A Great Big Compilation of Charles Spurgeon Quotes

I’ve been reading a fair amount of Spurgeon’s sermons lately, and recording them for a new YouTube channel, Historic Homilies. If you would like to listen to audio readings of Spurgeon sermons, check out the channel!

Anyway, as I’m reading the sermons, I’m always highlighting stuff that I like, or even things that simply strike me as mildly interesting. This will be a place for me to compile all of those snippets, in no particular order. It will be an ever-growing list.

Sermon: My Restorer

• This sweetest of the Psalms sings of many mercies which the happy soul of the believer receives, and it traces all those benefits to one source, namely to the Good Shepherd himself.
  
  
• What is the true position of every believer? It is that of a sheep abiding close to its Shepherd.
  
  
• The fittest condition of a believer is in communion with Christ. It ought not to be a privilege occasionally enjoyed, it should be the everyday life of the soul. We are to abide in Jesus, walk with him, and live in him.
  
  
• We need fellowship with Jesus not as a luxury for red letter days and Sabbaths, but as the necessary provision of every work day of our lives.
  
  
• “Abide in me” is his word to us for all seasons, and we ought to strive to realise it; so that always, by night and by day, on the Sabbath and equally on the week days, in our joys and in our cares, we should abide in him. Christ is not merely a harbour of refuge, but a port for all weathers.
  
  
• Such deeds of love as Jesus has performed for us can never be adequately requited, but at the very least they ought not to be insulted by lukewarm and casual intercourse; they demand our heart, our soul, our all.
  
  
• Shall I be the bride of Jesus, and my love never be displayed in converse with him? Shame upon me, a thousand times shame, if I allow a day to pass unblest with thoughts, and words, and deeds of love.
  
  
• Now, men do not ordinarily need to be stirred up to that which is their delight; their spirits fly after their joys as eagles to the spoil. Where their heart moves with pleasure, it draws all their powers after it; and if indeed it be so (and who shall contradict it?), that fellowship with Christ is the richest of all joys, the intensest of all delights, why are we so hard to move? Oh, how sluggish are our hearts, how dull our spirits, that we do not fly after Jesus with rapture of desire, and do not labour perpetually to abide in him.
  
  
• If we be foolish and ignorant, where should we dwell but with the Teacher? If always weak, to whom should we resort but to the strong for strength? Let the child abide by its parent, the scholar with the master, the patient by his physician, the poor man with his helper. To whom should we go in our hourly needs but to him who has hitherto been our all in all?
  
  
• Israel could not afford to be a single day without the manna, nor can we be satisfied for an hour without the bread of life.
  
  
• Without his love in our hearts we become victims to other loves, which lead us into idolatry, plunge us into hurtful lusts, and poison the wells of our joy. We must either be enthralled by the surpassing love of Jesus, or we shall be fascinated by the world’s deceits.
  
  
• If any man wishes to grow in grace, if he wishes to be filled with the Spirit, if he wishes to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, specially if he wishes to be made like to him in all things who is the head, he must abide in Christ.

Sermon: Holy Work for Christmas

• This is the mystery of God incarnate for our sake, bleeding and dying that we might neither bleed nor die, descending that we might ascend, and wrapped in swaddling bands that we might be unwrapped of the grave-clothes of corruption.
  
  
• No man can speak of the things of God with any success until the doctrine which he finds in the book he finds also in his heart.
  
  
• Who can be astonished at anything when he has once been astonished at the manger and the cross? What is there wonderful left after one has seen the Saviour?
  
  
• As we think today of the birth of the Saviour, let us aspire after a fresh birth of the Saviour in our hearts.
  
  
• The wise men went wrong even with a star, stumbled into Jerusalem; the shepherds went straight away to Bethlehem. Simple minds sometimes find a glorified Christ where learned heads, much puzzled with their lore, miss him.

Sermon: Secret Sins

• Oh! if we had eyes like those of God, we should think very differently of ourselves. The sins that we see and confess are but like the farmer’s small samples which he brings to market, when he has left his granary full at home. We have but a very few sins which we can observe and detect, compared with those which are hidden to ourselves and unseen by our fellow creatures.
  
  
• Of all sinners the man who makes a profession of religion, and yet lives in iniquity, is the most miserable.
  
