IN these days men and women are ready to be interested in anything that is attractive. We are living in an age of advertisements and people are ready to believe anything that is said to them. They believe advertisements, they believe what they are told, and so it follows that were they to see something in Christian people that gave the impression that such people were living a life of joy and happiness and triumph, they would crowd in and would be anxious to discover the secret of such successful living. It is not an unfair deduction to make, therefore, that what accounts for the masses being outside is the condition of those who are inside. So often we give the impression that we are dejected and depressed; indeed, some would almost give the impression that to become a Christian means that you face many problems that never worried you before. So, looking at things superficially the man of the world comes to the conclusion that you find happier people outside the Church than inside the Church. He is quite wrong, of course, but we must recognize that some of us at any rate have to plead guilty to the charge, that far too often because we suffer from spiritual depression, and are more or less miserable Christians, we grossly and grievously misrepresent the gospel of Redeeming Grace.
Now all this, of course, is due to the fact that we are confronted by a very powerful adversary. The fact is that the moment we become Christian we become subjected to the most subtle and powerful assaults of one who is described in the Bible as ‘the prince of the power of the air’, ‘the spirit who now ruleth in the children of disobedience’, ‘the god of this world’, ‘Satan’, the ‘Devil’. And as we go on with our study and consider the way in which the devil is able to come to us and to attack us, and the subtle way in which he deludes and leads us astray without our realizing it at all, we begin to understand why so many fail. And, of course, he is most subtle and most dangerous when he comes as ‘an angel of light’ and as a would-be friend of the Church and one who is interested in the gospel and in its propagation. According to the Scriptures he does that (2 Corinthians 11), and it is at that point that he is most subtle of all. Not only is he powerful, he is subtle, and as we continue to consider these various forms and manifestations of depression that will become more and more clear.
In view of this we must prepare ourselves for him and for such attacks; and the way to do that is to study the Scriptures. There alone are we given an insight into his methods. ‘We are not ignorant of his devices’, says the Apostle Paul again to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 2. 11), but the tragedy is that so many are ignorant of his devices that they do not believe in his existence, and even those who do, fail to remember that he is always there and that he can appear in many subtle forms. As we look objectively at what he does to us, we cannot but be amazed at our unutterable folly. As you look at some of these cases of spiritual depression you ask: ‘How could a man have fallen into that?’ It all seems so perfectly plain and obvious, yet we are all constantly falling into the same snare. That is due to the subtlety of the devil’s method. He puts things to us in such an attractive manner that we find that we have fallen almost before we realize that anything has happened at all. There is only one way to deal with all this and that is to study his methods, and to study the various teachings of the Scripture itself with regard to this condition of spiritual depression. That is what we are endeavouring to do in our present studies.
We must now consider the case of other people who are crippled in the present as the result of looking back into the past, not this time to some particular sin, but rather to the fact that they spent so much time outside the Kingdom and are so late in coming into it. This again is an extremely common cause of spiritual depression. These people are depressed by the fact that they have wasted so much time, wasted so many long years, and that they have been so slow to become Christians at all. They are always bemoaning the fact that they have missed so many opportunities—opportunities of doing good and helping others and opportunities of service. They say, ‘If only I had seen all this when I was young I would have volunteered for service, but I have only seen it now and it is too late’. Missed opportunities! Or they may put it in terms of what they might have attained to by now—if only. ‘If only’—that is their cry. But they did not believe; and looking back at the years spent out in the world not understanding these things, they are full of vain regrets for what they might have been, for how they might have grown in grace and for the point at which they would have arrived by now. They look back in that way to the past and they regret it and bemoan it: they look back at the joys they might have had, the years of happy joyful experience they might have had. But it is too late, the opportunities have gone. Why were they so foolish; how could they have been so blind? Why were they so slow? They heard the gospel; they read good books; they even felt something at a certain point but nothing came of it and the opportunity was allowed to go. Now at long last they have understood, and are obsessed by the thought—‘if only’.
Now this is a very common condition and it accounts for a state of spiritual depression in large numbers of people. How do we deal with this, what have we to say about it? Let me start by saying that while it is perfectly right for such people to regret the fact that they have been so slow to believe, it is quite wrong to be miserable about it. You cannot look back across your past life without seeing things to regret. That is as it should be; but it is just there that the subtlety of this condition comes in and we cross that fine line of distinction that lies between a legitimate regret and a wrong condition of misery and of dejection. The Christian life is a very finely balanced life. That is one of its most striking features. It has been compared to a man walking on a knife-edge with the possibility of falling easily on either side. All along we have to draw subtle distinctions and here is one of them, the distinction between a legitimate regret and a wrong condition of dejection and of misery.
