Oct 13, 2026 Show with Ray Rhodes on “Spurgeon: The Man Beyond the Pulpit”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth, who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 13th day of October 2026.

And before I introduce my returning guest and our theme for the day, for those of you who have not yet heard, I just got news, the exciting news, last week that my next free biannual Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Pastor's Luncheon is now set in stone to be held on Thursday, March 6th, 11 a .m. to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania, and we will be featuring for the first time as our keynote speaker, Pastor Pouyan Mershahi.

He is an Iranian-born convert to Christianity out from the Zoroastrian religion, and he found salvation in Jesus Christ after fleeing Iran, or Iran as many call it, after the Islamic Revolution. He fled to Iran, I mean from Iran to England, and that is where a faithful Christian evangelized him, and he, by the sovereign mercy and grace of God, embraced the true gospel and the true Christ of Scripture, and was born again, and eventually discovered and embraced the doctrines of sovereign grace, also known as Reformed theology, and he is currently pastoring Providence Baptist Chapel in Cheltenham, England, and he is quickly becoming a very popular and sought-after conference speaker.

In fact, after he leaves Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, after my pastor's luncheon, he is heading to Grand Rapids, Michigan to speak for Joel Beeky, but I am so thrilled. So, if you're a man in ministry leadership, please mark down on your calendars Thursday, May 6th—I hope I said May the last time I announced that, not March—May 6th, Thursday, May 6th, 11 a .m. to 2 p .m., that's 2027, of course, at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania, and that is featuring for the first time our keynote speaker, Pouyanne Mershahi.

If you would like to hear my previous interviews with Pouyanne, go to irontripandzioneradio .com and type in the search engine P as in Peter, O-O-Y-A-N, and that is the only person I have ever interviewed with that name, so all of his and only his interviews will come up.

Ray Rhodes and Nourished in the Word Ministries

But today, I have a returning guest, an old friend of mine, and I'm absolutely thrilled to have him back, Ray Rhodes. He is an author and founding pastor of Grace Community Church in Dawsonville, Georgia, now full-time president and special events speaker at Nourished in the Word Ministries, and today he's going to be addressing the theme of his latest book, Spurgeon, the Man Beyond the Pulpit, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

Ray Rhodes.

Thank you, Chris. It's an honor and privilege to be back with you, friend. Thank you.

The pleasure is all mine, brother, and tell our listeners about this ministry, Nourished in the Word.

Yeah. Nourished in the Word Ministries is a ministry of preaching, and I'll be on the road preaching in churches and various events across the country and other places. It's a ministry of pastor and their wife, pastor-wife care.

We want to minister to pastors of all ages. We've got about four decades of experience in pastoral ministry, my wife and I. We hope we can be an encouragement to pastors. We continue publishing sound resources to help Christians in their journey of faith, and we'll be partnering with churches in various ways, from leadership training to helping them with marriage retreats and other events as well.

So there's some of the things that we're doing and excited to be a part of this new venture. Can you tell us the website? It's nourishedintheword .com. Nourished. Nourishedintheword .com. Yep.

Amen. And we'll be repeating that later on in the program. Well, many Christians, in fact, Christians spanning denominational lines and theological perspectives love the writing of Charles Sadden Spurgeon.

I even remember meeting a Seventh-day Adventist who loved reading Charles Sadden Spurgeon. But few have delved into and dug deeply into the life of Charles Sadden Spurgeon and his teaching and preaching, and his wife and her life, Susanna, to the depth that you have, resulting in a number of books that you have written.

Susie Spurgeon and the Life Beyond the Pulpit

And before we begin to speak about your latest book, why don't you begin to let our listeners know about the books you've written about Susie Spurgeon?

Chris, we had a little drop there, I think, for a second. Let me see if I can recapture….

Oh, I can hear you. I can hear you. Fine. Please, before we go into the book at hand that we are discussing today, tell us about your writing on Susie Spurgeon.

