I’m excited to tell you the story of how God used a simple verse, from a complicated passage, to change the life of a man named Charles Spurgeon.
His story is for everyone, but it may have a special word to speak to a few groups in the room. One is laymen — that is, people who work for a living in normal jobs, outside of Christian ministry. People without a seminary education, people who aren’t pastors or have ministry jobs.
We recognize that this series has profiled four men who were preachers. Now, there is an interesting flow to our series:
- first, Saint Augustine,
- then, Luther, who was an Augustinian monk,
- then, John Bunyan, whose favorite book outside the Bible was Luther’s commentary on Galatians,
- now, Charles Spurgeon, whose favorite book outside the Bible was Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
We’ve moved from one convert to another, each building in some way on the previous one, but a weakness of our series (in some sense) is that they all became preachers. And we don’t expect you all to become preachers; we’d like a few, but most will be laymen, and that’s good.
Now, Spurgeon is known as “the Prince of Preachers.” But the hero, under God, in Spurgeon’s story is not Spurgeon, and not a trained, paid preacher, but a layman. So, Spurgeon’s story has a special word for laymen who are willing to open their mouths and say what they know about Jesus.
Spurgeon’s story also has a special word for teens and young adults. Spurgeon came to faith at age fifteen, which in his day was far more like young adulthood. Still, his story offers a challenge to those who are no longer children and not yet established adults: teens, college students, grad students, even young professionals. Don’t let the world (or the church) lower your standards of what’s possible in being deeply converted and dedicated to Jesus — and how God can make his Son thrilling to a young soul.
My prayer is that God might be pleased to give some their own engine. So often, parents, college workers, and pastors help young adults along and give them pushes. And then sometimes, God is pleased in the life of teenagers to give them their own engine, and they don’t need any more pushing. They say, “Get out of my way! I am going to follow Jesus. You can’t keep me from him and worship, my Bible, and prayer!” That’s what God did for Spurgeon at age fifteen — he gave him his own engine. And I pray he might be pleased to do that even here this morning.
Spurgeon’s story speaks to one more group: those in the room who are willing to admit, “I’m here but I’m not saved.” For two thousand years, unsaved people have shown up at churches for all sorts of reasons. That’s Spurgeon’s story. He was searching. He was unsaved and in a church on a Sunday morning when God broke through. So, if you’d say this morning, “I haven’t settled the issue of my sin and rebellion against God,” or “I haven’t ‘been saved,’” or “if I died on the drive home today, I wouldn’t be at peace with my Maker,” this story has a special word for you.
So, let me tell you about Charlie Spurgeon.
His Early and Whole Life
He was born in 1834, about 40 miles northeast of London, into a Christian family. In fact, both his father and grandfather were pastors. But his father met financial troubles and sent the young Charles to live with his grandparents from ages one to six. I don’t think this is an insignificant part of the story; don’t underestimate the effects of a good grandma and grandpa in the lives of our children. From their influence he emerged as “precocious,” learned to read, and first found Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (which he would read more than a hundred times).
From his earliest days, he was unusually sharp, ahead of his age level, “always reading books” (Spurgeon: A Biography, 8). He returned home at age six and excelled at school in both math and reading. He was noticed for “his unusual mental ability and his rare clarity of speech” (10), including “his native audacity” (11), that is, his courage to say hard things even to adults. And he naturally soaked in the Bible and truths about the Christian faith.
However, for seven years up to the age of fifteen, he lived with an agonizing sense of his own sin before the majesty and holiness of God. And he even had a season of spiritual wandering during which he experimented with atheism. His soul was in turmoil. He knew so much but couldn’t grasp how to have peace with God.
Shouldn’t he have known the answer already? What was he looking for? In order to be saved, to be right with God, he thought, “I must feel something: I must do something.” Biographer Arnold Dallimore says Spurgeon
wished he might give his back to be scourged or that he might make some difficult pilgrimage, if by such efforts he might be saved. Yet he admitted, “That simplest of all matters — believing in Christ crucified, accepting his finished salvation, being nothing and letting him be everything, doing nothing, but trusting to what he has done — I could not get a hold of it.” (17)
I wonder how many here this morning are in a similar place. Do you want to be saved but think, “I must feel something dramatic”? “I must do something significant”? Have your eyes been blinded to “that simplest of all matters,” as he called it, “being nothing, and letting [Jesus] be everything, doing nothing but trusting to what he has done”?
I want us to spend the rest of this message on the text God used to change Spurgeon and how it happened. But before doing that, I’ll tell you quickly about his next forty years.
