Beeson Podcast, Episode 383
March 13, 2018
Christian George

www.beesondivinity.com/podcast/2018/ Charles-Spurgeon-and-the-Pilgrimage-of-Preaching-From-Exodus-to-Exegesis

Announcer:	Thank you and welcome to the Beeson Podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George.

Timothy George:	Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. Well today we get to hear a lecture by Dr. Christian Timothy George, and if any of you are wondering is he any relation to you, the answer is yes. Actually, he's my one and only son. Dr. Christian George is the assistant professor of historical theology and the curator of the Spurgeon Library at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City. He's a graduate of Samford University, of Beeson Divinity School and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He's a Spurgeon scholar and is the editor of a 12-volume series titled, “The Lost Sermons of C.H. Spurgeon.”

	Well, today, we're going to hear a lecture Christian gave here at Beeson last year during our annual preaching lectureship. This lecture, believe it or not, yes, it focuses on Spurgeon but Spurgeon in a particular way. It's called from "Exodus to Exegesis." And Christian's talking here about Spurgeon, his dependence on John Bunyan but also the way in which he actually develops his own unique preaching style based on his theological insights and his reading of the Holy Scriptures.
	
So we go to Hodges Chapel and we listen to Dr. Christian George talk about Charles Haddon Spurgeon from Exodus to Exegesis.

Christian George:	Yesterday we laid the groundwork for these lectures by introducing you to the life and ministry of Charles Spurgeon. This morning my goal is to narrow the focus, narrow the scope and let's hone in on Spurgeon's homiletic. This is not a sermon; it is a lecture or perhaps as my provost Dr. Jason Duesing calls it, a lermon, so let's lermon together.
	
Now I decided given the ever expansive topic that the best way to introduce you to the homiletic of Charles Spurgeon is through his favorite book. Do you know what it is, outside of Scripture? The Psalms, that's a book of the Bible. Outside the Canon. His favorite book of the Bible, Dr. Carter, was this one. I actually brought Spurgeon's copy with me of the “Pilgrim's Progress” by John Bunyan. Every Victorian worth their salt had a copy of the Bible and a copy of this book on their mantle, and Spurgeon was no different. 
	
Now, you can see that this copy, this little pocket edition is warped. It's not so much water damage. The reason this little book is warped is because Spurgeon kept it in his back pocket. Yesterday, I think I mentioned that Charles Spurgeon was not depleted in the rotund department so to speak. He once said, "Call me anything but don't call me late for dinner." That's probably enough Spurgeon fat jokes for now. Maybe one more. Spurgeon once said, what did he say, "There is difficulty in everything in this world except in the eating of pancakes." Spurgeon, you would know.

Spurgeon read this book a hundred times in his life. He quoted from Bunyan more than any other author. And so today, the title of my lecture is “Charles Spurgeon and the Pilgrimage of Preaching: From Exodus to Exegesis.” By way of outline, we're going to explore three major milestones in the pilgrimage of every preacher after unpacking the burden of preaching and finding our way to the cross to talk about the crucicentrism of preaching. We'll eventually lodge this night in what Bunyan called the House of Interpretation. But before we begin let's ask the Lord to bless our time together.
	
Oh Father, I pray that you would illuminate our minds, invigorate our hearts. That we would see your son Jesus Christ through the faithful witness of Charles Spurgeon. Nothing in our hands we bring, simply to your cross we cling. The name of Christ, amen.
	
"As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where it was a den and I laid me down in that place to sleep and as I slept I dreamed a dream. I dreamed and behold I saw a man clothed with rags standing in a certain place with his face from his own house, a book in his hand and a great burden on his back. I looked and saw him open the book and read there in and as he read he wept and he trembled. Not being able no longer to contain his emotions he break out with a lamentable cry, what shall I do? What shall I do?"
	
