Spiritual knowledge of Christ will be a personal knowledge. I cannot know Jesus through another person’s acquaintance with Him. No, I must know Him myself. It will be an affectionate knowledge of Him; indeed, if I know Him at all, I must love Him. It will be a satisfying knowledge. When I know my Savior, my mind will be full to the brim – I shall feel that I have that which my spirit panted after. It will be an exciting knowledge; the more I know of my Beloved, the more I shall want to know. The higher I climb the loftier will be the summits which invite my eager footsteps. I shall want the more as I get the more. Like the miser’s treasure, my gold will make me covet more.
Would you drown your cares? Then go, plunge yourself in the Godhead’s deepest sea; be lost in His immensity; and you shall come forth as from a couch of rest, refreshed and invigorated. I know nothing which can so comfort the soul; so calm the swelling billows of sorrow and grief; so speak peace to the winds of trial, as a devout musing upon the subject of the Godhead. It is to that subject that I invite you this morning.
Pardon of sin must ever be an act of pure mercy, and therefore to that attribute the awakened sinner flies.
Treasury of David, Psalm 51.
When we deal seriously with our sin, God will deal gently with us.
Treasury of David, Psalm 51.
To injure our fellow men is sin, mainly because in so doing we violate the law of God. The penitent’s heart so filled with a sense of the wrong done to the Lord Himself, that all other confession swallowed up in a broken-hearted acknowledgment of offense against [God].
Treasury of David, Psalm 51.
Always has the Holy One of Israel estimated men by their inner nature, and not by their outward professions; to Him the inward is as visible as the outward, and He rightly judges that the essential character of an action lies in the motive of him who works it.
The joy of pardon has a voice louder than the voice of sin. God’s voice speaking peace is the sweetest music an ear can hear.
Treasury of David, Psalm 51.
All repetitions are not “vain repetitions.” Souls in agony have no space to find variety of language: pain has to content itself with monotones.
Treasury of David, Psalm 51.
The heart is the rudder of the soul, and till the Lord take it in hand we steer in a false and foul way.
Treasury of David, Psalm 51.
A heart crushed is a fragrant heart. Men contemn those who are contemptible in their own eyes, but the Lord sees not as man sees. He despises what men esteem, and values that which they despise. Never yet has God spurned a lowly, weeping penitent, and never will he while God is love, and while Jesus is called the man who receives sinners. Bulls and rams He desires not, but contrite hearts He seeks after.
Treasury of David, Psalm 51.
There is surely no grace in us if we do not feel for the church of God, and take a lasting interest in its welfare.
Treasury of David, Psalm 51.
Get a friend to tell you your faults, or better still, welcome an enemy who will watch you keenly and string you savagely. What a blessing such an irritating critic will be to a wise man, what an intolerable nuisance to a fool!
Meditation is the soul of religion… We ought, therefore, both for our own good and for the Lord’s honor to be much occupied with meditation, and that meditation should chiefly dwell upon the Lord Himself: it should be “meditation of Him.” For want of it much communion is lost and much happiness is missed.
The Treasury of David, Commentary from Psalm 104:34
Too many think lightly of sin, and therefore think lightly of the Savior. He who has stood before his God, convicted and condemned, with the rope about his neck, is the man to weep for joy when he is pardoned, to hate the evil which has been forgiven him, and to live to the honor of the Redeemer by whose blood he has been cleansed.
Our love ought to follow the love of God in one point, namely, in always seeking to produce reconciliation. It was to this end that God sent His Son.
If a man could know that he was loved by all his fellowmen, if he could have it for certain that he was loved by all the angels, yet these were but so many drops, and all put together could not compare with the main ocean contained in the fact that “God loved us.”
The best sermon is that in which the theme absorbs the preacher and hearers, and leaves no one either time or desire to think about the speaker.
The Sword and the Trowel 1870, “How Shall We Sing?”, 277-278.
Free will I have often heard of, but I have never seen it. I have met with will, and plenty of it, but it has either been led captive by sin or held in blessed bonds of grace.
