primarily unbelief is not in the mind but in the heart — Martyn Lloyd-Jones

"Stephen tells us that primarily this unbelief and rejection of the Gospel is due to the state of the heart. “To whom our fathers would not obey, but thrust him from them, and in their hearts turned back again into Egypt, saying …” (Acts 7:39) The real trouble with men and women, the cause of their unbelief, is in their hearts. Now in Scripture the term heart generally means the very center of personality. Particularly it means the seat of the desires. It is that in people that determines what they really want.

Now, you notice, unbelief is not in the mind. This is the first thing that people today must learn, for they fondly think that they are not Christians because of their great brains, because of their understanding, and especially because of all this wonderful modern knowledge that we have garnered. But that is exactly where they go wrong. The trouble with them is not primarily in their head but in their heart. The heart is deeper than the mind…

If you read the story of the children of Israel in the Old Testament, you will constantly find this truth that Stephen is expounding here. Constantly their hearts lusted after something else, lusted after other gods or other women. They were always lusting after something. That was the whole cause of their tragedy. If I had the powers of a dictator, I think I would compel everybody to read the story of the Jews in the Old Testament. There you see men and women behaving like fools, always governed by their wicked hearts.

Indeed, our Lord put it still more plainly and clearly when he said, “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies” (Matt. 15:19). That is where it all comes from. It is “not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth” (Matt. 15:11). It is not even the influences that are around us. They only play on what is inherent in us. “Unto the pure all things are pure” (Titus 1:15); but if you are not pure, everything will become impure. It is the human heart that is evil.

So the trouble with the world is not due to the fact that it does not have light and knowledge. Look at the books that have been poured out showing the madness of war and the wrongness of various attitudes that are ruining life. There is no lack of light and knowledge, and the light has come supremely in the Son of God Himself. We have it all in the Sermon on the Mount. So why are the nations fighting? Why are they arming? Why are they on the brink of some abyss? Here is our Lord’s answer: “This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world …” Why does everybody not turn to it and submit to it? Why do we not all live in the light? Here is the answer: “… and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19).

That is why people reject the Gospel. It is because they love evil; they enjoy what they are doing; they are governed by the heart. The apostle Paul sums this up in his customary manner when he writes to the Ephesians:

  "And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: among whom also we all had our conversation in times past [what sort of life was it? Here it is] in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind [that means, the lusts of the flesh, the body, and the mind]; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others."
—Eph. 2:1–3

I am talking about the world as it is. Listen to James:

  "From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not."
—Jas. 4:1–2

Is that not the explanation of the whole of history, I do not care which country you may name? This country [England], too, has been guilty of lusting for power, taking over this and that area of the world. We do not like other people to do it, but we have done it—all nations have. “This is mine.” “No, it’s mine.” Lusting! Desiring! Lust is the cause of the troubles of the world. Light is brushed aside because people are not governed by their reason but by their lusts and passions. This is the universal teaching of the New Testament.
The apostle John says exactly the same thing:

  "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever."
—1 John 2:15–17

These people, said Stephen to the Sanhedrin, their forefathers, had “in their hearts turned back again into Egypt.” (Acts 7:39)…

And do not talk to me about your scientific problems—I know as much about them as you do! That is not an explanation. You are putting them up as a camouflage to hide your lusts and passions and desires. You are insulting me if you say that your unbelief is because of your intellect, for you are saying that I am a fool; but I am ready to meet with you on scientific grounds whenever you like. Face the facts! Face yourself! Face your world as it is today. Read history, and you will see that it is the story of just this very unbelief, this madness, this being governed by lust and desire rather than by reason and truth. It is the rejection of God. It is spitting into the face of God’s love, rejecting His most glorious offer. He is offering you free pardon; He is offering to reconcile you unto Himself, to give you a new heart, a new life, and a new nature. He will take from you the fear of death and will hold before you the prospect of a glory that transcends your highest imagination. He is offering you all that for nothing. Do you say that you are wise in rejecting all that? It is the only solution to your problem and to the problem of the nations; it is the only solution to the problem of the whole world.

