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It is not how long you live, but how you live that counts.
Robert Murray M’Cheyne was a living example of this often neglected truth. He was born on May 21, 1813, in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was licensed to preach at the age of twenty-two, ordained to the pastorate of St. Peter’s Church, Dundee Scotland, at twenty-three, and died six years later in 1843.
Like John the Baptist and the Savior Himself, M’Cheyne ushered in Christ’s kingdom in just a few short years. It was during his brief public ministry that Scotland experienced one of its greatest revivals. From 1839-1842, much of Scotland was turned upside down through the Spirit-filled labors of W. C. Burns and Robert Murray M’Cheyne.
M’Cheyne rarely preached outside his native land. He wrote no books and was extremely frail in health. However, the impact of the “prophet of Dundee,” as he was known, lives on to this day. History records that the entire land of Scotland was shaken by him, and at his death; Scotland wept.
The spiritual well of living water went very deep in this unusual man of God. Here is a typical example of his simple but utterly unsimplistic way of Biblical reasoning on a difficult issue:
“No one ever came to Christ because they knew themselves to be of the elect. It is quite true that God has of his mere good pleasure elected some to everlasting life, but they never knew it until they came to Christ. Christ nowhere invites the elect to come to Him. The question for you is not, am I one of the elect? But, am I one of the human race?”
Jesus Christ was everything to Robert; for every time M’Cheyne directed men to look at their sins he also pointed them ten times to look on Jesus. This was the key to his tender and passionate preaching. To him Christ was not just one of many theological concepts in a message, Christ Jesus was the message! M’Cheyne’s power in the pulpit was the result of his intimate knowledge of Jesus. He could boldly say, “I am better acquainted with Jesus Christ than I am with any man in the world.”
Often as he preached, the entire congregation was brought to tears. M’Cheyne’s diary and letters describe for us some of these precious meetings. He wrote, “It was like a pent-up flood breaking forth; tears were streaming from the eyes of many, and some fell on the ground groaning and weeping and crying for mercy.” At other times men and women were so overcome with grief and conviction that they literally had to be carried out of the church -“In some areas whole congregations were frequently moved as one man, and the voice of the minister was drowned out by the cries of anxious souls.”
M’Cheyne’s voice, eyes and gestures spoke of the tenderness of Christ. It was not Robert Murray M’Cheyne the people saw, it was Jesus. M’Cheyne declared, “A man cannot be a faithful minister, until he preaches Christ for Christ’s sake – until he gives up striving to attract people to himself and seeks only to attract them to Christ.”
No Christian can read the biography or the writings of Robert Murray M’Cheyne without realizing that the true measure of life is not its length, but its usefulness. Nor does the amount of our activity or our words reflect the true value of our life. M’Cheyne ministered but a short seven and a half years and died at the age of 29, yet the fruitfulness of that brief life remains to this day.
M’Cheyne only left notes of some 300 sermons when he died in 1843, but his own counsel to a fellow minister explains why these sermons brought such abundant blessing, not only to ‘the noisy mechanics and political weavers’ of Dundee but, later, to all parts of the English – speaking world:
“Get your texts from God -your thoughts, your words, from God… It is not great talents God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus. A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God. A word spoken by you when your conscience is clear, and your heart full of God’s Spirit, is worth ten thousand words spoken in unbelief and sin.”
