← catalogue

Quiet Talks on Following the Christ

by S. D. Gordon · English · Gutenberg #18486 · 335,086 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Quiet Talks on Following the Christ
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Quiet Talks on Following the Christ

Author: S. D. Gordon


        
Release date: June 1, 2006 [eBook #18486]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18486

Credits: Produced by Curtis Weyant and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK QUIET TALKS ON FOLLOWING THE CHRIST ***




Produced by Curtis Weyant and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net






Quiet Talks on Following the Christ

By S. D. Gordon

Author of "_Quiet Talks On Power_," "_Quiet Talks on Prayer_," "_Quiet
Talks On Our Lord's Return_," etc.

New York Chicago Toronto
Fleming H. Revell Company
London and Edinburgh




Copyright, 1913, by
Fleming H. Revell Company


New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street




Contents



Introduction

   I. The Lone Man Who Went Before
  II. The Long, Rough Road He Trod
 III. The Pleading Call To Follow
  IV. What Following Means
      1. A Look Ahead
      2. The Main Road
      3. The Valleys
      4. The Hilltops
   V. Shall We Go?
  VI. Finger-Posts
 VII. Fellow-Followers
VIII. The Glory of the Goal,--face To Face




Introduction


These talks have been given, in substance, at various gatherings in
Great Britain, Continental Europe, and parts of the Far East, during the
past four years. The simple directness of the spoken word has been
allowed to stand. Portions of chapters three, four, six, and eight have
appeared at various times in "The Sunday School Times."

If any who read may find some practical help through the Master's
gracious touch upon these simple words, they are earnestly asked to add
their prayers that that same gracious touch may be felt by others
wherever these talks may go.




The Lone Man Who Went Before



A Call to Friendship.


One day I watched two young men, a Japanese and an American, pacing the
deck of a Japanese liner bound for San Francisco. Their heads were close
together and bent down, and they were talking earnestly. The Japanese was
saying, "Oh, yes, I believe all that as a theory, but is there _power_ to
make a man _live_ it?"

He was an officer of the ship, one of the finest boats on the Pacific. The
American was a young fellow who had gone out to Japan as a government
teacher, and when his earnest sort of Christianity led to his dismissal he
remained, and still remains, as a volunteer missionary. With his rare gift
in personal touch he had won the young officer's confidence, and was
explaining what Christianity stood for, when the Japanese politely
interrupted him with his question about power. The tense eagerness of his
manner and voice let one see the hunger of his heart. He had high ideals
of life, but confessed that every time he was in port, the shore
temptations proved too much, and he always came back on board with a
feeling of bitter defeat. He had read about Christianity and believed it
good in theory. But he knew nothing of its power.

Through his new American friend he came into personal touch with Christ,
then and there. And up to the day we docked he put in his spare time
bringing other Japanese to his friend's stateroom, and there more than one
of them knelt, and came into warm touch of heart with the Lord Jesus.

Just so our Lord Jesus draws men, Oriental and Occidental alike. Just so
He drew men when He was down here. He had great drawing power. Men came
eagerly wherever they could find Him.

He drew all sorts of men. He drew the Jews, to whom He belonged racially.
He drew the aggressive, domineering Romans, and the gentler cultured
Greeks. He drew the half-breed Samaritans, who were despised by both Jew
and foreigner, as not being either one thing or the other. The military
men and the civilians, the cultured and the unlettered, the official class
and those in private life, all alike felt the strong pull upon their
hearts of His presence.

The pure of heart, like gentle Mary of Bethany, and the guileless
Nathanael, were drawn to Him. And the very opposite, those openly bad in
their life, couldn't resist His presence, and the call away from their
low, bad level, but eagerly took His hand and came up. Fisherfolk and
farmers, dwellers in the city and country, scholars and tradesmen, crude
and refined, richly clad and ragged,--all sorts contentedly rubbed elbows
and jostled each other in the crowds that came to listen, and stayed to
listen longer, and then went away to come back again for more.

This was why He came--to draw men to Himself. Our Lord Jesus was the face
of God looking longingly into men's faces. And they couldn't withstand the
appeal of that gentle strong face. He was the voice of God talking into
men's ears; and the music of that low, quiet voice thrilled and thralled
their hearts. He was the hand of God, strong and warm, reaching down to
take men by the hand and give them a strong lift up and back to the old
Eden life. And, in time, as men put their hand in His, they came to feel
the little knotted place in the palm of that outstretched hand, and the
feel of it went strangely into their inmost being. He was the heart of
God, tender and true, beating rhythmically in time and tune with the human
heart. And the music had, and has, strange power of appeal to human
hearts, and power to sway human lives like a great wind in the trees.

Our Lord Jesus was the person of God in human shape and human garb, come
down close, to draw us men back again to the old trysting place under the
Tree of Life. And in every generation, and every corner of the earth,
then, and ever since then, men of every colour and sort have come back,
and found how His presence eases the tug of life on many a steep roadway,
and more, much more.[1]

And our Lord Jesus drew men into personal friendship with Himself. He
didn't like the long range way of doing things. Keeping men at arm's
length never suited Him. He gave the inner heart touch, and He longed for
the touch of the innermost heart. He was our friend. He asked that we be
His friends, real friends of the rare sort, of which one's life has only a
few.

And He asked, too, that all else that we brought to Him should be that
which grew out of this personal friendship. He gave and did all that He
did and gave, because He was our friend. He asked only for what grew out
of a real heart friendship with Himself. He longed to have us give all,
yet only what our hearts couldn't hold back. His friendship has one thing
peculiar to itself. He has no favourites, in our common thought of that
word, among the countless numbers who have come to be included in His
inner circle of friends. Yet He gives to each such a distinctive personal
touch of His own heart that you feel yourself to be on closest terms. He
is nearer and closer than any other, and your longing is to be as near and
close to Him in life as He is to you in His heart.[2]

Now, because we are His friends and He is our friend, He calls us to
follow Him. It is a privilege of friendship. He would share with you and
with me the things of His own heart and life. He wants to have us come
close up to Himself, and live close up. And the only way we can do it is
by giving a glad "Yes" to His invitation, and following so close that we
shall be up to Himself. Nothing less than this contents His longing.

But there is more than friendship here. He has a plan of action in His
heart. It is a wide-reaching plan, clear beyond our idea of what
wide-reaching means. It is nothing less than a plan for the whole world,
the entire race, for winning it up to the old Eden life of purity and of
close walking with God. That plan is the passion of His great heart. He
has held nothing back--spared nothing--that it might be done. He is
thinking of that plan as He comes eagerly to you and me, now, all afresh,
and with His heart in His voice says "Follow Me." This is a bit of His
plan for me and for you--that we shall be partners with Him in His plan
for the world.

And yet--and yet--this helping Him, this partnership, this working with
Him in His plan, is to be because of our friendship, His and mine, His and
yours. It is a more than friendship He is thinking of. But that more is
_through_ the friendship. It grows out of the friendship. Only so does it
work out His real plan.



Climbing the Hilltops.


Now this "Follow Me" of His, if taken into one's life, and followed up,
will come to mean two things. There are two great things that stand
sharply out in our Lord Jesus' life down here, His _characteristics_ and
His _experiences_. I mean what He was in Himself; and what He went
through, suffered, enjoyed, and accomplished; the Man Himself, and the
Man's experiences. These are the two things about which these simple talks
will be grouped. Our Lord Jesus wants us to follow that we may climb up
the hill as high as He did in these things.

Following means climbing. A friend has told recently of a journey taken to
a certain village in New England from which, she had been told, a fine
view could be got of the White Mountains. On arrival it seemed that a low
hill completely shut out the view, to her intense disappointment. But her
companion, by and by, called from the top of the low hill and eagerly
beckoned her to come up. A bit of climbing quickly brought her to where
the magnificent beauty of the mountains broke upon her delighted eyes.

Our Lord Jesus climbed the hilltops, both in His character and in His
experiences. He wants us to share those rare hilltops with Him. He has
gone away ahead of any other. He is the Lone Man in both character and
experiences. And in some of His experiences He will ever remain the lone
occupant of the hilltop. But He is eager for our companionship. He longs
for the personal touch. He wants us to have all He has got. He has blazed
a way through the thicket where there was no path before. He left the
plain marks on the trees as He went through, so we could surely find the
way. And now He eagerly beckons us to follow.

But following means climbing. It's a hill road, sometimes down hill,
sometimes up hill. Which makes stiffer climbing? Usually the one you are
doing seems the harder. Sometimes the road is a dead level between hills.
And dead level walking--the monotonous dead-a-way, with no bracing air, no
inspiring outlook--is often much harder than down hill or up. And so it
too is climbing. Following means climbing. He climbed. He made the high
climb all alone. No other ever had the courage to climb so high as He.
It's easier since He has smoothed down the road with His own feet; yet it
isn't easy; still it is easier than not climbing; that is, when you reckon
the whole thing up--with _Him_ in.

Now He asks you and me to climb. He cannot climb for you. That is, I mean
He cannot do the climbing you ought to do. He has climbed for us, marked
out the hill path, and made it possible for us to climb up too. But the
after-climbing He cannot do for us. Each must do his own climbing. So
lungs grow deeper, and heart-action stronger, and cheeks clearer, and
muscles firmer. Step by step we must pull up, maybe through a fog, with no
view of beauty, no bracing air yet, only His strong beckoning hand.

But those who reach up and get hold of hands with Him, and get up even to
some of the lower reaches of the climb, stand with full hearts and dumb
lips. They can't find words to tell the exhilaration of the climb, the
bracing air, the far outlook, and, yet more, the wondrous presence of the
Chief Climber, even though there's a bit of smarting of face and hands
where the thorny tanglewood tore a bit as you went by.

Just now I want you to come with me for a bit of a look at the Lone Man,
who has gone before. I mean at the Man Himself. We want to take a look at
the characteristics of His life; what the Man was in His character.

And please understand me here. Following does not mean that we are to try
to imitate these characteristics. No, it's something both simpler and
easier, and deeper and better than that. It means that, as we companion
with Him daily, these same traits will appear in us. It is not to be
imitation simply, good as that might seem, yet always bringing a sense of
failure, and that sense the thing you remember most. It is to be some One
living His life in you, coming in through the open door of your will. Your
part is opening up, and keeping open, listening and loving and obeying.
The touchstone of the "Follow Me" life is not imitation but following; not
copying but obeying; not struggle--though there will be struggle--but
companionship, a companionship which nothing is allowed to take the fine
edge off of.

And please remember, too, the meaning for us sinful men of these
characteristics of His. With us character is a result of choice, and then
nearly always--or should I cut out that "nearly"? the earnest man in the
thick of the fight finds no "nearlys"--it's always with him--character is
always the result of a fight to keep to the choice decided upon.

Now with greatest reverence for our Lord Jesus, let me say, _it was so
with Him_. He was as truly God as though not man. Yet He lived His
life,--He insisted on living His life, on the human level.[3] He was as
truly human as though not peculiarly divine. He had the enormous advantage
of a virgin birth, a divine fatherhood with a human motherhood. And, be it
said with utmost reverence, He needed that advantage for the terrific
conflict and the tremendous task of His life, such as no other has known.
But His character as a man--the thing we are to look at now--was a result
of choice, and choice insisted upon against terrible odds.

This gives new meaning to His "Follow Me." He went the same sort of road
that we must go. He insisted on treading _our_ road. It was not one made
easier for His specially prepared feet. It was the common earth road every
man must go, who will. And so the way He went we can go if we will, every
step of it. By His help working through our wills, we _can_, and, please
God, surely we will.



The Dependent Life.


There were _three traits in His character upward_, that is in His relation
with His Father. First of all He chose to live _the dependent life_. He
recognized that everything He was, and had, and could do, was received
from the Father, and could be at its true best only as the Father's direct
touch was upon it. This was the atmosphere in which all His human powers
would do their best. He had nothing of Himself, and could do nothing of
Himself. This is the plan the Father has made for human life and
effort.[4] Our Lord Jesus recognized this and lived it. Our common word
for this is humility. Humility is a matter of relationship. It means
keeping one's relationship with the Father clear and dominant. And this in
turn radically affects and controls our relationship with our fellows.

There were three degrees or steps in the dependent life He chose to live.
There was the giving up part, then the accepting for Himself the plan of
human life, and then accepting it even to the extent of yielding to wrong
and shameful treatment, without attempting to assert His rights against
such treatment. These were the three steps in His humility. In Paul's
striking phrase, He "emptied out" of Himself all He had in glory with the
Father before coming to the earth; He decided to come to the human level
and live fully the human life of utter dependence; and He carried this to
the extent of being wholly dependent on the Father for righting the wrongs
done Him.[5]

This is God's plan for the human life. It is to be a dependent life. It
actually is a dependent life, utterly dependent upon Him. It is to be
lived so. Then only is the fragrance of it gotten. It is part of the
dependent life--the true human life--that we depend on the Father for
vindication when wronged, as for everything else.[6]

Our Lord Jesus chose to live this life. There was an entire absence of the
self-spirit, that is the self-assertive, the self-confident spirit. There
was a remarkable confidence in action, but it was confidence in His
Father's unfailing response to His requests or needs. This sense of utter
dependence was natural to Him; as indeed it is natural to man unhurt by
sin. And then He carefully cultivated it. As He came in contact with the
very opposite all around Him, He set Himself--indeed He had to set
Himself--to keeping this sense of dependence untainted, unhurt by His
surroundings.

Now there were three things which naturally grew out of this dependent
life, or which naturally are part of it. One was, the sense of His Father,
and of His Father's presence. In a perfectly simple natural way, He was
always conscious of His Father's presence. Is this the meaning--one
meaning--of "blessed are the pure in heart for they shall _see God_"? And
then He doubtless set Himself to cultivate this, as an offset to what He
found around Him. He would quietly look up and speak to the Father in the
midst of a crowd.[7] This was the natural thing to do. He was more
conscious of the Father's presence than of the crowd pressing in to get
near. When He was speaking to the crowd He knew the Father too was
listening. He felt the Father watching as He helped the people. This was
the natural thing with Him, the presence of the Father.

With this there went a second thing, the habit of getting alone to talk
things over with the Father. The common word for this is prayer. Without
doubt His whole outer life grew out of His inner secret talking things out
with the Father. Everything was passed in review here, first of all. This
naturally grew out of the consciousness of His Father's presence, and this
in turn increased that consciousness. So He was in the habit of looking at
everything through His Father's eyes.

And with these two, there was plainly a third thing, a settled sense of
the power, the authority, of God's written Word. It was not simply that He
did not question it, but there was a deep-rooted sense grown down into
His very being that God was speaking in the Book, and that this revelation
of Himself and His will was _the thing_ to govern absolutely one's life.
This points back to a study of the Book. Doubtless that Nazareth shop was
a study shop too. He quoted readily and freely from all portions of the
Old Testament Bible. He seemed saturated with both its language and its
spirit. The basis of such familiarity would be long, painstaking,
prayerful study.

These three things naturally grew out of the dependent life He had
deliberately chosen to live and were a part of it. They were necessary to
it. These are the lungs and the heart of the dependent life.

Now His "Follow Me" does not mean merely that we try to imitate Him in all
this. We will naturally long to do so. And He is the example we will ever
be eager to follow. But the meaning goes deeper than this. It means that
as we really come close up in the road behind Him this will come to be the
natural atmosphere of our lives. We let _Him_ in, and His presence within,
yielded to and cultivated and obeyed, will work this sort of thing out in
our lives. We will come to recognize, and then to feel deep down in our
spirit, how dependent we are upon Him in everything. We will gradually
come to realize intensely that the dependent life is the true natural
life. It is God's plan. It reveals wondrously His love. It draws out
wondrously our love, and radically changes the whole spirit of the life.



Poor--Except in Spirit.


Now of course all this is in sharpest contrast to the common spirit of
life as men live, then and now. The spirit that dominates human life
everywhere is a spirit of independence. And this seems intensified in our
day to a terrific degree. There is, of course, a good independence in our
dealings with our fellows. But this is carried to the extreme of
independence of every one, even--say it softly--of God Himself.
Criticising God, ignoring Him, leaving Him severely out so far as we are
concerned,--this has become the commonplace. If for a moment He ignored
us, how quickly things would go to pieces! This has come to be the
dominant spirit of the whole race to a degree more marked than ever
before, if that be possible.

It seems to come into life early. I have seen a little tot, whom I could
with no inconvenience have tucked under my arm, walking down the road,
head up in the air, breathing out an aggressive self-confidence, and
defiance of all around, worthy of one of the old-time kings. And I
recognized that he had simply absorbed the atmosphere in which his four
brief years had been lived.

This has come to be the inbred spirit of mankind. Everywhere this proud,
self-assertive, self-sufficient, self-confident, self-aggressive spirit is
found, in varying degree. It is coupled sometimes with laughable
ignorance; sometimes with real learning and wisdom and culture. It is
emphasized sometimes the more by school training, and other such
advantages. But through all these accidental things it remains,--the
dominant human characteristic. The chief letter in man's alphabet is the
one next after h, spelled and written with a large capital. The yellow
fever--the fever for gold--so increasingly epidemic, is at heart a bit of
the same thing. The money gives power, and power gives a certain
independence of others, and then a certain compelling of others to be
dependent on the one who has the money and wields the power. Men
everywhere say just exactly what they are specially warned against saying,
"_my_ power and the might of _my_ hand hath gotten me this wealth." They
forget the words following this in the old Book of God. "But thou shalt
remember the Lord thy God, for it is _He_ that giveth thee power to get
wealth."[8]

This seems to be the picture that underlies that phrase, "poor in spirit,"
which the Master declared to be so blessed.[9] He is trying to woo men
away from the thing that is dominating those all around Him. I have
puzzled a good bit over the phrase to find out just what was in the
Master's mind. Emphasizing the word "spirit" seems to bring out the
meaning. The blessedness is not in being poor, but in a certain spirit
that may control a man. We are all poor in everything except spirit.

The last degree of poverty is to be a pauper. Now, the simple truth is
that we are all--every last man of us--paupers in everything. We haven't a
thing we haven't got from some one else. We are beneficiaries to the last
degree, dependent on the bounty of Another. We are paupers in life itself.
Our life came to us in the first instance from the creative Hand, through
the action of others, and it is being sustained every moment by the same
Hand. We had nothing to do with its coming, and, while we influence our
life by living in accord with certain physical laws, still the life itself
is all the time being supplied to us directly by the same unseen Hand.

We are paupers in ability, in virtue, in character, in fact in everything.
We own nothing; we only hold it in trust. We have nothing except what some
One else is supplying. What we call our ability, our genius, and so on,
comes by the creative breath breathing afresh upon and through what the
patient creative Hand has supplied and is sustaining. We are paupers,
without a rag to our bones, or a copper in the pocket we haven't got, not
having a rag to our bones; paupers in everything except----.

There is an exception. It is both pitiable and laughable. We are
enormously rich in _spirit_, in our imagination, in our thought of
ourselves. Blessed are they who are as poor in spirit as they actually are
in everything else. They recognize that they are wholly dependent on some
One else, and so they live the dependent life, with its blessed closeness
of touch with the gracious Provider. In certain institutions are placed
those who imagine themselves to be in high social and official rank, and
in possessions what they are not, who imagine it to such a degree that it
is best that they be kept apart from others. It would seem like an extreme
thing to say that these people are spirit-mirrors in which we may partly
see ourselves. Yet it would be saying the truth. How laughable, if it were
not so overwhelmingly pitiful, must men look to God,--without a stitch to
their backs except what He has given, without a copper in their pockets
except what has been borrowed from His bank, yet strutting up and down the
street of life, heads held high in air, as though they owned the universe,
and--if it did not sound blasphemous I could add the rest of the fact--and
were doing Him a favour by running His world so skilfully! And it grieves
one to the heart to note that this seems to be about as true within Church
circles as without. The difference between is ever growing smaller to the
disappearing point.

