50 People Every Christian Should Know

50 People Every Christian Should Know
Warren W. Wiersbe

 
Jonathan Edwards:
         The churches operated under what was known as the Half-Way Covenant. This permitted people to unity with the church if they had been baptized but had not made a profession of faith in Christ (they were baptized as infants, of course). Their children were then baptized as “half-way members,” but they were not permitted to share the Lord’s Supper or vote in church elections.
It was his conviction that truth must be experienced in the heart as well as understood in the mind. In his study of the Word, he concluded that church membership and the Lord’s Supper were for saved people alone. (p. 33)
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John Henry Newman:
Newman would have agreed with William Temple’s definition of worship: “to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open up the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.”
“Definiteness is the life of preaching,” he wrote in Lectures and Essays on University Subjects, “a definite hearer, not the whole world; a definite topic, not the whole evangelical tradition, and, in like manner, a definite speaker.  (p. 64)
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In my own ministry in pastors’ conferences, I have discovered that too many ministers neglect their daily devotional time, or hurry through it, so they can get involved in “more important matters.”  (p. 83)
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Robert Murray McCheyne:
He prepared his messages carefully and was a diligent student. “Beaten oil,” he used to say, “beaten oil for the lamps of the sanctuary” (referring to Exod. 27:20). He brought into the pulpit fresh manna that he gathered himself in his personal fellowship with the Lord. (p. 83)
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F. W. Robertson:
Because he could not find a group that agreed with him and because he had too much humility to start one of his own, he identified himself with no group and ultimately ended up criticizing all of them! His ministerial loneliness robbed him of the balance he needed, both emotionally and spiritually. “I would rather live solitary on the most desolate crag,” he wrote, “shivering, with all the warm wraps of falsehood stripped off … than sit comfortably on more inhabited spots, where others were warm in a faith which is true to them, but which is false to me.”
What is Robertson’s contribution to our preaching today? Perhaps his “six principles” still have something to say to us: (1) establish positive truth instead of only destroying error; (2) since truth is made up of two opposite propositions, look for a doctrine large enough to include both; (3) preach suggestively, not exhaustively; (4) start with Christ’s humanity, then move to his deity (Brooks would say, “Find the place where truth touches life”); (5) truth works from the inward to the outward; and (6) try to find the basis of truth even in error. We may not totally agree with all these propositions, but we must confess they give us a great deal to think about. (p. 92)
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Alexander Maclaren:
Maclaren was a perfectionist and an idealist. Hence he was never satisfied with his own work. Perhaps that is how the Lord keeps gifted people humble, and Maclaren was both. Maybe there is a warning here for preachers: let God evaluate your ministry, for often when we think we are doing our poorest, we are really doing our best. Woe to the man who becomes satisfied with his ministry! (p. 110)
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Charles H. Spurgeon:
There are men like Parker, Campbell Morgan, and D.L. Moody, who seem to belong to all believers, regardless of denominational affiliation; but there are also men like Spurgeon, Maclaren, and Truett, who helped the evangelical cause best by concentrating on their own denominational ministry. We need both kinds of preachers, and one should not be quick to condemn the other. (p. 147)
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Phillips Brooks:
“The preacher needs to be pastor that he may preach to real men. The pastor must be preacher that he may keep the dignity of his work alive. The preacher who is not a pastor grows remote. The pastor who is not a preacher grows petty.” (p. 154)
Brooks said: “I must not close without begging you not to be ashamed or afraid of the age you live in, and least of all to talk of it in a tone of weak despair.” It seems that every age has always been the worst and that every preacher has looked back and longed for “the good old days!” (p. 155)
If your ministry is to be good for anything, it must be your ministry, and not a feeble echo of another man’s.
This surely is a good rule: whenever you see a fault in any other man, or any other church, look for it in yourself and in your own church. (p. 156)
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Frances Ridley Havergal:
She taught a children’s Sunday school class at whatever church her father was pasturing, and she kept a permanent register of her students’ names so that she might pray for them. I wonder what would happen to our children and young people if each teacher who had ministered to them continued to pray for them? (p. 160)
Her daily quiet time with the Lord was kept with loving discipline, and she always devoted extra time to serious Bible study. (One wishes that some of our contemporary composers would spend more time in their Bibles and put more solid theology into their songs.) (p. 162)
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Alexander Whyte:
“We have plenty of time for all our work did we husband our time and hoard it up aright,” he told them. “We cannot look seriously in one another’s faces and say it is want of time. It is want of intention. It is want of determination. It is want of method. It is want of motive. It is want of conscience. It is want of heart. It is want of anything and everything but time.” (p. 166)
Whyte was not only a great preacher and student but also a great pastor. In  his Bunyan Characters he stated boldly:
For I am as sure as I am of anything connected with a minister’s life, that a minister own soul will prosper largely in the measure that the souls of his people prosper through his pastoral work. No preaching, even if it were as good preaching as the apostle’s itself, can be left to make up for the neglect of pastoral visitation. (p. 168)
Today, when so much ink is spilled criticizing God’s servants, some of us need to start majoring more in encouragement. (p. 169)
Here is a great preacher’s philosophy of pastoral work: God makes a man; the man makes a ministry; the ministry makes a church. (p. 171)
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George Matheson:
So much “devotional writing” today is shallow and sentimental and not at all spiritual. A Bible verse, a paragraph of approved platitudes, an exhortation, and a prayer make up the average “meditation.” (p 200)
Matheson himself admitted: “Prayer never causes me an effort. When I pray, I know I am addressing the Deity, but when I preach, the Devil may be among the congregation.” (p. 201)
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F. B. Meyer:
Meyer expressed his view of the local church:
It is urgently needful that the Christian people of our change should come to understand that they are not a company of invalids, to be wheeled about , or fed by hand, cosseted, nursed, and comforted, the minister being head-physician and nurse – but a garrison in an enemy’s country, every soul of which should have some post of duty, at which he should be prepared to make any sacrifice rather than quit it. (p. 216)
 
