The Wrong Assumption

When I plowed into the second chapter of that first letter of the Apostle Peter, I first thought I had found a great preaching text.  It was a text which would make one of those classic three point sermons.  Three words from the first four verses of that chapter grabbed me.  "Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice, and all your guile, insincerity, envy and all slander...(2:1)...long for the pure, spiritual milk...(2:2)...Come to Him, a living stone...(2:4).  The last point even took me to a great concluding story, a great means of offering an invitation to come to Christ.     

Faster than I could  process the thought, the conversion of Charles Spurgeon came to mind.  Spurgeon was a great 19th century English preacher who is known as "the Prince of Preachers."  Though Presbyterian, so many of his sermons sound like a page out of John Wesley's preaching manual.  On January 6, 1850 a very young and spiritually hungry Spurgeon got waylaid on his way to his church by a snowstorm and ended up in a small Primitive Methodist Church filled with no more than 20 or so folks.  

The preacher was absent because of the storm and an uneducated man preached from Isaiah 45:22, a text which said, "Look unto me, and be saved."  When the tailor had run to the end of his tether in about ten minutes, (as Spurgeon put it),  he looked at Spurgeon, called him out as a miserable man, and cried out, "Come to Him, and be saved."  Spurgeon did and the rest is history. The text from I Peter and the story of Charles Spurgeon's conversion speaks to the need of the church for more invitational preaching.  One of the biggest errors of the church today is found in its assumption that everyone present on Sunday morning has made a decision to be connected in a relationship with Jesus Christ.