That very church which the world likes best is sure to be that which God abhors.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that the churches or ideologies that are most popular or appealing to people are often at odds with true spiritual values.
Charles Spurgeon's quote implies that the institutions or belief systems that gain widespread popularity may not align with divine principles. It reflects a critique of superficiality and the tendency for people to gravitate towards what is comfortable or socially accepted, rather than what is morally or spiritually sound. This suggests a caution against conforming to societal norms that may conflict with genuine faith.
In practice
In a sermon about authenticity in faith, this quote could serve as a reminder for congregants to seek genuine spiritual experiences.
Amusement should be used to do us good “like a medicine”: it must never be used as the food of the man...Many have had all holy thoughts and gracious resolutions stamped out by perpetual trifling. Pleasure so called is the murderer of thought. This is the age of excessive amusement: everybody craves for it, like a babe for its rattle.
When you see no present advantage, walk by faith and not by sight. Do God the honor to trust Him when it comes to matters of loss for the sake of principle.
It is far easier to fight with sin in public than to pray against it in private.
You will never glory in God till first of all God has killed your glorying in yourself.
After faith comes repentance, or, rather, repentance is faith's twin brother and is born at the same time.
["All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth unto such as keep his covenant."] The original Hebrew word that has been translated "paths" means "well-worn roads' or "wheel tracks," such ruts as wagons make when they go down our green roads in wet weather and sink in up to the axles. God's ways are at times like heavy wagon tracks that cut deep into our souls, yet all of them are merciful.
In my state of spiritual abstraction, I no longer belong to myself and to my eyesight. I am nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits.
I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.
We cannot wait any longer to deal with the structural causes of poverty, in order to heal our society from an illness that can only lead to new crises.
One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.
Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.
I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous, and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. 'Nothing is more real than nothing.' They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark.
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