Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3545
“And when He had thus spoken, He went on ahead, ascending up to Jerusalem.” Luke 19:28.
A VERY beautiful spectacle it is to see the Lord Jesus marching in front and His followers eagerly following on behind. They were going up to Jerusalem, where it is true, He would receive some honor, but also where He would be betrayed into the hands of cruel men and put to a shameful death—but He went on ahead of them. As the shepherd goes before the sheep, not driving, but leading. As the captain goes before his soldiers as taking the post of danger, so our Lord went on before them. It was far better that He should go first than that they should, for the disciple is never more out of place than when he outruns his Master. If he will follow his Master’s commands, he shall do well. But if he shall follow his own devices and invent his own way, he shall do badly. The pilgrimage behind the cloud is a safe one, but a rush before the cloud will end in a disaster. The Master must go first, not the disciple. But then, when the Master advances, it is right to see the disciple follow, ready of foot, quick at his Master’s heel, delighted with his Master’s company. One likes to think of that journey up to Jerusalem, with Jesus Christ just a little ahead in the front, and His disciples closely following Him. I thought it was a picture that might serve us as a model throughout the whole year. I am not going to talk to you long at this time, but wish just to sketch that picture before your mind’s eyes and say, ” So be it unto each one of us.” May Jesus be with us. May Jesus lead the way. And may His own Divine Spirit give us Grace to follow Him—not like Peter, afar off—but as loving disciples who keep closely under their Master’s guidance! From the beginning of the year to the end of the year may we rejoice to feel that He goes ahead of us, but may we also, with cheerful willingness, follow close behind! I present it to you, I say, as the picture for this New Year of Grace, and may it be verified in your experience.
Very simply, then, I shall try to call attention to the blessed fact that Jesus goes ahead of us and, having done so, I shall ask you, in the second place, to seek after a sweet sensation of this Truth of God. And the first Truth, then, to consider is—
I. THE BLESSED FACT—He went ahead of them.
We have already said that He was going the way of suffering. He was going up to Jerusalem to suffer. When you are in the way of suffering, He will go before you. He was always in the way of service. There was more to be done at Jerusalem before He had finished His course. May we, in the way of service, always find Him going before us. And He was also, in the third place, on the way to death—and if we have any fears about our passage through the river, may this console us—He went before us!
To begin, then, at the beginning, here is the blessed fact that Christ has gone ahead of us in the way of suffering. He has done so by His own actual experience while He was here in the flesh. “He was a Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief.” “In all our afflictions He was afflicted.” “He Himself took our sicknesses and carried our sorrows.” Rest assured that in whatever way of suffering you have to go in consequence of your being a child of man, and especially in consequence of your being a child of God, you will find that Christ has gone that way ahead of you! Are you full of bodily pain, stretched upon the bed? Are you apt to think that none ever suffered as you do? He suffered more than you! He went ahead of you along that flinty pathway. The pangs of His death must have been extreme. And remember His Passion in the Garden, His agony in Gethsemane. You have not in this matter yet come to having drops of blood oozing in sweat from your countenance. No, He has gone ahead of you there. In all the pangs of your bodily frame, Jesus has preceded you. Read the 22nd Psalm, with all its wonderful expressions—“I am poured out like water, and all My bones are out of joint.” “You have brought Me into the dust of death.” He knew the fever and its thirst upon the Cross when He was dying there. He said, “You have brought Me to the dust of death.” You have not one suffering that may be imagined to be more exquisite than what He endured! Your griefs are molehills compared with the Alps of His sufferings!
But you will say that it is not exactly the pathway of personal bodily pain you are traversing, but you have endured much in the sufferings of others you have lost. You have had half your heart, perhaps, taken away at one time. Friend after friend has been carried to the tomb! But He went ahead of you in this pathway, also. Did you never read where it is written, “Jesus wept?” “Behold how He loved him,” said the Jews, as they beheld Him at the sepulcher of the most-beloved Lazarus. He knows what bereavements means as well as you—He has ahead of you. “Ah” you say, “but in consequence of the bereavement I have suffered, I am left a widow. How shall I be provided for? In addition to the woe of the loss, I have to look forward to the future! Will these hands be able to find me daily bread? My garments may become, by degrees, more and more thin and time-worn. I fear cold, nakedness and hunger.” And suppose it should come to that, as it will not, I trust, yet He went ahead of you! You are not so poor as He. Hear His voice tonight, “Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but I, the Son of Man, have not where to lay My head.” To pay the common tax, He must borrow money from the fish of the sea. His garment was the common seamless robe of peasants. He was but poorly clad—He was in all respects the child of poverty. First cradled in a manger, and then laid for His last sleep in a borrowed grave, for still He had not where to lay His head. In the sleep of death, Jesus went ahead of you! O son of poverty, O daughter of need, you may see the print of His footsteps all along that thorny way!