Heralds of God/Chapter 5
Chapter V
THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE
"The zeal for God that is not according to knowledge is a zeal
that dies in the middle years by the pessimism of experience; but
the zeal that is fed by His broken Body and His outpoured Blood
devours us still, in an age of weariness and cynicism."
THERE is a Franciscan story which tells how the saint on one occasion invited a young novice to accompany him on a preaching expedition through the town, and how they passed through one street after another and eventually returned to their starting-point, and not a word had been spoken. "But, father," said the probationer, puzzled and disappointed, "I thought we were going to preach?" " We have preached," replied Francis, "we were observed as we walked. They marked us as we went. It was thus we preached."
You have chosen a vocation—or rather, Christ has chosen you for it—which more than any other calling in the world depends upon the quality of life and the total witness of character which by the grace of God a man may bring to it. "Preaching," inquires Bishop Quayle, "is the art of making a sermon and delivering it?"—and he answers his own question: "Why, no, that is not preaching. Preaching is the art of making a preacher and delivering that. It is no trouble to preach, but a vast trouble to construct a preacher." When Gehazi went at Elisha's command to resurrect the dead, he took the prophet's staff with him, but no miracle happened; for the virtue of the staff was negatived by the hands that held it. "I was confirmed," wrote John Milton, "in the opinion that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem." Homiletics may indeed be taught by books and lectures; but at the heart of everything stands the personal equation, and the real work is done, not on the level where a man acquires a knowledge of technique and rules and devices, but on the deep levels of self-commitment where he rigorously disciplines his life for love of Jesus Christ. One hesitates to say anything on a matter so intimate and sacred: here words can be but few and faltering. Yet it would be a poor service to analyse the elements of preaching and be dumb about what matters most. "Anything destined to be strong and efficacious in action," Father Martindale reminds us, "needs a drastic preparation of character." And if there is truth in the saying pectus facit theologum, it is no less true that the inner life makes the preacher.
Sometimes it will happen that your most carefully prepared sermon discomfits you by missing fire completely—a salutary if humbling experience. Then is the time to put some searching questions to your own soul: "Why did it fail so palpably? Was it because I had neglected the flame on my own altar? Can it have been that I was so busy preparing my sermon that I omitted to prepare myself?" Now, just as this discipline of self-preparation is necessary for every sermon a man preaches, so it must form the constant background of his total ministry. I am not suggesting a double standard of sanctification—one level of holiness for the Christian layman as he goes about his business and another for the ordained minister of the Word: for with God there is no respect of persons, and every Christian without distinction is committed to live for Christ with every atom of his being. But I am saying that if I presume to point out to others the heavenward way, while failing to bend all my spiritual energies to its pursuit, I shall receive from God the greater condemnation. The ambassador of Christ shares all men's involvement in sinful corruption, and it was the greatest ambassador who ever lived who confessed himself to be the chief of sinners. But the preacher is essentially a seer, bringing back to men first-hand reports of divine truth and authentic visions of that Jerusalem which is the mother of us all: and if he cannot induce the vision nor evoke it at will, he can at least keep clean the window through which his vision is likely to come. "Take heed unto yourselves, and to all the flock" was Paul's parting injunction at Miletus to the elders of the Church—to yourselves first, for only so can the hungry sheep be fed. You must believe intensely and with total conviction, if you are to persuade others to believe. Your own spirit must be subjected to the full force and challenge of Christ's ethic, must be energized, supernaturalized, if you are to bring God's help to bear upon the gaping needs of men. The trouble is, as Richard Baxter put it bluntly to the clergy of his day, that "many a tailor goes in rags that maketh costly clothes for others; and many a cook scarcely licks his fingers, when he hath dressed for others the most costly dishes." It is a solemnizing thought for any preacher that what he speaks to men in the name of God is going to be mightily reinforced or mercilessly negatived by the quality of life behind it. Chaucer summed it up succinctly when he wrote of his good priest:
Christes lore, and His apostles twelve,
He taught, and first he folwed it him-selve.
It might indeed be supposed that the very nature of the preacher's calling would guarantee an invincible fidelity and consecration. But all sacred things are double-edged; and if the tasks of the ministry may be a safeguard and a panoply they have also their peculiar perils, and they exact vengeance from those who handle them with undue familiarity, Robertson of Brighton was right when he spoke of "the hardening influence of spiritual things"; for the prophetic awe and wonder in presence of the revelation of God can all too easily deteriorate into a mere mechanical trafficking with the ordinances of religion. To quote Baxter again: "It is a sad thing that so many of us preach our hearers asleep; but it is sadder still if we have studied and preached ourselves asleep, and have talked so long against hardness of heart, till our own grow hardened under the noise of our own reproofs." There is no sure defence against that grim and tragic loss of reality and zeal and faith except in a daily renewed surrender of life to Christ, nor is there any easy alternative by which to evade the cost of this rigorous and surgical self-discipline and commitment. There is no by-pass road round Calvary. "He is like a refiner's fire, and He shall purify the sons of Levi."
