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14.
Unction a
Necessity
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
Did
not our hearts burn within us?
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. I say
vitalized because what he declared to others it was impossible not to
feel he lived on himself.
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.
Mr. Spurgeon says:
"...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."
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."
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Topic E.
M. Bounds Index 
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Edward
McKendree Bounds
(1835-1913)
E. M. Bounds was a
Pastor around the time of the American Civil War. It is said
that he prayed daily for four hours before he would begin work on
his writings.
We are very happy
to be presenting his writings as one of our New Monthly Features.
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