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The sermon presents preaching as a privileged and powerful means of grace through which God’s Spirit awakens spiritually dead sinners and brings them to faith. Spurgeon sharply distinguishes genuine conversion from hearing, admiring a preacher, attending church, or making outward moral changes. True hearing is personal, penitential, believing, and obedient, resulting in fleeing to Christ and receiving His salvation. He also urges hearers to pray and prepare expectantly, while maintaining that the blessing ultimately depends on God’s sovereign grace.
Theological center: God sovereignly gives life and faith through the Holy Spirit’s powerful use of the preached Word, calling sinners to Christ.
Applications: Hear and obey the Word · Receive the gospel personally · Repent and believe in Christ · Consider hearing’s responsibility
Primary texts: Mark 6:20 · Ezekiel 37:5 · Matthew 13:16
“For Herod feared John, knowing that he was a just man and an holy, and observed him; and when he heard him, he did many things, and heard him gladly.” Mark 6:20 THE preaching of the Word has exceeding power. John commenced his ministry as an obscure individual, a man who led an almost hermit life. He begins to preach in the wilderness of Judea, but his cry is so powerful, that ere he has spoken many days, multitudes wait upon his words. He continues, clothed in that shaggy garment, and living on the simplest of food, still to utter the same cry of preparation for the kingdom of heaven—Repent! Repent! Repent! And now, not only the multitude, but the teachers, the respectable part of the community, come to listen to him. The Scribes and Pharisees sit down by Jordan’s banks to listen to the Baptist’s word. So powerful is his preaching that many of all ranks—publicans, sinners, and soldiers—come unto him and are baptized by him in Jordan, confessing their sins. Nay, the Scribes and Pharisees themselves seek baptism at his hands. Boldly however, he repulses them, tells them to bring forth fruits meet for repentance, and warns them that their descent from Abraham does not entitle them to the blessings of the coming kingdom of the great Messiah. His word rings from one end of Judea to the other. All men wonder what this can mean, and already there begins to be a feeling in the hearts of men that Messiah is at hand. Herod himself hears of John, and now you behold the spectacle of a cruel and unrighteous king sitting humbly to listen to this stern reformer. The Baptist changes not his preaching, the same boldness which had made him rebuke the common people and their teachers, now leads him to defy the wrath of Herod himself. He touches him in his most tender place, strikes his favorite sin, dashes down his idle lust to the ground, counts it his business not to speak of truth in generals but in particulars. Yea, he tells him to his very face, “It is not lawful for you to take to yourself your brother’s wife.” Oh, what a power there is in the Word of God! I do not find that the Pharisees with all their learning had moved Herod. I discover not that the most mighty of the Grecian philosophers or of the Gnostics who were then in existence, had any power to reach the heart of Herod. But the simple, plain preaching of John, his declaration of the Word with all honesty and simplicity, had power to pin Herod by the ear, to vibrate in his heart and to awaken his conscience. For sure we are it was awakened, if the awakening did not end in his conversion, at any rate it ma…