The Preached Word

Simpson's best-loved message: the deepest need of the soul is not any blessing — not healing, not sanctification, not 'the it' we chase — but Christ Himself as indwelling life. He traces his own journey from seeking experiences to receiving the Person, showing how every gift is kept only while the Giver is kept, and closes with the hymn born of this discovery: 'Once it was the blessing, now it is the Lord.'

From Elijah's 'still small voice,' Simpson argues that God is met in quietness rather than tumult: the sweetest blessing Christ brings is the Sabbath-rest of the soul. Practical counsel follows — stilled prayer, restrained speech, a hushed spirit under pressure and provocation — so that the life itself comes to speak with the sound of gentle stillness.

An ascending survey of what 'all things are possible to him that believeth' actually covers: salvation for the worst of sinners, sanctification, the healing of the body, daily provision, and the evangelization of the world. Simpson presses the staggering parallel — what is possible with God is offered to faith — and calls the reader to claim it in believing prayer.

Joy, Simpson argues, is the sharpest difference between Christianity and every other religion — and Nehemiah's word makes it the secret of strength. He distinguishes gladness that leans on circumstances from the indwelling joy of Christ, and shows that joy to be strength for service, endurance in trial, and the most winning witness a believer carries.

“Be filled with the Spirit” — and Simpson fastens on the word filled, so full that no room is left empty. The filling, he shows, is not an influence or a sensation or a set of truths but a living Person; the whole essence of Christianity is the indwelling Christ. He traces its nature, its conditions, and its abiding, calling the half-filled heart to be wholly possessed, that rivers of living water may flow from the inmost being.

Reading Abraham’s household as a parable, Simpson presses past the casting-out of Ishmael — the believer’s deliverance from indwelling sin — to the harder altar on Moriah, where even the sanctified self, like Isaac, must be laid down. Self, he warns, is a foe subtler than sin and far more dear. Only when the proud and wilful “I” has died can the risen Christ truly live in us, so that the life is no longer ours but “Christ liveth in me.”

“The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” Maclaren dwells on John's pairing of the two words — that in Christ grace and truth arrive together, neither one softening the other, the tenderness and the reality of God met in a single Person. Where Moses gave a law that revealed the standard, he argues, Christ gives the grace that meets the failure and the truth that was only shadowed before — the whole fulness of God now come near in flesh.

Maclaren takes the woman who crept through the crowd to touch the hem of Christ's garment and finds in her the encouragement of every weak believer: her faith was ignorant, half-superstitious, trembling and hidden — and it healed her all the same. The power, he shows, was never in the strength or the clearness of her faith but in the One she touched. A feeble hand laid on Christ draws from him as surely as a bold one, so no one need stay away for the poorness of his faith.

From a psalm written in the “autumnal calm” of age, Maclaren traces the cure for a fretting heart through its four quiet commands — delight thyself in the Lord, commit thy way, rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for him. Each, he shows, is a deeper stage of one surrender: desire fixed on God, the burden rolled onto him, the soul stilled, the impatience of waiting laid down. Tranquillity, he concludes, is not the absence of trouble but the presence of a trusted God.

Read the book of Acts knowing nothing of what followed, Booth says, and you would expect the world long since won — so why, after nineteen hundred years, this? Her answer is not better machinery but a baptism of love: a church willing to be laughed at in the streets, and to count that the only dignity worth having.

"Son, go work today in my vineyard." Booth turns from the world's need to the Church's strange reluctance to meet it, and asks why so few of Christ's people will actually go. The trouble, she argues, is not that labourers are lacking but that the willing are untrained and the trained unwilling — and she sends her hearers home to think on the wants of a dying world.

To be a witness, Booth insists, is not to argue a case but to testify to what you have seen and felt — and a Church that has stopped witnessing has usually stopped experiencing. She presses every believer, learned or unlettered, into the same plain duty: to tell what the Lord has done for their soul.

