But above all he excelled in prayer. The inwardness and
weight of his spirit, the reverence and solemnity of his address and behavior,
and the fewness and fullness of his words have often struck even strangers
with admiration as they used to reach others with consolation. The most
awful, living, reverend frame I ever felt or beheld, I must say, was his
prayer. And truly it was a testimony. He knew and lived nearer to the
Lord than other men, for they that know him most will see most reason
to approach him with reverence and fear. -- William Penn of George
Fox
THE sweetest graces by a slight perversion may bear the bitterest fruit.
The sun gives life, but sunstrokes are death. Preaching is to give life;
it may kill. The preacher holds the keys; he may lock as well as unlock.
Preaching is God's great institution for the planting and maturing of spiritual
life. When properly executed, its benefits are untold; when wrongly executed,
no evil can exceed its damaging results. It is an easy matter to destroy
the flock if the shepherd be unwary or the pasture be destroyed, easy to
capture the citadel if the watchmen be asleep or the food and water be poisoned.
Invested with such gracious prerogatives, exposed to so great evils, involving
so many grave responsibilities, it would be a parody on the shrewdness of
the devil and a libel on his character and reputation if he did not bring
his master influences to adulterate the preacher and the preaching. In face
of all this, the exclamatory interrogatory of Paul, "Who is sufficient
for these things?" is never out of order.
Paul says: "Our sufficiency is of God, who also hath made us able ministers
of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter
killeth, but the spirit giveth life." The true ministry is God-touched,
God-enabled, and God-made. The Spirit of God is on the preacher in anointing
power, the fruit of the Spirit is in his heart, the Spirit of God has vitalized
the man and the word; his preaching gives life, gives life as the spring
gives life; gives life as the resurrection gives life; gives ardent life
as the summer gives ardent life; gives fruitful life as the autumn gives
fruitful life. The life-giving preacher is a man of God, whose heart is
ever athirst for God, whose soul is ever following hard after God, whose
eye is single to God, and in whom by the power of God's Spirit the flesh
and the world have been crucified and his ministry is like the generous
flood of a life-giving river.
The preaching that kills is non-spiritual preaching. The ability of the
preaching is not from God. Lower sources than God have given to it energy
and stimulant. The Spirit is not evident in the preacher nor his preaching.
Many kinds of forces may be projected and stimulated by preaching that kills,
but they are not spiritual forces. They may resemble spiritual forces, but
are only the shadow, the counterfeit; life they may seem to have, but the
life is magnetized. The preaching that kills is the letter; shapely and
orderly it may be, but it is the letter still, the dry, husky letter, the
empty, bald shell. The letter may have the germ of life in it, but it has
no breath of spring to evoke it; winter seeds they are, as hard as the winter's
soil, as icy as the winter's air, no thawing nor germinating by them. This
letter-preaching has the truth. But even divine truth has no life-giving
energy alone; it must be energized by the Spirit, with all God's forces
at its back. Truth unquickened by God's Spirit deadens as much as, or more
than, error. It may be the truth without admixture; but without the Spirit
its shade and touch are deadly, its truth error, its light darkness. The
letter-preaching is unctionless, neither mellowed nor oiled by the Spirit.
There may be tears, but tears cannot run God's machinery; tears may be but
summer's breath on a snow-covered iceberg, nothing but surface slush. Feelings
and earnestness there may be, but it is the emotion of the actor and the
earnestness of the attorney. The preacher may feel from the kindling of
his own sparks, be eloquent over his own exegesis, earnest in delivering
the product of his own brain; the professor may usurp the place and imitate
the fire of the apostle; brains and nerves may serve the place and feign
the work of God's Spirit, and by these forces the letter may glow and sparkle
like an illumined text, but the glow and sparkle will be as barren of life
as the field sown with pearls. The death-dealing element lies back of the
words, back of the sermon, back of the occasion, back of the manner, back
of the action. The great hindrance is in the preacher himself. He has not
in himself the mighty life-creating forces. There may be no discount on
his orthodoxy, honesty, cleanness, or earnestness; but somehow the man,
the inner man, in its secret places has never broken down and surrendered
to God, his inner life is not a great highway for the transmission of God's
message, God's power. Somehow self and not God rules in the holy of holiest.
Somewhere, all unconscious to himself, some spiritual nonconductor has touched
his inner being, and the divine current has been arrested. His inner being
has never felt its thorough spiritual bankruptcy, its utter powerlessness;
he has never learned to cry out with an ineffable cry of self-despair and
self-helplessness till God's power and God's fire comes in and fills, purifies,
empowers. Self-esteem, self-ability in some pernicious shape has defamed
and violated the temple which should be held sacred for God. Life-giving
preaching costs the preacher much -- death to self, crucifixion to the world,
the travail of his own soul. Crucified preaching only can give life. Crucified
preaching can come only from a crucified man. |