The Spurgeon Series 1857 & 1858. Charles H. Spurgeon

were proper and correct; but maybe they have just been enticed into the house of the strange woman; they have just been tempted to go astray from the path of rectitude; their corruption is just breaking forth; they disdain now to sit at their mother’s apron strings; they think it is foul scorn to keep to the rules that bind the moral! They! they are free, they say, and they will be free; they will live a jolly and a happy life; and so they run on in boisterous yet wicked merriment, and betray the marks of death about them. They have gone further than the maiden; she was still fair and comely; but here there is something that is the later results of death. The maiden was caressed, but the young man is untouched; he lies on the bier, and though men bear him on their shoulders, yet there is a shrinking from him; he is dead, and it is known that he is dead. Young man, you have gone as far as that; you know that good men shrink from you. It was only yesterday that your mother’s tears fell fast and thick as she warned your younger brother to avoid your sin; your very sister, when she kissed you only this morning, prayed to God that you might find good in this house of prayer; but you know that of late she has been ashamed of you; your conversation has become so profane and wicked, that even she could scarcely endure it. There are houses in which you were once welcome; where you once bowed your knee with them at the family prayer, and your name was mentioned too; but now you do not choose to go there, for when you go, you are treated with reserve. The good man of the house feels that he could not let his son go with you, for you would contaminate him; he does not sit down now side by side with you, as he used to do, and talk about the best things; he lets you sit in the room as a matter of mere courtesy; he stands far away from you, as it were; he feels that you have not a spirit congenial with his own. You are a little shunned; you are not quite avoided; you are still received among the people of God, yet there is a coldness that reveals that they understand that you are not a living one.

      13. And note, too, that this young man, though carried out to his grave, was not like the maiden; she was in the garments of life, but he was wrapped in the grave clothes of death. So many of you have begun to form habits that are evil; you know that already the screw of the devil is tightening on your finger. Once it was a screw you could slip off or on; you said you were master of your pleasures — now your pleasures are master of you. Your habits are not now commendable, you know they are not; you stand convicted while I speak to you this morning; you know your ways are evil. Ah! young man, though you have not yet gone as far as the open profligate and desperately profane, take heed, you are dead! you are dead! and unless the Spirit quickens you, you shall be cast into the valley of Gehenna, to be the food of that worm which never dies, but eats souls throughout eternity. And ah! young man, I weep, I weep over you; you are not yet so far gone, that they have rolled the stone against you; you are not yet become obnoxious; you are not yet the staggering drunkard, nor yet the blasphemous infidel; you have much that is wrong with you, but you have not gone to all the lengths yet. Take heed; you will go further still; there is no stopping in sin. When the worm is there, you cannot put your finger on it, and say, “Stop; eat no more.” No, it will go on, to your utter ruin. May God save you now, before you shall come to that consummation for which hell so sighs, and which heaven can alone avert.

      14. One more remark concerning this young man. The maiden’s death was in her bedroom; the young man’s death was in the city gates. In the first case I described, the sin was secret. But, young man, your sin is not. You have gone so far that your habits are openly wicked; you have dared to sin in the face of God’s sun. You are not as some others — seemingly good; but you go out and openly say, “I am no hypocrite; I dare to do wrong. I do not profess to be righteous; I know I am an incorrigible rascal. I have gone astray, and I am not ashamed to sin in the street.” Ah! young man, young man! Your father, perhaps, is saying now, “Oh God that I had died for him — oh God that I had seen him buried in his grave, before he would have gone to such lengths in wickedness! Oh God that when I first saw him and mine eye was gladdened with my son, I had seen him the next minute smitten with disease and death! Oh, would to God that his infant spirit had been called to heaven, that he might not have lived to bring in this way my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave!” Your sport in the city gates is misery in your father’s house; your open merriment before the world brings agony into a mother’s heart. Oh, I beseech you, stop. Oh, Lord Jesus! touch the bier this morning! Stop some young man in his evil habits, and say to him, “Arise!” Then he will join with us in confessing that those who are alive have been quickened by Jesus, through the Spirit, though they were dead in trespasses and sins.