Let us inquire, then, what manner of man the preacher must be in his inner life. What are the seals and marks of his apostleship? It is, of course, not possible here to explore the full range of this theme, or indeed to do more than touch upon certain distinctive qualities, singling them out from many others which might equally have been mentioned. I suggest the following points.
First, the true preacher will be a man utterly dedicated to his work. "This one thing I do." The Christian ministry opens a door into the most absorbing life-work under heaven; and there is something seriously wrong with the man who, entering it, is not wholly absorbed. Unless we are prepared, with joyous and deliberate abandon, to be mastered, dominated and controlled by the great task, we ought to thrust it from us once for all, and not mock Christ with tepid loyalties and divided interests. This kind of spiritual concentration is, of course, a totally different thing from the strained and stubborn austerity which refuses to relax. It is hardly likely that any preacher will enhance his efficiency by going from one year's end to another without a holiday or a hobby, as though it were glorifying God to ignore the Master's word, "Come ye yourselves apart, and rest awhile." Equally mistaken is the absorption which consists in shutting oneself off from life, dwelling remote from the common interests of market, street and home, out of touch with the crowding cares and hopes and joys and agonies that mould the lives of men. The condemnation of that attitude is that it is downright inhuman and terribly unlike Jesus. But the fact remains that the servant of the evangel—more than anyone else, more than scientist, artist, composer or man of affairs—must be possessed, heart and mind and soul, by the momentous enterprise that has laid its compulsion upon him.
It would be unnecessary to emphasize this, were it not that slackness is such an insidious peril. This common sin has beggared the rich promise of many a ministry and blunted the cutting edge of its spiritual power. The very conditions of a minister's work—which put into his own hands the control of his time and the ordering of his days—impose a peculiar responsibility. If he fritters time away in idleness, if he squanders in desultory reading of the newspaper and magazine reviews those precious morning hours which ought to be rigorously safeguarded for wrestling with the Word of God, if when Sunday comes he offers to his people sermons shoddy with lack of thought, he damages his troth to Christ and dishonours his high calling. He proves himself to be culpably impercipient of the deep spiritual needs and longings of those whom the great Shepherd has committed to his care. He has never heard the inarticulate crying of the hungry flock: "O refresh us, travelling through this wilderness." He is the hireling who careth not for the sheep.
What right (to put it no higher) have we to speak to the labouring and the heavy-laden, if we are not ourselves as busy as the hardest toiler amongst them? Common decency ought to tell us that to stand in a pulpit on Sunday, and presume to instruct in the things of God men and women who all the week before have been beating us in simple faithfulness to duty, is a mockery and a sham. Rudimentary as this consideration is, it nevertheless calls for emphasis and plain speaking. Beware the professional busy-ness which is but slackness in disguise! The trouble is that we may even succeed in deceiving ourselves. Our diary is crowded. Meetings, discussions, interviews, committees throng the hectic page. We are driven here, there, everywhere by the whirling machinery of good works. We become all things to all men. Laziness? The word, we protest, is not in our vocabulary. Are we not engrossed from morning till night? Do we not conspicuously spend our days under the high pressure of an exacting life? But God, who searches the heart, knows how much of our outward strenuousness is but a rationalization of a latent slackness. What does it all amount to—the whole paraphernalia of good works and religious machinery—if there is lacking the intense concentration on the message which is to deliver men's eyes from tears, their feet from falling, and their souls from death, the lonely wrestling with God at Peniel without which no blessing comes?
"We are seeking," cried Richard Baxter to his brother preachers, "to uphold the world, to save it from the curse of God, to perfect the creation, to attain the ends of Christ's redemption. And are these works to be done with a careless mind or a lazy mind or a lazy hand? O see that this work be done with all your might! Study hard, for the well is deep." It is indeed intolerable to be slack or lethargic in the preparation of a message upon which issues of such incalculable moment hang* What is at stake in our work is the lives of men. Every sermon is to be preached in the knowledge that for someone present it may be now the fulness of the time and the day of salvation- "I take you to record this day," exclaimed Paul, "that I am pure from the blood of all men." Dare we look such words in the face? There was a day when Ezekiel, caught up in the Spirit, heard a voice from heaven crying, "If the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned; if the sword come, and take any person from amongst them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at the watchman's hand." And as he pondered the vision, suddenly with terrific dramatic force the voice went on: "So thou, O son of man, I have set thee a watchman unto the house of Israel." Age after age, this has been the great prophetic motive. Always the man of God has been the watchman on the ramparts of the world. Always the preacher of the Word has known himself to be a sentinel, appointed to keep vigil over immortal souls. Always the pressure of the immense responsibility has constrained him to cry, "Necessity is laid upon me: woe is me, if I preach not the Gospel!" That is not rhetoric. It is not the vehement, declamatory talk of the pietist or the fanatic. It is the plain unemotional declaration of the man who has grasped the essential issues of his calling. "These sheep of the Saviour's flock, these blundering, sinning, suffering, lovable men and women, these I must render again to the Lord who has given them to me, these I must offer at the throne in righteousness: else—God will ask the reason why! Their blood will God require at the watchman's hand." It is when this ultimate challenge stabs our conscience that we learn to see slackness, that ruinous besetting sin of so many a ministry, in its true colours, and make our vows unto the Lord against it.
