1,000 Sermons From the Heart of Spurgeon

Welcome to the Whole Council podcast. I'm John Snyder, and today we have a special guest with us, Jeremy Walker.

Glad to have you with us, Jeremy. Hello, John. Glad to be back. Many of you know

Jeremy, and Jeremy does a podcast for us called From the Heart of Spurgeon, and he has recently released a new book, and that's this here.

It's From the Heart of Spurgeon, Volume 1, 1855, and this is a collection of eight sermons by Spurgeon with Jeremy's introductions, and so we thought it would be nice to have

Jeremy visit us on the podcast and just help us to understand the value of Spurgeon for today, and you know, in particular, how we might benefit, how we can join in the reading program that he's doing, and just to kind of stir our hearts by thinking of what the

Lord did with a man 200 years ago. So Jeremy, explain to us the podcast and the book, if you would.

Thanks, John. The podcast and the book really came about as a result of a reading scheme that,

I suppose in some senses, had its origins in a documentary. So if we go back through the eyes of Spurgeon, which is something that Mediogratiae distributes, was a biographical documentary on the life and ministry of Spurgeon, and I had the privilege of presenting that, and out of that, which was itself really a reflection of my appreciation for Spurgeon, somebody asked the question,

I think more or less tongue -in -cheek, so how long would it take to read through the best -known of Spurgeon's published pulpit output?

So that's something called the New Park Street Pulpit, and then the Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, and we calculated it up, and assuming the right number of leap years,

I think it's something like about ten and a half years, and so what about it then? Would you do that?

So for various reasons, I said, I think there's potentially some value in that, as a

Christian and as a preacher, so we tried to set up a scheme, and we began reading through those sermons at a rate of one a day, and we set up a

Twitter account, now an X account, so that we'd be able to try and help people along with that, and about that time, the guys at Mediogratiae said, well, first of all, we're interested in this kind of material, and secondly, what are you going to do for the people who can't read through Spurgeon at the rate of one sermon a day, because that's quite a commitment, so what we said was, okay, this is phase two, or phase three, or four, depending on how many steps back you go, let's take one sermon a week out of whatever seven we're reading, typically seven, and let's make that our featured sermon, and try and get a representative sample of Spurgeon's output, so that people who aren't in a position to read one every day, might be able to read one every week, and then the suggestion was, well, why don't we do a podcast about that, and then another friend came in and said, well, why don't we collect those sermons that are featured for a given year into a book, and the first volume of that, the one that you, you know, here's my original proof copy from the heart of Spurgeon, so these are the eight featured sermons from the first volume of the new

Park Street Pulpit, so really it's that sort of ongoing refinement in an attempt to make the most of the investment.

So with Mr. Spurgeon, why choose him, and you know, and obviously we don't idolize a man, why do you find him so helpful, that you would be willing to invest that much time in his sermons?

I think fundamentally for me, from the first time I really came across him, especially as a preacher,

I was struck by a man who knows, adores, and proclaims

God as he's made known in Jesus Christ, and when you come across men and women like that from across the ages, and especially preachers of the gospel, these men who are captured and enraptured by Jesus Christ, whatever may be the circumstantial quirks, the cultural distinctives that they have, even some of the things in which we might actually say, that's not where I would go, and that's not what

I would say, those fundamental eternal gospel realities, that's the bedrock, and even the distance in space and time can be a real help to us, because it actually engages our minds, it helps us to think, what is he saying of enduring value?

So for me it's Spurgeon, the preacher of Christ, and that giftedness has been recognized really in his own time, and really since then, here is a man who not only knows

Christ, but knows how to preach Christ, and that to me would be his enduring value.

I think it would probably have been in my early teens, even before I think maybe age 12, that my grandfather, who was a godly believer, he had been converted later in life and had found out about Spurgeon, so he began to purchase those collections of sermons that some of our listeners might be aware of, so 12 sermons on prayer, 12 sermons on evangelism, or 12 sermons on holiness, and so those were obviously compiled after Spurgeon's death, and he had a lot of those sitting on his bookshelves, and I wanted to read the guy that my grandfather was interested in.

I wasn't a believer, but I think the most significant thing that I remember from reading some of those sermons in those early years was that I described it this way.

