C.H. Spurgeon (1834 - 1892)

View images and photos of the speaker C.H. Spurgeon. Spurgeon quickly became known as one of the most influential preachers of his time. Well known for his biblical powerful expositions of scripture and oratory ability. In modern evangelical circles he is stated to be the "Prince of Preachers." He pastored the Metropolitan Tabernacle in downtown London, England.

His church was part of a particular baptist church movement and they defended and preached Christ and Him crucified and the purity of the Gospel message. Spurgeon never gave altar calls but always extended the invitation to come to Christ. He was a faithful minister in his time that glorified God and brought many to the living Christ.

	C.H. Spurgeon 7 Description: This Gospel preaching is to display the very heart of God who freely calls sinners to come to Himself. Ho! Everyone who thirsts, Come to the waters; And you who have no money, Come, buy and eat. Yes, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend money for what is not bread, and your wages for what does not satisfy? Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, and let your soul delight itself in abundance. Is. 55:1 ff. It ought to demonstrate through Christs representative the hearty offer of Jesus Himself who cried, Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Matt. 11:28. Such preaching should be marked by such apostolic fervor that it can say boldly, truthfully, and freely, Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you (i.e. we beg you) on Christs behalf, be reconciled to God. 2 Cor. 5:20. And none of this zeal for a Gospel freely offered to sinners should be hindered by our commitment to Calvinism; indeed our belief that God does, indeed, have an elect whom He will save by the ministry of the Word should be the great spur to our evangelistic energies.
	C.H. Spurgeon 8 Description: As in so many other areas, Charles Spurgeon provides a model that is rich with insight for and application to our own day. Spurgeon, The Prince of Preachers, was always The Prince of Evangelistic Preachers. In sermons that were second to none in doctrinal content, often including lines and phrases that were bodies of divinity in miniature, Spurgeon never neglected pointed, personal, and passionate calls for his hearers to trust in Christ Jesus alone for salvation.
	C.H. Spurgeon 9 Description: God grant that there may be no...postponing here, lest we postpone ourselves into eternity, where there are no acts of pardon past. May we have Christ now. We may not live to see tomorrows sun. Albeit that the sun is well-nigh gone down, yet the light of this evening may not have gone before our life may be ended. How near to death we stand, and yet we scarcely think of it! Right on the edge of our graves sometimes we are, and yet we sport and laugh as though we had a lease of life! You forget death, most of you. The cemetery is so far out of town, but still you should not quite forget, for the hearse goes to and fro with awful regularity, and the church bell that tolls is not rusty, and those words, Earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes are still familiar to the ears of some of us. It will soon be your turn to die. You, too, must gather up your feet in the bed, and meet your fathers God; God grant that you may be found right with him. Little do I know for whom these sentences may have a special bearing; but they may have a bearing, dear friend, upon you. I see some of you dressed in black; you have had to go to the grave mourning because of others: that black will be worn by others soon for you, and the place that now knows you shall know you no more for ever. Oh! by the frailty of life, by the near approach of the Master, or by the certainty of death, I pray you see to it that you breathe the prayer, Lord, give me of thy grace. The Lord help you to pray it. Amen.
	C.H. Spurgeon book cover Description: Spurgeons evangelistic calls appeared at some point in every sermon. Like lightning that strikes in various places during a strong summer storm, Spurgeons appeals to those who were unconverted or undecided with respect to Christ and the Gospel came at various places in his powerful sermons: sometimes in the introduction, periodically in the various points of his messages, and very often at the conclusion. This master preacher seemed to study to avoid sameness in both the place and manner of his evangelistic applications. As a fisher of men he cast his net thoughtfully and drew it in, always anticipating a catch. And, following his own dictum that genuine love to God and fervent love to man make up the great qualification for a pleader, Spurgeons appeals were marked by a tender earnestness that could not help but bring the compassion of God to a congregation through the heart, mind, and energies of the preacher. In this excerpt from a sermon appropriately entitled Earnest Expostulation, based on Romans 2:4 (Or do you despise the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?), one can feel the influence of a minister who has pleaded with God for sinners before he pleads with sinners for God.
	C.H. Spurgeon close up in Chair Description: Weary, but not quite wearied out, O impenitent man, I plead with thee! Though thou hast so often been pleaded with in vain, once more I speak with thee in Christs stead, and sayRepent of thy sin, look to thy Saviour, and confess thy faith in his own appointed way. I verily believe that if I had been pleading with some of you to save the life of a dog I should have prevailed with you a great while ago. And will you not care about the saving of your own souls? Oh, strange infatuationthat men will not consent to be themselves saved; but foolishly, madly, hold out against the mercy of God which leads them to repentance. God bless you, beloved, and may none of you despise his goodness, and forbearance, and longsuffering.
	C.H. Spurgeon close up. Description: Unlike evangelistic preachers who fall into the trap of Arminianism, Spurgeon is clear that only the sovereign grace of God can truly bring a soul to faith in Christ. Yet, at the same time, he makes memorable use of the full range of motivations to call these souls to decision, e.g., the inevitability of death, the brevity and unpredictability of life, the return of Christ. How much this is like the wise father who tells both biological and spiritual children, Do not boast about tomorrow, For you do not know what a day may bring forth (Prov. 27:1); and how well this conforms to the apostolic model of an urgent messenger imbued with the truth that we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad, and as a ministerial outflow can say, Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord, we persuade men (2 Cor. 5:10 ff.). Reformed ministers today who rightly stand against the manipulative techniques of evangelism based on flawed and erroneous views of the human will should ask themselves if, in throwing out the dirty bath water of Arminianism, they have also thrown out the baby of genuine biblical urgency in pleading with the lost. Spurgeon surely did not!
