The Atonement is scoured, the inspiration of Scripture is derided, the Holy Spirit is degraded into an influence, the punishment of sin is turned into a fiction, and the resurrection into a myth, and yet these enemies of our faith expect us to call them brethren and maintain a confederacy with them.

“Another Word Concerning the Down Grade”, The Sword and the Trowel 23 p397; quoted in Preaching for Bodybuilding by Joel Breidenbaugh.

I was surprised by the size of Charles Spurgeon’s book Lectures to my Students. It will be a little bit before I can start digging through but so rich is its content that simply flipping open the pages and glancing at one section, the following jumped out.

What is our best argument to those who reject the truths of Scripture? Is it logic or reason? Or that these precious words have been proven through the experience of our lives? Spurgeon offers his thoughts, pages 272-273.

…They tell us sometimes that such and such statements are not true; but when we are able to reply that we have tried them and proved them, what answer is there to such reasoning? A man propounds the wonderful discovery that honey is not sweet. ‘But I had some for breakfast, and I found it very sweet’, say you, and your reply is conclusive. He tells you that salt is poisonous, but you point to your own health, and declare that you have eaten salt these twenty years. He says that to eat bread is a mistake – a vulgar error, an antiquated absurdity; but at each meal you make his protest the subject for a merry laugh. If you are daily and habitually experienced in the truth of God’s Word, I am not afraid of your being shaken in mind in reference to it. Those young fellows who never felt conviction of sin, but obtained their religion as they get their bath in the morning, by jumping into it – these will as readily leap out of it as they leaped in. Those who feel neither the joys nor yet the depressions of spirit which indicate spiritual life, are torpid, and their palsied hand has no firm grip of truth. Mere skimmers of the Word, who, like swallows, touch the water with their wings, are the first to fly from one land to another as personal considerations guide them. They believe this, and then believe that, for, in truth, they believe nothing intensely.

If you have ever been dragged through the mire and clay of soul-despair, if you have been turned upside down, and wiped out like a dish as to all your own strength and pride, and have then been filled with the joy and peace of God, through Jesus Christ, I will trust you among fifty thousand infidels. Whenever I hear the sceptic’s stale attacks upon the Word of God, I smile within myself, and think, ‘Why, you simpleton! how can you urge such trifling objections? I have felt, in the contentions of my own unbelief, ten times greater difficulties.’ We who have contended with horses are not to be wearied by footmen…