While the Spirit speaketh, express me that in
the latter times some shall depart from the
faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines
of devils, speaking lies and hypocrisy, having their
conscience seared with a hot iron, forbidding to
marry and commanding to abstain from meats which
God has created, to be received with thanksgiving
of them who believe and know the truth.
For every creature of God is good and
nothing to be refused if it be received
with thanksgiving.
For it is sanctified by the word of
God in prayer.
If thou put the brethren in remembrance of
these things, thou shalt be a good minister
of Jesus Christ, nourished up in the words
of faith and of good doctrine whereunto thou
hast attained.
But refuse profane and old wives' fables, and
exercise thyself rather unto godliness.
For bodily exercise profiteth little or temporarily, but
godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise
of the life that now is, and of
that which is to come.
This is a faithful saying and worthy of
all acceptation.
For therefore we both labour and suffer reproach,
because we trusting in the living God who
is the saviour of all men, especially of
those that believe.
These things command and teach, that no man
despise thy youth, but be thou an example
of the believers in word, in conversation, in
charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.
Till I come, give attendance to reading, to
exhortation, to doctrine.
Neglect not the gift that is in thee,
which was given thee by prophecy, with the
laying on of the hands of the presbytery.
Meditate upon these things, give thyself wholly to
them, that thy profiting may appear to all.
Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine.
Continue in them, for in doing this, thou
shalt both save thyself, and them that hear
thee.
May the Lord bless his word to us.
Brethren, as we come together this evening, I
want, if I may, to open my heart
to you in a special sense.
I had been looking forward to this conference
day much for many weeks, and to the
fellowship that we were to share together, and
to the opportunity which is so seldom given
to any of us who are here this
evening, I suppose, of being ministered unto in
the things of God.
And I had, in a very decisive way,
set aside the last two weeks, specifically from
all other outside engagements and concerns, in order
to give myself to preparation for this week's
conference.
Now, I have been in the ministry for
something like twelve years now, I suppose, and
I cannot recollect a time when I have
been so deluged with pastoral problems of the
most profound and difficult nature, and my whole
plans and programs so effectually torpedoed as they
have been in the last two weeks.
I have spent, I cannot count how many
hours, with a twenty-eight year old doctor
in practice who is a paranoid schizophrenic.
I have been in the middle of the
night, as well as during the day, dealing
with another woman who is mentally very seriously
ill.
I have been deluged by problems from two
families in my congregation, where the daughters have
fallen morally, and there has been agony in
the hearts of their parents.
And so there is a very real sense
this evening, in which I come to you
with all the plans and patterns that I
had previously intended to work through, demolished.
I was saying to someone earlier today, I'm
sure there was a time when this would
have worried me very much.
Largely, I think, and I think we all
know what this means, for the sake of
a certain kind of spiritual pride.
But I believe that God is sovereign in
this matter too.
And that in one sense, he has been
preparing the way for this conference in a
way that I would never have expected, nor
chosen.
And that there are certain things that are
on my heart this evening, in these hurried
hours that I have had to prepare for
this conference, which he means to say to
us during these days.
And therefore, there is a very real sense
in which I come to this conference with
my spirit molded by the way that God
has been dealing with us in our own
situation in Scotland in these last weeks.
And in a very special sense, cast upon
him.
And I come to, in the spirit of
being concerned, therefore, peculiarly, not so much to
be talking to you, or being the one
who is teaching, but rather to learn together
with you some of the things that seem
to me to be so utterly vital in
all our thinking about the work of the
ministry, which is our theme in these evenings.
Within this general concern, I believe that God
has purposed that we might focus our thinking
on these three evenings and three spheres.
This evening, upon the primary fact that above
all other things that we are called to
be, we are supremely called to be men
of God.
And that is to be the focus of
our thinking for this evening.
Tomorrow evening, I hope to draw your attention
to the essential nature of the work of
our ministry, and to suggest to you that
we are called supremely in that connection to
be ministers, or servants, of the Word of
God.
And on the last evening, I hope we
may deal with some of the things that
are involved, and which you will understand are
peculiarly close to my own heart and experience
in these days, in being called to be
shepherds of a flock.
