Compel Them to Come In I | Behold Your God Podcast

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00:09

Welcome to the Beholder God podcast. I'm Teddy James, content producer for Media Grazie. Again, this week, not in John's office.

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So if it looks a little different, if it sounds a little different as it has in previous episodes, that's why.

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We will be getting back into John's office in a few weeks. In fact, in three weeks, we'll be back with John, but this week we start a new series and this is with Jeremy Walker.

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Now, if you've listened to Media Grazie, if you've seen our films, our studies, you're familiar with Jeremy.

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He's been a contributor to Puritan, to Weight of Majesty. He's the host and narrator of Through the

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Ives of Spurgeon. He's also a contributor to our latest project on the church with Jeff Johnson.

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But we got a few reasons that we wanted to bring Jeremy on today, but Jeremy, first off, I just want to say thanks for taking some time and getting on the podcast with us.

01:01

Thank you, TJ. It's a pleasure to be with you. Absolutely. So you are also the author.

01:07

Well, before we get into your books, I want to get into your podcast. So it's the Word in Season podcast.

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It's a daily devotional thought. Tell our, tell the Behold Your God listeners a little bit about that and how it got started.

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Well, the Word in Season series began at the beginning of the first lockdown in the

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UK. I'm the pastor of a church in Crawley in West Sussex, in the Southeast of England, Maiden Bower Baptist Church.

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And one of the challenges I faced trying to pastor God's people when we were necessarily at a distance from one another was how

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I could encourage and assist them and exhort them without being able to see them face to face.

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And so I did a couple of five minute devotionals, recorded them on a phone, slumped in my chair, looking really, looking a mess.

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And a few friends, including yourselves there at Media Gratia, they picked those up and I was,

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I kept doing them. And then eventually I was asked if I would maybe continue doing those.

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So, so far we've been doing them all through the first lockdown, post lockdown. Here in the

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UK, we're actually about to go into another lockdown of about a month. So I'm continuing to do those.

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My aim will be to try and complete a full year, but they are really just five minute encouragements, exhortations, instructions intended to give some help to God's people, and perhaps to challenge those who are not yet among God's people, so that during whatever season of life we might be in, the word of God is a blessing to us.

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Yeah. And they are just incredibly warm, incredibly sweet. So if you haven't listened to A Word in Season, let me just encourage you.

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It is everywhere that the Behold Your God podcast is, including YouTube, including Facebook.

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So you can get it anywhere that you like to listen to podcasts or watch videos and they are, they will warm your heart toward Christ.

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Now we've got the podcast. There's one other thing that you do that I'd like to bring up, and that is that you are an author.

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So you've written, latest book is on Andrew Fuller, On the Side of God. Is that the right name?

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Yes. On the Side of God, the Life and Labours of Andrew Fuller. Yeah. And that is published by our friends at Free Grace Press.

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So we'll, we'll put a link to that down in the description of the podcast and of the video. But you also have a book called

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The Broken Hearted Evangelist. And as a church, we went through that book and read it and, and I found it again, incredibly warm, incredibly helpful.

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And I think that that kind of, it ties in well with what we want to talk about today, because we wanted to have you on the podcast for a long time.

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And as we were kind of talking and preparing to get you on, you really wanted to walk through a particular sermon by Charles Spurgeon.

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And so, and it is very evangelistic now with Thanksgiving season and with Christmas season and the holiday season approaching us, we're going to be spending a lot of time with family.

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Some of the family will be believers and some of them may not. So Jeremy and I wanted to take three episodes, walk through this particular sermon by Charles Spurgeon, because it is very evangelistic and it's very helpful to think through how can we present the gospel to those we love most.

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And so Jeremy, really quick, can you just kind of give us the context and introduce this whole sermon to us?

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Yes, certainly. Thanks. So Charles Spurgeon, as many of you may know, was a 19th century pastor and preacher.

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He was born in 1834, spent his early years in Essex, in a number of small towns and villages, was converted in his mid -teens and very quickly began to preach the word of God.

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He was a phenomenally gifted man, but he was also a man who'd known the marvelous grace of God and had been gripped by it in a very powerful way.

