Quiet Talks on Following the Christ

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 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.

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.

1. A Look Ahead

2. The Main Road—Experiences of Power And Privilege

3. The Valleys—experiences of Suffering And Sacrifice

4. The Hilltops—Experiences of Gladness and Glory

The Deeper Meaning of Friendship.

A friend in need is a friend indeed. Our Lord Jesus was our friend in our need. It was a desperate need. It could not be worse. We had been badly hurt by sin. The hurt was so bad that we could do nothing without help. Our Lord Jesus came to our help.

It was not easy for Him to be our friend. Friendship is sometimes very costly. His reputation went, and then His life. But He never flinched. He was thinking of us. Our need controlled Him. There were two controlling words in our Lord Jesus' life—passion and compassion. He had a passion for His Father. He had compassion for us. The two dovetailed perfectly. The Father had an overwhelming compassion for us. The passion for the Father in our Lord's heart included the throbbing, sobbing compassion for us. The compassion was the manward expression of the passion for the Father.

It was this compassion that controlled Him those human years. It drove Him hard along the road we've been looking at. He was driven into the Wilderness, through the years of sacrificial service, out into the grove of the olive trees, up the steep hill of Calvary, down into the depths of Joseph's tomb. Step-by-step He pushed His way along, for He was thinking of His Father and of us. The passion for the Father meant a compassion for us. Things proved worse in realization as He came up close to them, as they began to touch His very life. But He never wavered. He never flinched, for He was thinking of us. He was our Friend, our Friend in our desperate need. A friend in need is a friend indeed. It was by deeds that He met our needs.

But friendship is mutual. It has two sides, its enjoyments and its obligations. That word "friendship" has two meanings. It means fellowship. Two who are congenial in thought and aim and spirit can have sweet fellowship together as they make exchange with each other of the deep things of their spirits. This is one meaning, and a sweet, hallowed meaning, too. Then there is the other. You are in some sore need. It is a desperate emergency in your life, and out of the circle of your friends one singles himself out, and comes to your aid. At real cost or sacrifice to himself perhaps, he gives you that which meets and tides over your emergency.

This is the deeper, the rarer meaning of the word, rarer both in being less frequent and in being very precious. Fellowship friends may be many; emergency friends very, very few. And if circumstances so turn out that this man who has so rarely proven himself your friend, is himself in some emergency, and you are now in position to help him, as once he helped you, you count it not only an obligation of the highest sort, but the rarest of privileges. And with great joy you come to his help without stopping to count the cost in the doubtful, questioning way. Friendship is mutual.

Now this second, this deep, rare meaning, is the one we're using just now. It comes to include the fellowship meaning, so enriching the emergency friendship yet more. But the emphasis is on the emergency meaning of the word friendship. Our Friend was a friend in this deepest, rarest way, in the desperate emergency of our lives.

And now this Friend of ours is in need, a need so great that it is an emergency. And this seems a startling thing to say. You may think I'm indulging some rhetorical figure of speech merely. He, the Lord Jesus, in need! He is now seated at the Father's right hand in glory. He is "far above all rule and authority and power and dominion." He is the sovereign ruler of our world. How can it be said, with any soberness of practical meaning, that He is in need, and in desperate need? Yet, let me repeat very quietly, that it is even so.

He needs our co-operation. He needs the human means through which to work out His plans. The power of God has always flowed through human channels. And His plans have waited, have been delayed because He has not always been able to find men willing to let Him use them as He will. This is the only explanation of the long, weary waiting of the earth for His promised Kingdom. This, only, explains centuries of delay in the working out of His plans. The delay, the dark centuries, the misery,—these have been no part of His plan, but dead set against His plan.

"The restless millions wait the Light,

  Whose coming maketh all things new.

Christ also waits; but men are slow and late.

  Have we done what we could? Have I? Have you?"

Some unknown friend, on seeing the statue of General Gordon, as it stands facing the great desert and the Soudan at Khartoum, made these lines:

"The strings of camels come in single file,

  Bearing their burdens o'er the desert sand:

Swiftly the boats go plying on the Nile.

  The needs of men are met on every hand,

But still I wait

For the messenger of God who cometh late.

I see the clouds of dust rise in the plain,

  The measured tread of troops falls on the ear;

The soldier comes the empire to maintain,

  Bringing the pomp of war, the reign of fear,

But still I wait

The messenger of peace, he cometh late.

They set me brooding o'er the desert drear,

  Where broodeth darkness as the deepest night.

From many a mosque there comes the call to prayer;

  I hear no voice that calls on Christ for light.

But still I wait

For the messenger of Christ, who cometh late."^[95]

Following Wholly.

Our Friend is in need. The world's condition spells out the desperateness of that need. The world's need is His need. It is His world. This world is God's prodigal son. It is the passion of our Lord Jesus' heart to win His world back, and save it. That passion has been revealed most, thus far, in His going to the great extreme of dying. That passion is still unsatisfied. Yonder He sits, with scarred face and form, expecting.^[96] Bending eagerly forward with longing eyes He is expecting. He is expectantly waiting our response, expectantly waiting the day when things will have ripened on the earth for the next step in the great plan.

And down from the throne comes the same eager cry He used when amongst us on earth, "Follow Me." This is the one call, with many variations, that runs through the seven-fold message to His followers in the book of the Revelation.^[97]

But He calls for real followers. He needs Calebs, who are willing, if need be, to face a whole nation dead-bent on going the other way, and yet who never flinch but insist on following fully. Caleb's following was so unflinching, so against the current of his whole time, that it stands out with the peculiar emphasis of a six-fold mention.^[98]

Those who follow "wholly" seem scarce sometimes. I was struck recently with an utterance by a man prominent in business circles and in Christian activity for years. He was speaking of how he had been active in a certain form of Christian activity, and declared that it had never occasioned him any loss, or been a detriment to him in his business. The words had a strange, suspicious sound. The Master told those who would follow fully that they might expect much loss and detriment.

The Master was very careful to give the "if's" a prominent place. "If any man would come after Me."^[99] "If any man would serve Me let him follow Me."^[100] Those "if's" are the cautionary signals. They mean obstacles needing to be considered before one decides. We must determine whether we will take them away or not. Half-way following, part-way following, has become very common in some of the other parts of the world, where we don't live. I'll leave you to judge how it is in your own neighbourhood.

I have seen people start down this "Follow Me" road with great enthusiasm and real earnestness, singing as they go. Then the road begins to narrow a bit. The thorn bushes on the side have grown so thick and rank that they push over the sides of the road, and narrow it down. You can't go along without the thorns scratching face and hands badly as you push through.

And then you suddenly find a knife, a sharpedged knife, being held out across the road, by an unseen hand back in the bushes. The cutting edge is toward you. It is held firmly. It is clearly impossible to go on without a clash with that knife. The real meaning of that "Follow Me" is beginning to be seen now. Just ahead beyond the knife stands the Master, looking longingly, beckoning earnestly, calling still. But that knife! It takes your eyes, and the question is on in real earnest.

And it is very grievous to say that some stop there. They pitch their tents this side the knife. They may have had the courage to push through the thorns, but this knife stops them. They're not honest enough to back clear out of the road. So they hold meetings on the roadway, conferences for the deepening of the Christian life, with earnest addresses, and consecration meetings, and soft singing. And if perchance some one calls attention to the Master standing ahead there, beyond the knife, beckoning,—well, they sing louder and pray longer so as to ease their consciences a bit, and deaden unpleasant sounds, but they make no move toward striking tents and pushing on.

And many coming up along the road are hindered. The crowds, the meetings, the singing, the earnestness,—these take hold of them and keep them from discerning that all this is an obstruction in the way. The Master's ahead yonder, past that cutting knife. In a very clear voice that rises above meetings and music, He calls, "If any man would serve Me, let him follow Me, let him get in behind Me, and come up close after Me." He who would serve, he who would help, must not stop here, but push on to where the Master is beckoning,—yes, past the knife!

But there are big crowds at the half-way place, this side the knife. And there are still larger crowds looking on and sneering, sneering at those whose following hasn't got much beyond the singing stage. The outside crowd does love sincerity, and is very keen for the faults and flaws in those who call themselves followers.

The Tuning-Fork for the Best Music.

But some push on; they go forward; and as they reach the knife they grasp it firmly by the blade. Yes, it cuts, and cuts deep. But they push on, on after the Master. They turn the knife into a tuning-fork. Do you know about this sort of thing? The steel in a knife can be used to make a tuning-fork. The touch of obedience brings music out of sacrifice.

This is the only tuning-fork that can give the true pitch for that sweetest music we were speaking of a little while ago. This is a bit of the power of obedience. It can change a challenging knife into an instrument of music. This is a bit of the strategy of obedience, the fine tactics of sacrifice. The tempter with the knife would hold us back. We seize his knife from his grasp. He can never use that knife again. And we use it to make sweet music to help the marching. What was meant to hold us back now helps us forward.

This is the tuning-fork the Master used. He would have us use it, too. But each one must take it himself, out of the threatening hand that would hold us back. As the call to follow comes we must go on, no matter what it involves. No circumstance, no possible loss, no sacrifice, must hold us back, for a moment, or a step, from following where our Friend calls; only so can we be His friend.

