Spurgeon's Conversion
- Pastor Mark Wells
- Apr 2, 2016
- 2 min read
Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will,
Ephesians 1:4-5
I was having a discussion with Pastor Jamie the other day about the conversion of Charles Spurgeon. It reminded me that it is not by flowery words or convincing arguments that we come to Christ. It is by God’s grace and His sovereignty that we come to know Him. The below story of his conversion is a clear example that it is God who changes hearts, not mere men.
“I was years and years upon the brink of hell—I mean in my own feeling. I was unhappy, I was desponding, I was despairing. I dreamed of hell. My life was full of sorrow and wretchedness, believing that I was lost.” Charles Spurgeon used these strong words to describe his adolescent years. Despite his Christian upbringing (he was christened as an infant, and raised in the Congregational church), and his own efforts (he read the Bible and prayed daily), Spurgeon woke one January Sunday in 1850 with a deep sense of his need for deliverance. Because of a snowstorm, the 15-year-old’s path to church was diverted down a side street. For shelter, he ducked into the Primitive Methodist Chapel on Artillery Street. An unknown substitute lay preacher stepped into the pulpit and read his text— Isaiah 45:22 “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is none else.” Spurgeon’s Autobiography records his reaction: “He had not much to say, thank God, for that compelled him to keep on repeating his text, and there was nothing needed—by me, at any rate except his text. Then, stopping, he pointed to where I was sitting under the gallery, and he said, ‘That young man there looks very miserable’ … and he shouted, as I think only a Primitive Methodist can, ‘Look! Look, young man! Look now!’ … Then I had this vision—not a vision to my eyes, but to my heart. I saw what a Savior Christ was.… Now I can never tell you how it was, but I no sooner saw whom I was to believe than I also understood what it was to believe, and I did believe in one moment.
“And as the snow fell on my road home from the little house of prayer I thought every snowflake talked with me and told of the pardon I had found, for I was white as the driven snow through the grace of God.”
Upon his return home, his appearance caused his mother to exclaim, “Something wonderful has happened to you.”
For the next month’s young Spurgeon searched the Scriptures “to know more fully the value of the jewel which God had given me.… I found that believers ought to be baptized.” And so, he was baptized, by immersion, four months later in the River Lark, after which he joined a Baptist Church.
Your shepherd,
Pastor Mark
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