Attributes of God

Posthumous Salvations

Sherry Attributes of God, Christian Life, prayer, Sovereignty of God 1 Comment

It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart. – Ecclesiastes 7:2

There have been many, many instances in which earnest Christian people have sought the conversion of their relatives or friends; they have prayed for them, and wept over them, and pleaded with them, but all their efforts have been unsuccessful; yet, after their death, the memory of their holy zeal has touched the conscience of the one who would not yield before, and brought him to Christ. I wish, dear friends, that your godly mother, who is in heaven, and who died leaving her son unsaved, might seem to come to you just now. I ask for no apparition, but that she may be consciously present to your mind, and that her dying words may ring in your ear, for perhaps the remembrance of what she said may be blessed to you even now. When I am taken away, I can but wish that any true and faithful word that I have spoken may still continue to speak to you from my grave. When good Mr. Payson died, he begged that his people might come and see him before he was interred; and those who did so read these words on his bosom, “Remember the word which I have spoken unto you being yet present with you.” It was thus his desire, you see, that he should have posthumous spiritual children, that they should be born to God even though they should seem to be born out of due time. Ah! you wives, who have been praying for your husbands these many years, never give them up, because they may be brought to Christ when you yourselves will be in heaven. Mothers and fathers, never cease pleading for your children, for they, too, may be brought to Jesus when you are among the angels…Persevere in prayer, you who are seeking the salvation of others. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2663.cfm

In the Infinite Mercy of God

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, repentance, salvation, Sovereignty of God Leave a comment

…as of one born out of due time. – 1 Corinthians 15:8

There have been some dear friends who may be said to have been “born out of due time,” for they have been converted to God after it seemed impossible that they ever should be. I recollect reading of one who imbibed sceptical notions and became exceedingly furious against the preaching of the Word. One day, in Edinburgh, he heard it said that a certain eminent minister of the gospel intended, if he met him, to speak with him about his soul; whereupon the man uttered some very strong expressions, and, amongst other wicked things, he said, “I shall never be converted unless I lose my senses.” All who were acquainted with him, and who knew how desperately he was set against the gospel, thought that his was indeed a hopeless case; but, in the infinite mercy of God, it turned out to be quite the opposite. He began to suffer from great incoherence of thought, his mind gradually wandered, when he was trying to speak, he often spoke utter nonsense. He became unfit for business and had to be put into the custody of someone who watched him as his keeper. Reason was not actually gone, but it was reeling upon its throne; and while he was in that sad state, the case of Nebuchadnezzar came to his mind, and he wondered whether God had given him up, altogether, on account of what he had said, -that he would never be converted while he was in his senses. He turned his mind, all shipwrecked and battered as it was, towards God and out of the depths of his half-bewildered spirit, he cried unto the Lord as Nebuchadnezzar did, and his mind returned to him, and he became a humble, gentle, holy believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. Do you not think, dear friends, that he also was “one born out of due time”? ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2663.cfm

Grace’s Almighty Power

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, repentance, salvation, Sovereignty of God Leave a comment

…as of one born out of due time. – 1 Corinthians 15:8

When Puritanism seemed to be trodden under foot in the reign of James I, the king issued the Book of Sports, and gave commandment that every clergyman was to read from the pulpit, on Sunday, that, it was the royal will and pleasure that the young people should play at football, cricket, and other games and pastimes on the Lord’s-day afternoon. One of the ministers thought it would be well to do as the king ordered, and to say something beside, so, when the Sunday came for reading the Book of Sports to the people, he said, “I am commanded by the king and the authorities to read to you the following document, but it grieves my heart and conscience to have to read it. I know it is wicked, and wrong, and shameful, and abominable to desecrate the Sabbath as you are invited to do, and I wonder what will become of my country when even from the church itself Sabbath-breaking is recommended.” It happened that there was in the congregation, that day, a young man who had always been a ringleader in the Sabbath sports; he was no sooner out of church than he was on the village green…but, when he heard that Book of Sports read, he said to himself, “well, I acted in that way on my own account, and it, was wrong enough for me to do so; but now I say with the minister, “What is to become of all the country if everybody is to be as bad as I have been? What will happen to the nation if this kind of thing is to go on?” The thought struck him so forcibly that he became first a serious character, and then a true seeker after God, and afterwards a genuine believer in the Lord Jesus Christ…Very often, where sin has abounded, grace does much more abound; and when the Word of God seems to grow scarce, and the candle of the gospel burns but dimly, we may pray and expect that even then, some may be “born out of due time” to the praise of the glory of that grace which saves as it wills, and often selects the very chief of sinners to be the subjects of its almighty power. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2663.cfm

Never Despair Over a Lost Soul

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, repentance, salvation, Sovereignty of God Leave a comment

…I received letters unto the brethren, and went to Damascus, to bring them which were there bound unto Jerusalem, for to be punished... suddenly there shone from heaven a great light round about me. – Acts 22:5,6

