A Meditation for those who do not meditate on Christ.

Be assured of this: your sins must be your meditation, then, if Christ is not your meditation now. May there be great searchings of heart this night! How often do your convictions disperse like the smoke from the chimney, or the chaff from the winnower's hand; they soon vanish. It will not profit you to live at this rate — hearing sermons and forgetting them. Take heed to the voice of warning, lest God should say, "He that being often reproved hardeneth his neck, shall be suddenly destroyed, and that without remedy." O wicked men! wicked men! one word to you, all of you who know not God, and ye shall go.

I will give you a subject for your meditation to-night. It shall be a parable.

A certain tyrant sent for one of his subjects, and said to him, "What is your employment?"

He said, "I am a blacksmith."

"Go home," said he, "and make me a chain of such a length"

He went home; it occupied him several months, and he had no wages all the while he was making the chain, only the trouble and the pains of making it.

Then he brought it to the monarch, and he said, "Go and make it twice as long." He gave him nothing to do it with, but sent him away.

Again he worked on, and made it twice as long. He brought it up again, and the monarch said, "Go and make it longer still."

Each time he brought it, there was nothing but the command to make it longer still. And when he brought it up at last, the monarch said, "Take it, bind him hand and foot with it, and cast him into a furnace of fire." There were his wages for making the chain.

Here is a meditation for you to-night, ye servants of the devil! Your master the devil is telling you to make a chain. Some of you have been fifty years welding the links of the chain; and he says, "Go and make it longer still. Next Sunday morning you will open that shop of yours, and put another link on; next Saturday night you will be drunk, and put another link on; next Monday you win do a dishonest action, and so you will keep on making fresh links to this chain; and when you have lived twenty more years, the devil will say, "More links on still!" And then, at last, it will be, "Take him, and bind him hand and foot, and cast him into a furnace of fire." "For the wages of sin is death." There is a subject for your meditation. I do not think it will be sweet; but if God makes it profitable, it will do good. You must have strong medicines sometimes, when the disease is bad. God apply it to your hearts! Amen.

~~C.H. Spurgeon, from Sermon 2690, Meditations on God.