The Prince of Preachers Charles
Haddon Spurgeon has been called England's greatest contribution
to the spread of the gospel in the
19th century.
One of his contemporaries said that the chief
secret of Spurgeon's attractiveness was the fact that
in every sermon, no matter what the text
or the occasion, he explained the way of
salvation in simple terms.
Spurgeon's messages remain one of the great treasure
houses of Christian literature, still bringing the light
of the gospel and the comfort of the
scriptures to hungry souls long after the preacher
has passed into glory.
This is Charles Kelsch inviting you to listen
to a message from the Prince of Preachers.
C.
H.
Spurgeon preached this message on October 10th, 1858,
in the Music Hall of the Royal Surrey
Gardens.
It is entitled, Self-Examination.
The text is found in 2 Corinthians chapter
13 and verse 5.
Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith.
Prove your own selves.
Know ye not your own selves, how that
Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be
reprobates?
I had intended to address you this morning
from the third title given to our blessed
Redeemer, in the verse we have considered twice
before, Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God.
But owing to excruciating pain and continual sickness,
I have been unable to gather my thoughts
together, and therefore I feel constrained to address
you on a subject which has often been
upon my heart, and not unfrequently upon my
lips, and concerning which, I dare say, I
have admonished a very large proportion of this
audience before.
You will find the text in the thirteenth
chapter of the second epistle to the Corinthians
at the fifth verse.
Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith.
Prove your own selves.
Know ye not your own selves, how that
Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be
reprobates?
A solemn text that we cannot preach too
impressively or too frequently meditate.
The Corinthians were the critics of the Apostles'
age.
They took to themselves a great credit for
skill in learning and in language, and as
most men do who are wise in their
own esteem, they made a wrong use of
their wisdom and learning.
They began to criticize the Apostle Paul.
They criticized his style.
His letters, say they, are weighty and powerful,
but his bodily presence is weak and his
speech contemptible.
Nay, not content with that, they went so
far as to deny his apostleship, and for
once in his life the Apostle Paul found
himself compelled to become a fool in glorying,
for, says he, ye have compelled me, for
I ought to have been commended of you,
for in nothing am I behind the very
chiefest apostles, though I be nothing.
The Apostle wrote two letters to them.
In both he is compelled to upbraid them
while he defends himself, and when he had
fully disarmed his opponents and wrested the sword
of their criticism out of their hands, he
pointed it at their own breasts and said,
Examine yourselves.
You have disputed my doctrine.
Examine whether ye be in the faith.
You have made me prove my apostleship.
Prove your own selves.
Use the powers which you have been so
wrongfully exercising upon me for a little season
upon your own characters.
And now, my dear friends, the fault of
the Corinthians is the fault of the present
age.
Let not any one of you, as he
goeth out of the house of God, say
to his neighbor, How did you like the
preacher?
What did you think of the sermon this
morning?
Is that the question you should ask as
you retire from God's house?
Do you come here to judge God's servants?
I know it is but a small thing
unto us to be judged of man's judgment,
for our judgment is of the Lord our
God.
To our own master we shall stand or
fall.
But, O men, ye should ask a question
more profitable unto yourselves than this.
Ye should say, Did not such and such
a speech strike me?
Did not that exactly consort with my condition?
Was that not a rebuke that I deserve,
a word of reproof or of exhortation?
Let me take unto myself that which I
have heard, and let me not judge the
preacher, for he is God's messenger to my
soul.
I came up here to be judged of
God's word, and not to judge God's word
myself.
But since there is in all our hearts
a great backwardness to self-examination, I shall
lay out myself for a few moments this
morning, earnestly to exhort myself and all of
you to examine ourselves whether we be in
the faith.
First, I shall expound my text.
Secondly, I shall enforce it.
And thirdly, I shall try and help you
to carry it into practice here and on
the spot.
First, I shall expound my text.
Though in truth it needs no exposition, for
it is very simple, yet by studying it
and pondering it our hearts may become more
deeply affected with its touching appeal.
Examine yourselves.
Who does not understand that word?
And yet by a few suggestions you may
know its meaning more perfectly.
Examine, that is a scholastic idea.
A boy has been to school a certain
time, and his master puts him through his
paces, questions him to see whether he has
made any progress, whether he knows anything.
Christian, catechize your heart.
Question it to see whether it has been
growing in grace.
Question it to see if it knows anything
of vital godliness or not.
Examine it.
Pass your heart through a stern examination as
to what it does know and what it
does not know by the teaching of the
Holy Spirit.
Again, it is a military idea.
Examine yourselves, or renew yourselves.
