PUBLIC-DOMAIN CHRISTIAN BOOK
The Preacher and His Models
Stalker, James · 63,714 words · 91 reading sections
Preface
Produced by Colin Bell, Jeannie Howse and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net * * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has | | been preserved. | | | | Obvious typographical …
476 wordsSECTION 2Introductory
Gentlemen, it would be impossible to begin this course of lectures without expressing my acknowledgments to the Theological Faculty of this University for the great honour they have done me by inviting me to occupy this position. When I look over the list of my predecessors and observe that it includes such names as Bi…
786 wordsSECTION 3Introductory
The former is the serviceable intellect at college, but it is the latter which makes the preacher. There may, indeed, here and there, be miraculous professors who attach more importance, and give higher marks, to the indications of the creative intellect than to the achievements of the receptive intellect. But few can …
779 wordsSECTION 4Introductory
Seriously, this is a tremendous difference. Criticism, however brilliant, is a comparatively easy thing. It is easier to criticize the greatest things superbly than to do even small things fairly well. A brief experience of practical life gives one a great respect for some men whom one would not at one time have consid…
674 wordsSECTION 5Introductory
The machine of religion is large and complicated, and it is manned by so many workers that they get in each other's way; but, with all this bustling activity, is the work done? This is the question which gives us pause. Has the amount of practical Christianity increased in proportion to the multiplication of agencies? …
661 wordsSECTION 6Introductory
In what direction does hope lie? It seems to me that there can be no more important factor in the solution of the problem than the kind of men who fill the office of the ministry. We must have men of more power, more concentration on the aims of the ministry, more wisdom, but, above all, more willingness to sacrifice t…
686 wordsSECTION 7Introductory
If we are the successors of the apostles, the apostles were the successors of the prophets, who did for the Church of the Old Testament what the apostles did for that of the New. In outward aspect and detail, indeed, the life of the prophets differed much from that of the apostles. In force of manhood and in variety an…
908 wordsSECTION 8Introductory
* * * * * There is one thing more which I should like to say before closing this somewhat miscellaneous introductory lecture. I would not have come to lecture to you on this subject if I were not a firm believer in preaching. If in what has been already said I have seemed to depreciate its results, this is only becaus…
931 wordsSECTION 9Footnotes:
[1] "A set o' dull, conceited hashes Confuse their brains in college classes, They gang in stirks, and come out asses, Plain truth to speak, An' syne they hope to speel Parnassus By dint o' Greek. "Gi'e me _a'e spark o' nature's fire_, That's a' the learnin' I desire, Then, though I trudge through dub an' mire…
648 wordsSECTION 10The Preacher As A Man Of God.
In accordance with the plan announced yesterday, I am to turn your attention in the next four lectures to the prophets of the Old Testament as patterns for modern preachers; and the special subject for to-day is The Preacher as a Man of God. To earnest minds at the stage at which you stand at present no question could…
712 wordsSECTION 11The Preacher As A Man Of God.
It has sometimes been attempted to explain these scenes away, as if they were not records of actual experience, but only poetic representations which the prophets prefixed to their writings, to afford their readers a dramatic prefigurement of the general scope of their prophecies, ideas being freely put into them which…
939 wordsSECTION 12The Preacher As A Man Of God.
2. It is worthy of note that the event is precisely dated. The chapter begins with the words, "In the year that King Uzziah died." There are forms of religious experience which are dateless--processes of slow and unmarked growth, which may spread themselves over years; but there are also crises, when experience crystal…
683 wordsSECTION 13The Preacher As A Man Of God.
First, the throne on which God sits is described: it is erected in the temple, and it is high and lifted up, for He is a great King. But no description is given of the figure seated on it; only His train--the billowing folds of His robes--filled the temple. Above the throne, or rather round it, like the courtiers surro…
687 wordsSECTION 14The Preacher As A Man Of God.
Isaiah's mind was one of the most sensitive and complicated ever bestowed on a human being; but it was now in the hands of its Maker, who knew how to touch it to fine issues. The Maker's design on this occasion was to produce in it an overpowering sense of sin; and what He did was to confront it with infinite holiness …
698 wordsSECTION 15The Preacher As A Man Of God.
Isaiah's preparation was completed in these three successive phases of experience; and now the purpose was disclosed for which he had been prepared. From aloft--from the throne high and lifted up--came the question, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" The King needed a messenger to bear a message and represent…
671 wordsSECTION 16The Preacher As A Man Of God.
But this may come later; and it may be the burden of another great moment of revelation. For, as I have hinted already in this lecture, the true Christian life is not all a silent, unmarked growth; it has its crises also, when it rises at a bound to new levels, where new prospects unfold themselves before it and alter …
819 wordsSECTION 17The Preacher As A Man Of God.
