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 New Park Street Pulpit, volume 5, sermon number 262, "Distinguishing grace.""Pride is the inherent sin of man and yet it is of all sins the most foolish."
A thousand arguments might be used to show its absurdity; but none of these would be sufficient to quench its vitality. Alive it is in the heart, and there it will be, till we die to this world and rise again without spot or blemish.
Yet many are the arrows which may be shot at the heart of our boasting. Take for instance the argument of creation; how strongly that thrusts at our pride. There is a vessel upon the potter’s wheel, would it not be preposterous for that clay which the potter fashioneth to boast itself and say, “How well am I fashioned! how beautifully am I proportioned; I deserve much praise!”
Why, O lump of clay, whatever thou art, the potter made thee; however elegant thy proportions, however matchless thy symmetry, the glory is due to him that made thee, not to thyself; thou art but the work of his hands. And so let us speak unto ourselves. We are the thing formed; shall we say of ourselves that we deserve honour because God has formed us excellently and wondrously? No, the fact of our creation should extinguish the sparks of our pride.
What are we, after all, but as grasshoppers in his sight, as drops of the bucket, as lumps of animated dust; we are but the infants of a day when we are most old; we are but the insects of an hour when we are most strong; we are but the wild ass’s colt when we are most wise, we are but as folly and vanity when we are most excellent—let that tend to humble us.
But surely if these prevail not to clip the pinions of our high soaring pride, the Christian man may at least bind its wings with arguments derived from the distinguishing love and peculiar mercies of God. “Who maketh thee to differ from another?”—This question should be like a dagger put to the throat of our boasting;—“and what hast thou that thou did not receive;”—it would be like a sword thrust through the heart of our self-exaltation and pride.
