Over the last few weeks we’ve been dipping into the lives of great people of the faith. Today I want to inspire you with the life of a man who is known as the greatest preacher and evangelist of the 19th century. Born in 1834, Charles Spurgeon was a Baptist preacher in London. For 38 years, he preached to 4000 people every Sunday. Even before he turned 20, Spurgeon had preached over 600 times. His sermons sold about 20000 copies a week and were translated into 20 languages.

In his preaching, Spurgeon guarded closely what he held to be the unchanging truth of Scripture. Holding up his Bible, he once said: “These words are God’s… Thou book of vast authority, thou art a proclamation from the Emperor of Heaven; far be it from me to exercise my reason in contradicting thee … This is the book untainted by any error; but it is pure unalloyed, perfect truth. Why? Because God wrote it.”

Not only was Spurgeon passionate about biblical truth, but he was also passionate about seeing souls won for Christ. His own words give us an insight into that passion: “I remember, when I have preached at different times in the country, and sometimes here, that my whole soul has agonized over men, every nerve of my body has been strained and I could have wept my very being out of my eyes and carried my whole frame away in a flood of tears, if I could but win souls.”

God graciously used Spurgeon to save more people than we could possibly know. But for all his God-given brilliance and energy, Spurgeon faced the darkness of deep depression. His first taste of the despondency that plagued him on and off came at the age of 24: “My spirits were sunken so low that I could weep by the hour like a child and yet I knew not what I wept for.” He testified that, “Causeless depression cannot be reasoned with, nor can David’s harp charm it away by sweet discoursings. As well fight with the mist as with this shapeless, undefinable, yet all-beclouding hopelessness… The iron bolt which so mysteriously fastens the door of hope and holds our spirits in gloomy prison, needs a heavenly hand to push it back.”

What kept Spurgeon from caving in was his unwavering belief in the sovereignty of God in all his afflictions. He said: “It would be a very sharp and trying experience to me to think that I have an affliction which God never sent me, that the bitter cup was never filled by his hand, that my trials were never measured out by him, nor sent to me by his arrangement of their weight and quantity.”

Far from being out of God’s control, he saw his depression as the design of God for the good of Spurgeon’s ministry and the glory of God. In speaking of the way God had used depression and other suffering in his life, he said: “I am afraid that all the grace that I have got off my comfortable and easy times and happy hours, might almost lie on a penny. But the good that I have received from my sorrows, and pains, and griefs, is altogether incalculable … Affliction is the best bit of furniture in my house. It is the best book in a minister’s library.”

May God use the example of Charles Spurgeon, and other Christians like him, to teach and inspire us at Church by the Bridge.

With love in Christ,

Stephanie Menear
Women’s Pastor