The disciples were told to tarry until they were endued with power from on high, and Booth will not let her hearers hurry past that command. Gifts, eloquence, and organisation are worth nothing, she says, without the baptism of the Spirit — and she calls the Church to wait for it as the apostles did, and to expect it.

“Sin is the most expensive thing in the universe.” Finney reckons the true cost of sin against a holy law, then shows that God's love for a rebel world was great enough to meet that whole cost in the gift of His Son—and presses the sinner to accept a salvation already so dearly bought.

“The effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.” From his Lectures on Revivals of Religion: what prevailing prayer is, why so little prayer prevails, and the marks of prayer that does — praying for a definite object, in submission to God's will, by the Spirit, in faith, with importunity. Finney at his most practical and most searching.

“The Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” Finney on what it means for the Holy Spirit to lead a Christian in prayer — the burden for souls that comes from him, how it is grieved away, and how a church that has it cannot fail to see a revival. The companion lecture to Prevailing Prayer.

“Make you a new heart and a new spirit, for why will ye die?” The sermon that made Finney famous, and controversial: a change of heart is a change in the choice of a supreme ruler, so God can command it, the sinner is bound to it, and the Spirit's work is to persuade, not to override. The plainest statement of his call to decide now.

The proper study of the Christian is God Himself, and here Spurgeon fixes on one perfection: 'I am the Lord, I change not.' Because God's nature, love, and purposes never alter, the sons of Jacob are not consumed — and the believer whose world is shaking may anchor in the one heart that cannot change.

Salvation is 'not for your sakes': Spurgeon dismantles the two sins bred in the bone — self-dependence and self-exaltation — and shows that God saves for His own name's sake, entirely of grace. Therefore the vilest sinner may come with nothing in hand, and the saved have nothing to boast of but the tender heart of God.

The text Spurgeon first preached on at sixteen, in a cottage to a handful of poor people, when he could not have spoken on any other — and he takes it as plain fact before exhortation: to those who believe, Christ simply is precious. It turns at the last into a question, and a warning for the hearer who finds they cannot answer it.

A promise born in prison: 'Call unto Me, and I will answer, and show you great and mighty things.' Spurgeon takes Jeremiah's word as the golden key that unlocks God's treasury — urging bold, expectant, persevering prayer, especially in affliction, where God reveals to the praying heart what study alone never could.

Job's cry is not for relief but for an audience: 'Oh that I knew where I might find him!' Spurgeon takes it as a lesson in the craft of prayer — order your cause as the priest laid out his sacrifice, and ask plainly, saying Ishmael if you mean Ishmael — then catalogues the pleas that have prevailed: God's attributes, His promises, His great name, past mercies, even our own unworthiness.

If God feeds the young ravens when they croak, will He refuse a soul that cries? Spurgeon presses the argument six ways, noting that Scripture names not the dove but the raven — the unclean bird nobody prizes — so that none may plead his own blackness as a disqualification. To the fear of praying badly he answers with Christ, who makes a fair copy of the ill-spelt petition and signs it Himself.

Heaven dates Saul's first prayer to the road to Damascus — though the Pharisee had gone up to the temple twice a day for years. Spurgeon reads 'Behold, he prayeth' as both announcement and argument: the sign that sent Ananias into a persecutor's house, and a proof of sincerity no profession can counterfeit. Praying will make a man leave off sinning, or sinning will make him leave off praying.

Fame prefers men of brass and iron and passes the rest by, Spurgeon begins — which is the ground his text stands on. The bruised reed and the smoking flax are not merely weak but worthless, of no use to anyone except the Christ who will not break or quench them. He finishes defending the faith of small children against those who think them too forward.

Job's wish to be as in months past is the cry Spurgeon takes up for the believer who once walked in the light and cannot now find it. He treats it first as a complaint worth hearing rather than rebuking — the Shepherd's own people do cross the wilderness — before turning it toward the promise that whoever wills may still come and drink.

