C.H. Spurgeon's Sermons on the Miracles

by Charles Haddon Spurgeon

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 28, 1992

About the author

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892) was England's best-known preacher for most of the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1854, just four years after his conversion, Spurgeon, then only 20, became pastor of London's famed New Park Street Church (formerly pastored by the famous Baptist theologian, John Gill). The congregation quickly outgrew their building, moved to Exeter Hall, then to Surrey Music Hall. In these venues, Spurgeon frequently preached to audiences numbering more than 10,000—all in the days before electronic amplification. In 1861, the congregation moved permanently to the newly constructed Metropolitan Tabernacle.

Reviews

[Dylan Brady · Rating 5 out of 5]

20 brilliant Christ saturated sermons

Particularly loved this:

The Church of God on earth at this present time anxiously desires to spread her influence over the world. For Christ's sake we wish to have the Truths of God we preach acknowledged and the precepts which we deliver obeyed. But mark, no Church will ever have power over the masses of this or any other land except in proportion as she does them good. The day has long since passed in which any Church may hope to prevail on the plea of history. "Look at what we were," is a vain appeal—men only care for what we are.

The sect which glorifies itself with the faded laurels of past centuries and is content to be inactive today is very near to its inglorious end. In the race of usefulness, men nowadays care less about the pedigree of the horse and more about the rate at which it can run. The history of a congregation or a sect is of small account compared with the practical good which it is doing. Now, if any Church under Heaven can show that it is making men honest, temperate, pure, moral, holy—that it is seeking out the ignorant and instructing them, that it is seeking out the fallen and reclaiming them, that, in fact, it is turning moral wastes into gardens and taking the weeds and briars of the wilderness and transforming them into precious fruit-bearing trees—then the world will be ready to hear its claims and consider them.

If a Church cannot prove its usefulness, the source of its moral strength will have gone and, indeed, something worse than this will have happened, for its spiritual strength will have gone, too! A barren church is manifestly without the fruitful Spirit of God. Brothers and Sisters, you may, if you will, dignify your minister by the name of bishop. You may give to your deacons and elders grand official titles. You may call your place of worship a cathedral. You may worship, if you will, with all the grandeur of pompous ceremonies and the adornments of music and incense and the like—but you shall have only the semblance of power over human minds unless you have something more than these!

If you have a Church, no matter by what name it is called, that is devout, that is holy, that is living unto God, that does good in its neighborhood, that, by the lives of its members, spreads holiness and righteousness—in a word, if you have a Church that is really making the world whole in the name of Jesus—you shall, in the long run, find that even the most carnal and thoughtless will say, "The Church which is doing this good is worthy of respect. Therefore let us hear what it has to say." Living usefulness will not screen us from persecution, but it will save us from contempt! A holy Church goes with authority to the world in the name of Jesus Christ, its Lord, and this force, the Holy Spirit uses to bring human hearts into subjection to the Truth of God!