10. Chapter 10: Christian Service

Chapter X.

CHRISTIAN SERVICE. This chapter reproduces a written Address prepared for a public occasion. It has been left on purpose nearly as it originally stood.

Christian Service, in its full idea, is a phrase practically coextensive with Christian life; and Christian life is, in the intention of the Gospel, nothing less, nothing narrower, than the whole life of the Christian; morning, noon, and night; alone, in private, in society, in public; at all times and in all places. From one point of view, and that a most important point, he not only is a servant of the Lord, but he is a servant of the Lord in such a way, under such conditions, that the whole action of his life falls under the description of service. As he always exists, as a Christian, in and by his Master, so he always exists for his Master. He has, in the reality of the matter, no dissociated and independent interest. Not only in preaching and teaching, and bearing articulate witness to Jesus Christ, does he, if his life is true to its idea and its secret, “live not unto himself” (Rom 14:7); not with aims which terminate for one moment in his own credit, for example, or his own comfort. Equally in the engagements of domestic life, of business life, of public affairs; equally (to look towards the humbler walks of duty) in the day’s work of the Christian servant, or peasant, or artizan; “whether he lives, he lives unto the Master, or whether he dies, he dies unto the Master” (Rom 14:8); whether he wakes or sleeps, whether he toils or rests, whether it be the term or the vacation of life, “whether he eats or drinks, or whatsoever he does,” he is the Master’s property for the Master’s use.

“Teach me, my God and King, In all things Thee to see, And what I do in anything To do it as to Thee.

“A servant with this clause Makes drudgery divine; Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws makes that and th’ action fine. ” So wrote Herbert, two centuries and a half ago. And the Gospel principle is immoveably the same for us to-day. Let us not content ourselves even for a moment, in view of it, with the all too easy piety of an abstract assent and indefinite aspiration. Looking afresh, looking with adoring steadiness, at our beloved Lord, let us embrace in humblest practicality the all-inclusive conditions of His service. In His name, in His presence, let us yield to Him ourselves (Rom 6:13), as those who are already alive from the dead through Him. The probable result in our life will be no startling exterior revolution, but a happy and wonderful increase, as we go forward, of quietness, and preparedness, and liberty within. “His service,” in precise proportion to the simplicity and entirety of our acceptance of its bond and yoke, “is perfect freedom. ”Illi servire est regnare; and let us remember thatserviremeans bondservice; the service in which not only certain functions and acquirements of mine are hired out under conditions to another, but in which another has taken absolute possession of me.

Such, briefly indicated, is Christian Service. It is for all always. And the conditions to its true exercise are the same for all; a walk with God in the secret of the soul; a renunciation of all thought of intermittancy in the service; a simple and expectant reliance on the heavenly Master’s will to accept it and power to use it. For our present purpose, however, we will consider Christian Service under a limitation. We will think of it as meaning the service rendered by any of the great multitude of “Christian workers” as such. It may be the service of the commissioned pastor of the flock; it may be that of the visitor of the sick, of the rescuer of the fallen, of the teacher of the Bible class or the Sunday School, of the lay worker in mission-room or open air. It may be any one who seeks definitely to influence others for Christ.

If such is service, what then are the qualifications for it, or more properly, some of the chief things amongst them?

One word, if but in passing, let me say as to the message which the servant of Christ carries. There is urgent need for the Christian worker of our day to take care of his personal hold upon articulate, fundamental truth, as well as over his spirit of zeal and love. Zeal is not enough, nor energy, nor willingness to endure much hardness. All these things can, as a matter of experience, go along with “another Gospel, which is not another” (Gal 1:6-7). There must be humble and laborious pains about the Scriptural solidity and rightness of the message, as well as about the energy of the messenger. But I turn now to the personal rather than to the doctrinal qualifications of the servant of the Lord. And here first: would the worker be what the Master would have him be as a worker?Then let him be a consistent man all round. Would he serve in testimony?Then let him serve in everything. Would he be influential for his Master’s sake, far and wide, if a broad field of influence is, as a fact, open to him?Then let his wife, his children, his parents, his whole home circle, his circle of acquaintance, business, or labour, find him out as a servant of Jesus Christ in all ways that pratically touch them.

