Power
Through Prayer
BY
E. M. Bounds,
1835-1913
- -- Richard Baxter
- -- Richard Cecil
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Table of
Contents
I. MEN OF PRAYER NEEDED
II. OUR SUFFICIENCY IS OF GOD
III. THE LETTER KILLETH
IV. TENDENCIES TO BE AVOIDED
V. PRAYER, THE GREAT ESSENTIAL
VI. A PRAYING MINISTRY SUCCESSFUL
VII. MUCH TIME SHOULD BE GIVEN TO PRAYER
VIII. EXAMPLES OF PRAYING MEN
IX. BEGIN THE DAY WITH PRAYER
X. PRAYER AND DEVOTION UNITED
XI. AN EXAMPLE OF DEVOTION
XII. HEART PREPARATION NECESSARY
XIII. GRACE FROM THE HEART RATHER THAN THE HEAD
XIV. UNCTION A NECESSITY
XV. UNCTION, THE MARK OF TRUE GOSPEL PREACHING
XVI. MUCH PRAYER THE PRICE OF UNCTION
XVII. PRAYER MARKS SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP
XVIII. PREACHERS NEED THE PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE
XIX. DELIBERATION NECESSARY TO LARGEST RESULTS FROM
PRAYER
XX. A PRAYING PULPIT BEGETS A PRAYING PEW
"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, in dependent 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 time servers, 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.
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II. OUR SUFFICIENCY
IS OF GOD
"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 non-spiritual 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
holiest. 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.
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III. THE LETTER
KILLETH
"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 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 minutia 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?
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IV. TENDENCIES TO BE
AVOIDED
"Let us often look at Brainerd in the woods of America pouring out his very soul before God for the perishing heathen without whose salvation nothing could make him happy. Prayer -- secret fervent believing prayer -- lies at the root of all personal godliness. A competent knowledge of the language where a missionary lives, a mild and winning temper, a heart given up to God in closet religion -- these, these are the attainments which, more than all knowledge, or all other gifts, will fit us to become the instruments of God in the great work of human redemption."
-- Carrey's Brotherhood, Serampore
THERE are two extreme tendencies in the ministry.
The one is to shut itself out from intercourse with the people. The monk, the
hermit were illustrations of this; they shut themselves out
from men to be more with God. They failed, of course. Our being with God is of
use only as we expend its priceless benefits on men. This age, neither with
preacher nor with people, is much intent on God. Our hankering is not that way.
We shut ourselves to our study, we become students, bookworms, Bible worms,
sermon makers, noted for literature, thought, and sermons; but the people and
God, where are they? Out of heart, out of mind. Preachers who are great
thinkers, great students must be the greatest of prayers, or else they will be
the greatest of backsliders, heartless professionals, rationalistic, less than
the least of preachers in God's estimate.
The other tendency is to
thoroughly popularize the ministry. He is no longer God's man, but a man of
affairs, of the people. He prays not, because his mission is to the people. If
he can move the people, create an interest, a sensation in favor of religion, an
interest in Church work -- he is satisfied. His personal relation to God is no
factor in his work. Prayer has little or no place in his plans. The disaster and
ruin of such a ministry cannot be computed by earthly arithmetic. What the
preacher is in prayer to God, for himself, for his people, so is his power for
real good to men, so is his true fruitfulness, his true fidelity to God, to man,
for time, for eternity.
It is impossible for the preacher to keep his
spirit in harmony with the divine nature of his high calling without much
prayer. That the preacher by dint of duty and laborious fidelity to the work and
routine of the ministry can keep himself in trim and fitness is a serious
mistake. Even sermon-making, incessant and taxing as an art, as a duty, as a
work, or as a pleasure, will engross and harden, will estrange the heart, by
neglect of prayer, from God. The scientist loses God in nature. The preacher may
lose God in his sermon.
Prayer freshens the heart of the preacher, keeps
it in tune with God and in sympathy with the people, lifts his ministry out of
the chilly air of a profession, fructifies routine and moves every wheel with
the facility and power of a divine unction.
Mr. Spurgeon says: "Of course
the preacher is above all others distinguished as a man of prayer. He prays as
an ordinary Christian, else he were a hypocrite. He prays more than ordinary
Christians, else he were disqualified for the office he has undertaken. If you
as ministers are not very prayerful, you are to be pitied. If you become lax in
sacred devotion, not only will you need to be pitied but your people also, and
the day cometh in which you shall be ashamed and confounded. All our libraries
and studies are mere emptiness compared with our closets. Our seasons of fasting
and prayer at the Tabernacle have been high days indeed; never has heaven's gate
stood wider; never have our hearts been nearer the central Glory."
The
praying which makes a prayerful ministry is not a little praying put in as we
put flavor to give it a pleasant smack, but the praying must be in the body, and
form the blood and bones. Prayer is no petty duty, put into a corner; no
piecemeal performance made out of the fragments of time which have been snatched
from business and other engagements of life; but it means that the best of our
time, the heart of our time and strength must be given. It does not mean the
closet absorbed in the study or swallowed up in the activities of ministerial
duties; but it means the closet first, the study and activities second, both
study and activities freshened and made efficient by the closet. Prayer that
affects one's ministry must give tone to one's life. The praying which gives
color and bent to character is no pleasant, hurried pastime. It must enter as
strongly into the heart and life as Christ's "strong crying and tears" did; must
draw out the soul into an agony of desire as Paul's did; must be an inwrought
fire and force like the "effectual, fervent prayer" of James; must be of that
quality which, when put into the golden censer and incensed before God, works
mighty spiritual throes and revolutions.
Prayer is not a little habit
pinned on to us while we were tied to our mother's apron strings; neither is it
a little decent quarter of a minute's grace said over an hour's dinner, but it
is a most serious work of our most serious years. It engages more of time and
appetite than our longest dinings or richest feasts. The prayer that makes much
of our preaching must be made much of. The character of our praying will
determine the character of our preaching. Light praying will make light
preaching. Prayer makes preaching strong, gives it unction, and makes it stick.
In every ministry weighty for good, prayer has always been a serious
business.
The preacher must be preeminently a man of prayer. His heart
must graduate in the school of prayer. In the school of prayer only can the
heart learn to preach. No learning can make up for the failure to pray. No
earnestness, no diligence, no study, no gifts will supply its
lack.
Talking to men for God is a great thing, but talking to God for men
is greater still. He will never talk well and with real success to men for God
who has not learned well how to talk to God for men. More than this, prayerless
words in the pulpit and out of it are deadening words.
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V. PRAYER, THE GREAT
ESSENTIAL
"You know the value of prayer: it is precious beyond all price. Never, never neglect it -- Sir Thomas Buxton Prayer is the first thing, the second thing, the third thing necessary to a minister. Pray, then, my dear brother: pray, pray, pray."
-- Edward Payson
PRAYER, in the preacher's life, in the preacher's
study, in the preacher's pulpit, must be a conspicuous and
an all-impregnating force and an all-coloring ingredient. It must play no
secondary part, be no mere coating. To him it is given to be with his Lord "all
night in prayer." The preacher, to train himself in self-denying prayer, is
charged to look to his Master, who, "rising up a great while before day, went
out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed." The preacher's study
ought to be a closet, a Bethel, an altar, a vision, and a ladder, that every
thought might ascend heavenward ere it went manward; that every part of the
sermon might be scented by the air of heaven and made serious, because God was
in the study.
As the engine never moves until the fire is kindled, so
preaching, with all its machinery, perfection, and polish, is at a dead
standstill, as far as spiritual results are concerned, till prayer has kindled
and created the steam. The texture, fineness, and strength of the sermon is as
so much rubbish unless the mighty impulse of prayer is in it, through it, and
behind it. The preacher must, by prayer, put God in the sermon. The preacher
must, by prayer, move God toward the people before he can move the people to God
by his words. The preacher must have had audience and ready access to God before
he can have access to the people. An open way to God for the preacher is the
surest pledge of an open way to the people.
It is necessary to iterate
and reiterate that prayer, as a mere habit, as a performance gone through by
routine or in a professional way, is a dead and rotten thing. Such praying has
no connection with the praying for which we plead. We are stressing true
praying, which engages and sets on fire every high element of the preacher's
being -- prayer which is born of vital oneness with Christ and the fullness of
the Holy Ghost, which springs from the deep, overflowing fountains of tender
compassion, deathless solicitude for man's eternal good; a consuming zeal for
the glory of God; a thorough conviction of the preacher's difficult and delicate
work and of the imperative need of God's mightiest help. Praying grounded on
these solemn and profound convictions is the only true praying. Preaching backed
by such praying is the only preaching which sows the seeds of eternal life in
human hearts and builds men up for heaven.
It is true that there may be
popular preaching, pleasant preaching, taking preaching, preaching of much
intellectual, literary, and brainy force, with its measure and form of good,
with little or no praying; but the preaching which secures God's end in
preaching must be born of prayer from text to exordium, delivered with the
energy and spirit of prayer, followed and made to germinate, and kept in vital
force in the hearts of the hearers by the preacher's prayers, long after the
occasion has past.
We may excuse the spiritual poverty of our preaching
in many ways, but the true secret will be found in the lack of urgent prayer for
God's presence in the power of the Holy Spirit. There are preachers innumerable
who can deliver masterful sermons after their order; but the effects are
short-lived and do not enter as a factor at all into the regions of the spirit
where the fearful war between God and Satan, heaven and hell, is being waged
because they are not made powerfully militant and spiritually victorious by
prayer.
The preachers who gain mighty results for God are the men who
have prevailed in their pleadings with God ere venturing to plead with men. The
preachers who are the mightiest in their closets with God are the mightiest in
their pulpits with men.
