Spurgeon opens by tracing the four courts in which God has already pleaded the believer's cause: in the Court of Providence (raising up Ebedmelechs, Jonathans, and Boazes at exactly the right moment, turning enemies silent as stones and strangers into friends), in the Court of Divine Law (where Christ stands as the great Advocate, pleading first that sin has been fully punished in him so justice cannot punish it twice, and then that perfect obedience has been fully rendered in his place so the Law's demand for righteousness is also satisfied), in the Court of Conscience (where the blood applied by the Spirit silences every fear that memory, the devil, and inner self-examination can raise), and in the Court of Heaven (where Christ intercedes night and day before the Father, forestalling Satan's attacks before they reach us, and where on the Last Day every slandered and reputation-stripped saint will rise to vindication while their accusers are exposed). He then turns to the Christian's answering duty — pleading God's cause — beginning at the highest level, where he launches a sharp attack on the fashionable "charity" of his day that treats all religious opinions as equally acceptable, insisting that Christ and Truth are inseparable, that Rutherford's refusal to trade a hair's breadth of doctrine for his own freedom is the model for every faithful minister, and that the Church of England's tolerance of Puseyism, infidelity, and half-Popish teaching is a scandal demanding that her evangelical sons come out and plead for pure Truth regardless of the cost to their reputation. He closes by descending from the high places of controversy to the private barn, where one layman's tears over a hardened sinner accomplished what years of public preaching could not — arguing that holiness of life is a more powerful witness than any argument, that a flood of tears shed in love for a soul can break what flails of logic never touch, and that every believer can plead God's cause in that private, tearful, loving way by simply telling their neighbor that Christ came to save sinners, is able to save to the uttermost, and will in no wise cast out any who come to him.

Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on July 10, 1864.

Spurgeon opens by establishing that the universal rejection of the gospel banquet in Christ's parable is not an exaggeration but an accurate portrait of human nature — every person in the congregation has been making excuses rather than trusting Christ, not because the excuses are valid but because the heart is at enmity with God and uses excuses to pacify conscience, appease social pressure, and avoid the honesty of saying outright, "I do not want Christ," since the excuse-maker hopes to remain on good terms with his conscience while refusing obedience. He then strips away six of the most common excuses one by one: too busy (answered by noting that no one skips meals for lack of time, and that salvation takes no longer than a single look of faith); too good to need saving (answered by asking whether they have loved God perfectly, fed the hungry, never sinned in thought — a single crack in a perfect vase renders it useless); too bad to be saved (answered by Christ's command to "begin at Jerusalem," where his own murderers lived, showing God deliberately starts with the worst cases); lacking the right feelings (answered by pointing out that fitness is never required, and that a man who refuses medicine because he is too sick to take it is a fool); too young or too old (each dismissed as a lie Satan plants at opposite ends of life); and election as an excuse (answered by the medical analogy — "if you refuse the remedy you are predestinated to die by your own choice, not God's decree"). He closes with a triple hammer: you are making these excuses before a God who sees through every one of them and cannot be deceived; you are gambling with a soul that will live forever in either Heaven or Hell; and on the day of judgment no excuse will survive a single second, since the books will be open and the only words you will hear above the thunder of the trump are, "I called and you refused" — and he urges every hearer to look at this very moment to the bleeding Savior on the cross, since trusting Christ is the only act that stops the excuse machine forever.

Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on July 3, 1864.

