“Not unto us, O LORD, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory, for thy mercy, and for thy truths sake.” —Psalms 115:1
There are times when this is the only plea that God’s people can use. There are other occasions when we can plead with God to bless us, for this reason or for that; but, sometimes, there come dark experiences, when there seems to be no reason that can suggest itself to us why God should give us deliverance, or vouchsafe us a blessing, except this one, —that he would be pleased to do it in order to glorify his own name. Moses is an 
example of how this plea prevails with the Lord. When he was on the mount with God, and Jehovah threatened to destroy the idolatrous Israelites, Moses pleaded: “Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did he bring them out, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou swarest by thine own self, and sadist unto them, I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have spoken of will I give unto your seed, and they shall inherit it for ever. And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.” Joshua also used the same plea when he said to the Lord, after Israel’s defeat at Ai, “What wilt thou do unto thy great name?” He could not say, “Lord, hear me for Israel’s sake,” for they were utterly unworthy. He did not dare to say, “Deliver us for my sake;” he had not conceit or self-righteousness enough to present such a plea as that. He could not even say, “Hear us for Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob’s sake,” for the people had broken the covenant which God had made with their fathers; so he pleaded with the Lord, “Think of thine own honor; think of thy great name; think of thy repute among the heathen;” and thus he prevailed. It is noteworthy that that awful attribute of holy jealousy, which, under some aspects, is like a terrible flame, is the very one which helps us when everything else fails. Jehovah is very jealous of his own honor, and hence it is that, when the heathen say, “Where is now their God?” he answers their taunt by ceasing to chasten his people; —not for their sakes, but for his own mercy and truth’s sake, that the heathen may not think him unmerciful to his people, nor be able to accuse him of being unfaithful to his covenant.
Brothers and sisters, in all your times of distress, you will do well to urge this plea with the Lord. Possibly, you are pleading for a certain class of men or women who have grossly sinned; it may be that you have, on your heart, the case of one person who has gone to great lengths of iniquity. You can always plead, “Lord, save that sinful soul, to make thy grace the more illustrious. Do it, that others, who have witnessed his sin, may admire thy wonderful compassion; —that his relatives and friends, who have heard his blasphemies, and been horrified by them, may see what thou canst do when thou dost bare thine almighty arm, and magnify thy deeds of grace.”
—Charles H. Spurgeon (1834-1892)
delivered Thursday Evening, May 16, 1878 at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington
Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Vol. 48 Sermon No. 2784, “Non Nobis, Domine!”
My hearer, have you ever been one of these violent men, or are you so now? Blessed be God if this holy violence is in your spirit: you shall take heaven by force yet, you shall take it by storm, and carry the gates of heaven by the battery of your prayers. Only persevere with importunity; still plead, still wrestle, still continue to strive, and you must at length prevail. But ah! my hearer, if thou hast never had a strong unconquerable anxiety about thy soul, thou art as yet a stranger to the things of God. Thou dost not understand that violence victorious without which the gates of heaven never can be stormed. Some of us can look back to the time when we were seeking Christ. I could myself awake of a morning easily then. The first ray of light that came my chamber would awaken me to take up Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted that lay under my pillow. I believed I had not repented enough, and I began to read that. Oh! how I hoped that would break my heart. And then I would get Doddridge’s Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, and Allen’s Alarm,
Have you fears about the future? I need not stay to tell you how sweetly the text will lull them all to sleep. Yet suffer me these few sentences. Do you fear the darkness of future trial? The Lord God is your sun. Do you fear dangers which lie before you in some new sphere upon which you are just entering? The Lord will be your shield. Are there difficulties in your way? Will you need great wisdom and strength? God’s grace will be sufficient for you, and his strength will be glorified in your weakness. Do you fear failure? Do you dread final apostasy? It shall not be. He who gives you grace will, without fail, give you glory. Between here and heaven there is provender for all the flock of God, so that they need not fear famishing on the road. He that leads them shall guide them into pastures that never wither, and to fountains that are never dried up, for “no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly.”
The opposition of the great ones of the earth did not, after all, hinder the cause of Christ. The Pharisees, who were the leaders of religious thought, combined with the Herodians, who were the court party, to destroy Jesus; but at the very moment when their wrath had reached its highest pitch the crowd about the Saviour’s person was greater than ever. Let us not, therefore, dear friends, be at all dismayed if great men and learned men, and nominally religious men, should oppose the simple gospel of Christ.
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