Redemptive work is always costly. There is no hope of ease for the faithful servant of the Cross, It is involved in the very nature of his task that he can never be at the end of it. Not his to evade the burden and the heat of the day: physical weariness, sickness of heart and bitter disappointment, the strain of the passion for souls, all the wear and tear of vicarious burden-bearing—these he will know in full measure. He may even find himself wondering sometimes why he ever accepted a commission in a warfare in which there is no discharge. He may have moods when a haunting sense of anticlimax overwhelms him. It is one thing to set out gallantly when the flags are waving and the drums summoning to a new crusade, but it is quite another thing to keep plodding on when the road is difficult and the initial impetus has spent its force and the trumpets of the dawn have ceased to blow. It is one thing to have inspirations: it is another to have tenacity. "My little children," wrote Paul to the Galatians, "of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you": a swift and startling turn of phrase giving a profoundly moving insight into the price of true Christian ambassadorship. For—
it is by no breath,
Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with
death!—
and if ever a man finds the work of the ministry becoming easily manageable and surmountable, an undemanding vocation without strain or any encumbering load of care, he is to be pitied, not congratulated: for he has so flagrantly lost touch with One whose ministry of reconciliation could be accomplished and fulfilled only through Gethsemane and Calvary. "Without shedding of blood there is no remission of sins." Unless something of the evangelist's life-blood goes into his quest for souls and into the word he brings them from the Lord, the quest remains fruitless and the word devoid of delivering power.
That the ministry should be regarded (as in fact it has sometimes been regarded) as a profession—a career whose main qualifications are a certain amount of organizing ability, tact and culture? the reputation of being a good "mixer" and a shrewd judge of men, some measure of facility of speech, and a decent level of piety—this is shocking and deplorable. No ministry is worth anything which is not first and last and all the time a ministry beneath the Cross. Let a man reckon the cost ere he closes with the call.
There are, indeed, mighty compensations and incomparably precious rewards. You will receive letters which you will treasure all your life as sacred, because they tell gratefully of some vision received, some challenge accepted, some discovery made of the wonderful friendship of Jesus; and when, for one reason or another, your work is taking more out of you than you care to tell, and disappointments are encountered, and the haunting question "What is the use?" stands at your door and knocks, you will thank God at such a time that it is possible by opening the drawer where these letters lie, and reading one or more of them again, to send the low mood flying, and to rally and comfort your soul with a sudden vision of the essential worth and splendour of the task, the amazing privilege of being in it at all, and the magnificence of the faithfulness of God.
The true preacher, then, is a man completely dedicated to the high mission on which he is sent forth. He will be resolute and vigilant, lest any secret slackness should invalidate the message he proclaims. Not that he will obtrude his labours, or take credit from his crowded days, or wish that anyone should know the burden of his toil. Nothing could be further from his thoughts: for he is so piercingly aware that the uttermost of his devotion is a paltry, miserable return for what Christ has done for him. "If there is anything," exclaimed Rabbi Duncan, "in which I would be inclined to contradict my Lord, it would be if I heard Him say? "Well done, good and faithful servant.'"
II
This first mark of the herald of Christ leads on inevitably to the second. He will be a man of prayer. Here again, of course, it is necessary to guard against any suggestion of a double standard—as though the cultivation of the devotional life were a professional obligation limited to the few, and not the manifest duty of all. "A man of prayer"—that must be the ideal, not only of the ordained servants of the Gospel, but of everyone who bears the Christian name. All are here alike, for the New Testament knows nothing of a possession of the Spirit as a priestly monopoly, and the life of devotion is meant to be normal Christianity. The basic reason why a minister must pray is not because he is a minister (that would savour of official piety, always an odious thing), but because he is a poor, needy creature dependent on God's grace.
That is fundamental. But is it not also evident that the weight of his peculiar responsibility must drive him to his knees? If he is taking his work seriously at all, there will be days when Moses' hot outburst to the Lord will echo in his heart: "Wherefore layest Thou the burden of all this people upon me? Have I conceived all this people? Have I begotten them, that Thou shouldst say unto me, Carry them in thy bosom? I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me." It is out of such a mood of desperate defeat and bankruptcy that there rises, like a bright and morning star, the discovery of prayer's unsearchable riches, its power to steady the staggering soul, to replenish the lost virtue and the nervous energy which the toil of the passion for souls has drained away. Day after day, year after year, you will be expending yourselves, giving out to others. You simply cannot face the strain, except on one condition: you must simultaneously be taking in from God.
