Barriers Broken Down — C.H. Spurgeon

The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Barriers Broken Down, a sermon intended for reading on Lord's Day, July 26th, 1891, delivered by C. H. Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington. Romans 10, verse 3, for they being ignorant of God's righteousness and going about to establish their own righteousness have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God.

Prayer for the Salvation of Souls

You that have your Bibles open, kindly follow me from the first verse of the chapter. It begins, Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they might be saved. If you really desire that men should be saved, pray for them.

It is an empty wish, a mere formality, if you do not turn it into prayer. Every loving desire for any man or woman should, by the believer, be taken before God in prayer. We cannot expect that God will save men unless his people pray for it.

There must be travail before the birth, and there must be travail in prayer with God before we can expect that many will be born again into the church of God. Oh, for more prayer, let us cry to God in secret and in the family and in all our assemblies that God would save the sons of men.

Prayer Joined to Gospel Labor

But prayer, if it is sincere, is always attended with effort. Hence, the apostle begins to teach as well as to pray. He prays that Israel might be saved, and then he explains the difficulties in the way and tries to remove them.

You pray, dear friend, do you? But you never speak to the individual for whom you pray. Is your prayer sincere? I will not question it, but your prayer has hardly reached that pitch of passionate earnestness which will secure an answer.

For if you were in downright earnest, you would go to the person for whom you pray and explain the way of salvation. You want your boy to be a scholar, then you send him to school. You want your girl to learn a certain trade.

You put her apprentice to it, do you not? In the things of common life, that which you desire, you use means to obtain. Oh, that in all our churches, we might feel that while effort without prayer is presumption and prayer without effort is hypocrisy, the holy blending of prayer and labor will produce for certain a grand result.

If we labor for souls, we must not be content unless souls are really saved. For the apostle says, for I bear them record that they have a zeal of God. Well, does not that satisfy you, Paul? They are zealous for God.

They are red hot. No, says he, not unless it is in the right way. They have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge. We feel very thankful when we see tears stream down the cheek. But, you know, people cry at the theater and there is not much in it.

Pray God, it may not end in a shower of tears, but that the heart may bleed as well as the eyes weep. It may happen that we have induced our hairs to give up some outward sins. So far, so good. But it is written, he must be born again.

And if this vital change is not experienced, all outward reformation will land them short of heaven. Beloved, the apostle's love for souls led him to pray and led him to labor. But it led him to be very concerned that none should stop short of real living faith in Christ and justification by his blood and righteousness.

When we are in the throes of a revival and we think men are turning to Christ, let us be happy and let us not throw any cold water upon anybody. But let us see that it is really the work of grace in the hearts of our hairs.

Let us take care that the plowshare goes down deep. Some soil wants even cross plowing and scarifying. Let us do the work thoroughly, for it is only those that are really converted that will stand. We do not want a lot of people that will run in at one door of the church and out the other, but we want saving work and our prayer should be, Lord, quicken the people into divine life by divine truth through the divine spirit.

Justification by Faith Alone

Now, observe that the apostle being thus earnest about souls, endeavors to be specially clear about the doctrine of justification by faith. If we want men to be truly converted, we must set before them the plan of salvation very clearly and distinctly.

I meet with hundreds of persons who have had some kind of work upon their hearts, but they tell me that they walk in a mist. They have not quite understood it. They felt that they were on the rock, but they were not quite sure what the rock really was.

It is a good thing that our zeal for God should be according to knowledge, that we know what we believe and why we believe it and know that we are saved and how we are saved and why we are saved. For if there be a mistake here, it may be fatal.

Martin Luther, who as we all know, continually preached the doctrine of justification by faith, said one day that he felt half inclined to take the Bible and bang it about the people's heads, for they seemed as if they would not get a hold of the doctrine that we are saved by faith in Jesus Christ and by that alone.

I suspect that knocking people's heads about with the Bible would not affect any very great result, but that was Martin Luther's way of putting it. Keep hammering away on that nail, believe, believe, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.

