Salvation of the Lord
“Salvation is of the Lord.” — Jonah, iL 9.
Jonah learned this sentence of good theology in a strange nollege. He learned it in the whale’s belly, at the bottom of the mountains, with the weeds wrapped about his head, when fce supposed that the earth with her bars was about him for ever. Most of the grand truths of God have to be learned by trouble; they must be burned into us with the hot iron of affliction, otherwise we shall not truly receive them. No man is competent to judge in mattei’s of the kingdom, until first he has been tried; since there are many things to be learned in the depths which we can never know in the heights. We discover many secrets in the caverns of the ocean, which, ‘.hough w-e had soared to heaven, we never could have known. He shall best meet the wants of God’s people as a preacher who has had those wants himself; he shall best comfort God’s Israel who has needed comfort; and he shall best preach salvation who has felt his own need of it. Jonah, when he was delivered from his great danger, when, by the command of God the fish had obediently left its great deeps mid delivered its cargo upon dry land, was then capable of judging; and this was the result of his experience under his trouble — “Sah ration is: f the Lord.”
By salvation here we do not merely understand the special salvation which Jonah received from death; for according to Dr. Gill, there is something so special in the original, in the word salvation having one more letter than it usually has, when it only refers to some temporary deliverance, that we can only understand it here as relating to the great work Df the salvation of the soul which eudureth for ever. That ‘”sal
SALVATION OF THE LOliD.. ij-.
ration is of the Lord,” I shall this morning try to Aom’ as best I can. First, I shall endeavor to explain the doctrine; then 1 shall try to show you koio God has guarded us from making any mistakes, and has hedged us up to make us believe thegosml; then I shall dwell upon t/te influence of this truth upon men,’ and shall close up by showing you the counterpart of the doctrine. Seeing every truth hath its obverse, so hath this.
I. First, then, to begin by cxl lanation, let us kxpound this DOCTKJNE — the doctrine that sa vation is of the Lord, or of Jehovah. We are to understand by this, that the whole of the work whereby men are saved from their natural estate of sin and ruin, and are translated into the kingdom of God and made heirs of eternal happiness, is of God, and of him only. “Salvation is of the Lord.”
To begin, then, at the beginning, the plan of salvation is entirely of God. No human intellect and no created intelligence assisted Godn the planning of salvation; he contrived the way, even as he himself carried it out. The plan of salvation was devised before the existence of angels. Before the day-star flung its ray across the darkness, when as yet the unnavigated ether had not been fanned by the wing of seraph, and when the solemnity of silence had never been disturbed by the song of angel, God had devised a way whereby he might save man, whom he foresaw would fall. He did not create angels to consult with them; no, of himself he did it. We might truly ask the question, “With whom took he counsel? Who instructed him, when he planned the great architecture of the temple of mercy? With whom took he counsel when he digged the deeps of love, that out of them there might well up springs of salvation? Who aided him?” None. He himself, alone, did it. In fact, if angels had then been in existence, they could not have assisted God; for lean well suppose that if a solemn conclave of those spirits had been held, if God had put to them this question, “Man will rebel; I declare I will punish; my justice, inflexible and severe, demands that I should do so; but yet I intend to have mercy;” if he had put the question to the celestial squadrons of mighty ones, “IIow can those things be? How can justice have its donifinds fulfilled, and how can mercy reign?” Iha angels Mould have sat in silence until now; they could not have dictated the plan; it would have sutpassed angelic hitellect to have conceived the way whereby righteousness and peace should meet together, and judgment and mercy should kiss each other. God devised it, because without God it could not have been devised. It is a plan too 8y)lendid to have been the product of any mind except of that mind which afterward carried it out. “Salvation” is older than creation; it is “of the Lord.”
