Chapter Eight
CHAPTER EIGHT
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Christ Crucified: The Theology and Art of a Life’s Preaching
❆ ❆ ❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆ ❆ ❆
A prayer I prayed one day in my own church expressed everything I had always believed about what a pulpit is for. I said: “Lord, never let anyone occupy this pulpit who does not preach Christ and Him crucified.” That was not a proud claim about my own ministry. It was an acknowledgment of what the pulpit exists to do — and a prayer that after my time was over, the thing that had sustained the whole work would be the thing that continued. The pulpit is not a platform for displaying a man’s learning, or his eloquence, or his opinions about the affairs of the age. It is the place from which the news of the Cross is proclaimed to dying people who need it more than they need anything else in the world.
My oft-repeated desire for myself was that I might never, to the day of my death, preach to my people or be with them in any of their meetings without saying something about what gives peace to the sinner. That desire grew stronger, not weaker, as the years went on. The longer a man preaches, the more clearly he sees the alternatives — the Cross of Christ, or nothing. There is no third option. Every sermon that does not bring its hearers to Calvary has, at its centre, a vacancy. It may be full of other good things. It may be learned, orthodox, well-constructed, earnestly delivered. But if it does not carry the unconverted hearer toward the Saviour and the converted believer deeper into His grace, it has missed its primary aim.
My preaching style was always simple. I had never sought eloquence, and I was never possessed of it in the rhetorical sense. My sermons were addressed to the heart of the hearer rather than to the admiration of the critic. As early as 1835 I had written: “I never before felt the extreme difficulty of being absorbed in the days.” I meant by that the difficulty of keeping the eternal in view amid the pressing claims of the temporal — of preaching as one who genuinely sees the invisible, rather than merely talking about it. That difficulty never left me. But the resolution to address it never left me either.
I was not always a preacher who did this well. M’Cheyne’s rebuke after my sermon on “Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty” — which I have described in an earlier chapter — was the correction of a man who had preached a beautiful sermon about Christ without preaching it to sinners. The correction was given in love, received in humility, and acted on for the remaining half-century of my ministry. From that evening in Dundee I never again closed a service without pressing on my hearers the immediate claims of the Saviour.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE CROSS AS THE CENTRE OF EVERYTHING
The atoning sacrifice of the Son of God was the central point of all my preaching. I could not speak about anything for long without arriving at Calvary. Nature, history, the Psalms, the prophets, the letters of Paul — every road in Scripture led to the same destination. The Cross was not one doctrine among others. It was the doctrine from which all other doctrines received their weight and their meaning. A theology without the Cross at the centre is a wheel without a hub — the spokes may be in the right positions but they have nothing to connect them, and the wheel will not bear any weight.
I used to say: “The Cross was the breaking of God’s alabaster-box, the fragrance of which has filled heaven and earth.” That image of the broken alabaster-box — taken from the woman in the Gospels who broke her precious ointment over the feet of Jesus — captured for me the voluntary, costly, extravagant character of the atonement. God did not give His Son reluctantly, as a man might give up a valued possession under compulsion. He broke the box. He poured out the whole content. He held nothing back.
I spoke of this world as “the altar of the universe on which lay the Almighty Sacrifice.” That is a large claim. It means that what happened on Calvary was not merely a private transaction between God and a particular people, but the central event in the history of the cosmos — the event to which all of history before it was pointing and from which all of history after it derives its meaning. The Incarnation was but the scaffolding for the Atonement. Christmas is not the great day. Good Friday is. The reason Christ was born in Bethlehem was so that He could die at Calvary. Everything in the first thirty years of His life was preparation for the three hours of darkness on the hill outside Jerusalem.
“It is the Cross that shows us the love of God at a white heat.” That phrase — love at a white heat — was one I returned to often, because it captured the intensity that the sentimental version of God’s love misses. There is a version of divine love that is warm and pleasant and asks very little of itself and even less of those who receive it. That is not the love of the Cross. The love of the Cross is consuming, self-spending, justice-satisfying, wrath-absorbing love. It is love that goes to the uttermost because the sinner’s need required the uttermost. It is love at a white heat.
“The earliest form of worship was the lamb slain: Behold Abel’s altar! The latest form of worship is the Lamb slain who is now on the throne of the universe.” From the first sacrifice outside Eden to the last scene in the Revelation, the single thread that runs through the whole Bible is the blood of the Lamb. The whole history of redemption is one long story about what it cost God to bring His ruined people home. And the preacher who understands that will never lack for something to say. He has been given the most extraordinary subject in the universe, and an eternity would not exhaust it.
