831. The Altar

A Sermon Delivered On Sunday Morning, September 13, 1868, By C. H. Spurgeon, At The Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington.

Grey hairs are here and there upon him, yet he does not know it. (Hosea 7:9)

1. The prophet here testified that the kingdom of Israel had learned the way of the surrounding heathen, and had polluted itself with their vices, and that consequently the strength of the kingdom had decayed. He declares that he could discern obvious signs of this decay and certain as grey hairs, which denote the decline of life; yet the inhabitants of the realm of Israel had not observed their decline, but had boasted of their strength when all the while it was departing from them. We need not go into any details concerning that little kingdom which after awhile was swept away by Assyria; but there is no doubt that what happened to them happens to many a nation—it may happen to our own. Before we are aware of it the sceptre may depart from Britain. A general laxity of commercial morality may by degrees sap and undermine the foundation of our commerce, and before we are aware our industry may be crippled, our trade withdrawn, and our position among the nations debased. If so, we shall fall by our sins, and by our sins alone. Certainly such has often been the case with churches. It was notoriously so with that church presided over by the bishop of Rome. The sins of that modern Babylon did not come all at once, but by slow degrees; first, it submitted itself to one vain dogma of man’s invention; then to a superstitious decree of a haughty council; then to a third invention of a potent pontiff; and so by degrees the church apostatized until it ceased to be a church and became the persecutor of the saints. So after their own fashion it has been with some of our churches at home. Zealous and active, prayerful and united, they grew every day like cedars which the Lord has planted, and they were a blessing to the neighbourhood in which they stood; but discord crept in, or worldliness, or pride, and by and by the Holy Spirit departed, the ministry became barren, the people looked up to the shepherd, and they were not fed; soon the church was scattered abroad, the light was blown out, and the place that was once blessed by the church knew it no more. May this never be written in the history of this church! May grey hairs never come upon its head at all, or if they should come, may we have grace to perceive them at once, and resort to the strong for strength, so that we may be saved from drivelling into imbecility or apostatizing into error!

2. But I shall not discourse about nations this morning, nor even about churches. To handle such extensive themes might rather interest than edify. I shall now speak about individuals. Brothers and sisters, let us turn our thoughts to ourselves. It is an excellent rule concerning a text, for the hearer as well as the minister, to apply himself to the text, and then, secondly, to apply the text to himself. Keep your thoughts on the text, and then when you have drawn out its meaning, let all that it has to say be spoken in your own ears as addressed personally to you. I pray that God the Holy Spirit may stir us up to self-examination, so that if any strange sin or evil passion may have devoured our strength, at any rate we may know it and drive out the traitor at once.

3. First, this morning, I shall endeavour to explain the reason of the ignorance mentioned in the text, “yet he does not know it”; secondly, I shall hold up the mirror, so that every Ephraim here may see his grey hairs; and then, thirdly, I shall recommend remedies for this gradual decline.

4. I. Let me EXPLAIN THE IGNORANCE here mentioned, or show how it is that many a man is backsliding and declining in grace and yet does not know it.

5. I take it that this often is caused by a lack of acquaintance with one’s own soul. It is said that in London we do not know our next door neighbours, but it is a more strange thing that we should not know ourselves; that the soul should be so closely allied to the body as to be even married to it, and yet man scarcely gives his nobler part a second thought, but lives as if he were a horse or a cow. You have never seen your soul, and yet it is yourself! How is it you have lived so long, oh man, without giving to your immortal spirit some consideration, some hours of thought, some studious moments? And you, oh Christian, how is it that you, saved as you profess to be by an immense price, you who have received quickening from the Holy Spirit, that you think so little of soul affairs? We open our eyes in the morning, and right on until we close them at night we scarcely look for anything except what is external and of the body. Would it not be well if we could open our spiritual eyes too, and gaze into ourselves, and understand what business is going on in the world of souls, what vice increases or what virtue declines within our hearts? I am afraid we give our thoughts so much to this world that the next world is neglected. If there is only a scratch on the hand, if there is only a pimple on the flesh, timid folks must needs send for the doctor; but ah! they can let the souls be wounded, and a deadly gangrene comes upon them, but they do not send to the beloved Physician so that he would come and heal them of their diseases. Everywhere we see among men a great lack of acquaintance with their souls, a great forgetfulness of the motto of the old oracle of Delphi, “Man, know yourself!” and consequently it is that men decline almost to spiritual death, and yet scarcely know it.

