Cutting Off Spurgeon's Beard

Have you ever wondered, friend, why folks aren't tugging on our coat sleeves and asking us, uh, what must I do to be saved? It's because everybody in their own mind believes they are good enough to get to heaven, uh, that God is fair and he will hold a scale to them and weigh their good acts against their bad ones, and they will make it into heaven because the good outweighs the bad. Uh, that's how most folks think. If you don't believe me, just go out today and randomly talk to strangers about where they think they'll spend eternity, and the overwhelming majority of them will tell you they've never done anything really bad enough to go to hell, uh, that God is a loving God, and he will surely let them into his heaven.

Why they cut their neighbor's grass when they're out of town and help strangers in need, and the main reason people think this way is because that is the picture that the modern church has painted of God and heaven, uh, but it's a painted horse and a straw dog, and their hope of heaven is nothing more than a hole in the wall, and they sit on a rotten plank over the very lid of hell, and that unstable foundation is ready to crack and break, and down they'll go when they die outside of Christ. Uh, listen, friends, our acceptance before God is not based on the merit of our good deeds. It is only on the shed blood of the Son of God.

Uh, good people don't go to heaven. Only forgiven ones get to go there. You must get under the blood.

Uh, but churches have failed to preach the great truths of the Bible, which God honors and uses to bring sinners to him. You'd be hard-pressed today, friends, to hear the great doctrines of ruin, redemption, repentance, and regeneration. They'll tell you today in church that all you have to do to get to heaven is to only believe and just accept Jesus, and you'll have your free ticket to heaven.

And Baptist preachers today build monuments to men like Charles Spurgeon, and call him the greatest of all Baptist preachers, and quote him, and talk him up as a hero. Uh, but if old Spurgeon came back today and stood in their pulpit and preached the same doctrines he preached in his day to their church, why, the pastor and good deacons would get out their pocket knives and cut off his beard in an attempt to slit his throat. Uh, but listen, friends, if Charles Spurgeon was here, he would quote Jesus and tell you that no man can come to Christ on his own, but that the Father first draw him.

Uh, listen to Spurgeon's words. I do not come into this pulpit hoping that perhaps somebody will of his own free will return to Christ. My hope lies in another quarter.

I hope that my master will lay hold of some of them and say, you are mine, and you shall be mine. I claim you for myself. My hope arises from the freeness of grace, and not from the freedom of the will.

Now right there with that doctrine, you'd rush the platform and try to cut his beard off right then and there, because it takes salvation out of the hands of men, where we make ourselves Christians today, and put salvation back in the hands of God where it belongs. And old chubby bearded Spurgeon would inform you of your duty of repentance, for without repentance there is no conversion. Listen to his words.

If the man does not live differently from what he did before, both at home and abroad, his repentance needs to be repented of, and his conversion is a fiction. Uh, but no. We want to talk up and build monuments to Spurgeon, so long as we don't preach his message.

So we cut off his beard and dilute the gospel, and water it down to make it easier for sinners to swallow. Uh, but listen, brother preacher. The Holy Spirit will not attend joke-telling and an easy-believed gospel, for without the Holy Spirit conviction, there is no salvation.

Uh, listen again to Spurgeon's words. Uh, brethren, if we do not have the Spirit of God, it were better to shut the churches, to nail up the doors, to put a blank cross on them and say, God have mercy on us. If you ministers have not the Spirit of God, you had better not preach, and you people had better stay at home.

I think I speak not too strongly when I say that a church in the land without the Spirit of God is rather a curse than a blessing. Uh, we need to be more like Spurgeon and warn folks of their great danger of dying in their sins and being cast into a devil's hell. Uh, we must inform sinners of their duty of repentance, for Jesus declared, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.

And that means preachers who have never repented themselves. And like Spurgeon, we should stress the utter necessity of God performing a work of grace upon the heart through the new birth. Uh, that if a poor sinner wants to see the kingdom of heaven, he must get under the blood and be born from above.

I think that if Charles Spurgeon could come back today and take a good look at the church of today, the old boy would shave off his own beard and shame. Let us pray.