Christ's First and Last Subject

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.

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.