Teaching Resources International

The Preaching of the Master by C. H. Spurgeon

As among kings he is the King of kings, as among priests he is the great High Priest, as among prophets he is the Messiah, so is he the Prince of preachers, the Apostle of our profession.  They who are most excellent as preachers are those who are most like him; but even those who by being most like him have become eminent, are still far short of his excellence.  “His lips,” says the spouse, “are like lilies, dropping sweet smelling myrrh.”  He is a prophet mighty in word and deed.

To form a right conception of our Lord’s ministry, it is necessary to note the whole of it, and we may do so without departing from the text; for though the officers did not hear all that Jesus said, I have no doubt that the qualities which shone in his entire ministry were many of them apparent in the discourse which he delivered on that particular occasion.  Follow me, therefore, as I note the leading qualities of his unrivalled eloquence.

The most casual reader of Christ’s discourses would observe that their style is singularly clear and perspicuous, and yet their matter is by no means trivial or superficial. Did ever man speak like this man Christ Jesus, for simplicity?  Little children gathered around him, for much of what he said was interesting even to them.  If there be ever a difficult word in any of Christ’s discourses, it is because it must be there owing to the faultiness of human language, but there is never a hard word inserted, for its own sake, where an easier word could have been employed.  You never find him, for the sake of display, careering upon the wings of rhetoric; he never gives forth dark sayings that his hearers may discover that his learning is vast and his thinking profound.  He is profound, and in that respect, “never man spoke like this man;” he unveils the mysteries of God, he brings to light the treasures of darkness of the ages past which prophets and kings desired to see, but into which they could not pry; there is in his teaching a depth so vast that the greatest human intellect cannot fathom it, but all the while he speaks with plain words, in parables with multitudinous illustrations of the most homely kind — about eggs, and fish, and candles, and bushels, and sweeping houses, and losing pieces of money, and finding sheep.  His speech abounds in the truest and most natural of images, and is ever constructed not to display himself, but to make clear the truth which he was sent to reveal, “Never man spoke like this man!”  The common people with their common sense heard him gladly, for even if they could not always grasp the full compass of his teaching, yet upon the surface of his plain speech there  glittered lumps of golden ore well worthy to be treasured up.  For this quality our Savior, then, remains unrivalled, perspicuous yet profound.

His speech had this also about it that he spoke with unusual authority.  He was a master dogmatist.  It was not “it may be so,” or “it can be proven,” and “it is highly probable;” but “Verily, verily, I say unto you.”  And yet side by side with this was an extraordinary degree of self-sinking.  The Master spoke dogmatically, but never with proud self-sufficiency, after the manner of the children of conceit; he never pestered you with assumptions of superiority, and claims to official dignity.  He borrowed no assistance from a priestly robe or from an imposing title.  Meek he was as Moses, but like Moses he spoke the word of the Lord with absolute authority.  Coming out of the ivory palaces, fresh from the bosom of the Father, having looked into the unseen, and heard the infallible oracle, he spoke not with bated breath, with hesitancy and debate as the scribes and lawyers, not with arguments and reasonings as the priests and Pharisees, creating perplexity and pouring darkness upon human minds.  “Verily, verily, I say unto you,” was his favorite word.  He spoke that he did know, and testified what he had seen, and demanded to be accepted as sent forth from the Father.  He did not debate, but declare.  His sermons were not guesses, but testimonies.  Yet he never magnifies himself, he lets his works and his Father bear witness of him.  He asserts truth from his own positive knowledge, and because he has a commission from the Father to do so, but never as mere dogmatists do with an extolling of their own selves, as though they were to be glorified and not the God who sent the truth and the Spirit by whom it is applied.

Further, in our Lord’s preaching, there was a wonderful combination of faithfulness with tenderness.  He was indeed the prince of faithful preachers.  Not even Nathan when he stood before King David, and said, “Thou art the man,” could be more true to human conscience than Christ was.  How those cutting words of his must have told like rifle-bullets when they were first hurled against the respectability of the age, “Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!”  “Woe unto you, lawyers,” and so forth.  There was no mincing matters, no winking at wickedness because it happened to be associated with greatness, no excusing sin because it put on the sanctimoniousness of religion; he neither fawned on the great nor pandered to the populace.  Jesus reproved all classes to their faces concerning their sins.  It never occurred to him to seek to please men. He looked to the doing of his Father’s business, and since that business often involved the laying of righteousness to the line, of judgment to the plummet, he spared not to do it.  Perhaps no preacher ever used more terrible words with regard to the fate of the ungodly than our Lord has done.  Those awful sentences which fell from the lips of the Friend of Sinners prove that he was too much their friend to flatter them, too much their friend to let them perish without a full warning of their doom.  And yet though he thundered, how gentle were his words!  He did not break the bruised reed nor quench the smoking flax.  For the woman taken in adultery, he had no word of curse; for the mothers of Jerusalem bringing their babes, he had not a syllable of reprehension.  Kind, gentle, tender, loving, the speech which at one time sounded as the voice of Jehovah which breaks the cedars of Lebanon and makes the hinds to calve, was at other seasons modulated to music, softened to a whisper, and used to cheer the disconsolate, and bind up broken hearts.  “Never man spoke like this man,” so faithful and yet so tenderly affectionate, so mindful of the least good which he could see in man, and yet so determined to smite hypocrisy wherever his holy eye could discover it.

