Preaching

November 23, 2014

Whatever Christ is, His people are in Him. They were crucified in Him; they were dead in Him; they were buried in Him; they are risen in Him! In Him they live eternally, in Him they sit gloriously at the right hand of God, “who has raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” In Him we are “accepted in the Beloved,” both now and forever! And this, I say, is the essence of the whole Gospel. He that preaches Christ preaches the Gospel! He who does not preach Christ, preaches not the Gospel. It is no more possible for there to be a Gospel without Christ than a day without the sun, or a river without water, or a living man without a head, or a quickened human body without a soul! No, Christ Himself is the life, soul, substance and essence of the mystery of the Gospel of God. Christ, Himself, I say again, and no other!

– Charles Spurgeon –

November 20, 2014

Sermons and books are well enough, but streams that run for a long distance above ground gradually gather for themselves some of the soil through which they flow and they lose the cool freshness with which they started from the spring head. The Truth of God is sweetest where it breaks from the smitten Rock, for at its first gush, it has lost none of its heavenliness and vitality. It is always best to drink at the well and not from the tank. You shall find that reading the Word of God for yourselves, reading it rather than notes upon it, is the surest way of growing in Divine Grace. Drink of the unadulterated milk of the Word of God and not of the skim milk, or the milk and water of man’s word.

– Charles Spurgeon –

November 19, 2014

So, Beloved, the Holy Spirit is with us and when we take His Book and begin to read and want to know what it means, we must ask the Holy Spirit to reveal the meaning. He will not work a miracle, but He will elevate our minds and He will suggest to us thoughts which will lead us on, by their natural relation, the one to the other, till at last we come to the pith and marrow of His Divine Instruction. Seek, then, very earnestly the guidance of the Holy Spirit, for if the very soul of reading is the understanding of what we read, then we must, in prayer, call upon the Holy Spirit to unlock the secret mysteries of the Inspired Word.

– Charles Spurgeon –

November 9, 2014

The motto of all true servants of God must be, “WE PREACH CHRIST AND HIM CRUCIFIED.” A sermon without Christ in it is like a loaf of bread without flour in it! No Christ in your sermon, Sir? Then go home and never preach again until you have something worth preaching!

– Charles Spurgeon –

November 7, 2014

What we have done out of love to Christ; what we have offered through His mediation; what has been perfumed by faith in His Person becomes acceptable! God looks upon anything we say, or anything we do, and if He sees Christ in it, He accepts it; but if there is no Christ, He puts it away as a foul thing. See to it then, Beloved, that you never pray a prayer which is not sweetened with Christ. I would never preach a sermon—the Lord forgive me if I do—which is not full to overflowing with my Master.

– Charles Spurgeon –

November 3, 2014

As for myself, I can truly say that Jesus Christ and Him crucified is the sum of all knowledge to me. He is the highest intellectualism! He is the grandest philosophy to which my mind can attain! He is the pinnacle that rises loftier than my highest aspirations and deeper than this great Truth of God I wish never to fathom! Jesus Christ and Him crucified is the sum total of all I want to know and of all the Doctrines which I profess and preach!

– Charles Spurgeon –

November 2, 2014

If your ministry is full of Christ, it is a ministry that God can bless. “Oh,” said a Brother to me, only today, speaking of a certain minister, “I could not hear him, for there is nothing of Christ in his sermons.” Where there is nothing of Christ, Brothers and Sisters, there is nothing of unction, nothing of savor—and a man is quite right not to attend such a ministry as that. Leave Christ out of your preaching and you have taken the milk from the children! You have taken the strong meat from the men. But if your objective as a teacher or preacher is to glorify Christ and to lead men to love Him and trust Him, why, that is the very work upon which the heart of God, Himself, is set! The Lord and you are pulling together—and God the Holy Spirit can set His seal to a work like that! Is it not a marvelous thing that we should be workers together with God?

– Charles Spurgeon –

October 19, 2014

Mean conversions, expect them, and prepare for them. Resolve that your hearers shall either yield to your Lord or be without excuse, and that this shall be the immediate result of the sermon now in hand. Do not let the Christians around you wonder when souls are saved, but urge them to believe in the undiminished power of the glad tidings, and teach them to marvel if no saving result follows the delivery of the testimony of Jesus. Do not permit sinners to hear sermons as a matter of course, or allow them to play with the edged tools of Scripture as if they were mere toys; but again and again remind them that every true gospel sermon leaves them worse if it does not make them better. Their unbelief is a daily, hourly sin; never let them infer from your teaching that they are to be pitied for continuing to make God a liar by rejecting his Son.
– Charles Spurgeon –
from: Lectures to My Students