From the Heart of Spurgeon

Fields White For Harvest (S706)

Spurgeon often addresses the kind of Christian despondency that breeds a shameful passivity. He opens this sermon with a lengthy introduction bemoaning the low expectations of God’s people—people who yearn for a lively past and have vague hopes for a brighter future, but have given up all present hopes: “Not here, not now, not us!” This is the attitude that calls inaction, patience, and labels unbelief as realism. To counteract this ugly spirit, Spurgeon presses upon us the signs of harvest (and yes, we might long for more of those in our day!); he points out the wants or needs of harvest, the way in which we should engage in a day when there is work to be done; he warns us of the fears of harvest, reminding all his hearers, both converted and otherwise, that time passes and the work undone might be left undone forever. I can imagine the same despondent Christians today saying that Spurgeon’s circumstances allow him to hope in a way that we cannot; in fact, though we may face particular challenges, the very scope of the work ought to rouse our spirits for labour.

God’s Cure for Man’s Weakness (S697)

This is the kind of sermon that makes us ask, “If Spurgeon thought that he needed to preach this in his own day, what might he have said to us?!” He addresses those “who are beginning to imagine that weakness is the normal and proper state of a Christian; that to be unbelieving, desponding, nervous, timid, cowardly, inactive, heartless, is at worst a very excusable thing.” In Spurgeon’s understanding, this is a fearful and dangerous conclusion to reach. In response, he identifies some of the spiritual cures that faith in God’s Christ has worked in the experience of the church through the ages. Not satisfied with that, he then analyses faith to determine what are the divinely-appointed ingredients in this medicine. He urges us to go the Spirit of God to obtain the medicine, and praises the Physician who can make us strong out of our very weakness. There is no spiritual strength without the faith which God gives. If Spurgeon felt the church’s need in his own day, then we would do well to heed his counsels in our own.

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Lively Reading - The Voice of the Cholera (S705)

In 1866, cholera spread rapidly through London, claiming over five thousand lives. Into our own time, bedevilled with debates about Covid-19 and other such diseases—their causes and their cures—, Spurgeon speaks with a voice of spiritual sanity and reason. Here we find a remarkable blend of heavenly-mindedness and earthly sense, a readiness to acknowledge God’s hand in the spread of sickness, an awareness of divine justice and wisdom, an honesty about the potential causes and purposes of such afflictions. In all the often-silly arguments about diseases and vaccines, conspiracies and cures, have we missed the voice of the virus, speaking clearly and penetratingly to mortal men? Spurgeon lifts us above so much of the pettiness and foolishness of the current conversation and focuses our attention on eternity, and the God before whom we must soon stand.

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Joy and Peace in Believing (S692)

Joy and peace! Who would not wish to know joy and peace? Spurgeon wants us to know them, but he wants us to know them truly, building upon the right foundation and enjoying the things themselves, and not some cheap and shoddy counterfeits. Therefore he exposes some common errors with regard to joy and peace before going on to deal with the root of true spiritual joy and lasting peace through believing in Jesus Christ for salvation. And so we need to know what that believing means, and what it involves, and to understand that joy and peace always come through believing and are never really found by any other means. With a beautiful simplicity and gospel clarity, Spurgeon shows a pastoral precision in ensuring that the right things are put in the right spiritual sequence and connection. Joy and peace seem in short supply in today’s world. If we want them for ourselves, and if we want others to know them, here we have the guidance we need.

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Heedlessness in Religion (S685)

Do you really care about knowing and doing the will of the Lord? It is easy to be zealous in a few things which fall more naturally into our way of thinking, as Jehu did. But that same Jehu “took no heed to walk in the law of the Lord God of Israel with all his heart.” Spurgeon is concerned that many Christian professors fall into the same trap, and so—in this sobering sermon—he urges us to ensure that we are committed to knowing and doing all the law of the Lord with all our hearts. To do otherwise reveals a sickliness at best, a fatal absence of true religion at worst. We must heed all that God has spoken, and make sure that our hearts are right with him. Perhaps some today would dismiss Spurgeon’s employment of Jehu as a negative model as mere moralising. In fact, the preacher shows us how to use such examples to stir and stimulate our souls to watchfulness and self-examination.

