Robert Murray M'Cheyne by Andrew Bonar (Available from Amazon or free here) - Conclude Chapter 3 (First years of labour in Dundee).
We read about his:
(i) church planting efforts;
(ii) presbytery support;
(iii) itinerant preaching;
(iv) embrace of church discipline;
(v) holiness;
(vi) doctrine;
(vii) counseling.
Good to read of M'Cheyne's gradual appreciation of church discipline: '"When I first entered upon the work of the ministry among you, I was exceedingly ignorant of the vast importance of church discipline. I thought that my great and almost only work was to pray and preach. I saw your souls to be so precious, and the time so short, that I devoted all my time, and care, and strength, to labor in word and doctrine. When cases of discipline were brought before me and the elders, I regarded them with something like abhorrence. It was a duty I shrank from; and I may truly say it nearly drove me from the work of the ministry among you altogether. But it pleased God, who teaches his servants in another way than man teaches, to bless some of the cases of discipline to the manifest and undeniable conversion of the souls of those under our care; and from that hour a new light broke in upon my mind, and I saw that if preaching be an ordinance of Christ, so is church discipline. I now feel very deeply persuaded that both are of God,--that two keys are committed to us by Christ: the one the key of doctrine, by means of which we unlock the treasures of the Bible, the other the key of discipline, by which we open or shut the way to the sealing ordinances of the faith. Both are Christ's gift, and neither is to be resigned without sin.'
A neglect of church discipline is a sin.
Commence Chapter 4 (His mission to Palestine and the Jews) by reading up to the paragraph beginning 'We left Alexandria on 16th May 1839, parting from many kind friends in that city. We and our baggage were mounted on seventeen donkeys, like the sons of Jacob, when they carried corn out of Egypt.'
Please post your own notes and thoughts in the comments section below.
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