I remember being in Dr. John Campbell’s house, one day, when he told me that a minister was preaching at Whitefield’s old Tabernacle in Moorfields. One evening, when there were present, under very strange circumstances, two young men who had fallen into dissipated habits, and who had made an appointment with each other for the commission of some gross sin that very night…They were passing by the Moorfields Tabernacle and as they wanted to know the time at which they were to meet for this unholy purpose, one of them said to the other, “Go in, and see the time; there is sure to be a clock in there.” But the clock was not fixed as it is here, at the back of the preacher, but the other way; so, the young man had to go some little distance further in than he intended, in order to see the clock. If I remember rightly, the preacher that night was Matthew Wilks, and he was just uttering some quaint remark, something that arrested the young man’s attention, and held him fast in the aisle. His companion waited, outside for a time, but it was cold, so he thought he had better go in, and look at the clock himself, and fetch his friend out. He went in; the arrows of the Lord pierced the heart of both of them, and the second of those young men was John Williams, the famous missionary, and at last the martyr of Erromanga…You would not have thought it possible that those men should become, as they did, preachers of the gospel, when they were, at that very time, desperately set on the commission of a great sin against God, and their hearts were wholly given up to the pleasures and follies of this world; but so it happened, and our Lord still knows how to stop men as he stopped Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus…After such a triumph of divine grace, let us never despair of any sinner, however far he may have gone, into, sin. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2663.cfm

God’s Timing

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, salvation, Sovereignty of God, The Holy Spirit 2 Comments

And last of all He was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time. – 1 Corinthians 15:8

Mr. Tennant, a famous American minister of Whitefield’s time, one of the most earnest and seraphic men who ever proclaimed the gospel of Jesus Christ, had a hearer, who remained unmoved under many a score of his most faithful sermons. Others were saved, but not this man; he seemed unmoved and immovable; but it came to pass, on a certain Sabbath, that a very unusual thing happened. Mr. Tennant had prepared his sermon with great, care, it was what we are wont to call a laborious discourse, into which he had put all the thought and all the pains possible; but he had not been preaching long before his memory completely failed him, his mind refused to work, and, after floundering about for a while, he was obliged to sit down in great confusion, and say that, he could not preach to the people that day. The man I have mentioned, who had never before been impressed under Mr. Tennant’s ministry, was that day called by sovereign grace, as “one born out of due time,” for he was led to see that there was a spiritual and supernatural force which had usually helped the pastor to preach, and that, when this divine influence was withdrawn, he was as weak as other men, and could not speak with power: as he had been accustomed to do. This truth, somehow or other, -for human minds are strangely constituted, and things which have no effect upon certain people very greatly affect others who are present at the same time;- this truth, I say, induced the man to think; thinking, he was led to believe in God, and to trust in the Lord Jesus Christ for the salvation of his soul. He was, without doubt, one “born out of due time.” ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2663.cfm

Converted

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, prayer, salvation, Sovereignty of God, The Holy Spirit 1 Comment

“One born out of due time.”-1 Corinthians 15:8

It was necessary that Paul, as an apostle, should have seen the Lord. He was not converted at the time of Christ’s ascension; yet he was made an apostle, for the Lord Jesus appeared to him in the way, as he was going to Damascus to persecute the saints of God. When he looked upon himself as thus put in, as it were, at the end of the apostles, he spoke of himself in the most depreciating terms, calling himself, “one born out of due time.” Those who are acquainted with the Greek tongue know what a despicable term Paul here applied to himself,-as though he was scarcely a man at all,-at any rate, as the very last of the family, “born out of due time;” and not only the last, but also the very least, for he says, “I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” 

Paul proved that he was a true citizen of the New Jerusalem because he became, of all men, most zealous for Christ, zealous for the gospel, zealous for the winning of souls; he seemed to try to do all he could to undo the mischief he had wrought in the days of his unregeneracy, and to work with both his hands and all his heart to establish and extend the kingdom which once he tried to overthrow. O God, by Thy great mercy, cause another Paul to be born in this house of prayer! Thou canst do it; wilt Thou not bring to Thyself, by the power of the Eternal Spirit, some wild, threatening, blustering, blaspheming hater of Christ, lay him at the dear feet of the Crucified, and cause him to look up and live? Pray for this, dear Christian people. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2663.cfm

At the Day of Judgment

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, Sovereignty of God 1 Comment

After a long time the lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them. – Matthew 25:19

At the day of judgment you will not have to cast up a hurried account in the gross, but every item shall be read. Can you prove that? Yes. “For every idle word that man shall speak, he shall be brought unto account at the day of judgment.” Now, it is in the items that men go astray. “Well,” says one, “If I look at my life in the bulk, I am not very much ashamed, but it is those items, those little items-they are the troublesome part of the account, that one does not care to meddle with.” Do you know that all yesterday was made up of littles? And the things of to-day are all little, and what you do to-morrow will all be little things. Just as the tiny shells make up the chalk hills, and the chalk hills together make up the range, so the trifing actions make up the whole account, and each of these must be pulled asunder separately. You had an hour to spare the other day-what did you do? You had a voice-how did you use it? You had a pen-you could use that-how did you employ it? …When God comes to look into our hearts at last, He will not only look at the great but at the little; everything will be seen into, the pence sins as well as the pound iniquities-all must be brought against us, and an exact account given.

We must take our own trial before God’s eternal tribunal, and nothing can bias our Judge, or give Him an opinion for or against us, apart from the evidence. Oh, how solemn this will make the trial, especially if we have no blood of Christ to plead! The great Advocate will get His people an acquittal, through His imputed merits, even though our sin in itself would condemn them. But remember, that without Him we shall never be able to stand the fiery ordeal of that last dread assize. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0175.cfm