That not a single snowflake falls but under His sovereign will and guidance. I believe in the meticulous providence of God. Keep pressing on! Be persistent in godly impressions upon those around you. And years of being called to repentance and faith by his own mother prepared Spurgeon for that day when the gospel light finally broke through. Truly we believe in the necessity of God's gracious calling upon a sinner's life but we also know God works through means. But who knows whether or not the 10,000th time will be the time the sinner turns to Jesus? No, we may not always witness the fruit of our labors but we can believe that it is important to impress upon those around us the truth of the gospel and implore them to seek the mercy of Christ for the forgiveness of their sins. What an encouragement this is to parents and others who are faithfully and persistently sharing the gospel with others! Persistence pays off. She would pray for him, instruct him in the Scriptures, and implore he and his siblings to rest their souls upon Jesus. Particularly, he gives credit to his mother's impact on his early years. While it is true that Spurgeon attributes his conversion to a single moment in time, January 6, 1850, it is also true that he gives credit to godly impressions that happened long before then to bring him to that point of repentance and faith on that cold snowy morning. But as I consider this wonderful story once again, I think of 4 important lessons we can take away from it to apply to our own lives and ministries today: It's probable you've heard this conversion story before as it has been written about many times and was spoken of in Spurgeon's own sermons and works quite frequently. Oh, that somebody had told me this before, "Trust Christ, and you shall be saved." Yet it was, no doubt, all wisely ordered, and now I can say,- "Ever since by faith I saw the stream Thy flowing wounds supply, Redeeming love has been my theme, And shall be till I die." There and then the cloud was gone, the darkness had rolled away, and that moment I saw the sun and I could have risen that instant, and sung with the most enthusiastic of them, of the precious blood of Christ, and the simple faith which looks alone to Him. I had been waiting to do fifty things, but when I heard that word, "Look!" what a charming word it seemed to me! Oh! I looked until I could almost have looked my eyes away. Like as when the brazen serpent was lifted up, the people only looked and were healed, so it was with me. I know not what else he said,-I did not take much notice of it,-I was so possessed with that one thought. Look! Look! Look! You have nothin' to do but to look and live." I saw at once the way of salvation. Lifting up his hands, shouted, as only a Primitive Methodist could do, "Young man, look to Jesus Christ. This 'sermon' lasted all of about 10 minutes, but see how Spurgeon recounts the impact of what this man said to him that morning: "At last, a very thin-looking man, a shoemaker, or tailor, or something of that sort, went up into the pulpit to preach." This man preached the text of Isaiah 45:22 and exhorted this teenager, one Charles Haddon Spurgeon, to look to Christ and be saved. Apparently, the snow was so severe that the pastor of this little Methodist chapel didn't even show up that day! That young man huslted inside still carrying his burden of sin that he did not realize was soon to be lifted. A snowstorm prevented him from attending church with his father. On January 6, 1850, a 15-year-old young man wandered into the Primitive Methodist Chapel of Colchester.
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