Compel Them To Come In III | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Teddy James, content producer for Media Gratia. For the last week, not in John's office.

I promise. I know it's been a while. Next week we'll be back in John's office and John and I are going to record an episode or two then.

For this week, one more time, we do have Jeremy Walker. Now, if you've not listened to the last two episodes, let me remind you that Jeremy is a pastor at Maiden Bower Baptist Church just outside of London.

He is the host of the Word and Season podcast, which if you're not listening to that daily devotional podcast, let me encourage you, go and do it.

It is more than worth the time. He's also an author of multiple books and host of Through the

Eyes of Spurgeon, which you can watch for free on YouTube. He's a contributor to The Weight of Majesty, Puritan, The Church, and just about everything that Media Gratia has done.

We really do love and appreciate Jeremy. And Jeremy, before we get into the content of this week's podcast, how can our, how can

I and how can our listeners be praying for you and praying for your church? Thank you,

TJ. I think primarily pray that we would grow in the grace and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ as God's people here.

Pray that we would then really grow in holiness and be conformed to the image of Christ.

That's, that's our primary concern that we do that to the praise and the glory of God. And then

I think pray that we would be gripped by the kind of spirit that Spurgeon is showing here in this sermon.

As a pastor and a preacher, I find myself rebuked and ashamed of myself when

I hear how this man pleads with the unconverted and genuinely compels them by the grace of God to enter into the kingdom of heaven.

And so perhaps you would pray that not only might we be a truly godly people, but that would show itself in our witness to the lost in our community, in our friends and our families, with our neighbors and our colleagues, and that the

Lord would be pleased to save many sinners in Crawley and further afield by means of the investments that we make and that we would see the church growing through people being converted and baptized and becoming members and that that would enable us to do still more in the service of our

God and master. Yeah, absolutely. Amen. And also we will be praying for you guys with the lockdown that's going on and everything that's happening.

So particularly, you know, in the upcoming weeks, you who are listening to this, let me encourage you, pray for Maiden Bower, pray for the

UK. Our own country does need prayer to be sure, but also don't forget that there are believers across the world who are in need of prayer and we need to and want to lift them up.

So Jeremy, to get into the context of this week's podcast, could you very briefly kind of introduce this sermon for someone who has, who's missed the first two episodes?

Okay, so this is one of Spurgeon's directly evangelistic sermons.

It's typical of its class in his preaching. He's got a very brief text,

Luke chapter 14, verse 23, compel them to come in. And gripped by the urgency of this,

Spurgeon basically says, first of all, I'm in a hurry, no introduction. This is the good news.

And he sets Christ as crucified before us as sinners. He says, if you're a stranger to the gospel, then you need to hear and heed this good news of God.

And then he comes straight back to his text. And he says, I'm going to do two things. First of all,

I'm going to find you out. And secondly, I'm going to compel you to come in. And so in the context of the verse that he's handling, he identifies his congregation in terms of being, first of all, poor, spiritually poor, primarily, but he's making the point that no one is cut off from the grace of God's gospel.

Secondly, maimed, injured, unable to make any offering to God, halt or lame, stumbling along.

And Spurgeon uses that language of being halting between two opinions, being drawn to the world rather than running to Christ Jesus.

And then those who are blind, those who don't truly see themselves as they really are, and therefore don't see

Christ or God in Christ as he really is, as a sufficient savior.

And so he's identified the people and he's speaking to them in a way that's designed to help them to face the truth about their own souls.

And then the second part of his sermon, he says, I'm going to compel you now. Now I'm going to deal with you in terms of that need.

Yeah. And he does so, so well and so passionately. I hope that we can kind of give you some glimpse of just how helpful we find this sermon to be by the fact that we've now spent more time talking about the sermon than it took

Spurgeon likely to preach that sermon. So, you know, just to be aware, we do find it.