Well this is a question that every preacher must ask. What shall I do? Spurgeon believed that a preacher should do two things. A preacher must lead and a preacher must feed. Both tasks leading Exodus and feeding Exegesis. Both tasks involve movement, the movement of one thing to another. The two words are actually related. Exodus literally means the way out an exegesis means what students, to lead out. The preacher leads his flock by pushing this world into the next. But the preacher feeds his flock by pulling the next world into this one.
	
And so, the preacher is torn. The preacher is torn between two opposing directionalities, between the now of today and between the then of tomorrow. Between pushing the present forward and pulling the future backward. And at the center of this tension, this burden, is what James Earl Massey calls, “The Burdensome Joy.” It is the sermon. That majestic moment when God who is outside of time speaks to those on pilgrimage traveling through time. And he does this by the words of the preacher, the inspiration of the Scripture, and the presence of the Holy Spirit. 
	
Like Malachi 1:1, Charles Spurgeon believed that every sermon begins with a burden. He himself felt the weight of the Word. "Oh what work we have to do," he said, "and how short the time to do it. Millions of men unconverted yet and nothing but our feeble voice with which to preach." 
	
You see, in Spurgeon's day there were no chin microphones like this one, there were no speaker systems, no amplifiers. In fact, if you wanted to matriculate into Spurgeon's college, one of the first things Charles Spurgeon would do is take a tape measure and measure the size of your chest. That's a lawsuit today. But in the Victorian era the burden of preaching was not only spiritual it was physical. You had to be able to project the gospel. Spurgeon told his students, "Gentlemen with narrow chests are advised to use dumbbells every morning. You need broad chests and you must do your best to get them." 
	
Now we don't know how wide Spurgeons' chest was. I sense another fat joke coming on. He had a 52 inch waist, that gives you some indication. But Spurgeon took care to exercise the voice. In 1857 when Queen Victoria invited the 23-year-old Charles Spurgeon to preach the Fast Day sermon at the Crystal Palace to 23,654 people, a newspaper reporter interviewed a child at the very back of the palace. "Could you hear the preacher, that dot in the distance?" The child said, "It sounded like the preacher was sitting right next to me whispering in my ear." 
	
You can still go to the Crystal Palace. It was destroyed. It was burned to the ground, but you can still go to the ruins. Last time I was there I measure the distance between where Spurgeon would have been standing and where that child would have been. It was about 2000 feet away or a healthy par six. I see Dr. Gignilliat, if we think in terms of golf. 
	
In our own day, technology has managed to fossilize the art of voice craft. Most colleges I know, most seminaries I visit, they don't even offer classes on elocution or oratory. But Spurgeon instructed his students to work on the mechanics of the mouth. He encouraged them to think interdisciplinary about preaching. "Think of Michelangelo," he said, "working for a week without taking off his clothes. Think of Handel, hollowing out every key of his harpsichord like a spoon by incessant practice." He added, "We are bound to use every possible means to perfect the voice by which we are to tell forth the glorious gospel of God."
	
Spurgeon added, "The evangelists have written of our Lord, 'He opened his mouth and taught them. Open wide the doors with which such goodly truth marches forth and avoid the use of the nose as an organ of speech for the best authorities are agreed it is intended to smell with.'"
	
Spurgeon believed the preacher should know when to speak up but he should also know when to shut up. He understood that you don't have to raise your voice to raise the dead. "It is a cruel thing," he said, "to sit down by a sick man's bedside and shout out the words, ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd.’ Do not give your hearers headaches when you mean to give them heartaches. You aim to keep them from sleeping in the pews but it is not needful to burst the drums of their ears. Instead the preacher may vary the force of the voice."
	
You might say in our own day the preacher must exegete not just the passage but the people. Not just the text but your contexts. Spurgeon said, "A bell will be heard farther off than a drum. And very singularly the more musical a sound is the farther it travels. It is not the thumping of the piano which is needed." We heard Daniel Cason thumping the piano yesterday. "But it's the judicious sounding of the best keys. Let the bass, the treble and the tenor take their turn." 
	
