Pray with Spurgeon

WEEKEND EDITION

Enjoy this preview of the Weekend Edition, sent each Saturday exclusively for Pray with Spurgeon Plus subscribers.

If you want to receive the Weekend Edition every Saturday (and support the newsletter!), upgrade your subscription here.

PRAYER FOR THE CHURCH (BY SPURGEON)

Prepare your heart to gather with your church on Sunday. Join Spurgeon in prayer for the saints and sinners who will hear God's Word at your church tomorrow.

Our Father in heaven, there are young men and women here who listen to us whose hearts are untouched; put out your finger now and make their hearts dissolve. Here are men who are parents, women who are mothers; they are in the middle of life, but the hammer of God has still not come home to the heart. Lord bring it home today, and while the law is being preached may it act as a schoolmaster to bring them to Christ. Here, too, are some aged men who are tottering on the brink of the Jordan river and on the other side there is a dismal country without hope or light. Save them, save them, save them yet, that they may cross the river after another fashion and land in that blessed country of which our cheerful voices have been singing.

There are strangers within your courts; they are unknown to us, but searcher of all hearts, you know them. May they hear a sermon they shall never forget. May the arrows of God stick so fast that they may never be drawn out, except by that healing hand that once was pierced.

Amen.

SPURGEON’S LETTERS

Spurgeon’s letters are really encouraging devotional readings. Today, we’ll read a letter that Spurgeon to a friend who was grieving the death of a family member.

Dear Mrs. Higgs,

Others have now told me all about our dear one’s death. The Lord has dealt well with him. I wonder how he lived so long to encourage us all; and I feel relieved that he lived no longer, for it would have been great anguish to him. He has gone at the right time. The Lord will be your comfort and help. I meant to go to you this morning, but I found that my foot would not let me go up and down steps. It is a double pain to be kept from you and your sorrowing family.… We shall all meet again.… Let us bless God. Can we?

Your loving friend,

Charles Spurgeon

WISDOM FROM SPURGEON: CAN I GROW IN CONTENTMENT?

This section of the Weekend Edition will include Spurgeon’s answers to timely questions. Respond to this email with your questions.

Contentment in all states is not a natural thing for people. Ill weeds grow quickly: covetousness, discontent, and murmuring are as natural to people as thorns are to the soil. You have no need to sow thistles and brambles; they come up naturally enough, because they are indigenous to earth, upon which rests the curse; so you have no need to teach men to complain, they complain fast enough without any education.

But the precious things of the earth must be cultivated. If we would have wheat, we must plow and sow; if we want flowers, there must be the garden and all the gardener’s care. Now, contentment is one of the flowers of heaven, and if we would have it, it must be cultivated. It will not grow in us by nature; it is the new nature alone that can produce it and even then we must be especially careful and watchful that we maintain and cultivate the grace which God has sown in it. Paul says, “I have learned to be content” (Philippians 4:11), as much as to say he did not know how at one time. It cost him some pains to attain to the mystery of that great truth. No doubt he sometimes thought he had learned and then broke down. Frequently too, like boys at school, he had his knuckles rapped; frequently he found that it was not easy learning this task, and when at last he had attained unto it, and could say, “I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I find myself” (Philippians 4:11), he was an old grey-headed man upon the borders of the grave, a poor prisoner shut up in Nero’s dungeon at Rome.

We might well be willing to endure Paul’s infirmities and share the cold dungeon with him, if we too might by any means attain unto such a degree of contentment. Do not indulge, any of you, the silly notion that you can be content without learning or learn without discipline. It is not a power that may be exercised naturally, but a science to be acquired gradually. The very words of the text might suggest this, even if we did not know it from experience. We do not need be taught to complain but we must be taught to rest in the will and good pleasure of the Lord our God.