Friday, April 20, 2007

The Bible-believing, truth-driven, soul-winning, hard-working, Calvinistic Baptist preacher who changed the world one sermon at a time.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon died on January 31st 115 years ago at the age of 57 after preaching for 38 years at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London. My life has been greatly impacted by the sermons of C.H. Spurgeon and my soul has been deeply inspired by the strength he displayed during the course of his tumultuous life. It is a fortunate thing that I have the oppurtunity to study godly men like Spurgeon.

If there were anything to know about Charles Spurgeon, it was that he was a preacher. He preached over 600 times before he was 20 years old! His sermons sold about 20,000 copies a week and were translated into 20 languages. The collected sermons fill 63 volumes equivalent to the 27 volume ninth edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, and stands as the largest set of books by a single author in the history of Christianity.

There is no preacher this side of the Reformation I would more highly recommend you read.

Here are some select quotes from the pen of Charles Spurgeon:

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

We are all at times unconscious prophets.

The greatest enemy to human souls is the self-righteous spirit which makes men look to themselves for salvation.

It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness.

I would go to the deeps a hundred times to cheer a downcast spirit. It is good for me to have been afflicted, that I might know how to speak a word in season to one that is weary.

By perseverance the snail reached the ark.

As sure as God puts His children in the furnace he will be in the furnace with them.

The anvil is not afraid of the hammer.

He that deserves nothing should be content with anything.

God had one Son without sin, but not a single child without the rod.

Our misery is that we thirst so little for these sublime things, and so much for the mocking trifles of time and space.

A lie travels round the world, while Truth is putting on her boots.

If we cannot believe God when circumstances seem to be against us, we do not believe Him at all.

Quietude, which some men cannot abide because it reveals their inward poverty, is as a palace of cedar to the wise, for along its hallowed courts the King in his beauty deigns to walk

Whatever may be said about the doctrine of election, it is written in the Word of God as with an iron pen, and there is no getting rid of it; there it stands.

I believe the man who is not willing to submit to the electing love and sovereign grace of God, has great reason to question whether he is a Christian at all, for the spirit that kicks against that is the spirit of the devil, and the spirit of the unhumbled, unrenewed heart.

No man ever made himself to live. No preacher, however earnest, can make one hearer to live. No parent, however prayerful, no teacher, however tearful, can make a child live unto God. “You hath HE quickened,” is true of all who are quickened.

I may be called a Calvinist for preaching a limited atonement; but I had rather believe a limited atonement that is efficacious for all men for whom it was intended, than a universal atonement that is not efficacious for anybody, except the will of man be joined with it.

I take it that the highest proof of Christ’s power is not that he offers salvation, not that he bids you take it if you will, but that when you reject it, when you hate it, when you despise it, he has a power whereby he can change your mind, make you think differently from your former thoughts, and turn you from the error of your ways.

Final perseverance is the necessary evidence of genuine conversion.

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