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Title: Preacher and Prayer


Author: Edward M. (Edward McKendree) Bounds



Release Date: October 17, 2020  [eBook #63486]

Language: English

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  PREACHER AND   PRAYER

  E. M. BOUNDS

  Washington, Ga.


  _Three things make a divine--prayer, meditation,
  temptation._--_Luther._

  _If you do not pray, God will probably lay you aside from your
  ministry as he did me, to teach you to pray. Remember Luther’s maxim,
  “To have prayed well is to have studied well.” Get your text from
  God, your thoughts, your words._--_McCheyne._






The Christian Witness Co.
Chicago

Copyright 1907
by
E. M. Bounds.

Copyright now owned by
The Christian Witness Co.



  _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 a reference to the
  spiritual good of my congregation. Be much in retirement and prayer.
  Study the honor and glory of your Master._--RICHARD CECIL.




I.

  _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,
independent 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 timeservers, 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.




II.

  _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 nonspiritual 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 holies. 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.




III.

  _During this affliction I was brought to examine my life in relation
  to eternity closer than I had done when in the enjoyment of health.
  In this examination relative to the discharge of my duties toward my
  fellow-creatures as a man, a Christian minister, and an officer of
  the Church, I stood approved by my own conscience; but in relation
  to my Redeemer and Saviour the result was different. My returns of
  gratitude and loving obedience bear no proportion to my obligations
  for redeeming, preserving, and supporting me through the vicissitudes
  of life from infancy to old age. The coldness of my love to Him who
  first loved me and has done so much for me overwhelmed and confused
  me; and to complete my unworthy character, I had not only neglected
  to improve the grace given to the extent of my duty and privilege,
  but for want of that improvement had, while abounding in perplexing
  care and labor, declined from first zeal and love. I was confounded,
  humbled myself, implored mercy, and renewed my covenant to strive and
  devote myself unreservedly to the Lord._--BISHOP MCKENDREE.


The preaching that kills may be, and often is, orthodox--dogmatically,
inviolably orthodox. We love orthodoxy. It is good. It is the best.
It is the clean, clear-cut teaching of God’s Word, the trophies won
by truth in its conflict with error, the levees which faith has
raised against the desolating floods of honest or reckless misbelief
or unbelief; but orthodoxy, clear and hard as crystal, suspicious
and militant, may be but the letter well-shaped, well-named, and
well-learned, the letter which kills. Nothing is so dead as a dead
orthodoxy, too dead to speculate, too dead to think, to study, or to
pray.

The preaching that kills may have insight and grasp of principles,
may be scholarly and critical in taste, may have every minutiæ of the
derivation and grammar of the letter, may be able to trim the letter
into its perfect pattern, and illume it as Plato and Cicero may be
illumined, may study it as a lawyer studies his text-books to form his
brief or to defend his case, and yet be like a frost, a killing frost.
Letter-preaching may be eloquent, enameled with poetry and rhetoric,
sprinkled with prayer, spiced with sensation, illumined by genius, and
yet these be but the massive or chaste, costly mountings, the rare and
beautiful flowers which coffin the corpse. The preaching which kills
may be without scholarship, unmarked by any freshness of thought or
feeling, clothed in tasteless generalities or vapid specialties, with
style irregular, slovenly, savoring neither of closet nor of study,
graced neither by thought, expression, or prayer. Under such preaching
how wide and utter the desolation! how profound the spiritual death!

This letter-preaching deals with the surface and shadow of things, and
not the things themselves. It does not penetrate the inner part. It
has no deep insight into, no strong grasp of, the hidden life of God’s
Word. It is true to the outside, but the outside is the hull which must
be broken and penetrated for the kernel. The letter may be dressed so
as to attract and be fashionable, but the attraction is not toward God
nor is the fashion for heaven. The failure is in the preacher. God
has not made him. He has never been in the hands of God like clay
in the hands of the potter. He has been busy about the sermon, its
thought and finish, its drawing and impressive forces; but the deep
things of God have never been sought, studied, fathomed, experienced
by him. He has never stood before “the throne high and lifted up,”
never heard the seraphim song, never seen the vision nor felt the rush
of that awful holiness, and cried out in utter abandon and despair
under the sense of weakness and guilt, and had his life renewed, his
heart touched, purged, inflamed by the live coal from God’s altar.
His ministry may draw people to him, to the Church, to the form and
ceremony; but no true drawings to God, no sweet, holy, divine communion
induced. The Church has been frescoed but not edified, pleased but not
sanctified. Life is suppressed; a chill is on the summer air; the soil
is baked. The city of our God becomes the city of the dead; the Church
a graveyard, not an embattled army. Praise and prayer are stifled;
worship is dead. The preacher and the preaching have helped sin, not
holiness; peopled hell, not heaven.

