1 of 5

Spurgeon’s friends and even casual acquaintances remarked on his hearty laughter. His humor also found expression in his sermons and writings, for which he was sometimes criticized. Spurgeon responded that if his critics only knew how much humor he suppressed, they would keep silent.

At the same time, Spurgeon’s life was saturated with suffering. We know about his sufferings intimately owing to his frequent and candid descriptions of them.

What torments did Spurgeon suffer? How did he reconcile his painful experiences with his view of a gracious God?

At the risk of oversimplifying, we can categorize Spurgeon’s sufferings as spiritual, emotional, and physical—although recognizing the interplay of categories.

Spurgeon’s spiritual suffering began most markedly five years prior to his conversion. Throughout his ministry, he referred to the horrors he had felt for five years while under deep conviction of sin, intellectually aware of the gospel, yet blind to its personal application. “The justice of God, like a ploughshare, tore my spirit,” he recalled. “I was condemned, undone, destroyed—lost, helpless, hopeless—I thought hell was before me.… I prayed, but found no answer of peace. It was long with me thus.”

To Spurgeon, no suffering he later endured could equal this devastating bitterness of soul. These spiritual sufferings taught him to loathe the foulness of sin and to cherish the holiness of God. And they engendered within him a seraphic joy in his salvation.

During his early years in London, Spurgeon received intense slander and scorn. In 1881 he could look back at those years and say, “If I am able to say in very truth, ‘I was buried with Christ thirty years ago,’ I must surely be dead. Certainly the world thought so, for not long after my burial with Jesus I began to preach his name, and by that time the world thought me very far gone, and said, ‘He stinketh.’ They began to say all manner of evil against the preacher; but the more I stank in their nostrils the better I liked it, for the surer I was that I was really dead to the world.”

At the time, however, Spurgeon wavered between rejoicing in such persecution and being utterly crushed by it. In 1857 he wrestled with his feelings:

“Down on my knees have I often fallen, with the hot sweat rising from my brow under some fresh slander poured upon me; in an agony of grief my heart has been well-nigh broken; … This thing I hope I can say from my heart: If to be made as the mire of the streets again, if to be the laughing stock of fools and the song of the drunkard once more will make me more serviceable to my Master, and more useful to his cause, I will prefer it to all this multitude, or to all the applause that man could give.”

From the beginning of his ministry, Spurgeon attracted vast audiences in such establishments as Exeter Hall and the Royal Surrey Gardens Music Hall. While to all appearances he brimmed with self-assurance, in reality he was filled with trepidation. In 1861 he remarked, “My deacons know well enough how, when I first preached in Exeter Hall, there was scarcely ever an occasion, in which they left me alone for ten minutes before the service, but they would find me in a most fearful state of sickness, produced by that tremendous thought of my solemn responsibility.… ”

Spurgeon felt great anxiety, but it stemmed not so much from the multitudes as from the awesome responsibility of being accountable to God for the souls of so many. This remained a hearty source of spiritual suffering throughout his career. He remarked in 1883: “I have preached the gospel now these thirty years and more, and … often, in coming down to this pulpit, have I felt my knees knock together, not that I am afraid of any one of my hearers, but I am thinking of that account which I must render to God, whether I speak his Word faithfully or not.”

next page... |  1 of 5

share this page

RSS Feed   RSS Help