Robert Murray McCheyne was a local pastor in Dundee, Scotland, who died in 1843 at the age of 29. No extraordinary event in your life reminds you, but I had a very valuable friend, Andrew Bonar, a close pastor. Over a two-year period, Andrew published Memoir and Remains of Robert Murray McCheyne. It’s still published today, and here we are, 176 years after McCheyne’s death, motivated and inspired by his life.
What was McCheyne’s short, somewhat ordinary life that gave him the strength that inspired the book (and now the books) that preserves his legacy for today?
I think there was a double key to McCheyne’s life force: the greatness of Jesus and the pain of a thorn.
In McCheyne’s description of her teenage years, she said, “I kissed Rosa, didn’t I even think about the thorn?That is, “I have abandoned all the fun and attractive pleasures of the world and have not thought of sickness, suffering and death. But after his conversion, he often spoke of Jesus as his Rose of Sarom and lived with an almost constant awareness of the thorn of his illness and that his time could be short, he said in one of his sermons. :
“Don’t put your heart in the flowers of this world; because they’re all corrupt. Enjoy the Rose Sarom . . . more than anything; because it doesn’t change. He lives closer to Christ than the Saints, so that when they are taken from you, he can always have it to support him (Sermons by Robert Murray McCheyne).
McCheyne lived alone on the morning of his life: he died before the age of 30; however, her effectiveness was not thwarted by this fact, but reinforced by her. After suffering from tuberculosis, he lived with the strong feeling that he would die prematurely. Therefore, the double key to his life was the beautifulness of Jesus, the Rose, intensified by the pain of the thorn, the sickness and the rarity of his life.
McCheyne was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 21 May 1813. He grew up in an atmosphere of high moral standards, but, according to his own testimony, was “devoid of God. “When he went to the University of Edinburgh at the age of 14, he studied classical studies, kissed the rose of classical knowledge and ignored the thorn of suffering and death.
But all this changed in 1831, when he was 18 years old, Robert’s older brother, David, was neither spiritually nor physically, in the summer of that year he entered a deep depression and died on July 8. The thorn in the rose pierced McCheyne’s heart. All the beauty of the rose he lived for vanished. And by the grace of God, he saw another Rose, like David.
In the days leading up to his death, David found deep peace through the blood of Jesus. Bonar said that “The joy of the face of a fully reconciled Father illuminated the face of David [dying]. (Remember). McCheyne saw that and everything started to change. I had seen a rose that was not a classic learning experience. And he saw her beautifully, not in spite of the thorn, but for him. The thorn pierced him and woke him up.
Four months after his brother’s death, McCheyne enrolled in divinity Hall at the University of Edinburgh in November 1831, where he met the man who would have the greatest influence on his life and ministry, Thomas Chalmers.
Chalmers influenced all his great knowledge in the service of holiness and evangelization. He alerted McCheyne and the other students of the “white devil” and “the black devil,” the black devil who leads to the “carnal sins of the world, and white devil to the “spiritual sins” of complacency. And he made the gospel of Christ crucified by sinners the central power of this holiness.
Chalmers was also deeply oppressed by poverty in Edinburgh’s slums and with little testimony of the gospel. He created the Visiting Society and recruited McCheyne and his friends to participate. This took McCheyne into a world he had never seen as an upper middle-class student. created a sense of urgency for those who were far from the gospel. On March 3, 1834, involved for two and a half years in his divinity studies, he wrote:
“Scenes I never dreamed of attending . . . ? Doesn’t anybody take care of our souls?It’s written on every front, Wake up my soul!Lord, put your own strength in me; You confirm that any good resolve forgives my long past life of futility and madness. ?(Remember).
McCheyne extracted from his time in theology school a passion for holiness and evangelism. Would he never leave you and become impulses that defined your life?All this motivated by the beauty of Rosa and intensified by the thorn of suffering.
The last day of McCheyne’s theology conferences was March 29, 1835, at the age of 22. And that autumn, he was called to be an assistant minister in the dual parish of Larbert and Dunipace. There he served as an assistant until he received a call from St. Peter’s Church in Dundee in August 1836. There, McCheyne served as a parish priest, until his death six and a half years later.
