_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 labor, 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 every minutiæ of the
derivation and grammar of the letter, may be able to trim the letter
into its perfect pattern, and illume 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, enameled 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 specialties, with
style irregular, slovenly, savoring 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
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 deader 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?