{"id":987,"date":"2011-07-15T08:12:44","date_gmt":"2011-07-15T08:12:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/?p=987"},"modified":"2011-07-15T08:12:44","modified_gmt":"2011-07-15T08:12:44","slug":"stuffed-christians-spurgeon%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9clife%e2%80%99s-ever-springing-well%e2%80%9d-%e2%80%9cwe-are-all-christians-%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/?p=987","title":{"rendered":"Stuffed Christians? Spurgeon\u2019s, \u201cLife\u2019s Ever Springing Well\u201d \u201cWe are all Christians.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Stuffed Christians? <\/strong>Spurgeon\u2019s, \u201cLife\u2019s Ever Springing Well\u201d \u201cWe are all Christians.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhy, we belong to a Christian nation; are we not born Christians?\u201d<br \/>\n\u201cSurely we must be all right; we have always attended our parish church, is not that enough?\u201d \u201cOur parents were always godly; we were born into the church, were we not? Did they not take us up in their arms when we were little, and make us members of Christ? What more do we lack?\u201d This is the common talk. There is no Christian practice, there is no Christian habit, but what has been, or will be before long, imitated by people who have no vital godliness whatever. A man may appear much like a Christian, and yet possess no vital godliness! Walk through the British Museum, and you will see all the orders of animals standing in their various places, and exhibiting themselves with the utmost possible propriety.<\/p>\n<p>The rhinoceros demurely retains the position in which he was set at first; the eagle soars not through the window; the wolf howls not at night; every creature, whether bird, beast, or fish, remains in the particular glass case allotted to it. But you all know well enough that these are not the living creatures, but only the outward forms of them. Yet in what do they differ? Certainly in nothing which you could readily see, for the well stuffed animal is precisely like what the living animal would have been; and that eye of glass even appears to have more of brightness in it than the natural eye of the creature itself.\u00a0 Yet you know well enough that there is a secret inward something lacking, which, when it has once departed, you cannot restore. So in the churches of Christ, many professors are not living believers, but stuffed believers, Stuffed Christians!<\/p>\n<p>There is all the external of religion, everything that you could desire, and they behave with a great deal of propriety, too. They all keep their places, and there is no outward difference between them and the living, except upon that vital point; they lack spiritual life. This is the essential distinction, spiritual life is absent.\u00a0 It is almost painful to watch little children when some little pet of theirs has died, how they can hardly realize the difference between death and life!\u00a0 Your little boy\u2019s bird moped for awhile upon its perch, and at last dropped down in the cage; and do not you remember how the little boy tried to set it up, and gave it seed, and filled its glass with water, and was quite surprised to think that birdie would not open his little eye upon his friend as it did before, and would not take its seed, nor drink its water!\u00a0 Ah, you finally had to tell the poor boy that a mysterious something had gone from his little birdie, and would not come back again. There is just such a spiritual difference between the mere professor, and the genuine Christian.\u00a0 There is an invisible, but most real, indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the absence or the presence of which makes all the difference between the lost sinner and the saint.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Stuffed Christians? Spurgeon\u2019s, \u201cLife\u2019s Ever Springing Well\u201d \u201cWe are all Christians.\u201d \u201cWhy, we belong to a Christian nation; are we not born Christians?\u201d \u201cSurely we must be all right; we have always attended our parish church, is not that enough?\u201d \u201cOur parents were always godly; we were born into the church, were we not? Did [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c-h-spurgeon","category-false-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=987"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":988,"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987\/revisions\/988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}