Our last journey

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 23, sermon number 1,373, "Our last journey." 

"Each one of us must believe in the Saviour for himself, each serve God personally, and each have a good hope through grace wrought in his own soul. Will men never think of this till they come to die?" 

Here let me tell you that very much of the comfort with which we wrap ourselves up in days of health proves to be very sorry stuff when we come to die. While you are in good health and strength you often derive a measure of peace of mind from things which will not stand the fiery ordeal of an approaching eternity. Some of the best men that ever lived have found this out.

You may know the name of Mr. Durham, the author of a famous book on Solomon’s Song, one of the most earnest of Scotland’s ancient preachers. Some days before he died he seemed to be in some perplexity about his future well-being, and said to his friend, Mr. Carstairs, “Dear Brother, for all that I have written or preached, there is but one Scripture which I can now remember or dare grip unto, now that I am hastening to the grave. It is this—‘Whosoever cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast out.’ Pray tell me if I dare lay the weight of my salvation upon it.” Mr. Carstairs justly replied, “Brother, you may depend upon it though you had a thousand salvations at hazard.”

You see it was a plain, sinner’s text that he rested on. Just as Dr. Guthrie wanted them to sing a bairn’s hymn, so do dying saints need the plain elementary doctrines of the gospel to rest upon. Those fine ideas and dainty notions of our nearing perfection and becoming completely sanctified dissolve like the hoar frost in the sun, when we come face to face with eternity.

Those grand excitements, those high enjoyments, and those deep experiences which lead us to think ourselves to be somebodies in the church of God are of small account in dying moments. Men cannot die on stilts. Death finds out the truth of our condition and blows away with his cold breath a heap of chaff which we thought to be good wheat.

Then a man has to look to the mercy of God, to the blood of the covenant and to the promises of the Gospel, and to cling as a poor needy, guilty sinner to free, rich, sovereign grace, or else his spirit will utterly sink. When life is ebbing, nothing will do but the faithful saying, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.”

I have heard children of God speak in their last moments just as seeking souls speak. They come to God again just as they came at first, and they find in Jesus all their hope. Dying men want realities, they want a sinner’s Saviour, they want atonement for guilt, for so only can they pass out of the world with hope. Oh, brethren, follow after that which is solid and real, for nothing else will serve your turn when you come to die.

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