Spurgeon always took into the pulpit not a glass of water like this but a glass of chili vinegar and he would sip it during his sermon. Sometimes his voice goes completely hoarse like when he was preaching at Exeter Hall. And guess what his butler prepared him. He prepared him a basin of beef tea, the recipe of which we're still trying to conjure up in the Spurgeon library. No doubt we'll offer that through our website for free. 
	
But preaching involves not only a spiritual and a physical burden but the preacher must carry a moral one too. Like Christian who fell into the slow despond. The preacher must be on guard. You know in our own day and age, in our own city and our own time, it sort of seems like we can scarcely go a few months without hearing about the fall of some great pastor or preacher. The same was true in Spurgeon's day, nothing's changed. And although Spurgeon was not against the restoration of a pastor, after all, isn't God in the business of new beginnings? He did say this, "We should be very slow to help back to the pulpit men who have been once tried have proven themselves to have too little grace to stand the crucial test of ministerial life." 
	
In his lecture, “The Minister's Self Watch,” Spurgeon reminded his students of 1 Timothy 4:16, "Take heed unto thyself and watch your doctrine." He reminded them of the train in the United States that had come to a complete stop on the railroad track because a few small buzzing flies managed to find their way into the grease box of the carriage wheels. Spurgeon warned against the man who in all other respects is fitted to be useful but who may be by some small defect exceedingly hindered or even rendered utterly useless. 
	
I do think it's important to note that Charles Spurgeon never had a moral failing. Now that doesn't mean he was sinless. Far from it. He had a favorite sin, can you guess what it was? What was Spurgeon's darling sin as he called it? What is it? Pride. He called it his darling.
	
To borrow from Bunyan, pride was the hill of difficulty that Spurgeon was always finding himself climbing, and it had a steep slope. And why wouldn't he be unprideful? Here you have a man who can hold eight thoughts in his mind in a single moment. And as he said, “Choose one as from a shelf,” can you do that? I know I can't. 
	
Spurgeon told his students that ministers must be vigilant. "Alas," he said, "the beard of reputation, once it is shorn is hard to grow back again." Piggybacking off Jesus's words in Matthew 7:22, Spurgeon said, "Believe it brethren, God never saved a man from being a preacher." Some ministers he feared were even instruments for evil. "The life of the preacher should be a magnet to draw men to Christ,” he said, "and it is sad indeed when it keeps them from him." 
	
Spurgeon often compared the preacher to the city clock. So if Big Ben is off all of London is off. "So it is with the minister," he said. "The minister is the parish clock. Many take their time from him and if he be incorrect they all will go wrongly." What is the remedy of Spurgeon's darling and your darling and my darling? Well the remedy is close proximity to Christ. "Look no man in the face," Spurgeon said, "until you have seen the face of God." He said we need to live very near to God if we would approve ourselves in our vocation. Even in your recreation," Spurgeon said, "Remember, you are a minister." Oh, may God preserve his preachers in Spurgeon's day and in our day from taking vacations from vocations.
	
Bunyan writes, "Christian ran thus till he came at a place somewhat ascending and upon that place stood a cross and a little below in the bottom a sepulcher. So I saw in my dream that just as Christian came up with the cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders and fell back off his back and began to tumble. And so continued to do till it came to the mouth of the sepulcher where it fell in and I saw it no more."
	
Charles Spurgeon was best of all and most of all a crucicentric preacher. He said, "I believe that those sermons which are fullest of Christ are the most likely to be blessed in the conversion of hearers. Let your sermons be full of Christ from beginning to end, crammed full," he says, "with the gospel." "As for myself," Spurgeon continued, "I cannot preach anything but Christ and His cross for that's all I know."
	
