Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 957
Delivered on Lord’s-Day Morning, October 2, 1870
“And when the disciples saw Him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a ghost. And they cried out for fear.” Matthew 14:26.
SOME of the richest comforts are lost to us for want of clear perception. What consolation could be greater to the tempest-tossed disciples than to know their Master was present, and to see Him manifestly revealed as Lord of sea as well as land? Yet because they did not discern Him clearly, they missed the incomparable consolation. What is worse, at times the dimness of our perception will even turn the rarest consolation into the source of fear. Jesus is come, and in His coming the Sun of their joy has risen, but they do not perceive it to be Jesus. And thinking it to be a phantom, they are filled with alarm and cry out in dread.
He who was their best Friend, they were as much afraid of as though He had been the arch enemy. Christ walking on the waves should have put all fear to rest, but instead they mistake Him for a ghost appearing amidst the storm, foreboding darker ill. They were filled with dismay by that which ought to have lifted them up with exultation. Oh, the benefit of the heavenly eye salve by which the eyes are cleared! May the Holy Spirit anoint our eyes therewith. Oh, the excellence of faith which, like the telescope, brings Christ near to us, and lets us see Him as He is! Oh, the sweetness of walking near to Christ, and knowing Him with an assured, confident, clear knowledge—for this would give us comforts which now we miss—and at once remove from us distresses which today unnecessarily afflict us.
The subject upon which I wish to speak will be indicated to you if I, first of all, supply you with the outline of it. The first head will be this—it is too common an error to make a phantom of Christ. And, secondly, we are most apt to do this when Jesus is most evidently revealed. And therefore, thirdly, from this come our greatest sorrows. And, fourthly, if we could be cured of this evil, Jesus would rise very much in our esteem and many other blessed results would be sure to follow.
I. IT IS TOO COMMON AN ERROR TO MAKE A PHANTOM OF CHRIST. There are some who make a Christ of a phantom. I mean they take that to be their Savior which is but a delusion. They have dreamed so. They have excited themselves up to a high pitch of presumptuous credulity. They have persuaded themselves into delusive comfort, and they make their excited feeling or fancy their Christ. They are not saved, but they think they are. Jesus is not known to them. They are unspiritual. They are not His sheep. They are not His disciples, yet they have put something up before their mind’s eye which they think to be Christ, and their ideal of Christ, which is but a phantom, is Christ to them.
A terrible error! May God save us from it and bring us to know the Lord in deed and in Truth by the teaching of His Holy Spirit. For to know Him is life eternal. But an equally and probably a more common error is to make a phantom of Christ. More or less we have all erred in this direction. Let me show you this for reproof and direction. First, how often we have done this in the matter of sin and like cleansing of it! Our sin seems to us, when we are convinced of it, very real. Real, indeed, it is—our offenses against God are no imaginary ones—we have really provoked Him to wrath, and He is angry with us every day.
The stain of sin is not on the surface, merely, the leprosy lies deep within. Sin is a horrible evil, and when our spirits have been able to see the reality and the heinousness of it, they sink within us. But oh, what a glorious thing it is when we can, with equal vividness, see the actual cleansing from sin which Christ confers on all Believers by His precious blood! To see the scarlet and to weep over it is well, but to see that same scarlet vanish in the pure white of the atoning Sacri-fice—this is better.
Did you ever get as clear a perception of the second as you have done of the first? It is a great blessing when God makes sin to be experimentally heavy to you so that you feel it. But it is a greater blessing, still, when the atoning blood
is quite as vividly realized, and you see the bloody sweat of Gethsemane, and the pouring out of the life of the Redeemer upon Calvary, and the agonies unknown by which guilt was fully expiated before the Eternal Throne. My Brethren, when we are under concern of soul, or even after our first conviction—when sin returns heavily upon our spirits—our fears, and terrors, and alarms, are real enough.
No one dares to say to us, then, that we are in a state of nervous excitement about a fiction. Our danger, then, is right before us, as clearly as the flames are before some poor person immured in a burning house—we are sure of the danger, we see it, we perceive it, we feel it in the very core of our nature. But there is salvation provided by the Redeemer! He took our sin upon Himself. He suffered the punishment of it. He has put the sin away. Believing in Him our sin has gone! We have a right to peace, we are fully warranted in standing before God and may ask, “Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect?”