I. MEN OF PRAYER NEEDED

"Study universal holiness of life. Your whole usefulness depends on this, for your sermons
last but an hour or two; your life preaches all the week. If Satan can only make a
covetous minister a lover of praise, of pleasure, of good eating, he has ruined your
ministry. Give yourself to prayer, and get your texts, your thoughts, your words from
God. Luther spent his best three hours in prayer."
-- Robert Murray McCheyne

WE are constantly on a stretch, if not on a strain, to devise new methods, new plans, new organizations to
advance the Church and secure enlargement and efficiency for the gospel. This trend of the day has a tendency
to lose sight of the man or sink the man in the plan or organization. God's plan is to make much of the man, far
more of him than of anything else. Men are God's method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is
looking for better men.

"There was a man sent from God whose name was John." The dispensation that
heralded and prepared the way for Christ was bound up in that man John. "Unto us a child is born, unto us a
son is given." The world's salvation comes out of that cradled Son. When Paul appeals to the personal
character of the men who rooted the gospel in the world, he solves the mystery of their success. The glory and
efficiency of the gospel is staked on the men who proclaim it. When God declares that "the eyes of the Lord
run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect
toward him," he declares the necessity of men and his dependence on them as a channel through which to exert
his power upon the world. This vital, urgent truth is one that this age of machinery is apt to forget. The
forgetting of it is as baneful on the work of God as would be the striking of the sun from his sphere. Darkness,
confusion, and death would ensue.

What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel
methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use -- men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Ghost
does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not
anoint plans, but men -- men of prayer.
An eminent historian has said that the accidents of personal character have more to do with the revolutions of
nations than either philosophic historians or democratic politicians will allow. This truth has its application in
full to the gospel of Christ, the character and conduct of the followers of Christ -- Christianize the world,
transfigure nations and individuals. Of the preachers of the gospel it is eminently true.

The character as well as the fortunes of the gospel is committed to the preacher. He makes or mars the
message from God to man. The preacher is the golden pipe through which the divine oil flows. The pipe must
not only be golden, but open and flawless, that the oil may have a full, unhindered, unwasted flow.
The man makes the preacher. God must make the man. The messenger is, if possible, more than the message.
The preacher is more than the sermon. The preacher makes the sermon. As the life-giving milk from the
mother's bosom is but the mother's life, so all the preacher says is tinctured, impregnated by what the preacher
is. The treasure is in earthen vessels, and the taste of the vessel impregnates and may discolor. The man, the
whole man, lies behind the sermon. Preaching is not the performance of an hour. It is the outflow of a life. It
takes twenty years to make a sermon, because it takes twenty years to make the man. The true sermon is a
thing of life. The sermon grows because the man grows. The sermon is forceful because the man is forceful.
The sermon is holy because the man is holy. The sermon is full of the divine unction because the man is full of
the divine unction.

Paul termed it "My gospel;" not that he had degraded it by his personal eccentricities or diverted it by selfish
appropriation, but the gospel was put into the heart and lifeblood of the man Paul, as a personal trust to be
executed by his Pauline traits, to be set aflame and empowered by the fiery energy of his fiery soul. Paul's
sermons -- what were they? Where are they? Skeletons, scattered fragments, afloat on the sea of inspiration!
But the man Paul, greater than his sermons, lives forever, in full form, feature and stature, with his molding
hand on the Church. The preaching is but a voice. The voice in silence dies, the text is forgotten,