Bible Commentaries
Proverbs 4

Verse 13

The Hold Fast

A sermon (No. 1418) delivered on Lord's Day morning, June 9th, 1878, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington, by C. H. Spurgeon.

“Take fast hold of instruction; let her not go: keep her; for she is thy life.” Proverbs 4:13 .

Faith may be well described as taking hold upon divine instruction. God has condescended to teach us, and it is ours to hear with attention and receive his words; and while we are hearing faith comes, even that faith which saves the soul. To take “fast hold” is an exhortation which concerns the strength, the reality, the heartiness, and the truthfulness of faith, and the more of these the better. If to take hold is good, to take fast hold is better. Even a touch of the hem of Christ’s garment causeth healing to come to us, but if we want the full riches which are treasured up in Christ we must not only touch but take hold; and if we would know from day to day to the very uttermost all the fullness of his grace, we must take fast hold, and so maintain a constant and close connection between our souls and the eternal fountain of life. It were well to give such a grip as a man gives to a plank when he seizes hold upon it for his very life that is a fast hold indeed.

We are to take fast hold of instruction, and the best of instruction is that which comes from God; the truest wisdom is the revelation of God in Christ Jesus: of that therefore we are to take fast hold. The best understanding is obedience to the will of God and a diligent learning of those saving truths which God has set before us in his word: so that in effect we are exhorted to take hold of Christ Jesus our Lord, the incarnate wisdom in whom dwelleth all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. We are not to let him go but to keep him and hold him, for he is our life. Does not John in his gospel tell us that the Word is our light for instruction and at the same time our life? “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” The more we abide in the Lord Jesus and the more firmly we take hold upon him, the better will it be for us in a thousand ways. I intend at this time to speak as the Holy Spirit shall enable me upon this fast-hold ; and I reckon that the subject is one of the most important which can occupy your attention at this particular crisis in the history of the church. Many there be around us who believe in Christ, but it is with a very trembling faith and their hold is unsteady; we need to have among us men of tighter grip, who really believe what they profess to believe, who know the truth in its living power, and are persuaded of its certainty, so that they cannot by any means be moved from their steadfastness. Among the vacillating crowd we long to see fast-holders who are pillars in the house of our God, whose grasp of divine truth is not that of babes or boys, but of men full grown and vigorous.

We shall handle our subject by speaking first upon the method by which we may take fast hold; then upon the difficulties which will lie in our way in so doing; thirdly, upon the benefits of such a firm grasp; and lastly upon the arguments for our fast holding mentioned in the text.

I. First then, the method of taking fast hold upon true religion, upon the gospel, upon Christ in fact.

At the outset my brethren, much must depend upon the intense decision which a man feels in his soul with regard to eternal things. If he intends trifling he will trifle, but if he means taking fast hold he will, by God’s grace, do so. Under God, this, in many cases, depends very much upon a man’s individuality and force of character. Some men are naturally thorough and whole-hearted in all things upon which they enter, whether of this world or the next. When they serve the devil they are amongst his life guards, and they rush to the front in all kinds of iniquity. Among sinners they become the chief for they have no fear and no hesitancy; they are daredevils, defying both God and man, sinning greedily with both hands. Such men, when converted, often become eminent saints, being just as thorough and resolute in their following after God as they were in the pursuit of evil; they are determined to vindicate his holy cause and spread abroad the knowledge of his love. I must confess an earnest longing that many such may be brought into the church of Christ at this time to brace her up and inspire her with new energy. Many in our churches appear to have no depth of earth; with joy they receive the word from the very fact that they are so shallow, but as soon as the sun ariseth with burning heat it is discovered that they have no root, for they wither away. Others are truly religious, and probably will remain so, but they are not zealous; in fact they are not intense about anything, but are lukewarm, weak, and unstable. These are mere chips in the porridge, neither souring nor sweetening: they give forth no flavour, but they take the flavour of that which surrounds them; they are the creatures of circumstances, not helmsmen who avail themselves of stream and tide, but mere drift-wood carried along by any and every current which may take hold on them. They have no fullness of manhood about them, they are mere children; they resemble the sapling which can be bent and twisted, and not the oak which defies the storm. There are certain persons of this sort who in other matters have purpose enough, and strength of mind enough, but when they touch the things of God they are loose, flimsy, superficial, half-hearted. You see them earnest enough in hunting after wealth, but they show no such zeal in the pursuit of godliness. The force of their character comes out in a political debate, in the making of a bargain, in the arrangement of a social gathering, but you never see it in the work of the Lord. The young man comes to the front as a volunteer, or as a member of a club, or in the house of business, but who ever hears of him in the Sabbath school, the prayer-meeting, or the home-mission? In the things of God such persons owe any measure of progress which they make to the influence of their fellows who bear them along as so much dead weight, they themselves never throwing enough weight into the matter to add a single half-ounce of spiritual power to the church. Now, all this is mischievous and wrong.

My dear friends, we must all confess that if the religion of Christ be true it deserves that we should give our whole selves to it. If it be a lie let it be scoured from creation; but if it he true, it is a matter concerning which we cannot be neutral or lukewarm, for it demands our soul, our life, our all, and its claim cannot be denied. There must be a determination wrought in our souls by the Holy Spirit to be upright and downright in the work of the Lord, or else we shall be little worth.

We come however to closer matters of fact when we observe next that our taking fast hold of the things of God must depend upon the thoroughness of our conversion. In this church we try, as far as we can, in receiving church-members, to receive none but those who give clear evidence of a change of heart; but this evidence can be imitated so skilfully that the best examination and the most earnest judgment cannot prevent self-deceived persons from making a profession of religion. This we cannot help, but woe to those who wilfully deceive. Many exhibit flowers and fruits which never grew in their own gardens; their experience is borrowed and does not spring from the essential root of the Holy Ghost’s work within their souls: this is sad indeed. Our condition before God is a personal matter and can never be settled by the judgment of our fellows, for what can others know of the workings of our hearts? Each man must judge himself and examine himself, for whatever a church may attempt in its zeal for purity, it can never take the responsibility of his own sincerity from any man. We do not pretend to give certificates of salvation, and if we did they would be worthless; you must yourselves know the Lord and be really converted, or else your profession is a forgery and you yourselves are counterfeits. If a man shall in after life hold fast the things of God he must be soundly converted at first. Very much of his after life depends upon the thoroughness of his beginning. There must at the very first be a deep sense of sin, a consciousness of guilt, a holy horror of evil, or he will never make much of a Christian. I do not say that all or even any of those doubts and temptations and satanic suggestions which some have had to struggle with, are necessary to make a true conversion; but I must confess that I am not at all displeased when I meet with a good deal of battling and struggling in the experience of the newly awakened. It is not pleasant for them, but we hope it will be profitable. Those whose souls are ploughed and ploughed and ploughed again before the seed is sown upon them, often yield the best crop. John Bunyan’s “Grace Abounding” very much accounts for John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” If it had not been for his terrible conflicts of soul he might not have known how to hold fast his confidence when shut up for twelve years in prison, nor would he have seen visions of the celestial city when all around him was as the valley of the shadow of death. I do not wish to see seeking souls distressed by Satan, but I do press for this that there shall be an end of self-trust, a total destruction of self-righteousness, a complete giving up of all legal and carnal hopes, or else the conversion will be a mere show and he who is the subject of it will be like Ephraim, a silly dove without heart. Unless repentance of sin is real in you, you will never take fast hold of the truth of God.

And there must be, dear friends, a very sincere laying hold upon Christ Jesus. If you have any doubt about the doctrine of atonement I do not wonder if your religion soon wears into shreds. No, you must without question accept the substitutionary sacrifice; your soul must feel that the precious blood is her only hope, that this and this alone can make her clean before the living God. You must fly to Christ in desperation, and cling to him as all your salvation and all your desire; there must be no hesitancy here. At the very outset of the Christian life these two things should be very distinct with you sin which has ruined you, and Christ who has saved you. Make a muddle at first and your life will be a tangle. Some tradesmen never carry on their business well, they evidently do not more than half understand it and are mere bunglers. Now, if you come to enquire you will find that they were never thoroughly grounded in their calling; either they never served an apprenticeship, or else they were lazy lads and never became masters of their trade, and this bad commencement sticks to them all their lives. It is the same with the higher learning. A man may go a long way in the classics, but if he was not grounded in the grammar he will be everlastingly making mistakes which a sound scholar will soon discover. Every teacher must work hard at the elements if his pupils are to succeed. Whatever you do with the higher forms, do teach that little boy his grammar, ground him in the rudiments, or he will be injured for life. To borrow another illustration, we have heard of a bridge which spanned a stream and for some years stood well enough, but by-and-by through the force of the current, it began to show signs of giving way. When it came to be examined it was soon seen that the builders never went deep enough with the foundations. There is the mischief of thousands of other things besides bridges. We must have good and deep foundations or otherwise the higher we build the sooner the fabric will fall. Look at many of the wretched houses in the streets around us, they are the disgrace of the city; you will see settlements and cracks everywhere because of bad foundations and bad materials. The same is true in the characters of many professed Christians; for want of a good commencement you can see flaws and cracks innumerable and you wonder that they do not come down in sudden ruin. So indeed they would, but like those wretched houses they hold one another up. Many professors only keep upright because they stand in a row and derive support from their associations. I wish we could see more Christian men of the sort who dare to stand alone, like those old family mansions which stand each one in its own garden, so well built that when we begin to take them down each brick is found to be solid as granite, and the mortar is as hard as a rock. Such buildings and such men become every day more rare, but we must come back to the old style, and the sooner the better. Those of you who are yet in the early days of your piety should see to this. See that you are right, and sound, and thorough, and take fast hold of truth in the days of your first love, or yours will be but a sickly life in years to come.

This being taken for granted, the next help to a fast hold of Christ is hearty discipleship. Brethren, as soon as you are converted you become the disciples of Jesus, and if you are to become fast-holding Christians you must acknowledge him to be your Master, Teacher, and Lord in all things, and resolve to be good scholars in his school. He will be the best Christian who has Christ for his Master and truly follows him. Some are disciples of the church, others are disciples of the minister, and a third sort are disciples of their own thoughts; he is the wise man who sits at Jesus’ feet and learns of him with the resolve to follow his teaching and imitate his example. He who tries to learn of Jesus himself, taking the very words from the Lord’s own lips, binding himself to believe whatsoever the Lord hath taught and to do whatsoever he hath commanded he I say, is the stable Christian. Follow Jesus my brethren and not the church, for our Lord has never said to his disciples, “Follow your brethren,” but he has said “Follow me.” He has not said, “Abide by the denominational confession,” but he has said, “Abide in me.” Nothing must come in between our souls and our Lord. What if fidelity to Jesus should sometimes lead us to differ from our brethren? What matters it so long as we do not differ from our Master? Crochets and quibbles are evil things, but a keenly sensitive conscientiousness is invaluable. Be true disciples of Christ and let his least word be precious to you. Remember that if a man love him he will keep his words; and he hath said, “he that shall break one of the least of these my commandments and shall teach men so, the same shall be least in the kingdom of heaven.” Shun all compromises and abatements of truth, but be thorough and determined, holding fast your Savior’s words. Follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth. If such be your resolve by the grace of God, you will take fast hold of instruction and will never let it go.

It will much help you to this if in the next place you have a studious consideration of the Word of God, and meditate much upon the truth which you have received. There is too little studying of the Scriptures nowadays, I am persuaded. Books, magazines, papers, and the like bury the Bible under heaps of rubbish; but he who means to be a man of God to the fullness of his manhood will feed upon the word of God at first hand. Like the Bereans he will be of a noble spirit, and he will search the Scriptures daily. “I want,” saith he, “to obtain my creed, not at second hand from others, but directly for myself from the very word of God itself the pure well of gospel undefiled.” This is a very important point. I have heard often of late a misused expression “I do my own thinking:” let us correct it and then adopt it by saying, “I do my own searching of the word of God.” Remember, we are not called to think out a new gospel, as some imagine, but we are called to be thinkers upon the old gospel, that we may know and understand its principles and its bearings and become confirmed in the belief of it. We need to think over the word till we are thoroughly imbued with it. The silk of certain insects takes its color from the leaves on which they feed, and a Christian man’s life will always take its color from that which his soul feeds upon. Oh, to live upon the word of God, even upon the deep things of God, for so shall we be rooted and grounded in the faith and shall take fast hold of eternal wisdom.

An established Christian is one who not only knows the doctrine but who also knows the authority for it, having looked around it and pondered it in his heart. By careful meditation he is taught in the truth and is able to give a reason for the hope that is in him with meekness and fear. Nor is he merely a man of the letter; his study in the power of the Holy Spirit has carried him into the essence of the word. He has asked the Spirit of God to make him acquainted with divine truth, so that he has not only read of it but he has communed with it, and now he lives upon it, eats it, drinks it, receives it into the inward parts of his soul, and retains it there as a living and incorruptible seed. Now a man who does this year after year is the kind of man who, by God’s grace, will take fast-hold of instruction, and will prove a faithful witness for his Lord.

Add to this also an earnest seriousness of character, and you go a long way towards maintaining a fast hold of Christ. We do not mean by this that we are to dismiss cheerfulness the Lord give us more of it, for it is as oil to the wheels, and is a high recommendation of religion to the unconverted. There are some who are a deal too gloomy in their religion, and seem to think that the grace of God is never displayed by them unless they are sullen and doleful. But at the same time there is a flippancy which is not commendable, and a levity which is far apart from the mind of Christ. Christian life is not child’s play; we above all men ought to make our lives sublime, and not ridiculous. We are not called into this world to trifle away the hours and kill time in doing nothing; for this life links itself to eternity, and that eternity, in spite of all that is said to the contrary, wilt be one of endless misery or of endless joy; it is therefore no small thing to possess an immortal mind and to be responsible before God. Sin is no trifle, pardon is no trifle, and condemnation is no trifle. Eternal life is precious beyond all things, and to lie under the wrath of God is dreadful beyond conception. I love to see, especially in young Christians, with regard to the things of God, deep seriousness of purpose and spirit, showing that they feel it to be a weighty thing to be a Christian, and that they cannot afford to have their Christianity put under the shadow of suspicion, nor dare they even appear to be mere players upon a stage, for they fear and tremble at his word.