It’s the simple summary of his professional life: student up to 22 years, assistant pastor one year and senior pastor for six years, so I began to consider that what makes life without incident so useful, even 176 years after his death, is not an extraordinary fact in his life. On the contrary, is it your extraordinary passion for Christ?holiness and the lost, all intensified by the expectation of a short life?The thorn. And all this passion preserved in powerful and picturesque language always influences us by the words that came out of his mouth, not by the facts of his life.
So let us hear you talk about the search for holiness and your communion with God through word and prayer.
God had given McCheyne the key to the gospel to seek personal holiness, he received it through the teachings of Chalmers, who was very concerned about excessive introspection in the pursuit of holiness, he knew that a believer cannot progress in holiness without relying on the guarantee. of salvation and yet the effort to poll our sinful hearts in search of a test of grace usually turns against it.
Chalmers said that a simple glance at the dark room of the heart does not offer good prospects, but said that we should:
? Ask for help in the windows. Open the blinds and let the sun in, so if you want to see the inside, stay tuned . . . That is the exact way to speed things up, open the portals of faith wide, and with this, all light will be admitted. in the living rooms of experience. The real way to facilitate self-examination is to look in faith (Introduction to Great Christian Interest, 6).
McCheyne wrote this in class and pointed out the last sentence, so it’s not surprising to hear him give his own advice in similar terms:?Learn a lot about the Lord Jesus, for every look at yourself, look at Christ ten times. it’s totally adorable. . . . He lives a lot in God’s smiles. Feel your gaze that sees everything fixed on you in love. And rest in your mighty arms? (Memory).
This was his basic strategy in the search for holiness. So when McCheyne uttered what are probably his most famous words: “Is the greatest need of my people my own holiness?”, He meant not only that they needed a morally just pastor, but they a pastor who always walked in communion with Christ and transformed himself into the image of Christ through this constant communion. Which now leads us now, finally, to the way in which he has cultivated this constant communion with Christ.
McCheyne has much to say about the disciplines of meditation on the Word of God and prayer; their systematic disciplines were aimed at establishing in their hearts the habit of living in constant communion with Christ. He read the scriptures and prayed, and tried to keep this for the rest of his life. He liked to meet Jesus in the morning. He wrote: “I got up early to seek God and find the one who loves my soul. Who wouldn’t get up early to find a company like that?He wrote to a student, “Never see a man’s face until he sees his face, what is our life, our everything?(Memory).
And when he spoke of seeing the face of God, his mind was to see God in the Word of God, the Bible. He wrote to Horacio Bonar, brother of Andrew: “I love the word of God and consider it the sweetest food for my soul. (Memory)Did the written word become the window through which he saw the glories of Christ?The beauties of Rosa. It was the key to her constant communion with Jesus, who was the key to her holiness and preaching.
But brotherhood occurs in both directions, and prayer was essential to McCheyne’s power. Both the Word of God read and the Word of God preached depend on prayer by power. discern any obstacle to prayer. One of the measures McCheyne used to discern if he was too in love with the world was to realize the effect it had on his biblical prayers and readings:?for prayer or for the Bible . . . abusing this world. Oh! Free yourself from the joy of this world: “Is time running out?”(Sermons).
Thanks to this practice, word and prayer, the Sarom Rose has become increasingly beautiful and precious to McCheyne and, in the meantime, these acts of devotion intensified with the thorn of his suffering and the expectation of a short life. week he finished college, he wrote: “Life itself is rapidly disappearing. Are you running to eternity? (Memory).
It didn’t take long for tb evidence to become unmistakable. In early 1839 he wrote, “My sick painting makes me feel, every day, that my time may be too short. “And to his own congregation, he said in early 1843: “I don’t expect to live long. I expect a sudden call someday, maybe soon, so I say it very clearly?(Memory).
All this suffering and the expectation of death produced such a concentration of simplicity and intensity that they gave more and more power to everything McCheyne did. He saw this as the merciful way in which God lifted up the veil of eternity. On the morning of his life, McCheyne kissed Rosa and felt the thorn; his supreme joy was to know Christ; lived in communion with Jesus through the Word and Prayer; and the thorn of his suffering has intensified and purified this brotherhood, so we are still inspired by him 176 years later.