Election and Holiness

Importance of Small Things in Religion

Spurgeon uses the story of the ark of the covenant being moved on a new cart instead of being carried on priests' shoulders, and Uzzah being struck dead for touching it, to argue that small departures from God's clear instructions are never harmless — God's sense of how serious sin is differs vastly from ours, any change to what God has commanded brings real trouble even when the motive seems good, and one small deviation from Scripture has historically led, step by step, to much larger errors, as when the practice of infant baptism gradually grew into the damaging doctrine of baptismal regeneration. He argues this is why the church today lacks the power of the apostolic church — not because the gospel itself has weakened, but because the church has departed from the original purity and simplicity of Scripture in countless small ways, and only a return to "the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible" will restore her former strength. He closes by turning to anyone seeking salvation, warning them just as urgently against touching the ark with their own merit — trying to mix good works or self-effort with Christ's finished work — since salvation comes only by trusting Jesus completely and is offered freely to "whosoever," with the same right to come as the witness called by name in court, simply because Christ himself has commanded it. Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on April 8th, 1860.

Election and Holiness

Spurgeon defends the doctrine of Election as singular (God bypassed angels to choose fallen men), unconstrained (it rests on God's free will rather than any goodness in the chosen, foreseen or otherwise), and just (no one merits salvation, and God owes mercy to none, so giving extra grace to some wrongs no one, while the unsaved are lost only because they themselves refuse to come). He proves its truth by pointing out that even believers who deny the doctrine in theory affirm it the moment they pray for God to save specific loved ones or sing hymns crediting grace alone for their own conversion, since both acts assume God distinguishes between people. He closes by demolishing the charge that Election promotes sinful living, arguing instead that being chosen and separated by God's love is itself a powerful motive toward holiness, not license for sin, and urges believers to live up to their high calling without shame while warning unbelievers never to use uncertainty about election as an excuse for unbelief, since the only business required of anyone is simply to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved. Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on March 11th, 1860.

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.