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George H. Morrison:
With clock-like regularity he spent his morning in the study, his afternoons with his people in their homes, and his evenings either at church meetings or at home studying and writing. Like Whyte, he took long holidays, using the summer months for additional study, meditation, and rest. …. Although today’s overworked pastors might not be able to take two months off each summer, an occasional interruption for incubation would no doubt improve the minister and the ministry.
He faced and solved these important questions in his study, but he always stepped into the pulpit with exclamation points, not question marks. (p. 297)
He organized “The Round Table” and met with students following the evening service to discuss questions that troubled them. (p. 298)
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Frank W. Boreham:
Boreham said: “We shall never attract or arrest our hearers by an elaborate display of theology….  Theology is to a sermon what a skeleton is to the body: it gives shape and support to the preacher’s utterance without itself being visible. (p. 312)
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Oswald Chambers:
One man wrote to Mrs. Chambers that he had been “shocked at what I then considered his undue levity. He was the most irreverent Reverend I had ever met!” (p. 323)
“Teaching is meant to stir up thinking, not to store with goods from the outside.” That is good counsel in this age when many teachers and preachers manufacture their lessons and sermons out of borrowed nuggets instead of mining their own gold and refining it in experience.
He would have agreed with A.W. Tozer that the only real is the world of truth found in the Bible. He wrote: “The Actual world of things and the Real world of Truth have to be made into one in personal experience.” Too many Christians try to avoid this creative tension by going either to extreme isolation from the world or to extreme preoccupation with the world. (p. 324)
“Never make a principle out of your own experience; let God be as original with other people as He is with you.” (p. 326)
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Clarence Edward Macartney:
Unlike some pastors in his own day (and certainly in our day), each week he invested two or three evenings and three or four afternoons in visiting his people. Mention visitation to most preachers today, and they will smile and say, “We’re not into that.”(p. 333)
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A.W. Tozer:
A mystic is simply a person who: (1) sees a real spiritual world beyond the world of sense, (2) seeks to please God rather than the crowd, (3) cultivates a close fellowship with God, sensing his presence everywhere, and (4) relates his experience to the practical things of life. (p. 355)
Tozer’s sermons often confront us with these questions: Is God real to you? Is your Christian experience a set of definitions, a list of orthodox doctrines, or a living relationship with God? Do you have a firsthand experience with him, or a secondhand experience through others? Is your heart hungering and thirsting after personal holiness? (p. 355)
The mystics wrote to cultivate the inner man, and certainly this is a neglected activity in our churches today. We have more Marthas than Marys! But, in the long run, the ideal Christian will not be one or the other: he will be a balance of both. Worship and work will not compete; they will cooperate. (p. 258)
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William Culbertson:
Whenever you heard Culbertson speak (or pray), you knew he had just come from the throne with a live coal ready to burst into flame. Christian leaders must realize that if they suffer from shallowness, the malady will spread throughout their entire organization. (p. 370)