How then do we avoid being miserable in this respect? We are going to consider that in terms of what the Apostle Paul says here about himself. This always seems to me to be a perfect illustration of what our Lord taught in the parable recorded in verses 1-16 of the twentieth chapter of Matthew, about the labourers in the vineyard who were hired at different hours of the day, some not until the eleventh hour. We shall be looking at it from the standpoint of the people who were engaged at the eleventh hour and who were the last to enter into the Kingdom.
But before we come to the specific treatment of the matter in terms of Scripture, let us consider it in a more general way. There are certain principles of common sense and general wisdom that need to be applied to this condition. There are some people who seem to think that it is wrong for a Christian ever to use common sense. They seem to think that they must always do everything in an exclusively spiritual manner. Now that seems to me to be very unscriptural. The Christian is in no respect inferior to the unbeliever; he is always superior. The Christian can not only do everything that the unbeliever does, he can do even more. That is the way to look at the Christian. He is a man who is to apply common sense to situations, and it is right and legitimate that he should do so. If you can conquer the devil at that level, conquer him at that level. It does not matter at what level you conquer the devil as long as you conquer him. If you can defeat him and get rid of him by using common sense and ordinary wisdom, do so. It is perfectly right and legitimate for the Christian to do that. I am saying all this because I often find that people are in difficulty about this matter and are spending their time in praying about a matter instead of doing something that is perfectly obvious from the standpoint of common sense.
Let me explain what I mean. I would suggest that the first thing for anyone to say to himself who is in this condition (and the same is true for one who has to help anybody who is in this condition) is that to be miserable in the present because of some failure in the past is a sheer waste of time and energy. That is obvious. That is common sense. The past cannot be recalled and you can do nothing about it. You can sit down and be miserable and you can go round and round in circles of regret for the rest of your life but it will make no difference to what you have done. Now that is common sense and it does not need special Christian revelation to demonstrate it. The world in its wisdom tells us it is ‘no use crying over spilt milk’. Well, quote that to the devil! Why should a Christian be more foolish than anybody else? Why should you not apply natural common sense and human wisdom to a situation? But that is what many people fail to do. The result is that they are wasting their time and energy in vain regrets about things which they cannot change or undo, a purely foolish and irrational thing to do even from the mundane standard of common sense. Let us then lay this down as a principle. We must never for a second worry about anything that cannot be affected or changed by us. It is a waste of energy. If you can do nothing about a situation stop thinking about it; never again look back at it, never think of it. If you do, it is the devil defeating you. Vague useless regrets must be dismissed as irrational. My friend, stop dwelling on them! Quite apart from Christianity, it is a foolish thing to do, it is a sheer waste of energy and a waste of time.
But let us go further and realize that to dwell on the past simply causes failure in the present. While you are sitting down and bemoaning the past and regretting all the things you have not done, you are crippling yourself and preventing yourself from working in the present. Is that Christianity? Of course it is not. Christianity is common sense and much more—but it includes common sense. ‘Ah’, but you say, ‘I can hear that in the world.’ Well, if you can, hear it and act on it! Our Lord Himself has said that the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light. He commended the unjust steward and I am simply doing the same thing. The world from its standpoint of common wisdom is perfectly right in this matter. It is always wrong to mortgage the present by the past, it is always wrong to allow the past to act as a brake upon the present. Let the dead past bury its dead. There is nothing that is more reprehensible, judged by common canons of thought, than to allow anything that belongs to the past to cause you to be a failure in the present. And this morbid concern about the past does so. The people I am describing are failing in the present. Instead of living in the present and getting on with the Christian life they are sitting down bemoaning the past. They are so sorry about the past that they do nothing in the present. How wrong it is.
