The Faculty of Impromptu Speech, Part 6

From Lectures to My Students: A Selection from Addresses Delivered to the Students of The Pastors’ College, Metropolitan Tabernacle

First Series, Lecture X
By C.H. Spurgeon

Read the series.

My brethren, if the Lord has indeed ordained you to the ministry, you have the best reasons for being bold and calm, for whom have you to fear? You have to deliver your Lord’s errand as he enables you, and if this be done, you are responsible to no one but your heavenly Master, who is no harsh judge. You do not enter the pulpit to shine as an orator, or to gratify the predilections of your audience; you are the messenger of heaven and not the servant of men.* Remember the words of the Lord to Jeremiah, and be afraid to be afraid. “Thou therefore gird up thy loins, and arise, and speak unto them all that I command thee: be not dismayed at their faces, lest I confound thee before them.” Jer. i. 17. Trust in the Holy Spirit’s present help, and the fear of man which bringeth a snare will depart from you.

When you are able to feel at home in the pulpit, and can look round and speak to the people as a brother talking to brethren, then you will be able to extemporise, but not till then. Bashfulness and timidity which are so beautiful in our younger brethren, will be succeeded by that true modesty which forgets self, and is not careful as to its own reputation so long as Christ is preached in the most forcible manner at command.

In order to the holy and useful exercise of extemporal speech, the Christian minister must cultivate a childlike reliance upon the immediate assistance of the Holy Spirit.

“I believe in the Holy Ghost,” says the Creed. It is to be feared that many do not make this a real article of belief. To go up and down all the week wasting time, and then to cast ourselves upon the Spirit’s aid, is wicked presumption, an attempt to make the Lord minister to our sloth and self-indulgence; but in an emergency the case is widely different. When a man finds himself unavoidably called upon to speak without any preparation, then he may with fullest confidence cast himself upon the Spirit of God. The divine mind beyond a doubt comes into contact with the human intellect, lifts it out of its weakness and distraction, makes it soaring and strong, and enables it both to understand and to express divine truth in a manner far beyond its unaided powers. Such interpositions, like miracles, are not meant to supersede our efforts or slacken our diligence, but are the Lord’s assistance which we may count upon at an emergency. His Spirit will be ever with us, but especially under severe stress of service. Earnestly as I advise you not to try purely impromptu speaking more than you are obliged to do, till you have become somewhat matured in your ministry, I yet exhort you to speak in that manner whenever compelled to do so, believing that in the selfsame hour it shall be given you what you shall speak.

If you are happy enough to acquire the power of extemporary speech, pray recollect that you may very readily lose it.

I have been struck with this in my own experience, and I refer to that because it is the best evidence that I can give you. If for two successive Sundays I make my notes a little longer and fuller than usual, I find on the third occasion that I require them longer still; and I also observe that if on occasions I lean a little more to my recollection of my thoughts, and am not so extemporaneous as I have been accustomed to be, there is a direct craving and even an increased necessity for pre-composition. If a man begins to walk with a stick merely for a whim, he will soon come to require a stick; if you indulge your eyes with spectacles they will speedily demand them as a permanent appendage; and if you were to walk with crutches for a month, at the end of the time they would. be almost necessary to your movements, although naturally your limbs might be as sound and healthy as any man’s. Ill uses create an ill nature. You must continually practise extemporising, and if to gain suitable opportunities you should frequently speak the word in cottages, in the school-rooms of our hamlets, or to two or three by the wayside, your profiting shall be known unto all men.

It may save you much surprise and grief if you are forewarned, that there will be great variations in your power of utterance. To-day your tongue may be the pen of a ready writer, to-morrow your thoughts and words may be alike frost-bound. Living things are sensitive, and are affected by a variety of forces; only the merely mechanical can be reckoned upon with absolute certainty. Think it not strange if you should frequently feel yourself to have failed, nor wonder if it should turn out that at such times you have best succeeded. You must not expect to become sufficient as of yourself, no habit or exercise can render you independent of divine assistance; and if you have preached well forty-nine times when called upon without notice, this is no excuse for self-confidence on the fiftieth occasion, for if the Lord should leave you you will be at a dead stand. Your variable moods of fluency and difficulty, will by God’s grace tend to keep you humbly looking up to the strong for strength.

Above all things beware of letting your tongue outrun your brains. Guard against a feeble fluency, a garrulous prosiness, a facility of saying nothing. What a pleasure it is to hear of a brother breaking down who presumed upon his powers to keep on when he really had nothing to say! May such a consummation come to all who err in that direction. My brethren, it is a hideous gift to possess, to be able to say nothing at extreme length. Elongated nonsense, paraphrastic platitude, wire-drawn commonplace, or sacred rhodomontade, are common enough, and are the scandal and shame of extemporising. Even when sentiments of no value are beautifully expressed, and neatly worded, what is the use of them? Out of nothing comes nothing. Extemporary speech without study is a cloud without rain, a well without water, a fatal gift, injurious equally to its possessor and his flock. Men have applied to me whom I have denied admission to this College, because being utterly destitute both of education and of a sense of their own ignorance, their boundless conceit and enormous volubility made them dangerous subjects for training. Some have even reminded me of the serpent in the Apocalypse, which cast out of his mouth water as a flood so plenteously that the woman was likely to have been carried away with it. Wound up like clocks, they keep on, and on, and on, till they run down, and blessed is he who has least acquaintance with them. The sermons of such preachers are like Snug the joiner’s part when he acted the lion: “You may do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring.” Better to lose, or rather never to possess, the gift of ready utterance, than to degrade ourselves into mere noise makers, the living representations of Paul’s sounding brass and tinkling cymbal.

I might have said much more if I had extended the subject to what is usually called extempore preaching, that is to say, the preparation of the sermon so far as thoughts go, and leaving the words to be found during delivery; but this is quite another matter, and although looked upon as a great attainment by some, it is, as I believe, an indispensable requisite for the pulpit, and by no means a mere luxury of talent; but of this we will speak on another occasion.

* “At first my chief solicitude used to be what I should find to say; I hope it is now rather that I may not speak in vain. For the Lord hath not sent me here to acquire the character of a ready speaker, but to win souls to Christ and to edify his people. Often when I begin I am at a loss how I shall proceed, but one thing insensibly offers after another, and in general the best and most useful parts of my sermon occur de novo, while I am preaching.” —JOHN NEWTON. Letters to a Student in Divinity.