Shall we go on all the way? Or, shall we join the company at the half-way stopping place? Well, it's a matter of your eyes, how you use them. If the knife holds your eyes, you'll never get past it. That knife is like the deadly serpent's glittering eye. If the cobra's eye can get your eye, you are held fast in that awful, deadly fascination.

If you'll lift your eyes, to the Master's face!--ah, that's the one thing, the only thing, that can hold our eyes with gaze steadier than any serpent eye. The face of Christ Jesus, torn by thorns, scarred by thongs, but with the wondrous beauty light shining out, and those great patient, pleading eyes! This it was that held that young Indian aristocrat steady, while he sold all—bit by bit, of such precious things—sold all.

This it was that held steady the young Jewish aristocrat, Paul. He never forgot the light on that caravan road north, above the shining of the sun. He never could forget it. It blinded him. He "could not see for the glory of that light." Old ambitions blurred out. Old attachments faded, and then faded clear out before the blaze of that light. Family ties, inheritance, social prestige, reputation, old friendships, old honoured standards,—all faded out in the light of Jesus' face on that northern road.

How to Follow.

Shall we take a look at that face? a long look? Shall we go? Practically going means three things, a decision, a habit and a purpose; a thoughtful, calculating decision, a daily unbroken habit, an unalterable north-star sort of purpose.

Go alone in some quiet corner where you can think things out. Look at what it may mean for you to follow, so far as you know now. Most of it you don't know, and won't know, can't know except as it works out in your life. Take a long, quiet, thoughtful look at the road. Then take a longer, quieter, steadier look at Him, Christ Jesus, once crucified for you, now seated in glory with all power, and asking you to-day to be a channel for His power. Then decide. Say, "Lord Jesus, I will follow Thee. This is my decision. By Thy help, I follow Thee, I'll follow Thee all the way." That's the first step, the decision.

As I entered the tent at Keswick one morning, a friend handed me these lines, which came to her pen at the close of a previous meeting:

"I will follow Thee, dear Master,

Though the road be rough and steep,

Thou wilt hold me lest I falter,

Thy strong hand must safely keep.

Enter in, Lord, cleanse Thy temple,

Give the grace to put away

All that hinders, all that's doubtful,

O'er my life hold blessed sway.

Use me, Master, for Thy glory,

Live out Thine own life through me,

That my life may tell the story,

And win others unto Thee.

Keep me trusting Thee, Lord Jesus,

Walking closely by Thy side,

Keep me resting, sweetly resting,

As I in Thy love abide."

Then plan your work and time so as to get a bit of time off alone every day with the Book and with the Master. The chief thing is not to pray, though you will pray. It is not for Bible study, though that will be there too. The chief thing is to meet with the Lord Jesus Himself. He will come to you through the Book. He will fit its messages into your questions and perplexities. He Himself will come to meet with you when you so go to meet with Him. You won't always realize His presence, for you may sometimes be tired. But you can recognize His presence. You can cultivate the habit of recognizing His presence.

This is your bit of daily school-time, with the Book and the Master. It will keep your spirit sweet, your heart hot, and your judgment sane and poised. This is the second thing, the habit. It is the thing you cannot get along without. It must go in daily. Without it things will tangle; your heart will cool, your spirit sometimes take on an edge that isn't good, your judgment get warped and twisted, and your will grow either wabbly or stubborn. This second thing must be put in the daily round, and kept in. It helps to hold you steady to the first thing.

Then the third is the purpose to be true to whatever the Master tells you, to be true to Himself; never to fail Him. You may flinch within your feelings. You probably will. Yet you need never flinch in action. Follow the beckoning Figure just ahead in the road, regardless of thorny bush or cutting knife. Keep your spirit sweet, your tongue gentle and slow, your touch soft and even, your purpose as inflexible as wrought steel, or as granite, as unmovable as the North Star. That's the third thing, the purpose.

And the three make the three-fold cord with which to tie you fast and hard to the Lone Man ahead. He is less alone as we follow close up. The three together help you understand the meaning of obedience. The decision is the beginning of obedience; the habit teaches you what you are to obey and gives you strength to do it; the purpose is the actual obedience in daily round, the holding true to what He has told you.

Years ago, a young Jewess, of a wealthy family, that stood high in the Jewry of New York, heard the call of the despised Nazarene. It came to her with great, gentle power, and she decided that she must follow. Her father was very angry, and threatened disinheritance if she so disgraced the family. But she remained quietly, gently, inflexibly, true to her decision. At last the father planned a social occasion at the home to which large numbers were invited. And he said to his daughter, "You must sing at this reception, and make this your disavowal of the Christian faith." And she quietly said, "Father, I will sing."

The evening came, the parlours were filled, the time came for her to sing, and all listened eagerly, for they knew the beauty of her voice. With her heart in both eyes and voice, she began singing:

"Jesus, I my cross have taken,

  All to leave and follow Thee;

Destitute, despised, forsaken,

  Thou, from hence, my all shalt be.

Perish every fond ambition,

  All I've sought, and hoped, and known:

Yet how rich is my condition!

  God and heaven are all my own."

And she passed out into the night of disinheritance on earth, "into an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away." This was her decision. She had seen His face! All else paled in its light.

Shall we go, too?

The Parable of the Finger-Posts.

Waiting is harder work than working. It takes more out of you. And it puts more into you, too, of fine-grained, steady strength, if you can stand the strain of it. And if, to the waiting is added perplexity, the pull upon your strength is much greater. It is harder to hold steady, and not break. And if the thing you've put your very life into seems at stake, that taxes the wearing power of your strength to the utmost.

Such a time, and just such a test, came to the little band of disciples after the resurrection, and before the ascension. The story of it is told in that added chapter of John's Gospel. You remember that last chapter is one of the added touches. The Gospel is finished with the finish of the twentieth chapter. Then John is led by the Spirit, to add something more. That added chapter becomes to us like an acted parable, the parable of the added touch. There is always the added touch, the extra touch of power, of love, of answer to prayer. Our Lord has a way of giving more. The prayer itself is answered, and then some added touch is given for full measure. So it is in all His dealings, when He is allowed to have His own way. He is the Lord of the added touch. He does exceeding abundantly above what we ask, or think, or expect.

These disciples were now to have one of these added touches. It was a time of sore perplexity. The crucifixion had left them dazed, stupefied. It was wholly unexpected. They were utterly at sea, with neither compass, nor steering apparatus of any sort. That Saturday to them was one of the longest, dreariest, heaviest days ever spent by any one. They had all proven untrue to their dead Friend, save one.

Then as unexpectedly came the resurrection. They're dazed again, this time with joy. They haven't taken it in yet. To say that the two shocks, each so radically different from the other, shook them tremendously, is stating it very mildly. They don't know themselves. They haven't found their feet. They haven't adjusted yet to their swiftly changing surroundings. They don't know what next. They don't know what to do.

So the old impulsive Simon in Peter proposed something. Simon, the unsteady, was much in evidence those days. Peter the rock-man hadn't arrived yet. This was Simon Peter's specialty, proposing something. He said, "Well, I'm going fishing." And the others quickly said, "We'll go along." The mere doing something would be a relief. But they caught nothing. It was a poor night. The morning brought only heavy hearts with light nets and boats. They had failed at following; now they were failing even at their old specialty, fishing. Couldn't they do anything?

In the dim light of the breaking dawn there's some One standing on the beach, a Stranger. He seems interested in them, and calls out familiarily, "Have you caught anything?" And you feel the heaviness of their hearts over something else in the shout "No." And the gentle voice calls out, with a certain tone of quiet authority in it, "Throw over on the right there, and you'll get some fish." And they cast the nets out again, feeling a strong impulse to obey this kindly Stranger, without stopping to think out why.

And at once the ropes pull so hard that it takes all their strength to hold them. It's John's quick insight that recognizes the Stranger. With his heart in his throat, in awe-touched voice, he quietly says, "It's the Lord." That's enough for Peter. He takes the shortest way to shore. He has some things to talk over with the Master. And as the seven tired men landed the fish, they found breakfast waiting on the sands. Who built that fire? Who cooked that fish? Who was thinking about them and caring for their personal needs, when they were so tired and hungry? And when breakfast was finished, there's the quiet talk together, about love and service, while the sun is climbing up in the east. It is addressed to Peter, but it is meant, too, for those who were so fleet-footed a few nights before.

All this was the answer to their perplexity. They were willing and waiting to follow, but they had failed so badly. They were not quite sure where they stood. They had no finger-posts. Now the finger-posts were put up to show the way. This fishing scene was an acted parable, the Parable of the Finger-posts.

The Lineage of Service.

Look at these finger-posts a little. There was the Lord Jesus. They didn't recognize Him. But He was there. He had a plan. He took authoritative command of their movements. He gave directions. They obeyed Him. Then came the great haul of fish. Then came the quiet talk about love and service, but with the emphasis on love.

The love was the chief thing. The service was something growing out of love. "Lovest thou Me?" Then thou mayest serve, thou hast the chiefest qualification. Our Lord gave them the lineage of service that morning. These are the generations of true service. A sight of Jesus begets love, a tender, gentle, strong, passionate thing of rarest beauty that is immortal, but must have the constant sight of its father's face for vigorous life. And love at once begets obedience, which grows strong and stout and skilled, as long as it stays in its father's presence. And obedience begets service, untiring, glad, patient service.