There comes to my mind a reminiscence from college days, which grows more significant to me the longer I live. One Saturday morning at our Missionary Society there came, at our invitation, to talk to us about our future life, the professor who was the idol of the students and reputed the most severely scientific of the…
541 wordsSECTION 18Footnotes:
[7] "One great part of the history of the Bible is the history of Calls."--DEAN CHURCH. [8] I am sorry to observe that even Mr. G.A. Smith, whose Commentary on Isaiah is distinguished not only by thorough scholarship but by what is far rarer in works of the kind--a profusion of just and inspiring ideas--at this point,…
787 wordsSECTION 19Footnotes:
[12] I do not know that I have ever seen an entirely satisfactory statement of what constitutes a call to the ministry. Probably it is one of those things of the Spirit which cannot be mathematically defined. The variety of the calls in Scripture warns us against laying down any scheme to which the experience of every …
516 wordsSECTION 20The Preacher As A Patriot.
We have committed ourselves, in our mode of dealing with the subject of these lectures, to the guidance of Scripture; and I have already, in the opening lecture, alluded to the doubt, which might arise in some minds that this method might carry us away from the living questions of the present age. But long experience h…
900 wordsSECTION 21The Preacher As A Patriot.
* * * * * The contents of the prophetic writings, notwithstanding their variety, easily fall into a few great masses. The chief are these three--Criticism, Denunciation and Comfort. 1. There is a great mass of what may be called Criticism. Standing on their watch-tower and turning their observation on the internal co…
848 wordsSECTION 22The Preacher As A Patriot.
Then there was Oppression. Excessive luxury in the upper classes is usually accompanied with misery among those at the opposite end of the social scale; because the rich in such a state of society are heartless, and not only neglect the poor, but oppress them. The prophets are full of the wrongs inflicted on the weak b…
912 wordsSECTION 23The Preacher As A Patriot.
3. The third great element in these books is Comfort. Not unfrequently, in delivering these predictions of approaching calamity, the prophets had to put themselves into opposition to popular forms of patriotism and incur the danger of being regarded as enemies of their country. This was especially the case with Jeremia…
708 wordsSECTION 24The Preacher As A Patriot.
It was then especially that they cultivated the most remarkable of all the elements of prophecy--the hope of the Messiah. Tragic as was the failure of the prophets themselves to raise the nation to the elevation which they saw so clearly to be her destiny, they all believed that what they had failed to do would yet be …
936 wordsSECTION 25The Preacher As A Patriot.
We seem to have arrived at precisely the point in the Church's history when her mind and conscience are to awake to this aspect of her duty. One of the most eminent members of the English bench of bishops said recently, that the social question is the question which the Christianity of the present day has to solve; and…
752 wordsSECTION 26The Preacher As A Patriot.
For this work new weapons will be required; and perhaps the principal of these will be legislation. The prophets appealed, as I have said, to kings and princes, because in their hands lay at that time the force of government. But this power has now passed, and is daily more completely passing, into the hands of the peo…
780 wordsSECTION 27The Preacher As A Patriot.
These sentiments exist in the minds of our people already; and we only need to foster them and impregnate them with a Christian element, in order to produce convictions about public duty which would have the most blessed results. We might train our people to feel keenly the woe of mankind and especially the moral blots…
499 wordsSECTION 28Footnotes:
[16] Rev. G.A. Smith. [17] These are Isaiah's images. [18] For our purpose in these lectures it is of no consequence whether there were two Isaiahs or only one. We are seeking to ascertain the leading features of the prophets; and, if we attribute to one person qualities which were distributed among two, this will ma…
455 wordsSECTION 29The Preacher As A Man Of The Word.
Gentlemen, in the lecture before last I spoke of the prophet's call to the service of God, and in the last lecture of the work itself which he had to do. To-day I am to speak of the instrument with which he did it. This was the Word; the prophet was a Man of the Word. In accomplishing his great and difficult work he w…
726 wordsSECTION 30The Preacher As A Man Of The Word.
But this remarkable knowledge of the thoughts of God was not given to the prophets for themselves. The philosopher may shut himself up in secret to study the laws of the universe and keep his conclusions to himself; and even the poet perhaps may be so happy in his own vision of beauty that he does not care to utter his…
778 wordsSECTION 31The Preacher As A Man Of The Word.
The prophets had to go amongst men, even if it were at the risk of life, and deliver the Divine message. They had to use every device to make it telling, striking in at every opportunity and giving line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little. They did not disdain the homeliest means, if it se…
905 wordsSECTION 32The Preacher As A Man Of The Word.