Once there was lived upon this earth a life of terrible self-giving, yet of uttermost serenity. Do not we, who grow so hectic often and strained and tired and overburdened, long to share the secret of Christ's peace? It was the secret known to the mountain-tops where He outwatched the stars, to the olive trees in the garden which heard His voice at midnight, to the winds and waves that were His shrine while He communed with God. How shall any man be strong to do Christ's work to-day, with the purposefulness and passion and mastery of life that shine on every page of the Gospels, if he neglects Christ's hidden secret? Chalmers was indeed going to the root of the matter when he declared that most failures in the ministry were due, not to lack of visiting or of study or of organizational activity, but to lack of prayer.
There is more at stake in this than the reinforcing of your spirit or the culture of your private devotions. For whether your congregation be large or small a great part of your task on its behalf lies in the realm of intercession. I do not simply mean asking God to bless your people collectively—though, of course, you will do that-I mean praying for every family, each separate soul, by name. Let me assure you that this suggestion is entirely practicable, whether you have a hundred members or two thousand. Method and system, of course, are necessary; but is there any reason why prayer should not be methodical? Take your Communion Roll. Use it as a directory of intercession. Single out, say, three families each day. Mention each member of these homes by name. Visualize their circumstances. Think of their work, their difficulties, their temptations. Remember very specially any who may have been growing indifferent to religious ordinances and drifting away from the Church. Bear them individually upon your heart to the mercy-seat. From such concrete and particular intercession two results will follow. On the one hand, there will be a blessing for those for whom you pray. On the other hand, there will be revealed to you from time to time, even as you intercede for them, practical ways of helpfulness, new avenues of sympathetic understanding, opportunities of showing to this one or that other something of the kindness of God for Jesus' sake. And when you look into their faces on the Sunday, as you lead their worship and proclaim to them afresh the all-sufficient grace of Christ, that background of your hidden intercessions, of your pleading for them name by name, will lift your words and wing them with love and ardour and reality, God will not refuse the kindling flame when secret prayer has laid its sacrifice upon the altar. And you will prove in your own experience the truth to which that great soldier of the Cross, Samuel Rutherford, gave expression long ago: "I seldom made an errand to God for another, but I got something for myself."
Is it too much to say that revival in the Church depends upon the prayer-life of its ministers? Too often we take for granted that here at least all is well. But still to-day, as when the winds of Pentecost stirred the world, the first essential is the broken spirit and the contrite heart of those who preach the Word, the sense of dreadful inadequacy driving every apostle to his knees. To realize, face to face with the task, that it is hopeless trying to go on unless higher hands take hold of you; to know the feeling of utter incapacity which creates a trust that is vital just because it is desperate; to cry to God out of that depth of humiliation every day you live—this is to learn the secret of the apostles, whose very weakness was turned through the alchemy of prayer into their strongest asset, whose human inadequacy itself became the vehicle of the conquering might of Christ. "We have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the excellency of the power is of God, and not of us." It is when a man strikes rock-bottom in his sense of nothingness that he suddenly finds he has struck the Rock of ages. Then his ministry is supernaturalized, and through him the Spirit can act with power. "In Love's service," says the Angel in Thornton Wilder's play, "only the wounded soldiers can serve." And only those who have been wounded in the region of their human confidence, whose self-sufficiency has been shattered into supplication, only they can be the healers of this ailing world. Be sure of this, that if men are to be blessed by your ministry, prayer must be its alpha and its omega. "Our sufficiency is of God."
III
This brings us to the third characteristic note of the preacher's inner life. He will be a man marked by a great humility of heart. Nowhere surely are pride and self-importance and conscious striving after effect more incongruous and unpardonable than in the servant of the Cross, Yet pride would not be the basic sin it is, if it did not possess this demonic quality, that precisely where you would expect to find it lying dead for ever, there it reappears, insinuating itself in even subtler guise. "The final human pretension," Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, "is made most successfully under the aegis of a religion which has overcome human pretension in principle." "I am an apostle," wrote Paul to the Romans; "I magnify mine office"-for it is right to think greatly of a calling so momentous in its issues for the Kingdom of Christ and the souls of men. But that there can be a false magnifying of the ministerial office, Paul himself reminds us trenchantly in another passage. Read the fourth chapter of First Corinthians, and you will see the apostle's irony flashing like a rapier against the self-display, the acceptance of adulation, and all the stratagems of a latent egotism which too often have intruded themselves into the service of the Lord. Two hundred years ago, William Law in his Serious Call laid it down flatly that to serve Christ self-importantly is to be both a thief and a liar: "It has the guilt of stealing, as it gives to ourselves those things which belong only to God; and it has the guilt of lying, as it is the denying the truth of our state, and pretending to be something that we are not."