(1 Corinthians 2:2 KJV)
“For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE SINNER’S RIGHT AND THE SINNER’S NEED
I often said: “A sinner, so long as he is unpardoned, has a right to only one thing in the universe — only one — and that is the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.” That sentence scandalized some, and I meant it to. It is a scandalous sentence in the best sense — the sense in which the Gospel is always scandalous, always cutting across the human tendency to make salvation conditional on merit or preparation or the achievement of a certain spiritual state.
The sinner’s right to the blood of Christ is not earned. It is not the reward of repentance or the fruit of a sufficiently broken heart. It is simply the standing offer of the Gospel: come as you are, take what has been provided, the transaction is already accomplished on your behalf. “Many want salvation,” I used to say, “but they do not want the Saviour.” That was the diagnosis of the problem. The sinner who wants to be rescued from the consequences of sin without actually taking the Person of Christ as Lord and Saviour has not yet understood what is being offered. Salvation is not a product to be consumed. It is a relationship with a Person.
“Salvation is not fleeing to the shadow of the great Rock, but it is fleeing to the Man who is a Hiding-place, and laying our head on His bosom.” That distinction between the shadow and the Man mattered enormously to me. I had seen too many people who had found some comfort in religion — who had taken shelter in doctrine, in the means of grace, in the habits of piety — without ever actually resting their weight on Christ Himself. The shadow of the Rock is cool and pleasant. But it is only a shadow. The Man Himself is the reality, and those who know Him do not rest in the shadow. They rest in Him.
“The work of Christ is the open door for the sinner, but Christ Himself stands behind it waiting to welcome him.” Another of my favourite images — the distinction between the door and the One who stands behind it. The atoning work is the door that opens the way into the presence of God. But Christ is not merely the door. He is the Host. He is the One who welcomes. He is the end of the journey, not merely the means of beginning it. A man who understands the atonement theologically but has never personally encountered the Christ who accomplished it has grasped the key without ever opening the lock.
An invalid lady in the country sent me a message that she did not have enough joy. I sent back the answer: “Tell her it is not more joy she needs, but more of Christ.” That answer is the key to most of the spiritual problems I encountered in a long ministry. The deficit that presents itself as a lack of joy, or assurance, or strength, or peace, is almost always traceable to a deficit in the believer’s dealings with Christ Himself. More of Christ is the answer. Not more effort, not more discipline, not more meetings attended. More of Christ — more of His word, more of His presence at the Mercy-seat, more of the conscious fellowship that the Holy Spirit makes possible between the soul and its Saviour.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
DOUBTS, ASSURANCE, AND THE UNBOUNDED CONFIDENCE OF FAITH
I preached assurance as a duty, not merely as a blessing. This was one of my fixed convictions: that the Christian who lives in chronic doubt about his own standing before God is failing to honour the blood of Christ. I said: “Doubt and fears are not marks of God’s children. They are remnants of the old nature — specks upon the eye of faith. You should give them no quarter.” That sounds harsh to modern ears that have been trained to regard doubt as a form of intellectual honesty. But I was speaking of the doubt that refuses to take God at His word — the doubt that says “I know what the Scripture promises, but I cannot bring myself to believe it applies to me.” That doubt is not honesty. It is unbelief.
“If you say it is good to have doubts, you are just saying: ‘I will not take all that God offers.’ Faith takes a whole Christ for itself: My Lord and my God.” The “my” is the handle of faith, I used to say. Thomas’s great confession — My Lord and my God — is the model of what faith sounds like. Not “He is the Lord and God.” Not “Christ is the Saviour of sinners.” But: My Lord and my God. The personal pronoun is the hinge on which everything turns.
I described the person who had faith but not full assurance as “believing in Christ, but not believing what He says.” Faith dwells at Jerusalem. Full assurance goes into the palace and sees the King’s face. The first is real and saving. But the second is what Christ intends for His people, and those who are content with the first when the second is available are like a man who sleeps on the palace steps when the King has thrown the doors open and lit the fires inside. “It is the privilege and the duty of believers — looking at the blood — not to have a fear or a doubt. You can’t honour God more, you can’t please the Holy Spirit more, or Christ more, than by putting unbounded confidence in the blood.”
