I’ve been re-reading The Soul Winner by Charles Haddon Spurgeon on my new kindle (the one birthday gift that my whole family chipped in to get me) and have been reminded of the brilliance of Spurgeon. The dude’s been dead for over one hundred years and his sermons/books are light years ahead of 99.9% of the preaching/preachers I hear today. One minute reading Spurgeon is worth about sixty minutes reading or hearing some of our best preachers today. And don’t even get me going on youth communicators (of which I am one!)
Charles Haddon Spurgeon was truly was “The Prince of Preachers”.
Spurgeon had the wordsmithing skill of a Shakespeare combined with the oratory skills of a Winston Churchill drenched with the wit of a Dane Cook (minus the f bombs of course.) He was simply amazing. No wonder he started preaching at the age of 16 and by the age of 19 was pastoring the largest church in England! Not since the Apostle Paul have such powerful words hit God’s people right in the solar plexus in such an authoratative and convincing way.
Here are a couple of Spurgeon musings,
“Do something! Do something! Do something! When everybody else is in a committee meeting, do something….Our goal is not to talk about saving souls but to do it and that for the glory of God.”
When asked his style of preaching he responded, “I take my text and make a beeline for the cross.”
In The Soul Winner he writes, “I hate to hear the terrors of the Lord proclaimed by men whose hard visages, harsh tones, and unfeeling spirit betray a sort of doctrinal desiccation: all of the milk of human kindness is dried out of them. Having no feeling himself, such a preacher creates none, and the people sit and listen while he keeps to dry, lifeless statements, until they come to value him for being ‘sound’, and they themselves come to be sound, too; and I need not add, sound asleep also, or what life they have is spent in sniffing out heresy.”
Simply awesome.
I’ll never forget getting to visit prolific author and preacher Warren Wiersbe in his house in Lincoln, Nebraska. In Mr. Wiersbe’s basement there are more books than most large Christian bookstores have. I was in awe. But I was really amazed when he showed me some original Spurgeon notes. What shocked me wasn’t the fact that they looked like they had just been penned. The black ink was dark and sharp. No, what really amazed me was that it looked like he had just jotted down his major points and a few illustrations. He didn’t manuscript. His remarks were off the cuff comments and were more deep, more penetrating and more powerful than what I could develop in a week of working my feeble brain to the brink.
Some of you may read this and scoff. But read Spurgeon first. Believe me you won’t be scoffing any more.
And, by the way, one minute in Scripture is worth more than one hour with Spurgeon…with only the book of Leviticus as a possible exception.
