Well, as we turn this morning to the
life of Charles Patton Spurgeon, perhaps I should
say by way of introduction that it gives
me somewhat regret that we turn aside from
the preaching of the Word of God to
give our attention to matters which are not
so directly expository and yet I have to
check that thought with the belief that it
is also part of our duty as Christians
to know the way in which God has
led and blessed his church through the ages
and it was of course because the organizers
of this conference also believe that, that they
set aside a certain amount of time this
week that we should give our attention to
a subject such as the one before us
today.
I believe it is certainly one of the
greatest causes of the present state of the
church, the low state of the church, that
we have forgotten the history of the people
of God.
That is a sin, it is disobedience to
God's Word.
We are therein commanded to remember them who
have spoken unto you the Word of God.
The church's duty is to remember all the
way that the Lord thy God hath led
thee and there are so many texts in
the scriptures, let me just read you one
in Psalm 77 where the psalmist says, I
will remember the works of the Lord, surely
I will remember thy wonders of old.
I will meditate also of thy work and
talk of thy doings.
And the next Psalm says we will not
hide them, God's works and sayings, from our
children showing unto the generations to come the
praises of the Lord.
I was speaking with Mr. Oldham just at
breakfast time when he gave me something that,
underlying this to me, he was pointing out
that these great rafters that have been put
in the extension to the dining hall, that
that wood is not new wood at all
and if you look at it for a
moment you'll realize it's not new.
It's been built in there and it's not
being built in for this summer or even
next, but it's being built we hope for
many years of usefulness yet to come.
But perhaps it's a hundred years old, perhaps
it's older, it's come he tells me from
buildings in Philadelphia and other places and that
wood has been brought here for this purpose
and it is going to serve a purpose
in the days yet ahead.
And so it is with the history of
the Church of God.
We who are God's people gathered here this
morning, we have come under the influence of
God's providence in His Church.
The Word of God has come to us
spoken and written and the influence of C.
H.
Sturgeon has surely been very powerful in this
conference and in our lives, even though he
died so many years ago.
And I say then that we have a
duty to remember God's former work, to remember
it with thankfulness and to see that the
memory of it is passed on to a
generation that is still to come.
As we begin then this morning, I want
to start with an episode, a story in
the life of Charles Haddon Spurgeon.
Something which happened on October the 7th in
the year 1857.
Some of you may remember that that is
the year when what we call in England
the Indian Mutiny was at its height.
There was a mutiny of sepoy troops in
India and terrible barbarities were committed, not only
on other troops but on civilians, on families
and children.
And the government in London appointed the seventh
day of October 1857 as a day of
fasting and humiliation and prayer before Almighty God.
And I suppose that most if not all
of the churches of England and London met
that day for that purpose.
But about seven miles south of the centre
of London was a unique kind of building
called the Crystal Palace.
It was so called because it was made
almost entirely of glass.
It was built in 1851 for a great
exhibition.
I suppose perhaps the first of such great
exhibitions where business was done and produce was
displayed and so on.
And then after its erection in the centre
of London it was moved down seven miles
to Sydenham Hill and thereafter it became a
centre for recreation and musical concerts and things
like that.
And on this occasion in 1857 the board
of directors of the Crystal Palace proposed that
their building should also be opened that day
for prayer and that Mr. C.
H.
Spurgeon be invited to preach.
And that is what took place.
Well the day was a Wednesday, a midweek
day.
I suppose nobody went to work.
It was a nationally recognised day.
And at half past seven in the morning,
it was a wet cold morning we read,
not always like that in London, but it
was that morning.
Half past seven in the morning the trains
began to run and take people down to
Sydenham.
The service was due to begin at a
twelve o'clock.
And at twelve o'clock on a specially
built platform at one end of the Crystal
Palace C.
H.
Spurgeon rose and came to the desk.
He was a figure, slightly built then, five
foot six tall, black hair parted in the
middle, boyish sort of face, a large white
collar hanging over his coat, rather country style.
And when he stood on that platform I
don't suppose he could possibly be seen by
all the people present.
Because there were in the building some 23
,600 people, probably the largest congregation that ever
assembled to that date within a building for
such a purpose, or indeed for any purpose.
And it was a rather a rambling building.
It was 1,600 feet in length and
it had transepts off and it was 175
feet high.
And in this building Spurgeon proposed to speak,
of course, without any microphone.
And if they couldn't all see him we
can be sure that they could hear him.
Because everybody who spoke of Spurgeon's voice, well
they used different terms to describe it, but
they added up to the same thing.
Some said that his voice was like a
silver bell in its clarity.
And others spoke of it as an organ
and others as a trumpet.
