The Cedars of Lebanon

Spurgeon uses the wild, uncultivated, man-independent cedars of Lebanon — planted by God alone, watered by clouds rather than canals, protected by no hedge or ranger, answering to no human inspection, expecting nothing from man — as a sustained portrait of the mature believer who has learned to live entirely upon God: asking nothing of creatures, expecting nothing of circumstances, leaning on no eloquent preacher or generous donor, but drawing life directly from the Rock on which he stands, and thereby becoming, like the cedars, fuller, greener, more fragrant, more enduring, and more venerable than any hot-house plant man could ever cultivate. He then argues that this divine independence is also divine fullness — "the trees of the Lord are full of sap" — tracing that sap as essentially vital (without it there is no Christianity, only a corpse going through religious motions), mysteriously divine (the Life of God infused into the soul by the Spirit, as inexplicable as the wind but just as real), radically secret in its source (rooted in Christ as secretly and deeply as cedar roots penetrate stone), permanently active even when outwardly still (the blood circulates even when the hand does not move), and externally inevitable (a man saturated with this Life cannot hide it, since the Divine resin oozes out through every conversation, every action, and every corner of his house). He closes with a double appeal: to believers, urging them to pray for more of this sap, to abandon their half-hearted dependence on creature-support, to rise from hyssop-on-the-wall Christians to cedar-on-Lebanon Christians — pressing forward as Paul did, never content with the degree of grace yet obtained — and to unconverted sinners, simply inviting them to trust in the Lord, since the very Life he has been describing as the Christian's glory is freely available to all who come, and those who trust in him will never, in any circumstance, be confounded.Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on September 13, 1863.