Charles Spurgeon’s Conversion: Isaiah 45:22

Introduction: Faithful Preachers Who Shaped History

It’s almost like we should go to another classroom for this. There are credible historians who feel that the preaching of George Whitefield, John Wesley, and Charles Wesley is the reason why England did not descend into the violence and chaos that marked the French during the French Revolution. We are still singing hymns by John Newton. John Bunyan’s classic book, Pilgrim’s Progress, has had an incredible effect on our world. And we owe so much to this man here — this African bishop, sometimes called “the black dwarf” — who had a tremendous effect on what we believe today, all because of the courage and the faithfulness of a man named Athanasius.

But we’re going to look tonight at Charles Haddon Spurgeon. There are a number of topics on this chart that, when I go over them — and I’m not an emotional type at all — still touch me deeply. One of them is this man’s life that we’re looking at tonight. When I think of how God used him, and the effect he had on his age that still lingers today, I find it incredibly touching and moving. So I hope you will find the same, and not be bored by the number of details I want to look at with you.

So we’re going to ask for God’s blessing. Shall we pray?

Father, in the name of Thy beloved Son, our Lord Jesus, we bow in Thy presence. We are not doing this out of custom or mere habit, but because we feel such a deep need for God’s presence to fill this place, and for the help of God to assist in the preaching of the gospel. We pray for each one who is here, and each family represented. And we pray for spiritual and eternal blessing as a result of their being here to listen to the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. We ask this, praying a rich blessing wherever Thy word is proclaimed tonight, in the Saviour’s precious name. Amen.

Scripture Reading: Isaiah 45:20–23

I’d like to read with you in Isaiah’s prophecy, Isaiah chapter 45, verse 20.

“Assemble yourselves and come; Draw near together, You [who have] escaped from the nations. They have no knowledge, Who carry the wood of their carved image, And pray to a god [that] cannot save. Tell and bring forth [your case]; Yes, let them take counsel together. Who has declared this from ancient time? [Who] has told it from that time? [Have] not I, the LORD? And [there is] no other God besides Me, A just God and a Saviour; [There is] none besides Me. “Look to Me, and be saved, All you ends of the earth! For I [am] God, and [there is] no other. I have sworn by Myself; The word has gone out of My mouth [in] righteousness, And shall not return, That to Me every knee shall bow, Every tongue shall take an oath.

So we read in verse 20 about gods that cannot save. Now here is the One who can. A just God and a Saviour — there is none beside Him. Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God, and there is none else.

From Water Beach to the New Park Street Church

As I mentioned, I faced a huge problem selecting what to say about Charles Haddon Spurgeon in opening remarks. There may be more written by him and about him than anyone else on the chart. I’ve already given you some information about the young Charles Spurgeon — his childhood, his conversion, his early preaching days in Water Beach. Now I want to say some things about the man who preached for almost 40 years in London. When I gathered the information, I had 34 pages in Microsoft Word, so please bear with me if this seems long — I think it’s all very valuable and gospel related.

Let me pick up where your handout left off. Spurgeon had seen the congregation at Water Beach grow from 40 to 400 people, as the audience came from villages all around the surrounding countryside. Similarly, when he was called to preach at London’s New Park Street Church at the age of 19, he found at first a congregation of less than 200. He began to preach there, and attendance jumped almost immediately. Within a month, the 1,200-seat building was crowded — seats filled, aisles packed, people sitting in the windows and standing shoulder to shoulder in the Sunday school area. What characterized his preaching was that he spoke so people understood what he was saying. What a novel way to preach — the people actually knew what you were talking about.

A Building Too Small

After a few more months of overcrowding, construction began to enlarge the building. While that work was in progress, services were held at a larger building called Exeter Hall — an auditorium in the heart of London that seated 4,000 and had standing room for another thousand. And then it, too, proved too small. Hundreds were turned away who wanted to come and hear him. I think it’s at this point that the cabbies in London used to call for rides by saying, “Over the river to Charlie! Over the river to Charlie!” — to take people across the Thames to hear Charles Haddon Spurgeon.