May God grant us ears to hear! May God enable us to listen to the argument of Stephen presented of old to the members of the Sanhedrin, and may God give us grace to apply it to ourselves and to see that unless we repent, there is nothing awaiting us but the disaster and the doom that we so richly deserve. Let us listen to Him and yield to Him before it is too late."

— Martyn Lloyd-Jones (2006). Triumphant Christianity (Vol. 5, pp. 173–182). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books.

The folly of humanity — Martyn Lloyd-Jones

"The Bible has many ways of defining sin. It says that sin is missing the mark. It is like a man aiming at a target and missing it. It also says that sin is a transgression and that it is disobedience. But the ultimate fact about sinners, the men and women who disobey God, is that they are fools. “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God” (Ps. 14:1). Our Lord told a parable about a rich fool. The man, who was a farmer, was congratulating himself. His harvest was so great that his barns had become too small, and he was planning to pull them down and build larger ones. He was pleased with himself, and he said, “Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.” But that night God spoke to him and said, “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?” (Luke 12:16–20). The fool! And this is the most common charge that is brought in the Bible against men and women in sin and in rebellion against God…

In Romans 1:22 Paul makes the most devastating statement that has ever been made about the human race, and it has never been seen more clearly than at this moment: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.” If that is not the most perfect description that you have ever heard of men and women in this modern day, then you know very little about life.

“Professing themselves to be wise”—in what sense? In their self-confidence. The self-confidence of men and women is endless. They think there is nothing they cannot do. After all, they have split the atom, they have beaten the law of gravity, they sent men into space … can anything stand before them? They think they are the center of the universe. The greatest thing in the universe is the human brain. There seems to be no limit to its capacity, and the first claim men put forward is that they can make God. But there is nothing new about modern man—his forefathers did exactly the same thing. At the foot of Mount Sinai, they turned to Aaron and said, “Make us gods to go before us…”…

But, second, let me prove to you that men and women are fools. The Bible does not stop at assertions—it goes on to give us demonstrations. I know of nothing more devastating—in a kind of literary sense—than the way in which Stephen did it here…

If you are in any doubt about this, let me demonstrate to you the folly of human beings, let me prove it beyond the possibility of contradiction. First, men and women show that they are fools when you look at what they produce in contradistinction to what they reject. Stephen brought that out at this point by quoting from the thirty-second chapter of the book of Exodus. The children of Israel had rejected, and they had made. What had they rejected? God! What had they made? A calf! Could anything be plainer? They rejected God: “To whom our fathers would not obey, but thrust him from them, and in their hearts turned back again into Egypt, saying unto Aaron, Make us gods to go before us: for as for this Moses, which brought us out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him. And they made”—they were going to make a god; they were rejecting the true God—“a calf in those days, and offered sacrifice unto the idol.”
What else needs to be said! That is humanity at this very moment. In the second half of the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, the apostle Paul says:

  "Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things."
—Rom. 1:19–23

That is what people did, and that is what they are still doing. They reject God—God the Creator, God the sustainer of the whole universe, God the orderer of all things, the God of providence, the God of history, the holy God, the glorious God. I will tell you about the God whom the children of Israel had rejected. He gave a description of Himself to Moses soon after the incident of the golden calf:

  "And the LORD descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the LORD. And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation."
—Exod. 34:5–7

That is God! The everlasting and eternal God!…

Paul wrote to Timothy, “[God] only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto” (1 Tim. 6:16). No man has seen God or ever can see the everlasting God, the God of glory, who is beyond description. And yet He is a God to whom we can pray, a God who is ready to listen to us. He is the living God, the powerful God, the acting God.

      "God in three persons, blessed Trinity."
             Reginald Heber

That is the God from whom people turn away.

