SECTION XX.

THE PASTOR’S INNER LIFE.

Ancient asceticism, in demanding for the ministry a hidden life of communion with God, gave voice not only to one of the profoundest intuitions of the Christian consciousness, but also to one of the clearest teachings of Scripture. The men who deal with spiritual things must themselves be spiritual. Our age, while rightly rejecting a perverted asceticism, is tending to the opposite error. It is intensely practical. “Action!” is its watchword. This practicalness often becomes mere narrowness and shallowness. It overlooks the profounder laws of the Christian life. Spiritual force comes from within, from the hidden life of God in the soul. It depends, not on mere outward activities, but on the Divine energies acting through the human faculties, God working through the man, the Holy Ghost permeating, quickening all the powers of the preacher, and speaking by his voice to the souls of the people. The soul’s secret power with God thus gives public power with men, and the mightiest influences of the pulpit often flow from a hidden spring in the solitude of the closet; for a sermon is not the mere utterance of man: there is in it a power more than human. Its vital force comes from the Holy Spirit. Jesus said: “It is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you” (Matt. x. 20). Its spiritual energy springs from something deeper than logic and rhetoric. As Bushnell has well said: “Preaching is nothing else than the bursting out of life which has first burst in or up from where God is among the soul’s foundations.”

Such was the teaching of Christ. In His farewell words to His disciples He promised “another Comforter”—one who should take His place among them and abide with them for ever. As He had walked with them an Instructor, Friend, Helper, so after His departure the Holy Spirit should dwell among them, teaching, inspiring, guiding them, a true and living Divine Presence ever with them and mighty to help. Blessed as His own bodily presence had been, the presence of the Holy Spirit was of still higher moment, for He declared that it was better for them that He Himself depart and the Spirit come; for the Spirit, whose office it is to take of Christ and show Him, should reveal the Christ-presence within them in accordance with His promise: “He that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I will love him, and will manifest Myself to him” (John xiv. 21); “I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you” (John xiv. 18). Without this Divine Helper He expressly forbade their entrance on the ministry, and as His last charge before He ascended He said, “Tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem until ye be endued with power from on high” (Luke xxiv. 49).

At the Pentecost the Holy Spirit descended, and how marvelous was His power! Plain as had been the words Jesus spake, the apostles yet utterly misconceived the most vital truths; but when the Spirit of truth came, the Gospel, in its grandeur and power, stood clearly revealed before them. The men who before had timidly cowered in the presence of danger now rejoiced that they “were counted worthy to suffer shame” for the name of the Lord Jesus (Acts v. 41). They whose selfish ambition had aspired to be “greatest in the kingdom of heaven” now forgot their mean rivalries, and were inspired with single-hearted consecration to the Master; and the multitudes who before had despised and rejected their words, now convicted “of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment,” bowed before this unseen, mighty Power, and cried out, “Men and brethren, what must we do?” (Acts ii. 37).

Now, it is plain that the Holy Spirit, this special “power from on high,” was promised, not to the Apostles only, but to the ministry in all ages. In the New Testament period He dwelt, a living, quickening Divine presence, in all the servants of Christ, revealing truth, inspiring faith, and making their words the power of God unto salvation. They prayed in the Spirit; they spake in the Spirit; they lived in the Spirit. The promise of Jesus was fulfilled: “Lo! I am with you alway” (Matt. xxviii. 20); for the Christ-presence was continually revealed in them—a revelation of Him, not, indeed, to the eye, but to the soul, and unspeakably more blessed than had been His bodily presence when on earth. Not the Apostle only, but every servant of God, could say: “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. ii. 20); and in the hour of peril, when all men forsook him, the Christian confessor triumphantly affirmed: “Notwithstanding, the Lord stood with me and strengthened me” (2 Tim. iv. 17). In every subsequent age the indwelling Spirit of God has been the fountain of power in the ministry; and the mightiest men in the pulpit, renouncing self-sufficiency, have confessed, with Paul: “Our sufficiency is of God, who also hath made us able ministers of the New Testament” (2 Cor. iii. 5, 6). Conscious of need, they have turned their souls upward to God, and this Divine Helper has entered and filled them; and all the faculties and culture of the man, intellectual, moral, and spiritual, have been transfused, elevated, enlarged, by this invisible but mighty Power. It has been truly said: “The virtue of an electric wire is not in the wire, but in its connection with the voltaic battery. The power of the minister is not in the polish of his style, the pictorialness of his illustrations, the fervor of his manner, the order and arrangement of his discourse, but in his living connection with God and his capacity to act as a connecting-link between God and the human soul. It is God in the soul which is the secret of true pulpit power.”

