06.03. Chapter 3: Some Secrets Of Success In The Ministry
Chapter 3 SOME SECRETS OF SUCCESS IN THE MINISTRY
WE PURPOSELY refrain from starting this chapter with a text because we expect to emphasize not one, but three brief passages of Scripture in this discussion.
STUDIOUS HABITS Of all the speakers whose personal record we have in New Testament teaching, Paul is easily the most prominent. It will not be a disappointment therefore, nor seem indeed incongruous, that we should quote him on each of these subjects. To Timothy he wrote (2 Timothy 2:15) “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” In this passage the Apostle touches upon one of the most prominent factors, if not the one of par excellence, in ministerial success—“study!”
Studious habits are essentials in education! The truest education is not the mere compassing of a curriculum, not merely the completion of a prescribed course and the securing of a sheepskin! In fact, diplomas are sometimes egregious deceptions. The man who takes one without having learned how to study and having come to love the employment is, on his Commencement day, a subject of self-deception. We know not a few ministers who have an A. B. back of them, but whose brains are still quite impotent, and whose thinking processes are unoiled and unemployed. Better quit college at the commencement of the sophomore year a diligent student than walk proudly from the Commencement platform, diploma in hand, intellectually indolent and study-indisposed. The great Dr. Arnold is reputed to have been asked by a father why his boy should learn Latin. “When he has finished his education what good will it do him?” To this Dr. Arnold sagely replied, “It is not so much a question of what the lad will do with Latin, as it is what Latin will do with the lad.”
Hogarth said, “Genius and labor are synonymous.” And Alexander Hamilton declared, “People give me credit for genius, but all the genius I have lies just in this—when I have a subject in hand I study it day and night. I explore it in all its bearings. My mind-becomes pervaded with it, and the effort which I make, people call genius, but it is only the fruit of labor and thought.”
I was at an ordination not so many years ago when two men were set apart to the ministry. One of them had back of him five or six years of attendance upon college and theological seminary; the other had back of him an unfinished high school course. I voted heartily for the ordination of both and prophesied then that the latter youth would go far beyond the former, and history is rapidly demonstrating my expectation. The first had the school diploma; the second had the student habit. Better an industrious man with a pick by which he may dig deep into the side of the mountain holding the precious ore, than the fellow who has already secured a nice little nugget and is content with his acquisition.
Student habits result in the accumulation of knowledge.
Knowledge is power. Keeping that in mind, we should covet its acquisition. The average minister reads considerably; but while his mind may be a bit refreshed by the literary flow passing through it, he has no method of storing up nor husbanding his intellectual discoveries. At this point I want to pay tribute to Edward Judson of New York. There are few people who pass one in life’s journey and contribute to him such inestimable benefits. That may be done so casually that the giver himself is unconscious of having made a contribution. I am sure Edward Judson never dreamed what he was doing for me when, in his address to the students of the Louisville Theological Seminary in 1887, he gave us his method of acquiring and keeping sermonic material. It took the form of what he called “Todd’s Index Rerum” a plain book which had at the top of each page the letters of the alphabet, followed in their order by the vowels, as for instance, Aa, Ae, Ai, Ao, Au; Ba, Be, Bi, Bo, Bu, and so on to the end, or Za, Ze, etc. Few words can be spelled without a vowel. Under those initial letters can be put down a reference to any and every subject encountered in a life-time, or even conceivable to the human mind, together with the page of the book or magazine scrapbook in which that subject is discussed. That makes, therefore, a ready reference book that will catalogue one’s entire library, and with me, it accomplished another and eminently desirable custom, namely, that of creating scrapbooks. I have in my library above eighty scrapbooks, of one hundred to three hundred pages each, made up of incidents and articles clipped from newspapers and magazines through the last sixty years.
John Foster published two large volumes of over twenty thousand illustrations. I could easily duplicate the number from these scrapbooks alone; in fact, I suspect that I could almost double it; and in this long period of years I have never prepared a sermon without the use of the Index Rerum, which as you can readily see, gives me, on short order, definite direction as to where and what my library contains on any subject. The human intellect is a marvelous mechanism in its ability to register and retain great knowledge; but it is far from being all-sufficient. It is necessary, therefore, to have the aid of catalogued thoughts, and it is almost infinitely important to know the content of the intellectual treasure-chest. In a long life-time I have scarcely lost a dollar bill; and in the few instances that I have, I have been able to recover the loss; but I have sustained heavy intellectual losses. When a man comes upon something in a magazine or a book that has real value, but fails to store it up in an intellectual treasure chest to which he carries the key, he is as prodigal with real riches as Bim Gump is with Australian profits. But, alas, nothing short of reading and study will keep that treasure chest so constantly replenished, that, draw upon it as often as you will, like Solomon’s tomb, its treasures are inexhaustible.
