Spurgeon,
In the beginning, the preacher’s business is not to convert men, but the very reverse! It is idle to attempt to heal those who are not wounded, to attempt to clothe those who have never been stripped and to make those rich who have never realized their poverty.
As long as the world stands, we shall need the Holy Spirit, not only as the Comforter, but also as the Convincer, who will “reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.” I am inclined to think that the large number of backsliders who, after they have professed to be converted, turn back to the world, may be accounted for by the fact that they never seriously felt their guilt and were never brought low by the work of the Holy Spirit convicting them of sin.
Give me the old-fashioned form of conversion in which our fathers rejoice. I have lived long enough to see people jump into what they call salvation, and jump out of it as men plunge into a cold bath when they get up in the morning! Here is a person with a diseased leg. The doctor has looked at the limb, but he has not used his knife, he has not cut out the proud flesh—but he has applied a liniment and an ointment—and he has made a wonderful cure!
Marvelous are the healing powers of the clever man. According to common reports he is in high repute everywhere around. Yes, so he may be, but that limb will never be right again—the surgeon has done a permanent injury to it under the pretense of having rendered its owner a great service.
I believe that some men who are said to have been converted many times need to be converted now—and that multitudes of those who are trumpeted forth as having found the Savior do not yet know why they need a Savior and have not really found Him—but have exercised presumption in the place of faith and a belief in their own excited feelings instead of in the Lord Jesus Christ!
It must be so, I am sure, because we constantly see, on all hands, men who have been washed into deeper stains and who are worse after their so-called conversion than they were before. There must be, dear Friends, a probing of men’s hearts with the Law of God before we can rightly bring to them the healing of the Gospel.
Old Robbie Flockhart’s simile was a good one. He said, “You may take a piece of silk thread and try to sew with it as long as you like, but you will do nothing with it, alone—you need a sharp, piercing needle to go, first, and that will draw the silken thread after it. The needle of the Law of God prepares the way for the thread of the Gospel.”
There must be birth-pangs, or there will be no child born. The old-fashioned Grace of repentance is not to be dispensed with—there must be sorrow for sin—there must be “a broken and a contrite heart.” This, God will not despise. But a “conversion” which does not produce this result, God will not accept as genuine.
So we shall still continue to preach the Law of God. We shall thunder out the terrors of the Lord. We shall not be fashionable and popular, and prophesy smooth things lest our labor should be declared to have been in vain when the Lord shall come.
I charge all Brothers who are anxious for the true conversion of sinners, to be sometimes a little back ward in dealing out comfort to them. Wait till you see that it is really needed! Wait till you perceive that there is a wound before you apply the healing balm.
Until people are willing to confess their sins, you have no ground upon which you can comfort them. It is the man who “confesses and forsakes them” who “shall have mercy.” Christ is a sinner’s Savior and if a man is not a sinner, Christ has no salvation for him.
Until he will take the sinner’s place and frankly acknowledge his guilt, what is the use of preaching to him? Remember Christ’s own words—“They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