Preachers are human folks, and are exposed to and
often caught by the strong driftings of human currents. Praying is spiritual
work; and human nature does not like taxing, spiritual work. Human nature wants
to sail to heaven under a favoring breeze, a full, smooth sea. Prayer is
humbling work. It abases intellect and pride, crucifies vainglory, and signs our
spiritual bankruptcy, and all these are hard for flesh and blood to bear. It is
easier not to pray than to bear them. So we come to one of the crying evils of
these times, maybe of all times -- little or no praying. Of these two evils,
perhaps little praying is worse than no praying. Little praying is a kind of
make-believe, a salvo for the conscience, a farce and a delusion.
The
little estimate we put on prayer is evident from the little time we give to it.
The time given to prayer by the average preacher scarcely counts in the sum of
the daily aggregate. Not infrequently the preacher's only praying is by his
bedside in his nightdress, ready for bed and soon in it, with, perchance the
addition of a few hasty snatches of prayer ere he is dressed in the morning. How
feeble, vain, and little is such praying compared with the time and energy
devoted to praying by holy men in and out of the Bible! How poor and mean our
petty, childish praying is beside the habits of the true men of God in all ages!
To men who think praying their main business and devote time to it according to
this high estimate of its importance does God commit the keys of his kingdom,
and by them does he work his spiritual wonders in this world. Great praying is
the sign and seal of God's great leaders and the earnest of the conquering
forces with which God will crown their labors.
The preacher is
commissioned to pray as well as to preach. His mission is incomplete if he does
not do both well. The preacher may speak with all the eloquence of men and of
angels; but unless he can pray with a faith which draws all heaven to his aid,
his preaching will be "as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal" for permanent
God-honoring, soul-saving uses.
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VI. A PRAYING
MINISTRY SUCCESSFUL
"The principal cause of my leanness and unfruitfulness is owing to an unaccountable backwardness to pray. I can write or read or converse or hear with a ready heart; but prayer is more spiritual and inward than any of these, and the more spiritual any duty is the more my carnal heart is apt to start from it. Prayer and patience and faith are never disappointed. I have long since learned that if ever I was to be a minister faith and prayer must make me one. When I can find my heart in frame and liberty for prayer, everything else is comparatively easy."
-- Richard Newton
IT may be put down as a spiritual axiom that in
every truly successful ministry prayer is an evident and
controlling force -- evident and controlling in the life of the preacher,
evident and controlling in the deep spirituality of his work. A ministry may be
a very thoughtful ministry without prayer; the preacher may secure fame and
popularity without prayer; the whole machinery of the preacher's life and work
may be run without the oil of prayer or with scarcely enough to grease one cog;
but no ministry can be a spiritual one, securing holiness in the preacher and in
his people, without prayer being made an evident and controlling
force.
The preacher that prays indeed puts God into the work. God does
not come into the preacher's work as a matter of course or on general
principles, but he comes by prayer and special urgency. That God will be found
of us in the day that we seek him with the whole heart is as true of the
preacher as of the penitent. A prayerful ministry is the only ministry that
brings the preacher into sympathy with the people. Prayer as essentially unites
to the human as it does to the divine. A prayerful ministry is the only ministry
qualified for the high offices and responsibilities of the preacher. Colleges,
learning, books, theology, preaching cannot make a preacher, but praying does.
The apostles' commission to preach was a blank till filled up by the Pentecost
which praying brought. A prayerful minister has passed beyond the regions of the
popular, beyond the man of mere affairs, of secularities, of pulpit
attractiveness; passed beyond the ecclesiastical organizer or general into a
sublimer and mightier region, the region of the spiritual. Holiness is the
product of his work; transfigured hearts and lives emblazon the reality of his
work, its trueness and substantial nature. God is with him. His ministry is not
projected on worldly or surface principles. He is deeply stored with and deeply
schooled in the things of God. His long, deep communings with God about his
people and the agony of his wrestling spirit have crowned him as a prince in the
things of God. The iciness of the mere professional has long since melted under
the intensity of his praying.
The superficial results of many a ministry,
the deadness of others, are to be found in the lack of praying. No ministry can
succeed without much praying, and this praying must be fundamental,
ever-abiding, ever-increasing. The text, the sermon, should be the result of
prayer. The study should be bathed in prayer, all its duties so impregnated with
prayer, its whole spirit the spirit of prayer. "I am sorry that I have prayed so
little," was the deathbed regret of one of God's chosen ones, a sad and
remorseful regret for a preacher. "I want a life of greater, deeper, truer
prayer," said the late Archbishop Tait. So may we all say, and this may we all
secure.
God's true preachers have been distinguished by one great
feature: they were men of prayer. Differing often in many things, they have
always had a common center. They may have started from different points, and
traveled by different roads, but they converged to one point: they were one in
prayer. God to there was the center of attraction, and prayer was the path that
led to God. These men prayed not occasionally, not a little at regular or at odd
times; but they so prayed that their prayers entered into and shaped their
characters; they so prayed as to affect their own lives and the lives of others;
they so prayed as to make the history of the Church and influence the current of
the times. They spent much time in prayer, not because they marked the shadow on
the dial or the hands on the clock, but because it was to them so momentous and
engaging a business that they could scarcely give over.
Prayer was to
them what it was to Paul, a striving with earnest effort of soul; what it was to
Jacob, a wrestling and prevailing; what it was to Christ, "strong crying and
tears." They "prayed always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and
watching thereunto with all perseverance." "The effectual, fervent prayer" has
been the mightiest weapon of God's mightiest soldiers. The statement in regard
to Elijah -- that he "was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he
prayed earnestly that it might not rain: and it rained not on the earth by the
space of three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heaven gave
rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit" -- comprehends all prophets and
preachers who have moved their generation for God, and shows the instrument by
which they worked their wonders.
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VII. MUCH TIME
SHOULD BE GIVEN TO PRAYER
"The great masters and teachers in Christian doctrine have always found in prayer their highest source of illumination. Not to go beyond the limits of the English Church, it is recorded of Bishop Andrews that he spent five hours daily on his knees. The greatest practical resolves that have enriched and beautified human life in Christian times have been arrived at in prayer."
-- Canon Liddon
WHILE many private prayers, in the nature of
things, must be short; while public prayers, as a rule,
ought to be short and condensed; while there is ample room for and value put on
ejaculatory prayer -- yet in our private communions with God time is a feature
essential to its value. Much time spent with God is the secret of all successful
praying. Prayer which is felt as a mighty force is the mediate or immediate
product of much time spent with God. Our short prayers owe their point and
efficiency to the long ones that have preceded them. The short prevailing prayer
cannot be prayed by one who has not prevailed with God in a mightier struggle of
long continuance. Jacob's victory of faith could not have been gained without
that all-night wrestling. God's acquaintance is not made by pop calls. God does
not bestow his gifts on the casual or hasty comers and goers. Much with God
alone is the secret of knowing him and of influence with him. He yields to the
persistency of a faith that knows him. He bestows his richest gifts upon those
who declare their desire for and appreciation of those gifts by the constancy as
well as earnestness of their importunity. Christ, who in this as well as other
things is our Example, spent many whole nights in prayer. His custom was to pray
much. He had his habitual place to pray. Many long seasons of praying make up
his history and character. Paul prayed day and night. It took time from very
important interests for Daniel to pray three times a day. David's morning, noon,
and night praying were doubtless on many occasions very protracted. While we
have no specific account of the time these Bible saints spent in prayer, yet the
indications are that they consumed much time in prayer, and on some occasions
long seasons of praying was their custom.
We would not have any think
that the value of their prayers is to be measured by the clock, but our purpose
is to impress on our minds the necessity of being much alone with God; and that
if this feature has not been produced by our faith, then our faith is of a
feeble and surface type.
The men who have most fully illustrated Christ
in their character, and have most powerfully affected the world for him, have
been men who spent so much time with God as to make it a notable feature of
their lives. Charles Simeon devoted the hours from four till eight in the
morning to God. Mr. Wesley spent two hours daily in prayer. He began at four in
the morning. Of him, one who knew him well wrote: "He thought prayer to be more
his business than anything else, and I have seen him come out of his closet with
a serenity of face next to shining." John Fletcher stained the walls of his room
by the breath of his prayers. Sometimes he would pray all night; always,
frequently, and with great earnestness. His whole life was a life of prayer. "I
would not rise from my seat," he said, "without lifting my heart to God." His
greeting to a friend was always: "Do I meet you praying?" Luther said: "If I
fail to spend two hours in prayer each morning, the devil gets the victory
through the day. I have so much business I cannot get on without spending three
hours daily in prayer." He had a motto: "He that has prayed well has studied
well."
Archbishop Leighton was so much alone with God that he seemed to
be in a perpetual meditation. "Prayer and praise were his business and his
pleasure," says his biographer. Bishop Ken was so much with God that his soul
was said to be God-enamored. He was with God before the clock struck three every
morning. Bishop Asbury said: "I propose to rise at four o'clock as often as I
can and spend two hours in prayer and meditation." Samuel Rutherford, the
fragrance of whose piety is still rich, rose at three in the morning to meet God
in prayer. Joseph Alleine arose at four o'clock for his business of praying till
eight. If he heard other tradesmen plying their business before he was up, he
would exclaim: "O how this shames me! Doth not my Master deserve more than
theirs?" He who has learned this trade well draws at will, on sight, and with
acceptance of heaven's unfailing bank.
One of the holiest and among the
most gifted of Scotch preachers says: "I ought to spend the best hours in
communion with God. It is my noblest and most fruitful employment, and is not to
be thrust into a corner. The morning hours, from six to eight, are the most
uninterrupted and should be thus employed. After tea is my best hour, and that
should be solemnly dedicated to God. I ought not to give up the good old habit
of prayer before going to bed; but guard must be kept against sleep. When I
awake in the night, I ought to rise and pray. A little time after breakfast
might be given to intercession." This was the praying plan of Robert McCheyne.
