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Edward
McKendree Bounds (1835-1913), Methodist minister
and devotional writer, was born in Shelby County, Missouri. He studied law
and was admitted to the bar at 21 years of age. After practicing law for
three years, he began preaching for the Methodist Episcopal Church. After the
Civil War, Bounds served as pastor of churches in |
(1) Men of prayer needed (2) Prayer, the great essential (3) Much time should be given to prayer (4) A praying pulpit begets a praying pew (5) Examples of praying men (6) Begin the day with prayer (7)Prayer and devotion united (8) Prayer marks spiritual leadership (9) Preachers need the prayers of the people (10) The letter killeth
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 of prayer.
An eminent historian has said that the accidents of personal character have more to do with the revolutions of nations than either philosophic historians or democratic politicians will allow. This truth has its application in full to the gospel of Christ, the character and conduct of the followers of Christ -- Christianize the world, transfigure nations and individuals. Of the preachers of the gospel it is eminently true.
The character as well as the fortunes of the gospel is committed to the preacher. He makes or mars the message from God to man. The preacher is the golden pipe through which the divine oil flows. The pipe must not only be golden, but open and flawless, that the oil may have a full, unhindered, unwasted flow.
The man makes the preacher. God must make the man. The messenger is, if possible, more than the message. The preacher is more than the sermon. The preacher makes the sermon. As the life-giving milk from the mother's bosom is but the mother's life, so all the preacher says is tinctured, impregnated by what the preacher is. The treasure is in earthen vessels, and the taste of the vessel impregnates and may discolor. The man, the whole man, lies behind the sermon. Preaching is not the performance of an hour. It is the outflow of a life. It takes twenty years to make a sermon, because it takes twenty years to make the man. The true sermon is a thing of life. The sermon grows because the man grows. The sermon is forceful because the man is forceful. The sermon is holy because the man is holy. The sermon is full of the divine unction because the man is full of the divine unction.
Paul termed it "My gospel;" not that he had degraded it by his personal eccentricities or diverted it by selfish appropriation, but the gospel was put into the heart and lifeblood of the man Paul, as a personal trust to be executed by his Pauline traits, to be set aflame and empowered by the fiery energy of his fiery soul. Paul's sermons -- what were they? Where are they? Skeletons, scattered fragments, afloat on the sea of inspiration! But the man Paul, greater than his sermons, lives forever, in full form, feature and stature, with his molding hand on the Church. The preaching is but a voice. The voice in silence dies, the text is forgotten, the sermon fades from memory; the preacher lives.
The sermon cannot rise in its life-giving forces above the man. Dead men give out dead sermons, and dead sermons kill. Everything depends on the spiritual character of the preacher. Under the Jewish dispensation the high priest had inscribed in jeweled letters on a golden frontlet: "Holiness to the Lord." So every preacher in Christ's ministry must be molded into and mastered by this same holy motto. It is a crying shame for the Christian ministry to fall lower in holiness of character and holiness of aim than the Jewish priesthood. Jonathan Edwards said: "I went on with my eager pursuit after more holiness and conformity to Christ. The heaven I desired was a heaven of holiness." The gospel of Christ does not move by popular waves. It has no self-propagating power. It moves as the men who have charge of it move. The preacher must impersonate the gospel. Its divine, most distinctive features must be embodied in him. The constraining power of love must be in the preacher as a projecting, eccentric, an all-commanding, self-oblivious force. The energy of self-denial must be his being, his heart and blood and bones. He must go forth as a man among men, clothed with humility, abiding in meekness, wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove; the bonds of a servant with the spirit of a king, a king in high, royal, in dependent bearing, with the simplicity and sweetness of a child. The preacher must throw himself, with all the abandon of a perfect, self-emptying faith and a self-consuming zeal, into his work for the salvation of men. Hearty, heroic, compassionate, fearless martyrs must the men be who take hold of and shape a generation for God. If they be timid time servers, place seekers, if they be men pleasers or men fearers, if their faith has a weak hold on God or his Word, if their denial be broken by any phase of self or the world, they cannot take hold of the Church nor the world for God.
