Number Two-thousand; or, Healing by the Stripes of Jesus (sermon 2000)

This sermon is numerically significant on several levels. It is the two thousandth sermon, the last sermon of Volume XXXIII in the Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, and a sermon prepared to be read on the first day of the year of 1888. As so often with these 'major marker' sermons (ones that break through particular numerical boundaries), and all the more so when those markers are loaded up like this, Spurgeon deliberately returns to the very core of his ministry and the delight of his own soul—the atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus. The sermon is itself is of the utmost simplicity, as Spurgeon seeks to come to the text, and to come at the congregation. He shows how, in the verse in question, God treats sin as a disease and provides a cure for that disease in the stripes of the Lord Christ, a disease which is immediately and completely effective wherever it is applied. In truth, Spurgeon never strays very far from this theme, but an occasion like this makes it all the more imperative for him to state once more the touchstone of his ministry.