Lectures to My Students: Addresses Delivered to the Students of the Pastors' College, Metropolitan Tabernacle

by Charles Haddon Spurgeon

We have noticed in the churches of Holland, that as soon as the minister begins to preach every man puts his hat on, but the instant he turns to pray everybody takes his hat off: this was the custom in the older Puritan congregations of England, and it lingered long among the Baptists; they wore their caps during those parts of the service which they conceived were not direct

worship, but put them off as soon as there was a direct approach to God, either in song or in prayer. I think the practice unseemly, and the reason for it erroneous. I have urged that the distinction between prayer and hearing is not great, and I feel sure no one would propose to return to the old custom of the opinion of which it was the index; but still there is a difference, and inasmuch as in prayer we are more directly talking with God rather than seeking the edification of our fellow men, we must put our shoes from off our feet, for the place whereon we stand is holy ground.

Let the Lord alone be the object of your prayers. Beware of having an eye to the auditors; beware of becoming rhetorical to please the listeners. Prayer must not be transformed into “an oblique sermon.” It is little short of blasphemy to make devotion an occasion for display. Fine prayers are generally very wicked prayers. In the presence of the Lord of hosts it ill becomes a sinner to parade the feathers and finery of tawdry speech with the view of winning applause from his fellow mortals. Hypocrites who dare to do this have their reward, but it is one to be dreaded. A heavy sentence of condemnation was passed upon a minister when it was flatteringly said that his prayer was the most eloquent ever offered to a Boston congregation. We may aim at exciting the yearnings and aspirations of those who hear us in prayer; but every word and thought must be Godward, and only s...

Avoid all vulgarities ...

Choice words are for the King of kings, not such as ribald tongues have defiled.

Another fault equally to be avoided in prayer is an unhallowed and sickening superabundance of endearing words.

When “Dear Lord,” and “Blessed Lord,” and “Sweet Lord,” come over and over again as vain repetitions, the...

I must confess I should feel no revulsion in my mind to the words, “Dear Jesus,” if they fell from the lips of a Rutherford, or a Hawker, or a Herbert; but when I hear fond and familiar expressions hackneyed by persons not at all remarkable for spirituality, I am inclined to wish that they could, in some way or other, come to a better understanding of the true relation existing between man and God. The word “dear” has come from daily use to be so common, and so sma...

The strongest objection exists to the constant repetition of the word “Lord,” which occurs in the early prayers of young converts, and even among students. The words, “O Lord! O Lord! O Lord!” grieve us when we hear them so perpetually repeated. “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,” is a great commandment, and although the law may be broken unwittingly, yet its breach is still a sin and a very solemn one. God’s name is not to be a stop-gap to make up for our want of words. Take care to use most reverently the name of the infinite Jehovah. The Jews in their sacred writings either leave a space for the word “Jehovah,” or else write the word, “Adonai,” because they conceive that holy name to be too sacred for common use; ...

Avoid that kind of prayer which may be called—though the subject is one on which language has not given us many terms—a s...

Remember, it is still a man wrestling, even though permitted to wrestle, with the eternal I AM. Jacob halted on his thigh after that night’s holy conflict, to let

him see that God is terrible, and that his prevailing power did not lie in himself. We are taught to say, “Our Father,” but still it is, “Our Father who art in heaven.”

Familiarity there may be, but holy familiarity; boldness, but the boldness which springs from grace and is the work of the Spirit; not the boldness of the rebel who carries a brazen front in the presence of his offended king, but the boldness of...

Humble and lowly let us be in spirit, and so let us pray.

Pray when you profess to pray, and don’t talk about it.

Why do not men go at once to prayer—why stand beating about the bush; instead of saying what they ought to do and want to do, why not set to work in God’s name and do it?

Pray for your people as saints and sinners—not as if they were all saints.

Let your confessions of sin and your thanksgivings be truthful and to the point; and let your petitions be presented as if you believed in God and had no doubt as to the efficacy of prayer: I say this, because so many pray in such a formal manner as to lead observers to conclude that they thought it a very decent thing to pray, but, after all, a very poor and doubtful business as to any practical result.

Pray as one who has tried and proved his God, and therefore comes with undoubting confidence to renew his pleadings: and do remember to pray to God right through the prayer, and never fall to talking or preaching—much less, as some do, to scolding and grumbling.

As a rule, if called upon to preach, conduct the prayer yourself; and if you should be highly esteemed in the ministry, as I trust you may be, make a point, with great courtesy, but equal firmness, to resist the practice of choosing men to pr...

There must be no putting up of any-bodies and no-bodies to pray, and then the selection of the abler man to preach.

If you delegate the service at all, let it be to one in whose spirituality and present preparedness

you have the fullest confidence; but to pitch on a giftless brother unawares, and put him forward to get through the devotions is shameful.

Appoint the ablest man to pray, and let the sermon be slurred sooner than the approach to heaven.

Thus much I have said in order to impress upon you that you must highly esteem public prayer, and seek of the Lord for the gifts and graces necessary to its right discharge.

