Our religion is our glory; the Cross of Christ is our honor, and, while not ostentatiously parading it, as the Pharisees do, we ought never to be so cowardly as to conceal it. Perhaps they are your children, the objects of your fondest love, with no interest in Christ, without God and without hope in the world! "I thirst" is the fifth cry, and its utterance teaches us the truth of Scripture, for all things were accomplished, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, and therefore our Lord said, "I thirst." Thus have I tried to spy out a measure of teaching, by using that one glass for the soul's eye, through which we look upon "I thirst" as the ensign of his true humanity. John 19:1-16 - Glory Mocked and Condemned John 19:17-30 - Glory Crucified John 19:31-42 - Glory Buried A. Jesus is condemned to crucifixion. He must love, it is his nature. crucify him!" Our text is the shortest of all the words of Calvary; it stands as two words in our language "I thirst," but in the Greek it is only one. We ought not to forget the Jews. We ought all to have a longing for conversions. Did we not do so years ago before we knew him? No man dare call him friend now, or whisper a word of comfort to him. "After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst." For his sake we may rejoice in self-denials, and accept Christ and a crust as all we desire between here and heaven. Nay more; he is banished from their society, as if he were a leper whose breath would be infectious whose presence would scatter plague. His great love makes him thirst to have us much nearer than we are; he will never be satisfied till all his redeemed are beyond gunshot of thee enemy. "He that taketh not up his cross and followeth not after me," says Christ, "is not worthy of me." He thirsts to bless you and to receive your grateful love in return; he thirsts to see you looking with believing eye to his fulness, and holding out your emptiness that he may supply it. Shall carnal appetites be indulged and bodies pampered when Jesus cried :I thirst"? Yet his language teaches us not to worship her, for he calls her "woman," but to honor him in whom his direst agony thought of her needs and griefs, as he also thinks of all his people, for these are his mother and sister and brother. Dear fountain of delight unknown! May the Holy Ghost work in you the complete pattern of Christ crucified, and to him shall be praise for ever and ever. Do not let us forget the infinite distance between the Lord of glory on his throne and the Crucified dried up with thirst. Are you lukewarm? Ah, beloved, our Lord was so truly man that all our griefs remind us of him: the next time we are thirsty we may gaze upon him; and whenever we see a friend faint and thirsting while dying we may behold our Lord dimly, but truly, mirrored in his members. Conceal your religion? you that are ashamed of Christ, how can you read that text, "He that is ashamed of me, and of my words, of him will I be ashamed when I come in the glory of my Father, and all my holy angels with me." Henceforth, also, let us cultivate the spirit of resignation, for we may well rejoice to carry a cross which his shoulders have borne before us. Mark then, Christian, Jesus does not suffer so as to exclude your suffering. The spear broke up the very fountains of life; no human body could survive such a wound. You may die so, you may die now. Here, as everywhere else, we are constrained to say of our Lord, "Never man spake like this man." Cheerfully accept this burden, ye servants of the Lord. Did not the high-priest bring the scape-goat, and put both his hands upon its head, confessing the sins of the people, that thus those sins might be laid upon the goat? . We thought sometimes that we loved him as we heard the story of his death, but we did not change our lives for his sake, nor put our trust in him, and so we gave him vinegar to drink. souls, I do beseech you, by the agonies of Christ, by his wounds and by his blood, do not bring upon yourselves the curse; do not bear in your own persons the awful wrath to come! Brother, thirst to have your children save. Certainly it is so with you; you do but carry the light end of the cross; Christ bore the heavier end. I will not say it is because we are unfaithful to our Master that the world is more kind to us, but I half suspect it is, and it is very possible that if we were more thoroughly Christians the world would more heartily detest us, and if we would cleave more closely to Christ we might expect to receive more slander, more abuse, less tolerance, and less favor from men. How harshly grate the cruel syllables, "Crucify him! In the fourth place, one or two words upon CHRIST'S FELLOW-SUFFERERS. "We, whose proneness to forget Thy dear love, on Olivet Bathed thy brow with bloody sweat; "We whose sins, with awful power, Like a cloud did o'er thee lower, In that God-excluding hour; "We, who still, in thought and dead, Often hold the bitter reed To thee, in thy time of need.". The great agony of being forsaken by God was over, and he felt faint when the strain was withdrawn. Commentators like Thomas Manton and John Calvin are represented in this series. Such a greeting had the Lord of glory, but alas, it was not the shout of welcome, but the yell of "Away with him! Jesus paused, and said, "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me; but weep for yourselves and for your children." John 19:3. Some of those whom we loved very dearly we have seen quite unable to help themselves; the death sweat has been upon them, and this has been