Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 584
Delivered on Sunday Evening, July 31, 1864, by the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington
1 Kings 14:6.
AHIJAH the Prophet was blind. Did I not tell you this morning that God’s servants could be happy without the light of the sun? If God should be pleased to deprive their natural eyes of the pleasures of light their souls would not be without joy, for as in the New Jerusalem, so in the renewed heart—“the glory of God does lighten it and the Lamb is its Light. ” Doubtless this was the case with that venerable Prophet. He was not like Moses, whose eyes did not wax dim and whose natural strength did not abate. But his eyes were set with age. The organs of vision had so decayed through the multitude of his years that he could not see so much as a ray of light.
Yet doubtless when he could not look out of the windows, God looked in. And when there was no beam coming in from the sun, much light was darted in from Heaven. What man of modern times saw more than blind Milton? It were well for us to feel the influence of that “drop serene,” and close our eyes forever if we could but see such visions of God as Milton has penned in his Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Here is a fine picture for you. Behold the venerable Prophet sitting alone in his humble cottage. And yet not alone, because his God is with him. Blind, but yet in the highest sense a Seer, looking into the invisible and by faith beholding things which we blind men who have our sight can never see!
Ahijah beheld what eye has not seen and heard what ear has never heard. This, then, may furnish a word of comfort at the outset to any who are suffering under infirmity—Jesus can mend you. You are not the only persons who have been called to suffer. Full many of your humble guild—the company of the blind—have been gifted with spiritual sight. If you have lost hearing, or the use of any of the members of your body, remember that no strange thing has happened to you but such as is common to man. There is a way by which, in proportion as your tribulations abound, so your consolations may abound through Jesus Christ!
No, these very privations which you feel so sadly, which so loudly demand our sympathy, may by God’s love be transmuted into mercies by a holy alchemy which really turns iron into gold! He can turn your losses into gains and your curses into blessings. Mark well this venerable Prophet—a man so old as to have survived the senses which give life its charm—is it not time for him to die? Has he not outlived his usefulness when he is made entirely dependent upon his fellow creatures and a burden to himself? Why does not the Prophet’s Master send a convoy of angels to take the good man Home?
There he sits without any apparent perception of the scenes transpiring around him. Surely, surely it is time for the Master to call him away! But no, He does not. Ahijah must not die! He has another message to deliver and he is immortal till his work is done. I have no doubt he sweetly slept after he had delivered his last message, but not till then. Brothers and Sisters, you and I have no right to want to go to Heaven till our work is done! There is a desire to be with Christ which is not only natural but spiritual. There is a sighing to behold His face which if a man is without I shall question if he is a Christian at all! But to wish to be away from the battle before we win the victory and to desire to leave the field before the day is over is but lazy and listless! Therefore let us pray God to save us from it.
Whitfield and a company of ministers were talking together and expressing their desire to go to Heaven. Good Mr. Tennant was the only man who differed from them. He said he did not wish to die. And he thought that if his Brother Whitfield would but consider for a time, he would not wish to be gone, either. He said, if you hire a man to do a day’s work and he is saying all the day, “I wish it were evening, I wish it were time to go home,” you would think,” what a lazy fellow he is,” and you would wish you had never engaged him. “So,” he said, “I am afraid it is nothing but our idleness that often prompts us to desire to be away from our work.”
If there is a soul to win, let me not stop until I have won it. Truly some of us might summon up courage enough to say, “I would gladly barter Heaven for the Glory of Christ and not only wait twenty years out of Heaven if I may have twenty years of glorifying Him the better, but wait out altogether if I may outside Heaven sing to Him sweeter songs and honor Him more than I can inside its walls. For outside Heaven shall be Heaven to me if it shall help me to glorify my Lord and Master the better.”
You have heard, I dare say, that anecdote of good Mr. Whitfield? In his early ministry, lying down, as he thought, to die in a high fever, a poor Negro woman was sitting by his side and tending him. In his sad moments Whitfield thought of dying, but the black woman said, “No, master Whitfield, you are not to die yet. There are thousands of souls to bring to Christ! So keep up your spirits, for you must live and not die—your Master has yet work for you to do.”