And the text of the sermon and also a very well done reading by Jeremy is going to be found at the

Mediagratia blog, Mediagratia .org. And we're going to put a link to that in the description. If you're listening to this, it'll be in the description of the audio.

And if you're watching on YouTube, we'll put a link down below. So just be aware that that is there for you and don't just listen to it for yourself, but share it.

It is incredibly evangelistic. And so if there's, if there's a loved one and you've been presenting the gospel to them and you, you want to give them a resource, this would be a wonderful resource to share with them, to present the gospel to them.

Well, now let's get into the progression of Spurgeon's arguments. And he just begins by simply stating the message.

How does he present the gospel, Jeremy? And how can we learn to really simply and succinctly present the gospel to loved ones?

Well, it's striking. This is the second time in the sermon that Spurgeon does this. The first is right up there front and center in his introduction.

This is what you need to hear. And now he goes over it again as the basis for his pleading with sinners.

And again, he speaks with real affection and he speaks with real authority. He is very conscious of the fact that this is

God's message to sinners. It's not his. He is simply the messenger.

It is God's own message. And the very heart of this is that Jesus Christ has died and that this is the way that God in his wisdom and mercy has provided so that the breach between God in his holiness and man in his sinfulness might be closed up.

That there is no other way by which a sinner can be saved than through trusting in Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ alone.

And so Spurgeon is, he's graphic. He, again, there's this vividness of his imagination.

You can almost see him looking into the middle distance. And in his mind's eye, he has a dying

Christ before him. He sees the Lamb of God shedding his blood in order to save his people from their sins.

And it is again, he is communicating the heart of God in Christ towards sinners.

And so he placards Christ before them as crucified, to use Paul's language in the letter to the

Galatians. And it's on the basis of that, with that reality hanging before him and before them, that he says, now, this is what

I need you to grasp. This is the one that I need you to trust. I want you to trust.

God calls you to trust. Yeah. And it's not just that he simply tells them, but Spurgeon goes to the next step and he commands them to come to Christ.

How does he do that? Yeah. Well, at this point, there's something that's both proclamational.

There's no doubt about that. Spurgeon's not just giving a Bible talk. He's delivering a sermon. But there's also something conversational in that he's working his way through these different sorts of responses and how he's going to respond in turn to them.

So he says in effect, right, I've just set Christ before you. Are you not going to pay any attention to that?

Are you going to neglect and ignore that? He says, no, I need you to understand. You cannot just turn away.

In God's name, I command you to repent and believe. And if you want to know my authority,

I'm God's man. He sent me to bring this message to you. And there's humility there, not arrogance.

This is not Spurgeon being cocky and saying, look, I'm the preacher. So you need to listen to me. He's saying,

God has sent me to tell you this and you need to listen to him. So at the end of that little section, an ambassador is not to stand below the man with whom he deals, for we stand higher.

If the minister chooses to take his proper rank, girded with the omnipotence of God and anointed with his holy unction, he is to command men and speak with all authority, compelling them to come in.

Command, exhort, rebuke with all longsuffering. Now let's bear in mind that most of us aren't in that position.

It's not an excuse for us to go home and stand in the kitchen with our arms folded and start laying down the law to people.

But it is worth remembering that this is a divine command.

We are merely the communicators of that. And I think what's important here is the confidence we have as Christians that this is

God's message. My reputation at that point, that's not important. It's not about whether or not

I'm the head of the home and I can call for attention, or if I'm the outcast, the black sheep of the family and no one wants to pay any attention to me.

Actually, I have to communicate this divine authority that God commands all men everywhere to repent.

And so I think clothed with that sense that you are simply at this point an agent of God, whether you're standing in the pulpit or sitting in the dining room, walking down the street, it's that consciousness that you're speaking on behalf of the

Savior that I think will help us Yeah, and I actually have a dear friend who recently had a conversation with someone who was they were talking about all of the different things that this person was kind of leaning into.

As we mentioned in the last episode, we're talking about someone being spiritually poor and revealing their poorness.

