Giants of the Faith Bios

G. Campbell Morgan

1863-1945

“What an interesting person he was!”  This was my first thought when I began pondering the life and times of George Campbell Morgan.  He was born in 1863, on a farm in Tetbury, England, certainly an inauspicious beginning for what awaited him in later life.   He would live during a time of great change, and would meet and minister with Dwight L. Moody and D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones.  He would hold the pastorate at Westminster Chapel twice, once during World War I and then again during World War II (at this time with D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones as his assistant).  Morgan was also to travel across the Atlantic over 50 times in his life, to minister in the United States and Canada.  He would pastor churches in Britain and America, sit on the faculties of three schools, and was even to be the president of Cheshunt College in Cambridge for three years.

Morgan did not have the privilege of studying in either a seminary or a Bible college, and yet he has written books that are used in both.  No doubt the secret of his “success” was the diligent study of the Word and plain old hard work; which seems to be a common thread in the biographies of great Bible expositors.  G. Campbell Morgan put it this way, “Let me state in the briefest manner possible what I want to impress upon the mind of those who are contemplating Bible teaching, by declaring that the Bible never yields itself to indolence.  Of all literature none demands more diligent application than that of the Divine Library.”  Well said.  Morgan would read a book of the Bible forty or fifty times before he even attempted to preach on it or write about it!

During his lifetime, Morgan felt the Lord used him to build the church at large.  He sensed that God had prepared him for ministry to the churches, not to one church in particular.  Indeed his career reflected this.  He started preaching as a young man, and by 1886 was well known as a Bible teacher.  He conducted follow-up missions for Gipsy Smith, an evangelist who worked with the Salvation Army both in Britain and America.  Morgan began an itinerant ministry and then settled into a short pastorate in Straffordshire, England.  He moved on shortly to Rugeley, where the winters were long and very cold and Morgan found himself with much time to study.  It was in 1896 & 1897 that he went to Chicago and ministered with D. L. Moody in America.  Then he was back in Britain, serving as pastor for the first time at Westminster Chapel in London from 1904-1917. Next Morgan became the interim pastor of Highbury Quadrant Church in London.  After one year of service, he again travelled to the United States for almost seven years.  In 1933, he became pastor of Westminster Chapel again.  He remained the pastor through 1943 and was joined in 1938 by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones who became the senior pastor after Morgan resigned.  Two years later, G. Campbell Morgan died.

G. Campbell Morgan was married to Annie, better known as Nancy and had seven children:  four boys and three girls.   Percy-b. 1889, Gwendolyn-b. 1891, Kingsley John-b. 1895, Frank Crossley-b. 1898, Howard Moody-b. 1901, Kathleen Annie-b. 1904, Ruth-b. 1907.

Morgan is known as a devotional preacher, while D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones is known as a doctrinal preacher.  Morgan mostly taught from the four gospels while Lloyd-Jones’ focus was the doctrinal epistles.  I think it is interesting to note, that Morgan came first to lay the foundational groundwork of study at Westminster Chapel, while Lloyd-Jones took the congregation deeper into the Word with the doctrinal details.  It should be said that both types of teaching are necessary; one cannot grasp the deeper things of God until the foundation of the elementary principles have been laid.    Blessed were those who lived to hear the preaching of such fine men!

Next bio:  D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Charles Haddon Spurgeon was called the “Prince of Preachers”, but Alexander Maclaren was called the “Prince of Expositors”.

In a day when great pastoral ministry is often measured either by the pastor’s ability to have a lucrative speaking career outside of his church or to write books for the masses; Alexander Maclaren’s outstanding work ethic outshines the exploits of the ‘famous’ preachers of our time.

Born in Glasgow, Scotland February 11, 1826 into a Baptist nonconformist family, Maclaren knew from his youth that he was called to be a pastor and he never considered any other vocation. His father, David Maclaren was a devout Christian business man, who could be called a lay minister. He had to travel to Australia sometime in the 1830’s and lived there for four years, and while there he founded a church in Adelaide. While the senior Maclaren was gone, his son was born-again and baptized shortly after in 1840. He was fourteen years old.