And the truth is it combined these different
qualities.
He began then with prayer and then the
hymn was sung that morning before Jehovah's awful
throne, ye nations bow with sacred joy.
He read the scriptures from Daniel chapter 9.
He then engaged again in prayer and then
he began his sermon with these words, hoping
to receive help from God's Spirit.
I shall now proceed to address you from
the part of the ninth verse of the
sixth chapter of Micah.
Hear ye the rod and who hath appointed
it?
Well Spurgeon did not tell them how he
had come to choose that text, but we
know that it was a principle with Spurgeon
that he never preached from a text before,
as he said, before it began to bite.
And this was a text that had clearly
bitten Spurgeon as he prepared his message.
The first sentence of his sermon was, this
world is not the place of punishment for
sin, not the place, it may sometimes be
a place.
And he said that his duty that day
was, as they had assembled to humble themselves
before God, his duty then was to speak
to them of their sins and the sins
of the nation.
And that's what he proceeded to do.
He first spoke of the sin of the
open toleration of immorality in public.
He went on to speak of the oppression
of the poor and he spoke with great
fervor on that subject.
Behold, he says, this day the sins of
the rich, how are the poor oppressed?
How are the needy downtrodden?
In many a place the average wage of
men is far below their value to their
masters.
In this age there is many a great
man who looks upon his fellows as only
stepping stones to wealth.
He builds a factory as though he would
make a cauldron.
And then he began a description of how
a cauldron is stirred and brewed and here
is this rich man and he's pitching in
a clerk and a timekeeper and he gives
them a price.
I can't read it all to you.
But having done that he goes on to
press home that sin.
Ye great men of the earth, there is
a God and that God has said he
executes righteousness and judgment for all that are
oppressed.
He then turned and spoke of the sins
of the poor of which of course the
majority of the people present would come into
that category.
There are hundreds of you that are here
today who are the best hands in all
the world to prop up walls when you
ought to be busy at your own work.
Who when your time is bought and paid
for, steal it for something else.
And how many there are in which are
called the lower ranks and God forgive the
man that invented that word for we are
none of us lower than the other before
the judge of all the earth.
How many are there who do not know
what it is to look up to God
and say, though you have made me a
servant, I will discharge my duty.
I will serve my master and my God
with all my might.
Then he proceeded to the heart of the
sermon which was to speak of the sins
of the church.
Oh church of God, the rod has fallen
and the church ought to hear it.
I am afraid that it is the church
that has been the greatest sinner.
Do I mean by the church that established
by law?
No, I mean the Christian church as a
body.
We I believe have been remiss in our
duty.
For many and many a year pulpits never
condescended to men of lower state.
Our ministers were great and haughty.
They understood the polish of rhetoric.
They had all the grandeur of logic.
To the people they were blind guides and
dumb dogs for the people knew not what
they said.
Neither did they regard them.
The churches themselves slumbered.
They wrapped themselves in a shroud of orthodoxy
and they slept right on while Satan was
devouring the world.
He concluded then with a call and an
appeal for humiliation, for repentance.
Oh if I might but have some souls
won to Christ today what would I give?
What is all this great gathering to me?
It is an extra labor that is all.
For this I do not labor.
God is my witness.
I sought you not.
Never once have I said a thing to
court a smile from any man.
When God sent me into the ministry he
bade me fear no man and I have
not yet met the man to whom I
have feared to tell of God's truth.
Well there are several things that may be
said by way of brief comment on that
seventh day of October in 1857.
One was that when Spurgeon went home that
afternoon to his house on the New Kent
Road in London, Wednesday afternoon and went to
bed that Wednesday night, he slept until Friday
morning.
The only time in his life he did
such a thing, but he did it, those
two days.
Another interesting thing that came out of that
service was this.
Many years later two Christian men were talking
to each other.
One was ill and quite near the end
of his days and his friend asked the
unbelieved Christian how he had ever come to
be a Christian.
And the man replying to that question said,
many years ago in the month of October
1857 I was a workman doing a job
on one of the galleries in the Crystal
Palace, London.
The building was empty and I was with
some friends doing this work when suddenly as
though from nowhere a voice of extraordinary power
and sweetness said, behold the Lamb of God
which taketh away the sin of the world.
It was just a few days before the
wedding day and Spurgeon had gone down to
Sydenham and stood in, as he thought, an
empty part of this building to try the
acoustics.
He gave out this text unknown to him.
Here was this little group of workmen in
a far off gallery and this man dated
his first conviction to that text coming to
him in that way.
It began, he said, the work of God's
salvation in his life.
And one other thing, and the most remarkable
thing of all about this service, the age
of the preacher.
