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 41, sermon number 2,415, "The believer's heritage of joy."
They testimonies have I taken as an heritage for ever; for they are the rejoicing of my heart. Psalm 119:111
"A man’s mind is rich very much in proportion to the truth he knows."
He who knows the Word of God is mentally rich, he has a large heritage. There are persons, I
am told,—deists—who believe in God, but who do not believe in the Word of God. They believe, then, in a God who has never spoken, a silent God, a God who has, at any rate, never spoken to his noblest creatures most capable of understanding his mind. To them, God is one who remains locked up for ever in exclusiveness, except so far as his works may
reveal him. I think there are many difficulties in the way of receiving such a
theory as that.
Whatever difficulties there may be about God having spoken to
us, and given us testimonies,—and that is the meaning of the word in our
text,—there are none so great to overcome as this one would be, that, through
all these ages, so many men have sought after God, and so many craving hearts have yearned to find God, yet he should have suffered six
thousand years at least to pass, and should never have spoken to men a single
word that they can understand.
Now, so far from accepting that theory, I
believe this Word of God to be God’s testimony, God’s speech, God’s declaration about himself and about many other things that his creatures need to know,
God’s witness-bearing to us, out of the depth of his divine knowledge,
that we may know and understand and see things aright.
And I say, and I am sure that many of you will say with me, these speeches of God, these revealing of God which I find in these two books of the Old and the New Testaments, are my heritage. I rejoice to accept them as the estate of
my mind, the treasure of my thought, the mint of the heavenly realm, the
mine from which I can explore fresh veins of thought as long as I live,
claiming all as my heritage forever.
I have been preaching the Word of God these six-and-twenty years in this one place to very much the same
congregation all the while; and if I had been obliged to preach from any other book,
I should have worn it threadbare by this time; but the Bible is as fresh
to me to-day as when first I began to speak from it as a boy, and preached to
you from it as a youth.
It is an inexhaustible heritage of mental wealth to
the man who will accept it, and give his mind to the study of it. Look at
the doctrines, the precepts, the promises, the prophecies, the histories,
the experiences,—it is no use for me to try to map out this estate, it is
so large.
As a great heritage of mental wealth, it makes every man who receives
it, however illiterate he may be upon other subjects, a wealthy man
spiritually, while they who discard it become poverty-stricken in mind, whatever else of mental attainments they may
possess.
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