Preaching which kills is prayerless preaching. Without prayer the
preacher creates death, and not life. The preacher who is feeble in
prayer is feeble in life-giving forces. The preacher who has retired
prayer as a conspicuous and largely prevailing element in his own
character has shorn his preaching of its distinctive life-giving power.
Professional praying there is and will be, but professional praying
helps the preaching to its deadly work. Professional praying chills
and kills both preaching and praying. Much of the lax devotion and
lazy, irreverent attitudes in congregational praying are attributable
to professional praying in the pulpit. Long, discursive, dry, and
inane are the prayers in many pulpits. Without unction or heart, they
fall like a killing frost on all the graces of worship. Death-dealing
prayers they are. Every vestige of devotion has perished under their
breath. The deader they are the longer they grow. A plea for short
praying, live praying, real heart praying, praying by the Holy
Spirit--direct, specific, ardent, simple, unctuous in the pulpit--is
in order. A school to teach preachers how to pray, as God counts
praying, would be more beneficial to true piety, true worship, and true
preaching than all theological schools.

Stop! Pause! Consider! Where are we? What are we doing? Preaching to
kill? Praying to kill? Praying to God! the great God, the Maker of all
worlds, the Judge of all men! What reverence! what simplicity! what
sincerity! what truth in the inward parts is demanded! How real we must
be! How hearty! Prayer to God the noblest exercise, the loftiest effort
of man, the most real thing! Shall we not discard forever accursed
preaching that kills and prayer that kills, and do the real thing, the
mightiest thing--prayerful praying, life-creating preaching, bring
the mightiest force to bear on heaven and earth and draw on God’s
exhaustless and open treasure for the need and beggary of man?




IV.

  _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._--CAREY’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 preëminently 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.




V.

  _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.




VI.

  _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 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 them 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.




VII.

  _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
  Andrewes 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!”




VIII.

  _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._--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.’”




IX.

  _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.




X.

  _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 church-goers, 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.




XI.

  _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. He will be won in the
  labor._--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 distinguished 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 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!”




XII.

  _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
  hearty and I shall preach._--ROBERT MURRAY MCCHEYNE.

  _A sermon that has more head infused into it than heart will not come
  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.




XIII.

  _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 preëminently 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 school-house 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.




XIV.

  _One bright benison which private prayer brings down upon the
  ministry is an indescribable and inimitable something--an unction
  from the Holy One.... If the anointing which we bear come not
  from the Lord of hosts, we are deceivers, since only in prayer
  can we obtain it. Let us continue instant, constant, fervent
  in supplication. Let your fleece lie on the thrashing floor of
  supplication till it is wet with the dew of heaven._--SPURGEON.


Alexander Knox, a Christian philosopher of the days of Wesley, not
an adherent but a strong personal friend of Wesley, and with much
spiritual sympathy with the Wesleyan movement, writes: “It is strange
and lamentable, but I verily believe the fact to be that except among
Methodists and Methodistical clergyman, there is not much interesting
preaching in England. The clergy, too generally, have absolutely lost
the art. There is, I conceive, in the great laws of the moral world
a kind of secret understanding like the affinities in chemistry,
between rightly promulgated religious truth and the deepest feelings
of the human mind. Where the one is duly exhibited, the other will
respond. Did not our hearts burn within us?--but to this devout feeling
is indispensable in the speaker. Now, I am obliged to state from my
own observation that this _onction_, as the French not unfitly term
it, is beyond all comparison more likely to be found in England in a
Methodist conventicle than in a parish Church. This, and this alone,
seems really to be that which fills the Methodist houses and thins the
Churches. I am, I verily think, no enthusiast; I am a most sincere
and cordial churchman, a humble disciple of the School of Hale and
Boyle, of Burnet and Leighton. Now I must aver that when I was in this
country, two years ago, I did not hear a single preacher who taught me
like my own great masters but such as are deemed Methodistical. And
I now despair of getting an atom of heart-instruction from any other
quarter. The Methodist preachers (however I may not always approve of
all their expressions) do most assuredly diffuse this true religion and
undefiled. I felt real pleasure last Sunday. I can bear witness that
the preacher did at once speak the words of truth and soberness. There
was no eloquence--the honest man never dreamed of such a thing--but
there was far better: a cordial communication of vitalized truth. I say
vitalized because what he declared to others it was impossible not to
feel he lived on himself.”

