Teaching Resources International

Lukewarmness in the Pulpit by C. H. Spurgeon

“I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.” Revelation 3:15-16

Yet once more, notice that, wherever there is lukewarmness in religious matters, it is out of place. There is no spot, near to the throne of God, where lukewarmness could stand in a seemly position. Take the pulpit, for instance. Ah, my brethren, of all spots in the world, if lukewarmness cometh here, then is the preacher indeed undone!  He should be, of all men, the most in earnest who undertakes the charge of souls, for he has that solemn charge ringing in his ears: “I have set thee a watchman unto the house of Israel; therefore thou shalt hear the word at my mouth, and warn them from me.  When I say unto the wicked, O wicked man, thou shalt surely die; if thou dost not speak to warn the wicked from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand.”  They who have to deal with hardhearted sinners – they who have to preach unpalatable truths – surely they should not make men’s hearts harder, and the truth more unpalatable, by uttering it in a half-hearted manner.  It will go hard with the man who has exercised his ministry with indifference.  “If,” said one of old, “there be a man who finds the ministry an easy place, he will find it a hard matter, at the last, to give in his account before God.”  If, my brethren, there should be any professed ministers of Christ, who never know what it is to travail in birth for souls; if there be men who take up the ministry merely as a profession and exercise it as they might do in any secular calling if they preach merely as a matter of routine or because they consider it is a pleasant occupation; it would have been better for them if they had never been born.  Far better would it have been for them to have broken stones by the wayside than to have been preaching the gospel and leaving their hearts out of their sermon; yea, I know not whether it would not have been better to have been a devil in hell than to have been a minister in the pulpit without his heart in his work.

Baxter’s “Reformed Pastor” stirs my very soul whenever I read its glowing periods – those fiery thunderbolts which he hurls at the heads of idle shepherds and lazy minister I have read nearly the whole book through to those who are studying for the ministry in connection with this church, and often have I seen the tears start from their eyes while listening to the burning language of that fervent preacher and writer.  Every time I have read a chapter in that book, I have felt that, the next Sabbath, I could preach – I must preach – with greater earnestness after reading the solemn words of that mightiest of ministers, Richard Baxter.  Ah, beloved, we need to have more of that earnestness in the pulpit!  What though my young brethren should study less and be more earnest?  Rather let them study a much as ever they can; but, oh! if the Holy Spirit will but shed his sacred fire upon the dry fuel of their studies, how much more will be accomplished for the kingdom of Christ than is done now!  So, you see, dear friends, that lukewarmness is out of place in the pulpit.

So it is, my brethren and sisters, in the Sunday school, with the tract-distributor, and even with the private Christian, the humble attendant upon the means of grace. Everywhere, lukewarmness in religion is to be loathed and abandoned, for it is a gross and glaring inconsistency.  I would not have you go, with a lukewarm heart, even to distribute tracts.  I would not have you dare to visit the sick unless your heart is filled with love to Christ.  Either do such work well or do not do it at all.  Either put your heart into the work or let someone else do it.  We have had too many men of straw filling up our ranks; we have had too many automatons going forth to fight our battles.  We have counted our legions, and said, “A brave host they will be;” but if our army is sifted, if our ranks are thinned, we shall probably find that fewer true soldiers of the cross will accomplish more if they are not impeded in their onward march by the mixed multitude of those who pretend to join the army of the living God.

I hope that lukewarm professors will find themselves thoroughly out of place amongst us; I do not think they could long be happy here.  There are so many brethren here with a red-hot spirit that they would soon get burned, and they would say “This is not the spot for us.”  If you, lukewarm professors, come amongst us, you will be asked to do fifty things, and you will be teased till you do them, for the good people here will not be content unless you do all that you can, and they will probably want you to do two or three times more than you can.  I am sure that, in all places where God has sent warm-hearted men to preach the gospel, you will find yourselves extremely uncomfortable if you want to be lukewarm.  I certainly could tell you of some chapels where you could take your seat, and where you would be greatly needed for the support of the ministry.  The minister would never wake you; I daresay, if you paid an extra half-crown a quarter, he would let you sleep on as long as you liked.  If you did not join the church, nobody would ever think of asking you whether you were a member or not.  In our fashionable churches, of course, people do not speak to one another; that would be quite beneath their assumed dignity.  No man would dare, in such a place as that, to turn to his neighbor, and say, “Are you a child of God?”  Well, if you mean to be lukewarm, go to one of those places; but do not stay here, lest we should worry you by our importunities.  I question whether anybody would come here, for a few Sundays, without some brother walking up to him, and asking him whether he was a follower of Christ, or not; and the question would be repeated, by one or another, until he came to some decision concerning his soul.

