107. When Comforting Time Was Come.

CVII ‘When Comforting Time Was Come.’

JOHN BUNYAN was immensely indebted to the Puritan preaching of his day. It was the Puritan preaching of his day that first opened John Bunyan’s eyes to see himself. It was the Puritan preaching of his day that first opened his eyes to see his Saviour. It was the Puritan preaching of his day that so settled and grounded his heart on Jesus Christ as made of God to him his wisdom, and his righteousness, and his sanctification, and his redemption. And it was when his comforting time was come that he heard one preach a Puritan sermon on a sweet passage in the Song of Solomon. And then it was his own Puritan preaching all his days that was so much blessed, first to himself and then to all his spiritual children, as he so often and so eloquently testifies. Do you know, my brethren, and from your own experience, what a truly Puritan sermon is? Do you know what it is that differentiates and exalts a genuine Puritan sermon above all other sermons? And can you trace in yourselves, and can you trace up to Puritan preaching, such a succession of spiritual blessings as John Bunyan traces here, and indeed traces all through his Grace Abounding? For the very title of this spiritual masterpiece of his may very well be taken as the title of every genuine Puritan sermon; that is to say: first, sin abounding, and then grace much more abounding. Besides, that is the supreme theme of the true Puritan pulpit, and of no other pulpit that I have ever sat under. The sermon that John Bunyan heard from the lips of a Puritan preacher when his comforting time was come was, as we say at college, an eminently Christological sermon. That is to say, it was a mystical, an evangelical, and an intensely experimental sermon on that passage in the Song. It was the kind of sermon that was wont to be so much relished by our fathers and our mothers when, like John Bunyan, they were in deep spiritual distress and when their comforting time was again come to them.

Walter Marshall’s Ninth Direction is to this effect:

‘We must first receive the comforts of the Gospel in order that we may be able to perform sincerely the duties of the law.’

Now, the attentive student of John Bunyan’s great autobiography is able to trace quite clearly that same spiritual sequence, and that same evangelical and experimental order, in John Bunyan’s life, first of Gospel comfort, and then of consequent obedience. I shall not attempt to incorporate into this short discourse one hundredth part of the passages inGrace Abounding that bear upon Walter Marshall’s Ninth Direction. But he who is wisely interested in the one thing supremely interesting, he will find that rich chain of John Bunyan’s spiritual experiences for himself, which is a far better way than any one else finding them for him. As to the special sermon of this comforting time after many years Bunyan remembers the preacher’s text, and his five heads, and his application of his fourth particular. And no wonder. For it was that application which sent Bunyan home from church that Sabbath in such an ecstasy of unearthly joy.

‘So as I was going home that application came again into my thoughts; and, as I well remember, I said then in my heart: What shall I get by thinking on what I have now heard? And, still as what I had just heard ran thus in my mind, the words of the text waxed stronger and warmer, and began to make me look up. Now was my heart filled with comfort and hope, and now could I believe that my sins should be forgiven me. Yea, now, I was so taken with the love and the mercy of God that I could not contain myself till I got home. I thought I could have spoken of God’s love and mercy to me, even to the very crows that sat upon the ploughed lands before me, had they been capable to have understood me. Wherefore, I said in my soul, and with much gladness: Well, I would I had a pen and ink here, and I would write this down before I go any further. For surely I will not forget this forty years hence.’

Now like that comforting Sabbath morning to John Bunyan, so every returning Sabbath morning of our own is appointed of God to be a comforting time to us also. Every returning Sabbath morning the command comes forth from the God of Salvation to all His true preachers:

‘Comfort my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her iniquity is pardoned. Say to her that He who was delivered for her offences was raised again this morning for her justification.’

