M'Cheyne's Letter to W C Burns 1839

TO THE REV. W. C. BURNS

On his agreeing to undertake the charge of St Peter's, during Mr M‘C.‘s absence in Palestine,

EDINBURGH, Hill Street, March 22, 1839

MY DEAR FRIEND - 

- for I trust I may now reckon you among the number in the truest sense - I haste to send you a line in answer to your last. I am glad you have made up your mind to begin your spiritual charge over my flock on the first week of April. The committee have resolved that I leave this on Wednesday next, so that you will not hear from me again till I am away. Take heed to thyself: Your own soul is your first and greatest care. You know a sound body alone can work with power; much more a healthy soul. Keep a clear conscience, through the blood of the Lamb. Keep up close communion with God. Study likeness to him in all things. Read the Bible for your own growth first, then for your people. Expound much; it is through the truth that souls are to be sanctified, not through essays upon the truth. Be easy of access, apt to teach, and the Lord teach you and bless you in all you do and say. You will. not find many companions‘. Be the more with God. My dear people are anxiously waiting for you. The prayerful are praying for you. Be of good courage, there remaineth much of the land to he possessed. Be not dismayed, for Christ shall be with thee to deliver thee. Study Isaiah vi., and Jeremiah i., and the sending of Moses, and Psalm Ii. 12, 13, and John xv. 26, 27, and the connection in Luke i. 15, 16.

I shall hope to hear from you when I am away. Your accounts of my people will be a good word to make my heart glad. I am often sore cast down; but the eternal God is my refuge. Now farewell; the Lord make you a faithful steward.

Ever yours, etc.

M'Cheyne on the Lord's Day

R  M M'Cheyne wrote

“A well-spent Sabbath we feel to be a day of heaven upon earth. For this reason we wish our Sabbaths to be wholly given to God. We love to spend the whole time in the public and private exercises of God’s worship, except so much as is taken up in the works of necessity and mercy. We love to rise early on that morning, and to sit up late, that we may have a long day with God.”

It was M‘Cheyne’s usual practice to rise at 6 am on the Lord’s Day, and not to go to bed until midnight, so that he might spend as much time with God on His day as possible. I know he was a single man but that is the spirit we ought to have.

More here

Reading the Bible M

You read your Bible regularly, of course; but do try and understand it, and still more, to feel it. Read more parts than one at a time. For example, if you are reading Genesis, read a Psalm also; or, if you are reading Matthew, read a small bit of an epistle also. Turn the Bible into prayer. Thus, if you were reading the 1st Psalm, spread the Bible on the chair before you, and kneel and pray, 'O Lord, give me the blessedness of the man,' &c. 'Let me not stand in the counsel of the ungodly,' &c. This is the best way of knowing the meaning of the Bible, and of learning to pray.
Robert Murray M'Cheyne in a letter to a boy he sought to help in 1836

Banner and M'Cheyne

The April Banner of Truth mag is already out in electronic form. The focus (not sure why) is on M'Cheyne. It includes a rare M'Cheyne sermon, an obituary by Spurgeon, a commendation of the memoir by Samuel Miller and this memorial inscription from St Peter's in Dundee:

Erected by His Sorrowing Flock

IN MEMORY OF

THE REV. ROBERT MURRAY M‘CHEYNE

FIRST MINISTER OF ST PETER’S CHURCH,

DUNDEE,

WHO DIED ON THE 25TH DAY OF MARCH,

MDCCCXLIII.,

IN THE THIRTIETH YEAR OF HIS AGE.

WALKING CLOSELY WITH GOD,

AN EXAMPLE OF THE BELIEVER IN WORD,

IN CONVERSATION, IN CHARITY, IN SPIRIT, IN FAITH,

IN PURITY,

HE CEASED NOT

DAY AND NIGHT TO LABOUR AND WATCH FOR SOULS;

AND WAS HONOURED BY HIS LORD

TO DRAW MANY WANDERERS OUT OF DARKNESS

INTO THE PATH OF LIFE.

“Those also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him.” 

Don again

Just read this in Don Carson (on Ezekiel 43 ostensibly but really on 48:35).

The culmination of this vision within the book of Ezekiel is found in the last verse of the book: “And the name of the city from that time on will be: THE LORD IS THERE” (48:35). That is wonderful. Wherever the Lord is, is holy. “Therefore, prepare your minds for action; be self-controlled; set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed. As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written, ‘Be holy, because I am holy’” (1 Pet. 1:13-16). John saw a vision of “the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev. 21:2). The voice cried, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God” (Rev. 21:3).

We must always remember that: The Gospel is not admired in Scripture primarily because of the social transformation it effects, but because it reconciles men and women to a holy God. Its purpose is not that we might feel fulfilled, but that we might be reconciled to the living and holy God. The consummation is delightful to the transformed people of God, not simply because the environment of the new heaven and the new earth is pleasing, but because we forever live and work and worship in the unshielded radiance of the presence of our holy Maker and Redeemer. That prospect must shape how the church lives and serves, and determine the pulse of its ministry. The only alternative is high-sounding but selfserving idolatry.

