Zack Eswine
Assistant Professor of Homiletics and Director of the Doctor of Ministry Program, Covenant Theological Seminary
Beginning in 1865, Charles Haddon Spurgeon gave an annual conference address to the alumni of his Pastor’s College. Over the next twenty-seven years, the decline of Christian influence amid the towering issues of the age formed his recuring theme.[i] “It is hard to win attention to the Word of God,” Spurgeon lamented. “We all feel that a hardening process is going on among the masses.”[ii] Elsewhere he concluded,“Revelation which is unchanging,” is not considered “fast enough for an age of which it may be said, ‘Change is its fashion’.”[iii]
These words may surprise twenty-first century preachers. After all, the European 19th century is considered a golden-age in the history of preaching. But think about this for a moment. Sometimes one needs more doctors and more medicine because the illness is more deadly. Sometimes heroics are required because the situation is more dire. Maybe the saturation of good preaching in the 19th century indicates an age less golden than we tend to imagine. Maybe more were necessary because the situation grew critical.
A wise old preacher once gave this caution. “Say not, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this” (Eccl. 7:10). This same preacher also said that old things repeat themselves. New fads are often old fads with new clothes (Eccl. 1:9). These old sayings remind us that we preachers are part of a guild. We stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. We ready our shoulders for the feet of those who will follow. Each generation of preachers has something to offer and something to learn from the other.
In this article we attempt to ready our feet for Spurgeon’s shoulders. Our hope is bits of homiletic wisdom. There is much a young preacher at the dawn of the 21st century can learn from this 19th century pastor.
Trying to Stop the Decline
The “hardening process” that Spurgeon observed arose from many quarters. Preachers at the turn of the twenty-first century may be surprised when they look at this list of nineteenth century challenges closely.
The expansion of media access minimized dependence upon local preachers. Authority of the local pastor was increasingly challenged.
Darwinism and higher critical skepticism challenged the claims of the Bible. Human reason and experience became a more trusted authority.
Shorter attention spans were problems due the frenetic pace of the culture, illiteracy, and an increasing aversion to dull and extended logic.
Attention to rhetoric, eloquence and scholarship revived for respectability in society.
Architecture, music and other forms of art were increasingly sought to counteract the decline in church attendance.
Material opportunity hindered clergy willingness to serve “lesser” calls.
For many, Seminaries seemed unable to train pastors for the realities of ministry.
Pastors felt that they were spending their time doing everything other than prayer, preaching and care for people.
The plagiarizing of sermons flourished as a needed relief from the demanding pace of ministry.[iv]
Spurgeon summarized these concerns in a letter to the readers of his sermons in 1892. He wrote: “Our nation is fast learning to forget God . . . In too many instances ministers of religion have propagated doubt and the result is a general hardening of the popular feeling, and a greatly-increased neglect of public worship.”[v] At a minimum, Spurgeon here reminds us that a generation suspicious of biblical preaching did not originate with postmodernism. Twenty-first century preachers are not the first to encounter challenges to biblical preaching.
Challenging the Sermon
Like our own day, a host of Victorian voices agreed that “the pulpit is no longer a power in the country.”[vi] Preachers then as now, scramble amid this “hardening” and felt loss of power. Answers have to be found. “There are those who hold the opinion,” said William Davies, “that the function of the pulpit is now utterly decayed, that there is no more use for it, that it must inevitably grow more and more effete, until it shall no longer retain an existence among us.[vii] Louisa Merivale, though differing with Davies in his application of this sentiment, concured with this belief, “For ourselves, we should prefer being able to go to church occasionally without having to listen to a sermon at all.”[viii] As one observed, if the “sermon cannot be altogether got rid of, it can of course be shortened . . . the standard length being reduced from half an hour to a quarter.”[ix]
Some were noting that an average person can only handle fifteen minutes of bare argument.”[x] In 1859, the question was asked.
Will not great men—eloquent orators—remember sometimes that they were little children and had little thoughts and loved little things and were easily impressed with any pleasing incident? A tale of tenderness tenderly told occupying four or five minutes in the telling, would have kept them up then, through a quarter of an hour’s ‘dry as dust logic’.[xi]
Keeping in mind what an average person can bear was becoming increasingly important. “I want something for today—for over-burdened men and women in this year of our Lord 1869,” [xii] was the increasing summons. Give us “something live and something that has bearing on our daily work, something that recognizes the seething elements about us and their bearing on the questions of conscience and duty we are hourly called on to settle. Oh, if the clergymen would only study their fellow men more.”[xiii]
These searchings for renewed power in the pulpit led many to combine shorter sermons with art and architecture. Dr. Allon in 1888 worried about this trend, wondering how concessions “to ritual and music” might impact how churches view preaching. [xiv]
Is there really anything new under the sun?
