Your Soul’s Truest Friend
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834—1892), the great 19th century Prince of Preachers, was often called "the last Puritan." The spirit of Puritanism was certainly alive and well in his ministry.
A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.
Proverbs 17:17
our Lord Jesus is a friend who loved us before there was any time.
My dear brethren, when we read “a friend loveth at all times,” and refer that to Christ, the sentence full as it is, falls short of what we mean, for our Lord Jesus is a friend who loved us before there was any time. Before time began, the Lord Jesus Christ had entered into covenant that he would redeem a people unto himself, who should show forth his Father’s praise. Before time began, his prescient eye had foreseen the creatures whom he determined to redeem by blood. These he took to himself by election, these the Father also gave to him by divine donation, and upon these as he saw them in the glass of futurity he set his heart. Long before days began to be counted, or moons to wax and wane, or suns to rise and set, Jehovah Jesus had set apart a people to himself, whom he espoused unto himself, whose names he engraved upon his heart and upon his hands, that they might be taken into union with himself for ever and ever. Meditate on that love which preceded the first rays of the morning, and went forth to you before the mountains were brought forth, or ever he had formed the earth and the world. My brethren, you believe the doctrine of eternal love, meditate thereon, and let it be very sweet unto your hearts:—
“Before thy hands had made
The sun to rule the day,
Or earth’s foundation laid,
Or fashioned Adam’s clay,
What thoughts of peace and mercy flow’d
In thy dear bosom, O my God!”
Love, like a silver thread, runs down the ages.
He loved you when time began, in the elder days before the flood, and in the far-off periods; for those promises which were spoken in love had reference to you as well as to all the believing seed. All the deeds of love which were wrought as a preface to his coming, all had some bearing towards you as one of his people. There never was a point in the antiquity of our world in which this friend did not love you, every era of time has been a time of love. Love, like a silver thread, runs down the ages. Chiefly did he lay bare his love eighteen hundred years ago, when down with joyful haste he sped to lie in the manger; and hang as a babe at the virgin’s breast. He proved his love to you to a degree surpassing thought when, as a carpenter’s son he condescended for thirty years to live in obscurity, working out a perfect righteousness for you, and then spent three years of arduous toil, to be ended by a death of bitterness unutterable. You had no being then, but he loved you, and gave himself for you. For you the bloody sweat that fell amidst the olives of Gethsemane; for you the scourging and the crowning with thorns; for you the nails and spear, the vinegar and lance; for you the cry of agony; the exceeding sorrow “even unto death.” He is a friend that loved you in that darkest and most doleful hour, when your sins were laid upon him and with their crushing weight pressed him down, as it were, in spirit, to the lowest hell.
O let your heart be humbled…
Beloved, having thus redeemed you, he loved you when time began with you. As soon as you were born the eye of his tenderness was fixed upon you. “When Ephraim was a child, then I loved him.” It was lovingkindness which arranged your parents’ native place and time of birth. You came not into this world, as it were, by chance, or as the young ostrich bereft of a parent’s care— the Lord was your guardian; the Lord Jesus Christ looked upon you in your cradle, and bade his angels keep ward around you. He would not let you die unconverted, though fierce diseases waited around you to hurry you to hell. And when you grew up to manhood, and ripened the follies of youth into the crimes of mature years, yet still he loved you. O let your heart be humbled as you remember that if you ever fell into blasphemy, he loved you as you cursed him; that if you indulged in Sabbath-breaking, he loved you when you despised his day; that your neglected Bible could not wean his heart from you, that your neglected prayer closet could not make him cease his affection. Alas! to what an excess of riot did some of his people run! but he loved them notwithstanding all. He was a friend that loved under the most provoking circumstances.
“Loved when a wretch defiled with sin,
At war with heaven, in league with hell,
A slave to every lust obscene,
Who, living, lived but to rebel.”
When justice would have said, “Let the rebel go, O Jesus, be not bound any longer by cords of love to such a wretch,” our ever faithful Redeemer would not cast us away, but threw another band of grace around us and loved us still. Consider well, “his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses and sins.”