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The sermon presents human life as brief, fragile, and continually moving toward death, judgment, heaven, or hell. Sin—including hidden sin—is fully exposed before God, leaving sinners dependent on divine mercy rather than personal strength. Spurgeon emphasizes effectual calling: sinners cannot come to God unaided, but God can draw and enable them to come. The proper response is immediate, persistent, sincere prayer—confessing sin and pleading for mercy through Christ. The church is also called to mourn its decline, recover gospel faithfulness, and labor together for the faith of Jesus.
Theological center: Salvation depends on God’s gracious and effectual calling, yet sinners are urgently summoned to confess their sin and seek mercy through Christ.
Applications: Cry out to God immediately · Seek mercy while called · Pray with persistence · Pour out your heart honestly
Primary texts: Psalm 90:4-12 · Lamentations 2:19
How many this year have departed. Oh, where had we been had this been our case? Many of us can say, we should have been in bliss, and we should have returned unto God, but alas, many here would have entered the fires of hell and commenced their never-ending torture. “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.” “Thou carriest them away as a flood.” Who are they who are carried away as with a flood? Yourselves, my hearers, and myself. Though we know it not, we are always in motion. The impetuous torrent of time is carrying us along like a mighty rolling river. We cannot stand against the force which drives us onwards. As powerless as the straw are we, we can by no means resist it. Where are we going? Where is the river carrying us to? We cannot stem its torrents, we cannot escape its floods. Oh! where, oh! where, are we going! “Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up.” “In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.” “For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled.” No man better understands this than the convinced sinner, when smarting under the rod of God. Truly our strength is then utterly consumed, and the troubles of our heart are enlarged. “Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.” Hear that! “our secret sins.” Some of you bear hell’s mark on your forehead. Some of you, like Cain, have the mark of justice on your very brow. Your sins are beforehand with you in judgment. Ah! they are there tonight, blabbing out the tale of your sad, sad history. But there are persons here who have “secret sins.” You have not been found out yet. The night was too dark for human eye to see you, the deed was too secret for mortal to behold, but it is set somewhere. Just as we set a stone in a golden ring, so has God set your “secret sins in the light of his countenance.” Your sins are this night before the eyes of the infinite JEHOVAH. “For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told.” The Vulgate translation has, “Our years pass away like those of a spider.” It implies that our life is as frail as the thread of a spider’s web. Constituted most curiously the spider’s web is, but what more fragile? In what is there more wisdom than in the complicated frame of a human body, and what more easily destroyed? Glass is granite compared with flesh, and vapors are rocks compared with life. “Th…