6. Again there are some who do not want to know any evil thing about themselves. They would rather suppose themselves to be rich, than actually know the true condition. “No,” they say, “do not bring the journal; do not show me the ledger; I am spending now as if I were a wealthy man, and living at a lavish rate. I do not want to know that I am nearly a bankrupt—I would rather not know it.” Hear how these wounded ones dread to be dealt with honestly, and therefore cry, “Surgeon, bandage the sore—it shall be enough for me; I do not want the lancet; I do not care to have my wound radically healed.” They are fools who talk like this, and yet how such fools abound! My hearer, are you one of this tribe? Are you content to have a fair name to live? Are you satisfied to dream that you are rich and increased in goods, and in need of nothing, while you are in reality naked, and poor, and miserable? If so, may the Lord have mercy upon you, and make you wise enough to be your own friend and to be willing to know the truth of your state.

7. Many do not see the grey hairs because they do not look into the mirror to see them. We cannot very well perceive grey hairs without the use of the mirror, or our sins without the mirror of the word. Many professors do not search the Scriptures. They will never win the blessing of the first Psalm, for they are not found reading in God’s word day and night. They do not come to this book, which is God’s mirror, which he hangs up in the abodes of his people, so that they may see the natural face, and perceive what manner of men they are. Oh, these unread Bibles! These neglected Bibles, how they cry out against us! What swift witnesses will they be against many professors in the last heart searching day! What! does God give us a gauge by which we may measure ourselves, and will we not use it? Does he send us these tests and criteria by which we may discover whether all is well with us or not, and will we close our eyes and refuse to see? Oh! then, if we die and utterly perish, surely our blood must be upon our own head. He who will not be saved must be damned. He who will not take the trouble to look into the mirror shall have no one to blame if the undiscovered evil brings him into grievous ill and irretrievable mischief.

8. There are some, again, who look into the mirror to see whether there are grey hairs coming, but they use a false mirror, one which does not truly reflect the image. I mean this, that multitudes of Christians set up a standard of what a Christian ought to be that is far different from the standard of Holy Scripture. They compare themselves among themselves, and they are not wise. They say, “I am as holy, I am as unworldly, I am as conscientious, I am as prayerful as So-and-so.” Perhaps they even boast that they have more spirituality of mind than such a one, and being content to have excelled their fellow creatures they cannot conceive that there can be grey hairs upon themselves; and so their pride is flattered and their soul is thus cankered through and through by a false conception of what they should be. It is well for all of us, beloved, to aim high. It is said that he who shoots at the moon, if he does not hit it, will at any rate shoot higher than he who aims at a bush; and so he who aims at absolute perfection, if he should not attain it, may at any rate be something better than he who takes some poor imperfect friend of his and makes him to be a standard. Break your false mirrors, throw away your flattering lookingglasses, and take to the clear crystal of the word of God, and see there what Jesus was, and ask yourselves how near, or rather how far, you are from being like him. Look at the Son of God, the image of perfection, and hear him say, “Be perfect, even as your Father who is in heaven is perfect,” and blush as you see your deformities, your sins, your grey hairs, and in so blushing, may God bless you!

9. I am ashamed to have to say one more thing, namely, that some men who are decaying in strength do not see their spiritual grey hairs because they dye themselves so thoroughly; I mean that they colour themselves with hypocrisy. There are men who, if every hair were grey, would still wear raven locks in their own judgment, and the judgment of others, for they are masters of deceit. There are some who, if we speak of private prayer, retire into their prayer closets as regularly as others, but yet they never draw near to God in spirit and in truth. How many there are who are as apparently devout in the externals of religion as if they were the children of God, while all the while they are formalists, and Pharisees, without the root of the matter in them. It is the easiest thing in all the world to counterfeit the issues of the mint of heaven; indeed, and to pass the spurious coins among your fellow creatures, and to make them think that you are richer by far than they are in gracious things, while all the while your virtue is counterfeit, and your profession is a lie. Oh my hearers, take care of putting formal prayer, sham holiness, and imitation godliness, into the place of the real fruits of the Spirit. You must not be merely washed and cleansed, but “born again”; you must undergo a radical change; and you must serve the living God in the power of his eternal Spirit, not with the tongue and with profession only, but with heart, and soul, and strength, or else your religion will be nothing but a funeral pall to cover your dead soul, and help to increase the pomp with which you shall be carried to hell! May God save us from hiding from ourselves our secret faults. Let us be willing to be spoken to by the rough preacher’s stern voice! Let us be eager to read those passages of Scripture which try us most. Let it be our prayer, “Search me, oh God, and try my heart.” Daily and hourly let us desire to feel the refining fire go through our soul. Come with the fan in your hand, oh Saviour, and thoroughly purge my floor, and let my chaff be driven away, and let nothing except the pure wheat remain!

