"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.