Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1616
Delivered on Lord’s-Day Morning, August 28, 1881
“For we are saved by hope, but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man sees, why does he yet hope for? But if we hope for what we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.” Romans 8:24,25.
ACCORDING to our version “we are saved by hope,” but that is scarcely in accordance with other parts of Holy Scripture. Everywhere in the Word of God we are told that we are saved by faith. See the first verse of the fifth chapter— “Therefore being justified by faith.” Faith is the saving Grace—not hope—unless only as hope is, under some aspects, tantamount to faith. Faith is the saving Grace and the original should be rendered thus. One wonders that it is not so in the Revised Version—“We were saved in hope.” It would prevent misapprehension if the passage were so rendered, for as that eminent critic, Bengel, well says, “the words do not describe the means, but the manner of salvation: we are so saved that there may even yet remain something for which we may hope, both of salvation and glory.”
Believers receive the salvation of their souls as the end of their faith and it is offaith that it might be of Grace. They are saved by faith and in hope. At this present moment Believers are saved and, in a certain sense, completely saved. They are entirely saved from the guilt of sin. The Lord Jesus took their sin and bore it in His body on the tree. He offered an acceptable Atonement, by which the iniquity of all His people is once and forever put away. By faith we are at once saved from the defilement of evil and have free access to God our Father. By faith we are saved from the reigning power of sin in our members. As says the Scripture, “Sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under the Law, but under
Grace.”
The crown is removed from the head of sin and the arm of its strength is broken in the heart of every Christian by the power of faith. Sin strives to get the mastery, but it cannot win the day, for he that is born of God does not commit sin with delight, or as his daily habit, but he keeps himself so that the Evil One touches him not. As to the penalty of sin, that has been borne by our great Substitute and by faith we have accepted His sacrifice. “He that believes in Him is not condemned.” We rejoice, therefore, at this moment, in salvation already obtained and enjoyed by faith which is in Christ Jesus. Yet we are conscious that there is something more than this to be had. There is salvation in a larger sense, which as yet we see not, for at the present moment we find ourselves in this tabernacle, groaning because we are burdened.
All around us the creation is evidently in travail—there are signs of birth-pangs in a certain unrest, upheaval and anguish of the creation. Things are not as God originally made them. Thorns are in earth’s furrows; a blight has fallen on her flowers; a mildew on her grain. The heavens weep and saturate our harvests; earth moves and shakes our cities. Frequent calamities and disasters are portents of a great future which shall be born of this travailing present. Nowhere on earth can a perfect paradise be found. Our best things are expectant of something better. The whole creation groans and travails in pain with us. Even we that have received the first fruits of the Spirit and so are blessed and saved, nevertheless, groan within ourselves, waiting for a further something, a Glory not seen as yet.
We have not yet attained, but are pressing on. Our first soul-thirst as sinners has been quenched, but there are within us still greater desires by which we hunger and thirst after righteousness with longings insatiable. Before we ate of the Bread of Heaven we hungered for mere husks—but now our newborn nature has brought us a new appetite which the whole world could not satisfy! What is the cause of this hungering? We are under no difficulty whatever in answering the question. Our grief, longings and unsatisfied desires are principally gathered up in two things. First, we long to be totally free from sin in every form. The evil which is in the world is our burden—we are vexed with the evil conversation of the ungodly and are grieved by their temptations and persecutions.
The fact that the world lies in the Wicked One and that men reject Christ and perish in unbelief is a source of much affliction to our hearts. We have said with David, “Woe is me, that I sojourn in Mesech, that I dwell in the tents of Ke-
dar!” We wish for a lodge in a wilderness far off from the haunts of men, that we might in peace commune with God and hear no more of blasphemy, murmuring, lewdness and crime. This is not our rest, for it is polluted, and so far we look for a great deliverance when we shall be taken out of this world to dwell in perfect company. Yet even the presence of the ungodly were a small matter if we could be completely delivered from sin within ourselves. That is among the things not seen as yet.