You Never Can Predict What Your Sermon Will Accomplish

“Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else.”  Isaiah 45:22 (KJV)

On a snowy January Sunday in 1850, a 15-year-old minister’s son named Charlie Spurgeon was deterred by the blustery weather as he was walking to his own Baptist Church in Colchester, England. The young man’s heavy spirit matched the severity of the weather. In simple terms, he was miserable and unsettled about the condition of his soul before his God. As he was trudging uphill that morning, he finally gave up on the grind and turned aside from Artillery Street to enter a tiny Primitive Methodist Chapel. He proceeded to sit alone in a pew on the left side of the sparsely attended meeting.

The weather was so bad that the regular preacher to this modest congregation was unable to reach his own church that snowy Sunday morning!  So, an “unprepared” layman ascended the pulpit and bravely seized a text from Isaiah, the same one that was cited above. Spurgeon later would relate that the man, because he had no time to thoroughly prepare, fervently repeated over and over the challenging words of Isaiah’s Lord:

“Look to me and be saved.”

As he continued his repetitive but fervent exhortations, he finally looked directly at the unfamiliar and troubled youth and implored him directly to look to the Lord and be saved.  The lad looked to the Lord – and he was converted that morning.

A flame becomes an inferno

The rest is familiar history to those of us who are Spurgeon fanboys. The flame that was lit in that young man’s soul on that Sunday morning eventually became a powerful inferno. In two years, without any formal ministerial training, he would be preaching weekly in a small Baptist chapel in nearby Waterbeach, In two more years, as word spread about “the boy preacher from the fens,” he would be preaching to urban crowds in the great metropolis of London as pastor of the New Park Street Chapel.

In twenty more years, his weekly sermons, with the help of a stenographer, would be devotedly read around the world, without the help of any modern radio, television, or Internet.

In forty-two years after his conversion, following his passing in Mentone, France, he would be lying in a coffin in his beloved Metropolitan Tabernacle. His earthly life would end in the throes of the awful pain of an enduring affliction of gout. On a plaque attached to his coffin were the words of that same text from Isaiah that originally brought him to the Lord, “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else.”

The power of a single verse

Preacher, don’t ever underestimate the power of a single verse in the proclamation of God’s dynamic word. This amazing story is but one evidence that it is not the power of the preacher but the power of the preached word that yields fruit in peoples’ lives. As Pastor David Hegg said, “God does the saving; all we preachers do is offer a few loaves and fish.”

This amazing story is of course not the norm for our Sunday mornings. The success of that layman’s simple message does not excuse any laziness and ill-preparedness in preparing our messages. But the account is a sober reminder of something that the ancient prophet declared, “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the Lord of hosts.”

©2023 William Varner. Used with permission.