So now the bigger building was too small. When he came back to Park Street after the renovations, it now seated 1,500, and with the Sunday school hall and other rooms filled, a total of 2,000 could be pushed into Park Street. But he’d been pulling in more than 4,000 at the other building, so once more it was too small. The only way to handle that was two services — an evening service back at Exeter Hall, and a morning service at Park Street. Thereafter, evening by evening, the hall was crowded to its utmost capacity. Thousands who arrived hoping to get in failed to do so, and remained outside — a noisy, milling multitude that blocked the movement of traffic on the street. News of this activity spread throughout London and much of the British Isles.

A Humble Beginning

The humility that marked Spurgeon at this early age is evident in a statement he wrote later:

“When I first became a pastor in London, my success appalled me, and the thought of the career which seemed to open up, so far from elating me, cast me into the lowest depths. Who was I, that I should continue to lead so great a multitude? I would gladly have retired to my village obscurity, or emigrated to America to find a solitary nest in the backwoods, where I might be sufficient for the things which would be demanded of me. It was just then that the curtain was rising on my life’s work, and I dreaded what it might reveal.”

In his regular Sunday work, he spent time before each service alone with God, feeling the awesome responsibility of preaching the gospel to lost men and women, and he would pour out his soul in prayer. When he preached, Spurgeon did not ask people to walk to the front of the auditorium, raise a hand, or sign a card. But throughout each sermon, and especially as he drew to its close, he pleaded with unsaved hearers to believe on the Lord Jesus — and he expected them to do so right there and then.

There’s an amusing instance where one of his students complained to him: “Mr. Spurgeon, I have been preaching at Tower Hill, I don’t know how many weeks, and I don’t think I’ve seen a person saved.” Mr. Spurgeon said to him, “You don’t expect to see people saved every time you preach, do you?” “Oh, no, no, no — not every time.” “That’s your problem,” Spurgeon said. “Every time you preach the gospel, expect to see God work and souls become saved.”

The Metropolitan Tabernacle and an Unmistakable Voice

The huge crowds who wished to hear him preach led to the opening of a larger building in March 1861 — the Metropolitan Tabernacle, which I was able to visit myself. He preached to 6,000 every Sunday for 30 years. That was before microphones, and it was possible only because the Lord had endowed him with a commanding voice. Spurgeon’s model of preaching was the evangelist George Whitefield, famous for his capacity to be heard by crowds outdoors, and considered by many the greatest preacher since the Apostle Paul and Hugh Latimer. As with Whitefield, God blessed Spurgeon with a wonderful voice — even a whisper of it was heard in the Tabernacle. Many were astonished at the power and range on first hearing him.

“Mother, Is Mr. Spurgeon Speaking to Me?”

One writer told the story of a child taken by his mother to hear Spurgeon preach. Imagine a child sitting in a crowd of thousands, and at some point in the meeting the child turned to his mother and said, “Mother, is Mr. Spurgeon speaking to me?” There was an ability to convey his voice to the audience, and the man who wrote it down said, “Listening to Charles Spurgeon, I realized that could very well be.”

There were occasions when his wife Susannah — he called her Susie — walked into his vestry just before he was to go out to preach. He would be so intent on the task ahead, so immersed in his message and studying the Scriptures, that when she walked in he’d stand up and shake hands with her — and only then realize who it was, and apologize. But that was the concentration of his mind as he thought about preaching to people who were on the way to eternity.

Blessed Are Ye When Persecuted

Now, he had many critics. One leading minister said that Spurgeon’s preaching was an insult to God and to man. Another said his style was vulgar and impious. Spurgeon suffered these criticisms in silence. This is the kind of wife to have, young man, if you’re looking for a wife — his wife, seeing the results of these verbal blows on her husband, decided to do what she could to encourage him. She took a large piece of paper and printed on it the words of the Lord Jesus from Matthew chapter 5:

“Blessed are they who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye when people insult you and persecute you and say all manner of things against you falsely, because of Me. Rejoice, and be glad, for great is your reward in heaven; for so persecuted they the prophets who were before you.”

She attached that paper to the ceiling above his side of the bed. Every night the last thing he saw, and every morning the first thing he saw, was: “Blessed are ye when you are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.”

The Crystal Palace: Preaching to 23,654

He addressed the largest gathering of his entire career at a place called the Crystal Palace. There had been a mutiny in India against Britain’s rule — the Raj — and a service of national humiliation was planned. It was to be addressed by the one man with a voice enough to reach the expected gigantic audience on this national occasion — Charles Haddon Spurgeon. The people attending, counted at the turnstiles as they entered, numbered 23,654. This was undoubtedly the largest indoor congregation ever reached by the human voice in all of history up to that moment.

