Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1389
Delivered on Lord’s-Day Evening, August 19, 1877
“Be of good comfort, rise; He calls you.” Mark 10:49.
Preached on a night when the Tabernacle was free to all comers, the regular congregation having vacated their seats.
THESE open services, as most of you will judge, are intended to be purely evangelistic. No doubt a large number of Believers are here, many of them well-established in the faith, who would like to hear a doctrine argued, a type interpreted, or an apocalyptic symbol unfolded. But really, I cannot attend to you this evening. I feel something like Luther when preaching to a mixed assembly. He said, as nearly as I can remember, words to this effect, “I perceive in the Church Dr. Justus Jonas and Melancthon and other learned doctors. Now, if I preach to their edification, what is to become of the rest? Therefore, by their leave, I shall forget that Dr. Jonas is here at all and preach to the multitude.” So must I do at this good hour, asking those of you who are advanced in the Divine life to unite your prayers with mine, which will continually ascend, that the Word of the Gospel may be blessed to the unconverted.
Dear Friends, there are so many of you that have been, for years, listening to the proclamation of the Gospel. You are dwellers, almost, in Emmanuel’s land, but not quite—that is why I feel most earnest that this night should be the time of your decision for the Savior—that you should not remain, any longer, hearers only, but should become believers and afterwards doers of the Word of God! There are gentlemen in England who can afford to drive a coach and four from town to town and carry nobody, performing their journeys for their own amusement, but I am not able or willing to do anything of that kind. Unless I can have my coach loaded with passengers to Heaven, I would sooner it were never started and had rather my team stayed in the stable.
We must carry some souls to Heaven, for our call is from above and our time is too precious to throw away on mere pretense of doing good! We cannot play at preaching—we preach for eternity. We cannot feel satisfied merely to deliver sermons to senseless throngs, or to the most attentive crowds. Whatever smiles may greet us as we start and whatever salutation may welcome us at our close, we are not content unless Jesus works salvation by us! Our desire is that Grace should be magnified and that sinners should be saved. They used to jeer at the Tabernacle in Moorfields and the one in Tottenham Court Road. They called them Mr. Whitfield’s soul traps. A very excellent name for a place of worship!
Such may this Tabernacle always be! It ought to be a soul trap and we shall be disappointed, indeed, if there are not some souls taken in the trap tonight! If God does not bless the Word and make it so potent that some of you shall really close in with the Gospel proclamation and enter into eternal life, I shall be heavy of heart. Before I attempt to deal with my text, let me describe to you the plan of salvation. You know it, most of you. Oh that we could get at the thousands of London who do not know it! The multitudes that never enter a house of prayer or yield attention to the Gospel message! Our heart yearns over them—but what more can we do for them? They are perishing in willful ignorance.
Thanks be to God that so many are here tonight! I will seize the opportunity to declare the plan of Grace. Though so many of you know it, let me tell it to you again. By sin, by unrighteousness, by violation of God’s Law, we have broken our peace with God. We are lost, for He must punish sin. It is not possible that He should be the righteous Governor of the universe and allow sin to go unpunished! To punish sin is no arbitrary purpose of an angry God. It is inevitable in the universe that where there is evil, there should be suffering. If not in this life, yet in another life, which will shortly succeed that which now is, every transgression must receive its meet recompense of reward.
The question is, how can we be forgiven? How, consistently with Divine Justice, can our iniquities be blotted out? This is not an impossible problem left for us to work out—God’s way of peace is made clear by Divine Revelation. God,
in His Infallible Word, has told us the means and appliances by which guilty sinners can be made righteous before Him. And, instead of being driven from His Presence at the last, he may be accepted and dwell at His right hand! He tells us that inasmuch as the first sin that ruined us was not ours, but Adam’s, and by the transgression of one man we all fell, so it became possible for Him, in consistency with justice, to ordain that another Man should be forthcoming in whom we may rise and be restored!
That other Man has come—“the second Adam, the Lord from Heaven.” But the task of lifting up was much harder than that of casting down. A mere man could ruin us, but a mere man could not redeem and rescue us. Therefore, God Himself, the Ever-Blessed, clothed Himself with the nature of man, was born of a woman, lay in Bethlehem’s manger, lived here on earth a life of humiliation and self-denial and, at the last, took upon Himself the sins of men in one vast load. Even as the fabled Atlas was said to carry the world upon his shoulders, so He took sin and guilt upon Him and bore it in His own body on the tree. Jesus hung on the Cross as the Substitute for all of our race that ever will believe on Him and then and there He put away, by His suffering, all the transgression and iniquity of believing men so that now we can preach to mankind and say, “He that believes in Him is not condemned. He that believes on the Son of God has everlasting life.”