There are some outsiders that have come into this family, but they do not have the fine traits of blood-kin. "Duty" is one of these. It serves because it must. And at times it renders fine, high service. But its service comes out of the will, rather than out of the heart. It is ruled more by a sense of propriety, never by a passion of the heart.

"Privilege" is near of kin to duty, and it is a high-born, fine-grained thing. It serves because it is an honour to do so. It is enjoyable to be so highly connected. But it constantly needs proper recognition and appreciation of its work and skill. But these are really outsiders. They have married in, and do not have the real family traits. The one word, and the only one, that may properly be used for true service is that fine word, "passion." True service is a thing of love, a thing of the heart, a flame that pervades and permeates and envelops the whole life within and without, a fire that consumes and controls.

The Lord Jesus, His presence, His plan, His authoritative leadership, their obedience, love thrice asked and given, service because of love,—these are the finger-posts for these perplexed men. They can be put into very simple shape for our guidance. Three finger-posts hung up will include all of them,—clear vision, a spirit of obedience, a heart of tender love. These are the three great essentials of all true, full following. And there will not be, there cannot be, true full following without all three of these. There may be much earnest, honest service, much faithful plodding, and hard work, and much good done. But there's always less than the best. There is less than should be. The best results are not being got for the effort expended, except where these three are blended.

A clear vision means simply a clear understanding of things as they are, and of what needs to be done, with all the facts in that belong in. A spirit of obedience means not only an obedience in spirit, a spirited obedience, but an obedience that fits into the spirit of the Leader and His plans. And through these as a fine fragrance breathes a heart of tender undiscourageable love.

Not Quite In Is Outside.

These three things must be kept in poise. So the Master plans. This is the parable of the fishing. There are many illustrations of one only of these, or two, in action. And the bad or poor result that works out can be plainly seen. The Holy Spirit with great plainness and faithfulness has hung up cautionary signs along the road.

There may be clear vision without obedience. That is, a clear understanding of the Master's plan, but a failure to fit in. That will mean a dimming vision. And if persisted in, it will mean spiritual disaster. The great illustration of this is Judas. Judas had as clear a vision, in all likelihood, as the others when he was chosen for discipleship, and later for apostleship. There was the possibility of a John in Judas, even as there was the possibility of a Judas in John. Both are in every man. But Judas was not true to the vision he had. He wanted to use the Master to further his own plans and advantage. And the vision slowly blurred and dimmed, as the under nature was given the upper hand. The Master's clear insight recognized the demon spirit that Judas had allowed to come in, though Judas did not.^[101] Then came the dastardly act of betrayal. And Judas has been held up to universal scorn and condemnation.

But Judas isn't so lonely, if you think into the thing a bit. He only put personal advantage above loyalty to the Lord Jesus. He simply preferred his own plans to the Master's plans. That was all. And he tried to force his own through, without suspecting how the thing would turn out, and how tremendously much was involved. The great events being worked out have thrown his contemptible act into the limelight of history. But the act itself wasn't uncommon. Possibly you may know some one living quite near, with some of this same sort of trait.

One of the saddest things in the record of Christian leadership is just this, clear vision with a gradually lessening obedience, then a gradually dimming vision, and that decrease of both increasing, as the slant down increases. The old-time motions in public ministering continue, more or less mechanically, but the power has long since passed away. And sadder yet, like the strong man of old, these shorn men wist it not. One's lips refuse to repeat the word "Judas" of them, even in the inner thoughts. Yet these class themselves under the same description,—clear vision without full obedience to it; personal plans and preferences put above loyalty to the Master.

A second illustration is that of King Saul. Clear vision, failure to obey, forcing himself to wrong action to keep his popularity, rebellion, stubbornness,—these are the simple successive steps in his story. And the black night falls upon the utter spiritual disaster of his career, as he lies prone on the earth before the witch.

These two characters become formulas; they need only to be filled in with other names to make accurate modern biography of some.

There may be clear vision with make-believe or partial obedience. It hurts to speak of such a thing. The word "hypocrisy" is a very hard one to get out at the lips. It should never be used except to help, and then very, very sparingly, and only in humblest spirit, and with earnest, secret prayer. Ananias and Sapphira quickly come to mind here. They wanted men to think them wholly surrendered, though they knew they were not. That was all; not so unusual a thing, after all. There are sore temptations here for many. The swiftness of the punishment that came does not mean that their wrong was worse than that of others who do the same thing. That modern religious lying of this sort is not as quickly judged merely tells the marvellous patience of God.

There may be clear vision and obedience without love. This means a hard, cold, stern righteousness. It is truth without grace. Nothing can be made to seem more repulsive. One incident in Elijah's career furnishes the illustration here. Let us say such a thing very softly of such a mighty man of God, and say it in fewest words, and only to help. He was a man of marvellous faith, and prayer, and bold daring, in the midst of a very crooked and perverse generation. Israel was at its very lowest moral ebb thus far.

Elijah had a clear understanding of what should be done to check the awful impurity which was sweeping over the nation like a flood-tide. He was true to his conviction in sending the four hundred priests of horribly licentious worship to their death. But was he brokenhearted over them? Was he utterly broken down with grief as he led them to the little running brook of Kishon for the nation's sake? God touched the sore spot, when, down at Horeb, the mount of thunder and fire, He spoke to this man of fire and thunder in that exquisitely soft sound of gentle stillness. This was a new revelation of God to this stern prophet of righteousness.

There may be a sort of letter-obedience, a formal obedience to the vision you have. In one's own estimation, there may seem to be a knowledge of what is right, and a self-satisfied doing of it. There may be a painstaking attention to the forms of obedience, and a self-righteous content in doing the required things. Is this the underlying thought in Peter's self-complacent remark, "Lo, we have left all and followed Thee.^[102] We're so much better than this rich young ruler who couldn't stand the test you put to him. We——"? Poor, self-confident Peter! When the fire test did come, and come so hot, how his "we" did crumble!

"Light Obeyed Increaseth Light."

There may be obedience without clear vision. That is, there may be a doing of what is thought to be right, but without a clear understanding of what is the right thing to do. This results in fanaticism. Moses killing the Egyptian and hiding his body in the sand had no clear vision of God's plan. He knew something was wrong, and that something needed to be done. And so he proposed doing something. And the poor Egyptian who happened in his way that day felt the weight of his zeal. It's a not uncommon way of attempting to righten wrongs. He forgot that there is a God, and a plan, and that he who does not work into the plan of God is hitting wrong. There has been a lot of wreckage scattered along this beach.

Saul persecuting the Christians is another illustration here. He is a sad, striking example of conscientiousness without sufficient knowledge, of earnestness without clear light. He was conscientiously doing the wrong thing, as earnestly as he could, supposing it to be the right thing. John wanted to call down fire from heaven and burn up some people that didn't fit in with their plans.^[103] Earnest intensity without sufficient light has kindled a good many fires of this sort.

Sometimes this does not go as far as hurtful fanaticism, but leads to blundering and confusion and delay. Abraham was acting without clear light when he yielded to Sarah's plan of compromise for getting an heir.^[104] A bit of quiet holding of her suggestion before God for light would have cleared his mind. The result was wholly bad,—a confusion in his own mind, a mental cloudiness about God's plan and promise, an element of discord introduced in the tribal life, and a delay of many years, apparently, before the conditions were ripe for the coming of the heir of faith, on God's own plan.

Peter eating with his Gentile Christian brothers, and then refusing to eat with them, when some Jewish Christians came down from Jerusalem, made very bitter feeling in the Church at Antioch, for a time.^[105] Paul's clearer light helped. Time spent in waiting for clearer light is always time wisely spent, even though we may seem slow.

There may be love without clear vision. The love makes intense desire to do something, but with no clear idea of what would best be done. Peter's awkward sword-thrust was an attempt to help, because of real love in his heart for his Master, now in personal danger. The Master's quiet healing touch recognized the love, and also rebuked and corrected the hasty, ill-advised action. But there's worse yet here, mean contemptible cowardice. Peter actually denying his relation with his Friend and Master, and making his denial seem more natural by the addition of the oaths that the maid well knew no follower of this Jesus could have uttered—what mean contemptible cowardice! But go gently there in using such hard words. He was only afraid of being hurt. He merely wanted to save himself. That isn't such an uncommon thing. Haven't you sometimes known something of this sort—among others?

The cowardly nine, making a new record for fleet-footedness, down the road, in the dark, were only doing the same thing in more cowardly, less-spirited fashion. These men loved Jesus. No one may doubt that. But there was no clear understanding of that night's doings, though the Master had faithfully and plainly tried to tell them. Fear for their own safety overcame the real love in their hearts for the Man they forsook that dark night.

Clear vision and love without obedience is—impossible! Where there is no obedience, or faulty obedience, either the vision has blurred or dimmed, or the love is burning low.

Clear vision and loving obedience mean power, sweet, gentle, fragrant, helpful power. It means a grateful crowd, and a pleased Master, who has been able once again to reach the crowd.

Clear vision and love as a passion, an intense passion, means irresistible power. That is to say it means a perfect human medium through which our Lord Jesus can act and manifest Himself. And this is the real meaning of power, power to the full,—Jesus Christ in free action. John, the fisherman, had a gradually but steadily clearing vision. He did not understand fully. But he understood enough to know that there was more to come which would clear things up. He could follow where He did not understand. His love for the Man controlled, while his understanding was clearing. He went in "with Jesus" that awful night. I imagine he never left His side. Can we ever be grateful enough that at least one of us was true that night!