I recently heard, with much interest, a remark on the religion ofEnglish Church people made to a friend of mine by a member of the Church of the Unitas Fratrum, commonly called the Moravian Church, in Germany. “Your preachings,” said the Moravian, “are often admirable, far beyond much that we say or hear. Your statements of doctrine, your testimonies to Christ, and to His grace and power, are full and beautiful. But we see, as a rule, a great difference between your preachings and your lives. We, perhaps, have a humbler aim in the pulpit, but we seek to live all that we preach. ” And my friend spoke with loving admiration of what the consistency of Moravian life was; above all, in its being pervaded everywhere and in all things, to an extent deeply impressive, and strongly attractive, with humility of heart, and with peace and joy in the Lord.

Let our inference for ourselves, from such a comparison, be in favour not of a lower doctrine, or a more misgiving testimony, but of a bringing into real practice what in theory we know so well. Let us settle it in our inmost convictions that the life of the disciple is intended to be one, and of a piece; and that his work in detail stands related, certainly from his Lord’s point of view, in a profound and vital connexion, to his habits, his temper, his manner of life in general. Consistency is indissolubly bound up with “meetness for the Master’s use” (2Ti 2:21). To turn to another point, which is, after all, but one point of special brightness in the bright circle of consistency. I refer to that great qualification for Christian Service on which we have already dwelt in a previous chapter — an honest and unaffected self-forgetfulness, let me call it selflessness, in the worker’s soul, with reference to the work.

Deep in our nature, in the Fall, lies the sin of which this is the blessed contrary; and alas for the manifestations of that sin in the circles of Christian service! It appears all too often in just the most energetic, the most versatile, the most clever, of the servants of Christ those, perhaps, gifted with most capacity to originate and direct. Their capacities are the Master’s golden talents, and are certainly meant to be employed, in His time. But then, as the solemn associations of the misused word talent should of themselves remind us, they are never, no not for an hour, to be used for self, but for Him. The eager thought that the work, the enterprise, the organization, the connexion, is mine, is to be kept in jealous check. The first symptoms of religious envy are to be by the Lord’s servant as promptly and thoroughly dealt with as would be those of a formidable bodily disease; or rather, what is far better, the servant is to remember beforehand the danger of infection, and to live therefore in that germ-killing air, the presence and the peace of God.

It is a sorrowful sight, but not a very rare one, to see some otherwise admirable Christian ill of this disease already, and not taking the least action against it; to see a man manifestly equipped with manifold powers, and skill to use them, but with whom one fellow-worker after another “finds it very hard to work. ”For the Christian in question is not content with beingqualifiedto be first, to lead, to be prominent; he cannot be happy in any second place. And it is scarcely needful to point out that the exciting causes of this malady can arise not only from the individual, but from the individual’s circle, whether it be the circle of personal connexion, or of special line of Christian enterprise, or of ecclesiastical organization. It is one thing to be loyal to well-loved associates and colleagues, to be soberly convinced about certain principles of Church order. It is quite another thing, and, alas, it is far more common and more easy, I fear, to be simply prejudiced, and filled with the spirit of self, in regard, for instance, of some marked blessing sent down on work or workers going upon a different, not to say an alien, line. It has no necessary connexion whatever with fixity of principle, clearness of conviction, and a discernment of things that differ. Analyse it, and it will come out as the spirit of self, the precise antithesis to the spirit of the Gospel. Let us, for our life of service, live habitually in the holy air in which this cannot live. This leads me to say a little, in closing, of the all-importance to the servant of Jesus Christ of the maintenance of his own personal joy and glory in his Master. The sad secret of the spirit I have just sought to deprecate lies in the subtle substitution, somewhere and somehow, of self for Jesus Christ. It is calling the work “mine” instead of “His. ”It is working for my credit rather than for His glory. It is attracting, or trying to attract, to me, not altogether to Him. And where shall we go for the remedy?It must be to Him. It must be found in the renewal of our sight of Him, without one cloud between, even the cloud of our own restless activities. We must get a new view of “the fair beauty of the Lord” (Psa 27:4, Prayer Book), and of the blessedness and pleasantness of our lot and part in Him.

