3544. The Only Road

A Sermon Published On Thursday, December 28, 1916.

Jesus says to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man comes to the Father but by me.” {Joh 14:6}

For other sermons on this text:

   {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 245, “Way to God, The” 238}

   {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 942, “Way, The” 933}

   {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 2938, “Jesus the Way” 2939}

   {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 3544, “Only Road, The” 3546}

   Exposition on Joh 14:1-12 Col 1:1-19 {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 2751, “Prepared Place for a Prepared People, A” 2752 @@ "Exposition"}

   Exposition on Joh 14:1-16 {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 2382, “Holy Spirit’s Chief Office, The” 2383 @@ "Exposition"}

   Exposition on Joh 14:1-20 {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 3510, “Fainting Soul Revived, The” 3512 @@ "Exposition"}

   Exposition on Joh 14:1-21 {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 2672, “Neither Forsaken nor Forgotten” 2673 @@ "Exposition"}

   Exposition on Joh 14 {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 2515, “Something Worth Seeking” 2516 @@ "Exposition"}

   Exposition on Joh 14 {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 3076, “Cause and Effect of Heart Trouble, The” 3077 @@ "Exposition"}

   Exposition on Joh 14 {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 3307, “Over the Mountains” 3309 @@ "Exposition"}

1. Jesus had been speaking about the Father, about his going to the Father, about the Father’s house, and about going there, and he was asked by Thomas this question, “We do not know where you are going; and how can we know the way?” We are to understand this verse as being an answer to that question. He tells him where he was going, namely, to the Father, and also the way to the Father, namely, by himself. Now this verse has been read, and read, too, with a great deal of profit, without always being read correctly. For example, suppose I were to divide my sermon into three parts tonight, and show that, first, Christ is the way; secondly, that he is the truth; and thirdly, that he is the life. I do not think I should be able to give you the meaning of the text, for you will observe that he is not speaking about three things—he does not say, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life”; he is speaking about only one thing, namely, that he is the way, and then the two words, truth and the life, are put in to explain what he means by the way, so I think. Luther, taking the first meaning and putting in an and, for it is necessary to put one in to figure it out, says Christ is the way; that is, through him men begin to be Christians; secondly, he is the truth, that is, through him they are instructed further in the faith; thirdly, he is the life, that is, through him they enter into eternal blessedness in the life to come.

2. Now it is very true, but it is not the truth taught here; at least, we do not think so, certainly if we follow the strict analogy of the language. Augustine read the passage this way, “I am the way, the true way, and the living way.” But that is not quite it. There is truth is that, and it is more correct than Luther’s reading, “I am the true way, and the living way”; but we cannot see the sense without some considerable violation to the language. It is true, but not the truth taught here, and what we want to do is not only to preach about the truth, but the truth that is in our text. It appears to us that this was our Lord’s meaning, “I am the way to God.” That is the great teaching—“No man comes to the Father but by me; and I am the way in this respect—that no man can come to know the truth with regard to the Father unless he knows me as the truth; and, secondly, no man can possess the life by which he comes to the Father unless he receives me as the life. I am the way to the Father in a double sense—of being the truth which teaches men about the Father, and being the life which enables men to come to the Father, and have practical communion.” Believing that to be the meaning of the text, we will try and work it out.

3. First, then, Christ is the way to the Father since he is the truth; secondly, he is the way to the Father since he is the life; and, thirdly, taking the general statement with which the verse closes, he is altogether and in all respects the only way to the Father—”No man comes to the Father, but by me.”

4. I. To begin, then:—CHRIST IS THE WAY TO THE FATHER SO FAR AS HE IS THE TRUTH.

5. He is so in this respect—no one knows the Father until, first of all, he knows Jesus Christ. God the Father is to be seen in nature. He has painted every flower, and it is he who hangs every blade of grass with the glistening pearl of dew. But so dim is our eye, and, after all, so little of the more spiritual parts of his character could God reveal in mere materialism, that man does not behold God there. We are often told that we are to go from Nature up to Nature’s God—it is just about as easy to go from the higher pinnacle of the Alps to the stars! The step is too long for human nature. Men have never taken it. Those men of old who ransacked nature—the old philosophers and teachers of the heathen—did not discover God. “The world, by wisdom, did not know God.” Oh! what a maze of deities they had; what strange gods! What strange characters they gave to God! Our very children, in their classical learning in the schools, get their minds polluted by reading the deeds of beings that were called gods among the heathens; and still to this day if a man does not form the same gross conception of God the ancient heathen had, it is partly to be accounted for by the almost unconscious effect of Christianity on men’s minds.

