CHARLES SPURGEON'S CONVERSION

This is the wonderful account of Charles Spurgeon's conversion. God works in mysterious ways to bring about the salvation of His children...

"The 15 year old teenager headed off to church, as he normally did on Sunday mornings. But there was a blizzard that day and the heavy snow kept him from going to his usual place of worship. Instead he found himself in a Primitive Methodist Church.

As a young man, from a long lineage of Pastors, he knew all about Christianity, but he didn’t know Christ. Later he would write of those days, "It was my sad lot to feel the greatness of my sin without a discovery of the greatness of God’s mercy."

The Primitive Methodist Church almost didn’t open that morning, but the caretaker, thinking that a few people might show up, opened the doors and lit the stove. By 11:00 some 12-15 people had come inside, but not the Pastor. He had apparently been unable to get there because of the snow.

Finally one of the laymen of the congregation reluctantly took the pulpit. As he looked down, he could see the small congregation, hundreds of empty seats, and the young 15 year old boy seated under the gallery. The text for his sermon was "Look unto me, and be ye saved", and after about ten minutes of repeating himself, the man was about to step down from the pulpit. But before he did, he addressed the teenager. "Young man," he said, "you look very miserable, and you will always be miserable if you don’t obey my text. But if you do obey now, this moment, you will be saved." He paused again, then shouted at the young man with more animation, "Young man, look to Jesus! Look! Look! Look!"

That substitute preacher and his tentative sermon was what the Holy Spirit used to bring Charles Spurgeon to Christ. Later Spurgeon wrote of that experience, "There and then the cloud was gone, the darkness was rolled away."