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The sermon presents sin as genuine bondage rather than authentic freedom and warns that external moral reform cannot save. Spurgeon emphasizes the necessity of radical inward renewal by the Holy Spirit. Christ’s death decisively secures forgiveness for those who trust Him, with sins removed beyond condemnation. Believers nevertheless continue to experience warfare with indwelling sin, encouraged by the certainty that grace will ultimately triumph. The sermon ends with an urgent invitation for sinners to come to Jesus and rely on Him alone for salvation.
Theological center: Salvation and sanctification depend on God’s gracious work through Christ’s atoning death, received by faith and worked inwardly by the Holy Spirit.
Applications: Pursue sin relentlessly · Trust Christ entirely · Come to Jesus · Take comfort in forgiveness
Primary texts: Judges 4:22 · Psalms 103:12 · Jeremiah 13:23
“And, behold, as Barak pursued Sisera, Jael came out to meet him, and said unto him, Come, and I will shew thee the man whom thou seekest. And when he came into her tent, behold, Sisera lay dead, and the nail was in his temples.” Judges 4:22 IF the story of the world’s sufferings under different tyrants could all be written, there would be no man found who would be capable of reading it. I believe that even the despots themselves, who have committed the atrocities to which I refer, would not be sufficiently cold-blooded to sit down and read the account of the agonies which their own victims have endured. I have been struck in passing through many lands with the horrible sufferings which in the olden times were endured by the poor at the hands of the rich kings and lords who were their oppressors. In almost every town in which you enter, you either have shown to you the rack, the dark dungeon, the thumb-screw, or the infernal machine, or instruments too horrible to describe—that make one’s blood run chill at the very thought and sight of them. Verily, O earth, you have been scarred, your back has been ploughed with many a furrow, from your veins have gushed forth plenteous streams of blood, and your sons and your daughters have had to suffer agonies extreme! But oh! my brethren, I speak in sober earnestness when I declare that all the sufferings that have ever been exercised upon man have never been equal to the tyranny which man has brought upon himself— the tyranny of sin. Sin has brought more plagues upon this earth than all the earth’s tyrants. It has brought more pangs and more miseries upon men’s bodies and souls than the craftiest inventions of the most cold-blooded and diabolical tormentors. Sin is the world’s great Despot. It is the serpent in whose subtle folds earth’s inhabitants are crushed. It is such a tyranny that none but those whom God delivers have been able to escape from it. Nay, such a tyranny that even they have been scarcely saved, and they, when saved, have had to look back and remember the dreadful slavery in which they once existed, they have remembered the wormwood and the gall, and at the remembrance the iron has entered into their souls. We have before us, in this chapter, a picture of the children of Israel attacked by a very wicked and powerful king—Jaban, the king of Canaan. It is but a faint emblem, a very indistinct picture of the oppression which sin exercises upon all mankind—the oppression which our own iniquities continually bring upon us. I want to picture to you tonight, if I can, three acts in a great history—thre…