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And then not long after he'd begun preaching in a little place called Water Beach, just outside the city of Cambridge, he was called then to London and began to pastor what was called the

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New Park Street Church, a church with a long particular Baptist heritage.

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Now it wasn't long into that before the Lord was really pleased to start blessing his ministry to employ those marvelous gifts.

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But Spurgeon, who was any number of things, pastor, preacher, author, evangelist, philanthropist, reformer, his heart was in preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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And the year 1858 into 1859 was a season of unusual blessing.

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And so when TJ and I, when you and I began to discuss what we could do, my mind went to that particular season and to some of the very powerful preaching that Spurgeon did, appealing to the unconverted to be saved.

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And this sermon was one of several that we could have easily discussed, but it really captures,

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I think, something of the evangelistic fervor of Spurgeon as a pastor and a preacher and the heart of the man to see sinners come to Christ Yeah, absolutely.

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And one thing, if you aren't very familiar with Charles Spurgeon, or if you want just kind of an on -ramp to learn some more about him, let me encourage you to go watch the documentary

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Through the Eyes of Spurgeon. We have a physical disc of that that we sell here at Media Grazie, but you can actually watch it online for free at YouTube.

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Jeremy is the host and that film. It was Stephen McCaskill's first big project that he did and Stephen being the director of Media Grazie.

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So again, I'll put a link to both of those to the stream on YouTube and then also to what we call the

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Media Grazie feature edition disc, if you would like that. One other thing before we really get into the context of this or the text of this sermon,

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I do want to let you know that it is one thing to hear about a sermon and it's quite another to actually hear or to read the sermon itself.

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And we would highly encourage you take a few minutes. It's not incredibly long, but take some time and go read the sermon itself.

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Now, Jeremy has also recorded himself reading the sermon. I would say preaching the sermon, Jeremy. It really does kind of come across like that in the best of ways, but we'll provide the audio and the text of the sermon at mediagrazie .org.

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So as you're listening to this, to the series of podcasts, go back and listen to the sermon itself because it is very, very helpful to do so.

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Now, Jeremy, before we really get into, because there's a lot of things we want to discuss with the sermon, before we get into it, tell us a little bit about the text and what, tell us about the sermon itself.

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So it is in many respects what I think you would call a typical Spurgeon sermon.

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It's textual and topical. Now by topical, I don't just mean he's plucking an idea out of the air.

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What I mean is he's starting with a particular text and in Spurgeon's case, it's often only a verse or two, sometimes even a phrase of a verse, if not the verse as a whole.

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Spurgeon is typically aware of the context of that verse, as you'll see here, but his text in this case is from Luke's gospel, chapter 14 and verse 23, compel them to come in.

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And that's really the heart of the whole sermon. He is about to engage on behalf of Christ with this massive congregation in front of him and he's going to plead with them to be converted.

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And he sets off, as he often does, at something of a gallop. And I think one of the things, if you read this sermon, even bearing in mind that he's edited this slightly for publication, there is almost a breathlessness about this.

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You feel the fervor of his soul and he's really got two main points.

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That's not massively Spurgeonic. He'd often have three that would be maybe more typical, but these are subdivided and he basically says, okay, this is the gospel and now

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I need to deal with you as Christ commands me to compel you to come in. There are two things

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I need to do. First of all, I need to find you out and then I need to set to work to compel you to come in to the kingdom of God.

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Yeah. And what really strikes me about this sermon is that it is a portrayal of obedience to the command to compel you to come forward, to come to Christ.

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Yes. Spurgeon is himself in this sermon, a model both of what it means to respond to the word of God and someone who's then communicating that to others.

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There's a Christ -like passion and fervor in the way that he handles his text and deals with his congregation.

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He's a man under authority and feeling the weight of responsibility. Yeah. And he says in the very beginning to, you know, he says to the believer,

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I don't have much to say to you today. Well, I have to disagree with, with the Spurgeon there because I was so incredibly blessed by it.

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Now I know what he means by that. This was a very evangelistic. This sermon was pointed directly to the lost, but it is such a sweet reminder of the gospel truths of what we've been saved from, what we have been saved to, whom we have been saved to.

