Forgetting the things of time

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 Able to the Uttermost, pages 201-202, Pilgrim Publications.

"Why, to have one’s self prepared for the eternal dwelling-place might well become so absorbing a pursuit that we might forget the things of time." 

I could comprehend a mental abstraction that should make us absolutely foolish from day to day as to ordinary affairs if the mind were set upon superior and spiritual concerns; but I cannot comprehend this raving madness of humanity that men seem to be utterly abstracted from spiritual things, and rapt and taken altogether away about these bubbles, these trifles, these children’s toys.

I passed the Lake of Thrasymenus one evening, in traveling from Rome, and I marked the spot right well, for it is said that there when the Romans and the Carthaginians were engaged in deadly war there happened a terrific earthquake which shook the ground beneath their feet, and heaved the lake in waves, and tossed the mountains about on either side, but the combatants were so desperately set at slaughtering one another that they never observed the earthquake and did not believe it on the following day when they were told of it.

It seems so strange, does it not, that they should be so taken up with it? And men seem to be so taken up with the concerns of this life that even were God to set up His throne of judgment, and it did not interfere with the Stock Exchange, and the corn market, and the coal market, I believe men would still go on buying and selling and getting gain, and if the last thunderbolt were even now to be rushing through the sky, they would be so occupied with the things of time and sense that they would not be startled even then until it came in even closer proximity to their own souls.

Oh, what perversity of intellect is this! May God rouse us from it. When a man comes to see how all his lifetime he has been busy about these things and lost his soul, what a look it will be in looking backward! "I gained that money, scraped it together, for my heirs—used the rake, and used the shovel. I pinched myself, fool that I was! Why did I? I pinched myself for nobody."

"There I was up early in the morning, and late at night still at my business, my Bible covered with dust, the House of God forsaken, or, if I went to it, too sleepy to attend to what I should have heard; meanwhile no private prayer, no cleansing of myself in Christ’s blood, no seeking reconciliation with God; and all for what? Just that I might leave this heap of money to those who will forget me and probably be glad that I have gone, so that they may inherit what I have scraped together."

"What a fool I have been to live for that which I must leave, and to scrape together the thick clay which I must now renounce for ever."

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