Stir Up the Saints through the Word of God!

“We are face to face with an awful indifference to religion. That is due to the passionless condition of the Christian Church, and that in turn is due to the utter uncertainty of Christian people about the authority of the Book of God. Suffer a word of personal conviction. Where is the remedy? It is not by the defence (sic) of the Word of God, but by its study and by our own return to it until it so consumes us that we shall be able to say, ‘O Lord, how I love thy law: it is my meditation day and night.’ I have no panic in my heart as to its ultimate victory, my panic at the moment, if there is one there, is for the men and women who are neglecting it. My appeal is for a new devotion to it, a new answer to it. When our own people, of whatever section of the great catholic Church of Christ, turn from books concerning it to the Book itself, to know it, to understand it, to live in the power of it, then you will have generated within their hearts the passion which it teaches, and for ever more makes possible to send the same message on to those in darkness.” (pp. 51-52)

In many ways, these stirring words sum up the life mission of the well known Bible teacher and expositor, G. Campbell Morgan. Perhaps the best biography of Morgan’s life and ministry was written by his daughter-in-law, Jill Morgan entitled A Man of the Word. However, this smaller work reprinted by Ambassador press in 1999 provides a wealth of material to accompany the information contained in A Man of the Word.

G. Campbell Morgan was born in 1863 at Gloucestershire and was raised in the home of a Baptist pastor. In 1888 he attempted to become a Methodist minister. After taking doctrinal examinations and preaching the trial sermon before the board of Wesleyan ministers, he was listed among the 105 men who were rejected for the ministry that year. Upon wiring the disappointing news to his father, he received the following reply: “Rejected on earth. Accepted in Heaven. Dad.” Thankfully, he went on in ministry and became one of the premier Bible expositors of his day. Murray’s little book is a tribute to Morgan’s life work and its effect on the lives of those who heard his teaching. Murray records the well known saying, “You have probably heard of the man who proudly boasted, ‘I have gone through the Bible three times.’ ‘Ah,’ said a Minister quietly, ‘has it ever gone through you once?’” Dr. Morgan not only took his students through the Bible, he made sure the Bible went through them!

“His aim always is to let the Bible deliver its own message, and I know of no one who has demonstrated more convincingly the marvelous unity of the Divine Library. Large areas of Scripture, sadly neglected even by orthodox preachers, have been compelled to yield up rich treasures of truth. Any section he touches, begins to speak at once with living voice to our own generation.”

Morgan had a passion for doing ministry in an orderly fashion. Murray observed that this passion for orderliness extended beyond organization to his exposition of Scripture.

“He has almost a passion for system. He cannot bear unanswered letters or documents left about untidily. He believes in the most careful card indexing, filing, tabulating, cataloguing. I cannot imagine him doing anything in a slovenly, slipshod way . . . . He has not been dancing here, there, and everywhere rousing audiences by topical little extempores – the sort of man people speak of with a grin as ‘a good draw for our public meeting’. He has never lived with his head in the clouds, and he can talk as brightly as any other human being on the affairs of the day: but he is always happiest in exposition – the thing that has to be carefully, laboriously, prayerfully worked out in the study and presented in such a way that the hungry shall not be entertained, but fed.”

Morgan also had a carefulness about his personal life and testimony that lent credibility to his public teaching ministry. Murray records the following story that Morgan once told of his early years in marriage.

“I very well remember when I was married my father came into my house. He was a Puritan, and I used to think it was hard lines that he was. To-day I thank God for it. He came into my home soon after the wedding and looked around, peering into every room. Then, in his own peculiar way, he said to me: ‘Yes, all very nice. But nobody will know walking through here whether you belong to God or the devil’! I went through the rooms again and I thought, He is quite right. We made up our minds at once that there should be no room in the house henceforth that had not some message in picture text or book for every visitor, which should tell them that we are any rate would serve the King.”

Murray dedicates an entire section of his book to sayings found in Morgan’s messages. The following serve as a mere taste of what is in the rest of the section.

“Scholastic examinations are really no test of what a man knows. It is true in every department of life that the test fore-announced and prepared for, sometimes by cramming, is often at fault when we want to know what a man is or knows. God never fore-announces His examinations.”

“What is the Christian position with regard to the underworld? Conflict first. Do not forget that. Secondly, perfect equipment for the conflict. Thirdly, victory all the time if we will avail ourselves of our equipment.”

“You cannot grow the tulips of the Kingdom of God except you get the bulbs from heaven. Never forget this.”

“The most terrible thing is this, that while men are against the government of God, they are praying, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done.”

“I hold Christian Science to be characterized by an absence of what is Christian and an ignorance of Science.”

This little volume adds a dimension to Morgan’s life and ministry that is of great spiritual benefit to readers of every age and from every walk of life. It is of particular value to men who are either preparing for the ministry or currently involved in some aspect of ministry. Perhaps the best way to conclude this brief review is to let Morgan sum up his own life and ministry.

“I have endeavored to speak the things I know. I have many doubts, I have many questionings. There are certain departments of theological thought in which I find myself utterly at sea. I never take them into the pulpit. Sometimes the truths I have tried to teach have all been expressed in one of the sweetest verses in the whole realm of hymnology:

‘I worship Thee, sweet Will of God,
And all Thy ways adore,
And ever day I live I seem
To love Thee more and more.’”