He said, "We preach Jesus Christ to those who want him and we also preach Jesus Christ to those who do not want him. And we keep on preaching Jesus Christ until we can make them feel that they do want him and cannot do without him." In many ways, Spurgeon's dogged adherents to the doctrines of the past made him look old fashioned particularly in this swift moving current of 19th century theological liberalism. Other than occasional outburst, Spurgeon contributed very little to the higher critical scholarship of his day. You remember, Charles Spurgeon is a non-conformist. He can't even matriculate into Cambridge in 1851. 
	
Spurgeon would never be an academic. He was a people's preacher. He once said, "The Lord did not say feed my giraffes but feed my sheep." So Spurgeon's preaching emerged not up in the ivory towers of Cambridge but in the lowly villages surrounding it. Of course Spurgeon could have been an academic if he had wanted to. He actually almost did become an academic preacher in February of 1852. Charles had been the pastor of Waterbeach Chapel for only a few months when he finds himself standing at the crossroads of a decision. Should he follow his earthly father's wish and go to Stepney College in London or should he remain the pastor in the middle of nowhere to a dying church in Waterbeach?
	
It was the difference of opinions between two fathers, an earthly father and a heavenly father. It was a decision that would forever dent his trajectory. A formal interview was arranged probably by his father. An interview was arranged between Charles and the tutor at Stepney College, a man by the name of Joseph Angus, you can still go to the Angus Library in Oxford should you be in the area. They were to meet at the house of McMullan, the publisher, which is today the Cambridge Bookstore. But providence prevented the meeting.
	
A servant girl answered the door and she accidentally showed Charles into one room and Joseph into another room. The two men waited several hours each thinking the other had decided not to come. Charles said, "The stupid girl had given no information to the family that anyone had called and consequently the meeting never came about." By the way, Charles to my knowledge only called two people stupid in his whole life. The stupid shoemaker we talked about yesterday who converted him and the stupid servant girl whose actions prevented him from becoming an academic. May God bless all the stupid people in this world, including me.
	
After departing from the botched appointment, Charles walks through the north part of Cambridge, you can still go there today, it's a park called Midsummer's Common. And as he walked, he was startled by what seemed to him to be a loud voice saying these words, "Seekest great things for yourself? Seek them not." In other words, do you seek great things for yourself going to college becoming a doctor? Seek them not. Jeremiah 45:4. 
	
Spurgeon believed that God Himself was speaking to him in that park. And because of this mystical experience, Charles decided to disobey his earthly father and disappoint him by not pursuing formal theological education. Interestingly enough his own brother James did go to Stepney College and at the end of Charles's life James turned his back on him in the downgrade to controversy. It is also ironic I think that Charles did eventually go to London but not as an academic but as pastor of one of the oldest Baptist churches in the city. 
	
Now, I think it's important to say at this point that especially as you and I are looking at Spurgeon through academic lenses that Spurgeon is not best remembered as a theologian in the systematic sense of the word. It would be incorrect of course to say that he was not doing theology, much like Luther his theology emerges out of the corpus of his sermons. At the core of each sermon is the singular impulse to make Jesus Christ known. Spurgeon wasn't concerned about preaching perfect sermons. Though he did spend a great deal of time redacting them for publication. I'm not even sure Spurgeon could pass some of our preaching classes in our seminaries. I don't know. His greatest concern was becoming as the title of his book reveals, “A Soul Winner.”
	
This year we discovered in researching for Volume One of the lost sermons project the first convert in Spurgeon's ministry. I don't think I've said this anywhere else. A woman by the name of Mrs. Spalding. Spurgeon said this, "How my heart leapt for joy when I heard tidings of my first convert. Oh, if anybody had said to me, 'someone has left you 20,000 pounds,' I should not have given a snap of my fingers for it compared with the joy which I felt when I was told that God had saved a soul through my ministry." He said, "I felt like a boy who had earned his first guinea or like the diver who had brought up a rare pearl. I prize each one whom God has given me, but I prize this woman the most. She is the first seal to my ministry and a precious one."
	
