A Lesson from a Pump by Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 2, 1882

A Lesson from a Pump.

By Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I WAS in Cologne on a very rainy day, and I was looking out for similes and metaphors, as I generally am, but I had nothing on earth to look at in the square of the city but an old pump, and what kind of a simile I could make out of it I could not tell. All traffic seemed suspended, it rained so hard; but I noticed a woman come to the pump with a bucket. Presently I noticed a man come with a bucket, nay, he came with a yoke and two buckets. As I kept on writing and looking out every now and then, I saw the same friend with the buckets and the blue blouse coming to the same pump again. In the course of the morning I think I saw him a dozen times. I thought to myself, "Ah! you do not fetch water for your own house, I am persuaded; you are a water-carrier; you fetch water for lots of people, and that is why you come oftener than anybody else." Now there was a meaning in that at once to my soul, that inasmuch as I had to go to Christ not only for myself, but had been made a water-carrier to carry the water of everlasting life to others, I must come a great deal oftener than anybody else. I am sure it is so. You cannot labor in your Sabbath-school class, dear friends, you cannot take that village station, you cannot act as a deacon in the church so as to glorify God, especially you cannot come fresh to a congregation from Sabbath to Sabbath, year after year, always with something sparkling and fresh, and cheering and refreshing, unless you are constantly going to the Great Source yourself. In proportion as there is a draw upon you, take care that you keep up the supplies.—C. H. Spurgeon.