  
• Take heed above everything of a waxen profession that will not stand the sun; be wary of a life that needs to have two faces to carry it out; be one thing, or else the other. If you make up your mind to serve Satan, do not pretend to serve God; and if you serve God, serve him with all your heart.
  
  
• Hypocrisy is a hard game to play at, for it is one deceiver against many observers; and for certain it is a miserable trade, which will earn at last, as its certain climax, a tremendous bankruptcy.
  
  
• Do not measure sin by what other people say of it; but measure sin by what God says of it, and what your own conscience says of it.
  
  
• There are some who would not for the life of them say a wicked word in the presence of their minister, but they can do it, knowing God is looking at them. They are Atheists. There are some who would not trick in trade for all the world if they thought they would be discovered, but they can do it while God is with them; that is, they think more of the eye of man than of the eye of God; and they think it worse to be condemned by man than to be condemned by God. Call it by what name you will, the proper name of that is practical Atheism. It is dishonoring God; it is dethroning him; putting him down below his own creatures; and what is that, but to take away his divinity?
  
  
• You may as well ask the lion to let you put your head into his mouth. You cannot regulate his jaws: neither can you regulate sin. Once go into it, you cannot tell when you will be destroyed.
  
  
• I shall not fear to be called an Arminian, when I say, as Elijah did, “Choose you this day whom you will serve. If God be God, serve him; if Baal be God serve him.” But, now, make your choice deliberately; and may God help you to do it!

Sermon: A Mighty Saviour

• There are some who preach a gospel which is very well fitted to train man in morals, but utterly unfitted to save him.

Sermon: The Power of His Resurrection

• Behold the dead and buried One makes himself to live! Herein is a marvellous thing. He was master over death, even when death seemed to have mastered him: he entered the grave as a captive, but left it as a conqueror.
  
  
• The resurrection of Christ casts a side-light upon the gospel by proving its reality and literalness. There is a tendency in this generation to spirit away the truth, and in the doing thereof to lose both the truth and its spirit. In these evil days fact is turned into myth, and truth into opinion.
  
  
• Those who dream of being saved by their own good works are usually those who have no good works worth mentioning; while those who sincerely lay aside all hope of salvation by their own merits, are fruitful in every virtue to the praise of God.
  
  
• “That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection.” Jesus first, and then the power of his resurrection. Beware of studying doctrine, precept, or experiences apart from the Lord Jesus, who is the soul of all. Doctrine without Christ will be nothing better than his empty tomb; doctrine with Christ is a glorious high throne, with the King sitting thereon.
  
  
• To raise the dead body of our Lord from the tomb was as great a work as the creation. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, each one wrought this greatest miracle.
  
  
• He was compassed by the bonds of death, but he could not be held by them; even in his grave-clothes he came to life; from those wrappings he unbound himself; from the close-fastened tomb he stepped into liberty. If, in the extremity of his weakness, he had the power to rise out of the sepulchre, and come forth in newness of life, what can he not now accomplish?

Sermon: The Personality of the Holy Ghost

• Whenever I find a man in whom there rests the Spirit of God, the Spirit within me leaps to hear the Spirit within him, and he feels that we are one. The Spirit of God in one Christian soul recognizes the Spirit in another.
  
  
• “He shall abide with you forever.” Once give me the Holy Ghost, and I shall never lose him till “forever” has run out; till eternity has spun its everlasting rounds.
  
  
• Ever be careful how you speak of the Holy Ghost. I do not know what the unpardonable sin is, and I do not think any man understands it; but it is something like this: “He that speaketh a word against the Holy Ghost, it shall never be forgiven him.” I do not know what that means; but tread carefully! There is danger; there is a pit which our ignorance has covered by sand; tread carefully!

Sermon: The Valley of the Shadow of Death

• “Christ would sooner lose his life than lose his people. He did die once to save them, and until he dies again they shall never perish.”
  
  
• “Brethren, is it not an easy thing to walk through a shadow? If you get up in the morning and saunter down the field, and the spiders have spun their cobwebs across the path in a thousand places, you brush them all away; and yet there is more strength in a cobweb than in a shadow. The Psalmist speaks without fear, for he regards his expected trials as walking through a shadow. Trials and troubles, if we have but faith, are mere shadows that cannot hinder us on our road to heaven. Sometimes God so overrules afflictions that they even help us on to glory; therefore let us walk on and never be afraid. Let us be sure that if we walk in at one end of the hollow way of affliction we shall walk out at the other. Who shall hinder us when God is with us?”
  
