Overcoming Christ 2

Again, there are the eyes of 'prayer' which often overcome the Lord Jesus Christ, and this victory comes, sometimes, 'when we are praying for ourselves'. You know what it is in prayer to come to him, and say, "Lord, I am in great straits, and you have yourself brought me there. It has not been through my folly, but it is by your own act and deed that I am where I am. Now, Lord, you have promised that in six troubles you will deliver us, and in seven there shall no evil touch us. You have said, "Your shoes shall be iron and brass; and as your days, so shall your strength be;" now, Lord, you are God, and you can not lie, therefore will you not keep your promise? Here, Lord, you see my difficulty and my trial, and your inspired apostle has said that all things work together for good to those who love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose; your servant David declared that 'many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord deliverers him out of them all;' now, Lord, I look to you to do this for me."

It is one of the grandest things in all the world when a godly man, with the simplicity of a child, just believes God, and fully trusts him for everything. It has come to be a matter of marvel, in this evil age, that a man can say that God grants him many mercies in answer to prayer. People hold up their hands and say, "Dear, dear, what a wonder!" A wonder that God hears prayer? It would be a greater wonder if he did not hear it. Beloved, to me, prayer is a matter of fact; for me to go and take a promise to God, and ask him to fulfill it, and to get it fulfilled, is as common and as usual and as much a matter of fact as it is for you who are in business to take cheques, and pass them across the counter at the bank, and receive the cash for them.

Do you think that God is a fiction? If he is, then all our religion is a farce; but if God is real, then prayer is real, too. Many of us know that it is real, for we have tried it, and still try it every day we live. In every time of trouble, we bring the trouble to God's feet, and say, "Dear Lord, as you are true and faithful, you will help us through it:" and we find that he does help us through it. We speak what we do know, and testify what we have seen many a time.

When a child of God, in deep distress, believes in his Father, and steadily looks to him for deliverance, those eyes of his have mighty power, and God seems to say to him, "Turn away your eyes from me, for they have overcome me." You cannot look steadily to God and say, "Lord, I am sure about your faithfulness, I am sure about your promise, and I cannot and will not doubt it," but before long you shall see the hand of the Lord made bare for your deliverance, and you also shall be among the happy number who have to bear witness that, verily, there is a God in Israel. Thus does prayer prevail with God when we present it for ourselves.

So does it also overcome him 'when we pray on behalf of others'. Moses, you know, prayed for others and prevailed; do you, dear children of God, know what it is to wrestle with the Lord for the souls of others? I am sure that many of you do; there are your dear children, kinsfolk, friends, and neighbors, whom you bring before the Lord. I will tell you when you will win the day, mother, when with tears you say, "O God, you have given me these children; now give them to me according to the spirit as well as according to the flesh."

You will overcome the Lord, dear father, when you spread your suit before him and say, "Deny my children what you will, but do save them; let them all be yours in the day when you make up your jewels." You will succeed when, rising from your knees, you set those children a Christian example; and, having pleaded with God for them, you go and plead with them for God, and feel as if your heart would break if you did not see your boys and girls converted.

When, like Hannah, you even come to be a woman of a sorrowful spirit because you feel that you must have your children brought to God, then the Lord Jesus will look at you until he will say to himself, "I cannot let that poor soul cry and sigh in vain; it is not in my heart- the heart of one who was born of a woman-- to let that pleading woman's prayer go without an answer," and to you he will say, "Turn away your eyes from me, for they have overcome me. Be it unto you even as you will."

And you, dear child of God, who are teaching in the Sunday-school class, or you who are preaching in some small village station, when you get to feel inward grief of heart over those with whom you have to deal, when that grief increases until it comes to be a perfect agony, and you cannot help crying out for anguish of soul when you feel as if you must have them saved, as if you would give everything you had if they might but be brought to Christ, when you even wake at night to pray for them, and in the midst of your business cares you get distracted with the thought that some whom you love are perishing, at such times as that your powerful eyes in prayer shall move the heart of Christ, and overcome him, and he shall give you those souls for your hire.

Brethren, if we do not pray for sinners, for whom shall we pray? Sisters, if we do not plead for the abandoned, if we do not offer supplications for those who are perverse in heart, we have omitted to pray for the very people who most need our intercession. Let us bring these hard hearts beneath the almighty hammer. Let us by prayer bring these lepers beneath the healing touch of him who, despite their loathsomeness, can say to them, "Be clean." Let no degree of natural or inherited depravity, or of depravity that has come from long continuance in sin, hinder us from praying for all the unsaved whom we know, "O God, have mercy upon these guilty ones!"

I will not further enlarge upon this point, for it is settled beyond all question that those who love the souls of men will not be hindered from prayer for them on any account whatever. I conjure you, who have prayed for husbands or children, or friends, do not leave off pleading for them. If you have prayed for twenty years, and they are not converted, pray twenty years more; and if they have grown more wicked while you have pleaded, still pray on; and if heaven and earth and hell seem to combine together to bid you cease your supplications, still pray on. As long as you live, make intercession for transgressors; and as long as they live, let your cries go up to God on their behalf. So shall you "overcome heaven by prayer" as you plead for the ungodly.