Let me remind you that you have to do with solemn realities. You have to do with death, with eternity, with heaven, with hell, with Christ, with Satan, with souls that must live forever; can you deal with these things in a cold spirit?  If you can deal thus with them successfully, it will be one of the greatest marvels in the world, for these things demand the whole man.  If but to praise God requires that we call up all the powers of our soul, how much more is needed to serve God, and to serve him, not in the hewing of wood and the drawing of water, but in the winning of souls, in preaching his gospel, in propagating his cause, and extending his kingdom.  Here, my brethren, are stern and solemn things for us to deal with, and they must not be touched by any but those who come warm-heartedly to deal with them.

And remember, further, that there have been times, with you, when these things did seem worthy of a warm heart.  Perhaps you recollect when a child out of your Sunday-school class died, and then you thought, “Oh, that I had taught that child more earnestly, and prayed over it with all my heart!”  Possibly, when your own child died, you cried, “O Absalom, my son, my son!” and the thought wounded you to the quick, that you had not taught that child as you might have done, and that you had not wrestled with God in prayer for that child’s soul as you ought to have done.  Have not I also had to think like this when I have buried some of your kinsfolk or acquaintances?  As I have looked down into the grave of some unconverted hearer, the tears have streamed from my eyes; and, afterwards, I have awoke at night with some solemn and terrible dream embodying this black thought, “Have I been faithful to that soul?  Have I dealt with that spirit, now departed, as I would deal with it if I had another opportunity of preaching to it?”  Sometimes, I feel that I can even say, with the apostle Paul, “I take you to record this day that I am pure from the blood of all men.  For I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God.”  But there are other seasons of awful questioning when I tremble lest, out of so numerous a flock, the loss of even one should be attributed to the shepherd’s neglect.

Let me remind you, also, that the day is coming when you will think these things worthy of your whole heart, when you and I shall be stretched upon our dying beds; I think we shall have to regret, above everything else, our coldness of heart.  Among the many sins, which we must then confess, perhaps this will lie the heaviest upon our heart and conscience, “I did not live as I ought to have done; I was not as earnest in my Lord’s cause as I should have been.”  Then will our cold sermons, like sheeted ghosts, march before our eyes in dread array.  Then will our neglected days start up and to look right into our hearts and make our very blood curdle in our veins.  Then will our Sunday-school classes appear again before us; and those who taught us to teach others will come and reprove us for having despised their training and not having profited by that holy instruction which we received when we were set apart for God’s cause and were first trained to serve in his great army.  We may reckon these things of small importance now; but when we lie on the borders of eternity, we shall think them worth living for, and worth dying a thousand deaths for.    If you have lived lukewarmly, the things of God will then, even though you be a child of his, darken your dying hour, and weigh down your spirit with a fearful load of sad reflections.

Ay, and there will come a time when the things of God will seem yet more real than even on our dying bed; that will be when we stand at the bar of God.  Am I prepared to stand there with a ministry half discharged?  What shall I do if I have to give account before God for sermons preached without my heart being put into them?  How shall I appear before my Maker if I have ever kept back anything which I thought might have been useful to you, if I have shunned to rebuke any of you when I ought to have done so, if I have not warned you faithfully, and loved you tenderly, even as my own soul, and sought to woo you to the Savior?  How can I give in my account, as a steward of the Lord, if I have only served him half-heartedly?  O God, grant, I beseech thee that, notwithstanding a thousand infirmities, thy servant may ever be free from that great sin of being lukewarm in thy cause!

I am fearful, full often, in addressing the same congregation, Sabbath after Sabbath, and week after week, now by the space of seven years, lest my voice should grow stale to you; and I can truthfully say that, I would rather cease to preach at all than preach to people to whom my voice had become so familiar that it was only like the ringing of an old bell to which they gave no heed.  No, there must be feeling in the congregation as well as earnestness in the preacher; otherwise, let me resign my commission.  I pray God, if I am spared to minister to you, year after year, and you are spared to sit in the pew to hear the Word, that there may be earnestness in you, and earnestness in me that we may never come down to the dead level of some of the churches of which I spoke a little while ago – as you may think, in a spirit of censure; but as God knows, in a spirit of loving faithfulness – old churches that have come to be like pools without outlets, covered over with the sickly duckweed of respectability.  Stagnation in a church is the devil’s delight. I do not think he cares how many Baptist chapels you build nor how many churches you open, if you have only lukewarm preachers and people in them.  He cares not for your armies if your soldiers will but sleep; nor for your guns if they are not loaded.  God give us grace to make our religion all, that we may put our whole heart into it, and live it out, and then be prepared to die for it, if need be, and God so please, that we may live to enjoy the results of it in glory everlasting!

