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The sermon presents sin as deeper and more pervasive than people often recognize, including the sin of hard-heartedness and unbelief. Yet conviction of sin is meant to bring sinners to Christ, not persuade them that they must first become worthy of salvation. Spurgeon strongly emphasizes that Christ receives sinners without prerequisite good works, adequate feelings, or perfected repentance, and that his blood—not the sinner’s emotional response—is the ground of forgiveness. The message is broadly evangelical and strongly centered on grace, substitutionary atonement, and immediate faith in Christ.
Theological center: Salvation is by grace through faith in Christ’s sufficient atonement, not through the sinner’s works, feelings, or degree of repentance.
Applications: Come to Christ as you are · Distinguish conviction from condemnation · Trust Christ rather than feelings · Turn to God today
Primary texts: Job 13:23 · Isaiah 55:8-9 · Isaiah 1:18
“How many are mine iniquities and sins? make me to know my transgression and my sin.” Job 13:23 THERE are many persons who long to have a deeper sense of their sinfulness, and then with a certain show of conscientious scruple, they make an excuse for the exercise of simple faith. That spiritual disease, which keeps sinners from Christ, assumes a different shape at different times. In Luther’s day the precise evil under which men labored was this, they believed in being selfrighteous, and so they supposed that they must have good works before they might trust in Christ. In our day the evil has taken another, and that a most extraordinary shape. Men have aimed at being selfrighteous after quite a singular fashion, they think they must feel worse, and have a deeper conviction of sin before they may trust in Christ. Many hundreds do I meet with, who say they dare not come to Christ and trust Him with their souls, because they do not feel their need of Him enough, they have not sufficient contrition for their sins, they have not repented as fully as they have rebelled. Brethren, it is the same evil, from the same old germ of self-righteousness, but it has taken another and I think a more crafty shape. Satan has wormed himself into many hearts under the garb of an angel of light, and he has whispered to the sinner, “Repentance is a necessary virtue, stop until you have repented, and when you have sufficiently mortified yourself on account of sin, then you will be fit to come to Christ, and qualified to trust and rely on Him.” It is with that deadly evil I want to grapple this morning. I am persuaded it is far more common than some would think. And I think I know the reason of its great commonness. In the Puritanic age, which was noted certainly for its purity of doctrine, there was also a great deal of experimental preaching, and much of it was sound and healthy. But some of it was unscriptural, because it took for its standard what the Christian felt and not what the Savior said, the inference from a believer’s experience, rather than the message which goes before any belief. That excellent man, Mr. Rogers, of Dedham, who has written some useful works, and Mr. Sheppard, who wrote The Sound Believer, Mr. Flavel, and many others give descriptions of what a sinner must be before he may come to Christ, which actually represent what a saint is, after he has come to Christ. These good brethren have taken their own experience, what they felt before they came into light, as the standard of what every other man ought to feel before he may put his trust in Christ and…