Let me explain something here — those who have to do this kind of preaching will tell you about the emotional drain it can be, and to think of standing before that many people, hoping to have a message from God, can be an extremely exhausting thing. The service was held on a Wednesday evening, and Spurgeon was so exhausted afterward that he slept two nights and a day, and did not wake up until Friday morning. By the way, when he lectured to young preachers to help them learn to preach — the book is called Lectures to My Students, if you’ve ever seen it — he was doing this at the ripe old age of 34, giving instruction on how to preach.

When the Metropolitan Tabernacle was being repaired, services were held in a gargantuan structure, the Agricultural Hall. Spurgeon had seating installed to accommodate 15,000, with standing room for 2,000 or 3,000 more. The hall was in the north of London, miles from the Tabernacle, so many of Spurgeon’s regular congregants couldn’t make the trip. It was widely believed that this time he had attempted something too much even for him — to fill a building like that. Instead, in each of the services, some 20,000 people were listening to the word of God.

Sixty Ministries Born From One Church

Now I’m going to go over a long list. Please forgive me — you might be totally bored by this, but I want to impress upon you the impact that Christianity had in his day, much of which remains until now. Besides his constant round of preaching, a number of other organizations sprang up under Spurgeon’s ministry: the Pastor’s College, the almshouses, the orphanage, the Colporters’ Association, the Evangelists’ Association, the Country Mission, the Home and Foreign Working Society, the Loan Tract Society, the Sermon Loan Society, the Maternal Society, the Police Mission, the Coffee House Mission, the Loan Building Fund, the Christian Brothers Benefit Society, the Flower Mission, the Gospel Temperance Society, the Female Servants’ Home Society, the Blind Society, the Ladies’ Benevolent Society, the Tabernacle Evangelistic Society, and the Spurgeon’s Sermons Tract Society.

That is an amazing list, and it is not complete. More than 60 institutions stemmed from Spurgeon’s ministry to help poor and needy people, both with the gospel and with their temporal needs. That’s on top of his regular preaching, the printing of his weekly sermon, the magazines he published, and the 44 titles of books he had written.

“The God Who Answers by Orphanages”

His many activities did not stop Spurgeon from being accused of playing at religion. One day a man challenged him and declared that his Christian beliefs were worth nothing. Spurgeon responded by pointing out the failure of agnostic and atheistic societies to help people in need. He contrasted the work of Christians like Dr. Barnardo and George Müller with the utter failure of many unbelievers to help the thousands in poverty. He closed on a triumphant note, applying the words of the prophet Elijah to his critic. Remember, Elijah had challenged the prophets of Baal, and said, “The God who answers by fire, He is God” — and the Lord God sent fire down in answer to Elijah’s prayer. So Spurgeon said, “The God who answers by orphanages, let Him be God.” And of course the man had nothing to answer, because there were no noble agnostics or proud atheists running orphanages and homes for the poor.

One of Spurgeon’s chief American friends was the Christian H.J. Heinz — yes, if you’re using Heinz ketchup — a man deeply involved in Sunday school work, who felt Spurgeon was the humblest man he ever met. Sir Henry Doulton, whose factory manufactured the famous Royal Doulton china and figurines, was an earnest Christian who regularly attended Spurgeon’s ministry and employed a large number of people from the Metropolitan Tabernacle.

I wasn’t going to say this, but I will: a number of people went to London and heard the great preacher Joseph Parker, and left saying, “What a preacher Joseph Parker is.” Then, at night, they went to hear Charles Spurgeon, and found themselves leaving saying, “What a wonderful Saviour Christ is.” Spurgeon had pointed them to the Lord Jesus.

Spurgeon’s Sermons Reach the World

Thousands of people in various countries looked forward excitedly each week to the arrival of Spurgeon’s new sermon in print. These were sold on London streets and in other English cities, mailed throughout Britain and to other lands, and carried by colporters on their visits to villages and rural homes. They were also translated into many languages — Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Castilian, Chinese, Congo, Czech, Estonian, French, Gaelic, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Karen, Lettish, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Serbian (as it was then called), Spanish, Syriac, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, and several African languages. Some sermons were also prepared in braille for the blind.

