THE SHAMEFUL SUFFERER – Charles Spurgeon
The Shameful Sufferer
“Who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is now set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” — Hebrews 12:2
Introduction: The Unutterable Love of Christ
Oh, what shall I do, my Savior, to praise? Where shall language be found that can describe His matchless, His unparalleled love towards the children of men? Upon any ordinary subject, one may find liberty of speech and fullness of utterance, but this subject lies out of the line of all oratory, and eloquence cannot attain unto it! This is one of the unutterable things—unutterable because it surpasses thought and defies the power of words. How, then, can we deal with that which is unutterable?
I am conscious that all I can say concerning the sufferings of Jesus this morning will be but as a drop in the bucket. None of us know the half of the agony which He endured. None of us have ever fully comprehended the love of Christ which passes knowledge! Philosophers have probed the earth to its very center, threaded the spheres, measured the skies, weighed the hills—no, weighed the world itself—but this is one of those vast, boundless things which to measure surpasses all but the Infinite itself! As the swallow but skims the water and dives not into its depths, so all the descriptions of the preacher but skim the surface while depths immeasurable must lie far beneath our observation.
Well might a poet say— “O love, you fathomless abyss!” For this love of Christ is indeed measureless and fathomless! None of us can attain unto it. In speaking of it, we feel our own weakness; we cast ourselves upon the strength of the Spirit, but even then, we feel that we can never attain unto the majesty of this subject. Before we can ever get a right idea of the love of Jesus, we must understand His previous glory in its height of majesty and His incarnation upon the earth in all its depths of shame.
Now, who can tell us the majesty of Christ? When He was enthroned in the highest heavens, He was very God of very God. By Him were the heavens made and all the hosts thereof. By His power, He hung the earth upon nothing. His own almighty arm upheld the spheres—the pillars of the heavens rested upon Him. The praises of angels, archangels, cherubim, and seraphim perpetually surrounded Him. The full chorus of the hallelujahs of the universe unceasingly flowed to the foot of His throne—He reigned supreme above all His creatures, God over all, blessed forever! Who can tell His height, then? And yet, this must be attained before we can measure the length of that mighty stoop which He took when He came to earth to redeem our souls!
The Depths of Christ’s Suffering
And who, on the other hand, can tell how low He descended? To be a man was something, but to be a man of sorrows was far more. To bleed and die and suffer—these were much for Him who was the Son of God! But to suffer as He did—such unparalleled agony; to endure, as He did, a death of shame and a death by desertion of His God—this is a lower depth of condescending love which the most inspired mind must utterly fail to fathom! And yet, we must first understand infinite height and then infinite depth. We must measure, in fact, the whole infinite that is between heaven and hell before we can understand the love of Jesus Christ.
The Shame of the Cross
But because we cannot understand, shall we therefore neglect? And because we cannot measure, shall we therefore despise? Ah, no! Let us go to Calvary this morning, and see this great sight—Jesus Christ, for the joy that was set before Him, enduring the cross, despising the shame!
I shall endeavor to show you, first, the Shameful Sufferer; secondly, we shall dwell upon His Glorious Motive; and then in the third place, we shall offer Him to you as an Admirable Example.
I. The Shameful Sufferer
The text speaks of shame, and therefore, before entering upon suffering, I shall endeavor to say a word or two upon the shame. Perhaps there is nothing which men so much abhor as shame. We find that death itself has often been preferable in the minds of men to shame. And even the most wicked and callous-hearted have dreaded the shame and contempt of their fellow creatures far more than any tortures to which they could have been exposed.
The Fear of Shame
We find Abimelech, a man who murdered his own brethren without compunction, even he was overcome by shame when, “A certain woman cast a piece of a millstone upon Abimelech’s head, and all to break his skull. Then he called hastily unto the young man, his armor-bearer, and said unto him, ‘Draw your sword and slay me, that men say not of me, “A woman slew him.”’ And his young man thrust him through and he died.” Shame was too much for him! He would far rather meet the suicide’s death—for such it was—than he should be convicted of the shame of being slain by a woman!
So it was with Saul—a man who was not ashamed of breaking his oath and of hunting his own son-in-law like a partridge upon the mountains—even he fell upon his own sword rather than it should be said of him that he fell by the Philistines. And we read of an ancient king, Zedekiah, who albeit he seemed reckless enough, he was afraid to fall into the hands of the Chaldeans lest the Jews who had fallen away to Nebuchadnezzar should mock him.
