Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2511
“He brought us out from there, that He might bring us in, to give us the land which He swore unto our fathers.” Deuteronomy 6:23.
OUR text occurs in the passage where the Israelites are told to personally instruct their children concerning the testimonies and statutes and judgments of the Lord. When they asked the meaning of the various ordinances of God’s House, their parents were to tell them—not to refer them to the priest—they were, themselves, to instruct their children in the things of God. In our own case, however much we may love and appreciate the Sunday school system—and we cannot love it too much—I hope we shall never forget that the first duty towards the child belongs to the parent. Fathers and mothers are the most natural agents for God to use in the salvation of their children. I am sure that, in my early youth, no teaching ever had such an impression upon my mind as the instruction of my mother—neither can I conceive that to any child there can be one who will have such influence over the young heart as the mother who has so tenderly cared for her offspring.
We should especially tell our children our own experience, for so it is enjoined in this passage—“When your son asks you in time to come, saying, What mean the testimonies, and the statutes, and the judgments, which the Lord our God has commanded you? Then you shall say unto your son, We were Pharaoh’s bondmen in Egypt; and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.” Perhaps, my Friend, there is no testimony that you can bear which will be so useful, so interesting and so striking, as the testimony of what you have, yourself, seen and handled of the Word of Life. Tell the Gospel as you find it in the Bible, but set it in the frame of your own experience of its preciousness! Tell your son how you sinned and how the Lord had mercy upon you. Tell him how He met with you, how you were brought to seek His face, how you were born again, how you received a new heart and a right spirit. He will think the more of this great change because it happened to his father, or to his mother, or to some kind friend. And, perhaps, if he is not himself converted as a child, in his later life he may think of what you told him or the remembrance of his mother’s God may rise before him when he is far away from the scenes of his youth and has spent many years in foolish vanities—and he may even then turn to God, beckoned back to the great Father’s House above by the memory of his godly father and mother here below.
It is my earnest desire, just now, to bear witness on the behalf of many of God’s people while I try to explain the meaning of our text, “He brought us out. . .that He might bring us in.” We shall have three heads to our discourse. First, we were brought out. As surely as Israel was brought out of Egypt, we who believe in Jesus have been brought out of the house of our bondage! Therefore, secondly, we are out. And thirdly, the Lord who brought us out will bring us into another and a better country—into “Your land, O Immanuel”—into that place of rest and everlasting jubilee which God by Covenant has given over to His people as their perpetual possession.
I. First, dear Friends, let us speak upon the fact that we were BROUGHT OUT. Our text says, “He brought us out from there.” That is, Jehovah, the God of Israel, brought His people out from the house of bondage and, in like manner, we bear our testimony that the Lord has delivered us from the bondage of sin and Satan.
Our witness, therefore, is, first of all, that God has had to do with us. Some there are who think that God dwells far away, shut up in eternal seclusion. But we have not found it so, for He has had dealings in mercy with us. They suppose that the things here below are too little and too commonplace for God to consider, but it has not been so with us, for He has dealt well with His servants according to His Word. They suppose that there is a thick veil that shuts us out from the
Invisible, a great gulf that parts us poor mortals from any communication with God. They smile and turn upon their heels when we begin to talk of God—they are “agnostics”—know-nothings. Perhaps they will not say that there is no God, but they dosay that they do not know whether there is a God or not! And, as to any communication between the Holy One of Israel and such poor creatures as we are, they will not believe it to be possible. Well, then, we have to bear our testimony upon this point and it is this—that with some of us a very little while ago, and with others of us so many years ago as to be among the memories of our youth—God had solemn dealings. We were in the land of darkness and in the valley of the shadow of death. We were fond of sin—we were slaves to it and we had no wish nor will to escape from it—but He who is the Father of our spirits, having loved us with an everlasting love, and having made a Covenant with His only-begotten Son on our behalf, tore the heavens and in majesty came down!