THE DUTY OF THE PRESENT HOUR – Charles Spurgeon

THE DUTY OF THE PRESENT HOUR

“Break up your fallow ground: for it is time to seek the Lord, till He comes and rains righteousness upon you.” Hosea 10:12.

I. BREAKING UP FALLOW GROUND

“Break up your fallow ground.” Nature at its largest is but a small farm, and we had need to get a harvest out of every acre of it, for our needs are great. Have we left any part of our small allotment uncultivated? If so, it is time to look into the matter and see if we cannot improve this wasteful state of things. What part of our small allotment have we left fallow? We should think very poorly of a farmer who, for many years, allowed the best and the richest part of his farm to lie altogether neglected and untilled.

An occasional fallow has its benefits in the world of Nature, but if the proprietor of rich and fruitful land allowed the soil to continue fallow year after year, we would judge him to be out of his wits! The wasted acres ought to be taken from him and given to another farmer who would worthily cherish the generous fields and encourage them to yield their harvests. Bad is the man who neglects to cultivate his farm, but what shall be said of the sluggard who fails to cultivate himself? If it is wrong to leave untended a part of our estate, how much worse must it be to disregard a portion of ourselves!

Now, there is a part of our nature which many allow to lie fallow. It is not often that they neglect the clay soil of their outward frame. They dress that field, which is called the body, with sufficient care, and truly, I would not that they should be careless about it, for it is worthy to be kept in due order and culture. Albeit that it is a very secondary part of our nature, yet it is so interwoven with the higher that it is most important that the body should not be neglected. See you well to that field and, by temperance, cleanliness, and obedience to the rules of health, let it be as a garden.

Though it is, after all, but dust and ashes, akin to the common earth around us, yet the body is honorable, and when Divine Grace has sanctified the soul, the body becomes the temple of the Holy Spirit. Few need to be exhorted to pay attention to their bodies. “What shall we eat? What shall we drink and how shall we be clothed?” is a trinity of questions which the majority of mankind spend all their lives in answering. The fault is not that they care for the body, but that it takes an undue share of consideration and usurps a higher place than it can claim.

There is a second field in man’s self-farm and this is called the mind, or the soul, and there are many who neglect this. These do ill, for, “that the soul is without knowledge, it is not good.” There should be, for the mental powers, instruction and discipline. We should seek to know and learn to understand, for we are not as the brutes which perish, which know nothing beyond their daily needs. We have thought and judgment and memory and imagination—these all need to be trained and used. Let the mind be cultivated, by all means, and yet I need not say much upon this, for “culture” has become a kind of watchword with certain professors of religion and with supposed knowledge they are puffed up. They have enough thought for the mind and they glory in the harvests which it yields of human knowledge and earthly learning.

The soul, in such cases, seems to be well tilled, but the spirit, the highest nature of all—that with which we speak to God—is suffered to lie entirely fallow! The soil where true religion should flourish in the furrows is left, by many, to produce the deadly nightshade of superstition, the hemlock of error, or the thistle of doubt! Is it not so with some of you who listen to me at this hour? Your hearts, your innermost natures, have been neglected and from the finest part of your being, the Lord has derived neither rent nor revenue! Your best acres lie fallow—fallow when you have good need to cultivate every inch of the ground.

Do you know what happens to a fallow field? Do you know how it becomes caked and baked hard as though it were a brick? All the pliable qualities seem to depart, and it hardens as it lies caked and unbroken—I mean, of course, if year follows year and the fallow remains untouched. And then the weeds! If a man will not sow wheat, he shall have a crop, you can be sure of that, for the weeds will spring up and they will seed themselves, and in due time, the multiplication table will be worked out to a very wonderful extent! These seeds, multiplying a hundred-fold, as evil usually does, will increase and increase and increase, again, till the fallow field shall become a wilderness of thorns and briars and a thicket of weeds, nettle, and thistle.

If you do not cultivate your heart, Satan will cultivate it for you! If you bring no crop to God, the devil will be sure to reap a harvest! I fear that I am speaking to some who have never thought about this. It has not occurred to them to consider themselves and the reasons for which they have a being. There is one text which I should like to drop into your ear in the hope that it may drop down through your ear right into your heart, “The wicked shall be turned into Hell.” “Oh,” you say, “that is not me.” No, I did not mean that for you—I have not finished the verse yet. This is the part for you—“and all the nations that forget God.” There are nations of them, so numerous are careless souls! What did they do? They did not do anything—they merely fell into a little matter of neglect, that is all. They forgot something—they forgot God!

