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SCRIPTURE REFERENCE: GENESIS 32:24-30 (AMP).
For the Christian to understand prayer and to gain God kind of power through prayer, he or she must be consistent and indefatigable in the study of the Bible. Earnestly develop the spirit of humility till he or she becomes the embodiment of humility like Christ was.
Develop a seraphic devotion to Jesus Christ, and reach that high place where self is forgotten and the love of God and humanity becomes the all-absorbing thought and purpose. For our generation to renounce, sin, witchcraft, the occult and worldliness, we as avowed adherents of the Christian doctrine and values, must endeavor through committed efforts undergirded by true and pure Biblical doctrine and teaching to be "infused with heavenly ozone."
Man is looking for better methods, GOD IS LOOKING FOR BETTER MEN. Man is God's method. Cardinally, God uses men, and secondarily, resources through men. God places resources under men and not above men. A true man of God can effectively use every available resource to get his God-given assignment fulfilled without difficulty or complaint. God can use everything He has created to do His work.
Richard Baxter writes: "Recreation to a minister must be as whetting is with the mower--- that is, to be used only so far as is necessary for his work. May a physician in plague-time take any more relaxation or recreation than is necessary for his life, when so many are expecting his help in a case of life and death? Will you stand by and see sinners gasping under the pangs of death and say: "God doth not require me to make myself a drudge to save them?" Is this the voice of ministerial or Christian compassion or rather sensual laziness and diabolical cruelty?
Misemployment of time is injurious to the mind. It's very important to study the honor and glory of our Master Jesus if we are going to be effective in His hands! We must study universal holiness of life. Our whole usefulness as Christ ambassadors depends on this, for our sermons last but an hour or two; but our lives preach all the week. If Satan can only make a covetous Christian a lover of praise, of pleasure, of good eating, he has ruined your ministry and Christian life altogether. Give yourself to prayer, and get your texts, your thoughts, your words from God. Martin Luther spent his best three hours in prayer.
We are constantly on a stretch, if not on a strain, to devise new methods, new plans, new organizations to advance the Church and secure enlargement and efficiency for the Gospel. God's plan is to make much of the man, far more of him than of anything else.
MEN ARE GOD'S METHOD.
When God declares that "the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show Himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward Him." He declares the necessity of men and His dependence on them as a channel through which to exert His power upon the world. This vital, urgent truth is one that this age of machinery is apt to forget. The forgetting of it is as baneful on the work of God as would be striking of the sun from his sphere. Darkness, confusion, and death would ensue.
What the Church of Jesus Christ needs today is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men and women whom the Holy Ghost can use. Men and women of prayer. Men and women of mighty prayer. The Holy Ghost does not flow through methods, but through men and women. He does not come on machinery, but on men and women. He does not anoint plans, but men and women. MEN AND WOMEN OF PRAYER!
An eminent historian has said that the accidents of personal character have more to do with the revolutions of nations than either philosophic historians or democratic politicians will allow. This truth has its application in full to the Gospel of Christ, the character and conduct of the followers of Christ. CHRISTIANIZE THE WORLD, TRANSFIGURE NATIONS AND INDIVIDUALS. Of the preachers of the gospel it is eminently true.
The character as well as the fortunes of the Gospel is committed to the preacher. He makes or mars the message from God to man. The preacher is the golden pipe through which the divine oil flows. The pipe must not only be golden, but open and flawless, that the oil may have a full, unhindered, un-wasted flow.
The man makes the preacher.GOD MUST MAKE THE MAN. The messenger is, if possible more than the message. The preacher is more than the sermon. The preacher makes the sermon. As the life-giving milk from the mother's bosom is but the mother's life, so all the preacher says is tinctured, impregnated by what the preacher is.
The treasure is in earthen vessels, and the taste of the vessel impregnates and may discolor. The man, the whole man, lies behind the sermon. Preaching is not the performance of an hour. It is the outflow of a life. It takes twenty years to make a sermon, because it takes twenty years to make the man. The true sermon is a thing of life. The sermon grows because the man grows. The sermon is forceful because the man is forceful. The sermon is holy because the man is holy. The sermon is full of the divine unction because the man is full of the divine unction.