My third argument from the standpoint of common sense and human wisdom is this: That if you really believe what you say about the past, if you really do bemoan the fact that you have wasted so much time in the past, the thing to do is to make up for it in the present. Is not that common sense? Here is a man who comes in utterly dejected and saying: ‘If only—the time I have wasted!’ What I say to him is this: ‘Are you making up for that lost time? Why are you wasting this energy in telling me about the past which you cannot undo? Why don’t you put your energy into the present?’ I speak with vehemence because this condition has to be dealt with sternly and the last thing to do with such people is to sympathize with them. If you are suffering from this condition take yourself in hand and examine yourself from an ordinary common sense point of view. You are behaving like a fool, you are irrational, you are wasting your time and your energy. You do not really believe what you are saying. If you bemoan a wasted past, make up for it in the present, give yourself entirely to living at this present moment. That is what Paul did. He says: ‘And last of all He was seen of me also as of one born out of due time’. He says in effect: I have wasted a lot of time, others have got ahead of me. But he is able to go on and to add: ‘I laboured more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me’.
Very well, there is the argument, there is the way of dealing with this thing from the standpoint of common sense and of ordinary common human wisdom. That is enough, it should be sufficient, but nevertheless let us go beyond that. The Christian, I say, is never less than the unbeliever, he is always more. He should have all the common sense and wisdom of the unbeliever, but he has something more in addition. And here we come to the statement of the great Apostle and to our Lord’s teaching in the parable of the vineyard in Matthew 20.
Let us see what the Apostle has to say. We have seen what he said about the great sin in his life, we shall find the same thing with this problem also. The Apostle has been giving an account of the resurrection appearances. His immediate concern is about that great doctrine, but this is how he speaks: ‘Last of all He was seen of me also’. Now the Apostle undoubtedly regretted the fact that he had come into the Christian life so late. Let us be clear about what he means when he says ‘last of all’. He means that he was the last of the apostles to see the risen Lord. They had all seen Him in different ways together. Paul was not with them then; he was a blasphemer and a persecutor at that time. So ‘last of all’ means the last of the apostles. But not only was he the last of the apostles, he was literally the last person of all persons to see the risen Lord. No one has ever seen the risen Lord with his naked eyes since the Apostle Paul saw Him on the road to Damascus. He ‘shewed Himself’ to over 500 brethren at once. We do not even know their names, but He did show Himself to them and to these various witnesses that are recorded here. But the very last person of all to see Him was Saul of Tarsus. What happened on the road to Damascus was not that Paul had a vision—many have had visions since—but he literally saw the Lord of Glory. And that is what he says here: ‘Last of all He was seen of me’. That is what made him an apostle, that he was a witness to the fact of the resurrection. But the thing he is emphasizing is this, that he was the very last of all. And not content with that, he says: ‘Last of all He was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time’. There was something unnatural, untimely about his spiritual birth. He was not like the others. The others had listened to the Lord’s teaching, they had been with Him all along, they had been at the Crucifixion, they had seen Him buried, they had been with Him for forty days after the resurrection, they had been with Him at the Ascension. They were with Him from the beginning and right through to the end. But Paul on the contrary had had a kind of unnatural, an untimely spiritual birth; he has come, in some odd, strange way and—last of all.
That is what he says about himself. And of course he could only think of that with regret. He should have been in at the beginning, he had had the facilities, he had had the opportunities; but he had hated the gospel. He ‘verily thought within himself that he should do many things contrary to the Name of Jesus. . . .’ He regarded Him as a blasphemer, he tried to exterminate His followers and the Church. There he was outside, but all the others were in. But—‘last of all’, and in this strange way, he came in. How easy it would have been for him to have spent the rest of his life in vain regrets about the past! He says here: ‘Last of all he was seen of me, though I am the least of the apostles because I persecuted the Church’. It was all perfectly true, and he bitterly regretted it; but that did not paralyse Paul. He did not spend the rest of his life sitting in a corner and saying: ‘I am the last to come in. Why did I do that? How could I have rejected Him?’ That is what the people suffering from spiritual depression do. But Paul did not. What struck him was the amazing grace that brought him in at all. And so he entered into the new life with tremendous zeal, and though ‘last of all’ yet, in a sense, he became the first.
What then is the teaching? Let us take the Apostle’s teaching and look at it in the light of this parable in the twentieth chapter of Matthew, for they both say the same thing. What matters first of all if you are a Christian is not what you once were, but what you are. Does that sound ridiculous? It is so perfectly obvious that what matters is not what you were but what you are. Yes, how obvious when I put it like this, but how difficult to see it sometimes when the devil attacks us. The Apostle said that he was ‘not worthy to be called an apostle because he persecuted the Church of God’, but he goes on to add: ‘But by the grace of God I am what I am’. What does it matter what I was? ‘I am what I am.’ Put your emphasis there. Do not be for ever thinking about what you were. The essence of the Christian position is that you should remind yourself of what you are. Certainly there is the past with all its sins. But say this to yourself:
‘Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven,
Who like me His praise should sing.’
