REASONS FOR TURNING TO THE LORD – Charles Spurgeon
Reasons for Turning to the Lord
“Come, and let us return unto the Lord; for He has torn, but He will heal us; He has struck us, but He will bind us up. After two days will He revive us; on the third day He will raise us up, and we shall live in His sight.” Hosea 6:1, 2.
[Mr. Spurgeon was exceedingly unwell and his voice painfully weak, hence the pause in the middle of the sermon, during which the congregation sang part of a hymn to enable the preacher to gain strength enough to resume his discourse. This was the last sermon before Mr. Spurgeon’s departure from home to obtain needed rest. It has been revised by Mr. Spurgeon at Mentone. The sermons are continued regularly every week.]
The Tragedy of the Fall
If man had never sinned, what delightful communion there would have been between him and God! A fairy vision rises before us of loving obedience and condescending fellowship, holy delight and boundless favor, lowly adoration and fatherly smile, perfect bliss and infinite complacency. Alas! Alas! It is no more than a vision! God would have treated man with familiarity and indulgence, lavishing favor and honor upon him. The Garden of Eden, fair as were its glades and lovely as were its flowers, was but a faint image of the things prepared for man had he continued in loyalty to God. Inconceivable delights would have filled up the days of our life on earth had not the serpent’s trail come across our nature and slimed it over with sin. I shall not attempt any picture of man dwelling with God and God revealing Himself to man in new forms, always increasing man’s knowledge and, at the same time, causing His bliss to overflow. Alas! That dream has never been realized. That dangerous fruit which hung upon the tree of knowledge of good and evil has been plucked and eaten, and we will not pause to rehearse the sad story of the foul iniquities and the countless ills which have come upon mankind and severed man from his God.
The Wrath of God and the Justice We Deserve
Because of the fall and man’s depravity, justice now comes in with his rod and sword and changes the complexion of our life. God deals very graciously with man, but not at all after the fashion in which He might have dealt with him. He cannot, now, perpetually smile, but is led, by His holiness, to look on him with a wrathful countenance. The loving God, compelled by love itself, frowns at sin. He threatens, He denounces. His justice and holiness lead Him to use rough words towards His erring creatures. He does more; in infinite love, He chastens as well as rebukes. Instead of fatherly caresses, the great Lord wisely takes down the rod and lays it on the backs of those whom He most truly loves. “He scourges every son whom He receives.” Those nearest to His heart and most approved of His soul among the sons of Adam have nevertheless to feel that “our God is a consuming fire.” Placed in the crucible, they are thrust into the white heat of the furnace and there they are called to suffer that their dross may be removed.
God’s Wrath Upon the Ungodly
If thus the Lord is severe to His own people, what are His dealings with the ungodly? “God is angry with the wicked every day.” The wise men of modern thought have made a new god of late—one of those gods newly come up that our fathers knew not and who is quite unknown to the Bible, as false a god as Apollo or Baal. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob these deep thinkers cannot endure, but if you say that God is angry with the wicked every day, these modern god-makers tell you that He is too loving for that—that He cannot possibly be angry, but loves all, has redeemed all, and will, in the long run, save all, including Satan himself. They adore a god made of putty or of wax—plastic, effeminate, spineless, with no masculine faculty about him and no quality that entitles him to the respect of just and honest men. For a being, that cannot be angry at wrongdoing, is destitute of one of the essential virtues. And a moral Ruler, who is not angry with the wicked and who refuses to punish crime, is not divine. We find no such God as this modern saccharine idol when we come to search the Scriptures, for there the true God says, “If you walk contrary to Me, I will walk contrary to you.” “To the froward He will show Himself froward.” “Cursed is everyone that continues not in all things that are written in the book of the law to do them.” He is revealed as a God who “will by no means spare the guilty,” but declares that every transgression and iniquity shall have its just punishment of reward.