Hide yourselves under the banner of Jehovah’s jealousy. It is bloody red, I know; its ensign bears a thunderbolt and a flame of fire; but hide yourselves, hide yourselves under it, for what enemy shall reach you there? If it be to God’s glory to save me, I am entrenched behind munitions of stupendous rock. If it would render God inglorious to let me, a poor sinner, descend into hell; if it would open the mouths of devils and make men say that God is not faithful to His promise, then am I secure, for God’s glory is wrapped up with my salvation, and the one cannot fail because the other cannot be tarnished.
A Jealous God, Sermon 502, March 29, 1863.
It is a sweet compound of faith that knows God to be my Father, love that loves Him as my Father, joy that rejoices in Him as my Father, fear that trembles to disobey Him because he is my Father and a confident affection and trustfulness that relies upon Him, and casts itself wholly upon Him, because it knows by the infallible witness of the Holy Spirit, that Jehovah, the God of earth and heaven, is the Father of my heart.
The Fatherhood of God, Sermon #213.
As long as a man is alive and out of hell, he cannot have any cause to complain.
[Love] your neighbors through thick and thin… Don’t seek to please them, but to please your Master; and remember, if they spurn your love, your Master has not spurned it, and your deed is acceptable to Him as if it had been acceptable to them.
Morning and Evening, Morning: March 12.
I question whether the defenses of the gospel are not sheer impertinences. The gospel does not need defending. If Jesus Christ is not alive and cannot fight His own battles, then Christianity is in a bad state. But He is alive, and we have only to preach His gospel in all its naked simplicity, and the power that goes with it will be the evidence of its divinity.
It seems odd that certain who talk so much of what the Holy Spirit reveals to themselves, should think so little of what he has revealed to others.
Depend upon it, however, let men rebel against this truth as they will, that God has determined the end from the beginning. He has left no screw loose in the machine, He has left nothing to chance or accident.
A Feast for Faith, Isaiah. 28:29.
No doctrine in the whole Word of God has more excited the hatred of mankind than the truth of the absolute sovereignty of God. The fact that “the Lord reigneth” is indisputable, and it is this fact that arouses the utmost opposition in the unrenewed human heart.
If I did not believe the doctrine of the final perseverance of the saints, I think I should be of all men the most miserable, because I should lack any ground for comfort.
13.107.
You are hanging over the mouth of hell by a single thread, and that thread is breaking. Only a gasp for breath, only a stopping of the heart for a single moment, and you will be in an eternal world, without God, without hope, without forgiveness. Oh, can you face it?
Love your fellowmen, and cry about them if you cannot bring them to Christ. If you cannot save them, you can weep over them. If you cannot give them a drop of cold water in hell, you can give them your heart’s tears while they are still in this body.
What the Arminian wants to do is to arouse man’s activity; what we want to do is kill it once and for all, to show him that he is lost and ruined, and that his activities are not now at all equal to the work of conversion; that he must look upward. They seek to make the man stand up; we seek to bring him down, and make him feel that he lies in the hand of God, and that his business is to submit himself to God, and cry aloud “Lord save, or we perish!”
A child of five, if properly instructed, can as truly believe and be regenerated as an adult.
The Christian life is very much like climbing a hill of ice. You cannot slide up. You have to cut every step with an ice axe. Only with incessant labor in cutting and chipping can you make any progress. If you want to know how to backslide, leave off going forward. Cease going upward and you will go downward of necessity. You can never stand still.
Alas! Much has been done of late to promote the production of dwarfish Christians. Poor, sickly believers turn the church into an hospital, rather than an army. Oh, to have a church built up with the deep godliness of people who know the Lord in their very hearts, and will seek to follow the Lamb wherever he goes!
I agree with Matthew Henry when he says, “They that pray in the family do well; they that pray and read the Scriptures do better; but they that pray, and read, and sing do best of all.”
The Happy Duty of Daily Praise.
I fear that much of our prayer is lost because we do not sufficiently throw our hearts into it. It is possible for us to attend the meeting and all the while be thinking of the home, the infant in the cradle, or the shop, the field, the farm, the factory, the counting-house, the and I know not what beside. Is it any wonder then that prayer halts? The brother who prays may be burning with earnest desire, but his prayer lags because we are not backing it with silent Devour and passionate longing for God’s blessing. Oh! Brethren and sisters, we have often spoiled our prayer meetings thus.
