Charles Spurgeon鈥檚 words about the way Whitefield preached are worth pondering.

鈥淲hitefield鈥檚 sermons were not eloquent, but were rough and unconnected. But it was not in the words themselves, but in the manner in which he delivered them, the earnestness with which he felt them, the pouring out of his soul as he preached them. When you heard him preach, you felt like you were listening to a man who would die if he could not preach. Where, where is such earnestness today? One sad proof that the Church is in need of revival is the absence of earnestness which was once seen in Christian pulpits.鈥[1]


[1]听Excerpted from a sermon by Charles Spurgeon entitled 鈥淪piritual Revival the Want of the Church,鈥 in听Devotional Classics, ed. Richard J. Foster and James Bryan Smith, rev. ed. (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 319.