The memorable Methodist band in their praying shame us. "From four to five in
the morning, private prayer; from five to six in the evening, private
prayer."
John Welch, the holy and wonderful Scotch preacher, thought the
day ill spent if he did not spend eight or ten hours in prayer. He kept a plaid
that he might wrap himself when he arose to pray at night. His wife would
complain when she found him lying on the ground weeping. He would reply: "O
woman, I have the souls of three thousand to answer for, and I know not how it
is with many of them!"
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VIII. EXAMPLES OF
PRAYING MEN
"The act of praying is the very highest energy of which the human mind is capable; praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties. The great mass of worldly men and of learned men are absolutely incapable of prayer."
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
BISHOP WILSON says: "In H. Martyn's journal the
spirit of prayer, the time he devoted to the duty, and his fervor in it are the
first things which strike me."
Payson wore the
hard-wood boards into grooves where his knees pressed so often and so long. His
biographer says: "His continuing instant in prayer, be his circumstances what
they might, is the most noticeable fact in his history, and points out the duty
of all who would rival his eminency. To his ardent and persevering prayers must
no doubt be ascribed in a great measure his distinguished and almost
uninterrupted success."
The Marquis DeRenty, to whom Christ was most
precious, ordered his servant to call him from his devotions at the end of half
an hour. The servant at the time saw his face through an aperture. It was marked
with such holiness that he hated to arouse him. His lips were moving, but he was
perfectly silent. He waited until three half hours had passed; then he called to
him, when he arose from his knees, saying that the half hour was so short when
he was communing with Christ.
Brainerd said: "I love to be alone in my
cottage, where I can spend much time in prayer."
William Bramwell is
famous in Methodist annals for personal holiness and for his wonderful success
in preaching and for the marvelous answers to his prayers. For hours at a time
he would pray. He almost lived on his knees. He went over his circuits like a
flame of fire. The fire was kindled by the time he spent in prayer. He often
spent as much as four hours in a single season of prayer in
retirement.
Bishop Andrewes spent the greatest part of five hours every
day in prayer and devotion.
Sir Henry Havelock always spent the first two
hours of each day alone with God. If the encampment was struck at 6 A.M., he
would rise at four.
Earl Cairns rose daily at six o'clock to secure an
hour and a half for the study of the Bible and for prayer, before conducting
family worship at a quarter to eight.
Dr. Judson's success in prayer is
attributable to the fact that he gave much time to prayer. He says on this
point: "Arrange thy affairs, if possible, so that thou canst leisurely devote
two or three hours every day not merely to devotional exercises but to the very
act of secret prayer and communion with God. Endeavor seven times a day to
withdraw from business and company and lift up thy soul to God in private
retirement. Begin the day by rising after midnight and devoting some time amid
the silence and darkness of the night to this sacred work. Let the hour of
opening dawn find thee at the same work. Let the hours of nine, twelve, three,
six, and nine at night witness the same. Be resolute in his cause. Make all
practicable sacrifices to maintain it. Consider that thy time is short, and that
business and company must not be allowed to rob thee of thy God." Impossible,
say we, fanatical directions! Dr. Judson impressed an empire for Christ and laid
the foundations of God's kingdom with imperishable granite in the heart of
Burmah. He was successful, one of the few men who mightily impressed the world
for Christ. Many men of greater gifts and genius and learning than he have made
no such impression; their religious work is like footsteps in the sands, but he
has engraven his work on the adamant. The secret of its profundity and endurance
is found in the fact that he gave time to prayer. He kept the iron red-hot with
prayer, and God's skill fashioned it with enduring power. No man can do a great
and enduring work for God who is not a man of prayer, and no man can be a man of
prayer who does not give much time to praying.
Is it true that prayer is
simply the compliance with habit, dull and mechanical? A petty performance into
which we are trained till tameness, shortness, superficiality are its chief
elements? "Is it true that prayer is, as is assumed, little else than the
half-passive play of sentiment which flows languidly on through the minutes or
hours of easy reverie?" Canon Liddon continues: "Let those who have really
prayed give the answer. They sometimes describe prayer with the patriarch Jacob
as a wrestling together with an Unseen Power which may last, not unfrequently in
an earnest life, late into the night hours, or even to the break of day.
Sometimes they refer to common intercession with St. Paul as a concerted
struggle. They have, when praying, their eyes fixed on the Great Intercessor in
Gethsemane, upon the drops of blood which fall to the ground in that agony of
resignation and sacrifice. Importunity is of the essence of successful prayer.
Importunity means not dreaminess but sustained work. It is through prayer
especially that the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence and the violent take it
by force. It was a saying of the late Bishop Hamilton that "No man is likely to
do much good in prayer who does not begin by looking upon it in the light of a
work to be prepared for and persevered in with all the earnestness which we
bring to bear upon subjects which are in our opinion at once most interesting
and most necessary."
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IX. BEGIN THE DAY
WITH PRAYER
"I ought to pray before seeing any one. Often when I sleep long, or meet with others early, it is eleven or twelve o'clock before I begin secret prayer. This is a wretched system. It is unscriptural. Christ arose before day and went into a solitary place. David says: 'Early will I seek thee'; 'Thou shalt early hear my voice.' Family prayer loses much of its power and sweetness, and I can do no good to those who come to seek from me. The conscience feels guilty, the soul unfed, the lamp not trimmed. Then when in secret prayer the soul is often out of tune, I feel it is far better to begin with God -- to see his face first, to get my soul near him before it is near another."
-- Robert Murray McCheyne
THE men who have done the most for God in
this world have been early on their knees. He who fritters
away the early morning, its opportunity and freshness, in other pursuits than
seeking God will make poor headway seeking him the rest of the day. If God is
not first in our thoughts and efforts in the morning, he will be in the last
place the remainder of the day.
Behind this early rising and early
praying is the ardent desire which presses us into this pursuit after God.
Morning listlessness is the index to a listless heart. The heart which is
behindhand in seeking God in the morning has lost its relish for God. David's
heart was ardent after God. He hungered and thirsted after God, and so he sought
God early, before daylight. The bed and sleep could not chain his soul in its
eagerness after God. Christ longed for communion with God; and so, rising a
great while before day, he would go out into the mountain to pray. The
disciples, when fully awake and ashamed of their indulgence, would know where to
find him. We might go through the list of men who have mightily impressed the
world for God, and we would find them early after God.
A desire for God
which cannot break the chains of sleep is a weak thing and will do but little
good for God after it has indulged itself fully. The desire for God that keeps
so far behind the devil and the world at the beginning of the day will never
catch up.
It is not simply the getting up that puts men to the front and
makes them captain generals in God's hosts, but it is the ardent desire which
stirs and breaks all self-indulgent chains. But the getting up gives vent,
increase, and strength to the desire. If they had lain in bed and indulged
themselves, the desire would have been quenched. The desire aroused them and put
them on the stretch for God, and this heeding and acting on the call gave their
faith its grasp on God and gave to their hearts the sweetest and fullest
revelation of God, and this strength of faith and fullness of revelation made
them saints by eminence, and the halo of their sainthood has come down to us,
and we have entered on the enjoyment of their conquests. But we take our fill in
enjoyment, and not in productions. We build their tombs and write their
epitaphs, but are careful not to follow their examples.
We need a
generation of preachers who seek God and seek him early, who give the freshness
and dew of effort to God, and secure in return the freshness and fullness of his
power that he may be as the dew to them, full of gladness and strength, through
all the heat and labor of the day. Our laziness after God is our crying sin. The
children of this world are far wiser than we. They are at it early and late. We
do not seek God with ardor and diligence. No man gets God who does not follow
hard after him, and no soul follows hard after God who is not after him in early
morn.
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X. PRAYER AND
DEVOTION UNITED
"There is a manifest want of spiritual influence on the ministry of the present day. I feel it in my own case and I see it in that of others. I am afraid there is too much of a low, managing, contriving, maneuvering temper of mind among us. We are laying ourselves out more than is expedient to meet one man's taste and another man's prejudices. The ministry is a grand and holy affair, and it should find in us a simple habit of spirit and a holy but humble indifference to all consequences. The leading defect in Christian ministers is want of a devotional habit."
-- Richard Cecil
NEVER was there greater need for saintly men
and women; more imperative still is the call for saintly,
God-devoted preachers. The world moves with gigantic strides. Satan has his hold
and rule on the world, and labors to make all its movements subserve his ends.
Religion must do its best work, present its most attractive and perfect models.
By every means, modern sainthood must be inspired by the loftiest ideals and by
the largest possibilities through the Spirit. Paul lived on his knees, that the
Ephesian Church might measure the heights, breadths, and depths of an
unmeasurable saintliness, and "be filled with all the fullness of God." Epaphras
laid himself out with the exhaustive toil and strenuous conflict of fervent
prayer, that the Colossian Church might "stand perfect and complete in all the
will of God." Everywhere, everything in apostolic times was on the stretch that
the people of God might each and "all come in the unity of the faith, and of the
knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature
of the fullness of Christ." No premium was given to dwarfs; no encouragement to
an old babyhood. The babies were to grow; the old, instead of feebleness and
infirmities, were to bear fruit in old age, and be fat and flourishing. The
divinest thing in religion is holy men and holy women.
No amount of
money, genius, or culture can move things for God. Holiness energizing the soul,
the whole man aflame with love, with desire for more faith, more prayer, more
zeal, more consecration -- this is the secret of power. These we need and must
have, and men must be the incarnation of this God-inflamed devotedness. God's
advance has been stayed, his cause crippled: his name dishonored for their lack.