10. Thus I have, as briefly as I could, shown you why it is that many, perhaps of ourselves, may have well marked decay in our souls and yet we may not know it.

11. II. Secondly, I am to HOLD UP THE MIRROR.

12. Remember, brethren, that declines in grace and backsliding are usually very much like the fall of the autumn leaves. You are watching the trees, for even now they are beginning to indicate the coming fall. They evidently know that their verdant robes are to be stripped from them, for they are casting off their first loose vestments. How slowly the time of the brown leaf comes on! You notice here and there a tinge of the copper hue, and soon the gold leaf or the bronze is apparent. Week after week you observe that the general fall of the leaves is drawing nearer, but it is a matter that creeps slowly on. And so with backsliders. They are not put out of the visible church all at once, they do not become public offenders all at once. The heart by slow degrees turns aside from the living God, and then at last comes the outward sin and the outward shame. May God save us from falling little by little! The devil’s little strokes have felled many great oaks. Constant droppings of temptation have worn away many stones. May God save us from it. Some cities have been carried by storm. Brave soldiers have made the irons of the scaling ladder bite on the top of the wall, and up they have swarmed in defiance of death, and carried the city by sudden force within a few hours. But many other cities have been taken by the slow process of the siege; the supplies have been cut off; warriors have been killed at the sallyports, (a) slowly; entrenchment’s have been thrown up nearer and nearer to the wall, tunnels have been dug under the bastions, forts have been weakened, gates have been shaken, and at last the city has been subdued. Where Satan captures one man by force of strong temptation, he captures ten by the gradual process of sapping and undermining the principles which should rule within. May God preserve us from this! The cunning fowler can adapt his arts to suit our case, and if some of us may be taken by a sudden surprise attack, he understands how to draw the bow and bring us down; but if others are to be entrapped by being accustomed to the lure, he will spend weeks, and mouths, and years, for he counts no time lost so that he may bring a child of God to shame, and bring disgrace to the name of Jesus. I will, then, hold up the mirror to let those see their own hearts, in whom the evil is insinuating itself by degrees.

13. One of the grey hairs which denotes decay is a lack of holy grief for daily sin. Does this not come close to home for some of you? “Repentance! why,” one says, “I did repent when I was converted.” What, and not since then? Why, repentance and faith go hand in hand to heaven. A Christian must never stop repenting, for I fear he never stops sinning. Where there is no dew of repentance, there is one sign of a curse. Gilboa’s mountain was barren because there was no dew on it, and what shall I say about you who have lost the dew of repentance? What, can you grieve your God, and not grieve yourselves? What, sirs, can you go into your business and know that you have spoken and acted amiss, and when you come home at night are there no lamentings and confessions? Have sin and you grown so friendly that you can carry this viper in your bosom? Your God is a jealous God, and if he sees that you treat sin so lightly, rest assured he will make you smart before long, and withdraw his Holy Spirit from you, and leave you to grope in darkness. There is perhaps not a more common grey hair than this, and yet there is not one which more surely indicates that the constitution of the Christian is being secretly undermined. If you see this evil in the mirror, may God give you grace to repent over your lack of repentance, and to weep that you do not weep for sin.