He was 22 years of age.
And if you want to read the sermon
that I've just quoted briefly from, it's in
volume 3 of Spurgeon's sermons.
Volume 3 of the New Park Street Pulpit.
But another 60 volumes of sermons from Spurgeon's
hand would have followed.
63 volumes.
They went on being published until 25 years
after his death, till the year 1917.
And I suppose it was one of the,
certainly one of the greatest marvels of the
history of the church that God gave one
man so much influence.
Do you know at a certain period in
Spurgeon's life, his sermons that were preached in
London on Sunday were in the United States
papers on the Monday, the next day.
They were telegraphed.
They were telegraphed in a rather peculiar way
and therein lay a problem.
The consonants were telegraphed without the vowels and
the printing compositors of the newspapers in New
York and elsewhere, they had to put in
the vowels and sometimes it proved impossible.
And so this venture did not last very
long, but it was done for a while.
And Spurgeon's sermons literally encircled the globe.
Two years ago I had an experience which
confirmed to me just how peculiarly strong the
blessing of Spurgeon's ministry was.
I was in a village in the north
of Wales and speaking with an elderly Christian
man, I suppose a man in his late
70s, perhaps 80.
And we got talking about Spurgeon and he
told me how Spurgeon had come to his
village in north Wales and preached on the
open air grounds of the mansion house and
how people had come on horses and in
carts from miles around.
And then he said, you know when a
young man and woman began to go together
when I was a child, a youth, and
then were beginning to prepare for setting up
a home together, they would prepare a bottom
drawer.
I don't know if you use that expression.
The first things one begins to gather for
a new home.
He said, you know the first thing they
would put in their bottom drawer?
So I said, no.
He said, a portrait of Mr. Spurgeon.
And that was just a small little village
in the north of Wales and the same
could have been said I'm sure of many,
many other parts of not only Britain but
the world.
Now those 63 volumes of sermons 20 years
ago, it would have been incredible to think
that they could have been reprinted.
But yet today they are being reprinted.
The Trust has printed about 18 volumes, a
number of them are in there and the
Pilgrim Publications of Texas, they are doing a
splendid work in bringing out that whole set
of volumes.
And the truth is that Spurgeon's influence today,
I was going to say, is as powerful
as in his own life.
That may be possible.
About five years ago I think it was,
Mr. Martin was going to speak at a
meeting in Glasgow in Scotland.
And some friends known to me asked a
young Christian if she would come to the
meeting.
She had been converted, I think a matter
of a year or something like that.
But she didn't know very much, she was
just beginning and she was very interested.
What she did know was that her friends
had been so helped by Spurgeon.
And on the way to that meeting in
Glasgow that night, she said to her friends
who were taking her, will we be hearing
Mr. Spurgeon tonight?
She had just assumed because Spurgeon was spoken
about so much that he must be a
living minister.
Nobody had told her his dates, she didn't
know any church history, but she had hopes
that she would hear Mr. Spurgeon that night.
Well, she heard Mr. Martin and not Mr.
Spurgeon.
Now I want to give you just very
briefly the sort of skeleton outline of Spurgeon's
life.
He was born on June the 19th in
the year 1834 in the village of Calverdon
in Essex.
If you ever go to England, the most
important part of England spiritually, I think, is
the area that we call East Anglia.
You go east from London and you go
into Essex and Suffolk, the area that Constable
the Painter has made famous.
But it was famous long before Constable for
its spiritual history.
That's where so many of the Puritans ministered
and where so many of the New England
Puritans came from.
And it was in the heart of that
countryside at Calverdon that Spurgeon was born in
1834.
And when he was still a baby, he
was taken to his grandparents' home and he
was brought up for his first seven years
by his grandparents and his aunt who lived
at Stambourne.
His grandfather was a congregational minister and Stambourne
was just about perhaps 30 miles away from
Calverdon.
We do not know the reason for this.
It may probably have been the ill health
of his mother.
But Spurgeon's parents moved then to Colchester, also
in Essex, and there Spurgeon returned to his
home when he was about seven years of
age.
But those first seven years with his grandfather
left a mark upon his life for which
he never ceased to thank God in later
years.
So he went to school in Colchester until
he was 14.
At 14 he went to another school in
Kent at Maidstone.
He didn't get on too well there because
he knew more than his teacher in many
respects.
And then at the age of 15 he
began his profession, if you can call it
that.
He became a tutor in a school at
Newmarket, also in East Anglia.
And from Newmarket in 1850 he went to
be, in 1849 I should say, he went
to be a tutor at another school in
Cambridge.
Schools in those days were very small.
