Shepherding with Spurgeon

Weekly Newsletter for Pastors from SpurgeonBooks

ENCOURAGEMENT FOR PASTORS (BY SPURGEON)

Stars are guides and so are the Lord’s true ministers. Some stars in the sky have done measureless service to wanderers over the trackless deep and to those who have lost themselves in the labyrinths of the forest. The North Star has led many a slave to liberty. Happy have been the influences of the stars upon the hopeless who, being lost, have laid themselves down to die! Blessed are those men who, shining with the light of God, have turned many to righteousness; shall they not shine as the stars forever and ever? Are there not preachers of the Word who have stood like that famous star “above the place where the child was” (Matthew 2:9)? They have first led strangers to Jesus, and then have remained in faithful love shining over the place where the Lord abides.

SERMON ILLUSTRATION FROM SPURGEON

Spurgeon was a master illustrator. You can use this illustration in your own preaching to describe Christ coming at the perfect time (Galatians 4:4).

There is a measure of reason in appointing the age of twenty-one as the entrance into adulthood, for then a person is mature and full-grown. It would be unwise to make a person to be of age while only ten, eleven, or twelve; everybody would see that such childish years would be unsuitable. On the other hand, if we were detained from being of age until we were thirty, everyone would see that it was a needless and arbitrary postponement.

Now, if we were wise enough, we would see that the church of God could not have endured gospel light earlier than the day of Christ’s coming; neither would it have been well to keep her in gloom beyond that time. There was a fitness about the date that we cannot fully understand because we do not have the means of forming so decided an estimate of the life of a church as of the life of a man

ONE MORE REMINDER: PREACH JESUS THIS WEEKEND

“That which glorifies Christ the most of all is the preaching of the gospel to sinners.” — Charles Spurgeon