Shepherding with Spurgeon

Weekly Newsletter for Pastors from SpurgeonBooks

ENCOURAGEMENT FOR PASTORS (BY SPURGEON)

Our matter should be well-arranged according to the true rules of mental architecture. Not practical inferences at the basis and doctrines as the topstones; not metaphors in the foundations and propositions at the summit; not the more important truths first and the minor teachings last, after the manner of an anticlimax; but the thought must climb and ascend; one stair of teaching leading to another; one door of reasoning conducting to another, and the whole elevating the hearer to a chamber from whose windows truth is seen gleaming in the light of God.

In preaching, have a place for everything, and everything in its place. Never suffer truths to fall from you pell-mell. Do not let your thoughts rush as a mob, but make them march as a troop of soldiery. Order, which is heaven’s first law, must not be neglected by heaven’s ambassadors.

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.

RESOURCE FOR PASTORS

Make 2025 a Year in the Word

If you’re a parent, your kids don’t need watered-down, childish Bible stories — they need all of Scripture, unfiltered. Because the Bible isn’t like any other book; it’s the living and active Word of God. We need it… and our kids do too!

Let’s stop underestimating our kids. And even more urgently, let’s stop underestimating God’s Word.

Let’s make a plan for EVERYONE in our homes to hear more Bible in 2025.

Every December, I challenge parents to make a simple New Years Resolution — read the Bible to your kids EVERY DAY in 2025.

To effectively disciple your kids, you don’t need anything more than an open Bible and the discipline to cultivate a new habit.

Find resources (free and paid) to help you actually make family devotions a daily habit in the new year right here.

ONE MORE REMINDER: PREACH JESUS THIS WEEKEND

“Others might preach the gospel better than I do, but they could not preach a better gospel.” — Charles Spurgeon