Well now, that was the particular battleground of Luther's day so that he said the doctrine of justification by faith is the article of a standing or a falling church. If a church holds and preaches that it is a church of Christ, notwithstanding many blunders, but whatever it may preach, if it does not preach that, it is to be questioned whether it is not a fallen church, a church that has lost its true position.

The fight today is the same as in Luther's day. The words have changed and men make other pretenses, but the fight all along the line is still this. Are we saved by our own merits or by the merit of another?

Are we righteous through what we do or are we righteous through what Christ has done? Is sin put away by tears and repentances or is sin washed away by the precious blood of Christ and by that alone? Beloved, I trust that our pulpit will never give an uncertain sound upon this matter.

In our discourse, we shall endeavor to show you that while there are two righteousnesses, our own righteousness and the righteousness of God, there will always be, as there has always been, a conflict between the two.

Men will choose their own righteousness and they will not submit themselves to the righteousness of God. You that are fellow workers for Christ will be especially interested in this text for it sets forth three difficulties in the way of a man's salvation.

The first is ignorance. They being ignorant of God's righteousness, the next is self-will, and going about to establish their own righteousness, and the third is flat rebellion, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God.

Ignorance of God's Righteousness

Well, now, our first difficulty is with ignorance. Ignorance is the mother of devotion according to the Church of Rome. Ignorance is the mother of error according to the word of God. We love the spread of knowledge, although there is a knowledge which it were better not to know as there is a philosophy that is nothing but vain deceit and not true wisdom.

What we want our fellow men to possess is spiritual knowledge. Especially do we desire that they may have first and chiefly knowledge with regard to God's righteousness for the difficulty is that men do not know what that righteousness is which God requires.

Do you want to be saved by your own righteousness? Do you know what kind of righteousness it must be? To be accepted, it must be perfect. That is to say, if you have committed but one sin, you have stained your character in the sight of God and your hope of perfect righteousness is gone.

God's law requires obedience from the first moment that the creature understands that law as long as ever that creature lives. Mark what it requires of you. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy strength and with all thy mind.

Have you done that? And thy neighbor as thyself. Have you done that? Why, there is not one of us who has done it. If we had kept the law of God completely from the first command to the last and from the first day until now, even that would not save us.

For if there were to be one sinful word or deed during the rest of life, it would spoil the whole and God could not accept our righteousness. When a man commits one sin, he is guilty of disobedience to all the commands of God.

For he that offended in one point is guilty of all. Here is the chain containing 20 links. If I break one of them, I have broken the chain. Through there are 19 perfect links. But if number 20 is snapped, down goes the cage over the mouth of the mine and the miners are killed.

Suppose that I should be required to produce a perfect vase of alabaster or clear crystal as a present to the Queen. But my servant maid has chipped it just a little. What is to be done? I may possibly find somebody to use some patent cement and fasten the little pieces in their places.

But when all is done, it is chipped. It is not perfect. And if it must be perfect before royalty can accept it, I must get another vase for this one will not do. Now dear friend, while I am talking to you about a chip here and a chip there in your life, I'm sure you must be saying, do not talk so, sir.

Why, some of us have not only got chipped, but we are smashed right up. And as to broken links, why, we have fairly melted the chain. There is not a link left. We have nothing, absolutely nothing that we can bring before God.

I'm glad to hear it. If you are lost, you are the very ones Christ came to save. And if you have no righteousness of your own, you've got to the halfway house of salvation. When you strip a man, you are partly on the way to clothing him.

When a man is changing his old clothes for better, he must get the old ones off first. Oh, how glad I am to meet with a real sinner. There are many sham sinners about. I saw one day in Italy a fellow sticking out his arm with an awful sore, and he begged of me.

As I suspected that he had manufactured that sore with a little sulfuric acid, or by some such process, I did not feel the least pity for him. We have lots of people who come confessing their sins. Oh, yes, we are sinners.

We are sinners. Yes, they do not mean it. They are only sham sinners. A real sinner, one who feels his guilt, is a sacred thing. As heart says, the Holy Ghost has made him so. He is an empty vessel that God is going to fill.

He is a broken heart that God is going to make anew. But here is our trouble. That the mass of people are not aware how perfect, how complete any righteousness must be before God can accept it. The next difficulty is that men do not know that God has provided a righteousness for all believers.