6. Men cannot form such ideals of God living in England as they could do living in Greece before the gospel had been preached there; yet every idea of God that is not drawn by men from revelation, and is not brought to men through Jesus Christ, the Mediator, is sure to be a false one, a lopsided one—an ideal of God in which some one virtue predominates to the destruction of others. It is not God at all; it is a gross caricature of God; it is, in fact, no more God that men think out by reason than the golden calf was God which came out of the fire when Aaron had thrust the gold into it. They did not know God. You only have to take up the works of any of our great original thinkers who scorn to call themselves Christians, and though you will see that Christianity has moulded their thought, you will only see truth so far as it has done that, unconsciously to themselves. But where you get their real thoughts and reasonings, you will find that they have not come to the Father, because they have neglected the great truth which is in Christ, which is the way to the great truths which are in the Father, God.

7. Now while this is true with regard to the person of the Father himself, let me remind you, in the next place, that it is true with regard to everything about the Father. Now there is one doctrine in Scripture which is unique to the Father. It is the doctrine of election. The Father has chosen us to be his people. Everywhere in Scripture it is stated as the work of the first person of the blessed Trinity—to choose a people for himself that shall proclaim his praise. Now there are many people who want to get at that doctrine. I have known many unconverted people who want to understand it. I get letters frequently from people troubled about it. They say that they would feel peace if they could understand that doctrine. But, beloved friends, if any such are here tonight, I will speak to them. You cannot get to election; you cannot get to the Father by a direct road from where you are. Just read that sign-post. “No man comes to the Father but by Christ.” If, then, you want to understand election, begin with redemption. You will never understand the eternal choice until you begin at the cross. Begin with this, “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, not imputing their trespasses to them.” Do not begin at the ninth chapter of Romans. You would be much better to begin at the third chapter of John, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up; so that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” You will be worrying yourself, and bothering your poor head, and tormenting your poor heart for many years, if you will try to get to the Father first. Your business is to take God’s law and rule, and go to the Son on the cross first, and then to the Father on his throne.

8. It would be a strange thing if our children would insist on going to university before they went to the grammar school. They would never learn anything in that way, because the studies of the university are too severe for them until, first of all, they have gone to the preparatory school. It would be an odd thing, indeed, if every man who took down his Bible should always begin it backwards and read first the Revelation, and if every man read the Lord’s Prayer beginning at “Amen,” and went backward to “Our Father”; yet some minds will persist in this. There is a charm to them about the mystery of sovereignty and election, and they need to begin with that. Little children, why must you eat solid food first? There is the milk for you—be satisfied with your milk. It will strengthen you. You shall have the solid food eventually, when by reason of use your senses have been exercised; but listen to Christ’s tender words, “No man comes to the Father but by me.” There is no way to election except through redemption.

9. And I will give now another illustration of the same truth. Even the fatherhood of God is known only in Christ. This is what is mainly intended in this verse. It is not known as a truth until, first of all, we know the truth concerning Christ, and the truth concerning Jesus, the firstborn and elder brother, is the way to learn the truth concerning the entire family. What a muddle there is made in this world about the fatherhood of God. According to some, all of us are equally his children, and he must be indeed a strange Father if his dealings with the sons of men are to be considered as the dealings of a Father. Indeed, we can very well understand why some have said, “How can we account for this pit of hell?” Would a father put his children there? Certainly he would not. And if God is a Father to all mankind equally, and in the same sense, then it would be utterly unaccountable that there should be any eternal destruction from the presence of the Lord. But this fatherhood is a fiction, a sheer and clear fiction, an invention of modern times. There is another fatherhood in which God is the Father of the twice-born, the Father of the regenerate. The God and Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and, next of all, those who are in Jesus Christ. And when you come to know Christ as the Son, and yourself as one with him, then you begin to know what the fatherhood of God means in its speciality to the elect, in its truth, and in its depth, and in its blessed outflow; that, being a Father, he chastens us, he loves us, feeds us, guides us, trains us, educates us, and provides for us an inheritance which no one shall ever be able to take from us. I venture to say it here again, that no man knows anything in truth about the fatherhood of God until he knows something about union with Christ—his own sonship by virtue of his brotherhood with Jesus. No man comes to the Father but through the Son.

