For many years, Spurgeon preached a new year’s sermon from a text which an Anglican friend would supply. For 1864, the text was full of weight and promise: “If we endure [or, suffer], we shall also reign with him. If we deny him, he also will deny us” (2Tim 2:12). Spurgeon divides the text into two simple parts: suffering with Jesus, and its reward, and denying Jesus, and its penalty. He is careful to explain that it is not merely suffering, but suffering with Jesus, which wins the reward of which the text speaks. He explains what such suffering involves. He is briefer but equally forthright with regard to the denying of Christ and the denial by Christ which follows. We might imagine some feeling that it is an inappropriate note on which to begin a new year, but what better way to consider the days ahead than to be faced with such choices and consequences, that all our decisions and actions might be coloured by a sense of commitment to the person of the Saviour, and a desire to follow him wherever he leads, that we might be at last where he is?

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