That God should contend with man at all astonishes Spurgeon — the Almighty taking up weapons against the insect of a day — and Job's demand to be shown why becomes a question he answers separately for the child of God and for the sinner. Affliction is read as purpose rather than accident, and the hearer is sent to picture Christ on the tree.

The fourth figure walking in Nebuchadnezzar's furnace gives Spurgeon his subject, and he counts the furnaces a believer may be put into: the one men kindle, the one Satan blows with his three bellows, and the one God heats himself. Young men are told to lose everything before their integrity. He closes on the Christ who trod the glowing coals first.

Too impatient for an introduction — the command is to compel, and Spurgeon means to obey it in the sermon itself. It moves in two parts: first finding the hearer out, naming the drunkard, the moralist and the despairing in turn, then pressing them with everything short of force. He ends by handing the outcome to his Master.

The cross confounds the wisdom of the world: a stumbling-block to the religion of merit, foolishness to the proud intellect, yet to those who are called it is the power of God and the wisdom of God. Spurgeon defends the plain preaching of the crucified Christ against every fashionable substitute, and glories in what the world despises.

Without faith it is impossible to please God — so Spurgeon sets out to say plainly what faith is, and finds it made of three things: knowledge, belief, and trust, the last of which is its living heart. To the trembling seeker who fears his faith too small he answers that it is not the greatness of faith but the greatness of its object that saves, and that a feeble hand may still lay hold of a mighty Christ.

“The hill of comfort is the hill of Calvary.” Spurgeon takes the text word by word — justified, freely, by grace, through the redemption in Christ — to show that a sinner is set right with God not by degrees or by deserving but as a free gift, bought at the cross. He presses home that grace shuts the door on all boasting, and that the guiltiest may be justified the very moment he trusts the finished work.

Christ, “for the joy set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame.” Spurgeon lingers on the shame itself — the spitting, the mockery, the nakedness, a death kept for slaves — and asks the believer to measure the love that bore it willingly. From the once-shamed Sufferer, now set down at the right hand of God, he draws courage for any who must carry reproach for his name.

The enemies of Christ meant “a friend of publicans and sinners” for a slur, and unwittingly minted his dearest title. Spurgeon turns the scorned phrase into gospel: here is a Friend who chooses the friendless, who is not ashamed of the outcast, and whose friendship is sealed at the cross. He closes by pressing the sinner to close with a Friend who will never be ashamed of him — if only he is not ashamed to own that he needs one.

“Who gives songs in the night?” Where Elihu could only guess at the cause of Job’s grief, Spurgeon finds the mercy hidden inside it — that God alone can put a song into a suffering heart when every earthly reason for singing is gone. He gathers the night-songs a believer may sing: of remembered deliverance, of present providence, and of a hope that outlasts the dark, since the God who gives them is himself the Maker of the mourner.

Christmas Evans's most famous sermon, and the one Welshmen still quote: the whole gospel told as a single unfolding scene. Man is created in God's image, the crown of righteousness falls, and Mercy and Justice contend at the throne until the blood of Christ answers both. Preached in the open air across Wales by the great one-eyed Baptist.

"Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah?" Evans takes Isaiah's vision of the lone conqueror returning red from battle and reads it as Christ coming back from Calvary, having trodden the winepress alone. A sermon of one towering image, held up until the cross looks like the victory it is.

"He is not here; for he is risen." Evans stands at the empty tomb and presses what it proves — that the ransom was accepted, death is a beaten enemy, and the grave of every believer is now only a place where the Lord once lay. The angel's invitation, "Come, see the place," becomes the whole sermon's refrain.

Christ hears that John has been beheaded, withdraws, is followed, and is moved anyway — Moody starts where Matthew does, then gathers case after case of that compassion reaching people at their least deserving: the widow's son, the man robbed and spoiled, the prodigal, the backslider who has lost his testimony, and Jerusalem, wept over as it refused him.