Daily Devotions 01

Like me, I guess most readers of this blog try to start the day with a time of reading and prayer. Since the beginning of the year I have been using my little netbook to start the day most days and it has been a real help, with things going better and for longer than ever before. I try to follow the M'Cheyne reading scheme, which is quite demanding, especially as I endeavour to do all four readings at once. (I find if they are left they are less likely to get done). So I start with the Interactive M'Cheyne Daily Bible Reading Calendar (there is a button you can click on my sidebar) which takes you to the correct place on Bible Gateway. Sometimes (though there is rarely time) I'll read from more than one version. Sometimes to help me concentrate I'll use the audio facility there.
Users of the M'Cheyne system will be aware of Don Carson's helpful two books (For the love of God) offering a daily page of devotional comment. I have both volumes but it occurred to me that it must be available somewhere online and I found that Crossway have put the two volumes here and here. The snag here is that you have to go searching through to find the page you want. Further, obviously Crossway don't want to lose sales on this and so eventually they will not allow you to access all pages, which rather spoils the fun. However, the other day I was looking for a quote from Carson to lump across to here and discovered this very helpful blog. The way this is set up is that if you come to the main page you will have the text from one of the books for that day. To get the text for the other two readings you need to go through the archives (indeed today I had to do that in both cases as the current reading was not up - at least it's all there somewhere by now so you can find what you want eventually).
Obviously over reliance on technology can have its drawbacks but I have found these few sites a real help. I'll say more in a further post I hope.

Carson on Scripture

I came across this from Don Carson today talking about Psalm 108 which is made up of parts of other psalms in a different context. He says

For although all of Scripture is true and important, deserving study, reflection, and carefully applied thought, the Lord God in his wisdom did not give us a Bible of abstract principles, but highly diverse texts woven into highly diverse situations. Despite the diversity, of course, there is still only one sweeping storyline, and only one Mind ultimately behind it. But the rich tapestry of varied human experience reflected in the different biblical books and passages - not least in the different psalms - enables the Bible to speak to us with peculiar force and power when the “fit” between the experience of the human author and our experience is especially intimate.

For this astonishing wealth, God deserves reverent praise. What mind but his, what compass of understanding but his, what providential oversight over the production of Scripture but his, could produce a work so unified yet so profoundly diverse? Here, too, is reason to join our “Amen” to the words of 108:5: “Be exalted, O God, above the heavens, and let your glory be over all the earth.”

On Baxter's Call Part 03

In October 1834, when just 21, after finishing Baxter's Call, Robert Murray M‘Cheyne wrote
Though Baxter's lips have long in silence hung,
And death long hush'd that sinner-wakening tongue
Yet still, though dead, he speaks aloud to all,
And from the grave still issues forth his "Call,"
Like some loud angel-voice from Zion Hill,
The mighty echo rolls and rumbles still,
O grant that we, when sleeping in the dust,
May thus speak forth the wisdom of the just.

In June of that year C H Spurgeon was born. His familiarity with Baxter's little book is well known.
When I was seeking the Lord I read a great deal in Doddridge’s Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul and Baxter's Call to the Unconverted. I would wake up as soon as the sun was up in the morning that I might read these books.
“Oh, those books, those books!” he would exclaim “I read and devoured them”. He thanked God for Baxter's Call and remembered his mother using it. “There was a little piece of Alleine's Alarm, or of Baxter's Call to the Unconverted,” he says
and this was read with pointed observations made to each of us as we sat round the table; and the question was asked, how long it would be before we would think about our state, how long before we would seek the Lord. Then came a mother's prayer, and some of the words of that prayer we shall never forget, even when our hair is grey.
Spurgeon's contemporary, Thomas De Witt Talmage (1832-1902) was also brought up on Baxter in America. As he got older, he says, he read Doddridge's Rise and Progress and Baxter's Call as well as other books. He once spoke about the power of the printed page noting how Baxter himself had been affected by the printed page as a young man and then how
Richard Baxter wrote a book entitled A Call to the Unconverted, which brought thousands into the kingdom, among others Philip Doddridge. He wrote a book entitled The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul. Its harvest is uncounted multitudes for the kingdom of heaven, among others the great Wilberforce. Wilberforce in turn wrote a book on The Practical View of Christianity. It has done good beyond all earthly computation, and brought many into the kingdom, among others Leigh Richmond. Leigh Richmond wrote a book called The Dairyman's Daughter. It has brought tens of thousands to the Lord Jesus Christ as Saviour.
One final thing worth mentioning here is that in 1991 the evangelist John Blanchard produced an updated version of the book entitled Invitation to live, which has also no doubt been used to bring some to the Lord.