The Puritan Heritage of SpurgeonThe life of Spurgeon is a constant testimony to the Puritan legacy and its influence in his service to Christ. Due to rather stringent economic conditions, at eighteen months of age Charles was sent north to live with his grandparents in Stanbourne, Essex, northeast of London. The grandfather, James, was a staunch congregational Puritan pastor. At the age of six, little Charles one day happened into an old musty room in the manse at Stanbourne. The room exuded the odor of old leather-bound theological volumes. Most six-year-olds would have executed a hasty exit. But not Charles; he thought he had discovered a gold mine. Being already well able to read, he delved into the new-found treasure and picked up a copy of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. It fascinated him—actually, he read it over one hundred times during his life. The Bunyan classic became something of the Puritan pattern for his own spiritual pilgrimage. That was the atmosphere in which Charles’s early spiritual experience took place. Therefore, it is understandable why at the age of fifteen Charles was deeply under the conviction of sin and desperately seeking salvation. His conversion story, which he loved to share in his preaching, was typical of the Puritan approach. His search for Christ culminated one Sunday, January 1850, in a little primitive Methodist church in Colchester. An illiterate preacher looked at him and said, “Young man, look to Jesus.” Spurgeon said, “I looked and I lived.” It was a very dramatic experience and set him on the Puritan quest for biblical knowledge and ultimately to biblical preaching.
Four years later, at the age of nineteen, after a two-year pastorate in Waterbeach near Cambridge, Charles Spurgeon was called as a minister of the historic and prestigious New Park Baptist Church in Southwark, South London. John Rippon, Benjamin Keach, and theologian John Gill had been his illustrious predecessors at this significant church. So the “boy preacher” began his London ministry of nearly four decades. His first sermon at the New Park Street Church was heard by a mere eighty people. In six months, two thousand were being crammed into the old church building, while up to one thousand a Sunday were being turned away unable to get in. Soon the Metropolitan Tabernacle was constructed and Spurgeon preached to six thousand worshipers every Lord’s day. It became the largest evangelical congregation in the world at its time. Although Spurgeon died in Mentone, France at the relatively young age of fifty-seven, the world has rarely seen a more productive, theologically-oriented pulpit ministry. Not only that, he started over twenty different social and evangelistic ministries through his great church. Two hundred new congregations emerged out of the ministry. The Pastor’s College, which continues to this day, has trained thousands of men and women for ministry. The Stokwell Orphanage also carries on. Above all, the personal appeal of Spurgeon’s writings and pulpit style blesses multitudes to the present hour. Permeating it all was his Puritan legacy. If Spurgeon was not “The Last of the Puritans,” he certainly was one of the best.
The Preaching Style of SpurgeonNot only was Spurgeon deeply involved and immersed in Puritan theology and the necessity of a conversion experience, but his preaching effectiveness is almost unparalleled in the history of Christianity. His style was extemporaneous. He prepared his Sunday morning sermon on Saturday night and his Sunday evening sermon on Sunday afternoon. Yet, as one reads the sermons today, the eloquence, use of words, and the fervency that pulsates in every paragraph is quite phenomenal.
Perhaps the secret of Spurgeon’s power in the pulpit was his deep, profound commitment to evangelistic preaching. He said, “The revealed word awakened me; but it was the preached word that saved me; I now think I am bound never to preach a sermon without preaching to sinners. I think that a minister who can preach a sermon without addressing sinners does not know how to preach.” He went so far as to say in the Sportsman near the end of his days in September 1890, “The ordinary sermon should always be evangelistic.”
Spurgeon was also tremendously sensitive to the absolute necessity of the work of the Holy Spirit in his pulpit style and ministry. He constantly affirmed, in the traditional Puritan fashion, the absolute necessity of God’s sovereign act in effecting personal redemption. Therefore, he was a constant seeker for the mighty moving of the Holy Spirit to come upon the preaching of the Word so as to bring people to Christ. Spurgeon saw that outpouring of power. Revival came to the New Park Street almost simultaneously with his arrival in London. Actually, Spurgeon was something of a harbinger of the Prayer Revival of 1858, which reached all of Britain by 1860 after its inception in America.
No biographer, except Eric W. Hayden, has seen the full extent of the revival principle in the pulpit ministry of Charles Spurgeon. Often his success is explained merely on the grounds that he was a great preacher and social worker. But great preaching and ministry alone simply cannot explain the Spurgeon phenomenon. Spurgeon recognized it and said, “The times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord have at last dawned upon our land. There are signs of aroused activity in increased earnestness. A spirit of prayer is visiting our churches, and in its path is dropping fatness.” The awakening surrounding Spurgeon’s ministry was so profoundly deepened that for three years there were over one thousand people every Sunday turned away from the ten-thousand-seat-capacity Surrey Gardens Music Hall, where he preached to a packed building before the construction of the Metropolitan Tabernacle building.
Many things could be said about Spurgeon’s preaching style, but perhaps central to it all was the fact that he was absolutely committed to the full authority of the Scriptures. The admonition to “preach the word” was taken with dead seriousness by the London preacher. He would take his text and elucidate it from every perspective. He certainly fulfilled the mandate of the Bible itself to be a proclaimer of the Word. This is so central to the preaching ministry of Spurgeon, and that is what gives it its lasting effect. It is true, he had a marvelous flow of words and an eloquence that parallels even that of Shakespeare. Further, he had a deep, rich resonant voice that vibrated with the warmth of his own heart. Yet it was his preaching of the Word of God and his delineating of Scriptures to people that give Spurgeon his tremendous lasting effect. He can be read to this day with much profit.
Lewis A. Drummond
