Author’s Note: This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, A Year of Living Prayerfully.

If you’d like to share any of the myriad quotes below, just highlight one of them and something magic will happen. Enjoy!

For our last stop in England, Michelle and I took the Underground to Elephant and Castle, the same metro stop as the Benny Hinn conference. We passed a large sign that read, “Metropolitan Tabernacle Baptist Church (Spurgeon’s).”

Charles Haddon Spurgeon was born in 1834 and got saved at the age of fifteen. He started preaching at age sixteen and quickly earned the nickname “The Boy Preacher.” Spurgeon became a pastor at age seventeen; his first meetinghouse was a barn. He preached over six hundred times before his twentieth birthday. He took the pulpit of New Park Street Chapel at the age of twenty and soon packed it out.

Spurgeon was a pretty lively fellow, and attendance grew to more than ten thousand people. The church rented buildings for a few years before the Metropolitan Tabernacle was built to accommodate the crowds. The congregation included members of the royal family, the prime minister of England, and Florence Nightingale, among others.

In all, Spurgeon published over two thousand sermons. His sermons were so popular that they literally sold by the ton—at one point selling more than twenty-five thousand copies per week. Known today as the “Prince of Preachers,” Spurgeon preached to almost ten million people over the course of his life. In his early twenties, he founded Spurgeon’s College, which during his lifetime trained almost nine hundred pastors. He also founded the Stockwell Orphanage for boys, offering shelter, education, and a loving environment for impoverished, fatherless boys in London. This legacy continues in the form of Spurgeons, the charity he started in 1867.

Finding an open side entrance to the church, Michelle and I went inside to the bookstore. Though I wasn’t able to arrange an interview with Spurgeon (since he died years before I was born), I decided to interview him anyway, using quotes from one of his many books on prayer that lined the shelves.

Jay Brock (JB): Okay, Mr. Spurgeon, let’s start with an easy question. I was at a Benny Hinn convention right down the road from your church. What do you think of all that?

Charles Spurgeon (CS): We must never let our profit interfere in any way with the glory of God.

JB: I agree. Next question—do you think that prayer really works?

CS: Prayer moves the arm that moves the world. . . . You can be omnipotent if you know how to pray, omnipotent in all things that glorify God. . . . Prayer is the slender nerve that moveth the muscles of Omnipotence.

JB: But why pray? Won’t God do what He wants to do anyway? Does He really need us to ask? Hasn’t He already predestined everything?

CS: Why pray? Might it not as logically be asked, Why breathe, eat, move, or do anything? . . . Our prayers are in the predestination.

JB: Oh, wow—so Christians need to pray because God’s plan depends on it? I’ve never thought about that before. So how can we learn to pray?

CS: Prayer . . . is an art that only the Holy Spirit can teach us. He is the giver of all prayer.

JB: That doesn’t exactly help me.

CS: There is a secret work of the Spirit of God going on within you that is teaching you to pray.

JB: Well, I appreciate the encouragement, especially from someone like you, Mr. Spurgeon.

CS: When the Creator gives His creature the power of thirst, it is because water exists to meet its thirst. When He creates hunger, there is food to correspond to the appetite. . . . When He inclines men to pray, it is because prayer has a corresponding blessing connected with it.

JB: That’s pretty awesome, actually. So how do you define prayer, Mr. Spurgeon?

CS: True prayer is the trading of the heart with God.

JB: So when are Christians most effective in prayer?

CS: After the soul has unburdened itself of all weights of merit and self-sufficiency. . . . We are powerless in this business. . . . “He that hath made his refuge God,” might serve as the title of a true believer.

JB: Any prayer tips for beginners?

CS: As a rule, keep to present need. . . . The plainest, humblest language that expresses our meaning is the best.

JB: Any other advice?

CS: Ask for great things, for you are before a great throne.

JB: So what are you praying about these days?

CS: I have now concentrated all my prayers into one, . . . that I may die to self, and live wholly to him.

JB: Wow, that’s hard core. How important is prayer to the church?

CS: We shall never see much change for the better in our churches till the prayer meeting occupies a higher place in the esteem of Christians.

JB: I’ve heard that your Monday night prayer meetings used to be quite an event. How many people came each week?

CS: Scarcely ever numbers less than from a thousand to twelve hundred attendants.

JB: Wow, that’s crazy! I’m going to go check out your prayer room.

CS: That’s cool.*

Author’s Note: I did, indeed, manage to sneak my way into the “boiler room of prayer” in the basement of the Metropolitan Tabernacle. But more on that another time. If you’d like to pre-order the book or read the first two chapters for free, just visit this funky page. You can also enter our Goodreads giveaway.

*Charles Spurgeon may have said “that’s cool,” but it does not appear in any of his extensive writings.