Shame as a Deep Wound
These instances are but a few of many. It is well known that criminals and malefactors have often had a greater fear of public contempt than of anything else. Nothing can so break down the human spirit as to continually be subject to contempt—the visible and manifest contempt of one’s fellows! In fact, to go further, shame is so frightful to man that it is one of the ingredients of hell itself! It is one of the bitterest drops in that awful cup of misery—the shame of everlasting contempt to which wicked men awake in the day of their resurrection. To be despised of men, despised of angels, and despised of God is one of the depths of hell!
Shame’s Impact on the Proud
Shame, then, is a terrible thing to endure. And many of the proudest natures have been subdued when once they have been subjected to it. In the Savior’s case, shame would be peculiarly shameful. The nobler a man’s nature, the more readily does he perceive the slightest contempt, and the more acutely does he feel it; that contempt which an ordinary man might bear without suffering—he who has been bred to be obeyed, and who has all his life been honored—would feel most bitterly. Beggared princes and despised monarchs are among the most miserable of men!
The Shame of the Savior
But here was our glorious Redeemer, in whose face was the nobility of Godhead itself, despised and spit upon and mocked! You may, therefore, wonder in amazement what such a noble nature as His had to endure! The mere kite can bear to be caged, but the eagle cannot bear to be hooded and blindfolded—he has a nobler spirit than that. The eyes that have faced the sun cannot endure darkness without a tear! But Christ, who was more than noble—matchlessly noble, something more than of a royal race—for Him to be shamed and mocked must have been dreadful, indeed! Some minds are of such a delicate and sensitive disposition that they feel things far more than others.
Christ’s Tender Heart and Suffering
There are some of us who do not so readily perceive an affront, or when we do perceive it, we are totally indifferent to it. But there are others of a loving and tender heart. They have so long wept for others’ woes that their hearts have become tender, and they therefore feel the slightest brush of ingratitude from those they love. If those for whom they are willing to suffer should utter words of blasphemy and rebuke against them, their souls would be pierced to the very quick! A man in armor would walk through thorns and briars without feeling, but a man who is naked feels the smallest of the thorns.
Christ’s Suffering for the Lost
Now Christ was, so to speak, a naked spirit. He had stripped Himself of all for manhood. He said, “The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has not where to lay His head.” He stripped Himself of everything that could make Him callous, for He loved with all His soul. His strong, passionate heart was fixed upon the welfare of the human race! He loved them even unto death, and to be mocked by those for whom He died; to be spit upon by the creatures whom He came to save; to come unto His own and to find that His own received Him not but actually cast Him out—this was pain, indeed!
Shameful Accusation, Mockery, and Crucifixion
To go back to the point with which we started—shame is peculiarly abhorrent to manhood, and far more to such manhood as that which Christ carried about with Him—a noble, sensitive, loving nature such as no other manhood had ever possessed! And now come and let us behold the pitiful spectacle of Jesus put to shame. He was put to shame in three ways—by shameful accusation, shameful mockery, and shameful crucifixion.
1. The Shameful Accusation
And first, behold the Savior’s shame in His shameful accusation. He in whom was no sin and who had done no ill, was charged with sin of the blackest kind! He was first arraigned before the Sanhedrin on no less a charge than that of blasphemy. And could He blaspheme? He who said, “It is My meat and My drink to do the will of Him who sent Me,” could He blaspheme? He who in the depths of His agony when He sweat, as it were, great drops of blood at last cried, “My Father, not My will, but Yours be done”—could He blaspheme? No! And it is just because it was so contrary to His character that He felt the accusation. To charge some of you here present with having blasphemed God would not startle you, for you have done it and have done it so often as almost to forget that God abhors blasphemers and that He “will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain.”
But for one who loved as Jesus loved and obeyed as He obeyed—for Him to be charged with blasphemy—the accusation must have caused Him peculiar suffering! We wonder that He did not fall to the ground, even as His betrayers did when they came to lay hold upon Him! Such an accusation as that might blight an angel’s spirit. Such a slander might wither the courage of a cherub. Marvel not, then, that Jesus felt the shame of being accused of such a crime as this!