The Angel’s Christmas Song by C. H. Spurgeon

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, good will toward men.”—Luke 2:14

It is superstitious to worship angels; it is but proper to love them.  Although it would be a high sin, and an act of misdemeanor against the Sovereign Court of Heaven to pay the slightest adoration to the mightiest angel, yet it would be un­kind and unseemly, if we did not give to holy angels a place in our heart’s warmest love.  In fact, he that contemplates the character of angels, and marks their many deeds of sympathy with men, and kindness towards them, cannot resist the impulse of his nature—the impulse of love towards them.  The one incident in angelic his­tory, to which our text refers, is enough to weld our hearts to them forever.  How free from envy the angels were!  Christ did not come from heaven to save their peers when the fell.  When Satan, the mighty angel, dragged with him a third part of the stars of heaven, Christ did not stoop from his throne to die for them; but he left them to be reserved in chains and darkness until the last great day.  Yet angels did not envy men.  Though they remembered that he took not up angels, yet they did not murmur when he took up the seed of Abraham; and though the blessed Master had never condescended to take the angers form, they did not think it beneath them to express their joy when they found him arrayed in the body of an infant.

They sang the story out, for they could not tell it in heavy prose.  They sang, “Glory to God on high, and on earth peace, good will towards men.”  Methinks, they sang it with gladness in their eyes; with their hearts burning with love, and with breasts as full of joy as if the good news to man had been good news to themselves.  And, verily, it was good news to them, for the heart of sympathy makes good news to others, good news to itself!  Do you not love the angels?  Ye will not bow before them, and there ye are right; but will ye not love them?

The angels sang something which men could understand—something which men ought to understand—something which will make men much better if they will understand it.  The angels were singing about Jesus who was born in the manger.  We must look upon their song as being built upon this foundation.  They sang of Christ and the salvation which he came into this world to work out.  And what they said of this salvation was this: they said, first, that it gave glory to God; secondly, that it gave peace to man; and, thirdly, that it was a token of God’s good will towards the human race.

1. 1. First, they said that this salvation gave glory to God.

They had been present on many august occasions, and they had joined in many a solemn chorus to the praise of their Almighty Creator.  They were present at the creation: “The morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.”  They had seen many a planet fashioned between the palms of Jehovah, and wheeled by his eternal hands through the infinitude of space.  They had sung solemn songs over many a world which the Great One had created.

I doubt not, too, that their songs had gathered force through ages.  As when first created, their first breath was song, so when they saw God create new worlds, then their song received another note; they rose a little higher in the gamut of adoration.  But this time, when they saw God stoop from his throne, and become a babe, hanging upon a woman’s breast, they lifted their notes higher still; and reaching to the uttermost stretch of angelic music, they gained the highest notes of the divine scale of praise, and they sung, “Glory to God in the highest,” for higher in goodness they felt God could not go.  Thus their highest praise they gave to him in the highest act of his godhead.

“Angels, from the realms of glory, Wing your downward flight to earth,

Ye who sing creation’s story, Now proclaim Messiah’s birth;

Come and worship, Worship Christ, the new-born King.”

Ay, there is no mortal that can ever dream how magnificent was that song.  Then, note, if angels shouted before and when the world was made, their hallelujahs were more full, more strong, more magnificent, if not more hearty, when they saw Jesus Christ born of the Virgin Mary to be man’s redeemer—“Glory to God in the highest.”