Yeah. Back in 2018, I was privileged to publish a book with Moody Publishers called Susie, The Life and Legacy of Susanna Spurgeon. And as best we can tell, the first ever full biography of her. There was a small biography done maybe around 1903 or 1905 by Charles Ray.

So that was a wonderful experience to find out more about the domestic side of Charles Spurgeon, especially his wonderful and godly wife. And that led to a book about Charles and Susie's marriage called Yours Till Heaven, also with Moody Publishers.

So those two books preceded.

The present book. And if anybody wants to know more about those books and all of the writings of my guest Ray Rhodes, you can go to nourishedintheword .com, nourishedintheword .com. And you can also go to rayrodesjr .com, and jr. is abbreviated, rayrodesjr .com.

That's rayrodesjr .com. And I'll be repeating that information later on for you. Now, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, not only has he been written about by many authors over the decades and for over a century, and not only are many of his own writings available in print, but nonetheless, you believed that there was much of Spurgeon's life beyond the pulpit that has not yet been thoroughly addressed in print that resulted in this massive work that you have had brought into print by B &H Academic.

Why don't you tell us about that? About what led you to say, you know something, as much as there are wonderful books and many of them available about Charles Spurgeon, there's a lot that the average Christian, and even pastors and seminary professors may not yet know about this Prince of Preachers, as he's called.

So tell us about what led you to believe there needed to be another volume added about Spurgeon.

Yeah, that's a great question, Chris. You're right. When Spurgeon died, there was a new biography by some reports, one a month for two years, so 24 biographies of Spurgeon. Many of them were sort of repeating some of the familiar stories of Spurgeon, but there were a lot of them.

There was biographies of Spurgeon written during his lifetime, in fact. So as you said, there's no shortage of ink that's been spilled writing of the story of Spurgeon. In 1992, I think, I read my first big biography of Charles Spurgeon.

It was by Louis Drummond. I think it was called The Prince of Preachers. And of course, there's Arnold Dalimore's book preceded that one. Ian Murray's preceded that one, if you go back to The Forgotten Spurgeon.

And in more recent days, Alex de Prima has a book on Spurgeon as well. That's sort of the modern Dalimore. And Tom Nettles had a wonderful theological biography of Spurgeon. But as you mentioned, Spurgeon being the Prince of Preachers, typically when we think of Spurgeon, we think of him in those sorts of terms, and rightly so.

The last of the Puritans, the Prince of Preachers, the second Whitfield, sort of lofty terms assigned to Spurgeon. What I found was there was not sufficient information, in my estimation, of Spurgeon the man.

In this new biography with B &H Academic, we don't neglect the man behind the pulpit, but we wanted to pull the lens out and look beyond the pulpit. Who was Spurgeon as a man, day by day? Who was Spurgeon as a friend, as a husband, as a man who experienced affliction and depression and struggles, as a man who fought earnestly for the faith?

How did he feel during those times? What were his experiences? And we.

Especially—. Sorry, folks, my guest has frozen and he's dropped off. You're back on the air now.

Ray, I don't know what's going on. Okay. I don't know where I left off, Chris, but—.

It was just—. Nevertheless. Very recently, you got dropped off, so just take it up near where you—.

Just pick up anywhere you want. Sure. All right. Sorry about that. Maybe on my end, or I don't know. What's going on either? But nevertheless, I thought there was more to be told about Spurgeon the man, and we spent a lot of time focusing on his childhood and youth and early years, and perhaps as much information as ever has been told about those years.

And what we found. By digging through archives in England and America and looking in newspaper articles and letters and the rest, we found some fascinating stories about Spurgeon's childhood and youth that have never been told before, or when they've been attempted, some of the information was incorrect by some of the old biographies of Spurgeon.

Spurgeon's Childhood, Family Hardship, and Religious Formation

Well, where do you begin your journey with Spurgeon beyond the pulpit in this work?

Yeah, we start—. It's a chronological biography. Of course, there's no way even my 720-page biography could cover the life of Spurgeon. Spurgeon said there was enough—. His life was like a—. One day in his life was like a two-volume novel, so much happened, so many experiences he had.