If I had to tell you how we are to be saved, I might take some time about it. But if you ask me how you are to be lost, I will tell you in a minute. “How shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?” Neglect destroys men! Only sit still and allow matters to take their course and your damnation is sure! If you wish to be ruined in your spiritual farming, you need not sow thorns—you have only to leave your soul fallow and you will starve when the great harvest comes! Fallow ground in human nature naturally and of itself will work famine and bankruptcy for every man who lets it have its own way.

So my text begins right well by saying, “Break up your fallow ground.” Begin to look to what you have neglected! Take a survey of what has come already of your neglect! Contemplate what results will surely come of continued carelessness. God helping you, go into that field which is up to your knees with weeds and look around it and say, “This must be cleared out. This must be got ready for plowing. We cannot have this sad waste any longer. We have not gone through this gate before. We have scarcely looked over the hedge. We have left the field entirely to itself and everything cries out against our neglect. Now, by God’s Grace, we will enter into it and will clear all the rubbish away and pray the eternal God to bring the great steam plow of His almighty Grace and tear up the soil to the very bottom and then to burn these weeds and make this ground fit to be sown that it may bring forth a harvest to His praise.”

II. A TIME MENTIONED

When is it time to seek the Lord? I am not going to try to say anything fine, but something that will come home to each unconverted person. May the Holy Spirit help me in this attempt and bless it to your souls. When is it time to seek the Lord? Well, it is time as soon as ever you know right from wrong. Oh, it will be a thousand blessings to you, dear boys and girls, wherever you may be at this moment and to you young people that are listening to me, if you are led to seek the Lord while you are yet little! While you are yet children, may you become children of God! Before you are permitted to go into open sin, may your hearts be opened to Divine Grace.

Some of us who were converted while we were children will praise God forever, not only for our conversion, but for our early conversion. I have often prayed, with much sweetness to my own soul, that prayer of David, “O Lord, You have taught me from my youth and up to now have I declared Your wondrous works.” I look forward, hopefully, to the time when I shall add, “Now, also, when I am old and gray-headed, O God, forsake me not.” If you have had a man in your employ ever since he was a boy, you do not like to turn him away when he grows old—and our Lord never turns His old servants away. It is a surely prevalent plea with him, “You are my hope, O Lord God: You are my trust from my youth.”

It is time to seek the Lord as soon as we can seek anything, for to such seekers there is the special promise, “They that seek Me early shall find Me.” I found the Lord and joined His Church when I was 15 years old and I feel it no small joy to say with Obadiah, “I, Your servant, fear the Lord from my youth.” Early piety saves from much sin and sorrow and is often followed by a blessed and useful life. My heart rejoices that He, who was, Himself, “the Holy Child Jesus,” suffers the little children to come unto Him! Blessed be the name of the Lord for young people brought to Christ! May it please the Lord to touch each young heart here, at this time, with this thought, “It is time for me to seek the Lord.”

Come, you lads and lasses, you boys and girls, and learn of Jesus while yet your life is in its sweetest hours! But it is especially time to seek the Lord when it is late in the day of life and the shades of the eternal night are gathering. You cannot live long, dear Friend, for age, I see, is taking its toll upon your once stalwart form. In the order of Nature, you must soon be gone. You know that you have passed your threescore and ten, perhaps your fourscore years, and you are living, now, upon the special charity of God. You have run out your lease and are now a daily tenant. Surely it is time for you to seek the Lord! You may be gone to the Judgment and the irreversible sentence before another Sabbath comes round—“It may be no tomorrow shall dawn for you or me. Why will you run the awful risk of all eternity?”

Take heed to yourselves that you do not trifle on the verge of eternity. With one foot in the grave, oh, seek to have both feet on the Rock of Ages! Then you need not fear old age and its infirmities, or its closing hours. Jesus will cheer and comfort you and your eventide shall only be the prelude of a blessed morning—a morning without clouds. Dear Friend, it must be time to seek the Lord when death already seeks you and infirmity tells upon you. When they that look out of the windows begin to be darkened, it is time to look up to Heaven! When the keepers of the house tremble, it is time to find a home in Jesus. When our grave is ready for us, it is time to be ready for judgment.

When there are evident signs of an approaching end, it is time that you should end your ramblings and seek the Lord! What a mercy it is that the very wording of the text gives us encouragement! “It is time to seek the Lord”—then there is still time in which to seek the Lord! Then it is not over with me, even if I have long delayed. I may still come to Him! Yes, when you are nothing but a bag of bones with a crown of gray hair, Christ will have you! When you can only totter on your staff, you may come to Jesus, and if you have grown so infirm that even your memory begins to fail you and all your senses seem to be departing, yet He can give you a child’s eyes—the eyes of faith! And He can give you a child’s heart—the heart of love! And He can make you a new man in Christ Jesus!

