Lectures to My Students

by Charles Haddon Spurgeon

It is our duty and our privilege to exhaust our lives for Jesus.

we are to spend and to be spent,

In the ranks, men walk shoulder to shoulder, with many comrades, but as the officer rises in rank, men of his standing are fewer in number. There are many soldiers, few captains, fewer colonels, but only one commander-in-chief. So, in our churches, the man whom the Lord raises as a leader becomes, in the same degree in which he is a superior man, a solitary man.

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This loneliness, which if I mistake not is felt by many of my brethren, is a fertile source of depression; and our ministers’ fraternal meetings, and the cultivation of holy intercourse with kindred minds will, with God’s blessing, help us greatly to escape the snare.

Such was my experience when I first became a pastor in London. My success appalled me; and the thought of the career which it seemed to open up, so far from elating me, cast me into the lowest depth, out of which I uttered my miserere and found no room for a gloria in excelsis. Who was I that I should continue to lead so great a multitude? I would betake me to my village obscurity, or emigrate to America, and find a solitary nest in the backwoods, where I might be sufficient for the things which would be demanded of me. It was just then that the curtain was rising upon my life-work, and I dreaded what it might reveal. I hope I was not faithless, but I was timorous and filled with a sense of my own unfitness. I dreaded the work which a gracious providence had prepared for me. I felt myself a mere child, and trembled as I heard the voice which said, “Arise, and thresh the mountains, and make them as chaff.” This depression comes over me whenever the Lord is preparing a larger blessing for my ministry; the cloud is black before it breaks, and overshadows before it yields its deluge of mercy. Depression has now become to me as a prophet in rough clothing, a John the Baptist, heralding the nearer coming of my Lord’s richer benison.

If it be enquired why the Valley of the Shadow of Death must so often be traversed by the servants of King Jesus, the answer is not far to find. All this is promotive of the Lord’s mode of working, which is summed up in these words: “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord.”

Be content to be nothing, for that is what you are. When your own emptiness is painfully forced upon your consciousness, chide yourself that you ever dreamed of being full, except in the Lord.

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Their very respectable, stilted, dignified, important, self-restrained manner is easily acquired; but is it worth acquiring?

the Concordance, the Pictorial Bible, Poole’s Synopsis, Matthew Henry’s Commentary, and Robinson’s Researches in Palestine. “These are the books I use,” said he to a friend; “all that is Biblical is there; I have to do with nothing besides in my Biblical study.”

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Thomson’s Land and the Book instead of Robinson’s Researches, and give up the Pictorial Bible for Kitto’s Daily Bible Illustrations;

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D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature

In reading books let your motto be, “Much, not many.”

Books are a sort of idol to some men. As the image with the Roman Catholic is intended to make him think of Christ, and in effect keeps him from Christ, so books are intended to make men think, but are often a hindrance to thought.

the most difficult book you will ever read is your own heart.

Watch the twists and turns and singularities of your own mind, and the strangeness of your own experience; the depravity of your heart, and the work of divine grace; your tendency to sin, and your capacity for holiness; how akin you are to a devil, and yet how allied to God Himself! Note how wisely you can act when taught of God, and how foolishly you behave when left to yourself.

Wise men can learn as much from a fool as from a philosopher.

the sceptic cries, “What I want is facts.” These are our facts: let us not forget to use them. A sceptic challenges me with the remark, “I cannot pin my faith to a book or a history; I want to see present facts.” My reply is, “You cannot see them, because your eyes are blinded; but the facts are there none the less. Those of us who have eyes see marvellous things, though you do not.” If he ridicules my assertion, I am not at all astonished. I expected him to do so, and should have been very much surprised if he had not done so; but I demand respect to my own position as a witness to facts, and I turn upon the objector with the enquiry—“What right have you to deny my evidence? If I were a blind man, and were told by you that you possessed a faculty called sight, I should be unreasonable if I railed at you as a conceited enthusiast. All you have a right to say is—that you know nothing about it, but you are not authorized to call us all liars or dupes. You may join with revilers of old and declare that the spiritual man is mad, but that does not disprove his statements.”

I need scarcely warn any brother here against falling into the delusion that we may have the Spirit so as to become inspired. Yet the members of a certain litigious modern sect need to be warned against this folly. They hold that their meetings are under “the presidency of the Holy Spirit”: concerning which notion I can only say that I have been unable to discover in holy Scripture either the term or the idea.

Wherein may we look for the aid of the Holy Spirit? I should reply,—in seven or eight ways.

