Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 965
Delivered on Lord’s-Day Morning, December 11, 1870
“Know you not that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?Purge out, therefore, the old leaven, that you may be a newlump, as you are unleavened. For even Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness. But with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” 1 Corinthians 5:6-8.
“WHAT God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” Evermore in Scripture the Doctrines of Grace are married to the precepts of holiness. Where faith leads the way, the virtues follow in a goodly train. The roots of holiness and happiness are the same, and in some respects they are but two words for the same thing. There have been persons who have thought it impossible that holiness should come out of the preaching of salvation by faith. If you tell men that “there is life in a look at the Crucified One,” will they not conclude that cleanness of life is unnecessary? If you preach salvation by Grace through faith, and not at all by the works of the Law, will they not draw the inference that they need not be obedient to Christ, but may live as they wish?
To this the best answer is found in the godly, honest, and sober lives of the men who are most zealous for the Gospel of the Grace of God. On the other hand, there have been others of Antinomian spirit who have dared to say that because they are saved, and Christ has finished His work for them so that nothing is left undone by way of merit, therefore, from now on they may act as they please, seeing that they are not under Law, but under Grace. Our reply is that the faith which saves is not an unproductive faith, but is always a faith which produces good works and abounds in holiness.
Salvation in sin is not possible, it always must be salvation from sin. As well speak of liberty while yet the irons are upon a man’s wrists, or boast of healing while the disease waxes worse and worse, or glory in victory when the army is on the point of surrendering, as to dream of salvation in Christ while the Sinner continues to give full swing to his evil passions. Grace and holiness are as inseparable as light and heat in the sun. True faith in Jesus in every case leads to an abhorrence of every false way and to a perseverance in the paths of holiness even unto the end.
The Apostle Paul, while he was showing the Corinthians how wrong they were to tolerate an incestuous person in their midst, compared the spirit of uncleanness to an evil leaven. Then the leaven suggested to him the Passover, and turning aside for a moment, he applied the type of the paschal feast so as to make his argument yet more convincing. He would urge purity upon them by every conceivable reason, and his keen eyes saw an argument in the celebration of the Passover.
In using this type he furnishes me with another proof of the fact that hard by any Scripture where you find the safety of the Believer guaranteed, you are sure to see necessary holiness set side by side with it. Here you have at the Passover a favored people safe beneath the sprinkled blood, safe in that dire hour when the destroying angel’s sword was unsheathed—but you find that people busily engaged in purging out the defiling leaven from their houses—they were not saved by purging out the leaven, but were preserved by the sprinkled blood. They were obedient to the Divine precept, and diligently put away the corrupt and forbidden thing. The purity of the house from leaven went side by side with its safety by the blood.
We shall, this morning, first, consider the happy condition of Believers. Next, the holy duty commended to them, running side by side with their privilege. And thirdly, we shall show how their happiness and holiness, their holiness and happiness, act and re-act upon each other.
I. We have set forth to us THE HAPPY CONDITION OF ALL TRUE BELIEVERS IN CHRIST. “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast.” The habitual normal state of a Christian is that of one keeping a
feast in perfect security. We are to be, as a rule, like the Israelites who stood at the table of the Passover festival, with loins girt, and staves in their hands, expectant of a joyful deliverance. Observe how the Apostle puts it—take his words one by one—“Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.”
“Our Passover,” that by which God’s wrath makes a transition, and passes over us who deserve its full vengeance. It passed upon the Lamb of God, and therefore it passes over us. Christ is sacrificed or slain, His life is taken, for He gave Himself for us. His life and blood, yes, His true Self, He yielded up for us. The word for “us” implies substitution. Christ is sacrificed for or instead of us. We should never think of saying that Paul was sacrificed for us, though it is true Paul did lay down his life for the Church of God to promote the interests of the faithful, and in a certain sense, since his exertions handed down the Gospel, he died even for us.