And as it was of the Lord m planning so it was of the Lord in execution. No one has helped to provide salvation; God has done it all himself The banquet of mercy is served up by one host; that host is he to whom the cattle on a thousand hills belong. But none have contributed any dainties to that royal banquet; he hath done it all himself The royal bath of mercy, wherein black souls are washed, was filled from the veins of Jesus; not a drop was contrituited by any other being. He died upon the cross, and as an expiator he died alone. No blood of martyrs mingled with that stream; no blood of noble confessors and of heroes of the cross entered into the river of atonement; that is filled from the veins of Christ, and from nowhere else beside. He hath done it wholly. Atonement is the unaided work of Jesus. On yonder cross I see the man who “trod the winepress alone;” in yonder garden I see the solitary conqueror, who came to the fight single-handed, whose own arm brought salvation, and whose omnipotence sustained him. “Salvation is of the Lord,” as to its provisions; Jehovah — Father, Son, and Spirit — hath provided every thing.
So far we arc all agreed: but now we shall have to Separate a bit. “Salvation is of the Lord,” in the ajyplicatwn of it. “No,” says the Arminian, “it is not; salvation is of the Lord, inasmuch as he does all for man that he can do; but there is something that man must do, which if he does riot do, he must perish.” That is the Arminian way of salvation. Now last week I thought of this very theory of salvation, when I stood bl’^he side of that window of Carisbrooke castle, out of which King Charlos of unha[)py ai d unrighteous memory, attempted
SALVATION OP TUt LORD. 197
to- escape. I lead in the guide book that every thing was provided for his escape; his followers had means at the bottom of the wall to enable him to Hy across the country, and on the coast they had their boats lying ready to take him to another land; in fact every thing was ready for his escape. But here was the important circumstance: his friends had done all they could; lie was to do the rest; but that doing the rest waa just the point and brunt of the battle. It was to get out of the window, out of which he was not able to escape by any means, so that all his friends did for him went for nothing, so far as he was concerned. So with the sinner. If God had provided every means of escape, and only required him to get out of his dungeon, he would have remained there to all eternity. Why, is not the sinner by nature dead in sin? And if God requires him to make himself alive, and then afterward he will do the rest for him, then verily, my friends, we are not so much obliged to God as we had thought for; for if he require so much as that of us, and we can do it, we can do the rest without his assistance. The Romanists have an extraordinary miracle of their own about St. Dennis, of whom they tell the lying legend that after his head was off he took it up i’j his hands and walked with it two thousand miles; whereupon, said a wit, “So far as the two thousand miles go, it is nothirg at all; it is only the first step in which there is any difficulty.” So I believe, if that is taken, all the rest can be easily accomplished. And if God does reij lire of the sinner — dead in sin — that he should take the first step, then he requireth just that which renders salvation as impossible under the gospel as ever it was under the law, seeing man is as unable to believe as he is to obey, and is just as much without power to come to Christ as he is without power to go to heaven without Christ. The power must be given to him of the Spirit. He lieth dead in sin; the Spirit must quicken him. He is bound hand and foot and fettered by transgression; the Spirit must cut his bonds, and then he will leap to liberty. God must come and dash the iron bars out of their sockets, and then he can escape from the window, and make good his escape afterward: but unless the first thing be done for him, he Y^.ust perish as surely under the gospel as he would have done under
[/he law. I would cease to preach, if I believed that God, ib the matter of salvation, required any thing whatever of man which he himself had not also engaged to furnish. For how many have I frequently hanging upon my hps of the worst of characters — men whose lives have become so horribly bad, that the lip of morality would refuse to give a description of their character? When I enter my pulpit am I to believe that these men are to do something before God’s Spirit will operate upon them? If so, I should go there with a faint heart, feeling that I never could induce them to do the first part. But now T come to my pulpit with a sure confidence — God the Holy S])irit will meet with these men this morning. They are as bad as they can be; he will put a new thought into their hearts; he will give them new wishes; he will give them new wills, and those who haled Christ will desire to love him; those who once loved sin will, by God’s divine Spirit, be made to hate it; and here is my confidence, that what they can not do, in that they are weak through the flesh, God sending his Spirit hito their hearts will do for them, and in 1 hem, and so they shall be saved.
