A bit ago I was told off for just posting a link without much explanation as to what I thought about it. Well, sorry, I’m going to do it again.
The Martyn Lloyd-Jones Trust is offering 1,600 of the Dr’s sermons for free at their website. That sounds incredibly exciting to me, so please head over and help yourself. You’re welcome.
Please let me know what you think!
Image via Wikipedia
Here’s some food for thought…
It seems to me a curious piece of absurdity, if not a specimen of blasphemy, for a preacher to ask the help of the Holy Spirit in his preaching, and then to pull his manuscript out of his pocket! Where is the room for the Holy Spirit to work? Have they not bolted and barred the door against Him? What thoughts can He suggest? What emotions can He excite? The paper is the guide of the hour. Why, then, should they mock the Holy Spirit by asking for His assistance—an assistance which they will not follow? Or, if I shall have committed every word to memory and prepared every sentence, and then shall come into the pulpit and ask to have an anointing from the Holy One to help me to speak, what do I but ask Him to do what I do not want Him to do, since I can do quite as well without Him as with Him, and should be thrown out of my course if He did assist me? It seems to me that after due study of the Word, if the preacher—if you, dear Friend, the teacher—will cast yourself upon the teaching of the Spirit of God, though distractions may occur, though in the congregation or in the Sunday school class there may be much to throw you off track and to make you lose the thread of your discourse. If you can rest upon the Spirit of God, He will enable you to speak with power, point, propriety, and personality.
Well, I’m not sure I agree with Spurgeon that the Holy Spirit can only act in a spontaneous way (i.e. a preacher’s hand can be guided in the preparation of the ‘manuscript’ they pull out of their pocket), but I’d have loved to have heard these words being shouted from the pulpit of the Metropolitan Tabernacle on 17 March, 1867!
