ah! you are one of those sanctified fellows.” Well, if they said so to me, I should say, “I wish you would prove it.” What can be a more holy thing than to be a sanctified man? and what can be a more happy thing! Let me ask you, then, are you sanctified? One says, “I feel so sinful” I did not ask you that: I asked you whether you are set apart for God’s service. Can you say,
Dear Lord, I give myself away,
’Tis all that I can do?
Take me just as I am, and make use of me; I desire to be wholly yours? Do you feel that for you to live is Christ; that there is not any object you are living for except for Christ — that Christ is the great aim of your ambition, the great object of all your labours; that you are like Samson, a Nazarite, consecrated to God? Oh! then, remember that you are perfected in Christ. But, my hearer, if you are not sanctified to God in this sense, if you live for yourself, for pleasure, and for the world, you are not perfected in Christ, and what is to become of you? God will give you no access to him; God will not use you in his service; you have no peace in your conscience, and in the day when God shall come to separate the precious from the vile, he will say, “Those are my precious ones, who have the blood on them; but these have rejected Christ, they have lived for themselves, they were dead while they lived, and they are damned now that they are dead.” Take heed of that! May God give you grace to be sanctified to God, and then you shall be for ever perfected through Christ.
Free Grace
No. 233-5:65. A Sermon Delivered On Sunday Morning, January 9, 1859, By C. H. Spurgeon, At the Music Hall, Royal Surrey Gardens.
“Not for your sakes do I do this,” says the Lord God, “let it be known to you: be ashamed and confounded for your own ways, oh house of Israel.” {Ezekiel 36:32}
1. There are two sins of man that are bred in the bone, and that continually come out in the flesh. One is self-dependence and the other is self-exaltation. It is very hard, even for the best of men, to keep themselves from the first error. The holiest of Christians, and those who best understand the gospel of Christ, find in themselves a constant inclination to look to the power of the creature, instead of looking to the power of God and the power of God alone. Over and over again, Holy Scripture has to remind us of that which we never ought to forget, that salvation is God’s work from first to last, and is not of man, neither by man. But so it is, this old error — that we are to save ourselves, or that we are to do something in the matter of salvation — always rises up, and we find ourselves continually tempted by it to step aside from the simplicity of our faith in the power of the Lord our God. Why, even Abraham himself was not free from the great error of relying upon his own strength. God had promised to him that he would give him a son — Isaac, the child of promise. Abraham believed it, but at last, weary with waiting, he adopted the carnal expedient of taking to himself Hagar, to wife, and he fancied that Ishmael would most certainly be the fulfilment of God’s promise; but instead of Ishmael’s helping to fulfil the promise, he brought sorrow to Abraham’s heart, for God would not have it that Ishmael should dwell with Isaac. “Cast out,” said the Scripture, “the bondwoman and her son; for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the free woman.” Now we, in the matter of salvation, are apt to think that God is tarrying long in the fulfilment of his promise, and we set to work ourselves to do something, and what do we do? Sink ourselves deeper in the mire and pile up for ourselves a store of future troubles and trials. Do we not read that it grieved Abraham’s heart to send Ishmael away? Ah! and many a Christian has been grieved by those works of nature which he accomplished with the design of helping the God of grace. Oh, beloved, we shall find ourselves very frequently attempting the foolish task of assisting Omnipotence and teaching the Omniscient One. Instead of looking to grace alone to sanctify us, we find ourselves adopting philosophical rules and principles which we think will perform the divine work. We shall only mar it; we shall bring grief into our own spirits. But if, instead of it, we in every work look up to the God of our salvation for help, and strength, and grace, and assistance, then our work will proceed to our own joy and comfort, and to God’s glory. That error, then, I say is in our bones, and will always dwell with us, and hence it is that the words of the text are put as an antidote against that error. It is distinctly stated in our text that salvation is by God. “Not for your sakes do I do this.” He says nothing about what we have done or can do. All the preceding and all the succeeding verses speak of what God does. “I will take you from among the heathen.” “I will sprinkle clean water upon you.” “I will give you a new heart.” “I will put my Spirit within you.” It is all by God: therefore, again recall to our remembrance this doctrine, and give up all dependence upon our own strength and power.
2. The other error to which man is very prone, is that of relying upon his own merit. Though there is no righteousness in any man, yet in every man there is a proneness to trust in some imagined merit. Strange that it should be so, but the most reprobate characters have yet some virtue as they think, upon which they rely. You will find the most abandoned drunkard pride himself that he is not a swearer. You will find the blaspheming drunkard pride himself that at least he is honest. You will find men with no other virtue in the world, exalt what they imagine to be a virtue — the fact that they do not profess to have any; and they think themselves to be extremely excellent, because they have honesty or rather impudence enough to confess that they are utterly vile. Somehow the human mind clings to human merit; it always will hold to it, and when you take away everything upon which you think it could rely, in less than a moment it fashions some other ground for confidence out of itself. Human nature with regard to its own merit, is like the spider, it bears its support in its own body, and it seems as if it would keep spinning on to all eternity. You may brush down one web, but it soon forms another; you may take the thread from one place, and you will find it clinging to your finger, and when you seek to brush it down with one hand you find it clinging to the other. It is hard to get rid of; it is always ready to spin its web and bind itself to some false ground of trust. It is against all human merit that I am this morning going to speak, and I feel that I shall offend a great many people here. I am about to preach a doctrine that is gall and vinegar to flesh and blood, one that will make righteous moralists gnash their teeth, and make others go away and declare that I am an Antinomian, and perhaps scarcely fit to live. However, that consequence is one which I shall not greatly deplore, if connected with it there should be in other hearts a yielding to this glorious truth, and a giving up to the power and grace of God, who will never save us, unless we are prepared to let him have all the glory.
3. First, I shall endeavour to expound at large the doctrine contained in this text; in the next place I shall endeavour to show its force and truthfulness; and then in the third place I shall seek God’s Holy Spirit to apply the useful, practical lessons which are to be drawn from it.
4. I. I shall endeavour to EXPOUND THIS TEXT. “Not for your sakes do I do this says the Lord God.” The motive for the salvation of the human race is to be found in the heart of God, and not in the character or condition of man. Two races have revolted against God — the one angelic, the other human. When a part of this angelic race revolted against the Most High, justice speedily overtook them; they were swept from their starry seats in heaven, and henceforth they have been reserved in darkness to the great day of the wrath of God. No mercy was ever presented to them, no sacrifice ever offered for them; but they were without hope and mercy, for ever consigned to the pit of eternal torment. The human race, far inferior in order of intelligence, sinned also, and as I believe sinned as atrociously; at any rate, if the sins of manhood that we have heard of would be put together and properly weighed, I can scarcely understand how even the sins of demons could be much blacker than the sin of mankind. However, the God who in his infinite justice passed over angels, and allowed them for ever to expiate their offences in the fires of hell, was pleased to look down on man. Here was election on a grand scale; the election of manhood, and the reprobation of fallen angelhood. What was the reason for it? The reason was in God’s mind, an inscrutable reason which we do not know, and which if we knew, probably we could not understand. Had you and I been asked to decide who should have been spared, I do think it probable we should have chosen that fallen angels should have been saved. Are they