Well then, says one, that will make people sit still and fold their arms. Sir, it will not. But if men did so I could not help it; my business, as I have often said in this place before, is not to prove to you the reasonableness of any truth, nor to defend any ti’uth from its consequences; all I do here, and I mean to keep to it, is just to assert the truth, because it is in the Bible; then, if you do not like it, you must settle the quarrel with my Master, and if you think it unreasonable, you must quarrel with the Bible. Let others defend Scripture and prove it to be true; they can do their work better than I could; mine is just the mere work of proclaiming. I am the messenger; I tell the Master’s message; if you do not like the message, quarrel with the Bible, not with me; so lotg as I have Scripture on my side I will dare ar.d defy you to dc any thing against me. “Salvation is of the Lord.” The Lord has to apply it, to make the unwilling willing, to make the ungodly godly, and bring the vile rebel to the feet of Jesus, or else salvation will never be accomplished. Leave that one thmg imdone, and you have broken the link of the chain, tho rery link which was just necessary to its intejTity. Take away the fact that God begins the good work, and that he sends us w hat the old divines call preventing grace — take that away, and you have spoilt the whole of salvation; you have juHt taken the key-stone out of the arch, and down it tumbles. There is nothing left then.
And now on the next point we shall a little disagree airiin. “Salvation is of the Lord,” as the sustaining of the work in n7iy inan’’s heart. When a man is made a child of God he does not have a stock of grace given to him with which to go on for ever, but he has grace for that day; and he must have giace for the next day, and grace for the next, and grace for the next, until days shall end, or else the beginning shall be of no avail. As a man does not make himself syiritually alive, so neither can he keep himself so. He can feed on spiritual food, and so preserve his spiiitual strength; he can walk in the commandments of the Lord, and so enjoy rest and peace, but still the inner life is dependent upon the Spirit as much for its after existence as for its first begetting. I do verily believe that if it should ever be my lot to put my foot upon the golden threshold of Paradise, and put this thumb upon the pearly latch, I should never cross the threshold unless I had grace given me to take that last step whereby I might enter heaven. No man of himself, even when converted, hath any power, except as that power is daily, constantly, and perpetually infused into him by the Spirit, But Christians often set up for independent gentlemen; they get a little stock of grace in hand, and they say, “My mountain standeth firm, I shall never be moved.” But ah! it is not long before the manna begins to be putrid. It was only meant to be the manna for the day, and we have kept it for the morrow, and therefore it fails us. We raupt have fresh grace.
“For day by day the manna fell;
0 to learn that lesson well.”
So look day by day for fresh grace. Frequently too the Christian ;vants to have grace enough for a month vouchssfed to him in one moment. “O!” he says,” what a host of troubles I have cominrr — how shall T meet them all? O! that T had fOO SALTATION OP THB LORD.
grace enough t “bear me through them all!” My dear friends, you will have grace enough for your troubles, as they come one by one. “As thy days, so shall thy strength be;” but thy strength shall never be as thy months, or as thy weeks. Thou shaltrhave thy strength as thou hast thy bread. “Give us this day our daily bread.” Give us this day our daily grace. But why is it you will be troubling yourself about the things of to-morrow? The common people say, “Cross a bridge when you come to it,” T])at is good advice. Do the same. When a trouble comes, attack it, and down with it, and master it; but do not begin now to forestall your woes. “Ah! but I have so many,” says one. Therefore I say, do not look further before thee than thou need<^st. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Do as the brave Grecian did, who, when he defended his country from Persi**, did not go into the plains to fight, but stood in the narrow pasa of Thermopyla3; there, when the myriads came to him, they had to come one by one, and he felled them to the earth. Had he ventured into the plain he would have been soon devoured, and his handfull would have been melted like a drop of dew in the sea. Stand in the narrow pass of to-day, and fight thj troubles one by one; but do not rush into the plains of to-morrow, for there thou wilt be routed and killed. As the evil is sufiicient so will the grace be. “Salvation is of the Lord.”