After Spurgeon finally found saving faith at age fifteen, he began preaching the next year. A few years later, at age twenty, he became pastor at New Park Street Chapel in London. And the church grew and grew. Eventually they needed a massive, new building called the Metropolitan Tabernacle.
There are a few who have been called “the Prince of Preachers,” but with only one did the title stick. And oh, did he preach. We have no surviving audio recordings of Spurgeon, but we have edited transcripts of his sermons, about 3,600 of them, that fill up 63 volumes.
“There are a few who have been called ‘the Prince of Preachers,’ but with only one did the title stick.”
The church had about three hundred members when he showed up. Over the next four decades, it grew to over 5,300 baptized members. The two services were at capacity at six thousand each Sunday. The church started a school for pastors and trained and sent out hundreds of ministers and church planters. It also had an orphanage to address the orphan crisis in London in the mid-nineteenth century. They had a Sunday school that taught thousands of children.
As he aged, Spurgeon developed multiple chronic illnesses, and he died in 1892 at the age of 57. He had been at the church for almost forty years.
And all that — thousands of sermons, hundreds of ministers and healthy churches, thousands of members and healthy Christians, and perhaps tens of thousands of conversions to Jesus — all flowed from God’s work to change a troubled life at age fifteen.
Let me first set up his conversion text: Isaiah 45:22.
His Conversion Text
Spurgeon was saved through a sermon from a complicated chapter, in a complicated book.
The first 39 chapters are addressed to Isaiah’s own generation about how God will judge them for their sin and rebellion against him. He will send Assyria (and eventually Babylon) to discipline his rebellious people and carry them off to exile.
But then Isaiah 40 introduces a stunning message of comfort to a future generation. God will not forget his people but come to their rescue. And he’ll do this in two ways. First, he will deal with their physical need: They are in exile, and he’s going to raise up a surprising figure who will fix that problem. More importantly, they have a deeper spiritual need: their sin and disobedience got them into exile. And the message of Isaiah is that another surprising figure is coming who will be the sacrifice for their sin. At the end of chapter 44, God begins to tell how he’ll meet the physical, circumstantial need through the first surprising servant. Then will come a far greater servant after him who will meet the spiritual need (Isaiah 53).
Isaiah 45 has a clear main point: There is no other god like the true God. I count at least ten times that God says, “There’s none like me,” or “no other besides me.” And in Isaiah 45, God sets himself apart in at least three ways.
1. God will use a surprising figure.
The shock to the Jews of Isaiah’s day comes in the final verse of chapter 44. Not only is God the one
- who formed his people from the womb,
- who made all things,
- who alone stretched out the heavens,
- who spread out the earth by himself,
- who frustrates the signs of liars,
- who makes foolish the knowledge of wise men,
- who confirms the word of his servant,
- and who fulfills the counsel of his messengers,
but he says of the abandoned city of Jerusalem,
“She shall be inhabited,”
and of the cities of Judah, “They shall be built,
and I will raise up their ruins.” (Isaiah 44:26)
What news! Then verse 28 introduces the surprising figure:
[God] says of Cyrus, “He is my shepherd,
and he shall fulfill all my purpose”;
saying of Jerusalem, “She shall be built,”
and of the temple, “Your foundation shall be laid.” (Isaiah 44:28)
The shock is that God will use a pagan ruler to get his people home from exile. And God even gives his name: Cyrus. This is almost two centuries before a leader arises in Persia, known to history by that very name (Cyrus the Great), and does exactly what God promised through Isaiah.
Isaiah 45:1–8 says more. God calls Cyrus “his anointed” (verse 1). God will take Cyrus by the hand and “subdue nations before him” (verse 1). He will go before Cyrus and give him success (verse 2). But here’s another turn: Cyrus will not know the true God. God says to Cyrus,
I call you by your name,
I name you, though you do not know me.
I am the LORD, and there is no other,
besides me there is no God;
I equip you, though you do not know me. (Isaiah 45:4–5)
Why would God use Cyrus? He answers in verse 6:
that people may know, from the rising of the sun [the east]
and from the west, that there is none besides me;
I am the LORD, and there is no other.
God does this for the sake of his people; even though Cyrus doesn’t know him, he wants his people to see and to know. His people stand at the heart of his purposes and sovereignty over all the nations from east and west — just as his church is at the heart of his work today. As Jesus rules on the throne and oversees the movements of leaders and nations from east to west, he does it for the upbuilding and protecting and defense of his church. He does it:
For the sake of my servant Jacob,
and Israel my chosen,
I call you by your name. (Isaiah 45:4)
So God, through Isaiah, announces a shocking plan. He will raise up an unbelieving king named Cyrus who will free God’s people from exile (verse 13), rebuild Jerusalem, and even lay the foundation of the temple. And here we stand 2,700 years later, knowing from history that it happened just like God said.
