Royal Gardens
IN Joseph’s garden, in the new tomb, the Beloved of our souls slept for awhile, and thence arose to His glory-life. Detained of death He could not be, for He was no longer a lawful Captive; He had finished His work and earned His reward, and therefore the imprisoning stone was rolled away. He is not here, for He is risen; the seal is broken, the watchmen are dispersed, the stone is removed, the Captive is free. What comfort is here, for, as Jesus rose, so all His slumbering saints shall likewise leave the tomb. His resurrection is the resurrection of all the saints. Wait but awhile, and the tomb shall be no longer the treasury of death. So surely as the Lord came forth from the sepulchre to glory and immortality, all His saints are justified and clean. None can accuse us, now that the Lord has risen indeed no more to die. His one offering hath perfected for ever all the chosen ones, and His glorious uprising is the guarantee of their acceptance. Faith delights in the garden where Magdalene found her unknown, yet well-known, Lord, and where angels kept watch and ward over the couch which the immortal Sufferer had relinquished. Henceforth it is to us a King’s garden, abounding with pleasant fruits and fragrant flowers. And now I desire to take you to a King’s garden. You will not have far to go. Put your hand into your bosom and your finger will be on the latch of its door. It is the garden of the human heart.
The heart is a little garden, little apparently, but yet so extensive that it is all but infinite, for who can tell the limit of the heart of man, or how far-darting the imaginations and the affections of the soul of man may be? Now, this little-great thing, the human heart, is meant to be a garden for God. Did I say it was a garden? It should be so, but alas! by nature it scarcely deserves the name, for I perceive it to be all overgrown with weeds; thistle and briar, deadly nightshade, and nettles, and I know not what besides, spring up everywhere. I see trees, but they drop with poison, like the deadly upas, whose drip is death. There are no luscious fruits, but instead thereof grapes of Gomorrha and apples of Sodom; this loathsome den of festering evils is what should have been God’s garden, but Jo! it is a tangled wilderness of all manner of noisome things; thorns, also, and thistles doth it bring forth.
What must be done to this neglected garden? What heavenly horticulture can be used upon it to reclaim it from its desert state? God, the great Husbandman, must come and turn it over after His own fashion. The rough plough of conviction must be dragged through it. The spade of trouble must break up the surface and smash in pieces the clods, and kill the weeds, and fire must burn up the rubbish. Has that ever been done in the garden of your heart? Have you ever had your soul ploughed and cross-: ploughed and harrowed with sorrow till you were driven well-nigh to despair? Have you seen your sweet sins killed, so that you could not take pleasure in them any longer, but desired to be clean rid of them? That must be done if the garden is to be reclaimed and made worthy of the Divine Owner. Then when the soil is broken up, and the clods are turned, there must be seed-sowing, and the planting of slips from the tree of life, seeds from the nurseries of heaven, seeds that shall turn to flowers which shall be full of sweet perfume, acceptable to Christ. The seeds of faith, and love, and hope, and patience, and perseverance, and zeal, must be carefully cast into prepared soil by the Holy Spirit’s hand, and fostered by the same kindly care. Ere the heart can be called a garden fit for the King of kings, these must bud, and blossom, and yield their fruits. When I regard attentively that garden which was so lately covered over with weeds, but which is now sown and planted, I perceive that the plants grow not well unless the soil be drained. There must be always drained out of us much superfluity of naughtiness and excess of carnal confidence, or our heart will be a cold swamp, a worthless, plant-killing bog. Affliction drains us. We do not like to have our money or our friends taken from us, and yet the love of these might ruin us for all fruit-bearing if God did not remove them. Besides the draining, there must also be constant hoeing, and raking, and digging. After a garden is made, the flower-beds are never left long alone; the gardener must have his eye upon them, or they run to riot. If they were left to themselves, they would soon breed weeds again and return to the old confusion, but the hoe must be constantly kept going, if the garden is to be clean. So with the garden of the ‘heart; cleansing and pruning must be done every day,
.and God must do it through ourselves, and we must do it by constant self-examination and repentance, striving in the power of the Holy Spirit to keep ourselves free from the sins which do so easily beset us.
The heart is a King’s garden. Jesus bought it with His precious blood, and He has now by His grace come into it and claimed it to be His own. If your heart be His, oh, keep it for your Beloved! Do not give the keys to anyone else. The love of husband, wife, and child, each of these is to have its proper place, but the heart’s core is the King’s garden. Mark you, it is not the husband’s garden, nor the wife’s garden, nor the child’s garden; the dearest idols we have known must not be set up there; it is the King’s garden. I hope you will say to-night, before you go to rest, “O King, come into my garden, and eat my pleasant fruit! Awake, O heavenly wind, and blow upon the garden of my soul, and let all the plants of my new nature give forth their sweetness, that my Beloved may be charmed with my company, and that I may be filled with His sweet love.”
The church of God is a garden. Many thoughts are gathered in that one metaphor like bees in a hive. It is called a garden in Solomon’s Song, so I know that we are not wrong in using the illustration. But what does a garden mean?
A garden is not the open waste, the heath, or the common; it is not a wilderness; it is walled around; it is hedged in. Ah! Christian, when you join the church, remember you, too, become by profession hedged in for King Jesus. I earnestly desire to see the wall of separation between the church and the world made broader and stronger.
The King’s garden is a place of order. You do not, when you go into your garden, find the flowers all put in anyhow, but the wise gardener arranges them according to their tints and hues, so that in the midst of summer the garden shall look like a rainbow that has been broken to pieces and let down upon the earth, delightful to gaze upon. All the walks are regular, the beds are in proportion, and the plants well arranged, just as they should be. Such should the Christian church be — pastor, deacons, elders, members, all in their proper places. We are not a load of bricks, but a house. The church is not a mere heap, but it is to be a palace built for God, a temple in which He manifests Himself. Let us all try to maintain order in the household of Christ, and above all things hate discord and confusion. Let us be men who know how to keep rank, maintaining a decent order and regularity in all things. We seek not the order which consists in all sleeping in their places, like corpses in the catacombs, but we desire the order which finds all working in their places for the common cause of the Lord Jesus. May we never become a disorderly, disunited, irregular church. May there be order in the garden, preserved by the power of love and grace.
A garden is a place of beauty. Such should the Christian church be. You gather together the fairest flowers from all lands, and put them in your garden, and if you see no beauties in the streets, you expect to see them in the florist’s beds. So, if there be no holiness, no love, no zeal, no prayerfulness outside in the world, yet we should see these things in the church, We are not to take the world to be our guide, but we are to excel it. We must do more than others. The Lord Jesus Christ told His disciples that ¢hecr righteousness must exceed that of even the Scribes and Pharisees, or they could not enter the kingdom; and the genuine Christian must seek to be more excellent in his life than the best moralist, because Christ’s garden ought to have the best flowers in all the world. Even the best is poor compared with Christ’s deservings; let us not put Him off with withered and dying plants. The rarest, richest, choicest lilies and roses ought to bloom in the place which Jesus calls His own.
The King’s garden is a place of growth, too. I do not suppose the florist would think that soil fit to be a garden in which his plants would not grow. It would be a dead loss to him if the slips remained slips, and if the buds never turned to flowers. So in the church of God. We are not introduced into fellowship to be always the same, always little children and babes in grace. We should grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. The prayer-meeting should be a school of practical education for our beloved young members, a place for the young nestlings to try their callow wings. If they try to pray, at first they may almost break down, perhaps, but if they will not give way to a foolish timidity, they will soon get over it, and find themselves useful, not merely in public prayer, but in a thousand works of usefulness besides. Growth should be rapid where Jesus is the Husbandman, and the Holy Spirit. the dew from above.
Again, a garden is a place of retirement. When a man is in his garden, he does not expect to see all his customers walking down between the beds to do business with him. “No,” saith he, “Iam walking in the garden, and I expect to be alone.” So the Lord. Jesus Christ would have us reserve the church to be a place in which He can manifest Himself to us, as He doth not unto the world. Oh! I wish that Christians were more retired, that they kept their hearts more shut up for Christ! Iam afraid we often worry and trouble ourselves, like Martha, with much serving, so that we have not the room for Christ that Mary had, and do not sit at His feet as we ought to do. The Lord grant us grace to keep our hearts as closed gardens for Christ to walk in!