I asked once: “Would it have been right for the prodigal son to sit at the table dropping tears into his cup, saying ‘I can’t be glad,’ when the Father said ‘It is meet that we should make merry and be glad’?” The Father had declared a feast. The son was invited to the feast. To sit at the feast table in sullen self-reproach, refusing to eat, refusing to rejoice, refusing to take the robe and the ring as fully given — this was not humility. It was a kind of pride, a refusal to let go of the image of oneself as the one who must earn whatever he receives. The Gospel says: eat. Rejoice. The Father has made merry. Come and be glad.
There is a theology of sin that must not be flinched from if the theology of the Cross is to be preached in its full power. I preached on the Epistle of Jude in my later years — a text that many shrink from as unpleasant and unpopular, with its graphic descriptions of apostasy and judgment. I preached on it because it is in the Bible and therefore it is to be preached. Sin and its punishment — eternal banishment from God’s presence — were part of the whole counsel of God which every minister must declare. I used to say: “No one preached more about hell than Christ did.” He spoke those terrible words about eternal fire with a little child in His arms. He told the story of the rich man and Lazarus — as if, I said, He would pursue the sinner with a flaming sword until he entered the city of refuge.
Yet I also said: “I think He will weep over the lost as He did over Jerusalem. It will be something to be said for ever in heaven: ‘Jesus wept as He said, Depart, ye cursed.’ But then it was absolutely necessary to say it.” And again: “I think that the shower of fire and brimstone was wet with the tears of God as it fell, for God has no pleasure in the death of him that dieth.” These sayings are not contradictions. They are the two edges of the truth about God’s holiness and God’s love, which must be held together or both are distorted. A hell-fire preaching that shows no tears is not fully Christian. A loving-God preaching that never mentions the judgment is not fully honest. Both the weeping and the departing must be in the sermon if the sermon is to be the whole Gospel.
A lady whom I was asked to visit during an illness told me: “I’ve been trying for some days with all my might to believe in annihilation; but I can’t.” “I can tell you something better,” I said. “If you believe in Christ your sin will be annihilated.” That answer is worth examining. She had been seeking comfort in the doctrine that death simply ends everything, that there is no judgment to face and no reckoning to come. And she could not quite persuade herself of it. The conscience would not let her rest there. What I offered her instead was not the annihilation of persons but the annihilation of sin — which is what the blood of Christ actually provides. The problem is not that we exist; the problem is what we have done with our existence. And Christ has dealt with that.
I also observed, about one who dwelt very much upon sin without dwelling sufficiently on the power of the blood to cleanse, that his gospel was “the miry clay.” That diagnosis was exact. There is a kind of preaching that spends so much time ploughing up the soil of sin — so much time in conviction, in self-examination, in the detailed anatomy of the corrupt heart — that it never quite arrives at the seed. The people are left standing in the turned-up ground of their own sinfulness with no seed to plant in it. That is not the Gospel. The Gospel begins with sin’s reality but it does not end there. It ends at the throne of grace, with the sinner clothed in Christ’s righteousness, eating at the King’s table.
(Romans 8:1 KJV)
“There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE WORD OF GOD: THINKING IN SCRIPTURE
So readily did a scriptural phrase or a scriptural illustration drop from my lips that it almost seemed, those who knew me well said, as if I thought in scriptural language. I took that as a high compliment, because it is a high aspiration. To have the Word of God so thoroughly inhabiting one’s mind that the natural idiom of thought and speech becomes biblical — that is the result of a lifetime of serious, loving, daily engagement with the text.
My habit was to ask, when visiting people: “Have you got a letter from the King today?” That was my way of asking whether they had read their morning portion of Scripture. The image was not merely rhetorical. I genuinely believed that the Bible is a letter from the King — a personal communication from the living God, addressed to each reader individually, as real and as direct as any letter that arrives by post. The person who opens the Bible in the morning and reads it with that expectation will find it to be exactly what it claims to be. The person who reads it as a religious duty, to be discharged and checked off, will find it proportionally less.
I also asked people: “Do you read regularly through all sixty-six books of the Bible, and not trust to little text-books?” This question contained a caution that was needed in my day and is more needed in ours. The religious market of my time was already beginning to fill up with little devotional volumes — collections of short texts and brief meditations, handy and convenient — that could easily displace the actual reading of the Scripture itself. I had nothing against such volumes in their place. But their place was secondary, not primary. The primary food is the Bible itself, all sixty-six books of it, the strange and the familiar, the easy and the difficult, the Psalms and the Chronicles alike.