And what do people turn to? What do they make? A calf! Have you noticed, they always do something like this. Of course, they make it of gold, and this is where they show their folly still further. They think that making a calf of gold will be different from making a calf of wood. They do not see that in all cases it is still a calf. But because it is gold, it looks marvelous and is costly, and they think, “This is it—a calf made of gold!” And they bow down before it. And as Paul says in Romans 1, it does not stop with calves—they make “creeping things” (v. 23) and so on.

The people of this country [England], over 90 percent of them, are much too intelligent, they tell us, to believe in God any longer. What do they believe in? They believe in the British lion! He has recently had his tail twisted a bit, has he not? A lion. It is always an animal. The Russian bear! The German eagle! It is always the same. How we give ourselves away! What utter fools we are. We do not believe in God, but we believe in our country. Many people worship their country. Nationalism is ultimately worship of country, worshiping the blood that is in you, worshiping yourself writ large.

Then look at the worship of money! Oh, we are much too intelligent to believe in God, so we go in for sports pools to win money. Or perhaps our god is food, drink, travel, or pleasure. People say, “We can’t possibly believe in God,” but they literally worship money. I have known people who have worshiped houses—there is no question about it—and cars. I have known many people who have worshiped their own children. They have sacrificed God without a moment’s thought for the sake of their children. They will discourage their children from being religious so that they might get on in the world. In all this, as Paul reminds us, man has been worshiping himself. Not only “four-footed beasts, and creeping things” (Rom. 1:23) but man himself. Great man! Scientific man! Man come of age. What is man but a fool! He turns from God and worships a beast."

— Martyn Lloyd-Jones, M. (2006). Triumphant Christianity. Studies in the Book of Acts (Vol. 5). The folly of humanity.

God's preserving care — Charles H. Spurgeon

"Do we sufficiently praise God for guarding us from disease? I am afraid that his preserving care is often forgotten. Men will go thirty or forty years almost without an illness, and forget the Lord in consequence. That which should secure gratitude creates indifference. When we have been ill we come up to the house of the Lord and desire to return thanks because of our recovery; ought we not to give thanks when we are not ill, and do not need to be recovered? Should it not be to you healthy folk a daily cause of gratitude to God that he keeps away those pains which would keep you awake all night, and wards off those sicknesses which would cause your beauty to consume away like the moth?…

Oh, come let us sing unto Jehovah who hath said,—“I am the Lord that healeth thee” (Exodus 15:26). Do not attribute to secondary means that which ought to be ascribed to God alone. His fresh air, and warm sun, or bracing wind, and refreshing showers do more for our healing than we dream of, or if medicine be used, it is he who gives virtue to the drugs, and so by his own Almighty hand works out our cure. As one who has felt his restoring hand, I will personally sing unto him who is the health of my countenance and my God.”

— Charles H. Spurgeon

Christianity is the easiest and the hardest religion in the world — Francis A. Schaeffer

"We must realize that Christianity is the easiest religion in the world, because it is the only religion in which God the Father and Christ and the Holy Spirit do everything. God is the Creator; we have nothing to do with our existence, or existence of other things. We can shape other things, but we cannot change the fact of existence. We do nothing for our salvation because Christ did it all. We do not have to do anything. In every other religion we have to do something — everything from burning a joss stick to sacrificing our firstborn child to dropping a coin in the collection plate — the whole spectrum. But with Christianity we do not do anything; God has done it all: He has created us and He has sent His Son; His Son died and because the Son is infinite, therefore He bears our total guilt. We do not need to bear our guilt, nor do we even have to merit the merit of Christ. He does it all. So in one way it is the easiest religion in the world.

But now we can turn that over because it is the hardest religion in the world for the same reason. The heart of the rebellion of Satan and man was the desire to be autonomous; and accepting the Christian faith robs us not of our existence, not of our worth (it gives us our worth), but it robs us completely of being autonomous. We did not make ourselves, we are not a product of chance, we are none of these things; we stand there before a Creator plus nothing, we stand before the Savior plus nothing — it is a complete denial of being autonomous. Whether it is conscious or unconscious (and in the most brilliant people it is occasionally conscious), when they see the sufficiency of the answers on their own level, they suddenly are up against their innermost humanness — not humanness as they were created to be human, but human in the bad sense since the Fall.  That is the reason that people do not accept the sufficient answers and why they are counted by God as disobedient and guilty when they do not bow.