14. A second grey hair is the absence of lamentation in the soul when Jesus Christ is dishonoured by others. There was a time with some of us when, if we saw others sin, we could sit down and cry our heart out—we could not bear the thought that thousands of our fellow creatures should be living in continual neglect of our precious Lord Jesus. We thought we could lay down our lives, or a hundred lives if we had them, if we might only make him a throne in men’s hearts, and write his name on the very skies, so that everyone who ran might read it. But now we hear of sin, and it does not fill us with holy horror as it once did. Perhaps, dear hearer, you can hear the precious name of Jesus dishonoured, and yet your soul is not pierced through and through as with a hot iron. Ah, if you loved the Master, it would be a painful thing to live in such a wicked world as this! If you loved the sweet Lord Jesus, your heart would yearn over those who do not see his beauty, and to whom he is as “a root out of a dry ground.” Shame on us, shame most of all on myself, that I can walk through these streets of London without tears. Jesus saw Jerusalem and wept, but what was Jerusalem? A petty village compared with London, and yet he wept over it! Have we no tears for a city with equal light, and with equal sin, and with a population multiplied so many times?

   Did Christ o’er sinners weep,
   And can our cheeks be dry?

Indeed, they are dry, dry year in and year out, and scarcely a sigh or cry for poor dying souls is heard from some of us. We can be satisfied to have our friends saved, and our children and a few neighbours saved, and then as for the rest, we talk as if they were delivered over to ruin by God’s decree, and we satisfy ourselves with vain drivel about sovereignty, or some other idle conjecture, and do not mourn or lament, though hell is filling and Christ’s name is blasphemed, and God’s day disregarded, and I do not know what other infamy is committed beneath the light of the moon. It is a sure sign that our grace is not at flood tide, but sadly at the ebb, when there is no grieving over the sins of others.

15. A third grey hair in the Christian, a very plain one, and indicating that the disease is far gone, is the indulgence of certain minor sins. I call them minor, only because they are supposed to be so. When a thief finds that he cannot enter the door of a good man’s house, and that the windows are so barred up that there is no entrance for him, what does he do except, finding that there is a little window through which a child might creep, he fetches a boy and passes him through the narrow opening, and then the child opens the door to the man, and the house is plundered. Even so, when Satan cannot overthrow a believer with the gross sins of the flesh, he is certain to find some lesser evil which he introduces through an unguarded place, and then the lesser sin opens the door for the next. You know the process of the wedge. Try to put the blunt end of the wedge into the timber, and how useless it would be! But put in the thin edge first, give it only a gentle stroke with the mallet, and then again, and again, and again, and see how it cleaves its way, widening little by little. So some professors begin with a little conformity to the world. “Oh!” they say, “I cannot see the harm in it,” though others of their fellow Christians are grieved by it. Then they come to the next, and the next, and the next, and so by slow degrees they give up virtually all the truthfulness of their profession, and make shipwreck of the faith and are castaways, because the grace of God was not truly in them, but only notionally so; while others who go a certain distance in the road to apostasy are met by divine grace and turned back, not without many broken bones, and much severe lamentation for all the rest of the days of their life.

16. Covetousness, which few men will confess, is still a very common grey hair upon the heads of professors. Beware of a growing covetousness, for covetousness is of all sins one of the most insidious. It is like the silting up of a river. As the river comes down from the land it brings with it sand and earth, and it deposits all these at its mouth, and by degrees, unless the conservators (b) watch it carefully, it will dam itself up, and it will be difficult to find a channel for ships of great burden. You cannot see when the river closes its own mouth, but so it is, by daily deposit it creates a sandbar, which is dangerous to navigation. Many a man when he begins to accumulate wealth begins also to ruin his soul, and the more he deposits the more he suppresses his liberal spirit, which is, so to speak, the very mouth of his life. Instead of doing more for God he does less: the more he saves the more he wants, and the more he wants of this world the less he craves for the world to come. This disease creeps upon men as slowly as certain disorders which slumber in the blood for months, until they find occasion to develop themselves. Watch against a grasping spirit, dear friend. If you find the money sticking to your hands, be mindful of what you are doing. It is all well enough for you to seek to make all you can honestly—you are bound to do so, and to use it properly; but when the gold begins to cling to you, it will eat as does a canker, and will soon prove to be your ruin unless God prevents it.

