Why is Robert Murray McCheyne revered by evangelicals as one of Scotland’s greatest? After all he died aged 29, in 1843, had only eight years of ministry and he spent much of this time sick in bed.

Is it the passion he had for foreign mis­sions? Or his role in rekindling interest in evangelism to Jews? Is it his read-the-Bible-in-a-year program devised for his Dundee parishioners, used and re-used today, for example in Carson’s For the Love of God devotional series? Is it the strong stand he took against moderatism? The great revival in his church? Or the lucidity of his preaching and published sermons?

Perhaps all of these. But there were others worthy of interest, yet the atten­tion is showered on McCheyne. Hundreds still visit his grave at St Peter’s Dundee every year. McCheyne is remembered — he stands out from the crowd like a diamond in coal — because he was a pas­tor who knew his Lord.

Spurgeon writes that holiness is a minister’s chief necessity. Like Spurgeon, McCheyne considered that ministry is useless without it. He wrote: “The great­est need of my people is my own holi­ness.” McCheyne tenaciously pursued the Lord.

He longed all his life for a greater love of God, a deeper fear of God, a greater fill­ing of the Spirit and a more heartfelt ser­vice. He thought of Moses, who experi­enced the Lord with such fiery intensity that his face glowed! He thought of Peter, who replied to Jesus with all of his heart, “you know that I love you”. He thought of Jeremiah’s zeal for the honour of God:

His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of hold­ing it in; indeed, I cannot.

It seemed to his friends that McCheyne’s desire to taste and see the goodness of the Lord was fulfilled. His best friend and biographer, Andrew Bonar, writes that, early on in McCheyne’s ministry at St Peters Dundee, the congregation felt that their minister had a uniquely intimate relation­ship with God. One minister friend remarked that holiness seemed to come easy to Robert Murray McCheyne. Yet all his life McCheyne longed to go deeper. His awareness of the holiness of God gave him a constant awareness of his own sin­fulness. He wrote to a friend: “Pray for me, for I am a poor worm, all guilt and all helplessness.”

McCheyne wrote a revealing instruc­tion to a nearby evangelical minister: “Be often in the presence of God.” By this McCheyne did not mean that a Christian can be completely absent from God, or empty of the Spirit of God. But McCheyne was convinced that to kneel before the Father in prayer and to read and delight in the law of the Lord brought a particular intimacy with God. And these moments of intimacy were his happiest moments.

So McCheyne would rise at 6am and dedicate the first two hours of the day to prayer and to scripture. He commonly read three chapters of Scripture each day. He also communed with the Lord after dinner, and then again before bed. Of course devoting the top and tail of the day to the Lord like this was the habit of the Levites of King David’s time, who stood to praise the Lord both morning and evening! (1 Chronicles 23).

Bonar writes that McCheyne would stand after dinner and watch the glowing sunset. As he did he would speak of the Sun of righteousness, or the joy of angels in His presence, or the blessedness of those whose sun can go no more down, until his face shone with gladness as he spoke. Bonar writes: “His lamp was always burning.”

McCheyne made war on the philoso­phy of moderatism which reduced the Christian faith to morality and acceptable conduct. Sin, judgment, repentance and atonement were considered out of date. Moderates often despised evangelicals such as McCheyne.

So McCheyne would preach unwel­comed in parishes where he feared the gospel was never heard. One time, in the final year of his life, as Robert Murray McCheyne stood up to preach he expected to be injured. The people who had assembled in that town had resolved with one another to hurl stones at him as soon as he began to speak.

With the grit of Stephen, McCheyne stood before the stone-brandishing crowd. And like Stephen he spoke with wisdom and the Spirit. From McCheyne’s very first words the crowd listened intently to his message. Stones dropped unthrown to the ground as the people hung on every word McCheyne flung their way! And when he had said all he had planned to say they begged him to continue! Bonar writes that it was not his words, but the earnestness and serious­ness with which he spoke that arrested those who heard him.