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It is just such a sweet and encouraging and warm sermon. But you sometimes, as I was going to say, you sometimes hear

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Christians say after a certain sermon, I want to be converted all over again. And you know that they can't be because God saves once and for all, but you also understand what we mean.

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But if that's Christ, I feel over again, the depth of spiritual reality that's involved here in terms of heaven and hell, in terms of, you know, the sinner in his desperate need and Christ in all his saving sufficiency.

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And it's come back to me with wonderful force. And that not only encourages our hearts and draws us out again to the

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Lord Christ, it also equips us then to go and carry this good news to other people. Yeah, absolutely.

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I mean, it's one thing when evangelism is attempted to be driven by, you know, a model or by, you know, some type of manipulation.

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It is quite another, it is quite different when evangelism is driven by a love for Christ and a love to Christ and a reminder, no,

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I have to share this with you. I am compelled to share the gospel with you because of what it has done to me and because of who

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Christ is to me. And because, you know, and it also is so helpful because our hearts, at least

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I know mine, our hearts can be so easily become cold toward the gospel and cold toward our savior.

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And it is sermons like these that really do kind of melt that ice and soften the heart that has become hardened a little bit.

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Properly speaking, evangelism should just be, if you will, the natural overflow of our delight in God and in his good news and in his son,

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Jesus Christ. It's less something that we should have to be impelled to do, forced to do, and more something perhaps you'd almost want someone to say, can you, you know, you might need to rein in a little bit and think about how you're going to do this more effectively.

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It should be bubbling up out of us. And I don't mean by that it's just sort of an exuberant joy, what you have in this sermon.

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One thing that struck me, I mean, I would typically call another

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Christian man, my brother. That would come quite naturally. Spurgeon uses the language of brother over and over again in this sermon.

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And he's not speaking to people as Christians, he's speaking to them as fellow human beings. And there's a real affection and affinity that comes out.

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So he's got these twin pressures, if you like. There's a relationship to God in Christ as Christ's bondman.

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He is going to come and he is going to be an ambassador for Christ. And he is going to speak on behalf of the

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God who sent him to compel sinners to come into the kingdom. And then on the other hand, there's this deep concern and affection for his hearers, my brothers.

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And you can almost hear him and feel him. It's as if he's reaching out from the congregation by the lapels and looking them into the eye and with deep earnestness saying, that I am speaking these words to you.

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And so as a preacher, he's in that holy tension between his sense of obligation to God, his savior, and his sense of obligation to man as sinner.

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And he's speaking out of faith. That's one of the other things that just bleeds out of the whole sermon.

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He is persuaded that he is God's messenger with God's message to these needy people.

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And he is confident that speaking God's truth, independence upon God's spirit, that his holy business will be well accomplished.

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And it's almost as if he's got enough faith for himself to preach and enough faith for them to hear. He is persuaded that they will receive this truth and that they must receive it.

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And receiving it, they will be saved. And there's something of that passion that was in then the apostle

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Paul, that holy affection where he spoke to the Thessalonians not just in word, but in power and in the

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Holy Spirit and in much assurance, so that there's a spiritual force that you feel in his words, even reading them these decades, centuries later.

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Yeah, absolutely. So let's get into a little bit of the words. We don't have just a ton of time left in this particular episode, but that's exactly why we wanted to spend a few episodes really detailing and going into this.

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When Spurgeon opens up, he is going to talk about different classes, different cases of people, and he has distinguished those because he addresses them.

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And one of the strengths of that is for us, there's a lot of principles that we can draw out of that.

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There's a lot of truths. We can see our loved ones in some of these different classes and say, okay, well this, you know,

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I know where you are. How does Spurgeon address you? And we want to really get into that. But first there's kind of a general address to the people that Spurgeon is talking to.

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Jeremy, what is that? So Spurgeon actually does this twice in the course of the sermon. First is the introduction to the sermon as a whole.

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And then again, when he's about to start the compelling and he gets to work very quickly in this sermon, he says basically in a couple of lines,

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I'm in a hurry. I've got too many important things to do to worry about anything else. Let me tell you what my business is.

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And he goes straight for the gospel jugular. And really you can almost imagine him exploding out of the pulpit, as it were, as he speaks to people as strangers to the gospel.