10. And now I shall take another point of the same great truth. It is commonly thought that anyone can understand the mercy of God—that, at any rate, we can get to that. But, beloved, a great deal of mischief has been created in this world, by a mistaken notion about mercy with regard to God—that God is not very particular about our sins, that he does not judge us too severely, that he knows we are tempted a great deal, and that we have strong passions, and that, therefore, he winks at it all, and notwithstanding that we are not what we ought to be, yet he will graciously overlook it and accept us. That is the common notion of God’s mercy, but there is nothing whatever in Holy Scripture to support it—there is not a grain of evidence that such mercy as that is in the heart of God at all. The Lord is angry with the wicked every day. He hates sin, even a single sin. He will by no means spare the wicked. He neither closes his eyes against sin, nor will he restrain his hand from the punishment of sin. No man comes to the Father’s mercy until he has learned about Christ, but when you come to Jesus Christ, and you understand that God took his Son from his bosom and put him to death in our room and place so that he might have mercy on us without the violation of his justice; when we see how he made Christ to be our substitute, in order that he might freely and fully forgive—then we see what kind of mercy God’s mercy is. It is not mercy to the sin—he punished that—it is mercy to the sinner. It is not mercy that thinks little of sin; for he put his Son to death when sin was laid on him. It is not mercy that winks at sin, and treats it as though it were a trifle, for he made his Son cry out, “Why have you forsaken me?” It is a kind of mercy that is consistent with the fiercest wrath against every particle of iniquity. The Lord is a consuming fire, and will by no means spare the guilty. Every transgression shall have its punishment. But yet he is a “God merciful and gracious, passing by transgression, iniquity, and sin,” and this you can only know the meaning of when you know Christ as the truth that conducts you to the great truth of the mercy of God.

11. Equally the same remark might be made about God’s justice, but I shall not take time for that; I shall rather close these observations on this first point by saying that we do not know truly the power and dominion of God until we, first of all, know Christ. We may know God to be omnipotent, we may understand that he does as he wills, but that truth in its real force never breaks on the soul until it shines through the Mediator. I am alarmed to think of God’s greatness; I am afraid when I think of his supremacy. That he can do as he wills I know, and yet I rebel; that he can punish me, that he can crush me, I do know, and I tremble in his presence; but I feel no love for him until I see his love for me in the person of his dear Son, and then in a moment I bless him, for he is omnipotent, for his omnipotence is all on my side. I bless him that he is the King. Let the children of Zion be joyful in the King. I thank him that he does as he wills, I rejoice that he does; for he only wills to do what is for the good of his own chosen. You cannot love God in any one of his attributes, or know him properly and truly, unless it is through first knowing Jesus Christ.

12. Beloved, then let me say to you, summing it all up in one sentence, you will do serious mischief to yourselves if you study any truth concerning God apart from Jesus Christ. Luther was quite right when he said, “I will have nothing to do with an absolute God. I will not try to study him as God. I know that I cannot look at the sun; I must have a smoked glass to look through—I must have the person of the God-man to take away the blinding glory of the invisible God—invisible because he is too bright for my eyes to gaze on. You must have God in Christ. I will not try to study anything else.” Our preaching, if we do not preach Christ, is useless. We may preach what we like about the Father, what we like about portions of Scripture, but if there is no Christ there will be no good come of it. Someone once said, “Why is it that the Methodists and others get people to hear them, and they have conversions, but you do not find crowds going to hear Unitarians, {a} neither do you hear of conversions?” and someone said, “There is no blood in the Unitarian religion, and the blood is the very life of it.” Leave out the atoning sacrifice, and you have left out the marrow from the bones, and the bones from the body. The fabric becomes molluscous, soft, weak, powerless, yes, you have left out the very soul of the gospel if you leave out Christ the Mediator, Christ the surety, Christ the atonement, Christ suffering in our room and place.

13. Just as our preaching ought to be full of Christ, so let your studies of Scripture be. Read everything in the light of Christ. I believe in Calvinism, but not Calvinism without Christ—it becomes fatalism then. I am thankful to hear the practical preacher who preaches the precepts, but I do not believe in his preaching without Christ. He will get into legal bondage as sure as he is a man. The one thing that will keep preaching alive is to keep Christ in it, Christ at the top, Christ at the bottom, and Christ in the middle, and Christ all the way through. Many a man’s theology is a very gold pot of ointment, but there is a nasty fly in it that will make it stink, and there is nothing that will get the stinking fly out of the ointment but Christ our perfume; he keeps our theology sweet and pure. We do not know Christ himself, nor anything about him to any saving and practical purpose, except in that way. The truth that is in Christ is the way by which we get to the truth concerning God.

