The Believer Sinking In The Mire

Spurgeon opens with a vivid image of a man sucked into the black mud of a river bank — unable to help himself, sinking deeper with every struggle — as a picture of the Christian who has fallen into the deep mire of spiritual trial, cataloging its four main forms: tormenting doubts about the foundational truths of the faith, loss of personal assurance of salvation, temporal troubles that heap sorrow upon spiritual darkness, and sudden overwhelming sights of the corruption and sin lurking within one's own heart. He then addresses why God allows his people to fall into such states — as chastisement for neglected watchfulness, to test and prove the genuineness of faith, to strip away dependence on every created comfort and drive the soul back to God alone, and to make Heaven's peace incomparably sweeter by contrast — while insisting throughout that the very capacity to suffer in these ways is itself proof of spiritual life, since the dead feel nothing, and illustrating this with the experiences of Luther (who frequently doubted his own interest in the truths he preached so thunderously) and Knox (whose last great temptation was to trust his own blameless record rather than Christ). He closes with an urgent, almost desperate call to prayer as the one weapon that never rusts, never misfires, and can never be blockaded — insisting that prayer's essence is not elegant words or upright posture but the soul's sheer hunger and thirst, that God welcomes it at any hour in any state, and that to stop praying is to surrender the last defense to Satan — so that even from the deepest mire, the one act left is to cry out, "Deliver me, O God, and let me not sink." Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon in 1865. Listen for free on the following platforms: Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/1Rndn9d... Podcast Index - https://podcastindex.org/podcast/7491057 iHeartRadio - https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-da... Podcast Addict - https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/dai... Castro - https://castro.fm/podcast/fc718d93-28... Castbox - https://castbox.fm/channel/6814639?co... Deezer - https://www.deezer.com/us/show/100221... PlayerFM - https://player.fm/series/daily-sermon...