      15. 3. Now we come to the third and last case — LAZARUS DEAD AND BURIED. Ah! dear friends, I cannot take you to see Lazarus in his grave. Stand, oh stand away from him. Where shall we flee to avoid the noxious odour of that reeking corpse? Ah, where shall we flee? There is no beauty there; we dare not look upon it. There is not even the gloss of life left. Oh, hideous spectacle! I must not attempt to describe it; words would fail me, and you would be too much shocked. Nor dare I tell the character of some men present here. I would be ashamed to tell the things which some of you have done. This cheek might be suffused with a blush to tell the deeds of darkness which some of the ungodly of this world habitually practise. Ah, the last stage of death, the last stage of corruption, oh, how hideous; but the last stage of sin, is far more hideous! Some writers seem to have an aptitude for puddling in this mud, and digging up this miry clay; I confess that I have none. I cannot describe to you the lust and vice of a full grown sinner. I cannot tell you what are the debaucheries, the degrading lusts, the devilish, the bestial sins into which wicked men will run, when spiritual death has had its perfect work in them, and sin has displayed itself in all its fearful wickedness. I may have some here. They are not Christians. They are not, like the young maiden, still fondled, nor even, like the young man, still kept in the funeral procession: no, they have gone so far that decent people avoid them. Their very wife, when they go into the house, rushes upstairs to be out of the way. They are scorned. Such a one is the prostitute, from whom one’s head is turned in the very street. Such a one is the openly profligate, to whom we give wide quarters, lest we touch him. He is a man that is far gone. The stone is rolled before him. No one calls him respectable. He lives, perhaps, in some back slum of a dirty lane; he does not know where to go. Even as he stands in this place, he feels that if his next door neighbour knew his guilt he would give him a wide berth, and stand far away from him; for he has come to the last stage; he has no marks of life; he is utterly rotten. And notice; as in the case of the maiden the sin was in the bedroom, secret; in the next case it was in the open streets, public; but in this case it is secret again. It is in the tomb. For you will notice that men, when they are only half gone into wickedness, do it openly; but when they are fully gone their lust becomes so degrading that they are obliged to do it in secret. They are put into the grave, in order that all may be hidden. Their lust is one which can only be perpetrated at midnight; a deed which can only be done when shrouded by the astonished curtains of darkness. Have I any such here? I cannot tell that I have many; but still I have some. Ah! in being constantly visited by penitents I have sometimes blushed for this city of London. There are merchants whose names stand high and fair. Shall I tell it here? I know it on the best authority, and the truest, too. There are some who have houses large and tall, who on the exchange are reputable and honourable, and everyone admits them and receives them into their society; but ah! there are some of the merchants of London who practise lusts that are abominable. I have in my church and congregation — and I dare to say what men dare to do — I have in my congregation women whose ruin and destruction have been wrought by some of the most respected men in respectable society. Few would dare to speak so boldly as that; but if you boldly do the thing, I must speak of it. It is not for God’s ambassador to wash his mouth beforehand; let him boldly reprove, as men do boldly sin. Ah! there are some that are a stench in the nostrils of the Almighty; some whose character is hideous beyond all hideousness. They have to be covered up in the tomb of secrecy; for men would expel them from society, and hiss them from existence, if they knew all. And yet — and now comes a blessed interposition — yet this last case may be saved as well as the first, and as easily too. The rotten Lazarus may come out of his tomb, as well as the slumbering maiden from her bed. The last — the most corrupt, the most desperately abominable, may yet be quickened; and he may join in exclaiming, “And I have been quickened, though I was dead in trespasses and sins.” I trust you will understand what I wish to convey — that the death is the same in all cases; but the manifestation of it is different; and that