I felt like Spurgeon threw a net over me while he was preaching, and was pulling me, particularly my conscience, and it was as if halfway through the sermon something in John jumped up and sided with Mr.

Spurgeon, and pointed back at me and said, you know he's telling the truth.

Why are you not moving forward? Why have you not embraced Christ, or why are you still living for yourself?

It was the first time, and one of the few times, that in reading or listening to sermons,

I just felt so consistently my conscience became a traitor to my selfish self, and joined

Christ against me, and so obviously that was very beneficial.

Another benefit that my family has received from Spurgeon is that our older daughter was converted through reading the old

Funk and Wagnalls 20 -volume set of Spurgeon sermons. If people have seen these, you won't necessarily remember that they were printed by Funk and Wagnall, but you will remember them by the fact that they're falling apart.

They're a brown set, hardback, and they were kind of inexpensively done, so they're always falling apart if you find an old set.

She read through all 20 volumes at about age 12, 13, and she realized that this man is speaking of the

God of the Bible. Then she read through the entire set again and was converted, and then she read through part of the set again because she was afraid maybe she deceived herself, but as she read through the set again the third time, she realized, no, this is the true gospel.

So Jeremy, with so many sermons, there are 66 volumes in the main set with the two

Park Street Chapel and the Metropolitan Tabernacle. They're 66 big volumes.

How did you choose the eight sermons that you chose for this book? Some of the criteria are a little bit more personal, a little bit more subjective.

Some of them would be more objective. There is a deliberate attempt to choose representative sermons over time.

So perhaps if I identify some of the key thrusts of Spurgeon's ministry, one of them is going to be direct evangelistic preaching, and you've identified the immediacy and the directness.

So if this is what it feels like reading this sermon at a distance of, what, 200 years, what must it have been like to have this man looking you in the eye, as it were, and speaking to you soul to soul?

So sometimes we want to represent that direct evangelistic emphasis, and that's very true, especially in his early ministry in London when he's still gathering a congregation.

Then there are other elements or other themes that I think are typically quite prominent.

One of the things that I think is reflected both in his preaching and, interestingly, in the hymn book that they eventually produced is his dependence upon the

Holy Spirit. So that would be something you'd want to reflect. There is his absolute insistence on the holiness of a true child of God.

That needs to be reflected. There's his sense of the majesty of God. That needs to be reflected.

There's his repeated exhortations to God's people to serve Christ with all that is in them.

That needs to be reflected. So as you read, if you're reading regularly, one a day or something like it, those are the things that are going to start popping out.

So you're trying, when you're choosing representative sermons, to reflect those kind of emphases, and sometimes the shifting emphases as he's facing particular battles or challenges as a pastor in his own society.

He's very good for for example, occasional sermons. If there's something big happening, he will speak to it.

So you're trying to get that included and properly represented, and sometimes it sometimes feels like there's weeks you've just got an embarrassment of riches.

I want to choose all of these. At which point, so I'm marking these sermons as I go, so sometimes

I just have to look over, which one is most marked up? Which one's that one that speaks to my soul?

Or sometimes it's very, I'm reading one, I move to tears, my soul is stirred, and I'm thinking, okay, this,

I hope that if this is useful to me, then either it's already useful to others, or I can hopefully make it useful to others by interacting with it in the podcast, and then perhaps in due course being able to publish it as well.

So there's an objective desire to give the representative sample of Spurgeon as a whole,

Spurgeon at his best, Spurgeon with his strengths, Spurgeon in context, and beyond that, sometimes it's just, hey, this one sings, let's do this one.

Yeah, I think every time I look at one of those volumes of the

Metropolitan Tabernacle series, you know, I would throw it open and just look at the titles, and some of them,

I do find myself drawn to certain types of titles, you know, and particularly his descriptions of Christ, and you just think, like you said, you just think, well,

I wish I had another 24 hours, because I don't want to leave any of them behind, and I think

Spurgeon's Christocentricity is at the heart of why so many people will read him and quote him and genuinely appreciate him, not just because he is so, you know, quotable, he's so pithy in his statements, but, you know, why do people who would not necessarily agree with all of Spurgeon's theology, why do they quote him as well?