Genius (though the loftiest and most gifted), education (though the most learned
and refined), position, dignity, place, honored names, high ecclesiastics cannot
move this chariot of our God. It is a fiery one, and fiery forces only can move
it. The genius of a Milton fails. The imperial strength of a Leo fails.
Brainerd's spirit can move it. Brainerd's spirit was on fire for God, on fire
for souls. Nothing earthly, worldly, selfish came in to abate in the least the
intensity of this all-impelling and all-consuming force and flame.
Prayer
is the creator as well as the channel of devotion. The spirit of devotion is the
spirit of prayer. Prayer and devotion are united as soul and body are united, as
life and the heart are united. There is no real prayer without devotion, no
devotion without prayer. The preacher must be surrendered to God in the holiest
devotion. He is not a professional man, his ministry is not a profession; it is
a divine institution, a divine devotion. He is devoted to God. His aim,
aspirations, ambition are for God and to God, and to such prayer is as essential
as food is to life.
The preacher, above everything else, must be devoted
to God. The preacher's relations to God are the insignia and credentials of his
ministry. These must be clear, conclusive, unmistakable. No common, surface type
of piety must be his. If he does not excel in grace, he does not excel at all.
If he does not preach by life, character, conduct, he does not preach at all. If
his piety be light, his preaching may be as soft and as sweet as music, as
gifted as Apollo, yet its weight will be a feather's weight, visionary, fleeting
as the morning cloud or the early dew. Devotion to God -- there is no substitute
for this in the preacher's character and conduct. Devotion to a Church, to
opinions, to an organization, to orthodoxy -- these are paltry, misleading, and
vain when they become the source of inspiration, the animus of a call. God must
be the mainspring of the preacher's effort, the fountain and crown of all his
toil. The name and honor of Jesus Christ, the advance of his cause, must be all
in all. The preacher must have no inspiration but the name of Jesus Christ, no
ambition but to have him glorified, no toil but for him. Then prayer will be a
source of his illuminations, the means of perpetual advance, the gauge of his
success. The perpetual aim, the only ambition, the preacher can cherish is to
have God with him.
Never did the cause of God need perfect illustrations
of the possibilities of prayer more than in this age. No age, no person, will be
ensamples of the gospel power except the ages or persons of deep and earnest
prayer. A prayerless age will have but scant models of divine power. Prayerless
hearts will never rise to these Alpine heights. The age may be a better age than
the past, but there is an infinite distance between the betterment of an age by
the force of an advancing civilization and its betterment by the increase of
holiness and Christlikeness by the energy of prayer. The Jews were much better
when Christ came than in the ages before. It was the golden age of their
Pharisaic religion. Their golden religious age crucified Christ. Never more
praying, never less praying; never more sacrifices, never less sacrifice; never
less idolatry, never more idolatry; never more of temple worship, never less of
God worship; never more of lip service, never less of heart service (God
worshiped by lips whose hearts and hands crucified God's Son!); never more of
churchgoers, never less of saints.
It is prayer-force which makes saints.
Holy characters are formed by the power of real praying. The more of true
saints, the more of praying; the more of praying, the more of true
saints.
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XI. AN EXAMPLE OF
DEVOTION
"I urge upon you communion with Christ a growing communion. There are curtains to be drawn aside in Christ that we never saw, and new foldings of love in him. I despair that I shall ever win to the far end of that love, there are so many plies in it. Therefore dig deep, and sweat and labor and take pains for him, and set by as much time in the day for him as you can. We will be won in the labor."
-- Samuel Rutherford
God has now, and has had, many of these devoted,
prayerful preachers -- men in whose lives prayer has been a
mighty, controlling, conspicuous force. The world has felt their power, God has
felt and honored their power, God's cause has moved mightily and swiftly by
their prayers, holiness has shone out in their characters with a divine
effulgence.
God found one of the men he was looking for in David
Brainerd, whose work and name have gone into history. He was no ordinary man,
but was capable of shining in any company, the peer of the wise and gifted ones,
eminently suited to fill the most attractive pulpits and to labor among the most
refined and the cultured, who were so anxious to secure him for their pastor.
President Edwards bears testimony that he was "a young man of distingushed
talents, had extraordinary knowledge of men and things, had rare conversational
powers, excelled in his knowledge of theology, and was truly, for one so young,
an extraordinary divine, and especially in all matters relating to experimental
religion. I never knew his equal of his age and standing for clear and accurate
notions of the nature and essence of true religion. His manner in prayer was
almost inimitable, such as I have very rarely known equaled. His learning was
very considerable, and he had extraordinary gifts for the pulpit."
No
sublimer story has been recorded in earthly annals than that of David Brainerd;
no miracle attests with diviner force the truth of Christianity than the life
and work of such a man. Alone in the savage wilds of America, struggling day and
night with a mortal disease, unschooled in the care of souls, having access to
the Indians for a large portion of time only through the bungling medium of a
pagan interpreter, with the Word of God in his heart and in his hand, his soul
fired with the divine flame, a place and time to pour out his soul to God in
prayer, he fully established the worship of God and secured all its gracious
results. The Indians were changed with a great change from the lowest besotments
of an ignorant and debased heathenism to pure, devout, intelligent Christians;
all vice reformed, the external duties of Christianity at once embraced and
acted on; family prayer set up; the Sabbath instituted and religiously observed;
the internal graces of religion exhibited with growing sweetness and strength.
The solution of these results is found in David Brainerd himself, not in the
conditions or accidents but in the man Brainerd. He was God's man, for God first
and last and all the time. God could flow unhindered through him. The
omnipotence of grace was neither arrested nor straightened by the conditions of
his heart; the whole channel was broadened and cleaned out for God's fullest and
most powerful passage, so that God with all his mighty forces could come down on
the hopeless, savage wilderness, and transform it into his blooming and fruitful
garden; for nothing is too hard for God to do if he can get the right kind of a
man to do it with.
Brainerd lived the life of holiness and prayer. His
diary is full and monotonous with the record of his seasons of fasting,
meditation, and retirement. The time he spent in private prayer amounted to many
hours daily. "When I return home," he said, "and give myself to meditation,
prayer, and fasting, my soul longs for mortification, self-denial, humility, and
divorcement from all things of the world." "I have nothing to do," he said,
"with earth but only to labor in it honestly for God. I do not desire to live
one minute for anything which earth can afford." After this high order did he
pray: "Feeling somewhat of the sweetness of communion with God and the
constraining force of his love, and how admirably it captivates the soul and
makes all the desires and affections to center in God, I set apart this day for
secret fasting and prayer, to entreat God to direct and bless me with regard to
the great work which I have in view of preaching the gospel, and that the Lord
would return to me and show me the light of his countenance. I had little life
and power in the forenoon. Near the middle of the afternoon God enabled me to
wrestle ardently in intercession for my absent friends, but just at night the
Lord visited me marvelously in prayer. I think my soul was never in such agony
before. I felt no restraint, for the treasures of divine grace were opened to
me. I wrestled for absent friends, for the ingathering of souls, for multitudes
of poor souls, and for many that I thought were the children of God, personally,
in many distant places. I was in such agony from sun half an hour high till near
dark that I was all over wet with sweat, but yet it seemed to me I had done
nothing. O, my dear Saviour did sweat blood for poor souls! I longed for more
compassion toward them. I felt still in a sweet frame, under a sense of divine
love and grace, and went to bed in such a frame, with my heart set on God." It
was prayer which gave to his life and ministry their marvelous power.
The
men of mighty prayer are men of spiritual might. Prayers never die. Brainerd's
whole life was a life of prayer. By day and by night he prayed. Before preaching
and after preaching he prayed. Riding through the interminable solitudes of the
forests he prayed. On his bed of straw he prayed. Retiring to the dense and
lonely forests, he prayed. Hour by hour, day after day, early morn and late at
night, he was praying and fasting, pouring out his soul, interceding, communing
with God. He was with God mightily in prayer, and God was with him mightily, and
by it he being dead yet speaketh and worketh, and will speak and work till the
end comes, and among the to glorious ones of that glorious day he will be with
the first.
Jonathan Edwards says of him: "His life shows the right way to
success in the works of the ministry. He sought it as the soldier seeks victory
in a siege or battle; or as a man that runs a race for a great prize. Animated
with love to Christ and souls, how did he labor? Always fervently. Not only in
word and doctrine, in public and in private, but in prayers by day and night,
wrestling with God in secret and travailing in birth with unutterable groans and
agonies, until Christ was formed in the hearts of the people to whom he was
sent. Like a true son of Jacob, he persevered in wrestling through all the
darkness of the night, until the breaking of the day!"
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XII. HEART
PREPARATION NECESSARY
"For nothing reaches the heart but what is from the heart or pierces the conscience but what comes from a living conscience. -- William Penn In the morning was more engaged in preparing the head than the heart. This has been frequently my error, and I have always felt the evil of it especially in prayer. Reform it then, O Lord! Enlarge my heart and I shall preach. -- Robert Murray McCheyne A sermon that has more head infused into it than heart will not borne home with efficacy to the hearers."
-- Richard Cecil
PRAYER, with its manifold and many-sided
forces, helps the mouth to utter the truth in its fullness
and freedom. The preacher is to be prayed for, the preacher is made by prayer.
The preacher's mouth is to be prayed for; his mouth is to be opened and filled
by prayer. A holy mouth is made by praying, by much praying; a brave mouth is
made by praying, by much praying. The Church and the world, God and heaven, owe
much to Paul's mouth; Paul's mouth owed its power to prayer.
How
manifold, illimitable, valuable, and helpful prayer is to the preacher in so
many ways, at so many points, in every way! One great value is, it helps his
heart.
