Charles Spurgeon: The Boy Who Looked

On a Sunday morning in January 1850, a fifteen-year-old boy set out through the streets of Colchester, an old market town in the east of England, to go to church. It was snowing. Not a gentle, pretty snowfall, but the kind of storm that stings the face and fills the road and makes a person put their head down and stop thinking about where they meant to go.

The boy’s name was Charles Haddon Spurgeon. He was home from school for the winter holidays, and he was, by his own account, one of the most miserable young people in England. Not because of his family, who loved him, or his schoolwork, which he was good at. He was miserable because he believed he was a sinner who deserved God’s judgement, and he could not find any way to be at peace with God.

He never reached the church he had been heading for. The snow was too thick. Years later he wrote, “I sometimes think I might have been in darkness and despair until now had it not been for the goodness of God in sending a snowstorm, one Sunday morning, while I was going to a certain place of worship.” Instead, he turned down a side street and found a small chapel belonging to the Primitive Methodists.

The Primitive Methodists were a branch of the Methodist movement, popular with farm labourers and working people, and famous for singing so loudly and enthusiastically that more respectable churchgoers looked down on them. Charles had heard about their noise. He did not much care. He went in.

There were not many people inside. He remembered perhaps a dozen or fifteen. The minister who was supposed to preach that morning had not arrived; presumably the snow had stopped him too. So, after some time, one of the congregation went up into the pulpit to preach instead. Charles described him as “a very thin-looking man, a shoemaker, or tailor, or something of that sort.” Nobody knows his name for certain. Over the years several men have been suggested, but none of the guesses has ever been proved.

The man was not a trained speaker, and Charles thought he could hardly pronounce some of the words properly. He took as his text a single verse from the prophet Isaiah, in the old King James Version that everyone in England used then: “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). He did not have much to say about it. As Charles remembered it, he said that looking does not take any effort. You do not need to lift a foot or a finger to look. You do not need to be clever or educated. A child can look. The text, he said, was not “Look to yourself,” but “Look unto me”: look to Christ.

After about ten minutes he had run out of things to say. And then he did something that Charles never forgot. He looked straight at the boy sitting under the gallery, a stranger in the little chapel, and spoke directly to him. “Young man, you look very miserable,” he said. As Charles told the story, the preacher went on: he would always be miserable, in life and in death, if he did not obey the text; but if he obeyed it now, this moment, he would be saved. Then he lifted his voice and shouted, “Young man, look to Jesus Christ. Look! Look! Look! You have nothing to do but to look and live.”

And Charles looked.

Years in the Dark

To understand why that moment mattered so much, you have to know how long Charles had been waiting for it.

He was born on 19 June 1834 in Kelvedon, a village in Essex. His father, John Spurgeon, earned his living in business and preached on Sundays at a small Independent (Congregational) chapel. When Charles was little, he was sent to live for several years with his grandparents at Stambourne, where his grandfather, James Spurgeon, had been the minister for decades. The old manse had a room full of heavy Puritan books, written two hundred years earlier, and the boy pulled them down and read them long before he could understand them all. He loved John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the story of a man named Christian who flees from the City of Destruction carrying a burden on his back, and who loses the burden only when he comes to the cross.

So Charles grew up knowing a great deal about God. He could have told you what sin was, who Jesus was, and why Jesus died. He knew the words. What he did not have was the thing the words were about.

At some point as he grew older, he began to feel the weight of his own sin, and the feeling would not leave. He did not think he had done anything especially dramatic. He was a well-behaved boy. But the more he read the Bible, the more he became convinced that God saw his heart, not just his behaviour, and that his heart was proud and cold and selfish. He felt like Christian in Bunyan’s story, carrying a burden he could not put down.

He tried to fix it. He prayed. He read serious books, including old Puritan works written to warn unconverted people. He resolved to do better and failed. He went from chapel to chapel in the towns where he lived, hoping someone would tell him what to do. He later said that the preachers he heard told him many true things, about God’s law and about what Christians should be like, but that none of them told him plainly how a guilty person could be forgiven. He described this period as lasting years, and it was at its worst in the months before that snowy Sunday.

It is worth stopping here, because this is something many young people in churches go through, and few talk about. Charles was not a rebel who needed to be scared into faith. He was a church boy who knew all the answers and still felt far from God. His problem was not that he didn’t know the facts. His problem was that he was looking in the wrong place. He kept looking at himself: at his feelings, his efforts, his failures, his prayers. And every time he looked at himself, he found more reason to despair.

