The Heart of the Gospel: Paul Washer (Full Transcript)

Full text of evangelist Paul Washer’s sermon titled ‘The Heart of the Gospel’.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Paul Washer – Founder, HeartCry

For me to be here with you tonight. Such a privilege.

My all-time favorite preacher is Charles Spurgeon. And you begin maybe when you start out preaching, when you’re young and you think to yourself, I would like to be like him. It doesn’t take very long for you, a few years, and you realize that’s not going to happen.

The one thing that I most appreciate about Charles Spurgeon is that he admitted that he really only had one sermon, and it was about the cross of Jesus Christ, about the person of Christ.

I also, after reading now many sermons, I find it interesting that it’s not uncommon for him to begin any sermon by preparing the people for a failure.

And after you read for a while and you study for a while and you pray for a while, you begin to understand his burden. You cannot preach Christ. You cannot be a success at preaching Christ. You will never even begin to reach the foothills of the magnitude of Jesus Christ.

The great French Reformed Pastor Adolphe Monod preached 19 sermons on his deathbed, most of them looking up at the ceiling and couldn’t even look at his own congregation. He said this that evangelicals today would not quickly understand. He said, “Oh, the cross of preaching the cross!”.

And what he meant by that was, here is a feeble, tiny, wicked man whose intellect could fit in a pill box, and yet he’s being told that he must talk about the most glorious, most splendid Person, and the most glorious and most splendid thing that has ever occurred.