Spurgeon’s Call for the Holy Spirit
Spurgeon resonated with his generation’s search for renewed power in the pulpit. He recognized the loss of attention and the creative need for re-gaining it.[xv] He certainly agreed with the need for story and decried the “articulate snoring” of decorum-bound preachers whose souls no longer “sweat.”[xvi] But he warned against those “doctors” and “deep thinking” men who put aside the Bible for new schemes of pulpit attaction and power. He lamented preachers who felt they “must link to the preaching of Christ all the aids of music and architecture.”[xvii] Whether we agree with Spurgeon on these points, our central assertion remains. There are things Spurgeon faced that resemble our own times.
According to Spurgeon, however, the primary hope for regaining a relevant and powerful pulpit amid a declining was not found “in the preacher” nor “in the crowd,” nor “in the attention” that preachers “can attract.” The only hope for regaining kindled fire in the pulpit is “in God, and in God alone.”[xviii]
Spurgeon meant this literally. A preacher must become convinced that “It were better to speak six words in the power of the Holy Ghost than to preach seventy years of sermons without the Spirit.”[xix] The absence of this conviction among preachers troubled Spurgeon. He feared that the decline in Christian influence witnessed in his Victorian age was nothing less than “an evident withdrawal of the Holy Ghost,” a grieving of the Spirit in the churches.[xx] If he was right, the greatest need of the hour for preachers and churches was neither to scramble for new methods nor to remain stagnant in age-limited decorum. Rather, each preacher must “come back” to God in Christ, and seek a return of His gracious effusions of power for the generation. Without the Holy Spirit no homiletic method will have what it takes to revive a generation. We stop for a moment and ask ourselves if we really believe this. As a friend of mine once said, facing our current cultural challenges with a sermon feels like taking a toy shovel into a blizzard.
The Spirit’s Leadership for Our Preaching
Many preachers agree. We know that the Holy Spirit is necessary for biblical influence in a generation. But many are unsure of what this practically means. For the remainder of this article I will introduce (only briefly) some of Spurgeon’s primary thoughts concerning a Spirit-inhabited sermon style.
1. Use the Spirit’s appointed means
Spurgeon believed that the Spirit appointed certain means by which He demonstrates His power. Though He is the “free Spirit” of God,” Spurgeon reminded, the Holy Spirit “is by no means capricious in his operations.”[xxi] He will not adorn that which counters His nature. Whatever else a preacher may do, one cannot expect the Spirit’s power while ignoring these particularly appointed means.
To lean on these means of a humble heart, a Christ-centered Bible and a community of prayer and deed, is to trust God in the midst of felt irrelevance. To lay aside these means is to trust something other than God to meet the demands of the hour. To lean on these means feels weak but places us in a stronger position. To lay aside these means feels strong but puts us in a weaker position. This is how one knows if trust in God is their mode of preaching. To trust someone is to hold onto what they have said even if for the moment it seems that what they said is not working. Trusting God means saying what God has said. This means explaining His word in a Christ-exalting way even if for the moment it seems that other methods would work better.
Our battle, even when including electronic saturation, biblical ignorance, and postmodernism epistemologies, is not against flesh and blood. The armor given, including the word which is the sword of the Spirit, remains our stronger posture (Eph. 6) even though it feels weak. It is in our weakness that God demonstrates His strength.
2. Put your trust in the Spirit’s Purpose and not in the Spirit’s means
This does not mean that we can obligate God to use his favored means. When preachers see that God blessed a particular method in one place, their temptation is to say, “we need that method here in our place.” Spurgeon reminds that a method, even a favored one, without God’s Spirit is empty. Spiritual power is never the result of a method. The method was only an instrument of true power. Therefore, rather than solely reorganizing our energy around reduplicating the methods of others, we must ask God to work here as He did there. Reliance upon the Holy Spirit discourages our tendency to reduce the blessing of God to a formula. “We have tried to propagate the truth in a certain way, and the Lord has blessed us in it” Spurgeon cautioned, “and therefore we venerate the mode and the plan, and forget that the Holy Spirit is a free Spirit.”[xxii]
Because the Spirit has a free will, the preacher must learn to trust the Spirit’s purposes for his sermon. For example, when referring to one of his sermons which he felt was less than effective, Spurgeon acknowledged that the first place to look was to his responsibility with sermon preparation. But upon examination, if the preacher in good conscience can honestly say that he was faithful to his responsibilities, and the sermon still seemed less than effective, then the preacher must surrender to the purposes of the free Spirit.