After beginning college at the University of Glasgow, he completed his seminary education in Stepney at the Baptist College there (after the family moved to England) and Maclaren excelled in his studies. He loved the original biblical languages of Hebrew and Greek and graduated with honors in both. For the rest of his life, Maclaren daily read one chapter of the Old Testament in Hebrew and one in the New Testament in Greek. He also did all of his work for his sermons from the original languages.

In 1845, he received his first pastorate in Southampton where he took over for an incompetent pastor who had led the church Portland Chapel into debt and disrepair and thus given the church a bad reputation in the community. The work Maclaren devoted to the Chapel caused it to prosper. Many came to Christ and the area came to know the young preacher. He married in 1856 and two years later was called to preach at Union Chapel in Manchester. He accepted and began a forty-five year career that gave him the name “Maclaren of Manchester.”

Maclaren’s habit of study was first begun at school and he continued this as a pastor. He was known to devote sixty hours to the preparation of a single message. He stayed home, did his work and the church grew. The church in Manchester moved to a new building that seated about fifteen hundred. Yet he kept up his disciplines, refusing most invitations and studying the Word and feeding his people. Maclaren often refused speaking engagements, including one to Yale, to speak on preaching. He felt that, “To efface one’s self is one of the preacher’s first duties. The herald should be lost in his message.” It was obvious that he made a conscious decision to remain a humble and single-minded preacher.

Maclaren was a true expositor; he let the Bible speak for itself. He studied a passage in the original language; then he meditated on it, seeking out the divine truth. He said that he never wore his slippers when he was working on a message, he wore his work boots to remind himself that he was indeed working, and the work was hard. He took the study time and sermon preparation time very seriously and it is evident in his body of work and his length of service. The two key components of his ministry were devotion and discipline. Yet he did not look on the Bible as simple fodder for his own sermons. He looked upon it rightly as the very source of his spiritual life and power. He sought to understand the mind and heart of God. When he found a truth, he first applied it to his own life and then he sought the best way in which to share it with his church. There was a conscious effort made to present the truth so anyone could grasp it and apply it to their life.

The sermons that came from him were recorded by stenographers and were masterful in composition, though he preached from outlines, rather than complete notes. The sermons were then published each week in the Manchester Guardian, and were also published in book form. After his retirement, he undertook what became a 31-volume pastoral commentary entitled Expositions of Holy Scripture, creating sermonic analysis for virtually all of the books of the Bible.

One of the only posts he agreed to take outside of his church was that of the president of the Baptist Union. And this was only done later in his life after he had retired from active preaching. He was a contemporary of Spurgeon and was aware of the Down-Grade controversy. He was to be part of the delegation of four men that went to speak with Spurgeon but had become ill. It is thought that he would have been one who was sympathetic to Spurgeon and would have agreed with him.

Alexander Maclaren died May 10, 1910 but his godly life, godly work-ethic, devotion and discipline remain a model for Christians today.

A note on his name: The name was originally spelled McLaren, but Alexander changed the spelling during his student days. He said he didn’t like the Highland way of spelling his name.

At the close of the last article on the Down-Grade Controversy, we found Spurgeon withdrawing from the Baptist Union. Charles Haddon Spurgeon sent a letter (dated October 28, 1887) to Samuel Harris Booth, General Secretary of the Baptist Union to announce his withdrawal. He explains that the reasons for the withdrawal would be laid out in the November issue of The Sword and the Trowel. Spurgeon said, “By this time many of our readers will be weary of the Down-Grade controversy: they cannot be one-tenth so much tired of it, or tried by it, as we are.” The controversy had been all-consuming to him as he weighed whether or not he was going to withdraw from the Union. At last he knew he had to cut his ties with them because he felt that he could not compromise on what was so obviously unbiblical. He saw no reason that anyone who purported to believe in the sufficiency and authority of the Bible should have fellowship with those who doubted it. Since the Union would do nothing to stop those doubters, to continue in concert with them would be joining in with their sin. There was no other course of action available and after seeking God’s direction, he removed himself from the Union.

Spurgeon had not left with haste or without the certainty that he had given all he had to try to bring understanding to the leadership of the Union. He had been writing to the General Secretary for months and had many private conversations with him before he made his decision. He had been sworn to secrecy concerning the letters and conversations, yet urged to use the information to fight the corrupting influence of the modernist thinking.