This unction is the art of preaching. The preacher who never had this
unction never had the art of preaching. The preacher who has lost this
unction has lost the art of preaching. Whatever other arts he may have
and retain--the art of sermon-making, the art of eloquence, the art of
great, clear thinking, the art of pleasing an audience--he has lost the
divine art of preaching. This unction makes God’s truth powerful and
interesting, draws and attracts, edifies, convicts, saves.

This unction vitalizes God’s revealed truth, makes it living and
life-giving. Even God’s truth spoken without this unction is light,
dead, and deadening. Though abounding in truth, though weighty with
thought, though sparkling with rhetoric, though pointed by logic,
though powerful by earnestness, without this divine unction it issues
in death and not in life. Mr. Spurgeon says: “I wonder how long we
might beat our brains before we could plainly put into word what
is meant by preaching with unction. Yet he who preaches knows its
presence, and he who hears soon detects its absence. Samaria, in
famine, typifies a discourse without it. Jerusalem, with her feast
of fat things, full of marrow, may represent a sermon enriched with
it. Every one knows what the freshness of the morning is when orient
pearls abound on every blade of grass, but who can describe it, much
less produce it of itself? Such is the mystery of spiritual anointing.
We know, but we cannot tell to others what it is. It is as easy as it
is foolish, to counterfeit it. Unction is a thing which you cannot
manufacture, and its counterfeits are worse than worthless. Yet it is,
in itself, priceless, and beyond measure needful if you would edify
believers and bring sinners to Christ.”




XV.

  _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 Lord; 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 preacher. 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 be refreshed. It is well described as:

            “a two-edged sword
    Of heavenly temper keen,
  And double were the wounds it made
    Where’er it glanced between.
  ’Twas death to sin; ’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 arraigner, 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.




XVI.

  _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, penetrating, 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.




XVII.

  _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 preëminently God’s leaders. They are primarily
responsible for the condition of the Church. They shape its character,
give tone and direction to its life.

Much every way depends on these leaders. They shape the times and
the institutions. The Church is divine, the treasure it incases is
heavenly, but it bears the imprint of the human. The treasure is
in earthen vessels, and it smacks of the vessel. The Church of God
makes, or is made by, its leaders. Whether it makes them or is made
by them, it will be what its leaders are; spiritual if they are so,
secular if they are, conglomerate if its leaders are. Israel’s kings
gave character to Israel’s piety. A Church rarely revolts against or
rises above the religion of its leaders. Strongly spiritual leaders;
men of holy might, at the lead, are tokens of God’s favor; disaster
and weakness follow the wake of feeble or worldly leaders. Israel had
fallen low when God gave children to be their princes and babes to rule
over them. No happy state is predicted by the prophets when children
oppress God’s Israel and women rule over them. Times of spiritual
leadership are times of great spiritual prosperity to the Church.

Prayer is one of the eminent characteristics of strong spiritual
leadership. Men of mighty prayer are men of might and mold things.
Their power with God has the conquering tread.

How can a man preach who does not get his message fresh from God in
the closet? How can he preach without having his faith quickened, his
vision cleared, and his heart warmed by his closeting with God? Alas,
for the pulpit lips which are untouched by this closet flame. Dry and
unctionless they will ever be, and truths divine will never come with
power from such lips. As far as the real interests of religion are
concerned, a pulpit without a closet will always be a barren thing.

A preacher may preach in an official, entertaining, or learned way
without prayer, but between this kind of preaching and sowing God’s
precious seed with holy hands and prayerful, weeping hearts there is an
immeasurable distance.

A prayerless ministry is the undertaker for all God’s truth and for
God’s Church. He may have the most costly casket and the most beautiful
flowers, but it is a funeral, notwithstanding the charmful array.
A prayerless Christian will never learn God’s truth; a prayerless
ministry will never be able to teach God’s truth. Ages of millennial
glory have been lost by a prayerless Church. The coming of our Lord has
been postponed indefinitely by a prayerless Church. Hell has enlarged
herself and filled her dire caves in the presence of the dead service
of a prayerless Church.