17. With some it is not quite so much what we call covetousness, though it is the same sin, as it is worldliness. They are as much taken up with the little they have as some would be with their much, and as much drawn away from God by their losses as others would be by their gains. They are from morning to night always fretting and worrying about the things of this life. They have never understood our Lord’s great text, “Be careful for nothing,” but the first, last, and middle thoughts of their life are, “What shall we eat, what shall we drink, and with what shall we be clothed?” They rise up early, and sit up late, and eat the bread of carefulness, but forget the Lord who alone can build the house. Do not some of you find yourselves falling into this fretful way? There was a time when it was not so. Oh, that hour of prayer, how you enjoyed it, but you clip it very short now! You say you cannot afford the time. Ah, that Thursday night lecture, that Monday evening prayer meeting, how sweet those used to be! How you went home thanking God that there were such wells in the desert! But you cannot come out to them now that you are so pestered with cares, and even on Sunday your business intrudes itself into your thoughts. You have been making calculations in the pew this morning; you have been worrying yourself about interest and discount, and mortgage and commission. The stockbroker’s din and the rate collector’s knock have sounded in your ears. The fact is, my friend, you are growing worldly. Now take a bright knife from your table and dig it into the earth in your garden, and leave it there, and see how it will rust. This is what will become of your soul: put it into the earth, and keep it there, it must corrode. A man can do as much business as the wealthiest merchant in the world, and if he lives near to God it will not harm him; but a man can do a tin pot business, as they say, and yet for all that, because he puts his soul into it, cares about it, worries over it, and departs from the living God, it will consume the graciousness of his soul, take away all the sharpness of his Christian zeal and all the brightness of the holy communion which he once had with his God. Beware of that grey hair. Oh my beloved brethren, I have held the mirror up; you can see the evil, avoid it, for the Lord’s sake and your own.

18. In some professors the grey hair of envy is very visible; indeed, in some of the best too. Some of God’s servants are not satisfied to serve God in their own way, but they must needs make it their aim to excel some other brother, and if that brother should happen to be more successful, or to be thought to be so, immediately they feel grieved, and are happy to try and pick a hole in his coat, or pull a feather from his cap, lest he should outshine them. This is the sin of some of the hardest workers in Christian churches. I wish we could all get the spirit of dear Mr. Dodd, the Puritan, who said, “I wish that I were the worst preacher in all England,” by which he meant, “I wish they were all better than myself.” He did not mean that he would like to be any worse than he was, but he desired that all his brethren might be better than himself. We ought to be like the old Roman, who when another was elected to an office in preference to himself, thanked God that his country had better men than himself. So should we. But the spirit that was evinced in the days of Luther is often seen even in our churches; many confessed that Luther had proposed many excellent reforms, but they could not endure them because they were proposed, as they said, by a beggarly monk. At this time many would confess to the notable deed of a zealous brother, but then they must needs find fault because the man is so young, “How shall he be allowed to outstrip the venerable elders?” Or, “He is such a poor man, who is he that he should be making such a to do?” Or, “The man has never had an education, how dare he pretend to be useful?” This is very mean and despicable, and yet, alas! most common. Let us give no quarter to the foul spirit of envy. It is a devil with as many lives as a cat, and you will have to kill it a great many times over to get rid of it, but it must be killed. It is a grey hair of the most pernicious kind, for it denotes a sad declension of the soul from walking closely with God.

19. Another grey hair is pride. When we think ourselves to be something, then we are nothing. When we boast within ourselves, “I have none of these grey hairs,” we are then snow white with them. When we conceive that others might well pattern themselves after us, we may soon be beacons to them. Rocks always lie in the way of the barque of pride. When we write fine things about ourselves, we shall soon write bitter things against ourselves. A professor is never lower in the sight of God than when he is high in his own esteem.

20. Neglect of prayer, again, is another grey hair. When a town begins to slacken in its commerce, its decline may come by slow degrees; careful watchers observe it, because they perceive that the ships in the harbour grow fewer and fewer. Our soul is the harbour, and our prayers are the vessels by which we trade between our souls and heaven, and when these prayers begin to be fewer, or are of lighter tonnage, when they make fewer voyages to the celestial haven, then be sure that our soul’s spiritual trade is under a sad decline.