Well, this person thought themselves spiritually rich. And the question brought to them was this, okay, how is your life of repentance?

That was the question. And it was the command, repent and believe. Well, this conversation just focused on repentance and how's your life of repentance?

And because my friend was able to come up and say, you are commanded,

I can command you because God has commanded you to repent. And the fact that there's no repentance in your life reveals you're not a believer.

And it's that kind of loving straightforwardness that Spurgeon is showing and teaching at the same time.

Yeah, absolutely. And he doesn't stop with commanding. He also goes on to exhort. And notice this,

Spurgeon doesn't allow someone to give an answer and then he says, oh, okay, well,

I tried. No, he's going through a progression and we want you to see this progression.

And that's really why we're kind of taking this point by point. So Jeremy, what does he say about the exhortation?

So he begins with this command. God says, you must have come to Jesus Christ.

But he then imagines that someone might say, well, I'm not going to pay any attention to that. He says, well, if you're not going to pay any attention to that, then let me appeal to you.

Let me exhort you. And now, again, there's a note of pleading that comes into his dealings.

And he's really appealing to their sense of what should be their sense of need in comparison to Christ in all his saving glory.

He's saying, don't you understand what a loving Savior he is? And he puts himself in the narrative.

He says, I've been there. Christ came to me. Christ called to me. Christ commanded me.

I turned my back upon him. I wanted nothing to do with him. But Christ continued to press his claims of love upon me, and he won me over with his affections.

And then when I thought that I would come to Christ, I imagined that I'd find him there with a fist raised, ready to destroy me because of my rebellions.

And yet his hands were stretched out to save me. I thought his eyes would flash lightnings against me, but they were full of tears of love toward me.

And he's saying, don't you see who Christ is and what Christ will be to you if you come to him repenting and believing?

So he's now pleading their own self -interest. It's Ezekiel -like language.

Why would you die? It's God's speech through his prophet. Why will you stay at a distance?

Why would you remain in the darkness? Why would you live under the curse of God when there's a

Christ who is ready to save you? And this is all that he is. And he can't release it. He just, you get this sense he's heaping up pleas and arguments.

Don't you understand what God in Christ is holding out to you? Why will you not come to him?

Yeah. And also he just, he really does expose the illogicalness of refusing the gospel.

Right? I mean, he's saying, would you rather be under the curse and under judgment or under grace?

It is. Okay. At least here in America, we have a view of people in England as being very logical and very smart, which is why if you ever want to just sound smart, you kind of add an

English accent to it and it makes you feel a little smarter. It's a great advantage to have, I've got to say. And so it really does make a lot of sense to me that Spurgeon would use almost a logical argument to say, wouldn't this be better?

Now, it's not the whole of his sermon, but he does take some time to just simply say, just think logically through this.

Would it not be better? Is it not in your self -interest? And it's to point them to the gospel.

Well, it's, it's eminently reasonable. Why, when you are dead in your trespasses and sins, would you not take life when it's held out to you?

Why, if you are lost, would you not respond to the one who comes to find you? Why, if you're in need, would you not receive the one who blesses you?

I mean, it makes sense to trust in Jesus Christ. And it's not a rationalistic argument, but it is a reasonable argument.

And he says, you know, it's born of his own sense of spiritual realities.

This is one of the most powerful points in the sermon. When he's basically looking at this congregation, he says,

I see you as spiritual suicides until you come to Christ. You are going on in the way of damnation.

You are casting yourselves into hell. And I'm the one who's between you and judgment at this point.

Christ has put me here to plead with you not to continue in this dreadful course, but to turn now to him and to trust in him in order that you might be saved.

And he, again, with that vivid sense of spiritual reality, on the day of judgment,

I can't afford to have you say, preacher, you told me funny stories. You laughed with me.

You made me cry a little. You know, you told me a story about a dog in trouble.

