Session 4: A Marvelous Ministry: The Preaching of Charles Spurgeon, Part 1

Just to let you know, if you want to get a muffin or a refill on your coffee while I'm speaking, you won't offend me or distract me.

If I were sitting down there and a guy talking like I do standing up here,

I'd want a refill on the coffee, so my sympathies are with you. And we have,

I think, two sessions before lunch, right? And two more sessions before lunch, and then someone was asking when are we going to do the

Q &A. I'm told we're going to do that during lunch, so while you're eating lunch, we'll take some questions.

If you have questions to write on those cards, give them to Pastor Jim, and we'll handle those at lunchtime.

And I think this may be the last of my messages that I was able to prepare sort of ordered

PowerPoint slides with, so after this, you're just going to have to listen to me talk.

Now, I do have another set of PowerPoint slides that I'll sort of talk you through, but this time, in this hour, we want to talk about Spurgeon the preacher.

This is the beginning of two sessions we're going to devote to the subject of his preaching. As you've seen,

Spurgeon began preaching very soon after his conversion. He was converted, as I said, on January 6th, 1850, and exactly five years and one day later, he preached his first sermon as pastor of the

Metropolitan Tabernacle in Lund. Actually, it was called the New Park Street Church at the time.

Like I said, he never attended any seminary or university. He just sort of became full -grown, mature, almost from the beginning.

Spurgeon had an incredible and near -photographic memory, so he would remember everything he ever read, even sometimes years later.

He could read a book once, and he didn't have to mark it. Years ago, I visited

Spurgeon's library when it was at William Jewell College in Kansas City.

This was a collection of books that Spurgeon owned privately. After his death, it was auctioned off and purchased by William Jewell College in Kansas City.

This was a Baptist school, and they had it for, I think, almost a century. They have since sold it to Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, also in Kansas City.

Now, today, it's on display in a beautiful facility. That is the old library at William Jewell College.

This was sold, as I said, at auction to William Jewell as a Baptist school just a few years after Spurgeon's death.

William Jewell College also owned the library of Lois Lenski. She was a famous children's author.

It seemed to me like they treated the Spurgeon library like a kind of stepchild. They kept it away from the public in a locked room.

Around 1996 or so, I visited there. They opened the library for me and gave me permission to browse to my heart's content.

I was helping to find places where Spurgeon marked his favorite books while he read.

To my surprise, marginal notations in Spurgeon's books are extremely rare.

That's true even in the books that I knew Spurgeon used a lot. Unlike me, he remembered everything he ever read.

He really didn't need to highlight his books or write marginal notes to himself the way

I do. If you look at my books, you find them all marked up. After Midwestern Seminary purchased the library, but before they had a chance to put it on display permanently, it was locked in a warehouse for a few years while they built this beautiful facility.

During that time, I visited Kansas City again. The president of the seminary there, Jason Allen, graciously let me look at a few

Spurgeon artifacts that he had specifically taken out of the collection in order to keep on permanent display.

The books he showed me included a few volumes that Spurgeon did write notes in, although he didn't typically mark the pages of his books.

It turns out that he wrote notes in the flyleaf to remind himself what he thought about certain books.

If it was a book he didn't like, he would write a scathing one -paragraph review in the front of the book.

Some of them are funny, and it's intriguing, and sometimes really sarcastic stuff.

If you want a sample of that, read Spurgeon's comments in a book he actually published called

Commenting and Commentaries. He took all of his commentaries. In fact, that's a great resource.

People write to me all the time and say, what commentary would you recommend for the book of Habakkuk? I always turn to Commenting and Commentaries and see what

Spurgeon wrote. In my experience, I don't know about you, Jim, but I don't particularly care for modern commentaries because they're so academic, and they discuss all these trivial, pedophagic details.

Somebody asked what pedophagy is. You define it as a tendency to focus usually controversy on trivial matters.

All you want to do is discuss things that don't really matter and argue about things that don't really matter. That's pedophagy.

Modern commentaries are full of that kind of stuff. Older commentaries, the kind of commentaries Spurgeon used, usually had more devotional content, but they're also very serious, scholastic works, a lot of them.

Spurgeon went through his library of commentaries, and he had a considerable library, and he recommended the best and commented on the worst commentaries in several categories.

But each book of the Bible, for example, if you turn to Habakkuk, you'd see what he recommends as a commentary on that and what he holds in high contempt.

His comments are, he would have been a good blogger, and I think if he had got on Twitter, you'd have probably read a little sarcasm in him.

But anyway, where are we? Oh, this is the new facility at Midwestern Seminary, their library.

Anyway, for the most part, Spurgeon had no trouble recalling anything he'd ever read, and since he had started reading the

Puritans in his grandfather's library as a very young boy, even his very earliest memories were filled with things that he had learned, phrases that he'd picked up, doctrines that interested him, and illustrations he remembered from what he read as a child.

And therefore, even as a new Christian, into his life as a believer, Spurgeon drew with him already an encyclopedic knowledge gleaned from a childhood full of interest in spiritual things.

There was also one other profound influence on Spurgeon that I shouldn't fail to mention.

In the autumn before his conversion, he went to a private school in Cambridgeshire, and the cook and the housekeeper at that school was a woman named

Mary King. Spurgeon often said afterward that he was indebted to Mary King for most of his theology.

She was one of those who enjoyed reading theology and discussing it, and seeking to understand the deep things of God, debating difficult doctrines.

