04 January 2015

Look up not down

Your weekly Dose of Spurgeon
The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from the lifetime of works from the Prince of Preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon.  The following excerpt is from The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, volume 35, sermon number 2,100, "Faith essential to pleasing God."
"It is ennobling to feel that you have only one Master, and that you live to please him, even God."

To please men is poor work. To live to follow everybody’s whim is slavery. If you let one man pull you by the ear in his direction, another will tug at you from another direction and you will have very long ears before long.

Happy is he who, pleasing God, feels that he has risen above seeking to please men. It is grand to say, “This is what God would have me do and I will do it in happy fellowship with others, or alone by myself, as the case may be. But do it I must.”

This gives a man backbone, and at the same time removes the selfishness which is greedy of popular applause. It is a grand thing to be no longer looking down for cheer but to be distinctly looking up for it. The man who truly believes in God makes small account of men.

Put them together, they are vanity; heap them up in their thousands, they are altogether lighter than vanity. Nations upon nations, what are they but as grasshoppers! The lands in which they live, what
are they before God! “He taketh up the isles as a very little thing.”

To please God, even a little, is infinitely greater than to have the acclamations of all our race throughout the centuries. The true believer feels that God is, and that there is none beside Him; none that need to be thought of in comparison with him.

The theology of the present aims at the deification of man but the truth of all time magnifies God. We shall stand by the old paths, wherein we hear a voice which bids us worship Jehovah, our God, and serve him alone. He shall be all in all.

Only as we see men loved of him can we live for men; we seek their good in God, and for his glory; and regard them as capable of being made mirrors to reflect the glory of the Lord.



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