Sermon Tone Analysis

! Charles Spurgeon: Preaching Through Adversity

1995 Bethlehem Conference for Pastors

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By John Piper January 31, 1995

 

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A Personal Introduction

My topic this year is "Preaching through Adversity," and the man I focus on is Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who died on this day 103 years ago at the age of 57 after preaching for 38 years at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London.

There are very personal reasons why I chose this topic and this man for this year's biographical study.

Everyone faces adversity and must find ways to persevere through the oppressing moments of life.

Everyone must get up and make breakfast, and wash clothes, and go to work, and pay bills, and discipline children and generally keep life going when the heart is breaking.

But it's different with pastors—not totally different, but different.

The heart is the instrument of our vocation.

Spurgeon said, "Ours is more than mental work—it is heart work, the labour of our inmost soul" (see note 1).

So when our heart is breaking we must labor with a broken instrument.

Preaching is our main work.

And preaching is heart work, not just mental work.

So the question for us is not just How you keep on living when the marriage is blank, and a child has run away, and the finances don't reach, and pews are bare and friends have forsaken you; the question for us is more than, How do you keep on living?

It's, How do you keep on preaching.

It's one thing to survive adversity; it is something very different to keep on preaching, Sunday after Sunday, month after month when the heart is overwhelmed.

Spurgeon said to the students of his pastors' college, "One crushing stroke has sometimes laid the minister very low.

The brother most relied upon becomes a traitor ... Ten years of toil do not take so much life out of us as we lose in a few hours by Ahithophel the traitor, or Demas the apostate" (see note 2).

The question for us is not, How do you live through unremitting criticism and distrust and accusation and abandonment; for us the question is also, How do you preach through it?

How do you do heart work when the heart is under siege and ready to fall?

For just over a year now that has been perhaps the uppermost question of my life.

And, if I am not mistaken, I believe it is now, or will be, uppermost for many of you as well.

Just last Sunday night I spent a half-hour on the phone with the wife of a pastor who would love to be here.

He is under so much criticism and accusation that she found it hard to go to church and marveled that he could preach last Sunday morning—and I know this is a pure and faithful servant whose church I would gladly attend for the sake of my soul.

Preaching great and glorious truth in an atmosphere that is not great and glorious is an immense difficulty.

To be reminded week in and week out that many people regard your preaching of the glory of the grace of God as hypocrisy pushes a preacher not just into the hills of introspection, but sometimes to the precipice of self-extinction.

I don't mean suicide.

I mean something more complex.

I mean the deranging inability to know any longer who you are.

What begins as a searching introspection for the sake of holiness, and humility gradually becomes, for various reasons, a carnival of mirrors in your soul: you look in one and you're short and fat; you look in another and you're tall and skinny; you look in another and you're upside down.

And the horrible feeling begins to break over you that you don't know who you are any more.

The center is not holding.

And if the center doesn't hold—if there is no fixed and solid "I" able to relate to the fixed and solid "Thou," namely, God, then who will preach next Sunday?

When the apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:10, "By the grace of God, I am what I am," he was saying something utterly essential for the survival of preachers in adversity.

If, by grace, the identity of the "I"—the "I" created by Christ and united to Christ, but still a human "I"—if that center doesn't hold, there will be no more authentic preaching, for there will be no more authentic preacher, but a collection of echoes.

O how fortunate we are, brothers of the pulpit, that we are not the first to face these things!

I thank God for the healing history of the power of God in the lives of saints.

I urge you for the sake of your own survival: live in other centuries and other saints.

I have turned to Charles Spurgeon in these days, and I have been helped.

And that's what I want to share with you this afternoon.

My aim is to give you strength to keep on preaching through adversity.

First let me answer the question,

!!!!

Why Spurgeon?

!!!!! 1. Charles Spurgeon was a preacher.

He preached over 600 times before he was 20 years old.

His sermons sold about 20,000 copies a week and were translated into 20 languages.

The collected sermons fill 63 volumes equivalent to the 27 volume ninth edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, and "stands" as the largest set of books by a single author in the history of Christianity" (see note 3).

Even if his son Charles was biased his assessment is close enough to the truth, "There was no one who could preach like my father.

In inexhaustible variety, witty wisdom, vigorous proclamation, loving entreaty, and lucid teaching, with a multitude of other qualities, he must, at least in my opinion, ever be regarded as the prince of preachers" (see note 4).

Spurgeon was a preacher.

!!!!! 2.

He was a truth-driven preacher.

I am not interested in how preachers deal with adversity if they are not first and foremost guardians and givers of unchanging Biblical truth.

If they find their way through adversity by other means than faithfulness to truth, I turn away.

