What can we learn from Robert Murray M’Cheyne? Dr. Jordan Stone talks about the life and ministry of Robert Murray M’Cheyne and how believers can learn from his example of love for Christ.
Robert Murray M’Cheyne was a Scottish Presbyterian pastor who was born in 1813. He died only weeks before his 30th birthday in 1843, and he represents a wonderful model that ministers, elders, officers in the church, and ordinary church members themselves can learn from.
M’Cheyne’s Love for Christ
I think primarily through this lens of 2 Corinthians 5:14, where the Apostle Paul tells us that it’s the love of Christ that controls him, that compels him in all his preaching of Christ. In one of the memorials after M’Cheyne died, one of his closest friends said, “It was a love to Christ that was the secret of all of his devotion and consistency in ministry.” And so when you read Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s hymns, his sermons, his journals, and his letters, what you see overflowing—and it’s genuinely inescapable—overflowing from his heart is a love for Christ in every way. It’s why he delighted to think about the Sabbath as a trysting time with Christ or reading the Bible was this trysting hour in the morning where these two lovers meet. And so his heart was very much inflamed with love for Christ, which generated all kinds of things in his ministry that are worth paying attention to today.
Implications for Ministry
So why was he so earnest in evangelism and could tell his church that he had genuinely never woken once in the morning without thinking how he could bring more souls to Christ? Well, he loved, he said, the glory of Christ in the salvation of souls. So it’s love for Jesus that compels evangelism. Why was his preaching of Jesus so full of his beauty and his tenderness and his fullness? Well, because M’Cheyne knew the love of that beauty, of that tenderness, of that fullness in his very heart. When the Apostle Paul thinks about gospel ministry, he thinks about the Christian life as one that’s in every way this overflow of the loving exchange, this communion between the Savior and the believer.Why was he so eager to extend Christ, even to the nations, through things like church planting and the missions work that he was engaged in? Well, he wanted to see the nations know that love for Christ in every way. Why was it that he endeavored each and every day to spend hours in prayer and Bible study? Well, it was because there that he met the one whom his soul loved.
And so when the Apostle Paul thinks about gospel ministry, he thinks about the Christian life as one that’s in every way this overflow of the loving exchange, this communion between the Savior and the believer as this mutual exchange of love. Well, Robert Murray M’Cheyne shows us in a very practical, moving, but a very ordinary way, as well, what that loving exchange can look like. And even for ministers, what that can grow into in the local church by way of the fruit that is showing forth—the fruits of godliness, the fruits of conversion, the fruits of growth, the fruits of faithfulness and suffering. M’Cheyne shows us all of those things as it centers on this wonderful love for Christ.