And I think it's because genuine believers from all traditions find the common ground of, you know, it is their

Lord that's being lifted up, and it draws them again and again, and so they like to use him.

And that's the enduring value, because he's preaching the unchanging Christ. Every believer in every age who loves that Jesus is going to pick up on that element of his ministry and say, that's still my

Savior, and I still delight in him. Yeah. Now, Spurgeon did not just preach, he did an array of ministries.

You mentioned he was just indefatigable in his labors. It's astonishing to read how much he was involved in, especially, as you mentioned, he was a man who suffered from a number of health issues, some of them quite debilitating at times, and his wife suffered greatly, and he devoted, you know, a great deal of time to serving her at that, you know, during that time of life.

But there were other books that he wrote, so if you could recommend something on top of his sermons, where would you point people to begin in reading other things that Spurgeon wrote?

Yeah, as you've mentioned, Spurgeon is, you know, he is wearing himself out in the service of Christ on a number of different levels, and one of those is his writings.

So you've got the general output, the weekly sermon that was produced originally by Passmore and Alabaster, who were his publishers, alongside of that you've got, now you've mentioned some of the selections that people had made,

Spurgeon on Topic X, there were things like that in his own lifetime.

So there's a beautiful collection, The Saint and His Saviour, that was quite an early collection.

So you've got these, or Trumpet Calls to Christian Energy, or Words to the Young, so you've got these little themed selections, which

I think are superb. He did one New Testament commentary on the

Gospel of Matthew that is, it's distinctive, that I don't know many other commentaries like it, and again, it's the commentary of a man who not only knows the

Scriptures, but knows the Christ of the Scriptures, and that just sings off the page. In terms of Old Testament commentaries,

I don't know if you can even call it a commentary, but the Treasury of David, which is this voluminous study in the

Book of the Psalms, sometimes republished, you know, five, six, three volumes.

It's magnificent, and again, there are little excerpts on that, like the golden alphabet of the

Psalms, so he works through Psalm 119 as a devotional study. He did produce an autobiography that was finished off by his wife, and by his personal secretary, a wonderful godly man by the name of J.

W. Harold, I think it was. These are the, and he does,

I mean, he does these little things, you sort of think, that's just kind of a slightly weird

Victorian deal. So he's often accused of being a bit of eccentric.

He's got a book on eccentric preachers that I think is probably him finding a not very subtle way of saying, yeah, give us a break.

Some of us have, you know, have known God's blessing, even though we don't necessarily fit your mould. So he's got quite an array of things like this, that, as you mentioned, the big sermon series, the sermon selections along particular themes, some of these biblical treatments, some of these interesting historical and biographical pieces, the autobiography itself, which incidentally, a publisher like the

Banner of Truth have boiled that down into a more manageable two -volume set, the early years and the full harvest,

Spurgeon's originals, four big volumes. So there's a variety of material along various lines that, taking into account what we've said before about the fact that we're not going to pick that up and just be able to engage with him in terms of 21st century idiom and speech, even in his own time,

Spurgeon's almost deliberately old -fashioned. You know, it's not a performance, but he's almost awkwardly harking back to a previous age, and you sort of think, yeah, it's still working, but get through that, use that, make that your off -ramp, as it were, to get onto this, and it's still really refreshing.

Well, Jeremy, we've seen in Spurgeon's sermons an enduring quality.

We've experienced it ourselves, and we, you know, of course, we know so many others who have benefited from him, so surely there are lessons for a minister today that are timeless, you know, that go beyond imitating his style, and so can you point out some of those that you think are most beneficial for the man in spiritual leadership?

I think some of the particular qualities of Spurgeon as a preacher, which would be of enduring value today, one would be his manifest earnestness, yoked with his affectionate concern for his hearers.

This is a man, you feel his heart. He often actually refers to his tears as he preaches, not every time, but it's communicating again some of that immediacy.

This man loves the people he's preaching to. He wants them to be blessed, so he is not playing games.

He is by no means performing. He is a preacher of God's gospel and a preacher of righteousness.

Now again, that's not just to be mimicked, but it is to be cultivated. I think the second thing is his insistence upon the gospel, about the

Christ of the gospel as being at the heart of the whole of Christianity. He's never diverted from that.