She was a remarkable woman, especially given that she was employed full -time as a domestic worker, basically, the cook and the housekeeper.

And in Spurgeon, she found a kindred spirit, and he talked to her by the hours.

She was a strong Calvinist who loved the doctrines of grace and loved to talk theology.

And Spurgeon recalled with great fondness and gratitude the influence that she had on him.

He said this about her in his own words, Many a time we have gone over the covenant of grace together, talked of the personal election of the saints, their union with Christ, their final perseverance, and what vital godliness means.

And Spurgeon says, I do believe that I learned more from her than I should have learned from any six doctors of divinity of the sort we have nowadays.

That church in Cambridgeshire where Mary was attending was spiritually dry.

The pastor was not very pastoral. And Spurgeon once asked Mary why she bothered to go at all.

And she replied that a hen scratching on a heap of rubbish may not get any corn, but she shows that she's looking for it, she's using the means to get it, and she's warmed by the exercise.

So you can get a sense of that, what a clever, keen thinker she was.

Somebody you could learn a great deal from. Spurgeon had a great regard for her, and in her old age, he helped support her financially.

She is not the only widow he helped support, but she's one of them. And she is the one who first sparked his interest in the doctrines of grace and many other cardinal doctrines that Spurgeon would later preach about.

He learned much from her, and her reward in heaven will be great. You never hear about her, which is kind of sad,

I think. But Spurgeon's early January conversion came at the end of Christmas holidays for Spurgeon's boarding school that year.

And when he returned to Cambridgeshire, he decided to join this church where Mary attended.

Although it was as dry as dust, this was the only option Spurgeon had at the time. And so he went to visit the minister for a membership interview and found out the pastor wasn't available to meet with him.

So after four days in a row trying to get a meeting with this man, I hesitate to call him a pastor, he wasn't very pastoral,

Spurgeon wrote him a letter saying that if the pastor wouldn't see him, he would simply propose himself for membership at the next church meeting.

So finally the pastor interviewed him, and he was admitted to the fellowship of that church. The church was not a

Baptist church, however, and Spurgeon, true to the conviction he had formed as a 14 -year -old, remember

I told you, as a 14 -year -old he discussed baptism and studied it, and decided that if he ever was converted, he would be baptized as a

Baptist. And so he searched for a Baptist minister and finally found one about eight miles away in Ilam, a little town called

Ilam. And he wrote his parents asking their consent for him to be baptized. They replied with their approval and a word of warning from his father,

John Spurgeon, cautioning him that he must not trust his baptism for his salvation.

Of course Spurgeon knew that, but Spurgeon's mom told him that she had prayed for him from his infancy that he would become a

Christian, but she never asked the Lord to make him a Baptist. Spurgeon responded telling her that the

Lord had answered her prayers by giving her exceedingly abundantly more than she had asked for.

And so one Friday morning in May that year, Spurgeon got up early and walked eight miles, walked eight miles to Ilam Ferry on the

River Lark. It's a pleasant little stream that divides Suffolk from Cambridgeshire.

It's a favorite place of local anglers, lots of fish there. Spurgeon had never even witnessed a baptism by immersion, and he was nervous, and it was cold and windy, and the place where he was immersed was so remote that even though today there's a stone monument marking that site, you will never find it unless you know someone who knows how to get there.

This is what the place looked like. That's the pastor who baptized Spurgeon.

There were two young women scheduled to be baptized that morning, and here is what Spurgeon wrote about that day.

He said, The wind blew down the river with a cutting blast as my turn came to wade into the flood, but after I had walked a few steps and noted the people on the ferryboat and inboats and on either shore,

I felt as if heaven and earth and hell might all gaze upon me, for I was not ashamed then and there to own myself a follower of the

Lamb. My timidity was washed away. It floated down the river into the sea, and it must have been devoured by the fishes, for I have never felt anything of the kind since.

Baptism also loosed my tongue, and from that day it has never been quiet. So he marked that day as a huge change in his life.

All the fear he had of speaking up, he said, was gone forever, instantly, and he started his preaching ministry almost immediately.

This is the place today. You see that little gray thing next to the pump?

That's the stone marker that marks this. I told you it was pretty remote. And I don't think there's a road that leads to it.

You sort of have to hike through there. This is,

I don't know who these people are. It's a picture, though, that shows you a sort of close -up of the monument.

These people had to walk to get there. So it's kind of an impressive photo.

Spurgeon's Baptist convictions were biblical. They were not sectarian. By that I mean he didn't become a

Baptist in order to be part of a group or a denomination. He became a Baptist because he was convinced of the

Baptistic understanding of the sacraments, that that was the most biblical. He would have been perfectly happy to pastor a congregation like the church

I attend, Grace Church, which is Baptistic in our theology but not a member of any

Baptist union. And, in fact, in later years, as we're going to see, Spurgeon famously pulled his church out of the

Baptist union because of his conviction that the Baptist union in England was becoming too tolerant of doctrinal compromise.

He wrote this, quote, I did not fulfill the outward ordinance in order to join a party and to become a

Baptist, but to be a Christian after the apostolic fashion. For they, when they believed, were baptized.

It is now questioned whether John Bunyan was baptized, but the same question can never be raised concerning me.

I, who scarcely belong to any sect, am nevertheless by no means willing to have it doubted in time to come whether or not

I followed the conviction of my heart. After his conversion and baptism,

Spurgeon immediately set out to do as much as he could to proclaim the gospel to others.