One man had some of Spurgeon’s sermons elegantly bound into volumes of 42 discourses and sent them to all the crowned heads of Europe. A million sermons went out in Russia alone. In many countries where people lived at a distance from a church, groups gathered every Lord’s Day and someone would read one of Spurgeon’s sermons aloud — that’s like Zoom before it was created. In one remote district of England, approximately 200 people had been saved simply from listening to Spurgeon’s sermons read aloud. Likewise, there were out-of-the-way areas in Scotland where people had no idea who the prime minister of Great Britain was, but they all knew who Spurgeon was, through the reading of his sermons. Up until 1917 — 25 years after his death — five of his sermons were still printed every month, discontinued only when the wartime shortage of paper stopped publication.

Spurgeon had a library of 12,000 books, and — much like a number of people here — was an astonishing speed reader, endeavoring to master six of the hardest books he could find every week. He once said he counted eight sets of thoughts passing through his mind at the same time while he was preaching. I can barely handle one.

Once, on a Saturday night, he was having trouble collecting his thoughts for a message. He worked late; it just wasn’t developing. He was very discouraged and dog-tired. Mrs. Spurgeon advised him to go to bed and promised to wake him early so he’d have time to prepare — but she didn’t wake him. Here’s why: he had scarcely fallen asleep before he began to talk in his sleep, preaching a sermon on the very text he had just been studying. His wife got up, got a piece of paper and a pencil, and jotted down the points as he preached them in his sleep. When he woke up, she gave him the paper — there was his message, and that’s what he preached that day. Believe me, my wife cannot do that for me.

His constant round of activity took a toll on him, and he was often very ill. By the time he was 30, his frame began to show signs of wear. He developed gout and was often confined to bed, suffering great pain. He wrote:

“It is mercy to be able to change sides while lying in bed. Did you ever lie awake? Did you ever try to turn and find yourself helpless to turn in bed? Did you find others lift you, and by their kindness only reveal to you the miserable fact that they had to put you back the way you were, because it was preferable to where they had just moved you? What a mercy I have felt it to be, to have only one knee torturing me at a time.”

Spurgeon’s Final Days and Homegoing

On June 7, 1891, Spurgeon stood before his people for the last time. From that platform he had proclaimed the gospel to millions of hearers, but this was the last time they would hear his voice. During his final illness, he received messages of sympathy from the Prince of Wales, from Mr. Gladstone the former prime minister, from several members of the aristocracy and Parliament, and from numerous others from all walks of life.

In hopes of some recovery, Spurgeon traveled to Menton, France. But on January 28 he became unconscious, and despite all that could be done, he remained that way until the evening of Sunday, January 31, 1892, when — surrounded by his wife and a few friends in his room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage — his earthly journey came to its close, and he went home to be with Christ. He was 57 years old.

His body was brought back to London. Five different services were held to accommodate the thousands who wanted to pay their respects. When the hearse bearing his casket set out on the five-mile journey to the cemetery, people thronged the streets the whole way. The bells of churches sounded as the procession passed, and even the pubs along the route were closed. At the orphan house, a covered platform had been erected outside, and in deep mourning the children sat there. They were supposed to sing as the funeral procession went by, but most of them couldn’t — they were in tears, watching the body of the man who had brought them out of extreme poverty into care and love pass by on its way to rest. A hundred thousand mourners surrounded his funeral cortege as it entered West Norwood Cemetery in London.

British Prime Minister David Lloyd George said this: “Spurgeon was the greatest preacher of his age. It was an age of great preachers, but he was the greatest in a great age. He was a great orator — I never heard anything like it.” I’ve thought that if it’s been said that Sir Winston Churchill marshaled the English language and sent it into battle, then Charles Haddon Spurgeon baptized the English language and consecrated it to the service of God.

How Do You Account for Spurgeon?

So — an answer to the question, how do you account for Spurgeon? This boy comes, at the age of 19, to London, and thousands are waiting to hear him. For the rest of his life, thousands upon thousands of people hear the gospel, hundreds are saved, and all this activity springs up to help the poor and needy. How do you account for Spurgeon?

Someone asked that question once, and the man said he could answer it in one word: “God. That’s how you account for the life of Charles Haddon Spurgeon.”