At the Spurgeon Library, my team and I have spent no small number of hours trying to find out who Mrs. Spalding was, the first convert of Spurgeon's ministry. After we triangulated her own account along with 1851 census and some additional genealogical records, we found this pearl. 49-year-old Hannah, Hannah Spalding, wife of Richard Spalding who worked in Cambridge as an agricultural laborer. The dating of the sermon is also interesting in that it reveals that Spurgeon preached the gospel a hundred times before he saw his first fruit. 
	
A few weeks ago I had the privilege of talking with Tom Wright, we were in New York City. We just happened providentially to be in the same place. And over the course of our conversation, I really liked what he said about Spurgeon. He said that Charles Spurgeon had a remarkable and uncanny gift for upsetting the status quo. What he meant I think was that Spurgeon didn't follow the trajectory of his century. He didn't fit the mold. Spurgeon shattered the mild. Karl Barth was not even two years old when October the 28th 1887 came and Spurgeon parted ways from the Baptist Union by withdrawing his fellowship.
	
You might say that Spurgeon was born into an age of upgrade and downgrade. Over the course of his life, light bulbs like these replaced gas lamps. Engines replaced animals. And with the publication of essays and reviews and the life of Jesus by David Strauss and also Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, 19th century evangelicalism sparked as much controversy as it did electricity. There was a crisis of faith in the Victorian pulpit. Tim Larson better coins it, it was a crisis of doubt. Was Jesus God? Did miracles really happen? Is there any way in the world that science and faith can co-exist?
	
Spurgeon's indefectible insistence on preaching Christ, his intractable and unbudging insistence on preaching grace, it cast him in the eyes of many as a man behind his time. Spurgeon was a fossil from a bygone era best studied or pitied. Spurgeon clung to the doctrines that were rediscovered by the Protestant Reformers, appropriated by the English Puritans and advanced through the evangelical awakenings. Oh, Spurgeon the longed for days gone by. If only London could go back to the days of Benjamin Keach and John Gill.
	
Long before people started using words like Plesiosaurus and Pterodactyl. If only the Earth could be 4000 years old again and the church could talk less about natural selection and more about supernatural selection or predestination as the Puritans were so fond of doing. But like Bunyan, Spurgeon clung to the Book. What is the Scripture’s great theme? Is it not first and foremost Jesus Christ. “Take thou this book and distill it into one word and that one word will be Jesus. And we may look upon all its pages as the swaddling bands of the infant savior. For if we unroll the Scriptures we come upon Jesus Christ himself.” With pen and with pulpit, Spurgeon indentured his intellectual abilities into the service of the church.
	
To many like Mark Twain who went to hear Spurgeon in London on August the 17th, 1879, Spurgeon's Christocentricity looked outdated, it looked old fashion. Mark Twain had just published his book the bestselling “Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” Most of us read that as children. But he goes to London on his way back from Europe just to hear Spurgeon preach. He was going to meet the famous Charles Darwin but he stops into the tabernacle and this is what Mark Twain wrote in his diary that evening. 
	
"Sunday, August 17, '79. Raw and cold and drenching wet. I went over to the Tabernacle and heard Mr. Spurgeon. The house was full, about 3000. The first hour lacking one minute, taking up with two prayers and two very ugly hymns and Scripture. Mr. Spurgeon treated the topic in an unpleasant old fashion." Then Twain added, "English sacred music seems to always be the perfection of the ugly. It is a slander to suppose that God could enjoy any kind of congregational singing." He slams the sermon and then he slams the singing.
	
Those two ugly him were actually written one of them by Isaac Watts and the other Robert Grant. The sermon was entitled, “Contention Ended and Grace Reigning.” I think it's one of the best sermons Spurgeon ever preached. Listen to what Mark Twain heard that day come out of Spurgeon's lips. "Oh come ye wanderers and rest in Jesus. Come ye most lost, most ruined, most hopeless and find heaven begun in Christ. The impending judgment seems even now to scorch your souls. Come and find deliverance from God for God Himself invites you. Tarry no longer, may Jesus sweetly lead you to himself."
	
