Category Archives: Sanctification

Spurgeon on Romans 7

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Why Spurgeon only went to the chapel where he was saved one more time:

The next Sunday I went to the same chapel, as it was very natural that I should. But I never went afterward, for this reason, that during my first week the new life that was in me had been compelled to fight for its existence, and a conflict with the old nature had been vigorously carried on. This I knew to be a special token of the indwelling of grace in my soul; but in that same chapel I heard a sermon upon “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” And the preacher declared that Paul was not a Christian when he had that experience. Babe as I was, I knew better than to believe so absurd a statement. What but divine grace could produce such a sighing and crying after deliverance from indwelling sin? I felt that a person who could talk such nonsense knew little of the life of a true believer. I said to myself, “What! am I not alive because I feel a conflict within me? I never felt this fight when I was an unbeliever. When I was not a Christian, I never groaned to be set free from sin. This conflict is one of the surest evidences of my new birth, and yet this man cannot see it; he may be a good exhorter to sinners, but he cannot feed believers.” I resolved to go into that pasture no more, for I could not feed therein. I find that the struggle becomes more and more intense; each victory over sin reveals another army of evil tendencies, and I am never able to sheathe my sword, nor cease from prayer and watchfulness.

No. 1850-51

A Sermon Intended for Reading on Lord’s-Day, July 26, 1885,

Delivered by C.H. Spurgeon, At The Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington,

On the Evening of June 7, 1885.

Blindness to the Depth of Sin

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This excerpt is a transcript of a sermon by Dr. Michael Reeves entitled “Getting Your Heart Right,” based on Matthew 15:1-28:

… the Pharisees could not understand the idea of the need for a new heart.

Well, that’s all a long time ago, but people haven’t changed.

And that enslavement to that view of reality, that failure, that blindness to the human condition, to the human heart, has just carried on.

And I’m going to give you an example of this from much closer to our day. I’m going to read you from the diary of an 18th-century man, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who first wrote the dictionary of the English language. A literary giant, enslaved man.

And I want to get inside his head and read you a few extracts from his journal. And you’ll just get inside his head.

This is very similar to what we’ve seen in the Pharisees.

Here we go.

September the 18th, 1738: “Oh Lord, enable me by your grace… enable me by your grace to redeem the time which I’ve spent in sloth, vanity, and wickedness. Enable me to lead a new life in your faith, fear, and love. And finally, enable me to obtain everlasting life.”

Nineteen years later, 1757: “Almighty God, enable me from this instant to amend my life that I may not lose the things eternal.”

Two years later, 1759: “Enable me to shake off idleness and sloth.”

Two years later, 1761: “I have resolved, till I am afraid to resolve again. Yet, hoping in God, I steadfastly purpose to lead a new life.”

Three years later, 1764: “I have made no reformation. I have lived totally useless, more sensual in thoughts, more addicted to wine and meat. Grant me, oh God, to amend my life… my purpose from this time to avoid idleness, to rise early, to read the scriptures.”

A few months later: “I’ve now spent 55 years in resolving. Oh God, grant me to resolve aright and to keep my resolutions. I resolve to rise early, not later than six, if I can.”

1765: “I purpose to rise at 8 because though I shall not rise early, it will be much earlier than I now rise, for I often lie until two.”

1775, ten years later: “When I look back upon resolutions of improvement which year after year have been made and broken, why do I try to resolve again? I try because reformation is necessary. I try in hope of the help of God.”

Oh dear. Isn’t it tragic? Isn’t it familiar?

It’s a life of the flesh, of fleshly pleasure, and then fleshly attempts to make himself a new man. It’s all self-effort, with prayers chucked up, asking God to chip in and help him do what he needs to do.

You can hear it here, and he’s even more explicit elsewhere. Johnson went through life ground down with guilt. He just didn’t realize his greatest problem.

He refused to accept the free pardon and welcome of God.

And so he tried to deal with his guilt by self-improvement.

And whatever your theology teaches, isn’t it easy to think, “I don’t have a big problem with sin. I can sort myself out. I resolve to do better. I can do better. And I will do better.”

And that is one of the clearest indicators of a Pharisaical blindness to the depth of sin. The sense that sin is just a behavior problem we can sort out with a bit more effort, with a bit of work by the flesh.