It was into such an atmosphere, never intenser than in Palestine and
Jerusalem nineteen centuries ago, that the man Christ Jesus came. And He
had the moral daring to begin living a dependent life, the true human
life, looking up gratefully to the Father's hand for everything. Was it
any wonder His presence caused such a disturbance in the moral atmosphere
of the world! He insisted, with the strange insistence of gentleness, on
living such a life, through all the extremes that the hating world-spirit
could contrive against Him. Out of such a life comes His "Follow Me." And
in this He is simply calling us back to the original human life as planned
by God.

Now, of course, in that first step, that great "emptying out" step, there
can be no following. There He is the Lone Man, unapproachable in the moral
splendour of His solitude. But from the time when He came in amongst us as
Jesus, our Brother, the typical Son of man, He was marking out afresh the
original road for our feet. This was the foundation trait in His
character. He lived the dependent life.



A Father-pleasing Life.


The second trait in His upward relation was this--He chose to live _a
Father-pleasing life_. I use those words because He used them.[10] I might
say "consecrated" or "dedicated" or "surrendered" or other like words. And
these are good words, but in common use we have largely lost their
meaning. They are used unthinkingly for something less--much less--than
they mean. Perhaps if we use the phrase He used we may be able to get back
to the thing He meant, and did.

There are three possible lives open to every man's choice: a bad life, in
which selfishness or passion or both, either refined or coarse, rule; a
good, true, natural life; and a Father-pleasing life. By a good, true,
natural life I mean, just now, a really Christian life in all that that
means, but lived as if there were no emergency in the world to change
one's habit of life.

You know an emergency coming into a man's life makes radical changes. You
go to bed tonight and ordinarily will sleep out your eight hours in
comfort and quiet. If a fire break out in the house, you are up in the
middle of the night, hurrying around, only partly clad, carrying out
valuables, or helping turn on water, or something of this sort. Your
natural arrangements for the night are all broken up by the fire. An
emergency may make radical changes in one's life for a little time,
sometimes for the whole life. Financial reverses may change the whole
habit of one's life.

Here's a man who has a well-assured, good-sized income from his business,
or his inheritance, or both. He lives in a luxuriously appointed home,
with many fine pictures and works of art and curios which it is enjoyable
to have. He has a choice library including some fine costly old prints and
editions, and enjoys adding rare books on subjects in which he is
specially interested. He belongs to some literary and social and athletic
clubs. He has an interesting family growing up around him whose education
is being carefully looked after. He is an earnest Bible-loving Christian,
faithful in church attendance and church duties, pure in life, and saintly
in character. He gives liberally to church and benevolent objects,
including foreign missions, which have become a part of the church system
into which he fits. And he goes an even, contented round of life, home,
church, club, recreation and so on, year in and out, holding and using the
great bulk of his money for himself. I think of that as one illustration
of the good, true, natural life.

Now, the Father-pleasing life is radically different in certain things.
Ordinarily the two would be identical. The true natural life as originally
planned for us would be the life pleasing to the Father. But something,
not a part of God's plan, has broken into life, a terrible something,
worse than a fire in the night, or a financial panic that sweeps away your
all. Sin has wrought fearful havoc; it has made an awful emergency, and
this emergency has affected the life and character of all the race, in a
bad way, terribly, awfully, beyond words to tell, or imagination to
depict. The whole earth is in the grip of a desperate moral emergency.

And naturally enough this emergency affects the life of any one concerned
with this earth. It has affected God's life, and God's plans,
tremendously. It has broken His heart with grief, and radically changed
His plans for His own life. He has made a plan for winning His world away
from its rebellion, its sin, back again to purity and close touch with
Himself. That plan centred around His Son, and He spared not His own Son,
but gave Him up.

And that emergency, and that plan of the Father's because of the
emergency, have affected our Lord Jesus' life on the earth. The whole plan
of His human life was radically revolutionized by it. The emergency, the
Father's plan, gripped Him. He turned away from the true, good, natural
life which it would have been proper for Him as a man to have lived, and
He lived another sort of life. It was an emergency life, a life fitted to
His Father's plan, and so the Father-pleasing life.

He became a homeless man, with all that that means. Would any man have
enjoyed home-life with all the rare home-joys, the sweetest of all natural
joys, so much as He? And then the larger circle of congenial friends, the
enjoyment of music, of exquisite art, the reverent study of the great
questions of life, of the wonders of nature whose powers it was given man
to study and cultivate and develop,[11]--it is surely no irreverence to
think of Him both enjoying and gracing such a life, for such was the
original plan of human life as thought out by a gracious Creator.

Instead, He had not where to lay His head, though so wearied with
ceaseless toil. He fairly burned His life out those few years, early and
late, ministering to the emergency-stricken crowds, healing their sick,
feeding their hunger, raising their dead, comforting broken hearts,
winning back sin-stained men and women, teaching the ignorant neglected
multitudes, preaching the Father's yearning love, searching out the
straying, ceaselessly travelling up and down, without leisure enough to
sleep or to eat oftentimes, and all this despite the efforts of His
kinsfolk to restrain His burning intensity.

This is what I mean by a Father-pleasing life. It was truly the
consecrated life, consecrated to His Father's emergency plan for His
world. It was the surrendered life, wholly given up to the one passionate
plan of His Father's broken heart for His earth family.

Now, His "Follow Me" does not mean imitation. It does not mean a restless,
aggressive hurrying here and there in meetings and Christian service. It
means that there will be a getting so close that the sweet fever of His
heart shall be caught by ours. The world-vision of His eyes shall flood
ours. The passion of the Father's heart shall become the passion of our
hearts. And we shall be controlled in all our lives, our holdings, our
habits, _by what He tells us_. It does not mean that we will seek to be
homeless as Jesus was, though it may possibly turn out to mean for some of
us that we shall be homeless even as He.

But it means that we shall find out _the Father's plan for our lives_.
And when it has become clear, we will set to music pitched in the joyous
major our Lord's own words, "I do always the things that are pleasing to
Him." And then we will set our lives to that joyous music with its rare
undertone of the exquisite minor. It may mean Africa for you, or China for
this other one. It may mean a plainer home at home, a simpler wardrobe, a
more careful use of money. It may mean a new dominant note in your
preaching, and all the personal influence of your life. It may possibly
mean what will seem like yet more radical changes. It certainly will mean
a deepening peace within, a closer touch of fellowship with the Lord
Jesus, a wholly new conception of the meaning of prayer, and a radically
new experience of the power of God in our own bodies and lives, and in our
touch with others. It will mean that the music of His will and ours
swinging rhythmically together in all things shall sweep our lives even as
the strong wind the young saplings.

This was the second trait in our Lord Jesus' character upward, He lived
the Father-pleasing life. To some it will seem like a further step--a
fourth step--downward in His humility. And it was. The way up is down. The
down slant is the beginning of the hilltop road. Going down is the way up;
downward in the crowd's estimation; upward into closer touch of
sympathetic life with God, and in reaching the true ideal of life.



The Obedient Life.


The third trait of our Lord Jesus' character upward, in relation with His
Father, was that He lived _the obedient life_. This is really emphasizing
what has just been said. But it is putting the emphasis on the daily habit
of His life, rather than on the underneath motive. This was the daily
spelling out of the first two traits. Obedience became the touchstone by
which everything was tested.

The touchstone was not men's needs, deeply as that took hold of His heart,
and shaped so much His life. It was not the thought of service, though
never was a life so filled with eager glad service. The touchstone was not
natural liking or choice, the proper instinctive reach out of His true
human nature, though this would be strong in Him, the typical Son of Man.
This would not be repressed as an unholy or wrong thing. It would only be
given second place, or left out, as it might run across the grain of the
great life-passion. With a fresh touch of awe it may truly be said: He did
not come down to earth primarily to die, though He knew beforehand that
this would stand out as the great one thing. The death was an item in the
obedience. He came down to do His Father's will. The path of obedience led
straight to the hill of the cross, and He trod that path regardless of
where it led. Obedience was the one touchstone of His life.[12] And it
will be the one touchstone of His true follower's life. We shall run
across this same vein of bright yellow gold, again and again, as we work
on through this "Follow Me" mine. These were the three traits of our Lord
Jesus' character upward, toward His Father. They were not different
because of the emergency of sin He found in the world. They would have
marked His life just as fully had there been no sin. But the presence of
sin caused them to change radically the whole course of the life He
actually lived.



Sinless by Choice.


Then there were _two traits of character inward_, in Himself. One was His
_purity_. There was the absence of everything that should not be in Him.
This is the negative side, though no part of His character called for more
intense positiveness. Purity means sinlessness. He was sinless. But we
must quickly remember what this means, or else there may seem to be no
following for us, only a wistful gazing where we cannot go. It does not
mean simply this, that through His peculiar birthright there was freedom
from all taint of sin.

It means more than this. Sinlessness was a matter of choice with Him, and
of choice insisted upon. And, be it said reverently, no man ever had a
stiffer fight to keep true to his purpose than He. He was tempted in all
points like as we are. He was tempted more than we. The tempter did his
best and worst; he mustered all his cunning and driving power against this
Lone Man. And the temptations were real. I am not concerned over the
merely academical questions of the schoolmen here. The practical side is
the intense side that takes all one's strength and thought. Practically,
that our Lord Jesus was really tempted, means that He could have yielded
had He so chosen. That He did not meant real struggle on His part. Not, of
course, that He ever wanted to yield to what was wrong, but temptation was
never so subtle, and doing the right never made so difficult as for Him.
He suffered in being tempted.[13] His sinlessness meant a decision, then
many a time a moist brow, a clenched hand, and set jaw, a sore stress of
spirit, and deep-breathed continual prayer whose intensity down in His
heart could never be fully expressed at the lips. The temptation to fail
to obey, simply not to obey, when obeying meant going through a sore
experience was never brought so deftly, so subtly, so repeatedly and
insistently to any as to Him. Resisting not only meant the decision, but
the strength of resistance against terrific strength of repeated
insistence.

How wondrously human this God-man was in His temptations, in His set
refusals, and even more, how human in keeping free from sin. For sin is
not human, letting sin in would have been a going down from the human
level. This is the practical meaning of His sinlessness--choice, choice
insisted upon, fighting, continual prayer, the Father's help, such as any
man may have--not more.

This helps us to see how intensely practical His "Follow Me" becomes. It
is not only that we will want to fight against the incoming of sin because
we feel we ought to. But as we get close to Him and breathe in His spirit,
there will come an inbred dislike, an intense inner loathing of sin,
however refined it may be in its approach. There will be a continual
coming for cleansing in the only fluid that can remove sin--His precious
blood, and in the only flame that can burn it out--the fire of the Holy
Spirit.[14] There will be a hardening of the set purpose to be free of
sin. We can be sinless in _purpose_. There can be a growing sinlessness in
actual life. And yet all experience goes to show that the nearer we
actually walk with God the more we shall be conscious of the need of
cleansing, the more we will talk about our Lord Jesus, and the less and
still less about our attainments.

The second inward trait in our Lord Jesus was the other side of this--His
positive _goodness_. I mean the presence in Him of all that should be
there. This is the exact reverse or complement of the purity. It is the
other half that must go with that to make a perfect character. I like to
use the word "holiness" in the sense of whole-ness. He had and developed a
whole life. It was fully rounded out. There was nothing lacking that
should be there, even as there was nothing present that should not have
been there.

There is among us a good bit of negative goodness of character. We point
with pride to what we don't do of that which is bad or not good. But this
is a very one-sided sort of thing. Purity and goodness together--purity
and holiness, wholeness--made the perfect, completed character of our
Lord. And it was so wholly through His choice, His own action, with His
Father's gracious help working through His choice. And the blessed
contagion of the Leader's presence will make an intense longing within to
follow Him here too.



A Fellow-Feeling.


Then there were _two outward traits of character_, that is in His
relations with His fellow-men, of Nazareth, of Israel, and of all the
race. He had _sympathy_ with men; a rare, altogether exceptional sympathy.
_He felt with men_ in all their feelings and needs and circumstances. His
fine spirit reached into men's inner spirit, and felt their hunger and
pain and longings and joys, felt them even as they did, and the arms of
His spirit went around them to help. And they felt it. They felt that He
really understood and felt with them. And so sincere and brotherly was His
fellow-feeling that they gladly welcomed it as from one really of
themselves. To men, this Man, so lone in certain traits and experiences,
was their brother, not only in His feeling with them, but in their feeling
toward Him.

There's something peculiar in that word sympathy. It's a warm word. It has
a soft cushion to it. It is a help word. There's something in it that
makes you think of a warm strong hand helping, of a soft padding
cushioning the sharp edges where they touch your flesh. It makes you think
of a tender, fine spirit breathing in and through your own spirit, even as
the soft south wind in the spring warms you, and the bracing mountain wind
in the summer brings you new life.

Our Lord Jesus had this great trait of sympathy with His fellows. He
_could_ have it, for He had been through all their experiences. He knew
the commonplace round of daily life so common to all the race. Nazareth
taught Him that, through thirty of His thirty-three years,--ten-elevenths
of His life. He knew temptation, cunning, subtle, stormy, persistent. He
knew the inner longings of a nature awakening, and yet what it meant to be
held down by outer circumstances. He knew the sharp test of waiting, long
waiting. He knew hunger and bodily weariness, and the pinch of scanty
funds. He was homeless at a time when a home would have been most
grateful. He knew what it meant to have the life-plan broken, and
something else, a bitter something else thrust in its place.

And he knew, too, the sweets of human life, of human love, of the
helpfulness of others' sympathy, of the Father's pleased smile, of the
Holy Spirit's indwelling, of the wondrous inner peace that follows
obedience in hard places, of the joys of service, of the delight of being
able to sympathize. His experience ran through the whole diapason of human
feelings, and so He can find a key-note in every one of its tones for the
sweet rich symphony of sympathy.

There is again an exception to be noted here. There could be no
fellow-feeling in choosing wrong, or in yielding to the low or base or
selfish. He is the Lone Man there. Does this make all the stronger His
sympathy with us in our upper reach out of such things? Surely it does.
The exception makes it stand out more sharply that our Lord Jesus felt our
feelings. Wherever you are, however tight the corner, or narrow the road,
or lonely the way, or keen the suffering, you can always stop and say: "He
was here. He was here _first_, and _most_. He understands." As you kneel
and look up, you can remember that there's a Man on the throne, a
fellow-man, with a human heart like mine, and like yours. He understands.
He feels. With utmost reverence let it be said, there's more of God since
our Lord Jesus went back. Human experience has been taken up into the
person of God.

And let me remind you again, that the "Follow Me" here will mean nothing
less than fellowship in the sufferings of our fellows, fellowship to the
point of radically affecting our lives. Sympathy will go deeper than a
sense of pity for those less fortunate, and a giving to them a warm hand
and a good lift up. The poor woman, living in a slum district, being
visited by a mission visitor, spoke for the universal human heart when she
said earnestly, "We don't want _things_; we want _love_." As we get up
close to our Lord Jesus there will come the indwelling in us of the spirit
that controlled Him. We will see through His eyes, we will feel with His
heart, our hands will reach out to grasp other human hands with the
impulse of His touch upon them. We shall know the exquisite pain of real
sympathy with men in need, and the great joy of sharing and making lighter
their load.



When You Don't Have To.


The second outward trait of our Lord Jesus' character was _sacrifice_.
This is not something different from what has been said; it is only going
a step further, indeed going the last step that He could go, in both His
sympathy with men and His obedience to His Father. It helps to remember
what sacrifice means; not suffering merely, though it includes suffering;
not privation simply, though it may include this, too. There is much
suffering and privation where there is no sacrifice. Sacrifice means doing
something to help some one else when it takes some of your life-blood, and
when you don't have to, except the have-to of love.

Sacrifice was so woven into the very fabric of Jesus' life that wherever
you cut in some of the red threads stick out. It was the never-absent
undertone of His life, from earliest years until the tragic close. But the
undertone rose higher and grew stronger until at the last it became the
dominant, the only tone to be heard. He gave His life out on the cross
that so men might be saved from the terrible result of their sin, when He
didn't have to, except the have-to of His great heart.

I have spoken of sacrifice as one of the two outward, manward traits of
His character. But the truth is His Calvary sacrifice faced three ways:
upward, inward and outward. It faced toward the Father, for it was
carrying out the Father's plan, and that lets us see not only the Father's
love, but His estimate, as the world's administrator of justice, of the
horribleness of the sin which He was so freely forgiving.[15] It faced in
toward Himself, for it was the purity and perfection of the life poured
out that gave the peculiar meaning to His death, and it was His
sympathetic love that led Him up that steep hill. It faced outward, for
the love of it was meant to break men's hearts and bend their stubborn
wills, and so it did and has.

His sympathy--love suffering--came to have a new meaning as He went to the
last extreme in His suffering. Sympathy is sometimes spoken of as putting
yourself in the other's place so as to help him better. Our Lord Jesus did
this. He did it as none other did, or could. He actually put Himself in
our place on the cross. He experienced what would have come to us had He
not taken our place. He suffered the suffering that belongs to us because
of our sin. He felt the feelings that came through sin working out to its
bitter end. Indeed He went beyond our own feelings here. For because He
consented to suffer as a guilty sinner, we, who trust His precious blood,
are spared that awful experience.

Calvary was sympathy to the extreme of sacrifice. But both words,
"sympathy" and "sacrifice," get new depths of meaning at Calvary. This red
shuttle thread of sacrifice will appear again and again in the fabric
which His "Follow Me" weaves out for us. What a character He calls us to!
What strength of friendship to insist on our coming up close to Himself!
Is it possible? Surely not. He is so far beyond us. Yet there is a way,
only one, the way of the dependent life, depending on Him to reproduce His
own likeness in us. And our giving Him a free hand in doing it.

There is one word that could be used to cover all of this, if we only
knew its full, rich, sweet meaning. That is the little understood, the
much misunderstood, much belittled-in-use word, "love." All that has been
said of the character of our Lord Jesus can be found inside that
four-lettered word. Each trait spoken of is but a fresh spelling of love,
some one side of it. Love planned the dependent life, and only love can
live it truly. Love longs to please love, regardless of any sacrifice
involved. Obedience is the active rhythm of love on the street of life.
Purity is the inner heart of love; and the fully rounded character is the
maturity of love. Sympathy is the heart of love beating in perfect rhythm
with your own, and sacrifice is love giving its very life gladly out to
save yours. Some day we shall know how much is meant by the sentence, "God
is love."

A little child of a Christian home came one day to his mother, asking what
it meant to "believe on the Lord Jesus." She thought a moment how to make
the answer simple to the child, and then said, "It means thinking about
Him, and loving Him." Sometime after, the little fellow was noticed
sitting very quietly, apparently much absorbed in thought, and his mother
said, "What are you doing, my son?" With child-like simplicity he said in
a quiet tone, "I'm believing on the Lord Jesus." And a warm flush of
feeling came to the mother's heart as she realized the practical tender
meaning to her son, of the word "believing."

May we be great enough to be as little children while I adapt that
mother's language here: Following our Lord Jesus is thinking about Him and
loving Him. As we come to know the meaning of love we shall find that
following is loving. The "Follow Me" life is the love life. But we must
learn the meaning of love before that sentence will grip us.

The closer we follow Him the closer we will come to knowing what love is.
The nearer we get to Him the nearer we get to its meaning. We will know it
as we know Him. When we come into His presence, face to face, its simple
full meaning will flash upon us with a great simple surprise.

Let us follow on to know it, that we may know Him. Let us live it and so
we shall live Him. And in so living we shall know it and Him; we shall
know love, and Jesus, and God.




The Long, Rough Road He Trod



The Book's Story.


It wasn't always a rough road, of course. But as you look at it from end
to end, the roughness of it is what takes your eye most, and takes great
hold of your heart. The smooth places here and there make you feel that it
was a rough road. And yet, rough though it really was, the roughness was
eased by the love in the heart of the Man that trod it; though not eased
for the soles of His feet, nor for hands and face. For there was thorny
roughness at the sides as He pushed through, as well as steep roughness
under foot.

And it may not seem so long at first. But the longer you look, the sharper
your eyes get to see how great was the distance He had to come, from where
He was, down to where we were.

