PUBLIC-DOMAIN CHRISTIAN BOOK
The Preacher and His Models
Stalker, James · 63,714 words · 91 reading sections
The Preacher As A Christian.
Perhaps, however, we see even more suggestively how his whole mind was occupied with this subject by observing the way in which the mere incidental mention of the name of Christ sends him off into the most sublime statements regarding Him. For example, when he is speaking to husbands about loving their wives, the thoug…
781 wordsSECTION 62The Preacher As A Christian.
There is nowhere else on record--at least there was not till St. Paul had taught it to the Christian world--such a merging of one life in another. And it is all the more remarkable when it is considered how big and strong a nature St. Paul's was. If any other man might have coveted an original and independent life, sur…
671 wordsSECTION 63The Preacher As A Christian.
In all ages this has been the secret of devoted lives. It has made the great preachers--St. Augustine and St. Bernard, Luther and Wesley, Samuel Rutherford and McCheyne. It has made those too who have not been great in the eyes of men, but by their self-denying lives have made the kingdom of God to come. In one of his …
354 wordsSECTION 64Footnotes:
[48] The most charming chapter of Adolphe Monod's _Saint Paul_ is on the subject of these two paragraphs. It is difficult to quote from it, because one would like to quote it all; but I allow myself the pleasure of borrowing these golden sentences: "C'est qu'en dépit de tant de promesses faites à la foi, nous sommes to…
668 wordsSECTION 65Footnotes:
_Divine and Human._ Speak as though the mouth were God's; but let the voice be a man's. _First and Second Aims._ All gifts (presence, voice, gesture, culture, style, and so on) may be wings, if kept behind one's back; the moment they are seen they become dead weights. Two strings to one's bow will do with any shaf…
332 wordsSECTION 66The Preacher As An Apostle.
Gentlemen, in the two last lectures we have investigated two of the principal sources--perhaps I might say the two principal sources--of a minister's power--his manhood and his Christianity. These may be called the two natural springs out of which work for men and God proceeds. Out of these it comes as a direct necessi…
683 wordsSECTION 67The Preacher As An Apostle.
For example, the athlete in the racecourse has to keep himself in training and to put every muscle on the stretch. So St. Paul felt the obligation to put every power he possessed into his work. "Give thyself wholly to them," he says to a young fellow-labourer about his duties; and what he preached he practised. "Stir u…
831 wordsSECTION 68The Preacher As An Apostle.
* * * * * Taking up the responsibilities of his office in the spirit which I have described, St. Paul would have found any sphere, however limited, laborious. But, in point of fact, the sphere allotted to him was an enormous one. It was nothing less than the whole Gentile world. The known world was not, indeed, in th…
910 wordsSECTION 69The Preacher As An Apostle.
These incidents are glorified now by the influence of time, but, when they had to be endured, they were real and painful enough. To take but a single instance, what must it have been to a man of such sensitive honour and engaged only in doing good to be so frequently in the hands of the police and in the company of mal…
772 wordsSECTION 70The Preacher As An Apostle.
There is the work of visitation. The sick and the bed-ridden must be visited; and it is of enormous profit to visit the whole congregation from house to house. As Dr. Chalmers said, the directest way to a man's heart is generally through the door of his home. Acquaintance with the actual circumstances of the families o…
731 wordsSECTION 71The Preacher As An Apostle.
Of course this difficulty is greatest in the small sphere. Here the temptation is, to be overcome by the monotony of the situation, to allow the powers to stagnate, to feel that anything will do, and put the people off with that which has cost no exertion. "I know," says one who wields a trenchant pen,[58] "how plausib…
660 wordsSECTION 72The Preacher As An Apostle.
St. Paul was never a mere evangelist. The evangelist's work is to deal with the initial stage of the Christian life: he has to bring men to decision; and, when this is done, he passes on, leaving to other agencies whatever more may be required. An evangelist sometimes knows very little of what becomes of his converts a…
785 wordsSECTION 73The Preacher As An Apostle.
In a former lecture I spoke of the power of discerning in men and women of every class and condition the humanity which is common to all and speaking straight to that, without reference to the superficial differences which distinguish class from class and one individual from another. But ministerial sympathy has to emb…
675 wordsSECTION 74The Preacher As An Apostle.
One of the best opportunities of this kind is when parents come seeking baptism for their children. When you are speaking in their children's interest, men will welcome an amount of faithfulness which they would not endure at other times. You can show how much their children's welfare in time and eternity may depend on…
454 wordsSECTION 75Footnotes:
[54] An indication of the intensity with which St. Paul's mind worked upon the subject of the ministry is to be found in the number and variety of his metaphors for it. The following are those which I have noted, but there may be more--nurse (1 Thess. ii. 7), father (1 Cor. iv. 15), gardener (1 Cor. iii. 6), labourer (…
513 wordsSECTION 76The Preacher As A Thinker.
