Study universal holiness of life. Your whole usefulness
depends on this, for your sermons last but an hour or two; your life preaches
all the week. If Satan can only make a covetous minister a lover of praise,
of pleasure, of good eating, he has ruined your ministry. Give yourself
to prayer, and get your texts, your thoughts, your words from God. Luther
spent his best three hours in prayer. -- Robert Murray McCheyne
WE are constantly on a stretch, if not on a strain, to devise new methods,
new plans, new organizations to advance the Church and secure enlargement
and efficiency for the gospel. This trend of the day has a tendency to lose
sight of the man or sink the man in the plan or organization. God's plan
is to make much of the man, far more of him than of anything else. Men are
God's method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for
better men. "There was a man sent from God whose name was John."
The dispensation that heralded and prepared the way for Christ was bound
up in that man John. "Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given."
The world's salvation comes out of that cradled Son. When Paul appeals to
the personal character of the men who rooted the gospel in the world, he
solves the mystery of their success. The glory and efficiency of the gospel
is staked on the men who proclaim it. When God declares that "the eyes
of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong
in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him," he declares
the necessity of men and his dependence on them as a channel through which
to exert his power upon the world. This vital, urgent truth is one that
this age of machinery is apt to forget. The forgetting of it is as baneful
on the work of God as would be the striking of the sun from his sphere.
Darkness, confusion, and death would ensue.
What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new organizations
or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use -- men of
prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Ghost does not flow through methods,
but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not
anoint plans, but men -- men of prayer.
An eminent historian has said that the accidents of personal character have
more to do with the revolutions of nations than either philosophic historians
or democratic politicians will allow. This truth has its application in
full to the gospel of Christ, the character and conduct of the followers
of Christ -- Christianize the world, transfigure nations and individuals.
Of the preachers of the gospel it is eminently true.
The character as well as the fortunes of the gospel is committed to the
preacher. He makes or mars the message from God to man. The preacher is
the golden pipe through which the divine oil flows. The pipe must not only
be golden, but open and flawless, that the oil may have a full, unhindered,
unwasted flow.
The man makes the preacher. God must make the man. The messenger is, if
possible, more than the message. The preacher is more than the sermon. The
preacher makes the sermon. As the life-giving milk from the mother's bosom
is but the mother's life, so all the preacher says is tinctured, impregnated
by what the preacher is. The treasure is in earthen vessels, and the taste
of the vessel impregnates and may discolor. The man, the whole man, lies
behind the sermon. Preaching is not the performance of an hour. It is the
outflow of a life. It takes twenty years to make a sermon, because it takes
twenty years to make the man. The true sermon is a thing of life. The sermon
grows because the man grows. The sermon is forceful because the man is forceful.
The sermon is holy because the man is holy. The sermon is full of the divine
unction because the man is full of the divine unction.
Paul termed it "My gospel;" not that he had degraded it by his
personal eccentricities or diverted it by selfish appropriation, but the
gospel was put into the heart and lifeblood of the man Paul, as a personal
trust to be executed by his Pauline traits, to be set aflame and empowered
by the fiery energy of his fiery soul. Paul's sermons -- what were they?
Where are they? Skeletons, scattered fragments, afloat on the sea of inspiration!
But the man Paul, greater than his sermons, lives forever, in full form,
feature and stature, with his molding hand on the Church. The preaching
is but a voice. The voice in silence dies, the text is forgotten, the sermon
fades from memory; the preacher lives.
The sermon cannot rise in its life-giving forces above the man. Dead men
give out dead sermons, and dead sermons kill. Everything depends on the
spiritual character of the preacher. Under the Jewish dispensation the high
priest had inscribed in jeweled letters on a golden frontlet: "Holiness
to the Lord." So every preacher in Christ's ministry must be molded
into and mastered by this same holy motto. It is a crying shame for the
Christian ministry to fall lower in holiness of character and holiness of
aim than the Jewish priesthood. Jonathan Edwards said: "I went on with
my eager pursuit after more holiness and conformity to Christ. The heaven
I desired was a heaven of holiness." The gospel of Christ does not
move by popular waves. It has no self-propagating power. It moves as the
men who have charge of it move. The preacher must impersonate the gospel.
Its divine, most distinctive features must be embodied in him. The constraining
power of love must be in the preacher as a projecting, eccentric, an all-commanding,
self-oblivious force. The energy of self-denial must be his being, his heart
and blood and bones. He must go forth as a man among men, clothed with humility,
abiding in meekness, wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove; the bonds of
a servant with the spirit of a king, a king in high, royal, in dependent
bearing, with the simplicity and sweetness of a child. The preacher must
throw himself, with all the abandon of a perfect, self-emptying faith and
a self-consuming zeal, into his work for the salvation of men. Hearty, heroic,
compassionate, fearless martyrs must the men be who take hold of and shape
a generation for God. If they be timid time servers, place seekers, if they
be men pleasers or men fearers, if their faith has a weak hold on God or
his Word, if their denial be broken by any phase of self or the world, they
cannot take hold of the Church nor the world for God.
The preacher's sharpest and strongest preaching should be to himself. His
most difficult, delicate, laborious, and thorough work must be with himself.
The training of the twelve was the great, difficult, and enduring work of
Christ. Preachers are not sermon makers, but men makers and saint makers,
and he only is well-trained for this business who has made himself a man
and a saint. It is not great talents nor great learning nor great preachers
that God needs, but men great in holiness, great in faith, great in love,
great in fidelity, great for God -- men always preaching by holy sermons
in the pulpit, by holy lives out of it. These can mold a generation for
God.
After this order, the early Christians were formed. Men they were of solid
mold, preachers after the heavenly type -- heroic, stalwart, soldierly,
saintly. Preaching with them meant self-denying, self-crucifying, serious,
toilsome, martyr business. They applied themselves to it in a way that told
on their generation, and formed in its womb a generation yet unborn for
God. The preaching man is to be the praying man. Prayer is the preacher's
mightiest weapon. An almighty force in itself, it gives life and force to
all.
The real sermon is made in the closet. The man -- God's man -- is made in
the closet. His life and his profoundest convictions were born in his secret
communion with God. The burdened and tearful agony of his spirit, his weightiest
and sweetest messages were got when alone with God. Prayer makes the man;
prayer makes the preacher; prayer makes the pastor.
The pulpit of this day is weak in praying. The pride of learning is against
the dependent humility of prayer. Prayer is with the pulpit too often only
official -- a performance for the routine of service. Prayer is not to the
modern pulpit the mighty force it was in Paul's life or Paul's ministry.
Every preacher who does not make prayer a mighty factor in his own life
and ministry is weak as a factor in God's work and is powerless to project
God's cause in this world. < |