Let me take a little sea room, and go back a bit so we can see the full
length, and the real roughness, of the road He came. And lest some of you
may think that the telling of the first part of it has the sound of a
fairy tale, let me tell you that it is simply the story of what actually
took place, as told in the pages of this old Book of God. It will be a
help if you will keep your copy of the Bible at hand, and turn
thoughtfully to its pages now and then as we talk.

There is a rare simplicity in the way in which the story of the Bible is
told. And it helps to remember that the Bible is never concerned with
chronology, nor with scientific process but only with giving pictures of
moral or spiritual conditions among men as seen from above. And chiefly it
is concerned with giving a picture of God, in His power and patience and
gentleness, and in His great justice and right in dealing with everybody.
Yet the picture and the language never clash with the facts of nature and
of life as dug out by student or scientist.

It is a great help in talking about these things of God, and of human
life, not to have any theories to fit and press things into, but simply to
take the Book's story, and to tell it over again in the language of our
generation. It simplifies things quite a bit not to try to fit God into
your philosophy, but to accept His own story of life. It not only greatly
simplifies one's outlook, it gives you such sure footing, such steadiness.
Any other footing may go out from under your feet any time. But the old
Book of God "standeth sure," never more sure than to-day when it was never
more riddled at, and mined under. But neither bullets nor mining have
affected the Book itself. The only harm has been in the kick-back of the
firing, upon those standing close by.

I am frank to confess my own ignorance of the great truths we are talking
over here, save for the Bible itself, and the response to it within my own
spirit, and the further response to it in human life all over the earth
to-day West and East. Human life is a faithful mirror, accurately
reflecting to-day just the conditions found in this old Book. No book so
faithfully and accurately describes the workings and feelings of the human
mind and heart of to-day in our western world, and in all the world, as
this Book, written so long ago in the language of the East. Its finger
still gives accurately the pulse beat of the race. And it helps, too, to
tell the story in the simple way in which this Book itself does, as a
story.



God on a Wooing Errand.


God and man used to live together in a garden. It was a most wonderful
garden, full of trees and flowers and fruit, of singing birds with rare
feathers and songs, of beasts that had never yet learned fear, nor to make
others feel it, and a beautiful river of living water. The name given it
indicates that it was a most delightful spot.[16] God and man used to live
together in this garden. They talked and walked and worked together. Man
helped God in putting the finishing touches on His work of creation. It
was the first school, with God Himself as teacher.[17] God and man used to
have a trysting time under the trees in the twilight. But one evening when
God came for the usual bit of fellowship the man was not there. God was
there.[18] He had not gone away, and He has never gone away. Man had gone
away, and God was left lonely standing under the tree of life.

A friend, in whose home we were, told of her little daughter's remark one
day. The mother had been teaching her that there is only one God. The
child seemed surprised and on being told again, said in her childlike
simplicity, "I think He must be very lonesome." Well, the child was right
in the word used. God is lonesome, though for an utterly different reason
than was in the child's mind. God was lonesome that day, left standing
alone under the trees of the garden. He is lonesome for fellowship with
every one who stays away from Himself. That homely human word may well
express to us the longing of His heart.

Man went away from God that day, then he wandered farther away, then he
lost his way back, then he didn't want to come back. And away from God his
ideas about God got badly confused. His eyes grew blind to God's pleading
face, his ears dull and then deaf to God's voice. His will got badly
warped and bent out of shape morally, and his life sadly hurt by the sin
he had let in.[19]

And all this was very hard on God.[20] It _grieved_ Him at His heart. He
sent many messengers, one after another, through long years, but they were
treated as badly as they could be.[21] And at last God said to Himself,
"What more can I do? This is what I will do. I'll go down Myself and live
among them, and woo them back Myself." And so it was done. One day He
wrapped about Himself the garb of our humanity, and came in amongst us as
one of ourselves.[22] And He became known amongst us as Jesus. He had
spoken the world into being; now, in John's simple homely language, He
pitched His tent amongst our tents as our near neighbour and kinsman.[23]
Our Lord Jesus was the face of God looking into ours, the voice of God
speaking into the ears of our hearts, the hand of God reached down to make
a way back and then lead us along the way back again, the heart of God
coming in touch to warm ours and make us willing to go back.

It was a long road He came, as long as the distance we had gone away from
Him. And no measuring stick has yet been whittled out that can tell that
distance. We want to look a bit at the last lap of the road, the
earth-lap. It runs from the Bethlehem plain where He came in, to the
Olivet hilltop where He slipped away again up and back, for a time, until
things are ready for the next step in His plan.



The Rough Places.


The bit of earth-road began to get pretty rough before He had quite gotten
here. The pure gentle virgin-mother was under cruelly hurting suspicion on
the point about which a woman is properly most sensitive, and that too by
the one who was nearest to her. I've wondered why Joseph, too, was not
told of the plan of God when Mary was, and so she be spared this sore
suspicion. I think it was because he simply _could_ not have taken it in
beforehand, though he rose so nobly when he was told. Her experience was
unavoidable, humanly speaking.

That hastily improvised cradle was in rather a rough spot for both mother
and babe. The hasty fleeing for several days and nights to Egypt, with
those heart-rending cries of the grief-stricken mothers of Bethlehem
haunting their ears, the cautious return, and then apparently the change
of plans from a home in historic Bethlehem to the much less favoured
village of Nazareth,--it was all a pretty rough beginning on a very rough
road. It was a sort of prophetic beginning. There proved to be
blood-shedding at both ends, and each time innocent blood, too.

The word Nazareth has become a high fence hiding from view thirty of the
thirty-three years. Was this the dead-level, monotonous stretch of the
road, from the time of the early teens on to the full maturity of thirty?
Yet it proved later to have a dangerously rough place on the precipice
side of the town. It seems rather clear that Joseph and Mary would have
much preferred some other place, their own family town, cultured
Bethlehem, for rearing this child committed to their care. But the serious
danger involved decided the choice of the less desirable town for their
home.[24]

But the roughest part began when our Lord Jesus turned His feet from the
shaded seclusion of Nazareth, and turned into the open road. At once came
the Wilderness, the place of terrific temptation, and of intense spirit
conflict. The fact of temptation was intensified by the length of it.
Forty long days the lone struggle lasted. The time test is the hardest
test. The greatest strength is the strength that wears, doesn't wear out.
That Wilderness had stood for sin's worst scar on the earth's surface.
Since then it has stood for the most terrific and lengthened-out
siege-attack by the Evil One upon a human being. Satan himself came and
rallied all the power of cunning and persistence at his command. He did
his damnable worst and best.

In an art gallery at Moscow is a painting by a Russian artist of "Christ
in the Wilderness," which reverently and with simple dramatic power brings
to you the intense humanity of our Lord, and how tremendously real to Him
the temptation was. This helps to intensify to us the meaning of the
Wilderness. It stands for victory, by a man, in the power of the Spirit,
over the worst temptation that can come.

Then follows a long stretch of rough road with certain places sharply
marked out to our eyes. The rejection by the Jewish leaders began at once.
It ran through three stages, the silent contemptuous rejection, the active
aggressive rejection, then the hardened, murderous rejection running up to
the terrible climax of the cross.

The contemptuous rejection of the Baptist's claim for his Master, by the
official commission sent down to inquire,[25] was followed by the more
aggressive, as they began to realize the power of this man they had to
deal with. John's imprisonment revealed an intensifying danger, and the
need of withdrawing to some less dangerous place.

Our Lord's change to Galilee, and to preaching and working among the
masses, was followed by a persistent campaign on the part of the
Southerners of nagging, harrying warfare against Him throughout Galilee.
It grew in bitterness and intensity, with John's death as a further
turning point to yet intenser bitterness. The visits to Jerusalem were
accompanied by fiercer attacks, venomous discussions, and frenzied
attempts at personal violence. This grew into the third stage of
rejection, the cool, hardened plotting of His death. The last weeks
things head up at a tremendous rate; our Lord appears to be the one calm,
steady man, even in His terrific denunciation of them, held even and
steady in the grip of a clear, strong purpose, as He pushed His way
unwaveringly onward. Then came the terrible climax,--the cross. The worst
venomous spittle of the serpent's poison sac spat out there. It was the
climax of hate, and the climax of His unspeakable love.



When Your Heart's Tuned to the Music.


Surely it was a long, rough road. Its length was not measured by miles,
nor years, but by the experiences of this Lone Man. So measured it becomes
the longest road ever trod, from purity's heights to sin's depths; from
love's mountain top to hate's deepest gulf. It makes a new record for
roughness. For no one has ever suffered what our Lord Jesus did; and no
one's suffering ever had the value and meaning for another that His had
and has for all men and for us. Not one of us to-day realizes how He
suffered, nor the intensity of meaning that suffering actually has for all
the race, and for those of us who accept it for ourselves.

It was a rough, long road, and He knew ahead that it would be. He saw
dimly ahead, then more sharply outlined as He drew on, those crossed logs
in the road, growing bigger and darker and more forbidding as He pushed
on. But He could not be stopped by that, for He was thinking about us,
and about His Father. He pushed steadily on, past crossed logs all
overgrown and tangled with thorn bushes and poison ivy vines, bearing the
marks of logs and thorns and poison ivy, but He went through to the end of
the road, He reached His world; He reached _our hearts_. And now He is
longing to reach through our hearts to the hearts of the others.

    "But none of the ransomed ever knew
        How deep were the waters crossed;
    Nor how dark was the night that the Lord passed through,
        'Ere He found His sheep that were lost.

    'Lord, whence are those blood-drops all the way
        That mark out the mountain's track?'
    'They were shed for one who had gone astray
        Ere the Shepherd could bring him back.'

    But all through the mountains, thunder-riven,
        And up from the rocky steep,
    There arose a glad cry to the gate of heaven,
        'Rejoice! I have found my sheep.'"[26]

But there was something more on that road. Do you know how the wind blows
through the trees on the steep mountain side, and will make music in your
heart, _if your heart is tuned to its music_, even while you are pushing
your way through thorny tanglewood and undergrowth? Do you know how, as
you go down the deep mountain ravines, with the wild rushing torrent far
below, where a single misstep would mean so much, how the breeze playing
through the leaves makes sweetest melody, _if your heart's tuned to it?_

Well, this great Lone Man had a heart tuned for the music of this road.
The strong wind of His Father's love blew down through the wild mountains
into His face, and made sweetest music, and His ear was in tune and heard
it. He had a tuning-fork that gave Him the true pitch for the rarest
music, while His feet travelled cautiously the deep wilderness ravines,
and boldly climbed through the thorny undergrowth of that steep hill just
outside the city wall. Obedience is the rhythm of two wills, that blends
their action into rarest harmony. Some of us need to use His
tuning-fork,[27] so as to enjoy the music of the road.



The Pleading Call To Follow



Hungry for the Human Touch.


God hungers for the human touch. There's an inner hesitancy in saying
this, and in hearing it. We feel it can hardly be so, even though our
inner hearts would wish it were so.

We know that we men hunger for the human touch, the strongest of us. And
in our hour of sore need we know that our inner hearts look up, and wish
we could have a really close touch with God. Well, this is a bit of the
image of God in us. We were made so, like Himself. In seeing ourselves
here, we are getting a closer look at the heart of God. He longs for the
human touch. When He made us He breathed into our nostrils the breath of
His own life. And this is not simply a bit of the first Genesis chapter.
It is a bit of every human life. There's the breath of God in every new
life born into the world. He gives a bit of Himself. We are not complete
creatively until part of Himself has come to be part of us.

And Jesus' coming was but the same thing put in yet more intense, close,
appealing shape to us. He came to get us in touch again after the break
of sin. He gave His blood that we might have life again after the
sin-break had broken off our life, and commenced to dry it up. This was an
even closer touch. The breath of God came in Eden to breathe in our lungs.
The blood of His Son came on Calvary to give life-action to our hearts.
Could there be anything to make clearer His hunger for the human touch?

The Holy Spirit's presence spells out the same thing once more. There has
been every sort of thing to induce Him to go away. He has been ignored,
left out of all reckoning, and talked against. Yet with a patience beyond
what that word means to us, He has remained creatively in every man as the
very breath of his life. And He comes and remains the very breath of the
spirit life in those who yield to His pleading call.

Jesus was God coming after us. We had gone away. He came to woo us back
into close touch again. He came to the nation of Israel, that through it
He might reach out to all men. When He comes again it will be again to use
Israel as His messenger, while He Himself will be present on the earth in
a new way to woo men to Himself. When that nation's leaders rejected
John's announcement, and so rejected our Lord Jesus, He began to appeal to
individual men, while waiting for the nation. And the work with
individuals was also His call to the nation.

So the chief thing He did was to call men. His presence was a call, and
the crowds flocked to Him wherever He went. His life of purity and
sympathy was felt as an earnest call and responded to eagerly. His doings
were a very intense call. Every healed man and woman, every one set free
of demon influence, every one of the fed multitudes, felt called to this
man who had helped him so. His teaching was a continual call, and His
preaching. But above all else stood out the personal call He gave men. For
our Lord Jesus was not content to deal with the crowds simply; He dealt
with men one by one in intimate heart touch.



Called to Go.


There are a number of invitations He used in calling men. It was as though
in His eagerness He used every sort that might go home. And yet there was
more than this; these invitations are like successive steps up into the
life He wanted them to have. He said, "Come unto Me."[28] This was always
the first, and still remains first. It led, and it leads, into rest of
heart and life, peace with God. He quickly followed it with "Come ye after
Me."[29] They must come to Him before they could come after Him. This was
found to mean discipleship, learning the road. He would "make" them like
Himself in going after others. He said, "take My yoke upon you."[30]This
meant a bending down to get into the yoke, a surrender of will and heart
to Himself, and then partnership, fellowship side-by-side with Himself.

Then He spoke another word to the innermost circle, on the night in which
He was betrayed. He had a long talk that evening with the eleven around
the supper table, and walking down to the grove of olives at the Brook of
the Cedars.[31] Several times that evening He used this new word, "abide,"
"abide in Me." That means staying with Him, not leaving, living
continuously with Him. It means a continued separation from anything that
would separate from Him. And then it means a fulness of life coming from
Himself into us as we draw all our life from Himself, a rich ripeness, a
rounded maturity, a depth of life, and these always becoming
more,--richer, rounder, deeper.

Then after the awful days of the cross were past, on the evening of the
resurrection day, in the upper room with ten of the inner disciples, He
practically said, "You be Myself"; "as the Father sent Me, even so send I
you"[32]; "You be I." I wonder if any one of us has ever been taken or
mistaken for the Lord Jesus. We would never know it, of course. But He
meant it to be so.

A Scottish lady missionary in India tells of a Bible class of girls which
she had. She was teaching them about the life and character of the
Lord Jesus. One day a new girl came in, fresh from the heathenism in
which she grew up, knowing nothing of the Gospel. She listened, and then
became quite intense and excited in her childish way, as she heard them
talking about some One, how good He was, how gentle, how He was always
teaching and helping the people around Him. At last she could restrain her
eagerness no longer, but blurted out, "I know that man; he lives near us."
It was found that she did not know about Christ, but supposed they were
speaking of a very earnest native Christian man living in her
neighbourhood. She had mistaken her neighbour for Jesus. How glad that man
must have been if he ever knew. This was a part of our Lord's plan.

And at the very end, these successive invitations took the shape of a
command, which was both a permission and an order,--"Go ye."[33] Men who
had taken to heart, one after another, these invitations were ready for
the command. They would be eager for it. The invitations were the Master's
preparation for the command. He could trust such men to go, and to keep
steady and true as they went, in the power He gave them. There is one word
that you find in all these invitations--"Me." They all centre about the
Lord Jesus. He is the centre of gravity drawing every one, in ever growing
nearness and meaning, to Himself. It is only when we have been drawn into
closest touch with Him that we are qualified to "go" to others. It's only
Himself in us, only as much of Himself as is in us, that will be helpful
to any one else, or will make any one else willing to break with his old
way. He is the only magnet to draw men away from the old life up to
Himself.



"Follow Me."


But there's one other invitation which belongs in this list. It proves to
be the greatest of them all, because you come to find it includes all
these others. It's His "Follow Me." It seems at first glance to be the
same as that "Come after Me." But it is the word He repeated again and
again, under different circumstances, with added explanations, to the same
men, until you feel that He meant it to stand out as the great invitation
to His disciples. It seems to mean different things at different times.
That is to say, it grew in its significance. It came to mean more than it
had seemed to.

Peter is a good illustration here. The word really came to him five times,
with a different, an added, meaning each time. His first following meant
acquaintance.[34] John the Herald had sent his disciples, John and Andrew,
along after Jesus as He was walking one day on the Jordan river road. They
followed Jesus to their first acquaintance in a two hours' talk, which
quite satisfied their hearts as to who He was. John never forgot that
first following. Every detail of it stands out in his memory when long
years after he began to write his story of the Master. Andrew went at once
to hunt up Peter, and brought him face-to-face with his newly found Friend
and Master. That interview settled things for Peter. Andrew's following
now included his. Following meant the beginning of the personal friendship
which was to mean so much for both of them.

It was about a year after, that "Follow Me" had a new meaning to Peter and
some others.[35] The invitation was an illustrated one this time,
illustrated by a living picture of just what it meant. It was one morning
by the Lake of Galilee. Peter and his partners had had a poor night's
fishing, and were out on shore washing their nets. The Master had come
along, with a great crowd pressing in to get closer and hear better. There
was danger of the crowd pushing the Master into the water. The Master
borrowed Peter's boat for a pulpit. Peter sat facing the crowd while the
Master talked to them.

Was that the first time the spell of a crowd began to get its subtle
heart-hold on Peter as he looked into their hungry eyes? Who can withstand
the great appeal of the crowd's eyes? Not our Lord, nor any that have
caught His spirit. Then the great draught of fishes, after the fishless
night, made Peter feel the Master's power. Fishes would make him feel it,
being a fisherman, as nothing else would. The sense of Jesus' power, and
with it a sense of purity--interesting how the power made him feel the
purity--this brought him to his knees at our Lord's feet with the
confession of his own sinfulness.

Peter was greatly moved that morning, greatly shaken. A new experience of
tremendous power had come to him. And out of it came a new life, a radical
change as he left the old occupation, fishing, boats, father, means of
livelihood, and entered upon the new life. "Follow Me" meant a radical
change of life, constant companionship with Jesus, sharing His life, going
to school, getting ready for leadership and service; yes, and for
suffering too. He entered the Master's itinerant training school that
morning. A man needs a sight of the Lord Jesus' power, a _feel_ of it,
before he is fit to serve, or even to go to school to get ready for
service.

It was some months after this that another meaning grew into the words
"Follow Me," and grew out of them. The words are not spoken this time, but
acted. Out of the group of disciples that He had gathered about Him our
Lord prayerfully chose out Peter with the others to be sent out as His
messenger to others.[36]Part of the schooling was over; now a new part, a
new term of school, was to begin. He gave them a special talk that
morning, and sent them out to teach and heal and do for the crowds what
He had been doing.

He called them Apostles, Sent-ones, Missionaries. "Follow Me" now meant
going to others. It meant more--_power_, power to do for men all the
Master Himself had done. First, power felt that early morning by the lake,
now power given. That was a great advance in training. Power had to be
felt before it could be given, and has to be felt before it can be used.
Only as the power takes hold of our inner hearts to the feeling point,
will it ever take hold of others. And no life is changed through our
service till power takes hold of us to _the feeling point_.



The Deeper Meaning.


But there was a special session of the "Follow Me" school one day, a very
serious session.[37]They had to be shown the red threads in the weave of
the word. The words had to be held under the knife, so they could look
into the cut, and see the deeper meaning. "Follow Me" had to take deeper
hold of them yet, if His power was to get the deeper hold of them, and, by
and by, get hold of the needy crowds. The very setting of the words gives
the new meaning to them. John had felt the keen edge of Herod's axe blade,
and was now in the upper presence. They were up in the far northern part
because of the growing danger threatening Him by the leaders.

