Who Was Spurgeon the Pastor? | Geoff Chang

Room For Nuance

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:10

We're back with another episode of the Room for Nuance podcast. I'm your host, Sean DeMars. I'm here with our special guest,

00:16

Jeff Chang. Hello, Jeff. Good to be here. Thanks for coming, flying all the way down to Alabama.

00:22

I know your arms are tired. Yeah. Will you open us in prayer? Let's pray.

00:28

Okay. Father, we pray that this conversation would be edifying for those who are here. Lord, we pray that it would be glorifying to you.

00:35

In Christ's name. Amen. Amen. Jeff, I just introduced you to a group of pastors, and I'm going to say on this podcast what

00:45

I said to them. I really didn't want to read your book. Why is that?

00:53

Thanks, man. I got to toss you a softball if I need to knock it out of the park. I just feel like of the reading of Spurgeon books, there is no end.

01:02

There's a lot coming out. And there's a lot that have already been written. I can't read all the other good ones that have already come out.

01:08

I can't read all the good ones that are still coming out. And I do think that there is a little bit of like a

01:14

Spurgeon idolatry in our Reformed Baptist world. Man, you should come see the Spurgeon library.

01:20

We have so much stuff there. I heard you guys have—you got like a piece of his skull bone? No, not that.

01:25

No? We do have water from the river where he was baptized. Do you really? Yeah, it's just sitting in a bottle. Obviously, it wasn't the water that he was baptized in.

01:33

Are you sure? Obviously. Okay. Because you never step in the same stream. It is one of the more interesting displays we have, for sure.

01:39

And how many years do you get off of purgatory if you touch that? Something else that we have that's really weird.

01:46

We have a bone from the last meal that his dog ate before his dog died.

01:54

That is very weird. And if somebody were to ask you why you have that, what would you say? I would not know why we have that.

02:00

Okay. And who's the we? Is that like you and your wife? No, no. So this is the Spurgeon Library. So I'm the curator of the

02:07

Spurgeon Library. We are on the campus of Midwestern Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri. So our main collection are his 6 ,000 books.

02:17

So think of a pastor's library, books of theology, commentaries, hymnals, books on preaching, church history, all those things.

02:25

We have his books on display, 6 ,000 volumes. And in addition to that, we have like his papers.

02:31

So the things that his secretaries collected, his newspaper clippings, manuscripts, letters, and random artifacts like his cane, the dog bone, and other random things.

02:44

And what does it look like? I have like all these questions. I'm not going to probably get to any of them because now

02:50

I'm really interested in this. What does it mean to be the curator?

02:56

Does that mean like you have to keep inventory? Partly. But, you know, you think about a museum.

03:01

It's trying to tell the story of World War I or something like that. So we are trying to tell the story of Spurgeon's life.

03:07

We have this amazing collection. And as the curator, I'm trying to think of ways to tell that story through these things that we have.

03:15

So I'm constantly thinking through new displays, how to arrange them, how to tell them, how to like tell the story behind them.

03:22

So if you come, it's sort of part museum. You really get an introduction to his life, his ministry.

03:28

But we're also a research center, so we have all kinds of interesting projects going on also. Is it like a night at the museum thing?

03:35

Like when the doors close, does anybody come to light? You know, if I ever showed up at the museum late at night and there were people there with candles lit, you know,

03:44

I would be concerned. You'd be concerned. And do people like give tours there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I've got assistants trained, and I give tours sometimes.

03:51

Yeah, we have groups that come by all the time, church groups or individuals, yeah. And in your book, which we are going to get to,

04:00

I promise, you say towards the end of the book that Spurgeon's books went to auction after he passed, and nobody really wanted them in his own day?

04:12

Yeah, yeah, that's right. So that's part of the story of how the books got to Kansas City, Missouri. So he dies in London in 1892.

04:19

And if you know anything about the story of his life, there's this thing called the downgrade controversy. He's taking a stand against theological liberalism.

04:27

And really, after that conflict, evangelicalism in the U .K. was never the same. I mean, they embraced it, tolerated it.

04:36

Churches began to decline. So even during Spurgeon's time and after his death, people were beginning to move away from historic

04:44

Christianity. They were embracing this new teaching, so that when Spurgeon's books came for sale, they couldn't find a buyer.

04:51

I mean, we have a letter in our collection where a pastor is writing to E .Y. Mullins, who was president of Southern Seminary at the time, and he says something like, hey,

05:01

I heard you were interested in buying Spurgeon's books. Don't bother. These books are nearly worthless. They only have the old puritanical theology.

05:08

They don't have any of the new modern theology. Nobody here is interested in them, and you should save your money. So those books were unpurchased for a long time until the

05:18

Missouri Baptists heard about it. They were conservative theologically, and they went over and purchased them.

05:24

So the books came to America in 1906. They landed at William Jewell College, which is near Kansas City.

05:31

It was kind of the Missouri Baptist Seminary. And then in 2006, Midwestern had an opportunity to purchase those books, and we did.

05:39

And so now they're at Midwestern Seminary. So cool, man. Okay, let's go back to in light of the fact that you basically run a shrine for this man.

05:50

The Spurgeon -olatry, the Spurgeon idolatry, that's obviously the vast majority of the people who appreciate, admire

05:58

Spurgeon. They're not being idolatrous. But, I mean, that is kind of the inclination of the human heart. We can always take people and put them on too high of a pedestal, ascribe too much importance to them.

06:08

And, like, you know, I remember during my time in the PCA world, there was, like, a lot more quoting of John Calvin than Scripture sometimes.

06:16

And even from good brothers. And I just found that a little troubling. In the Reformed Baptist world, that's kind of how it can be with Spurgeon.

06:24

But in your talk, you gave a pretty good little apologetic for the significance of Spurgeon to Reformed Baptists.

06:32

Can you just sort of, like, recap that for us here? Yeah. I mean, I began just by quoting from Hebrews 13.

06:44

The exhortation there to remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God, consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith.

06:54

And then he sort of grounds that command in this sort of declaration, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

07:02

So, you know, especially on the heels of that sort of hall of faith where he's modeled—

07:08

Hebrews 11. Yeah, Hebrews 11, of how we look to the saints of old as encouragements and examples in their faith.

07:15

There's something about remembering those that have taught the word of God to us that is meant to help us, you know, to realize that we're not the first ones to live the

07:23

Christian life. We're not the first ones to try to figure out some of these challenges that we face. There have been faithful brothers and sisters before us, and we need to learn from them.

07:30

We need to benefit from their example. So, you know, with the Spurgeon Library, you know, in so many ways,

07:37

Spurgeon, especially kind of those who are Baptists, and you mentioned Reformed Baptists, so those who perhaps share in those kind of Calvinistic convictions, especially those

07:47

Baptists. In many ways, Spurgeon is one of our forefathers, if you will, right?

07:53

One of those figures from church history that we can look to who shares our convictions.

08:00

That's not to say that we should ever worship them, venerate them. Certainly, we don't want to go back to kind of the use of relics and those kinds of things.

08:09

One of the things that we say in the Spurgeon Library, we have like these glass doors with the sort of imprint of Spurgeon on it, of course.

08:17

And we say, you know, our goal here is not to look to Spurgeon but to look through him. I love that.

08:23

To see the Lord Jesus Christ and to see a model of faithfulness, right? Insofar as he helps us to follow

08:30

Christ faithfully, he can be helpful to us. And that's why the Spurgeon Library exists. That's why we do what we do.

08:36

Is your book in the Spurgeon Library? Unfortunately, Spurgeon never owned my book. But you couldn't just like sneak it in there?

08:43

Just slip it in there, yeah. I would justify like this. I would say if you really want to understand these books in your context, read this book.

08:50

I appreciate that. Okay, back to me not wanting to read your book, which is not really what you want to hear from someone who's interviewing you about your book.

08:57

No, it's okay. But I'm about to flip it, you see. Okay, okay, go for it. I didn't really want to read another book about Spurgeon, but then

09:04

I did, and I was delightfully proven wrong. You know, it was so good.

09:10

You basically trot out Spurgeon's philosophy of ministry. Why did Spurgeon practice membership this way, discipline this way, congregational singing this way, elders this way?

09:20

And it was just so good, brother. And I know that, I mean, for me to read that one book in however many hours

09:27

I read it, it was, you know, 50 -fold your time in reading Spurgeon to put all of that together.

09:33

And so that's why I have you here, man. I want to just dig in and ask you to try to even get more than what's in the book, because I bet you there's some stuff that didn't make it in.

09:43

But also just to get other people excited. Hopefully people will pick it up, not just pastors, but lay elders, deacons, church members.

09:50

It's very good. That's super encouraging to hear. Yeah. Thank you. So right off the bat, you say that for Spurgeon, the local church is the foundation of the body of Christ.

10:04

Let me see exactly how you say it. I have it right here. The local church is the foundation of Spurgeon's entire ministry. Oh, yeah.

10:10

How come? Yeah, and I wanted to highlight that just because that was so easily overlooked. When we tell the story of Spurgeon's ministry, what people are highlighting are, you know, the amazing number of sermons that he's preaching from place to place in these large music halls that seat 10 ,000 people.