How, then, shall the pastor maintain an inner life such that he shall be “endued with power from on high” and God shall speak through him to the souls of men? In answer this I suggest as a means of chief importance:

I. The Habitual Practice of Secret Prayer.—For prayer is the bond which links the Divine power with the human. It is the channel through which God pours His life into the soul. It is the uplifted hand of man’s weakness taking hold on God’s strength. It calls down from heaven the sacred fire, which alone may kindle the preacher’s sacrifice. It has the most vital relations to the character and work of a pastor.

1. The relation of secret prayer to the spirit and purpose of the ministry.

Special dangers beset the pastor. The most sacred services, from their frequent recurrence, may come to be performed in a perfunctory spirit, and his life may thus degenerate into mere professionalism. Unconsciously he comes to meditate, read, and even pray with a view only to others and its effect on others. The sense of his personal relation to God is lost. As a public speaker a desire for popularity may unduly influence his preaching, and conspicuous position tempt his ambition, obscuring his vision of the great end of his ministry—the honor of Christ and the salvation of souls. The very respect which his office secures may foster spiritual pride and make him insensible to his defection in heart from God. Few men are environed by such subtle and powerful seductions to a false life as a Christian minister, and against these only a vivid consciousness of his high calling is an adequate safeguard. He is God’s ambassador, receiving his commission and his message, not from men, but from the Sovereign of heaven and earth. The souls of his congregation are entrusted to him, and the words he is charged to speak are the words of God’s saving power. “In them that are saved” he is “a savor of life unto life,” but “in them that perish” “a savor of death unto death” (2 Cor. ii. 15, 16). If faithful to his trust, he “shall shine as the brightness of the firmament” and “as the stars for ever and ever” (Dan. xii. 3); if unfaithful, the blood of souls will be found on him in the day of God’s inquisition. Now, only a distinct realization of these responsibilities as an ever-present, living force pervading his spirit will hold the minister in his inmost life true to Christ and to his work.

It is here prayer has its mightiest reflex power. It gives a vital sense of God and of spiritual realities. It lifts the life above the control of lower motives to a loftier moral elevation, with a purer atmosphere and a broader horizon. The whole man is elevated, ennobled, transfused with Divine life, as he holds communion with God. When Moses had been with God in the mount, his face shone with a glory such that Israel could not steadfastly look on it. It was when Jesus was praying that he was transfigured, “and His face did shine as the sun, and His raiment was white as the light” (Matt. xvii. 2). God imprints His own image on the soul that comes face to face with Him.

The inner life of a preacher always stands revealed in the pulpit; it transfuses itself through his preaching. No mere declamation, no arts of rhetoric, no dramatic simulation of emotion, can conceal the absence of spiritual life. Moral earnestness can never be assumed; it is the attribute only of a soul profoundly feeling the power and reality of Divine truth. The man, therefore, who would speak God’s Word with the pungency and fervor of a Bunyan, a Baxter, a Flavel, or a Payson must, like them, be constant and fervent in prayer. The springs of spiritual life opened in the closet will pour forth never-failing streams of life in the pulpit. Luther said: “Prayer, meditation, and temptation make a minister.” He himself is said to have spent three hours daily in prayer, and those mighty words which thrilled the heart of Christendom were the utterances of a soul thus glowing with the flames of devotion.

2. The relation of secret prayer to the apprehension of spiritual truth.

Spiritual truth is revealed only to the spiritual mind: “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; . . . neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. ii. 14). Spiritual susceptibility is the essential condition of apprehending spiritual truth. A soul instinct with Divine life, sensitive to Divine impressions, in sympathy with Divine things—this, and this only, can enter in to a realization of those great truths which constitute the Gospel. Without this the very message the pastor is charged to preach he himself will fail to apprehend. He may, indeed, see the Christian doctrines through the eye of an impassive logic, but such a lifeless intellectualism, even when abstractly correct, has no power. The theology of the pulpit is a theology vitalized by prayer and glowing in the heart as a great, living reality. The hearts of men are most surely moved by living truths vividly realized in the speaker’s soul. The love of God in the incarnation and death of His Son, the guilt and danger of the souls of men, the glories of the saved and the miseries of the lost,—these are not matters of cold intellection. To him who lives in the atmosphere of prayer they stand out as vivid realities. Such men, like Paul, “believe, and therefore speak;” and in words of burning fervor they utter these great truths and press them on the souls of men. Payson, on his death-bed, said: “Prayer is the first thing, the second thing, the third thing, necessary for a minister.” Whitefield spent hours of each day on his knees with God’s Word open before him, and it was from the audience-chamber of heaven he went forth to speak those marvelous words of power which stirred the souls of the multitude. These eternal truths thus passed in him beyond mere intellections; they took possession of the whole man, and he could but speak with tender pathos and holy boldness, as he saw light in God’s light, and the spiritual world was thus all ablaze with light around him.

