The Preacher's Devotional Time

The effectual preacher will treat his morning Bible study/prayer closet as the law of the Medes and Persians. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones said, “I have felt always, and increasingly with the years, that one of the great rules for a preacher is to safeguard the mornings. Make an absolute rule of this. Try to develop a system whereby you are not available on the telephone in the morning; let your wife or anyone else take messages for you, and inform the people who are telephoning that you are not available. One literally has to fight for one’s life in this sense!” (Preaching and Preachers, pp. 166, 167). John Henry Jowett commented, “With all my heart I give this counsel: be as systematic as a businessman. Enter your study at an appointed hour, and let that hour be as early as the earliest of your businessmen goes to his warehouse or his office. I can see and hear my businessmen as they start off early to earn their daily bread. And shall their minister be behind them in his quest of the Bread of Life? Shall he crouch and loiter into the day, shamed by those he assumes to lead, and shall his indolence be obtrusive in the services of the sanctuary when ‘the hungry sheep look up and are not fed’? Let the minister, I say, be as businesslike as the businessman. Let him employ system and method, and let him be as scrupulously punctual in his private habits in the service of his Lord, as he would have to be in a government office in the service of his country. And to regularity let him add proportion. Let him estimate the comparative values of things. Let first things be put first, and let him give the freshness of his strength to matters of vital and primary concern. Gentlemen, all this will pay, and the payment will be made in sterling good” (The Preacher: His Life and Work).

​(Friday Church News Notes, January 18, 2019, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)

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