GOD BEGAN THE WORK OF SALVATION IN YOU AND HE SHALL FINISH IT. THE PERSEVERANCE OF THE SAINTS C.H. Spurgeon First of all this (work of salvation) is a good work! This good is THE BEST that a man can receive. To make a man healthy in body and wealthy in estate, to educate his mind and train his faculties - all these are good, but in comparison with the salvation of the soul, they sink into insignificance! The work of sanctification is a good work in the highest possible sense, since it influences a man by good motives. It sets him on good works, introduces him among good men, gives him fellowship with good angels and in the end makes him like unto the good God Himself. The Apostle calls it a “work,” and, in the deepest sense, it is indeed a work to convert a soul. If Niagara could suddenly be made to leap upward insteadof forever dashing downward from its rocky height, it were not such a miracle as to change the perverse will and the raging passions of men! To wash the Ethiopian white, or remove the leopard’s spots, is proverbially a difficulty—yet these are but surface works! To renew the very core of manhood and tear sin from its hold upon man’s heart this is not only the finger of God, but the baring of His arm. Observe that the Apostle affirms that this good work was BEGUN BY GOD. He was evidently no believer in those remarkable powers which some theologians ascribe to “free will”! He was no worshipper of that modern Diana of the Ephesians. He declares that the good work was begun by God, from which I gather that the faintest gracious desire which ultimately blossoms into the fragrant flower of earnest prayer and humble faith is the work of God. No, Sinner, you shall never be before God! The first step towards ending the separation between the prodigal son and his father is taken by the Father, not by the son! There lies within the heart of man no grain or vestige of spiritual good. He is to all good, alien, insensible, dead and he cannot be restored to God except by an agency which is altogether from without (outside) himself and from above! If you could develop what is in the heart of man, you would produce a devil—for that is the spirit which works in the children of disobedience! Develop that carnal mind which is enmity against God and you cannot by any possibility be reconciled to Him and the result is Hell. The fact is that the Divine life has departed from the natural man—man is dead in sin and life must come to him from the Giver of life, or he must remain dead forevermore. There are some who would persuade us that this great work of the salvation of souls is begun by God and then deserted and left incomplete! And that there will be spirits lost forever upon whom the Holy Spirit once exerted His sanctifying power—for whom the Redeemer shed His precious blood, and whom the eternal Father once looked upon with eyes of complacent love! I believe no such thing! The repetition of such beliefs curdles my blood with horror! They sound like blasphemy! No, where the Lord begins He will complete. And if He puts His right hand to any work, He will not stop until the work is done, whether it is to strike Pharaoh with plagues and at last to drown his chivalry in the Red Sea, or to lead His people through the wilderness like sheep and bring them in the end into the land that flows with milk and honey. In nothing does Jehovah turn from His intent. “Has He said and shall He not do it? Has He purposed it, and shall it not come to pass?” “He is God and changes not and therefore the sons of Jacob are not consumed”. That day of the Second Coming is set as the day of the finished work which God has begun, when, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, body, soul, and spirit, shall see the face of God with acceptance and forever and ever rejoice in the pleasures which are at God’s right hand. This is what we are looking forward to—that God who taught us to repent—will sanctify us wholly! That He who made the briny tear to flow, will wipe every tear from that same eye! That He who made us gird ourselves with the sackcloth and the ashes of penitence, will yet gird us with the fair white linen which is the righteousness of the saints! HE WHO BROUGHT US TO THE CROSS WILL BRING US TO THE CROWN! He who made us look upon Him whom we pierced and mourn because of Him, will cause us to see the King in His beauty and the land that is very far off. The same dear hand that struck and afterwards healed, will, in the latter days, caress us! He who looked upon us when we were dead in sin and called us into spiritual life, will continue to regard us with favour till our life shall be consummated in the land where there is no more death, sorrow nor sighing! Such is the Truth of God which the text evidently teaches us. WE SHALL SHOW FURTHER GROUND FOR OUR BELIEF IN THE DOCTRINE OF THE FINAL PERSEVERANCE OF THE SAINTS. Our first ground shall be the express teaching of Holy Scripture. But, my dear Friends, to quote all the Scriptural passages which teach that the saints shall hold on their way would be to quote a LARGE proportion of the Bible, for, to my mind, SCRIPTURE IS SATURATED THROUGH AND THROUGH WITH THIS TRUTH OF GOD. And I have often said that if any man could convince me that Scripture did not teach the perseverance of Believers, I would at once reject Scripture altogether as teaching nothing at all—as being an incomprehensible book of which a plain man could make neither heads nor tails, for this seems to be of all doctrines the one that lies most evidently upon the surface. Take the ninth verse of the 17th chapter of the book of Job and hear the testimony of the Patriarch: “The righteous also shall hold on his way and he that has clean hands shall be stronger and stronger.” Not, “the righteous shall be