We start at the beginning with his birth in Calverdon to John and Eliza Spurgeon. They were living—. They were married in Stambourne, where Spurgeon's grandfather lived, and then they moved to Calverdon, a village in England, a small village where John Spurgeon was a shopkeeper.

And it was during that time that when Spurgeon was born, he didn't have any memories of his birthplace because they were only there about 10 months of his life. And then they moved to a second town called Raleigh in England, where John Spurgeon purchased a shop and opened the shop.

And that's a part of the story that is mostly neglected by previous biographies. Most people have John Spurgeon in Calverdon and then moving to Colchester. But there's an important interlude in Spurgeon's life in Raleigh.

Again, he's just a boy, but it's from Raleigh that his parents send him to live with his grandparents in the village of about 500 people in Stambourne. And that's where Spurgeon spent his most formative years.

And during that time, Charles Spurgeon's father lost his business. He lost his home. He lost their possessions. He lost everything. And he ended up in what amounts to debtor's prison for about three months.

Now, Charles Spurgeon was living an idyllic life in the village of Stambourne. He didn't know much about that. He was just a boy when that's happening. But nevertheless, that kind of experience from his father would have an impact on Charles's life, especially later.

From there, they did eventually move to Colchester, where people are somewhat familiar of Spurgeon's story. And at about six years old, Spurgeon left his grandfather's home to move there with him. So there's a lot of bits and pieces, a lot of interesting storylines, and a lot of fascinating circumstances that occurred from the time Spurgeon was 14 months of age to the time he was six years old.

In fact, the first time he ever heard the Bible read, the first time that he could understand it, or the first time he heard a sermon preached, the first time he participated in family worship, his earliest influences were not with his parents at all.

They were with his grandparents in the village of Stambourne. Now, from what I can remember,.

His grandparents were deeply religious and influenced by Puritan theology, correct?

That's right. James Spurgeon was a Congregationalist pastor. He pastored at another little village from 1806 to 1810. He came to Stambourne in 1810, and he was there for over 50 years as their pastor.

And so Spurgeon, when he heard preaching, he heard preaching from his grandfather. When he heard family worship, he heard Bible reading from his grandfather. He heard Scripture reading from his grandmother as well.

So he was raised in a very godly home during those early years before he went back to live with his parents.

Spurgeon's Conversion and Baptism

And is there any insight that you have into a fairly well-known—it's well-known amongst Spurgeon devotees that he, I believe at the age of 15 or 16, was walking through the frigidly cold streets of London during a snowstorm and found refuge and warmth in a primitive Methodist church.

And he was really there with the motive simply of getting warmed up and getting out of the blizzard. And there was a man other than the minister there who took the place of the minister that day. The minister could not get to the church, I'm assuming because of the weather, and gave a very simple message that the Lord used to actually break open Spurgeon's heart of stone and give him a heart of flesh, and he counts that as the day he became born again.

Tell us about that for those of our listeners who don't know that story, and if you have any additional.

Information, we'd love to hear it. Yeah. So, in 1840, Spurgeon is born in 1830. So, in 1840, he moves from his grandparents' home to Colchester. His father is a clerk there for a shipping industry that is owned by his father-in-law.

And it is during that time that Spurgeon returns to his family, who's really faced a lot of challenges and difficulties. But to jump ahead to the conversion story, Spurgeon leaves there in 1848 to go to a Church of England school in Maidstone, England.

And there, before he is converted, he becomes convinced of baptism by immersion for believers only. And Spurgeon said, if God ever converts me—so he was acknowledging even at that age that he was unconverted—but if God ever converts me, I will be baptized in the biblical manner.

He'd been baptized as a baby as a congregationalist church, and the Church of England taught this baptism by representation. They said, yes, repentance and faith are required, but it can be stood for through a representative of the child.

And Spurgeon looked at both of those views biblically and came to the conclusion that baptism was for believers only, and it was to be by immersion, which caused him no little bit of grief because of his grandfather and his parents, who were congregationalists.