Now, if all these things be in you and abound, there will grow around them an experimental verification of the things of God. I mean that you will not only read of the love of God, but you will feel it from day to day, and so be assured of it. You read in the Scriptures of the power of sin and you believe what you read, but to this will be added the confirmatory fact that you feel it in your members, and therefore cannot doubt it. You read of the efficacy of the precious blood of Jesus; but you do more, for you feel its cleansing power upon your heart and its consoling influence over your conscience, and so you are established in the blessed truth. We hardly know anything till we have lived it. You must get truth burnt into you with the hot iron of experience or you will forget it. I believe that the pains and griefs and afflictions of many of God’s children have been absolutely necessary to establish them in the faith; and I can only hope that you who are the children of joy may derive as much benefit from your gladness, as mourners have found in their sorrows; it might be so and should be so, but I fear it seldom is. The whole of our life should be a daily testing of the gospel, and a continuous verification of the eternal truth thereof. Our life should agree with this Book of life: just as the book of nature, being written by the same author as the book of revelation, shows the same hand and style; so the book of the new creation within us; being inscribed by the same Spirit who has written these Scriptures, will display the same style and manner; and we shall thus be growingly assured of the things which are verily revealed to us of God. Go on, dear friends, and may the Lord grant that whatever your experience may be, whether it shall abound in bitterness or in sweetness, the testimony of God may be confirmed in you, and your grip of it may be intensified by every year’s experience.

I must add one other word. I believe that in the mode of taking fast hold upon the gospel, practical Christianity has a great influence; I refer especially to practical usefulness. Some members enter the church and never do a hand’s turn. We have the distinguished privilege of seeing them sit in their pews, and that is all we know about them. We cannot bring them under church censure, for they are punctual in religious observances; but they are barren boughs. Give me the young man who, when he joins the church, says, “I shall take a little time to study the gospel till I know more of it by the teaching of God’s Spirit;” and then, having done so, says, “I have not learned this for myself. There is something for me to do in connection with the church of God and I am determined to find out what it is and to do it.” You see such a young believer going to the Sabbath school, or you find him beginning to speak in a cottage, or becoming a visitor, and seeking to speak personally to individuals about their souls. If he be a man of the right kind his work will be another hold-fast to his mind. Look at him, how he keeps to the gospel: how he clings to the old, old truth. He is not the man to run after new theories and modern doubts for he is helped to keep right by his practical connection with spiritual disease and its remedy. Go into the back slums of London and see if you will doubt the doctrine of human depravity. Oh no, it is your ladies and gentlemen that wear lavender kid gloves who doubt that doctrine. Try to rescue a harlot from her sin, and if you are enabled to lead her to Jesus you cannot doubt the power of the precious blood of Jesus to cleanse the heart. Not those who battle with vice but those who practice it themselves are found cavilling at the doctrine of atonement. Those who are busy plucking brands out of the fire are little given to speculation, but are firm abiders in the gospel. I think there are few exceptions to the rule that the “advanced thought” gentlemen are not engaged in practical work for the salvation of souls. They are grand talkers but very poor workers. I am not hypercritical when I say that if you will mention a “modern thought” professor, it will generally turn out that he is not worth his salt as to practical usefulness: not he; he has the parrot-faculty of pulling things to pieces, but what positive work has he ever done? He may be a distinguished dignitary or a noble scholar, but as to actually grappling with the hearts and consciences of men and entering into the dark and troublous experience of tempted souls, he is quite at sea, for he knows nothing about it. He would talk after another fashion if his hand had ever been laid to hard work among sinful men and afflicted consciences. I tell you sirs that to argue with a poor distressed conscience and to try to bring it to peace in Christ soon lets you know the truth of the gospel. To stand by a dying bed and hear the holy triumph of even the most illiterate of the children of God, or what is equally efficacious, to watch the last sad hours of an impenitent sinner dying without hope, will make you know that there is a world to come, joyful or terrible as the case may be; and you will also learn that sin is a great evil, and that the atonement is a great reality. Young convert, if you want to be one of the firm holders of the gospel you must get to work as well as to study, for this by the overruling power of the Holy Ghost will strengthen you in the faith of God’s elect. Thus I have brought forward the method: may it prove to be instructive.

II. Very briefly I want now to show the difficulties of taking fast hold of instruction, and every difficulty I mention will tend to show all the more clearly the necessity of it.

The first difficulty is that this is the age of questioning. Everybody questions now. Our friends over in Germany have pushed the questioning business to the furthest point, and in their thorough way they have produced its legitimate fruit in cold-blooded attempts to murder a venerable monarch. Professed ministers of the gospel have taught the German mind to doubt everything, and now the basis of society is shaken and law and order are undermined. What could they expect otherwise? He who does not fear God is not likely to honor the king. When men give up their Bibles they will care but little for human laws. We have plenty of the like evil leaven in England, and certain clergymen and dissenting divines are spreading it with hideous industry. Young gentlemen whose whiskers have not yet developed are authoritatively deciding that nothing can be decided, and dogmatically denouncing all dogmas. We meet them every day, and we notice that in proportion to their ignorance is their confidence in sneering at every holy thing. According to them nobody is sincere, nothing is sacred. These great men, who would never have been heard of if they had not been heretical, know better by far than God himself. As for apostles and prophets, they are just nothing at all to these infallibles; their own “thought” is more precious than inspiration itself. This conceited scepticism is in the air; everywhere it seems to be abroad and you cannot help encountering it; therefore let us be the more earnest to hold fast the faith.

Worse than this, this is an age of worldliness. Everybody wants to be rich, and nobody is rich now at the point at which his forefathers were content to stop. Our good old deacons and respected church members were content with very moderate incomes, they were satisfied and happy with thrift and prudence, and would have been deeply grieved with the extravagance which is seen on all sides at this time. They not only considered their shops and their fields, but they planned to have time to look after the Sunday-schools in which they were proud to serve, and the prayer-meetings which they delighted to attend. But, dear me, prayer-meetings, lectures, sermons, Sunday-schools, these are all despised now! If a man can make an extra guinea or two by putting himself where they are out of the question, he jumps at the chance. We must be rich, we must cut a dash, we must spend more than our neighbors, and for this the work of the church may go to the dogs. Oh for a few simple, earnest Christians who will judge their Lord and his cause to be worth some consideration, and will lay themselves out to serve his church. When worldliness is so predominant it becomes so much the harder to take fast hold of eternal things. One needs to hear the word, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you,” for unless we do hear it we shall be tempted to take fast hold on the world, and let the things of eternity slip by us.

Then, besides, there is and always has been a great desire for novelty. We are all the subjects of it: we all like something fresh. But there are some who are sick of the changeable disease; you see them zealots for a creed to-day, but on a sudden you find them deeply immersed in the opposite teaching. Ah, now they have found out something very wonderful: just as the idiot who saw the rainbow, and believed that there was a jewel at the foot of it, ran for miles to seize a glittering sapphire and grasped a piece of glass bottle; so do they forever pursue and never attain. We have a few of these gentlemen in most of our churches, but you will find them nowhere long. Another inventor starts a new system and away they go, pining always to be the first disciples of each new prophet. May God save us from the Athenian spirit which for ever hungers for something new.

Another difficulty, and the worst of all, is the corruption of our own hearts. “Take fast hold of instruction” says the text. “Why,” I hear a brother say, “my dear sir, sometimes it is as much as I can do to take hold of it at all. I have to question whether I have been converted. I go down into such depths of despondency that unless the truth holds me, I shall never hold it.” Well, but I hope this is all a means of helping you to hold it all the more firmly. You now see that salvation must be by grace from first to last. By this very process you will be compelled to hold the doctrines of grace the more intensely, because you are made to see how utterly unable you are, in and of yourselves to think a good thought, much less to remain steadfast in the whole truth of Christ.

And then there is Satan, too; how busy he is in trying to undermine the fundamentals of the faith! Has he not suggested to some of us all kind of doubts? Yes. I said to a man one day who had uttered some blasphemy in my presence against a certain truth, “You think you stagger me! My dear man, I have had more doubts pass through my thoughts a great deal than you could tell me, or fifty like you.” The doubts which the devil insinuates into the minds of the people of God are at times quite as horrible as any which a Voltaire or a Tom Paine was ever able to invent, and yet by God’s grace we have not given up the gospel, nor shall we, though heaven and earth shall pass away. Because we are one with Christ, we shall live in the truth of Christ, for he will keep and preserve us even to the end.

III. Thirdly let us consider the benefits of taking fast hold. I wish I had an hour in which to dilate upon the benefit of so doing, but I must briefly say that it gives stability to the Christian character to have a firm grip of the gospel. Men who take fast hold are the backbone of a church. All through the dark reign of moderatism in Scotland, who kept up the testimony for truth? Why, those solid Christians who were known as “the men” who held the faith and walked with God in the power of it. These were men much in prayer and much in meditation, who lived on when all sound teaching had left the pulpits, because their souls were sustained by secret communion with God on the hill-side. When the time came for pure truth to revive in Scotland these men came to the front and were honored as the men who had kept the flame alive in the land. What was it delivered our country in still earlier times from being altogether under the hoof of Rome? When prelates forsook Christ, and preachers by hundreds in Mary’s day turned from Protestantism to Popery, the true faith lived on in the hearts of poor men and women, weavers and cobblers, who believed what they did believe and could not deny the truth. Everybody in the parish knew that they were “stubborn heretics” who could not be frightened or argued down. They knew, they were sure, they were confident, and therefore they spoke. It did not matter to them that they were in a minority, for they knew that a minority of one on God’s side is a majority. “I Athanasius against the world,” said that grand old confessor, when they told him everybody had gone over to Arianism, and that nobody believed in the deity of Christ. “The earth and all the inhabitants thereof are dissolved, I bear up the pillars of it,” said one of old; and happy is that man to whom such an office is given.

A firm grip of the gospel will give you strength for service. The man who can “hold the fort” at one time is the very man who can capture a fort at another time. He who can stand well can march well. The hand of the church is made of the same material as its backbone. It is of no use sending poor hesitating professors into the field of holy labor. If you hardly know what you believe how can you teach other people? But when the truth is written upon your very soul and graven as with the point of a diamond upon your heart, you will speak with confidence; and there will be a power about your utterances which none shall be able to withstand or gainsay. For the sake then of your spiritual strength, I press the exhortation of the text, “Take fast hold of instruction.”

And this, too, will bring you joy. The outskirts of our Jerusalem are dreary; her glory lies within. Where shines the brightest light? It is in the holy of holies, in the innermost shrine. The skin and husks of religion are poor things, but the juice, the life, the vital power of religion, therein lies the sweetness. You must not be satisfied with the “name to live”; it will never comfort you, it will even distress you. The life of Christ mightily developed in you must be the joy of your heart. Multitudes of Christian professors get next to nothing out of Christianity. How can they? They hold their religion as some rich farmers hold “off-hand farms.” Nobody ever makes anything out of off-hand farms: the man who makes farming pay lives on the spot, and gives his whole time and energy to it. So is it in the things of God: if you make your minister your bailiff in religion you will get nothing out of it; you must live in it and upon it, and then you will prosper. I want you to say, “If there be anything in godliness I am going to know it; if prayer has power I am going to pray; if there be such a thing as communion with God I will enjoy it; if there be such a thing as likeness to Christ I will obtain it. Godliness shall not be an addition to my life, but it shall be my life itself.” Ah brother, you are the man of the shining countenance, you are the man of the sparkling eye; you drink deep, and you find that the deeper you drink the sweeter the draught becomes.

Lastly, with regard to this summary of benefits; persons of this kind are the very glory of the church, they are the persons in whom true religion displays its brightest beams. They may be humble cottagers, or obscure members of a large church who are scarcely known, but those who live with them, those who are at all acquainted with them, say of them, “These men are a credit to the church and an honor to the name of Christianity.” Not your frothy talkers, not your flimsy professors, but your deep taught, grace-instructed men and women, these are they who are the beauty of the church and the glory of Christ. I would to God we had many more such. I look around and see that the cause does not prosper as I could wish throughout the land, and then I recollect in one spot an earnest village preacher, in another a holy laborious deacon, in a third a gracious woman, zealous in every good work, and I am comforted. Thank God, there is life in the old church yet. There is hope for her yet because of her fast-holding people. If I study the statistics of the churches, I have to say, “What is the good of these figures? Probably a church of two hundred members might be cut down to twenty earnest effectives.” For my part, I would sooner stand on this platform with twelve holy men and women to back me up than with twelve thousand mere pretenders to religion, such as can be found in crowds anywhere. No, it is the fast grip of faith, it is vital godliness which makes a man to be a real power in the church.

IV. Now lastly I have to mention the arguments of the text, which are three. All through the sermon I have been using argument, therefore I shall be the more brief and draw to a close.

The first argument is, take fast hold of true religion because it is your best friend. Read the text: “Take fast hold of instruction; let her not go.” You cannot find your way to heaven without this guide, therefore do not suffer it to leave you. Do as Moses did, who when his father-in-law, Hobab, was with him, would not suffer him to depart, “for” he said, “thou shalt be to us instead of eyes, for thou knowest where to encamp in the wilderness.” As Moses kept Hobab, so do you keep the faith, for you cannot find your road except by holding the true gospel with a true heart. What a sweet companion the gospel is! How often it has cheered you! How easy has the road become while you have been in intercourse with it. Do you what the disciples at Emmaus did when Jesus talked with them: they constrained him, saying “Abide with us.” Do not let him go; you will be a lonely pilgrim if you do. No, if you could be led by an angel but must lose the presence of your God, you would be wise to cry out against such an evil, and like Moses plead: “If thy Spirit go not with us, carry us not up hence.”

The next argument is that true godliness should be held fast, for it is your treasure. “Keep it,” says our text. It is your best inheritance at the present moment, and it is to be your eternal inheritance: keep it then. Let everything else go, but do not part with a particle of truth. The slightest fragment of truth is more valuable than a diamond. Hold it then with all firmness. You are so much the richer by every truth you know; you will be so much the poorer by every truth you forget. Hold it then, and hide it in your heart. A certain king who had a rare diamond sent it to a foreign court, entrusting it to a very faithful servant. This servant was attacked however on the road by a band of robbers, and as they could not find the diamond, they drew their swords and killed him. He was found dead, but his master exclaimed, “He has not lost the diamond, I am sure!” He judged truly, for the trusty servant had swallowed the gem and so preserved it with his life. We also should thus place the truth in our inward parts, and then we shall never be deprived of it. A priest took a Testament from an Irish boy. “But” cried the boy, “you cannot take away those six chapters of Matthew that I learned by heart.” They may take away our books but they cannot take away what we have fed upon and made our own. “His flesh is meat indeed, his blood is drink indeed,” for when we have fed upon him our Lord Jesus remains in us the hope of glory. Hold fast the truth, O believers in Jesus, for it is your treasure.