At whatever period these pictures of nature were laid up in the memory of Isaiah, they came back to him when he was engaged in the work of a prophet, and supplied the imagery by means of which the Divine truths which he heralded were made impressive and attractive to his countrymen and acceptable to all subsequent gene…
816 wordsSECTION 33The Preacher As A Man Of The Word.
I have seen the same truth put in another way. Tholuck, one of the most gifted of modern preachers, has made the remark that a sermon ought to have heaven for its father and the earth for its mother. Why, he asks, do one half of our sermons miss the mark? It is because, while they treat of the circumstances and relatio…
835 wordsSECTION 34The Preacher As A Man Of The Word.
The selection of the theme for preaching is to be determined chiefly by the power of the Word to lay hold of the conviction of the preacher. Or, if the subject is prescribed, as when one is lecturing through a book of the Bible, the points to be treated are to be determined in this way. Sometimes, as a preacher reads t…
792 wordsSECTION 35The Preacher As A Man Of The Word.
Many rules have been proposed for winning the attention of the congregation. Some have laid stress on commencing the sermon with something striking. Mr. Moody, the evangelist, whose opinion on such a subject ought to be valuable, recommends the preacher to crowd in his best things at the beginning, when the attention i…
737 wordsSECTION 36The Preacher As A Man Of The Word.
Wherein a good delivery consists it is difficult to say. It is the rekindling of the fire of composition in the presence of the congregation; it is the power of thinking out the subject again on your feet. This must not be a mere repetition of a byegone process, but a new and original action of the mind on the spot. Th…
671 wordsSECTION 37The Preacher As A Man Of The Word.
4. Allow me, gentlemen, in closing this lecture, to emphasize another sense in which the prophets were men of the Word, and in which they are worthy of imitation. They were masters of the Written Word. They not only spoke the word of God, but wrote it for publication, in a form sometimes more diffuse and sometimes more…
374 wordsSECTION 38Footnotes:
[23] The Servant of the Lord is a prophet; and in the descriptions of him in this character we can perhaps best see what was Isaiah's conception of a prophet. See especially ch. lxi. 1-3. [24] See Ewald's Introduction to _The Prophets_. [25] "Bonorum ingeniorum insignis est indoles, in verbis verum amare, non verba. …
694 wordsSECTION 39Footnotes:
[37] Adolphe Monod, himself a distinguished master of the art of delivery, gives some good hints on it in a paper on _The Eloquence of the Pulpit_, translated and published as an article in _The British and Foreign Evangelical Review_, January, 1881:-- "In general, people recite too quickly, far too quickly. When a m…
578 wordsSECTION 40The Preacher As A False Prophet.
Upon anyone who is studying the physiognomy of the age of the prophets there is one disagreeable feature which obtrudes itself so constantly that even in the briefest sketch it is impossible to pass it by. This is the activity of the false prophets.[38] It culminated in the lifetime of Jeremiah, whose whole career migh…
758 wordsSECTION 41The Preacher As A False Prophet.
They must have been a numerous and powerful body. Jeremiah mentions them again and again along with the king, the princes and the priests, as if they formed a fourth estate in the realm; and Zephaniah mentions them in the same way along with the princes, the judges and the priests. They evidently formed a separate and …
769 wordsSECTION 42The Preacher As A False Prophet.
The false prophets won and kept their popularity by pandering to the opinions and prejudices of the people. The times of Jeremiah were big with coming calamities, and he had to predict that these calamities were sure to come; for there were no signs of deep or genuine repentance, and, indeed, the time for repentance wa…
717 wordsSECTION 43The Preacher As A False Prophet.
Who were these false prophets, and how did there come to be such numbers of them? These are questions which an attentive reader of the Bible cannot help asking; but it is not by any means easy to answer them. The prophets whose names have come down to us are not by any means numerous; but, besides them, there must hav…
836 wordsSECTION 44The Preacher As A False Prophet.
* * * * * Having no message of their own, what were the false prophets to do? The best they could do was to repeat and imitate what had been said by their predecessors. It is with this Jeremiah reproaches them when he says, "Behold, I am against the prophets, saith the Lord, that steal My words everyone from his neigh…
698 wordsSECTION 45The Preacher As A False Prophet.
This also is a painful side of the subject. It is inevitable that the ministry should become a means of livelihood, and yet it is fatal to pursue it with this in view. It is the least lucrative of the professions, and yet, in the pressure of modern life, it may tempt men to join it merely as a profession. Even if it ha…
675 wordsSECTION 46The Preacher As A False Prophet.
