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The sermon presents spiritual despondency as a real experience among believers who may lose former joy, assurance, and sense of God’s presence. Spurgeon strongly connects decline with neglected prayer and misplaced affections, calling hearers back to earnest devotion and exclusive dependence on Christ. He comforts the despairing with the possibility of divine deliverance while warning nominal Christians that outward respectability without inward transformation is empty. The sermon concludes by calling sinners to seek new life in Christ rather than merely longing for their former condition.
Theological center: Spiritual renewal and assurance are grounded in God’s restoring grace through Christ, expressed in genuine regeneration, prayer, and sanctified living.
Applications: Return to earnest prayer · Set your heart wholly on Christ · Pursue wholehearted Christian growth · Seek new life in Christ
Primary texts: Job 29:2 · Psalms 107:5 · John 6:37
“Oh that I were as in months past!” Job 29:2 FOR the most part the gracious Shepherd leads His people beside the still waters and makes them to lie down in green pastures. But at times they wander through a wilderness, where there is no water and they find no city to dwell in. Hungry and thirsty, their soul faints within them and they cry unto the Lord in their trouble. Though many of His people live in almost constant joy and find that religion’s ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace, yet there are many who pass through fire and through water. Men do ride over their heads—they endure all manner of trouble and sorrow. The duty of the minister is to preach to different characters. Sometimes we admonish the confident, lest they should become presumptuous. Oftentimes we stir up the slumbering, lest they should sleep the sleep of death. Frequently we comfort the desponding, and this is our duty this morning—or if not to comfort them, yet to give them some exhortation which may by God’s help be the means of bringing them out of the sad condition into which they have fallen, so that they may not be obliged to cry out forever, “Oh that I were as in months past!” At once to the subject. A complaint—its cause and cure. And then close up with an exhortation to stir up your pure minds, if you are in such a position. I. First, there is a COMPLAINT. How many a Christian looks on the past with pleasure, on the future with dread, and on the present with sorrow! There are many who look back upon the days that they have passed in the fear of the Lord as being the sweetest and the best they have ever had, but as to the present, it is clad in a sable garb of gloom and dreariness. They could wish for their young days over again, that they might live near to Jesus, for now they feel that they have wandered from Him, or that He has hidden His face from them, and they cry out, “Oh that I were as in months past!” 1. Let us take distinct cases one by one. The first is the case of a man who has lost the brightness of his evidences and is crying out, “Oh that I were as in months past!” Hear his soliloquy, “Oh! that my past days could be recalled! Then I had no doubt of my salvation. If any man had asked for the reason of the hope that was in me, I could have answered with meekness and with fear. No doubt distressed me, no fear harassed me. I could say with Paul, ‘I know whom I have believed,’ and with Job, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth;’ “‘My steady soul did fear no more Than solid rocks when billows roar.’ “I felt myself to be standing on the rock Christ J…