John Piper recommends that every preacher make one great Christian thinker his guide for life (Piper's is Jonathan Edwards) and Mark Driscoll advises all ministers to find dead pastors to look up to because "live one's always disappoint." Driscoll's hero is Charles Spurgeon and I would urge everyone to at least give the long dead Brit a try.Spurgeon barely lived 58 years, suffered from bouts with depression, was a workaholic who also cared for an invalid wife but he was also God's chosen instrument to build the first modern megachurch and influence pastors for generations to come as the "Prince of Preachers."
If you don't know anything about Spurgeon then I would recommend clicking over to Desiring God (link to the left) and looking for Piper's 1995 biographical lecture (Piper delivers an hour long bio on a different Christian thinker every year at the Desiring God conference and they are all well worth reviewing). The fine bloggers at Pyromaniacs (link also found to the left) deliver a "Weekly Dose of Spurgeon" and definitely check out The Spurgeon Archive at www.spurgeon.org
One of my favorite Spurgeon sayings was during a sermon when he essentially said "I preach the Gospel. I preach Calvinism but I repeat myself." Awesome!
