Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 806
Delivered on Thursday evening, April 16, 1868, by.
“Your young men shall see visions.’” Acts 2:17.
MANY visions have led to the most disastrous results. When Napoleon had a vision of a universal monarchy over which he should preside, with the French eagle for his ensign, he drenched the lands in blood. Many visions have been wretchedly delusive. Men have dreamed of finding the fairy pleasure in the dark forest of sin. Carnal joys have danced before their eyes as temptingly as the mirage in the desert, and they have pursued the phantom forms to their misery in this world and to their eternal ruin in the next. Mistaking license for liberty, and madness for mirth, they have dreamed themselves into Hell! Many dreams have sucked the life-blood out of men as vampires do.
Men have passed from stern reality into dreamland and while seemingly awake, have continued like sleepwalkers to do all things in their sleep. Many pass all their days in one perpetual daydream—speculating, building castles in the air, thinking of what they would do—and vowing how they would behave themselves. With fine capacities they have driveled away existence! As their theory of life was born of smoke, so the result of their lives has been a cloud. The luxurious indolence of mere resolve, the useless tossing of regrets—these have been all their sluggard life.
But for all this, good and grand visions are not unknown—visions which came from the excellent glory. Visions which, when young or old men have seen them, have filled them with wisdom, Divine Grace and holiness. Visions which have worked with such effect upon their minds that they have been lifted up above the level of the sons of men and made sons of God, co-workers with the Eternal! Such visions are given to men whose eyes have been illumined by the Holy Spirit—visions which have come of that eye-salve which only the Holy Spirit can apply. Visions which are not bestowed on carnal men nor unveiled to the impure in heart. Visions reserved for the men elect of God who are sanctified by the Holy Spirit, and made meet to be partakers of the witness of God and the testimony of His Son.
All Divine things, when they first come to men from the Lord, are as visions because man is so little prepared to believe God’s thoughts and ways that he cannot think them to be real. They appear to us to be too great, too good to be real. We look at them rather as things to be desired and wished for, than as things that may be actually ours. It must be so while Jehovah’s ways are higher than our ways, and His thoughts than our thoughts. It must be so, that even Divine mercy should at first be a burden to the Prophet who has its message to deliver, and that the eternal promise should be a vision to the Seer who first receives it.
We are so gross and carnal, even when most clarified and made fit to receive Divine impressions, God’s spiritual messages and directions to us must usually at the first float dimly before the sense, and only in after thoughts become solid and clear. We must take care that we do not neglect heavenly monitions through fear of being considered visionary. We must not be staggered even by the dread of being styled fanatical, or out of our minds—for to stifle a thought from God is no mean sin. How much of good in this world would have been lost if good men had quenched the first half-fashioned thoughts which have flitted before them!
I mean, for instance, had Martin Luther taken the advice of his teacher when he said to him, “Go your way, silly monk! Go to your cell and pray God, and if it be His will He will reform the abuses of this Church, but what have you to do with it?” Supposing the agitated monk had administered an opiate to his soul, what then? Doubtless the Gospel to Luther at the first was dim enough, and the idea of reform most vague and indistinct—but had he closed his heart to his vision, how long might not the Romish darkness have brooded over the multitudes of Europe? And George Fox, that most eminent of dreamers who dreamed more and more vividly than any other man! Where had been all the testimonies for a spiritual religion? Where all the holy influences for benevolence, for peace, for anti-slavery, for I know not what besides which have streamed upon this world through the agency of the Society of Friends, if the wild Quaker had been content to let his impressions come and go and be forgotten?
These things, which nowadays are ordinary Christian doctrines, were considered in his day to be but the prattle of fanatics, even as the reforms which some of us shall live to see are denounced as revolutionary, or ridiculed as Utopian. O young men, if you have received a thought which dashes ahead of your times, hold to it and work at it till it comes to something! If you have dreamed a dream from the Lord, turn it over and over again till you are quite sure it is not steam from a heated brain, or smoke from Hell—and when it is clear to your own heart that it is fire from off God’s altar— then work and pray and wait your time.