Five Sermons

The young pastor of New Park Street

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–1892) was born at Kelvedon in Essex, the son and grandson of Independent (Congregational) ministers. On a snowy Sunday in January 1850, aged fifteen, he turned into a small Primitive Methodist chapel in Colchester where, as he told it, a lay preacher stood in for the absent minister and took a single text: "Turn to Me and be saved, all the ends of the earth" (Isaiah 45:22). He looked, and turned to Christ.

Convinced from the New Testament that baptism belongs to believers, he was immersed that May and joined the Baptists (believer's baptism). At seventeen he was pastor at Waterbeach, near Cambridge, and in 1854, at nineteen, of New Park Street in Southwark, London, an old Calvinistic (Particular) Baptist church. He calls himself "the successor of the great and venerated Dr. Gill" 207.17, its eighteenth-century pastor.

While the crowded chapel was enlarged in 1855 the church met at Exeter Hall in the Strand, and from October 1856 in the Music Hall of the Royal Surrey Gardens. At the first service there, on the evening of 19 October 1856, someone raised a false cry of fire and seven people died in the crush; afterwards the church met there on Sunday mornings. Spurgeon was deeply shaken, and never hid the depression that returned to him through life (Is depression a lack of faith?). In 1861 the church moved into the Metropolitan Tabernacle.

From January 1855 a sermon was printed every week from a shorthand report Spurgeon corrected, and each year's were bound as The New Park Street Pulpit (from 1861, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit); the series outlived him. He founded a pastors' college and an orphanage, left the Baptist Union in 1887 over a drift, as he saw it, from Scripture and the atonement, and died at Menton, in France, in 1892 (Nineteenth-century evangelicalism).

Five Sunday mornings

The library holds five sermons from his early twenties, numbered as in The New Park Street Pulpit. No. 1, The Immutability of God (New Park Street Chapel, 7 January 1855), opens the printed series; No. 7, Christ Crucified (Exeter Hall, a month later), filled a double number, 7–8. Three come from the Music Hall in 1858: No. 207, Sovereign Grace and Man's Responsibility, in August, and on successive December Sundays No. 227, Compel Them to Come In, and No. 228, The Blood.

They show the two things he refused to part: God's sovereign grace (Nos. 1 and 7), the gospel pressed on all (No. 227), the two together (No. 207), and the blood of Christ at the centre (No. 228). His printed sermons run to thousands. Left out are his thirty years at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, The Treasury of David on the Psalms, Morning and Evening, his Lectures to My Students and the controversy of his last years.

Each sermon opens with its day, place and text (227.text), sets out its heads in Roman numerals, often subdivided, with lines of hymns between, and usually ends by turning to saints and to sinners. The places are paragraphs (227.12 is the twelfth of No. 227). The English is Spurgeon's own, from volumes 1, 4 and 5 of The New Park Street Pulpit; he quotes the King James Version.

Two lines at once

The first sermon begins by claiming that "the proper study of a Christian is the Godhead" 1.1, and takes this text:

Because I, the LORD, do not change, you descendants of Jacob have not been destroyed.

Malachi 3:6

God does not change, Spurgeon argues, in essence, attributes, plans, promises or threatenings, nor in the objects of his love, and Hezekiah's added years prove no change 1.20 (see Does God change his mind?). Immutability is comfort: "If God hath loved me once, then he will love me for ever" 1.14, and so his people will not fall away (perseverance).

At Exeter Hall he took Paul's words:

but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

1 Corinthians 1:23-24

To preach Christ crucified, he says, is to preach justification by faith, sovereign and electing grace, "the peculiar redemption which Christ made for his elect" and perseverance: "Calvinism is the gospel, and nothing else" 7.3. The gospel's despisers are the Jew, who loves the outside of religion and may hope for heaven "Because I am a Baptist" 7.7, and the Greek, who thinks it foolish. A general call goes to everyone; the special call names God's children, as Christ named Mary: "I cannot give the special call; God alone can give it, and I leave it with him" 7.15. This is effectual calling.

Why, then, plead with sinners? At the Music Hall in 1858 he took up the question.

And Isaiah boldly says: “I was found by those who did not seek Me; I revealed Myself to those who did not ask for Me.” But as for Israel he says: “All day long I have held out My hands to a disobedient and obstinate people.”

Romans 10:20-21

"The system of truth is not one straight line, but two" 207.2. Verse 20 teaches sovereign grace: God seeks us before we seek him. Spurgeon owns that when converted "I was an Arminian thoroughly" 207.6, until he asked how he had come to seek God at all. Verse 21 teaches responsibility: God's outstretched hands were sincere, and those who perish do so by their own disobedience 207.10. The two "do not want any reconcilement" 207.16 (to want is to need); they are nearly parallel lines that "will meet somewhere in eternity, close to the throne of God, whence all truth doth spring" 207.2.

