THEN WE SHALL APPEAR by C. H. Spurgeon

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 14, 1881

THEN WE SHALL APPEAR.

By C. H. Spurgeon

“When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory.” Col. 3:4.

Do YOU ever feel like those lions in the Zoological Gardens, restlessly walking up and down before the bars of their cage, and protesting thereby that they were never meant to be confined within those narrow limits? Sometimes they are for thrusting their heads through the bars, and then for dashing back and tearing the back of their dungeon, or for rending up the pavement beneath them, as if they yearned for liberty. Do you ever feel like that? Does your soul ever want to get free from her cage?

Here is an iron bar of sin, of doubt, and there is another iron bar of mistrust and infirmity. Oh, if you could tear them away, could get rid of them all, you would do something for Christ—you would be like Christ. Oh, if you could but by some means or other burst the bands of this captivity! But you cannot, and therefore you feel uneasy.

You may have seen an eagle with a chain upon its foot, standing on a rock. Poor, unhappy thing! It flaps its wings—looks up to the sun—wants to fly straight ahead at it and stare it out of countenance—looks to the blue sky, and seems as if it could sniff the blue beyond the dusky clouds, and wants to be away; and so it tries its wings and dreams of mounting; but that chain, that cruel chain, remorselessly holds it down.

Has not it often been so with you? You feel, “I am not meant to be what I am, I am sure I am not; I have a something in me which is adapted for something higher, and I want to mount and soar; but that chain, that dragging chain of the body of sin and death, will keep me down.” Now, it is to such as you that this text comes, and says to you, “Yes, your present state is not your soul’s true condition, you have a hidden life in you; that life of yours pants to get out of the bonds and fetters which control it, and it shall be delivered soon, for Christ is coming, and when Christ shall appear you shall appear—the same appearance that belongs to him belongs to you. He shall come, and then your day of true happiness, and joy, and peace, and everything that you are panting for and longing for shall certainly come too.”

Whatever Christ’s body is in heaven, our body is to be like it; whatever its glory and strength and power, our vile body is to be fashioned like unto his glorious body. As for our soul, whatever of immortal joy Christ possesses, we are to possess that; and as for honor, whatever of esteem and love Christ may have from intelligent beings, we are to share in the same; and as for position before God, whatever Christ has, we are to stand wherever he stands.

Are his enemies put to confusion? So are ours. Do all worlds discern his glory? They shall discern ours too. Is all dishonor wiped away from him? So shall it be from us. Do they forget forever the shame and spitting, the cross and nails? So shall they in our case. Is it forever glory, and honor, and power, and dominion, and bliss without end? So shall it be in our case.

Let us comfort one another, therefore, with these words, and look up out of our wormhood and our chrysalis state to that happier and better day when we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

All this has nothing to do with a great many of you. You will die, but you will never rise like Christ. You will die, and you will die. Why did I say “and you will die?” Why, because you will have to feel the second death; and that second death, mark you, is as much more tremendous than the first as the trumpet of the angel is more terrible than the voice of the earth preacher can be.

Oh, I would that Christ were your life; but you are dead, and God will say of you one of these days, as Abraham said of Sarah, “Bury the dead out of my sight,” and you must be put out of his sight as an obnoxious, putrid thing. Oh, that he would quicken you this day! “There is life,” says the hymn, “in a look at the crucified One.” God help you to exercise one look at that Christ of whom I spoke, and then you shall join with the rest of his people in saying, “Christ is our life!”—C. H. Spurgeon.