Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3444
“None can keep alive his own soul.” Psalm 22:29.
SELF-SUFFICIENCY is the sin of nature—all-sufficiency is the supply of Divine Grace! Ishmael, sent away into the wilderness with his bottle, is man trusting in himself—Isaac, dwelling by the never-failing wells of Gerar, is man led by Grace to trust in the unfailing supplies of the God of all consolation! It is as hard to get man away from self-trust as it would be to reverse the course of Niagara. He begins by believing that he can make himself alive—and when he is convinced that this is not possible, he then tries to entrench himself behind the idea that he can keep himself alive. No, though man is dead in trespasses and sins and it is but a rank absurdity to imagine that death can produce life, yet the sinner still thinks that by something of his own he can create a soul within the ribs of death, that a sinner may grow into a saint of himself, that the man who is as full of sin as the leopard is full of spots, may yet, by his own innate energy, cast off his spots and become pure! I say that when man is cured of that rank absurdity, he then will need as much trouble to be cured of another, for even those who are alive unto God fall, more or less, into the false confidence that they can keep their own souls alive, and he out of us all who best knows that he can do no such thing has, nevertheless, sometimes caught himself acting as if he did believe that he could keep his own soul alive! To be sound in Doctrine is one thing, but to have that orthodoxy in the heart is another thing. To believe that I am dependent every day upon the Grace of God is easy, but to carry that dependence and the sense of that dependence into all my dealings with God and with man—this is not nature, but is in itself a work of Grace!
Now, it is upon our entire dependence upon God as Believers that I am to speak tonight. We have, if we are Believers, been made alive from the dead. Our souls have been quickened by the life of Christ—we live with the life that Christ has given to us, but we cannot keep ourselves alive any more than we could first make ourselves alive. That is the point to be thought over tonight—may its rich and humbling instructions be sanctified to us all. First, let me—
I. Break up This Doctrine a Little
It is like one of the loaves brought to Christ—it needs breaking and we will break it up thus. The Believer’s life must be dependent upon God. He cannot maintain it by his own strength because of its very nature. It is a derived life. We know how plainly our Savior puts this in the parable of the vine. The life of the Christian is not the life of the separate plant put into the soil to suck for itself through its own throat, the nourishment out of the earth. It is the life of a plant which derives all its sap through the stem—through a root that is not in itself. It does not bear the root, nor a root, but the root bears it, so that once you cut away the branch from the vine, you have taken away the life from the branch, for though the life is in the branch as long as it is joined to the vine, yet it is not so in the branch, itself, that it is there at all apart from the vine. You are dead—then where is your life? Your life is hid with Christ in God, and if you live at all, this is the reason! “Because I live, you shall live also.” Your life is not in yourselves as a separate life. Your life, the true life of your soul, is a derived one, and is in Christ Jesus! Another illustration from the same blessed Word of God gives us the like sense. We are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. There is life in my hand—undoubted life—but let that hand be laid down upon the block, and the headsman’s axe separate it from the arm, and there remains no life whatever in the hand that is separated from the vital center, the heart. The limb moves and has life in itself, in a certain sense, but it is derived life, relative life—it only lives at all, in fact—because it is joined to something else in which its life more truly dwells. You see then, Brothers and Sisters, that none can keep his own soul alive, because the soul’s truest life is not in itself, but lies in Another, even in Christ its Head!
Furthermore, the life that is in a Believer is avery dependent life. We are born in regeneration, but after a child is born it will not live if the mother’s care shall cease. It must be nursed. It must be fed. It must have a thousand little needs supplied, which, if neglected, would be pretty sure to end that little life right speedily. When our dear converts are born to Christ, our anxieties for them are not ended. Their life is but a frail and feeble thing and though we believe they shall not die, but live, yet they only live because the great Father of the Christian family takes care that they shall be supplied with the unadulterated milk of the Word of God, that they shall be continually nursed in the ordinances of God’s house, that they shall be trained and instructed and brought up until they come to the stature of men and women in Christ Jesus. Brothers and Sisters, just as the life of the baby would not be sustained unless something was done for it which it could not do for itself, so the life of the Christian is of the same sort—dependent upon the blessed offices of God the Holy Spirit, and of the gracious Redeemer who watches over all the children of Grace as a nurse watches over her child. Yes, but you tell me that this is a great Truth of God for young Believers, but what of those that become adults in Christ? I reply that still if the figure does not hold good, yet the Truth, itself, does, and we will change the figure and come back to the one we had before. The fully-developed arm will die if separated from the trunk, just as surely as the infant’s arm—and yonder huge branch of the ancient oak, itself a tree—yet were it sundered from the oak, must wither. It matters not how great the growth of a Christian, nor how mature his experience, he still owes all he has and all he is to his union with Christ—he cannot keep his own soul alive! If I might use such an allegory, it is something like this—all Believers are pensioners upon the court of Heaven. They begin, we may say, as pensioners when they are converted, to draw out of Heaven’s bank but a small pension. They are poor in Grace, poor in faith, poor in everything—but they draw a pension just as large as they can manage to live upon. By-and-by they are promoted, and their pension is now not £50 a year, but £100. By-and-by they are promoted yet again, but as they are promoted and draw more pension money, they spend more. There are certain demands upon them which require them to spend whatever they get! So at last we will suppose that one of them has come to a high rank and he draws out of the court of the King’s Bank at the rate of £10,000 a year. Yet, my Brothers and Sisters, if at any moment that pension should be stopped, he is just as poor a man as he that drew his £50, for, as I have said, he spent it as he received it—and if he is now rich, he is only rich because of the constant income which his gracious King is pleased to give him! But if that were stopped, he could no more keep alive his own soul, though he has come to the first rank in Grace, than he could who has just commenced to draw from the Bank of the King of Kings! Your spiritual riches all flow in from Christ, and if you are once separated from Him, you are naked, and poor, and miserable, be you who you may!