Preface For more than a century, Charles Haddon Spurgeon's sermons have been consistently recognized, and their usefulness and impact have continued to the present day, even in the outdated English of the author's own day. Why then should expositions already so successful and of such stature and proven usefulness require adaptation, revision, rewrite or even editing? The answer is obvious. To increase its usefulness to today's reader, the language in which it was originally written needs updating. Though his sermons have served other generations well, just as they came from the pen of the author in the nineteenth century, they still could be lost to present and future generations, simply because, to them, the language is neither readily nor fully understandable. My goal, however, has not been to reduce the original writing to the vernacular of our day. It is designed primarily for you who desire to read and study comfortably and at ease in the language of our time. Only obviously archaic terminology and passages obscured by expressions not totally familiar in our day have been revised. However, neither Spurgeon's meaning nor intent have been tampered with. Tony Capoccia All Scripture references are taken from the HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION (C) 1978 by the New York Bible Society, used by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers. SERVICE AND HONOR by Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892) "Whoever serves Me must follow Me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves Me" (John 12:26). You cannot claim to have Christ as your Lord if you will not serve Him. If you take Christ as your Lord and Savior, you must take Him for all that He is, not only as a Friend, but also as Master; and if you are to become His disciple, you must also become His servant. I hope that no one fights against that truth. Surely it is one of our highest privileges on earth to serve our Lord, and this also will be our joyous occupation even in heaven itself: "His servants will serve Him. They will see His face" (Revelation 22:3-4). This thought also enters into our idea of salvation; to be saved, means that we are rescued from the slavery of sin, and brought into the glorious liberty of the servants of God. O Master, You are such a glorious Lord that serving You is perfect freedom, and the sweetest rest to my soul! You have told us that it would be so, and we have found it so. "Take my yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls" (Matthew 11:29). We do find it so; and it is not as though rest were a separate thing from service, the very service itself becomes rest to our souls. I don't know how some of us would have any rest on earth if we could not employ our daily lives in the service of Christ; and the rest to be enjoyed in heaven is never to be pictured as inactivity, but as constantly being permitted the high privilege of serving the Lord. Learn then, all of you who would have Christ as your Savior, that you must be willing to serve Him. We are not saved "by" service, but we are saved "to" service. After we are saved we live in service to our Lord. If we refuse to be His servants we are not saved, for we still remain evidently the servants of self, and the servants of Satan. Holiness is another name for salvation; to be delivered from the power of self-will and the domination of evil lusts, and the tyranny of Satan--this is salvation. Those who want to be saved must know that they will have to serve Christ, and those who are saved rejoice that they are serving Him, and their service is evidence of a change of heart and renewal of the mind. So you are proposing to yourself that you will serve Christ, are you? You are a young man, as yet you have plenty of vigor and strength, and you say to yourself, "I will serve Christ in some remarkable way; I will seek to make myself a scholar, I will try to learn the art of speech, and I will in some way or other glorify my Lord's name by the splendor of my language." Will you, dear friend? Is it not better, if you are going to serve Christ, to ask Him what He would like you to do? If you wished to do a kindness for a friend, you certainly would desire to know what would best please that friend, or else your kindness might be mistaken and you might be doing that which would grieve rather than gratify. Now listen. Your Lord and Master does not require you to become either a scholar or an orator to serve Him. Both of those things may happen in your path of duty which he would have you to take; but first of all He says, "If any man serve Me, let Him follow Me." This is what Christ prefers beyond anything else, that His servants should follow Him. If we do that, we shall serve Him in the way which is according to His own choice. I notice that many good friends desire to serve Christ by standing in the most noticeable place. You cannot get there in one step, young man; your better way will be to serve Christ by following Him, by "doing the next thing," the thing you can do, that little simple duty which lies within your capacity which will bring you no special honor, but which, nevertheless, is what the Lord desires of you. In effect, you can hear Him say to you, "Whoever serves Me must follow Me, not by aiming at great things, but by doing just what I give them to do at that time." "Should you then seek great things for yourself?" said the prophet Jeremiah to Baruch, "Do not seek them." So I say the same to you. One friend, perhaps, blessed with great riches, is saying, "I will save my