III. A SEARCH COMMENDED

“It is time to seek the Lord.” “Seek the Lord?” Why, He is here! “Seek the Lord?” He is everywhere! “Seek the Lord?” He needs no seeking, for in Him we live and move! Yes, but do you not see that it does not refer so much to where God is, as to where you are? You have turned your back on Him, dear Friend. If you are the person that I mean tonight, you have been forgetting Him and so, because He has not been in your thoughts, you have, in a moral and spiritual sense, lost the Lord. He is everywhere except in your thoughts.

He is not to be sought for as though He were some hidden thing to be discovered by search or ingenuity—He is to be sought after because, as far as you are concerned, you have so forgotten Him as to have lost sight of Him. “Seek the Lord.” I hear the earnest enquirer say, “It must mean that I am now to endeavor to realize that there is a God. And that He is very near me.” Yes. “And that I am speaking to Him?” Yes. “And that He calls to me and says, ‘come to Me; be reconciled’?” Yes. All this and more is to be your finding of God as really existent to you.

Begin now to live, not as an atheist who is without God, but as a Christian, who has God with him and has God within him. “Seek the Lord” means, then, that thought and love and desire should all come towards God and realize Him and so seek Him. “Seek the Lord?” asks one, “But I am sinful! If I come into His Presence, He will slay me, for He cannot look upon iniquity.” Then you must come and seek the Lord in the way in which it will be good for you to come near to Him, namely, through His dear Son! As a sinner, you could not come to Him, or He to you, but He has been pleased that His dear Son should take upon Himself the form of a Servant and be made in the likeness of sinful flesh and “bear our sins in His own body on the tree.”

Now, if you will come to Christ, God is in Christ and you will thus come to God! We may not come to God without preparation, but we may come to Christ without any preparation! We may come just as we are—at once—in all our carelessness, in all our nakedness, in all our filthiness! We shall never find God till we seek Him by the way of Jesus Christ! My sinning Brother, since the Lord has not hidden Himself in Christ, but has revealed Himself in Christ and bids you see Him in His Son, I entreat you, attend to this word of the text, “It is time to seek the Lord.”

IV. A PERIOD SET

How long are we to seek the Lord? “It is time to seek the Lord, till He rains righteousness upon you.” I believe that very much seeking of the Lord is based on ignorance—that there are some who really set about seeking the Lord as if they could not find Him and as if He were a long way off. This is corrected by the Apostle in those memorable words, “Say not in your heart, Who shall ascend into Heaven, or who shall descend into the depths? The Word is near you.” How near you? “In your mouth.” That is how near it is. “In your mouth.” What hinders a man’s receiving that which is in his mouth? Swallow it, man. Swallow! That is all you have to do. It is in your mouth—nothing can be nearer, surely, than to have it in your mouth.

Oh, if I were dying and I had a lozenge in my mouth and I knew that it would save my life, do you think I would not suck it down? Ah, would I rest until it was down? I would not care if a critic stood by and said, “You must not eat that lozenge. You are not worthy of it.” I have got it in my mouth and your remonstrance comes too late, it is gliding down my throat. “Oh, but you must not swallow that lozenge: you are not fit to receive it.” In vain your supposition! I have got it in my mouth and if possession is nine points of the law, it is all the points of the Gospel! I take it into my inward parts and I will never part with it.

That is just the Gospel and a sweet way of putting it—“The Word is near you, even in your mouth and in your heart.” “If you shall confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and shall believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved.” You have it, again, in our Lord’s words in His commission to His disciples, “He that believes and is baptized shall be saved. He that believes not shall be damned.”

But, about this seeking. You see that there are some that forget that it is so very near them and they go seeking, but, if you seek the Lord, Soul, whatever of ignorance mingles with the search, I exhort you to persevere in seeking the Lord till He rains righteousness upon you. Seek the Lord, my dear Hearer, till you find Him! Never be satisfied with means! Rest not till you get to the end—find the Lord, or else go on seeking.

Oh, stay not at Heaven’s gate—ask for an abundant entrance! Be not content with knocking, but knock louder and yet louder till the gate is opened! It is well to be near the kingdom, but it is an awful thing to be so near it and yet not to be in it. It is well to be persuaded to be a Christian, but a dreadful thing to be almost persuaded and then to stop in an undecided condition. “Well,” you say, “but I may, perhaps, wait a bit longer. I have waited long already and I am weary.” Suppose it to be so, is it not worth waiting for? But I tell you, your waiting is very much through your own ignorance. As I have already said, the Word is near you and you may have it tonight! Even now, you may have it, for it is in your mouth.

