Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1104
“As the earth brings forth her bud, and as the garden causes the things that are sown in it to spring forth; so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations.” Isaiah 61:11.
DURING the past week the air has been balmy with the breath of spring and all Nature has felt the influence of the “ethereal mildness.” The earth, of which, through the long winter, we might have said, “she is not dead, but sleeps,” has now awakened and she begins already to put on her garments of glory and beauty. Wild flowers are springing up in the hedgerows, buds upon the trees are hastening to burst, the time of the singing of birds is come and if the voice of the turtle is not heard in our land, yet we trust the winter is past—the rain is over and gone.
Now, Nature is not at work to amuse and please us merely—its mission is instruction. Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter are God’s four Evangelists, bringing each one a different version of the self-same Gospel of Divine love. Spring has its own peculiar testimony and it is for us to read it, and to interpret it, by the light of God’s Spirit. A close analogy is often hinted at in the Old and New Testaments between the springtime and the work of God in the hearts of men. As God has promised in the outward world, that there shall be seed time and then a harvest-winter and a following summer, so He declares, over and over again, that His Word, which, when it goes forth, is like unto the sowing, shall not return unto Him void, but shall prosper in the thing for which He has sent it.
As surely as in due season the earth brings forth her buds and the garden causes the things that are sown in it to spring forth, so shall God’s great purposes be accomplished and righteousness and praise shall spring forth before all the nations. The teaching of this morning is that there is a spiritual springtime appointed of God and it will surely come! As certainly as spring comes to the earth physically, so surely will it come to the Church spiritually! As certainly as God keeps His Covenant with the elements, so will He keep His Covenant with His Church and with His Son.
I. I shall need you, this morning, first to CONTEMPLATE THIS TRUTH IN REFERENCE TO THE BROAD FIELD OF THE WORLD. Let our meditations go abroad and let them range through history and into prophecy. God will surely, in the great world at large, cause the principles of righteousness which bring praise to His name to spring forth before all mankind. This leads us, first of all, to expect that there may be, in God’s work, and in our work for God, a period of unrequited labor. The analogy between the processes of Nature and God’s work in the Church holds good not only as to the revivals of spring, but as to the depressing incidents of winter.
There is a time when the farmer is occupied with the plow and with the scattering of the seed, while from day to day he sees no result from his labor. He trusts to the earth his golden grain and buries it in hopes of a future springing up, but month after month he has no return. He watches patiently, he sees the dreary months go round but not a single ear is brought loose to give him promise, much less do ample sheaves reward his toil. “Dread winter reigns tremendous over the conquered year.” The vegetable world lies dead. As it is in the natural world we must expect it to be in the spiritual world—there will ordinarily be a time of unrequited sowing for the Lord’s laborers. To a great extent this was so with the Church of God in her early history. Then she was fitly imaged in these words—“a sower went forth to sow.”
True, through the infinite compassion of the great Farmer, there were souls saved at once by the preaching of the Gospel, but yet the wide spread of the Gospel was not a work of a few months—years of self-denial were needed. Good men had to toil throughout the whole of their lives, yes, and to lay down those lives, too, by painful and bloody deaths. And yet, at the first, Christ’s kingdom did not come. Generation after generation of holy martyrs and confessors went to prison and to death to bear testimony to the Truth of God as it is in Jesus. It was the Church’s time of sowing and her seed was steeped in tears and blood. God’s Presence and power did not so much reveal themselves in immediate success as in patient endurance, heroic fortitude, and boundless self-sacrifice.
Holy hymns were not sung by assembled thousands where passers-by could hear them, but in the crypts and in the catacombs the righteous praised the Lord. The Word of God was in those days hidden away like a buried thing, concealed like the seed-corn beneath the clods. The Church parted with her holiest sons, who died that she might live and grow, and multiply, and subdue the earth—but for many years it seemed as if the sacrifice had been made in vain, for her Truths were still the scoff of the age, the butt of perpetual ridicule. It looked as if her principles, as well as her martyrs, would be buried. Imperial tyrants boasted that they would exterminate Christianity and leave to the Church neither root nor branch, nor place, nor name.