This, certainly, is true Biblical teaching. "Who maketh thee to differ from another? What hast thou that thou didst not receive? Why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?" Imagine a poor dauber setting his amateurish efforts alongside a Raphael or a Titian: "Yes, it is rather good, that work of mine!" What are our best words for Christ compared with the Christ of whom we speak? What is our uttermost of devotion in the presence of that blazing holiness? "All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags," all our anxious concern "Did I preach well to-day?" is dust and ashes in the presence of the Cross: that every mouth may be stopped before God.
Observe that there are three contributory factors here. The first we have noted already. It is the magnitude of the task. To build something of the New Jerusalem in your own parish and field of labour, to fight for social justice and the Christian ethic in the wider community, to carry upon your heart the sorrows and shames and sins of the souls committed to your care, to be amongst them as a witness and a herald, "to present" (as Paul put it) "every man perfect in Christ Jesus"—could you conceive any task more humbling in its appalling responsibility? There is a great sermon of John Donne's, delivered in the year 1624, in which he sets forth his conception of the awful burden on the preacher's heart. "What Sea," cries Donne, "could furnish mine eyes with teares enough to poure out, if I should think, that of all this congregation, which lookes me in the face now, I should not meet one at the Resurrection, at the right hand of God! When at any midnight I hear a bell toll from this steeple, must not I say to my selfe, what have I done at any time for the instructing or rectifying of that man's Conscience, who lieth there now ready to deliver up his own account and my account to Almighty God?" Is it to be wondered at that many a man of God besides Elijah and Jeremiah has tried to run away from a commission so crushing and intolerable? Nothing but the grace of God can hold you to it. The magnitude of the task is the first element in evangelical humility.
The second is the unworthiness of the preacher. Who are we to expound categorically the mysteries of God and the soul? Our best insights are so fragmentary, our ignorance so abysmal. Never forget that in your congregation there will be those who had been "born again" before you were born at all. You will be preaching to some who will always be "further ben" in the deep things of God than yourself. Must not that reflection replace false confidence with modesty? But ignorance and finitude are not, of course, the sum total of our unworthiness. "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips: mine eyes have seen the King." "Only once," wrote Dr. Alexander Whyte, "did God choose a completely sinless preacher." Our doom it is that with no atom of personal merit or deserving, with nothing indeed but broken contrition and the shame of sin's radical corruption, we have to tell of Jesus and His love. Let the preacher, charged to mediate the word of God to men, pause ere he mount the pulpit-steps and breathe the secret prayer, "God be merciful to me a sinner." There will be days when the sense of personal unworthiness smites and shatters us, until we cry "My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" It is then, by some miracle of divine lovingkindness, at such a moment of desolation, that there comes the angel, touching a man's lips with a live coal from the altar of God.
There is a third reason for the humility which will always mark the servant of the evangel. This is the fact that anything his work may achieve is God's doing, not his own. If visible results attend his ministry if souls are brought out of darkness into lights if the faithful are strengthened and the apathetic awakened and the spiritually dead resurrected (and, mark you, unless he is aiming at these things he has no right to be in the ministry at all), if success in this deep sense is granted, he will not seek to depreciate it or ignore it, for that would be dangerously like the sin against the Holy Ghost: but equally he will not take to himself one grain of credit for it, for it is the doing of the Lord alone. It is only God who can take the five loaves and the two fishes-our paltry, scanty offering-and make it a banquet for the hungry souls of men. Moreover preaching (as we saw in a previous lecture) is essentially worship, and in worship all human glorying is excluded, for the God whom we adore fills the whole horizon, and our mood is that of prostrate Abraham: "Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes." Spurgeon in one place describes the clergyman who says, "When I was preaching at such-and-such a place, fifteen persons came into the vestry at the close of the service, and thanked me for the sermon I had preached." And Spurgeon, unable to restrain himself, lets fly furiously at the complacent creature: "You and your blessed sermon be hanged! Take not to yourself the honour which belongeth unto God only."
All we can do is nothing worth, unless God blesses the deed;
Vainly we hope for the harvest-tide, till God gives life to the seed.
Here, in the knowledge that the human agent is nothing—vox et praeterea nihil—is the final source of the preacher's humility of heart. He will rejoice whenever another soul, through his ministry, stumbles upon the crowning revelation and breaks loose from its fetters and enters the Kingdom; but he will give God the glory. Flesh and blood have not revealed it, but only the Father in heaven.