But this evening, the focus of our attention
is upon what the Apostle Paul is thinking
of, I have little doubt, when he says
to Timothy, take heed unto thyself.
And to the doctrine.
And the priority is an apostolic priority, and
a priority which you and I may neglect
only at the profoundest peril for ourselves and
for our ministry.
There is a very real reason, and a
peculiar one, for this priority.
It is a reason which is peculiar to
the work of the ministry, and I reckon
is not to be found in any other
sphere of life, and that is that the
man you are conditions and largely determines the
character of the work that you do.
Now I suggest to you that that is
not true in almost any other sphere of
life, or in any other calling.
It is quite possible, you see, in almost
every other sphere of life, for a man
to divide these two things effectively, the man
he is, and the work he does.
For example, I have been in conversation in
the last few weeks with a medical practitioner,
who is a man with a brilliant mind,
and an extraordinary ability, particularly in diagnosis, and
who is recognized to be a brilliant physician.
But I can tell you this evening, because
you don't know who he is, that he
is a thoroughly bad character.
His ethics are atrocious, personally.
But he is still a first-rate physician,
and that combination is utterly impossible in the
ministry.
But you see, it is possible to divorce
these two things in other spheres of life.
It is utterly impossible in the ministry.
You cannot keep your true self hidden in
the ministry, which thereby becomes one of the
most effective and radical sins of a man's
character.
And if you are not found out, as
it were, in the early stages, brethren, the
day comes when the truth will out about
the inner hidden reaches of a man's life.
And in the ministry, you cannot keep it
hidden.
The man you are determines.
The work that you do.
And the reason for this is that there
is spiritually, as well as physically, a law
of bringing forth.
They brought forth every one after his kind,
and there is a sense in which that
physical principle can be applied to the spiritual
life of fruit bearing.
And we are sent by our Lord and
Master that we might bear fruit.
And it is impossible to gather grapes of
thistle.
And the fruit that we bear will be
in direct relation to the character that we
possess.
Robert Murray McShane, who had to come into
this address sooner or later, Robert Murray McShane
once said, What a man is on his
knees before God, that he is, and nothing
more.
And that brings us to our true size
in the ministry, brethren.
What a man is on his knees before
God, that he is, and nothing more.
Now you will see what this means.
It means that it is perfectly possible for
a man to be brilliantly trained theologically, greatly
gifted technically, thoroughly orthodox mentally, and reformed, and
yet for his ministry to be a complete
and unrelieved disaster.
Because it is possible to be thoroughly trained,
thoroughly orthodox, thoroughly reformed, and thoroughly dead.
And beloved, if you are a corpse in
the ministry, it doesn't greatly matter whether you're
a reformed corpse or a liberal corpse.
You're a corpse all the same.
And in these days, we need to pay
attention to this.
I believe.
The reason for this, of course, is that
it is men God uses.
It is men God anoints.
The Holy Spirit of God throughout the whole
of the scriptures comes upon men.
So I say again, the man you are,
largely conditioned.
The work that you do.
Now I'm well aware that that statement, taken
out of its context, could in some senses
be misleading.
But there is a basic principle here from
which we can never escape.
And as we seek to discover together some
of the marks of the man God wants
to make us, I make no apology for
suggesting to you that he must first of
all be a man of experience.
Now, of course, I am not referring here
primarily, not indeed at all for this purpose,
to that kind of experience which is so
often thrust upon people as a necessity when
they're preparing for the ministry and the experience
of the world and the experience of men
and getting to know people and getting alongside
the man on the factory floor and so
on.
This is all very helpful, I'm sure.
And I think it's wrong to be cynical
about that kind of experience.
But I'm referring rather to that personal experience
of God and of the gospel that a
man is called upon to minister.
My concern is expressed infinitely better than I
could express it in the words of Spurgeon
when he wrote, Better abolish pulpits than fill
them with men who have no experimental knowledge
of what they preach.
Now, brethren, we may all of us say
amen to that.
But let us wait to be sure that
we are not saying it about other people
and failing to apply this truth to our
own hearts.
Better abolish pulpits than fill them with men
who have no experimental knowledge of what they
preach.
Of course, there is a basic New Testament
provision which undergirds this.
One of the New Testament words used to
describe the ministry is the word matus and
concerns the whole thought of witnessing to something
that we have experienced and known for ourselves.