10:27

They're talking about his publications. They're talking about his orphanages, obviously his conflicts with the denomination.

10:36

And all that can cause one to lose sight of the fact that actually those were sort of connected to his role as a pastor.

10:45

You know, those ministries would not have existed except for the fact that he was a local church pastor. And I don't think

10:51

Spurgeon, as far as I know, never lost sight of that either. He never sort of envisioned himself as this kind of huge celebrity

10:58

Christian figure. Rather, he always understood himself to be a pastor.

11:04

So often when he signed his name, C .H. Spurgeon, pastor. That's what he would sign. So, yeah, we have to, if we're to understand his ministry rightly, it's that of a local church pastor.

11:19

Yeah, I'm thinking about how many guys that we know that are local church pastors, but who also extend their gospel tentacles out from the local church to do good for the lower case

11:32

C, Catholic church. Like podcasts? Uh -huh, that's right. Or I think about Mark, for example.

11:40

I remember one time somebody was talking to him about a 9 Marks thing in his office, and they were making it sound like 9

11:46

Marks was his ministry, and CHBC was just kind of like something he did on the side. And he was like,

11:51

I'm the pastor of this local church. Like, this is my ministry. Everything else can fall down around it, but this is my ministry.

11:58

It was good for me to hear that and to see that. But I'm thinking about how when

12:03

I see it done best, it is always flowing out from the guy's work as a local church pastor.

12:10

That's true. When guys start to kind of sideline local church stuff so that they can do more stuff,

12:16

I'm not saying that they're even wrong for doing that. They're certainly freeing the Lord if they want to move on from being a pastor.

12:22

But whenever the balance begins to shift, it seems like the health begins to shift too. Like ministries just seem like they're at their best when they're flowing out of like a vibrant, grounded, accountable local church ministry.

12:34

I like that word grounded. I think there is something about being a local church pastor that keeps you, like you said, accountable, grounded.

12:41

You have to shepherd sheep, you know, and sheep are difficult sometimes.

12:47

You have to teach to people who are hurting. It's not just to your fans, you know.

12:53

So all of that is good for the soul, and it strengthens one's ministry, I would say. You say that if you want to understand

13:01

Spurgeon's pastoral ministry, you have to understand his view of the pulpit, his use of the pulpit.

13:08

Yeah. Tell us about that. Well, it's exactly right to understand that preaching was a big part of his role as a pastor of a church of thousands.

13:19

There's no way he could meet with every single person individually. There's no way he could disciple every single person individually.

13:25

But the one thing that he could do was that task of preaching, right, where every

13:31

Sunday, as far as, you know, people were able to, they were gathered together, and he had the opportunity to shepherd them, to feed them from God's Word.

13:42

He would see that as kind of the central role that he played. He has this great line about the pulpit being the

13:49

Thermopylae of Christendom. So good. If you think of the movie 300, right, King Leonidas standing at the pass defending

13:57

Greece, right, against the Persians, and it's there whether kind of victory is going to be won or lost, right, just defending that pass with your life.

14:10

Yeah, the pastor, when he gets up into that pulpit, he is, if he preaches heresy, if he strays from the

14:18

Word, that's going to spell doom for that church. But if he's faithful, what can

14:24

God do, right, by the power of His Word? So the pulpit being central to the pastor's job description.

14:33

Really, he gave himself to that. I'm looking up a scripture real quick where I think in 1

14:40

Peter, this is really borne out. Yeah, 1

14:47

Peter 1 .23, Then verse 24,

14:55

I'll just skip that for now. And it says, So the living, abiding

15:05

Word of God that creates new life, that gives the gift of the new birth to sinners, it comes through the preaching of the

15:10

Word. And if your ministry is going to have any power, it has to be central. It has to be central.

15:17

Hey, here's a non -controversial question.

15:23

Okay. Was Spurgeon an expositional preacher? Oh, I like that question. I'm going to say yes.

15:30

Okay. I'm going to say yes, meaning that we can discuss how well he did it.

15:37

We can discuss how skillful he was in any particular sermon. But at the end of the day, I think we have to recognize his sermons, he aimed to root them in scripture.

15:47

So every sermon that he preached, there was a text. Yeah, some sermons were more devotional. If you find that, you know, so often when you read a sermon, there's some kind of contextual data.

15:58

So this is a Thursday night. It's a Monday night. If it's a Monday or Thursday night, those tend to be Monday nights or prayer meeting nights.

16:04

Thursday night is like a devotional Bible study. So those can be a little more, let's just say creative, right?

16:12

He might move more quickly to application. But especially earlier on, especially kind of during the sermon volumes are being published when he's still alive.

16:24

They're publishing primarily his Sunday morning sermons. And those tend to be much more expositional.

16:30

He sticks to the text. He exposits it. But like the Puritans, he spends the majority of the sermon just meditating on that text, turning it over, applying it, pressing it home.

16:44

So I would argue, yes, he is always expositional. He always seeks to root his sermons in the text.

16:53

He does it to varying degrees. I think one mistake that can pop up around expositional preaching is that it must be line by line.

17:04

Although that is certainly, I think, generally the better, wiser practice just to make sure that you are able to follow the train of thought of a particular passage.

17:15

Having said that, expositional preaching is not line by line. You can do topical preaching that's line by line. Expositional preaching is the point of the text is the point of the sermon.

17:24

And I think, by and large, Spurgeon did that. And he would also, in addition to preaching, he would also plan the scripture readings during the service, which would be drawn from a related text to the sermon.

17:38

And for those texts, he would read it line by line and comment as he went along. He's doing that sort of commentary, a commenting, he would call it, on larger portions of scripture that I think would supplement some of the kind of contextual expositional work for the sermon itself.

17:56

I cannot tell you how many times I've been sitting in a service, hearing a scripture read, either call to worship, call to repentance, assurance of pardon, or just like our longer scripture reading.

18:07

Where even though I was in the service planning and I approved everything, where I'm like, oh, this hits so different.

18:15

It actually fills out something that I forgot to say in my sermon. But it's okay, because if you're in the whole service, you're still getting it.

18:22

Yeah, that's nice. Yeah, it's really cool. Another, just a good plug to make sure that you're not just your whole sermon, but your whole service is rooted and grounded in the word of God.

18:30

And that you're thoughtfully planning your liturgy so that every element is still driving home that same point.

18:36

Yeah, that's right. Which is helpful to have one guy, at least, especially the preacher, giving some input to the whole service, right?

18:44

So don't delegate it to your other staff. But you as a preacher, you know what you're going to be preaching on.

18:50

You know the text. Help weave in songs, scripture readings that kind of connect with what you're going to be doing in your sermon.

18:56

Yeah. And if your first thought when you hear that is, I just don't know a lot of hymns. I don't either.

19:03

Like, I work with Luke on our service planning stuff for music. And half of it is me just going, Luke, what are the lyrics to that hymn?

19:09

And he does it. That's his job. He knows. If we're going to think through this, he's going to tell me, okay, here are the lyrics.

19:15

Does this thematically line up with what we're saying? It may or it may not. But at the end of the day, if singing is a word ministry in the church, if prayer is a word ministry of the church, and we're planning our service around those things, then

19:27

I have to give an account for that. The pastor does. Okay. Okay.

19:32

Was Purjan too slow to share his pulpit? Because he was pretty tight -fisted.

19:43

Perhaps. That could be kind of a territorialness. I don't think it was.

19:49

I think it was more just his sense of stewardship of that pulpit. Okay. So that if he felt like he was healthy and able, then he would preach.

19:58

And certainly that was something that his congregation wanted and appreciated. So, yeah,

20:05

I think it would be right to notice that he basically only delegated his pulpit if he was traveling or if he was sick.

20:14

You may not know the answer to this, and shame on you if you don't. What would you say on an average year was the percentage of Sundays that he preached?

20:24

It all depends on his health. If he's in town, if he's healthy, he's probably preaching. And that's good because he was unhealthy a lot and he traveled a lot.

20:33

So if that's the case, it's kind of like I just got off a sabbatical, and I told our guys, if there's an open

20:39

Wednesday night slot or if there's a service leading slot for the next several months, I want to be up there because I haven't been around as much.

20:46

Okay, so he did good there. You say that it is impossible, strong language, to overstate how important prayer was for Spurgeon's view of the health of the local church.

21:03

Yeah, prayer. I mean, for Spurgeon, when I hear him talk about the corporate prayer meeting, you get the sense that this is part of his philosophy of ministry.

21:14

He understands theologically that apart from prayer, what can we do? You know, if you're

21:22

Reformed, if you believe that God is sovereign over salvation, I mean, this makes sense to you, but it's one thing to give lip service to it.

21:29

It's another thing to so believe that you're trying to impress it upon your people that we need to pray.

21:34

And he was trying to do that. I mean, I often try to think what would be a comparison here in America for the way he was emphasizing prayer.

21:42

And the best thing I could think of is just the way we might talk to our church members about the church budget. You know, we might think, oh, what can we do unless you give, right?