Praying makes the preacher a heart preacher. Prayer puts the
preacher's heart into the preacher's sermon; prayer puts the preacher's sermon
into the preacher's heart.
The heart makes the preacher. Men of great
hearts are great preachers. Men of bad hearts may do a measure of good, but this
is rare. The hireling and the stranger may help the sheep at some points, but it
is the good shepherd with the good shepherd's heart who will bless the sheep and
answer the full measure of the shepherd's place.
We have emphasized
sermon-preparation until we have lost sight of the important thing to be
prepared -- the heart. A prepared heart is much better than a prepared sermon. A
prepared heart will make a prepared sermon.
Volumes have been written
laying down the mechanics and taste of sermon-making, until we have become
possessed with the idea that this scaffolding is the building. The young
preacher has been taught to lay out all his strength on the form, taste, and
beauty of his sermon as a mechanical and intellectual product. We have thereby
cultivated a vicious taste among the people and raised the clamor for talent
instead of grace, eloquence instead of piety, rhetoric instead of revelation,
reputation and brilliancy instead of holiness. By it we have lost the true idea
of preaching, lost preaching power, lost pungent conviction for sin, lost the
rich experience and elevated Christian character, lost the authority over
consciences and lives which always results from genuine preaching.
It
would not do to say that preachers study too much. Some of them do not study at
all; others do not study enough. Numbers do not study the right way to show
themselves workmen approved of God. But our great lack is not in head culture,
but in heart culture; not lack of knowledge but lack of holiness is our sad and
telling defect -- not that we know too much, but that we do not meditate on God
and his word and watch and fast and pray enough. The heart is the great
hindrance to our preaching. Words pregnant with divine truth find in our hearts
nonconductors; arrested, they fall shorn and powerless.
Can ambition,
that lusts after praise and place, preach the gospel of Him who made himself of
no reputation and took on Him the form of a servant? Can the proud, the vain,
the egotistical preach the gospel of him who was meek and lowly? Can the
bad-tempered, passionate, selfish, hard, worldly man preach the system which
teems with long-suffering, self-denial, tenderness, which imperatively demands
separation from enmity and crucifixion to the world? Can the hireling official,
heartless, perfunctory, preach the gospel which demands the shepherd to give his
life for the sheep? Can the covetous man, who counts salary and money, preach
the gospel till he has gleaned his heart and can say in the spirit of Christ and
Paul in the words of Wesley: "I count it dung and dross; I trample it under my
feet; I (yet not I, but the grace of God in me) esteem it just as the mire of
the streets, I desire it not, I seek it not?" God's revelation does not need the
light of human genius, the polish and strength of human culture, the brilliancy
of human thought, the force of human brains to adorn or enforce it; but it does
demand the simplicity, the docility, humility, and faith of a child's
heart.
It was this surrender and subordination of intellect and genius to
the divine and spiritual forces which made Paul peerless among the apostles. It
was this which gave Wesley his power and radicated his labors in the history of
humanity. This gave to Loyola the strength to arrest the retreating forces of
Catholicism.
Our great need is heart-preparation. Luther held it as an
axiom: "He who has prayed well has studied well." We do not say that men are not
to think and use their intellects; but he will use his intellect best who
cultivates his heart most. We do not say that preachers should not be students;
but we do say that their great study should be the Bible, and he studies the
Bible best who has kept his heart with diligence. We do not say that the
preacher should not know men, but he will be the greater adept in human nature
who has fathomed the depths and intricacies of his own heart. We do say that
while the channel of preaching is the mind, its fountain is the heart; you may
broaden and deepen the channel, but if you do not look well to the purity and
depth of the fountain, you will have a dry or polluted channel. We do say that
almost any man of common intelligence has sense enough to preach the gospel, but
very few have grace enough to do so. We do say that he who has struggled with
his own heart and conquered it; who has taught it humility, faith, love, truth,
mercy, sympathy, courage; who can pour the rich treasures of the heart thus
trained, through a manly intellect, all surcharged with the power of the gospel
on the consciences of his hearers -- such a one will be the truest, most
successful preacher in the esteem of his Lord.
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XIII. GRACE FROM THE
HEART RATHER THAN THE HEAD
"Study not to be a fine preacher. Jerichos are blown down with rams' horns. Look simply unto Jesus for preaching food; and what is wanted will be given, and what is given will be blessed, whether it be a barley grain or a wheaten loaf, a crust or a crumb. Your mouth will be a flowing stream or a fountain sealed, according as your heart is. Avoid all controversy in preaching, talking, or writing; preach nothing down but the devil, and nothing up but Jesus Christ."
-- Berridge
THE heart is the Saviour of the world. Heads do
not save. Genius, brains, brilliancy, strength, natural
gifts do not save. The gospel flows through hearts. All the mightiest forces are
heart forces. All the sweetest and loveliest graces are heart graces. Great
hearts make great characters; great hearts make divine characters. God is love.
There is nothing greater than love, nothing greater than God. Hearts make
heaven; heaven is love. There is nothing higher, nothing sweeter, than heaven.
It is the heart and not the head which makes God's great preachers. The heart
counts much every way in religion. The heart must speak from the pulpit. The
heart must hear in the pew. In fact, we serve God with our hearts. Head homage
does not pass current in heaven.
We believe that one of the serious and
most popular errors of the modern pulpit is the putting of more thought than
prayer, of more head than of heart in its sermons. Big hearts make big
preachers; good hearts make good preachers. A theological school to enlarge and
cultivate the heart is the golden desideratum of the gospel. The pastor binds
his people to him and rules his people by his heart. They may admire his gifts,
they may be proud of his ability, they may be affected for the time by his
sermons; but the stronghold of his power is his heart. His scepter is love. The
throne of his power is his heart.
The good shepherd gives his life for
the sheep. Heads never make martyrs. It is the heart which surrenders the life
to love and fidelity. It takes great courage to be a faithful pastor, but the
heart alone can supply this courage. Gifts and genius may be brave, but it is
the gifts and genius of the heart and not of the head.
It is easier to
fill the head than it is to prepare the heart. It is easier to make a brain
sermon than a heart sermon. It was heart that drew the Son of God from heaven.
It is heart that will draw men to heaven. Men of heart is what the world needs
to sympathize with its woe, to kiss away its sorrows, to compassionate its
misery, and to alleviate its pain. Christ was eminently the man of sorrows,
because he was preeminently the man of heart.
"Give me thy heart," is
God's requisition of men. "Give me thy heart!" is man's demand of man.
A
professional ministry is a heartless ministry. When salary plays a great part in
the ministry, the heart plays little part. We may make preaching our business,
and not put our hearts in the business. He who puts self to the front in his
preaching puts heart to the rear. He who does not sow with his heart in his
study will never reap a harvest for God. The closet is the heart's study. We
will learn more about how to preach and what to preach there than we can learn
in our libraries. "Jesus wept" is the shortest and biggest verse in the Bible.
It is he who goes forth weeping (not preaching great sermons), bearing
precious seed, who shall come again rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with
him.
Praying gives sense, brings wisdom, broadens and strengthens the
mind. The closet is a perfect school-teacher and schoolhouse for the preacher.
Thought is not only brightened and clarified in prayer, but thought is born in
prayer. We can learn more in an hour praying, when praying indeed, than from
many hours in the study. Books are in the closet which can be found and read
nowhere else. Revelations are made in the closet which are made nowhere
else.
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XIV. UNCTION A
NECESSITY
"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."
-- Charles Haddon 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."
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XV. UNCTION, THE
MARK OF TRUE GOSPEL PREACHING
"Speak for eternity. Above all things, cultivate your own spirit. A word spoken by you when your conscience is clear and your heart full of God's Spirit is worth ten thousand words spoken in unbelief and sin. Remember that God, and not man, must have the glory. If the veil of the world's machinery were lifted off, how much we would find is done in answer to the prayers of God's children."
-- Robert Murray McCheyne
UNCTION is that indefinable,
indescribable something which an old, renowned Scotch preacher describes thus:
"There is sometimes somewhat in preaching that cannot be ascribed either to
matter or expression, and cannot be described what it is, or from whence it
cometh, but with a sweet violence it pierceth into the heart and affections and
comes immediately from the Word; but if there be any way to obtain such a thing,
it is by the heavenly disposition of the speaker."
We call it unction. It
is this unction which makes the word of God "quick and powerful, and sharper
than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and
spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and a discerner of the thoughts and
intents of the heart." It is this unction which gives the words of the preacher
such point, sharpness, and power, and which creates such friction and stir in
many a dead congregation. The same truths have been told in the strictness of
the letter, smooth as human oil could make them; but no signs of life, not a
pulse throb; all as peaceful as the grave and as dead. The same preacher in the
meanwhile receives a baptism of this unction, the divine inflatus is on him, the
letter of the Word has been embellished and fired by this mysterious power, and
the throbbings of life begin -- life which receives or life which resists. The
unction pervades and convicts the conscience and breaks the heart.
This
divine unction is the feature which separates and distinguishes true gospel
preaching from all other methods of presenting the truth, and which creates a
wide spiritual chasm between the preacher who has it and the one who has it not.
It backs and impregns revealed truth with all the energy of God. Unction is
simply putting God in his own word and on his own preachers. By mighty and great
prayerfulness and by continual prayerfulness, it is all potential and personal
to the preacher; it inspires and clarifies his intellect, gives insight and
grasp and projecting power; it gives to the preacher heart power, which is
greater than head power; and tenderness, purity, force flow from the heart by
it. Enlargement, freedom, fullness of thought, directness and simplicity of
utterance are the fruits of this unction.
Often earnestness is mistaken
for this unction. He who has the divine unction will be earnest in the very
spiritual nature of things, but there may be a vast deal of earnestness without
the least mixture of unction.
