Milo

3 DECEMBER (PREACHED CHRISTMAS EVENING 1769)

Lost to God

‘For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.’ Luke 19:10
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING: Isaiah 1:2–8

A sinner may be described as lost to God. He made us and he made us for himself, for his own service, for his own glory, to know, love and honour him. But as it was said of the prodigal, this my son was lost [Luke 15:24], so God has lost the reverence, obedience and dependence due to him from his creatures. Speaking after the manner of men he expresses concern, and, as it were, disappointment upon this account (Isaiah 1:2 and 5:4). In him we live and move and have our being [Acts 17:28]. He gives us life and breath and all things, rain and fruitful seasons—a boundless capacity and an immortal duration. But what are the returns? How totally are we all lost to him by nature, and how totally are some of you lost to him still. May he give you to know it—instead of reverence, contempt and blasphemy. See how it is with angels and glorified spirits (Isaiah 6). But how is it upon earth? Ah, how is the holy arm of God profaned, his worship neglected. Instead of dependence upon him, self reigns in every heart. We trust in our own strength and live to our own ends (Daniel 5:23). Instead of obedience, the sinner has broken the bonds of God and cast off his yoke behind him. Which of his holy commandments is not transgressed wilfully, habitually, openly, without control and without remorse—as if it was, as indeed it is, a very principle of our vile nature to set our Maker at defiance? Consider each of you what part you have in these charges.
FOR MEDITATION:
The thief who near the Saviour hung
I take my pattern from the thief,
(In death, how happy he!)
I have no other plea;
Was answered when his dying tongue
For I of sinners am the chief,
Said, ‘LORD remember me.’
Then LORD remember me.

My sins are not less black than those
The Lamb upon his glorious throne
Which brought him to the tree:
As newly slain I see,
No thought can give my heart repose,
And trust he will not those disown
But LORD remember me.
Who plead, ‘remember me’.

SERMON: LUKE 19:10 [3/5]

December 2nd

Christian perfection

Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect.… Phil. 3:12.

It is a snare to imagine that God wants to make us perfect specimens of what He can do; God’s purpose is to make us one with Himself. The emphasis of holiness movements is apt to be that God is producing specimens of holiness to put in His museum. If you go off on this idea of personal holiness, the dead-set of your life will not be for God, but for what you call the manifestation of God in your life. ‘It can never be God’s will that I should be sick,’ you say. If it was God’s will to bruise His own Son, why should He not bruise you? The thing that tells for God is not your relevant consistency to an idea of what a saint should be, but your real vital relation to Jesus Christ, and your abandonment to Him whether you are well or ill.
Christian perfection is not, and never can be, human perfection. Christian perfection is the perfection of a relationship to God which shows itself amid the irrelevancies of human life. When you obey the call of Jesus Christ, the first thing that strikes you is the irrelevancy of the things you have to do, and the next thing that strikes you is the fact that other people seem to be living perfectly consistent lives. Such lives are apt to leave you with the idea that God is unnecessary, by human effort and devotion we can reach the standard God wants. In a fallen world this can never be done. I am called to live in perfect relation to God so that my life produces a longing after God in other lives, not admiration for myself. Thoughts about myself hinder my usefulness to God. God is not after perfecting me to be a specimen in His show-room; He is getting me to the place where He can use me. Let Him do what He likes.

December 2

“Perfect through suffering.” (Heb. 2:10.)

