Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 697
Delivered on Sunday Morning, June 24, 1866, by C. H. Spurgeon, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington
“Out of weakness were made strong.” Hebrews 11:34.
SOME kinds of weakness are of God’s appointment and necessarily incident to manhood. They are not sinful, and therefore we may continue to be subject to them without regret. In reference to such weaknesses it may be that after beseeching the Lord even thrice to remove them it may be for our good that they should remain. Then will our gracious God give us, in place of removing the weakness, this reply, “My grace shall be sufficient for you.” This is a case of in weakness being made strong, and there are many of God’s saints who daily experience so blessed a privilege. They are weak, and continue weak. They have infirmities which they once wished to have removed but which now they are content to bear, for now they are of the same mind with the Apostle—they glory in their infirmity because when they are weak they are strong.
But, dear Friends, there is another kind of weakness which is sinful—a weakness which springs not from nature but from fallen nature—not from God’s appointment, but from our sinfulness. And out of this we should desire to be delivered. We cannot pray for strength in sinful weakness, but must earnestly plead for strength to come out of it and to be made strong. This seems to me to be the particular blessing which faith is said to have obtained in the text, “out of weakness were made strong.” It is the inestimable privilege of many a Christian to be strong in weakness when the weakness is only one of infirmity, but it is an equally precious gift to be made strong out of weakness when that weakness is of a sinful kind.
Looking round the Church at large, with as impartial an eye as we can summon, we are afraid that for the most part it is nowadays comparable to a huge infirmary rather than a camp filled with brave soldiers. Both ministers and private members of the Church are very generally weak in one way or other. They are living, but they are sickly. They are working for God, but they are working in a feeble, inefficient manner. If I look upon the camps of the Lord’s enemies, whether Puseyite or Broad Church, I see intelligence and vigor so apparent that I am apt to think that never was error more earnest, more active, more intense than just now!
There is a reality about the efforts of our opponents which may well alarm us—and when I look to the camp of the Lord Jesus Christ I lament a predominant lukewarmness, a want of enthusiasm and deficiency in force, which, if it does not betoken a departure from God in heart, certainly indicates very great feebleness in the vital parts—producing comparative weakness in all the parts.
I desire this morning to speak to those who are weak—weak where they ought not to be—and who feel a growing tendency to rest content in that weakness. I would stir up those who are beginning to imagine that weakness is the normal and proper state of a Christian—that to be unbelieving, desponding, nervous, timid, cowardly, inactive, heartless, is at worst a very excusable thing. I want, if God wills, to show to the sinfully weak ones that their condition is not proper at all. I want to show that it is a work of faith to lift us out of it—not to help us in our evil weakness—but to deliver us out of it and to make us strong, reversing our present condition by enabling us to be mighty in the work of God.
Since the text teaches that faith is the grand cure for spiritual feebleness, I shall, first, cite a few cases of cure. In the second place I shall analyze the remedy. In the third place I shall endeavor to administer it, and in the fourth place I shall say a word of praise to the Physician who prescribes it.
I. At the outset we have said that faith is the cure for spiritual weakness, and I have to MENTION CASES OF CURE. I shall not now cite cases from the Old Testament of bodily cures which have been worked by faith, though I might mention Hezekiah, who, being sick unto death, was, by faith in God’s promise, restored to life and his period of existence lengthened fifteen years.
In the Apostolic times it was through faith that many sicknesses were made to fly before the healing touch of the Apostles. That power of healing has probably become extinct, or is lying dormant in the Church—yet there are still indications that faith has some power in that direction. I cannot but think that when honest John Wickliffe, raising himself up in the bed of sickness, said to the monks who surrounded him, expecting him to die and tempting him to recant, “I shall not die, but live to declare the wicked deeds of the monks”—I cannot but think that his faith had much to do with his cure.
Had he been a man of a timorous, wavering frame of mind, his sickbed might have been his deathbed—but the vital forces were all thrown into energetic action by the mental energy of his faith and the crisis was safely passed. I do not know how far faith may still operate upon the bodily frame, for there is certainly an intimate connection between the soul and the body. Those wondrous cases recorded in the life of Dorothea Trudel of Zurich indicate the singular power of faith to assist in the cure of the body by its calming influence on the mind.