“Look Unto Me”

That is why the thin preacher’s text hit him so hard. The verse did not say, “Feel better and be saved,” or “Try harder and be saved.” It said, “Look unto me.” The answer was not inside Charles at all. It was outside him, in Jesus Christ, who had died for sinners and who God had raised from the dead.

When Charles told the story later, he said that he had been waiting to do fifty things, and the preacher had told him to do only one, and that one was simply to look. At that moment, he said, he saw it. “There and then the cloud was gone, the darkness had rolled away, and that moment I saw the sun.” He said he could have risen up on the spot and sung with the most enthusiastic of the Methodists about the blood of Christ and the simple faith that looks to him alone.

What exactly did he believe had happened? He believed that Jesus had taken the punishment his sins deserved, so that God could forgive him completely, not because Charles had earned it, but as a free gift. He believed that all he had to do was to trust Jesus to do what Jesus had promised: to save anyone who came to him. For the rest of his life he would preach exactly that message, again and again, in thousands of sermons. He often went back to Isaiah 45:22. A modern translation puts it, “Turn to Me and be saved, all the ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is no other.” But he always remembered it in the words he heard that morning.

One small note for honesty’s sake. Spurgeon gave the date of that Sunday as 6 January 1850, and that is the date usually remembered. A few historians have pointed out small puzzles in the records, including which chapel it was and whether the date was exactly right. None of that changes the story he told, and told consistently, for forty years. But it is a good reminder that even famous memories are just that: memories.

Baptism in the River

Charles went back to school in Newmarket, a horse-racing town about fourteen miles from Cambridge, where he was both a pupil and a junior teacher. One of the people he talked with most there was not one of the teachers but the school’s cook, an older woman named Mary King. She loved to talk about the deep things of God, and the teenage Charles would sit with her and discuss theology. He later said that he learned more from her than from many learned ministers. It is a detail worth noticing: a future “Prince of Preachers” being taught in a kitchen by a woman whose name would otherwise have been forgotten.

Reading his Bible, Charles became convinced that people who believed in Jesus should be baptized, as the first Christians had been, by being immersed in water as a sign of being united with Christ in his death and resurrection. His family’s church did not practise baptism this way, and he talked it over with his parents. They let him decide for himself.

On 3 May 1850, his mother’s birthday, he walked about eight miles from Newmarket to Isleham, a village on the River Lark, and was baptized in the river by a Baptist minister named W. W. Cantlow. He was fifteen. He was naturally shy, and he later remembered that he had been nervous beforehand. But afterwards he found that his shyness about speaking of Christ had, as he put it, been washed away in the river.

A Sixteen-Year-Old in a Cottage

That summer Charles moved to Cambridge to work as an assistant teacher at a school there, and joined the Baptist church on St Andrew’s Street. It was a university city, full of students preparing to become clergymen. Charles was not one of them, and never would be.

He began teaching a Sunday school class, and he found that the children listened to him. Before long he was asked to address the whole Sunday school, and then other people began to take notice. In Cambridge there was a group of lay preachers, ordinary church members who went out on Sundays to take services in the villages around the city, where there were small chapels and no money to pay a minister. The leader of the group, James Vinter, asked Charles to walk out one evening to the village of Teversham with a young man who was going to preach there, so that he would have company.

As they walked, it slowly became clear that the other young man thought Charles was the preacher. When Charles protested, his companion said that he had never preached in his life and was not going to start that night. If Charles did not preach, nobody would.

So, in a farm cottage in Teversham, in front of a small group of farm workers and their families, the sixteen-year-old Charles Spurgeon preached his first sermon. He took as his text, in the King James wording he knew, “Unto you therefore which believe he is precious” (1 Peter 2:7). We do not know exactly what he said. We do know that when he finished, an old woman called out to ask how old he was, and he told her (with some dignity, he remembered) that she should think about the sermon and not his age. The exact date is not recorded, but it was probably late in 1850 or early in 1851.

After that he preached nearly every Sunday, and often on weekday evenings too, walking from village to village through the flat countryside around Cambridge after a full day of teaching.

Pastor at Seventeen

In October 1851 Charles was asked to preach at Waterbeach, a village a few miles north of Cambridge with a small Baptist chapel. The congregation was tiny. The village had a reputation for poverty and drunkenness. The people asked him to come back, and then to stay. At seventeen, he became their pastor.