In public reading of the Scriptures, I never passed over any portion because of its difficulty or obscurity. Instead, every word and phrase were explained with care and minuteness. An exposition of the first eight chapters of First Chronicles was given with the preface: “This is God calling the roll of mankind.” And what at first had seemed a record of unmeaning and forgotten names became, in that light, a history of men and women with hopes and fears and aspirations like those of a present time. Every name in that genealogy represents a soul that God made and sustains and will one day judge. If God troubled to record the name, we should trouble to read it.
As I read the fifth chapter of Genesis, with its melancholy refrain — and he died, and he died, and he died — I came to the twenty-fourth verse: “Enoch walked with God: and was not; for God took him.” I stopped and said: “A triumphal arch amid the tombs!” Every repetition of the death-refrain had been building the context for that one exception. The chapter is a long, dark tunnel, and then suddenly — one opening in the ceiling where the light pours in. Enoch walked with God. The pattern of the chapter makes the exception luminous. Without the deaths, the translation would not carry its full weight. God writes chapters as well as verses, and the architecture of the whole passage is part of the meaning.
Another remark on the same passage: “Enoch walked with God, and one day he took a very long walk, for he never came back again!” This was the kind of saying that my friends called my “fables” — the imaginative expansion of a scriptural scene that brings out its implications in a way that straight exposition sometimes cannot. Mr. Moody used to say: “Now, I want to hear some more fables!” He meant it as a compliment. The fable is not an addition to the text. It is the text seen from a slightly different angle, with the lights adjusted so that the relief appears.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION: MAKING SCRIPTURE VISIBLE
I believed deeply in illustration as a tool of preaching. Not illustration as decoration — not the colourful story inserted to wake the congregation up after a long stretch of doctrine. But illustration as a mode of understanding: the concrete image that gives the abstract truth a body it can inhabit, so that the hearer can grasp what the words alone might leave unreachably vague. Christ used this method. His parables are not embellishments of His teaching. They are His teaching. The Kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed, like a woman who lost her coin, like a father who had two sons. These stories are the theology, dressed in the coat that enables it to survive the journey from the pulpit to the heart.
I described a scriptural incident once when a woman came to Elisha in desperate poverty, with two sons about to be taken by creditors as payment for her dead husband’s debts. Elisha told her to go to her neighbours and borrow empty vessels — as many as she could find — and then to pour into them the small quantity of oil she had left. She obeyed. And the oil kept flowing until every vessel was full, and only stopped when the last vessel was filled. I told it this way: “Reuben, you go up the street, and Samuel, you go down the street, and ask all the neighbours for the loan of empty vessels.” “But what will they say to us, mother?” “They will say nothing, but give you the dishes!” The dialogue gave the scene flesh and breath. The hearers could see the two boys setting off in opposite directions through the village, and the kindly neighbours handing over their empty pots. And behind the domestic scene was the great truth: God fills what is empty and brought to Him in faith.
I sometimes described the beggar at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple who asked Peter and John for alms, and received instead the healing of his lameness. I used to say: I thought he must have been a careless and unbelieving man, or he might have been healed long before — for we read in Matthew twenty-one that the blind and the lame came to Christ in the Temple, and He healed them. This lame man had been there, presumably, for decades. He had access to the same Temple courts where Jesus had healed others. What was he doing all those years? Begging for coin. The thing he needed most was offered and he did not take it. How many people sit in the pews of a gospel church for years, close enough to touch the hem of the garment, and reach out only for what is less than what is being offered?
I liked to speak about the angels, and told congregations they should not be discouraged that angels are not sent to preach the Gospel. “It is a good thing angels were not sent to preach to us. I would go far to hear an angel preach, but I don’t think I would get much good from his sermon. I would come away thinking of his beautiful words and his persuasive tongue, but perhaps saying: ‘It is all very well for that angel to talk about the miry clay, but he does not know how stiff it is! He never was in it.’” The Gospel must be preached by those who have needed it. That is why God chose sinners to be the heralds of salvation. We know what we are talking about. We know the stiffness of the clay. And we know the grace that pulled us out.
The Bible was so alive to me that it illuminated the most ordinary scenes of daily life. I told a Tuesday evening class about the bricks of Babylon — how every ancient Babylonian brick had on it the king’s stamp, so that even a broken brick bore witness to the authority that had created it. “So,” I said, “everything we do should have the King’s stamp on it.” One of the women in the class, not long after, was set to the tedious work of cleaning a feather-bed. Many times she felt tempted to hurry over it carelessly. But the bricks of Babylon kept ringing in her ears, and she had to do it all faithfully. When I called to see her she said: “O, these bricks of Babylon were a trouble to me!” “Were they on your dusters and brooms?” I asked. “No, on a feather-bed!” she replied. The story was repeated to a servant, who said: “Well, I hate cleaning the knives, but I can’t but do them thoroughly now.” A single Bible image, properly applied, had changed the texture of two people’s daily work. That is what illustration does when it is rooted in real truth — it reshapes behaviour, not just opinion.