But Mark Twain was not alone in thinking this was old fashioned. The newspapers depicted him once as Gulliver, beached in beleaguered by the critics of his day. Spurgeon held to his guns and said this, "If a man can preach one sermon without mentioning Christ's name, it ought to be his last." Spurgeon had the uncanny gift of incarnating the gospel into the common language of the people. His homiletic stood in high relief like some of these reliefs here against the monotonous preaching of his day. One reporter said that Spurgeon talked English instead of pulpit.
	
"To preach the gospel," he said, "is not to mumble over some dry manuscript. It is not to speak colorlessly about color or odorlessly about odor." That's why as another report said, "The scholarly drop in to hear Dr. Von or Dr. Dykes. The intellectual gather around the pulpits of Lydon or Stanley. The lovers of oratory follow Pushnin but the crowd, the crowd goes to the Tabernacle."
	
Spurgeon reacted against the kind of intellectual preaching that, in his own words, requires a dictionary rather than a Bible to explain it. He added, "The preacher must also mind that he preaches Christ simply. He must break up his big words and his long sentences and pray against the temptation to use them. It is usually the short dagger-like sentences that does the work the best. A true servant of Christ must never try to let the people see how well he can preach. He must never go out of his way to drag a pretty piece of poetry into a sermon nor to introduce some fine quotation from the classics." Even though Spurgeon did do all that.
	
"Instead he must employ a simple homely style or such a style as God has given him, and he must preach Christ so plainly that his hearers can not only understand him but that they cannot misunderstand him even if they tried to do so." That's probably why Charles Spurgeon is one of the most tweeted preachers on the internet. The man doesn't need 140 characters to get the gospel across.
	
The famous Irish actor James Noles, who actually would have been Spurgeon's professor of speaking at Stepney, he once told his students this, "Spurgeon is only a boy but he can do anything he pleases with his audience. He can make them laugh and he can make them cry in five minutes." He added, "I would give a large amount of money if I could only get Spurgeon on stage." And the stage he was referring to was the Drury Lane Theatre, which is still standing in London.
	
Helmut Thielicke once said that Spurgeon was the combustion of two things, oxygen and grace. And Spurgeon suffered no shortage of either. He once said, "Some ministers would make great martyrs. They're so dry they would burn well." Spurgeon would not burn well. He believed you must take your sermons, Beeson, and make them red hot. "Never mind," he said, "if men think you're too enthusiastic or fanatical. You give them a red hot shot. We do not go snowballing on Sunday," he said. "We go fire balling. We ought to hurl grenades into the enemy's ranks."
	
The irony should not be lost that on July 17, 1944 in the heat of World War 2, when London was getting pummeled by Nazi rockets, an unmanned vengeance weapon, as the Nazis called it, was catapulted into the sky above France. Soaring at 400 miles an hour this long range German weapon took 25 minutes to cross the English Channel before descending upon the city. About 6000 Londoners would lose their lives from these missile attacks. And yet the particular bomb that fell in the summer of ‘44 would land not near the Thames River where it was aimed but instead on the tomb of Charles Haddon Spurgeon in West Norwood Cemetery. The detonation not only exposed Spurgeon's coffin to the elements but it also did one more thing. It dislodged the stone Bible cemented above Spurgeon's casket and it deposited it in pieces to the ground. 
	
What Germany had done to English theology in Spurgeon's life, she also accomplished after his death. Of course by way of nuance we must be careful not to demonize all of 19th century German higher critical scholarship. The quest to uncover the Jesus of history accomplished much in giving us the humanity of Christ but truncating Christ divinity and demythologizing his miracles and denying the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. It made Spurgeon in his own words, “feel really ill.” 
	
