First, “I will
deliver.” When God called Moses to go down into Egypt to deliver the children
of Israel from the hand of the Egyptians, in all the world there wasn’t a man
who, humanly speaking, was less qualified than Moses. He had made the attempt
once before to deliver the children of Israel, and he began by delivering one
man. He failed in that, and killed an Egyptian, and had to run off into the
desert, and stay there forty years. He had tried to deliver the Hebrews in his
own way, he was working in his own strength and doing it in the energy of the
flesh. He had all the wisdom of the Egyptians, but that didn’t help him. He had
to be taken back into Horeb, and kept there forty years in the school of God,
before God could trust him to deliver the children of Israel in God’s way. Then
God came to him and said, “I have come down to deliver,” and when God worked
through Moses three million were delivered as easy as I can turn my hand over.
God could do it. It was no trouble when God came on the scene.
Learn the lesson. If we want to
be delivered, from every inward and outward foe, we must look to a higher
source than ourselves. We cannot do it in our own strength.
We all have some weak point in
our character. When we would go forward, it drags us back, and when we would
rise up into higher spheres of usefulness and the atmosphere of heaven,
something drags us down. Now I have no sympathy with the idea that God puts us
behind the blood and saves us, and then leaves us in Egypt to be under the old
taskmaster. I believe God brings us out of Egypt into the promised land, and
that it is the privilege of every child of God to be delivered from every foe,
from every besetting sin.
If there is some sin that is
getting the mastery over you, you certainly cannot be useful. You certainly
cannot bring forth fruit to the honor and glory of God until you get
self-control. “He that ruleth his spirit is better than he that taketh a city.”
If we haven’t got victory over jealousy, over envy, over self-seeking and
covetousness and worldly amusements and worldly pleasure, if we are not
delivered from all these things, we are not going to have power with God or
with men, and we are not going to be as useful as we might be if we got
deliverance from every evil. There isn’t an evil within or without but what He
will deliver us from if we will let Him. That is what He wants to do. As God
said to Moses, “I have come down to deliver.” If He could deliver three million
slaves from the hands of the mightiest monarch on earth, don’t you think He can
deliver us from every besetting sin, and give us complete victory over
ourselves, over our temper, over our dispositions, over our irritableness and
peevishness and snappishness? If we want it and desire it above everything
else, we can get victory.
People are apt to think that
these little things (as we call them) are weaknesses that we are not
responsible for; that they are misfortunes, that we inherited them. I have
heard people talk about their temper. They say,
“Well, I inherited it from my
father and mother; they were quick-tempered, and I got it from them.”
Well, that is a poor place to
hide, my friend. Grace ought to deliver us from all those things.
A lady came to me some time ago
and said she had great trouble with her temper now, and she was more irritable
than she was five years ago, and she wanted to know if I didn’t think it was
wrong.
I said, “I should think you are
backsliding. If you haven’t better control over yourself now than you had five
years ago, there is something radically wrong.”
“Well,” she said, “I should like
to know how I am going to mend it. Can you tell me?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
I said, “When you get angry with
people and give them a good scolding, go right to them after you have made up
your mind that you have done wrong, and tell them you have sinned and ask them
to forgive you.”
She said she wouldn’t like to do
that.
Of course she wouldn’t; but she
will never get victory until she treats it as sin. Don’t look upon it as
weakness or misfortune, but sin.
No child of God ought to lose control of temper without confessing it.
A lady came to me some time ago
and said that she had got so in the habit of exaggerating that people accused
her of misrepresentation. She wanted to know if there was any way she could
overcome it.
“Certainly,” I said.
“How?”
“Next time you catch yourself at
it, go right to the party and tell them you lied.”
“Oh!” she said, “I wouldn’t like
to call it lying.”
Of course not, but a lie is a lie
all the same, and you will never overcome those sins until you treat them as
sins and get them out of your nature. If you want to shine in the light of God
and be useful, you must overcome, you must be delivered. And that is what God
says He will do; He will deliver.
Moody, D. L. (1900). Moody’s Latest Sermons (pp. 10–13).
Chicago: Fleming H. Revell.
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