The best, the greatest offering is an offering of prayer. If the
preachers of the twentieth century will learn well the lesson of
prayer, and use fully the power of prayer, the millennium will come to
its noon ere the century closes. “Pray without ceasing” is the trumpet
call to the preachers of the twentieth century. If the twentieth
century will get their texts, their thoughts, their words, their
sermons in their closets, the next century will find a new heaven and a
new earth. The old sin-stained and sin-eclipsed heaven and earth will
pass away under the power of a praying ministry.




XVIII.

  _If some Christians that have been complaining of their ministers
  had said and acted less before men and had applied themselves with
  all their might to cry to God for their ministers--had, as it were,
  risen and stormed heaven with their humble, fervent, and incessant
  prayers for them--they would have been much more in the way of
  success._--JONATHAN EDWARDS.


Somehow the practice of praying in particular for the preacher has
fallen into disuse or become discounted. Occasionally have we heard the
practice arraigned as a disparagement of the ministry, being a public
declaration by those who do it of the inefficiency of the ministry. It
offends the pride of learning and self-sufficiency, perhaps, and these
ought to be offended and rebuked in a ministry that is so derelict as
to allow them to exist.

Prayer, to the preacher, is not simply the duty of his profession, a
privilege, but it is a necessity. Air is not more necessary to the
lungs than prayer is to the preacher. It is absolutely necessary for
the preacher to pray. It is an absolute necessity that the preacher
be prayed for. These two propositions are wedded into a union which
ought never to know any divorce: _the preacher must pray; the preacher
must be prayed_ for. It will take all the praying he can do, and all
the praying he can get done, to meet the fearful responsibilities and
gain the largest, truest success in his great work. The true preacher,
next to the cultivation of the spirit and fact of prayer in himself, in
their intensest form, covets with a great covetousness the prayers of
God’s people.

The holier a man is, the more does he estimate prayer; the clearer
does he see that God gives himself to the praying ones, and that the
measure of God’s revelation to the soul is the measure of the soul’s
longing, importunate prayer for God. Salvation never finds its way to a
prayerless heart. The Holy Spirit never abides in a prayerless spirit.
Preaching never edifies a prayerless soul. Christ knows nothing of
prayerless Christians. The gospel cannot be projected by a prayerless
preacher. Gifts, talents, education, eloquence, God’s call, cannot
abate the demand of prayer, but only intensify the necessity for the
preacher to pray and to be prayed for. The more the preacher’s eyes are
opened to the nature, responsibility, and difficulties in his work,
the more will he see, and if he be a true preacher the more will he
feel, the necessity of prayer; not only the increasing demand to pray
himself, but to call on others to help him by their prayers.

Paul is an illustration of this. If any man could project the gospel
by dint of personal force, by brain power, by culture, by personal
grace, by God’s apostolic commission, God’s extraordinary call, that
man was Paul. That the preacher must be a man given to prayer, Paul
is an eminent example. That the true apostolic preacher must have the
prayers of other good people to give to his ministry its full quota of
success, Paul is a preëminent example. He asks, he covets, he pleads
in an impassioned way for the help of all God’s saints. He knew that
in the spiritual realm, as elsewhere, in union there is strength;
that the concentration and aggregation of faith, desire, and prayer
increased the volume of spiritual force until it became overwhelming
and irresistible in its power. Units of prayer combined, like drops
of water, make an ocean which defies resistance. So Paul, with his
clear and full apprehension of spiritual dynamics, determined to make
his ministry as impressive, as eternal, as irresistible as the ocean,
by gathering all the scattered units of prayer and precipitating
them on his ministry. May not the solution of Paul’s preëminence in
labors and results, and impress on the Church and the world, be found
in this fact that he was able to center on himself and his ministry
more of prayer than others? To his brethren at Rome he wrote: “Now
I beseech you, brethren, for the Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, and for
the love of the Spirit, that ye strive together with me in prayers
to God for me.” To the Ephesians he says: “Praying always with all
prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with
all perseverance and supplication for all saints; and for me, that
utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly, to
make known the mystery of the gospel.” To the Colossians he emphasizes:
“Withal praying also for us, that God would open unto us a door of
utterance, to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am also in
bonds: that I may make it manifest as I ought to speak.” To the
Thessalonians he says sharply, strongly: “Brethren, pray for us.” Paul
calls on the Corinthian Church to help him: “Ye also helping together
by prayer for us.” This was to be part of their work. They were to lay
to the helping hand of prayer. He in an additional and closing charge
to the Thessalonian Church about the importance and necessity of their
prayers says: “Finally, brethren, pray for us, that the word of the
Lord may have free course, and be glorified, even as it is with you:
and that we may be delivered from unreasonable and wicked men.” He
impresses the Philippians that all his trials and opposition can be
made subservient to the spread of the gospel by the efficiency of their
prayers for him. Philemon was to prepare a lodging for him, for through
Philemon’s prayer Paul was to be his guest.

