Shepherding with Spurgeon

Weekly Newsletter for Pastors from SpurgeonBooks

ENCOURAGEMENT FOR PASTORS (BY SPURGEON)

You must remember that we have need of very vigorous piety, because our danger is so much greater than that of others. Upon the whole, no place is so assailed with temptation as the ministry. Despite the popular idea that ours is a snug retreat from temptation, it is no less true that our dangers are more numerous and more insidious than those of ordinary Christians. Ours may be a vantage-ground for height, but that height is perilous, and to many the ministry has proved a Tarpeian rock (a famed clifftop execution site in Ancient Rome).

If you ask what these temptations are, time might fail us to list them; but among them are both the coarser and the more refined; the coarser are such temptations as self-indulgence at the table, enticements to which are superabundant among a hospitable people; the temptations of the flesh, which are incessant with young unmarried men set on high among an admiring throng of young women: but enough of this, your own observation will soon reveal to you a thousand snares, unless indeed your eyes are blinded.

SERMON ILLUSTRATION FROM SPURGEON

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

You have a tame leopard in your house, and you are often warned that it is a dangerous creature to trifle with. But its coat is so sleek and beautiful, and its gambols are so gentle that you let it play with the children as though it were the well-domesticated cat. You cannot have it in your heart to put it away; you tolerate it; indeed, you indulge it still. Alas, one black and terrible day it tastes blood and tears to pieces your favorite child. Then you know its nature and need no further warning; it has condemned itself by displaying the fell ferocity of its nature.

So with sin. We thought it such a fair thing; we could not be persuaded that anything so pleasant, so fair spoken, could really be so deadly an enemy as God said it was. But when sin leaped upon our altogether lovely Jesus, and like a ravening wolf delighted itself in his slaughter, then it condemned itself most effectually.

ONE MORE REMINDER: PREACH JESUS THIS WEEKEND

“A sermon without Christ in it is like a loaf of bread without any flour in it.” — Charles Spurgeon