Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 756
Delivered on Thursday Evening, March 21, 1867, by C. H. Spurgeon, at the Surrey Chapel, Blackfriars Road..
“I must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day: the night comes, when no man can work.”- John 9:4.
You observe that a very speculative question had been put to our Lord, and His answer to that very speculative question is, “I must work.” His disciples wished to know something about the mysterious fact that some persons are born in an unhappy condition—blind, or deaf, or dumb—on what account they were sent into the world under such disadvantageous circumstances. Would you not, yourselves, like to know? Do you not wish that the Savior had expounded all that mystery?
There are so many points of controversy connected with that question that He could scarcely have had a more suggestive topic. Surely He might have enlightened us far more than Socrates or Plato. Why did He not, at once, with such a noble opportunity, plunge into the labyrinth of metaphysics, or begin to expound predestination and open up the points in it which agree or disagree with free agency? Here was a noble opportunity for interpreting all the marvels of Divine Sovereignty and natural suffering!
Why did He not at once open all this up to the people? No, but with a very short answer He turns to them and says, “I must work. You may think. You may talk. You may argue, but I must work. You may give yourselves up, if you know no better, to the inferior occupation of jangling about words, but I must work. Nobler calls I have to obey than those which come to your carnal ears.”
We gather, then, that the Savior has a greater respect for work than He has for speculation! That when He comes into the world He will go to all the mighty thinkers, and the gentlemen who are constantly producing new ideas, and wonderful points of subtlety, and put them into the scale as so much rubbish! But when He finds a single worker—a poor widow who has given her two mites, a poor saint who has spoken for Christ and been the means of the conversion of a soul—He will take up these works which were done for Him as precious grains of costly gold!
We may say of the field of enterprise and work for Christ, as of the land of Havilah, “The gold of that land is good,” and Christ thinks it to be so. He estimates the work of faith and labor of love done for Him as of great price.
I. I shall ask your attention to the text, taking and keeping close to the very words of it. And the thing we observe first, is, A NECESSITY TO LABOR—“I must work.” With Christ it was not, “I may if I will.” Nor, “I can if I like.” It was not the mere possibility and the mere potentiality of work, but an imperious necessity—“I must.” He could not help Himself. If I may use such words concerning One who is no less Divine than He was human, He was under restraint. He was bound. He was compelled.
The cords, which bound Him, however, were the cords of His Deity. They were the cords of love which bound Him who is Love. “I must work.” It was because He loved the sons of men so well that He could not sit still and see them perish. He could not come down from Heaven and stand here robed in our mortal flesh and be an impassive, careless, loitering spectator of so much evil, so much misery. His heart beat high with desire. He thirsted to be doing good, and His greatest and grandest act, His sacrifice of Himself, was a baptism with which He had to be baptized, and He was straitened until it was accomplished.
His great soul within Him felt as if it could not be easy. It was like the troubled sea that cannot rest. Each of His thoughts was like a mighty wave that could not be still. His whole soul was like a volcano when it begins to swell with lava, and needs to vent. He must let His soul run out in hot consecration and devotion to the cause of those whom He came to save. “I must,” He says, “I must work.” Not only was it the love within which made the compulsion, but it was also the sorrow without which compelled Him.
That blind man had touched the secret chord that set the Savior’s soul at work. If that blind man had not been there, or, rather, if it had been possible for the Savior to forget the cases of misery which existed around Him, then He might, perhaps, have been quiet. But because always before His soul He saw the multitudes perishing as sheep without a shepherd. Because, far more vividly than you and I have ever done, He realized the value of a soul and the horror of a soul being lost, He felt as though He could not be still. “I must work,” He said.
Fancy yourselves, my Brothers and Sisters, standing on the beach when a ship is being broken on the rocks. If there were anything that you could do towards the rescue of the mariners, would you not feel within yourselves, “I must work”? Why, it is said that, sometimes, when the crowd sees a vessel going to pieces, and hear the cries of the drowning men, they seem as if they were all seized with madness, because, not being able to give vent to their kindness and brotherly feeling towards the perishing ones by any practical activity, they know not what to do, and are ready to sacrifice their own lives if they might but do something to save others.