Corn in Egypt

Spurgeon uses the story of Jacob's sons starving in Canaan while grain sits waiting in Egypt as a rich picture of the sinner's spiritual condition — a total, essential, hopeless need with nothing in oneself to meet it and nowhere else to turn — and then matches it point for point with the good news of the gospel: not only is there mercy in God, but it is abundant beyond measure, held by Christ who is the sinner's own brother, and freely available to any who come at his express invitation rather than on a risky guess. He then turns to the practical application, arguing forcefully against any preaching that tells sinners to wait passively for grace, insisting instead that just as Jacob's sons immediately picked up their empty sacks and headed to Egypt the moment they heard there was grain, sinners should come to Christ now — empty-handed, with nothing but their need, their sins laid out as the only "recommendation" required. He closes with the personal testimony of his own three years of fruitless agonized prayer until he learned to stop relying on the prayers themselves and simply look to Christ on the cross — and invites every hearer to do the same, reminding them that the stakes are nothing less than eternal life or eternal death.Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on January 16th, 1859.