"I Came to See How God Is Having His Name in Me"

5 I was reading Thomas Shepard to myself one night last week I came again and again on this striking exclamation, ‘O! the reason is God will have His Name.’ That great experimental divine is dwelling with deep spiritual insight on some of God’s more mysterious ways with some men. As for instance his so intricate and past-finding-out providences with some men, His so extraordinary and so unaccountable goodness and grace to some men, His so marvellous loving-kindness and tender-mercy to some men, His so immeasurable and amazing long-suffering with some men, and soon. And then that great experimental preacher exclaims, ‘OQ! the reason is that God will have His Name.’

Well then to begin with, what is His Name? My brethren, it is our best happiness on earth that we do not need to ask that question. For there is nothing that we know so well as just the Name of the Lord, The Name of the Lord is our best and our most cherished knowledge. It is our present and our everlasting salvation. ‘The Name of the Lord is the sure ground of all our hope for time and eternity. For it is this: ‘Tue Lord: tHe Lord God; merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth: forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin.’

Now if that is the Divinely-declared Name of THE Lord what exactly is it for Him to ‘have His Name’ according to that striking expression of His servant? It is this. It is to have His Name proclaimed and published and manifested to all men and to all time as He Himself proclaimed and manifested His Name to Moses on the Mount. And it is to have His Name listened to and understood and received and appropriated and rested on and feared and loved and adored and glorified — and all that by all believing men. Now not only the thirty-fourth of Exodus but the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation is full of the Name of the Lord. The Name of the Lord: and then all the ways He has taken in order to ‘have His Name’: that is what ‘the Scriptures principally teach.’ And that is what our own lives principally teach as soon and as often as we begin to read our own lives in the light of His Name.

Take to begin with some of God’s more special and more personal providences towards some men. For there are some men who by reason of God’s special and peculiar providences toward them give Him back His Name every day. His providences toward them are such that they are compelled to take refuge in His Name actually every hour of every day. Their very first thought every new morning has to be the Name of the Lord. The Name of the Lord repeated to themselves as they rise off their bed is more to them than their morning clothing and their morning meal. But for their recollection of the Name of the Lord they could not face the coming day, and far less could they face the recollection and the review of the departed day. And all the day it is the same experience with them. The returning day would simply be impossible to them, were it not for the Name of the Lord. They make haste like Moses and bow their head and worship a hundred times every day. Dear old Jacob Behmen told a much-tempted disciple of his to throw himself every half-hour into the abyss of the Divine Name, and he would get strength there that would enable him to live out of reach of all the sins and all the miseries and all the crosses and all the tribulations of which his life was full. And there are men among ourselves exactly like the Teutonic philosopher and his much-tried disciple. Sudden providences, unforeseen providences, unexpected and unprepared-for providences, rush in every hour of every day upon some men. A word suddenly falls on their ears, an image suddenly falls on their eyes, a thought suddenly arises in their minds, a feeling suddenly awakens in their hearts, and that G moment God has His Name again in those men. They flee every moment they live to the Name of the Lord as a bird flees to its mountain. To those men their life is a daily miracle. It is a miracle to them how their life is beset before and behind and is surrounded unceasingly with special providences and secret visitations that all work together to give God His Name! They have never heard nor read anywhere such a work of divine wonder as their own life is. ‘Till they come to see that nothing less than the whole Name of the Lord is the real meaning and the true end of their whole life in this world. Any other explanation of their life falls far short of the facts. ‘Till they can accept no other theory of their life but that the Lord is having His whole Name adorned in them as He is having it adorned in no other man they know or have ever heard of. Says Shepard on this subject: ‘ You shall find this if the Lord for His Name sake loves thee, there is not any carriage or passage of His providence toward thee but He gets Himself His name by means of it. For if this be God’s end, every passage of His providence is but a means to this end.’

But there is one thing in your life that is far more mysterious and far more staggering and far more cross-bearing to some of you than your most mysterious and perplexing and cross-bearing providences; and that is your so prolonged and so postponed sanctification; your unattained and seemingly unattainable holiness of heart and life. And you are not alone in that, though you often think you are. Their slow, standstill, backgoing sanctification has been the most staggering of all the staggering experiences of God’s best saints from the beginning of His saints till now, just as it has been the most perplexing problem that He has set His deepest preachers, such as Shepard, to deal with before their fit people; this profound problem — Why so much sinfulness is still left to pollute and to fester and to spread death and hell in the heart and in the mind and in the life of the truly regenerate man? Well, God alone fully knows His own mind and His whole mind in all these matters. But I think I have somewhat of His mind when I say to you that all this is permitted, and indeed is ordained, in order that He may have His whole Name in you: His whole glorious and everlasting Name. God did not sanctify you on the same day on which He justified you. And that was so because He got His Name sufficiently, for one day, on that great day when He justified such an ungodly man as you are. Sufficient for one day was your first forgiveness. I will put it to yourself to say — If you had been both called and justified and adopted and sanctified wholly and all at once you would never have known, you would never have believed, what an inveterate and hopeless and unparalleled sinner you are, nor what a glorious Saviour you have got in the Son of God. No; it is not your first pardon that gives God His great Name in you. It is His every day and every hour pardon of your sins; sins that are past all name and past all belief. And that going on between God and you for a long lifetime of seventy or eighty years. And thus it is that God is getting and is going to get His great Name in you, such a Name as He has not got in Moses or in David or in Paul, great as His Name has been in them. And this goes on till under the agony of His Name in you the cry goes up from your ever-broken heart, the cry of the Psalmist and the Apostle: ‘For Thy sake, O God, we are killed all the day long: we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.’ And till you sing with John Newton and say:

