Spurgeon's Sovereign Redeemer

There are some men and women so greatly used of God, that if you can introduce people to them, they will sooner or later meet the Savior. By reading about them, learning from their devotion to Christ, the church, and the mission of Gospel, we draw closer to Jesus.

Charles Spurgeon is such an individual.

As I was thinking about what I could share in a setting like this, many things came to mind that I KNOW would be applicable to a wide variety of people.

As somewhat of a personal testimony, I thought it would be good to speak on a topic that Spurgeon greatly helped me with when I was a young Christian, and now as a pastor, preacher, and a lover of good theology.

This is Spurgeon’s love of, handling of, reverence and awe of God’s sovereignty as summarized in what is known as the doctrines of grace.

“There is nothing for which the children ought more earnestly to contend than the doctrine of their Master over all creation — the Kingship of God over all the works of His own hands — the Throne of God and His right to sit upon that throne . . . It is God upon the throne that we love to preach. It is God upon the throne whom we trust.”

Spurgeon’s view of God’s sovereignty would startle many, no doubt. Christians today tend to believe that God is only sovereign to the extent that he does not violate what we want. So in a way, there are some who, when it really comes down to it, believe that the will of man is what’s sovereign.

The Sovereignty in which Spurgeon believed is a purposeful and intentional sovereignty that rules over the affairs of this earth and all the creatures inhabiting it, most importantly in the saving of the elect saints whom he has called out of the human race, for no outward reason deserving boast on their part, but by grace alone before the foundations of the earth were established.

Ephesians 2:8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

“Men will allow God to be everywhere except on his throne. They will allow him to be in his workshop to fashion worlds and to make stars. They will allow him to be in his almonry to dispense his alms and bestow his bounties. They will allow him to sustain the earth and bear up the pillars thereof, or light the lamps of heaven, or rule the waves of the ever-moving ocean; but when God ascends his throne, his creatures then gnash their teeth; and when we proclaim an enthroned God, and his right to do as he wills with his own, to dispose of his creatures as he thinks well, without consulting them in the matter, then it is that we are hissed and execrated, and then it is that men turn a deaf ear to us, for God on his throne is not the God they love.”

And I have seen this deaf ear.

Speak of God’s sovereignty among saints, and you get an AMEN!

Speak of it in this way, that God rules down to the smallest molecule (As Sproul once said), that salvation is not of the human will or exertion, that predestination is not a dirty word to be debated, but a glorious word from God that inspires our worship, and you’ll get a deaf ear.

“And I have my own private opinion, that there is no such thing as preaching Christ and him crucified, unless you preach what now-a-days is called Calvinism.  I have my own ideas, and those I always state boldly.  It is a nickname to call it Calvinism.  Calvinism is the gospel, and nothing else.  I do not believe we can preach the gospel, if we do not preach justification by faith without works; nor unless we preach the sovereignty of God in his dispensation of grace; nor unless we exalt the electing, unchangeable, eternal, immutable, conquering love of Jehovah; nor, I think, can we preach the gospel, unless we base it upon the peculiar redemption which Christ made for his elect and chosen people; nor can I comprehend a gospel which lets saints fall away after they are called, and suffers the children of God to be burned in the fires of damnation, after having believed.  Such a gospel I abhor.  The gospel of the Bible is not such a gospel as that.  We preach Christ and him crucified in a different fashion, and to all gainsayers we reply, ‘We have not so learned Christ.’”

This is not the predominate preaching of today? It’s too offensive. Not winsome enough. To theological.

Did this kind of preaching negatively affect the ministry of Charles Spurgeon?

“When Spurgeon arrived at The New Park Street Church, in 1854, the congregation had 232 members. By the end of his pastorate, 38 years later, that number had increased to 5,311. (Altogether, 14,460 people were added to the church during Spurgeon's tenure.) The church was the largest independent congregation in the world.”

“Occasionally Spurgeon asked members of his congregation not to attend the next Sunday's service, so that newcomers might find a seat. During one 1879 service, the regular congregation left so that newcomers waiting outside might get in; the building immediately filled again.”

There is such a fear that people might not be pleased that Christians compromise the gospel in their witness, and pastors in their pulpits.

Not Spurgeon. His Gospel message was rich with Calvinistic theology.

“That doctrine which is called “Calvinism” did not spring from Calvin; we believe that it sprang from the great founder of all truth.”

Did he believe all 5 points?

Let’s consider each one for a moment.

Total Depravity?

“The fact is, that man is a reeking mass of corruption. His whole soul is by nature so debased and so depraved, that no description which can be given of him even by inspired tongues can fully tell how base and vile a thing he is.”

Unconditional Election

“There is no more humbling doctrine in Scripture than that of election, none more promoting of gratitude, and, consequently, none more sanctifying. Believers should not be afraid of it, but adoringly rejoice in it.”

