Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3288
“But if our Gospel is hidden, it is hidden to those who aire lost.” 2 Corinthians 4:3.
In this verse and the following one we have a very brief yet very full description of what every minister of the Gospel ought to preach. In the first place, he is to preach the Gospel—not metaphysics, not politics, not mere morality, not simply doctrines as such. He is to preach the Gospel, which signifies good news, something new and something good—so good that nothing else can equal it—the glad tidings of mercy for the guilty, the blessed tidings of God coming down to man that man may go up to God, the welcome tidings of atonement made for human guilt! It is also new as well as good—it comes as a strange novelty to the attentive ear. Mythology never dreamed it, human wit could never have invented it, even angelic intellect could not have devised a scheme—
“So just to God, so safe for man.” The business of the Christian minister is to preach this Good News, to publish to the sinners the glad tidings that there is a Savior, to point the guilty to Christ and to be constantly saying to each individual sinner, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved.” I care not what may be the learning or eloquence of the minister, though he may speak with the tongue of men and angles, if he does not preach Christ and bid sinners trust in Him, he has mistaken his mission and missed the grand objective for which he was sent!
This Gospel is called in the text “our Gospel”By this expression I understand that the minister must accept it for himself before he can hold it out to others. I am myself to look to Jesus as my own personal Savior—and then I am to cry to others, “Look unto Him, and be you saved, all the ends of the earth.” I must be able to say—
“I came to Jesus, and I drank Of that life-giving stream—
and then, but not till then, I am to cry, “Ho, everyone that thirsts, come you to the waters.” What a miserable wretch must he be who preaches to others a Gospel in which he has, himself, no share! He spreads the table and invites others to come to the feast, while he, himself, is starving! He is like a plague-stricken physician who knows the remedy for the disease and sees others cured by it, yet dies with the remedy in his hand. Ah me, of all the portions, that must be most dreadful in the world to come, as well as most uncomfortable in this present life! Surely it must be the portion of the man who preaches to others what he has never experienced in his own soul. Paul might well call it “our Gospel,” for it had saved him, the chief of sinners, and made him a beloved Apostle of Jesus Christ. He might well call it “our Gospel” for he had held it fast in time of persecution and amid all the perils to which he had been exposed—and he was, at last, to give his life as a sacrifice for it! And it must be “our Gospel,” too, “to have and to hold,” or else we cannot preach it with any power!
In the verse following our text, something more is said about the Gospel—it is there called “the glorious Gospel” There was something in it that aroused and inflamed the Apostle ‘s noblest thoughts. Paul was no boaster. “God forbid that I should glory,” he said—but there was one exception—“save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” He did not stand up as a mere apologist for the Gospel, or say, “I can defend it against all comers and maintain that it is reasonable,” but he gloried in it as the best and highest Truth of God—as wiser than all the Stoic’s wisdom and more full ofjoy than all the Epicurean’s pleasure! He gloried in that Gospel which brings full and free forgiveness to the penitent! That Gospel which takes the meanest and basest of mankind and makes them princes in the court of the King of kings! That
Gospel which comes to men in poverty, in slavery, in the degradation of superstition, idolatry and crime—and lifts them up out of the horrible pit and the miry clay, sets their feet upon the Rock of Ages, cleanses them, clothes them, puts a new song into their mouth, preserves them from falling and, at last, brings them where they shall see the face of God and dwell forever in His Presence! It is, indeed, a glorious Gospel which can do all this! Yet, alas, the most of men are like the rooster on the dunghill who, when he found a pearl, said that he would sooner have found a grain of barley—they think more of their corn and their wine, their feasts and their mirth, than they do of the inexpressibly glorious things of the Kingdom of Heaven. Oh, that they were wise enough to perceive the glories of this glorious Gospel!
Paul further calls it “the glorious Gospel of Christ” And well he might, for it is all about Christ from beginning to end! Give me a true preacher of the glorious Gospel of Christ and I will gladly listen to him. I would like him to be an educated minister if that is possible, for there is no need for my ears to be tortured by mistakes in grammar, but I do not care so much about that as about the other matter! I would sooner hear Christ’s Gospel preached ungrammatically than I would hear the best philosophy set forth in the most orderly sentences, but with the Gospel of Christ left out. When the table is spread for dinner, it is well to have a clean tablecloth, china, glass and cutlery of all the right sort and in their proper places—but if there is no food on the dishes, all those other things are a mere mockery to the hungry ones who are waiting to be fed! Sooner, by far, would I go to a bare table and eat from a wooden bowl something that would appease my appetite, than I would go to a well-spread table on which there was nothing to eat! Yes, it is Christ, Christ, Christ whom we have to preach! And if we leave Him out, we leave out the very soul of the Gospel! Christless sermons make merriment for Hell. Christless preachers, Christless Sunday school teachers, Christless class leaders, Christless tract distributors—what are all these doing? They are simply setting the mill to grind without putting any grist into the hopper—all their labor is in vain! If you leave Jesus Christ out, you are simply beating the air, or going to war without any weapon with which you can smite the foe!