There was the same danger as with the others, and it was made more acute by His simple, open stand at his Friend's side. But love, with at least some understanding, held him steady. He could understand that Jesus must be doing the right thing, even though he could not understand the run of events that centred about Jesus.

The intensity that would call down fire, changed, under the influence of the changing, clearing vision, into an intensity of love. It was a mellower, gentler, evener, but not less intense flame. The disciple whom Jesus loved became the disciple of love. Love and vision worked upon each other from earliest times with him. Love made the vision clearer, the clearing vision made the love stronger, till they worked together into a perfect blend.

Paul's unmistakable vision on the Damascus road brought a passion of love, and an answering obedience, that swept him like a great flame. The fire-marks of that flame could be found all over the Roman Empire. He made mistakes doubtless, but these but made the trend of his whole life stand out the more. Paul was a wonderful combination of brain and heart and will, held in remarkable poise. The finest classic on love is from his pen. John could love. Paul could love, and could tell about love.

But a peculiar tenderness comes into one's heart as we remember that there was just one Man who held these three in perfect poise. And let us not forget that though He was more than man, yet it was a man, one of ourselves, who so held these three in such fine balance. It was a human poise, even as planned by the Father for the human life. The clear vision early began coming to Him,^[106] and it became clearer and fuller and unmistakable until it had had its fulfilment. Obedience was the touchstone of all His life, from Nazareth to Olivet. And who, like Him, had the heart of tender love, the heart that was ever moved with compassion at sight of need, the heart that broke at the last under the sore grief of its burden of love?

The Olivet Vision.

Shall we take a moment more to look at these three finger-posts a little more closely? Just what is meant by a clear vision? I could say at once that it means a vision of our Lord Jesus Christ. And yet that language has sometimes been used in a vague sort of way. And some of us have taken it in a vague indefinite way, and not thought into its practical meaning. Clear vision here means an understanding of who Christ Jesus is, and what He is, and what plans He has. Then it means that that understanding is so clear that it becomes intense, intense to the point of being overwhelming. That is, it becomes the dominant thing that controls your thinking, and affections, and actions,—your life.

I think I may say correctly that the place for getting such a clear, full vision of Christ Jesus is Olivet. Olivet is a good place to pitch your tent for a little while, until your vision clears. Then you'll not stay there, though you may return to keep the lines of your vision clear and clean; you will be down in the valleys with the crowds.

One day the Master led His disciples out to the Mount of Olives. It was the last time they were together. And the group of men stand there talking, the eleven grouped about the One. He is talking with them quietly and earnestly. Then, to their utter amazement, His feet are off the ground, He is rising upward in the air, then higher, and higher, until a bit of cloud moves across, and they see Him no more. This is all you would see at a distance.

But let us come a bit nearer, and stand with them, and listen, and watch. Olivet is the last bit of earth to feel the presence of the Master's feet. Off yonder to the west, down in the valley, you see a clump of trees; that is Gethsemane, the place of the bloody sweat and the tense agony of spirit. Across the valley, still looking west, lies the city, outside whose wall is the little knoll called Calvary, where Jesus gave His life out. Over here to the east and south lies little Bethany, which speaks of His resurrection power. And a bit farther off are the bare wilds sloping down,—that is the place of the sore temptation. Far away to the north, up in the clouds, lies the snow-clad mountain, beyond your outer vision, yet coming now to your inner vision, where the God within shined out through the Man.

But while a quick glance takes all this in, your eyes are caught and held by the Man in the midst. His presence embodies and intensifies all that these places suggest. His face bears the impress of the Wilderness, and of the Garden. The scars plainly there tell of Calvary, as no piece of geography ever can. His mere presence tells unmistakably of the resurrection. And you know who He is, and what. He made the world and breathed His breath of life into man's nostrils. Later He came in amongst us as one of ourselves. He was tempted like as we, suffered like as we never suffered, gave His life for us, went down into death, rose up again out of death. This is the Jesus of Olivet.

But the action of His face and pose are part of the sight. His eyes are looking outward. The set of His face is out. His hands point out. And He is talking; listen: He is talking about a "world". And the outward turn of face and eyes and pointing hand become the emphasis of that word, "world." He died for a world. He is thinking about a world. He has a plan of action for a world.

But another word gets your ear—"ye." He is thinking about these disciples, about His followers. He has a plan of action for them. And these two plans, for the world, for their lives, these two are tied up together. And a third word stands out—"I." "I am with you, I am in command." And now three things stand out together, a world-plan, a plan for the follower's life fitting into the world-plan, and in the midst—Jesus, the Christ, my Saviour, my Lord. This is the Olivet vision. This, the clear, full vision: of Jesus, crucified, risen, empowered; of His world-plan; of His plan for my life as part of the world-plan.

Olivet faces four ways. Backward, it points to the sympathy, the humanness, the suffering, the cross, of Jesus. Upward, it looks to Himself, now sitting above the clouds at the Father's right hand, "far above all rule, and authority, and power, and dominion, and every name that is named," with "all things in subjection under His feet." Outward, it reaches to the world He died for, and plans for, and is still brooding over with more than a mother's love. Forward, it anticipates eagerly the time when He will come back to finish up what He began, and we are to continue. When He returns it will be to this same Olivet.^[107] He picks up the line of action exactly where He left it. Olivet is to know a second pressure of those feet.

This is the clear, full vision, the three-fold vision we need and must have for true following: Himself, His world-plan, His plan for each one's life. This means seeing things as they are. They fall into true perspective. You see how disproportioned and grotesque the common perspective of earth is. You see things through His eyes. His eyes take out of yours the personal colouring, the colour blindness of personal interest and advantage which so strangely and strongly affect all our sight.

We need frequent visits to Olivet's top, until constant looking at its outlooking landscape, at Himself, fills and floods our eyes. We need the quiet time alone with Himself and His Word, and some map-picture of His world, as a habit, until these, Himself, and His word, and His world, are burned into eyes and heart, until they fire as a sweet fever the whole life.

The Spirit of Obedience.

Out of the vision comes the spirit of obedience. We have spoken of the act of obedience, and the habit of obedience, but deeper down is the spirit of obedience, which lies under act and habit. I have used the words, "spirit of obedience," rather than simply the word, "obedience," because obedience sometimes stands for a bondage to rules, a slavery to things. The obedience itself must be deeper than rule or outward thing. The spirit of obedience sees into the spirit of the rule, and through the outward thing, and floods it with a new spirit of life. This spirit of obedience is the one finger-post found oftenest along this road. So only can we be true to the vision. And obedience itself is not true obedience, nor true to the vision, save as it is a love-obedience. Real obedience breathes in the spirit of the One being obeyed. It breathes out the love-spirit of him who obeys.

The touchstone of the "Follow Me" life is not need, nor service, nor sacrifice. The need is felt to the paining point. The service is given joyously to the limit of strength. The sacrifice is yielded to to the bleeding point. But these all come as they come, through and out of obedience. Yet need is the controlling thing, too, but not the need as we see it, but as He sees it, who sees all, and feels most deeply. The need is best met, the service best given, the sacrifice most healing in its power, as each grows out of obedience.

The standard of obedience is three-fold, the Word of God, the Spirit of God, and one's own judgment and spirit-insight. These three are meant to fit together. This is the natural result when things are, even measurably, as they should be. When God is allowed to sway the life as He wishes, these three fit and blend perfectly. The Word of God taken alone will lead to superstitious regard for a book and to a cramped judgment and action. To say that we are guided by the Spirit, without due regard for the Book He has been the principal one in writing, leads to fanaticism, or at least to ill-advised, unbalanced, unnatural opinions and action.

Naturally one's own judgment and spirit-insight play a large part, for they make the personal decision, they interpret both Word and Spirit to us. It is through one's judgment and spirit-insight that the Holy Spirit and the Word influence the decision and action. The great essential is the habitual, quiet, broad, thoughtful study of God's Word, with the will and life utterly yielded to the Holy Spirit. So one's spirit is trained to understand, and one's judgment to form its conclusions. The Holy Spirit makes us understand God's purpose as revealed in His Word, and fits this into the need of practical life. Obedience, intelligent and full, depends upon the quiet time alone with God over His Word.

I want to add something more here. It is something startling. There are no break-downs in the path of obedience. I say that very softly, as a guilty sinner in the matter of break-downs. I remember that the record of Christian service is like one continuous record of break-downs, broken bodies, wrecked nerves, sometimes wrecked minds. And I am not saying it to criticize any one, except it be myself. Out of a long personal experience of constant going, unwise overwork, and serious break-downs, I am but confessing my own sins, when I say there are no break-downs in the path of obedience. Does that mean that there is much earnest service that we have not been told to do? And the answer must be a very gentle, but very clear, "Yes."

But the Man in command has perfect knowledge of what you can do. And He never asks you to do anything beyond your strength. Or, if He does need you to meet some emergency beyond your strength, He gives the strength required. He sends in a fresh supply of resurrection life to repair the waste of your body, and then, too, He calls into use strength, resources, talents, that you have not known you had. Now I know that if this be taken seriously, it will lead some to a heart-searching time alone with the Master. I am sure that if obedience alone is to be the key-note, it will mean many a readjustment. And it will mean, too, a new flood stream of power flowing through and out as the connecting parts are re-adjusted.