Paul termed it "My Gospel;" not that he had degraded it by his personal eccentricities or diverted it by selfish appropriation, but the Gospel was put into the heart and lifeblood of the man Paul, as a personal trust to be executed by his Pauline traits, to be set aflame and empowered by the fiery energy of his fiery soul. Paul's sermons-----what were they? Where are they? Skeletons, scattered fragments, afloat on the sea of inspiration! But the man Paul, greater than his sermons, lives forever, in full form, feature and starter, with his molding hand on the CHURCH. The preaching is but a voice. The voice in silence dies, the text is forgotten, the sermon fades from memory; but the preacher lives. The sermon cannot rise in its life-giving forces above the man. Dead men give out dead sermons, and dead sermons kill. Everything depends on the spiritual character of the preacher. "THE EFFECTIVENESS OF A PREACHER'S MESSAGE IS DETERMINED BY THE DEGREE OF HIS SPIRITUALITY!"
"Holiness to the Lord." So every preacher in CHRIST'S ministry must be molded into and mastered by this same holy motto. It is a crying shame for the Christian ministry to fall lower in holiness of character and holiness of aim than the Jewish priesthood.
Jonathan Edwards said: "I went on with my eager pursuit after more holiness and conformity to Christ. The heaven I desired was a heaven of holiness."
The Gospel of Christ does not move by popular waves. It has no self-propagating power. It moves as the men who have charge of it move. The preacher must impersonate the Gospel. Its divine, most distinctive features must be embodied in him. The constraining power of love must be in the preacher as a projecting, eccentric, an all-commanding, self-oblivious force. The energy of self-denial must be his being, his heart and blood and bones. He must go forth as a man among men, clothed with humility, abiding in meekness, wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove; the bonds of a servant with the spirit of a king, a king in high, royal, independent bearing, with the simplicity and sweetness of a child. The preacher must throw himself, with all the abandon of a perfect, self-emptying faith and a self-consuming zeal, into his work for the salvation of men. Hearty, heroic, compassionate, fearless martyrs must the men be who take hold of and shape a generation for God. If they be timid time servers, place seekers, if they be men pleasers, or men fearers, if their faith has a weak hold on God or His Word, if their denial be broken by any phase of self or the world, they cannot take hold of the Church nor the world for God.
The preacher's sharpest and strongest preaching should be to himself. His most difficult, delicate, laborious, and thorough work must be himself. The training of the twelve disciples was the great, difficult, and enduring work of Christ. Preachers are not sermon makers, but men makers and saint makers, and he only is well-trained for this business who has made himself a man and a saint. It is not great talents nor great learning nor great preachers that God needs, but men great in holiness, great in faith, great in love, great in fidelity, great for God---- men always preaching by holy sermons in the pulpit, by holy lives out of it. These type of preachers and Christians can mold a generation for God.
After this order, the early Christians were formed. Men they were of solid mold, preachers after the heavenly type-------heroic, stalwart, soldierly, saintly. Preaching with them meant self-denying, self-crucifying, serious, toilsome, martyr business. They applied themselves to it in a way that told on their generation, and formed in its womb a generation yet unborn for God. THE PREACHING MAN IS TO BE THE PRAYING MAN.
Prayer is the preacher's mightiest weapon. An almighty force in itself, it gives life and force to all.
The real sermon is made in the closet. The man---- God's man------ is made in the closet. His life and his profoundest convictions were born in his secret communion with God. The burdened and tearful agony of his spirit, his weightiest and sweetest messages were got when alone with God.
PRAYER MAKES THE MAN; PRAYER MAKES THE PREACHER; PRAYER MAKES THE PASTOR.
The pulpits of our day and generation are weak in praying. The pride of learning is against the dependent humility of prayer. Prayer is with the pulpit too often only official----- a performance for the routine of service. Prayer is not to the modern pulpit the mighty force it was in Paul's life or Paul's ministry.
Every preacher who does not make prayer a mighty factor in his own life and ministry is weak as a factor in God's work and is powerless to project God's cause in this world.
The sun gives life, but sunstrokes are death. Preaching is to give life; it may kill. The preacher holds the keys; he may lock as well as unlock. Preaching is God's great institution for the planting and maturing of spiritual life. When properly executed, its benefits are untold; when wrongly executed, no evil can exceed it's damaging results. It is an easy matter to destroy the flock if the shepherd be unwary or the pasture be destroyed, easy to capture the citadel if the watchmen be asleep or the food and water be poisoned.