“From the loss of our glory in Thee, preserve and keep us, gracious Lord and God. ” Such is one response in a solemn Litany of that venerable Moravian Church to which I referred just now.

I have read of a servant of Christ in the past, a man singularly rich in the gift of spiritual influence over individuals. He was asked to disclose something of his secret. His reply, in essence, was that it lay, as far as he knew, in the sense of profound contentment with his blessed Master in which his soul was kept through grace. Jesus Christ irradiated him within and for himself. He was, at the very centre of his soul’s consciousness, deeply happy to belong to “his King who had saved him,” and to be used by that great and holy Possessor as should seem best to Him. And this took friction and anxiety out of his life in a very wonderful way, while it kept that life, so to speak, always directed, peacefully and unwearily, towards the thought of service, towards the idea, and the expectation, of being used. And the service was all the happier, because it was not the source of the man’s happiness. The source and secret was Jesus Christ; and that secret acted equally whether marked success attended action and speech, or apparently no success at all; whether the servant was put by the Master into the front rank of active reapers in the harvest field, or told to “sit down in a corner and sharpen the sickles of others”; whether he was called to speak in spiritual power to a multitude, or to lie still on a sick bed. That heaven-given spirit, in a blessed paradox, was for him the source of at once workfulness and of repose. And in a very marked degree it preserved the worker from the infection of the sin of envy, of jealousy, of selfishness. Ah! in the air of a life so hid with Christ in God, do we not feel instinctively that such sin could not breathe? “The fruit of righteousness is sown in peace” (Jas 3:18); in the peace of God. It is one of the deepest and most sacred laws of the life of the children of God that their activity has its root in passivity; their strength has profoundly much to do with weakness; their rising up and going on with giving way and sinking down; with that opposite of positive effort which is yet so fruitful of work — “Yield youselves unto God” (Rom 6:13).

“From the loss of our glory in Thee, preserve and keep us — us who humbly ask to serve Thee for ever — gracious Lord and God. ” In immediate conclusion, I would most earnestly plead, then, in the interests of true Christian service, for what in these hurrying times we need so specially: a deeper entrance of our souls into the secret of the presence of the Lord. Work is not food for the spirit any more than for the body. Amidst a multitude of works the worker’s soul may wither, and the works will feel the difference in due time. We must, because we are servants, and not masters, bondservants and not contractors, limbs and not Head, we must see to it that we are living and serving not only so as to get through a great deal of action, but so as to be vessels meet for the Master’s use, in His way and not our own. And for this we must live, so to speak, behind our service; we must live, in a true and holy sense, independent of it. We must live upon Jesus Christ, not upon energy, upon success, upon notice, upon praise; God forbid. And to live upon Him in service, we must, in the rule and habit of our lives, watch over times of solemn, sacred, blessed intercourse with Him in secret. We must, despite all the influences of our day, make time for thoughtful prayer, for reverent search into His Word, for recollection of our treasures in Him, time to exercise the more deliberate acts of a living faith in His great promises, and in the unseen realities of the things eternal. So shall we come forth evermore to serve, and to serve indeed.

Thank God, the picture is not a visionary one — not an ideal of the land of the clouds. It is the secret of many a life of steadfast, chastened, humble, Christ-reflecting service in the great Church ofGod to-day. And the Lord, in whom that open secret lies, can make it for all His servants their own happy possession. So shall it be for us, by His grace, to His glory. Amen.