Spurgeon defined the work of the preacher like this: "To know truth as it should be known, to love it as it should be loved, and then to proclaim it in the right spirit, and in its proper proportions" (see note 5).

He said to his students, "To be effective preachers you must be sound theologians" (see note 6).

He warned that "those who do away with Christian doctrine are, whether they are aware of it or not, the worst enemies of Christian living ... [because] the coals of orthodoxy are necessary to the fire of piety" (see note 7).

Two years before he died he said,

"Some excellent brethren seem to think more of the life than of the truth; for when I warn them that the enemy has poisoned the children's bread, they answer 'Dear brother, we are sorry to hear it; and, to counteract the evil, we will open the window, and give the children fresh air.' Yes, open the window, and give them fresh air, by all means ... But, at the same time, this ought you to have done, and not to have left the other undone.

Arrest the poisoners, and open the windows, too.

While men go on preaching false doctrine, you may talk as much as you will about deepening their spiritual life, but you will fail in it" (see note 8).

Doctrinal truth was at the foundation and superstructure of all Spurgeon's labors.

!!!!! 3.

He was a Bible-believing preacher.

The truth that drove his preaching ministry was Biblical truth, which he believed to be God's truth.

He held up his Bible and said,

"These words are God's ... Thou book of vast authority, thou art a proclamation from the Emperor of Heaven; far be it from me to exercise my reason in contradicting thee ... This is the book untainted by any error; but it is pure unalloyed, perfect truth.

Why?

Because God wrote it" (see note 9).

What a difference where this allegiance holds sway in the hearts of preachers and people.

I had lunch with a man recently who bemoaned the atmosphere of his Sunday school class.

He characterized it like this: if a person raises a question to discuss, and another reads a relevant Bible verse, the class communicates, "Now we have heard what Jesus thinks, what do you think?"

Where that atmosphere begins to take over the pulpit and the church, defection from truth and weakness in holiness are not far behind.

!!!!! 4.

He was a soul-winning preacher.

There was not a week that went by in his mature ministry that souls were not saved through his written sermons (see note 10).

He and his elders were always on the "watch for souls" in the great congregation.

"One brother," he said, "has earned for himself the title of my hunting dog, for he is always ready to pick up the wounded birds" (see note 11).

Spurgeon was not exaggerating when he said,

"I remember, when I have preached at different times in the country, and sometimes here, that my whole soul has agonized over men, every nerve of my body has been strained and I could have wept my very being out of my eyes and carried my whole frame away in a flood of tears, if I could but win souls" (see note 12).

He was consumed with the glory of God and the salvation of men.

!!!!! 5.

He was a Calvinistic preacher.

He was my kind of Calvinist.

Let me give you a flavor of why his Calvinism drew 5,000 people a week to his church rather than driving them away.

He said,

"To me, Calvinism means the placing of the eternal God at the head of all things.

I look at everything through its relation to God's glory.

I see God first, and man far down in the list ... Brethren, if we live in sympathy with God, we delight to hear Him say, 'I am God, and there is none else'" (see note 13).

For Spurgeon "Puritanism, Protestantism, Calvinism [were simply] ... poor names which the world has given to our great and glorious faith,—the doctrine of Paul the apostle, the gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ" (see note 14).

But he did make distinctions between the full system, which he did embrace, and some central, evangelical doctrines shared by others that bound him together with them—like his favorite, the doctrine of the substitution of Christ for sinners.

He said, "Far be it for me to imagine that Zion contains none but Calvinistic Christians within her walls, or that there are none saved who do not hold our views" (see note 15).

He said, "I am not an outrageous Protestant generally, and I rejoice to confess that I feel sure there are some of God's people even in the Romish Church" (see note 16).

He chose a paedobaptist to be the first head of his pastor's college, and did not make that issue a barrier to who preached in his pulpit.

His communion was open to all Christians, but he said he "would rather give up his pastorate than admit any man to the church who was not obedient to his Lord's command [of baptism]" (see note 17).

His first words in the Metropolitan Tabernacle, the place he built to preach in for thirty years:

"I would propose that the subject of the ministry in this house, as long as this platform shall stand and as long as this house shall be frequented by worshippers, shall be the person of Jesus Christ.

I am never ashamed to avow myself a Calvinist; I do not hesitate to take the name of Baptist; but if I am asked what is my creed, I reply, "It is Jesus Christ" (see note 18).

But he believed that Calvinism honored that Christ most fully because it was most true.

And he preached it explicitly, and tried to work it into the minds of his people, because he said, "Calvinism has in it a conservative force which helps to hold men to vital truth" (see note 19).

Therefore he was open and unashamed: "People come to me for one thing ... I preach to them a Calvinist creed and a Puritan morality.

That is what they want and that is what they get.

If they want anything else they must go elsewhere" (see note 20).