_During this affliction I was brought to examine my life in relation to
eternity closer than I had done when in the enjoyment of health. In
this examination relative to the discharge of my duties toward my
fellow-creatures as a man, a Christian minister, and an officer of the
Church, I stood approved by my own conscience; but in relation to my
Redeemer and Saviour the result was different. My returns of gratitude
and loving obedience bear no proportion to my obligations for
redeeming, preserving, and supporting me through the vicissitudes of
life from infancy to old age. The coldness of my love to Him who first
loved me and has done so much for me overwhelmed and confused me; and
to complete my unworthy character, I had not only neglected to improve
the grace given to the extent of my duty and privilege, but for want of
that improvement had, while abounding in perplexing care and labour,
declined from first zeal and love. I was confounded, humbled myself,
implored mercy, and renewed my covenant to strive and devote myself
unreservedly to the Lord._—BISHOP MCKENDREE.
The preaching that kills may be, and often is, orthodox—dogmatically,
inviolably orthodox. We love orthodoxy. It is good. It is the best. It
is the clean, clear-cut teaching of God's Word, the trophies won by
truth in its conflict with error, the levees which faith has raised
against the desolating floods of honest or reckless misbelief or
unbelief; but orthodoxy, clear and hard as crystal, suspicious and
militant, may be but the letter well-shaped, well-named, and
well-learned, the letter which kills. Nothing is so dead as a dead
orthodoxy, too dead to speculate, too dead to think, to study, or to
pray.
The preaching that kills may have insight and grasp of principles, may
be scholarly and critical in taste, may have all the minutiæ of the
derivation and grammar of the letter, may be able to trim the letter
into its perfect pattern, and illumine it as Plato and Cicero may be
illumined, may study it as a lawyer studies his text-books to form his
brief or to defend his case, and yet be like a frost, a killing frost.
Letter-preaching may be eloquent, enamelled with poetry and rhetoric,
sprinkled with prayer, spiced with sensation, illumined by genius, and
yet these be but the massive or chaste, costly mountings, the rare and
beautiful flowers which coffin the corpse. The preaching which kills may
be without scholarship, unmarked by any freshness of thought or feeling,
clothed in tasteless generalities or vapid specialities, with style
irregular, slovenly, savouring neither of closet nor of study, graced
neither by thought, expression, or prayer. Under such preaching how wide
and utter the desolation! how profound the spiritual death!
This letter-preaching deals with the surface and shadow of things, and
not the things themselves. It does not penetrate the inner part. It has
no deep insight into, no strong grasp of, the hidden life of God's Word.
It is true to the outside, but the outside is the hull which must be
broken and penetrated for the kernel. The letter may be dressed so as to
attract and be fashionable, but the attraction is not toward God nor is
the fashion for heaven. The failure is in the preacher. God has not made
him. He has never been in the hands of God like clay in the hands of the
potter. He has been busy about the sermon, its thought and finish, its
drawing and impressive forces, but the deep things of God have never
been sought, studied, fathomed, experienced by him. He has never stood
before "the throne high and lifted up," never heard the seraphim song,
never seen the vision nor felt the rush of that awful holiness, and
cried out in utter abandon and despair under the sense of weakness and
guilt, and had his life renewed, his heart touched, purged, inflamed by
the live coal from God's altar. His ministry may draw people to him, to
the Church, to the form and ceremony; but no true drawings to God, no
sweet, holy, divine communion induced. The Church has been frescoed but
not edified, pleased but not sanctified. Life is suppressed; a chill is
on the summer air; the soil is baked. The city of our God becomes the
city of the dead; the Church a graveyard, not an embattled army. Praise
and prayer are stifled; worship is dead. The preacher and the preaching
have helped sin, not holiness; peopled hell, not heaven.
Preaching which kills is prayerless preaching. Without prayer the
preacher creates death, and not life. The preacher who is feeble in
prayer is feeble in life-giving forces. The preacher who has retired
from prayer as a conspicuous and largely prevailing element in his own
character has shorn his preaching of its distinctive life-giving power.
Professional praying there is and will be, but professional praying
helps the preaching to its deadly work. Professional praying chills and
kills both preaching and praying. Much of the lax devotion and lazy,
irreverent attitudes in congregational praying are attributable to
professional praying in the pulpit. Long, discursive, dry, and inane are
the prayers in many pulpits. Without unction or heart, they fall like a
killing frost on all the graces of worship. Death-dealing prayers they
are. Every vestige of devotion has perished under their breath. The more
dead they are the longer they grow. A plea for short praying, live
praying, real heart praying, praying by the Holy Spirit—direct,
specific, ardent, simple, unctuous in the pulpit—is in order. A school
to teach preachers how to pray, as God counts praying, would be more
beneficial to true piety, true worship, and true preaching than all
theological schools.
Stop! Pause! Consider! Where are we? What are we doing? Preaching to
kill? Praying to kill? Praying to God! the great God, the Maker of all
worlds, the Judge of all men! What reverence! what simplicity! what
sincerity! what truth in the inward parts is demanded! How real we must
be! How hearty! Prayer to God the noblest exercise, the loftiest effort
of man, the most real thing! Shall we not discard forever accursed
preaching that kills and prayer that kills, and do the real thing, the
mightiest thing—prayerful praying, life-creating preaching bring the
mightiest force to bear on heaven and earth and draw on God's
exhaustless and open treasure for the need and beggary of man?