one of the marks of their approaching dissolution, that they have been parched with thirst, and could only mutter between their half-closed lips, "Give me to drink." If not, may that picture of Christ fainting in the streets lead you to do so this morning. I have already told you that such was our Lord's mystical desire; let it be ours also. May God deliver you! But how vast was the disparity! So numerous has the family of man now become, that there is a death every second; and when we know how very smell a proportion of the human race have even nominally received the cross and there is none other name given under heaven among men whereby we must be saved oh! According to the sacred canticle of love, in the fifth chapter of the Song of Songs, we learn that when he drank in those olden times it was in the garden of his church that he was refreshed. Well, beloved, the cross we have to carry is only for a little while at most. Romish expositors, who draw upon their prolific fancy for their facts, tell us that he had a rope about his neck with which they roughly dragged him to the tree; this is one of the most probable of their surmises, since it was not unusual for the Romans thus to conduct criminals to the gallows. Christ does exempt you from sin, but not from sorrow; he does take the curse of the cross, but he does not take the cross of the curse away from you. For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh." O to be enlarged in soul so as to take deeper draughts of his sweet love, for our heart cannot have enough. Sit at his feet with Mary, lean on his breast with John; yea, come with the spouse in the song and say, "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for his love is better than wine." We know from experience that the present effect of sin in every man who indulges in it is thirst of soul. sinner, if God hides his face from Christ, how much less will he spare you! Either Christ must die for me, or else I must die for myself the second death; if he did not carry the curse for me, then on me must it rest for ever and ever. It is the empty cup placed under the flowing stream; the penniless hand held out for heavenly alms." . good God! Yes, he loves to be with his people; they are the garden where he walks for refreshment, and their love, their graces, are the milk and wine which he delights to drink. IV. He derived spiritual refreshment from the winning of that women's heart to himself. This is unfortunate, since his works contain priceless gems of information that are found nowhere except in the ancient writings of the Jews. John 19:7-8. Well might the Master say, "Weep not for me, but for yourselves." (1-4) Pilate hopes to satisfy the mob by having Jesus whipped and mocked. After preaching his first sermon at the age of 16, he became pastor of the church in Waterbeach at the age of 17. When you are molested for your piety; when your religion brings the trial of cruel mockings upon you; then remember, it is not your cross, it is Christ's cross; and how delightful is it to carry the cross of our Lord Jesus? The sufferings of Christ should make us weep over those who have brought that blood upon their heads. He is thirsty still, you see, for our poor love, and surely we cannot deny it to him. There are more unlikely things than that you will be dead before next Sunday. Do we not see here the truth of that which was set forth in shadow by the scape-goat? I. The Geneva Series of Commentaries include historic commentaries on biblical books written by some of the great theologians in the history of the church. Appetite was the door of sin, and therefore in that point our Lord was put to pain. Our great hero, the destroyer of Death, bearded the lion in his den, slew the monster in his own castle, and dragged the dragon captive from his own den. I cannot roll up into one word all the mass of sorrows which met upon the head of Christ who died for us, therefore it is impossible for me to tell you what streams, what oceans of grief must roll over your spirit if you die as you now are. It began with the mouth of appetite, when it was sinfully gratified, and it ends when a kindred appetite is graciously denied. We read, "The soldiers also mocked him, offering him vinegar." Some of us, indeed, confess that, if we had read this narrative of suffering in a romance, we should have wept copiously, but the story of Christ's sufferings does not cause the excitement and emotion one would expect. It is a blow at the fable of purgatory which strikes it to the heart. After our Lord Jesus Christ had been formally condemned by Pilate, our text tells us he was led away. No, no; we must not make a cross of our own. Your heir of royalty is magnificently drawn along the streets in his stately chariot, sitting at his ease: my princely sufferer walks with weary feet, marking the road with crimson drops; not borne, but bearing; not carried, but carrying his cross. Add to Cart. But further, my brethren; this, I think, is the great lesson from Christ's being slaughtered without the gate of the city let us go forth, therefore, without the camp, bearing his reproach. John 18:19-40 - Glory on Trial A. Shall the servant be above his Master, or the disciple above his Lord? Who among us would not willingly pour out his soul unto death if he might but give refreshment to the Lord? The most careless eye discerns it. III. The power to suffer for another, the capacity to be self-denying even to an extreme to accomplish some great work for God this is a thing to be sought after, and must be gained before our work is done, and in this Jesus is before us our example and our strength. 