There's a helpful literal reading of a verse in Hebrews.^[108] "Now the God of peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great Shepherd of the sheep, with the blood of an eternal covenant, put you in joint [with Himself] to do His will in every good work, working in you [or through you] that which is well-pleasing in His sight." Obedience puts us in joint with Him, if we are out. It keeps us in joint; then the power flows from Him, through that joint, out where our life touches.

Obedience is really a music word. It is the rhythmic swinging together of two wills, His and ours. Rhythm of action is power. Rhythm of colour is beauty. Rhythm of sound is music. But it's really all music. For power is music of action. Beauty is music to the eye. Rhythmic sound is music to the ear and heart. If there might be more of this music, He and we in perfect accord, how the crowds would be caught by its melody and come eagerly to listen.

The Heart of Love.

And out of the vision comes the heart of love. The sight of the Lord Jesus' face begets love; and love begets obedience. But obedience never can keep true away from its father. It is never true full obedience except it have the throbbing heart of love in it. This is the unfailing mark. It's so easy to fail here. Yet "love never faileth." The classical Thirteenth of First Corinthians becomes an indictment. We know it better in the Book than in life. "Love suffereth long, ... envieth not ... is not puffed up; doth not behave itself unbecomingly or inconsistently, seeketh not even its own, is not provoked." Love "beareth" with "all things" in the one loved, which it would gladly have different, "believeth all" possibly good "things" of him, "hopeth" for "all" desirable "things" in him, "endureth all things" in him that hurt and pain. "Love never faileth." In conversation one day with an unusually earnest worker in the Orient, we were talking of these things. His work was beset by many sore perplexities. "Ah," he said, "there is where I have failed. I have not had the heart of love." And I thought how many of us could say the same thing.

There are in the Bible three great illustrations of the heart of love. As Moses came down from the presence of God, and found the people dancing about the golden calf, he was hotly indignant. But as he goes back to plead with God, the greatness of his love and grief comes out. In God's presence their sin is seen to be so much greater. He cries, "Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold. Yet now if Thou wilt forgive their sin——" And a great sob breaks the sentence abruptly off, and it is never finished. The possibility seems to come to his mind, in this holy presence, that such sin, by these so greatly blest, could not be forgiven. And that seems to him unbearable. "And if not," if it cannot be forgiven, "blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy Book; but don't blot them out."^[109]

In the beginning of the great Jew section of Romans, Paul is speaking of the intense pain of heart he had over the unbelief and stubbornness of his racial kinsfolk. He says, "I have great sorrow and unceasing pain in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren's sake, my kinsmen," that so they might not be accursed.^[110] Yet neither Moses nor Paul could so sacrifice himself for another's sin. "No man can by any means redeem his brother, nor give to God a ransom for him."^[111] But Jesus, the pure, sinless one, was blotted out. He was made a curse. Moses and Paul would if they could. Jesus both could and did. Was there ever such a heart of love! And that heart was greatest in its action of love when it broke.

A simple story has come to me, I cannot remember where, of a woman in southern China in the province of Kwangtung. She had a serious illness and was taken to a mission hospital in Canton for treatment. There for the first time she heard of Christ, of His love and death. And that story coming so new and fresh transformed her, as she opened her heart to the Saviour. And a great peace came into her heart, and showed plainly in her face. Then her thought began turning to her own village. Not a soul there knew of this wondrous Saviour. If they but knew. But what could she do, her illness was very serious.

The next time the physician came by she asked him how long she would live if she stayed there. He said that he did not know, but he thought about six months. And how long if she left the hospital and returned home. He didn't know; maybe three months. And after he had gone she quietly announced that she was going home. And those about her were greatly astonished. "Why," they said, "you'll lose half your life!" And the tears came into her eyes, as a gentle smile overspread her poor worn face, and she simply said, "Jesus gave His whole life for me; don't you think I'm glad to give half mine for Him?" I don't know how long she lived. The story didn't say, but it did tell that most of the people in her village knew a long life, even an everlasting life, because of her simple telling of the Gospel story.

There were the three essentials, though never so thought of or analyzed by her. She had the vision of Jesus Christ her Saviour, then of those who had never heard of Him, and then of her own part in the plan of telling them. The impulse to tell them was obeyed gladly. And the heart of love counted not her life dear unto herself if only others might be told of this wondrous Christ Jesus.

God's Problem.

God needs men. That is the tremendous fact that stands out in every generation. There never has been a corner since Adam walked out of Eden where that need was not thrust into some man's face, and thrust into God's face. It is being thrust into our faces to-day as ever before, and as never before. For the ends of the earth are come upon us, for the helping touch of our hands, or for the drag-back to be overcome by some one's else helping touch.

God is a needy God. That fact is spelled out by every page of this old Book of His. And it is spelling itself out anew by the book of the life of the race whose current chapter is being written by our generation. God's wonderful plan for man lies at the root of His need. In His great graciousness He made us in His own image. That is, He gave to us the right of full free choice. He has never infringed upon that image, that right of choice, by so much as a whispered breath or the moving of a hair. He gave man the sovereignty of the earth and its life. And every move God has made among men on earth has been through a man, and through his free consent.

The tragedy of sin has intensified God's need tremendously. It has intensified everything, man's misunderstanding and hatred of God, the love of God's heart for man, and the distance between the two. It is constantly intensifying pain, sorrow, man's need, and the blight upon nature. It increases God's difficulty in working out His will of love for man. For it makes it increasingly hard to get even Christian men to see things through God's eyes, and gladly give themselves up to His purposes.

Poor God! Such a needy God! Rich in power, in character, in the loving worship of the upper world, in His love for all, rich beyond power of human calculation; so poor in the response of men to the wooing of His heart. So poor in the glad, intelligent co-operation of those who trust Him for salvation in the next world, but are content with very little of it in this. So needy in the lack of those who bring love and life, intellect and wealth, and lay all at His feet.

This has been God's problem, to respect the rights He has given man, and yet work through him in carrying out His great plan of love. This is the warp into which the whole of the Bible fabric is woven—the tragedy of sin, of sin-hurt, sin-stubborned men, the patience of God in wooing men back, and His exquisite tact and unlimited patience is always working through men's consent, and through human channels.

To-day He comes to you and me, pleadingly asking us to help Him in His passionate plan for His race. Some few have the gift of leadership. Most of us are moulded to follow. He needs both leader and follower. He needs the life. He needs the love. Through these, whether in prominent place or shadowed, in leadership or in following along some well-beaten path, through these—the life, the love, He works in His great simple plan for overcoming the tragedy of sin. That plan includes the whole race. God has no favourites among the nations. When the hour is ripe for an advance step, a man is found ripened for leadership. This is the real final explanation of certain great leaders. It was not the man himself alone, but the coming together of the time, the man, and the plan; the time for an advance step, the man who had yielded to God up to the ripening point, the plan of God. And the decisive thing was the plan of God.

President Finney used to insist very earnestly that revivals followed a fixed law of action. When men would with all their hearts fit into the great laws of grace, there would follow the gracious revival results even as effect follows cause in nature; and without question he was wholly right. In addition to this, however, there is a further fact to note, of which Finney himself was a striking illustration. In God's broader plans for the race when the time is ripe for an advance step, He has some man in training for leadership in that hour, and so ripeness of time and of man and of plan come together. But the chief factor at work is God Himself.

This, and only this, explains fully certain great religious movements and leaders. Such men in later centuries as Luther in Germany, Zwingli in Switzerland, Calvin in France and Switzerland, Wesley and Whitefield in England, and Finney in both America and England. Only this can satisfactorily explain Moody's unusual career. He was a man of strong native parts, of marked individuality, and of utter surrender to God. And this combination would have brought great results under any circumstances, but it does not explain the great movement in which he was the leader. It was God's hour for an advance movement, the man so untrained in men's schools, was slowly made ready in God's school, and man and hour and plan fitted together. But the chief emphasis remains on the fact that it was the time in God's gracious plan for an advance. And the nations of the earth have been feeling the blessed impulse of that advance ever since.

But the leaders are few; and what could they do without the great mass of followers? God needs the faithful ones, unknown by name, hidden away in quiet corners, each the centre of a group which is touching a larger group, and so on, ever widening. Everything turns on this,—letting God have the full use of us; living as though God were the realest thing in this matter-of-fact, every-day world; going on the supposition that the Bible is indeed His Word, and is a workable book for daily problems and needs, the one workable book; making everything bend toward getting His will done. When we get up into His presence, this will be found to have been the one thing worth while. When the race story has been all told, the biography of earth brought to its last page, this will be the one thing that will stand out, and remain, that we let Him use us just as He would, and that we have brought everything at our disposal to bear on doing His will of love.

He comes to you and me afresh to-day with His old-time winsome patience, asking the use of us. He always thinks of us in two ways, for our own sakes and for our help in reaching the others. Followers are messengers. Some are special messengers in speech. But all are messengers in their lives; that is, they are meant to be. This is our Lord's plan. He wants us to live the message.