2. The Shameful Mocking
Nor did this content them. Having charged Him with breaking the first table, they then charged Him with violating the second—they said He was guilty of sedition. They declared that He was a traitor to the government of Caesar; that He stirred up the people, declaring that He Himself was a king. And could He commit treason? He who said, “My kingdom is not of this world, else would My servants fight.” He who when they would have taken Him by force to make Him a king, withdrew Himself into the wilderness and prayed—could He commit treason? It would be impossible! Did He not pay tribute and sent to the fish when His poverty had not the wherewithal to pay the tax? Could He commit treason? He could not sin against Caesar, for He was Caesar’s Lord! He was King of kings and Lord of lords! If He had chosen to, He could have taken the purple from the shoulders of Caesar and at a word have given Caesar to be a prey to the worms! Jesus Christ commit treason? ‘Twas far enough from Jesus, the gentle and the mild, to stir up sedition or set man against man. Ah no, He was a lover of His country and a lover of His race! He would never provoke a civil war and yet this charge was brought against Him. What would you think, good citizens and good Christians, if you were charged with such a crime as this—with the clamors of your own people behind you crying out against you as so dreadful an offender that you must die? Would not that abash you? Ah, but your Master had to endure this as well as the other! He despised the shameful indictments and was numbered with the transgressors!
The Shameful Sufferer
“What did they do? Did they bring crowns with which to honor Him, and did the nobility of earth cast their robes beneath His feet to carpet His footsteps? No! He is delivered up to rough and brutal soldiers. They find for Him a mimic throne, and having put Him on it, they strip Him of His own robes and find some old soldier’s cloak of scarlet or purple, and put it about His loins. They plait a crown of thorns and put it about His brow—a brow that was of old benighted with stars! And then they fix in His hand—a hand that will not resent an insult—a reed scepter! Then bowing the knee, they pay their mimic homage before Him, making Him a May-day king.”
The Pain of Despised Royalty
Now, perhaps there is nothing so heartrending as despised royalty! You have read the story of an English king who was taken out by his cruel enemies to a ditch. They seated him on an anthill, telling him that was his throne, and then they washed his face in the filthiest puddle they could find; and the tears running down his cheeks, he said, “I shall yet be washed in clean water,” though he was bitterly mistaken. But think of the King of kings and Lord of lords having for His adoration the spit of guilty mouths; for homage, the smiting of filthy hands; for tribute, the jests of brutal tongues! Was ever shame like Yours, You King of kings, You emperor of all worlds, flouted by the soldiers, and smitten by their menial hands? O earth! How could you endure this iniquity? O you heavens! Why did you not fall in very indignation to crush the men who thus blasphemed your Maker? Here was a shame, indeed—the King mocked by His own subjects!
Mocking His Prophetic Role
He was a prophet, too, as we all know, and what did they do that they might mock Him as a prophet? Why, they blindfolded Him—shut out the light of heaven from His eyes and then they smote Him and buffeted Him with their hands and said, “Prophecy unto us who it is that smote You.” The prophet must make a prophecy to those who taunted Him to tell them who it was who smote Him! We love prophets. It is but the nature of mankind that if we believe in a prophet, we should love him. We believe that Jesus was the first and the last of prophets. By Him, all others were sent—we bow before Him with reverential adoration. We count it to be our highest honor to sit at His feet like Mary. We only wish that we might have the comfort to wash His feet with our tears and wipe them with the hairs of our head. We feel that like John the Baptist, His shoe-laces we are not worthy to loosen, and can we, therefore, bear the spectacle of Jesus the prophet blindfolded and buffeted with insult and blows?
Mocking His Priesthood
But they also mocked His priesthood! Jesus Christ had come into the world to be a priest to offer sacrifice, and His priesthood must be mocked, too! All salvation lay in the hands of this priest, and now they say unto Him, “If You are the Christ, save Yourself and us!” “Ah, He saved others; Himself He could not save,” they laughed! But oh, what mystery of scorn is here! What unutterable depths of shame that the great High Priest of our profession—He who is the Paschal Lamb, the altar, the priest, the sacrifice—that He, the Son of God incarnate, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world should thus be despised and thus be mocked!
Mocking His Sufferings
He was mocked still further, in His sufferings. I cannot venture to describe the sufferings of our Savior under the lash of the scourge. St. Bernard and many of the early fathers of the Church gave such a picture of Christ’s scourging that I could not endure to tell it again! Whether they had sufficient data for what they said, I do not know. But this much I know—“He was wounded for our transgressions; He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and with His stripes, we are healed.” I know it must have been a terrible scourging to be called wounding, bruising, chastisement, and stripes. And, remember, that every time the lash fell on His shoulders, the laugh of him who used the lash was mingled with the stripe—and every time the blood poured out afresh and the flesh was torn off His bones, there was a jest and a jeer to make His pain yet more poignant and terrible!
