More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 10, 2018 - March 1, 2019
OF COURSE THE PREACHER is above all others distinguished as a man of prayer.
He prays as an ordinary Christian, else he were a hypocrite. He prays more than ordinary Christians, else he were disqualified for the office which he has undertaken.
As a citizen, his country has the advantage of his intercession; as a neighbor those under his shadow are remembered in supplication.
He prays as a husband and as a father; he strives to make his family devotions a model for his flock; and if the fire on the altar of God should burn low anywhere else, it is well tended in the house of the Lord’s chosen servant—for he takes care that the morning and evening sacrifice shall sanctify his dwelling.
I take it that as a minister—he is always praying.
So should we all.
If his heart be in his work, he cannot eat or drink, or take recreation, or go to his bed, or rise in the morning, without evermore feeling a fervency of desire, a weight of anxiety, and a simplicity of dependence upon God; thus, in one form or other he continues in prayer.
He has peculiar temptations, special trials, singular difficulties, and remarkable duties; he has to deal with God in awful relationships, and with men in mysterious interests; he therefore needs
much more grace than common men, and as he knows this, he is led constantly to cry to the strong for strength, and say, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.”
If, in the future, you shall be called to sustain pastorates, large or small, if you become lax in secret devotion, not only will you need to be pitied, but your people also; and, in addition to that, you shall be blamed, and the day cometh in which you shall be ashamed and confounded.
While the unformed minister is revolving upon the wheel of preparation, prayer is the tool of the great potter by which he moulds the vessel.
All our libraries and studies are mere emptiness compared with our closets. We grow, we wax mighty, we prevail in private prayer.
Texts will often refuse to reveal their treasures till you open them with the key of prayer.
Who will be content to thirst when living waters are so readily to be obtained!
Prayer will singularly assist you in the delivery of your sermon. In fact, nothing can so gloriously fit you to preach as descending fresh from the mount of communion with God to speak with men. None are so able to plead with men as those who have been wrestling with God on their behalf.
A
truly pathetic delivery, in which there is no affectation, but much affection, can only be the offspring of prayer. There is no rhetoric like that of the heart, and no school for learning it but the foot of the cross. It were better that you never learned a rule of human oratory, but were full of the power of heaven-born love, than that you should master Quintilian, Cicero, and Aristotle, and remain without the apostolic anointing.
When we have done with preaching, we shall not, if we are true ministers of God, have done with praying, because the whole church, with many tongues, will be crying, in the language of the Macedonian, “Come over and help us” in prayer. If you are enabled to prevail in prayer you will have many requests to offer for others who will flock to you, and beg a share in your intercessions, and so you will find yourself commissioned with errands to the mercy-seat for friends and hearers. Such is always my lot, and I feel it a pleasure to have such requests to present before my Lord.
The minister who does not earnestly pray over his work must surely be a vain and conceited man.
He acts as if he thought himself sufficient of himself, and therefore needed not to appeal to God. Yet what a baseless pride to conceive that our preaching can ever be in itself so powerful that it can turn men from
their sins, and bring them to God without the working o...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
If we are truly humble-minded we shall not venture down to the fight until the Lord of Hosts has clothed us with all power, and...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
He will surely become a mere superficial talker, best approved where grace is least valued and a vain show most admired.
He cannot be one of those who plough deep and reap abundant harvests. He is a mere loiterer, not a laborer. As the preacher he has a name to live and is dead. He limps in his life like the lame man in the Proverbs, whose legs were not equal, for his praying is shorter than his preaching.
If any man here should venture to say that he prays as much as he ought, as a student, I should gravely question his statement; and if there be a minister, deacon, or elder present who can say that he believes he is occupied with God in prayer to the full extent to which he might be, I should be pleased to know him.
Writes his wife, “At the time of his health, he did rise constantly at or before four of the clock, and would be much troubled if he heard smiths or other craftsmen at their trades before he was at communion with God; saying to me often, ‘How this noise shames me. Does not my Master deserve more than theirs?’ From four till eight he spent in prayer, holy contemplation, and singing of psalms, in which he much delighted and did daily practise alone, as well as in the family. Sometimes he would suspend the routine of parochial engagements, and devote whole days to these secret exercises, in
...more
We not only ought to pray more, but we must.
The fact is, the secret of all ministerial success lies in prevalence at the mercy-seat.
Such is the mystery of spiritual anointing; we know, but we cannot tell to others what it is. It is as easy as it is foolish to counterfeit it, as some do who use expressions which are meant to betoken fervent love, but of oftener indicate sickly sentimentalism or mere
cant.
“To affect feeling,” says Richard Cecil, “is nauseous and soon detected, but to feel is the readiest way to the hearts of others.”
Let your fleece lie on the threshing-floor of supplication till it is wet with the dew of heaven. Go not to minister in the temple till you have washed in the laver. Think not to be a messenger of grace to others till you have seen the God of grace for yourselves, and had the word from his
mouth.
Time spent in quiet prostration of soul before the Lord is...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Herein I follow George Fox most lovingly; for I am persuaded that we most of us think too much of speech, which after all is but the shell of thought.
Quiet contemplation, still worship, unuttered rapture, these are mine when my best jewels are before me. Brethren, rob not your heart of the deep-sea joys; miss not the far-down life, by forever babbling among the broken shells and foaming surges of the shore.
If your ordinary prayers do not keep up the freshness and vigor of your souls, and you feel that you are flagging, get alone for a week, or even a month if possible.
We have occasional holidays, why not frequent holy days?
Times of humiliation and supplication for the whole church will also benefit us if we enter into them heartily.
“Dear friends, we really must be gone for a little while to refresh our souls in solitude,” our profiting would soon be apparent, and if we did not write Latin Vulgates, yet we should do immortal work, such as would abide the fire.
Moreover, if the observation be meant to imply that the hearing of sermons is not worshipping God, it is founded on a gross mistake, for rightly to listen to the gospel is one of the noblest parts of the adoration of the Most High.
It is a mental exercise, when rightly performed, in which all the faculties of the spiritual man are called into devotional action. Reverently hearing the word exercises our humility, instructs our faith, irradiates us with joy, inflames us with love, inspires us with zeal, and lifts us up towards heaven.
Be assured that free prayer is the most scriptural, and should be the most excellent form of public supplication.
If you lose faith in what you are doing you will never do it well; settle it in your minds therefore, that before the Lord you are worshipping in a manner which is warranted by the word of God, and accepted of the Lord.
Tertullian writes, “we pray without a prompter because from the heart.”[***] Justin Martyr describes the presiding minister as praying “according to his ability.”[†††]
All our faculties should concentrate their energy, and the whole man should be elevated to his highest point of vigor while in public prayer, the Holy Spirit meanwhile baptizing soul and spirit with his sacred influence; but slovenly, careless, lifeless talk in the guise of prayer, made to fill up a certain space in the service, is a weariness to man, and an abomination to God.
Had free prayer been universally of a higher order a liturgy would never have been thought of, and today forms of prayer have no better apology than the feebleness of extemporaneous devotions.
The secret is that we are not so really devout at heart as we should be. (Habitual communion with God must be maintained, or our pub...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Private prayer is the drill ground for our more public exercises, neither can we long neglect it without being out of order when before the people.
Our prayers must never grovel, they must soar and mount. We need a heavenly frame of mind.
Our addresses to the throne of grace must be solemn and humble, not flippant and loud, or formal and careless.
