IV. But what shall be your cry when you shall say, "Good God! We may well remember our faults this day. Then comes the "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" crucify him!" As for yourselves, thirst after perfection. Acts 19 Acts 19 He preached in the same church as C. H. Spurgeon over one hundred years earlier. Beloved, let us thirst for the souls of our fellow-men. and they smote him with their hands. Do not let the picture vanish till you have satisfied yourselves once for all that Christ was here the substitute for you. A carnal appetite of the body, the satisfaction of the desire for food, first brought us down under the first Adam, and now the pang of thirst, the denial of what the body craved for, restores us to our place. 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. If we be true to our Master we shall soon lose the friendship of the world. Think, dear friends, there are some in this congregation who as yet have no interest in Jesu's blood, some sitting next to you, your nearest friends who, if they were now to close their eyes in death, would open them in hell! Amen. His most fruitful years of ministry were at the New Park Street and later the Metropolitan Tabernacle pulpit in London. He thirsted for water doubtless, but his soul was thirsty in a higher sense; indeed, he seems only to have spoken that the Scriptures might be fulfilled as to the offering him vinegar. You must consider Jesus, and not yourself; turn your eye to Christ, the great substitute for sinners, but never dream of trusting in yourselves. Always was he in harmony with himself, and his own body was always expressive of his soul's cravings as well as of its own longings. We see how the Holy Spirit wants us to pray. And yet he placed himself for our sakes into a position of shame and suffering where none would wait upon him, but when he cried, "I thirst," they gave him vinegar to drink. As for myself, I would grow more and more insatiable after my divine Lord, and when I have much of him I would still cry for more; and then for more, and still for more. Today! Among other things methinks he meant this "If I, the innocent substitute for sinners, suffer thus, what will be done when the sinner himself the dry tree whose sins are his own, and not merely imputed to him, shall fall into the hands of an angry God." 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. Metaphorically understood, thirst is dissatisfaction, the craving of the mind for something which it has not, but which it pines for. We will now take the text in a third way, and may the Spirit of God instruct us once again. Have you prayed for your fellow men? 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. John 18:19-40 - Glory on Trial A. As Spurgeon puts it "Faith is described as 'receiving' Jesus. Secondly, we shall regard these words, "I thirst," as THE TOKEN OF HIS SUFFERING SUBSTITUTION. All this is a blessed clog upon us, and a means of keeping us more near the Lord. What if the bread be dry, what if the medicine be nauseous; yet for his thirst there was no relief but gall and vinegar, and dare we complain? I invite you to meditate upon the true humanity of our Lord very reverently, and very lovingly. We ought all to have a longing for conversions. To-day I invite your attention to another Prince, marching in another fashion through his metropolis. In your chamber let the gasp of your Lord as he said, "I thirst," go through your ears, and as you hear it let it touch your heart and cause you to gird up yourself and say, "Doth he say, 'I thirst'? No longer sink below the brim; But overflow, and pour me down A living and life-giving stream.". Now, I am not sure that we ought to blame ourselves for this. This is a kind of sweet whereof if a man hath much he must have more, and when he hath more he is under a still greater necessity to receive more, and so on, his appetite for ever growing by that which it feeds upon, till he is filled with all the fulness of God. They would be very proper, very proper; God forbid that we should stay them, except with the gentle words of Christ, "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me." We read, "The soldiers also mocked him, offering him vinegar." It is the empty cup placed under the flowing stream; the penniless hand held out for heavenly alms." . If you will look, there is the mark of his blood-red shoulder upon that heavy cross. The lictors executed their cruel office upon his shoulders with their rods and scourges, until the stripes had reached the full number. You have been ill, and you have been parched with fever as he was, and then you too have gasped out "I thirst." Scripture provides a wealth . We shall by the assistance of the Holy Spirit try to regard these words of our Saviour in a five-fold light. You see there the multitude are leading him forth from the temple. "'Twere you my sins, my cruel sins, His chief tormentors were; Each of my grimes became a nail, And unbelief the spear. It is so with each one of you? For him they have no tolerance. Hast thou laid thy hand upon his head, confessed thy sin, and trusted in him? Our Lord says, "If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink," that thirst being the result of sin in every ungodly man at this moment. With "I thirst" the evil is destroyed and receives its expiation. July 2nd, 1882 by C. H. SPURGEON (1834-1892) "I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them." John 17:26 . Commentators like Thomas Manton and John Calvin are represented in this series. Thoughtful men have drawn a wealth of meaning from them, and in so doing have arranged them into different groups, and placed them under several heads. He calls for that: will you not give it to him? He had no sooner said "I thirst," and sipped the vinegar, than