Paul’s attitude on this question illustrates his humility and his deep
insight into the spiritual forces which project the gospel. More than
this, it teaches a lesson for all times, that if Paul was so dependent
on the prayers of God’s saints to give his ministry success, how much
greater the necessity that the prayers of God’s saints be centered on
the ministry of to-day!

Paul did not feel that this urgent plea for prayer was to lower his
dignity, lessen his influence, or depreciate his piety. What if it
did? Let dignity go, let influence be destroyed, let his reputation
be marred--he must have their prayers. Called, commissioned, chief of
the Apostles as he was, all his equipment was imperfect without the
prayers of his people. He wrote letters everywhere, urging them to
pray for him. Do you pray for your preacher? Do you pray for him in
secret? Public prayers are of little worth unless they are founded on
or followed up by private praying. The praying ones are to the preacher
as Aaron and Hur were to Moses. They hold up his hands and decide the
issue that is so fiercely raging around them.

The plea and purpose of the apostles were to put the Church to praying.
They did not ignore the grace of cheerful giving. They were not
ignorant of the place which religious activity and work occupied in the
spiritual life; but not one nor all of these, in apostolic estimate
or urgency, could at all compare in necessity and importance with
prayer. The most sacred and urgent pleas were used, the most fervid
exhortations, the most comprehensive and arousing words were uttered to
enforce the all-important obligation and necessity of prayer.

“Put the saints everywhere to praying” is the burden of the apostolic
effort and the keynote of apostolic success. Jesus Christ had striven
to do this in the days of his personal ministry. As he was moved by
infinite compassion at the ripened fields of earth perishing for lack
of laborers--and pausing in his own praying--he tries to awaken the
stupid sensibilities of his disciples to the duty of prayer as he
charges them, “Pray ye the Lord of the harvest that he will send forth
laborers into his harvest.” “And he spake a parable unto them to this
end, that men ought always to pray and not to faint.”




XIX.

  _This perpetual hurry of business and company ruins me in soul if
  not in body. More solitude and earlier hours! I suspect I have been
  allotting habitually too little time to religious exercises, as
  private devotion and religious meditation, Scripture-reading, etc.
  Hence I am lean and cold and hard. I had better allot two hours or an
  hour and a half daily. I have been keeping too late hours, and hence
  have had but a hurried half hour in a morning to myself. Surely the
  experience of all good men confirms the proposition that without a
  due measure of private devotions the soul will grow lean. But all may
  be done through prayer--almighty prayer, I am ready to say--and why
  not? For that it is almighty is only through the gracious ordination
  of the God of love and truth. O then, pray, pray, pray!_--WILLIAM
  WILBERFORCE.


Our devotions are not measured by the clock, but time is of their
essence. The ability to wait and stay and press belongs essentially to
our intercourse with God. Hurry, everywhere unseeming and damaging, is
so to an alarming extent in the great business of communion with God.
Short devotions are the bane of deep piety. Calmness, grasp, strength,
are never the companions of hurry. Short devotions deplete spiritual
vigor, arrest spiritual progress, sap spiritual foundations, blight
the root and bloom of spiritual life. They are the prolific source of
backsliding, the sure indication of a superficial piety; they deceive,
blight, rot the seed, and impoverish the soil.

It is true that Bible prayers in word and print are short, but the
praying men of the Bible were with God through many a sweet and holy
wrestling hour. They won by few words but long waiting. The prayers
Moses records may be short, but Moses prayed to God with fastings and
mighty cryings forty days and nights.

