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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Singing in sorrow, then, is one more way God conforms us to the image of his beloved Son. Here, as we suffer with him in song, Jesus teaches us to say, “Our God still reigns. Our God will deliver. And someone needs to hear of his surpassing worth.”

In all likelihood, no song had ever touched the walls of this cell or drifted through its bars. Moaning, cursing, yelling — these were the usual sounds rising from the dark heart of the prison. Not singing.
And especially not at midnight. Here was the hour of gloom, the first long hallway in the mansion of night, darkness without the faintest shade of dawn.
The other prisoners couldn’t mistake the sound. Some had woken under the strange melody, certain they were lost in a dream. Others, catching the first notes, lay wondering whether madness had seized the two men. It had seized many a man in chains before. These, however, were not the howling strains of the mad.
Midnight made its lonely march, and still the men went on: beaten, bloodied, cuffed — and singing.
How Could They Sing?
The events of that day make the song of Paul and Silas all the more surprising. A mob had attacked the two missionaries after Paul cast out a demon from a slave girl (Acts 16:16–21). The city magistrates, dispensing with due process, stripped the men and oversaw their public beating before delivering them to the city’s jailer, who “put them into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks” (Acts 16:24).
Darkness fell, and then that strange sound rose:
About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. (Acts 16:25)
Praying we can fathom. Who among us would not cry out for deliverance from such an unjust dungeon? Yet Paul and Silas not only prayed, but sang. They tuned their heartache with a hymn, and met the darkness of midnight with a melody.
And as they did, they joined a great chorus of saints who sung by faith and not by sight. They joined King Jehoshaphat, who walked into war with praises rising (2 Chronicles 20:20–21). They joined Jeremiah, who gave his most bitter lamentation a tune (Lamentations 1–5). They joined psalmist after psalmist who, though feeling afflicted and forgotten, raised a “song in the night” (Psalm 77:6).
Again and again, the saints of God meet sorrow not only with prayer, but with song. So what did Paul and Silas see that freed their hearts to sing?
Our God still reigns.
From one perspective, Paul and Silas’s day was a picture of perfect mayhem. Their spiritual power was slandered; their gospel trampled by a mob; their innocence silenced by injustice. They appeared like two victims caught in the chaos of a merciless, purposeless world.
But such was not their perspective. For Paul and Silas, all the day’s sorrows rested in the hand of a sovereign God. God had called them to Philippi through a midnight vision (Acts 16:9–10). Was he now any less sovereign in a midnight prison? God had used them in Philippi to save Lydia and her household (Acts 16:11–15). Had he discarded them now? No, prison could neither thwart the plans of God nor remove them from his sight; of this they were sure.
Years later, locked in yet another jail, Paul reminds the Philippian church of God’s surprising sovereignty:
I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ. (Philippians 1:12–13)
God had taught Paul and Silas to see his good purposes wherever they looked, even when they looked through the bars of a prison cell.
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The expectation for a man is that He is the strong one. Not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually. When tragedy hits the home, he is the life raft his family will cling to for security and strength. He may weep privately over many things, but a man is a rock for his family. His goal in life is not to be emotionally carried by his wife and children, his goal is to carry them. Be strong for them. Be an anchor for them. And to help them navigate the trouble waters of life with his love and provision at the lead. 

