There is another joy in the text—joy in the honor which it brings to Christ. The stripes, let us lament them; the healing let us rejoice therein; and then, the physician, let us honor Him. “With his stripes we are healed.” Jesus Christ works real cures. We are healed, effectually healed. We were healed when we first believed, we are healed still. Abiding cure we have, for still to His wounds we fly. An eternal cure have we, for never man was healed by Christ and then relapsed and died. “With his stripes we are healed,” by nothing else; by no mixture of something else with those stripes; not by priestcraft, not by sacraments, not by our own prayers, not by our own good works. “With his stripes we are healed”—healed of all sin of every kind, of sins past, of sins present, and sins to come; we are healed, completely healed of all, and that in a moment; not through long years of waiting and of gradually growing better, but “With his stripes we are healed,” completely healed, even now. Blessed be His name. Now, child of God, if thou wouldst give glory to God, declare that thou art healed this morning. Be not always saying, “I hope I am saved.” The man who says he hopes he is cured does not greatly recommend the physician; but the man who knows he is, he is the man who brings him honor. Let us speak positively: we can do so. Let us speak out in the face of all mankind, and not be ashamed. Let us say, “As surely as we were diseased, so surely are we healed through the stripes of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Let us give Jesus all glory, let us magnify Him to the utmost.
I see now in vision a company of men gathering herbs along the slopes of the Seven Hills of Rome; with mystic rites they cull those ancient plants, whose noxious influence once drugged our fathers into deadly slumbers. They are compounding again the cup of Rome’s ancient sorcery, and saying: “Here is the universal medicine! The great catholic remedy.” I see them pouring their Belladonna, Monkshood, and deadly Henbane, into the great pot forever simmering on the Papal hearth. Think you the nations are to be healed by this accursed amalgam? Will not the end be as in the days of the prophets, when one gathered wild gourds, and they cried out, “there is death in the pot?” Ay, indeed, so it will he, even though Oxford and Canterbury set their seal upon the patent medicine. Come, ye brave sons of protesting fathers! Come and overturn this witches’ caldron, and spill it back into the hell for which alone it is fit. Pity that even old Tiber’s tawny flood should be poisoned with it, or bear its deadly mixture to that sea across which once sailed the apostolic bark. The wine of Rome’s abominations is now imported into this island, and distributed in a thousand towns and villages by your own national clergy, and all classes and conditions of men are being made drunk therewith. Ye lovers of your race, and of your God, stop the traffic, and proclaim around the Popish caldron, “There is no healing there.” No healing plants ever grew upon the Seven Hills of Rome, or are the roots improved in virtue if transplanted to Canterbury. or the city on the Isis. There is one divine remedy, and only one. It is no mixture. Receive ye it and live—”With his stripes we are healed.” No sprinkling can wash out sin, no confirmation can confer grace, no masses can propitiate God. Your hope must be in Jesus, Jesus smitten, Jesus bruised, Jesus slain, Jesus the Substitute for sinners. Whosoever believes in Him is healed, but all other hopes are a lie from top to bottom. Of sacramentarianism, I will say that its Alpha is a lie, and its Omega is a lie, it is false as the devil who devised it; but Christ, and only Christ, is the true Physician of souls, and His stripes the only remedy. Oh, for a trumpet to sound this through every town of England! Through every city of Europe! Oh, to preach this in the Colosseum! Or better still from the pulpit of St. Peter’s!—”With his stripes we are healed.” Away, away ye deceivers, with your mixtures and compounds: away ye proud sons of men with your boastings of what ye feel, and think, and do, and what ye intend and vow. “With his stripes we are healed.” A crucified Savior is the sole and only hope of a sinful world.
III. Now, I said this is a VERY SUGGESTIVE TEXT
But I shall not give you the suggestions, for time has failed me, except to say that whenever a man is healed through the stripes of Jesus, the instincts of his nature should make him say, “I will spend the strength I have, as a healed man, for Him who healed me.” Every stripe on the back of Christ cries to me, “Thou art not thine own; thou art bought with a price.” What say you to this—you who profess to be healed? Will you live to Him? Will you not say, “For me to live is Christ. I desire now, having been healed through His precious blood, to spend and be spent in His service.” Oh, if you all were brought to this it would be a grand day for London—if we had a thousand men who would preach nothing but Christ and live nothing but Christ, what would the world see? A thousand? Nay, give us but a dozen men on fire with the love of Jesus, and if they would preach Christ out and out and through and through, and nothing else, the world would know a change before long We should hear again the cry, “The men that turn: the world upside down have come hither also.” Nothing beneath the sun is so mighty as the gospel. Believe me, there is nothing so wise as Christ, and nothing so potent over human hearts as the Cross. Vain are the dreams of intellect, and the boasts of culture. Give me the Cross and keep your fineries.
You will know this when you come to die, beloved. You will find nothing able to cheer your departing moments but the Savior on the bloody tree. When the man is panting for existence, and the breath is hard to fetch, and the spirit faces eternity, you want no priest, no dead creed, no gaudy oratory, no sacraments, no dreams, you will demand certainties, verirties, divine realities; and where find you them but in the divine Substitute? Here is a rock to put your foot on, here are the rod and the staff of God Himself to comfort you. Then nothing will seem more admirable than the simple truth that God became man and suffered in man’s stead, and that God has promised that whosoever believeth in His Son shall not perish, but have everlasting life.
Beloved, if you know that Jesus has healed you, serve Him, by telling others about the healing medicine. Whisper it in the ear of one; tell it in your houses to the twos; preach it, if you can, to the hundreds and thousands; print it in the papers; write it with your pen; spread it through every nook and corner of the land. Tell it to your children; tell it to your servants; leave none around you ignorant of it. Hang it up everywhere in letters of boldest type. “With his stripes we are healed.” Oh, sound it! Sound it! Sound it loud as the trump of doom! Make men’s ears to hear it, whether they will or no! The Lord bless you with this healing. Amen.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
