Tudo pela Graça

Spurgeon's book for someone who is not yet a Christian and suspects they are too far gone to become one. It is plain to the point of bluntness, addressed throughout as “you”, and it moves through the objections in the order people actually raise them: I am not good enough, I cannot feel anything, I have tried before, I do not know how to believe.

He wrote it in 1886, near the end of a ministry spent preaching to thousands in London, and it carries the habits of a preacher rather than a writer — short paragraphs, homely illustrations, a refusal to leave a point until it has landed. The text under all of it is Ephesians 2:8, and the title is the argument: if any part of salvation were owed to the reader's improvement, the reader would be lost, which is precisely why they are not.

Spurgeon anticipates the objection that this is too easy, and answers it at length. His point is not that sin is small but that faith is not a work — that the man who says he cannot believe well enough has misunderstood what he is being asked for.

It is the shortest book on this shelf and the most often given away. If you are looking for somewhere to start, or something to hand to someone else, this is it.