A Psalm of Remembrance

Spurgeon presents the apostle John's declaration — "We have known and believed the love that God has to us" — as the truest summary of Christian experience, distinguishing between the sweeter but less heroic state of knowing God's love through visible blessings, answered prayer, restored health, and the direct inner witness of the Holy Spirit, and the grander state of believing that love in the dark when every circumstance contradicts it and the inner witness is silent. He then takes this same declaration as the believer's testimony to the world, witnessing that God's love is entirely undeserved, unconquerable in the face of repeated resistance and ingratitude, undiminished by ongoing sin and failure, perfectly immutable through all the changes of a lifetime, and an unfailing support in the deepest trials — with Spurgeon drawing freely on his own experience of suffering and public attack to confirm that not one good thing has ever failed of all that God promised. He closes with two practical applications: first, an encouragement to the sorely tried believer to honor God in the furnace by trusting him when outward evidence seems to argue against his love; and second, an invitation to despairing sinners from the lips of the whole congregation of forgiven people — drunkards, swearers, adulterers — that no sin exceeds the love of God, and to believe it now is itself evidence that God has set his heart upon them.Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on May 22nd, 1859.