084. Nay, I Never Thought of Christ, Nor Whether There Was One, Or No.

LXXXIV ‘Nay, I Never Thought Of Christ, Nor Whether There Was One, Or No.’

‘BECAUSE I knew no better I fell in, very eagerly, with the religion of the times; to wit, to go to church twice a day, and that, too, with the foremost. And there should very devoutly, both sing and say as others did; yet all the time retaining my wicked life. Thus I continued about a year; all which time our neighbours did take me to be a very godly man: a new and a religious man. Though, as yet, I knew not Christ, nor grace, nor faith, nor hope. Nay, all this time I never thought of Christ, nor whether there was one, or no.’

Now with Bunyan before us to warn us in this matter it is quite possible that you and I may be coming to this very church twice a day, and may be saying and singing with the foremost, and yet all the time may be, like Bunyan, so insensible to spiritual things as never once all the day really to think that there is a Christ to hear us say and sing and to save us. If that stupidity was so gross with a man of John Bunyan’s genius and sensibility it is not at all impossible that it may be the same with some of ourselves. Come away then, and let us all examine ourselves as to this great matter: this by far the greatest of all matters: our thoughts, yes or no, about Christ, And let us begin like Bunyan with the Sabbath morning. Bunyan rose off his bed every Sabbath morning in good time for church, but he never once said, ‘This is the day that Christ hath made for me, by His arising again this day for my justification.’ The time came when he said that the very first thing every Sabbath morning. One Sabbath morning, long afterwards, he was so in the spirit of Christ’s resurrection and of his own justification, that he says he saw Christ leaping round His empty grave for very joy that He had at last finished the work that His Father had given Him to do. And then before his Sabbath morning breakfast Bunyan was always scrupulous to say a special Sabbath morning grace, but that was all, he never once looked above the bare words of the superstitious grace. And then he rested, according to the commandment, from his six days’ work with his hammer and his anvil, but his weary soul had not yet found its Lord’s Day rest in the Risen Christ. And then when the Sabbath morning bells rang he went up to church and sang the psalms and sounded out the responses till he honestly thought that he stood as well with God as any man in all England.

Now, honestly, what do you think about the first thing on the morning of the Lord’s Day? If it is indeed His day, should He not have your first thought in the morning? That is to say, if He was indeed delivered for your offences, and was raised again that morning for your justification. And to go no farther back did you think of Him, aye or no, the first thingthis morning? What did you say to yourself all the time you were washing your hands and your face this morning? ‘This fine linen,’ said one as he put it on, ‘is to me a parable and a sacrament of the righteousness of Christ.’ ‘I put on His righteousness and it clothed me,’ said another; ‘it was to me for a robe and for a diadem.’ Do you ever say anything like that on a Sabbath morning? And then in after days when the Gospels were read at family worship and in the church,

‘Methought,’ says Bunyan, ‘I was as if I had seen Him born, as if I had seen Him grow up, as if I had seen Him walk through this world from His cradle to His cross; to which also, when He came, I saw how gently He gave Himself to be hanged and nailed upon it for my sins and wicked doings. Also, as I was musing upon this His progress, that dropped on my spirit — He was ordained for the slaughter.’

Now has anything like that dropped on your spirit all this day? It was a large part of John Bunyan’s genius and grace; it was a large part of his extraordinary success both in literature and in religion, that he always as good as saw everything he read about in his Bible, and everything he sang about, and everything he prayed about, both at home and in the church. And it will make you and me to be men of something of the same genius and the same grace if we also see Christ every time we pronounce His name and hear it pronounced. But Bunyan, at that early time, was still a far way from all that. For he quotes, as describing himself at that time, this text out of the Preacher: ‘Thus man, while blind, doth wander, and wearieth himself with vanity, for he knoweth not the way to the city of God.’ But all that was not yet the worst with poor Bunyan. Not only did he never once think of Christ on the Sabbath or all the week; far worse than that, the thought of Christ was ‘grievous’ to him when at any time a sermon or a book or something else pressed Christ home upon his attention. He could not himself endure the thought of Christ, nor could he endure the company of any man whom he suspected to be much given to that thought. That house, he tells us, was like a prison to him, where he saw lying open on the table a book about Christ. Now the houses of the Baptists in Bedford were full of books about Christ in those Puritan days, as full as our houses are of newspapers and novels, till there was scarcely a house in all the town that Bunyan could enter with comfort and remain in with peace of mind. And there will be some of you exactly like that. The circulating library people never send you a book about Christ. What would you think and what would you say to them if they did? And a text like this and a sermon like this are both grievous to you. There are some kinds of sermons you greatly like and go talking about all the week, but not sermons on the Person of Christ, or on the work of Christ, or on the glory of Christ. You never all your days sat down to read a whole Epistle of Paul about Christ, no not even on a communion week; at any rate, not since you were in your first earnestness as a young communicant.

