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 1,375, "Now then do it."
"To admit a thing to be right is but a small part of the matter, if you practically deny it by your indifference."
Note the business on hand—it is that Jesus should be king over you. It was needful that David should become king, or else he could not rescue Israel from the Philistines, and in your case Jesus must be king or he cannot be your Saviour.
Thousands of people are quite willing to be saved by Christ, but when it comes to the first step, namely, that Jesus must be accepted as ruler, lawgiver, master, king and Lord, then they start back and reject eternal life.
“Yet know (nor of the terms complain),
Where Jesus comes, he comes to reign;
To reign, and with no partial sway;
Thoughts must be slain that disobey.”
The whole question of your being saved or lost will turn on this: if Jesus be not your king, then the devil will remain enthroned in your heart, and you will remain a lost soul: but if your heart will yield itself up to the supreme authority of King Jesus, then the work of salvation has already commenced, and Jesus will take care to purge your nature of all his enemies, until you shall be an empire in which he alone shall reign in holiness and peace.
Jesus must be king! What say you, sir, shall it be so? Do you hesitate about it? He must be your Lord and Master, his will must be your will, his commands must be law to you, and his example must henceforth be the model of your life. Do you demur, or will you yield at once?
Next, notice that if Christ is to be your king, it must be by your own act and deed. So saith the text concerning King David—“Now then, do it.” David would not be king over Israel unless Israel was willing that he should be king; and our Lord Jesus Christ is no forced monarch over one single human heart; the promise is, “Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power.”
The kingdom of Christ over men’s hearts is a kingdom of love, not a kingdom of force, so that there must be the full assent and consent of the will to the reigning power of Christ in the soul, or else he does not reign at all.
What sayest thou, yes or no? Are you willing that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, should henceforth rule and reign over thine entire nature as thy heart’s supreme Lord? There is the question. Let it be settled once for all. You have sometimes sought to have it so, “now then do it.”
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