God’s Severe Dealings with Man
Since evil obtained sway over the human race, God walks towards men, therefore, not at all as He might have done if men had never fallen. He speaks to them in the stern voice of a Judge and handles them as one who sees the need of a rod. He treats men not as roughly as they deserve, for He is infinitely tender and gentle, but still with such severity as becomes necessary to show that He cannot smile on transgression. The conduct of God towards man is not like His dealing with the angels, not like His dealing with cherubim and seraphim but, according to our text, He tears, He strikes, He kills. It is of such a God as this that I have to speak tonight, and of such acts as these I have to talk with you. My design is not that any may flee from the Lord, but that as the result of what we have to say, many may return to the Lord, who He has struck, but who He will heal. Who He has slain, but who He will restore.
A Smiting God
There are three things in my text which are, to my mind, very clear. The first is a smiting God. The second is a believing heart, for he who used such words as my text was no unbeliever. And, thirdly, a persuasive voice—the voice which so pleadingly cries, “Come, and let us return unto the Lord.” May God the Holy Spirit, teach me how to proclaim the name of the Lord, and render the word quick and powerful to the salvation of the blood-bought. How much I need His strength in my extreme weakness! Pray for me, you saints of God, that once again I may faithfully and effectively do duty as one of the Lord’s ambassadors.
A Smiting God and His Hand in Our Afflictions
I. First, then, I see plainly enough in the text a smiting God—“He has torn, but He will heal us. He has struck us, but He will bind us up.” Notice, first, that the person who wrote these words discerns the presence of the Lord, for he is convinced that his trials come from God. Ungodly men set down their troubles to chance and sometimes they even trace them to the devil, as if they expected their father to have dealings with them. Frequently they lay their ills at the door of their fellow men and grow quarrelsome, malicious, and revengeful. It is a happy day for a man when he knows in whose hand is the rod and learns to trace his troubles to God. Alas, there are even some children of God who greatly err in this matter when under affliction. They spend their time in bewailing second causes, and do not look at the first cause. This is very brutish. If you strike a dog with a stick he will bite at the stick. Had he a little intelligence he would bite at you, knowing that the blow came not from the stick or stone, but from the hand that used these implements. So is it usually with unbelievers in trouble, they look at the secondary agent and they spend their anger or their thoughts entirely there. If, in the day of adversity, they would consider, they would perceive that affliction springs not out of the ground, neither do distresses come by chance, but the hand of the Lord is in all these things.
The Affliction as God’s Purpose
“Shall there be evil in a city and the Lord has not done it?” Whichever way the trial comes, it comes from Him. If the trouble was caused by a triumphant enemy or by a deceitful friend, if it comes as a loss in business or as a sickness of body, or if it wounded us through the arrows of death piercing the heart of our beloved, in either case it was the Lord. Learn that lesson. He has smitten you. He has torn you. He has done it all. He has ordained our trials for judgment and established them for correction. Let us not despise them by refusing to see His hand or by angrily rebelling against Him. We read that, “Aaron held his peace,” when his two sons were slain with fire because it was the fire of the Lord that struck them, and what could he say? If even Christian men too often forget the Lord’s hand, we need not be at all surprised that unconverted men do so.
The Purpose of Affliction and God’s Love
Perhaps I am speaking to one who has been followed by a succession of disasters till he is now surrounded by a sea of affliction. You have scarcely escaped from one trouble before you have plunged into another. It seems to you as if your “bad luck,” as you call it, were no more absent from you at any time than your shadow. You cannot get on at anything. Whatever you touch withers beneath your hands. You have been ill again and again. You have lost your best friend when you most needed him. You have lost your job and wherever you apply you get no favorable reply. It is true that you are not wise enough to trace some of these misfortunes to your own bad habits—your indolence or your drunkenness. I wish, however, you were even as wise as that, for then you might amend. If you grow wiser, still, you would say, “It cannot be that I am to have stroke upon stroke and loss upon loss without there being some reason for it, for God does not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.” I should not wonder, my friend, that you are so sorely smitten because the Lord has some great design of love to your soul.