So he left there to go to a school in Newmarket. And during Christmas break, he comes home. This would be late 1849. And while he's at home, he writes a 300-page essay. Again, before his conversion, he writes a 300-page essay on potpourri.

And so he attacks the Catholic Church's view of the pope and proclaims sound doctrine. Again, he's doing this as one who doesn't believe he is converted. Well, a short time after that, we get to the snowy morning.

His father, by this time, is preaching regularly. He's not a pastor yet. John Spurgeon begins preaching probably about 1839 for the first time when Spurgeon's five years old. But in 1850, he's preaching pretty regularly.

And so he leaves to go off to preach about 10 or 12 miles away. And his mother is home with the children. And as you mentioned, a cold January morning. Charles alone heads off to church. And along the way, the snowstorm has become so fierce.

And it's really close to his house, Chris, where he makes the decision to turn down a side street and artillery street, in fact, and go into the Primitive Methodist chapel. So the snow is building up at that time.

And Spurgeon puts his hand to the door to open it. He said the only thing he'd ever heard about Primitive Methodists was that they sang so loud they'd make your ears hurt. But he didn't care, he said, as long as he could hear about Jesus.

So he went in and sat down. And indeed, the normal pastor was not there. A guest preacher was preaching, only a handful of people. Spurgeon walks in the door. He goes over to the left side of the room, sits near the wall.

And you can go to that church today and you can see that spot where Spurgeon sat. And I've been there. And the preacher pointed him out and said, young man, you look very miserable. And you'll continue to be miserable unless you look unto Christ and be saved.

And so preaching from Isaiah, he said, look unto Christ. Even a fool can look, anyone can look to Christ and be saved. And Charles Spurgeon believed that there was that moment the Holy Spirit opened his heart.

He understood the gospel he had been hearing for all of his life. He trusted in Christ. And he walked into that building that morning, an unsaved boy. He left that building. He said, even the snow looked more bright.

The birds were singing more sweetly. And he made his way back home, a converted man and converted boy, a teenager. And his mother said that she could even see the change in his appearance and his demeanor.

He had been a strong-willed child. His parents had had some measure of difficulty with Spurgeon and he with them. But he was a new man and is recognizable to his family. He talked to his father about that.

And that evening, he went to the Congregationalist church that he had intended to go to that morning, but was diverted because of the storm.

Spurgeon's Embrace of Reformed Theology and Early Ministry

And when did he—and the Congregationalist church that he was attending may have been a Reformed congregation in its theology, as many Congregationalist churches were back then, especially because of the fact that they came from a Puritan heritage.

But was that the case with this church? And when are you aware of Spurgeon actually having these teachings sink in and him discovering and embracing the doctrines of sovereign grace that we call Reformed theology?

Yeah, that's a great question, a fascinating story. His grandfather, it was said of him that he had bribed Puritan theology, and he even looked like a Puritan. He was born in 1776, but when Spurgeon went to live with him in 1835, he was still looking like he stepped out of a Puritan age.

And when Spurgeon would go back to Stambourne during the summers, and he would read Puritan books in his grandfather's library. And Chris, some of those books—eight pounds, nine pounds, ten pounds, twelve-pound books—you can imagine the young Spurgeon going and grabbing one of those big Puritan volumes and opening it up.

That's where he first encountered John Bunyan and Pilgrim's Progress. So he heard Puritan theology from his grandfather. He read Puritan theology in books, but it was actually a household servant in the school he was attending in Newmarket that helped him to understand with more clarity the doctrines of grace.

She had available to him to read a magazine called The Gospel Standard, and Spurgeon was reading from Calvinistic preachers in that magazine. And so he said he learned more theology from this household servant named Mary that he could have learned from several doctors of divinity.

Both of them went to a Congregationalist church there that was not that good. It was as dry as dirt, they described it. Spurgeon asked his friend Mary how she could continue tolerating such preaching.