In order to make our public prayer what it should be, the first necessary is, that it must be a matter of the heart.

A man must be really in earnest in supplication. It must be true prayer, and if it be such, it will, like love, cover a multitude of sins. You can pardon a man’s familiarities and his vulgarities too, when you clearly see that his inmost heart is speaking to his Maker, and that it is only the man’s defects of education which create his faults, and not any moral or spiritual vices of his heart.

Cast your whole soul into the exercise.

If ever your whole manhood was engaged in anything, let it be in drawing near unto God in public.

So pray that, by a divine attraction, you draw the whole congregation with you ...

So pray, that by the power of the Holy Spirit resting on you, you express the desires and thoughts of every one present, and stand as the one voice for the hundreds of beating hearts whic...

Next to this, our prayers must be...

As I have said before, there is no need to make the public prayer a gazette of the week’s events, or a register of the births, deaths, and marriages of your people, but the general movements that have taken place in the congregation should be noted by the minister’s careful heart.

Then, by way of negative canon, I should say, do not let your prayer be long. I think it was John Macdonald who used to say, “If you are in the spirit of prayer, do not be long, because other people will not be able to keep pace with you in such unusual spirituality; and if you are not in the spirit of prayer, do not be long, because you will then be sure to weary the listeners.”

Livingstone says of Robert Bruce, of Edinburgh, the famous cotemporary of Andrew Melville, “No man in his time spoke with such evidence and power of the Spirit. No man had so many seals of conversion; yea, many of his hearers thought no man, since the apostles, spoke with such power. . . He was very short in prayer when others were present, but every sentence was like a strong bolt shot up to heaven. I heard him say that he wearied when others were long in prayer; but, being alone, he spent much time in wrestling and prayer.”

My friend, Dr. Charles Brown, of Edinburgh, lays it down, as a result of his deliberate judgment, that ten minutes is the limit to which public prayer ought to be prolonged.

You cannot pray too long in private.

We do not limit you to ten minutes there, or ten hours, or ten weeks if you like. The more you are on your knees alone the better. We are now speaking of those public prayers which come before or after the sermon, and for these ten minutes is a better limit than fifteen. Only one in a thousand would complain of you for being too short, while scores will murmur at your being wearisome in length.

Do not be too long, for several reasons. First, because you weary yourselves and the people; and secondly, because being too long in prayer, puts your people out of heart for hearing the sermon. All those dry, dull, prolix “talk-i-fi-cations” in prayer, do but blunt the attention, and the ear gets, as it were, choked up. Nobody would think of blocking up Ear-gate with mud or stones when he meant to storm the gate. No, let the portal be cleared that the battering-ram of the gospel may tell upon it when the time comes to use it. Long prayers consist of repetitions, or else of unnecessary explanations which God does not require; or else they degenerate into downright preachings, so that there is no difference between the praying and the preaching, except that in the one the minister has his eyes shut, and in the other he keeps them open. It is not necessary in prayer to rehearse the Westminster Assembly’s Catechism. It is not necessary in prayer to relate the experience of all the people who are present, or even your own. It is not necessary in prayer to string a selection of texts of Scripture together, and quote David, and Daniel, and Job, and Paul, and Peter, and every other body, under the title of “thy servant of old.” It is necessary in prayer to draw near unto God, but it is not required of you to prolong your speech till everyone is

longing to hear the word “Amen.”

One little hint I cannot withhold—never appear to be closing, and then start off again...

“A third class is made up of meaningless pleonasms, vulgar, common-place redundancies of expression, in quoting from the Scriptures.

But enough of this. I am only sorry to have felt bound in conscience to be so long upon so unhappy a subject. I cannot, however, leave the point without urging

upon you literal accuracy in all quotations from the word of God.

It ought to be a point of honor among ministers always to quote Scripture correctly. It is difficult to be always correct, and because it is difficult, it should be all the more the object of our care. In the halls of Oxford or Cambridge it would be considered almost treason or felony for a fellow to misquote Tacitus, or Virgil, or Homer; but for a preacher to misquote Pa...

Vehemently strive against garblings and perversions of Scripture, and renounce forever all cant phrases, for they are the disfigurement of free prayer.

praying with their eyes open. It is unnatural, unbecoming, and disgusting. Occasionally the opened eye uplifted to heaven may be suitable and impressive, but to be gazing about while professing to address the unseen God is detestable. In the earliest ages of the church the fathers denounced this unseemly practice. Action in prayer should be very little used, if at all. It is scarcely comely to lift and move the arm, as if in preaching; the outstretched arms however, or the clasped hands, are natural and suggestive when under strong holy excitement. The voice should accord with the matter, and should never be boisterous, or self-asserting: humble and reverent let those tones be in which man talketh with his God. Doth not even nature itself teach you this? If grace does not, I despair.

True prayer is not the noisy sound That clamorous lips repeat, But the deep silence of a soul That clasps Jehovah’s feet.

Let us have anything so that our people do not come to regard any form of service as being appointed, and so relapse into the superstition from which they have escaped.

Vary the current of your prayers in intercession.