The Righteousness of Christ Imputed to Me

As he takes thy sin and lays it upon Christ so he takes Christ’s righteousness and lays it upon thee. He looks at thee as if thou wert as righteous as his Son who represents thee. He treats thee as if thou hadst been obedient to all his law; he looks upon the model man Christ Jesus, the perfect humanity, and he sees in Christ all his people, and treats them accordingly. He looks upon his people as if they themselves had magnified the law and made it honorable by a sinless life. Wondrous doctrine this, but he that believes it shall find rest unto his soul; and it is because of it that we are authorized to come forth this day and declare the day of salvation. The guilt of the believing sinner is put away, for Christ has carried it; and now righteousness belongs to the sinner, for God imputes it to him without works: therefore this is the day of salvation.

From a sermon by Charles Haddon Spurgeon entitled "The Day Of Salvation," delivered January 13, 1878. Image by Paul Bica on Flickr under Creative Commons License.

More Love for Jesus!

My brethren, are not multitudes wrapped up in forms and ceremonies? If the service pleases the eye and the ear are they not quite content? Love to the person of Christ has not occurred to the mass of avowed worshippers of Jesus. We know others to whom the end-all and be-all of religion is an orthodox statement of doctrine. So long as the preaching is according to the confession of faith, and every word and act is piously correct, they are well pleased; but no love to Jesus ever stirs their bosoms, religion to them is not an exercise of the heart at all — it is mere brain work, and hardly that. They know nothing of the living soul going out towards a living person, a bleeding heart knit to another bleeding heart, a life subsisting on another life and enamoured of it. We know brethren who carry this very far, and if the preacher differs from them in the merest shade, they are overwhelmed with pious horror at his unsoundness, and they cannot hear him again: even if he preach Christ most preciously in all the rest of his discourse, it is nothing, because he cannot sound their “Shibboleth.”

What is orthodoxy without love, but a catacomb to bury dead religion in. It is a cage without a bird; the gaunt skeleton of a man out of which the life has fled. I am afraid that the general current of church life runs too much towards externals, and too little towards deep burning love to the person of Christ. If you preach much about emotional religion, and the heart-work of godliness, coldblooded professors label you as rather mystical, and begin to talk of Madame Guyon and the danger of the Quietist school of religion. We would not mind having a little spice of that, even if we were blamed for it, for after all the realizing of Christ is the grand thing. The faith which is most blessed is faith which deals most fully with the person of Jesus Christ, the truest repentance is that which weeps at a sight of his wounds, and the love which is most sweet is love to the adorable person of the Wellbeloved.

From a sermon by Charles Haddon Spurgeon entitled "Lovest Thou Me?," delivered February 27, 1876. Image by Jeff Kubina on Flickr under Creative Commons License.

Let us approach His Glory

The presence of God, as you know, in the temple and the tabernacle was known by the shining of the bright light called the Shekinah between the wings of the cherubim over the ark of the covenant. We often forget that the presence of God in the most holy place was a matter of faith to all but the high priest. Once in the year the high priest went within the awful veil, but we do not know that even he ever dared to look upon the blaze of splendor. God dwelleth in light that no man may approach unto. The smoke of the incense from the priest’s censer was needed partly to veil the exceeding glory of the divine presence, lest even those chosen eyes should suffer blindness. No one else went into the hallowed shrine, and only he once in the year. That symbolical pavilion of Jehovah is not for a moment to be compared with our Lord Jesus, who is the true dwelling-place of the Godhead, for “in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.” What a masterly sentence that is! None but the Holy Ghost could surely have compacted words into such a sentence, — “In him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.” “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself.”

The manifestation of the Godhead in Christ is not unapproachable, for we may freely come to Jesus: a voice out of the excellent glory bids us come boldly unto the throne of the heavenly grace. We cannot come too often, nor be too long in our approaches unto Jesus, the true mercy-seat. The atonement has been offered, and the veil of the temple, that is to say, the flesh of Christ, has been rent, and now we may approach the Godhead in Christ Jesus without trembling. Verily, as I think of God, incarnate God in Jesus Christ, and dwelling among the sons of men, I feel how true it is, “In this place is one greater than the temple.”