Possibly a tell here would be – have you ever been in this situation? I think it’s so easy for us today in our culture of self-affirmation to believe, “I’m not a deep sinner.”

And even if my theology tells me that we are all – we’ve all fallen short of the glory of God—it’s easy to forget that.

And I think a good tell on that is, have you ever been in a situation where, I don’t know, maybe it’s you’re late for something? You’re stuck in traffic. You’re stressed, you’re anxious. And then someone does something to really annoy you, and out of your mouth come these words. Or if you’re so good you managed to keep your mouth shut, but into your head come all these vicious thoughts. And sometimes they’re so vicious you think, “Whoa, where did that come from? ‘Cause I’m lovely. Where did that come from?”

You’ve forgotten the sewer of sin that bubbles up in all of us.

So I must ask you, dear friends, how much of a sinner do you think you are? How blind are you to the depth of your sin?

Because if you don’t see yourself as a great sinner, what has Christ got to offer you? Christ will never be a great Savior to you. You’ll never love him much unless you see how much he does for you.

So if you think of yourself as a pretty good person, you’ll never really know the joy of treasuring an all-sufficient Savior. You’re trapping yourself in self-identity rather than knowing the joy, the liberation of forgiveness.

And I say this however long you’ve been walking with Christ.

My mentor when I was a very young man, I pastored with him. He was on church staff with me. He was maybe the most godly man I knew. Some of you may have heard of him. He was a great preacher. His name was John Stott. And he was the most wonderfully humble, godly man.

And I remember once seeing him, coming in, he was in private, didn’t know anyone was going to see him. And he was on his knees in tears at his own sin.

And I remember thinking, I was young, I was thinking, “I’m not aware that there’s any sin left in this guy.” Here he is in tears at his own sin.

Because when the Spirit works in your heart, he is a Spirit who’s grieved by sin and he makes you ever more sensitive to sin.

And so those who’ve been walking with Christ a long time, they will find they feel ever more sinful, though actually the Spirit makes them look ever more glorious. They’re ever more sensitive to their sin.

So friend, are you sensitive to your sin? If you’re not, you’re sharing the Pharisees’ blindness, not the Spirit’s sensitivity.

God is so much more thorough than us. Where we would seek to change by putting a thin layer of paint on ourselves and painting ourselves neat and clean, God deals with us all the way down in the foundations of our hearts.

And this is his great promise of the new covenant—to give us new hearts of flesh, transforming not just the symptoms of our behavior but transforming the very desires that drive our actions.

Because the essence of our problem is, while we were made to love the Lord our God, we were created as lovers. And even when we sinned in the fall, we remained lovers. To be human is to love.

But our loves turned. And from turning from being lovers of God—as Paul says it—we became lovers of self, lovers of money, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. That’s been our problem in sin. We still love, but we’ve turned to love the wrong thing. And that’s our real problem.

And we need our hearts turned to love aright. We don’t just need our behavior corrected. We need our very desires turned back to the Lord our God so that we love, adore, cherish him just as once we cherished sin.

Death and Life are in the Power of the Tongue

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I want to write briefly about a verse we all know. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits” (Proverbs 18:21).

One error of the word-of-faith movement is to interpret texts like this out of context or in a woodenly literal way.

I received an email this week warning people to “watch their confession,” claiming that harmless phrases such as “My head is killing me” can open the door to calamity, even a brain tumor or death. The idea is that death is in the power of your tongue, not God’s, and that He cannot do anything if you “speak death” over yourself. In this view, your words tie God’s hands, which is a jaw-dropping low view of God and a terribly shallow reading of Scripture. You are even told to avoid saying “that tickled me to death” for the same reason.

Breathe a sigh of relief. Idioms do not kill.
Like all pernicious teaching, it has severe consequences. If someone is not being taught the right thing in a church, they are being taught something else. That “something else” can harm far more than we might first realize. Many wounded, grieving families have been told that a child’s death must have come because a parent “spoke death” with the tongue, based on a misreading of this verse. That is both false and cruel.

