Confident Believers vs. the Chameleons

Your weekly dose of Spurgeon
posted by Phil Johnson




The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from The Spurgeon Archive. The following excerpt is from "Hold Fast Your Shield," a sermon published in 1875.


ome persons appear to think that a state of doubt is the very best which we can possibly reach. They are very wise and highly cultured individuals, and they imagine that by their advanced judgments nothing in the world can be regarded as assuredly true.

Some of the broad church school would seem to believe that no doctrine in the Bible is worth dying for, or worth anybody's losing over and above a halfpenny for. They do not feel sure of any doctrine: it may be true, and there is a good deal to be said for it, but then a good deal may be said on the other side, and you must hold your mind "receptive," and be ready to accept "new truth."

Some Robinson or other said something about new truth, as if there ever could be such a thing, and, under cover of his probably misinterpreted speech, like chameleons, they are always taking their clue from the particular light that falls upon them. They have no light in themselves and no truth which they hold to be vital.

Such people cannot understand this confidence, but the veriest babes in the family of faith know what it means. Here are certain things which God has taught me; I believe them and am sure about them.

"Dogmatical," says one.

Exactly so; call it what you like, but we are bold to confess that there remains no doubt to us after God has spoken. The question is solved by God's word; the doubt is laid to sleep for ever by the witness of the Holy Spirit.

Oh, to know the grand truths of the gospel, and to know them infallibly. For instance, the grand doctrine of the substitutionary sacrifice of the Son of God—to know it and hold it and say, "Let others question and quibble, but I must believe it; it is my only hope, it is all my salvation. I stake my soul upon it: if that be not true then am I lost." And so with regard to all the other grand truths of revelation, the thing is to know them and grasp them firmly. There must be leverage if we would move men, and to have a leverage you must have a fixed point.

There must be certain undoubted truths about which you can sing, "O God, my heart is fixed; my heart is fixed: I will sing and give praise "—things which you perceive to be plainly taught in the Scriptures—things brought home by the power of the Holy Spirit.

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