Gentlemen, in the foregoing lectures I have adverted very little to the studies, in preparation for the work of the ministry, with which you are at present occupied. Indeed, I have rather ostentatiously kept to a standpoint at some distance from the academic one, for reasons which I explained in the opening lecture. Bu…
757 wordsSECTION 77The Preacher As A Thinker.
St. Paul often expresses the intense intellectual satisfaction which Christianity brought him, and the joy he experienced in applying it to the solution of the problems of life. The light which Christianity cast on the universe was to him, he says, like the morning of creation, when God said, Let there be light, and th…
788 wordsSECTION 78The Preacher As A Thinker.
* * * * * Gentlemen, you are going to be teachers of Christianity, and this implies that you should yourselves have mastered it in thought. A certain number of people will be more or less dependent on you for the view they have of Christianity; and this really means the view they have of all the most important and sol…
661 wordsSECTION 79The Preacher As A Thinker.
How this is to be done, of course it requires wisdom to decide, and there will doubtless be different ways for different men and for different times. In a former generation a president of this college[61] preached in the College Chapel straight through the doctrines of Christianity, taking them up one by one in systema…
716 wordsSECTION 80The Preacher As A Thinker.
But, gentlemen, it is important for you to see that your opening ministry is not enveloped in mist simply because you have never made a real study of Christianity. This, I am afraid, is the commonest source of a vague theology. In a former lecture I have recommended a wide acquaintance with the masterpieces of literatu…
835 wordsSECTION 81The Preacher As A Thinker.
St. Paul had the heartiest scorn for intellectualism in religion divorced from experience; and it cannot be denied that it is this divorce which has brought contempt on the intellectual element in preaching. When doctrine is preached as mere dogma, imposed as a form on the mind of the preacher from without, no wonder i…
702 wordsSECTION 82The Preacher As A Thinker.
"And here I cannot but record the effect of an actual though undesigned experiment, which I prosecuted for upwards of twelve years among you. For the greater part of that time I could expatiate on the meanness of dishonesty, on the villany of falsehood, on the despicable arts of calumny; in a word, upon all those defor…
796 wordsSECTION 83The Preacher As A Thinker.
* * * * * There is nothing which I should more like to leave ringing in your ears than this remarkable statement of my great fellow-countryman. But I cannot close and bid you farewell without expressing the happiness which I have derived from these weeks spent in your society and thanking you for the extremely encoura…
271 wordsSECTION 84Footnotes:
[61] The earlier President Dwight. [62] "Great subjects insure solid thinking. Solid thinking prompts a sensible style, an athletic style, on some themes a magnificent style, and on all themes a natural style."--PHELPS, _My Note-book_. [63] "We owe it to the Church, we owe it to the time in which God has called us to…
432 wordsSECTION 85An Ordination Charge.[67]
I should like to connect what I have to say with a text of Scripture, which you may remember as a motto for this occasion. Take, then, that pastoral exhortation to a young minister in 1 Tim. iv. 16: "Take heed unto thyself, and to the doctrine; continue in them; for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself and them t…
768 wordsSECTION 86An Ordination Charge.[67]
This is what we have to fight against. The people we live among and the hundred details of our calling will steal away our inner life altogether, if they can. And then, what is our outer life worth? It is worth nothing. If the inner life get thin and shallow, the outer life must become a perfunctory discharge of duties…
678 wordsSECTION 87An Ordination Charge.[67]
This is your work; the Book is put into your hands to-day, that you may unfold its contents to your people, conveying them into their minds by all possible avenues and applying them to all parts of their daily life. It is a grand task. I cannot help congratulating you on being ordained to the ministry to-day, for this…
763 wordsSECTION 88An Ordination Charge.[67]
But preparation of this sort for the pulpit is not easy. It requires time, self-conquest and hard work. Perhaps the greatest ministerial temptation is idleness in study--not in going about and doing something, but in finding and rightly using precious hours in one's library, avoiding reverie and light or desultory read…
775 wordsSECTION 89An Ordination Charge.[67]
Yet take heed that your doctrine be such as will save them that hear you. What saving doctrine is has been determined in this land by a grand experiment; and it is only faithfulness to the history of Scotland, as well as to God and your people, to make it the sum and substance and the very breath of life for all you pr…
886 wordsSECTION 90An Ordination Charge.[67]
I esteem it one of the chief rewards of our profession, that it makes us respect our fellow-men. It makes us continually think of even the most degraded of them as immortal souls, with magnificent undeveloped possibilities in them--as possible sons of God, and brethren of Christ, and heirs of heaven. Some men, by their…
299 wordsSECTION 91*** End Of The Project Gutenberg Ebook The Preacher And His Models ***
[67] Delivered at the Ordination of the Rev. William Agnew, Gallatown, Kirkcaldy, 1879. * * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Typographical errors corrected in text: | | | | Page 67: humilitating replaced with humiliating | | Page 137: propets replaced with prophets | | Page 1…
197 wordsSource & rights
Public domain in the USA; original historical text digitized by Project Gutenberg.
Project Gutenberg source record →
Historical Christian writing; not Scripture.