14. II. And now we shall pass on to the second point:—CHRIST IS THE WAY TO THE FATHER SINCE HE IS THE LIFE.

15. We get life through him—then we come to God. But we are dead until we get Christ, and God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. We are dead, I say, until we get Christ, and the place of the dead is in the earth, and not in heaven. Bury the dead out of my sight, corruption cannot inherit the kingdom of God. Now observe that we never come to God until we first get enough life in Christ to have him as a hope of pardon. I never dared think of coming to God until, first of all, I saw that he had laid help on one who is mighty, even on Christ Jesus. When I understood that the only-begotten Son of God became man for the sinner’s sake, and suffered in the sinner’s place, then I thought, “There is hope for me.” And the next thought I had was, “I will arise and go to my Father, and I will confess my sin, hoping that he will have mercy on me.” Is there one here who wants to be reconciled to God? Soul, your only hope of ever being reconciled to him is on the cross; it is through Jesus, and through Jesus only, that you can have even half a hope that is worth having of ever being the friend of God. Oh! look there; go to his bleeding wounds to get life, and you will then begin to get to God.

16. But it went further when that hope grew into possession and into faith—it was then that we came to God by Christ. Many of you remember when you not only had a hope of being pardoned, but knew you were. Perhaps you remember the very day when all the load of your sin was rolled off your shoulder, and you felt as light as air, though, before, your heart had been as heavy as lead. You remember that time. Did you not at that moment look at God, and bless God with all your heart? Did you not feel you loved him because he blotted out your sin? Did you not feel that day that you could talk to him, that you could praise him, that you could magnify him, that you could live for him, and die for him? I know I did. I knew I had come to God, because in Christ I had the full assurance that my transgressions were forgiven me. The life that gives the assurance of pardon is the life which is the way by which we come to God.

17. Since that, beloved, since we have come to God through complete pardon, we have often come to him in prayer, but I will ask you, “Did you ever get to the Father in prayer except through the Son? Have you ever tried to pray and have forgotten Christ?” If you have, it has been a dead failure. Remember the Primitive Methodist prayer meeting, where the brother got hampered in prayer and could not go on, and someone in the meeting cried out, “Plead the blood, brother; plead the blood”; indeed, and then the man began to pray again. You have always found it so I know—that you could not pray until you got to pleading the blood. I have many a time been with God in prayer, asking for a great blessing, and I have felt that I had not obtained it until I could come to such a text as this, “Do it, for you have promised it. Do it, for you will glorify your Son; do it for his sake, he deserves it, you have promised that he shall have the full reward for his soul’s travail; do it for his sake.” Then I have felt I have received it, for I had reached the Father because I had pleaded the Son. The Son’s life within my soul had helped me to plead his precious merit, and the life that showed itself in the breath of prayer enabled me to get to the Father, God. You must have felt this, believers—you must have felt this, I know.

18. It is just the same when coming to God in praise. It is easy enough to sing a Psalm, pleasant enough to get a hymn and hum it over to yourself alone, but for real worship to God and thorough devout praise of him, you will never do it unless you have been to the foot of the cross first. There is no music that is sweet to God unless Christ tunes the harp. If there is no blood on the harp, there will be no music such as God can accept. When the Lord touches the tongue, then it praises him properly—if he touches it with a drop of Jesus’ blood, not otherwise. “Oh! let the redeemed of the Lord say so,” says the psalmist—”Let the redeemed of the Lord say so, whom he has redeemed out of the hand of the enemy”—as if he felt that no one could praise God so well as those who had tasted the redemption that was by Christ Jesus. The way for every chorister to come to God with a sincere thank offering is to come via crucis—by the way of the cross. Only in that way can he be accepted with his thank offering.

19. But, beloved, I trust we know what it is to come to God as a matter of lifelong experience. It ought not to be by fits and starts that we come to the Father—like Enoch, we are to walk with God. It should be habitual with us, to commune with the Most High. But, notice that, it can never be so unless it is habitual with us to rest on the finished work of Christ. Lose your sense of acceptance in the beloved, and you will lose communion with God. Get away from the foot of the cross, and you have gotten away from the foot of that ladder, the top of which reaches to heaven. There is no other ladder but Christ himself in his atonement. Get away from that, and you have taken away the bridge by which you can get to God at all. Fellowship with God must come through faith in Christ. The meeting-place under the law is the meeting-place under the gospel. Now, under the law the only meeting-place was the mercy seat, the propitiatory that covered the law, that golden slab covered the law on stone. There God met his people. And Jesus Christ covers God’s law completely. Our sins are not seen, his righteousness, his propitiation, that is seen, and God will meet us there, but he will meet us nowhere else. We can only come, then, to communion with the Father by reckoning and resting on the mediatorial work of the Son.

