Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2349
“Him that comes to Me I will in no wise cast out.” John 6:37.
EOD CHRIST will not die in vain. His Father gave Him a certain number to be the reward of His soul travail and He will have every one of them, as He said, “All that the Father gives Me shall come to Me.” Almighty Grace shall sweetly constrain them all to come. My father recently gave me some letters which I wrote to him when I began to preach. They are almost boyish epistles, but, in reading through them, again, I noticed in one of them this expression, “How I long to see thousands of men saved, but my great comfort is that some will be saved, must be saved, shall be saved, for it is written, ‘All that the Father gives Me shall come to Me.’”
The question for each of you to ask is, “Do I belong in that number?” I am going to preach with the view of helping you to find out whether you belong to that, “all,” whom the Father gave to Christ—the “all” who shall come to Him. We can use the second part of the verse to help us to understand the first. “Him that comes to Me I will in no wise cast out,” will explain our Savior’s previous Words, “All that the Father gives Me shall come to Me.”
I shall have no time for any further preface. I must at once get to my subject and try to put everything in a condensed form. Kindly give heed to the word, think about it, pray over it—and may God the Holy Spirit apply it to all your hearts!
I. First, notice in the text THE NECESSITY OF CHARACTER—“Him that comes to Me.” If you want to be saved, you must come to Christ. There is no other way of salvation under Heaven but coming to Christ. Go wherever else you will, you will be disappointed and lost—it is only by coming to Him that you can by any possibility have eternal life!
What is it to come to Christ? Well, it implies leaving all other confidences. To come to anybody is to leave everybody else. To come to Christ is to leave everything else—to leave every other hope, every other trust. Are you trusting to your own works? Are you trusting to a priest? Are you trusting to the merits of the Virgin Mary, or the saints and angels in Heaven? Are you trusting to anything but the Lord Jesus Christ? If so, leave it, and have done with it! Come away from every other reliance and trust to Christ Crucified, for this is the only way of salvation, as Peter said to the rulers and elders of Israel, “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under Heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.”—
“To Jesus bleeding on the tree, Turn you your eye, your heart,” and come to Him at once and your soul shall live forever!
To come to Jesus means, in brief, trusting Him. He is a Savior—that is His business—come to Him and trust Him to save you. If you could save yourself, you would not need a Savior, and now that Christ has set up to be a Savior, let Him do the business. He will. Come and lay all your needs at His feet and trust Him. Resolve that, if lost, you will be lost trusting alone in Jesus, and that can never be! Tie up all your hopes into one bundle and put that bundle upon Christ. Let Him be all your salvation, all your desire and you will be surely saved!
I have sometimes tried to explain to you what the life of faith is like. It is very much like a man walking on a tight rope. The Believer is told that he shall not fall, He trusts in God that he shall not, but every now and then he says, “What a way it is down there if I did fall!” I have often had this experience. I have gone up an invisible staircase—I could not see the next step, but when I put my foot down on it, I found that it was solid granite. I could not see the next step and it seemed as
if I should plunge into an abyss. Yet have I gone on upward, steadily, one step at a time, never able to see farther into absolute darkness, as it seemed, and yet always with a light just where the light was needed.
When I used to hold a candle for my father, in the evening, when he was sawing wood out in the yard, he used to say, “Boy, hold the candle where I am sawing, don’t look over there.” And I have often thought to myself, when I wanted to see something in the middle of next week, or next year, that the Lord seemed to say to me, “Hold your candle on the piece of work which you have to do today—and if you can see that, be satisfied, for that is all the light you need just now.” Suppose that you could see into next week? It would be a great mercy if you lost your sight a while, for a far-seeing gaze into care and trouble is no gain! “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof”—as sufficient unto the day will be the good thereof.
But the Lord does train His people for the skies by testing their faith in the matter of His daily care of them. Often a man’s reliance upon God for the supply of his earthly needs proves that he has trusted the Lord for the weightier affairs relating to his soul’s salvation. Do not draw a line between the temporal and the spiritual and say, “God will go just so far—and I must not take such and such a thing to Him in prayer.” I remember hearing of a certain good man, of whom one said, “Why, he is a very curious man—he prayed about a key the other day!” Why not pray about a key? Why not pray about a pin? Sometimes it may be as important to pray about a pin as to pray about a kingdom! Little things are often the linchpins of great events. Take care that you bring everything to God in faith and prayer. “Be careful for nothing; but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.”