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The sermon teaches that genuine Christian joy can coexist with depression, suffering, and temporary heaviness. Trials have a purposeful relationship to conformity to Christ, while the believer’s deeper joy rests in election, heavenly inheritance, Christ’s return, and God’s preserving power. Spurgeon strongly emphasizes assurance: Christ’s sheep will not finally perish because God keeps them. The sermon also sharply distinguishes the believer’s temporary affliction from the unbeliever’s coming eternal misery and calls hearers to seek Christ.
Theological center: Christian assurance rests on God’s electing love, Christ’s saving work, and God’s power to keep believers unto salvation.
Applications: Seek Christ for salvation · Rest in God’s keeping power · Consider Christian paradox · Remember eternal election
Primary texts: 1 Peter 1:6 · John 10:28 · 2 Timothy 1:12
“Wherein ye greatly rejoice, though now for a season, if need be, ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations.” 1 Peter 1:6 THIS verse to a worldly man looks amazingly like a contradiction, and even to a Christian man, when he understands it best, it will still be a paradox. “Ye greatly rejoice,” and yet, “ye are in heaviness.” Is that possible? Can there be in the same heart great rejoicing and yet a temporary heaviness? Most assuredly. This paradox has been known and felt by many of the Lord’s children and it is far from being the greatest paradox of the Christian life. Men who live within themselves, and mark their own feelings as Christians, will often stand and wonder at themselves. Of all riddles, the greatest riddle is a Christian man. As to his pedigree, what a riddle he is! He is a child of the first Adam—“an heir of wrath, even as others.” He is a child of the second Adam—he was born free. There is therefore now no condemnation unto him. He is a riddle in his own existence. “As dying and behold we live; as chastened, and not killed.” He is a riddle as to the component parts of his own spiritual frame. He finds that which makes him akin to the devil—depravity, corruption, binding him still to the earth, and causing him to cry out, “O wretched man that I am.” And yet he finds that he has within himself that which exalts him, not merely to the rank of an angel, but higher still—a something which raises him up together, and makes him “sit together with Christ Jesus in heavenly places.” He finds that he has that within him which must ripen into heaven, and yet that about him which would inevitably ripen into hell, if grace did not forbid. What wonder, then, beloved, if the Christian man be a paradox himself, that his condition should be a paradox, too? Why marvel you, when you see a creature corrupt and yet purified, mortal and yet immortal, fallen but yet exalted far above principalities and powers—why marvel you, that you should find that creature also possessed of mingled experience, greatly rejoicing, and yet at the same time, “in heaviness through manifold temptations.” I would have you this morning, look first of all at the Christian’s heaviness—He is “in heaviness through manifold temptations.” And then, in the next place, at the Christian’s great rejoicing. I. In the first place, HIS HEAVINESS. This is one of the most unfortunate texts in the Bible. I have heard it quoted ten thousand times for my own comfort, but I never understood it till a day or two ago. On referring to most of the commentaries in my possession, I cannot find that…