21:51

We feel like that's what makes the engine go. But as Spurgeon taught his people, no, the engine that drives the ministries of our church actually is prayer.

22:04

And, you know, if you're not going to do anything else, please at least pray. Pray for the ministry here.

22:10

Don't let us be without your prayers. And it's so encouraging to see how that really took hold of the culture of the church.

22:19

And one guest preacher would come from America, and he just, as he went throughout the church building on a

22:27

Sunday, every room, small groups of people praying before the service, after the service, back again on Monday night.

22:34

You know, his deacons tried to persuade Spurgeon to move the Monday night prayer meeting to another night because they felt, well, you just poured yourself out on Sunday.

22:44

You're exhausted. Take Monday off. But Spurgeon always kept it on Monday night because I think after preaching, the first thing he wanted to do was we got to come together and pray that God will do something with this word.

22:55

So, yeah, more than just getting his people to pray,

23:01

I think he gave them a heart to pray. Like, this is what we need to do. And, yeah,

23:07

I think that is a strong rebuke to the American church. I just find, you know, there are so many churches that are growing, have multiple services.

23:17

They're filling the space. I have not yet encountered one church that needs to go to multiple services for their prayer meeting.

23:24

You know, because there's so many people coming out to pray. I think if you could get that, that would be a good sign of help.

23:30

Maybe thin the hurt a little bit by making the prayer meeting a requirement. See if those three services.

23:36

Yeah. But you have to think about how do we give our people a heart to pray, right?

23:41

And some steps like that could be helpful. But at the end of the day, it's the conviction that it's

23:48

God who does this. God who does the work. At our best, we are unable to raise the dead.

23:55

Yeah. Or even do much less than that, really. Let's talk about Spurgeon and the

24:00

Lord's Supper. Oh. A lot to be admired. A lot of interesting stuff. And maybe one of the areas of critique that you might have for Spurgeon's ministry.

24:10

Tell us about what the Lord's Supper was like at the Metropolitan Tabernacle. Yeah. They celebrated the

24:17

Lord's Supper initially once a month. It was a big deal. It was early on in his ministry when there were a lot of visitors coming.

24:27

There were always a lot of visitors coming. So from very early on, they had to think about how do we properly fence the table?

24:33

There was a members meeting where some members raised the concern that there were some unworthy people coming to the table.

24:42

So the elders, the deacons at that time, needed to address that. Eventually, they would implement a system of tickets where members would have tickets that would identify them as members of the church so that they could partake of the

24:55

Lord's Supper. Visitors could partake also, but they would have to come during the week to interview with an elder, kind of like a membership interview, where they would share their testimony, share about where they're coming from, where they were members at in terms of other churches.

25:10

And if all was well, then they would be also given tickets to partake of the Lord's Supper. But no ticket.

25:17

But no ticket, no admission. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So that was just the best system they could come up with of fencing the table when there were so many people there, like thousands of people there.

25:27

He did practice open communion, meaning that he would allow Paedo -Baptists to come to the table.

25:33

So that was a debate going on among Baptists in the 19th century. Still is. Still is, sure.

25:39

Yeah. I think in our day, though, when we talk about open communion, more often what people are referring to are just the practice of not fencing the table at all.

25:49

Oh, sure. Sorry, I didn't mean the terminology. I just mean Baptists still disagree about whether or not we should let

25:55

Presbyterians come to the table. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so Spurgeon practiced open communion.

26:01

He certainly, I think he felt much more at ease on that issue if those visitors were coming from gospel -preaching churches, so they could participate.

26:11

Yeah, the one thing, oh, and over time, he so prized the

26:17

Lord's Supper. I mean, he, being in the Reformed tradition, really saw it as a time of spiritual communion with Christ.

26:23

He believed in the spiritual presence of Christ at the table. So some of his best sermons—

26:28

But not in the elements. Or did he? It sounded like what

26:34

I remember from your book, you saying he had more of a memorialist view. No, I would say he's more in that Reformed tradition in terms of a spiritual presence, in the

26:45

Calvinist as opposed to Zwinglian kind of tradition, though certainly he would use the language of memorial also.

26:55

What was I saying? Dude, I'm so sorry. I totally interrupted you. You were saying over time, he valued it so much.

27:01

No, I was going to say, some of his best devotions are his Lord's Supper meditations, where he just meditates a lot on Song of Solomon and our communion with Christ as the bridegroom.

27:14

Yeah, so he increased the frequency of the Lord's Supper eventually to every week, though the first Sunday of the month was always kind of the great communion, so people were particularly encouraged to be present for that one.

27:26

One practice that I would disagree with, which would also be out of step with kind of the tradition that he came from, would have been just that over time, in wanting to promote frequency of the

27:38

Lord's Supper, he began to encourage people to take the Lord's Supper kind of on their own in groups, in small groups.

27:43

So he himself, when he was on vacation in southern France, he would take the

27:49

Lord's Supper with the small group that he was with. And yeah, that would have been just kind of a new sort of practice.

27:57

It wouldn't have been something that he inherited. Again, I think he has good motives, but in doing so, it seems like that would undercut the discipline of the church, right, where people are now able to sort of, if they were excommunicated, they could communicate themselves again, right, on their own.

28:14

So that seems to be odd. Yeah, not only that, but the language in 1

28:19

Corinthians about the one bread making us one body. Wait for one another, kind of prioritizing being together.

28:25

Yeah, it seems like there's something about the whole body together. And I understand any given Sunday, the whole body won't be there, but it's not possible if you're just in a small group.

28:35

Yeah, I agree with that. There is... I underlined and marked up that book so much.

28:42

There's so much we could talk about, but we only have so much time, even on this show, we only have so much time.

28:48

I thought one of the most fascinating sections was how rigorous they were with the membership process, given how many members they had.

28:55

And I thought the part that was most enlightening, hilarious, perhaps even a little concerning,

29:01

I don't know, was where you talked about how, like, the elders would send out people to investigate the lives of potential members.

29:08

Like the Metropolitan Tabernacle Gestapo would show up in your neighborhood and be like, how does he treat his wife?

29:14

And is he mean to his neighbors? I mean, I'm not really exaggerating, right? They call them inquirers or messengers or visitors.

29:24

Yeah, they were sent out, actually not by the elders, but by the congregation. So these would be voted on by the congregation as representatives of the church to go investigate the different applicants.

29:34

And that would be after already a pretty rigorous process. After two rounds of interviews, that's right.

29:40

Two rounds of interviews. That's right. So, yeah, this was a time of doing amazing revival, lots of people coming forward.

29:49

This is a time when Christianity, if you're English, you're basically a Christian, you know, you're born into the

29:54

Christian church. So Spurgeon just, I think in that context, wanted to be especially careful when it came to church membership practices.

30:02

The practice of sending out inquirers is not original to him. Folks in the congregationalist tradition were doing that also, though that practice was beginning to fade away.

30:17

So Spurgeon is just sort of kind of bringing it back. Yeah, and it's a remarkable thing. One of the things

30:22

I imagine is that having people come into your neighborhood, asking your neighbors about your profession of faith and the fact that you're joining the church, that probably created opportunities for you then to share the gospel with your neighbors and to share the gospel with your co -workers and so forth.

30:40

I was, I was, we're in an area where a lot of our church members work for the government and they do government contracting stuff.

30:48

And every now and then they put me down, their pastor, as a reference for their security clearance. Oh, nice.

30:54

And the government calls. Yeah. And when they call, they do like a 20 minute interview. They're like, set aside 20 minutes.

31:00

And they're like, you know, do they have any connections to Russia? And, you know, as far as you know, do they harbor any anti -American sentiments?

31:06

And I'm like, as far as I know, no, but we've never really talked about it. But that,

31:12

I mean, it was, the security clearance stuff is very thorough. And it sounds like the membership stuff was very thorough too.

31:19

Yeah, that's interesting. Because it matters because like spiritually, you know, obviously this matters much more than...

31:24

Right, for the government, it matters because the thing about security, but for the church, for the reputation of Christ, it matters also.

31:31

Right. Yeah. All right, Luke, let's make sure that we add this to the next elders meeting. We're going to start, we're going to elect an author.

31:40

Messengers. Yeah. Not prescribed by the Bible, but we'll add it anyways. I see that was supposed to be funny, but it didn't really land.

31:48

In your chapter on meaningful membership, you say that Spurgeon wanted to pastor a quote real church, end quote.

31:56

What do you mean by that? What's a real church? Well, he has this great quote, and this is from his last sermon to his pastor's college conference.

32:07

They are on the heels of the downgrade controversy. They've seen their denomination ravaged. And he's preaching on, the title of the sermon is

32:17

The Greatest Fight in the World. And he says, we know that our weapon is the word of God, so he preaches on that.

32:25

We know that our power in this fight is the Holy Spirit, so he preaches on that. And then he asks, what's our army?

32:31

He says the army is the church. So it's not the seminary. It's not this conference of pastors.

32:37

It's the local church. What can you do unless the brothers and sisters go forward in this fight?

