Gladness for Sadness (sermon 1701)

29/08/2025 29 min
Gladness for Sadness (sermon 1701)

Listen "Gladness for Sadness (sermon 1701)"

Episode Synopsis

With a wonderful pastoral sensitivity, Spurgeon preaches a sermon to a congregation which has recently lost two esteemed, elderly deacons. Without artificiality, and without clumsiness, he takes full account of the sorrow of the congregation, while offering them hope and joy in proportion to their grief. He zeroes in on the gladness for which Moses prayers at the end of Psalm 90, looking at the way in which the Lord is able to supply a gladness to balance out sadness, and at the distinctiveness of the gladnesses which the Lord is pleased to grant his praying people. These joys are both real and enduring, and as he contemplates the future—and asks his people to contemplate a future without two eminent servants of God in their midst—Spurgeon does so with eyes lifted to heaven, fixed upon the hand of Almighty God. So he encourages himself, and them, and us, with the prospect of God's work in and after our days, giving us our own work to do and then smiling upon that work. It is a genuinely encouraging sermon, and I hope that you will find it so.