The Preacher: His Life and Work by John Henry Jowett

I'm looking for a book called The Preacher: His Life and Work by John Henry Jowett. This is a very rare book, and I've yet to find it, except for an online version: http://www.abcog.org/jowett1.htm but I would like to have a copy of the book one of these days.

Is this what you are looking for?Bookfinderginnyrose*Moderator Edit:ginnyrose, reconfigured your link, it was making the page go 'wide'.

Taka,This is Rich!This sense of great personal surprise in the glory of our vocation, while it will keep us humble, will also make us great. It will save us from becoming small officials in transient enterprises. It will make us truly big, and will, therefore, save us from spending our days in trifling. Emerson has somewhere said that men whose duties are done beneath lofty and stately domes acquire a dignified stride and a certain stateliness of demeanour. And preachers of the gospel, whose work is done beneath the lofty dome of some glorious and wonderful conception of their ministry, will acquire a certain largeness of demeanour in which flippancy and trivialities cannot breathe. "I shall run the way of Thy commandments when Thou shalt enlarge my heart."Think this book is just as applicable to disciples as well as preachers, it cut's across the lines ... Already, the sentiment's are finding that inward recognition ... Just outstanding brother. I pray you find a personal copy. Edit:Throwing cost to the wind ...Amazon

Now, if such be the sacredness of our calling, and its consequent glory, we cannot be blind to its solemn responsibilities. It is a great, awful, holy trust. We are called to be guides and guardians of the souls of men, leading them into "the way of peace." We are to be constantly engaged with eternal interests, leading the thoughts and wills of men to the things that primarily matter, and disengaging them from lesser or meaner concerns which hold them in servitude. We are to be the friends of the Bridegroom, winning men, not to ourselves, but to Him, match-making for the Lord, abundantly satisfied when we have brought the bride and the Bridegroom together. I do not wonder that men shrink from the calling even when they feel the glory of it! I do not wonder at the holy fear of men as they approach the sacred office! Listen to these words of Charles Kingsley, written in his private journal, written in the dawning of the day on which he was to be ordained to the priesthood of the Lord: "In a few hours my whole soul will be waiting silently for the seals of admission to God's service, of which honour I dare hardly think myself worthy . . . Night and morning for months my prayer has been, Oh, God, if I am not worthy, if my sin in leading souls away from Thee is still unpardoned, if I am desiring to be a deacon not wholly for the sake of serving Thee, if it is necessary to show me my weakness and the holiness of Thy office still more strongly, Oh, God, reject me!" I say I do not wonder at the shrinking, and I would not pray that the day may come when it may entirely pass away, lest in a perilous self-confidence we lose the brightness of the glory, and have an impoverished conception of our great vocation. In this matter, as in many others, "the fear of the Lord is a fountain of life," and "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."

Yeah, this is probably the best book I ever read on the subject of ministry. $50.00-$124.95 on Amazon I can believe because it was published once in 1912 and never published again. I was glad to find the text online.

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"Gentlemen, we are not always doing the most business when we seem to be most busy. We may think we are truly busy when we are really only restless, and a little studied retirement would greatly enrich our returns. We are great only as we are God-possessed; and scrupulous appointments in the upper room with the Master will prepare us for the toil and hardships of the most strenuous campaign. We must, therefore, hold firmly and steadily to this primary principle, that of all things that need doing this need is supreme, to live in intimate fellowship with God. Let us steadily hold a reasonable sense of values, and assign each appointed duty to its legitimate place. And in any appointment of values this would surely be the initial judgment, that nothing can be well done if we drift away from God. Neglected spiritual fellowship means futility all along the road."

Seem to recall some of this somewhere.A Bible for the heathens?1631 "Wicked Bible" This King James Version Bible is an unspeakably rare collector’s item. The printers were fined 300 pounds sterling for their terrible typographical error in printing the Ten Commandments, omitting the all-important word “not” and rendering the verse as, “Thou shalt commit adultery”! The lot of 1,000 copies were ordered destroyed, but only a handful escaped destruction, making them the rarest of rare. This is the only one for sale in the world.Offered at $89,500

But the discipline of the soul must be serious and studious. This high culture must not be governed by haphazard or caprice. There must be purpose and method and regularity. And you may depend upon it, that when you give yourselves to soul-culture in this serious way, it is a travail and not a pastime. If it were easy it might scarcely be worth counselling: it is tremendously difficult, but its rewards are infinite. One of the most cultured spirits in modern Methodism, a man whose style is as strong as his thoughts are lofty, has recently given this judgment as he looked back upon the years of his ministry: "I have not failed to study: I have not failed to visit: I have not failed to write and meditate: but I have failed to pray.Now why have I not prayed? Sometimes because I did not like it: at other times because I hardly dared: and yet at other times because I had something else to do. Let us be very frank. It is a grand thing to get a praying minister.... I have heard men talk about prayer who never prayed in their lives. They thought they did: but when you have heard them, they made their own confession in a ruthless way." These sentences lift the veil upon a naked experience, and they expose the solemn fact that prayer is very costly, even at the expense of blood, and that churches which have praying ministers may not realize the travail by which the power is gained. We are permitted to look upon our Master as He prays. "In the days of His flesh He offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears." It was a holy and a costly business. "And being in an agony He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat was as were great drops of blood falling down to the ground." There was something here which we can never share, and yet there is something which we must share if we are leagued with the Lord in the ministry of intercession, and enter into "the fellowship of His sufferings."