32:43

And so one of the applications he makes is, let's make sure we have a real church. So many of our churches are just statistics.

32:51

We have these inflated roles, but we haven't seen so -and -so in so many years.

32:56

They've gone off to America or to Australia or to heaven. How can you still count them? So he says, let your church be real, or don't make any kind of statistic profession at all.

33:07

So I thought it was a powerful admonition for pastors to know who's there, work to maintain kind of a real sense of who you are as a church in terms of the people.

33:19

Don't take pride in just kind of numbers, but work to cultivate meaning behind those numbers.

33:26

A message that is just as meaningful today and just as needed today. You think about even like on the mission field, the

33:33

CPM, DMM stuff. You planted how many churches? Okay, sorry. We're counting real churches, not like wherever you met a guy who said that he's heard the name of Jesus before.

33:44

On page 197 of your book, you say that Spurgeon was deeply involved in gospel activism.

33:51

So he was a social justice warrior? What's the deal here, man? Oh, you already talked to Alex about this, didn't you? His interview isn't coming out, so.

33:59

What? Alex Duke? Oh, you're talking about Alex DeFrima. Okay, yeah, but you say it better, so go ahead.

34:07

Gospel activism. I mean, Spurgeon never confused evangelism with mercy ministry, but he charged his people to do something for Christ.

34:18

You join the church to do something. You don't join an organization just to sit around.

34:24

No, there's a purpose. You're here to do something. If you join the church, what do you mean to do? He pointed to the example of this

34:30

German church planter, Johann Anken, who would have people fill out in a book what they would do once they joined the church.

34:40

Like, here's what I intend to do for Jesus. And then, like, if people didn't do it, they would get disciplined from the church.

34:46

So probably not going to do that. Okay, so we're not going to do that. But he said, like, that's pretty good. I like that. Spurgeon.

34:51

Let's take that and tweak it. Yeah, so anyway, so he won his people. He had a church of 5 ,000.

34:58

He thought, boy, what a stewardship. If these people could be active for Jesus, what could we do here in London?

35:04

And so he charged them. He taught them. He equipped them and gave them that kind of mindset. And yeah, out of that church, all kinds of ministries came out.

35:13

But there was just this mindset of, like, let's be entrepreneurial. Let's think about who we have around us.

35:20

If there are poor people around us, let's meet those needs so that we can share the gospel. If there are slums that we're living around, let's go cut flowers, fresh flowers, so we can bring it into these slums and then share the gospel, you know, in these homes.

35:35

Oh, I live next to all these coffee shops. What if we stocked these coffee shops with good Christian literature?

35:41

So there was a group of people doing that. So they were just thinking of all kinds of creative ways to get the gospel out.

35:48

And it's a remarkable story. In one section in your book, and I think Alex does this in his book as well,

35:55

Spurgeon and the Poor, which you would recommend, yes? Yeah. You guys list out all of the ministries that were associated with the

36:03

Metropolitan Tabernacle and how many of them were benevolence -related. Right. And it was incredible. Yeah, it's amazing.

36:08

You know, from orphan care to anything else. How do they pay for all this?

36:17

The orphanages. I mean, there were some ministries that obviously required fundraising. So Spurgeon funded the college, for example, largely through the sale of his sermons.

36:29

Like out of his own pocket, right? Right. Yeah. And then eventually, out of the giving of his own church, the church kind of took over that effort.

36:36

But for years, he sustained it himself. That's right. That's right, the first seven years especially. The orphanages, again, sale of his sermons were a big part of that.

36:46

He gave a lot to them. He also did a lot of fundraising. It kind of became a coordinated effort among evangelicals.

36:52

They saw this as kind of their orphanage. So a lot of people gave to it. But a lot of the ministries that came out of the church were grassroots efforts.

37:01

So they were members of the church. Spurgeon had nothing to do with it. They were members of the church going out, giving to it, fundraising for it, but then just doing the work on their own free time.

37:10

And they weren't getting paid. Yeah. Speaking of weird money stuff,

37:17

Spurgeon's salary for many years, or maybe for his whole ministry,

37:23

I don't know, you tell me, came from booth rentals? Or pew rentals?

37:29

Yeah, seat renting is the term that you use in the book. Tell us about that. Yeah, a common practice in the 19th century where there would be some pews, or some seats that would be purchased, or you'd pay your dues in order to occupy those seats.

37:46

And that would give you kind of a guaranteed seat. But that would be how you would kind of give to the ministry of the church.

37:52

So would those people paying those seat rentals, would they also like tithe, if you don't call it tithe, whatever?

37:59

They would. But that would be kind of over and above for a particular, you know, maybe a building project or maybe a ministry that's being launched.

38:09

So they might give extra offerings on top of that. But, yeah, the regular way of giving to the church was through a seat subscription.

38:17

Thoughts on that? I think there are different ways to do it, you know. The envelope system kind of in the 20th century is what's led to modern ways of giving today.

38:31

I think, yeah, when you look through church history, you just see that people did it different ways throughout history, and there's pros and cons either way you go.

38:43

I think it's kind of a neutral thing, to be honest, yeah. Gotcha. Well, one fun thing about the seat subscriptions is that you had a ticket for that too.

38:54

Just tickets everywhere. There would be nights where Spurgeon would say, hey, for the month of February, I'm going to be preaching particularly evangelistic sermons.

39:02

So why don't you think about coming in the morning, but then for the evening, give your tickets away.

39:08

Like find your neighbor, say, hey, it's hard to get into, but you can have my seat. It's kind of a special thing.

39:14

Invite kind of non -Christians to come. And they would do that, and that would often be fruitful. That's so cool. When I was reading about all of their benevolent activities throughout the city of London, it got me thinking about our own context.

39:26

And you may not have an answer for this. You can't be an expert in everything. But one of the things

39:33

I was thinking about was how it is literally legally not possible for the church to do many of the things that Spurgeon and Metropolitan Tabernacle did in his day.

39:42

I'm thinking particularly about like adoption and foster care and how much red tape there is.

39:48

There's a bureaucratic, it's a bureaucratic nightmare, really, to try to do anything in that way. Like the state has become the head of all benevolence activity, and it really doesn't leave a ton of room for the church.

40:02

Marvin Olasky has a really good book on that, The History of American Compassion.

40:08

I don't know if that's the exact title, but Google Marvin Olasky, and you'll get there, where he basically talks about how charity in the

40:16

United States was largely like grounded in local churches, and then slowly but surely the government took over.

40:24

Anyways, I don't even know where I'm going with this question, but reading that and also Alex's book stimulated me to think like, okay, well, a lot of the stuff that I even would want to do,

40:33

I just don't know that we can. Yeah, and that's the challenge I think that churches have to face in every generation, right?

40:40

What is gospel activism going to look like in our day? I was in East Asia recently, and I was so encouraged by the churches there, the brothers and sisters there, because in the past few decades they've had a fruitful college ministry, kind of campus ministry, reaching college students with the gospel.

40:59

But in more recent days, the government of the country that I was visiting, they've implemented like facial recognition software that keeps anyone who's not a college student or associated with college from going on college campuses.

41:15

And I was so encouraged meeting though with the pastors of these churches because they were thinking, okay, now that that's the situation, how can we re -strategize, right?

41:26

How are we going to reach college students given this new landscape? And they were praying and strategizing and talking about that, but they weren't giving up, you know?

41:34

And so it was just a good reminder like, yeah, there's no guarantee that any one strategy will always work for all time.

41:41

But as Christians, we have to, we want to get the gospel out. So how are we going to do that?

41:47

What was Spurgeon's view of baptism? I mean, just straight down the line, traditional Baptist stuff.

41:53

Did he have any idiosyncratic things like he did with the Lord's Supper? Pretty much straight down the line.

42:00

He emphasized that we don't believe in adult baptisms. We believe in believer's baptism. Yeah. So, you know,

42:08

I found some accounts of him baptizing. I found one account of him baptizing a child as young as 10, though that was unusual.

42:17

Typically, people who are older, at least in their teens, his own sons made professions of faith early, but he only baptized them at 18.

42:26

So, yeah, the rigorous membership process would apply no matter how old you were.

42:34

Okay, well, what about on the back end? Because some churches, they want to baptize people at a younger age.

42:40

They think it's not right to withhold baptism, but they also recognize that in many of these cases that some of these children may not be able to carry out the fullness of membership responsibilities.

42:51

So they kind of create like a pseudo -membership office where you're in the church, but you don't really do all the stuff.

42:57

What do you think Spurgeon would have thought of that? Yeah, he certainly didn't practice it.

43:02

So there's no kind of multiple tiers of membership. Yeah, if you joined the church at 10, you would be just a member of the church taking the

43:10

Lord's supper. Have a vote in the members meetings? Presumably have a vote, yeah. The church was pretty unified, so I don't know that that was a particular issue.

43:21

So, yeah, I haven't come across any times where that would have been disruptive, and I don't think there was a lot of them. Because of the rigor of the membership process, people did tend to be older when they joined and got baptized.