It is the turning point where our Lord Jesus begins to tell them that He
was to suffer. Their ears _could_ not take in the words. Their dazed eyes
show that they think they could not have heard aright,--He to _suffer!_
What could this mean? They hadn't figured on this when they left the nets
and boats to follow. There had been a rosy glamour filling impulsive
Peter's self-confident sky. Now this black storm cloud! Then to Peter's
foolhardy daring came words spoken with a new intense quietness that made
the words quiver: "If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself
and take up his cross daily and 'Follow Me.'"[38]

This was startling to a terrific degree. Here was a new, strange,
perplexing combination--"deny himself," and "cross," coupled with His
"Follow Me." What could He mean? This was surely some of His intensely
figurative language again, they think. Yes, it surely was; and it stood
for a yet intenser experience. "Follow Me" means sacrifice. It means a
going down as well as a going up. And it proves to mean that one can go up
in power and service, only as far as he has gone down in the obedience
that includes sacrifice. Did Peter take in the meaning that day? I think
not. Actions speak louder than words.

That betrayal night a few short months after, when the actual cross was
almost in actual sight, he "followed Him afar off."[39] Without knowing
it, that was as far as he had ever really followed thus far. He wanted to
keep as "far off" from that cross as possible. He always had. He baulked
at its first mention, baulked tremendously. Yet he "followed." Poor Peter!
he was in a terrible strait betwixt two, this wondrous Master whom he
really loved, and this threatening cross of nails and thongs and thorns.
It was a stiff struggle between heart and flesh; between the longing of
his love and the shrinking from pain and hardship and shame. And Peter's
kinsfolk are still having the same struggle. A great many stop here. This
is going _too_ far! They prefer staying by the easier "Follow Me's," and
forgetting this one. Yes, and go on living powerless lives, and engaging
in powerless service, when the crowds were never so needy.

Peter didn't follow this time. The road was too rough. He stumbled and
fell badly. Badly? Still no worse than many others. When he got up he was
still facing the same way. You can always tell a man's mettle by the way
he faces as he gets up after a bad fall.

Six months or so after there came another "Follow Me," to Peter. No, it
wasn't another; it was the same one, the one he hadn't accepted. Peter was
to have another opportunity at the same place where he fell so badly. How
patient our Lord Jesus was--and is.

It was one morning just after breakfast--a rare breakfast--on the edge of
the lake, after as poor a night's fishing as that other time.[40] Again
the touch of power revealed the Master's presence. Again Peter had a
special word with the Master while the others are hauling in the fish. Now
breakfast's over and the seven are grouped about the One, listening. The
Lord's quiet skilled hand touches the heart meaning of "Follow Me." Its
real meaning is a love meaning. Do you love? Then "Follow Me." Then you
_must_ follow, your love draws you after, even though the path be rough
and broken. This is the same "Follow Me" that Peter baulked at so badly
months before. Its meaning had not changed. It would mean a death, Peter
is plainly told. But now Peter baulks no longer. The Master's great love
had taught Him how really to love. And now not even a cross for himself
would or could keep him from following close up to such a Master.

Here is the meaning of "Follow Me" as it worked out in Peter's
experience--acquaintance, a new life, schooling, service, a sight of
sacrifice, and a baulking, then--a sight of Jesus on the cross, and then a
willingness to go on even though it meant the sorest sacrifice. This is an
etching of the road Peter actually went, an etching in black and white,
with the black very black. Is it a picture of your road? But perhaps you
have never filled out the last part--still back at that baulking place. In
the thick of our present life, in the noise and din of the street of
modern life, comes as of old the quiet, clear, insistent call "Follow Me."



Getting in Behind.


But, some one says, how can we really follow this Lone Man, our Lord Jesus
Christ? He was so pure in His life, stainless in motive, and unstained in
character. And we--well, the nearer we get to Him the more instinctively
we find Peter's lakeshore cry starting up within, "I am a sinful man." His
very presence makes us feel the sin, the sin-instinct, the old selfish
something within. How can we really follow? And the answer that comes is a
real answer. It answers the inner heart-cry.

It is this: we begin where He ended. The cross was the end of His life. It
must be the beginning of ours. It was the climax of His obedience. All the
lines of His life come together at the cross. It is the beginning for us.
All the lines of our lives, the lines of purity, of character, of service,
of power, run back to the one starting point. And we come to find--some of
us pretty slowly--that it is only the lines that do start there that lead
to anything worth while. The starting point for the true life, and for
real service is very clear. And if any of us have made a false start, it
will be a tremendous saving to drop things and go back and get the true
start. "The blood of Jesus His Son cleanseth from all sin"--this is the
only point from which to start the "Follow Me" life. "Follow Me" does not
mean imitation. It means reincarnation. It's some One coming to re-live
His life in us. He died that His life might be loosed out to be relived in
us.

I have already spoken of this as being a call to friendship. All the rest
that comes is meant to be what naturally grows out of this friendship.
Peter never forgot his last "Follow Me" call. "Lovest thou Me?" Then thou
mayest follow. This greatly sweetens all the rest. It's all for Him!--our
friend. Out of this personal relation comes service, power in service,
suffering because of opposition to Him whom we serve, and joy because we
may suffer on His account.[41]

Matthew became His friend that day down at the little customs-shed at the
Capernaum water edge. And out of that friendship grew our first gospel.
John lived very close, and out of his intimacy came the gospel that
reveals to us most the inner heart of our Lord, and His own intimacy of
relation with the Father. And out of that friendship came, too, not only
John's wonderful little "abiding" epistle,[42] but the Revelation book,
which gives us an inkling of the coming in of the Kingdom time that lies
so near to our Lord's heart. Out of such intimacy of touch grew Stephen's
ringing address before the Jewish council, and--his stormy, stony exit,
out and up into his Master's presence.

And time would fail me to tell of those in every corner of the earth, and
every generation since our Lord was here, who have served and suffered
because they loved Him and followed. Hidden away in the rocks and caves of
France from the fires of persecution, the Huguenots sang their favourite
hymn:

    "I have a friend so precious,
      So very dear to me,
    He loves me with such tender love,
      He loves so faithfully.

    I could not live apart from Him,
      I love to feel Him nigh,
    And so we dwell together,
      My Lord and I."

When I was in China a year ago, my heart caught some of the distant echoes
of that sort of singing, by Chinese Christians, in the midst of the fiery
persecutions of the Boxer time. And I heard the same sad, glad undertone
last year out in Corea, in the homes we visited, whose loved ones were
behind prison bars for their Friend's sake.

One of the latest chapters of this friendship's outcome is only just
closed in the story of that quiet, young friend of the Lord Jesus, William
Whiting Borden, who sat down a little while ago, and so placed the wealth
left him that the world might learn of his Friend, and then went out and
laid down his life in Egypt in this same passion of friendship. So the
earth's sod in every corner has known the fertilizing of such friendship
blood, and shall some day know a wondrous harvest under our great Friend's
own gleaning.

And this is why He asks us to follow. He needs our help. Our Lord Jesus
gave His precious life blood to redeem the world, to set it free from its
sin-slavery. But there are two parts to that redemption, His and ours.
These two parts are strikingly brought out by a single word in the
beginning of the book of Acts,[43] the word "began." Luke says that what
he has been writing in his Gospel of the life and death of Jesus was only
a _beginning_. This was what "He _began_ both to do and to teach." It is
usually explained that what our Lord Jesus began in the Gospels, the Holy
Spirit continued to _do_ in the Acts, and to _teach_ in the Epistles. And
this is no doubt true. But there is still more here. The Holy Spirit
continued and continues through men what He began through Jesus. There is
a second part to the work of redemption, our part, the Holy Spirit working
through us. There had to be a first part; that was the great part. There
could be no second without a first. That first part was done when our Lord
Jesus was hurt to death for us. That is the great first part. Yet in doing
that He had but begun something. He touched Palestine. We are to cover the
earth. He touched one nation; we are to go to all nations. We are to
continue what He began. The work of redemption was finished on the cross
so far as He was concerned; but not yet finished so far as its being taken
to "all the world" was concerned. He needs us. This is why He asks us to
follow. He needs our co-operation.

The second great factor in carrying out what He began is--how shall I put
it? Shall I say, men and the Holy Spirit? You say, "No, change that, say
the Holy Spirit and men. Put the Spirit first." Well, the order of these
two depends on where you are standing. If you are standing at the Father's
right hand, you say "the Holy Spirit and men." For the power is all in the
Holy Spirit. He is the power. There can be nothing done without Him.
Whatever is done in which He is not dominant amounts to nothing. How I
wish we men might have that tremendous fact grip us in these days when the
whole emphasis is on organization.

But, very reverently let me say this, and I say it thus plainly that we
may know how much our Lord Jesus is depending on us, how really He needs
us,--this, that since we are on the earth, in the place of human action,
where the fighting is to be done, it is accurate to say with utmost
reverence, "_men_ and the Holy Spirit." For mark keenly, the initiative is
in human hands. God's action has always waited on human action. The power
is only in the Holy Spirit. The most astute and strong leadership amounts
to nothing without Him flooding it with His presence. But the power needs
a channel. The Spirit needs men strongly pliant to His will. The great
world-plan waits, and always has waited, for willing men. And so our great
Friend asks us to follow because He really needs us in His plan.

Have you ever noticed the picture in the word "follow"? You remember that
the earliest language was picture language. And it is a great help
sometimes to dig down under a word and get the picture. Here, it is a man
standing on a roadway, earnestly beckoning, and pointing to the road he is
in. The Old Testament word means literally "same road." The very word the
Master Himself used means "in behind."

To-night this wondrous Lord Jesus stands just ahead. His face still shows
where the thorns cut and the thongs tore. But there is a marvellous
tenderness and pleading in those great patient eyes. His hand is reached
out beckoning, and you cannot miss the hole in the palm of it. The hand
points to the road He trod for us. And His voice calls pleadingly, "Take
this same road; get in behind. I need your help with My world."



Selling All.


And yet--and yet----. Do you remember one time our Lord turned to the
crowds that were following and told them it would be better to count up
the cost before deciding to be His disciples?[44] He feared if they didn't
there would be "mocking" by outsiders because His followers' lives didn't
square with their profession. His fear seems to have been well founded.
There seems to be quite a bit of that sort of mocking. It's better to
count the cost, to know what following really means. A Salvation Army
officer in Calcutta tells about a young handsome Hindu of an aristocratic
family. One day he came in, drew out a New Testament, and asked the
meaning of the words, "sell whatsoever thou hast," in the story of the
rich young ruler.[45] The Salvationist told him it meant that if a man's
possessions stood in the way of his becoming a Christian he must be
willing, if need be, to dispose of them for the needy. To his surprise the
young man quietly said, "I fear you don't understand."

"Do you want to be a Christian?"

"Yes, but I'm not willing to sell all that I possess."

After a little more talk the young Indian left. Sometime after he appeared
at one of the Salvation Army meetings, and when the opportunity was given
for those who would accept Christ to kneel at the altar, at once he
started forward. But instantly a storm broke out in the crowded meeting. A
group of men rushed forward, shouting angrily, seized the young man and
bore him bodily out while the crowd watched in terror. A few weeks later
the young man turned up again, asking to be taken in and quietly saying,
"I have begun to sell all."

Then his story came out. A Bible had come into his hands; the character
and call of the Lord Jesus made a great appeal to him. He was haunted by
the words, "sell whatsoever thou hast." He felt he knew what it meant for
him. His family heard of his interest in Christianity. They belonged to
the highest class, were wealthy and officially connected with the heathen
temple-worship. They did their best to dissuade him, then finding that
useless, they kept watch, and had him forcibly taken from the meeting
where he was about to openly confess Christ. The entreaties of his father
and mother shook him greatly but failed to change his decision. He had
been imprisoned, chained hand and foot, and scantily fed, but all to no
purpose. Then he managed to escape and came to the one Christian place he
knew, the Salvation Army, and asked to be taken in.

After about two weeks he disappeared as abruptly as he came. Then one day
he came back, and told his Salvation friend that he had been carried to
Benares, their holy city, and forced to bathe in the Ganges. "But," he
said, "as I stood in the water of the Ganges, I said, 'Lord Jesus, wash me
in Thy precious blood,' and when I was forced to bow to idols, I bowed my
soul to the eternal Father and said, 'Thou art God alone.'" His mother had
implored him on her knees not to disgrace them; his tutor, whom he loved
dearly, and his brothers had joined the father in their plea not to bring
such shame on the family. "Well," the Salvationist said, "now, you know
the meaning of 'sell whatsoever thou hast'" "Not yet," he said, "but I
have sold nearly all."

Again he came back and said quietly, "_I have sold all_." He appeared
deeply grief-stricken, and yet there was a light shining in his eye. In
answer to questions he said, "I have not only ceased to be a Brahmin, I
have ceased to be a human being. I am not only an outcast, I am dead. I
have neither father, mother, brothers, nor sisters. I have been burned in
effigy, and the ashes buried. It was not the effigy they burned; it was I.
My father would not recognize me now if he met me on the street, nor would
my mother. I am dead. I have been buried. It is the end. I have sold
all."[46] He had counted the cost. Then though it meant so much, he
followed. The rich young Jew to whom the words were first spoken, saw
_things_ bigger than Jesus; the rich young Hindu saw Jesus bigger. Each
held to what he prized most, and let the other go. Would it not be better
if we were to count the cost, and then _deliberately_ decide? and if it be
to follow, then follow _all the way?_ I want to talk a little later about
what it means to follow. I hope this will help us a little in our
calculations, in counting the cost before starting in to follow fully.

And yet, and yet, may the vision of the Lone Man in the road, beckoning,
flood our eyes while we count the cost, even as with the young Hindu.




What Following Means


1. A Look Ahead.
2. The Main Road.
3. The Valleys.
4. The Hilltops.




1. A Look Ahead



Saltless Salt.


The Lord Jesus never tried to make things look easier than they are. He
wanted you to see the road just as it is, and asked you to look at it
carefully. He knew this was the only right way to do. He knew that so the
sinews would be grown in character that would stand the tests coming, and
only so.

It was never His plan to increase the numbers by cutting down the
doorsills so men could get in more easily. That was a later arrangement.
He was never concerned for numbers, but for right and truth. A man walking
alone down the middle of the one true path was more to Him, immensely
more, than a great crowd wabbling along on the edge, half out, half in,
neither in nor out, and so really out but not knowing it. If they were
really out and knew it, it would be better, for they could see more
distinctly the path they were not in, its straightness and attractiveness.

This sort of thing grew more marked with our Lord Jesus as the end drew
on, the tragic end. The crowds thickened about Him those last months. They
liked good bread, and plenty of it, and healed bodies, pain gone. And He
liked to give them these. He helped just as far as they would let Him. But
He wanted to give them more. He knew this other was only temporary. He was
more concerned about healing the spirit of its disease, and giving the
more abundant life. And full well He knew that only the knife could help
many. And the knife had to be freshly sharpened, and used with strong
decisive hand, if healing and life were to come.

And men haven't changed, nor the diseases that hurt their life, nor the
Master, nor the tender love of His heart. But there's more than knife;
there's fulness of life following. He would have us get the life even
though it means the knife. Most times--every time, shall I say?--the life
comes only through the knife. Yet when the life has come, with its great
tireless strength, and its deep breathing, and sheer delight of living,
you are grateful for the knife that led the way to such life.

One day our Lord entered a vigorous protest against the wrong sort of
salt,[47] saltless salt, the sort that seemed to be salt, and you used it
and depended on it, and then found how unsalty it was, for the thing you
depended on it to preserve, had gone bad. The great need is for salty
salt. There still seems to be a great lot of this saltless salt in use.
It's labelled salt, and so it's used as salt, but it befools you. The
saltiness has been lost out, and the man using it wakes up to find out
how great is the loss, loss of what he thought he had salted, and loss of
time, character and time, the character of that salted with saltless salt,
and the time spent.

It would be an immense clearing of the religious situation to-day on both
sides of the Atlantic, if the saltless salt could be got rid of, either by
removing the unsaltiness in it--though that seems a hopeless task, it's so
unsalty, and there is so much of it, and such a large proportion of it,
and it's so well content with being just as unsalty as it is. _Or_, the
only other thing is put very simply and vigorously by the Lord in a short
intense sentence, "Cast it out." Out with it. And lots of it _is out_ so
far as preservative usefulness is concerned.

And yet with wondrous patience He puts up with a great deal of salt that
seems to have nearly reached the utterly saltless stage, hoping to get rid
of the unsaltiness, and then to give it a new saltiness. For, be it keenly
marked, when the saltiness has quite gone out of the salt, when the
preservative quality has quite gone out from that body of people which He
has placed in the world as its moral preservative,--then look out. Aye,
"look up,"[48] for that's the only direction from which any help can
relieve the desperateness of the situation. And "lift up your heads," for
then comes a new preservative to the rotting earth-life. But some of us
will smell the smell of the decay before the new salt begins to work.



The Thing in Us That Wants Things.


It was along toward that tragic end, when the tension was tightening up to
the snapping point, the bitter hatred of the leaders yet more bitter, the
crowds yet denser, the terms of discipleship yet more plainly put with
loving, faithful plainness, that a characteristic incident happened.[49] A
young man of gentle blood and breeding, and influential position, came
eagerly, courteously elbowing his way through the crowd that gathered
thick about. Our Lord had just risen from where He had been sitting
teaching, when this young man, in his eagerness, came running to Him. With
deep reverence of spirit he knelt down in the road, and began asking about
the true life, the secret of living it. Our Lord begins talking about
being true in all his dealings with his fellow-men. The young man
earnestly assured Him that he had paid great attention to this, and felt
that there was nothing lacking in him on this score. The utter sincerity
and earnestness of his spirit was so clear that the Master's love was
drawn out to him. And He showed His love in a way characteristic of Him in
dealing with those who want to go to the whole length of the true road.
That is, He talked very plainly to him. There were four things to do
beforehand, He said, four starting steps into this life he was so eager
to enter. Four words tell the four steps: "go," "sell," "give," and
"come."

"Go" meant the decisive starting in on this way; "sell" meant putting
everything into the Father's hand for His disposal as _He_ alone might
choose. "Give" meant using everything, everything you are, and have, and
can influence, as _He_ bids you. "Come" meant this new man, this decisive,
emptied, now trusted man, trusted as a trustee, coming into a new personal
relation with the Lord Jesus.

The first three things were important because they revealed the man. But
_the_ thing was that the man, this new-emptied and now God-trusted man,
should come into personal touch with the Lord Jesus. The things he had and
held on to came in between. When they no longer came in to separate, then,
and only then, was he ready to get "in behind" and "follow" along the
"same road." For this is the friendship road. Only friends are allowed
here, inner friends, those who come in by that gateway. There must be the
personal touch. Things that stand in the way of that must be straightened
out.

It was rather a startling answer. The young man was startled tremendously.
The way to come in is first to go out. The way to get is first to give.
The way to buy what you want is to sell what you have. That is to say, the
way for this young man to get what he was so eager for was to get rid of
what he already had. And yet it wasn't getting rid of the things the
Master was thinking about, but getting rid of the thing in him that
wanted the things, getting rid of their hold upon him. Our Lord Jesus
wanted, and wants, free men, emptied men. He wants the strength in the man
that the emptying and selling process gives. This is the laboratory where
the unsaltiness is being burned out, and the new salty saltiness being
generated, put in.

This young fellow couldn't stand the test. So many can't. No, I'm getting
the words wrong. He wouldn't stand it; so many won't. The slavery of
_things_ was too much. The thing in him that wanted the things was
stronger than the thing that wanted the true life. He was too weak to make
that "go" decision. He belonged to the weakly fellowship of the saltless
ones. They are not wholly saltless, but that's the chief thing that marks
them. It's a long-lived fellowship, continuing to this day, with a large
membership in good and regular standing.

I think the real trouble with this fine-grained lovable young man was in
his eyes, the way they looked, what they saw. It was a matter of seeing
things in true perspective. He didn't get a good look at the Man he asked
his question of. He was looking so intently at the _things_ that he
couldn't get the use of his eyes for a good look at the Man. This is a
very common eye-trouble. He was all right outward, toward his fellows, but
he wasn't all right upward toward the Father.