And he seemed to sense his calling to ministry immediately. At one point, a few years later, he began to think seriously that he might be called to preach the gospel in China.

And all through his life, he took a keen interest in foreign missions, but he knew he needed to start right where he was.

And so he started immediately, systematically distributing tracts. He would spend his

Saturdays going door to door with the gospel. And then the

Sunday after his Friday baptism, he partook in the

Lord's table for the first time and began teaching Sunday school. He found that teaching a class of young boys was a good way to hone his speaking skills.

It was there that he learned how to hold an audience. That is a good strategy, by the way, is to teach young boys.

And they're fidgety, and they don't listen well, and you have to keep their attention. And Spurgeon said when these kids would fidget or whatever, he saw it as a signal that it was time for him to illustrate whatever truth he was talking about.

And in fact, one boy in the Sunday school class used to say, this is very dull, teacher.

Can't you pitch us a yarn? And Spurgeon said later that he realized that the point of a good illustration may be remembered long after the rest of the sermon is forgotten.

And he was big on illustrations. In fact, one of his famous books is called

Sermons in Candles because he was teaching his ministerial students in the preacher's college that he started.

And he made the comment offhandedly that you should be able to make an illustration out of any everyday object.

And he sort of looked over there and there was a candle. He said, there's a candle. He said, I could probably give you a dozen illustrations based on a candle.

And one of the students challenged him on that and said, could you really? And Spurgeon said, yeah.

And so he basically off the top of his head gave about 50 illustrations based on a candle.

And so all of that was compiled and published in a book. And it's one of the most charming of Spurgeon's books,

Sermons in Candles. It's his exhibition of how you can take an everyday object and make a sermon illustration out of it.

Anyway, he was big on illustrations. He transferred to a school in Cambridge the following school year.

And that is where he preached his first sermon. Actually, more or less got tricked into it.

He had joined a Baptist church in Cambridge with a long history. And one of the men in that church was president of an organization called the

Preachers Association. And this man called on Spurgeon one Saturday morning just as school was dismissed and asked

Spurgeon to go with him the next evening to Teversham, a town nearby. He told

Spurgeon that there was a young man who was going to preach there, who was not accustomed to preaching and he would appreciate having company.

And so when this guy who invited Spurgeon showed up with another student, Spurgeon, of course, assumed that this third guy was the preacher.

And as they drew near to their destination, Spurgeon told this other student that he hoped the

Lord would empower him as he preached. And the other student looked at Spurgeon like he was crazy and told him he had never preached, he couldn't preach, and unless Spurgeon himself preached, there wasn't going to be any sermon.

The place where Spurgeon preached his first sermon was this little cottage in Teversham.

There's actually a photograph of it that was taken towards the end of Spurgeon's life. It was a small and little rustic affair.

There could not have been many people present. And Spurgeon had no choice but to use one of his

Sunday school messages. And so the text he chose that evening was 1 Peter 2 .7, Unto you who believe he is precious.

And when he finally finished preaching, he was simply relieved that he hadn't broken down or been unable to do it.

But other people in the audience said that they were dramatically impacted by that message.

By the way, the cottage still exists today. Its address is 6 High Street in Teversham.

It obviously has been significantly rebuilt. The walls are higher. The roof is a different pitch, and it's not any longer a thatched roof.

But this is the same cottage on the same foundation with indoors many of the same features and structure as the original.

Today it's part of a suburban development, not as rural as it was in Spurgeon's time.

But there is a plaque on the wall commemorating the start of Spurgeon's preaching ministry at that spot.

Spurgeon was naturally gifted as a speaker. He had a rich voice and a quick mind.

One of my regrets is that there are no recordings of Spurgeon's voice. The technology actually existed, but nobody ever thought to record him, which is sad.

He must have had a powerful voice because on at least one occasion, we'll talk about this later today, on at least one occasion he preached to I think a crowd of about 23 ,000 people in the

Crystal Palace, which was a large greenhouse -looking building. It was said that even on the outer edge of the congregation you could hear every syllable clearly.

So he must have had an incredibly powerful voice. There is a recording of one of his sons who also became a preacher.

You'll find it on the Internet if you look for it. There's a note there that says, People said he sounded just like his father.

I don't believe it because the son's voice just doesn't have that sort of richness. You can't imagine him speaking to a live crowd of 23 ,000 people with no amplification and managing to make himself heard.

But Spurgeon could do that. Again, we'll talk more about the power of his voice. But he was also witty and eloquent.

As I discussed with somebody during the break, he was funny. He may have been suffering from depression all his life, but he had a very keen sense of humor, and it sometimes came through in his preaching.

Once a woman scolded him for using humor in his sermons, and he said, Madam, if you know how many funny things occurred to me that I don't say, you would congratulate me for my, you know.

So there was the wit, the eloquence, too. You read his sermons, and you think this is mostly extemporaneous.

He only took into the pulpit a short outline, and yet he preached these sermons that are full of eloquence and vocabulary that most of us would not use off the top of our head.

His preaching from day one stood out as something special, and soon the entire region around Cambridge was talking about this young boy who could preach so well.

Now, I need to move quickly through the story of how Spurgeon came to London, so I'm going to draw heavily on what

Spurgeon's first important biographer wrote about him about that part of his life. This is, again, W .Y.

Fullerton. Several people have asked, if you just read one biography of Spurgeon, which one would you recommend?

Fullerton would be a good one to start with. He was personal friends with Spurgeon. He wrote the first biography, and it's also available online for free.