Eighty men of the one hundred-member Council of the Baptist Union met to discuss Spurgeon’s withdrawal. Most were very upset by Spurgeon‘s accusations of compromise. The General Secretary, in his private letters and conversations to Spurgeon, had urged him to speak out against what he clearly saw as widespread compromise. Yet when he met with the Council, he denied this, saying that he never intended for him to formulate charges with the information. This was not strictly true, since he urged Spurgeon to speak out. The Council accused Spurgeon of misrepresenting the truth and Booth, the General Secretary was among them. Spurgeon never betrayed Booth and bore the false accusations. He told his wife that “God knows all about it, and He will see me righted.” One of his biographers states that he was not righted. He could have furnished Dr. Booth’s letters as proof that he had followed Matthew 18, as the Union accused him of not doing, but he did not break his promise to keep them confidential.

By using Spurgeon’s supposed breach of Jesus’ instruction in Matthew 18, the Council was evading the real issues. He had in fact done things right, but lack of integrity on the part of Dr. Booth led the Council to this conclusion. Spurgeon saw this action by the Union for what it was. It is human nature to cast doubt on the integrity of those with whom you don’t agree; indeed it is a common ploy. Instead of dealing with the heart of the matter, cast doubt on your accuser. This is a very familiar response to a biblical challenge. Paul endured much the same treatment we note as we read the epistles.

Spurgeon had been careful not to mention specific names of those preaching “another gospel”, thinking that this may have been the best way to deal with the fact that the entire Union had been on the Down-Grade.

He did not want to make it seem as though his attacks were of a personal nature, rather than addressing the doctrinal drift of the entire group. But the Council used this against him by saying that his accusations were too vague to deal with. From the human standpoint, he was in a no-win situation. But God would surely count him among His faithful few, who understood and lived the words of a song; “though none go with me, still I will follow…”

A panel of four men was dispatched to meet with Spurgeon to see if they could get him to reconsider his withdrawal. Only three were able to meet with him (one man was ill) and Spurgeon asked them to adopt an evangelical statement of faith, they refused. He would not change his mind either, so nothing was really accomplished at this meeting. However, the full Council met a mere five days later and voted to accept his withdrawal, but also to censure him. They maintained that he did not give them enough evidence to investigate the charges he had made, so they supposed them to be false. The real facts were that he not only had letters proving he had addressed the issues with Dr. Booth, but in the letters between the two, names were in fact named, so that Booth could have (and should have) substantiated the claims Spurgeon had made. Spurgeon could have cited the published articles of some of his fellow Baptists to bring ample proof that he was correct in pointing out the errors.

Why did he not just name the names and bring forth the proof the Council deemed necessary? He did not want the battle to degrade into a personal war and further, he was concerned that the problem needed to be addressed in a different manner, or it was destined to keep happening. The Baptist Union did not have a doctrinal statement, so there was no real mechanism in place for disciplining anyone for false teaching. The only thing they were concerned with was mode of baptism, which leaves a group wide open for heresy. The curtain had fallen, so to speak on this group. They did adopt a creed of sorts, but one that was vague enough to allow the continuation of the Down-Grade. After introducing this weak doctrinal statement, a disclaimer was added that said the Union did not have the authority to enforce any doctrinal standards on its members. So, a wishy-washy statement of faith was rendered completely useless for the purpose of addressing error with this addition.

If it is the desire to have peace at any price, the price will be very dear indeed. The only real peace attainable is from the Prince of Peace and I doubt that He would have voted on such a measure as had the Baptist Union. Spurgeon was not trying to be divisive; he was not in favor of schism. But his conscience that had been informed by the Bible would not allow him to continue in fellowship with a group of men that were unable to discern the enemies of the gospel in their midst. He felt that the best way to promote unity in this case was to leave. “Nothing has ever more largely promoted the union of the true than the break with the false.”

These times tried Spurgeon’s soul. He lost close friends and even some of his students from his Pastor’s College turned against him. Spurgeon never regretted his decision. The Baptist Union was certainly never the same. And evangelicals owe a debt of gratitude to Spurgeon whose actions helped alert the church of the dangers of the Down-Grade and modernism.

