalt be helped to overcome; but there must be care, and prayer, and watchfulness, and trust, and continual looking up to the Lord for grace. Only so can you say, "I kept myself from mine iniquity."
III. Thirdly, I conclude with A HAPPY RESULT.
David says, "I kept myself from mine iniquity." He does not say that he could not sin, but that he would not, and he did not. When a wicked man gets old, he may say, "I do not sin like those young people." No, because you cannot; it has been well said that there is many an old man who, if you could put young eyes in him, would look the same way as he used to do. That is not what we want; it is not the failure to commit a sin because your passions have grown colder, or your strength has left you; it is a change of heart that is wanted. "I kept myself from mine iniquity;" that is, "though it would try to tempt me, and did so, and I might have yielded to it, yet by the grace of God I would not yield."
I do pray, my brothers and sisters, that, if we live ten, twenty, thirty, or fifty more years, we may be able to say, without any boasting, but in deep humility before God, "By his great grace, by trust in Jesus, I kept myself from mine iniquity," because, if we do so, see what a blessing it will be to us, for it will be to us a reason for our being brought out of the trouble. If when you are in need, if when you are under temptation, God helps you to keep straight, you will come out all right at the last. What a number of stories I might tell here of young men, who were great losers at first by being godly; but they kept themselves right, and they had to thank God for it ever afterwards. I know, at this present moment, a personal friend who was a banker's clerk. On a certain day, he was told to do something which he judged to be, speaking plainly, dishonest; and he told the manager that he could not do it, whereupon he received a month's notice. It was a country bank, and he was not sent about his business at once; and he had to turn the matter over. He had a wife and children; and when he went home, it was not easy to tell the wife that the excellent situation that he held would be vacated within a short time. But he stood fast in his integrity, he said that he was sure God would bring him safely through, and he never had even the slightest thought of doing other than he had said he would do. It was within twelve months that he obtained the situation of manager for that very bank, and it belongs to him at this moment; he very speedily became a man in a much better position than he could have expected to have obtained, simply from the fact that it had been proved that he could be trusted. It is not always so; some people have to be a long time under a cloud; but, in the long run, if thou as a child of God wilt but stand fast, God will not let thee be a loser. If he does, it shall be thy glory to lose everything sooner than tarnish thy character. Thou shalt find it a greater joy to lose all things for Christ than it would be to gain the whole world by doing anything that was wrong. If you are able to say, "I kept myself from mine iniquity," then you shall also be able to say with David, "I will love thee, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer. I will call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised."
Next, if you act thus, it will be a triumph of divine grace. Brethren, we want to show the world what grace can do, and every member of the church ought to feel that he is put upon his behaviour to prove what the grace of God has done in him. What credit is brought to Christ by professed Christians who are so like worldlings that, if you put them under a microscope, you could not tell the difference between them? If you can do what worldlings do, you shall go at last where worldlings go. If grace does not make you to differ from them, it is not the grace of God, it is all a sham. We ought to feel that Christ's honour is in danger by our ill behaviour, and so live that we can glorify our Father who is in heaven by our good works, keeping ourselves from our iniquity.
For again, this will be our best testimony to others. It is well to preach as I do, with my lips; but you can all preach with your feet, and by your lives, and that is the most effective preaching. The preaching of holy lives is living preaching. The most effective ministry from a pulpit is that which is supported by godliness from the pew. God help you to do this!
And, lastly, what a sweet peace this will give to your conscience! Though we know we are saved by grace, hear this, ye ungodly. There is no way of salvation for you, or for us, but by the grace of God through Jesus Christ; yet when we are saved, the evidence to our own soul of that work of grace upon our nature is very sweet when we can say, "I have kept myself from mine iniquity." A well-spent life, a life that is pure, a life that has been consecrated to usefulness, a life in which there has not been a turning aside to the right hand or to the left, helps us to lie down with comfort upon our dying bed, and bid farewell to all our dear ones and feel that we are leaving behind us the legacy of a gracious example in which we do not glory, but for which we give God the glory, and thank and praise his holy name. Begin at the cross; there is the source of your salvation. Then go, and live like the living Saviour. God help you to do so, for Christ's sake!
Bibliographical Information Spurgeon, Charle Haddon. "Commentary on Psalms 18". "Spurgeon's Verse Expositions of the Bible". https://www.studylight.org/commentaries/eng/spe/psalms-18.html. 2011.
Verse 16
Divine Interpositions
Suggested by the loss of the "Princess Alice" September 8th, 1878 by C. H. SPURGEON (1834-1892)
"He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters." Psalms 18:16 .
I do not know how you feel, my brethren, at this time, but as for myself, a heavy cloud seems to hang over me all the day. The overwhelming calamity of last Tuesday, so crushing and so far reaching, of which we must have spoken to each other, I suppose, every hour during the past week, cannot be removed from the thoughts of our minds or from the affections of our hearts. The whole of London may well be likened to that ancient city of which we read "The city Shushan was perplexed." Every man has been asking his fellow, "Have you lost a friend?" and no man wonders when the answer is, "Alas, I have been sorely bereaved." In our own immediate circle we have borne a special share of the grief, for five, at least, of those who are in church membership with us have been removed from our midst, and we can scarcely speak with any of our brethren without discovering that they have lost some connection or friend. Alas, that unhappy vessel has sunk with a more precious freight than ever loaded Spanish galleon, and her wreck has brought a greater loss to our city than if she had carried untold gold. We cannot help thinking of this dire affliction, and, therefore, we had better think of it with some practical purpose. I believe that this sudden grief comes, like every other event, from God, and comes as a voice from God to this our city a voice which, we trust, will be heard and regarded. "The Lord's voice crieth unto the city, and the man of wisdom shall see thy name: hear ye the rod, and who hath appointed it." We are of the mind of that old prophet who said, "Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?" (Amos 3:6 .) Cometh there anything in the form of calamity upon the sons of men without the permission, control, and overruling of the Lord? Assuredly not. "The Lord killeth and maketh alive: he bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth up." I know that many minds are so stunned by this tremendous blow, that they can hardly think of God in connection with it, and half wish to believe that the Omnipresent was not there. The problem staggers their reason, and they are unable to leave it among the mysteries of faith. As yet they have not gained the confidence of Job, who denied that affliction cometh out of the dust, but attributed it to the Lord, saying, "He taketh away: who can hinder him?" Even some who love the Lord, and trust him, are somewhat of the mind of Mary and Martha when they said, "Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died"; while others who should know better would timidly conceal their belief in an overruling providence, lest the ribald world should scoff at them. Let them scoff, I say; for our God is none the less glorious because his ways are far above and out of our sight. It is an atheistical thought which would put God out of any place; if he be not everywhere, he is nowhere; omnipresence is an essential of Godhead. If his hand ruleth not over evil it is not omnipotent, and thus again it lacks another essential attribute of deity. It would be dreadful to suppose him to have a limited dominion: "His