Invested with such gracious prerogatives, exposed to so great evils, involving so many grave responsibilities, it would be a parody on the shrewdness of the devil and a libel on his character and reputation if he did not bring his master influences to adulterated the preacher and the preaching.
Paul says: "Our sufficiency is of God, who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life."
The true ministry is God-touched. God-enabled, and God-made. The Spirit of God is on the preacher in anointing power, the fruit of the Spirit is in his heart, the Spirit of God has vitalized the man and the Word; his preaching gives life, gives life as the spring gives life, gives life as the resurrection gives life, gives ardent life as the summer gives ardent life, gives fruitful life as the autumn gives fruitful life. The life-giving preacher is a man of God, whose heart is ever athirst for God, whose soul is ever flowing hard after God, whose eye is single to God, and in whom by the power of God's Spirit the flesh and the world have been crucified and his ministry is like the generous flood of a life-giving river.
The preaching that kills is non-spiritual preaching. The ability of the preaching is not of God. Lower sources than God have given to it energy and stimulant. The Spirit is not evident in the preacher nor his preaching. Many kinds of forces may be projected and stimulated by preaching that kills, but they are not spiritual forces. They may resemble spiritual forces, but are only the shadow, the counterfeit; life they may seem to have, but the life is magnetized.
The preaching that kills is the letter; shapely and orderly it may be, but it is the letter still, the dry, husky letter, the empty bald shell. The letter may have the germ of life in it, but it has no breath of spring to evoke it; winter seeds they are, as hard as the winter's soil, as icy as the winter's air, no thawing nor germinating by them.
The letter-preaching has the truth. But even divine truth has no life-giving energy alone; it must be energized by the Spirit, with all God's forces at its back. Truth un-quickened by God's Spirit deadens as much as, or more than, error. It may be the truth without admixture; but without the Spirit its shade and touch are deadly, its truth error, and its light darkness.
The letter-preaching is unction-less, neither mellowed nor oiled by the Spirit. They may be tears, but tears cannot run God's machinery; tears may be but summer's breath on a snow-covered iceberg, nothing but surface slush. Feelings and earnestness there may be, but it is the emotion of the actor and the earnestness of the attorney. The preacher may feel from the kindling of his own sparks, be eloquent over his own exegesis, earnest in delivering the product of his own brain; the professor may usurp the place and imitate the fire of the apostle; brains and nerves may serve the place and feign the work of God's Spirit, and by these forces the letter may glow and sparkle like an illumined text, but the glow and sparkle will be as barren of life as the field sown with pearls. The death-dealing element lies back of the words, back of the sermon, back of the occasion, back of the manner, back of the action.
The great hindrance is in the preacher himself. He has not in himself the mighty life-creating forces. There may be no discount on his orthodoxy, honesty, cleanness, or earnestness; but somehow the man, the inner man, in its secret places has never broken down and surrendered to God, his inner life is not a great highway for the transmission of God's message, God's power.
Somehow self and not God rules in the holy of holies. Somewhere, all unconscious to himself, some spiritual nonconductor has touched his inner being, and the divine current has been arrested. His inner being has never felt its thorough spiritual bankruptcy, its utter powerlessness; he has never learned to cry out with an ineffable cry of self-despair and self-helplessness till God's power and God's fire come in and fill, purify, and empower. Self-esteem, self-ability in some pernicious shape has defamed and violated the temple which should be held sacred for God.
Life-giving preaching costs the preacher much----- death to self, crucifixion to the world, travail of his own soul. Crucified preaching only can give life. Crucified preaching can come only from a crucified man.
Prayer and wrestling prayer makes that caliber of man. Prayer, in the preacher's life, in the preacher's study, in the preacher's pulpit must be a conspicuous and an all-impregnating force and an all-coloring ingredient. Prayer is not a little habit pinned on to us while we were tied to our mother's apron strings; neither is it a little decent quarter of a minute's grace said over an hour's dinner, but it is a most serious work of our most serious years. The character of our praying will determine the character of our preaching and entire Christian life.
Bishop Peter
Morgan.