I think again that immediacy and that directness, he doesn't talk, he certainly, first of all, doesn't talk just about true divinity.

It comes from his heart, but neither does he talk around the people in front of him. There is a directness, both of challenge and appeal and comfort, that I think is quite rare, not least in the, you often, you'll listen to him preach and you'll sort of think, oh wow, that's just peeling back the layers of my soul, and then he says now by way of application you're going, whoa, that's still to come.

So that depth and that profundity, very practically, he is clear, he is vivid, he is lively, and for boring and disorganized and dull preachers, to read a bit of Spurgeon is a wonderful and positive corrective.

He's a classic three pointer a lot of the time, but he's not bound to that. He loves illustration, sometimes a whole sermon is an illustration developed and applied.

His hermeneutic, his way of interpreting scripture is fascinating and stimulating, so I think as preachers we read him not to merely ape him, not just to mimic him, not to try and stand up and reproduce the

Spurgeonic style, that would be insane, but to learn from him how we today can preach more to the glory of God, and in the truest and best sense, more effectively to the people who are in front of us.

Yeah, I remember reading Tozer who, you know, in the 20th century, who did not have the benefit of education beyond childhood, and he mentioned in a series of comments to men who were studying for the ministry that one of the most important languages they could study would be

English. Before they worried about their Hebrew and Greek, they might want to become better equipped in English, but when he was asked, well, how do you learn to preach, you know, like in the mechanics of speaking to a group, and he said, read the greatest communicators.

We tend to learn by it kind of rubbing off on us, and as you mentioned, reading

Spurgeon, while not mimicking the Victorian style, but the elements that you just mentioned, those are timeless, and it's one thing to write down a list and say, well,

Jeremy mentioned four things. Well, that's good, but then we're not like that.

I'm not like that. I want to see someone do it, and then I think, oh, so that's what you meant, and reading

Spurgeon is one way of saying, okay, so that's direct. That's getting behind the armor of the listener for love of the listener.

Yeah, I think they sometimes say that some things are better caught than taught, and I think there's something infectious in a righteous and holy sense in Spurgeon's ministry, and reading it, although you don't get all the dimensions of watching and listening the man in full flow, you can at least stop and reflect.

There's a certain coolness, a detachment that you get. You can start, why is this hitting me like this?

Why am I able to follow the flow of his arguments? How is he doing this that I think is enduringly helpful?

Yes. Well, how can a person get involved in the Reading Spurgeon program?

Well, probably the primary way is, I'd certainly hope that people who are listening to this would want to plug into the podcast, which you can track down mediagratii .org

slash podcasts, and with regard to the Reading Spurgeon scheme, what we've done is every week, if you sign up to the newsletter, you will get both a little introduction to the sermon, and you will get the sermon itself as a link, so that if you don't have immediate access to it, or you just want a very simple way in your inbox, you'll get the introduction, you'll get a link to the sermon, you can just read along.

If you want to, you can find us at Reading Spurgeon on Twitter, now known as X, and we'll try most days of most weeks to post a few quotes from the daily sermon, so that you can get the flavor of these things and work your way along, and I'd hope too, you know, that this book would be of value, and these are meant to be your tasters, and if there's sufficient interest in this, then

God willing, we can start working through the other years. These are available through Amazon primarily, that's been the way that we've tried to do it at this point, so you can go to most of the main international

Amazon sites, you can type in, from the heart of Spurgeon, you should be able to find this book, and this is your sampler, this is the thing that you can read before bed at night, or using your devotions in the morning, and hopefully make the most of that, but the podcast, the

Twitter feed, or the X feed, the mediagratii .org podcast page, and then this, and perhaps other books in due course, would be the primary ways to plug in.

Well Jeremy, thanks for joining us, I know you're Jeremy is the pastor at Maiden Bower Baptist Church in Crawley, just south of London, right?

Correct, yes. And it's always good to have Jeremy with us, and hopefully we'll get him back in the

States again, preaching in little New Albany, Mississippi. Tell your family we said hello.

I will, and thank you to you, and to the friends at Mediagratii, to your family, and to the church friends there too.