Shepherding with Spurgeon

Weekly Newsletter for Pastors from SpurgeonBooks

ENCOURAGEMENT FOR PASTORS (BY SPURGEON)

Too many ministers are like the signposts on country roads; they hold out their hands and point the way but never walk the road themselves. They, like the posts, still stand where they always did. God, deliver us from being signposts on the road to heaven and not going there ourselves!

The builder uses many poles that are not part of the permanent building, but as soon as the house is up, down goes the scaffolding. So God may permit us to be scaffolding for his church, and when that church is completed he may take us down, and we may be consumed in the fire. May the Lord grant that this may never be so with any one of us.

Deacons and elders of churches, the same may be said of you! If while bearing the vessels of the Lord, you are not clean—have not been washed in the great basin of the Savior’s atonement—remember that this bearing the Lord’s vessels will not save you. Just as the carrying of bread and meat by the ravens did not put them in the list of clean birds, but left them unclean still.

SERMON ILLUSTRATION FROM SPURGEON

Spurgeon was a master illustrator. You can use this illustration in your own preaching to describe the importance of seeking change from the heart.

it would be of little use for our water companies to keep their reservoirs full, if they did not also keep them pure. I remember to have read a complaint in the newspaper of a certain provincial town, that a tradesman had been frequently supplied with fish from the water company, large eels having crept down the pipe, and sometimes creatures a little more loathsome. We have known such a thing as water companies supplying us with solids when they ought to have given us nothing but pure crystal. Now, no one likes that. The reservoir should be kept pure and clean; and unless the water comes from a pure spring, and is not impregnated with deleterious substances, however full the reservoir may be, the company will fail of satisfying or of benefitting its customers. Now it is essential for us to do with our hearts as the company must do with its reservoir. We must keep our hearts pure; for if the heart be not pure, the life cannot be pure. It is quite impossible that it should be so.

ONE MORE REMINDER: PREACH JESUS THIS WEEKEND

“Whatever subjects I may be called to preach, I feel it to be a duty which I dare not neglect to be continually going back to the doctrine of the cross.” — Charles Spurgeon