Lastly, it is your “lift.” Mr. Arnot, in his very beautiful book upon the Proverbs, tells a story to illustrate this text. He says that in the Southern seas an American vessel was attacked by a wounded whale. The huge monster ran out for the length of a mile from the ship, and then turned round, and with the whole force of its acquired speed struck the ship and made it leak at every timber, so as to begin to go down. The sailors got out all their boats, filled them as quickly as they could with the necessaries of life, and began to pull away from the ship. Just then two strong men might be seen leaping into the water who swam to the vessel, leaped on board, disappeared for a moment, and then came up bringing something in their hands. Just as they sprang into the sea, down went the vessel, and they were carried round in the vortex, but they were observed to be both of them swimming, not as if struggling to get away, but as if looking for something, which at last they both seized and carried to the boats. What was this treasure? What article could be so valued as to lead them to risk their lives? It was the ship’s compass which had been left behind, without which they could not have found their way out of those lonely southern seas into the high road of commerce. That compass was life to them, and the gospel of the living God is the same to us. You and I must venture all for the gospel: this infallible word of God must be guarded to the death. Men may tell us what they please, and say what they will, but we will risk everything sooner than give up those eternal principles by which we have been saved. The Lord give all of us his abundant grace that we may take fast hold of divine instruction. Amen.

Verse 23

2 Sermons: The Great Reservoir and Wisdom Guards the Heart

The Great Reservoir

February 21, 1858 by C. H. SPURGEON (1834-1892)

"Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life." Proverbs 4:23 .

If I should vainly attempt to fashion my discourse after lofty models, I should this morning compare the human heart to the ancient city of Thebes, out of whose hundred gates multitudes of warriors were wont to march. As was the city, such were her armies, as was her inward strength, such were they who came forth of her. I might then urge the necessity of keeping the heart, because it is the metropolis of our manhood, the citadel and armory of our humanity. Let the chief fortress surrender to the enemy, and the occupation of the rest must be an easy task. Let the principal stronghold be possessed by evil, the whole land must be overrun thereby. Instead, however, of doing this, I shall attempt what possibly I may be able to perform, by a humble metaphor and a simple figure, which will be easily understood; I shall endeavor to set forth the wise man's doctrine, that our life issues from the heart, and thus I shall labor to show the absolute necessity of keeping the heart with all diligence. You have seen the great reservoirs provided by our water companies, in which the water which is to supply hundreds of streets and thousands of houses is kept. Now, the heart is just the reservoir of man, and our life is allowed to flow in its proper season. That life may flow through different pipes the mouth, the hand, the eye; but still all the issues of hand, of eye, of lip, derive their source from the great fountain and central reservoir, the heart; and hence there is no difficulty in showing the great necessity that exists for keeping this reservoir, the heart, in a proper state and condition, since otherwise that which flows through the pipes must be touted and corrupt. May the Holy Spirit now direct our meditations. Mere moralists very often forget the heart, and deal exclusively with the lesser powers. Some of them say, "If a man's life be wrong, it is better to alter the principles upon which his conduct is modeled: we had better adopt another scheme of living; society must be re-modeled, so that man may have an opportunity for the display of virtues, and less temptation to indulge in vice." It is as if, when the reservoir was filled with poisonous or polluted fluid, some sage counsellor should propose that all the piping had better be taken up, and fresh pipes laid down, so that the water might run through fresh channels; but who does not perceive that it would be all in vain, if the fountain-head were polluted, however good the channels. So in vain the rules by which men hope to fashion their lives; in vain the regimen by which we seek to constrain ourselves to the semblance of goodness, unless the heart be right, the very best scheme of life shall fall to the ground, and fail to effect its design. Others say, "Well, if the life be wrong, it would be better to set the understanding right: you must inform man's judgment, educate him, teach him better, and when his head is well informed, then his life will be improved. Now, understanding is, if I may use such a figure, the stopcock which controls the emotions, lets them flow on, or stops them; and it is as if some very wise man, when a reservoir had been poisoned, proposed that there should be a new person employed to turn the water off or on, in hope that the whole difficulty would thus be obviated. If we followed his advice, if we found the wisest man in the world to have control of the fountain, Mr. Understanding would still be incapable of supplying us with healthy streams, until we had first of all purged the cistern whence they flowed. The Arminian divine, too, sometimes suggests another way of improving man's life. He deals with the will . He says, the will must first of all be conquered, and if the will be right, then every thing will be in order. Now, will is like the great engine which forces the water out of the fountain-head along the pipes, so that it is made to flow into our dwellings. The learned counsellor proposes that there should be a new steam-engine employed to force the water along the pipes. "If," says he, "we had the proper machinery for forcing the fluid, then all would be well." No, sir, if the stream be poisonous, you may have axles to turn on diamonds, and you may have a machine that is made of gold, and a force as potent as Omnipotence, but even then you have not accomplished your purpose until you have cleansed the polluted fountain, and purged the issues of life which flow therefrom. The wise man in our text seems to say, "Beware of misapplying your energies, be careful to begin in the right place." It is very necessary the understanding should be right; it is quite needful the will should have its proper predominance; it is very necessary that you should keep every part of man in a healthy condition; "but," says he, "if you want to promote true holiness, you must begin with the heart, for out of it are the issues of life; and when you have purged it, when you have made its waters pure and limpid, then shall the current flow and bless the inhabitants with clear water; but not till then." Here let us pause and ask the solemn and vital question, "Is my heart right in the sight of God?" For unless the inner man has been renewed by the grace of God, through the Holy Spirit, our heart is full of rottenness, filth, and abominations. And if so, here must all our cleansing begin, if it be real and satisfactory. Unrenewed men, I beseech you ponder the words of an ancient Christian which I here repeat in thine ear: "It is no matter what is the sign, though an angel, that hangs without, if the devil and sin dwell therein. New trimmings upon an old garment will not make it new, only give it a new appearance; and truly it is no good husbandry to bestow a great deal of cost in mending up an old suit, that will soon drop to tatters and rags, when a little more might purchase a new one that is lasting. And is it not better to labor to get a new heart, that all thou dost may be accepted, and thou saved, than to lose all the pains thou takest in religion, and thyself also for want of it?" Now, ye who love the Lord, let me take you to the reservoir of your heart, and let, me urge upon you the great necessity of keeping the heart right, if you would have the stream of your life happy for yourselves and beneficial to others. I. First, keep the heart full. However pure the water may be in the central reservoir, it will not be possible for the company to provide us with an abundant supply of water, unless the reservoir itself be full. An empty fountain will most assuredly beget empty pipes; and let the machinery be never so accurate, let every thing else be well ordered, yet if that reservoir be dry, we may wait in vain for any of the water that we require. Now, you know many people (you are sure to meet with them in your own society, and your own circle; for I know of no one so happy as to be without such acquaintances) whose lives are just dry, good-for-nothing emptiness. They never accomplish anything; they have no mental force; they have no moral power; what they say, nobody thinks of noticing; what they do is scarcely ever imitated. We have known fathers whose moral force has been so despicable, that even their children have scarcely been able to imitate them. Though imitation was strong enough in them, yet have they unconsciously felt, even in their childhood, that their father was, after all, but a child like themselves, and had not grown to be a man. Do you not know many people, who if they were to espouse a cause, and it were entrusted to them, would most certainly pilot it to shipwreck. Failure would be the total result. You could not use them as clerks in your office, without feeling certain that your business would be nearly murdered. If you were to employ them to manage a concern for you, you would be sure they would manage to spend all the money, but could never produce a doit. If they were placed in comfortable circumstances for a few months, they would go on carelessly till all was gone. They are just the flats, preyed on by the sharpers in the world; they have no manly strength, no power at all. See these people in religion: it does not matter much what are their doctrinal sentiments, it is quite certain they will never affect the minds of others. Put them in the pulpit: they are the slaves of the deacons, or else the, are over-ridden by the church; they never have an opinion of their own, can not come out with a thing; they have not the heart to say, "Such a thing is, and I know it is." These men just live on, but as far as any utility to the world is concerned, they might almost as well never have been created, except it were to be fed upon by other people. Now, some say that this is the fault of men's heads: "Such a one," they say, "could not get on; he had a small head; it was clean impossible for him to prosper, his head was small, he could not do anything; he had not enough force." Now, that may be true; but I know what was truer still he had got a small heart and that heart was empty. For, mark you, a man's force in the world, other things being equal, is just in the ratio of the force and strength of his heart. A full-hearted man is always a powerful man: if he be erroneous, then he is powerful for error; if the thing is in his heart, he is sure to make it notorious, even though it may be a downright falsehood. Let a man be never so ignorant, still if his heart be full of love to a cause, he becomes a powerful man for that object, because he has got heart-power, heart-force. A man may be deficient in many of the advantages of education, in many of those niceties which are so much looked upon in society; but once give him a good strong heart, that beats hard, and there is no mistake about his power. Let him have a heart that is right full up to the brim with an object, and that man will do the thing, or else he will die gloriously defeated, and will glory in his defeat. HEART IS POWER. It is the emptiness of men's hearts that makes them so feeble. Men do not feel what they are at. Now, the man in business that goes heart and soul into his business, is more likely to prosper than anybody else. That is the preacher we want, the man that has a full soul. Let him have a head the more he knows the better; but, after all, give him a big heart; and when his heart beats, if his heart be full, it will, under God, either make the hearts of his congregation beat after him; or else make them conscious that he is laboring hard to compel them to follow. O! if we had more heart in our Master's service, how much more labor we could endure. You are a Sunday-school teacher, young man, and you are complaining that you can not get on in the Sunday-school. Sir, the service-pipe would give out plenty of water if the heart were full. Perhaps you do not love your work. O, strive to love your work more, and then when your heart is full, you will go on well enough. "O," saith the preacher, "I am weary of my work in preaching; I have little success; I find it a hard toil." The answer to that question is, "Your heart is not full of it, for if you loved preaching, you would breathe preaching, feed upon preaching, and find a compulsion upon you to follow preaching; and your heart being full of the thing, you would be happy in the employment. O for a heart that is full, and deep, and broad! Find the man that hath such a soul as that, and that is the man from whom the living waters shall flow, to make the world glad with their refreshing streams. Learn, then, the necessity of keeping the heart full; and let the necessity make you ask this question "But how can I keep my heart full? How can my emotions be strong? How can I keep my desires burning and my zeal inflamed?" Christian! there is one text which will explain all this. "All my springs are in thee," said David. If thou hast all thy springs in God, thy heart will be full enough. If thou dost go to the foot of Calvary, there will thy heart be bathed in love and gratitude. If thou dost frequent the vale of retirement, and there talk with thy God, it is there that thy heart shall be full of calm resolve. If thou goest out with thy Master to the hill of Olivet, and dost with him look down upon a wicked Jerusalem, and weep over it with him, then will thy heart be full of love for never-dying souls. If thou dost continually draw thine impulse, thy life, the whole of thy being from the Holy Spirit, without whom thou canst do nothing; and if thou dost live in close communion with Christ, there will be no fear of thy having a dry heart. He who lives without prayer he who lives with little prayer he who seldom reads the Word he who seldom looks up to heaven for a fresh influence from on high he will be the man whose heart will become dry and barren; but he who calls in secret on his God who spends much time in holy retirement who delights to meditate on the words of the Most High whose soul is given up to Christ who delights in his fullness, rejoices in his all-sufficiency, prays for his second coming, and delights in the thought of his glorious advent such a man, I say, must have an overflowing heart; and as his heart is, such will his life be. It will be a full life; it will be a life that will speak from the sepulcher, and wake the echoes of the future. "Keep thine heart with all diligence," and entreat the Holy Spirit to keep it full; for, otherwise, the issues of thy life will be feeble, shallow, and superficial; and thou mayest as well not have lived at all. 2. Secondly, it would be of little use for our water companies to keep their reservoirs full, if they did not also keep them pure. I remember to have read a complaint in the newspaper of a certain provincial town, that a tradesman had been frequently supplied with fish from the water company, large eels having crept down the pipe, and sometimes creatures a little more loathsome. We have known such a thing as water companies supplying us with solids when they ought to have given us nothing but pure crystal. Now, no one likes that. The reservoir should be kept pure and clean; and unless the water comes from a pure spring, and is not impregnated with deleterious substances, however full the reservoir may be, the company will fail of satisfying or of benefiting its customers. Now it is essential for us to do with our hearts as the company must do with its reservoir. We must keep our hearts pure; for if the heart be not pure, the life can not be pure. It is quite impossible that it should be so. You see a man whose whole conversation is impure and unholy; when he speaks he lards his language with oaths; his mind is low and groveling; none but the things of unrighteousness are sweet to him, for he has no soul above the kennel and the dunghill. You meet with another man who understands enough to avoid violating the decencies of life; but still, at the same time he likes filthiness; any low joke, anything that will in some way stir unholy thoughts is just the thing that he desires. For the ways of God he has no relish; in God's house he finds no pleasure, in his Word no delight. What is the cause of this? Say some, it is because of his family connections because of the situation in which he stands because of his early education, and all that. No, no; the simple answer to that is the answer we gave to the other inquiry; the heart is not right; for, if the heart were pure, the life would be pure too. The unclean stream betrays the fountain. A valuable book of German parables, by old Christian Scriver, contains the following homely metaphor: "A drink was brought to Gotthold, which tasted of the vessel in which it had been contained; and this led him to observe. We have here an emblem of our thoughts, words, and works. Our heart is defiled by sin, and hence a taint if sinfulness cleaves unfortunately to everything we take in hand; and although, from the force of habit, this may be imperceptible to us, it does not escape the eye of the omniscient, holy, and righteous God." Whence come our carnality, covetuousness, pride, sloth and unbelief? Are they not all to be traced to the corruption of our hearts? When the hands of a clock move in an irregular manner, and when the bell strikes the wrong hour, be assured there is something wrong within. O how needful that the main-spring of our motives be in proper order, and the wheels in a right condition. Ah! Christian keep thy heart pure. Thou sayest, "How can I do this?" Well, there was of old a stream of Marah, to which the thirsty pilgrims in the desert came to drink; and when they came to taste of it, it was so brackish that though their tongues were like torches, and the roofs of their mouths were parched with heat, yet they could not drink of that bitter water. Do you remember the remedy which Moses prescribed? It is the remedy which we prescribe to you this morning. He took a certain tree, and he cast it into the waters, and they became sweet and clear. Your heart is by nature like Marah's water, bitter and impure. There is a certain tree, you know its name, that tree on which the Saviour hung, the cross. Take that tree, put it into your heart, and though it were even more impure than it is, that sweet cross, applied by the Holy Spirit, would soon transform it into its own nature, and make it pure. Christ Jesus in the heart is the sweet purification. He is made unto us sanctification. Elijah cast salt into the waters; but we must cast the blood of Jesus there. Once let us know and love Jesus, once let his cross become the object of our adoration and the theme of our delight, the heart will beam its cleansing, and the life will become pure also. Oh! that we all did learn the sacred lesson of fixing the cross in the heart! Christian man! love thy Saviour more; cry to the Holy Spirit that thou mayest have more affection for Jesus; and then, how ever gainful may be thy sin, thou wilt say with the poet,

"Now for the love I bear his name, What was my gain I count my loss; My former pride I call my shame, And nail my glory to his cross."

