Here is another probing sermon, profitable even when painful. Here is the Christ walking among the Ephesian church in Revelation 2, first of all perceiving their hearts and lives and concluding that while he knows their works he still has something against them. The Lord therefore issues a prescription, to remember from where they have fallen, and to repent. This leads to our Lord’s persuasion, in which he issues both a threatening warning and a sweet promise. You can see that the intention is not at all to crush, but there is still a challenge to our souls in the first heading, as we are forced to face the possibility of declining love for Christ in our hearts. The prescription comes to us clearly and helpfully, in three yoked commands: remember, repent, and return. Again, this is not difficult to understand, but it is not necessarily easy to obey. Finally, Spurgeon presses in some motives with our Lord’s persuasives, his warning and his promising, both designed to put us back in the way of love. To decline in love to Christ is the Christian’s wasting disease; to grow in love for Christ is the Christian’s foretaste of glory. So we are obliged to look into our own hearts, not in hopeless despair, but in order that we might, at Christ’s direction and invitation, address any drifting away from him whom our souls love.

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I doubt that anyone who reads Spurgeon with any consistency and seriousness thinks of him as a soft preacher. Some may have a notion of him as some genial Victorian pulpiteer, but a few sermons will quickly dispel the image, and reveal a man whose compassion is matched with his conviction, whose kindness is rivalled only by his courage. The result is sermons which bite and sting, and sometimes constitute a sustained assault upon the Christian conscience. This sermon is one such, a penetrating study of Numbers 32:23 and the suggestion that Gad and Reuben might have held back when the time came to conquer the Promised Land. Spurgeon transfers the principle to those professing believers who do not go up to spiritual war with their brothers, who sinned against their brothers and their Lord by the great sin of doing nothing. Spurgeon holds nothing back in pressing this principle into the conscience of his hearers, and our own, by extension. This, he makes clear, is a sin that will find us out. There is, of course, a danger that sermons like this will trouble the feeble and stir up a false guilt, but there is an equal need for sermons which fearlessly probe both our motives and our intentions, and call us to consider whether or not we are serving God and his people as we could and as we should.

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“These are days of great looseness; everywhere I see great laxity of doctrinal belief, and gross carelessness in religious practice. Christian people are doing to-day what their forefathers would have loathed. Multitudes of professors are but very little different from worldlings. Men’s religion seems to hang loosely about them, as if it did not fit them: the wonder is that it does not drop off from them. Men are so little braced up as to conscientious conviction and vigorous resolve, that they easily go to pieces if assailed by error or temptation. The teaching necessary for to-day is this: ‘Gird up the loins of your mind,’ brace yourselves up; pull yourselves together; be firm, compact, consistent, determined. Do not be like quicksilver, which keeps on dissolving and running into fractions; do not fritter away life upon trifles, but live to purpose, with undivided heart, and decided resolution.” So Spurgeon describes the reason for preaching this sermon, and what more can we say by way of introduction? It expresses the preacher’s profound concern and earnest plea. The sermon develops as the sustained exhortation of a pastor confident that the motives which the gospel supplies will be sufficient to establish and encourage the people of God in a lukewarm and watery age.

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Repeatedly, insistently, joyfully, earnestly, Spurgeon pounds away on the same drum: “Rejoice evermore!” His introduction is unusually long, situating, explaining, illustrating, and enforcing the command of the text. Only then does he come to the quality of the joy which a Christian is commanded to feel and express. He moves on to the object of this joy, considering God and his covenant as causes of joy, and encouraging us to stir up joy by holy exercise. Then he gives us more reasons for rejoicing—that it wards off temptation, shuts out worldly mirth, encourages saints, and attracts sinners. In a sense, the sermon is worth reading for the spontaneous outflow of thought and encouragement contained in (or bursting out of!) the introduction. One almost wonders if Spurgeon suddenly took a breath, and realised half his time had gone before he had even begun his first point! With marvellous sermonic control, not rattling things off, but with a kind of condensed fervour, he covers his ground tersely and intensely, pressing home flashes of insight and exhortation. It is a wonderful theme, well-handled both in terms of its matter and its manner.

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Racing through his text, throwing light upon it from various angles, Spurgeon gives us a sermon full of hope, because full of Christ. He begins by showing us that the gospel of faith is evidently a gospel for those who are lost. Then we are reminded that this gospel has to do with Christ Jesus, and him only. The faith which saves makes a particular confession about this Christ. This faith in Christ brings with it a great comfort to enjoy. Faith also has a sure promise to rest upon. There is a rising intensity through this sermon, as Christ comes more and more into view as the object of faith, and the preacher pleads with his congregation to get to grips with Christ as confessing believers and believing confessors. The risen Christ is the only hope of every sinner: “This is the ship which has carried thousands to heaven. We who go on board shall get to heaven by it. If it could go down, we should all sink together; but as it floats safely, we will all sail together to the Fair Havens. There is no second vessel on this line; and there is no other line. This one chartered barque of salvation by a confessing faith now lies at the quay. Come on board! Come on board at once! God help you to come on board at this very moment, for Jesus Christ’s sake!”

