Hearers, Unsaved—Exhortation to – Charles Spurgeon

THE rain fell today, but fell upon thorns and briers as well as upon the green blades of the wheat. The dews will weep, and they will fall upon the thickly-tangled thistles and matted brier quite as copiously as upon the cottager’s well-weeded garden: and when the sun shines out with cheering ray, he will have rays quite as genial for the thistles and for the briers as for the fruit trees and for the barley and the wheat. So it is with you unconverted men and women. You have received God’s daily favors in as great abundance as the righteous. Nay, perhaps you have had more: you have been sitting clothed in fine linen like Dives, while God’s own saints have been rotting at your gates like Lazarus. You have not pined for lack of the outward influences of the means of grace. Some of you are sermon hearers; you are constantly within God’s gates; your Bibles are not unknown to you; you frequent the place where the proclamation of mercy is freely made; and yet all this has been wasted on you. Are you not near unto cursing?—visited by daily favor, rebuked by conscience, aroused at times by the natural motion of your own heart, awakened by God’s Spirit, awed under his Word, and yet, for all this, aliens to the commonwealth of Israel. Yet despair not! If your souls seek after better things, God is able to transform these wasteful thorns, these briers that bear no fruit, into fig trees, that shower their luscious fruit.