That old word "witness" has grown to mean three things, that you know something, that you tell it, and that you tell it with your life. Every time the word witness is used in the New Testament it stands for some form of the word underneath from which our English word "martyr" comes. We have come to associate that word "martyr" with the idea of giving one's life in a violent way for the truth believed. This is the meaning that has grown into the word. But the practical meaning of this martyr-witness word goes a bit deeper yet than this. It is not merely giving the life out in the crisis of dying, but that the whole life is being given out in a continual martyrdom, that is, a continual witnessing. These words, follower, messenger, witness, run together. In following we are witnesses. We know something about this Man who goes before, a blessed something that has entered into the marrow and joints of one's being. We tell it. We tell it chiefly by living it. We are messengers. The whole life is a message of what Christ Jesus has done for us, and is to us.

A Confession of Faith in Wood and Nails.

Now, this is the thing—this living it—that God has always counted on most. There are in the Bible most striking illustrations of lived or acted messages. One man actually preached a sermon nearly fifteen months long merely by the position of his body. You would call that a long sermon, but it had the desired result, at least partly. The man got the ears of the people. They were hardened sermon listeners. The talked sermons had no effect. So they were given an acted sermon.

I think it may help to look at a few of the old-time followers. The one chief thing that marked these men was that they lived the messages. They experienced the truth they stood for, sometimes to the extent of much suffering. This experience became part of the man's life. And this it was that God used as His message. You cannot be a follower fully without the thing taking your very life, and taking it to the feeling, deep-feeling, point.

One of the earliest of these followers was Enoch. His brief story is like the first crocus of spring coming up through the cold snow, like a pretty flower growing up out of the thin crack of earth between great stones. There was such a contrast with the surroundings. It is in the Fifth of Genesis, one of the most tiresome chapters in the whole Bible. Its tiresome monotony is an evidence of its inspiration; for it is a picture of life with God left out. There are five chapters in Enoch's biography. He was born; with that he had nothing to do. Like his lineal descendants and his neighbours he just "lived" for a while, went through the usual physical and mental and social motions of life, no more. Then a babe came into his household, a fresh act of God, a fresh call of God, one of God's loudest calls. This was the turning point. He must have heard and answered that call, for a new life began. He "walked with God." This became his chief trait. It stands in contrast with his former life. Before he merely lived; now he was on a higher plane, he walked with God. The final chapter,—"God took him." They two had a long walk one day along the hilltops—or was it only a short walk?—and Enoch never came back. God kept him.

Now, in all this Enoch was God's messenger to the whole race. Jude speaks of his prophesying or preaching. But the emphasis of this simple Genesis biography is not on his preaching but on himself. That man walking about in his simple daily touch of heart with God,—that was the message. It wasn't an easy thing to do. The whole set of his time was against it. It was an evil time; impurity and violence were its outstanding traits. Enoch's life cut straight across the grain of his time. He was the leader of the first racial family, the chief one in the direct line from Adam. And he insisted on living habitually a simple, holy, pure life, walking with God, never out of touch. Following meant keeping in step with God, never missing step.

And this was talked about. Every one knew it. He was doubtless felt to be out of touch with his time. And he was, blessedly out of touch. It was probably never harder to walk with God. But he did it. This is how he helped God. This is what he was asked to do. God was speaking to the whole race through this great man's simple habit of life. And He spoke still louder when, one day, He took him away. Enoch's absence was the talk of the race. "He was not found." Clearly they looked for him, looked everywhere and discussed him and his peculiar manner of life, his strange disappearance, and his freedom from death.

So he met God's need. He became God's medium of communication to the entire race, simply in what he was, and so it is that most of us may help God. And if we will, He will be less needy, for He will speak through our lives to all whom we touch. Following means walking with God. So we help God in His need.

And Enoch helped God to get Noah. The touch of Enoch is on his great-grandson. Grace is hereditary, when there's enough of it. Enoch had the boldness to set a new standard. It was easier for Noah to reach up toward it, when it was already set. Now, Noah was asked to do something more. Enoch walked with God, the personal life was the one thing. Noah walked with God, and did something more.

He was asked to believe something unusual. It was something that could be believed only by accepting God's word against every other circumstance and probability; that is, that a flood was coming to cover the whole earth, and destroy the race. And he was asked further to put his belief into the shape of an immense house-boat probably built where it wouldn't float except such a flood did come. That huge boat was his confession of faith. He acted his faith. It would be a costly thing, perhaps taking all Noah's wealth, and taking some years to build. That belief was about the unlikeliest thing imaginable from every natural standpoint, with God left out. And God is practically left out, except as a very last questionable consideration, then, and ever since, and to-day. Probably Noah was the butt of gossip and ridicule, quite possibly of scandal and reproach, year after year, by the whole race; and he would feel it, and feel it for his family's sake. That boat and its dreaming builder were the standing joke of the time. He was regarded as a fool, a fanatic, a poor, unbalanced enthusiast, building his gigantic boat on dry land! Perhaps some regretted that he brought the cause of religion into reproach by being such an extremist.

Yet the only thing he did was to believe God's word, and to shape his conduct accordingly. He simply did as God asked. He heard God correctly. His ears were trained to hear. He did what God wanted, regardless of what people thought. That was how he helped God in His need. The race was saved through this fresh start, else it had burned out long ago. Following meant a true life lived, and faith in God expressed in wood and nails, and in good money paid out, while men met him coldly on the road, or jeered.

Befriending God.

Long years afterward there was another man who helped God so decidedly that he became known as "the friend of God." And the word "friend" is used this time in the emergency sense. He did the thing God asked him to do, and this helped God in a plan He was working out for the whole race. God had to have a man. Abraham was willing to be the man. And in that he became God's helpful friend. The thing God asked him to do seems very simple, and yet it was a radical thing for this man to do. He was to leave his father's family, and all his kinsfolk, and live a separated life, both from them and from all others. It is almost impossible for the West to realize how close and strong family ties are in the Orient. Separation meant an unusual, sad break in holiest ties. God was trying a new step in His fight against sin. He had separated the leader of sin from all others.^[112] He had removed all the race except a seed of good.^[113] Both of these plans had failed, through man's failure. Now a new, farther-reaching plan is begun. A man is separated from all others, to become the seed of a new nation, a faith nation, which should be a different people from others, embodying in themselves God's ideals for all.

Abraham is asked to become a separated man in a peculiar sense, separate outwardly, separate in his worship of the true God, and separate in living a faith life. It was to be a life dependent wholly on God regardless of outer circumstance or difficulty. There was a training time of twenty-five years before Abraham was ready for the next step,—the bringing of the next in line of this new faith stock. Separation, then still further separation, an open stand for God in the land of strangers, then a series of close personal tests, each entering into the marrow of his life,—this was the training to get the man ready to be a faith father to his son, the next in line of a faith people. And the hardest test of all came after the child of faith had grown to manhood. Then he became a child of faith in his own experience, as well as in his father's. Following meant separation. It meant believing God against the unlikeliest circumstances, against nature itself, hoping in the midst of hopelessness. Everything spelled out "hopelessness." God alone spelled out "hope." He took God against everything else. It meant going to school to God, until he could be used as God planned. And Abraham consented. He followed. He helped God in His need. He befriended God; he became His friend in His need.

But every generation needs men. Each new step in the plan needs a new man. In a sore crisis of that plan, long after, another man's name, Moses, is known to us, only because he singled himself out as being willing to let God use him. In his unconscious training, the training of circumstances into which it was natural to fit, he was peculiarly prepared for the future task. Bred in Egypt as the son of the ruler's household, he received the best school training of his day, with all the peculiar advantages of his position in the royal family.

Following meant more to Moses, in what he gave up of worldly advantage, than to any other named in the Bible record. Egypt was the world empire of that day. Moses was in the innermost imperial circles, and could easily have become the dominant spirit of the court, if not the successor to the Pharaoh's throne. But he heard the call. His mother helped train his ears. He answered "Yes" to God, without knowing how much was involved. Following meant giving up, then a long course of training in the university of the desert, with the sheep and the stars and—God. It meant a repeated risking of his life not only in his bold dealings with Pharaoh, but afterward with the nation-mob, mob-nation, whose leader, and father and school-teacher, and everything else, he had to be for forty years. And it meant much on the other side, too.

"Had Moses failed to go, had God

  Granted his prayer, there would have been

  For him no leadership to win;

No pillared fire; no magic rod,

No smiting of the sea; no tears

  Ecstatic, shed on Sinai's steep;

  No Nebo, with a God to keep

His burial; only forty years

  Of desert, watching with his sheep."

A Yet Deeper Meaning.

When we turn to the leaders of the latter years of the Kingdom time of God's teacher-nation, the prophetic time, there is one thing that stands out sharply in the men God used. It was this, a man's inner personal life and experience were made use of to an unusual degree. It is as though the sacred inner life were sacrificed. The holy privacies were laid bare to the public gaze. The sweets of the inner holy of holies of the personal life were given up. The people were so far God-hardened that only acted preaching, lived messages, that took it out of one's very life, with pain in the taking, had any effect.

This is most markedly so in the case of Hosea, whose experience it seems almost if not wholly impossible for us to take in.^[114] It is true that the Christianized West has conceptions of personal privacy to which the East is a stranger. Yet, even so, the way in which these men were asked to yield up their inner personal lives, must have been a most marked thing to these Orientals. For God used it as the one thing apparently, the extreme thing, to touch their hearts with His appeal.