IV
In the light of what has just been said, the fourth mark of the true preacher, to which we now pass, may appear at first sight paradoxical. He will be a man of authority. It is quite mistaken to suppose that humility excludes conviction, G. K. Chesterton once penned some wise words about what he called "the dislocation of humility." "What we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table." Humble and self-forgetting we must be always, but diffident and apologetic about the Gospel never.
When D. L. Moody first carried his evangelism into one of our great University centres, there was some initial opposition. His first meeting was persistently interrupted, punctuated with scoffing epithets. At last Moody broke out. "You jeered at the hymns," he exclaimed, "and I said nothing. You jeered at the prayers and I said nothing. But now you jeer at the Word of God, I would as soon play with forked lightning!" Surely the diffidence and lack of assurance which would be appropriate enough in the propagating of private theories or the giving of human advice become ludicrous and nauseating in the proclamation of a Word so swift and powerful and tremendous. "It is not God's ordinary way," cries John Donne, "to be whispering of secrets. For Publication of Himselfe He hath constituted a Church, And in this Church, His Ordinance is Ordinance indeed; His Ordinance of preaching batters the soule, and by that breach, the Spirit enters; His Ministers are an Earthquake, and shake an earthly soule; they are the sonnes of thunder, and scatter a cloudy conscience."
The very terms describing the preacher's function—herald, ambassador—manifestly connote authority. Far too often the pulpit has been deferential and apologetic when it ought to have been prophetic and trumpet-toned. It has wasted time balancing probabilities and discussing opinions and erecting interrogation-marks, when it ought to have been ringing out the note of unabashed, triumphant affirmation—"The mouth of the Lord hath spoken it!"
It is significant that when the vision of the glory of God struck Ezekiel prostrate to the ground, the first words that shattered the silence were "Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee." God wants no grovelling, faint-hearted creatures for His ambassadors: He wants men who, having communed with heaven, can never be intimidated by the world. You will remember how the same note sounds again in Paul's account of his conversion. "Who art Thou, Lord?" "I am Jesus whom thou persecutes. SBut rise, and stand upon thy feet: for I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make thee a minister." It is always thus in every age the ministers of the living Christ are made—the crashing, paralysing sense of abject worthlessness, the self-esteem broken and rolled in the dust, and then a man rising to his full stature as God's commissioned messenger. "Chief of sinners," "least of all saints"—such was Paul's self-estimate; yet with what royal, unqualified authority he proclaimed the word and the will of the Lord!
The Christian preacher is the bondslave of Christ and the servant of all: but let him not confound such apostolic servitude with spiritual servility. The Gospel is not servile: it is "mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds." Dr. G. L. Prestige, in his biography of the late Bishop Gore, has described a sermon Gore preached before the University of Oxford, in which he sought to distinguish between true humility and false deference. "Some who heard it long recalled the trumpet tones and accompanying snorts of derision with which he quoted the Magnificat, interspersing each passage with contemptuous cries of 'Servile?'" "Stand upon thy feet," said the voice to Saul of Tarsus, "for I will make thee a minister, delivering thee from the people": for to have stood before Christ is to be clothed with an authority that defies subservience and no face of man. To quote Donne again—"So the Apostles proceeded; when they came in their peregrination to a new State, to a new Court, to Rome it selfe, they did not enquire, how stands the Emperour affected to Christ, and to the preaching of His Gospel? This was not their way; They only considered who sent them; Christ Jesus: And what they brought; salvation to every soul." This is the note that modern preaching must recapture. For this is no time for Christ's accredited servants to be soft-pedalling their distinctive message; no time for that peculiarly unpleasant form of servility which regards it as a feather in the Church's cap if some scientist or philosopher or Brains Trust specialist speaks approvingly and patronizingly of our holy religion; no time to be watering down the radical and challenging content of the Christian faith to suit the taste of any vague indeterminate humanism that boggles at the supernatural. We shall never do Christ's work to-day unless-like our Master-we dare to speak with authority, and not as the scribes.