kingdom ruleth over all." We are not as those who believe in two co-existent forces, each supreme, one of whom shall create disasters, and the other shall distribute blessings. The prince of evil is, according to our faith, subordinate to the great Lord of all. Thus saith Jehovah, by the mouth of his servant Isaiah, "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and I create evil: I the Lord do all these things." He reigneth in the calm summer's day, and gives us the precious fruits of harvest, but he is equally present and regnant in the hurricane which destroys, or the blight which desolates. His providence speeds the ship to its desired haven, but it is equally his providence which sinks the barque and its mariners to the bottom of the sea. It is his power which looses the bands of Orion and binds the sweet influence of the Pleiades; his are the lightnings as well as the sunbeams, the thunderbolts as well as the raindrops. He is able to make the heaven as iron and the earth as brass, so that our land shall not yield her increase; he can call for a famine and break the whole staff of bread; for famine, pestilence, and war are as rods in his hand. Everywhere is God, and in all things his hand is present: in the things which seem to us to be evil as well as in the events which appear to us to be good, God is at work. He doeth no wrong, for God is not tempted of evil, neither tempteth he any man, but we speak of physical evil, which causeth sorrow, pain, and death among men, and we say that certainly God is there. If not a sparrow falleth to the ground without our Father, we are sure that no great calamity can befall us apart from him. He is not far from us in our deepest sorrow, and however we may trace a calamity to the carelessness or the mistake of men, these are but the second causes, and we see behind all mere detail the permit of the Lord. If it were not so, mourners would be deprived of the greatest reason for submission, and the surest source of consolation. Even where a terrible event is the result of crime God is not excluded. He shares not the guilt, but he overrules the act. Think of the crucifixion of our Lord, and remember that though the sin of it lay heavy upon those who perpetrated it, yet the grand design of it was God's. Read Peter's words in the Acts: "Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain." Who shall deny that God was at Calvary, though sin there reached its culminating point? We freely admit that we do not understand this, and therefore we do not attempt to explain it; but we believe and adore. Happily, we need not attempt to justify the ways of God to man, for he asks no defense at our hands, and deigns not to give any account of his matters: this only is our resolve, "Though he slay me yet will I trust in him." Now, the question which has very naturally suggested itself to many is this, If there be a providence, why does it permit these terrible evils? It is dreadful that human life should be lost on such a scale: God is omnipotent, nobody doubts that; why, then, does he not interfere to save? That shall suggest to us the first point of our discourse this morning, that miraculous interpositions in the affairs of this life are not to be expected, and we may not hope literally to use the words of our text and say," He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters." Still, secondly, we shall note that, according to our text, providential interpositions of another kind are vouchsafed; and thirdly, and best of all, gracious interpositions are given for the salvation of men. What though the Lord doth not nowadays send from above, and take his servants, and draw them by miracle out of the waters of the river, yet doth he uplift us from the depths of trouble, and especially doth he upbear us from the deeps of sin to our eternal salvation, for thus saith the Lord, "I will bring again from Bashan, I will bring my people from the depths of the sea." I. First, then, MIRACULOUS INTERPOSITIONS IN THE CALAMITIES OF THIS LIFE ARE NOT TO BE EXPECTED. I am not standing here as an advocate for God to defend his character because he does not thus interpose, for to objecters his sole answer is, "Nay, but O man, who art thou that repliest against God?" If you will accuse your Maker he will not care to answer you. You who have forged the accusation may fashion an answer, if it seem good unto you. Yet there is a difficulty which none can deny, and that difficulty lies in a fact. Why is there any evil at all, seeing that the good God is almighty, and sits upon the throne? This is the old puzzle which none can answer. The negro put it in a very natural form when he asked the missionary, if God be so much stronger than the devil, why does he not kill the devil and make an end of his mischief? Just so: that is the top and bottom of the matter. There is the question, but who can answer it? A fool may raise in an hour more objections than the wisest man could remove in a century. Now, the cleverest theory will not alter facts. What you and I may think is a very small matter compared with what really is, and it is quite certain that there is moral evil in the world, and that there is also a God; that there is physical evil in the world, and yet love is supreme; and that the Almighty permits fire and water to destroy his creatures, and does not interpose to rescue them, and yet he is full of tenderness and pity. There be some of course who will dare to condemn their Maker, and call him by I know not what horrible names. I have even heard such a word as "monster" hissed from between proud lips. Again I say it is not worth our while to answer such objectors, because such persons are not pervious to explanation, nor willing to receive it; and then again, it is a small matter to the Most High what such persons may think of him. He doeth as he pleases and asks no leave from his creatures. But now just for a minute let us consider the question which we trust is modestly proposed. Suppose that every time a great danger threatened we might expect a miraculous interposition from heaven, what then? The supposition is not absurd, for there might be such an interposition: we must admit the possibility since God is almighty. The train is thundering along the iron way, it will dash into another, and many lives will be destroyed, but if the Lord willed it he could put his hand upon the engine and stay it in its full career. The vessel freighted with eight hundred lives is about to sink: but if the Lord willed it he could buoy it up in the hollow of his hand. Yet he does not move; the iron road is strewn with the dead, the river is gorged with corpses. We do not know all the reasons for this non-interference, but yet we think we can see a little, which little we will think upon. For, first, such interpositions would change the whole arrangement of the world: it would not be the same place at all. The Lord has made this world, and he governs it by certain fixed laws. If those laws were variable, and were continually being altered, it would be another form of creation altogether, and man had need to be another creature. His physical, moral, and even spiritual condition would be changed from top to bottom. It was the Lord's arrangement that he should put forth his power in certain ways which we call the laws of nature, and by that arrangement he abides. There is no such independent force as "nature," as some are always dreaming; nor is there any energy in mere laws of nature apart from God's own power. You may write all the laws you like, but there is no power in laws, there must be a power in the king to carry out the laws. All power emanates from God, be it what it may; he is the source and fountain of all the forces which operate throughout creation; but he has been pleased from the beginning to determine that his power shall usually go forth in certain ways, and under fixed laws and regulations. He can suspend those laws when he pleases; he can quench the violence of fire, stop the mouths of lions, and make water to stand upright as a heap; but he has not often done so, and in these days he never does so. I think we can in a measure see why; for if such were the case continually, the whole plan and purpose with which he made the present world would have been abandoned, and another mode of power would have taken its place. Recollect, too, that whatever the plan of God is, it is now being carried out under the shadow of the Fall. There had been, I suppose, neither pain, nor sickness, nor sighing, nor death, had there been no sin. If had been possible for a race to have multiplied from the glades of Eden, and to have gone forth into a wider Paradise as pure and holy as Adam first came from his Maker's hands, I can believe that there would have been no famine, no war, no catastrophe of shipwreck by sea, nor of accident by land; but however multitudinous the