O ye members of Christian churches! there are many of you who have a feigned experience and a feigned religion. How many there are of you who have the externals merely of godliness! ye are white-washed sepulchres, outwardly fair and beautiful, like the garnished gardens of a cemetery; but inwardly ye are full of dead men’s bones and rottenness! Be persuaded, I beseech you, to get no deliverance any way except by the blood of the Lamb, and by really feasting on Christ. Many a man gets a deliverance by stifling his conscience. “Ah!” says one of these mixed multitude, “here am I in the prison; and this is the night when the children of Israel go out of Egypt; Oh! if I might go out!” What does he do? Why, the keeper is frightened; he has lost his eldest son, and the prisoner says, “Let me out!” and he bribes the keeper to let him go. And there is many a man that get out of Egypt by bribing his conscience. “There, master conscience,” he says, “I will never get drunk any more; I will always go to church; there is my shop, that is always open on Sunday-I will put two shutters up, and that is almost as good as closing it entirely; and I will not do the business myself-I will get a servant to do it for me.” And out he comes! But he had better remain in Egypt than get out like that. There are some again that get out by main force; the keeper falls down dead, and so they get out of prison. There are men who not only bribe, but kill their conscience; they go so far that their conscience is almost dead, and when he is in a fit one day they rush forth, and escape; and so they have “peace, peace, where there is no peace.” They wrap themselves up in the folds of their own delusions, and invent for themselves refuges of lies, where they do place their trust. O ye mixed multitude! ye are the ruin of the churches; ye set us a lusting; the pure Israelite’s blood is tainted by union with you; you sit as God’s people sit, and yet you are not his people; you hear as God’s people hear, and yet you are “in the gall of bitterness and in the bonds of iniquity.” You take the sacrament as sweetly as others, while you are eating and drinking damnation to yourself; you come to the church-meeting, and you sit in the private assembly of the saints; but even when you are there, you are nothing but a wolf in sheep’s clothing, entering the flock when you ought not to be there.
My dear hearers, do try yourselves, to see whether you are real Israelites. Oh! could Christ say to you, “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile.” Have you the blood on your door-post? Have you eaten of Jesus? Do you live on him? Do you have fellowship with him? Has God the Holy Ghost brought you out of Egypt? or have you come out yourself? Have you found refuge in his dear cross and wounded side? If you have, rejoice, for Pharaoh himself cannot bring you back again; but if you have not, I pray my Master to dash your peace into atoms, fair and lovely as it may be; I beseech him to send the winds of conviction and the floods of his wrath, that your house may fall now, rather than it should stand to your death, and then, in the last solemn hour, the edifice of your own hands should totter. Mixed multitude! hear ye this! ye assembled gatherings of professors! “Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your-own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?” But if he be not in you, then are ye reprobates still, whom God abhorreth. The Lord bring all his people out of Egypt, and deliver all his children from the house of bondage.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
