June 7 2026
Charles Hadden Spurgeon (1834-92), noted English Baptist preacher, told this personal experience.
He was called to the home of an elderly woman who was bedfast. Malnutrition was about to take her physical life. During his visit, Spurgeon noticed a framed document on the wall. He asked the woman, “Is this yours?”
She said it was and explained that she had worked as a maid in the household of some of the English nobility. “Before Lady So-and-so died,” the woman said, “she gave that to me. I served her for nearly half a century. I’ve been so proud of it because she gave it to me. I had it framed. It’s been hanging on the wall ever since she died 10 years ago.”
Mr. Spurgeon asked, “Would you allow me to take it and have it examined more closely?”
“Oh, yes,” said the woman, who never learned to read, “just be sure to see I get it back.”
Spurgeon took it to the authorities. They had been looking for it. It was a bequest. The English noblewoman had left her maid a home and money.
She lived in a little one-room house built out of wooden boxes and was starving to death—yet she had hanging on the wall a document that authorized her to be well cared for and to live in a fine house. The money was gathering interest. It belonged to her.
Spurgeon helped her get it, but it didn’t do her as much good as it could have earlier.
Do you realise how much you have within your reach? Practices and small changes now that can connect you right now into the divine life? You might know something intellectually or have metaphorically ‘framed’ that great truth, but you haven’t yet leaned into it; made it living. Is that you? Your faith is up there, hung symmetrically in the right place on the wall, but as an object rather than a daily way of living. In your head, you believe the right stuff – you’ve framed it where people can see it, right there on the wall. But are you hungering, thirsting and seeking and practicing those things that position your life within grace’s reach? Enter into your inheritance!! Get your faith off the wall…
Julian Holdsworth
BSBC Pastor