	C.H. Spurgeon Illustration Description: The great British Calvinistic Baptist was possessed of the Spirit of His Lord who, on the one hand could say, No one can [i.e., has the ability to] come to me unless the Father...draws him (John 6:44) while he has already said in virtually the same breath, All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out (John 6:37). Such freedom in declaring all that God has said with respect to Gods sovereignty in salvation and the free offer of the Gospel should mark our preaching as well. And the declarations should come with the loving, earnest passion that marked our Saviour. Nothing less befits the minister who, in word, conduct, and spirit, is set apart to an office that represents the great Saviour of sinners, cf. 2 Cor. 5:20.
	C.H. Spurgeon in a chair. Description: Many divines say that Christ did something when he died that enabled God to be just, and yet the Justifier of the ungodly. What that something is they do not tell us. They believe in an atonement made for everybody; but then their atonement is just this. They believe that Judas was atoned for just as much as Peter; they believe that the damned in hell were as much an object of Jesus Christs satisfaction as the saved in heaven; and though they do not say it in proper words, yet they must mean it, for it is a fair inference, that in the case of the multitudes, Christ died in vain, for he died for them all, they say; and yet so ineffectual was his dying for them, that though he died for them they are damned afterwards. Now such an atonement I despiseI reject it.
	C.H. Spurgeon in His Early Ministry Years Description: In this as with every other aspect of the person and work of Christ that Spurgeon so faithfully expounded for so many years there is an inevitable turning of the doctrine into something that pertains to the actual salvation of sinners. This is the heart of Spurgeons power as an evangelistic preacher. It is the reason for the continuing popularity of his sermons as both models for preachers and as rich spiritual food for readers. One cannot read a sermon of Charles Spurgeon without coming away with a fresh, lively, sincere, and heart-affecting presentation of Jesus Christ who came into the world to save sinners. For that reason, alone, Spurgeons sermons provide a priceless treasury for us. How often our preaching is anemic because it suffers from a Christ-deficiency. Reading Spurgeon will revitalize your ministerial blood!
	C.H. Spurgeon in Study Description: I say to you, Jesus Christ stands like a great flowing fountain in the corners of the street, and he inviteth every thirsty soul to come and drink. You need not stop and say, Am I thirsty enough? Am I black enough?... Come as you are! Come as you are! Every fitness is legality; every preparation is a lie; every getting ready for Christ is coming the wrong way. You are only making yourselves worse while you think you are making yourselves better.... Come as you are! If you are the blackest soul out of hell, trust Christ, and that act of trust shall make you clean. This seems a simple thing, and yet it is the hardest thing in the world to bring you to it; so hard a thing that all the preachers that ever preached cannot make a man believe in Christ. Though we put it as plainly as we can, and plead with you, you only go away and say, It is too good to be true! or else you despise it because it is so simple; for the Gospel, like Christ, is despised and rejected of men, because it has no form and comeliness and no beauty in it that you should desire it.
	C.H. Spurgeon in the pulpit Description: Spurgeon truly believed that earnest evangelistic appeals that grew out of the person and work of Christ would be effective for the salvation of sinners. With his own inimitable humor (which in no small measure contributes to the delight in reading Spurgeons various works), Spurgeon lampoons the kind of preaching that possesses little or no passion for the conversion of the lost: There are sermons of such a kind that, unless God takes to ripening wheat by means of snow and ice, and begins to illuminate the world by fogs and clouds, He cannot save souls under them. Why the preacher himself evidently does not think that anybody will be converted by them! If a hundred persons or of half a dozen were converted by them, nobody would be so astonished as the preacher himself
	C.H. Spurgeon's Church Description: Within a few years of his 1854 debut as the young pastor of london park street chapel, the plain-speaking charles Haddon Spurgeon packed that city's crystal palace with 30,000 eager listeners.
	Chopping Tree Description: IN THESE DAYS a simple, childlike faith is very rare; but the usual thing is to believe nothing, and question everything. Doubts are as plentiful as blackberries, and all hands and lips are stained with them. To me it seems very strange that men should hunt up difficulties as to their own salvation. If I were doomed to die, and I had a hint of mercy, I am sure I should not set my wits to work to find out reasons why I should not be pardoned. I could leave my enemies to do that: I should be on the look-out in a very different direction. If I were drowning, I should sooner catch at a straw than push a life-belt away from me. To reason against one's own life is a sort of constructive suicide of which only a drunken man would be guilty. To argue against your only hope is like a foolish man sitting on a bough, and chopping it away so as to let himself down. Who but an idiot would do that? Yet many appear to be special pleaders for their own ruin. They hunt the Bible through for threatening texts; and when they have done with that, they turn to reason, and philosophy, and skepticism, in order to shut the door in their own faces. Surely this is poor employment for a sensible man.
	Christian Hall of Fame series booklet Description: He is the best speaker who can turn ears into eyes. This ancient Arabic proverb offers wise advice to all speakers, and particularly to those who are called to proclaim the Gospel of everlasting life and peace. Our preeminent model is the Master Speaker himself, who used beautiful field lilies and finely plumed birds to illustrate the perfect care of our Father in Heaven. In His perfect mouth a widows mites became unforgettable lessons in giving, and the hairs of our head (however many or few!) abide as silent teachers of the sovereignty of God.
	Dead yet he speaketh. Description: EVEN if we cannot hear the living voice of Spurgeon ringing out from the pulpit of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, we are at least able to read his sermons and commentaries and other writings to enjoy the fruits of his wonderful ministry. The Spurgeon tracts are a reminder of how the Holy Spirit used this great preacher to declare the life-giving Gospel of Jesus Christ for the edification and spiritual good of so many.