But, lastly, upon this point. The nltimatepeo’fection of salvation is of the Lord. Soon, soon, the saints of earth shall be saints in light; their hairs of snowy age shall be ciowned with perpetual joy and everlasting youth; their eyes suffused with tears shall be made bright as stars, never to be clouded again by sorrow; their hearts that tremble now are to be made joyous and fast, and set for ever like ])illars in the temple of God. Their follies, their burdens, their griefs, their woes, are soon to be over; sin is to be slain, corruption is to be removed, and a heaven of spotless purity and of unmingled peace is to be theirs for evei*. But it must still be by grace. As was the foundation such must the toji-stone be; that wjiich laid on earth the first beginning must lay in heaven the top-most store. ,ls they wore redeemed from their filthy conversation t)y grace, so they must be redeemed from death and the grave
by grace too, and they must enter heaven singing
“Salvation of the Lord alone;
Grace is a shoreless sea.”
There may be Arminiaus here, but they will not be Arminlans there; they may here say, “It is of the will of the flesh,” but in heaven they shall not think so. Here they may ascribe some little to the creature; but there they shall cast their crowns at- the Redeemer’s feet, and acknowledge that he did it all. Here they may sometimes look a little at themselves, and boast somewhat of their own strength; but there, “Not unto us, not unto us,” shall be sung with deeper sincerity and with more profound emphasis than they have even sung it here below. In heaven, when grace shall have done its work, this truth shall stand out in blazing letters of gold, “Salvation is of the Lord.”
II. Thus I have tried to expound the gospel, Now shall I show you HOW God has hedgkd this dootuine about.
Some have said salvation in some cases is the result o? natural temperament. Well, sir, well; God has eifectually answered your argument, You say that some people are saved because they are natui’ally religious and inclined to be good; unfortunately I have never met with any of that class of lwy-Bons yet; but I will suppose for a moment that there are such people. God has unanswerably met your objection; for, strange to say, the great number of these who are saved are just the most unlikely people in the world to have been saved, while a great number of those who ]ierish were once just the very people whom, if natural disposition had any thing to do with it, we should have expected to see in heaven. Why, there is o!ie here who in his youth was a child of many follies. Often did his mother weep over him, and cry and groan over her son’s wanderings; for what with a fierce high spirit that could brook neither bit nor bridle, what with perpetual rebelliond and ebullitions of hot anger, she said, “My son, my son, what wilt thou be in thy riper years? Surely thou wilt dash in pieces law and order, and he a disgrace to thy fatlier’rj name.” He grew up; in youth he was wild and wanton, but, wonder of wonders, on a sudden he became a new mail; changed, altogetl er changed; no more like what he was before than angels aie like lost spirits. He sat at her feet, he cheered her heart, anvi the lost, fiery one became gentle, mild, humble as a little child, and obedient to God’s commandinentis. You say, wonder of wonders! But there is another here, lie was a fiiir youth: when but a child he talked of Jesus; often when his mother had him on her knee he asked her queS” lions about heaven; be was a prodigy, a wonder of ipiety in his youth. As he grew up, the tear rolled down his cheek under any sermon; he could scarcely bear to hear of death without a sigh; sometimes his mother caught him, as she thought, in prayer alone. And what is he now? He has just this very morning come from sin; he has become the debauched desj)erate villain, has gone far into all manner of wickedness and lust, and sin, and has become more damnably corrupt than other men could have made him; only his own evil spirit, once confined, has now developed itself; he has learned to play the lion in his manhood, as once he played the fox in his youth. I do not know whether you have ever met with such a case; but it vei-y frequently is so. I know I can say that in mv conjxregation some abandoned wicked fellow has had his hoart broken, and been led to weep, and has cried to God for mercy, and renounced his vile sin; whilst some fliir maiden by his side hath heard the same sermon, and if there was a tear she brushed it away; she still continues just what she was, “without God and without hone in the world.” God has taken the base things of the world, and has just picked his people out of the very roughest of men, in order that he may prove that it is not natural disposition, but that “salvation is of the Lord” alone.
