"You won't meet anything uglier than yourself"

Your weekly dose of Spurgeon

The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from the lifetime of works from the Prince of Preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon.  The following excerpt is from The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, volume 22, sermon number 1,289, "The Heart Full and the Mouth Closed."

"It ought to encourage every one here who has not found peace with God to hear us tell of what we feel of our own sinfulness, because, sinner, where one sinner gets through there is room for another." 

If there is a prison door, and that door is broken down, and one gets out, another man who is in the same prison may safely say, “Why should not I escape too?”

Supposing we were all beasts in Noah’s ark, and we could not get down from the ark to the ground except by going down that slanting stage which most of the painters have sketched when they have tried to depict the scene. Well, we must go down that stage.

Are you afraid? Are you, sheep and hares, afraid that the staging will not bear you up? Listen, then. I am an elephant, and I have come down out of the ark over that bridge, and therefore it is clear that all of you who are smaller than I am can come over too.

There is strength enough to bear up the hare and the coney, the ox and the sheep, for it carried the elephant. The way down has been trodden by that heavy, lumping creature, it will do for you, whoever you may be.

Ever since the Lord Jesus Christ saved me, I made up my mind to one thing, namely, that I should never meet another person who was harder to save than I. Somebody said to me once when I was a child, when it was very dark, and I was afraid to go out, “What are you afraid of? You won’t meet anything uglier than yourself.”

Surely as to my spiritual condition that is true, I never did meet anything uglier than myself, and I never shall. And if there is a great, big, black, ugly sinner here, I say, sinner, you are not uglier than I was by nature, and yet the Lord Jesus Christ loved me. Why should he not love you too?

I tell you that though Jesus Christ is omniscient, and it is saying a great thing to say what he could not see, yet I do venture to say that Jesus Christ could not see anything in me to love. What if he cannot see anything good in you? Then we are on a par, and yet I know he loves me, why not you?

That he loves me I know. Bless his name, I know he loves me now, and I love him, too. If he loved me when there was nothing in me to love, why should he not love you when there is nothing in you to love? Oh, turn that ugly face towards the lovely Saviour, and trust in him.

I put it in a pleasant way, and you smile, but I want to get it into your hearts: I want some poor, trembling sinner to say, “I shall recollect that. I did think myself an ugly sinner, but I will come to Christ, and trust him.”

If you do so, you will never regret it, but you will bless God for ever and ever, and so shall I: and when we get to heaven we will talk about it, and we will say, “Here we are, a pair of huge, horrible sinners, we came to Jesus Christ, and he took us in, and, blessed be his name, we will praise him as long as ever we live.”

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