You, you told me a happy stories about your family at home, but you never warned me that I was in danger of hell unless I came to Jesus Christ.

And that's, he's pleading because he knows that he is responsible for how he pleads and because he knows that they are responsible for how they respond to his pleas.

And again, for us, if we're dealing with people, it may not be with the same pulpit authority, but they need to understand that we are persuaded.

They need to feel the reality that they might perhaps be denying. They need to understand from our gracious and gentle earnestness that we know what is at stake, even if they deny it.

And that's powerful in God's hands in dealing with people who haven't yet come to Christ. Yeah.

I can't remember who it was. It was, I think it was Spurgeon who said, if, if people must go to hell, let them crawl over our bodies to do so.

And so there's a real potent sense of, and perhaps this is one of the things that we are so much missing in the modern church, certainly in Europe and America, that we don't typically have this pressing sense of spiritual reality.

You know, Jonathan Edwards praying, Lord stamp eternity on my eyeballs. Now, let me see things through the lenses of eternity.

Let me weigh all things in the light of judgment. Let me understand that there's a hell to be shunned and a heaven to be gained and let me live and speak in the light of those things.

Absolutely. And so, you know, when we talk about these things and when we talk about commanding, we're talking about in exhorting, we get into entreating, really keep those things in mind.

If we have, if we have the right view of why we're doing what we're doing, why we're bringing these things up, why we're having these conversations with loved ones, knowing the, the price that we could pay of being the black sheep, of being ostracized by our family, uh, you know, of being the person who brings up that conversation again, every, every

Christmas or every Thanksgiving. The thing is we must, we have that command upon us to compel them to come in.

And that's really where this, where it comes in. That's, that's why Spurgeon moves on then to threatening.

Now, when we hear the language of threatening, we might think, oh, that sounds a little bit harsh. That sounds a little bit, uh, judgmental.

Well, let's bear in mind, first of all, there is a judgment and therefore we, we must speak.

But actually I would say that Spurgeon's entreaties are in some ways more threatening than his threatenings, uh, because he's very forceful about the fact that, you know,

I'm, I'm trying to keep you out of hell. And then he comes as it were back to that, but these are again, the most tender and earnest threatenings you will ever hear.

He is warning them that if they go on rejecting God's gospel, they will be lost and that there will come a time when they will no longer hear these things.

Uh, there's no guarantee that there'll be another family meal. There's no guarantee that I'll be alive to tell you, or you'll be alive to hear that this may be the last opportunity that we have to, to, to deal with these things.

And, and he's quite, I mean, he's again, very realistic, let but a mouthful of food go in the wrong direction and you may die.

The slightest chance as we have it may send you swift to death when God wills it. Strong men have been killed by the smallest and slightest accident.

And so may you in the chapel, in the house of God, men have dropped down dead. You know, we're, we're, we're living in a world that is terrified of, or perhaps careless of coronavirus.

But the fact remains that this disease is there. And it's one of many things it's brought death front and center.

However seriously you take that or not. Um, the, these things give us a handle.

What would you do if you were laboring for breath in a hospital bed? What would you do? Will you be ready?

If you, if you choke on your Thanksgiving turkey, if you, you know, you, you, you get a piece of Christmas pudding caught in your throat.

We are, we are but a breath from eternity. Do you realize that? Now, if that's threatening, you can hear the affection and the love that lies behind it.

It's, it's not you, if you want to call it sort of, you know, hellfire and damnation preaching or blood and thunder preaching, you know, you call it that, but you listen to the tone with which he's, he's speaking these things.

And you understand that, that he has a deep, deep concern for the souls of those to whom he speaks.

And again, that's something that we need to communicate absolutely firm with regard to the truth of what

God says, but always from a heart of love. Exactly. And I think that that's really the point of this, right?

It is driven, it is centered, it is grounded in a heart of love, first to Christ, because Spurgeon wants to see these jewels added to the crown of Christ.