Well, but some say, it is the niimster they hear who converts men. Ah! that is a grand idea, full sure. No man but a fool would entertain it. I met with a man some time ago who as-Biired me that he knew a minister who had a very large amount of converting power in him. Speaking of a great evangelist in America, he said, “That man, sir, has got the greatest quantity of converting power I ever knew a man to have; and Mr. 8»>and-so in a neihli iring town I thirk is second to him.” At
Ihat time this converting power was being exbibiled; two hundred persons were converted by the converting power of this second best, and joined to the church in a few months. I went to the place some time afterwards — it was in England — and I said, “How do your converts get on?” “Well,” said he, “I can not say much about them.” “How many out of liidse two hundred whom you received in a year ago stand last ?■’ “Well,” he said, “I am afraid not many of them; we have turned seventy of them out for drunkenness already.’’” Yes,” I said, “I thought so: that is the end of the grand experiment of converting power.” If I could convert you all, any one else might unconvert you; what any man can do another man can undo; it is only what God does that is abiding. No, my brethren; God has taken good care it shall never be said conversion is of man, for usually he blesses those who seem to be the mOvSt unlikely to be useful. I do not expect to see so many conversions in this ])lace as I had a year ago, when I had far fewer hearers. Do you ask why? Why, a year ago I was abused by every body; to mention my name was to mention the name of the most abominable buffoon that lived. The mere utterance of it brought forth oaths and cursing; with many men it was a name of contempt, kicked about the street as a foot-ball; but then God gave me souls by hundreds, who were added to my church, and in one year it was my happiness to see not less than a thousand personally who had then been converted. I do not expect that now. My name is somewhat esteemed now, and the great ones of the earth think it no dishonor to sit at my feet; but this makes me fear lost my God should forsake me now that the world esteems me. I would rather be despised and slandered than aught else. This assembly that yon think so grand and fine, T would readily part with, if by such a loss I could gain a greater blessing. “God has chosen the base things of the world;” and, therefore, I reckon that the more esteemed I may be, the worse is my position, so much the less expectation shall I have that God will bless me. He hath but his “treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of man.” A poor minister began to preach once, and all the world sooke ill of him; but God blessed him. By-ancl-bye they turnerl round and petted hiinp He was the man — a wonder! God left liuu! It has otlen been the same. It is for us to recollect, in all times of popularity, that “Crucify him, crucify him” follows fast upon the heels of “Hosanna,” and that the crowd to-day, if dealt faithfully with, may turn into the handful of to-morrow; for men ove not plain speaking. We should learn to be despised, earn to he contemned, learn to he slandered, and then we shall learn to be made useful by God. Down on my knees I have often fallen, with the hot sweat rising from my biow, under some fresh slander poured upon me; in an agony of grief my heart has been well-nigh broken; till at last 1 learned the art of bearing all and caring for none. And now my grief runneth in another line. It is just the opposite. I fear lest God should forsake me, to prove that he is the author of salvation, that it is not in the preacher, that it is not in the crowd, that it is not in the attention I can attract, but in God, and in God alone. And this thing I hope I can say from ray heart: if to be made as the mire of the streets again, if to be the laughing-stock of fools and the song of the drunkard once more will make me more serviceable to my Master, and more useful to his cause, I will prefer it to all this multitude, or to all the applause that man could give. Pray for me, dear friends, pray for me, that God would still make me the means of the salvation of souls;
for I fear he may say, “I will not help that man, lest the world should say he has done it,” for “salvation is of the Lord,” and so it must be, even to the world’s end. III. And now what is, what should be, the influence
OF Tins DOCTRINE UPON MEN?
