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 22, sermon number 1,296, "Gone. Gone for ever.""Time is going and eternity approaching; will you never wake up?"
As time has gone so also have many persons gone to whom we might have been useful. Thousands have passed away during our short span of life. Have you not had to say, “I ought to have spoken to So and-So, who was in my employment, but he died without hope before I had warned him, and he is gone where no words of mine can ever reach him?”
Oh, how many have passed away since I first began to address this audience, and if I could charge myself with unfaithfulness to you in preaching the word of God, how would I have to regret each funeral, and to remember each tomb, and say, “There lies one for whom I can render no acceptable account at last, for I have been unfaithful, and kept back the truth.”
I thank God that I have not this to burden my heart. Do not let it be so with any of you.
Sometimes, however, the confession of the thing gone concerns noble ideas and resolves. You had great conceptions, and if they had but been embodied in action something good would have come of them; but where are the ideas now? Were they not smothered in their birth?
You resolved to do great things, the plans were thoroughly arranged, and your whole heart was eager to carry it out, but delay chilled the goodly purpose till it died of cold, and it lies buried in forgetfulness. You dreamed well, but there you stopped.
As for actual work for the Lord, you had other fish to fry, and therefore you cast out your net for him. You suffered the season for activity to go by, and so your excellent ideas and resolutions melted into thin air, and they are gone.