But whence comes this authority? It springs, first, from the fact that it is God's Word, not our own, that we proclaim. When that noble ambassador of Christ, Temple Gairdner of Cairo (whose life-story is one of the classics of missionary biography), was an under-graduate, he took some share in student meetings organized by one of the religious societies in the University. "Do I speak at a meeting?" he wrote in a letter to a friend, "I am asked, 'Are you better than those here, that you speak to them?' Nay, but Christ is better—I do not speak of myself but of Him." It is this that redeems our stammering lips from con- fusion, and gives the veriest sinner words that ring like iron and shine like flame. "You have not chosen Me," says Jesus—that would be too flimsy and fortuitous to be a basis for apostleship—"but I have chosen you": that rallies all the latent courage of the soul. It is "in Christ's stead," declared St. Paul, that we who in ourselves are fallible and sinful creatures announce the Gospel of reconciliation; and the preacher across whose consciousness that thrilling word—"in Christ's stead"—has pealed needs no other apostolic succession to invest him with the insignia of authority. He is not diffidently offering men the dubious results of his private speculation: he is standing on his feet to deliver to them, in the name of the King of kings, a word that cannot return void. He preaches as if the Lord God omnipotent were there at his right hand: as indeed God is. The keynote of his preaching is not "Thus I think": it is "Thus saith the Lord." The late Sir George Adam Smith has described the early years of Dr. Alexander Whyte's ministry in St. George's, Edinburgh, and the great preacher's influence on the student community in particular, to which at that time Smith himself belonged. "I remember how one of us coming out of church one day said: 'Well, till hearing Whyte I never realised that paradox of St. Paul, I … yet not I.' There was the natural man himself, the strong, gifted, ardent personality with his own features, accents and styles, and his own experiences, all of which came home to our hearts, but it was the Spirit of the Lord which we felt pouring through him." That penetrating analysis goes right to the roots of the secret of true preaching. "I—yet not I, but Christ!" Not mine the witness, not mine the cry and beseeching, not over my poor lips but out from the depths of the eternal breaks the word that is to convict and save. I plead with men, yet not I: Christ pleadeth in me. In Christ, God goes forth in action through the Spirit. "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear "
There is a second, subsidiary source of the preacher's authority. This is the testimony of the Christian centuries behind him and of the universal Church around him. Not as an isolated, lonely figure, intruding oddly upon the contemporary scene, does he stand in his pulpit to-day. What matter though his sphere of labour be thankless and obscure, and his own gifts and talents meagre and unimpressive? Behind him stand Spurgeon and Liddon and Newman and Chalmers and Baxter and Jeremy Taylor and Latimer and Luther and Francis and Augustine and Chrysostom and Paul. Those who belittle the vocation of the preacher prove the poverty of their own historic imagination: for behind every pulpit from which the Word is faithfully proclaimed to-day there stretches the august pageant of the gathering ages. It is an immensely thrilling experience to know, when you tell men of Christ the Lord, that your poor words are backed and reinforced by the witness of two thousand years. Indeed, the very indestructibility of the Church out of whose bosom you speak, its survival of desperate vicissitudes, its defiance of the gates of hell—this is itself impressive proof of the eternal significance of your ministry and vocation. If ever you feel lonely in your task—and there will be days when crashing loneliness besets you—remember who are your kith and kin, Columba and Xavier and Savonarola and Knox and Wesley and all the multitude who in every generation have preached the identical Christ whom you preach to-day, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one Cross, one victory, one mercy-seat, one building not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Nor need you turn your gaze to the past only. Lift up your eyes, and look around you; and realize that, while you stand solitary in your pulpit, yonder—at that very moment—beyond the walls of your church and out to earth's remotest bounds a great host of witnesses are publishing the same tidings which you now bear upon your heart. So the littleness and the inadequacy of the individual preacher are caught up into the context of historic Christianity; and his message rings, not with the dogmatism of a self-assured complacency, but with the authoritative testimony of a great cloud of witnesses, the glorious company of the apostles, the goodly fellowship of the prophets, the noble army of martyrs, and the holy Church throughout all the world.
Yet even this is not enough. The preacher proclaims God's word, not his own; and he proclaims it out of the midst of the Christian fellowship. But a third factor is needful to vest him in the authority of a true ambassador. He must possess the word—or rather, he must be possessed by it—as a living, personal experience. Why is it that two men, enunciating the very same truths, may differ utterly in results achieved? The one declares the salvation of Christ, and little or nothing happens. The other, using almost the identical words, declares the same salvation, and chords are set vibrating in a hundred hearts. It is in the realm of personal experience that the difference lies. There were certain Jewish exorcists, the writer of the Book of Acts narrates, who tried to do the works of God and cast out evil spirits by using the formula, "I adjure you by Jesus whom Paul preacheth." As if miracles could be wrought in the name of someone else's Christ! Are we to tell men to-day of a Christ whom the apostles preached, or Luther, or the Wesleys, or our own immediate fathers in the faith? It is not surprising that the sons of Sceva in the Book of Acts, adjuring their congregation by Jesus whom Paul preached, met the blunt retort—"Jesus we know, and Paul we know, but who are ye?" You may preach Paul's Christ or Calvin's Christ, and not break a single shackle of sin or bind up one broken heart. There is not authority enough in second-hand religion to rouse the listless and set the captives free. But how different it is when, like the apostle, the twentieth-century preacher can declare "my Gospel," when he is manifestly building not on rumour and hearsay but on the proved facts of his own experience, and when those hearkening to his word are constrained to say "There is a man who has been with Jesus!"