From a sermon by Charles Haddon Spurgeon entitled "One Greater Than The Temple," delivered January 23, 1876. Image by Rennett Stowe on Flickr under Creative Commons License.

True God from True God

When John fell down to worship one of the angels he received an earnest protest, “See thou do it not.” Now, if the worship given to Christ had been wrong, the thrice holy Savior would have exclaimed most earnestly, “See thou do it not”; but he intimates no objection to the worship, although it is freely rendered by all the intelligent beings before the throne. Depend upon it, my hearer, you never will go to heaven unless you are prepared to worship Jesus Christ as God.

They are all doing it there: you will have to come to it, and if you entertain the notion that he is a mere man, or that he is anything less than God, I am afraid you will have to begin at the beginning and learn what true religion means. You have a poor foundation to rest upon. I could not trust my soul with a mere man, or believe in an atonement made by a mere man: I must see God himself putting his hand to so gigantic a work. I cannot imagine a mere man being thus praised as the Lamb is praised. Jesus is “God over all, blessed for ever.” When we ever speak at all severely of Socinians and Unitarians you must not be surprised at it, because if we are right they are blasphemers, and if they are right we are idolaters, there is no choice between the two. We never could agree, and never shall while the world standeth.

We preach Christ the Son of God as very God of very God, and if they reject him it is not for us to pretend that it makes no difference, when in fact it makes all the difference in the world. We would not wish them to say more than they believe to be true, and they must not expect us to say less than we believe to be true. If Jesus be God, they must believe it, and must worship him as such, or else they cannot participate in the salvation which he has provided. I love the deity of Christ! I preach his humanity with all my might, and I rejoice that he is the son of man; but oh, he must be the Son of God too, or there is no peace for me.

From a sermon by Charles Haddon Spurgeon entitled "Jesus, The Delight Of Heaven." Image by Randi Hausken on Flickr under Creative Commons License.

My Lord and my God

And first, dear friends, we ought to say to Jesus, “Lord, Lord,” in reference to his divinity. How can we be saved if we do not? Jesus Christ of Nazareth is to us Lord and God. We do not hesitate to use the language of Thomas when he put his finger into the print of the nails, and to say to him, “My Lord and my God.” Let others say of him what they will, and make him to be a mere man, or a prophet, or a delegated God, such talk is nothing to the point with us; we believe him to be very God of very God, and worship him this day as he is enthroned in the highest heavens, believing him to be worthy of the adoration which is due to God alone....

Compromise must always be impossible where the truth is essential and fundamental. There are some points in which we may agree to differ, but these are points in which there can be no mutual concessions or tonings down of statement. Christ Jesus is either God or he is not, and if he be God, as we believe he is, then those who reject his deity cannot be true believers in him, and, therefore, must miss the benefits which he promises to those who receive him. I cannot conceive any man to be right in religion if he be not right in reference to the person of the Redeemer. “You cannot be right in the rest unless you think rightly of him.” If you will not have him to be your God, neither will he save you. Let his abundant miracles, his divine teaching, his unique character, and his resurrection convince you that “the Word was God,” and is in all respects equally divine with the Father and the Spirit.

From a sermon by Charles Haddon Spurgeon entitled "The Sieve." Image by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on Flickr under Creative Commons License.

Trifling with Divine Truth

There are some truths which must be believed, they are essential to salvation, and if not heartily accepted the soul will be ruined.... Now, in those days the saints did not say, as the sham saints do now, “We must be largely charitable, and leave this brother to his own opinion; he sees truth from a different standpoint, and has a rather different way of putting it, but his opinions are as good as our own, and we must not say that he is in error.” That is at present the fashionable way of trifling with divine truth, and making things pleasant all round. Thus the gospel is debased and another gospel propagated....