There is another peril which I will name. The sense of scriptural truth is very delicate and it can be easily impaired. Every preacher knows how sensitive is the organ of spiritual perception, and how vigilantly it has to be guarded if he is to retain his vision and apprehension of "the deeper things" of God. You will find in your ministry that an evil temper can make you blind. You will find that jealousy can scale your eyes until the heavens give no light. You will find that paltry temper raises an earth-born cloud between you and the hills of God. You will find when you enter your study that your moral and spiritual condition demands your first attention. I have sat down to the preparation of my sermon and the heavens have been as brass! I have turned to the gospel of John and it has been as a wilderness, without verdure or dew! Yes, you will find that when your spirit is impaired, your Bible, and your lexicons, and your commentaries are only like so many spectacles behind which there are no eyes: you have no sight!All this you will probably grant when our attention is confined to the influence of deliberate sin upon spiritual vision. But I would ask you to consider whether the spiritual organ of the preacher may not be bruised if he is enticed to give the burden of his attention to secondary discussion and controversies, to matters which have certainly not first rank in the interests of the soul. I believe it is possible for the sociologist to impair the evangelist in the preacher, and that a man can lose his power to unveil and display "the unsearchable riches of Christ." Gentlemen, this fear is not the creation of the fancy. I have heard men make the confession that they have acquired a passion and aptitude for certain types of preaching, and they have lost the power to expound those deepest matters which absorbingly engaged the heart and brain of the Apostle Paul. When the preacher becomes economist there are men outside who can surpass him in his office. His influence in these secondary realms is comparatively small. His legitimate and unshared throne is elsewhere and among other themes. It is for him to keep a clean, clear, true insight into the things that matter most, to explore the wonderful love of God, to delve and mine in the treasures of redemption, "to know nothing among men save Jesus Christ and Him crucified."

But a second reason is given why the themes of the pulpit should be more widely varied than those of a past generation. We are told that there is a tragic lapse of interest in the Church. The Church is now surrounded by a multiplicity of conflicting or competing interests. Modern life has put on brighter colours: it has become more garish, more arresting, more mesmeric. Society has become more enticing, and lures of pleasure abound on every side. And all this is making the Church seem very grey and sombre, and her slow, old- fashioned ways appear like a "one-horse shay" amid the bright, swift times of automobile and aeroplane! And therefore the Church must "hurry up" and make her services more pleasant and savoury. Her themes must be "up-to-date." They must be "live" subjects for "live" men! They must be even a little sensational if they are to catch the interest of men who live in the thick of sensations from day to day.I can quite understand men who take this position, and I think they offer certain reasonable counsels which it will be our wisdom to heed. But on the other hand I think the road is beset with perils which we must heed with equal vigilance. The Apostle Paul recognized changing assortments of circumstances, and he resolved upon a certain elasticity, and he became "all things to all men" that he might l "save some." But in all the elasticity of his relations he never changed his themes. He moved amid the garishness of Ephesus, and Corinth, and Rome, but he never borrowed the artificial splendour of his surroundings and thereby eclipsed the Cross. No "way of the world" seduced him from his central themes. Wherever he went, whether to a little prayer-meeting by the river-side in Philippi, or amid the aggressive, sensational glare of Ephesus or Corinth, he "determined to know nothing among men save Jesus Christ and Him crucified." And I am persuaded that amid all the changed conditions of our day - the social upheavals, the race for wealth, the quest of pleasure, we shall gain nothing by hugging the subordinate, or by paying any homage to the flippancy and frivolity of the time. The Church is in perilous ways when she begins to borrow the sensational notes of the passing hour. One of the clearest and wisest counsellors of our time, a man who knew the secrets of men because he dwelt in "the secret place of the Most High," gave this straight counsel to the ministry a little while ago: "Against religious sensationalism, outré sayings, startling advertisements, profane words, irreverent prayers, the younger ministry must make an unflinching stand, for the sake of the Church and the world, for the sake of their profession and themselves." I do not think these words describe an imaginary peril. The peril is already at our gates; in some quarters it has been an actual menace to our worship, and here and there the menace has become a "destruction that wasteth at noonday." There is a certain reserved and reticent dignity which will always be an essential element in our power among men. We never reach the innermost room in any man's soul by the expediencies of the showman or the buffoon. The way of irreverence will never bring us to the holy place. Let us be as familiar as you please, but let it be the familiarity of simplicity, the simplicity which clothes itself in all things natural, chaste, and refined. And I think if we were to exercise ourselves upon things supremely beautiful we should find that we had hit upon the supremely sensational, and that the out-of-the-way themes, the glaring titles, the loud advertisements, are undesirable ministers in the quest and cure of souls.(* Note, keep in mind that this was written in 1912!)