human race might have become its records would have been all unstained with agonizing details such as those which blacken the broad-sheets of to-day. But, alas, man has fallen, and to a race in such a condition it would not be consistent that everything should be of sunlight and summer; there must now be heard the roar of the storm and the cry of death, as the fruit of sin. Render calamity impossible and what mark would there be of the divine displeasure for man's revolt? Wherein indeed would sin differ as to its consequences from obedience and holiness? Think for a little, and you will see reason for God's staying his hand from rescue. Furthermore, if interpositions were given to save the lives of godly men alone, as some would have it, then this world would became the place of judgment, which it is not intended to be. It still remains among many persons as a superstition that if there is an accident, and people suffer, there must have been some special sin in the victims of the disaster; and yet our Lord has told us that the men upon whom the tower of Siloam fell were not sinners above others, and the Galileans who were slain by Pilate were not sinners above other Galileans. I pray you dismiss from your minds the idea that a sudden death is necessarily a judgment. Never draw any inference from the destruction of a building, or the wreck of a ship, or an explosion, or aught of that nature, as to the character of the persons who perish, for if you do you will be guilty of cruel injustice. What if some gracious man be spared, ascribe the deliverance to providence, but do not suppose that those who perished were less gracious than he. You shall find that men of bad character sometimes escape where saints are left to die. Because I said the other day that providence had saved a certain godly woman, foolish persons drew the inference that I condemned those who perished. No sentiment could have been further from my mind. I ascribe to providence death as well as life, and draw no inference as to the character of the person. What if a man has found a watery grave in the Princess Alice, do not therefore imagine that God was angry with him, for he may now be in Paradise, and at any rate the same wreck carried down with it many of the Lord's beloved. Now, if God were to interpose and save his own people whenever they were in danger, this world would become the place of judicial separation, which it is not and is not meant to be: judgment is reserved for the world to come. When Christ shall descend from heaven with a shout, and sit upon his great white throne then will he separate the tares from the wheat, but now they are to grow together. Then will he put the goats on the left and the sheep on the right, but for the time present they feed in the same pastures. One event happeneth to them all; as it happeneth to the fool so happeneth it to the wise. This is not the land of judgment, but of longsuffering; not the place wherein God giveth sentence, but waiteth patiently awhile. There is a judgment of nations in this world, but that of individuals, with rare exceptions, is reserved for the final account. Beloved, note once again that if God were to interpose in the case of all calamities it would involve many evils. For, observe, if next year the mass of farmers should refuse to sow the fields, if over whole nations the land should be left to produce only weeds, there would be great scarcity of corn. Suppose that in such cases God should interpose and cause harvests suddenly to grow by miracle, that our teeming millions might escape starvation, what would be the consequence? Why, it would encourage idleness everywhere; men would say, "The Lord is too good to let us starve, and therefore we may allow the plough to rust, and dance away the hours." Would that be well? Suppose again that when a contagious disease comes into a district the Lord miraculously prevented it from being fatal, although the carelessness of men may have left feverlairs in rotting, overcrowded houses enough to pollute the very air. Suppose, I say, that we all neglected sanitary laws, and then knew that a merciful God would not let the poor people die of fever, or of cholera, then the filthiness of our cities would increase till they became huge dunghills, and man who is great enough now at polluting rivers and defiling God's earth in every imaginable way, would go on to turn the whole earth into one monstrous globe of rottenness. But now even pests and plagues and fevers have their good side, they are watchmen to sound an alarm, prophets to give us warning. They arouse man to discover the laws of his being, and thus they benefit the race. Suppose again that whenever there is a likelihood of there being an accident God were to send an angel at once to interpose, and avert the collision or the wreck, what would happen? Why then, of course, every railway and steamboat company might go in for accidents in any quantity, seeing they would be harmless, and might even become attractive. There would be no reason for keeping a watch at the ship's bow, and no necessity for breaks or signals. There would be no longer any need to be careful about human life, but we might each one be as reckless as he pleased, and gratify himself with experiments which could not end fatally. Such a state of things would destroy many of the virtues, and render many vices harmless. I cannot suppose a world regulated upon such a system; I can imagine God divinely interposing and suspending his own laws now and then, as pleaseth him, for some great purpose of instruction; but it appears wise and good for all concerned that, having made man what he is, the Creator should rather leave him to take the consequence of violating the fixed laws of matter than make those laws variable and uncertain. Again, dear friends, divine interpositions of a miraculous sort would not be attended with the advantage to the ungodly which we might suppose, because if there were miracles of mercy on the behalf of God's people to snatch them from a watery grave, or from the devouring element of fire, or from the deadly consequences of a collision, then we might expect to have, and naturally should have, miracles of judgment, too. If you get into the wilderness, and manna falls from heaven, and water leaps from the rock, remember you have also entered a land where the earth opens to swallow up Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, and where the very sand breeds fiery serpents to sting to death the rebels against God. You cannot have the mercy wonder interposing without having the judgment wonder side by side with it: and on the whole it is a more lenient mode of dealing on God's part to let sinners alone, and to let one event happen to all men for a while, because the longsuffering of God leadeth the sinner to repentance, and the sorrow that falleth upon the child of God is blessed to him. If all accidental deaths were punishments it would be a far more terrible state of things than that which is now before us; and therefore the matter is best as it is. If we had wonders of miraculous deliverance often before us they would not impress mankind as we imagine. If God were always suffering the wicked to drown or burn, and always snatching the righteous from the midst of every danger, men would not think much of it after all; they might be slightly impressed at first, but by-and-by they would harden their hearts. In Egypt there was light in the houses of the Israelites when all was dark with the Egyptians, and God smote Egypt heavily while he was blessing Israel; but this fact did not affect Pharaoh, for he only hardened his heart the more. When in the wilderness the Israelites, murmuring against God, saw some of their companions swallowed up and destroyed, it very little affected them; for soon after they began murmuring against Moses, and charged him with destroying the people of God. All things considered, the arrangement is best as it is, and the Lord knows it is so, and, therefore, continues the method of letting physical law take its course, although occasionally it may destroy hundreds of lives. Neither would it be so great a gain to the godly, as some imagine, always to have their lives spared in times of danger. We have to die some day, brothers and sisters, and we have nothing here below which might make us anxious to postpone the hour of our departure. It is as well to die one way as another: at least, there is small choice in the modes of death. If one were asked by what death he should glorify God, he might be long in the choosing, and probably would then choose that which would be most painful. Some are afraid to go to sea lest they should be drowned, and yet there is little reason for the fear. When a captain was asked whether he was not afraid to go to sea he said, "Not at all." "But your father was drowned, captain?" "Yes." "Your grandfather was