The Roaring Lion

Spurgeon opens by insisting that Satan is a real, active, personal adversary — not a myth or superstition — and traces the terrifying scope of his activity: following believers into every place (sanctuary, family circle, prayer closet, business), into every spiritual duty (where he leaves the imprint of his foot like a dog's paw-print on wet Egyptian brick), and into every frame of mind (exploiting depression with despair, exploiting triumph with presumption, exploiting settled peace with complacency), while wielding a vast army of fallen spirits and thousands of years of experience against creatures who have been alive only a handful of decades. He then catalogs Satan's three kinds of "roaring" — the roar of persecution (historical and dramatic, from Nero's burning stake to Anabaptists drowned in Dutch rivers, though reduced to mere mockery and slander today), the roar of violent temptation (dragging a believer against his will toward a sin he loathes, a relentless assault described like enemies forcing water down a martyr's throat), and the roar of injected blasphemy (putting thoughts the believer never formed into his mind and then accusing him of having originated them himself, as Bunyan pictured in the Valley of the Shadow of Death) — and addresses each one with the comfort that many believers before have endured and survived them all. He closes with the prescription: resist steadfastly in the faith — not by flight but by standing firm, countering every one of Satan's accusations with a specific Scripture, keeping the shield of faith raised even when battered, and drawing comfort from the fact that every temptation the believer faces is already labeled "common to man," endured before by the whole cloud of witnesses now robed in white before the Throne; and he closes with a tender appeal to the unconverted, insisting that even a beleaguered Christian in the Slough of Despond is more blessed than a comfortable hypocrite walking in dry ease, and urging them to cast themselves on Christ this very moment.Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on  November 17, 1861.