I asked the Lord that I might grow
In faith, and love, and every grace;

Might more of His salvation know,
And seek more earnestly His face.

Lord, why is this? I trembling cried,
Wilt Thou pursue a worm to death?
‘Tis in this way,’ the Lord replied,
‘I answer prayer for grace and faith.

‘ These inward trials I employ,
From self and pride to set thee free;
And break thy schemes of earthly joy,
That thou mayest seek thy all in Me.’

In other words it was all in order that God might have His whole Name in the author of the Olney Hymns, and the Cardiphonia, and the Authentic Narrative, and in you and in me.

But more than all that, and far more wonderful than all that — out of the greatest sins and trespasses of His own redeemed and pardoned people God gets by far His greatest Name. ‘I am not afraid, says the greatest theologian of the English Church: ‘I am not afraid to affirm it boldly, with St. Augustine, that men puffed up through a proud opinion of themselves receive a great benefit at the hands of God when they are permitted and that grievously to transgress.... Ask the very soul of Peter, and it shall undoubtedly make you this answer: “‘ My eager protestations, made in the glory of my ghostly strength, I am ashamed of: but those crystal tears, wherewith my sin and weakness were bewailed, have procured my endless joy: my strength was my ruin, but my fall has been my stay.”’ And our author, a divine of a very different school as we say, agrees with Hooker and almost surpasses him when he says: ‘ Hence you shall find that those very sins that so dishonour His Name, He will even by them get Himself a glorious Name: for He will be so far from casting thee out of His love because of them that He will do thee good by means of them. Thy sins, that might well have been thy damnation, He will make use of them to humble thee, and to empty thee, for thy salvation. Doth not thy weakness strengthen thee, like Paul? Doth not thy darkness make thee cry the more for light, like David? Do not thy falls into sin make thee to be weary of sin, and to be watchful against it, and full of longing to be for ever free of it? And hence holy Mr. Fox has said that for his part he thanked God for his sins far more than for his good works. O! the reason is that God will have His whole Name.’ Paul was not deterred from telling these deep truths in his Epistle. No not even by the fear that some of his Roman readers would make a bad use of them; and neither has judicious Hooker been deterred, nor experimental Shepard, nor holy Mr. Fox as you see and hear.

Now to sum all that up for ourselves this communion morning: God is such and His Name is such that a multitude which no man can number will all be needed — to let Him have His whole Name from among them. Every one of that great multitude will in the end make his own personal and peculiar contribution to the glory of God’s Name. But it is your peculiar contribution that He is seeking here and now on this communion day. You say — some of you — that there is not the like of you, you feel sure, in all that redeemed and rejoicing multitude now before the throne. And God agrees with you in that. He sees no one else at all like you among all His elect. And thus it is that He has His eye and His heart so specially set upon you this communion morning. He sees the prospect of His Name in you as in no one else in all this house. When he comes in immediately to see the guests His eye will fall on you first. For there are things in the text that no one at the Table this morning aright understands but yourself. There are things in His great Name that no one now present will be able to draw out and adorn: no one but you. The very things in your case that make your case so extraordinary and so unparalleled are the sure and certain marks of your special election to know and to show forth His Covenant Name. ‘In one sense,’ says John Newton in his golden Cardiphonia: ‘In one sense we are excellently well suited to answer His eternal purpose. If we were not vile and worthless beyond all expression, the exceeding riches of His grace would not have been so gloriously displayed in us. His glory shines far more in redeeming one sinner like you and me, than in preserving and upholding a thousand angels like Gabriel and Michael themselves.’ Well then, if all that is so, come away and make your special and peculiar contribution to God’s great Name. Come away and contribute your abounding sinfulness, and God will contribute His still more abounding grace and mercy. And God and you working together in that way He will have His whole and full Name in you, and that as in no one else at the Table to-day, no, nor at the Table above.