You will observe in the Savior’s preaching a remarkable mingling of zeal with prudence.  He is full of ardor; the zeal of God’s house hath eaten him up.  He never preached a cold, dull sermon in all his life.  He was a pillar of light and fire.  When he spoke his words burned their way into men’s minds by reason of the Sacred enthusiasm with which he delivered them, but yet his fervor never degenerated into wild fire like the zeal of ignorant and over-balanced minds.  We know some whose zeal if tempered with knowledge might be of use to the church, but being altogether without knowledge, it is dangerous both to themselves and to their cause.  Fanaticism may spring out of a real desire for God’s glory; there is, however, no need that earnestness should degenerate into rant.  It never did so in the Savior’s case.  His zeal was red hot, but his prudence was calm and cool.  He was not afraid of the Herodians, but yet how quietly did he answer them in that trap concerning tribute-money!  They would never forget the penny and the question, “Whose image and superscription is this?”  He was ready to meet the Sadducees at any time, but he was on his guard, so that they could not entangle him in his speech.  He was quite sure to escape their nets, and take them in their own craftiness.  If a question be asked, which for the moment he does not care to answer, he knows how to ask them another question, which they also cannot answer; and to send them about their business covered with shame.  It is a grand thing when a man can be warm and wise, when he can carry about him an unexcitable temperament, and yet the force which excites others: unmoved himself, the man of prudence becomes the power by which others are moved.  Such was the Savior.  But I must not let that sentence of mine pass unchallenged — in the higher sense he was always more moved than the people — but I mean as to temper and spirit, he was not readily disturbed.  He was self-possessed, prudent, wise, and yet when he spoke he flashed, and burned, and blazed with a sacred vehemence which showed that his whole soul was on fire with love to the souls of men.  Zeal and prudence in remarkable proportions met in Jesus, and “Never man spoke like this man.”

So, too, everyone who has read our Lord’s discourses and marked his character will have perceived that love was among the leading characteristics of his style as a preacher. He was full of tenderness, brimming with sympathy, overflowing with affection.  That weeping over Jerusalem, whose children he would have gathered, was but one instance of what happened many a time in his life; his heart sympathized with sorrow whenever his eye beheld it; he could not bear that the people should be like sheep without a shepherd, and be wrought many deeds of kindness, and said many words of instruction, because he loved them.  But our Savior’s speech was never affected and canting.  He used no stale honey, there was nothing of that — I do not know the word to use — that fulsome sugarishness, which in some people is disgustingly perceptible.  It was never so with the Savior.  He condemned this or that evil in no measured terms; there was in him no apologizing, no guarding of expressions, no fawning, no using of soft words.  They who are shaken with the wind and affect flattering phrases, stand in kings’ palaces; but he, the people’s preacher, one chosen out of the people, dwelt among the many, a man among men.  He held his own position, but trampled on none.  He committed himself to no man, but he was willing to bless every man.  No one else in this matter has so exactly struck the balance, and therefore, “Never man spoke like this man.”

One memorable characteristic of our Lord’s preaching was his remarkable commingling of the excellences which are found separately in his servants. You know, perhaps, a preacher who is admirable when he addresses the head, who can explain and expound very logically and clearly, and you feel that you have been instructed whenever you have sat under him; but the light though clear, is cold like moonlight, and when you retire you feel that you know more, and yet are none the better for what you know.  It would be well if those who can enlighten the head so well would remember that man has also a heart. On the other hand, we know others whose whole ministry is addressed to the passions, and the emotions; during a sermon, you shed any quantity of tears, you pass through a furnace of sensation, but as to what is left which is calculated permanently to benefit you, it were difficult to discover; when the sermon is over, the shower and the sunshine have both departed, the fair rainbow has disappeared from sight, and what remains?  It would be well if those who always talk to the heart, recollected that men have heads as well.

Now the Savior was a preacher whose head was in his heart, and whose heart was in his head.  He never addressed the emotions except by motives which commended themselves to the reason nor did he instruct the mind without at the same time influencing the heart and conscience.  Our Savior’s power as a speaker was comprehensive.  He aroused the conscience, who more than he?  With but a single sentence, he convicted those who came to tempt him, so that beginning with the eldest, and ending with the youngest, they all went out ashamed.  But he was not a mere render open of wounds, a cutter and a killer, he was equally great in the arts of holy consolation.  With intonations of matchless music, he could say, “Go thy way; thy sins, which are many, be forgiven thee.”  He knew how to console a weeping friend as well as to confront a boisterous enemy; his superiority was felt by all sorts of men; his artillery struck at all ranges; his mind war, equal to all emergencies; it was for good like the sword of the cherubim at the gates of Eden for evil, it turned every way to keep the gates of life open for those who would fain enter there.

My brethren, I have entered upon a theme which is boundless; I merely touch some of the outer skirts of my Master’s robes; as for himself, if you would know how he spoke you must hear him.  One of the ancients was wont to say that he could have wished to have seen Rome in all its splendor, to have been with Paul in all his labors, and to have heard Christ when preaching.  Surely it were worth worlds, but once to have caught the round of that serene, soul-stirring voice, to have beheld for once the glance of those matchless eyes as they looked through the heart, and that heavenly countenance as it glowed with love.

His eloquence had, however, this for its main aspect that it concerned the greatest truths that were ever made manifest to man.  He brought light and immortality to light, he cleared up what had been doubtful, he resolved that which had been mysterious, he declared that which is gracious, that which saves the soul and glorifies God.  No preacher was ever laden with so divine a message as Christ.  We who bring the same glad tidings bring the news at second hand, and but in part; but he came forth from the Father’s bosom with the whole truth, and, therefore, “Never man spoke like this man.”

From a sermon, “The Unrivalled Eloquence of Jesus.”