Now all other preachers among us but the Puritan preachers are either afraid, or they are ashamed, or they are in some way not willing, or are in some way not able, to preach the one thing worth preaching: a free and a full justification by faith in Jesus Christ that is; and, then, out of that, a life of evangelical obedience. You never hear the one divine message of a free and a full and an immediate forgiveness from any other pulpit but the Puritan pulpit. Or if you ever hear it, all other preachers mix it up and adulterate it with the wood and the hay and the stubble of our own impossible performances. For my part, the older I grow and the wiser I grow, I both preach and pray and sing more and more every Sabbath morning Paul’s gospel, that is to say, the Puritan gospel. Summer and winter, fair and foul, dark and clear, I open my Divine Day with Charles Wesley’s Sabbath morning words:

Dark and cheerless is the morn Unaccompanied by Thee:

Joyless is the Day’s return Till Thy mercy’s beams I see. And almost more with this of Charles Wesley’s also: His blood can make the foulest clean, His blood avails for me. And Jonathan Edwards, that mighty Puritan, says to us that we are on this day specially to meditate upon and to celebrate the work of our redemption. We are with especial joy to remember the resurrection of our Lord, because His resurrection was the full finish of our redemption. This was the Day of the great gladness of His heart. For this was the Day of His deliverance from the chains of death, as it was the day of our deliverance from the chains of hell. And as John Bunyan has it in his own inimitable and incomparable way: On every Sabbath morning he always asserted that he saw Jesus Christ leaping and dancing and singing around his deserted grave, because He had that morning finished for ever John Bunyan’s justification. Hooker himself was a true Puritan as often as he preached on justification on a Lord’s Day morning. Would that that wonderful man had given more of his time and more of his strength and more of his style to the pure Gospel, and less to the ecclesiastical polity of only one section of the Church of Christ; great as his services have been to all our Churches in some parts of his great debate. Keep up your hearts, all you Puritan preachers. For yours is the only truly heart-comforting and soulsatisfying preaching in all the world. That preaching of yours made Paul, and it made Luther, and it made Hooker, and it made all the English and Scottish reformers, and it made the pilgrim fathers, and it made the Wesleys, and it made Chalmers, and it made Spurgeon and Parker. It made them all, because there is nothing else to be called true preaching; there is nothing else to make true preachers in all the world. There is no other preaching with such Scripturalness, and such depth, and such strength, and such insight, and such adequate and expert treatment of the case, and such adequate and expert treatment of the Cross, and out of all that such Pauline treatment of a sinner’s Sabbath morning justification. The true comforting time comes again to every truly Puritan and truly evangelical preacher, and to every truly Puritan and truly evangelical people, with every returning Lord’s Day morning. And then above all other comforting Sabbath mornings the communion Sabbath morning comes to us here next Lord’s Day with its special and its supreme comfort to all true communicants. For the God of Salvation is at His best on a communion morning, and His Puritan preachers are at their best, and His prepared people are at their best also. Not that Jesus Christ can be any more or any better to you on a communion day than He is every Sabbath day, when you again receive and rest upon Him alone for salvation as He is offered to you in the Gospel. Only, the Lord’s Supper has a Gospel impressiveness about it all its own. For as the Apostle says to the Galatians: ‘Christ crucified is more evidently set forth before your eyes in the Lord’s Supper.’ You hear Christ preached every Sabbath, and as often as you hear you again believe to the saving of your souls. But on the communion Sabbath you both hear, and see, and touch, and taste your salvation, till all your bodily senses are, so to speak, sanctified to the salvation of your souls. As Robert Bruce has it in his magnificent sacramental sermons:

