Only a daring soul would attempt to preach on Job 6:6: "Can that which is unsavory be eaten without salt? Is there any taste in the white of an egg?"1 To publish such a sermon would take even more courage. Charles Haddon Spurgeon was apparently the only preacher among the recognized greats who ever attempted to do so.

Spurgeon answered both of Job's questions with resounding negatives. He used that wise man's metaphors as tools to compare the tastelessness of egg white, without salt, to the unpalatable and indigestible sermons common in his day.

Many Victorian-age preachers neglected the needs of their hearers, ignored logic, disdained doctrine, and bored congregations with material of little value, delivered in a style both verbose and irrelevant. Sermons lacked spiritual power and experiential authenticity.

Some saw themselves as apologists for the faith, laboring at seventy-five minute sermons which spawned points and sub-points with the same abandon that caged rabbits multiply. Other pulpiteers pondered aloud about obtuse theological nothings, pouring out an ocean of words in a grandiloquence that set their audiences "a-drowning."

Then, as now, many mistook opaqueness for amplitude, holding that, because one could not see the bottom clearly, the river was deep, when often it merely was muddy.

Other preachers strove for a kind of pulpit cleverness which they assumed their exalted positions as clergy demanded. Those wishing to earn a reputation as literary lions roared their bombastic mouthings, and/or intoned dreary religious essays to hearers held fast beneath the claws of their clerical authority.

Spurgeon aimed to avoid these extremes of bombastic banality, committing himself to a clear communication of the biblical doctrine of grace.

The Fresh Style of Spurgeon

Through disciplining himself to adopt a precise, lucid, zestful, and sometime colloquial style of thought and delivery, Spurgeon sought to sharpen the aptness of his presentations. He linked them clearly with his hearers' needs, using ideas phrased to arrest and hold their attention.

Before congregations drowning in a maelstrom of sermonic words and ideas, he placed solid planks of biblical doctrine shaped to enable a firm grip from even the weakest in the faith. He sought to preach to the common people with an uncommon clarity, taking George Whitefield, the open-air evangelist of a previous century, as his major model.

His central themes followed orthodox lines. He proclaimed the sovereignty of God, the cross of Christ and its relation to the other doctrines of grace, and the enabling power of the Holy Spirit to facilitate genuine holiness. He linked together the pragmatic relevance of a variety of biblical doctrines around the nucleus of substitutionary atonement. But he also used illustrations from nature and life as few before him had.

Spurgeon bent novelty and humor to fresh ends. His application of the dynamics of faith to personal and life-situation concerns refreshed and invigorated many by its innovative pertinence.