I once asked a minister friend who had revival in his country congregation and who expressed a wish for city colleagues to come and help him: “I thought you said the Master was with you. Why do you want any of us?” I was not being unkind. I was reminding him of a theological truth: the presence of Christ is not upgraded by the presence of clever preachers. Where Christ is, all necessary power is already present. The question is not whether there are enough gifted men in the room. The question is whether the men present are relying on the One whose power is unlimited.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT: EVERY LINE WET WITH DEW
I once said: “Every line in this inspired Bible is wet with the dew of the Spirit’s love.” That sentence expresses a great deal of what I understood about the relationship between the Scripture and the Holy Spirit. The Bible is not merely a record of what the Spirit once did in inspiring the writers. It is the continuing vehicle of the Spirit’s active presence. When a believer reads the Word of God with faith, the Spirit who inspired the writing is present in the reading — illuminating, applying, pressing truth into the places where it is most needed, sometimes with the gentleness of morning dew and sometimes with the force of a hammer.
“The sword of the Spirit” — the sword which the Spirit uses. The sword is made up of various parts: the long blade, the handle, and so on. And the Scriptures have many parts. But the Gospel is the sharp point by which it pierces the soul. A man can read much Scripture without being pierced. He can read the genealogies, the poetry, the history, the law, and be instructed without being wounded. But when the sharp point of the Gospel — the word of the Cross, personally applied by the Spirit to a particular conscience — finds its target, the wound is real, and the healing that follows is real, and the life that grows from the healing is real. I have watched this happen so many times that I cannot speak of the Spirit’s use of the Word as a theory. It is a witnessed fact.
I wrote to a friend who was weary: “Keep a grape of Eshcol beside you, and moisten your parched palate with it when you can.” The grapes of Eshcol were the grapes that the spies brought back from Canaan as evidence of the land’s fruitfulness — so large that a single cluster had to be carried between two men on a pole. My instruction was to keep one such grape always near — one particular word of promise, one verse of Scripture that had come alive to the soul and whose juice could be pressed out again in moments of dryness. Just a few days ago, I told this same friend, I had to ride six miles after breakfast to visit, and scarcely got home in time for dinner, when the hour of a teachers’ meeting struck, and then another meeting after that. But that morning I had received one word — Hosea three, verse one: the love of the Lord toward those who look to other gods. And that one grain of grace, that particle of fine wheat, recurred to my soul all day, so that the bustle was full of God. A single grape of Eshcol carried through a long hard day.
On the vexed subject of divine sovereignty, I tried always to preach it as an invitation rather than a barrier. I wrote after a visit to certain churches in the North: “Doctrine and hearing of the Word abound, though the doctrine is not what we in the South reckon to be the very truth, for sovereignty is thrust in at all points as if to overawe the sinner, and make him draw back from touching even the hem of the garment. They say that they do it to empty and humble the sinner. Oh for showers of the Spirit! For when the Spirit comes, all things take their proper place.” That last sentence is the key to everything. The sovereignty of God, properly understood, is not a doctrine that keeps the sinner at arm’s length. It is the doctrine that assures him his case is not beyond God’s reach. No sinner is too hardened, too long-resisting, too deeply sunk for the sovereign God to save. Sovereignty is not the locked door; it is the master key.
I was equally suspicious of those who used election as a reason for passivity. I said: “If God were to reveal your election to you, you would believe in yourself instead of in Christ.” Election is not revealed in advance of faith as a basis for confidence, but confirmed after faith as a ground of assurance. We do not first discover that we are elect and then come to Christ. We come to Christ, and in coming we discover that we have been chosen. The order matters enormously for the preacher. He cannot know who is elect in his congregation. He must preach to every person as if they might be, and as if this sermon might be the moment of their coming.
The work of the Holy Spirit in preaching was something I spoke about with a reverence that sometimes bordered on silence. I never went to the pulpit without preparation, yet I depended entirely on the power of the Holy Spirit to make the word preached effectual. Those two things — thorough preparation and absolute dependence — are not in tension. They are the two hands of faithful preaching. To prepare and not depend is to trust one’s own craftsmanship. To depend and not prepare is to presume on the Spirit’s power. The right posture is both: study as if everything depends on your faithfulness to the text, then go to the pulpit having placed everything in God’s hands, as if nothing depends on you at all.
