Author: Charles Spurgeon

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Bless our beloved church and its leaders. We thank you for your mercy, that many of us are spared to do service for you, notwithstanding many infirmities.

We bless you for others who, having gone from us, have been brought back again; for the many Sunday School teachers among us; and ask, that all may be anointed with fresh oil, that every working or suffering brother and sister may receive fresh grace this day; that this may be a time of the trimming of lamps, that all may shine brightly to the praise of your grace.

Amen.

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May we take a delight in being stripped, if God strip us. When you use the chisel upon these blocks of stone, that are to be built upon the Living Stone, Lord, do not only square us, and fashion us, but separate us from the old rock to which we have been wedded so long: set us free from that hole of the pit, and let us be brought into the upper air, and built upon Christ, to lie there forever.

“You rejoice in this, even though now for a short time, if necessary, you suffer grief in various trials so that the proven character of your faith—more valuable than gold which, though perishable, is refined by fire—may result in praise, glory, and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” (1 Peter 1:6–7)

Amen.

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And now, Lord, look upon your people for good. You know the troubles of every burdened spirit. You know how some whom you love are sick; how others have to watch over their dearest ones fading away, and withering like flowers. Lord, send comfort to the saints in trouble.

Oh, grant us grace to bear whatever your righteous will puts upon us, without repining; and if business is going amiss, and if many things are cross to the desires of nature, may we feel it is your will, and, therefore joyfully yield to that will; nay, more, may we take a delight in being stripped, if God strip us; take a delight in smarting, if it be God who makes us smart.

Amen.

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Look with great grace, we pray, O Lord, upon the slaves of sin: break their fetters. Oh, save this people. We know there are some we will see today who are, as yet, in the “gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity.” Move, O Divine Spirit, over them, and fetch out from among us those that know not God, that they may know themselves and their God this day.

Oh make this to be a profitable, soul-winning day, one of the high days on which heaven’s bells shall ring out more sweetly than ever, because many and many a prodigal child has come back to the Father’s house, to make the Father glad.

Amen.

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The Lord be pleased to help us every day to put down sin. O Lord, whenever pride arises, may we be more than ever humbled in your sight. Whenever self comes up, may we be determined it shall not live, but flee to the precious blood, that we may slay it.

Lord, save us from self; save us from the love of the world; save us from the pride of the eye, and the pride of life; save us, we beseech you, from everything that is natural to fallen man, and let the new nature which you have planted manifest itself day by day, until we shall be made like Christ, “whom having not seen we love,” but to whom we shall be conformed, for we shall “see him as he is.”

Amen.

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We do not live for self, nor even for self-salvation. Jesus Christ has become the Lord and Master of our spirit, and he has delivered us from the dominion of self and sin, and helped us to be obedient unto you. Now, henceforth, the strongest portion of our will is towards holiness.

Oh, that we could be perfectly holy! We sigh after it and cry after it: we think we could bear all trials, we feel persuaded we could give up all pleasures, if we might but win the pleasure of complete obedience to God. This, indeed, is the target towards which, like arrows shot from an archer’s bow, our lives are speeding. Though rough winds turn us aside, yet shall we strike the target by your grace.

Amen.

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O God, you have smitten a heavy blow at our proud self; you have made us lie broken in pieces before you. You have set up another in the place of the false god that ruled us. We do not live for self, nor even for self-salvation. Jesus Christ has become the Lord and Master of our spirit, and he has delivered us from the dominion of self and sin, and helped us to be obedient to you.

Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, so that you obey its desires. (Romans 6:12)

Amen.

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Lord God, we wonder you did ever have any mercy on us at all; for in justice and judgment, if we were set upon the Throne, we could do no other than condemn ourselves, for there is no plea against your justice that can be found within our lives or nature.

Yet, Lord, we thank you that you have saved many of us, and we would this morning exult in that salvation, and pray that all of those who we will interact with today will be saved also!

“LORD, if you kept an account of iniquities, Lord, who could stand?” (Psalm 130:3)

Amen.

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As we marked the leaves falling from the trees, “We are altogether as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.” “We all do fade as a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.” As the wind strips the leaves from the trees and leaves them bare, so we stand before you this morning. We have not by nature one green shoot, or anything like fruit: we are unprofitable altogether, and only fit to be “hewn down and cast into the fire:” for what fruit we have born, if it has been the fruit of our nature, has been more the fruit of thorns and thistles, than of figs and grapes.

“What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24–25)

Amen.

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We lie humbly before you, confessing our sin, our frequent sin, our willful sin; our sin against light and knowledge; sins of heart and thought, sins of word, and sins of action. There is no power of body, or of the will, which has not been defiled with sin; and we confess this before you with much shame.

So great has been the stream, that we are sure there must be a deep and large fount of pollution within our nature; and you have made some of us to know that it is so. You have taken us into the chambers of imagery, that are within our spirit, and we have dug through the wall, and have gone from one chamber to another; and the deeper we search, the more we are shocked; and the further we have pryed into the secrets of our being, the more are we utterly ashamed that we should be such creatures as we are by nature.

How shall we draw near to you, for we have no merits? Let the merits of Jesus stand for us, that we may acceptably approach our God.

Amen.

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