THE POWER
THROUGH PRAYER
BY EDWARD M.
BOUNDS
Contents
1 Men of Prayer Needed
2 Our Sufficiency Is of God
3 The Letter Killeth
4 Tendencies to Be Avoided
5 Prayer, the Great Essential
6 A Praying Ministry Successful
7 Much Time Should Be Given to
Prayer
8 Examples of Praying Men
9 Begin the Day with Prayer
10 Prayer and Devotion United
11 An Example of Devotion
12 Heart Preparation Necessary
13 Grace from the Heart Rather than the
Head
14 Unction a Necessity
15 Unction, the Mark of True Gospel
Preaching
16 Much Prayer the Price of Unction
17 Prayer Marks Spiritual Leadership
18 Preachers Need the Prayers of the
People
19 Deliberation Necessary to Largest Results from
Prayer
20 A Praying Pulpit Begets a Praying
Pew
Recreation to a minister must be
as whetting is with the mower -- that is, to be used only so far as is
necessary for his work. May a physician in plague-time take any more
relaxation or recreation than is necessary for his life, when so many
are expecting his help in a case of life and death? Will you stand by
and see sinners gasping under the pangs of death, and say: "God doth
not require me to make myself a drudge to save them"? Is this the
voice of ministerial or Christian compassion or rather of sensual
laziness and diabolical cruelty. -- Richard Baxter
Misemployment of time is injurious
to the mind. In illness I have looked back with self-reproach on days
spent in my study; I was wading through history and poetry and monthly
journals, but I was in my study! Another man's trifling is notorious
to all observers, but what am I doing? Nothing, perhaps, that has
reference to the spiritual good of my congregation. Be much in
retirement and prayer. Study the honor and glory of your Master.
-- Richard Cecil
1 Men of Prayer Needed
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.
2 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.
3 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?
4 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.
5 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.
6 A Praying Ministry is
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.
7 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!"
8 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."
9 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.
10 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.
11 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!"
12 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.
13 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.
14 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."
15 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:
"a two-edged sword
Of heavenly temper keen,
And double were the wounds it made
Wherever it glanced between.
'Twas death to silt; 'twas life
To all who mourned for sin.
It kindled and it silenced strife,
Made war and peace within."
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.
16 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.
17 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 h