The cross in the heart is the purifier of the soul; it purges and it cleanses the chambers of the mind. Christian! keep thy heart pure, "for out of it are the issues of life." 3. In the third place, there is one thing to which our water companies need never pay much attention; that is to say, if their water be pure, and the reservoir be full, they need not care to keep it peaceable and quiet, for let it be stirred to a storm, we should receive our water in the same condition as usual. It is not so, however, with the heart. Unless the heart be kept peaceable, the life will not be happy. If calm doth not reign over that inner lake within the soul which feeds the rivers of our life, the rivers themselves will always be in storm. Our outward acts will always tell that they were born in tempests, by rolling in tempests themselves. Let us just understand this, first, with regard to ourselves. We all desire to lead a joyous life; the bright eye and the elastic foot are things which we each of us desire; to carry about a contented mind is that to which most men are continually aspiring. Let us all remember, that the only way to keep our life peaceful and happy is to keep the heart at rest; for come poverty, come wealth, come honor, come shame, come plenty, or come scarcity, if the heart be quiet there will be happiness anywhere. But whatever the sunshine and the brightness, if the heart be troubled the whole life must be troubled too. There is a sweet story told in one of the German martyrologies well worth both my telling and your remembering. A holy martyr who had been kept for a long time in prison, and had there exhibited, to the wonderment of all who saw him, the strongest constancy and patience, was at last, upon the day of execution, brought out, and tied to the stake preparatory to the lighting of the fire. While in this position he craved permission to speak once more to the Judge, who, according to the Swiss custom, was required to be also present at the execution. After repeatedly refusing, the judge at last came forward, when the peasant addressed him thus: You have this day condemned me to death. Now, I freely admit that I am a poor sinner, but positively deny that I am a heretic, because from my heart I believe and confess all that is contained in the Apostles' Creed (which he thereupon repeated from beginning to end). Now, then, sir, he proceeded to say, I have but one last request to make, which is, that you will approach and place your hand, first upon my breast and then upon your own, and afterwards frankly and truthfully declare, before this assembled multitude, which of the two, mine or yours, is beating most violently with fear and anxiety. For my part, I quit the world with alacrity and joy, to go and be with Christ, in whom I have always believed; what your feelings are at this moment is best known to yourself. The judge could make no answer, and commanded them instantly to light the pile. It was evident, however, from his looks, that he was more afraid than the martyr." Now, keep your heart right. Do not let it smite you. The Holy Spirit says of David, "David's heart smote him." The smiting of the heart is more painful to a good man than the rough blows of the fist. It is a blow that can be felt; it is iron that enters into the soul. Keep your heart in good temper. Do not let that get fighting with you. Seek that the peace of God which passeth all understanding, may keep your heart and mind through Christ Jesus. Bend your knee at night, and with a full confession of sin, express your faith in Christ, then you may "dread the grave as little as your bed." Rise in the morning and give your heart to God, and put the sweet angels of perfect love and holy faith therein, and you may go into the world, and were it full of lions and of tigers you would no more need to dread it than Daniel when he was cast into the lion's den. Keep the heart peaceable and your life will be happy. Remember, in the second place, that it is just the same with regard to other men. I should hope we all wish to lead quiet lives, and as much as lieth in us to live peaceably with all men. There is a particular breed of men I do not know where they come from, but they are mixed up now with the English race and to be met with here and there men who seem to be born for no other reason whatever but to fight always quarreling, and never pleased. They say that all Englishmen are a little that way that we are never happy unless we have something to grumble at, and that the worst thing that ever could be done with us would be to give us some entertainment at which we could not grumble, because we should be mortally offended, because we had not the opportunity of displaying our English propensities. I do not know whether that is true of all of us, but it is of some. You can not sit with them in a room but they introduce a topic upon which you are quite certain to disagree with them. You could not walk with them half a mile along the public streets but they would be sure to make an observation against every body and every thing they saw. They talk about ministers: one man's doctrine is too high, another's is too low; one man they think is a great deal too effeminate and precise, another they say is so vulgar they would not hear him at all. They say of another man that they do not think he attends to visiting his people; of another, that he visits so much that he never prepares for the pulpit. No one can be right for them. Why is this? Whence arises this continual snarling? The heart must again supply the answer, they are morose and sullen in the inward parts, and hence their speech betrayeth them. They have not had their hearts brought to feel that God hath made of one blood all nations that dwell upon the face of the earth, or if they have felt that, they have never been brought to spell in their hearts "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye love one another." Whichever may have been put there of the other ten, the eleventh commandment was never written there. "A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another." That they forgot. Oh! dear Christian people, seek to have your hearts full of love, and if you have had little hearts till now that could not hold love enough for more than your own denomination, get your hearts enlarged, so that you may have enough to send out service-pipes to all God's people throughout the habitable globe; so that whenever you meet a man who is a true-born heir of heaven, he has nothing to do but to turn to the tap, and out of your loving heart will begin to flow issues of true, fervent, unconstrained, willing, living love. Keep thine heart peaceable, that thy life may be so; for out of the heart are the issues of life. How is this to be done? We reply again, we must ask the Holy Spirit to pacify the heart. No voice but that which on Galilee lake said to the storm "Be still," can ever lay the troubled waters of a stormy heart. No strength but Omnipotence can still the tempest of human nature. Cry out mightily unto him. He still sleeps in the vessel with his church. Ask him to awake, lest your piety should perish in the waters of contention. Cry unto him that he may give your heart peace and happiness. Then shall your life be peaceful; spend ye it where ye may, in trouble or in joy. 4. A little further. When the water-works company have gathered an abundance of water in the reservoir, there is one thing they must always attend to, and that is, they must take care they do not attempt too much, or otherwise they will fail. Suppose they lay on a great main pipe in one place to serve one city, and another main pipe to serve another, and the supply which was intended to fill one channel is diverted into a score of streams, what would be the result? Why nothing would be done well, but everyone would have cause to complain. Now, man's heart is after all so little, that there is only one great direction in which its living water can ever flow; and my fourth piece of advice to you from this text is, Keep your heart undivided. Suppose you see a lake, and there are twenty or thirty streamlets running from it: why, there will not be one strong river in the whole country; there will be a number of little brooks which will be dried up in the summer, and will be temporary torrents in the winter. They will every one of them be useless for any great purposes, because there is not water enough in the lake to feed more than one great stream. Now, a man's heart has only enough life in it to pursue one object fully. Ye must not give half your love to Christ, and the other half to the world. No man can serve God and mammon because there is not enough life in the heart to serve the two. Alas! many people try this, and they fail both ways. I have known a man who has tried to let some of his heart run into the world, and another part he allowed to drip into the church, and the effect has been this: when he came into the church he was suspected of hypocrisy. "Why," they said, "if he were truly with us, could he have done yesterday what he did, and then come and profess so much to-day?" The church looks upon him as a suspicious one: or if he deceive them they feel he is not of much use to them, because they have not got all his heart. What is the effect of his conduct in the world? Why, his religion is a fetter to him there. The world will not have him, and the church will not have him; he wants to go between the two, and both despise him. I never saw anybody try to walk on both sides of the street but a drunken man: he tried it, and it was very awkward work indeed; but I have seen many people in a moral point of view try to walk on both sides of the street, and I thought there was some kind of intoxication in them, or else they would have given it up as a very foolish thing. Now, if I thought this world and the pleasures thereof worth my seeking, I would just seek them and go after them, and I would not pretend to be religious; but if Christ be Christ, and if God be God, let us give our whole hearts to him, and not go shares with the world. Many a church member manages to walk on both sides of the street in the following manner: His sun is very low indeed it has not much light, not much heat, and is come almost to its setting. Now sinking suns cast long shadows, and this man stands on the world's side of the street, and casts a long shadow right across the road, to the opposite side of the wall just across the pavement. Ay, it is all we get with many of you. You come and you take the sacramental bread and wine; you are capsized; you join the church; and what we get is just your shadow; there is your substance on the other side of the street, after all. What is the good of the empty chrysalis of a man? And yet many of our church members are little better. They just do as the snake does that leaves its slough behind. They give us their slough, their skin, the chrysalis case in which life once was, and then they go themselves hither and thither after their own wanton wills; they give us the outward, and then give the world the inward. O how foolish this, Christian! Thy master gave himself wholly for thee; give thyself unreservedly to him. Keep not back part of the price. Make a full surrender of every motion of thy heart; labor to have but one object, and one aim. And for this purpose give God the keeping of thine heart. Cry out for more of the divine influences of the Holy Spirit, that so when thy soul is preserved and protected by him, it may be directed into one channel, and one only, that thy life may run deep and pure, and clear and peaceful; its only banks being God's will, its only channel the love of Christ and a desire to please him. Thus wrote Spencer in days long gone by: "Indeed, by nature, man's heart is a very divided, broken thing, scattered and parceled out, a piece to this creature, and a piece to that lust. One while this vanity hires him (as Leah did Jacob of Rachel), anon when he hath done some drudgery for that, he lets out himself to another: thus divided is man and his affections. Now the elect, whom God hath decreed to be vessels of honor, consecrated for his holy use and service, he throws into the fire of his word, that being there softened and melted, he may by his transforming Spirit cast them anew, as it were, into a holy oneness; so that he who before was divided from God, and lost among the creatures, and his lusts, that shared him among them, now, his heart is gathered into God from them all; it looks with a single eye on God, and acts for him in all that he doth: if therefore thou wouldest know whether thy heart be sincere, inquire whether it be thus made anew." 5. Now, my last point is rather a strange one perhaps. Once upon a time, when one of our kings came back from a captivity, old historians tell us that there were fountains in Cheapside that did run with wine. So bounteous was the king, and so glad the people, that instead of water, they made wine flow free to everybody. There is a way of making our life so rich, so full, so blessed to our fellow men, that the metaphor may be applicable to us, and men may say, that our life flows with wine when other men's lives flow with water. Ye have known some such men. There was a Howard. John Howard's life was not like our poor common lives; he was so benevolent, his sympathy with the race so self-denying, that the streams of his life were like generous wine. You have known another, an eminent saint, one who lived very near to Jesus: when you talked yourself, you felt your conversation was poor watery stuff; but when he talked to you, there was an unction and a savor about his words, a solidity, and a strength about his utterances, which you could appreciate, though you could not attain unto it. You have sometimes said, "I wish my words were as full, as sweet, as mellow, and as unctuous as the words of such an one! Oh! I wish my actions were just as rich, had as deep a color, and as pure a taste as the acts of so-and-so. All I can do seems but little and empty when compared with his high attainments. Oh, that I could do more! Oh, that I could send streams of pure gold into every house, instead of my poor dross," Well, Christian, this should teach thee to keep thine heart full of rich things. Never, never neglect the Word of God; that will make thy heart rich with precept, rich with understanding; and then thy conversation, when it flows from thy mouth, will be like thine heart, rich, unctuous, and savory. Make thy heart full of rich, generous love, and then the stream that flows from thy hand will be just as rich and generous as thine heart. Above all, get Jesus to live in thine heart, and then out of thy belly shall flow rivers of living water, more rich, more satisfying than the water of the well of Sychar of which Jacob drank. Oh! go, Christians, to the great mine of riches, and cry unto the Holy Spirit to make thy heart rich unto salvation. So shall thy life and conversation be a boon to thy fellows; and when they see thee, thy face shall be as the angel of God. Thou shalt wash thy feet in butter and thy steps in oil; they that sit in the gate shall rise up when they see thee, and men shall do thee reverence. But one single sentence, and we have done. Some of your hearts are not worth keeping. The sooner you get rid of them the better. They are hearts of stone. Do you feel today that you have a stony heart? Go home, and I pray the Lord hear my desire that thy polluted heart may be removed. Cry unto God and say, "Take away my heart of stone, and give me a heart of flesh;" for a stony heart is an impure heart, a divided heart, an unpeaceful heart. It is a heart that is poor and poverty-stricken, a heart that is void of all goodness, and thou canst neither bless thyself nor others, if thy heart be such. O Lord Jesus! wilt thou be pleased this day to renew many hearts? Wilt thou break the rock in pieces, and put flesh instead of stone, and thou shalt have the glory, world without end!

Wisdom Guards the Heart Proverbs 4:23

What I want to do tonight is pretty much take up where we left off this morning, talking about spiritual warfare and the fact that one of the key battlefields in that warfare is the human heart. I want to look back at the Book of Proverbs, chapter 4 a single verse Proverbs 4:23 . I want you to turn there, even though it’s only one verse, because we will look a bit at the context. So, turn there, and while you’re doing that, let me read the verse. Proverbs 4:23 , “Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.”