Now, it may be that not everyone here has had a chance to look at the handout, so you may not know that the verse I read to you — Isaiah chapter 45 and verse 22 — is the very verse God used to bring Charles Haddon Spurgeon to Christ.

One God, One Saviour, One Way

I want you to notice that this verse gives us what could be called the most embracive invitation: “Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.” All the ends of the earth. That is the most embracive invitation, and it’s because there is one God. If there were a multiplicity of gods, as non-Christian religions imagine, then it might be true that one of those gods would offer his or her followers salvation, but it wouldn’t be available to others. But “I am God, and there is none else” is the statement that goes along with it. Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God, and there is none else.

Were there a number of saviours — as much of Christendom, with its many religions, sects, and denominations, often suggests — were there many saviours or mediators, then there would be a number of ways to be saved. But there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.

Creation, the Fall, and a World Twisted by Sin

That one God created a world He intended to be a world of comfort, bliss, activity, and joy for His creatures. Earth is an island of life in a vast, inhospitable, enormous ocean of menacing planets and galaxies — finely tuned for life. There are countless things that had to all be set to their sweet spot for life to possibly exist here. If just one of them was slightly off, Earth could not have sustained life. But everything was perfect, because God had created a world in which He wanted to place a creature. Earth would be the site where God would display His creativity, His wisdom, and His might.

You know what He wished for? God wished to create a being capable of understanding something about his Creator. So He created an intelligent creature — man and woman — giving us a spirit that would enable us to intelligently understand something about this infinite Being who made us. It was His desire to create a being with a conscience, a sense of right and wrong, so He wanted us to be not only spirit beings and intelligent creatures, but moral creatures — so He gave us a soul, enabling mankind to rule the planet and care for God’s creation. And it was God’s desire to create a creature with the ability to visibly represent Him and serve Him — because man is not only a moral creature and an intelligent creature, but a tripartite creature. We have soul, we have spirit, we have a body — and that would enable us to visibly display something of the Creator.

And then a catastrophe took place, and sin came in. Adam’s willful rebellion ruined God’s creation and threatened to thwart God’s plans and purposes. The disaster was of unimaginable proportions. In his wildest, most nightmarish imagination, Adam had no idea what he was unleashing. He threw open the gates to every horror that the rampaging power of sin could inflict on the human race.

Adam’s nature changed. Suddenly he was afraid of God. He became petty and vindictive and selfish — does this sound like anything you’ve seen in your own life and heart, and in others? The awful moral, mental, and spiritual darkness that sin creates came rushing into the soul of Adam. Adam’s universe changed. Now we live in a world that’s unfair and chaotic. It’s not that good people live long and bad people die young. Babies die. Wars break out. Famines take place. Diseases stalk the land. Epidemics and pandemics inflict the human race. We don’t live in a world that’s fair and right and kind — we live in an unjust universe, all because of sin. Adam’s abilities changed. He lost the ability to represent God, to rule for God, and to commune with his Creator.

Now, what I’m telling you is not just a historic fact — it’s true of every one of us. Sin has ruined us.

The Car in the Backyard

You see, you could buy a car built to go really fast — I won’t give you any speeds here, but let’s just say fast. And instead of driving that car on your nice highways, you drive it around to your house, pull it around back, pop open the four doors and the trunk, get your wheelbarrow and shovel, and load the wheelbarrow with soil. You wheel it over to this brand-new car, and you pour as much of the soil as you can into the trunk. You get the trunk nice and full and level, then bring the wheelbarrow around to the sides, front and back, shoveling in the loam and the dirt. Then you get plants and begin planting them in the trunk of this new car that cost you $75,000, and you hang potted plants on the four open doors. So the car can still be useful — those doors will work fine to hang potted plants on. The trunk, open to the sun and rain, could — if you planted and cared for it properly — start to produce wonderful flowers.

But that’s not what the car was made for. You’ve taken something built to do this, and twisted it to do that instead. You were not made — listen to me carefully — you were not made to spend Monday to Friday working to get money so you can spend Saturday and Sunday spending that money, having a little fun, and then back to the daily grind on Monday. You were not made for this world. You were made for God. You were made for the eternities. You were made for heaven. But sin has warped and distorted us, and instead of living the way we’re supposed to live, we live sinful, selfish lives where the most important thing to us is what makes me happy. That’s what sin has done to us.