People are living against the revelation of themselves. They are denying the revelation of God they themselves and all reality are.  They are denying it and yet they have to live with it. When the person comes to see that there are good and sufficient reasons, then he or she is faced with a problem; either they bow before those good and sufficient reasons, and bow to the Person behind the reasons, or they refuse to bow.
It is not that the answers are not good, adequate and sufficient.  Unless one gives up one’s autonomy, one cannot accept the answers."

— Francis A. Schaeffer (1982). The complete works of Francis A. Schaeffer: a Christian worldview. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books.

now I can worship God better — Francis A. Schaeffer

"A number of years ago I was at a discussion group in Detroit.  An older black pastor was there.  We discussed many intellectual and cultural problems and the answers given by Christianity.  One would have called the discussion “intellectual” rather than devotional.  As he was leaving, the black pastor shook my hand and thanked me.  If he had said, “Thank you for helping me to defend my people better,” or “Thank you for helping me to be a better evangelist,” I would have been very glad that what I had said had been helpful, and then possibly I would not have given it another thought.  But what he actually said was, “Thank you for opening these doors to me; now I can worship God better.”  I will never forget him because he was a man who really understood.  If this is not our own response first of all, and then the response of those whom we try to help, we have made a mistake somewhere."

— Francis A. Schaeffer (1982). The complete works of Francis A. Schaeffer: a Christian worldview. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books.

suffering, futility, sin and hope — John Piper

Sermon text: Romans 8:18–25

"The meaning of all the misery in the world is that sin is horrific. All natural evil is a statement about the horror of moral evil. If you see a suffering in the world that is unspeakably horrible, let it make you shudder at how unspeakably horrible sin is against an infinitely holy God. The meaning of futility and the meaning of corruption and the meaning of our groaning is that sin – falling short of the glory of God – is ghastly, hideous, repulsive beyond imagination.

Unless you have some sense of the infinite holiness of God and the unspeakable outrage of sin against this God, you will inevitably see the futility and suffering of the universe as an overreaction. But in fact the point of our miseries, our futility, our corruption, our groaning is to teach us the horror of sin. And the preciousness of redemption and hope."

— John Piper, Subjected to Futility in Hope, Part 1

Without absolutes, morals as morals cease to exist — Francis A. Schaeffer

"From the biblical answer flow four important facts.

Firstly, the God who is there is a good God.

Secondly, there is a hope of a solution to the dilemma of man.

Thirdly, there is a sufficient basis for morals. Nobody has ever discovered a way of having real “morals” without a moral absolute. If there is no moral absolute, we are left with hedonism (doing what I like) or some form of the social contract theory (what is best for society as a whole is right). However, neither of these alternatives corresponds to the moral motions that men have. Talk to people long enough and deeply enough, and you will find that they consider some things are really right and some things are really wrong.  Without absolutes, morals as morals cease to exist, and humanistic man starting from himself is unable to find the absolute he needs.  But because the God of the Bible is there, real morals exist.  Within this framework I can say one action is right and another wrong, without talking nonsense.

Fourthly, there is an adequate reason for fighting wrong.  The Christian never faces the dilemma posed in Camus’ book La Peste.  It simply is not true that he either has to side with the doctor against God by fighting the plague, or join with the priest on God’s side and thus be much less than human by not fighting the plague. If this were an either-or choice in life, it would indeed be terrible. But the Christian is not confined to such a choice.  Let us go to the tomb of Lazarus.  As Jesus stood there, He not only wept, but He was angry.  The exegesis of the Greek of the passages John 11:33 and 38 is clear. Jesus, standing in front of the tomb of Lazarus, was angry at death and at the abnormality of the world the destruction and distress caused by sin.  In Camus’ words, Christ hated the plague.  He claimed to be God and He could hate the plague without hating Himself as God.