Christ's Perfect Righteousness for Believers

For every soul of Adam born who will believe in Christ, there is a perfect righteousness not ours, but God's. God came here in human form, not bound to be obedient, but being found in fashion as a man, he became obedient.

Obedient to his own law and fulfilled every jot and tittle of it. He was obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. And his obedience is ours if we believe. God looks at us as if we had done what his son has done.

Christ died and rose again. And God regards us as having died in him and reckons that we are risen with him and now live in him. Our righteousness is the righteousness of another, even of the Son of God, a perfect righteousness, a divine righteousness, an everlasting righteousness.

In the book of Daniel, it is written that Messiah, the prince, should finish the transgression, make an end of sins, make reconciliation for iniquity and bring in everlasting righteousness. He was made sin for us who knew no sin that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.

Alas, how many there are who do not know that God justifieth the ungodly, that sinners can be regarded as just through what Christ has done and suffered, and that believing in the precious Christ whom God has set forth to be a propitiation, the vilest are fair to look upon in God's esteem and the far off ones are made nigh by the blood of Christ.

Oh, I wish that men knew it. I've sometimes thought that if they did but know it, if they did but really hear the gospel, they must believe it. You that preach Christ in the streets, go on preaching him.

I saw a man preaching the other day with no creature but one dog to listen to him, and I really thought that he might as well have gone home. But I met with a story yesterday which I know to be true. And it showed me that I was making a mistake.

There was a woman who for years had been in such dreadful despair that she would not even hear the gospel. She came to be very ill, and she said to one that called upon her, you sent a man to preach under my window three months ago, and I got a blessing.

No, the friend said, I never sent anybody to preach under your window. Oh, she said, I think you did, for he came and preached, and my maid said that there was nobody listening to him. I did not want to hear him.

And as he made so much noise, my maid shut the window and I lay down in bed. But the man shouted so that I was obliged to hear him, and I thank God I did. For I heard the gospel, and I found Christ. Did you not send him?

No, said the good man, I did not. Well, she said, then God did. There was nobody in the street listening to him. But I heard the gospel, and I got out of my despair, and I found the Savior, and I am prepared to die.

Fire away, brethren! You do not know where your shot will strike, but there's a billet for every bullet. I believe that there is some soul whom God means to bless whenever we preach the gospel, depending upon his grace.

The Gospel Must Be Heard and Understood

But the mass of mankind are ignorant of the righteousness which God requires, and ignorant of the righteousness which God has provided. Many are ignorant as to how they are to receive this righteousness.

If there be such a righteousness, say they, how are we to get it? The current notion is, I must pray so much, I must weep so much, I must feel so much. Ah, this is the common ignorance, whereas men should know that there is life for a look at the crucified one.

Why, everybody preaches this, says someone. I know they do. But people do not understand it, although you keep on preaching it. For until God the Holy Ghost makes men to know the meaning of what you say, they will but nod their heads and pass on.

Though I heard the gospel from my childhood, and was brought up upon the very knee of piety, I did not understand what I must do to be saved till I heard that text preached from Look unto me, and be ye saved, O the ends of the earth.

I do not believe that my ignorance was the fault of the preacher. It was certainly not the fault of my father or my mother, and not the fault of the Bible, which I had read through again and again, but it was the fault of these dim eyes that I could not see.

Go on, ye preachers of the word. Spread abroad the knowledge of this great fact, that he that believeth on the sun hath everlasting life. The worst of this terrible ignorance is that the mass of mankind do not know him who is our righteousness.

Who is the righteousness of God? Who is the blessed one? God's only begotten son. God, the word made flesh, born at Bethlehem, nurtured in the carpenter's shop, toiling here below and wearing his life away for the souls of men, extending his arms upon the cross, giving his side to be pierced, his soul to be breathed out, his body to be laid in the tomb, that men might be saved.

O Jesus, in thy wounds is our salvation. But men do not know it. O Jesus, thy death is the death of sin. Thy life is our life unto God. But men do not know it. Alas, alas, men still go on in their blindness and ignorance.

