11. Robert Murray McCheyne (1813–1843)
11
Robert Murray McCheyne
1813–1843
It is not great talents God blesses so much as great likenesses to Jesus. A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God.”
Those words were written on October 2, 1840, by Robert Murray McCheyne, pastor of St. Peter’s Church in Dundee, Scotland. They are typical of McCheyne, for “likeness to Jesus” was the emphasis of his life and ministry. “I heard you preach last Sabbath evening,” a stranger wrote him, “and it pleased God to bless that sermon to my soul. It was not so much what you said, as your manner of speaking that struck me. I saw in you a beauty in holiness that I never saw before.”
I wonder if this “beauty of holiness” is not a missing ingredient in ministry today. We hear people boasting that their pastor is a good expositor (and there is nothing wrong with that), a good counselor, a man who is “fun to be with”; we rarely hear people say, “Our pastor is a holy man of God.” The people in Dundee could say that of McCheyne.
Robert Murray McCheyne was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on May 21, 1813. His family discovered early that he was a precocious child: at the age of four, while recovering from an illness, he learned the Greek alphabet and was able to write the letters on his slate. He entered Edinburgh University in November, 1827, still an unconverted youth. The death of his brother David in 1831 stirred him deeply, and as a result he trusted Christ. That year, McCheyne entered the Divinity Hall and dedicated himself to the ministry of the gospel. One of his fellow students, Andrew A. Bonar, became his close friend; and it is Bonar who, in 1844, published The Memoirs and Remains of the Rev. Robert Murray McCheyne, today recognized as a great Christian classic.
He was licensed by the Presbytery (along with Andrew Bonar) on July 1, 1835; the following November he began his ministry as an assistant in the church at Larbert, near Stirling. From the very outset of his ministry, he withdrew himself in total dependence upon the Lord. He fed himself daily on the Word of God, and each Lord’s Day would share his spiritual nourishment with the congregation. “I see a man cannot be a faithful minister, until he preaches Christ for Christ’s sake,” he wrote in his journal, “until he gives up striving to attract people to himself, and seeks only to attract them to Christ.” We wonder what McCheyne would think of all the so-called Christian celebrities we have today—and the people who run after them.
On August 14, 1836, McCheyne was asked to be a candidate at a new extension church that had opened in May in Dundee (Andrew Bonar was also a candidate). The population of Dundee had grown in recent years to more than fifty thousand; and there was a desperate need for a church in the northwest corner of the expanding city. It would not be an easy place for ministry, for there was a great deal of poverty and vice, and the minister would have over four thousand souls in his parish. “A city given to idolatry and hardness of heart,” was the way the youthful preacher described Dundee. But then he added, “Perhaps the Lord will make this wilderness of chimney-tops to be green and beautiful as the garden of the Lord, a field which the Lord hath blessed!”
The church called McCheyne to be their pastor, and he was ordained and installed on November 24, 1836. He would minister at St. Peter’s less than seven years; he preached his last sermon there March 12, 1843, and was called home on March 25. But in those few years, he made an impact on Scotland that is still felt, and that spiritual impact has continued over the years and has spread throughout the church. The reason that McCheyne’s life and ministry continue to enrich us is because he was a true man of God.
To begin with, McCheyne was careful and consistent in his devotional life. It was his happy custom to spend time before breakfast reading the Scriptures (three chapters a day), singing hymns (he was an excellent musician), and praying. He followed the counsel of godly, seventeenth-century Anglican Jeremy Taylor: “If thou meanest to enlarge thy religion, do it rather by enlarging thine ordinary devotions than thy extraordinary.” This is good counsel for today. Far too many Christians are scurrying around looking for special meetings, thinking that extraordinary experiences will make them better Christians. In my own ministry in pastors’ conferences, I have discovered that too many ministers neglect their daily devotional time, or hurry through it, so they can get involved in “more important matters.”
Another factor was McCheyne’s sincere burden for souls. He wrote to his friend, Rev. W. C. Burns: “I feel there are two things it is impossible to desire with sufficient ardor—personal holiness, and the honor of Christ in the salvation of souls.” Early in his ministry, in 1834, when he heard that a sinner had turned to Christ through hearing him preach, McCheyne wrote in his journal: “The precious tidings that a soul has been melted down by the grace of the Savior . . . Lord, I thank Thee that Thou has shown me this marvelous working, though I was but an adoring spectator rather than an instrument.”
