
Episode #35
A Desperate CaseβHow To Meet It
Spurgeon opens by contrasting Moses and Christ descending from their respective mountaintops β Moses repelling the people with the Law's dazzling terror, Christ drawing them with the attraction of grace β before introducing the desperate case at the mountain's foot: a boy possessed from childhood by the most violent kind of evil spirit, deaf, dumb, suicidal, given to frantic convulsions, utterly baffling the disciples, and used by Spurgeon as a picture of the real desperate cases he sees in his own congregation β the decades-long drunkard who knows he is destroying himself yet cannot stop, the man who crosses seas to indulge his vice and returns broken only to repeat it, the hardened young thief whose parents have tried twenty situations and whose rages make his own mother fear him. He surveys the five groups gathered around the helpless boy β the sneering scribes who use the disciples' failure as proof the whole gospel is a fraud, the anguished father half-believing yet drowning in unbelief, the defeated disciples who cannot explain why what worked everywhere else has failed here, the watching crowd who have made this case a condition of their own faith, and the devil himself gloating from his entrenched position β before describing the decisive moment when Christ arrives, comprehends the situation in an instant, and with a single word of command drives out what every human effort could not touch. He closes by pressing the disciples' private question β "Why could not we cast him out?" β with Christ's two-part answer: first, want of faith, since God honors preaching proportional to the preacher's confidence that even the worst sinner can be saved (illustrated by Whitfield and Rowland Hill winning the cases others wrote off), and second, insufficient prayer, since some cases require the church to move beyond ordinary petition to concentrated, fasting-accompanied, wrestling prayer that will not let God go until it receives the answer β and he closes with a practical challenge, inviting half a dozen believers to take some specific desperate sinner before God in exactly this way and prove whether Christ's prescription is true. Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on January 10, 1864.

