Christian Life

Awake, Unconverted Man!

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

Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation. – 2 Corinthians 6:2

You, you unconverted man, are asleep; a deep and horrible sleep holds you fast. If it were not so, you would perceive your danger, and you would be alarmed. You have broken God’s law; the fact is certain and solemn, though you treat it lightly. Punishment must follow every breach of that law, for God will not be mocked nor suffer His government to be treated with contempt. For every transgression there is an appointed recompense of reward. The retribution which is your lawful due will not long be withheld: it is on its road towards you. The feet of justice are shod with wool: you hear not its coming, but it is as sure as it is silent. Its steps are swift, and its stroke overwhelming.

If you were awakened, O sin-stricken transgressor, you would also perceive that there is a remedy for your disease, a rescue from your present danger. “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them;” and “Whosoever believeth in Jesus Christ hath everlasting life.” Forgiveness of sin is guaranteed to every one that rests in the work of Jesus…If God would awaken thee, thou wouldst tremble at the jaws of hell which are open to receive thee; thou wouldst turn to Christ, and say, “Jesus, save me! Save me now!” You are asleep, sinner-you are asleep, or you would not take matters so coolly. I am afraid for you and bowed down with amazement and dread. The mercy is that you may be awakened: you are not yet among the slain that go down into the pit. Oh, that that almighty grace would awaken you at this present moment ere your doom is sealed and your damnation executed! Here I offer my fervent prayers for you, believing that He to whom I pray is able to bring to holy sensibility the most stolid of mankind. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0996.cfm

Cherish Your Faithful Preacher

Sherry Attributes of God, Christian Life Leave a comment

And He commanded us to preach unto the people, and to testify that it is He which was ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and dead. – Acts 10:42

Faithful preachers are among God’s best gifts. Cherish them and be obedient to their admonitions. I have known persons become offended when a minister is “too personal;” but wise men always prize a ministry in proportion as it is personal to themselves. He who never tells me of my faults, nor makes me feel uneasy, is not likely to be the means of good to my soul. What is the use of a dog that never barks? Why have a doctor, and grow angry with him if he points out the source of your disease? Did God send us, as His messengers, to pander to your taste or flatter your vanity? We seek not your approval if it be not founded on right…Conscience makes men respect the gospel even when their depravity makes them loathe it. They are held fast by the cords which they fain would cast from them. May it often be so that while my plain dealing excites your anger, it may nevertheless have a power over you; and may every man and woman here, whether saved or unsaved, feel that the preaching is the truth of God to his or her soul; and, whether liked or not liked, may it become the permanent means of arousing from sleep, and ultimately bringing to Christ every one of you to whom these words shall come. Be sure and attend an arousing ministry and pray God to make the ministry which you now listen to more and more an arousing ministry to your own soul. Pray for the preacher, for he is in the same danger as yourselves, for he, too, is compassed with infirmity. The minister soon goes to sleep unless God wakens him; and what is more sad than to see the professed messenger of God become a traitor both to his Master and to men’s souls by a lack of zealous affection? It is ill for the sheep if the shepherd himself be asleep. Woe to the camp where the sentry is given to slumber! May God deliver our country from being overrun with preachers whose souls are insensible concerning their grand work, and who love the bread of their office better than the glory of God or the good of their hearers. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0996.cfm

Set a Spiritual Alarum

Sherry Christian Life 1 Comment

Wherefore He saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. – Ephesians 5:14

“How can I be kept awake?” No one can give you spiritual power and watchfulness but the Spirit of God. “All my fresh springs are in Thee.” Where life first comes from, there more life must be obtained. Christ has come that we may have life, and that we may have it more abundantly. He who first called us from the dead, must also arouse us from among the slumbering. He who brought us from the grave of our depravity must bring us from the couch of our indolence. Pray about the matter; make it a point with God: ask Him to arouse you. On your knees is the posture in which to conquer sloth.

Act towards yourselves about spiritual wakefulness as you would with natural wakefulness. Set your inventive faculties to work, and devise means for chasing away the sleep dragon. What would you do if you required to be awakened early? Perhaps you would set an alarum; a good thing, no doubt. Take care you set a spiritual alarum. Every Christian ought to keep one, and it should be so well set as to keep exact time, and so powerful as to arouse the most slumbering. A tender conscience, quick as the apple of the eye, is a precious preservative against sinful sleep; but it must never be tampered with, or its usefulness will soon end. When once the hour has come, down runs the alarum, the man starts up all at once, and says, “It is time to rise;” so should my conscience be so well regulated, that when a temptation is near, or a sinner is near me whom I ought about warn, my soul should at once take the alarum and say, “Here is work to do-a sin to be conquered, or a soul to be instructed: now, therefore, perform the doing of it with all thy might! I hear the alarum, and I must bestir myself!” May we always maintain and retain such a special wakefulness that we may be at our post of duty or in our place of conflict with a punctuality which none can gainsay. O for the alarum of a tender conscience! ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0996.cfm

Wealth Lies in the Field of the Awakened

Sherry Attributes of God, Christian Life, promises 1 Comment

And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. – Romans 13:11

Brethren, slumber impoverishes us. The sluggard, and the thistle and thorn, always go together, and rags and poverty follow close behind. You may miss, by your sleep, great spiritual profit. You cannot expect sleepy Christians to grow in grace. They will miss many instructive things in God’s Word, many precious promises meant only for the wakeful. They will lose high enjoyments and spiritual banquetings, for the king’s entertainments are not for those who fold their arms and toss upon the bed of indolence. Wealth lies in the field of the wakeful, but the lover of ease shall have want come upon him as an armed man. I blow the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in God’s holy mountain, for it is high time to awake out of sleep.