Moody works through Colossians office by office — Saviour, Redeemer, Deliverer, Leader, Light, Teacher, Shepherd, burden-bearer — each meeting a need the one before it uncovers: to be pulled from the water is not yet to be bought back, and Israel out of Egypt still needed a way through the desert. He breaks off admitting the list could not be finished this side of eternity.

Moody gathers eight promises in which Christ says 'I will' — rest, a welcome for whoever comes, cleansing, confession before the Father, power to win others, comfort, resurrection, glory — and sets God's word against ours, which we break for want of will or of power. He closes by asking for a ninth, the prodigal's: 'I will arise, and go to my father.'

The last man saved before Christ died is Moody's answer to everyone who distrusts a sudden conversion: he asks how long God needs to save a soul, then walks the thief through it — conviction, confession, an unashamed word for Christ before a jeering crowd, and the request itself. He closes with a dying soldier who asked that his mother be told he died looking up.

Asked once which of Christ's promises was the most precious, Moody found he could not choose — a father cannot name a favourite child — but keeps returning to this one, and to the two rests inside it: the rest given to whoever comes, and the rest found afterwards by whoever takes the yoke. He ends at the bedside of a sick child who wanted only to be held.

Regeneration is the foundation-stone, Moody argues, and a man unsound there is unsound everywhere — so he clears away the substitutes one at a time: born to Christian parents, baptised, admitted to a church, morally respectable, full of good resolutions. None of them is birth. The change is God's work and comes at once.

Not a sermon at all by its own account, only an answer to the jailer's question — and the whole address turns on Moody's distinction between believing about Christ and receiving him, pressed through the figure of a marriage, where consent has to be given, and through Ruth's choice against Orpah's. It ends at the door where Christ stands knocking.

Give up the ark, Moody says, and he would give up the whole Bible — and he reads God's word to Noah as a summons addressed to a household rather than to a man alone. The weight of it falls on parents, and on the door that God shut himself, before ending with a dying boy who promised to tell Jesus that his father had prayed for him.

Moody makes the leprous Syrian captain a mirror for every sinner: great, honoured, capable — and yet carrying a blight no rank can cover. He follows Naaman past his pride at the plain command to wash in Jordan, past his “are not the rivers of Damascus better?”, down to the seventh dipping and the flesh come again like a little child’s — the gospel’s whole lesson that God’s cure is free and simple, and refused only by those too proud to stoop for it.

“What must I do to be saved?” — and the answer, “Believe,” at once raises Moody’s real question: what is it to believe? He divides the faith that merely assents to facts about Christ from the faith that trusts and rests on Christ himself, picturing the balloon-rope seized instead of the car — a hold that feels like faith and saves no one. The right kind of faith, he urges, lets go of every other rope and casts its whole weight on the Saviour.

Moody takes a single word for his text — “gospel” — and grieves how little it is understood in a land that hears it hourly. He unfolds its plain meaning, good tidings, and its content in Paul’s summary: Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose again. Good news is not good advice, he insists; it is something already done, to be received rather than achieved, and glad tidings only to those who know they are lost.

Whitefield's most famous sermon, on the false prophets who cry “Peace, peace” where there is no peace. He lays out the way God actually brings a soul to peace — conviction of actual sin, of original sin, of one's own righteousness, and of unbelief — before the heart closes with Christ. A searching sermon, preached to thousands in the open air.

“Except ye be converted, and become as little children.” Whitefield asks what conversion really is and gives his hearers plain marks to try themselves by — the simplicity, dependence, and teachableness of a child before its Father. Warm, direct, and meant to be answered on the spot.

“Enoch walked with God.” From those four words Whitefield draws a whole portrait of the Christian life: what it means to walk with God, the means of keeping step with him — prayer, the Word, the company of his people — and the end of such a walk, when God takes his friend home.