There were non-conformist schools that the dissenters
belonged to.
That was the descendants of the Puritans.
There were also Church of England schools.
And Spurgeon then went as a tutor in
one of these small dissenting schools.
In the next year, 1851, at the age
of 17 he became pastor of the church
at Waterbeach near Cambridge, five miles from Cambridge.
There he stayed until the end of 1854.
One Sunday in 1854, at the age of
19, he preached for the first time in
London.
He was immediately invited by the vacant congregation
who heard him to come as their minister.
He went to New Park Street Chapel, beginning
of 1854.
He preached in the end of 1853, I
should have said.
I think I'm right in saying, in London.
He went in 1854 and that was the
congregation with which he remained all his life.
The building moved to the Metropolitan Tabernacle in
1861 and he preached there from 1861 to
1891.
He preached his last sermon in the Tabernacle
in June 1891, when he was overtaken finally
by the illness from which he died.
He went to Menton in the south of
France to recover as it was hoped and
prayed.
But he died on Sunday, January 31st at
Menton in the south of France in 1892,
aged 57 years.
Now that's just the outline of his life.
Now what I want to do in the
time that remains is to try to group
certain facets of Spurgeon's life and spirit under
one or two scriptural texts.
I didn't know how to organize this material
and as I thought about it, there came
to my mind certain texts of scripture which
it seems to me Spurgeon so much exemplified
and therefore I've brought together certain things under
these texts.
The first text then is this, 1 Peter
chapter 2 and verse 7, Unto you therefore
that believe he is precious.
Unto you therefore that believe he is precious.
This in fact was the first text that
Spurgeon preached from.
The age of 16 in a little cottage,
country cottage at Tabersham near Cambridge.
And he said, I do not think I
could have said anything upon any other text,
but Christ was precious to my soul.
And that brings me to say a word
about his conversion.
Spurgeon was then a Christian of about a
year's standing.
He tells us that as a child for
five years, from the age of 10 to
the age of 15, he labored under conviction
of sin.
For five years as a child there was
nothing before my eyes but my guilt.
For years I sought pardon and found it
not.
He said that the law came like 10
great black plowmen who plowed up his soul
and then cross plowed it.
And some of the writers who've written on
Spurgeon have expressed surprise that somebody could be
brought up in a Christian home.
His father also was a congregational minister as
you may know.
And yet in the midst of that Christian
light, this boy could labor under this burden
these many years.
Well, if we understand the theology of the
Bible, we will not be surprised.
God so often in preparing men for usefulness,
lays the foundations deep.
And that's what he was doing with Spurgeon.
And so it was at last on the
6th of January 1850, a snowy morning that
prevented Spurgeon from going as he usually did
with his father.
Prevented him going to hear his father minister.
He turned into a little primitive Methodist chapel
in Colchester in Artillery Street and heard somebody
whose name nobody knows.
It was never recorded.
Preach a sermon on the text.
Look unto me and be ye saved all
the ends of the earth for I am
God.
Young man said to the preacher, have you
looked to Christ?
Spurgeon said at that moment he was given
the strength to look and to understand the
simplicity of the way of salvation.
I looked, he said, until I could have
looked my eyes away.
But in that January then, in the year
of 1850, C.H. Spurgeon came to the
joy of the consciousness of salvation in Christ.
And later on that month he said, I
feel now as if I could do everything
and give up everything for Christ.
And then I know it would be nothing
in comparison with his love to me.
And a verse of a hymn that he
so often quotes of this period and later,
the words, sooner than not my Saviour love
all may I cease to be.
And it's the intensity of his love and
devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ which not
only shines in Spurgeon's life of this period,
but which was so wonderfully maintained through his
ministry.
Unto you therefore that believe, he is precious.
As a young Christian he said, I used
to rise with the sun that I might
get time to read gracious books and to
seek the Lord.
And of his longing to be useful, I
could scarcely content myself even for five minutes
without trying to do something for Christ.
One of the early sermons that he preached
contained this statement which is so characteristic of
Spurgeon himself.
He said a hundred years ago or more,
if we had gone through the churches, we
might have readily found a number of ministers
of great note.
But now we are all little men, the
sons of nobodies.
Our names shall never be remembered.
There is scarce a man alive now upon
this earth.
There are plenty to be found who call
themselves men, but they are the husks of
men.
The has gone from them.
The littleness of Christians of this age results
from the littleness of their consecration to Christ.
The age of John Owen was the day
of great preachers.
But let me tell you that that was
the age of great consecration.
Those great preachers whose names we remember were
men who counted nothing their own.
They were driven from their churches and their
homes and they gave up all willingly for
their Lord.