It has been and will remain a question in the minds of those who are faced with similar circumstances whether or not to remove themselves from associations that no longer deem adherence to Scripture as necessary. For many, to remain seems like blasphemy and in Spurgeon’s words, “Fellowship with known and vital error is participation in sin.” For others, they may decide to stay to see if they can bring light and correction to the group. It is this writer’s opinion that if the body cannot see the error immediately, it is not likely that they will see it at all…

It is not how long you live, but how you live that counts.

Robert Murray M’Cheyne was a living ex­ample of this often ne­glected truth. He was born on May 21, 1813, in Edinburgh, Scot­land. He was licensed to preach at the age of twenty-two, ordained to the pastorate of St. Peter’s Church, Dundee Scotland, at twenty-three, and died six years later in 1843.

Like John the Baptist and the Savior Himself, M’Cheyne ushered in Christ’s kingdom in just a few short years.  It was during his brief public ministry that Scotland experienced one of its greatest revivals.  From 1839-1842, much of Scotland was turned upside down through the Spirit-filled labors of W. C. Burns and Robert Murray M’Cheyne.
M’Cheyne rarely preached outside his native land. He wrote no books and was ex­tremely frail in health. How­ever, the impact of the “prophet of Dundee,” as he was known, lives on to this day. History records that the entire land of Scotland was shaken by him, and at his death; Scotland wept.

The spiritual well of living water went very deep in this unusual man of God. Here is a typical example of his sim­ple but utterly unsimplistic way of Biblical reasoning on a difficult issue:

“No one ever came to Christ because they knew themselves to be of the elect. It is quite true that God has of his mere good pleasure elected some to everlasting life, but they never knew it until they came to Christ. Christ no­where invites the elect to come to Him. The question for you is not, am I one of the elect? But, am I one of the human race?”

Jesus Christ was everything to Robert; for every time M’Cheyne directed men to look at their sins he also pointed them ten times to look on Jesus. This was the key to his tender and passionate preaching. To him Christ was not just one of many theological concepts in a message, Christ Jesus was the message! M’Cheyne’s power in the pulpit was the result of his intimate knowl­edge of Jesus. He could boldly say, “I am better ac­quainted with Jesus Christ than I am with any man in the world.”

Often as he preached, the entire congre­gation was brought to tears. M’Cheyne’s diary and letters describe for us some of these precious meetings. He wrote, “It was like a pent-up flood breaking forth; tears were streaming from the eyes of many, and some fell on the ground groaning and weep­ing and crying for mercy.” At other times men and women were so overcome with grief and conviction that they literally had to be carried out of the church -“In some areas whole con­gregations were frequently moved as one man, and the voice of the minister was drowned out by the cries of anxious souls.”

M’Cheyne’s voice, eyes and gestures spoke of the tenderness of Christ. It was not Robert Murray M’Cheyne the people saw, it was Jesus. M’Cheyne declared, “A man cannot be a faithful minister, until he preaches Christ for Christ’s sake – until he gives up striv­ing to attract people to him­self and seeks only to attract them to Christ.”

No Christian can read the biography or the writings of Robert Murray M’Cheyne without realizing that the true measure of life is not its length, but its usefulness. Nor does the amount of our activity or our words reflect the true value of our life. M’Cheyne ministered but a short seven and a half years and died at the age of 29, yet the fruitfulness of that brief life remains to this day.

M’Cheyne only left notes of some 300 sermons when he died in 1843, but his own counsel to a fellow minister explains why these sermons brought such abundant bless­ing, not only to ‘the noisy mechanics and political weavers’ of Dundee but, later, to all parts of the Eng­lish – speaking world:

“Get your texts from God -your thoughts, your words, from God… It is not great talents God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus. A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God. A word spoken by you when your conscience is clear, and your heart full of God’s Spirit, is worth ten thousand words spoken in unbelief and sin.”

Amy Wilson Carmichael was born in 1867 into a strong Presbyterian home in Northern Ireland. Amy’s childhood was filled with wonder as she rode her pony along the shores of the Irish Sea. She loved to study the sea creatures in the tide pools on bright summer days. The family was rather well-to-do and devoted to the Lord. Amy and her Mother often brought food to the needy in the town of Millisle where they lived and the family regularly attended church. Amy was the oldest of seven children and from early on, she loved to take care of and entertain her younger siblings. In 1880, Amy opened her heart to Jesus Christ on a deeper level while away at boarding school in England. In 1884, the family fell into financial difficulties and Amy had to return home to Ireland.