money until I have a considerable amount, and then build some homes for the poor; I will give large amounts of money to the some new foreign missionary work, or I will build a church building in which Christ's name will be preached." May God stop me if I try to discourage any good works that you want to do! Still, if you want to be absolutely certain that you are pleasing Christ, then I would not recommend any particular thing for you to do with your money, but I would advise you just to do this-- follow Him, remembering that He said, "Whoever serves Me must follow Me." You will, by simply going behind your Master, following His footsteps, and truly being His disciple, do that which would please Him more than if you could lavish His cause with a mountain of riches. This is what He prefers as the best proof of your love, the highest confirmation of your devotion: "Whoever serves Me must follow Me." He requires that you should become like a little child, so that you may be taught by Him. His own words are, "Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 18:3). If you want to be a servant of Christ, come to Him like a little child; sit in His lap to be taught by Him the gospel A B C's. "Whoever serves Me must follow Me--follow Me as My disciple, regarding Me as your Teacher, to whom you will yield your understanding and entire mind, that I may fashion it according to My own will." This is the language of our Lord, and I would deeply impress it upon all of you, and especially on any who are beginning the Christian life. If you are to serve Christ, put your mind like a piece of paper under His pen, that He may write on you whatever He pleases. Be His sheet of paper, on which He may write His living letters of love. You can serve Him in this way, in the best possible manner. "Do whatever he tells you" (John 2:5). If you truly want to serve Christ, do not do what you feel like doing, but do what He commands you to do. Remember what Samuel said to Saul, "To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams" (1 Samuel 15:22). I believe that the profession of being totally devoted to God, when it is accompanied by action that I suggest to myself, may be nothing but self- worship, an abomination in the sight of God; but when anyone says to the Lord, "What do You want me to do? Show me, my Master, what You want me to do,"--when there is a real desire to obey every command of Christ, then there is the true spirit of service, and the true spirit of sonship. "Whoever serves Me must follow Me; running at My call, following at My heels, waiting at My feet to do whatsoever I desire him to do." This makes life a lot more simpler than some dream it to be. You are not to go and carve a statue out of the marble by the exercise of your own genius; if that were the task set before us, most of us would never accomplish it. But you are to just go and write according to Christ's own example, to copy His letters, the up-strokes and the down-strokes, and to write exactly as He has written. The other day I was asked to sign my name to an important document, and when it was handed to me, I noticed that I had already signed it before, so I said, "Why, I have already signed it!" "Yes," said the one who brought it, "you have the very easy task of signing it all over again." In that case I followed my own writing; and in the same way, you have the easy task of writing after Christ, directly writing over again the letters that He Himself has made, and you cannot do Him better service than this. "Whoever serves Me must follow Me," that is, "let him do just what I command him to do; follow Me by imitating My example." It is always safe to do what Christ would have done under the same circumstances in which you are placed. Of course, you cannot imitate Christ in His miraculous work, and you are not asked to imitate Him in some of those sorrowful respects in which He suffered that we might not suffer; but the ordinary life of Christ is in every respect an example to us. Never do what you could not imagine Christ would have done. If it strikes you that the course of action that is suggested to you would be un-Christlike, then it is unchristian, for the Christian is to be like Christ. The Christian is to be the flower growing out of the seed, Christ; and there is always a unity between the flower and the seed out of which it grows. Keep your eyes fixed on your heavenly model and pattern, and seek in all things ever to imitate Christ. If you want to serve Christ, duplicate His life as nearly as possible in your own life. "Whoever serves Me must follow Me, let him follow Me by copying My example." You do not need to run away from your father and mother, and leave your home and friends, and go away to the lost people in Africa, in order to serve Christ. It is not dreaming up some idea in your own mind and working that out according to your own whims and fancies, that constitutes service for Christ; it is simply this--Whoever serves Christ must follow Christ. Let him put his foot down as nearly as he can where Christ put his foot down; let him walk in Christ's steps and be moved by His spirit, actuated by His motives, live with His aim, and copy His actions. This is the noblest way in which to serve the Lord. "Whoever serves Me must follow Me; and where I am, my servant also will be." I don't know of any other master but Christ who ever said that. There are some places where an earthly master does not want his servant to be; he must have some room to himself, and some engagements which he cannot explain to his