21. It is a grey hair, too, when we have no delight in listening to the word, or reading it. There was a time with some of you when you would cheerfully stand in the aisles with the crowd to listen and were glad, though you did not have a place to lean against, if you might catch a good word from the Master. But now it must be a soft cushion if you are to sit comfortably, and the preacher must take care that he selects goodly similes and choice words, if he wishes to hold your ear. You are dainty now. When you were hungry, you could eat gospel meat from the bone, no matter how it was cut; but now it must be daintily carved, or your stomach turns against it. When the appetite fails, the man’s health is wrong, and he needs a tonic, and perhaps the great Physician will before long send him a bitter draught which will restore him.

22. Another grey hair is, lack of love for God—when we think harsh thoughts of him because we are in trouble; when we do not seek his honour; when we can hear his name blasphemed without a chill of horror; when we do not, in fact, love him as a tender child loves a parent. Oh beloved, it is a sweet thing to love God; it is the true life of man, this love for God in the soul; when you can talk with him, walk with him, rejoice in him, bless him, praise him, and hold him to be good even in the darkest of his dispensations. But we do not love God as we should. Oh our dear God, our blessed Father, our tender Parent, whose truthfulness we have proven ten thousand times, and whose lovingkindnesses every day are innumerable, how little do we praise him, how often do we complain about him, how few good words we speak to others concerning him, and how ready are we, at the very first rebuff from him, to murmur against him! May our souls get to love God better, and this will be a sign that we are in a holy and happy state.

23. A lack of love for believers also is another grey hair. Those who do not love the Father are not likely to love the children. Many professors seem to be entirely wrapped up in themselves. Their notion of religion is their own salvation, and their idea of zeal is simply looking after their own prosperity. Brethren, see that you love one another. “Little children, love one another,” John said, “for love is from God”; and if you do not love the poor and needy of Christ’s church, and the feeble and the suffering, yes, if your heart does not go out towards all in whom there is anything of Christ Jesus, depend upon it you are not living as near to God as you should.

24. Again, lack of love for perishing sinners is a sad grey hair to be found I fear in some of us ministers, as well as in the people—to be found in me: oh that it were not so! Ah! when we can think of the perishing and yet are not dismayed on their account, when we refuse to speak the gospel to them, when we do not warn them, when we never pray for them, when our prayer closets never witness our sighs and cries for these poor souls that will so soon be damned and cast away from all hope, when we can even think of neighbours, children, friends, perishing, and not feel any brokenness of spirit, nor pour out any lamentations over them, oh! then indeed we must have forgotten the compassion of Jesus and our heart must be terribly diseased. Look at the grey hair, and ask God to deliver you from what it indicates.

25. One other grey hair is the suspension of communion with God; we sang about it just now.

   Where is the blessedness I knew
      When first I saw the Lord?
   Where is the soul refreshing view
      Of Jesus and his word?

How wretched it is to follow Jesus afar off, and to be unable to say, “He brought me into his banqueting house, and his banner over me was love”; when we can no more rejoice with the joy of those who make merry in his name, neither can weep at his feet—then we have turned aside, and may God in mercy bring us back again!

26. III. Two or three words shall suffice for the third point, namely, to recommend to you CERTAIN REMEDIES.

27. I would press it home upon any professor here who has seen grey hairs in the mirror I have held up, to make an enquiry concerning whether he is a child of God or not, for these things go far to make us doubt whether we were ever born again; and if this is a question, then all is at stake. Oh, I urge you make the trial, for it would be better for you to doubt and fear than to go to hell blindfolded with carnal security. Young people, you joined the church some years ago, and you thought then you felt deep repentance, conviction of sin, and a true faith in Christ; you have had two or three years to test you, how is it with you now? Is not the world getting the upper hand with you? Does not that tempting offer of marriage almost persuade you to break the Lord’s command not to be unequally yoked together with unbelievers? Do not the pleasures of the world, which are so congenial to poor evil flesh and blood, do they not begin to fascinate you? Then ask yourselves, “Am I built on the rock, or is it a sandy foundation? Have I received the grace of God in truth, or am I under some fond delusion which is lulling my conscience for awhile, and stupefying my reason?” I implore you by the blessed God, by death and by eternity, make sure work of it; see that you get to Christ and not to an imaginary peace; see that you possess true and living faith in a living Saviour, and not a confidence based on mere excitement. I ask you that because I believe the answer to that question may very much help you to get rid of these grey hairs.

