I
_Recreation to a minister must be as whetting is with the mower—that
is, to be used only so far as is necessary for his work. May a
physician in plague-time take any more relaxation or recreation than is
necessary for his life, when so many are expecting his help in a case
of life and death? Will you stand by and see sinners gasping under the
pangs of death, and say: "God doth not require me to make myself a
drudge to save them?" Is this the voice of ministerial or Christian
compassion or rather of sensual laziness and diabolical
cruelty?_—RICHARD BAXTER.
_Misemployment of time is injurious to the mind. In illness I have
looked back with self-reproach on days spent in my study: I was wading
through history and poetry and monthly journals, but I was in my study!
Another man's trifling is notorious to all observers, but what am I
doing? Nothing, perhaps, that has a reference to the spiritual good of
my congregation. Be much in retirement and prayer. Study the honour and
glory of your Master._—RICHARD CECIL.
_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 are 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 discolour. 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 moulding 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 jewelled letters on a golden frontlet:
"Holiness to the Lord." So every preacher in Christ's ministry must be
moulded 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, independent 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 timeservers, 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 or great
learning or 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 mould a generation for God.
After this order, the early Christians were formed. Men they were of
solid mould, 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 advance God's cause in this world.