STEEL is iron plus fire. Soil is rock, plus heat, or glacier crushing. Linen is flax plus the bath that cleans, the comb that separates, and the flail that pounds, and the shuttle that weaves. Human character must have a plus attached to it. The world does not forget great characters. But great characters are not made of luxuries, they are made by suffering.
I heard of a mother who brought into her home as a companion to her own son, a crippled boy who was also a hunchback. She had warned her boy to be very careful in his relations to him, and not to touch the sensitive part of his life but go right on playing with him as if he were an ordinary boy. She listened to her son as they were playing; and after a few minutes he said to his companion: “Do you know what you have got on your back?” The little hunchback was embarrassed, and he hesitated a moment. The boy said: “It is the box in which your wings are; and some day God is going to cut it open, and then you will fly away and be an angel.”
Some day, God is going to reveal the fact to every Christian, that the very principles they now rebel against, have been the instruments which He used in perfecting their characters and moulding them into perfection, polished stones for His great building yonder.—Cortland Myers.
Suffering is a wonderful fertilizer to the roots of character. The great object of this life is character. This is the only thing we can carry with us into eternity.… To gain the most of it and the best of it is the object of probation.
—Austin Phelps.

“By the thorn road and no other is the mount of vision won.”

2 DECEMBER (PREACHED CHRISTMAS EVENING 1769)

Lost

‘For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.’ Luke 19:10
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING: Matthew 1:18–21

The return of this day has by long custom been observed as a commemoration of the coming of Christ in the flesh. But how is it observed by many—alas, as a time of riot and folly for the indulgement of those sins and follies, those works of the devil, which Christ was manifest to destroy—a little lip service and outward attendance at church and the rest of the day and many following days (which instead of holidays might rather be called sinning days) spent in dissipation. So I fear it is with many here and perhaps you are waiting to close this very evening as you might do if you thought, or were sure, that Christ came into the world to procure you a liberty of sinning without control. The Lord give you a better understanding of my text before you go from hence.
The state of mankind, which moved the pity of Jesus to come that he might seek and save them, is expressed fully and briefly by that which was lost—which may be considered either as a thing is lost, when the rightful proprietor is deprived of it, or as a person is said to be lost, when he is in a miserable, hopeless, state, so as to be beyond all ordinary means of assistance and recovery. Thus sinners are lost to God and lost in themselves.
FOR MEDITATION: Thus I was as miserable on all hands as could well be imagined. My breast was filled with the most excruciating passions; eager desire, bitter rage, and black despair … no hope of relief or mitigation; no friend to take my part, or to listen to my complaint: Whether I looked inward or outward, I could perceive nothing but darkness and misery. I was tempted to throw myself into the sea, which would put a period to all my sorrows at once. But the secret hand of God restrained me. Help me to praise him, dear Sir, for his wonderful goodness to the most unworthy of all his creatures.
Narrative, April 1745
Jesus my Saviour, who has redeemed my lost title to the good things of both worlds.
John Newton to David Jennings, 29 August 1752

SERMON: LUKE 19:10 [2/5]

December 1st

The law and the gospel

For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all. James 2:10.

The moral law does not consider us as weak human beings at all, it takes no account of our heredity and infirmities, it demands that we be absolutely moral. The moral law never alters, either for the noblest or for the weakest, it is eternally and abidingly the same. The moral law ordained by God does not make itself weak to the weak, it does not palliate our shortcomings, it remains absolute for all time and eternity. If we do not realize this, it is because we are less than alive; immediately we are alive, life becomes a tragedy. “I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.” When we realize this, then the Spirit of God convicts us of sin. Until a man gets there and sees that there is no hope, the Cross of Jesus Christ is a farce to him. Conviction of sin always brings a fearful binding sense of the law, it makes a man hopeless—“sold under sin.” I, a guilty sinner, can never get right with God, it is impossible. There is only one way in which I can get right with God, and that is by the death of Jesus Christ. I must get rid of the lurking idea that I can ever be right with God because of my obedience—which of us could ever obey God to absolute perfection!
We only realize the power of the moral law when it comes with an ‘if.’ God never coerces us. In one mood we wish He would make us do the thing, and in another mood we wish He would leave us alone. Whenever God’s will is in the ascendant, all compulsion is gone. When we choose deliberately to obey Him, then, with all His almighty power, He will tax the remotest star and the last grain of sand to assist us.