Spurgeon Thursday - The Burden Of The Word Of The Lord

I found this as I was reading one of Spurgeon's later sermons, #2114 to be exact. It reminded me of the importance we bloggers must put on the words we use when we write our blogs. We can tell ourselves "I'm just reporting what I see" until we're blue in the face, but in the end we're ministers preaching the Word Of The Lord.

The burden of the word of the LORD to Israel by Malachi (KJV) (Malachi 1:1)

Do not make me a messenger of death to you. I implore you, receive the message of mercy, and be saved.

And, then, it becomes a great burden to me to preach the gospel when I think of what those lose who will not have it. That heaven above-what tongue can describe it? What painter can ever picture it-the heaven above, where all is love, and joy, and peace, and everlasting blessedness? What if you should be shut out? What if against you the door should be closed! 

There is no opening that door again, remember. Even though you stand and cry, “Lord, Lord!” yet will he not open it to you. May no one of us miss eternal felicity! May no one among us fall into eternal misery! But here lies the burden of the Lord-in the consequences of our ministry. 

I recollect walking out to preach nigh unto forty years ago, just when I began my witnessing for the Lord Jesus. As I trudged along with a somewhat older brother, who was going to preach at another village station, our talk was about our work, and he said to me, “Does it not strike you as a very solemn thing that we two local preachers are going to do the Lord’s work, and much may depend even upon the very hymns we give out, and the way in which we read them?” 

I thought of that, and I prayed-and often do pray-that I may have the right hymn, and the right chapter, as well as the right sermon. Well do I remember a great sinner coming into Exeter Hall, and I read the hymn beginning, “Jesu, lover of my soul,” and that first line pierced him in the heart. 

He said to himself, “Does Jesus love my soul?” He wept because he had not loved the Savior in return; and he was brought to the Savior’s feet just by that one line of a hymn. 

It does make it the burden of the Lord when you see life, death, and hell, and worlds to come, hanging, as it were, upon the breath of a mortal man, by whom God speaks to the souls of his fellows. This is serious burden-bearing. At least, I find it more and more so the longer I am engaged in it.

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