servant, and into which his servant must not pry. But the Lord Jesus Christ makes this the glorious privilege of everyone who enters His service that, where He is, His servant also will be. But where is Christ? He is and always was in the place of communion with God. He was always near to His father. He often spoke with God. He ever had the joy of God filling His spirit. And you, perhaps, are saying to yourself, "I wish that I had communion with God." Well, through Jesus Christ, it is to be had by serving Him in that particular kind of service which consists in following Him. If you want to walk with God, why, of course, you must walk! If you sit down in idleness, you cannot walk with Him; and if you do not keep up a good brisk pace, He will walk on in front of you, and leave you behind, for the Lord is no dawdler in His walking. Therefore, you see, there must be diligent progress, and activity in service, in order that we may keep pace with Him and have communion with Him; and if we closely follow Him, He has promised that we will be in the place of communion with our blessed Master. Our Lord Jesus Christ was in the place of confidence. Whenever Christ went to work, He worked with assurance. He never had a doubt as to His ultimate success. No haphazard work ever came from Christ's hands. He spoke with certainty, and He worked with the full assurance that His labor would not be in vain. If you want to have confidence in your work for Christ, so as to perform it without any doubts and fears, you will have to obtain it by serving Him, and to serve Him by following Him; and then, into that sacred place of confidence where your Master always stood, there you will also come. It is very sweet to notice how the Lord Jesus brings His Father into His speech; it is as if He said, "When a man joins himself to Me, then he joins himself to My Father also. It is not only I who will love him and do My best to honor him, but My Father, the great and ever-blessed Lord over all, keeps an eye on that man." On whom does he look with his gaze of approval? Not on those who have some grand plan of serving themselves, but on those who serve Christ, and who do it by following Him. It is delightful to have a sense of the approval of God, such as you never had when you had the approval of men. Sometimes, when even Christian people cry, "Well done, well done," the Lord says, "That is quite enough praise for him; I will not give him My `Well done.'" But when you get no "Well done" from men, but, on the contrary, are misunderstood and misrepresented, then the Lord comes and puts His hand on you, and says, "Be strong, do not fear, I have accepted your service. I know your motive, and I approve of your action. Do not be afraid of them, but go on your way." Such approval as that is the highest honor we can have here. "If any man serves Me," says Christ, "him will My Father honor," with a sense of sonship, and with a sense of approval. If a man will serve Christ by following Him, the Father will give him honor in the eyes of the blood-bought family. There are certain ones of the Lord's people who do not carry yardsticks with them, but they carry scales and weights, and if they do not measure by quantity, they measure by quality; their approval is worth having. They are often the poorest and most afflicted members of the church; but being the most instructed, and living the nearest to God, to have them minister to us is a thing worth having. I believe that, if any man will lead the life of a Christian, however few his talents, and if his service lies in close obedience and imitation of Christ, the real saints, not the mere professors, especially not the shining worldly ones among them, but real saints will say, "That is the man for us, that is the woman with whom we would like to converse." Thus it comes to pass that those who really do serve the Lord by following Him have honor in the estimation of those who sit and eat with them at their Lord's table. And then, when we come to die, or when we stand at the judgment seat of Christ, or when we enter the eternal state, what a glorious thing it will be to find the Father ready to honor us forever because we served the Son! Our reward will not be because God owes us anything, but because of His grace; it is grace that gave us the service and grace that will reward us for our service; but no man and no woman will serve the Lord Jesus Christ here on earth by following Him, without finding that the Father has some special honor, some rich and rare reward, to give to such soldiers in due time. This is the day of the fight, expect nothing but bullets, bruises, wounds, and scars; but the battle will soon be over, and when the war is ended, the King will come, and ride up and down the ranks, and in that day you who have been most battered and most wounded in the battle will find Him pause when He reaches you, and He will attach on you chest a star that will be more of an honor to you than all the Medals that have decorated brave men here on earth. Stars and ribbons may be given to those who want them, but blessed are they who will shine as the stars in the kingdom of our Father! And this honor is to be had by that believer who will faithfully serve his Lord; not by any who merely talk about it, or dream of it, or propose to do it, but to those who serve Him by following Him--this honor will be given. Transcribed by Tony Capoccia Bible Bulletin Board internet: www.biblebb.com modem: 609-324-9187 Box 318 Columbus, NJ 08022 ....online since 1986 Sysop/Webmaster: Tony Capoccia