The preacher's sharpest and strongest preaching should be to himself. His most difficult, delicate, laborious, and thorough work must be with himself. The training of the twelve was the great, difficult, and enduring work of Christ. Preachers are not sermon makers, but men makers and saint makers, and he only is well-trained for this business who has made himself a man and a saint. It is not great talents nor great learning nor great preachers that God needs, but men great in holiness, great in faith, great in love, great in fidelity, great for God -- men always preaching by holy sermons in the pulpit, by holy lives out of it. These can mold a generation for God.
After this order, the early Christians were formed. Men they were of solid mold, preachers after the heavenly type -- heroic, stalwart, soldierly, saintly. Preaching with them meant self-denying, self-crucifying, serious, toilsome, martyr business. They applied themselves to it in a way that told on their generation, and formed in its womb a generation yet unborn for God. The preaching man is to be the praying man. Prayer is the preacher's mightiest weapon. An almighty force in itself, it gives life and force to all.
The real sermon is made in the
closet. The man -- God's man -- is made in the closet. His life and his
profoundest convictions were born in his secret communion with God. The
burdened and tearful agony of his spirit, his weightiest and sweetest messages
were got when alone with God. Prayer makes the man; prayer makes the preacher;
prayer makes the pastor.
The pulpit of this day is weak in praying. The pride of learning is against the dependent humility of prayer. Prayer is with the pulpit too often only official -- a performance for the routine of service. Prayer is not to the modern pulpit the mighty force it was in Paul's life or Paul's ministry. Every preacher who does not make prayer a mighty factor in his own life and ministry is weak as a factor in God's work and is powerless to project God's cause in this world.
(2) Prayer, the Great Essential
You know the value of prayer: it is precious beyond all price. Never, never neglect it -- Sir Thomas Buxton Prayer is the first thing, the second thing, the third thing necessary to a minister. Pray, then, my dear brother: pray, pray, pray -- Edward Payson
PRAYER, in the preacher's life,
in the preacher's study, in the preacher's pulpit, must be a conspicuous and an
all-impregnating force and an all-coloring ingredient. It must play no
secondary part, be no mere coating. To him it is given to be with his Lord
"all night in prayer." The preacher, to train himself in self-denying
prayer, is charged to look to his Master, who, "rising up a great while
before day, went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed."
The preacher's study ought to be a closet, a
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.
(3) Much Time Should Be Given to Prayer
The great masters and teachers in Christian doctrine have
always found in prayer their highest source of illumination. Not to go beyond
the limits of the
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,
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
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!"
(4) A Praying Pulpit Begets a
Praying Pew
I judge that my prayer is more than the devil himself; if it
were otherwise, Luther would have fared differently long before this. Yet men
will not see and acknowledge the great wonders or miracles God works in my
behalf. If I should neglect prayer but a single day, I should lose a great deal
of the fire of faith. -- Martin Luther
ONLY glimpses of the great importance of prayer could the
apostles get before Pentecost. But the Spirit coming and filling on Pentecost
elevated prayer to its vital and all-commanding position in the gospel of
Christ. The call now of prayer to every saint is the Spirit's loudest and most
exigent call. Sainthood's piety is made, refined, perfected, by prayer. The
gospel moves with slow and timid pace when the saints are not at their prayers
early and late and long.
Where are the Christly leaders who can teach the modern
saints how to pray and put them at it? Do we know we are raising
up a prayerless set of saints? Where are the
apostolic leaders who can put God's people to praying? Let them come to the
front and do the work, and it will be the greatest work which can be done.
An increase of educational facilities and a great increase
of money force will be the direst curse to religion if they are not sanctified
by more and better praying than we are doing. More praying will not come as a
matter of course. The campaign for the twentieth or thirtieth century fund will
not help our praying but hinder if we are not careful. Nothing but a specific
effort from a praying leadership will avail. The chief ones must lead in the
apostolic effort to radicate the vital importance and
fact of prayer in the heart and life of the Church. None but praying leaders
can have praying followers. Praying apostles will beget praying saints. A
praying pulpit will beget praying pews. We do greatly need some body who can set the saints to this business of praying. We are
not a generation of praying saints. Non-praying saints are a
beggarly gang of saints who have neither the ardor nor the beauty nor the power
of saints. Who will restore this breach? The greatest will he be of reformers
and apostles, who can set the Church to praying.