20. And assuredly at the last we shall need to come to the Father through Christ when the veil that now separates us from the invisible world shall begin to be torn in two. We shall long to be in the many mansions, and to hear our Father’s welcome, but we shall have to die with Jesus’ name on our lips, in order to get there. We shall have to rise too; our spirit will have to mount with Jesus; he must give it the wing; and when our body rises, it must be in the image of Jesus and in the life of Jesus, or else we cannot come to the Father for the glory entrance as well as the grace entrance. It is because Christ is the life that we are able to come. We have no way whatever, and no possibility of ever discovering a way by which in our life we can have fellowship with God, the God of our salvation, except by receiving life through Jesus Christ. Oh! men and women, I trust you desire to be at one with your Maker. I trust you wish to be friends with him who can crush you like a moth between his fingers. I hope there is a desire within your soul to have him for a friend whom no one can endure to have for an enemy. If, then, you will come to God, there is the gate—that gate with the mark, with the blood-mark; you must go through there—through the wounds of Jesus. You get to God’s heart only in that way. He has shut every other gate of mercy, if there ever were another open, and this one stands open as the only one, but that is open night and day. You must come to God the Father through Jesus Christ the Son, who suffered, died, rose again, and sits at the right hand of his Father for ever.

21. III. Now we shall close our discourse by the third point, on which we will be brief. The last sentence of the text takes a kind of sweep—a broad sweep. It does not state that Christ is the way because he is the truth, or because he is the life only, but it says without exception, “No man comes to the Father but by me,” by which I understand, first, that:—CHRIST IS THE ONLY WAY THAT GOD HAS APPOINTED by which we can come to the Father.

22. The priest tells me that I must only get to the Father through him. He is a liar, and there is no other answer necessary than that; we need not enter into such a question to debate with him. I would as soon believe a cow, if it could speak like this and tell me that I was to come to God by it, as believe that I was to come to God through a sinner like myself. No, God does not come to me in that form; he has better ways and modes. “There is one God,” says the Scripture, “and one Mediator between God and man—the man Christ Jesus.” In that way we do believe, but in the way of priestcraft we do not believe, and may God save us from it. This is the only one, the absolutely solitary way to God, for God never appointed another; that is to say, he has never appointed a way through ceremonies, nor a way through moods or feelings, nor a way through good works. What is the picture of the way to heaven by good works? Why, it is Mount Sinai all ablaze, like Etna smoking and heaving like a great volcano. And where are the people who want to get to heaven by good works? There they are, down in the valley; there is a great ring set around the mountain. Why do they not come up in the first place, they do not want to come up, for the mountain is altogether shrouded in smoke, and even Moses said, “I greatly fear and quake.” In the next place, “They cannot come up, for there are bounds set around the mountain, and if so much as a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned, or thrust through with a spear.” You cannot get nearer to God than that on the basis of works, for Mount Sinai is the symbol of works. Look to the flames that Moses saw, and shrink, and tremble, and despair. You cannot get to God that way. Calvary is the mountain. Why do you leap, you high hills? This is the hill that God has chosen—the Calvary of the cross, the Golgotha of the tremendous sacrifice. There you can get to God; he has appointed that to be the place where you shall meet him. Oh! do not try to find another way; do not be so arrogant as to say, “This is my way,” but take God’s way and come humbly now to Jesus crucified, and you shall meet God and find mercy and pardon tonight. It is the one and only appointed way.

23. Next, it is the only actual way. You never did meet the man who got to God except through Jesus Christ. I have known men who talked about worshipping the pure god of Nature. I knew one who never went to a place of worship, and when I spoke to him, he said, “I worship God in my own garden.” I said, “Yes, I suppose that is a god made of wood. I think I heard you cutting him down the other morning,” and I believe that is the true worship of nature. It does not go much beyond that kind of thing, and if you find those who profess to find God without coming to Jesus Christ, you will find their god is their belly, and that they worship pleasure, and they lie in their throat when they talk about coming to God apart from Jesus Christ. They do not come; no one ever did come; no one ever shall come—the majority of them do not want to come. He who casts off Christ casts off God with him, or he who says, “I would come to God, but will not come to Christ,” contradicts himself. There is, deep down in his very soul, a hatred of God, of the very true God, or else there would be no hatred of the Christ of God.