What is the instructive lesson to be learned from this first syllable of the angels’ song?  Why this, that salvation is God’s highest glory.  He is glorified in every dewdrop that twinkles to the morning sun.  God is glorified in every bird that warbles on the spray; in every lamb that skips the mead.  From the tiny minnow to the huge Leviathan, do not all creatures that swim the water bless and praise his name?  Do not all created things extol him?  Is there aught beneath the sky, save man, that doth not glorify God?  Do not the stars exalt him, when they write his name upon the azure of heaven in their golden letters?  Do not the lightnings adore him when they flash his brightness in arrows of light piercing the midnight darkness?  Do not thunders extol him when they roll like drums in the march of the God of armies?  Do not all things exalt him, from the least even to the greatest?  But sing, sing, oh uni­verse, till thou hast exhausted thyself, thou canst not afford a song so sweet as the song of Incarnation.  Though creation may be a majestic organ of praise, it cannot reach the compass of the golden canticle—Incarnation!  There is more in that than in creation, more melody in Jesus in the manger, than there is in worlds on worlds rolling their grandeur round the throne of the Most High.

1. 2. When they had sung this, they sang what they had never song before.

“Glory to God in the highest,” was an old, old song; they had sung that from before the foundations of the world.  But, now, they sang as it were a new song before the throne of God: for they added this stanza—” on, earth, peace.” They did not sing that in the garden.  There was peace there, but it seemed a thing of course, and scarce worth singing of.  There was more than peace there; for there was glory to God there.  But, now, man had fallen, and since the day when cherubim with fiery swords drove out the man, there had been no peace on earth, save in the breast of some believers, who had obtained peace from the living fountain of this incarnation of Christ.

Do you not feel my brethren, that the gospel of God is peace to man?  Where else can peace be found, but in the message of Jesus?  Go legalist, work for peace with toil and pain, and thou shalt never find it.  Go, thou, that trustest in the law: go thou, to Sinai; look to the flames that Moses saw, and shrink, and tremble, and despair; for peace is nowhere to be found, but in him, of whom it is said, “This man shall be peace.”  And what a peace it is, beloved!  It is peace like a river, and righteousness like the waves of the sea.  It is the peace of God that passeth all understanding, which keeps our hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord.  This sacred peace between the pardoned soul and God the pardoner; this marvelous at-one-ment between the sinner and his judge, this was it that the angels sung when they said, “Peace On earth.”

1. 3. And, then, they wisely ended their song with a third note.  They said, “Good will to man.”

Philosophers have said that God has a good will toward man; but I never knew any man who derived much comfort from their philosophical assertion.  Wise men have thought from what we have seen in creation that God had much good will toward man, or else his works would never have been so constructed for their comfort; but I never heard of any man who could risk his soul’s peace upon such a faint hope as that.  But I have not only heard of thousands, but I know them, who are quite sure that God has a good will towards men; and if you ask their reason, they will give a full and perfect answer.  They say, he has good will toward man for he gave his Son.  No greater proof of kindness between the Creator and his subjects can possibly be afforded than when the Creator gives his only begotten and well beloved Son to die.

So good a will moreover that he has even condescended to say, “Come, now, let us reason together; though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as wool; though they be red like crimson, they shall be whiter than snow.”  And if you say, “Lord, how shall I know that thou hast this good will towards me,” he points to yonder manger, and says, “Sinner, if I had not a good will towards thee, would I have parted with my Son?  If I had not good will towards the human race, would I have given up my Son to become one of that race that he might by so doing redeem them from death?  He has good will to men; he is willing to pardon; he passes by iniquity, transgression, and sin.

And when the Lord Jesus has become your peace, remember, there is another thing, good will towards men.  Do not try to keep Christmas without keeping good will towards men.  If you are men of wealth, you have poor in your neighborhood.  Find something wherewith to clothe the naked, and feed the hungry, and make glad the mourner.  Remember, it is good will towards men.  Try, if you can, to show them goodwill at this special season; and if you will do that, the poor will say with me, that indeed they wish there were six Christmases in the year.

You are going home to your father and mother, young men; many of you are going from your shops to your homes.  You remember what I preached on last Christmas time.  Go home to thy friends, and tell them what the Lord hath done for thy soul, and that will make a blessed round of stories at the Christmas fire.  If you will each of you tell your parents how the Lord met with you in the house of prayer; how, when you left home, you were a gay, wild blade, but have now come back to love your mother’s God, and read your father’s Bible.  Oh, what a happy Christmas that will make!

What more shall I say?  May God give you peace with yourselves; may he give you good will towards all your friends, your enemies, and your neighbors; and may he give you grace to give gory to God in the highest.  I will say no more, except at the close of this sermon to wish every one of you, when the day shall come, the happiest Christmas you ever had in your lives.

This is an edited excerpt from a sermon preached by Spurgeon on December 20, 1857.

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.”