Spirit of God. If we have continued together in peace and love these many years, I cannot attribute it to our constitutional good tempers, nor to wise management, nor to any natural causes, but to the love into which the Spirit has baptized us, so that rebellious nature has been still. If a dozen Christian people live together for twelve months in true spiritual union and unbroken affection, trace it to the love of the Spirit; and if a dozen hundred, or four times that number shall be able to persevere in united service, and find themselves loving each other better after many years than they did at the first, let it be regarded as a blessing from the Comforter, for which he is to be devoutly adored. Fellowship can only come to us by the Spirit, but a church without fellowship would be a disorderly mob, a kingdom divided against itself, and consequently it could not prosper. You need fellowship for mutual strength, guidance, help, and encouragement, and without it your church is a mere human society.

If you are to tell upon the world you must be united as one living body. A divided church has long been the scorn of Antichrist. No sneer which comes from the Vatican has a greater sting in it than that which taunts Protestants with their divisions; and as it is with the great outward church so it is with any one particular church of Christ. Divisions are our disgrace, our weakness, our hindrance, and as the gentle Spirit alone can prevent or heal these divisions by giving us real loving fellowship with God and with one another, how dependent we are upon him for it. Let us daily cry to him to work in us brotherly love, and all the sweet graces which make us one with Christ, that we all may be one even as the Father is one with the Son, that the world may know that God hath indeed sent Jesus, and that we are his people.

VII. Seventhly, we need the Holy Spirit in that renowned office which is described by our Lord as THE PARACLETE, or Comforter. The word bears another rendering, which our translators have given to it in that paasage where we read, "If any man sin we have an Advocate (or Paraclete) with the Father." The Holy Spirit is both Comforter and Advocate.

The Holy Spirit at this present moment is our friend and Comforter, sustaining the sinking spirits of believers, applying the precious promises, revealing the love of Jesus Christ to the heart. Many a heart would break if the Spirit of God had not comforted it. Many of God's dear children would have utterly died by the way if he had not bestowed upon them his divine consolations to cheer their pilgrimage. That is his work, and a very necessary work, for if believers become unhappy they become weak for many points of service. I am certain that the joy of the Lord is our strength, for I have proved it so, and proved also the opposite truth. There are on earth certain Christians who inculcate gloom as a Christian's proper state, I will not judge them, but this I will say, that in evangelistic work they do nothing, and I do not wonder. Till snow in harvest ripens wheat, till darkness makes flowers blossom, till the salt sea yields clusters bursting with new wine, you will never find an unhappy religion promotive of the growth of the kingdom of Christ. You must have joy in the Lord, brethren, if you are to be strong in the Lord, and strong for the Lord. Now, as the Comforter alone can bear

you up amid the floods of tribulation which you are sure to meet with, you see your great need of his consoling presence.

We have said that the Spirit of God is the Advocate of the church,— not with God, for there Christ is our sole Advocate,-but with man. What is the grandest plea that the church has against the world? I answer, the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, the standing miracle of the church. External evidences are very excellent. You young men who are worried by sceptics will do well to study those valuable works which learned and devout men have with much labour produced for us, but, mark you, all the evidences of the truth of Christianity which can be gathered from analogy, from history, and from external facts, are nothing whatever compared with the operations of the Spirit of God. These are the arguments which convince. A man says to me, "I do not believe in sin, in righteousness, or in judgment." Well, brethren, the Holy Ghost can soon convince him. If he asks me for signs and evidences of the truth of the gospel, I reply, "Seest thou this woman; she was a great sinner in the very worst sense, and led others into sin, but now you cannot find more sweetness and light anywhere than in her. Hearest thou this profane swearer, persecutor, and blasphemer? He is speaking with purity, truth, and humbleness of mind. Observe yon man, who was aforetime a miser, and see how he consecrates his substance. Notice that envious, malicious spirit, and see how it becomes gentle, forgiving, and amiable through conversion. How do you account for these great changes? They are happening here every day, how come they to pass? Is that a lie which produces truth, honesty, and love? Does not every tree bear fruit after its kind? What then must that grace be which produces such blessed transformations? The wonderful phenomena of ravens turned to doves, and lions into lambs, the marvellous transformations of moral character which the minister of Christ rejoices to see wrought by the Gospel, these are our witnesses, and they are unanswerable. Peter and John have gone up to the temple, and they have healed a lame man, they are soon seized and brought before the Sanhedrim. This is the charge against them"You have been preaching in the name of Jesus, and this Jesus is an impostor." What do Peter and John say? They need say nothing, for there stands the man that was healed; he has brought his crutch with him, and he waves it in triumph, and he runs and leaps. He was their volume of evidences, their apology, and proof. "When they saw the man that was healed standing with Peter and John, they could say nothing against them."

