Sinner, Christ Wants Thee!
Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. – Matthew 11:28,29
Sinner! if thou wantest Christ, Christ wants thee; if thou hast a desire after Christ, Christ has a desire after thee. What sayest thou, poor soul, wilt thou take Christ just as He is? Come! bundle out all thy righteousness. come! Pack up all thy goodness and cast it out of doors. Take Jesus, Jesus only, to be thy salvation; and I tell thee, though thou wert black as night, and filthy as a demon, while thou art yet in the land of the living, if thou dost now take Christ as thy Savior, that Christ will be enough for thee, enough to clothe thee, enough to purge thee, enough to perfect thee, and enough to land thee safe in heaven. But if you are self-righteous, I have no gospel for you except this,
“Not the righteous, not the righteous, Sinners, Jesus, came to save.”
Sinners, of all sorts and sizes! sinners black, sinners blacker, sinners blackest! sinners filthy, sinners filthier, sinners filthiest! Sinners bad, sinners worse, sinners worst! All ye who can take to yourselves the name of sinner! All of you who can subscribe to that title! I, in God’s name, preach to you that “He is able to save to the uttermost them that come unto God by Him;” and if by faith and prayer you are enabled to come to Him this night, there is not a sinner who feels his need of a Savior who may not this night have that Savior. God has given Him first, and He will not deny Him second. He who is freely proclaimed in revelation, is freely commended to you in ministration.
“True relief and true repentance,
Every grace that brings you nigh;
Without money,
Come to Jesus Christ and buy.”
Oh! save souls! O God! save souls! Amen! Amen!
~ C.H. Spurgeon
Sermon, Grace Reviving Israel
A Mournful List of Honours
“O ye sons of men, how long will ye turn My glory into shame?” – Psalm 4:2
An instructive writer has made a mournful list of the honours which the blinded people of Israel awarded to their long-expected King:
(1.) They gave Him a procession of honour, in which Roman legionaries, Jewish priests, men and women, took a part, He Himself bearing His cross. This is the triumph which the world awards to Him who comes to overthrow man’s direst foes. Derisive shouts are His only acclamations, and cruel taunts His only paeans of praise.
(2.) They presented Him with the wine of honour. Instead of a golden cup of generous wine they offered Him the criminal’s stupefying death-draught, which He refused because He would preserve an uninjured taste wherewith to taste of death; and afterwards when He cried, “I thirst,” they gave Him vinegar mixed with gall, thrust to His mouth upon a sponge. Oh! wretched, detestable inhospitality to the King’s Son.
(3.) He was provided with a guard of honour, who showed their esteem of Him by gambling over His garments, which they had seized as their booty. Such was the body-guard of the adored of heaven; a quaternion of brutal gamblers.
(4.) A throne of honour was found for Him upon the bloody tree; no easier place of rest would rebel men yield to their liege Lord. The cross was, in fact, the full expression of the world’s feeling towards Him; “There,” they seemed to say, “Thou Son of God, this is the manner in which God Himself should be treated, could we reach Him.”
(5.) The title of honour was nominally “King of the Jews,” but that the blinded nation distinctly repudiated, and really called Him “King of thieves,” by preferring Barabbas, and by placing Jesus in the place of highest shame between two thieves. His glory was thus in all things turned into shame by the sons of men, but it shall yet gladden the eyes of saints and angels, world without end. ~ C.H. Spurgeon
Our Lord’s Thirst
“I thirst.” – John 19:28
Our Lord endured thirst to an extreme degree, for it was the thirst of death which was upon Him, and more, it was the thirst of one whose death was not a common one, for “He tasted death for every man.” That thirst was caused, perhaps, in part by the loss of blood, and by the fever created by the irritation caused by His four grievous wounds. The nails were fastened in the most sensitive parts of the body, and the wounds were widened as the weight of His body dragged the nails through His blessed flesh and tore His tender nerves. The extreme tension produced a burning feverishness. It was pain that dried His mouth and made it like an oven, till He declared, in the language of the twenty-second psalm, “My tongue cleaveth to My jaws.” It was a thirst such as none of us have ever known, for not yet has the death dew condensed upon our brows. We shall perhaps know it in our measure in our dying hour, but not yet, nor ever so terribly as He did. Our Lord felt that grievous drought of dissolution by which all moisture seems dried up, and the flesh returns to the dust of death: this those know who have commenced to tread the valley of the shadow of death. Jesus, being a man, escaped none of the ills which are allotted to man in death. He is indeed “Immanuel, God with us” everywhere.
