…this thing is from Me… – 1 Kings 12:24
There sat, one Sabbath day, in that left-hand gallery, a young Hindoo gentleman wearing a scarlet sash. I preached that morning from this text, “What if thy father answer thee roughly?”* and I had hardly reached the vestry at the back before this young Hindoo gentleman was there with an aged man, and all in a hurry the young man said, “Sir, has Mr. E_____ told you about me?” “No,” I said, “I have not seen him for months; what could he have told me about you?” “Are you sure that you never heard of me before?” “To my knowledge, I never heard of you, and never saw you before.” “Well then, sir,” he said, “there is a God, and that God is in this place.” “How so?” I asked. “Last night, I told this gentleman here that I was almost persuaded to be a Christian; but that, when I went home to India, I should be disinherited by my father, and I felt sure that I should not have the courage to stand out as a Christian; and then my friend said, ‘Come and hear Mr. Spurgeon to-morrow morning,’ and I came in here, and you preached from those words, ‘What if thy father answer thee roughly?’ Verily,” he said, “the God of the Christians is God, and He has spoken to me this day.” That was an illustration of our text, “This thing is from Me.” Has it not often happened so? The providential working of the Holy Ghost is a very wonderful subject. They who are the Holy Ghost’s servants learn to depend upon Him for every word they are to utter; they sometimes feel their flesh creep, and almost every hair on their head stand on end at the way in which they have unconsciously spoken so as to depict to the very life the character of their hearers, -casual hearers, perhaps, -as if they had photographed them though they knew them not. Oh, you who are the Lord’s workers, commit yourselves to God’s guidance; the more you can do it, the better, for often you will have to say of an event that happens to you, “This thing is from the Lord.” ~ C.H. Spurgeon
https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2476.cfm