Charles Spurgeon

The Boy Who Could Not Find Peace

Spurgeon was raised in the kind of household where Calvinistic theology was the air. His father, John Spurgeon, was an Independent (Congregationalist) minister. His grandfather, James Spurgeon, was an Independent minister with a fifty-year pulpit at Stambourne in Essex. Books by Bunyan, Watts, and Doddridge lined the shelves at Stambourne where young Charles spent long stretches of his childhood, and he read them avidly.

The result was a boy who, by ten or eleven, knew the gospel intellectually with a precision most adult Christians never achieve — and who, by twelve or thirteen, had been brought under such conviction of his own sinfulness that he could not sleep. He prayed. He read his Bible. He visited every chapel in his town to hear sermons. He sought peace from every direction, and he could not find it.

This is itself worth pausing on. Here was a boy with the perfect background for an easy conversion — devout family, doctrinal orthodoxy, biblical literacy, every external advantage. And he could not save himself. He could not even, by intellectual conviction alone, transfer his weight from his own efforts onto Christ. His five-year struggle is one of the loudest possible testimonies that conversion is not a matter of correct theology plus willingness to apply it. It is the work of God on a soul that, until the Spirit comes, cannot do for itself the very thing it knows it must do.

The Sunday the Roads Closed

January 6, 1850 was a Sunday. A snowstorm had buried Colchester. Spurgeon was home for the New Year holiday — since August he had been working as an usher at a school over in Newmarket — and the roads were impassable. He could not get to the church his family had told him to attend. He could not get more than a few streets in any direction. He turned down a side street called Artillery Street and saw the door of a small Primitive Methodist chapel — the kind of working-class evangelical Methodist body that the better-born Independents like the Spurgeon family did not normally frequent.

He went in.

He sat in the back. There were maybe twelve or fifteen people in the room, all of them apparently as snowed-out as he was. The regular minister had not made it through the weather. After a delay, a thin, plain-looking working-class man — possibly a shoemaker, possibly a tailor (Spurgeon could never afterward find out who he was) — stood up to take the service. The man was really stupid, Spurgeon later said with characteristic warmth, as you would say. He was obliged to stick to his text, for the simple reason that he had little else to say.

He chose Isaiah 45:22 from the Authorised Version: Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.

The Sentence

The substitute preacher had no real sermon. He could only repeat the verse in different ways, hammering it like a tinker mending a pot. My dear friends, this is a very simple text indeed. It says, “Look.” Now lookin' don't take a deal of pains. It ain't liftin' your foot or your finger; it is just “Look.” Well, a man needn't go to college to learn to look. You may be the biggest fool, and yet you can look. A man needn't be worth a thousand a year to be able to look. Anyone can look; even a child can look.

And then the preacher ran out of things to say about looking, and looked instead. He found the well-dressed, serious boy at the back. Spurgeon remembered the eyes, not a finger: just fixing his eyes on me, as if he knew all my heart.

Young man, you look very miserable.

The words went through him, because they were simply and publicly true. He was miserable. He had been miserable for five years — and in all that time, in a household of ministers where the doctrine was flawless and the shelves were full of Bunyan, no one had ever once said it to his face.

And you always will be miserable — miserable in life, and miserable in death — if you don't obey my text. But if you obey now, this moment, you will be saved. Young man, look to Jesus Christ. Look! Look! Look! You have nothing to do but to look and live!

The thin substitute preacher was, theologically, perfectly correct in the most important way a preacher can be correct. He had given a desperate teenager the one instruction the soul under conviction needs: stop looking at yourself, stop looking at your sin, stop trying to fix yourself — and look at Christ.

And the Spirit, who had been preparing Spurgeon for five years, now did the work of an instant. I saw at once the way of salvation. I know not what else he said — I did not take much notice of it — I was so possessed with that one thought. Like as when the brazen serpent was lifted up, the people only looked and were healed, so it was with me. I had been waiting to do fifty things, but when I heard that word, “Look!” what a charming word it seemed to me! Oh! I looked until I could almost have looked my eyes away.

What Spurgeon Walked Out With

Spurgeon walked out of that chapel changed at the root. He was fifteen. He was baptized by immersion four months later. At sixteen he preached his first sermon, in a cottage at Teversham, having been sent out under the impression that he was merely walking along to keep another young man company. At seventeen he was pastoring the Baptist chapel at Waterbeach. By nineteen he was called to the New Park Street Chapel in London — the once-famous pulpit of John Gill and John Rippon, then in steep decline. By twenty-two he was filling the largest auditoriums in London, and by twenty-six he was preaching weekly to congregations of five and six thousand at the newly built Metropolitan Tabernacle.

The sermons that were taken down in shorthand and printed fill sixty-three volumes — 3,561 of them, the largest published body of sermons in the English language. How many he actually preached was never counted; in his strongest years it ran to something like ten a week. He founded a pastors' college, an orphanage, and sixty-six para-church organizations, and he got a sermon into print every week for thirty-eight years without missing one.

And every time he was asked how it had begun, he told the same story. The snowstorm. The substitute. The verse. The pointing finger. And the look that healed.

Look at What It Took to Get Him Into That Room

Notice what God did to convert Charles Spurgeon. He did not send him to the world's most learned preacher. He did not send him to a famous revival meeting. He did not even send him to his own home church on a normal Sunday. God organized the weather. He buried Colchester in snow. He grounded the regular preacher of a tiny working-class chapel. He nudged a fifteen-year-old onto a side street he had never walked down. He arranged for a thin lay-preacher of marginal education to be pressed into service, sticking helplessly to one verse because he had nothing else to say. And He used that man, that verse, that fixed stare, in that half-empty chapel, to convert a fifteen-year-old nobody had heard of.

This is what sovereignty looks like at the grain of a single soul. Not a decree hovering somewhere above history — a decree with weather in it. And notice the scale of the machinery against the size of the object: a storm across a county, a minister stranded, a stranger pressed into service he had not prepared for, all of it converging on one boy in a back row who had no idea he was the point of the morning. (See our page on the billions of choices argument for what this implies about every conversion that has ever occurred.)

The Five Years Were Not Wasted

Spurgeon's story is the proof that God uses what He pleases to bring His chosen home. The thin substitute could not have produced this conversion through his preaching skill. He had no preaching skill. The verse was not magical. Other people had heard it without conversion. The snowstorm did not save anyone. What saved Spurgeon was the Spirit, working precisely in the moment the Father had appointed, through the means the Father had arranged, on a soul the Father had chosen long before the chapel existed.

And it is the proof that God brings His chosen home even after long preparation. Spurgeon had been seeking peace for five years. He felt those five years were wasted. He thought he should have been converted long before. But they were not wasted. They were five years of ground being broken up — self-trust turned over, sin exposed, every remedy he could invent tried and used up — so that when one sentence finally landed on him, there was nothing left standing in the way of it.

Now be careful here, because there is a way of reading this story that would put you back exactly where Spurgeon spent those five years. Do not go looking for evidence that the weather has been arranged on your behalf. Do not audit the chapel you wandered into, or the conversation you almost missed, or the fact that you are reading this, for signs that you are one of the chosen. That is looking inward again, and it is the precise thing the sentence in that chapel forbade.

Because the command that saved him did not point inward, and it was not addressed to anybody in particular — which is exactly why it reached a boy in a back row that nobody in the room had noticed:

Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.

ISAIAH 45:22, AS HE HEARD IT READ

All the ends of the earth. It does not ask you to establish first that you are the sort of person it was meant for. That thin, half-educated man in the Artillery Street chapel could not have told you whether Spurgeon was elect, and did not try. He only knew where to tell him to look.

Look there.