Pray with Spurgeon

WEEKEND EDITION

I hope you enjoy this preview of the new Weekend Edition of Pray with Spurgeon.

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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.

We pray with great earnestness that you would bless this church. We thank you for additions made to our members; we pray that they may be good men, and true, holy women, in their very hearts. Lord, keep those who are in membership. Let us not fall; let us not fall. Make us all useful. Keep the church in unity, peace and concord, and give it zeal and passionate longing for the conversion of the souls of men.

O Lord, we do ask you to remember us this weekend when we come to worship you together, may the Lord be there! And when we gather together may a very large tide of blessing come. May many be brought in who now think nothing of you. While we are preaching, may the Holy Spirit be working, may souls be saved by thousands.

Amen.

SPURGEON’S LETTERS

Spurgeon’s letters are really encouraging devotional readings. Today, we’ll read a note that Spurgeon sent to his father on January 30, 1850 — just a few weeks after Spurgeon’s conversion.

My Dear Father,

I am most happy and comfortable, I could not be more so while sojourning on earth, “like a pilgrim or a stranger, as all my fathers were.” I currently have a nice little mathematical class and have quite as much time for study as I had before. I can get good religious conversations with Mr. Swindell, which is what I most need. Oh, how unprofitable has my past life been! Oh, that I should have been so long time blind to those celestial wonders, which now I can in a measure behold! Who can refrain from speaking of the marvelous love of Jesus which, I hope, has opened my eyes! Now I see him, I can firmly trust to him for my eternal salvation. Yet soon I doubt again; then I am sorrowful; again faith appears, and I become confident of my interest in him.

I feel now as if I could do everything, and give up everything for Christ, and I know it would be nothing in comparison with his love. I am hopeless of ever making anything like a return.

I ever remain your dutiful and affectionate son,

Charles Spurgeon

WISDOM FROM SPURGEON: WHAT IS TRUE REPENTANCE?

This section of the Weekend Edition will include Spurgeon’s answers to timely questions. Pray with Spurgeon Plus subscribers can respond to this email with your questions.

Genuine, spiritual mourning for sin is the work of the Spirit of God. Repentance is too excellent a flower to grow in nature’s garden. Pearls grow naturally in oysters but repentance never shows itself in sinners unless divine grace works it in them. If you have one particle of real hatred for sin, God must have given it to you, for human nature’s thorns never produced a single fig. “That which is born of the flesh is flesh.”

True repentance has a distinct reference to the Savior. When we repent of sin, we must have one eye upon sin and another upon the cross, or it will be better still if we fix both our eyes upon Christ and see our transgressions only, in the light of his love.

True sorrow for sin is eminently practical. No man may say he hates sin if he lives in it. Repentance makes us see the evil of sin, not merely as a theory, but experimentally—as a burnt child dreads fire. We shall be as much afraid of it, as a man who has lately been stopped and robbed is afraid of the thief upon the highway; and we shall shun it—shun it in everything—not in great things only, but in little things, as men shun little vipers as well as great snakes. True mourning for sin will make us very jealous over our tongue, lest it should say a wrong word; we shall be very watchful over our daily actions, lest in anything we offend, and each night we shall close the day with painful confessions of shortcoming, and each morning awaken with anxious prayers, that this day God would hold us up that we may not sin against him.

Sincere repentance is continual. Believers repent until their dying day. This dropping well is not intermittent. Every other sorrow yields to time, but this dear sorrow grows with our growth, and it is so sweet a bitter, that we thank God we are permitted to enjoy and to suffer it until we enter our eternal rest.

For further study: see 2 Corinthians 7.

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