And I don't believe that this is confined
to the preserve of the first apostles.
Paul speaks addressing himself to the Ephesian elders
at Miletus, describing his ministry that he had
received from the Lord Jesus in these words,
testifying, he says, this is the ministry, testifying
to the gospel of the grace of God.
And there is this element in ministry, an
inescapable element of a testifying to something that
we ourselves have touched and handled, the reality
of which has broken in upon our lives.
And it is this that I would suggest
to you is the indispensable context of a
man's ministry.
Now, be careful, I am not saying that
it is the content of his ministry.
You will scarcely imagine that I'm suggesting that
our preaching should degenerate into the retailing of
personal experience.
But I insist with equal vigor that the
context of a man's ministry of the word
of God is inevitably this personal experience of
God and of the gospel and of the
things that he is preaching about, which is
the essence of the New Testament atmosphere in
which the word of God is ministered.
Our preaching is, of course, a heralding of
God's mighty act in redemption.
But my point is that we are to
preach it as men who are personally involved
in the redeemer.
In such a way that his redemption and
revelation have changed our own lives.
And if this is so, it will quite
inevitably break through.
The reality of the words that we are
preaching will first be born witness to, beloved,
by the Holy Spirit through our own lives.
And I wonder if it is not the
absence of this that is the explanation of
that cold and metallic touch that can creep
into a man's ministry so easily.
May I share with you, brethren, that there
are many people who sense amongst those of
us who hold the reformed position that very
coldness and detachment and clinical touch in our
ministry.
We are here this evening and in these
days to deal with realities.
And I suggest to you that there is
something of this that we need to come
before God with honest and open hearts about.
That spirit of harshness, that coldness, that sense
of distance and detachment.
Is it not here that we need to
learn afresh?
The need for a conviction that is born
of experience.
And I wonder if in suggesting to people
that we do not live, of course, by
our experience.
We live by the Word of God.
In our concern for being objective to which
I give my whole heart and mind.
I wonder if we may be in danger
of losing the need for that reality in
our own experience which is so vital.
Last summer when I was on holiday, I
took with me Helmut Thieleke's book to be
distinguished from the other man with a similar
name, Paul Thiele.
Helmut Thieleke is the German whose writings have
become very popular amongst many people today.
He has a book called The Trouble with
the Church.
I don't think that what he thinks is
the trouble with the church is really what
I think is the trouble with the church.
But there are some very valuable insights in
Thieleke's book.
And in one place he asks a question
which seems to me to be very vital.
And it's directed to ministers.
Is the center of gravity of your life
in the message you preach?
Or is it somewhere else?
This is what the world wants to know,
says Thieleke.
In these days of the advertising medium, when
the man who speaks so much about the
commodity doesn't take it himself at home.
The world wants to know is the center
of gravity of your life who preach the
everlasting tidings of God's grace in the message
that you preach?
Or is the center of gravity of your
life, however slightly, somewhere else?
You see what he means?
And with all the other things with which
one would disagree in his writings, one has
to open one's heart to this particular issue.
Where is the center of gravity of your
life?
Is it in these very things that you
are preaching?
And is that obvious to people because it's
true?
I think the greatest testimony that was ever
borne to a minister was borne by someone
who spoke of a minister in Scotland and
of the man behind it.
In these words, he is a man who
knows God, and he helps me to know
him better.
I suggest to you, brethren, that is the
kind of character we ought to covet.
The man you are conditions the work that
you do.
And the basic thing, the context in which
we minister a word is that we should
be men of experience, who have experienced the
very things that we are urging upon other
people.
Within the same context, may I suggest to
you in the second place, that the man
God calls us to be will be a
man under constraint.
I'm thinking, of course, of that description of
the Apostle Paul's ministry in 2 Corinthians chapter
5 verse 14, where he describes himself and
his fellow laborers as men under constraint.
The love of Christ constraineth us.
And the word, as you will know, is
the same word that Jesus used when he
speaks of the baptism with which he is
to be baptized.
I have a baptism to be baptized with,
and how am I straitened?
And it's the same word as constrained, until
it be accomplished.
And it is a word which doesn't mean
so much what we often take it to
mean, to be thrust out.
