How Saints May Help The Devil # 2

How Saints May Help The Devil # 2

I. First, then, it shall be my sad and melancholy business this morning to show certain facts which it were dishonest to deny, namely, that THE ACTS OF MANY OF CHRIST'S FOLLOWERS HAVE BEEN THE CAUSE OF JUSTIFYING AND COMFORTING SINNERS IN THEIR EVIL WAYS. 

1. And first I would observe that the daily inconsistencies of the people of God have much to do in this matter. By inconsistencies I do not exactly mean those grosser crimes into which, at sad and mournful periods, many professors fall; but I mean those frequent inconsistencies which become so common indeed that they are scarcely condemned by society.

The covetousness of too many Christians has had this offset. "Look," says the worldling, "this man professes that his inheritance is above, and that his affection is set not on things on this earth, but on the things of heaven but look at him, he is just as earnest as I am about the things of this world; he can drive the screw home as tightly with his debtor as I can; he can scrape and cut with those that deal with him quite as keenly as ever I have done." Nay, beloved, this is not a mere tale; alas! I have seen persons held up to commendation as successful merchants, whose lives will not bear the test of Scripture, whose business transactions were as hard as griping, as grasping, as the transactions of the most worldly. How often has it happened that some of you have bent your knee in the sanctuary, and have said, "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors," and one hour afterwards your finger has been almost meeting your thumb through the jugular vein of some debtor whom you had seized by the throat! The church of Christ appears to be as worldly as the world itself, and professors of religion have become as sharp in trade and as ungenerous in their dealing as those that have never been baptized into the Lord Jesus, and have never professed to serve him. And now what does the world say? It throws this in our teeth. If it be accused of loving the things of time and sense, it answers, "And so do you." If we tell the world that it has set its hopes upon a shadow, it replies, "But we have set our hope upon the self-same thing in which you are trusting; you are as worldly, as grasping, as covetous as we are; your protest has lost its force; you are no longer witnesses against us - we are accusers of you."

Another point in which the sinner often excuses himself is the manifest worldliness of many Christians. You will see Christian men and women as fond of dress, and as pleased with the frivolities of the age, as any other persons possibly could be, just as anxious to adorn their outward persons, so as to be seen of men; just as ambitious to win the praise which fools accord to fine dressing, as the most silly fop or the most gaudy among worldly women. What saith the world, when we turn round to it, and accuse it of being a mere butterfly, and finding all its pleasures in gaudy toys? "Oh! yes," it says, "we know your cant, but it is just the same with you." Do you not stand up and sing, "Jewels to me are gaudy toys, And gold but sordid dust?"

And yet you are just as fond of glittering as we are; your doctors of divinity pride themselves just as much in their D. D. as any of us in other titles. You are just as punctilious about terms of honor as any of us can be. You talk about carrying the cross; but we do not see it anywhere, except it be a golden cross sometimes hanging on your bosom. You say you are crucified to the world, and the world to you: it is a very merry sort of crucifixion. You say that you mortify your members and deny yourselves: your mortification must be suffered in secret, for it is but very little that we can see of it! Thus the worldling casts back to our challenge, declaring that we are not sincere, and thus he comforts himself in his own sin, and justifies himself in his iniquity.

Look too, at the manifest pride of many professors of religion. You see members of Christian churches as proud as they possibly can be. Their backs are as stiff as if an iron rod were in the center, they come up to the house of God, and it is a Christian doctrine that God has made of one flesh all nations that dwell upon the face of the earth, but the Christian is as aristocratic as anybody else, just as proud and just as stiff. Is the Christian clothed in broad cloth? How often does he feel it a condescension to own a smock frock! And how often do you see a sister of Christ in satin, who thinks it something wonderful if she owns a fellow-member in an unwashable print. It is of no use denying it. I do not thing that the evil is so common amongst us as it is in the some churches and chapels in which a poor man scarcely dares to show his face. The pride of the church surely has become almost as great as the pride of Sodom of old. Her fullness of bread and her stiffness of neck hath brought her to exalt herself; and whereas it is the real glory of the church that "the poor have the gospel preached unto them," and that the poor have received the Word with gladness, it becomes now the honor of the church to talk of her respectability of the dignity and station of her members, and of the greatness of her wealth. What, then, do worldlings say? "You accuse us of pride, you are as proud as we are. You the humble followers of Jesus, who washed his saints' feet? Not you; no, you would have no objection, we doubt not to be washed by others, but we do not thing it likely that you would ever wash ours! You the disciples of the fishermen of Galilee? Not you; you are too fine and great for that. Accuse us not of pride: why, you are as stiff-necked a generation, as we ourselves are."

~Charles H. Spurgeon~

(continued with # 3)