Prayer Meetings, August 30th, 1868.
Prayer girds human weakness with divine strength, turns human folly into heavenly wisdom, and gives to troubled mortals the peace of God. We know not what prayer can do.
There is nothing into which the heart of man so easily falls as pride, and yet there is no more vice which is more frequently, more emphatically, and more eloquently condemned in Scripture. Pride is a thing which should be unnatural to us, for we have nothing to be proud of. In almost every other sin, we gather us ashes when the fire is gone. But here, what is left? The covetous man has his shining gold, but what does the proud man have? He has less than he would have had without pride, and is no gainer whatever. Pride wins no crown.
The doctrines of original sin, election, and effectual calling, final perseverance, and all those great truths which are called Calvinism – though Calvin was not the author of them, but simply an able writer and preacher upon the subject – are, I believe, the essential doctrines of the gospel that is in Jesus Christ. Now, I do not ask you whether you believe all this – it is possible you may not; but I believe you will before you enter heaven.
The best way to deal with slander is to pray about it: God will either remove it, or remove the sting from it. Our own attempts at clearing ourselves are usually failures; we are like the boy who wished to remove the blot from his copy, and by his bungling made it ten times worse.
The Treasury of David, Commentary for Psalm 119:20.
I bear my testimony that there is no joy to be found in all this world like that of sweet communion with Christ. I would barter all else there is of heaven for that. Indeed, that is heaven. As for the harps of gold and the streets like clear glass and the songs of seraphs and the shouts of the redeemed, one could very well give all these up, counting them as a drop in a bucket, if we might forever live in fellowship and communion with Jesus.
If I had never joined a church till I had found one that was perfect, I should never have joined one at all. And the moment I did join it, if I had found one, I should have spoiled it, for it would not have been a perfect church after I had become a member of it. Still, imperfect as it is, it is the dearest place on earth to us.
Oh, to think of heaven without Christ! It is the same thing as thinking of hell. Heaven without Christ! It is day without the sun, existing without life, feasting without food, seeing without light. It involves a contradiction in terms. Heaven without Christ! Absurd. It is the sea without water, the earth without its fields, the heavens without their stars. There cannot be a heaven without Christ. He is the sum total of bliss, the fountain from which heaven flows, the element of which heaven is composed. Christ is heaven and heaven is Christ.
The most useful members of a church are usually those who would be doing harm if they were not doing good.
Persecution in the Early Church, Christian History, n. 29.
The Lord Jesus Christ is very jealous of your love, O believer. Did he not choose you? He cannot bear that you should choose another. Did he not buy you with his own blood? He cannot endure that you should think you are your own, or that you belong to this world. He loved you with such a love that He could not stop in heaven without you; He would sooner die than that you should perish; He stripped himself to nakedness that He might clothe you with beauty; He bowed his face to shame and spitting that He might lift you up to honor and glory, and He cannot endure that you should love the world, and the things of the world. His love is strong as death towards you, and therefore will be cruel as the grave… He loves you so much that He cannot endure that anything should stand between your heart’s love and Him. Be careful Christians, you that are married to Christ; remember, you are married to a jealous husband.
A Jealous God, Sermon 502, March 29, 1863.
Many people want to know their election before they look to Christ. But they cannot learn it thus; it is only to be discovered by “looking unto Jesus.” Look to Jesus, believe on Him, and you shall make proof of your election directly, for as surely as you believe, you are elect. If you will give yourself wholly up to Christ and trust Him, then you are one of God’s chosen ones. Go to Jesus just as you are. Go straight to Christ, hide in His wounds, and you shall know your election… Christ was at the everlasting council. He can tell you whether you were chosen or not, but you cannot find out in any other way. Go and put your trust in Him. There will be no doubt about His having chosen you, when you have chosen Him.
Love to Jesus is the basis of all true piety, and the intensity of this love will ever be the measure of our zeal for His glory. Let us love Him with all our hearts, and then diligent labor, and consistent living will be sure to follow.
It is blessed to eat into the very soul of the Bible until at last you come to talk in scriptural language and your spirit is flavored with the words of the Lord.
Christ is the cause of the greatest division, but He is also the medium of the greatest union.