Mockery at the Cross
And when He came at last to His cross and they nailed Him upon it, how they continued the mockery of His sufferings! We are told that the high priests and the scribes stood, and at length sat and watched Him there. When they saw His head fall upon His breast, they would, no doubt, make some bitter remark about it and say, “Ah, He will never lift His head again among the multitude.” And when they saw His hands bleeding they would say, “Ha, ha, these were the hands that touched the lepers, and that raised the dead—they will never do that again!” And when they saw His feet, they would say, “Ah, those feet will never tread this land again and journey on His pilgrimages of mercy.” And then some coarse, some villainous, some brutal, perhaps some beastly jest would be made concerning every part of His thrice-adorable person!
Mocking His Thirst and His Prayers
They mocked Him, and at last, He called for a drink, and they gave Him vinegar—mocking His thirst while they pretended to relieve it! But worst of all, I have one more thing to notice—they mocked His prayers. Did you ever read in all the annals of executions, or of murders, that ever men mocked their fellow creatures’ prayers? I have read stories of some dastardly villains who have sought to slay their enemies and, seeing their death approaching, the victims have said, “Give me a moment or two for prayer”—and rare has been the cases when this has been disallowed! But I never read of a case in which when the prayer was uttered it has been laughed at and made the object of a jest!
But here hangs the Savior and every word He speaks becomes the subject of a pun, the motto of a jest. And when at the last He utters the most thrilling death-shriek that ever startled earth and hell, “Eloi, Eloi, lama Sabacthani,” even then they must pun upon it and say, “He calls for Elijah; let us see whether Elijah will come and take Him down.” He was mocked even in His prayer! O Jesus! Never was love like Yours; never patience that could be compared with Your endurance when You endured the cross, despising the shame!
The Cross: The Ultimate Shame
I feel that in thus describing the Savior’s mockeries, I have not been able to set before you the fullness of the shame through which He passed and shall have to attempt it yet, again, in another moment when I come to describe His shameful death, taking the words which preceded the ones I have already enlarged upon. He endured the cross just as He despised the shame. The cross! The cross! When you hear that word it wakens in your hearts no thoughts of shame. There are other forms of capital punishment in the present day far more disgraceful than the cross. Connected with the guillotine there is much with the block as much with the gallows, most of all. But, remember, that although to speak of the gallows is to utter a word of disgrace, yet there is nothing of shame in the term, “gallows,” compared with the shame of the cross as it was understood in the days of Christ!
The Cross in Jesus’ Time
We are told that crucifixion was a punishment to which none could be put but a slave and, even then, the crime must have been of the most frightful character—such as the betrayal of a master; the plotting his death or murdering him—only such offenses would have brought crucifixion, even upon a slave. It was looked upon as the most terrible and frightful of all punishments. All the deaths in the world are preferable to this! They have all some slight alleviating circumstance—either their quickness or their glory. But this is the death of a villain; of a murderer; of an assassin—a death painfully protracted—one which cannot be equaled in all inventions of human cruelty for suffering and humiliation! Christ Himself endured this. The cross, I say, is in this day no theme of shame. It has been the crest of many a monarch—the banner of many a conqueror! To some it is an object of adoration. The finest engravings; the most wonderful paintings have been dedicated to this subject. And now, the cross engraved on many a gem has become a right royal and noble thing. But we are unable at this day, I believe, to fully understand the shame of the cross. But the Jew knew it. The Roman knew it—and Christ knew what a frightful thing—what a shameful thing it was to be put to the death of crucifixion.
The Aggravations of Christ’s Shame
Remember, too, that in the Savior’s case, there were special aggravations of this shame. He had to carry His own cross. He was crucified, too, at the common place of execution—Calvary, analogous to our ancient Tyburn, or our present Old Bailey. He was put to death, too, at a time when Jerusalem was full of people. It was at the feast of the Passover, when the crowd had greatly increased and when the representatives of all nations would be present to behold the spectacle. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, in Greece, yes, and perhaps far-off Tarshish and the islands of the sea—all were there to unite in this scoffing and to increase the shame! And He was crucified between two thieves, as if to teach that He was viler than they! Was ever shame like this?
