Charles Spurgeon
"Thou art a great sinner." says he. "Yes, but I believe He is a great Saviour" "But thou hast sinned beyond all hope." "No, there is forgiveness with Him, that He may be feared."
"It is the church that is unmerciful sometimes, but not the Master: he is ever willing to receive us when we come to him.”
"The gospel has found some of its brightest jewels in the lowest haunts of vice. Bear it, bear it into the caves of darkness, where the blackness seems to be palpable, and to hang like the glooms of death-bear ye aloft the everlasting torch, which the divine Lord himself has kindled, and you shall discover by its light some precious blood-redeemed ones, who shall be to the praise of the glory of his grace."
"If you have read your Bible, and have felt no visit from the Holy Spirit, or if you have heard a sermon and found no dew from the Lord attending it, then turn at once to prayer. Tell the Lord your condition, and entreat him to reveal himself unto you. Pray first and read afterwards, and you will find that your speaking with God will be replied to by his speaking to you through the Word."
"It is not the letter which saves the soul; the letter kills in many ways, it can never give life. If you dwell on the letter alone you may be tempted to use it as a weapon against the truth, as the Pharisees did, and your knowledge of the letter may breed pride in you to your destruction."
"Take me as I am, a rough piece of metal, very rough, stern, and hard. You may tutor me in my childhood, and use the rod; you may train me in my manhood, and set the pains of the magistrate and the fear of the law before my eyes, but you will make a very sorry fellow of me, with all your hitting and knocking. But if God takes me in hand, and puts me in the furnace of affliction, and melts me down by trial, then he can fashion me like unto his own glorious image, that I may at last be gathered with him above."
"I noticed them put the metal in the crucible, and after subjecting it to an intense heat, I saw them pour it out like water into the moulds, but first they removed the impurities from the top; but the scum would never have come on the top had it not been for the fire. They could not extract the dross if it had not been put in the furnace and melted. That is the benefit of the furnace to God's people; it melts, tries, and purifies them. They get rid of their dross; and if we can but get rid of that, we may be willing to suffer all the misery in the world."
"His fury rages differently in different persons. On some he displays his great wrath by stirring up outward persecution. The man is not a Christian yet, he is not actually converted yet, but Satan is so afraid that he will be saved that he sets all his dogs upon him directly. The poor soul goes into the workshop, and though he would give his eyes if he could say, “I am a Christian,” he cannot quite say so; and yet his workmates begin to pounce upon him as much as if he was in very deed one of the hated followers of Jesus. They scoff at him because he is serious and sober, because he is beginning to think and to be decent, because he begins to listen to the gospel and to care for the best things. Before the man-child is born the dragon is longing to devour him before the man gets to be a Christian the prince of the power of the air labours, if possible, to destroy him. The devil will lose nothing through being behind. He begins as soon as ever grace begins."
"I would not hear your sins on any account. No sum of money would be sufficient compensation for the impurity that must accrue to any man who shall hear another's sins. I would not tell you mine; much less hear your's. No, make your confessions to God. Go to your closet; shut to your door; then pull out your empty sacks—that is, make a full confession of your sins; tell the Lord that you are a wretch undone without his sovereign grace."
"I do from my inmost soul detest slavery… and although I commune at the Lord's table with men of all creeds, yet with a slave-holder I have no fellowship of any sort or kind. Whenever [a slave-holder] has called upon me, I have considered it my duty to express my detestation of his wickedness, and I would as soon think of receiving a murderer into my church… as a man stealer."
"The time has come for Christians to stir: The house is being robbed, its very walls are being digged down, but the good people who are in the bed are too fond of the warmth, and too much afraid of getting broken heads, to go downstairs and meet the burglars …Inspiration and speculation cannot long abide in peace. Compromise there can be none. We cannot hold the inspiration of the Word, and yet reject it; we cannot believe in the atonement and deny it; we cannot talk of the doctrine of the fall and yet talk of the evolution of spiritual life from human nature … One way or another we must go. Decision is the virtue of the hour."
