_But above all he excelled in prayer. The inwardness and weight of his
spirit, the reverence and solemnity of his address and behaviour, 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 stimulus. 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 behind the
words, behind the sermon, behind the occasion, behind the manner, behind
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 holies. Somewhere, all unconscious to himself, some
spiritual non-conductor 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 come in and fill, purify and empower.
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.