The simple fact is this, “the wind bloweth where it listeth;” and sometimes the winds themselves are still . . .Therefore if I rest on the Spirit, I cannot expect that I should always feel His power alike . . .in the one case the Holy Spirit went with the Word; and in the other case He did not. All the heavenly result of preaching is owing to the Divine Spirit sent from above.[xxiii]
Spurgeon will acknowledge that “At times, the Spirit gives or withholds his blessings connected with ourselves.” At other times “the Spirit of God blesses one preacher more than another and the reason cannot be such that any man could congratulate himself.”[xxiv] We must ask ourselves if we are willing to remain faithful while God chooses to withhold our hoped for result. Can we trust His timing? Can we wait amid felt irrelevance, leaning upon His means, knowing that He, and not we, determine how and when to demonstrate His power?
3. Seek the Virtual Preaching of Jesus
Spurgeon believed in “the attendant power of the Spirit of God.”[xxv] An “attendant power” identifies a close power or an “alongside of” power. According to Spurgeon, the “attendant power of the Spirit of God,” “refers to that “secret something” which “goes along with” the preacher’s “pleadings.” When the preacher preaches, two voices are being heard—the preacher’s voice and God’s voice alongside it, such that “the voice of man” is made “to be the voice of the Holy Ghost.”[xxvi] Accordingly, the preacher assumes that any true power in preaching depends upon “God himself” who “must come upon the scene” and kindle the fire of the truth.[xxvii]
Spurgeon’s conclusion is striking. Where the message of Jesus “is honestly and truthfully delivered with the Spirit of God, Jesus Christ himself is virtually present, speaking through the lips of his servants.”[xxviii] The preacher does not speak as if God is away on business. The preacher is meant to speak in the presence of God. Commenting on I Thessalonians 1:5, which says: “our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit,” Spurgeon asked:
Do you sometimes, after hearing a sermon feel . . .as if God himself had been there, you did not know what else it could be. It could not have been the speaker nor the words he uttered, but the very God did come and look into your eyes, and searched the thoughts of your mind, and turned your heart upside down, and then filled it full again with his love and with his light, with his truth and with his joy, with his peace and with his desire after holiness?[xxix]
Spurgeon’s conviction on this point informed his prayers and at times led him to plead to God publicly from the pulpit, “Oh” he at times cried, “that the Spirit of God may give the sermon!”[xxx] It also informed the way he sometimes applied the truths of his sermons to his hearers. For example, when speaking to the point of forgiving love, Spurgeon preached as if Jesus were actually living and present to minister to his hearers in that very moment. He spoke as though his hearers were meant to leave him and go to Jesus directly for healing. “Your Lord himself stands before you,” Spurgeon declared. “You remember how he forgave you all your trespasses and I am sure you will give earnest heed to his exhortation to forgive.” Spurgeon then called publicly upon the present Spirit of God to apply Christ’s message, saying: “ May the dove-like Spirit now brood over this assembly, and create love in all our bosoms.”[xxxi]
By saying these things, Spurgeon did not believe that the preacher speaks infallibly. Spurgeon maintained that the tongue of the preacher is a “feeble instrument,” and “marred by a thousand imperfections,” Yet, God makes the bearer of His words able to speak by His blessing.[xxxii] Preaching then becomes more than a speech, a lecture or a seminar for education. Preaching is the means by which God draws near and presently speaks to His people. Preaching is a meeting with God. What would happen if preachers and people looked toward Sunday with this expectation?
4. Recognize the difference between mental and spiritual power
Why should preachers look for this attendant power? First, The Spirit of God is the “author of the sacred Word,”[xxxiii] and therefore gives authority to its contents. “The Holy Ghost has made this Book himself,” Spurgeon explains. “Every portion of it bears his initial and impress.”[xxxiv] The Spirit attends presently what He wrote previously.
