Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1496
Delivered on Thursday Evening, September 4, 1879
“My soul is among lions.” Psalm 57:4.
SOME of you cannot say this and you ought to be very thankful that you are not obliged to do so. Happy are you young people who have godly parents and who dwell in Christian families. You ought to grow like the flowers in a conservatory, where killing frosts and biting blasts are unknown. You live under very favorable circumstances. Your soul, I might almost say, is among angels, for you dwell where God is worshipped, where family prayer is not forgotten, where you can have a kindly guidance in the hour of difficulty and comfort in the time of trial. You dwell where angels come and go and God, Himself, deigns to dwell! Happy should young people be in such circumstances! How grateful and how holy you ought to be!
I want all who dwell where everything helps them, to remember the many gracious ones who dwell where everything hinders them. You who live near the Beautiful Gate of the temple must not forget the many who are sighing in the tents of Kedar. If your soul is not among lions, praise God for it—and then let your sympathies go out towards those who mournfully complain—
“My soul with him that hates peace Has long a dweller been. I am for peace, but when I speak, For battle they are keen.”
It is a Christian duty to “remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.” And whenever our own favored circumstances lead us to forget those who are persecuted and tried, our very mercies are working mischief in us. “We are all members, one of another.” If one member suffers, all the rest should suffer with him and, therefore, we will turn our thoughts towards our persecuted Brothers and Sisters tonight, that our united supplications may sustain them under their difficulties and, if the Lord is so pleased, may even deliver them.
When may a Christian truly say, “My soul is among lions”? Such is the case when, either from our being members of ungodly families, or from having to gain our livelihood among unconverted and graceless people, we are subjected to reproach and rebuke and to jest and jeer for Jesus Christ’s sake. Then we can say, “My soul is among lions.” I know that many in this congregation are the only ones in their family whom God has called. I bless His name that He is often taking one of a household and a lone one of a family and bringing such to Jesus. Some quite un-Christian person who thinks not of God drops in here out of curiosity and God meets with him and he becomes the first of his kith and kin to say “I am the
Lord’s.”
Frequently when converts come to cast in their lot with us, they will say, “I do not know one in all my family who makes any profession of godliness. They are, all of them, opposed to me.” In such a case the soul is among lions and it is very hard and trying to be in such a position. Well may we pity a godly wife bound to an ungodly husband! Alas, full often a she is married to a drunk whose opposition amounts to brutality. A tender, loving spirit that ought to have been cherished like a tender flower is bruised and trod under foot—and made to suffer till her heart cries out in grief, “My soul is among lions!” We little know what life-long martyrdom’s many pious women endure.
Children also have to bear the same when they are singled out by Divine Grace from depraved and wicked families. Only the other day there came under my notice one who loves the Lord. I thought that if she had been a daughter of mine I should have rejoiced beyond all things in her sweet and gentle piety, but her parents said, “You must leave our house if you attend such-and-such a place of worship. We do not believe in these things and we cannot have you about us if you
do.” I saw the grief which that state of things was causing and though I could not alter it, I mourned over it. Woe unto those who tyrannize over my Lord’s little ones!
Nobody knows what godly working men have to put up with from those among whom they labor. There are some shops where there is religious liberty, but frequently the working men of this city are great tyrants in matters of religion. I tell them that to their faces—if a man will drink with them and swear with them, they will make him their companion—but when a man comes out to fear God, they make it very hard for him. And pray, dear Sir, has not a man as much right to pray as you have to swear? And has he not as much right to believe in God as you have to disbelieve? It is a wonderfully free country, this wonderfully free country! Almost as free as America in the olden times when every man was free to beat his own slave, for now the working man claims freedom to laugh and swear at every other working man who chooses to be sober and religions!
There are large factories all over London where a Christian man has to run the gauntlet of sneers from morning to night which never ought to come upon the face of honest men and which never would come if Britons were as fond of freedom as they profess to be! They declare that they never will be slaves, but they are slaves—slaves to their own ungodliness and drunkenness—the great mass of them! And only where Divine Grace comes in and snaps the chain do men become free at all. If one serious man sets his face steadfastly to serve God, the baser sort seem as if they must get him under their feet and treat him with every indignity that malice can devise. It may be all in sport, but the victim does not think so.