Holy Violence

Spurgeon argues that Christ's words about the violent taking the kingdom of heaven by force describe the intense earnestness that God's Spirit produces in those he is saving — an all-consuming anxiety about their souls that shows itself in wide-awake attention to preaching, agonized prayer, sleepless nights, and a desperate refusal to rest until they find Christ — and he contrasts this with the dead routine of churches where ministers, deacons, and congregations all go through the motions of religion with no more life than sleepwalkers. He defends this holy violence as entirely reasonable: the genuinely awakened sinner knows they have no right to heaven by birth, knows the infinite value of what they are asking for, feels the terror of hell behind them like a manslayer, and faces enemies within and without that make anything less than desperate effort a sure path to failure. He closes with two contrasting exhortations — to the complacent respectable churchgoer whose easy religion will carry them nine-tenths of the way to heaven and leave them at the gate, and to the despairing sinner who thinks themselves too vile to try — urging both to abandon lukewarmness and cast themselves on Christ with all their strength, since every truly violent seeker in the history of the world has been answered, and God's faithfulness cannot fail the soul that will not give up.Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on May 15th, 1859.