Second, Spurgeon wanted preachers to recognize that two kinds of power are at their disposal. Both kinds of power possess the ability to produce effects. But as Spurgeon explained: “The sort of power of which we feel the need, will be determined by our view of our work and the amount of power that we shall long for will also very much depend upon our idea of how that work should be done.”[xxxv] The preacher needs a “sort of power” which has the capacity to perform what preaching is meant to do. Spurgeon hints at these two distinct kinds of power when he states that “it is extraordinary grace, not talent, that wins the day; extraordinary spiritual power, not extraordinary mental power” that is our hope.[xxxvi] Note in this statement that natural talent is connected to “mental power” in contrast to the grace from God which describes the substance of “spiritual power.” “Mental power” refers to that energy, creativity and force which derives from human ingenuity and human strength. This kind of power is both noble and desirable. The preacher must labor and spend energy to think, reflect, preach and love his hearers. Spurgeon does not denigrate mental power. “We want to have such mental vigor as God pleases to give us,” Spurgeon said. His point is that if the work of preaching is to annihilate the distance between God and His people, then mental power will prove insufficient to accomplish the preacher’s work.[xxxvii] A “brilliant speech,” in other words, even though it is desirable, does not possess the kind of power necessary to “win” a “soul for Christ.” We must “remember that text,” he said, “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord.” [xxxviii]
Spurgeon believed therefore that “mental power” cannot stand alone in preaching. It must be accompanied by “spiritual might.” “Mental power may fill a chapel,” Spurgeon warned, “But spiritual power fills the Church. Mental power may gather a congregation, but spiritual power will save souls.” His conclusion? “We want spiritual power.”[xxxix]
5. See the Bible as your primary homiletics textbook
Where is this found? In contrast to some of his 19th century contemporaries who sought helpfully to recover classical rhetoric, Spurgeon suggested that Jesus and not Cicero nor Aristotle was the one who should serve as the preacher’s model orator. Similiarly, the Bible, and not De Orator nor Aristotle’s Rhetoric, was Spurgeon’s primary manual for rhetorical principle and style. “Teachers of Scripture,” Spurgeon said, “cannot do better than instruct their fellows after the manner of the Scriptures.”[xl] Trusting the Holy Spirit means that preachers must learn to see the Bible as God’s speech. The Bible is God preaching. Therefore, we learn from its pages, not only what to preach, but how to preach.
For example, the Bible uses familiar language. In this regard, Spurgeon tried to distance himself from the rhetorical eloquence of the Victorian pulpit by describing his pulpit-work as more of a conversation than a grand lecture. So, at times Spurgeon would say to his hearers, “I am hardly going to preach to-night, but just to talk familiarly to you, and I want you to let your hearts talk.”[xli] Or, he could step to the pulpit and say: “Let us talk familiarly with one another on this theme.”[xlii] Speaking “familiarly” meant speaking from the pulpit in a familiar manner, less like what one would expect from a public lecture hall and more like what one would expect among close friends in one’s home. Spurgeon said, “I wish to lay the formalities of the pulpit aside and talk to you, as if you were in your own houses.”[xliii]
While Spurgeon preached with great passion and enough volume to enable 6, 000 people to hear him comfortably without the aid of a microphone, he was perceived by his audiences as speaking conversationally. As one described it: He “stood erect, or, when reaching after his audience, bent over the desk . . . he stood there in perfect simplicity and talked in a free, familiar, conversational manner, as if he were intent upon taking his audience into his confidence . . . [he] spoke to the people as one talking in a simple, colloquial manner, without oratorical effort.”[xliv]
Spurgeon taught his students to preach familiarly because he believed that God preached in this same way. In Isaiah 1:18, for example, the text says: “Come now let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” Spurgeon commented on this passage noting that the God whose “voice . . . shakes the earth with tempests” is the same God “who speaks to us” and says, “Come now, let us reason together.” Spurgeon points out that God the creator and judge lays aside his thunderous power, draws near to the sinner, and invites the sinner to converse with reason. It is as if God says, “Tell me, what is your difficulty? I will lay aside my glory, and will come down, and talk familiarly with you that we may have this question settled.”[xlv] For Spurgeon, God’s manner is the preacher’s best guide. How might this impact the way we preachers read the Bible?