They became great men.
And if we were as they were, wholly
given up to God.
If we could say of ourselves, from the
crown of my head to the sole of
my foot, there is not a drop of
blood that is not holy God's.
All my time, all my talents, everything I
have is God's.
If we could say that, we should be
strong.
His words then as a young man and
those words which, as I say, remain fresh
through his ministry.
The last words just about he ever spoke
to his wife before his death were words
which he whispered to her in a morning
after a long night.
He said, I have had a precious time
with my Lord this night.
And the verse which Spurgeon was so fond
of, if he had been in such a
gathering as this and a child had asked
him to write his name, he would gladly
have done that.
And underneath the name, he would have written
the lines of William Cooper.
E'er since by faith I saw the
stream, by flowing wounds supply, redeeming love has
been my theme and shall be till I
die.
Christ then, precious, his conversion in the year
1850, his baptism in the same year near
Cambridge, his joining the Baptist Church in Cambridge.
A second text briefly, we've already thought about
it this week.
How shall they call on him in whom
they have not believed?
And how shall they believe in him of
whom they have not heard?
And how shall they hear without a preacher?
When Spurgeon began preaching in England and perhaps
across the English speaking world, there was a
great change taking place.
The older preachers, men like William J.
of Bath and John Angel James, these men
had recently died in the previous ten years,
many of them had gone home.
And there was a new kind of preaching
that was being popularised.
It was fashionable, it was tasteful, it was
polished, it was educated.
But it did not have the unction, it
did not penetrate the conscience and the heart.
And it was into that sort of situation
that suddenly God sent C.
H.
Spurgeon.
And the first thing that one observes about
Spurgeon in his preaching at Waterbeach and then
as he came to London, was this tremendous
sense of a divine commission.
Son of man, I have set thee as
a watchman unto the house of Israel.
Therefore give them warning from me.
And in the midst of all that polished,
polite, pulpit language of the day, Spurgeon came
in an altogether different mould.
And one of the things he said was
that if the church despises preaching, God will
despise her.
The church's supreme work is to proclaim the
Word of God.
And he said of himself that it was
his prayer that every time he went into
the pulpit, it should be with the petition
upon his heart, God have mercy upon me,
a sinner.
He preached in the consciousness of God's presence,
of God's awesome holiness, of the tremendous nature
of the salvation which he preached and of
the judgment which was to come.
And Spurgeon as he came to London with
this sense of preaching, preached to all.
And this was perhaps one of the most
unique features about his ministry.
In 1854 in London, as you may imagine,
there was a great deal of church going.
There were areas of London which on the
Lord's Day, you would have seen people flocking
in hundreds and even thousands to church.
But the area of London where Spurgeon began
to preach was not such an area.
It was rather the opposite.
It was on the south bank of the
Thames in Southwark, where houses and shops were
crowded together, where poor people lived, clerks, tradesmen,
costumongers, people who kept their shops open on
Sunday morning and then when they shut them
up, went out to try and get some
fresh air.
It was in the midst of that sort
of area that Spurgeon came preaching.
And in his years in that church, he
admitted 14,691 new members.
And a greater part of these, by far
the greater part, were not those who had
come from other churches but those who had
been drawn and hewn out of the world.
And one of the American writers on Spurgeon
who often heard him preach says, the character
of mediocrity wrote itself legibly, unmistakably over the
appearance of the tabernacle congregation.
I say this to Mr. Spurgeon's praise.
His church was essentially a mission church occupying
mission ground.
All the unequaled influence as a minister of
the gospel that Spurgeon attained, he attained, let
this be forever remembered to his honour, in
the service of a church made up of
not many wise and not many noble.
Another thing with regard to Spurgeon's preaching, the
way he broke through contemporary fashions, the way
in which he broke with the prevailing tradition.
He didn't go to any of the usual
theological colleges.
There were certain well-known figures in the
church in that day whose names were often
quoted.
And the pupils who came out of the
colleges were pretty much in the mould of
these men.
And suddenly this man who no one had
heard of, he was but a youth, appears
from the countryside of East Anglia and he
begins to speak, not in the fashion of
the 1850s, but the doctrine that he preaches
was the doctrine of 200 years earlier and
the doctrine of George Whitfield.
And he seemed to be saying everything which
people had begun to believe could not be
said in that way in the 1850s.
I don't of course mean that he said
it in an old-fashioned way.
On the contrary, he was conversational, there was
nothing high and mighty about his delivery, but
what he said came not from his own
day, but came way back from the history
that he had read.
And one can see in Spurgeon as a
youth how he was moulded by the influence
of men who had died 100 and 200
years before him.
Listen to this quotation.