Indeed McCheyne himself held earnest­ness and seriousness to be the chief human factor for successful ministry — earnestness and seriousness before God. God’s workers must ask themselves: How well do I know God? How do I delight in Him? How deeply do I treasure His love? Do I confess my sins with tears? How tenaciously do I cling to the cross? On the six-year anniversary of his ministry in Dundee, McCheyne cried out to his congregation:

Oh, oh learn what need there is that ministers be filled with the Holy Ghost, that they may be con­verting ministers — that, like John, they may ‘turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wis­dom of the just’.

We can see the importance of a Christian worker’s walk with the Lord in this: McCheyne ministered to others in the same ways that God had ministered to him. He observed the ways in which God had tended to and nurtured him and he watered and trained other vines in the same manner. For this reason he consid­ered that his own personal spiritual growth was critical for his ministry. So “the greatest need of my people is my own holiness”.

Like many evangelicals in Scotland at this time, McCheyne prayed for revival. He yearned that those in his church and parish who were outside Christ would come to the Saviour. And he yearned that the Spirit would renew Christians to a vibrant spiritual life. He regularly led the Dundee congregation to pray that show­ers of revival might fall. Every Thursday evening the prayerful gathered and McCheyne read examples of the powerful activity of the Lord in past revivals. Prayer then followed. McCheyne believed that God would certainly bless a faithful, prayerful ministry.

McCheyne preached for revival. His preaching was arresting. The holy manner in which he spoke and the seri­ousness with which he spoke of divine things was compelling. Martyn Lloyd Jones relates that even as McCheyne entered the pulpit, before he had uttered even a single word, the congregation would begin to weep silently. McCheyne secretly called upon God for power as he preached. Bonar notes that he was in the habit of writing short prayers at the top of sermon manuscripts: Master, help! Help, Lord, help! Send showers; Pardon, give the Spirit and take the glory. The awe of God’s presence was on the people.

It was during McCheyne’s absence, under the ministry of another, William C. Burns, that showers began to fall on Dundee from the windows of heaven. People who had been hard, softened and turned in their hundreds to Christ. And the Lord stirred many walking in half-hearted belief to true devotion. Upon McCheyne’s return the revival continued. When the Presbytery of Aberdeen sought to determine the valid­ity of the revival, McCheyne wrote that 600 to 700 people had spoken with minis­ters about their salvation.

Why did God bring revival in McCheyne’s absence? Bonar suggests that God “meant to show that he did not need the help of any person”.

At this time evangelical ministers throughout Scotland were praying for revival. The Lord brought revival to other towns: Abernyte, Kilspindie, Errol and Collace. These revivals were an important part of the great influence the gospel was having in Scotland by the Spirit’s power.

McCheyne had spent much of his time in ministry sick with fever. In 1843 he caught a particularly bad dose of typhus when this disease was raging through Dundee. McCheyne went to be with his Saviour as his sun was just beginning to rise — in March 1843. He had walked with the Lord for less than 12 years.

His best friend Andrew Bonar wrote a deeply inspiring account of his life a year after his death, Memoirs and Remains of R. M. McCheyne. This remains one of the great works of Christian literature.

These reflections leave one with the feeling that many of the evangelicals of those days were greater men and woman than those of today. They were men and women of whom Malachi’s description of the faithful priest is true:

My covenant with him was one of life and peace, and I gave them to him. It was a covenant of fear, and he feared me. He stood in awe of my name. True instruction was in his mouth, and no wrong was found on his lips. He walked with me in peace and uprightness, and he turned many from iniquity.

Let us then listen to McCheyne’s cry:

Oh see what need there is that ministers be filled with the Spirit — that, like John, they be ‘in the Spirit on the Lord’s day’ — That Christ’s people may be kept ‘like a lamp that burneth!’ ... Oh see what need we have of a day of Pentecost to begin in the hearts of ministers, that our words may be like fire, and the hearts of the peo­ple like wood!