“We have no superstitious regard for times and seasons. Certainly we do not believe in the present ecclesiastical arrangement called Christmas. First, because we do not believe in the mass at all, but abhor it, whether it be sung in Latin or in English; and secondly, because we find no Scriptural warrant whatever for observing any day as the birthday of the Savior; and consequently, its observance is a superstition, because not of divine authority. Superstition has fixed most positively the day of our Savior’s birth, although there is no possibility of discovering when it occurred. … It was not till the middle of the third century that any part of the church celebrated the nativity of our Lord; and it was not till very long after the Western church had set the example, that the Eastern adopted it. … Probably the fact is that the “holy” days were arranged to fit in with the heathen festivals. We venture to assert, that if there be any day in the year, of which we may be pretty sure that it was not the day on which the Savior was born, it is the twenty-fifth of December. Nevertheless since, the current of men’s thoughts is led this way just now, and I see no evil in the current itself, I shall launch the bark of our discourse upon that stream, and make use of the fact, which I shall neither justify nor condemn, by endeavoring to lead your thoughts in the same direction. Since it is lawful, and even laudable, to meditate upon the incarnation of the Lord upon any day in the year, it cannot be in the power of other men’s superstitions to render such a meditation improper for to-day. Regarding not the day, let us, nevertheless, give God thanks for the gift of His dear Son.”
"There are some ministers—I trust they hardly know what they are about—who by leaving out the doctrine of man's responsibility, naturally lead men into that guilty and abominable doctrine of Antinomianism which has done so much to injure the cause of Christ."
"But, perhaps, the only way in which most men get their faith increased is by great trouble. We don't grow strong in faith on sunshiny days. It is only in strong weather that a man gets faith. Faith is not an attainment that droppeth like the gentle dew from heaven; it generally comes in the whirlwind and the storm. Look at the old oaks: how is it that they have become so deeply rooted in the earth? Ask the March winds and they will tell you. It was not the April shower that did it, or the sweet May sunshine, but it was March's rough wind, the blustering month of old Boreas shaking the tree to and fro and causing its roots to bind themselves around the rocks. So must it be with us. We don't make great soldiers in the barracks at home; they must be made amidst flying shot and thundering cannon. We cannot expect to make good sailors on the Serpentine; they must be made far away on the deep sea, where the wild winds howl, and the thunders roll like drums in the march of the God of armies. Storms and tempests are the things that make men tough and hardy mariners. They see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep. So with Christians. Great-faith must have great trials. Mr. Great-heart would never have been Mr. Great-heart if he had not once been Mr. Great-trouble. Valiant-for-truth would never have put to fight those foes, and have been so valiant, if the foes had not first attacked him. So with us: we must expect great troubles before we shall attain to much faith."
"Take care man lest thou shouldest be God's scaffold, lest thou shouldest be used on earth to be a scaffolding for building his church, and when his church is built thou shouldest be cast down and burned up with fire unquenchable. Take heed that thou art built upon a rock, and not upon the sand, and that the vermillion cement of the Saviour's precious blood unites thee to the foundation of the building, and to every stone thereof."
"There is not in all the world a creature so strong as a Christian when God is with him. Talk of Behemoth I he is but as a little thing. His might is weakness when matched with the believer. Talk of Leviathan that maketh the deep to be hoary! he is not the chief of the ways of God. The true believer is mightier far than even he. Have you never seen the Christian when God is with him? He smelleth the battle afar off, and he cries in the midst of the tumult, "Ah! aha! aha!" He laugheth at all the hosts of his enemies. Or if you compare him to the Leviathan-if lie be cast into a sea of trouble, he lashes about him and makes the deep hoary with benedictions. He is not overwhelmed by the depths, nor is he afraid of the rocks; he has the protection of God about him, and the floods cannot drown him; nay, they become an element of delight to him, while by the gram of God he rejoiceth in the midst of the billows."