A Christian can fight what is wrong in the world with compassion and know that as he hates these things, God hates them too.  God hates them to the high price of the death of Christ.

But if I live in a world of nonabsolutes and would fight social injustice on the mood of the moment, how can I establish what social justice is?  What criterion do I have to distinguish between right and wrong so that I can know what I should be fighting?  Is it not possible that I could in fact acquiesce in evil and stamp out good?  The word love cannot tell me how to discern, for within the humanistic framework love can have no defined meaning.  But once I comprehend that the Christ who came to die to end “the plague” both wept and was angry at the plague’s effects, I have a reason for fighting that does not rest merely on my momentary disposition, or the shifting consensus of men.

But the Christian also needs to be challenged at this point.  The fact that he alone has a sufficient standard by which to fight evil, does not mean that he will so fight.  The Christian is the real radical of our generation, for he stands against the monolithic, modern concept of truth as relative.  But too often, instead of being the radical, standing against the shifting sands of relativism, he subsides into merely maintaining the status quo.  If it is true that evil is evil, that God hates it to the point of the cross, and that there is a moral law fixed in what God is in Himself, then Christians should be the first into the field against what is wrong — including man’s inhumanity to man."

— Francis A. Schaeffer (1982). The complete works of Francis A. Schaeffer: a Christian worldview. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books.

no one has ever thought of a way of deriving personality from nonpersonal sources — Francis Schaeffer

"The Bible states that this God who is personal created man in His own image.… God is personal, & man is also personal.

It might be helpful to illustrate the situation in this way.
Imagine you are in the Alps, and from a high vantage point you can see three parallel ranges of mountains with two valleys in between.  In one valley there is a lake, but the other is dry.  Suddenly you begin to witness what sometimes happens in the Alps; a lake forming in the second valley where there was none before.  As you see the water rising, you may wonder what its source is.  If it stops at the same level as the lake in the neighboring valley, you may, after careful measurements, conclude that there is a possibility that the water has come from the first valley.  But if your measurement shows that the level of the second lake is twenty feet higher than the first, then you can no longer consider that its source may be from the neighboring valley and you would have to seek another explanation.  Personality is like that; no one has ever thought of a way of deriving personality from nonpersonal sources.

Therefore, biblical Christianity has an adequate and reasonable explanation for the source and meaning of human personality.  Its source is sufficient — the personal God on the high order of Trinity.  Without such a source men are left with personality coming from the impersonal (plus time, plus chance).

The two alternatives are very clearcut.  Either there is a personal beginning to everything, or one has what the impersonal throws up by chance out of the time sequence.  The fact that the second alternative may be veiled by connotation words makes no difference.  The words used by Eastern pantheism; the theological words such as Tillich’s “Ground of Being”; the secular shift from mass to energy or motion — all eventually come back to the impersonal, plus time, plus chance.  If this is really the only answer to man’s personality, then personality is no more than an illusion, a kind of sick joke which no amount of semantic juggling will alter.  Only some form of mystical jump will allow us to accept that personality comes from impersonality.  This was the position into which Teilhard de Chardin was forced. His answer is only a mystical answer of words.

Because these men will not accept the only explanation which can fit the facts of their own experience, they have become metaphysical magicians.  No one has presented an idea, let alone demonstrated it to be feasible, to explain how the impersonal beginning, plus time, plus chance, can give personality.  We are distracted by a flourish of endless words, and lo, personality has appeared out of the hat!  This is the water rising above its source.  No one in all the history of humanistic, rationalistic thought has found a solution.  As a result, either the thinker must say man is dead, because personality is a mirage; or else he must hang his reason on a hook outside the door and cross the threshold into the leap of faith which is the new level of despair.

