Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3162
“And the King said, If the Lord does not help you, where can I find help for you? From the threshing floor, or from the winepress?” 2 Kings 6:27.
I READ in your hearing the very horrible incident connected with the siege of Samaria. I do not wonder that when the poor woman applied to the king he should have been horrified. He felt that her case, and the case of all about him was a desperate one, so he said, “If Jehovah does not interpose, what can I do?” The winepress is dry and the threshing floor is empty—there is nothing left to alleviate the horrors of famine. “If the Lord does not help you, where can I find help for you?”
I. Now the CASE OF EVERY UNSAVED MAN IS A VERY TERRIBLE ONE. He is not in dread of immediate death by famine, but if he is at all awakened to know his true condition, he will labor under a fear of something worse than death, and worse than the need of bread. There is many a sinner that I have met with (and I know the feeling myself) who would be glad if death could end it and if that were all. But “there is the dread of something after death”—that wrath to come of which the Word of God speaks in such solemn tones—that fire that never shall be quenched, that worm that dies not—it is that which haunts the sinner’s conscience when he is once awakened to know his condition! And horrible as the story was in Samaria, it is not worse than the horrible fate that awaits every man who lives and dies unsaved!
Now it is no wonder at all, that when a man is awakened to see his great danger, standing as he does upon the edge of a precipice with a frightful gulf beneath him, he begins to appeal to anybody and everybody and to cry for help. So, tonight, I am going to begin by saying that in the case of the sinner, it is vain to look to man, for every honest man will have to say to such an one, “If the Lord does not help you, how can I help you?” You feel that you are in dreadful danger and you want to be saved—I beseech you, do not look to any of us, or to any of your fellow creatures for help, for we are quite powerless in the matter! God must save you! He must give you Christ or else you must die. We have no power to forgive your sins. There are some pretenders who surely ought to feel themselves out of place in this age, like owls in daylight, who still profess that they can pardon sin. It is a strange country, this. If a poor woman in a red cloak passes a farm and for sixpence tells a servant girl her fortune, she is put in prison. And I will not say but what she deserves it—yet a gentleman may stand up before his thousands and pretend to turn bread and wine into the flesh and blood of God, and to have power to pardon sin, and I have never heard of any punishment for so gross an imposition! It is infinitely more gross than anything the poor ignorant witch has ever practiced! It is not in us to pardon sin. If you had offended us, we might pardon your offenses against ourselves, but offenses against God must be forgiven by God, Himself.
“Does not the power which rested in the Apostles to forgive sin still rest in the Church?” I think it does, but no Apostle ever had the power to pardon an impenitent soul! No Apostle ever had the power to pardon one who did not believe in Jesus. All that an Apostle could do was to say that he was pardoned when he saw that he believed and repented—and that same power belongs to us to this day—to declare, in God’s name, that HE THAT BELIEVES IN HIM IS NOT CONDEMNED and that he that confesses his sin to God and forsakes it, shall find mercy—but with this exception (and it is no exception, at all) all power in the matter of pardoning sin rests with the eternal God and with Him, alone. It is certainly not in the power of any man to renew your nature! You cannot enter Heaven except you are born-again. Unconverted man, you must be made a new creature in Christ Jesus, but there is no man under Heaven that can create in you a new heart or a right spirit! Let a man first create as much as a fly and send it winging its way in the sum-
mer’s air and then let him talk about regenerating a soul. It is a stupendous work—a work to which only the Deity is equal! God alone creates or re-creates the soul of man! You look in vain, then, to any—even though they call themselves priests or bishops or Doctors of Divinity! Your fellow men cannot help you in the matter! You must be born-again from above, and the Spirit of God must do it, or your case is hopeless.
But it is said, “Can we not pray for sinners?” Yes, blessed be God, we can, and THE PRAYER OF A RIGHTEOUS MAN AVAILS MUCH. During this week I have had very many requests for prayers, and some of them from some of you now present. Such prayers as mine, indeed have gone up to Heaven for you, that you might find peace. But I charge you before God, put no superstitious confidence in myprayers or in the prayers of anybody! What could your mother’s prayers do for you? Nothing at all unless you pray for yourself. If the Apostle Paul were here and pleading to God, what would be the use of his prayers? Just nothing unless the Lord moved you to make a personal confession of your sin and to believe personally in Jesus and personally to pray to Him! Now there is a great value in prayer. I value the prayer of a little child. The poorest Christian has power with God in supplication. We do not undervalue that, but still, if the Lord does not help you in answer to those prayers and if it does not become a personalmatter with yourself so that you pray, you will be guilty of a superstitious reliance upon the prayers of others—having made a god of them—and God will be grieved with you for having done so. No prayers of all the saints on earth could save a single soul unless that soul fled for refuge to the hope set before it in the Gospel in the Person of Jesus Christ.
But perhaps there may be some persons here who will say, “Cannot you help me by giving me the ordinances of the Christian religion? Will not they help me?” Ah, Beloved Friends, if you are continually here in this place, I am sure you are not under that delusion! There is no ordinance in the Christian religion that belongs to unconverted people. Can you not be baptized? you ask. No, you have nothing to do with Baptism until you are a Believer in Jesus Christ! Perhaps there is no Popish error which has done more mischief to the Christian Church than that of giving baptism to unconverted persons—to persons who have no faith in Jesus—under the notion that it does something, for if it does nothingat all of any good! Why is it given? And to the extent to which it is believed that there can be any efficacy in it—to that extent it is mere Popery and Sacramentarianism and ought to be abandoned by the true Believer in Jesus Christ! I believe we should increase sin by that view, but certainly not wash it away, for you would have been guilty of having dared to take to yourself an ordinance which belongs to none except to those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ with all their heart. “But may we not come to the Communion Table?” No, NO, NO! And if we dared to permit you—if we said, “Unconverted man, you may come to the Table,” we would certainly be doing you no service whatever. On the contrary, we would be doing certain injury. Remember that dreadful text—“He that eats and drinks unworthily eats and drinks damnation to himself—“condemnation” it ought to be, for that is the real word there! The other is too forcible and I do but give the correct rendering. But I would not ask you to come and eat and drink condemnation to yourself, “Not discerning the Lord’s body.” Why I know unconverted people who seldom go to a place of worship all the year round and yet will go and take what they call, “the Sacrament,” on Good Friday—choosing that day which they receive as the memorial of Christ’s death in which especially to insult the Savior, for He never asked them to come to His Table living in sin, living in constant neglect of all religion and then to do Him this piece of impertinence—to go and intrude themselves into that sacred feast to which they are not bidden and to which they have no right to come!
Oh, believe me, if you rely on Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, you might as well rely upon the incantations of a witch or upon the spell of a Hottentot! There is nothing in a sacrament that can, in itself, save a soul! When you are saved, then these outward emblems remind you of Truths of God and help your memory and stir your minds. But until you are saved, to partake is profane! You must not touch these things! They are for the children, not for you—for those who are saved and not for you who are unreconciled to God! We may say, therefore, when you talk to us about coming to what are called sacraments—“We cannot help you. If the Lord does not help you, we cannot help you there.”
But there are some who will say, “But may we not join the Church of God?” I hope none of you, my brethren, are under the idea that if you are unconverted and join a church, that will help you. Oh, how I have wasted my labor here if I have led any of you to believe that! I charge you, if you are not a friend of Christ, not to come among his friends or declare yourself to be one by a lying profession! It is “a superfluity of naughtiness,” for there can be NO EXCUSE FOR A