"Study universal holiness of life. Your whole usefulness depends on this. Your sermon on Sabbath lasts but an hour or two; your life preaches all the week. Remember, ministers are standard-bearers. Satan aims his fiery darts at them. If he can only make you a covetous minister, or a lover of pleasure, or a lover of praise, or a lover of good eating, then he has ruined your ministry forever. Ah! Let him preach on fifty years, he will never do me any harm. Dear brother, cast yourself at the feet of Christ, implore his Spirit to make you a holy man. Take heed to yourself and to your doctrine."
Robert Murray McCheyne was a minister in the Church of Scotland and influenced the establishment of missions to the Jews by the Church of Scotland. He died at age 29 during a typhus epidemic. After his death, his biography and many of his writings were published and have since had a lasting impact on evangelical Christianity.
Born in Edinburgh, McCheyne studied arts and divinity at the university there and in 1836 became minister of St. Peter’s Church, Dundee. His life and ministry were short and punctuated by severe illnesses, yet McCheyne’s impact on Scotland was like that of Samuel Rutherford. There was the same self-discipline, fervent prayer, Bible study, assiduous preparation for the pulpit, sense of urgency that time was short, and the same deep concern for souls. He once said he blessed God every morning that he lived in witnessing times. Ordered to take an extended rest from parish work, he went to the Holy Land and contributed to the later development of a Scottish mission to Jews. He wrote letters, tracts, poems, used his artistic and musical gifts effectively, and accepted invitations to preach all over Scotland. When the encroachment of civil authority on spiritual matters came before parliament he wrote: “Once more King Jesus stands at an earthly tribunal, and they know Him not!” The outcome was the 1843 Disruption when the national church lost most of its evangelicals. McCheyne would have joined them but—not quite thirty—he had died a few months earlier.
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