Still is the Lord of life despised and rejected of men. And still his servants cry, who has believed our report? And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? You see, our great difficulty is human ignorance.

Ignorance, dear friends, even of the facts of the truth. You do not know how near to this place in the very midst and heart of London there are tens of thousands who do not know the name of Christ. You think it incredible, but I know that it is so.

There are multitudes that have never read a chapter in the word of God since they went to Sunday school as children, and they never darkened the threshold of God's house. There are streets in neighborhoods not far from here, where if one man goes to a place of worship, he is marked by all his neighbors as a strange character.

Let me turn aside for a moment and ask you, how in this city of London are we to get the gospel to the working men, to a great number of them? How does it get to some of them? How? Oh, little Mary sings it on father's knee on Sunday night.

He has not been out to a place of worship, but his little girl has been to the Sunday school. Or his son Jack has been to the mission and comes home and tells his father what the preacher said. He will listen to his own children when he will listen to no one else.

The way to increase the number of those who are not ignorant is for us so to see the things of Christ that others who have never seen them may have from us an intimation of what we've seen. Oh, it must be very painful to a blind man for another to say to him, now I am looking over a delightful landscape.

Away there I can see a beautiful piece of water and beyond the hills I see the sea. There is a ship going along. Oh, the man says, I wish I had eyes that I could see too. The Holy Spirit makes us see that as we tell the story, we may set others longing to see also.

The Joy of Salvation Draws Others to Christ

I think I reminded you once before that when the prodigal came back his father said, bring forth the best robe and put it on him and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet. But you will notice he never fed him.

The father does not say anything about that. He says, bring hither the fatted calf and kill it and let us eat and be merry. Well, it is the servants and all the rest of the household that are to eat. There's nothing said about killing the fatted calf for the prodigal.

No, no, you see, he had lost his appetite and others must begin to eat fast. And then when they began to eat, he was sure to join in with them. There's no sure way of begetting an appetite than seeing other people eating.

Let us enjoy the things of Christ so much that poor sinners mouths will water and they will begin to ask, what is thy beloved more than any other beloved? What is this righteousness whereof you speak?

What is this wonderful thing? We have need to tell out what we know. For ignorance, even of the simple facts of the gospel is extremely common. Others are in great ignorance as to the excellence of the gospel.

They do not know the peace, the joy, the rest it brings. His worth, if all the nations knew. Sure, the whole world would love him, too. But they think that it is all mere talk. Or something all very well for parsons and for some few other people to get hold of.

But nothing for the working man, nothing for the man of business, nothing for your noble gentleman who has his heaven at Newmarket and his bliss at Epsom. Our dear friends, I would to God they knew the pearl of great price, the incomparable value of salvation by blood.

For then they would reckon the highest glory of this present world as unworthy to be compared with the least delight of the kingdom of God. With many, the ignorance is willful. Nobody is so blind as the man that does not want to see.

Nobody so deaf as the man that does not wish to hear. Many are like the hogs in harvest, very deaf when they are told to go out of the cornfield. And so, when sinners run riot in their sins, they are very deaf indeed when they are told to quit them and fly to Christ for refuge.

Some of you perhaps do not want to know too much. When you come to that part of the Bible that begins to touch your conscience, you say, shut that up. You will go on somewhere else. You do not want to know.

Willful ignorance will bring terrible damnation. If there be salvation and you do not want to know it, then you deserve to be cast away. There are some who are ignorant despairingly. And I do pity them, poor souls.

They sigh and cry, oh, I cannot be saved, I am so guilty, my heart is so hard. The devil tells men first that they can be saved any day they like, so they may put it off. Then immediately afterwards he says, salvation is not for such as you.

You never had enough sense of sin. You never will have enough faith. God will never save you. Oh, my dear friend, I wish I could make you understand that whoever comes to Christ, he will in no wise cast out.

For he himself has said, he that believeth on me hath, hath now everlasting life. He shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck him out of Christ's hands. Some of us will give Christ great glory when we get to heaven.

I think that some people will meet us at the gate and say, what, and have you got here? I should not wonder if it was some elder brother. That elder brother was a good fellow. He was a real child and he was always with his father and all his father had was his.