Jesus Himself, the Chief Pastor, lived a life of ceaseless prayer. Pressed under the burden of souls, he waked while others slept. Sometimes He spent the whole night in prayer; at others, “rising up a great while before day,” He sought communion with the Father.

“Cold mountains and the midnight air
Witnessed the fervor of His prayer.”

And if He, the Sinless One, the God-man, must needs thus pray, if prayer was essential even to His inner life and to His power in the work assigned Him, how much great necessity must press on His weak, sinful servants! If communion with God filled so large a place in the life of the Chief Pastor, it surely should not have less place in the life of the under-shepherds.

II. The Habitual Self-Application and Self-Appropriation of Divine Truth.—The habit of viewing truth objectively in its relation to other truths or to other souls, rather than subjectively in its relation to one’s own soul, is one of the greatest dangers of the minister, because his work tends directly to keep uppermost in his thinking the needs of others. He may thus come to conceive vividly and to present strongly the most affecting and stupendous truths of the Gospel without the least thought of their relation to himself and their bearing on his own life and destiny. Nor is he in this necessarily insincere. He has an actual and strong conception of the truth and of its pregnancy with weal or woe to others, and in pressing it he is true to his present conviction; but his conception of it is purely in its relation to others, and secures no application to his own spiritual wants. Now, God’s only way, so far as we know, of saving and sanctifying an intelligent soul is through the truth; and this not truth conceived in the intellect as a mere object of thought, but truth conceived in the heart, entering into the center of a man’s being, and acting as a life-force in his deepest moral convictions and affections. “Born again by the Word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever” (1 Pet. i. 23), “Sanctify them through Thy truth, Thy Word is truth” (John xvii. 17), are passages which indicate an unvarying law of the Gospel. All spiritual life comes from the Holy Spirit, acting through Divine truth received into the soul. To this law God has not made the minister an exception. The measure of religious life in him, as in every man, is determined by the extent of this believing appropriation of Divine truth and its consequent living power in him. He may be, therefore, a learned theologian, holding in his intellectual vision a wide range of truth, while yet, from failure in heart appropriation of it, he is a dwarf in vital spiritual development, because Christian life grows not from mere knowledge, but from truth believingly appropriated.

The pastor, therefore, should cultivate the habit of applying and appropriating to his own soul the truths he preaches. He should habitually look at them in their relation to himself and take them into his own life by a distinct act of faith, which believingly, joyfully, appropriates them as belonging to him. Every truth thus received will become in him an added element of life, deepening and enlarging his religious consciousness and imparting a richer and more blessed experience. Then, from this fountain of life within, thus ever enlarged and enriched, he will present in the pulpit, not a dead system of doctrines, but a living Gospel which shall come with fulness of life to the people.

III. An Habitual Self-Surrender and Consecration to Christ and His Work.—Selfishness, in its more insidious forms, endangers the life of a pastor. Outwardly, by office, he is consecrated to the service of Christ, and for this very reason he is less likely to detect, deep down at the springs of his living, the presence and power of a self-love, in the form of pride, envy, self-will, self-indulgence, and ambition, which may be, after all, the controlling force in his inner life. The danger is here the greater because, its growth having been unperceived, the man is unconscious of its control, and because, with all “the deceitfulness of sin,” it lurks stealthily, but all the more potentially, within the sacred forms and associations of a consecrated office. Hence the necessity of frequent and rigid self-examination. A man must interrogate himself, and with careful introspection seek to detect the real forces that control his life. There should be pauses in his career when he will stand alone in the presence-chamber of the Omniscient One, and cry, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts; and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Ps. cxxxix. 23, 24). The best lives have found great value in such special seasons privately set apart for fasting, prayer, and self-examination, as the navigator, in the perils of his voyage, stops to take observation of the sun and stars and make certain what is his position and whither the winds and currents are bearing him. Then, with vision thus clarified, and in full view of his real position, he should make a distinct renewal of self-dedication to God, giving up himself, with all he is and has, unreservedly to Him.

Without this self-renunciation and self-devotion to Christ, as an habitual fact, the inner life will be without spiritual power. Jesus, in His promise of the Holy Spirit and of the Christ-presence, makes this the one, essential condition: “If ye love Me, keep My commandments, and I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter” (John xiv. 15, 16). A true consecration of self to Christ, therefore, assures the presence of the Holy Spirit as the revealer of Christ within the soul. This was the habitual attitude of the apostle Paul. He says: “The life that I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Gal. ii. 20). Self was nothing, Christ everything; for when confronted with peril of death, he said: “None of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the Gospel of the grace of God” (Acts xx. 24). Thus self-dedicated, he received the promise: The Spirit wrought in him mightily, filling him with Divine life and power. So utter was his self-abnegation, and so all-absorbing his love of souls, that, like Moses of old (Ex. xxxii. 32), he “could wish,” were it right and would it secure their salvation, to be himself “accursed from Christ” for them (Rom. ix. 3). With like self-devotion to souls, Rutherford, the eminent Scotch minister, while assuring his flock that they “were the objects of his tears, care, fear, and daily prayers,” said “My witness is above, that your heaven would be two heavens to me, and the salvation of you all as two salvations to me.” A ministry thus self-forgetting is of necessity a ministry of power; for God Himself works in it, as all history has shown.