6. Don’t Forget to Testify
Spurgeon’s familiar speaking drew the ire of his critics. He was accused of being vulgar and self-centered. He often spoke in the first person and was not afraid to appeal directly to the hearer. For this reason, he was heavily criticized. Referring to those who printed Spurgeon’s sermons, one critic remarked that, “the printer” must often “run out of capital “I’s.” [xlvi] Another critic declared that Spurgeon’s preaching “indicated low views of Deity, and exalted views of self. Indeed,” he asserted, “self is never out of sight . . .”[xlvii]
With the Apostle Paul as his mentor, Spurgeon countered his critics. By his counter-argument he essentially added a fourth task for preaching. Not only must the preacher explain, illustrate and apply the message. The preacher must also testify.
We must also testify. We must bear witness to the effect which the gospel has had upon our heart and life. The telling out of our personal experience is a means of grace to our hearers. Paul was wont to describe his own conversion . . . There is much force in such a personal testimony. Oh, that you and I, after having explained the gospel, may always be able to tell out something from our own experience which will prove it![xlviii]
7. Engage the imagination and emotion
Added to this redemptive vulnerability, Spurgeon intentionally engaged the
imagination. “God helping me,” Spurgeon vowed, “I will teach the people by parables, by similes, by illustrations, by anything that will be helpful to them; and I will seek to be a thoroughly interesting preacher of the Word.”[xlix]
While Spurgeon agreed that preachers were not entertainers nor fabricaters of stories he lamented those prudish preachers who would not “stoop to tell a simple, homely story.”[l] Look, he would say, “The Bible itself abounds in metaphors, types, and symbols; it is a great picture book; there is scarcely a poetical figure, which may not be found in the law and the prophets, or in the words of Jesus and his apostles.” If, as the Bible says, “The preacher is bidden to speak as the oracles of God,” then the preacher “should imitate their illustrative method, and abound in emblems and parables.”[li]
Spurgeon’s rationale for emotion in preaching was the same. There must be passion. “The soul must run over at the mouth, and the speech must be the outflowing lava of a heart that swells and heaves with inward fires.”[lii] But why? Spurgeon turns again to the divine manner that he sees in the Scripture. “Even thus doth God, with sacred pathos, with love welling up from the depth of his heart plead with every sinner before me,” Spurgeon said, “and He words the pleading thus: ‘Oh Israel, return unto the Lord thy God.’”[liii] From texts like these, Spurgeon felt that God’s pathos is most clearly demonstrated in His loving movements toward sinners. Spurgeon explains:
Here is a text, “Their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more forever,” that is God’s own assertion. He knows his own memory and he has put it so. Let me repeat those words. They melt my own heart while I speak them, and therefore I hope every child of God will feel the sweetness of them. What inconceivable love! What force, what pathos, what grace there is in every syllable: “and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more forever.”[liv]
Bare logic, Spurgeon taught his students, must be “made red hot with affection.” The preacher therefore must “argue as a mother pleads with her boy . . . quickened . . . by the living warmth of love.” [lv] This warmth of love included the threatenings of the Bible. Spurgeon did not hesitate to warn; far from it. But he felt that “While the winds and tornadoes of the Law may sometimes tear away a [sinner’s] cloak, far oftener they make him hug his sins, and bind his self-righteousness more tightly around him.” Therefore, Spurgeon felt that as a rule, “the gentleness and love of Jesus Christ” could better “disarm the man, and make him cast away both his sins and his self-righteousness.”[lvi] Do we agree with Spurgeon?
8. Lean upon the Community of Believers
With this familiar, direct, conversational, imaginative and emotional proclamation
of the biblical text; wrapped in the personal vulnerability and testimony of the preacher, Spurgeon sought the present voice of God speaking to the soul by means of His feeble sermon.
But for Spurgeon, powerful preaching required a praying and gifted community of the Spirit. The community therefore is meant to unite in prayer. Spurgeon’s team of praying people while he preached is well known. But, the community is also meant to unite by walking with Christ in their spheres of daily calling.
Theologically, Spurgeon believed that the unction of the Spirit was meant not just for the sacred office of preacher but also for the callings of every believer. “We shall never see the world turned upside down as it was in apostolic times until we get back to the apostolic practice, that all the saints are filled with the Holy Ghost, and speak for Christ as the Spirit gives them utterance.”[lvii] Spurgeon expected the attendant power of God to fall, not only in the moment of preaching, but also in varying degrees in the ordinary moments of life. He could say: “I fear that the presence of God is not often felt as it ought to be at a dinner-table, when a number of people are met together and are enjoying themselves.”[lviii] His concern was also a practical one. The needs of any given community are too great for the sacred officers to handle alone. “What can one overseer do? What could twenty pastors do?” Spurgeon asked, “It is impossible if you leave this work entirely to us that it will ever be properly discharged. Oh no! Let each member have his own office in the body.”[lix] Furthermore, the nature of some callings meant that the weight of their tasks required recognition beyond that of the preacher’s. Spurgeon often made this point with Sunday school teachers.