Here is what thrust out the great Apostle
over the ancient world, a flame for God.
He was constrained by the love of Christ.
The word rather means quite the opposite.
It means to be held in as the
banks of a river hold it in and
keep it on its course.
And this is the meaning of this word
which shed so much light upon the Apostle's
ministry.
He is a man under constraint, held by
the love of Christ.
I remember Alan Stutz at one of the
earliest student conferences that I ever attended, telling
us of his time in China, when he
used to see the river Yangtze at one
point in its journey, in this connection.
It has that one place, great banks, which
are a solid rock, which hold the river,
constrain it on its course.
I remember Alan Stutz telling us who were
students, and some of us students for the
ministry in these days, he said it does
three things to that river.
It gives it depth.
As these gray constraining banks hold the flow
of the mighty Yangtze, it plows its way
down into the depths of the river bed
and gives it vast depths at that point
where it is constrained.
It gives it dynamic, for the great power
of this surging water is harnessed by the
constraining force of the banks of the river.
And it gives it direction, as this river
cannot be dissipated and moved to and fro
like that other river in ancient times which
put a word into our language, the river
Meander.
Which is a picture of so many of
our lives.
The river Yangtze is at that point held
and given direction.
And beloved, if there are three things that
we need in our lives, and in our
ministries, and in our churches, and in the
lives of believers for whom God has given
us responsibility in these days, it is these
three things, is it not?
Now the apostle Paul found this constraining force
upon his own ministry, upon his own life.
And it was this that gave focus to
his life, and direction to his ministry.
And he is writing out of all the
context of the sufferings and perplexities and trials
and tribulations of the ministry in two Corinthians,
you'll remember.
It's there that he speaks about being perplexed
and cast down, about bearing about in his
body the dying of the Lord Jesus.
And yet when people ask, what is it
that keeps the man going through all these
years, through all these dark and harsh and
difficult days, his answer, the love of Christ.
And that not in any dissipated and emotional
sense.
Paul speaks of the love of Christ in
that passage in a very clear and very
decisive fashion.
He says the love of Christ constraineth because
we thus judge, we look at it this
way, this is how we understand it.
And brethren, it was his understanding of the
theology of the atonement that did this for
the apostle Paul.
It's not his love for Christ, it's Christ's
love for him.
And this is what New Testament theology did
for Paul.
It set a flame burning in his heart
that remained incandescent throughout all his days as
he went out over the ancient world and
saw men and women drawn to God.
And it is this kind of constraint that
we need to let God apply to our
lives so that we are men under constraint.
It was this that made him the kind
of man who says, this one thing I
do.
Brethren, are you known of a man of
one thing?
A man under constraint.
May I suggest to you in the third
place that this whole concern of being the
man whom God will be pleased in his
grace and mercy to use, will involve us
in not only being a man of experience
and a man under constraint, but a man
of true humility.
Now by that I mean something rather specific.
It's a very difficult thing to speak about
humility, isn't it, without becoming very self-conscious.
I'm not speaking now about that kind of
groveling attitude which has more to do with
Uriah Heap than with the New Testament, which
is very proud of its humility, you know,
and very conscious of it.
I hope we may be able to speak
of this outside of that atmosphere this evening.
You know about that book which I apologized,
Mr. Riesinger came from America entitled Humility and
How I Achieved It.
I'm speaking this evening about something which seems
to me to be tremendously important for our
present purpose in thinking about the ministry of
the Word.
Every calling has its peculiar patterns.
And the man who stands in the pulpit
and is set over a people, and he
is in a very real sense set over
them by God as the shepherd of the
flock, he is exposed to the thickening peril
of vain glory and pride and self-display.
Brethren, you will not have been long in
the ministry if you haven't discovered this already.
And it is something that we need to
face, because however much we may seek to
disguise our pride and our vain glory, there
is nothing so deadening in the ministry as
this, however you may disguise it.
And I suppose if God opens up pathways
to ministry in different spheres, if there are
larger numbers and you're called to minister in
a place where there are many people, you
are exposed to it in an ever more
incisive fashion.
And I say again, it's a deadly thing.
I wonder if you know of the young
man in Scotland.
