Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 619
Delivered on Sunday Morning, March 12, 1865
“Call unto Me and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things, which you know not.” Jeremiah 33:3.
SOME of the most learned works in the world smell of midnight oil. But the most spiritual and most comforting books and sayings of men usually have a savor about them of prison dampness. I might quote many instances—John Bunyan’s Pilgrim may suffice instead of a hundred others. And this good text of ours, all moldy and cold with the prison in which Jeremiah lay, has nevertheless a brightness and a beauty about it which it might never have had if it had not come as a cheering word to the prisoner of the Lord shut up in the court of the prison.
God’s people have always, in their worst condition, found out the best of their God. He is good at all times, but He seems to be at His best when they are at their worst. “How could you bear your long imprisonment so well?” said one to the Landgrave of Hesse who had been shut up for his attachment to the principles of the Reformation. He replied, “The Divine consolations of martyrs were with me.”
Doubtless there is a consolation more deep, more strong than any other which God keeps for those who, being His faithful witnesses, have to endure exceedingly great tribulation from the enmity of man. There is a glorious aurora for the frigid zone. And stars glisten in northern skies with unusual splendor. Rutherford had a quaint saying that when he was cast into the cellars of affliction, he remembered that the great King always kept his wine there and he began to seek at once for the wine bottles and to drink of the “wines on the lees well refined.”
They who dive in the sea of affliction bring up rare pearls. You know, my companions in affliction, that it is so. You whose bones have been ready to come through the skin through long lying upon the weary couch. You who have seen your earthly goods carried away from you and have been reduced well-near to penury. You who have gone to the grave these seven times, till you have feared that your last earthly friend would be borne away by unpitying Death. You have all proven that He is a faithful God and that as your tribulations abound, so your consolations also abound by Christ Jesus!
My prayer is, in taking this text this morning, that some other prisoners of the Lord may have its joyous promise spoken home to them! That you who are shut up and cannot come forth by reason of present heaviness of spirit may hear Him say, as with a soft whisper in your ears and in your hearts, “Call upon Me and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things, which you know not.”
The text naturally splits itself up into three distinct particles of the Truth of God. Upon these let us speak as we are enabled by God the Holy Spirit. First, prayer commanded—“Call unto Me.” Secondly, an answer promised—“And I will answer you.” Thirdly, faith encouraged—“And show you great and mighty things, which you know not.”
I. The first head is PRAYER COMMANDED. We are not merely counseled and recommended to pray, but bid to pray. This is great condescension. An hospital is built—it is considered sufficient that free admission shall be given to the sick when they seek it. But no order in council is made that a man must enter its gates. A soup kitchen is well provided for in the depth of winter. Notice is promulgated that those who are poor may receive food on application. But no one thinks of passing an Act of Parliament compelling the poor to come and wait at the door to take the charity.
It is thought to be enough to proffer it without issuing any sort of mandate that men shall accept it. Yet so strange is the infatuation of man, on the one hand, which makes him need a command to be merciful to his own soul! And so marvelous is the condescension of our gracious God on the other—that He issues a command of love without which not a man of Adam born would partake of the Gospel feast, but would rather starve than come! In the matter of prayer it is even so. God’s own people need, or else they would not receive it, a command to pray.
Why is this? Because, dear Friends, we are very subject to fits of worldliness, if indeed that is not our usual state. We do not forget to eat—we do not forget to take the shop shutters down—we do not forget to be diligent in business—we do not forget to go to our beds to rest—but we often forget to wrestle with God in prayer and to spend, as we ought to spend, long periods in consecrated fellowship with our Father and our God. With too many professors the ledger is so bulky that you cannot move it! And the Bible, representing their devotion, is so small that you might almost put it in your waistcoat pocket.
Hours for the world! Moments for Christ! The world has our best and our prayer closet the remnants of our time. We give our strength and freshness to the ways of mammon and our fatigue to the ways of God. Therefore it is that we need to be commanded to attend to that very act which it ought to be our greatest happiness, as it is our highest privilege to perform—to meet with our God! “Call upon Me,” He says, for He knows that we are apt to forget to call upon God.