God’s Chastisement as a Sign of His Love
Look at the prodigal son in the distant country. He had plenty of money and he spent it in riotous living. He was in fine health and lived in the fastest style. Wine and women soon took away his money and then he said that bad luck had befallen him. Of course it had, and the young squire was obliged to swallow his dignity and independence and seek for a job. He looked in the daily paper and searched up and down among his dear friends who had drunk to his health with gallons of his rare old wines. They knew of nothing for him and gave him the cold shoulder. No money-lender would grant him a loan and no man gave him any. He walked his shoes off his feet, but could find nothing to do. He had rags upon him and hunger within him. He was a broken-down gentleman without a trade and without the physical strength to dig or plow. What could he do? He was “down on his luck,” as men of his kind are known to say, and nobody wanted his company. One person who had some sort of pity for the poor wretch found him employment and he commenced active life in the noble capacity of a pig feeder. “He joined himself to a citizen of that country and he sent him into his fields to feed swine.” He was now at his lowest, for his occupation was filthy and degrading, and the wages were not enough to keep body and soul together, so that he often envied the hogs that could so readily fill themselves with husks. Yet in this deep distress, there was mercy and hope. His way home was round by the swine trough. He might never have come to his father if he had not come, first, to those pigs and husks.
God’s Mercy in Affliction
Perhaps, O tried sinner, the way to God for you is through your troubles. If the Lord had prospered you in that piece of betting, for instance, or if you had got on in that infamous business which you ought never to have touched, you might have been a rich man and have been damned. But you are not to be rich. God does not mean that you should be. He means to follow with stroke upon stroke and tearing upon tearing, till at last you shall realize that He is saying to you, “Return to Me, for you will never rest until you do.” You shall never know prosperity until you have come clean out and made your peace with God. Then shall your peace be as a river and your righteousness as the waves of the sea. I am certain that I speak as though I were a prophet to the soul of some who are in this house tonight. And I pray God that if it is so, they may look on the series of trials through which they have passed as being really sent to them, not by chance or haphazard, nor by the conjunction of the stars, nor by anything of that atheistic foolery which men are so fond of inventing, but sent from God Himself with benign intent. He smites, He tears, He slays, but this is all the surgery of love.
He Has the Sentence of Death in Himself
But, dear brother or sister, still have faith, for so the text has it—“We shall live in His sight.” You know what Job said—to my mind it is the grandest thing a man ever said—he was not reigning on a throne, but sitting on a dunghill covered with boils and scraping himself with a potsherd, yet he was more than royal. Glorious old Job bravely said, “Though He slay me yet will I trust in Him.” This was grand! Can you imitate it? Though you feel as if you were slain, though you sit in your pew tonight and say, “Well, it is of no use, I know I am undone,” yet I charge you to trust the Lord, your Redeemer, over the head of it all. Trust the covenant God in the teeth of everything. Believe God to be true and every fact and circumstance and thought and feeling to be a liar. Cling to the eternal mercy of God who casts out none that come to Him by Jesus Christ. Oh, it is a blessed thing to be empty and to believe that God can fill you, to be nothing and to believe that He can make you His child, to be lost and to believe that the Lord can save you, to feel condemned and yet to believe that Christ can justify you. Oh, to sink and sink and sink, even into the grave of all natural hope and yet to feel that you shall rise again when the third day has come! This is the faith of God’s elect.
The Faith of God’s Elect
Notice that the faith of my text looks for brighter things, for it says, “In the third day He will raise us up, and we shall live in His sight.” You are afraid of God now perhaps, but when He comes and lifts you up out of your state of spiritual death-gloom you will delight to see Him, to feel Him near, to know that He has quickened you and to spend your new life in delightful communion with Him. You shall live in His sight. What heavenly living that must be! Life under the eye of the Lord! Life such as He calls life! Life which He can look upon with pleasure! In His presence is fullness of joy and this, His wounded ones shall know when He has healed them.
The Power of Persevering Faith
I wish I could say what I want to say, but I am very feeble and therefore, not much at ease in speaking. Yet I do not know but what my broken words may, after all, be best. When voice will not answer to mind and we have to bring out our discourses piecemeal, the morsels may be all the sweeter to the afflicted. But this is what I want to say—do, do, I pray you never yield to that temptation of the devil which would lead you to cry, “God is dealing roughly with me. He will never save me.” No, expect quite the contrary. Because of these blows and strokes, because of your misery of heart, because of your troubled conscience, because of your inward distress you may all the more have hope. Nothing is more dreadful than to be without sensation, that is a token of death, but to be broken in pieces all asunder, to feel your thoughts to be like a case of knives cutting to the very center of your heart—this, at the very least, proves that life is still in you. Besides, remember that the path to joy is sorrow, the door to life is by death, and the road to salvation is by condemnation in the conscience. The way to enjoy God’s love is, first of all, to be troubled under God’s wrath.