We put it as our most sober judgment that the great need of
the Church in this and all ages is men of such commanding faith, of such
unsullied holiness, of such marked spiritual vigor and consuming zeal, that
their prayers, faith, lives, and ministry will be of such a radical and
aggressive form as to work spiritual revolutions which will form eras in
individual and Church life.
We do not mean men who get up sensational stirs by novel
devices, nor those who attract by a pleasing entertainment; but men who can
stir things, and work revolutions by the preaching of God's Word and by the
power of the Holy Ghost, revolutions which change the whole current of things.
Natural ability and educational advantages do not figure as
factors in this matter; but capacity for faith, the ability to pray, the power
of thorough consecration, the ability of self-littleness, an absolute losing of
one's self in God's glory, and an ever-present and insatiable yearning and
seeking after all the fullness of God -- men who can set the Church ablaze for
God; not in a noisy, showy way, but with an intense and quiet heat that melts
and moves everything for God.
God can work wonders if he can get a suitable man. Men can
work wonders if they can get God to lead them. The full endowment of the spirit
that turned the world upside down would be eminently useful in these latter
days. Men who can stir things mightily for God, whose spiritual revolutions
change the whole aspect of things, are the universal need of the Church.
The Church has never been without these men; they adorn its
history; they are the standing miracles of the divinity of the Church; their
example and history are an unfailing inspiration and blessing. An increase in
their number and power should be our prayer.
That which has been done in spiritual matters can be done
again, and be better done. This was Christ's view. He said "Verily,
verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he
do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father."
The past has not exhausted the possibilities nor the
demands for doing great things for God. The Church that is dependent on its
past history for its miracles of power and grace is a fallen Church.
God wants elect men -- men out of whom self and the world
have gone by a severe crucifixion, by a bankruptcy which has so totally ruined
self and the world that there is neither hope nor desire of recovery; men who
by this insolvency and crucifixion have turned toward God perfect hearts.
Let us pray ardently that God's promise to prayer may be
more than realized.
The act of praying is the very highest energy of which the human mind is capable; praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties. The great mass of worldly men and of learned men are absolutely incapable of prayer. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
BISHOP WILSON says: In H. Martyn's journal the spirit of prayer, the time he devoted to the duty, and his fervor in it are the first things which strike me."
Payson wore the hard-wood boards into grooves where his knees pressed so often and so long. His biographer says: "His continuing instant in prayer, be his circumstances what they might, is the most noticeable fact in his history, and points out the duty of all who would rival his eminency. To his ardent and persevering prayers must no doubt be ascribed in a great measure his distinguished and almost uninterrupted success."
The Marquis DeRenty,
to whom Christ was most precious, ordered his servant to call him from his
devotions at the end of half an hour. The servant at the time saw his face
through an aperture. It was marked with such holiness that he hated to arouse
him. His lips were moving, but he was perfectly silent. He waited until three
half hours had passed; then he called to him, when he arose from his knees,
saying that the half hour was so short when he was communing with Christ.
Brainerd said: "I love to be alone in my cottage, where I can spend much time in prayer."
William Bramwell is famous in Methodist annals for personal holiness and for his wonderful success in preaching and for the marvelous answers to his prayers. For hours at a time he would pray. He almost lived on his knees. He went over his circuits like a flame of fire. The fire was kindled by the time he spent in prayer. He often spent as much as four hours in a single season of prayer in retirement.
Bishop Andrewes
spent the greatest part of five hours every day in prayer and devotion.
Sir Henry Havelock always spent
the first two hours of each day alone with God. If the encampment was struck at
Earl Cairns rose daily at
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
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
I
ought to pray before seeing any one. Often when I sleep long, or meet with
others early, it is eleven or
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.
