Spurgeon on Standing Firm

                                                                                                                                                                              Vol. X, No. 5, May 1997

Charles Haddon Spurgeon was the greatest English preacher of the last half of the nineteenth century, living from 1834 to 1892, and preaching from the age of sixteen. The following selection is from The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, pp 83-84 (the Metropolitan Tabernacle was Spurgeon’s London church for the last 37 years of his life) and appeared in SBC Life, April 1997.

“We admire a man who was firm in the faith, say four hundred years ago ... but such a man today is a nuisance, and must be put down. Call him a narrow minded bigot, or give him a worse name if you can think of one. Yet imagine in those ages past, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and their compeers had said, ‘The world is out of order; but if we try to set it right, we shall only make a great row, and get ourselves into disgrace. Let us go to our chambers, put on our night-caps, and sleep over the bad times, and perhaps when we wake up things will have grown better.’ Such conduct on their part would have entailed upon us a heritage of error. Age after age would have gone down into the infernal deeps, and the pestiferous bogs of error would have swallowed all. Those men loved the faith and the name of Jesus too well to see them trampled on... .

“It is today as it was in the Reformers’ day. Decision is needed. Here is the day for the man; where is the man for the day? We who have had the gospel passed to us by martyr hands dare not trifle with it, nor sit by and hear it denied by traitors, who pretend to love it, but inwardly abhor every line of it ... . Look you, sirs, there will come another generation, and another, and all these generations will be tainted and injured if we are not faithful to God and to His truth today. We have come to a turning-point in the road. If we turn to the right, mayhap our children and our children’s children will go that way; but if we turn to the left, generations yet unborn will curse our names for having been unfaithful to God and His Word.”

An excellent biography of Spurgeon is Lewis Drummond’s Spurgeon, Prince of Preachers (Kregel Publications, 1992). During his ministry Spurgeon struggled against apostasy in the British Baptist Union, a controversy which foreshadowed the Conservative Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention 100 years later. Unfortunately for Spurgeon, in his struggle those who believed in the full authority of God’s Word lost, and he was effectually voted out of the Union on 23 April 1888 by a count of some 2,000 to seven, to cheers of the crowd of (mostly) ministers. It was a devastating blow to Spurgeon, a glorious victory for his opponents. Yet today, who remembers their names while the whole evangelical world reveres the memory of staunch Spurgeon, one of the most eloquent and effective preachers and one of the truest soldiers of the cross ever to stand on the Lord’s side.