your estates have gone — when your hopes are lost, and when your goods are destroyed, then the people of God shall begin to know their riches; then they shall shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father.
Not as the world gives do I give to you.
15. III. Now this brings me to one PRACTICAL REFLECTION, or rather EXHORTATION TO GOD’S PEOPLE. If this is true, my hearer, I beseech you do not serve the world; serve no one except Christ, for he is the best Master; serve him with all your might, because he so richly has given and so richly will give. I would not serve the world for the best empire in it. A king once said he wished all his subjects could be kings for a day, for “they would soon discover,” he said, “that the art of governing is not so easy as they think, and that a crown is not so soft a thing to wear as they imagine.” No, the world may abuse us if it likes; if it abuse us we are not very sad about it, because the world is not our master, and as long as our own Master is satisfied we do not care about a stranger. If anyone should walk into your garden, and say to your gardener, “I do not like the arrangement of these beds; I do not like those flowers; you are evidently a careless man”; he would say, “Well, my master has been around this morning; he did not say much, but I saw a smile of satisfaction on his face, therefore, what is that to you? it is no business of yours. I am not your servant; I do not serve you.” Now, the world is a bad paymaster to those who obey and serve it. Let every Christian make up his mind that he will have nothing to do with serving the world. If the world scorns and frowns, let him say, “It is no business of yours; you are not my master; I do not serve you. If it amuses you to abuse me go on; it will not harm me.” There is even in the mind of Christians at times too much of a tendency to timeserving. We are all so apt to think that we really must bow to public opinion, to this, that, and the other. Oh! you will never be happy until the Holy Spirit has brought you to this, — that you will fear God, and that you will fear no one else — that you will serve God with an undivided heart. I go further: I would not even serve the church if I must have it for a master. I can serve God, I can serve Christ; for Christ is a blessed Master; but I would not advise any of you to make the church your master. Wherever the church is we are all bound to serve the brethren, to serve the church of Christ as we are bound to assist in a common cause, but do not think that even the dictum of the church is to be your judge. Do not imagine that even its praise is that which you are to seek. You are to seek the praise of Christ. His church may do wrong, his ministers may make mistakes, but Christ himself can never be in error. Serve Christ — this is the practical exhortation from the whole subject. My dear friends, you who love Christ, and have been chosen by him from before the foundation of the world, who have been bought with his blood, have been washed, and pardoned, and forgiven, if Christ gives to you, not as the world gives then I beseech you serve Christ better than worldlings serve the world. Oh, it is astonishing what men have done to serve the world. They have rushed to the cannon’s mouth, and given their life to be food for gunpowder, and they have thought they were well rewarded with a little praise. Men, too, have sweated at the furnace; they have spent their livings, have starved their families, to invent some luxuries for the tables of the rich. Men have undergone unheard of labours, toils that positively appal you to read about, merely to become eminent in their profession, to be first in the rank of artisans among whom they were numbered.
16. When the world has a gulf to fill, it never lacks a Curtius {a} to leap into it, but Christ often sees his cause left and deserted by reason of the coldness of his friends. There is many a battle where the warriors of Christ turn their backs, though armed and carrying bows. I was thinking yesterday, and the thought struck me forcibly, that one thousand eight hundred years ago, or a little more, there were a few men met in an upper room for worship — about four hundred of them. They met, and they prayed, and they preached, and there was a divine fire kindled in their hearts; and in a few years, they had preached the gospel in every language under heaven, and the mass of the world became professedly Christians. Now here is a room, not with four hundred people, but oftentimes filled with thousands, and yet, does the religion of Christ progress as it should do? No. If there were only a few, with a hundredth part of the zeal of Christ’s disciples that there was in olden times, before another year rolls around, there would be missionaries in every town; the gospel would be preached in every village of India, and China, and every other nation accessible to the foot of the missionary. As it is we are an idle generation; a tribe of dwarfs has succeeded a race of giants, and now Christ’s cause creeps where it once ran, and only runs where once it was accustomed to fly as with wings of lightning. Oh, that God would make bare his arm! And if ever he does, the first sign of it will be that the church will begin to serve Christ more zealously. Some will give their blood to die in the preaching of the Word. Others will pour their wealth into coffers of the church, and every living soul, numbered in the family of Christ, will spend itself and be spent for its Master’s honour. “Not as the world gives do I give to you.” Oh Jesus, not as the world’s followers give, do we desire to give to you. They give their lives only once, we wish to “die daily”; they give much of their talent, we wish to give all. Take our heart, and seal it, make it as your own, that we may live to your honour, and die in your arms, and sit upon your throne with you for ever and ever.
{a} M. Curtius: a brave young Roman knight who, in obedience to an oracle, to save his country, leaped armed and on horseback into the chasm which suddenly opened in the Forum of Rome.
Little Sins
No. 248-5:185. A Sermon Delivered On Sunday Morning, April 17, 1859, By C. H. Spurgeon, At The Music Hall, Royal Surrey Gardens.
Is it not a little one? {Genesis 19:20}
1. These words we shall take for a motto, rather than a text in the ordinary acceptance of that term. I shall not this morning attempt to explain the connection. It was the utterance of Lot, when he pleaded for the salvation of Zoar; but I shall take it altogether away from the connection in which it stands, and make use of it in another fashion. The great Father of Lies has multitudes of devices by which he seeks to ruin the souls of men. He uses false weights and false balances in order to deceive them. Sometimes he uses false times, declaring at one time that it is too early to seek the Lord, and at another that it is now too late. And he uses false quantities, for he will declare that great sins are only little, and as for what he confesses to be little sins, afterwards he makes them to be nothing at all — mere peccadilloes, almost worthy of forgiveness in themselves. Many souls, I do not doubt, have been caught in this trap, and being snared by it, have been destroyed. They have ventured into sin where they thought the stream was shallow, and, fatally deceived by its depth, they have been swept away by the strength of the current to that cataract which is the ruin of such vast multitudes of the souls of men.
2. It shall be my business this morning to answer this temptation, and try to put a sword in your hands by which to resist the enemy when he shall come upon you with this cry; — “Is it not a little one?” and tempt you into sin because he leads you to imagine that there is but very little harm in it. “Is it not a little one?”
3. With regard then to this temptation of Satan concerning the littleness of sin, I would make this first answer, the best of men have always been afraid of little sins. The holy martyrs of God have been ready to endure the most terrible torments rather than step so much as one inch aside from the road of truth and righteousness. Witness Daniel: when the king’s decree went forth that no man should worship God for such and such a time, nevertheless he prayed three times a day as before, with his window open towards Jerusalem, not fearing the king’s commandment. Why could he not have retired into an inner room? Why might he not have ceased from vocal prayer, and have kept his petitions in his thought and in his heart? Would he not have been as well accepted as when he kneeled as usual, with the window open, so that all the world might see him? Ah! but Daniel judged that little as the offence might seem, he would rather suffer death at the jaws of the lion, than he would by that little offence provoke the anger of his God, or lead men to blaspheme his holy name, because his servant