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Faith versus Sight (S677)

Spurgeon launches himself into this sermon hard. It is not one of his most polished addresses, but it has a certain raw vigour about it, both for style and for substance, which reminds us of the true strength of his ministry: the God in whom he had such robust confidence. In contrasting walking by faith and walking by sight, he first of all considers what is meant by walking, and how these two principles are therefore going to govern all our life, one way or another, and primarily encouraging the walk of faith. Then he moves on to a more direct contrast, and here he is primarily negative about walking by faith, exposing its vanity and folly. Finally, he urges us to keep the two distinct, and not to mix sight with faith, especially with regard to our understanding of salvation, and our relationship to God. We must not be governed by experience, by feeling, by passing providences, but must be anchored to truth, divine revelation, and hold to the Jesus of the Scripture, set forth in the Bible as the only object of saving faith. For our one hundredth podcast, we do not try to choose Spurgeon at his finest or most palatable, but to offer another representative sermon of a preacher of Jesus Christ who would have his hearers come to and cling to his beloved Saviour.

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The Mighty Arm (S674)

This sermon is really a plea for believing prayer. Often, at the beginning of a new year, as well as at other seasons, the Tabernacle was giving itself to earnest prayer for the Lord’s blessing through the coming months. Correspondingly, Spurgeon often calls the church to prayer, as he does here by remind the saints that God has a mighty arm. He wants believers to understand the nature of divine power, but he goes beyond a merely doctrinal enumeration. As a preacher, he presses to the practical: Spurgeon wants us to understand the Lord’s might not just in theory but in practice, not merely as a doctrinal affirmation but as an awesome reality. That leads to the lessons we need to learn still about the strength of God, and here Spurgeon is not far from William Carey. We should expect great things and therefore attempt great things, and as a result we must pray for great things from a great God.

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Consolation in the Furnace (S662)

Nebuchadnezzar’s exclamation is a Christian’s consolation: “Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God” (Dan 3:25). In order to obtain the balm, we need to understand first of all what is the furnace into which the children of God are still cast, what it is that the saints lose in the furnaces into which they are thrown, what the saints do when they are in the furnace, what they cannot lose no matter how high or hot the flames, and the company which they enjoy. The fact that Christ himself draws near when the Christian is so afflicted is the great peace and joy we can genuinely anticipate when we are tried as were Daniel’s three friends: “you must go into the furnace if you would have the nearest and dearest dealings with Christ Jesus.” It is, then, a sweetly comforting sermon, helpfully realistic about the various trials which a Christian might be called to face, and equally realistic about the blessings a faithful believer can enjoy when so tried.

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The Great Itinerant (S655)

This heartening sermon focuses on the brief assertion by the apostle Peter that our Lord went about doing good. What a delight it is to consider the character and activity of our Lord under this short description! Spurgeon spends the main part of the sermon in asking what Christ did, how he did it, and why he did it. It really is as simple as that. Then, in a second point, he makes his application: to what extent are we following in the footsteps of our Saviour? This gives us reason to repent over our past, and to consecrate ourselves for the future, in dependence upon God, to go as he went, marked by the same intent, imbued with the same spirit, and moved by the same desire.

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A Blow for Puseyism (S653)

At this point in his ministry, Spurgeon was engaged in a particular battle against sacramentalism, the idea that the means of grace actually and immediately bestowed grace in and of themselves (an idea technically referred to as ex opere operato). So, for example, and as we have already seen, Spurgeon contended against the idea of baptismal regeneration. In Spurgeon’s day, this thinking was becoming more prominent, not least in the Anglican communion, where men like Edward Pusey (1800–1882) were leading lights in the so-called Oxford Movement, under which a ‘high church’ agenda was pursued and various Roman Catholic doctrines and practices were reintroduced into Anglicanism. In this sermon, Spurgeon hits hard at the underlying flaws of this movement, contrasting the unprofitable flesh of carnal externalities with the life-giving operations of the Holy Spirit. While the fruits of Puseyism are still evident around us, the principles set forth by Spurgeon remain vital for the ongoing commitment of Christ’s church to true spirituality and simplicity of worship, and our confidence in the means which God has provided.

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