Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2290
“Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable Gift.” 2 Corinthians 9:15.
IF you will read, at home, the chapter from which our text is taken, you will find that Paul was stirring up the Corinthians to an act of liberality. He had boasted of what they would do, but he had just a little fear that they might fall behind and not quite come up to what he had promised on their behalf. He stirred them up to liberal giving, telling them that they who sowed liberally, should reap liberally, and they who sowed sparingly would reap sparingly. Once upon that theme of giving, the Apostle could not help speaking of another gift. He saw a track just off the main road and he felt that it led him straight away to his God and to his Savior. And so, while the ink was yet flowing in his pen, he began to write about it as though he would say, “I am not thinking now, my Brethren, so much of your gifts as I am of another gift—not so much of your gifts to the Lord’s poor people as of the Lord’s great Gift to you—His poor people. “Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable Gift.”
A person, who was collecting for some good objective, called upon a friend one day and, as he needed him to be very generous, pleaded hard with him. After a while, he seemed to quit the subject altogether, and he said, “I knew your father.” “Did you?” “Yes, and I called upon him about a certain business, just as I do upon you, and your father did not need any prompting. He said, ‘State the case,’ and as soon as the case was stated, he pulled out his purse and gave me ten times as much as I had expected to obtain from him.” You see, our friend was not exactly pleading with the son when he told that story, and yet I do not know how he could have pleaded better, for reverence for his father’s name and the desire not to seem to fall off from his father’s standard, were the very best arguments that could have been used with him!
So I admire the wisdom of Paul. When he would bring these Corinthians up to a high standard of liberality towards their poor Brethren in Judea, he says, as though it were only by the way, “Thanks be unto God, your Father and my Father, for His unspeakable Gift. Whatever you give, I can speak about, but what He gave surpasses all powers of speech! Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable Gift.”
Now, this text, tonight, gives me three things to speak of. The first is, that Christ is a Gift. And, secondly, that as a Gift, Christ is unspeakable. And, thirdly, that as a Gift unspeakable, Christ calls forth praise to God from us.
I. First, then, CHRIST IS A GIFT.
How often you hear people speak about Christ and His salvation as though they were the reward of merit—as though we did something by which to win his Divine favor! If they do not teach that salvation comes through our own merits, yet, according to them, it is the effect of our feelings and our experiences. Somehow or other, according to this common notion, we must get fit to receive God’s Gift and thus, what comes to us is more our due than an alms of heavenly charity! I hesitate not to say that this teaching flies in the teeth of the entire Word of God. Everywhere in the Scriptures the great word is not merit, but GRACE—not deserving, but receiving freely of the great mercy of our God!
Our Lord Jesus must be a Gift to us if we are ever to possess Him. He could only come to us sons of men by way of a gift. Consider the dignity of His Person for a minute and then ask how it is conceivable that we could have deserved that such a Person as He should come here and live and die, that we might be saved! I can conceive of a man meriting this or that honor among his fellow men, but when I think of the Prince of Life, the Lord of Glory equal with the Father, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, very God of very God—and when I see Him giving Himself up to die for men, my very blood boils at the thought that we could ever have deserved that Sacrifice! One is indignant that human pride should dare to go the length of even imagining that a life of perfection could have deserved to be rewarded by the Gift of Christ!
No, my Brothers and Sisters, if we had kept God’s Law without a flaw. If there had been no omission of duty, no commission of sin and we could have taken the compound merits of a perfect world and laid them at the feet of God, they could not have deserved that Christ should become Man—that Christ should live in poverty—that Christ should die in shame for man! There would have been no need of Christ’s death if man had not sinned. But had there been a supposable need, Christ’s Sacrifice could not have been deserved even if we had remained innocent, like our first parents in the Garden of Eden before the Fall! I am sure that none of you could, for a minute, tolerate the thought that any human merit could deserve the Incarnation of God upon this earth, the coming of the Divine Son in our nature into this world and His shameful death upon the Cross of Calvary.