The Blind Beggar

Spurgeon takes blind Bartimaeus as a picture of every spiritually blind and spiritually poor sinner, tracing how his faith likely grew simply from hearing, over and over, the story of the man born blind whom Jesus healed — a single narrative lodged in a darkness-bound mind until it became an unshakeable conviction that this Jesus must be the promised Messiah — and applying this to his hearers by asking how they can have heard far more gospel than Bartimaeus ever did, and still not believe. He follows the story beat by beat through Bartimaeus's faith seizing the slim opportunity of Christ merely "passing by" rather than waiting for better conditions, his refusal to be silenced by the crowd making him cry louder rather than quieter, his immediate leap forward the moment Christ called without needing to be dragged, and his frank four-word request — "that I might receive my sight" — holding it up as a model of earnest, specific, unhesitating prayer that knows exactly what it wants and wastes no words in asking. He closes by dwelling on the most beautiful detail: the moment Bartimaeus received his sight, he did not run to family or temple or landscape but followed Jesus in the road, using this as a portrait of the true convert whose one consuming desire after forgiveness is to stay near the one who opened his eyes — and he invites every spiritually blind person in the hall to let Bartimaeus's story be written again in their own experience.Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on August 7th, 1859.