WATCHFUL

'Son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of

Israel.'--The word of the Lord to Ezekiel.

'They watch for your souls.'--The Apostle to the Hebrews.

There were four shepherds who had the care of Immanuel's sheep on the

Delectable Mountains, and their names were Knowledge, Experience,

Watchful, and Sincere. Now, in that very beautiful episode of his great

allegory, John Bunyan is doing his very utmost to impress upon all his

ministerial readers how much there is that goes to the making of a good

minister, and how much every good minister has to do. Each several

minister must do all that in him lies, from the day of his ordination to

the day of his death, to be all to his people that those four shepherds

were to Immanuel's sheep. He is to labour, in season and out of season,

to be a minister of the ripest possible knowledge, the deepest and widest

possible experience, the most sleepless watchfulness, and the most

absolute and scrupulous sincerity. Now, enough has perhaps been said

already about a minister's knowledge and his experience; enough,

certainly, and more than enough for some of us to hope half to carry out;

and, therefore, I shall at once go on to take up Watchful, and to supply,

so far as I am able, the plainest possible interpretation of this part of

Bunyan's parable.

1. Every true minister, then, watches, in the words of the apostle, for

the souls of his people. An ordinary minister's everyday work embraces

many duties and offers many opportunities, but through all his duties and

through all his opportunities there runs this high and distinctive duty

of watching for the souls of his people. A minister may be a great

scholar, he may have taken all sacred learning for his province, he may

be a profound and a scientific theologian, he may be an able church

leader, he may be a universally consulted authority on ecclesiastical

law, he may be a skilful and successful debater in church courts, he may

even be a great pulpit orator, holding thousands entranced by his

impassioned eloquence; but a true successor of the prophets of the Old

Testament and of the apostles of the New Testament he is not, unless he

watches for the souls of men. All these endowments, and all these

occupations, right and necessary as, in their own places, they all

are,--great talents, great learning, great publicity, great

popularity,--all tend, unless they are taken great care of, to lead their

possessors away from all time for, and from all sympathy with, the

watchfulness of the New Testament minister. Watching over a flock brings

to you none of the exhilaration of authority and influence, none of the

intoxication of publicity and applause. Your experiences are the quite

opposite of all these things when you are watching over your flock. Your

work among your flock is all done in distant and lonely places, on

hillsides, among woods and thickets, and in cloudy and dark days. You

spend your strength among sick and dying and wandering sheep, among

wolves and weasels, and what not, of that verminous kind. At the same

time, all good pastors are not so obscure and forgotten as all that. Some

exceptionally able and exceptionally devoted and self-forgetful men

manage to combine both extremes of a minister's duties and opportunities

in themselves. Our own Sir Henry Moncreiff was a pattern pastor. There

was no better pastor in Edinburgh in his day than dear Sir Henry was; and

yet, at the same time, everybody knows what an incomparable

ecclesiastical casuist Sir Henry was. Mr. Moody, again, is a great

preacher, preaching to tens of thousands of hearers at a time; but, at

the same time, Mr. Moody is one of the most skilful and attentive pastors

that ever took individual souls in hand and kept them over many years in

mind. But these are completely exceptional men, and what I want to say

to commonplace and limited and everyday men like myself is this, that

watching for the souls of our people, one by one, day in and day

out,--that, above everything else, that, and nothing else,--makes any man

a pastor of the apostolic type. An able man may know all about the

history, the habitat, the various species, the breeds, the diseases, and

the prices of sheep, and yet be nothing at all of a true shepherd. And

so may a minister.

2. Pastoral visitation, combined with personal dealing, is by far the

best way of watching for souls. I well remember when I first began my

ministry in this congregation, how much I was impressed with what one of

the ablest and best of our then ministers was reported to have testified

on his deathbed. Calling back to his bedside a young minister who had

come to see him, the dying man said: 'Prepare for the pulpit; above

everything else you do, prepare for the pulpit. Let me again repeat it,

should it at any time stand with you between visiting a deathbed and

preparing for the pulpit, prepare for the pulpit.' I was immensely

impressed with that dying injunction when it was repeated to me, but I

have lived,--I do not say to put my preparation for the pulpit, such as

it is, second to my more pastoral work in my week's thoughts, but--to put

my visiting in the very front rank and beside my pulpit. 'We never were

accustomed to much visiting,' said my elders to me in their solicitude

for their young minister when he was first left alone with this whole

charge; 'only appear in your own pulpit twice on Sabbath: keep as much at

home as possible: we were never used to much visiting, and we do not look

for it.' Well, that was most kindly intended; but it was much more kind

than wise. For I have lived to learn that no congregation will continue

to prosper, or, if other more consolidated and less exacting

congregations, at any rate not this congregation, without constant

pastoral attention. And remember, I do not complain of that. Far, far

from that. For I am as sure as I am of anything connected with a

minister's life, that a minister's own soul will prosper largely in the

measure that the souls of his people prosper through his pastoral work.