saved, let him do what he will”—that we never believed and never shall—but “the righteous shall hold on his way”—his way of holiness, his way of devotion, his way of faith—he shall hold to that and he shall make a growth in it, for he that has clean hands shall add “strength to strength,” as the Hebrew has it, or, as we put it, “shall be stronger and stronger.” In the 125th Psalm, read the first and second verses, “They that trust in the Lord,” that is the special description of a Believer, “shall be as mount Zion, which cannot be removed, but abides forever. As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the Lord is round about His people from henceforth even forever.” Here are two specimen ears pulled out of those rich sheaves which are to be found in the Old Testament. As for the New Testament, how peremptory are the words of Christ in the 10th of John, 28th verse, “I give unto them eternal life”—not life temporal which may die—“and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of My hands. My Father, which gave them to Me, is greater than all, and no man is able to pluck them out of My Father’s hands.” The Apostle tells us, 11th Romans, 29th verse, that, “the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.” That is, whatever gifts the Lord gives, He never changes his mind of having given them so as to take them back again. And whatever calling He makes of any man, He never retracts it, but he stands to it still. There is no playing fast and loose in Divine mercy! His gifts and calling are without repentance. If He begins and does not finish His work, all the parts of His Character are dishonoured. Where is His wisdom? Why did He begin that which He did not intend to finish? Where is His power? Will not evil spirits always say “that He could not do what He did not do”? Will it not be a standing jeer throughout the halls of Hell that God commenced the work and then stayed from it? Will they not say that the obstinacy of man’s sin was greater than the Grace of God, that the hardness of the human heart was too hard for God to dissolve? Further, how can it be that the righteous should, after all, fall from Grace and perish, if you recollect the doctrine of the Atonement? The doctrine of Atonement, as we hold it and believe it to be in Scripture, is this—that Jesus Christ rendered to Divine justice a satisfaction for the sins of His people—that He was punished in their place. Now if He were so, and I do not believe any other atonements worth the turning of a finger, if He were really our satisfactory vicarious Sacrifice, then how could the child of God be cast into Hell? Why should he be cast there? His sins were laid on Christ—what is to condemn him? Christ has been condemned in his place! In the name of everlasting justice, which must stand, though Heaven and earth should rock and reel, how can a man for whom Christ shed His blood be held as guilty before God, when Christ took his guilt and was punished in his place? HE WHO BELIEVES MUST SURELY BE ULTIMATELY BROUGHT TO GLORY—the Atonement requires it—and since he cannot come to Glory without persevering in holiness,he must so persevere, or else the Atonement is a thing that has no efficacy and force. The doctrine of justification, in the next place, proves this. Every man that believes in Jesus is justified from all things from which he could not be justified by the Law of Moses. The Apostle Paul regards a man who is justified as being completely set free from the possibility of accusation. Have you not the rolling thunder of the Apostle’s holy boasting still in your ears: “Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect?” If nothing can be laid to their charge—if there is no accuser—who is he that condemns? If God considers Believers just and righteous through the righteousness of His dear Son. If they put on His wondrous mantle—the fair white linen of a Savior’s righteousness—where is there room for anything to be brought against them by which they can be condemned? And if not accused, nor condemned, they must hold on their way and be saved! Further still, my Brethren, the intercession of Christ in Heaven is a guarantee for the salvation of all who trust Him. Remember Peter’s case—“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan has desired to have you that he may sift you as wheat, but I have prayed for you, that your faith fail not.” And the prayer of Christ preserved Peter and made him weep bitterly after he had fallen into sin. The like prayer of our ever-watchful Shepherd is put up for all His chosen—day and night he pleads, wearing the breastplate as our great High Priest before the Throne of God—and if He pleads for His people, how shall they perish unless, indeed, His intercession has lost its authority? Moreover, do you not remember that every Believer is said to be “one with Christ”? “For you are members of His body,” says the Apostle, “of His flesh, and of His bones!” And is your imagination so depraved that you can picture Christ, the Head, united to a body in which the members frequently decay—hand and foot and eyes, perhaps, rotting off so as to need fresh members to be created in their place? The metaphor is too atrocious for me to venture to enlarge upon it! “Because I live you shall live also,” is the immortality that covers every member of the body of Christ! There is no fear that the righteous will turn back to sin and give themselves up to their old corruptions, for the holiness that is in Christ by the vital energy of the Holy Spirit penetrates the entire system of the spiritual body and the least member is preserved by the life of Christ! Read the full sermon –
Posted on: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 09:06:11 +0000
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