Sermons of Robert Murray M‘Cheyne

No Christian can read the biography or Sermons of Robert Murray M’Cheyne without realizing that the true measure of life is not its length but its usefulness. He 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.

Nor does the amount of our activity or our words reflect the true value of our life. Robert Murray M’Cheyne left notes of only some 200 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’.