drowned?" "Yes." "Your brothers have been drowned?" "Yes." "Are you not afraid to go to sea?" "No," said he, "not at all; for I may ask you the same question. Your father is dead?" "Yes." "Where did he die?" "In his bed." "And his father, where did he die?" "In his bed." "And his father?" "In his bed." "And your brothers, where have they died?" "In their beds." "Are you not, then, afraid to go to bed?" Certainly we must die somewhere or other, and we shall not die one single minute before the ordained period. I am a sufficient believer in predestination to feel sure that every bullet has its billet, and that no death can befall the man whom God ordains to live, God hath appointed all things, and his people are safe everywhere, whether they live or die. "Surely there is no enchantment against Jacob, nor divination against Israel;" the powers of darkness cannot harm us though they put forth all their craft and power. The Lord has declared that he who hath made God his refuge shall abide beneath his shadow, and therefore we may go where duty calls us without trembling, and we may die when God bids our spirit return without the slightest fear. We ask no immunity from death. Why should we be absolved from it? It is better to die than to live full often, inasmuch as it is better to be in heaven than to remain in banishment below. So there I leave that matter of the non-interposition of God to think very briefly of interpositions which do occur. II. PROVIDENTIAL INTERPOSITIONS ARE FREQUENT AMONG GOD'S PEOPLE: they can often say, "He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters." Divine interpositions come in the way of deliverance from floods of trouble. Have you not experienced them? How strikingly has God delivered some of us! What remarkable preservations of life have we enjoyed; not miraculous, certainly, but full of wonder for all that. We have as much reason to praise God for our deliverances as if the laws of nature had been suspended, for we have been quite as completely preserved. What helps we have had in the hour of sorrow, when one after another our beloved have been taken from us, or when they have gone to the very edge of the grave, and yet have been spared to us. How often have we been helped in business troubles and saved from impending failure or serious loss! In times of slander, when our character has been belied, how graciously has God brought to light our innocence! I say again, not by miracle, but yet very marvellously has our God delivered us. In answer to prayer God worketh in his own way for the good of his people without stopping one single wheel of providence: without violating one single law of nature, God is able to work the same end as we sometimes wish he would work by a miracle. He will not quench the violence of the flame, but yet a precious life shall be snatched from a burning house. He will not prevent the water from drowning, and yet in how many cases in answer to prayer have vessels been saved and the lives of men preserved by unexpected incidents! He will not stop the ordinary run of business, nor alter the way in which the world goes on, and yet he knows how to help the poor, and to bless the struggling tradesman, and to bring up the righteous from deep distress. A miracle is a rough procedure after all, if I may dare say so, compared with the Lord's present methods. The grandest achievement of all is for the Lord God to work miraculous results without miracles, to produce by common means, in answer to the cry of his servants, that which appears to be impossible without a suspension of natural laws. See how the Lord allows all the forces of nature to drive on in their ordinary course, and yet the outcome of it all is that his servant is delivered and his prayers answered. God doth this by very varied ways. We have known some who have been brought out of deep waters by having health suddenly restored to them, or by having the health of those upon whom their maintenance depended renewed. This is God's mercy, and let him be praised for it. Sometimes circumstances have greatly changed; a man has been going down hill for years as to his business, but something quite unexpected has happened, and he has just as gradually risen to a position of comfort. My friends, believe in the unexpected. I was about to utter a paradox, and say expect the unexpectable. Believe that God will do for you something which you know nothing about. The Lord always has a plan in reserve. You think he has reached his last, and you will be left to perish; but it is not so. At the right moment he will bring forth some new and surprising stroke of wisdom, which he did but postpone to the particular moment, so that when he performs it, and draws his servant out of deep waters, the praise and the glory will the more fully redound to his name. We have known the Lord save his servants in the hour of trouble by touching the hearts of their enemies; those that were most unkind and cruel have suddenly become the most generous and thoughtful. At other times enemies have died or have been put to confusion, like the wicked Haman when he plotted the destruction of the Jews. The Lord has hanged up Haman that his chosen might be delivered. Mordecai has gone from the king's gate to the king's house, and Haman has ascended from the king's table to the king's gallows. I cannot instance all the ways in which the Lord makes clear the pathway of his people, but this I know that often in our lives some of us have had to pause and sing, "He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters." Some will not see the hand of God, but I warrant you, brethren, those who have been delivered out of the deep waters will see it. Their experience teaches them that God is yet among us. Others may talk about "laws of nature," as if God were gone to sleep and had left the world wound up like a watch to go without him; but those who have been in sore affliction and tribulation, and have been brought out therefrom, will for ever bless and extol him who is a very present help in trouble. Yes, my brethren, the way by which we have come hitherto is as full of God as this city is full of men. There are deserts which the foot of man hath never trodden, but there is no wilderness where the foot of God hath not been. What say you, my beloved friends, you are not fanatics, neither has the enthusiasm of devotion carried you out of your minds; but are you not conscious of distinct providential deliverances? "Conscious of them," say you, "indeed, if we did not speak of them with joy and thankfulness, the very stones of the street would cry out against us for our wicked silence. Many and many a time hath he sent from above, and rescued us. We are, like Moses, drawn out of the waters, and like him we would be servants of the Lord." III. Now, thirdly, INTERPOSITIONS IN MATTERS OF GRACE ARE THE CHIEF OF ALL. As best I can I should like to conclude with a few words upon this subject. God does not, even to save the souls of his chosen, violate any of his laws. "The soul that sinneth, it shall die." "Every transgression shall have its just punishment and reward." Yet the Lord would save his people. How should he make these two things agree, how should he be just and yet the justifier of the ungodly? It is in the person of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ that we see how one law has been made to counteract and yet to honor another, to remove its direful consequence and yet to make it honorable. You recollect that the law of the Medes and Persians could not be altered; and there was a law made by Ahasuerus that on a certain day the people of all countries might gather themselves together and kill the Jews. Haman had promulgated this royal edict far and wide, and the king could not alter it. Mark the wise method by which the cruel law was met; they made another law, which was that the Jews might defend themselves, might slay those who tried to kill them, and take all their property for a spoil. This met the case, though no edict was revoked. Now, God does not and never will alter his law that sin must be punished; but forth comes another law that, inasmuch as the first sin was committed by a representative man, a representative man should be permitted to come in and bear the penalty which was consequent thereon. This has been done; no law has been broken, and yet God's mercy has had free course. Now let us think a minute or two upon this great salvation and how it is described in the text. "He sent from above." Oh, blessed Lord, the whole race of man was sinking in the old vessel of the covenant of works which had been cut in pieces by the first sin; they were all going down en masse to destruction. Then thou didst send from above. But who was he that was sent? Not the brightest of the cherubim nor the chief of the angelic band, but HE came, the messenger of the covenant, whom we delight