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Now, later on, he's going to talk about as you've mentioned, the spiritual classes of people, the different ways that you can think about this condition as it's right there in his text.

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But to begin with, it's this general declaration. You are strangers to the gospel.

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You are outside the kingdom of God. You don't know Christ. You have not bowed the knee to him.

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You haven't grasped what is at stake. You don't know what you need. And I need you to understand this.

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And so the opening, I mean, in the printed text, it's a paragraph.

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And he is, again, straight into direct address. He's looking these people in the eye and he's saying, you need to understand the good news of Jesus Christ.

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And really, it's one of those points where the whole gospel, not in all its detail, but in its essence is right there in just a few lines.

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There's a sense of its weight. There's an awareness of need. There's an awareness of the mercy of God, the completeness of Christ as the savior of sinners, the importance of hearing and heeding what is being said.

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And then this immediate pleading, take this, take this Christ, take this truth, come to him, bow to him.

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That's what we're about. And it is to people like you or me by nature, he would say, yeah,

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I know what it is to be a stranger to the gospel. He'll show us that later on. He says, you need to understand that I am now addressing you.

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If you don't know Christ, it means you're not a Christian. It means you're not in his kingdom.

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You don't have this salvation and you need to get this now. Yeah. And so a couple of, of I think principles for us to kind of think through in that addressing people as strangers to the gospel.

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One, we have to be willing and we have to be able to tell people you are not a

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Christian. There's a lot of people who think that, oh, well, because I am a member of a church, because my parents are members of a church or because I did this thing, that makes me a

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Christian. That makes me justified before God and Christ alone makes us justified.

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And go ahead. Yeah, absolutely. We need our spiritual categories clear.

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And by this, I don't mean that we have to be trained theologians in the sense of academic instruction, but we do need to have this biblical sense of who and what we're dealing with.

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So we need to know who we're dealing with and we need to know what we're dealing with. We need to be very clear about the gospel, the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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We need to know it. We need to understand that it is God's good news to sinners for salvation, that we're talking about Christ himself as the alone saviour of sinners in whom a man, a woman, a boy or girl must put their entire trust in order to be delivered from sin and death and hell.

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And already you can hear that there are categories here that are vitally important, because we're not born

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Christians. We don't become Christians by virtue of our parents. We don't become

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Christians because we once had some kind of holy hot flush. We were listening to a sermon. We're not

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Christians because a preacher once made us cry. We're not Christians because we once signed a card or walked the aisle.

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We're not Christians because we've been baptised, not Christians because we've become members of a church.

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Now, some of those things are things that Christians must do. You ought to be baptised if you've been converted.

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It's right to be a part of a healthy church as a Christian. But the problem so often is that we've got our categories all confused.

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And you, perhaps more than I would, Teddy, you're living in an environment where almost everybody's going to say, well,

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I'm a Christian. And one of the first things we need to understand is that there are strangers to the truth as it is in Jesus.

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And they may know a lot about Christ, but they don't know Christ himself, and they haven't bowed the knee to him.

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And until we're ready then to deal honestly with people, and you get that with Spurgeon, you can imagine people hating him after this.

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How dare you tell me that I'm a stranger to truth? How dare you tell me that I've gone through the motions, but I don't really know

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Christ Jesus. I'm an upstanding citizen. I'm a good person. I go to church.

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I say my prayers, whatever it might be. Spurgeon's saying, no, no, you need to understand what it really means to turn to Christ from your sins, to trust in him in order to be saved.

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And unless you haven't done that, and until you have done that, you are not what the Bible calls a believer in Jesus Christ, and you are still exposed to judgment.

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And you're still a stranger to the gospel. Yeah, this is you. You need to hear this in order that you then may truly come in, may come to Christ in order to be saved.

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Yeah. And so, you know, as we get into this, and again, the reason that we're doing this series of episodes is because we understand that the holidays were coming.

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And it's so interesting to me, Jeremy, we live in such different contexts. I've been kicking myself since the very beginning of the podcast.