he shouted, "It is finished"; and all was over: the battle was fought and the victory won for ever, and our great Deliverer's thirst was the sign of his having smitten the last foe. We would fain lift thy name on high in grateful remembrance of the depths to which thou didst descend! This is what the Apostle meant when he said, "I fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body's sake, which is the Church." Our first parents plucked forbidden fruit, and by eating slew the race. Next Saturday all eyes will be fixed on a great Prince who shall ride through our streets with his Royal Bride. For several Sabbath mornings my mind has been directed into subjects which I might fitly call the deep things of God. The Redeemer's cry of "I thirst" is a solemn lesson of patience to his afflicted. Great and worshipful being that he is, truth is to be altered for him, the gospel is to be modulated to suit the tone of his various generations, and all the arrangements of the universe are to be rendered subservient to his interests. There is bread upon your table to-day, and there will be at least a cup of cold water to refresh you. I suppose that the "I thirst" was uttered softly, so that perhaps only one and another who stood near the cross heard it at all; in contrast with the louder cry of "Lama sabachthani" and the triumphant shout of "It is finished": but that soft, expiring sigh, "I thirst," has ended for us the thirst which else, insatiably fierce, had preyed upon us throughout eternity. A river of the water of life, pure as crystal, proceedeth to-day out of the throne of God and of the Lamb, and yet once he condescended to say, "I thirst," before his angelic guards, they would surely have emulated the courage of the men of David when they cut their way to the well of Bethlehem that was within the gate, and drew water in jeopardy of their lives. It was a thirst such as none of us have ever known, for not yet has the death dew condensed upon our brows. You have seen Jesus led away by his enemies; so shall you be dragged away by fiends to the place appointed for you. There was nothing behind in the price, but there is something behind in the manifested power, and we must continue to fill up that measure of revealed power, carrying each one of us the cross with Christ, till the last shame shall have been poured upon his cause, and he shall reign for ever and ever. Beloved, can you say he carried your sin? Will your thoroughfares be thronged? There can be no shadow of doubt but that our Lord was really crucified, and no one substituted for him. Come hither, ye lovers of Immanuel, and I will show you this great sight the King of sorrow marching to his throne of grief, the cross. It is not likely that we shall be able to worship with their worship. There were two other cross-bearers in the throng; they were malefactors; their crosses were just as heavy as the Lord's, and yet, at least, one of them had no sympathy with him, and his bearing the cross only led to his death, and not to his salvation. May the Holy Ghost help us to hear a fourth tuning of the dolorous music, "I thirst." Here, as everywhere else, we are constrained to say of our Lord, "Never man spake like this man." It is the opinion of some commentators that Simon only carried one end of the cross, and not the whole of it. 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." 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." It is calculated that one soul passes from time into eternity every time the clock ticks! I like to think of our Lord's saying, "It is finished," directly after he had exclaimed, "I thirst"; for these two voices come so naturally together. After preaching his first sermon at the age of 16, he became pastor of the church in Waterbeach at the age of 17. Now Christ standing in the stead of the ungodly suffers thirst as a type of his enduring the result of sin. The spear broke up the very fountains of life; no human body could survive such a wound. " And He bowed His head, and gave up His spirit. Christ must die a felon's death, and it must be upon the felon's gallows, in the place where horrid crimes had met their due reward. "When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost." John 19:30. He wants you brother, he wants you, dear sister, he longs to have you wholly to himself. I invite your attention to CHRIST AS LED FORTH. The reed was no mere rush from the brook, it was of a stouter kind, of which easterns often make walkingstaves, the blows were cruel as well as insulting; and the crown was not of straw but thorn, hence it produced pain as well as pictured scorn. 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. Pilate, as we reminded you, scourged our Savior according to the common custom of Roman courts. "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." Lectures to My Students - Charles Haddon Spurgeon 1889 Lessons from the Apostle Paul's Prayers - Charles Spurgeon 2018-02-19 Why study and pray the prayers of the Apostle Paul? Is not this a fertile field of thought? 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. Beware of rendering him homage and dishonouring his name at the same time. John 19:16 . I claim for the procession of my Lord an interest superior to the pageant you are now so anxiously expecting. "It is finished" is the last word but one, and there you see the perfected Saviour, the Captain of our salvation, who has completed the undertaking upon which he had entered, finished transgression, made an end of sin, and brought in ever lasting righteousness. "Come ye out from among them, and be ye separate, and touch not the unclean thing." To-day I invite your attention to another Prince, marching in another fashion through his metropolis. 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