By the end of the century England had received from Germany an infant who had been born of a woman but not a virgin and a criminal who died on a cross but never rose from the grave. For Spurgeon, this neology, this new theology that Karl Barth would later try to fix was obvious. If Christ cannot save, the Spirit cannot cleanse. If justification stands trial, sanctification stands trial. If your Christology and your sermons collapse, your pneumatology and your soteriology and every other essential theological category will be sure to fall. 
	
I sort of think there's a lesson here for us here at Beeson. Preacher, you don't need to go cook up some clever new theology to make it appetizing to your people. Nor is it your primary task to defend God's Word though we need to divide it rightly. Spurgeon said, like a lion, the Bible can defend itself, you just have to let it out of the cage. Brothers and sisters, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Your task is to faithfully transmit it to a new generation.
	
Well, as we move toward the end of this lecture I'd like us to lodge tonight at the house of interpretation and talk briefly about Spurgeon's hermeneutic. 
	
"Then Christian began to gird up his loins and to address himself to the journey. So the other told him that by that he was gone some distance from the gate. He would come at the house of the interpreter at whose door he should knock and he would show him excellent things." In the Spurgeon Library as we're revamping our website, I've been counseled or you might say commanded by powers higher than myself, that I need to undertake the ministry of blogging. Now, I don't know about you, but I've said some pretty degenerate things about blogging. Like this, blogging is nothing more than graffiti with punctuation. 
	
Nevertheless, last semester I decided to descend into this genre and in one of my more quite controversial blogs, “Six Things Spurgeon Didn't Say”, I had to debunk perhaps what is the most commonly attributed quote to Spurgeon. And I apologize in advance if you have published this, I have friends who have published. Or if you've used it in a sermon. I recently had a friend who used this as the title of his book. Spurgeon didn't say this. "I take my text and make a bee-line to the cross." He never said it. He never said anything remotely like it. The phrase originated in America. Did you know that? In the early 19th century.
	
By 1891, James Dixon defined the idiom to make a bee-line as "following a straight course like a bee is supposed to do." 
	
By the way, Spurgeon also didn't say and this will break your heart, "I have never found a text that I had not got a road to Christ in it and if I do find one that does not have a road to Christ in it I will make one. I will go over hedge and ditch but I would get it my master. For the sermon cannot do any good unless there is a savior of Christ in it." That was actually a Welsh minister that Spurgeon quoted. 
	
Now, by the way, if you can prove me wrong any of you, it's an open challenge. Find me the original source and I'll send you some swag from the Spurgeon Library, you have my word.
	
But the question is raised, how did Spurgeon get to Christ? What was his method, his hermeneutic, his bee-line to Calvary? Well, one day I was perusing the books in our library that Spurgeon owned and I found one entitled, “Bees and Beekeeping.” I was pleased to discover in the author's own words, "Bees are accomplished fliers but they never traverse the air with the same directness as many birds so that the expression bee-line used by bee hunters needs to be accepted in a modified sense. It is the habit of the bee to skim along in extended sweeps alternatively curving to the right and to the left."
	
I think this modified definition better characterizes Spurgeon's often flighty hermeneutic. Instead of flying in a straight line toward the conclusion of his sermon, Spurgeon zig-zagged his way to Calvary. Now, I know the iron sided expositors among us might raise their eyebrows at some of his sermons. I raise my own eyebrows sometimes. But the honey of his homiletic was a unique amalgamation of nectar collected from numerous flowers or tulips if you want to make a Calvinist joke. Influenced by the Puritans, Spurgeon incorporated typology, allegory, spiritualization and metaphor, I see you shaking your head.
	
In his lecture on allegory, for instance, Spurgeon warned against the abuses of these devices. He criticized Benjamin Keach his predecessor for running away with his metaphors. Spurgeon said, "He ran not only on all fours but on as many legs as a centipede. Now John Bunyan got more grace than Keach. After all, he was a Spurgeon called him the chief and head and Lord of all allegorists. "Bunyan is a swimmer," said Spurgeon, "we are mere waders." 
	
