Originally from here.
Third Stratagem. Satan endeavours to make the Christian throw away his breastplate, by scaring him with the contradictive opposition and feud which it brings from the world. This is yet a third stumbling-block which Satan useth to lay in the way of a soul setting forth in this path of righteousness. ‘O,’ saith Satan, ‘this is the ready way to bring thee under the lash of every tongue, to lose the love of thy neighbours, and contract the scorn, yea hatred, of all thou livest among. And dost thou not desire to live friendly and peaceably with thy neighbours? canst thou bear to be hooted at, as Lot was among the Sodomites, and Noah amidst the old world, that were all of another way? This holiness breeds ill blood wherever it comes. Own that, and you bring the world’s fists about thy ears presently.’
Truly, though this be a sorry weak objection in itself, yet, where it meets with a soft temper, and a disposition tendered with a facility of nature, one in whom love and peaceful inclinations are predominant, it carries weight enough to amount to a dangerous temptation. No doubt Aaron stumbled at this stone in the business of the golden calf. He did not please himself, surely, in the thing; but it was an act merely complacential to the people, as appears by his apology to Moses, ‘Let not the anger of my lord wax hot: thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief,’ Ex. 32:22. As if he has said, ‘I did not know what they would have done to me upon my denial. What I did was to pacify them, and prevent more trouble from them.’ There is need we see to be armed against this temptation, which that thou mayest be, seriously weigh these two particulars.
Answer First. Thy God, Christian, whom thou servest, commands the tongues, hands, yea hearts, of all men. He can, when he pleaseth—without the least abating in thy holy course—give thee to find favour in the eyes of those thou most fearest. ‘When a man’s ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him,’ Prov. 16:7. Laban, in a fury, pursues Jacob, but God meets him in the way, and gives him his lesson how he should carry himself to the good man, Gen. 31:24; and, ver. 29, he doth ingenuously confess to Jacob what turned the wind into a warmer corner, and made him so calm with him, that set out so full of rage, ‘It is in the power of my hand to do you hurt: but the God of your father spake unto me yester-night,’ &c. Thank him for nothing. He had power to hurt Jacob, but God would not let him. Mordecai, one would have thought, took the readiest way to incur the king’s wrath, by denying Haman that reverence which all were, by royal command, to pay him. But the holy man’s conscience would not suffer his knee to bow. And yet we see, when that proud favourite had done his worst to be revenged on him, he was forced himself to inherit the gallows intended for Mordecai, and leave Mordecai to succeed him in his prince’s favour. Thus God, who hath a key to king’s breasts, on a sudden locked Ahasuerus’s heart against that cursed Amalekite, and opened it to let this holy man into his room. O who would be afraid to be conscientious when God can, and doth so admirably provide for his people’s safety, while they keep close to him!
Answer Second. Suppose thy holy walking stirs up the wrath of ungodly ones against thee, know that there may be more mercy in their hatred than in their love. Commonly the saints get good by the wrath of the wicked against them, not so oft by their favour and friendship. Their displeasure wakens their care, and makes them more accurate (thus David prayed God to ‘make his way plain for him,’ because of his observing enemies), whereas their friendship too oft lays it asleep, and proves a snare to draw them into some sinful compliance with them. Jehoshaphat was wound in too far by his correspondence with Ahab, so hard is it to keep in with God and wicked men also. Luther professed he ‘would not have Erasmus’s honour for a world;’ indeed the friendship he had with, and respect he had from, the great ones of the world made him mealy-mouthed in the cause of God. The Moabites could not give Israel the fall at arm’s length, but when they closed in alliances with the children of Israel, then they were too hard for them. Not their curses, but their embraces did them hurt. Again, we can never lose the love, or incur the wrath of men, upon better or more advantageous terms than for keeping our ‘breastplate of righteousness’ close to us.
1. When we lose for this any love from men, we gain God’s blessing instead of it. ‘Blessed are ye, when all men speak evil of you falsely, for my name’s sake,’ Matt. 5:11. God’s blessing is a good roof over our head to defend us from the storm of man’s wrath. O it is sad, when a Christian opens the mouths of the wicked, by some unholy action, to speak evil of him! No promise will open then its door to hide thee from the storm of their railing tongues. Man reviles and God frowns. Little welcome such a one has, when he returns home to look into his own conscience, or converse with his God; but when it is for thy holiness they hate thee, God is bound by promise to pay thee love for their hatred, blessing for their cursing. And truly that courtier has little cause to complain, that for a little disrespect from others, that cannot hurt him, is advanced higher in his prince’s favour.