Spurgeon opens by demolishing the popular idea that Christianity can be lived without conflict — tracing the comfortable, cringe-and-conform religion of his day as a smooth road that leads to the wrong destination — before insisting that Scripture from Genesis to Revelation describes a narrow, persecuted, costly road, and that Christ himself was not carried to his throne on a bed of ease but was hated, mocked, ejected from his own nation's religion, and crucified by it, so that any disciple who expects a better reception than his Master has simply not read the terms of service. He then unpacks "going forth outside the camp" in four areas: open public confession of faith (refusing to be a secret disciple whose silence functions as denial), separation in company (choosing the saints as bosom friends rather than the merely moral or worldly), separation in pleasures and maxims (where honest trading, consistent holiness, and a different ruling principle make the Christian visibly unlike his neighbors), and — most controversially — separation from corrupt organized religion, where he calls on faithful ministers and members still inside the Church of England to come out rather than lend their respectability to a body that simultaneously houses evangelical truth, Puseyism, and outright infidelity. He closes by cataloging the reproach the separated Christian must bear — being called bigot, fanatic, self-righteous fool, rebel against progress, and friend of the poor and uneducated — and answers every charge by pointing out that every one of them was first leveled at Christ himself, before ending with three reasons for bearing this reproach willingly: because Christ bore it first and fellowship with him requires a shared experience, because the Head's separation from the world is the pattern and purpose of every member's separation, and because the crown waiting at the end is so staggeringly disproportionate to any momentary shame that the Scottish Covenanting women drowned in the rising tide for a theological detail most men would not die for even the whole Bible — and urges his congregation to take that cross up with joy.

Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on June 26, 1864.

Spurgeon opens by overturning a near-universal assumption — that a sinner must first feel deep sorrow for sin and then, armed with sufficient grief, be permitted to come to Christ — arguing from Zechariah 12:10 that the Scripture precisely reverses this order: it is looking to the pierced Christ that produces mourning, not mourning that earns the right to look, so that demanding sorrow before faith is as foolish as refusing medicine until you can show the healthy skin that only medicine produces. He then works through what in a sight of Christ compels genuine mourning: the sheer excellence of the Sufferer's person (the Creator of the universe submitting to a slave's death), the stainless purity of his character violated by those he came to bless, the detailed agony of Gethsemane, the trials, the scourge, the cross, and the God-forsaken darkness — all of which was caused not by any fault in Christ but by the sins of the very people for whom he was dying and whose place he was taking, so that genuine weeping flows not from hellish terror but from the discovery that one's own sins drove those nails. He closes by describing the look of faith that triggers this mourning — impossibly simple (requiring no education, no merit, no preparation, no courage, only the turning of the mind's eye toward the crucified Christ, as the bitten Israelites looked at the bronze serpent), personal (no sponsor or sacrament can perform it for another), and immediately available to the worst sinner this moment — and he urges every hearer to stop searching within themselves for feelings that will authorize them to come, and instead come now exactly as they are, since every soul that has ever done so has found Christ, and not one has ever been turned away.

Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on June 19, 1864.

Spurgeon opens by tracing how Paul's composite quotation from Isaiah proves both Christ's full divinity (since what Isaiah attributes to "the Lord of Hosts" Paul applies directly to Jesus) and the paradox of the Foundation Stone: God laid Christ in Zion to be a sure refuge and the ground of human hope, but sinful human nature consistently converts him into a stumbling block — and Spurgeon surveys the many forms this stumbling takes in his own congregation: stumbling over Christ's demand for holiness (they want Christ but not the giving up of cherished sins), stumbling over the plan of faith-alone salvation (which wounds human pride by placing the moralist on the same footing as the harlot), stumbling over the Doctrines of Grace (which declare God sovereign over salvation without consulting the creature), and stumbling over the inconsistency of other Christians (which is really just a convenient excuse for continuing in unbelief, since another man's stumbling is no license for your own). He presses the stumbling unbeliever with three sharp arguments: stumbling at Christ is a deep personal insult to the Father who paid for the feast with his only Son's blood; it will be the one charge at judgment that needs no other evidence, making the rejection of Christ the head and crown of all condemnation; and it destroys the only bridge by which escape was possible, since there will be no second atonement, no second striving of the Spirit, and nothing left for those who refused this salvation but the fearful expectation of judgment. He closes by turning to the promise — "whoever believes shall not be ashamed" — and grounds it in four unbreakable securities: Christ has never yet left a single soul he has loved, his promises have never failed even the weakest believer in the darkest trial, no Christian has ever been found to have died or risen in confusion, and the text's "whoever" is broad enough to take in even the most doubting, fallen, and unworthy soul who will dare to trust Christ now, while warning that those who refuse will find on the resurrection morning that the One they stumbled at is seated on the judgment throne, and the shame they refused to feel at the cross will be theirs in measure unimaginable forever.

Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on May 22, 1864.

Spurgeon uses the Jonah narrative — the sailors rowing desperately to reach shore before finally casting Jonah overboard and watching the sea instantly calm — to preach against every form of self-salvation, working through the most common kinds of "hard rowing" he sees in his congregation: moral reformation that cannot erase the old record of sin, religious superstition piled up in vows and ceremonies that exhaust the worshipper without easing the conscience, orthodox doctrinal knowledge that substitutes creed-mastery for a living Savior, fervent prayer mistakenly trusted in as the ground of acceptance rather than as a means of reaching the Savior, and the subtlest error of all — endless self-examination trying to generate the right feelings, depth of repentance, or softness of heart before daring to come to Christ — all of which he condemns as a secret form of self-righteousness that insults the Atonement, violates the plain law that "by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified," and guarantees failure as certainly as bringing snow to heat an oven. He argues that the one good effect of this desperate rowing is that it eventually exhausts the sinner into the discovery of his own complete helplessness, but warns that if allowed to go on too long it hardens into a chronic unbelief that grows more impenetrable with every passing year and becomes Satan's most effective trap — a despairing resignation that uses "there is no hope for me" as cover for not coming to Christ at all. He closes with the Substitution as the only answer — Christ, like Jonah, willingly cast into the deep of divine wrath so that the whole ship's company may sail to port in instant calm — insisting that this means a sinner need do absolutely nothing to complete or secure salvation: God's justice, which once terrified, now becomes the very pillar of peace, since it is precisely because God is just that a soul for whom Christ has fully paid can never be punished, and the only remaining posture is to put both feet entirely on Christ and love him freely as one who owes Christ nothing but everything.

Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on May 1, 1864.

Spurgeon opens by acknowledging the promise's original application to Israel's future national restoration — a day still coming when the dry desert of scattered Jewry will be flooded with the Spirit and every tribe brought home — before turning it as a word of personal comfort to backslidden believers, insisting that the single word "yet" at the text's opening is a star in a dark sky, declaring that however far God's people have wandered, however cold their love, however barren their lives, God's choosing is eternal and his love is not the mood of a fickle lover but the settled covenant of a husband who, knowing everything about his bride before he married her, has declared that he "hates putting away." He then works through the promises of what God will do — "I will help you" as a short, all-purpose word that turns every way to meet every trial, and "I will pour water on the thirsty" as the promise of a full personal revival — before turning to the sermon's most tender section: God's promise to pour his Spirit upon the children of his people, insisting that this blessing flows only through parents who are themselves revived, that no Christian home, no baptism, no hereditary religion, and no natural amiability can substitute for the Spirit's own work, and that parents must pray specifically and persistently for their children's new birth as earnestly as they pray for their own souls. He closes with a vision of children who receive this outpoured Spirit growing with the speed of willows beside water courses — becoming ministers, missionaries, and confessors who openly say "I am the Lord's" — and with a double application: to believing parents, to plead this promise like a check that must be presented at the bank of prayer before it yields its gold; and to unconverted hearers, to recognize that until they are themselves made thirsty and come to Christ, they stand under the curse and have no standing to plead the promise for their children at all.

Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on April 10, 1864.