The Crucifixion of Jesus
Let me conduct you to the cross. The cross, the cross! Tears begin to flow at the very thoughts of it. The rough wood is laid upon the ground; Christ is flung upon His back; four soldiers seize His hands and feet! His blessed flesh is rent with the accursed iron. He begins to bleed. He is lifted into mid-air—the cross is dashed into the place prepared for it—every limb of my Savior is dislocated—every bone put out of joint by that terrific jerk! He hangs there naked to His shame, gazed upon by all beholders! The sun shines hot upon Him; fever begins to burn; His tongue is dried up like a potsherd—it cleaves to the roof of His mouth—He has nothing with which to nourish His mouth with moisture. His body has been long emaciated by fasting. He has been brought near the brink of death by flagellation in the hall of Pilate. There He hangs. The tenderest parts of His body—His hands and feet—are pierced and where the nerves are most numerous and tender, there is the iron rending and tearing its fearful way! The weight of His body drags the iron up His feet and when His knees are so weary that they cannot hold Him, and then the iron begins to drag through His hands!
Christ’s Inner Suffering
Terrible spectacle, indeed! But you have seen only the outward—there was an inward. You cannot see that—if you could see it, though your eyes were like the angels, you would be struck with eternal blindness! Then there was the soul. The soul dying! Can you guess what must be the pangs of a soul dying? A soul never died on earth yet. Hell is the place of dying souls, where they die everlastingly the second death. And there was within the ribs of Christ’s body, hell itself poured out! Christ’s soul was enduring the conflict with all the powers of hell, whose malice was aggravated by the fact, that it was the last battle they should ever be able to fight with Him! No, worse than that—He had lost that which is the martyr’s strength and shield—He had lost the presence of His God! God Himself was putting His hand upon Him! It pleased the Father to bruise Him! He has put Him to grief; He has made His soul a sacrifice for sin! God, in whose countenance Christ had everlastingly seemed Himself, basking in delight, concealed His face! And there was Jesus forsaken of God and man, left alone to tread the winepress—no, to be trod in the winepress—and dip His clothes in His own blood!
The Agony of Christ’s Soul
Oh, was there ever grief like this? No love can picture it! If I had a thought in my heart concerning the suffering of Christ, it would chafe my lips before I uttered it! The agonies of Jesus were like the furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, heated seven times hotter than ever human suffering was heated before. Every vein was a road for the hot feet of pain to travel in—every nerve a string in a harp of agony that thrilled with the discordant wail of hell! All the agonies that the damned, themselves can endure were thrust into the soul of Christ! He was a target for the arrows of the Almighty—arrows dipped in the poison of our sin! All the billows of the Eternal dashed upon this rock of our salvation! He must be bruised, trod, crushed, destroyed—His soul must be exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death.
The Cross, Despised and Endured
But I must pause; I cannot describe it. I can creep over it and you can, too. The rocks split in two when Jesus died! Our hearts must be made of harder marble than the rocks themselves if they do not feel! The temple tore its gorgeous veil of tapestry, and will not you be mourners, too? The sun itself had one big tear in its own burning eye which quenched its light. And shall we not weep? We for whom the Savior died? Shall we not feel an agony of heart that He should thus have endured for us?
Despising the Shame
Mark, my friends, that all the shame that came on Christ, He despised! He counted it so light compared with the joy which was set before Him, that He is said to have despised it! As for His sufferings, He could not despise them—that word could not be used in connection with the cross, for the cross was too awful for even Christ Himself to despise! That, He endured. The shame He could cast off, but the cross He must carry and to it He must be nailed. “He endured the cross, despising the shame.”
II. His Glorious Motive
What was that which made Jesus speak like this?—“For the joy that was set before Him.” Beloved, what was the joy? Oh, ‘tis a thought that must melt a rock and make a heart of iron move! The joy which was set before Jesus was principally the joy of saving you and me! I know it was the joy of fulfilling His Father’s will—of sitting down on His Father’s throne—of being made perfect through suffering—but still, I know that this is the grand, great motive of the Savior’s suffering—the joy of saving us!
The Joy of Saving Sinners
Do you know what the joy is of doing good to others? If you do not, I pity you, for of all joys which God has left in this poor wilderness, this is one of the sweetest! Have you seen the hungry when they have needed bread for many an hour—have you seen them come to your house almost naked—their clothes having been thrust away, that they might get money to buy bread? Have you heard the woman’s story of the griefs of her husband? Have you listened when you have heard the tale of imprisonment, of sickness; of cold or hunger; of thirst and have you never said, “I will clothe you, I will feed you”? Have you never felt that divine joy when your gold has been given to the poor and your silver has been dedicated to the Lord; when you bestowed it upon the hungry and you have gone aside and said, “God forbid that I should be self-righteous—but I do feel it is worth living for—to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and to do good to my poor suffering fellow creatures”?