A man like Sir Julian Huxley has clarified the dilemma by acknowledging, though he is an atheist, that somehow or other, against all that one might expect, man functions better if he acts as though God is there.  This sounds like a feasible solution for a moment, the kind of answer a computer might give if you fed the sociological data into it.  God is dead, but act as if He were alive.  However, a moment’s reflection will show what a terrible solution this is.  Ibsen, the Norwegian, put it like this: if you take away a man’s lie, you take away his hope. These thinkers are saying in effect that man can only function as man for an extended period of time if he acts on the assumption that a lie (that the personal God of Christianity is there) is true.  You cannot find any deeper despair than this for a sensitive person.  This is not an optimistic, happy, reasonable or brilliant answer.  It is darkness and death.

Imagine that a universe existed which was made up only of liquids and solids, and no free gases.  A fish was swimming in this universe.  This fish, quite naturally, was conformed to its environment, so that it was able to go on living.  But let us suppose that by blind chance, as the evolutionists would have us believe, this fish developed lungs as it continued swimming in this universe without any gases.  Now this fish would no longer be able to function and fulfill its position as a fish.  Would it then be higher or lower in its new state with lungs?  It would be lower, for it would drown.  In the same way, if man has been kicked up by chance out of what is only impersonal, then those things that make him man — hope of purpose and significance, love, motions of morality and rationality, beauty and verbal communication — are ultimately unfulfillable and are thus meaningless.  In such a situation, is man higher or lower?  He would then be the lowest creature on the scale.  The green moss on the rock is higher than he, for it can be fulfilled in the universe which exists.  But if the world is what these men say it is, then man (not only individually but as a race), being unfulfillable, is dead.  In this situation man should not walk on the grass, but respect it — for it is higher than he!"

— Francis A. Schaeffer (1982). The complete works of Francis A. Schaeffer: a Christian worldview. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books.

To make no decision is always to make a decision against God — Martyn Lloyd-Jones

"There are only two ultimate possibilities in life. We are, all of us, either for God or else we are against Him, and nothing else matters. The color of your skin does not matter at all; you may be very clever, you may be very learned, or you may be ignorant and illiterate—it does not matter. The one question is: Are you one of God’s people, or are you one of the people who are against Him?

There is no other possibility. There is no such thing as neutrality in the realm of the spirit.

To make no decision is always to make a decision against God, for we are all by nature against Him.

“The carnal [natural] mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be” (Rom. 8:7). We are all born God-haters; we are all against God. Some people, I know, say, “I’ve always believed in God.” But that means that they have never believed in Him. What they have believed in is some figment of their own imagination. If you confront such people with the God of the Bible, they will soon begin to show their hatred of Him. They have a God whom they can manipulate and handle, a God made after their own image and likeness, and they hate the living God who is revealed in the Bible.

So there is no such thing as neutrality. I repeat that we are either for God or we are against Him. There is no no-man’s-land in this matter. We all of us are inevitably in one of two camps. Our Lord Himself said it: “He that is not with me is against me” (Matt. 12:30)."

— Martyn Lloyd-Jones (2004). Vol. 4: Glorious Christianity (1st U.S. ed.). Studies in the Book of Acts (252–253). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books.

don’t fight your sins in your own power — C. H. Spurgeon

"But we must take our sins to God too. Possibly this is a more difficult point. The sinner thinks that he must fight this battle for himself, wrestle with his own evil temper himself, and he himself must enter into conflict with his lusts and his besetting sins; but when he comes into the fight, he soon meets with a defeat, and then he is ready to give it all up. Take your sins to God, my brethren. Take them to the cross that the blood may fall upon them, to purge away their guilt, and to take away their power. Your sins must all be slain. There is only one place where they can be slaughtered—the altar where your Saviour died. If you would flog your sins, flog them with the whip that tore your Saviour’s shoulder. If you would nail your sins fast, drive the same nails through them which fastened your Lord to the cross; I mean, let your faith in the great Surety, and your love to him who suffered so much for you, be the power with which you do conflict with evil. It is said of the saints in heaven, “They overcame through the blood of the Lamb.” That is how you must overcome. Go to Jesus with your sins; no one else can help you; you are powerless without him."

C. H. Spurgeon (1867). The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, Vol. XIII (164–165). London: Passmore & Alabaster.