Editor’s Note: This article is taken from the foreword to C. H. Spurgeon’s Sermons: Revival Years – New Park Street Pulpit 1855–1860. Used by permission of Reformation Heritage Books. This collection is now available for purchase.

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My hope is that every gospel minister will have in his personal library his own complete set of Charles Spurgeon’s sermons. Let me tell you why.

As a preacher, Charles Spurgeon must be counted among the greats of church history. When it comes to notoriety, Spurgeon was to the nineteenth century what George Whitefield was to the eighteenth and Billy Graham to the twentieth centuries. He was the best known and most influential minister of his era.

Spurgeon was born in 1834, and his life and ministry took place during the Victorian Era. The British Empire, with its global reach, proved a divine conduit for Spurgeon’s ministry, carrying his sermons, articles, and books around the world. He was a physical dynamo, doing the work of multiple men at once, a phenomenon he explained occurred by the Holy Spirit working through him.

Spurgeon launched and presided over sixty-six ministries, the most notable of which were orphanages for boys and girls and his Pastor’s College. Like the Metropolitan Tabernacle, these ministries exist today.

But Spurgeon’s influence, then and now, goes back to his preaching ministry. Throughout his ministry, stenographers recorded his sermons as he delivered them. During the week his sermons would be transcribed, set in galleys, quickly edited, and then printed for distribution. The “Penny Pulpit” was mailed all over the world, further amplifying his ministerial reach.

During his prime, Spurgeon often preached ten or more times per week. His powers of oratory, imagination, and recollection proved a fierce combination, holding his listeners’ rapt attention. No one could turn a phrase, deploy the full complement of the English language, or recall theological and historical facts like Spurgeon. It’s as though Spurgeon never uttered an inarticulate sentence or ever preached a boring sermon. That singular gifting, coupled with the evident power of Scripture and favor of the Holy Spirit, gave his sermons authority and brought his ministry unique results.

Spurgeon was not a classic expositor. Typically, he did not preach verse by verse through passages of Scripture. Rather, he customarily selected a verse and heralded all the theological and spiritual truth contained within it.

Just as Spurgeon’s preaching was unique, so was his preparation. The extraordinary demands on Spurgeon’s life and his singular gifting meant that his sermon preparation was unorthodox. Though all of life was sermon preparation for Spurgeon, he often prepared his Sunday sermons on Saturday evenings. As a young man, he took heavy notes into the pulpit. As he advanced in ministry, he typically entered the pulpit with a minimal outline, often jotted on a scrap of paper.

Though his sermon notes were as minimal as his sermon preparation, when Spurgeon entered the pulpit, the Lion roared. Throngs flocked to hear his sermons, just as multitudes were changed by them. Never in London, before or since, has someone so impacted that great metropolis for Christ. All this, and more, is why Spurgeon is universally acclaimed as a—if not the—Prince of Preachers.

Yet there’s more than Spurgeon’s enduring relevance that makes this project opportune. Indeed, the renewed publishing of Spurgeon’s sermons arrives at a time of great need for local churches. Evangelical preaching is at a low ebb. Shrinking attention spans and shallow sermons leave many churchgoers deprived of the pure milk of the Word. What is more, in many evangelical churches, the hour of worship more resembles a concert venue than a public worship service.

But Scripture indicates that true worship encompasses the public reading of Scripture; corporate prayer; the singing of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs (Eph. 5:19; Col. 3:16); and the preaching of the Word.

Historically, Protestants have viewed preaching as the central, anchoring component of the public worship service. Thus, the pulpit is the focal point of the place of worship and preaching the focal point of the service of worship.

And this is for good reason. Even in the midst of a darkening culture, a drifting church, and a vacillating heart, Paul charged Timothy—and through Timothy, us—to preach the Word, in season and out.

Thus, we should look to Spurgeon, including this sixty-three-volume collection of his sermons, to stir within ourselves and the twenty-first-century church a return to Christ-centered, biblically based sermons.

Just as preaching is indispensable to Christian worship, so preachers are indispensable to Christian ministry. In fact, the ability to teach the Word is the one requisite gift every biblically qualified pastor must possess. That’s because teaching is the one, nondelegable responsibility of every biblically qualified pastor.

In this regard, the apostle Paul’s logic was airtight. In Romans 10:14–15 he argued, “How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent? as it is written, How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!”

Churches will be no stronger than the strength of the pulpit, and the pulpit will not be stronger than the calling and quality of the men who enter them. Indeed, much is at stake in the preaching of the Word.

All this is to say that preaching and preachers are indispensable to the church’s ministry. This was true in Spurgeon’s day, and it is true in ours as well.

And so, dear reader, may the spirit of Spurgeon be yours. And may your commitment to preach be stirred anew and your ability to preach strengthened as you read these sermons from the Prince of Preachers himself, the immortal Charles Haddon Spurgeon.