Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2916
“I have preached righteousness in the great congregation: lo, I have not refrained my lips, O Lord, You know. I have not hid Your righteousness within my heart; I have declared Your faithfulness and Your salvation: I have not concealed Your loving-kindness and Your truth from the great congregation. Withhold not Your tender mercies from me, O Lord: let Your loving-kindness and Your truth continually preserve me.” Psalm 40:9-11.
THE 25th ANNIVERSARY OF MR. SPURGEON’S FIRST SERMON IN THE TABERNACLE!
SOMETIMES, dear Friends, we should take a review of life. There are occasions when men feel bound to do so and the retrospect may be full of profit to themselves. I find that many look back in hours of trouble. A dark cloud brings them to a pause. In prosperity they might have run on with very little thought, but sorrow calls them to a halt. They are driven to God in prayer and at such times it is not unusual for them, if God has been gracious to them in the past, to recollect His great goodness and to mention it while they are pleading at the Mercy Seat. They say, “He has dealt well with His servants. The Lord has helped us up to now.” They look back and see the Ebenezers which they have raised in past years and then they cry, “Has God forgotten to be gracious?”—
“And can He have taught me to trust in His name, And thus far have brought me to put me to shame?’ Thus they drive their griefs away and the remembrance of past mercy helps them to snatch firewood from the altars of the bygone years, with which to kindle the sacrifice of the present moment.
Men are also accustomed to review their lives when they are brought near to the grave. It is helpful, when we fear that life is about to end, to begin to add it up, to see what the sum total reaches. If God should say to us, “Set your house in order, for you shall die, and not live,” the best way to do it is to remember the past—looking at what we have done and what God has done—and then to set one against the other, that we may repent of the sin and may hope because of the mercy. Now, albeit that we may not, ourselves, be brought so near to death’s door as that, yet during the past month or so we have, as a people, been continually going to the sepulcher. I think that there were seven notable Brothers and Sisters who fell asleep last week, so constantly have death’s arrows been flying among us. Therefore, as we are come to the bank of the river and are reminded that we must, ourselves, shortly put off this tabernacle, let us look back a little and remember all the ways the Lord our God has led us.
There are, however, other occasions apart from those of great sorrow or of apprehended departure when wise men are fully warranted in considering the period as peculiarly noteworthy. I have come to such a time today. Twenty-five years have passed over our heads since I preached my first sermon in this house. The sanctuary was opened with songs of joy—many who were with us then are now in Glory—and many of you who are with us today were not even born then. To those who were at the opening of the Tabernacle, it must seem almost an old building now! I hear people talk of “the dear old Tabernacle” and well they may, for a quarter of a century is no mean period in the history of a building or of a Church. There has been a great deal done in those 25 years and we have both personally and as a Church enjoyed abounding mercy. I did not think it right to let the occasion pass over without offering devout thanksgiving to the Lord
for all His loving-kindness to us, and endeavoring to say some words that shall perhaps make us feel more our indebtedness to God and cause us to determine to be more than ever consecrated to His service.
This text, though it belongs, first of all, in the most Divine and fullest sense to our gracious Master, also belongs to David—and through David to those whom God has called to bear testimony to the Gospel of His Grace. We can say and we do say, humbly but most earnestly—and I know that there are many Brothers here who can join us, each in his own ministry, and many Brothers and Sisters who, though not in the ministry, can say, in any event in the spirit of the words after their measure—“I have preached righteousness in the great congregation: lo, I have not refrained my lips, O Lord, You know. I have not hid Your righteousness within my heart; I have declared Your faithfulness and Your salvation: I have not concealed Your loving-kindness and Your truth from the great congregation.”
I. Coming, then, to our text, here is, first, A CONTINUAL TESTIMONY. Many of you have borne testimony for God in your homes as well as in your lives. Some of you have borne the testimony in your classes in the Sunday school. Some in the streets, some in cottage meetings—some in larger assemblies. We especially who are called to the public ministry of the Word, have borne this testimony in “the great congregation.” But all of us who are the Lord’s servants have, I hope, borne our testimony according to our opportunities and abilities.