Preacher, Keep Your Heart Full!

My friend and fellow BHT'er Strawfoot shared this passage from Charles Spurgeon with me this morning and it blessed my socks off. I hope it does yours too.

The preacher we want [is] the man that has a full soul. Let him have a head—the more he knows the better; but, after all, give him a big heart: and when his heart beats, if his heart be full, it will, under God, either make the hearts of his congregation beat after him, or else make them conscious that he is laboring hard to compel them to follow. Oh! if we had more heart in our Master’s service, how much more labor we could endure. . . .

Perhaps you do not love your work. Oh, strive to love your work more, and then when your heart is full, you will go on well enough. “Oh,” saith the preacher, “I am weary of my work in preaching; I have little success; I find it a hard toil.” The answer to that question is, “Your heart is not full of it, for if you loved preaching, you would breathe preaching, feed on preaching, and find a compulsion upon you to follow preaching; and your heart being full of the thing, you would be happy in the employment. Oh, for a heart that is full, and deep, and broad! Find the man that hath such a soul as that, and that is the man from whom the living waters shall flow, to make the world glad with their refreshing streams.

Learn, then, the necessity of keeping the heart full; and let the necessity make you ask this question–”But how can I keep my heart full? How can I keep my desires burning and my zeal inflamed?” Christian! there is one text which will explain all this. “All my springs are in Thee,” said David. If thou hast all thy springs in God, thy heart will be full enough. If thou dost go to the foot of Calvary, there will thy heart be bathed in love and gratitude. . . . If thou dost continually draw thine impulse, thy life, the whole of thy being from the Holy Spirit, without whom thou canst do nothing, and if thou dost live in close communion with Christ, there will be no fear of thy having a dry heart. He who lives without prayer–he who lives with little prayer–he who seldom reads the Word–he who seldom looks up to heaven for a fresh influence from on high–he will be the man whose heart will become dry and barren; but he who calls in secret on his God–who spends much time in holy retirement–who delights to meditate on the words of the Most High–whose soul is given up to Christ–who delights in His fullness, rejoices in His all-sufficiency, prays for His second coming, and delights in the thought of His glorious advent–such a man, I say, must have an overflowing heart; and as his heart is, such will his life be. It will be a full life; it will be a life that will speak from the sepulcher, and make the echoes of the future.

-- from a sermon entitled “The Great Reservoir,” The New Park Street Pulpit, Vol. IV

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