but it cannot bring you to Christ. Go as you are. At a hospital, the best recommendation is sickness. He who is a little sick needs some help to get him there, but let me be run over in the street, and nearly dead, and I need nothing to recommend me to the hospital — the door flies open, and I am immediately brought in. So a condition of your lost and ruined state is the only recommendation you need in going to Christ. Just now a lot of people want to bestow their charity, and they do not know how to find the lowest class of the poor; they want to lay hold of those whose beds are made of straw; they desire to gain knowledge of those low lodging places of the very poor, which are worse than the places that beasts inhabit. These are the men they want to find; and the greater the poverty the more recommendation. So in your case. Your woes plead with God. Your wants, your misery, your helplessness, your ill deserts, these are the orators that move the heart of God towards you, but nothing else. Come just as you are, with nothing in your hand, to Jesus Christ, who is Lord over the land of mercy, and will not send you away empty.
16. III. Thus I have discussed the good news as well as the pitiful plight. I come now to the third part, which is GOOD ADVICE. Jacob asks, “Why do you look at one another?” And he said, “Behold, I have heard that there is grain in Egypt: go down there, and buy for us from there; that we may live, and not die.” This is very practical advice. I wish people would act the same with religion as they do in temporal affairs. Jacob’s sons did not say, “Well, that is very good news; I believe it,” and then sit still and die. No, they went immediately to the place where the good news told them that they could get grain. So should it be in matters of religion. We should not be content merely to hear the tidings, but we should never be satisfied until by divine grace we have availed ourselves of them, and have found mercy in Christ. Some ministers do in fact tell poor awakened sinners to be inactive; they say to them something like this — “You must wait, you must wait until Christ comes to you.” They will even dissuade the woman who had an issue of blood, from pushing through the crowd to lay hold upon the hem of the Redeemer’s garment. They would bid the man who is crying aloud by the wayside to hold his tongue; to sit still quietly until Christ should turn and look upon him. They cannot endure that Christ Jesus should invite men to his feast, much less that the servants of the Lord should endeavour to compel them to come in. They excuse the sinner and even dare to teach that the rejection of Christ by the sinner, is no sin at all. Now, as in the sight of God, I do fear such men are guilty of the blood of souls. I would not stand in the position of a man who talks like that for all the stars twice reckoned up in gold. I cannot understand that; I cannot understand that when my Master said, “Do not labour for the food which perishes, but for that food which endures to everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give to you: because God the Father has set his seal on him,” that I am to tell a sinner to sit still. When the angel said, “Escape for your life; do not look behind you; do not stay at all in the plain; but flee to the mountain, lest you be consumed,” am I to go to Sodom, and say to Lot, “Stay here until the Lord brings you out?” Why, we know, for a certainty, that salvation is the Lord’s work, and the Lord’s work alone; but we equally know for a certainty, that when the Lord works, he sets us to work. When he works in our soul, the Lord does not believe; he has nothing to believe, he makes us believe. When the Lord works repentance, he does not repent: what has he to repent of? He makes us repent. The Lord brought Lot out of Sodom, but did not Lot use his own two legs to run to the mountain? And so it must be with us. Christ does all, but he makes us the instruments. He tells us to stretch out our own withered hand, and yet we do not stretch out that withered hand by ourselves. He tells us to do it, and we do it through his strength. Tell a sinner to sit still! What does hell desire more than that? Tell a sinner to wait; would not Satan approve of such a ministry? And does he not approve of it? Ah, my brethren, he who loves his Master, he who loves the gospel, he who loves men’s souls cannot preach such untruthful and unchristian doctrine. He feels that the humanity within him, is much more the grace within him, revolts against a thing so barbarous and so inhuman as that. No, when we preach to the sinner, we must say to him, “You know your need, you feel that you cannot be saved except through mercy in Christ. Look to him, believe on him, seek him, and you shall find him.”
17. But I have heard it said, that if a sinner seeks Christ without Christ seeking him he will perish. Now what an absurd thing for anyone to say. Because, did a sinner, or could a sinner ever seek Christ without Christ first seeking him? I never like to suppose an impossibility, and then draw an inference from it. “Suppose,” said one, I know of — “a sinner should come to Christ without Christ coming to him, he would be lost.” Well, that is very clear, only it is supposing a thing that cannot happen; and what is the good of that? Sometimes people have asked me this question — “Suppose a child of God should live in sin, and die in sin, would he be saved?” The thing is impossible. If you suppose yourself into a difficulty, you must suppose yourself out of it. It is like the old supposition, “Suppose the moon were cream cheese, what would become of us on a dark night?” So, suppose a sinner should come to Christ without Christ coming to him, what would be the result? It is supposing an impossibility, and then drawing an absurdity from it. Christ said, “No man can come to me, except the Father who has sent me draws him.” If a sinner comes, he is drawn, or he would not have come. It is mine, therefore, to exhort the sinner to come to Christ; it is the Holy Spirit’s work to enforce the exhortation, and draw the sinner to Christ.
18. Lastly, let me ask this question, “Why do you look at one another?” Why do you sit still? Flee to Christ, and find mercy. Oh, one says, “I cannot get what I expect to have.” But what do you expect? I believe some of our hearers expect to feel an electric shock, or something of that kind, before they are saved. The gospel says simply, “Believe.” That they will not understand. They think there is to be something so mysterious about it. They cannot make out what it is; but they are going to wait for it and then believe. Well, you will wait, until doomsday; for if you do not believe this simple gospel, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ,” God will not work signs and wonders to please your foolish desires. Your position is this — you are a sinner, lost, ruined; you cannot help yourself. Scripture says, “Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners.” Your immediate business, your instantaneous duty is to cast yourself on that simple promise, and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, that since he came into the world to save sinners, he has therefore come to save you. This you have to do, that simple command — “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall he saved.” Now take the sons of Jacob as your example. No sooner had their father told them what they had to do than the first thing they did was, they went and fetched their empty sacks. Now do the same. “What is the good of them?” you say; “there is no grain in them.” No I know there is not, still you must take your empty sacks and have them filled. Bring out your sins; bring out all the aggravation of your sins; cast them all at the feet of Christ, and make your confession. There is no salvation in confession, but still you cannot have salvation without it. You must make a full and free confession of your sins. “What, tell them to you, sir?” I am extremely obliged to you. I would not hear your sins on any account. No sum of money would be sufficient compensation for the impurity that must accrue to any man who shall hear another’s sins. I would not tell you mine; much less hear your’s. No, make your confessions to God. Go to your closet; shut your door; then pull out your empty sacks — that is, make a full confession of your sins; tell the Lord that you are a wretch undone without his sovereign grace. When you have done that, you say, what next? Then cast away all hope you ever had or have, put away all trust in your good works and everything else; and what next? Cast yourself simply on this great truth, that Jesus Christ came to save sinners, and you shall rise from your knees a happier man. Or if that is not the case, try it again, and again, and again, and it shall not fail you. Prayer and faith were never lost. He who confessed his sins and sought the Saviour never sought in vain. When I was first convicted of sin, yet a lad, I went to God and I cried for mercy with all my might, but I did not find it. I do not think I knew what the gospel was. For three years I persevered in that; and many a day, in every room of the house in which I lived, as each room became unoccupied, upon an occasion, I have spent hours in prayer, the tears rolling down my cheeks, and straining myself in an agony of desire to find Christ and find salvation. But it never came. It was not until I heard that simple doctrine, “Look to me and be saved.”
