Hold to the Colossal Gospel
THERE is food for thought in what Spurgeon said in a recent sermon delivered while he was suffering great bodily pain: “When a man gets to cutting down sin, paring down depravity and making little of future punishment, let him no longer preach to you. Some modern divines whittle away the gospel to the small end of nothing. They make our divine Lord to be a sort of blessed nobody; they bring down salvation to mere salvability, make certainties into probabilities, and treat verities as mere opinions. When you see a preacher making the gospel small by degrees and miserably less, till there is not enough of it left to make soup for a sick grasshopper, get you gone. . . . As for me, I believe in the colossal; a need deep as hell and grace as high as heaven. I believe in a pit that is bottomless and in a heaven that is topless. I believe in an infinite God and an infinite atonement, infinite love and mercy; an everlasting covenant ordered in all things and sure, of which the substance and the reality is an infinite Christ. Christ is all; Christ is unspeakable, the speakable gift of God. Hold to that, or you will not thank God as you ought.” Then, speaking of thankfulness, he added: “I have known what it is to thank God with all my heart for being able to move my limbs and turn in bed. Perhaps you have enjoyed perfect health; do you thank Him for that? To be out of the hospital, to be out of the lunatic asylum, to be out of prison, to be out of hell, do we ever glorify God for these things?”