Natural or Spiritual?

Accidents, Not Punishments

Spurgeon uses a series of recent railway disasters and public calamities as the occasion to firmly reject the popular idea — eagerly spread even by some ministers — that victims of sudden accidents were greater sinners than those who escaped, arguing from Christ's own words about the Galileans and the tower of Siloam that one event happens to the righteous and the wicked alike, that providence in this world does not sort people by moral merit, that applying such logic would produce monstrous conclusions (blaming a crushed infant as a worse sinner than adults who survived, or damning Spurgeon's own congregation killed in the Surrey Music Hall panic), and that telling pious falsehoods to frighten people away from Sunday travel is a dishonest tactic that insults the gospel and breeds the very infidelity it means to prevent. He then argues that this error actually undermines one of Christianity's greatest arguments — for if God rewarded good and punished sin in this life, there would be no need for a day of judgment; it is precisely because the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer here that justice demands another world where all accounts are settled. He closes by turning the warning that "except you repent, you shall all likewise perish" back on each hearer personally: not as an accusation against the dead but as a searching question about the living — whether they hold any guarantee against sudden death, whether they are as guilty as those who died, whether they have truly repented, and whether death — which will come as surely, as irresistibly, and as instantly to every hearer as it came to those crushed in the tunnel — will find them trusting Christ or still unprepared. Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on September 8th, 1861.

Natural or Spiritual?

Spurgeon divides all humanity into only two classes — the natural man, who has nothing beyond what he was born with, and the spiritual man, who has received the new life of the Holy Spirit — and works through the many faces of the natural man's rejection of divine things: active opposition and open mockery, secret sneering at "Calvinistic" doctrine, lazy indifference that rates the Bible below a farming almanac, and a fashionable tolerance that considers all religious opinions equally unimportant, all of which prove the apostle's point that the natural man does not, cannot, and will not receive the things of the Spirit. He then defends the things of the Spirit from the charge of foolishness by arguing that no one who has actually studied them can call them trivial — citing Newton's own confession that Scripture's depths were unfathomable — and traces the real reason for the rejection to three deficiencies in the natural man himself: a lack of taste, like a country bumpkin unmoved before a Raphael painting; a lack of spiritual organs, like a blind man on a mountaintop dismissing the landscape as worthless; and a lack of the very nature that could appreciate divine things, illustrated by the fable of a learned pig who pities the astronomer for wasting time at his telescope instead of rooting for acorns. He closes with two urgent practical conclusions: first, that since no amount of education, self-effort, or priestly ceremony can transform a natural man into a spiritual one — only the new birth by the Spirit can do it — regeneration is an absolute necessity and must be plainly and faithfully preached; and second, that any believer who genuinely receives and loves the things of the Spirit thereby has good evidence they have already been born again, and should both prize that faith and pour earnest prayer into God's throne that the same Spirit would be sent with power upon ministers, teachers, and the unconverted around them. Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on September 1, 1861.

Adoption

Spurgeon expounds adoption as a sovereign act of pure grace — not prompted by any foreseen merit or goodness in the adopted, since grace is itself the cause of those qualities and could not logically be their effect — in which God translates spiritually ruined sinners from the family of Satan, with all its guilt and condemnation, into His own family through Jesus Christ, giving them not merely the name of children but the very nature of children through regeneration. He catalogs the rich privileges flowing from adoption: release from the Law's condemnation, God's name placed on us, access to the throne with boldness through the Spirit of adoption, the pity and protection of a Father who feels every sorrow, temporal and spiritual provision, ongoing education in grace, and the discipline of the Father's rod — with the crucial guarantee that despite chastening, God's children are sealed to the day of redemption and can never be cast out of the family, a truth that exposes as inconsistent any system claiming believers can lose and regain their standing. He closes with the corresponding duties adoption creates: obeying the Father's commands not from legal compulsion but from filial love (the same Ten Commandments now read as Gospel written on the heart rather than Law carved on stone), and trusting the Father without wavering, since it is as absurd for God's child to doubt his Father's word and care as it would be to question the love of the best earthly parent while that parent's resources remain infinite. Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on February 10, 1861.

The Tabernacle—Outside the Camp

Spurgeon uses the incident of Moses pitching the tabernacle outside the Israelite camp — after their golden calf idolatry drove God's presence from the center — as a picture of the believer's necessary separation from the world, arguing that genuine seekers of God must go outside not only the camp of the openly profane and the thoughtlessly careless, but also the camp of the merely moral, the merely religious, and even the nominally church-going, since God's tabernacle is not to be found among those who have adulterated worship with human invention, kept back parts of God's Word, or made peace with worldly motives while wearing Christian labels. He then honestly catalogs the inconveniences this separation entails: the cost of public confession, the loss of friends and family approval, coldness from fellow Christians who call earnestness fanaticism, the false charge of bigotry, and the burden of being watched and held to a higher standard — but insists that none of these should deter a true disciple, just as David went to fight Goliath alone while his brothers sneered, and that sensitivity to being watched ought to function as a check on sin rather than a reason to avoid commitment. He closes with four arguments for going outside the camp: for your own joy (worldly Christians are miserable Christians), for your own growth in grace, for the Church's sake (it has always been the distinctly separate men who have saved the Church in every era of reformation), and most urgently for Christ's sake, since He was driven from the camp and crucified by it, and it is a strange loyalty that seeks the smiles of the world that put him to death. Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on  February 10, 1861.

Portraits Of Christ

Spurgeon explains that believers are predestinated to be conformed to Christ's image in three dimensions — in character (humility, diligent service, faithful love, and fervent prayer), in suffering (bearing the reproach and Cross that the world heaps on anyone who truly follows Christ, just as it heaped them on him), and ultimately in glory (for those who bear the image of the crucified will also bear the image of the crowned) — and he argues this is the truest form of imitation, not outward mimicry or cold morality, but an inward transformation of the essential spirit and character. He answers why believers should desire this conformity: it is what was lost in Eden and what Christ restores, it is the very goal of all God's predestinating purposes rather than merely Heaven itself, and it is already the instinctive cry of every regenerate heart — and he adds provocatively that this privilege of becoming like Christ is one even angels cannot share, making the suffering Christian more enviable than Gabriel in some sense. He closes by addressing the seeming impossibility of becoming like the spotless Christ, arguing that none of the three obstacles — the depravity of the material, the corrupting influence of the world, or the height of the ideal — can frustrate a God who decreed it, and that the very act of gazing on Christ in love and longing is itself the chief means by which the Spirit accomplishes the transformation, photographing his image on the soul of all who live in fellowship with him. Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on January 13, 1861.