"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.