Remember that if you are a child of God, you will never be happy in sin. You are spoiled for the world, the flesh, and the devil. When you were regenerated there was put into you a vital principle, which can never be content to dwell in the dead world. You will have to come back, if indeed you belong to the family.
I do not come into this pulpit hoping that perhaps somebody will of his own free will return to Christ. My hope lies in another quarter. I hope that my Master will lay hold of some of them and say, "You are mine, and you shall be mine. I claim you for myself." My hope arises from the freeness of grace, and not from the freedom of the will.
Some people like to read so many chapters every day. I would not dissuade them from the practice, but I would rather lay my soul asoak in half a dozen verses all day than rinse my hand in several chapters. Oh, to be bathed in a text of Scripture, and to let it be sucked up into your very soul, till it saturates your heart! Set your heart upon God’s Word! Let your whole nature be plunged into it as a cloth into a dye!
When I regarded God as a tyrant, I thought my sin a trifle, but when I knew Him to be my Father, then I mourned that I could ever have kicked against Him.
Repentance and Conversion, Sermon 2419.
Be careful, dear friends, that you do not misrepresent God yourselves. You who murmur; you who say that God deals hardly with you, you give God an ill character; when you look so melancholy, worldlings say, “The religion of Jesus is intolerable;” and so you stain the honor of God.
C.H. Spurgeon A Jealous God, Sermon 502, March 29, 1863.
God never punishes his children in the sense of avenging justice. He chastens as a father does his child, but he never punishes his redeemed as a judge does a criminal. It is unjust to exact punishment from redeemed souls since Christ has been punished in their place. How shall the Lord punish twice for one offense?
I would propose that the subject of the ministry of this house, as long as this platform shall stand, shall be the person of Jesus Christ. I am never ashamed to avow myself a Calvinist, but if I am asked to say what is my creed, I think I must reply, “It is Jesus Christ.” The body of divinity to which I would pin and bind myself forever, God helping me, is Christ Jesus, who is the sum and substance of the gospel, who is Himself all theology, the incarnation of every precious truth, the all-glorious personal embodiment of the way, the truth, and the life.
Next to the Bible, the book that I value most is John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. I believe I have read it through at least a hundred times. It is a volume of which I never seem to tire.
If there be any one point in which the Christian church ought to keep its fervor at a white heat, it is concerning missions. If there be anything about which we cannot tolerate lukewarmness, it is in the matter of sending the gospel to a dying world.
There is no attribute more comforting to His children than that of God’s sovereignty. Under the most adverse circumstances, in the most severe trials, they believe that sovereignty has ordained their afflictions, that sovereignty overrules them, and that sovereignty will sanctify them all. There is nothing for which the children ought to more earnestly contend to than the doctrine of their Master over all creation – the Kingship of God over all the works of His own hands – the Throne of God and His right to sit upon that throne…for it is God upon the Throne whom we trust.
Divine Sovereignty, 1856.
It is not my aim to introduce doubts and fears into your mind; no, but I do hope self-examination may help to drive them away. It is not security, but false security, which we would kill; not confidence, but false confidence, which we would overthrow; not peace, but false peace, which we would destroy.
Morning and Evening, Evening – December 18, 2000 (paraphrased).
It is a very remarkable fact that no inspired preacher of whom we have any record ever uttered such terrible words concerning the destiny of the lost as our Lord Jesus Christ.
If I never won souls, I would sigh till I did. I would break my heart over them if I could not break their hearts. Though I can understand the possibility of an earnest sower never reaping, I cannot understand the possibility of an earnest sower being content not to reap. I cannot comprehend any one of you Christian people trying to win souls and not having results, and being satisfied without results.
Tearful Sowing and Joyful Reaping, Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, 1869, v. 15, p. 237
Born, as all of us are by nature, an Arminian, I still believed the old things I had heard continually from the pulpit, and did not see the grace of God. When I was coming to Christ, I thought I was doing it all myself, and though I sought the Lord earnestly, I had no idea the Lord was seeking me.
Sermon, A Defense of Calvinism.
I am certain that I never did grow in grace one-half so much anywhere as I have upon the bed of pain.
Christian History, n. 29.
