Robert Murray M’Cheyne ministered but a short seven-and-a-half years, and died at the age of 29, yet the fruitfulness of that brief life remains to this day. He left notes of only some 200 sermons when he died in 1843, but his own counsel to a fellow minister explains why these sermons brought such abundant blessing not only to ‘the noisy mechanics and political weavers’ of Dundee but, later, to all parts of the English-speaking world: ‘Get your texts from God – your thoughts, your words, from God It is not great talents God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus. A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God. A word spoken by you when your conscience is clear, and your heart full of God’s Spirit, is worth ten thousand words spoken in unbelief and sin’.