What are the needs of the people who face us in the pews? In their innermost souls what do they crave? Are they hungering for the rediscussion of newspaper topics, with only the added flavour of the sanction of the sanctuary? Shall the preacher be just a visible editor, presenting his message amid the solemn inspirations of prayer and praise? What is the apostolic guidance in the matter? When I turn to apostolic witness and preaching I am growingly amazed at the fulness and glory of the message. There is a range about it, and a vastness, and a radiance, and a colour which have been the growing astonishment of my latter years. When I turn to it I feel as though I am in Alpine country; majestic heights with tracts of virgin snow; suggestions of untraversed depths with most significant silence; mighty rivers full and brimming all the year round; fields of exquisite flowers nestling beneath the protecting care of precipitous grandeur; fruit- trees on the lower slopes, each bearing its fruit in its season; the song of birds; the moving air; the awful tempest. Turn to one of Paul's epistles, and you will experience this sense of air, and space, and height, and grandeur. Turn to Ephesians, or Colossians, or Romans, and you feel at once you are not in some little hill-country, and still less on some unimpressive and monotonous plain, you are in mountainous country, awful, arresting, and yet also fascinating, companionable, intimate. In Ephesians you lift your wondering eyes upon the ineffable Glory, but you also wander by rivers of grace, and you walk in paths of light, and you gather "the fruits of the Spirit" from the tree that grows by the way. I say it is this vastness, this manifold glory of apostolic preaching which more and more allures me, and more and more overwhelms me as the years of my ministry go by. There is something here to awaken the wonder of men, to lead them into holy awe, to brace their spirits, to expand their minds, and to immeasurably enlarge their thought and life.And what is true of apostolic preaching has been true of all great preaching down to this very hour. Take Thomas Boston. We are told that his language was "tasked and strained to the utmost, to admeasure and to understand," when he spoke of "those redemptive blessings which meet all men's necessities . . . the full and irrevocable forgiveness of sins; reinstatement in the divine favour and friendship; the gift of the Holy Spirit in his enlightening, purifying, and peace-giving influences, turning men into living temples of the living God; victory in death and over death; the reception of the soul at death into the Father's house, and the beatific vision of God." These were the themes of transcendent interest which enriched and glorified the preaching of Thomas Boston, and which made it so mighty a power for the highest good that there was scarcely a cottage home in all Ettrick in which some of his converts could not be found.Or take Spurgeon. You may not like his theology. You may resent some of the phraseology in which his theology is enshrined. But I tell you that, with Spurgeon's preaching as your guide, your movements are not limited to some formal exercise on a barren asphalt area, or confined to the limits of some small backyard. Hear him on the love of God, on the grace of Christ Jesus, on the communion of the Holy Ghost. Hear him on such texts as "Accepted in the Beloved," "The Glory of His Grace," "The Forgiveness of Sins," "The Holy Spirit of Promise," "The Exceeding Greatness of His Power to Usward Who Believe" - hear him on themes like these, and you have a sense of vastness kindred to that which awes you when you listen to the Apostle Paul. Every apparently simple division in the sermon is like the turning of the telescope to some new galaxy of luminous wonders in the unfathomable sky.Or take Newman. What was it that held the cultured crowds in St. Mary's enthralled in almost painful silence? I know there was the supreme genius of the preacher. There was also that mysterious fascination which always attaches to the mystic and the ascetic, to those who are most evidently detached from the jostling and heated interests of the world. But above and beyond these there was the vastness and the inwardness of the themes with which he dealt. His hearers were constrained from the study to the sanctuary, from the market- place to the holy place, even to "the heavenly places in Christ Jesus." The very titles of his sermons tell us where he dwelt: "Saving Knowledge," "The Quickening Spirit," "The Humiliation of the Eternal Son," "Holiness Necessary for Future Blessedness," "Christ Manifested in Remembrance," "The Glory of God." The very recital of the themes enlarges the mind, and induces that sacred fear which is "the beginning of wisdom." The preacher was always moving in a vast world, the solemn greatness of life was continually upon him, and there was ever the call of the Infinite even in the practical counsel concerning the duty of the immediate day.I say this has been the mood and the manner of all great and effective preaching. It was even so with the mighty preaching of Thomas Binney. "He seemed," says one who knew him well, "to look at the horizon rather than at an enclosed field, or a local landscape. He had a marvellous way of connecting every subject with eternity past and with eternity to come." Yes, and that was Pauline and apostolic. It was as though you were looking at a bit of carved wood in a Swiss village window, and you lifted your eyes and saw the forest where the wood was nourished, and, higher still, the everlasting snows I Yes, that was Binney's way, Dale's way, the way of Bushnell, and Newman, and Spurgeon - they were always willing to stop at the village window, but they always linked the streets with the heights, and sent your souls a- roaming over the eternal hills of God. And this it is which always impresses me, and impresses me more and more the solemn spaciousness of their themes, the glory of their unveilings, their wrestlings with language to make the glory known, the voice of the Eternal in their practical appeals; and this it is which so profoundly moved their hearers to "wonder, love, and praise."