Still further, study habits eventuate in versatility.
I believe with one of the notable preachers of the past century, so far as the fundamentals of the faith are concerned, there is power in “Repeat!” “Repeat!” “Repeat!” To indoctrinate and establish people we have to add line upon line and precept upon precept; but, alas, when one repeats the same line over and over again to the same people, he becomes tiresome. In my boyhood one of the great local preachers in the Kentucky section where I lived was a converted rabbi. The rabbi was a peripatetic, never a pastor. He had a half dozen sermons and they were not so bad, but he repeated them so often that the county boys knew most of them by heart, so when the rabbi was preaching, some mischievous boy in the back seat would be preceding him by two or three lines, telling his neighbor kid what was coming next. In contrast to that conduct, I think of my great friend, the greatest preacher that the Southland has produced in a hundred years—Dr. B. H. Carroll of Texas. Once when we were in the West Texas Bible Conference we were in adjacent rooms, with only a door between, for ten days. For me it was an intellectual treat to have the fellowship and sit at the feet of that prince among preachers.
He told me then what I could not have believed had I not had immutable evidence of the fact; namely, that for years he had averaged reading something like five hundred pages a day. He was the most rapid reader I have ever known, and yet was capable of intelligently discussing the entire content of a book that he had finished in less than sixty minutes. I speak from absolute knowledge in the matter, for these discussions involved contents of my own volumes which he had in less than an hour, previously read, and yet which he seemed to have intelligently compassed in that brief time. The result was that his every sermon was filled and garnished with material not before employed. His storehouse of knowledge seemed inexhaustible, and when you add to that fact an eloquent utterance, you produce a preacher of top sort, and such Carroll was.
It will be recalled also that while he was pastor of the First Baptist Church of Waco for twenty years, he was always a professor or teacher; and of all college and theological seminary instructors no one known to our denomination was so insistent with his student-body that they give themselves to incessant study as was Carroll. He combined theory and practice and his opinions carried all the more weight with the student body, knowing as they had to know that he daily demonstrated, in his own intellectual life, what he was demanding of them.
I come now to our second suggestion:
STRONG CONVICTIONS
Here again I take my cue from the Apostle Paul. In his first letter to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 16:13) Paul, speaking of and to Timothy and Apollos, his juniors, as also to other Corinthian believers, said, “Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong”
If I were asked what is the ground of the average preacher’s weakness, I should answer in the words, “Lack of strength, particularly at the point of conviction, used as a synonym for courage.”
Convictions determine the course of life itself. The smaller forms of life live by the law of least resistance. The insects that crawl the earth flee at the face of danger or make a circuit above or about any obstacle. The lower forms of human life follow a kindred custom. That is why the jungle paths of Africa were, when white men first went there, extremely narrow and crooked. It hadn’t occurred to them to cut a straight swath through the forest that confronted them, or even to remove a fallen tree or stone that impeded their course; they just passed around both, and by the loss, in distance, compelled themselves to waste far more time and energy by circumlocution than would have been required for conquest.
I know preachers who adopt the insect and savage custom. The old Scotsman was their representative and voiced their philosophy when he said, “When you meet a difficulty, face it; and then pass around.”
They tell me that the Germans some years ago invented a dam which would hold back a certain amount of water, but whenever the depth became so great and the current so strong as to endanger it, it would conveniently lift and let out enough so as to save itself. But bright as the Germans are, preachers long since beat them to it! I have known lots of them who have ways of their own of easing the pressure by compromise. It is our candid conviction, however, that such ministers, like the German dam, will never produce adequate reservoirs of power; and it is my further conviction that by the compromises made to ease pressure they degrade themselves in the opinions of both friends and foes.
Better keep fellowship with your own convictions and conscience than with all professed friends, especially if the time comes when one must sacrifice the former in order to retain the latter.
Strong convictions account for major undertakings.
William Carey, our great prince of missionaries said, “Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.”
Mirabeau said, “ ‘Impossible’ is a blockhead of a word.”
Lord Chatham, when told by a colleague that a certain thing was impossible, calmly replied, “Then I’ll trample upon impossibilities.” The thing the preacher should remember is the statement, “With God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26), and its correlated concept, “All things are possible to him that believeth” (Mark 9:23).