You could just download it and read it. For many years, Fullerton was Spurgeon's personal assistant, so he worked closely with him and helped him edit his sermons for publication.

Spurgeon was invited to preach in various churches and study groups on Sundays and many weekdays while he was still a student in what we would consider high school in and around Cambridge.

As I said, he never went to university. But here's how he described his own daily routine in those days.

In the early morning, he was up praying and reading the Bible, and then he went to school until about 5 in the evening, and then he would set off almost every day to speak somewhere in the villages in and around Cambridge to explain whatever passage of Scripture he had read that morning.

Toward the end of October 1851, he promised to supply the church.

Oh, this is the interior of that cottage where he gave his first sermon. Did I forget to click that one?

In October 1851, he promised to supply the pulpit of this church at Water Beach, which is six miles from Cambridge.

This chapel was a primitive structure with a thatched roof, and Spurgeon had promised to preach only a few

Sundays, but he ended up remaining as the pastor of this congregation for more than two years.

His first convert was a laborer's wife, and he said that he still prized that one soul more than all the multitude who came to Christ through his preaching afterward.

And at the first opportunity on Monday morning after she was converted on Sunday, he went to her cottage to encourage and instruct her in the first steps of the

Christian life. He said this, If anyone had said to me, somebody has left you 20 ,000 pounds,

I would not have given a snap of my fingers for what it compared with the joy which

I felt when I was told that God had saved a soul through my ministry. He said,

I felt like a boy who had earned his first guinea or like a diver who had been down to the depth of the sea and brought up a rare pearl.

And news about this young student's ability to preach spread like wildfire through that region, and so soon he was invited to speak at Ilam.

That was the town closest to the spot where he was baptized. The deacons there thought this is going to be a great event, so they borrowed the largest chapel in the neighborhood, thinking that large crowds were going to come, but only seven people showed up for the

Sunday morning service, and they said Spurgeon preached as if he were preaching to a packed auditorium, and by evening, the news of him had spread so much that for the evening service, people literally had to be turned away.

The place couldn't seat enough. At one point, he decided that he would go to college.

He sought enrollment at Stepney College. That's a Baptist school that was part of Oxford University at the time, and it still is actually.

Now it's known as Regent Park College. It's a very prestigious school, and it was even then, and it is today.

The principal at the time was a man named Dr. Angus, and he visited Cambridge on February 1st in 1852 to preach at St.

Andrew's Street Chapel there, and he made arrangements in the afternoon to meet

Spurgeon, to interview him as an enrollee for the university at Oxford.

So this meeting was scheduled to take place in a very large house. It was the mansion owned by Mr.

McMillan, the publisher, you know, McMillan, and Spurgeon arrived early.

He was always early for meetings like this, and so a servant girl showed him into the drawing room where he waited for two solid hours.

He was too shy and, as he thought, too insignificant to make a lot of noise, and so he waited quietly in that room two hours before he rang the bell and reminded someone that he was waiting to meet this important man, but by then,

Dr. Angus had come and gone, and he was on his train on the way back to London. This principal himself had showed up and waited quite a long time, thinking

Spurgeon wasn't there, but he was in another room, and neither one of them knew that the other was in the house ready for the meeting, which, of course, was an incredibly disappointing turn of providence, but it was definitely by God's design.

Spurgeon said that as he walked away that afternoon, a thought came into his head. He heard it almost like a loud voice.

The words that came to him were a quotation from Jeremiah 45, verse 5, "'Seekest thou great things for thyself?

Seek them not.'" He said that verse kept running through his head, and so he gave up the idea of ever going to college and just resolved to continue in ministry where the

Lord had placed him. The stupid girl who put him in that room didn't tell anyone that he was in the house, so the whole thing was her fault, but in God's providence, it really did turn out to be a good thing.

While Spurgeon pastored at Water Beach for two years, his influence began to grow.

Respect for him grew as well, and soon his reputation reached all the way to London. The New Park Street Baptist Church was one of the largest and definitely the best -known and most respected of all

London Baptist churches. In previous years, this church had been pastored by John Gill, who was probably the keenest -thinking

Baptist expositor who ever lived. His works are still worth reading.

In fact, Gill's influence on the Baptists of England was widespread, and I hesitate to say anything negative about him because he is one of the commentators

I always turn to for help when it comes to a really hard passage of Scripture. I always go and look to see what

John Gill said about it, and his insights are really quite profound. He was an expert in Old Testament Hebrew, and he was a voracious student of Jewish writings about the

Old Testament. So he had mastered all the rabbinical works and gave him great insight into the meaning of Scripture, and he was a great preacher as well.

But in all candor, his long -range influence has not always been entirely good.

John Gill's high Calvinism pointed a lot of British Baptists into a poisonous kind of hyper -Calvinism.

Spurgeon said this about him. Spurgeon, of course, even as a young man, is unintimidated by the fact that he is now stepping into the pulpit that had been occupied by the greatest of all

Baptist theologians, John Gill. Here's what he said about Gill. By the way, this is from Commenting and Commentaries, the book

I said where he goes through all of his commentaries and comments on them. He says this. For good sound, massive, sober sense in commenting, who can excel

Gill? Very seldom does he allow himself to be run away with by imagination, except now and then when he tries to open up a parable and finds a meaning in every circumstance and every minute detail, or when he falls upon a text which is not congenial to his creed, and he hacks and hews terribly to bring all the word of God into a more systematic shape.