Now, I want to start by giving you just a very, very short summary of what that proverb means. What it’s saying is this: your heart is like a reservoir and what comes out of it is what determines the quality and the character of your spiritual life. If your heart is defiled, it will have consequences in your behavior, your speech, your attitudes, and every area of life. The heart is the wellspring of life itself, and if you pollute the fountain, you defile all of life. It’s vital to understand that.

Now, also, one other thing I don’t want you to miss and let’s not skip over is this: that when Scripture speaks of the heart, it’s speaking of your thought life, the core of your soul, where your thoughts and imaginations operate. We sometimes contrast heart and mind in a way that Scripture really doesn’t. The heart isn’t set against the mind in Scripture, but normally, when you see Scripture speaking of the heart, it’s speaking of the mind or at least at the very least including the mind, because the heart is where Scripture puts the seat of your thought life. Proverbs 23:7 , “As he thinketh in his heart , so is he.” So, what you think about and how you think, the ideas you entertain in the privacy of your own imagination, that is the true barometer of your spiritual character.

One of the key verses in the New Testament is Mark 7:20-23 , where Jesus said this, “That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man; for from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, and foolishness.” Jesus said, “All these things come from within and defile the man.” He was answering people who had charged His disciples with eating with unwashed hands, and He was saying, you know, “It’s not what goes into you that defiles you, but what comes out of your heart.” You cannot entertain wicked thoughts without being utterly defiled by them. In fact, that is, is it not, the very principle our verse is teaching? “A corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit,” Matthew 7:18 , “A contaminated well is unhealthy.” So, it’s vital to guard your heart and keep it from every kind of defilement.

Now, that’s the meaning of our text. That’s what it’s teaching. What I want to do in this hour is focus on the practical and doctrinal implications of this command that we’re given in this verse: “Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life,” or, as another version has it, “Guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” There are three clear spiritual and doctrinal ramifications of this verse that I want to highlight for you tonight. Number one is the duty of guarding the heart; second is the difficulty of guarding the heart; and third is the desirability of guarding the heart. We’ll look at these one at a time, so, if you’re taking notes, I’ll try to help you get the main points down.

First is the duty of guarding your heart. The duty of guarding your heart. This is on the face of it. Notice, this is an imperative; it’s a command. There’s a duty that’s clearly set forth in this verse and it’s essential that we embrace this duty and submit to the command. In fact, I would say that this is the chief practical duty of the Christian life as it pertains to us. You know, we’re taught by the first question in the Catechism that man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. And that’s what God made us for to glorify Him and to enjoy Him and that’s a fitting statement of our duty with respect to God, but our first and primary duty with respect to ourselves, is the duty stated in this verse: “Keep your heart with all diligence.” As we’re going to see tonight, that is ultimately the only way you can glorify God and enjoy him forever.

Now, this is not an easy obligation and we’re going to talk about that when I get to the second point but the point here is that it, nonetheless, is an important duty. It’s not easy to keep our thoughts pure and holy, but our sinful thoughts are the first and most important sins we are called to crucify, mortify, put to death. We saw that a little bit this morning. Remember, Jesus taught that those sinful thoughts are the source and the fountain of all the evil that defiles us. That’s interesting, isn’t it? I mean, Scripture and Jesus here is explicitly teaching that you’re not defiled by sin that rubs off on you from the outside. Think of it. Jesus, perfectly sinless, came to this earth, dwelt among sinners as a man, and the sin that He lived in the midst of, none of it rubbed off on Him. Why? Because there was no sin coming from within to defile him. The truth is, our own sinful thoughts, what emanates from our own heart, that is the source of every problem we have. That’s what defiles us.

When the apostle Paul commands us to mortify the sin that’s in our members, his focus is not on external deeds I read you that verse this morning, Colossians 3:5 but what he does in Colossians 3:5 , when he says, “Mortify the sin that’s in your members,” he gives a long list of the kinds of sin that, basically, come out of the thought life. Sins that are hatched in an unholy heart; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, covetousness, evil concupiscence these are all sins that occur in the mind! They are sins of the passion and of the mind. So, the process of mortifying sin, as we saw this morning, involves getting control of the mind, the imagination, the passions, the heart. Paul is calling for internal purification when he says, “Mortify the sin that is in your members.” He’s not calling merely for the reformation of our external behavior you understand that, right? He’s not saying what your mother meant, when you were a child and she said, “Behave!” She meant, “Act nice.” Paul means, “Think nice.” That’s how sanctification works.

The focus on sanctification, in Scripture, is always about purifying the heart and renewing the mind. We’re transformed by the renewing of our mind. The outworking of our sanctification, naturally then, results in a change of behavior. But a change of behavior, without the renewal of the heart, is not sanctification at all. In fact, it’s a form of hypocrisy and I’ll have more to say about that as we go, but first, let me give you some practical steps for guarding your heart. How can we do this? What precisely does this verse require of us? “Keep thy heart with all diligence” what does that mean? Scripture gives us some clear guidelines for “keeping our heart” and I want to outline just the basics for you. So, you ought to write these down. If you’re taking notes, again, these are sub-points. I did this this morning, I rarely do this, I hate to confuse you with sub-points, but I’ve got a little list that you need to take down here.

Step one: give your heart to Christ . You cannot begin to put this principle into practice unless your heart is surrendered to the Lordship of Christ and you are devoted to Him in love. If you’re not a believer in Christ, that means your heart is not worth keeping! It’s a heart of stone; it’s cold, it’s dead, it’s spiritually lifeless. If you’re not a believer, your heart is corrupt and sinful and utterly impotent to produce any kind of righteousness. You need a wholesale heart renewal, a new heart. That’s what Jesus meant when He said, “You need to be born again.” As Scripture describes it you can study this for yourself, in Ezekiel 36:0 but as Scripture describes the process of the new birth, regeneration, it’s all about a new heart, the implantation of a new heart. The Lord says, “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit I will put within you. I’ll take out the stony heart and put in a heart of flesh.” That is the promise. That is the biblical description of the new birth. That is what theologians refer to as regeneration.

But, it’s all about a supernatural work of God in the heart. Essentially, a spiritual heart transplant. It is the wholesale renewal of the heart and the will and the passions. It’s not something you can do for yourself. It involves, in effect, spiritual resurrection: life from the dead. Without it, Scripture says, your heart is utterly incapable of any righteousness whatsoever. That’s what Romans 8:7-8 means when it says, “The carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then, they that are in the flesh cannot please God.”

There’re no exceptions to that rule, by the way. What it means is that without regeneration, without a new heart, what you have is a heart that is bereft of any kind of righteousness, incapable of obedience to God, devoid of any true love for Him, unable to do anything whatsoever to please Him. That’s really what theologians call the doctrine of total depravity. I didn’t make it up; it’s what the Bible teaches. If you don’t have a regenerate heart, your heart is not worth keeping, and it’s impossible for such a heart to produce any true righteousness. But Christ invites us to give Him our hearts.

Wisdom speaks in Proverbs 23:26 and says this, “My son, give me thine heart.” That’s the voice of wisdom and I believe that that is also the voice of Christ, who is personified throughout the Book of Proverbs as wisdom. You can’t truly give your heart to wisdom without devoting your heart to Christ. According to 1 Corinthians 1:30 , “Christ is made, unto us, wisdom.” So, if you want to keep your heart, step one is this: give it to Christ. Devote it to His wisdom. Devote it to love for Him. According to Ephesians 3:16-17 , the way to be “strengthened by might in the inner man” is to “have Christ dwell in your hearts by faith.” Give Him your heart. Embrace Him as the chief object of your love. Jesus Himself said, “He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he that love his son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.” If He is not first in your heart, then you have no hope of keeping your heart pure. It’s as simple as that.

Step two: crucify your mind . Mortify your evil thoughts. I already quoted Colossians 3:5 , “Mortify, therefore, your members which are upon the earth…fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry,” but this is a recurring theme in the Apostle Paul’s writings, this idea of putting to death sin in your body, mortifying the sin. Romans 8:13 , “If you live after the flesh, you shall die; but if you, through the Spirit, do mortify the deeds of the body, you shall live.” What he’s saying is this: put your evil thoughts to death. Deal with them ruthlessly. Don’t allow them any breathing room. Choke the life out of them. Mortify them. Romans 13:14 , “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof.”

By the way, this is one of the marks of the true Christian. Galatians 5:24 says, “They that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts.” We haven’t done it perfectly. It’s a process of crucifixion, and that’s a slow death, so those affections and lusts continually come back to plague us; but if you are truly a believer, then at some point and in some way, you have begun the process of crucifying these lusts and affections.

And Paul says continue the process. Carry it through to the end, because sinful thoughts are a fierce, deadly enemy that must be met with lethal force, choked out of existence, rooted up, exterminated, and utterly purged from our lives. That’s the only way to deal with sin in your life any sin. Understand what Jesus was saying when He said, “All that defiles you comes from your heart,” He’s saying that every sin that troubles you is hatched in your mind! If you can control your mind, if you can mortify that sin that’s in your mind, that is the pathway to sanctification. If you don’t do that, every wicked thought will destroy you, if you don’t destroy it. And you’ll never get control of your thought life if you’re not proactive, deliberate, ruthless in mortifying and putting to death the sin that’s in your heart.

Step three: put restraints on your heart that will keep you from entertaining iniquity in that private arena of your own mind. Put restraints on your heart you can shorten your version to just that put restraints on your heart. Get rid of evil influences. Don’t watch movies or read novels that fill your mind with wickedness. Have some self-control in what you expose yourself to; in biblical terms, “exercise yourself rather unto godliness.”

Look at the context of our verse now. Proverbs 4:0 you should have turned there Proverbs 4:20 go back to verse 20: “My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings. Let them not depart from thine eyes, and keep them in the midst of thine heart, for they are life unto those that find them and health unto all their flesh.” And then our verse, “Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.” Verse 24, “Put away from thee a froward [or deceitful mouth], and perverse lips put far from thee. Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee. Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established. Turn not to the right hand or the left; remove thy foot from evil.” There’s lots of sound advice about how to guard your heart in that passage I just read. Look at it closely.

First of all, if you want to guard your heart, you have to guard your ears, verse 20, “Attend to my words; incline thine ear to my sayings.” Be careful what you fill your ears with. This verse suggests that the focus of your hearing ought to be the wisdom of God’s Word. Be attentive. Incline your ears to these sayings. I’m amazed at what some Christians fill their ears with. I could probably tell a lot about the state of your sanctification just by checking the presets on your car radio, right? I mean, what that tells me is what you listen to when you’re alone and can choose to listen for yourself. What do you tune into? What do you tune into? The shock jocks with their off-color humor and the angry ranting of certain drive time radio personalities? Do you gravitate to music that’s profane and full of iniquity? I always wonder why would a Christian ever want to fill his ears with profanity and lewdness, and how can a godly person derive enjoyment from those things?

Now, I’m not suggesting that all secular music or humor is evil, but I am saying, shouldn’t our listening be dominated by that which edifies? This passage seems to say so. Our ears ought to be inclined to the truth of the Word of God. If that’s not the focus and predominance of what you listen to when you’re alone, with time to think and meditate, then you’re probably not doing a very good job of guarding your heart.

Next: guard your eyes, verse 21: “Don’t let the truth depart from your eyes” and that’s also echoed in verse 25: “Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee.” Keep your eyes where they ought to be or you won’t be able to keep your heart where it ought to be that’s a simple principle. Jesus said, in Matthew 6:22-23 , “The lamp of the body is the eye. If, therefore, your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is evil, your whole body shall be full of darkness.” That’s a good reason not to watch some of the stuff we watch, isn’t it? Our culture constantly bombards us with images and entertainment deliberately designed to appeal to the lust of the eyes, and if you don’t know when to turn away and refuse to watch, you aren’t doing a very good job of guarding your heart.

And I’m not speaking only about that which is overtly evil. That’s a given. I shouldn’t even have to make that point. But much of what we watch is simply a waste of time! That is as detrimental to us, spiritually, as watching evil things, because it fills our hearts with vain thoughts. The Psalmist wrote in Psalms 119:37 , “Turn away mine eyes from looking at worthless things.” If you sit for hours watching TV even if you’re only watching the Fox News Channel or Home and Garden Network you’re probably not doing a very good job of guarding your heart.

Here’s another one: guard your conscience, verses 21 and 22 say this: “Keep these sayings in the midst of your heart, for they are life unto those that find them and health unto all their flesh.” When the sage here encourages us to guard our hearts, he is, in effect, urging us to keep a healthy and active conscience. He’s saying we should cultivate a mind and a conscience that are informed by the Word of God. In fact, I don’t need to say much about this; it’s self-evident. Don’t let the voice of God’s wisdom be silenced in your own heart by the hardening of your conscience.

There’s more, verse 24: guard your tongue, “Put away from you a deceitful mouth and put perverse lips far from you.” Proverbs 17:20 says, “He who has a perverse tongue falls into evil.” One of the very practical ways you can mortify sin in your heart is by consciously and carefully restraining its expression in your speech. James 3:2 says, “If any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man and able also to bridle the whole body.” If you can control your tongue, you’ll be able to control your mind too.

Here’s another one: guard your feet, verses 26 and 27: “Ponder the path of thy feet and let all thy ways be established. Turn not to the right hand or to the left; remove thy foot from evil.” In other words, stay away from places where temptation assaults you. That’s pretty much just straightforward, simple wisdom. Jesus taught us to pray, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” If you sincerely mean that, then don’t go places where you know you’re going to be tempted. It’s pointless to pray that prayer if you are willingly going to expose yourself to temptation.

Now, recently I said some of these things in a message I think in Grace Life and someone came to me afterwards and said, “Well, that’s not very balanced. Why don’t you warn about the dangers of legalism? You ought to do another message,” he said, “and explain why we shouldn’t be legalistic.” Well, I have preached on legalism before! I’ve actually preached on legalism twice from this pulpit and if you want to hear that, you can get the tape. But, let me just say that I don’t think legalism is the biggest temptation most of us face. If modern evangelicals have an imbalance, it’s in the other direction, in the direction of worldliness, not legalism. But, there’s nothing legalistic about what I’m telling you. I haven’t given you any lists or rules about specific things you can and cannot do. I haven’t gone beyond what Scripture says. I’ve only given you a list of principles. I’m telling you that you ought to avoid temptation. Again, this is just a basic principle of spiritual and biblical wisdom; it’s not a complex idea.

