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The sermon teaches that genuine spiritual life may begin imperceptibly and weakly, but God will preserve and increase it. Assurance is grounded not in the believer’s present strength, feelings, or gifts, but in Christ’s righteousness, intercession, and unfailing power. Spurgeon distinguishes saving grace from ministry ability and encourages discouraged believers to expect progressive sanctification and final conformity to Christ. This confidence should produce diligence rather than passivity through obedience, baptism, Communion, Scripture-shaped faith, and church fellowship.
Theological center: Salvation and perseverance rest on Christ’s finished work and faithfulness, while the Holy Spirit progressively increases grace in believers until final glory.
Applications: Trust Christ for salvation · Look to Christ for assurance · Use God’s means of grace · Distinguish grace from gifts
Primary texts: Job 8:7 · Proverbs 4:18 · Acts 16:31
“Though thy beginning was small, yet thy latter end should greatly increase.” Job 8:7 THIS was the reasoning of Bildad the Shuhite. He wished to prove that Job could not possibly be an upright man, for if he were so, he here affirms that his prosperity would increase continually, or that if he fell into any trouble, God would awake for him, and make the habitation of his righteousness prosperous, and though his family were now all destroyed and his wealth scattered to the winds, yet if he were an upright man, God would surely appear for him, and his latter end would greatly increase. Now the utterances of Bildad and of the other two men who came to comfort Job, but who made his wounds tingle, are not to be accepted as being inspired. They spoke as men—as mere men. They reasoned no doubt in their own esteem logically enough, but the Spirit of God was not with them in their speech, therefore with regard to any sentiment which we find uttered by these men, we must use our own judgment, and if it be not in consonance with the rest of Holy Scripture, it will be our bounden duty to reject it as being but the word of man—of a wise and ancient man it is true, but still of a man only. With regard to the passage which I have selected as a text, it is true—altogether apart from its being said by Bildad, or being found in the Bible at all, it is true, as indeed the facts of the book of Job prove, for Job did greatly increase in his latter end. His beginning was small, he was brought down to poverty, to the potsherd and to the dunghill, he had many graves, but no children, he had had many losses, he had now nothing left to lose, and yet God did awake for him, his righteousness came out from the darkness which had eclipsed it, he shone in sevenfold prosperity, so that the words of Bildad were prophetic, though he knew it not, God put into his mouth, language which did come true after all. Indeed, we have here a great principle—a principle against which none can ever contend. The beginning of the godly and the upright man may be but very small, but his latter end shall greatly increase. Evil things may seem to begin well, but they end badly, there is the flash and the glare, but afterwards the darkness and the black ash. They promise fairly, their sun rises in the zenith, and then speedily sets, never to rise again. Evil things begin as mountains, they end as molehills. You sail upon their ocean at first and as you sail onward it grows into a river, and afterwards into a dry bed, if not into burning sands. Behold Satan in the garden of Eden. Sin begins with the promis…