No preaching, even if it were as good preaching as the apostle's itself,

can be left to make up for the neglect of pastoral visitation and

personal intercourse. 'I taught you from house to house,' says Paul

himself, when he was resigning the charge of the church of Ephesus into

the hands of the elders of Ephesus. What would we ministers not give for

a descriptive report of an afternoon's house-to-house visitation by the

Apostle Paul! Now in a workshop, now at a sickbed, now with a Greek, now

with a Jew, and, in every case, not discussing politics and cursing the

weather, not living his holidays over again and hearing of all the

approaching marriages, but testifying to all men in his own incomparably

winning and commanding way repentance toward God and faith toward the

Lord Jesus Christ. We city ministers call out and complain that we have

no time to visit our people in their own houses; but that is all

subterfuge. If the whole truth were told about the busiest of us, it is

not so much want of time as want of intention; it is want of set and

indomitable purpose to do it; it is want of method and of regularity such

as all business men must have; and it is want, above all, of laying out

every hour of every day under the Great Taskmaster's eye. Many country

ministers again,--we, miserable men that we are, are never happy or well

placed,--complain continually that their people are so few, and so

scattered, and so ignorant, and so uninteresting, and so unresponsive,

that it is not worth their toil to go up and down in remote places

seeking after them. It takes a whole day among bad roads and wet bogs to

visit a shepherd's wife and children, and two or three bothies and

pauper's hovels on the way home. 'On the morrow,' so runs many an entry

in Thomas Boston's _Memoirs_, 'I visited the sick, and spent the

afternoon in visiting others, and found gross ignorance prevailing.

Nothing but stupidity prevailed; till I saw that I had enough to do among

my handful. I had another diet of catechising on Wednesday afternoon,

and the discovery I made of the ignorance of God and of themselves made

me the more satisfied with the smallness of my charge . . . Twice a year

I catechised the parish, and once a year I visited their families. My

method of visitation was this. I made a particular application of my

doctrine in the pulpit to the family, exhorted them all to lay all these

things to heart, exhorted them also to secret prayer, supposing they kept

family worship, urged their relative duties upon them,' etc. etc. And

then at his leaving Ettrick, he writes: 'Thus I parted with a people

whose hearts were knit to me and mine to them. The last three or four

years had been much blessed, and had been made very comfortable to me,

not in respect of my own handful only, but others of the countryside

also.' Jonathan Edwards called Thomas Boston 'that truly great divine.'

I am not such a judge of divinity as Jonathan Edwards was, but I always

call Boston to myself that truly great pastor. But my lazy and deceitful

heart says to me: No praise to Boston, for he lived and did his work in

the quiet Forest of Ettrick. True, so he did. Well, then, look at the

populous and busy town of Kidderminster. And let me keep continually

before my abashed conscience that hard-working corpse Richard Baxter.

Absolutely on the same page on which that dying man enters diseases and

medicines enough to fill a doctor's diary after a whole day in an

incurable hospital, that noble soul goes on to say: 'I preached before

the wars twice each Lord's Day, but after the wars but once, and once

every Thursday, besides occasional sermons. Every Thursday evening my

neighbours that were most desirous, and had opportunity, met at my house.

Two days every week my assistant and I myself took fourteen families

between us for private catechising and conference; he going through the

parish, and the town coming to me. I first heard them recite the words

of the Catechism, and then examined them about the sense, and lastly

urged them, with all possible engaging reason and vehemency, to

answerable affection and practice. If any of them were stalled through

ignorance or bashfulness, I forbore to press them, but made them hearers,

and turned all into instruction and exhortation. I spent about an hour

with a family, and admitted no others to be present, lest bashfulness

should make it burdensome, or any should talk of the weakness of others.'

And then he tells how his people's necessity made him practise physic

among them, till he would have twenty at his door at once. 'All these my

employments were but my recreations, and, as it were, the work of my

spare hours. For my writings were my chiefest daily labour. And blessed

be the God of mercies that brought me from the grave and gave me, after

wars and sickness, fourteen years' liberty in such sweet employment!' Let

all ministers who would sit at home over a pipe and a newspaper with a

quiet conscience keep Boston's _Memoirs_ and Baxter's _Reliquiae_ at

arm's-length.

