Introduction

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–1892) began his printed ministry with the Holy Spirit. When the weekly publication of his sermons was launched in January 1855, the young pastor of New Park Street Chapel was twenty years old, and a fortnight after the first numbered sermon he gave a whole Sunday, morning and evening, to the third Person of the Trinity. Those two sermons — numbers four and five of what became the sixty-three volumes of the New Park Street and Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit — stand first in this book. From that winter Sunday to the end of his life, Spurgeon returned again and again to the Holy Ghost, convinced that everything he did in the pulpit was either the Spirit’s work or no work at all.

He said so constantly, and he meant it. A sermon, in his view, was a dead thing until the Spirit breathed on it; a church, however large and orthodox, was a valley of dry bones until the wind blew; a sinner could hear the gospel a thousand times and never stir until the Spirit applied it. Spurgeon did not think this a reason for idleness — he preached more, wrote more and organised more than almost any minister of his century — but he thought it the only reason for hope. “We want a greater Teacher,” runs the hymn he quotes at the close of one of these sermons, for “application is the work of God alone.”

Out of the many times Spurgeon took up the subject, twelve sermons are gathered here. They are not a systematic treatise, and they were not preached as a series; each stands complete, on its own text, with its own appeal at the end. But read together they form something close to a full doctrine of the Spirit, taught not in the language of the lecture-room but in the warm, direct, often startling idiom of a preacher pleading with real people. The book is arranged in four movements.

First, who the Spirit is. The opening three sermons were all preached in 1855, and they lay the foundation. “The Personality of the Holy Ghost” insists that the Spirit is not an influence or an emanation but a Person, truly God, to be loved, trusted and worshipped. “The Comforter” turns that doctrine into consolation: the same Person is sent to be the believer’s advocate, teacher and friend. “The Holy Ghost—The Great Teacher” takes up the promise that he will guide us into all truth, and presses on the reader both the need of such a guide and the readiness of the Spirit to be one.

Second, the Spirit’s work in salvation. “The Necessity of the Spirit’s Work” opens Ezekiel’s great covenant promise, “I will put my Spirit within you,” and argues that without it no preaching, however gifted, can make a single Christian. “The Withering Work of the Spirit,” one of Spurgeon’s most searching sermons, shows the Spirit first blowing upon the flower of human goodness until it fades, so that the incorruptible seed of the Word may take root. “Adoption—The Spirit and the Cry” follows the work through to its sweetest fruit: the Spirit of the Son sent into our hearts, crying, “Abba, Father.”

Third, the Spirit in the believer. Here the sermons turn from the beginning of the Christian life to its long middle. “The Work of the Holy Spirit” warns the Galatian in all of us against beginning in the Spirit and trying to finish in the flesh. “The Holy Spirit’s Intercession” is perhaps the tenderest thing in the book — an exposition of the groanings that cannot be uttered, for every believer who has not known how to pray. “Grieving the Holy Spirit” closes the movement with a loving and very practical warning: the Spirit who seals us can be grieved by us, and the saint who grieves him soon finds the light of his own soul going out.

Fourth, the Spirit’s power in the church. The last three sermons lift the eye from the individual to the people of God. “The Power of the Holy Ghost” celebrates the might that raised Christ and still raises dead souls. “The Outpouring of the Holy Spirit,” preached in 1858 while news of revival in America was reaching London, asks why the Spirit fell while Peter was still speaking, and urges the church to pray until he falls again. And “The Abiding of the Spirit the Glory of the Church,” from the mature preacher of 1886, takes Haggai’s word to discouraged builders — “my spirit remaineth among you: fear ye not” — and turns it into courage for every congregation that has looked at its own weakness and despaired.

It is worth remembering where these sermons came from. Spurgeon preached them to crowds that would have flattered any man into thinking the power lay in his own gifts, and he never let himself believe it. Again and again he traced the blessing on his ministry to the prayers of his people and to the Spirit whom they prayed for. He also knew, as few preachers have, the seasons when the Spirit’s comfort seemed withdrawn — he suffered long bouts of depression and pain — and that is why these sermons speak so humanly. They come from a man who had learned to lean on the Comforter because he had so often needed comfort.

A word about the text. The sermons are given as they were printed in the weekly Pulpit, without modernisation or abridgement, and the Scripture is the Authorised Version that Spurgeon read and quoted. Most of the twelve date from the first half of his ministry, and they carry the energy of the young preacher — the long sentences, the sudden questions, the direct address to the unconverted hearer at the end. Readers new to Victorian preaching will find that a little patience is richly repaid.

Spurgeon would not have wanted this book to be read merely as doctrine. He would have wanted the reader to stop, and ask for the very thing the sermons describe. Read one sermon; then pray, as he so often urged his hearers, that the Spirit who inspired the text would now apply it. If, by the last page, the Holy Spirit has become to any reader less a doctrine to be defended and more a Person to be known, loved and obeyed, the volume will have done what its author lived to do.

— The Ochorus Library