Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1974
“For in that He Himself has suffered being tempted, He is able to succor them that are tempted.” Hebrews 2:18.
WE are told by the Apostle in the fifth chapter that one special requisite in a High Priest was that he have compassion upon men. “For every High Priest taken from among men is ordained for men in things pertaining to God, that he may offer both gifts and sacrifices for sins: who can have compassion on the ignorant and on them that are out of the way; for that he himself also is compassed with infirmity.” You see, God did not choose angels to be made High Priests because, however benevolent they might be in their wishes, they could not be sympathetic. They could not understand the peculiar needs and trials of the men with whom they had to deal. Ministers who of God are made to be a flame of fire could scarcely commune familiarly with those who confess themselves to be as dust and ashes! But the High Priest was one of themselves. However dignified his office, he was still a man. He was one of whom we read that he could lose his wife, that he could lose his sons. He had to eat and to drink, to be sick and to suffer just as the rest of the people did. And all this was necessary that he might be able to enter into their feelings and represent those feelings before God and that he might, when speaking to them for God, not speak as a superior, looking down upon them, but as one who sat by their side, “a brother born for adversity,” bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh.
Now this is peculiarly so in the case of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is sympathetic above all. There is none so tender as He. He has learnt it by His sufferings, but He proves it by His continual condescension towards His suffering people. My Brothers, we that preach the Gospel, you that teach it in the Sunday school—you will always find your greatest power to lie in love. There is more eloquence in love than in all the words that the most clever rhetorician can ever put together. We win upon men not so much by poetry and by artistic wording of sentences, as by the pouring out of a heart’s love that makes them feel that we would save them, that we would bless them, that we would, because we belong to them, regard them as brethren and play a brother’s part and lay ourselves out to benefit them. Now, as it should be in the under-shepherds, so is it in that Great Shepherd of the sheep. He abounds in tenderness and though He has every other quality to make up a perfect High Priest—though He is complete and in nothing lacking—yet if I must mention one thing in which He far outshines us all, but in which we should all try to imitate Him, it would be in His tender sympathy to those who are ignorant and out of the way and to all those who are suffering and sorely distressed.
It is in the spirit of brotherly sympathy that I would endeavor to preach on this occasion as the Good Spirit shall help me. May I ask my Brothers and Sisters whose hearts are full ofjoy at this hour to be praying for others who have not that joy and to be helping me in my endeavor to speak words of consolation to them? May the Holy Spirit, in answer to your prayers, make every sentence to be as wine and oil to the wounds of those who are left half dead in the King’s highway! We have not to look far for “them who are tempted,” for they are all around us, and deserve the thoughtful regard of each one of us. Do not overlook them, my more happy Brothers and Sisters, “considering yourself, lest you, also, be tempted.”
In my text I think I see two things very clearly. Jesus suffering—“He Himself has suffered being tempted.” Jesus succoring—“He is able to succor them that are tempted.” And then I think I see a third thing most certainly there, namely, Jesus sought after because in the word which is translated, “succor,” there is a latent meaning of crying. He is able to hear the cry of them that are tempted. It is a word that signifies a mother’s quickness to answer her child’s cry and Jesus is able to answer our cry, therefore we ought to lift up that cry when our soul is in distress. It shall be the best thing seen in this Tabernacle tonight if the third thing be seen, namely, Jesus sought after by every weary, heavy-laden spirit. Why should it not be? Come, Holy Spirit, and create in each mourner the spirit of prayer and the Grace of supplication!
I. First, then, and to begin, here is JESUS SUFFERING.
I call your attention, first, to the feeling that is here expressed—“in that He Himself has suffered being tempted.” Many persons are tempted, but do not suffer in being tempted. When ungodly men are tempted, the bait is to their taste and they swallow it greedily. Temptation is a pleasure to them. Indeed, they sometimes tempt the devil to tempt them! They are drawn aside of their own lusts and enticed so that temptation, instead of being suffering to them, becomes a horrible source of pleasure. But good men suffer when they are tempted and the better they are, the more they suffer. I know some children of God to whom temptation is their constant misery day and night. If it took the form of external affliction, they would bravely bear it, but it takes the shape of evil suggestions and profane insinuations which leap into their minds without their will and though they hate them with their whole heart. These suggestions continue to annoy some dear saints whom I know, not only daily, but nightly, and month after month. These thoughts beset them as a man may be surrounded by swarms of gnats or flies from which they cannot get away. Such Brothers and Sisters are tempted and they suffer being tempted. Our Lord Jesus Christ enters into this trying experience very fully because His suffering through being tempted must have been much greater than any suffering that the purest-hearted Believer can know, seeing that He is more pure than any one of us.