When McCheyne preached, it was out of a full heart of love for his people. He lamented in his journal: “In the morning was more engaged in preparing the head than the heart.” When his friend Bonar told McCheyne that his text the previous Sunday had been, “The wicked shall be turned into hell,” McCheyne asked, “Were you able to preach it with tenderness?” He used to pray, “Give me Thy gentle Spirit, that neither strives nor cries.”
He prepared his messages carefully and was a diligent student. “Beaten oil,” he used to say, “beaten oil for the lamps of the sanctuary” (referring to Exod. 27:20). He brought into the pulpit fresh manna that he gathered himself in his personal fellowship with the Lord. No borrowed sermons, no last minute concoctions. His sermons were considered long, but they were full of spiritual nutrition. He wrote to a friend, “I cannot say that my sermons are much shorter, though I have tried to shorten them.” He received many invitations to preach and had a difficult time refusing. In one of his last letters, he wrote, “I preached twenty-seven times when I was away, in twenty-four different places.”
McCheyne drew spiritual help from the great saints of the past. In his journal and letters, you find him mentioning such classics as The Letters of Samuel Rutherford (another saintly Scot), The Memoirs of Henry Martyn, The Christian Ministry by Charles Bridges, The Life and Journal of David Brainerd, Richard Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted, and The Works of Jonathan Edwards. How much richer we would be if we would refuse the books of the hour and discover again the books of the ages.
Because of his saintly life and Spirit-anointed ministry, McCheyne was envied by some ministers and criticized by others, but he maintained a loving attitude toward all. In fact, he rejoiced at the blessings God gave to his brethren in the ministry. While McCheyne was on a missionary tour for the Church of Scotland in 1839, a revival broke out in his church under the ministry of Rev. William C. Burns. On hearing the good news, McCheyne wrote to Burns: “You remember it was the prayer of my heart when we parted, that you might be a thousandfold more blessed to the people than ever my ministry had been.”
During a period of illness, he asked several ministers of different denominations to take his place, and for this he was publicly criticized. He published an open letter in the Dundee Warder, in which he stated that
all who are true servants of the Lord Jesus Christ, sound in the faith, called to the ministry, and owned of God therein, should love one another, pray one for another, bid one another God-speed, own one another as fellow-soldiers, fellow-servants, and fellow-laborers in the vineyard; and, so far as God offereth opportunity, help one another in the work of the ministry.
He was a man with a large heart and a great love for the people of God.
McCheyne had never been a strong man, and he overtaxed himself in his work. Once he fainted in the pulpit, and often he had to lie still for hours to encourage his palpitating heart to quiet down. He became ill at a church meeting on March 13, 1843, and had to be put to bed and given constant medical attention. He became delirious on the twenty-first, but even then was repeatedly praying or quoting Scripture. On Saturday morning, March 25, while his doctor was standing by, McCheyne lifted his hand as if to give a benediction, and then stepped into eternity.
“Live so as to be missed!” was one of his favorite sayings. Between six and seven thousand people assembled for the funeral procession; business was almost at a standstill in Glasgow. He was buried next to St. Peter’s Church, and his grave can be visited today. I recall standing there one quiet June evening, reading the inscription on the monument. Then we were ushered into the vestry where the church officer opened a closet and brought out McChenye’s own Bible. I am not given to sentiment, but I must confess that I was deeply moved as I turned the pages of the Bible and read McCheyne’s own annotations in the margins. It was a high and holy hour I cannot forget.
He was only thirty years old when he died, and he had ministered less than seven years at St. Peter’s Church; yet his ministry and influence go on (it is interesting that two of his models in the ministry also died young: David Brainerd, at thirty; and Henry Martyn, at thirty-two). The Memoirs and Remains of the Rev. Robert Murray McCheyne, by his dear friend Andrew Bonar, is a Christian classic that should be in every believer’s library. Get the complete Banner of Truth edition, not a condensed version, and do not speed-read the book; read it carefully and meditate on what you read. I have often turned to McCheyne in dry, disappointing hours and have never failed to find refreshment for my soul.
“To gain entire likeness to Christ,” he wrote, “I ought to get a high esteem of the happiness of it. I am persuaded that God’s happiness is inseparably linked in with His holiness.”1
May our happiness be in his holiness and in a growing likeness to Jesus Christ.