Insight for the Journey

Come with me now in your imagination.  We are going to go way back to 1850.  The place is Colchester, England.  It’s a relatively small community, maybe 50 or 60 miles northeast of London.  It was the second Sunday in January.  There was a terrible snowstorm.  Now, it doesn’t snow much in Britain, but there was a snowstorm that day!  It was almost a proverbial whiteout.  Trudging along the street that Sunday morning was a young 15 year old lad.  Had you been there, you would say, “what in the world is that teenager doing out on a crazy day like this?” You would never believe it.  He was going to church.

You see, at the age of 6, because he was an incredibly precocious child, he had gone through that great book by John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress and there was a burden on his shoulders that he just could not bear any longer.  He determined, “I’m going to go to every church here in Colchester and maybe some preacher or some person will tell me how this terrible burden can roll off into that grave that I read about in Bunyan’s great classic.”

Trudging along, he passed a little dead end street called Artillery Street and then he remembered, “you know, my mother told me that there is a little, Primitive Methodist church down this street.  And man, it’s a long way where I plan to go and it’s such a miserable day, I’ll just turn in down there.”

Now, in that little church building you could drop about 5 or 6 of them here in our sanctuary at Grace.  He became the 15^th worshipper that day.  He sat about two thirds of the way back on the preacher’s right.  Well, it was such a miserable day that even the pastor didn’t show up that day.J  And an old, kind of lanky, rather illiterate layman got into the pulpit and began to preach.  I’ve got to tell you friends, he didn’t know how to preach a lick.  All he knew to do was to quote his text, make a few comments, quote the text again, a few more comments, quote the text again and around and around he went.  His text was that beautiful passage from the Old Testament, “look unto me all the ends of the earth and be ye saved.”  And he droned on, “look unto me all the ends of the earth and be ye saved.  Now, ye don’t have to have a thousand pounds in the bank to look.  Why, you can be a pauper and look.  Look unto me all ye ends of the earth and be ye saved.  And ye don’t have to have a college degree and a great education to look.  Why, you can be stupid and look.  Look unto me all ye ends of the earth and be ye saved.”  And he just churned over in that fashion for about ten or fifteen minutes until suddenly, he spotted that 15 year old kid back there.  Now, he did what a preacher really ought not to do.  He stopped and he sort of stepped aside from the pulpit, pointed his finger right at the young man and said, “Young man!  You look terribly miserable!”  That young man later said, “Oh I was so miserable.”  The old preacher went on, “yes, and you’ll be miserable in life and you’ll be miserable in death unless you obey my text young man.  Look to Jesus!  Look!  Look!  Look!”

Later he said, “I did look… and clang, went every harp in heaven and I lived!”

Four years later, at the age of 19, that young man became the pastor of the church that met in the beautiful big structure in the south of London called The New Park Street Baptist Church.  But guess how many people heard him on that day?  The church was in bad times and only 80 people showed up.  Well, he was only 19 years old. But 37 years later, that church became the largest evangelical church in the world.  Charles Haddon Spurgeon stands today as probably the greatest English speaking preacher who ever lived. 

How do you account for a pastorate like that?  Listen to Spurgeon’s words.  “I take my text and I make a bee line to the cross.”

He kept the focus on the gospel.