The church is a garden, but it is the King’s garden. The church is not mine, nor yours, but the King’s. It is the King’s garden, because he chose it for Himself.
“We are a garden walled around,
Chosen and made peculiar ground;
A little spot enclosed by grace
Out of the world’s wild wilderness.”
We are the King’s because He bought us. Naboth said he would not give up his vineyard, because he inherited it. So doth Christ inherit us by an indefeasible title. We are His heritage, and He has so dearly bought us with His Own blood that He will never give us up, blessed be His name! We are His, because He has conquered us. He won us in fair fight, and now we acknowledge the validity of His title-deeds, and confess, every one of us, as the members of His church, that we are His, and that He is ours.
What a nobility this gives to Christ’s church! I
have sometimes heard people talk disparagingly of church meetings; there may be but few persons present, some of those may be young members, some may be very old, yet I have been much grieved when I have heard people despise such a church meeting, for Christ would not despise it. Let such beware. Whenever the church meets, either as a whole or representatively, there is a solemn dignity cast about that assembly which is not to be found in a parliament of kings and princes. You cannot keep a garden in proper order without work. We want more labourers ‘in the church, especially of one sort. We want some who will be planters.
In every church there ought to be some Zo watch over those who are planted. When we receive members we ought to look after them, and as one person cannot do it thoroughly, as even the elders and deacons are hardly numerous enough for so great a work, it should be the aim and duty of all the experienced Christians in the church to fondly tend the younger ones. I believe that many of you do this, and I am very thankful to zealous friends who are not in office in the church, but who do a great deal in visiting the sick and watching over the younger members. Only I want all of you to do it. Oh! if everybody were duly anxious about keeping this garden in order, how beautifully trimmed all the borders would be, and how few weeds should we find springing up in the beds.
There should be a little band in every church ¢o collect the straggling. Our vines will grow out of order if they can, but we must deal wisely with them, and fasten them up in their places. We must be on the alert where we see backsliding begin. How much can be done by old Christians in trying to stop backsliding amongst the young! I believe that half the. cases that have gone badly might have been stopped by a little judicious forethought, if believers had taken them in time.
Sometimes we need ¢o burn up the rubbish and sweep up the leaves. In the best church there will always be some falling leaves. Somebody gets out at the elbow with another brother. We are not any of us perfect.
Now, I have said that the church wants labourers, but it wants something else. /¢ wants new plants. Our King finds plants for His garden outside the wall. He takes the wild olive branches, and grafts them into the good olive, and then the sap changes the nature. A new thing that? It is not thus in our gardens at home, but wonders are wrought in the garden of the King. He transplants weeds from the dunghill, and makes them to grow as lilies in the midst of His fair garden. Will you be such a plant? May the Master’s love constrain you to desire to be such a one, and, if you desire it, you shall have it.
But all the labourers and all the new plants would not be what the church requires if she had not sorhething else, for every garden wants vazm, and every garden needs sunshzne.
Do pray in the family, do pray in the closet for us. Do not let us become poor in prayer. It is a bad thing to become poor in money, because we need it for a thousand causes, and cannot get on without it. But we can do without money better than we can do without prayer. The very least thing that a church member can do is to plead with God that the blessing may descend. It is the King’s garden, and will you not pray for it? It is the King’s own garden, wherein He loves to walk, and which He has purchased with His blood; shall not your prayers go up that His church may flourish, and that His kingdom may come?
This King’s garden, what does it produce? Sometimes in our garden we have a tree which is so loaded with fruit that we have to put props under it to keep the branches from trembling. I am afraid that this is not the picture of most of us, You say to the gardener sometimes, “Will there be any fruit on that tree this season? It is time that it should show.” He looks, and looks, and looks again, and at last the good man says, “I think I can see one little one up at the top, sir, but I do not know whether it will come to much.” That, I am afraid, is the photograph of many professors. There is fruit, or else they would not be saved ones, but it is “a little one.” “Herein is My Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be My disciples.”