Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 416
“Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith you shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.” Ephesians 6:16.
LIKE the Spartans, every Christian is born a warrior. It is his destiny to be assaulted. It is his duty to attack. Part of his life will be occupied with defensive warfare. He will have to defend earnestly the faith once delivered to the saints. He will have to resist the devil, he will have to stand against all his wiles—and having done all, still to stand. He will, however, be but a sorry Christian if he acts only on the defensive. He must be one who goes against his foes as well as stands still to receive their advance. He must be able to say with David, “I come against you in the name of the Lord of Hosts, the God of the armies of Israel whom you have defied.”
He must wrestle not with flesh and blood but against principalities and powers. He must have weapons for his warfare—not carnal—but “mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds.” He must not, I say, be content to live in the stronghold though he is then well guarded and munitions of stupendous strength his dwelling place may be. But he must go forth to attack the castles of the enemy and to put them down, to drive the Canaanite out of the land.
Now, there are many ways in which the Christian may to a great degree forget his marshal character. And alas, there are not a few who, if they are Christians at all, certainly know but very little of that daily warfare to which the Captain of our salvation calls His disciples. They will know most of fighting who cleave closest to king David. They who are willing not merely to be with him when he is in Saul’s court with his fingers amid the strings of the harp, but going in and out before the people and behaving discreetly, so that “all Israel and Judah loved David because he went out and came in before them.”
They must be men who are willing to go with David into the cave of Adullam when he is outlawed, when his character has become a stench in the nostrils of every proud hypocrite and when Saul the king—in his day the representative of that worldly religion which is not of God, but stands in the strength of man—when he hunts David to seek his life. Thus the men who are willing to follow Christ in the midst of an ungodly and perverse generation must come right out from it and be separate. Their life will have to be like the life of the men of Napthali who hazarded their lives onto the death in the high places of the field.
You will remember that Jonathan, one of the sweetest characters in the Word of God, is one of whom, after all, there is little to be said. His life was inglorious from the very time that he forsook David and his death was among the slain of the Philistines upon the dewless mountains of Gilboa. Alas, poor Jonathan—he could give David his bow—but he could not draw the bow for David. He could give David his garments, even to his armor—but he could not put on the armor for David. The attraction of his father’s court was too much for him and there he stayed.
In that Book of the Chronicles, where the Holy Spirit has recorded the names of the mighty men that were with David in Adullam we find not the name of Jonathan. We find the names of those who broke through the Philistines to give David a drink of the water of the well of Bethlehem. We find the name of the man who went down into the pit in the time of winter and smote the lion. But Jonathan has not the honor to stand recorded in the list of the great host which was like the host of God. And there are Christians of that kind nowadays. They have a soft religion—religion which shuns opposition, a reed-like religion which bows before every blast��unlike that cedar of godliness which stands aloft in the midst of the storm and claps its boughs in the hurricane for very joy of triumph, though the earth be all in arms abroad.
Such men, like those who shunned David in Adullam, lack the faith that shares the glory. Though saved, yet their names shall not be found written among the mighty men who for our Great Commander’s sake are willing to suffer the loss of all things and to go forth without the camp bearing His reproach. Those Christians too, who having come clean out from the world—diligently engaged in building up the Church—will have to fight more than others who are rather built up than builders.
You remember, in Nehemiah’s day, how the Jews worked when they built the walls of Jerusalem. With one hand they held the trowel and in the other they held a weapon. “The builders, everyone had his sword girded by his side and so built.” Moreover there were master masons along the wall and the laborers all actually worked. But here and there you might see a sentinel ready to sound the trumpet so that the workmen might prove warriors and rush to the fray and drive away their foes.