He's preaching on life in earnest.
Again it's one of his sermons when he
was a young man.
Wake up, he says, Church of God, why
are you given to slumber?
Oh, for a voice like thunder!
What am I, more than half asleep myself,
as I read the life of such a
man as Joseph Alain of Taunton, or Richard
Baxter of Kidderminster, or William Grimshaw of Howarth,
and George Whitfield of everywhere?
I blush, I blush at my cold heart,
especially when perusing the life of our Apostle
Paul.
I blush a thousand times to think how
idly I have lived.
These men lived, we dare not say we
live.
Oh, the long-suffering and the tender mercy
of God, that he has had compassion on
such a church as that of the present
day, who are so dull and sluggish in
the service of Christ.
Well, one of the leading ministers of London
said that Spurgeon was the most impudent rascal
who had ever come into a pulpit.
And you can imagine that some people were
offended.
This man coming and without the qualifications which
others had, but steeped and molded in these
old men, Grimshaw and Alain and John Owen,
and preaching with this tremendous conviction that God
had commissioned him and sent him.
Another text then on another subject, and this
is a text as far as I know
that Spurgeon never preached on, but a text
that he lived.
Proverbs chapter 11 and verse 24.
11, 24.
There is that scattereth and yet increaseth, and
there is that withholdeth more than is meet,
but it tendeth to poverty.
The first part of the text, there is
that scattereth and yet increaseth.
You see the meaning?
There is a scattering.
When a man gives himself out, pours himself
out, and yet the more he does it,
the more he has.
To him that hath shall be given.
The man who scatters, the man who doesn't
withhold, but who gives, is the man who
has more to give, and more to give.
There is that scattereth and yet increaseth.
And how true that is of Spurgeon.
How many there were in his early twenties
who said, well, this great preaching can't possibly
last.
But it did last.
And it not only lasted, but it became
richer and deeper.
And the American who I mentioned a few
moments ago, a man called Wilkinson, he went
to hear Spurgeon preach when Spurgeon was 24.
And he never got back across the Atlantic
to London until Spurgeon was 53.
And with great anticipation, he made his way
to the Metropolitan Tabernacle.
And as he got near, he noticed he
was walking behind a young lady who was
obviously a servant girl with a Bible and
going to the Tabernacle.
So he got into conversation with her.
And he asked her, how Mr. Spurgeon was
preaching these days?
Was his health affecting his preaching?
Oh no, she said.
Our pastor, Mr. Spurgeon, preaches better and better
all the time.
Well, then Wilkinson went into the service.
And when it was over, there were a
man and wife sitting behind him.
And he got into conversation with them.
They were regular members of the Tabernacle.
And what they had to say was, Mr.
Spurgeon, we think, is constantly improving in his
preaching.
And that was Wilkinson's own judgement.
He had heard him at 24.
He heard him at 53.
And all that time, he was giving out
and he was proving the all-sufficiency of
God's grace.
To me, it is a marvellous testimony, not
to Spurgeon's greatness, but to what God did
and could do through an earthen vessel.
He scattered and yet he increased.
And that's not true simply of his preaching,
but of so many other things.
As most of you know, he founded a
college.
Nine hundred students went through his college in
his lifetime.
He used to teach them once a week
on a Friday, all afternoon.
And forty of those students built churches in
the London area.
And that usefulness went on year after year.
Spurgeon gave himself to it and yet he
increased.
He built two orphanages for children.
They were perhaps his favourite institutions.
One for boys, one for girls.
He was often there.
If children were ill, he visited them.
There were many who saw him visit that
orphanage and they said that Spurgeon in the
orphanage was even a greater man than he
was in the pulpit.
And then there were his books and his
magazine.
A monthly magazine, 20,000-25,000 readers.
150 books he wrote, translated into about 40
languages.
It was said that if you put all
Spurgeon's sermons side by side, they would stretch
from the earth to the moon.
Well, there was this tremendous outflow of material.
Then, let me mention on the same point,
his use of money.
The first money Spurgeon ever earned was four
shillings and nine pence for preaching.
Four shillings and nine pence.
Oh, that's half a dollar or something like
that.
Very little indeed.
But you know, he came to earn each
year, latterly, between 20 and 30,000 pounds.
That's about 10,000 dollars.
We have a banker at our table of
breakfast.
He's very handy.
So, I asked not only for the proper
equivalent, but I wanted it in the last
century rate of exchange and he was able
to give it me in the last century
rate of exchange.
About 10,000 dollars.
That's a lot of money.
But that money, which in a sense was
salary, he used to keep up the orphanage,
to help students, so that when he died,
he died really, comparatively, a poor man.
