Life in a Look
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Knowing that both his father and grandfather were famous English ministers was not much help to troubled fifteen-year-old Charles.
"I thought my sins were greater than other people's," he wailed. "I cried to God for mercy, but I feared He would not pardon me."
While he was attending school in Colchester, young Charles vowed, "I'll attend every church in town to find out how to become a Christian."
He heard one sermon on Galatians 6:7, "Be not deceived, God is not mocked." But the preacher did not say how he might avoid deception. After six months of visiting every chapel he could find, he was almost in despair.
Then came the cold, snowy morning of January 6, 1850. Dutifully, Charles set out to attend the church he had selected. As he trudged along, his heart felt colder than the falling snow. When he saw that the fierce storm would prevent him from reaching his destination, he turned aside to an obscure chapel he never before knew existed.
At first he was hesitant to enter the Artillery Street Primitive Methodist Church. Later he said, "I had
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heard that those people sang so loud they made one's head ache."
But Charles Spurgeon slipped in and sat down. After several minutes of painful silence, a tall, thin man shuffled to the pulpit. "Looks as if our minister was held up by the weather," he explained. "Reckon you'll have to put up with me."
"Now I'll take a text like all preachers do," the homely man continued. "Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth" (Isaiah 45:22). Sitting in his pew, Charles grimaced and thought, Why, he can't even pronounce his words properly.
Up front, the substitute preacher began spinning his text around, for he knew of little else to say. "The text says 'Look,' " he droned. "Now, lookin' don't take a deal of pains. It ain't liftin' your foot or finger; it is just 'Look'!
"Now some of ye are lookin' to yourselves, but it's no use lookin' there. Ye may say, 'Wait for the Spirit's workin.' But I say, look to Christ."
The eyes of the bored handful of hearers began to wander, but not Charles Spurgeon's. He was staring at the ignorant preacher as if to say, "Why didn't I think of this before?"
As the preacher rolled his text along, he began shouting, "Look unto Me, I'm sweatin' great drops of blood; I'm hangin' on the cross." Then the tall man spotted Charles' strained face.
"Young man, you look miserable," he thundered, as the boy slid down an inch in the uncomfortable pew. Then he lifted up his hands and shouted in Primitive Methodist style, "Young man, look to Jesus Christ. Look! Look!"
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Charles later testified, "I saw at once the way of salvation. I looked until I could have almost looked my eyes away. The darkness rolled away, and I saw the sun. I felt I could spring from my seat and shout with the wildest of these Methodist brethren, "I am forgiven.' "
"Oh, how I wish I could do something for Christ," Charles wrote to his mother after he returned home. Within a week, he was doing something. First it was giving out tracts; then when his supply was exhausted, he wrote on slips of paper, and dropped them on the streets, hoping someone could be helped.
He began teaching Sunday school at sixteen and a year later was called as pastor at Waterbeach Chapel. Then he moved to London and a larger church, and before he was twenty-one, he was acclaimed "the boy wonder of England." At twenty-three he preached to exactly 23,645 people in one service. His church built the Metropolitan Tabernacle that seated fifty-five hundred people. He founded a college for preachers, an orphanage, and even a gospel paper. His sermons were published by American newspapers. And still today — one hundred years later — many believe Charles Haddon Spurgeon to be the greatest preacher since the apostle Paul.
In 1864, Spurgeon revisited the Artillery Street Chapel. He preached from the text, Isaiah 45:22, through which he was converted. Pointing to a seat under the gallery, he said, "I was sitting in that pew."
The true identity of the tall, thin substitute preacher is still shrouded in mystery. He never came forward to acknowledge that he delivered the sermon that prompted the great Spurgeon to look to Christ.