There is a masculinity crisis in the modern world. And what I mean by that is not neanderthalian, fart contest winning, beer bonging, grab happy, chest bumping caricatures of manhood that we have all been conditioned to accept as normative. Anyone can grow up to become a big-bodied mass with a penis… What I am talking about is men. Real men. Biblical men. And we need them now more than ever.
We need that same kind of iron clad warrior who bravely sounded the alarm nearly 200 years ago, against the coming plague of feminism, but the world was far too foolish to listen to them. Now, instead, we are the recipients of an emasculated world, where men appear in dresses on magazine covers, and the perverted laud them for their courage. We need real men. And let me clear, sinful masculinity is equally toxic as well. This post is about Biblical, godly, creation-ordered, manhood… Now, after a heart amen, I assume you are ready to continue? Well enough…
After decades of manlessness, the majority of men find themselves in the peculiar position of having no real clue what Biblical masculinity looks like. And frankly it is not their fault. Most men did not have fathers, grandfathers, pastors, mentors, or godly masculine men in their life, as they were growing up, so they have little to no vision of what that even looks like. And because of that, the next generation of boys will be just as blind as we all were when it is their turn to be at the helm.
For this reason, we need a revival of true masculinity. We need a return to God, a return to His Word, and a return to the God-blessed realm of what true manhood can offer the world, which God Himself called very good and blessed. And when we do that, we can change the world.
I would say many, if not most, of the problems plaguing this culture and especially the church have to do with failed masculinity, and weak, impotent, emasculated men. If that is true, then producing a new culture of Biblical, Christ-like, servant men will be an undeniable blessing, not only to the church, but to the entire world. Just as all ships in a harbor are lifted by the rising tide, all people will be benefited by the rise of a Biblically faithful culture of men.
No more excuses. It is time for us to open up our Bibles and get to work. Let’s go!
Over the next several weeks, we will be looking at 6 fundamental characteristics of what it means to be a godly man. We will speak frankly, unapologetically, but most importantly Biblically on this topic… And we will call men to imitate the true man, Jesus Christ, as we seek to ACT LIKE MEN, WORSHIP LIKE MEN, LOVE LIKE MEN, FIGHT LIKE MEN, LEAD LIKE MEN, AND BUILD LIKE MEN.
#1: What does it mean to act like men?
We begin today by looking at what it means to Act Like Men!
And there is no better place to begin, than by considering what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:11. He says:

When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.

This verse really does present the entire case for Biblical manhood in two basic words; “grow” and “up!” That’s right, I said it, we need to “grow up!” We need to stop acting like a battalion of lilly flowers, we need to stop thinking in childish ways, and eliminate the immaturity in our speech, and step into the real world of maturity that God designed us to live in!
But I do not want to speak in generalities here… So, let’s go a step further, just so it is crystal clear what this means.
In the home, the infant is the purest distillation of ego-centricism on earth. Dads, you may feel like you exist to entertain them. Moms, you definitely have felt like you exist to serve them. It can feel like they believe they are at the center of the universe demanding their every need.
They act as though their needs are the only needs worth caring about and that they are the only ones who matter. They do not seem to mind at all about screaming during your phone call, interrupting your precious sleep, and they seem totally oblivious to that essential task you were doing. Stop it and feed me, they seem to scream. Stop what you are doing and change me. Stop the things that are important to you and figure out why I am crying… I will stop when you get it right… Essentially the baby lives like his needs matter more than yours, dear mother, and if you do not believe me, it is because you have not yet had one.
I think God makes them so cute, so that we can’t help but love them. This is especially true for mom’s, who laugh, smile, ooh and ah, even while border on the verge of literal exhaustion and being treated by this baby like no reasonable adult in our life ever would! If you really think about it, and get past all of their cuddly cuteness, they are the most needy, whiny, self-absorbed, time-sucking people in your life! And you love them like no one else. What a beautiful love God has placed into your hear, dear daughter of Eve.
And that is certainly an endearing quality in a helpless babe who needs his mother incessantly for their entire existence, but I am sure you would agree that it is a noseauting quality in your man. No woman on earth wants to be a parent to a child and to a husband… But yet so many women end up feeling like they have adult babies for their spouses. I have heard that message consistently for years. It is a massive burden on a woman who wants to be led by you, to feel like she is the one leading you. And I am not excusing her sin, but your sin is not helping very much either, brother.
There are far too many men who live this way, and apparently did not jump through the necessary hurdles of maturation, only to graduate into manhood with a male body, but a fetal mind. This kind of man acts like their needs are the only ones that matter. They prioritize themselves, their emotions, their wants, their priorities, over everyone else. And they act just as spoiled as the soiled screaming toddler at their feet. The only advantage they seem to have in their manhood, is that they get to have sex with their wives, who struggles more than you realize, with how childish you and I can be.
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