Shepherding with Spurgeon

Weekly Newsletter for Pastors from SpurgeonBooks

ENCOURAGEMENT FOR PASTORS (BY SPURGEON)

I am struck with astonishment as I think how many sermons are preached, how many Sunday-school addresses are given, how many religious books are written of which you are quite sure that the intention was not immediate conversion. It is thought that in some unknown way these good things may accidentally contribute to men’s salvation, but they are not aimed at as their present object.

Ah, brother, if you want men to come to Christ you must preach Christ to them with all your heart, with this design, that immediately they may close in with Christ, and at once give their hearts to Jesus. Yes, and you are to pray that they may do so through the present effort which you are making for their good. There is the target, and if you continue to shoot into the air long enough an arrow may perhaps strike it; but, man alive, if you want to win the prize of archery you had better fix your eye upon the white and take your aim distinctly and with skill. If an individual would win souls he must bend his whole soul to it and make it the object of his whole energy.

SERMON ILLUSTRATION FROM SPURGEON

Spurgeon was a master illustrator. You can use this illustration in your own preaching to describe the danger of the love of money.

Man, continuing in sin, becomes fixed in its habit. Only the other day I read of a great millionaire in New York who once was weak enough to resolve to give a beggar a penny. He had grown old in covetousness, and he remembered himself just as he was about to bestow the gift, and said, “I would like to give you the penny, but you see I would have to lose the interest of it forever, and I could not afford that.”

Habit grows on a man. Everybody knows that when he has been making money, if he indulges the propensity to acquire, it will become a perfectly tyrannical master, ruling his entire being. Hence the reason why sin being in the nature, and secondly, coming upon us in the use and the habit, and thirdly, being in itself a thing that naturally clings to us and gets a dominancy over us, it is written within us as with the point of a diamond.

ONE MORE REMINDER: PREACH JESUS THIS WEEKEND

“What shall I say to young men who are about to enter the ministry that shall be more useful to them than this? Keep to the cross; keep to the cross!” — Charles Spurgeon