Why, first, with sinners, this doctrine is a great hatte’n:ig ram against their pride. I will give you a figure The sinner in Ills natural estate reminds me of a man who has a strong and v/ell-nigh impenetrable castle into which he has fled There is the outer moat; there is a second moat; there are the high walls; and then afterward there is the dungeon and keep, into which the sinner will retire. Now, the first moat that goes round the sinner’s trusting place is his good works. “Ah!” he says, “I am as good as my neighbor; twenty shillings in tl)e pound down, ready money, I have always paid; 1 am no sinner; ‘I tithe mint and cummin;’ a good respectable gentleman I am indeed.” Well, when God comes to work with him, to save him, ‘.le sends his army across the tii-st moat; and as they go througl it, the- cry, “Salvation is of the Lord;” and the moat is dried up, for if it be of the Lord, how can ii; be of good works? But when that is done, he has a second intren jhinent — ceremonies. “Well,” he says, “I will not trust n my good works, but I have been baptized, I have been confirmed; do not I take the sacrament? That shall be my trust.” “Over the moat! Over the moat!” And the soldiers go over again, shouting, “Salvation is of the Lord.” The second moat is dried up; it is all over with that. Now they come to the next strong wall; the sinner, looking over it, says, “I can repent, I can believe, whenever I like; I will save myself by repenting and believing.” Up come the soldiers of God, his great army of conviction, and they batter this wall to the ground, crying, “‘Salvation is of the Lord.’ Your faith and youi- repentance must all be given you, or else you will neither believe nor repent of sin.” And now the castle is taken; the man’s hopes are all cut off’; he feels that it is not of self; the castle of self is overcome, and the great banner upon which IS written “Salvation is of the Lord” is displayed upon the battlements. But is the battle over? O no; the sinner has retired to the keep, in the t’enter of the castle; and now hj? changes his tactics. “I can not save myself,” says he, “therefore I will despair; there is no salvation for me.” Now this second castle is as hard to take as the first, for the sinner sits down and says, “I can’t be saved, I must perish.” But God commands the soldiers to take this castle too, shouting, “Salvation is of the Lord;” though it is not of man, it is of God; “he is able to save, even to the uttermost,” though you can net save yourself. This sword, you see, cuts two ways; it cuts pride down, and then it cleaves the skull of despair. If any man say he can save himself, it halveth his pride at once; and •J another man say he can not be saved, it dasheth his despair CO the earth; for it aflirms that he can be saved, seeing, “Sali Tition is of the Lord.” That is the effect this doctrine has uuon the sinnei, may it have that effect on you!
But what influence has it upon the saint? Why, .t is the keystone of all divinity. I vnll defy you to be heterodox if you believe this truth. You must be sound m the faith if you have learned to spell this sentence — “Salvation is of the Lord;” and if you feel it in your soul you vnll not he proud; you can not be; you will cast every thing at his feet, confessing that you have done nothing, save what ho has helped you to do and therefore the glory must be where the salvation is. If you believe this you will not he distrustful. You will say, “My salvation does not depend on my faith, but on the Lord; my keeping does not depend on myself, but on God who keepeth me; my being brought to heaven rests not now in my own hands, but in the hands of God;” you will, when doubts and fears prevail, fold your arms, look upward and say,
“And now my eye of faith is dim,
I trust in Jesus, sink or swim.”
If you can keep this in your mind you may alioays he joyful. lib can have no cause for trouble who knows and feels that his salvation is of God. Come on, legions of hell; come on, demons of the pit!
“He that has helped me bears me through,
And make a me more than conqueror too.”
