The Lips and the Life by Theodore L. Cuyler

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Jun 30, 1904

The Lips and the Life

By Theodore L. Cuyler

Every true Christian, whether in high or humble station, is bound to be a preacher of the gospel. Remember that there are manifold ways of preaching Christ’s gospel without choosing a text or addressing a congregation. Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury preached God’s truth on the floor of the British Parliament; Dr. Wayland, Mark Hopkins, and James McCosh from the presidential chairs of a college; William Carvosso, the saintly Methodist class leader, brought hundreds of souls to Christ; and humble John Pounds, the shoemaker who baited poor street boys into his shop with a biscuit or a potato, was the founder of “Ragged Schools”! Halyburton, when laid aside by illness, made a sick-bed his pulpit. “It is the best one I was ever in,” he said; “I am laid here for the very end that I may commend my Lord and Saviour.”

A Christ-loving heart is the true ordination after all. “As ye go, preach!” “Let him that heareth say, Come!” These are the heavenly commissions to every one who has felt the love of Jesus in his soul. Knowing the gospel fixes at once the obligation to make it known to others. If I have drunk from the well of salvation, I am bound to call out, “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.” God has a vast variety of pulpits for his servants to preach from. Yours, my friend, may be in a Sunday-school teacher’s seat or in the nursery or a mother’s arm-chair; it may be at a work-bench or in a counting-room. You may preach by a Bible or a tract or a loaf of bread on a poor man’s table, or by an earnest talk in a mission school, or a faithful pleading with an impenitent soul—any way that will give you a hold on a sinner’s heart and draw him to the Saviour; any way so that he who heareth says, Come!

But there are other methods of saying “Come!” besides the voice or the printed page. Clean, consistent, Christly living is a mighty magnet to draw souls to Jesus. A godly example is the most powerful attractor toward heaven. Even the most eloquent pastor will find that his people look at him during the week to find out what he means on the Sabbath. Preaching piety on one day of the week does not counteract the practising of selfishness or cowardice or compromise with wrong on the other six days. If we say “Come!” with the lips, it is well; if we say “Come!” with the life, it is still better.

Bible religion made attractive to others is the most potent instrument for the conversion of souls. But few people are eloquent with the lips; yet every Christian may rise to the eloquence of a winsome example. If you can not utter a truth from the desk or the platform, you can live out the truth; that is the best preaching after all. No infidel can answer that. It draws silently but surely. It says Come! by showing the way. The “living epistle” never needs a translation or a commentary. It is in plain English, that a child can understand. An arrant skeptic once spent a day or two with Fenelon, and, on leaving, he said to him: “If I stay here much longer, I shall become a Christian in spite of myself.” Stanley also confessed that when he left London for Africa in search of Livingstone, he was “as much prejudiced against religion as the worst infidel,” but a few weeks of companionship with the heroic missionary so impressed him that he said: “I was converted by him, although he had not tried to do it.”

More eloquent often than words is the silent beauty of conduct and of Christly character. A poor sick girl, for example, is wearing away her young life in a chamber of confinement. All day long and all the night for weary weeks and months the patient sufferer suffers on. But she bears the sorrows of her lot so meekly, she speaks of her discipline so sweetly, she exhibits such quiet trust in Him whose strong arm is underneath her, she lives out so much religion in that sick-room, that her worldly minded father and her fashion-loving sisters are deeply touched by it. Her example is a “means of grace” to that whole family; they get no better preaching from any pulpit. Her deep, tranquil joys beside the well of salvation are a constant voice speaking to them, “Come, come ye to this fountain!”

I might multiply illustrations of this truth that godly acts often speak more impressively than words. A God-fearing youth occupies the same room with two or three giddy scoffers—his fellow clerks or fellow students. Night and morning he bends the knee in prayer before them. They make game of him at first; but he prays on. The daily reminder of that fearless act of devotion awakens presently in the minds of his companions the memory that they, too, had once been taught to pray, but now have learned to scoff. Example is an arrow of conviction; they, too, “remember their God and are troubled.”

In his day Rev. John Angell James, of Birmingham, was the most popular and influential of the evangelical preachers and writers in England. He said in one of his discourses: “If I have a right to consider myself a Christian, and if I have attained to any usefulness in the church of Christ, I owe it, in the way of instrumentality, to the sight of a companion who slept in the same room with me, and who always bent his knees in prayer on retiring to rest. That scene roused my slumbering conscience, and sent an arrow to my heart; for, though I had been religiously educated, I had neglected prayer, and had cast off the fear of God. My conversion soon followed, and my preparation for the work of the ministry. Nearly half a century has rolled away since then; but that little chamber and that praying youth are still present to my mind, and will never be forgotten even amid the splendors of heaven.”

Actions speak louder than words. If you wish to move others, move yourself! Cæsar never said to his troops “Ite!” He took the lead, and cried out “Venite!” Paul acknowledged the power of example when he said, “Be ye followers of me.” Even the lips of our adorable Redeemer do not so move us as the study of his sublime and sinless life and the power of his self-sacrificing death. Godly living is what this poor ungodly world is dying for to-day. If the vital union of believers with their divine Head means anything, it means that Christ Jesus pours himself into the world through the lips and the lives of his representatives. “Ye are my witnesses.” It is not that I live, exclaimed the hero-apostle, but it is Christ that liveth in me.—Rev. Theodore L. Cuyler, D. D.