Isaiah had just such peculiar experiences. The birth of a son is planned for, and told of for the purpose of making more emphatic the message to the dull ears and slow heart of the nation.^[115] His two sons bore names of strange meaning, as a means of teaching truths that were peculiarly distasteful to the people. Isaiah takes one of these strangely named sons as he goes to deliver a message to the king. And the son standing by his father's side is a reminder in his name of a disagreeable truth.^[116] A little later the man is actually required to go about barefooted, and without clothing sufficient for conventional respectability, and to continue this for three years.^[117] When we remember that he was not an erratic extremist, but a sober-minded, fine-grained gentleman of refinement and of a good family, it helps us to understand a little how hard-hearted and stubborn were a people that could be appealed to only in such a way.

And it tells us, too, how utterly surrendered was the man who was willing thus to give up his private personal life. How much easier to have been simply an earnest, eloquent preacher, with his inner personal life lived free from public gaze, a thing sacred to himself. Following meant the giving up of the sacred private life to a strangely marked degree, for God to use.

Even more marked are the experiences that Jeremiah was asked and consented to go through. It would seem as though the repeated conspiracies against his life, the repeated imprisonments in vile dungeons dangerous to health and life, and the shame of being put in the public stocks before the rabble, would have been much for God to ask, and for a man to give. But there is something that goes much farther and deeper into the very marrow of his life than these. He is bidden not to marry, not to have a family life of his own.^[118] And he obeyed. This was to be so only and solely as a message to the people. A message couched in such startling language they might listen to. Again we must remember the Oriental setting to appreciate the significance of this. In the East the unit of society is not the individual but the family. A man's marriage is planned for by the family, as a means of building up the family. To be childless and especially son-less was felt to be peculiarly unfortunate, almost bordering on disgrace.

This meant for Jeremiah not only the loss of personal joys and delights, but that his line would be broken off from his father's family. He would be without heir, or future, in the family history. So following meant going yet deeper into the inner personal life, for the sake of God's plan. This giant's strength is revealed in nothing more than in his tear-wet laments over his people. And he gave all this strength to following. He said "Yes" to God's need and request, though it must have taken his very life to say it.

But Ezekiel was asked to do something even beyond this. He was the messenger of God to the colony of Hebrew exiles in Assyria. His accounts of the visions of God reveal a remarkable power of detailed description, and a remarkably strong mentality. Strange to say, these people in captivity are yet harder to reach than were their fathers in their native land. Yet, not strange, for the human heart is the same when it won't open to the purifying of the upper currents of air. Here the man himself literally became the message. He actually lay upon his left side for thirteen months and then on his right side for six weeks longer.

During all that time he ate food that was particularly repugnant, and it was carefully weighed out, and the water as carefully measured out for his use. He had to rise, no doubt, for various reasons, but the bulk of the time for nearly fifteen months he lay out where all could see him. His fellow-exiles, I suppose, looked and wondered, laughed and gossiped perhaps, and then as time wore on, they thought and thought more, and were awed as they began slowly to take in the meaning of this strange message of God. Thereafter Ezekiel was the leader, to whose house the leaders of the colony came, and to whose words they intently listened.

But there was a yet deeper meaning to following than we have found yet. It is a meaning that awes one's heart into amazed silence. He was married. His wife is spoken of very tenderly as "the desire of thine eyes." He was told that she would be taken away out of his life. She would die. That was the great thing. Then he was not to mourn outwardly for her; this was the second thing. He was to be before the people as though the greatest sorrow of his life had not happened. Is it any wonder the people came astonished to know what this meant? The simple brevity with which he tells of the occurrence takes hold of one's heart. "So I spake unto the people in the morning; and at even my wife died; and I did in the morning as I was commanded."^[119] There was no questioning, no hesitancy of action, but a simple, prompt obedience, even though his heart was breaking. This was what God asked of him. God needed this in His dealings with these people of His in whom His world-plan centred. How desperate must have been the need that called for such an experience as this! Ezekiel said "Yes" even to this. Surely there was here some of that Calvary meaning, of the secondary sort, of which we have spoken together. Following meant not only giving his personality and life, but now it meant giving what must have been more than life itself.

Through Fire.

To Daniel following meant something essentially different. He was not a messenger to his own people, nor their leader. He was a messenger to the great world-rulers of his time, through the visions he interpreted, and through his unbending faithfulness and purity of life; The thing that stands out largest is the life he lived, a life of simplicity in habit, of purity and consistency, with an unwavering faith in God. God could use him to speak to the great emperors. So he helped God to get His message to men so hard to reach through a human channel.

Following meant a pure life. It was Daniel's insistence on being pure and true that shut him up with the wild beasts. And it was through his unflinching fidelity and persistence that God could send His message anew, in the most public manner, out to all the millions of that great world-empire. Following meant to a marked degree a pure life as the basis of the service rendered. It proved to mean a lions' den, and the power of God overcoming the instincts of ravenous beasts. But clear beyond these it meant that God could reach His world with His message to an unusual extent.

Daniel's three companions helped God by means of a most thrilling experience, a really terrible experience. God had been pleading with the great Nebuchadnezzar through Daniel's message. Now He wants to speak again in a way that will compel attention. He needs these three young men. They consent to be His messengers. It meant going through a terrible ordeal. They simply remained true in their personal devotion to God. This was the thing God needed, and used. Everything of use to God roots down in the life. The personal plea of the great king, and the prospect of a horrible death fail alike to move them. They probably had quite resigned themselves to the fate of being burned alive for the truth. But God had a different purpose. He was thinking about this ruler with whom He dealt so personally and unusually, time and again.

The three men, walking quietly up and down in the seven-times heated furnace in company with a glorious looking person "like a son of the gods"—this was the message God wanted spoken to the ruler He was pleading with. His strangely marvellous power, and His personal regard for His faithful followers—this was what God was trying to say to Nebuchadnezzar. He asked the use of these three young men. Their personal loyalty to Himself even unto death—this was what He wanted. Through this He reached the heart of the man He was after.

The experience of these men is an intensely interesting study. It was a fearful ordeal that they went through. Yet it was wholly mental, and of the spirit. They suffered no pain of body, nor inconvenience. The fire only made them free, burned up the bonds that held them. It took great strength of will, of decision, to stay steady through all the fearful test. Yet nothing happened to their bodies except to help them. God took care of that. They gave Him what He asked. He gave them more than they expected. They probably expected death and were willing. God had a deeper plan He was working out. How glad they must have been that they followed fully, that they didn't disappoint God.

Following meant simply being true, even though the road led through a furnace. God would attend to the furnace. Their part was simply to follow where He led. And our God is needing just such acted messages to-day. He is longing for just such opportunities to reveal His power and love, not merely to us, but through us to His world.

Let us take time for one more of these faithful followers. This time it is a young woman. It is at the most critical juncture of God's plan, thus far. He needed a woman whom He could use to bring His Son, and could use further to mother that Son's early years. All unconsciously Mary of Nazareth and of Bethlehem was fitting into His plan in her life, her simple, pure, godly, personal life. We can understand that God wooed her especially to such a life of heart devotion as a preparation for the after part. And she said "Yes" to all His wooings, never suspecting what was to come of it. You never know how much a simple "Yes" to God may mean, or a "No." You never know how much of service may grow out of the true life. Yet all true service is something coming out of the life.

Then the plan of God was made known to her,—the marvellous plan, yet so simple to Him. And again she said a simple, awed "Yes." She waits only long enough to ask the natural, woman's question as to method. There was no questioning of God's power, what He could do, and would do. It came to mean hurting suspicion, peculiarly hurting to as pure and gentle a soul as she. Apparently this was unavoidable. It speaks volumes for her openness of both mind and heart to God, that she instantly took in Gabriel's meaning, and could take it in that such an unprecedented thing was possible. It would have saved her the cruel suspicion if Joseph had been told beforehand, but the whole probability is that he could not have taken it in that such a thing was possible.

Following meant the glad "Yes" to the early wooing up to a pure devoted life. It meant saying a further "Yes" to the plan of God even though something so unusual, and with it the misunderstanding and cruel suspicion, on the one point most sensitive to a woman, and by the one nearest her. But she said "Yes" both times. She let God have the use of her life for His plan. That was all He asked. That is all He asks. But that is what He asks.

These are a few of the glorious company of followers, the goodly fellowship of those who have helped God in His passionate plan for His world, the noble army of willing ones. But the number is incomplete. The plan is not yet fully worked out. The need is not yet wholly met. It was never more urgent. To-day the insistent voice still comes as of old, asking you and me to follow.

And no one can tell how much his following may mean to God in reaching His world.

"With You Always.".

Have you ever seen Christ? No, I don't mean have you been to some uplifting convention, and been tremendously caught by some talented, earnest speaker, and been swayed by the atmosphere of the hour and place, and felt that all was not just as it should be with you; and then you prayed more, and made some new resolves, or re-made some old ones, and left off some things, and put on some things; I don't mean that, but this—have you ever seen Christ?

No, of course, you don't see Him with these outer eyes. Well, then just what do I mean practically? This—has there come to you a real sense of Himself? of His presence? of the tremendous plea His presence makes? and, possibly, you don't know just how to answer. You say, "I'm not just sure," or "How can I know?" Well, you'll never say it that way, nor ask that question again after the experience has come.