Salvation resteth not on this poor arm, else should I despair, but on the arm of yon Omnipotent — that arm on which the pillars of the heavens do lean. “Whom should I fear? The Lord is my strength and my life; of whom shall I be afraid?’^ And this, may by grace, nerve you to work for God. If you had to save your neighbors you might sit down and do nothmg; but since “salvation is of the Lord,” go on and prosper. Go and preach the gospel; go and tell the gospel everywhere. Tell it in your house, tell it in the street tell it in every land xnd every nation; for it is not of yourself, it is “of the Lord.” Why do not our friends go to Ireland to preach the gospel? Ireland is a disgrace to the Protestant church. Why do not they go and preach there? A year or so ago a nrmber of our brave ministers went over there to preach; they Jid right brav<*ly ) they went there, and they came back again, and thai
SAl.VATJON OF TlIK LOKD. 207
18 about the sum total of the glorious expedition against Popery. But why come y)ack again? Because they were stoned, ^ood easy men! Do they not think that the gospel ever will spread without a few stones? But they would have been killed! Brave martyrs they! Let them be enrolled in the ]-ed chronicle. Did the martyrs of old, did the apostles shrink from going to any country because they would have been killed? No, they were ready to die: and if half a dozen ministers had been killed in Ireland, it would have been the fmest thing in the world for liberty in future; for after that the people dare not have touched us; the strong arm of the law would have put them down; we might have gone through every village of Ireland afterwards, and been at peace; the constabulary would soon have put nn end to such infamous murder; it would have awakened the Protestantism of England to claim the liberty which is our right there as we give it elsewhere. We shall never see any great change till we have some men in our ranks who are willing to be martyrs. That deep ditch can never be crossed till the bodies of a few of us shall fill it up; and after that it will be easy woik to pi-each the gospel there. Our brethi-cn should go there once more. They can leave their white cravats at home, and the white feather too, and go forth with a brave heart and a bold spirit; and if the people mock and scoff, let them mock and scoif on. George Whitefield said, when he preached on Kennington Common, where they threw dead cats and rotten eggs at him, “This is only the manure of Methodism, the best thing in the world to make it grow; throw away as fast as you please.” And when a stone cut him on the forehead, he seemed to preach the better for a little blood-letting. O! for such a man to dare the mob, and then the mob would not*need to be dared. Let us go there, recollecting that “salvation is of the Lord,” and let us in every place and at every time preach God’s Word, believing that God’s Word is more than a match for nan’s sin, and God will yet be master over all the earth.
My voice fails me again, and my thoughts too, I was weary Ihis morning, when I came into this pulpit, and I am weary now Sometimes I am joyous and glad, and feel in the pulpi* us if I could preach foi- ever; at othei” times I feel glad to (lose; but yci with such a text I would ‘that I ccald have wuished up with all the might that mortal lip could summon. O! to let men know this, that their salvation is of God: ijwearer, swear not against him in whose hand thy breath is! Despiser, desjnse not him who can save you oi’ destroy you. And thou hypocrite, seek not to deceive him from whom sal- ‘vation comes, and who therefore knows right well whether thy salvation come from him.
IV. And now in concluding, let me just tell you what is the OBVERSE OF THIS TRUTH. Salvation is of God: then damnation is of ma?i. If any of you are damned, you will have no one to blame but yourselves; if any of you perish, the blame will not lie at God’s door; if you are lost and cast away, you will have to bear all the blame and all the tortures of conscience yourself; you will lie for ever in perdition, and reflect, “I have destroyed myself; I have made a suicide of my soul; I have been ray own destroyer; I can lay no blame to God,” Remember, if saved, you must be saved by God alone, though if lost you have lost yourselves. “Turn ye, turn ye why will ye die, O house of Israel.” With my last filterinf sentence I bid you stop and think. Ah! my hearers, nly hearers! it is an awful tiling to preach to such a mass as this. But the other Sunday, as I came down stairs, I was struck with a memorable sentence, uttered by one who stood theie. He said, “There are 9000 people this morning without excuse in the day of judgment.” I should like to preach so that this always might be said; and if I can not, O may God have mercy on me, for his name’s sake! But now remember! Ye have souls; those souls will be damned, or saved. Which will it be? Damned they must be for ever, unless God shall save you; unless’ Christ shall have mercy upon you, there is no hope for you. Down on your knees! Cry to God for mercy. Now lift up your heart in prayer to God. May now be the very time when you shall be saved. Or ever the next drop of blood shall run through your veins, may you find oeace! Remember, that peace is to be had now. If you feel cow your need of it, it is to be had now. And how? For the mere asking for it. *■’ Ask, ar.d it shall be given you; seekj &2id yc akali find.”
SALVAXrON OF THE LORD. 20&
‘B at if your ears refuse
Tho language of his grace,
Your hearts grow hard, Uke stubborn Jews,
That unbelieving race,
The TiOrd with vengeance drest,
Shall lift his hand and swear,
You that despised my promised rest
Shall have no portion there.”
0 1 that ye may not be despisers, lest ye “wonder and perish I” May ye now fly to Christ, and be accepted in the h& loved. It is my last best piayer. May the Lord heaa it Ameu.