But Spurgeon was no mere ventriloquist merely parroting the Puritans. He had his own style. He made his own honey. His preaching refurbished older expressions of evangelicalism and textured them in a conversational language of his day. His typical sermon included an introduction, a deductive explanation of his points and then a final exhortation. But this template was not original to Charles Spurgeon. In fact, I make the argument that this sermon structure is largely credited to his reading of a book own from his earliest ministry entitled, “Essay on the Composition of a Sermon.” You must all get that book today. It's free to download on the internet. Essay on the composition of a sermon by French Calvinist Minister John Claude, pastor of the church near Paris.
	
Claude said that a sermon should be like a telescope and primary divisions are like lenses that bring the subject of your text near. And so, in this way, Spurgeon was not a creator. He was a converter. In the same way that water absorbs the properties of a pipe, the traditional axioms of biblical orthodoxy were not altered by Spurgeon, only flavored. 
	
Of course at times, Spurgeon failed to flavor them enough. More than a handful of sermons he lifted directly from the works of Philip Doddridge and Richard Baxter and John Bunyan. Spurgeon once said, "He who will not use the thoughts of other men's brains proves he has no brains of his own." I love the story when Spurgeon is about to reprimand a young preacher who was caught plagiarizing one of Spurgeon's sermons. Listen to Martin Lloyd Jones' exchange, narrate the exchange.
	
"Well now," said Mr. Spurgeon, "you need not be frightened. If you are honest you will not be punished. We are all sinners but we do want to get to the facts. You have been preaching a sermon on such and such a texts?" "Yes, sir." "And you have divided up your subject as follows?" "Yes sir." "And you say you have not been preaching my sermon?" "That is so, sir." "Well, are you saying then that it is your sermon?" "No, sir." "Well, whose sermon is it?" "It is a sermon by William J. of Bath, sir," said the student. Lloyd Jones noted, "The fact was that Mr. Spurgeon had also preached William J.'s sermon and actually put it into print with his own sermons."
	
Now of course it's important to note the rules of plagiarism were far more relaxed in the 19th century than they are in the 21st century. Spurgeon never preached for more than 45 minutes. "A sermon lasting over an hour," he said, "might have been enjoyed by the Puritans but we are a degenerate race. And besides we have more to do. Say no more when you have no more to say." And then of course to that comment, he added, "If some people remembered this rule they would never begin at all."
	
All right. So as our time draws to a close allow me to conclude our pilgrimage today with one final reflection. It is a reflection not so much about preaching but the preacher's life, the legacy of preaching. Tomorrow we're going to Pilgrimize with Spurgeon through the Valley of Humiliation. We're going to go with him through Vanity Fair and talk about preaching that speaks to culture and eventually we'll cross the Jordan River and make our way to the Celestial City. But listen now to what Spurgeon said only weeks before his death to a small group of friends in Mentone, France. January the 1st, 1892.
	
"We would have it so happen when our life's history is written. Whoever reads it will not think of us as self-made men but as the handiwork of God in whom His grace is magnified. Not in us may men see the clay but the potter's hands. They said of one he is a fine preacher but of another they said we never notice how he preaches but we feel that God is great." Spurgeon concludes this way. "We wish our whole life to be a sacrifice, an altar of incense continually smoking with sweet perfume unto the Most High." May that be true of us as well.
	
Let's conclude in prayer. Father, we praise you today for drawing the lines of our lives to converge here in this chapel. Forgive us Lord for keeping the word accident in our dictionaries. Lord, give us the same spirit that Spurgeon had, that your Son Jesus Christ had, so that everybody who hears us will hear you, so that everybody who sees us will see you. Lord, I pray particularly for the preachers and the ministers in this room. Give them boldness and courage to lead and feed your flocks. May this place, may this dome here in Birmingham continue to be a beacon of light in this dark and dying world. In the name of Jesus Christ, I pray, amen.

Announcer:	You've been listening to the Beeson podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson podcast at our website beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School in interdenominational evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson podcast.