  
• “The shepherd is not only the keeper but the lord of the sheep. Remember that your Saviour is your Sovereign.”

Sermon: The Beatitudes

• “Christians ought to be seen and they ought to let their light be seen. They should never even attempt to conceal it. If you are a lamp, you have no right to be under a bushel, or under a bed—your place is on the lamp stand where your light can be seen.”

Sermon: A Faithful Friend

• “But our Lord Jesus never can forsake those whom once He loves, because He can discover nothing in us worse than He knew, for He knew all about us beforehand. He saw our leprosy and yet He loved us. He knew our deceitfulness and unbelief, and yet He did press us to His bosom. He knew what poor fools we were, and yet He said He would never leave us nor forsake us. He knew that we should rebel against Him and despise His counsel often. He knew that even when we loved Him our love would be cold and languid. But He loved for His own sake. Surely, then, He will stick closer than a brother.”
  
  
• “Deception is not confined to the tradesman’s shop. It prevails throughout society. The sanctuary is not exempt. The preacher adopts a sham voice. You hardly ever hear a man speak in the pulpit in the same way he would speak in the parlor. Why, I hear my brethren, sometimes, when they are at tea or dinner, speak in a very comfortable decent sort of English voice, but when they get into their pulpits, they adopt a sanctimonious tone and fill their mouths with inflated utterance, or else whine most pitifully. They degrade the pulpit by pretending to honor it—speaking in a voice which God never intended any mortal to have. This is the great house of sham. And such little things show which way the wind blows.”
  
  
• “No circumstance can possibly arise that ever will divide the Savior from His love to His people and the saint from his love to his Savior. He is ‘a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.’”
  
  
• “Farewell, with this one thought—we shall never, all of us meet together here again. It is a very solemn thought, but according to the course of nature and the number of deaths, if all of you were willing to come here next Sabbath morning, it is not at all likely that all of you will be alive. One out of this congregation will be sure to have gone the way of all flesh. Farewell, you that are appointed to death, I know not where you are—yon strong man, or yon tender maiden, with the hectic flush of consumption on her cheek. I know not who is appointed to death. But I do now most solemnly take my farewell of such a one. Farewell poor soul—and is it farewell forever? Shall we meet in the land of the hereafter, in the home of the blessed, or do I now bid you farewell now forever? I do solemnly bid farewell to you forever, if you live and die without Christ.”

Sermon: Safe Shelter

• “Let the unknown tomorrow bring with it what it may, it cannot bring us anything but what God shall bear us through! So let it come, and let it go. The Lord’s name be praised! We shall bless His name in it, and after it, and why not before it?”
  
  
• “We shall mount above the billows of our griefs, and sing as we lift our heads above the spray! We shall rise above the clouds of our present afflictions, and look down upon them as they float beneath our feet, rejoicing that the Lord has borne us, as upon wings, above them all, to bring us to Himself!”
  
  
• “You must not suppose that if you loved Jesus Christ, and put your trust in Him, you would give up the joy of life; you would just have found it! You would then, begin to be happy because you would have found what your soul needs to fill it.”

Sermon: Prayer, The Cure For Care

• “God has never yet failed to honor believing prayer. He may keep you waiting for a while, but delays are not denials, and He has often answered a prayer that asked for silver by giving gold.”
  
  
• “If you were to worry as long as you wished, you could not make yourself an inch taller, or grow another hair on your head, or make one hair white or black. So the Savior tells us and He asks, if care fails in such little things, what can care do in the higher matters of providence? It cannot do anything.”
  
  
• “You may pray about the smallest thing and about the greatest thing, you may not only pray for the Holy Spirit, but you may pray for a new pair of boots. . . . Say not that they are too little for Him to notice—everything is little in comparison with Him.”
  
  
• “Do not imagine that God needs any fine language. . . . Pray for what you want just as if you were telling your mother or your dearest friend what your need is. Go to God in that fashion, for that is real prayer, and that is the kind of prayer that will drive away your care.”

