Here's a description Charles Spurgeon and his preaching. What strikes me most is that this was a man who Believed. Believed with a capital B. Taken from Charles H. Spurgeon: His Faith and Works, H.L. Wayland, 1892.
They [the congregation] saw a man who believed what he said; to whom everything that he taught was intensely real. The doctrines were alive; he made them breathe and pulsate. They were not weapons to be furbished up for their own sake alone, and then laid aside. They were to control the life. Religion was not something to be put in one's iron safe, along with his other fire insurance policies, and looked at once a week. It was to control every moment of the life. Repentance was not merely an exercise preliminary to joining the church; it meant leaving off every wrong practice; it meant, as in actual instances, for the thief to restore his spoils.
The Bible was not a book to be laid away in decorous and dusty disuse, nor was it a book to be read as a task, hateful but unavoidable. Rather the Bible was a book to be read, to be believed, to be obeyed, to be enjoyed, a counsellor in perplexity, a solace in trial.
They saw a man who was master of that great gift, the plainest and simplest Anglo-Saxon speech, who preached with the single aim that all should understand, whether they would or not. He did not preach about "the drift of current theological thought," or about "a parallel between Paul's Epistles and the Dialectics of Aristotle," or about "the primordial germ," or about "the alleged use of two-tined forks among the prehistoric races." He had no literary or professional ambition. He used the English of Bunyan and of Abraham Lincoln.
They saw a man who spoke directly to the soul, who seemed to look into the heart of each person in the thousands before him, and talked with him as if the two were absolutely alone in the spiritual world. Once the writer heard him close a sermon in something like these words:
"Will you accept Christ?" "Well, I will think about it." "That is not the question. Will you accept Christ?" "I will go home and pray." "No, that is not the question. Will you accept Christ?" "I will leave off swearing." "No, that is not the question; will you accept Christ?"
And he pressed the question, till it seemed that no one in the great congregation could avoid deciding then and there the question of eternity.
“Two things are necessary to the life of pure faith. The first is, that we behold God alone, under all the imperfect coverings that conceal him; the second is, constantly to have our souls kept in a state of dependence.”
–Fenelon