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The sermon understands church growth as a gracious work of God that should produce wonder, joy, humility, and worship. Genuine membership is marked not merely by numbers or profession but by fleeing from sin and self-righteousness to Christ, continuing in communion with Him, and displaying transformed character. Spurgeon strongly emphasizes substitutionary atonement: Christ bears the sinner’s guilt, making Him the only safe foundation and refuge. The church is urged to remain united, welcome true converts, examine false assurance, and direct all praise to God alone.
Theological center: Jesus Christ is the only refuge and substitutionary atonement for sinners, while salvation and church increase are ultimately the work of God’s sovereign grace.
Applications: Give God all glory · Examine your faith · Trust Christ as refuge · Worship the substitute
Primary texts: Isaiah 60:8 · Luke 1:37 · Ephesians 4:5
“Who are these that fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows?” Isaiah 60:8 THE ancient church, in the foresight of her mighty increase in these latter days, lifts up her hands in astonishment, and having been so used to see the Lord’s grace confined to a small nation, she exclaims in amazement, “Who are these that fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows?” We, beloved, are in a somewhat similar position. It has pleased our Father to add to our numbers so greatly beyond all precedent in modern times, that I doubt not that many of our aged members, who remember days of yore, when God was pleased to bless them very greatly, and then think of days of sadness and weariness, when they were diminished and brought low, are this morning lifting up their hands and saying, as they think of the present prosperity of our church, “Who are these that fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows?” I am sure whenever I appoint an evening for seeing the converts I am amazed. I can only stand up afterwards, clap my hands, and go home and weep for very joy to think that the Word of our God is so running and multiplying and abundantly increasing. And as post after post I receive letters from different parts of this country, from one person here, and another there, not in England only, but in Scotland, and even across the sea—in Ireland, and you know, in the Crimea also—I have been overwhelmed with amazement and have been obliged to cry out, “Who hath begotten me these?” “Who are these that fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows?” The church, when she uttered these words, appears to have been the subject of three kinds of feeling. First, wonder. Secondly, pleasure. Thirdly, anxiety. These three feelings you have felt, you are not strangers to them, and you will understand while I speak to you as the children of God, how it is that we can feel at the same time, wonder, pleasure, and yet anxiety. I. First, the church of old and our church now, appears to have been the subject of WONDER when she saw so many come to know the Lord. “Who are these that fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows?” Take the first sentence of the text first, “Who are these that fly as a cloud?” The church wondered, first of all, at the number of her converts. They did “fly as a cloud.” Not here and there a convert—not now and then one—not converts like solitary bitterns of the desert, but they “did fly as a cloud.” Not a convert now and then, like a meteor, a thing we see but seldom, which flashes across the sky, rejoices the darkness and then is gone. Not now…