It was not in this way that the apostles regarded error. They did not prescribe large-hearted charity towards falsehood, or hold up the errorist as a man of deep thought, whose views were “refreshingly original;” far less did they utter some wicked nonsense about the probability of there being more faith in honest doubt than in half the creeds. They did not believe in justification by doubting, as our neologians do; they set about the conversion of the erring brother; they treated him as a person who needed conversion, and viewed him as a man who, if he were not converted, would suffer the death of his soul, and be covered with a multitude of sins. They were not such easy-going people as our cultured friends of the school of “modern thought,” who have learned at last that the deity of Christ may be denied, the work of the Holy Spirit ignored, the inspiration of Scripture rejected, the atonement disbelieved, and regeneration dispensed with, and yet the man who does all this may be as good a Christian as the most devout believer!

O God, deliver us from this deceitful infidelity, which while it does damage to the erring man, and often prevents his being reclaimed, does yet more mischief to our own hearts by teaching us that truth is unimportant, and falsehood a trifle, and so destroys our allegiance to the God of truth, and makes us traitors instead of loyal subjects to the King of kings.

From a sermon by Charles Haddon Spurgeon entitled "To Sabbath-School Teachers And Other Soulwinners," delivered October 19, 1873. Image by Greg on Flickr under Creative Commons License.

When have we learned a doctrine?

My brethren, this is a lesson for us; let us never reckon that we have learned a doctrine till we have seen its bearing upon our lives. Whatever we discover in God’s word, let us pray the Holy Spirit to make us feel the sanctifying influence of it. You know not a man because you recognize his features, you must also know his spirit, and so the mere acquaintance with the letter of truth is of small account — you must feel its influence and know its tendency.

There are some brethren who are so enamored of doctrine that no preacher will content them unless he gives them over and over again clear statements of certain favourite truths: but the moment you come to speak of practice they fight shy of it at once, and either denounce the preacher as being legal, or they grow weary of that which they dare not contradict. Let it never be so with us. Let us follow up truth to its practical “therefore.” Let us love the practice of holiness as much as the belief of the truth; and, though we desire to know, let us take care when we know that we act according to the knowledge, for if we do not our knowledge itself will become mischievous to us, will involve us in responsibilities, but will bring to us no effectual blessing. Let everyone here who knoweth aught, now pray God to teach him what he would have him to do, as the consequence of that knowledge.

From a sermon by Charles Haddon Spurgeon entitled "Motives For Steadfastness," delivered May 11, 1873. Image by Ken Lund on Flickr under Creative Commons License.

Into the Light of Truth

Men who know not the truth, since they must have some faith, seek out many inventions; for, if they are not taught of God, they soon become taught of Satan, and apt scholars are they in his school. Galilee was noted for the heresies which abounded there. But what a mercy it is that God can save heretics. Those who have received false doctrine, and added darkness to darkness in so doing, can yet be brought into the glorious light of truth. Though they may have denied the Deity of Christ, though they may have doubted the inspiration of Scripture, though they may have fallen into many traps and pitfalls of false doctrine, yet the Divine Shepherd, when he seeks his lost sheep, can find them out and bring them home again.

From a sermon by Charles Haddon Spurgeon entitled "Light For Those Who Sit In Darkness," delivered September 10, 1871. Image by Katie Brady under Creative Commons License.

Beauty in the Details

You know, brethren, it is the details in which lies the beauty. If I trust Jesus as my Savior I shall be saved, but the enjoyment of faith comes from knowing him in his person, in his offices, in his work, in his present, and past, and future. We perceive his true beauty, by studying him, and observing him carefully, and with holy watchfulness. So it is with the doctrines; the mere whole of the doctrine... is blessed, but it is when we come to take the doctrine to pieces that we gain the purest enjoyment.

“Yes,” says the clown, as he looks at a fine painting, such, for instance, as Paul Potter’s famous Bull at the Hague, “it’s a rare picture certainly,” and then he goes away. But the artist sits down and studies its details. There is to him a beauty in every touch and shade, which he understands and appreciates. Many believers have light enough to know the faith in its bare outline, but they have not observed the filling up, and the minutiae wherein the sweetest comfort will always be found by the spiritually educated child of God. They can see, but they “see men as trees, walking.”