And this is indeed what I began to feel as I grew into the Scriptures, and learned from men like Spurgeon to let unconditional election sweeten my love for my Savior, and help me in my preaching to others, not a gospel of do this, pray this, say this... but of leaning wholly on the Mercy and Grace of God.

How about Limited or Definite atonement?

“I do not believe in an atonement which is admirably wide, but fatally ineffectual.”

It’s been said that EVERYONE limits the atonement. Some limit its power saying it cannot save those who do not choose him. The Calvinist limits it extent concluding that God saves everyone he intends to save - consistent with Jesus words “my sheep will hear my voice.”

“I thank God I do not believe that I was redeemed the same way that Judas was, and no more. If so, I shall go to hell as Judas did. General redemption is not worth anything to anybody, for of itself it secures to no one a place in heaven: but the special redemption which does redeem, and redeems men out of the rest of mankind, is the redemption that is to be prayed for, and for which we shall praise God for ever and ever.”

Irresistible Grace?

The argument goes like this...

God doesn’t force anyone to follow him, So how could grace be irresistible?

And of course the Scripture argues clearly that because sinful man is dead in their trespasses, all the apparent resisting that we see toward the gospel is the natural response.

“God does not save an unwilling man, but he makes him willing in the day of his power.”

All unregenerate persons resist the Gospel until the Spirit of God comes to them.

“I take it that the highest proof of Christ’s power is not that he offers salvation, not that he bids you take it if you will, but that when you reject it, when you hate it, when you despise it, he has a power whereby he can change your mind, make you think differently from your former thoughts, and turn you from the error of your ways.”

John 6:37 “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. 38 For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me.”

And lastly, the perseverance of the saints.

That doctrine that gives us the assurance that we will make it there, not because we are faithful, but because he is faithful. A perseverance the rests in God’s ability and God’s promise. And what is his ability, but all that is in his nature and character as God. He is Sovereign in his choosing, sovereign in His justifying work through the Savior, Jesus, and Sovereign in His Shepherdly grip to never let anyone pluck us from His hands.

“Before we advance to the argument it will be well to remark that those who reject the doctrine frequently tell us that there are many cautions in the word of God against apostatizing, and that those cautions can have no meaning if it be true that the righteous shall hold on his way. But what if those cautions are the means in the hand of God of keeping his people from wandering? What if they are used to excite a holy fear in the minds of his children, and so become the means of preventing the evil which they denounce.”

We need to be Gospel men and women.

Paul said to the Romans…For I am not ashamed of the Gospel. What Gospel was he referring to but what the Scripture teaches in its full counsel.

God...sovereign, creator, holy.

Man sinful. unable, offensive to God having broken his law, rags of filth on our best day.

God...gracious to the detestable and filthy, because He has a bride in this world and He has lovingly sacrificed himself for Her in the death of Christ in order that His blood might wash her filthy rags, making them as white as snow.

She could not save herself. She would not save herself. But she has a Savior named Jesus, the bridegroom, the lamb of God come to take away her sin.

And in all of this I tell you I was greatly helped by Spurgeon, and continue to be helped.

I love the doctrines of grace because I have come to see them in Scripture. Spurgeon is not powerful to regenerate. The Spirit is. The prince of preachers, and the boom of his voice in the Metropolitan Tabernacle and in the open air would have been impressive indeed, but I want to better know the Redeemer who impressed the preacher. His unashamed preaching of Sovereign grace through his relatively short life of joy and sorrow is a inspiration to me. Spurgeon was just one voice, like John the Baptist, crying out through the halls of History saying,

They said to him, “Who are you? We need to give an answer to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’

Brothers and sisters, one thing I pray Spurgeon might assist us with in this generation, is that we would persevere with these old truths, not because we think it is the best way to grow a church fast (It’s usually not) But because we believe it is right, and pleasing to our Savior, and that it is this Gospel that saves.

Do it boldly. Clearly. Humbly. Because if there’s anything the doctrines of grace will do when properly understood, it is to cause us to think less often of ourselves, think more of Christ, and bow our lives and ministries humbly before Him.

I recollect an Arminian brother telling me that he had read the Scriptures through a score or more times, and could never find the doctrine of election in them. He added that he was sure he would have done so if it had been there, for he read the Word on his knees. I said to him, “I think you read the Bible in a very uncomfortable posture, and if you had read it in your easy chair, you would have been more likely to understand it. Pray, by all means, and the more, the better, but it is a piece of superstition to think there is anything in the posture in which a man puts himself for reading: and as to reading through the Bible twenty times without having found anything about the doctrine of election, the wonder is that you found anything at all: you must have galloped through it at such a rate that you were not likely to have any intelligible idea of the meaning of the Scriptures.”