Now, this is the joy which Christ felt! It was the joy of feeding us with the bread of heaven—the joy of clothing poor, naked sinners in His own righteousness—the joy of finding mansions in heaven for homeless souls—of delivering us from the prison of hell and giving us the eternal enjoyments of heaven!
Christ’s Sacrifice for the Unworthy
But why should Christ look on us? Why should He choose to do this for us? Oh, my friends, we never deserved anything at His hands! As a good old writer says, “When I look at the crucifixion of Christ, I remember that my sins put Him to death. I see not Pilate, but I see myself in Pilate’s place, bartering Christ for honor. I hear not the cry of the Jews, but I hear my sins yelling out, ‘Crucify Him, crucify Him.’ I see not iron nails, but I see my own iniquities fastening him to the cross! I see no spear, but I behold my unbelief piercing His poor wounded side— ‘For You, my sins, my cruel sins, His chief tormentors were! Each of my sins became a nail and unbelief the spear.’”
The Love of Christ Despite Our Rejection
It is the opinion of the Romanist, that the very man who pierced Christ’s side was afterwards converted, and became a follower of Jesus. I do not know whether that is the fact, but I know it is the case spiritually. I know that we have pierced the Savior. I know that we have crucified Him. And yet, strange to say, the blood which we fetched from those holy veins, has washed us from our sins and has made us accepted in the beloved! Can you understand this? Here is manhood mocking the Savior; parading Him through the streets; nailing Him to a cross and then sitting down to mock at His agonies. And yet, what is there in the heart of Jesus but love to them? He is weeping all this while that they would crucify Him—not so much because He felt the suffering, though that was much—but because He could not bear the thought that men whom He loved could nail Him to the tree! “That was the unkindest stab of all.”
The Joy of Saving Us
You remember that remarkable story of Julius Caesar when he was struck by his friend Brutus. “When the noble Caesar saw him stab, ingratitude more strong than traitor’s arms quite vanquished him! Then burst his mighty heart.” Now Jesus had to endure the stab in His inmost heart and to know that His elect did it—that His redeemed did it, that His own church was His murderer—that His own people nailed Him to the tree! Can you think, beloved, how strong must have been the love that made Him submit even to this?
Christ’s Willing Sacrifice
Picture yourself today going home from this hall. You have an enemy who all his life long has been your enemy. His father was your enemy and he is your enemy, too. There is never a day passes but you try to win his friendship. But he spits upon your kindness and curses your name. He does injury to your friends and there is not a stone he leaves unturned to do you damage. As you are going home, today, you see a house on fire. The flames are raging and the smoke is ascending up in one black column to heaven. Crowds gather in the street and you are told there is a man in the upper chamber who will be burnt to death. No one can save him! You say, “Why that is my enemy’s house.” And you see him at the window. It is your own enemy—the very man! He is about to be burned alive. Full of loving-kindness, you say, “I will save that man if I can.” He sees you approach the house. He puts his head out the window and curses you! “An everlasting blast upon you!” he says, “I would rather perish than that you should save me.”
Christ’s Sacrificial Love for Us
Can you imagine yourself, then, dashing through the smoke and climbing the blazing staircase to save him? And can you conceive, that when you get near him, he struggles with you, and tries to roll you in the flames? Can you conceive your love to be so potent, that you can perish in the flames rather than leave him to be burned? You say, “I could not do it. It is above flesh and blood to do it!” But Jesus did it! We hated Him; we despised Him, and when He came to save us, we rejected Him! When His Holy Spirit comes into our hearts to strive with us, we resist Him! But He will save us—no, He Himself braved the fire that He might snatch us as brands from eternal burning! The joy of Jesus was the joy of saving sinners.
III. Our Imitation
The great motive, then, with Christ, in enduring all this, was that He might save us!
A Call to Christians
And now, give me just a moment, and I will try and hold the Savior up for our imitation. I speak now to Christians—to those who have tasted and handled the good word of life. Christian men and women! If Christ endured all this merely for the joy of saving you, will you be ashamed of bearing anything for Christ? The words are on my lips again this morning— “If on my face for Your dear name, shame and reproach shall be, I’ll hail reproach and welcome shame, my Lord, I’ll die for Thee.”