The statement of Elijah’s praying may be condensed to a few brief
paragraphs, but doubtless Elijah, who when “praying he prayed,” spent
many hours of fiery struggle and lofty intercourse with God before he
could, with assured boldness, say to Ahab, “There shall not be dew
nor rain these years, but according to my word.” The verbal brief of
Paul’s prayers is short, but Paul “prayed night and day exceedingly.”
The “Lord’s Prayer” is a divine epitome for infant lips, but the man
Christ Jesus prayed many an all-night ere his work was done; and his
all-night and long-sustained devotions gave to his work its finish and
perfection, and to his character the fullness and glory of its divinity.

Spiritual work is taxing work, and men are loath to do it. Praying,
true praying, costs an outlay of serious attention and of time, which
flesh and blood do not relish. Few persons are made of such strong
fiber that they will make a costly outlay when surface work will pass
as well in the market. We can habituate ourselves to our beggarly
praying until it looks well to us, at least it keeps up a decent form
and quiets conscience--the deadliest of opiates! We can slight our
praying, and not realize the peril till the foundations are gone.
Hurried devotions make weak faith, feeble convictions, questionable
piety. To be little with God is to be little for God. To cut short the
praying makes the whole religious character short, scrimp, niggardly,
and slovenly.

It takes good time for the full flow of God into the spirit. Short
devotions cut the pipe of God’s full flow. It takes time in the secret
places to get the full revelation of God. Little time and hurry mar the
picture.

Henry Martyn laments that “want of private devotional reading and
shortness of prayer through incessant sermon-making had produced much
strangeness between God and his soul.” He judged that he had dedicated
too much time to _public_ ministrations and too little to _private_
communion with God. He was much impressed to set apart times for
fasting and to devote times for solemn prayer. Resulting from this
he records: “Was assisted this morning to pray for two hours.” Said
William Wilberforce, the peer of kings: “I must secure more time for
private devotions. I have been living far too public for me. The
shortening of private devotions starves the soul; it grows lean and
faint. I have been keeping too late hours.” Of a failure in Parliament
he says: “Let me record my grief and shame, and all, probably, from
private devotions having been contracted, and so God let me stumble.”
More solitude and earlier hours was his remedy.

More time and early hours for prayer would act like magic to revive and
invigorate many a decayed spiritual life. More time and early hours
for prayer would be manifest in holy living. A holy life would not be
so rare or so difficult a thing if our devotions were not so short
and hurried. A Christly temper in its sweet and passionless fragrance
would not be so alien and hopeless a heritage if our closet stay were
lengthened and intensified. We live shabbily because we pray meanly.
Plenty of time to feast in our closets will bring marrow and fatness
to our lives. Our ability to stay with God in our closet measures our
ability to stay with God out of the closet. Hasty closet visits are
deceptive, defaulting. We are not only deluded by them, but we are
losers by them in many ways and in many rich legacies. Tarrying in
the closet instructs and wins. We are taught by it, and the greatest
victories are often the results of great waiting--waiting till words
and plans are exhausted, and silent and patient waiting gains the
crown. Jesus Christ asks with an affronted emphasis, “Shall not God
avenge his own elect which cry day and night unto him?”

To pray is the greatest thing we can do: and to do it well there must
be calmness, time, and deliberation; otherwise it is degraded into the
littlest and meanest of things. True praying has the largest results
for good; and poor praying, the least. We cannot do too much of real
praying; we cannot do too little of the sham. We must learn anew the
worth of prayer, enter anew the school of prayer. There is nothing
which it takes more time to learn. And if we would learn the wondrous
art, we must not give a fragment here and there--“A little talk with
Jesus,” as the tiny saintlets sing--but we must demand and hold with
iron grasp the best hours of the day for God and prayer, or there will
be no praying worth the name.

This, however, is not a day of prayer. Few men there are who pray.
Prayer is defamed by preacher and priest. In these days of hurry and
bustle, of electricity and steam, men will not take time to pray.
Preachers there are who “say prayers” as a part of their programme,
on regular or state occasions; but who “stirs himself up to take
hold upon God?” Who prays as Jacob prayed--till he is crowned as a
prevailing, princely intercessor? Who prays as Elijah prayed--till all
the locked-up forces of nature were unsealed and a famine-stricken
land bloomed as the garden of God? Who prayed as Jesus Christ prayed
as out upon the mountain he “continued all night in prayer to God?”
The apostles “gave themselves to prayer”--the most difficult thing to
get men or even the preachers to do. Laymen there are who will give
their money--some of them in rich abundance--but they will not “give
themselves” to prayer, without which their money is but a curse. There
are plenty of preachers who will preach and deliver great and eloquent
addresses on the need of revival and the spread of the kingdom of God,
but not many there are who will do that without which all preaching and
organizing are worse than vain--pray. It is out of date, almost a lost
art, and the greatest benefactor this age could have is the man who
will bring the preachers and the Church back to prayer.




