Look! Look! Look!

This Sunday, while our pastor was preaching through the gospel of John (view here) he told a story about  Charles Spurgeon with a very impactful verse - Isaiah 45:22.  I encourage you to memorize it!  The original following excerpt can be found here.  If you have time, there is an outstanding sermon by Spurgeon himself on the verse here that is much too long to quote although it deserves to be.  Anyways, here is the excerpt of Spurgeon's conversion.

Now, Charles worshipped at his father’s church in Tollesbury, nine miles to the south of Colchester, where his parents lived. On the morning of Sunday, January 13, 1850, John Spurgeon recommended that his son stay and worship at a Nonconformist church in Colchester—very possibly Colchester Baptist Church—due to a fierce snowstorm that was raging outside. However, the snow was falling so heavily that Spurgeon was unable to reach the Nonconformist church recommended by his father and he was compelled to turn aside into what was then a small Primitive Methodist chapel called Artillery Street Chapel (now Spurgeon Memorial Evangelical Church). Here there were gathered a dozen or so people.

“I had heard of the Primitive Methodists,” Spurgeon wrote a number of years later in his own inimitable account of his conversion, “how they sang so loudly that they made people’s heads ache; but that did not matter to me. I wanted to know how I might be saved, and if they could tell me that, I did not care how much they made my head ache.” When it was evident that the minister of the congregation was snowed in by the storm, “a very thin-looking man, a shoemaker, or tailor”—a man who spoke in the broad dialect common to rural Essex—went into the pulpit to preach. His text was Isaiah 45:22: “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God and there is none else.” He began thus: “My dear friends, this is a very simple text indeed. It says, ‘Look.’ Now lookin’ don’t take a deal of pain. It ain’t liftin’ your foot or your finger; it is just, ‘Look.’ Well, a man needn’t go to College to learn to look. You may be the biggest fool, and yet you can look. A man needn’t be worth a thousand a year to be able to look. Anyone can look; even a child can look. But then the text says, ‘Look unto Me.’ Ay! many on ye are lookin’ to yourselves, but it’s no use lookin’ there. You’ll never find any comfort in yourselves. Some look to God the Father. No, look to Him by-and-by. Jesus Christ says, ‘Look unto Me.’ Some on ye say, ‘We must wait for the Spirit’s workin.’ You have no business with that just now. Look to Christ. The text says, ‘Look unto Me’.”

After the preacher had elaborated what looking to Christ meant for about ten minutes or so, Spurgeon said the poor man “was at the end of his tether.” It was at this point in the service that the preacher noticed Spurgeon under the gallery, and with so few present, knew him to be a stranger. Fixing his eyes on Spurgeon, he said to him, “Young man, you look very miserable.” It was as if the man had read Spurgeon’s heart, for this was his very state indeed when it came to spiritual matters. The preacher continued: “And you always will be miserable—miserable in life, and miserable in death—if you don’t obey my text; but if you obey my text, this moment, you will be saved.” Then, lifting up his hands, he shouted, as only a Primitive Methodist could do, “Young man, look to Jesus Christ. Look! Look! Look! You have nothin’ to do but look and live.”

As soon as the preacher had uttered these words, Spurgeon said that he saw at once the way of salvation. “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. 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.”