I was cradled in the home of piety, nurtured with the tenderest care, taught the gospel from my youth up, with the holiest example of my parents, the best possible checks all around to prevent me running into sin.
55.352.
Brethren, I wish it were more common, I wish it were universal, with all [Christians] to have family prayer. We sometimes hear of children of Christian parents who do not grow up in the fear of God, and we are asked how it is that they turn out so badly. In many, very many cases, I fear there is such a neglect of family worship that it’s not probable that the children are at all impressed by any piety supposed to be possessed by their parents.
A Pastoral Visit, Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, v. 54. p. 362-363.
I remember one who spoke on the missionary question one day saying, “The great question is not, ‘Will not the heathen be saved if we do not send them the gospel?’ but ‘Are we saved ourselves if we do not send them the gospel?’”
51.30
The bow cannot be always bent without fear of breaking. Repose is as needful to the mind as sleep to the body… Rest time is not waste time. It is economy to gather fresh strength.
Lectures to My Students.
God will not go forth with that man who marches in his own strength.
Quoted in: Curtis C. Thomas, Practical Wisdom for Pastors, Crossway Books, 2001, p. 209.
The power that is in the Gospel does not lie in the eloquence of the preacher, otherwise men would be the converters of souls, nor does it lie in the preacher’s learning, otherwise it would consist in the wisdom of men. We might preach until our tongues rotted, till we would exhaust our lungs and die, but never a soul would be converted unless the Holy Spirit be with the Word of God to give it the power to convert the soul.
The best moment of a Christian’s life is his last one, because it is the one that is nearest heaven. And then it is that he begins to strike the keynote of the song which he shall sing to all eternity.
If I did not believe in the infallibility of Scripture – the absolute infallibility of it from cover to cover, I would never enter this pulpit again!
36.9.
"Oh," says one, "I will join the church when I can find a perfect one." Then you will never join any. "But," you say, "perhaps I may." Well, but it will cease to be perfect as soon as it receives you into its membership.
We talk about pearly gates and golden streets, and white robes, and harps of gold, and crowns of amaranth, and all that; but if an angel could speak to us of heaven, he would smile and say, “All these fine things are but child’s talk, and ye are little children, and ye cannot understand the greatness of eternal bliss, and therefore God has given you a child’s horn book, and an alphabet, in which you may learn the first rough letters of what heaven is, but what it is thou dost not know. O mortal, thine eye hath never yet beheld its splendours; thine ear hath never yet been ravished with its melodies; thy heart has never been transported with its peerless joys.”
The Sympathy of the Two Worlds, Sermon, Luke 15:10.
I must confess that I never realize Christ’s preciousness so much as when I feel myself still to be, apart from Him, an undeserving, hell-deserving sinner.
If we be married to Christ, and He be jealous of us, depend upon it this jealous husband will let none touch His spouse.
A Jealous God, Sermon 502, March 29, 1863.
If it were Christ’s intention to save all men, how deplorably He has been disappointed!
It is, perhaps, one of the hardest struggles of the Christian life to learn this sentence – “Not unto us, not unto us, but unto Thy name be glory.”
A Jealous God, Sermon 502, March 29, 1863.
If we cannot prevail with men for God, we will, at least, endeavour to prevail with God for men. We cannot save them, or even persuade them to be saved, but we can at least bewail their madness and entreat the interference of the Lord.
Lecturers to My Students, Lesson 3, The Preacher’s Private Prayer.
Ah! if there be degrees in glory, they will not be distributed according to our talents, but according to our faithfulness in using them.
It is a reading age, a preaching age, a working age, but it is not a praying age.
If you begin to slip on the side of a mountain of ice, the first slip may not hurt if you can stop and slide no further. But alas, you cannot so regulate sin! When your feet begin to slide, the rate of the descent increases, and the difficulty of arresting this motion is incessantly becoming greater. It is dangerous to backslide in any degree, for we know not to what it may lead. The Christian life is very much like climbing a hill of ice. You cannot slide up. You have to cut every step with an ice ax. Only with incessant labor in cutting and chipping can you make any progress. If you want to know how to backslide, leave off going forward. Cease going upward and you will go downward of necessity. You can never stand still.