Go through the rank and file of your
actions and examine all your motives.
Just as the captain on review day is
not content with merely surveying the men from
a distance, but must look at all their
accoutrements, so do you look well to yourselves.
Examine yourselves with the most scrupulous care.
And once again, this is a legal idea.
Examine yourselves.
You have seen the witness in the box
when the lawyer has been examining him, or,
as we have it, cross-examining him.
Now Mark, never was there a rogue less
trustworthy or more deceitful than your own heart.
And as when you are cross-examining a
dishonest person, one that hath buy-ins to
serve, you set traps for him to try
and find him out in a lie, so
do with your own heart.
Question it backward and forward, this way and
that way.
For if there be a loophole for escape,
if there be any pretense for self-deception,
rest assured your treacherous heart will be ready
enough to avail itself of it.
And yet once more, this is a traveler's
idea.
I find in the original it has this
meaning.
Go right through yourselves.
As a traveler, if he has to write
a book upon a country, he is not
content to go round its borders merely, but
goes, as it were, from Dan to Beersheba,
right through the country.
He climbs the hilltop, where he bathes his
forehead in the sunshine.
He goes down into the deep valleys, where
he can only see the blue sky like
a strip between the lofty summits of the
mountains.
He is not content to gaze upon the
broad river unless he trace it to the
spring whence it rises.
He will not be satisfied with viewing the
products of the surface of the earth, but
he must discover the minerals that lie within
its bowels.
Now, do the same with your heart.
Examine yourselves.
Go right through yourselves from the beginning to
the end.
Stand not only on the mountains of your
public character, but go into the deep valleys
of your private life.
Be not content to sail on the broad
river of your outward actions, but go follow
back the narrow rill till you discover the
secret motive.
Look not only at your performance, which is
but the product of the soil, but dig
into your heart and examine the vital principle.
Examine yourselves.
This is a very big word, a word
that needs thinking over, and I am afraid
there be very few, if any of us,
who ever come up to the full weight
of this solemn exhortation.
Examine yourselves.
There is another word you will see a
little further on, if you will kindly look
at the text.
Prove your own selves.
That means more than self-examination.
Let me try to show you the difference
between the two.
A man is about to buy a horse.
He examines it.
He looks at it.
He thinks that possibly he may find out
some flaw.
Therefore, he carefully examines it.
But after he has examined it, if he
be a prudent man, he says to the
person of whom he is about to buy,
I must prove this horse.
Will you let me have it for a
week, for a month, or for some given
time, that I may prove the animal before
I actually invest in him?
You see, there is more in proof than
in examination.
It is a deeper word, and goes to
the very root and quick of the matter.
I saw but yesterday an illustration of this.
A ship, before she is launched, is examined.
When launched, she is carefully looked at, and
yet before she is allowed to go out
far at sea, she takes a trial trip.
She is proved and tried, and when she
has ropted a little, and it has been
discovered that she will obey the helm, that
the engines will work correctly, and that all
is in right order, she goes out on
her long voyages.
Now prove yourselves.
Do not merely sit in your closet and
look at yourselves alone, but go out into
this busy world and see what kind of
piety you have.
Remember, many a man's religion will stand examination
that will not stand proof.
We may sit at home and look at
our religion and say, Well, I think this
will do.
It is like cotton prints that you can
buy in many shops.
They are warranted fast colors, and so they
seem when you look at them, but they
are not washable when you get them home.
There is many a man's religion like that.
It is good enough to look at, and
it has got the warranted stamp upon it.
But when it comes out into actual daily
life, the colors soon begin to run, and
the man discovers that the thing was not
what he took it to be.
You know, in Scripture we have an account
of certain very foolish men that would not
go to a great supper, but, foolish as
they were, there was one of them who
said, I have bought a yoke of oxen,
and I go to prove them.
Thus he had at least worldly wisdom, enough
to prove his oxen.
So do you prove yourselves.
Try to plow in the furrows of duty.
See whether you can be accustomed to the
yoke of gospel servitude.
Be not ashamed to put yourself through your
paces.
Try yourself in the furnace of daily life,
lest happily the mere examination of the chamber
should detect you to be a cheat, and
you should after all prove to be a
castaway.
Examine yourselves.
Prove your own selves.
There is a sentence which I omitted, namely
this one.
Examine yourselves whether ye be in the faith.
Oh, says one, you may examine me whether
I am in the faith.
I am an orthodox Christian, fully up to
the standard, good, genuine weight.
There is no fear whatever of my coming
up to the mark and going a little
beyond it too.
Ah, but my friend, that is not the
question.