24. But Jesus Christ is the way, the only way, but, blessed be God’s name, he is an open way. Whoever desires to come to God the Father tonight may come through Jesus Christ. The way to God is open. There are no bolts nor bars, no bogs across the road to keep a sinner out. God’s mercy is as free as the air we breathe for every soul that will take Christ and rest in Jesus Christ. This is the one condition—come to God by Christ, and you may come. Come now; come with all your sins in you; come in all your filth, and rags, and leprosy. Come, though the sentence of wrath hovers over you, and the black clouds of justice threaten to strike you with the lightning of eternal wrath. You may come just now, and as you are tonight, if you will only come through Christ. We need a mediator between our souls and God, but we do not need any mediator between our souls and Christ. We need to get ready to come to God, but we do not need to get ready to come to Christ. You cannot come to God unless you are washed in the blood of Christ, and clothed in the righteousness of Christ, but you may come to Christ just as you are, not waiting to rid yourselves of one foul blot; just as you are, without any good thing whatever, without even enough goodness in you to be seen with a microscope, and with so much sin that scarcely could eternity hold it. You may come to Christ, though you are almost as bad as a devil; though in some respects you are a very devil, yet you may come to God in Christ, but not to God outside of Christ. You must come to Christ first, and rest at the foot of the cross and look up to the atoning sacrifice. There is a way to God’s heart for you, even you.

25. And this way is a most suitable one for all present here. You know if there is a ladder, it is no use to anyone if it does not go to the top. If I want to go up to the top of a house, and a ladder goes only halfway, it is no use. If I want to go to God, I need a way that reaches up to God. Now Christ is himself God. He will lead us right up to God through himself, if we get to him. But a ladder that went to the top would be no good to me if it did not go down to the bottom. Though it reached to the top of the house, yet if it only went halfway down, I could not get there. Christ is a man just like myself. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was born of a virgin, and was a sufferer of human infirmities, even as you are, and died as you will. He lived in suffering, as you may do. Oh! then, see the ladder has its foot in his humanity and, again, has its top in his deity. Climb it. He is a suitable Saviour for you. What kind of man was Jesus Christ when he was here on earth? He was very holy, but was he very reserved? Was he distant? Did he turn his back when he saw a sinner? Did he go to the other side of the street lest he should touch him, and so be defiled with the presence of a Publican or a prostitute? The Pharisees did that, but not the Master, for this man received sinners and ate with them, sat at the same table with them, and he was called the friend of Publicans and sinners.

26. Oh! sinner, what a Christ, Christ is! What a suitable Saviour for you! Do not think today that he is the judge of sinners. Today he is the friend of sinners. Do not look at him today as though he were the censurer of sinners, the critic and the cynic against sinners. No, but the lover of sinners’ souls. Oh sinner, may his Spirit draw you to come to him tonight in these pews. Let this silent cry go up, “Jesus, Son of man and Son of God, bring me to your Father; teach me about your Father by teaching me about yourself; give me life before God by giving me life in you. You are the way—yourself, in your own person. I trust you; be the way to me, to me, to me, unworthy though I am. Dear, dear Saviour, glorify your mercy by forgiving my sin, my great sin, and accept my unworthy person through your infinite compassion, and reconcile me to God.” Oh! such a prayer as that will be heard. Have you prayed it? It is heard. If you do not feel it is heard, pray it again; keep on praying it; but, above all, look to Christ on the cross; count the purple drops as they fall from his dear wounds. Remember that he was God who died on that cross. Sit and look, and look, and look, and look again. Look, I say, and look again, and if peace does not come with looking, keep on looking, and you will get peace there, and faith there, and life there. You will not take faith to Christ; you will get faith from Christ. Keep on looking; keep on looking. I heard a brother say the other day that what he saw he always looked at, and that is a sensible thing to do with a great many things, but, above all, with Christ. If you see him, keep on looking at him. It does not merely say, “See Christ,” but “Look to him, look to him, and be saved, all you ends of the earth.” May God grant you that gracious life-look, for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

{a} Unitarian: One who affirms the unipersonality of the Godhead, especially as opposed to an orthodox Trinitarian. OED.

End of Volume LXII.