Spurgeon is known, even renowned, for preaching from individual texts, often very short ones, even phrases. While some sermons or addresses are linked by their time or place of preaching (think of the lectures to his students), and while it is possible to arrange collections of sermons under certain themes (as many have done, both Spurgeon himself and others since) most of the sermons stand alone by design. This sermon, then, is unusual in that it constitutes part of what seems to be one of the closest things Spurgeon preaches to a series of sermons. This sermon on justification is preceded by one on effectual calling, then followed the next Lord’s day by one on consecration, and the theme deliberately picked up again in a sermon the following year on mature faith, each illustrated by an episode in the life of Abram. So this sermon is notable both in terms of its distinctive relation to other sermons, and the way in which Spurgeon interprets and applies the experience of the patriarch to the believers of his own day. He is unashamed to make clear the commonality between Abram’s faith and life, and ours, and so to make Abram a model for every true believer—to hold him up as, indeed, the father of those who believe.

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