But when you teach in Sabbath-schools, you are, if it be possible,in a more responsible situation even than a minister occupies. He preaches to grown-up people, to men of judgment, who, if they do not like what he preaches, can go somewhere else; but you teach children who have no option of going elsewhere. If you teach the child wrongly, he believes you; if you teach him heresies, he will receive them; what you teach him now, he will never forget.[lx]
For Spurgeon, therefore, the preacher’s hearers possess an ordinary calling by God which leads them into the instrumental agency of the Spirit of God. Prior to the preaching event, therefore, many of the preacher’s hearers are laboring instrumentally in the hands of the Spirit, as “fellow workers” in the common cause of the gospel. The purpose of the preacher gains a community orientation. The preacher must not think that his task is merely to inform and educate. Rather, the pulpit is meant to be “a fountain from which streams of beneficence flow forth” into the surrounding community. Spurgeon applied this point to his own preaching:
This Tabernacle is not a mere theological lecture platform. It is a fountain from which streams of beneficence are ever flowing forth. Our friend would never be satisfied with crowds listening to his eloquent voice, if those crowds were not prompted to go away to do all the good they can, imitating his example, and blessing the neighborhood round about.[lxi]
Consequently, the congregation is meant to learn a community orientation from the preacher. They too know that their church is not their own but meant for the gospel in community. Not only is Spurgeon not afraid to speak openly of the Holy Spirit from the pulpit, but he publicly declares value and casts a vision for the daily life of God’s people. For example, he calls them not to try to be preachers. Theirs is not
“to seek precedence in public assemblies.” Rather he says to them, you are called:
To exert influence in private society . . . by a good conversation, with a speech seasoned with salt, at home among friends, kinsfolk, or companions, to the dozen or to one, make known what love has done, what grace has done, what Christ has done. Make it known; make it known. Among your servants, among your children, among your tradespeople-wherever you go make it known; make it known.[lxii]
In other words, every believer in their sphere of calling has a testimony of life and words to bring to their God-given place in the world. Such testimonies fill the community with those who speak and live with people for God and who speak and live with God for people.
Conclusion
Charles Spurgeon called for a generation facing moral decline to turn with renewed intention to God. This meant that he prayed for God to revive the generation and turn people to Himself. It also meant, that Spurgeon looked to God as the primary preacher and God’s word as the primary textbook for preaching. From God’s manner in the Bible, Spurgeon sought a community emphasis of unction. He chose to speak in ordinary language, with personal transparency and directness, using instruction, story, emotion, and personal testimony, to mirror God’s approach by the sermon.
For some, Spurgeon is a helpful model. He clung to the exposition of Scripture in an age which increasingly doubted the authority of the Bible and the relevance of preaching. He did not turn to social and artistic supplements for his preaching. Yet, he was personal, reasoned, imaginative, and emotional in his biblical proclamation.
For others, Spurgeon is helpful because he embraced a personal and vibrant approach to preaching. Yet, he did not abandon the Bible to do so.
For all of us, Spurgeon’s attention to the Holy Spirit calls us in our hour to consider what we are saying we most need for reformation and revival in our land. He leads us by causing us to ask questions: What would preaching look like if God was our hero preacher, the Bible was our sample of the way God preaches, and God intends to pair His voice with ours in the midst of our perplexing times? What would it mean for us to resemble the familiarity, imagination, emotion and transparency found in God’s preaching? What would it mean for us to wait on God even if His means seem ineffective for a time? Spurgeon casts a vision for what God does in the preaching. He bids us to seek the Lord and wait upon Him.
Have you ever seen an assembly listening to an orator all unmoved and stolid? Suddenly, the Holy Ghost has fallen on the speaker, and the King Himself has been visibly set forth among them in the midst of the assembly, and all have felt as if they could leap to their feet and cry, “Hallelujah, Hallelujah!” Then hearts beat fast, and souls leap high; for where Jesus is found His presence fills the place with delight.[lxiii]
May the Lord grant us the wisdom to reorient our hope toward Him, the stamina to wait upon Him, and the grace of His visitation in our generation.