Whitefield calls this one of the most comprehensive verses in the Bible, and preaches it as the whole gospel in miniature: Christ made to the believer wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption — the fourfold gift, each in its order, and all of it flowing from the everlasting love of the Father.

Self-righteousness, Whitefield says, is the last idol rooted out of the heart. Against it he sets the doctrine that shaped his whole ministry: the righteousness of Christ imputed to the believer, so that the Lord himself is our righteousness. A sermon meant to strip a hearer of every plea but Christ.

Why is there so little love among Christians? Because, Whitefield answers, so few of them pray for one another. He recovers intercession as the neglected root of Christian love — whom to pray for, and how — and presses it home as a duty no believer may leave to the ministers.

Written out of Hudson Taylor's own exhaustion in inland China, where he had begun to wonder whether he ought to stop preaching altogether. He presses Christ's promise until it yields its weight — 'shall' means shall, 'never' means never, and 'drinketh' is a habit, not a single draught — then shows the well becoming a spring, since the overflow depends not on the size of the vessel but on the supply.

If goodness and mercy follow the believer all his days, then days of adversity are days of blessing too. Taylor reads Job's calamities as God's own doing rather than Satan's — the enemy is servant, never master — and presses the reader to take every sorrow from a Father's hand, whoever carried it.

Israel was commanded to wear a ribband of blue — heaven's own colour — on the fringe of every garment, that they might remember and do all the LORD's commandments. Taylor makes it a picture of the believer marked out for God, carrying a heavenly reminder to obedience into the ordinary detail of daily life.

Meditating on the First Psalm, Taylor sets the prosperity that comes from beneath — the fleeting success of the wicked that so perplexes God's servants — against the blessedness of the man who delights in the law of the LORD. Planted by the rivers of water, that man bears fruit in his season, and whatever he does prospers.

Boaz blesses Ruth, who left father, mother and homeland to shelter under the wings of the God of Israel, with the prayer that the LORD give her a full reward. Taylor reads her as a type of the soul that forsakes all to trust God, and finds that He is no man's debtor.

"If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily." Against the self-assertion natural to us all, Taylor sets Christ's call to daily cross-bearing, and shows that the cross is not the LORD's to carry alone but the believer's constant following in His steps.

"The LORD God is a Sun and Shield… no good thing will He withhold from them that walk uprightly." Taylor unfolds the all-sufficiency of God — light and defence, grace for now and glory to come — and the single condition attached to the promise: an upright walk.

“Ye were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.” A short study from A Ribband of Blue: what we were, what we have been brought back to, and how blessed it is to be watched over, provided for, and led by such a Shepherd. Hudson Taylor at his most tender.

The Queen of Sheba came to Solomon with hard questions and went home with more than she asked. Hudson Taylor reads her journey as a pattern for coming to Christ, the greater than Solomon — the distance, the hard questions, the open communing, and the royal bounty given to everyone who comes.

Ryle presses a single question home — “Do you pray?” — and calls it the surest test of a real Christian, because private prayer is the one duty no one but God can see you keep. He answers the excuses one by one, insists that a prayerless soul is a Christless soul, and urges that the gap between a thriving believer and a starved one is almost always the gap between their praying. “Diligence in prayer,” he writes, “is the secret of eminent holiness.”

“Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Ryle refuses to let anyone rest in “I belong to the church, and I suppose I am,” and turns instead to the plain marks of the new birth that John's first epistle lays down — a life that no longer makes sin its practice, that believes, loves, overcomes the world, and keeps itself. He holds them up not to torment but to test, so a reader may know, and not merely hope, whether he is born of God.

Ryle draws the line the anxious believer most needs drawn — between faith, which saves, and assurance, which comforts. A trembling soul may truly lay hold of Christ and still lack the settled confidence that Christ is his; the two are distinct gifts, and to confuse them is to rob weak believers of their peace. He commends assurance as a thing worth seeking, shows why so few enjoy it, and points the way to it through diligent, close walking with Christ.