Earnestness and unction look alike from
some points of view. Earnestness may be readily and without detection
substituted or mistaken for unction. It requires a spiritual eye and a spiritual
taste to discriminate.
Earnestness may be sincere, serious, ardent, and
persevering. It goes at a thing with good will, pursues it with perseverance,
and urges it with ardor; puts force in it. But all these forces do not rise
higher than the mere human. The man is in it -- the whole man, with all
that he has of will and heart, of brain and genius, of planning and working and
talking. He has set himself to some purpose which has mastered him, and he
pursues to master it. There may be none of God in it. There may be little of God
in it, because there is so much of the man in it. He may present pleas in
advocacy of his earnest purpose which please or touch and move or overwhelm with
conviction of their importance; and in all this earnestness may move along
earthly ways, being propelled by human forces only, its altar made by earthly
hands and its fire kindled by earthly flames. It is said of a rather famous
preacher of gifts, whose construction of Scripture was to his fancy or purpose,
that he "grew very eloquent over his own exegesis." So men grow exceeding
earnest over their own plans or movements. Earnestness may be selfishness
simulated.
What of unction? It is the indefinable in preaching which
makes it preaching. It is that which distinguishes and separates preaching from
all mere human addresses. It is the divine in preaching. It makes the preaching
sharp to those who need sharpness. It distills as the dew to those who need to
he refreshed. It is well described as:
This unction comes to the preacher not in the study but in the
closet. It is heaven's distillation in answer to prayer. It is the sweetest
exhalation of the Holy Spirit. It impregnates, suffuses, softens, percolates,
cuts, and soothes. It carries the Word like dynamite, like salt, like sugar;
makes the Word a soother, an arranger, a revealer, a searcher; makes the hearer
a culprit or a saint, makes him weep like a child and live like a giant; opens
his heart and his purse as gently, yet as strongly as the spring opens the
leaves. This unction is not the gift of genius. It is not found in the halls of
learning. No eloquence can woo it. No industry can win it. No prelatical hands
can confer it. It is the gift of God -- the signet set to his own messengers. It
is heaven's knighthood given to the chosen true and brave ones who have sought
this anointed honor through many an hour of tearful, wrestling
prayer.
Earnestness is good and impressive: genius is gifted and great.
Thought kindles and inspires, but it takes a diviner endowment, a more powerful
energy than earnestness or genius or thought to break the chains of sin, to win
estranged and depraved hearts to God, to repair the breaches and restore the
Church to her old ways of purity and power. Nothing but this holy unction can do
this.
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XVI. MUCH PRAYER THE
PRICE OF UNCTION
"All the minister's efforts will be vanity or worse than vanity if he have not unction. Unction must come down from heaven and spread a savor and feeling and relish over his ministry; and among the other means of qualifying himself for his office, the Bible must hold the first place, and the last also must be given to the Word of God and prayer."
-- Richard Cecil
IN the Christian system unction is the
anointing of the Holy Ghost, separating unto God's work and
qualifying for it. This unction is the one divine enablement by which the
preacher accomplishes the peculiar and saving ends of preaching. Without this
unction there are no true spiritual results accomplished; the results and forces
in preaching do not rise above the results of unsanctified speech. Without
unction the former is as potent as the pulpit.
This divine unction on the
preacher generates through the Word of God the spiritual results that flow from
the gospel; and without this unction, these results are not secured. Many
pleasant impressions may be made, but these all fall far below the ends of
gospel preaching. This unction may be simulated. There are many things that look
like it, there are many results that resemble its effects; but they are foreign
to its results and to its nature. The fervor or softness excited by a pathetic
or emotional sermon may look like the movements of the divine unction, but they
have no pungent, perpetrating heart-breaking force. No heart-healing balm is
there in these surface, sympathetic, emotional movements; they are not radical,
neither sin-searching nor sin-curing.
This divine unction is the one
distinguishing feature that separates true gospel preaching from all other
methods of presenting truth. It backs and interpenetrates the revealed truth
with all the force of God. It illumines the Word and broadens and enrichens the
intellect and empowers it to grasp and apprehend the Word. It qualifies the
preacher's heart, and brings it to that condition of tenderness, of purity, of
force and light that are necessary to secure the highest results. This unction
gives to the preacher liberty and enlargement of thought and soul -- a freedom,
fullness, and directness of utterance that can be secured by no other
process.
Without this unction on the preacher the gospel has no more
power to propagate itself than any other system of truth. This is the seal of
its divinity. Unction in the preacher puts God in the gospel. Without the
unction, God is absent, and the gospel is left to the low and unsatisfactory
forces that the ingenuity, interest, or talents of men can devise to enforce and
project its doctrines.
It is in this element that the pulpit oftener
fails than in any other element. Just at this all-important point it lapses.
Learning it may have, brilliancy and eloquence may delight and charm, sensation
or less offensive methods may bring the populace in crowds, mental power may
impress and enforce truth with all its resources; but without this unction, each
and all these will be but as the fretful assault of the waters on a Gibraltar.
Spray and foam may cover and spangle; but the rocks are there still, unimpressed
and unimpressible. The human heart can no more be swept of its hardness and sin
by these human forces than these rocks can be swept away by the ocean's
ceaseless flow.
This unction is the consecration force, and its presence
the continuous test of that consecration. It is this divine anointing on the
preacher that secures his consecration to God and his work. Other forces and
motives may call him to the work, but this only is consecration. A separation to
God's work by the power of the Holy Spirit is the only consecration recognized
by God as legitimate.
The unction, the divine unction, this heavenly
anointing, is what the pulpit needs and must have. This divine and heavenly oil
put on it by the imposition of God's hand must soften and lubricate the whole
man -- heart, head, spirit -- until it separates him with a mighty separation
from all earthly, secular, worldly, selfish motives and aims, separating him to
everything that is pure and Godlike.
It is the presence of this unction
on the preacher that creates the stir and friction in many a congregation. The
same truths have been told in the strictness of the letter, but no ruffle has
been seen, no pain or pulsation felt. All is quiet as a graveyard. Another
preacher comes, and this mysterious influence is on him; the letter of the Word
has been fired by the Spirit, the throes of a mighty movement are felt, it is
the unction that pervades and stirs the conscience and breaks the heart.
Unctionless preaching makes everything hard, dry, acrid, dead.
This
unction is not a memory or an era of the past only; it is a present, realized,
conscious fact. It belongs to the experience of the man as well as to his
preaching. It is that which transforms him into the image of his divine Master,
as well as that by which he declares the truths of Christ with power. It is so
much the power in the ministry as to make all else seem feeble and vain without
it, and by its presence to atone for the absence of all other and feebler
forces.
This unction is not an inalienable gift. It is a conditional
gift, and its presence is perpetuated and increased by the same process by which
it was at first secured; by unceasing prayer to God, by impassioned desires
after God, by estimating it, by seeking it with tireless ardor, by deeming all
else loss and failure without it.
How and whence comes this unction?
Direct from God in answer to prayer. Praying hearts only are the hearts filled
with this holy oil; praying lips only are anointed with this divine
unction.
Prayer, much prayer, is the price of preaching unction; prayer,
much prayer, is the one, sole condition of keeping this unction. Without
unceasing prayer the unction never comes to the preacher. Without perseverance
in prayer, the unction, like the manna overkept, breeds worms.
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XVII. PRAYER MARKS
SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP
"Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen; such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of heaven on earth. God does nothing but in answer to prayer."
-- John Wesley
THE apostles knew the necessity and worth of
prayer to their ministry. They knew that their high
commission as apostles, instead of relieving them from the necessity of prayer,
committed them to it by a more urgent need; so that they were exceedingly
jealous else some other important work should exhaust their time and prevent
their praying as they ought; so they appointed laymen to look after the delicate
and engrossing duties of ministering to the poor, that they (the apostles)
might, unhindered, "give themselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of
the word." Prayer is put first, and their relation to prayer is put most
strongly -- "give themselves to it," making a business of it, surrendering
themselves to praying, putting fervor, urgency, perseverance, and time in
it.
How holy, apostolic men devoted themselves to this divine work of
prayer! "Night and day praying exceedingly," says Paul. "We will give ourselves
continually to prayer" is the consensus of apostolic devotement. How these New
Testament preachers laid themselves out in prayer for God's people! How they put
God in full force into their Churches by their praying! These holy apostles did
not vainly fancy that they had met their high and solemn duties by delivering
faithfully God's word, but their preaching was made to stick and tell by the
ardor and insistence of their praying. Apostolic praying was as taxing,
toilsome, and imperative as apostolic preaching. They prayed mightily day and
night to bring their people to the highest regions of faith and holiness. They
prayed mightier still to hold them to this high spiritual altitude. The preacher
who has never learned in the school of Christ the high and divine art of
intercession for his people will never learn the art of preaching, though
homiletics be poured into him by the ton, and though he be the most gifted
genius in sermon-making and sermon-delivery.
The prayers of apostolic,
saintly leaders do much in making saints of those who are not apostles. If the
Church leaders in after years had been as particular and fervent in praying for
their people as the apostles were, the sad, dark times of worldliness and
apostasy had not marred the history and eclipsed the glory and arrested the
advance of the Church. Apostolic praying makes apostolic saints and keeps
apostolic times of purity and power in the Church.
What loftiness of
soul, what purity and elevation of motive, what unselfishness, what
self-sacrifice, what exhaustive toil, what ardor of spirit, what divine tact are
requisite to be an intercessor for men!
The preacher is to lay himself
out in prayer for his people; not that they might be saved, simply, but that
they be mightily saved. The apostles laid themselves out in prayer that their
saints might be perfect; not that they should have a little relish for the
things of God, but that they "might be filled with all the fullness of God."
