A Message for the Last Sunday Night of the Old Year

Your weekly dose of Spurgeon
posted by Phil Johnson

The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from The Spurgeon Archive. The following excerpt is from "The Last Message for the Year," a sermon preached at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London, on Sunday evening, 28 December 1873.

ossibly there is someone, on this last Sunday night of another year, who is saying to himself, "I hardly know why I came here, for I have been everything that I ought not to have been, and nothing that I ought to have been."

But, friend, dost thou desire to begin a new life even before the new year dawns up thee? Art thou willing to leave thy sins? Dost thou long to be a holy man? In a word, is it the one wish of thine heart that thou mayest be saved? Then I remind thee that the Lord Jesus Christ said, "Him, that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out." There is nothing there to shut out the most irreligious man if he will but come to Christ.

You say that you are an odd man,—well, I have often said and others have said that I am an odd man, a lot that cannot be put in any catalogue; you are self-condemned, and so was I before I came to Christ; you feel that you are, as George Whitefield used to say, one of the devil's castaways, so bad that even Satan himself would not own you.

Why, you and I ought to shake hands, for that is just how I felt when that poor local preacher pointed to me, and said, "Look, young man, look! Jesus Christ says to you "Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else." I did look, and was saved by the same gospel I preach to you; and as this is the last Sunday night in another year, and as it may be the last gospel invitation you will ever have the opportunity of hearing, I repeat to you the very last invitations recorded in the Word of God, "The Spirit and the bride say, comes and let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely."

This agrees with John 3:16 which I have already quoted to you, and it also agrees with Christ's words in our text, "Him that cometh to me" and John Bunyan said that meant any "him" in all the world,—"I will in no wise cast out," that is, for no reason, for no conceivable motive, for no possible cause will Christ cast out one who comes to him by faith. "Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out" is a grand old Anglo-Saxon expression, that sweeps round the man who comes to Christ, and guards him, like a sword of fire protecting, him from every possibility of being cast out by Christ.

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