in, the Son of God, the only begotten of the Most High, the brightness of his Father's glory. He was the Messiah, the sent one, and he descended from above that he might work out our redemption. Brethren, let your hearts leap for joy as you behold the messenger of the covenant of grace, even Jesus Christ, the adorable and ever blessed Son of the Highest. Now, note the next word, "He took me." When we had lost all hold on God then did this blessed messenger take hold on us. He accepted us as the Father's gift to him, and accepted a charge as the great Shepherd of the sheep, that he would keep and preserve those whom his Father gave him, though they were ready to perish. Then what a hold he took on us. He took not up angels, but he took up the seed of Abraham, by becoming a man. Babe in Bethlehem, laborer at Nazareth, suffering man at Gethsemane, thou hast taken indeed a hold on us, such as thou wouldst not relax in life or death! "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us," and so being sent from above he took hold upon us. Then what a wondrous drawing took place after that grip had once been given, He drew us out of many waters, entering into them himself, plunging into the rivers of grief and infirmity, and then into the waters of the curse, being "made a curse for us": descending deep, as it were, into the very depths of hell to bring up the Lord's jewels, that they might be delivered from the pit. Oh, the matchless uplifting which he gave to us when he drew us out of many waters by his own suffering life and agonizing death. Fix your eyes, brethren, upon the work of Jesus. See the human race all sinking. Behold how hopeless and helpless it is; and see him descending, walking the waters, snatching with his own right hand sinking men and women from the billows of destruction, and landing them on the Rock of Ages, putting a new song into their mouths. As you feel that you are partakers of this deliverance, let each one of you say, "He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters." This was the great deed itself, but, just a minute, I ask you to remember the application of it to your own experience. Do you recollect when you felt everything sinking from beneath you? My own self-wreck will help me to describe your experience. I had sailed on gallantly in the good vessel of my own works, hearing music, and full of delight, never dreaming of danger; but suddenly the law of God came along, moving unswervingly in its terrible course, and it cut into the vessel of my works, as though it had been vanity itself. Down it began to sink, and I with it. I looked around for something I could lay hold upon, but nothing availed. The priest was there and offered me his inventions, but I knew him of old, and knew that he would sink as well as I. What, then, could he do for me? Ceremonials were there, but I knew that they prove bubbles to a man who trusts in them. Hopes of salvation by self-mortification were there, and the like, but they clearly could not bear the weight of such a sinner as I was. I sank, I sank, nor had I will or wish to be saved, nor did I struggle for life; yet Jesus came, whose will of grace precedes our will, whose purpose of love outruns our desire for salvation. "He took me": well do I recollect his grasp. He took me and made me more conscious of my danger than I had been before. He took me, by his Holy Spirit, and I knew that he had taken me, for I began to feel his grip tightening upon me. He drew me gradually to look at him, to trust him, and to leave myself and all my hopes entirely in his hand, then he drew me right out of the many waters and made my heart to sing for joy. Do you not recollect the time with yourself? As you look with wonder upon some friend who has been rescued from the great calamity of this week, I want you to feel that you may look with equal wonder upon yourself, for you have experienced a greater rescue. You have been delivered from sinking into the pit that hath no bottom, a sinking down in sin and into the lower depths of corruption. He came from heaven, he took you, he drew you out of many waters, therefore praise and bless his name! You were too anxious to hope, and yet he taught you to hope in his mercy. You were too despairing to struggle, but he made you exercise holy violence to enter the kingdom. You were too weary and despondent to trust, but he led you to faith. His divine Spirit wrought all your works in you, and here you are sitting in this house of prayer this morning to say, "He hath delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling." Now, I should not wonder if since then you have been pretty nearly shipwrecked as to your spiritual hopes, and have a second and a third time been rescued. You have begun to grow somewhat cold, and you have wandered from the Lord, and you have, therefore, dreaded the total destruction of all true religion within your spirit. Then you have cried out in fear "I have been a hypocrite, or a mere formalist, and shall perish after all." But when you were ready to give all up under the temptation of the powers of darkness the Lord has again restored you. Has he not sent from above and taken you out of the deep yet again? Yes, blessed be his name, he has sought you and led you back to his ways. If I address a backslider who feels as if he were sinking deeper and deeper, I would pray for him that he may yet know how Christ can save a sinking Peter and bring a runaway Jonah to the shore again. Last of all, we shall soon come into the many waters of death: sooner, perhaps, than we think. To some the stream of death is very shallow. We have known certain of the saints go over dry-shod, singing all the way. They can hardly have been conscious of death, nor have known when they were last on earth and when they were first in heaven. But there are others who have to cross Jordan at a time when it overfloweth its banks, and, like Christian in the "Pilgrim's Progress," they are up to their necks in the stream, and need words of comfort. You remember how one said, "Fear not, brother, I feel the bottom, and it is good." There is a rocky bottom all the way across. No slippery sand nor sucking mud, but sound rock from shore to shore, and however deep it is, it is never so deep as to drown a believer's hope, nor destroy his soul. Yet I can imagine the best of saints to be flooded with many troubles in their last hours physical weakness, depression of spirit, temptations of Satan, family difficulties, all increase the swellings of Jordan. Do you know what will happen? He will send from above, he will take you, and he will draw you out of many waters, and you shall rise to glory. What a heaven of heavens above others will you feel when you go right up from the depths to the heights! To leap right away from de profundis to in excelsis, from the death-sweat and the expiring faintness to the ecstasy and the ineffable glory, how transcendent the bliss! What an exchange it will be, brethren, for those who have grown old and decrepit, or for those who could scarcely say even a word to testify their dying faith, to find themselves on a sudden rid of every ache and pain, and all their withering flesh, and to be disembodied in perfect liberty, charmed with the beatific vision of their Lord, from whom they are never to part again. Why, methinks, we might almost choose the death-road of the two. Some are very fond of expecting that their Lord will surely come in time to prevent their dying. Ah, well, you may be very thankful if it happens, but I do not think it is the way I shall go, nor can I say that I envy you the prospect in which you delight. In heaven you will come to us who die, and ask us What was it to fall asleep in Jesus? What was the feeling of putting off the body? What was the joy of being made like our Covenant Head in death? I do not say that you will regret that you did not descend into the tomb, but of this I am sure, none of us who shall sleep will think that you had any preference over us.
"Where should the dying members rest, But with their dying Head?"
If the Master went that way, descending into the sepulcher, and so up by the hill of resurrection to the golden gate, we will not even envy Enoch and Elias, though they were permitted to take the reserved route, and enter the city by the postern gate. It shall be all well with us if we are resting in Jesus, for at the last he will send from above and take us, and draw us out of many waters. To his name be praises. Amen.
Verse 23
Kept From Iniquity
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Sermon
(No. 2432)
Intended for Reading on Lord's-day Morning, September 29th, 1895,
Delivered by
C. H. SPURGEON,
At the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington,
On Thursday Evening, September 22nd, 1887.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I kept myself from mine iniquity" Psalms 18:23 .
