I know that it is very unfashionable nowadays to talk about 'salvation'
as man's need. The word has come to be so worn and commonplace and
technical that many men turn away from it; but for all that, let me try
to stir up the consciousness of the deep necessity that it expresses.
What is it to be saved? Two things; to be healed and to be safe. In
both aspects the expression is employed over and over again in
Scripture. It means either restoration from sickness or deliverance
from peril. I venture to press upon every one of my hearers these two
considerations--we all need healing from sickness; we all need safety
from peril.
Dear brethren, most of you are entire strangers to me; I daresay many
of you never heard my voice before, and probably may never hear it
again. But yet, because 'we have all of us one human heart,' a
brother-man comes to you as possessing with you one common experience,
and ventures to say on the strength of his knowledge of himself, if on
no other ground, 'We have all sinned and come short of the glory of
God.'
Mind, I am not speaking about vices. I have no doubt you are a
perfectly respectable man, in all the ordinary relations of life. I am
not speaking about crimes. I daresay there may be a man or two here
that has been in a dock in his day. Possibly. It does not matter
whether there is or not. But I am not speaking about either vices or
crimes; I am speaking about how we stand in reference to God. And I
pray you to bring yourselves--for no one can do it for you, and no
words of mine can do anything but stimulate you to the act--face to
face with the absolute and dazzlingly pure righteousness of your Father
in Heaven, and to feel the contrast between your life and what you know
He desires you to be. Be honest with yourselves in asking and answering
the question whether or not _you_ have this sickness of sin, its
paralysis in regard to good or its fevered inclination to evil. If
salvation means being healed of a disease, we all have the disease; and
whether we wish it or no, we want the healing.
And what of the other meaning of the word? Salvation means being safe.
Are you safe? Am I safe? Is anybody safe standing in front of that
awful law that rules the whole universe, 'Whatsoever a man soweth, that
shall he also reap'? I am not going to talk about any of the moot
points which this generation has such a delight in discussing, as to
the nature, the duration, the purpose, or the like, of future
retribution. All that I am concerned in now is that all men, deep down
in the bottom of their consciousness--and you and I amongst the
rest--know that there _is_ such a thing as retribution here; and if
there be a life beyond the grave at all, necessarily in an infinitely
intenser fashion there. Somewhere and somehow, men will have to lie on
the beds that they have made; to drink as they have brewed. If sin
means separation from God, and separation from God means, as it
assuredly does, death, then I ask you--and there is no need for any
exaggerated words about it--Are we not in danger? And if salvation be a
state of deliverance from sickness, and a state of deliverance from
peril, do we not need it?
Ah, brethren, I venture to say that we need it more than anything else.
You will not misunderstand me as expressing the slightest depreciation
of other remedies that are being extensively offered now for the
various evils under which society and individuals groan. I heartily
sympathise with them all, and would do my part to help them forward;
but I cannot but feel that whilst culture of the intellect, of the
taste, of the sense of beauty, of the refining agencies generally, is
very valuable; and whilst moral and social and economical and political
changes will all do something, and some of them a great deal, to
diminish the sum of human misery, you have to go deeper down than these
reach. It is not culture that we want most; it is salvation. Brethren,
you and I are wrong in our relation to God, and that means death
and--if you do not shrink from the vulgar old word--damnation. We are
wrong in our relation to God, and that has to be set right before we
are fundamentally and thoroughly right. That is to say, salvation is
our deepest need.
Then how does it come that men go on, as so many of my friends here now
have gone on, all their days paying no attention to that need? Is there
any folly, amidst all the irrationalities of that irrational creature
man, to be matched with the folly of steadily refusing to look forward
and settle for ourselves the prime element in our condition--viz., our
relation to God? Strange is it not--that power that we have of refusing
to look at the barometer when it is going down, of turning away from
unwholesome subjects just because we know them to be so unwelcome and
threatening, and of buying a moment's exemption from discomfort at the
price of a life's ruin?