If those poor blind eyes are delivered from the scales that hide a present Savior, even now, at this moment, you may give that look of which we sing—“There is life for a look at the Crucified One! There is life at this moment for you.” Then look, Sinner—look unto Him and be saved! Unto Him who was nailed to the tree.”

Yet, if you do not understand it, cease not to seek that light may come! Pardon will pay you abundantly when it comes. You say, “I have been pleading for months.” Then, do not waste all that you have done! Come and close with Christ and get, now, the answer to all those prayers!

Think of Columbus within three days of America, that wondrous land in which he believed. He saw few signs of it—here and there a bit of seaweed—some little tokens that there might be land ahead. But the mariners declared that they would sail no farther upon that mysterious sea. Suppose that, within three days of the shore, Columbus had turned back? Then he would have lost all his pains for lack of a few hours perseverance! And you, tonight, perhaps, within half an hour of unspeakable joy—you, within the next 10 minutes able to rejoice in Christ and find present salvation—will you now start back? No, by the Eternal Godhead, push on! O Spirit of the living God, push the sinner on and lead him, now, to say, “If I perish, I will perish pleading for mercy and hoping in the Grace of God by Jesus Christ.” You cannot and you shall not perish so!

“It is time to seek the Lord, till He rains righteousness upon you.” That is how long you have to seek Him.

I will give you a picture and with that conclude. You know the story of Elijah when the heavens had long been deaf—a bronze concave that mocked the desires of men? He went up to the top of Carmel and he began to pray. With groans and cries and tears—with his head between his knees he used language which only God heard—and it was mighty pleading! Then he said to his servant, “Go up, now, look toward the sea.” And Gehazi went up and looked toward the sea—he gazed down there along the shoreline and up there above the Lebanon. And then he cast a wistful look around and came back and said, “There is nothing.”

The Prophet, while his servant was gone, had been crying more importunately. He had been pouring out his soul to its very depths before God, saying, “I will not let You go unless You bless this thirsty land!” A second time He said to Gehazi, “Go again.” I think I see Gehazi going and looking, but he perceives nothing. “Master,” he said, “there is nothing.” But the Prophet had still been praying and so he said, “Go, a third time.” And away went Gehazi, thinking it was a fool’s errand. He went and looked and in a moment said, “There is nothing. I told you there was nothing.” But the Prophet had still been praying while the servant went and he said to Gehazi, “Go, a fourth and then the fifth time. He felt, “As the Lord lives, He must hear my prayer,” and he gave himself, again, to wrestling with his Lord. Before the living God he knelt and he felt that he could not rise until the promise and the covenant had been fulfilled!

Here comes Gehazi. He does not like his task at all. “Master,” he says, “I have been five times and there is nothing! Will you send me again?” “Go again, Gehazi! Go again,” said Elijah. “Go again.” And Gehazi goes the sixth time. “Alas!” he says to himself, “I never went on such an idle set of errands before.” All along the Mediterranean Sea he looks and looks and looks again. And back he comes with the old tale, “There is nothing. There is nothing. There is nothing.” But what does Elijah say to him? “This last time while you have been gone, I have prevailed. I have believed that I have the petition which I asked and I know I have it. Go, Gehazi, go and look! I said to you, go again seven times—so go and look again.”

The weary servant is in no hurry to go. The longer he is about it, the more is the likelihood there will be nothing to come of it. When he reaches Carmel’s top and casts his eyes over the sky, there is a little fleece of cloud—but it is such a tiny flake that it is not bigger than a man’s hand. What is that to the sky? What rain can come out of a morsel of cloud to be measured by a span? He comes back and he declares, “Behold, there arises a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand.” Up rises the Prophet and wraps his mantle about him! The rain is coming and he sends Gehazi in haste down to Ahab, to warn him against the nearing deluge, saying, “Prepare your chariot and get you down, that the rain stop you not.”

Nobody could hear it, but Elijah had marvelous ears as he had a marvelous voice with God! He runs before Ahab’s chariot in sacred exhilaration of delight! The heavens are already beginning to turn to blackness and the first big drops are falling! Elijah has prevailed! Now, get to your chambers tonight—you that have not found the Lord—and come not forth till you have found Him and He has given you Grace as a mighty shower! If, by the morning light, there is but a little hope and though you can only say, “God, be merciful to me a sinner,” keep the watches and continue the prayer! O Soul, though you can only cry, “Lord, I believe! Help my unbelief,” yet watch on and seek on, for the Lord will rain righteousness upon you! A deluge of mercy shall descend and your heart shall rejoice, for this is His own promise, “When the poor and needy seek water and there is none and their tongue fails for thirst, I, the Lord, will hear them. I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.” So be it unto you. Amen.

Charles Spurgeon