Matthew 26:41 , “Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

1 Peter 5:8-9 , “Be sober, be vigilant because your adversary, the devil, walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” “Resist him,” Peter says, “steadfast in the faith.”

You’re in Proverbs 4:0 … Look down at verses 14 and 15, “Do not enter the path of the wicked, and do not walk in the way of evil.” Avoid it. Do not travel on it. Turn away from it and pass on. Don’t “walk in the counsel of the ungodly, or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of the scornful,” and if that sounds legalistic to you, you’re probably having a hard time guarding your heart.

Two more things, and then I’ll move on to the next point. Keeping your heart also involves a watchful, cautious self-control over your emotions. Don’t let your emotions drive or control your mind, but vice versa. Emotions are good, but in their place, just like your arms are good, but they’re not for walking. Your nose is good, but it’s not very good for driving nails. In the same way, your emotions are good, but they’re not for thinking. Scripture condemns the person who thinks with his emotions. James 3:14-15 refers to that kind of thinking as “sensual wisdom”: wisdom driven by the senses, thinking that is driven by the emotions. James says this: “This wisdom descendeth not from above” this sensual wisdom “but is earthly, sensual, devilish.” He says it produces “bitter envying and strife in the heart.”

Listen to Richard Baxter, the great Puritan author. He said this: “Keep out” or cast out “all inordinate passions, for passions violently press the thoughts and forcibly carry them away. If anger or grief or pleasure be allowed in, they will command your thoughts.”

Another writer says it like this and I like this he says, “Emotions are like screaming kids. Until you calm them down, you can’t be heard. If you want to get rid of your bad thoughts, control your emotions.” That’s good advice.

But, finally and above all, the thing that sums all of this up: control your thoughts . This is the whole point, and this is the area where the virtue of self-control is most important. This is the one area where your battle for self-control will be won or lost: your thought life. If you willingly and deliberately allow yourself to indulge in evil thoughts or wicked fantasies, what this verse says is you’re filling the wellspring of your life with poison and nothing is more self-destructive! “Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life.” We’re talking about spiritual warfare this morning. This is classic warfare issue, right?

I mean, we’ve got this reservoir up here that feeds water to most of the San Fernando Valley… And you realize, don’t you, that since the terrorist situation has become such a problem, that thing is guarded carefully, constantly! Because it’s a great danger if anyone would poison that reservoir. The Scripture is saying, “Your heart’s like that. Keep it pure. Out of it flow the springs of life.”

Now, let’s move on. That’s the first implication of our text: the duty of guarding the heart. So, doctrine number one that we want to draw from this text is this: it is your bound and duty to keep your heart. You need to do it carefully and diligently and conscientiously, and that’s a good place to make the transition to doctrine number two.

Doctrine number two is the difficulty of guarding the heart. Our text implies that keeping the heart is not an easy task. This is not something that comes naturally. “Keep thy heart,” he says, “with all diligence.” This is not something that comes easy for anybody. It requires diligence. It’s not something that you can do passively. It calls for effort, perseverance, persistence, constancy, and industry diligence. It’s a struggle. And that’s all an understatement, really.

Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?”

Genesis 8:21 , God himself says, “The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”

According to Psalms 51:5 , we are “shapen in iniquity.”

Solomon said, in Ecclesiastes 9:3 , “The heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live.”

We are all hopelessly, desperately, and completely wicked in and of ourselves. That is the state of every fallen human heart. Again, that’s the doctrine of total depravity. Romans 3:10 , “As it is written: ‘There is none righteous; no, not one.” Nobody escapes this verdict.

Now, remember that all the sin we struggle with emanates from our own hearts. Matthew 15:19-20 (this is a cross-reference to the one I read earlier), Jesus says, “For out the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies…These are the things which defile a man.” So, the heart is the source of our problem in the first place. We have to guard our heart, not only from evil outside influences, but, more importantly, from the evil that breeds right there within.

Proverbs 28:26 , “He that trusts his own heart is a fool.” Here’s a good lesson: you can never trust your own heart too little, and you can never trust God too much. We face perpetual threats to the purity of our hearts. We’ve already mentioned some. Vain thoughts, mindless, trivial matters that we give our attention to, the pleasures of sin entice us, the lure of the world, the wiles of the devil, the sinful tendencies of our own flesh all of those things appeal to the wickedness and corruption that lies in our hearts, and that wickedness that’s inside of us is ready to respond to any kind of catalyst. And you cannot cleanse your own heart. This is not a problem we can fix for ourselves.

Proverbs 20:9 , “Who can say, ‘I have made my heart clean; I am pure from my sin’?” The implied answer is nobody can say that.

Job 14:4 , “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean one?” No one!

1 John 1:8 , “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”

So, this is a huge problem. Our hearts are desperately wicked and we can’t change that, Scripture says, any more than the leopard can change his spots. It’s part of our nature. We can pretend that we’re basically good that’s what a lot of people do but that doesn’t change reality. The great Scottish Puritan, Andrew Grey, said this and I love this statement he said, “We conceive that if there were a window opened in each of our bosoms, through which each one of us that are here might behold one another’s hearts, we would become monsters and wonders to one another, and to ourselves likewise, and we might cry out, “Oh, where is the God of judgment that takes no vengeance on such deceitful hearts?” If our hearts, he says, were turned inside out, so to speak, and we saw the insides of our hearts, we would wonder at God’s patience. That’s true. I know that’s true because I’ve peeked in my own heart. Our hearts are breeding grounds for all kinds of evil. According to 1 John 1:10 , if you think you’re an exception to this rule, you are self-deceived. You’re calling God a liar, and His Word is not in you.

To quote Proverbs 28:26 one more time, “He who trusts in his own heart is a fool.” That’s why it is no simple task to keep your heart pure. Remember that Adam had a heart that wasn’t even already defiled by sin, and he kept it pure only a very short time. The fall occurred before he and Eve had ever conceived a child. It must have been very soon after their creation. That shows the difficulty of keeping a pure heart. That also gives us some perspective on what kind of diligence is required for the keeping of our hearts. This is something we have to do constantly. If you keep your heart only part-time pure, that’s nothing but hypocrisy. It’s an abomination to God. If the only time you think about these things or the only time you ever strive to obey, even, is when you’re listening to a message on the subject or when you come to the Lord’s Table or when it’s otherwise convenient to examine yourself, then all you’re doing is practicing the religion of the Pharisees. You’re merely honing the skill of hypocrisy.

Face it, there are times when it’s fairly easy to guard our hearts. When we’re under affliction, when we’re under conviction, when we’re in church, or when we’re in public it’s much easier to keep our hearts pure and focused than when we’re alone, in private, or enjoying our leisure. And, frankly, that’s why trials that’s one major reason why trials and difficulties are good for us. That’s why, when God providentially sends us trials and afflictions, it’s sometimes an act of mercy on His part, because when circumstances force us to be dependent on the Lord, our hearts stay fixed on Him. But the real test of obedience in this matter is whether you keep your heart pure in private, when you’re alone, when things are going well, when you have opportunities to rest from all the cares of life your leisure time. That’s when it’s most vital to keep careful watch over your heart! Sadly, that is precisely where most of us fail so miserably.

What’s the solution? Well, you could devote yourself especially, in your leisure time, to the task of cultivating humility, repentance, holiness, and the fear of God. Give your private life to God. It’s relatively easy to be a Christian in public. It’s fairly simple to search your heart and examine your life if you do it only once a week or if you limit your self examination to those times when you come before the Lord’s Table, but if you do that, God despises your worship.

Listen to Isaiah 66:2-4 . The Lord says this, “To this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my Word.” And then it says this: “He that killeth an ox” and it’s talking here about sacrifices for sin “is as if he slew a man and he that sacrifices a lamb is as if he cut off a dog’s neck; he that offers an oblation as if he offered swine’s blood; he that burned incense as if he blessed an idol. Yea, they have chosen their own ways and their soul delighted in their abominations.” And the Lord says this: “I will also chose their delusions and bring their fears upon them because when I called, none did answer; when I spoke, they did not hear, but they did evil before mine eyes and chose that in which I delighted not.”

In other words, God’s saying, if you choose your own way, if your private life is devoted purely to personal pleasure, where you seek delight in what God deems abominable, then when you come to worship, your worship is unacceptable. It’s repulsive to God. Your sacrifice, He says, is no more valid than if you’d offered pig’s blood! Graphic language, isn’t it? But what its saying is that your supposed service to God if you’re a hypocrite your service to Him offends Him. You may think you’re sacrificing a lamb, but it’s no more acceptable to God than if you cut off a dog’s neck and offered that to him. It’s a repulsive picture, isn’t it? It’s summed up for us in Proverbs 15:8 , which says, “The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord.”

So, what’s acceptable to God? Well, I just read it. Isaiah 66:2 , “Him that is of a poor and contrite spirit, and trembles at my Word.”

Psalms 51:17 says the same thing, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.” Notice, it’s the offering of our hearts that is acceptable to God! And, by definition, you cannot do that on a part-time basis. If God is to have our hearts, He must have the whole heart. That’s a difficult duty, but think about it. That is the substance of the first and great commandment, Matthew 22:37 , “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy mind.”

So, we’ve seen the duty of guarding our hearts and the difficulty of guarding our hearts; here, quickly, is a third doctrine we can glean from this text: the desirability of guarding the heart. Look at the text again. “Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life.” It’s sheer folly not to guard your heart, because it’s spiritual suicide! It’s unbelievably self-destructive. It’s a sure way to ruin your life. Poison the wellspring with evil? Don’t ever trivialize the sins you commit in the privacy of your own heart. Don’t think for a moment that you can entertain sin in your mind without any danger to your soul, because the sin you cultivate in your imagination directly assaults your soul. It assaults your conscience. It poisons your mind. When you engage in evil thoughts, you are pouring poison directly into the well that supplies all of your life and you will reap what you sow.

Cultivating sinful desires removes every barrier from the will that might otherwise keep you from doing the deed. If you imagine it, you will do it. The thought is the parent of the deed. If you foster a desire for sin, you will succumb when temptation presents itself; you won’t have any defense against it. Micah 2:1 says, “Woe to them that devise iniquity and work evil upon their beds.” He’s talking about people who lie in bed at night and imagine the evil things they might do, or derive enjoyment from fantasies about evil. And he says this: “When the morning is light, they practice it because it is in the power of their hand.” In other words, when the opportunity comes in real life, in the light of day if opportunity presents itself and you’ve imagined it and enjoyed and thought pleasantly of that evil imagination, you will do it…when the opportunity comes by.

Hosea says the same thing, but listen to the vivid imagery he uses. Hosea 7:6-7 , “For they have made ready their heart like an oven, whiles they lie in wait: their baker sleepeth all the night; in the morning it burneth as a flaming fire. They are all hot as an oven, and have devoured their judges; all their kings are fallen: there is none among them that calleth unto Me.” He’s comparing the mind to an oven where you bake the deeds that come out in your life, and he says, to stoke that oven with evil thoughts is to fan those flames and it will be destructive. To stoke the mind with evil thoughts is to fan the flames of evil and, if you do that, you won’t have any will to resist when temptation comes.

Proverbs 25:28 says, “He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down and without walls.” So, guard your heart! It’s the wellspring of your life. If you defile the fountain, you destroy yourself.

Galatians 6:7 , “God is not mocked. For whatever a man sows, that also shall he reap.” That, in and of itself, is a good reason why we ought to guard our hearts. It’s the only way to safeguard our own well-being.

But there’s something even more serious at stake here than your earthly reputation and happiness. When you give your heart to evil thoughts, by entertaining evil in your hearts you incur the wrath of God. Psalms 66:18 says, “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.”

Job said something similar. He knew something about keeping his heart pure, didn’t he? And he also experienced God’s grace in the midst of his trials. But he said this: “What is the hope of the hypocrite, though he hath gained? When God takes away his soul, will God hear his cry when trouble comes upon him?” Did you realize that it’s the heart and not merely the behavior that God sees and judges?

In 1 Chronicles 29:17 , David prays this: “I know also, my God, that thou triest the heart, and hast pleasure in uprightness.”

Jeremiah 17:10 , God Himself says this: “I, the Lord, search the heart” I test the mind! “even to give to every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings.”

Do you understand that? God is saying…not that He looks at what we do and then judges us accordingly, but that He looks at our hearts and judges us according to that. Revelation 2:23 is an echo of that: “I am He who searches the minds and the hearts and I will give to each one of you according to your works.” God sees every thought of your heart, and He knows your heart perfectly.

Psalms 44:20-21 , “If we had forgotten the name of our God, or stretched out own hands to a foreign god, would not God search this out? For He knows the secrets of the heart.”

Jeremiah 20:12 says, “God sees the mind and the heart.”

1 Chronicles 28:9 says, “The Lord searches all hearts and understands all the imaginations of all of our thoughts.”

In Solomon’s Prayer of Dedication for the Temple, he said this (1 Kings 8:39 ): “Thou even, Thou only knowest the hearts of all the children of men.”

Hebrews 4:13 says, “Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in His sight, but all things are naked and open unto God’s eyes.”

Scripture is full of this truth. God sees our hearts. If you would blush to have the secret thoughts of your heart made manifest for everyone in this room to see, you ought to tremble at the reality that God already sees those thoughts and knows them altogether. Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Hebrews 12:14 adds this: “Without holiness, no man shall see the Lord.” So, this is a vitally important matter. It underscores the desirability of guarding our hearts. An impure heart can ruin us for life and all eternity. There’s no advantage, frankly, to poisoning the wellspring of your heart.

So, where do we go for a pure heart? I’ve already spoken of the utter impossibility of cleansing your own heart. What do we do with defiled hearts? Well, first and most obviously, we have to repent of the impurity . David wrote, in Psalms 51:17 , “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, Thou wilt not despise.” He’s talking there about repentance.

Second, while we can’t cleanse our own hearts, God Himself can cleanse us . That’s why David prayed also in Psalms 51:19 , “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”

Again, if you’re an unbeliever if you have never trusted Christ for salvation what you need is a new heart. I’ve already quoted Ezekiel 36:25-26 , where God describes the work of regeneration. Actually, I referred to it and quoted a snippet of it. Let me quote it again. God says this: “I will sprinkle clean water upon you and you shall be clean; from all your filthiness and from all your idols, I will cleanse you. A new heart also I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you. I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh.” Acts 15:9 says, “God purifies our hearts by faith.” Malachi 3:2 says this about Christ: “He’s like a refiner’s fire and like a fuller’s soap.” He can do that work of cleansing that we so desperately need and cannot do for ourselves.

