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 Storm

January 6, 1850 was a Sunday. A snowstorm had buried Colchester, the Essex town where Spurgeon was then attending school. 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 great deal of pain. 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 look. Anyone can look; even a child can look.

And then the preacher noticed the well-dressed serious teenager in the back, and pointed straight at him.

Young man, you look very miserable.

Spurgeon later said this was the most penetrating sentence he had ever heard, because the man had read his face exactly. He was miserable. He had been miserable for five years.

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. By sixteen he was preaching in a small 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.

Over the next thirty years he would preach more than 3,500 sermons, all of them taken down in shorthand and published; he would found a pastors' college, an orphanage, sixty-six para-church organizations; he would publish his weekly sermon every week without missing one for thirty-eight years; he would become the most quoted Christian preacher in the English language since the apostle Paul.

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.

Why The Story Is Designed

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 pointing finger, in that empty chapel, to convert one of the great gospel voices of human history.

This is what sovereignty looks like operating at the granular level of a single soul. It is not abstract. It involves the snowfall on a January morning. It involves which substitute showed up. It involves which side street caught a teenager's eye. The God who chose Spurgeon before the foundation of the world organized everything, including the weather, to make sure he was in that exact chapel at that exact moment to hear that exact verse from that exact mouth — and not a moment later. (See our page on the billions of choices argument for what this implies about every conversion that has ever occurred.)

What His Story Proves

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 the five years were not wasted. They were the Spirit's patient hammering, breaking up self-trust, exposing sin, exhausting his every effort, until the soil was so prepared that one verse from one stupid (his word) lay-preacher in a snowstorm could make him an oak of righteousness for the whole 19th century to lean against.

If God is willing to organize the weather for one boy in Colchester, He is organizing it for you, too. The chapel you walked into by accident. The conversation that you almost did not have. The book you almost did not pick up. The page you are reading right now. Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth. The Spirit who told a Methodist substitute to point at Spurgeon is pointing now.