This delightful sermon blends the twin beauties of prayer and praise from Philippians 4:6—“Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.” After an extended introduction which suggests that the preacher’s soul it fully taken up with his topic, Spurgeon first underscores the reasons why Christians should mingle thanksgiving with prayer, urging us to “illuminate your prayers; light them up with rays of thanksgiving all the way through,” so that even if grief and sorrow are the burden of the prayer, it has at least some sparkles of gratitude. Then he turns the same thought in another direction, showing the evil of the absence of thanksgiving in our prayers, showing just how selfish and wilful that ungrateful pleader is. Finally, Spurgeon suggests that, according to the context, peace is the result of mingling thanksgiving with our prayers, together with warmth of soul and expectant hope. The sermon as a whole is not just an incentive to pray, but an incentive to a certain kind of praying, prayer in which pleading and praising are woven together, in which our intercessions are given a sweet aroma by being perfumed with thanksgiving to the God of all mercies. I hope it is as stirring to you as it seems it was to Spurgeon as he preached it.

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The beginning of Volume XXV has curious numbering, reflecting the fact that Spurgeon is very sick in Mentone while these sermons are being produced and published. There are combinations of letters and mediations from his sickbed with shorter sermons preached on different occasions. Most of them, taken together, are the same length as his regular output, but following the pattern can be a touch confusing. These sermons share a certain approach: taking a physical experience and drawing a spiritual parallel. So you have here a nose and eyes! The nose belongs to the child whom God raised from the dead by Elisha, and that child’s seven sneezes become a parable of the simple, unpleasant, monotonous, and sure indications of spiritual life in a newly-regenerated man or woman. The eyes belong to Hagar, and—just as the Lord opened her eyes in the wilderness to see the water which she needed for the life of her and her son—so we need our eyes opened. Spurgeon wonders at what remarkable things we might see if our spiritual eyes could see the past, the future, the angels, or the coming glory. He thinks of the things that darken our eyes to spiritual reality, and yearns for God to open the eyes of the inwardly blind, before thinking of the things which a believer might see at the communion table: Christ near at hand, our standing in Christ, and our happy prospects. May God open the eyes of us all, to see Christ for salvation, and to know our joy in him!

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There is a state of peace and there is a sense of peace. Spurgeon does not confuse or confound the two. In a distinctly pastoral sermon, he begins with the priority of the objective state of peace, secured by Jesus Christ and received and enjoyed by faith in him. He steps us through the stages of our experience in obtaining this peace, not just describing but directing the guilty sinner to Christ. He underscores the certainty and security of a peace granted by God for Christ’s sake. Then he moves to the secondary and subjective sense of peace, grounded in the objective reality of our standing before God pardoned through Christ’s blood and clothed in Christ’s righteousness. Here again the shepherd’s heart is very much in evidence, as Spurgeon thinks about the way a child of God might complain about or query his own feelings. The preacher reminds us that we do not expect to have peace with the devil, with the flesh, with the world, or with our own sin, and so we should not draw the wrong conclusions from those battles. We do have peace with God, however, and we are told what that looks like and how that operates, in our communion with him and confidence in him in all things.

Read the sermon: https://www.mediagratiae.org/resources/peace-a-fact-and-a-feeling

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