LOVE CHRIST FIRST

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · January 15, 1880

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 3

LOVE CHRIST FIRST.

The present course of “Yale Lectures on Preaching,” by Chancellor Howard Crosby, D. D., LL. D., now appearing in The Independent, is one of unusual interest. From the fifth lecture we take the following paragraph, in which an enthusiastic personal love for the Saviour is forcibly set forth as the first necessity of a successful preacher. We commend it to the consideration of all who have any work to do for the Master. Other extracts from these lectures may follow hereafter.

“Our first remark is that the true preacher must be one who has an enthusiastic love for his Lord and Saviour. He is not so much to preach a proposition as a person, and the power of the presentation will be proportioned to his love of the person. The great facts of Christ’s mediatorial life should be ever before his mind’s eye, and he should be ever conscious of the dependent connection of his own life with that of his Lord. There is a cold intellectual way of looking at a great truth, and an equally cold way of presenting such a truth with logical exactness; but association with a truth under these conditions is association with a marble statue. Certain demands of the intelligent nature may be satisfied, and even an esthetic rapture may be reached; but when the heart’s depths are considered, this satisfaction and this rapture are but as a fleeting thought across the mind or a flush across the face. The profound love of the heart must be for a person. The religion of Christ is love for a person. The person of Christ as the theanthropic one, with all the powers and perfections of God and all the sympathy, proximity, and likeness of man, is the object of the believer’s adoration and affection. Out of that personal contact of the soul with Christ comes the understanding of all his truth as he makes it known in the written word. The soul that so walks with Christ has the key to the divine knowledge which is recorded for spiritual discernment. In love with Christ he knows Christ’s mind, according to our Lord’s own statement, ‘All things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you,’ and according to that other scripture, ‘We have the mind of Christ.’”