Spurgeon opens with Paul's preaching at Lystra — arguing from the fact that Paul brought the same unaltered Gospel of facts (Christ's incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension), doctrines (atonement, pardon, justification), and commands (believe and be baptized) to backward Lycaonian idol-worshippers as to polished Athenians and sophisticated Corinthians — that the Gospel needs no adjustment for any audience, since it is the one remedy for the one disease of sin wherever it appears, and that those who trim or change it in the name of cultural relevance have removed the very power they are trying to make effective. He then dwells on what Paul perceived in the cripple — "faith to be healed" — describing it from his own remembered experience as that in-between state where a person already believes Christ is able and willing to save, already trusts him after a fashion, already resolves to perish at the cross rather than anywhere else, yet still cannot stand upright in full assurance — kept lame by long-standing despair, ignorance about what salvation feels like, fear of self-deception, or consciousness of great sin — before pressing home that at this precise moment Paul's command is what is needed: "Stand upright on your feet," for whoever truly believes is already saved, completely and eternally, and further delay dishonors God's word. He closes with a passionate and extended personal appeal — identifying specific people in his congregation who have been moved repeatedly and gone back to besetting sin, speaking with grief of one who died of delirium tremens having rejected Christ after many hearings — and with an almost desperate urgency urges every trembling seeker to simply believe now, insisting that no feeling is required, no preparation, no further waiting, only the honest surrender of the soul to the Christ who has never yet cast out a single one who came.

Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on April 27, 1856.

Spurgeon takes "From Me is your fruit found" in its second sense — that all spiritual fruit produced by the believer proceeds from God alone — and establishes this doctrinally through four channels: from God's eternal purpose (holiness was written into the predestinating decree before the world began), from calling (the dead sinner had nothing good in him and never would have except that God called him into the garden), from union with Christ (as every grape is first in the root before it appears on the branch, so every good work was first in Christ before it appeared in the believer), and from providence (every dew-drop, every sun-ray, every pruning-knife of affliction saying to the tree, "From me is your fruit found"). He then confirms this experimentally by walking through the believer's own memory: before conversion, no repentance, faith, or love appeared; under the Law, commands only provoked the flesh to greater sin and produced no holiness; at the moment of trusting Christ, fruit appeared instantly and abundantly; and whenever a believer has since drifted from simple dependence on Christ, fruitfulness has withered — proving by bitter experience that the creature is an empty vessel and God the only fountain. He closes with three practical lessons: fight every besetting sin the same way you received salvation — by bringing it directly to Christ and asking him to kill it with his own blood, not by trying to overcome it through legal effort; cultivate most the graces (faith and love) that most closely connect the soul to Christ, since these are the fruit-bearing shoots; and whether a declining saint afraid to come without fresh evidences or an unconverted sinner waiting to reform before coming — stop carrying coals to Newcastle, bring your empty ship to the harbor, and take from Christ the very fruit he asks you to bring.

Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on March 1, 1864.

Spurgeon opens by noting that the cursing of the fig tree is Christ's only miracle of pure judgment, and argues from this that its rarity makes its lesson all the more weighty — the curse does not fall on the openly godless who make no profession, nor on those who are simply not yet called, but falls precisely and only on the tree covered with conspicuous leaves that promise fruit and deliver nothing, which is the portrait of the high-professing, outwardly religious person. He then works through the many species of this fruitless-but-leafy professor: the formalist who mistakes going through religious ceremonies for genuine worship, the doctrinal enthusiast who would die for orthodoxy but whose life is rotten and his temper unchristlike, the fluent talker whose words come from the throat and not the heart, those who feel momentary regret over sin but never true repentance, and those who make endless resolves that never harden into action — before pressing the deeper point that Christ actually hungers for fruit from those who have claimed to be purchased by his blood, and that for a person with so much visible leaf — a church leader, an early convert with loud testimony, someone famous for professing great love for Christ while giving nothing — the curse comes all the more certainly because the disappointment is all the greater. He closes with a self-searching personal confession that his own elevated position multiplies his condemnation if his profession is hollow, before ending with the one remaining door of hope: grace can still make even the leafiest hypocrite genuinely fruitful if they will now cast themselves on Christ's wounds in honest faith, asking the Spirit — in whom alone all true fruit is found — to work what no amount of leaves has ever produced.

Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on February 21, 1864.