A gripping parable by Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Maybe you care deeply for someone to whom this parable might speak, someone who is not yet pondering God’s grace and redemption. Pray about sending your loved one or friend this link to the late British preacher’s parable and the following counsel for turning to Christ for a new life on earth and in eternity.

“A certain tyrant sent for one of his subjects, and said to him, ‘What is your employment?’ He said, ‘I am a blacksmith.’ ‘Go home,’ said he, ‘and make me a chain of such a length.’ He went home; it occupied him several months, and he had no wages all the while he was making the chain, only the trouble and the pains of making it. Then he brought it to the monarch, and he said, ‘Go and make it twice as long.’ He gave him nothing to do it with, but sent him away. Again he worked on, and made it twice as long. He brought it up again, and the monarch said, ‘Go and make it longer still.’ Each time he brought it, there was nothing but the command to make it longer still. And when he brought it up at last, the monarch said, ‘Take it, bind him hand and foot with it, and cast him into a furnace of fire.’ There were his wages for making the chain. Here is a meditation for you…. Your master the devil is telling you to make a chain. Some of you have been fifty years welding the links of the chain; and he says, ‘Go and make it longer still.’ Next Sunday morning you will open that shop of yours, and put another link on; next Saturday night you will be drunk, and put another link on; next Monday you will do a dishonest action, and so you will keep on making fresh links to this chain; and when you have lived twenty more years, the devil will say, ‘More links on still!’ And then, at last, it will be, ‘Take him, and bind him hand and foot, and cast him into a furnace of fire.’ ‘For the wages of sin is death.’”

Excerpted from Charles Haddon Spurgeon’s sermon “Meditation on God” preached in 1858 at New Park Street Chapel, Southwark, England.

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