There are three respects in which the promise of our text may be regarded as applying to those who answer to the description of the people of God. The believer has no cause to be ashamed: (1) When he searches into himself; (2) when he stands before the world; (3) when he stands before God.
I. It is proved by daily experience that, when his own heart is laid open to a man, he shrinks from the scene of foulness and deformity, and could not endure, for any consideration, that others should see him in the light in which he now sees himself. He cannot look into a single recess of his heart without finding fresh cause for confusion of face; inasmuch as the more he knows himself, the more he sees of his moral uncleanness, the more he ascertains that he is everything at which he should blush, and has nothing in which he should trust. The conscience of the believer may charge him with many offences, and bring him in guilty of much that is at variance with the law of God, but if he have respect unto all God's commandments, conscience may produce the catalogue, and yet not put him to shame. Conscience can have nothing with which to rebuke him, and therefore he can have nothing to be ashamed of at the tribunal of conscience, if he have not sinned in contempt of its remonstrances, and if he have shown a heartfelt repentance for sins committed.
II. Nothing but a clear conscience will enable us to look the world calmly and fearlessly in the face. The people of God must carry religion with them into every business of life, and see that all scenes are pervaded by its influence. They must have respect unto all the commandments; to make exceptions is to make a breach by which shame comes in. And if it be their endeavour to keep all the commandments, we know not why Christians should not bear themselves with that lofty dignity which no calumny can disturb.
III. The people of God need not be ashamed when brought into the presence of God. They have respect unto all God's commandments, and amongst these from the first have been reckoned the commandments which relate to faith. Here we have the groundwork of confidence before God, notwithstanding our own insufficiency. If there be respect to that commandment which enjoins that we take Christ as our surety, and depend on His merits, what cause remains for shame even though it be the High and Holy One that inhabiteth eternity in whose presence we stand? "Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect?"
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 1541.
No person can doubt that a great part of the unhappiness and of the sin which there is in the world consists in a sense of shame. And by shame I mean a consciousness of mortified distress. So powerful a feeling is it, and so saddening, that God has thought it not unworthy to be recorded even among the joys of paradise, that its inhabitants were "not ashamed." Look at the different kinds of shame to which we are all subject.
I. Among the shames which we have all felt, we must place our retrospects. And here I mean in a twofold sense: the shame of beginnings which have had no endings, and the shame of beginnings which have ended in nothing but disappointment and wretchedness. Paul summed it all up long ago, about a man of the world: "What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed?" And he drew the contrast with the Christian: "But this hope maketh not ashamed." The child of God is not like the man who began to build a tower, and had never calculated how he could finish it; but long since he has laid his foundation in God's own faithfulness, and he has been careful before he began to connect his work with God's glory. So he goes on in a holy confidence, while the very confidence he holds commands the issue.
II. There is another sense of shame I mean the feeling of present loneliness. To be alone in what is good, does, of itself, tend to make a man ashamed. The remedy for the feeling of shame in standing alone for Christ and truth is in the conviction of the sacred presences that are with us and about us. Let such an one, who is ashamed of the "shame" of standing alone, read the latter part of the twelfth of Hebrews, and see to what he is come, and in the midst of which he is placed every moment; and the sense of that spiritual companionship will take away all his "shame," and he will feel how God gave His promise to all His own sorrowful ones: "My people shall never be ashamed."
III. Is not sin in its very nature a shame, and does not a Christian feel, more than any other, the "shame," the deep shame, of sin? You must remember that faith cuts off all painful retrospects; but if that man be living, as he ought to be living, in the assurance of God's love, the shame is so swallowed up and lost in the feeling of forgiveness, and Christ's glory is so his glory in it, that his eye may weep indeed, but it will still look up; the man may be in the dust, but his heart is in the heavens; he is humble, but he is not dejected; he is cast very low, but not ashamed.
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,2nd series, p. 220.
Reference: Joel 2:26. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xix., No. 1098. Joel 2:28-32. Pulpit Analyst,vol. i., p. 571.Joel 2:32. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxxii., No. 1931.Joel 3:1-8. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. i., p. 449. Joel 3:9-17. Ibid.,p. 450. Joel 3:14. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. xi., p. 207. Joel 3:16. W. H. Jackson, Christian Word Pulpit,vol. xix., p. 107. Joel 3:18-21. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. i., p. 452.Joel 3:21. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. vii., No. 379. Joel. S. Cox, Preacher's Lantern,vol. ii., pp. 9, 74, 137, 209, 265, 329; R, Smith, Ibid.,vol. iv., pp. 215, 349, 400.