Listening to great preaching

What is the young preacher to do? Let him listen to other preachers, the best and most experienced. He will learn a lot from them, negatively and positively. He will learn what not to do, and learn a great deal of what he should do. Listen to preachers! Also read sermons. But make sure that they were published before 1900! Read the sermons of Spurgeon and Whitefield and Edwards and all the giants. Those men themselves read the Puritans and were greatly helped by them. They seem to have lived on the Puritans. Well, let the young preacher in turn live on them, or perhaps be led by them to the Puritans. (Lloyd-Jones, Martyn. "Preaching
& Preachers." Zondervan: Grand Rapids, MI. 1971 p119-120)

I think Lloyd-Jones' counsel is right on, but I wouldn't limit it to preachers. What is the young Christian to do? Listen to the best preachers! Now that task is much, much easier with the internet. You can listen to readings of the sermons of

Jonathan Edwards
Charles Spurgeon
Andrew Murray
John Bunyan
A.W. Tozer

among others, on sermonaudio.com (although their search function is very inefficient).

Among living preachers, I recommend:

• John Piper as one of the most profound, expository, missional preachers
• Mark Driscoll for passionate, Reformed Gospel-centered teaching aimed at the unchurched of Seattle
• Mark Dever for thoughtful exposition that (almost) always addresses both the saved and the unsaved in the audience

And I think that every one of them, if not a Puritan, would point back to the Puritans as a repository of anointed, Biblical preaching. Happy listening!