Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2265
“You have magnified the nation, and increased the joy: they joy before You according to the joy in harvest, and as men rejoice when they divide the spoil.” Isaiah 9:3.
NOTICE that I make a correction in the version from which I am reading. The Authorized Version has it, “You have multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy.” This is not consistent with the connection. The Revised Version has very properly put it, “You have multiplied the nation, You have increased their joy.” I have not any learning to display, but I think I could show it to you, if this were the proper time, how the passage came to be read with a, “not,” and I could also prove to you that, in this instance, the Revisers were right in making their alteration.
Tonight, there are about 82 persons who have confessed Christ before the Church, have been baptized and who are to be received into our fellowship. We feel very grateful for this large addition to our members and, all the more so, because it is no strange thing, but month by month, all the year round, they continue to come, though not in such large numbers as at this time. God be thanked for thus blessing us! We cannot allow these occasions to pass over without joying before the Lord as men rejoice when they gather in their sheaves of corn!
To bring out your joy, think of how we would feel if we did not have an increase in the Church, or very few were ever added. The good old people seem quite content to be very few. Their notion is that the way to Heaven is very narrow, as, indeed, it is, and that, therefore, they must not expect many to find their way. I remember a Church where the good old deacons used to say of the converts, “Summer them and winter them. Keep them out till we have tried them for a very long time.” It came to pass, after the process of, “summering and wintering,” that a great many of them never came forward at all! Though they were very excellent people, they never summoned courage enough to join such a Church. Did you ever hear a farmer say of his wheat, “Summer it and winter it, and then take it into the barn”? No, farmers are not such fools! But these good men were so very wise that they became otherwise, so they said, “Keep the corn out in the field; else you will bring in some poppies, or some cornflowers, and we do not want them. Keep the converts out of the Church till you are sure that there are no hypocrites among them.”
Well, dear Friends, we are not at all of this mind! We try to use every caution and great prudence—and our friends do not come into this Church without experiencing an examination—some of them even think it to be an ordeal—yet I find that the more difficult it is to get into a Church, the more people want to come into it! And whenever the barriers are lowered and you tell people that they may come without any test as to the state of their souls, nobody cares to come! Well, we have taken pains and care, and have sought only to welcome the worthy, that is, those who are trusting in Je-sus—and yet we have had a great number come, by His Grace! But suppose that we had none? Well, I hope every Christian man and woman here would be troubled about it. I should not wonder if the question arose, “Had we not better put somebody else on the platform?” That somebody who is now here would be the first to say, “If I am doing no good, let somebody else come and try, for it would be sad and sickening business to be fishing for souls and never catching anything.”
Last winter, at Mentone, I went out in a boat where I was assured that there were shoals of fish. And I had a line, I should think it was 150 feet long—and after waiting hour after hour and never feeling the fish bite—I gave up the useless occupation. I think every minister is bound to give up the spiritual fishery in any particular place if, after many days’
toil, he has caught nothing for Christ. Rachel says, “Give me children, or I die!” Christ’s servant says, “Give me converts, or I die!” Indeed, we are dead as far as our ministry is concerned unless God blesses it.
We also feel that we ought to be glad when others are joined to the Church because we look back, with exquisite pleasure, upon our own joining of it. I remember the trouble it cost me to join the Church. I think I went to see the pastor some four or five days running—he was always too busy to see me—till, at last, I told him it did not matter, for I would go to the Church Meeting and propose myself as a member. And then he, all of a sudden, found time to see me— and so I managed to get into the Church and confess my faith in Christ! Oh, dear Friends, that was one of the best days’ work I ever did, when I openly declared my faith in Christ and united myself with His people! I think many here could say the same—they remember when they united with the people of God, and publicly avowed their faith. You do not regret it Brothers and Sisters, do you? I am sure you feel that it was a happy day when you could say—