first step in which there is any differently.” So I believe, if that is taken, all the rest can be easily accomplished. And if God does require of the sinner — dead in sin — that he should take the first step, then he requires just that which renders salvation as impossible under the gospel as ever it was under the law, seeing man is as unable to believe as he is to obey, and is just as much without power to come to Christ as he is without power to go to heaven without Christ. The power must be given to him by the Spirit. He lies dead in sin; the Spirit must quicken him. He is bound hand and foot and fettered by transgression; the Spirit must cut his bonds, and then he will leap to liberty. God must come and dash the iron bars out of their sockets, and then he can escape from the window, and make good his escape afterwards; but unless the first thing is done for him, he must perish as surely under the gospel as he would have done under the law. I would cease to preach, if I believed that God, in the matter of salvation, required anything whatever from man which he himself had not also engaged to furnish. For how many have I of the worst of characters frequently hanging upon my words — men whose lives have become so horribly bad, that the lip of morality would refuse to give a description of their character? When I enter my pulpit am I to believe that these men are to do something before God’s Spirit will operate upon them? If so, I should go there with a faint heart, feeling that I never could induce them to do the first part. But now I come to my pulpit with a sure confidence — God the Holy Spirit will meet with these men this morning. They are as bad as they can be; he will put a new thought into their hearts; he will give them new wishes, he will give them new wills, and those who hated Christ will desire to love him; those who once loved sin will, by God’s divine Spirit, be made to hate it, and here is my confidence, that what they cannot do, in that they are weak through the flesh, God sending his Spirit into their hearts will do for them, and in them, and so they shall be saved.
7. Well, then, one says, that will make people sit still and fold their arms. Sir, it will not. But if men did so I could not help it; my business, as I have often said in this place before, is not to prove to you the reasonableness of any truth, nor to defend any truth from its consequences; all I do here — and I mean to keep to it is just to assert the truth, because it is in the Bible; then, if you do not like it, you must settle the quarrel with my Master, and if you think it is still unreasonable you must quarrel with the Bible. Let others defend Scripture and prove it to be true; they can do their work better than I could; mine is just the mere work of proclaiming. I am the messenger; I tell the Master’s message; if you do not like the message quarrel with the Bible, not with me; as long as I have Scripture on my side I will dare and defy you to do anything against me. “Salvation is of the Lord.” The Lord has to apply it, to make the unwilling willing, to make the ungodly godly, and bring the vile rebel to the feet of Jesus, or else salvation will never be accomplished. Leave that one thing undone, and you have broken the link of the chain, the very link which was just necessary for its integrity. Take away the fact that God begins the good work, and that he sends us what the old divines call preventing grace — take that away, and you have spoilt the whole of salvation; you have just taken the keystone out of the arch, and down it tumbles. There is nothing left then.
8. And now on the next point we shall disagree a little again. “Salvation is of the Lord,” as to the sustaining of the work in any man’s heart. When a man is made a child of God he does not have a supply of grace given to him with which to go on for ever, but he has grace for that day; and he must have grace for the next day and grace for the next, and grace for the next, until days shall end, or else the beginning shall be of no avail. As a man does not make himself spiritually alive, so neither can he keep himself so. He can feed on spiritual food, and so preserve his spiritual strength; he can walk in the commandments of the Lord, and so enjoy rest and peace, but still the inner life is dependent upon the Spirit as much for its later existence as for its origin. I do truly believe that if it should ever be my lot to put my foot upon the golden threshold of paradise, and put this thumb upon the pearly latch, I would never cross the threshold unless I had grace given to me to take that last step by which I might enter heaven. No man by himself, even when converted, has any power, except as that power is daily, constantly, and perpetually infused into him by the Spirit. But Christians often set themselves up as independent gentlemen; they get a little supply of grace in hand, and they say, “My mountain stands firm, I shall never be moved.” But ah! it is not long before the manna begins to be putrid. It was only meant to be the manna for the day, and we have kept it for the next day, and therefore it fails us. We must have fresh grace.
For day by day the manna fell,
Oh to learn that lesson well.
So look day by day for fresh grace. Frequently too the Christian wants to have grace enough for a month bestowed to him in one moment. “Oh!” he says, “what a host of troubles I have coming — how shall I meet them all? Oh! that I had grace enough to bear me through them all!” My dear friends, you will have grace enough for your troubles, as they come one by one. “As your days, so shall your strength be”; but your strength shall never be as your months, or as your weeks. You shall have your strength as you have your bread. “Give us this day our daily bread.” Give us this day our daily grace. But why is it you will get troubling yourself about the things of tomorrow? The common people say, “Cross a bridge when you come to it.” That is good advice. Do the same. When a trouble comes, attack it, and down with it, and master it; but do not begin now to forestall your woes. “Ah! but I have so many” one says. Therefore I say, do not look further before you than you need. “Sufficient for the day is its own evil.” Do as the brave Grecian did, who, when he defended his country from Persia, did not go into the plains to fight, but stood in the narrow pass of Thermopylae; there, when the myriads came to him, they had to come one by one, and he felled them to the earth. Had he ventured into the plain he would have been soon devoured, and his handful would have been melted like a drop of dew in the sea. Stand in the narrow pass of today, and fight your troubles one by one; but do not rush into the plains of tomorrow, for there you will be routed and killed. As the evil is sufficient so will the grace be. “Salvation is of the Lord.”
9. But, lastly, upon this point. The ultimate perfection of salvation is of the Lord. Soon, soon, the saints of earth shall be saints in light; their hairs of snowy age shall be crowned with perpetual joy and everlasting youth; their eyes, suffused with tears, shall be made bright as stars, never to be clouded again by sorrow; their hearts that tremble now are to be made joyous and fast, and set for ever like pillars in the temple of God. Their follies, their burdens, their griefs, their woes, are soon to be over; sin is to be slain, corruption is to be removed, and a heaven of spotless purity and of unmingled peace is to be theirs for ever. But it must still be by grace. As was the foundation such must the top stone be; what laid on earth the first beginning, must lay in heaven the top most stone. As they were redeemed from their filthy conversation by grace, so they must be redeemed from death and the grave by grace too, and they must enter heaven singing,
Salvation of the Lord alone,
Grace is a shoreless sea.
10. There may be Arminians here, but they will not be Arminians there; they may here say, “It is of the will of the flesh,” but in heaven they shall not think so. Here they may ascribe some little to the creature; but there they shall cast their crowns at the Redeemer’s feet, and acknowledge that he did it all. Here they may sometimes look a little at themselves, and boast somewhat of their own strength; but there, “Not to us, not to us,” shall be sung with deeper sincerity and with more profound emphasis than they have ever sung it here below. In heaven, when grace shall have done its work, this truth shall stand out in blazing letters of gold, “Salvation is of the Lord.”
11. II. Thus I have tried to expound the gospel. Now shall I show you HOW GOD HAS HEDGED THIS DOCTRINE AROUND?
12. Some have said salvation in some cases is the result of natural temperament. Well, sir, well, God has effectually answered your argument. You say that some people are saved