And yet even that statement must be changed. For a man cannot be right
with his fellows who is not right with God. When God doesn't have the
passion of the heart, our fellows don't have all they should properly have
from us; there is a lack. The common law may be kept, the pounds and yards
may weigh and measure off fully what is due them from us, but the uncommon
law, the love-law is not being kept. The warm spirit that should breathe
out through all our dealings is lacking. It's been checked by the check in
the upper movement. Only the spirit that flows freely up, ever flows
freely out.

That young Indian aristocrat we spoke of elsewhere got a sight of _Jesus_.
That settled _things_ for him, including even such sacred things as human
loves. This young Jewish aristocrat couldn't get his eyes off of the
things. So many "thing"-slaves there are, so much "thing"-slavery. If only
there were the sight of _His_ face! His _face_; torn? yes; scarred? yes
again, but oh, the strength and light and love in it!

Do you remember that other young Jewish, university-trained aristocrat? He
got a look, one good long look-in-the-face look of _that face_, one day,
on the road up to the northern Syrian capital. The light of it flooded his
face, and strangely affected him. He said "when I could not _see_ for the
glory of that light."[50] He couldn't see things for Him. The sight of Him
blurred out the things. The great need to-day is for a sight of _Him_.
Lord Jesus, if Thou wouldst show us Thy "hands and feet" again, and torn
face, even as in the upper room that resurrection evening,[51] for that's
what we are needing. And yet, Thou art doing just that, but the things so
hold our vision! And the Master's answer is the same as to the young Jew.
We need the decisive "go"; the incisive, inclusive "sell"; the privileged
"give"; the new-meaninged "come" into His presence. And then we may get
"in behind" Him, and follow close up in the "same road," with eyes for
naught but Himself.



Outstanding Experiences.


I want to follow the Master's plan, and ask you to take a good look at His
"Follow Me" road. You remember that we have had one talk together about
the characteristics of our Lord Jesus' life. Now we want to talk a little
about _the experiences_ of His life. And I do not mean that we are to try
to imitate these experiences, or any of them. The meaning goes much deeper
than this, and yet it marks out a simpler road for our feet. I mean that
as we actually go along with this Master of ours, these experiences will
work out in our lives.

As we let Him in as actual Lord, and get our ears trained for His quiet
voice, there will come to us some of the same things that come to Him.

The same Spirit at work within us, and the same sort of a world at work
without, will so work against each other as to produce certain other
results, now as then. It is not to be an attempt at imitation; it's far
more. It is to be _obedience_ on our part, a real Presence within on His
part, and a bitter antagonism without on the world's part; rhythmic full
glad obedience, a sympathetic powerful real Presence, a tense and
intensifying subtle, relentless, but continually-being-thwarted
opposition. The key-note for us is simple, full obedience.

There were certain great outstanding experiences in our Lord Jesus' life.
Let us briefly notice what these were and group them together. There was
_the Bethlehem Birth_. That was a thing altogether distinctive in itself.
It was a supernatural birth, the Spirit of God working along purely human
lines, in a new special way, for a special purpose. It was a rare blending
of God and man in the action of life. It was followed by _the Nazareth
Life_; that was a commonplace life, lived in a commonplace village, but
hallowed by the presence of the Father, and sweetened by the salt of
everything being done under that Father's loving eye. The Father's
presence accepted as a real thing became the fragrance of that commonplace
daily life. And this life covered most of those human years.

Then our Lord turned from the hidden life of Nazareth to the public
ministry. At its beginning stands _the Jordan Baptism of Power_. In the
path of simple obedience He had gone to the Jordan, taken a place among
the crowds, and accepted John's baptism. And in this act of obedience,
there comes the gracious act of His Father's approval, the Holy Spirit
came down upon Him in gracious, almighty power. And from this moment He
was under the sway of the Spirit of Power. This was the special
preparation and fitting for all that was to follow.

At once the Spirit driveth Him into the Wilderness. And for forty days He
goes through the great experience of _the Wilderness Temptation_. In
intensity and in prolonged action, it was the greatest experience thus far
in His life. He suffered, being tempted. It was a concentration of the
continuous temptation of the following years of action. But the Wilderness
spelled out two words, temptation _and_ victory; temptation such as had
never yet been brought, and met, and fought; victory beyond what the race
had known. Temptation came to have a new spelling for man, v-i-c-t-o-r-y.
It came to have a new spelling for the tempter, d-e-f-e-a-t.

After His virtual rejection by the nation as its Messiah,[52] and the
imprisonment of him who stood nearest Him as Messiah,--John the Herald,
there followed _the Galilean Ministry_. For those brief years He was
utterly absorbed in personally meeting and ministering to the crying needs
of the crowds. Compassion for needy men became the ruling under-passion.
He was spent out in responding to the needs of men. It was not restricted
to Galilee, but that stands out as the chief scene of this tireless
unceasing service. The Galilean ministry meant a life spent in meeting
personally the needs of men.

In the midst of that, made increasingly difficult by the ever-increasing
opposition, there came the experience of _the Transfiguration Mount_. It
comes at a decisive turning point, where He is beginning the higher
training of the Twelve for the tragic ending, so surprising and wholly
unexpected to them. For a brief moment the dazzling light within was
allowed to shine through the garments of His humanity. What was within
transfigured the outer, the human face and form. And the overwhelming
outshining light was evidence to those three men of the divine glory, the
more-than-human glory hidden away within this human man.

Then within a week of the end came _the Gethsemane Agony._ That was the
lone, sore stress of spirit under the load of the sin of others. In
Gethsemane He went through in spirit what on the morrow He went through in
actual experience. Gethsemane was the beginning, the anticipation of
Calvary, so far as that could be anticipated. Anticipation here was
terrific; yet less terrific than the actual experience.

And then came the climax, the overtopping experience of all for Him, as
for us, _the Calvary Cross._ There He died of His own free will. He died
for us. He died that we might not die. He took upon Himself what sin
brings to us, while the Father's face was hidden. So He freed us from the
slavery of sin, made a way for us back to real life, and so touched our
hearts by His love that we were willing to go back.

And close upon the heels of that came _the burial in Joseph's tomb_. The
burial was the completion of the death. The tomb was the climax of the
cross. He was actually dead and buried. The corn of wheat had fallen down
into the ground and been covered up. There was nothing lacking to make
full and clear that Jesus had died.

Then came the stupendous experience of _the Resurrection Morning_. Our
Lord Jesus yielded to death fully and wholly. Then He seized death by the
throat and strangled it. He put death to death. Then He quietly yielded to
the upward gravity of His sinless life and rose up. He lived the dependent
life even so far as yielding to death, and now the Father quietly brought
Him back again to life, to a new life.

And after waiting a while on earth among men, long enough to make it quite
clear to His disciples that it was really Himself really back again, He
quietly yielded further to the upward gravity, and entered upon _the
Ascension Life_, up in the Father's presence. That life is one of
intercession. He ever liveth to make intercession for us.[53] He is our
pleading advocate at the Father's right hand.[54] Thirty years of the
Nazareth life, three and a half years of personal service, nineteen
hundred years, almost, of praying. What an acted-out lesson to us on
prayer, the big place it had and has with Him, the true proportion of
prayer to all else!

These are the experiences of our Lord Jesus that stand out clear above
the mountain range of His life. It was all a high mountain range; these
are the great peaks jutting sharply up above the range.



At the Loom.


Now these peaks, these outstanding experiences, as you look at them a bit,
seem to fall naturally into three groups. There were certain experiences
of power and of privilege, the Bethlehem Birth, the Jordan Baptism, the
Nazareth Life, and the Galilean Ministry.

There were experiences of suffering and sacrifice, the Wilderness
Temptation, the Gethsemane Agony, the Calvary Death, and the Joseph's Tomb
of Burial.

And then there were certain experiences of gladness and great glory, the
Transfiguration Mount, the Resurrection Morning, the Ascension Life, and,
we shall find a fourth here also, a future experience, the Kingdom Reign
and Glory.

These outstanding events, while distinct in themselves, are also
representative of continual experiences. The Jordan Baptism stands not
only for that event, but for the power throughout those forty and two
months. The same sort of suffering that came in Gethsemane had run all
through His life, but is strongest in Gethsemane. So each of these
experiences is really like a peak resting upon the mountain range of
constant similar experience. And these three groups of experience
continuously intermingled, interlaced and interwoven, made up the pattern
of that wondrous life.

Now these same experiences of His are also the great experiences that will
characterize the "Follow Me" life, for every one who will follow fully. It
will always remain true that these experiences were distinctive of Him.
They meant more to Him than they will or can mean to any other. But it is
also true that they will come to us in a degree that will mean everything
to us.

I want to change the figure of speech here. I think it will help. This
invitation, "Follow Me," is the language of a road, the picture of one
walking behind another in a road. And that will remain in our minds as the
chief picture of this pleading call. But there's another bit of picture
talking that will help. That is the picture of a weaver's loom, with the
warp threads running lengthwise, the shuttle threads running crosswise,
and the cross beam (or batten) driving each shuttle thread into place in
the cloth with a sharp blow.

These three groups of experiences are like so many hanks of threads in
the loom, in which the pattern of life is being woven. The experiences of
power and privilege are the warp threads running lengthwise of the loom,
into which the others are woven. These make up the foundation of the
fabric.

The other two groups make up the shuttle threads, running crosswise, being
woven into the warp. The experiences of suffering and sacrifice are the
dark threads, the gray threads, sometimes quite black, and the red
threads, blood red. The experiences of gladness and glory are the bright
threads, yellow, golden, sunny threads.

And the daily round of life, the decisions, the actual step after step in
living out the decisions, the patient steady pushing on, is the beam that
with sharp blow pushes each thread into its place in the fabric being
woven.

As we allow the same Spirit that swayed our Lord's life to control us, He
will work out in us certain of these same experiences. And the enmity
aroused, and working against that Spirit's presence and control, will
bring certain other experiences. Our part will be simple obedience,
listening, looking, studying quietness so as to insure keener ears and
eyes--it's the quiet spirit that hears what He is saying--then obeying,
using all the strength of will, and all the grace at our disposal, simply
to hold steady and true, and to obey, no matter what threatens to come, or
what actually does come. This will be found to be like weaving.

Probably you have often heard of how the weavers work in the famous
Gobelin tapestry factories in Paris. They know nothing of the beauty of
the pattern being woven. They work on the "wrong" side, the under side of
the web. They miss the inspiration of seeing the rare beauty they
themselves are making. All the weaver sees is the apparent tangle of many
coloured threads and thread ends, while he thrusts in his needles
according to the card of instructions. The more faithfully and skilfully
he can follow the directions the better a piece of weaving work is done.

We simply obey. We use all the strength we have, and the skill we can
acquire, in obeying. We are not to depend on what we can see or feel for
inspiration, only on the Master Looms-man; on His word, written, and
spoken in our hearts, and on His answering peace within. Obedience is the
one key-note for all the music. Surrender is the first act of full
obedience. Obedience is the habitual surrender. Our part is to hear right
and do what He bids.

Some day we shall be fairly swept off our feet by the beauty of the
pattern He has been weaving--_if_ we've let Him have His way at the loom.




2. The Main Road--Experiences of Power And Privilege



The Bethlehem Birth.


There were four of these experiences in our Lord's life. At the very
beginning came _the Bethlehem Birth_. That meant for Him a birth out of
the usual course of nature, yet working within nature's usual processes.
It was something more-than-the-natural coming down into the natural. The
power of the Holy Spirit came upon the pure gentle maiden of Nazareth and
a new human life was begotten by Him within her, and in due course came to
the maturity of birth. This was a distinctive thing with Jesus.

Now, in quite a different sense, but in a very real sense, there will be
for us, too, a Bethlehem Birth. The Holy Spirit will come in and begin a
new life within us. This is the only beginning of the "Follow Me" life for
any of us. There's a something on the Spirit's part before there can be a
beginning on my part. Yet that hardly tells the whole story. My part is
really first; I open the door for Him to come in. When I accept Jesus as
my Saviour, that's opening the door. The Spirit comes in and begins the
new life within me. And yet there's another first before that first act of
mine. He woos me with His patient, tender love. That is the first first.
Then I open the door: at once He comes in, and does the thing which only
He can do. So begins the "Follow Me" life. This is the real, the only
beginning.

And yet there's more here of the practical sort than we have thought of,
most of us. It means that there is within us a life higher than the
natural life, and this higher life is to _be_ higher, it is to be the
_controlling_ life. It is to hold the upper hand over the natural life.
The control is to be from above. That is to say, the motives and desires
of the upper life are to be dominant in my daily round. It is the
Father-pleasing life as contrasted with the natural life, of which we
talked a while ago. Wherever the two come in conflict, the upper is to
rule.

Now, I know this rather runs across the grain of a good deal of our
so-called Christian life. There are a good many people who, let us really
believe, have been "born again," to use the familiar phrase, yet they seem
to have stayed in the being-born stage, the infancy stage. That which was
"born again" in them seems not to have been developed. It has never been
allowed to grow. The under life has been given the upper hand, and the
upper life kept strictly down. The salt isn't salty. The common round of
life is seasoned wholly by the old seasoning.

Our Lord's "Follow Me" becomes a radical, decisive thing at the very
start. It means that we will allow this new life of the Spirit to grow
into lusty vigour, and to become the controlling life So it will be the
chief thing. All the life shall be directed and controlled _from above._
This is a result that will come of itself if we really follow. Obedience,
and back of that the quiet time on the knees with the Book, will give food
and air and growing space to this new life, and its growth will crowd down
the other.



The Jordan Baptism of Power.


Then there was a _Jordan Baptism of Power_ in our Lord's life. This stood
at the beginning of His leadership, His life-work, His service among men.
As He came up out of the Jordan waters He stood waiting in prayer. He was
expecting something. His whole being was absorbed in the expectancy of
what had been promised.[55] And that expectancy was not disappointed. None
that wait on God shall be put to confusion by any disappointment.[56] The
blue above was rift through, the Holy Spirit as a gentle dove came, and
remained upon Him, and the Father's voice of pleased approval spoke to His
grateful, obedient heart. From that time the whole control of His life was
absolutely in the hands of the Holy Spirit.

This does not mean an inert passivity on Jesus' part; it meant a strong,
intelligent yielding to the Holy Spirit. It does not mean that His natural
faculties of mind and will and heart were held down, not to be used. It
means that they were actively, studiously used in discerning the Holy
Spirit's leading, and in doing as He directed. And it means that so there
came a fulness of life, an increasing life, into His faculties, mind and
will and heart. Our Lord Jesus used all His powers in yielding to the
inspiration and direction and control of the Holy Spirit, keeping ever
open to His suggestion, and making that suggestion the law of His own
action.

And the Spirit of Omnipotence, working with the gentleness of a dove,
breathed upon those yielded powers, and breathed through them, even as had
been planned with the first breathing of this sort, in Eden. So from the
Wilderness clear up to the last Olivet command to the disciples,
everything was done at the bidding, the direction of this Spirit. And so
the almighty power was breathed into every word and action and bit of
suffering. The one key-note of the Master's action was obedience; the
result was the flooding of the Spirit's omnipotence through His obedient
faculties and life.

Now, _as we follow_, this same sort of experience will be ours. What a
tremendous thing to say! Yet the road was being beaten down for _our
feet_. The Son of Man was simply showing to His brother-men the road we
were all meant to go, showing it by going in it. All the power that came
into Jesus' life will come into ours, _if_ He is given His way. For the
Holy Spirit is not measured out, either to Him or to us,[57] but poured
out without stint.[58] As we follow we shall be led along behind the Man
going before.

There will need to be instruction, for we're so new to this road. And
human teachers are sent by the Holy Spirit to help us understand, teachers
in print, and teachers in shoes. There will need to be the initial act of
full surrender to the Lord Jesus as Lord indeed, for most of us have been
going another way than this. There will need to be a house-cleaning time,
for we have let in so much of another sort.

A soft, but very honest, searching light will come flooding in through the
sky-light windows. And as we instinctively go to our knees and faces
because of what that light brings to light, there will be a wondrous
cleansing, both by blood and by fire. Then will come a filling of our very
being by this wondrous Spirit of God.

How shall we know this filling, do you ask? There will be a quiet, deep
peace, at times a great joy that sings, but ever the deep peace that
_holds_ you, a new hunger for the old Book, and a new soft light on its
pages. There will be an inner drawing to talk with God, and an intense
desire to please Him, to find out what He wants you to do, and then to do
it.

There will come other things too, of a less pleasant sort, temptation
will come anew, and a sense--sometimes very acute--of sin, a feeling that
there's a something within you fighting you, the new you. There will be an
increased sensitiveness to sin, and an intense hatred of it. This is what
the filling means. These things will tell you that He, the Spirit, has
taken possession of what you surrendered, and that He is now at work
within. These are His finger-prints.

Then there will be the outflowing side of this filling. A passion that all
men may know this compassionate God, will come as a fire burning in your
bones. Its flames will envelop and go through everything you are and have
and can do. But under all will be the passion for pleasing the Lord Jesus.
Obedience will become the chief thing, holding everything else in check,
obedience to Him, pleasing Him, doing His will.

The Bethlehem Birth is the _beginning_ of a new, a supernatural life
within; _this_ will be the actual life itself, in full vigour and power.
That is the supernatural birth, this the supernatural life. That is, there
is at work within you, very quietly and simply, a power more than the
natural, working through the natural order, and sometimes upsetting what
we may have grown to think of as the natural order. This is the Jordan
Baptism of Power, the Holy Spirit taking charge, and you living a
Spirit-controlled life. There's a new sign hung out over your life, "this
life is being conducted under new management." You won't say it; it won't
be shouted out. It'll be louder yet. Your _life_ will be telling it
continually.



Power Is in the Current.


The word to emphasize here is _control_. You will find new meanings, that
you had not thought of, gradually working out of it. If the Holy Spirit
had control of us as He had of--Philip, for instance. He picked Philip up
out of the midst of the Samaritan crowd, where he was the human centre of
things, and put him down away off here in the desert,--_strange
contrast!_--and with one lone traveller, greater contrast yet![59] If He
were free to pick you and me up like that, out of these surroundings,
congenial and pleasant, and set us down where we had no thought of going,
and never would have gone of our own choice, and we sing as we are picked
up, _and_ keep on singing where we find ourselves amidst the uncongenial
perhaps, the strange, the unprecedented and hard,--_if_ He were free to
control like that these days, there would be a present-day Pentecost
beside which the Acts-Pentecost was but the beginnings of the throbbings
of power.

There are some peculiarities of this "Follow Me" road here. There comes a
strangely new sense of proportion. As you follow close up behind the Man
ahead, you will grow _smaller_, and He will grow _larger_. No, that's not
an accurate statement; you won't _grow_ any smaller, you will only find
out how small you are. He won't grow any larger, you will simply be
finding out, and then finding out more, how large He is. It'll seem
strange to most of us, finding out our real size, or lack of the size we
always supposed we were. But it will come with a great awing,
heart-subduing sense, to find how marvellous in size this great Man is;
and yet He is our brother, as well as so immensely more.

You come to find out that power, that thing that used to be so much talked
about, and defined, and yet chiefly wondered about, that power is a matter
of position. The man close in behind the Lord Jesus doesn't need to be
concerned about power. In fact he isn't concerned about it, only concerned
with keeping close in touch. All the rest comes without our being
concerned. It comes from him, the Man ahead. There is far more power, the
very power of God, softly flowing and flooding its way in and through and
out, than you are ever conscious of. Others will know more of the power
than you. You are thinking about the Man ahead, keeping in touch, pleasing
Him. Obedience has become a new word to you. It's the music of keeping
step, keeping step with Him.

Have you noticed how much the current of the stream will do for you if you
are out in a row-boat? All you need to do is to keep up enough motion to
hold the boat within the sweep of the current. Then your chief task is
_steering_. You're not concerned about power; only about the steering.
There's more power in the current than you can ever use. Your one concern
is to keep out of the shallows and sucking side-eddies, away from snag and
rock, and _in the current._ The power's in the current. Right steering
brings all that power to bear on your little boat.