Strong convictions sustain tenacious purposes. The difficulty with most of us in the ministry is that when we think something good and propose it, to find we have an opponent in the form of a trustee or a deacon, we straightway desist and cover up our cowardice by announcing ourselves as “discreet” servants of the Lord.
Fixity of purpose is a fine quality if it is controlled by sane judgment. An individual will naturally entertain an opinion upon practically every subject that comes up in church administration; but when it involves minor matters, why make a rupture issue? If major, why back down because there are opponents? It takes a long time and a tenacious purpose to put over big enterprises and may require officer-removals! There comes a time when, if a fellow won’t fish or cut bait, he should be put ashore.
Tenacity alone will witness the end of great undertakings and will often bring victory after having endured many defeats. My moral is, if a thing is right and ought to be done, try to be fair to your opponents, and in controversy, even kind; but don’t capitulate, don’t back down; do it!
COMPLETE SURRENDER Here again I appeal to Paul. Writing to the Romans, he said, “Yield yourselves unto God” (Romans 6:13).
While this was written to the members of the church at Rome, certainly the first fellow in such a fellowship who should adopt it as a practice is the preacher, and especially the pastor who is supposed to be ‘an example to the flock in all things.’
Self-surrender is essential to victory over sin. The special temptations to which a preacher is subject are not a whit different from those that are common to human flesh. It seems to me that when the Apostle John wanted to sum up sin’s possibilities he was inspired to express them under the phrase, “The lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16).
Unquestionably, these are the vulnerable points of all flesh, but they are more than vulnerable points with the preacher—they are danger points, and the danger is so grave that nothing but a surrender to God’s will provides sufficient strength for resistance.
“The lust of the flesh” is undoubtedly a clear reference to sexual passion.
“The lust of the eyes” is probably God’s prescription against both lust and covetousness.
“The pride of life” warns against egotism. And what three perils so beset preachers as do these? Take the first of them. How many fellow laborers of the years have fallen before it, have gone down not only with a crash; but like the great tree of the forest, uprooted by the storm, they have carried others with them, and even crushed some.
“The lust of the eyes” has even wider reach! Covetousness is the word that properly expresses it; and that covetousness may take any one of a hundred forms for one to covet many things. However, men have come to think of the word in connection with cash returns, and apply it to the passion for silver and gold.
Here also is the preacher in peril, not because of his greed oftentimes, but rather because of his disposition to run the race of life with the multitude. Other people about him have good houses, fine clothes, expensive cars, and so on; and ofttimes even the young minister, who ought like young lawyers and young doctors to take it hard for the first few years, will refuse, or at least fail, to endure as a good soldier. Many times there has come disgrace to the cause because some young preacher has, by borrowing from trusted friends, or leaving unpaid bills where credit had been accorded, finally found it necessary to flee the vicinity in order to escape legal procedure.
Success, then, in the ministry demands such a surrender of the life to God that loyalty to His sacred precepts will become a daily and dependable practice; and that is perhaps the one and only adequate secret of victory over sin.
Still further, the complete surrender of life assures spiritual complacency.
It is too bad for a man not to be at peace with himself; and at the same time at peace with God. That can only come about when he has reached the point where he can say, as our blessed Saviour himself did say, “Father . . . , not my will but thine be done.” That can only come about when of the daily duties he can quote His Master still further, ‘Father, I come to do Thy will.’ To be consciously in the center of the divine will is the place of complacency, no matter what comes or goes, whether the day is stormy or filled with balmy sunshine.
Some years ago a certain art institution is said to have offered a great prize for the best picture on the subject of peace. One artist painted a battlefield. The battle was over, the guns had ceased their firing, the dead were quiet, the wounded had been carried away, and the healthy, discharged soldiers were happily on their way home. But that picture was not judged worthy of the prize.
Many more were studied and set aside, and finally the judges united upon the presentation of a robin that had built her nest among the boughs overhanging Niagara Falls; there, calmly brooding against the day when her young should come, she had no fears of the mighty cataract, nor was alarmed at the thundering noise. She sat there in complete content and perfect peace.
Thus the soul of the man who is consciously at the center of God’s will; let the cataract roar, let the avalanche pour, let the dangers be ever so eminent—he can keep forever calm, and his spirit will be at peace.
Dr. Henry Varley is reported to have said one day in Moody’s presence, “It remains to see what God could do with a perfectly surrendered life I” In reflecting upon the remark, Moody said, “If so, that life shall be mine.” The world knows the result!
BIBLIOGRAPHY Watson, John (Ian Maclaren, pseud.) The Cure of Souls (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., no date).
Scarborough, Lee. With Christ After the Lost (Nashville, Tenn.: Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1919).