The great C.H. Spurgeon

We've begun a home group with 3 other families in our neighborhood. We've met a couple of times and it's good. Shawn is taking us through a book titled Twelve Sermons on Prayer by Spurgeon. Last night we tackled the first sermon.

I wanted to encourage you today with some of it:

"Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know." Jeremiah 33:3

"Some of the most learned works in the world smell of the midnight oil; but the most spiritual, and most comforting books and sayings of men usually have a savour about them of prison-damp.
"...God's people have always in their worst condition found out the best of their God."

"call to me" - prayer commanded. We are not asked or recommended to pray, but commanded for the health of our soul. A hospital stands with the understanding that those who need it will enter. There is no command to go and be healed. So why do we need a command from God to pray? Because we are very subject to fits of worldliness: we don't forget to eat, we don't forget to pay bills (well, maybe sometimes), we don't forget to go to bed. We are very dilligent in matters of money but spend few moments wrestling with God.

God says "call to me" because He knows we will forget to "call to Him".

When we are burdened, have sinned too much and Satan has us believing we cannot possibly enter into His presence, God's command insists that at all times under all conditions, we drag ourselves if necessary to the throne of grace and "though my words fail me and my heart itself will wander, yet I will still stammer out the wishes of my hungering soul and say, 'O God, at least teach me to pray and help me to prevail with Thee.'

Unbelief also dampens our desire to pray. But still it is commanded! Call to me in every circumstance with every thought be it simple, complicated, worldly, or just too big. God's command is for a Christian at all times for all things, to pray.

So because He commands us many times in Scripture, we know it is sure and lasting. Let us buffet these ol' bodies to answer His command and bow before the One who loves us and will see to the perfecting of our souls through much time spent in our closet communing with Him.

I paraphrased and added much to this but I believe you will see the great truth Spurgeon is teaching. There are two more points: "I will answer you" - an answer promised; and "and tell you great and unsearchable things that you do not know." -encouragement to faith. I will hopefully share his insight into those as well on another day.

sim