(1 Corinthians 2:4–5 KJV)
“And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.”
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
TROUBLING OTHERS WITH RELIGION: THE SOUL-WINNER’S COMPULSION
I said often, and I meant it literally: “I never like to hear anyone say ‘I never trouble others with my religion.’ A believer must trouble others with his religion.” The word “trouble” is exact. The Gospel is a disturbance. It disturbs the comfortable and the complacent. It troubles those who would prefer to remain undisturbed in their existing arrangements with God and the world. And the true witness to the Gospel must accept the social cost of being the person who brings this disturbance. Not aggressively, not unkindly, not with the self-righteous satisfaction of one who enjoys making others uncomfortable. But persistently, lovingly, urgently, as one who genuinely believes that the person before him is on his way to a Christless eternity and that the words being spoken might be the last warning they receive.
I used to tell my workers: “If you shine as lights now, and cast your light on the shadows around you, you will hear of it in the ages to come. If you do not, God will get others to do it.” That last sentence was not a threat. It was an observation about the economy of the Kingdom. God’s purposes will be accomplished. The question is whether we will have the privilege of being the instruments. The person who withdraws from witness, who decides the cost of troubling others is too high, does not thereby keep the others from being troubled. God will send someone else. The person who withdrew simply forfeits the privilege and the reward.
A friend once wrote to me expressing discouragement in his work. I replied not with a letter of advice but with a parable. I described a workman tunnelling the Alps who began one day to brood on the feebleness of his arm, comparing it with the immensity of the mountain before him, until he sat down in despair. And then a voice came — the voice of the one overseeing the work — saying: “Did I not know what your arm could do, and what it could not do, when I sent you to propel, by careful attention to your steam apparatus, that wedge of steel? Think of that little wedge of steel tipped with diamond. Why moan over your feeble arm?” The point was this: the worker’s arm is not the operative instrument. The diamond-tipped wedge is. The worker’s job is to keep the wedge in the right position and trust the mechanism to do what the arm alone never could. In preaching, the diamond-tipped wedge is the Word of God, wielded by the Spirit of God. The preacher’s job is to get it into the right position.
“The best part of all Christian work,” I said, “is that part which only God sees.” Service for the Master that everybody praises is very dangerous service. The work done in obscurity, done without applause, done for an audience of One — that is the work that accumulates the most in the ledger of eternity. I sometimes thought that on the day when the accounts are finally settled, the name of one we never heard of in the Church of Christ will be among the highest — the man or woman who did most, quietly, without recognition, simply for the Master.
Let me say something about the particular joy that attaches to the conversion of a long-resisting sinner — the man or woman who has heard the Gospel many times, who has resisted many approaches, who has sat through years of faithful preaching apparently unmoved, and who then, in God’s own time, is found kneeling in a pew in brokenness and tears. I have seen this often. It is a different kind of joy from the joy that attends the conversion of the young, the sudden, the dramatic. There is a weight to it, an amazement, a sense that what has just happened is as much a resurrection as the raising of Lazarus — because the resistance that God has overcome was so visible and so long.
When I preached on the raising of Lazarus, I used to say that the most remarkable thing is not that Jesus raised a dead man but that He called him by name. “Lazarus, come forth.” Not “Dead man, come forth.” That is the model of the Gospel’s working. Not a general announcement but a personal word, spoken by the Spirit to the individual conscience. The preacher proclaims the general word; the Spirit makes it specific. And when that specific word lands in the soul for which it was intended, a dead man walks out of a tomb.
I have been a minister for more than fifty years, and I have seen the full range of what ministry produces. I have seen conversions so dramatic that they overturned a life in an evening. I have seen the slow, patient, decade-long work of the Spirit in a soul that resisted every approach until the defences finally gave way. I have seen great seasons of revival when the air itself seemed charged with the presence of God. I have seen long dry years when nothing appeared to grow and every seed seemed to rot in the ground. And what I have learned from all of it is this: the work is God’s, the power is God’s, the timing is God’s, and the instruments are used or not used at His pleasure. Our part is to be faithful. To preach the Cross. To pray without ceasing. To visit the flock. To keep the diamond-tipped wedge in position. And to leave the results with the One who owns the mountain.
❆ ❆ ❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆ ❆ ❆