IN our reading we had a very wonderful description of God's delivering mercy towards his servant David. He was very peculiarly tried in the court of Saul; he deserved so well of the king that it was doubly hard for him to be treated so ill. He had been the deliverer of his country when he slew Goliath, yet he was hunted as if he had been the grossest of malefactors. He had to fly for his life, like a partridge upon the mountains, and all the while, no doubt, Saul and his partisans accused him of all manner of evil. There was scarcely any bad thing which they did not attribute to David; but he was upright before God, and he dared to challenge the investigation of the Most High, for he was sincere and true to the core. He proved by his conduct that he was so; for when Saul was in his hands, on two memorable occasions when he might readily have taken his life, he disdained to do so. He would not put forth his hand against the Lord's anointed, and in great grace, in his own good time, God was pleased to deliver his servant. If men blow out the candle of a Christian's reputation, God will light it again; if he does not do so in this life, remember that at the resurrection there will be a resurrection of reputations as well as of bodies: "Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father." It is, after all, of very small account what is said by men whose breath is in their nostrils. "They say. What do they say? Let them say." Let them say till they have done saying; it little matters what they say; yet, to a sensitive spirit, like that of David, the tongue is a very sharp instrument, it cutteth like a razor, and pierceth even to the bones. He felt, therefore, the slander of many, and was sometimes greatly troubled by it. However, God was pleased to work a very marvelous deliverance for him. It seemed as if the Lord would sooner shake the earth to atoms, and crush the arches of heaven, than fail to deliver his servant. He will do so still, depend upon it. "He shall never suffer the righteous to be moved."
David attributes his providential deliverance to the mercy of God by which he had been kept clear in his conduct: "I kept myself from mine iniquity." Whatever you do, if you do right, God will see you through; but, whoever you may be, if you turn aside to crooked ways, you will soon fall into a bog. If you try to carve for yourself, you will probably cut your own fingers. He who thinks that he can do better by suppressing truth, or by speaking falsehood, or by acting contrary to the dictates of his conscience, will find that he has made a great mistake. Do thou so trust in God as to hold to thine integrity. "Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee." Ponder the path of thy feet, and God will bring thee through as surely as he is alive, which is saying much more than if I said as surely as thou art alive; for, as the Lord liveth, before whom we stand, he will not forsake the righteous, nor cast off them that serve him faithfully.
This is the passage we have to consider, "I kept myself from mine iniquity." Here is, first, a personal danger: "mine iniquity." And, secondly, here is a special guard: "I kept myself." And then, thirdly, here is a happy result. David could say, as he looked back upon his life, "I kept myself from mine iniquity." There was no boasting in this declaration; but as his enemies accused him falsely, like an honest man he defended himself, for he was able truthfully to say, "I kept myself from mine iniquity."
I. Well now, here is, first, A PERSONAL DANGER: "mine iniquity."
This is a dreadful possession to have in the house; a man had better have a cage of cobras than have an iniquity, yet we have each of us to deal at home with some special form of sin. It is said that there is a skeleton in every house. I do not know whether that is true; but I do know that there is something very much allied to a skeleton, that is, the body of this death with which we all have to deal; and it takes a special shape in each good man. There is some particular sin which he may call "mine iniquity." Not only is there the general iniquity which affects the whole race, but each man has his own particular form of it: "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way." There is a general sin, but there is a particularity in it, too; each man has his own way of sinning, so that he can speak of "mine iniquity."
Let us think of the particular form of iniquity with which some of us have to do. It takes its speciality, perhaps, from our natural constitution. He who judges all men alike does them an injustice. There are some who have but little tendency to a particular form of evil, but they have a very great inclination towards some other sin. Some are sanguine; they are expecting great things, and they fall into the sin of expecting to drink sweet waters from the cisterns of this world. There are some of quite another temperament, who are inclined to despondency, perhaps to suspicion; they may fall into mistrust, or various forms of unbelief, and even into despair, which will be very grievous to the God who is ever gracious. There are some men who, from their very parentage, are inclined to drunkenness or to unchastity. There are others, favoured by God with a godly ancestry who, if they were left to themselves, would not probably fall into either of these forms of sin, yet they might be proud of their own integrity, and proud of their own uprightness; and is not pride as great a sin as those more open transgressions? Depend on it, my dear friend, thou hast some tendency peculiar to thyself, and there is a special point where thou liest open to the attacks of temptation. Happy will that man be who so knows himself that he sets a double watch against that postern gate through which the adversary is apt to creep in the dark. Peculiar constitutions may lead to special forms of sin, and it behooves the godly man to keep himself from his own iniquity.
Our tendency is to decry the particular form of sin that we find in others. We hold up our hands as if we were quite shocked. Better look in the looking-glass than look out at the window. Looking out of the window, thou seest one for whom thou art not responsible; but looking in the glass, thou seest one of whom thou must give account to God, and thou wilt do well to ask God to keep that one. Thou wilt, likely enough, within a day's march, not see a much worse man than he is, if thou dost know him well. I remember Mr. Berridge's quaint joke. He had, hanging round his room, the portraits of many ministers; and he would say to his friend, "Here is Whitefield, here is Wesley, here is So-and- so;" and then, leading his visitor to a looking-glass, he would say, "Here is the devil." Yes, he is somewhere about there where thou art looking. If thou lookest long enough, thou mayest detect some of his handiwork at any rate, for there is something of his work about us all. Sin, therefore, may be something peculiar to constitution.
But any man may also know that "mine iniquity" may be engendered by education. How impressible we are in childhood! We bear the print of our mother's fingers when we are fifty years of age, and it is not gone from us even when we are old and grey-headed. Things that were done at our father's home are likely to be done in our own home. Things that we saw, things that we heard, when we were very young, may abide with us, and help to shape our whole life. May God help us so to look back upon our early training as to discover the defects of it, and, not laying the sin upon others, which would be a wicked perversion of the truth, yet let us recollect that, as we lived in a sinful generation, we have acquired some taint therefrom, and we have need to watch against the sins which were taught us when we were young, especially any of you who have been rescued by grace out of homes of drunkenness and debauchery! I bless the Lord that there are many here who have been brought by sovereign grace out of very dens of iniquity. There are some here who are, so far as they are aware, the only ones of all their household who know the Lord; and when they go home to-night, it will be a great pain to them, as they cross the threshold, to think how very different the atmosphere will be from that in the house of God where they have worshipped. Well, my dear brother or sister, we sympathize with you in your trial, and pray the Lord that you may carefully watch and that you may be kept from your iniquity.
No doubt there are certain forms of iniquity which grow out of our particular condition. The young man has his iniquity; it is not the iniquity of the aged. The young man is tempted to sinful pleasure, the old man to covetousness. Each period of life has its own special snare. Pray, I beseech you, young people, middle-aged people, old people, pray the Lord that you may be kept from the peculiar iniquity of that part of the life-passage through which you are going. He who quits the shores of England for Australia may ask the guardian care of God while yet the white cliffs of Albion have scarcely melted from his view. Let him ask God's blessing as he passes through the middle passage of the Suez Canal; but let him not forget to pray when the captain tells him that, within a few days, he will come in sight of the southern shore. No, all along we need keeping.
