Is There Any Fruit?

Spurgeon even preaching as he did in the middle of the huge Metropolitan Tabernacle, would sometimes pause in the middle of a sermon and say 'listen for a moment to the ticking of that clock' and the assembly would be silent and hear nothing but that old clock going tick, tick, tick and he would say to them 'it is the beating pulse of eternity'. I wish I could do that, because for the fruitless every second as it goes by is mercy, mercy, mercy.

There was another old custom, that when a person died, at that moment they would stop the clock in their sick room. It showed that time had ended for that person. For the unconverted the stopping of the clock is the end of that steady ticking of mercy, mercy, mercy. The time for repentance is at an end, the tree is hewn down and cast into the fire.