2. While thy holy walking loseth thee some love from the world, it gains thee the more reverence and honour. They that will not love thee because thou art holy, cannot choose but fear and reverence thee, at the same time, for what they hate thee. Let a saint comply with the wicked, and remit a little of his holiness to correspond with them, and he loses by the hand—as to his interest, I mean, in them—for by gaining a false love he loses that true honour which inwardly their consciences paid to his holiness. A Christian walking in the power of holiness is like Samson in his strength, the wicked fear him; but when he shows an impotent spirit, by any indecency in his course to his holy profession, then presently he is taken prisoner by them, and falls under both the lash of their tongue and the scorn of their hearts. They can now dance about such a one, and make him their May-game, whose holiness even now kept them in awe. It is not poverty, or the baseness of thy outward state in the world, that will render the contemptible, so long as thou keepest thy breastplate of righteousness on. There sits majesty in the brow of holiness though clad in rags. Righteous David commands reverence from wicked Saul. The king himself does this homage to his poor exiled subject, ‘He wept, and said to David, Thou art more righteous than I,’ I Sam. 24:17. Ay, this is as it should be, when carnal men are forced to acknowledge that they are outshot by the holy lives of Christians. O Christians, do some singular thing—what the best of your merely civil neighbours cannot do—and you sit sure in the throne of their consciences, even when they throw you out of their hearts and affections! So long as the magicians did something like the miracles Moses wrought, they thought themselves as good men as he; but when they were nonplussed in the plague of lice, and could not, with all their art, produce the like, they acknowledged ‘the finger of God’ to be in it, Ex. 8:16. Do not more than carnal men do, and you stand but level with themselves in their opinions of you, yea, they think themselves better than you, who pretend to holiness more than they. It is expected that every one in the calling he professeth should more than a little exceed another that is not of that calling, which if he do not, he becomes contemptible. We come to the application, in which we shall be the shorter, having sprinkled something of this nature all along as we handled the doctrinal part.
APPLICATION.
[Use for information on two points as to holiness.]
Use First. The information afforded in the preceding, bearing on those two particulars, viz. as to maintaining the power of holiness, and as to the possibility of doing so.
1. If we are thus to endeavour the maintaining of the power of holiness, then sure there is such a thing as righteousness and unrighteousness—holiness, and sin that opposeth it. Yet there is a generation of men that make these things to be mere fancies, as if all the existence they had were in the melancholy imaginations of some poor-spirited timorous men, who dream of these things, and then are scared with the bugbears that their own foolish thoughts represent to them. Hence, some among us have dared to make it their boast and glorying that they have at last got from under the bondage of that tyrant conscience; they can now do that which we call swearing, lying, yea, what not, without being bearded and checked by an imperious conscience; yea, they assert that there is no sin to any but him that thinks so. These are worse fools than he the psalmist speaks of, Ps. 14:1. He doth but ‘say in his heart there is no God;’ but these tell the world what fools they are, and cannot hide their shame. I do not mention these os much to confute them—that were to as little purpose, as to go prove there is a sun shining in a clear day because a mad frantic man denies it—as rather to affect your hearts with the abominations of the times, ye holy ones of God. O how deep asleep were men, that the enemy could come and sow such tares as these amongst us! Perhaps they thought such poisonous seed would not grow in our soil, that had so much labour and cost bestowed on it by Christ’s husbandmen; that such strong delusions would never go down with any that had been used to so pure a gospel diet! But alas! we see by woeful experience that, as a plague when it hits into a city that stands in the purest air, oft rageth more than in another place, so when a spirit of delusion falls upon a people that have enjoyed most of the gospel, it grows most prodigious. It makes me even tremble to think what a place of nettles England, that hath so long continued—without wrong to any other church Christ hath in the world—one of his fairest, fruitfullest garden‑plots, may at last become, when I see what weeds have sprung up in our days. I have heard that reverend and holy Master Greenham say, he feared rather atheism than Popery would be England’s ruin. Had he lived in our dismal days, he would have had his fears much increased. Were there ever more atheists made and making in England since it was acquainted with the gospel, than in the compass of a dozen years last past? I have reason to think there are not. When men shall fall so far from profession of the gospel, and be so blinded that they cannot know light from darkness, righteousness from unrighteousness, are they not far gone in atheism? This is not natural blindness, for the heathen could tell when they did good and evil, and see holiness from sin without scripture light to show them, Rom. 2:14, 15. No, this blindness is a plague of God fallen on them for rebelling against the light when they could see it. And if this plague should grow more common, which God forbid! woe then to England!
2. If we be to maintain the power of holiness, then surely it is possible. God would not command what he doth not enable his own peculiar people to do; only here, you must remember carefully the distinction premised in the opening of the text, between a legal righteousness and an evangelical righteousness. The latter of these is so far from being unattainable, that there is not a sincere Christian in the world but is truly holy in this sense, that is, he doth truly desire, and conscionably endeavour—with some success of his endeavour through divine grace assisting—to walk according to the rule of God’s word. I confess all Christ’s scholars are not of the same form. All his children are not of the same stature and strength. Some foot it more nimbly in the ways of holiness than others, yet not a saint but is endued with a principle of life that sets him at work for God, and to desire to do more than he is able. As the seed, though little in itself, yet hath in it virtually the bigness and height of a grown tree, towards which it is putting forth with more and more strength of nature as it grows, so in the very first principle of grace planted at conversion, there is perfection of grace contained in a sense;—that is, a disposition putting the creature forth in desires and endeavours after that perfection to which God hath appointed him in Christ Jesus. And therefore, Christian, whenever such thoughts of the impossibility of obtaining this holiness here on earth are suggested to thee, reject them as sent in from Satan, and that on a design to feed thy own distrustful humour—which he knows they will suit too well, as the news of giants and high walls, that the spies brought to the unbelieving Israelites, did them—and all to weaken thy endeavours after holiness, which he knows will surely prove him a liar. Do but strongly resolve to be conscientious in thy endeavours, with an eye upon the promise of help, and the work will go on. Thou needest not fear it, ‘for the Lord God is a sun and shield: the Lord will give grace and glory: no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly,’ Ps. 84:11. Mark that ‘grace and glory,’ that is, ‘grace unto glory.’ He will still be adding ‘more grace’ to that thou hast, till thy grace on earth commenceth glory in heaven.
WesleyGospel Ministries 