But it is also out of love to those that are hearing him speak. And as long as we are compelled, it's brother language, your brother, brother, brother, listen to me.

You're my, you're a creature like I am. You're, you're my, you're my fellow. I'm standing alongside you.

I'm looking at you and I'm pleading with you. And having done this, this, this commanding and then the appealing and the exhorting and the threatening,

Spurgeon then says, well, is that it? Is that all I've got? Do I now say, oh, well, done deal, walk away?

No, he says, I can still weep and pray. Though you may not yet be hearing me,

I can still be praying for you. And again, as a preacher, as a father, as a

Christian, when I hear Spurgeon's heart at this point, this is what makes me think, man,

I have so much to learn, because he basically says, you have no idea how much

I've prayed for you before I even preached this sermon. And you have no idea how much

I will plead with God for your soul when this sermon is over. And that's really the, if you will, the secret of Spurgeon's power with men is that before he wrestles with men, he's wrestled with God on behalf of men.

And again, there's an encouragement for us. Now, this isn't just about me having these clever theological categories.

This isn't about me being able to bring the precise theologically correct response to somebody's carelessness with regard to the gospel.

Now, this is a saved sinner pleading with sinners to be saved. And he has prayed beforehand and he has wept over their souls and he'll go away and weep and pray once more, because as he's already confessed, he does not have the power to save.

He's on a mission to compel as God's messenger, but he will plead with the

God of heaven who sent him to carry these truths with saving power into the souls of men and women.

And you and I, we will stumble over our words. We will go away.

We'll want to put our heads in our hands. I can't believe I botched it that badly. I didn't get that right.

I missed this out. I could or should have said this, that or the other thing. Well, plead with God because God delights to take the foolish things and the base things and the weak things and to put to shame that in which men boast.

So you may have been bamboozled in the intellectual argument. You may have been dismissed by a proud and sneering person, but you have a

God in heaven. And if you love the people to whom you've spoken, you can plead with God to bless your feeble words and carry them into the souls of those who need them.

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

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

My take should be unto you therefore which believe he is precious and I would trust the

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

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

Spurgeon himself used to say, I wouldn't cross the road to hear myself preach.

I think most of us who preach today would say we would cross the road to avoid hearing ourselves preach.

We look back on this man and we think of him, and in some senses, quite rightly, as a man of prodigious gifts.

But Spurgeon is a profoundly humble man and he is useful not because of his gifts in and of themselves, but because of his humble consecration of those gifts to the

God of salvation. And he's very conscious in this sermon that it is not by might and not by power, but by God's spirit that the progress of the gospel is accomplished.

And so to say I'm not Spurgeon is not the point. To say

I'm not Whitfield, I'm not Lloyd -Jones, I'm not John Chrysostom, I'm not

Augustine, I'm not Sutcliffe, I'm not Samuel Pierce.

Okay, we know all the things we're not. That's not me. But by the grace of God, I am what

I am. By the grace of God, I know these saving truths. And by God's grace,

I may yet speak them so that someone hearing might repent and believe.

So don't imagine that you need to speak like Spurgeon or preach like Spurgeon.

I mean, let's pray that God will raise up a battery of Spurgeon -like ministers in our day by all means.

But it is the God of salvation who saves people from their sins. And Spurgeon is conscious of his feebleness.

Let's be by all means very conscious of our own and cast ourselves and our faithful message into the hands of the

God who saves. As we like to do with every episode, we want to end this episode, we want to end this series with a prayer from Charles Spurgeon.

Lord Jesus, take from us now everything that would hinder the closest communion with God.

Any wish or desire that might hamper us in prayer, remove, we ask you. Any memory of either sorrow or care that might hinder the fixing of our affections wholly on our

God, we ask you to take it away now. Help us that we may now come boldly into the holiest of all, where we should not dare to come if our great

Lord had not rent the veil, sprinkled the mercy seat with his own blood, and bidden us to enter.