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The sermon presents humanity as guilty before God and therefore in need of salvation. Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion, and atoning blood are sufficient for sinners, and salvation is received not through works, sacraments, ministers, dreams, or unusual feelings, but through faith expressed in calling upon and confessing Christ. Spurgeon treats the promise “whosoever” as genuinely broad, offering hope to deeply guilty sinners. Election is explained pastorally: those who truly believe may regard their faith as evidence that they are elect and secure in Christ.
Theological center: Salvation is by God’s grace through faith in the atoning work of Christ, received by calling upon and publicly confessing His name.
Applications: Call upon Christ · Trust Christ alone · Believe the universal promise · Recognize personal guilt
Primary texts: Romans 10:13 · Romans 10:9 · Romans 10:14
“Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” Romans 10:13 IT has been said by an eminent divine that many of us in preaching the Word suppose too great knowledge in our hearers. “Very often,” says this divine, “there are in the congregation persons who are totally unacquainted with the great science of divinity. They are entire strangers to the whole system of grace and salvation.” It is proper, then, that the preacher should address himself to his hearers sometimes as if they were totally ignorant of his message and tell it to them as a new thing, going over the whole of it as if he believed them to be ignorant of it. “For,” says this good man, “it is better to suppose too little knowledge and so to explain the thing clearly, to the lowest comprehension, than to suppose too much and thus to let the ignorant escape without a word of instruction.” Now, I think I shall not this morning err in his point of view, for I shall assume that some of my congregation, at least, are totally unacquainted with the great plan of salvation. And you that know it well and have tried its preciousness, will bear with me, I am sure, while I try in the simplest words that human lips can put together to tell out the story of how men are lost and how men are saved, according to the words of my text by calling upon the name of the Lord. Well then, we must begin at the beginning. And we must first tell our hearers that inasmuch as our text talks of men being saved, it implies that men need saving, and we tell them that if men had been as God created them, they would have needed no saving. Adam in the garden wanted no salvation, he was perfect, pure, clean, holy, and acceptable before God. He was our representative, he stood as the representative for all the race, and when he touched the forbidden fruit and ate of the tree of which God had said, “Thou shalt not eat thereof, or thou shalt surely die,” when he so transgressed against God, he needed a Savior, and we, his offspring through his sin, are born into this world, each of us needing a Savior. We, who are now present, must not however throw blame on Adam. No man was ever yet damned for Adam’s sin alone. Children dying in infancy are, without doubt, saved by sovereign grace through the atonement which is in Christ Jesus. No sooner do they close their eyes on earth than, being innocent of any actual sin, they at once open them in the bliss of heaven. But you and I are not children. We need not talk just now of Adam’s sins. We have our own to account for and God knows they are enough. Holy Scripture tells us…