Reading Biographies: Spurgeon

I am, supposedly, reading Arnold Dallimore’s Spurgeon along with Tim Challies and others. Last week was the first week reading this biography and the assignment was to read the first two chapters.

I read them on schedule—honest—but I couldn’t find time to post on what I read until now. What’s more, I wasn’t sure what I should be putting up in response to each week’s reading. Simply summarizing chapters in a biography seemed pointless. So here’s my plan: Each week I’ll choose something I think is interesting from that  week’s reading, quote it for you, and make a few comments.

These first two chapters tell us about Charles Spurgeon’s childhood and his conversion. Spurgeon, we’re told, experienced many years of “long and bitter conviction of sin” before he was converted at age 15.

[T]hroughout several boyhood years, he was constantly conscious of the universal requirements of God’s law. “Wherever I went,” he says, “it had a demand upon my thoughts, upon my words, upon my rising, upon my resting.” And amidst his struggles to overcome that dreadful realization he came face to face with its kindred truth, the spirituality of the law. Although he had never committed the sins of the flesh he felt themselves guilty of them in the spirit, and he cried out, “What hope had I of eluding, such a law as this, which every way surrounded me with an atmosphere from which I could not possibly escape.”

Frequently, upon awakening after a troubled night, he took up such books as Alliene’s Admonition to Unconverted Sinners and Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted. But the works that had been so helpful to others only enforced what he already knew—that he was lost and needed to be saved. They left him with a bitter longing to know how the great salvation was to be received, and he remained seeking and suffering.

These years of terrible conviction—almost to the point of despair—prepared him to be truly converted when he finally heard a simple sermon that proclaimed the gospel.

Since reading this account, I’ve been thinking of children and conviction of sin. I know that I experienced  a rather deep conviction before I responded to the gospel call when I was a little girl. Not for years, like Charles Spurgeon; after all, I was only five years old. But I knew that I was in big trouble with God and there was nothing I could do to make things better. And it wasn’t just a passing thought, but something I stewed over enough that I remember it. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was a necessary step to finding the Saviour.

When my own children were very young, I think I did a good job of presenting God as loving father to them, but that I was too cautious in presenting him as judge. My natural inclination was to protect them from the difficult time I’d experienced as a little girl, fretting over my sin and my “God problem.” It was foolish of me to think this way, especially since I also knew from my own past the importance of conviction of sin as a necessary step toward knowing God as saviour. God loves you isn’t the whole story, and even young kids need to know the whole story.

Unfortunately, Charles Spurgeon was troubled for far too long before someone told him that he would be saved if he trusted Christ. He’d been missing part of the story, too, and he’d suffered for it. Still, he says, “it was, no doubt, all wisely ordered….” And Dallimore tells us that

the sufferering through which he had passed … had a lasting effect upon him. A recognition of the awful evil of sin was deeply ingraned upon his mind and made him loathe iniquity and love all that was holy. The failure of preachers he had heard to present the gospel, and to do so in a plain, direct manner, caused him throughout his whole ministry to tell sinners in every sermon and in a most forthright and understandable way how to be saved.

So yes, it was difficult for him—and for much of it, he was just a young boy—but at the same time it was all wisely ordered to produce good fruit.