If you’re a Christian, part of the work of your sanctification is to go to Him regularly for that kind of forgiveness and cleansing. If we “confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” God promises forgiveness from our sins and He imparts to us his own Spirit. That is what enables us to know His mind, to equip us to think righteous thoughts, to empower us to obey his commandments. And although we still don’t do that perfectly because of the weakness of our flesh and the imperfections of our fallenness Christ, Scripture says, clothes us in the garments of his perfect righteousness so that we can stand before God without fear of condemnation. That’s the gospel message, and that is the greatest incentive I know for filling our hearts and minds with thoughts of Christ and His glory.

Let’s close in prayer.

Lord, our hearts are humbled by the duty that is set forth before us in this verse. Guard our hearts with all diligence. We confess that we have not done that as we should; we don’t do that as we should. Lord, we seek Your cleansing and thank You for the promise of that cleansing, and we pray with David, the psalmist, that You would create in us and constantly recreate in us pure and clean hearts for the glory of Christ in whose name we pray. Amen.

Verse 25

Eyes Right

A sermon (No. 2058) by C. H. Spurgeon

“Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee.” Proverbs 4:25 .

These words occur in a passage wherein the wise man exhorts us to take care of all parts of our nature, which he indicates by members of the body. “Keep thy heart,” says he “with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life. Put away from thee a froward mouth, and perverse lips put far from thee. Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee. Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established. Turn not to the right hand nor to the left: remove thy foot from evil.” It is clear that every part of our nature needs to be carefully watched lest in any way it should become the cause of sin. Any one member or faculty is readily able to defile all the rest, and therefore every part must be guarded with care. We have selected for our meditation the verse which deals with the eye. These windows of light need to be watched in their incomings, lest that which we take into our soul should be darkness rather than light; and they need to be watched in their outgoings lest the glances of the eye should be full of iniquity, or should suggest foolish thoughts. Hence the wise man advises, “Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee.” Have eyes and use them. Using them, take care to use them honestly.

Some persons are always as if they were asleep. They go though the world mooning about, seeing nothing, or seeing men as if they were trees with a sight which is not sight, but blindness hidden. The shadows of this transient life impress them and that is all: they have never awakened yet to the true life and its solemn realities. They have never seen anything in very truth; for it is faith that sees, and of faith they have none. That which is apart from faith is not visible to the soul however clear it may be to the eye. We have thousands around us who need to be startled out of that slumber in which they see the fabrics of their dreams, and the unsubstantial fancies of the hour. They say, “We see,” but scales are on their eyes. I fear we have such in all our congregations, lulled to sleep even by the preacher’s tones, to whom the fact of coming to their accustomed seat and listening to the usual hymns, tends rather to confirm them in a sluggard’s slumber than to stir their souls to action. O ye sluggards, may God awaken you by grace lest he arouse you by the thunderbolts of his vengeance! It is time that your eyes began to look right on, and your eyelids straight before you.

Many others are somewhat awake mentally but they are not looking right on, neither do their eyelids look straight before them. They are staring about them, star-gazing, wondering what will be seen next: always ready like the Athenians to hear and see some new thing. They move, it is true, but it is in a labyrinth which leads to nothing, in a circle which ends where it began; they toil and slave but it is all in the shadowland: of substantial work they do nothing. An active idleness, a diligent laziness, is all that their life is made up of; for as yet they have no purpose no purpose worth being the aim of an immortal soul. An arrow will never strike the mark if it travels in a zigzag direction; and the man whose life has no aim whatever, who pursues this, and then that, and then the other, what will he achieve? Are not many like “dumb driven cattle” going they know not where? They have never yet discovered that this life is a preface to a life of diviner mold. They do not regard the present as the lowly porch of the glorious edifice of the future. They have not thought that time is but the doorstep of eternity, a thing of small account, save that it is linked with the endless ages; and so they seek after this, and then after that, and then after the other; and always after that which is too poor, too trifling to be the object of a mind capable of fellowship with God. How many there are whose spirit is agitated by a mere nothing, resembling

“Ocean into tempest tost To waft a feather or to drown a fly”!

To beings who lead such purposeless lives we would address the words of the wise man, “Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee.” Have something to do and do it. Have something to live for and live for it. Get to know the right way, and knowing the right way keep to it with full purpose of heart and concentration of faculty. O man, see whither thou art going and go that way with thine eyes open, resolutely marking every step as thou takest it. Look where thou oughtest to look and then follow thine eyes, which shall thus be useful outriders to thy life, and help to make thy way safe and wise. When thou hast sent thine eyes before thee to make sure of the way, it will be safe to follow. Look before you leap, and only leap when looking bids you do so. If a man is to let his eyes look right on and his eyelids straight before him, then he is to have a way, and that way is to be a straight way, and in that straight way he is to persevere. You cannot see to the end of a crooked way. You can only see a small part of a way that twists and winds. Choose then a direct path which has an end which you dare think of and look upon. Some men’s lives are such that they dare not think of what the end of them must be. They would not long pursue their present track if they were forced to gaze into that dread abyss which is the only possible close of an evil course. The way of transgressors is hard in itself, but it is hardest of all when we behold their dreadful end. “Surely thou hast set them in slippery places. Thou castest them down into destruction.” You need to have a way, and a straight way, and a way whose end you dare contemplate, or else you cannot carry out the advice of Solomon, “Let thine eyes look right on and let thine eyelids look straight before thee.”

Every wise man will conclude that the best way for a man is the way which God has made for him. He that made us knows what he made us for, and he knows by what means we may best arrive at that end. According to divine teaching, as gracious as it is certain, we learn that the way of eternal life is Jesus Christ. Christ himself says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life”; and he that would pursue life after a right fashion must look to Jesus, and must continue looking unto Jesus, not only as the author but as the finisher of his faith. It shall be to him a golden rule of life when he has chosen Christ to be his way, to let his eyes look right on, and his eyelids straight before him. He need not be afraid to contemplate the end of that way, for the end of the way of Christ is life and glory with Christ for ever. “It doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” A friend said to me the other day, “How happy are we to know that whatever happens to us in this life, it is well!” “Yes,” I added, “and to know that if this life ends it is equally well, or better.” Then we joined hands in common joy to think that we were equally ready for life or death, and did not need five minutes’ anxiety as to whether it should be the one or the other. Brethren, when you are on the King’s highway, and that way is a perfectly straight one, you may go ahead without fear and sing on the road.

With all my heart I invite any who have never yet begun to live after a right fashion, to take Christ to be the way of life to them; and then I entreat them to let their eyes look straight on, and their eyelids straight before them, and to follow Jesus without giving a glance either to the right hand or to the left till it shall be said of them, even in glory, “These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth.”

I. I shall make my earnest appeals to the heart and conscience by beginning with this first exhortation: let Christ be your way . You that are young, let him be your way from your youth. You that have hitherto gone the wrong road until your hairs have grown grey in the service of iniquity, turn I beseech you, and take to the way of salvation. May his Spirit turn you, and you will be turned, then will Jesus become your way from henceforth.

If Christ be your way, you will begin first to seek to have Christ. “How shall I have him?” says one. Dost thou desire him? Wilt thou accept him? He is thine. The act of accepting Christ secures Christ to us, for the Father freely gives him to all who freely accept him. Some are troubled through ignorant and unbelieving fears, and are saying, “I wish I could lay hold on Jesus! I wish I knew that Christ was mine!” Art thou willing to have him? Who made thee willing? Dost thou desire him? Who made thee desire him? Who but the Spirit of the Lord? Wilt thou now take Jesus to be thy Savior to save thee from thy sin? Then depend on it, he is thine. There was never any difficulty with him to give himself to thee; the difficulty was to bring thee to receive him; and now that thou dost receive him, remember this “ As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.” Jesus himself has said it, “Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out”; and therefore, since thou comest, thou shalt never be cast out. Jesus has accepted thee, for thou hast accepted him. But I pray you, none of you rest until you have Christ. Let your eyes look right on and your eyelids straight before you till you find him. Look nowhere else but to him and after him. Shut yourself up in your room determine not to come out again until you have him, and it shall not be long before you find him. Concentrating all your gaze upon the Crucified, light shall come from him, causing the scales to fall from your eyes, and you shall see him, even you that could not see; and you shall cry in delight, “He is mine, he is mine.” Remember how David said to his son, “If thou seek him, he will be found of thee.” Think of the words of the prophet, “Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near.” When you have Christ, the next business of your life must be to know Christ. Seek to know more of him, to know him better, to know him more practically, to know him more assuredly. “That I may know him,” said the apostle, after he had been a believer in him for fifteen years. That same man of God speaks of “the love of Christ which passeth knowledge,” even his knowledge, which was of the fullest sort; so that he meant to go on learning more and more of Christ, and he did not count himself to have attained. Christian men and women, you do not know your great Master yet. Here have some of us been nearly forty years in his service, and yet we could not describe him to our own satisfaction. Why, we hardly know the power of the hem of his garment yet. We have not descended far down into the mines of his perfections. How little know we of our hidden wealth in Christ Jesus! Oh, that we studied Scripture more, that we were more teachable, and waited more humbly upon the Lord for the light of his Spirit from day to day! Well says our singer

“Hoard up his sacred word,

And feed thereon and grow;

Go on to seek to know the Lord,

And practice what you know.”

In this matter let your eyes look right on, and your eyelids straight before you. Other men may have their pursuits, this is yours; stick to it earnestly. The science of a crucified Savior shines like the moon in the midst of the stars as compared with all the other sciences which men may know; study it with your whole power of mind and heart. The angels on the mercy-seat of the ark stood always looking downward and bending over. Hence the apostle says, “Which things the angels desire to look into”; and if they desire to look into the ark of the covenant and its sacred mysteries, how much more should we!

When you come to know somewhat of what he is, then go on to obey Christ. Is there anything that he has bidden you do? Do it. Some Christians have never yet been baptized: how will they answer for wilful neglect of a known duty? Others have been Christians for years and yet have never communed at the Lord’s table. Jesus said “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” Do they keep his commandments? It was his dying request, “This do in remembrance of me,” and yet they will not fulfill it. Even such a tender request they slight, as though it were of no importance whatever, as if their Lord was a mere nobody whose wishes might well be overlooked. What shall I say of many of the biddings of our holy gospel, many of those sweet precepts which are to be used in the family, and in the business, and in the field? What forgetfulness there is of them! What refusings to follow Christ! He might come to us and say, “If I be a Master, where is mine honor?” Truly it ought to be one of the first thoughts of a Christian to find out the Lord’s will; and when he knows it, obedience should follow immediately. His eyes should look right on, and his eyelids straight before him. What said the blessed virgin to those who were at the feast? Note the words, “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.” It was well spoken of the favored mother and it remains as a golden precept for us all “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.” Make no reserve, exercise no choice but obey his command. When you know what he commands, do not hesitate, question, or try to avoid it, but “do it”: do it at once, do it heartily, do it cheerfully, do it to the full. It is but a little thing that, as our Lord has bought us with the price of his own blood, we should be his servants. The apostles frequently call themselves the bond-slaves of Christ. Where our Authorized Version softly puts it “servant” it really is “bond-slave.” The early saints delighted to count themselves Christ’s absolute property, bought by him, owned by him, and wholly at his disposal. Paul even went so far as to rejoice that he had the marks of his Master’s brand on him, and he cries, “Let no man trouble me: for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” There was the end of all debate: he was the Lord’s, and the marks of the scourges, the rods, and the stones were the broad-arrow of the King which marked Paul’s body as the property of Jesus the Lord. Now if the saints of old time gloried in obeying Christ, I pray that you and I, forgetting the sect to which we may belong, or even the nation of which we form a part, may feel that our first object in life is to obey our Lord and not to follow a human leader, or to promote a religious or political party. This one thing we mean to do, and so follow the advice of Solomon as he says, “Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee.” Beloved, let us endeavor to be obedient in the minute as well as in the greater matters, for it is in details that true obedience is best seen. Let us copy the faintest touches in the life of our great Exemplar.

That being attended to, remember, if Christ be your way you have further to seek to be like him, not only to do as he did, but to be as he was; for “as he was, so are we in this world.” What a man does is important, but what a man is, is all-important. The ring of the metal is something, but if its ring could be imitated by a base coin it would be nothing. It is after all the substance of the metal that decides its value. O man, what art thou? If thou be a twice-born man thou art a partaker of the nature of Christ; but if not thou art under the curse which cleaves to the old nature as leprosy cleaves to the leper. “As we have borne the image of the earthy we shall also bear the image of the heavenly”; and we must begin to bear that heavenly image even now. As born again into the headship of the Second Adam, we should seek to be as much like the Second Adam as we are already by nature like the first Adam through our first birth. The second birth should be as operative to produce the image of the second Adam, as the first was to produce the image of the first Adam. Alas! “the earthy” is impressed upon us very distinctly; we cannot spend an hour without discovering the clear stamp of nature’s die. Oh that “the heavenly” could be quite as clearly discerned! This therefore we must aim at, though as yet we have not attained it. Here is something to be thought of very carefully, and I charge you by the Holy Ghost, let your eyes look right on and your eyelids straight before you, that you may be transformed from glory to glory into the image of the Lord. God grant that it may be so with every one of us!

Now supposing that we have attended to all this, if Christ is our way and our model there is something more; namely, that we seek to glorify Christ and labor to win others to him. Here is a grand field for all our energies. O Christian people, what are we left in this world for except to bring others to Jesus? Are we not left in this wilderness that we may find out more of the good Shepherd’s stray sheep, and work for him and with him to bring them in. I fear we forget this. Are not some of you indifferent as to whether your fellow-men are lost or saved? Have not some of you, in your families, come to this pass - that you see your brother an infidel, your sister frivolous, your parents godless, and yet it does not fret you? I think that if I had a godless relative it would break my night’s rest, not now and then, but always. A brother, a father, a child unsaved! What mean ye by taking your ease? If the spirit of Christ be in us, the tears that fell from the eyes of Jesus will find their like upon our cheeks. We shall weep day and night because men are not gathered unto eternal life. Nor will this be a loss to us for blessed are the mourners in Zion. Blessed are they that mourn because others abide in sin and reject the Lord!