But at the time, can you imagine the instinctive response of some of God’s people to this plan? “No way, God! You can’t do it like that. You can’t use an evil, wicked king to bring your people back from exile!” To which God responds in verse 9:
Woe to him who strives with him who formed him,
a pot among earthen pots!
Does the clay say to him who forms it, “What are you making?”
or “Your work has no handles”?
So, first, God will use a surprising figure.
2. God designs a swelling fellowship.
That is, he means to expand his people. He will not just bring home Jewish exiles, but he will swell the fellowship and expand his covenant people to include people from other nations. This meant that one day God’s salvation would include a fifteen-year-old in England in 1850, and a roomful of twenty-first-century Americans today.
We already saw that verse 6 mentions that “people may know, from the [east] and from the west, that there is none besides me.” God is not satisfied for Israel only to know there is none like him. He will have people know from east to west. He will extend his rescue to the nations. So, we come to verse 20:
Assemble yourselves and come;
draw near together,
you survivors of the nations!
They have no knowledge
who carry about their wooden idols,
and keep on praying to a god
that cannot save.
Declare and present your case;
let them take counsel together! (Isaiah 45:20–21)
The question in verse 20 is this: Is God assembling the nations simply to shame them? To judge them? To damn them for their refusal to acknowledge and obey the one true God?
“The beautiful simplicity of ‘Look to me’ became the open door to eternal life.”
Not here. He’s drawing them to himself that they might know him — that they might have an opportunity to be reconciled with the one, unique, true God. Remember, the theme of this chapter is that there is none besides him and no other like him. Indeed, there is not — including his grace and mercy. And so, contrary to what we might expect, we find out in the next verse that God will gather the nations to offer them rescue too, along with Israel. He will offer them (us!) his grace. His full pardon. Salvation. Deliverance from our sins. Which leads to one last way he shows there is no other like him.
So, God will use a surprising figure; he designs a swelling fellowship; and then . . .
3. God calls for a simple look.
This is such good news. Whether the fifteen-year-old Spurgeon or the lay preacher that day had any good sense of these complexities of Isaiah 45, the beautiful simplicity of verse 22 is a clear call that became the open door to eternal life for Spurgeon.
Verse 22 is the hinge of the passage, the turning point. This is where Jewish critics of God’s plan to use Cyrus are called to lay down arms and turn to him. And God not only calls Israel, but even the nations:
Turn to me and be saved,
all the ends of the earth!
For I am God, and there is no other.
In all the complexities of this chapter — in the surprise of using Cyrus and the expanding of God’s people to “the ends of the earth” — God’s one requirement for his rescue rings out with crystal clarity: “Turn to me. Turn from your sins. Turn from your idols and your pretend gods. And when you turn, don’t look in. Don’t turn to yourself, but look to me. Turn to me. See me do it: I’m your Savior; there is none like me. Look to me and I will save you.”
In all the chaos and confusion, God requires simple faith: a humbled, repentant posture of soul, despairing of pretend gods, and despairing of self. Like we heard Spurgeon say earlier: “being nothing, and letting [Jesus] be everything, doing nothing, but trusting to what he has done.”
So, here’s the story in Spurgeon’s own words.
His Conversion Story
The day is January 6, 1850:
I sometimes think I might have been in darkness and despair until now, had it not been for the goodness of God in sending a snowstorm one Sunday morning [!], while I was going to a certain place of worship. When I could go no further, I turned down a side street, and came to a little [chapel]. In that chapel there may have been a dozen or fifteen people. . . . I wanted to know how I might be saved. . . .
The minister did not come that morning; he was snowed up, I suppose. At last, a very thin-looking man, a shoemaker, or tailor, or something of that sort [Spurgeon doesn’t even know what profession!], went up into the pulpit to preach. Now, it is well that preachers be instructed, but this man was really stupid. He was obliged to stick to his text, for the simple reason that he had little else to say. The text was [Isaiah 45:22, in the King James Version] —
“LOOK UNTO ME, AND BE YE SAVED, ALL THE ENDS OF THE EARTH.”
He did not even pronounce the words rightly, but that did not matter. There was, I thought, a glimmer of hope for me in that text.
The preacher began [like this]: “This is a very simple text indeed [!]. It says ‘Look.’ Now lookin’ don’t take a deal of pain. It ain’t liftin’ your foot or your finger; it is just, ‘Look.’ Well, a man needn’t go to College to learn to look. You may be the biggest fool, and yet you can look. A man needn’t be worth a thousand a year to look. Anyone can look; even a child can look.