Believing this, let us tenderly feel how very near akin to us our Lord Jesus has become… Can you help feeling how very near Jesus is to us when His lips must be moistened with a sponge, and He must be so dependent upon others as to ask drink from their hand?…Ah, beloved, our Lord was so truly man that all our griefs remind us of Him: the next time we are thirsty we may gaze upon Him; and whenever we see a friend faint and thirsting while dying, we may behold our Lord dimly, but truly, mirrored in His members. How near akin the thirsty Saviour is to us; let us love Him more and more. ~ C.H. Spurgeon
https://www.blueletterbible.org/comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1409.cfm
The Humanity of Our Lord
After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, “I thirst.”—John 19:28
Our text is the shortest of all the words of Calvary; it stands as two words in our language-“I thirst,” but in the Greek it is only one. I cannot say that it is short and sweet, for, alas, it was bitterness itself to our Lord Jesus; and yet out of its bitterness I trust there will come great sweetness to us. Though bitter to Him in the speaking it will be sweet to us in the hearing, -so sweet that all the bitterness of our trials shall be forgotten as we remember the vinegar and gall of which He drank. Jesus said, “I thirst,” and this is the complaint of a man. Our Lord is the Maker of the ocean and the waters that are above the firmament: it is His hand that stays or opens the bottles of heaven, and sendeth rain upon the evil and upon the good. “The sea is His, and He made it,” and all fountains and springs are of His digging. He poureth out the streams that run among the hills, the torrents which rush adown the mountains, and the flowing rivers which enrich the plains. One would have said, If He were thirsty, He would not tell us, for all the clouds and rains would be glad to refresh His brow, and the brooks and streams would joyously flow at His feet. And yet, though He was Lord of all He had so fully taken upon Himself the form of a servant and was so perfectly made in the likeness of sinful flesh, that He cried with fainting voice, “I thirst.” How truly man He is; He is, indeed, “bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh,” for He bears our infirmities. I invite you to meditate upon the true humanity of our Lord very reverently, and very lovingly. Jesus was proved to be really man, because He suffered the pains which belong to manhood. Angels cannot suffer thirst. A phantom, as some have called Him, could not suffer in His fashion: but Jesus really suffered, not only the more refined pains of delicate and sensitive minds, but the rougher and commoner pangs of flesh and blood…Thirst is no royal grief, but an evil of universal manhood; Jesus is brother to the poorest and most humble of our race. ~ C.H. Spurgeon
https://www.blueletterbible.org/comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1409.cfm
Sing!
O come, let us sing unto the LORD: let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation. – Psalm 95:1
When you can say, “I feel like singing all the time,” then sing; and when you say, “I do not feel like singing,” make a point of singing then, just to let the devil know that he is not your master. It is a good thing to praise Christ in the presence of His friends; it is sometimes a better thing to extol Him in the presence of His enemies. It is a great thing to praise Jesus Christ by day; but there is no music sweeter than the nightingale’s, and she praises God by night. It is well to praise the Lord for His mercy when you are in health, but make sure that you do it when you are sick, for then your praise is more likely to be genuine. When you are deep down in sorrow, do not rob God of the gratitude that is due to Him; never stint Him of His revenue of praise whatever else goes short. Praise Him sometimes on the high-sounding cymbals, -crash, crash, -with all your heart and being; but when you cannot do that, just sit, and mean His praise in solemn silence in the deep quiet of your spirit. To be redeemed from a dying world, to be fetched out from a condemned world, to be brought out from slavery, to be made a child of God, is enough to make you emulate the angels, and even to excel them. They cannot rise to so high a pitch of gratitude as you ought to reach even now, and ought to keep up all the days of your life, and then “for ever and ever “in the presence of the King. ~ C.H. Spurgeon
https://www.blueletterbible.org/comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2483.cfm
Giving God the Glory
To whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen. – Galatians 1:5
God is glorified in Christ’s death. Has the Father given His Son, Jesus Christ, to die for us? Then there is glory enough in Jesus Christ upon the cross to last throughout eternity. Fix your eye upon that bleeding Savior; behold the glorious justice of God in laying guilt on Him, and punishing it on Him, and behold also the inconceivable love of God in thus putting His Only-begotten to death that we might live through Him. You need not range the world around to see the glory of God in nature, though that is a delightful employment, for there is enough glory in the cross of Christ to last throughout all eternity. The apostle says, “To whom be glory for ever and ever.” How long that is, I cannot tell. “For ever” is without any end, but Paul says, “For ever and ever,” and there is glory enough in the cross of Christ to last for ever and ever, as long as the Eternal Jehovah Himself exists.
Well then, has Jesus Christ delivered us from the world? Have we fled to Him, and been pardoned? Are we accepted in the Beloved? Then, let us begin to glorify God now. Let us glorify His dear Son, let us praise Him. Let every beat of our heart tell out our joyous thankfulness, and so continually yield sweet music unto God…for it is indeed a subject of great praise to be separated from the world, and to be made holy unto the Lord. But, brothers and sisters, when you once begin the music, never leave off, because, as the apostle says, glory is to be given to God “for ever and ever.” I saw, last week, a brother from the backwoods of America, and he said to me, “Twenty years ago, I was in your vestry, and you did me much good by something that you said to me.” I asked, “What did I say?” And the good man replied, “You said, ‘Brother, as a minister, there are two occasions upon which you ought to preach Jesus Christ.’ I enquired, ‘What are those two occasions?’ You answered, “In season, and out of season.'” Well now, there are two occasions upon which we ought to praise God, “in season, and out of season.” Praise Him when you feel like praising; and when you do not feel like it, praise Him till you do. ~ C.H. Spurgeon
https://www.blueletterbible.org/comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2483.cfm
He Hath Said 