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I meant to mention in your introduction that you're also the pastor of Maiden Bower Baptist Church, just outside of London in the

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UK. So that gives you a bit of context for where Jeremy is. Now we've, on the podcast, we've talked about Anglicanism quite a bit and how, you know,

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John's PhD is in the Puritan influence on the Great Awakening. And so we've talked about how in the

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UK, what was it, 97, 98 % of people in England were members of the

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Anglican church during the Puritan era. And so for Nonconformists to come in, even for Whitefield to come in during the

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Great Awakening was so impactful. And one of Whitefield's best sermons was the

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Almost Christian. And it was to the person who had been baptized into the Anglican church and had been a member and they put their hope of salvation in that rather than in Christ.

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It's so interesting to me that we live so far apart, you being in the UK, me being here in Mississippi in the

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States, and yet Satan uses the exact same deceptive tactics. Put your hope in something other than Christ.

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Here it's put your hope in your membership or put your hope in the baptism you had when you were a kid or put your hope in your parents' activity.

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Whereas there it's put your hope in, you know, you're baptized into the Anglican church. So we have to be careful that when we're presenting the

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Gospel, we are presenting the Gospel of Christ and not the Gospel of any other view of justification.

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Absolutely. And what you've identified are sort of the religious refuges of unconverted people.

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What I think also we need to take account of in Spurgeon's day, again, he would have been speaking to a religiously educated audience, at least to some extent.

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The scriptures would have been part of the common discourse of the age. Most of those people would know something of the

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Bible and its stories. Where I am today, that's not likely to be the case.

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And so you've also got the, not just the refuges of nominal religion, the label of Christian without the substance, you've also got the just goodness, niceness.

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Some people will try and dismiss this need altogether. There'll be people who take refuge in science, people who take refuge in all kinds of false religions, not just the form of Christianity, but some false gods, some false idols, some damning system of religion.

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There's just so many ways that people will try and bring something in other than Christ.

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And that's always the point. And you've made it clear that Satan is against Christ and he's either going to undermine him or he's going to displace him.

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He's going to veil him. He will do whatever he can to take Christ out of the picture and to try and move in some other functional savior, someone or something else that we imagine will make us right with God.

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And the ironic thing is that even in our context, someone would say to me, but I don't believe in God.

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And then I'll say, so what happens on the day of judgment? Well, I'm a good person. Why do you need to be a good person on the day of judgment?

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Immediately there's this ingrained, and it is, it's part of our humanity, that we are conscious that we are dealing with God, that we live before him, that we are accountable creatures.

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So in one breath, someone denies him. And then the next breath, they're basically saying, well,

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I suppose if he were there, I'd be good enough anyway. And that idea that I've got something that I can present in the place of Christ, that this is what makes me acceptable.

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This is what makes me safe. This is what grants me security. If that thing or one is anything else, anything other, anything more, anything less than the

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Christ of the gospel, then you remain lost. You are still dead in your sins.

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The name Charles Spurgeon can evoke countless stories and quotes. But how much do you know about the man himself?

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In the feature -length documentary Through the Eyes of Spurgeon, get to know the man many consider the best preacher of the 19th century.

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My text should be, unto you therefore, which believe he is precious. And I would trust the

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Lord to open my mouth in honor of his dear son. He seemed a great risk and serious trial.

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But depending upon the power of the Holy Ghost, I would at least tell out the story of the cross and not allow the people to go home without a word.

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To learn more about Through the Eyes of Spurgeon, visit Mediagratia .org or click the link in the description of this episode.

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I hope that after hearing this and hearing really a plea of identifying the strangers to the gospel, and maybe you are even a stranger to the gospel, that you would compel those to come near, compel them to come in and to come to Christ.

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And if you are an unbeliever listening to this, maybe a loved one has shared it with you, let us compel you to come to Christ.

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Let me encourage you, the sermon that we're focusing on these next several episodes, the audio of that and the text of that will be linked in the description below.

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As we do every week, we like to end the podcast with a prayer. And this week's, as for the next, the following two weeks will come from Charles Spurgeon.

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Come near our Father, come very near to your children. Some of us are very weak in body and faint in heart.

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Soon, oh God, lay your right hand upon us and say, fear not. Come near to kill the influence of the world with your superior power.

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Our Father, come and rest your children now. Take the helmet from our brow. Remove from us the weight of our heavy armor for a while.