Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2957
“The LORD our God spoke unto us in Horeb, saying, You have dwelt long enough in this mountain.” Deuteronomy 1:6.
IT is a good thing, sometimes, to look back—to take a retrospective view of our life. It is a very bad thing to live upon the past—to say, “I believe I am a child of God because I had certain spiritual enjoyments and experiences 10 or 12 years ago.” Ah, such stale fare as this will not feed hungry souls. They need present enjoyment, or, at least, present confidence in the ever-living God. Yet, Brothers and Sisters, we may sometimes gather fuel for today from the ashes of yesterday’s fire. Remembering the mercies of God in the past, we may rest assured concerning the present and the future.
If we have wisely learned by experience, we may, from our own failures in the past, gain wisdom which shall enable us to avoid the evils which overcame us on former occasions. It is well to do as you may sometimes have seen the bargemen do on a river or canal. They walk backward, pushing with all their might backward, to drive their barge forward and, sometimes, we may go backward just far enough to help us to push forward, but no further than that! Never must anyone of us say to himself, “What I was in my youth, or what I was in middle life, is a sufficient comfort for me now. Soul, take your ease, for I have much goods laid up for many years.” That will never do, for we need to exercise a present faith to enjoy a present love—and to live in present holiness and fear of the Lord. Yet it will help us if we remember all the ways whereby the Lord our God has led us these many years in the wilderness.
But, coming to our text, we are reminded that we must expect changes—“You have dwelt long enough in this mountain.” Secondly, we ought not to make these changes without the authorization of our Divine Leader—“The Lord our God spoke unto us in Horeb, saying, You have dwelt long enough in this mountain.” But, thirdly, in our spiritual pilgrimage there are times when it becomes very clear that we have been long enough in a certain condition and need to make an advance towards the Canaan which is our blest inheritance.
I. To begin, then, WE MUST EXPECT CHANGES.
Israel was not always to dwell at Horeb and even the choicest place of Divine manifestation is not always to be ours. The land of Jordan and of the Hermonites and the Hill Mizar, though very precious to us because of the spiritual experiences we have enjoyed there, are not to be our permanent places of abode. We have to journey onward and pitch our tent somewhere else.
We need not wonder at this, my Brothers and Sisters, for this is a changing world. We would be out of gear with the whole creation if we did not frequently change. Behold how the year changed. It seems but yesterday that the rivers were locked in ice. Soon we saw the flowers peeping up from the soil and now we have reached midsummer—and shall soon be looking for the appointed weeks of harvest! And it will not be long before winter will be here again. On this earth, on the greatest or on the minutest scale, all things change, whether it is an empire that rises and passes away, or a crocus or a rose that blooms and fades. All things that are, once were not and, by-and-by, shall not be, or, at least, the place which knows them, now, shall know them no more forever. The forest once slept in an acorn cup. That some forest, beneath the axe, shall pass away and vanish into smoke. All things change and, therefore, we, also, must expect to change.
And, mark you, we have already changed. Perhaps we had a happy childhood and can remember even now the songs of the nursery and the holy hymns of our cradle days. But there came a time when we had dwelt long enough in that mountain, for it would have been ill for us always to continue as children. Then we were youths and were at school. And perhaps we recollect with pleasure those free days of boyhood and girlhood when, if we did not know the value of
knowledge, at any rate we found that those who taught us had more pleasant ways of teaching than our fathers knew! But it was not well for us to always stay at school—there came a time when our parents felt and we felt that we had stayed long enough in that mountain. Since that, some of us have passed from change to change till we have come to the full maturity of spiritual life. And some of you I see, with the snows of many a winter lying on your brows, are approaching yet another change—you know that, by-and-by, you must come to another, for it will be said of you, “You have dwelt long enough in this mountain.” And so, we shall pass through all the several stages of man till we come to the blessed mountain where we shall never dwell too long, nor ever feel that we have dwelt there long enough! But while we are beneath the moon, there must be waxing and waning to all who come under the moon’s spell. And where the very heart of the earth, like a great sea, has its ebbs and its floods, we cannot but expect that we, too, should have our ebbs and our floods without us and within us.