He says, Gill is the Koryphaeus of hyper -Calvinism, but if his followers never went beyond their master, they would not go very far astray.

So it's clear, isn't it, that he thought Gill was a bit extreme and somewhat dangerous and that his followers sometimes take him too far.

He called him the Koryphaeus of hyper -Calvinism. Koryphaeus is an expression from Greek drama that speaks about a chorus leader.

So he's saying that John Gill was like the choir leader, the worship leader, who sang all the hymns twice.

No, but he would influence and encourage Baptists towards a kind of hyper -Calvinism that was dangerous and deadly to evangelism.

But Spurgeon himself stops short of calling Gill a hyper -Calvinist.

He says he's the Koryphaeus of hyper -Calvinism. Ian Murray, who wrote a book on Spurgeon and hyper -Calvinism, would tell you that Spurgeon was actually being too generous in his assessment of Gill.

He would classify Gill as a hyper -Calvinist. Not the worst of hyper -Calvinists, but he had some hyper -Calvinist opinions, and I agree with that.

I never encourage anyone to adopt Gill's doctrinal opinions on everything.

But Spurgeon is right that as a commenter on Scripture, his commentaries, Gill is usually superb.

And anyway, by Spurgeon's time, Gill had been dead and buried for nearly 80 years, but he still held an honored and influential place in Baptist history, still does to this day.

And the chapel where he pastored was on the south bank of the

River Thames in London. Actually, I should say the place where he pastored had been rebuilt, and the congregation had moved to this spot on the south bank of the river.

If you're familiar with the layout of London, New Park Street Chapel was literally within throwing distance of where they discovered and rebuilt

Shakespeare's Globe Theater. If you've ever visited London, you might know where that is.

Actually, I think the spot where the church was located is now covered up by part of the

Tate Modern Art Museum. This was the largest of all

Baptist church buildings, but the congregation was beginning to dwindle.

This is what it looked like when Spurgeon went there. The situation of the chapel was not good, and as a consequence, the congregation for years had been declining.

It was a hard place to get there. London's sewage all drained into the river in those days, and the chapel was in a low -lying area that never got a breeze, and a stench hung over the entire neighborhood all the time.

The site had been chosen because when the congregation had been forced to move from the previous location, the deacons chose the cheapest alternative they could find, and it was hard to get to.

It was dank and smelly and desperately hot and humid in the summers, and it was inconvenient in every conceivable way in the winters.

In fact, the building is directly across from St. Paul's Cathedral, south of the river.

The red dot is where New Park Street Chapel was, but it's in a very seedy industrial area.

The neighborhood featured a boiler works factory, an iron foundry, the local gas works, and a factory that made lead paint.

And the closest bridge charged a toll. There was no public transport or hired carriages that would go within a half mile of the place.

Fullerton says this, quote, It lay so low that it was frequently flooded, and when factories and warehouses sprang up all around it, naturally the people moved their residences elsewhere.

So nobody in the congregation lived near it. And Fullerton quotes a pastor who described the building this way.

He says, A more dingy, uninviting, and repelling region than where the chapel is situated

I have seldom explored. It's in a gloomy, narrow street surrounded by small, dirty -looking houses.

Within a minute's walk of the chapel, you see written up at the corner of a little street, Bear Garden.

It's actually still on this map. Well, I've covered it up with one of those dots.

But the street to this day is called Bear Garden. That, by the way, was a pit for bear baiting and bull baiting and other cruel sports that appealed to the lowest characters in society.

They would literally have dogs attack bulls and bears and kill them for entertainment.

It was like a British bull fight, I suppose. So that a street named Bear Garden still graces that neighborhood today.

During its history of 200 years, before Spurgeon got there, 200 years, this church had at least three notable preachers whose portraits still to this day hang in the vestry of the

Metropolitan Tabernacle. Benjamin Keech was one of them who had paid a high personal price for being a nonconformist and a

Baptist in an era when nonconformists were being punished with prison and persecuted for holding views that differed from the

Church of England. And Keech was locked in the pillory. That's the boards where they stick your head in hands.

He was known for his published works on the metaphors and parables of Scripture.

And he was the pastor of this church for 36 years, from 1668 to 1704.

So this is the tail end of the Puritan era. And he was, I think it's safe to label him a

Baptist Puritan. I've mentioned Dr. John Gill who followed

Keech. He pastored this church for more than a half century, starting in 1720.

And Fullerton, wait a minute, where are we? There, that's

Gill. He was up there already, wasn't he? He pastored this church for more than a half century.

Fullerton, who is talking about this painting of him, says this. And this is the painting that still hangs in the pastor's office, the vestry of the

Metropolitan Tabernacle. I took this photo of the portrait. Here's what

Fullerton says about it. In this portrait, his nose has a distinct tilt. Mr.

Spurgeon was accustomed to say that he's turning up his nose at Arminians. Spurgeon said it,

I wish I had the exact quote, because I remember it was a real clever way he said, he looks as if the scent of Arminianism is wafting into the room, something like that.

He does look a little like that, doesn't he? The next pastor, or the other famous pastor, was

Dr. John Rippon, who was famous for publishing the first ever Baptist hymn book.

That's what it looked like. We still sing several of the hymns that this hymn book introduced to the church, including

How Firm a Foundation, All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name, Rock of Ages, and There is a

Fountain Filled with Blood. So this was the first Baptist hymn book ever, still one of the most important and influential hymn books ever published.

