The Warrant of Faith

Spurgeon argues that the only legitimate warrant for a sinner to trust Christ is the plain Gospel command — "This is his commandment, that we should believe on the name of his Son Jesus Christ" — and he wages a sustained battle against every other proposed warrant: requiring repentance first (which is legal, since it makes repentance the real ground of trust rather than Christ), requiring convictions or good desires first (which are either already the Spirit's work, making the person already saved, or merely natural feelings, which are no true qualification at all), requiring election to be known first (which is circular, since election is only known through faith, not before it), all of which effectively make the Gospel a message for people who are already saved rather than a free offer to sinners as sinners. He shows the absurdity of every qualification-based system by pointing out that it leaves a dying man in despair since he can never know if he has felt enough, that it consoles the self-righteous hypocrite who is comfortably sure he has the right feelings, and that it vexes and repels the most genuinely penitent, who, precisely because the Spirit has taught them their own unworthiness, will never feel they have qualified enough — while the Moravian missionaries' experience in Greenland proved that plain proclamation of Christ to sinners, with no preparation demanded, accomplished in days what months of Law-work had failed to do. He closes by insisting that a command is a sufficient warrant — God commanded Israel to borrow Egyptian gold without any moral preparation, and he now commands sinners to believe without any spiritual preparation — and that the glorious result of this Free Grace preaching is that it levels all pride (every sinner has the same warrant), forbids all despair (no degree of sin can cancel a divine command), and keeps the believer daily near Christ himself rather than endlessly examining his own feelings for evidence that he is allowed to trust.Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on September 20, 1863.