She said, well, even a chicken scratching in the dirt will find some grain or a worm sometime. And so she would reverse what the preacher said at times and get the truth, she said. So she attended church faithfully.

There was not a good solid church there in Newmarket at that time, but she attended along with Charles Spurgeon. So she and The Gospel Standard were really two of the means that God used to really solidify Charles Spurgeon in the.

Reformed faith. Now, if my memory serves me right, Charles Spurgeon was so biblically literate and so gifted at oratory skills and so on that he very quickly in his teenage years became a pastor,.

Did he not? He did. He did. So he's at Newmarket there before his conversion and after his conversion. He joins the Congregationalist church there because he believed as a Christian, you should be a member of a church.

There was no Baptist church there for him to join. So he joined that church and eventually his father consented to him being baptized. I put an entire chapter talking about his baptism and his father's reluctance to allow him to be baptized.

So Spurgeon is still 15 years old. He wants to be obedient to his father. Eventually, I think he would have been baptized regardless of what his father said, but he wanted to honor his father. So he waited and waited and waited.

Spurgeon believed that you shouldn't receive communion until you're baptized. Based on Acts chapter two, they received his word, were baptized, then they continue the apostle's doctrine, the breaking of bread and the rest.

So he took that seriously, but he desperately not only wanted to be baptized, he wanted to receive communion. And so he was writing these passionate letters to his father, pleading for his permission to be baptized.

Eventually, his father consented to that. Spurgeon had to walk about eight miles away to be baptized by a Baptist minister. And from there he comes back. He's active teaching Sunday school and a ministry there in Newmarket.

But that summer he moves to Cambridge and he attends a school there, not part of the Cambridge University colleges, but he attends a school there. And it is while he is there, he joins his first Baptist church, St. Andrew Street Baptist Church.

And they have in that church a layman's preachers association. And so he's participating in that, not as a preacher yet, but he's learning about preaching. He wants to be a preacher. Well, one day the director of that, James Venter, sent Charles along with another man to a village church where chapel, really a cottage.

It was not a chapel at all, it was a cottage where this congregation met. And Spurgeon thought he was going along simply to be an encouragement to this other man who would preach. And so along the way Spurgeon told this gentleman, he said, I'll be praying for you tonight as you preach the word.

And the other gentleman was shocked. Preach the word? I've never preached in my life. I'm not going to be preaching. If there's a sermon tonight, you'll be preaching. And so this director of this layman's association, it sort of tricked them both and tricked Spurgeon into going.

And so it was January in 1851 that Spurgeon preached his first sermon. He had to prepare it in his mind, his heart, on the rest of the walk to this village cottage where a handful of villagers met to gather.

And so it was after that though, the word got out quickly about this young preacher. He's not even 16 years old yet. Well, yeah, he's 16. He's not even 17 years old yet. And he is preaching in the village chapels and village cottages almost every night after that.

And crowds were coming to hear him even at that time, still not a pastor. But in 1851, Spurgeon accepts the pastorate of the Waterbeach Baptist Chapel about six miles north of Cambridge. So from ages 17 to age 19, Spurgeon is a village pastor.

And Chris, I've been to that church and I preached at that church as well. Wow, it still exists. Yeah, it does. The building is different. The building burned down after Spurgeon left to move to London, but Spurgeon helped rebuild the building that's there.

And he preached in that building as well. So that was a part of my experience was being able to preach in his grandfather's church and in the Waterbeach Chapel while I was there. So that's where Spurgeon began.

So 17 years old, he's a pastor. What were you and I doing at 17? I'm not going to say it on the air. I definitely was not pastoring a church. Yes, I was not even darkening the door of a church.

At that time. But I will pick up or you will pick up where you left off there to explore more of Charles Haddon Spurgeon's life beyond the pulpit. And if anybody would like to join us with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA. And don't go away, folks, because we are going to be right back after these messages from our.

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Welcome back. If you just tuned us in, my guest today for the entire program is Ray Rhodes, an old friend of mine, and have many fond memories of seeing him at Bible conferences and interviewing him. He's an author and founding pastor of Grace Community Church of Dawson, Georgia, and now full-time president and special events speaker at Nourished in the Word Ministries.