It's said by some that it was in
Dr. Alexander White's Church of St. George's in
Edinburgh that he went up into the pulpit
on his very first Sunday in the church,
newly ordained, a brilliant young man who had
been made a very great deal of in
the circles in which he had moved, and
had been the first man of his year
in the university.
And he was very full of himself.
And he walked up into the pulpit in
St. George's on this Sunday when it came
his turn to preach, with great confidence and
great cockiness, and there he stood before the
people and surveyed them all.
And as he started to preach, suddenly his
words appeared to rush back down his throat.
And his mind went a ghastly blank, and
he forgot everything that he was going to
say.
And his tongue wouldn't obey the dictates of
his thoughts.
And he found himself confused and stumbling and
bungling his way through ten minutes.
And in deep shame and embarrassment, he sat
down and crawled down the pulpit steps at
the end, if it had been possible, with
his head between his knees, and came into
the vestry and lay over the table, and
when quite, if it was, he came back
in.
He said to himself, what went wrong?
And White said to him, Laddie, if you'd
get up the way you come down, you'd
have mere chance of coming down the way
you get up.
And there is a profound spiritual truth in
that.
And that is not said in order that
we might try to affect some kind of
mock humility, than which there is nothing more
obnoxious, I believe, in the sight of God,
but that we might learn the fact that
Paul was seeking to teach the Corinthians in
1 Corinthians chapter 3, you'll remember, where he
was faced with this problem of people glorying
in men.
And Paul deals with it largely by pointing
to the fact which underlies the point of
true humility in the ministry, and that is
this, that this work in which we are
engaged is God's work, and not ours.
Paul may plant, and Apollos may water, he
said, but planting and watering are not the
efficient causes of vegetation.
It is God that giveth the increase, and
then he turns to the neuter gender to
emphasize the point.
What then is Paul?
What is Apollos?
What thing is Paul?
What thing is Apollos?
There are no thing, only God is anything
in the ministry of the world.
It is God that giveth the increase, and
beloved, it is the increase that we so
greatly need in our day as in Paul's.
And it is this that our Lord is
emphasizing to the disciples.
I am the vine, ye are the branches.
The agricultural metaphor is the perfect one of
God.
And without me ye can do nothing.
Now of course, this does not mean that
there is no kind of work that you
can do in the ministry.
Even although God the Holy Spirit is breathed
right out of your ministry by your own
foolish pride, you can go on laboring and
as it is as though God is saying,
go on great preacher, without me.
So you see, it is possible for a
man to indoctrinate other men, even with reformed
doctrine, beloved, that only God can regenerate them.
And a great illustration of this principle, of
course, is the life of John the Baptist,
who had not merely as a motto pinned
on his wall, but as words that were
burned into his soul.
I must decrease, he must increase.
And John's ministry is introduced to us, you
will notice, in the gospels largely with an
emphasis not on who he was or what
he was doing, but rather on what he
wasn't.
Have you noticed that?
What a great encouragement to those of us
who are discouraged by ourselves and our own
weaknesses and failures.
He was not that light, he was not
that prophet, he was not what was he
then.
He was a voice crying in the wilderness.
But they heard John speak and they followed
Jesus.
You see, I tell you brethren, there is
no greater blasphemy under God's heaven than to
use the pulpit as a place for self
-advertisement or self-display or self-glory.
Now God is the God who has said,
my glory I will not give to another.
So what I have to ask myself this
evening before God, and I am opening my
own soul to, is the real honest longing
of my heart.
That when I am done, people may say,
what a preacher, or what a sermon.
Or is my longing that they might say,
surely the Lord is in this place.
This has been to me the house of
God and the gate of heaven.
Is that the longing that really consumes our
heart, brethren?
That's what I mean by a man who
has a true humility.
Remember Jesus warning in Matthew chapter 6, in
the Sermon on the Mount, about giving alms.
And it applies to the whole sphere of
Christian service.
When thou doest thine alms, he says, don't
do it as the Pharisees do, in order
that they might be seen of men.
Let not thy left hand know what thy
right hand doeth, that thine alms may be
in secret, and God, who seeth in secret,
shall reward thee openly.
Now there is a principle of reward, and
of purpose and intent, in these areas in
Matthew 6, where Jesus is speaking about the
secret concern.