A man’s nose is a prominent feature in his face, but it is possible to make it so large that eyes and mouth and everything else are thrown into insignificance, and the drawing is a caricature and not a portrait: so certain important doctrines of the gospel can be so proclaimed in excess as to throw the rest of truth into the shade, and the preaching is no longer the gospel in its natural beauty, but a caricature of the truth, of which caricature, however, let me say, some people seem to be mightily fond.

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I give you the motto, “Go forward.” Go forward in personal attainments, forward in gifts and in grace, forward in fitness for the work, and forward in conformity to the image of Jesus.

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart” is, perhaps, more easy to comply with, than to love Him with all our mind; yet we must give Him our mind as well as our affections, and that mind should be well furnished, that we may not offer Him an empty casket. Our ministry demands mind.

Nowadays we hear men tear a single sentence of Scripture from its connection, and cry “Eureka! Eureka!” as if they had found a new truth; and yet they have not discovered a diamond, but a piece of broken glass.

I am sure that no preaching will last so long, or build up a church so well, as the expository.

Highly cultured soul-murderers will find their boasted “culture” to be no excuse in the day of judgment.

It is time we knew what to teach, or else renounced our office. “For ever learning and never coming to the truth” is the motto of the worst rather than the best of men.

If there be any brother here who thinks he can preach as well as he should, I would advise him to leave off altogether. If he did so he would be acting as wisely as the great painter who broke his palette, and, turning to his wife, said, “My painting days are over, for I have satisfied myself, and therefore I am sure my power is gone.”

It is not enough to be so plain that you can be understood, you must speak so that you cannot be misunderstood.

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There are preachers who in their sermons seem to take their hearers one by one by the button-hole, and drive the truth right into their souls, while others generalise so much, and are so cold withal, that one would think they were speaking of dwellers in some remote planet, whose affairs did not much concern them.

We cannot do other than plead with them to be reconciled to God.

mark those who woo sinners to Jesus, find out their secret, and never rest till you obtain the same power.

“This is not the thing for me, for I am not seeking to be great, but to be really useful.”

His language was equally plain in each case, because it was equally familiar to the audience:

In our modes of speech we should aim at being “all things to all men.”

Resolve, dear brethren, that you can be poor, that you can be despised, that you can lose life itself, but that you cannot do a crooked thing. For you, let the only policy be honesty.

I thank God I can say this, there is no member of my church, no officer of the church, and no man in the world to whom I am afraid to say before his face what I would say behind his back.

Be consumed with love for Christ, and let the flame burn continuously, not flaming up at public meetings and dying out in the routine work of every day. We need indomitable perseverance, dogged resolution, and a combination of sacred obstinacy, self-denial, holy gentleness, and invincible courage. Excel also in one power, which is both mental and moral, namely, the power of concentrating all your forces upon the work to which you are called. Collect your thoughts, rally all your faculties, mass your energies, focus your capacities. Turn all the springs of your soul into one channel, causing it to flow onward in an undivided stream.

Do not try to be great at this and great at that—to be “everything by turns, and nothing long”; but suffer your entire nature to be led in captivity by Jesus Christ, and lay everything at His dear feet who bled and died for you.

Other things are precious, but this is priceless; we must be rich towards God. We need to know ourselves. The preacher should be great in the science of the heart, the philosophy of inward experience.

Martin Luther used to say that temptation is the best teacher for a minister. There is truth on that side of the question.

Do not be afraid of becoming too holy. Do not be afraid of being too full of the Holy Spirit.

Know where Adam left you; know where the Spirit of God has placed you.

Brethren, know man in Christ, and out of Christ. Study him at his best, and study him at his worst; know his anatomy, his secrets, and his passions. You cannot do this by books; you must have personal spiritual experience; God alone can give you that.

They say in Italy that where the sun does not enter the physician must. Where Jesus does not shine the soul is sick.

The notion of holy places and consecrated meeting-houses had not occurred to them as Christians; they preached in the temple because it was the chief place of concourse, but with equal earnestness “in every house they ceased not to teach and preach Jesus Christ.”

It is most interesting to observe that congregational singing is sure to revive at the same moment as gospel-preaching.

Not only must something be done to evangelize the millions, but everything must be done, and perhaps amid variety of effort the best thing would be discovered.

“If by any means I may save some” must be our motto, and this must urge us onward to go forth into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in.

The great benefit of open-air preaching is that we get so many new-comers to hear the gospel who otherwise would never hear it. The gospel command is, “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature,” but it is so little obeyed that one would imagine that it ran thus, “Go into your own place of worship and preach the gospel to the few creatures who will come inside.”