THE AMUSEMENT QUESTION by Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 3, 1880

THE AMUSEMENT QUESTION.

By Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I WOULD to God we were on the Lord's side in view of the sinful amusements which appear to have such charms for many that even Christian people go quite as far as they should in reference to them. When they had bowed before this golden calf they "rose up to play," and very pretty play it was. It does not bear explanation. There is about the world a good deal of this "playing." Beware, I pray you, of every amusement that prevents your redeeming the time, or tends to pollute the mind. There are recreations of a healthy, manly, refreshing kind, but those which are of no possible service to you are unprofitable. The same spirit which made the Puritan refuse to reverence the so-called holy days and holy things of superstition led him to so reverence God and his sacred law that he would not join in the debasing amusements of the period, which were, indeed, so gross as a rule that even irreligious people would not in those times endure them. We have somewhat of the same protest to bear, and we must not flinch from it. We have better joys than the wanton and the foolish can bring to us. We say of a pastime—if this is pure and clean, if this is health-giving to the body, or restful and invigorating to the mind, we are not led by an old-fashioned whim, to denounce it, and we do not denounce it; but if about it there is a taint of vice or a temptation that way, or if it be mere folly, we cannot endure it. We venture not where Jesus could not have gone. We would not go where we should be afraid to die, or should tremble to hear the trumpet announcing the coming of the Lord. Stern teaching this. Are you enough on the Lord's side to hear it? I pray God to put back bones into modern professors. Every other part of their bodies seems to grow firm except their spinal column, which remains soft and easily distorted. We want to be made resolute and faithful on the Lord's side. "Oh," says one, "these are small points." Yes, but I want you to be like the Spartan who painted on his shield a fly. "Your escutcheon is very small," said one. "True," he said, "but I hold it very close to the enemy." If our points of conscience seem to be small, so much the more need that we hold them in the very face of those who think little of the things of God. A small point where God is involved is a great matter. Trifling with small things leads to trifling with great things.—Spurgeon.