Sermon: A Most Needful Prayer Concerning the Holy Spirit

• “The Lord’s presence is our strength. God with us is our banner of victory. When He is not with us we are weaker than water, but in His might we are omnipotent.”
  
  
• “The Holy Ghost is not to us a luxury, but a necessity. We must have the Spirit of God or we live not at all in a spiritual sense.”
  
  
• “Souls are not saved by systems, but by the Spirit. Organizations without the Holy Ghost are windmills without wind. Methods and arrangements without grace are pipes from a dry conduit, lamps without oil. Even the most scriptural forms of church-government and effort, are null and void without the ‘power from on high.’”

Sermon: A Prayer For Revival

• “A church cannot be revived unless God revives it. Not a soul is saved, not a saint is quickened and made to grow except by the work of God.”
  
  
• “A child of God should rise above circumstances and rejoice in God. There is more in God to cheer you than in your circumstances to depress you.”

Sermon: God’s Thoughts of Peace, and Our Expected End

“No, beloved, His thoughts are not of evil. Though the Lord hates your sin, He does not hate you. Though He is the enemy of your follies, He is your own firm friend; yes, He is all the truer friend, because He fights against your faults.”

“I have never yet visited a member of this church who has expressed the least fear in their dying moments ... They pass away as if they were going to a wedding rather than to a tomb — as if it were the most joyful thing that ever happened to them to have reached their expected end. Doubts are all driven away when you see how believers die.”

“The Lord never forgets His own, for He has engraved them upon the palms of His hands. Never at any moment does Jehovah turn His thoughts from His beloved, even though He has the whole universe to rule. He says of His church, ‘I the Lord do keep it; I will water it every moment: lest any hurt it, I will keep it night and day.’”

“Welcome clouds, if showers of mercy are to come of them. God forbid we should always have sunshine, for that would mean drought. Let the clouds come if they bring a blessed rain.”

“Our troubles drive us to our knees. If it had not been for Esau, Jacob had never wrestled at Jabbok. I hope we usually go to our closets of our own accord, but often we are whipped there. Many of the most earnest prayers that ever rise to heaven come from us when we are in bondage under grief.”

“There are several subjects now upon the public mind, concerning which it is wise to say little or

nothing, because it is not easy to decide about them. Upon a certain matter one asks you this question,

and another asks you another question, and it is possible that you have so carefully weighed and measured the arguments both pro and con that you cannot come to a conclusion either way. Your thoughts differ from day to day, and therefore you do not yet know them. You need not be ashamed of this; it shows that you have a just sense of your own imperfect knowledge. A fool soon makes up his mind, because there is so very little of it, but a wise man waits and considers. The case is far otherwise with the only wise God. The Lord is not a man that He should need to hesitate, His infinite mind is made up, and He knows His thoughts. With the Lord there is neither question nor debate, ‘He is in one mind, and none can turn Him.’ His purpose is settled, and He adheres to it. He is resolved to reward them that diligently seek Him, and to honor those that trust in Him. He is resolved to remember His covenant forever, and to keep His promises to those who believe Him. His thought is that the people whom He has formed for Himself shall show forth His praise. The Lord knows them that are His; He knows whom He gave to His Son, and He knows that these shall be His jewels forever and ever. Beloved, when you do not know your own mind, God knows His mind.”

Sermon: God With Us

“Oh, man Christ, how could You bear the Deity within You! We know not how it was, but God knows. Let us adore this hiding of the Almighty in human weakness, this comprehending of the Incomprehensible, this revealing of the Invisible, this localization of the Omnipresent. Alas, I do but babble! What are words when we deal with such an unutterable truth?”

“Do not say, ‘We can do nothing.’ Who are you that can do nothing? God is with you. Do not say, ‘The church is feeble and fallen upon evil times’—no, ‘God is with us.’ We need the courage of those ancient soldiers who were desirous to regard difficulties only as whetstones upon which to sharpen their swords.”

“Whatever is possible or whatever is impossible, Christians can do at God’s command, for God is with us. Do you not see that the word, ‘God with us,’ puts impossibility out of all existence? Hearts that could never be broken will be broken if God is with us.”

Sermon: A Christmas Question

“As well might a gnat seek to drink in the ocean, as a finite creature to comprehend the Eternal God. A God whom we could understand would be no God.”