Well now, is our preaching to-day characterized by this apostolic vastness of theme, this unfolding of arresting spiritual wealth and glory? I ask these questions not that we may register a hasty and careless verdict, but to suggest a serious and personal inquiry. Dr. Gore, the Bishop of Oxford, has been recently telling us what he thinks is the perilous tendency of the ministers and teachers of the Protestant religion. He declares that we are seeking refuge from the difficulties of 'thought in the opportunities of action.' That is a very serious suggestion. It would mean that we are intensely busy in the little village shop, and have no vision of the pine forests, or of the august splendours of the everlasting hills. And it would mean something more than this. We are not going to enrich our action by the impoverishment of our thought. A skimmed theology will not produce a more intimate philanthropy. We are not going to become more ardent lovers of men by the cooling of our love for God. You cannot drop the big themes and create great saints.But altogether apart from what Dr. Gore thinks of our preaching, what do we think of it ourselves? In the light of the example of the Apostle Paul, of his teaching and preaching, and by the example of the other great preachers I have named, how does it fare with our familiar themes? Are they always in the village shop, or is there always a suggestion of the mountains about them? Are they thin, and small, and of the dwarfed variety? Can our language very easily say all that we have got to say, or does it fail to carry the glory we would fain express? Is it not true that our language is often too big for our thought, and our thought is like a spoonful of sad wine rattling about in a very ornate and distinguished bottle? Men may admire the bottle, but they find no inspiration in the wine. Yes, men admire, but they do not revere; they appreciate, but they do not repent; they are interested, but they are not exalted. They say, "What a fine sermon!" not, "What a great God!" They say, "What a ready speaker!" and not, "Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!"~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~It is this note of vastitude, this ever-present sense and suggestion of the Infinite, which I think we need to recover in our modern preaching. Even when we are dealing with what we sometimes unfortunately distinguish as "practical" duties we need to emphasize their rootage in the eternal. It is at the gravest peril that we dissociate theology and ethics, and separate the thought of duty to men from the thought of its relation to God. When the Apostle Paul, in the twelfth chapter of Romans, begins to be hortatory, preceptive, practical, it is because he has already prepared the rich bed in which these strong and winsome graces may be grown. Every precept in the twelfth chapter sends its roots right down through all the previous chapters, through the rich, fat soil of sanctification and justification, and the mysterious energies of redeeming grace. We employ a universe to rear a lily-of- the-valley. We need the power of the Holy Spirit to rear a fruit of the Spirit. We require evangelical grace if we would t create evangelical patience. We require "the truth as it is in Jesus" if we would furnish even a truly courteous life. Ruskin says that if you were to cut a square inch out of any of Turner's skies you would find the infinite in it. And it ought to be that if men were to take only a square inch out of any of our preaching, they would find a suggestion which would lead them to "the throne of God and of the Lamb."All this means that we must preach upon the great texts of the Scriptures, the fat texts, the tremendous passages whose vastnesses almost terrify us as we approach them. We may feel that we are but pigmies in the stupendous task, but in these matters it is often better to lose ourselves in the immeasurable than to always confine our little boat to the measurable creeks along the shore. Yes, we must grapple with the big things, the things about which our people will hear nowhere else; the deep, the abiding, the things that permanently matter. We are not appointed merely to give good advice, but to proclaim good news. Therefore must the apostolic themes be our themes: The holiness of God; the love of God; the grace of the Lord Jesus; the solemn wonders of the cross; the ministry of the Divine forgiveness; the fellowship of His sufferings; the power of the Resurrection; the blessedness of divine communion; the heavenly places in Christ Jesus; the mystical indwelling of the Holy Ghost; the abolition of the deadliness of death; the ageless life; our Father's house; the liberty of the glory of the children of God. Themes like these are to be our power and distinction. "O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion, get thee up into the high mountain. O thou that tellest good tidings to Jerusalem, lift up thy voice with strength: lift it up: be not afraid: say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God!"