Yet he was surprised to see the prodigal come home after wasting his father's living. Ah, but it is those that cost the Lord so much in whom his infinite grace will be displayed. They will glorify him most.

Oh, ye despairing ones, if you must faint, faint away into the bosom of Christ, swoon away into the arms of the almighty Savior, and then it will be well to have swooned and you will find in him your strength.

Self-Righteousness and the Refusal of Grace

There is another thing that stands in our way that is worse than ignorance. And that is self will. Men ignorant of God's righteousness are said to be going about to establish their own righteousness. In other words, to set up the poor idol of their own righteousness.

Man sees God's righteousness and instead of accepting it, he says. I think I could match that. I will set up my own righteousness. There is a treasure of gold and the man says, no, I will not have that.

I think that I could make a sovereign at home out of a bit of brass. Fool that he is, how shall he mimic God? If I were at heaven's wide open gate and a voice would say, enter freely. And I replied, no, I think I prefer the Surrey Hills or a place down by the seaside.

What a fool I should be. But even then, not so great a fool as when forsaking the righteousness of God, I want to set up my own. A human thing at best. How shall that match the divine righteousness? An imperfect thing at best.

How shall I compare that with the perfect righteousness of Christ? A fading, fleeting thing, always apt to be damaged by the next moment's temptation. How can I be so foolish? A ridiculous thing, an ignominious thing, a filthy thing.

Paul said that his righteousness, which was of the law, was blameless. And yet he counted it done that he might win Christ. Done the most filthy thing. Here, scavenger, take it away. Have any of you any righteousness of your own?

I do not believe that even the dust man would have it. He would say, no, the carts are not for carting away man's righteousness. We have no place bad enough to shoot it into. Shoot it into the bottomless pit.

Nay, even there they have not any righteousness, for they know their true condition. Human righteousness is a great lie. It is filthy rags away with it from off the face of the earth. What do men try to do?

In what vain efforts are they spending their time and strength? According to the text, they go about to establish their own righteousness. I think you will better understand it if I read it. They go about to set up their own righteousness.

You see, it is a dead thing. See here, they say, we will make it stand. If I had a corpse here, I am glad that I have not. Well, I set it up. Well, I set it up and it tumbles down. Nevertheless, I will put its legs out a little wider and see whether it will stand.

Down it goes. Now I will prop it up. Surely I can make this dead thing stand. But no, it has a tendency to fall and down it goes. Have I not seen a sinner try to set up the corpse of his own righteousness and make it stand?

At last, he has been obliged to say what the fool said in the old classic. It wants something inside. And so it does. For until there is life within, it will not stand. Even so, our righteousness has no true vitality, no life within, and it will not stand.

Or to use another illustration, it is like a man trying to patch up an old house. You find such in country villages, a place which nobody has ever repaired for 50 years. I do not know if there is any landlord, but if there is, he would like to forget that he has such a property.

The main beam is nearly cracked through. The lathe and plaster have gone long ago, and the birds go in and out to the best parlor whenever they like, and the whole thing is tumbling down. A man buys it and he says, Now you know, it is a pity to pull this house down.

I think I will repair it. So he puts in a beam there, just under the roof. And he puts a strut here and another timber there, and by the time he has spent as much as would have built a house, he has got a very handsome ruin left and nothing more.

I think it was Charles I who used to swear, God mend me. Somebody said it would be an easier job to make a new one of him, and I believe it. When men say, God mend me, they had better say, God make me new.

So as to your righteousness, if you have a lot of it, and it is very good, if you have been christened, or baptized, if you like, and confirmed and have always gone to your place of worship, and are so good that you wonder you can live in such a wicked world as this, if you have all that righteousness, the best thing to do with it is to get rid of it, for it will ruin your soul.

The Futility of Efforts to Establish Personal Righteousness

But this is what men do. They try to set up their own righteousness. And then the text says that they go about to do this. Going about to establish their own righteousness. That is to say, they set about it with great zeal.

Some of you that know the Lord can recollect how you thought you would do it. Why, at first, when you started as a young man, you were never going to do anything wrong. You were going to have a perfect righteousness of your own.

