# Samuel Miller on the need for a converted ministry



## Reformed Covenanter (Nov 2, 2022)

... How can a man who knows only the theory of religion, undertake to be a practical guide in spiritual things? How can he adapt his instructions to all the varieties of Christian experience? How can he direct the awakened, the inquiring, the tempted, and the doubting? How can he feed the sheep and the lambs of Christ? How can he sympathize with mourners in Zion? How can he comfort others with those consolations wherewith he himself has never been comforted of God? He cannot possibly perform, as he ought, any of these duties, and yet they are the most precious and interesting parts of the ministerial work. However gigantic his intellectual powers; however deep, and various, and accurate his learning, he is not _able_, in relation to any of these points, _to teach others_, seeing he is not taught himself. If he make the attempt, it will be _the blind leading the blind_; and of this, unerring wisdom has told us the consequence.

It were rash, indeed, and unwarranted, to say, that a man who knows nothing of the power of godliness, may not be employed, by a sovereign God, as the means of saving benefit to others. God undoubtedly may, and probably sometimes does, “by way of miracle, raise a man to life by the bones of a dead prophet.” He may, and, there is reason to believe sometimes does, “honour his own word so far as to make it effectual to salvation, even when it falls from unhallowed lips.” The ministry even of Judas Iscariot was, probably, not without its benefit to the church of Christ. But such a result is not, in ordinary cases, and certainly not in any considerable degree, to be expected. When unsanctified ministers are introduced into the church, we may generally expect them to prove, not only an offence to God, but also a curse to his people. Piety, orthodoxy, practical holiness, and all the spiritual glories of _the household of faith_, will commonly be found to decline in proportion to the number and influence of these enemies in disguise. ...

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Samuel Miller on the need for a converted ministry


What are we to understand by an ABLE AND FAITHFUL MINISTRY? It is a ministry, at once qualified and disposed to perform, with enlightened and unwearied assiduity, all the duties, whether of instruc…




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## Gesetveemet (Nov 2, 2022)

This is so good. Yet the minister who knows the true work of God knows that everything is “given” from beginning to end moment by moment and day by day and that there is nothing from our side.


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