Apart from his house and apart from his
library, he left, I think perhaps 2,000
pounds at the most.
Very little indeed.
And yet he had that enormous income, which
he went on using.
He didn't believe, with regard to financial matters,
that one has to first trust in God
and then secondly organize and build up resources
and all the rest.
He said, we only have to do the
first.
We have to trust in God and as
God blessed the work, Spurgeon used what God
gave.
Now I have another text in Proverbs.
Chapter 17 verse 22.
Proverbs 17 and 22.
A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.
Now, I think one can hardly speak on
Spurgeon, even briefly, without touching on this facet
of his character.
One of Spurgeon's friends, a man called William
Williams, he said that he laughed more in
Spurgeon's presence than he did in the whole
of the rest of his life apart from
Spurgeon.
He said he had the most fascinating gift
of laughter I ever heard in any man
and it did good like a medicine.
Now you mustn't misunderstand Spurgeon at this point.
If you read his autobiography, as I hope
you all will, you will find in the
second volume how much pain and suffering and
anguish he went through personally, the sufferings of
his wife, the manner in which he entered
into the needs and the sufferings of the
church.
Spurgeon was the very opposite of a frivolous,
light-hearted man.
William Williams, who I just quoted to you,
said that his prevailing mood was not merriment.
Oh no, far less was he a joker
in the pulpit or anything of that kind
as he's sometimes been represented to be.
But he did have this wonderful gift of
humour and he used it.
He used it in many different ways and
I can't really take the time to tell
you some of them but I must give
you a few ideas.
Sometimes he used his humour to extricate himself
in an awkward situation.
His alertness, his quickness, he was once preaching
in a country chapel which was packed, it
was only a little building, it was packed.
He had scarcely begun his sermon when there
was a tremendous crack and a crash at
the back of the chapel and a bunch
of all the people had been sitting on
had split in the middle and gone to
the floor because the whole congregation was disrupted.
So he said, it teaches us not to
trust in forms and ceremonies.
Who Spurgeon recognised but he couldn't, well he
thought he had remembered his name so he
greeted him, good morning, he said, good morning
Mr. Partridge.
Partridge, the man said, Partridge, he was being
corrected.
So Spurgeon said, I will not make game
of you anymore.
And then, this is not as it were
a humorous one but it's him using a
humorous situation to bring home a spiritual point.
Spurgeon says, I was dining with Mr. So
-and-so and a foreign rabbi was present,
a Jewish rabbi.
Hot ducks were part of the fare for
dinner of which the rabbi was not allowed
to partake, a duck having webbed feet.
He gave two or three significant sniffs and
got in as much of the ducks as
he dared.
And turning to me he said, Moses very
hard, Moses very hard.
Yes, yes I said, yes I said, there
is a yoke upon the neck which neither
you nor your fathers have been able to
bear.
So, just a text of scripture and who
knows.
And then when he met argumentative types who
were kind of super saints, well then Spurgeon
was inclined then to use a little humor.
If he felt it was impossible to convince
a man of the correctness of a position
he wouldn't even attempt it but he might
just end the conversation with something a little
humorous.
And I hope I can tell you this
one straight, I don't have a note of
it, but it goes like this.
Before I tell you, you have to understand,
as I'm sure you do, that in Britain
our political parties, we don't have Republicans and
Democrats, but in Spurgeon's day the two great
parties were the Tories and the Liberals.
And Spurgeon was a Liberal.
Most of the non-conformist Christians were Liberals
at that time.
That party is completely gone in its old
form.
Well, Spurgeon, it was a time of a
general election to Parliament and Spurgeon had been
to the voting booths, the polling station as
we call them.
He had been to cast his vote and
on the way back he met a gentleman
who he recognized coming towards him who didn't
believe that the Christian should have anything to
do with politics or voting or that kind
of thing.
So, when he met Spurgeon, there was no
avoiding the fact that Spurgeon had come from
the voting booth and Spurgeon said he had
been casting his vote.
Oh, said the man to Mr. Spurgeon, don't
you know that Christians don't vote?
That the new man doesn't vote?
Spurgeon said it wasn't the new man that
voted.
It was the old man.
Oh, said the man, yes, but we are
told to mortify the old man.
That's just what I did, said Spurgeon.
My old man is a Tory and I
made him vote Liberal.
Well, that gives you perhaps just a little
idea of Spurgeon's humour.
He used it perhaps most with his students.
If you read his lectures to his students,
you'll get a great deal of humour there.
He made them remember things.
He said some students think or ministers think
that they possess the attributes of divinity.
They are invisible all the week and incomprehensible
on the Sunday.
