One bright benison which private prayer brings down upon
the ministry is an indescribable and inimitable something -- an unction
from the Holy One . . . . If the anointing which we bear come not from
the Lord of hosts, we are deceivers, since only in prayer can we obtain
it. Let us continue instant constant fervent in supplication. Let your
fleece lie on the thrashing floor of supplication till it is wet with
the dew of heaven. -- Charles Haddon Spurgeon
ALEXANDER KNOX, a Christian philosopher of the days of Wesley, not an adherent
but a strong personal friend of Wesley, and with much spiritual sympathy
with the Wesleyan movement, writes: "It is strange and lamentable,
but I verily believe the fact to be that except among Methodists and Methodistical
clergyman, there is not much interesting preaching in England. The clergy,
too generally have absolutely lost the art. There is, I conceive, in the
great laws of the moral world a kind of secret understanding like the affinities
in chemistry, between rightly promulgated religious truth and the deepest
feelings of the human mind. Where the one is duly exhibited, the other will
respond. Did not our hearts burn within us? -- but to this devout feeling
is indispensable in the speaker. Now, I am obliged to state from my own
observation that this onction, as the French not unfitly term it,
is beyond all comparison more likely to be found in England in a Methodist
conventicle than in a parish Church. This, and this alone, seems really
to be that which fills the Methodist houses and thins the Churches. I am,
I verily think, no enthusiast; I am a most sincere and cordial churchman,
a humble disciple of the School of Hale and Boyle, of Burnet and Leighton.
Now I must aver that when I was in this country, two years ago, I did not
hear a single preacher who taught me like my own great masters but such
as are deemed Methodistical. And I now despair of getting an atom of heart
instruction from any other quarter. The Methodist preachers (however I may
not always approve of all their expressions) do most assuredly diffuse this
true religion and undefiled. I felt real pleasure last Sunday. I can bear
witness that the preacher did at once speak the words of truth and soberness.
There was no eloquence -- the honest man never dreamed of such a thing --
but there was far better: a cordial communication of vitalized truth. I
say vitalized because what he declared to others it was impossible not to
feel he lived on himself."
This unction is the art of preaching. The preacher who never had this unction
never had the art of preaching. The preacher who has lost this unction has
lost the art of preaching. Whatever other arts he may have and retain --
the art of sermon-making, the art of eloquence, the art of great, clear
thinking, the art of pleasing an audience -- he has lost the divine art
of preaching. This unction makes God's truth powerful and interesting, draws
and attracts, edifies, convicts, saves.
This unction vitalizes God's revealed truth, makes it living and life-giving.
Even God's truth spoken without this unction is light, dead, and deadening.
Though abounding in truth, though weighty with thought, though sparkling
with rhetoric, though pointed by logic, though powerful by earnestness,
without this divine unction it issues in death and not in life. Mr. Spurgeon
says: "I wonder how long we might beat our brains before we could plainly
put into word what is meant by preaching with unction. Yet he who preaches
knows its presence, and he who hears soon detects its absence. Samaria,
in famine, typifies a discourse without it. Jerusalem, with her feast of
fat things, full of marrow, may represent a sermon enriched with it. Every
one knows what the freshness of the morning is when orient pearls abound
on every blade of grass, but who can describe it, much less produce it of
itself? Such is the mystery of spiritual anointing. We know, but we cannot
tell to others what it is. It is as easy as it is foolish, to counterfeit
it. Unction is a thing which you cannot manufacture, and its counterfeits
are worse than worthless. Yet it is, in itself, priceless, and beyond measure
needful if you would edify believers and bring sinners to Christ."
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