“Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is none else.”  Isaiah 45:22 (KJV)

 When I was young, my grandma told us stories of her life growing up in England in the 1890’s.  She lived in a village on the Welsh border, Llanymynech, where one half of the village was in England and the other half in Wales.  Her father was a circuit preacher in the Primitive Methodist Church.  I visited her village and saw the church where my great grandfather preached.  His name was still on the list of pastors (from 1890).  The building was small, about the size of a two-car garage, a very simple structure where the Word of God was preached each Sunday morning and an evangelistic Sunday school was held in the afternoon.  I have an old Moody and Sankey hymnbook that my grandma won for perfect attendance at Sunday school.  Great grandpa must have been a busy man on Sunday.  After the morning preaching, he got on his horse and went to other churches to preach.  “One generation shall praise Your works to another, and shall declare Your mighty acts,” Psalms 145:4.

This week, I read a story about a man who happened to attend a little Primitive Methodist church in England.  When Charles Spurgeon was fifteen, he was driven by a snowstorm into a little church of that affiliation where a handful of faithful members had braved a blizzard.  The pastor didn’t show up (probably a circuit preacher), but after waiting for a time, an old gentleman rose without preparation and chose Isaiah 45:22 as his text.  “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is none else.” 

 Spurgeon later recalled:  He had not much to say for that compelled him to keep on repeating his text, and there was nothing needed – by me, at any rate – except his text.  I remember how he said, ‘My dear friends, this is a very simple text indeed.  It says, Look!  Well, a man needn’t go to college to learn to look.  You may be the biggest fool, and yet you can look.’”

Spotting Charles in the back of the room, the man added, “Young man, you look very miserable.  And you always will be miserable—miserable in life and miserable in death—if you don’t obey my text; but if you obey now, this moment, you will be saved.”  Then he shouted at the top of his voice: “Young man, look to Jesus Christ.  Look!  Look!  Look!  You have nothing to do but to look and live!”

Charles H. Spurgeon later said, “I owe my conversion to Christ to an unknown person, who certainly was no minister in the ordinary acceptation of the term; but who could say this much, “Look unto Christ and be saved, all the ends of the earth.”

 I can hardly imagine such plain spoken language confronting a fifteen year old boy in our church pews  today!  It reveals that God can use anything to touch the consciences of unbelievers and He knows who will be saved.  God had His eye on that young man, He had work for him to do and it had to start with a humble spirit toward God.  Charles Spurgeon later became known as the “Prince of Preachers.”  He said “Christ had not commanded him to ‘feed my giraffes,’ but rather to ‘feed my sheep.’  Thus, in preaching, he insisted that, “We must not put the fodder on a high rack by our fine language, but use great plainness of speech.”  And Charles did speak plainly and often upon his favorite theme, “Jesus Christ and Him crucified!” 

 Your friend, Jean