Paul did not rely on his apostolic preaching to secure this end, but "for this
cause he bowed his knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." Paul's praying
carried Paul's converts farther along the highway of sainthood than Paul's
preaching did. Epaphras did as much or more by prayer for the Colossian saints
than by his preaching. He labored fervently always in prayer for them that "they
might stand perfect and complete in all the will of God."
Preachers are
preeminently God's leaders. They are primarily responsible for the condition of
the Church. They shape its character, give tone and direction to its
life.
Much every way depends on these leaders. They shape the times and
the institutions. The Church is divine, the treasure it incases is heavenly, but
it bears the imprint of the human. The treasure is in earthen vessels, and it
smacks of the vessel. The Church of God makes, or is made by, its leaders.
Whether it makes them or is made by them, it will be what its leaders are;
spiritual if they are so, secular if they are, conglomerate if its leaders are.
Israel's kings gave character to Israel's piety. A Church rarely revolts against
or rises above the religion of its leaders. Strongly spiritual leaders; men of
holy might, at the lead, are tokens of God's favor; disaster and weakness follow
the wake of feeble or worldly leaders. Israel had fallen low when God gave
children to be their princes and babes to rule over them. No happy state is
predicted by the prophets when children oppress God's Israel and women rule over
them. Times of spiritual leadership are times of great spiritual prosperity to
the Church.
Prayer is one of the eminent characteristics of strong
spiritual leadership. Men of mighty prayer are men of might and mold things.
Their power with God has the conquering tread.
How can a man preach who
does not get his message fresh from God in the closet? How can he preach without
having his faith quickened, his vision cleared, and his heart warmed by his
closeting with God? Alas, for the pulpit lips which are untouched by this closet
flame. Dry and unctionless they will ever be, and truths divine will never come
with power from such lips. As far as the real interests of religion are
concerned, a pulpit without a closet will always be a barren thing.
A
preacher may preach in an official, entertaining, or learned way without prayer,
but between this kind of preaching and sowing God's precious seed with holy
hands and prayerful, weeping hearts there is an immeasurable distance.
A
prayerless ministry is the undertaker for all God's truth and for God's Church.
He may have the most costly casket and the most beautiful flowers, but it is a
funeral, notwithstanding the charmful array. A prayerless Christian will never
learn God's truth; a prayerless ministry will never be able to teach God's
truth. Ages of millennial glory have been lost by a prayerless Church. The
coming of our Lord has been postponed indefinitely by a prayerless Church. Hell
has enlarged herself and filled her dire caves in the presence of the dead
service of a prayerless Church.
The best, the greatest offering is an
offering of prayer. If the preachers of the twentieth century will learn well
the lesson of prayer, and use fully the power of prayer, the millennium will
come to its noon ere the century closes. "Pray without ceasing" is the trumpet
call to the preachers of the twentieth century. If the twentieth century will
get their texts, their thoughts, their words, their sermons in their closets,
the next century will find a new heaven and a new earth. The old sin-stained and
sin-eclipsed heaven and earth will pass away under the power of a praying
ministry.
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XVIII. PREACHERS
NEED THE PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE
"If some Christians that have been complaining of their ministers had said and acted less before men and had applied themselves with all their might to cry to God for their ministers -- had, as it were, risen and stormed heaven with their humble, fervent and incessant prayers for them -- they would have been much more in the way of success."
-- Jonathan Edwards
SOMEHOW the practice of
praying in particular for the preacher has fallen into disuse or become
discounted. Occasionally have we heard the practice arraigned as a disparagement
of the ministry, being a public declaration by those who do it of the
inefficiency of the ministry. It offends the pride of learning and
self-sufficiency, perhaps, and these ought to be offended and rebuked in a
ministry that is so derelict as to allow them to exist.
Prayer, to the
preacher, is not simply the duty of his profession, a privilege, but it is a
necessity. Air is not more necessary to the lungs than prayer is to the
preacher. It is absolutely necessary for the preacher to pray. It is an absolute
necessity that the preacher be prayed for. These two propositions are wedded
into a union which ought never to know any divorce: the preacher must pray;
the preacher must be prayed for. It will take all the praying he can do, and
all the praying he can get done, to meet the fearful responsibilities and gain
the largest, truest success in his great work. The true preacher, next to the
cultivation of the spirit and fact of prayer in himself, in their intensest
form, covets with a great covetousness the prayers of God's people.
The
holier a man is, the more does he estimate prayer; the clearer does he see that
God gives himself to the praying ones, and that the measure of God's revelation
to the soul is the measure of the soul's longing, importunate prayer for God.
Salvation never finds its way to a prayerless heart. The Holy Spirit never
abides in a prayerless spirit. Preaching never edifies a prayerless soul. Christ
knows nothing of prayerless Christians. The gospel cannot be projected by a
prayerless preacher. Gifts, talents, education, eloquence, God's call, cannot
abate the demand of prayer, but only intensify the necessity for the preacher to
pray and to be prayed for. The more the preacher's eyes are opened to the
nature, responsibility, and difficulties in his work, the more will he see, and
if he be a true preacher the more will he feel, the necessity of prayer; not
only the increasing demand to pray himself, but to call on others to help him by
their prayers.
Paul is an illustration of this. If any man could project
the gospel by dint of personal force, by brain power, by culture, by personal
grace, by God's apostolic commission, God's extraordinary call, that man was
Paul. That the preacher must be a man given to prayer, Paul is an eminent
example. That the true apostolic preacher must have the prayers of other good
people to give to his ministry its full quota of success, Paul is a preeminent
example. He asks, he covets, he pleads in an impassioned way for the help of all
God's saints. He knew that in the spiritual realm, as elsewhere, in union there
is strength; that the concentration and aggregation of faith, desire, and prayer
increased the volume of spiritual force until it became overwhelming and
irresistible in its power. Units of prayer combined, like drops of water, make
an ocean which defies resistance. So Paul, with his clear and full apprehension
of spiritual dynamics, determined to make his ministry as impressive, as
eternal, as irresistible as the ocean, by gathering all the scattered units of
prayer and precipitating them on his ministry. May not the solution of Paul's
preeminence in labors and results, and impress on the Church and the world, be
found in this fact that he was able to center on himself and his ministry more
of prayer than others? To his brethren at Rome he wrote: "Now I beseech you,
brethren, for the Lord Jesus Christ's sake, and for the love of the Spirit, that
ye strive together with me in prayers to God for me." To the Ephesians he says:
"Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching
thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints; and for me,
that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly, to make
known the mystery of the gospel." To the Colossians he emphasizes: "Withal
praying also for us, that God would open unto us a door of utterance, to speak
the mystery of Christ, for which I am also in bonds: that I may make it manifest
as I ought to speak." To the Thessalonians he says sharply, strongly: "Brethren,
pray for us." Paul calls on the Corinthian Church to help him: "Ye also helping
together by prayer for us." This was to be part of their work. They were to lay
to the helping hand of prayer. He in an additional and closing charge to the
Thessalonian Church about the importance and necessity of their prayers says:
"Finally, brethren, pray for us, that the word of the Lord may have free course,
and be glorified, even as it is with you: and that we may be delivered from
unreasonable and wicked men." He impresses the Philippians that all his trials
and opposition can be made subservient to the spread of the gospel by the
efficiency of their prayers for him. Philemon was to prepare a lodging for him,
for through Philemon's prayer Paul was to be his guest.
Paul's attitude
on this question illustrates his humility and his deep insight into the
spiritual forces which project the gospel. More than this, it teaches a lesson
for all times, that if Paul was so dependent on the prayers of God's saints to
give his ministry success, how much greater the necessity that the prayers of
God's saints be centered on the ministry of to-day!
Paul did not feel
that this urgent plea for prayer was to lower his dignity, lessen his influence,
or depreciate his piety. What if it did? Let dignity go, let influence be
destroyed, let his reputation be marred -- he must have their prayers. Called,
commissioned, chief of the Apostles as he was, all his equipment was imperfect
without the prayers of his people. He wrote letters everywhere, urging them to
pray for him. Do you pray for your preacher? Do you pray for him in secret?
Public prayers are of little worth unless they are founded on or followed up by
private praying. The praying ones are to the preacher as Aaron and Hur were to
Moses. They hold up his hands and decide the issue that is so fiercely raging
around them.
The plea and purpose of the apostles were to put the Church
to praying. They did not ignore the grace of cheerful giving. They were not
ignorant of the place which religious activity and work occupied an the
spiritual life; but not one nor all of these, in apostolic estimate or urgency,
could at all compare in necessity and importance with prayer. The most sacred
and urgent pleas were used, the most fervid exhortations, the most comprehensive
and arousing words were uttered to enforce the all-important obligation and
necessity of prayer.
"Put the saints everywhere to praying" is the burden
of the apostolic effort and the keynote of apostolic success. Jesus Christ had
striven to do this in the days of his personal ministry. As he was moved by
infinite compassion at the ripened fields of earth perishing for lack of
laborers and pausing in his own praying -- he tries to awaken the stupid
sensibilities of his disciples to the duty of prayer as he charges them, "Pray
ye the Lord of the harvest that he will send forth laborers into his harvest."
"And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray and
not to faint."
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XIX. DELIBERATION
NECESSARY TO LARGEST RESULTS FROM PRAYER
"This perpetual hurry of business and company ruins me in soul if not in body. More solitude and earlier hours! I suspect I have been allotting habitually too little time to religious exercises, as private devotion and religious meditation, Scripture-reading, etc. Hence I am lean and cold and hard. I had better allot two hours or an hour and a half daily. I have been keeping too late hours, and hence have had but a hurried half hour in a morning to myself. Surely the experience of all good men confirms the proposition that without a due measure of private devotions the soul will grow lean. But all may be done through prayer -- almighty prayer, I am ready to say -- and why not? For that it is almighty is only through the gracious ordination of the God of love and truth. O then, pray, pray, pray!"
