There is one nail, fastened in a sure place; and on it hang all the flagons and all the cups. “Oh,” says one little cup, “I am so small and so black, suppose I were to drop!” “Oh,” says a flagon, “there is no fear of you; but I am so heavy, so very weighty, suppose I were to drop!” And a little cup says, “Oh, if I were only like the gold cup there, I should never fear falling.” But the gold cup answers, “It is not because I am a gold cup that I keep up; but because I hang upon the nail.” If the nail gives way we all come down, gold cups, china cups, pewter cups, and all; but as long as the nail keeps up, all that hang on Him hang safely.
I once read these words on a tombstone: “Born, died, kept.” Let us pray God to keep us in perfect peace, and assured of salvation.
VIII
Christ All and in All
Colossians 3:11
Christ is all to us that we make Him to be. I want to emphasize that word “all.” Some men make Him to be “a root out of a dry ground,” “without form or comeliness.” He is nothing to them; they do not want Him. Some Christians have a very small Saviour, for they are not willing to receive Him fully, and let Him do great and mighty things for them. Others have a mighty Saviour, because they make Him to be great and mighty.
If we would know what Christ wants to be to us, we must first of all know Him as our Saviour from sin. When the angel came down from heaven to proclaim that He was to be born into the world, you remember he gave His name, “He shall be called Jesus,2 for He shall save His people from their sins.” Have we been delivered from sin? He did not come to save us in our sins, but from our sins. Now, there are three ways of knowing a man. Some men you know only by hearsay; others you merely know by having been once introduced to them, you know them very slightly; others again you know by having been acquainted with them for years, you know them intimately. So I believe there are three classes of people today in the Christian Church and out of it: those who know Christ only by reading or by hearsay, those who have a historical Christ; those who have a slight personal acquaintance with Him; and, those who thirst, as Paul did, to “know Him and the power of His resurrection.” The more we know of Christ the more we shall love Him, and the better we shall serve Him.
Let us look at Him as He hangs upon the Cross, and see how He has put away sin. He was manifested that He might take away our sins; and if we really know Him we must first of all see Him as our Saviour from sin. You remember how the angels said to the shepherds on the plains of Bethlehem, “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people: for unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” (Luke 2:10–11). Then if you go clear back to Isaiah, seven hundred years before Christ’s birth, you will find these words: “I, even I, am the Lord; and beside me there is no Saviour” (43:11).
Again, in the First Epistle of John (4:14) we read: “We have seen, and do testify, that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world.” All the heathen religions, we read, teach men to work their way up to God; but the religion of Jesus Christ is God coming down to men to save them, to lift them up out of the pit of sin. In Luke 19:10, we read that Christ Himself told the people what He had come for: “The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.” So we start from the Cross, not from the cradle. Christ has opened up a new and living way to the Father; He has taken all the stumbling-blocks out of the way, so that every man who accepts of Christ as his Saviour can have salvation.
But Christ is not only a Saviour. I might save a man from drowning and rescue him from an untimely grave; but I might probably not be able to do any more for him. Christ is something more than a Saviour. When the children of Israel were placed behind the blood, that blood was their salvation; but they would still have heard the crack of the slave-driver’s whip if they had not been delivered from the Egyptian yoke of bondage: then it was that God delivered them from the hand of the king of Egypt. I have little sympathy with the idea that God comes down to save us, and then leaves us in prison, the slaves of our besetting sins. No; He has come to deliver us, and to give us victory over our evil tempers, our passions, and our lusts. Are you a professed Christian but one who is a slave to some besetting sin? If you want to get victory over that temper or that lust, go on to know Christ more intimately. He brings deliverance for the past, the present, and the future. “Who delivered; who doth deliver; who will yet deliver.” (2 Corinthians 1:10).
How often, like the children of Israel when they came to the Red Sea, have we become discouraged because everything