A Persuasive Voice
That brings me to my third point, upon which I must be brief, but I would be earnest. Oh, Spirit of God, enable me.
The Call to Return to the Lord
III. The text has in it a persuasive voice. Oh that I could say it in wooing tones. But though the music of love is in my heart, my voice is hoarse. Bear with me, however, while I cry, “Come! Come! Come let us return unto the Lord.” This persuasive voice is to be attentively regarded, in the first place, because it pleads for a right thing. Dear friends, if we have wandered away from God and if God is angry with us, what ought to be our first step? Why, to get back to God. If I had offended any man or felt that I had done him an injustice, I hope I should not need much persuasion to go to him and confess my wrong and ask him to give me his hand. I trust it is the same with you. Now, since you have grieved the Lord, you ought to be the first to seek reconciliation. And if, instead of it, He is first and comes to you with overtures of peace, surely you should not need much persuasion to end the quarrel. Come, poor erring child, you have acted sinfully towards your loving Father, does not your heart, itself, suggest to you the resolve—“I will arise and go unto my Father”? You have grieved Him and because you have grieved Him, He has struck you that you may know for yourself the evil of your actions. Let the first smiting suffice and yield at once to His reproofs. “Come, and let us return unto the Lord.”
Personal Plea for Reconciliation
A great part of the persuasiveness of the text lies not merely in the rightness of it, but in the speaker putting himself with the people whom he entreats to return. He says, “Come, and let us return unto the Lord.” My dear hearers, willingly enough, without any sort of mock humility, do I feel compelled to put myself among you. If you have never returned to the Lord, come, let us go together, for I know the way and have good cause to tread it over again. I went to Him, I almost forget how many years ago, but I was only a stripling of 15 years of age. Deeply conscious of my guilt, I sought the Lord God of my fathers in much brokenness of spirit. He had struck me. He had torn me. He had slain me by the law of His mouth. Where could I go? I tried every helper, but I found all carnal hopes to be mockeries. I went trembling to my God and pleaded the precious blood of Jesus, and He healed me. He bound me up and He gave me to live in His sight. To this I bear my solemn and sure witness. But though I went to Him so many years ago, I have been many times since. I have felt sin upon the conscience. I have had my own inward depravity to mourn over. I have had to feel myself to be nothing, yes, and to be less than nothing. And I have been very heavy in soul and, therefore, driven by distress to my Lord. Yes, I have gone to Him a thousand times. And therefore I did not boast when I said I knew the way.
Encouragement to Seek the Lord
Ah, poor helpless soul, I know your downcastings and distractions, for I know the heart of a stranger by having felt, myself, to be an alien to my mother’s children, unworthy to be numbered with the family of God. I have comforted God’s people, but sometimes could not comfort myself. I have tried to fill others while mourning my own emptiness. But I bear witness that I never went to my Lord in vain. Come, give me your hand, one on this side, one on that, and let us return to the Lord. Come, let us make a ring all round the place and hand in hand let us return to the Lord. You who do not know the way will, perhaps, be helped by brotherly sympathy as we tell you how we resolved to return.
An Invitation to Return Now
You that think yourselves the biggest, blackest sinners, you do not think so badly of yourselves as I often think, and rightly think, of myself. But though of sinners the chief and of saints the least, “I know whom I have believed and I am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him until that day.” And you, dear friend, though up till now you have never sought Jesus, I hope that you will seek Him now and find abundant satisfaction in laying hold upon Him. Notice that this exhortation is put in the present tense. “Come, and let us return unto the Lord.” It is not tomorrow. It is not next year. It is so written that it means—“Let us return to the Lord now,” if at all why not at once? The sooner a good thing is done, the better.