Now concerning the salvation of our fellow-men; we shall never compass it unless our eyes look right on and our eyelids straight before us. Before we win souls we must live for souls. We need men and women who live to convert others to Christ. The minister had better quit his pulpit if it be not his one burning desire to bring hearts to Jesus’ feet. If a divine impulse be not upon him driving him to seek the souls of men, let him go elsewhere with his windy periods. Professors have little right to be in Christ’s church unless they are passionately in earnest to increase his kingdom by the salvation of their fellow-men. O my brothers and sisters on whom is the blood-mark of redemption, I charge you concerning this matter to “let your eyes look right on and let your eyelids look straight before you”! Seek souls as dogs hunt their game; eye, nostril, ear all open, and every muscle strained. Converts are not gained by dreamers. We cannot imitate Jesus as a Savior of men by being dull and heartless. In any point in which we follow our Lord let us do it with all our soul.

Thus much upon the first point: let Christ be your way in all things, and keep to that way.

II. Following the text again, only working it a little differently, the second exhortation is set your eyes on him as your way . If Christ be your way and you follow him to have him, to know him, to obey him, to be like him, and to glorify him, then set your eyes on him as the way. Think of him, consider him, study him, and in all things regard him as first and last to you.

First, that you may know the way of life, let your eyes be fixed on him. Soul, art thou in the dark? Kneel down and pray and look Christward. Saint, art thou bewildered? Go by the way of the cross, the way of the Crucified, for that is the true and sure path. Sinner, art thou burdened? Wouldst thou be rid of thy burden? Run Christward. Any direction given thee to go anywhere else will misdirect thee. I say not to any one I meet to-night, “Go to the wicket-gate.” Neither will I bid you look to any light within and run that way. My only direction is “Go to Jesus.” You see that cross and him who bled thereon! Stand still and look that way, and your burden shall fall from your shoulders. Where Jesus died, you shall live. Where Christ was wounded, you shall be healed. “Let your eyes look right on and let your eyelids look straight before you.” Know the road; you will never know it too well: the more you know it the happier you will be in it. “To Christ!” “To Christ!” “To Christ!” That is the sole inscription upon every finger-post of the road to heaven. Keep you to the King’s highway.

Since Christ is the way, let your eyes be fixed on him as the way, that you may follow him well, may follow him wholly. Gather up all your faculties to go after your Lord. Be not like Lot’s wife who longed, and looked, and lingered, and was lost. Away, away, away from Sodom, altogether away: let no eye steal in that direction. Away, away, away to Christ, to Christ alone. All eyes must be for Jesus who cries “Look unto me and be ye saved.” As the ploughman looks to the end of the furrow and keeps right on, even so must you look only to Jesus. What hast thou to do with anything but Christ, sinner? I tell thee that thou hast nothing even to do with thine own sins, but to lay them down at his feet. He is all; the beginning and the end. “Let thine eyes look right on and let thine eyelids look straight before thee.”

Look alone to Jesus and do this to keep your spirits up. Some men’s eyes do not look right on and their eyelids do not look straight before them, for they look back upon that part of the road which they have traversed, and grow content with that which they have already attained. They live in retrospection. When you begin to look back at what you have done and rub your hands and say with self-satisfaction, “I remember when I did right well,” wisdom warns you that this is not the right kind of look. What have you to look back upon? Poor, weak creature! Forget that which is behind and press forward to something better and higher. When you sinful souls get looking back upon your past bad lives, I am glad of that, but still I do not want even you to keep your eyes always in that direction. You will get no comfort in looking into the foul ditch of your own transgressions. Look, look, look before you! Look where the cross stands. Run that way. Let thine eyelids look straight before thee to the atoning sacrifice; away from the past, which he will graciously blot out, to Jesus only. Some spend much of their time in what is called introspection. Now introspection, like retrospection, is a useful thing in a measure; but it can readily be overdone, and then it breeds morbid emotions, and creates despair. Some are always looking into their own feelings. A healthy man hardly knows whether he has a stomach or a liver; it is your sickly man who grows more sickly by the study of his inward complaints. Too many wound themselves by studying themselves. Every morning they think of what they should feel: all day long they dwell upon what they are not feeling; and at night they make diligent search for what they have been feeling. It looks to me like shutting up your shop and then living in the counting-house, taking account of what is not sold. Small profits will be made in this way. You may look a long while into an empty pocket before you find a sovereign, and you may look a long time into fallen nature before you find comfort. A man might as well try to find burning coals under the ice as to find anything good in our poor human nature. When you look within it should be to see with grief what the filthiness is; but to get rid of that filthiness you must look beyond yourself. I remember Mr. Moody saying that a looking-glass was a capital thing to show you the spots on your face; but you could not wash in a looking-glass. You want something very different when you would make your face clean. So let your eyes look right on

“To the full atonement made,

To the utmost ransom paid.”

Forget yourself and think only of Christ.

Some not only unduly practice retrospection and introspection, but they carry much too far a sort of circumspection. They look all around them: they look upon their past, and their present, and their fears and their doubts, and from all these things they judge their condition, and decide their state of mind. You recollect Peter. He cried to his Lord, “Bid me come unto thee on the water.” He receives permission. Down the side over the boat goes Peter. To his intense surprise he is standing on a wave. Peter had never done such a thing before in his life as walk on the water. He might have kept on standing on the wave and he might have walked all the way to Jesus, if he had kept his eyes on his Master until he reached him. The waters would have borne him up as well as a granite pavement; but Peter began to look at the billows, and he listened to the howling of the wind, and then to the beating of his own heart; and down he went; and then he had to cry to his Master. “Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee”: thou canst walk the waters all the way to the golden shore if thou canst but stop thine eyes to all things else. Surely I may use the text as an illustration of that closing of the eyes. “Let thine eyes look right on.” “I understand that,” says one, “for I trust. But you cannot look with your eyelids.” What can that mean? Remember that you can shut your eyes with your eyelids to a great many things, and so cease to see them; and in the matter of faith-sight a great many things are best not seen. So, when you would otherwise see the danger and all the difficulties and the doubts, do not look with your eyes, but look with your eyelids. Not to look at the difficulties at all is all the look they deserve. Let your eyelids shut out the view which would create distrust. Do not see, do not feel, “only believe.” Believe Christ, and believe nothing else. “Let God be true but every man a liar.” If all the sins thou hast ever done should come rolling up like Atlantic billows, and if all the devils in hell should come riding on the crests of those waves howling as they come, take no notice of them. Christ has said he that believeth in him hath everlasting life; believe thou in him, and thou hast the everlasting life as surely as Christ is the Christ of God. Draw down the blind and see nothing, know nothing, believe nothing but the living word of the living Savior. “Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee.” When thou closest thine eyes to consider, thou canst see a good deal with closed eyes, but still look thou right on to the one and only trust.

You must also let your eyes look right on, dear friends; for if you begin to look two ways at a time you will miss the Lord Jesus, who is your way. Under the Jewish law no man who had a squint was allowed to be a priest. He is described as one who had “a blemish in his eye.” I wish they would make a similar law with regard to spiritual sight in preachers nowadays, for certain of them are sadly cross-eyed. When they preach free grace they squint fearfully towards free-will; and if they look to the atonement they must needs see in it more of man than of Christ. See how they look to Moses and to Darwin; to revelation and to speculation! A great many people would fain be saved, but they squint: they look a little towards sin, and the flesh, and the world, and they make provision for personal gain, and personal ease. In this case they fail to see Christ’s strait and narrow way of the denial of self, and the crucifixion of the flesh. If thou wouldst have salvation, “Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee.” Look not a little this way and a little that way, or thou wilt never run aright. “I could believe that I was a Christian,” says one, “if I felt more happy. I could trust Christ if I felt my nature changed.” That is a squint which ruins the faith-look. That is trying to look two ways at once. You cannot do it: it will ruin you. It would spoil the beauty of the sweetest countenance if we could use our eyes to look otherwise than straight on. We have some friends who if they wish to see us, look over there, and yet we are not there. Avoid this spiritual blemish; it has no advantages “Let thine eyes look right on.” Look to Christ alone, to him as thy whole salvation. Have nothing to do with thy good works as a ground of trust, or thou art a lost man. I charge thee have nothing to do even with thy faith and thy repentance as a ground of trust. Trust not thy trust, but trust alone in what Christ has done. If thou shalt trust thy best feelings or thy worst feelings, thy prayers or thy praises, thy almsgivings or thy consecration in any degree, thou hast made an antichrist of them. Strip thyself of thy last rag and let Christ clothe thee from top to toe. Be thou hungry unto famishing, and clean out the last crumb thou hast in the pantry, for then only wilt thou feed on Christ the bread of life. Let him be both bread and wine, and make up the whole of a feast for thee. Thou shalt have salvation surely enough if this be what thou dost. But let not Jesus bring the bread, and carnal confidence the wine: take a whole Christ to be all thy salvation and all thy desire, and thy peace shall be unbroken. Let the Holy Spirit bring thee to that oneness of trust which makes both eyes meet at their proper focus, and let that focus be the Lord Jesus. “Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee.”

III. But my time has almost expired and I have only to lay emphasis on one more matter. Let your eyes distinctly and directly look to Christ alone. I have gone over this before, but I need to hammer at it again in order to clench the nail. Look not to any human guide but look to Christ Jesus alone. We have no faith in priests; but it is a very easy thing to fix your faith upon a minister and hear what he says, and believe it because he says it. I charge you, believe nothing that I tell you if it cannot be supported by the Word of God. I am content to stand or to fall by this: “To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, there is no light in them.” I will quote the authority of no other book whoever may have composed it; no ancient book, let it belong even to the earliest days of the church. This one inspired volume is the text-book of our religion. Follow Holy Scripture and you have an infallible chart. Our Lord Jesus Christ is the one apostle and high priest of our profession: follow him. Not even mother or father or the brightest saint that ever lived must divide you from your perfect Guide. “Let your eyes look right on and let your eyelids look straight before you,” and hear the gracious words of him who bought you with his blood as he cries, “Follow me.”

Then again look to Christ directly and distinctly for yourself. I warn you against putting any trust in national religion, or in family and birthright godliness. A personal Christ must be laid hold of by a personal faith. You must yourself repent, yourself believe, yourself get a grip of him, and of none but him. You must use your own eyes: “Let your eyes look right on and let your eyelids look straight before you.”

Again, look not to any secondary aims. Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. In seeking Christ make no bargain with gain or reputation; be content to lose all gold and all honor if you may but win Christ. To follow religion for self would be a mean act of hypocrisy, and to leave it for the same reason is equally vile. Let your eyes be fixed on following your Lord, and as to any worldly consequences, bring your eyelids into use, keep them fast closed, and go right on in implicit obedience to your Lord.

Forget all things else when seeking Christ and when you have found Christ. It is no ill thing for a man, when he is under concern of soul, to let his business and everything go till he finds his Savior. I urge no one to such a course, but I have noticed many converts who have done this who have soon found rest. If a captain were busy about the comfort of his passengers in their cabins but all the while knew that there was a great leak in the ship, and that it would soon go down, and to this he paid no heed whatever, you would say to him “How foolish you are to mind the little and neglect the great!” But if he told the passengers, “Breakfast cannot be prepared with our usual care for all hands are pumping or repairing the vessel,” you could not blame him when you knew that every man’s help was needed to save the ship from going down. In times of extreme danger, secondary things must give place to the main thing. If this house were to take fire you would not stay to sing the last hymn, even if I gave it out. May the Holy Spirit lead some of you to feel that you must be saved! You must be saved, and therefore you must put other things into a second place. Remember how Bunyan pictures the man running for his life, and when his neighbors called to him to stop, he put his fingers in his ears, and as he ran he shouted “Eternal life! Eternal life! Eternal life!” That man was a wise man. Imitate him; if you have not found eternal life run for it with your “eyes right on, and your eyelids straight before you.”

And lastly, take care that you continue gazing upon Christ until you have faith in him. “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” Go on hearing the Word of God till faith come thereby. Do you ask me how faith comes? It is the gift of God, but it usually comes in a certain way. Thinking of Jesus and meditating upon Jesus will breed faith in Jesus. I was struck with what one said the other day of a certain preacher. The hearer was in deep concern of soul, and the minister preached a very pretty sermon indeed, decorated abundantly with word-painting. I scarcely know any brother who can paint so daintily as this good minister can; but this poor soul under a sense of sin said, “There was too much landscape, sir. I did not want landscape; I wanted salvation.” Dear friend, never crave word-painting when you attend a sermon; but crave Christ. You must have Christ to be your own by faith or you are a lost man. When I was seeking the Savior I remember hearing a very good doctrinal sermon; but when it was over I longed to tell the minister that there was a poor lad there who wanted to know how he could be saved. How I wished he had given half a minute to that subject! Dr. Manton, who was usually a clear and full preacher of the gospel, when he preached before the Lord Mayor, gave his lordship something a cut above the common citizens and so the poorer folk missed their portion. After he had done preaching his sermon an aged woman cried, “Dr. Manton, I came here this morning under concern of soul, wanting a blessing, and I have not got it for I could not understand you.” The preacher meekly replied, “The Lord forgive me! I will not so offend again.” He had overlooked the poor, and had thought mainly of my Lord Mayor. Special sermons before Mayors and Queens and assemblies are seldom worth a penny a thousand. The gospel does not lend itself to show performances. I am not here to give you intellectual treats: my eyes look right on to your salvation. Oh that yours may look that way! Go after Christ, dear friend. Seek after Christ with your whole heart and soul. Feel that the one thing you must have is to be reconciled to God by the death of his Son. Keep on with that cry, “None but Christ: none but Christ.” Make this your continual litany

“Give me Christ, or else I die;

Give me Christ, or else I die.”

Then you will soon find him. “Let your eyes look right on and let your eyelids look straight before you,” and you shall see the Lord of grace appearing to you through the mist and through the cloud; that self-same Savior who stands in the midst of us even now and cries, “Look unto me and be ye saved all the ends of the earth: for I am God and there is none else.”