Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 459
“Therefore laying aside all malice and all guile and hypocrisies, and envies and all evil speaking, as newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the Word, that you may grow thereby. If, indeed, you have tasted that the Lord is gracious.” 1 Peter 2:1-3.
“IF, indeed, you have tasted that the Lord is gracious.” “If” If, then, is not a thing to be taken for granted concerning all of the human race. “IP—then there is a possibility, and a probability, that some may not have tasted that the Lord is gracious. “If, if—then this is not a general but a special mercy. And it becomes our business to enquire whether we are in that company, who know the Grace of God by inward experience.
There is no spiritual favor which may not be a matter for heart-searching. At the very summit of holy delight, we meet the challenge of sentinel “IP—“Ifyou, then, are risen with Christ,” and at the very bottom, even at Repentance Gate itself, he meets us with a warrant of arrest until he sees whether our sorrow is the godly sorrow that needs not to be repented of. “Ifyou are the Son of God,” is not always a temptation of the devil but often a very healthy enquiry most fittingly suggested by holy anxiety to men who would build securely upon the Rock of Ages.
If at the Lord’s Table, itself, it is proper for us to say, “Lord, is it I?” when there is a Judas in the company, and if after the most intimate fellowship, Christ exclaimed, “Simon, son of Jonas, do you love me?”—let no enjoyment of ordinances, let no high and rapt fellowship which we may have known, exempt us from the great duty of proving ourselves whether we are in the faith.
But, Beloved, albeit this should be a matter of heart-searching, I take it that no man ought to be content while there is any such thing as an “if about his having tasted that the Lord is gracious. I can understand Believers saying—
“It is a point I long to know, Often it causes anxious thought. Do I love the Lord or no? Am I His, or am I not?”
But I do not understand their being comfortable while their souls are under such suspense. I can comprehend the doubts which arise from jealousy and holy distrust, but I cannot understand the continuance of those doubts, without a desperate struggle to clasp the Savior with the hands of faith, and say, “I know whom I have believed and I am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed to Him.”
Do not rest, O Believer, till you have a full assurance of your interest in Christ. Let nothing satisfy you till, by the infallible witness of the Holy Spirit bearing witness with your spirit, you are certified that you are a child of God. Oh, trifle not here. Let no “perhaps,” and “if,” and “maybe,” satisfy your soul. Build on eternal verities and verily build upon them. Get the sure mercies of David and surely get them. Let your anchor be cast into that which is within the vein and see to it that your soul is linked to the anchor by a cable that will not break.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Jesus, I exhort and stir you up to get beyond these dreary “ifs.” Abide no more in the howling wilderness of doubts and fears. Cross the Jordan of distrust and enter the Canaan of peace, where the Canaanite still lingers but which ceases not to flow with milk and honey.
Our text mentions a taste—“If, indeed, you have tasted that the Lord is gracious.” And the Apostle speaks of the duty of those men of taste who have received this special favor. These two things shall take up our time this morning—the taste and the duties arising out of it And before we conclude, we shall go back to the Psalm with which we commenced this morning, and address those who as yet have never tasted that the Lord is gracious, in the words of David—“O taste and see that the Lord is good!”
I. First, then, TASTE is prominent in the text. I scarcely need observe, that in Scripture, the Holy Spirit uses natural things as figures by which to set forth spiritual mysteries. Inasmuch as our language was ordained to speak the thoughts of the mind and to describe the things of the body, it is not fitted, in itself, for the utterance of the things of the spirit. As much as the soul is higher than the body, so much superior is the spirit (that is, the new principle implanted in regeneration) to the mere soul which every man possesses. And, as you will clearly see, if our speech had only been made for the body and had not been adapted for a being that had a soul, we should have been strangely embarrassed for the expression of our mental emotions.
And now, as our speech only reaches unto the natural soul, if we would speak of the higher thoughts and impulses of the inner and newborn spirit, we can only do so by using the words we employ concerning natural objects. In this way we do not so much describe spiritual things as they are in themselves, but bring them down to our comprehension. When we shall become pure spirits, we may have a spiritual language. When we are caught up to the third Heaven, we shall use those words which now are not lawful for a man to utter—spiritualwords fitted for spiritual’things.