He said some ministers have three hands, a
right hand and a left hand and a
little behind hand.
Well, there's a great deal like that.
I think he made just one mistake or
at least he verged on it and I
believe he did make it sometimes.
It was more in personal conversation.
In fact, it was entirely in personal conversation,
but the words of great men get put
into books.
Sometimes he used a text of scripture, not
humorously, perhaps directly, but in a humorous sense
that so the next time you hear that
text, you think alas, not so much of
the meaning of the text, but of the
humorous anecdote that you were told.
I think that was a great mistake and
I think that the faults of great men
are taken up by others and magnified and
you know what a Scourge and curse it
has been that people think it can be
spiritual to twist a text to give it
a humorous aspect.
As I say, it is only very occasionally
that one finds that in Spurgeon, but when
one does, I don't think it is something
that we should emulate.
Now, my last point of...
two minutes?
Well, the last text I had was really,
in many ways, the most important one.
Romans 3 and verse 4.
Let God be true, but every man a
liar.
Let God be true, but every man a
liar.
And Spurgeon's great overruling conviction and concern was
that we are the servants of God and
that his honor, his praise, and his glory
are the end of all our work.
The first thing I would have you notice,
he says, preaching on the song of Moses,
is that the end of this song, Exodus
chapter 15, is the praise of God and
nobody else but God.
Moses, you have said nothing of yourself.
Did you not lead the thousands for battle
like a mighty commander through the depths?
Is there not a word for you?
Not one.
The whole strain of the song is, I
will sing unto the Lord from beginning to
end.
It is all praise of Jehovah.
There is not one word about Moses, not
a single word in praise of the children
of Israel.
Dear friends, the last song in this world
shall be full of God and of no
one else.
And this was Spurgeon's view.
You have heard in the downgrade controversy.
In Spurgeon's later years, the majority of the
church, the Protestant church, and even of the
evangelical church, was broadening itself.
It was doing it deliberately to try to
accommodate the new learning, the new science, the
new view of Scripture, to accommodate it within
the church.
And Spurgeon, almost alone, stood against the stream.
And he did it knowing that he was
on a path which could lead to the
loss of congregations, to the loss of popularity,
to the loss of success.
And it was the bravest thing he ever
did.
I suppose, without any doubt, it shortened his
life.
And his conviction was that success is not
what we are to aim at.
God does not reward success.
He rewards faithfulness.
It is a very small thing, he would
say with the Apostle Paul, that I should
be judge of you.
That man Wilkinson contrasted Spurgeon with Henry Ward
Beecher.
And he said, what marvellous individuality and daring
Beecher had.
But, he said, the great characteristic of Spurgeon
was his docility before the Word of God.
He was like a little child.
He said, speak Lord, for thy servant heareth.
And it is a very fine tribute.
I haven't time to read it to you.
I must stop then.
Our time has gone.
There is one last point that I make
as I pack up my papers.
And that is, you surely can see from
Spurgeon's life the influence, the moulding power of
good books.
Spurgeon seemed to come like Elijah from nowhere,
but he didn't.
He had been prepared.
And he had been prepared by men who
being dead were yet speaking.
And it is an encouragement then to everyone
here, to parents, to realise that the books
that you have in your home, the books
you encourage your children to read, these can
be moulding servants and it may well be
ministers for a future generation.
And the young people that are here, how
important it is for them to know that
as you take in from the riches of
good literature, you are getting strength which an
older generation hasn't got.
Spurgeon as a young man was far ahead
of middle aged and old age people and
not because of what he was himself so
much as because of what he had taken
in and was consecrated to God.
And I don't know any stronger argument for
the prayerful use of good books than the
life of C.
H.
Spurgeon.
I hope then that we'll all look at
the books on Spurgeon.
His autobiography in two volumes is just a
marvellous piece of work, first volume, second volume,
and then these volumes of his sermons, thick
volumes, don't be alarmed by the size, I
would recommend that every Christian has one or
two of these volumes.
You can then just browse in them and
pick out sermons.
I wouldn't recommend that every Christian buys all
of them.
But every minister, I nearly said every missionary,
I suppose he couldn't carry them, but every
minister should have every volume, the 63, because
then you have got a library.
What Mr. Easinger was saying last night, there's
nothing original.
Spurgeon says the only one who is original
in the Bible is the devil, he speaketh
of his own.
Now Spurgeon wasn't original, he poured into his
sermons the whole wealth of the history and
the teaching of the church.
And if you have the 63 volumes of
Spurgeon's sermons, and you begin to make your
own index and notes, you have the most
valuable collection of preaching material you could possibly
have.
Thank you Mr. Elwood.