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A simple division and a thorough exposition form the bedrock of a sermon urging the saints to pray. Rising from Paul’s plea to the Romans at the end of the fifteenth chapter of that letter, Spurgeon emphasises the need even of an apostle for the intercessions of the saints, highlighting the demands and dangers that he faced, and underlining the humility shown in seeking such help. The bulk of the sermon is then given over to a step-by-step exposition of the prayer requested, Spurgeon breaking down the petition phrase-by-phrase. It is a simple but effective approach, and Spurgeon’s persistent pressing home of its practical lessons prevents it becoming a shallow slide across the surface of the text. The preacher addresses both the general desires and the specific details of the apostle as he asks the saints to engage with him in prayer. Then, briefly but pointedly, he turns to the blessing given in answer to the prayer, urging his hearers to seek the same mercies for the same reasons. As he closes, he brings his applications close to the congregation, reminding them that they too face demands and dangers similar to those of the apostle, and must have the same response: to go to the God of peace to obtain the help that he alone is able to give.

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In this brief address, Spurgeon acknowledges that his text—“Now set your heart and your soul to seek the Lord your God”—fits best those who are already saved. However, appreciating that it involves a little straining, he still wants to apply it also to those who are not yet converted. The exhortation as a whole gives us a lively sense of Spurgeon’s appetite for the Lord God, and his appetite for others to have such an appetite. There is a concentration and consecration of all the faculties on the glorious person and personal glory of the God of heaven, a present desire to draw near to him and to enjoy him. Spurgeon more or less runs through the same trajectory for each of the two basic classes of people in his sights as he preaches, pressing upon us all the immediate necessity and blessed prospect of drawing near to God.

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This is another simple sermon in two parts. Whereas the previous sermon offered a stark contrast between the wages of sin and the gift of life, this provides a sequence. After an introduction in which Spurgeon suggests a difference between happiness and blessedness (the former being a good thing, but essentially being of this world, while the latter has a heavenly quality about it), he exposes the world’s suggestions of where blessedness—true and lasting happiness—can be found. Then he turns us to the somewhat surprising text of James 1:12 to look at blessedness in this life and in the life to come. Yes, there are heavenly joys even now for the man who endures temptation—the man who, out of love to God, holds fast in the storm, and whose faith and hope and love are demonstrated to be real and true. And then there are joys to come, the crown of life which the Lord bestows upon those who do not turn away or fall away. Sustained and strengthened by his grace in Christ Jesus for every good work, their heavenly reward shall only make their appreciation of God’s favour all the richer and riper. Spurgeon gets happily expansive, almost carried away, as he considers the blessedness of the blessed in the glory to come, urging all to make sure that they enjoy this crown, awaking in the likeness of Jesus Christ, our resurrected Lord and King.

Podcast 273: A Discourse upon True Blessedness Here and Hereafter (S1874) Jas 1:12

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Spurgeon is not a mindless preacher, stuck in a rut of structure, though he is always recognisably himself in style. Here he begins with a brief introduction, before launching into a study in contrast between the wages of sin, which is death, and the gift of God which is everlasting life in Jesus Christ our Lord. In each case (particularly the first) he goes beyond a scant understanding of the words, and begins to dig out their sense, and press home their substance, and plead in the light of what he has to say. The first part of the sermon is a pressing development of the misery of sin and its consequences, manifestly weighing down the very heart of the preacher as he speaks. In the second half he moves into light and joy, setting forth the wonders of redeeming grace in Christ, and the free favour of God. He closes with applications for the believer, pressing home what it means to receive this life and to live as those who live indeed, but also encouraging every child of God to believe in the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit, the same power by which Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. By the grace of God, the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ will yet secure life for those who are dead in ins, to the praise of his glory. It is a simple structure, and a striking sermon, and it should leave us feeling the horrible weight of sin and its awful wages, the wonder of God’s grace in Christ, bestowing life on the hell-deserving.

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Here is Spurgeon at the heart of his ministerial and pastoral calling: glorying in the cross of a crucified Christ. Here is the essential power of all his preaching, and here is the delight of his own soul. Unpacking the sermon methodically, and finding his time running out as he expands upon this theme, Spurgeon begins with the cross itself, and what the apostle meant when he thought of it and spoke of it. He had in mind the fact of the cross, the bare reality of the incarnate Son of God dying for sinners. He had in mind the doctrine of the cross, and all it means, and the cross of the doctrine, the very centre and core of true Christianity. And why did Paul glory in this? Spurgeon ranges across the attributes of God, highlighting the ways in which God is manifested and magnified in the salvation accomplished in the death of his beloved Son, as well as speaking of the particular delights and comforts and stirrings which it brings to those who glory in it. And then, says our preacher, Paul had felt all its impact on his own soul and on his own life. The world had been emptied of all its attraction, all its enticements, all its glories, by the glory of the cross. Oh that the glory of the cross would have the same impact on us today, that the death of Christ would slay in us both self and the world, and so hold our hearts that no-one and nothing else would ever draw us, but that Christ in all the matchless mercy of his atoning sacrifice would be and remain our all-in-all.

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