A Basket of Summer Fruit

Spurgeon takes the vision of the basket of summer fruit — ripe and ready to be consumed — as a picture with three applications: that God's own purposes have a precise ripeness, coming neither too early nor too late, whether in the first advent of Christ, the second advent to come, or the personal timing of each believer's conversion, trials, and deliverances, all of which arrive exactly when divine wisdom ordains. He then applies the image to nations, tracing how Babylon, Greece, and Rome each fell at the precise point when their national sin had ripened to the point of destruction, and warning England to repent of her own national sins before the same judgment overtakes her. He closes with two personal applications — the believer who is ripening day by day in knowledge, experience, spirituality, and kindness through affliction and grace, being made ready for glory like fruit reaching perfect sweetness, and the unconverted sinner who is equally ripening but toward destruction, growing harder, bolder in sin, and more contemptuous of God with each passing year until suddenly gathered into the wrath they have been cultivating — and he pleads urgently for any sinner to turn before the gathering time arrives.Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on October 28th, 1860.