Now

“Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” — 2 Corinthians 6:2 (ESV)

Spurgeon ends his book the way he started it — talking straight to you. Reading a book like this is pointless, he says, unless you actually take hold of what it says. “It is as if one saw plenty of food in a shop and yet remained hungry, for want of personally eating some.” He tells you he stopped writing at this very page, put down his pen and knelt to pray for whoever would read it. Then, in his words, he takes you by the hand — a firm grip — and with tears in his eyes asks, “Why will you die?” Don’t drift out of reach through sheer carelessness, he pleads. Don’t turn away from the one who loves you. And if you do, he says, at least admit that he did his best for you: “God knoweth I wrote each line for your eternal good.”

But he also speaks to the reader who has trusted Jesus. Stay with this. Let free grace be the way you live, not just the way you started. Living from a free gift does something unusual to a person: “To receive all as a free gift preserves the mind from self-righteous pride, and from self-accusing despair.” It makes you warm and grateful instead of anxious and driven. People trying to save themselves by doing their best, he says, never know that kind of joy. A slave can obey out of fear; a child loved by his father obeys out of something better. Years of going through religious motions, Spurgeon warns, can mean nothing to God, while “a glance from the eye of true faith is spiritual and it is therefore dear to Him.” Start with the inside, and the outside will follow.

And then: tell others. Your own soul won’t stay healthy unless you care about other people finding what you found. “The life of your soul lies in faith; its health lies in love.” He puts it even more sharply: anyone who has no longing to lead others to Jesus “has never been under the spell of love himself.” Start at home. Then your neighbours. Then your street. Spread the message wherever your hand can reach.

His last words are an urgent plea not to put it off. “You have had enough of resolving, come to action.” Trust Jesus now, decisively, today. It may be now or never. “Let it be NOW; it would be horrible that it should be never.” And the book’s final line is a farewell and an invitation in one: “meet me in heaven.”

Now — what is this actually about? Grace isn’t something to think about forever; it’s something to receive and then live from. It’s possible to read a whole book about grace, agree with every page, and still never actually trust Jesus — like standing in a food shop and walking out hungry. “Someday” feels safe, but Spurgeon is honest that you don’t own someday. Today is the only day you’ve definitely got.

And if you have received it, the rest of your life is meant to be shaped by it. Not proud, because none of it was earned. Not crushed, because none of it can be lost by your failure. Grateful. Warm. Busy with love for the people around you. That’s what a life that is “all of grace” looks like from the outside. It started with a knock at the door in chapter one. The only question left is whether you’ll open it — and Spurgeon would say: why not today?

One thing to do this week: decide. If you’ve never actually trusted Jesus, don’t make another resolution about doing it later — tell him today, in your own words, that you are taking the free gift and leaning your whole weight on him. If you already trust him, think of one person you care about and, this week, tell them in a sentence or two what grace has meant to you.