It is so with our condition of life as to our outward circumstances. The rich man has his temptations. Few know how great they are, or they would not be so eager after riches. It is as hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven as for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. It is a natural impossibility, for so many difficulties surround the possession of riches; but with God all things are possible. Yet the poor man will not find that he has a much larger hole to go through. His straitened circumstances will not materially help him. Agur did well to pray, "Give me neither poverty nor riches." There are peculiar trials in each condition; and even the middle way between the two is not without its own special temptations; so that, whether thou hast much or little, pray God that thou mayest keep thyself from thine iniquity.
There are iniquities which come through prosperity. I have never yet prayed to God to preserve me in going up in a balloon, for I have never had any idea of entering one; but whenever you prosper very greatly, and especially when you prosper very fast, you are very like a man going up in a balloon. If people knew the danger, they would send in prayers to the Monday night prayer-meeting, asking that the Lord would have mercy upon the man who is greatly prospering, for there are very peculiar trials surrounding that condition. Oh, that men might be kept from that cleaving to the world and letting the Saviour go, which so often follows upon great success in life!
But equally must he pray who is in adversity. Oh, the ills of adversity! The worst ill of all is the tendency to doubt God, and to put forth your hand unto iniquity in order to remove the heavy load. Pray the Lord, thou who art losing everything, that he will keep thee from thine iniquity. Thou needest not pray, like Pharaoh, "Take away the frogs;" but pray like David, "Take away mine iniquity." That is the prayer of the true child of God.
I may be speaking to some who have great talents. Well, you have need to pray, "Lord, keep me from mine iniquity," for great talent is a very dangerous thing for a man to possess, a charge which needs great grace. And, if thou hast but one talent, thine iniquity may be to wrap it in a napkin, and hide it in the earth. There is a temptation in the one talent as well as in the five. Therefore, pray the Lord to keep thee from that iniquity which is often the accompaniment of the particular condition in which thou art found.
Brothers, there are some of you who have need to pray this prayer in reference to your calling. I do not think that any calling is free from temptation, but there are some positions in which the temptation is very terrible. I need not go into those which surround many of you in trade, when everybody seems to "cut the thing fine," as they say, and to cut the truth much finer than anything else, and say a great deal that is not true, under the notion that somehow or other it will help his business. If there be customs in your trade which all others follow, and which you know to be wrong, do not adopt them; but say, "Lord, keep me from mine iniquity." You need not begin to say, "Those grocers, those milk-dealers, those publicans, all have their iniquities." Think about your own; quite enough iniquities may crowd into your shop without your thinking about the shops of other people. Pray the Lord that you may be kept from your iniquity.
And, O beloved, what iniquities there are which surround us all in daily life! Into what company can you go without being tempted? In this city, at the present time, the position of a Christian is very much like that of Lot in Sodom. I speak what I do know; I do not exaggerate the conditions which surround the lives of some Christian working-men and Christian working-women who are not able to let their children go into our streets by reason of the filthiness of the language that they would hear. Even round about this house of prayer is a very cauldron of iniquity, so that many say, "We cannot live there, and we do not know where to live to keep our children out of the temptations which now surround them." I say not that one age is worse than another, but I do say that the peculiar trials of to-day should make Christians walk very near to God; and, instead of loosening and relaxing the lines of our religious profession, let us tighten them as much as ever we can, and seek to be thoroughly Nonconformist, not conforming to the world, to be out and out Dissenters, dissenting from the ways of this ungodly generation.
Still, to help you to find out your iniquity, I will make one or two more remarks. It is likely to be that iniquity which thou hast oftenest fallen into in thy previous life. What has been thy sternest struggle? Against quickness of temper? Then, that is thine iniquity. Doubt and mistrust? That is thine iniquity. Has it been covetousness? Has it been slowness to forgive any who have offended you? Has it been gossiping and mixing untruth with your talk? That is your iniquity. Whatever it is which hitherto has stained thy life, that is probably the thing which will stain it again unless thou dost watch, and call in the power of the Holy Spirit for thy protection. That sin which you find yourself readily committing, which you drift into without any effort, ay, which you drift into when you are making a great many efforts not to do it, that is your iniquity. That which you have returned to after having smarted for it, that which you have vowed you would never be guilty of again, and which yet has in a moment, like the bursting forth of some hidden spring of water, carried thee away with a rush, that is thine iniquity. Oh, how canst thou keep thyself from it unless God shall keep thee? Cry unto the Most High to enable thee to keep thyself from thine iniquity. That is thine iniquity which has overtaken thee even after thou hast prayed against it, and laboured against it, that thou hast concluded that surely thou wilt never do it again, and yet thou hast done it.
Let me tell you one thing more; that which you do not like to hear condemned, that which you do not like the preacher to mention, that which makes you to wriggle in your seat, and feel, "I wish he would not say that, he is coming too closely home," that is your iniquity. And if thou canst not bear that thy wife should speak to thee about it, or that thy brother or thy sister should give thee a friendly word of advice concerning it, that which thou art most loath to hear, probably has to do with thine iniquity. We may often judge ourselves by this test. It is that which thou art most loath to hear that thou hast most need to hear; instead of being angry with him who points it out to thee thou shouldst be willing to pay him for doing it. When you go to your doctor, and ask him to examine you, if he says, "There is something a little amiss with the heart, or with the lungs," do you knock him down? Do you get into a passion with him for telling you the truth? No, you give him his guinea, and thank him even for imparting evil news. And should we not thank those who rebuke us, and tell us of our faults? When God sendeth thee not a faithful friend, I pray him to send thee an honest enemy, who will deal straightly with thee, and let thee know where thy weakness is, that thou mayest then cry to God, "Lord, keep me from mine iniquity."
II. Now, secondly, in our text there is A SPECIAL GUARD: "I kept myself from mine iniquity."
Someone may perhaps say, "I have a special temptation, but I am going to set a guard against it." Let me ask you first who you are; are you a child of God? Have you passed from death unto life? If you say, "No," I am not referring to you in this part of my subject. You must be born again, you must go by faith to Jesus Christ, and ask for cleansing in his precious blood, and renewal by the Holy Spirit; but I am now talking to the child of God, the man who has spiritual life. I speak to you, my dear brother, because you can, by God's grace, keep yourself from your iniquity. How are you to do it?