‘Speers thou what new thing we get in the sacrament? I say, we get Christ better than we did before. We get a better grip of Christ in the sacrament. The same thing which thou possessed by the hearing of the Word, thou possesses now more largely. For by the sacrament my faith is nourished and the bounds of my soul are enlarged; and so where I had but a small grip of Christ before, as it were betwixt my finger and my thumb; now, I get Him in my haill hand. For, ay the more my faith grows the better a grip I get of Christ Jesus. So far that great Puritan preacher in Reformation Edinburgh. And then when you prepare yourselves for the communion day and for the Lord’s Table by some previous days and nights of recollection of your past life, and by retired reading of the Word of God, and by much secret prayer to Him, then the Supper comes home to you with an immense power and an immense impressiveness. So much so, that at the very moment when the elder puts the bread and the wine into your hand, that very moment Almighty God again puts His Son and His salvation into your heart. And then Christ Himself comes and speaks in your heart and says to you: My broken body thus I give For you, for all: take, eat, and live. My blood I thus pour forth, He cries, To cleanse the soul in sin that lies. And that very moment the sin-cleansing efficacy of His atoning blood is anew experienced and anew possessed by every believing and appropriating heart. Yes: Jesus Christ is at His very best on the communion day, and your Gospel preachers are at their very best. And you are at your very best yourselves. And then your great comforting time has again come round to you once more in this sad and sinful world. But it is not your Puritan weekly Sabbath, nor is it your Puritan communion Sabbath, nor is it your best Puritan preaching that is your truest and your best and your consummating comforting time; it is — will you let me say it? — your death-bed; yes, it is your death-bed if you are prepared for it. It will be sure to startle some and it will almost anger others to hear a good word said for death; for death, which is the last of all our enemies, as Paul himself in one place calls it. But a great Pauline preacher, Thomas Shepard, who is by far the deepest and the most spiritual of all the pilgrim fathers, he says again and again and again of death that to a true Christian man his death is his most comforting time; it is by far and away his best means of grace; it is by far and away his best Gospel ordinance. Far away better than the weekly Sabbath, far away better than the Communion Sabbath, and far away better than the best preaching. For, says Shepard, the Sabbath and even the Supper itself and even when they are both at their very best, they only bring Christ down to us for another short season. But our death, if we are thoroughly prepared for it, and if we accomplish it aright, will immediately take us home to be with Christ for ever; never again to be parted from Him, and never again to be found unlike Him. But for Thomas Shepard or any one else to speak of death in that bright and eager and entrancing way will seem I fear to some of you to be simply monstrous and insufferable and impossible. You would rather have the so-called Puritan gloom than an unnatural and an impossible hilarity like that about death. But all the same, it was David’s hilarity, and it was our Lord’s hilarity, and it was Paul’s, and Luther’s, and Shepard’s, and Rutherford’s hilarity and that of many more. Read the Revelation of John the Divine, and the Paradise of Dante, and the deathbeds of John Bunyan’s pilgrims, and Newman’s Gerontius, and your own Rutherford’s Letters. Read in all those so masterly and so heavenlyminded books, and you will see that death, as we are wont to call it, is not death at all to them, but is the true beginning of everlasting life. It is the true comforting time to all those who have been for so long saying to themselves secretly like David that they shall be satisfied only when they awake with His likeness. And again like David: I wait for God, my soul doth wait, my hope is in His word. And like Paul: To me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. And like Rutherford:

There to an ocean fullness, His mercy doth expand, And glory, glory dwelleth In Immanuel’s Land. And again:

Amid the shades of evening, While sinks life’s lingering sand, I hail the glory dawning In Immanuel’s Land. And like George Herbert:

Death! thou wast once an uncouth, hideous thing! But since our Saviour’s death Has put some blood into thy face, Thou hast grown, sure, a thing to be desired, And full of grace. And like James Montgomery:

So, when my latest breath Shall rend the veil in twain, By death I shall escape from death, And life eternal gain. And like Alfred Tennyson:

Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning at the bar When I put out to sea.

For, though from out our bourne of time and place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face, When I have crossed the bar. And almost best of all — for your tombstone and mine — this: ‘The souls of believers are at their death made perfect in holiness, and do immediately pass into glory.’ Yes; our death, says Thomas Shepard, is our best means of grace; it is our best Gospel ordinance; and it is by far and away our best comforting time. Comfort ye, therefore, comfort ye, my dying people, saith your God.