Awaken too, my brother, for you are losing opportunities for usefulness. While you sleep men are dying. See how the cemeteries are becoming crowded, how the area of them has to be enlarged. Day by day you see wending through the streets the funeral procession: men, gone beyond the reach of your instructions and your warnings, are carried to their long homes. Awake then, awake, for death is busy everywhere…Awake, for perhaps while you are asleep another heart that is now accessible to the gospel may become finally hardened. Conscience will soon become seared, and then there is nothing for zeal and earnestness to work upon. It will be too late for you to put the seal upon the wax when once it is cool. Quick, sir; while the wax is soft put the seal down! How many opportunities for good we all miss! But those who are asleep lose all their opportunities, and they will be surely required of them when the Master comes. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0996.cfm

Only the Wakeful are Praiseful

Sherry Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, The Father, The Holy Spirit Leave a comment

Sing praises to God, sing praises: sing praises unto our King, sing praises. – Psalm 47:6

Under Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, the acceptableness of our praise depends very much upon the warmth of it. As cold prayers virtually ask God to deny them, so cold praises ask God to reject them. Cold praises are a sort of semi-blasphemy: they do, as it were, say, “Thou art not worthy to be ardently praised. O God, we bring Thee these poor thanksgivings: they are good enough for Thee.” Surely if we treated our heavenly Father as we should, every sacred passion would glow in our hearts like a furnace: our whole heart would catch fire, and as Elijah went up into heaven with horses of fire and chariots of fire, so, too, our souls, as we thought upon the goodness and the graciousness of God, would ascend to heaven in vehement joy of adoration…Mark with what exhilaration the psalmist rendered praise unto God and imitate him therein. See him dancing before the ark, and hear him cry aloud, “Sing praises to God, sing praises: sing praises unto our King, sing praises.”

Only the wakeful are praiseful. The very best praises God receives from earth are from His troubled saints; but then they are awake; the strokes of the rod have aroused them…When martyrs have magnified God standing on the burning fagot, they have given God better praise than even the angels can. It was the old fable, that the nightingale was made to sing by the thorn that pricked her breast: and many a child of God has poured forth his sweetest music when the thorn of affliction has pierced his heart…Remember what Job did when he sat on the dunghill, scraping himself with a bit of broken pot- he praised God and said, “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” It was grand of thee, O patriarch of Uz, to be able thus to extol thy Lord: then was thy soul fully awake. Beloved friends, may our inmost souls be so energetic with the power of grace that we may spontaneously and earnestly bless the Lord at all times and under all circumstances. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0996.cfm

Fuel for the Flame of Gratitude

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

The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy. – Psalm 103:8

We should have a vivid sense of the mercies we have received, or we cannot bless God aright for them. You who have not yet received spiritual blessings, should not be forgetful of His temporal mercies: it is surely sufficient cause for lively thanksgiving that you are not upon a bed of sickness; that you are not in the lunatic asylum; that you are not in the workhouse; that you are not on the borders of the grave; that you are not in hell; that you still have food and raiment, and that you are where the gospel is graciously presented to you. Should not all this be thought of? Should not this be fuel for the flame of gratitude? As for us who have tasted spiritual blessings, if our minds were awake, we should think of eternal love and His going forth from eternity; of redeeming love, and the streams that flow from the fount of Calvary; of God’s immutable love and His patience with our ill-manners in the wilderness; of covenant mercy, of mercies yet to come; of heaven and the bliss hereafter. Such recollections should call up our whole man to praise the Lord. If the innumerable benefits which we receive were thought of and dwelt upon, the contemplation would put a force, a volume, a body into our song…To praise God is to stand in the immediate presence of the blessed and only Potentate. Do not even seraphs veil their faces in that august presence? With what earnestness of spirit should we praise!.. Let all sleepiness be put away in the presence of the ever-wakeful Jehovah, before whose eyes all things are naked and open. He never slumbereth nor sleepeth, so as to make a pause in His mercy to us: let not our slumbering spirits cause an omission of our grateful song. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0996.cfm

The Delightful Exercise of Private Praise

Sherry Christian Life Leave a comment

My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed: I will sing and give praise. Awake up, my glory; awake, psaltery and harp: I myself will awake early. – Psalm 57:7,8

I am afraid there is very little private singing nowadays. We often hear discourse concerning private prayer, but very seldom of private praise: and yet ought there not to be as much private praise as private prayer? I fear from the seldomness of its being mentioned, that private thanksgiving has grown to be a sleepy affair. Then as to public worship, how earnest ought it to be! Yet how seldom is it hearty and real! How often do we hear half-awake singing? Sometimes a sort of musical box, consisting of pipes, keys, and bellows, is set to do all the adoration. The heathens of Tibet turn the wind to account religiously, by making it turn their windmills and pray for them; and our brethren in England, by an ingenious adjustment of pipes, make the same motive power perform their praise. Where this machinery is not adopted, still the Lord is robbed of His praise by other methods, sometimes half a dozen skilled voices of persons who would be equally as much at home at the opera or the theater as in the house of God, are formed into a choir to perform the psalmody; and it is supposed that God accepts their formal notes as the praise of the entire assembly. How far different is the genuine song of gracious men who lift up their voices to the Lord because their hearts adore Him! Oh, I love to hear every voice pouring out its note, especially if I can but hope that with every voice there is going forth a fervent heart. This warm hearted, joyful singing-why, it makes the congregation on earth to be like the assembly of the skies; and causes the meeting-place of the saints to be a faint type of the gathering of the angels and glorified spirits before the throne of God. To drone or to whisper in such a delightful exercise is criminal. If ever we should exhibit the angels’ wakefulness, it should be when we are emulating their employment. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0996.cfm