Preached to a church under persecution: Calvin argues that no one suffers patiently for the gospel without first being sure of the cause, then calls believers to go out “without the camp” and bear Christ's reproach—their eyes fixed on the resurrection, where all their joy and triumph lie.

“Vanity of vanities”—preached in the cathedral at Constantinople while Eutropius, the fallen court minister who had once tried to strip the Church of its right of sanctuary, clung trembling to the very altar he had attacked. Chrysostom spares him nothing and yet pleads for him, turning the man's ruin into a sermon on the emptiness of power and the mercy that shelters even an enemy.

Written from exile, near the end of his life, Chrysostom's most consoling treatise: nothing outside a man — not loss, exile, slander, sickness, or death — can harm him; only his own sin can. He proves it from Job, Joseph, the three children in the furnace, and Paul in chains, and turns every trial into a field for virtue.

Newton opens his Messiah discourses where Handel's oratorio opens — with God's charge to “comfort ye my people.” He asks what warrant a minister has to speak comfort to the guilty, and finds it in the finished work the verse announces: the warfare accomplished, the iniquity pardoned, the double received at the Lord's hand. Real comfort, he insists, is not soothing words but the good news that God himself is now reconciled in Christ.

“Come unto me, all ye that labour.” Newton marvels at the invitation's mixture of majesty and grace — an earthly king would be bankrupt in a day if all the poor applied to him, but the riches of Christ are unsearchable and never fail. He presses that the only qualification named is need, that the heavy-laden are the very ones called, and that the rest offered is not a wage to be earned but a gift to be received by simply coming.

Newton sets the Baptist's cry — “Behold the Lamb of God” — against the whole visible creation, whose wonders somehow leave us unmoved. Greater than every work of God's hand, he argues, is the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world: the one object worth arresting every eye. He unfolds why the Redeemer is figured as a lamb — the innocence, the meekness, the sacrifice — and turns the announcement into a summons to look and live.

Some joys are too big for words, Newton observes, and Paul's “If God be for us, who can be against us?” is one of them — a question flung out because no statement could hold the wonder. He weighs what it means to have God himself on our side: not that opposition ceases, but that none of it can finally prevail. Every accuser — sin, law, death — is answered by the God who gave his own Son, and the believer is left more than a conqueror.

Newton closes his Messiah discourses with heaven's own song, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain.” As the queen of Sheba crossed a wilderness to see a king greater than report, he says, so faith journeys toward a greater King still — and is never disappointed. He gathers the sevenfold ascription — power, riches, wisdom, strength, honour, glory, blessing — into one theme: that the Lamb once slain is now the object of endless worship, and that to join this song below is the gospel's highest end.

Not the faith of a heathen, nor of a devil, nor even what the apostles held while Christ was still on earth — Wesley clears each away in turn before saying what saving faith is: not a cold assent, a train of ideas in the head, but a disposition of the heart. Preached before the University at Oxford three weeks after Aldersgate.

Wesley, who once reckoned himself one of them, maps the almost Christian with unsettling precision: the honesty, the good works, the outward religion, a real form of godliness — everything but the one thing. Then he names what the altogether Christian has that the other lacks: the love of God and neighbour, and a faith that lays hold of Christ. Preached before the University at Oxford.

Wesley's earliest University sermon, and one he never disowned: true religion is not the outward mark but the circumcised heart — humility, faith, hope, and love. He traces each in turn and closes on the love that fulfils the law. Preached at Oxford five years before Aldersgate, yet already sounding his lifelong note of holiness of heart.

“Is thine heart right, as my heart is with thy heart? ... give me thine hand.” Wesley builds a whole doctrine of Christian love on Jehonadab's answer: a man may differ from me in opinion and in worship and yet be one with me in heart. He is careful, though, to say what a catholic spirit is not — neither indifference to truth nor a speculative muddle — before naming what it is.

