many doubts, but you have had them all unriddled, when you have come to the cross of Christ. You have had many difficulties; but they have been all explained in the light of Calvary. You have seen mysteries, when you have brought them to the face of Christ, made clear and obvious, which once you never could have known. Allow me to remark here that some people make use of Christ’s gospel to illuminate their heads, instead of making use of it to illuminate their hearts. They are like the farmer Rowland Hill once described. The farmer is sitting by the fire with his children; the cat is purring on the hearth, and they are all in great comfort. The ploughman rushes in, and cries, “Thieves! thieves! thieves!” The farmer leaps up in a moment, grasps the lantern, holds it up to his head, rushes after the thieves, and, says Rowland Hill, “he tumbles over a wheelbarrow, because he holds the light to his head, instead of holding it to his feet.” So there are many, who just hold religion up to illuminate their intellect, instead of holding it down to illuminate their practice; and so they make a sad tumble of it, and cast themselves into the mire, and do more harm to their Christian profession in one hour than they will ever be able to undo. Take care that you make the wisdom of God, by God’s Holy Spirit a thing of true wisdom, directing your feet into his statutes, and keeping you in his ways.
19. And now a practical appeal, and we are finished. I have been putting my arrow on the string; and if I have used any light similes, I have only done so just as the archer tips his arrow with a feather, to make it fly the better. I know that a rough quaint saying often sticks, when another thing is entirely forgotten. Now let us draw the bow, and send the arrow right into your hearts. Men, brethren, fathers, how many of you have felt in yourselves that Christ is the power of God, and the wisdom of God? Internal evidence is the best evidence in the world for the truth of the gospel. No Paley or Butler can prove the truth of the gospel as well as Mary, the servant girl over there, that has the gospel in her heart, and the power of it displayed in her life. Say, has Christ ever broken your bonds, and set you free? Has he delivered you from your evil life, and from your sin? Has he given you “a good hope through grace,” and can you now say, “On him I lean; on my beloved I rest myself?” If so, go away and rejoice: you are a saint; for the apostle has said, “He is to us who are saved, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” But if you cannot say this, allow me affectionately to warn you. If you do not need this power of Christ, and this wisdom of Christ now, you will need them in a few short moments, when God shall come to judge the quick and the dead, when you shall stand before his bar, and when all the deeds that you have done shall be read before an assembled world. You will need religion then. Oh that you had grace to tremble now; grace to “kiss the Son, lest he is angry, and you perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled only a little.” Hear you how to be saved, and I am finished. Do you feel that you are a sinner? Are you conscious that you have rebelled against God? Are you willing to acknowledge your transgressions and do you hate and abhor them, while at the same time you feel you can do nothing to atone for them? Then hear this! Christ died for you; and if he died for you, you cannot be lost. Christ died in vain for no man for whom he died. If you are a penitent and a believer, he died for you, and you are safe; go your way; rejoice with joy unspeakable, and full of glory; for he who has taught you your need of a Saviour, will give that Saviour’s blood to be applied to your conscience, and you shall before long, with that blood washed host, praise God and the Lamb saying, “Hallelujah, for ever, Amen!” Only do you feel that you are a sinner? If not, I have no gospel to preach to you; I can only warn you. But if you feel your lost estate, and come to Christ, come, and welcome, for he will never cast you away.
Heavenly Rest
No. 133-3:209. A Sermon Delivered On Sunday Morning, May 24, 1857, By C. H. Spurgeon, At The Music Hall, Royal Surrey Gardens.
There remains therefore a rest for the people of God. {Hebrews 4:9}
1. The Apostle proved, in the former part of this and the latter part of the preceding chapter, that there was a rest promised in Scripture called the rest of God. He proved that Israel did not attain that rest; for God swore in his wrath, saying, “They shall not enter into my rest.” He proved that this did not merely refer to the rest of the land of Canaan; for he says that after they were in Canaan, David himself speaks again of a future time concerning the rest of God, as a thing which was yet to come. {Psalms 95:7-11} Again he proves, that “seeing those to whom it was promised did not enter in, because of unbelief, and it remains that some must enter in, therefore,” he says, “there remains a rest for the people of God.”
2. “My rest,” says God: the rest of God! Something more wonderful than any other kind of rest. In my text it is (in the original) called the Sabbatism — not the Sabbath, but the rest of the Sabbath — not the outward ritual of the Sabbath, which was binding upon the Jew, but the inward spirit of the Sabbath, which is the joy and delight of the Christian. “There remains therefore” — because others have not had it, because some are to have it — “There remains therefore a rest for the people of God.”
3. Now, this rest, I believe, is partly enjoyed on earth. “We who have believed do enter into rest”; for we have ceased from our own works, as God did from his. But the full fruition and rich enjoyment of it remains in the future and eternal state of the beatified on the other side the stream of death. Oh that it shall be our delightful work to talk a little this morning. And oh! if God should help me to raise only one of his feeble saints on the wings of love to look within the veil, and see the joys of the future, I shall be well contented to have made the joy bells ring in one heart at least, to have set one eye flashing with joy, and to have made one spirit light with gladness. The rest of heaven! I shall try first to exhibit it and then to extol it.
4. I. First, I shall try to EXHIBIT the rest of heaven; and in doing so I shall exhibit it, first by way of contrast, and then by way of comparison.
5. 1. To begin, then, I shall try to exhibit heaven by way of contrast. The rest of the righteous in glory is now to be contrasted with certain other things.
6. We will contrast it, first, with the best estate of the worldling and the sinner. The worldling has frequently a good estate. Sometimes his vats overflow, his barns are crammed, his heart is full of joy and gladness; there are periods with him when he flourishes like a green bay tree, when field is added to field, and house to house, when he pulls down his barns and builds greater, when the river of his joy is full, and the ocean of his life is at its flood with joy and blessedness. But ah! beloved the state of the righteous up there is not for a moment to be compared with the joy of the sinner; — it is so infinitely superior, so far surpassing it, that it seems impossible that I should even try to set it in contrast. The worldling, when his grain and his wine are increased, has a glad eye and a joyous heart; but even then he has the direful thought that he may soon leave his wealth. He remembers that death may cut him down, that he must then leave all his fair riches behind him, and sleep like the basest of the land in a narrow coffin, six feet of earth his only inheritance. Not so the righteous man: he has obtained an inheritance which is “undefiled, and that does not fade away.” He knows that there is no possibility of his losing his joys;
He is securely blessed,
Has done with sin, and care, and woe,
And does with Jesus rest.
He has no dread of dissolution, no fear of the coffin or the shroud; and so far the life of heaven is not worthy to be put in comparison with the life of the sinner. But the worldling, with all his joys, always has a worm at the root of them. You devotees to pleasure! the blush upon your cheek is frequently only a painted deception. Ah! oh sons and daughters of gaiety! the light foot of your dance is not in keeping with the heavy woe of your miserable spirits. Do you not confess that if by the excitement of company you for awhile forget the emptiness of your heart, yet silence, and the hour of midnight,