28. Next, I beseech you professors, who can honestly feel that you are converted, to remember what will be the result of decays in grace. You cannot keep those decays always buried; even if you could they would be mischievous. They will lose the company of Christ for you; they will deprive you of the joy of the Lord; they will mar your prevalence in prayer; they will take away from you much of your usefulness in outward life; but do you know what it will come to in the long run, unless grace prevents it? Why, these decays will begin to tell upon your outward conduct and conversation. Do not say, “I shall never be a public sinner.” Little do you know what you will be. That lip which vows today, “I will never deny him,” may yet deny Christ with oaths and curses. Who are you that you should be better than Peter? Do you not recoil at the thought of it? Then recoil at the sight of these grey hairs. Amend, I urge you, and return to God with grieving and repentance, to think you should already have departed from him so much, or else your last end may be worse than the first.

29. I recommend to every believer here a daily self-examination. Pythagoras commanded his disciples, three times every night, before they went to sleep, to go over the errors of the day, so that they might see them and avoid them in the future. Repentance is a blessed grace. Mr. Rowland Hill used to say it was one of his regrets that he could not take repentance into heaven with him. It is so blessed a thing to weep under a sense of sin, that we may say in the words of our hymn writer—

   Lord, let me weep for nought but sin,
      And after none but thee;
   And then I would, oh that I might,
      A constant weeper be.

Look at the great heinousness of the sin of departing from God; see sin in its true deformity and blackness, and repent of it.

30. Then with repentance join much supplication, especially supplication for the power of the Holy Spirit to be shed abroad in you. I do feel, brethren, as if few of us had ever entered into the power of religion; we are living in the weakness of it. We live on the outskirts; we have not penetrated into the metropolitan city of intense vital godliness. We are like those poor Eskimos far away at the poles. Oh that we could reach the tropics of true godliness, where the sun of divine grace should be vertical all the day long, and its divine heat should bring out in our hearts all the tropical luxuriance of which renewed nature can be capable. We want to yield sweet fruits for Christ, fragrant flowers, and all that human nature can produce when sanctified by the blessed Spirit. Oh, by supplication seek to get more power from on high, so that you may get rid of these grey hairs!

31. Brethren, to our supplications let us add renewed faith. Let us go to Jesus as we went at the first. We draw living waters from that sacred well, waters which shall still refresh us. Let us go with the penitent’s cry, beating on our breast, because of our wanderings, and ask for restoration and a fresh cleansing in the fountain which Jesus filled. Jesus is not slow to be entreated; he will bind up what is broken, he will restore what has gone astray.

32. And then to this prayer of faith, let us add a daily watchful activity. Let us guard ourselves so that we do not slide down the slippery slope of declension. Let us keep our feet with all diligence, and cry to the great Keeper, who alone can hold us up and make us safe. And let us see to it, brethren, that we are not deluded into the idea that we can get to heaven safely and yet live at a distance from God, that as long as we are just saved, it will suffice. I charge you, brethren, rise! Let your motto be “Superior,” higher yet! Rise like eagles that God has trained to face the sun! Rise like angels whose abode is heaven! Get up, get up, you lingerers in the valley; ascend to clearer atmospheres, to do even better service for your God. I long heavily for more grace to serve my Master with, and more consecration for his service! And I wish the same for all of you. Let none of us be content to tarry down below in the marshland of the poor poverty stricken religion of this present day, but let us climb the high mountains where the sun of God’s grace is shining brightest, and stand there enjoying communion with him, leaving the world beneath. So shall grey hairs vanish, and so shall we, like the eagle, renew our youth.

33. Beloved, there is much that may strike the ungodly in this sermon as well as the believer, and I pray God to make it a twoedged sword both to wound and to heal. “Whoever believes on the Lord Jesus Christ shall be saved.” There is the gospel! Receive it and live in its power! Amen.

[Portion of Scripture Read Before Sermon—Hosea 7]

(a) Sallyport: An opening in a fortified place for the passage of troops when making a sally. OED.
(b) Conservators of a river: persons having charge of a river, its embankments, weirs, creeks, etc., and supervision of the fisheries, navigation, and watermills. OED.