The family moved and Amy’s new-found faith had begun to stir within her as she noticed the poor on the streets of Belfast. She was moved when God brought Scripture to mind as she began to evaluate her desire to help others less fortunate than herself. Soon, Amy invited neighborhood children to the family home on Sunday afternoons. They played games, and had story time and Bible lessons. The children responded enthusiastically, but were from privileged families. What of the poor children Amy noticed on the streets, didn’t they deserve to hear the gospel?

Amy volunteered to visit the slums with the Belfast City Mission and turned her attention to the poor children of the streets. She would approach the children and ask them to come with her to have fun at the mission. The children’s response was great and this led to many opportunities for influencing the lives of others for Christ. There were many mills in the city of Belfast which employed young women. These were the working poor who also lived in the slums. Called “Shawlies” because they wore shawls, using them to cover their heads since hats cost more than they could afford, these same girls were often abused. Who cared for them? Amy knew God did and she began to invite them to church. She taught them to read, to pray and began teaching them etiquette and hygiene. In 1885 when Amy was 17 years old, her Father died. This left the Carmichaels poorer than they had been, but they were a long way from the destitute people Amy continued to work with.

Meanwhile, Amy’s work with the Shawlies continued and grew so large that a mission house was needed to accommodate their great number. Amy prayed for funds to build a facility and the funds came in! She asked a mill owner for land on which to build and it was donated. Amy gained affiliation with the YWCA and more than 500 girls were involved in the activities offered almost every night of the week. Soon, the work of “Welcome Hall”, as Amy called the building, became known to Christians all over the British Isles. She was asked to open another place in Manchester, the great factory city in the west of England. Amy traveled there and lived in the slums as she worked to build another “Welcome Hall”. She reflected on her life there and felt that she could endure anything now that she had endured the filth of the slums. Did she have an inkling of what was to come?

About this time, Amy visited a friend and attended a meeting of the Keswick Convention. The purpose of the convention was a return to holiness. They did not discuss the formation of a new sect, nor was it a doctrinally heavy meeting. Christians were exhorted to holy living and they often brought in missionaries as speakers. Amy heard Hudson Taylor speak at one such convention and met Robert Wilson. Robert Wilson, cofounder of the Keswick Convention, had recently lost his daughter, about Amy’s age. He took a fatherly interest in Amy and asked to adopt her in 1890. Mrs. Carmichael agreed.

She was adopted and tutored by this godly man, and through his influence she began to reinforce her spiritual reading. Robert Wilson had once said to her, “Be a deep well, daughter.”

Amy responded to the Lord’s call to the mission field in her twenties. She was single at the time and remained that way throughout her life. Af­ter fifteen months in Japan, Amy Carmichael arrived in India in 1895 with the sup­port of the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society. She served in India for fifty-six years without a furlough. The focus she carried in her heart for Christ and His work was ever undaunted, causing her to offer prayers like, “Rid me, good Lord, of every diverting thing.” That was Amy. Her gift of prose so often bore this out with a blunt yet eloquent and passionate touch.

Give me the love that leads the way, the faith that nothing can dismay;

The hope no disappointments tire; the passion that will burn like fire.

Let me not sink to be a clod; Make me thy fuel, Flame of God.

She founded and maintained the Dohnavur Fel­lowship in India where a major part of her work there was devoted to rescuing children who had been dedicated by their families to be temple prostitutes. During her lifetime she rescued more than a thousand children from neglect and abuse. This single woman was truly mother to the motherless. To them she became known as “Amma,” which means mother in the Tamil lan­guage. Amy died in India on January 18, 1951 and was buried there.

Amy Carmichael’s life is a model of selfless dedication to the Savior, a life of discipleship and abandonment. She lived for one reason, and that was to make God’s love known to those trapped in utter darkness.

After a severe fall in 1931 she was bedridden for nearly the rest of her life. That in-and-of-itself is amazing when you consider some of the most enduring ministry performed through her life was accomplished in those years. No doubt it was during this time she plumbed the depths of her now famous words, “Learn the blessedness of the un-offended in the face of the unexplainable.” She was obviously no stranger to hardship and suffering for our Lord’s kingdom and Glory, Hers were kingdom values. Our values determine our evaluations.