43:34

But, yeah, it's pretty much straight down the line in terms of baptism. What's remarkable to me is, you know, many of the people joining the church were coming from paedo -baptist backgrounds, so they were being baptized as believers for the first time.

43:50

And many of them were being converted out of kind of not being saved at all, right? So something like 70 % of the people that joined the church were baptized there, which is remarkable.

44:03

It's incredible. It's not like transfer growth. I mean, these people are coming to Christ. And to set some historical context for some of our viewers and listeners who may not know, if you were born in Victorian England, you were baptized in the

44:16

Church of England. Right. I mean, that's basically the way it went. Typically. Typically, yeah. I mean, with exceptions, as Baptist churches grew. But by and large, it's kind of like I have

44:23

Mexican buddies and he's like, yo, to be Mexican is to be Catholic. You know, in England in the 1700s, 1800s, and, you know, you're born, you're probably going to be baptized as a baby in the

44:34

Anglican Church, and you're going to grow up thinking, I'm a Christian. Right. And then many of them later, it sounds like, came into contact with Spurgeon and the gospel and, yeah, had to walk in obedience.

44:44

Yeah, that's right. Speaking of Anglicanism and baptism and Spurgeon, one of the major controversies of his career had to do with that.

44:54

Can you tell us more about it? Yeah. The baptismal regeneration controversy. So in the 19th century, there was a movement in the

45:02

Church of England that was growing called the Oxford Movement. It was a movement that was seeking to recover

45:12

Roman Catholic aesthetics and liturgy and even...

45:18

Some doctrine. Even doctrine. Yeah, even teaching. And Anglicans have always been a little, like, a little tending in that direction anyway.

45:26

Yes, and even this group, I mean, even as I say that, they were trying to say, no, we can still be Protestants while holding to apostolic succession and baptismal regeneration and these kinds of things.

45:34

All the stuff that's not Protestant. All the things, yeah, that Protestants rejected. Anyway, so this wing of the

45:41

Church of England was growing up, and really, if you were to see kind of a Church of England service today, like when you see the weddings of the royals, it's very ornate, it's very lavish, kind of like this place that we're sitting in.

45:55

Yeah, that's right. And all that is from the influence of the Oxford Movement. They really, in many ways, won the day aesthetically in the

46:03

Church of England. So this wing is growing, and Spurgeon is urging the evangelicals in the

46:12

Church of England to leave, to protest against this, with the growing influence of the

46:17

Oxford Movement. The Church of England is no longer a Protestant church, hardly so, if they are at all.

46:24

So he's calling folks like J .C. Ryle and others to leave the Church of England. And so finally, one sermon in,

46:34

I'm forgetting the year. What year was the baptismal regeneration controversy? I'm bad with dates, brother.

46:40

Oh, man, I can't believe I'm forgetting. Sometime between the Reformation and now, for sure. He preaches a sermon called

46:46

Baptismal Regeneration, where he blasts the language of the Book of Common Prayer that makes it sound like when baptism is performed, that individual is born again, is regenerate.

47:00

And based on that point, like, hey, if this is what your prayer book says, if you're an evangelical, you need to leave.

47:08

And that caused just a huge firestorm. Spurgeon was attacked by Church of England folks.

47:14

He was attacked by evangelicals who were wanting to care well for their evangelical friends in the Church of England. But many supported

47:21

Spurgeon also, and it ended up being this huge controversy. What came out of that?

47:26

Well, Spurgeon really devoted himself, in large part, to fighting this ritualism, this

47:32

Oxford Movement, for the next decade or so. That's, in large part, why The Sword and the

47:37

Trowel began to be published, because he wanted to use that to fight that battle. But yeah, it proved to be kind of, a lot of people wondered, was that the right thing to do?

47:50

This was a difficult battle that made him a lot of enemies, lost him some friends. It's funny how history repeats itself.

47:57

I couldn't help but think of, like, Martyn Lloyd -Jones and John Stott later, kind of having a similar falling out, not on the same issue, but kind of.

48:05

Kind of. Yeah. 1864.

48:11

1864. Which makes sense, The Sword and the Trowel came out in 1865. Yeah, I knew that. The same year as?

48:19

What else happened in 1865? You don't know? No. All right, well, if you're watching or listening to this, put it in the comment section.

48:28

Nice. People always do that in YouTube videos, and I never do that. Leave your thoughts in the comment section.

48:33

Well, I just did it. Leave it in the comment section. What do you think?

48:41

Do you think he handled that well? Do you think he should have been more diplomatic? Well, Church of England, their 13 articles are

48:50

Protestant. No doubt about that. But Cranmer, as he's trying to grapple with a congregation, a church, a nation that's just flipped from Roman Catholicism, he is allowing for language that perhaps would be less helpful in the prayer book.

49:07

And that's what Spurgeon is putting his finger on. There's no question that the Church of England was a Protestant church.

49:13

So I think they should have, yeah, I think the Oxford Movement was clearly wrong when they were saying that these things were not incompatible with Protestant convictions.

49:23

Yeah. But Spurgeon, as a good Baptist, he cares a lot about liturgy.

49:30

He cares a lot about the gathering of the church, about baptism. And so he's going to hit on those things.

49:36

I guess that's one of the weird things about these, I would say, unbiblical ecclesiastical structures, where it's like, well, do you judge them based on the 13 articles?

49:46

Or is the Book of Common Prayer equally authoritative for them? And even like what if this local congregation down the road is staunchly?

49:54

39 articles, my bad, not 13. Yeah, and I copied you. Yeah, no, that's my fault. We're just sheep.

50:01

I'm just repeating whatever you say. I was like, that doesn't sound right, but you're the expert here. Or did you say 39?

50:10

Hey, if he said 39, leave it in the comments section. Oh, this is terrible.

50:17

But anyways, it's this really unbiblical polity structure, where it's like is the prayer book equally as authoritative as essentially their statement of faith?

50:30

And listen, I'm sympathetic to Spurgeon, because you can have a statement of faith that is one thing, but then in practice be something else.

50:39

And the Anglican Church always feels like it's just a gnat hair away from just going back to Rome. So I'm not rendering a judgment either way.

50:46

I'm just saying I'm sympathetic to it. And I wasn't there with him, boots on the ground. But, I mean, yeah.

50:52

I think you're right. I mean, honestly, our liturgy in our churches probably do more to shape our people than our statement of faith.

51:01

What they're singing, what they're reading, what they're saying each Sunday, the order of the service, that's shaping their

51:06

Christian discipleship probably more practically than their statement of faith. Spurgeon had elders.

51:15

He did? He had elders. Starting in 1859. Why 1859? Five years in.

51:22

He starts in 1854 as a pastor of New Park Street Chapel. When he arrives, there are deacons there, and just he's the solo elder, the solo pastor.

51:33

Very quickly, they are overwhelmed by the pastoral work with all the people joining the church. And he right away sees the need to have elders.

51:41

That's what he understands is the New Testament solution. But, yeah, he moves somewhat carefully in this.

51:48

There were no, as far as we know, there are no other Baptist churches in those times that were using elders.

51:55

All of them had the solo pastor sort of model. So he knew that for the older members, especially of the church, this was going to be a difficult thing.

52:04

This is something that was associated more with Presbyterianism than with Baptists. So he just gave himself time to teach on it, to let the congregation feel the need for something like this.

52:15

And then five years in, the congregation was ready. They voted to create the office of elders.

52:21

Wasn't Benjamin Keech the pastor of? He was, yeah. And didn't he have elders? When you read his polity, he has room for elders.

52:30

But he doesn't say it quite as explicitly. But did he not have elders when he was pastoring there?

52:37

I'm not sure. Okay. I'm not sure. By the time we get to Gil, he's the solo pastor.

52:43

And John Gil, too. Gosh, what a stacked bench over the years there, right? John Gil and then

52:49

John Ripon after that. I haven't really heard of him. Yeah. He was a significant particular Baptist also. Was he good?

52:54

Yeah. We sing a lot of his hymns, actually. Really? Yeah. Probably not a lot. Maybe like one or two.

53:01

Some. Okay. And then now in that same legacy of people connected to Spurgeon, you have

53:06

Rick Warren, right? The chancellor of the college? The chancellor of Spurgeon's college, yes.

53:13

Spurgeon's probably happy about that. Well, he's happy. We know that. We know he's happy.

53:19

All right. I won't get you into too much hot water here. You represent an entire seminary. I don't want you to. No. Yeah. We have a great relationship with Spurgeon's College UK.

53:27

Yeah. You know, they are evangelicals there in that UK context, and we're grateful for their ministry.

53:34

That was very diplomatic of you. I was going to ask you something, but now

53:40

I have forgotten it. Let's talk about Spurgeon's College.

53:47

The pastor's college. The pastor's college. It was very near and dear to his heart. I mean, it was outside of the local church, and I know it was connected to the local church, but outside of his role as a pastor, it was the thing he cared most about in the world ministry -wise.

54:00

Yeah. He said as much a few times. Yeah. That's right. Can that be replicated?