From a sermon entitled "Seeing And Not Seeing, Or Men As Trees Walking" delivered July 22, 1866. Image by Martin Gommel under Creative Commons License.

The root of faith

Some of you may have the notion that you are advanced in knowledge, that you have much skill in interpreting the word of God, and that you understand the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven. It is highly possible that your notion is correct. Well! You go out into the world, and you meet with people who do not know quite so much as you do, and who have not yet learned all the doctrines of grace, as they are threaded together in the divine plan of salvation. May I persuade you not to get into controversy, not to be continually fighting and quarrelling with people who do not hold just your sentiments. If you discover the root of the matter in any man, say at once — “Why should I persecute you? Why should we fall to quarrelling with each other, seeing that the root of the matter is in us both?” Save your swords for Christ’s real enemies. The way to make men learn the truth is not to abuse them. We shall never make a brother see a doctrine by smiting him in the eye. Hold your lantern up and let him see.

From a sermon entitled "The Root Of the Matter," delivered April 12, 1863. Flickr photo by dro!d ; some rights reserved.

Jesus the Beloved

“This,” said the mysterious voice from heaven in the midst of the waters of Jordan, “this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” And again, at the resurrection of Lazarus there came the same voice from heaven, announcing the perpetuity of the Father’s love. None of us can tell how dear Jesus must be to his Father. We have, however, abundant proofs of the fact that he is very near unto him, for he is privy to all his Father’s counsels. From the counsels of the Most High, Christ was never absent.

“When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: while as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth: when he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep: when he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth: then I was by him, as one brought up with him; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him.”

“Let us make man,” said God, “in our own image,” - calling Christ into creation’s work. “Without him was not anything made that was made,” is the declaration of John the divine. Beside this, we know that everything which is done of the Father by his divine decree is that he may glorify his Son; while, on the other hand, the Son lived and died, and lives again that he may glorify the Father. Such is their mutual interest in one another that we cannot suppose a relationship closer, nor a love more intense than that which exists between the Father and the Son. It were foolish and ridiculous in me to attempt to dive into the awful depths of the divine unity. We know that the Father is one with the Son, and that Jesus is one with Jehovah. The unity of essence is a well so deep, that I cannot expect to find its bottom; and the love which springeth up from this essential unity must be more deep and profound than the wit of man can guess, or than the language of man can utter. I repeat the confession of our ignorance, it is impossible for us to form even a guess of the intensity of the affection that must exist between the eternal Father and Jesus Christ, his Son; since their essential union from which this affection springs is a doctrine beyond our comprehension, and is meekly to be received of our faith. Certainly we know that never was the term “beloved” so full of meaning, never did human word become so divinely rich as when God himself, by the Holy Ghost, applied it to Jesus the beloved of the Father.

From a sermon entitled "Accepted In The Beloved," delivered September 21, 1862. Flickr photo by Miyuki Utada; some rights reserved.

Gospel doctrine

Gutenberg Bible

Depend upon it, doctrinal ignorance will always make Churches weak; but where saints are fed upon the finest of the wheat, and are made to suck of the honey out of the rock, and to eat of the manna and fatness of Gospel doctrine, they will, all other things being equal, become the strongest and most valiant believers on the face of the earth. There is a tendency in these times to depreciate the value of Gospel doctrines. Oh! I beseech you, be not led astray of this error. There are in the Word of God certain things really taught.

Do not believe that the Bible is a lump of wax to be shaped just as you please. Do not imagine that “Yes” is right, and that the “No” which contradicts it is right too. The Lord has written this Book intending to teach us something, and a moderate understanding, sanctified by the teaching of the Holy Spirit, will enable you to know what the Lord does mean to teach you... Do not, I beseech you, say, “Oh, it does not much matter what doctrines I hold.”

From a sermon entitled "The Love Of Jesus, What It Is, None But His Loved Ones Know," delivered June 18, 1862. Flickr photo by David Jalbert-Gagnier; some rights reserved.