Wednesday, February 16, 2022

The Gospel, Justice Satisfied, Sermohn by Charles Spurgeon

Spurgeonj is simply the best. I'm so glad I found this collection of his sermonjs at You Tube, read by some good voices for the task. SI have discovered from just scrolling through the videos of his sermons that his very face produces a deep sense of the Holy Spirit in me. Just seeing his face. I am grateful that I have this sense of him, I'm not sure how many have this sort of reaction. I'fve come to wonder if it's what scripture identifies as the gift of discernment of spirits. I think that because I also have a strong negative reactio to mere symbols of evil spirits as I did at the logo of the 1988 Olympic games in South Korea, which I wrote about on one of my other blogs. Someone wrote me about that to upbraid me for such an idea, saying symbols simply don't do that. I thought I'd described it well enough to be clear I certainly didn't make it up so I don't know how he could have been so convinced. I've never heard of this particular phenomenon before, I simply experienced it. I'm speculating that it is the gift of discernment, it simply seems to be a reasonable explanation. I also experience a great sense of peace when my eye falls on the Bible, , simply takes in a page of it, even without reading it, as if the Bible itself emanates a spirit. And now the face of Spurgeon. Well, I can't claim much about this, perhaps it is meant for me alone. I don't know.

Nevertheless what I experience of the spirit of Spurgeon seems thoroughnly justified by his praching. It does add the dimension, though, of a sense that he must spend hours immersed in the things of God so that he is soaked in the Holy Spirit as it were. Soaked, saturated, so that he himself radiates God through his own spirit. As he describes his method of developing a sermon in the documentary about him that I posted a while back, just that amount of work to find the most authentic God-honoring, or more accurately God-initiated, message, shows his deep dependence on the Holy Spirit. He said he would come up with many ideas for sermons but he considered them to be the production of the flesh until he knew that a particular topic was given to him by God. that being his method week aftger week would alone account for his palpably godly spirit.
This sermon, about God's Justice and how the sacrifice of Christ satisfies it, shows his usual methodical and thorough exploration of his message. We are all sinners, condemned by God's justice, until we embrace the salvation given through Christ. But he doesn't let us off easy. If you don't powerfully feel your own guilt under the Law of God the gospel won't do anything for you. And the more we understand about the character of Christ Himself the more solidly planted in the gospel we can claim to be. He makes me aware of how little I qaualify. He drives me to desire a greater immersion of my own. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

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