I would have you orthodox, for a man
who is heterodox in his opinions will most
likely be heterodox in his actions.
But the question now is not whether you
believe the truth, but whether you are in
the truth.
Just let me give you an illustration of
what I mean.
There is the ark, and a number of
men around it.
Ah, says one, I believe that ark will
swim.
Oh, says another, I believe that ark is
made of gopher wood and is strong from
stem to stern.
I am quite sure that ark will float,
come what may.
I am a firm believer in that ark.
Ay, but when the rain descended and the
flood came, it was not believing the ark
as a matter of fact.
It was being in the ark that saved
men, and only those that were in it
escaped in that dread day of deluge.
So there may be some of you that
say of the gospel of Christ, I believe
it to be of a particular character.
And you may be quite correct in your
judgment.
You may say, I think it to be
that which honors God and casts down the
pride of man.
Herein, too, you may think you quite right.
But, Mark, it is not having an orthodox
faith.
It is being in the faith, being in
Christ, taking refuge in Him as in the
ark.
For he that only has the faith as
a thing of extra, and without being in
the faith, shall perish in the day of
God's anger.
But he that lives by faith, he who
feels that faith operates upon him and is
to him a living principle, he who realizes
that faith is his dwelling place, that there
he can abide, that it is the very
atmosphere he breathes and the very girdle of
his loins to strengthen him, such a man
is in the faith.
But let me repeat again.
All the orthodoxy in the world, apart from
its effect upon the heart as a vital
principle, will not save a man.
Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith.
Prove your own selves.
Know ye not your own selves?
If you do not, you have neglected your
proper study.
What avails all else that you do know,
if you know not yourself?
You have been roaming abroad while the richest
treasure was lying at home.
You have been busying yourself with irrelevant affairs
while the main business has been neglected and
ruined.
Know ye not your own selves?
And especially know ye not this fact, that
Jesus Christ must be in your heart, formed
and living there, or else ye are reprobates.
That is, ye are worthless persons, vain pretenders,
spurious professors.
Your religion is but a vanity and a
show.
Reprobate silver shall men call you, because the
Lord hath rejected you.
Now, what is it to have Jesus Christ
in you?
The Roman Catholic hangs the cross on his
bosom.
The true Christian carries the cross in his
heart.
And a cross inside the heart, my friends,
is one of the sweetest cures for a
cross on the back.
If you have a cross in your heart,
Christ crucified in you, the hope of glory,
all the cross of this world's troubles will
seem to you light enough, and you will
easily be able to sustain it.
Christ in the heart means Christ believed in,
Christ beloved, Christ trusted, Christ espoused, Christ communed
with, Christ as our daily food, and ourselves
as the temple and palace wherein Jesus Christ
daily walks.
Ah, there are many here that are total
strangers to the meaning of this phrase.
They do not know what it is to
have Jesus Christ in them.
Though ye know a little about Christ on
Calvary, ye know nothing about Christ in the
heart.
Now remember that Christ on Calvary will save
no man unless Christ be in the heart.
The Son of Mary, born in the manger,
will not save a soul unless He be
also born in your hearts and live there,
your joy, your strength, and your consolation.
Know ye not your own selves?
How that Jesus Christ is in you, except
ye be reprobates?
The second point was to enforce the text.
I have proved it.
Now I am to enforce it.
And here is the tug of war.
May the Spirit of the living God drive
the sword in up to its very hilt
this morning, that now the power of God
may be felt in every heart searching and
trying the reins.
Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith.
Examine yourselves first, because it is a matter
of the very highest importance.
Small tradesmen may take coppers over the counter
without much examination.
But when it comes to gold, they will
ring it well, for they could not afford
to lose a sovereign out of their little
gains.
And if it comes to a five-pound
note, there is an anxious holding it up
to the window to see if the watermark
be there and whether all be correct, for
it might be ruined to the man if
he lost a sum to him so large.
Ah, but merchants and tradesmen, if ye be
deceived in the matter of your own souls,
ye are deceived indeed.
Look well to the title deeds of your
estate.
Look well to your life policies and to
all the business that you do.
But remember, all the gold and silver you
have are but as the rack and scum
of the furnace compared with the matter now
in hand.
It is your soul, your own soul, your
never-dying soul.
Will you risk that?
In times of panic, men will scarcely trust
their fellows.
I would to God there was a panic
this day so that no man would trust
himself.
Ye may trust your fellows far more safely
than ye may trust yourselves.
Will you think, men and brethren, what your
soul is?
The life is more than meat and the
body than raiment.
But the soul is as much more to
be accounted of than the body, as the
body is more important than the raiment.
Here are my clothes.
