LET me read to you the verse that comes before our text. It is a good habit always to look at texts in their connection. It is wrong, I think, to lay hold of small portions of God's Word, and take them out of their connection as you might pluck feathers from a bird; it is an injury to the Word; and, sometimes, a passage of Scripture loses much of its beauty, its true teaching, and its real meaning, by being taken from the context. Nobody would think of mutilating Milton's poems so, taking a few lines out of Paradise Lost, and then imagining that he could really get at the heart of the poet's power. So, always look at texts in the connection in which they stand. The verse before our text is this, "Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God: whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversation: Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever."
He was converted to Christ at the age of 16 and immediately began preaching. He preached in the streets and in the fields before he was 21. In his first church, he began with 100 members. It grew until he was preaching to 10,000 people in the Surrey Music Hall. His church, the Metropolitan Tabernacle, seated 6,000 people. He withdrew from every movement among English Baptists which tended to criticize the Authorized Version 1611 in any way.
Before his death, he published more than 2,000 sermons and 49 volumes of commentaries, sayings, anecdotes, illustrations, and devotions.
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