2 Our Sufficiency Is of God
But above all he excelled in prayer. The inwardness and weight
of his spirit, the reverence and solemnity of his address and behavior, and
the fewness and fullness of his words have often struck even strangers with
admiration as they used to reach others with consolation. The most awful,
living, reverend frame I ever felt or beheld, I must say, was his prayer. And
truly it was a testimony. He knew and lived nearer to the Lord than other men,
for they that know him most will see most reason to approach him with
reverence and fear. -- William Penn of George Fox
THE sweetest graces by a slight perversion may bear the bitterest fruit. 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 its 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 adulterate the preacher and the preaching. In face of all this, the
exclamatory interrogatory of Paul, "Who is sufficient for these things?" is
never out of order.
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 following 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 from 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. This 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 unquickened 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, its light darkness. The letter-preaching is unctionless, neither
mellowed nor oiled by the Spirit. There 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 holiest. 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 comes in and fills, purifies, empowers. 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, the travail of his own soul. Crucified preaching only
can give life. Crucified preaching can come only from a crucified man.
