SEMINARY TRAINING
man of God as he prepares to preach. The purpose of seminary training is to prepare the student as a servant of the Lord. If Christ is Lord, then we are His subjects. If He is Master, then we are His slaves. There will always be a struggle against the self-life (Gal. 5:16,17). But the most important les son of seminary discipline is to learn to be a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ. Edwin L. Sabin put it well: An enemy I had whose mien I stoutly strove to know, For hard he dogged my steps, unseen Wherever I might go. My plans he balked, my aims he foiled, He blocked my onward way. When for some lofty goal 1 toiled He grimly said me nay. “Come forth!” I cried, “lay bare thy guise! Thy features I would see.” But always to my straining eyes He dwelt in mystery.
gation. First, last, and always he is to prepare to be an expository preacher of the whole counsel of God. It is reported of Woodrow Wilson, son of a minister, that he once said of preachers: “When I hear some of the things which young men say to men by way of putting the arguments to themselves for going into the minis try, I think they are talking of another profession. Their motive is to do something. You do not have to be anything in particular to be a lawyer, and I know. You do not have to be anything in particular, except a kind- hearted man perhaps, to be a physi cian. You do not have to be anything, nor undergo any strong spiritual change, in order to be a merchant. The only profession which consists in being something is the ministry of our Lord and Savior—and it does not consist of anything else. And that conception of the ministry which rubs all the marks off and mixes him in the crowd, so that you cannot pick him out, is a process of eliminating the ministry itself.” One must be a
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