Daily devotion – Tuesday 24th August 2021
“Remember, you are not a tree, that can live or stand alone. You are only a branch. And it is only while you abide in Christ, as the branch in the vine, that you will flourish or even live.” – Robert Murray McCheyne
Robert Murray McCheyne taught himself Greek at age four. He rose to the top of his elementary school at five. He entered high school at eight and enrolled at Edinburgh University at fourteen.
At age eighteen, he began dreaming of ministry and began the lifelong habit of the morning quiet time, his journal for February 23, 1834, reading, “Rose early to seek God and found Him whom my soul loves. Who would not rise early to meet such company?”
In 1836, he began pastoring St Peter’s Church in Dundee, beginning each day reading God’s Word and praying.
But McCheyne was not well physically. He experienced “violent palpitations” of the heart, growing so weak and frail that he took an extended trip, seeking to recover. But he missed his Church, and on February 27, 1839, he wrote them the following words in a pastoral letter:
“I wish to be like Epaphras in Colossians 4: “Always labouring fervently for you in prayer.” When hindered by God from labouring for you in any other way, it is my heart’s joy to labour thus for you. When Dr. Scott of Greenock, a good and holy minister, was laid aside by old age from preaching some years before his death, he used to say, “I can do nothing for my people now but pray for them….” This I also feel!
McCheyne only partially recovered, dying in 1843 at age twenty-nine. On the day of his death, nothing was heard in the houses of Dundee but weeping.
Men, meeting others on the streets, burst into sobs.
Scottish ministers studied his life, and his sermons are held up as classics of teaching.
He once said, “If the veil of the world’s machinery were lifted off, how much we could find is done in answer to the prayers of God’s children.”
How much indeed.
It’s not how long you live as it is how much of your life you live serving Christ!