54:07

I mean, do you need a Spurgeon to do that? Well, you've got stories of pastors today who have started colleges, you know, a

54:15

John Piper, a John MacArthur. And do we expect the same thing to happen to those colleges that happened to Spurgeon's College once the great man is gone?

54:25

I don't know. I don't know. But certainly there are lessons to be learned, for sure. Yeah. But I think more than just starting a college, just the principle that pastors ought to be training the next generation.

54:38

I think that's true for all pastors. You and I were in a room recently with a couple hundred pastors, and it was asked, how many of you here have an internship program at your church?

54:46

And I looked around, and I could not believe how many men had internships at their church.

54:52

Praise God. Yeah, that's right. So it doesn't have to be a seminary or college. It probably won't be, you know. No offense, but you're probably not the kind of guy who's going to start a seminary out of your church.

55:01

But that doesn't mean that you can't train men for the ministry. As a matter of fact, wouldn't you say, brother, that if you're not training up men for the ministry, in some sense that you're derelict in your duty?

55:11

I would. I mean, it's part of your job description. Yeah. 2 Timothy 2. Exactly, exactly.

55:18

And it's so needed, because especially as a seminary professor, I mean, I'm part of an institution.

55:25

We're trying to train men in Greek and Hebrew and church history and systematics. And that's all really important.

55:32

But we also need men to be mentored by pastors, to be apprenticed, if you will, to see what pastoral ministry looks like, to see how that knowledge that they get in the classroom applies in the context of a church.

55:47

It's one thing to read about church discipline in a book. It's another thing to sit in an elders meeting and then a members meeting. Yeah, exactly.

55:54

Did Spurgeon believe in church discipline? He did. Yeah, he did. And what do you think he would say to pastors today in churches that have membership, but do not practice discipline?

56:06

Yeah, he would say perhaps that those churches, yeah, are unsound, that there's an unhealth to them.

56:18

I don't think he would, like, unchurch them and say that they're no church at all. But he understands that because the church is the people, if you allow there to be those who are not repenting of their sin and trusting in Christ to be members of your church, you are undermining the church itself.

56:38

You are allowing kind of weak planks into the structure of the building.

56:45

So for the health of the church, for the reputation and the witness of the gospel, church discipline is an important practice.

56:54

In chapter 10, the concluding chapter of your book, which is one of the few times I got to the end of a theology book and I was like, oh, no,

57:02

I'm kind of sad this is over. You say that Spurgeon's ministry was marked more by heartache than by triumphalism.

57:13

Yeah, it would be kind of a wrong impression. You know, again, we can idolize him, celebrate him, but it would be a wrong impression to imagine

57:23

Spurgeon as this sort of floating through life, always triumphant kind of figure, success everywhere he goes.

57:31

No, for much of his life, he was overworked. He felt the burden. I mean, I think one of the reasons why he preached so much was because these sermons were funding orphans.

57:44

These sermons were funding these poor college students. Can I pause you right there? Yeah. That ran into an issue later in his ministry when he denounced slavery quite severely, right?

57:56

What happened there? Yeah, so he found out that the American publishers of his sermons were editing his comments on slavery in their publications.

58:07

So once he found that out, people were asking him about that. He wanted to make clear his position, so he wrote an editorial to a newspaper in Boston and just made clear he detests slavery.

58:19

He would not sit with a slaveholder. He would not sit with a murderer or a slaveholder at the

58:27

Lord's Supper table. I think he called him a man -stealer, which is the word from the New Testament.

58:32

That's right, that's right. So he just made it crystal clear that he detested that practice, that institution.

58:39

And for that, his sermons began to be burned, and all throughout the South, Dr. Kidd, who's a fellow professor, he's done some amazing research of—

58:50

Thomas Kidd? Thomas Kidd, yeah, of book burnings that were being held in Alabama and all throughout the

58:56

South of Spurgeon's sermons, which tells you of how popular he was at one point, but then now there are bonfires, and people are warning him, no, don't go on a speaking tour in America, no matter how much they offer you, because somebody's going to kill you.

59:09

Did he? He never did. Never came to America. That was a significant story, though, because that's when his book sales dried up, and he no longer had money to pay for the pastor's college, but then the congregation stepped up and said, no, we're going to own this ministry and begin funding it ourselves.

59:27

So, yeah, but he always carried the weight of ministry on him. It all rode on his shoulders.

59:33

He got sick as a result. He was under tremendous mental pressure. Some people speculated that he suffered from some kind of clinical depression.

59:43

He wrestled with gout, rheumatism. He had kidney issues that plagued him.

59:49

He was pretty heavy. Pretty heavy, yeah. He didn't get much exercise, smoked cigars.

59:59

So, yeah, he suffered a lot. When you read his letters, when you read his poems, you encounter a man who's often deeply discouraged and at a loss, and yet crying out to the

01:00:13

Holy Spirit for help. And I think in many ways that experience of suffering perhaps explains a bit of the secret of his ministry.

01:00:21

Like here's one who had no choice but to depend on God, and that comes out in his preaching.

01:00:26

That comes out in his work. Speaking of his poems, you have published a book of some of Spurgeon's poems.

01:00:33

Is that right? Yeah, one of the things that we discovered in our collection, a book of handwritten poems, never before seen, not well known.

01:00:43

So 186 poems. Just kind of private devotional prayers, kind of value of vision, kind of genre, meditations on God and his attributes, reflections on the ministry.

01:00:59

Really edifying. Without having read them, just the idea that he was doing this is so encouraging to me.

01:01:07

It shows, I think, that he was just not an outward -facing Christian leader, but like he had a sincere devotional fervor.

01:01:16

Yeah, this would be the closest that we have to kind of his private journal, as it were, or his prayer journal.

01:01:24

I know you're not a poetry expert, but are they good? They are very edifying.

01:01:31

Are they good in terms of like would you ever turn them into hymns for congregational singing? Probably not.

01:01:37

But for your own devotional reading, they can be really, really helpful. What was your favorite one that you found?

01:01:43

Do you have a favorite? Yeah, several. I think my favorite ones are just his poems on the

01:01:55

Lord's Day. He has poems where he's just, he can't wait to go to church. He's so excited, the

01:02:02

Sabbath rest of the week, which is striking because Sundays were always so tiring for him.

01:02:09

He's at work all day, and yet for him to realize that this is a day of rest, this is the closest we get to heaven, it's really encouraging.

01:02:17

What's that called? I think it's just called Sabbath. No, I'm sorry. The name of the book.

01:02:27

I'm forgetting the name of my own book. Dude, I had somebody try to interview me about my prosperity.

01:02:34

Somebody was trying to interview me about it, and I was like, oh, I need to read my own book. I don't remember anything that I wrote.

01:02:40

You don't remember the title. Okay, it's called Christ Are All, Poems for the Christian Pilgrim.

01:02:45

Okay, there we go. Christ Are All. Nailed it, look at that. You got the subtitle and everything. And then you also have put out a book about some

01:02:54

Christmas stuff? Yeah, so we're working with New Growth Press to release a number of 30 -day devotions, 30 -day devotional.

01:03:03

So we just take stuff from Spurgeon's sermons and package it. So I've taken 30 of his

01:03:12

Christmas sermons and found really edifying excerpts, and this is kind of an

01:03:18

Advent devotional. It's called A Wondrous Mystery, and, yeah, a 30 -day

01:03:24

Advent devotional from Charles Spurgeon, meditating on the incarnation, the wonder of the incarnation. So Spurgeon was not puritanical in the sense that he celebrated

01:03:32

Christmas and Easter and other stuff like that? Yeah, he didn't agree with the puritans in terms of rejecting that calendar entirely.

01:03:41

Victorians loved Christmas. Charles Dickens and Christmas Carol and all that. So Spurgeon loved

01:03:47

Christmas too, but he certainly didn't go for, you know, there were no decorations, no Christmas tree on the platform.

01:03:53

It was just like any Sunday. But he would always preach. Well, not always. He would tend to preach on the incarnation or some aspect of it.

01:04:02

How does Spurgeon's life end? Yeah, so he dies January of 1892.

01:04:11

By the summer of 1891, his health is really failing. Due to?

01:04:18

Just ongoing illness. Again, the kidneys were problematic. He had long stretches of illness all spring.

01:04:29

He would recover for a period of time, but then relapse. So he preaches kind of his final sermon there early summer of 1891, and then right away gets on a train and heads down to southern

01:04:40

France, which is where he always goes to recover his health. And a lot of people did that. They thought like the fresh air and the sea breeze and all that stuff.

01:04:48

That's right. That's right. Yeah, so he could be more active, get sunshine. On that last trip, yeah, his wife is with him, which was kind of a treat.

01:04:56

She hadn't been able to go with him before, so he's able to show her around. But by the time they move into the wintertime, his health is declining even more.

01:05:07

In his letters, he's still talking like, yeah, I'll be back soon, church. No, I can't wait to see you. But by January, it's clear the doctors are saying, yeah, unless something miraculous happens, he's not going to make it.

01:05:19

He dies kind of late January of 1892. And sorry not to press into this again, but was there an official diagnosis when he passed?