(7) Prayer and Devotion United
There is a manifest want of spiritual influence on the ministry of the present day. I feel it in my own case and I see it in that of others. I am afraid there is too much of a low, managing, contriving, maneuvering temper of mind among us. We are laying ourselves out more than is expedient to meet one man's taste and another man's prejudices. The ministry is a grand and holy affair, and it should find in us a simple habit of spirit and a holy but humble indifference to all consequences. The leading defect in Christian ministers is want of a devotional habit. -- Richard Cecil
NEVER was there greater need for
saintly men and women; more imperative still is the call for saintly,
God-devoted preachers. The world moves with gigantic strides. Satan has his
hold and rule on the world, and labors to make all its movements subserve his ends. Religion must do its best work, present its most attractive and perfect models. By every means,
modern sainthood must be inspired by the loftiest ideals and by the largest
possibilities through the Spirit. Paul lived on his knees,
that the
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
Prayer is the creator as well as the channel of devotion. The spirit of devotion is the spirit of prayer. Prayer and devotion are united as soul and body are united, as life and the heart are united. There is no real prayer without devotion, no devotion without prayer. The preacher must be surrendered to God in the holiest devotion. He is not a professional man, his ministry is not a profession; it is a divine institution, a divine devotion. He is devoted to God. His aim, aspirations, ambition are for God and to God, and to such prayer is as essential as food is to life.
The preacher, above everything else, must be devoted to God. The preacher's relations to God are the insignia and credentials of his ministry. These must be clear, conclusive, unmistakable. No common, surface type of piety must be his. If he does not excel in grace, he does not excel at all. If he does not preach by life, character, conduct, he does not preach at all. If his piety be light, his preaching may be as soft and as sweet as music, as gifted as Apollo, yet its weight will be a feather's weight, visionary, fleeting as the morning cloud or the early dew. Devotion to God -- there is no substitute for this in the preacher's character and conduct. Devotion to a Church, to opinions, to an organization, to orthodoxy -- these are paltry, misleading, and vain when they become the source of inspiration, the animus of a call. God must be the mainspring of the preacher's effort, the fountain and crown of all his toil. The name and honor of Jesus Christ, the advance of his cause, must be all in all. The preacher must have no inspiration but the name of Jesus Christ, no ambition but to have him glorified, no toil but for him. Then prayer will be a source of his illuminations, the means of perpetual advance, the gauge of his success. The perpetual aim, the only ambition, the preacher can cherish is to have God with him.
Never did the cause of God need
perfect illustrations of the possibilities of prayer more than in this age. No
age, no person, will be ensamples of the gospel power except the ages or
persons of deep and earnest prayer. A prayerless age
will have but scant models of divine power. Prayerless
hearts will never rise to these Alpine heights. The age may be a better age
than the past, but there is an infinite distance between the betterment of an
age by the force of an advancing civilization and its betterment by the
increase of holiness and Christlikeness by the energy
of prayer. The Jews were much better when Christ came than in the ages before.
It was the golden age of their Pharisaic religion. Their golden religious age
crucified Christ. Never more praying, never less praying; never more
sacrifices, never less sacrifice; never less idolatry, never more idolatry;
never more of temple worship, never less of God worship; never more of lip
service, never less of heart service (God worshiped by lips whose hearts and
hands crucified God's Son!); never more of churchgoers, never less of saints.
It is prayer-force which makes
saints. Holy characters are formed by the power of real praying. The more of true saints, the more of praying; the more of praying,
the more of true saints.
(8) Prayer Marks Spiritual Leadership
Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen; such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of heaven on earth. God does nothing but in answer to prayer. -- John Wesley
THE apostles knew the necessity and worth of prayer to their ministry. They knew that their high commission as apostles, instead of relieving them from the necessity of prayer, committed them to it by a more urgent need; so that they were exceedingly jealous else some other important work should exhaust their time and prevent their praying as they ought; so they appointed laymen to look after the delicate and engrossing duties of ministering to the poor, that they (the apostles) might, unhindered, "give themselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the word." Prayer is put first, and their relation to prayer is put most strongly -- "give themselves to it," making a business of it, surrendering themselves to praying, putting fervor, urgency, perseverance, and time in it.