And the principle appears to be, that the
man whose desire is for the reward of
men, gets it.
They do it that they might be seen
of men.
Verily I say unto you, says Jesus, they
have their reward.
They get the praise of men, but that's
all they get.
But you, when you do your alms, do
it in secret.
Let not your left hand know what your
right hand doeth, and God, your Father, who
seeth in secret, will reward you.
And the question is, you see, do I
need to be seen of men, in order
to be faithful to God?
Now brethren, let's examine ourselves.
What about the big occasion as opposed to
the little occasion, you know?
Am I more concerned to be faithful in
preparation, for instance, when it's the big occasion,
than I am when it's just the dozen,
or so in the quiet hidden corner of
ordinary people.
I tell you with utter honesty this evening,
I face this question when I go to
the couple of dozen people who meet with
me for Bible study on a Wednesday evening
in my congregation.
I face this question.
What about that occasion, as opposed to the
other, when there may be hundreds of people
there?
I don't think there are many of us
who don't need to search our souls about
this.
What is our aim and purpose?
Who are we unto please?
Oh, we say, we are not men pleasers.
Well, let him that thinketh he standeth take
heed.
This is why Spurgeon is said, on the
steps up to his pulpit, to have paused,
is he not, on every step, as the
adulation of the crowd was focused upon him,
and he stopped to say, on every step,
as he mounted up to preach the word,
I believe in the Holy Ghost.
That's it.
A man of true humility.
And if what I've just been saying is
true, then the last thing is a logical
corollary of this, and that is that if
we are to take heed to ourselves and
become the kind of men God uses, we
will be men of prayer, men of experience,
men under constraint, men of true humility, and
men of prayer.
If this work is God's work, you see,
and not ours, then in such a man's
life and ministry, prayer will not, as it
so often is, be supplemental.
It will be fundamental.
Let me quote you Spurgeon again.
Of course the preacher is, above all others,
distinguished as a man of prayer.
He prays as an ordinary Christian, else he
were a hypocrite.
He prays more than ordinary Christians, else he
were disqualified from the office which he has
undertaken.
The point is that the eternal worth of
any man's ministry is in direct proportion to
the validity of his secret life and his
walk with God.
It was Professor Finliss and I first heard
saying it in Scotland, but I gather that
it's a phrase that has arisen in many
contexts, but it does express the truth, that
the secret of failure is so very often
failure in secret.
There is of course a warning note that
needs to be sounded here.
All this does not mean that a minister's
private devotional life is a kind of lever
for service and a means of extorting
from God, as it were, the blessings that
we see we need.
Can you grasp the distinction that I'm seeking
to make here?
The moment a man's communion with God comes
down to this level of using it as
a lever because he sincerely believes that this
is the way to see God work, he
becomes guilty of using God for his own
end and of indulging in the blasphemy of
making God his servant.
I think this is an important thing.
You get the same kind of thing in
many people's personal lives in what is often
called the devotional reading of the Bible, you
know, where people say, I just read the
Bible devotionally to get a word to help
me through the day, you know the kind
of thing, to get a thought that is
going to carry me through the next 24
hours, you know.
If somebody professed their love for you, but
was only interested in you insofar as you
ministered to their own ends and purposes, you
would accuse them, or at least suspect them,
and justifiably, of covered love, wouldn't you?
And if they professed their devotion, it would
be legitimate to ask, to whom are they
devoted?
To me, or to themselves?
And there is a sense in which we
need to beware of the subtle peril of
only being interested in a life of communion
with God because we want the display of
God's power in order that we might feed
our own spiritual pride.
Do you know anything about this?
May I read to you a portion of
William Law's Serious Call?
Devotion is neither public nor private prayer, but
prayers, whether private or public, are particular parts
or instances of devotion.
Devotion signifies a life given or devoted to
God.
He, therefore, is the devout man who lives
no longer to his own will, or the
way and spirit of the world, but to
the sole will of God, who considers God
in everything, who serves God in everything, who
makes all the parts of his common life
parts of piety by doing everything in the
name of God and under such rules as
are conformable to his glory.
I suggest to you that that is the
foundation of the life of communion with God,
which ought to lie at the heart of
a man's life.
And this will relieve us of something of
that strained, unnatural atmosphere that creeps into some
of our lives.