If we have the Spirit of God amongst us, and conversions are constantly being wrought, the Holy Spirit is thus fulfilling his advocacy, and refuting all accusers. If the Spirit works in your own mind, it will always be to you the best evidence of the gospel. I meet sometimes one piece of infidelity, and then another; for there are new doubts and fresh infidelities spawned every hour, and unstable men expect us to read all the books they choose to produce. But the effect produced on our mind is less and less. This is our answer. It is of no use your trying to stagger us, for we are already familiar with everything you suggest; our own native unbelief has outstripped you. We have had doubts of a kind which even you would not dare to utter

if you knew them; for there is enough infidelity and devilry in our own nature to make us no strangers to Satan's devices. We have fought most of your suggested battles over and over again in the secret chamber of our meditation, and have conquered. For we have been in personal contact with God. You sneer, but there is no argument in sneering. We are as honest as you are, and our witness is as good as yours in any court of law; and we solemnly declare that we have felt the power of the Holy Spirit over our soul as much as ever old ocean has felt the force of the north wind: we have been stirred to agony under a sense of sin, and we have been lifted to ecstacy of delight by faith in the righteousness of Christ. We find that in the little world within our soul the Lord Jesus manifests himself so that we know him. There is a potency about the doctrines we have learned which could not belong to lies, for the truths which we believe we have tested in actual experience. Tell us there is no meat? Why, we have just been feasting. Tell us there is no water in the fountain? We have been quenching our thirst. Tell us there is no such thing as light? We do not know how we can prove its existence to you, for you are probably blind, but we can see. That is enough argument for us, and our witness is true. Tell us there is no spiritual life! We feel it in our inmost souls. These are the answers with which the Spirit of God furnishes us, and they are a part of his advocacy.

See, again, how entirely dependent we are on the Spirit of God for meeting all the various forms of unbelief which arise around us; you may have your societies for collecting evidence, and you may enlist all your bishops and doctors of divinity and professors of apologetics, and they may write rolls of evidence long enough to girdle the globe, but the only person who can savingly convince the world is the Advocate whom the Father has sent in the name of Jesus. When be reveals a man's sin, and the sure result of it, the unbeliever takes to his knees. When he takes away the scales and sets forth the crucified Redeemer, and the merit of the precious blood, all carnal reasonings are nailed to the cross. One blow of real conviction of sin will stagger the most obstinate unbeliever, and afterwards, if his unbelief return, the Holy Ghost's consolations will soon comfort it out of him. Therefore, as at the first so say I at the last, all this dependeth upon the Holy Ghost, and upon him let us wait in the name of Jesus, beseeching him to manifest his power among us. Amen.

PORTION OF SCRIPTURE READ BEFORE SERMON-Romans xv.

HYMNS FROM "OUR OWN HYMN BOOK "-912, 446, 445.

"REST IN THE LORD."

A Sermon

DELIVERED ON LORD'S-DAY MORNING, JANUARY 14TH, 1877, BY C. H. SPURGEON,

AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

"Rest in the Lord."-Psalm xxxvii. 7.

