Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2476
“Thus says the LORD, You shall not go up, nor fight against your brethren, the children of Israel: return every man to his house; for this thing is from Me.” 1 Kings 12:24.
IT is very delightful to read a history in which God is made prominent. How sadly deficient we are of such histories of our own English nation! Yet surely there is no story that is more full of God than the record of the doings of our British race. Cowper, in one of his poems, shows the parallel between us and the house of Israel. He dwells upon various special incidents in our history and draws valuable lessons from them. God’s wisdom and power have been conspicuous from the time when this now, full-grown nation, was but like a nursing child. He has nursed and watched over it, protecting it against gigantic foes and made it to be the defender of His Truth, the favored abode of His people. Oh, for a historian who could dip his pen in thoughts of God and who, from beginning to end of his history, would not be showing us the crafty policy of kings and cabinets, but the finger of God! We need, nowadays, to have history written in some such style as appears in these Books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles—then might history become almost like a new Bible to us! We would find that, as the Book of Revelation agrees with the Book of Creation, so does the book of Divine Providence in human history agree with both of them, for the same God is the Author of all these works! If we cannot get anybody to write such histories, yet let us continually amend the errors and add appendices to such records as we have, for God is God, and God is everywhere, and blessed is the man who learns to spy Him out!
Notice, next, what I pointed out to you in our reading, what power was possessed by God’s Prophets under the Old Testament. Here is one Shemaiah—some of you never heard of him before—perhaps you will never hear of him again. He appears once in this history and then he vanishes! He comes and he goes—only fancy this one man constraining an hundred and eighty thousand chosen men, warriors ready to fight against the house of Israel, to peace—by giving them in very plain, unpolished words, the simple command of God—“Thus says the Lord, You shall not go up, nor fight against your brethren, the children of Israel: return every man to his house.” And it is added, “they hearkened, therefore, to the Word of the Lord, and returned to depart, according to the Word of the Lord.” Why have we not such power? Perhaps, Brothers, we do not always speak in the name of the Lord, or speak God’s Word as God’s Word! If we are simply tellers of our own thoughts, why should men mind us? If we speak the word which we, ourselves, have fashioned, what is there in our anvil that it should command respect for what we make upon it?
But if we can rise to the height of this great argument and speak the Truth of God as messengers of God, and there leave it, believing in it, ourselves, and expecting great results from it, I know that there will come more from our ministries than we have ever seen as yet! When the Apostle Peter spoke to the lame man at the Temple gate, he said, “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.” And he did rise up and walk because the name of Jesus Christ was relied upon! We have need to preach the Gospel, not as though our persuasion, much less our oratory, were to prevail with men, but believing that there is an intrinsic power in the Gospel and that God the Holy Spirit will go with it to work the Divine purpose and accomplish the decrees of the Most High! We have need to stand near to God and to be more completely overshadowed by His Presence—and to be, ourselves, more fully believers in the Divine Majesty—and then shall we see greater things than these! Surely, God must have meant that, under the New Testament, there should be a power in His Word even greater than that which rested on it under the Old Testament!
Note one more lesson conveyed by this incident. It would be a grand thing to preach only one sermon and to be as successful as Shemaiah was! It would be far better than to preach ten thousand and to accomplish nothing by them all. I hope the net result of our ministry will not be like that of the famous leader who, with his troops, marched up a hill and then marched down again. A man may take many years to say nothing and he may very elaborately and very eloquently discharge himself of that which it was totally unnecessary for him to have said, but it would be far better to be surcharged with one message—and to deliver that one in the power of Almighty God, even if the speaker’s voice is never heard again! I pray that those of us who do preach the Gospel may preach each sermon as if that one discourse were worth a lifetime—worth the putting forth of every faculty that we possess, so that, if we never preached again, we might nevertheless have done a life-work in a single sermon!