Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1184
“For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.” Romans 5:6.
As I was sitting, the other day, with an aged Believer who is a local preacher among our Wesleyan friends, he said to me, “I cannot hope, in the course of nature, to stand up in the pulpit many more times. Therefore, every time I preach now, I preach of nothing but Jesus Christ. And I said to the people the other day, ‘You will say when I am dead and gone, Poor old Mr. So-and-So will come and preach to us no more. But as he got older and older the more he preached about Jesus Christ, till for the last few months of his life the old man never spoke about anything but his Master.’” Then, as if confidentially addressing himself to me, he said, “I should like to leave just that impression upon the people’s minds when I am taken from them.”
The resolution seems to me so good that I think that it might be taken up by us who are younger and adopted as our own. Paul, before he was, “Paul the aged,” said, “I determined not to know anything among you save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.” There is nothing like striking at the center and keeping to vital points. And if we are keeping to Christ crucified, we are keeping to that which will save souls, which will build up Believers and which will glorify God. But, dear Friends, if we might be allowed to go astray from this subject sometimes, yet certainly not on an evening like this, when we are about to gather around the Lord’s Table which is loaded with the memorials of our Redeemer’s passion. Tonight, you who are Believers in Jesus ought to have no eyes for any object but Him, no ear for any sound but that which tells of Him—indeed, no hearts with which to relish any theme save your crucified Lord. Blind, deaf, dead to every worldly consideration, let us be just now, all alive, all awake and all aglow with love to Him and the desire to have fellowship with Him.
Our text brings us at once to the Cross and it sheds a light upon our former estate. Let us see where we were and what was needed to make us the children of God. Do you ask, How did our Redeemer view us when He died for us? The response is here clearly given, “When we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.” Thus we have a two-fold description of the state in which Christ viewed mankind when He shed the blood of redemption. The men for whom His Propitiation was offered, were “without strength,” and they were “ungodly.” If you or I have any part or lot in the matchless death of Jesus, we must feel ourselves to have been in just this condition, for it cannot have any relation to any persons but those who, by nature, are “without strength” and “ungodly.”
I. THAT EACH MAN FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED WAS WITHOUT STRENGTH IS OBVIOUS. He was legally weak. Before God’s bar he had a weak case, a case without strength. He stood up as a prisoner to be tried and of all the cases that were ever brought into court his was the most destitute of power. He was without strength. To make the case our own, as it really is ours, we could not deny the charge that we had broken the Law. We could not set up an alibi, nor could we put in a plea of extenuation. The fact was clear. Our own conscience vouched for it, as well as the record of God’s Providence.
We could not make apologies, for we sinned willfully, sinned against light and against knowledge, sinned repeatedly, sinned without any necessity and sinned with an extravagant willfulness. We sinned with many different aggravations. We sinned after we knew sin to be exceedingly sinful before God and extremely injurious to ourselves. Yes, we sinned deliberately and presumptuously when we knew the penalty—when we understood what we should lose for lack of obedience and what we should incur as the chastisement of transgression. I say again, man’s case is well described as being extremely weak.
Looked at legally, it is utterly without strength. No advocate who understood the case would have ventured to plead it, except that one glorious Advocate who did plead it, but at the cost of His own life. He knew that if He undertook it and stood up to plead with God for us, He must die for it, for it was a case in which, before the Law, we were without
strength. We had no good works to be a setoff for our sin. We had no hope of ever performing any in the future which could ever stand in the place of the good works which ought to have been done in the past. The case, put however it might be, broke down utterly—and the prisoner himself, if, indeed, able to speak the truth, would be compelled to
say—
“Should sudden vengeance seize my breath,
I must confess You just in death.
And if my soul is sent to Hell,
Your righteous Law approves it well.”
We were without strength. It was a bad case, altogether, and could not be defended. And man, by nature, is morally weak. We are so weak by nature that we are carried about like dust and driven to and fro by every wind that blows. We are swayed by every influence which assails us. Man is under the dominion of his own lusts—his pride, his sloth, his love of ease, his love of pleasure. Man is such a fool that he will buy pleasure at the most ruinous price. He will fling his soul away as if it were some paltry toy and barter his eternal interests as if they were but trash. For some petty pleasure of an hour he will risk the health of his body. For some paltry gain, he will jeopardize his soul. Alas! Alas! Poor Man, you are as light as the thistledown which goes this way or that, as the wind may turn. In your moral constitution you are as the weathercock which shifts with every breeze.