How holy, apostolic men devoted themselves to this divine work of prayer! "Night and day praying exceedingly," says Paul. "We will give ourselves continually to prayer" is the consensus of apostolic devotement. How these New Testament preachers laid themselves out in prayer for God's people! How they put God in full force into their Churches by their praying! These holy apostles did not vainly fancy that they had met their high and solemn duties by delivering faithfully God's word, but their preaching was made to stick and tell by the ardor and insistence of their praying. Apostolic praying was as taxing, toilsome, and imperative as apostolic preaching. They prayed mightily day and night to bring their people to the highest regions of faith and holiness. They prayed mightier still to hold them to this high spiritual altitude. The preacher who has never learned in the school of Christ the high and divine art of intercession for his people will never learn the art of preaching, though homiletics be poured into him by the ton, and though he be the most gifted genius in sermon-making and sermon-delivery.
The prayers of apostolic, saintly leaders do much in making saints of those who are not apostles. If the Church leaders in after years had been as particular and fervent in praying for their people as the apostles were, the sad, dark times of worldliness and apostasy had not marred the history and eclipsed the glory and arrested the advance of the Church. Apostolic praying makes apostolic saints and keeps apostolic times of purity and power in the Church.
What loftiness of soul, what purity and elevation of motive, what unselfishness, what self-sacrifice, what exhaustive toil, what ardor of spirit, what divine tact are requisite to be an intercessor for men!
The preacher is to lay himself out in prayer for his people; not that they might be saved, simply, but that they be mightily saved. The apostles laid themselves out in prayer that their saints might be perfect; not that they should have a little relish for the things of God, but that they "might be filled with all the fullness of God." Paul did not rely on his apostolic preaching to secure this end, but "for this cause he bowed his knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." Paul's praying carried Paul's converts farther along the highway of sainthood than Paul's preaching did. Epaphras did as much or more by prayer for the Colossian saints than by his preaching. He labored fervently always in prayer for them that "they might stand perfect and complete in all the will of God."
Preachers are preeminently God's leaders. They are primarily responsible for the condition of the Church. They shape its character, give tone and direction to its life.
Much every way depends on these
leaders. They shape the times and the institutions. The Church is divine, the
treasure it incases is heavenly, but it bears the imprint of the human. The
treasure is in earthen vessels, and it smacks of the vessel. The
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
(9) Preachers Need the Prayers of the People
If some Christians that have been complaining of their ministers had said and acted less before men and had applied themselves with all their might to cry to God for their ministers -- had, as it were, risen and stormed heaven with their humble, fervent and incessant prayers for them -- they would have been much more in the way of success. -- Jonathan Edwards
SOMEHOW the practice of praying in particular for the preacher has fallen into disuse or become discounted. Occasionally have we heard the practice arraigned as a disparagement of the ministry, being a public declaration by those who do it of the inefficiency of the ministry. It offends the pride of learning and self-sufficiency, perhaps, and these ought to be offended and rebuked in a ministry that is so derelict as to allow them to exist.
Prayer, to the preacher, is not simply the duty of his profession, a privilege, but it is a necessity. Air is not more necessary to the lungs than prayer is to the preacher. It is absolutely necessary for the preacher to pray. It is an absolute necessity that the preacher be prayed for. These two propositions are wedded into a union which ought never to know any divorce: the preacher must pray; the preacher must be prayed for. It will take all the praying he can do, and all the praying he can get done, to meet the fearful responsibilities and gain the largest, truest success in his great work. The true preacher, next to the cultivation of the spirit and fact of prayer in himself, in their intensest form, covets with a great covetousness the prayers of God's people.
The holier a man is, the more does he estimate prayer; the clearer does he see that God gives himself to the praying ones, and that the measure of God's revelation to the soul is the measure of the soul's longing, importunate prayer for God. Salvation never finds its way to a prayerless heart. The Holy Spirit never abides in a prayerless spirit. Preaching never edifies a prayerless soul. Christ knows nothing of prayerless Christians. The gospel cannot be projected by a prayerless preacher. Gifts, talents, education, eloquence, God's call, cannot abate the demand of prayer, but only intensify the necessity for the preacher to pray and to be prayed for. The more the preacher's eyes are opened to the nature, responsibility, and difficulties in his work, the more will he see, and if he be a true preacher the more will he feel, the necessity of prayer; not only the increasing demand to pray himself, but to call on others to help him by their prayers.
