Review: “Lectures to my Students”
Lectures to my Students
C. H. Spurgeon
Various publishers and editions
Every Friday afternoon
Charles Spurgeon would head down to the Pastors’ College – of all the
institutions in which he was involved, the one that was perhaps dearest
to his great heart – and attempt to put an edge and a point on the
blades that had been tempered in the fires of the college forges all the
week long. This is not the place to discuss the peculiar features and
particular excellences of Spurgeon’s plan for pastoral training, but it
shows Spurgeon’s sensitivity to the needs of his students that those
Friday afternoons found him at his most deliberately engaging and his
most transparently personal as he sought to put a little fire in their
bellies before the Lord’s day.
It is at this point that many current
scholars will, perhaps, huff about a Baptist pietist, even a mere
activist or enthusiast, given to taking gross liberties with the text – a
genius, we grudgingly admit, but a fairly vulgar and far from polished
tool in the Master’s hands, and not quite the thing as far as exposition
is concerned. Others will give you Spurgeon re-made in the image of
Stout’s Whitefield, a great advertiser and a pulpit actor of the first
water, perhaps even a man who ought to be appreciated as an early model
for the megachurch pastor. Please ignore such flawed assertions and
myopic perspectives; pick up this book and read it for itself.
The
full version of this volume (which is heartily recommended) is divided
into four sections, the last of which (though the second in the original
publishing sequence) is Spurgeon’s infamous Commenting &
Commentaries (which is where most of the reprinted commentaries with
Spurgeon’s endorsement find their – often, it must be said, selective –
phrases of commendation). Our primary interest is in the first three
sections of the full collection.
Of these, the first two seem to be
constructed without the intention of progress that is apparent in many
others of the older pastoral theologies. So, for example, Spurgeon
plunges into his material with four chapters on ‘The Minister’s
Self-Watch,’ ‘The Call to the Ministry,’ ‘The Preacher’s Private Prayer’
and ‘Our Public Prayer.’ And yet, as we begin to jump from topic to
topic, we find each one not so much following on from the last as
setting out another anchor point. In this way, as we proceed we find our
souls both stretched in various directions and, at the same time,
firmly held within a developing web of healthy principles and practices
that give us a measure of establishment with the aim of stable
development and genuine ministerial usefulness.
Most of the time,
each element is essentially self-contained, although some topics do
break over two or more chapters (the main exception is the third
section, of which more below). Each chapter is fairly brief, and marked
by typically Spurgeonic arrangements of the material, with thoughtful
and engaging headings guiding us progressively through the matter at
hand. The style is homely, full of quotations broadly drawn from various
authors, marked by humour and practical insight. These ‘lectures’ very
quickly turn into sermons – you can almost feel the momentum building in
some of them – and so illustrate the very craft they are intended to
illuminate. Each is generally marked by holy wit and sanctified common
sense.
There are several specific blessings and some particular
challenges from reading Spurgeon on pastoral ministry. One blessing is
that these chapters are never mere ‘how to’ guides. To be sure, they are
always practical, but they are never merely a set of mechanical rules
for this and for that – for sermon construction, for prayer, and so on.
Such technical discussions have their value, but Spurgeon does not so
much give you a classroom discourse on the nature and excellence of the
instrument as get the machine going and take you into the field to use
it.
Again, our author covers topics not always covered elsewhere, and
rarely with the kind of knockabout pungency found here. He speaks to us
about getting the attention of our congregation, about the minister’s
fainting fits (if you have never had one, read this before you do – it
will save you much grief), on choosing a text, on open-air preaching, on
the voice, on posture and gesture. Such material digs up the heart and
prompts careful reflection about the ways and the means in which we
invest our pastoral energies and the manner in which we employ the tools
and opportunities we have been given. Spurgeon will nudge you into
rooms of experience you might never have visited and open windows for
you to look out on views you might never have contemplated.