And ominously, Adam’s future changed. His body began to die, inexorably tending toward the dust from which God had made it. His spirit and soul, cut off from God, were now exposed to eternal exile from Him. He turned from God, making in his soul a disastrous choice to disobey — he died spiritually, which had to do with his spirit. And now mankind lives almost exclusively for the interests of the body. You and I were born into that unnatural condition, and we’re made to think it must be natural, because everybody we know lives the same way — it’s all been blasted by sin.

This is the God who says, “Look to Me — I can save you from that — because I am God, and there is none else.” How can God do that? In creation, we learn His purposes. And when we see sin coming in, we see the catastrophe it caused. But when you come to a place called Golgotha, Calvary, the cross of the Lord Jesus, we see God’s remedy for the entire world.

Calvary: God’s One Remedy for Sin

Now, it was singular. It was singular. God provided just one way. You must understand that you and I could never, by any means, have produced a way of salvation ourselves. If there was going to be a way of salvation, it had to come from God — not the way people often imagine.

I’ve had meetings on Prince Edward Island near where they built what they call the Fixed Link — so that instead of taking a ferry from New Brunswick to the island, you can now take your car over a bridge. It’s a marvel — an engineering masterpiece — to think of people starting over here in New Brunswick, building out into the water, and people from the island building out into the water, and you can’t be within a foot of each other; you have to match perfectly. A lot of times people think of salvation like that: God did most of the paving of the way, He reached pretty well down to us, and now we build a way up to Him, and they join, and we’re on the way to heaven.

If there’s going to be salvation, it’s got to come solely and completely from God. God had one Son. One Son. And that Son was the only person who could remedy the catastrophe created by sin. That one Son made one sacrifice — He sacrificed Himself. His work of redemption on the cross, He finished it, and it never needs to be repeated. And now there is a message that tells about that — the gospel tells us there is one way of salvation.

You say, “Well, that sounds very exclusive, very limited.” I’ll tell you what it is: it’s understandable and wonderful that God isn’t telling you to sift your way through a thousand different messages and a hundred different ways, trying to find out what you think is best. The only Person who could correct and solve our problem was His beloved Son. He did that by dying on a cross at Calvary to save you from your sins. And the message of the gospel is that “neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). If you want salvation, you can have it through Christ, and Christ alone.

“You Need the Doctor, Not His Mother”

I remember reading years ago about a woman on her lunch break. She was a Christian, and on her lunch break she would often meet with a friend who worked as a receptionist for a doctor. They would talk about the Bible, and the Christian woman would tell her friend about the Lord Jesus. The friend would say, “Here’s how I feel — I’m a woman, and I just feel more comfortable talking to Mary, Jesus’ mother. So I talk to her, and ask her to talk to her Son for me.” The Christian would say, “But you can go right to the Lord. There’s nobody who loves you more than the Lord Jesus — He’s the one Mediator, you can go right to Him.” No, no, no — she just felt more comfortable talking to Mary.

Now, if she had planned this out, she probably wouldn’t have said it quite that way — it just sprang into her mind in the moment. Because some time later, that woman called her friend, and with a sore throat said, “I’m really not feeling well — could you make an appointment for me with the doctor?” And the Christian receptionist said, “Well, I can’t get you the doctor, but I can make an appointment with his mother, if you’d like.” “No,” she said, “I want to see the doctor.” “Well, he’s kind of busy — I can get you to his mother, and she can talk to the doctor about you.” “I’m sick,” she said. “I need the doctor.” “Yes,” her friend said. “And you’re a sinner, and you need the Saviour. You need Christ, not His mother. He’s the one way for you, friend — the one way of salvation.”

A Global, Unrestricted Invitation

Now, this call goes out, and it’s global. None is excluded. All the ends of the earth — as the Lord Jesus said, “Preach the gospel to every creature; go ye into all the world.” He wants every Christian to tell it, and every creature to hear it. He wants this message to go out to you tonight. No one is excluded. Everybody is embraced and included. This gracious invitation stands irrespective of other factors — it’s not a matter of what your religion is, how few or many your sins are, or what your attitude is.