May I tell you a little bit about it? Yet, mark you, only "a little bit." You can never tell another one what it means to see Him. When once the sight has come, every word you utter about it, or Him, seems so lame and weak that you despair of ever being able to let out at your lips what has gotten into you. But let me try, even if lamely, in the eager yearning that it may help you know if, thus far, you have missed seeing Him, and maybe—so much better—help you to see Him. For until you have—well, nothing, absolutely nothing, is worth while.

When you see Him there comes such a sense of His purity that, instantly, you are down on your face in utter despair, because of your own self—your impurity; your lack of purity; the sharp contrast between Him and you. You feel that young Isaiah's outcry in the temple that morning is wholly inadequate. "Unclean lips," is it? Why, the whole thing, from innermost recesses clear through and out, is unclean. Then it dawns upon you that this is really what Isaiah is feeling and trying to express in his "woe" and "undone."

And that vivid sense of contrast between Him and you never grows less, but more acute and deeper. Even when you come to know Him better, and the sweet peace comes with its untellable balm to your spirit, yet you are always conscious of the contrast, and you know that you are not pure; only He is; and all you can do is to keep under the cleansing stream of His blood, very low down.

"Never higher than His piercèd feet,

Never farther than His bleeding side."

With that comes such a sense of Himself, of His—what word can tell it?—His glory,—which means simply His character, what He is in Himself—that again words can never tell out the sense of your own littleness; no, that is not the word, your own nothingness. And now you recall, with an inner shrinking, how well you have thought of yourself, how much you have talked about yourself and your view of things, perhaps in the language of a properly phrased humility. Now you are dumb. His presence dumbs you. You begin to wonder at the strange self-confidence and self-complacence that have been so common even in your holiest moments and experiences. It seems, in this Presence, as though you could never open your lips again—except to speak of Him.

Then your eyes are drawn more intently to His person,—His face, His wounds. The scars where the thorns tore His great, patient face; the grief-whitened hair, draped above those deep, tender, unspeakable eyes; that strangely rough place in the palm so lovingly outstretched; the spear-scar, the nail-marks in those feet coming over to you,—these grip you. Their meaning begins to come. There's cleansing; yes, blessed fact! there's cleansing from this horrid impurity whose stain you are so conscious of. Yet, what it cost Him! What my impurity forced upon Him! Yes, cleansed; blessed Jesus! What a relief to be cleansed! Yet I must stay under the stream; only so can the sense of relief be continual. And I must stay down on my face at His feet. It is the only place for such as I discover myself to be. Yet what grace to let me stay at His feet!

Have you seen Christ? This is what begins to come when you have—His purity, your contrasted lack; His glorious self, your own nothingness in yourself; His suffering—the price of your cleansing. This is only a beginning, yet a beginning that comes to be the continuous thing.

Closer Acquaintance.

After a little, as you are sitting still in His presence, and have become a bit quieter after that flush of first emotions at seeing Him, you begin to be caught all anew with how lovable He is. This takes great hold of you. I overheard a once-drunken, now thoroughly changed man, up in Scotland, as he was fairly pouring out his heart in prayer in his sweet, broad Scotch,—"Once Thou didst have no form or comeliness to me, but now"—and it seemed as if all the pent-up feelings within rushed at once to flood-tide—"now Thou art the chiefest among ten thousand, and the One altogether lovely." And the high-water mark of the flood was touched on "chiefest" and "altogether."

That first look made you think mostly of your-self—an inner loathing. Now you think of Him. He is so lovable, so true and tender, and patient and pure; again your language gives out, and you feel better content just to look without trying to use words. They're such poor things when it comes to telling about Him. He is so much more than anything that can be said about Him. His will is so wise and thoughtful and far-reaching and loving. Strange how stupid you have been in insisting so strenuously and blindly on having your own way. His plan, His thought about everything concerning you, is so superb. And He asks me to be His follower. What joy! What if the way be a bit rough; it's following Him; that's enough. He calls me to be His personal friend. I can hardly take it in,—His friend? Yes, that's His own word. Well, let any thorns tear because of the narrowing of the road; I'm His friend, man, do you hear? His friend,—do you get hold of that word? What can any thorn thing do against that!

"We" may go hand in hand now,—His is pierced; I feel the scar where our hands touch. But we're together at last, the thing He has been working for. I can feel His presence. I can hear the low music of His voice within. Thorns don't count here. Oh, yes, I feel them; they haven't lost their power to slash and sting,—but—with Him so close alongside!--Wondrous Christ, here I am at Thy feet, Thy glad slave forever. I'm wholly Thine. It's my own choice. I'll never go any other way by Thy grace. This is the second bit that comes, the glad surrender of life to His mastery. Do you know about this? You will, when you've seen Christ.

Then you come to know, without being able to tell just how, that He is not only with you, but within you. At first His presence may have seemed as something outside yourself. You were looking away at some One who was looking at you. And His look at you broke your heart, and made your will, once so strangely strong in itself, now as strangely pliable to His as only a strong will can be. But now He is living within you. You may not be clear just how the change came. But you do know that there's a something which you come to know is a some One, who is within. His presence is peace past understanding, but not past appreciation. There's a longing for His Word, a desire to talk with Him even when you don't want to ask for something, a deep heart-cry for purity, a burning within to please Him. These all seem to come from Him, and at the same time to be satisfied by Himself, even while they remain and increase.

And yet more, while this Presence within seems so quietly real and exquisitely peace-bringing, there is still the outer presence, the One whose presence it was at the first that brought all this change. Two presences, one above, enthroned there; one within, enthroned there; yet they seem the same, as though one personality with two presences had come into your consciousness. There's the Lord Jesus above at the Father's right hand; here's the Holy Spirit within at my right hand,^[120] yet in practical effect they are as one, while one's thought is always directed to the Lord Jesus both within and above.

The Presence within makes you think wholly of the Presence above, who yet seems also to be within. You are getting a taste of the practical meaning of the Trinity now, three that in effect are as one. But you are too much taken up with the gladness of it to think about the metaphysics of it. He—whether within, or above, or both—is so much more than words. The experience is so much more than any explanation. You are not concerned about the explanation so long as you can have the sweet experience.

The Final Goal.

This is the third bit that comes when you've seen Christ, the gracious indwelling of the Lord Jesus' other self, the Holy Spirit. But if you have seen Him, you are probably not counting steps nor analyzing processes, but just singing a bit of joyous praise to Him.

Then there's the outer turn; He does that. He draws you to Himself, and yet at the same time sends you away—no, not from Him—for Him, out to the others He hungers after, even as after you. Up, in, out,—so He draws and directs, up to Himself, in by contrast to one's self with a holding hard to Him while looking within, then a sending out to the others. He kindles a fire, He is a fire, drawing, burning, cleansing, warming, then driving you forth, and doing all at the same time. Wondrous fine, this fire of love—of His heart—of Himself. The common word for this is "service." The word doesn't matter much. Service is a good word. But the thing that comes seems so much more than this word seems to contain.

That hand that was pierced, which has been to you so tender and warm, and in its clasp so expressive of this wondrous friendship—that hand now leads you where you had not thought of going. And you go,—aghast almost at first at the radical change in your carefully worked out plans, losing your breath for a moment as you wonder what "they" will think (though "they" never will understand, unless—ah, yes, unless they see Him). That hand reaches in where your life touches others, in the family, the business circle, the social circle, and moulds you over anew in the old relationships, not taking you away from them (though there may be some partings), but making you a new presence in the midst of them.

That hand reaches into your pocket, and your safety-deposit box, in among the title papers and securities, and shakes off the dust and rust, and sends them out on an errand after the others. That fire—Himself—draws all into the smelting-pot. Its alchemy transmutes possessions into lives, redeemed, sweetened, Jesus-touched, Christ-renewed lives, made like Himself. And the sweet music of their new lives comes up into His gladdened ears, and a few of the strains come to cheer you. One may have at first a strange feeling of bareness, for things that we've always clung to as essential have gone out from us to others. But with the outgoing of things has come an incoming of Himself, in greater abundance than we dreamed possible. He, within, completely overbalances what He has sent out from us into use. He—He is everything.

The usual word for all this is "service," a blessed word. Yet service seems to suggest your doing something for Him among others. This is quite different. It is His doing something with you for others. The thing itself is so much more than any word. Christ is so much more than anything you say about Him. The truth is always less than Himself. But one never understands how much that means till he has seen Christ. Have you seen Christ? Then others shall see Him, too, in you, and through you.

This is the glory of the goal—face to face with Himself. It begins now. It is a very real thing. This is a bit of the meaning of that mountain beatitude, "the pure in heart ... shall see God." Yet only he who sees understands what seeing means. The subtle intensity of God's presence cannot be explained, only understood by the purified in heart. Only the opened eyes see.

But this is only a beginning. There will be the far greater glory of the final goal, as we come into His immediate presence, literally face to face. That may be when we are called away from the lower road up to the higher reaches, above the clouds and the blue, the glory-reaches, up where He now sits. It may be by that goal coming nearer, by Himself actually coming on the clouds in great glory, for His own and for the next chapter in His great world-plan. Then we shall be caught up into His presence. Then we shall be fully like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.

And we shall be sharers in His glory, in the Kingdom time of glad earth service. But we shall be thinking only of Himself—face to face.