Let me be robbed of my garments.
If my body be secure, what does it
matter?
And as for my body, what is it
after all but the rag that enshrines and
covers my soul?
Let that be sick.
Let that become like a worn-out vesture.
I can afford to lose my body.
But, O God, I cannot afford to have
my soul cast into hell.
What a frightful hazard is that which you
and I are running if we do not
examine ourselves.
It is an everlasting hazard.
It is a hazard of heaven or hell,
of God's eternal favor or of His everlasting
curse.
Well might the apostles say, Examine yourselves.
Again, examine yourselves, because if you make a
mistake, ye can never rectify it except in
this world.
A bankrupt may have lost a fortune once
and yet may make another.
But make bankruptcy, spiritual bankruptcy in this life,
and you will never have an opportunity to
trade again for heaven.
A great general may lose one battle, but
with skill and courage he may retrieve his
honor by winning another.
But get defeated in the battle of this
life, and you can no more gird on
your armor.
You are defeated forever.
The day is lost, and there is no
hope of your being able to gain it
again or so much as to make the
attempt.
Now or never, man, remember that.
Thy soul's eternal state hangs on the turn
of today.
Loiter thy time away, waste thine abilities, take
thy religion at second hand of thy priest,
of thy minister, or of thy friend, and
in the next world thou shalt everlastingly rue
the error, for thou shalt have no hope
of amending it.
Fixed is their eternal state.
Could man repent?
Tis then too late.
There are no acts of pardon past in
the cold grave to which we haste.
But darkness, death, and long despair reign in
eternal silence there.
Examine yourselves again, because many have been mistaken.
That is a matter which I will undertake
to affirm upon my own authority, certain that
each one of you can confirm it by
your own observation.
How many in this world think themselves to
be godly when they are not?
You have in the circle of your own
friends persons making a profession of whom you
often stand in astonishment and wonder how they
dare to do it.
Friend, if others have been mistaken, may not
you be?
If some here and there fall into an
error, may not you also do the same?
Are you better than they?
No, in no wise.
You may be mistaken also.
Methinks I see the rocks on which many
souls have been lost, the rocks of presumption,
and the siren song of self-confidence entices
you unto those rocks this morning.
Stay, Mariner, stay, I beseech thee.
Let yon bleached bones keep thee back.
Many have been lost.
Many are lost now and are wailing at
this present hour their everlasting ruin, and their
loss is to be traced to nothing more
than this, that they never examine themselves whether
they were in the faith.
And here let me appeal to each person
now present.
Do not tell me that you are an
old church member.
I am glad to hear it.
But still I beseech you, examine yourself, for
a man may be a professor of religion
thirty or forty years, and yet there may
come a trial day when his religion shall
snap after all and prove to be a
rotten bough of the forest.
Tell me not you are a deacon, that
you may be, and yet you may be
damnably deceived.
Ay, and whisper not to me that you
are a minister.
My brethren in the ministry, we may lay
aside our cassocks to wear belts of flame
in hell.
We may go from our pulpit, having preached
to others what we never knew ourselves, and
have to join the everlasting wailings of souls
we have helped to delude.
May God save us from such a doom
as that.
But let no man fold his arms and
say, I need not to examine myself, for
there is not a man here or anywhere
who has not good cause to test and
try himself today.
Furthermore, examine yourselves, because God will examine you.
In the hand of God there is the
scale and the balance.
You shall not be taken into heaven for
what you profess to be, but you shall
be weighed, every one of you put into
the scale.
What a moment will that be with me
and with you when we are in God's
great scale!
Surely were it not for faith in the
Lord Jesus Christ and for a certainty that
we shall be clothed in His righteousness at
last, we might all tremble at the thought
of ever being there, lest we should have
to come out of the scale with this
verdict, thou art weighed in the balances and
art found wanting.
God will not take His gold and silver
by appearance, but every vessel must be purified
in the fire.
We must each one of us pass through
a most searching test and scrutiny.
Beloved, if our hearts condemn us, how much
more shall God condemn us?
If we are afraid to examine ourselves, what
cause have we to tremble at the thought
of the dread searching of God?
Some of you feel that you are condemned
this very day by a poor creature like
myself.
How much more, then, shall you be condemned
when God in thunder-robed shall summon you
and all your fellows to the last infallible
judgment?
Oh, may God help us now to examine
ourselves!
And I have yet one more reason to
give.
Examine yourselves, my dear friends, because if you
are in doubt now, the speediest way to
get rid of your doubts and fears is
by self-examination.
I believe that many persons are always doubting
their eternal condition because they do not examine
themselves.