Paul is an illustration of this. If any man could project the gospel by dint of personal force, by brain power, by culture, by personal grace, by God's apostolic commission, God's extraordinary call, that man was Paul. That the preacher must be a man given to prayer, Paul is an eminent example. That the true apostolic preacher must have the prayers of other good people to give to his ministry its full quota of success, Paul is a preeminent example. He asks, he covets, he pleads in an impassioned way for the help of all God's saints. He knew that in the spiritual realm, as elsewhere, in union there is strength; that the concentration and aggregation of faith, desire, and prayer increased the volume of spiritual force until it became overwhelming and irresistible in its power.
Units of prayer combined, like drops of water, make an ocean which defies resistance. So Paul, with his clear and full apprehension of spiritual dynamics, determined to make his ministry as impressive, as eternal, as irresistible as the ocean, by gathering all the scattered units of prayer and precipitating them on his ministry.
May not the solution of Paul's preeminence
in labors and results, and impress on the Church and the world, be found in
this fact that he was able to center on himself and his ministry more of prayer
than others? To his brethren at
Paul's attitude on this question
illustrates his humility and his deep insight into the spiritual forces which
project the gospel. More than this, it teaches a lesson for all times, that if
Paul was so dependent on the prayers of God's saints to give his ministry
success, how much greater the necessity that the prayers of God's saints be
centered on the ministry of to-day!
Paul did not feel that this urgent plea for prayer was to lower his dignity, lessen his influence, or depreciate his piety. What if it did? Let dignity go, let influence be destroyed, let his reputation be marred -- he must have their prayers. Called, commissioned, chief of the Apostles as he was, all his equipment was imperfect without the prayers of his people. He wrote letters everywhere, urging them to pray for him. Do you pray for your preacher? Do you pray for him in secret? Public prayers are of little worth unless they are founded on or followed up by private praying.
The praying ones are to the preacher as Aaron and Hur were to Moses. They hold up his hands and decide the issue that is so fiercely raging around them.
The plea and purpose of the apostles were to put the Church to praying. They did not ignore the grace of cheerful giving. They were not ignorant of the place which religious activity and work occupied an the spiritual life; but not one nor all of these, in apostolic estimate or urgency, could at all compare in necessity and importance with prayer. The most sacred and urgent pleas were used, the most fervid exhortations, the most comprehensive and arousing words were uttered to enforce the all-important obligation and necessity of prayer.
"Put the saints everywhere to praying" is the burden of the apostolic effort and the keynote of apostolic success. Jesus Christ had striven to do this in the days of his personal ministry. As he was moved by infinite compassion at the ripened fields of earth perishing for lack of laborers and pausing in his own praying -- he tries to awaken the stupid sensibilities of his disciples to the duty of prayer as he charges them, "Pray ye the Lord of the harvest that he will send forth laborers into his harvest." "And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray and not to faint."
During this affliction I was brought to examine my life in relation to eternity closer than I had done when in the enjoyment of health. In this examination relative to the discharge of my duties toward my fellow creatures as a man, a Christian minister, and an officer of the Church, I stood approved by my own conscience; but in relation to my Redeemer and Saviour the result was different. My returns of gratitude and loving obedience bear no proportion to my obligations for redeeming, preserving, and supporting me through the vicissitudes of life from infancy to old age. The coldness of my love to Him who first loved me and has done so much for me overwhelmed and confused me; and to complete my unworthy character, I had not only neglected to improve the grace given to the extent of my duty and privilege, but for want of improvement had, while abounding in perplexing care and labor, declined from first zeal and love. I was confounded, humbled myself, implored mercy, and renewed my covenant to strive and devote myself unreservedly to the Lord. -- Bishop McKendree
THE preaching that kills may be, and often is, orthodox -- dogmatically, inviolably orthodox. We love orthodoxy. It is good. It is the best. It is the clean, clear-cut teaching of God's Word, the trophies won by truth in its conflict with error, the levees which faith has raised against the desolating floods of honest or reckless misbelief or unbelief; but orthodoxy, clear and hard as crystal, suspicious and militant, may be but the letter well-shaped, well-named, and well-learned, the letter which kills. Nothing is so dead as a dead orthodoxy, too dead to speculate, too dead to think, to study, or to pray.