Do you remember that old story of the way in which the prisoners in the
time of the French Revolution used to behave? The tumbrils came every
morning and carried off a file of them to the guillotine, and the rest
of them had a ghastly make-believe of carrying on the old frivolities
of the life of the _salons_ and of society. And it lasted for an hour
or two, but the tumbril came next morning all the same, and the
guillotine stood there gaping in the _Place_. And so it is useless,
although it is so frequently done by so many of us, to try to shut out
facts instead of facing them. A man is never so wise as when he says to
himself, 'Let me fairly know the whole truth of my relation to the
unseen world in so far as it can be known here, and if that is wrong,
let me set about rectifying it if it be possible.' 'What will ye do in
the end?' is the wisest question that a man can ask himself, when the
end is as certain as it is with us, and as unsatisfactory as I am
afraid it threatens to be with some of us if we continue as we are.
Have I not a right to appeal to the half-sleeping and half-waking
consciousness that endorses my words in some hearts as I speak? O
brethren, you would be far wiser men if you did like this jailer in the
Macedonian prison, came and gave yourselves no rest till you have this
question cleared up, 'What must I do to be saved?'
There was an old Rabbi who used to preach to his disciples, 'Repent the
day before you die.' And when they said to him, 'Rabbi, we do not know
what day we are going to die.' 'Then,' said he, 'repent to-day.' And so
I say to you, 'Settle about the end before the end comes, and as you do
not know when it may come, settle about it now.'
II. That brings me to the next point here, viz., the blessed, clear
answer that we may all take.
Paul and Silas were not non-plussed by this question, nor did they
reply to it in the fashion in which many men would have answered it.
Take a specimen of other answers. If anybody were so far left to
himself as to go with this question to some of our modern wise men and
teachers, they would say, 'Saved? My good fellow, there is nothing to
be saved from. Get rid of delusions, and clear your mind of cant and
superstition.' Or they would say, 'Saved? Well, if you have gone wrong,
do the best you can in the time to come.' Or if you went to some of our
friends they would say, 'Come and be baptized, and receive the grace of
regeneration in holy baptism; and then come to the sacraments, and be
faithful and loyal members of the Church which has Apostolic succession
in it.' And some would say, 'Set yourselves to work and toil and
labour.' And some would say, 'Don't trouble yourselves about such
whims. A short life and a merry one; make the best of it, and jump the
life to come.' Neither cold morality, nor godless philosophy, nor wild
dissipation, nor narrow ecclesiasticism prompted Paul's answer. He
said, 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.'
What did that poor heathen man know about the Lord Jesus Christ? Next
to nothing. How could he believe upon Him if he knew so little about
Him? Well, you hear in the context that this summary answer to the
question was the beginning, and not the end, of a conversation, which
conversation, no doubt, consisted largely in extending and explaining
the brief formulary with which it had commenced. But it is a grand
thing that we can put the all-essential truth into half a dozen simple
words, and then expound and explain them as may be necessary. And I
come to you now, dear brethren, with nothing newer or more wonderful,
or more out of the ordinary way than the old threadbare message which
men have been preaching for nineteen hundred years, and have not
exhausted, and which some of you have heard for a lifetime, and have
never practised, 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.'
Now I am not going to weary you with mere dissertations upon the
significance of these words. But let me single out two points about
them, which perhaps though they may be perfectly familiar to you, may
come to you with fresh force from my lips now.
Mark, first, whom it is that we are to believe on. '_The Lord_,' that
is the divine Name; '_Jesus_,' that is the name of a Man; '_Christ_,'
that is the name of an office. And if you put them all together, they
come to this, that He on whom we sinful men may put our sole trust and
hope for our healing and our safety, is the Son of God, who came down
upon earth to live our life and to die our death that He might bear on
Himself our sins, and fulfil all which ancient prophecy and symbol had
proclaimed as needful, and therefore certain to be done, for men. It is
not a starved half-Saviour whose name is only Jesus, and neither Lord
nor Christ, faith in whom will save you. You must grasp the whole
revelation of His nature and His power if from Him there is to flow the
life that you need.
