Ministries, Rejected—Condemnation in – Charles Spurgeon

WE cannot tell what the metal is until we get it in the fire, but the fire tries it: and if you have lain long in the white heat of an impressive gospel ministry, the love of Jesus being like coals of juniper, and yet you have never been melted, if you do not tremble for yourself, I take leave to tremble for you. If a mother has pleaded with you, if she has even gone to her grave with sorrow because of the hardness of your heart, oh! surely this will testify against you in the day of reckoning; this marks you, even today, as hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. If you have worn out one after another of faithful friends who would gladly have conducted you to the cross: if you have made your God to be, as Amos says, like a cart that is loaded with sheaves and pressed down, beware, O man, beware! You are filling up the measure of the Almighty’s wrath; it is almost full, and when it is filled, beware! beware! beware! God is long in being provoked, but when his anger is at last stirred within him, woe unto those against whom he lifts up himself, Oil is a smooth and gentle thing, but once set it on a blaze, and how it burns! and love, that tender thing, if once it turns to jealousy, how terrible its flame! Christ is the Lamb today, but tomorrow he may be a lion to you if you reject him. That face which wept over Jerusalem, that dear face which is the very mirror of everything that is compassionate, will, if you continue hardened in heart, become the image of everything that is terrible; so that you shall call to the rocks, “Hide us,” and to the mountains, “Cover us; hide us from the face of him that sits upon the throne.