“But then the text says, ‘Look unto Me.’ Ay!” he said. . . . “Many [of you] are lookin’ to yourselves, but it’s no use lookin’ there. You’ll never find any comfort in yourselves. . . . Jesus Christ says, ‘Look unto Me.’ Some [of you] say ‘We must wait for the Spirit’s workin.’ You have no business with that just now. Look to Christ. The text says, ‘Look unto Me.’”
Then the good man followed up his text in this way: “Look unto Me; I am sweatin’ great drops of blood. Look unto Me; I am hangin’ on the cross. Look unto Me; I am dead and buried. Look unto Me; I rise again. Look unto Me; I ascend to Heaven. Look unto Me; I am sittin’ at the Father’s right hand. O poor sinner, look unto Me! look unto Me!”
When [the preacher] had . . . managed to spin out about ten minutes or so, he was at the end of his tether. Then he looked at me under the gallery, and I daresay, with so few present, he knew me to be a stranger.
Just fixing his eyes on me, as if he knew all my heart, he said, “Young man, you look very miserable.” Well, I did, but I had not been accustomed to have remarks made from the pulpit on my personal appearance before. However, it was a good blow, struck right home.
He continued, “And you will always be miserable — miserable in life and miserable in death — if you don’t obey [Isaiah 45:22 and look to Jesus]; but if you obey now, this moment, you will be saved.” Then lifting up his hands, he shouted . . . “Young man, look to Jesus Christ. Look! Look! Look! You have nothin’ to do but look and live.”
[Spurgeon says:] I saw at once the way of salvation. I know not what else he said — I did not take much notice of it — I was so possessed with that one thought. . . . I had been waiting to do fifty things, but when I heard that word, “Look!” what a charming word it seemed to me! Oh! I looked until I could almost have looked my eyes away.
There and then the cloud was gone, the darkness had rolled away, and that moment I saw the sun; and I could have risen that instant, and sung with the most enthusiastic of them, of the precious blood of Christ, and the simple faith which looks alone to Him. Oh, that somebody had told me this before, “Trust Christ, and you shall be saved.” Yet it was, no doubt, all wisely ordered. . . .
That happy day, when I found the Saviour, and learned to cling to His dear feet, was a day never to be forgotten by me. . . . I listened to the Word of God [in Isaiah 45:22]; and that precious text led me to the cross of Christ. (Autobiography, 1:87–89)
Dear friend, this morning — however miserable you look, or however well you hide it — I say to you, right now, in this moment, on the authority of Isaiah 45:22, “Look to Jesus. Look! Look! Look! You have nothing to do but look and live!”
And if you think that such looking to Jesus with the eyes of the soul will someday run out of juice, remember that Spurgeon would go on to preach thousands of sermons over the next forty years, all of them in their own varied and fresh ways saying, “Look to Jesus. Look! Look! Look!”
Later Spurgeon would say that any Christian desiring to “pursue life after a right fashion must look to Jesus, and must continue looking unto Jesus” (“Eyes Right”). Looking to Jesus is not something we do alongside the other Christian habits and patterns. It’s what we’re doing in and through them all:
- We look to Jesus when we open his word and hear it preached.
- We look to him in prayer, as we pray to our Father in Jesus’s name.
- We look to him in the face and eyes of Christian brothers and sisters who have the Spirit of Jesus and speak words of grace to feed our faith.
- And we make our personal needs in this life an occasion for looking to Jesus.
My friend Scott Hubbard says one way to keep looking to Jesus is to connect your personal need to his person and work: “‘Look to Jesus’ does not mean ‘think of anything at all about Jesus’ but rather ‘think of Jesus in a way that perfectly suits your pressing need.’”
For Spurgeon, at the age of fifteen, that need was how to be saved, how to be rescued from sin and spiritual agony, how to have peace and be in the right with the holy God. In his need and desperation, he finally looked to Jesus.
And he didn’t stop looking. All of his Christian life, in the four decades that followed, grew out of a soul that kept looking to Jesus — which brings us to the Table.
Look at the Table
This Table is one more occasion each week to look to Jesus. I said earlier that God had two surprising figures in Isaiah chapters 40 to 55. The first is Cyrus, to meet Israel’s physical need and free them from exile. The other is the Servant of Isaiah 53, who offers himself as the once-for-all sacrifice for the sins of his people.
When we look to Jesus at the Table, we look to his cross: his body broken for us, his blood shed for us. And so, we look to him, and eat in faith.