Once again, there is another time when the eyes of the believer seem to overcome the heart of Christ, and that is, 'when we have turned right away from the world, and looked to him alone'. I have known it so again and again; have not you beloved? In this world, at present, our Lord is somewhat concealed; he does not fully reveal himself to his people. Here he says to us as he said to Mary, "Touch me not." He lets us wait until the veil shall be drawn up, and then we shall see him face to face, and shall be like him.

Here we have to live by faith rather than by sight, and it is expectation rather than enjoyment that makes up much of our present bliss; yet, at times, I have known my Lord come wonderfully near to his servants, and lay bare his inmost heart to them. It seemed as if he could not help it; it has been at some such gathering as this, when we have gone right away from the world, and have forgotten its cares and pleasures for a while, and we have sat down to think only of him. Our soul has surveyed him in his Godhead and his manhood, as our Prophet, Priest, King, and near Kinsman, living, dying, risen, ascended, soon to come; we have looked him over, and there has not been any part of his character which we have not admired, nor one office in which we have not trusted him, nor one deed for which we have not blessed him.

We have come to think, "He is altogether lovely," and while we have been admiring him in a perfect rapture, there has been added to it this sweet thought, He is all goodness, and he is all mine, from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot. "My Beloved is mine, and I am his." We have not said much, and we could not have said much just then; we have been quite quiet, and alone with our Lord, and we have felt that silence was the only eloquence we could use as we looked at him again, and again, and again.

At such seasons, my soul has felt ready to swoon away in his presence. You remember how John in Patmos, when Jesus appeared to him, said, "When I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead;" and well he might, for he had a brighter vision of his Lord than you and I can have at present. But even faith's view of him is enough to transport us straight away into heaven itself. Well, brethren, whenever we are thus happily engaged in contemplation of our Lord, not only is he very near to us, but he is greatly moved by our love, and he says to us, "Turn away your eyes from me, for they have overcome me." And, meanwhile, to prove how overcome he is, he begins to reveal himself more fully to us.

You may perhaps have read, in the life of holy Mr. Flavel the extraordinary instance he records of the love of Christ being poured into his soul. He says that he was riding on a horse, going to some engagement, and he had such a sense of the love of Christ that he completely lost himself for several hours; and when he came to himself again, he found his horse standing quite still, and discovered that he had been sitting on horseback all those hours, utterly lost to everything but a special revelation of the wonderful love of Jesus.

You may also have heard of Mr. Tennant, the mighty American preacher, and friend of George Whitefield, who was found, lost and absorbed, in a wood, to which he had retired, and his friends had to call him back, as it were, from the sweet fellowship he had been enjoying with Christ. You may remember, too, John Welsh, the famous Scotch preacher, who had to cry out, "Hold, Lord, hold! I am but an earthen vessel, and if I feel more of your glorious love, I must even die; so stay your hand a while."

There are such experiences as these, I will not enquire whether you have ever known them; but if you have, I will tell you one thing. All the infidels in the world, and all the devils in hell, will never make you doubt the truth of the Scriptures if you have once been face to face with Christ, and have spoken with your Master as a man speaks with his friend. Such things have happened unto those whose cloud-piercing eyes have been so fixed upon Christ that he at last has felt the mighty fascination of their loving and believing glances, and has revealed himself in still greater measure unto them and made them even more blest than they were before.

Last of all, sometimes the eyes of Christians have great power in overcoming Christ 'when they long for his appearing'. Have you never seen the saints lie dying with such language as this on their lips, "Why are his chariots so long in coming? Why tarries he?

"Hasten, my Beloved, fetch my soul
Up to your blessed abode:
Fly, for my spirit longs to see
My Savior and my God."

I have heard them say, with evident regret, "I thought to have been in heaven long before now." I have seen them almost grieve when the doctor has said that they were better, and that there was hope that they might last another month or two. They seemed to say, "Why should my banishment continue? Why should my release be postponed? These chains of clay which seem so hard to shake off, these fetters of brass, will they never drop from me? Must I still linger in this world of pain, and sorrow, and sin, and suffering? Why not let me go?" And they have been like a poor thrush which I have sometimes seen a boy try to keep upon a little bit of turf; it longed for the broad fields, and beat itself against the wires of its cage.

So is it with our dear suffering friends, at times; yet they have learned patiently to wait until their change came; but often, their eyes have been so fixed upon their Lord that they have said to him, "Will you never come?" And, at last, Christ has looked out of heaven so sweetly on those sick ones, and he has said, "Your eyes have overcome me, come up higher:" and they have leaped out of their body into his bosom, and the pierced hands have received their blood-washed spirits, and they have been "forever with the Lord."

I am looking forward, and I trust we who are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ are all looking forward, to that day when God will let us languish into life, when we shall see the bars of the prison opened once for all, and we shall pass through them, and leave this dying world behind to go to the land of the living, the land of the hereafter, where we, too, shall be "forever with the Lord." Keep your hearts always longing for that blest hour. Keep you eyes ever looking upward, beloved. Set small store by anything here, and be ever ready to depart; and so, full often, shall Jesus say to you, as though he could no longer bear that you should gaze upon him, though indeed he loves it all the while, "Turn away your eyes from me, for they have overcome me."

God bless you all, beloved, for Christ's sake! Amen.

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