Furthermore,
Spurgeon is always stimulating, even when provocative or plain
misguided. For example, his chapter ‘On Spiritualizing’ is perhaps the
one which is invariably singled out as worthy of being dismissed. I
honestly wonder if some who speak so quickly have read perhaps a couple
of his more extravagant sermons (remembering that, even if you cannot
follow him in everything, he usually takes pains to demonstrate a proper
understanding of almost every text he treats, albeit sometimes followed
by a phrase like, “However, this morning we are going to take our text
as . . .”) and presumed that they know what is coming. However, the
first third of the chapter is on abuses of the principle. Only then does
he turn to the types, metaphors, allegories of Scripture, with further
thoughts on generalizing universal principles, preaching on parables and
miracles, before some further cautions on the kind of men who can
employ such an approach wisely, and those who cannot, the whole
illustrated with some judicious quotations and thoughtful comments. I am
not saying that I can follow everywhere Spurgeon leads here, but he
will make you ask yourself whether or not you have made the Scriptures
too much of a dry stick and wrung out a little more sap than you might
have intended.
The material on illustration – the entire third
section – is worth a mention in its own right. Are you weary of those
sermons and commentaries which open each chapter with some strained
connection to some situation or event in the real world, or which offer
the example of “Algernon (not his real name), a basket-weaver from
Clapham, raised by wolves and incapable of eating vegetables,” only to
have Algy’s case fully resolved by the close of the chapter by the
penetrating insights and applications of our preacher/author? Spurgeon
will help you think through the purpose, value, collections, selection
and employment of illustrations, helping us to really enliven our
sermons and put hooks in the ears of those who hear us.
I would not
wish to ignore the spirit of consecration that pervades the whole. There
is nothing here that is dry or dull, but it is all carried along by a
man who demonstrates the very earnestness he encourages, characterised
by a burning desire to see God glorified in salvation, in the fullest
sense of the word. You are never allowed the sense that these are
treasures for mere display; each is a tool for use in the great business
of seeking and saving the lost in the declaration of the gospel.
Overall, the volume is marked by a concern for character as well as
capacity, for substance rather than style, for spirit as well as form in
service to aim.
But there are a few notes of caution which ought to
be sounded. Perhaps first and foremost is the fact that Spurgeon often
forgets that you are not Spurgeon. This can be the case even when he is
making allowances for us. For example, in the chapter on choosing your
text he acknowledges that his strength comes from variety rather than
profundity, and that he could not announce a series on a topic or
sustain one on a book if you paid him to do so. However, there are few
others who would feel well able to wait until Saturday evening before
thinking of their morning sermon, or Sunday afternoon before sitting
down to prepare for the evening, which was effectively what Spurgeon
ended up doing, and pretty much where he sends you.
This then bleeds
into a tendency to absolutism at certain times (a tendency by no means
confined to Spurgeon’s pastoral theology) and to make a general
principle from a personal preference or habit. For example, Spurgeon
says here that unless you already have conversions to show for your
labours, you are not called to the ministry. Had he lived at another
time, or in another place, he might have been a little more wary or
balanced, or spoken more generally of fruitfulness. The same applies to
some of the comments about text selection and the like.
The volume
is, as it must be, of its time. Some of the comments, asides and
applications will need to be adapted (for example, the kind of pulpit
cant against which Spurgeon rails is just as current, although it finds
slightly different forms and environments today). However, we do this
with anything else from another time and place, and it should prove no
great difficulty for the wise.
Finally, in this regard, we have
mentioned already that there are some topics which you will have to
wrestle with. You are not obliged to agree with everything that even a
Spurgeon says, but you will need good and sound reasons to disagree, and
may even find your own perspective improved and enriched even if not
fundamentally altered by the process.
So, let me urge you, if you
have not already done so (and even if you have), to get to grips
(perhaps, again) with Spurgeon’s Lectures to my Students. To open the
pages is to walk into a family gathering, and to listen to a spiritual
father among his labouring sons, an older pastor among his younger
brothers. It will not be long, I hope, before you are made to feel
thoroughly at home, and – listening in to that rich voice from a warm
and full heart – start to obtain a blessing.
