Pray with Spurgeon

WEEKEND EDITION

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, our God, do not let the teaching of the Sunday school, the preaching of the evangelists, the personal visitations of individual minds — do not let any of these efforts be in vain. Give conversions. We groan out this prayer from our very heart, yet can we also sing it, for you have heard us plenteously already, and our heart rejoices in God the Savior who works so graciously among the children of men.

Amen.

SPURGEON’S LETTERS

Spurgeon’s letters are really encouraging devotional readings. Today, we’ll read a thank you note that Spurgeon sent to a friend.

Dear friend,

Where shall I find another heart so true or warm as yours? I have been made ill by the heavy strain upon me, but love like yours is a cordial medicine. God bless you, dear Mr. Keevil! Your noble gift will help to bring up the gifts to an amount which will cheer my heart.… Thank you a thousand times over. I pray the Lord to prosper you, and bless your substance.

How kind of you to take in so many men! They will get plenty of corn and clover.

Yours very heartily,

Charles Spurgeon

WISDOM FROM SPURGEON: WHAT IS TRUE REPENTANCE?

This section of the Weekend Edition will include Spurgeon’s answers to timely questions. 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.