God, bring life to your church

📬 Weekend Edition: “We cast ourselves upon you, and ask you to make us all useful today.”

Author

SpurgeonBooks
March 15, 2025

Pray with Spurgeon

WEEKEND EDITION

This is a preview of the Pray with Spurgeon Weekend Edition, which is sent each Saturday exclusively for Pray with Spurgeon Plus subscribers.

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.

God, make us to be more and more a living church, a church in which God shall show forth the glory of his power. We long for this! May all ministries among us be living ministries, Holy Spirit ministries; and so may it be in all the churches, that every golden candlestick may have a candle well-lit. May it come to pass that there is enough sacred oil to keep the lights well burning, to the glory of our God.

We cast ourselves upon you, and ask you to make us all useful today in our families, in our classes, in the church, in the world. And when you shall have used us here, permit us the great joy of serving you day and night in your temple above.

Amen.

SPURGEON’S LETTERS

Spurgeon’s letters are really encouraging devotional readings. Today, we’ll read a note that Spurgeon sent to his future wife on January 11, 1855 — one year before their wedding.

My Dearest,

The letter is all I can desire. Oh, I could weep for joy (as I certainly am doing now) to think that my beloved can so well testify to a work of grace in her soul. I knew you were really a child of God, but I did not think you had been led in such a path. I see my Master has been plowing deep and it is the deep-sown seed, struggling with the clods, which now makes your heart heave with distress. If I know anything of spiritual symptoms, I think I know a cure for you. Your position is not the sphere for earnest labor for Christ. You have done all you could in more ways than one; but you are not brought into actual contact either with the saints or with the sinful, sick, or miserable, whom you could serve. Active service brings with it warmth, and this tends to remove doubting, for our works thus become evidences of our calling and election.

Yours, with pure and holy affection, as well as terrestrial love,

Charles Spurgeon

WISDOM FROM SPURGEON: WHY IS SECRET SIN SO DANGEROUS?

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

Now, I hold that secret sin, if anything, is the worst of sin; because secret sin implies that the man who commits it has atheism in his heart. You will ask how that can be. I reply, he may be a professing Christian, but I shall tell him to his face that he is a practical atheist if he labors to keep up a respectable profession before man and then secretly transgresses. Why, is he not an atheist, who will say there is a God, yet at the same time thinks more of man than he does of God? Is it not the very essence of atheism—is it not a denial of the divinity of the Most High when men lightly esteem him and think more of the eye of a creature than of the observation of their Creator? There are some who would not for the life of them say a wicked word in the presence of their minister, but they can do it when they know God is looking at them. They are atheists. There are some who would not trick in trade for all the world if they thought they would be discovered, but they can do it while God is with them; that is, they think more of the eye of man than of the eye of God; and they think it worse to be condemned by man than to be condemned by God.

Call it by what name you will, the proper name of that is practical atheism. It is dishonoring God; it is dethroning him; putting him down below his own creatures; and what is that, but to take away his divinity? Do not, I beseech you, incur the fearful guilt of secret sins. No man can sin a little in secret, it will certainly engender more sin; no man can be a hypocrite and yet be moderate in guilt; he will go from bad to worse and still proceed until when his guilt shall be published and he shall be found to be the very worst and the most hardened of men. Take heed of the guilt of secret sin.