3. Our young communicants' classes, and still more, those private

interviews that precede and finish up our young communicants' classes,

are by far our best opportunities as pastors. I remember Dr. Moody

Stuart telling me long ago that he had found his young communicants'

classes to be the most fruitful opportunities of all his ministry; as,

also, next to them, times of baptism in families. And every minister who

tries to be a minister at all after Dr. Moody Stuart's pattern, will tell

you something of the same thing. They get at the opening history of

their young people's hearts before their first communion. They make

shorthand entries and secret memoranda at such a season like this: 'A. a

rebuke to me. He had for long been astonished at me that I did not speak

to him about his soul. B. traced his conversion to the singing of 'The

sands of time are sinking' in this church last summer. C. was spoken to

by a room-mate. D. was to be married, and she died. Of E. I have great

hope. F., were she anywhere but at home, I would have great hopes of

her,'--and so on. But, then, when a minister takes boldness to turn over

the pages of his young communicants' roll for half a lifetime--ah me, ah

me! What was I doing to let that so promising communicant go so far

astray, and I never to go after him? And that other. And that other.

And that other. Till we can read no more. O God of mercy, when Thou

inquirest after blood, let me be hidden in the cleft of that Rock so

deeply cleft for unwatchful ministers!

4. And then, as Dr. Joseph Parker says, who says everything so plainly

and so powerfully: 'There is pastoral preaching as well as pastoral

visitation. There is pastoral preaching; rich revelation of divine

truth; high, elevating treatment of the Christian mysteries; and he is

the pastor to me who does not come to my house to drink and smoke and

gossip and show his littleness, but who, out of a rich experience, meets

me with God's word at every turn of my life, and speaks the something to

me that I just at that moment want.' Let us not have less pastoral

visitation in the time to come, but let us have more and more of such

pastoral preaching.

5. But, my brethren, it is time for you, as John said to the elect lady

and her children, to look to yourselves. The salvation of your soul is

precious, and its salvation is such a task, such a battle, such a danger,

and such a risk, that it will take all that your most watchful minister

can do, and all that you can do yourself, and all that God can do for

you, and yet your soul will scarcely be saved after all. You do not know

what salvation is nor what it costs. You will not be saved in your

sleep. You will not waken up at the last day and find yourself saved by

the grace of God and you not know it. You will know it to your bitter

cost before your soul is saved from sin and death. You and your minister

too. And therefore it is that He Who is to judge your soul at last says

to you, as much as He says it to any of His ministers, Watch! What I say

unto one I say unto all, Watch. Watch and pray, lest you enter into

temptation. Look to yourself, then, sinner. In Christ's name, look to

yourself and watch yourself. You have no enemy to fear but yourself. No

one can hurt a hair of your head but yourself. Have you found that out?

Have you found yourself out? Do you ever look in the direction of your

own heart? Have you begun to watch what goes on in your own heart? What

is it to you what goes on in the world around you compared with what goes

on in the world within you? Look, then, to yourself. Watch, above all

watching, yourself. Watch what it is that moves you to do this or that.

Stop sometimes and ask yourself why you do such and such a thing. Did

you ever hear of such a thing as a motive in a human heart? And did your

minister, watching for your soul, ever tell you that your soul will be

lost or saved, condemned or justified at the last day according to your

motives? You never knew that! You were never told that by your

minister! Miserable pair! What does he take up his Sabbaths with? And

what leads you to waste your Sabbaths and your soul on such a stupid

minister? But, shepherd or no shepherd, minister or no minister, look to

yourself. Look to yourself when you lie down and when you rise up; when

you go out and when you come in; when you are in the society of men and

when you are alone with your own heart. Look to yourself when men praise

you, and look to yourself when men blame you. Look to yourself when you

sit down to eat and drink, and still more when you sit and speak about

your absent brother. Look to yourself when you meet your enemy or your

rival in the street, when you pass his house, or hear or read his name.

Yes, you may well say so. At that rate a man's life would be all

watching. So it would. And so it must. And more than that, so it is

with some men not far from you who never told you how much you have made

them watch. Did you never know all that till now? Were you never told

that every Christian man, I do not mean every communicant, but every

truly and sincerely and genuinely Christian man watches himself in that

way? For as the one essential and distinguishing mark of a New Testament

minister is not that he is an able man, or a studious man, or an eloquent

man, but that he is a pastor and watches for souls, so it is the chiefest

and the best mark, and to himself the only safe and infallible mark, that

any man is a sincere and true Christian man, that he watches himself

always and in all things looks first and last to himself.