In fact, probably if you look in any, we don't use hymn books much anymore, but I remember this from my younger days as a

Christian. Any hymn book that included How Firm a Foundation, in the spot where it says the author's name, it was attributed to K, just the letter

K, in Rippon's selection of hymns. K was the way one of Rippon's church members signified himself anonymously.

There's some speculation on who it was. Nobody really knows for sure, but if you look at that hymn in any printed hymn book, it will be attributed to K in Rippon's selection.

Rippon's ministry lasted 63 years, from 1773 to 1836.

Rippon came to that church when he was just 21 years old, as pastor. Some of the older members left when he was called because they thought he's too young, but he stayed there longer than any pastor in the history of that church, even to this day.

And the church thrived under his leadership. There were three or four other pastors between Rippon and Spurgeon, but the church declined in those years, and until during Spurgeon's time, when he came there, there were fewer than 200 souls on the best of Sundays, seated in a building that was designed for a congregation of 1 ,200.

So when the church finally asked Spurgeon to candidate, the pastorate there had been vacant for several months, and here's how that came about.

A man named George Gould was a deacon at a church in Essex, the county where Spurgeon was born and grew up, and he happened to be visiting

Cambridge on a weekend where there was a gathering of the Cambridge Sunday School Union.

Spurgeon was one of the speakers. He was still a teenager, and he frequently met with the same scorn from older people that prompted those people to leave the

London church when 21 -year -old John Rippon was called to be their pastor. They despised his youthfulness.

And at this Cambridge gathering where Spurgeon was one of the speakers, two of the other speakers were joking or making snide remarks from the platform about Spurgeon because of his young age.

One of them asked why he had left his few sheep in the wilderness. The other guy said that he wished boys would tarry at Jericho until their beards were grown before they tried to reach people older than them.

That's a reference to an incident in Scripture. And Spurgeon sat there with these insults coming from the platform, was not shamed or intimidated by any of it.

He asked permission to reply, and then he pointed out that the men in Scripture who were told to tarry at Jericho were not young boys who lacked the ability to grow beards.

They were men whose beards had been shaved off by their enemies in order to shame them. And then he pointed out that an old preacher who has disgraced his calling has more to be ashamed of than a young preacher who's just seeking to be faithful.

And whether Spurgeon knew it or not, one of those two pastors had been involved in some kind of scandal, and so this exchange simply unmasked his shame.

Anyway, this deacon, George Gould, was impressed by Spurgeon's boldness and his ability to speak and answer that sort of criticism on the fly, and so he told a friend of his,

Thomas Olney, who was one of the leading deacons at the New Park Street Chapel in London. He told him about this incident because he knew

Olney and the London deacons were looking for a pastor, and so he said, you ought to give this kid a look.

And Thomas Olney passed that suggestion on to the rest of the deacons, and they were so desperate that they wrote to the church at Water Beach and invited

Spurgeon to come to London on a Sunday just to preach one Sunday for them. This, by the way, is what happened.

This was the original New Park Street when Spurgeon came. After the congregation moved out, they sold the building to a company.

What do you call it? They make medicine and stuff, right? So, yeah, a pharmaceutical company.

And you can see they've made renovations that actually add an extra floor to the building, but it's the same building.

It's gone now, and as I said, I think the Tate Museum took that spot. Spurgeon was convinced that this letter inviting him to preach was a mistake.

That maybe they were actually asking for his grandfather or his father, and so he showed the letter to one of his deacons who assured him that this was not a mistake.

He had known for some time that this little chapel at Water Beach would not be able to hang on to Spurgeon as their preacher.

And so Spurgeon answered them. He wrote back to say he was willing to come, but he told them they needed to know that he was only 19 years old and he was a nobody.

And so the London deacons wrote back to assure him it's not a mistake, and they scheduled him to preach at the

New Park Street Church on December 18, 1853. It had not yet been four years since Spurgeon's conversion, but he was being asked to preach at London's oldest and most venerable

Baptist church with an eye to becoming their permanent pastor. Now, to be candid,

Spurgeon was somewhat scared and sorry about a prospect like this. He said the verse that kept running through his head was

John 4, verse 4. He must needs go through Samaria. In Fullerton's words,

Fullerton says, he felt that he was being forced along an undesired path. He wished that he'd stayed at home, and in the midst of the preparations for Christmas in the big city, he was somewhat bewildered.

The host church in London was not a champion of hospitality. Spurgeon was not asked to stay in anyone's home.

Instead, he was directed to a boarding house in Queen Square, Bloomsbury. Fullerton says their lack of courtesy was their measure of expectation.

In other words, they weren't any more hospitable to Spurgeon because they really didn't think this was a great prospect to be their next pastor.

And Spurgeon was, in many ways, a rustic country lad. He was a bit of a bumpkin, and no one seemed to have high hopes that this country boy could ever succeed in London.

Bloomsbury, the square where Spurgeon stayed, was not anywhere near the New Park Street Church.

It was north of the river. It's about three blocks east of the British Museum, and was even then.

It's actually separated by one block from Russell Square, which is where a terrorist bomb killed 26 people in 2005.

I mention that because that's when I happened to be speaking at the Metropolitan Tabernacle at the very moment the bomb went off.

But anyway, this boarding house where they put Spurgeon up is a two -mile walk from the

New Park Street Chapel. And in busy London, in mid -December, a week before Christmas, and you have to cross the river on a busy bridge, this wasn't a pleasant walk.

