Grosey's Messages

I remember receiving a phone call from a neighbour to the church I pastored in Newcastle.  "You have better come down.. your church is on fire!  What? Yes its burning.. "Can you call the firebrigade? I am on my way down."

All efforts at extinguishimg it seemed to for awhile to fail. The expensive organ, the billowing smoke, the flames shooting out of my office window, the fireman and the police stopping me from entering the burning building. "What are you going to do in there?"  "I don't know, stop it I guess!"

 Some saw in that nothing but unmitigated disaster, while others of us heard the voice of God as from heaven, sounding through the crackling thunder of that awful day. 

And the reminders this week of the power of fire in the disaster at Los Angeles.

First, it was sudden.

We all felt that whatever else might go down, that Tabernacle never could. We thought it fire-proof when on that day that building was in flames, there was on every face in the street amazement.

Sudden as sudden could be !

Spiritual fire broke out here last year.  Many were rising and asking for prayers, there was a look of amazement on the faces of the people, and some aged Christians wondered what it all meant. Suddenly. suddenly. So nearly always does the Spirit come. So He came when Jonathan Edwards preached in Northampton, and John Livingstone in Scotland, and William Tennant preached in Monmouth and Dr. Finlay preached in Baskinridge, and  Nettleton, and Daniel Baker, and Truman Osborne, and Mr. Earle, and Edward Payson preached everywhere. Almost always the blessing came suddenly. It has been especially so in our midst. In a night family altars have been reared in houses where before there was no prayer; infidels persuaded of the truth of Christianity in five minutes ; children going unsaved coming home Christians; men coming into these services to make merry with the anxiety of those who were seeking after God, themselves at the close rising for prayer; and many of the old passages of Scripture that seemed to lie dormant in the hearts of God's people have flashed up with unwonted and overwhelming power.

Whitefield was once preaching on Blackheath, and a man and his wife coming from market saw the crowd and went up to hear. Whitefield was saying something about what happened eighteen hundred years ago, and the man said to his wife, "Come, Mary, we will not stop any longer. He is talking about something that took place more than eighteen hundred years ago. What's that to us?" But they were fascinated. They could not get away. The truth of God came to their hearts.

When they were home, they took down the Bible and said, "Is it possible that these old truths have been here so long and we have not known it ?" Ah ! it was in the flash of God's Spirit on Blackheath that they were saved —the Spirit coming mightily, and suddenly, and overwhelmingly upon them. So it was that God's Spirit came to Andrew Fuller and Bishop Latimer— suddenly.

 

It was irresistible.

Notwithstanding all our boasted machinery and organization for putting out fires, the efforts that were made did not repulse the flames one single instant. Having begun, they kept on more and more triumphantly, clapping their hands over the destroyed building. There was a great sound of fire-trumpets and brave men walking on hot walls; but the flames were balked not an instant.

So it has been with the Holy Spirit moving through the hearts of this people. Why, there have been aged men who for forty or fifty years resisted the truth who have surrendered! There have been men here who have sworn that the religion of Jesus Christ should never come into their households; they and their children kneel now at the same altar. We have all felt it. Formalists trying to put out the spiritual fire have only had their trouble for their pains. It has gone on.

It is going on now, conquering pride, and worldliness, and sin ; and I pray it may keep on until it has swept everything before it, and there shall be in every household an altar, and in every heart a throne for the blessed Jesus.

Go on, great baptism of the Holy Ghost as with fire! In the days of revival in England, when John Wesley was preaching, everywhere scoffers would mimic his preaching, and one man thought it was very smart to gather an audience, and stand up with a Bible, and take John Wesley's favorite text, "Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish ;" and he preached—he, the scoffer—to an audience of scoffers, until the truth rebounded on his own heart and he cried for mercy, and the truth overwhelmed the hearts of his hearers, and they cried for mercy, and instead of being an audience of mockers it became an audience of seekers. Oh ! this is the power of God, this is the wisdom of God unto salvation. Both baptisms—the one of fire and the one of the Holy Ghost —irresistible.

 

It was consuming.

Did you ever see any more thorough work than was done by that fire? The strongest beams turned to ashes. The iron cracked, curled up, and was destroyed. The work of the flames consummate. So it has been with the Holy Ghost :it has been a consuming fire amidst the sins and the habits of those who despise God. How many have had their transgressions utterly consumed ! Some who were victims of bad habits have had their chains broken off. Down at the club-room and down at the saloon, they wonder why these people do not come any more.

