“It Is Finished!”

“It Is Finished!”

Spurgeon opens by marveling at the extraordinary clarity of Christ's mind on the cross — that even while being crucified in agony, he could survey and comprehend the entire sweep of Scripture, every type from the red heifer to Solomon's temple, every prophecy from Eden to Malachi, and declare with perfect understanding that all of it was now fulfilled in him, an intellectual feat so staggering that Spurgeon uses it to argue Christ could also have compressed in those hours of suffering an equivalent for all eternity's punishment. He then unpacks "It is finished" in four dimensions: all prophecies and types were perfectly fulfilled (the Bible's apparent contradictions about the coming Messiah making an unsolvable puzzle until Christ alone explains them all); the perfect obedience the Law required was completed at last (since even sinless Adam could never have said this, as he remained always capable of future failure); the debt of divine justice was paid to the last farthing (Hell's weapons exhausted, the Law's whip worn out, God's justice now satisfied and free to show mercy); and Satan, sin, and death were decisively defeated (sin nailed to the cross alongside its Destroyer, Satan hurled in chains into the pit, and death disarmed, its keys taken). He closes by urging every hearer to go publish these words everywhere — to Hindu ascetics torturing themselves, to Catholic priests still offering sacrifice, to Protestants trusting in their good works, and to despairing sinners of every description — insisting that "It is finished" demolishes every system of human merit and every excuse for doubt, and that God accepts a sinner who believed five minutes ago just as fully as a saint of eighty years, since his acceptance rests entirely on Christ's finished work and not one syllable on anything the sinner feels or does. Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on December 1, 1861.

The Roaring Lion

Spurgeon opens by insisting that Satan is a real, active, personal adversary — not a myth or superstition — and traces the terrifying scope of his activity: following believers into every place (sanctuary, family circle, prayer closet, business), into every spiritual duty (where he leaves the imprint of his foot like a dog's paw-print on wet Egyptian brick), and into every frame of mind (exploiting depression with despair, exploiting triumph with presumption, exploiting settled peace with complacency), while wielding a vast army of fallen spirits and thousands of years of experience against creatures who have been alive only a handful of decades. He then catalogs Satan's three kinds of "roaring" — the roar of persecution (historical and dramatic, from Nero's burning stake to Anabaptists drowned in Dutch rivers, though reduced to mere mockery and slander today), the roar of violent temptation (dragging a believer against his will toward a sin he loathes, a relentless assault described like enemies forcing water down a martyr's throat), and the roar of injected blasphemy (putting thoughts the believer never formed into his mind and then accusing him of having originated them himself, as Bunyan pictured in the Valley of the Shadow of Death) — and addresses each one with the comfort that many believers before have endured and survived them all. He closes with the prescription: resist steadfastly in the faith — not by flight but by standing firm, countering every one of Satan's accusations with a specific Scripture, keeping the shield of faith raised even when battered, and drawing comfort from the fact that every temptation the believer faces is already labeled "common to man," endured before by the whole cloud of witnesses now robed in white before the Throne; and he closes with a tender appeal to the unconverted, insisting that even a beleaguered Christian in the Slough of Despond is more blessed than a comfortable hypocrite walking in dry ease, and urging them to cast themselves on Christ this very moment. Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on  November 17, 1861.

Bread For The Hungry

Spurgeon opens with a lesson on providence drawn from Israel's forty years of eating manna — arguing that the sustaining power behind all food is not in the food itself but in God's direct command, so that he could just as easily nourish his people through any other means if he chose, as proved by long fasts, miraculous deliverances without any visible intervention, and the stories of Henry Erskine finding money in a marsh and a martyr fed from his persecutor's table — and applies this to any believer facing temptation to sin in order to survive: God is not limited to one channel of provision, so it can never be right to do a wrong thing, and faith must simply stand still and wait for the salvation God will supply. He then turns to the spiritual application, describing the hunger God creates in the soul before conversion — painful and insatiable, resisting every substitute offered by amusements, moralism, or philosophy, growing sharper rather than duller with time, driving a person to crowd wherever the bread of Heaven is genuinely preached — and the heavenly food that satisfies it: the Word of God in its written and preached forms, which is simultaneously rich and plain, unfailingly sweet, perfectly wholesome, always abundant, and which unlike any human writing never grows stale after decades of feeding on it. He closes with the practical duty this privilege creates: just as Israel's manna did not fall into their mouths but lay outside the tents to be gathered fresh every single morning, believers must open their Bibles daily, carry a text under the tongue throughout the day, and come to preaching with open mouths expecting to be fed — and he turns to those who feel no such hunger at all, warning them that the soul's appetite suppressed here will awaken in eternity where nothing can satisfy it, and pleading with them to trust Christ now, since the granary of Heaven is never locked to any soul willing to be nothing so that Christ may be everything. Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on November 10, 1861.

The Shield of Faith

Spurgeon opens by insisting that the Christian life is not a peaceful stroll but a constant battle requiring both defensive and offensive courage — contrasting the heroic warriors of David's cave of Adullam with the soft, compromise-loving Jonathan who stayed in Saul's comfortable court and missed the roll call of the mighty men — and warning that those who avoid conflict by hiding in worldly respectability are not using the shield of faith but the skulking place of a coward. He then expounds the shield of faith through four qualities that make it the most essential piece of the believer's armor: it covers the whole person — head against heresy, heart against worldliness, hands against temptation, knees against prayerlessness, and even conscience against guilt — and it is simultaneously armor for the armor, defending all the other graces so that meekness, love, and righteousness are preserved only as long as faith is held up; it must receive blows rather than avoid them; it must be strong, whole, and forged from heaven rather than human effort; and above all it must be actively handled, by quoting specific promises against specific attacks of Satan. He closes with a tender application to anxious sinners who are being kept from Christ by the enemy's accusations, urging them to stop looking for evidence inside themselves — experiences, feelings, worthiness — and simply raise the shield of faith toward Christ by daring to believe in the teeth of everything Satan says, on the grounds that the smallest vacuum of honest need is enough for Christ to fill, and that the only remaining sin is to refuse the commandment to believe. Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on October 27, 1861.

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.