If we value comfort more than character, then trials will upset us. If we value the material and physical more than the spiritual, we will not be able to “Count it all joy!” If we live only for the present and forget the future, the trials will make us bitter, not bet­ter. If a Christian cannot rejoice in his trials, his values are not godly and biblical. Nobody understood this better than Amy who summed it all up in this poem:

Hast thou no scar?

No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand?

I hear thee sung as mighty in the land,

I hear them hail thy bright ascendant star,

Hast thou no scar?

Hast thou no wound?

Yet, I was wounded by the archers, spent,

Leaned me against the tree to die; and rent

By ravening beasts that compassed me, I swooned:

Hast thou no wound?

No wound? No scar?

Yes, as the Master shall the servant be,

And pierced are the feet that follow Me;

But thine are whole: can he have followed far

Who has no wound nor scar?

Ultimately Amy became a prolific writer, pro­ducing thirty-five published books including His Thoughts Said … His Father Said (1951), If (1953), and Edges of His Ways (1955). Best known, perhaps, is an early historical account, Things as They Are: Mission Work in Southern India (1903).

Obedience, total commitment, and selflessness were the marks of Amy Carmichael’s life. In a world where the thought of living one’s life for Jesus Christ above all else is rapidly fading, she remains a bright and ever burning example of one whose sole existence was devoted to her beloved Lord and Savior. Another observation to make concerning Amy’s life is that she was faithful in the little things of ministry and therefore God was able to entrust her with more responsibilities as her faithfulness continued. She obviously evaluated her gifts and sought to use them to the glory of God and she was flexible enough to do His will at every turn.

God may or may not take you, as He did Amy Carmichael, to some far away land. However, He does have a plan for your life—to use you as His light of eternal hope and forgiveness to oth­ers. Ask Him to make His will perfectly clear. The rewards of God are not based on human achievements or financial success. They are given, instead, to those who “settle some things with Him” as she would say, and commit them­selves to Christ through a life of obedience and selfless devotion.

Charles Spurgeon – Prince of Preachers

{1834-1892}

God’s Hand

When Jesus Christ called Peter and Andrew he said, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men”.  Even a cursory glance at their lives proves He did just that.  So it is with Charles Spurgeon.  Even with a brief glance at his life, one is left with the distinct impression that it was the presence of Christ in Spurgeon that made him one of the greatest Christians and preachers that the church has ever known.

God’s Way

Spurgeon is one of those classic men of God who, despite his lack of formal theological education, rose to prominence due to the fact that the hand of the Lord rested gloriously upon his life.  As a little boy, he learned to read using the Bible.  Instead of looking at children’s picture books, he read the deep, rich writings of the Puritans.  It is an understatement to say that his mind was huge.  His life was marked by an extraordinary aptitude for devouring difficult reading material and for his ability to sustain strenuous thought.  By the age of 13, he would sit comfortably with his Grandfather‘s group of pastoral friends, reasoning and dialoguing extensively on any given theological issue.  As a growing boy, he loved to read and as an adult, he loved to write.  Ultimately, the English Baptist preacher with his graphic and emotionally charged sermons changed the face of evangelical Christianity.  Today, over one hundred years after his death, there is more material in print by Charles Spurgeon than by any other Christian author, alive or dead.

Spurgeon was born in 1834 in the area of Essex, England where there was a long-standing heritage of Protestant resistance.  Spurgeon’s heroes were dauntless Protestants who were burned to death for their faith and daring Puritans, such as John Bunyan, who were jailed for their beliefs.  During the years of his evangelistic ministry, he made it clear that George Whitefield was his chief example.

God’s Salvation

His conversion came in 1850 at age fifteen.  Even with a head full of theology and the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ, he was up to this time, still unconverted.  Nevertheless, he was going through intense soul-searching and conviction from the Holy Spirit.  On his way to a scheduled appointment, he was forced by a snowstorm to take shelter in a small country church where God opened his heart to the salvation message.

Spurgeon explains what happened in his own words:  “The preacher was reading from Isaiah 45:22. ‘Look unto Me and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is none else.’  There was nothing needed, by me at any rate, except this text.  Then stopping, he pointed to where I was sitting under the gallery, and he said, ‘That young man there looks very miserable’…and he shouted, ‘Look!  Look, young man!  Look now!’  I can never tell you how it was, but I no sooner saw whom I was to believe than I also understood what it was to believe…As the snow fell on my road home from the little house of prayer, I thought every snowflake talked with me and told of the pardon I had found, for I was white as the driven snow through the grace of God.”