“So there be many spiritual sleepwalkers in our midst, who think that they are awake. But they are somnambulists, not awake, but men who walk and talk in their sleep.”

“The proof of the Christian is in the living.”

“Man grows from childhood up to manhood naturally; in grace, men grow from manhood down to childhood, and the nearer we come to true childhood, the nearer we come to the image of Christ. For was not Christ called “a child,” even after He had ascended up to heaven? ‘Thy holy child Jesus.’”

“Suppose you should see in tomorrow’s newspaper (although, by the way, if you believed anything you saw there you would probably be mistaken) . . .”

“See the maidens as they dance, and the young men as they make merry. And why is this mirth? Because they are storing the precious fruits of the earth, they are gathering together unto their barns wheat which will soon be consumed. And what, brothers and sisters, have we the bread which endures to eternal life and are we unhappy? Does the worldling rejoice when his corn is increased, and do we not rejoice when, “Unto us a child is born, and unto us a son is given’?”

“What matters your poverty? ‘Unto you a child is born.’ What matters your sickness? ‘Unto you a Son is given.’ What matters your sin? For this child shall take the sin away, and this Son shall wash and make you fit for heaven.”

“How is it that we give so little to Christ who gave Himself for us? How is it that we serve Him so sadly who served us so perfectly? He consecrated Himself wholly, how is it that our consecration is marred and partial? Why are we continually sacrificing to self and not to Him?”

Miscellaneous

“As I hurried forward, with an awful speed, I began to doubt my very existence; I doubted if there were a world, I doubted if there were such a thing as myself. . . . But here the devil foiled himself: for the very extravagance of the doubt, proved its absurdity.”

“You are not Bible readers. You say you have the Bible in your houses; do I think you are such heathens as not to have a Bible? But when did you read it last? How do you know that your spectacles, which you have lost, have not been there for the last three years?”

“When a promise is general, you may take it in its widest possible meaning. Particulars restrain and restrict, but where there are no particulars, then you have unlimited range. ‘I will give you rest’—rest about everything, rest at all times, rest in every part of your nature.”

“Some have fallen into such a condition that they believe nothing, unless, indeed, it should not happen to be in the Bible—and then they will believe it. But if it is in God’s Word, then, of course, they feel it necessary to doubt it.”

“I believe that living in communion with God is the only sure cure for doubt.”

“But remember that the Christ, who invites the erring sinner before conversion, invites the erring believer after conversion.”

“This is the kind of rest that the Lord Jesus Christ gives—rest of the deepest, truest kind—rest which the world cannot give and which the world cannot possibly take away.”

“Now look here, beloved—there is none too much joy in the world. Do not you go about killing any whenever you see it. Rather try to encourage it, and if you see a young Christian happy in believing, and you do not happen to be as cheerful as he is, do not try and take his joy from him. . . . Warn the young believer of all the sin against which he should be on his guard, but do not hold up before him a gloomy view of the Christian life.”

“A hundred years ago, a man went to the Lord Jesus with this promise, ‘I will give you rest,’ and the Lord Jesus gave him rest. Fifty years ago, another man went with this promise, and he said ‘Lord, there it is! You said, “I will give you rest,”’ and the Lord gave him rest. Now tonight take that promise to yourselves; it is just as good as if it had never been fulfilled. I give my neighbor a check; he goes with it to the bank, and gets the cash for it. Now suppose the banker returns that check to me, and I go with it to the bank, and try to cash it again. ‘No,’ they say, ‘we have cashed that check once, and that is done with.’ But you may take God’s check, and go to the Bank of Heaven every day, and every hour in the day, and the check is just as good as if it had never been cashed before. ‘I will give you rest.’ You tried that when you were twenty-one; try it now that you are seventy. When you were forty, in the day of your trouble, you said, ‘Lord, give me rest;’ now that you are eighty, the promise still stands just as good as ever. God’s promises are not like a bundle of old checks that are done with, and sent back to the drawer—they are ever fresh and ever new.”

“Oh, the perfect repose, the unutterable bliss, that will be yours and mine before long. I say, ‘before long,’ for in this great congregation I do not doubt that there are several brothers and sisters who will see the King in His beauty before many weeks are gone. I could wish that it were my lot to go first among you, but if it may not be, will, you shall go on a little ahead, my brothers and my sisters, and we will follow in our turn.”