Scripture never teaches that stray words open a legal door for Satan to kill. Jesus rejects the blame game in suffering, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed” (John 9:3). When a tragedy was reported to him, he did not tie it to the victims’ special sins (Luke 13:1–5). God himself says, “See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal” (Deuteronomy 32:39). Our days are written in his book before one of them came to be (Psalm 139:16). Even when Satan afflicts, he does so only within limits God sets (Job 1:12; 2:6). In Christ we have this comfort, that nothing, not even death, can separate us from the love of God (Romans 8:38–39). So to every bereaved parent we say, the Lord is near to the brokenhearted, and your words did not cause your child’s death (Psalm 34:18).

Proverbs 18:21 is both precious and true, but it is not teaching that a casual phrase like “this is killing me” hands Satan permission to harm us. Scripture never says that idioms open spiritual doors to the devil. God alone numbers our days, and the evil one cannot take a single step apart from God’s sovereign allowance. “Behold, all that he has is in your hand. Only against him do not stretch out your hand.” “Behold, he is in your hand, only spare his life” (Job 1:12; 2:6).

So what does the verse teach?
What this proverb, and others, teaches is both simpler and far weightier than the shallow word-of-faith interpretation. In context, the verse reveals that the tongue has real influence for ruin or for flourishing. “From the fruit of a man’s mouth his stomach is satisfied; he is satisfied by the yield of his lips” (Proverbs 18:20). Our words can wound or heal, condemn or acquit, tear down or build up. “A fool’s lips walk into a fight, and his mouth invites a beating. A fool’s mouth is his ruin, and his lips are a snare to his soul” (Proverbs 18:6–7). “There is one whose rash words are like sword thrusts, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.” “A gentle tongue is a tree of life, but perverseness in it breaks the spirit” (Proverbs 12:18; 15:4).

Guard the unity of the church
Our tongues can destroy the unity of a local church. God calls us to be “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3). Yet “a dishonest man spreads strife, and a whisperer separates close friends” (Proverbs 16:28). “For lack of wood the fire goes out, and where there is no whisperer, quarreling ceases” (Proverbs 26:20).

Scripture warns that “where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice” (James 3:16). So we are told to “watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught; avoid them,” and to deal firmly with divisiveness in the church, “As for a person who stirs up division, after warning him once and then twice, have nothing more to do with him” (Romans 16:17; Titus 3:10).

The goal is peace and maturity. “I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment,” and “above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony” (1 Corinthians 1:10; Colossians 3:14). “But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another” (Galatians 5:15). When hurt arises, our Lord gives a better way. “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone” (Matthew 18:15). Quiet, direct, loving conversation preserves unity.

How the proverb works
In Proverbs 18:21 the expression behind “in the power of” is the Hebrew idiom “in the hand,” meaning control or influence. It is not about occult mechanics or verbal charms. Throughout the Bible the pair “life and death” functions as a moral, covenant summary. “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil” (Deuteronomy 30:15). James reminds us that the tongue can set a whole life ablaze, yet he never says our idioms summon demons. “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear” (Ephesians 4:29). Jesus teaches that our words reveal our hearts, which God will judge. “You brood of vipers. How can you speak good, when you are evil. For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil. I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned” (Matthew 12:34–37).

Providence and comfort
The Lord orders and governs all things. The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession says this plainly in Chapter 5, “Of Divine Providence,” paragraph 1, where God “upholds, directs, disposes, and governs all creatures and things, from the greatest even to the least.” He orders all things, and ordinarily uses means, which is why our words carry real moral weight. This frees tender consciences from superstition and calls all of us to holiness of speech.

A simple practice
So let us walk in wisdom together. Choose words that give grace. Before you speak, ask, ‘Will this edify?’ ‘Will this help?’ Drop needlessly cynical phrases if they nourish unhelpful attitudes, not from fear, but from love.

Pray with me, “Set a guard, O Lord, over my mouth; keep watch over the door of my lips,” and consider committing these verses to memory: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” and “Know this, my beloved brothers, let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger” (Psalm 141:3; Proverbs 18:21; James 1:19).

Parents, model this for your children. Small group leaders, set the tone in your gatherings. All of us, let us seek a church culture where speech is truthful, kind, timely, and zealous to preserve unity.

The gospel gives both power and pattern. Christ saves us by grace, renews our hearts, and then trains our tongues. As He forms us, our words will more and more become instruments of life and builders of peace.