Introduction

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–1892) is remembered as the “Prince of Preachers,” yet those who knew the Metropolitan Tabernacle best would have told you that the secret of the pulpit lay somewhere beneath it. When admirers pressed him for the reason behind his extraordinary influence, Spurgeon is said to have led them downstairs to a room where hundreds of members were kneeling in prayer while he preached, and answered simply, “There is my boiler room.” The heat that warmed thousands in the auditorium above was generated, he insisted, on the knees of praying people below. The sermons gathered in this volume come from a man who believed that to the marrow — that prayer is the true engine of the Christian life — and who preached on it more searchingly, and far more often, than on almost any other theme.

Out of the hundreds of times Spurgeon opened the Scriptures on prayer, twelve are gathered here. They were not chosen at random. Each is among his most loved and most reprinted, and together they form something like a school of prayer: they teach the trembling beginner how to draw near, they press the seasoned saint to plead with holy boldness, and they carry the weary sufferer to the only place where care is truly cured. Spurgeon never treated prayer as a technique to be mastered. “True prayer,” he says in one of these sermons, “is an approach of the soul by the Spirit of God to the throne of God.” It is not the utterance of words, nor the beauty of the phrases, but the movement of a living heart toward a living God — and that is a thing the plainest Christian can do as well as the most eloquent.

The book is arranged in four movements, and it may help the reader to see the shape of the whole before beginning.

First, the ground and boldness of prayer. The opening two sermons lay the foundation. “The Throne of Grace” dwells on the astonishing invitation to “come boldly” to a King whose very throne is made of grace; “The Golden Key of Prayer” unlocks the great promise, “Call unto me, and I will answer thee.” Here Spurgeon settles the question that silences most prayer before it begins: whether God will hear us at all. He answers with both hands full.

Second, how to pray. The heart of the book is intensely practical. “Order and Argument in Prayer” shows the saint filling his mouth with arguments and reasoning his case before God, as Job longed to do. “Ask and Have” confronts the reason so many of us live spiritually empty — “ye have not, because ye ask not.” “The Conditions of Power in Prayer” and “Praying in the Holy Spirit” turn to the abiding life and the Spirit’s help without which no prayer rises higher than the ceiling. “Pray Without Ceasing” gathers it all into a life of unbroken communion, prayer becoming as natural and constant as breath.

Third, prayer that prevails. Spurgeon believed, without embarrassment, that prayer moves the arm that moves the world. “True Prayer—True Power!” links believing prayer to real spiritual might; “Intercessory Prayer” turns the praying heart outward to plead for others, as our great High Priest ever lives to do; and “The Power of Prayer and the Pleasure of Praise” binds asking and thanksgiving together, so that the church which begs on its knees also sings on its feet.

Fourth, prayer for the weary. The book closes tenderly. “Prayer, the Cure for Care” takes Paul’s remedy for anxiety — “be careful for nothing; but in everything by prayer” — and presses it into the reader’s trembling hands. And “The Ravens’ Cry” ends where prayer so often begins: not with polished words at all, but with the instinctive cry of a needy creature, which the God who feeds the young ravens never fails to hear. It is a fitting last word, for it puts prayer within reach of the most stammering soul in the room.

It is worth remembering that Spurgeon preached none of this from a distance. The man who urged his people to pray without ceasing rose early to pray over his sermons, bathed every service in the intercession of the church, and traced the great Tabernacle awakening not to his own gifts but to praying knees. He knew, too, the harder side of the praying life — long seasons of depression, petitions that seemed to go unanswered, and the private struggle to keep praying when all feeling had drained away. That is why these sermons never scold. They come from a fellow pilgrim who had found the throne of grace to be exactly what its name promises, and who could not rest until he had led others to kneel there beside him.

A word about the sermons themselves. They were preached to Victorian congregations, most of them between 1860 and 1888, and they carry the cadence of that pulpit — the long sentences, the vivid illustrations, the sudden turns to direct appeal. Nothing has been modernized or abridged; the text is Spurgeon’s own, transcribed from the printed Pulpit volumes. Readers new to him will find that a little patience is richly repaid, for beneath the older style beats a pastor’s heart that is startlingly close to our own struggles. He knew dry seasons, unanswered petitions, and the temptation to give up praying, and he speaks to all of them.

Spurgeon would not have wanted this book to be merely read. “Let us pray” were words he came back to again and again, not as a formula but as a summons. The best way to honor these sermons is to close the book at intervals and do the very thing they commend. Read one sermon; then pray. Read another; then pray again. If, by the time the last page is turned, prayer has become less of a duty and more of a delight, the volume will have served its purpose — and its author, now these many years “with Christ, which is far better,” would count it joy.

— The Ochorus Library