21. The school of experience
21
The school of experience
Pastors who are indeed to be pastors after God’s own heart have all to pass into their pastorate through the school of experience. Preaching after God’s own heart, and pastoral work of the same divine pattern, cannot be taught in any other school than the school of experience. Poets may be born and not made, but not pastors nor preachers. Nay, do not all our best poets first learn in their sufferings what afterwards they teach us in their songs? At any rate, that is certainly the case with preachers and pastors. As my own old minister once said to me in a conversation on this very subject, ‘Even God himself cannot inspire an experience.’ No. For if he could he would surely have done so in the case of his own Son, to whom in the gift of the Holy Ghost he gave all that he could give and all that his Son could receive. But an experience cannot in the very nature of things be either bestowed on the one hand or received and appropriated on the other. An experience in the unalterable nature of the thing itself must be undergone. The Holy Ghost himself after he has been bestowed and received has to be experimented upon, and taken into this and that need, trial, cross, and care of life. He is not sent to spare us our experiences, but to carry us through them.
And thus it is (in sight of the highest illustration we have of this law of experience), that the apostle has it in his Epistle to the Hebrews that though Christ himself were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things that he suffered. And being by experience made perfect he then went on to do such and such things for us. Why do you think was our Lord able to speak with such extraordinary point, impressiveness, and assurance about prayer; about the absolute necessity and certainty of secret, importunate, persevering prayer having, sooner or later, in one shape or other, and in the best possible shape, its answer? Why but because of his own experience? Why but because his own closet, hilltop, all-night, and up-before-the-day prayers had all been at last heard and better heard than he had been able to ask? We can quite well read between the lines in all our Lord’s parables and in all the passages of his sermons about prayer. The unmistakable traces of otherwise untold enterprises and successes, agonies and victories of prayer are to be seen in every such sermon of his. And so, in like manner, in all that he says to his disciples about the sweetness of submission, resignation, and self-denial, as also about the nourishment for his soul that he got out of every hard act of obedience,—and so on. There is running through all our Lord’s doctrinal and homiletical teaching that note of reality and of certitude that can only come to any teaching out of the long and deep and intense experience of the teacher. And as the Master was, so are all his ministers.…
Let no minister, then, lose heart when he is sent back to the school of experience. He knows in theory that “tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience,”1 but it is not theory, but experience, that makes a minister after God’s own heart. I sometimes wish that I might live to see a chair of Experimental Religion set up in all our colleges. I fear it is a dream, and that it must have been pronounced impracticable long ago by our wisest heads. Still, all the same, that does not prevent me from again and again indulging my dream. I indulge my fond dream again as often as I look back on my own tremendous mistakes in the management of my own personal and ministerial life, as well as sometimes see some signs of the same mistakes in some other ministers.… It is quite true, that, as my old minister shrewdly said to me, even the Holy Ghost cannot inspire an experience. No. But a class of genuine experimental divinity would surely help to foster and develop an experience.…
*From Bunyan Characters, First Series (2nd ed.; Edinburgh/London: Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier, 1895), 250-52, 254-55.
1. Romans 5:3b-4a.