Twenty -five years later, Spurgeon described the walk to the church that morning this way. He said,

It was a clear, cold morning, and we wended our way along Holborn Hill towards Blackfriars and certain torturous lanes and alleys at the foot of Southwark Bridge.

Wondering, praying, fearing, hoping, believing, we felt all alone and yet not alone.

Expectant of divine help and inwardly borne down by our sense of the need of it, we traversed a dreary wilderness of brick to find the spot where our message must needs be delivered.

That's what Spurgeon looked like at the time, boyish. Here's Fullerton's description of that boarding house in Queen Square.

It says, He was given a bedroom more like a cupboard over the front door. The boarders, that's the other people in the boarding house, looked askance at the new arrival.

His very clothes proclaimed his country breeding. He had a great black satin stock around his neck.

That's what they wore in those days instead of a necktie. It was like a huge turtleneck, a very pretentious looking thing.

And in special honor of the occasion, he produced a blue handkerchief with white spots.

This keeps coming up, this polka dotted handkerchief. You'll hear about it again, but that's what he wore on his first Sunday.

The young men gave him some talk about the wonderful preachers of London and sent him to his little bedroom so depressed that with the added noise of the street traffic, he was unable to sleep.

And then when he arrived at New Park Street the following morning and saw the building, which appeared to him very imposing, he was amazed at his own temerity.

I can relate to this experience. One of the first times I preached at the

Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, I was scheduled to preach on a Sunday morning, and they put us up in a hotel within walking distance of the church.

It was a nice place and all that, but what was it, Darlene, about 2 .30 in the morning? The fire alarm went off.

And, you know, I'm modest, so I took time and got dressed before we went outside, but we went outside, and the entire population of this hotel were standing in the snow, most of them barefoot and in their pajamas, because of this fire alarm that had gone off.

Apparently somebody let the toast burn in the kitchen. And we stood out in the cold at 2 .30

in the morning until about 3 .30 in the morning. They let us go back to our rooms, and I didn't get any sleep that night, and I had to preach the next morning.

And I thought, this is what Spurgeon himself must have felt like. But he preached the sermon from James 1 .17.

He said, Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.

And the deacons were immediately and profoundly impressed with his preaching. One of them said he was sure that if they could have

Spurgeon for just three months, the place would be full again. The truth is, he underestimated.

It didn't take that long, and in fact, that evening, a much larger crowd came. This is the second time in my description of what happened to early

Spurgeon where he has a larger Sunday evening service than he preached to in the morning.

Any preacher would like that, right? But in fact, that evening, this larger crowd came, including a young girl whom

Spurgeon would one day marry. I'll have more on that in another session later, but Spurgeon preached a sermon on the doctrine of justification that evening.

His text was Revelation 14, verse 5. They are without fault before the throne of God.

And the people that night refused to leave the building until the deacons assured them that they would have

Spurgeon back to preach again, and they did. He promised he would return three more times in January.

That would be a month later. He staggered those Sundays between Water Beach and London.

There were five Sundays that January. He preached the first, third, and fifth Sunday. He stayed in London the day after this first experience in December and did some sightseeing and I suppose

Christmas shopping. In a letter he wrote to his father, he said, I spent Monday going about London.

I climbed to the top of St. Paul's. If you've ever done that, you can imagine that feeling.

And he said, I left some money with the booksellers. And in his commenting and commentary books, he tells us that what he bought that day included the commentary of Thomas Scott.

This was with his first pulpit fee from London. He buys a commentary by Thomas Scott. Afterwards, he came to think of that commentary as nothing but milk and water.

He gave it a bad review in his commenting and commentaries. London in those days was a bleak place.

This was the era of dickens and workhouses and horrible poverty and lots of orphans and not too far before Jack the

Ripper, you know? And Fullerton says, there were great areas of slums. It was estimated that over 3 ,000 children under 14 years of age were living as thieves and beggars.

More than 20 ,000 over 15 years of age existed in idleness and at least 100 ,000 were growing up without education.

Ragged schools were even then places of peril to their teachers and the common lodging houses sheltered tens of thousands in lairs fitter to be the habitation of hogs rather than human beings.

But people were beginning to care, he says. Lord Shaftesbury, he was a wealthy

British nobleman who was an evangelical, solid believer who funded a lot of charitable work in those days.

Lord Shaftesbury was leading a crusade against the exploitation of the poor. It was a time of transition, he says.

The city was ready for a voice and it was not too large to be reached by one voice.

During all of those months that the church was without a pastor, the dickens had never asked any of their candidates to come and preach a second time, so this was the first.

Spurgeon came those three times in January and on his final Sunday that month, they asked him if he would be willing to stay as their interim pastor for the next six months.

Give us a six -month trial, they said, with the understanding that this was a probationary period and if things went well, they would call him permanently to be pastor.

And from that very first letter he received, Spurgeon had been hesitant about his prospects with the church in London and the thought of a six -month engagement in the city just didn't seem appealing to him, especially if after six months, what if they determined that he's not the right man for the office?

What if three months into it, the people are fed up with him? So he wrote back and said, my objection is not to the length of the time of probation.

I would engage to supply for three months of that time and then should the congregation fail or the church disagree,

I would reserve to myself the liberty without breach of engagement to retire and you on your part would have the right to dismiss me without seeming to treat me ill.

Enthusiasm and popularity are often like the crackling of thorns and they soon expire. I do not wish to be a hindrance if I cannot be a help.

So he basically writes back a tentative sort of no because he thinks six months is too long.

What if they hate me two months in? I don't want them to have to put up with me for another four months if they don't like me.