Well, first, you must find out what it is. You must get a clear idea of your own iniquity. Ask the Lord to search you, and try you, and know your ways. When you have found out what that iniquity is, then endeavour to get a due sense of its foulness and guilt in the sight of God. Ask the Lord to make thee hate most that sin to which thou art most inclined. Remember that thou art a child of God; it ill becomes thee to be friendly with any of the King's enemies. Remember that Christ has bought thee; thou belongest to him, thou shouldst not be the slave of any sin, thou must not be such if the life of God be in thee. The life of God in the soul hates sin; thou canst not take pleasure in any sin if thou art indeed a regenerate man or woman. Therefore, I say to thee, seek to get a sight of the heinousness of thy particular sin and the danger which attends it, that, as thou hast an extraordinary horror of it, thou mayest set that over against thy tendency to it.
Then, be resolved in the power of the Holy Spirit that this particular sin shall be overcome. There is nothing like hanging it up by the neck, that very sin, I mean. Do not fire at sin indiscriminately; but, if thou hast one sin that is more to thee than another, drag it out from the crowd, and say, "Thou must die if no other does.I will hang thee up in the face of the sun." Strive against thine anger; strive against thy covetousness; strive against thine envy; strive against thine evil temper, thy malice, if that be thy fault; for there are some who are very slow to forgive. Strive against it till thou gettest thy foot upon its neck. "I cannot do it," says one. Why, the Lord has said that he will bruise Satan under our feet shortly! Surely, if you are to have the devil under your foot, you can get all sin under your feet by God's help; and you must do it. It is a part of that work that must be wrought in us to bring every thought into captivity to divine grace. You are not able to subdue the least sin apart from Christ; but, by the help of the Holy Spirit, there is nothing that can master thee. I tell thee that, if thou let any sin master thee, thou wilt be lost. If any sin should remain unconquered, thou art ruined; for this is the way of salvation, the absolute conquest of every sin through the grace of the Holy Spirit. It must be so with thee ere thou canst enter heaven, and thou art able to overcome it in the power of Jesus Christ. If thou hast an iniquity that more than another haunts thee, then keep away from all that tempts thee to it. Is there a house where thy company is much liked, but where thou art never able to come away without having fallen into sin? Keep away from that house. It is often one of the most essential things in young converts that they should quit the company in which they once sported. You may go into some company to do good; but mind that you are strong enough to resist the evil, for it does not always do for those who have but little strength to attempt to pull others out of the fire; they may be themselves pulled into it. No, come ye out from among them, be ye separate; touch not the unclean thing. You have no business to be in that place where it becomes almost necessary that you should sin; that necessity should warn you not to go there.
The true path of safety is to pray and believe against all sin. We conquer sin by faith in Christ. This is the axe that will cut down the upas tree, and there is no other that will do so. Believe thou in Jesus Christ the Saviour, who died for thee; and then believe in him as living again, and willing to help thee in every conflict against sin. Go thou, having Christ crucified with thee, and ask him to crucify thy sin, and nail it up to his cross. So thou shalt be helped to overcome; but there must be care, and prayer, and watchfulness, and trust, and continual looking up to the Lord for grace. Only so can you say, "I kept myself from mine iniquity."
III. Thirdly, I conclude with A HAPPY RESULT.
David says, "I kept myself from mine iniquity." He does not say that he could not sin, but that he would not, and he did not. When a wicked man gets old, he may say, "I do not sin like those young people." No, because you cannot; it has been well said that there is many an old man who, if you could put young eyes in him, would look the same way as he used to do. That is not what we want; it is not the failure to commit a sin because your passions have grown colder, or your strength has left you; it is a change of heart that is wanted. "I kept myself from mine iniquity;" that is, "though it would try to tempt me, and did so, and I might have yielded to it, yet by the grace of God I would not yield."
I do pray, my brothers and sisters, that, if we live ten, twenty, thirty, or fifty more years, we may be able to say, without any boasting, but in deep humility before God, "By his great grace, by trust in Jesus, I kept myself from mine iniquity," because, if we do so, see what a blessing it will be to us, for it will be to us a reason for our being brought out of the trouble. If when you are in need, if when you are under temptation, God helps you to keep straight, you will come out all right at the last. What a number of stories I might tell here of young men, who were great losers at first by being godly; but they kept themselves right, and they had to thank God for it ever afterwards. I know, at this present moment, a personal friend who was a banker's clerk. On a certain day, he was told to do something which he judged to be, speaking plainly, dishonest; and he told the manager that he could not do it, whereupon he received a month's notice. It was a country bank, and he was not sent about his business at once; and he had to turn the matter over. He had a wife and children; and when he went home, it was not easy to tell the wife that the excellent situation that he held would be vacated within a short time. But he stood fast in his integrity, he said that he was sure God would bring him safely through, and he never had even the slightest thought of doing other than he had said he would do. It was within twelve months that he obtained the situation of manager for that very bank, and it belongs to him at this moment; he very speedily became a man in a much better position than he could have expected to have obtained, simply from the fact that it had been proved that he could be trusted. It is not always so; some people have to be a long time under a cloud; but, in the long run, if thou as a child of God wilt but stand fast, God will not let thee be a loser. If he does, it shall be thy glory to lose everything sooner than tarnish thy character. Thou shalt find it a greater joy to lose all things for Christ than it would be to gain the whole world by doing anything that was wrong. If you are able to say, "I kept myself from mine iniquity," then you shall also be able to say with David, "I will love thee, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer. I will call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised."
Next, if you act thus, it will be a triumph of divine grace. Brethren, we want to show the world what grace can do, and every member of the church ought to feel that he is put upon his behaviour to prove what the grace of God has done in him. What credit is brought to Christ by professed Christians who are so like worldlings that, if you put them under a microscope, you could not tell the difference between them? If you can do what worldlings do, you shall go at last where worldlings go. If grace does not make you to differ from them, it is not the grace of God, it is all a sham. We ought to feel that Christ's honour is in danger by our ill behaviour, and so live that we can glorify our Father who is in heaven by our good works, keeping ourselves from our iniquity.
For again, this will be our best testimony to others. It is well to preach as I do, with my lips; but you can all preach with your feet, and by your lives, and that is the most effective preaching. The preaching of holy lives is living preaching. The most effective ministry from a pulpit is that which is supported by godliness from the pew. God help you to do this!
And, lastly, what a sweet peace this will give to your conscience! Though we know we are saved by grace, hear this, ye ungodly. There is no way of salvation for you, or for us, but by the grace of God through Jesus Christ; yet when we are saved, the evidence to our own soul of that work of grace upon our nature is very sweet when we can say, "I have kept myself from mine iniquity." A well-spent life, a life that is pure, a life that has been consecrated to usefulness, a life in which there has not been a turning aside to the right hand or to the left, helps us to lie down with comfort upon our dying bed, and bid farewell to all our dear ones and feel that we are leaving behind us the legacy of a gracious example in which we do not glory, but for which we give God the glory, and thank and praise his holy name. Begin at the cross; there is the source of your salvation. Then go, and live like the living Saviour. God help you to do so, for Christ's sake!