And note what it is that we are to exercise towards Jesus Christ. To
'believe on Him' is a very different thing from _believing Him_. You
may accept all that I have been saying about who and what He is, and be
as far away from the faith that saves a soul as if you had never hoard
His name. To believe on the Lord Jesus Christ is to lean the whole
weight of yourselves upon Him. What do you do when you trust a man who
promises you any small gift or advantage? What do you do when dear ones
say, 'Rest on my love'? You simply trust them. And the very same
exercise of heart and mind which is the blessed cement that holds human
society together, and the power that sheds peace and grace over
friendships and love, is the power which, directed to Jesus Christ,
brings all His saving might into exercise in our lives. Brethren, trust
Him, trust Him as Lord, trust Him as Jesus, trust Him as Christ. Learn
your sickness, learn your danger; and be sure of your Healer and
rejoice in your security. 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou
shalt be saved.'
III. Lastly, consider the blessing we may all receive. This jailer
about whom we have been speaking was a heathen when the sun set and a
Christian when it rose. On the one day he was groping in darkness, a
worshipper of idols, without hope in the future, and ready in
desperation to plunge himself into the darkness beyond, when he thought
his prisoners had fled. In an hour or two 'he rejoiced, believing in
God with all his house.'
A sudden conversion, you say, and sudden conversions are always
suspicious. I am not so sure about that; they may be, or they may not
be, according to circumstances. I know very well that it is not
fashionable now to preach the possibility or the probability of men
turning all at once from darkness to light, and that people shrug their
shoulders at the old theory of sudden conversions. I think, so much the
worse. There are a great many things in this world that have to be done
suddenly if they are ever to be done at all. And I, for my part, would
have far more hope for a man who, in one leap, sprung from the depth of
the degradation of that coarse jailer into the light and joy of the
Christian life, than for a man who tried to get to it by slow steps.
You have to do everything in this world worth doing by a sudden
resolution, however long the preparation may have been which led up to
the resolution. The act of resolving is always the act of an instant.
And when men are plunged in darkness and profligacy, as are, perhaps,
some of my hearers now, there is far more chance of their casting off
their evil by a sudden jerk than of their unwinding the snake by slow
degrees from their arms. There is no reason whatever why the soundest
and solidest and most lasting transformation of character should not
begin in a moment's resolve.
And there is an immense danger that with some of you, if that change
does not begin in a moment's resolve now, you will be further away from
it than ever you were. I have no doubt there are many of you who, at
any time for years past, have known that you ought to be Christians,
and who, at any time for years past, have been saying to yourselves:
'Well, I will think about it, and I am tending towards it, but I cannot
quite make the plunge.' Why not; and why not now? You can if you will;
you ought; you will be a better and happier man if you do. You will be
saved from your sickness and safe from your danger.
The outcast jailer changed nationalities in a moment. You who have
dwelt in the suburbs of Christ's Kingdom all your lives--why cannot you
go inside the gate as quickly? For many of us the gradual 'growing up
in the nurture and admonition of the Lord' has been the appointed way.
For some of us I verily believe the sudden change is the best. Some of
us have a sunrise as in the tropics, where the one moment is grey and
cold, and next moment the seas are lit with the glory. Others of us
have a sunrise as at the poles, where a long slowly-growing light
precedes the rising, and the rising itself is scarce observable. But it
matters little as to how we get to Christ, if we are there, and it
matters little whether a man's faith grows up in a moment, or is the
slow product of years. If only it be rooted in Christ it will bear
fruit unto life eternal.
And so, dear brethren, I come to you with my last question, this man
rejoiced, believing in the Lord; why should not you; and why should not
you now? 'Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.' A
look is a swift act, but if it be the beginning of a lifelong gaze, it
will be the beginning of salvation and of a glory longer than life.