‘I am what I am’—whatever the past may have been. It is what I am that matters. What am I? I am forgiven, I am reconciled to God by the Blood of His Son upon the Cross. I am a child of God. I am adopted into God’s family, and I am an heir with Christ, a joint-heir with Him. I am going to glory. That is what matters, not what I was, not what I have been. Do what the Apostle did therefore if the enemy is attacking you along this line. Turn to him and say: ‘What you are saying is perfectly true. I was all you say. But what I am interested in is not what I was but what I am, and “I am what I am by the grace of God”.’
The second deduction is this—and they are all simple and obvious. It is not the time of your entry into the Kingdom that matters but the fact that you are in the Kingdom. That is the thing that matters. How foolish it is to mourn the fact that we were not in earlier, and to allow that to rob us of the things we might be enjoying now. It is like a man going to a great exhibition and discovering that there is a long queue. He has come rather late. He arrives at the exhibition but he has to wait a long time, he is about the last to get in. What would you think of such a man if, having got in through the door he simply stands at the door and says, ‘What a shame I wasn’t the first to get in, what a pity I wasn’t in earlier’? You laugh at that, and rightly so, but I would point out that you are probably laughing at yourself, for that is precisely what you are doing spiritually. ‘O that I have left it so late.’ My friend, begin to enjoy the pictures, look at the sculpture, enjoy the treasures. What does the time of your entering matter? The fact is that you are in, and the exhibition is there, all spread out before you. It is not the time of your entry that matters. Go back to the twentieth of Matthew again. Those men were the last to enter the vineyard, it was the eleventh hour, but they were in. That was the thing that counted. They had been taken hold of, they had been employed, they had been brought in. It is the being in that matters, not when you come in, or how you come in. I could emphasize this at great length. One has so constantly to be saying it. It is not the mode or manner of conversion that matters, what matters is the fact that you are saved. But people will sit down and worry about how they came, the time, the mode, the manner, the method. It does not matter at all; what matters is that you are in. And if you are in, rejoice in it, and forget you were ever out.
But we must go even further. I suggest that this particular manifestation of spiritual depression is due to the fact that this person is still morbidly and sinfully preoccupied with self. I said just now that we have to be brutal with this condition. And it has to be said that the real trouble with these people is still ‘self’. What are they doing? They are still judging themselves instead of leaving judgment to God. They lash themselves and scarify themselves metaphorically because they were so late and so long, and they go on condemning themselves. They appear to be very humble and full of contrition, but it is a mock modesty, it is a self-concern. Listen to Paul saying the self-same thing in the fourth chapter of this first epistle to the Corinthians. ‘Let a man so account of us as of the ministers of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover, it is required in stewards that a man be found faithful. But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you or of man’s judgment; yea (and this is one of greatest things Paul ever said), yea, I judge not mine own self; for I know nothing by myself; yet am I not hereby justified; but He that judgeth me is the Lord’ (verses 1-4). As Christians we must leave our judgment to Him. He is the Judge and you have no right to waste His time or your own time and energy in condemning yourself. Forget yourself, leave the judgment to Him; get on with the work. This whole trouble is due to this morbid preoccupation with self in the matter of judgment. Not only that, it is indicative of a proneness still to think in terms of what we can do. This kind of person comes to us in apparent modesty and says, ‘If only I had come sooner what a lot of work I could have done’. In a sense that is quite right, but in another sense it is quite wrong, and utterly false. The parable of our Lord about the labourers in the vineyard was designed to demolish that argument.
