My Year with Spurgeon #47

What Have I Done?
Charles Spurgeon
1857
Jeremiah 8:6

How can we resist feeling that he is a God whom we must love, when we know that he regards everything that concerns us, numbers the very hairs of our heads, bids his angels protect our footsteps lest we dash our feet against stones, marks our path and ordereth our ways. But especially is this great truth brought near to man’s heart, when we recollect how attentive God is, not merely to the temporal interests of his creatures, but to their spiritual concerns.

Few men like to take the trouble to review their own lives; most men are so near bankruptcy that they are ashamed to look at their own books. The great mass of mankind are like the silly ostrich, which, when hard pressed by the hunters, buries its head in the sand and shuts its eyes and then thinks, because it does not see its pursuers, that therefore it is safe.

The great mass of mankind, I repeat, are ashamed to review their own biographies. and if conscience and memory together could turn joint authors of a history of their lives throughout, they would buy a huge iron clasp and a padlock to it, and look the volume up, for they dare not read it. They know it to be a book full of lamentation and woe, which they dare not read, and still go on in their iniquities.

No tradesman ever gets the poorer by looking to his books. he may find himself to be poorer than he thought he was, but it is not the looking to the books that hath hurt him; he hath hurt himself by some ill trading before. Better, my friend, for you to know the past whilst there is yet time for repairing it, than that you should go blindfolded, hoping to enter the gates of Paradise and find out your mistake when alas! it is too late, because the door is shut.

You might as well hope to go to heaven by cursing and swearing, as by the merits of your own good works; for although good works are infinitely preferable to cursing and swearing in a moral point of view, yet there is no more merit in one than there is in the other, though there is less sin in one than in the other.

Lord accept me, Lord pardon me, and take me as I am, from this time forth and for ever, to be thy servant whilst I live, to be thy redeemed when I die.

© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible