Voices; Birth-Marks; The Man and the Elephant

by Mathew Joseph Holt

“A preacher whose soul is filled with the power and the zeal of the Holy Ghost, though he is a mender and caster of nets, has a greater message and is better fitted to interpret the Bible than the scribe lost in a theological hair-splitting discussion upon some phase of non-essential doctrine. A man’s own conscience is the best interpreter of his theology, especially if quickened by prayer, when he talks with God, and by the Scriptures, when God talks with him. Thus there becomes fixed in his soul the essential doctrine which nothing can shake.

“Again I have never been thoroughly convinced that predestination as taught in our creed is not tinctured with fatalism. To accept predestination, without a belief in fatalism, is to believe that man is a free moral agent; and this, as the years go by, I am inclined less and less to believe. I have a friend, a physician, full of theories, who contends that a child born with a misshapen head or diseased brain cells is frequently a born criminal; and that a surgeon’s knife may in rare instances transform such a criminal into a saint.

[pg 334] “Nor do I believe that a man once truly converted cannot fall from grace. While Calvin insists this is true, it is denied by Luther and Augustine. Man can only remain within the grace of God by constant struggle and endeavor and by insistent and persistent prayer. His spiritual life like his temporal has its days of sunshine and of shadow. The doctrine that once converted, you can never fall from grace, tends to a careless spiritual life and leads to discarding the teaching that all are sinners and life a succession of falls, a never ending struggle and prayer to live like the Master. Many a sinner has been saved who never had one thought about predestination. Belief in it is unessential for salvation. No soul who does not believe in it will be damned, if that soul believes in the Lord Jesus Christ, loves the Lord his God with all his heart and his neighbor as himself.

“The danger of educated religious organizations is that these non-essential doctrines are apt to suppress the growth of the real faith. There is a tendency to formalism, to doctrinal subtleties, to measuring the relative importance of each commandment, to spending time in fixing the character and location of hell, rather than striving to avoid it, to fixing the form of baptism, to word weaving, hair-splitting, letter worship; thus becoming blind leaders of the blind; eyes set upon unessential and exaggerated regalia, while the spirit loses sight of the light of the world.

“Think you a penitent sinner cannot be baptized, because there is not water at hand? Baptize him with sand. Think you that the ordinance of the Lord’s supper cannot be observed because the wine is spilled? Fill the vessel with water and the spirit of observance will symbolically transform water into wine, as the wine stands [pg 335] for the blood of Christ. Must the gospel of Christ remain unpreached because there are no theologically educated ministers to expound it? Do you propose to create a sort of purgatory in which these immature preachers may have an opportunity to ripen until you say they are fit harvesters for the grain, over-ripe and wasting?

“A seminary education is a good, but not the great thing. Shall you or the Master say who is fit to serve as his messenger? Would you have picked his twelve? Would you have chosen from the fishing village or from the school of Gamaliel or the Sanhedrin? Any of you would have considered himself more fitted to preach the Pentecostal sermon than Peter. Had you done so, it is probable there would have been no physical demonstrations and at most half a dozen conversions. Yet Peter was but a fisherman, filled with the power of the Holy Ghost and telling in his own heart to heart way what the Master had taught him in that itinerant seminary of one teacher and twelve students on the shores of Galilee. Who among you would have chosen Saul as disciple for the Gentiles, as he traveled the road to Damascus, anxious to continue his persecutions.

“I cannot claim because I am the graduate of a seminary and a classical college that God has given to me a greater perception and measure of the power of the Holy Ghost to lead sinners to repentance than to Samuel McAdoo; nor for the same reason that I and not he, am God’s minister. A preacher not fired with the Holy Ghost soon delivers his message.

“Brother Small, what has the Master taught these preachers of the Cumberland Presbytery that you and I may not know?

[pg 336] “So often when I look back over the days that are gone, recalling my follies, my mistakes, my presumptions and my prayer, my way, Lord, not yours—I drop upon my knees and pray—God be merciful to me a fool.

“Do not think that I condemn the faith of our fathers, or advocate an uneducated ministry. God can use the deformed, the broken vessel; He can make the crooked straight and the blind to see; His the greater glory, the more feeble the minister. God, Gideon, the three hundred, defeated the host of Midian. When it comes to the sacrifice, God will provide himself a lamb, but we should give as best we may for his service.