Now, power here is a matter of steering, so far as our part is concerned.
We steer to get into the current of our Lord Jesus' will, and, by His
grace, we use all our will power in _keeping_ in that current, and out of
the shallows and suction-eddies at the side. The Lord Jesus, once spit
upon and crucified, now seated "far above all rule, and authority, and
power, and dominion, and every name that is named," and _at work on earth
through His Holy Spirit_,--this Lord Jesus, _free to do as He
chooses_,--this is power. _He_ is power.

Power is the Lord Jesus in action, and the action is always through some
man's life. We steer so as to keep in touch. He acts through the man in
touch. And the hungry, needy crowds know a something coming to them, with
irresistible grateful sweep.



Living a Nazareth Life.


There was a third experience in this group. Our Lord Jesus lived _the
Nazareth Life_. In actual order of time this came before the baptism of
power. I have changed the order here, and named it third simply for the
practical help in the change. With the Lord Jesus, the whole of the life
was under the sway of the Holy Spirit from birth on, through the earliest
conscious years, and all the years. With us, in actual experience, we are
all free to confess that it has not been so from our Spirit-birth on.

That baptism of power at Jordan was without doubt a baptism of power for
leadership and service. Service and leadership ever need the time of
special waiting on God, and the fresh anointing by the Holy Spirit's
touch, the fresh consciousness of Himself, as the only source of power in
the service and leadership.

In our actual experience the Holy Spirit, coming in power, has had much to
do in changing our habits, ourselves, and our lives, as well as in our
service. There has been so much service that has not been backed up by the
life, that many have come to feel, and to feel very deeply, that the power
in service must have its roots in the human side, deep down in the daily
habit of life. With our Lord Jesus that Jordan experience made no
difference of this sort in His life. There was nothing needing to be
changed. That Nazareth life had been lived continuously under the control
of the Holy Spirit.

Look a moment at that Nazareth life of His. It means simply a commonplace,
treadmill round of life lived under the hallowing touch of the Father's
presence. This was according to the original plan. It is God's presence
recognized that hallows what is common. It is the absence of His presence,
that is, the leaving of Him out, that makes common things common; that is,
it makes the familiar thing and round _seem_ and _feel_ common. It's the
unhallowed and unhallowing touch of the selfish, of sin, that makes things
seem common, in the sense of not being holy and sweet and pure and
refreshing. Sin makes things grow stale to you. Selfishness affects your
eye, the way things look to you. God's presence recognized keeps things
fresh. His touch upon us, ever afresh, makes us fresh. Everything we touch
and see is touched by a God-freshened hand, and seen through a
God-freshened eye.

Now Jesus lived this commonplace round of life, and lived it under the
ever-freshening touch of His Father's presence. It isn't the thing you do,
nor the things that surround you, that make your life, but the spirit that
breathes out of you in the midst of the things. It's the _you_ in you that
makes the life, regardless of surroundings. The outer things are the
accidents, you, the spirit that breathes out of you,--this is the real
thing.

Jesus _lived_ it. That is the tremendous fact that Nazareth stands for.
He lived what He taught, and He lived it first, and He lived it far more
deeply and really than it could be taught to others. This was the basis of
those few service years. Nazareth lies under the Galilean ministry. There
were thirty years under the three-and-a-half-years. And the thirty years
crop up into and out of the three-and-a-half. The life lived was the great
fact at work, as the Man went about doing good. The hidden life of
Nazareth lies open in the Galilean ministry.

When you are reading the wonderful works among the needy throngs, you are
reading the biography of the Nazareth years, in their outer reach. The
life you live is the thing that tells! This is the meaning of the thirty
hidden years. The Father said, "My Son shall spend most of His years down
there _living_, just living a true, simple Eden life; living with Me in
the midst of home and carpenter shop and village." This is what the world
needs so much to be taught, how to live. And the teaching must be by
living, teaching by action. The message must be lived.

If we men might live Jesus! That's what the world needs. At one of the
smaller meetings of the Edinburgh Conference, in 1910, a Christian
gentleman from India, native of that land, said, "We don't need more
Bibles in India." And then to this surprising statement, he added, "We
have enough Bibles. If the Christians in India would _live the Bible_,
India would be converted." And I thought, that will do for America, and
England, and for all the world. _Jesus lived it_. As a man in His
decisions and actions, His habits and daily round, He lived the truth.

The story is told of a missionary in some part of Africa who had not had
much success in his work. He was in the habit of explaining some portion
of the New Testament to the people at His house. One day the portion
contained the words, "give to him that asketh thee, and from him that
would borrow of thee turn thou not away."[60] The people asked him if this
meant what it said. He told them that it did. One of them said he would
like to have the table, pointing to it; another asked for a chair, another
for the bed, and so on. The missionary was rather startled at such literal
taking of his teaching. He told them to come again on the morrow, and he
would give his answer.

When they had gone, he and his wife had rather a heart-searching time
together. They felt they had not reached the hearts of the people yet. But
to do as they asked meant real sacrifice of a very personal sort. At last
with much prayer they decided to meet the people where they had opened the
way. And so the next day they gave their answer, and soon the house was
literally bare of all its furnishings. And that night they slept on the
floor, yet with a sweet peace in their hearts in the midst of this strange
experience.

The next day the people came back, carrying the furniture. They had
really been testing these new-comers. "Now," they said, "we believe you.
You _live_ your Book. We want you to teach us." And with open hearts they
listened anew to the Gospel story, and many of them accepted Christ.

The little incident reveals the unity of the race. Those Africans said
what England and America and all the world is saying, "_Live it_." Is your
religion _livable_? What the world needs to-day is _a Jesus lived_, not
simply taught, nor preached about, but lived in the power of the Holy
Spirit. How the fire, the holy fire, of that sort of thing would catch and
spread! Oh, yes, it might mean sleeping on the bare floor! That's what
living-it means, the actual life overriding any mere thing that stands in
the way.



Live It.


I stood one day on the abrupt edge of a little hill in a Southern Japanese
city. There, in a great tree hanging out over the edge, had hung the bell
that called together the faithful retainers of the lord of the province,
when they were needed. There, nearly thirty years ago, a little band of
Japanese youth, of noble families, had gone out at break of day one
Sabbath morning, and solemnly covenanted to follow the Lord Jesus, and to
devote their lives to making Him known throughout their land. Boys still
in their tender teens most of them were. And that covenant was not
lightly made, for already the fires of persecution had been kindled, and
these fires burned fiercely but could not compete with the fire in their
hearts. And as one goes up and down the island empire of the Pacific
to-day, he can find traces of their lives cropping up everywhere, like
gold veins above the soil.

And as I sought to trace the hidden springs of the power at work behind
all this, I found it was in the _life_ of one young man, a simple, holy
life burning with a passion for Jesus. In this life could be found the
kindling of the tender flames burning so hotly in these young hearts. He
was a young American officer engaged, by the feudal lord of the province,
to teach military tactics and English. He dared not teach Christianity;
that would have meant instant dismissal. So for two years he _lived_ the
message, so simply and lovingly that he won the love of his pupils. Then
they came Sundays to his house to hear him read the English Bible, because
they loved him. As he prayed the tears would run down his face, and they
laughed to think a _man_ would weep, but they came because they loved him.
He really _loved them into the Christian life_. I was reminded of the line
in Hezekiah's song of thanksgiving after his illness, "Thou hast loved my
soul up from the pit."[61] This young teacher _lived his pupils to the
Lord Jesus_. The latter part of his life was a sad one, but nothing can
change the record of those earlier years.

I saw recently a news item telling how many million copies of the Bible
are being printed every year. The item slurringly remarked that the
statisticians didn't seem concerned yet with figuring up how many of them
were read. But, I thought, what these Bibles need is a new binding. This
Bible I carry is bound in the best sealskin, with kid-lining. It is
supposed to be the best binding for hard wear. But there's a much better
sort of leather than that for Bible binding; I mean _shoe leather_. The
people want the Bible bound in shoe leather. When we tread this Bible out
in our daily walk, when what we are becomes an illustrated copy of the
Bible, the greatest revival the earth has known will come. With utmost
reverence let me say that our Lord Jesus wants to come and walk around in
our shoes, and live inside our garments, and touch men through us.

I remember something in my early Christian life that was a sore temptation
to me. There were some Christian leaders who had helped me greatly by
their preaching and writings. Then it chanced that I was thrown into
personal contact with them, now one, now another. And I had a sore
disappointment. It's hard to find that your idol has clay feet. It's
doubtless wrong to have idols. Yet youth is the time of such idol worship.
The disappointment was a very sore one. Then out of it I was led to see
that the Master never disappoints. And there was a drawing nearer to
Himself alone.

And then a questioning arose: was some one perhaps looking at me? And a
burning desire came to be more in life than in speech, not only for the
sake of some one, perchance looking; but for the sake of that other One,
the Man with eyes of flame, His looking. I need hardly tell you that it
has been my blessed privilege to have had personal contact with leaders
whose fragrant lives are so much more than word or act.

The Nazareth life means that the Lord Jesus lived His message, amid
commonplace surroundings, in the midst of what is called the dull monotony
of the daily round. That is, in the place where it is hardest to do it, He
lived every bit of what He taught. And as we follow, simply, obediently,
the Spirit will lead us along this same road. The same experience will
happen to us. Could there be a greater evidence of the power of this Holy
Spirit than to do such a thing with such as we know ourselves to be? Yet
He will, _if_ we let Him. A big "if" you say? But not too big to be taken
out of the way, out of His way. He will live out through us what He puts
into us, by and with our constant consent.

This is the meaning of the Nazareth life. Our part is obedience, simple,
intelligent, strong obedience to Him. The result will be this same
experience, a Nazareth life of purity and power lived by the Spirit's
power.

This was the thought in the mind of Horatius Bonar, as he wrote of the
unnamed woman who anointed our Lord's head, and of whom Jesus said that
what she had done should be told as a memorial of her, wherever the Gospel
should be preached.

    "Up and away like dew in the morning,
      Soaring from earth to its home in the sun,
    So let me steal away, gently and lovingly,
      Only remembered by what I have done.

    My name and my place and my tomb all forgotten,
      The brief race of time well and patiently run,
    So let me pass away peacefully, silently,
      Only remembered by what I have done.

    Gladly away from this toil would I hasten,
      Up to the crown that for me has been won,
    Unthought of by man in reward and in praises,
      Only remembered by what I have done.

    Up and away like the odours of sunset
      That sweeten the twilight as darkness comes on,
    So be my life--a thing _felt_ but not noticed,
      And I but remembered by what I have done.

    Yes, like the fragrance that wanders in freshness,
      When the flowers that it comes from are closed up and gone,
    So would I be to this world's weary dwellers,
      Only remembered by what I have done.

    I need not be missed if my life has been bearing,
      As the summer and autumn move silently on,
    The bloom and the fruit and the seed of its season;
      I still am remembered by what I have done.

    I need not be missed if another succeed me,
        To reap down these fields that in spring
          I have sown;
    He who ploughed and who sowed is not missed by the reaper;
    He is only remembered by what he has done.

    Not myself but the truth that in life I have spoken,
        Not myself but the seed in life I have sown,
    Shall pass on to ages--all about _me_ forgotten,
        Save the truth I have spoken, the things
          I have done.

    So let my living be, so be my dying,
        So let my name be emblazoned, unknown,--
    Unraised and unmissed I shall still be remembered,
        Yes,--but remembered by what I have done."



The Galilean Ministry.


The fourth experience in this group was _the Galilean Ministry_. Our Lord
Jesus gave Himself up to helping those in need. He devoted Himself to
personal service among men. After John's imprisonment He withdrew to
Galilee and ministered to the needy.

There were crowds of them. They were in sorest need of body and spirit.
And He gave Himself freely out to them in glad helpful service. He met
their need. He did whatever their condition called for. He ministered to
their bodily needs. He mingled among them freely as an older brother or
friend, holding their children on His knees while He talked with them over
their concerns and troubles. But He didn't stop there. Having won their
hearts, He met their deeper needs. He comforted their hearts, talked to
them one by one, drawing out their hearts, and speaking of the Father.

And as the crowds thickened, He taught and preached to the multitudes. He
was a preacher, proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom. He was a teacher,
bit by bit, line upon line, patiently teaching and explaining to them
about the Father's love, and about the true life and how to live it. Three
words are used several times to characterize that Galilean ministry,
teaching and preaching and healing.[62]

He warned against sin, patiently wooing erring men and women away from
their sin into lives of purity, and strengthening the young and earnest in
their purposes. The need of the crowd swept Him like a strong wind in the
young trees. He couldn't resist their plea. The presence of a man in need,
of either body or spirit, took hold of His heart. Over and over we are
told that He was "moved with compassion." What a life it was! What a heart
He had!

Now our Lord Jesus calls us along this bit of the road. That is to say,
the Holy Spirit within us will make our hearts tender and compassionate,
even as our Lord Jesus was. The crowds always moved Him tremendously. He
couldn't stand the great dumb cry that the mere presence of a multitude
rang in His ears. The mere presence of some one in need, earnestly
seeking, played upon the strings of His heart.

Does the crowd get hold of your heart as you elbow your way through them,
or look down into their faces? Is it just a crowd to you? Or is it a great
company of hungry hearts, half-starved lives, so needy for what only this
Lord Jesus can give? The dumb cry of the crowds, in crowds and one by one,
comes up in our ears to-day. Do you hear it? I say "dumb," for they don't
know themselves what it is they need. They feel the need. Restless and
chafing, they feel without knowing just what it is they lack and need.

When the Spirit that swayed the Lord Jesus comes in, He mightily affects
your heart. You feel with something of our Lord's feeling. And you _must_
help. You know that the one thing, the only thing, that can really
radically meet their need is this Saviour Jesus. You must do something to
get them really to know Him. And that something comes to be everything.
Service isn't a pastime; it's a passion. That "must" sends you out on glad
unheralded errands to help in any way you can, and in every way by which
the Jesus message can get to them.

The "must" of His tender passion within keeps you steadily pushing ahead,
regardless of not being understood by some, nor your efforts appreciated
by others. The flame of that "must" takes hold of time and strength and
possessions. It becomes the delight of your life to minister to the needs
of men, even as He did. You see them through His eyes. You feel their need
through His heart. _And_--this is a great _and_--if you really follow as
simply and fully as He leads, you will find _the same power_ working out
through your effort as through His, though there will be immensely more of
it than you will know about.

But--there's a "but" that needs to be put in here--the key-note will not
be service, but _obedience_. The need will not be the controlling thing.
It will move you tremendously; it will kindle a sweet fever in your heart,
a fever to help; it will take hold of your heart strings and play upon
them until you almost lose control. But it must not be allowed to control.
That belongs to Him alone.

The key-note is not need, nor service to meet the need, but obedience.
There is a Lord to the harvest. His plans are worked carefully out. He
takes Philip away from the crowded meetings in Samaria to talk with one
man. It was doubtless a strategic move to touch lives in Africa, as well
as to meet this one man's need. He feels the need more than you ever do or
can. His ears are keener, His heart more tender. He is in command. You do
as He bids. So you help most in meeting the need.

He Himself when down here left the crowds, when they were so great that
the towns were overwhelmed and they had to be taken out to the country
places. He would leave these crowds and go off quietly to get alone with
His Father.[63] All that tireless ministry was under the direction of
Another. He went off for close touch, and fresh consultation with His
Father.



The Father's Image in the Common Crowd.


Have you ever wondered what there was in those common crowds to attract
our Lord Jesus? Perhaps if you have ever walked in those narrow crowded
alleys called streets, in China or Japan, you may have wondered,
sometimes. Tired, dirty, pinched faces, eyes vacantly staring, or else
fired with low passion, high-keyed voices bickering and jangling,--all
this crowds in and out on every hand. Dirt, disease, low passion,
selfishness, apparent absence of anything noble or refined, are all
tangled inextricably up with these in human form.

And our Lord Jesus lived in an Oriental world. Is there any world quite
like it, except indeed it be the slums of our western world cities,
European and American? City slums seem to be our western point of contact
with the greater part of the eastern world. What was there to attract the
Lord Jesus to these crowds? Their need, you answer. Yes, no doubt, their
terrible need did move Him with compassion, to the hurting point.

But was there more than this? Something He said one time has made me
think there was something more, a pathetic, tremendous more, that took
hold of His heart. Could it be that He saw some lingering trace of the
Father's face in these faces? His eyes were very keen. He had seeing eyes.
And these men have all been made in the Father's image. Has that image
ever been wholly lost?--terribly blurred and scarred by sin, yes; but
wholly lost? Do you think so? I think not.

Those wondrous eyes of His looking into men's tired, pinched faces,
disfigured with passion or sorrow, or with sheer weariness of
existence--did He see something of the Father's face looking appealingly
up to be helped out of their sad plight? I wonder. Was it as though the
Father's face cried out to Him out of these poor beaten faces? I think so.
Do you remember that time when our Lord Jesus associated Himself so
closely with just such men and women, in talking of a coming day? He says
"inasmuch as ye did it to one of these My brethren, these least, ye did it
unto Me."[64] Listen to those words, "My brethren"! He is thinking of just
such crowds as He Himself ministered to, and as you find to-day in
Oriental city and in European and American slum. What is done for them is
done to Him. Their need is His need; their cry, His. It's Jesus coming to
us in these crowds. Their need is Jesus Himself appealing to us. And the
Jesus within us will answer with heart and life to this Jesus coming to
us in the pitiable need of the crowds.

I do not mean to use that word "pitiable" chiefly in the bodily sense,
though there's so much of that. But it has a deeper meaning. Here is this
fair young face turned to yours in the social group, here this strong
young man needing nothing that money can buy, but yet very needy, both of
them. In their young, eager faces the hidden away image, the
not-yet-touched-into-new-life image of the Father looks out asking for
help, help out into growth amidst so much that holds back. Inasmuch as
your light, tactful touch is given here, it is done unto Jesus. Jesus is
helped into the life, the God-image crowded back within is helped to get
out into free expression.

You may not be sent to some distant field as young Borden was. Your
personal place may be at home. But the crowd, the need, is everywhere; at
home, in the social circle, and among the men driven by the passion for
business and for pleasure, in this dangerously prosperous land of ours.
Need of body even here, and deeper need of spirit. Much more tact is
required, Spirit-born tact and patience and alertness, to touch and help
these.

But the Spirit will guide. He has a passion for men in their need. He has
exquisite tact in touching men under all circumstances. He will take
command of your life here as elsewhere. He will lead you into a life of
personal service in helping men. And He will lead you _in_ that service.
This is the Galilean Ministry which will work out in your experience as
the Holy Spirit has control. This is a bit of the "Follow Me" roadway.

These are the four experiences of power and privilege. They are as the
great underlying experiences of our Lord's career. The other experiences
grew up out of these. These were the warp threads in the loom of His life.
The others were woven into these. This is the main road that He trod. It
is the main road of this "Follow Me" journey. It is along this road,
between its beginning and end, that we shall run down into the valley-road
stretches, and run up to the stretches along the hilltops.




3. The Valleys--experiences of Suffering And Sacrifice



The Never-absent Minor.


Here the road begins to drop down into the valleys. It runs sharply down,
and on, through some wild gulches and ravines thick with lurking danger,
with the upper-lights almost lost in the deep black darkness. It is
darkness that can be felt more than the Egyptian darkness ever was. It
proves to be the valley of the shadow of death, then--of death itself,
before the upward turn comes.

The weaver we were speaking of finds some strange shuttle-threads to be
woven into the pattern, gray black, ugly black threads, and red threads
almost wet and sticky in their blood-like redness.

Yet this is part of the road that was trodden, and that is still waiting
to be trodden by feet sturdy and bold enough to go on down into the
shadows, before the upward turn is reached again. And these threads will
work out a rare beauty in the pattern being woven.

