While the inspiration page will continue to feature quotations from that great nineteenth-century divine Charles Haddon Spurgeon, at times some rare insights from other spiritual leaders from the past will be included instead of Spurgeon.

When I was a little girl, my Aunt Lydia had a small calendar in her hallway, which read “Perhaps Today.” As I was in the process of making place cards for my New Year’s Day dinner on that last New Year’s in the 1900s, I awoke abruptly one morning in December with words from the Book of Revelation, “Behold I come quickly.” These words went on the cards.

For centuries this earth has waited for our Lord’s return. “Perhaps Today” has been our cry. Spurgeon tells the story of a woman: “There is the wife at evening. It is past the proper hour for her husband to return. She goes to the window and looks out into the cold dark night, and then she goes back to the chair, and to the little one, and takes her needle and whiles away the time, but soon she is up again looking out of the window once more, and listening to every foot-fall in the street, or looking out from the open door. Why is not her spouse at home? How is it that he is away? She sits down again, she tries to ease her mind with household business, but every ticking of the clock, and every striking of the hour suggests to her, ‘Why is he so long in coming?’ See she is again drawing back the curtains and looking out into the black night for the hundredth time, longing for her husband, and why? because she takes delight in him, and wants to see his face. So when Christians look out into the dark world and say, ‘When will he come?’ and when they go to their labour, and say, ‘Why are his chariot-wheels so long in coming?’ and when they can cry with John, ‘Come quickly, even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus,’ and are waiting for and hasting unto the coming of the Son of man, then they prove that they have intense delight in him.” But if he does not come today, and we die today? “When we gather up our feet in our last bed, we may utter this text in a full and sweet sense, ‘I shall not die, but live.’ When Wycliffe died as to his body, the real Wycliffe did not die. Some of his books were carried to Bohemia, and John Huss learned the gospel from them, and began to preach. They burnt John Huss, and Jerome of Prague; but Huss foretold, as he died, that another would arise after him, whom they should not be able to put down; and in due time he more than lived again in Luther. Is Luther dead? Is Calvin dead to-day? That last man the moderns have tried to bury in a dunghill of misrepresentation; but he lives, and will live, and the truths that he taught will survive all the calumniators that have sought to poison it. Die! Often the death of a man is a kind of new birth to him; when he himself is gone physically, he spiritually survives, and from his grave there shoots up a tree of life whose leaves heal nations. O worker for God, death cannot touch thy sacred mission! Be thou content to die if the truth shall live the better because thou diest. Be thou content to die, because death may be to thee the enlargement of thine influence. Good men die as dies the seed-corn which thereby abideth not alone. When saints are apparently laid in the earth, they quit the earth, and rise and mount to heaven-gate, and enter into immortality. No, when the sepulchre receives this mortal frame, we shall not die, but live. Then shall we come to our true stature and beauty, and put on our royal robes, our glorious Sabbath-dress.”

And for those who are left? In a sermon preached on Sunday morning, December 22, 1861, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Spurgeon spoke of the death of Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria of England. Said Spurgeon: “And this, too, shall be our best comfort. God hath done it. What! shall we weep for what God hath done? Shall we sorrow when the Master hath taken away what was his own? ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord.’ The gardener had a choice flower in his beds. One morning he missed it. He had tended it so carefully that he looked upon it with the affection of a father to a child, and he hastily ran through the garden and sought out one of the servants, for he thought surely an enemy had plucked it, and he said to him, ‘Who plucked that rose?’ And the servant said, ‘I saw the master walking through the garden early this morning, when the sun was rising, and I saw him bear it away in his hand.’ Then he that tended the rose said, ‘It is well; let him be blessed; it was his own; for him I held it; for him I nursed it; and if he hath taken it, it is well.’ So be it with your hearts. Feel that it is for the best that you have lost your friend, or that your best relation has departed. God has done it.”

Elizabeth R. Skoglund, Bright Days, Dark Nights

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You can read more from and about Charles H. Spurgeon and other great spiritual leaders from the past in Elizabeth R. Skoglund’s books Bright Days, Dark Nights and Found Faithful.

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