Spurgeon lived a life filled to the brim with good works of benevolence and charity. However, too few today are familiar with this vital aspect of his life and ministry nor the theological convictions that undergirded it. I have written this book because I find in Spurgeon a most compelling example of the proper wedding of faithful gospel preaching with earnest social concern. Evangelicals have frequently failed in correctly understanding the relationship between these two biblical burdens. I am convinced that Spurgeon can help us. 

The following excerpt is from the Preface of Spurgeon and the Poor by Alex DiPrima. Learn more about this important new work here.
The American temperance activist John B. Gough stepped off the train in London. He had come to visit England’s greatest preacher, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. The year was 1879, and the preacher was at the height of his powers. Gough himself had described Spurgeon’s ministry as “a career thus far unparalleled in the history of ministers.”[1] Indeed, there had never been a preacher like him. In his teenage years, he gained a reputation as the famous “boy preacher of the Fens.”[2] He arrived in London at the age of nineteen to command the pulpit of the city’s most historic Baptist church in the heart of the metropolis, just south of the Thames. He preached for nearly forty years from that pulpit to thousands upon thousands, winning souls, planting churches, and ministering to the poor.
During Gough’s visit, Spurgeon provided him with a tour of the Stockwell Orphanage. Ten years prior, Spurgeon began this ministry to orphaned boys with the help of an elderly widow who will appear later in these pages. While the two men were visiting the orphanage, Spurgeon received a call to the bedside of a boy who was terminally ill. As he sat with the dying boy, Spurgeon placed the child’s hand in his and told him, “Jesus loves you. He bought you with His precious blood, and He knows what is best for you. It seems hard for you to lie here and listen to the shouts of the healthy boys outside at play. But soon Jesus will take you home, and then He will tell you the reason, and you will be so glad.”[3] Spurgeon then inched forward in his chair, laid his hand on the boy’s head, and quietly prayed aloud, “O Jesus, Master, this dear child is reaching out his thin hand to find thine. Touch him, dear Saviour, with thy loving, warm clasp. Lift him as he passes the cold river, that his feet be not chilled by the water of death; take him home in thine own good time. Comfort and cherish him till that good time comes. Show him thyself as he lies here, and let him see thee and know thee more and more as his loving Saviour.”[4] After a moment’s pause, he said with a warm smile, “Now, dear, is there anything you would like? Would you like a little canary in a cage to hear him sing in the morning? Nurse, see that he has a canary tomorrow morning. Goodbye, my dear; you will see the Saviour perhaps before I shall.”[5] Gough, who had quietly witnessed the scene, recorded his recollections in his autobiography, writing, “I had seen Mr. Spurgeon holding by his power sixty-five hundred persons in a breathless interest; I knew him as a great man universally esteemed and beloved; but as he sat by the bedside of a dying pauper child, whom his beneficence had rescued, he was to me a greater and grander man than when swaying the mighty multitude at his will.”[6]
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These events were the action of God, “to remember His holy covenant, the oath which He swore to our father Abraham” (Luke 172, 73). We remember Jesus Christ, because God remembers his covenant. In remembering, we confess with the mouth and believe in the heart the Person and the pre-ordained events by which we are “delivered from the hands of our enemies,” and that we “might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him all the days of our life” (Luke 1:74, 75). 