29. Let this mind be in you also. What knocks he for? What a cataract of immortal souls dashes downwards to the pit every hour! My well beloved hath a vineyard in a very fruitful hill: and he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and planted it with the choicest vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and also made a winepress therein." Here is the forgiveness of sin free forgiveness in answer to the Saviour's plea. points to the anguish of his soul; "I thirst" expresses in part the torture of his body; and they were both needful, because it is written of the God of justice that he is "able to destroy both soul and body in hell," and the pangs that are due to law are of both kinds, touching both heart and flesh. Do not let the picture vanish till you have satisfied yourselves once for all that Christ was here the substitute for you. You have, then, no true sympathy for Christ if you have not an earnest sympathy with those who would win souls for Christ. When Pilate therefore heard that saying, he was the more afraid: It shows he was afraid all along the coward the vacillating coward and now a fresh superstition seizes upon him. He was innocent, and yet he thirsted; shall we marvel if guilty ones are now and then chastened? It is calculated that one soul passes from time into eternity every time the clock ticks! That is very possible; Christ may have carried the heavier end, against the transverse beam, and Simon may have borne the lighter end. Have we not often given him vinegar to drink? Our Lord felt that grievous drought of dissolution by which all moisture seems dried up, and the flesh returns to the dust of death: this those know who have commenced to tread the valley of the shadow of death. We see in Simon's carrying the cross a picture of what the Church is to do throughout all generations. Godly working-men, should your employers or your fellow-workers frown upon you; wives, should your husbands threaten to cast you out, remember, without the camp was Jesus' place, and without the camp is yours. Know ye not, beloved, for I speak to those who know the Lord, that ye are crucified together with Christ? A strong emphasis in Spurgeon's preaching was God's grace and sovereignty over man's helpless state. It is that he may eat and drink with you, for he promises that if we open to him he will enter in and sup with us and we with him. And yet, though he was Lord of all he had so fully taken upon himself the form of a servant and was so perfectly made in the likeness of sinful flesh, that he cried with fainting voice, "I thirst." Charles Haddon Spurgeon December 1, 1861 Scripture: John 19:30 From: Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Volume 7 It is Finished! Those pictures which represent our Lord as wearing the crown of thorns upon the tree have therefore at least some scriptural warrant. Christians, will you refuse to be cross-bearers for Christ? V. I close with THE SAVIOR'S WARNING QUESTION "If they do these things in the green tree, what will they do in the dry?". ( John 19:1-4) Pilate hopes to satisfy the mob by having Jesus whipped and mocked. Nor dost thou set a time for waiting, but instantly thou dost set wide the gate of pearl; thou hast all power in heaven as well as upon earth. The Church, the bride of Christ, was there conformed to the image of her Lord; she was there, I say, in Simon, bearing the cross, and in the women weeping and lamenting. He is greatly to be commended and admired, for his sin is said to be seeking after God, and his superstition is a struggling after light. I wonder he has ever received them, as one marvels why he received this vinegar; and yet he has received them, and smiled upon us for presenting them. He loved the Gentile, but still Jerusalem was the city of the Great King. Pilate, as we reminded you, scourged our Savior according to the common custom of Roman courts. The "I thirst" was the bearing of the last pang; what if I say it was the expression of the fact that his pangs had at last begun to cease, and their fury had spent itself, and left him able to note his lessor pains? "I thirst," ay, this is my soul's word with her Lord. John 19:16 . Cover it with a cloak? It is not sorrow over Rome, but Jerusalem. How has it been with you? (7) Luke 23:46 And Jesus, crying out with a loud voice, said, "Father, INTO THY HANDS I COMMIT MY SPIRIT. Call to mind his complaint in the fifth chapter of Isaiah, "Now will I sing to my well beloved a song of my beloved touching his vineyard. I have shown you, believer, your position; let me now show you your service. We would fain lift thy name on high in grateful remembrance of the depths to which thou didst descend! It is not likely that we shall be able to worship with their worship. Take up your cross, and go without the camp, following your Lord, even until death. Romanists of all ages have wrought upon the feelings of the people in this manner, and to a degree the attempt is commendable, but if it shall all end in tears of pity, no good is done. He ran and filled a sponge with vinegar: it was the best way he knew of putting a few drops of moisture to the lips of one who was suffering so much; but though he felt a degree of pity, it was such as one might show to a dog; he felt no reverence, but mocked as he relieved. His most fruitful years of ministry were at the New Park Street and later the Metropolitan Tabernacle pulpit in London. You do suffer. 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