IV. An Habitual looking Above for the Reward.—“Godliness” has “promise of the life that now is” (1 Tim. iv. 8); and nowhere, perhaps, is that promise more fully realized than in the pastorate in the present age. In social relations, in opportunities for culture, in friendships formed, in means of influence, in popular estimation, and even in temporal support, few positions in life have higher advantages or more agreeable surroundings. But, with all this, life, even in a faithful ministry, is, on its earthly side, rarely other than a disappointment; and the pastor who seeks reward in human applause or in any form of earthly hope, not only thereby excludes the Holy Spirit from his life but is also sure to find unrest and failure as the ultimate result. The rewards of the faithful pastor are from God and are of special magnitude and blessedness.

The rewards come, in part, in the present life. A faithful minister finds them alike in a clear conscience and a sense of the approval of God, and in his work itself and the blessed results following it. With all its care and toil, the ministry, to the man who knows his call of God to the work and devotes himself to it without reserve, is the happiest work on earth. “Sorrowful” he is, “yet always rejoicing.” Henry Martyn said: “I do not wish for any heaven on earth besides that of preaching the precious Gospel of Jesus Christ to immortal souls. I wish for no service but the service of God in laboring for souls on earth and to do His will in heaven.” Dr. Doddridge: “I esteem the ministry the most desirable employment on earth, and find that delight in it, and those advantages from it, which I think hardly any other employment on earth could give me.” Rutherford: “There is nothing out of heaven, next to Christ, dearer to me than my ministry.” Brown: “Now, after forty years’ preaching of Christ, I think I would rather beg my bread all the laboring-days of the week for an opportunity of publishing the Gospel on the Lord’s Day than without such privilege to enjoy the richest possessions on earth.” Such is the testimony of godly ministers in all ages, even in periods of bitter persecution. The conscious presence of Christ; the blessed privilege of declaring to guilty men God’s rich and free mercy; the delight in the work of saving souls and of ministering comfort and strength and hope to the sorrowing, the weak, and the despairing; the joy of communion with saints,—all these enter into the minister’s experience, and give to his work even on earth an unspeakably rich reward.

But the highest reward of the ministry is reserved in heaven. There they will “shine as the brightness of the firmament” “and as the stars for ever and ever” (Dan. xii. 3). “He that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal” (John iv. 36). Every soul won to Christ here will there be an occasion of eternal joy. Paul said: “What is our hope, or joy, or crown of rejoicing? Are not even ye in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ at His coming?” (1 Thess. ii. 19). Glorious beyond our thought is the reward set before every faithful Christian: he shall receive a “crown of righteousness” (2 Tim. iv. 8), a “crown of life” (James i. 12), “an eternal weight of glory” (2 Cor. iv. 17) and shall “shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of God” (Matt. xiii. 43); and all this intensified shall be the reward of the true pastor, according as he is faithful to his high calling from God.

Let the pastor, then, seek most of all to be faithful to Christ and His work. Let it be to him “a very small thing” that he “be judged” “of man’s judgment” (1 Cor. iv. 4) and let him ever cherish as of chief moment a clear conscience, finding his highest comfort in the sweet assurance of God’s approval. Be it his to have “respect unto the recompense of the reward,” and so endure “as seeing him who is invisible” (Heb. xi. 26, 27). Thus, will his life approximate that grandest of merely human lives—the life of him who declared, “As we were allowed of God to be put in trust with the Gospel, even so we speak, not as pleasing men, but God which trieth our hearts” (1 Thess. ii. 4), and at the close of which it was said, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith; henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day” (2 Tim. iv. 7, 8).

When of old, at the Sea of Galilee, the Lord reinstated Peter after his fall, He thrice with solemn emphasis proposed the question, “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me?” He thus taught for all the ages that personal love to Him is the primal condition for the sacred office. Without this as the central, fontal principle in the soul the pastor’s life will fail of spiritual power, but with this as its impulsive force he will be like the faithful minister seen by Bunyan’s pilgrim: he “had eyes lifted up to heaven, the best of books in his hand, the law of truth was written upon his lips, the world was behind his back; he stood as if he pleaded with men, and a crown of gold did hang over his head.”

Transcriber’s Notes.