"One bright benison which private prayer brings down upon the ministry is an indescribable and inimitable something -- an unction from the Holy One... If the anointing which we bear come not from the Lord of hosts, we are deceivers, since only in prayer can we obtain it. Let us continue instant constant fervent in supplication. Let your fleece lie on the thrashing floor of supplication till it is wet with the dew of heaven." - Charles Haddon Spurgeon |
ALEXANDER KNOX, a
Christian philosopher of the
days of Wesley, not an adherent but a strong personal friend of Wesley, and
with much spiritual sympathy with the Wesleyan movement, writes: "It is
strange and lamentable, but I verily believe the fact to be that except among
Methodists and Methodistical clergyman, there is not much interesting preaching
in England. The clergy, too generally have absolutely lost the art. There is,
I conceive, in the great laws of the moral world a kind of secret understanding
like the affinities in chemistry, between rightly promulgated religious truth
and the deepest feelings of the human mind. Where the one is duly exhibited,
the other will respond. Did not our hearts burn within us? -- but to this devout
feeling is indispensable in the speaker. Now, I am obliged to state from my
own observation that this onction, as the French not unfitly term it,
is beyond all comparison more likely to be found in England in a Methodist conventicle
than in a parish Church. This, and this alone, seems really to be that which
fills the Methodist houses and thins the Churches. I am, I verily think, no
enthusiast; I am a most sincere and cordial churchman, a humble disciple of
the School of Hale and Boyle, of Burnet and Leighton. Now I must aver that when
I was in this country, two years ago, I did not hear a single preacher who taught
me like my own great masters but such as are deemed Methodistical. And I now
despair of getting an atom of heart instruction from any other quarter. The
Methodist preachers (however I may not always approve of all their expressions)
do most assuredly diffuse this true religion and undefiled. I felt real pleasure
last Sunday. I can bear witness that the preacher did at once speak the words
of truth and soberness. There was no eloquence -- the honest man never dreamed
of such a thing -- but there was far better: a cordial communication of vitalized
truth. I say vitalized because what he declared to others it was impossible
not to feel he lived on himself."
This unction is the art of preaching. The preacher who never had this unction
never had the art of preaching. The preacher who has lost this unction has lost
the art of preaching. Whatever other arts he may have and retain -- the art
of sermon-making, the art of eloquence, the art of great, clear thinking, the
art of pleasing an audience -- he has lost the divine art of preaching. This
unction makes God's truth powerful and interesting, draws and attracts, edifies,
convicts, saves.
This unction vitalizes God's revealed truth, makes it living and life-giving.
Even God's truth spoken without this unction is light, dead, and deadening.
Though abounding in truth, though weighty with thought, though sparkling with
rhetoric, though pointed by logic, though powerful by earnestness, without this
divine unction it issues in death and not in life. Mr. Spurgeon says: "I
wonder how long we might beat our brains before we could plainly put into word
what is meant by preaching with unction. Yet he who preaches knows its presence,
and he who hears soon detects its absence. Samaria, in famine, typifies a discourse
without it. Jerusalem, with her feast of fat things, full of marrow, may represent
a sermon enriched with it. Every one knows what the freshness of the morning
is when orient pearls abound on every blade of grass, but who can describe it,
much less produce it of itself? Such is the mystery of spiritual anointing.
We know, but we cannot tell to others what it is. It is as easy as it is foolish,
to counterfeit it. Unction is a thing which you cannot manufacture, and its
counterfeits are worse than worthless. Yet it is, in itself, priceless, and
beyond measure needful if you would edify believers and bring sinners to Christ."