You had an ugly temper, however, and it broke out indeed. Well, you said, I shall never do so again. You came down to breakfast, and you were as bad-tempered as ever. So you said, never mind, I will set it up now.

I shall be a tea-tolker. That will be a grand thing. So it was. But somehow or other, down tumbled your righteousness again. Then you went to a place of worship. You said, I will always be there. You began to think that you would grow into a saint, but you did not.

Down tumbled your righteousness. Over it went, and you, all the while, tried zealously to set it up. Going about implies great earnestness. When a man says, I am going about a thing, he means that he is going to take his coat off, going to work in his shirt sleeves.

He is going to toil at it for many hours. I recollect how I set to work in my shirt sleeves to make a righteousness of my own. And I did very nicely indeed, while it was dark. But when a little light from the cross broke in, I began to see the filthiness of it.

And you, my friend, think yourself very beautiful when you cannot see yourself. But let the looking glass be held before you. You would begin to see the spots of filth that defile the very best of your righteousnesses.

Ah me, how foul the righteousness of men is. And yet they go about to set up their own righteousness. To go about to establish a righteousness means, in the next place, that men have varied ways of doing it.

Shall I tell you what I frequently meet with? I have talked with a person and said, can you trust in your own works? Oh no, sir, I can never do that. Well, can you come to Christ and take the righteousness of God?

Well, sir, no, I do not feel enough my own emptiness. Look, this man is going to bring his own emptiness to help him. He actually thinks that if he has not any righteousness, his own emptiness is good for something.

And if he can get to feel that he will come and bring his feelings of emptiness to commend him to Christ. Did you ever hear such a thing? You go to him and you say, my dear man, salvation is not on account of your feelings.

Each time you drive him out of his refuge of life, he hastens back to the old ground again, something of himself. Suppose there is a ship out at sea and the people on board feel that they are safe. One of them says, I know that we shall not drift far out, of course.

Why? Because we have such a big anchor on board. You say, ah, he is a cockney. He must be a fool who believes in an anchor on board. Why, it is no good to anybody. It is when you let go the anchor and lose sight of it and the anchor gets an unseen grip down below.

That is good for something. But while the anchor is on board, it is only so much dead weight for the ship. You want to have your anchor on board, do you not? You do not like it to enter into that which is within the veil.

That is too mysterious. You want to feel something, to have something of your own. Oh, pride. Oh, self-will. God will have salvation to be all of grace and man will have it of death. God gives the promise of his grace and man puts his penny down to pay for it.

Men's pennies and God's promises do not very well go together to buy heaven. He says, like a king, you may have it for nothing. And we say, Lord, we think we could make up a little something to buy it.

Well, then, you will never have it. His terms are free, rich, sovereign grace. A sinner with nothing, receiving everything from God. He may have it. He may have it now. None can say him nay. But he stands, chaffering, trying to pay his penny, as if God kept a shop.

Has God come down to stand in your market and cry to you, here, bring your gold and your silver to purchase my favor? You know not who he is, for all things are his. If he were hungry, he would not tell you, for the cattle on a thousand hills belong to him.

Well, will you have salvation freely? If so, take it freely. But if you will buy it, you and God can never agree. Let me just close this point about human will by saying that the efforts of men for their own salvation are deadly efforts.

Submission to God's Righteousness

God will save them one way, and they want to be saved another. God says, there is medicine, take it, drink it. Man says, no, I will grow my own drugs in my own garden, and I will compound my own physic.

And he goes and takes his own dose. And can he ever get well in such a way as that? God says, I will forgive. Man says, I will try and deserve to be forgiven, as if that could be possible. I've heard that the Romanists say that venial sins are a kind of sins that deserve to be forgiven.

What sort of sin must that be? Yet some men seem to think that somehow or other, they can deserve to be forgiven. That would not be forgiveness at all. Come, come ye vilest of the vile, ye lost and utterly undone.

Come, come you that have no righteousness or the ghost of a shade of a shadow of a pretense of any. Come as you are, there is everything you want in Christ. Come and have him, and you shall not be refused, but reject his terms, and salvation can never be yours.