Charles H. Spurgeon told of a young preacher who asked an elderly minister for his opinion of a sermon he had preached when the older gentleman had been one of the congregation to which he had spoken.

“A very poor sermon, indeed!” Was the reply.

“A poor sermon!” Exclaimed the young man; “it took me a long time to prepare it.”

“Ah, no doubt of it!” And then the older man said that while the discourse had merit as a lecture, it was not a good sermon because “there was no Christ in it.”

“Well!” Was the reply, “Christ was not in the text.”

“Don’t you know, young man,” the venerable minister said, “that from every town and every village and every hamlet in England, wherever it may be, there is a road to London, the centre? And so, from every text in Scripture there is a road to the centre of the Scriptures, – that is, Christ. And, my dear brother, your business is to say when you get a text, ‘Now, what is the road to Christ?’ And then preach a sermon running along the road to the great centre, Christ.”

By T. Darley Allen, Signs of the Times, January 28, 1930. Dale Galusha