He was still teaching in Cambridge during the week. On Sundays he walked or rode out to Waterbeach and preached, and visited people in their homes. The chapel began to fill. Within a couple of years it was packed, and Charles later wrote that the village itself had changed, with families that had been wrecked by drink becoming sober and homes becoming happier. He was a teenager, and he was being given responsibility most adults would hesitate to take.

His father and others believed he should go to college to be trained properly. In 1852 an appointment was arranged for him to meet Dr Joseph Angus, the head of a Baptist college, at a house in Cambridge. Charles arrived and was shown into one room. Dr Angus was shown into another. They waited for each other for hours, and Dr Angus eventually left for his train without either of them knowing the other was in the building.

Charles was disappointed. That afternoon, walking across an open field in Cambridge called Midsummer Common, he said that a verse came into his mind so strongly that it was almost as if he heard it spoken: “Seekest thou great things for thyself? seek them not” (Jeremiah 45:5). He took it as God’s word to him, and he decided to stay with his village congregation and not to chase a college place. He never went to college at all. Everything he knew, he learned from books, from preaching, and from people like Mary King.

London at Nineteen

In late 1853 a deacon from the New Park Street Chapel in London heard about the young preacher. New Park Street was a historic Baptist church that had once been great and was now half empty. They invited Charles to preach. He went, and was dismayed: he was a country boy in country clothes, and London felt enormous and cold. Only about eighty people came that first Sunday morning. But the evening congregation was larger, and the church asked him to come back. In 1854, at nineteen, he became their pastor.

What happened next is hard to believe. Within months, the chapel could not hold the crowds. The church rented Exeter Hall, a large public hall, and then the Surrey Gardens Music Hall, which held thousands. People came from every class: servants and shopkeepers, lords and members of Parliament. Newspapers mocked his plain, lively style. He kept preaching the same thing he had heard in the snow: look to Christ and live.

What Came After

The rest of his life was as full as any life could be. In January 1856 he married Susannah Thompson, and they had twin sons, Thomas and Charles. In October that year, while Spurgeon was preaching to a vast crowd in the Surrey Gardens Music Hall, someone shouted “Fire!” There was no fire, but in the panic seven people died. Spurgeon was crushed by grief, and for the rest of his life he struggled with times of deep depression, which he spoke about openly at a time when few preachers did.

In 1861 his church moved into the Metropolitan Tabernacle, a huge new building in south London, where he preached to around five thousand people every Sunday for thirty years. His sermons were printed every week and sent around the world. He founded a college to train poor young men as ministers, because he remembered what it was like to have no college place. He opened an orphanage for boys, and later for girls. He spoke out against slavery in the United States, and as a result some of his sermons were burned in the American South. He suffered painful illnesses for many years, and he died in Menton, in the south of France, on 31 January 1892, aged fifty-seven.

He preached thousands of sermons in his life. But if you had asked him what the most important thing that ever happened to him was, he would have told you about a snowstorm, a thin man in a pulpit, and the moment he stopped looking at himself.

In Their Own Words

“There and then the cloud was gone, the darkness had rolled away, and that moment I saw the sun.”

— Charles Spurgeon, recalling his conversion, in his Autobiography (published 1897–1900)

Think It Through

1. Charles grew up in a Christian home and knew a lot about God, but still felt far from him. Why do you think knowing the facts was not enough for him?
2. The preacher’s message was “look,” not “try harder.” Where do you tend to look when you feel you have failed: at yourself, at other people, or somewhere else?
3. Charles was a pastor at seventeen. What would it take for adults to trust a teenager with that kind of responsibility, and what would it take for a teenager to accept it?
4. A forgotten cook and an unknown lay preacher shaped one of the most famous preachers in history. Who are the “unknown” people who have shaped what you believe?

Read More on Ochorus

Spurgeon wrote All of Grace for people exactly like his fifteen-year-old self, searching and unsure, and you can read it on Ochorus either in full or in All of Grace (For Teens). Around the Wicket Gate is another short book written for seekers. His daily readings, Morning by Morning and Evening by Evening, are good companions for a year. Among his sermons in the library, try “Compel Them to Come In” and, if you ever find yourself in a dark place, “Comfort for the Desponding.” His full biography is on his author page.