From the Preachers Heart: 64 sermons and a series of 4 lectures

by Robert Murray M'Cheyne

Robert Murray McCheyne's sermons were spiritual and forceful - in many ways models for preachers today. They were also attended with wonderful power and fruitfulness when they were first preached. McCheyne was a man who stood out amongst his contemporaries - regarded as one whose grace and gentleness were obvious to all who met him.
He preached with urgency - 'as a dying man to dying men' - sermons as relevant today as when published over 150 years ago.

Genres: Theology

536 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Robert Murray M'Cheyne a minister in the Church of Scotland from 1835 to 1843. He was born at Edinburgh, was educated at the University of Edinburgh and at the Divinity Hall of his native city, where he was taught by Thomas Chalmers. He first served as an assistant to John Bonar in the parish of Larbert and Dunipace, near Falkirk, from 1835 to 1838. After this he served as minister of St. Peter's Church (in Dundee) until his early death at the age of 29 during an epidemic of typhus.

Not long after his death, his friend Andrew Alexander Bonar edited his biography which was published with some of his manuscripts as The Memoir and Remains of the Rev. Robert Murray M'Cheyne. The book went into many editions. It has had a lasting influence on Evangelical Christianity worldwide.

In 1839, M'Cheyne and Bonar, together with two older ministers, Dr. Alexander Black and Dr. Alexander Keith, were sent to Palestine on a mission of inquiry to the condition of the Jews. Upon their return, their official report for the Board of Mission of the Church of Scotland was published as Narrative of a Visit to the Holy Land and Mission of Inquiry to the Jews. This led subsequently to the establishment of missions to the Jews by the Church of Scotland and by the Free Church of Scotland. During M'Cheyne's absence, his place was filled by the appointment of William Chalmers Burns to preach at St. Peter's as his assistant.

M'Cheyne was a preacher, a pastor, a poet, and wrote many letters. He was also a man of deep piety and a man of prayer. He never married, but he did have a fiancée at the time of his death, Jessie Thain, who died heartbroken.

M'Cheyne died exactly two months before the Disruption of 1843. This being so, his name was subsequently held in high honour by all the various branches of Scottish Presbyterianism, though he himself held a strong opinion against the Erastianism which led to the Disruption.

M'Cheyne designed a widely used system for reading through the Bible in one year. The plan entails reading the New Testament and the Psalms through twice a year, and the Old Testament through once.

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really challenging collection of evangelistic sermons from the nineteenth-century Scottish preacher, Robert Murray McCheyne. The sermons are a fine example of how evangelistic preaching may also be doctrinal and can lead professing Christians to self-examination. Interestingly, even though he was a premillennialist, McCheyne believed that the papacy was the antichrist. This point is noteworthy because some modern premillennialists claim McCheyne as one of their own but diverge from him on this issue. He also believed that there was an analogical likeness between Old Testament Israel and Protestant Scotland, comparing the latter to Capernaum, which had been raised to heaven through the preaching of the gospel. Many modern Reformed types would jump to the conclusion that he was either teaching British Israelism or returning to the Mosaic covenant.