THE Occurrence of our text in the psalm before us is an instance of the great rule that the Lord does nothing by halves. In this priceless psalm the Lord found his servant in the first verse liable to fretfulness and envy, and he exhorted him to cease from fretting; then, in verse three, he taught him to trust, in verse four he led him on to delight, in verses five and six he conducted him into a peaceful committing of his way unto God, and he did not stay the operation of his grace till he had perfected that which concerned him and brought him up to the elevated point of our text, "Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for him." God doth not merely cure the evil in us, but he confers unspeakable good. He takes away the disfiguring wound, but he imparts also comeliness and beauty. If any of you this morning are in a low state of grace, so that you have even fallen into fretfulness at the prosperity of the ungodly, do not cast away all hope, for the grace of God aboundeth toward us in all wisdom and prudence, and he will restore your soul. Remember how David said, in the seventy-third Psalm: "I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked." "So foolish was I, and ignorant: I was as a beast before thee. Nevertheless I am continually with thee thou hast holden me by my right hand." The Lord knoweth how to bring his people again from Bashan, yea, and to uplift them like Jonah from the depths of the sea; and he can bring you by the operation of his grace this day upward from doubt to assurance, from fretful

ness to rest.

Rest is a blessing which properly belongs to the people of God, although they do not enjoy it one tithe as much as they might. Under the Old Testament dispensation there was considerable provision made for rest. Typically the chosen nation was shown that one great end of the visitation of the Lord was to give his people rest, for on the seventh day they rested and did no manner of work. Yea more, in the seventh Nos. 1,333-4.

year they rested according to the divine precept. "Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; but in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the Lord: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard." When they were obedient to the Lord's command they thus enjoyed a whole year of rest, and were no losers by it, for no doubt the seventh fallow year so benefited the land that it brought forth all the more fruit during the other six, so that there was none the less store in their barns. Over and above this, once in fifty years when the seventh seventh year came round, they carried out still further the Sabbatic idea, and the Jubilee year was a time of peculiar and emphatic rest and festival. For thus had the Lord commanded. "A jubilee shall that fiftieth year be unto you ye shall not sow, neither. reap that which groweth of itself in it, nor gather the grapes in it of thy vine undressed. For it is the jubilee; it shall be holy unto you: ye shall eat the increase thereof out of the field." So that very prominently even in that somewhat servile and yoke-bearing dispensation there was brought before the mind of the Israelite the privilege of rest, and those who possessed the inner sight, as Moses did, realized the promise, "My Spirit shall go with thee and I will give thee rest." Indeed, Canaan itself was intended to be the type of rest: the land that floweth with milk and honey, the land of brooks and valleys, the land that the Lord thy God thinketh on, the land upon which the eyes of the Lord rest from the beginning of the year even to the end of the year was meant to be a place where every man should rest under his own vine and fig tree, and look for a yet deeper rest in God. Had they known it, in giving them Canaan Joshua had given them a fair picture of rest; they did not see through the type so as fully to understand its significance, yet nevertheless there it was. O Christian men and women, ye also miss much of your rest, ye have too much of fretfulness, too much of care, too much that is servile. The land doth not keep her Sabbaths as she should, neither doth your soul rest as it might; and as for jubilees, how very scarce they are, whereas, if Christian believers lived near to God, and enjoyed the peace which Jesus gives, they might keep jubilee every year, and Sabbath every day. The Lord grant that we may have power to enjoy his rest, and that it may never be said of us, "They could not enter in because of unbelief."

Brethren, the Lord, as if to show us that he would have us rest, has been pleased to speak of resting himself. It is inconceivable that he should be fatigued, it were profanity to suppose that he who fainteth not neither is weary, and of whose understanding there is no searching, can ever be in a condition to need rest, and yet he did rest, for when he had finished all the works of his hands in the six days of creation the Lord "rested on the seventh day, and sanctified it." When afterwards that rest was broken because his works were marred, we find him further on smelling a "sweet savour of rest" in the sacrifice which was offered unto him by Noah, whose very name was rest. These two facts are highly instructive, and teach us that God resteth in a perfect work, and that when that work is marred the Lord resteth in a perfect sacrifice, even in the Lord Jesus Christ. He hath a rest there and he speaks of our "entering his rest" as it is written "they shall not enter into my rest."