_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 clergyman, 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 to 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.”