The Stony Heart Removed

Spurgeon opens by insisting that humanity's spiritual ruin is so total that no repair is possible — the old house must come completely down, the old garment is too rotten to patch, the old wineskin too brittle for new wine — and then describes the stony heart in five aspects: it is cold toward God (warming briefly under a moving sermon only to cool the moment it ends), hard beyond the reach of the Law's heaviest hammer, dead and utterly without spiritual feeling, incapable of retaining any impression like wax against stone, and growing harder with every rejected mercy until the very fires of Hell, rather than melting it, only make the damned blaspheme God the louder. He then traces the specific dangers of the unremedied stony heart: the mounting probability of final impenitence for the long-time Gospel-hearer who has felt and forgotten many stirrings, the progressive hardening that makes every year of delay more dangerous, the fact that a hard heart is Satan's favored throne from which he sends its owner confidently into sermons, religious books, and even the Bible itself, knowing that without a softened heart every means of grace simply slides off — and he pictures this with the image of John Bunyan's armor of Diabolus, whose breastplate is precisely a hard heart, proof against all Gospel arrows. He closes by describing the heart of flesh in three dimensions — a tender conscience that recoils from sin before, during, and after the act; a pliable will that bends to every breath of the Spirit rather than digging itself in like a root; and warm affections that genuinely love God and ache over perishing neighbors — and urges every hearer to trust Christ now as the only heart-changer, since neither morality, nor resolve, nor outward religious effort can turn the stone to flesh any more than polishing a shilling turns it to gold.Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on May 25, 1862.