_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 is 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
discolor. 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 molding 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 jeweled letters on a golden frontlet:
“Holiness to the Lord.” So every preacher in Christ’s ministry must
be molded 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 nor
great learning nor 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 mold a generation for God.
After this order, the early Christians were formed. Men they were
of solid mold, 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 project God’s cause in this world.