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The sermon presents sin as serious rebellion against an angry and holy God, capable of producing profound spiritual and even bodily distress. Spurgeon teaches that God sovereignly uses different means to bring sinners to Christ: some experience terrifying conviction, while others are drawn by the beauty and kindness of Jesus. Neither terror nor gentler experience saves; faith in Christ’s blood and righteousness does. The preacher strongly rejects reliance on good works, emotional readiness, or religious experience, urging every sinner to trust Christ immediately.
Theological center: Salvation is by faith in Christ’s substitutionary blood and righteousness alone, not by preparation, works, feelings, or the intensity of conviction.
Applications: Trust Christ immediately · Rest on Christ alone · Examine the basis of assurance · Receive relief in Christ
Primary texts: Psalm 32:3-4 · Mark 16:16 · Hebrews 4:12
“When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer.” Psalm 32:3-4 DAVID here describes a very common experience among convicted sinners. He was subjected to extreme terrors and pangs of conscience. These terrors were continual, they scared him at night with visions, they terrified him all day with dark and gloomy forebodings. “Day and night thy hand was heavy upon me.” His pain was so extreme that when he resorted to prayer, he could scarcely utter an articulate word. There were groans that could not be uttered within his spirit, and hence he calls his prayer roaring—a “roaring all the day long.” Wherever he was, his spirit seemed to be always sighing, sending a full torrent of melancholy groans upwards towards God, a “roaring all the day long.” So far did this groaning proceed, that at last his bodily frame began to show evidences of it. He grew old, and that not merely in the lines of the countenance and the falling in of the cheeks, but his very bones seemed as if they partook of the suffering. He became like an old man before his time. We have heard of some who through severe trouble have had their hair blanched in a single night. But here was a man who did not show merely externally, but even internally, the heavy pressure of grief on account of sin. His bones grew old and the sap of his life, the animal spirits, were all dried up, his “moisture was turned into the drought of summer.” So intimate is the connection between the body and the soul, that when the soul suffers extremely, the body must be called to endure its part of grief. Verily, in this case it was but simple justice, for David had sinned with his body and with his soul too. By fornication he had defiled his members, he had looked out from his eyes with lustful desires and had committed iniquity with his body, and now the frame which had become the instrument of unrighteousness becomes a vehicle of punishment, and his body bears its share of misery—“my moisture is turned into the drought of summer.” We gather from what David says in this psalm, and indeed in all these seven penitential psalms, that his convictions on account of his sin with Bathsheba and his subsequent murder of Uriah, were of the deepest and most poignant character, and that the terrors he experienced were indescribable, filling his soul with horror and dismay. Now this morning, I propose to deal with this case, so common among those who are under conviction of sin. There are many, who, when the Lo…