Free Grace

Not for your sakes do I this, saith the Lord God, be it known unto you: be ashamed and confounded for your own ways, O house of Israel. EZEKIEL 36:32

Spurgeon was a Calvinist, and he never hid it. He grew up on the Puritans, he preached the doctrines of grace from his first pulpit to his last, and in his early sermon Christ Crucified he went so far as to say that it was a nickname to call these truths Calvinism, since in his view they were simply the gospel. Many readers will not share all his convictions here. But before deciding what to make of his Calvinism, it is worth seeing what it was for. It was not a system for sorting people. It was a doxology. Its whole purpose was to take every scrap of credit for salvation away from man and give it to God.

Two sins bred in the bone

He opens his sermon Free Grace, on a text from Ezekiel, with a diagnosis. There are two sins of man, he says, that are bred in the bone and continually come out in the flesh: self-dependence and self-exaltation. Even the holiest Christians feel the pull of both. We want to contribute something to our salvation, and then we want to be admired for it. Against both, Scripture keeps reminding us of a single truth. Salvation, Spurgeon says, “is God’s work from first to last, and is not of man, neither by man.”

Salvation is of the Lord. JONAH 2:9

He illustrates this from Abraham. God promised him a son, and Abraham believed; but when the promise was slow in coming, he took Hagar, and Ishmael was born. Abraham thought he was helping God keep His word. Instead he brought sorrow into his house. Spurgeon thought many Christians do the same. Instead of looking to grace alone, they set to work to assist Omnipotence, and they only sink themselves deeper in the mire.

The reason is in God

The heart of the sermon is an uncomfortable question. Why is one person saved and another not? Spurgeon’s answer is that the reason lies not in the person saved but in the heart of God. There was nothing in any of us to recommend us. All were alike lost, all without a claim on mercy. God’s choice was, as far as anything in us is concerned, without cause. It was the effect of His sovereign love.

According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love. EPHESIANS 1:4

He knew perfectly well how this lands on the natural mind. People are happy, he observes, to accept that God passed by the fallen angels and saved men; nobody complains about that. “Every man approves of Calvinism till he feels that he is the loser by it.” It is only when the doctrine touches us personally that we object. Spurgeon did not think the objection answered the Scripture.

So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy. ROMANS 9:16

Why he found it joyful

What is striking about Spurgeon’s preaching of election is its tone. He did not preach it grimly or defensively. He preached it with delight. In Free Grace he tells his congregation that when he was meditating on the text the day before, it filled him with transport and joy. He looked back on his own life — piously brought up, and in rebellion against it all, his mother’s tears shed in vain and his father’s warnings lost on him — and he found himself saved anyway, by grace. If it had been by merit, he says, “I had never been saved.”

That is the key to his Calvinism. It was not first a theory about other people. It was the explanation of his own conversion. When he asked himself why he had believed, he could find no answer in himself. He had heard the same gospel for years and rejected it. Something had to be done in him that he could not do for himself. He concluded that God had done it, and that God had meant to do it, and that it was all of grace.

For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? 1 CORINTHIANS 4:7

The rock that does not move

For Spurgeon, sovereign grace was also the ground of the believer’s security. The sermon that stands first in the printed series of his sermons, The Immutability of God, preached in January 1855, begins with the words of Malachi: I am the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed. He opens by insisting that “the proper study of a Christian is the Godhead,” and goes on to argue that the unchanging God is the only reason His people are not destroyed. If salvation depended on us, it would change as we change. Because it depends on Him, it stands.

For I am the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed. MALACHI 3:6

This is why he thought the doctrines of grace were comforting rather than cold. A salvation that began in God’s eternal love, was purchased by Christ’s blood and applied by the Spirit’s power cannot be lost through the believer’s weakness. Chapter sixteen returns to this.

Grace that sends the preacher out

The most important thing about Spurgeon’s Calvinism is what it did next. In Free Grace, immediately after describing his joy in the doctrine, he says his next thought was how he could go and preach it to the poor sinner. And he does, at once. You say you dare not come to Christ because you have nothing to recommend you? Then you are exactly the person to come. Christ does not want your recommendations. He saves not for your sake but for His own name’s sake, and therefore your unworthiness is no barrier at all.

This is the point where Spurgeon differed sharply from the hyper-Calvinists of his day, who held that the gospel should be offered only to those who showed signs of being elect. Spurgeon thought that a betrayal of the Scriptures. Because grace is free, it may be freely offered to anyone. The next chapter is about that offer.

A word to readers who differ

Many devout Christians read Romans 9 and Ephesians 1 differently. They believe God’s choice rests on His foreknowledge of faith, or that His grace enables every person to respond, or they simply decline to resolve the mystery. Spurgeon could speak dismissively of such views, and in places he went beyond what the text requires, as when he speculates about the proportion of mankind to be saved. The reader need not follow him in every detail to receive what matters most. Almost every Christian who has prayed for the conversion of a friend has already confessed that salvation is God’s work, for otherwise why ask Him? Almost every believer, looking back, says with Spurgeon: I did not deserve it. And that confession is the beating heart of free grace.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask where self-dependence or self-exaltation shows up in your spiritual life. Name one example of each from the past month.

2. Look back over your own coming to faith. Write down every way in which God took the initiative before you did.

3. If you find the doctrine of election troubling, read Ephesians 1:3–14 as a hymn of praise rather than a puzzle to solve, and see what it does to you.

4. When you next feel unworthy to pray, remember Ezekiel 36:32 — not for your sake — and pray anyway.

5. Let free grace send you outward: pray this week for someone you have assumed would never come to Christ.

A PRAYER

Sovereign Lord, You saved me not for my sake, but for Your own name’s sake, and I am ashamed of how often I have taken the credit.

I was trained in the truth and ran from it. You did not wait for something good in me. You put it there.

Keep me from pride in grace, as if grace made me better than others. Let it make me humbler and more grateful.

And let the freeness of Your mercy send me to tell others that they need bring nothing, for You give all. Amen.