We are addressing the theme of his most recent book, Spurgeon, the Man Beyond the Pulpit. If you have a question, our email address is chrisorensen at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence.

We already do have a number of folks beginning to email their questions in, but before I go to any of them, I wanted you to lay out some more history behind Spurgeon beyond the pulpit. So, where can you take us from this 17-year-old pastor to perhaps where he met his wife Susie?

Spurgeon Becomes Pastor in London and Meets Susie

Yeah, you know, Chris, one of the interesting things about Spurgeon, there was nothing in Spurgeon to suggest that he was going to become the sort of Spurgeon that they became, the one that we admire so much.

He came from a poor family. He lived in England's villages and small towns. He had poor parents. He never received a formal college sort of education, but that's not the whole story because Spurgeon was such an avid reader.

He taught himself. He went to the best schools he could go to as a boy and teenager, but he never attended a college. But he read many, many books, even from his youth. So, he's in Water Beach, and there he is pastoring that church.

That church has about 40 people, and it's sort of a cottage-like building itself when he gets there. But when he leaves, it won't hold the people. There's 400 people in that church. They're gathered inside.

They're gathered outside. Who knows how many people are actually showing up on a Sunday trying to hear just a word from this boy preacher, they called him. He was known as the boy preacher. Well, along the way, one Sunday morning, he was handed an envelope from a London address, and it was an invitation for him to come and preach as a guest preacher at the New Park Street Chapel.

So, this would be in the fall of 1853 when he receives this letter. He's about to preach at Water Beach when he gets the letter, and Spurgeon is so surprised by the letter, he imagines it must have been sent to the wrong Spurgeon.

It couldn't be him, the village preacher, being invited to preach in a prominent London congregation. But the church, through their correspondence, assured him that they had the right Spurgeon. They had heard about him from a friend of that church who heard Spurgeon speaking at a Sunday school conference in Cambridge.

Well, long story short, Spurgeon made the journey on December the 17th, 1853, during Christmastime to London to speak at this church. Now, maybe just backing up a little bit, Chris, you probably know this, I'm sure you do, that that church was one of the most historic churches in all of Baptist history.

Some of their pastors included men like Benjamin Keech, John Gill, John Ripon. These men had long pastorates. After Ripon died in about 1837, as I recall, they had a number of shorter-term pastorates, two years, eight, nine, ten years, two years again, and the church declined greatly.

Their last long-term pastor, John Ripon, had moved the church to New Park Street, just south of the Thames River there in London. It was a terrible location. It was wet and uncomfortable, an industrial area, but nevertheless, it held 1 ,200 people.

Spurgeon was a priest there on the 18th of December. On the 17th, he arrived to no hospitality at all. He arrived at the train station. He made the journey up about two miles from the church to stay at a boarding house that the church had secured for him.

His room was about the size of a closet, as he described it. His bed was over the door. Outside were the loud sounds of horses and carriages and people talking. He had a difficult time getting a nice sleep.

He was really sort of surprised at the lack of hospitality that he received in London, and he didn't have a high view of London anyway. But that next morning, he got up and had breakfast and made the two-mile journey by himself.

No one from the church met him. No one picked him up in a carriage or anything to take him to the church. He went by himself. When he arrived, when he crossed the bridge over to finally making his way over to the New Park Street Chapel, he looked at this massive building, and he was intimidated.

Who was he to address such a distinguished London crowd? But the reality is, it wasn't a London crowd at all. It was a London crowd, but it was a small crowd. He walked inside, and there's only a handful of people there.

It's been estimated maybe 100, 150 people at the most were in that service that morning. And so 19-year-old Charles Spurgeon preached his first sermon in that building, and his confidence grew even as he preached.

That night, they were so moved by his sermon that those who were there went out and tried to invite their friends and family to come and hear the boy preacher. And so there was a lot more people there that evening.