Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2765
“His marvelous Light.” 1 Peter 2:9.
EVERYTHING about a true Christian is marvelous. He is a marvel to himself and a marvel to all who are around him. Mere professors—man-made Christians—people who have made themselves Christians by their own free will apart from the Spirit of God, have nothing marvelous about them. You can make professors of that sort by the score and you can see them dissolve by the score, for what man made, man can unmake! And what is merely natural has its season, like the leaves on the trees and, by-and-by, it withers away because its time to fade has come. But a true Christian is a God-made man, a twice-born man and he is a partaker of the Divine Nature. He is a mass of marvels, for he is dead and yet he is alive! He is one who lives here and yet his life has gone away up yonder. He is one who is a citizen of earth and yet his citizenship is in Heaven. He is a true man, but he is more than a man, for God has lifted him up above the level of other men, given him a life which other men do not possess, revealed to him secrets which others do not know and prepared for him a place into which the ungodly can never enter.
The longer he looks at himself, the more he wonders at God’s Grace and at what God’s Grace has done, is doing and will yet do for him. He is a riddle to himself—an enigma made up of a thousand enigmas. He probably does not fully understand all that has happened in any single day of his life—and there are certain days in which God’s dealings with him quite stagger him. And though faith sees all things to be plain, yet to mere human reason, things often appear to be in a snarl, and twisted together and he does not know what to make of them.
Everything about a true Christian is marvelous, as angels know, who often desire to look into the things which concern them, and as He knows, who is our Leader and Commander—who was a Man wondered at and whose faithful followers are all wondered at still, He, Himself is the greatest marvel of all! And among the many marvels that surround us is the marvelous Light of God in which we dwell. Those of us who are now in Christ, lived at one time in the gross darkness of ignorance. I mean even those of us who were brought up in Christian families and knew the letter of the Gospel well. We did not know its inner meaning and we never felt its power. We were in darkness, though, indeed, there was a certain measure of Light which had come to us, which made us responsible for our wrong-doing. Still, our heart remained in gross darkness.
And, by-and-by, this darkness was attended with much misery. There came to us a little Light—just enough to make our darkness visible. And so we perceived the darkness in which we dwelt and we began to sigh and cry, like prisoners shut up in an underground dungeon, to whom light and fresh air cannot come. Then everything about us seemed to blacken and the gloom around us deepened. We were in the dark as to our apprehensions of the future. We knew that we must die, yet we feared to die. We clung to life, yet, sometimes, we did not desire even life, itself, but said, with Job, “My soul chooses strangling and death rather than my life.” The prospect of annihilation would have seemed almost like Heaven to us if we could, thereby, have gotten rid of our sinful, sorrowful being, clouded with apprehensions of the wrath of God and ofjudgments yet to come upon us. I know that I am talking about something which many of you understand! It was a thick Egyptian night in which you were then enveloped—a darkness that might be felt—and you tried your utmost to escape from it, but you could not, for it was inyou. Your soul was in darkness, the Light within your spirit was
quenched and all around you seemed to darken, and darken, and darken, as though an eternal midnight were surely descending upon you!
Well, at that time, it happened to me, and I know that it also happened to some of you as it did to Peter, that the angel of the Lord suddenly smote us on our side and a Light shone into our prison and we arose, scarcely knowing what we were doing. But we girded our garments about us and followed our angelic leader, while the prison gates, which had formerly shut us in, opened before us of their own accord and we found ourselves to be free and in broad daylight, too, although, for a time, we could scarcely realize those blessed facts! We saw what we had never seen before. We enjoyed what we had never even hoped to enjoy! Yes, as in an instant we possessed what we thought must forever be denied to us! We scarcely knew how to contain our joy, but we made our way, as fast as we could, to the house of Christ’s disciples who had prayed for us. And how we gladdened them as we told them the story of God’s delivering and enlightening Grace, and so showed forth the praises of Him who had called us out of darkness into His marvelous Light! Truly, it was marvelous Light to us at that time. Many day have passed since then with some of us, but it is still marvelous Light and, as we look upon it now, it is not any less marvelous than it was at the very first!