Self-examination is the safest cure for one
half the doubts and fears that vex God's
people.
Look at the captain over yonder.
He is in his ship, and he says
to the sailors, You must sail very warily
and carefully and be upon your watch, for
to tell you the truth, I do not
know where I am.
I do not exactly know my latitude and
longitude.
And there may be rocks very close ahead,
and we may soon have the ship broken
up.
He goes down into the cabin.
He searches the chart.
He takes an inspection of the heavens.
He comes up again, and he says, Hoist
every sail, and go along as merrily as
you please.
I have discovered where we are.
The water is deep, and there is a
wide sea-room.
There is no need for you to be
in any trouble.
Searching has satisfied me.
And how happy will it be with you
if, after having searched yourself, you can say,
I know in whom I have believed and
am persuaded that he is able to keep
that which I have committed unto him.
Why, then, you will go along merrily and
joyfully because the search has had a good
result.
And what if it should have a bad
result?
Better that you should find it out now
than find it out too late.
One of the prayers I often pray and
desire to pray so long as I live
is this.
Lord, let me know the worst of my
case.
If I have been living in a false
comfort, Lord, rend it away.
Let me know just what I am and
where I am.
And rather let me think too harshly of
my condition before Thee than to think too
securely and so be ruined by presumption.
May that be a prayer of each heart.
And be heard in heaven.
And now, how are you to search yourselves?
I am to try and help you, though
it must be very briefly.
First, if you would examine yourselves.
Begin with your public life.
Are you dishonest?
Can you thieve?
Can you swear?
Are you given to drunkenness, uncleanness, blasphemy, taking
God's name in vain and violation of His
holy day?
Make short work with yourself.
There will be no need to go into
any further tests.
He that doeth these things hath no inheritance
in the kingdom of God.
You are reprobate.
The wrath of God abideth on you.
Your state is fearful.
You are accursed now, and except you repent,
you must be accursed forever.
And yet, Christian, despite thy many sins, canst
thou say, By the grace of God I
am what I am.
But I seek to live a righteous, godly,
and sober life in the midst of a
crooked and perverse generation.
Remember, Professor, by thy works thou shalt be
judged at last.
Thy works cannot save thee, but they can
prove that thou art saved.
Or if they be evil works, they can
prove that thou art not saved at all.
And here I must say every one of
us has good cause to tremble, for our
outward acts are not what we would have
them to be.
Let us go to our houses and fall
upon our faces and cry again, God, be
merciful to me, a sinner!
And let us seek for more grace, that
henceforth our lives may be more consistent and
more in accordance with the Spirit of Christ.
Again, another set of tests.
Private tests.
How about your private life?
Do you live without prayer, without searching the
Scriptures?
Do you live without thoughts of God?
Can you live as an habitual stranger to
the Most High, having no love to Him
and no fear of Him?
If so, I make short work of the
matter.
You are in the gall of bitterness and
in the bonds of iniquity.
But if thou art right at heart, thou
wilt be able to say, I could not
live without prayer.
I have to weep over my prayers, but
still I should weep ten times more if
I did not pray.
I do love God's word.
It is my meditation all the day.
I love His people.
I love His house.
And I can say that my hands are
often lifted upwards towards Him.
And when my heart is busy with His
world affairs, it is often going up to
His throne.
A good sign, Christian.
A good sign for thee.
If thou canst go through this test, thou
mayst hope that all is well.
But go a little deeper.
Hast thou ever wept over thy lost condition?
Hast thou ever bemoaned thy lost estate before
God?
Say, hast thou ever tried to save thyself
and found it a failure?
And hast thou been driven to rely simply,
wholly and entirely on Christ?
If so, then thou hast passed the test
well enough.
And hast thou now faith in Christ, a
faith that makes thee love Him, a faith
that enables thee to trust Him in the
darkest hour?
Canst thou say of a truth that thou
hast a secret affection towards the Most High,
that thou lovest His Son, that thy desire
is after His ways, that thou feelest the
influence of the Divine Spirit and seekest every
day to experience the fellowship of the Holy
Spirit more and more?
And lastly, canst thou say that Jesus Christ
is in thee?
If not, thou art reprobate.
Sharp though that word be, thou art a
reprobate.
But if Jesus Christ be in thy heart,
though thy heart sometimes be so dark that
thou canst scarcely tell He is there, yet
thou art accepted in the Beloved, and thou
mayest rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of
glory.
This message, Self-Examination, was preached by Charles
Haddon Spurgeon on October 10, 1858.
This is Charles Kelsch inviting you to join
me again for another message from the Prince
of Preachers.