Faith Illustrated

A Blast of the Trumpet Against False Peace

Spurgeon takes aim at false peace — the comfortable feeling of being spiritually fine when one is not — identifying five main sources of it: the man who drowns conscience in ceaseless amusement and gaiety, beating drums so loud that the soul's own cries cannot be heard; the man who has swallowed infidel arguments not from honest intellectual conviction but because the Bible makes him too uncomfortable in his sins; the careless procrastinator who silences conscience by promising to reform later, not realizing that each delay makes the heart harder; the man living on hollow resolutions that have already been broken every time they came due; and most dangerously, the church member who has turned sound doctrine into a cover for immoral living, believing himself elect while loving sin, which Spurgeon calls a thoroughly damnable delusion against which Calvin's own teaching stands as a direct refutation. He also addresses ignorance as a source of false peace, arguing that when the gospel is not clearly preached people remain comfortable in forms and formalities without ever grasping justification, atonement, or the difference between the old and new covenants — and he reserves his most solemn warning for the possibility that some may have been given up by God as a judicial act, their conscience permanently silenced not by grace but by the withdrawal of the Spirit's striving. He closes by urging every hearer to test their peace against three standards — whether it would hold on a sickbed, in a dying hour, and at the last judgment — and insists that any peace compatible with the love of sin, trust in personal righteousness, or living outside of Christ, is a false peace that will crumble precisely when it is most needed. Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on February 26th, 1860.

Sin Immeasurable

Spurgeon takes the question "Who can understand his errors?" to argue that our sin is genuinely beyond our own comprehension — we cannot count its number, weigh its guilt, or grasp its special aggravations, especially when those sins are committed against a praying mother, a merciful escape from death, or special spiritual privilege — and that to fully understand our sin we would need to first understand things permanently beyond human reach: the true depth of our fallen nature, the full spiritual strictness of God's Law, the blinding perfection of God's holiness, the horror of Hell, and the full weight of suffering Christ bore on the cross. From this he draws two negative lessons — that no one can hope to be saved by their own righteousness, since even their good deeds are tainted and their omissions alone would condemn them, and that no one can hope to be saved by working up the correct feelings or a complete sense of their own guilt first, since that guilt can never be fully grasped by anyone this side of eternity. He closes with the positive lesson that makes the rest bearable: though human sin is too vast to measure, Christ's atoning blood is wider and deeper still, so that anyone — however great their sin — who simply trusts in Jesus as he is, just as they are, will be saved, while no amount of slight sin can save the one who refuses to believe. Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on February 12th, 1860.

Mr. Evil-Questioning Tried and Executed

Spurgeon takes Naaman's question about the rivers of Damascus as the emblem of what he calls "Evil-Questioning" — the habit of raising intellectual objections to the gospel not from honest intellectual difficulty but as a convenient cover for continuing in sin — and he tracks this enemy through his disguises (calling himself "Honest Enquiry"), his speeches (turning Calvinist doctrine into an excuse for passivity, Arminian mercy into a license for delay, the imperfection of Christians into a reason to reject Christianity), and his distinguishing marks (applying to spiritual matters a logic he would never use in business, measuring the Infinite God by finite standards, drawing arguments from exceptions, and always reaching conclusions that happen to conveniently favor the sinner's continued rebellion). He then arraigns Evil-Questioning as a traitor to the King, a liar whose conclusions the questioner knows to be false, a murderer of souls, and an enemy who deserves immediate execution — and describes his large family of equally dangerous children that John Bunyan named: Doubt, Unbelief, Wrong Thoughts of Christ, Clip Promise, Legal Life, Live by Feeling, Carnal Sense, and Self Love, with brief counsel on how to deal with each. He closes with a dual application: to believers, urging them to refuse every suggestion that clips the promise, judges by feeling, or measures God by circumstances; and to the unconverted, urging them to stop their endless questioning, bring all their questions to the cross, look to Christ in simple trust, and discover that he will receive even the blackest sinner who dares to throw himself upon him. Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on February 5th, 1860.

The King’s Highway Opened and Cleaned

Using the image of Israel's cities of refuge — where magistrates annually cleared the roads of every obstacle so that the fleeing manslayer could arrive safely — Spurgeon surveys the road of faith and systematically removes six common stumbling blocks that prevent anxious sinners from trusting Christ: the enormity of past sin (answered by the boundless sufficiency of Christ's blood, which abounds where sin abounds), the hardness and lack of feeling in the heart (answered by the fact that the command to believe requires no preparation, and that a sight of Christ will melt what terrors cannot), the weakness of one's faith (answered by the truth that it is the object of faith, not its strength, that saves — the fringe of the garment is enough), the presence of doubts and fears mixed with faith (answered by Christ's own word to "little faith" and the testimony of the greatest saints who lived with doubt), the fear of death (answered by the principle that dying grace is given for dying moments, not before), and the consciousness of ongoing sin and failure to be holy (answered by the reminder that perfection is not the condition of salvation, and that the very grief over sin is evidence of new life). He closes by pressing the one great barrier that underlies all others — human pride that finds the simplicity of "trust Christ" too humbling — and urges every hearer to cast themselves wholly on Christ with nothing to commend them but the divine command itself, staking his own soul on the certainty that no soul that has ever genuinely trusted the blood of Christ has ever been cast away. Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on January 8th, 1860.

Woman’s Memorial

In this sermon, Spurgeon tells the story of a woman who showed great love for Jesus by breaking a very expensive jar of perfume and pouring it on His head. Other people complained that she wasted money, but Jesus said her act would be remembered forever. Spurgeon explains that what made her action special was that she did it from her heart, without worrying about what others thought, and she did it only for Jesus, not for attention or praise. He encourages people to serve Jesus with the same kind of love — doing good things not because they “have to,” but because they truly want to, even if others don’t understand. The woman’s gift shows that real love for Jesus is willing to give its best, even when it seems unusual or costly. Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on November 27th, 1859.