Have you ever wondered in your own personal life why somehow there is great difficulty to devote  yourself toward godly things? It may differ with you, but in the experience of my own soul this happens so often when my hope, my trust, my joy, my peace is depending on anything but God.

I find great ease to fall into sin when the eyes of my heart cease to look at the Throne of grace. I find myself becoming a stranger both to God and my own soul the moment I see God as something common. When the incorruptible God has become like corruptible man in my eyes. When the glory and beauty of God in Christ loses it’s luster in my heart.

Surely we are but feeble, weak, and unprofitable servants, wretched sinners. But though weak as we are, as helpless and sinful as we are, just like Moses when he lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, God bids us, “Look unto Me” (Isaiah 45:22).

Dear reader, I do not know if it is well with your soul this day, if truly you are converted from spiritual death to spiritual life, Here, in the simplicity of this blessed truth is a mountain of confidence that you can ground your hope upon. Here is the bedrock of our salvation. Full salvation! From first to last!

“Me”, what a wonderful declaration, for what is there in Him but the fullness of all grace and peace? There is nothing less but grace abounding in His name and person. Grace abounding that overcomes death and sin!

Let us cast ourselves wholly unto Him, dear reader—to God in Christ Jesus! Let us do so even in the face of adversity. Even in the face of temptation and pain. Oh, dear heart, let us endure the greatest of sufferings before we would taste even the sweetest of sins! And may we declare soon after with Mr. Spurgeon,

“My sole hope for heaven lies in the full atonement made on Calvary’s cross for the ungodly.

On that I firmly rely.

I do not have the shadow of a hope anywhere else.”

When I was in the hand of the Holy Spirit, under conviction of sin, I had a clear and sharp sense of the justice of God. Sin, whatever it might be to other people, became to me an intolerable burden. It was not so much that I feared hell as that I feared sin. All the while, I had on my mind a deep concern for the honor of God’s name and the integrity of His moral government.

I felt that it would not satisfy my conscience if I could be forgiven unjustly. But then there came the question, “How could God be just and yet justify me when I am so guilty?”

I was worried and wearied with this question; neither could I find any answer to it. Certainly, I could never have invented an answer that would have satisfied my conscience.

The doctrine of the atonement is to me one of the surest proofs of the divine inspiration of Holy Scripture. Who would or could have thought of the just Ruler dying for the unjust rebel? This is no teaching of human mythology; this is no dream of poetical imagination. This method of atonement is only known among men because it is a fact; fiction could not have devised it. God Himself ordained it; it is not a matter that could have been imagined.

I had heard of the plan of salvation by the sacrifice of Jesus from my youth, but I did not know any more about it in my innermost soul than if I had been born and bred in a remote African tribe. The light was there, but I was blind.

It was necessary for the Lord Himself to make the matter plain to me. It came to me as a new revelation, as fresh as if I had never read in Scripture that Jesus was declared to be the propitiation for sins that God might be just. I believe it will have to come as a revelation to every newborn child of God whenever he sees it—I mean that glorious doctrine of the substitution of the Lord Jesus.

I came to understand that salvation was possible through vicarious sacrifice; furthermore, provision had been made in the first constitution for a substitutionary sacrifice. I was made to see that He who is the Son of God, coequal and coeternal with the Father, had of old been made the covenant Head of a chosen people. In that capacity, He could suffer for them and save them.

Our fall was not at first a personal one, for we fell in our representative, the first Adam. Therefore, it became possible for us to be recovered by a second Representative, Jesus. He undertook to be the covenant Head of His people so that He could be their second Adam. I saw that before I had actually sinned, I had fallen by my first father’s sin. I rejoiced that, therefore, it became possible in point of law for me to rise by a second Head and Representative. The fall by Adam left a “loophole” of escape; another Adam could undo the ruin done by the first.

When I was anxious about the possibility of a just God pardoning me, I understood and saw by faith that He who is the Son of God became man.

In His own blessed person, He bore my “sins in his own body on the tree?” (1 Pet. 2:24).

I saw that “the chastisement of [my] peace was upon him; and with his stripes [I was] healed” (Isa. 53:5).

It was because the Son of God, supremely glorious in His matchless person, undertook to vindicate the law by bearing the sentence due to me, that therefore God was able to pass by my sin.

My sole hope for heaven lies in the full atonement made on Calvary’s cross for the ungodly.

On that I firmly rely.

I do not have the shadow of a hope anywhere else.

By myself, I could never have overcome my own sinfulness.

I tried and failed.

My evil tendencies were too many for me until, in the belief that Christ died for me, I cast my guilty soul on Him.

—C. H. Spurgeonⁱ

Read the rest of Spurgeon’s recollection of his conversion here: My Conversion

Footnotes

1. (2000). My Conversion (electronic ed.) (11). Escondito, California: Ephesians Four Group. [↩]