And so they came to this agreement that it would be a short probation. The deacons gave

Spurgeon as a gift when he said, yes, he'd do it for three months.

They gave him a gift of a dozen white pocket handkerchiefs. That blue polka -dotted handkerchief got retired and Spurgeon learned to dress more like a city preacher.

You're going to hear more about the blue polka dots, but just keep it in mind. In an 1876 article reminiscing about that probationary period,

Spurgeon said this, the six months probation was never fulfilled for there was no need.

The place was filling, the prayer meetings were full of power, and conversion was going on. A requisition for a special meeting signed by 50 of the male members was sent to the deacons on April 12th.

If you do the math, that's February, March, April. So they're in the third month, just barely into it.

And according to the church book, it was on April 19th, resolved unanimously that we tender our brother, the

Reverend C .H. Spurgeon, the most cordial and affectionate invitation forthwith to become the pastor of this church.

And we pray that the result of his services may be owned of God, with an outpouring of the Holy Spirit and a revival of religion in our midst, that it may be fruitful to the conversion of sinners and in the edification of those who believe.

And a week later, Spurgeon sent his reply to that invitation. He said, there is but one answer to so loving and candid an invitation

I accept. And then asking for their prayers, he said, remember my youth and inexperience, and I pray that these may not hinder my usefulness.

I also trust the remembrance of these will lead you to forgive any mistakes I may make or unguarded words that I may utter.

So Spurgeon didn't come into this role in any way overconfident or cocky.

And he was also not exactly welcomed with open arms by the entire community of saints.

The Baptist manual of 1854 listed the new pastor simply as J.

Spurgeon. They didn't even get his name right. And at one gathering of Baptists that year, with Spurgeon himself present in the room, a

London pastor prayed for, these are his exact words, our young friend who has so much to learn and so much to unlearn in his prayer.

And Spurgeon got a lot of that kind of condescending backhanded feedback early on.

I could do a whole session on the caricatures and cartoons that the newspapers aimed at him.

I'll have some in a PowerPoint presentation later if we have time to go through it.

But they were brutal to him, and yet he was confident enough in the message that he preached that he just didn't need to worry about what people thought of him.

For the most part, he just seemed amused by it. He famously said,

I have hardly ever known what the fear of man means. Wish I could say that.

His biographer, Fullerton, likens him in that regard to John Knox, and it's a fair comparison.

And Spurgeon would have liked that comparison. He wrote this, John Knox's gospel is my gospel.

That which thundered through Scotland must thunder through England again. And in fact, his courage in the pulpit is one of the features that stands out in any portrait of Spurgeon as a preacher.

Courage. W .T. Stead was a newspaper editor who died in the sinking of the

Titanic. He's a secular newspaper editor, famous man. And sometime in the 1800s, he was touring

Melrose Abbey, which is a ruined monastery in Scotland. You'd recognize it if you saw pictures of it.

It looks like a beautiful cathedral, but the roof is gone, the interior is empty, and the place is filled with grass.

And it's beautiful in its own way, but it's just a picture of a ruined church that was once great.

And he's touring that, and nearby there were lots of stories of John Knox and his ministry, and how he revived

Scotland for Christianity. And he said to the tour guide, this newspaper editor said to the tour guide, it's a shame that England never had a

John Knox in any of her pulpits. And the tour guide lady turned to him and said, yes, but you have

Mr. Spurgeon. One of Spurgeon's first trials as a pastor in London was that he had to deal with a major pandemic.

He talks about it in his comments on Psalm 91 in the Treasury of David. He says this,

In the year 1854, when I had scarcely been in London 12 months, the neighborhood in which

I lived was visited by Asiatic cholera, and my congregation suffered from its inroads.

Family after family summoned me to the bedside of the smitten, and almost every day I was called to visit the grave.

I gave up myself with youthful ardor to the visitation of the sick, and was sent forth from all quarters of the district by persons of all ranks and religious.

I became weary in body and sick at heart. My friends seemed falling one by one, and I felt or fancied that I was sickening like those around me.

A little more work and weeping would have laid me low among the rest. I felt that my burden was heavier than I could bear, and I was ready to sink under it.

As God would have it, I was returning mournfully from a funeral when my curiosity led me to read a paper which was wafered up in a shoemaker's shop on the

Dover Road. It did not look like a trade announcement, nor was it, for it bore in good, bold handwriting these words,

Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most high, thy habitation.

There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. Spurgeon says the effect on my heart was immediate.

Faith appropriated the passage as her own. I felt secure, refreshed, girt with immortality.

I went on with my visitation of the dying in a calm and peaceful spirit. I felt no fear of evil, and I suffered no harm.

The providence which moved the tradesman to place those verses in the window, I gratefully acknowledge.

And in the remembrance of its marvelous power, I adore the Lord my God. So he worked through this pandemic.

They didn't quarantine churches in those days. And it's a fascinating story.

If you want to read some interesting history of what a serious pandemic actually looks like, just look up the

Wikipedia page for 1854 Broad Street Cholera Outbreak.

This was a famous outbreak. The first year Spurgeon was in London. It's a fascinating story.

And it did not deter Spurgeon from any ministry, nor did it interrupt the worship of this congregation.

I'll close with that. And in the next session... Are we done here?

It goes by so fast. In the next session, we'll talk more in detail about Spurgeon's preaching and what made it so distinctive.

But we'll take a 15 -minute break. Do we have time for questions? Oh, just write your questions on a card.