-- William Wilberforce
OUR devotions are not measured by the clock, but
time is of their essence. The ability to wait and stay and press belongs
essentially to our intercourse with God. Hurry, everywhere
unseeming and damaging, is so to an alarming extent in the great business of
communion with God. Short devotions are the bane of deep piety. Calmness, grasp,
strength, are never the companions of hurry. Short devotions deplete spiritual
vigor, arrest spiritual progress, sap spiritual foundations, blight the root and
bloom of spiritual life. They are the prolific source of backsliding, the sure
indication of a superficial piety; they deceive, blight, rot the seed, and
impoverish the soil.
It is true that Bible prayers in word and print are
short, but the praying men of the Bible were with God through many a sweet and
holy wrestling hour. They won by few words but long waiting. The prayers Moses
records may be short, but Moses prayed to God with fastings and mighty cryings
forty days and nights.
The statement of Elijah's praying may be condensed
to a few brief paragraphs, but doubtless Elijah, who when "praying he prayed,"
spent many hours of fiery struggle and lofty intercourse with God before he
could, with assured boldness, say to Ahab, "There shall not be dew nor rain
these years, but according to my word." The verbal brief of Paul's prayers is
short, but Paul "prayed night and day exceedingly." The "Lord's Prayer" is a
divine epitome for infant lips, but the man Christ Jesus prayed many an
all-night ere his work was done; and his all-night and long-sustained devotions
gave to his work its finish and perfection, and to his character the fullness
and glory of its divinity.
Spiritual work is taxing work, and men are
loath to do it. Praying, true praying, costs an outlay of serious attention and
of time, which flesh and blood do not relish. Few persons are made of such
strong fiber that they will make a costly outlay when surface work will pass as
well in the market. We can habituate ourselves to our beggarly praying until it
looks well to us, at least it keeps up a decent form and quiets conscience --
the deadliest of opiates! We can slight our praying, and not realize the peril
till the foundations are gone. Hurried devotions make weak faith, feeble
convictions, questionable piety. To be little with God is to be little for God.
To cut short the praying makes the whole religious character short, scrimp,
niggardly, and slovenly.
It takes good time for the full flow of God into
the spirit. Short devotions cut the pipe of God's full flow. It takes time in
the secret places to get the full revelation of God. Little time and hurry mar
the picture.
Henry Martyn laments that "want of private devotional
reading and shortness of prayer through incessant sermon-making had produced
much strangeness between God and his soul." He judged that he had dedicated too
much time to public ministrations and too little to private communion with God.
He was much impressed to set apart times for fasting and to devote times for
solemn prayer. Resulting from this he records: "Was assisted this morning to
pray for two hours." Said William Wilberforce, the peer of kings: "I must secure
more time for private devotions. I have been living far too public for me. The
shortening of private devotions starves the soul; it grows lean and faint. I
have been keeping too late hours." Of a failure in Parliament he says: "Let me
record my grief and shame, and all, probably, from private devotions having been
contracted, and so God let me stumble." More solitude and earlier hours was his
remedy.
More time and early hours for prayer would act like magic to
revive and invigorate many a decayed spiritual life. More time and early hours
for prayer would be manifest in holy living. A holy life would not be so rare or
so difficult a thing if our devotions were not so short and hurried. A Christly
temper in its sweet and passionless fragrance would not be so alien and hopeless
a heritage if our closet stay were lengthened and intensified. We live shabbily
because we pray meanly. Plenty of time to feast in our closets will bring marrow
and fatness to our lives. Our ability to stay with God in our closet measures
our ability to stay with God out of the closet. Hasty closet visits are
deceptive, defaulting. We are not only deluded by them, but we are losers by
them in many ways and in many rich legacies. Tarrying in the closet instructs
and wins. We are taught by it, and the greatest victories are often the results
of great waiting -- waiting till words and plans are exhausted, and silent and
patient waiting gains the crown. Jesus Christ asks with an affronted emphasis,
"Shall not God avenge his own elect which cry day and night unto him?"
To
pray is the greatest thing we can do: and to do it well there must be calmness,
time, and deliberation; otherwise it is degraded into the littlest and meanest
of things. True praying has the largest results for good; and poor praying, the
least. We cannot do too much of real praying; we cannot do too little of the
sham. We must learn anew the worth of prayer, enter anew the school of prayer.
There is nothing which it takes more time to learn. And if we would learn the
wondrous art, we must not give a fragment here and there -- "A little talk with
Jesus," as the tiny saintlets sing -- but we must demand and hold with iron
grasp the best hours of the day for God and prayer, or there will be no praying
worth the name.
This, however, is not a day of prayer. Few men there are
who pray. Prayer is defamed by preacher and priest. In these days of hurry and
bustle, of electricity and steam, men will not take time to pray. Preachers
there are who "say prayers" as a part of their programme, on regular or state
occasions; but who "stirs himself up to take hold upon God?" Who prays as Jacob
prayed -- till he is crowned as a prevailing, princely intercessor? Who prays as
Elijah prayed -- till all the locked-up forces of nature were unsealed and a
famine-stricken land bloomed as the garden of God? Who prayed as Jesus Christ
prayed as out upon the mountain he "continued all night in prayer to God?" The
apostles "gave themselves to prayer" -- the most difficult thing to get men or
even the preachers to do. Laymen there are who will give their money -- some of
them in rich abundance -- but they will not "give themselves" to prayer, without
which their money is but a curse. There are plenty of preachers who will preach
and deliver great and eloquent addresses on the need of revival and the spread
of the kingdom of God, but not many there are who will do that without which all
preaching and organizing are worse than vain -- pray. It is out of date, almost
a lost art, and the greatest benefactor this age could have is the man who will
bring the preachers and the Church back to prayer.
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XX. A PRAYING PULPIT
BEGETS A PRAYING PEW
"I judge that my prayer is more than the devil himself; if it were otherwise, Luther would have fared differently long before this. Yet men will not see and acknowledge the great wonders or miracles God works in my behalf. If I should neglect prayer but a single day, I should lose a great deal of the fire of faith."
-- Martin Luther
ONLY glimpses of the great importance of prayer
could the apostles get before Pentecost. But the Spirit
coming and filling on Pentecost elevated prayer to its vital and all-commanding
position in the gospel of Christ. The call now of prayer to every saint is the
Spirit's loudest and most exigent call. Sainthood's piety is made, refined,
perfected, by prayer. The gospel moves with slow and timid pace when the saints
are not at their prayers early and late and long.
Where are the Christly
leaders who can teach the modern saints how to pray and put them at it? Do we
know we are raising up a prayerless set of saints? Where are the apostolic
leaders who can put God's people to praying? Let them come to the front and do
the work, and it will be the greatest work which can be done. An increase of
educational facilities and a great increase of money force will be the direst
curse to religion if they are not sanctified by more and better praying than we
are doing. More praying will not come as a matter of course. The campaign for
the twentieth or thirtieth century fund will not help our praying but hinder if
we are not careful. Nothing but a specific effort from a praying leadership will
avail. The chief ones must lead in the apostolic effort to radicate the vital
importance and fact of prayer in the heart and life of the Church. None
but praying leaders can have praying followers. Praying apostles will beget
praying saints. A praying pulpit will beget praying pews. We do greatly need
some body who can set the saints to this business of praying. We are not a
generation of praying saints. Non-praying saints are a beggarly gang of saints
who have neither the ardor nor the beauty nor the power of saints. Who will
restore this breach? The greatest will he be of reformers and apostles, who can
set the Church to praying.
We put it as our most sober judgment that the
great need of the Church in this and all ages is men of such commanding faith,
of such unsullied holiness, of such marked spiritual vigor and consuming zeal,
that their prayers, faith, lives, and ministry will be of such a radical and
aggressive form as to work spiritual revolutions which will form eras in
individual and Church life.
We do not mean men who get up sensational
stirs by novel devices, nor those who attract by a pleasing entertainment; but
men who can stir things, and work revolutions by the preaching of God's Word and
by the power of the Holy Ghost, revolutions which change the whole current of
things.
Natural ability and educational advantages do not figure as
factors in this matter; but capacity for faith, the ability to pray, the power
of thorough consecration, the ability of self-littleness, an absolute losing of
one's self in God's glory, and an ever-present and insatiable yearning and
seeking after all the fullness of God -- men who can set the Church ablaze for
God; not in a noisy, showy way, but with an intense and quiet heat that melts
and moves everything for God.
God can work wonders if he can get a
suitable man. Men can work wonders if they can get God to lead them. The full
endowment of the spirit that turned the world upside down would be eminently
useful in these latter days. Men who can stir things mightily for God, whose
spiritual revolutions change the whole aspect of things, are the universal need
of the Church.
The Church has never been without these men; they adorn
its history; they are the standing miracles of the divinity of the Church; their
example and history are an unfailing inspiration and blessing. An increase in
their number and power should be our prayer.
That which has been done in
spiritual matters can be done again, and be better done. This was Christ's view.
He said "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that
I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go
unto my Father." The past has not exhausted the possibilities nor the demands
for doing great things for God. The Church that is dependent on its past history
for its miracles of power and grace is a fallen Church.
God wants elect
men -- men out of whom self and the world have gone by a severe crucifixion, by
a bankruptcy which has so totally ruined self and the world that there is
neither hope nor desire of recovery; men who by this insolvency and crucifixion
have turned toward God perfect hearts.
Let us pray ardently that God's
promise to prayer may be more than realized.
THE END