Is there perfect music without the underchording of the minor? Not to
human ears. For they are attuned to life as it has really come to be. And
the minor chord is in real life, never quite absent; and the minor chord
is in the true human heart, never wholly absent. And only the music with
the minor blended in is the real music of human life. Only it can play
upon the finest strings of the human heart.

But this sort of thing, the getting of beauty out of ugly threads, the
getting of music where there is discord, the upward turn again of the
valley road, all this is a bit of the touch of God upon life, where the
hurt of sin has come in. Only the Lord Jesus can make music where sin had
brought in and wrought out such discord. Only He can change the weaving
into beauty, where the ugly slimy sin-threads have come in. He can lead up
again out of the depths, but only He. His blood, Himself, is the thing
added that makes music where no melody had ever been a possible thing; and
gives the weaver's threads the transforming touch that works beauty where
there was only the ugly; and pulls you up again to the higher levels. The
good never comes out of bad. It comes only by something radically
different coming in and overcoming the bad.

In Seoul they showed us the great bell hung at the crossing of certain
chief streets there. And then they told us the bell's legend. In early
twilight times an artisan had made a great bell at the king's command, but
the tone of it was not pleasing to the royal ears. So a second one was
made, and a third, but neither was satisfactory. Then the king said that
if the man did not make a bell with pleasing tones his life should be
forfeited for his failure. This was very distressing for the poor
unfortunate bell-moulder.

His daughter, a young girl in her teens, either had a vision, or felt
within herself that a sacrifice was the thing needful to give the bell its
true tone. And so she resolved to give herself to save her father, and
with rare fortitude one night she plunged into the great pot of molten
metal. And the tone of the bell was so sweet and musical that the king was
delighted. And the maker, instead of being killed, was highly honoured. So
ran the simple bit of Korean folklore.

We ran across legends quite like it in other parts of the Orient. They all
seemed to point, with other similar evidence, to the feeling deep down in
human consciousness of the need of sacrifice. Is it a bit of an innate
instinct in our common human nature, that only through sacrifice can the
hurt of life be healed? However this be, it certainly is true, that the
touch of Him who gave His life clear out for men, that touch is the thing,
and the only thing, that can make music where there was only discord. It
is only His pierced hand upon weaver and web that touches ugly threads
into beauty as they are woven into the fabric of life. Only He can lead us
up out of the valley of death up to the road of life along the high
hilltops.



The Wilderness.


You remember, there were four experiences of suffering and sacrifice in
our Lord Jesus' life. The first of these was _the Wilderness Temptation_.
That rough road He took led straight to and through a wilderness. He was
tempted. He was tempted like as we are. He was tempted more cunningly and
stormily than we ever have been.

It was a pitched battle, planned for carefully, and fought with all the
desperateness of the Evil One at bay against overwhelming forces. It was
planned by the Holy Spirit, and fought out by our Lord in the Spirit's
strength. For forty full lone days it ran its terrific course. But our
Lord's line of defence never flinched. The Wilderness and Waterloo, those
two terrific matchings of strength, the one of the spirit, the other of
the physical, both were fought out on the same lines. Wellington's only
plan for that battle was to _stand_, to resist every attempt to break his
lines all that fateful day. The French did the attacking all day, until
Wellington's famous charge came at its close.

Our Lord Jesus' only plan for the Wilderness battle was to _stand_, having
done all to stand, to resist every effort to move Him a hair's breadth
from His position. That battle brought Him great suffering; it took, and
it tested, all His strength of discernment, and decision, of determined
set persistence, and of dependent, deep-breathed praying. And through
these the gracious power of the Spirit worked, and so the victory, full
joyous victory, came.

Now it comes as a surprise to some of us to find that the "Follow Me" road
leads straight to the same Wilderness. No, it is not just the same, none
of these experiences mean as much to us as they did to Him. They are
always less. But then they mean everything to us! We will be tempted. So
surely as one sets himself to follow the blessed Master, there's one thing
he can always count upon--temptation. Sooner or later it will come,
usually sooner and later. So the Evil One serves notice to contest our
allegiance to the new Master.

The tempter sees to it that you are tempted. That belongs to his side of
the conflict. And quickly and skilfully, and with good heart he goes at
his task. Through the weak or evil impulses and desires within us, and
through every avenue without, those dearest to us, and every other, he
will begin and continue his cunning approaches. It is well to understand
this clearly, and so be ready. The closer you follow this Man ahead, the
more, and the more surely, will you be tempted. It is one of the things
you can count on--temptation.

But, steady there, steady! the tempter can't go a step beyond attacking,
without your help. He can't make a single break in your lines from
without. The only knob to the door of your life is on the _inside_.
Temptation never gets in without help from within. I have said that the
Wilderness spelled two words for our Lord Jesus, temptation _and_ victory.
We may use His spelling if we will. A temptation is a chance for a
victory. Begin singing when temptation comes; out of it, resisted, comes a
new steadiness in step, and a new confidence in the victorious Man of the
Wilderness.[65]

But let me tell you _how_ the victory comes. It comes through our Lord
Jesus. And it comes by His working _through your decision_ to resist to
the last ditch.



"Lead Us Not."


The Lord Jesus gave us two special temptation prayers to make. The one is:
"Lead us not into temptation."[66] That petition has been a practical
puzzle to many of us, and the explanations not always quite clear. Would
God lead us into temptation? we instinctively ask. And the answer seems to
be both "yes" and "no."

The "yes" means that character can come only through right choice. We must
decide what our attitude toward wrong shall be. It is only temptation
resisted that makes the beginnings of strength. Before temptation comes
there may be innocence but never virtue. Innocence resisting temptation
becomes virtue. The temptation is the intense fire in which the raw iron
of innocence changes into the toughened, tempered steel of virtue. It is
essential to character that it resist the wrong. It is choice that makes
character. The angels in the presence of God are continually choosing to
remain loyal to Him. Choice includes choosing not to choose the evil, to
refuse it. Adam was tempted; the temptation was bad, only bad; but it
could have been made an opportunity to rise up into newness of strength.
Job was led into temptation, and he failed when the fires grew in heat,
and touched him close enough; and then he learned new dependence on God
alone instead of on his own integrity.

That's the "yes" side of the answer. We must decide what we will do with
evil. The presence of evil forces choice upon us. The one thing God longs
for is our choice, free and full choice. Freedom of choice is the image of
God in which every man is made. We are like Him in _power_, in the right
to choose; we become like Him in _character_ when we choose only the
right. God would lead us into opportunity for the choice on which
everything else hinges. The prayer says: "Lead us not into temptation."
The prayer becomes the choice. It reveals the decision of your heart. The
man who thoughtfully makes the prayer makes the choice.

And with that goes the "no" side. Certainly God would not lead us into the
temptation to do wrong.[67] And so He has made a way--it's a new way since
our Lord Jesus was here--a way by which we can have the full opportunity
for choice, and yet be sure of always choosing the right, and so growing
into His image in character. To pray, "Lead us not into temptation," is
practically saying, "I will go as Thou leadest. Lead me. I am willing to
be led. I was not ever thus, nor _prayed_ that Thou shouldst lead me on. I
loved to choose and see my path, but now--but now, lead _Thou_ me on. Here
I am, willing to be led. I put out my hands for Thee to grasp and lead
where Thou wilt. I'll sing, 'Where He may Lead, I'll Follow." This is the
only safe road through the Wilderness. We yield wholly to His control.

May I say reverently, this was the way our Lord entered and passed through
the Wilderness, wholly under the control of Another--the Holy Spirit. He
chose to yield to that control. The Spirit acted through His yielding
consent, and flooded in the power that brought the victory. Even He in His
purity needs so to do. How much more we in our absence of purity, and so
absence of strength. "Lead us not" means practically, that we get in
behind this victorious Lord Jesus. We refuse to go alone.

The Wilderness spells only defeat for the man who goes alone. We must
yield wholly to this great lone Man who went before. We lean upon Him. We
trust Him as Saviour from the sin that temptation yielded to has already
brought. We will trust His lead wholly now as temptation comes. We will
stick close and be wholly pliant in His hands. This is the first
temptation prayer our Lord gives us. It means our utter surrender to His
leadership.

Then there is a second prayer for temptation use: "Watch and pray that ye
_enter not_ into temptation."[68] This goes with the other. It is the
partner prayer. Be ever on the watch, and pray, that you may not _enter_
into temptation. Guard prayerfully against acting independently of your
Leader. Watch against the temptation. Watch yourself lest you be inclined
to go off alone, to break away from His lead. For there will be only one
result then, defeat. These two prayers together show the way to turn
temptation into victory,--"lead not," "enter not." A temptation is a
chance for a victory if you never meet it alone, but always under the lead
of the great Victor of the Wilderness.

Then it may help to put the thing in another way. There are two steps in
victory over temptation. The first is recognition. To recognize that the
thing coming for decision is a temptation to something wrong,--that's the
first step in victory. It pushes the temptation out into the open. You say
plainly, "This is something to be resisted." The second step as you set
yourself to resist is to plead the blood of the Lord Jesus. That means
pleading His victory over the tempter. That's the getting in behind Him
and depending wholly upon Him.

"Follow Me" takes us into the Wilderness, and leads us into victory there.
There we will learn more about prayer, and music, and the Master, and get
new strength and courage on this stretch of the valley road.



Gethsemane.


At the farther extreme of the service years, there came to the Lord Jesus
the other three of these dark experiences, all three close together. On
the night of the betrayal came _the Gethsemane Agony_. That was a very
full evening. Around the supper table they had gathered and talked, and
the Lord Jesus had made His last, tender but fruitless effort to touch
Judas' heart by touching his feet. There was the long quiet heart-talk in
the supper room after Judas had gone out, "and it was night" for poor
Judas.[69]

Then the talk continued as they walked across the city within view of the
great brass vine on Herod's temple, so beautiful in the light of the full
moon. And then, as they walk through the narrow, shadowed streets, the
shadows come into the Lord Jesus' spirit and words.[70] Now they are
outside the wall of the city, out in the open, under the blue, and with
upturned face, the great pleading prayer is breathed out.[71] Now they are
across the Kidron, and now in among the shadows of the huge olive trees of
the garden called Gethsemane.

It's quite dark and late. He leaves the disciples to rest under the
trees, and with the inner three He pushes a bit farther on. And now He
pushes on quite alone in the farther lone recesses of the woods. And now
the intensity of His spirit bends His body as He kneels, then is
prostrate. And the agony is upon Him. He is fighting out the battle of the
morrow. He is sinless, but on the morrow He is to get under the load of a
world's sin; no, it was yet more than that, He was to be Himself reckoned
and dealt with as sin itself. All the horror of that broke upon Him under
those trees, more intensely than it had yet. The brightness of the full
moon made the shadows of the trees very dark and black, but they seemed as
nothing to this awful inky black shadow of the sin load that would come,
no longer in shadow but actually, on the morrow.

The agony of it is upon Him as He falls prostrate on the ground, under the
tense strain of spirit. Out of the struggle a bit of prayer reaches our
awed ears, "_If it be possible_ let this cup pass away from Me; yet not as
I will, but as Thou wilt." And so tense is the strain that an angel comes
to strengthen. With what reverent touch must he have given his help. Even
after that the great drops of bloody sweat came. But now a calmer mood
comes. The look full in the face of what was coming, the realizing more
clearly how the Father's plan must work out, these help to steady Him.
Again a bit of prayer is heard, "Since this cannot pass away; since only
so can Thy plan for the world be accomplished Thy--will--be--done." The
load of the world's sin almost broke His heart that dark night under the
olives. It actually did break His heart on the morrow. This is the meaning
of Gethsemane, intense suffering of spirit because of the sin of others.

And at first thought you say, surely there can be no following for any of
us in this sore lonely experience of His. And there cannot. He was alone
there as on the morrow. None of us can go through what He went through
there. For, it was _for us_, and for our sin that He went through it. And
yet there _is_ a following, if different in degree and in depth of
meaning, yet a very real following. While Gethsemane stands a lone
experience for Jesus, yet there will be _a_ Gethsemane for him who follows
fully where He asks us to go.

There will be a real suffering of spirit because of the sin of others. We
will see the world around us through those pure, seeing eyes of His. We
will _feel_ the ravages of sin in those we touch, with something of the
feeling of His heart. Close walking with Christ brings pain and it will
bring it more, and more acutely. We will see sin as He does, in part. We
will feel with our fellow-men toiling in its grip and snare as He did, in
part. There will be sore suffering of spirit. This is the Gethsemane
experience, and it will not grow less but more.

    "'O God,' I cried, 'why may I not forget?
    These halt and hurt in life's hard battle
        Throng me yet.
    Am I their keeper? Only I? To bear
    This constant burden of their grief and care?
    Why must I suffer for the others' sin?
    Would God my eyes had never opened been!'

    And the Thorn-crowned and Patient One
    Replied, '_They thronged Me too. I too have seen_.'

    'But, Lord, Thy other children go at will,'
        I said, protesting still.
    'They go, unheeding. But these sick and sad,
    These blind and orphan, yea and those that sin
    Drag at my heart. For them I serve and groan.
    Why is it? Let me rest, Lord. I _have_ tried--'

    He turned and looked at me:
        '_But I have died_!'

    'But, Lord, this ceaseless travail of my soul!
    This stress! This often fruitless toil
    These souls to win!
    They are not mine. I brought not forth this host
    Of needy creatures, struggling, tempest-tossed--
        They are not _mine_.'

    He looked at them--the look of One divine;
    He turned and looked at me. '_But they are mine_!'

    'O God, I said, 'I understand at last.
    Forgive! And henceforth I will bond-slave be
    To thy least, weakest, vilest ones;
    I would not more be free.'

    He smiled and said,
        '_It is to me_.'"[72]

The word Gethsemane has not been used accurately sometimes. And it is not
good that it is so, for it keeps us from appreciating what the real
meaning is. In poetry and otherwise it has been used for some great
experience of sorrow in which the soul has struggled alone. But there are
two things in the Gethsemane experience that give it a meaning quite
different from such. The Gethsemane sorrow is on account of the sin of
others, _and_ it comes to us through our own consent, of our own action.
We need not go through the Gethsemane experience save as we make the
choice that comes to include this. It is only as we _choose_ to follow
fully, close up to His bleeding side, where the Lord Jesus is leading,
that this experience of pain will come.

Moses knew what this meant. As he came from the presence of God in the
mount the sin of the people seemed so terrible, that the fear that
possibly it could not be forgiven unless he made some sacrifice sweeps
over him and came out as a great sob.[73] The sight of their sin brought
sorest pain to his spirit. Paul tells us there was a continual cutting of
a knife at his heart because of his racial kinsfolk, their sin, their
stubbornness in sin, the awful blight upon their lives.[74] There was
sore, lone, unspeakable pain of spirit because he felt so keenly the sin
of others. This is the Gethsemane experience. Have you felt something like
this as you have come in touch with the sin, the blighted lives, the
wreckage of lives among both poor and rich, lower class and better? You
will if you follow where He leads.



Calvary.


Then came the morrow. _The experience of Calvary_ came hard on the heels
of Gethsemane. The pain of spirit became both pain of body and pain of
spirit, intensified clear beyond what the night before had anticipated.
How shall I trust myself to speak of that morrow, or you to listen? Yet,
let us hold still, and, for a great purpose, look at it again, if only for
a moment, that the meaning of it, the flame of it may take fresh hold, and
consume us anew.

Gethsemane was followed by a sleepless night, while bitter hate brought
its utmost iniquity and persistence to hound this Man to death. Nine, of
the next morning, found Him hanging, nailed on the cross, crowned with the
cruel mocking thorn crown. From nine till three He hung, while the strange
darkness came down over all nature from noon till three, the blackness of
midnight shutting out the brightness of noon. The Father's presence was
withdrawn. This tells the bitterness of the cross for Jesus as does
nothing else.

It was out of a breaking heart that the cry was wrung, "My God, My God,
why didst _Thou_ forsake Me?" When you can penetrate that darkness you may
be able to tell how really Jesus took our place, and suffered as sin for
us,--not before. Then with a great shout of victory He gave up His life.
His great heart broke. He died. He died literally of a broken heart. The
walls of that muscle were burst asunder by the terrific strain on His
spirit.

_He died for us_. He who so easily held off the murderous mob with their
stones, now holds Himself to that cross,--_for us_. This is the Calvary
experience. It can be felt, but never explained fully; words fail. It can
be yielded to until our hearts are melted to sobs, but never fully told in
its tenderness and strength to others. It can bring us down on knees and
face at His feet as His love-slaves for ever,--so is its story best told
to others. That breaking heart breaks ours. That pierced side pierces
through all our stubborn resistance. That face haunts us. Its scars tell
of sin, ours. Its patient eyes tell of love, His. Was there ever such sin?
Was there ever such love? Was there ever such a meeting of sin and purity,
of love and hate, of God's best and Satan's worst?

Surely there can be no following _here_! And, strange to say, the answer
is both a "no," with a double underscoring of emphasis, and a "yes," that
will come to have a like emphatic underlining. _No_, there can be no
following. Here, He is the Lone Man who went before. And He remains the
Lone Man in what He did, and in the extent of His suffering. There is only
one Calvary. There was only the One whose death could settle the sin score
for us men. It is only by His death for our sin that there is any way out
of our sore plight of sin, and sin's own result. There the Lord Jesus did
something that had to be done, for the Father's sake; there He broke the
slavery of our sin; there He broke our hearts by His love. There He stands
utterly alone in what He did. Calvary has no duplicate, nor ever can have.
That is the emphatic "no" side of the answer. There can be no following on
that road.

And yet,--and yet, there can be. There is a "yes" side to the true, full
answer. There will be a Calvary experience for every one who really
follows. His was _the_ Calvary experience, ours is _a_ Calvary experience.
It does not mean what His meant for the world. But it enters into the
marrow of our very being, and means everything to us. It means that as I
really follow there will come to me experiences of sacrifice that will
take the very life of my life--_if_ I do not pull back, but persist on
following the beckoning hand. And it means too, that there will be in a
secondary, a minor sense, a redemptive value in my suffering. That
suffering will be a real thing in completing the work of some man's
redemption.

Listen to Paul. He has been writing to the Corinthian Christians in much
detail, of the suffering he has been going through of both body and
spirit, and then he adds, "_so then death working in me worketh life in
you_."[75] The same thought underlies that wonderful bit of tender,
tactful pleading in the eleventh and twelfth chapters of the same letter.
The same thing is put in a rather startling way in the epistle to the
Colossians,[76] "I ... fill up on my part, in my flesh, _that which is
lacking_ of the afflictions of Christ for His body's sake, which is the
Church."

This fits in with the thought in that word "began" in the beginning of the
book of Acts.[77] In a very real sense our Lord depends upon our faithful
following to supplement among men the great thing which only He could do.
Paul knew _a_ Calvary experience, and Peter and John, and so has, and
will, every one who follows the pierced hand that beckons. Ask Horace
Tracey Pitkin at Paotingfu if he understands this. And the China soil wet
with his blood gives answer, and so do the lives of those who were won to
Christ through such suffering throughout China. Ask David Livingstone away
in the inner heart of Africa, and those whom no man can number in every
nation, who have known this sort of thing by a bitter, sweet experience,
some by violence, some by the yet more difficult daily giving out of the
life in hidden away corners.



The Underground Road.


And hard following this came _the Burial in Joseph's Tomb_. "Christ died
for our sins and ... He was buried."[78] "Joseph took the body, ... and
laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock, and he
rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb."[79] "The chief priests and
the Pharisees ... went, and made the sepulchre sure, sealing the stone,
the guard (of Roman soldiers) being with them."[80]

Out of that sealed tomb comes with the emphasis of action, the emphasis of
death, this word, "except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die,
it abideth by itself alone."[81] The only pathway of life is the
underground road. For our Lord, Joseph's tomb made the death clear beyond
doubt. The tomb was the climax of the death. He was dead and buried. For
him who follows it means this, _a burial clear out of sight in the soil of
the need of men's lives_. He who simply gets in behind and faithfully
follows will find himself actually being buried in the needs of men. And
only where there is such a burial can there come resurrection power into
the life.

