Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1529
Delivered on Lord’s-Day Morning, March 21, 1880
“A great multitude, when they had heard what great things He did, came unto Him.” Mark 3:8.
THE opposition of the great ones of the earth did not, after all, hinder the cause of Christ. The Pharisees, who were the leaders of religious thought, combined with the Herodians, who were the court party, to destroy Jesus, but at the very moment when their wrath had reached its highest pitch the crowd about the Savior’s Person was greater than ever. Let us not, therefore, dear Friends, be at all dismayed if great men and learned men and nominally religious men, should oppose the simple Gospel of Christ! All the world is not bound up in a Pharisee’s phylactery, nor held in chains by a philosopher’s new fancy. If some will not have our Savior, others will—God’s eternal purpose will stand and the kingdom of His Anointed shall come.
If our Lord Jesus is rejected by the great, nevertheless the common people hear Him gladly. To the poor, the Gospel is preached and it is His joy and His delight that out of them He still gathers a company who, though poor in this world, are rich in faith and give glory to God. I would have you, Beloved, count upon opposition and regard it as a token of coming blessings. Dread not the black cloud, it does but prognosticate a shower. March may howl and bluster and April may dampen all things with its rains, but the May flowers and the autumn’s harvest of varied fruits will come and come by this very means. Go on and serve your God in the serenity of holy confidence and you shall live to see that the hand of the Lord is not to be turned back, though the kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together.
Those who came to Christ in such great multitudes did not all come from right motives and I shall not assume that they did. Some came from idle curiosity, no doubt. Others came to listen to what He had to say, but were not prepared to believe in Him. We know that many came to be fed with loaves and fishes, swayed by the most mercenary motives. Still, in the case now under notice, large numbers came to Jesus because they had heard of the great things which He did, hoping that He would do something of the same kind for them, for multitudes of those who came were sick folk, plague-smitten, stricken with disease and they came thinking that by touching Him they might be delivered from all their sufferings. This gift they gained and glorified the name of the Lord!
I shall not, therefore, stay to divide out the characters which made up the crowd, but remind you that we must never expect that all who come to hear the Gospel will receive it. Just as Jesus went up into the mountain and there called out to Himself whom He would, so does He form His Church, which is an assembly of called-out ones whom the Sovereign Lord selects from the congregation of hearers that they may become a Church of Believers. The process of selection and separation is always going on and the great heap which lies on the threshing floor is being daily winnowed to divide the golden grain from the worthless chaff.
For our present purpose, only, we shall just now view those who literally came to Christ as the types of those who come spiritually. Many, I trust, who are present at this time will come to Jesus for the same reason that these people came, namely, because they have heard of the great things which have been done by Him. So to our work at once. Three things are before us. The first is the attraction—“They had heard what great things He did.” Secondly, the gathering—“They came unto Him.” And thirdly, the context furnishes us with this—the result of the attraction and the gathering. We find it written, “He had healed many; insomuch that they pressed upon Him for to touch Him, as many as had plagues.”
I. Here is the ATTRACTION—“They had heard what great things He did.” My dear Hearers, the case of these people is parallel with your own! There must be very few of you here but what have not heard of the great things which Jesus Christ has done. Let us note, first, that these people had heard with somewhat of a believing ear. Stories floated about concerning one who had healed blindness, palsy, leprosy and they accepted the statements as facts. A lame man told how
he had been made to leap like a rabbit and a blind man declared that his eyes had been opened—and as these wonders passed from mouth to mouth these people believed them to be true.
I know that even those of you who are not converted yet, believe what is recorded in these four Gospels concerning the miracles that Jesus worked. You are persuaded that the records are authentic. You believe that the Lord Jesus did heal the sick and that He did even raise the dead and cast out devils. You also accept the grand Gospel statement that He is able to save unto the uttermost those that come unto God by Him. Believing so much as that, you ought to believe a good deal more and I pray the Holy Spirit, now, to lead you to that farther faith. If you have come as far as that, the most reasonable thing to do is to go to Him with your own case and trust Him to heal you!