So may it always be—the Spirit of God consuming the dissipations of men !

That Spirit has gone through the hearts and lives of many who sit before me, like fire through stubble. They have been swept by the purifying flames. Fire is consuming.

 

It was melting.

If you examined the bars and bolts, and plumbing work of the Tabernacle after it went down, you know it was a melting process. The things that seemed to have no relation to each other adjoined flowed together. So it has been with the Spirit of God, melting down all asperities and unbrotherliness. Heart has flowed out toward heart. It has been a melting process. If there is any thing that our city churches need, it is melting. There are a thousand icicles hanging to the eaves of our city churches where there are two icicles hanging to the eaves of the country churches. We are so afraid we will get acquainted with somebody that will not do us honor! The great want of the Church to-day is a thaw—a thaw. Oh, that the Lord God would rise up and melt down the freezing conventionalities of his Church !

I think the fire of God's Spirit working in our midst here have melted us we flow together in Christian sympathy, and harmony, and love, and that we can now join hands in one great family circle as a church, and sing as we never sang before:

"Before our Father's throne We pour our ardent prayers

Our fears, our hopes, our aims are one, Our comforts and our cares.

"The glorious hope revives Our courage by the way,

While each in expectation lives, And longs to see the day."

 

God evidently does not intend us for smooth work. He has rocked us in a very rough cradle. Ofttimes has this church been assaulted in various ways, and if there are any who expect to have a smooth time and an easy pathway, they had better wake up from the delusion and get out of this church. If God baptized us with fire, it is because he means to fit us for hot and tremendous work. If you are afraid of fatigue, and afraid of persecution, and afraid of opposition, you had better not train in this battalion, for I have no quiet encampment to offer you by still waters; but rather to tell you of a forced march, hard fighting, and a bayonet charge. I believe God means us to go forth and proclaim an earnest, uncompromising, out and out, straightforward, revolutionary,  old-fashioned Gospel, that believes in repentance and regeneration, in glory and in perdition.

We want that Spirit to come down in all our families with his arousing, melting, illuminating, saving presence; and I believe that then the influences which we have already had in the way of a blessing will be only as a spark compared with the great  conflagration of religious enthusiasm and zeal we shall feel here.

But, my friends, when is this work to begin ? If you, as a private Christian, and I, as a minister of the Lord Jesus Christ, have some work to do, when shall we begin it? Now, and here.

 

Remember , a fire..It will be when the Lord shall be revealed from heaven with flaming fire, to take vengeance upon those who know not God and obey not the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ!

From that conflagration LA shall recover; but the soul that goes down into that final conflagration shall never recuperate. That fire last week continued only three or four hours, and on the following day even the smoke ceased to curl up in the frosty air but that soul that rejects Christ shall go into a fire that shall never be quenched, " and the smoke of its torment ascends up forever and forever." May God Almighty through Jesus Christ keep us out of that ! Whatever misfortune and disaster may come upon us in this world, let it come ; but God forbid that any of us should lose heaven ! We can not afford to lose our soul. Save that, we have saved every thing. Lose that, we have lost every thing. Instead of the baptism that consumes, oh that we might this morning, penitently, believingly, prayerfully, joyfully receive the Saviour I suppose that some of you know there were persons who stood in the presence of that burning church who for the first time sought after God. They said then to themselves ; indeed they arose in the prayermeetings afterward, and said it: "When I stood in the presence of that building, I was reminded as never before that there was nothing fire-proof, that there was nothing on earth certain, and there and then, in the presence of that devastation and ruin, I resolved that I would be the Lord's, and I have kept my promise. I have given my heart to Jesus."

I rehearse the scene, shall it not be, under God's Spirit, the means of bringing some of you to Christ? You have tried this world. You have been drinking out of the fountains of its pleasure. You have tried in January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September,

October, November, December and now, and tell me frankly, oh man of the world! is there any thing this side Christ and heaven that can give solace, and peace, and contentment to your immortal nature? No; you know there is nothing. You have tried the world, and it has failed you. It is a cheating world. It is a lying world. It is a dying world. Oh, seek after God to-day, and be at peace with him!

" When we cannot see our way,

We should trust and still obey ;

He who bids us forward go,

Will instruct the way to know."