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.