To remember Jesus Christ, we must affirm his deity. To reject the true eternal deity of the singular person, Jesus of Nazareth, is to deny him and bring on us the consequence that he will deny us. This mysterious reality that the man, Jesus of Nazareth, was at the same time and in the same person the Son of God constitutes our redemption and the source of our eternal worship.
Twice Luke tells us that Mary kept certain things “in her heart.” (Luke 2:19, 51). On the first occasion, Luke adds the words, “pondered them.” Both the events and the words that accompanied the event were too large for immediate comprehension. But that she kept them in her heart means that she remembered them intensely, she sought more expanded understanding of what had happened and what she had been told. Not only deeper cognition was needed, but a spirit of adoration and worship fitting for the eternal wonder of the event.
As a virgin, she was told that the Holy Spirit would come upon her to impregnate her in order to bear a child that she would call Jesus (Luke 1:31). He would be called “the Son of the Most High” (1:32). She learned, therefore, that not only does the Holy Spirit make her pregnant with a child according to her seed to be established and nurtured in her womb, but the “Most High” Himself, God the Father, will overshadow her simultaneously with the Spirit’s coming upon her. The result of that is that not only will her child conceived by the Holy Spirit in her womb be a man called Jesus, but as the result of the overshadowing of the “power of the Most High,” the Holy One conceived in her would be called “the Son of God” (Luke 1:35).
Within the time span of a few minutes, the leading mysteries of classical orthodoxy were present in the very body of Mary. The Trinity and the duality of natures in the single person of Christ were concentrated in a moment in the angel’s announcement and in her own body. The fulfilling powers of redemptive history operated in perfect harmony to assure that “her seed” would bruise the head of the serpent (Genesis 3:15) and destroy “him who had the power of death” (Hebrews 2:14). Paul said it succinctly, “When the fullness of time was come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons” (Galatians 4:4). Her womb was the location of the “fullness of the time,” and Holy Spirit, Holy Father, and Holy Son all converged, as it were, “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,” to bring into the world the Redeemer. This Redeemer could, and did, effect forgiveness, procure righteousness, rob Satan’s fold, reconcile God and sinners, overthrow death as sin’s boon companion, and fit his people for heaven.
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15 of the 24 men on the SJC have now, to some extent, gone on official record to express concern over TE Johnson’s views. This development contradicts claims that TE Johnson’s views were exonerated by the SJC in Speck v. Missouri Presbytery. In the case, the SJC decision represented an adjudication regarding a particular presbytery’s process by evaluating the investigative process of Missouri Presbytery. This case was chiefly about Missouri Presbytery and not about TE Johnson or his views. The case was about evaluating Missouri Presbytery’s investigation of TE Johnson. At the very least, the SJC has not vindicated TE Johnson (as Johnson claims), and this case has not made the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) into a Side-B denomination….

Earlier this week, byFaith Online published an article entitled SJC Answers Dissent in Greg Johnson Case. This comes several months after the majority made a ruling on a complaint against Missouri Presbytery that sided with Missouri Presbytery over how the Presbytery conducted an investigation of one of its members, TE Greg Johnson. On October 21, 2021, the majority concluded, “based on the Record, there was no reversible error in the decisions reached by Missouri Presbytery regarding the four allegations. It was not unreasonable for Presbytery to judge that TE Johnson’s ‘explanations’ on the four allegations were ‘satisfactory’.”[1] The Standing Judicial Commission (SJC) believes that the investigation led by Missouri Presbytery was done in a reasonable and procedurally sound fashion. The SJC vote was 16-7-0 (with one member unable to attend the meeting).
On October 31, 2021, the seven dissenters submitted their dissent in writing. The dissent concludes:
The SJC overlooked the clear deficiencies of Presbytery’s investigation, which is proven by re-opening the record and admitting additional information that sought the “present” positions of TE Johnson, extending consideration of facts well beyond the events complained against. Moreover, it was incumbent on the SJC to deal with the matters raised by the Complainant as issues of Constitutional interpretation instead of deferring to the lower court in this case.[2]
In other words, they believe the SJC erred by submitting new questions for TE Johnson to answer regarding his views on sexuality. To the minority, this is proof that Missouri Presbytery failed to conduct a proper investigation of TE Johnson concerning his views and statements on sexuality.
This week, it was revealed that the SJC chose to reconvene on February 1, 2022 in order to adopt a response to the dissenting opinion. In this response, the majority commends the dissenters “zeal for truth, and their evident desire to promote the peace and purity of the Church,”[3] but also claim that the dissenters do “not accurately reflect either the Record in this Case or the ruling and opinion of the SJC.”[4] The SJC chose to adopt a response to the dissent due to the majority’s belief that the dissenters misrepresented the case in their dissent.
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[1] Standing Judicial Commission, “Decision on the Complaint of TE Ryan Speck v. Missouri Presbytery,” 2021, 28.
[2] Steve Dowling et al., “Dissenting Opinion on the Complain of TR Ryan Speck v. Missouri Presbytery,” 2021, 8.
[3] Standing Judicial Commission, “SJC Answer to the Dissenting Opinion of RE Steve Dowling et Al.,” 2022, 13.
[4] Ibid.