The influence of such a travesty of the sacred office as these passages describe must have been deplorable; and without doubt it was one of the principal causes of the overthrow of the Jewish State. Jeremiah says expressly, that from the prophets profaneness had gone out over the whole land. They who, from their positi…
352 wordsSECTION 47Footnotes:
[38] As this subject is somewhat novel, the following collection of texts may be acceptable; but it is not given as exhaustive:-- Isa. ii. 6; xxviii. 7; xxx. 10, 11; xlvii. 13; lvi. 10-12. Jer. ii. 8, 26; iv. 9; v. 31; vi. 14; xiv. 13-16; xviii. 18; xxiii. 9-40 (_locus classicus_); xxvi. 8; xxvii. 9, 16; xxviii. xxix…
620 wordsSECTION 48The Preacher As A Man.
Gentlemen, in the foregoing lectures I have finished, as far as time permitted, what I had to say on the work of our office, as it is illustrated by the example of the prophets; and to-day we turn to the other branch of the subject--to study the modern work of the ministry in the light cast upon it by the example of th…
859 wordsSECTION 49The Preacher As A Man.
Undoubtedly St. Paul was one of these favourites of fortune. Nature designed him in her largest and noblest mould, and hid in his composition a spark of celestial fire. This showed itself in a certain tension of purpose and flame of energy which marked his whole career. He was never one of those pulpy, shapeless beings…
804 wordsSECTION 50The Preacher As A Man.
We think of the intellect of the system-builder as cold. But there is never any coldness about St. Paul's mind. On the contrary, it is always full of life and all on fire. He can, indeed, reason closely and continuously; but, every now and then, his thought bursts up through the argument like a flaming geyser and falls…
790 wordsSECTION 51The Preacher As A Man.
The nature of St. Paul's work no doubt immensely developed this side of his character, but, before passing from the subject, it is worth remembering how the circumstances of his birth and upbringing were providentially fitted to broaden his sympathies, even before he became a Christian. He was not simply a Jew, but a H…
772 wordsSECTION 52The Preacher As A Man.
We perhaps lay too much stress, however, on intellectual gifts and attainments. These are the only ones which are tested by our examinations in college; yet there are moral qualities which are just as essential. The polish given by education tells, no doubt; but the size of the primordial mass of manhood tells still m…
652 wordsSECTION 53The Preacher As A Man.
* * * * * Closely connected with the force of personality is the other power, which St. Paul possessed in so supreme a degree, of taking an interest in others. It is the manhood in ourselves which enables us to understand the human nature of our hearers; and we must have had experience of life, if we are to preach to …
905 wordsSECTION 54The Preacher As A Man.
If a minister allows himself to harbour sentiments of this sort, he is lost.[45] No one will ever win men who does not believe in them. The true minister must be able to see in the meanest man and woman a revelation of the whole of human nature; and in the peasant in the field, and even the infant in the cradle, connec…
832 wordsSECTION 55The Preacher As A Man.
But, while we respect the intelligence of the young, there is something else which we need to believe in still more. We do not half realise the drama of religious impression going on in the minds of children. We forget our own childhood and the movements excited in our childish breasts under the preaching of the Word--…
446 wordsSECTION 56Footnotes:
[43] "The Sybarites of to-day will tolerate a sermon which is delicate enough to flatter their literary sensuality; but it is their taste which is charmed, not their conscience which is awakened: their principle of conduct escapes untouched.... Amusement, instruction, morals, are distinct _genres_."--AMIEL. [44] The f…
471 wordsSECTION 57The Preacher As A Christian.
In the last lecture I spoke of St. Paul as a Man, showing how remarkable were his endowments and acquirements, and how these told in his apostolic career. But it was not through these that he was what he was. Great as were the gifts bestowed on him by nature and cultivated by education, they were utterly inadequate to …
922 wordsSECTION 58The Preacher As A Christian.
But he had to repent of his own righteousness as well as of his sin. He had inherited the passionate longing of the Jewish race for fellowship with God--the longing expressed a hundred times in the poetry of his fathers in words like these: "As the hart panteth after the waterbrooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O Go…
664 wordsSECTION 59The Preacher As A Christian.
Probably Paul's opposition to Christianity was from the first very specially opposition to Christ Himself. When he struck at the disciples, he was really striking at the Master through them. It is easy to conceive what an affront the pretensions of Jesus must have been felt to be by Paul. Jesus had been a man of about …
797 wordsSECTION 60The Preacher As A Christian.
3. After his conversion the whole life of St. Paul was comprehended in one word; and this word was Christ. There has often in modern times been a Christianity which has contained very little of Christ. Mr. Sage, of Resolis, one of whose quaint sayings I quoted in my last lecture, has solemnly left it on record that, wh…
725 wordsSource & rights
Public domain in the USA; original historical text digitized by Project Gutenberg.
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Historical Christian writing; not Scripture.