XX.

  _I judge that my prayer is more than the devil himself; if it were
  otherwise, Luther would have fared differently long before this. Yet
  men will not see and acknowledge the great wonders or miracles God
  works in my behalf. If I should neglect prayer but a single day, I
  should lose a great deal of the fire of faith._--MARTIN LUTHER.


Only glimpses of the great importance of prayer could the apostles
get before Pentecost. But the Spirit coming and filling on Pentecost
elevated prayer to its vital and all-commanding position in the gospel
of Christ. The call now of prayer to every saint is the Spirit’s
loudest and most exigent call. Sainthood’s piety is made, refined,
perfected, by prayer. The gospel moves with slow and timid pace when
the saints are not at their prayers early and late and long.

Where are the Christly leaders who can teach the modern saints how to
pray and put them at it? Do we know we are raising up a prayerless set
of saints? Where are the apostolic leaders who can put God’s people
to praying? Let them come to the front and do the work, and it will
be the greatest work which can be done. An increase of educational
facilities and a great increase of money force will be the direst curse
to religion if they are not sanctified by more and better praying than
we are doing. More praying will not come as a matter of course. The
campaign for the twentieth or thirtieth century fund will not help
our praying but hinder if we are not careful. Nothing but a specific
effort from a praying leadership will avail. The chief ones must lead
in the apostolic effort to radicate the vital importance and _fact_ of
prayer in the heart and life of the Church. None but praying leaders
can have praying followers. Praying apostles will beget praying saints.
A praying pulpit will beget praying pews. We do greatly need somebody
who can set the saints to this business of praying. We are not a
generation of praying saints. Nonpraying saints are a beggarly gang
of saints who have neither the ardor nor the beauty nor the power
of saints. Who will restore this breach? The greatest will he be of
reformers and apostles, who can set the Church to praying.

We put it as our most sober judgment that the great need of the Church
in this and all ages is men of such commanding faith, of such unsullied
holiness, of such marked spiritual vigor and consuming zeal, that their
prayers, faith, lives, and ministry will be of such a radical and
aggressive form as to work spiritual revolutions which will form eras
in individual and Church life.

We do not mean men who get up sensational stirs by novel devices, nor
those who attract by a pleasing entertainment; but men who can stir
things, and work revolutions by the preaching of God’s Word and by the
power of the Holy Ghost, revolutions which change the whole current of
things.

Natural ability and educational advantages do not figure as factors in
this matter; but capacity for faith, the ability to pray, the power
of thorough consecration, the ability of self-littleness, an absolute
losing of one’s self in God’s glory, and an ever-present and insatiable
yearning and seeking after all the fullness of God--men who can set the
Church ablaze for God; not in a noisy, showy way, but with an intense
and quiet heat that melts and moves everything for God.

God can work wonders if he can get a suitable man. Men can work wonders
if they can get God to lead them. The full endowment of the spirit
that turned the world upside down would be eminently useful in these
latter days. Men who can stir things mightily for God, whose spiritual
revolutions change the whole aspect of things, are the universal need
of the Church.

The Church has never been without these men; they adorn its history;
they are the standing miracles of the divinity of the Church; their
example and history are an unfailing inspiration and blessing. An
increase in their number and power should be our prayer.

That which has been done in spiritual matters can be done again, and
be better done. This was Christ’s view. He said: “Verily, verily, I
say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do
also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my
Father.” The past has not exhausted the possibilities nor the demands
for doing great things for God. The Church that is dependent on its
past history for its miracles of power and grace is a fallen Church.

God wants elect men--men out of whom self and the world have gone by a
severe crucifixion, by a bankruptcy which has so totally ruined self
and the world that there is neither hope nor desire of recovery; men
who by this insolvency and crucifixion have turned toward God perfect
hearts.

Let us pray ardently that God’s promise to prayer may be more than
realized.




      *      *      *      *      *      *




Transcriber’s note:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.



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