The Spurgeon Series 1859 & 1860. Charles H. Spurgeon

Seek grace to fight that battle in your own heart. Endeavour by divine grace to overcome those propensities which continually push you towards iniquity. On your knees wrestle against your besetting sins. As habits appear endeavour to break them by the battle axe of strong resolution wielded by the arm of faith. Take all your lusts as they bestir themselves to the foot of the cross, and let the blood of Jesus fall upon those vipers and they must die. The blood of Christ shall spill the blood of sin. The death of Christ shall be the death of iniquity, the cross of Christ shall be the crucifixion of transgression. Labour with yourselves to drive the Canaanites out of your hearts. Spare none, let no petty lust escape. Put down pride, sloth, lust and unbelief and you now have a battle before you which may fill your hands, and more than fill them. Oh! cry to God your strength, and look to the hills from where comes your help, and then fight on again, and as each sin is overcome, each evil habit broken off, each lust denied, go on to the rooting up of another, and the destruction of more of them, until all being subdued, body soul and spirit shall be consecrated to Christ as a living sacrifice, purified by his Holy Spirit.

      10. And while this battle is being fought, indeed, and while it is still fighting, go out and fight with other men’s sins. Strike them first with the weapon of holy example. Be yourselves what you would have others be; be clean you who bear the vessels of the Lord. Be clean yourselves before you can hope to be the purifiers of the world; and then, having first sought the blessing of God, go out into the world and bear your witness against sin. Let your testimony be unflinching; never let a sin pass under your eye without rebuke. Utterly kill young and old; do not let any escape. Speak sometimes sternly if the sinner is hardened in his sin; speak gently, if it is his first offence, seeking not to break his head but to break the head of his iniquity — not to break his bones or wound his feelings, but to cut his sin in two, and leave his iniquity dead before his eyes. Go forth where sin is the most rampant. Go down the dark alley; climb the creaking staircase; penetrate the dens of iniquity where the lion of the pit lies in his death lair, and go and pluck out of the mouth of the lion two legs and a piece of an ear, if that is all that you can save. Count it always your joy to follow the track of the lion, to corner him in his den, and fight him where he reigns most securely. Protest daily, hourly, by act, by word, by pen, by tongue, against evil of every kind and shape. Be as burning and shining lights in the midst of darkness, and as twoedged swords in the midst of the hosts of sin. Why, a true Christian who lives near to God, and is filled with grace and is kept holy, may stand in the midst of sinners and do wonders. What a marvellous feat Jonah did! There was the great city of Nineveh, having in it hundred twenty thousand souls that did not know their right hand from their left, and one man went against it — Jonah — and as he approached it he began to cry, “Yet in forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” He entered the city — perhaps he stood aghast for a moment at the multitude of its population, at its richness and splendour, but again he lifted up his sharp shrill voice, “Yet in forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” On he went, and the crowd increased around him as he passed through each street, but they heard nothing but the solemn monotony, “Yet in forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown”; and yet again, “Yet in forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” And on he went, that solitary man, until he caused a convulsion in the midst of myriads, and the king on his throne robed himself in sackcloth and proclaimed a fast, a day of mourning and of sadness. Yet on he went, “Yet in forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown,” “Yet in forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown,” until all the people bowed before him, and that one man was the conqueror of the myriad. Ah! believer, if you will go out and do the same, if you will go into the streets, the lanes, the byways, the houses, and into the private clubs of men, and still with this continued cry against sin and iniquity, say to them, “Look to the cross and live, look to the cross and live.” Though there should be only one earnest man in London who would continue that monotony of “Look to the cross and live,” from end to end this city would shake, and the great leviathan metropolis would be made to tremble. Go forth then, believer, and cry against sin with all your might.

      11. And even so must we cry against error. It is the preacher’s business Sunday after Sunday, and weekday after weekday, to preach the whole gospel of God, and to vindicate the truth as it is in Jesus from the opposition of man. Thousands are the heresies which now beset the church. Oh children of God! fight the Lord’s battles for truth. I am astonished, and yet more astonished when I come to think it over, at the want of earnestness that there is in the Protestantism of the present age. How do you imagine that Cardinal Wiseman pays for all his splendours, and that the Roman Catholic church is supported? Fools and slow of heart, you find much of their wealth for them. If he is to preach in any place, who is it that crowds the chapel full, and pays for admission? The Protestants; and the Protestantism of England is the paymaster of the Pope. I am ashamed that sons of the Reformers who have Smithfield {b} still in their midst unbuilt upon, should bow themselves before the beast, and give so much as a single farthing to the shrine of the devil’s firstborn son. Take heed to yourselves, you Protestants, lest you be partakers of her plagues; do not touch her, lest you become defiled. Give a drachma to her, or a grain of incense to her censors, you shall be partakers of her adulteries and partakers of her plagues. Every time you pass the house of Popery let a curse light upon her head. Thus says the Lord: — “Come out of her, my people, so that you do not become partakers in her sins and so that you do not receive her plagues. For her sins have reached to heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities. Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double to her double according to her works: in the cup which she has filled, fill to her double. How much she has glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her; for she says in her heart, I sit as a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow. Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judges her.” — {Revelation 18:4-8} How soft some men’s minds are growing; how effeminate in the battle. I hear then speaking of Puseyism, {c} — and what is that except Popery made worse than it was before by being more despicable and deceptive than even Popery itself. Do you not hear men talk about the Puseyites in these days and say, “Ah! well, they differ only a little from us.” Do not the evangelical party in the Church of England seem at the present moment to make common cause and communion with the Puseyite? Else how is it that the great preachings have been alternatively conducted by High and Low Church? It is all very well with that Church when it is separated from her heretical sons, and a great gulf fixed, but all that helps to bridge that gulf must mar her glory and destroy her power. We must have no truce, no treaty with Rome. War! war to the death with her! There cannot be peace. She cannot have peace with us — we cannot have peace with her. She hates the true Church; and we can only say that the hatred is reciprocated. We would not lay a hand upon her priests; we would not touch a hair of their heads. Let them be free; but we would destroy their doctrine from the face of the earth as the doctrine of demons. So let it perish, oh God, and let that evil thing become as the fat of lambs. Into smoke let it consume: yes into smoke let it consume away.

      12. We must fight the Lords battles against this giant error, whatever shape it takes; and so must we do with every error that pollutes the church. Slay it utterly; let none escape. “Fight the Lord’s battles.” Even though it is an error that is in an Evangelical Church, yet we must strike it. I love all those who love the Lord Jesus Christ; but, nevertheless, I cannot have any truce any treaty with various errors that have crept into the church, nor would I have you regard them with complacency. We are one in Christ; let us be friends with one another; but let us never be friends with one another’s error. If I am wrong, rebuke me sternly; I can bear it, and bear it cheerfully; and if you are wrong, expect the same from me, and neither peace nor parley with your mistakes. Let us all be true to one another, and true to Christ; and as soon as we perceive an error, though it is only as the shadow of one, let us root it out and drive it from us, lest it plague the whole body, and put leprosy into the entire fabric of the church. No peace with sin, no peace with falsehood. War, war, war without deliberation: war for ever with error and deceit!

      13. And yet again, it is the Christian’s duty always to have war with war, but not to have bitterness in our hearts against any man who lives is to serve Satan. We must speak very harshly and sternly against error, and against sin; but against men we have not a word