The most famous sermon ever preached in America. At Enfield, Connecticut, in the summer of 1741, Edwards read this in a level voice while his hearers cried out and clung to the pillars: the unconverted held over the pit by nothing but the hand of a God who is under no obligation to keep holding. Its terror is in service of one appeal — that an extraordinary opportunity stands open now.

“Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee.” Edwards's clearest account of what happens in conversion: not new information, not a warmed imagination, but a light immediately imparted by the Spirit — a real sense of the excellency of divine things that the natural mind cannot produce. He shows it to be both scriptural and rational, and then asks whether the hearer has it.

The first thing Edwards ever published, preached at the Boston lecture when he was twenty-seven: redemption is so arranged that man depends on God for everything — the good itself, the giving of it, and the way it comes — so that no flesh may glory in his presence. A young man's manifesto for the whole Awakening that followed.

John is told to behold a Lion, and turns to see a Lamb. Edwards takes that moment and unfolds the “admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies” in Christ — infinite majesty with infinite condescension, justice with grace, sovereignty with obedience — first in his person, then in his humiliation, then in his exaltation. His most loved sermon, and the gentlest.

“As the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” From Isaiah's four pictures — a hiding-place from the wind, a covert from the tempest, rivers in a dry place, the shadow of a rock — Edwards draws what Christ is to the soul that comes to him: safety, fulness, and sweet refreshment. A sermon of comfort, to be read slowly.

Luther reads Paul's great chapter as a rebuke to proud teachers and preachers: tongues of men and angels, all knowledge, faith to move mountains, even a martyr's death—without love they are nothing. He sets love above every gift as the Spirit's own fruit, and the surest mark of a real Christian.

Luther's Christmas Eve sermon from the Church Postil of 1522, on “the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men.” He sets the text's two evils — ungodliness and worldly lusts — against the Christian life it teaches, and arms the hearer with the text itself. Marked in the old editions as Luther at his best.

One of Luther's most popular writings of the early Reformation (1519), a Good Friday sermon in three movements: the false ways of meditating on Christ's passion, the true way — seeing one's own sins in his wounds until the heart is terrified — and then the comfort of it, when the same wounds are seen as the love of God.

Torrey takes for his subject the greatest sentence ever written — three monosyllables, “God is love” — and marvels that the Book able to say more in a line than others say in a volume should crown all its sayings with this. He weighs what it means that love is not merely something God does but what God is, and follows the sentence to its proof at Calvary, where the love that is God’s very nature gave up his Son for a world that did not love him.

“A man shall be as a hiding-place from the wind, a covert from the tempest … the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” Torrey loves the Old Testament because it is full of Christ, and here finds him foretold as the refuge every soul needs — from the storm of conviction, the tempest of judgment, the drought of a thirsty heart, the weariness of a hard road. The rock stands open; his whole appeal is that no one leave the shelter unentered.

“Wherewith shall I come before the Lord?” M'Cheyne calls it the piercing question of every awakened soul, and answers it as only he could — not with rams and rivers of oil, not with the fruit of the body, but by the good way God himself has showed: coming in Christ, with a broken heart, to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. Ends with his own closing verse.

Jeremiah's complaint — that the hope of Israel behaves like a stranger in his own land, a wayfaring man who turns aside for a night — becomes M'Cheyne's cry for revival in Scotland. He names the reasons God withdraws from a people, and pleads for the “times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord.”

“Your goodness is as a morning cloud, and as the early dew it goeth away.” The impressions of natural men are fading, M'Cheyne warns — real, and gone by noon. A tender, searching sermon on the difference between being moved and being changed, for every hearer who has felt much and kept little.

Preached at the close of a communion Sabbath, 28 October 1840: everyone who has that day confessed Christ before men should take up Ephraim's words and mean them. M'Cheyne walks through the idols a believer is done with, and the Christ who is worth more than all of them.