25 October 2015

Compounded good

Your weekly Dose of Spurgeon
The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from the lifetime of works from the Prince of Preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon.  The following excerpt is from Words of Cheer, pages 126-27, Pilgrim Publications.
“All things work together for good” that is to say, none of them work separately. 


I remember an old divine using a very pithy and homely metaphor:— “All things work together for good; but perhaps, any one of those ‘all things’ might destroy us if taken alone.

The physician, prescribes medicine; you go to the chemist, and he makes it up; there is something taken from this drawer, something from that phial, something from that shelf any one of those, ingredients, it is very possible, would be a deadly poison, and kill you outright, if you should take it separately; but he puts one into the mortar, and then another, and then another, and when he has worked them all up with his pestle, and has made a compound, he gives them all to you as a whole, and together they work for your good, but any one of the ingredients might either have operated fatally, or in a manner detrimental to your health.”

Learn, then, that it is wrong to ask, concerning any particular act of providence, Is this for my good? Remember, it is not the one thing alone that is for your good; it is the one thing put with another thing, and that with a third, and that with a fourth, and all these mixed together, that work for your good.

Your being sick very probably might not be for your good, only God has something to follow your sickness, some blessed deliverance to follow your poverty, and He knows that when He has mixed the different experiences of your life together, they shall produce good for your soul and eternal good for your spirit.

We know right well that there are many things that happen to us in our lives that would be the ruin of us if we were always to continue in the same condition. Too much joy would intoxicate us, too much misery would drive us to despair but the joy and the misery, the battle and the victory, the storm and the calm, all these compounded make that sacred elixir whereby God maketh all His people perfect through suffering, and leadeth them to ultimate happiness. “All things work together for good.”

5 comments:

Michael Coughlin said...

Excellent, and much needed. Thanks!

Unknown said...

What happened to everything on spurgeon.org/~phil ? Everything is gone. Can you let me know?

Michael Coughlin said...

Check here and click on the upper left.

http://romans45.org/

FX Turk said...

It's a fair question. The Spurgeon Archive has moved, and Phil's bookmarks etc. are caught in the gap right now.

I'll let him know his valuable (if dusty) archives are in a nether region.

FX Turk said...

From Phil just now on FB:

For those looking for my website: replace “spurgeon.org/~phil” with “romans45.org” in all the old URLS, and everything is still there.