Influence

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 We Endeavour, pages 52-53, Pilgrim Publications.

"We must give an account of our influence."

Everybody has some kind of influence. The mother who never leaves the nursery has a wondrous influence over those little children of hers, though no neighbour feels the force of her influence, and no one but her own little ones is affected by her faithfulness.

And who knows but that she is pressing to her bosom, perhaps a Whitefield, who will thunder out the gospel through the length and breadth of the land; or perhaps, on the other hand, an infidel, whose dreadful blasphemies shall ruin multitudes?

There is an influence that the mother has for which she must give an account to God. And the father’s influence,—oh! fathers, you cannot shake off your obligations to your children by sending them to school, whether to a Sunday school or a boarding-school, They are your children, and you must give an account of your stewardship concerning your own offspring.

Ay, and even the nurse-girl, though she seems of small note in the commonwealth, yet she also has an influence over her little charge, which she must use for Christ.

Not only he who thrills a senate with his oratory, but he also who speaks a word from the carpenter’s bench, each has his influence, and each must use it, and give an account of it; not merely the man who, by refusing to lend his millions, could prevent the horrors of war, but the man who with a smile might help to laugh at sin, or with a word of rebuke might show that he abhorred it.

There is no one of you without influence, and I ask you now how you have used it. Has it always been on the side of the Lord? “Give an account of thy stewardship,” for that influence will not always last.

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