It was my respected and trusted friend, the
Reverend William Still of Aberdeen, who once said,
it is the spiritual thing done naturally, and
the natural thing done spiritually, which distinguishes the
man of God.
I commend that to you for meditation, brethren.
Now, in the light of all this, I
think we need greatly to see this imperative
place of prayer in the context of our
basic need as Christian men and Christian ministers
to know God.
That is the reason that prayer is so
vital in the ministry, not as a lever
primarily.
But the primary reason it's so vital, and
from this, of course, the whole question of
our intercession and supplication for the work of
God's spring.
But the primary reason it's so vital is
that there is no greater need in the
ministry than that a man should know God.
I think it's not unnecessary, even amongst us
this evening, to distinguish between knowledge about God
and knowledge of God.
Those of us who have the concern which
is so entirely commendable for the diligent study
of theology need to watch over our souls
in a special way here.
Because, you see, it's possible to know about
God in the most detailed and profound and
orthodox way, and yet hardly to know God
at all.
I read you some words of Dr. Packer
from the Evangelical magazine of a few years
ago.
In this analytical and technological age, there is
no shortage of books on the church book
stalls or sermons from the pulpit on how
to pray, how to witness, how to read
our Bible, how to tithe our money, how
to be a young Christian, how to be
an old Christian, how to be a happy
Christian, how to get consecrated, how to lead
men to Christ, how to receive the baptism
of the Holy Spirit, for in some cases
how to avoid receiving it, how to speak
with tongues or how to explain away Pentecostal
manifestations, and generally how to go through all
the various motions which the teachers in question
associate with being a Christian believer.
Nor is there any shortage of biographies delineating
the experience of Christians in past days for
our interested perusal.
Whatever else may be said about this state
of affairs, it certainly makes it possible to
learn a great deal secondhand about the practice
of Christianity.
Moreover, if one has been given a good
bump of common sense, one may frequently be
able to use this learning to help floundering
Christians of less stable temperament to regain their
footing and develop a sense of proportion about
their troubles, and in this way one may
gain for oneself a reputation for being quite
a pastor.
Yet one can of all this and hardly
know God at all.
I think that's true, brethren.
Daniel 11 32 reminds us that it is
the people that know their God who shall
be strong and do exploits, and one is
therefore not to find, not surprised to find
amidst all the paganism and all the debauchery
of the atmosphere in which Daniel ministered, this
man of God standing out in his generation
as a man who was influencing rather than
influenced.
Nor is one surprised to discover that his
windows were opened towards Jerusalem, and he was
found bowed before God three times a day.
And one is not surprised to find either
that the great apostle himself, who breached the
strongholds of Satan in days full of complexities
and darkness, tells us that the consuming passion
of his life was that I may know
him.
All things I am ready to count but
loss for the excellency of this knowledge.
Now as we close this evening, I suggest
to you that it is here that our
ministry is really tested as the years go
by.
I know that the ministry brings us to
great physical tests and to great mental exhaustion,
but I don't think it's a man's physical
resources nor his mental capacity that is primarily
tested in the ministry.
It's his spiritual resources that are tested primarily.
And of course it's at this point that
we would all like someone to prescribe a
recipe for us.
A better Alexander than myself who wrote that
book which Ian lent me recently called Thoughts
on Preaching.
A companion volume I imagine to thoughts on
Christian experience or religious experience.
It says in it, Brethren I can give
you no recipe because God works with a
glorious individuality in his children.
And this is tremendously important for us to
grasp.
Perhaps all I can do before we close
this evening is to point out the need
for what, for the lack of a better
word, I have to call balance.
I think balance is one of these very
self-conscious and overworked words in these days,
you know.
A person who says I'm not this kind
of person, I'm a very balanced person.
Personally I'm always a bit suspicious of balanced
people, but for the lack of a better
word, the balance that I suggest to you
is this.
It's the balance first of all between an
honesty and realism on the one hand, and
a true wholeheartedness and devotion on the other.
I believe that the scriptures hold this kind
of balance.
It is possible you see for us in
an unbiblical way to be dishonest and discouraging
with each other about this, is it not?
Prescribing for other people things that are not
in the slightest bit true of ourselves.
