Biography
David Martin McIntyre was a Scottish minister and Bible teacher who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He belongs to those servants of God whose books outlived the record of their days. Very few details of his private life survive in print, and he seems to have wanted it that way. What remains is a handful of writings and the memory of those who sat under his teaching, and they point to a man whose whole weight rested on one thing, the life of prayer.
He was raised in Scotland in a land where the Bible was still read in the home and the church had shaped the culture for generations. He entered the ministry and served in congregations before moving into wider teaching work. He taught in Bible training settings and spoke at conventions where believers gathered to seek a deeper walk with God. He was part of the stream of Scottish evangelical life that valued the Scriptures, the Cross and the work of the Holy Spirit, and which held that a minister was only as strong as his private prayer.
His best-known book is The Hidden Life of Prayer, first published in the early years of the twentieth century. It is a short book, and most of it was written as plain meditations for believers who wanted to pray more deeply. It begins with a simple claim. Prayer is the hidden source of all fruitful service, and no man can do God's work with God's power unless he has first learned to be alone with God. He wrote that the secret place has no substitute. Public ministry that is not fed from the closet will wither. He drew on the Bible, on the lives of great men of prayer and on the experience of a man who had walked with God and knew the cost.
He wrote also on the prayer life of the Lord Jesus. In The Prayer-Life of Our Lord he followed the Gospel record and showed how often Christ withdrew to pray, how He prayed before choosing the twelve, before great miracles and in the garden before the Cross. The book sets before the reader the dependence of the Son on the Father and calls the believer to share that dependence. He did not write to show that prayer was a technique. He wrote to show that prayer was fellowship with a living God and that it is the believer's greatest privilege.
He also wrote on other subjects of the faith, including the Fatherhood of God and the work of Christ. In all of it he leaned on Scripture first. He gave little room to clever argument or to the opinions of the day. He believed that the Word, received on the knees, would teach what was needed. His style was simple and unadorned and he trusted the plain truth to do its own work.
The words he chose give a picture of the man himself. He spoke often of the cost of prayer, of the need for time, of the importance of silence and of the danger of a busy life that crowds God out. He knew that a man could be active in religion and empty within. He warned against the temptation to substitute organization and noise for communion with God. These were warnings from a man who understood the pull of a busy life and who had been tested by it.
Whatever weakness he had, and he surely had them, they are not recorded in the books he left. We should not pretend to know more than we do. It is enough to say that he was a man, and that like every servant of God he lived by mercy. The few traces of his life show a person who sought to practice what he taught.
The years have passed and most of his world has gone. Yet his short books are still found on the shelves of pastors and missionaries who want help to pray. They keep being reprinted because they speak to a hunger that does not change. In an age that moves fast and values what can be seen, he speaks about what happens behind a closed door. He asks the reader whether he prays, and whether he has a hidden life with God from which public ministry flows.
He has no memorial that most people know. His memorial is the quiet testimony of those who read him and went to their knees.