“I must, however, just remind you that, when Jesus says, ‘I will give you rest,’ He does not mean that He will make you lazy. Lazy people cannot rest—they never know what rest means. There must be labor to give us rest.”

“And he who begins to learn the faith in one way, and then tries to learn it in another way, and then attempts to learn it in yet another way, is more likely to be a skeptic than to be a saint.”

“Whenever the salt is put on the table, let us see in it a lesson to us to season our conversation with thanks, of which salt we cannot use too much.”

“Beloved, our crusty tempers and sour faces will never be evangelists. They may become messengers of Satan, but they will never become helpers of the gospel.”

“We should say of the Lord, ‘Let Him do what seems good to Him, if He will give us health, we will thank Him, if He will send us sickness, we will thank Him. If He indulges us with prosperity or if He tries us with affliction, if the Holy Spirit will but enable us, we will never cease to praise the Lord as long as we live.’”

“To the fullest performance of this duty there must be a subordination of ourselves to the will of God. We must not desire to have our own way; we must be content to say, ‘Not my will, but Yours be done.’ I cannot give thanks to God always for all things till my old self is put down. While self rules, the hungry horseleech is in the heart, and that is fatal to gratitude. Self and discontent are mother and child.”

“If a man is rich, and God has given him a thankful spirit, he cannot be too rich. If he will give thanks to God, he may be worth millions, and they will never hurt him. On the other hand, if a man has learned to give thanks to God, and he becomes poor, he cannot be too poor; he will be able to bear up under the severest poverty. The rich man should learn to find God in all things; the poor man should learn to find all things in God.”

“We ought also to thank God for the mercies which we do not see, as well as for those which are evident. We receive, perhaps, ten times as many mercies which escape our notice as those which we observe—mercies which fly by night on soft wings and bless us while we sleep.”

“It is not in the power of the enemy to injure the men of God when once self is dethroned, and the heart has learned to be resigned to the will of God. O, you are great, you are strong, you are rich, and you are mighty when you have bowed yourselves to the will of the Most High! Stoop that you may conquer! Bow that you may triumph! Yield that you may get the mastery. It is when we are nothing that we are everything—when we are weak that we are strong, it is when we have utterly become annihilated as to self, and God is all in all, it is then that we are filled with all the fullness of God. May the Holy Spirit conduct us into this spirit of perpetual thankfulness.”

“To have the feet taken out of the miry clay, and to feel them set on the rock of ages is a subject for eternal gratitude. But you have not received one spiritual mercy only, beloved brethren—nor two, nor twenty—you have had them strewn along your path in richest profusion. The stars above are not more numerous nor are the sands beneath more innumerable. Every hour, yes, every moment has brought a favor upon its wings. Look downward and give thanks, for you are saved from hell. Look on the right hand and give thanks, for you are enriched with gracious gifts. Look on the left hand and give thanks, for you are shielded from deadly ills. Look above you and give thanks, for heaven awaits you.”

“Nor is it alone for great and eternal benefits, but even for minor and temporary benefits we ought to give thanks. There ought not to be brought into the house a loaf of bread without thanksgiving. Nor should we cast a coal upon the fire without gratitude. We eat like dogs if we sit down to our meals without devoutly blessing God. We live like serpents if we never rise to devout recognition of the Lord’s kindness. We ought not to put on our garments without adoring God, or take them off to rest in our beds without praising Him. Each breath of air should inspire us with thanks, and the blood in our veins should circulate gratitude throughout our system.”

“You have heard, perhaps, of a Puritan who met his son, each one of them traveling some 10 or 12 miles to meet the other. And the son said to his father, ‘Father, I am thankful to God for a very remarkable providence which I have had on my journey here. My horse has stumbled three times with me, and yet I am unhurt.’ The Puritan replied, ‘My dear Son, I have to thank God for an equally remarkable providence on my way to you. For my horse did not once stumble all the way.’ If we happen to be in an accident by railway, we feel so grateful that our limbs are not broken, but should we not be thankful when there is no accident? Is not that the better thing of the two? If you were to fall into poverty, and someone was to restore you to your former position in trade, you would be very grateful. Should you not be grateful that you have not fallen into poverty? Bless God for His unknown benefits. Extol Him for favors which you do not see, always giving thanks to God for all things.”