from The Sword and the Trowel (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1891) pp. 178-79.
t is not to be thought of for a moment that any minister would appropriate a sermon bodily, and preach it as his own. Such things have been done, we suppose, in remote ages, and in obscure regions; but nobody would justify a regular preacher in so doing. We give great license to good laymen, who are occupied with business all the week, and too much pressed with public engagements to have time to prepare. When princes and peers have speeches made for them, a sort of toleration is understood; and should a public functionary be so anxious to do good that he delivers a sermon, we excuse him if he has largely compiled it; yes, and if he memorises the bulk of it, and bravely says so, we have no word of censure. But for the preacher who claims a divine call, to take a whole discourse out of another preacher's mouth, and palm it off as his own, is an act which will find no defender.
Yet, he that never quotes, will never be quoted. To stop to give the name of the writer, and book from which the extract is made, would be pedantic, and would break the effect aside from the purpose of a discourse. Verbatim quotations some of us can seldom make; because we have shockingly bad memories for other men's words, and we should have to write out the extracts and read them, which would greatly embarrass us in an extempore sermon. We can, as a rule, only give the sense, and, if possible, say that we owe it to a learned divine, or a standard writer. Even this cannot always be done, since wide readers cannot possibly remember the source of every thought which they repeat.
As to thoughts: if a speaker should be able to confine himself to ideas which never entered into mortal brain before, he would have few enough, or none at all. Our predecessors have, in substance, already thought all that is worth thinking; and all that we can do is to shape these matters in our own mould, and deliver them in our own language. Everything that is worth hearing in the most original sermons could be found somewhere else by a man who had the Bodleian at his command, and an index of it in his head. To shut men up to absolutely new thoughts, would be to condemn them to silence, to forbid them to use their Bibles, and to make total ignorance of all that is written in books a main qualification for the pulpit. Even with such an inglorious unacquaintance with the utterances of others, the mind, to be a mind at all, would be forced unconsciously to follow trodden tracks, unless it ran into utter wildness of almost inconcievable heresy. Some would appear to be trying this plan; but their success in folly more than equals their achievement in originality. The man who aims at edifying his hearers, reads instructive authors with attention, and, after sitting at their feet as a learner, inwardly digests their teaching. He "eats the roll," and so makes it his own, and, in due course, delivers to his people that which he has himself enjoyed, with much more that has come of it. We do not call this plagiarism; and if any choose to do so, we shall defend the imaginary offence, and glory in committing it.
It is to be feared that really vicious plagiarism must be getting very common, since we note that a gentleman who was prosecuted for a breach of promise, was found to have committed another breach also; for he had copied his love-letters from a story book. His heart must have been in a rather artificial condition when his passion could be expressed in another man's words. The same remark might be made in reference to a preacher's heart, if he found another man's language the exact exponent of his own emotions. He who buys manuscript sermons, paying so much for a sufficient quantity to last him through a quarter of a year, would soon either to have no heart at all, or else to abide in constant bondage; since he never uses his own powers freely, but runs on in his purchased discourse like a man racing in a sack. For a deacon, or other good man, to read a profitable sermon, and say that he is doing so, is a praiseworthy action; but for a pastor to buy ready-made discourses, and voice them as his own, is the reverse. If a man has no message from God, let him hold his tongue; and if he is tempted to borrow another's utterances, let him beware of that Scripture which saith, "Behold, I am against the prophets, saith the Lord, that steal my words every one from his neighbour."
So far as Spurgeon's Sermons are concerned, the author does not take out a patent for them; but, on the contrary, would be glad for anyone to borrow from them, or read them publicly. The gracious truths which we preach we would publish to the four winds of heaven. There might be a question as to copyright should anyone publish a whole sermon as his own, as a learned professor once did; but to read them as Spurgeon's Sermons is an honour done to the preacher, for which he is grateful. One brother turned our sermons into Welsh, and then translated them back again into English, and so made them his own; who can find any fault with him? Very wise people would scorn to be thus indebted to any man; and yet their own sermons are such, that the people could not be worse fed even if their shepherd did borrow a little corn from a neighbour's granary. To feed your children on bread not made at home may be risky; but not to feed them at all is worse. One's own coat fits him best; but when the snow lies thick on the ground, it would be better to borrow a friend's wrapper than go out with none at all. Plagiarism is not to be commended; but there are offences of a more crimson dye than this.
harles Spurgeon loved the Song of Solomon. Sixty-three of his published sermons are based on texts from Solomon's Song. That's two-plus sermons a year on average, twice as many messages as Spurgeon preached from Colossians. In fact, Spurgeon's unabridged Song of Solomon sermons contain enough material to fill a fifteen-hundred-page book with a typeface smaller than you are now reading. All that material was drawn from an Old Testament poetic love song that most preachers would say is the single most difficult book in Scripture from which to preach.
We might quibble with Spurgeon's hermeneutical shortcut, but the point he was ultimately making is not altogether invalid. Marriage is, after all, a picture of Christ and His church (Ephesians 5:22-33). Spurgeon's dogmatic assertion simply echoes the words of the apostle: "This mystery [marriage] is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church" (v. 31). In the preceding verse, Paul had Quoted Genesis 2:24 ("Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh"), which is the original divine mandate for the institution of marriage.
ack in the era when I was blogging on a regular basis, there was a lot of discussion about the ethical propriety of pastors' paying for research and writing from a company like 
I could go on. It seems a lot of unscrupulous hustlers are making money hawking superficial sermons to slothful preachers.
But apparently there are a lot of men filling pulpits in evangelical churches who don't much bother to study the Scriptures for themselves. They use the work of others without attribution and pretend their sermons are the fruit of their own study. Whether they recite full sermons or just steal a paragraph here and there doesn't matter. It is still plagiarism. It is an illegitimate shortcut, and if a preacher does it routinely, in my judgment, he is not qualified to teach.
Almost every website that offers sermon-prep shortcuts for preachers will say things like, "Pastors today are busy with administration, planning, organizing, counseling, and a host of other duties. We can help minimize the time you spend preparing sermons."
ere are four items—a small sampling of some typical issues that illustrate my concerns about the doctrinal and ideological trajectory of The Gospel Coalition:
Despite the Coalition's stated view that the church needs to 
TGC badly mishandled almost every aspect of the COVID crisis, uncritically echoing untruths that we now know were deliberately spun by Dr. Fauci and Francis Collins, parroted by most of the media, and used by government officials to impose tyrannical restrictions. Officials in Canada were literally jailing pastors while letting rapists walk free. In California the government was closing churches while opening casinos, strip clubs, and massage parlors. Officials in every major developed country forced policies on people that the politicians themselves flouted.
TGC has shown a clear preference for the Woke notion that systemic injustice is a major factor causing ethnic strife, political unrest, and other social problems—and that practically all our institutions need a major overhaul to compensate for that. Since 2014 or so, 
arlene and I were in London 20 years ago today. I was preaching at the Metropolitan Tabernacle's School of Theology when 
We were not close enough to hear any of the explosions, but somehow word of the attacks spread through the Met Tab congregation, and when I finished my message, there was an eery silence. By the time I came down from the pulpit, the Tabernacle was already more than half empty.
Darlene if I had said or done something unintentionally offensive. She told me there was some kind of emergency—explosions in the London Underground, possibly terrorism. The whole city was shutting down.
rminian reasoning: "If God is sovereign, doesn't that make him the author of evil? Why would an all-powerful, all-knowing, beneficent God permit evil in the first place?