This, of course, is not to say that you are to keep talking about your own soul, or dragging your secret experiences into the light. Emphatically not: such self-exposure in the pulpit is apt to make all decent men and women squirm, and the note of autobiography soon becomes mawkish and insufferable, "Stand out of the way," men feel like saying to such a preacher, "and let us through to Jesus!" But if self-obtrusion is to be discountenanced, the fact remains that the only sermon the world wants to hear is one that throbs with the vitality of first-hand knowledge and experience. This alone carries authority and conviction. This leaves men saying, "God spoke to us to-day."
Therefore it is essential that, right on to the very end of his ministry, the preacher's own vision of God in Christ should be a growing and expanding thing. No doubt the last sermon that you ever preach on earth will contain the same Gospel with which you first launched out on the day of your ordination. Yet surely there will be a difference. For all along the road, God will have been speaking to you, enlarging your experience with new disclosures of His grace. And if, as we have seen, authority is born of personal apprehension of the truth, it is well to remember that such apprehension is never final: it is always, as Hosea expressed it, a "following on to know the Lord." God asks no man to face to-day in the strength of yesterday's grace, or to hoard for his sustenance tomorrow manna gathered to-day. "I will make thee a minister and a witness," said the risen Christ to Saul of Tarsus, "both of these things which thou hast seen, and of those things in the which I will appear unto thee": for beyond the Damascus vision there was a whole world of spiritual knowledge waiting to be explored, and when he lay in prison near the end he was reaching out to know Christ better still in the power of His Resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings. However long your ministry, there need be no danger of the blight of staleness and stagnation, if your personal experience of Christ is growing all the time. Here is the ultimate secret of authoritative preaching—a first-hand knowledge, never inert and static, never dependent merely on remembered episodes, shining and decisive God-encounters long ago, but always dynamic and developing, always with insight added to insight, and wonder piled on wonder, from the moment when you first gird on your armour for the fray, until the last sermon is preached and the long campaign is over and your work on earth is done.
V
We have been inquiring into the nature of the preacher's inner life. We have distinguished certain vital marks of his apostleship. There are others, too numerous to mention here. Let it suffice to call attention to one final, indispensable quality. He will be a man on fire for Christ.
God help the preacher who tries to ply this work with no overpowering sense of its urgency! When you remember, as you stand in your pulpit, that some around you there have been lifting you to God, to gird your soul with strength and your words with the authority of Jesus; that never a congregation gather, but some expectant souls are presents hoping and hungering for the open heavens and the vision of the Lord; that always there are some trembling on the verge of spiritual decision, so that for them this very service might be the hour of life's supreme encounter; that every one of those into whose faces you look is so infinitely precious that for their sakes Christ was willing to endure the Cross and despise the shame—when you reflect on this, must not your spirit catch fire, and all listlessness and formality be burned up in the glow of the evangel? Here is the source of authentic inspiration, "the demon of preaching," as it is sometimes called. When all is said and done, the supreme need of the Church is the same in the twentieth century as in the first: it is men on fire for Christ.
I beg you not to commit the fearful blunder of damping down that flame. It is, of course, understandable and right that you who are going out into the ministry should distrust, and set your faces against, the spurious fervour which notoriously brings discredit on the faith. But the pity is that there are preachers so frightened of this taint that they have actually done violence to the flame Christ has kindled within them, choosing deliberately an attitude of cool and imperturbable detachment, and perhaps even confounding frigidity with philosophic depth and logical precision with spiritual power. Let us have precision of utterance and clarity of exposition by all means: but even precision and logic are bought too dear if they stifle the living flame. The radical mistake, of course, is in supposing that precision and the heart on fire are somehow exclusive of each other. It is a supposition manifestly disproved by every page of the New Testament, but it can do untold damage to the Church. "I indeed baptize you with water," said John to his desert congregation, "but He that cometh after me shall baptize you with fire"; and the weakness of many an otherwise competent ministry is that it has been content with the first baptism and neglected the second, has tried to do with water what can be accomplished only with the fire of Christ. "She introduced me," said Frederic Myers of that noble woman Josephine Butler, "to Christianity as by an inner door: not to its encumbering forms, but to its heart of flame." That, under God, is your high calling; and how shall you tend the flame upon other altars if it is not burning on your own? The whole nation was destined to know the impact of the hour when John Wesley in the Aldersgate Street meeting-house felt his heart "strangely warmed" within him; and even in the wilder chaos of the twentieth century there is nothing which the Holy Spirit might not accomplish through a generation of preachers on fire for Christ.
Yours is the greatest of all vocations. You will stint no pains or labour to prepare for it. But do remember that there is nothing that can avail if the warmth of the Christ passion is lacking, nor any substitute for a heart that burns within you as He talks with you by the way.
I pray that God will mightily bless your ministry. May He fulfil and verify in your experience those words which stand in the enactments of Leviticus, but which must surely mean far more for you to-day than the writer of any code in Israel could ever comprehend: "THE FIRE SHALL EVER BE BURNING UPON THE ALTAR: IT SHALL NEVER GO OUT."