Shepherding with Spurgeon

Weekly Newsletter for Pastors from SpurgeonBooks

ENCOURAGEMENT FOR PASTORS (BY SPURGEON)

It is infamous to ascend your pulpit and pour over your people rivers of language, cataracts of words, in which mere platitudes are held in solution like infinitesimal grains of medicine in an Atlantic of utterance. Better far give the people masses of unprepared truth in the rough, like pieces of meat from a butcher’s block, chopped off anyhow, bone and all, and even dropped down in the sawdust, than ostentatiously and delicately hand them out upon a china dish a delicious slice of nothing at all, decorated with the parsley of poetry, and flavored with the sauce of affectation.

SERMON ILLUSTRATION FROM SPURGEON

Spurgeon was a master illustrator. You can use this illustration in your own preaching to describe the believer's desire to be with Christ.

We are necessarily abroad through the day, looking after this or that work which needs attention, but the moment we are at liberty, we know where our nest is. It is with the hearts of many of us as it is with the needle in the mariner’s compass. Do you see it? It is pointing to the pole. If you will, you may put your finger on that needle, and turn it round. It points east now; yes, you turn it round till it points south; but take your finger off, it is back at once to its true pole; so is it with our hearts. Our hearts are with Christ on his throne, always magnetized and polarized for Christ, and we shall never rest until we get back to him. He is in our first thoughts in the morning, and our last meditations at night.

ONE MORE REMINDER: PREACH JESUS THIS WEEKEND

“Do not preach about the gospel, but preach the gospel—the full, free, glorious gospel of the living Christ who is the incarnation of the good news.” — Charles Spurgeon