Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 805
Delivered on Lord’s-Day Morning, April 12, 1868, by.
“But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, has quickened us together with Christ, (by Grace you are saved).” Ephesians 2:4, 5.
THERE have been conferences of late of all sorts of people upon all kinds of subjects, but what a remarkable thing a conference would be if it were possible for persons who have been raised from the dead! If you could somehow or other get together the daughter of the Shunammite, the daughter of Jairus, the son of the widow at the gates of Nain, Lazarus, and Eutychus, what strange communing they might have one with another! What singular enquiries they might make, and what remarkable disclosures might they present to us! The thing is not possible, and yet a better and more remarkable assembly may be readily gathered on the same conditions, and more important information may be obtained from the confessions of its members.
This morning we have a conference of that very character gathered in this house, for many of us were dead in trespasses and sins, even as others—but we hope that through Divine energy we have been quickened from that spiritual death, and are now living to praise God! It will be well for us to talk together, to review the past, to rejoice in the present, to look forward to the future. “You has He quickened who were dead in trespasses and sins.” And as you sit together, an assembly of men and women possessed of resurrection life, you are a more notable conclave than if merely your bodies and not your spirits had been quickened!
The first part of this morning’s discourse will be occupied with a solemnity in which we shall take you into the morgue. Secondly, we shall spend awhile in reviewing a miracle, and we shall observe dead men living. We shall then turn aside to observe a sympathy indicated in the text, and we shall close with a song, for the text reads somewhat like music—it is full of thankfulness, and thankfulness is the essence of true song. It is full of holy and adoring wonder! It is evermore true poetry even though expressed in prose.
I. Celebrate, first, a great SOLEMNITY and descend into the morgue of our poor humanity. According to the teaching of sacred Scripture, men are dead, spiritually dead. Certain vain men would make it out that men are only a little disordered and bruised by the Fall—wounded in a few delicate members but not mortally injured. However, the Word of God is very explicit upon the matter and declares our race to be not wounded, not merely hurt, but slain outright and left as dead in trespasses and sin.
There are those who fancy that fallen human nature is only in a sort of swoon or fainting fit—and only needs a process of reviving to set it right. You have only, by education and by other manipulations, to set its life-floods in motion and to excite within it some degree of action—and then life will speedily be developed. There is much good in every man, they say, and you have only to bring it out by training and example. This fiction is exactly opposite to the teaching of sacred Scripture! Within these truthful pages we read of no fainting fit, no temporary paralysis—DEATH is the name for nature’s condition—and quickening is its great necessity.
Man is not partly dead, like the half-drowned mariner in whom some spark of life may yet remain if it be but fondly tendered, and wisely nurtured. There is not a spark of spiritual life left in man—manhood is to all spiritual things an absolute corpse. “In the day you eat thereof you shall surely die,” said God to our first parents, and die they did—a spiritual death—and all their children alike by nature lie in this spiritual death. It is not a sham death, or a metaphorical one, but a real, absolute, spiritual death. Yet it will be said, “Are they not alive?” Truly so, but not spiritually. There are grades of life. You come first upon the vegetable life—but the vegetable is a dead thing as to the vitality of the animal. Above the animal life rises the mental life, a vastly superior life. The creature, which is only an animal, is dead to either the joys or the sorrows of mental life.
Then, high above the mental, as much as the mental is above the animal, rises what Scripture calls the spiritual life— the life in Christ Jesus. All men have more or less of the mental life, and it is well that they should cultivate it—get as much as they can of it. It is well that they should put it to the best uses, and make it subserve the highest ends. Man, even looked upon as merely living mentally, is not to be despised or trifled with. But still, the mental life cannot of itself rise to the spiritual life—it cannot penetrate beyond that mystical wall which separates forever the mere life of mind from the life of that new principle, the Spirit, which is the offspring of God and is the living and incorruptible seed which He casts into the soul.