I remember a friend in Philadelphia, a young man who resigned an
influential position to go out as a missionary in India. And another
friend not at all in sympathy remarked sneeringly in my hearing, "He's
gone to bury himself in India." He spoke more aptly than he knew. The
years since have told what a blessed burial that was. For scores of lives
in Southern India have known the resurrection power of the Lord Jesus
through his service.

Do you remember when the Greeks came to Philip with their great plea,
"Sir, we would see Jesus"?[82] Whether really from Greece, or
Greek-speaking people from elsewhere, or simply non-Jewish people, they
represented the outer, non-Jewish world coming to Jesus. The Jew door was
slammed violently in His face, but here was the great outer-world door
opening. And He had come to a world! But instantly, across the vision so
attractive to His eyes, there came another vision, never absent from His
spirit those last weeks, the vision black and forbidding, of _a cross_.
And He knew that only through this vision of a cross could the vision of a
world coming be realized. And out of the sore stress of spirit, that for a
few brief moments shook Him, came the quietly spoken, tense words, "Except
a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone."

The road to Greece is not over the sea here to the west, not the overland
caravan route up north through Asia Minor; it is the road down through
Joseph's tomb. That was true for Him. It was by that road that He so
marvellously reached the Greeks and all the world. And this is true for
us. It is only by this road that we can reach out to the crowds with the
reach-in that touches heart and life.

These are the four experiences of suffering and sacrifice. This is the
dip-down in the "Follow Me" road where it runs through a darkly shadowed
valley. These are the dark and red shuttle-threads being woven into the
web, by repeated sharp blows of the batten-beam. These are the minor
chords that, coming up through the strains of music, give a peculiar
sweetness to it.



What Is Sacrifice?


Now you will note that the chief thing in all this is _sacrifice_. The
chief thing in all of our Lord's life, clear from Bethlehem to Calvary and
the tomb, was sacrifice. It runs ever throughout; it finds its tremendous
climax in the cross. And the word to put in here in quietest tone--the
quietest is tensest, and goes in deepest--the word is this: _Following
means sacrifice_. It means sacrifice as really for the follower as for the
Lone Man ahead.

That word "sacrifice" has practically been dropped out of the dictionary
of the Christian Church of the western world. It has not been wholly lost.
There is much real sacrifice, no doubt, under the surface. But, in the
main, it is one of the lost words in our generation of the Church. We are
rich, and increased in goods, and have need of nothing that we cannot
provide by the lavish use of money; so we think. And the loss of that word
explains the loss from our working dictionaries of another word, _power_.
For the two words always go together.

But please note what sacrifice means. For we may get confused in the use
of words, and like the Hebrews in Isaiah's day call things by the wrong
names.[83] Sacrifice does not merely mean suffering, though there may be
much suffering included in it. But there may be suffering where there is
no sacrifice. It does not mean privation, though there may be real painful
privation in it. But again there may be much privation and pain without
any element of sacrifice entering in.

The heart of sacrifice is that it is voluntary, and that it really costs
you something. It is something that would not come to you unless you
decide to let it come. It is wholly within your power to keep it away, and
it brings with it real pain or cost of some kind. Sacrifice means doing
something, or doing without something, that so help may come to another,
even though it costs you some real personal suffering of spirit, or of
body, or both, or lack of what you should have and would enjoy.

And please note that sacrifice is _not_ the key-note of the "Follow Me"
life. We are not to seek for sacrifice. Perhaps that is quite a needless
remark. We are not likely to seek for it. No one loves a cross any more
than did Peter, when he had the hardiness to rebuke his Master.[84] And
yet we remember those earnest souls in earlier times, who shut themselves
up behind monastic walls, and inflicted pain upon themselves by privation
and by bodily self-infliction. And we cannot help admiring their
earnestness and saintliness, even while we see how morbid was their
conception of life, and how completely they got the true order reversed.
And there can be found some here and there, among us to-day, with the same
idea.

But the key-note of the true life is not sacrifice. It is obedience.
Sacrifice is something coming in the pathway of obedience. There come the
places and times where you cannot obey without making a sacrifice.
Obedience involves sacrifice. And the sacrifice may be of the very real,
cutting, hurting sort, personally. The whole instinct of one's being is
against it. This seems to be carrying things quite too far, we think. And
so the test is on. The sacrifice is not sought. It is shrunk from with all
the vigour of one's nature. Obedience means that you go steadily on, no
matter how it cuts, or how much it costs.

And the motive under the obedience is usually the decisive thing. If that
motive be a personal passion for the Lord Jesus, then you only wait long
enough to be quite clear of His leading, of what He would have you do. And
then you go on, regardless of the personal loss or pain to yourself. The
key-note of the "Follow Me" music is obedience, simple, sane, poised, full
obedience.



How Much It Cost God.


One day out in Illinois, while visiting a small church college, I was told
this story of one of the students. He had felt very deeply the need of the
foreign mission lands, and the plea being made for men to volunteer to go
out as missionaries. And after much thought and prayer he had decided to
volunteer. But he felt he must first get his mother's consent. So he wrote
of his purpose and asked if she were willing that he should go. In due
time the reply came back. It was a mother's letter to her son, full of a
mother's endearments. But the paper was marked with tear-stains. She gave
her consent. She said, "I'm glad my boy wants to go, and I'm glad to have
you go, but"--and here the writing was blurred with the teardrops that had
plainly fallen as she wrote--"_I never knew before how much it cost God to
give His Son_."

There was the whole story of sacrifice as it came to that mother. There
was the sore need of the people in foreign lands for the Gospel of Christ.
That need had not been met. The need in its sore pressure had become an
emergency, largely an unappreciated emergency. The tragedy of an unmet
emergency had moved the son's heart to action, under the touch of the Holy
Spirit, and then it came to the mother's heart. The decision rested with
her. Her inner heart told her the Master's desire. She obeyed, with
exquisite pain in her heart over the separation, maybe separation for
life, from her son. The key-note is obedience, even though it may mean
cutting pain.

The whole test of love and of life is in sacrifice yielded to as the need
may come. In God's first plan of life there is no sacrifice. God never
chooses sacrifice as His first choice for any one, not even for His Son.
But sin is here, an abnormal, foreign thing. Life is shot through and
through with its ugly markings. You can't go a foot's length down the
pathway of obedience without finding the keen edge of a knife, freshly
sharpened, held across the path with its cutting edge toward you,
challenging your advance, doing its utmost to hold you back.

And only as the breast is bared to the cutting until a bit of your red
life stains the knife, only so can there be any of the power of God in, or
through, or out of, your life. But turn that sentence around, and smile in
your heart as you remember this, as you do push quietly on past the
cutting knife, and say never a word about the knife or the sharp pain--the
best folks never talk about their sacrifices, they are too intent on the
Man just ahead,--as a man so does, there come into his life a fire and a
fragrance that burns and breathes out wherever he goes.

It is sin that makes sacrifice. Sin did the carpenter work on the cross,
our sin. Sin grew the thorns, and then served as weaver to make the
mocking, cutting crown--our sin, yours and mine. Love yields to the
sacrifice, His love for us, His love in us for the others. Sin is
everywhere. Its finger-print is in nature, and its scar on human life. And
sin's ravages make cruel need, and need intensified makes emergency, and
these involve sacrifice as we rise to meet need and emergency.

And love is everywhere. That is, it would be, it will be, if it can find
human feet to carry it. It will be if our Lord may have His way. Sacrifice
is Love's healing shadow. Sacrifice is love giving the oil and wine of its
own life to bind up the wounds that sin has made. The "Follow Me" road is
marked red, so you trace His footprints who went ahead, and theirs who
follow.



What Obedience Has Meant for Some.


But, no one can decide for another what obedience may mean for him. You
may not tell me, nor I you. It is intensely interesting to note what
obedience has meant to some. It led Paul to give up inheritance and family
prestige, social standing, fellowship in university circles, a home life
of scholarly quiet and research, and to be reproached and ostracized, to
be homeless having no certain abiding place, dependent on his own hands
for daily bread, as he went burning like a flame from end to end of the
Roman world. And at the end it meant a prison, and block and axe.

I met a rare Christian nobleman in London, of an old, honoured family, of
whom a friend told me this. This nobleman had a large inheritance. Among
other things a certain estate. He felt led to place the estate on the
market, get the best possible return for it, and then with his shrewd
business sense, prayerfully to place the proceeds where he felt they would
help best the cause of Christ. And to a friend who expressed appreciation
and approval of such unusual action, he quietly said, "I want no praise
for this; if the poor Jew had to give one-tenth, surely a rich Christian
can do very much more." That was what obedience, at that point, meant to
him.

I knew a Canadian woman who had been led to a higher level in her
Christian life. A friend put into her hands a bit of manuscript, to which
she had access, thinking it would help her in her new life. The manuscript
was read, and returned through the friend to its writer. He had intended
having it published with some others, if a publisher could be found
willing to accept it. Then he had felt that he would do nothing with it
until very clear leading came. He did not want to do anything, except as
he was led. If the Master wanted to use the writing, it was there if He
chose to give the word for its use.

Sometime after as the woman was busy with her nursing work she was on
night duty, and had her quiet time in an interval of the night's round. As
she was reading her Bible and praying, she said, "A voice said to me very
quietly, 'Send Mr. Blank twenty-five dollars to publish ----'" [naming
the title of the article she had read]. Twenty-five dollars taken out of
her frugal savings would leave quite a hole. But the impression that came
with the message was unmistakable. And so the money was sent. And it was
received by the writer of the manuscript as the Master's answer for which
he had been waiting. And that was the beginning of some little books whose
messages have been graciously used to bring help to many lives. Her bit of
obedience was a link in the chain, and so a bit of her life is in the
printed messages the Master has been using. The tracing of red was on the
gold, and on the messages sent out. That was what obedience meant that
time to her. And obedience usually has its hardest time when its struggle
is over a bit of gold.

A friend took us driving one day up in Scotland, and told this story as we
passed through a beautiful estate. A few generations back it belonged to
one who followed fully. And in response to the clear inner leading the
estate was sold, and the proceeds used in sending the message of a
crucified, risen Christ, out to the farther ends of the earth.

It was at the same time that a like incident came personally to me of
another Scottish friend of our Lord Jesus. The beckoning call was so
distinct, and the answering need so clear in its echo, that he planned a
moderate annuity for the remainder of his life, and loosed out all the
rest of his wealth on the same sort of errand. I do not say you should do
something of this sort. And you may not tell me what I shall do. Only the
Master has that privilege. But we can urge each other to have trained
ears, and soft heart, and obedient will; ears for what the Master is
saying, a heart softened by the warmth of His, a will gladly obedient to
His slightest wish.



Necessity--Luxury.


And our Lord Jesus speaks very distinctly, though so quietly. His meaning
is unmistakably plain to listening ears. He is quite apt to take you off
for a little walk and talk. What kind of a house do you live in? What
proportion of your income do you spend on yourself? What is in those
safety-deposit boxes? How much would it mean to Him if your signature at
the bottom of legal papers put some property at His disposal? Take a look
through your wardrobe; who and what controls there? No, I'm not talking
about money, nor about missions, only about a personal passion for the
Lord Jesus, and about the passion _in_ Him for His world.

"But," you say to yourself, "there's danger of going to extremes here, is
there not?" Yes, there is; you are quite right. Extremes are bad, we
should be on our guard against them. There is nothing more desirable in
these days than sane, poised judgment, a sound mind. And be it keenly
marked that the man who is really swayed by the Holy Spirit is peculiarly
a sane, well-balanced man. That is one mark of the Spirit's presence.

Yet there's more to be said. _Our Lord Jesus went to extremes_. He went to
a great extreme on the cross, did He not? Is there any extreme like that
of Gethsemane? and Calvary? It is because He went to such extremes, and
the West knows about it, that the West is so radically different from the
East, and that you and I are redeemed from the slavery of sin, with a
sweet peace in our hearts, and so much happiness in our lives.

The distressing thing is that there is so much of going to extremes. Go
through the Christian homes of the western world to-day, and you find home
appointments, wardrobes, safety-deposit boxes, bank books, title deeds,
all spelling out one word, spelled in capital letters, EXTREMES. But that
key-note, named several times already, gives the only safe
way--_obedience_. We need to be on our guard, not so much lest we go to
extremes at either extreme, but that we _obey_ our Lord Jesus. That, and
that only, leads to the wise, well-balanced judgment and action. Obedience
to Him means true sanity.

Where do you draw the deciding line between necessity and luxury? How do
you define those two words? What is necessity? And what is luxury? Simple
definitions help much in getting clear ideas. The dictionary says, a
necessity is something you must have. And a luxury, in its root meaning,
is an extravagance, something "wandering beyond the proper boundary." The
trouble is to know how to draw the line when it comes to one's own
affairs. There is such a big difference between what you want and what you
need. And often we don't want to go into such distinctions. They might
bother our consciences a bit. It seems difficult to keep one's poise in
such things. Some godly people go to extremes in not providing
sufficiently for real needs. Most of us go to the other extreme. Where
does the true dividing line come in?

Well, I think you can say truly that _whatever keeps up and adds to your
strength_ can properly be called _a necessity_. All beyond that line is
luxury. It is the part of wisdom to provide carefully and well for
necessities. Luxury is _bad_, for it really saps our strength. It makes a
man less vigorous in every way. And yet more can be said. The question of
need comes in. Luxury is wrong because of the crying need of men for what
the money spent in luxury would bring to them. I think chiefly now of the
need of their lives for what can come only through a knowledge of Christ.
The bitter cry of the common people against Louis XVI, at the time of the
French Revolution, was that the royal family lived on the costliest
delicacies while many of the common people were actually starving. They
thought that was the chief crime to be expiated at the guillotine.

What is necessary for one's strength moves on a sliding scale. As years
come, and the sort of work one does and his strength change, his needs
increase. What might at one time have been reckoned luxury is now a real
necessity for his best strength and work. _Whatever ministers to one's
strength is a necessity_. All above this becomes luxury, and so is both
hurtful to strength, and wrong in itself.

A missionary returning to his home-land, on furlough, noted on his first
return home that what had been considered luxuries before he left, were
now reckoned necessities; on his second furlough he noted again that what
had been reckoned luxury on his first return was now counted necessity.
And each return home found this condition repeating itself.

It reminded me of the experience of Sir John Franklin in one of his Arctic
explorations. His ship was hemmed in by an ice-field so that progress was
impossible. All he could do was to calculate his longitude and latitude,
and wait. The next day he was still hemmed in, and so far as he could see,
was exactly where he had been on the previous day. But on calculating
longitude and latitude again, he was surprised to find that the ship had
drifted several miles backward from the position of the previous day.

It would be a sensible thing for us to make frequent calculations, and
find out where we are, and prayerfully steer a changed course if we've
been drifting. But we can't decide such questions for each other, and they
can't be decided by what another does. They can only be decided alone on
one's knees with the Master, with the Book, and perhaps a map of the world
at hand. We need both the Word of God, and a view of the world of God to
shape our judgment. No, it's not a question of money primarily, nor of
missions, only of personal loyalty to our Lord Jesus, and to the passion
of His heart.



Grafted.


Have you noticed the significance of that word "abide" which our Lord used
on the night of His betrayal?[85] "Abide" means a grafting process; we
were branches in the vine, but we were broken off by sin. The only way to
abide in that vine is by being grafted in. "Abide" means grafted. But the
grafting process has two wounds. It means a knife used twice. It means a
wound in the vine-stock, and our Master flinched not there. It means
likewise a wound in the branch to be grafted in. Just as surely as the
knife must make the incision into the stock, it must also cut the end of
the branch before it can be grafted in. Our Master flinched not. How about
you and me when it comes to the knife, with its sharp cutting edge, and
slash and sting?

Perhaps this explains why there's so little life, so little sap-flow, so
little fruit. If you follow along the narrow road your progress is sure
to be barred by a knife thrust out across the path. And the whole
instinct of our nature is to shrink from the knife. The sacrificial knife
becomes the pruning, the grafting knife. There can be no life without that
knife. Failure to obey cuts off the supply of life.

I became greatly interested in a young man whom I met in Japan. He comes
of a noble, wealthy family. He attended a mission school to study English,
learned to read the Bible, became intensely interested, and then decided
to become a Christian. But his family was violently opposed, and pleaded
earnestly with him. He would in time be the head of his family, but if he
insisted now on being a Christian he would be disowned. He was to be
trained in the Imperial University, and could have chosen a public
national career including the probability of membership in the Imperial
diet, but he remained true to his decision. And he was disowned in
disgrace, cast adrift without a cent. Now he is devoting himself to
mission work in the city where I met him, working among the neediest and
lowest. I was told that the police gladly say that his mission has greater
power than they in preserving order in that worst quarter of the city.

The night I stood by his side, speaking through his interpretation, a
Japanese policeman dragged up a couple of youths who had been giving
trouble, and pushed them in, saying, "Here's the place for you; now listen
to that." And I have never been in a simple service where the quiet
intense power of God was more marked. This is what obedience meant to him.
And this too is what abiding meant. He yielded to the grafting knife, and
the life of the vine-stock came flowing freely through, bearing abundant
fruit.

A few years ago I read a simple story in "The Sunday-school Times" that
brought a lump in my throat. The writer told of a south-bound train
stopping at a station near Washington City. At the last moment, an old
negro with white hair came hurriedly forward and clambered on the last
coach as the train pulled out. He was very black, and very dusty, and
single occupants of seats looked apprehensive as he shuffled along looking
for a seat. But he did not offer to intrude, but stood at the end of the
car, looking with big wondering eyes down the car. He was evidently very
tired. Then a young man offered him space in his seat, for which he seemed
very grateful, and with child-like simplicity began talking.

He was going back home "to Georgy"; had been up in Virginia for years with
the rare old slave loyalty serving his old master between times, while
earning his own way. Now his master was dead and he was going back down to
the old home state, "back to Georgy," and the words came softly, while his
hand tenderly patted the seat cushion. Clearly Georgia was the acme of
happiness and content for him. As the train boy came through, the young
man bought some sandwiches for the old negro. He was very grateful. Yes,
he _was_ hungry, and had walked several miles to get the train. He
couldn't spend money for "victuals"; "money's too skase fur buying things
on the road," he said, "I was 'lowin' ter fill up arter I done reach
Georgy."

Then the conductor came in for tickets. The black man anxiously fumbled
through one pocket after another, and finally remembered that his ticket
was pinned to the lining of his hat. "Done tuk ebery cent I could scrape
up to get dat ticket," he said, "but dat's all right. I kin wuk, an' fo'ks
don' need money when dey's home." The conductor had passed on to the next
seat behind. There sat a shabbily dressed woman, with anxious,
frightened-looking face, the seat full of bundles and a pale-faced baby in
arms.

"Tickets, please."

The woman's face flushed red, and then grew white and set, as she said, "I
haven't any."

"Have to get off then; save me the trouble of putting you off."

The woman sprang up with terror in her big eyes, "Don't put me off; my
husband's dying; the doctor said he must go South; we've sold everything
left to send him; now he's dying; I must go to him. But I have no money,
don't put me off. My God--my God--if you--" Her plea poured out in
excited, jerky sentences. But the conductor could do nothing. He must obey
his instructions, or be discharged. The woman sank back sobbing, in the
seat. The conductor turned back to get the old negro's ticket.

"I'se feared you'll have to put _me_ off, boss," he said humbly, "don't
expect a pore ole nigger like me to raise enuf fur a ticket." The
conductor harshly ordered him off the train at the next station, saying
there was some excuse for the poor woman, but none for him. The train
began to slow up for the station. The old negro quietly dropped his ticket
into the lap of the woman, saying, "Here's yo' ticket, missus. I do hopes
yo' find dat husban' o' yourn ain' so bad as yo'se afeared." And before
her dazed eyes could take in what he was doing, the old man had shuffled
out of the car, and as the train pulled on he was seen quietly plodding
along, still "bound for Georgy."

And there was no mention of Christ in the story, but one who knows the old
typical slave class to which he belongs needs not to be told of the motive
down in his heart. That's what

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/18486