Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2149
“The Lord has appeared of old unto me, saying, Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love: therefore with loving kindness have I drawn you.” Jeremiah 31:3.
THUS speaks the Israel of God. She seems to wake up as if she had long been asleep and had forgotten a grand fact— a fact which she ought to have treasured up in her fondest memory. Suddenly startling into recollection, she cries, “The Lord has appeared of old unto me.” How strange that she should have forgotten it! Her spiritual lethargy had dimmed her memory and caused her to feel and act as if it were not true, as if her God had never revealed Himself to her. Then she saw with amazement that notwithstanding all the heavy chastisement which the Lord had sent her and notwithstanding all her backslidings, there was still a hope of mercy, no, there was the certainty of it, for the unchanging God had said, “Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love.”
Are any of you forgetful or unaware of this sacred Truth of God? Has it never occurred to you that God has spoken to His people? Though you are a child of God, have you been taken up with so many inferior things that you have let go the blessed memory of former appearances of the Lord to your soul? May the Holy Spirit awake you at this time! May there come a blessed awakening hour to your drowsy spirits! This startling remembrance came to Israel at a time when her sorrows were very great and her sins were greater, still. She had been wounded so that she was sick and sore—and she found no healing medicine—and none to bind up her wounds. In her distress she remembered not only her faults, but also the former loving kindnesses of her Lord.
She gathered from that ancient assurance of Divine Grace that her God loved her, still, and would return to her in great mercy. She dwelt with hope upon that Divine assurance of irrevocable favor—“I have loved you with an everlasting love.” When earthly joys ebb out, it is a blessed thing if they make room for memories of heavenly visitations and gracious assurances! When you are at your lowest, it may happen that then the God of All Grace comes in and brings to your remembrance the love of your espousals and the joy of former days, when the candle of the Lord shone round about you.
It only needs a touch, this morning, of that pierced hand to make our hard hearts soft! If our Divine Lord will only come by His Spirit and visit us as we sit in these pews, the waters of love will flow within until the wilderness shall become a pool and the dry land springs of water! Long may we have suffered a great decay of spiritual life, but we shall, on a sudden, be restored and then our hearts will burn and glow with holy attachment to Him whose love has not changed, though we have so sadly fallen. God grant it may be so! May a renewed appearing of the Lord revive our joy in His appearing of old! While you are sitting there, listening to my words, may a still small voice be heard within your souls, melting your hearts and causing you to say, “Yes, I had almost forgotten it, but ‘The Lord has appeared of old unto me, saying, Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love.’”
May the grand discovery of everlasting love be made by many of you for the first time in your lives! Oh, for the surprises of Almighty Grace! As when one in plowing stumbles on treasure hid in a field and rejoices exceedingly, even so
may you rejoice in newly discovered love! Or if you know it already, may you feel its drawings for the thousandth time and may it be to you still fresh and new, as though you had never felt it before. The visits of God’s Grace and the discoveries of His love to our hearts never grow stale! We can go over this heavenly ground again and again and always behold new glories in it! May an overpowering memory of the Lord’s love come over us all at this time, by the power of the Holy Spirit!
I shall handle the text, first, by calling your attention to the marvelous appearing—“The Lord has appeared of old unto me.” Secondly, to the matchless declaration—“Saying, Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love.” And thirdly, to the manifest evidence of this love—“Therefore with loving kindness have I drawn you.” May the Holy Spirit be poured forth, anointing every word I speak with Divine unction and may this discourse be precious to His people!
I. First, consider THE MARVELLOUS APPEARING—“The Lord has appeared of old unto me.” Here are two persons, but how different in degree! Here we have, “me,” a good-for-nothing creature, apt to forget my Lord and to live as if there were no God—yet He has not ignored or neglected me. There is the High and Holy One, whom the Heaven of heavens cannot contain and He has appeared to me. Between me and the great Jehovah there have been communications—the solitary silences have been broken—“The Lord has appeared,” has appeared “unto me.”