“The gospel is as free as the air you breathe” by Charles Spurgeon

“There is no need to pass through years of penance, of hard labour, and of trial; the gospel is as free as the air you breathe.

You do not pay for breathing; you do not pay for seeing the sunlight, nor for the water that flows in the river as you stoop to drink it in your thirst.

So the gospel is free; nothing is to be done in order to get it. No merits need be brought in order to obtain it. There is free pardon for the chief of sinners through Jesus Christ’s blood.

But I said it was a full pardon, and so it is. When Christ does anything he never does it by halves. He is willing this night to blot out every sin and cleanse every iniquity of every soul present who is now prepared by God’s grace to seek his mercy.

If now, sinner, God hath put it in thine heart to seek him, the pardon which he is prepared to give thee, is a full one; not a pardon for a part of your sins, but for all at once.

Here is pardon for your drunkenness, pardon for your oaths, pardon for your lust, pardon for your rebellion against heaven; for the sins of your youth and the sins of your old age; for the sins of the sanctuary and the sins of the brothel, or the tavern.

Here is pardon for all sin, for “the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.” But again, the pardon we have to preach is a present pardon. If you feel your need of a Saviour, if now you are enabled to believe, in Christ, you shall be pardoned now.

Those who have ordinary hopes say they hope to be pardoned when they come to die. But, beloved, that is not the religion we preach. If you will now make confession of sin, now seek the Lord, you shall be pardoned now.

It is possible for a man to have come in here with all his sins hanging about his neck like a millstone, enough to sink him lower than the lowest hell, and yet to go out of this door with every sin blotted out.

If now he is enabled to believe on him, he may this night receive perfect pardon from the hand of God. The pardon of a sinner is not a thing done when he is dying, it is done when he is living— done now.

And there be some here I trust, and they not a few, who can rejoice to night in the fact that they are pardoned.

Oh! is it not a magnificent thing for a man to be able to tread God’s earth with this for a song in his mouth, “I am forgiven, I am forgiven, I am pardoned!”

I think it is one of the sweetest songs in all the world— scarcely less sweet than that of the cherubim before the throne.”

–Charles H. Spurgeon, “A Free Salvation,” in The New Park Street Pulpit Sermons, vol. 4 (London; Glasgow: Passmore & Alabaster; James Paul; George John Stevenson; George Gallie, 1858), 4: 274–275.