Introduction

Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else. ISAIAH 45:22

Of all the preachers in this series, Charles Haddon Spurgeon needs the least introduction and is the most often misremembered. He is quoted everywhere, often in sentences he never quite said. He preached to congregations of five and six thousand in London every Sunday for more than thirty years, without amplification, and his sermons were printed each week and sold by the tens of thousands across the English-speaking world and far beyond it. He founded a college for preachers, an orphanage, almshouses and a society for carrying Christian books to the poor. He wrote a seven-volume commentary on the Psalms and a pair of daily devotionals that have never been out of print. And he did it all before he died, worn out, at fifty-seven.

The scale of the man can hide the substance, which is remarkably simple.

One look

Spurgeon’s teaching begins where his Christian life began: in a small chapel in Colchester on a snowy January morning in 1850, when a fifteen-year-old boy heard a lay preacher repeat a single text from Isaiah and urge him to look to Christ. He looked, and he was saved, and for the next forty years he did very little else but tell other people to do the same. In All of Grace, the small book he wrote for enquirers late in his life, he put it in a single sentence: when he heard the command to look, he says, “I looked, and in a moment the Lord justified me.”

That is the one thread that runs through everything in this book. Salvation is all of grace, from its first cause in the eternal love of God to its last stone laid in heaven, and grace is received by the simplest act a sinner can perform: a look of trust at Jesus Christ crucified. Spurgeon was a convinced Calvinist who believed that God chooses, calls and keeps His people. He was also one of the most urgent evangelists of his century, who pleaded with every hearer, without exception, to come to Christ that very morning. He saw no contradiction between the two, and he refused to let either swallow the other. Both served the same end. The sovereignty of grace meant that salvation depended on nothing in the sinner, so that anybody might look; the free offer meant that nobody need wait to find something in himself before he looked.

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God. EPHESIANS 2:8

Everything else he taught flows from that fountain. The cross is the object at which faith looks. Prayer is the looking turned into asking. The promises are God’s pledges to people who look to Him. Affliction drives the eye back to Christ when it has wandered. The Lord’s Supper sets Christ before the eye every week. Soul-winning is the work of telling others where to look. Even his last great controversy was, in his own mind, a quarrel about whether the churches would go on pointing people to the same place.

How this book is arranged

After a chapter on his life, twenty-one short chapters set out his teaching. They begin with his conversion and the gospel it gave him: the look of faith, justification of the ungodly, the substitution of Christ, and his conviction that every sermon must lead to the cross. They go on to the two great truths he held together, free grace and the free offer, and then to faith and repentance, the unchanging God on whom faith rests, the promises, prayer, the Word and the Spirit. They move from there into the life of the believer: the warfare with sin, the perseverance of the saints, the gladness of the Christian life and the dark night of affliction, and communion with Christ at His table. The last follow him out to the lost and the poor, into the controversy of his final years, and home to heaven.

Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. Spurgeon would have wanted it so. He preached for verdicts, and almost every sermon he ever delivered turns, near the end, to face the hearer with a direct question. Read one chapter a day, or one a week. Linger over the application points. Pray the prayer, or better, pray your own.

Reading him with care

This is not a book of hero-worship, and there are places where Spurgeon must be read carefully. Four deserve to be named at the outset.

First, his Calvinism. Spurgeon believed the doctrines of grace were simply the gospel, and he could say so in terms that will jar readers who belong to other traditions. Many sincere Christians who love Christ read the passages on election differently, and they are not enemies of grace. This book presents his convictions as he held them, but it tries to show that the heart of what he taught — that salvation is God’s gift and not our achievement — is common ground for every believer who has ever sung of amazing grace.

Second, his combativeness. Spurgeon was a controversialist by temperament as well as conviction. His sermon on baptismal regeneration in 1864 and the Down-Grade controversy of 1887 were both fought with a sharpness that wounded friends as well as opponents. Chapter twenty-two weighs that honestly.

Third, his temperament. He was a man of high spirits and deep glooms, of sparkling humour and sudden depression. His rhetoric belongs to the Victorian pulpit, with its long periods, its thunder and its tears, and it does not always travel well.

Fourth, sheer bulk. More than three and a half thousand of his sermons are in print. Nobody can read them all. The chapters that follow try to draw out the handful of truths he returned to again and again, and the Reader’s Guide at the end suggests where to begin.

So the counsel of this book is the counsel of Scripture: Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Where Spurgeon is faithful — and on the cross, on faith, on prayer, on the preciousness of Christ, he is faithful indeed — receive it and act on it. Where he presses further than Scripture warrants, or speaks more harshly than love requires, mark it and pass on. He would have been the first to insist on it. He wanted nobody to look at him.

In the little book he addressed to seekers, he likened his work to a drinking fountain set up by the roadside, and he answered his critics with one sentence that might stand over the whole of his ministry: “Here is my fountain, and here is my cup: find fault if you please; but do drink of the water of life.” That is the spirit in which this companion is offered. It is not a substitute for his own pages, which are freely available and still vivid. It is a cup hung beside the fountain.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Before reading further, write down in one sentence what you would say to someone who asked you how to be saved. Keep it, and compare it with Spurgeon’s answer when you reach the end of this book.

2. Notice whether you come to Spurgeon expecting a doctrine to defend or a Saviour to look at. Ask God for the second.

3. If you belong to a tradition that differs from his on election, resolve to listen for what you share with him before you listen for what divides you.

4. Choose one of his books from the Ochorus library — All of Grace is the best place to start — and read a chapter alongside each chapter of this one.

5. Ask yourself honestly when you last looked to Christ for yourself, rather than simply thinking about Him.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You said, Look unto Me, and be saved, and I have spent a great deal of time looking elsewhere.

I have looked at my feelings, at my progress, at my failures and at other people’s opinions of me. Turn my eyes back to You.

As I read of a man whose whole life pointed away from himself to You, keep me from admiring the pointer and missing the One he pointed to.

Teach me that all is of grace, and let me drink from the fountain, not merely study the cup. Amen.