The warriors who win battles are those who are resolved to conquer or die. The heroes who emancipate nations are those who count no hazards and reckon no odds, but are resolved that the yoke shall be broken from the neck of their country. The merchants who prosper in this world are those who do their business with all their hearts, and watch for wealth with eagerness. The half-hearted man is nowhere in the race of life, he is usually contemptible in the sight of others, and a misery to himself.
Especially is this a truth in the spiritual life. Souls are not saved by men who scarcely know or care whether they are saved themselves.
I would have you school yourselves till you obtain a horror of the sinner’s sin, surely not so strange a task if you remember your own former estate and present tendencies! How fiery was that oven through which your spirit passed when the hand of God was heavy upon you both by day and night! I want you, my brethren and sisters in the Lord Jesus, to get a clear view of the Wrath of God which threatens your own children, your own friends, your fellow seat-holders, your neighbors, your kinsfolk, unless they are saved.
If you could get into your heart as well as into your creed the sincere belief that, “the wicked shall be turned into hell, with all the nations that forget God,” if you could recollect that even those who hear the Gospel have no way of escape if they remain impenitent, and that if they reject Christ there remains nothing for them but “a fearful looking for of judgment and of fiery indignation,” if your soul could be made to melt for heaviness because of the woes of lost spirits, and because so many of your fellow men will within a little while be lost, lost as these others are, past all recall, beyond all hope, or all dream of alleviation, surely you would become awfully earnest about souls. We should hear praying of a mighty sort if believers sympathized with men in their ruin, then groans and tears would not be so scarce, then the soul pouring out itself in groans which cannot be uttered would be but an ordinary thing. Then shall we prevail with God, through the precious blood of Jesus when we feel intensely the sinner’s need.
By Charles Spurgeon – THE DAWN OF REVIVAL, OR PRAYER SPEEDILY ANSWERED