Some high Calvinists, holding that saving faith is God's gift to the elect and so not the duty of the unconverted, would not urge them to repent and believe, and called preachers like him "Mongrel Calvinists" 207.9. Such men make one doctrine their sail but "have not the other to be the ballast" 207.9. Why is anyone saved? Grace, grace, grace. Why is anyone lost? There "the Arminian is far more right than the Antinomian" 207.17. Antinomian, properly one who holds believers free of the moral law, here means the high Calvinism that makes man "not free enough to be responsible" 207.2. The Synod of Dort had said as much: the guilt of unbelief lies in man, faith is God's free gift I.5, and the gospel's promise and command are for "all persons promiscuously and without distinction" II.5.

Compel Them to Come In shows how this sounds from the pulpit, going straight out to the "highways and hedges" of the parable (Luke 14:23). Since Augustine cited the verse in defending imperial force against the Donatists, compel had a dark history; Spurgeon's compulsion is persuasion. He tells the message, commands, exhorts, warns of death and judgement, and at last weeps and prays, for "words and tears are the arms with which gospel ministers compel men to come in" 227.23. To one who cannot believe he says, "I am not come to invite you to faith, but am come to invite you to Christ" 227.22. He ends where 7.15 had pointed: "I cannot compel you, but thou O Spirit of God who hast the key of the heart, thou canst compel" 227.25.

Reformed and Presbyterian readers love him as a preacher of Dort and Westminster who offered Christ freely to all, and many share his refusal to force the two truths into one system; Westminster too says God's decree does not take away "the liberty or contingency of second causes" Westminster Confession 3.1. Methodists, in one of whose chapels he was converted, reject unconditional election and particular redemption, teaching that prevenient grace wakes every heart to answer Wesley, yet hear in his pleading their own revival's urgency. See Grace and election and What is predestination?

The blood on the door

A week later, Spurgeon went back to the night of the Passover:

The blood on the houses where you are staying will be a sign; when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No plague will fall on you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.

Exodus 12:13

He knew it was "an old subject" 228.3; but Adoniram Judson, home from Burma, had given a crowd that wanted travellers' tales only "the wondrous story of the dying love of Jesus" 228.3. Christ's blood is that of a victim appointed by God and, like the lamb, spotless; it is divine, shed once for all, and accepted, as the resurrection sealed 228.12. It alone saves, and saves surely and completely (The cross and atonement).

The deepest comfort is in the third head. The text does not say "when you see the blood, but when I see it" 228.26: the Israelite inside could not see the doorposts, but God could, and "this is the only condition of the sinner's salvation—God's seeing the blood; not your seeing it" 228.26. So he warns the anxious off every substitute, even their faith: "It is not your hold of Christ that saves you; it is his hold of you" 228.20. Wesley called faith "the condition, and the only condition, of justification" III.1; the words differ, but both turn the hearer's eye from himself to Christ.

As a Baptist he is blunt: "you that are trusting in your infant baptism, your confirmation, and your Lord's Supper, you are trusting in a lie" 228.15, though he adds, "keep them in their places" 228.15. In 1855 he reissued the Baptist Confession of 1689 for his people Second London Baptist Confession; his church asked believer's baptism of its members, yet welcomed believers of other churches to the Lord's Table. Reformed churches, which baptize infants, part from him there, though they confess that grace is not "so inseparably annexed unto it" that none can be saved without it Westminster Confession 28.5. Catholics, the Orthodox and Lutherans teach that God gives the new birth in baptism, a way Christ gives himself rather than something set beside him. See Baptism and the Lord's Supper.

Reading them well

These sermons were spoken: read them aloud, a head at a time. Spurgeon talks to one hearer as "you" and voices objectors in quotation marks, so a quoted line is not always his view. He quotes both sides of an old quarrel: Charles Wesley's "Jesus, lover of my soul" 7.29 and the Calvinist Toplady's "Nothing in my hand I bring" 228.28. Some words have changed: the Sabbath is Sunday, a faggot is a bundle of firewood, consumption is tuberculosis; and manager is a misprint for manger (1.6).

He put the Bible above every name, and tells us how to read him: "Where I separate from the truth, cast my words away" 207.19. Some pages carry the quarrels of Victorian England: when he says the doctrines of grace have always meant "Down with Popery" 207.9, or warns against confirmation, he aims at Rome and at the Church of England's ritual, and Catholic and Anglican readers will not recognize their faith in his picture. Hear first his point: nothing but Christ may be trusted.

He paints hell vividly and says, "I must threaten you" 227.20, but "in hopes that a brother's threatening may drive you to the place where God hath prepared the feast of the gospel" 227.22 (see Are heaven and hell real?). Read his claim that one who never knew himself a Christian "never was a Christian" 7.20 with the comfort for doubters at 7.22. Early in 7.7 he calls the Jews a wandering race under a curse, a reading common among Christians of his day; read it with care. The anecdote at 1.10 keeps the condescending dialect of its day; Spurgeon himself denounced American slavery, and in parts of the South, it is reported, his sermons were burned for it.

All five come to one place. At the end of The Blood he gives the trembling sinner John's words, "the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin" (1 John 1:7), and tells him that "us" includes him, if he feels his need of a Saviour 228.30.