Single-mindedness

I do not know how many books I have read over the past forty-five years of ministry but it has been a lot. I have given away many, many books to aspiring young ministers, family, and friends. When it came time to clean out my office at the seminary on my retirement and move books to my office at the house I had a huge dilemma--not enough space! Which ones come home with me? Well, a few won hands down! There were several books that I purchased in my earliest years and have moved faithfully from place to place. One is a book of sermons by the early twentieth-century southern evangelist, Samuel Porter Jones. A reprobate, by his own reckoning, Sam was converted after the death of his young daughter. He became something of a legend with his long tail coat and cane, his high stepping, and his flame-throwing preaching.

I have a book of his sermons, number six in the "Great Pulpit Masters" series. To include Sam in such a set is stretching it a bit but he was known for his "quotable quotes." I love the brown-edged pages of this little hard back book and its old book smell. And I love what is inside, a grouping of sermons that begins with one on "Eternal Damnation" and ends with a question, "Why Continue in Sin?" In the book we also learn something of Sam Jones' life. The following story comes from a revival he was preaching in St. Louis. After preaching several days a committee came to see Sam. They had some complaints.

"We have brought you here to pitch into sinners and you have pitched into us." "Never mind," replied Mr. Jones, "I will get to sinners. I never scald hogs until the water is hot."

In keeping with this retort, Sam preached the following in a sermon entitled "All Things Work Together for Good."

"Take an ordinary Methodist, now a backslider, and strike him down with a six weeks' spell of typhoid fever, and you can do more to get him better spiritually than by preaching 500,000 sermons. Take and shake a sinner over a coffin and turn him loose, and he will hit the ground running every time."

Sam's folksy style was very popular in the towns and communities where he preached. I liked this man the first time I read him, and I still do. There is something in his zeal that attracts, to me his is the same kind of enthusiasm you find in the monastic movement. Sam was no monk but he and Anthony of the desert, the "father" of monasticism, had much in common. They were the embodiment of a single-mindedness that characterizes all prophets, including those of the Old Testament. They were consumed with God in one way or another. If to be in love is to be thoroughly devoted to another person, they were in love with God. Sam was a showman; Anthony fled from recognition. Yet each man was a "father" of the faithful and could be included in that long list of those full of faith in Hebrews 11.

Sam's concern for Christians who lose their zeal, who become spiritually tired, is still a concern of the Church. Maybe we need to be "shaken over a coffin" once or twice to see that devotion to God is life-consuming. Perhaps we get too satisfied or too dull in spiritual matters to be able to follow Christ as our true Lord and Redeemer. Or, as Sam suggests in another place, maybe the reverse is true. "Many a man imagines he has religion when he only has a liver complaint." Whatever the case may be, Sam Jones, and many like him, reminds us that faith is serious business and we need to be sure that we really are what we profess to be. It is all a matter of grace, of course, but we need to place ourselves in the direction the Holy Spirit is moving.

Jerry Mercer