‘As for Paul’s Epistles,’ says Bunyan, ‘I could not away with them. Being as yet but ignorant, either of the corruptions of my own nature, or of the want and worth of Jesus Christ to save me.’ But as we read on towards the middle and the end of Grace Abounding, we come on continual exclamations like this: ‘O Blessed Paul! O, yes, thou Blessed Paul!’ And we come again and again on other exclamations like this:

‘O methought Christ! Christ! there was nothing but Christ now before my eyes. To speak as then I thought, had I had a thousand gallons of blood in my veins, I could freely have spilt it all before His feet.’ And who knows but that He who made John Bunyan so to differ from his former self, may yet in His abounding grace work the same miracle of grace and truth in you. I hope to live to see books on Christ lying open on your table and you will not hide them away as if you were ashamed of them.

Men and women! Grown-up men and women! Take pity on your poor stunted minds and starved hearts! For what a mind and heart to be pitied is that which does not constantly think about Christ! I do not care how great a name any man may bear among men if he does not constantly think about Christ. Even were his name the name of a Shakespeare, or a Goethe, or a Newton, the humblest believer may well pity him if he has not yet begun to think about Christ. For, O what splendid, what soul-saving thinking Christ makes to a man! Christ Himself, and then all other things in heaven and on earth, in God and in man; what thinking they all make when they are all seen and thought of in Christ! What seraphic minds those Colossian believers must have had if they indeed understood and enjoyed the Epistle that bears down to us their honoured and beloved names. For, what intellectual and what spiritual heights and depths are there! What theology! What Christology! What philosophy, and for once not falsely so called! And with it all, and as the true riches of it all, what a Gospel! What pardon! What peace with God! What present grace, and what coming glory! Did you ever sit down and read at a down-sitting the Epistle to the Colossians? When you do, write me and tell me what you think and feel as you close the divine book. I will tell you beforehand one thing you will think and feel and say. You will say with some in the Church of Colosse,

‘What a man was Paul — if he was a mere man, and not the very Holy Ghost Himself come to us in the flesh to talk of the things of Christ, and to show them to us!’ And now to bring all this to this point. Intending communicants! You of all men are to think of little else but of Christ all this week. For just thinking of Christ — that will make you worthy communicants as nothing else will. The more you think all this week of His Son the better pleased the Father will be with you when He comes in to see the guests. On the other hand, do not come near His table unless you are prepared to think of Christ and of little else all your after days. For no one can possibly sit at His table, and eat and drink the things of Christ that are there provided, without being so possessed with Christ as to think of Him above and before all else as long as they live in this world. If you spend this week wisely, and then if you communicate worthily next Lord’s Day, you will both understand and will for ever make your own what Bunyan says about a communion day of his long afterwards:

‘Both again, and again, and again,’ he says, ‘I was made to see that day that God and my soul were made friends by the Blood of Christ. Yea, I saw that the justice of God, and my sinful soul, could embrace and kiss each other through that blood. Now was my heart full of comfort and hope. Now I could believe that my sins should be all forgiven. Yea I was now so taken with the love and the mercy of God to me that I could not contain it all till I got home. I thought I could have spoken of His love and of His mercy to me, even to the very crows that sat upon the ploughed lands before me.’ And now after the intending communicants, if the divinity students here present will listen to me let them do this. Let them borrow from their library the index volume of Dr. Thomas Goodwin’s immortal works. And next Sabbath morning and evening let them open that splendid index under ‘Christ.’ Let them ponder those five glorious pages slowly and thoughtfully and believingly and appropriatingly; and, if they do not leap in their rooms at the glorious prospect of their soon being preachers of Christ there must be something far wrong with them. They are surely too far off their right road in life already. Let them forthwith choose some other calling. Let them go to the bar, or to medicine, or to the army, or to the civil service; but it is only common sense that they should not go to the Church of Christ. They may make passable advocates, or doctors, or soldiers, but not preachers of Christ to please Him and to edify His people and to earn His reward. And yet, no! That is not good advice, and I will take it all back. Rather than that, let them look well down into their own sinful hearts; and back, and forward, into their own sinful lives; and all around at the world of sinful men round about them. And then let them read with all their scholarship and with all their philosophy and with all their personal experience say, the prologue to John’s Gospel and his seventeenth chapter, and then the Epistle to the Colossians, and then Goodwin’s index again under ‘Christ.’ And I am as sure as I am standing in this pulpit that neither the army, nor the bar, nor anything else in this world will ever get those men. It is because so few of our able young men ever think about Christ that there is everywhere such a dearth of first-class divinity students. It is not the falling Sustentation Fund, nor is it the Higher Criticism, nor is it the many openings into wealth and honour at home and abroad that steals from the Church her choicest sons. No, no. It is simply this: It is simply because, like John Bunyan in his blinded youth, they are not yet sensible of the danger and the disaster of all sin and of their own sin. And then, as the result of that, it is because they never think of the Divine Redeemer from sin, or whether there is one, or no. O come, all you youths of genius and of learning and of the beginnings of grace! For here is the proper scope for you! Your proper field in all this world is the Evangelical pulpit and pastorate. Here is the one sphere in this whole world in which to lay out and to multiply your talents so that both you and they may be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ. ‘God,’ says Goodwin, ‘had only one Son, and He made Him a minister.’