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If we were what we profess to be!
Spurgeon, "Citizenship in Heaven" #476. Phil. 3:20.
There can be no comparison between
a soaring seraph and a crawling worm.
Christians ought so to live that it would
be idle to speak of a comparison between
them and the men of the world. It should
not be a comparison but a contrast.
The believer should be a direct
and manifest contradiction to the
unregenerate.
The life of a saint should be altogether
above, and out of the same list as the
life of a sinner.
While the world is darkness, we should
manifestly be light. And while the world
lies in the Wicked One, we should most
evidently be of God, and overcome the
temptations of that Wicked One.
Wide as the poles asunder, are
life and death,
light and darkness,
health and disease,
purity and sin,
spiritual and carnal,
divine and sensual.
If we were what we profess to be,
we would be as distinct a people in the
midst of this world, as a white race in a
community of Ethiopians.
There should be no more difficulty in
detecting the Christian from the worldling
than in discovering a sheep from a goat,
or a lamb from a wolf.
But Alas! the Church is so much adulterated!
O for the time when the ignoble life of the
worldly man, whose god is his belly and
whose end is destruction, shall be rebuked
by our unworldly, unselfish character!
There should be as much difference between
the worldling and the Christian as between hell
and heaven; between destruction and eternal life.
As we hope at last that there shall be a
great gulf separating us from the doom of
the impenitent; there should be here a deep
and wide gulf between us and the ungodly
in our lifestyles.
The purity of our character should be such,
that men must take knowledge of us that
we are of another and superior race!
God grant us more and more to be most
clearly a chosen generation, a royal priesthood,
a holy nation, a peculiar people, that we may
show forth the praises of him who has called
us out of darkness into his marvelous light.
Pass through this Vanity Fair without trading
in its vanities. When they ask, "What will you
buy?" your answer should be, "We buy the
Truth of God."
The lost world should be able to say of us,
"There goes a heavenly citizen, one who is
with us and among us but is not of us."
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