ChosenRebel's Blog

Thursday is for Discipleship

Unfortunately, I know too many pastors and too many church leaders and too many believers in Christ who don’t love the truth.

They love their opinions. They love their traditions. They cherish their habits and prejudices. They are comfortable with their preferences. They hold with tenacity their own patterns and behaviors.

They say they follow the One who is the Truth but just below the surface, the reality is that their Jesus is too comfortable, too homogenized, too domesticated. Their Jesus bears little resemblance to the unadorned, powerful and radical figure that walks through the pages of the New Testament and lives and reigns from heaven today.

My Jesus, too often, looks just like theirs but not like the real Jesus.

And that’s why we need to listen sometimes to voices that have been to the mountain top and seen God and God’s word with greater clarity than us. Spurgeon, Charles Hadden Spurgeon is one of those figures. Here’s an excerpt from one of his sermons to Sunday School works with an introduction from Kairos Journal. Let it help you to become a lover of truth, so that your ministry and life are filled with power and empty of hypocrisy.

Truth in the Teacher’s Loving Grasp—Charles H. Spurgeon (1834 – 1892)

For thirty years, Charles Spurgeon faithfully proclaimed the gospel at London’s New Park Street Church. Though quite capable of literary allusion and rhetorical flourish, Spurgeon explained that the heart of effective teaching is simplicity and love for one’s subject. In this passage from “The Mustard Seed: A Sermon for the Sabbath-School Teacher,” he talks of the gospel, but the principles apply to teaching in general.

It is well for the teacher to know what he is going to teach; to have that truth distinctly in his mind’s eye . . . Depend upon it, unless a truth is clearly seen and distinctly recognised by the teacher, little will come of it to the taught. It may be a very simple truth; but if a man takes it, understands it, grasps it, and loves it, he will do something with it. Beloved, first and foremost let us ourselves take the gospel, let us believe it, let us appreciate it, let us prize it beyond all things; for the truth lives as it is loved, and no hand is so fit for its sowing as the hand which grasps it well.¹

1 C. H. Spurgeon, “The Mustard Seed: A Sermon for the Sabbath-School Teacher,” The Parables of Our Lord (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 2003), 704.