_But above all he excelled in prayer. The inwardness and weight
of his spirit, the reverence and solemnity of his address and
behavior, 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 nonspiritual preaching. The ability of the
preaching is not from God. Lower sources than God have given to it
energy and stimulant. 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 back of the words, back of the sermon, back of the occasion,
back of the manner, back of 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 nonconductor 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
comes in and fills, purifies, empowers. 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.