Isn't this true?
Talking as if things were true of us
which in fact are not true.
You know one of the encouraging things to
me about biblical biography is that it is
so frank, so utterly realistic.
Talking to us about Elijah and his praying
for instance.
Elijah, a man subject to like passions as
we are, prayed.
Now that's not to discourage us and make
us feel the various worms when we come
away from this kind of picture, but to
encourage us to believe that God was able
out of the common clay of this man
to make a man whose life told for
God in his generation with all its dissoluteness
and disorder.
And the same is true of men like
Abraham, and the same is true of Moses.
And isn't this one of the encouragements that
we need?
You see I think probably it's possible for
us to come to some of the lives
of some of the great men of God
in the past and see that they rose
like old John Welsh in the middle of
the night.
And to imagine that this is a pattern
that God imposes upon everybody.
Reverend I tell you with all my heart
this evening that if I rose much in
the middle of the night, my next day
would be an utter disaster.
My physical constitution couldn't stand it.
Now I'm absolutely honest about this.
And personally I don't see very much difference
between the man who in older days went
to bed at nine and got up at
four thirty, and my going to bed at
twelve and getting up at seven thirty.
I don't see very much difference about this.
I don't think that there's anything specially sanctified
about three or four o'clock in the
morning.
Now I think we must be very honest
about this brethren.
And I think it's an important thing that
we should be.
We live in days of peculiar tensions and
strains and so on.
This is true.
That's the one side of the picture and
I don't want to under emphasize it.
But let me say this on the other
side of the picture.
Although the pattern of our life may be
different.
Although God deals with us all differently and
to try to stereotype a man's secret life
is disastrous.
But I believe that nonetheless, although all these
things are true, the very same kind of
wholeheartedness and devotion and passion that rule these
men's lives needs to rule ours.
However different the context may be, it is
possible to use the difference of our historical
context as an excuse for escaping the rapier
challenge of their devotion to God.
And this is the Bible.
You get it in the Apostle Paul.
I count not myself to have apprehended, not
as though I had already attained.
He has no unreal pretensions about himself.
He is ready to acknowledge certain things as
being true.
We are cast down.
We are perplexed.
He speaks about all the weaknesses of his
life.
But you get the thrust of it, don't
you, in these words.
I press toward the mark.
I count all things but loss and regard
them as garbage in order that I may
win Christ.
I am become all things to all men.
Do you see how everything he is ready
to let it slide for this one thing?
If by any means I might win some.
Now that's the kind of man I long
that God might make me and you.
And however different our circumstances may be from
each other and from other people who have
gone before us, this is the abiding factor.
And the second balance and the last thing
I want to say this evening is this.
That we have to hold the balance between
a true discipline on the one hand and
a proper Christian liberty on the other.
All I want to say about that is
that there is in this age of debunking
a tendency to debunk the idea of discipline,
you know.
Let's not be in bondage.
We are after all not under law.
We are Christ's freed men.
And of course there is a discipline which
can lead to bondage.
There is a very close friend of mine
who is in the ministry now whose life
is disciplined like iron.
And people find him singularly unapproachable and a
little hard.
We need to learn brethren that the fire
which burned in the hearts of men in
the early church was not only a fire
that consumed.
It was a fire that warmed.
There is a discipline which can lead to
bondage.
But I wonder if we do not even
more need to learn that there is a
liberty that can lead to license and carelessness
and dissertation of time and energy.
And I wonder if we don't need to
give our attention to this in the context
in which we live.
Not taking our patterns from other people and
strict stereotyping of our lives by them, but
realizing that God wants us to be men
who are redeeming the time.
Are you just using your time or are
you redeeming it?
Of course as we will be having to
say on Wednesday evening, it's possible for a
man to have his timetable so strictly organized
as you will imagine to return to what
I was saying at the beginning.
But when people do come on the phone,
when they knock on the door, when they
come with broken hearts, you resent them.
You know?
I don't think Jesus ever did that with
people.
May God make us men who are in
the deepest and truest sense.
Men utterly of one thing.
So that we may become men whom God
will use.
Whether in the way we specially want or
not doesn't really matter.
But that his name might be glorified and
that our terribly needy world might be blessed
and saved and that God may be all
in all.