Spurgeon's Table Talk

With some to whom we preach, the Word doth indeed have "free course," for it goes in one ear land out the other.

You cannot measure fire by the bushel, nor prayers by their length.

Don't preach too long. I should say, if you are earnest and interesting, that, whatever you are preaching about, you should preach about forty minutes. Some sermons remind me of the sailor who was told to pull a rope on board; he pulled, and pulled until he was tired, and then declared that he believed "the end of this 'ere rope is cut off."

Stick to your preaching, and let nothing take you from it. If you have not finished your sermon, and should hear the sound of the archangel's trump, go on with it.

There are dungeons underneath the Castle of Despair as dreary as the abodes of the lost, and some of us have been in them.

To learn to say "No" will be of greater service than to know Latin.

Some people seem to have three hands: a right hand, a left hand, and a little behind hand.

The Plymouth Brethren reject our idea of the ministry. Yet many of them have been like the Irishman who went to school and said of it, "None of us knowed nothin', and we each larn's one another."

We must make the Church a school to educate the conscience. Many a man has enough conscience to scare him in sin, but not enough to save him from sin.

"Lead me not into temptation" means, to me, bring me not into a committee.

If you preach so as to convert souls, the Lord will not disappoint you.

Avoid carelessness in every part of your work. A clergyman in conducting the Burial Service over a person came to "this our beloved …" But he did not know if he was burying a man or a woman, and turned to one of the mourners with the question, "Brother or sister?" "Neither, sir, only a friend," was the bewildering reply.

I observed the other day a marine store notice, "Fifty tons of bone wanted." Yes, I thought, and mostly backbones.

Don't be squeamish in the pulpit, like one who read, "Jonah was three days and three nights in – ahem – the society of the fish."

A member once said to his minister who wanted a little more salary as his family increased, "I did not know you preached for money." "No, I don't," said the minister. "I thought you preached for souls." "So I do; but my family cannot live on souls, and if they could it would take a good many of the size of yours to make a meal."

(From the Banner of Truth Magazine October 1969)

Whitefield by Spurgeon

If I turn to the pages of history to find out the best men who ever lived, do you know where I find them? Not among those who were called "respectable" in their time …I see great names, Erasmus and others, mighty and learned men, but on a dirty, thumbed page I see the name of Luther associated with such epithets as these – "dog, adulterer, beast," and everything else that the malice of Rome could suggest. And I say, "Ah, this is the man whom God chose, for he went without the camp." That list of great divines and of schoolmen and of theologians, you may wipe them all out without much regret! But this man "without the camp," he is somebody …

Turn to another list of archbishops, bishops, deans, rural deans, rectors and curates … There is nothing special about any of them. At last I find a picture of Hogarth – a caricature of a man preaching with devils coming out of his mouth, and underneath it is written, "Fire and brimstone." I look at the portrait and I say, "See, it is Mr Whitefield." Ah! There is the man of the age, depend upon it; that man all black, charged with crimes that Sodom never knew … this man here that is abused, that is laughed at, that is mocked; this is the man who is somebody.

(From the Banner of Truth Magazine June 1970)