A Personal Plea for Salvation
As far as I am concerned, there is a very personal reason for pressing upon any unconverted person here that he should return to the Lord now. I reckon it to be a great privilege to be able to stand here and bid you come to the Lord, though the exercise of that privilege has worn me out and made me brain-weary and full of pain. That privilege I shall not enjoy for some little time and it would charm me if I might win you now. Oh that my Lord would make this last sermon of mine for a while—perhaps forever—to be a weight cast into the scale to decide a hesitating will for Christ. I see the balances, how evenly they are poised! I see them trembling, a decision is to be arrived at one way or the other. This side for God—shall it go down? Is there weight enough? Satan clings to the chains of that evil scale. He seeks to drag it down. He casts in new temptations. Who will win? With all my heart, would I throw earnest entreaties into the scale of right, that salvation may win the day. But which shall it be? Which shall it be? Perhaps the turn it takes tonight will be the turn it takes for eternity. God grant that it may be for God, for truth, for Christ, for heaven, and not for the world, for sin, for self and eternal perdition. O Holy Spirit, work mightily to decide men aright.
The Power of God’s Forgiveness
The pleading of my text—and with this I close—is rendered all the more powerful because it is full of pleasing expectancy. Imagine that you had to try to make up a quarrel and the offending person was to say to you, “Well, suppose I agree to end this dispute. Will the other party be satisfied?” Upon the answer to that question your hope of success would very greatly depend. It has sometimes been my lot to have some such work as that to do and I have not felt quite sure that I would succeed till I had crossed that bridge. The aggrieved individual has been in a very hot temper and I could not altogether wonder, for he had been shamefully treated. “Well,” I have said to the offender, “I will try my best, you know, and it will greatly strengthen me if I can say that you bitterly feel that you were in the wrong and desire to offer an ample apology.” My client has said, “I should not mind going a good way in apologizing, but it can only be on the condition that I shall be kindly met. If I am to be repulsed—well, I shall not say anything until I have some idea of the temper and spirit of my opponent.” When I have been able to say, “The person whom you have offended is grieved for you as much as for himself. He is quite willing to receive you at any time and will give you every token of forgiveness. He hardly needs you to make any confession at all, he is so ready to forgive you, and nothing will give him greater pleasure than to have your friendship.” Why then the other party has said, “What? Does he really say that? Does he speak kindly of me after what I did? Did he really say that he would be glad to see me at his house? Did he speak of me as still being his friend? Then be so good as to tell him that I am very sorry and I will be round to say it myself, directly.”
God’s Invitation to Return
Now, my God, my gracious God, bids me say that He is a God ready to pardon. You have not to go and propitiate Him, make Him tender and plead with Him in prayer till you melt His heart. No. He waits to be gracious to you. He has come tonight, by His poor feeble servant, to entreat you to accept His love and grace. Let my broken accents reach the ears of your hearts. Repent of sin. Believe in Jesus Christ and look to Him for mercy. May God help you to do so and to do it now! Do not let returning to the Lord be left to be talked of when you get outside, return before you rise from your seat. I dread that vain companion who waits for you at the door. I am afraid of that idle chat on the road home. Do not even allow the exhortation of the text to wait to be thought of when you get home, for perhaps it may then be forgotten. But now, upon that seat or standing where you are, may God help you to respond to the gracious invitation, “Come, and let us return unto the Lord, for He has torn and He will heal. On the third day He will raise us up, and we shall live in His sight.” God bless you, dear friends, may His richest blessing rest upon every one of you. Other voices will be heard here, for a few weeks, but none will speak more lovingly than mine, all broken, cracked, hoarse and unmusical though it is. May those brethren who speak to you have more strength than I have and more grace. If they shall be the means of bringing some to Jesus whom I have never reached, I shall be glad, indeed. I want you all, members of the church, to be very, very diligent in helping in the February meetings by your efforts and your prayers. My dear brothers Clarke and Smith are well fitted for their work. You ought to have this Tabernacle crowded every night of the week; that is what I want to hear. Each one of you must get to work to get the outside people into the house that they may hear and live. The evangelists will be here for the best part of the month and if you all work hard and earnestly to gather the crowds together when those two brothers speak and sing, I do not doubt that a blessing will rest upon them like that which came upon our brothers Moody and Sankey in years gone by. Pray for me, I beseech of you, and having done so, prove the sincerity of your prayers by helping in the Lord’s work. This will be as medicine to your sick pastor’s soul and body. I rely upon you, each one, to see these services made a success, God the Holy Spirit helping you.