The Soul's Great Crisis | A Spurgeon Sermon on Romans 7:8-9

[@ClifRonczka]

Over the course of the last five or six years I have been trying to determine which preachers to listen to. I attended a Roman Catholic grammar school and completed the necessary rituals for confirmation and communion but never adhered to RC 'methods'. Even as a preteen I claimed atheism. About age nineteen I was working for a couple who were farming and also had a welding supply business. The man's wife attended a church which observed Saturday as Sabbath and she one day left a magazine from the church open where I would find it. As I recall I never told either her or her husband any of my background but she must have 'intuitively' surmised something, as the magazine was left open to an article entitled 'How to Raise a Juvenile Delinquent'. As Spurgeon points out in the first few minutes of this teaching, 'something' was 'inexplicably' at work, if not in my heart, possibly in my brain for I eagerly read the article and this piqued my curiosity first of this woman's observance of Sabbath and later of religion.

[@ClifRonczka]

This sermon is loaded with statements that require lots of meditation and investigation. At 13' + or - has me meditating on Psalm 119:5-6 "Oh, that my ways were directed to keep your statutes! 6) Then I would not be ashamed, when I look into all your commandments."

[@ClifRonczka]

Something we have which Spurgeon didn't have is the www. This sermon directed me to a Wikipedia article entitled 'letter and spirit of the law' and under the sub heading 'the Bible' the focus is on 2 Cor. 3:4-6 4) "Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. 5) Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, 6) who has made us sufficient to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life."