The preaching that kills may have insight and grasp of principles, may be scholarly and critical in taste, may have every minutia of the derivation and grammar of the letter, may be able to trim the letter into its perfect pattern, and illume it as Plato and Cicero may be illumined, may study it as a lawyer studies his text-books to form his brief or to defend his case, and yet be like a frost, a killing frost. Letter-preaching may be eloquent, enameled with poetry and rhetoric, sprinkled with prayer spiced with sensation, illumined by genius and yet these be but the massive or chaste, costly mountings, the rare and beautiful flowers which coffin the corpse. The preaching which kills may be without scholarship, unmarked by any freshness of thought or feeling, clothed in tasteless generalities or vapid specialties, with style irregular, slovenly, savoring neither of closet nor of study, graced neither by thought, expression, or prayer. Under such preaching how wide and utter the desolation! how profound the spiritual death!
This letter-preaching deals with the surface and shadow of things, and not the things themselves. It does not penetrate the inner part. It has no deep insight into, no strong grasp of, the hidden life of God's Word. It is true to the outside, but the outside is the hull which must be broken and penetrated for the kernel. The letter may be dressed so as to attract and be fashionable, but the attraction is not toward God nor is the fashion for heaven. The failure is in the preacher. God has not made him. He has never been in the hands of God like clay in the hands of the potter. He has been busy about the sermon, its thought and finish, its drawing and impressive forces; but the deep things of God have never been sought, studied, fathomed, experienced by him. He has never stood before "the throne high and lifted up," never heard the seraphim song, never seen the vision nor felt the rush of that awful holiness, and cried out in utter abandon and despair under the sense of weakness and guilt, and had his life renewed, his heart touched, purged, inflamed by the live coal from God's altar. His ministry may draw people to him, to the Church, to the form and ceremony; but no true drawings to God, no sweet, holy, divine communion induced. The Church has been frescoed but not edified, pleased but not sanctified. Life is suppressed; a chill is on the summer air; the soil is baked. The city of our God becomes the city of the dead; the Church a graveyard, not an embattled army. Praise and prayer are stifled; worship is dead. The preacher and the preaching have helped sin, not holiness; peopled hell, not heaven.
Preaching which kills is prayerless preaching. Without prayer the preacher creates
death, and not life. The preacher who is feeble in prayer is feeble in
life-giving forces. The preacher who has retired prayer as a conspicuous and
largely prevailing element in his own character has shorn his preaching of its
distinctive life-giving power. Professional praying there is and will be, but
professional praying helps the preaching to its deadly work. Professional
praying chills and kills both preaching and praying. Much of the lax
devotion and lazy, irreverent attitudes in congregational praying are
attributable to professional praying in the pulpit. Long, discursive, dry, and
inane are the prayers in many pulpits. Without unction or heart, they fall like
a killing frost on all the graces of worship. Death-dealing prayers they are.
Every vestige of devotion has perished under their breath. The deader they are
the longer they grow. A plea for short praying, live praying, real heart
praying, praying by the Holy Spirit -- direct, specific, ardent, simple,
unctuous in the pulpit -- is in order. A school to teach preachers how to pray,
as God counts praying, would be more beneficial to true piety, true worship,
and true preaching than all theological schools.
Stop! Pause! Consider! Where are
we? What are we doing? Preaching to kill? Praying to kill? Praying to God! the great God, the Maker of all worlds, the Judge of all
men! What reverence! what simplicity! what sincerity! what truth in the
inward parts is demanded! How real we must be! How hearty! Prayer to God the
noblest exercise, the loftiest effort of man, the most real thing! Shall we not
discard forever accursed preaching that kills and prayer that kills, and do the real thing, the mightiest thing -- prayerful praying,
life-creating preaching, bring the mightiest force to bear on heaven and earth
and draw on God's exhaustless and open treasure for the need and beggary of man?