in order to obtain salvation?” I do, most assuredly; that is the doctrine of the text. “But,” one says, “I thought it was all the work of God.” So it is, from first to last. But when God has begun the work in the soul, the constant effect of God’s work in us is to set us working; and where God’s Spirit is really striving with us, we shall begin to strive too. This is just a test by which we may distinguish the men who have received the Spirit of God, from those who have not received him. Those who have received the Spirit in verity and truth are violent men. They have a violent anxiety to be saved, and they violently strive to enter in at the narrow gate. Well they know that seeking to enter in is not enough, for many shall seek to enter in but shall not be able to, and therefore they strive with might and main.
3. I shall this morning, first, direct your attention to these violent men. Look at them. Secondly, we shall show their conduct. What makes them so violent? Are they justified in this impetuous vehemence? We shall next rejoice in the fact, that they are sure to be successful in their violence. And then, I shall endeavour to arouse in your hearts, by the help of God’s Holy Spirit, that holy violence, without which the gates of heaven will be shut in your teeth, and you will never be able to enter the pearly portals of Paradise.
4. I. First then, LET US LOOK AT THESE VIOLENT MEN. Understand that what they are, they have been made by divine grace. They are not so naturally by themselves. But there has been a secret work of grace in them, and then they have become violent men. Look at these violent men, who are violently in earnest to be saved. You will observe them when they come up to the house of God; there is no yawning with them, no listlessness or inattention, no imagination that if they only sit in the place for the hour and a half which is regularly allotted to divine worship, they will have done enough. No; they hear with both their ears, and they look with both their eyes, and all through the service they have an intense desire that they may find Christ. Meet them as they go up to the house of prayer, and ask them why they are going there. They know very well what they are going after. “I am going there to find mercy, and to find peace and rest to my soul; for I am in anguish about sin, and I want to find the Saviour; I am in hopes that being in the way the Lord will meet with me, so I am about to lay myself down by the side of the pool of Bethesda, in the hope that the Holy Spirit will stir the pool and enable me to step in.” You do not find these people like most of modern hearers, critical, or else careless. No; they are wide awake to see whether there is not something to be had which may be a balm to their wearied spirits, and a cordial to their troubled hearts. Note these violent people after they have gone home. They go to their bedrooms and they begin to pray; not that prayer between sleeping and waking that some of you are used to attend to, not that drowsy supplication which never gets beyond the ceiling of your bedroom; but they fall on their knees and with a holy anxiety they begin to cry, “Lord, save or I perish; oh Lord save me; I am ready to perish, Lord; I beseech you, stretch out your hand and rescue my poor soul from that destruction which now haunts my spirit.” And see them after they have prayed, how they turn over the Word of God. They do not read its chapters as if the mere looking at the letters was enough, but they read just as Watts says in his hymn,
Yet save a trembling sinner, Lord,
Whose hope, still hovering round your word
Would light on some sweet promise there,
Some sure support against despair.
And down they are on their knees again. “Oh Lord speak to my soul through your word! Lord help me to lay hold on the promise, enable me to grasp it! Oh, do not let my soul perish for lack of your help and your grace.” And then see these violent men whom God has really made in earnest about being saved. You will not find them leaving their devotions in their closets, or in their house of prayer. Wherever they go there is a solemn earnestness upon them, which the world cannot understand. They are seeking after Jesus, and they will not rest nor can rest until they find him. Their nights are disturbed with dreams, and their days are made sad with their partings after the blessing — without which they cannot live, and without which they dare not die.
5. My hearer, have you ever been one of these violent men, or are you so now? Blessed be God if this holy violence is in your spirit: you shall take heaven by force yet; you shall take it by storm, and carry the gates of heaven by the battery of your prayers. Only persevere with importunity; still plead, still wrestle, still continue to strive, and you must at length prevail. But ah! my hearer, if you have never had a strong unconquerable anxiety about your soul, you are as yet a stranger to the things of God. You do not understand that victorious violence without which the gates of heaven can never be stormed. Some of us can look back to the time when we were seeking Christ. I myself could easily wake up in the morning then. The first ray of light that came my room would awaken me to take up Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted that lay under my pillow. I believed I had not repented enough, and I began to read that. Oh! how I hoped that would break my heart. And then I would get Doddridge’s Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, and Allen’s Alarm To The Unconverted, and read them. But, still, I think I might have read them to this day, and not been a whit the better, if I had not something better than alarm, in remembering that Christ came into the world to save every sinner who was willing to cast himself upon his blood and righteousness, and take him at his word, and trust God. Have you not seen many — and are there not many among us — men who have said “I must have mercy, I must have it: it is not a thing which I may have, or may not have but I am a lost soul if I do not have it?” And when they have gone to pray they have seemed like Samsons; they have grabbed hold of the two posts of heaven’s gate of mercy, and they have pulled as if they would pull them up by their eternal roots sooner than not get the blessing. They have hammered at the gates of heaven until it seemed as if they would split the golden bolts rather than be turned away. No man ever gets peace until he gets into such a passion of earnestness to be saved, that he cannot find peace until Christ speaks pardon to his soul, and brings him into life and liberty. “The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.”
6. But this violence does not end when a man finds Christ; it then begins to exercise itself in another way. The man who is pardoned, and who knows it, then becomes violently in love with Christ. He does not love him just a little, but he loves him with all his soul and all his might. He feels as if he could wish to die for Christ, and his heart pants to be able to live alone with his Redeemer, and serve him without interruption. See such a man who is a true Christian, hear his prayers, and you will see there is violence in all his supplications when he pleads for the souls of men. See his outward actions, and they are violently sincere, violently earnest. See him when he preaches: there is no dull droning out of a monotonous discourse, he speaks like a man who means what he says, and who must speak it, or else woe would he to him if he did not preach the gospel. As I look around on many of the churches, yes, on many members of my own church, I am apt to fear that they are not God’s children at all, because they have nothing of this holy violence. Have you ever read Coleridge’s Rime Of The Ancient Mariner? I dare say you have thought it one of the strongest imaginations ever put together, especially that part where the old mariner represents the corpses of all the dead men rising up — all of them dead, yet rising up to manage the ship; dead men pulling the ropes, dead men steering, dead men spreading the sails. I thought what a strange idea that was. But do you know I have lived to see that to be true: I have seen it done. I have gone into churches and I have seen a dead man in the pulpit, and a dead man as a deacon, and a dead man holding the plate at the door, and dead men sitting to hear. You say, “Strange!” but I have. I have gone into societies, and I have seen it all going on so regularly. These dead men, you know, never overstep the bounds of prudence, — not they: they do not have enough life to do that. They always pull the rope orderly, “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen!” And the dead man in the pulpit, is he not most regular and precise? He systematically draws his handkerchief from his pocket, and uses it at the regular period, in the middle of the sermon. He would not think of violating a single rubric that has been laid down by his old fashioned church. Well,
