Spurgeon's legacy

One reason why I love older books is their zeal and seriousness - especially about preaching. As patient readers of this blog will know I am desperately concerned about the often low state of contemporary preaching when it seems there is little expectation that God can change people through his preached word.  Really transform. Fullerton's book 'Souls of Men' begins by asking how the famous preacher CH. Spurgeon should be best remembered. By his church, college, orphanage, his writing, his preaching? Of course, in 1928 with Fullerton a good friend, and memories of the great preacher alive, people were constantly asking him about Spurgeon. In particular, ministers asked him whether the same kind of preaching would work at other times and produce similar results. Could Fullerton sum up the lasting legacy of this great man? Yes he could in nine words.

At length, on awakening one morning, it came to me as if spoken by the very voice of God: 'His testimony to the converting power of the gospel.'  The conversion of his hearers was the constant aim of his ministry, and therefore the constant result of it. The word 'therefore' is not used thoughtlessly. When his first student Medhurst complained that he was not having conversions Spurgeon said; 'But you do not expect conversions every time  you preach, do you? 'Oh, no, of course not!' 'And that is why you do not have them!'.....And in another conversation Spurgeon said that he did not mean the word 'expect' in a sense that he was guaranteeing conversion but he hoped it would be so....He expected it because he loved the people, because he believed they needed to be converted, and because he knew that the Gospel is 'the power of God to salvation to everyone that believes.'

He then quotes a conversation Timothy Richard (missionary to China) had in Shanghai with a man who, thinking of Spurgeon's impact, asked: 'Did you ever know a man's whole life to be changed by simply listening to a preacher for half an hour? ' That was the miracle that happened thousands of times in Spurgeon's Tabernacle.

The question that concerns Fullerton is strongly stated : 'Why does it not happen oftener today? He challenges that we need :

• a greater sense of the realism of conversion - conversion from sin. Sin must become exceeding sinful and not regarded as the almost excusable lapse of a too pliant nature. 
• a great passion for others' souls. We need to feel. Nothing great in the world is ever accomplished without passion, and this greatest of all vocations will need it the most.
• deep sympathy and deep love. In this divine task if I have not love I am nothing.
• make it your business. You will win souls if you make it your business to win them.  

I reckon that's a nugget to treasure from an old book!