God’s Work

Spurgeon preached his first sermon in 1851.  From the beginning of his ministry, his style and ability were noted far above average.  His flamboyance in the pulpit earned him titles such as, “The Preaching Boy Wonder”, and “The Prince of Preachers”.  At the age of 17, he assumed his first pastorate lasting from 1852-1854 near Cambridge at Waterbeach.  His gifts were quickly and widely evident and he was called to the pastorate of the Baptist church in New Park Street, Southwark, London.

The congregation was small when he arrived, but within a few weeks he was attracting large crowds, even though he was only twenty years of age.  The chapel proved too small, and it was decided to extend it.  While this was proceeding, he preached at the Exeter Hall, but again the crowds could not be accommodated.  When he returned to the extended chapel in New Park Street, this quickly proved too small, so a great tabernacle was planned.  While this was being built, he preached to great crowds at the Surrey Gardens Music Hall.

The Metropolitan Tabernacle cost thirty one thousand pounds to build and could hold six thousand people.  Spurgeon preached here from 1861 until just before his death.  His preaching was powerful and humorous.  His messages appealed to the intellect as well as the heart and he was a careful expositor of the Scriptures as well as a dedicated evangelist.  The excellent quality of his sermons is proven by the fact that in their printed form, they are still popular and eminently readable today, over a century after they were written.

Spurgeon was a prolific writer.  From 1855, a sermon written by him was printed each week.  These have been collected in many volumes.  In 1865, he started a monthly magazine called The Sword and the Trowel.  His insightful comments on the Psalms are found in The Treasury of David (1870-1885).  The advice he gave to young preachers is found in his Lectures to My Students (1875, 1877) and Commenting and Commentaries (1876).  His autobiography, edited by his wife and two friends (taken from his letters, diaries, and writings) was published in four volumes between 1897 and 1900.

As a compelling preacher, Spurgeon said he had but one solitary purpose:  “I take my text and make a bee-line to the cross”.  A single burning desire filled his heart-to see people come to Jesus Christ by faith.

“Saving faith is an immediate relation to Christ, accepting, receiving, resting upon Him alone, for justification, sanctification, and eternal life by virtue of God’s grace”, Spurgeon explained.  Devoted to the Scriptures, to disciplined prayer, and to godly living, Spurgeon exemplified Christian commitment when he stood in the pulpit.  This alone gave power to his preaching.

God’s Servant

However, there was a weaker side to Spurgeon-his health.  One scholar wrote; “Perhaps it is correct to say that as a preacher, Spurgeon had everything, except good health.  He suffered constantly from various ailments and fell into serious depression at times.  Yet through all of his sufferings, he was ever learning the deeper meaning of the Christian life.  Spurgeon said, ‘I would go to the deeps a hundred times to cheer a downcast spirit.  It is good for me to have been afflicted, that I might know how to speak a word in season to one that is weary.’”

Toward the end of his life, he took a firm stand in the famous “Downgrade Controversy” of 1887-1889.  This was a time when many preachers turned from the Word of God in their pulpits, becoming more liberal in an effort to get more and more people into their churches.  This, combined with his fragile health condition from rheumatoid gout, wore him down physically until his death at the age of fifty-seven in 1892.

In extreme pain at what turned out to be his last sermon on June 7, 1891, Charles Spurgeon told those gathered, “He [Jesus Christ] is the most magnanimous of captains.  There never was His like among the choicest of princes.  He is always to be found in the thickest part of the battle.  When the wind blows cold, He always takes the bleak side of the hill.  The heaviest end of the cross lies ever on His shoulders.  If He bids us carry a burden, He carries it also.  If there is anything that is gracious, generous, kind and tender, yea lavish and superabundant in love, you always find it in Him.”

“These forty years and more have I served Him, blessed be His name!  I have had nothing but love from Him.  I would be glad to continue yet another forty years in the same dear service here below if so it pleased Him.  His service is life, peace, joy.  Oh that you would enter on it at once!  God help you to enlist under the banner of Jesus even this day!  Amen.”