_One bright benison which private prayer brings down upon the ministry
is an indescribable and inimitable something—an unction from the Holy
One.... If the anointing which we bear come not from the Lord of hosts,
we are deceivers, since only in prayer can we obtain it. Let us
continue instant, constant, fervent in supplication. Let your fleece
lie on the thrashing-floor of supplication till it is wet with the dew
of heaven._—SPURGEON.
Alexander Knox, a Christian philosopher of the days of Wesley, not an
adherent but a strong personal friend of Wesley, and with much spiritual
sympathy with the Wesleyan movement, writes: "It is strange and
lamentable, but I verily believe the fact to be that except among
Methodists and Methodistical clergymen, there is not much interesting
preaching in England. The clergy, too generally, have absolutely lost
the art. There is, I conceive, in the great laws of the moral world a
kind of secret understanding like the affinities in chemistry, between
rightly promulgated religious truth and the deepest feelings of the
human mind. Where the one is duly exhibited, the other will respond.
"Did not our hearts burn within us"?—but this devout feeling is
indispensable in the speaker. Now, I am obliged to state from my own
observation that this _onction_, as the French not unfitly term it, is
beyond all comparison more likely to be found in England in a Methodist
conventicle than in a parish Church. This, and this alone, seems really
to be that which fills the Methodist houses and thins the Churches. I
am, I verily think, no enthusiast; I am a most sincere and cordial
Churchman, a humble disciple of the School of Hale and Boyle, of Burnet
and Leighton. Now I must aver that when I was in this country, two years
ago, I did not hear a single preacher who taught me like my own great
masters but such as are deemed Methodistical. And I now despair of
getting an atom of heart-instruction from any other quarter. The
Methodist preachers (however I may not always approve of all their
expressions) do most assuredly diffuse this true religion and undefiled.
I felt real pleasure last Sunday. I can bear witness that the preacher
did at once speak the words of truth and soberness. There was no
eloquence—the honest man never dreamed of such a thing—but there was far
better: a cordial communication of vitalized truth. I say vitalized
because what he declared to others it was impossible not to feel he
lived on himself."
This unction is the art of preaching. The preacher who never had this
unction never had the art of preaching. The preacher who has lost this
unction has lost the art of preaching. Whatever other arts he may have
and retain—the art of sermon-making, the art of eloquence, the art of
great, clear thinking, the art of pleasing an audience—he has lost the
divine art of preaching. This unction makes God's truth powerful and
interesting, draws and attracts, edifies, convicts, saves.
This unction vitalizes God's revealed truth, makes it living and
life-giving. Even God's truth spoken without this unction is light,
dead, and deadening. Though abounding in truth, though weighty with
thought, though sparkling with rhetoric, though pointed by logic, though
powerful by earnestness, without this divine unction it issues in death
and not in life. Mr. Spurgeon says: "I wonder how long we might beat our
brains before we could plainly put into word what is meant by preaching
with unction. Yet he who preaches knows its presence, and he who hears
soon detects its absence. Samaria, in famine, typifies a discourse
without it. Jerusalem, with her feast of fat things, full of marrow, may
represent a sermon enriched with it. Every one knows what the freshness
of the morning is when orient pearls abound on every blade of grass, but
who can describe it, much less produce it of itself? Such is the mystery
of spiritual anointing. We know, but we cannot tell to others what it
is. It is as easy as it is foolish, to counterfeit it. Unction is a
thing which you cannot manufacture, and its counterfeits are worse than
worthless. Yet it is, in itself, priceless, and beyond measure needful
if you would edify believers and bring sinners to Christ."