Let me put it positively as I close. I have said that part of the trouble with these people is that they are still morbidly preoccupied with themselves, that they have not learned as Christians that they are to deny self and take up the Cross and follow Him and to leave themselves, past, present and future in His hands. Ah, yes, but why are they morbidly preoccupied with themselves? The answer is that they are not sufficiently occupied with Him. It is our failure to know Him and His ways as we should know them—that is the real trouble. If we only spent more of our time in looking at Him we should soon forget ourselves. I said just now that once you are in that exhibition you must not stand at the door bemoaning the fact of your late entry, but rather look at the treasures. Let me take that into the spiritual realm. You have come into the spiritual life. Well, stop looking at yourself and begin to enjoy Him. What is the difference between a Christian and a non-Christian? Paul in the second Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 3, says it is this, that the non-Christian is a man who looks at Christ and God with a veil over his eyes and therefore cannot see. What is the Christian? This is his description (verse 18). ‘But we all’—every one of us as Christians—‘we all with open face (the veil has gone), beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory.’ That is the Christian. He spends his time in looking at Christ, in gazing upon Him. He is so enraptured by the sight of Him that he has forgotten himself. If you were to feel more interest in Christ you would be less interested in yourself. Begin to look at Him, gaze upon Him with this open, unveiled face. And then go on to learn that in His Kingdom what matters is not the length of service but your attitude towards Him, your desire to please Him. Go back again to the parable. He does not count service as other people do. He is interested in the heart. We are interested in time, we all clock in and count the time we have spent, the work we have done. Like the first men in the parable we claim to have done all, and boast of the time we have spent in the work. And if we are not among those who went in at the beginning we are concerned because we have not done this and that, and because we have missed all this time. Our Lord is not interested in our work in this way. It is the widow’s mite He is interested in. It is not the amount of money, it is the woman’s heart. And it is the same in that parable in the twentieth chapter of Matthew. For the same reason He gave the people who had been in the vineyard for only one hour the same as He gave to those who had been in all day. That is also the case that Paul puts here. ‘Last of all He revealed Himself unto me also.’ But thank God that does not make any difference. His grace goes before, ‘by the grace of God I am what I am’. He is not interested in time, He is interested in relationship.
That brings me to the last principle. Nothing matters in the Kingdom but the grace of God. That is the whole point of the parable. God has a different way of looking at things. He does not see as men do; He does not compute as they do; it is all grace from beginning to end. The last people got a penny exactly as did the first; they were given the same wages as the first. Indeed, He impresses the truth upon us by saying: ‘That many that are last shall be first and the first last’. We have to cease thinking in this carnal, human, fleshly manner. In the Kingdom of God and of Christ the standpoint is that of grace, and of grace alone; and it cuts across all other regulations. It is His grace that matters—‘by the grace of God I am what I am’. So stop looking at what you have not done and the years you have missed and realize that in His Kingdom it is His grace alone that matters. You who have come in last may find yourselves first one day to your own amazement, and like the people in the parable at the end of Matthew 25, you will ask: ‘When did I do this, when did I do that?’ He knows, He sees, His grace is sufficient.
Very well, I end with an exhortation from the Old Testament. ‘In the morning’, therefore, ‘sow thy seed: but in the evening withhold not thy hand, for thou knowest not whether shall prosper either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good.’ I wonder whether I am addressing someone who has spent a lifetime outside Christ, in sin and the world, someone who has come into the Kingdom in old age, and who has been tempted in the way I have been describing. If so my word to you is this: ‘In the evening, the evening of your life, withhold not your hand in this marvellous Kingdom of grace. It is supernatural. You may find on the Judgment Day that you have a much bigger reward than those who were saved in their youth’. What a glorious gospel. Youth is the great word today—Youth. The question of age is irrelevant in God’s kingdom and it is unscriptural to emphasize it as we do. ‘In the morning sow thy seed’; yes, but with equal force I would say, ‘In the evening withhold not thy hand’.
And then, remember what is perhaps one of the most comforting and wonderful things that is found anywhere in Scripture. It was spoken to the prophet Joel as he was given that great vision and understanding of the coming of Christ, the Christ that was to come. This was the word he was given to utter: ‘I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten’ (Joel 2. 25). He has promised to do it; He can do it. The wasted years, the barren years, the years that the locusts and the canker-worms and the caterpillars and all these other things have devoured, until there was nothing apparently left, of them He says: ‘I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten’. If you think of it in terms of what you can do with your strength and power, then time is of the essence of the contract. But we are in a realm in which that does not matter. He comes in and He can give us a crop in one year that will make up for ten—‘I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten’. That is the character of our Master, that is our Saviour, that is our God. I say, therefore, in the light of this: Never look back again; never waste your time in the present; never waste your energy; forget the past and rejoice in the fact that you are what you are by the grace of God, and that in the Divine alchemy of His marvellous grace you may yet have the greatest surprise of your life and existence and find that even in your case it will come to pass that the last shall be first. Praise God for the fact that you are what you are, and that you are in the Kingdom.