01:05:28

Did he have a heart attack? Was it the kidneys? No, it was kidneys. I think we would call it

01:05:34

Breit's disease. I don't know much about that. Yeah. And do you know like his final moment?

01:05:41

Was it a peaceful death? Was his bride there by his side? Yeah. By all accounts, in his last days, he kind of went in and out of consciousness.

01:05:51

Yeah. But prior to that, I mean, he was at peace. He was leading family worship as always and preaching to the people.

01:06:02

He was preaching in France? He was preaching just to the small group of people there and to people who were gathered in his hotel room. Preachers going to preach.

01:06:07

That's right. He couldn't help it. And then who was the next hire at the church after he passed?

01:06:13

Yeah, there was kind of a controversy about that. The person who he had called or asked to fill the pulpit while he was gone, his name was

01:06:26

A .T. Pearson. He was a Presbyterian from America, so he was not eligible to succeed

01:06:32

Spurgeon, though some people wondered. And Spurgeon, I think, picked him in part because he was not eligible to succeed him, so there was no confusion about that.

01:06:42

But the church wanted to maintain kind of the Spurgeon legacy, so they called Thomas Spurgeon to be his successor.

01:06:49

He came and he passed. Sorry, that's his son, not his brother. That's right, his younger son.

01:06:56

He passed there for a number of years. Well? He was an evangelical.

01:07:04

He certainly did not. He rejected the theological liberalism that was growing. But Ian Murray would say that he was more influenced by D .L.

01:07:17

Moody than by his own father, so he was more open to sort of American revivalism and implemented some of those things at the tabernacle.

01:07:27

So even in Thomas' day, members could tell something's changed. It's not quite the same.

01:07:34

Did the church shrink? The church was still large, but yes, it shrunk.

01:07:40

It began shrinking a little bit, and then more so as the years went on. There was a brief period after Thomas where there was an

01:07:47

Archibald Brown, and Ian Murray would say that that was the true successor. He was a close friend of Spurgeon's.

01:07:53

How many years was that? He was kind of an associate for Thomas for like a year, and then Thomas retired completely, and then

01:08:01

Archibald was pastor for like three years, or it was just a short time. Why such a short time? He was also pretty old by then.

01:08:09

But Spurgeon wasn't that old. When he died, how old was he when he died? Yeah, he was like 57. This would have been like 10 to 12 years after Spurgeon's death.

01:08:21

And so then what, he retired? Yeah, so Archibald Brown retired, and then the next pastor,

01:08:28

I'm forgetting his name, but he came from America, and he was very much of kind of American revivalism sort of school.

01:08:37

You would think that Archibald would like really dig in to make sure that they got the right guy. Yeah, yeah.

01:08:44

Perhaps here's where Baptists and wanting to preserve Congregationalism will be more reticent to kind of say, hey, here's the guy, right?

01:08:54

As an ardent Baptist and Congregationalist myself, I would just, yeah, the congregation still has to vote, but I mean, who better to tell you who are good options than the one that you've been following and leading this whole time, or following as he leads you this whole time?

01:09:12

Even better if that person is like already on staff, maybe an associate pastor or something. Yeah. And listen,

01:09:18

I don't envy anybody who has to go on stage after Elvis. You know, like who's going to take over when

01:09:25

Piper retires? It's already happened, but you get my point. Like, you know, when great men, and there are great men.

01:09:31

I know we're all sinners, but there are great men who even in the Scriptures you see are famous for their preaching of the gospel.

01:09:39

When they need to find their successor, that's tough, man. That's tough. And I think churches maybe get in trouble if their goal in hiring the next guy is to sort of like, let's replicate the previous guy.

01:09:53

Let's keep the magic going. And there's just not a next guy. You know, you have to depend on the

01:09:58

Lord afresh to do a new work. And yeah, there's no way around that.

01:10:04

I'm thinking about somebody like John MacArthur. He's getting up there in age now. What, 104?

01:10:11

I don't know. He's getting up there. But like, I wonder if the guys there at Grace are like, not like we need to find the next

01:10:19

John MacArthur, but I wonder if they're thinking through like, okay, what are we going to do when John passes? I would like to think that they are. But I've seen so many cases where people don't want to look at the obvious thing in the face and say like, hey, this guy that we really love is not going to be here in 10 years.

01:10:36

And we just don't want to talk about it. We don't want to think about it. And so like rather than being proactive and trying to find a suitable replacement, they just go, you know, whatever the

01:10:44

Lord wills. Like, no, you probably need to be a little more intentional than that. And you can still do everything right, and it can fall apart.

01:10:49

Yeah. So, yeah. And where is Metropolitan Tabernacle now?

01:10:56

Is that church still walking with Jesus? Yeah, still a really lovely congregation. They're still meeting at the same place there in London.

01:11:02

The building's burned down a few times through world wars and fires. But the facade is still there.

01:11:10

The building behind it is much smaller. Is this a metaphor? No, no, literally the facade, like the pillars and all that is still there.

01:11:17

But, no, the heart of gospel ministry is still there also. Yeah, yeah. So there's still an evangelical church.

01:11:25

Yeah. It's a very sweet, diverse congregation. When I worshiped there in 2017,

01:11:32

I was just deeply encouraged. Oh, that's so cool. How many members do they have, do you know? Or like, I guess not members, but is it like in the several thousands like it used to be?

01:11:39

No, no, no, like 200, 300, 400 maybe. Oh, great, man. Yeah, which in London is just remarkable.

01:11:45

Yeah. I think in your book there's a drawing that showed the Metropolitan Tabernacle with the pulpit and then it had thousands of people surrounding the pulpit, you know, almost like a stadium seating kind of set up.

01:11:59

I really wish we had a picture of that. That would have been so cool to see. Anything else about Spurgeon's life and ministry that you're like, dude,

01:12:08

I've been studying. This is my life's work. And you got me on this podcast. And I know it's not in my book, but I definitely want to tell you about this because it's super cool.

01:12:19

Well, I mean, so much we could talk about, but, you know, you talked about this, how there are so many

01:12:25

Spurgeon books being written. It's a privilege to be at the

01:12:30

Spurgeon Library. You know, we're connected with the Midwestern Seminary, so we have a lot of PhD students who are coming through, pastors who love pastoral ministry, love

01:12:42

Spurgeon, and they're just wanting to dig into him a little bit more. And so, yeah, we're always uncovering new things.

01:12:47

I've got guys working on his view of limited atonement. I've got guys – I have a student who just finished his dissertation on Spurgeon and kind of theology proper, the doctrine of God.

01:12:59

So particularly thinking about some of the issues about classical theism that people have been thinking about in modern times, just how does that apply to Spurgeon.

01:13:07

Would he have – I mean, was he, like, theologically, technically proficient?

01:13:14

Did he go to seminary? He didn't go to seminary, but he was a theologian.

01:13:19

He was kind of well -read, a student of church history, a student of the creeds and confessions.

01:13:26

So, yeah, all the categories of classical theism he would have had, and he would have affirmed those.

01:13:33

And he was just an autodidact. That is just – Pretty much. Yeah. Anyway, so all that to say that it's exciting to see kind of this new wave of Spurgeon scholarship arising, which

01:13:44

I think will be genuinely helpful for pastors. If nothing else, like, you love a figure like Spurgeon, but Spurgeon brings with him so much, right?

01:13:55

And so with my book, Spurgeon is sort of like this vehicle for introducing people to good

01:14:01

Baptist polity, right? But he can be a good vehicle for good soteriology or good classical theism or all kinds of good practices, prayer, all these things.

01:14:11

So I'm excited about where Spurgeon scholarship is going. Hopefully, I mean for it to be helpful for local church pastors, not just academic.

01:14:19

But, yeah, pray for our work in the Spurgeon Library. Do you think there is anyone alive today who is kind of the equivalent of Spurgeon?

01:14:29

Oh, some. I mean you see glimpses of it in different men. Like you mentioned

01:14:35

John MacArthur. I mean with the Master's College and what he's done there, that is Spurgeon -esque.

01:14:40

When I look at Mark Dever and his amazing networking gift and pulling people together, that's

01:14:50

Spurgeon -esque to me. I really think that Mark is, by God's grace, all that stuff, not

01:14:57

Mark's. But, I mean, stemming from Mark is responsible for the ecclesiology revival we've seen over the last 25 years.

01:15:03

I mean he's been talked about in connection to the Young, Restless, and Reformed stuff. I think that's far less significant than the fact that 10 years ago when

01:15:12

I was trying to find somebody in my city, find a healthy church, like it was really hard. And now every new pastor who comes to town, like he's got it.

01:15:21

It's in the seminaries. It's in the air. I really think he's responsible for a lot of that. I agree. I've always thought

01:15:28

Piper was the closest. What do you think about that? Yeah, Piper's there too.

01:15:33

I mean, especially in the preaching. Yes, the preaching, but he started a pastor's college. I think his mission's emphasis, you know?

01:15:42

I think his preaching has stirred more good stuff to happen in the kingdom than really anybody else.

01:15:50

But, I mean, that's the superlative that I can't prove with any significant metric. Yeah, I agree.