Spurgeon’s Own Conversion: “Look and Live”

In the words of that unknown tradesman — if you haven’t read the account — the man who was supposed to preach that snowy day never made it. Spurgeon wasn’t even supposed to be there either; he was trying to get to the place he usually went, but the storm was so bad he turned into this other chapel instead, and the regular preacher couldn’t get there. So a man got up — a shoemaker, by trade — who hardly knew what to say. He read Isaiah 45:22, and ran out of material almost immediately. So he started saying, “Look to me. I’m hanging on a cross. Look to me. I’m shedding my blood. Look to me. I’m being buried. Look to me. I’m rising from the dead. Look to me. I’ve ascended to heaven. Look to me. I’m sitting on the throne.” And then he ran out of anything more to say.

He looked at the young Spurgeon and said, “Young man, you look miserable.” And Spurgeon said, “I was miserable” — because he was worried about his sins, and he wasn’t used to people commenting on his appearance in the middle of a meeting. But the preacher said, “Young man, you look miserable, and you will be miserable until you obey my verse. Look, look, look. You have nothing to do but look.”

Spurgeon described it as a light shining into his mind — that instead of it being something he was supposed to do, added to what Jesus had already done, he was simply to look to Christ. It had nothing to do with what he could do or accomplish. It was just simply looking. And when that man said, “You have nothing else to do but look,” Spurgeon said, “Oh, I looked. I looked until I could have looked my eyes away, as I realized that the Lord Jesus had died for me.”

Look to Me and Be Saved

See, this is the most attractive offer, isn’t it? Listen to the words again: “Look to Me, and be ye saved.” Be ye saved. Put anything else in there and it’s not as attractive. “Look to Me and become wealthy.” “Look to Me and live a long life on earth, and then die and go to hell.” Whatever you put in there would only lessen the attraction of this wonderful word: look to Me, and be ye saved.

Saved. The mastery of sin that binds you and chains you for eternity will be broken, and you’ll be the servant of the Lord Jesus instead of the slave of sin. Instead of hurtling down the broad way to eternal judgment in the lake of fire, you’ll be on the way to heaven. He will rescue you from the effects of sin in this life, and from the dire effects of sin in the next. You will be saved. “Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth. For I am God, and there is none else.”

Do you remember when I mentioned, at the beginning of the meeting, Mr. Spurgeon being called to speak at the Crystal Palace — 23,000-plus people, without the advantage of a microphone, a PA, anything but his voice? He went there early. According to an article that appeared in the Christian Herald newspaper on February 11, 1892, Charles Spurgeon went to the Crystal Palace ahead of time, went to where he would be standing to preach, and wanted to try out the acoustics. So he lifted his voice and said, “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief” (1 Timothy 1:15). I don’t know if he practiced it a few times or just the once, but satisfied, Spurgeon left.

Some days later, a man came to him and said he had been on his lunch hour, so disturbed about his sins, that he went and got behind one of the statues in the Crystal Palace, where nobody could see him, got down on his knees, and told God he was a sinner and didn’t want to go to hell. And he said a voice had come, saying, “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” And he thought to himself, He came to save me. He came to save me.

He came to save you. You. If you turn to Him tonight and trust Him tonight, He will do exactly what He said He will do. He will save you.

A Warning of Coming Judgment

Did you notice how the passage ends — God telling us about coming judgment? “As I live, saith the Lord, every knee shall bow to Me, every tongue shall confess to God.” He’s telling us that if you miss God’s salvation, then one day you must stand to be judged for your sins. You can have that judgment removed. You can have those sins washed away tonight. But if you fail to do that, one day you must stand before God.

If you read the handout, you’ll remember that as a young boy, Spurgeon was sent to stay at his grandfather’s. His grandfather, who was a preacher, used to read the Scriptures at the table. One day, as his grandfather read to the family, the Bible spoke of a bottomless pit. The precocious little boy Charles asked his grandfather, “How could there be a pit without a bottom?” He said later in life, “I have no idea how my grandfather answered that question. I do know this — that from a young age, I came to understand it was possible for a person so to live, and so to die, that he would spend eternity getting farther and farther away from God.” The bottomless pit.

God wants to save you tonight from that kind of horror. He wants to save you for heaven. He wants to save your life and your soul. This is what He says: Look unto Me. You have nothing else to do but look. Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth. That takes in everyone in this building. All the ends of the earth. For I am God, and there is none else.