01:15:58

Who's somebody who you would say is an anti -Spurgeon? Just kidding.

01:16:05

I don't even know what that would be. Well, I mean, no, not anti -Spurgeon, but I'm trying to think of who has accomplished as much as Spurgeon, and I'm thinking about Rick Warren's list of accomplishments that he listed out.

01:16:18

Did you hear how many pastors this guy trained? It was a lot. It's impressive. It's a lot. Okay, anyways. Are there materials that Spurgeon has produced in your museum slash library that people haven't even read yet?

01:16:35

Oh, yeah. Okay, so there's stuff you guys can still go in and be like, oh, nobody's ever read this. Yeah, and certainly nobody's ever published or researched this, but yes.

01:16:46

We have shelves upon shelves, stacks upon stacks of primary source materials. His secretaries did a good job of keeping his stuff, collecting.

01:16:54

They had like shelves of newspaper clippings, like anything they could find that was published, connected to Spurgeon, they saved it.

01:17:03

So, yeah, we have just so much. So people who are looking to do primary source research, come to Midwestern.

01:17:10

Quick, rapid fire, no thinking, tell me the five best books on Spurgeon, or they could be your favorite.

01:17:15

They don't have to be the best. On Spurgeon. Dalamore's biography.

01:17:24

Arnold Dalamore. Same guy who wrote the volumes on Whitfield that are really good. Yep. Wait, am

01:17:30

I including Spurgeon's books in there? No. Wait, that was going to be my next question. Oh, okay. Louis Drummond has a large biography on Spurgeon, and it has issues, but it's very good.

01:17:42

Okay. I like Alex DiPrima's new, fresh biography. I would put that on the top five.

01:17:48

Very readable, updated. Ian Murray?

01:17:57

Yes, Forgotten Spurgeon. He kind of gets a little bit of flack. They say he does hagiography. No, but for his time writing before kind of this whole crest of Spurgeon scholarship was coming in, it's such an important work.

01:18:10

He really nails Spurgeon as a theologian engaging in these controversies. I'm going to think of something more devotional.

01:18:25

Well, we're about to run out of tape in the cameras. Yeah. Sorry, man. It's okay. Four is good. Okay. What are your three favorite

01:18:32

Spurgeon resources? Like Spurgeon from Spurgeon himself. Okay. Well, you got to go with lectures to my students.

01:18:38

Obviously. You got to do Treasury of David. When it comes to the

01:18:43

Psalms, that is a classic commentary from church history. It needs to be on every pastor's shelves.

01:18:52

I mean, can I just say all his sermons? Yeah. Let's just say 63 volumes of his sermons. Have you read all those?

01:18:59

No. Are you trying to? Yes. One a week? About, yeah.

01:19:05

Will you make it before you die, Lord willing? You think? Have you done the math on that? I have not done the math. Depends on how long

01:19:10

I live, I suppose. You know how they're trying to say that Lincoln was gay? Do you know this? I've never heard that.

01:19:15

Oh, there's like a whole documentary out about it. You know, his bodyguard slept in the same bed as him, so obviously he was, you know, leaning in that direction.

01:19:23

Have you seen anybody try to appropriate Spurgeon in a way that he would not appreciate any of their scholarship?

01:19:32

Yes. I mean, I have encountered folks who have tried to argue that Spurgeon was a landmarkist, that he was...

01:19:40

For our viewers, a landmarkist is? A group of kind of Baptists who are basically saying that Baptists are the only true

01:19:50

Christians in church history. We do succession via baptism rather than via bishopric and all that stuff, yeah.

01:19:55

But Spurgeon would have thought that was ridiculous. Folks who have tried to make Spurgeon, whatever view of eschatology that they have, on mill, pre -mill, post -mill,

01:20:05

I've heard all three argued. What was his view? I think technically he would have been more historic pre -mill, though he might have had some nuances there too.

01:20:14

I've heard folks who have tried to make Spurgeon a Mason. I don't know much about Masonry, but yeah, that's...

01:20:24

It's the kind of thing where, you know, with those people, like if you say, well,

01:20:31

Spurgeon said this, that clearly shows that he was not, they would say, well, of course, that's what he would say, right?

01:20:36

It's like, there's no way to refute that sort of thing. Unfalsifiable claims. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh, I've heard somebody argue that Spurgeon was an

01:20:44

Armenian, which Spurgeon would clearly Didn't he write in defense of capitalism? That's right. That's right. So, yeah, it's just,

01:20:51

I'm not sure how they got there. So, yeah, so many people love Spurgeon that they try to make him one of their own.

01:20:59

So that's bound to happen. Yeah, a lot of people love him also without really knowing what he believes.

01:21:04

Like I've spoken with a number of Arminian Baptists who just love, love, love Spurgeon, you know, without knowing that he would be like, hey, you should stop believing in Arminianism.

01:21:15

All right, let's get on to some rapid fire questions. You can't think about these. You can't say neither.

01:21:21

You can't say both. You can't say what's the third option. Boom, rapid fire response.

01:21:27

You ready? I think you've done these in previous interviews, haven't you? Every episode. Okay. Okay, what is your least favorite race?

01:21:36

I don't have one. Mine is NASCAR. Okay. Okay. Tea or coffee?

01:21:43

I prefer coffee. Favorite sitcom? Do you have one? I'm watching a lot of Everybody Loves Raymond these days.

01:21:50

Oh, that's a deep cut. It's a good one. I like that. Yeah. Okay, you're trapped on an island and I know

01:21:58

Spurgeon is not on the list. I'm going with more contemporary guys. You can only have books from one of these guys for the rest of your life trapped on an island.

01:22:05

Dever, Piper, Keller, Sproul, or John MacArthur. Who do you choose? Their collected works. Sproul. Same thing, but this time with sermons.

01:22:17

Piper. Yeah. Lewis or Tolkien? Tolkien. Favorite fiction?

01:22:29

You can say you don't read fiction. I mean,

01:22:36

Lord of the Rings. Yeah. Since I said Tolkien. Mountains or beach?

01:22:46

Mountains. Champagne or wine? Champagne. Are you allowed to drink?

01:22:55

Yes. Okay. Least favorite candy? I've never liked licorice.

01:23:05

Black licorice or any licorice? Any licorice. That's fine as long as black licorice is included. Android or iPhone?

01:23:13

Macaroni salad or potato salad? Macaroni salad. Mayonnaise or mustard?

01:23:22

Mayonnaise. Caviar or escargot? Getting fancy on you. Caviar. Yeah, gross.

01:23:29

Night out or night in? I prefer to stay in. Concert or football game?

01:23:37

I think concert. Morning person or night owl? Morning.

01:23:45

Burger king or McDonald's? McDonald's. Mexican or Italian? Italian. Burgers or barbecue?

01:23:55

Burgers. Chinese takeout or sushi? Sushi. By the way, it hasn't hit me until just now that this is essentially a list written by a fat kid.

01:24:04

I'm just like, here are 13 food questions. What else do you like on your taco? Cold or hot?

01:24:13

I think I like it cold. Rock or rap? You don't care.

01:24:19

Do you listen to music? I do. What was your most recently listened to album?

01:24:24

I was listening to a recording of Andrew Peterson and his friends playing through Rich Mullen's Liturgy of Legacy and Ragamuffin Band, which is one of the most important albums of CCM history.

01:24:44

Anyways, that's what I was listening to most recently. I would have taken you for a K -pop fan. No, not a fan of K -pop.

01:24:50

Unibrow or no eyebrows? Uni, I guess.

01:24:58

Okay. Classical or jazz? Classical. Trapped on an island with one systematic theology for the rest of your life?

01:25:07

Calvin. Calvin. What hymn do you want to be sung at your funeral? I'm not sure.

01:25:23

I don't know. I haven't thought about this. That's fine. We'll take that. It's a pretty deep question.

01:25:29

I don't want to lock myself in. Yeah, most people would just say, open the eyes of my heart, Lord. That's just,

01:25:35

I'm like, really? Okay, final question of the interview. Save the best, most important question for last.

01:25:42

How many holes does a straw have? One hole?

01:25:49

Yeah, that's right. All right. He passed the test. Let's pray. Lord, thank you for my brother,

01:25:56

Jeff. Thank you for the life and gifting that you have given him, not for himself, but to serve the church for her good and for the glory of your name.

01:26:06

We pray that you will continue to equip him for every good work that you predestined him to and that he will carry them out with faithfulness.

01:26:14

We pray that his work on Spurgeon will bear an abundance of fruit for the health of your church,

01:26:20

Lord. Thank you for giving us examples of men to look up to and women in the church. We pray that you'll raise up many more pastors to lead and to guide your flock,

01:26:31

Lord. Raise up shepherds who have hearts trained in the same way that Spurgeon's was. We pray for the many pastors out there who are doing their best to not be

01:26:40

Spurgeon, but to emulate his ministry of faithful gospel proclamation and practice. We pray that you'll allow even this episode to influence many men to be, yeah, constantly striving for ever deepening devotion to Christ and more faithfulness to his bride.